Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

The silver screen turns gold

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The oldest film festival in the United States and Canada, the San Francisco International Film Festival reaches its golden anniversary this year. Click below for our picks and previews.

Choice words about image culture as the SF International Film Festival hits 50

Take 50: Our picks for the fest

A brief history of star wars and star awards at the SFIFF

This year’s debut fiction features

Better than sex, worse than violence: new French extremism

Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth digs up life amid the ruins

HK hottie Daniel Wu spoofs boy bands (and himself) in The Heavenly Kings

Kelly Sears’s animated shorts crystallize pop-cult preoccupations

The four men in The Iron Mask

Otar, Otar, how does your Garden grow?

50 great movies that have yet to hit the Bay

The 50th annual San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 26-May 10 at Sundance Cinemas Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF; Landmark’s Aquarius Theatre, 430 Emerson, Palo Alto; Landmark’s Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF; SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF; McBean Theater, Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF; and El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. For tickets (most regular programs $8-$12) and additional information, go to www.sffs.org.

Future prefects

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> kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Try this out for size: "ELO, the other band that matters." Electric Light Orchestra bulb changer Jeff Lynne would probably prefer that handle to "ELO, the other white meat" – the former sentiment is probably about as good as it gets, emanating from a member of Klaxons, the Brit buzz bomb and neu-rave crossover pop phenom of the moment.

Isn’t ELO, like, your parents’ guilty pleasure, the LP they tuck away when the hep seniors wheel over for low-carb hash brownies? "I actually think they’re quite cool right now," counters Klaxons vocalist-keyboardist-bassist James Righton, on the phone shortly after touching down in Los Angeles for Klaxons’ first US tour. "The Pussycat Dolls used a sample of ‘Evil Woman.’ I think people are looking again at Jeff Lynne’s work and the great, inventive pop music that ELO made. We haven’t experimented with strings sounds like Jeff Lynne has.

"I dunno, Jamie is getting to be a big Roy Orbison fan. I might become a huge Traveling Wilburys fan."

High praise – and heady irreverence – coming from one of the freshest-sounding UK bands accompanied by much blog hum and Euro chart action. Dusting off and sexily propagating rave siren honk, disco flash, and propulsive beats, Klaxons come off less like nostalgia hounds stuck in the acid house’s broken-down Hacienda – Simian Mobile Disco and Soulwax remixes aside – than like a spastic-elastic, at times noisy, at times infectious, synth-driven rock unit ready to embrace the harsh urgency of dance punk (changing it up like restless, simulacra-sick toddlers picking up, suckling, and tossing off one reference after another) and sci-fi postmodernism (bidding semper fi to J.G. Ballard with the title of their debut, Myths of the Near Future, on Geffen/Polydor, and Thomas Pynchon with their first single, "Gravity’s Rainbow").

Add magic, psychedelia, and a Web community devoted to guitarist Simon Taylor’s hair to Klaxons’ recipe, and one wonders, could this be the future – once again with that dehydrated feeling (time to unearth those glowsticks) – if not the present? Flying right like a good, recycling-conscious meta-zen from Planet Baudrillard, Righton owns up honestly that the band would never dare to consider themselves – um, gag! – truly unique. "I think it’s hard to create something truly original, especially if you’re in the traditional guitar-bass-drum format. We just stole a lot from other people. We just weren’t picking from the usual Dylan, Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin," he drawls. "We picked a lot of Brian Eno, Bowie, Gang Gang Dance, a lot of noise, Faust, ELO…." As above so below, as Aleister Crowley and Klaxons go.

THE GOOD, THE GOOD, AND THE GOOD Former Clash bassist Paul Simonon is all too familiar with the anxiety of influence – and the dilemma of surpassing personal bests. The onetime low-end linchpin of the first group marketed as the only band that mattered, Simonon graciously took time from a camping trip with his son to chat in the English woods ("not really Sherwood but quite close") about his latest project with Blur boy Damon Albarn, Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and the Verve guitarist Simon Tong: the hypnotic, elegiac Danger Mouse-produced full-length The Good, the Bad and the Queen (Virgin).

"I’m sort of finding I’m sympathetic to the problems that a musician has when they’ve been very successful, to come up with another album or possibility," he told the trees and me, describing his empathy with Notting Hill neighbor Albarn (after Albarn rang up, Simonon says, "we got chatting and discovered we were neighbors by two streets") and the way their collaboration materialized. "It’s very easy to fall into the trap of sort of doing what we did the last time. It’s sort of different, but with the Clash we moved around: the first album is no comparison to the second, the second was no comparison to the third, and I find that’s Damon’s approach too. Otherwise, it’s really boring, and you might as well get a job and move into another field, rather than just clodding on."

True to his word, Simonon made his own career switch a while back, making and showing grimly realistic paintings of the Thames over the past few years. "The great thing about painting is that you don’t have to discuss it with anybody," he explains. "It’s difficult because if it doesn’t seem to pass the test, you have to destroy it. I don’t find it easy. It’s trial by error."

Simonon had stopped playing until this album – "’Retired’ sounds like I’m in a wheelchair or something!" – but he won’t make the error of trying to blow air into the Clash’s still elegant cadaver. It’s one punk reunion you shouldn’t hold your breath for. "I never entertained the idea, really, seemed like a backward step, really," he says matter-of-factly. "We went on solidly for seven years nonstop. I think it would do no good to re-form – no matter how much money is offered. My calculations are pretty bad, really – a million here or there is all just toy money from my own personal perspective. It meant the Clash – it didn’t mean the cash!" *

KLAXONS

With Amy Winehouse

Thurs/26, 9 p.m. doors, sold out

popscene

330 Ritch, SF

www.popscene-sf.com

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE QUEEN

Sun/29, 8 p.m., $32.50

Grand at the Regency Center

1290 Sutter, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

Locals only?

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BOOK REVIEW Not for Tourists Guidebooks has just released the fourth edition of its Not for Tourists Guide to San Francisco. Besides having a mad grip of inaccuracies, the title is problematic: this tome is definitely not not for tourists.

The first thing I found wrong with the book was its only foldout map. It’s a highway map, which is weird, since most city dwellers tend to stay clear of the damn things. They’re for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and, uh, the tourists. And the map isn’t even detailed enough for you to see where on- and off-ramps are or tell which is which. And with San Francisco’s grand total of four highways, it’s hard to imagine why the NFT folks didn’t devote their largest page to a Muni map – just one of many things this book doesn’t have.

In all fairness, Muni routes are included in the 120 minimaps that comprise most of the book. But the layout is incredibly daunting! To follow one bus route, you might have to flip back and forth 20 times to see where the line will take you – shit most locals just don’t have friggin’ time for. I became further discouraged by the decision to devote pages to Ghirardelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Pier 39. (If not for tourists, for whom?) But despite this and despite noticing an ad for Segway Tours of the Marina Green (insert sound of me retching here), I still gave the rest of the guide a whirl, determined to get some practical use out of it.

I attempted to find a liquor store when I was trapped in SoMa without rolling papers – only to discover the intersection I was at, Fourth Street and Mission, was on the corner of three maps. The bar I was in (my favorite) was nowhere to be found. I was in minimap limbo. Next I tried to wax nostalgic with the maps of neighborhoods where I used to live – only to discover that some bars listed on the neighborhood directories weren’t dotted on the maps.

So I tried using the guide to call my neighborhood grocery store, Eight-Twenty-Eight Irving Market, to see if it carried printer paper. Apparently, it falls somewhere between liquor store and supermarket, because it’s not in the book. (BTW: it carries college rule but not printer paper.) Finally, I called the Hotel Utah – only to lose an eardrum when that killer "bee-doo-eet!" sound alerted me to the fact that the number listed in the guide was disconnected.

Maybe, maybe buy the Not for Tourists Guide for first-year college students or other new SF transplants. But if you’ve been here for longer than six months, just hang on to your Muni map and your BART schedule and save the $14.95 (suggested retail) for 411 charges.

www.notfortourists.com

Another close one

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Noise luminary Tom Smith’s nearly three-decade jaunt through the experimental rock abyss has been part of a sustained continuum of all his undertakings. Throughout the late ’70s and much of the ’80s, the main brain and entrepreneur of To Live and Shave in LA occupied his time in bands such as Of Boat, Pussy Galore, and Peach of Immortality, before TLASILA took its first few breaths in July 1990. After migrating to South Florida in 1991, the Georgia native quickly stumbled on bassist and engineer Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra and oscillator operator Ben Wolcott. Alongside contemporaries such as Harry Pussy and Tamato duPlenty, the threesome submerged themselves in Miami’s flourishing noise rock scene of the early ’90s, carving a sonic palette void of any real structure but fraught with their influences: Throbbing Gristle, UK glam, kraut rock, and the avant-garde.

"We had no overt goal in mind, but we knew what we loved and shared a particular excitement for the things we deplored," Smith wrote in an e-mail. "It’s all problem-solving, really – a race toward unknowing. I gravitate towards reproduction and demolition."

Wolcott agreed via e-mail, attesting to the Miami scene’s love-hate relationship with the band. "We were respected for our perseverance but hated by the public. We were just reaching out to like-minded people, looking to commune with fellow extremists in the arts," he explained. "There is a slight obsessive bent to spreading the Shave gospel. We logged a lot of hours touring, and it’s hard to believe we would drive so many hours to blast our pedagogy that would only last for 15 minutes in an empty bar."

Originally devised by Smith as a solo project, TLASILA’s history is about as labor-intensive as it is legendary. Diligent – and sometimes violent – performances, a steady flow of albums and tours, and a rotating cast of players and slayers from a miscellany of eclectic musical realms have included everyone from Thurston Moore to Andrew W.K. to the Bay Area’s own Weasel Walter.

"Tom is a very peculiar, singular talent," Walter noted in yet another e-mail. "He is an outsider artist essentially. He is an obsessive organizer, and his inspiration comes from a wide swath of cultural vantages, from the highest to lowest. He puts Xenakis and the Dark Brothers on an even keel, and that’s why his art is simultaneously so visceral and intellectual. His lyrics are almost James Joyce-like in their pure semantical deconstruction…. What he does is absorb, cut up, and regurgitate everything in culture and spit it back out."

Following a festival performance in 2000, Smith broke ranks with the group and formed OHNE with Swiss performance artist Dave Phillips. With Wolcott already out of the picture, Falestra soldiered on with TLASILA, from which numerous spin-offs and clones surfaced, including TLASILA 2 and I Love LA. Falestra and Smith reconvened in 2003 and shaped the band into its strongest lineup yet: an 11-member ensemble residing throughout the country, in Atlanta; Las Vegas; Northampton, Mass.; LA; Charleston, SC; and Adel, Ga. Guitarist-producer Don Fleming, Sighting’s Mark Morgan, stripper Misty Martinez, Chris Grier, and Andrew "Gaybomb" Barranca are some of the noiseniks, along with Moore, Wolcott, and W.K., rounding out TLASILA’s current incarnation. A touring version, of Wolcott, Graham Moore, Martinez, and Falestra, will undertake the group’s West Coast dates – its first since 1996 – and will support TLASILA’s great 2006 full-length, Noon and Eternity (Menlo Park), and the forthcoming Les Tricoteuses (Savage Land). But the ceaseless TLASILA work ethic won’t allow the ensemble to stop there: Smith promises that even more albums can be expected to materialize during the ensuing tour. Live, shave, live again.

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA

With Rose for Bohdan, Tourette, and the Weasel Walter Quartet

May 3, 8:30 p.m., $6-$10

21 Grand

416 25th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-7263

Also with Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa and Rose for Bohdan

May 4, 9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

Soft machines

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Electrifying a thumb piano sounds about as unlikely as, say, strapping a jet engine onto a surfboard. That very action, however, explains the central mystery behind Congo’s Konono No. 1. But don’t expect an esoteric creation myth from founder and likembe virtuoso Mawangu Mingiedi, who explains that his feedback-rich music exists simply "because it’s a very soft-sounding instrument and Kinshasa is a very noisy town."

