ACTRESS AND AUTHOR If you love to watch cult movies and pay tribute to the stars that make them great (and in San Francisco, who doesn’t?), Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass screening of Death Race 2000, featuring a live appearance by Mary Woronov, is something special. Woronov isn’t your average actor — she’s a painter, great writer, and performer whose roots in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous are often unjustly obscured by her Warhol-era exploits, both of which predate her Roger Corman–produced bouts with Hollywood. And Death Race 2000? We’re now six years past the date targeted by Paul Bartel’s 1975 movie, yet its nightmare vision of fascist TV remains hideously funny — right on time, if not ahead of it.
“It is,” Woronov agrees by phone from Los Angeles. “As a country, we’re out of our minds! We’re the greatest polluter, we have the most corrupt government, and we have the biggest weapons of mass destruction. We’ve conducted the most wars since World War II. And I’ve been living here under the illusion that we’re democratic.”
“The media has completely lulled us into nothingness,” she continues. “People can be told that their pensions will be taken away but the head of the corporation will increase his own pension two million dollars — and they don’t do anything! They don’t riot! They just go, [assumes a zombie voice] ‘OK.’ What happened to us?”
A big question, but Woronov’s next novel, What Really Happened, might answer some of it — even if she makes a point of saying the book isn’t political. What it is, though, is the latest outgrowth of a creative birth that took place when Woronov, facing the idea of death (“I got an illness that was merely an infection, but they told me it was cancer”), kicked drugs at the age of 50. “My brain started working and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I started writing,” she says.
The results have included one memoir (1995’s Swimming Underground), one short-story collection (2004’s Blind Love), and two novels (2000’s Snake and 2002’s Niagara, which sports this great first sentence: “I started drinking in the day, and by the time I got to the supermarket I was so loaded I need a cart to stand up”). Publisher Amy Scholder discovered Woronov, and Gary Indiana has raved about her work, but even if she’s now able to call herself a “great writer,” she can also be hilariously blunt. “I wrote Swimming Underground because I thought it would make me famous,” she says. “To my disappointment, I got a review in the New York Times that said I was too busy crawling around the bathroom floor to say anything real about Warhol.”
As if the New York Times qualifies as an authority. In fact, Woronov’s take on the Factory uptown era, praised by Lou Reed as the best of what is surely now a library bookcase worth of efforts, is as distinct and dominant as her appearance in films such as 1966’s Chelsea Girls. Were the other Superstars intimidated by her and by the whip wit of her friend, the infamous Ondine? “People were very intimidated by Ondine,” she says. “People were mystified by me. For one thing, I didn’t have sex. For another, I acted like a guy, merely as a counterbalance to the transvestites and the female energy there. I did theater and I was a really good actress, so I didn’t have the desperation of the other girls who thought Warhol was somehow going to make them a star.”
The theater that Woronov “did” wasn’t exactly forgettable Broadway nonsense. Along with Ondine (who once played the role of Scrooge there), she took part in the Café Cino scene memorably described in Jimmy McDonough’s Andy Milligan biography The Ghastly One. She also worked with Playhouse of the Ridiculous’s great Ronald Tavel and John Vaccaro. “Their sensibility was extremely feminine, extremely bizarre,” she says. “They were camp at its highest level, where you accept the most strange things and are entertained by them.”
This sensibility inspired some of Woronov’s most memorable film performances, such as Miss Togar from 1979’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School. “I dressed like an aberration of Joan Crawford,” Woronov says. “Everyone else is in modern dress and I look like I’m from the 1930s. The thing about [Miss Togar] is that, you know, she’s a fucking pervert. What makes it wonderful is that I don’t play a pervert. I play someone commenting on perversion — just like a transvestite plays someone commenting on female-ism.”
Woronov’s own female charms suit Death Race’s Calamity Jane, and another classic collaboration with Bartel, 1982’s Eating Raoul, truly allows her Amazonian sexiness to bloom. “I knew I was sexy, but there was still a dichotomy of gender slippage,” she says, discussing prude-turned-dominatrix Mary Bland. “I was still denying [sexiness] and yet showing it — like an underslip.”
At the forefront of ’90s new queer cinema with roles in movies by Gregg Araki and Richard Glatzer, Woronov continues to add to one of the world’s most colorful filmographies. Recently, she appeared in The Devil’s Rejects, and she praises the film’s director, Rob Zombie, as an honest man and class act in an industry full of phonies.
Today, Mary Woronov remains in LA. “For writing, you can’t beat it, it’s such a peculiar place — it’s like a swamp,” she says with a laugh. “Everybody I know is moving to Europe or talking about moving but not moving. I have decided I’m not going to move. I really want to stay here and wait for the revolution. I do believe there will be one.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
MIDNIGHT MASS: DEATH RACE 2000 AND MARY WORONOV
Sat/5, 11:59 p.m.
Bridge Theatre
3010 Geary, SF
$12
(415) 267-4893
www.peacheschrist.com
www.maryworonov.com
For a complete Q&A with Mary Woronov — and to find out why she hates Warhol — go to the Guardian’s Pixel Vision blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Proud Mary
After the gold rush
› johnny@sfbg.com
Lay up nearer, brother, nearer
For my limbs are growing cold
— “The Dying Californian”
A man’s last testimony to his brother before perishing at sea, “The Dying Californian” is a mid-19th-century tune that documents the dark side of the Gold Rush. The early 21st-century group the Dying Californian takes its name from the song, which brothers and bandmates Nathan and Andrew Dalton first heard when their sister played an arrangement of it for their family.
“My brother and I were raised listening to the same music and singing together,” Nathan Dalton says, as a candle casts a flickering light across his face while we drink beers in a booth at the back of the Attic on 24th Street. “We somehow know who is going to do the harmony and who is going to do the melody.”
It’s twilight. The Impressions mourn an ex who loves somebody else and Maxine Brown cries out “Oh No, Not My Baby” as Dalton breaks down the basics of his kin’s musical background: piano and guitar lessons, a father into George Jones and Merle Haggard, an older sister with three degrees in music, and a shared love of family acts ranging from the Carter Family (“Sara Carter isn’t putting on some diva act”) to the Carpenters. “They get a bad rap,” he says of the latter. “You really have to listen to [Karen’s] voice.”
Listen to Dalton’s voice on the Dying Californian’s 2003 album for Turn Records, We Are the Birds That Stay, and especially on an upcoming 12-song follow-up for the same label, and you’ll conclude that Karen Carpenter–lover Mark Eitzel has a worthy heir apparent. Not since American Music Club released California in 1988 has a band tapped so potently into a type of sound that tastes good with liquor but can also make you drunk with melancholy even if you’re on the straight and narrow.
“On the new record,” says Dalton, “I’d changed the lyrics of ‘Blur Just the Same,’ but Liam [Nelson, the group’s producer and extra guitarist] stopped the recording and told me the old lyrics resonated with him so much.” Dalton switched back to his original words, and the result is a great yet understated lament — one with a bridge that takes the type of blurred-photo imagery that horror movies use for jolts and instead makes the ghostliness tearfully sad. It’s one of more than a few moments on the record with a spiritual underpinning — the Dalton brothers know their share of hymns.
“The first band that blew me away and made me feel like ‘That’s what I want to do’ is early R.E.M.,” Dalton says as the bar grows darker. “There’s something spooky about Murmur and Reckoning and Chronic Town. I’ve always been attracted to haunting music like that.” The brothers have flipped roles somewhat since their years with the punk-inflected Troubleman Unlimited band Nuzzle. Nathan plays guitar and sings melody on the Dying Californian’s recordings, while brother Andrew plays keyboards and harmonizes. They’re joined by Nelson, bassist Simon Fabela, and drummer Ricardo Reano. While they excel at ballads, the new, as-yet-untitled, record’s “Second Shadow” proves the group can also unleash a cage-shaking rave-up.
Framed by the Dalton brothers’ “oh-oh” harmonies, the Dying Californian’s upcoming collection builds upon the rustic handsomeness of We Are the Birds That Stay, which features cover art by filmmakers José Luis Rodríguez and Cathy Begien. Over the past few years, the Dying Californian’s music has been a fixture of the movies Begien shows at the Edinburgh Castle’s Film Night. “God bless Cathy,” says Dalton. “We’ve been friends since our college days. It was strange seeing the video she made for our song ‘Madrugada’ [at the Edinburgh]. My voice was booming and I was sitting in the audience watching their reaction. That movie she made about her family [Relative Distance] must be so tough to watch with a crowd — she’s gutsy.”
Dalton moved from soundtracking Begien’s movies to also starring in one, Separated by Death. He played — surprise, surprise — a ghost. “I know [Cathy’s] work, know her, and know what she likes,” says Dalton. “She can convey this feeling to me that I put into music…. She wants to do a whole [feature-length] musical. We can do it.”
Dalton has lived in California most of his life, long enough — and far and wide enough — to know that “most people in Northern California have definite opinions about LA, and people in LA are just kind of oblivious.” I tell him that a friend of mine once made this observation to me after a stereotypical Mission hipster threw attitude at him upon hearing he was moving back to LA. “That’s why LA wins,” Dalton agrees with a laugh. “It says, ‘What? You hate us!?’”
The Dying Californian’s leader can also break down the individual qualities of the state’s major cities — the isolation of Santa Cruz, where most of his friends have moved from, or the quiet darkness of Berkeley, where he lives now with his wife and 16-month-old son. That domesticity and Dalton’s new surroundings spurred the recording of a meditative acoustic solo album, Byss and Abyss, released on the fledgling label Sap Moon. “Maybe it has something to do with desperation,” he says as we look at Byss and Abyss’s cover and insert artwork, which was inspired by a book about alchemy and mysticism. “People can fool themselves into thinking an ordinary object is gold.”
Of course, music has an alchemical quality as well, and if it results in fool’s gold, at least it’s a foolish pleasure. “The best art can seem better than gold,” Dalton agrees. “Sometimes I feel like one of these guys who made all the symbols or a tinkerer, but with my four-track.” SFBG
THE DYING CALIFORNIAN
With Lady Hawk
and Magnolia Electric Company
Fri/4, 10 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$12
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.thedyingcalifornian.com
Bitch’s brew
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
San Francisco is full of a bunch of pussies. I’m sorry, it’s not that I want to say these things. I feel strongly that a woman’s vagina should never be used to describe something weak or negative. In fact I tend to correct people who use that word in such a way, being that I am shamelessly p.c. San Francisco is the only city in the world where I would have to spend more time defending the use of a single word in a single sentence than the overall meaning of that sentence.
