› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
As long as I can remember, I’ve had a fascination with gyno play and playing doctor. I had never acted upon it until meeting my current boyfriend. We’ve begun experimenting with speculums, various insertable objects, vibrators, etc. We are always very careful to be sterile and safe.
I’ve grown more and more interested in the idea of cervical dilation and cervical insertions but have been unable to find any literature on the subject. Apparently, I am the only human alive with such a fascination. I have looked online and found several varieties of uterine sounds but always in context of urethral play, not cervical stretching.
I understand that any cervical penetration has the possibility of causing cramps or other pain, but I am anxious and willing to experiment with this aspect of such play. My concern is safety. Any information?
Love,
Stretch me
Dear Stretch:
Questions like this always remind me of a kids’ science show I used to watch, starring the performance artist Paul Zaloom and some guy in a ratty old rat costume. Seriously, this existed. I’m not making it up. In one episode Paul was explaining how to grow a particularly odoriferous bacteria colony in an old tennis shoe when he broke off midsentence, looked directly into the camera, and said, “Don’t even do this.” That’s how I feel when people ask me about certain extreme and possibly harmless but just a little bit potentially fatal practices. Do something else. Don’t even do this.
Cervical stretching and sounding are, of course, accomplished every day in thousands of gynecologists’ offices and with no lasting harm to the patient. That’s how you get IUDs in and unwanted tissues out, provided, of course, that “you” are a trained medical professional. It isn’t the pain that worries me. I understand that you’re up for that, and, you know, go crazy, although having been the recipient of several antepartum “internals,” I can assure you that the sensation is … let’s call it “challenging” and leave it at that. You know that’s how they determine how close you are to going into labor, right? A doctor or midwife rummages around in there, eventually emerging to announce that you’re only “a fingertip” dilated. Guess what high-tech, finely calibrated device is used to determine that? No, really. Guess.
So, yes, cervical stretching hurts like 12 kinds of mofo, but that’s not our concern here. I’m afraid of you perforating something, introducing outside-world bacteria to your insides, or both. I don’t need to tell you how badly that could go for you, and only you can decide if it’s worth the risk.
It isn’t true that there’s absolutely no information on this out there — there’s just very, very little of it. There’s probably something in BME, the Body Modification Ezine, although you may have to join to get to some of their more esoteric content. I imagine the extreme practitioner C.M. Hurt knows something about cervical play if anyone does, but the closest thing I could find among her writings was an article (on dungeonmagic.com) about female catheterization play that you might enjoy. A place called Eros Boutique carries every conceivable type of sound and catheter, and medical books and sites with instructions for inserting an IUD could walk you through the steps necessary to prepare for messing with your cervix. That’s all I’ve got. I could tell you that in order to introduce something, say, a little catheter full of sperm for intrauterine insemination, into the uterus, they sometimes have to grab the cervix with a clawlike thing called a “tenaculum” (Could that word be more vivid? Half tentacle, half speculum?), but I’m afraid that given your proclivities, it would only encourage you.
This is very strange for me — up till now, whenever someone has asked me about inserting things into the female urethra, I’ve said, in a word, “don’t,” and for good reason. Unlike the longer and hardier male version, the female urethra is only a few inches long and kind of fragile. It’s a very short trip to the bladder, which really doesn’t want you dragging in dirt all over its nice clean floor. So while I generally counsel people, especially beginners, to leave the urethra alone and go play someplace safe, like the vagina, I’m going to take a flyer and suggest the urethra as a slightly safer alternative to the cervix if you absolutely must go poking in places where you’re not invited. At least you can sort of resanitize it by peeing afterwards. You may also feel free to be cranked open with a speculum, even a cold speculum for that frisson of gynecological authenticity, and prodded about the cervix with a gloved finger. It is possible — oh, so very possible — to create some quite intensely painful sensations in that region without ever attempting entry. I can’t, in good conscience, support your friend playing doctor in the sanctum sanctorum there. I just can’t.
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.
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
At your cervix
Tricks and treats with Down at Lulus
HALLOWEEN BEAUTY The Oakland salon and boutique Down at Lulus is copowered by members of Gravy Train!!! and the Bobbyteens. Seth Bogart of the former and Tina Lucchesi of the latter got together with me recently to first discuss the greatness of Davines hair care products from Italy (“If you have dry hair, they will blow your mind,” Lucchesi says), then get down to ghost boobs, hot sweet and sticky treats, and other things Halloween-y.
SFBG What are your best or worst Halloween experiences?
TINA LUCCHESI None are very memorable because I’m always pretty wasted. A funny one was seeing the Phantom Surfers open for the Cramps at the Warfield after Bill Graham died. One of my friends dressed as Dead Bill Graham and got us kicked out. Everyone was so pissed off about him stepping out of a coffin and slagging off Bill Graham and Ticketmaster. But I did get to hang out with Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach.
SETH BOGART It’s funny to go trick-or-treating when you’re old. One time my friend was dressed up like Michael Jackson, and this lady answered the door with a baby and was disgusted that we were still trick-or-treating. He made comments about her baby, and she slammed the door in our face.
SFBG What to you is a sexy Halloween costume or look?
TL I hate all the typical ones like French maid, naughty nurse, or Catholic schoolgirl. Why can’t there be a look like sexy crack whore?
SB I think the only appropriate sexy costume is when a guy is wearing it. When a girl does, it’s so played out. A hot straight guy you never get to see naked, wearing a bikini — that’s my fave.
SFBG What’s your idea of a fun Halloween night?
TL Probably playing tricks on little kids and scaring them. I’ve always wanted to set up a crazy graveyard in front of my house.
SB No one comes to my house because it’s kind of dangerous, and I think I’m over trick-or-treating, finally. My ideal Halloween would be to experience something haunted, like a séance.
SFBG Do you have a favorite scary movie?
TL So many. I love The Wizard of Gore. I love Herschell Gordon Lewis movies and Mario Bava movies like Black Sunday and Castle of Blood. Texas Chainsaw Massacre — classic. The Last House on the Left — classic.
SB I love horror movies, but I also love haunted houses. Every year I go to, like, five. The best one is in Hollister in a cornfield — it’s so scary. When the chainsaw man comes, we all run, and a lot of people get hurt just from falling.
SFBG What are you going to dress up as this year?
TL Either Dolly Parton with extreme boobs and hair, Cyndi Lauper, or a vampire bloody majorette.
SB I think I’m going to be Teen Wolf. But I’m not sure yet. One year I was Nancy Reagan, but the mask was hotter than hell and it was making me sick. I had to take it off. (Johnny Ray Huston)
DOWN AT LULUS
6603 Telegraph, Oakl.
Call for appointments
(510) 601-0964
www.downatlulus.com
The sound of evil
› duncan@sfbg.com
Metal people scare me.
Not in an “ooh, I’m scared” kind of way, but in an “oh, that’s sad,” arrested development kind of way.
This is especially true of the black metal cabal. Black metal is supposedly the be-all and end-all of evil, and it’s just so camp that it’s silly. Everyone’s got a fake metal name (Necronomicon or Umlaut), panda bear Kiss tribute makeup (I mean, corpsepaint), and homemade nail-spike armbands. Don’t forget the unreadable band logo that looks like cleverly arranged twigs. Clearly, these are people who spend as much time rehearsing their look in front of a mirror as they do rehearsing their music in the studio, if not more.
Which is why Ludicra is one of the few bands generally classified as black metal that I’ll bother with. For one thing, the group includes vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman and guitarist–backing vocalist Christy Cather — they’re not in the same old heavy metal boys club.
More importantly, when I want to hear heavy music, I want it to intersect with my life. I haven’t been burning churches or worshipping Thor lately. If I want to hear some fairy-tale shit, I’ll cut out the middleman and listen to Ride of the Valkyries. Alienation, loneliness, the death of relationships, and the sense of anonymity in being yet another face in a big city — this is stuff I can relate to. “Something big and bright/ Looms outside my window/ Choked with promise/ Smothered in hope/ Days plod on like machines of ceaseless ruin/ Lost in a forest of haunted buildings.” These are the opening lines of “Dead City” from Ludicra’s new album, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis (Alternative Tentacles), which quotes Saint Jerome, via Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, meaning “dregs of the city, law of the earth.” Jerome was referring to Christ’s apostles and how they were the lowliest scumbags teaching the highest truth. This is echoed in the album’s verminous cover art: restrained line drawings of roaches, ants, rats, flies, and a club-footed pigeon. The meek shall inherit the earth — or at least the urban parts — but they probably won’t be walking on two legs.
Although it’s not necessarily meant to be a concept album, Fex Urbis feels like one to me: five epic tracks, the longest almost a dozen minutes, about the entropy of modern city living. From that hopeful light outside the window, just out of reach, to “the sign that modern times is finally crashing down” in the final track, “Collapse,” the full-length reminds me of the Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn (Neurot, 2005), which, in turn, reminds me of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. For all its double-bass drum bombast, dark screams, and perfectly timed twin-guitar riffing, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis has more in common with Philip Glass’s score to that film than with anything released by Mayhem.
Putting in the CD for the first time, I was kind of spooked out by Shanaman’s voice. It’s an otherworldly death rattle. But when juxtaposed with both the lyrics and the relatively clean backing vocals, also sung by Shanaman, the result isn’t evil — a tone that has held so much sway over the metal community for so many years after the first, eponymous Black Sabbath album — but heavy. The music is epic without being cheesy fantasy, which makes it resonate.
I think it’d be fair to say at this point that I don’t believe in evil. I believe ignorance and delusion exist at the base of willful choices. Evil is supernatural. Ignorance is human and therefore that much scarier. Even on Halloween, nothing is going to reach out from the land beyond and get you.
Sure, Shanaman’s voice sounds evil, but when I talked to her in person, the first word that came to mind was sweet. She laughs easily, sometimes because she thinks something is funny but mostly out of nervousness, it seems. She’s a self-admitted “total choir geek.”
Drummer Aesop Hantman knew he wanted to be in a band with her since the mid-’90s, when he was in Hickey and she was in the local noise-grind act Tallow. “Here was this totally demure, nice girl that would fucking explode,” he says in a phone interview. “It was really unnerving.”
Ludicra, which includes guitarist John Cobbett and bassist Ross Sewage, are likewise unnerving. They remind you that just because there’s no bogeyman under your bed and Satan is real only to country bumpkins like the Louvin Brothers and unrepentant metal geeks, it doesn’t mean you won’t be swallowed up by forces greater than yourself: “Gone are the days of reckless vanity,” Shanaman howls as the album winds down. “Gone are the old songs from the shore…. Here’s the end of what we have dreamt of. Here’s the face of the collapse.” SFBG
LUDICRA
Tues/31, 9 p.m.
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
$7
(415) 552-7788
Dan West’s top five horror films
1. Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) Not only the greatest title in cinema history but also its single greatest achievement. Never before (or since) have bad acting, cannibalism, alcoholism, and the Abominable Snowman scaled such heights. The greatest film ever made.
2. The Wizard of Gore (1970) Director Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast) does it again, becoming the first filmmaker in history to slaughter someone on camera with a live chain saw. A mad magician runs amok with ghastly results. If the crude and relentless gore effects don’t turn your stomach, the “acting” certainly will.