The likembe has a gentle, waterlogged twang, like a mouth harp encased in Jell-O. It is as native to the Congolese sound as the ancestral hum of the Bazombo trance music brought to Kinshasa by Mingiedi when he left his hometown on the Angolan border after the death of his father. Answering questions with producer Vincent Kenis via e-mail, Mingiedi describes Bazombo as "the cradle of our music. There’s a little bit of it in whatever we play."

Konono No. 1 aspired to bring those ancient polyrhythms to urban gatherings, but how to rock the party with one of the quietest instruments going? As the likembe was hardly a match for the squall of city life in Congo’s capital, amplification of Mingiedi’s chosen instrument became the order of the day. This was to be no small feat, considering the resource-poor and occasionally violent setting he found himself in. "Bad things can happen in Kinshasa," Mingiedi explains. "Even when there’s peace in the streets, it’s certainly difficult to lead a peaceful life in a place where the most basic commodities are absent or intermittent at best."

While matter-of-fact about the hardships of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mingiedi is far more forthcoming when describing the trial-and-error process that ultimately led to the creation of Konono No. 1’s wall of plucks and feedback: "I started with cassette recorder microphones, but the feedback was difficult to control. Only later did I try electric guitar pickups, then reverse engineered them, then started to design my own models."

Mingiedi’s likembe hack is now the stuff of DIY legend, and it extends to more than just his particular instrument. Konono No. 1 is an ensemble of recycling genius – of wood microphones crowned with salvaged magnets, of percussion rendered from pots and pans, of car battery-powered amplifiers. Onstage the band is also flanked by massive lance voix, or voice throwers, megaphones originally used by Belgian colonizers. Yet even accompanied by dancers and armed with piercing whistles, Konono No. 1 has its heart in the three likembes that bob across the waves of rhythm like fragile tin boats. Mingiedi says these too have been modified: "First it was hollow, like the traditionally built likembe – then to suppress feedback I used a solid block of mahogany."

As years went by, word of Konono No. 1 trickled out, eventually reaching the ears of Crammed Records cofounder Kenis in the form of a culture broadcast in 1979. He remained enraptured by Konono No. 1, actually traveling to Congo to find them. As he writes in a letter to the music blog the Suburbs Are Killing Us, he was able to interact with other "tradi-modern" bands yet was told that Konono No. 1 had ceased to exist. Finally, in 2000 he received word that they had reunited – using the same equipment they had played years before.

Fast-forward to 2007, and Konono No. 1 have traveled the world, performing at the Kennedy Center, opening for Dutch legends the Ex, and most recently contributing to the first single off Bjork’s latest record, Volta (One Little Indian/Atlantic), titled "Earth Intruders." When I ask if Konono No. 1 will perform with Bjork, Mingiedi answers with hints of Sun Ra, "I hope it will happen. If it does, watch out for our special Earth intruder stage outfits." *

KONONO NO. 1

Sat/28, 9 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

Give it a hand

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> andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear readers:

Every few months some harried freelancer charged with coming up with a novel spin on something sexual or other contacts me for a pithy quote. And since I am all about the pith, I will oblige if at all possible. Most recently, the writer was a staffer at Details, which I used to read when it was sort of sceney and kinda gay back in the ’80s but which sunk beneath my radar when it morphed into some sort of younger, more metro GQ. What did I think, the writer wanted to know, about the demise of the hand job? Had the rise of more exotic pursuits among American teenagers sealed its fate, or was good old manual release doomed to fade into obscurity by dint of its own lack of pizzazz? What was the hand job’s appeal, if any? And by the way, did I know any really good horror stories, Indian burns, that sort of thing?

It got me thinking, first about horror stories. As a collector of (other people’s) horrible sex accident stories, I know that hand jobs hardly figure. Skin-to-skin virus transmission is possible, sure, but nobody ever seems to accidentally yank anybody’s equipment clean off or anything. Not even close. Even CBT, cock and ball torture, is rarely as grizzly as it sounds. I did once demonstrate my most successful technique, a two-fisted opposite swivel, for a friendgirl who’d had only girlfriends but was considering branching out. Damned if my little pantomime didn’t look very much like I was administering an Indian (sorry, Native American is it?) burn, something I’d never noticed when doing it for real. Of course, hand jobs are best administered with a generous shot of lube or, at the very least, a palmful of spit. It’s really hard to hurt somebody with a palmful of spit.

So, hand jobs are safe, I concluded, but are they sexy? Is nobody doing them anymore because there’s so much hotter stuff to do, or is it simply that they’re not worth doing? These I couldn’t answer because I’m not sure I buy the premise. There’s no question that there has been a steady trickle (ew) of articles and TV scare pieces about the oral sex "epidemic" among young people, going back at least 10 years. But not only do these fail to convince me that more young people (well, women – these articles are never about a cunnilingus epidemic) are going down, they never say a thing about them eschewing hand jobs in favor of blow jobs. If you compare The National Survey of Family Growth, the best recent research on Americans’ sex habits, published in 2005, with Sex in America, the last decent survey, done in the early ’90s, there isn’t much increase in the incidence of oral sex. Period. There is, intriguingly, an increase in the incidence of anal sex, potentially a much greater health risk. But it doesn’t say a thing about hand jobs, which are, presumably, relegated to the catchall category "any" sex. So no matter how many articles are published insisting that life for the typical American teen these days is one big blow job party (the parts that aren’t taken up with pornographically violent video games and being obese, anyway), I haven’t seen anything supporting it. And before people start freaking out about all those teenagers having anal sex, the increase there was among people in their 20s.

My own take is that hand jobs aren’t dead, they’re just boring. Or at least, boringish. Boringish to receive, depending upon the recipient’s level of desperation and the donor’s skill, of course; boringish to perform (at least compared to the raunchier, more dramatic blow job), and above all boringish to write TV magazine scare pieces about. Nobody dies from them, so nobody cares. Also, while the hand job may figure prominently in some gay male scenes, most straight people kind of forget about them as they leave their teenage groping days behind. This leaves me, an inveterate champion of the underdog, in the position of having to defend the poor, disrespected hand job. Besides the obvious safety issue, they’re, um, easy. They don’t make you gag, not unless something nearly unimaginable disgusting is going on. They’re a good way to learn about penises. This last is true, actually, since for some reason most girls start out believing that a penis ought to be patted gently on the head, like an elderly lap dog, while in truth they can, and ought, to be wrangled, roped, and thrown like a rodeo doggie. Only hands-on learning will do.

So this is what I told the writer from Details: "After its high school glory days, the hand job may go underground, but it’s rarely completely missing from a couple’s repertoire. It’s just that it becomes a tool, or a tool of a tool, rather than an act in its own right. Foreplay without any hand play, for instance, would become sort of a special trick, like writing a paragraph without using any e‘s."

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson teaches sex and communication skills with San Francisco Sex Information. She has been a theater artist, a women’s health educator, and a composting instructor, but not at the same time. She is considering offering a workshop on how to have and rear twins without going crazy, since she’s currently doing that too.

Take 50

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TAKE 50: SF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

THURS/26

*Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese, Italy/France, 2006). Epic in scope, playful in its stylistic shifts and tonal splices, and sumptuous in its painterly framing and use of light, Golden Door looks on an age-old American saga – an immigrant family’s crossing from the Old World to the new – with startlingly fresh, impassioned eyes. Director Emanuele Crialese (Respiro) turns his sometimes wry, sometimes tender focus on a band of illiterate Sicilian peasants drawn from their dirt-poor village by pre-Photoshop pictures of giant chickens and trees laden with enormous gold coins. Led by an intrepid yet ignorant patriarch (Respiro‘s Vincenzo Amato) and a comical spiritual fixer of a grandmother (Aurora Quattrocchi), the group is joined in steerage by a cryptic gentlewoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Ellis Island and its proto-eugenic experiments await – along with dream sequences that fluidly transmit the otherworldly magic of the villagers’ forthcoming American mystery tour. (Kimberly Chun)

7 p.m., Castro. Opening night film and party at City Hall, $85-$125

FRI/27

Black Sheep (Jonathan King, New Zealand, 2006). Something is going baaaaaad in Lord of the Rings country. The usual science experiment-gone-wrong results in the usual creature rampage, as sheep go George Romero on humans at a rural New Zealand ranch. This jolly, diverting, ultimately too-silly horror comedy from neophyte writer-director Jonathan King is duly funny. Still, it overstays its one-joke welcome by a bleat or three. (Dennis Harvey)

10:45 p.m., Kabuki

*A Few Days Later … (Niki Karimi, Iran, 2006). Already a star from her appearances in Tahmineh Milani’s overwrought – but much beloved – melodramas, Iranian actress Niki Karimi looked to the grand master, Abbas Kiarostami, for directing inspiration. In this, her second feature, she beautifully captures a specific brand of avoidance and understatement. She plays Shahrzad, a mousy graphic designer who becomes distracted at work. At home her answering machine constantly squawks about her family’s health and well-being, and her annoying neighbor (Behzad Dorani, from Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us) keeps parking his giant SUV in her space. To her credit, Karimi never shows the expected hospital scenes, tearful good-byes, or tense confrontations that seem to be looming. Instead, she retreats inside the character’s head and brings the film to a stunningly private conclusion. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

7:15 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 12:15 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/30, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

Murch (David and Edie Ichioka, England/US, 2006). Codirector Edie Ichioka is a disciple of legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), so you know this doc will be nothing less than a glowing portrait. But instead of a simple glorification, it is more an embellished interview (complete with jump cuts during the talking head portions), with Murch using an astounding array of metaphors – besides the obvious "editing is like putting together a puzzle," he also works in painters, sock puppets, kidney transplants, and dream therapy, among others – to explain his approach to his craft. As Murch proves, a talented editor can make a good film great and a great film a masterpiece; it all comes down to an intangible combination of technical skill, sense of rhythm, and artistic instinct. (Cheryl Eddy)

9 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Sun/29, 4:15 p.m., Castro; Tues/1, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3:30 p.m., PFA

*Slumming (Michael Glawogger, Austria/Switzerland, 2006). Two arrogant yuppie pranksters (August Diehl and Michael Ostrowski) cruise around verbally pigeonholing others, making playthings of them. Meanwhile, a drunken, derelict poet (Paulus Manker) wanders the streets alternately cajoling and ranting at people. When the pranksters find the poet passed out on a bus station bench, they decide to transport him to a similar spot across the border, without a passport. Director Michael Glawogger (Workingman’s Death) and cowriter Barbara Albert achieve a pleasurable quirky quality with their black comedy, carefully guiding it between the precious and the preachy; they sometimes amusingly present a joke’s payoff before the setup. The film passes easily between immaculate cafes and slush-covered highways, but at its center is Manker’s wonderfully cantankerous performance. (Anderson)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 8:30 p.m., SFMOMA; May 7, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

SAT/28

*All in This Tea (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, US, 2006). Tea still has an effete connotation in this country, but David Lee Hoffman is an adventurer of the old order. An unabashed partisan of the fair drink, he regularly travels to China to ferret out farmers and distributors, sampling and savoring the Old World leaves. His dedication is total; we’re hardly surprised when Werner Herzog drops by Hoffman’s Marin home for a spot of tea, because the director is a connoisseur of aficionados, explorers, and cranks. Hoffman is capably eccentric but also unassuming, making All in This Tea a friendly primer. Codirectors Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht bring their usual ethnographic grace to this 10-years-in-the-making project. (Goldberg)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 4:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*At the Edge: New Experimental Cinema (various). Experimental showcases are always an Achilles heel for film festivals big on narrative. They’re often shoehorned with tepid concessions to so-called innovation, although sometimes they yield moments of genuine surprise. This showcase has a bit of both. Paul Clipson’s Super 8 trip of blurred urban lightscapes looks through Stan Brakhage’s kaleidoscope but can’t see beyond it. On the other hand, the sleep of reason produces monsters (slavery, social Darwinism) and some beautiful animation in Atlantis Unbound, in which Lori Hiris morphs her black-and-white charcoal sketches – evoking the mystical art of William Blake or Austin Osman Spare – of 19th-century scientists into slaves, merfolk, and other beings from beyond the pale of the Enlightenment. The banality of evil is also evoked in Xavier Lukomski’s static shots of the serene Drina River Bridge, where, as the voice-over informs us, Bosnians dredged up the victims of genocide. When viewed through a long shot, the horrors of history become more pronounced, given their calm surroundings. (Matt Sussman)