But seriously, San Francisco is made up of a bunch of pussies and nothing could exemplify that more than its long and flamboyant rock history. If you held up the Bay’s rock résumé next to your average Midwestern state’s — Ohio’s, for example — you’d start to get the picture. No one is going to argue that San Francisco doesn’t deliver the goods when it comes to art-damaged, high-concept, performance-focused freak music, made by freaks for freaks, but let’s ask anyone who’s ever heard the Pagans, the Dead Boys, or Rocket from the Tombs if Californians can deliver the kind of ugly-faced raw violence that litters any Ohio rock comp. No, we can’t. Not counting Blue Cheer or Death Angel.
I’m not trying to start a turf war here or even a debate over whether Midwestern ugly rock is better than West Coast weirdo jams, but I am trying to help you understand why an unknown band from Columbus, Ohio, is the most exciting thing to happen to the local music underbelly in a long while. Would a trio of educated and liberated women from Berkeley call their band 16 Bitch Pile-Up? Or would any band from the Yay Area list a cache of instruments that includes a “PVC pipe,” a homemade “vile in,” “television feedback,” “a bag of beer bottles with a mic thrown in,” and “your face”? There is a reason why bands like Comets on Fire, XBXRX, and other non-noise locals are itching to gig with this band. Frankly, the Pile-Up is a needed shock to the system, bringing the kind of attitude, fierceness, and work ethic that grow in places where the rivers are flammable and national elections are stolen in plain sight.
HUNGRY LIKE A WOLF EYE
16BPU achieved a bit of cult status well before descending on the Bay. For the last four years they made Columbus a choice destination on any tour, running the art and music space BLD and offering floor space for all manner of riffraff. What began as studio spaces for fellow art schoolers, dropouts, and friends fast became an epicenter of East-meets-Midwest noise happenings. Yet in spite of their notoriety and a Wolf Eyes–style mile-long discography, there is little recorded evidence of their work readily available — although the long-out-of-print BFF (Gameboy, 2003) and Come Here, Sandy (Gameboy/Cephia’s Treat, 2004), their split 12-inch with brothers in cave-stomp Sword Heaven, are worth seeking out. It was their powerful live performances that engendered such reverence. Early on, one witnessed rituals of unique intuition and deep communal spirit — a group of women truly listening to one another and at the same time losing themselves in the fuck-it-all physicality of harsh electronic mayhem.
The Pile-Up is a satisfyingly lean Moirae-like triad, made up of Parkside sound person Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers, and Shannon Walters. The group — which previously existed as a five-piece in Columbus and as a four-piece featuring Angela Edwards of Tarantism for a brief and brutal West Coast tour — has never quite achieved its titular namesake’s size to form what Walters envisioned as a “symphony of terror.” Instead, the women have honed in and formed a unique power trio, capable of pulling off creepy junkyard jams à la the aforementioned Wolf Eyes, subtle vocal exhortations, and beautiful walls of searing white noise.
“It’s alchemy. In our case, the girls and I spend so many living minutes together,” explains Walters over coffee only minutes after having our guts reorganized by Damion Romero at a recent Noise Pancake performance. “We take care of each other. We often want to murder each other. We share virtually all aspects of our lives and with that comes a very developed sense of communication.”
Bernat elaborates, “We share a slightly twisted sense of humor that is fundamental to almost all of what we do and make.” Which is one way to understand a band that has released an album titled Make Like a Fetus and Abort.
When asked over e-mail how she’d respond to an easily offended West Coaster like me, Cathers offers, “I welcome any conversation on the use of language. It is one of my great joys — as I look for sounds that will make the greatest impact, that will send a chill up the collective spine and put your flesh and your psyche in the same presence. I love words that have that impact as well.”
MORE UTOPIA
What makes 16BPU fascinating is that beneath the intellectual muscle and blue-collar brawn is a group that is deeply sensitive, passionate, and emotional in their playing. Beyond the obvious (tough) love that they share with each other as friends, there is a seriousness to their music that stares right in the face of pain, anger, and fear with an absolute solidarity of purpose.
“I think what I try to convey through playing can only be expressed as a feeling of mortality,” says Walters. “Being very close to death and vitality simultaneously.”
“I can say we have seen a lot of nasty shit in our lives that can either make you want to leave the planet or create your own utopia out of dysfunction,” Cathers writes.
“All those themes are present,” Bernat concludes, “but they are present alongside equally positive feelings about strength, love, and perceptions of beauty.”
All of which makes me think that perhaps they fit into the Golden State after all. SFBG
16 BITCH PILE-UP
With Hogotogisu and Skaters
Aug. 12, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$7
(415) 923-0923
With Comets on Fire and Kid 606 and Friends
Aug. 16, 9 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$13
(415) 885-0750
Gabriel Mindel is in Yellow Swans.
Jeepers creepers
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
My sister introduced me to one of her best friends. She’s a wonderful girl, smart and tough and funny and cute and accomplished. She’s traveled the world and is a field biologist. She’s exactly the kind of woman I dream of.
On our second date, if you can call it that, we spent nearly four days straight together. The more we’re together, the more we want to be together. So here’s the rub. One night my sis and I were talking about herpes, and she told me that this girl once had a genital fever blister. She also said (she’s a biologist too) that she had 95 percent confidence in the information.
Now clearly I can’t betray my sister’s confidence by just blurting out some blunt question, and I don’t much care for games. So I’ve offered to get tested and intimated that I would like her to as well. You know, as a way to let the evidence speak for itself, and nobody gets hurt. She demurred and said something like, “What for? We’ve already pretty much taken our chances.”
What do I do? I know my chances of picking herpes up without her being broken out are somewhat less than 10 percent, so I’m kind of playing the numbers right now, but I think she should have already been honest with me. Don’t you? I mean, that’s what a real relationship is founded on. And I do have to admit that it kind of nags at me, in the back of my head, but I’ve let it go now for three or four wonderful, adventurous weekends spent in and out of bed and in and out of all kinds of different sex positions. What’s to be done? I like her a lot. How do I keep the romance alive and figure out what I might be picking up all at the same time?
Love,
What Good Can Come of This?
Dear What:
You have no idea what you could be picking up, and neither, to be fair, does she. As many as 75 percent of people infected with HSV (herpes simplex virus) are asymptomatic or oblivious, so what makes you so special? You could have been infected for years and been merrily spreading it from blossom to blossom like a busy little bee, all unawares. Anybody could.
While I think many AIDS educators go way overboard insisting that everyone is equally at risk and every new contact should be assumed positive until proved otherwise, it’s surely true of herpes: Anyone could have it, and most of us do. I have no idea, for instance, whether I’m immune (I’ve never had the slightest hint of a cold sore or anything suspicious down there) or am simply another asymptomatic shedder, merrily spreading, et cetera.
Herpes is usually tested for with a swab at the site, but there are blood tests available for the asymptomatic and curious (the American Social Health Association, at www.ashastd.org, has all the information). Hardly anyone gets them, though — they’re expensive and inconvenient, and most people never even think about herpes unless they know they’ve been exposed or have developed symptoms. And I don’t blame them. What could be more “out of sight, out of mind” than something you’ve never seen and would rather not think about?
All this aside, a “genital fever blister” like your lady friend reputedly had that one time almost certainly counts as a symptom. While there are herpes-ish things that can pop up in or around the mouth — canker sores, pizza mouth — a blistery lesion on the genitals is overwhelmingly likely to be the real thing. (Of course, she added cheerfully, it could have been syphilis!)
It’s pretty common to have one outbreak and never have another, although as I’m sure you know, the herpes is not gone nor should it be forgotten. It is merely hiding. And an infection tends to get less virulent over time and is harder to spread from female to male (that 10 percent figure you quoted probably referred to transmission from male to female and to monogamous non-safe-sex-having couples over the course of a year, not a three-day one-night stand), though you could, I suppose, have been unlucky. In the absence of suddenly appearing sores, you’ll probably never know. Now what do you want to do about it?
Assuming the lady ever even had that outbreak (hey, my brother’s a biologist too; he’s way smart, but I defer to him on matters of marine ecology, not who’s had which kind of cooties and when), she did owe it to you to fess up. This does not absolve you from failing to think about, ask about, or take responsibility for avoiding infection yourself, though, does it? It takes two to tango, tangle, or transmit, after all.
If you don’t like games, don’t “intimate” things — ask them. If you want to know if you got infected, get a blood test. If you want the girl, call her. I don’t see where any of these are mutually exclusive.
Love,
Andrea
Close encounters
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Love is more than metaphor in Orbit (notes from the edge of forever). Love is like the intractable need connected to the exploration of space — especially when the search is bent toward the hope of some ultimate encounter: that contact with somebody, out there, who knows who you are. It’s as if an inner wilderness were turned inside out and projected to infinity.
And so Orbit starts with the mutual seduction of two lovers onstage, and with flickering TV screens (the sets dangling from long vertical skewers loaded with books and the occasional table lamp) tapping classic sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Alien, with their mix of rapture and terror. Here promise and betrayal collide with gravitational conviction, at the point where the yearning for communion meets the blind panic of a self dissolving; a body waylaid, violated, no longer your own (if it ever was). “That transmission? Mother’s deciphered it,” says Sigourney Weaver. “It doesn’t look like an SOS…. It looks like a warning.”
But Orbit itself is never warned off. Rather, as the title implies, it’s continually reapproaching. A new dance theater work from the Erika Shuch Performance Project — the brainchild of San Francisco–based choreographer, director, and performer Erika Chong Shuch, and the resident company at Intersection for the Arts — Orbit spirals around our obsession with UFOs, extraterrestrial life, alien abduction, and other moon-age daydreams. The piece pulls a variety of texts, media, and simulacra into its elliptical trajectory (including recorded interviews, pop music, original songs, and some wonderfully transporting interactive video segments designed by Ishan Vernalis and lll), and is a playfully eclectic, moody, and deeply romantic whirl, danced and acted by Shuch and cocreators Melanie Elms and Danny Wolohan. Joining them is an ensemble, dressed in street clothes and postal uniforms, composed of Kieran Chavez, Joseph Estlack, Daveen DiGiacomo (also responsible for the live music and sound design), Courtney Moreno, and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart.
Elms comes on as the extradimensional counterpart to Shuch’s and Wolohan’s young lovers — whom we’ve seen alternately drifting over the sensual ridges of the lunar surface projected behind them (luxuriating in the exploration of personal space), helping one another (with a touch of comic strain) to moonwalk off the walls, or defending favorite metaphors for their place in the cosmos and their search for ETs. Behind them Elms’s retro space alien glides around as if invisibly in mischievous blue gloves, the show’s intergalactic pixie, puppet mistress of hapless earthlings.
