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A constitutional amendment mandating a national day of prayer? If such a proposal remains fictitious (for the moment), it hardly stretches the imagination. For these are the times that try a civic teacher’s soul and, not incidentally, call forth from the venerable San Francisco Mime Troupe one of its best efforts in years.
The world premiere of SFMT’s teeth-baring musical comedy, GodFellas — this year’s free agitprop in the park — tells the story of Angela Franklin (Velina Brown), a mild-mannered public school civics teacher with a thing for Tom Paine, who becomes the leader of a mass movement to save secular democracy from God-wielding gangsters grown fat on the church-state-mingling scam that is the Bush junta’s faith-based initiative, now pushing a theocratic Prayer Day Amendment.
Fronted by a suave evangelist named the Reverend C.B. De Love (Michael Gene Sullivan), the “Syndicate” is in the process of soaking up federal dollars, trampling the separation clause, and shoring up its political power while expanding the totalitarian reach of its Beltway allies. Our first glimpse of this outfit comes in the opening scene’s staged concert, the Ministry of Rock. Christian headbangers preaching with power chords (and amusingly outfitted by costume designer and actor Keiko Shimosato) soon introduce the headline act. “For everything I got, I wanna thank J.C.,” croons De Love to a jaunty rock-blues beat. “But I’m not working for Jesus. Got Jesus workin’ for me.”
Of course, where the art of rhetorical persuasion and the channels of popular culture fail, the Syndicate is ready to call in its muscle — a burly nun with a Bronx accent and five o’clock shadow, Sister Jesus Mary Joseph (Victor Toman). It’s in this holy spirit that the Syndicate comes knocking down the door of Angela’s Center for Extended Studies, a place, she says, for teaching all subjects that have been cut from the curriculum. Angela founded the Center with her liberal-minded colleague Todd (Christian Cagigal), a good-natured if sexually repressed Catholic-school art teacher and her shy love interest (his wild side is suggested, in a typical instance, by the donning of his “adventure cardigan”). Together they’ve been keeping the flame of critical thinking alive, in addition to fanning a smoldering flirtation (you know, involving lewd inflections of lines from the Federalist Papers and the like).
As the Syndicate muscles in on their operation, they retreat to separate camps, Todd capituutf8g to the new bosses in order to continue teaching and Angela heading for the Golden Gate Bridge. There, an epiphany of a decidedly secular nature convinces her to fight back, winning her first recruits from among passersby. As Angela takes on the forces of theocracy, the seduction of politics and mass media threatens to make her secular movement as dogmatic as the Syndicate. All of which brings home the message that democratic societies function under a popular regime of critical thinking and die under regimes of blind faith.
If the play itself sounds a little like a civics lesson, it is. But it’s one that goes down like a sweet, melodious riot of sharp comedy and contagious song — a combination that is ultimately a highly effective framework for the play’s ample citations of Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, clarion lines that give the lie to the insatiable authoritarianism, religious and otherwise, that cloaks itself in the flag. Despite its essentially familiar formula, all elements of the production — from Bruce Barthol’s skillful and imaginative score to the great performances under the astute direction of SFMT veteran Ed Holmes, to the finely honed script by Sullivan and collaborators Jon Brooks, Eugenie Chan, and Christian Cagigal (Tom Paine should probably get a writing credit too) — smoothly come together to make GodFellas an inspired and genuinely stirring piece of political theater, not to mention an invigorating dose of common sense. SFBG
GODFELLAS
Through Oct. 1 around the Bay Area
Sat/15, 2 p.m.
Peacock Meadow
JFK Drive between McLaren Lodge
and Conservatory, Golden Gate Park, SF
Sun/16, 2 p.m.
Lakeside Park
Lakeside Drive at Lake Merritt, Oakl.
Free
(415) 285-1717
www.sfmt.org
Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture
Imagine there’s no heaven
Sweet 16mm
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In 1967, the Bay Area’s Brotherhood of Light transformed the average rock show into a full-blown psychedelic spectacle. Using 16mm film and Technicolor dyes and oils, the collective began projecting swirling visuals on larger-than-life backdrops at venues like the Fillmore. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and, of course, the Dead all got the Brotherhood treatment. The projectionists definitely livened up those 20-minute drum solos — Iron Butterfly, I’m looking at you — but ultimately, their improvisations couldn’t continuously jell with the music.
