Low-key yet brutal, Half Nelson is exactly the kind of movie Hollywood will never make. Notably, it’s entirely cliché free. There’s no deliverance for Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), an eighth-grade teacher whose raging crack habit is steadily taking over his life. There’s no real turnaround for 13-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of Dan’s students who’s being eyeballed for drug-delivery service by the neighborhood dealer, Frank (Anthony Mackie). And though Dan and Drey forge an alliance amid their unstable worlds — they kinda have to after Drey discovers Dan, who’s also her basketball coach, hitting the pipe after a game — the friendship is a shaky one. “I want to know consequences,” Dan tells his class, trying to get them excited about his latest history lesson (later, he’ll engage in an arm-wrestling contest to illustrate “turning points”). But in his own life, Dan can barely face another day without getting high first.
The first feature from producer-writer Anna Boden and director-writer Ryan Fleck, the unflashy Half Nelson uses subtlety to speak volumes. Its beats are succinct but intense: when Dan’s ex-junkie ex-girlfriend briefly appears, she’s rosy cheeked and sporting an engagement ring — pretty much the embodiment of the kind of hope for the future that Dan can’t imagine ever having. The film doesn’t spend much time on exposition. We never learn how or why Dan started using. Like last year’s Down to the Bone, Half Nelson burrows into the mind of a full-blown addict whose ability to fake normalcy becomes more precarious by the day. The first time the stern principal hooks Dan into an emergency meeting, it’s to reprimand him for straying from the lesson plan. The second time, he’s just taught a class on hyperdrive, with an oozing nosebleed to boot, and his double life is in full crumble.
Even as she comes to terms with her favorite teacher’s shortcomings, Drey has plenty of her own problems. Her weary mother barely has time for her between double shifts; her father is merely a voice on the telephone; and her older brother is incarcerated, a circumstance that’s the direct result of his association with Frank. To Dan’s dismay, the candy-chomping Frank insinuates himself into Drey’s largely unsupervised life, and an odd tug-of-war results. Clearly, neither man is a good father figure, not by any stretch. There’s a tense confrontation between Frank and Dan that perfectly illustrates Half Nelson’s ability to inject unpredictability into familiar movie moments. The scene also picks up a key thematic thread — can one man make a difference? — that’s echoed by Dan throughout the film, particularly in a late scene involving a visit to his grossly liberal (and liberally inebriated) parents.
Half Nelson is a film with no wasted space, and that goes double for its acting. Epps (stoic) and Mackie (charmingly manipulative) are excellent, but this is Gosling’s game from the start. His layered, sympathetic performance conveys not just Dan’s jittery freak-outs and frustrations but also his deep inner anguish. It’s what makes watching Half Nelson a wholly satisfying experience. (Cheryl Eddy)
HALF NELSON
Opens Fri/25
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.halfnelsonthefilm.com
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Basehead of the class
Pedro’s progress
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Poor Generalissimo Franco, not yet dead a decade before the Spanish film industry he’d so carefully censored gained its new leading tastemaker: a plump, girly homo fond of gender blur, anticlericalism, and nuclear-family meltdowns. Twenty-two years have passed since What Have I Done to Deserve This? made Pedro Almodóvar “enfant terrible of Spanish cinema” — a title that still sticks in his late 50s — as well as a dominating cultural force.
New movies “by Almodóvar” (like Picasso or Cher, he became an institution early on) are international events as those by Fellini or Bergman used to be in the ’60s. There remain good Spanish movies by directors working in entirely different styles. Yet in terms of what gets seen abroad, you might reasonably judge the whole industry to have gone Almodovaresque — a term applicable to select hit films by established talents like Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) and Álex de la Iglesia (Ferpect Crime), not to mention rising talents like Ramón Salazar (20 Centimeters) and Manuel Gómez Pereira (Queens). There may well be too many shrill, candy-colored Spanish comedies in which women act like hysterical drag queens and men like horndogs — but the master himself is no longer making them.
His ongoing evolution is partially charted in “Viva Pedro,” an upcoming four-week retrospective at the Castro and Shattuck theaters. The eight films in this series are what Sony Classics could get its hands on. “Viva” has to skip over his first five features (including What Have I Done?), leaving little of the John Waters–style anarchy that dominated his early work. (Like Waters, Almodóvar started out making campily offensive 8mm silents with nonsynch soundtracks, up through Fuck Fuck Fuck Me Tim!, his 1978 feature debut.) Particularly missed is Labyrinth of Passion, the quintessential all-purpose Almodóvar title and one of his funniest films. Also left out are early-’90s titles Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down; High Heels; and Kika.
Still, there’s plenty of good stuff in a package encompassing his two most outré forays into homoeroticism (1986’s Matador and the following year’s Law of Desire, both with Banderas), his most successful farce (1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), and the strange, still-in-progress trip toward profundity commenced in 1995 with The Flower of My Secret.
Almodóvar reportedly often shoots scenes in alternate funny and serious modes. The eccentric Flower is said to have found its largely serious tenor in the editing room. This high-wire balance between baroque ideas and earnest emotions was less wobbly in 1997’s wonderfully lurid Live Flesh. Two years later, Almodóvar surprised critics by delivering All About My Mother, a waterfall of Douglas Sirk–ian suffering female tears universally hailed for its newfound maturity. I (resistant) imagined Susan Hayward hammering her coffin lid, yelling, “Manny, you son of a bitch agent, that shoulda been my script!”
Almodóvar came out (in all senses) of the Madrid-centered Movida arts movement, whose late ’70s–early ’80s explosion of punk, camp, and transgression personified the most radical forces behind Spain’s rapid transformation from Franco-era repression to today’s extremely liberal culture. Traditional Spanish obsessions with death, sex, and religion plus post-Franco giddiness toward finger-diddling every hitherto taboo subject needn’t be “read into” Almodóvar movies — they’re spelled out on every flamboyant, melodramatic surface.
But not until his most recent two films did all these themes blend together in sardonic yet sympathetic wide-screen perfection. These are 2002’s Talk to Her — in which the main female characters are comatose, leaving the men to do the emotional weight lifting — and 2004’s Bad Education, a Catholic black comedy cum sexual-horror film oddly, elegantly redolent of Vertigo. In November we’ll get Volver, with Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura returning to the fold. Whether or not it matches his recent achievements, Almodóvar has already earned the right to seem larger than life. SFBG
“VIVA PEDRO”
Begins Sept. 1
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
www.clubcultura.com
www.sonyclassics.com/vivapedro
VIDIOT’S DELIGHT
With the simultaneous advent of personal computers and video games on a massive scale in the early ’80s, it was unsurprising that Hollywood tried to fit all things virtual into the exploitable framework of cheesy teen comedies. The latest Midnites for Maniacs triple bill reprises three of the era’s daffier such efforts.
The eccentric Heartbeeps, a major flop released in 1981, puts Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters in constrictingly ingenious makeup as two servant robots who run away from their factory warehouse in the brave new world of 1995. Despite meeting such over-the-top types as Randy Quaid, Christopher Guest, Mary Woronov, and Paul Bartel en route, their comic odyssey is weirdly sentimental, even inspirational — it’s like Jonathan Livingston Seagull for androids.
More successful but equally derided was 1985’s Weird Science, which struck many as several juvenile steps backward for writer-director John Hughes after that year’s The Breakfast Club. Alas, he was never so silly or immature or funny again. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are dweebs who create an “ideal woman” (Kelly LeBrock) on their computer; she of course comes to life and teaches them all sorts of valuable life lessons while embodying a world of adolescent male masturbation fantasies.
Last and ever-so-least — save in camp value — is Joysticks, the Roller Boogie of video arcade movies, from the director (Greydon Clark) of Satan’s Cheerleaders, Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate, and Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. A mean politician (Joe Don Baker, not walking so tall career-wise in 1983) tries to shut down the local arcade, believing it to be a hotbed of underage sin. Our heroes (cute guy, nerd guy, fat and desperately-trying-to-be-a-young-John-Candy guy named “McDorfus”) thwart him and save democratic freedom amid many Porky’s-style jokes. What you need to know: sequences are separated by the graphic of a Pac-Man biting its way across the screen; “punk” subsidiary villain King Vidiot is played by Napoleon Dynamite’s future Uncle Rico (Jon Gries); and the theme song really is just about playing video games (“Jerk it left/ jerk it right/ shoot it hard/ shoot it straight/ video to the maaaaaax!!!”). (Dennis Harvey)
MIDNITES FOR MANIACS: “DIGITAL SEX: 80’S STYLE!” TRIPLE FEATURE
Fri/25, 7:30 p.m.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$10
www.midnitesformaniacs.com
Best of the Bay 2006 Pixs
A friend feeds a banana to Anthony Riley of Gooferman, winner of Best Band Name
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Amber Kvietys of the Primitive Screwheads, Best Goofy Gore
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Howard Dillon of Wild Irish Productions, the Best Bloomin’ Thespians
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Maurice Lee of Wasteland, Best Vintage Clothing Store
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Members of the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), winner of Best Six-Week Superhero Lessons
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Indira, Luis, Adrian, and Tyson of Mission Art and Performance Project, winner of Best Art All Over the Hood
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Shawn and Skyler from the Transfer, Best Bar to Hop Aboard the Party Train
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Blakely Bass of Residents Apparel Gallery, winner of Best Clothing Store for Women and Men
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Jenny and Jason of Acro Yoga, the Best Way to Down Your Date’s Dog
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Trixxie Carr of Smash Up Derby, winner of Best Tori Amos Meets Slayer
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Monte, Cindy, and Vittoria of Pan Theater, winner of Best Prep for Your State of the Union Speech
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Michael and Shannon of the Vau de Vire Society, the Best Falmin’ Hot Circus Freaks
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Aaron Sweeney and his Transjanimals, the Best Fuzzy Substitutes for a Lover
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Demetri and Andy of Folsom Street Fair, winner of Best Street Fair
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
John Segura and friends from the Knockout, winner of Best Beer-Soaked Bingo
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Chris of the Fruit Guys (with friends), the Best Banana in Your Inbox
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Best of Bay Guests and Winners
Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Living Dead Girls, the Best Proof That the Dead Can Dance
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Erase Errata
Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Extra Action Marching Band
Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Extra Action Marching Band
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Kid Beyond Best Oral in the Bay
Guardian photo by Matthew Hughes Boyko and Amy Rose Sampson
Guardian Editor and Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann with Kielbasia, the Best Drag Queen with an Accordion
Photo courtesy of Kielbasia
Scissors for Lefty
Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Scissors for Lefty
Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Northern composure
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Four years ago, a high school junior named Britney Gallivan managed to fold a piece of paper in half 12 times, surpassing the eight-fold limit with a 4,000-foot-long piece of special toilet paper. For this girl, origami became more than paper frogs, cootie catchers, and hope-giving cranes. But those cranes are still essential. The four sprightly members of Shapes and Sizes do a lot of musical origami and showy unfolding on their self-titled debut. They make cranes with at least two heads, constantly pulling in multiple directions: toward fairy tales and woodsy rock, unexpected bursts and clap-along accents.