8:30 p.m., PFA. Also Tues/1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Carved Out of Pavement: The Work of Rob Nilsson On the brink of 70, longtime SF filmmaker Rob Nilsson is astonishingly prolific. No less than four work-in-progress features will be excerpted in this tribute program, including some from the nearly completed "9@Night" series of interwoven fictions made with the Tenderloin Action Group. For all his invention and industry in production, Nilsson hasn’t exactly worked overtime getting his movies seen – except at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where you can count on one or two premiering each fall. The MVFF is copresenting this special show, which will have the filmmaker reviewing a career that stretches back to the mid-’70s SF CineAction collective and 1979’s Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Northern Lights, as well as discussing latter-day digital projects with numerous current collaborators, also present. Excerpts from "9@Night" will also be projected on the SFIFF’s Justin Herman Plaza outdoor screen May 1 to 3. (Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki

Fabricating Tom Ze (Decio Matos Jr., Brazil, 2006). Though typically grouped with the explosive Brazilian Tropicalismo movement, Tom Ze has always been too much of an eccentric to fall properly into line. It’s a point made abundantly clear in Fabricating Tom Ze (I still haven’t figured out the title), a generally awestruck doc that makes up for its thin content with plenty of Ze’s indefatigable, abundant speech. Between the interruptions, self-mythologizing, and creative suggestions for the film’s director (all of which Decio Matos Jr. takes), Ze spills over with quixotic, brilliant epigrams on creativity and authenticity. "I have to make a small invention every time I have an idea worthy of becoming music," he reports – as if there were any doubting his inventiveness. (Goldberg)

1 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Tues/1, 8;30 p.m., El Rio; May 6, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

*Hana (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2006). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gentle deconstruction of that venerable institution of Japanese film the samurai movie isn’t too much of a departure from his previous features. Hana also focuses on the small, unexpected sense of community that arises out of idiosyncratic responses to tragedy or, in this case, the public’s hunger for it. It’s 1702, and like other underemployed samurai during peacetime, Sozaemon Aoki (Okada Junichi) is restless, as is the general population, which gorges itself on violent revenge plays and romanticized notions of honor. The pensive Sozaemon is bent on carrying out his duty to avenge his father’s death, even if he seems more at home tutoring the kids in the hardscrabble but lively tenement where he lives. His neighbors, who initially tease him about his lack of guts, eventually rally round his failures – and their own lowly status – and celebrate the humble resolve. To paraphrase resident dimwit Mago (Kimura Yuichi), when life gives you shit, make rice cakes. (Sussman)

4:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m.; and May 5, 5:45 p.m., PFA

*The Island (Pavel Lounguine, Russia, 2006). Not to be confused with Michael Bay’s jiggly, blow-’em-up, organ-harvesting gesture toward Logan’s Run. If Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies were lit by God, then The Island sets God to work creating an austere black-and-white landscape of unforgiving snow, rocky shores, hills of coal, and blighted driftwood. By all appearances a mad monk but in this reality a truth-talking, faith-healing saint of sorts, Father Anatoly is doing penance on the island for a wartime act that most reasonable deities would excuse. No such luck for this Russian Orthodox overseer – wearisome monastery politics and the teary negotiations of the sick and injured occupy the sooty savant in this elegantly wrought parable, which puts cheesy stateside Biblesploitation big-budgeters such as The Reckoning to shame. (Chun)

4:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

Once (John Carney, Ireland, 2006). A genuine sleeper at Sundance, this small Irish indie charmer will be spoiled only if you swallow all advance hype about its purported brilliance. Sometimes nice is quite enough. Real-life singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play struggling Dublin musicians, one a native busker still living above Da’s vacuum repair shop, the other a Czech emigre supporting her family by selling flowers on the street. Their slow-burning romance is more musical than carnal, climaxing in a studio recording session. Writer-director John Carney’s film manages to play like a full-blown musical without anyone ever bursting into song. Instead, the appealing original folk rock tunes played and sound-tracked here come off as vivid commentary on a platonic (yet frissony) central relationship. (Harvey)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 6, 9:30 p.m., Clay

Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US, 2006). Jessica Yu, the Oscar-winning director of the 1996 short documentary Breathing Lessons (she also made 2004’s In the Realms of the Unreal, a haunting look at outsider artist Henry Darger), returns with Protagonist, an initially confusing but ultimately fascinating doc about four men who couldn’t be more dissimilar on the surface. How can the themes of classical Greek tragedy link a Mexican bank robber, a German terrorist, a reluctantly gay Christian, and an aggro martial artist? Yu uses puppet interludes, revealing interviews, and a keen eye for detail as she traces their shared stages of provocation, rage, doubt, catharsis, and so on – proving the journey of an antihero has little to do with setting, be it ancient or modern. (Eddy)

6:15 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Mon/30, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/1, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson, US, 2006). The duly strange, as yet unresolved case of SUNY Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz has spurred local filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s best feature to date, a documentary-dramatization hybrid. With the man himself still legally restrained from discussing his circumstances, Thomas Jay Ryan plays Kurtz, who as a founding member of the multimedia Critical Art Ensemble had long made work focusing on social justice issues and the intersection between science and government. To create an exhibition on biotechnology, he acquired for carefully safety-measured display some bacteria samples readily available online. When wife of 27 years Hope (played by Tilda Swinton) unexpectedly died of heart failure in her sleep, emergency medical personnel grew suspicious of these unusual art supplies. Soon FBI personnel evicted the distraught widower from his home, quarantined the entire block, and accused him of possessing bioterrorist weapons of mass destruction during an incredibly cloddish investigation. Kurtz’s real-life colleagues and friends were interviewed in a free-ranging yet pointed feature whose actors also step out of character to articulate their concern about the government’s post-9/11 crackdown on dissent, even the rarefied gallery kind. (Harvey)

6 p.m., Castro. Also May 4, 8: 45 p.m., SFMOMA; May 8, 7 p.m., PFA

SUN/29

The End and the Beginning (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2006). Picking a small town at random and making a film about its residents can be brave filmmaking. It can also be plain lazy, as is the case with Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s directionless profile of rural Aracas, in the state of Paraiba. Unsurprisingly, people being people, he finds great interview subjects, but he doesn’t bother to connect them to one another or to the town. Only their highly region-specific Catholicism provides any unifying thread. And though Coutinho’s not exactly condescending (beyond some slight Kids Say the Darndest Things baiting of his loonier interviewees), there’s an unspoken mandate to keep things simple: his response to one woman’s enticing hint at her failed law practice is to ask about her sewing. (Jason Shamai)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/1, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Singapore Dreaming (Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh, Singapore, 2006). With their second feature, Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh have their hearts in the right place while their eyes are on the prize of capturing a postcolonial city-state clutching at the global economy. The gently humorous, humanist realism of Edward Yang comes to mind while watching this husband-and-wife directorial team’s warm, witty depiction of the everyday lives of a working-class Singapore family who live, dream, bicker in pidgin English and Mandarin, and inhale vast quantities of herbal tea in their high-rise project. Pops buys lottery tickets, hoping to move into a slick new condo. Back from his studies in the States, the pampered son is discovering that in go-go Singapore his degree isn’t quite as covetable as it once was, and the beleaguered daughter is in her final trimester, coping with a demanding yuppie boss and a slacker hubby who yearns to be in a carefree rock band and pees in his father-in-law’s elevator. When disaster strikes, no one is thinking about the matriarch, whose only seeming desire is to properly feed and water her brood, but she ends up providing some unexpected feminist substance, rather than sustenance, under the movie’s wise gaze. (Chun)

8:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3 p.m., Kabuki

12 Labors (Ricardo Elias, Brazil, 2006). Part Black Orpheus, part 400 Blows, 12 Labors is a Brazilian feature that revisits the myth of Hercules through the story of a motorcycle messenger’s rehabilitation. A kid from a rough part of Sao Paulo, Heracles gets out of juvie and tries to start a new life. To land a job as a motorcycle messenger, he has a trial day with (you guessed it) a dozen jobs to complete. An artist who never knew his father, he also writes origin stories in comic book form, which mystify his coworkers. Though Heracles’s experiences seem tinted with divinity, he inspires worry on the part of the viewer. Since all good myths have moral purpose, this one finally addresses the very current social issue of juvenile delinquency and rehabilitation in urban Brazil. (Sara Schieron)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/30, 7 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:15 p.m., Aquarius

MON/30

*Broken English (Zoe Cassavetes, USA, 2006). "I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with me," Parker Posey recently opined, despite having a prominent role in Superman Returns. Fortunately for us, Amerindie cinema does still know what to do with her. The SFIFF is hosting a double bill of the pushing-40 actor’s latest, reprising the title figure in Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool sequel Fay Grim and starring in Zoe Cassavetes’s feature debut. Posey is perfect as director-scenarist Cassavetes’s superficially cheery but highly insecure NYC hotelier. Some may think this low-key seriocomedy paces pat single-gal-searching paths – from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City – but in its thoughtful nature and serious treatment of a clinical-depression interlude it roams well outside stock terrain. Even if the fade-out waxes a tad improbably happily-ever-after, Posey’s nuanced performance will make you root for it. (Harvey)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 2 p.m., Kabuki

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, USA/Germany, 2006). A decade ago Hal Hartley made his best movie, the practically epic – by this miniaturist’s standards – Henry Fool. By most estimates it’s been downhill ever since. They love him in France – but perhaps he should never have left Long Island. So it was heartening news to hear he was returning to the world of Henry Fool, better still to know the sequel would revolve around the title character’s scrappy, vulnerable abandoned wife, Fay, who provided one of Parker Posey’s finest hours. She’s still good here, natch, but Fay Grim is all over the map – literally. The convoluted story line journeys from a mild farcical take on espionage thrillers to a murkily serious commentary on world politics. It’s watchable, but once again one gets the sense that with Hartley, the wider his focus, the blurrier it gets. (Harvey)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 3, 9:10 p.m., PFA

TUES/1

Congorama (Philippe Falardeau, Canada/Belgium/France, 2006). Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau’s story of a revolutionary electric car and a sticky-fingered inventor is part of that ever-widening army of films that plant fairly obvious and poorly integrated details into the first act so that later, when the story is retold from another perspective, they reappear with more context to click Aha!-ingly into place. Though some of the big, unwieldy reveals are a lot of fun in a Lost sort of way, they distract from the more prosaic but more satisfying concerns of the film’s smartly drawn characters. The inventor, for instance, is a not particularly likable person who still has a believably loving, humor-filled relationship with his family. Now talk about a novel concept! (Shamai)

6 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 9:15 p.m., PFA; May 6, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy, 2006). Alain Resnais’s 17th feature is dreamy and sometimes enchanting, though it doesn’t warrant comparison to the knife-sharp moral plays made during his prime, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Adapted from a play by Alain Ayckbourn (the two previously collaborated on Smoking and No Smoking), Private Fears in Public Places weaves the love(less) stories of a half dozen Parisians; plotlines intersect, but in light brushes rather than the solemn collisions of Babel and Crash). The artifice Resnais imposes on his film is poetic in miniature – the camera, for example, periodically floats above the set, filming actors as if they were in a dollhouse – but the sum total is stultifying, unhinging an already-adrift narration and making Private Fears in Public Places seem needlessly opaque. (Goldberg)

7 p.m., PFA. Also May 3, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, USA, 2006). Promising to be the next best coming-of-age cultie with its sure-handed, sharp performances and Freaks and Geeks-like sobriety, Rocket Science finds new agony and indie rock-laced ecstasy in one miserable adolescent’s progress. Or to be specific, one stuttering, 98-pound weakling’s marked, often laugh-out-loud funny lack of progress. The high school years for Hal Hefner (compulsively watchable frail cutie-pie Reece Thompson) seem to be going from bad to sexy once he gets recruited for the school debate team by scarily driven, Tracy Flick-esque champ Ginny (Anna Kendrick). But his travails never quite end even as he attempts to extract nerd revenge and literally find his voice, accompanied by vintage Violent Femmes and hand-clapping quirk pop by Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide. Tapping memories connected to a speech impediment, Spellbound codirector Jeffrey Blitz turns tongue-tied prince Hal’s articulation struggles into the perfect metaphor for every awkward teen’s gropes toward individuation. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 6:15 p.m., Clay

Mi viva loca

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Viva Pinata

(Microsoft; Xbox 360)

GAMER When I grabbed Viva Piñata at the store, I hoped the game would inspire my Xbox 360 to a greatness beyond its current status as a sleek, expensive bookend that plays DVDs. Viva Pinata’s premise might be described as Pokemon: Capitalist Edition — you are a pinata farmer in charge of creating a garden that will attract a multitude of brightly colored pinatas, which you will have to tend and breed in a totally G-rated way. You make money from selling the rarer, more valuable piñatas.

