Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

It came from San Francisco

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Crazed sea lizard terrorizes Seoul! US military negligence spawns bloodthirsty mutant! Breaking news: beast came from San Francisco!

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is just a movie, so the red, white, and blue can’t really be blamed for unleashing a monster on his country’s populace. But Bong’s beast came to life in a part of San Francisco steeped in military history. Tucked away in the Presidio, amid old army barracks, tree-lined drives, and cutting-edge nonprofit facilities is the Orphanage, an upstart special effects company aiming to shape the future of film.

The Orphanage already had a number of high-profile projects under its belt when it eagerly took on The Host. It ended up with its defining achievement to date. When New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, writing from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, called Bong’s movie "the best film I’ve seen at this year’s [festival]," it quickly became the subject of rapturous buzz from all corners: erudite cinema journals, mainstream magazines, and blogs. One of the most consistent subjects of praise has been the movie’s creature. The horror site Bloody Disgusting calls its design "the most astounding part of the film … remarkable and incredibly ambitious … a cross between a dinosaur, a tremor, and a giant squid with giant teeth." Another site describes it as "some kind of aqua-lizard thing that looks as real as anything else in the frame." Bong deserves much of this praise, but he couldn’t have gotten it without the Orphanage, which has joined the long line of important F/X names to emerge from the Bay Area.

When George Lucas moved his F/X company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to Marin in 1980, he made the Bay Area ground zero for film’s technological advances. Pixar and DreamWorks Animation SKG also call the region home, with home bases in Emeryville and Redwood City, respectively. Lucas relocated ILM to the Presidio in 1995, erecting a statue of Yoda to watch over the campus. Though meant to symbolize Lucas’s venerable legacy as an innovator and a maverick, the statue now carries connotations of a different sort: that of an elder accessible only to a select few.

The Orphanage was born of this legacy. Jonathan Rothbart, Stuart Maschwitz, and Scott Stewart — all ILM veterans — founded the company in 1999, landing Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars as their first feature project. The Orphanage has worked on several of the biggest box office successes of the past few years, including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Superman Returns, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But its partnership with a director on the fringe of the mainstream, Robert Rodriguez, has been its most enduring. The F/X house has worked on three of his features, most notably the "Yellow Bastard" section of Sin City, and is currently finishing Grindhouse, the filmmaker’s collaboration with Quentin Tarantino.

It’s this sense of partnership that prepared the Orphanage for its collaboration with Bong on The Host. Based on the success of his playfully wry 2003 thriller, Memories of Murder, the director received $10 million to make The Host, a budget quite large by Korean standards but extremely modest by Hollywood’s. Unschooled in CGI but knowing he needed animators, he shopped the film around to a number of companies. "Director Bong didn’t choose the Orphanage because of our creature experience; we didn’t really have a whole lot — almost none at all," Arin Finger, the film’s visual F/X producer, says. "[He] approached houses like ILM and the big giants, but what they were going to charge was way out of his budget" — Bong and his producers spent $3 million on the effects for the film — "so it was a great opportunity for us."

The Host is many things: a comedy-drama about a fractured family brought together by catastrophe, a political critique, a horror movie, a revenge tale. But above all it’s about a monster — and quite a monster. Equally capable of frightening grace and endearing clumsiness, the creature and its parts don’t resemble anything in the animal kingdom so much as everything in the animal kingdom: reptile, amphibian, fish, worm, monkey, and at least one bit of human anatomy. Having just dabbled in small-scale creature work with films such as Hellboy and Jeepers Creepers 2, the Orphanage accepted a daunting task when it agreed to animate Bong’s monster, the main character of his film. "We were kind of looking at this project as one where [we] could really develop a creature department," sequence supervisor Brian Kulig says. "On top of that, the creature is running around in darkness, in broad daylight, it’s on fire, it’s drooling, it’s in the rain, it’s swimming. Everything that could possibly happen to this creature pretty much did."

As Finger, Kulig, and fellow sequence supervisor Michael Spaw discuss their work on The Host, the interview site — a stately room just above the rest of the company’s creative team — gives a snapshot of the Orphanage in action. Its headquarters strongly resembles an older part of the Presidio’s history: an army intelligence bunker. Rows of people sit diligently at their computers, with only a sliver of natural light seeping through the occasional ground-level window. One gets the distinct impression that the company has expanded rapidly in recent years and may soon outgrow its home.

Much of this growth can be attributed to The Host and its creature team, whose mastermind was Kevin Rafferty, the visual F/X supervisor. Rafferty, another ILM veteran who has supervised the effects on numerous Hollywood blockbusters, spent much of The Host‘ s shoot on set with Bong and his crew. This level of on-set presence is rare in the F/X world, according to Finger, Kulig, and Spaw — all three of whom also logged hours in Seoul. Oftentimes, as Spaw put it, the F/X team "is only associated after principal photography is done, and you’re handed plates, and you make everything work. Actually being on set was an invaluable experience." When the trio speak about their time in Korea, they say Bong, the cast, and the crew were eager to collaborate, accessible and gracious in a way unknown in Hollywood, and game for whatever it took to capture a shot.

Having first dreamed up the idea for The Host in high school, Bong had the nature of his beast largely worked out in his head — a vision he articulated to the Orphanage during a two-week visit prior to the shoot. "Director Bong treated the creature like one of his actors. He worked with the animators one-on-one to dial in the expressions and emotions of the character," Finger says, the reference to "Director Bong" a sign of his and his cohorts’ reverence for the filmmaker. Spaw adds, "Director Bong made it clear to us that sure, you have this monster film, a horror film — or however you want to classify this rather interesting piece of cinema — but if you didn’t understand how [the creature] was thinking or how the real physical actors were reutf8g to it, it wouldn’t work."

For the movement of the monster, the Orphanage team used a variety of reference points, including Jurassic Park. But due to the unique nature of Bong’s creature, none was definitive. As Finger says, "You never see a dinosaur swinging by its tail." (The tail is one of the monster’s stronger physical traits, capable of grabbing people and allowing it to latch on to structures and hang in midair.)

Other touchstones in creating the monster — including walruses, crocodiles, and paraplegics — were less predictable. Footage of paraplegics in motion, for example, was useful because Bong and the Orphanage’s creation has just two legs at the very front of its long body. Though incredibly graceful in water, it is challenged on land, where it has a baby’s unpredictable sense of balance. "There is a shot when [it] is first kind of rampaging around in this park area along the Han River, and [it] stumbles and basically does a face-plant and kicks up some dust," Spaw says. "It’s great, really engaging the audience to believe that this thing is not perfect."

To create the CGI version of the monster, the Orphanage relied on a small clay model, or maquette, sculpted by the New Zealand F/X house Weta Digital (King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), which was constructed using a design that Bong commissioned from artist Chin Wei-chen. Bong had wanted the creature to be completely CGI, but when Rafferty realized there would be significant close-ups involving live actors and the creature, he petitioned for a live puppet as well.

Consequently, the Australian company John Cox Creature Workshop constructed a two-ton model of the beast’s head, a particularly complex piece of art. While the head as a whole resembles a nasty fish, the open mouth is bizarre and unique, as if a vagina had sprouted leathery butterfly wings adorned with spikes. The Orphanage had to adapt its animation to the Cox model, ensuring that the digital monster’s movements and characteristics matched those of the puppet. "We had to cater the animation process, which we normally don’t do — like how the creature’s mouth opens and closes," Kulig says. "The mouth alone had so many intricate parts."

One possible reason for The Host‘s success is that the Orphanage and Bong’s South Korean crew routinely defied convention throughout their collaboration. "It was amazing to watch how Director Bong’s mind worked," Kulig says. "He would react to CGI footage we already had and shoot all these shots that weren’t on the schedule. None of us could figure out what he was doing. But when we showed up the next day and saw the footage edited, it worked beautifully."

Constantly interacting with the Orphanage representatives on set, Bong also recorded daily videos for the SF team in which he critiqued footage projected on a wall behind him. He was adamant that the creature look ungainly and act awkwardly — like, as Kulig puts it, a "fish out of water." Both despite and because of its clumsiness, the creature wreaks considerable havoc on the residents of Seoul and, in particular, a few of the film’s main characters. In some cases the violence proved too great to use actual people. For these shots the Orphanage employed what it calls "digital doubles," or animated versions of the actors. But whenever possible Bong used his cast, who gamely submitted to a variety of miserable scenarios, including being pummeled by cushion-wielding men (stand-ins for the creature) and getting repeatedly dragged through the Han River.

As the South Korean film industry’s cachet has risen worldwide, coproductions with other countries have become more commonplace. The Host, the first major F/X film in Korean history, is also the first to employ a company with strong ties to Hollywood. Finger, Kulig, and Spaw describe an on-set camaraderie in which everyone was both intensely hardworking and jovial. "The opportunity to work with pretty much the most famous Korean actors out there was amazing," Finger says. "On a typical US blockbuster movie, that never happens — the actors are in their trailer and they’re off. We were drinking and singing karaoke with these guys after the shoot, and the director [and crew] as well."

At the center of everything, confident in his vision but eager to use the expertise of others, was Bong. F/X people are used to playing a secondary role as, to paraphrase Spaw, service providers whose job is to make pixels. But on this occasion, the Orphanage’s experience was different. "Every now and then, you have the opportunity to work in service of a great piece of art [that] wouldn’t be the same without your contribution," Spaw says. "That’s why you look to work with someone like Director Bong. Both sides have gotten something truly unique out of the experience." One unique reward: they’ve created the biggest box office hit ever in South Korea. Another: they’ve made a great movie that just might become a classic. *

More on The Host:

Cheryl Eddy’s review

Johnny Ray Huston on director Bong Joon-ho

A talk with Bong Joon-ho

We are going to eat you!

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By Cheryl Eddy


› cheryl@sfbg.com

Director and cowriter Bong Joon-ho insists that The Host is not really anti-American, and I’d agree. More accurately, it offers an incisive take on US foreign policy, echoing 2004’s double punch of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Team America: World Police. The key difference is that The Host isn’t homegrown, so it’s not dabbling in self-satire. Instead, it reflects how an outside nation (in this case, South Korea) views the US obsession with controlling absolutely everything on the planet.

The Host approaches the theme by depicting how a foreign city in crisis reacts to a pudgy, galloping sea monster birthed by American neurosis. The film opens in the morgue of a US army base in South Korea, where the Yankee in charge instructs his Korean underling to discard hundreds of gallons of toxic liquid. "I hate dust more than anything," he explains, wiping dirt from the glass bottles. When his assistant protests, pointing out that the chemicals might end up polluting the local river, the American won’t listen. "Pour them right down the drain," he says.

The best part is that this really happened, kind of. A January 2005 Korea Times article reported the following: "A local appeals court on Tuesday sentenced Albert McFarland, an American civilian employee of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), to six months imprisonment, with the term suspended for two years, for instructing his subordinates to dump a toxic substance into the Han River in Seoul in 2000." The toxic substance was 227 liters of formaldehyde, which is more than enough to freak out environmentalists and probably quite close to the real amount needed to create some kind of monstrous Han River mutant — or at least inspire Bong to dream one up. It’s not as dramatic as Godzilla‘s nuclear birth, but it’s plenty sinister nonetheless.

The next American in the film surfaces right when the monster does. He just so happens to be an out-of-uniform US soldier who helps The Host‘s schlubby antihero, Gang-du (Kang-ho Song), brain the creature with a traffic sign. Turns out, thanks for nothin’, dude: as news broadcasts inform us throughout the film, the soldier becomes mysteriously ill with a virus attributed (by the US military, naturally) to the mutant. That the creature represents some kind of bioterror smacks of propaganda; it’s made all the more suspicious by the fact that Gang-du, who endured a face full of sea-monster blood, remains completely healthy.