Shapes and Sizes fit on the energetic Asthmatic Kitty roster, but I wouldn’t have expected it. Neither did the band. “We sent out around 50 demos, and three or four labels responded. Asthmatic Kitty got back to us quickly and were excited,” said vocalist-guitarist Rory Seydel and vocalist-keyboardist Caila Thompson-Hannant, speaking at the same time on a conference call from Victoria, British Columbia.
“It took a while, though, to get to where we are now with them,” Seydel added. “We met up with the heads of the label while we were on tour, and they agreed to produce the album.”
“The whole process took a year,” Thompson-Hannant chimed in.
The full-length is the demo, unchanged. Some of the songs had been living in their heads for years. Old high school friends, Thompson-Hannant and Seydel wrote the first Shapes and Sizes ditties when they were only 18. “It’s a long departure. I think we’ve grown up a little,” laughed Seydel, who just turned 22.
When they headed into Victoria’s Lucky Mouse Studios — also home to Frog Eyes — Shapes and Sizes planned on recording a seven-song EP. But, said Thompson-Hannant, they decided to “really go to town,” laying down some tunes that they’d never even practiced and adding a cavalcade of other instruments, from saxophones to vibraphones, trumpets to violas. With the help of Frog Eyes engineer Tolan McNeil, they achieved a panoramic sound.
They will not be touring with a horn section, said Seydel, but that’s fine, since they can just turn up their guitars “really loud.”
He’s only half kidding. Their show tunes–influenced melodies are designed to expand in the live environment, a giddy indie-rock cabaret. The youthful duo cuts, collages, and boldly displays myriad shapes of stories and sizes of sounds, as drummer Jon Crellin and bassist Nathan Gage add rhythmic color to this melodic union. Because they play almost exclusively originals (save for a cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Come Back from San Francisco” last Valentine’s Day), their songs continue to morph in front of their eyes and they are constantly working on new material.
“It seems like the songs are always changing,” said Thompson-Hannant with the same sense of awe that lifts her singing. “I’ve come undone … another wire linked up to my heart,” she croons on “Northern Lights.” Seydel joins this dramatic unraveling on the Pavement-influenced “Rory’s Bleeding,” singing a cappella at the start: “Why is Rory bleeding?/ Placed between black and white/ Phew, I was dreaming/ I couldn’t see his eyes.”
Shapes and Sizes inhabit a delightfully brisk and very bright way-Northern version of Architecture in Helsinki’s Australia. A deeply collective energy is present on both bands’ debuts, but it’s only in hearing Architecture’s greatest achievement, In Case We Die (Bar/None, 2005), that their earlier efforts appear as the treasure maps that they are, diagrams on origami paper about to become 3-D unicorns. It’s a sure bet that Shapes and Sizes too will continue to expand. Inside their paper cranes are the scribbled notes of castaways happily ignoring borders and ready to hitch a ride. SFBG
SHAPES AND SIZES
With Oh No! Oh My!
Tues/22, 8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1422
www.independentsf.com
This tune’s for you
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We’ve all been there. You’re entranced by some wonderful song that you can’t live without, only to buy the album, hunker down to listen, and find it full of duds. Your purchase … sucks. What a weird and wondrous experience, then, to cram What Made Milwaukee Famous into the stereo and be greeted with a crayon box full of pop, each song shaded a little differently than the last and highlighted with quite arguably some of the best pop vocals around.
Named for a line in a Jerry Lee Lewis song, Austin’s WMMF formed when vocalist-guitarist Michael Kingcaid put out ads in the Austin Chronicle. Kingcaid, having survived the demise of previous bands, eschewed live performances for a year, opting for an extended period of introduction. He explains, “I had the blueprints, at least in pencil, for a long time. None of us knew each other initially. We didn’t want to jump out and play any shows when we weren’t ready to sound our best.”
After WMMF played local clubs, 2005 heralded the band’s arrival in the form of high-profile opening gigs for the Arcade Fire and a slot performing on PBS’s Austin City Limits with Franz Ferdinand. Their status has recently been upgraded from underground to upwardly indie after signing with Seattle’s Barsuk Records. The new album, Trying to Never Catch Up, offers 12 doses of ingeniously potent pop rock. Trying to Never Catch Up is aptly named, never dallying in one genre long enough to get comfortable. The first song, “Idecide,” kicks off with a death rattle, spitting synths out of “Warm Leatherette,” and spazzy, arpegiatted keyboards that signal homage to Grandaddy before there’s even time to figure out what’s playing. Somewhere in the midst of all that music, WMMF braid in two of their secret weapons: dense, astutely written lyrics and Kingcaid’s big, brilliantly colored tenor. Time signatures shift nervously while the world’s lovers fall prey to “enough sting to be stung/ enough poison to choke/ enough rope to be hung.” Asked to explain, Kingcaid offers, “I think of that one as having three or four different narrators,” and points to a theme of “being beholden to someone or something.” In other hands, “Idecide” could fall flat, a cheesy new wave brood about failed relationships. In Kingcaid’s, it’s a slick, foreboding cautionary tale.
There is much about WMMF that harkens back to a time, say, the ’80s, when gimmick wasn’t enough. The age of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Squeeze, when good melodies and witty lyrics were par for the course. While the band recalls the breezier moments in that decade as well — “Selling Yourself Short” recalls Modern English’s “Melt with You” in three notes or less — there is an obsession with craftsmanship that sets their full-length above other recent releases. “Hellodrama,” a sweet, smart-alecky tribute to a girl who won’t quite go away, mixes “Candy-O” claps with exasperated entreaties — “You’re still lingering around the set/ trying to set me off” — managing to turn dating angst into a potential dance hit.
On the quietly strummed “Hopelist” we hear “I didn’t ever want/ I never thought I’d be/ in a situation that defies contingency.” Though writing about relationships can be heady stuff, Kingcaid maintains that he isn’t looking to glorify anyone’s emotional downward spiral. “I’m sure that I’m going to write things that are going to end tragically, but I don’t ever want to leave anybody in a pit, ’cause I’ve been there.” It’s that balance of light and dark that informs the entire What Made Milwaukee Famous experience: just enough lyrical darkness to lure you in — just enough melodic color to make you stay. SFBG
WHAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS
With French Kicks and Matt and Kim
Fri/18–Sat/19, 9 p.m.
Café du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
Confessions of a Gofessional
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Things move fast in rap. By the time their second album, World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch), dropped in April, the Team already had a new single, the “Hyphy Juice” remix, which now rivals “It’s Getting Hot” as their biggest radio hit. Since then, Moedoe label head K.O.A.B. has inked a deal for Hyphy Juice, the energy drink he co-owns with the group, to be sold at 7-11 stores nationwide, while Team member Clyde Carson just signed as a solo act to Capitol Records. Carson’s ambitious project, Theater Music — consisting of one multisong, album-length track à la Prince’s Lovesexy (Warner, 1988) — will appear next year, cobranded by Moedoe as well as the Game’s Black Wall Street.
Yet my appearance at the Team’s condo concerns none of these matters. Instead, I’ve been summoned by Kaz Kyzah to discuss The Gofessional, his new mixtape with KMEL managing director DJ Big Von Johnson. Consisting of 19 tracks of mostly original material, The Gofessional is part of a growing trend in the Bay Area mix scene — like Husalah and Jacka’s Animal Planet and Beeda Weeda’s Homework — of blurring the distinction between the carefully crafted album and the “anything goes” approach of mixtapes. What makes The Gofessional unique, however, is its method of distribution: it’s available for free at bigvon.com.
In the first week alone, the mixtape was downloaded 7,000 times on the strength of two singles currently spinning on KMEL: “Cocaine,” a soulful love-as-addiction metaphor over a 9th Wonder beat, and the LT-produced original “Love” (featuring Jimmie Reign), an R&B-infused investigation of more serious subjects often neglected by the Bay’s current “go dumb” ethos.
STALLED PREMIERE?
Before beginning, however, Kaz clears up the lingering mystery around World Premiere’s release, not, as anticipated, through major label Universal but rather through independent powerhouse Koch.
“We were on a label of a Mexican artist, Lil Rob, and it wasn’t the place for us,” Kaz says, referring to the Universal-distributed Upstairs imprint, which caters primarily to Latino rap. “When we got over there, it wasn’t what we wanted. But it worked out where we could use it to get the album done and move on. We didn’t have to pay any bread. We actually came out winning.”
“At the same time, I was going through legal trouble,” he continues, describing continuing fallout from a robbery charge he caught at age 18. “I was worried about going to jail and house arrest. I did end up spending a couple of months in jail, so it was a real hectic time.”