I’ll be honest: my interest in this game was piqued when someone told me you could whack the Whirm pinatas with a shovel and feed their candy viscera to the Sparrowmint pinatas. We need more of that sort of content in children’s games.

The game play is most reminiscent of SimCity: you must satisfy the requirements of your potential citizens to entice them to move in and stay. Once your population gets large, chaos ensues. You plow your garden, and once you have nice soil, a Whirm pinata moves in. These are soon followed by Sparrowmints. But why doesn’t my bird pinata eat my worm pinata? After about five tries, my Sparrowmint flew off toward my worm and ate it. This lack of responsiveness sadly plagues Viva Pinata. Actions fail and give you no indication why. At other times the game generates an ominous err-err noise and doesn’t indicate why it made the sound or refocus on the problem piñata. You have to search over your large garden of piñatas to find the one that was poisoned or got in a fight.

When your pinatas inevitably start fighting, you’ll find there’s no way to break them up except to whack or spray them. Your pinatas sicken if they lose a fight, get wet, or are smacked. If you don’t build fences, you’ll spend most of your time calling the doctor, yet building fences is nearly impossible. The analog control is terrible — it will fail to fence areas such as untilled land but won’t tell you why. Getting your pinatas behind the fence is another trial — there aren’t any gates, and the game doesn’t pause while you’re fencing. You have to herd them into the area you want to fence, and half the time they wander off while you’re building.

After about two days of playing this game, I got frustrated and sold it. The controls were awkward and unintuitive — reprehensible in an adult game but inexcusable in a kids’ one. The game play felt buggy and broken. Since this is the only real children’s title for Xbox 360, I can’t completely dis it. But your kids, being smarter and more patient than both you and me, will probably enjoy it a lot more than you will. (Kea Johnston)

The pigs are alright

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FILM Rejoice, fans of smart, sharp, genre-tweaking comedy: Hot Fuzz — the latest from Shaun of the Dead writer-director Edgar Wright, cowriter-star Simon Pegg, and costar–slacker extraordinaire Nick Frost — has arrived. Pegg plays a London supercop whose makes-everyone-else-look-bad ways get him shunted to a small town where policing is limited to underage drinking and escaped swans. Or is it? Hot Fuzz apes British cop shows and American blockbusters that take law enforcement to explosive levels, including the singularly silly Bad Boys II. Recently, I sat down with the trio to get the buzz on Fuzz.

SFBG Considering Shaun‘s popularity, do you think people were surprised you didn’t make another horror movie or a sequel?

EDGAR WRIGHT I think, because every film takes three years essentially to make, to spend six years of our lives on the same idea would have been a mistake. We have so many stories to tell that you just want to keep moving on.

NICK FROST Most of the [Shaun] characters died, as well.

SIMON PEGG Plus I don’t think we wanted to be specifically tied to one genre — even if we do comedies every time — and be known as the guys who do horror comedy. It would be nice to flip between genres and types of comedy as well.

SFBG I was watching the trailers before The Hills Have Eyes 2, and someone yelled out, "Shaun of the Dead!" when the Hot Fuzz preview came on.

SP I don’t think Hot Fuzz would have been such an easy sell over here if it had been our first film, because even though it ends up being much more American than Shaun of the Dead is, it’s also much more British than Shaun of the Dead is. What we’re kind of hoping is that the groundswell of support for that film, which seemed to take place mainly on DVD, will be the thing that brings people to Hot Fuzz. I’ve been amazed at how many people have seen Shaun of the Dead.

SFBG What do people say when they see you on the street?

NF [Noo Yawk accent] Hey, Shaun of the Dead, right here!

SP I ran into someone on the Sunset Strip who was wearing a Shaun of the Dead T-shirt. He was a bit stunned, and so was I. (Cheryl Eddy)

Hot Fuzz opens April 20 in Bay Area theaters. For an extended interview with its creators, click here.

Meeting acute

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the only voices raised on behalf of understanding Timothy McVeigh — that is, as someone slightly more complicated than a Hollywood-style incarnation of pure evil — was that of Gore Vidal. Vidal insisted on pointing to the obvious: the bombing of offices that included the local headquarters of the FBI and the ATF — although utterly cruel and misguided in leading to 168 deaths — was not arbitrary wickedness but a carefully considered act of revenge. As Vidal put it in his article on McVeigh for Vanity Fair, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City "was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas."

McVeigh — a decorated military hero of the Gulf War, as it turned out — had counterattacked a government he claimed was waging war against the American people. In this opinion, McVeigh, who insisted he had no accomplices, was not alone. He represented a growing libertarian movement afoot in the American heartland. Moreover, as Vidal, a critic from the left of federal tyranny, pointed out in a 1998 piece for Vanity Fair, "Shredding the Bill of Rights," the government had violated Posse Comitatus in laying its siege of the Branch Davidians.

For Vidal’s attention to the matter, McVeigh began a correspondence with him, even inviting the writer to attend his execution — an invitation Vidal declined. This immediately sounds like a fascinating, even dramatic dialogue. But stageworthy? Edmund White’s two-hander, Terre Haute, shrewdly ups the ante a bit, imagining an actual date between Vidal and McVeigh — respectively cast as the lightly fictionalized writer James Brevoord (a fine John Hutchinson) and the transparently McVeigh-like terrorist Harrison (a fiercely magnetic Elias Escobedo, who even bears a strong physical resemblance to the original). They encounter each other in the flesh in a series of brief meetings across a plastic security screen in the maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Ind., during the days preceding Harrison’s execution.

On death row Harrison has had time to think over his actions. Neighbor Ted Kaczynski, we learn, has suggested he would have done better to blow the building up at night, when it was empty of innocents. But Harrison remains unrepentant, even if we see the burden of responsibility close over him when the lives of innocent "collaterals," particularly the children at the day care center, get mentioned. Brevoord — who is there to write on the meaning of Harrison’s act and to boldly ask the whys so studiously erased in the media — sympathizes with Harrison’s anti-imperialism while provoking the younger man with mounting scorn for his embrace of feeble right-wing conspiracy theories.

Besides a political tête-à-tête, the meeting is the occasion for a clash of personalities, temperaments, and backgrounds, all of which White brings out starkly in the dialogue: Brevoord, for instance, is the kind of man who has no trouble using kerfuffle in an idle sentence, although an indeed is more than enough to throw Harrison for a loop. The tension here is often lightly comical, but the point about education, intellect, and political opposition (and the art of the interviewer) is well made. And if the script feels overly expositional at times, the actors offer strong and credible performances throughout.

The New Conservatory Theatre Center’s US premiere is a sharp and intimate production, staged by director Christopher Jenkins with intelligent assurance, including a concentration on character that garners moments of alternately subtle and electric intensity between two men negotiating an extraordinary situation. Yet the director can’t resist kitschy flourishes, introducing the McVeigh character, for instance, with a short piercing scream of sound and a light that illuminates Harrison standing like Hannibal Lecter behind the see-through wall of the visiting cell. Scenic designer Bruce Walters’s visiting room, meanwhile, is a simple but convincingly dire arrangement of wire-woven Plexiglas walls, yellow-taped borders, and blinking security cameras.

White draws the facts of the case, as well as the style and argument from Vidal’s relevant essays, into well-crafted if sometimes information-laden dialogue. It can be too clashing and unnecessarily confrontational, but it is generally graceful and filled with absorbing ideas, especially in the monologues given to the Vidal character. Unfortunately, the play gets distracted from the meat of its story. That tale not only sports an intriguing tension between two very different sorts of rebels but is politically urgent and deep, ranging from the correct response to a truly totalitarian encroachment on fundamental liberties to the dissolving relation between cause and effect in a culture dominated by mind-numbingly interchangeable images of good and evil.

Instead, the play ends up veering off into carnal considerations of repressed desires, a layer to the characters’ relationship that was probably best left hinted at. The best you might say about it is that it further humanizes a figure too quickly passed off as a cartoon rather than a riddle that needs solving. But in practice it tends to trivialize what’s gone before, inevitably mixing an unhelpful pinch of Freud into the media-repressed why of a terrible public act. *

TERRE HAUTE

Through May 6

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $22–$40

New Conservatory Theatre Center

25 Van Ness, SF

(415) 861-8972

www.nctcsf.org

>

Eco trip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER So you wanna live clean, go green, and leave a low-impact footprint on this embattled Earth — yet you also want to bring the noise, bust a move, and get the rock out? It’s worth wondering about on Earth Day, when everyone seems to be looking to what they can change while the powers-that-be hold their apocalyptic course. Some might argue that a decadent pop lifestyle clashes with the color green — and even those who want to tour consciously must pay a price.

"It is a lot of work," said Oakland musician John Benson, whose veggie oil–fueled bus and curbside shows are a model for ecopunks who want to burn less petroleum and more french fry grease. He has converted vehicles for about five bands so far and plans to attend the Version Festival in Chicago to demo veggie-run vehicles, but Benson and his converts are learning that culling free fuel from oil Dumpsters behind truck stops can be dirty and time-consuming work.

"Bands that are really glamour conscious get really bummed out," he explained. "There’s a time loss and a filth factor, and when you’re on a tour, you’re conscious of making the next show." Also with used oil, "you get dead rats, sweet and sour sauce, and the occasional ball of hair," he added. "You have to be prepared to pull over and pull it out. Be prepared to get your favorite suit covered with rat droppings. It’s a fashion hazard."

Still, creating a cleaner planet doesn’t have to be a filthy business, despite the fact that even green-minded musos such as Smog Veil Records honcho Frank Mauceri admit, "Traditionally, the music industry has not been a green industry. It’s not a business that’s been sensitive to the environment."

Nonetheless, Mauceri, who fought Chicago’s city hall to install an electricity-producing wind turbine and solar panel system atop his new headquarters, and others are trying to buck tradition. San Francisco singer-songwriter Kelley Stoltz’s recent Below the Branches (Sub Pop, 2006) sported a Green-e label, tagging the full-length as the first to be recorded with all-renewable energy purchased through offsets from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour similarly created a climate-neutral solo album, On an Island (Sony, 2006), through an arrangement with the CarbonNeutral Co., planting trees in response to the carbon emissions produced during the disc’s making.

But what can you, humble musicmaker and fan, do? I did a little chatting, Web searching, and non-ozone-depleting cogitating for just a few suggestions on how to green your music enjoyment.

THE TROUBLE WITH CDS Are digital downloads the real green deal for music consumers? Part of Smog Veil’s green initiatives involves eliminating jewel cases and using all-paper Digipaks, eventually moving to solely digital downloads. But the digital divide continues to be an issue — so the nonwired music lover might want to purchase music from bands such as Cloud Cult who have packaged their CDs in 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper with nontoxic soy ink. And those still attached to the shiny plastic discs can turn to Green Citizen (1-877-918-8900) for recycling. Meanwhile old-school DIY-ers such as Benson make a plea for analog: "People are finding bulk tapes in thrift stores and recording over them in the spirit of recycling."