3. Straight Jacket (1963) High camp is the order of the day as convicted ax murderer Joan Crawford returns home after a lengthy stay in the loony bin, only to seemingly resume her old habits. Hilarity ensues in this William Castle–directed classic. Crawford really sells it. This is the stuff of which drag queens are made!
4. King Kong Lives (1986) Quite possibly one of the most misguided, unintentionally hilarious, idiotically optimistic sequels ever made, this follow-up to the Dino de Laurentiis–produced remake of King Kong boasts a plethora of delights for the bad movie enthusiast. Kong, after falling to his supposed death from the heights of the World Trade Center, is retrofitted with a giant artificial heart during a Monty Python–like opening sequence. It is a film that has to be seen to be believed. Several bong hits might help.
5. The Car (1977) Never has vehicular manslaughter been so much fun! The screenplay boasts “technical advice” from Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. SFBG
San Francisco filmmaker Dan West codirected Monsturd and the forthcoming RetarDEAD.
Assassin fascination
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Four presidents have been killed in office: the two you hear about (Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy) and the two you kind of don’t (James A. Garfield and William McKinley). But any time a political figure meets a violent death, post-traumatic stress can echo through generations — particularly because Hollywood is so fond of assassination cinema. Oliver Stone’s JFK is the most exhaustive example but certainly not the first; John Wilkes Booth pops up in 1915’s Birth of a Nation.
You don’t even have to be president to get your own assassination narrative (see: this fall’s Bobby) or be a successful target, for that matter. The Assassination of Richard Nixon spun would-be Tricky Dick killer Samuel Byck into a Travis Bickle–by–way–of–Sept. 11 man with a twisted take on the American dream. Fictitious films like Nashville and The Manchurian Candidate also pick up the assassination thread; Taxi Driver went one further by actually inspiring John Hinckley Jr. to take aim at Ronald Reagan.
Images of Reagan’s shooting outside the Washington, DC, Hilton clearly influenced Gabriel Range’s made-for-British-television mock doc Death of a President, by my count the first to imagine the death of a sitting president. The murder takes place Oct. 19, 2007, outside a Chicago hotel surrounded by angry antiwar protesters. Actors playing secret service agents, speechwriters, and sundry witnesses recall their experiences; the events themselves unfold via staged and real footage, some massaged with special effects to make the holy shit! moment as authentic as possible.
But the holy shit! is what you expect — and once Death of a President segues into the President Dick Cheney era, it assumes the far less salacious task of exposing post-9/11 America’s darker corners. A Muslim man is nabbed for the crime; his home country of Syria is taken to task as the FBI scrambles to make a motive out of terrorism. PATRIOT Act Three is passed. Civil liberties become even more restricted. But is the suspect really the killer? Is he a patsy? Or is he guilty only of wrong time, wrong place, wrong race?
In many ways, Death of a President resembles The Confederate States of America — a fake TV doc beamed from a reality where the South won the Civil War — rather than its assassination-obsessed cinematic predecessors. This, despite all the controversy surrounding the film’s sensational suggestion that someone might think the world a better place with Bush in the grave. Ultimately, Range is more interested in using Bush’s untimely death as a way to address issues that already exist in 2006, notably the lose-lose repercussions of a hopeless, never-ending Iraq war. Alas, there’s nothing shocking about that. SFBG
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT
Opens Fri/27
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
(415)267-4893
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
www.deathofapresident.com
Steel Will
Inspired by Tad Friend’s 2003 New Yorker article “Jumpers,” filmmaker Eric Steel spent 2004 shooting the Golden Gate Bridge — intentionally capturing the plunges launched from the world’s most popular suicide spot. The resulting doc, The Bridge, studies mental illness by filling in the life stories of the deceased through interviews with friends and family members. After playing to packed houses at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, The Bridge opens for a theatrical run in the city that’s perhaps most sensitive to its controversial subject matter. I spoke with Steel during the New Yorker’s early October visit to San Francisco.
SFBG: When you contacted the families, did they know that you had footage of their loved ones committing suicide?
ERIC STEEL: The families didn’t know, for the same reason that the Golden Gate Bridge authority didn’t know. My biggest fear was that word would get out about what we were doing and someone that wasn’t thinking clearly would see it as an opportunity to immortalize themselves on film. My original plan was — when we finished shooting at the bridge, and when I’d completed all the interviews — that I was then gonna tell the families that I had the footage and review it with them if they wanted to see it. But in January of 2005, I went to the bridge authority and said, “I have all this footage, and I have these interviews with the families. I want to interview you, the highway patrolmen, and the people who came into contact with these people before they died.” They went to the San Francisco Chronicle and suddenly it was all over the front page. I spoke to most of the families that I’d already interviewed and explained, “You have to believe that I’m a sensitive person. We’re all doing this in order to save lives and not to exploit people.” Almost all of them felt that way, but [some] didn’t. Also, there were families that I had not yet contacted. Some said, “We don’t want to have anything to do with you,” but others said, “We think you’re doing this for the right reasons.”
SFBG: There aren’t any officials interviewed in the film. Why did they refuse to participate?
ES: I think it would be very hard for them to respond to some of the issues that we raise. We could easily have used interviews in the film that we didn’t, that were much more damning, of what the highway patrolmen and the bridge people did and didn’t do. There’s one man, the crystal meth addict — we called the bridge as soon as we saw him climb over. It took them four and a half minutes to [reach him]. From where my crew was sitting, I could have run to that spot faster than they got there.
SFBG: How many calls like that did you make?
ES: We probably called 20 times during the year. We didn’t call so much that they thought we were crying wolf. But for us, it was simple: as soon as someone made a move to climb up onto the rail, we made a phone call.
SFBG: Was there ever a point when you thought, “I’m filming people jump. Should I be doing this?”
ES: Because we had already determined that if we could intervene, we would, and that would be the priority, it didn’t feel like we were waiting to film them dying. We were out there because we knew it was coming. With 24 [suicides in an average year], it was like every 15 days you would expect someone to die. If 10 days had gone by and there hadn’t been an incident on the bridge, I know the [camera crew] who was working the next day got increasingly anxious. But not a day went by when you didn’t think you were watching somebody who might be preparing to die.
SFBG: Did you ever consider acknowledging your role within the context of the film, maybe via narration?
ES: I really wanted to be invisible, in a way. For me, there was something strange about explaining too much. I thought it would let the audience off the hook a little bit too easily.
SFBG: Have you been drawn into the debate over the suicide barrier?
ES: I believe that it’s ridiculous that they don’t have a barrier. At the same time, I recognize that the barrier’s really the final moment where you can make a difference. The lives stretch back in time, and there are all sorts of moments where people could have intervened. If we had a better health care system, better mental health services, we wouldn’t be in the same position. The burden is on the bridge to put up a barrier, but it’s also on all of us to take more responsibility for the people who need our help. (Cheryl Eddy)
THE BRIDGE
Opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.thebridge-themovie.com
Solomon’s, mine
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Boo! And hiss, while you’re at it. Isn’t it scary how the music retail biz has changed? As a onetime music store flunky, I was hard-pressed to decide whether it was a trick or treat when I heard a few weeks back about the liquidation of Tower Records — this after filing for bankruptcy twice in the last two years. After all, I wasted a good, penniless year and a half of the late ’80s behind a register in the “tape” room and then behind a clipboard at one of the Sacto chain’s flagship stores at Columbus and Bay in San Francisco.
Those were the days — the horror, the horror of trying to subsist on megamuffins and minimum wage. The fun of stacking and alphabetizing cassettes under the benevolent leadership of the azure-Mohawked experimental musician Pamela Z. The joy of talking psychedelia and envisioning earth-shattering cultural epiphanies (one fave: imagining Sonic Youth teamed with Public Enemy years before “Kool Thing”) with Winter Flowers’ Christof Certik. The insanity of controlling the red-eyed, camped-out crowd from behind the Bass ticket booth when the final Who tour went on sale — and getting a Tower sweatshirt when my $50,000-in-two-sellout-hours register totaled to the penny.
The shock of realizing, as a budding world music buyer, that my assistant was thieving bags of Van Morrison and Chieftains CDs from my section. The starstruck bedazzlement of glimpsing the musicians and celebs pour through the glass doors on a regular basis (following a testy Todd Rundgren around with a drooling coworker, catching a lady-killing grin from Chris Isaak, and listening to Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys praise the version of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem pouring out of the speakers). The weirdness of instructing shut-in customers on what to do when the cassette ends (you press “rewind” or you find Scotch tape and record over it in disgust). The surprise of ordering vinyl and CD versions of the same release and finding certain humongous labels unwilling or unable to ship records, making available only the higher-priced so-called alternative. The pleasures of the lurching, lumbering 1 a.m. Muni ride home after completing the midnight closing shift, back to my digs in the Lower Haight. The switch-flipping surrealness of realizing I was the only one actually bothering to work during most of my shifts — while everyone else was down the street on three-hour lunches or fielding drinks with label reps.
Sure, the party was great while it lasted, and in pop cultural backwaters like Honolulu, Tower became the only, life-changing game in town — jetting in imports, hard-to-find discs, zines, and books at below list prices — and likewise you could get your hand-stapled xeroxed zine into Towers from Tokyo to Paris. And while the sprawling stores flourished, they drove out of business the local mom-and-pop music stores that didn’t recalibrate and start to sell used music and books, collector’s cards, comics, and games.
So now it’s being boiled down to end racks and wire fixtures — after a 30-hour bankruptcy auction ended in favor of the Great American Group’s $134.3 million bid rather than that of Trans World Entertainment, which said it would have kept most of the stores open. And frankly, I feel only somewhat sentimental — despite the initial quality of in-house magazine Pulse and the quasi-democratic, carry-everything supermarket atmosphere — because Russ Solomon’s retail model was far from carefree. The reason the prices were so low was that the workers there were barely scraping together a living (therefore often resorting to unrepentant graft — one staffer funded his trip to Italy on returned, unmarked promo music). At the time it felt like the glamorous equivalent of a record store sweatshop, with its overeducated, obsessive employees bitterly muttering to themselves about the amount of money that would pass through their hands — and straight into Solomon’s coffers.
Why stay? Pre–Amoeba Music, Tower was the biggest and best music store in San Francisco. And did such rampant thieving make a dent in profits, leading to the chain’s demise? Maybe it only started to show when downloads began their rule and the market shattered into a grillion niches, when even a megalith like Tower didn’t seem able to keep up.
As Tower crumbles, I may not be able to find the music I passionately want or need at 11:55 p.m., but I might shed a tear for my last shred of connection with the store — those times I’d trot up Market, between sets at Cafe du Nord, when most shops are darkened and early birds are tucked in bed, and duck into the Castro Tower to browse the magazine racks, those fluorescent lights beating down and the words dancing beneath my ringed eyes.
NO PAIN, NO DOCTORS If you think this election season is painful, tell it to the Bay Area–by–way–of–Chicago art-rock transplants No Doctors. Their whistle-stop tour of sorts stops this week at Club Six in San Francisco and ends at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland — and takes the formidable loudness of the foursome to some scenic points such as Joshua Tree and Lompoc. A working vacation with a message?
The tour has been dubbed “US out of CA,” guitarist Elvis DeMorrow told me. “I think everyone can get behind secession at this point.” After spending most of the past year working on their new LP, Origins and Tectonics, due spring 2007 on Yik Yak, the band “somehow arrived on an all-California thing, playing all the places no one even tries to play,” he continued.