While the delays of label jumping and legal woes may have muted World Premiere’s impact, the period of house arrest last year proved productive for Kaz, who with West Oakland rapper J-Stalin and East Oakland producers Tha Mekanix formed a side group called the Go Boyz and recorded an album at the condo. These late-night sessions featuring an ankle-braceleted Kaz were the genesis of the current Go Movement, which already constitutes a third front in the Bay’s hyphy and thizz campaigns.
“What I want people to understand about the Go Movement,” the Hyphy Juice shareholder stresses, “is it’s not not about getting hyphy, going dumb. But it encompasses a whole lot more and that’s what makes it so powerful. Like when I talk to Dotrix [of Tha Mekanix], we’ll use go 1,500 times and have an in-depth conversation.
“It was Dot who said, ‘You the Gofessional, man.’ And that was one of my favorite movies, The Professional, so I used it for my mixtape. I didn’t want to come out with the Go Boyz, and nobody know what Go is all about. I was talking to some people from Marin, they never even heard of the Go Movement. To us it’s old, but a lot of people are still catching on.”
GOING FOR THE STREETS
The free download format of The Gofessional is proving to be an effective means of spreading the word. (Another 5,000 hard copies have already been distributed for the benefit of those not online, and more are on the way.) For Johnson, who apart from Kaz is the author of this largess, the free mixtape is designed to boost record sales as well as keep the Bay’s current buzz alive.
“I got 7,000 downloads in a week, when I know artists who put out records that took seven months to reach that in sales,” Johnson says later that day at KMEL. “There are a lot of big artists, a lot of songs on the radio, but sales aren’t adding up. So I feel like, give some away. Instead of trying to break a song, I’m trying to break an artist in the streets. I definitely think this will stimulate album sales.”
It’s refreshing to hear such a statement these days, when the “free download” has been blamed for bringing the recording industry to its knees. To me, Johnson’s logic is irrefutable; I’m more likely to check out something for free than for $15, and I’m way more likely to buy a $15 album from someone whose previous work I have and like. As The Gofessional is easily better than dozens of albums I’ve actually purchased, the odds of me buying an eventual Kaz Kyzah solo album are extremely high. Given the current excitement in Bay rap and Carson’s deal with Capitol, the interest in Kaz’s mixtape hasn’t failed to attract the attention of majors as well.
“I got a lot of labels looking at me,” Kaz confesses. “I ain’t put out an album. They’re checking for me off of mixtapes, which is weird, but it’s a beautiful thing. People be, like, this is hotter than people’s albums. But I’m a perfectionist, so doing a solo album is going to take a minute, really sitting down and figuring out what I want to do with it. And not being too quick to jump on the wrong deal.” SFBG
Big bang
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REVIEW Near the end of “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman’s woozy celebration of the universe contained within, he asks, “Do I contradict myself?” then responds to his own query, “Very well, then, I contradict myself.” This is followed by the oft-cited parenthetical thought, “I am large — I contain multitudes,” a sentiment that has been variously expressed in art since Whitman did so at the turn of the 20th century. “Cosmic Wonder,” a group exhibition featuring more than 20 emerging and established artists and an artists collective, offers a new take on Whitman’s lines as well as on one of the other overarching themes of the poem: the complexity of the American identity.
The heart of “Cosmic Wonder” revolves around the soul — more specifically, around a 21st-century reading of spirituality and our current relationship with the natural world. Threaded throughout are propositions toward articuutf8g the self within the context of an increasingly chaotic society that’s split between the built environment (manufactured slabs of concrete and acres of glass, metal, and plastic) and the myriad holes (some might call them black) within cyberspace. In the exhibition introduction, guest curator Betty Nguyen writes that among other things, “Cosmic Wonder” is about the “relationship of the individual to the multitude.” The contemporary “I” contains multitudinous parts; the song of the self is a dissonant dirge in multiple echo chambers; the largess of self is refracted across numerous surfaces. How to find oneself in this fractured landscape?
The black-and-white DVD projection Untitled (Silver) by Takeshi Murata (whose Monster Movie was part of “The Zine Unbound” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last year) is more of a kinetic painting than a video — the aesthetic is that of a painterly pixilation made of swooping gestures, as if an invisible brush is drawing the action. A woman moves through an indiscernible landscape, her figure dissolving between the abstract and wholly recognizable. Set to a squishy electronic soundtrack composed by Robert Beatty and Ellen Mollé, it suggests the ways identity morphs as we move through real and virtual time, shape-shifting in order to adapt to whichever environment we’re in. A stream of pixels trails the woman’s figure, as if she’s leaving programming code and bits of herself behind as she wends her way through a so-called meatland (as cybergeeks refer to life off-line) and cyberspace.
Shrines abound in various forms: Yukinori Maeda’s Eclipse/Eclipse Weeping Rock floor installation; Paper Rad’s wall-mounted installation consisting of hundreds of paintings and drawings and four DVDs; Mark Borthwick’s photographs, drawings, and performance environment Is My Nature My Only Way; and a giant mandalalike site-specific wall painting by Hisham Bharoocha. Spend a little time in the main gallery and it becomes difficult to determine what could be considered a shrine and what’s straight-up installation, especially in the context of the remainder of the show. Although taking cues from religious configurations, these shrines embody a more current vision of how to access the divine. What is offered can be seen as a sort of shrine reclamation project that eschews any particular religious doctrine in favor of celebrating those things that strike a more universal chord (inasmuch as anything can be considered universal in this age of political and religious partisanship). At the end of one of the videos serving as the centerpiece of the work by Paper Rad (a collective hailing from Pittsburgh, Penn., and Northampton, Mass.), the voice-over narration asks for a “nonexclusive real prayer” to put to rest a robot battle involving the U2 iPod, Adam Sandler, and … I forget what else. The point is it would be nice to think a “nonexclusive real prayer” could be said to help resolve some of the conflicts currently raging around the world.
Nature’s beauty is championed through chosen material (Jose Alvarez’s sculptural paintings made of mineral crystals and seashells), content (Doug Aitken’s geometrically reconfigured landscape horizon lines), and intent (Mike Paré’s illustrations of blissed-out festivalgoers and ritual-inventing skateboarders). Arik Moonhawk Roper’s animation Lazarian Forest is a darker and perhaps more accurate depiction of our current relationship with nature. Set to a squawking, increasingly agitated soundtrack, a strange flower blooms in stop-motion stages. Leaves unfurl skyward, a bulb sprouts from its stem, and the music reaches a crescendo as the bulb slowly cracks open to reveal a green human skull — the simultaneous celebration and destruction of nature encapsulated. Very well, then, we contradict ourselves. SFBG
COSMIC WONDER
Through Nov. 5
Tues.–Wed. and Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$3–$6
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org
The slither king
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Meet the individual who just may be the coolest cat in America right now — snake handler Jules Sylvester, the guy responsible for charming winning performances out of Samuel L. Jackson’s fork-tongue costars in Snakes on a Plane. Sylvester, a Hollywood veteran who’s wrangled critters on everything from Men in Black (thousands of cockroaches) to Out of Africa (lions, dogs, and owls) to Arachnophobia (duh), is bar none the jolliest person I’ve ever talked to at 8:30 in the morning on the subject of killer snakes.
SFBG: What was your first reaction when you heard there was gonna be a movie called Snakes on a Plane? Most people are, like, “Say what?”
JULES SYLVESTER: That was my reaction too. I actually laughed my head off, like, there’s no way they’re gonna keep that title. I was quite impressed that Samuel L. Jackson liked the title so much that’s one of the reasons he took the movie.
SFBG: How do you direct snakes? Are they pretty smart?
JS: No, they’re thick as a brick! But each snake has his own slightly different character. It’s snake management more than anything. They’re not trained at all. People are very vain. We like to say our reptiles love us. They really don’t give a rat’s butt.
SFBG: So for particular scenes, they would say, “OK, we need a snake to fall here,” and you’d figure out which type to use?
JS: That’s correct. I had about 450 snakes I took up to [the set in] Canada.
SFBG: [Interrupting] Did you take them on a plane?
JS: I thought it was pretty tacky to put them on a plane to do a movie called Snakes on a Plane. So I drove them! When we actually filmed, I only used like 60 or 70 at any one time. I used them for maybe two hours on the set. The temperature by that time is pretty hot, and they’re getting a little tired. You take that team out and you bring in the second team, so you never exhaust your snakes.
SFBG: What’s the fiercest snake in the movie?
JS: Definitely the albino cobra. When I put him on the airplane seat and touched his tail, he turned around and he just laid into the cushion. He just chowed on that cushion. He kinda hoped it was me. [Laughs delightedly.] That’s just his job — his job is to be very pissed off.
SFBG: If you actually encountered a snake on a plane in real life, what should you do?
JS: Cover [the snake] with a blanket. It’s an awkward one, in that I know what I would do, but Joe Blow wouldn’t know what the hell to do. It’s like, screaming bloody murder and pointing at it is the worst thing you can do — that will panic everybody. SFBG
SNAKES ON A PLANE
Opens Fri/18
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
for theaters and showtimes
www.snakesonaplane.com
For the complete Jules Sylvester interview, visit www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Blow up
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER I’ve lived in the Bay Area for more years than I ever imagined I would back in my nomadic grad student days and devoured my share of quintessentially San Francisco experiences, like parking on the faux median on Valencia and falling drunkenly off an It’s Tops fountain stool round about 3 a.m. after tucking into a few too many down the street at Zeitgeist. But the one must-see post-punk happening I’ve always missed — never at the wrong place at the right time — was Survival Research Laboratories in full-effect performance mode. No wonder — weary of being shut down by the local fuzz and fire officials, founder Mark Pauline told me three years ago that SRL had decided to lavish their monstrous, robotic attentions on tolerant, fire-retardant overseas audiences in Europe and Japan instead — that is, until Aug. 11, when the longtime Potrero Hill area crew unfurled a new three-ring destructo-circus titled Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration at the Zero One festival in San Jose.