The Host‘s central concern is Gang-du’s family, who spend the film frantically searching for the thirtysomething slacker’s much-beloved daughter after she’s snatched by the monster. Bong insists his movie isn’t trying to point fingers at any specific targets but instead is framing its conflict as more of an us-versus-them dig at society (see "God of Monster," page 58). But The Host does emphasize America’s meddling military presence in Korea. Who else would advocate such over-the-top quarantine and security measures, other than the country that won’t even let you stash a shampoo bottle in your carry-on? Who else would greet violence with violence, plotting destruction (without spoiling the plot, let’s just say even more dangerous chemicals are involved) and blithely ignoring peace-minded protesters? America … fuck yeah!

So far, no American fascists — you know, the people who got their knickers in a knot over the Dixie Chicks — have come out against The Host; presumably, Korean monster movies are far removed from any Fox News–fueled radars. A Wikipedia article on The Host pointed out a particularly amusing reaction, though: it seems North Koreans (memorably mocked in Team America) are diggin’ the film’s perceived slam against the United States. According to the cited Yonhap News article, dated November 2006, "North Korea gave a rare compliment to a South Korean blockbuster movie on Thursday, upholding its critical stance toward the U.S. troops stationed in the South and dubbing them the ‘monster of the Han River.’ "

It gets better: "’The movie portrays realistically and through impersonation that the American troops occupying South Korea are the monster that steals people’s lives and destroys their happiness,’ North Korea’s weekly magazine Tongil Sinbo said in its latest edition."

Obviously, Bong’s intention when making The Host was not to stoke North Korea’s already abundant hatred of America. (It’s a testament to the film’s huge home-country success that even its pop culture–deprived neighbors took note of it.) Still, the film makes an effective point about monsters who invade where they’re not wanted — and the undeniable amount of devastation they leave behind. That Bong wraps his message in the tentacles of a sea monster (and a damn enjoyable movie, to boot) makes it all the more potent. *

THE HOST

Opens March 9

Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center (mezzanine level), SF

California Theatre

2113 Kittredge, Berk.

www.hostmovie.com

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Bong hits the mainstream

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› johnny@sfbg.com

When I first saw Bong [Joon-ho]’s new film, The Host … I recovered a long-dissolving hope for the future of movies…. I had heard about this Korean monster flick … but nothing had prepared me for the carnivalesque, politically acidic megaspectacle that unspooled, seducing me and the rest of the audience into a state of childlike rapture.

"Gogol in Seoul," by Gary Indiana, Artforum

To inspire "childlike rapture" in Gary Indiana, a wizened contender for the most truthfully caustic novelist and political commentator of our time, one must possess amazing powers as a filmmaker. Amazing powers — of imagination, societal observation, and colorful vérité-based pop symbolism — are exactly what Bong Joon-ho has, in measures that have grown in size and scope with each of his three features to date. Indiana’s recent cover essay on Bong marks the first time in years (if not ever) that a commercial film has taken over the cover of Artforum — just one sign of its subject’s imminent pop art impact. But while Indiana’s excellent piece draws upon Nikolay Gogol, Antonio Gramsci, post-Confucian history, and enthusiasm for the rich pleasures of contemporary South Korean film, it ignores one major stylistic source of The Host‘s ability to induce kidlike joy. With his latest film, Bong announces himself as the heir apparent to Steven Spielberg — an heir who replaces Spielberg’s reactionary tendencies with an acutely observant antiestablishment viewpoint.

It’s easy to see why Indiana would steer clear of citing the man who birthed E.T. He might consider Spielberg the epitome of the "Hollywood tripe" that had just about permanently driven him from movie theaters. If so, he has my sympathy. Within the strange world of film criticism, few phenomena have been more vexing than the penchant of elite East Coast and Hollywood-hooked critics to overlook Spielberg’s cornball antics and project all manner of philosophical profundity onto his flair for spectacle. Is it not fair to assert that, aside from passages of 2001’s A.I. and 2002’s Minority Report, Spielberg has failed to deliver on the promise of his ’70s and early-’80s megamarketable hits?

Filmmakers from outside the United States have a different appreciation of the Spielberg effect — that moment when the adult complexities of movies from the early ’70s gave way to blockbusters. A director such as Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa would pinpoint that change as the moment in 1975 when Jaws generated lines all the way around now-extinct movie palaces. Clearly, from that film through the 1982 summer that brought E.T. and Poltergeist, Spielberg demonstrated a facility for pop imagery that was as potent as Andy Warhol’s, perhaps more resonant, and definitely more lucrative. Lost in his pop dynamism’s wake, however, were infinite degrees of human experience. A case could be made that Spielberg’s brand of humanism is in fact inhumane and in perfect lockstep with a society in which democracy is defined as capitalism.

An isolated viewing of Bong’s first film, the 2000 satire Barking Dogs Never Bite, wouldn’t suggest a predecessor to the young Spielberg. Only Bong’s gift for physical comedy and his eye for everyday pop iconography (such as photocopied missing dog posters) distinguish his debut from likable recent South Korean movies such as Take Care of My Cat, A Good Lawyer’s Wife, and Rules of Dating. Like those movies, Barking Dogs is more naturally multifaceted than Sundance indie drivel. The story line gives a wannabe professor a lesson in class struggle: rather than Marxist platitudes, Yoon-ju (Lee Sung-jae) learns from the street, or more accurately, the subterranean realm Bong often explores. Instead of The Host‘s marauding many-ton guppy, the movie’s beasts are canine and domestic. But there are clear hints of what’s to come in Bong’s career. The director’s eye for bright yellow symbolism and affinity for characters who work in cramped Kwik-E-Marts and offices are already apparent. A shot of a row of cement walls within the basement of the movie’s apartment building will be echoed in The Host by an eerie, signature glimpse of the creature distending its lassolike tail under a bridge to go for another murderous dip.

"Nobody in this country follows rules since the liberation," one character proclaims in Barking Dogs Never Bite, but Bong’s 2003 fact-based follow-up, Memories of Murder, shows that the era of Chun Doo-wan’s dictatorship was certainly no better — equipped with siren calls and an endless variety of misused police force, it’s the perfect oppressive backdrop for South Korea’s first serial killer. Memories seems to obey every basic conceit of serial killer suspense films while enriching and subverting the genre. (The smartest character is a briefly glimpsed female detective whose insight is ignored by the warring male leads.) When Memories had its first SF engagement in 2004, I praised Bong’s ability to fashion a thriller into a societal and political indictment, even likening it to M. At the time I wondered if such praise was too lavish, but now I only regret not noting the influence of the aforementioned Kurosawa, whom Bong has cited as one contemporary. Kurosawa’s peak efforts, 1997’s Cure and the 2001 Japanese version of Pulse, don’t strive for or possess the pop appeal of Bong’s work, but Bong has learned plenty from their maker’s keen critical knowledge of film history — and contemporary madness. Memories is also the first time he proves commercial strictures can be trampoline flexible in terms of revealing individual and group character.

The Host is the Spielberg movie that Spielberg never made, the one where E.T. and the shark from Jaws are fused together into a rampaging tragicomic beast that doubles as an entire country and even a globe overrun by the toxins of US military paranoia. (It’s also a perfect antidote to War of the Worlds‘ abundant US-centric phoniness.) Each member of the film’s core ragtag family, including Bong regulars such as the always endearing Bae Du-na (from Barking Dogs) and the less famous, underrated Park Hae-il (hauntingly fierce in Memories and better in Park Chan-ok’s Jealousy Is My Middle Name), is as nuanced as Homer Simpson–esque protagonist Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), who undergoes wild tortures because he refuses to stop telling the truth. The anarchic hilarity and horror of the creature’s first rampage in The Host are more than matched by Park’s family, whose grieving turns slapstick in an uproarious follow-up scene. One suspects Bong has as many tales as The Host‘s creature has tails. This convert can’t wait to see more of them. *

AN EVENING WITH BONG JOON-HO

Mon/5, 6:30 p.m. Memories of Murder; 9:45 p.m. Barking Dogs Never Bite; $9–$11

Clay Theatre

2261 Fillmore, SF

(415) 267-4893

www.sffs.org

>

God of monster

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At the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival — blissfully far from any rivers concealing flesh-eating aquatic life forms — I spoke (through a translator) with Bong Joon-ho, director and cowriter of The Host.

SFBG I’ve read that you make films you yourself want to see. Are you a fan of monster movies, and have you always been?

BONG JOON-HO I’m a fan of several monster films, but I was not necessarily fascinated exclusively by them. I admire John Carpenter’s The Thing and Steven Spielberg’s films — Jaws, for example — but they were not my sole interest.

SFBG The Host contextualizes its monster within a framework of social and political commentary. Was that something you planned from the beginning?

BJ I think it’s the tradition of this type of monster film to have political undertones. What’s interesting is that the first thing you see [in The Host] — an American researcher asking his [Korean assistant] to discard toxic chemicals — was based on a real story in [South] Korea. That incident gave me the idea for this film, because it actually happened and it had that political undertone. So it was very practical for me to start with that.

SFBG How do you think American audiences will view the film?

BJ It’s true that there’s a lot of satire against the American government, but I don’t think it’s as heavy as Fahrenheit 9/11! I worked with American artists [from San Francisco effects studio the Orphanage] while making this film, and when they read the script, they enjoyed it.

SFBG Can you talk a bit about the creature design and how it was working with the special-effects houses that contributed to The Host?

BJ The original design for the creature was by me and a Korean artist named Chin Wei-chen. New Zealand’s Weta Workshop made the model of the creature. Based on that model, the Orphanage created the computer graphics. There are 10 shots focusing on the head of the creature, and this head — it’s one-to-one scale — was created by John Cox Creature Workshop, located in Australia. So those 10 shots were the actual head of the creature, not computer graphics.

SFBG Both in close-up and at full-length, the monster’s appearance is impressive. But the ways in which the Korean and American governments react to its sudden appearance are almost more sinister than the creature itself.

BJ Definitely there is some kind of implication there, but the creature doesn’t necessarily represent the government of the United States. It’s everything combined: the social and political and the possible hardships that an ordinary family, like in the film, might suffer in daily life. The fact is, this family tries to save their daughter by fighting really hard against the creature. But society doesn’t support their efforts. What I tried to convey is the reality that in life individuals don’t get support from society.

SFBG For all its monstrous elements, The Host isn’t really a horror movie. There’s quite a bit of dark humor in the script.

BJ I wanted to add humorous elements, but it was not really intentional. It came out naturally. Like in my previous film Memories of Murder — which was based on an actual, really terrible serial-killing story — I managed [to include] some humorous elements. Combining the humor and fear, comedy and tragedy, that’s part of life. For me, that approach is more realistic than just focusing on one aspect.

SFBG What does the title The Host mean to you?

BJ The first meaning is the biological meaning — that the creature may be the host of a virus. If I expand the meaning of The Host, it also represents all of the evils of life — everything that suppresses the daily lives of ordinary people.

SFBG Will there be a sequel?

BJ I would be happy to see the sequels made, not necessarily by me but by other directors.

SFBG But no American remake, right? Promise?

BJ [Laughs.] I’d like to remain the original creator of The Host. (Cheryl Eddy)

Sour milk

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m still breast-feeding my third baby, and my libido is completely gone. I don’t even think about sex. My ob-gyn seemed to think it’s related to breast-feeding. That was months ago, and I still feel the same. I feel bad for my husband. I know he is starting to take it personally.

Love,

Shut-Down Mom

Dear Mom:

I have to admit I’ve been letting your question sit here in my "good question!" file for months. As a newish mother myself, I can’t easily write about this without taking it a bit personally too. I generally try to avoid getting all me-me-me unless it’s particularly amusing, but sometimes it can’t be helped.

Of course it seems related to breast-feeding. It is deeply and inextricably connected to breast-feeding, a process involving sex- and sexuality-related hormones, intimate touch, and boobs. So really, how could it not affect your sex life? Not to say that postpartum libido issues (I hesitate to call them problems since they are so natural, normal, and expected if generally unwelcome) are purely hormonal. You may be a big bag of hormones, but you’re a specific, unique sack of hormones living a unique and specific life. You have a husband, and you have rather a lot of children. There’s a lot more going on than the mere release or reception of this molecule or that.