Luckily for the No Doctors, DeMorrow is keeping his administrative job at the Stanford medical school’s pain research division. “To me, it’s totally relevant to playing music with a band and the effects it might have in your life,” he declares. Playing music as pain control? Don’t tell that to the bright bulbs at the CIA who came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers as an instrument of torture. SFBG
NO DOCTORS
Tues/31, 8 p.m.
Club Six
60 Sixth St., SF
$5–$7
(415) 863-1221
Still dizzy
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
About what you said about infatuation — isn’t it possible to be head over heels in love with someone and also have caring and mutual support? What would preclude it? I am not talking about commitment — there are lots of “committed” couples out there who don’t care at all and take each other for granted, as well as couples in the starry-eyed stage (I hope) who care for each other deeply. Caring should happen soon, otherwise it’s a crappy relationship, in my humble opinion.
Love,
Starry but Supportive
Dear Support:
There’s such a thing as spaghetti sauce, right? It’s made of tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil, and probably some oregano or something, but regardless — the existence of spaghetti sauce does not negate the existence of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and so on. Each still has its individual reality; all can be combined in any permutation and will still probably be OK on pasta, even if these mixes can’t reasonably be referred to as “spaghetti sauce” specifically.
Right? Oh, what am I talking about? Love, intimacy, sex, romance, caring, trust, and commitment are components — any given relationship may contain any or all of them. Your relationship with your best friend? It has love, intimacy, caring, trust, and commitment. Your relationship with your husband? You probably hope to have all of them, with some in ascendance at certain times while others slack off, eventually to return. Not that a satisfying relationship must feature all seven above plus the ones I forgot. A pickup in the park doesn’t promise any more than sex alone, but if that’s what the participants were looking for, it’s hunky-dory. Even the classic “men are from Mars”–type hetero marriage is often big on trust and commitment (and some have plenty of sex and romance, even many years in) without being nearly as intimate as many people’s close friendships or even work partnerships. We tend in this culture to hold up an idea of perfect partnership. At San Francisco Sex Information we use a Venn diagram with love, sex, and intimacy as intersecting circles, with the middle representing the holy grail. But satisfactory relationships can be forged using whichever components suit the participants’ needs. There is no duty to conform to the current local ideal if you don’t feel like it. Nor is it a sin to settle, if you ask me. One does what works.
I make a distinction between loving a whole lot and limerence (which differs from infatuation both in duration and intensity). Limerence — or longing for reciprocity — is not so much a feeling as it is a form of madness, and like other forms of madness is turning out to have a biochemical basis. “When I think of you my serotonin plummets, my darling! O, how my dopamine soars!” Not that faithful, mutually concerned, monogamous pair-bonding is entirely without its biochemical aspects — look up “prairie vole” on the Web sometime. Drugs and varmints aside, though, of course you can love and care for and be supportive of the same person you’re deeply in love with but perhaps not madly in love with. You do have to know the person to have that sort of relationship, while to crush out wildly on someone, you needn’t even have met. Since true limerence is a form of madness, it doesn’t tend to concern itself with planning for the future either, beyond the obvious (and unprovable) “I will always love you.”
Now, while we’re on the subject of love and limerence, a reader tipped me off that I was mistaken: Dorothy Tennov did not pull the word “limerence” out of her scholarly butt back in the ’70s and the word does share a root with other English words, which I’d list here if I hadn’t promptly lost her e-mail. I was horrified, since who wants to be wrong? Happily, not only does the Wikipedia entry on limerence back me up on Tennov’s pure invention of the term (“The word was pronounceable and seemed to her and two of her students to have a “fitting” sound…. The coinages are arbitrary; there is no specific etymology”), but here’s Tennov herself, back in 1977: “I first used the term ‘amorance,’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’…. It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me, it has no etymology whatsoever.”
So there we have it. As long as it works well in French! Unless Dorothy Tennov writes in telling me that she didn’t, after all, pull “limerence” out of her scholarly ass, I’m standing by my story.
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.
Online Exclusive: Method Man at the crossroads
a&eletters@sfbg.com
When a bumped phone interview with hip-hop legend and putf8um artist Method Man mushroomed into a proposed
backstage post-show encounter, I naturally jumped at the chance.
Being a devotee of the ultimately more funk-based grooves of Bay Area hip-hop, I tend not to pay
attention to the doings of NYC, and I can’t claim to have ever followed the Wu-Tang Clan in general or Meth
in particular, though I have always admired both from afar. Yet one needn’t follow the Big Apple’s scene in
great detail to appreciate its impact, and with Meth’s successful film and TV career, most recently as a recurring character in this season of HBO’s cop drama The Wire, one needn’t even listen to hip-hop anymore
to appreciate his.
This situation is exactly what’s troubling Method Man. His very success in the cultural mainstream, he
feels, has been held against him by the hip hop-industry, a curious situation considering
mainstream success is the perceived goal and direct subject matter of most raps these days. Unlike the
recent fashion among rappers like Andre3000 to pooh-pooh their interest in music in favor of their
“acting career,” Meth wants to be known primarily as an MC. But Hollywood success has proved to be a
slippery slope, paved by Ice-T and Ice Cube — each in his turn the most terrifying, authentic street rapper
imaginable — to the end of your hit-making potential in hip-hop.
Couple this perception with Meth’s vocal challenges of the effect of corporate media consolidation, and it’s
not difficult to imagine why Def Jam released his fourth solo album, 4:21: The Day After, without a peep
at the end of August, as if the label had written him off despite his track record of one gold and two
putf8um plaques.
Still, no one who’s heard the angry, defiantly shitkicking 4:21 (executive produced by the RZA, Erick
Sermon, and Meth himself) or saw the show Meth put on that evening (leaping from the stage to the bar and
running across it by way of introduction, later executing a backwards handspring from the stage into the crowd by way of ending) could possibly doubt his vitality as an MC. He put on a long, exhausting show,
heavy with new material, that utterly rocked the packed house.
Shortly after the show ended, I was brought backstage by Meth’s road manager, 7, to a tiny corridor of a
dressing room crammed with various hangers on. A man in a warm-up suit with a towel over his head was
sitting alone on a short flight of steps in the center of the room.
“That’s him,” 7 said, before disappearing to take care of other business.
It was like being sent to introduce yourself to a boxer who’d just finished a successful but punishing
brawl. The face that looked up at my inquiry was that of a man who’d retreated somewhere far away into
himself, requiring a momentary effort to swim to the surface. Quite suddenly I found myself face to face
with Method Man, whose presence immediately turned all heads in the room our way as he invited me to sit down
for a brief discussion of his new album and his dissatisfaction with his treatment by the music
industry.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: I read the statement on your Web site [www.method-man.com] in which you
discuss your problems with the industry. Could you describe the problems you’ve been having?
METHOD MAN: My big problem with the industry is the way they treat hip-hop artists as opposed to artists
in other genres. Hip-hop music, they treat it like it’s fast food. You get about two weeks of promotion
before your album. Then you get the week of your album, then you get the week after, then they just
leave you to the dogs.
Whereas back in the day, you had artists in development, a month ahead of time before you even
started your campaign, to make sure that you got off on the right foot.
Nowadays it’s like there’s nobody in your corner anymore. Everybody’s trying to go into their own
little club, for lack of a better word. Everybody has their own little cliques now. Ain’t no money being
generated so the labels are taking on a lot of artists because of this at once that they don’t even have
enough staff members to take care of every artist, as an individual. Their attention is elsewhere, or only
with certain people.
SFBG: Your new single [“Say,” featuring Lauryn Hill] suggests you’ve had problems with the way critics have
received your recent work and even with the radio playing your records. How can someone of your status
be having trouble getting spins?
MM: You know what it is, man? A lot of people have come around acting like I’m the worst thing that ever
happened to hip-hop, as good as I am.
Hating is hating. I’ve been hated on, but just by the industry, not in the streets. They never liked my crew
[the Wu-Tang Clan] anyway. They think we ain’t together anymore and they try to pick at each and
every individual. Some motherfuckers they pick up. Other people they just shit on. I guess I’m just the
shittee right now, you know what I mean?
SFBG: Do you think it has to do with the age bias in hip-hop? The idea an MC is supposed to be 18 or 20?
MM: You know what I think it is? As our contracts go on, we have stipulations where, if we sell a certain
amount of albums, [the labels] have to raise our stock. A lot of times dudes just want to get out their
contracts so they can go independent and make more money by themselves. There’s a lot of factors that
play into it.
SFBG: Are you not getting enough label support?
MM: A label only does so much anyway. It’s your team inside your team that makes sure that you got a video.
Or that you got that single out there, or that your tour dates are put together correctly. The labels,
they basically just do product placement. They make sure that all your stuff is in the proper place where
it’s supposed to be at. They’re gonna make sure your posters are up. They’re going to make sure that
they’re giving out samples of other artists that are coming out also. [But i]t’s really up to us [the
artists] to make sure our music is going where it’s supposed to.
Right now there’s so many artists people can pick and choose from, don’t nobody like shit no more.
SFBG: Do you think you’re getting squeezed out of radio play as a result of corporate media
conslidation?
MM: Absolutely; this shit ain’t nothing new. It isn’t just happening to me. It’s been going on since dudes
have been doing this hip-hop music. They bleed you dry and then they push you the fuck out.
That’s why I always stress to the fans to take your power back. I always hear people talking about things
like, “Damn, what happened to these dudes? What happened to these guys? I always liked their shit.”
But the fans, not just the industry, tend to turn their backs on dudes. They get fed so much bullshit,
they be like, “Fuck it; I’m not dealing with that shit. I’m going to listen to this.”
SFBG: So what about your acting career? Do you feel like you’ve been overexposed as an actor or that
you’ve been spread too thin and are readjusting your focus?
MM: Fuck Hollywood, B.
SFBG: But I heard you say on the radio today you wanted to play a crackhead and get an Oscar….
MM: I do want to play a crackhead in a movie. I’m going to be a crackhead who dies of an overdose at the
end of the movie, and people cry, and I’m going to get me an Oscar. But fuck Hollywood; tell ‘em to come see
me. Tell ‘em to come to my door.
SFBG: Obviously, from what you said during the show and the lyrics on 4:21: The Day After you haven’t
renounced smoking marijuana, so could you discuss the concept behind “4:21”? Is it about the difficulties
of living the hard-partying lifestyle of the rap artist?
MM: It was just symbolic of a moment of clarity for me. I made a symbol for myself of a moment of
clarity. You know I’ve always been an avid 4:20 person. I like to get out there and smoke with the
best of them. But I picked “4:21” as like, the day after. I got tired of people running up on me and
being like, “You was funny in that movie,” because I was an MC first and foremost. It used to be like, “Yo,
that fuckin’ verse you did on that song, that was hot.” Now it’s like, “My kids love you; they love that
movie, How High.”
It gets to the point when even when I’m having a serious moment, or a serious conversation, people
laugh at the shit like it’s funny. But they laugh cause they thinking of the movie; they thinking of
some sitcom shit.
SFBG: Besides yourself and RZA, Erick Sermon executive produced the album. Can you talka bout your
connection with him?
MM: I’ve been fuckin’ with E ever since I’ve been fuckin’ with Redman. E knows what I like, you know
what I’m saying? The same way he knows what Redman likes. And RZA, that’s a given right there. I’ve been
down with RZA’s shit A1 since day one.