I hightailed it down to downtown San Jose to catch the seldom-sighted SRL flash their permits, then proceed to burn it all down. Late for the last media seating, I was told it was all good because SRL were moving very slowly (as slowly and deadly as their ’bots, I presumed) and to please have a survival kit in a brown paper sack: peanut butter crackers, Chips Ahoy!, a moist towelette, a bottle of water, and a pair of earplugs. In the back of the hall, the jumpsuited and helmeted SRL crew strolled merrily around, throwing bottles of water playfully at each other, testing flamethrowers, as we studied the grounds for signs of action. It felt like fishing or bird-watching — only the critters were big hunks of metal and the gods were knowing wiseacres who wear lots of black.
With an ominous turbine wail or two later it began — as a giant inverted foiled cross spun in place like a sacrilegious music box, a giant gold figure with a massive red phallus dropped Styrofoam balls, and a doghouse sheltering Cerebus shuddered. Purple lighting shot out of a towering Tesla coil and a woman beside me started screaming, “Omigod, that’s so cool!” Sorry, we all weren’t that dweebish — although almost everyone in earshot tended to laugh nervously in both fear and amazement as fire poured out of several flamethrowers in our corner and blew toasty gusts against our faces.
If you, er, burn at Black Rock, I guess you could consider this a preview of sorts. At one point, about five machines, including a short, squat teapotlike ’bot, were firing on all cylinders, blaze-wise, and that’s not even counting the V-1, a fire-farting flamethrower-shockwave canon that resembles the butt of a jet fighter. And of course fire without smoke loses a bit of the drama, so roving smoke machines were placed behind large rectangular photo screens depicting a gas station on fire, gap-mouthed kids, etc. And of course the flames started to spread, eating up the gold idols and turning the Lord of Balls into an impressive column of heat. Sparks flew into the sky, robots like the crabby, clutching Inchworm tussled in the center of it all, and the ungodly din of popping, whirring, and grinding sounded for all the world like a construction crew armed with Boeing engines run amok and set to detonate. What other mob would pride itself on creating “the loudest flamethrower in history”?
Me, I had to duck when the loudest machine of all, the shockwave canon, started lobbing rings of air left and right of our heads, taking the leaves off the surrounding trees. In the process of putting together a robot army, SRL created their own scary symphony, their own atonal, noise-drenched Ride of the Valkyries to go along with their future-war enactments. And by the end, even the hausfrauen in the bleachers raved about how they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the smoke- and noise-belching spectacle. In the aftermath, viewers gathered around the barriers like groupies, bickering over which ’bot was their favorite and picking the brains of the SRL-ers. Thank Vulcan, some things were sacred — there were no T-shirts on sale. Those are on the fire-retardant Web site (srl.org).
TACO LIBRE I suspect it takes either careful SRL-style planning — or its carefree antithesis — to achieve a much-coveted sense of freedom in performance — the latter approach is doubtless embraced by Inca Ore, a.k.a. Eva Saelens, once of Portland, Ore.’s Jackie-O Motherfucker and the Alarmist and of the Bay’s Gang Wizard and Axolotl. She was happily howling at the full moon in Oakland last week with her paramour and collaborator, Lemon Bear, in celebration of their noise–improv–sex magik album, The Birds in the Bushes (5RC, 2006), recorded in a cabin outside Tillamook, Ore. I spoke to the sweet, uncensored Saelens at about midnight, after some enchanted evening spent slow dancing in a parking lot to Mexican radio, finding inspiration in a fish taco, and playing music under the stars.
Saelens, 26, may not completely adore her current O-town abode — “It’s criminal how not affordable it is” — but at least she’s not on tour, as she has been for long periods with Jackie-O, Yellow Swans, and Axolotl. “When I was in Europe, we drove through Provence from Italy to Spain, and we couldn’t even get out to smell the lavender — we were so late,” she said sadly. “Touring is so frustrating — you really have to juice yourself. Even sometimes doing improv, it isn’t easy to bring it, but when you break through it’s like being in another world. Sometimes I’ll try to push an explosion or try to lose my mind, and if you do that on a nightly basis, it’s unreliable and it’s also abusive. You’re pushing your emotions in an athletic way, almost, and sometimes your body refuses to compete.”
For Saelens, it’s now a race to reach a meditative spot with a violin or clarinet — a change from the spooked state of her album. “We played the stove a lot, banged on bottles,” she said. This after Lemon Bear hacked his toe while chopping wood barefoot one morning. “We got sloppy — we were so happy.” SFBG
INCA ORE
Tues/22, 8 p.m.
Thee Parkside
1600 17th St., SF
Call for price
(415) 503-0393
Also with Tom Carter (and Ghosting, Bonus, and Axolotl)
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk St.
$6
(415) 923-0923
Milkbone
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Do you think lactation is sexy? My sister just had a baby, and her husband finds the breast-feeding all very erotic, and I told her there was something wrong with him. I said she should tell him to see a shrink, but she told me it didn’t really bother her. I’m worried he is brainwashing her. Do you know of any books I can give her? What should I say to keep her safe? Should I call child services if she doesn’t snap out of it?
Love,
Fretting Sis
Dear Sis:
Yikes! Are you serious? If anyone’s going to do any snapping out of anything, it had better be you. I did mention recently that I don’t find lactation or its accompanying equipment at all sexy, but my opinion here matters barely more than yours does; if it isn’t a problem for your sister, it isn’t a problem, period. I see that you want some drama and to get to be the hero and all, but too bad. Go find a stray kitten to rescue and leave your sister’s family alone.
It’s no surprise to me that the husband, incidental beneficiary of nature’s bounty, should appreciate his good fortune. Men like boobs! News at 11. Nor does it shock me that the occasional woman quite innocently experiences some sexual sensation while breast-feeding. We only have so many body parts and so many physiological responses: breast-feeding, orgasm, and emotional bonding, for instance, all release or respond to the same hormone, oxytocin, which also induces labor. For most people the pleasurable (orgasm) and the nearly unbearable (labor) could not be further apart, but individuals are not “most people.” Susie Bright, for instance, wrote about using a vibrator during labor and (I think) claimed to have had an orgasm while delivering her daughter. Pretty unusual, granted, but hell, it’s got to be better for you than an epidural.
We’ll never know how many women have felt a harmless little buzz while breast-feeding, and considering the attitudes out there (yours, for instance) we never will. It’s not just disapproval, either. Every once in a while there’s a story about a woman who’s admitted feeling something vaguely sexual while breast-feeding actually losing her kids. (OK, in the most famous of these the kid was three, which does change things, but still.)
It may be difficult to establish the requisite distance when there’s a baby involved, but it would behoove you to learn the difference between “I think that’s weird” and “I think that’s wrong and dangerous and I have the responsibility to do something about it.” Or try it this way: if you hear that your brother-in-law is turned on by the baby, then by all means freak out and panic and leap into action. If, on the other hand, you hear that he’s turned on by his own wife’s breasts, well, shut up and go home.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I told my husband that I got hit on at the grocery store. I told the guy I was married and I walked away. Well, my husband apparently felt the need to prove to me he’s desirable too. So he tells me how he was “joking” with this cashier, asking, “Do you want to go for a ride?” “In your truck?” she asked. He replied, “I didn’t say anything about my truck.” She wanted to take him up on it, but she wasn’t getting off work for a few hours. He shrugged and said that he had to go, never once telling her that he was married.
We don’t wear rings; I know I’m married and I make sure any guy who tries to hit on me knows too. I’m kinda upset with my husband now. He doesn’t understand why. What do you think?
Love,
Check Me Out
Dear Check:
I think he’s kind of a tool or was at any rate behaving in a tool-like manner. It isn’t merely that he was playing a nasty little game with you, although I’d think that would be bad enough, but what about the cashier, whom he was using as a cheap prop or pawn? He behaved caddishly toward her as well. One can only hope that she was playing him right back, planning to amuse her girlfriends later with the story of that horn-dog married guy at the store today, what a tool.
It’s not his childish insistence on getting you back that bothers me most, though. He was obnoxious to the cashier and toolish to you, but not understanding why you’d mind these things makes him an idiot, and that is pretty close to unforgivable.
You will forgive him, of course, after explaining one more time exactly what he did wrong. You pretty much have to, since you don’t, I assume, want to have to get a new husband. It’s hard enough to get a new grocery store, and I don’t see either of you going back to the old one, do you?
Love,
Andrea
Clubber’s index
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO To paraphrase an even bigger Gaye than me: what the fuck’s going on? Bloodshed and glitter, testosterone and falsies, international hatred and asymmetrical haircuts, Katyusha missiles and fuchsia Converse. It’s the middle of summer: Clubland’s on fire and the world’s going to hell. Everything’s a water-based-mascara blur, a streak of tears and soju. Can’t we keep the wars on the dance floor, where they belong? Help us, Willie Ninja! Save us, Amanda Lepore! Rescue us, what’s-her-name from the Gossip!
It’s really all gone, Pete Tong.
Well, fine with me: I’ve got my apocalyptic outfit all picked out, with two different pairs of tangerine pumps to match the flames. The problem, of course, is which hair — Meyer lemon yellow for the toxic blast or Bing cherry red for the fallout? The earth’s gonna ’splode and I’m going down like an atomic Carmen Miranda, child. But first I’ll be glowing under the black-light sleaze. Our politics of dancing may have lamed out (no mosh pits, break wars, or vogue balls), but there’s still no escaping the thrill of the electric boogaloo, especially when the brink wiggles ever closer, its plutonium-lashed antimatter Betty Boop eyes blasting through you. Party time!