I’ve read a ton on this subject, if not before I had these kids, then certainly since. And while most of what you see out there is common sense or nonsense, there are a few bits and bobs you may not have heard. Not everyone knows, for instance, that we all release the milk-making hormone prolactin after orgasm, producing a sensation of satiety. Even fewer people will have heard about the researchers who recently measured prolactin levels in laboratory subjects who masturbated to orgasm or had penis-vagina sex to the same end. The screwers released 400 percent more prolactin than the wankers did, possibly explaining why most people find partnered sex more satisfying than masturbation. Much work remains to be done (what about other kinds of sex with a partner? What about homo sex?), but if we in the Lactation Nation are already walking around with high levels of prolactin, which of course we are, we may already be feeling the sort of satiety that other, less milky people have to have partnered sex in order to achieve. We don’t want sex because we feel like we just had some, and the drive to go get some more is suppressed. That’s one theory, anyway.

Breast-feeding also releases oxytocin, that busy hormone with jobs ranging from stimuutf8g uterine contractions and causing your husband to start snoring so soon after sex to making prairie voles (and perhaps everyone else) bond to a partner and stick around to raise the children together. The oxytocin released at orgasm is responsible for the aaaaahhhh feeling you get as you nestle back into your beloved’s arms. It creates similar warm fuzzies at the mere touch of the right person (good hugs release oxytocin, while unwanted or merely social hugs do not). Oxytocin, of course, is released as your baby nurses, but also by just cuddling with her (or in some cases thinking about her). Again, the sensations of calm, happy, shmoopy-pie satiety, while delightful, are not exactly conducive to going out and gettin’ you some.

Add to all this the fact that your usual sex drivers, estrogen and testosterone, are at an all-time low, and the chemical basis of the "just don’t wanna" that can last as long as you keep up the nursing becomes obvious. Add to that the sleep deprivation, the ambivalent (to put it mildly, also inaccurately) feelings that many of us harbor about the changes our bodies have gone through, and the vaginal dryness, and there ya go. Death of sex. For a while. Do not despair.

Here’s my big secret program, which I hope to make some bucks selling to desperate couples: Do not feel guilty. Guilt kills sex. Do not hide or contrive to fall asleep before or after your husband, and do not lie or make excuses. All of these set up a familiar but deadly teenagerish dynamic where you own the sex but won’t be doling much, if any, out. Meanwhile, your husband is skulking around like a starving mongrel trying get whatever scraps you might drop in an unwary moment. Yuck and ew. You are grown-up partners, and you’re on the same side. Do not forget this.

Face your husband, clear-eyed. Remind him that it’s hormonal. Remind him that it will end. Encourage him to keep offering, since your proposition circuits are down at the moment. And — really important — if it doesn’t sound unappealing, take him up on it sometimes. Just because you didn’t crave it doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it. Eventually, you’ll even want it, as long as you don’t have a bunch of stupid fights about it first.

Love,

Andrea

PS A blow job wouldn’t hurt.

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 just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Here comes the neighborhood

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TRASH TV This review of E!’s The Girls Next Door started with a vision of me à la Gloria Steinem for her 1963 Bunny Club exposé, only I was doing my research sitting on my boyfriend’s couch and eating Pirate’s Booty, sans notebook. I grew up in an überfeminist house (No Three’s Company!), spent a semester writing a paper on the sexism in Pretty Woman, and went to a once-all-women’s college that had an unwritten rule about using womyn in all campus postings. So I was mentally going to note The Girls Next Door‘s sexism, infantilism, and misplaced values. Then came the eye-popping bobble-head opening and the catchy "Come on, come on to myyyyy house" theme song promising candy — and candy I got in the form of bottle blonds Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson, and Bridget Marquardt (Bridg, to me).

The girls of Hugh Hefner’s reality TV series weren’t the dumb bimbos I’d envisioned — OK, Kendra didn’t know polygamy is illegal in this country and deemed Olive Garden the best. They have career aspirations: Babies! Broadcast journalism! Playmate of the Year! Who couldn’t relate to jealous Holly (Hef’s official number one girlfriend) when his ex Barbi Benton sashays into the mansion and declares, "Hef still has my bust!" to her bronze likeness? Who wouldn’t ooze with sympathy when brainy Bridg has to miss the nude shower shoot because her mean old prof refuses to postpone her semester final? And she studied!

It took only an episode for me to realize I wanted to leave behind my hardworking p.c. life and monogamous relationship and live in the Playboy Mansion. I want to order fried chicken and ice cream from the butler; watch movies with my two BFFs and boyfriend, all snuggled in a California King; and slip and slide down the mansion lawns in a red, white, and blue bikini. I want a murder-mystery birthday party and girls who watch my back when the psychic who claimed to connect with the spirit I saw in my bedroom turns out to be a fraud. I want backyard barbecues and luaus and as many puppies as my heart desires. Puffin — as Holly affectionately calls Hef — hasn’t called yet, but the good news is that with such episodes as "Mutiny on the Booty," "Clue-less," and "Eighty is the New Forty" under my belt, that doctoral thesis is practically writing itself! (Anna Mantzaris)

For The Girls Next Door dates and times visit www.eonline.com/on/shows/girlsnextdoor.

You like me!

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DON’T FORGET TO THANK THE MOST HIGH "The Oscars of gay porn are coming! The Oscars of gay porn are coming!" I whinnied to my roommate Baby Char-Char, my girlish hands gesticuutf8g wildly. "Don’t you know what this means? Soon the streets will be absolutely crawling with porn stars!"

"So what else is new?" the lovely Char-Char humphed, settling back into his vegan chicken nuggets. Thus the rapturous ambivalence that greets the arrival of the GayVN Awards to San Francisco this Feb. 24. The GayVNs, which honor nominees in 38 categories — personal favorites: Best Music (really), Best Sex Comedy (you’re kidding), and Best Non-Sex Performance (you’re really kidding) — are awarded by the AVN Media Network, which also hosts the wild, mostly straight AVN Awards each year in Vegas.

AVN Media usually looses the GayVNs on a suspecting world in West Hollywood, but this year it’s holding them at the Castro Theatre. What does this mean, besides an influx of WeHo pay-for-plays with brassy home highlights shining like cross-eyed beacons through our February fog? For one, it means official recognition of San Francisco as the new ground zero of male-on-male video, the omphalos of anal erotica, if you will. For two, it means Craigslist will probably go down from all the traffic.

MCed by Kathy Griffin and also by the parts of Kathy Griffin made in South Korea ("I’m so glad that ‘My gays’ have asked me to join them for their big event," La Griffter declaims in press materials), the GayVNs — no relation to our fine mayor, alas — will keep fans and industry observers perched on the pinched tips of their seats to see just who’ll sashay away with a big fat rectangular piece of etched something in such categories as Best Actor (Shane Collins in Doggie Style? Justin Wells in Booty Thief ?) and Best Bisexual Video (Bi Back Mountain? Bi Bi American Pie 9?).

But really, isn’t it an honor just to be nominated? Sure it is!

I love gay porn — it’s ruined several of my more serious relationships, thank god — and it’s great to see the industry turn on its own and reward them. But the real question I have is what shall I wear to the ceremony? My Carnival of Venice mask with the ostrich plumes? My lace-up man corset with poly-mesh cape? One thing’s for sure: don’t even think about reaching for the leopard spots–zebra stripes guayabera–hot pants combo. Everyone will be wearing that. (Marke B.)

GAYVN AWARDS

Sat/24, 7pm, $100–$300

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.gayvnawards.com

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Worth a shot

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Sam Small (Jud Williford) is an unemployed man in a fraying bathrobe with a limp Jimmy Dean sausage in his pocket, living off the bacon brought (literally snuck) home by his wife, Mary (Beth Wilmurt), a waitress. Sam’s situation, aggravated by his well-thumbed copy of Hamlet, has led him to contemplate suicide.

Albert (Marty Pistone) — right across the hall from Sam and Mary’s apartment 86 in number 69 — is sympathetic. He’s on the rebound from a dot-bomb himself (not to mention a dead wife) but is rebuilding his future by recycling the detritus of a lavish consumer society on eBay and shooting Web-ready video with a well-worn vixen named Margaret (Denise Balthrop Cassidy). Joblessness need be no impediment, Albert proclaims. "Nobody has to hire you, Sam. It’s the 21st century!"

And then the brainstorm: Albert’s entrepreneurial instincts latch on to Sam’s suicidal tendencies to conjure a Web-based raffle for the right to Sam’s martyrdom. Soon various people-cum-causes come calling, and Sam and Mary’s fortunes are on the rise. This is the story of American Suicide, presented by Z Plays and the Encore Theatre Company.

It is also the story of American can-do despair in its most contemporary form: breathing the Internet ether of a post-postindustrial economy and the giddy dreams of the self-unemployed. That the play feels so effortlessly precise makes one appreciate even more the achievement of writer-director Mark Jackson, whose brilliantly staged adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide turns the Soviet playwright’s banned 1929 tragifarce into a piercingly funny satire on the American way of death.

For every individual fantasy in this country rests on the bones of some victim or other. In this case, it’s Sam, the classic American little guy, whose iconic aspects Williford expertly underscores to comic but also telling effect with a Depression-era clip to his speech. Sam’s gotta die, or no dice. But the deal is so sweet even he gets caught up in it.

Our hapless hero even finds himself pursuing a lifelong dream of becoming an actor (lifelong — ay, there’s the rub), which pitches him into the middle of another squalid little tale of diminished lives and desperate schemes. This one involves a washed-up film director (Michael Patrick Gaffney) and a 22-year-old Norma Desmond named Chloe Banks (Jody Flader), who’s bent on a comeback via a torrid suicide note from a leading man–slash–lover. Both are played, like all the characters in American Suicide, as delightfully precise caricatures by a very fine cast. This includes Delia MacDougall, whose larger-than-life turn as major thespian Gigi Bolt, a representative of the embattled American theater living down the street from Sam’s apartment building in her car, effortlessly projects to the back rows and back several times over.

The histrionic theme is one of the more self-referential of Jackson’s many original contributions to Erdman’s story line, and he clearly has fun with it. So bright is the suicide scheme’s promise to all involved that not even the scandal-starved Chloe’s willful intrusion into the conjugal poverty of Sam and Mary’s water-stained studio apartment (a principle component of James Faerron’s slick and versatile set design) throws a wrench into the works. Indeed, the hard-bitten note in Mary’s natural sweetness at the outset of the play drops away completely by the time worldly fortune and a life of leisure appear on the horizon. Wilmurt’s excellent and endearing play on the supportive wifey adopts something of the wide-eyed, guileless, endlessly grateful manner of a game show contestant.

Liam Vincent rounds out the terrific cast in the roles of two mysterious men who together push the play’s social critique a notch higher, or lower, into the realm of politics and an ever-encroaching state power.

The issue of martyrdom naturally calls forth from among the other eager suicide opportunists a certain bearded fellow (played with wonderfully dignified comic assurance by Vincent) in Middle Eastern garb. Jackson eschews cheap shots here, instead going for the jugular with some of the play’s funniest dialogue as Sam’s political ignorance (a classic American virtue never too far from an equally classic rapaciousness) before the jihadist prompts the latter to narrate a kind of preschool allegory of anti-imperialism — a story later used for cross-purposes by a shadowy government trench coat (Vincent again) who’d like to use Sam to do something about the dearth of Americans willing to die for ideas. *

AMERICAN SUICIDE

Through March 11

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $25–$30

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 437-6775

www.zspace.org

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Chorophobics, beware

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For the last decade four baseball players have been staring at me as I sit at my computer. They never say anything, but their presence is uncanny. I first encountered them in a downtown office building where I was working. Every time I walked into that sterile lobby, they looked at me. There was something about those burning eyes, open smiles, and striped uniforms that made these players look more like skeletons than athletes. I couldn’t ignore them, so I took them home.