SFBG: 4:21 also features a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When did you guys record this track?
MM: “Dirty Meth” — that’s a posthumous joint with O.D.B. It was after he was gone already. I tell everyone
that so they know.
SFBG: But he seems to permeate the new album.
MM: He does. Good word, too. He permeates it.
Economy class
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO “Please pass the grilled Moroccan spice-rubbed lamb loin,” I dewily asked the cute investment banker from Philadelphia on my left.
Me and Hunky Beau were seated under the Saturday stars at Escondida, a “hidden kitchen” — a.k.a. renegade restaurant in someone’s home or backyard — deep in the Outer Mission, at a table that also included four hip lady lawyers and a postgrad neurobiologist from UCSF who makes headphones for birds. (Don’t ask. Well, OK — first you implant screws in the skulls of small finches, and then you jury-rig a sort of “fly-pod” out of two Q-tips and an old transistor in order to test their hearing skills. Someday, I swear, those poor, deaf birds will have revenge on us all.)
Hidden kitchens are big these days, especially since the permit processes for restaurants and clubs seem to be getting more complex by the minute, and most of the time the underground menus are cheaper than the real thing: you get multicourse gourmet eats plus drinks in a lively underground setting for the price of appetizers at Andalu. And there’s a naughty inspectors-be-damned thrill to boot. (It’s all very hush-hush, but you can usually find hints about upcoming covert cucina events on chowhound.com or Craigslist — just don’t sue me if you get botulism. I got nothin’ for ya.)
The food and company were delish. But me? I was more interested in shoving as much entrée as I could into my faux-leopard baguette handbag — the Hunkster and I were due on a plane to Honolulu in a few hours to attend the biggest gay wedding of the year in Waikiki. And a girl can’t survive a five-hour ride on $4 minicans of Pringles alone. It was bad enough I had to pack my in-flight Stoli in three-ounce saline solution bottles just to get past the damn check-in.
Waikiki? Why not, I say. But first, a real drink to get the whole aloha ball rolling. So we hit up Jet, the new Greg Bronstein joint in the Castro where the Detour used to be, and ordered us up some primo alco-Dramamine. Although I partially miss the hurricane-fence decor and tragic queen atmosphere of the Detour, Jet’s awfully cute, with black padded leather walls, Broadway marquee lighting, and a fuzzy pink double bed in an alcove in the back. There’s also a small dance floor, rare these days in the Castro without a giant video screen playing Kylie Minogue. The club, in all its luxuriant gay sleaziness, is either a pint-size Studio 54 or Liza Minnelli’s future mausoleum. Probably both. Right now, the music is all hip-hop lite — pretensions to be the next Pendulum? — and there’s a velvet rope on weekends — as if! — but something could definitely be done with the place.
Lemme tell you though, Honolulu in October is fabu. The mangoes are huge, the agua is aqua, the gay scene is horrid — new club coming in November: Circuit Hawaii! — and the 14-year-old tranny hookers in six-inch clear plastic heels are gorgeous. Plus there’s, like, five military bases nearby, for those into raping drunk Marines. And who isn’t? Me and Hunky were hopping around like we had humuhumunukunukuapuaas in our Volcoms.
My dearest amigos from the old EndUp days, ChrisP and Armando, got betrothed right on the water in a tear-jerking all-hula celebration bursting with orchids and sunlight. There weren’t any conch shell blasts or caged white doves (or earthquakes), but the grooms were rowed into the friends-and-family ceremony on an outrigger by four hot muscle dykes in sports bras — an ancient tradition, I’m told. It was the second amazing gay wedding I’d been to this year, and although I used to rail against such things politically — why be normal? — I cried like Tonya Harding at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Love is real. And so was the open bar, which me and my sadly, gloriously bare ring finger quickly sidled up to for a post–gay marriage mai tai, studiously avoiding the moony-eyed intimations Hunky Beau was sending my way. I’m not quite done playing hard to get yet. Or am I? Aloha! SFBG
JET
2348 Market, SF
8 p.m.–2 a.m.
www.jetsf.com
What Is Crispin?
CULT ICON Over a decade ago a pair of first-time filmmakers approached Crispin Glover to ask if he would act in their movie.
Glover signed on — but to direct, with the condition that most of the roles be filled by actors with Down syndrome. Best known for eccentric fringe roles in films such as River’s Edge, Bartleby, Back to the Future, and Rubin and Ed, Glover had written other screenplays involving people with the condition and had kept it in his mind’s eye for some time. “Looking into the face of someone who has Down syndrome,” he says during a recent SF interview, “I see the history of someone who has lived outside of the culture.”
Glover maintains that the resulting film, What Is It?, is not about Down syndrome. But he raises a valid point about the benefits of casting underutilized actors. “There is not necessarily a learned social masking [in their performances],” he says.
Though Glover’s casting decisions were backed by then–executive producer David Lynch, they soured Hollywood’s corporate entities and led to a plan to shoot a short film proving the viability of a disabled cast. That short flowered into the realization that a feature-length movie could be made without kowtowing to studio execs and for less than $200,000. After almost 10 years Glover emerged with What Is It?, a 72-minute film he describes as “being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home. As tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche.” However tenuous a tagline that may seem, it hits the mark dead-on.
Glover has taken strenuous liberties with narrative structure, resulting in split sanctums. The outer realm — an atmospheric ringer for a Diane Arbus print — concerns itself with the travels of the Young Man (Michael Blevin), who is slighted by his friends and finds solace in snails (one of them voiced by Fairuza Balk) before several violent if childlike murders take place in a graveyard. The second, inner sanctum is the young man’s psyche, a kingdom presided over by one Demi-God Auteur (Glover), populated by concubines, and disrupted by a minstrel in blackface (Apocalypse Culture author Adam Parfrey) who aims to become an invertebrate by injecting himself with snail juice.
Overflowing with incendiary imagery, What Is It? juxtaposes Shirley Temple with swastikas, features buxom monkey-ladies crushing watermelons, and documents a praying mantis claiming the lives of a snail and a child. “Some of those things start out as emotional, and then you intellectualize them,” Glover says.
After What Is It?’s Sundance premiere, many critics liberally employed words like exploitative, weird, and inflammatory. The latter two I’ll concede. But whatever What Is It? is, a deeper plot than what’s suggested by those words is afoot. “There are things in this film that would not necessarily be taboo in 1910,” Glover says. “In certain silent films, racism, sexuality, violence are handled in a more frank way than they are right now. Why should these things not be put in front of the public? They exist. They’ve got to be able to be talked about and processed in the culture.”
Glover is traveling with What Is It?, preceding each screening with a slide-show presentation from eight of his books. Most were created in the ’80s using cut-up techniques akin to those of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The large-screen format and dramatic readings by Glover breathe new life into the books, which were published in small, beautiful editions by his own press, Volcanic Eruptions. After the movie there is a Q&A in which the filmmaker takes the time to speak with every viewer, be they friend, member of the press, or regular part of the audience.
It seems that we are approaching the disclaimer part of the text — the part wherein the responsible reviewer urges the reader to shed all preconceptions and bring an open mind to the Castro Theatre this weekend. The caveat is that each viewer’s point of view is vital to the film’s life. Glover chops art down to its most basic method of consumption: from the mind of the creator to the eye of the viewer and out into whatever cultural context is born from that interaction. In this regard, he is a purist. Note that the title of the film isn’t Why Did He Do That? or What Does He Mean By This? but What Is It? That interpretation is yours alone. (K. Tighe)
WHAT IS IT? AND THE VERY FIRST CRISPIN GLOVER FILM FESTIVAL IN THE WHOLE WORLD
Fri/20–Sun/23, call or see Web site for times
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$5–$18
(415) 621-6120
www.castrotheatre.com
www.crispinglover.com
Head of Hopper
CULT MOVIE Movie history is full of figures who could do no wrong one minute, then blew it — never trusted to do right again — the next. This year alone something like this happened to the richly deserving M. Night Shyamalan, and it might soon be happening to Darren Aronofsky, whose sci-fi soap opera The Fountain is arguably the most daft hijacking of major-studio cash in 35 years — since Dennis Hopper morphed from princeling to pariah via something called (with masochistic foreboding) The Last Movie.
An eccentric journeyman actor onscreen since 1955, Hopper was way past 30 when he codirected Easy Rider with Peter Fonda. Any studio would have supplied him any sum to get the follow-up. Universal gave him half a mil for The Last Movie, and he stayed on schedule and on budget throughout shooting in a far-flung Peruvian Andes village.
Then the aging boy wonder returned home to edit — for 18 druggy, hazy months, as executives freaked and anticipation rose to a tottering peak. A documentary chronicling that period, The American Dreamer, shows Hopper in extremis — doffing clothes (“symbolically,” he says) to run around suburban Los Alamos; cohabiting with a harem of hippie goddess freeloaders; comparing himself to Orson Welles, then exhaling, “I’d like to go about a month with three chicks in a hot tub.”
Upon release, The Last Movie — which screens in a new, Hopper-funded 35mm print this weekend — looked like the nail in the coffin of acid casualty cinema. The film was a mess, a freak show, an indulgence par excellence — with an incoherent quasinarrative that had Hopper as a stuntman on a western who stays on during postproduction to reenact the mythic pulp action with villagers who can’t or won’t separate the phony spectacle they’ve hosted from more spiritual yet violent reality.
“I only hope that after this game is over, morality can begin again,” prays (in vain) the local priest, played by spaghetti western icon Tomas Milian. But morality has left the building. The Last Movie isn’t the balm for stoner egos that Easy Rider offered. It incriminates everybody — colonialists, swingers, industry suits, the greedy (like our hero’s covetous Indio girlfriend), and filmmaking itself. Periodic “scene missing” titles help make this a deconstructive metamovie well ahead of its time. It’s an antiaudience picture, now more breathtaking than ever in sheer gall.
Who could make such a movie now? Might stars align again to permit such major-studio strangeness? Hard to imagine: The Fountain is nutty and navel-gazing but sentimental in a way Hopper’s auto-excoriating wack-off abhors. All those lysergically and vaginally oversatiated months spent editing The Last Movie make it a stand as memorably bold — if ruinous — as Custer’s.
Hopper is 71 now, but The Last Movie will always be a boy-man’s definitive up-yours against pricks in suit and tie. It’s a lyrical abstract as yet unchallenged for discombobulation by any film made under a major studio’s umbrella. It remains a startling finger driven straight up the Universal. (Dennis Harvey)
THE LAST MOVIE
Fri/20–Sat/21, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, screening room, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org
Surfing new turf
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Listening to the warm analogs, e-bowed guitar, and post-jazz swing that manifest on “Medium Blue” off Surf Boundaries (Ghostly International) — one of two new albums by Christopher Willits — you might assume that the instrumentation was performed by an ensemble of helping hands rather than simply the Bay Area electronic musician. And you’d be half right. The 28-year-old Kansas City, Mo., native executes many of the album’s compelling melodies and fizzling, ambient textures on guitar, laptop, and synths — aided at times by compañeros including Adam Theis, Brad Laner, and notably, R&B-pop vocalist Latrice Barnett on the calming orchestrations of stringed instruments and horns.
“My name’s on the record, but tons of collective energy came into making it happen,” explains Willits at a Mission District bar. “I outsourced some things to the brilliant friends around me.”