DELIVERY SYSTEM BLUES You’ve proudly purchased that ecofriendly download, yet what to do when the trusty iPod breaks? Apple has a recycling program: any US Apple store will accept old iPods and offer a 10 percent discount on a new player. Nonetheless the highly toxic e-waste generated by all MP3 makes and models continues to worry environmentalists. Cart those busted players to the aforementioned Green Citizen or call pickup artists such as E-Recycling (1-800-795-0993).

LIVE WASTE "Music is a catalyst," Perry Farrell recently told me from London. "It can bring people together and make change fashionable. I’d love to see everyone buying recycled paper and buying hydrogen fuel cell cars." Farrell has done his part with Lollapalooza, which introduced solar-powered stages and came up with fun ways to encourage recycling (audience members gathering the most recyclables have scored backstage passes). Bonnaroo and the Vans Warped Tour have powered stages, generators, and buses with biodiesel. Still, efforts can be as simple as the Green Apple Music and Arts Festival (not to be confused with the SF bookstore). Founder Peter Shapiro is using the fest to promote Earth Day with shows in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City this year while providing city venues with environmentally friendly paper products, garbage bags, and cleaning materials and offsetting the carbon dioxide emissions produced by the festival, making it the largest carbon-neutral event in the country. He told me that he hopes "we’ll get people to think about it for 30 seconds, maybe go buy an energy-efficient lightbulb, maybe carpool or walk to the next show."

GET IN THE VAN Not all young bands can afford to buy carbon dioxide emission offsets and convert to biodiesel when they go on tour, like Barenaked Ladies, Pearl Jam, Gomez, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — let alone slap their name on a biodiesel company the way Willie Nelson has with BioWillie. But that doesn’t mean musicians have to stop spreading the green love. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s Philip Dickey says his Springfield, Mo., group is aiming to convert its touring van to veggie oil someday, but until they can afford it, they’re trying to do their part. "No one in the band has a car. We all ride bikes when we’re in town, and when we’re touring, there’s five of us in a van. Pollution sucks, and pollution coming out of our van sucks. But it’s not like one person in an SUV. We also have a new song called ‘Bigger Than Your Yard’ about how everyone has to have a car." *

GREEN APPLE MUSIC AND ARTS FESTIVAL EARTH DAY EVENT

With Bob Weir and Ratdog, Stephen Marley, the Greyboy Allstars, and others

Sun/22, 11:30 a.m., free

Golden Gate Park

Fulton and 36th Ave., SF

Other events run Thurs/19–Sat/21

For a schedule, go to www.greenapplefestival.com

SOMEONE STILL LOVES YOU BORIS YELTSIN

Tues/24, 8 p.m., $14–$15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

>

More fun?

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› duncan@sfbg.com

"Have you heard this yet?" I asked the cashier at Green Apple Books and Music’s annex, laying The Weirdness (Virgin) on the counter. The black cover with the ominous Stooges logo in reflective silver seemed somehow dangerous in and of itself.

"Yeah. It’s all right," he answered. "It could’ve been worse."

"So it’s no Fun House?"

"Not even. But it’s not bad. It could’ve been really embarrassing."

So, how is The Weirdness — aside from not too embarrassing? It opens with a grunt from Iggy Pop and a squealing guitar that sounds like an overdriven, amplified harmonica. The track, "Trollin’," is, of course, about tooling for twat in a convertible, with lines such as "I see your hair as energy / My dick is turnin’ into a tree." Not to throw salt in a brother’s game, but with the Igg turning 60 at the Warfield show April 21, the boner jams might be a little inappropriate.

But when have the Stooges ever been appropriate? Pop’s lyrics have always blurred the line between idiot and savant: we can all agree that "The Passenger" is some of the finest alienation poetry ever penned, but "It’s 1969 OK / All across the USA / It’s another year for me and you / Another year with nothin’ to do" ain’t exactly Shakespeare. The Weirdness includes Mike Watt on bass, who, despite his storied history with the Minutemen and Firehose, must be crapping his trousers every time he gets onstage with the band. Steve Mackay — the original sax player who brought unadulterated free-jazz death skronk mayhem to "LA Blues," the outro to Fun House (Elektra, 1970) — is heavily showcased, and the whole thing was recorded by Steve Albini, the obvious choice to put the album to tape with minimal hocus-pocus.

As a latter-day Iggy Pop slab, The Weirdness is pretty damned OK. I mean, 9 times out of 10, are you going to grab Naughty Little Doggy (Virgin, 1996) instead of Lust for Life (RCA, 1977)? But every so often, you get that wild hair up your ass, and since you’re not expecting too much, you’re pleasantly surprised. The Weirdness has its moments: it’s got the anthemic "My Idea of Fun" ("is killing everyone!") and the shambling, rambling "Mexican Guy," a sort of twisted version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It’s got Iggy as crooner on the title track and "Passing Cloud," both recalling the hugely underrated 1979 Arista disc New Values. It’s got lusty shout-outs to black women ("The End of Christianity") and bum-outs ("Greedy, Awful People").

But is it a Stooges album? I know that for guys like Pop and brothers Ron and Scott "Rock Action" Asheton, on guitar and drums respectively, the idea of some college kid walking around campus cranking their music may be antithetical to a "Search and Destroy" ethos, but like it or not, punk — and its kinder, gentler offspring indie rock — broke on college radio and campuses. During my time in the institution, when I felt up to my eyeballs, I’d put Fun House on the headphones, walk over to the coffee cart, and just melt everyone like I had heat vision. Seven tracks, just under 37 minutes, both life affirming and a complete sonic death match. Linda Blair in The Exorcist has nothing on the scream — "Loooooord!" — Pop lets out at the beginning of "TV Eye," followed by one of the simplest and heaviest guitar riffs in history, played by Ron Asheton before he was moved to bass in favor of the more polished, less primal James Williamson. That type of sheer rock ‘n’ roll megatonnage has yet to be matched — it’s just not fair to hold The Weirdness to the same standards as the three original Stooges records.

No one’s going to be screaming out the names of new tracks. Thirty years down the line, it doesn’t matter if the reunion is a cash grab or a fitting epitaph. What matters is that it’s the Stooges. Are you gonna miss the second coming on account of not being overwhelmed by the latest chapter? Six decades in, Pop has been a prince and a pauper, a louse-ridden junkie and a rock god. He’s been covered in peanut butter and blood. He’s been your dog, and he’ll be it again. *

STOOGES

Thurs/19 and Sat/21, 8 p.m., $39.50–$45

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 775-7722

>

Resurrection blues

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Sure it’s all about puppy love, music-geek boners, and clean-cut strangers offering to be their dog now, but as Iggy Pop declared during a crowded onstage interview at this year’s South by Southwest fest in Austin, Texas, back when the once-decried Stooges first burst blown-out, bratty, and oozing monosyllabic menace, bristly distortion, and snotty attitude from Ann Arbor, Mich., "the two things were, ‘They can’t play.’ " He gestured toward the two other surviving original Stooges, guitarist Ron Asheton and his brother, drummer Scott, then nodded almost imperceptibly toward himself. "And ‘We hate him!’ "

Thirty-four years after the Stooges called it quits the last time around, that animosity was absent the next night as the Stooges packed the dirt expanses of Stubb’s in Austin. The Stooges’ first two albums, 1968’s self-titled debut and 1970’s Fun House (both Elektra), left an indelible, grotesque yet groovy, brutal bruise on rock’s flower-power posterior with the most proudly primal and corrosive art rock ever generated by smarter-than-they-looked-or-sounded troglodytes enamored of the dirty blues, garage rock, and free jazz. And now it looked like the surprisingly mixed mob at Stubb’s of T-shirted record collectors, black-garbed rockers, shaggy hipsters, gray-haired codgers with pasteled wifeys, buttoned-down frat boys, and straightened-haired patrician blonds was all in on the joke and the joy of still-powerful songs such as "1969" and "TV Eye." A deeply tanned, limber Pop undulated above the mass, flailing and bounding like a bronze lizard made of bubble gum and Motor City tire rubber, seemingly swallowed by the crowd, then spat back out while the Ashetons, Mike Watt on bass, and Pacifica resident Steve Mackay on sax punched through bleeding, blighted versions of "No Fun" and "Loose."

Still, you couldn’t help tearing your peepers away from arguably the finest rock combo ever to roll off Detroit-area assembly lines to wonder who were all these people? Deeply closeted Stooges fans who wore out the grooves of their gatefold Fun Houses in the dark beside dank jocks and dusty sneaks? Surely there were more Three Stooges Usenet newsgroups than Stooges message boards? If you weren’t even born when a band first came around, does the connection you forge with the group and its work still count as nostalgia?

What does someone in the middle of the Stooges reunion storm, such as Ron Asheton, feel about the newbs and the love lavished even as the band fails to gather enough votes to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite multiple nominations?

"It’s the best time. It’s superfine," the 58-year-old Asheton says from Ann Arbor. "Especially since the audiences are more receptive than they’ve been in the past. They know the songs. It’s kind of like the world has caught up with the Stooges."

Between playing with bands such as Destroy All Monsters and acting in low-budget horror flicks such as Mosquito, Asheton — a born raconteur given to wicked, basso profundo Pop impersonations and swoopingly dramatic vocal flourishes — has been holding down the inherited Asheton family homestead as the only remaining Stooge left in Michigan while Scott and Pop spend most of the year in Florida. He was prepping for the start of the reunited Stooges’ first full US tour and looking forward to working on the 30 or so additional songs written during the making of The Weirdness.

SFBG Why do you still live in Michigan?

RON ASHETON I love it. It’s a beautiful state. I love the Great Lakes, and I have a place on Lake Heron that I get to go to infrequently. When I was younger, we moved so much that when I finally got to Michigan, I said when I was 14, [miming a pouty teen] ‘I’m never moving again!’ Though I did live in California for six years when Main Man Management took the Stooges to LA — being here was like being in the backwater rather than being close to the action when you’re young and stupid!

SFBG How do you feel about The Weirdness?

RA When I listen to it, I can’t just listen to it once — I really do, it’s true! — I listen to it twice, and I picture people in the summertime, riding in the cars or sitting by the campfire on the beach or having a backyard party.

It was really fun to do it differently than in the past, where with the first record, we had one week. I never heard the record till it was actually in the stores. The second, Fun House — I heard the acetate shortly before it was released, and that only took two weeks. This one took three weeks, and I got to be one of the producers.

SFBG Why weren’t you able to listen to The Stooges before it came out?

RA That’s the way record companies dealt with things. It was just taken out of our hands after we were done — "You kids are dismissed! Leave the room!" The producer [John Cale] and the owner [Jac Holzman] of the record company took the record, and they got a new toy! "Yeah, I paid for it! I can do whatever I want with it!" So it was very smart of Iggy to want to have control of the new record.

SFBG The Stooges always wrote songs based from the start on your guitar riffs. How did you develop the songs this time?

RA We did it on this also. The only difference now was it was concentrated — going down to Florida and me walking in the building, plugging in my guitar, and starting to play. Iggy lurking about — same thing. Coming up with things just off the top of my head, and Iggy saying, "Hey, I like that!"

SFBG How would you describe the Stooges’ dynamic, writing and playing together?

RA I think part of it is we actually grew up together. Being teenagers and deciding to get a band house and getting that first summer sublet and finally getting kicked out of there and moving on and getting another place, that common bond of doing everything together. We literally ate dinner together, went out, cruised the town, went to parties, knowing we were part of the birth of that ugly baby the Stooges! *

STOOGES

Thurs/19 and Sat/21, 8 p.m., $39.50–$45

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 775-7722

For more from Ron Asheton, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Local Grooves

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ASSEMBLE HEAD IN SUNBURST SOUND

Ekranoplan

(Tee Pee)

It only takes a quick look over the cover art (a gauche sci-fi trip) and song titles ("Summon the Vardig," "Message by Mistral and Thunderclap") to get the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound’s vibe: paint-thinner psych, boys-club rawk. There’s nothing subtle about Ekranoplan, but the Assemble Head generally seem likable traditionalists on it, worthy adherents of the nothin’-fancy ethos of heavy rockers such as Blue Cheer.