A couple years ago choreographer Kim Epifano became similarly hooked on Fears of Your Life, a book about the dreads and anxieties that haunt our days and invade our nights. It was written by Michael Bernard Loggins, who — just like baseball-player painter Vernon Streeter — is an artist at Creativity Explored, a nonprofit that helps adults with developmental disabilities make, show, and sell their art.

Epifano proceeded to create a dance theater piece inspired by Loggins’s little red book. At the time, she had gone back to grad school and was full of her own anxieties. She asked the mixed-ability AXIS Dance Company to collaborate with her, figuring that "Michael has one kind of disability, and some AXIS dancers have [others]." She also realized that "many of Michael’s fears are also my fears — everyone’s fears. The overlap is astonishing." Fears of Your Life became Epifano’s MA dissertation at UC Davis in 2006; the piece "was just such a lovely way to bring my academic and my professional life together."

At the first stage rehearsal in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, site of the piece’s three performances Feb.23–25, large puppets (by sculptor Mike Stasiuk) sat at the edge of the stage waiting to join the show, as did clunky white shoes covered in writing, including a letter to Epifano.

Performers executed wheelies or spread on the floor like puddles; technicians hooked up cables for the boom box; dancer Katie Faulkner tuned her guitar; and Stephanie Bastos worked on her beatbox moves while coaching narrator C. Derrick Jones on his Portuguese. The atmosphere was one of relaxed attentiveness as the performers acclimated to the new environment. But then the fears begin to splatter in words and movements: fear of hospitals and needles, black cats, schools and dentists, spiders and monsters, cars at intersections, and strangers. And then there is "the fear of taking your own life away from yourself," demonstrated by Jones making a protective tent out of his raincoat.

The most moving sections of Loggins’s litany offer insights into what it means to be different in this society. He talks of his fear of the bus going too fast, being exposed to ridicule from strangers, and "people being just mean to him," Epifano says. "He gets pulled over by the police all the time because they think he is some kind of weirdo." Has Loggins come to any rehearsals? "He sure has, all the time," Epifano says. "He made us change one thing. He won’t let us say ‘shit,’ so now we say ‘aw shucks.’ " (Rita Felciano)

FEARS OF YOUR LIFE

Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 2 p.m.; $21–$25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

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Feeling the spirit

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Yeah, I was a club kid once. It’s a bit of a blur, but somehow somewhere in the ’90s I went from punk and indie to baggy pants and glow sticks in the flick of a switch. I put away my Fall records and picked up endless white-label 12-inches and compilation CDs with titles like Ultimate Techno Explosion. Or something to that effect. Like I said, it’s a blur. I remember the dancing, though — suddenly my punk ass liked to shake! It’s a shame most of my indie friends chose to stay behind, but this was the ’90s. In those days, never the twain shall meet….

It’s now a full decade later, and — finally! — the indie kids are cutting loose without fear of bruising their street cred, thanks to artists such as the Rapture, !!!, and LCD Soundsystem. Turns out rock and dance music don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. Need further proof? Take Austin’s finest ambassadors of electropunk mania, Ghostland Observatory. The duo — composed of vocalist-guitarist Aaron Behrens and keyboardist-drummer Thomas Ross Turner — whip up a mighty frenzy of swaggering rawk bravado and delirious vocal acrobatics delivered with a come-hither fluster over sweltering beds of booty-bouncing beats. Music for getting hot and bothered, certainly — or maybe songs for unleashing demons. Take your pick.

"We’re two entirely different people," Turner says, chuckling, over the phone from the Texas capital, in explanation of how their quite dissimilar influences have coalesced into the flipped disco of 2005’s delete.delete.i.eat.meat and last year’s Paparazzi Lightning (both Trashy Moped Recordings). "Aaron’s more into the rock showman thing — people like Prince and Freddie Mercury. For me, Daft Punk pretty much are my heroes — they got me into electronic music and club culture. That’s where we’re each coming from."

They might be coming from different places, but their destination is clearly shared, as evidenced on Paparazzi Lightning. Picture an evening of unbridled debauchery — one in which a club night teeters on the brink of collapse — condensed into 35 frantic minutes, and you’re on your way to understanding the Ghostland Observatory vision. Behrens can clearly work a room into whatever mood he sees fit, whether through stomping and yowling with wanton glee on the thundering "All You Rock and Rollers" and "Ghetto Magnet," or the seething taunts of "Move with Your Lover." Meanwhile, Turner effortlessly guides us on the emotional travelogue of a never-ending night, flashing away with the urgency of red-carpet paparazzi as he peppers the album with synth shrieks, squelches, and Daft Punk–worthy rhythms.

Asked about their live shows, Turner gives fair warning: "It’s really nonstop. We just give and give until everybody’s wiped out and goes home." All right, indie rockers and club kids — you heard the man. Better start stocking up on energy drinks. *

GHOSTLAND OBSERVATORY

With Honeycut, the Gray Kid, and Landshark

March 3, 9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

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Noise Pop: Revisiting the Clinic

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Liking a band for more than three albums is getting harder these days, as many fall apart by that point. Even when groups do make it, most stop being musically interesting or otherwise start sucking. Clinic almost did that: Their third album, Winchester Cathedral (Domino, 2004), wasn’t bad but didn’t find the band progressing. Their distorted Farfisa started to sound routine and cliché; their trance-inducing rhythms begat yawning.

Clinic’s recently released full-length, Visitations (Domino), finds the Liverpool quartet back in form. All the elements that make Clinic’s unique sound are still there — the organ and the beat, fuzzed-out guitar, dubbish bass — but they sound just a bit better this time around. "Family" starts the album on a vaguely major note, a krauty stomp with a snaky blues riff that devolves all over the song. The album ends quietly and morosely with the title track, hushed strumming, hand drums, and melancholy keyboard building into a sinister waltz over broken glass. In between, the band’s economical songwriting creates an overwhelming sense of eeriness within the confines of three-minute pop songs. When they really hit their stride, on "Gideon," for instance, they create a palpable feeling of dread that almost manifests physically by the track’s end. Even on less heavy tunes such as the garagey "Tusk" and the vaguely funky "Animal/Human," Ade Blackburn’s taut and desperate vocals make sure nothing goes down too easy.

For a band to make it past number three is hard enough. For a band to pull itself out of a rut and create a stunning fourth album is outstanding. I don’t know if they’re still wearing surgical gowns onstage, but they needn’t bother with the gimmick when they perform as part of Noise Pop. (Gene Bae)

CLINIC

With Earlimart, Sea Wolf, and the Mumlers

March 3, 9 p.m., $17

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

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Noise Pop: Basking in their luster

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Oh me, oh my, love that country pie, and oh me, oh my, the influence of Devendra Banhart and Will Oldham is now as long and thick as their beards. Actually, Brightblack Morning Light’s Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes were opening for Oldham when Banhart was making the leap from homemade cassette to Young God. But in the autumn of 2006, around when they landed a primo spot opening for Os Mutantes at the Fillmore and then walked onto the cover of Arthur like it was a throne lying in wait for them, the applause for and catcalls about their group really began to fly back and forth. Spiritualized acolytes old enough to have gone high-igh-igh with Spacemen 3 the first time around praised Brightblack’s "heroin-gospel" sound, while other older folks who’d seen one too many white people claim an American Indian great-grandmother cried foul. Younger fans espoused nature love as their more cynical peers held their noses — that is, with whichever hand wasn’t masturbating an iPod with carpal tunnel–ridden thumbs. At the end of last year, as rock critics assembled top 10 lists, there were many rivers to cross — some leading to the Walkmen’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s Pussycats — and yet just about all roads led to the Rhodes-dominated sound of Brightblack Morning Light (Matador). This show should offer some hints about the follow-up. (Johnny Ray Huston)

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT

With Women and Children, Mariee Sioux, and Karl Blau

March 3, 8 p.m., $14

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

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Noise Pop: Nilsson rating

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You may not have heard of Harry Nilsson, but you sure as hell have heard his music. The singer-songwriter was responsible for everything from "Without You" ("I can’t live, if living is without you") to "Coconut" ("You put the lime in the coconut, you drink ’em both up"), from "One" (famously covered by Aimee Mann for Magnolia) to "Everybody’s Talkin’ " (which he sang for Midnight Cowboy). So why haven’t more people heard of Nilsson, one of the most prolific, talented, and experimental artists of his generation? That’s what John Scheinfeld’s 2006 documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ about Him?) seeks to answer — and to remedy. This engaging, affectionate film follows Nilsson’s life and career throughout its tumultuous, triumphant, tragic course, from his start singing demos to his collaboration with the Beatles. Interviews with an eclectic cast of colleagues — including Yoko Ono, May Pang, Terry Gilliam, Robin Williams, Micky Dolenz, and Randy Newman — round out the picture of this profoundly creative but fatally self-destructive genius. With its stellar nostalgic soundtrack, Who Is Harry Nilsson is a must-see for rock ‘n’ roll lovers, Beatles fans, and the people who already know and love Nilsson — which, after this screening, hopefully will include you. (Molly Freedenberg)

WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN’ ABOUT HIM?)

Feb. 28, 7 p.m., $10

Roxie Film Center

3117 and 3125 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

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Noise Pop: Blag, guts, and pussy

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› duncan@sfbg.com

Love ’em or hate ’em, the Dwarves are as close to punk rock royalty as San Francisco is ever gonna have. They’ve been in the game since emigrating from Chi-town in the ’80s, with nary a letup for soul-searching acoustic meandering or trips to rehab.

"What you wanna do, B? What you wanna do?" a voice queries in "Demented," from 2004’s The Dwarves Must Die (Sympathy for the Record Industry). "I wanna fight, fuck, and destroy like they used to" is vocalist Blag Dahlia’s answer.

Dahlia, born Paul Cafaro, and the ever-naked (except for a Lucha Libre mask) Hewhocannotbenamed on guitar have been the core of the Dwarves for longer than some of their audience members — and dates — have been alive and got the band booted from Sub Pop in 1992 for engineering a Hewho death hoax. Living in San Francisco, one can count on good burritos, high gas prices, and experiencing six or fewer degrees of Blag separation at all times. I made out with a girl who claimed he’d stolen her spiked belt when they lived together. On a snippet from Thank Heaven for Little Girls (Sub Pop, 1991), an audience member at a Dwarves show says, "The lead singer’s a fucking shithead, man. He broke a fucking glass onstage. I get bumped by the crowd. The next thing you know, my hand’s fucking sliced." I could swear this happened at a show I was working security for at Slim’s.

While Dahlia has certainly created an impressive myth, just how worthy of their legacy — or relevant — are the Dwarves in 2007? The Dwarves Must Die has the middle-aged Dahlia rapping, of all things, to hilarious effect on "Massacre," on which he spouts the line "This one goes out to Queens of the Trust Fund: you slept on my floor, now I’m sleeping through your motherfucking records," which led to a much-publicized dustup with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme at a Hollywood club. I’ve even spotted Dahlia playing around town as MC Blag. He takes swipes at "fake punkers" Good Charlotte, but he’s apparently cowritten songs with them, as well as produced more than one Offspring album.

"I don’t ride a skateboard and love what you hate for / And don’t give a fuck about punk-rocking no more," Dahlia raps on "Massacre." To me, it’s this willingness to not be punk rock that makes the band even more so. Musically, things took a turn for the poppy on 1996’s The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking (Epitaph), and that’s when they got interesting. Far from being merely a glass-smashing nihilist, Dahlia is also a frustrated romantic, a ’50s protorock crooner like Dion or Del Shannon in fingerless leather gloves (see Must Die‘s warped piss take on Shannon, "Runaway #2").