Their impact is evident: the CD shifts dynamically from the usual guitar-run-through-a-laptop drone and fuzz of Willits’s live sets. He says that he hopes to someday put together a band to perform a release like Surf Boundaries on tour. That plan isn’t a surprise, considering Willits’s determination to always have a full plate.
The Mills College graduate’s musical career has quickly taken flight since his move to the Bay in 2000. It’s amazing that Willits even has time for solo endeavors between playing with Flössin — his side project with Hella’s Zach Hill featuring guest noisemaking from Kid606, the Advantage’s Carson McWhirter, and Matmos — and ongoing collaborations with avant-garde musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, and former Tool bassist Paul d’Amour. When not on tour, Willits spends his time at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, where he began teaching digital audio workshops five years ago. With John Phillips, he also founded Overlap.org, an online community that aims to give exposure to electronic and experimental artists through blog feeds, podcasts, and live music events.
Much of Willits’s work as a solo artist and a collaborator is documented on labels such as Taylor Deupree’s 12K and Sub Rosa, but his recent alliance with the Midwestern electronic imprint Ghostly International may prove the most promising. “I really like Ghostly, because they’re more into artist development rather than boxing in artists’ sounds and constraining them from branching off,” Willits says.
Likewise, his latest offerings are all over the sonic map. The art alone for Surf Boundaries illustrates its ethereal mood: soft hues delicately wash images of animals scattered around a portrait of Willits. The music within strikes a wonderful symphonic balance between electronic composition and live instrumentation as Willits and his collaborators frolic with a blend of jubilant French pop, glitchy guitar, and shimmering psychedelia.
Along with Surf Boundaries’ cozy, sleepy appeal comes Willits’s shrill wake-up call with guitarist Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company) — the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. The space pop–oriented unit gives the Creation Records class of ’91 competition with white-noise guitar treatments and alt-rock rhythms.
The duo met through mutual friend Kid606, and for Willits the collaboration was a dream come true.
“Laner is one of my guitar heroes,” he says, adding that when he first listened to his old Medicine cassette in high school, he mistook Laner’s nails-on-chalkboard approach to guitar playing for a stereo malfunction.
“I realized that the way he’s making that sound is that he’s running all his guitar effects into a shitty four-track and then cranking the preamps up on it, so it’s getting this full …” — Willits makes a fast, circular motion with his arms — “whish!”
Released in August as Ghostly’s first full-length available exclusively via download, NVSO’s The Right Kind of Nothing highlights Laner’s signature guitar bluster and Willits’s ability to dabble subtly in an aggregation of soundscapes. What results is a continuous squall of beaming shoegaze discord that feels like sunshine bursting into a dark room — only to be broken by heavy kraut rock tempos and Swervedriver guitars.
Though Surf Boundaries and The Right Kind of Nothing radically differ in sound and structure, both discs showcase Willits’s ambition to crack the electronic mold and move toward a contemporary vein of experimental rock.
“All I’m trying to do is feel out my own energy and relationship to my creative process,” Willits explains. “I could have never envisioned the albums sounding the way they do. I love being surprised by my own creativity.” SFBG
CHRISTOPHER WILLITS
With Daedelus, Caural, and Thavius Beck
Fri/20, 9 p.m.
Bar of Contemporary Art
414 Jessie, SF
$10
(415) 777-4278
www.sfboca.com
www.overlap.org
Hailing a Japanoise guitar maestro
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FULL CIRCLE For more than three decades Masayuki Takayanagi (1932–1991) has served as a cult figure to a small but rabid coterie of listeners searching for the roots of extremity in improvised music and free jazz. The Japanese guitarist has received kudos from renowned experimentalists like John Zorn and Otomo Yoshihide yet has remained obscure because his recorded output has been generally unavailable. During the last decade a slew of his reissued recordings have been available only as hard-to-find, pricey imports, while the original vinyl pressings have changed hands for ridiculous amounts of money.
So what’s the big deal? Beginning in the late ’60s, Takayanagi blazed kamikaze musical assaults of a previously unheard violence and abstraction in the jazz idiom. Long before the pure Japanoise of artists like Merzbow, Masayuki Takayanagi threw down a gauntlet. “I always feel that beauty of form and tone are lies. Playing music that’s muddy and violently splattered is an essential way of getting at the truth,” he once wrote. This approach manifested itself in a concept he called “mass projection” — a gushing, sweaty arc of maximum density and energy that was savagely defiant of melody, interplay, and structure.
Unfortunately, a good portion of Takayanagi’s early free-music output is marred by lousy recording quality: early ’70s performances on the DIW and PSF labels suffice as archival documents but barely hint at the true strength and articulation of the music. The newly issued CD versions of the mythically scarce 1975 diptych Axis: Another Revolvable Thing Volume 1 and 2 (Doubt Music, Japan) should rectify this situation, presenting almost 100 focused minutes of Takayanagi and his classic New Directions Unit in full fury.
Recorded live in Tokyo on Sept. 5, 1975, the quartet revealed their manifesto in six movements, roughly building from agitated, spacious quietude to climactic, sustained catharsis. Although the volumes mix up the sequence, the release’s freshly translated liner notes suggest that the music can also be pondered in the order it was executed. The first part — a display of Takayanagi’s more minimal “gradual projection” style — evokes the low-volume scuttling of English guitar pioneer Derek Bailey’s early Company groups. Spotlighting acoustic guitar, flute, slide whistle, rubbery acoustic bass, and skittering percussion, the music is pervaded with a deceptively delicate sense of restraint. A second gradual projection concerns isolated, dynamic sounds that burst through silence in their own mysterious tempos. After a few minutes, Kenji Mori’s lumpy bass clarinet croaks while Takayanagi surprisingly sneaks in a few brief melodic shards that allude to his straight-ahead roots. Part three — a dull drum solo — fills space before the final half of the concert: three mass projections. The first builds very slowly, with sustained cymbal wash and sinister tremolo bass bowing before revealing the perverted grunts from Takayanagi’s now-electrified strings. The second pushes the intensity up but still feels like a tease, threatening to explode before receding into sustained tones penetrated by pricking soprano saxophone curlicues and tumbling percussion.
In the final segment the floodgates open, and we are assaulted by a lengthy tirade that appears to start at maximum intensity but manages to blow straight through the roof, ascending into unknown levels of forceful cruelty. Hiroshi Yamazaki’s superhumanly dense drum attack violently propels the onslaught. Bassist Nobuyoshi Ino ditches his main ax, creating an acidic wall of fierce noise on cello while Takayanagi goads his guitar into shrieks of feedback and crusty slabs of distorted density, bashing it with a metal slide. Intermittently cutting through the din on his alto saxophone, the unflappable Mori is eerily eloquent. Throughout this hypnotic overload of information, one might concentrate on the detail of parts, the texture of the whole, or nothing at all. After 16 minutes the saxophone lapses into outright screaming. Takayanagi’s guitar coasts arrogantly over the damage in thick sheets of atonality before rising into dog-whistle range, calling an end to a harrowing 22 minutes of sustained devastation. If only the first and last sequences of this concert were paired alone on one release, Axis might have been Takayanagi’s single finest recording. With these discs, at least, the secret is out, and the tortured innovations of an obscure musical pioneer are finally revealed to a wider audience seeking buckets of blood in their music. SFBG
Straight outta Mill Valley
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Some time has passed since people routinely looked in 924 Gilman Street’s direction to familiarize themselves with what’s new and interesting in Bay Area rock. However, this doesn’t mean that nothing worthwhile passes through its doors. Topping the bill of the annual Punk Prom earlier this year were the Abi Yoyos, whose cavalier, recklessly hooky normal-dude brand of punk is totally outlook brightening.
Over beer and burritos at a San Francisco taquería, guitarist-vocalist-songwriter Matt Bleyle and lead vocalist Shawn Mehrens, both 21, recently strolled down a nearly five-year-long footpath of memories, including problematic tour vans and onstage pleas for Albuterol inhalers. Unlike a lot of local groups, the Abi Yoyos openly rep the North Bay: namely, Mill Valley. Its members’ paths crossed when Bleyle, Mehrens, and bassist Jeff Mitchell attended Tamalpais High.
“The band was sort of an offshoot of the conversations that Matt and I would have while taking all-night walks in Mill Valley,” Mehrens said. “Nothing is open past 10 p.m., and nobody really presents any options as to how to change things aside from maybe starting a band.” Originally, they played straight hardcore; since then, they’ve adopted a more complex, melodic approach. They cite Charles Darwin — or as Mehrens calls him, “Chuck D” — and Phil Ochs as inspiration for their evolution, along with bands like los Rabbis and the Fleshies.
“Originally we were called Gutter Snatch, as we tried to just come up with the most offensive name possible,” Bleyle said. The moniker Abi Yoyos came to pass courtesy of a Pete Seeger song and an African tale that prophesied “if we turn our back on music and religion, Abi Yoyo [a bogeyman who symbolizes Western civilization] will come and get us.”
The musicianship of the band — which includes drummer Blaine Patrick and saxophonist Kyle Chu — is remarkably solid. “Blaine has won ‘Outstanding Soloist’ awards at Stanford Jazz Camp,” Bleyle explained. “Jeff was in a band called Turbulence that sounded like a cross between Weezer and Hendrix.” Chu joined the band after the Abi Yoyos’ first 7-inch, “The World Is Not My Home” (Riisk), and the lineup solidified to what it appears as on their new debut, Mill Valley (Big Raccoon).
To put out that record, Mehrens worked 80-hour weeks between three jobs, including one at ellusionist.com, a magicians’ supply Web site. “We’re really hard to pigeonhole,” said Mehrens, who now runs Big Raccoon. His friend Corbett Redford, who ran S.P.A.M. Records, along with other industry-seasoned pals, gave the Abi Yoyos the guidance needed to release Mill Valley, an altogether inspired, infectious set of songs.
“I think we can all agree on our hometown heroes,” Bleyle said with a smirk. Sammy Hagar was one of the first names to be mentioned, along with “the guy who invented the toilet-seat guitar,” Huey Lewis, Clover, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Cruisin’ and boozin’, my ass!” exclaimed Mehrens to much laughter. “I hate Sammy Hagar.”
Instead the band takes after punkier forefathers. John from the Fleshies introduced the Abi Yoyos to the Punk Prom audience as what Flipper would sound like “if Flipper were good.” After a few minutes of searching for the drummer, that description gained credibility as the band, donning dresses and sparkly makeup, ripped into their cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.”
They routinely jam “Helter Skelter” in their practice space — a large metal storage box with electrical outlets by San Quentin State Prison — skirting lunacy in their proximity to inmates and in their unusual reverence for both the sticky melodies of ’60s pop and the fast, snotty punk that emerged from LA in the ’80s. In a scene where, in Mehrens’s words, “image means a lot,” the Abi Yoyos tend to defy punker conventions, adopting an unusually eclectic aesthetic. “Quagmire” moves from medium-paced hardcore to a full-blown anthem about halfway through — a nod to Bleyle’s recent “openness to prog” and odd song structures — and they pop hooks in a forcefully shameless manner; Mehrens was, after all, “raised on R&B and Motown.”
“We have friends in a lot of different scenes,” Mehrens said. “Bands that play hardcore, dancy punk, crusty punk, and some that don’t do anything at all. At every show, there are different types of kids rockin’ out.”