At times, moving about the stage in an idiosyncratic way coolly reminiscent of some ray gun–toting go-go dancer, Elms seems no more than a figment of the collective imagination. (In one eerily comic scene, the strange hands rooting around in a panicky Wolohan’s sweatshirt turn out not to be blue-gloved, but the hands of his lover.) From other angles, however, she becomes an active force of violently erratic potential, like a galactic succubus. The chorus, meanwhile, in alternately trancelike and frenetic motion, do everything from dance, sing, and play instruments to operate the ropes and pulleys that rearrange those TV-and-book kebabs around the stage. With Elms they circle the lovers as forces of nature both internal and external, mercurial ones too, capable of imparting a gentle caress one minute, a savage abuse the next.
One or two segments veering toward the madcap — like Wolohan’s admittedly hilarious puppet-show narration of his rescue by a friendly lighthouse (Shuch) — can be funny at the cost of some subtlety, and in truth the parts don’t contribute equally to the whole. But the surprises in store are several, and there’s a cumulative force to the loose but inspired patterning of movement, theme, and image. If part of that pattern is the idea of lives in eternal orbit around some elusive whole, always approaching and never landing, Shuch and company manage a not insignificant union all the same, joining the passion of the true believer with the wry alert eye of the perennial searcher. SFBG
ORBIT (NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF FOREVER)
Through Aug. 5
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF
$9–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 626-3311
www.theintersection.org
Get the funk out of here
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
For more than 30 years, Afrobeat has been slowly grabbing ears in underground music circles like a revolutionary movement steadily arming itself for a coup d’état. Rawer than jazz, more organic than R&B, and as politically and socially relevant as hip-hop, this genre binds American styles to percussive African rhythms, chants, and 10-piece-plus horn-heavy orchestras. This is a high-energy music with the street appeal of blaxploitation grooves and the third-world desperation of reggae, a sound that is as mysterious and at times as daunting as the continent itself. The huge sound and unstoppable momentum require that Afrobeat’s direct political message be taken seriously and unequivocally. As our government takes either the middle ground or simply the wrong ground, the liberal locomotive of Afrobeat is moving ahead full speed, proving that funk beats and dance music slam home a message harder than an acoustic guitar ever did and with more attitude than Neil Young could ask for.
Afrobeat has always had a direct agenda, ever since Fela Kuti, its legendary inventor, decided to fight back. Kuti’s Afrobeat style bloomed in Nigeria during the late 1960s, taking the global explosion of funk and mixing it with African highlife and Yoruba music. He translated the musical message of Curtis Mayfield and Sly and the Family Stone, written on the streets of urban America, for millions of oppressed West Africans. Viewers tell of Kuti performances that resembled a heated battlefield with dozens of musicians backing their fearless leader — he often donned war paint for shows — and bouts that seemed like they would never end till one side surrendered.
Even now, Afrobeat won’t kill you with kindness or change your ways through love — put a flower in Kuti’s gun and you’ll get blasted. This is music for the huddled masses, not a feel-good exercise to tug at the heartstrings of the powerful. It follows that Kuti — a polygamist, presidential candidate, and cultural phenomenon — became a political prisoner when Nigeria’s military junta attempted to quell the musical movement that was planting the seeds of revolution.
Fast-forward to the 21st century: With war and political deception once again on the front pages and, more important, on the minds of young people, Afrobeat is providing a much-needed niche. The sound is being embraced among jam-band earthies who want an honest government that will work to reverse human-made environmental devastation and Latino listeners faced with the anti-immigration issues.
Filled with activist-minded residents ready to get behind authentic revolutions, San Francisco is proving a leader in the revival, playing host to the second annual Afrofunk Music Festival, the only gathering in the world devoted to Afrobeat, though the event encompasses music from great world music artists like Prince Diabaté. Sila Mutungi, the festival’s producer and vocalist of Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, describes the festival’s goal as a fun, positive one, “but ultimately, we’re here to raise awareness and money to fight the tragic famine and genocide happening right now to children and families in Sudan, Niger, and my own country, Kenya.” Proceeds will go to the Save the Children Emergency Relief Fund to aid Africa’s most susceptible population.
For the hard-hitting in-your-face funk that got Kuti chased around the globe, catch Afrobeat artists Aphrodesia and Albino from San Francisco and Los Angeles’s Afrobeat Down. As the first American band to play in Lagos’s New African Shrine, a venue made famous by Kuti, Aphrodesia proudly boast an acute political consciousness, a tight brass section, and a female leader, Lara Maykovich, who demands to be heard. She condemns environmental destruction as she sings, “Somewhere beyond the bulldozed rows/The fallen giants laying low./Sometime before the earth has died/Is where we all must draw the line” on their latest album, Frontlines (Full Cut, 2005). Frontlines is a worthy contribution to the Afrobeat movement, with well-crafted originals, stirring lyrics, and, of course, a Kuti cover. Southern California’s Afrobeat Down is known as its area’s premier Afrobeat combo, one with an unabashed desire to re-create the hard-driving funky sound of its early-’70s inspirations, and 12-piece Albino won the 2005 San Francisco Music Award for Best World Music.
Those three Afrobeat acts should get you dancing and feeling good and help you realize that the answer isn’t blowing in the wind but can be heard at polling places, in lumberyards, on battlefields, and on Afrobeat stages around the globe. SFBG
AFROFUNK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Thurs/27–Sat/29, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$17–$35
(415) 771-1421
www.afrofunk.org
Swordplay time
The tug in the 2003 girl samurai flick Azumi between that J-cult of kawaii, cute — as embodied by the button-nosed, bee-stung-lipped assassin Aya Ueto, who resembles a pert Japanese version of Jessica Alba — and the particularly cutthroat scenario fueling the manga-based, CGI-ridden film make it the perfect pop vehicle for director Ryuhei Kitamura. His mission: drag the Japanese swordplay genre into the 21st century if it kills him — and leaves him choking on his own blood in the most mangled yet decorative way possible. Kitamura, who mixed swordplay with yakuza and zombies in his 2000 debut, Versus, ransacks as many flashy devices from cinema, TV, and games as he can.
To enact what might be considered the perfect post-9/11 scenario, Azumi and her otherwise all-boy crew of adorable youngsters have been trained from birth as killing machines in order to “neutralize” the warlords vying to destroy the tenuous peace in Tokugawa-era, 19th-century Japan. They’re forced to ignore the down-home atrocities committed in random villages under the orders of their stern samurai teacher, Gessai (Yoshio Harada). But when the kids are put to their final test and forced to kill or be killed by their favorite fellow student, Azumi begins to question her training-slash-brainwashing.
From her school uniform–like tunic to her eager-to-excel mien, Azumi is as much a child of Charles Darwin — a fresh-faced schoolkid of Kinji Fukasaku’s soon-to-be-remade Battle Royale (Dakota Fanning swinging an ax versus Emma Roberts toting an AK-47?) — as she is the daughter of Japanese cinematic swordswomen like Lady Snowblood. Comparing Azumi to other female-centered revenge fantasies such as the Snowblood series, Lady Vengeance, and Ms. 45 will ultimately disappoint: Her gender seems almost incidental; her empathy, yet another self-preserving tool. Flirting with pacifist — and sadistic — subversion but ultimately succumbing to blood and conditioning, Azumi proposes that a kind of unjust justice is its own justification. If that ain’t kitsch — and if Azumi isn’t a signpost in a decadent period of samurai filmmaking — what is? (Kimberly Chun)
AZUMI
Opens Fri/28
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.asiavisionfilms.com
A flickering light
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Acclaim is often decreed as much by fashion as by accomplishment. While Frank Borzage spent four decades as a well-paid Hollywood director and was honored with two Oscars, his talent wasn’t — and still isn’t — fashionable. In his hundred or so features, he routinely elevated or rescued contrived material. Typed as a director of romances and melodramas, he made myriad movies that were phony in concept — but never in their treatment.
Indeed, purity was often his subject, transcendence a running theme. What sometimes looked like “mush stuff” to critics now seems an oft-extraordinary intensity of unforced emotion. “Frank Borzage’s Philosophy of Desire,” a retrospective starting at the PFA this week, just scratches the surface of a very deep filmography. Its 12 titles can match up against any dozen by John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, and Howard Hawks.
Making his unlikely way into showbiz from a working-class Catholic immigrant family in Salt Lake City, the strapping, athletic Borzage entered movies as a popular mid-1910s actor. Disgusted by the poor product of a fledgling company he signed on with, he offered to direct himself, and early two-reel westerns distinguished him as an innovator with sophisticated visual and psychological instincts.
He abruptly jumped to the A-list when chosen to direct the first film version of Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque. This tale of a concert violinist rising from New York City’s Jewish ghetto was detested as “too realistic” by its own producer (Paramount’s Adolph Zukor) but became a surprise smash — winning praise from Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein and Europe’s surrealists. As Herve Dumont’s fine Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic puts it, Borzage’s usual narrative centered on “the young couple facing adversity.” Using poetical imagery and few words (Borzage admitted to being a de facto silent film director well into the sound era), his genius lay in mixing beauty and pain, happiness and sorrow in profoundly telling sequences he often invented himself.
These near-mystic surges of human yearning found quintessential expression in films he made for Fox during an eight-year stint starting in 1925. That year brought his first masterpiece, Lazybones, which cast cowboy star Buck Jones against type as a country layabout who ends up raising a local girl’s abandoned child. There’s one scene when the tot is crying because she’s teased and shunned as a “bastard,” and he comforts her with a self-deprecating lie. The moment is classic Borzage — character stoicism and directorial restraint at a point of crushing sadness — and for anyone who likes an honest cry at the movies, it is almost unbearably good.
Lazybones was not a hit, but the later films (most famously, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel) that Borzage made with newcomers Janet Gaynor (herself the subject of a current PFA program) and Charles Farrell were huge. Later the director found another elfin, fragile, yet morally fibrous favorite femme in Margaret Sullavan, heroine in a trilogy that subtly charted the growing fascism in Germany: 1934’s Little Man, What Now?, 1938’s Three Comrades, and 1940’s The Mortal Storm. These ambitious movies blended comedy, romance, thriller, and drama to unpredictable effect. But no film of the era exemplified Borzage’s penchant for unclassifiable projects more than 1937’s History Is Made at Night, an exquisite-corpse narrative lent total emotional truth by his handling of Jean Arthur’s flight from a demented rich husband into the arms of headwaiter Charles Boyer.