According to one of Dahlia’s ex-lovers, "He’s very mellow and affectionate. I’d get random 3 a.m. voice mails with him singing old soul songs where every word that was romantic would be changed to my name." She went on to say that despite his onstage calls for violence, during their time together she’d never seen him in a fight: "He’s kind of a pacifist."

All this, of course, is neither here nor there. As far as I’m concerned, after 1990’s death blast Blood Guts and Pussy (Sub Pop), with its iconic, Michael Lavine–photographed cover of two naked women and an equally buck-ass midget drenched in blood (the midget appears to be making nice with a bunny rabbit), they could have basically shit in jewel cases for the rest of their career and still worn the crown. That record is basically the punk rock version of Slayer’s Reign in Blood (Def Jam, 1986): 12 tracks in 13 minutes and six seconds — pure punk bliss. And they were smart enough to not try to repeat it every record. Really, what’s Josh Homme have that can hold a candle to that? *

DWARVES

With Girl Band and the White Barons

March 4, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

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Noise Pop: Cats have nine lives

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Few numbers are as loaded as three. From the Holy Trinity to the three main spiritual channels in our bodies described by kabbalists and yogis alike, spiritual triads exist alongside musical forms of threeness: the exponential sound of the power trio, great albums named III, and, indeed, Loudon Wainwright III.

The trio Sebadoh, early harbingers of indie rock, had their own III back in 1991, trading off instruments and artistic wills to make 23 wonderfully unpredictable tracks of folk-core meanderings and spastic noise rock shape-shifting. It’s pretty much universally acknowledged that this record rocked in ways previously unknown. But what really went on between the three original members, Eric Gaffney, Lou Barlow, and Jason Loewenstein? They had all gone on to solo careers before announcing last year both the reissue of III on Domino and a gig at the Great American Music Hall for Noise Pop, an early stop on the Sebadoh "reunion" tour from the West Coast to Toronto and back again.

But Sebadoh’s members aren’t surprised to find themselves together again. "Sebadoh have never reissued anything," Barlow said recently on the phone from his house in Los Angeles, while his young daughter seemed to be taking a noise rock solo in the background. "I think Pavement were reissuing things within two years of being together. The question is, actually, why didn’t we ever reissue things before?"

The new III is fantastic, complete with a bonus disc including the prescient Gimme Indie Rock! EP, the original four-track demo of "The Freed Pig," and "Showtape ’91," a noise and word collage that’s a flashback to the original supporting tour for III. The reissue process was typically strenuous but also cathartic. It was partly to deal with Homestead Records, the album’s original label, Gaffney explained in a recent e-mail. "Signing to Homestead turned out to be a bad idea, so years later I filed a lawsuit … to try to get paid and get the masters back."

Sebadoh never got them back. So how did a reissue happen? "We worked on the bonus disc, and then it was remastered at Abbey Road from a store-bought III CD and the vinyl," Gaffney wrote. "I found a lot of old band tapes for the ‘bonus’ CD. Good stuff."

Barlow agreed, sort of. "A few years ago, Eric and I had an e-mail conversation … an e-mail war … where we just basically went point-by-point through every misunderstanding we had between us, and it all culminated in the reissue. I really just kind of had to let Eric choose what went on the extras disc. But it was totally worth it just to get the record out." They both got what they needed out of the process, Barlow said. "And then it just kind of came up that, well, I guess we could play some shows. Let’s up the ante here! What’s the next logical challenge?" III is an important Sebadoh disc partly because the clash of wills and styles made the music sound so driven. If their accomplished solo projects are any indication, the tour should rock hard and sweet, and that’s all that matters. They plan to play off the crowd, Barlow said, and sets may include material from any time in Sebadoh’s history. "It’s when we get lost in the moment and enjoy the music and drop the phony power plays, that’s when it’s happening," wrote Gaffney, who lives and breathes right here in San Francisco. In other words, the third time — Sebadoh with Gaffney, without, and now again with — is a charm. (Ari Messer)

SEBADOH

With the Bent Mustache, Love of Diagrams, and the New Trust

Feb. 28, 8 p.m., $18–$20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

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Noise Pop: Miss him?

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The first time Roky Erickson performed in San Francisco was in the summer of 1966, fronting his Austin, Texas, band the 13th Floor Elevators, whose garage rock classic "You’re Gonna Miss Me" was rising up the national charts. Sharing the bill at the Fillmore with Grace Slick’s first band, the Great Society, Erickson sang of psychedelic reverberations and reincarnations in both sagely reassuring croons and blood-curdling yelps. The Elevators’ name shows up on Fillmore-Avalon posters so often that even today they’re still thought of as an honorary San Francisco psychedelic band of sorts.

The last time Roky performed in the city was in the early 1980s, and he was singing of two-headed dogs and aliens from the most tawdry of B-grade horror films. Times had changed, yes, but Erickson had changed more, irreversibly fried by a three-year stint in a maximum-security Texas state hospital after he was declared insane in 1969. The one thing undeniably the same was that one-of-a-kind voice, crushing Little Richard, James Brown, and Buddy Holly through the blender of a particularly Texan brand of acid-baked dementia.

Performers from GWAR to Marilyn Manson have made a lucrative career by fashioning an act from gothic horror. Erickson, to all appearances, has actually lived it, and if his record sales have been tiny in comparison to those of others, the fervor of his cult following is second to few. "Roky’s aesthetic rings true with younger music-media fans," says Billy Angel, who played autoharp as part of Erickson’s backup band the Aliens when Erickson reemerged in the late 1970s. "He brought to vision many years ago the now-contemporary experience of rock music coming through the sound system while film noir beams from the video screen."

Erickson’s first San Francisco appearance in about 25 years — as part of Noise Pop on March 1 — comes at a time when most fans had given up hope of seeing him onstage. Withdrawing from music entirely for about a decade, he began performing again in late 2005 after a bitter fight for his custody between his mother and his brother Sumner — the latter also a renowned musician but quite a different one: a tuba player for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. You couldn’t make it up, but we know it’s true because the whole battle was caught on film, in the mesmerizing and disturbing documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me (screening at the Roxie Film Center on Feb. 28).

As his family feuds over what’s best for its prodigal son and praise pours in from such interviewees as Patti Smith, Erickson wanders through the film like a ghostly observer. Apparently neither gratified nor agitated by the attention of either fanatical fans or would-be caretakers, he’s more interested in adjusting his army of televisions and stereos to just the right impossibly painful, cacophonous loudness. As much as most everyone on camera gushes over his genius and tragedy, what Erickson thinks about his cult and incapacitation remains a mystery.

There’s just one scene in the 90-minute film in which he seems at ease and makes one suspect his upcoming show might not be the psychodrama we fear. A therapist asks him to play a song; Erickson starts to strum an acoustic guitar and sing with folky, gentle tenderness, his vocal chops fully intact. Suddenly, he doesn’t seem like a nearly inert burnout fawned and fought over like a familial football. Music courses through his system — his thoughts and voice are clear and calm. It might be the only psychic skin he has left, but he wears it well. *

YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME

Feb. 28, 9:15 p.m., $10

Roxie Film Center

3117 and 3125 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

ROKY ERICKSON AND THE EXPLOSIVES

With Oranger, Howlin Rain, and Wooden Shjips

March 1, 8 p.m., $25

Great American Music Hall

850 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

>

Noise, pop — two great tastes in one!

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FEB. 27

TAPES ‘N TAPES, HAR MAR SUPERSTAR, AND MC-DJ DAVID CROSS


Song scribe extraordinaire Har Mar ripped it up at Thee Parkside a few Noise Pops back, and buzz band Tapes ‘n Tapes made the South by Southwest crowd go nuts (and crawl the wall outside), so you know this is gonna be a blast. Watch for those low-flying groupies of indie comedy fave David Cross too. (Kimberly Chun)

9 p.m. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. Free if you sign up at www.noisepop.com/freedm

FEB. 28

HELLA, POP LEVI, AND MACROMATICS


In Northern California we are all familiar with the term hella, typically used to convey abundance. This same definition can be applied to Sacramento’s math rock savants Hella, whose chaotic brew of avant musical equations can be compared to a piano falling down an elevator shaft or the sonic vibrations of a song trapped in a quasar. Once made up solely of guitarist Spenser Seim and drummer Zach Hill, Hella has since morphed into a full band with the addition of guitarist Josh Hill, bassist Carson McWhirter, and vocalist Aaron Ross, making for a more contained noise that verges on the fringes of prog. Opening is London’s Pop Levi, who describes his slithering psych pop as "Prince making out with Bob Dylan in Syd Barrett’s bedroom," and Romy Hoffman, better known as Macromatics, who makes punk-rooted hip-hop and has been known to shout out to Lemony Snicket and Melanie Griffith in the same breath. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

8 p.m. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $12. (415) 621-4455

JOSH RITTER


Sure, I remember the first time I heard Josh Ritter, who plays a solo acoustic set as part of Noise Pop. There I was, driving beneath a huddle of midnight pines in the middle of nowhere when a warm drawl lured me off the dirt road and into the airwaves with tales of Patsy Cline’s ghost and girls with wooden-nickel smiles — all delivered with the urgency of a young Bob Dylan and the intimacy of Townes van Zandt. Five years later, the Idaho-bred indie folkie still slays me with the Americana mythology of "Golden Age of Radio," and the storytelling voodoo he has cast ever since makes me wish they’d start giving out the O. Henry Award for songwriting. Ritter could be the first winner. (Todd Lavoie)

7:30 p.m. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, SF. $15. (415) 861-5016

MARCH 1

LYRICS BORN AND THE COUP


This Noise Pop show is a warm reminder that all is not lost in contemporary rap music. Yes, it’s still possible for hip-hop to both move your butt and stimulate your mind. Prime examples of this are longtime Oakland political wordsmith Boots Riley and his funk-fueled live band the Coup, who are blessed to be back after a recent tour bus accident. With headliner Quannum MC Lyrics Born, who has proven himself a tireless performer at 150 shows a year, you have a hip-hop concert that’s guaranteed to deliver on all levels. (Billy Jam)

8 p.m. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $25. (415) 346-6000

NO AGE


Hybridizing jangled guitar treatments and shrill electronics, No Age make ambient basement rock that sounds like the Stooges if Iggy had moved the rest of the band with him to Berlin. For the past year, this LA duo — embodying two-thirds of the short-lived maniacal punk outfit Wives — has wed lo-fi with New York noise. On "Dead Plane," a song featured on the band’s MySpace page, a slow burner of dainty hums builds then takes a backseat to a three-chord commotion of dismantled sounds. Matt and Kim, Erase Errata, and Pant Pants Pants round out this rocktastic happening. (Chris Sabbath)

8 p.m. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $10. (415) 621-4455

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY


At first glance, Scissors for Lefty remind you of those dudes down the block who your friends keep telling you are going to make it big. The video for their latest single, the new wave "Ghetto Ways," off Underhanded Romance (Pepper Street Music), works in clips from the 1970s horror flick The Dead, the Devil and the Flesh. The result: pure camp, including an impressive dance break by vocalist Bryan Garza. Lest you forget SFL hail from the Bay Area, "Mama Your Boys Will Find a Home" gives a shout-out to the Mission and girls who "breathe new life into checking our voice mail." (Elaine Santore)

8:00 p.m. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. $15. (415) 255-0333

MARCH 2

ANNUALS


The gears of this much-blogged-about sextet’s musical engine are greased with an all-engaging medley of brash experimental pop and electronic folk. And like kindred spirits Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Arcade Fire, the Annuals back up their buzz with a punch of indie rock delight: their 2006 full-length, Big He Me (Ace Fu), has scored a favorable reception from critics and fans alike. Led by singer-songwriter Adam Baker, the Raleigh, N.C., group’s captivating live show promises to be one of the highlights of Noise Pop. Simon Dawes, Pilot Speed, and Ray Barbie and the Mattson 2 also perform. (Sabbath)