Their first nationwide tour began in late July and has included such transcendent experiences as Dumpster diving, playing a farm in Las Cruces, and shooting Roman candles out the passenger-side window of their van on the Williamsburg Bridge. “We’re a little too weird for the South,” said Mehrens by phone from Ohio. “And one show flyer described us as ‘strange punk,’ which we all think is pretty awesome.”
With any luck, their sharp wit and taut songwriting will take them much further than would the gas tank of Sammy Hagar’s convertible. SFBG
ABI YOYOS
With This Is My Fist, Onion Flavored Rings, Giant Haystacks, and Robocop 3
Sat/21, 7 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$5
(415) 255-7227
Deliverance
Few American independent features in recent memory have seemed as truly capable of turning something old into something surprisingly new as Old Joy — an achingly beautiful ode to the varieties and vagaries of iPod-era young male disaffection based on a short story by Jon Raymond and transformed into something richly steeped in the increasingly remote cinematic traditions of ’70s New Hollywood by Kelly Reichardt, a filmmaker all-too-little heard from since her startlingly downbeat Badlands rethink, River of Grass, played film festivals more than a dozen years ago.
An oft-times emotionally elliptical tale of two increasingly estranged friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), approaching the end of their 20s, Old Joy is, however, far more than yet another return to the once-hallowed terrain of Amer-indies past. It is resolutely modern and of the moment — in everything from its narrative nuances and politically loaded peripheral details (including a startling glimpse of the marquee for a movie house called the Baghdad) to its cognoscenti-inclined casting of Oldham as the philosopher-fool at the (off-)center of its tear-shaped universe. Old Joy finally attains escape velocity from the anomie of the past by deciding to wear its hand-me-down stripes inside out. In the process it rediscovers the sort of between-here-and-there heartbeat once found within Henry Gibson’s archly overblown anthem to Americanarama in Robert Altman’s Nashville: how far we all have come till now, and how far we’ve got to go.
Set mainly among the verdant, mountainous Cascades of rural Oregon and poignantly bookended by brief episodes in the quasi-Buddhist backyard retreats of suburban Portland and the vagrant-haunted halogen corridors of its (relatively small-town) inner-city nights, Old Joy ultimately extends well beyond those parameters even as it dissolves into them. “It’s all just one huge thing now,” Oldham’s Kurt at one point rather blankly declaims. “Trees in the city, garbage in the forest. What’s the big difference?” And though Reichardt’s film scarcely seems to have an answer to that question, her filmmaking paints a wholly deliberate picture of contemporary America in contrasting tones of talk radio babble and freak-flag-flying drum circle excess. Old Joy finally comes to limn a new millennium mural within which the collapse of dissenting voices on both the right and left of the political spectrum is an indistinguishable part of one great, awful, swirling whole.
With betweenness a central, dynamic element of Reichardt’s film, it seems somehow entirely surprising and altogether natural that she proves to be a filmmaker intent on discovering a new frontier by following the bread crumb trails of some joyfully old-fashioned cinematic extremes. No better example of that tendency can be found than in the way that Reichardt counters her own heartfelt if generationally predictable fealty to a ’70s touchstone like Five Easy Pieces (implicit in a roadside diner scene) with a far stranger red wagon reference to an altogether unlikelier era’s angry-funny relic, Steve Martin’s The Jerk. Old Joy’s adenoidally intoned expression of age-old alienation manages to escape the antigravity of tradition. Reichardt’s movie trumps the oppressive politics-present-and-accounted-for exertions of cornball kitsch like World Trade Center with a succession of mumbling inarticulations, inchoate male intimacies, and the barely stressed but overwhelmingly evident assumption that when it comes to rediscovering certain perpetually misplaced American verities, Two-Lane Blacktop may be just another way of saying Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Loading a dog and a doggie tent into the back of a Volvo and running down the road to nowhere (occasionally in reverse) on their way to half-remembered paradises among the mighty pines, Mark and Kurt slowly begin to explore their mutual and individual disappointments with the world, themselves, and each other. Not since the windscreen mindscapes of Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road has the conjunction of motion sickness, modern living, and the struggles of overgrown boys seeking to finally attain the status of men seemed so moving — and so at pains to find a way to get moving at all.
As the strains of Yo La Tengo’s dream-drift soundtrack and cinematographer Peter Sillen’s high-def digi-vistas of roadside splendor increasingly blur together and as Mark and Kurt at last begin to haltingly immerse themselves in the baptismal fluids of Old Joy’s promised land — the Bagby Hot Springs, a remote and rustic respite for body and soul nestled deep in the old-growth woods — Reichardt’s film finally finds a way to cross the myriad bridges briefly glimpsed from Mark’s Volvo windows as Old Joy’s relatively brief but precisely calibrated screen time whizzes by. But if what you find once Old Joy finally reaches its destination seems neither precisely a sense of uplift or letdown, rest assured that’s a carefully patterned part of Reichardt’s picture too — a moment that seems neither an ending or a new beginning but yet another frozen teardrop in a world that’s only just begun to thaw.
OLD JOY
Opens Fri/20
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.kino.com/oldjoy
For an interview with Old Joy writer Jon Raymond, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Cooking with genius
Kenny Shopsin is a philosopher-cook who shrinks his kitchen to the size of the world and enlarges the world to the size of his kitchen, likening his old stove to ”a whore’s ass” and pasting terrorists onto the wings of flies. Here are the rules at his General Store in Greenwich Village, New York City: no parties of five or larger, and everyone has to eat. Don’t insult the cook by ordering just coffee unless you want to eat it. Also, most legendarily, if you’re not a regular, you can go fuck yourself.
Why all the candy on the shelves?
“People like to take candy,” Shopsin tells Matt Mahurin in I Like Killing Flies. And as for whomever is waiting to kill themselves to blow up America, “I wish them luck.”
Mahurin, a committed regular at the General Store, is always in the right place with his camera. We hear from kindred spirits, meet the Shopsin family, and watch Kenny, an alchemist, turn soup into soup the way Harry Smith turned milk into milk. This is the cook as a cook in a kitchen where total collapse is fended off by duct tape, cups on string, a busted red flyswatter, and the metaphysics of telling fuckers off. A tin of shredded coconut, apparently invented to keep the dish rack from collapsing, is also and finally a tin of shredded coconut — useful for dusting a stack of pancakes speed-glazed with a flaming-hot spatula.
Mahurin’s film makes this clear: genius has something to do with food if the cook is a genius and everything to do with doing what you must do.
The Shopsins were squeezed out of their old shop of 32 years in 2002. I Like Killing Flies documents their lucky move down the street. Unscrewing the front door from the jambs, Shopsin cracks that he might use it as a cheap headstone. Compared to the original spot, the new Shopsin’s General Store is a sprawling, airy tree house but still quite funky. The West Village is getting way too slick and specialized, and everything about Shopsin’s funkifies through overdiversity — too much creativity. I counted 138 different soups on the menu, including pistachio red chicken curry and Peruvian shrimp avocado, as well as dozens of “Breakfast Name Plates,” including the Twain (“huckleberry Finnish crepes”) — yet all Shopsin cares to eat, he tells Mahurin, is his own chili stewed with a splash of coffee. He compares such counterintuitive fusions to sodomy. Mara and Zach Shopsin took orders from me and my girlfriend, and the cook himself, in his Shopsin’s T-shirt (he doesn’t remove it for the whole movie) made sure that we walked out with free candy.
Mahurin’s documentary is one you can live in. Your head fits right into this furnished hollow tree. The film mentions but does not explore the death of Eve Shopsin, Kenny’s wife, in 2003, but we get to enjoy her presence for the whole first hour or more, which is a blessing in itself. (Julien Poirier)
I LIKE KILLING FLIES
Opens Fri/20
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
$4–$8
www.thinkfilm.com
Joy sticks
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Skip the cherries — life at times seems like a big fat bowl of Froot Loops — the type that figure-eight, undulate, and connect in the most unpredictable ways. For instance, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, né Will Oldham, and his ungainly, increasingly ecstatic shadow folk-country — that association’s only right and natural. Oldham and Gen X cinematic hot-spring stoner sagas — it’s altogether plausible. But Oldham and Diddy, the Bad Boy impresario identified in his own PR literature as a “mogul” before proffering the job title “artist” — huh?
What could these two possibly have in common apart from their age, 36? It’s a logical leap if you study Diddy — arriving about two hours late for his recent roundtable interview at the Ritz-Carlton with absolutely zero Burger King Whoppers for yours truly and the other journos who were ready to gnaw their own typing arms off in hunger and antsiness. Instead the mogul packs a makeup artist and hair man (who brandishes a far-from-puffy comb — sorry) and plays us no tracks from his new, still-scarce album, Press Play (Bad Boy/Universal), yet carries it in his bejeweled hand like a salesman. (Perhaps in answer to the inevitable query: with fashion design, artist development, reality TV, label jockeying in his past, and DiddyTV on YouTube currently serving up alleged shots of Sean in the john, why does he even bother making an album? Diddy’s comeback: “It’s a gift and curse, because I do so many things. I’m making sure people know how serious I am about music.”)
Well, Diddy and Oldham name games are the most obvious thread. Like Diddy, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Puffy, a.k.a. Sean Combs — Oldham is a man of many hats, personae, songs: a humble troubadour, a rambling tangent-exploring interview, a perpetual touring player, a before-his-time out-folker, a Hollywood-shunning onetime teen star of Matewan. At one point it seemed like he had a recording name for his every sound, if not every album — Bonnie “Prince” Billy was just the latest handle in a line that included Palace Brothers, Palace, Will Oldham, and at least one disc that sported no name at all. It was disorienting, delirious, and hard to track, and at times it just made you want to throw your hamburger mitts up, shave the nearest beard, and beat yourself around the face and neck.
Oldham probably feels much the same after fielding the same question repeatedly, explaining that he once thought of his albums much like films or plays and wanted to label each uniquely. “I thought it would be a way of focusing things on each record,” he says from his native Louisville, Ky. “People would say, ‘I like this record,’ rather than ‘I like the music of …’ I didn’t realize that it was sort of a definitely pointless battle — to see about maybe trying to make people focus on records as independent entities rather than representations of an individual’s or group’s work, and it became sooo energy-expending to always explain this name thing. I was finally just, like, ‘This is just bullshit.’”
And if Diddy and his whirlwind junket offered little apart from the lingering impression that for some reason it was critical for him to leave the scent of power and money (he’s reportedly worth $315 million) on local media — then Oldham is his opposite. On time and generously unearthing the contents of his mind, he’s disarmingly candid and eager to dive into the depths of his past, untangling his feelings and thoughts about acting, recording, and mentoring (he famously championed a solo Joanna Newsom and played her music for their label, Drag City). Yet unlike Diddy, who appears to be jetting around the country in search of the artistic credibility he first found in music as a producer, Oldham has never been more on top of his so-called game.
His new album, The Letting Go (Drag City), is the worthy, relatively full-blown, and outright beauteous studio follow-up to his 2005 stunner Superwolf with Matt Sweeney. This time Dawn McCarthy of the Bay Area’s Faun Fables leaves her imprint — her vocals echoing somewhere in the vicinity of Sandy Denny and Joan Baez. Under the gaze of Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurosson (Björk’s sometime engineer whom Oldham met while touring with the swan queen), The Letting Go is awash with melancholic melodic Southern rock and blues-folk, tunes that revolve around cursed love, child ghosts, and frosty wakes. Captured in Reykjavík and decorated with an image of Makapu’u beach on Oahu, The Letting Go doesn’t sound on the surface like the product of volcanic island ramblings and rumblings — but its lyrics do hint at the tragedy of believing that each man or woman is an island.