Demands for more focused escapism and propaganda during WWII paired Borzage with inappropriate projects, and the postwar cynicism and penchant for spectacle made him seem even less relevant. What snowball’s chance in hell is there that 1959’s The Big Fisherman (which former Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg, and Hitchcock cinematographer Lee Garmes called “the finest thing I ever did — a visual masterpiece”) might ever get restored? Holding one’s breath is ill-advised.
Borzage died of cancer at 68 in 1962. Back then, his greatest films seemed antique. Now we know better. The summer of 2006 has brought the latest universal insights by M. Night Shyamalan and Kevin Smith. Guess what — the least worthy work by Borzage never stunk up the joint like Lady in the Water or Clerks II, nor auto-serviced such undeserved directorial narcissism. SFBG
“FRANK BORZAGE’S
PHILOSOPHY OF DESIRE”
Through Aug. 23
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft, Berk.
$4–$8
(415) 642-0808
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Ramblin’, man
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER He’s been at home on the range, in the skies overhead, on the South Pacific sea, and on the streets of Greenwich Village. He was taken under the migrant wing of Woody Guthrie, read to Jack Kerouac, backed up Nico, was called the sexiest man in America by Cass Elliott, thieved Allen Ginsberg’s girlfriend, married James Dean’s ex, and was ensconced in the heart of Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue. Mick Jagger said he purchased his first guitar after seeing him play, and his “San Francisco Bay Blues” was one of the first songs Paul McCartney learned to play. ’Nuff said — Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is a legend and would be even if Bill Clinton hadn’t dubbed him an “American treasure.”
I caught up with the singer of cowboy songs, working stiffs’ ballads, salty sailor chanteys, sad songs of the blue, down and out, and lonesome, near his Marshall home, at a Petaluma watering hole, on the occasion of his forthcoming 75th birthday on Aug. 1.
“I don’t like to think about it,” says Elliott of his age. Still sharp, superarticulate, and a consummate flirt, the Brooklyn-born cowboy digs into his Caesar salad — don’t hold the anchovies, man — in the shade of the restaurant, then pokes at our shared plate of fries with his fork. Despite the heat, his hat remains clamped on his head, a bandanna around his neck. “I like to say, in 17 days and 25 years I’m gonna be 100.”
He isn’t quite ready to hang up his boots and sit at home accepting accolades: The still-riveting interpreter of America’s folk songs attended bull-riding school at 47, still harbors an abiding fondness for ponies and long-distance trucks, and hasn’t given up a dream of someday, well, writing songs on a regular basis. “I’ve only written about five songs in 40 years,” he says, proudly sticking to that story. “I’m not a writer. I want to learn to write, I really do. I’m incredibly lazy, though. I can spend 15 days just sleeping after an airplane trip.”
But much travel is on the horizon for this singer of other folks’ songs — he’s now in demand with the release of a wonderful, spare new album of seldom-played tunes, I Stand Alone. David Hidalgo, Corin Tucker, Flea, Nels Cline, and DJ Bonebrake joined him on the Anti- album, in studios of their choosing. Turns out the man truly stood alone — though you wouldn’t be able to tell from the palpable tough love and hardscrabble synchronicity evident on “Careless Darling,” his gritty-sweet pairing with Lucinda Williams.
I tell him I saw him perform five years ago at the Guardian-hosted “Power to the People” show at Crissy Field, put together, incidentally, by I Stand Alone producer Ian Brennan. “Outdoors!” Elliott exclaims. “Right by the bay. I don’t like performing outdoors because I feel nooo connection with the audience. I can see them getting up or eating a sandwich. I want them to be able to be focused on me, because I’m focused on them and I’m trying to focus on what the heck the song is about. Like, what does it mean?”
But let’s wander back to I Stand Alone. “I’ve never been with a hip company before,” Elliott says of Anti-. “My daughter [Aiyana, who directed the 2002 documentary The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack] wanted to call it Not for the Tourists. Her husband asked, ‘Why don’t you sing those songs in your show, Jack?’ And I said, ‘They’re not for the tourists.’” The songs were long gone from his set simply because he tired of them, having sung them so often in his early years. Yet they possess a taken-for-granted ease found in things that are so worn and familiar that they’re second nature.
“It’s like what Woody told me one time. I asked him to show me how to play a certain cowboy song. I loved it, and Woody had a very unusual way of singing that song and playing it on the guitar,” says Elliott, recalling the year as 1951 and Woody as a hard-drinking 39 to his 19 years. “I said, ‘Woody, can you show me how to play that song ‘Buffalo Skinners,’ and he said, ‘That’s on the record, Jack, and you can go listen to it.’ I listened to it about a hundred times, and I pretty much learned what he was doing, but I never could quite do it exactly the way he did it. He just wasn’t in the mood to be teachin’ guitar.”
Those days of shadowing Guthrie around the country and following his every move, which often got Elliott pegged as a mere imitator, are now “like a dream. I think it was one of the happiest times of my young life because I got to hear all his stories. I’m sorry,” he says, pointing to my recorder, “I didn’t have one of these to record with.” SFBG
RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT
Sausalito Art Festival
Sept. 2, call for time and price
Marinship Park, Sausalito
(415) 331-3757
www.sausalitoartfestival.org
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival
Oct. 6–7, visit Web site for schedule
Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF
Free
www.strictlybluegrass.com
WHAT? YOU’RE STILL HUNGRY?
BUZZCOCKS
Manchester reunited? The punk-pop progenitors are still snarly — just check their latest, Flat-Pack Philosophy (Cooking Vinyl). Thurs/27, 9 p.m., Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. $20 advance. (415) 625-8880.
FAME, HIP-HOP KARAOKE
OK, I’ll give it up if you do: I’m a stone-cold junkie for karaoke. This time you can skip “Rock of Ages” and head straight for “My Adidas” at this launch event hosted by the SweatBox. Fri/28 and the last Friday of every month, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., Bar of Contemporary Art, 414 Jessie, SF. $5. (415) 756-8890.
DAVID BAZAN
AND MICAH P. HINSON
Two once and former Holy Rollers come down to earth. Thurs/27, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $10. (415) 621-4455.
Standard deviation
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m a young, mostly heterosexual woman, and I don’t get much out of ordinary sex. I rely on (safe) sex with one-off partners, which just doesn’t satisfy me.
I’m increasingly interested in S-M — tattoos, piercings, bondage, and I like to be dominated. I’ve also been having fantasies about being cut, which I find a bit worrying. Maybe not being able to fulfill the other, milder desires is causing me to think up more twisted things? Obviously it’s difficult to bring this up with strangers, but I’m not interested in having a long-term partner now. I also don’t want to buy into a whole subculture when all I want is the occasional bit of harmless deviance. What next? Do I even have a problem?
Love,
Deviant Dallier
Dear DD:
Ha! Good question. I wish more people would ask me if they even have a problem, so I could just say, “Not really, no,” and go back to my book. And you don’t, particularly. You seem to know exactly what you want. The only question is how to get it.
The S-M scene does not care if you “buy into it.” You will not hurt its feelings by failing to identify with it. Think of it not as a club but as a marketplace: Is there something you want? What are you willing to pay for it? Is it really so hard to attend a meeting here and there or some events at the local Sexe Shoppe? You don’t have to buy a lot of shiny, unflattering clothing or pierce your face or anything, just go and check out the scene. Meet some nice deviants, get invited to some parties. I’m not a joiner either but sometimes you just have to shut up and do it, whatever it is. It’s competitive out there, and if you want to be properly abused you’re going to have to assert yourself.
As for the cutting, it’s less scary in the doing than in the contemputf8g. Most people into blood play are obsessively careful, occasionally too careful, if you know what I mean, and few will come near you with anything sharpish without undertaking exhaustive negotiation first. You do not want to get into this with total strangers, though, or at least I’d rather you didn’t. There’s a whole realm of “play partners” out there, perverty people who get together at parties or less public arenas to exchange some affectionate floggings or piercings and then go on their way again, no strings attached, or at least not for long. I’m sure someone would want to do the same with you, but if you want it you’ll have to, oh, I dunno, leave the house?
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
My girlfriend and I have explored a number of fantasies, and last week she let me in on one that worries me: She wants us to act out a rape fantasy. She says she wants to be dominated and forced to submit, especially by someone who minutes ago was holding doors open for her.
I’m the first to admit that I’m interested and I think it could be fun if done right. I like the idea of the “woman in a frilly Southern dress gets ravished by muscular lover” stuff of romance novels. Unfortunately, her fantasy is closer to “girl gets dragged off the sidewalk and pounded hard while being called a slut.” I really worry about forcing myself on a woman while she screams “No, don’t!” — no matter that she asked me to do it.
Sorry to kill your immediate reaction, but yes, we have talked openly about it. I’ve told her my concerns, and she understands. So what do we do here? Should we even be considering it? Have we accidentally stumbled into one of those relationship-killing zones where it’s best for a couple to just forget the idea and move on?
Love,
Hesitant
Dear Hes:
I dunno. There are interracial couples who act out slave dramas without psychological harm. There are incest survivors who reenact their childhood traumas in “daddy’s girl” scenarios and the like and end up the stronger and saner for it. If they can play with this combustible material without getting burned, I don’t see why you two can’t. It’s worth noting, though, that the bottom/submissive/“victim” in a scene is not the only one who can get hurt. Not only can tops develop “flogger’s shoulder” or other repetitive strain injuries, they are just as vulnerable to psychological harm as the bottom, but without the built-in safety valve: Bottoms can cry and regress and call a safe word if things get too intense. So can you, but you’ll have to break role to do it. If you try this and it’s too much for either one of you, stop. (You’ll need a safe word other than “stop!” or “no!” or this will never work.) It’ll be fine. It’s not like you’ll accidentally actually rape her or anything. It’s a game, and games end when you’re done playing.
Love,
Andrea
Roots and antennas
› mirissa@sfbg.com
After a miserable World Cup performance, someone has to redeem Brazil’s cultural status in the eyes of observers. With a critically acclaimed performance at SXSW under his belt and his self-titled US debut on Six Degrees, Lenine may be just the man for the job. Brazil’s überpopular singer-songwriter is spearheading the latest neo-tropicália movement, following in the footsteps of artists like Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes. Inspired by the cosmopolitan samba vibe of his current base in Rio de Janeiro, Lenine mixes intelligent lyrics with rock, hip-hop, and electronica into an equatorial sound that transforms rustic native rhythms into incredibly lush pop music.
Lenine’s hometown of Recife in northeastern Brazil has historically attracted a rich ethnic mix of Africans, Portuguese, Dutch, and indigenous South Americans. However, when asked about his own ethnic roots, Lenine offers a less than literal answer. “I have roots and I have antennas,” he says on the phone from Rio.