9 p.m. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $10. (415) 861-5016

AUTOLUX


A dreamlike fusion of languid atmospherics and apocalyptic noise, Autolux’s futuristic dark pop is fit for a fembot. The LA trio is composed of bassist Eugene Goreshter, guitarist Greg Edwards, and drummer Carla Azar, whose pounding percussion echoes with an ominous clamor. On songs such as "Turnstile Blues," from Future Perfect (DMZ/Epic, 2004), austere vocals, lush musical landscapes, and fuzzed-out, droning guitars inspire comparisons to the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine, the moodiness of Slowdive, and the artful dissonance of Sonic Youth. Their sound may borrow from distortion-heavy bands of the past, but Autolux appear to be ushering in their own version of sonic modernism. (Kaufman)

9 p.m. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $14. (415) 771-1421

DANDY WARHOLS


The Dandy Warhols: you either hate to love them or love to hate them. But regardless of their arrogant pomp, overt cheekiness, and swaggering vocalist Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s pretentious double-hyphenated name, this foursome still comes through with catchy, pop-laced psychedelia that successfully blurs the boundaries between the underground and the mainstream. The Dandys — who made a splash with their 1997 single "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" and later garnered attention as the sell-out antagonists to the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s incorrigible madcap Anton Newcombe in the 2004 documentary DiG! — continue to find commercial success while staying true to their original sound. This show’s openers include the Bay’s Elephone and Oakland’s Audrye Sessions, whose sweeping, romantic indie rock lullabies will thaw even the most jaded heart. (Kaufman)

9 p.m. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. $30. (415) 625-8880

ALELA DIANE


What hath Vashti wrought? Here they come round the mountain, like Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls Wilder in the credit sequence for Little House on the Prairie — yes, indeedy, the fair maidens with granny hankies of acoustic stringed Americana seem to be multiplying endlessly or cloning themselves through antique alchemical methods such as MySpace. Yet many deliver the goods — and I don’t just mean personally sewn CD packaging; I mean singing and songwriting. Such is definitely the case with the palindromically named Alela Diane, who hails from Joanna Newsom country — Nevada City — but favors guitar over harp and resuscitates Karen Dalton’s quaver with less affectation than Newsom. Humming through teeth, tying tongues in knots, and finding flatlands within mouths, Diane has a definite flair for oral imagery and aural spells: "My Brambles" vividly invokes a favorite word or pet cat, while "The Rifle" and "Lady Divine" flirt with danger instead of falling prey to it à la Marissa Nadler’s eerie murder ballads. (Diane’s handsome friend Rubio Falcor also has a way with a song, if his MySpace cabin is anything to go by.) Along with Zach Rogue and Thao Nguyen, Diane will open for Vic Chesnutt, who is dusting off his shelves and ghetto bells for a few California shows. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7:30 p.m. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, SF. $15. (415) 861-5016

MARCH 3

DEAD MEADOW


Followed by a trail of critical acclaim inundated with joint-smoking references and marijuana puns, Dead Meadow are frequently and unfairly categorized as drugged-induced hard rock. Instead the Washington, DC, group possesses a genius far surpassing the clownish gimmickry of unsophisticated stoner jams. As musically intricate and ethereal as they are untamable and beastly, Dead Meadow take inspiration from rock greats such as Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin but inhabit a unique and mystical domain where early incarnations of metal coexist with swirling, murky psychedelia — the perfect soundtrack for a druid ritual or black magic spell casting. Starlight Desperation and Spindrift open. (Kaufman)

9 p.m. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $12–$14. (415) 861-5016

PONYS


Chicago’s Ponys are making dangerous music. You know, the kind of stuff you don’t want your little sister listening to for fear that she might become seduced by the unduutf8g rhythms, or worse, that she’d fall for the shaggy-haired drummer. This tough-as-nails garage quartet is the sonic kick in the pants that music fans have been craving. Saddled with thundering guitars and ferocious bass lines, the Ponys bring grit and musical malevolence to a famously frenetic live show. Even better, Jered Gummere’s sneering vocals evoke Richard Hell’s, lending an old-school flavor to a feral yet infectious racket composed of equal parts DIY primordial punk, dirty psych à la Blue Cheer, and Love’s irreverent melodicism. Lemon Sun, the Gris Gris, and Rum Diary open. (Kaufman)

9:30 p.m. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $10–$12. (415) 621-4455

SPINTO BAND


If you own a television, you might already know the Spinto Band — or at least their song "Oh Mandy," which provided the soundtrack to a Sears commercial. But don’t hold that against this quirky, energetic group from Delaware. While you’re dancing to their melodic, happy, and bouncy brand of indie rock, you’ll forget all about sweaters and washing machines. Also on the lineup: Dios Malos, who offer catchy and experimental SoCal suburban indie pop; the Changes, who make romantic, earnest pop that made them one of Paste‘s bands to watch; and the Old-Fashioned Way, who produce danceable indie with a sense of humor straight outta the Tenderloin. (Molly Freedenberg)

9 p.m. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. $12. (415) 861-2011

For more Noise Pop picks, check out next week’s Guardian.

For more info, see www.noisepop.com/2007

The rise and fall of the Donnas

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The Donnas have every right to be bitter — and the general nonexistence of delectable male groupies is just one item on a laundry list of spoilers. "Seriously, if there were hot guys throwing themselves at me, I would take advantage of them!" complains vocalist Brett Anderson, lounging on the patio outside engineer Jay Rustin’s Sherman Oaks recording studio, where the Donnas are recording their next album.

What’s the issue on this mild winter day in an intensely girly garden paradise cluttered with poodle-haired pups, dive-bombing hummingbirds, and wildly whistling songbirds? The unequal treatment undergone by one of the most celebrated and derided groups of female rock musicians to hit the country’s pop radar since the Go-Go’s. Essentially, "it’s not the same!" Anderson and guitarist Allison Robertson yelp simultaneously.

"It’s much harder for a girl to get a blow job," adds Robertson, ever the analytical Donna, even in matters of quickies. "A lot of guys on the road in rock bands don’t always bang every girl — they just get blow jobs really fast. Guys can do that. It takes 10 minutes or five minutes. But with girls, it’s just not the same. We all know — it’s a little more involved. You need a little more privacy usually, I dunno."

Their tour bus just has tiny bunks shielded by curtains. "Literally, a Porta Potty is more private than a bunk," says Anderson, still the wisecracking, immaculately turned-out amazon in a sweater, skinny jeans, flats, and Springsteen T.

Once Palo Alto’s misfit all-girl rockers from Jordan Middle School, San Francisco’s punk-metal-pop sweethearts on Lookout!, then Atlantic’s up-and-comers splashed all over MTV, the Donnas are now, 13 years along, veterans at the ripe ages of 27 and 28 who can say they’ve been and done that and seduced, if not 40 boys in 40 nights, then thousands of listeners. Today labelless, off their well-worked and beloved touring circuit, and working through a Saturday on a disc with nary a flunky pushing a pop agenda, the Donnas are free, though their trajectory has been tough — littered with put-downs (some said they were the products of a Svengali in the form of Radio Trash–Super*Teem label owner Darrin Raffaelli, who initially collaborated with the teen band once called Ragady Anne then the Electrocutes), innuendo (who could ignore the unsettling amounts of older stalker dudes at their shows?), and rumor. "A lot of people think we’ve gotten dropped and we owe [Atlantic] thousands of dollars and we can’t pay them back!" Robertson explains. "Also that we’re broke and we’ve broken up."

"Also that we’re lazy," Anderson jumps in, imitating an imaginary slurring, boozy Donna. " ‘Oh yeah, we’re working on our record. Gimme another beer!’ "

Contrary to conjecture, it turns out that the Donnas weren’t dropped from Atlantic but left amicably, deciding not to renew in the face of pressure to go more pop after 2002’s Spend the Night failed to take off on rock radio despite much MTV play for their video "Take It Off" and 2004’s Gold Medal failed to remedy matters. "Our big joke was that we were making Gold Medal so Spend the Night would go gold," Anderson quips. Fortunately, the women who once aced their high school courses and recorded their first 7-inches after hours at a local Mailboxes Etc. are used to driving themselves — even when they couldn’t operate a motor vehicle.

"They started when they were in seventh grade," Anderson’s mother, Bonnie, says over the phone from Palo Alto. She’s one of a contingent of Donnas parents including Robertson’s musician dad, Baxter, and bassist Maya Ford’s English instructor father, John, who founded Poetry Flash. "We had to drive. We were the roadies. Mostly we drove them to different shows, unloaded them, watched them, and went, ‘Omigod,’ and loaded ’em up again. We lived vicariously through them."

But then, the Donnas’ career has been marked by such disjunctions: they were the good students who got into UC Santa Cruz (Robertson and Ford), UC Berkeley (Anderson), and NYU (drummer Torry Castellano) as well as sexy, nice girls-gone-bad who foregrounded female desire, fast tempos, and crunchy metal-fleck glam rock licks, fashioning a sound that might have emerged from Rikki Rockett and Vince Neil if they took the rock train to the next gender. All appetite and attitude, riding the tension between the needs to please and be pleased, the Donnas projected the carefree party-hard image that presaged Andrew W.K. while undergoing their share of trauma and drama, starting with a car accident on the cusp of 2001’s Turn 21 (Lookout!) and continuing through the trouble-plagued Gold Medal sessions, which saw Castellano’s painful case of tendonitis, Anderson’s ravaged vocal chords, Robertson’s divorce, and ordinarily prolific lyric writer Ford’s dry spell. "I kind of ran out of ideas and just got depressed," Ford says on the phone in Los Angeles. "I think I felt, like, a lot of pressure, and it’s never a good situation to be under the gun."

But the Bay Area–bred band stuck together, even when they always felt like outsiders amid Lookout!’s East Bay punk scene. "The thing that’s the most impressive about the Donnas is that through all of this, being teenagers, being best friends, having dreams of school and different careers, parental pressure to pursue those, highs and lows in terms of record sales and attention, they’ve stuck together," says manager Molly Neuman, once the drummer of riot grrrl groundbreakers Bratmobile and a force behind the now-catalog-driven Lookout! alongside her ex-husband, Christopher Appelgren.

The frustrating thing — even on this Grammy weekend, as the Dixie Chicks were getting ready to receive their dust collectors across town — was hitting the wall on rock radio as so many other female bands have. All the while they were dancing backward, away from the on-air jokes about synchronized periods and D-cups and being told repeatedly, " ‘We don’t play female rock on our rock station,’ " unless it’s Evanescence or No Doubt, Robertson says.

After trying Atlantic’s pop strategy and working with songwriters such as Dave Stewart ("You write songs with a guy who’s had these number one hits, and you see he still has to sit and go, ‘Dog, no. Frog, no’ — that’s nice," Anderson says. "You feel like, ‘Oh shit, he has to do that too’ "), they’re hoping to strike a balance with the new record, cooking up hard rock ear candy that satisfies a craving for sweet riffs and hard-to-shake hooks without falling prey to the monochromatic hardness of, say, Spend the Night. The songs they’ve tracked so far focus on Donna favorites — partying and dancing — with glances at the equalizing effects of nightfall and the loneliness of the road. And perhaps the gumption that gave these women the courage to face prove-it punks and surly sods every night on tour, the same sassiness that some mistake for brattiness, has been tempered with time.

"We were listening to old records and thinking, ‘Shit! Like, we’re scary!’ " Anderson says, laughing.

"This album," Robertson says softly, "is more like ‘Come party with us.’ " *

DONNAS

With Boyskout, Bellavista, and Push to Talk

March 2, 9 p.m., $20

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

Sonic Reducer will return next week.

Views of Iwo Jima

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been met with near-unanimous stateside praise for its humanistic portrayal of the infamous 1945 battle. It became the first film primarily in the Japanese language to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar — on Feb. 25 it vies for an Academy Award in that category and three others. Eastwood himself has called it a "Japanese film." But how have Japanese audiences and critics responded?