Unfortunately or fortunately, that means I’m writing to you from a denial-induced metafabulous blackout. The last two weeks are coming back to me in strobe-lit flashes, a wet jockstrap here, a fogged-up Prius there, and everywhere the stink of cheap whiskey on my breath. Oh, but I’m dutiful. Below is a Harper’s-like rundown of my recently recalled Clubland affairs, a fortnight of forthright escapist fandango.
Soundtracks: DJ B’ugo, a.k.a. Ugo N’gan’ga Gitau of Montreal (www.bugo.dj). All three discs of the new Defected Records Eivissa 2006 Balearic house mix. Old Slits. CNN in the liquor store
Shoes: brown suede Emericas. Grape Kool-Aid shell toe Adidas. Fuzzy gorilla slippers. No Crocs
Outerwear: Home Depot and ImagiKnit
Underwear: conceptual
Drag queen out of drag most encountered: Peaches Christ
Drag queen out of clothing most encountered: Rentteca
Burning Man camp fundraisers successfully avoided: 157
Number unsuccessfully avoided: 36
Cute Israeli refugees I managed to drag home: 2
Cute Lebanese refugees who thanked me politely but said they “weren’t having it”: 12
Number I continued hitting on anyway: 12
Roller-skating-oriented nightlife events attended: 5
Bruised inner thighs: several
Trampled wigs: half
Efforts to really go check out that new club Shine (shinesf.com) being derailed by more focused pick-up efforts of eager, scruffy bicyclists on South Van Ness on the way there: many
Formal reprimands received at the Dore Alley gay leather fetish fair for doing something that “wasn’t allowed”: 1
Times I got away with it: roughly 3
Thwarted attempts to register for the upcoming San Francisco Drag King contest just so I could hang out in the dressing room: 2
Trips to the bathroom during the Guardian Best of the Bay party to puke up free petite sirah: still counting
Amount of self-respect somehow retained throughout all of the above: pricey SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO DRAG KING CONTEST
Thurs/17
Call for time and price
DNA Lounge
375 11th St., SF
(415) 626-1409
www.sfdragkingcontest.com
{Empty title}
Playing with his balls
MLB 06: The Show
(Sony; Sony PSP)
GAMER This was supposed to be a review of the FIFA World Cup game, but I hate soccer. So instead I am covering this totally awesome baseball game. The Show is something like the 10th generation of these games from Sony. So if you’ve been keeping up, there are few changes in the playing of the game itself. Instead there are some cool new features.
First of all, when custom-creating a player, you can load in personal photos and put your own face or someone else’s on the player’s head. Or maybe you would like your player to have a giant beaver instead of a face. The possibilities are endless.
There is also a rivalry mode in which you can track the jillions of stats from games you play against a chosen friend. I have no friends, so I have not tried this particular feature. But if I had the Show back in 2002 when my friend and I were locked in a mortal, daily war with Dreamcast World Series Baseball 2K1 (Pedro Martinez on the cover — also the best baseball video game ever made), this function would have come in handy. I don’t know that I’ve ever been as angry at a person as when my “friend” — Guardian hack and self-defense nut Jason Boronski — incessantly ran up the score with something he called “chaos on the base paths,” a.k.a. cheating. One time during a very tense seventh inning when the wheels just came off and the Cheater made an impressive nine-run comeback, a deadly silence fell on the room. Staring straight at the TV, playing the game out in smoldering, angry silence, I waited for the last straw so I could throw my controller as hard as I could — at the wall, at the screen, at Boronski’s face. I honestly didn’t know where it was going. I just knew I was approaching total madness. Boronski’s response: “I’m actually afraid of you right now.” Good times, good times.
The makers of the Show have added a really amazing number of cuts to the play — including batter walk ups and pitcher reactions. I used to click right through these, but the other day my shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, hit a three-run homer and the cut showed him walking into the dugout where he was totally ignored by his teammates who customarily would be congratuutf8g him. These irreal video beings were messing with his mind! Incredible. Now I watch all the cutaways to see how much more exciting my life can be. Thank you, game makers.
You do have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this game fully. Just a warning. (Mike McGuirk)
Keeping it hyperreal
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
It’s our bright and hazy fortune to be living in an age in which each day presents some new means of communicating with one another. So why does life itself come to feel ever more atomized, more suffocating, more confusing and lonely? Can it really be true that no man is poor who has Friendster?
Remote, the latest multimedia performance piece from partners Sara Kraft and Ed Purver, explores this distance, this ambivalence inside our desire to connect with one another amid proliferating technologies of communication and control. With performers Ernie Lafky and Rowena Richie, Kraft and Purver use a keen assemblage of live video feed, video-based art (all of it mixed live by Purver), Internet hookups, exuberant performance, and music to present a dispersed series of “lab studies.” These run the gamut from everyday text messaging between a bicoastal couple (Kraft and Purver) to the deeply ominous if also comical attempts by the US government in the 1970s to harness paranormal psychic phenomena for use by its military and intelligence apparatus.
This latter dimension of Remote’s evocative archaeology takes the mediation of everyday life in its most overtly sinister direction. Based on extensive research, including use of declassified CIA documents and interviews with key participants, Remote pursues its themes through the belly of the beast — in real-life programs and experiments (reproduced in various cunning and wry ways here) that had bruised military careerists attempting to walk through walls, would-be “psi warriors” trying to implode goats with bursts of psychic energy, and intel gatherers vigorously massaging their temples in an effort to peep into far-flung corners of the globe without leaving the office. (These strategies have since been made unnecessary by new technologies of remote surveillance and destruction — a point underscored in Remote by ghostly infrared images associated with the military’s remote human targeting.)
Moreover, as in the path they cut with 2002’s Woods for the Trees, Kraft and Purver pursue Remote’s themes through the prism of their own relationship — which came eerily to resemble the project they had already begun when Purver relocated to New York. Presenting their lives through the very media sustaining their real relationship gives supple and transparent significance to the projected image of a couple literally interfacing with one another across the ether of the Internet.
Throughout Remote’s nonnarrative sequence of scenes, the social and psychological reification that treats human beings as physical objects (and even goats as “targets”) blends and contrasts with the primacy of human subjectivity, casting its own “projections” onto the physical world, whether in the name of emotional affinity or under the guise of scientific, clinical, or technological detachment. The theme gives rise to a number of inspired, gorgeous scenic compositions integrating Kraft and Purver’s video work, Frieda Kipar’s enveloping lighting design, Sheldon B. Smith’s haunting soundscapes, and Kraft’s melodic refrains (“The farther you are, the closer I feel to you. Stay away. Please stay away…”). The mise-en-scène shrewdly unites media and theme to make at once obvious and strange the Möbius strip carrying technological and mental projections of ourselves to the world and back again.
At the same time, there’s much laughter in Remote’s investigation of these fundamentally absurd situations. Even a little too much. (The recurring attempt by the psi warrior–in–training to explode the heart of the inert goat, for instance, comes perilously close to beating a dead horse.) But then, pinpointing the humor in the otherwise bleak and chilling territory of the postmodern is an integral and mostly successful part of Kraft and Purver’s revelatory mode. Remote lacks some of the consistency of their earlier work. Still, they have a proven knack for conveying the authentic human voice singing in those darkened woods and between those flickering screens. SFBG
REMOTE
Thurs/10–Sat/12, 8 p.m.
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission, SF
$15–$20
(415) 435-7552
www.kraftpurver.com
www.counterpulse.org
Rage and resistance
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“It’s a whole different feeling on the East Coast.” Raymond “Boots” Riley, Oakland’s most famously outspoken rapper, is talking. The Coup, the group he’s led for more than a decade, has just returned from a series of spring New York dates. Their latest album, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph), has just dropped. It’s a good time to clock the distance between the coasts. “They’ve got a whole different code of language and lifestyle — and the same with the political energy that’s there. It doesn’t even translate,” he says. “We were in New York for four days, and like the old saying goes, ‘It’s a nice place to visit.’”
He pauses, perhaps for breath, perhaps to check himself, before continuing, “There are a million things to plug into back there. You don’t even have time to make a mistake. With all the stuff you hear about Oakland, the truth is that people walk down the street and say ‘what’s up’ to each other even when they’re strangers.”
For Riley, that sense of community is crucial. It keeps him going. Because exposing the dark hand behind the daily injustices heaped on the populace — and empowering people to stand against it — is what Riley is all about. Beginning with the Coup’s 1992 debut, Kill My Landlord (Wild Pitch), through his latest, the group’s fifth full-length, he has created a deeply personal, heartfelt, often funny body of work that captures the East Bay’s radical legacy, as well as its funky, booty-shaking musical sensibility.
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
For those whose eyes were focused on other things — understandable under the circumstances — the original drop date for the Coup’s fourth album, Steal This Album: Party Music (75 Ark), was 9/11. If current events weren’t enough, the original cover featured Riley and Coup DJ Pam the Funkstress in front of a crumbling World Trade Center. It got the group a fair bit of publicity — not all of it favorable, including scrutiny from the political police. The result was that in some quarters, Party Music was seen as too hot to handle.
It contributed to a potentially lethal — career-wise — four-year-plus interlude between albums. Riley is frank about the delay.
“A couple of years were about us touring to make sure that people found out about that album,” he explains. “For a long time when we toured, we’d get into town and find out that the album wasn’t in the stores. I don’t apologize for anything about that album, and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t just disappear.”
But a nearly five-year wait?
“Well,” Riley says, “there was the business of what did I want the next album to be. And in the past, the first 12 songs I liked, there was the album. But this time, I had 100 songs I liked, I kept obsessing about the music, and a lot of that was me running away from making the album.” Party Music may not have gone putf8um, but it boosted the Coup’s visibility and reputation among more than just funk lovers. The past few years have seen an upsurge in political activism, and the group managed to find fans among those who like rebellion with their music. High expectations came with the territory.