Producer Tim Green (the Fucking Champs) has previously twiddled the knobs for Comets on Fire, and it’s a little hard not hearing the Assemble Head as Comets’ younger (and possibly even more stoned) brother. The album’s overture, for one, is frankly imitative: a skuzzy riff rides teakettle feedback and a cresting cymbal before the band belly flops into a chugging Stooges riff and throaty vocals. It’s a great formula, but the Assemble Head don’t have Comets on Fire’s experimentalist instincts, making such passages seem, well, formulaic. Ekranoplan works better when the band plays it fast and loose on guitar rave-ups such as "Mosquito Lantern" and snaky biker ballads "Rudy on the Corner" and "Gemini." Toss in an instrumental that sounds like it could be an outtake from the acoustic side of Led Zeppelin III (titled, in all restraint, "The Chocolate Maiden’s Misty Summer Morning"), and you’ve got a fine record: nothin’ fancy, but a keeper for the coming summer. (Max Goldberg)

ASSEMBLE HEAD IN SUNBURST SOUND

With Howlin Rain, Citay, and Voice of the Seven Woods

Tues/24, 9 p.m., $8.50–$10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

XIU XIU

Remixed and Covered

(5RC/Kill Rock Stars)

The latest from electrotheatrics trio Xiu Xiu — one disc apiece devoted to covers and remixes by kindred warriors in the fight against musical sterility — is a cranium-gorging success, thanks to the artists’ finessing of the middle ground between reverence for the originals and eagerness to tweak them into thoughtful new forms. While all nine interpretations on the first disc are successful in this balancing act, the most noteworthy are those least beholden to the familiar Xiu Xiu viral-electro template. Larsen’s computer-vocal "Mousey Toy" imagines Laurie Anderson fronting an early Tortoise record. Devendra Banhart takes "Support Our Troops" on a spin in his interplanetary doo-wop time machine.

The remix disc brims with equally intriguing constructions. Gold Chains’ thumping mix of "Hello from Eau Claire" makes over vocalist Caralee McElroy into the queen of Alienated Divaland, and Warbucks’s overhaul of "Suha" is a stunning piano-driven electropop confessional evoking Talk Talk’s finest moments. If that’s not ear-pricking enough, consider the disc’s closer: To Live and Shave in LA filter the entirety of Xiu Xiu’s The Air Force album into a four-minute dreamscape that bristles and glows in a proper brain-scrubbing tribute to the band. (Todd Lavoie)

XIU XIU

Sun/22–Mon/23, 8 p.m., $14

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

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Save the green planet

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has made something of a modern silent movie. I didn’t count, but I am pretty sure there are only a handful of words (if not less) spoken by the movie’s main characters. Taking the place of dialogue is ambient noise — snippets from a Cantonese opera, a Malaysian news report, a talk show in Mandarin — and most of all, unadulterated silence. With communication perpetually out of reach, it is no wonder alienation is such a major theme in Tsai’s films. Visually, the director is all about stationary long shots and understatement. He fashions an environment that dwarfs and suppresses its inhabitants.

In many instances this environment is literally ecological. Pollution, contamination, unknown illnesses, and inexplicable catastrophes run deep in Tsai’s world: in 1997’s The River, the main character contracts a nagging, stubborn neck pain after being in a filthy river (the causality, however, is never made explicit). His peripatetic quest for a treatment leads to a denouement of son-and-father bonding in a gay sex club. The Hole, Tsai’s 1998 follow-up, imagines Taipei after a deadly and unknown pandemic strikes; the entire city is emptied out but for two people, surviving unbeknownst to each other. Taipei is once again under ecological threat in 2005’s The Wayward Cloud as a dire water shortage drives people to eat watermelons for liquid sustenance.

Similarly, the Kuala Lumpur of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is not doing too well. In one scene a noxious haze blankets the city, generated by a wildfire in Indonesia that has been blown across the Strait of Malacca. People are warned to stay inside or wear masks if they have to venture out. Unfortunately, there is a mask shortage, so plastic bags and disposable Styrofoam bowls are deployed as makeshift substitutes.

"It is a truthful reflection of the world we live in at this moment," Tsai says during an interview when asked about the scenarios of ecological trouble in his films. "We are living in a moment [when] the world is actually sick. For example, the fire you see in this film [I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone] is something that Malaysians and the countries around Malaysia have to face every year. It is a real problem that has a lot of repercussions — not just environmental but also social and economical."

In a sense, the intersection of these outcomes is embodied in the massive unfinished construction site that serves as a kind of structural centerpiece in the film. Located in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, the building to be, along with many others, was started during an economic boom in the country. In the late 1990s the Asian financial crisis devastated the entire region, and the project was left unfinished and abandoned. The foreign laborers brought into Malaysia to help build it instantly became jobless.

Tsai first saw the structure in 1999 when he visited Malaysia, his birth country. Six years later he decided to enter the site for the first time. What he found was a giant pool of dark water — a collection of rain, soot, and runoff that had gathered inside the building over the course of years.

Water, of course, is Tsai’s preferred element; his first three features — Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’Amour (1994), and The River — are known as his water trilogy. Tsai has said before that he sees his characters as plants and their loneliness as a sort of thirst that needs constant watering. As such, discovering that large body of water within a gutted structure was, to him, an unmistakable sign. "I saw the water and decided I had to make a film at that place," Tsai says. "I felt the water was waiting for me to come back." *

I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE

Thurs/19–Sat/21, 7 and 9 p.m.; Sun/22, 4 and 7 p.m.; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

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Writing the book on cinematic sound

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Where to start with the work of Ennio Morricone? The composer and musician has scored more than 400 films, so the task for the curious listener, let alone for the intrepid film curator, can be daunting. His most famous soundtracks have become a kind of enduring synecdoche, capable of summoning not just a particular title but an entire genre — think of the evocative power of the ocarina flourish in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Countless others, unearthed from the vaults every few years, are often the only artifacts we have of titles — mostly sexy thrillers and low-budget police procedurals — long since forgotten (see Dagored’s impressive reissue catalog of Morricone’s more obscure Italian scores). The Castro Theatre has assembled a decent pocket guide — Il Maestro for Dummies, if you will — which includes chestnuts such as 1986’s The Mission (his biggest Oscar snub and crossover success) and the more rarely screened and heard, such as Sam Fuller’s 1982 tale of a racist canine, White Dog.

Morricone first garnered international attention for his collaborations with Sergio Leone, in which he underscored the rugged beauty of the director’s lawless western mesas by adding ethereal choirs, noble strings, lilting harpsichord, and fuzz guitars that dart like rattlesnakes across the landscape. It’s an approach perhaps best encapsulated in his gorgeous theme for 1968’s Once upon a Time in the West, also included in the Castro’s lineup.

By that time Morricone had already proven himself to be a protean asset to directors regardless of genre, given his ear for unusual timbres and sensitivity to emotional coloring. He could sum up the tragic cost of liberation in a simple martial tattoo, as he did in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), or use his extensive compositional training to achieve twisted, discordant ends, as heard in his score for the 1968 psychological thriller A Quiet Day in the Country.

It is the darker, freakier side of Morricone, deliciously showcased on the 2005 Mike Patton–curated compilation Crime and Dissonance (Ipecac), that has most consistently entranced this listener and could provide enough entries for its own film festival. The Doors-esque theme for Dario Argento’s 1971 giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet — kicked off with a chaotic drum roll worthy of the Muppets’ Animal — only hints at the bleating, echo-laden trumpet (often played by Morricone himself), cackling snippets of wah-wah guitar, frantic free jazz drumming, and creaking gongs that would later accompany the supernatural goings-on and criminal activities in films such as The Antichrist (1974) and The Cold Eyes of Fear (1971). The score for the latter was the only one Morricone ever performed with his avant-garde orchestral ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.

His work on these pulpy flicks, like his celebrated spaghetti western scores, are only one facet of the embarrassment of riches constituting Morricone’s oeuvre. To call the honorary Oscar he received at this year’s Academy Awards long overdue is a gross understatement. Hollywood’s acknowledgement seemed almost too little too late for someone who has so profoundly shaped how we hear, and in turn how we see, movies. *

LEGENDARY COMPOSER: ENNIO MORRICONE

April 20–25

See Rep Clock for show info

$6–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

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Smoke gets in your eyes

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Long before Al Gore saw green in front of a blue screen and Hollywood used the Academy Awards to congratulate itself for suddenly becoming ecofriendly, Tsai Ming-liang braided more than a half dozen superb movies set in parts of a poisoned planet that Americans rarely contemplate. Resulting in at least a pair of classics — 1997’s The River and 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn — Tsai’s one of a kind linked works to date have been distinguished by their not just rare but entirely singular realism and prescience about everyday pollution. Along with Todd Haynes’s similarly radical 1995 melodrama, Safe, The River uncovers the taken-for-granted toxicity of human-made environments and does so with a depth that realizes there is no easy diagnosis, let alone cure.

Tsai’s palette changes a bit in his latest film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the first set in his birth country, Malaysia. Instead of the soaked Taipei that dominates most of his alienated romantic comedies, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone occupies a Kuala Lumpur beset by nearby fires. While painterly, the colors aren’t so glossy, partly because smoke gets in Tsai’s eyes and those of the film’s lovers, who of course include his frequent star Chen Shiang-chyi and his muse, Lee Kang-sheng. If (as Tsai once suggested to me) Lee’s characters are connected to — if not directly reflective of — Tsai’s view of whatever Lee’s going through in his offscreen life, then Tsai must be annoyed to the point of murderous thoughts. This time Lee is leading a double life, leaving the gorgeous Norman Atun to pine for him just as Lee once pined in what was previously Tsai’s most literal musical-beds narrative, 1994’s Vive l’Amour. Unrequited love has a long life in Tsai’s world, where hearts are pure while water and air are toxic. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Vino, verde, vici

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Fuck green — I want emerald, I want turquoise, I want veridian. I want shades of chartreuse cascading down the sides of my highball glass and mint cream swirling at the lip of my rim. Mmm. I was going to write this week about how much I’m head over loafers for Lil Mama’s clover new vid, "Lip Gloss," and what the deal is lately with so many trash-tragic newbie chicks wearing flip-flops and fleece to the clubs (did I miss a memo from Target?), but it’s the Green Issue — yay for Earth! — so I’m going in on the recent trend toward "green" cocktails.

Green cocktails? Easy! All you have to do is down eight or nine shots of Fernet, and — voila! — you’re green. And let’s not even get into how some drinks instantly recycle themselves. Yet in terms of mixology, green usually means organic — juices, vodka, ice cubes, fruit flies, what have you. Organic, however, doesn’t necessarily mean green: it probably took five tons of jet fuel to plop that native Guangdong lychee into your tropical Bellini. Conundrums! When it comes to partying green, it seems, the snifter of a conscious tipple is somewhat bruised with environmental irony. It’s environy.

But if you can snag some local fresh-squeezed mixer, shake it with small-batch liquor, and consume only what you need — not hard, since organic cocktails are kind of freakin’ pricey — you can still get three sheets to the wind and not feel like you’re littering. Usual suspects such as gourmet vegetarian legend Millennium (milleniumrestaurant.com — house-infused kumquat–star anise gin, anyone?) and the snuggly bar at Roots Restaurant (theorchardgardenhotel.com) in the grandly green-built Orchard Garden Hotel have been in on the organic, fresh-brewed tip for a while. And a few surprising spots have begun wearing their green hearts on their sleeves too. Vesuvio (vesuvio.com) in North Beach is bursting with ecofriendly drinks such as the Pojito, a mojito with local-made 209 gin and organic Pama pomegranate liqueur. SoMa restaurant Coco500 (coco500.com) features a nifty lemongrass Bloody Mary, with lemongrass-infused organic vodka, organic tomato juice, and sriracha (sun-dried chili paste).