There’s been a spate of Hollywood productions set in Japan in recent years — Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to name a few. Each film scored various degrees of commercial success in the United States, but most Japanese audiences agreed that the portrayals of Japanese ranged from well-meaning but a little bit off to downright offensive. With the exception of The Last Samurai, which rode Tom Cruise’s popularity, none performed particularly well at the Japanese box office.

Letters was met with considerable anticipation as soon as the production was announced. Word spread that Eastwood was considering having a Japanese filmmaker direct the project. (He reportedly muttered, "Akira Kurosawa would’ve been perfect.") Once it was confirmed that Eastwood would be taking the helm himself, there were equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. In Japan, Eastwood had been one of the most highly regarded American filmmakers for many years, particularly after Unforgiven, whose fresh treatment of the western genre resonated with samurai movie fans. Yet given the track record of American directors taking on Japan, some suspicion was inevitable.

Letters‘ companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers, opened first, to generally rave reviews, with solid if unspectacular box office numbers. Letters made its world premiere in Tokyo on Nov. 15, 2006, and opened theatrically Dec. 9, 11 days ahead of the US release. To date it’s grossed more than $41 million in Japan (and still going strong), as opposed to a mere $10 million in the US, despite the Oscar nomination and the praise heaped on the film. (Flags, by comparison, grossed $33 million here and $29 million in Japan.) Pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, one of the notable cast members, helped draw a younger audience, many of whom reported having been averse to war movies until taking the leap with this film.

A quick survey of published reviews and blogs in Japan indicated that critics and audiences alike have responded with extremely, if not unanimously, positive comments. Historians have indicated that with the exception of some minor inaccuracies, the film is well researched and essentially true to the events that occurred, while film reviewers have already anointed it a masterpiece for our times. Here’s a sampling of some comments found:

"If one were to see this film without any prior knowledge of its director or production team, there would be no reason to believe this isn’t a bona fide Japanese film."

"When the two films are seen together, there’s a chemical reaction that’s never before seen in the history of cinema."

"Seeing the American soldiers fill the beach, I’d wonder if Doc [from Flags] is somewhere in that crowd. That’s when I realized the effect that seeing both films can have."

"Japanese American writer Iris Yamashita deserves tremendous praise for the incredible detail with which she depicts what is, for her, essentially a foreign story."

"My generation grew up watching films that showed the ugliness and cruelty of Japanese Imperial soldiers, so I didn’t know how to respond to seeing such proud and beautiful Japanese soldiers in Letters."

To be sure, some have also pointed out blemishes. Chief among them is lead Ninomiya’s all-too-modern speech, which for some Japanese viewers sticks out awkwardly from an otherwise well-executed deployment of the language used during World War II. Cast members Tsuyoshi Ihara and Ryo Kase (who delivers the finest, most underrated performance in the film as the former military police officer Shimizu) have mentioned in interviews that the tight time frame from casting to filming prevented them from being fully prepared for their period-specific roles, and they admit details of the era were missed. Many of the cast members reportedly crowded inside Ihara’s hotel room to watch a DVD demonstrating proper Imperial soldier salutes.

That said, those same actors praise Eastwood for keeping his eye on the big picture and focusing more on the characters’ emotions than the period details. They also give him credit for being extremely open to ideas from the cast. "He’s always standing next to the actors," Kase says. "And if we suggest trying something different, he would always say, ‘OK, let’s try it.’ " Ken Watanabe is said to have personally taken on the task of adjusting the translated dialogue on set to sound more natural and accurate.

It’s not surprising, then, that one of the most often heard comments from Japanese viewers was the following: "Tough to admit, but this is a more Japanese film than even a Japanese director might create." More than a few critics and bloggers have pointed out their mixed feelings that such a remarkable "Japanese film" was made by an American filmmaker. The comments range from expressions of frustration and embarrassment — "Why couldn’t this masterpiece of a portrait about the Japanese experience have been made in Japan?" — to one of gratitude: "The film was made possible only because of an outside perspective like Eastwood’s."

The comments are similar to those I heard while traveling to Japan five times during the past two years as a coproducer of the new HBO documentary White Light/Black Rain, directed by Steven Okazaki. We were there to shoot interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many documentaries — both in Japan and the US — have tackled the subject before, but surprisingly few have focused on the stories of survivors. Filmmakers, peace activists, and survivors all expressed appreciation for our endeavors but admitted embarrassment that an American production was taking on the important duty.

Indeed, many seem to concede the Japanese film industry is currently incapable of producing films like Letters or White Light that dare to expose the horrific consequences of war. The increasingly conservative society has seen a recent surge in the movement to remove Article 9 of the Constitution, which forbids the nation from maintaining an army, navy, or air force. Reflecting the growing nationalism and the call for remilitarization, recent Japanese blockbusters such as Aegis, Yamato, and Lorelei depict the Japanese military defending the nation in war or against terrorism, though they stop just short of glorifying battle. Even warriors from a different age — the samurai — appear to be gaining in onscreen popularity once again.

In this climate, Letters appears to have had a cathartic effect on the Japanese audience. What many had felt yet couldn’t fully voice, the film spoke loud and clear. Though the awareness of the Pacific War had been waning among the younger generations, the success of the film has spawned new books and TV documentaries renewing interest in the period and sending people rushing to try to visit Iwo Jima. (Because of the US military presence on the island, access is extremely limited.) Most important, Eastwood’s dual-film concept has more than accomplished its objective of offering a perspective from both sides of the battle. Japanese reviews of Flags often mentioned some degree of surprise at seeing the hardships encountered by American soldiers during the war and their ability to emotionally identify with the American characters. And Letters, in turn, has been embraced in Japan. As one blogger wrote, "That the film’s creators broke down the walls of race and language to make this film that has moved so many people on both sides may be the best response to war yet." *

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Now playing in Bay Area theaters

For a discussion between Taro Goto and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa about Letters from Iwo Jima and the films of Clint Eastwood, please go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Academy fight song

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First things fuckin’ first: I know I’m not the only film fan who’s still pissed about Crash winning over Brokeback Mountain in 2006’s Best Picture race. In fact, let’s change the subject before I punch the nearest preachy ensemble drama (look out, Babel!). Cinemaniacs actually have a bigger problem this year, with the prospect of an Academy Awards ceremony chockablock with predetermined winners. You might as well time your corner-store run during the Best Actor and Best Actress awards, cause there’s zero mystery about who’s gonna snag those trophies (this way you can actually watch the People Who Died montage for once). But who else will win besides Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren? Can we make it through four hours of entertainment-related programming without mentioning Anna Nicole Smith? And are there any showdowns worthy of honorary Oscar recipient Ennio Morricone’s iconic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly score?

Best picture: Surprisingly, who’ll go home with the biggest O is anyone’s guess. The choices are Babel (which won the Golden Globe), The Departed (a big-budget box office hit), Letters from Iwo Jima (stellar movie, but Clint Eastwood’s already got like 57 of these things), Little Miss Sunshine (the little indie that could?), and The Queen (a good movie made great by Mirren’s performance). I’m aiming at my Oscar dartboard (it’s taped on a Crash poster) and picking Babel. Or Little Miss Sunshine. Or The Departed. Yep, I’m useless.

Best director: If Martin Scorsese doesn’t win for The Departed, I’m shaving my hair into a Mohawk. Paul Greengrass (United 93) I could maybe live with. But if Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) gets his mitts on Marty’s trophy, it’s Bickle time.

Supporting actor: Frankly, I’m just psyched that the Academy chose to nominate The Departed ‘s Mark Wahlberg (funny, bitchy) instead of going the predictable route with Jack Nicholson (over-the-top in a bad way; what the fuck was that Tony Montana scene about anyway?). Despite mutterings about how Norbit‘s hideous existence is gonna harm his chances, Eddie Murphy’s Dreamgirls comeback will prove hard to beat, what with the singing, dancing, and acting chops — and nary a fat suit in sight.

Supporting actress: It’s Dreamgirls‘ J-Hud all the way. Insert your own "and I am telling you" pun here. Think she’ll thank Beyoncé in her acceptance speech?

Foreign-language film: Pan’s Labyrinth is on a roll. Give Guillermo del Toro his much-deserved due. You know you loved Blade 2 as much as I did.

Original screenplay: Even with the hokey thing about the stag, The Queen, written by the havin’–a–banner year Peter Morgan, is pretty appropriately regal. But the superfreaky Little Miss Sunshine contains the line "Do what you love, and fuck the rest," which may be kind of a cliché but is endearing enough to win me over. Kind of like the movie itself.

Adapted screenplay: Wizard sleeves! Vanilla faces! Gypsy tears! Wa wa wee wa! Oh, all the nominees in this category are deserving, but if they don’t give this to Borat genius Sacha Baron Cohen and his crew, the Academy will have chosen wisely. Not.

Documentary: Al Gore will never be president, but he can win an Oscar. (Or at least his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, can.) He’s kind of like Ronald Reagan in reverse.

Costume: I almost want to say Curse of the Golden Flower, for the sheer fact that it made Gong Li’s knockers defy gravity. However, I think the sequin-per-capita rule applies here: Dreamgirls, you may not have snagged a Best Picture nom, but getting snubbed has never looked so glamorous. (Cheryl Eddy)

ACADEMY AWARDS

Sun/25, 5 p.m., ABC

www.oscar.com

>

Spectator pumps

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Most of the sex I’ve had with my girlfriend has been pretty bad, all thanks to my stupid brain. I go back and forth between impotence and premature ejaculation. Initially, I thought it was physical, but it’s become evident that it’s primarily a mental thing. You know how if someone says, "Don’t think about elephants," all you can think about are elephants? This is the same idea. If I’m confident and stay in the moment, everything goes well and lasts more than long enough for us both to be happy. If I think, "What if my boner goes away?" — it usually does. If I stress that the sex is going to be bad and my girlfriend is going to be unsatisfied, I usually come too quickly. I’ve looked into counseling and hypnotherapy, but they’re expensive and I’m broke. Can you offer any advice?

Love,

Mind-Bending Sex, but Not the Good Kind

Dear Kind:

You are such a textbook case of the classic performance dysfunctions (performance anxiety and spectatoring) that I immediately thought of the big-name researchers and writers on the subject. On my way to getting you some links to Helen Singer Kaplan and Masters and Johnson, though, I was distracted by a book called You Can Be Your Own Sex Therapist. I haven’t read it, but I like the title and appreciate the sentiment. (Felled by god-awful neck pain, I eschewed chiropractors, acupuncturists, and conventional doctors and went the DIY route with a foam pillow and a book called Heal Your Own Neck. I also diagnosed my own depression and used to clean my teeth with dental tools I bought at the flea market, so make of this what you will.) I also like and often recommend The New Male Sexuality, by the unfortunately late Bernie Zilbergeld, PhD.

If you could afford to see a sex therapist, chances are the therapist would introduce you to the concept of "sensate focus," the exercises designed to encourage you and your partner to give and receive touch for its own sake, without getting all goal-oriented about erection or orgasm. The therapist would help you identify what is distracting you and coach you through learning to stay present and enjoying what’s actually happening instead of projecting your anxieties into the uncomfortable near future. While working with a therapist is probably ideal, even seeing an intern for a sliding-scale fee can end up costing you some serious bucks. See if there’s such a clinic handy and if you can afford some sessions with an intern (don’t worry, they’re supervised); and if that doesn’t seem feasible, get a book and do it yourself. Your dysfunction is supernormal. It should be superfixable too.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend is 18 and less sexually experienced than I am. I find myself constantly spelling out to him what to do. I can see how this could occasionally be erotic, but we’re both getting frustrated. He doesn’t seem to be learning how to satisfy me very fast. Even worse, I’m taking antidepressants, and one of the side effects is delayed orgasm. Is it fair for me to expect more effort from him? Should I just accept that sex is going to be mediocre for a while?