“I got sidetracked when I started this album for a little bit,” says Riley. “I set out thinking I was going to have to address everything in the world. I was taking on too much.”
It’s instructive to understand what “too much” means to Riley.
“At first I’d think about writing a song that would break down the Palestinians’ fight for land,” he says. It led to what he calls overthinking the problem. “Some people look out at the world and see things simply. I see things in their complications. It’s how I understand the world, but it also can lead to problems. That comes out in my music sometimes, because I can always do something over by just erasing a line.”
What this led to in the case of Bigger Weapon was a classic hurry-up-and-wait situation. There was a time, for instance, when Riley would go into the studio and just follow his instincts. Now many listeners were knocking at the door. The president of Epitaph, Andy Caulkins, was one of them.
“He’d call me,” Riley remembers, “and say, ‘We’re really excited about this album. It’s really the time for it.’ ‘Laugh, Love, Fuck,’ a kind of personal manifesto, was the first song I turned in. After a few of my conversations, I’d be wondering if this was what they expected. But I realized that what motivates me to think about things on a world scale, it has to do with what is happening in my town, how it’s similar and dissimilar to what’s going on in the world. Otherwise it’s like I’m sitting in class, and it’s just a bunch of facts. When I first got into organizing I was 15, and I was really excited about learning things, and I think I read every book that was shoved at me. What stuck with me is the parts of the books that my actual real life made clear.
“How I write best is just me being myself — when I have what I call moments of clarity — just feeling things, reacting to things as I live my life. That’s when it works.”
The material is so personal that at moments Riley had difficulty handling the idea of a public hearing. “I have songs on here,” he says, “that I couldn’t look at people when I first played them … ‘I Just Want to Lay Around in Bed with You’ and ‘Tiffany Hall.’ The last one is about a friend of mine and what her death signifies to me. Those songs were hard for me in that very personal way.”
These tracks were foreshadowed by cuts like “Wear Clean Drawers” and the wrenching “Heaven Tonight” from Party Music. The former is a kind of heartfelt message to his young daughter warning her about the difficulties that life has in store for her; the latter is built around the story of a young woman with hunger pangs that are the unjust punishment of poverty.
At the time that he wrote “Drawers,” Riley remembers thinking, “Maybe this isn’t why I got into rapping, that I needed to break the whole system down.”
In fact, his songs do indict the system, like the tracks on the latest album — not by imparting lofty lessons, but by focusing on the human particulars. Ultimately, the album shows a confident Riley at home with an unambiguous approach to songwriting.
TAKE THE POWER
To say that the rapper is unapologetic doesn’t begin to describe his resolve. The truth is that he never budged from the original World Trade Center a flambé cover of Party Music, and there’s no give in Pick a Bigger Weapon. The title itself works two ways: as advice to the dispossessed and as a challenge to the powers that be.
“In my life,” he says casually, “I’m still probably the only person I kick it with who considers himself a revolutionary. I mean, I’m not in an organization, but I think that in this world the people can take power.
There are no doubt folks who feel that Riley lives in a different universe. When asked about the skeptical among us, he tells a story he heard from guitarist Tom Morello of the late rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine. Morello has become a Riley friend and fellow traveler who can be found on occasion playing behind the Coup, as well as working with Riley as a guitar-rap duo. According to the guitarist, Rage some years ago was working on a video with outspoken director Michael Moore. The idea was for Rage to arrive on Wall Street on a busy workday, where they’d set up and play, loud. The financial district population would, they thought, be pushed up against the wall by the Rage challenge.
What happened was unexpected, and for Riley serves as a case in point. “They showed up on Wall Street,” he explains, “and expected all kinds of chaos with people scared, threatened by their music, and the police coming and everything. But what happened was, out of the financial district came about 100 people in suits chanting, ‘Suits for Rage! Suits for Rage!’ The point is that there are a lot of people who don’t want to be part of the system and don’t see themselves as part of it.”
“We all hear about the problems, like you can’t say anything or the FBI’s gonna put you in jail,” continues Riley. “But the thing is that people need to feel empowered. I try to make music first that makes me feel good about life, that makes me feel empowered. Some beats make you feel like, ‘Damn, I’m gonna beat somebody’s ass,’ and sometimes might do that, but I try to make music that draws on a lot of different feelings.”
As Riley says, the album has many flavors. But when all is said and done, the essential message can be found on the first full track, “We Are the Ones.” Over a booming, bouncy bass line, he sounds almost laid-back as he raps, “We, we are the ones/ We’ll see your fate/ Tear down your state/ Go get your guns.”
It’s frank, on the ferocious side, and exactly what audiences have come to expect from the Coup. It took Riley nearly five years to release it, but Pick a Bigger Weapon is in your hands. Use it wisely. SFBG
THE COUP
With T-Kash and Ise Lyfe
Sat/12, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$20
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
LIFE IS SHORT
In its almost 27 minutes, Samantha Reynolds’s Back to Life doesn’t break down the history of taxidermy, but it does prod, stumble, and finesse its way into some memorably off-kilter portraiture, not to mention insight about mortality. Her decision to be on camera initially might seem amateurish (especially after the movie’s opening animation), but as a surrogate viewer, she achieves an uncomfortable intimacy with her subjects. And her subjects are something else. They include one taxidermist who is simply continuing the family business and another whose creative memento mori urges are directly connected to family horror: a father who shot himself and an uncle who committed matricide, for starters. “I put it in her hands before I pushed the button,” the latter taxidermist says, referring to the book I’m OK, You’re OK and another relative, both now in powder form in a glass bottle on her mantle.
There are no Norman Bates types in this doc, just bereaved pet owners, artists dealing with their lot in life, and businesspeople doing their job — a job that just happens to involve sawing off the legs and heads of dead pets to make molds, a task that Reynolds herself joins in on with a grimace. Back to Life is just one of the many byways available in the varied programming of “SF Shorts” — the first San Francisco International Festival of Short Films. Even better is Kim Romano’s Muriel, a profile of a 67-year-old woman in Key West who tosses off one-liners that Woody Allen would covet; Romano has a gift for funny and even poignant framing, and there are more vivid characters in her 19-minute movie than you’d find in a full day of Sundance drama features. Overseen by a jury that includes filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, the seven programs include sections devoted to documentary and comedy. Festival directors James Kenney and Michael Coyne took in over 900 entries before choosing 56. That last number includes a movie by Melissa Joan Hart, a.k.a. the director formerly known as Sabrina the teenage witch. (Johnny Ray Huston)
SF SHORTS
Thurs/10–Sat/12
See Film listings for venues
and showtimes
$9–$10
(877) 714-7668
www.sfshorts.org
Fifteen, minute
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The sweet 16 has nothing on your average quinceañera, a celebration of reaching womanhood at age 15 that has roots in ancient Aztec civilization and is a tradition still very much alive throughout the Americas. Not unlike the bank-breaking theatrics of debutante balls, weddings, and bar mitzvahs in other communities, there’s often a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses extravagance to them that celebrates prosperity and community as much as youth and the coming-of-age.
Two such blowouts bookend Quinceañera, which won both the Grand Jury and Audience awards for Best Dramatic Feature at Sundance this year. Dazzled by her cousin Eileen’s bash — complete with DJ, live band, and Hummer limo with lighted stripper pole in the back — 14-year-old Magdalena (Emily Rios) begins stoking her own delusions of imminent coming-out grandeur. This dismays her less-than-prosperous priest-by-day, security-guard-by-night dad (Jesus Castaños), who likes to think of his little girl as pure, simple, and devout. That image takes a worse beating when he finds out Magdalena is in, you know, “trouble” — something that freakishly came about despite her not having gone all the way with on-off boyfriend Herman (Ramiro Iniguez).
When the physical evidence can no longer be hidden, the domestic consequences are predictably dire, and Magdalena ends up another black sheep taken in by Tío Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), the great-uncle who “loves everyone and judges no one.” Already in residence is Magdalena’s cousin and Eileen’s tattooed, muscle-bound, cholo sibling Carlos (Jesse Garcia), thrown out by his parents for being a “liar and a thief and a pothead and a gay.” He sure acts the part of bad news, though like Magdalena may well be more sinned against than sinner.
Both ashamed of past deeds and uncertain what their futures hold, the cousins cohabit uneasily, the household barely kept afloat by Tomas’s earnings as the neighborhood champurrado vendor and Carlos’s at the local car wash. At least the latter is getting some action — when a yuppie gay couple (David W. Ross and Jason L. Wood) buys the Echo Park property encompassing the front house and Tomas’s longtime rear garden rental, Carlos becomes the nightly “peanut butter in their sandwich,” as Magdalena snorts. But this too turns problematic, raising issues of gentrification, fidelity, and economic power, which the movie is careful not to hammer too heavily.
A gay couple who themselves live in Echo Park — the idea for this movie arose when they were asked to photograph the quinceañera of their neighbors’ daughter — cowriters-codirectors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland risk overstacking the deck with a heavy-handed screenplay. But Quinceañera takes the mantle from 2006’s Junebug as the hugely satisfying little late-summer movie amid so many bigger ones worth skipping. Its pet project genuineness is especially heartening given that Glatzer and Westmoreland (who previously codirected 2000’s idiosyncratic The Fluffer) are longtime toilers in the Hollywood trenches where not much art is made, let alone for art’s sake: one has done a whole lotta reality TV (including conceiving America’s Next Top Model), while the other’s résumé includes such one-handed wonders as Dr. Jackoff and Mr. Hard. SFBG
QUINCEAÑERA
Opens Fri/11
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.sonyclassics.com/quinceanera
Found in translation
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
In early ’80s Hollywood, director John Byrum set about making a film set in ’20s Paris. Coming down from the nouveau bohemian high of filming 1980’s Heart Beat, a film based on Carolyn Cassidy’s accounts of Jack Kerouac, Byrum was fully prepared to tickle the underbelly of the poetic avant-garde. He aimed to do so through a film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
The Razor’s Edge tells the story of Larry Darrell, a young American who has just returned from war and decided to loaf around Paris to find the meaning of his life. From there, Maugham unravels some of the most misunderstood fibers of the human condition: jealousy, love, antipathy, lust, greed, and spirituality. Steeped in sex, drugs, murder, and philosophy, the novel had been the basis for a 1946 film starring Tyrone Power and Anne Baxter. Byrum brought a copy of the book to his friend Margaret “Mickey” Kelley, who was holed up in the hospital after giving birth.