“Traditionally it’s been, put up the trippy image, and sometimes it’ll hit and look cool, but not always,” says Small Sails multi-instrumentalist Ethan Rose. “Not that there aren’t more people doing syncing today, [but] that became kind of our whole MO — let’s do something more with this and make it part of the performance.”
Sonically speaking, Small Sails is a trio. Three Portland, Ore., musicians trade off on keyboards, guitar, vibraphones, and drums to concoct an electro-organic, mostly instrumental panorama reminiscent of a less melancholy Album Leaf. But in keeping with their visual focus, the band formerly called Adelaide is actually composed of four members. Ryan Jeffery, who’s collaborated with Rose since their days at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, handles the projectionist duties.
The use of 16mm projectors isn’t unique by today’s standards: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Rachel’s, and Broadcast have used them. But Small Sails — which played its first Bay Area show in March and has since opened for Fog and the Helio Sequence — is one of the few acts to tout its projectionist as a full-fledged member.
It’s easy to understand why. Jeffery, who cites New York artist Bruce McClure as an inspiration, doesn’t simply press a few buttons and drink Amstels during the show. He literally plays two dueling Kodak Analyst IIs, projectors Rose discovered by chance at an old camera shop in San Diego five years ago. (Incidentally, the model was a favorite among football coaches in the late 1970s because its variable-speed control allows footage to be viewed at a mesmerizing eight frames per second; real time is three times that rate.)
Looping 10 minutes of footage into a 45-minute set, Jeffery will tinker with speed, pull things in and out of focus, and use his hands to create subtle strobing effects timed perfectly to a shift in the melody. Though there are no LSD-inspired Rorschach swirls, the way he mashes up a rural landscape from one projector with a random figure’s silhouette via the other highlights the abstract vibe of a project that’s trippy in its own right but never long-winded.
While Adelaide stretched its post-rock meanders to seven minutes, Small Sails injects a lighter pop sensibility that keeps the music trim and utterly buoyant. After a few radio blips and digital hiccups, “Aftershocks and Afterthoughts,” an unreleased song that may appear on their debut, flows forth in a wave of catchy guitar noodles, crisp beats, and spacey ambient noise that layers and peaks in under a minute. Then as a punchy synth hook enters the mix (think: Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” sped up and almost danceable), a bright “hi-oh, hi-oh” vocal refrain comes charging in. The words are sparse and nonsensical, but somehow such ambiguity is what helps make Small Sails so compelling, both on record and in person.
“The aim is to gently guide a narrative idea, but at the same time it’s not telling some specific personal narrative. It’s sort of everybody’s narrative,” Rose says. “With the imagery and the colors and the sounds, it creates this space that opens up emotionally to a whole bunch of different places for different people. It’s a platform for an open experience.”
The Brotherhood would be proud. SFBG
SMALL SAILS
With Lazarus and Only
Thurs/13, 9 p.m.
Hotel Utah
500 Fourth St., SF
$6
(415) 546-6300
Sexy transmissions
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Low-flying Seattle ethnomusic label Sublime Frequencies has been in business for less than three years, but in that time established itself as easily the most happening label around in terms of hard-to-find music from overseas. In fact, it’s created a niche that didn’t even really exist before, steadily churning out kaleidoscopic and often in-your-face CDs and DVDs from places as far flung as Iraq, Java, North Korea, and Nepal, releases that are equally at home in the world music and experimental sections at a record store.
I don’t love everything they’ve put out, but I have listened to every note of the more than 20 CDs released so far — I’ve missed a few DVDs, I admit — and a handful of them have become personal favorites. Another half dozen have landed in heavy rotation on the home stereo at various points. I’ve especially enjoyed the label’s presentation of music from Southeast Asia, including two discs compiled by Bay Area musician Mark Gergis of Porest and Neung Phak — Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan and Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk and Pop Music Vol. 1 — and several more assembled by label head Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls, including the frantic Radio Phnom Penh and last fall’s unstoppable Guitars of the Golden Triangle: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar Vol. 2. The massive amount of material the pair cull from radio, vinyl, cassettes, and field recordings is beyond the reach of most file sharers because the majority would have no idea where to start downloading, and Gergis and Bishop put out their findings without much information or regard for sound quality or marketability. What I like about the music on these discs is the blend of familiarity and strangeness, of traditional and modern influences.