Love,

Tappy-Foot

Dear Tappy:

Is that an "until I’m off the pills" while or an "until my boyfriend shapes up" while? You didn’t mean a "sex will be mediocre as long as I’m with this guy but I’m going to stick it out until something better comes along" while, did you? I hope you didn’t, but I fear you did.

Sex educators are forever bugging people to communicate more during sex. "Tell him what you want," they urge, "He can’t read your mind!" I say it too, of course, but I also often imagine an outcome much like yours: two essentially unsuited people endlessly nagging each other (or one nagging the other, whichever) to do it a little harder, slower, longer, or better. Helpful suggestions are all very well (vital, actually), but if there’s no spark, you’re not going to ignite one by rubbing two things together until everybody’s exhausted and dispirited.

I don’t mean to say you should give up right now. You should talk to him sometime when he isn’t down there grinding away in whatever dull and vaguely irritating way he’s grinding. And don’t tell him you need to talk to him about how lousy he is in the sack, either. Raise it as a communication issue, and see how that goes. Then you can give up.

I should caution you, however, against making it his problem that you are experiencing some extremely common, but regrettable, side effects of medication. That is not his fault, any more than being so tragically young is his fault. Both will get better with time.

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 just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

We could be heroes

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Justice League Heroes

(Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment; PS2, Xbox, PSP, Nintendo DS)

GAMER The best game to feature comic book heroes to date is Marvel vs. Capcom. Here we have heroes from the DC universe gathered together as the mighty Justice League, ready to stomp the guts out of fiends doing dirt. Pretty colors, special moves, funny dialogue, and a solid two-player mode combine for an entertaining gaming experience, but it’s not quite as fun as reading the comic books.

The story for Justice League Heroes was written by Dwayne McDuffie, who worked on the excellent Cartoon Network show Justice League Unlimited. He did a great job creating a story arc and added some genuinely funny material. The basic story: The Justice League has possession of a meteor. The meteor is communicating with Braniac, who is doing major damage all over the place. So the Justice League goes to work, and as you might expect, they get the job done. But then there’s a twist. Surprise is a nice game feature.

JLH was developed by Snowblind Studios, which is also responsible for Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Like Dark Alliance, JLH is a dungeon crawler, a format typically reserved for D&D-type games with ogres, wizards, and other magical critters. Throughout the game, you play as various Justice League heroes: Superman, Batman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter are all in effect, and more characters and costumes can be unlocked during the game. The costumes actually influence each character’s abilities and special moves, which adds to the game’s replayability. In general, the heroes go out two at a time. You get to switch from one to the next by pressing a button, and whichever hero you’re not controlling will fight by your side with the help of fairly good AI. Unlockable characters include Aquaman and Hawkgirl. The two-player mode works well and makes the game move right along, because any time you die, the other player can revive you.

Game play is solid if somewhat simple. Hand-to-hand fights are best handled with button mashing, but special moves, like Batman summoning a swarm of bats, add dazzling cinematic effects. Each character has a mega and a super-mega attack mode. You can make the heroes who can fly do so by jumping and tapping a button. Unfortunately, they only fly a few feet off the ground. When you hit the button after jumping with heroes who can’t fly, they do a flip in the air or sort of glide slowly to the ground. The environment is destructible, so you can wing lampposts at villains.

Overall the game is fast paced and will probably hold your attention, thanks to a good story, funny one-liners, and a sweeping orchestral soundtrack. But comic book enthusiasts and nonnerds alike, beware: this game is so-so — so use your awesome judgment. Of course, it’ll be worth playing for mega–comic book fans, because any chance to interact with and even control one’s heroes is worth taking. Casual gamers will also enjoy the two-player mode, and fashion fiends will love the costume options. (Nate Denver)

Happy returns

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A man hides from the world in a shabby seaside rooming house until two men arrive determined to take him away. The latter represent a kind of conformity, brutal and ruthless in its determination and tactics. The turning point in their showdown with the wayward man will be the birthday party they help his smitten elderly landlady throw for her sole tenant.

The mystery-laden simplicity of The Birthday Party ‘s plot provides ample room for absorbing the subtle details of the relationships it presents, and Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre brings those out expertly. Artistic director Tom Ross’s production is not only sure and intelligent but palpably enthusiastic in its essaying of this nearly 50-year-old play, which is both Harold Pinter’s first full-length work and Aurora’s first production of his work since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

A scene of domestic nonbliss opens the play: housewife Meg (Phoebe Moyer) and deck-chair attendant Petey (Chris Ayles) are an aging couple mired in a domestic routine whose laconic, staccato rhythms are bleakly comedic. Their empty chat introduces the mix of precise characterization and the ruse that the play will go on developing. Their frowsy little boarding house, meanwhile, offers (in the choice details of Richard Olmsted’s set design) a muted clash of wallpaper, a lumpy armchair with soiled cushions, and a small, serviceable dining table among an obligatory arrangement of homey knickknacks. The place, it seems, is avoided like the plague by all but permanent resident Stanley (a dyspeptic antihero brilliantly realized by James Carpenter).

Vaguely suggesting guilt, despondency, or disgust, Stanley rises late, jabs at his cornflakes, complains about them and the tea, lights a cig, then spends the day doing nothing. The psychosexual aspects of this ad hoc family get played up grotesquely in Meg’s mommy lust for the younger man, in the clash of her youthful eagerness and frumpy exterior, and maybe just a bit in the ultimately impotent patriarch Petey’s playful moniker. The seductive girl next door, Lulu (Emily Jordan), and the arrival of Goldberg (Julian Lopez-Morillas) and McCann (Michael Ray Wisely) up the ante, threatening to sunder the bonds of the little household.

The genteel Goldberg and strong-arm McCann are precise and lively versions of their terrorist types and flaunt their respective Jewish and Irish Catholic backgrounds just enough to give their authoritarianism a religious as well as secular inflection. But power’s way is the way of the playground, and the power play by Goldberg and McCann has a lot of play in it. They’re keen on a set of games that never leave them far from grade school bullies.

The birthday party, the central event of the play, provides a kind of formal, ritual occasion for children still fighting, struggling, and pushing each other around, stubbornly refusing to give any ground. The pushing and shoving never really stops, but the party offers a set of temporary restrictions — new parameters for the game. And it’s a literal game of blind man’s bluff that caps the dreary, drunken celebration at which Stanley (who insists it is not his birthday) is the unwilling guest of honor.

Fifty years of modern theater, including not least Pinter’s subsequent work, have no doubt made a play like The Birthday Party more approachable, but it remains too esoteric for many. Instead of the elusive language used in The Birthday Party, audiences often expect something more akin to a crossword puzzle — enter the appropriate words in their respective boxes, and you achieve a definitive solution: nice, neat, and self-contained.

But if The Birthday Party is a puzzle, it is open-ended and without a solution, or rather with a series of partial and contingent solutions. Words are not really evidence here. Evidence has to be gathered between and behind the lines.

As if to underscore this limit of language, Stanley’s final word isn’t a word at all. It’s a horrifying howl that rises like bile in the throat of a man who has finally been tamed, blinded, and led off. As mysterious as it is immediate, it might be, fatalistically speaking, his last gesture of defiance, a final assertion of individuality and independence. More hopefully, it may be the first expression of some new measure of understanding for which there are no words yet. (Nine across: what a new animal sounds like.) Either way, something has happened. That much is certain. So happy birthday. *

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Through March 4

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., $28–$50

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

>

Gimme Grammy?

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› Kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Strip away the pre-Grammy bashes and after-parties, the hunger pangs, the monstrous Staples Center and the surrounding downtown LA sketchiness, and the mandatory earful you get from radio broadcasters playing brain-numbing Grammys numbers games as if they were rattling off sports stats — and I’d say I’m glad to have made the five-hour drive to the awards show. I feel privileged to have camped out at the arena’s media center for almost 12 hours to hurl polite questions at the Dixie Chicks, Ludacris, T.I., etc., at that most bemoaned of ceremonies, because I learned so much about the music industry’s "biggest night of the year" Feb. 11. Start with this grain of wisdom from pretelecast host Joe Satriani: "Remember, it’s not whether you win or lose but how good you look at all the after-parties tonight," and go forward, ladies and gentlemen, to "What I Learned at the Grammys":

1) Skip many of the pretelecast awards, unless you’re dying to see who won Best Spoken Word, Polka, or Surround Sound albums. None of the stars show up for these unless they’re presenting. Only so-called niche artists (read: Hawaiian, American Indian, gospel) still interested in industry recognition bother showing up before 5 p.m.

2) If, however, there’s screaming for a nominee during the pretelecast handout, you can bet the band is there. Wolfmother, for instance, got a load of whoops when its name was called for Best Hard Rock Album — and indeed Rob Tyner–’froed vocalist Andrew Stockdale eventually made it from outer Siberia to the stage. Backstage he joked, "I thought this award was reserved for the permanent residents of Bel-Air."

3) Speak the truth. Then stick to it. Even the Dixie Chicks couldn’t honestly say they made the Best Record and Album, just two of the five Grammys they won, but they did gratefully acknowledge that their awards were symbolic — and no less meaningful. "I’m definitely aware that we were up against a lot of great music," Natalie Maines told the media. "But I definitely think people had an inspiration and different motivation in voting for us."

4) Be nice — and better, be funny. Media wage slaves in regulation black knew that in the tightly controlled Grammy universe, we best not ask untoward questions for fear of being ejected and disinvited in the future. We must take humility — and humor — lessons from Lewis Black, winner of Best Comedy Album, who sputtered, "I never win shit, so I’m astonished."

5) Keep the American Idol appearances to a minimum (thank the lord that Kelly Clarkson didn’t make another album this year, and pass the ammunition). Carrie Underwood looked terrified as she sang "San Antonio Rose" during the tribute to Lifetime Achievement honoree Bob Wills.

6) Be from Texas or better still, Houston: the Dixie Chicks, Beyoncé, Chamillionaire, "My Grammy Moment" newb Robyn Troup.

7) Skew elderly, as usual. Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett score before silly but infectious monster hits "Hips Don’t Lie" and "Promiscuous"? Complain into the hearing aid.

8) Concentrate on giving the people memorable performances, with tasteful production à la Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy," complete with airline pilot uniforms and an eerie Lost–as–a–modern opera feel. With the exception of the messily mixed Ludacris and Earth, Wind and Fire production, most of the show was solid.

9) Keep your celebrated poonanny shots to yourself. Christina Aguilera, known for her own supposed flash at a Grammy telecast a few years back, tactfully fielded a question backstage on how to leave a limo gracefully, unlike her former Mickey Mouse Club mate Britney Spears. "Are you setting me up to say, ‘Keep your legs closed’?" asked the petite blond, working that retro vibe in black lace and a simultaneously amused and prim attitude.

10) When all else fails, baffle them with bullshit — or designer body modification mishaps. Frail, in a gold tie and matching yellow splotched jacket, Ornette Coleman waxed oblique and philosophical, improvising a mumbled hepcat monologue on sound freely, incomprehensively, and far out there backstage after his Lifetime Achievement win. Coleman sounded utterly cracked until he brought it all home: "I’m only saying what I’m saying because I want to hurry up and get this over with." Rim shot!

Grammy’s only surreal moment was the instant Smokey Robinson’s strangely erased-looking, waxy brow and unnaturally bright blue eyes appeared on TV as he came out to sing "The Tracks of My Tears" alongside a wildly energetic, trampoline-bouncing, handstanding Chris Brown. Had the Motown songwriting genius been body-snatched and replaced by a Botox victim from Planet Zanthar? A woman reading my notes on Robinson’s tweaked face over my shoulder told me I had to write about it. "His wife is my godmother," she swore. "I went up to him last night at a party and said, ‘You look like a demon!’ He takes care of himself, but someone needs to tell him." Speaking truth to legend? It could become a habit. *

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