That’s why Oldham has gone out of his way to introduce performers like Newsom and McCarthy to his audiences. “Part of it is to reveal how interconnected things could be if you want them to be,” he explains with a soft Southern drawl. “Part of it is also, if the world isn’t going your way and there’s a certain amount always of loneliness to do battle with, sometimes you realize it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to be this solitary figure in the world.” The yearning to connect, this time with an old friend, surfaces in Old Joy, a film by Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass), which has caught praise on the festival circuit for its rapturously, deliberately paced meditation on two men’s slow-growth rambles through old-growth Oregon wilderness. Oldham’s first substantial starring role since Matewan (he most recently appeared in Junebug), his character, Kurt, is a slacker gone to seed, soon to be homeless, and still in search of his next high, his next life lesson, his next brush with grace. After helping Reichardt brainstorm hot-spring locales in Kentucky, the man who could have ended up like Macaulay Culkin or so many Coreys — and instead laid down the blueprint for, one imagines, Jenny Lewis — accepted the part. “I knew Kelly was going to be working in a way I like to work, which is just like a full immersion process,” he says, making the connection much as he pulls together Old Joy, his 1997 album, Joya (Drag City), Madonna, Emily Dickinson, and The Letting Go. “Everybody goes there. Everybody’s basically on call…. The line between tasks is a semipermeable membrane. That’s how I like making records too.” SFBG
BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY
With Dark Hand and Lamplight and Sir Richard Bishop
Oct. 30–31, 8 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$18
(415) 885-0750
For more on Will Oldham and Diddy, go to www.sfbayguardian.com/blogs/music.
Clean freak
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m 40 and experiencing a sexual renaissance. I’ve turned into a squirter, which I’m coming to terms with. Guys seem to like it: I haven’t met one yet who complained about being wet all the way down to his toes.
The problem is that occasionally when I’m really having a good time I also lose a little bit of stool. Sometimes it’s just a smearing on the sheets, sometimes it’s a little more significant. This happens with regular vaginal intercourse, even without any anal. I find it incredibly embarrassing, though the guys I’ve been with have been cool about it. One of them was very gallant: we were moving around to a rear entry position when he told me I needed to go clean up because “he had pushed some poop out of me.” Nice of him to take the blame.
So, why is this happening and what can I do about it? I’ve had hemorrhoids, though I don’t have them currently. I have some skin tags around my rectum as a result. I had a vaginal hysterectomy (I don’t have my cervix but do have my ovaries), and I wonder if there might be some rectal prolapse going on? I don’t have health insurance right now and haven’t wanted to see a doctor about what doesn’t seem terribly urgent, just embarrassing. Are there Kegels for the rectum? Do I need to start anal douching before intercourse now?
Love,
Losing It
Dear It:
I’m impressed. Of course you’re embarrassed, but a lot of people would be too mortified to go on. You, dare I say it, suffer incontinence with extraordinary aplomb. You poop with poise. How many people can claim likewise?
This didn’t sound particularly familiar to me so I read around a bit, thinking there must be some study or other connecting vaginal hysterectomy with fecal incontinence, but I really couldn’t find anything. One study specifically queried abdominal and vaginal hysterectomy patients about their bowel health and habits and concluded this: “Patients undergoing abdominal hysterectomy may run an increased risk for developing mild to moderate anal incontinence postoperatively and this risk is increased by simultaneous bilateral salpingo-oopherectomy. An increased risk of anal incontinence symptoms could not be identified in patients undergoing vaginal hysterectomy.”
Salpingo-oopherectomy, for those following along at home, is removal of ovaries and fallopian tubes, and just think, if I’d gone to med school, I could use words like that all day. Oh well. Just because those doctors didn’t find any connection doesn’t mean you haven’t experienced one. Major surgery, with the scalpels and the nerves and everything, sounds a more likely culprit than do hemorrhoids or skin tags. Seeing a proctologist or surgeon seems like a good idea — something’s wrong here — but there’s no rush on that; you’re coping rather brilliantly.
In the meantime, yes, there are Kegel-y things you can do. They’re pretty much self-explanatory: squeeze, release, repeat. Do not douche right before partnered sex, or you may regret it in yuckier ways than I can bear to get into here. The night before is safer, and do what your mother would tell you to do, provided you talked to your mother about this sort of thing: eat more of what she used to call roughage. Lots more. The idea is to get so regular and so thorough in your elimination that there’s nothing left around to put in a surprise appearance later. And then, let’s get real: get some insurance. I don’t care how, just do it. Once we’re 40, running around with no coverage ceases to be devil-may-care and starts being stupid.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
You once wrote, “The human ass can clean itself. If it couldn’t, we’d all be dead. Internal ass hygiene requires only fiber (ingested, not shoved up there) and water (likewise).” But when I do anal, “something” is left on my penis. Isn’t there a way that my girlfriend could clean her ass so much that this would not happen? In the porno movies everything seems so clean. Not that if they had such an accident they would record it.
Love,
Tidy Guy
Dear Guy:
Yeah, I should clarify that. By “clean itself” I don’t mean “wow, it’s so clean in here — I’d eat off the floor” clean. I mean clean for the inside of a butt. I was talking about heroic measures, high colonics and suchlike, and the way hosing out your innards on a regular basis cannot possibly be a good idea.
There is, sadly, no way to guarantee that you will never see “something” again (but you might mind it less if you were using a condom, hint hint). Word has it that the pros do douche the night before. That requires a certain amount of planning, which is easy to accomplish if you know you’re going to be having anal sex from, say, 2 to 3:30 p.m., and never on Wednesdays. If you can pull that off, more power to you.
Love,
Andrea
Win, lose, or draw
FESTIVAL Anyone who assumes the San Francisco Film Society hibernates between springtime fests is sorely mistaken. Aside from all the preparations for next year’s landmark 50th SF International Film Festival, much year-round activity has been emanating from the organization’s Presidio headquarters, including a recent outdoor screening of giant-ant classic Them! Next up: the first San Francisco International Animation Showcase, three days of films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Clear your Oct. 12 calendar, for the only place your butt needs to be is sitting in a theater watching Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, without a doubt the monster movie of this year’s festival circuit. It features F/X by San Francisco’s own the Orphanage — and a giant, hungry, nasty sea creature riddled with political and social subtext. Oct. 14 heralds a pair of shorts programs: “The Kids Are Alright,” with award-winning student films like Sukwon Shin’s Rock the World (George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and … Journey?) and Luis Nieto’s ingeniously seamless live action–animation hybrid Carlitopolis, about a spectacularly resilient lab mouse; and “International Panorama,” with dynamic works from England, Iran, Japan, and beyond. The minifest wraps up with The Incredibles director Brad Bird’s 1999 The Iron Giant, which to everyone but diehard Pacifier fans remains Vin Diesel’s best family-friendly performance to date. (Cheryl Eddy)
www.sffs.org
Sickness in short order
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
COMEDY DVD/CD When comedian Neil Hamburger appeared in the mid-’90s, he didn’t exactly burst onto the scene. He floundered, groaned, and groveled his way through jokes that have often been deemed intentionally bad. “It’s so bad it’s good!” went the typical assessment of the comedian’s act — an assessment that’s not only insensitive but also a bit simplistic. Hamburger may not have been the smoothest, most polished comedian, but no one tried harder or battled against longer odds, and his willingness to muddle forth in the face of repeated failure and humiliation was at least mildly inspiring.
Based on his early track record, Hamburger’s recent success — appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live, a role in an upcoming Jack Black movie, sold-out shows at the Hemlock Tavern — has been unexpected. Listen to his earliest albums, 1996’s America’s Funnyman and 1998’s Raw Hamburger (both Drag City), and you’ll find there’s not a lot of laughter. Groaning, hissing, clanking silverware, and ringing slot machines, yes. But not many genuine laughs. Since those days, his persistent cough has gotten worse, and his jokes have grown more offensive, yet his audiences have grown bigger. The younger rock ’n’ roll audiences he plays to have been much more receptive to his hard-R-rated humor as well as his Q&A-style delivery (“Why did God invent Gene Simmons? To boost sales of the morning-after pill”) than to the more observational musings of his earlier sets.
The recent Drag City DVD, The World’s Funnyman, offers a window into Hamburger’s evolution. The feature is more or less a typical Hamburger show circa anytime since 2003, featuring off-color jokes about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other top stars. The highlights of the DVD, however, are relegated to the special features section: two minidocumentaries, Neil Hamburger in Australia and the Canadian-made America’s Funnyman, along with a video for his song “Seven-Elevens,” from the 2002 album Laugh Out Lord (Drag City). Best of all, though, is the black-and-white cinematic depiction of scenes from Left for Dead in Malaysia (Drag City, 1999), perhaps the darkest and most trying of Hamburger’s albums. Basically, the audience doesn’t understand a word he’s saying, but that doesn’t stop him from treating it like any show. After all, as he notes, “some things transcend the language barrier — like a disinterested audience.” The credits mention that this is a teaser for a feature-length film entitled Funny Guy–itis. If that’s true, then please, someone get this guy a movie deal and finish it, pronto.
There are those who claim that Neil Hamburger is actually the alter ego of former Amarillo Records head Gregg Turkington, but then again, these are the sort of folks who argue that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, that Batman is really Bruce Wayne. There’s no hard evidence. Still, some of Hamburger’s most harped-upon themes are echoed on Turkington’s most recent efforts, on the Golding Institute’s Final Relaxation (Ipecac). Coproduced with Australian television producer Brendan Walls, the album is billed as “your ticket to death through hypnotic suggestion.” As the extremely creepy narrator, Turkington stresses that certain people are not qualified to participate, including “pregnant or lactating women” and “those who have booked expensive overseas vacations or plane tickets.”
Obviously, Final Relaxation is not 100 percent effective — otherwise I’d be writing this from beyond the grave. Still, the disc casts a disturbing enough pall over the listening environment, with Turkington offering up plenty of negative reinforcements (“You will not be able to cook like a television chef. Your time on earth will be spent failing”) and bizarre commands (“Please, please break some of the teeth in your head — for me”) amid Walls’s sickly electronic noises. It’s not a laugh-a-minute affair, but like many of Hamburger’s albums, it walks a fine line between cringe-inducing ineptitude and head-scratching ridiculousness. And yes, that’s an endorsement. SFBG
Static shock
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW When it premiered in New York two years ago, Sam Shepard’s latest play was timed to influence the outcome of the presidential election — an enticingly bold agenda. Of course, if you want to influence elections, as everybody understands by now, you need to be more than bold. You need to be Diebold. And anyway, what politician worries about what’s on an Off-Broadway stage? As political theater goes, Hugo Chávez calling George W. Bush the devil and sniffing out his sulfuric farts before the United Nations has much more oomph to it, in addition to getting at least as big a laugh. Chávez also backed up his warm-up zingers with a real political program. And he reads Noam Chomsky!