The latest batch from Sublime Frequencies unleashes music from Algeria and Northeast Cambodia, as well as a couple of new ones from Thailand: a two-CD set titled Radio Thailand: Transmissions from the Tropical Kingdom and a DVD, Phi Ta Khan: Ghosts of Isan. Radio Thailand was compiled by Gergis and Bishop, who each produced a disc, and like all the label’s Radio titles, it is a fast-paced collage of music, advertisements, and news snippets spliced together from hours of radio broadcast recordings. Segues are abrupt at times, and the fidelity varies wildly. While the experience as a whole is like watching TV while someone else is wielding the remote, at least the content is more interesting than flipping between, say, VH1, Court TV, and lame reality shows.
Listening to Radio Thailand’s second disc, I’m struck by the futility of trying to describe this music in any sort of useful detail. I don’t know the artists’ names, the song titles, or the years any of the music was released. I can’t understand the lyrics and don’t know the names of most of the genres or subgenres represented. Now and then a familiar snippet pops up, like the tune from Ennio Morricone’s theme to For a Few Dollars More — only it’s dressed up in low-budget ’80s synth tones and slapped on top of a disco beat with a guy singing a completely unrelated melody during the verses. There are syrupy ballads, droning a cappella chants, and lots of bouncy ’80s synth pop that sounds absolutely nothing like New Order. Now and then, a voice in English emerges from the wilderness, but it’s inevitably a non sequitur: an announcement for a giant catfish fry, a report on the quality of Thai rubber, a woman announcing, “I have 20 minutes left with you guys, at least. Like, 22 minutes. No, 21 minutes and something.” Unless you’ve been to Thailand and spent hours flipping through the radio dial — and I certainly haven’t — then you probably haven’t heard anything like this.
In contrast to the information onslaught of Radio Thailand, the recent DVD Phi Ta Khan: Ghosts of Isan is far more deliberate in its pacing. Produced by Rob Millis of the Seattle group Climax Golden Twins, the video documents a three-day festival in the northern Thai region of Isan, near the border with Laos. This region is the home of the hypnotic, droning molam style featured on the aforementioned Thai Country Groove CD, and there’s plenty of that music to be heard here. There’s zero narration and Millis doesn’t employ any fancy production tricks, but none of that is needed, as the costumes, dancing, and music are colorful enough on their own. In addition to the religious-occult focus of the festival, there’s also apparently a fertility ritual at work, judging by the vast assortment of phallic symbols on hand: handheld penises, wooden penis puppets with movable parts, you name it. One particularly bizarre scene involves two men trying to repair the damaged member belonging to one of the giant costumed mascots.
The incredible music here ranges from giant percussion ensembles composed of ordinary villagers to full-on electrified combos rolling down the street on the back of flatbed trucks equipped with generators and huge stacks of speakers. At one point, a nasty fuzz-tone keyboard sound surfaces amid the din, but before you can ask, “Where did that come from?” it turns out to be nothing but a Casio being run through a couple of battered PA cones on the back of a moving pickup truck. This scene, like the entire DVD, embodies the sort of low-budget mayhem at the heart of the label’s seat-of-the-pants aesthetic. You won’t find this stuff at Starbucks. SFBG
SUBLIME FREQUENCIES PRESENTS
PHI TA KHAN: GHOSTS OF ISAN AND SUMATRAN FOLK CINEMA
Fri/14, 8 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
$5
(415) 824-3890
CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS WITH
HERB DIAMANTE, POREST (MARK GERGIS), AND SEA DONKEYS
Sat/15, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$8
(415) 923-0923
Nude awakening
Anicca — at the Theater Artaud complex this week — is not exactly your everyday site-specific dance theater event. With the audience in tow, the piece makes its way from the Noh Space through internal hallways into Theater Artaud proper. Its 20 dancers (half professionals, half amateurs) all perform in the nude. Onstage. Outside. Foggy or not.
Eric Kupers, codirector of Dandelion Dancetheater, knows the risks of this kind of endeavor. Anicca, which means “the impermanence of all phenomena,” is but the latest work of his Undressed Project, which challenges us to look closely at what usually goes unacknowledged. Though we may no longer be shocked by naked bodies in public, for the most part this is still an uncomfortable experience for both viewer and dancer, particularly when the performers come in all sizes and shapes. Two of them have each lost a leg in a car accident.
“We have to accept the discomfort that comes with nudity,” says Kupers, who practices Buddhist mediation. “If we make room and embrace it, we can harness the energy that comes from relaxing with it.” At the very least, a project such as Anicca raises questions about vulnerability and voyeurism.