“My roots are usually underground and hidden…. You see the fruit, the leaves, the branches, but the roots are not shown. What’s most important to me is the expression, not where it comes from.”
At a recent performance at Cité de la Musique in Paris, Lenine exhibited this preferred mode of expression by choosing to collaborate with a Pan-American group including Cuban bassist Yusa and Argentine percussionist Ramiro Musotto.
Though he’s been referred to as Brazil’s answer to Prince, Lenine sees himself as more in line with history’s troubadours. “I completely relate to that figure who since early days has traveled around to chronicle human life,” he explains. “Today when I hear Neil Young or Serge Gainsbourg, I hear the echoes of that tradition. As a singer-songwriter I use my instrument to document life as I pass through it.”
Today the singer-songwriter finds inspiration in northeast Brazilian rhythms like maracatu, xote, and baião but points to his move to Rio de Janeiro 28 years ago as the real turning point in his career. “It completely changed me and crystallized my art,” he says. “When I arrived in Rio, it was a desire that hadn’t yet been realized…. My whole career as a musician began and was constructed in Rio.”
Lenine’s US debut compiles work from his three Brazilian releases, including collaborations with US groups like Living Color and Yerba Buena. The album opens with “Jack Soul Brasileiro,” an homage to famous Brazilian percussionist Jackson do Pandeiro. “He was one of the greatest percussionists the world has ever seen,” Lenine explains. “This is a person who never went to school, yet at least 90 percent of Brazilian musicians refer to him somehow in their work. It’s great street music that’s completely nonacademic.”
The songwriter emphasizes the huge influence of Brazilian street music on his work, typified by embolado, the rapid-fire style of rapping that emerged from the streets of northeastern Brazil. “It’s not only the music but the attitude of the street that comes into direct conflict with an academic approach to music,” he observes. “I love exploring this conflict and want to break down these walls.” SFBG
LENINE
Tues/1, 7 p.m.
Swedish American Hall
2170 Market, SF
$20
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
High tide, low tide
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Moving the WestWave Dance Festival (called Summerfest/dance until two years ago and now in its 15th year) to the Project Artaud Theater was a smart idea. Even though the cavernous former warehouse dwarfs some of the smaller companies using the space, Artaud lays out an altogether funky welcome mat, squeaky stairs included.
Due to philosophical and financial considerations, WestWave has always focused on up-and-coming choreographers. That means there’s an abundance of new work — at least half of the pieces in this year’s fest are world premieres — as well as a lot more duos, rather than pieces for six and more. On opening night two works exemplified the vitality of local dance: You and You and You by EmSpace Dance’s Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and RAWdance’s Drained. The two couldn’t have been more different. Both were terrific.
In Stuart’s piece, three dancers (Damara Ganley, Noel Plemmons, and Julie Sheetz) began very far apart but oozed toward each other like streams of lava. Voluptuous without being erotic, the dancers pressed themselves together, piled on top of each other, and rearranged limbs in order to find space for themselves. This was dancing about mass and weight but also softness and yielding. At the end Plemmons encased Sheetz so tightly that you couldn’t be sure whether he was strangling or embracing her.
RAWdance’s Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith are high-stakes gamblers. In Drained, performed with Dudley Flores and Laura Sharp, they threw themselves into a game of kamikaze dancing that was as exacting as it was freewheeling. They had at their disposal a defined number of moves and gestures for two men, two women, and two boxes. So how many permutations were possible? To find out, the dancers dove in at top speed. Drained may be a one-idea piece, but watching the choreography test the body’s limits with such skill and exuberance was great fun.
The rest of the program was more of a mixed bag. Poorly projected visuals undercut Fellow Travelers Performance Group’s spare and reticent Warning Signs (by Ken James, with Cynthia Adams). Still, the juxtaposition of the live dancers with their “talking” portraits was intriguing. In the wispy In Closing, Fresh Meat Productions’ Sean Dorsey (with Courtney Moreno) looked at the inevitable winding down of a relationship in which love and tenderness survive only as memories. Delicately weaving its components, the piece was a little thin but evoked the situation’s mix of tenderness and regret.
Cathleen McCarthy’s passionately danced quintet Driven to This started with a protracted but not uninteresting solo, though the piece quickly lost its way. It almost felt like the solo belonged somewhere else. Driven needs a backbone and pruning. The evening’s low point came when Kyoungil Ong (who runs quite a good Korean dance company, Ong Dance Company) performed her Flower Tears II. This was a derivative and shallow excursion into dance theater. Centered on a huge white paper gown from which legs or arms periodically emerged, the work was so overwrought and cliché that it bordered on self-parody.
On WestWave’s second night, four of the six pieces were by beginners. Showcasing truly inexperienced artists in a festival doesn’t do anybody a favor, not least the artists themselves. However, even this decidedly subpar program yielded one discovery. Alena Odrene Cawthorne’s delicious Face It embraced weight and phrasing for a vernal celebration of maidenhood in a way that has not been seen since the very early days of modern dance. The choreographer sent her quartet of elegant, pastel-clad dancers (Kathleen Franklin, Angela Pasalis, Susan Tobiason, and herself) into José Limón’s swooping circles, serpentine trajectories, wide pliés, and stretching arms — all without a trace of irony. It was hard to believe that this companionable bliss was for real. In stepped Pamela Wood, an older woman in African dress. She couldn’t believe it either. The dancers tried to “convert” her by drawing her in. She wasn’t having any of it. In the end, they simply danced around her. Bravo!
The program also featured Apryl Renee’s buffoonish Trope of Seuss, a rather miserable take on Green Eggs and Ham. Renee acted as the narrator and Susan Donham as the reluctant object of Charlotte Mayang’s manic nuturer. The same trio, joined by Kate Joyce, returned in the obscure Traveling Companions. Heavy on atmosphere but light on movement invention, the piece rather crudely explored the push and pull of a calling, based on the Book of Ruth.
The earnestness and focus of young Catalina Jackson in danceNAGANUMA’s Pallid Faeries were enchanting. Claudine Naganuma tried to portray four different versions of the mythic creatures as both youngsters and adults — but why? She had a concept; she needed to translate it into stageworthy choreography. Even less intriguing were Rebecca Wender’s Afterward and Amy Lewis’s Conversion, neither of which belonged in a program of professional dance. SFBG
WESTWAVE DANCE FESTIVAL
July 27–30, 8 p.m.
Project Artaud Theater
450 Florida, SF
$18–$20
(415) 863-9834
www.westwavedancefestival.org
Runway rundown
TV Based on the preview episode and the season debut, here is our handy racing form for the new season of Project Runway. Whether or not they rhymed fashion with passion in their video auditions, all the contestants better pray that Nina Garcia finds their work “aesthetically pleasing.” Michael Kors? He looks like he fell into a vat at Orange Julius.
Bradley Baumkirchner Whimsically flying below the radar: 8-1
Laura Bennett Megarich Manhattan mother-of-five with architectural experience and a possible unholy diva streak. Wendy Pepper with posh accent? 3-1
Robert Best Barbie specialist, therefore doomed to be this season’s Nick? Seems sharper, would never say, “Heck, yeah!” 3-1
Malan Breton Started out like Stephen from Top Chef but may prove to be so bizarre he’s charming. Could pull an upset or simply stick around for eccentricity’s sake. 5-1
Bonnie Dominguez Dissed Serena Williams. 15-1
Stacey Estrella SF resident and this season’s Marla. Scratched.
Katherine Gerdes Cute but out of her league. Could resuscitate Lindsey Jacobellis’s career, but skiwear ain’t dinnerwear. 25-1
Kayne Gillaspie Twangy pageant guy. Has he made JonBenet dresses? Naive and likable. 10-1
Uli Herzner Hideous nouveau–purple lady clothes you’d find in a Hayes Valley boutique five years ago. But will Ms. Klum take a shine to her? 40-1
Alison Kelly Too much blond hair dye could fry this Hostess Snowball’s brain, but she may stick around, if only to counteract the rather high queen quotient. 15-1
Angela Keslar Pro: likes Elvis. Con: très crunchy. 50-1
Michael Knight Drives talking car — just kidding. From the ATL. Another sweet naïf or a Chloe-style copycat? 30-1
Vincent Libretti A basket as a hat — this CC DeVille type is off to a roaring Rudi Gernreich start. 20-1
Keith Michael Handsome — until he opens his mouth. Jude Law look-alike and serious contender. 3-1
Jeffrey Sebelia Insufferable braggart with distracting neck tattoo; was humbled quick. 25-1 (Cheryl Eddy, Huston)
Blyth spirit
MOVIE STAR “You can tell that it’s cheap by the smell of the fabric!” Veda Pierce says, wrinkling her nose when her mother, Mildred, gives her a dress.
You can tell 1945’s Mildred Pierce is a classic film by the depth of its shadows. And you can tell that Ann Blyth — however Veda-rific and villainous — is the kind of class act Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, the no-nonsense type who doesn’t have an unkind word to say about anyone. Particularly when you ask about Joan Crawford.
“I can only speak from my own experience,” Blyth says. “She was terrific to work with and very kind to me. I was seriously injured shortly after finishing Mildred Pierce — I fractured my back. After eight or nine months, one of the first things I could do was swim, and she invited me to her pool.” Uh-oh — her pool? According to Blyth, it’s best to erase that I-will-always-beat-you Mommie Dearest swim scene from your head: “I think many people realize there were exaggerations [in the movie].”
So on to brighter subjects — such as the fact that Blyth, a grandmother and expert knitter who is still happily married after 53 years, never let the movies mess up her life. That’s an achievement, considering her formidable career, one built from a keep-it-simple approach to acting. “You listen to the person you’re playing opposite,” she says. “Then your own intuitive sense comes into play.”
In addition to Mildred Pierce’s Michael Curtiz, Blyth also worked with directors Raoul Walsh (“pretty freewheeling”) and Douglas Sirk (“a very introspective person”). Her talent as a songbird is on display in movies shared with “very special friend” and “delight” Donald O’Connor, and she held her own opposite leading men as varied as “dear” Farley Granger and Robert Mitchum, who had “shoulders that went on forever” but also “was very playful.”
Blyth’s own bright presence made a definite impression on Howard Hughes, who gave her a swimming pool and a Cadillac after a single conversation. Still, this week at least, all roads lead back to Veda. According to Blyth, her romantic scenes with fellow Mildred Pierce villain Zachary Scott were a pleasure because he exemplified the Norma Desmond line “We had faces!” Eve Arden? “She could say something wicked and not hurt anyone’s feelings.”