“The very next night around four in the morning, the phone rings and it was Mickey’s husband, Bill [Murray],” Byrum remembers, via phone from his home in Connecticut. “All he said was, ‘This is Larry, Larry Darrell.’”
That sealed the deal. With a marquee name in tow, Byrum was set to remake The Razor’s Edge, starring Bill Murray — in his first-ever dramatic role. Throwing conventional script-writing out the passenger side window, the pair soon drove across America to write the screenplay. Murray and Byrum returned with a script that bore no resemblance to the 1946 film version. They even wove a farewell speech to Murray’s late friend John Belushi into the text.
There was just one problem: they had to find someone to let them make the thing. “I’ll tell you who got this movie made,” Byrum says. “It was Dan Aykroyd. Dan pointed out that we could give Ghostbusters to Columbia in exchange for a green light on The Razor’s Edge — Bill was convinced. Forty-five minutes later we had a caterer.” This devil’s bargain is par for the course. Hollywood legend has it that Tyrone Power committed to do one more Zorro movie for the privilege of playing Larry Darrell.
The film that took a drive around the country to write would soon take a trip around the world to film — the boys found the rest of their cast and set out. With Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, and Denholm Elliott in tow, the next year and a half would see the crew touch down in France, Switzerland, and India. The moment the last shot wrapped, Murray was on a plane to the set of Ghostbusters.
The Razor’s Edge — starring Bill Murray and shot entirely on location with a $12 million budget and a ridiculously talented cast — bombed. In a big way. Ghostbusters, the film Murray agreed to do only to get this one made, was released just weeks before, and it more than eclipsed Byrum and Murray’s labor of love, which ultimately ended up grossing only $6.5 million.
“I knew we weren’t going to get Oscars and fame from it,” says Byrum. “But when the film tanked so badly, Bill went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne because he was sick of the movie business.”
Twenty years later, Bill Murray has established himself as a master of dramatic roles, and the irony isn’t lost on Byrum, who at least gets to enjoy The Razor’s Edge’s ascendant cult movie status. “I wish I hadn’t gotten there first,” he says. “But when you get to do all these things making a movie, who cares if it’s a hit? I mean, it helps — but who cares?”
THE RAZOR’S EDGE
Tues/15, 7 and 9:30 p.m. (part of the Castro’s “70mm Series,” Aug. 11–19)
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$6–$9
(415) 621-6120
www.castrotheatre.com
To hell with the world
One question that has swirled around Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is whether it is too soon to make a film about the WTC attacks. Survivors have compared their experiences to Bruce Willis movies, The Planet of the Apes, and The Towering Inferno, and the rest of us only ever experienced the event as representation anyway — is it too soon to turn a disaster film into a disaster film? Or is it too soon to turn the deaths of more than 2,700 people into entertainment?
Perhaps fearing such criticism, Stone doesn’t entertain; instead, he’s created one of the most plodding disaster flicks ever made. By focusing on two Port Authority police officers trapped beneath the rubble, Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) and John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), Stone tries to form a heavily underlined allegory about passing through hell to make it to the light.
There is an oft-repeated urban legend about an actress — Pia Zadora, usually — who is so awful in a theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank that during the second act, as the Nazis are searching the house, somebody in the audience calls out, “They’re in the attic!” Cage approaches that level of performance here. He usually conveys “befuddled” and “dopey” with a kind of genius, but Stone highlights his regular-guy qualities and removes humor and irony to create a caricature of virtuous and inarticulate American masculinity. Cage’s failed attempt to act against type combined with Stone’s blaring sentimentality might easily lead audiences to hope against hope that the next crumbling building will drop a girder just so and end this tortured performance for good.
The sappy music and fuzzy domestic scenes that Stone relies on to convince us we should care about his characters only suggest instead that Americans, in our relationship to technology, have stopped being human. Stone, at least, seems to believe that we wouldn’t know what to feel about death and salvation without an orchestra drowning out our ability to feel anything but contrived replicas of grief and hope. Cute and heartwarming moments usually serve to negate the reality of death. More profound cinematic journeys into hell, such as Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, with its creepy Hello Kitty bags, and Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, with its badass fuzzy heroine, face death, complexify reality, and transform cute into its opposite; Hotel Rwanda never uses the “heartwarming” survival of its heroes to look away from the deaths of thousands. Turning historical events into heartwarming allegories is a problem generally, because it creates meaning at the expense of complexity; it’s also a problem specifically, because America didn’t actually pass through hell on Sept. 11 but settled in and began vigorously exporting hell.
If you expected Stone to give voice to the conspiracy theories that serve as a dreamworld underbelly to the official story, you’ll be disappointed. You want to feel the deep cosmic sadness that such mass death and terror deserve? Sorry. As a historian, Stone has made a career out of distorting our collective mythologies. He waited almost 20 years to make the Doors pompous and boring (The Doors, 1991), about 30 to take the fun out of “Who shot JFK?” conspiracy theories (JFK, 1991), and millennia to make Greek imperialism trite and campy (Alexander, 2004). Instead of the Native Americans who often pop up in Stone’s films to deliver wise and mystical sentences, there is an apocalyptic Christian ex-Marine, Dave Karnes, (Michael Shannon) saying things like, “God put this curtain of smoke here to hide something we aren’t yet ready to see.”
Or at least something horrible and complicated that Stone isn’t ready to show us. Jimeno has his own visions of Christ with a water bottle, and Karnes goes off at film’s end to Iraq to avenge the attack. Stone might like to hide his reactionary focus on vengeance and family values behind the screen of a true story, but his waving flags, footage of President Bush, Christian imagery, and use of the word evil are choices that convey obvious political messages. Although many were too distracted by Colin Farrell’s silly blond wig to notice, Stone already revealed his secret affection for imperial military adventures in Alexander. Even worse, World Trade Center doesn’t have any silly blond wigs to distract us and keep us from pondering the political message of making an apocalyptic catastrophe as boring as hell. (Stephen Beachy)
Stone’s throw
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Still several entries short of being its own disaster-movie subgenre, the miniwave of Sept. 11 cinema continues with Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Scrubbed of any JFK-style theorizing, Stone’s respectful take on the tragedy focuses on a pair of Port Authority Police Department officers who were pulled alive from the Twin Towers rubble 12 hours after the buildings collapsed.
The film’s tagline promises “a true story of courage and survival,” and indeed World Trade Center goes for the uplift-amid-tragedy jugular. The 9/11 movies may be here, but it’s clearly still too early to dramatize the events without offering catharsis. Even United 93, Paul Greengrass’s take on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, spun its obviously devastating final moments into a tribute to its hijacker-defeating passengers. World Trade Center stacks the sentimental deck even higher by plopping movie stars (Nicolas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crash’s Michael Peña) into the disaster. While United 93 had a nearly documentary feel, with nonactors in key roles and gritty handheld camerawork, World Trade Center is classically cinematic, foregoing a sprawling retelling of the 9/11 story in favor of a tightly compacted exploration of human determination.
The day starts like any other, as PAPD cops John McLoughlin (Cage) and Will Jimeno (Peña) settle into their routine, tracking runaways and giving directions to tourists. Suddenly there’s a shadow overhead, a terrible sound, and the men are hustling several blocks to aid the evacuation of the first World Trade Center tower to be hit — accidentally, they think — by an airplane. Stone never shows the planes’ impact; within the film’s world, context (and explicit mention of terrorists) feeds in via televisions blaring in the background of nearly every scene that takes place beyond ground zero. Even when the towers collapse, trapping McLoughlin and Jimeno deep within a perilous pile of stone and metal, neither realizes what Stone assumes every viewer will already know about Sept. 11 chronology.
At a certain point, World Trade Center splinters. McLoughlin and Jimeno cling to life, chatting back and forth about pop culture (since the film is drawn from the men’s own recollections, it’s entirely likely the Starsky and Hutch conversation really took place), their intense pain, and their families. Meanwhile, Donna McLoughlin (Bello) and Allison Jimeno (Gyllenhaal) anxiously await news of their missing husbands, with golden-hued flashbacks reminding all partners of happy domestic moments they’ve been taking for granted. There’s a brief the-whole-world-is-watching montage that illustrates grief on an international level. And, of course, there’s President Bush on the news spewing rhetoric, inspiring ex-Marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) to don his military gear and head to New York City to help out.
The problem here isn’t in the way Stone and first-time scripter Andrea Berloff characterize these real-life people as almost supernaturally brave under extraordinary circumstances (Jimeno’s personal encounter with Jesus is World Trade Center’s “ride the snake” moment, but it kinda works amid the ongoing theme of faith as a survival tool). And it’s not that the film disregards the people who died that day. The tone here is very, very reverent. But it’s telling that World Trade Center focuses on a success story; unlike the characters in United 93, which built off a few cell phone calls to reconstruct the flight’s last frantic moments, World Trade Center’s heroes lived to share their memories, sickly sweet what-should-we-name-the-baby arguments included.