By exposing themselves the way they do, the dancers have to let go not only of the way they see themselves but also of the way they customarily present themselves to an audience. They put themselves into extreme, emotionally fragile positions. In doing so, they challenge perceptions of how identity is tied to the image we have of ourselves and of others. Still, Kupers was amused to see that while some dancers had no problem with being seen naked by hundreds of people, “they said they wouldn’t dance barefoot on cement.”
As for voyeurism, Kupers remembers that in the early days of the Undressed Project he would get audiences who were ready to ogle buffed and muscled bodies. That’s not what they got. Looking at the diverse bodies of his dancers — old, young, skinny, wrinkled, and big, as well as toned — raises questions. What does our gaze mean to us, to the dancers? Is there shame, embarrassment, titillation, curiosity, acceptance?
Anicca features a taped score and at least one live (naked) violinist. As they view the piece, audience members will be guided by members of Kupers’s Undressed Project workshop. “I think I’ll call them ‘naked rangers,’” Kupers concludes. (Rita Felciano)
ANICCA
Wed/12 and Fri/14, 7pm (also Fri/14, 10 p.m.);
Thurs/13 and Sat/15–Sun/16, 6 p.m. (also Sat/15, 10 p.m.)
Begins at Noh Space
2840 Mariposa, SF
$13–$18
(415) 863-9834
www.odctheater.org
A present from the past
› johnny@sfbg.com
One of us is wearing green short-sleeved Lacoste, the other blue short-sleeved Sergio Tacchini. We’ve looked around his apartment, where he’s leaving behind one shoebox-size tranquil bedroom — he’s now restlessly moving his belongings between two larger sun-drenched spaces. He jokingly calls one a massage room and the other a museum and talks about the patterns of shadows through his windows — how there’s a shadow that looks like a dancing lady, and how the window that faces a church is both peaceful and a passage to a fantasy about priests. Then we walk down the 37-step staircase onto 23rd Street, and Colter Jacobsen and I start talking about his art.
One of Jacobsen’s first shows took place in the exact spot we’ve just left behind. “Woods in the Watchers,” featuring pencil renderings of nudes and seminude photos Jacobsen found at the shop known as the Magazine (on Larkin), was presented in and around his bedroom. “The funny thing is what instigated the whole project was Friendster,” he says as we begin an uphill trek. “I was obsessed with it for two weeks and just started seeing everybody as a personal page — as if when they were looking at you, they were clicking on you. It was kind of fucked up. My response was that I wanted something more tactile. The idea eventually came to be one-hour timed drawings of guys wearing watches.”
We pass a couple on a stairway taking pictures of each other — the man is shooting video, the woman taking digital snapshots. Jacobsen remarks that one irony of the “Watchers” drawings, which uncover a bygone snail mail universe of intimate connections, is that they’re back on the Internet, via the Web site of local press Suspect Thoughts. I say they remind me a bit of the late artist and writer Joe Brainard’s casually hot drawings for the book gAy BCs. “[Brainard’s] stuff is amazing, it’s intimidating to me,” says Jacobsen. “It’s gestural and quick. I use a mechanical pencil and just thinking about approaching a piece of paper without a pencil scares me a little.”
If so, he has little reason for apprehension. In “Watchers” and especially in a recent group exhibition at White Columns in New York (where New York Times critic Roberta Smith singled him out for praise), and now in “Your Future,” a show at Four Star Video’s attic space, Jacobsen displays a talent for drawing images in a low-key way that can still saturate the banal with potent emotion — a truly rare ability these days.
A Mormon upbringing and contemplative community college time in San Diego, where he took a single class on color, light, and theory three times, are a few extreme shorthand examples of what led Jacobsen to San Francisco and his current work. He counts fellow artist Donal Mosher and the writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian as friendly influences; in fact, he’s created a gridlike piece charting Bellamy’s and Killian’s use of color in their fiction. “From reading their writing and not knowing what’s fiction and what’s real, I’ve gone on all these mind trips,” Jacobsen admits, as we cross paths with a woman using her cell phone like a loudspeaker. “One time on the Fourth of July I totally thought they were going to kill me.”