As for less immediately intoxicating spirits, Yield Wine Bar (yieldsf.com) offers a vast array of biodynamic, sustainable, and organic wines with some of the more harmful of the 250 chemicals involved in production filtered out — that’s almost as many chemicals involved as in the first 10 minutes of a drag queen’s night out. Harmful. Wine’s pretty easy, of course — we live in wine heaven, and the products of conscious vintners such as Beringer (beringer.com) and Five Rivers Ranch (fetzer.com), as well as those from distributors such as the Organic Wine Co. (ecowine.com), can be found all over. Beer’s getting in on it too: local foam-meister Anderson Valley Brewing Co. (avbc.com) pumps out the suds from a solar-powered brewery, even.

But the green drink ground zero in San Francisco has to be Elixir in the Mission. Not only does it foreground organic cocktails, but the whole Elixir enchilada is officially green certified by the city in terms of recycling, cleaning, and waste disposal — the first bar of its kind. H., Elixir’s wryly gregarious owner, mixes up fierce experimental environmental drinks at the bar’s monthly green drink happy hour, which brings in an enthusiastic crowd of ecoliquor seekers (who are also really into baseball, judging from the reactions to the big-screen TVs). At a recent green grog gathering, he whipped me up a luscious Eldersour, using organic Square One rosehip-infused vodka and elderflower syrup, and a kick-ass — I can’t believe I’m seriously about to type this word — GreenTeani, a Square One martini with organic green tea infusion and lime zest. It was gone in a minute — gulp.

"There’s the green side of our business — stuff like installing low-flow toilets and making sure we recycle as much as possible," H. says. "And then there’s the organic side, with the drinks, that people seem to be getting really into lately. The little things you can do every day to feel like you make a difference matter more and more, the principle of it — even if it’s related to being a bar or going out. Nobody can be perfect when it comes to environmental stuff. I mean, I drive an old BMW to work — and it doesn’t run on used fryer oil. But it’s paid for."

After a few more GreenTeanis and a quick trip to the low-flow, I had to admit that I certainly felt better about my environment. Global warming? Pshaw. Everything was just ducky. Now where can I get an organic date? *

GREEN DRINK HAPPY HOUR

Second Thursdays, 6 p.m.–late

Elixir

3200 16th St., SF

(415) 552-1633

www.elixirsf.com

>

The shiznit

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Two years ago I met a guy who was a friend of a friend. I got to know him and realized that he was the most fascinating, intelligent person I’d ever met. Despite not being initially attracted to him, I soon got over this and fell in love with him.

We skirted discussing a romantic relationship because he had deep emotional problems precipitated by a number of traumatic things that happened to him in his childhood. He could often be unfriendly to the point of cruelty. I made too many allowances for this and probably let him get away with things I wouldn’t have tolerated in anyone else.

We remained friends even though we now live in different cities. I have had involvements with numerous other people but have always known that if this guy suddenly wanted me, I would drop everything. It’s against my feminist sensibility, but no one can compare. I can’t see myself ever meeting another person who understands me so completely. Will I ever get over it? Am I being totally pathetic?

Love,

Hung Up and Hung Over

Dear Hung:

Yep. Pathetic in a way I have no problem understanding and even reutf8g to, but pathetic nonetheless. And yes, you’ll get over it, but I can’t promise it will be quick or painless. Extractions and amputations so rarely are.

Look, we’ve all been there. Most people who value (I’m tempted to say "overvalue") qualities such as intelligence and quick wit in a partner have been there. Sadly, there is no rule that says a big brain has to come with a big heart or any heart at all, for that matter. A big, fast, fascinating brain is no guarantor of sanity either. Your friend sounds like he might have been more than a little dinged up by his crappy childhood — he’s probably broken beyond reasonable hope of repair. I’m sure he’s also devastatingly sexy or whatever, but who cares? Not you. Not anymore. Not if I have anything to say about it, anyway.

Here’s another lesson it’s hard to learn: getting your jokes is not the same thing as getting you. He may be wonderful to talk to, and you may have endless "Oh my gawd, nobody else ever got that!!!!" moments with him, but that doesn’t mean he knows (or cares) what you need, what makes you happy, or even what’s so great about you. Even more disappointing, understanding you is not at all the same thing as being your friend. If he’s the kind of charming, destructive bastard I think he is, he’s nobody’s friend, not even his own.

While I’m rabbiting on about how you don’t have to be this to be that or that to be this and so on, here’s another one: you don’t have to be nice to be exciting in bed. Not for certain values of exciting, anyway. So let’s just be thankful that you never did it with him. You didn’t, right? Realizing just how deadly a bullet you might have dodged there, let’s give you credit for making at least one terribly smart decision, even if it’s because you never got the chance to do him and still regret it. I’ll never tell.

So, let’s summarize. This guy, alluring as he is, is pretty much a shit. Happily for you, he’s currently a long-distance shit (good lord, what an image). Unhappily for you, he has probably acquired something of that long-distance glow since you’ve been apart. Look, for instance, at the time dilation you’ve apparently undergone since you started letting him warp your space-time continuum: you say you’ve "always known" you’d drop everything and go to him should he ever express interest, yet it’s been all of two years since you met and probably much less since you started mooning around over him (and that marks the last of the cheesy space metaphors, I promise). Don’t let him warp your sense of the future — will you "ever get over" him? Of course you will. You’ll even find someone just as much to your liking eventually, but he won’t be just a nice version of the shit, so don’t waste your time looking for that. Such a quest is doomed to fail, not to mention make the not-shitty guys you do meet think you’re kind of messed up in a not-all-that-appealing way.

Oh, and one last thing — there’s nothing gender-politics related about your situation, so don’t go getting your feminist sensibility in a wad. You think guys don’t lose their fool hearts to girls who are perfect for them in every way except for being cold and cruel and maybe a little crazy? Where would great art be without the Cruel Mistress or La Belle Dame sans Merci? In Barneyland, that’s where. "I love you, you love me" makes for a very nice LTR, but you can’t dance to it.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she’s raising twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Love machine

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW To look at the formally austere self-portraits made by the American artist Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) at various points throughout his career, you might surmise, from the repeated images of his stiff, unsmiling visage, that he toiled in obscurity for dry, dusty decades as an administrative underling at a low-level law firm, forever obsessed with organizing his paper clips, pausing from his tedious task only long enough to clean his spectacles on a crisply starched pocket handkerchief and tie the laces of his uncomfortable shoes, polished deep black the previous evening while listening to news of the Lindbergh kidnapping on his wooden Philco tube radio. As the crotchety stepfather of modernism, Sheeler cultivated a stern yet slightly mewling look of quotidian routine, as if neither he nor any other mere individual should assume particular importance amid the daunting technological advancements of his era. Like all true-blue men of meager means in the early part of the 20th century, Sheeler was enthralled with industrial progress and glorified all things steel and chrome. If this clerk allowed himself one indulgence, it was basking in the cult of the machine.

If modernism taught us anything, however, it’s that appearances can — no, should — be deceiving. Hat, coat, and desk chair notwithstanding, Sheeler was no paper-pushing nine-to-fiver. Indeed (a word I imagine he uttered frequently, accompanied by a nearly imperceptible tilt of the head), this self-proclaimed precisionist was rather radical in behavior, artistic methodology, and aesthetic philosophizing — though always politely so. Working with deliberate pacing and patience as a filmmaker, photographer, and painter and alarmingly proficient at drawing and printmaking, Sheeler established a unique dichotomy between new and old, rendering the former as oddly antiquated and the latter as the cat’s pajamas. Fittingly, his remarkable body of work remains strikingly contemporary; thus the "Charles Sheeler: Across Media" exhibition, handsomely installed in the upper galleries of the appropriately angular de Young Museum, has not the aged patina of a haphazard retrospective begrudgingly granted to a doddering éminence grise of yesteryear but the luminous sheen of a classy chassis careening into J.G. Ballard’s Crash by way of the icy David Cronenberg adaptation. Sheeler is Vaughan, so turned on by cogs and shafts, bolts and pylons, that he becomes the ghost in his own machine.

Born in Philadelphia, Sheeler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then booked passage for Paris, where he looked askance at Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s cubist conundrums before returning to the States, plonking down a fiver on a Brownie camera and taking up commercial photography with an emphasis on architecture.

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with photographer Paul Strand on Manhatta, a six-minute city-symphony film ostensibly based on portions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass yet excising virtually all traces of the bearded bard’s insatiable lust for life in favor of abstractions formed by bridges, skyscrapers, and the sun setting over the Hudson River. Widely considered the first American avant-garde film, Manhatta screens repeatedly in the gallery and is surrounded by related photographs that further reveal Sheeler’s New York state of mind.

Sheeler soon settled in a rented farmhouse in Doylestown, Penn., with fellow artist Morton Shamberg, but it was the home’s 19th-century stove that Sheeler referred to as his "companion," so enamored was he of its utilitarian exactitude and sensuous shape. Comfortably ensconced in the farmhouse, Sheeler spent years deftly rendering his kitchen and bathroom in ink, paint, and the darkroom’s chemical bath.

Having gained a reputation as a fastidious exemplar of precisionism, Sheeler was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of its factories. Soon after, Fortune magazine commissioned Sheeler to produce a half dozen paintings that "reflect life through forms and trace the firm pattern of the human mind." Naturally, Sheeler looked not to living things for inspiration but to objects simultaneously beautiful in their simplicity and threatening in their potential to destroy: waterwheel, railroad, airplane, dam, steam turbine, and hydroelectric turbine (he really loved turbines).

Among many other career and exhibition highlights are the iconic, ironic American Landscape, in which human-made structures — cylinders, silos, smokestacks — have entirely supplanted natural splendor (score one for culture); experimental photographs of the interior of an 18th-century Quaker fieldstone house; and the dazzling The Artist Looks at Nature, from 1943, in which Sheeler paints himself in the process of sketching his 1932 drawing Interior with Stove, which in turn was based on his much earlier photograph The Stove. In this singular work, Sheeler links various media in which he excelled, positions himself in a perfectly logical space-time continuum, and moves into the realm of the uncanny. For an artist who implicitly championed the places, products, and processes of capitalism and whose every invisible brushstroke stoked the fires of the first corporation generation, this tricky bit of derring-do signals a metarebellion against the industry under whose wheels Sheeler’s entire century would soon be crushed. It’s enough to make you fall in love with that old stove all over again. *

CHARLES SHEELER: ACROSS MEDIA

Through May 6

Tues.–Thurs. and Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m.; Fri., 9:30 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF

$6–$10 (free first Tuesday)

(415) 750-3614

www.thinker.org/deyoung

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Keys of life

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PIANO MAN On April 13, 1957, at an assembly room in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, George Michalski gave his first piano recital. He played John W. Schaum’s "Snake Dance" and "The Sphinx" and closed with "My First Waltz," by Bjarne Rolseth, from G. Schirmer’s Piano Solo series for students. "My mom was so excited leaving the house that she tripped and sprained her ankle," Michalski remembers. "She went to the show anyway and stayed for the whole recital — then we took care of her leg."

On April 13, 2007, Michalski will put on another piano recital in San Francisco. This time it won’t be at the library, but his mother will attend. So will some special guests — unsurprising, since in the 50 years after his first performance, Michalski’s ivory-tickling talent has led to collaborations with everyone from Blue Cheer to Barbra Streisand.

"The most exciting thing about making music is to go from Blue Cheer to someone like Streisand," Michalski says while discussing his special anniversary show, which one friend has described as vaudevillian. "Blue Cheer is so far into [pure volume and distortion] that I think of them as classical music. The biggest challenge of playing with them was peer pressure. When I worked with Streisand [on songs such as "The Man I Love" and the soundtrack to 1979’s The Main Event], I tried to get her to listen to blues. She was very open-minded."

A member of Foxtrot — the onetime house band at both Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go and its chief competitor, the Starwood, and also the first white group signed to Motown Records (where Smokey Robinson gave Michalski a piano and Berry Gordy’s mother, Bertha, signed his checks) — Michalski has rubbed creative shoulders with everyone from Don Johnson to some of the best-known mimes in the world and crossed paths with political figures such as Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu.