So how exactly did Blyth get that special twinkle in her eye? “You mean that devil look?” she asks with a laugh. “Working with Mike Curtiz helped…. Every scene to me was special, from the very beginning when [Veda] seems to be a spoiled brat, until the end, when she’s developed into a truly evil person. Thank goodness I don’t know anyone like that!”
Yes, Mildred Pierce contains noir corners that Todd Haynes and Sonic Youth would die for — and it has Joan. But even Joan would have one less classic in her filmography if it wasn’t for Blyth. As the woman herself says, without her performance “[Mildred Pierce] would just be about opening up a very successful drive-in.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
MILDRED PIERCE
With Ann Blyth
Fri/21, gala and screening 7 p.m., reception 10:30 p.m.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$27.50–$55
(415) 863-0611
www.ticketweb.com
Burritos of the gods
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
SFBG So what inspires you?
MICHAEL SHOWALTER You do, you inspire me.
I think about you in the morning. I doodle little pictures of your face and think about you making me a burrito. Sometimes I doodle little pictures of you making me a burrito.
OK, so maybe that isn’t exactly how it goes. Although Showalter is a doodle enthusiast, he is only mildly turned on by baby-size burritos. Being the narcissistic Bay Area dweller that I am, I immediately ask Showalter, who’s on the phone from his home in New York City, about San Francisco.
“I like San Francisco. I like beat poetry. I like gay people…. I don’t like gay beat poets.”
So he doesn’t read Ginsberg?
“My favorite books are Everybody Poops and the Odyssey. They are actually very similar.”
Showalter is a smart guy. He’s one of those smart guys who scared the hell out of his parents by going into comedy. His dad, a Yale-educated French lit professor, and his mom, a literary critic, worried that their little brainiac (680 math, 620 verbal) was going down the wrong path. “It’s not like this is something you go to grad school for,” he says.
I remind him that his buddy Eugene Mirman did design his own comedy major and that he could have done the same.
“I would have designed a doodling major. My thesis would be on doodles.”
Instead, Showalter took the smart-guy route and studied semiotics at Brown. This is the mind fuck of all possible majors. Most people who spend their formative years steeped in the philosophy of language become literary theorists or filmmakers. People who spend this much time reading Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes take a long time to recover.
Showalter used sketch comedy as a catalyst for his recuperation. This might explain why his entire body of work is (a) fanatically devoured, quoted, and forever adored by viewers or (b) dismissed as ridiculous and forgotten promptly.
Personally, I can’t take anyone who didn’t like The State seriously, but Showalter takes it in stride. “I think people that don’t like it might not get it,” he says. “It’s metahumor — a lot of people aren’t into metahumor. A friend once told me that it is better to have nine people think your work is number one than a hundred think your work is number nine.”
After the Showalter- and David Wain–penned Wet Hot American Summer was released in 2001, some critics gave the boys a very hard time for the scene that involved someone slipping on a banana peel. “The joke was that we made a banana peel joke,” explains Showalter.
Still, one has to wonder, how the hell do these guys come up with this stuff? How does the absurdist sketch comedy show Stella get so far out there? Do Michael Ian Black, Wain, and Showalter just sit around a table bouncing ideas off each other?
“Yeah, exactly like that,” says Showalter. “It is that cliché situation with guys sitting in a room with a Nerf basketball. Only we don’t put it into the net. Ever.” All three members of Stella contribute equally to the creative process — “If we all think it’s funny, then it’s funny,” Showalter observes.
Last year’s film The Baxter marked a departure from sketch comedy. As the writer, director, and star of the romantic comedy, Showalter admits it wasn’t all tweed and roses on the set. “There were problems between the director and the star,” he says. “We just didn’t get along. I found it difficult to deal with myself.”
After his experience writing the film, Showalter joined the faculty of the Peoples Improv Theater. He currently teaches a course on writing comedic screenplays. Yeah, he’s a real teacher. He has a syllabus but doesn’t use textbooks. Instead, he shows movies to illustrate his points. “I show bad comedies like Annie Hall and good comedies like Porky’s.”
Showalter plans to continue teaching, possibly adding a sketch comedy class to his schedule. As far as acting goes, he says, “I’m working on a reality show for a major television network. That’s all I can say.”
The tour is also on his mind. Although stand-up is a pretty new thing for Showalter, he doesn’t worry much about people not laughing: “Pretty much everyone who comes to see me already thinks I’m funny, so I don’t really get heckled.”
Good thing. A heckler at a Showalter show would probably throw canned vegetables on stage. The Blue Collar Comedy tour made a movie. The Comedians of Comedy tour made a TV special. The idea of Showalter, Mirman, and Leo Allen traipsing up and down the West Coast in a van makes me nervous.
Will there be groupies? Drugs? Booze? “It will be like that part with the red snapper in the Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods,” he deadpans. “Very Zeppelin-esque. I have already said too much. Let’s just say it has a lot to do with sushi.”
Sure, Showalter gives a good interview, but I don’t think I’d let him near me with a fish. SFBG
MICHAEL SHOWALTER WITH EUGENE MIRMAN AND LEO ALLEN
Tues/25, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$15
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
SEE YOU TOMORROW, GOD WILLING
Last year I put the Uruguayan movie Whisky on my top-10 list and voted for it and its lead actress, Mirella Pascual, in many film polls, including Film Comment’s and the Village Voice’s. With impeccable precision, Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll’s sophomore feature sets a dedicated romantic next to a depressive’s withered and miserly soul (in understated yet glossy color — so many gorgeous royal blues). Just for its mordant look at a business run with out-of-date machinery, I hoped in print that it would get a Bay Area theatrical run.
Now Whisky has a San Francisco play date, at this year’s SF Jewish Film Festival. Rebella and Stoll’s film is screening at the Castro on July 24 — a little less than three weeks after Rebella committed suicide at his apartment in Montevideo. Looking at Whisky again with this knowledge was painful. The deep loneliness and sadness that run like a river beneath much of the movie’s surface humor were already evident, and now they are fully exposed. But if you love life and cinema, you should see this great film in that great theater. Rebella and Stoll are true talents, and even before this month, the final moments of the former’s last finished work came across as a rare, pure vision of heartbreak. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Past ain’t past
› cheryl@sfbg.com
“What is the international camp language? It’s beating.” In an instant, a guide at the former concentration camp just outside of Mauthausen, Austria, transforms a group of high schoolers from giggly to terrified. From the looks of the parking lot, Mauthausen is like any other historical attraction. Sightseers roll up in enormous motor coaches, clutching digital cameras loaded only with fun-time Euro-vacation shots — until now.
There’s no narration in KZ, Rex Bloomfield’s layered doc about the Mauthausen camp’s post–World War II transformation into an exceedingly unsettling tourist destination. (KZ is short for the German word Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp.) The film is largely composed of interviews with visitors, guides (“I’ve been taking antidepressants for years,” one remarks woefully), and Mauthausen residents — many too young to remember the camp’s horrors and some too old to realize that Hitler Youth nostalgia isn’t something most folks would want caught on tape. The disconnect between town and camp, past and present, can be breathtaking. “McDonald’s” and “Mauthausen” are painted on the same billboard; a young couple shrug off the fact that their comfy home once belonged to an SS officer; and the local tavern features lederhosen, suds, and a folkie strummer whose sunny lyrics praise “the cider tavern up by the KZ.”
Though Bloomfield doesn’t shape his film with archival footage, talking-head academics, or voice-overs, the way KZ is edited makes it pretty clear he’s just as stunned as we are by the juxtapositions his film uncovers. An elderly Mauthausener remarks that during the war she wasn’t sure what was going on in the camp, just that it was “nothing good”; moments later the camera cuts to a group nervously shuffling into the KZ’s gas chamber, where they hear incredibly graphic descriptions of deaths that happened where they now stand.
For its San Francisco Jewish Film Festival engagement, KZ screens with the short The Holocaust Tourist: Whatever Happened to Never Again?, which examines the off-kilter rebirth of Jewish culture (think faux-Hebrew signage and “Jewish-style” restaurants that serve pork) in Krakow, Poland, owing to the popularity of Schindler’s List. What visitors to Mauthausen or Krakow (the closest big city to Auschwitz) actually get out of their experiences is unclear; some seem deeply moved, while others are simply checking off another stop on, say, their “Highlights of Poland” itinerary. As both films point out, being a tourist is perhaps all most people can — or should — be in places where such evil still lingers.
Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, Israel, folks with zero interest in confronting horror head-on can’t avoid it when a suicide bomber targets their hangout, a laid-back watering hole called Mike’s Place. Amazingly, filming for the documentary Blues by the Beach — intended as a feel-good look at “real life in Israel” beyond headline-grabbing violence — had begun before the April 2003 attack. After the project’s primary catalyst, American producer Jack Baxter, was seriously injured in the blast, Joshua Faudem (an Israeli American with a filmmaking background who happened to be a Mike’s Place bartender) carried on with help from his then-girlfriend, Pavla Fleischer, also a filmmaker.
Despite this stunning chain of coincidences, Blues by the Beach unfortunately suffers from lack of focus, shifting from Baxter’s search for a doc subject to Mike’s Place to Faudem’s failing relationship with Fleischer. Though the filmmakers’ post-traumatic stress is well earned, it can get tedious. Far more inspiring is the resilience of Mike’s Place itself. Visit the bar’s Web site (www. mikesplacebars.com) for a striking illustration of how recent tragedy offers just as much opportunity for off-the-wall juxtaposition as anything left over from World War II: a page memorializing the victims of the bombing and another page proudly displaying pics from the bar’s annual “Pimp-n-Ho” costume bash. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO
JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
July 20–Aug. 7
See Film listings for showtimes
and venues
(925) 275-9490
www.sfjff.org
Flame on
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER To the naked eye — and deep-fried, extra-crispy spirit — working fast food is a lot like what the Flaming Lips call the “sound of failure” on their latest album, At War with the Mystics (Warner Bros). It’s the worst of times … and the worst of times. And I can feel the pain — I once broke my back and suffered hypothermia of the right hand for Häagen-Dazs.
That’s probably why I found it so poignant when, in the recent Lips doc by SF filmmaker Bradley Beesley, The Fearless Freaks, Wayne Coyne went back to the Long John Silver, the spot where he’d donned a ludicrous pirate getup and tossed salted bits of seafood as a fry cook for more than a decade. And it was inspiring — because Coyne, now 45, is so shameless and proud about his contributions to our fast food nation. “I think that kind of mindless manual labor really does save the world in a way because you’re just busy doing stuff,” he told me over the phone from his Oklahoma City home in April. “Being busy keeps you out of trouble — keeps you away from too much existential doubt.”