By focusing so intently on just the McLoughlins and the Jimenos (and to a lesser extent Karnes, a rather one-note concession to Stone’s military fixation) the film leaves the door open for countless Sept. 11–related movies to come. It’s just a question of whether future filmmakers will hew to Greengrass’s example and go raw or create movies like Stone’s World Trade Center: a bit overcooked. SFBG
WORLD TRADE CENTER
Opens Wed/9
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.wtcmovie.com
The Death of me
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Wanna know the surest way to mortify me or send me skulking into the shadows? Bludgeon me with praise. Single me out with love. It just makes the misanthrope in me squirm like a worm at the end of hook. That was the sweet but unintentionally sinister sensation at the “Girls Just Wanna Have Chun” show at the Stork Club on Aug. 5 with Pillows, Liz Albee, and other all-girl bands, inspired by, I’m told, my recent cover story [“Where Did All the Girl Bands Go,” 7/19/06]. I feared some sort of roasting and de-ribbing until one of the organizers, Suki O’Kane, reassured me her intentions were honorable. “I hear you cluckin’, big chicken,” she helpfully e-mailed. Yup, fightin’ words got me to the club on time, but that didn’t stop an acute sense of self-consciousness from washing over my sorry PBR-swilling self.
You realize then that on some off-days you were just never psychologically prepared to leave home. Even indie rock pros like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service know what I’m blathering on about. I spoke to the DCC guitarist-vocalist while he lounged in a bus outside the big ole barn he was scheduled to play at Penn State that night, and he fessed up to the struggle to deliver when he wasn’t feeling it. “I’ll be perfectly honest — there have been times when I can be a little bitch on stage,” he said. “I’m trying to always harness my inner Wayne Coyne. Y’know, WWWCD — what would Wayne Coyne do?”
The spunky Death Cabbies I first caught at the Bottom of Hill have truly made the leap from “shows” to “concerts,” as Gibbard put it, something he jokes about with his bandmates. “We started touring in ’98, playing to nobody and eating mustard sandwiches,” he explained. “You go out a year later, and there’s maybe 50 people there, and then the next time there’s 150 people there…. It’s been such a gradual kind of build that it doesn’t feel outlandish to me. I can’t imagine what a band like the Arctic Monkeys must feel like, and I’m glad this is happening to us five records in rather than one or two records in. I think we were one of the last generation of bands to develop pre-Pitchfork, pre–blog culture, and that’s fortunate.”
Chatty, thoughtful, and up for analyzing this crazy little thing called the music biz, Gibbard has obviously given quality thought time to blogatistas’ impact on his musical genre. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens, because I have this horrible premonition that blog culture will turn the United States into the UK,” he added. “You know how the NME is this awful, horrific publication that before a band even has a single out lauds them as the greatest thing since sliced bread and then as soon as their full-length comes out says they’re past their prime?
“I’m just so kind of over fashion rock and all its different forms. Coming out of the last three or four years of dance punk and bands that want to be Wire, it’s kind of exciting to see a band that’s just really rocking out in earnest ways.”
But what about Postal Service (which Gibbard said he plans to revisit sometime next year, before DCC begin work on their next album) — aren’t they dance punk? “I don’t think if I’m involved in it in any way that it can be in any way … punk, at all,” he said with a laugh.
FASHION LASHIN’ CSS (of Sao Paulo, Brazil), a.k.a. Cansei de Ser Sexy or Tired of Being Sexy, would know a wee bit about fashion, blog jams, ad nauseated. Gibbard’s Postal Service labelmates on Sub Pop have managed something nigh impossible to our Electroclash-crashed consciousnesses: they manage to reference Paris Hilton on their new self-titled album and not sound like shopping-damaged sluts whom you want to slap.
It helps that the mostly femme ensemble kicks off its new album with the self-explanatory chant “CSS Suxxx” and goes on to charm with überdanceable joints like “Artbitch” (“Lick lick lick my art-tit … suck suck suck my art-hole”). Vocalist Lovefoxxx is one earthy, superenthused, helpful mama to boot. CSS met through common friends and photo logs. “We had daily jobs, so we’d spend all day in front of the computer,” the 22-year-old ex–graphic designer rasped from Houston. She’s since moved on. “Silly teenagers started to join it.”
The lady has an endearingly visual way of describing the band: “It’s like if you have a dog and you get your golden retriever to go with a Labrador and then you get weird puppy sex.” So help me with this picture: what is an “art tit”? “Art tit was like artist, and art hole sounds like asshole,” she explained patiently. “It doesn’t get deeper than that, Kimberly.” SFBG
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
With Spoon and Mates of State
Fri/11, 7 p.m.
Greek Theatre
Gayley Road, UC Berkeley, Berk.
$35
www.ticketmaster.com
CSS
With Diplo and Bonde do Role
Thurs/10, 11 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$15
(415) 625-8880
GET OUT
BLEEDING EDGE FESTIVAL
The Valley is alive with the sound of … art. In conjunction with the ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA gathering, the Bleeding Edge Fest presents Yo La Tengo, Black Dice, Brightblack Morning Light, the Avett Brothers, Skoltz Kogen, Sunroof!, the Chemistry Set, and others in tony Saratoga. Matmos and Zeena Parkins collaborate on an original work, as do Isis and Tim Hecker. Sun/13, noon–10 p.m., Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Rd., Saratoga. $50. (408) 961-5858, www.bleedingedgefestival.org.
FINAL FANTASY AND CURTAINS
Arcade Fire player Owen Pallett puts his love of D&D to song as Final Fantasy, while ex-Deerhoofer Chris Cohen collaborates with Nedelle Torrisi in Curtains. Fri/11, 10 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 621-4455.
QUIET, QUIET OCEAN SPELL
Brightblack Morning Light dream up an un-air-conditioned dreamscape starring Lavender Diamond, Daniel Higgs, and a special Ramblin’ surprise. Fri/11, 4:20 p.m.–12:45 a.m., Henry Miller Library, Hwy 1, Big Sur. $25. www.henrymiller.org.
HOTEL UTAH SHOWCASE
Open-mic regs toast Playing Full Out! 2006 Hotel Utah Compilation Album. Thurs/10, 8 p.m., $3–$5. Amnesia, 853 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-0012.
ALT.SEX.COLUMN
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m a 50-year-old man who has gone without sex for too long now. To me, my ex-wife’s 35-year-old niece is the true personification of the “MILF.” She’s had her two kids, got divorced, and still looks as hot as she did at 18, when I first developed an incredibly deep infatuation. Since I was still married to her aunt, I couldn’t indicate this in any way. Now I can’t stop thinking about her. I know it’s holding me back from pursuing other opportunities, but I’ve found that I really need her … bad! I guess my questions are, how appropriate would it be for me to make my thoughts and overwhelming feelings known to her? If appropriate, how should I approach this? I don’t want to freak her out, but how should I tell her that I’ve had the hots for her for 17 years now and would do anything to go to bed with her at least once?
Love,
Not Really Her Uncle!
Dear Unc:
We’ll get to your questions, but first, “… the true personification of the ‘MILF’”? She “still looks as hot as she did at 18”? Can we talk about this? I know that new parents are notorious one-note bores and I swear I’m not one and will keep writing about other topics, but while I’ve got you, this MILF business has got to go. First off, nobody looks as good as they did at 18 (and frankly, we could all live without the pressure) and second, what does it even mean, “MILF”? By specifying the “mother” in “mother I’d like to fuck,” does the speaker intend to make a distinction between the rare mother worth fucking and the unfuckable masses? Or is it really the “mother” part that intrigues, that sexy whiff of fecundity, that milkshake that brings all the boys to our yard? My personal suspicion is that it’s the latter masquerading as the former, that the fascination with the pregnant or baby-toting Heidi Klum or Angelina Jolie is not fueled so much by the fact that they still look “hot” as by the implication that if somebody knocked them up, then so, by extension, could you. But I may be getting a little theory-addled here.
I bring all this up not so much out of a wish to render my readers walleyed with boredom, but because I was so touched by a new blog called “Shape of a Mother” (shapeofamother.blogspot.com) that I’d take pretty much any opportunity to mention it, even in a column about wanting to fuck your ex-niece-in-law (which, by the way, whatever). The concept is elegantly simple: have a baby or have had a baby or in a few cases don’t have had a baby, take a picture of your transformed body, write a few notes about how you feel about the changes, and Bonnie, the blogger, will post it. The result is an extraordinarily moving document, whether you see it as political (I surely do) or as mere documentation or even as art. It reminds me, in a gut-punch way — not a “wasn’t feminism fun?” way — that sisterhood not only was but can still be powerful. Also, when my absolute best self is not in ascendance, that my own recently ravaged body is not really so ravaged, comparatively. In your faces, stretch-marked bitchez, I got off easy!
No, seriously, this sort of normalization by exposure — see Joanie Blank’s pussy-picture book, Femalia, for a similar and similarly successful tool for fostering self-respect and even self-love among women who may have been feeling freakish, ugly, and ashamed of their perfectly normal bodies — works. It may be the only thing that does work, and it’s way cheaper than therapy. All it takes is seeing unretouched women (two- or three-dimensional, either way) who don’t have a modeling contract or sex with Brad Pitt. It works on men too, although men as a group seem less inclined toward this sort of collective feel-betterism. They can still be cured of a lifetime of self-loathing by mere exposure to the unglamorized truth (it’s five and a half to six and a half inches, dudes).
Let’s get down to it: this woman is not your relative, your ex-wife is not your wife, and nobody cares. Oh, and she doesn’t want to fuck you, so it’s time to give it up already.
What you have here is not a crush or a fancy but something verging on obsession and by definition unhealthy. If you insist on trying to get somewhere with her, you should really leave out the part about thinking dirty thoughts about her since she was 18. That’s pretty skeevy, pops. If I were her, I’d change the locks.
Ask her out, decently. Emphasize interest over obsession. Try not to sound like you have a secret room in the basement plastered with her photographs, and then take no for an answer. We can only hope that her rejection breaks the spell. She isn’t the one holding you back, you know.
Love,
Andrea
SFBG