The ’70s television mainstays Shields and Yarnell, currently on a reunion farewell tour, are the aforementioned mimes. "Robert [Shields] was discovered right here in the Bay Area, in Union Square — the term street mime was invented to describe him," Michalski says, then adds some funny details that could cause someone wearing pancake makeup to become red-faced. "Robert hates most street mimes — because they’re not very good and they give mimes a bad name. I’ve seen him stand there, watch a mime, and rip the guy to shreds. And when mimes recognize that it’s Robert watching them, boy, do they get nervous."

In recent years Michalski has been making music with the original tabloid target, Eddie Fisher. "Confidential magazine got started by writing about him — he was on their first cover," Michalski says, while praising Fisher’s gentle nature. "The whole notion of the paparazzi partly started with him and Liz [Taylor]. That guy has seen a lot, and what he hasn’t seen, his daughters have — Carrie Fisher is no slouch."

To put together his anniversary show, Michalski drew from an idea he first landed on with his friend the late Vince Welnick, keyboardist for the Tubes, in which a strange array of friends stop by his apartment to perform. In addition to unconventional cover versions of songs that have made a few of the special guests famous and some dueling piano boogie-woogie interludes, the evening — presided over by MC Steve Parrish — will likely include numbers from Michalski’s most recent recordings, including San Francisco (Masia Music, 2002), which transforms his love of the city into a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, song-by-song portrait. "This show is different, but there’s no dead time," Michalski says at the end of our conversation before leaving to meet his mother. "It runs like an Italian train system." (Johnny Ray Huston)

AN EVENING WITH GEORGE MICHALSKI

Fri/13, 7:30 p.m., $20

Fat City

314 11th St., SF

www.ticketfusion.com

www.georgemichalski.com

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We shall over come ourselves

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nearly all the imagery we’re fed when it comes to understanding or imagining issues reutf8g to race in the United States comes from the civil rights era. No doubt that was a critical moment in American history, but it should go without saying that the road home can’t be found on an outdated map. The idea that "we shall overcome" is nice, but in reality different times have created different conceptions of who "we" are, what we’re overcoming, and how we will accomplish it.

It stands to reason that the problem tends to follow our playwrights onstage. The challenges and potential payoffs found in Tanya Barfield’s Blue Door (at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by actor Delroy Lindo) and the American Conservatory Theater production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War (see "Home Run: After the War Lucidly Strikes Home," 4/4/07) are different, as if the writers had looked at the bag of tricks they’d been handed and consciously decided to make their own tools. Daily life — onstage and off — has been littered with lazy and self-serving, formulaic attempts to explore nearly every question reutf8g to race. What is most satisfying about Blue Door and After the War is that each asks fresh questions that are difficult and important.

Barfield’s multicharacter, two-actor play focuses on a troubled African American math professor struggling to deny the single fact that most shapes his interactions with the world — he’s hit bottom so hard that his white wife is pushing him to participate in the Million Man March as a way to get in touch with himself. As a result, his career is on the rocks, as are his marriage and his relationship with his family. His daily life gives way to a surreal sleepless night during which he’s visited by relatives, including some who were slaves, an experience that forces him to admit that his present and future have been shaped by the past.

Gotanda has created an ad hoc family of post–World War II refugees who share space in a boardinghouse in what was — before the war — San Francisco’s Japanese neighborhood. Six years later things are considerably different; the war’s over, and African Americans have moved into the Fillmore District housing vacated by interned Japanese Americans. As the original residents struggle to find and rebuild their community, politicians and developers have plans that don’t include black and Japanese American — or any marginalized — San Franciscans.

Gotanda’s multiracial, multinational menagerie lives under the roof of a young jazz musician named Chester Monkawa. Monkawa is a long way from today’s stereotypical hypersuccessful model minority. But although Gotanda’s created his share of outcasts and rebels over the years, what’s different about After the War is the difficulty the assembled characters have in dealing with each other. They’re a happy family when things are going well, but when the pendulum swings the other way, they go with what’s familiar — seeing race as life’s fundamental building block.

It’s refreshing to see After the War and Blue Door raise questions without ready-made answers, but that fact speaks to the problems their playwrights face. If such issues were easily dealt with onstage, we’d be doing a better job with them offstage as well. In fact, it takes a lot of money and an almost pathological reservoir of self-delusion for anyone to deny that America is a long way from addressing its ills. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see what Barfield and Gotanda — one young and black, the other a veteran Japanese American playwright — are doing. *

AFTER THE WAR

Through April 22

See stage listings for info

BLUE DOOR

Through May 20

See stage listings for showtimes, $33–$61

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

For an interview with Delroy Lindo, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Still evolving

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The human race either sinks or swims. That’s evolution as Charles Darwin first saw it. But flippers and a seal pelt, that’s pure Kurt Vonnegut. The novelist plays God like no other, wresting the species from its self-destruction, then sending it on its wobbly way with a childlike capacity for invention and a wry if discontented grasp of human folly. That’s Galápagos, anyway, his 1985 best-seller in which evolution saves humankind from its big and mischievous brains by sending it back to the sea. And although the transition from page to stage is probably as slippery as that first fin step on dry land, Vonnegut fans (a species unto themselves) will no doubt flock to see the book’s adaptation in the world premiere of Galáp, by San Francisco’s Boxcar Theatre.

In a year that found the young company variously pitched in the sand at Baker Beach and careening onboard the Mexican Bus’s rolling party platform, it hardly surprises one to see the itinerant Boxcar pulling into the Cadillac Building at 1000 Van Ness to occupy the vacated offices of an online shoe company as it brings its inaugural season (aptly titled "Journeys") to a close. And indeed, a better-sounding setting for a play inspired by a Vonnegut story is hard to imagine.

Artistic director Nick A. Olivero wants to make the most of it too. His imaginative, kinetic staging contains continual surprises, aided by the aquatic and exotic atmosphere summoned through Lisa Lutkenhouse’s resourceful costumes, Norm Munoz’s puppets, and David Sophia Siegel’s jaunty original score. The room itself is divided into several stages, more or less enveloping the audience in the play’s fractured story line, which looks back one million years through the eyes of a ghost (Josh Truett) at the troubled but pivotal year of 1986 as several hapless tourists aboard "the nature cruise of the century" to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands become the progenitors of the next wave in human evolution.

The six-member cast cycles through a number of characters, sometimes sharing duties in a single role. If the hardworking cast begins to win us over, it also never masters the rigors of the material or Vonnegut’s satirical style. Poor sight lines, moreover, make some scenes impossible to view from certain seats. Boxcar’s ambitious closer is a mixed bag, in other words, but like Vonnegut’s relentless survivors, the company shows it can adapt. (Robert Avila)

GALÁP

Through April 27

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $12–$28

AMC Cadillac Bldg.

1000 Van Ness, SF

(415) 776-1747

www.boxcartheatre.org

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Six ed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Conventional wisdom — chew before swallowing, hang on to your nine-to-five, the safety of the passengers depends on keeping conversation with the driver to a minimum — usually suffices eight days a week. But along march catastrophic events, and the rules fly out the window. Luckily, agile industry vets such as Six Degrees founders Bob Duskis and Pat Berry know how to respond to fate’s highs and lows. For instance, the label was universally warned not to release its Arabian Travels comp post–Sept. 11.

"Everybody told us, ‘You are crazy if you put this record out. People are going to be angry. Retailers aren’t going to carry it,’ " Duskis recalls at Six Degrees’ sizable Mission District office. "And we thought, you know, this is the perfect time to put this record out! More than ever people need things that transcend stereotypes — a positive representation of what comes from the Middle East." That, on top of evidence that Americans were suddenly ravenous for any information about a world they had once largely ignored, convinced them to go ahead. Turns out "it’s one of our best-selling compilations!" Duskis delivers the kicker, chuckling. "And we got a lot of mail from people of Middle Eastern descent who live in this country saying, ‘Thank you very much!’ Obviously, we feel like music is a great connector."

On the cusp of Six Degrees’ 10th anniversary celebration, sitting in a conference room atop some 20,000 CDs in the company’s downstairs warehouse with his 14-year-old hound Scout by his side, Duskis, 47, is feeling ever more optimistic about the future. On April 18 the label head will be joining the imprint’s Bombay Dub Orchestra, Jef Stott, and r:sphere of Zaman 8 on the steelers’ wheels — as he often does online via the label’s monthly radio show and occasionally does at one of many nights sponsored by Six Degrees at Supperclub, Madrone Lounge, and elsewhere. Part of the party: Backspin: A Six Degrees 10 Year Anniversary Project, which finds roster artists covering their faves (Karsh Kale takes a tabla to the Police’s "Spirits in the Material World").

Six Degrees has plenty to toast, while providing a lesson in indie survival techniques. After hitting it big with licensed bossa nova royalty Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo (2000) and subsequently downsizing amid the industry’s early ’00s doldrums, the imprint has been busily undertaking new projects, expected for a company that has always looked forward: a digital-only Emerging Artists series including Bay Area artists Stout and Zaman 8 as a way of breaking new performers with lower overhead, and a new partnership with Starbucks Entertainment to play and promote the debut by the silky-voiced, groove-obsessed, and cute-as-a-bug Brazilian singer-songwriter CeU, the first non-English-language artist to break into the chain’s Hear Music Debut series and find exposure to java junkies everywhere. "Hitting that consumer that’s outside the traditional pathways, which have been closed to us or just aren’t working anymore, it’s the kind of thing we need to do," Duskis explains. "All signs are pointing for this to be a big breakout."

Breaks and smarts have gotten Duskis and Berry this far: the two met at Palo Alto new age independent Windham Hill. Duskis had worked his way up to become the head of A&R; Berry, VP of sales and marketing. Both were united in their belief that the label should explore more global sounds, and they eventually departed to create Six Degrees under the umbrella of then-Polygram-owned Island at the behest of their genre-crossing hero Chris Blackwell, who asked the two to market the "weird stuff, all the nonpop stuff."

After Blackwell left, Duskis and Berry got out of Island with their masters in the nick of time before being entangled in yet another monstrous merger. With an infusion of venture capital, they relaunched the label as a true independent in ’98 before hitting it massive with Tanto Tempo. "From the start we treated it not like this was going to be some weird, little world-electronica record but as something for a wide range of people, from young club audiences and electronica fans to older people who had hit the first bossa nova wave to pop and Sade fans. Sure enough, it became the coffee-table world music record of that year," Duskis says. (Gilberto’s latest, Momento, comes out April 24).

The success of that album pegged Six Degrees as a world fusion label, but the founders always saw the imprint as more than that, releasing artists as varied as Michael Franti, Cheb i Sabbah, and the Real Tuesday Weld — more a global content provider with a highly eclectic palate and fingers dipped in digital distribution; podcasts; music blogs; and licensing to film, TV, and commercials before anyone else. "One thing I’d say we’ve never tried, as a label," Dukais quips, "is to be so hip it hurts." *

CEU

Fri/13, 9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

SIX DEGREES’ 10TH ANNIVERSARY

April 18, 10 p.m., $10

Supperclub

657 Harrison, SF

(415) 348-0900

www.sixdegreesrecords.com

NO STOPPING HIM NOW

Gone are the days when Jeff Chang churned out columns for the Guardian, but my Hawaii bud can be excused for burying himself in books such as his award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and his compelling new volume, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic, $18.95). Total Chaos emerged from discussions on the future of demographics and aesthetics in the arts about three years ago and found Chang editing playwright Danny Hoch, artist Doze, and DJ Spooky, as well as essays on hip-hop and queerness. It’s a wide-angle take on hip-hop’s impact on the arts, triggering what Chang calls "crosscutting debates within the book." And without: "I’ve seen a review in the National Review complaining that there’s no center to this," Chang says on the road. "But hip-hop is about call-and-response. It’s not necessarily about people having a consensus." Expect a hot back-and-forth when Chang gathers Marcyliena Morgan of Stanford’s Hip-Hop Archive and contributors such as Adam Mansbach for a hip-hop aesthetics talk April 17 (and later on May 8).

TOTAL CHAOS HIP-HOP FORUM

Tues/17, 6:30 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.cantstopwontstop.com

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