Who’d’ve thunk that grease monkey in the plumed hat would become the blood-spattered, bubble-riding, balloon-shoving ringleader to a Flaming Lips nation? Certainly not me when I caught their brave but somewhat ineffective Walkman experiment at the Fillmore in ’99, during their Music Against Brain Degeneration/Soft Bulletin tour. Tuning into the selected radio channel, I could barely hear anything of the show through the flimsy headsets. But I guess word spread because the scene at this year’s Noise Pop opening show with the Lips was beyond standing room.
The opening moments of the show were worth it — the band tore into the stirring, trebly melody of “Race for the Prize,” Coyne whipped a lit-up sling around his head, smoke poured off the stage, and Santa-suited techs threw far too many balloons into the sold-out crowd. The punks had taken acid, to paraphrase the title of the 2002 Lips compilation, and it was a genuine spectacle, replete with darkness (in the form of Coyne’s monologues critiquing the Bush administration) and light (the cute animal costumes) and sing-alongs to Queen’s seemingly uncoverable “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The key to regime change lay with each individual, declared pop philosopher Coyne, suggesting that his audience make it “popular to be gay, smoke pot, and have abortions” throughout the country, not just in San Francisco.
“Maybe I’m a fool, maybe I’m embarrassing, maybe it’s humiliating, but at least it opens it up to say, ‘Well, you speak your mind,’” Coyne said later. “In San Francisco, you guys don’t grapple with the same problems that you would in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City doesn’t have a tolerance of smoking pot, and gay people are on the verge of having all their rights taken away. You almost wonder, will people at some point try to reverse the civil rights movement.”
Speaking about the Lips’ 1983 inception, Coyne told Staring at Sound biographer Jim DeRogatis that “he’d like to be in a band like the Grateful Dead, throw big parties with people coming to them and having a great time.” DeRogatis said, “[Coyne] also said, ‘We’d like to be different; we’d like to still make records that don’t suck.’ They have elements of a jam band following, they have people from the indie rock ’80s. They have people who’ve discovered them in the alternative era. They have new Gen Y fans that downloaded The Soft Bulletin and think it’s incredible. Their audience is all over the map — they don’t fit into any demographic in terms of the way that corporations are slicing up the audience.”
The trick, said Coyne, is to never get too comfortable. “We always force ourselves to do something new, even if we’re not comfortable with it. I don’t think we really have any agenda other than to freak ourselves out.”
Ushered in with The Fearless Freaks; 20 Years of Weird: the Flaming Lips 1986–2006 (a collection of live recordings and oddities), their current tour, the DeRogatis book, the Fearless Freaks documentary, and next year with luck Christmas on Mars (Coyne’s feature film debut as a director), At War turns out to be, indeed, a war album, questioning uses and abuses of power with the opening track, “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song.”
But that’s not to say Coyne shies away from the band’s evangelical tendencies. “We’re using drama and music and sort of heightening the whole experience to be somewhat of a religious experience,” he explains. “I think all good rock ’n’ roll has that. But hopefully the agenda is that you, as an individual, at the end of the day, decide what’s great about your life instead of looking to some rulebook or some invisible force up in space somewhere. Music is just one part of it, and at the end of the day, to me, it’s dumb entertainment.” Aye, aye, matey? SFBG
FLAMING LIPS
With Ween and the Go! Team
Sat/22, 6:30 p.m.
Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Berk.
$41.50
www.ticketmaster.com
SAY WHAT?
ROOTS OF OCHIS
Get down with these pulsating Northern Cali indie darlings. Just do it. No questions. Wed/19, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $7. (415) 923-0923.
PAPERCUTS
The lovely Bay Area indie rockers’ album is coming out on Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s label, Gnomensong. Thurs/20, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $7. (415) 861-5016.
RACONTEURS AND KELLEY STOLTZ
Midwestern rock supergroupies meet the Detroit native–SF vinyl diehard (who was pals with Brendan Benson back in the day). Sat/22–Sun/23, 8 p.m., Warfield, 982 Market, SF. $29.50–$37.50. (415) 775-7722.
MINDERS
Enter It’s a Bright Guilty World (Future Farmer); then enter the dragon. The Kingdom and Junior Panthers also perform. Sun/23, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 621-4455.
MAVIS STAPLES
Legendary gospel-soul sister communes with the eucalyptus. Sun/23, 2 p.m., Stern Grove, SF. Free. sterngrove.org.
Little creatures
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I would like to know if leeches can be used on female nipples and clits?
Love,
Sucky
Dear Suck:
Would you, now? And why would you like to know that? I suppose it’s too much to hope for that you are selflessly devoted to the cause of curing helpless women of scrofula, ague, and the bloody flux, and are seeking new treatment modes? Tell me you’re not really wondering if perhaps leeches, applied to well-innervated body bits, could provide a stimuutf8g sort of suction. If so, I’m impressed — it takes quite a lot to gross me out but, man, that’s disgusting.
Do you actually know how leeches leech? It isn’t very nice. Here’s a succinct description of the feeding habits of Hirudo medicinalis, courtesy of the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web: “It attaches to the host by means of its two suckers and bites through the skin of its victim. Simultaneously, the leech injects an anesthetic so that its presence is not detected, and an anticoagulant in order for the incision to remain open during the meal. It has three jaws, which work back and forth during the feeding process, which usually lasts about 20 to 40 minutes and leaves a tripartite star-shaped scar on the host.” How hot is that? And you caught the part about the anesthetic, right? The little suckers don’t suck you as much as they sort of . . . dissolve you, but you can’t even feel it while they’re at it. A poor choice of sex toy all around, I’d say.
I realize, of course, that simply hoping that nobody finds leeches sexy is not enough to keep someone, somewhere, from doing exactly that. There is, as my aphorism-coining husband is wont to put it, someone for everything, and all we can ask of the inevitable leech fanciers is that they keep it to themselves.
Speaking of things that suck, I’ve been a little distracted lately from my readers’ blow job issues and quixotic quests for the perfect dildo due to having gone and had two babies a mere three weeks ago: real babies, with the diapers and the 3 a.m. feedings and all that good stuff. They’re lovely, thanks.
I couldn’t say for sure if one’s essential self (assuming there is such a creature) really changes with the onset of parenthood, but one’s perceptions sure do. Things change. Nipples, for instance, are changed forever. Once mildly sexy in theory and distinctly sexual in practice, nipples at my house are now the most quotidian of objects, either made of silicone and soaking in the sink or the real fleshy deal shoved unceremoniously into the frantically gaping but adorable maw of an insatiable small being at any and often every hour of the day. They have been repurposed, and if you take the time to think about it, that is just kind of bizarre, as though you had a penis but it had suddenly been declared indispensable as a household tool — a garden hose, say, or a plumber’s snake — and put to that use for most of the day, every day, until you were expected to bring it back to the conjugal bed and put it back to work at its original job.
What has all this to do with your question about leeches? Oh, not much, admittedly, except perhaps as an example of things which one might think could be vaguely sexy but just don’t cut it. This brings us to the least sexy vaguely sexy-sounding device on this or most other planets, an object without which I had lived quite happily until they wheeled one into my hospital room and ordered me to use it lest my defenseless and undersized newborns suffer and die before our horrified eyes. It’s the breast pump. Yes, the words breast and pump are both inherently sexy and yes, the thing does bear a superficial resemblance to similar devices sold for use on whichever erectile bits and bobs you could stuff into them. Not only that, but there are milky-MILF fanciers all over the Internet, not to mention all those “human cow” stories that clutter up the BDSM fantasy sites. I don’t care. Any object that brings to mind the phrase “moo cow milker” is unfit to be considered a sex toy. The nasty thing may distinguish itself from your leeches by lacking the ability to inject an anticoagulant or inflict a tripartite, star-shaped scar, but that’s about the best that can be said for it.
That’s enough of that. Go read Christopher Hitchens’s entertaining intellectual history of the all-American blow job in this month’s Vanity Fair, or turn up an obituary of John Money, the seminal gender researcher who died this week after a long career as first the hero and then the bogey man of trans- and intersexuals everywhere, and you’ll know as much as I do this week. I gotta go change diapers, and that isn’t sexy either.
Love,
Andrea
The planet of the mutants
› johnny@sfbg.com
It’s been nearly 40 years since Sérgio Dias Baptista of Os Mutantes saw Ten Years After at the Fillmore, but he still has, well, vivid memories of his first visit to San Francisco as a naive 17-year-old. He remembers sitting on a bench at a park in Haight-Ashbury and seeing a man on a faraway hilltop slowly walking toward him, until the man finally arrived — to offer Dias what he claims was his first joint. “I think it was also the first time someone showed me a peace sign, and I didn’t understand what was that,” the ebullient guitarist says. “I thought it stood for ‘Victory.’”
Dias hopes to bring some “nice ‘inner weather’” to a much different United States this week, when the antic victorious peacefulness of Os Mutantes takes over the same venue where he once saw Nottingham’s finest. “It’s going to be, like, ‘Whoa!’” he predicts. “Flashbacks all over the place!”
Imagine if the Monkees or Sonny and Cher were true subversives rather than sedatives and you have a glimmer of Os Mutantes’ initial censor-baiting carnival-esque presence on Brazilian TV shows such as The Small World of Ronnie Von. If fellow tropicalistas Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were the Bahians with bossa nova roots, then Dias, his brother Arnaldo, and Arnaldo’s girlfriend Rita Lee Jones — a vocalist known for her spontaneous raids of network costume wardrobes — were the Tropicália movement’s outrageous São Paulo–based rock ’n’ roll wing. With a pianist-composer for a mother and a tenor singer–poet for a father, the Dias brothers lived and breathed music. “Working 10 or 12 hours a day on songs became a normal thing for us,” says Dias, who wears a cape on the front of the group’s first album and an alien skullcap on the back of their second. “The level of expectation was high, but without any demands. That was very good for our technical development.”
This amazing development, overseen by Karlheinz Stockhausen–influenced producer Rogério Duprat — the George Martin or Phil Spector or Jack Nitzsche or Pierre Henry of Tropicalismo — can be heard on the group’s triple crown of classics, 1968’s Os Mutantes, 1969’s Mutantes, and 1970’s A Divina Comédia, ou Ando Meio Desligado. “There was no psychedelia — Brazil received information in kaleidoscope,” Dias asserts, using a favorite interview metaphor. Whether generated by drugs or by cultural conduits, the kaleidoscopic sound of Os Mutantes’ first three records ranges from Ventures-like guitar riffing (“I have to thank [Ventures guitarist] Nokie Edwards for hours of pleasure,” says Dias) to hallucinatory and surreal choral passages (such as Os Mutantes’ time stopper “O Relógio”) and Janis Joplin–like freak-outs about domestic appliances (the third album’s “Meu Refrigerador Não Funciona,” or “My Refrigerator Doesn’t Work”).