Two years and another flagrantly stolen election later, The God of Hell remains less interesting for any recyclable reference to the electoral contest between Democrats and Republicans (two packs squaring off again for dominance in the same corporate-owned kennel) than for the reflection in its bleak farce of something larger: an attempt to redraw the psychic and social landscape. Shepard’s ostensibly simple political broadside — whose call to alarm rings more with absurdist resignation than Brechtian defiance — has nonetheless a wily power curled up inside.
The play — sharply directed by Amy Glazer and leading off the 40th anniversary season of the Magic Theatre, Shepard’s old stomping ground — opens on the home of a dying breed: a Wisconsin dairy farmer and his wife. Emma (played with just the right suggestion of guileless good humor and native smarts by Anne Darragh) loves her indoor plants, which she compulsively waters to within an inch of their lives. Frank (John Flanagan), meanwhile, “loves his heifers,” as his affectionate wife readily explains to Frank’s old friend and their current houseguest, the jumpy and radioactive Graig Haynes (Jackson Davis), hiding from some unspecified disaster out west at a mysterious place called, in a name redolent of real-life nuclear disasters, Rocky Buttes. On the one hand, the couple looks primed to live happily heifer after. On the other, they appear stuck in a semiparadisial oasis amid unforgiving winter and a sea of agribusiness, isolated, alone, stoic, lonely, a little loony, and lost without knowing it — yet.
Emma is in the act of coaxing Haynes from the basement with some frying bacon when a stranger at the door interrupts her. As the pork sizzles, the man (Michael Santo), a business suit we later learn goes by the name Welch, appears to be selling a host of patriotic paraphernalia out of his attaché case. But his pushy demeanor quickly goes beyond the usual sales routine, his interest in Emma’s loyalty and her basement growing downright creepy, exuding an unctuousness and a sly arrogance that perfectly suggest the totalitarian turn in what Frank calls a “country of salesmen.” (Santo, whose face stretched into a thin grin bears an eerie resemblance to our real-life torturer-in-chief, is altogether perfect in the part.)
Shepard’s farmers, while purposefully cartoony, aren’t country bumpkins. Nor are they merely atavistic 1950s farmers, existing wholly in the past and detached from the present (as Welch, with telling condescension, likes to imagine them). Locally speaking, they are savvy and sure. (It’s no joke holding your own as an independent dairy farmer amid government-subsidized corporate behemoths.) Emma in particular is rooted to the very house itself, born on a patch of floor Hayes finds himself standing on at one point.
It’s the world beyond the farm and Wisconsin that the main couple find hard to grasp. In the play’s central irony, Frank and Emma tentatively mark the outer world by reference to a standard pop-cultural conspiracy narrative. But significantly, it’s just that laughable (at first) recourse to the formula of a TV thriller or sci-fi movie that points in the direction of the truth, helping Emma and Frank chart the terrain opened up by the arrival of Haynes and Welch. Long before his old friend resurfaces, Frank has already imagined for him, however vaguely, just the kind of intrigue and danger he turns out to have been undergoing. After passing the seeds of this narrative to his wife (who, as it were, dutifully overwaters them), Frank turns around and mocks her paranoia of government vehicles: “Dark cars. Suspicious. Tinted windows. Unmarked Chevies. Black antennas bowed over.” But we already know she’s right. The terrain of conspiracy, like the empire it limns, stretches in all directions, making borders meaningless except as a demagogic strategy in Welch’s fascist, state-centered patriotism.
The play invokes borders mainly to undermine, comically deflate, or cynically manipulate them. The overall and overwhelming implication is their irrelevance to an imperial might that recognizes no boundaries in the exercise of its will (things don’t need to escalate far before Welch threatens to send a bunker buster through Emma’s kitchen window). The vastness of the system confronting Emma and Frank comes across most dramatically in the unstoppable reach of plutonium — named after Pluto, the god of hell — which here serves as both a literal threat of the system and the ideal metaphor for its poisonous, apocalyptic reach. It’s this geography (real, metaphorical, potential) that the play wants us to pay attention to, since survival depends on some grasp of the lay of the land. SFBG
THE GOD OF HELL
Through Oct. 22
Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m.
Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Buchanan at Marina, SF
$20–$45
(415) 441-8822
www.magictheatre.org
In bed with the Long Winters
It’s become popular to characterize the Long Winters’ John Roderick as an intellectual ronin of sorts: a librarian without master who travels the countryside lending his songs and wisdom to brainy 826 benefits. Others reject this stuffy veneer outright, preferring to embrace him as a lovable vaudevillian rogue of the “song, dance, seltzer down the pants” variety.
Still, Roderick is well aware of his reputation as a mysterious dude, explaining, “It’s never been clear, even to the people close to me, whether or not I might actually be an emotionally abusive, exploitative, drunken rapist posing as a sensitive singer-songwriter, and that’s an ambiguity that I cultivate.”
His band, the Long Winters, are back with their third album, Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk), a sonic patchwork of lust, architecture, rock ’n’ roll love children, and memories of lovers past that defy destruction. Maybe. Roderick writes to ensure that his lyrics don’t bind the listener with logistical detail, preferring to provide softly focused emotional Polaroid photos. “What I’m shooting for is that the listener be able to recall their own stories — when they felt the same way,” he says. With mentions of everything from teaspoons to retired Air Force pilots, however, come fans usually seeking interpretational guidance. Why not indulge listeners with answers? “No one really wants me out in the parking lot after a show explaining my lyrics” he deadpans. “Even if a few people might think they do.”
The crazy thing is, it actually works. On “Teaspoon,” rituals of courtship, “the way that she smiles me down,” careen past as a horn section trumpets the start of a new relationship. Even if the lady in question “claims to be clowning,” the mood is clear, the butterflies in the stomach already swirling. Putting the Days to Bed’s best moment is the wistfully gorgeous “Seven,” a song that lies on its back in tall grass, staring at the sky and hoping against hope to see a lost lover’s face in the clouds. “Would you say that I/ Was the last thing you want to remember me by?” Roderick wonders aloud.
It’s this kind of masterfully eloquent longing that has built the Long Winters no small amount of indie fame. Yet while appreciative of the kudos, Roderick quickly reduces them to a digestible perspective: “I think the Long Winters fall somewhere between it being OK for us to sample some crackers from the deli tray of the Wrens without getting our hands slapped but not so far as to get drunk and spill guacamole on Sufjan Stevens’s pants.” (Kate Izquierdo)
More of Kate Izquierdo’s interview with Long Winters’ John Roderick.
LONG WINTERS
With What Made Milwaukee Famous and the Vasco Era
Fri/13, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
Sweet dreams
› kimberly@sfbg.com
“It definitely contributes to this kind of cavelike, sort of womblike environment up here.”
Tom Carter is surveying his kingdom, a.k.a. the Oakland apartment he shares with his partner, Natacha Robinson, and we both try to make the connection between Charalambides, his 15-year-old duo with ex Christina Carter, and the hundreds of Playmobil figurines that populate damn near every surface around him. The only Playmobil-free space seems to be Carter’s cranny-cum-closet-cum-studio housing a computer equipped with Pro Tools and sundry plug-ins that simulate analog effects. Otherwise the Lego-like pieces cover his mantles, bookshelves, lintels, and alcoves, reenacting the Crusades, banquets, pirate ship scenes, you name it. In front of Carter on the table is Robinson’s latest tableau in progress: a petite pair of anthropomorphized mice in wedding garb, fashioned from Sculpey, next to a pile of teensy clay food.
It’s a distracting collection, yet the multitudes also seem to mirror Carter’s prodigious creative output: in addition to Charalambides — which most recently released one of the more straight-laced recordings of its lifespan, A Vintage Burden (Kranky), an almost slow-fi folk album that manages to be both haunting and achingly beautiful — Carter is in Badgerlore (the Bay Area supergroup of sorts with Seven Rabbit Cycle’s Rob Fisk, Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, Yellow Swans’ Pete Swanson, Grouper’s Liz Harris, and Skygreen Leopards’ Glenn Donaldson); Zaika with Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards; Kyrgyz with Loren Chasse and Christine Boepple of the Jewelled Antler Collective and Robert Horton; and various stirring CD-R projects with solely Horton (the latest, Lunar Eclipse [Important], collects 73 minutes of terrifying drone, conjured with the aid of e-bow, boot, vibrator, and field recordings). All of which led Carter, who also records other musicians regularly and continuously toils on live CD-Rs, to quit his job as a manager at Berkeley’s Half Price Books in order to concentrate on performing live with Charalambides, which plays its first show in the Bay Area this week since Carter moved to town in 2004. The duo has also lined up fall dates at Arthur Nights in LA and All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK.
There’s obviously a lot on Carter’s plate — we’re not even going to start with the dusting. But Carter is no one’s toy, despite his laid-back style and acid-washed drawl and the fact that Charalambides is now catching a second wind of attention from publications like Wire after putting out vinyl-only recordings throughout the last decade on respected underground imprint Siltbreeze.
Carter began Charalambides in 1991 with fellow Houston record store employee Christina after playing in “pretty goofy” bands like Schlong Weasel. (They named the band after a Greek surname noticed on a shopper’s check; “it was supposed to be evocative but doesn’t mean anything,” he explains.)
“I probably would have met her anyway,” Carter says now of their fateful encounter. “I knew all her boyfriends.” Nonetheless the two were wed, becoming creative partners.
Houston at that time was a hotbed of “superweird experimental stuff,” Carter says. “It was sort of grunge-influenced in a way, but it was sort of psychedelic and bizarre. People just making odd decisions based on drug use and volume.”
Third Charalambides members would come and go, like guitarist Jason Bill and pedal steel player Heather Leigh Murray, but the Carters were constants, even after they broke up in 2003. The 2004 album Joy Shapes (Kranky) documents the split. “It was kind of an intense record to make and kind of intense to listen to,” remembers Carter. “Exhausting to listen to and just exhausting all around.”
Developing their songs through improvisation and then overdubbing parts over the sounds, Charalambides dropped in and out of dormancy until 2000, mostly, Carter says, because “we were never really comfortable as a live band.” The group started to make music with an eye to performance. “We always wanted things to be somewhat formless when we approached a song, but at the same time, we wanted to kind of know what we were doing so it would actually exist as a song. What was the minimum thing you could have in a song and it still be a song?” Vintage Burden turned out to be their first “duo record” in ages, a return to the way the pair had once worked, producing sprawling psychedelic numbers, with one notable difference. Christina, who now lives in Northampton, Mass., wrote all the songs before Carter flew to her home to record on her eight-track Tascam digital recorder. Working on music was easy, he says. “Neither one of us is a particularly grudge-bearing person.”
Keep the grudges for movie-house sequels. Currently listening to ’60s West Coast rock groups like the Byrds and the Grateful Dead in addition to peers and pals like the Yellow Swans and Skaters, Carter might be considered the kick-back link between hippie experimentation of the past and the transcendent aggression of the present. “I do consider myself part of the tradition of Texas–West Coast transplants,” he says mildly. Why do so many Texans turn up on these shores? “I dunno. It’s a place to smoke weed in peace. Ha-ha-ha.” SFBG
CHARALAMBIDES
With Shawn McMillen, Hans Keller,
and Feast
Mon/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$7
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Also Tom Carter–Shawn McMillen duo, Sean Smith, and Christina Carter
Tues/17, 8 p.m.
21 Grand
416 25th St., Oakl.
$6
(510) 44-GRAND
21grand.org