A reaction to international pop culture inspired by modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto,” the sound of Os Mutantes and their fellow Tropicalistas wasn’t music to the ears of Brazil’s military dictatorship or to those of younger music fans who adhered to post–bossa nova nationalist tradition or derivative Jovem Guarda rock. In October 1967, at TV Records’ Second Festival of Brazilian Popular Music, both Veloso (performing “Alegria, Alegria,” which name-drops Coca-Cola) and Gil (performing “Domingo No Parque” with Os Mutantes) received the type of reaction Bob Dylan had recently gotten for going electric. “It felt good. You pull out your fists and think, ‘OK, they’re against us, so let’s show them the way,’” Dias says when asked about the era’s battles against forces of repression. “When you’re young, you think you’re indestructible or immortal.”
Tropicalismo’s figureheads soon learned otherwise. The following year brought the landmark compilation Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis, recorded the same month as the massive protests in Paris, its title fusing Veloso’s anthem “Tropicália” (which mentions the Brigitte Bardot film Viva Maria) and Os Mutantes’ “Panis et Circensis.” Turning a catchphrase from the May revolts into a song (“É Proibido Proibir”), Veloso soon faced an onslaught of eggs and tomatoes as well as boos during performances. In December 1968, Brazilian president Artur da Costa e Silva imprisoned Veloso and Gil, who were later exiled to England. One could say Os Mutantes got off lucky in comparison, as they were still able to flout the Federal Censorship Department through the gothic-vault morbidity of A Divina Comédia’s cover art and through mocking sound effects on TV. “It was a dark period, but we fought with a smile,” says Dias, who doesn’t miss a chance to compare Brazil’s Fifth Institutional Act with the United States’ Patriot Act. “We were jokers, but we were serious jokers.”
Today, eight years after Beck’s best album, Mutations (featuring the single “Tropicalia”), Os Mutantes and their contemporaries are surfing another deserved cosmic wave of younger-generation wonderment, and it’s more apparent than ever that the movement’s major musical artists covered each other’s tracks in a way that emphasized — rather than hid — their unity and intent. The recent Soul Jazz comp Tropicália: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound begins with Gil’s “Bat Macumba” and closes with the Os Mutantes version. Through moments like Gal Costa’s gorgeous “Baby” (another Veloso composition also covered by Os Mutantes), the lesser-known but perhaps superior collection Tropicália Gold, on Universal, highlights the music’s oft-overlooked links to bossa nova and the ties between Tropicalismo îe-îe-îe and Françoise Hardy’s languid yé-yé. Veloso’s autobiography, Tropical Truth, gives shout-outs to Jean-Luc Godard, but Serge Gainsbourg had to have been just as much an influence on Veloso’s lyrics and the whiz-bang! noises on Os Mutantes recordings such as A Divina Comédia’s “Chão de Estrelas.”
Since he laments that Al Jazeera isn’t readily available in Brazil, Sérgio Dias might be the first to note that Brazilian TV and popular music ain’t always what they used to be, regardless of the fact that Gil is now the country’s Minister of Culture. For example, the ’90s brought the bizarre blond ambition of Playboy playmate–turned–pop star and kids TV host Xuxa — not exactly the girl Os Mutantes had in mind when they “shoo shoo”-ed through Jorge Ben’s “A Minha Menina.” But the Dias brothers still have many reasons to celebrate. Earlier this year, a Tropicália exhibition at the Barbican in London brought the movement’s visual artists, including the late Hélio Oiticica (who coined the term Tropicália), together with their current technicolor children such as Assume Vivid Astro Focus. It also led to a live performance by Os Mutantes with new vocalist Zélia Duncan — the first time the Dias brothers appeared onstage together in over three decades. Devendra Banhart, who had written to the group asking to be their roadie, was the opening act.
“I felt like the guys going into the arena,” says Dias. “It was such a burst of energy — it was outrageous. After the show, the audience stood yelling ‘Mutantes!’ for 10 minutes. It’s such a humbling situation, to think about people wanting this 30 years later. It makes me want to bow to the universe.” SFBG
OS MUTANTES
With Brightback Morning Light
Mon/24, 9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$37.50
(415) 346-4000
www.thefillmore.com
A band of sisters
› kimberly@sfbg.com
Cast your eyes on the Billboard chart and it seems like summer 2006 will go down in history as the season of the Latin diva, with Nelly Furtado doffing a soft-focus folkie-cutie image by declaring herself “Promiscuous” and Shakira holding on to the promise of, well, that crazy, sexy, but not quite cool chest move she’s close to trademarked via “Hips Don’t Lie.” Rihanna and Christina Aguilera brought up the rear of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart last week — solo singers all. But with the on-again, off-again slow fade of Destiny’s Child, the imminent demise of the explicitly feminist Sleater-Kinney, and the earlier evaporation of the even more didactic le Tigre, one has to wonder, what has happened to all-girl groups?
Was it a gimmick? Did Newsweek and Seventeen leach riot grrrl’s genuine grassroots movement of its “authenticity” and power? Was Sarah McLachlan lame? Was Courtney Love insane? Perhaps the answer is on today’s pop charts, where the sole “girl group” — if you don’t count the manly guest MC appearances — is the frankly faux Pussycat Dolls, a sorry excuse for women’s empowerment if there ever was one. Their ’90s counterparts the Spice Girls baldly appropriated “girl power” as their own marketing slogan, but at least they gave 30-second-commercial-break lip service to the notion.
The scarcity of all-female bands — particularly the variety whose women do more than simply lip-synch on video — has perhaps spread to supposedly more progressive spheres. Erase Errata bassist-vocalist Ellie Erickson notes that when the band recently played Chicago’s Intonation Music Festival, she was shocked to discover that their all-female trio made up almost half the total number of women performing among about 50 artists. Even at a more down-low, underground gathering like last month’s End Times Festival in Minneapolis, where Bay Area bands dominated, only one all-girl band, T.I.T.S., made the cut, observes the band’s guitarist, Kim West. “When we were in Minneapolis there were so many girls who came up to us and were, like, ‘This is so awesome! There are no all-girl bands here and it’s so rare to see this,’” she recalls.
Girl groups do persist: the news-making, stand-taking, chops-wielding Dixie Chicks among them. But for every Chicks there’s a Donnas, now off Atlantic after the Bay Area–bred band’s second major-label release stumbled at takeoff. Is Dixie Chicks credibility forthcoming for commercial girl bands like Lillix, the Like, and Kittie? Some might argue that feminism’s gains in the ’70s and ’80s — which led to the blossoming of all-female groups from TLC to Babes in Toyland, Vanity 6 to L7, and Fannypack to Bikini Kill — have led to a postfeminist moment in which strongly female-identified artists are ghettoized or otherwise relegated to the zone of erotic fantasy (e.g., Pussycat Dolls). Gone are the days when Rolling Stone touted the “Women of Rock” in their 1997 30th anniversary issue and Lilith Fair brought female singer-songwriters to every cranny of the nation.
“I think that with the demise of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre, it’s a very sad time for girl groups,” e-mails Evelyn McDonnell, Miami Herald pop culture writer and coauthor of Rock She Wrote. “It seems like the end of the ’90s women in rock era, an era that unfortunately left fewer marks than we hoped it would 15 years ago.”
Radio’s known resistance to women-dominated bands hasn’t helped. Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna told me last year that despite the best efforts of her label, Universal, to get her feminist trio’s first major-label release, This Island, out to the masses, “MTV didn’t play our video and radio didn’t play our single either. Some of that is that we’re women and they’ve already got Gwen Stefani. So we just have to wait till she stops making music or something like that.” She was told that a group of three women was less likely to get play than a band of men fronted by a female vocalist.
Perhaps feminism is simply not in vogue, speculates Erase Errata vocalist-guitarist Jenny Hoyston. “I think any woman who’s a musician is going to have people say she’s only getting attention because she’s a woman,” she says. “It’s gonna be assumed that they don’t know how to work their gear, that they don’t necessarily play as well. That kind of typical stuff…. A lot of people aren’t taken seriously, especially if they get too queer or too gay in their songwriting, and I think that people get judged a lot for being too feminist, for sure, and I think there’s a major backlash against feminism in scenes that I’ve been a part of in this country. I think people are cooler about it in the UK definitely and in some other countries in Europe.”
But how does one explain the strong presence of all-female (or female-dominated) bands in the Bay Area such as Erase Errata, T.I.T.S., 16 Bitch Pileup, Blectum from Blechdom, Boyskout, Vervein, and Von Iva? “I think San Francisco is a big hub for women bands,” offers West, a veteran of Crack: We Are Rock and Death Sentence! Panda. With a provocative name and costumes (“It’s sexy from afar — and scary once you get closer,” West says), the band — including guitarist-vocalist Mary Elizabeth Yarborough, guitarist-vocalist Abbey Kerins, and Condor drummer Wendy Farina — reflects a kind of decentralized, cooperative approach to music making. “There’s no lead,” West explains. “I think that’s a really big element. We all sing together and we all come up with lyrics together. We each write a sentence or a word or a verse and put it in a hat and pull it out and that becomes a song. No one has more writing power than anyone else — it’s all even. I think girls are more likely to like some idea like that than guys.”
And there’s power in their female numbers, West believes, discussing T.I.T.S.’s June UK tour: “It’s funny because it was the first time I’d ever been on tour with all four girls. When I’d go on tour with Crack, guys would be hitting on us, and with T.I.T.S., guys were a little more intimidated because I think we were like a gang. We had that tightness in our group, so it’s harder to approach four girls than one girl or two girls, especially when we’re laughing and having a good time.”
In the end, McDonnell is optimistic that feminism could make a comeback. “I see a revival of progressive ideas in general in culture, largely in reaction to war and Bush…. The Dixie Chicks are arguably the most important group in popular music, and they’re fantastically outspoken as women’s liberationists,” she writes, also praising the Gossip, Peaches, and Chicks on Speed. “And the decentralization of the music industry should open avenues to women, making success less dependent on cruelly, ridiculously chauvinist radio.”
Ever the less-optimistic outsider, I’m less given to believing file sharing and self-released music can dispel the sexism embedded in the music industry — or stem the tide of social conservatism in this country. But that kind of spirit — as well as going with the urge to make music and art with other women, from our own jokes, horrors, and everyday existences — is a start. SFBG