Jacobsen’s favorite course at the SF Art Institute was a creative writing class taught by Bellamy. There, he wrote a story — O Rings, about a blind girl obsessed with the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion — that has somewhat eerily prefigured his current art and life. He’s worked at Lighthouse for the Blind and currently is a caregiver and driver for the blind and disabled.
The walk up 24th Street has led us to Grand View Avenue, where the view is indeed grand. As we climb the coiled freeway overpass, Jacobsen talks about the “memory drawings” featured in both the show at White Columns and in the current Four Star Video show in San Francisco. “When I try to find a photo to draw from — which takes a long time — it’s like me trying to predict what I’ll be meditating on for the next couple of weeks,” he says. “I don’t take it lightly, and it’s often related to something personal.”
The element of prediction might be what Jacobsen is referring to when he says that these drawings stemming from old photos “are about the future.” In Four Star Video’s attic, Jacobsen has painted the titular words of the show over a newspaper obit page and fixed it to the corner of a wall so it can also read “Our Future.” This melancholy verging on morbidity spills from some drawings, especially a truly great one of a waterfront snapshot that uses a film-frame crosscutting technique to convey romantic heartbreak.
The show’s staircase climb to a heavenly Four Star “Future” is typical of Jacobsen’s casual yet concise use of place, and there are many elements at play, some so understated that a viewer who isn’t attentive might not even notice. Two papier-mâché teardrops hide in a corner, near the store’s rare DVDs of Salo and Lilya 4-Ever. (Images are often presented in twos and fours and eights: “Eight is my favorite number,” says Jacobsen. “It’s like two circles or two eyes.”) A pair of found-object mock columns stand next to the store’s shelving units. In a practice that updates pop art chestnuts to the current moment, Jacobsen — who first used the technique while reeling from being “totally blind” about a guy he was in love with — uses Wite-Out to cover up most of Peanuts and other strips (including his least favorite, Family Circus) in a way that reveals the wartime aggression and tension seething beneath.
Though he uses newspaper “funnies,” Jacobsen refers to these works as his “Saddies.” “I just wanted to show what I was seeing,” he says as we travel back down 24th Street past some children. Another irony: This newspaper is a space to discuss the deathly element within Jacobsen’s use of newspapers as found material. “My friend Tariq [Alvi] sees paper as death, because he once saw a mummy and the quality of its skin was like paper,” Jacobsen says when I mention the current bicoastal interest in works — especially drawings — on found or old documents.
As we near the end of our stroll, I ask Jacobsen about another walk, one in which he led a group of people — half of them blindfolded and the other half accompanying those wearing blindfolds — during a Sunday evening this June. The walk spanned from one Mission laundromat to another and included Jacobsen’s discussion of the visual theories of physicist Joseph Plateau, who went blind from staring at the sun. The choice of the event’s landmarks stemmed partly from the laundry lectures of Portland-based artist Sam Gould of Red76 and partly from Plateau’s interest in bubbles. “Does that all relate somehow?” Jacobsen asks as he explains it. “I have trouble figuring out how one thing connects to the next.”
“Usually, where I start [with a project] is where I’m stupid or ignorant — which can be anywhere, really,” he admits with a laugh, after saying that he even counted the number of steps — 313 and 168 — between the two laundromats and the walk’s starting point. Right around then, we reach those 37 steps that lead back up to his apartment, the same staircase that Jacobsen’s friend and musical collaborator Tomo (of Hey Willpower and Tussle) climbs, carrying a column, in a drawing within the Four Star Video show. When I say that the staircase’s red steps are just two short of matching a certain famous 39 Steps, Jacobsen says Alfred Hitchcock is one of his favorite filmmakers. It’s funny how one thing connects to the next — and often beautiful when Jacobsen renders the connections. SFBG
“YOUR FUTURE”
Through July 31
Daily, noon to 10 p.m.
Attic, Four Star Video
1521 18th St., SF
Free
(415) 826-2900
www.4starsf.com
Mortality play
Meryl (Justine Clarke) is basically the human incarnation of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, except without the “survival” part. As she rides the train home after her father’s funeral, animated thoughts of fiery collisions and strangle-happy strangers zip into her head as abruptly as they cut into Look Both Ways’ otherwise live-action proceedings. That Meryl’s nightmares are adorably hand drawn doesn’t make them any less dreadful or persistent; later she imagines being eaten by a shark (while in a swimming pool) and the ickiest possible consequences after she sleeps with photographer Nick (William McInnes) soon after they meet.
The fact that they first cross paths at the site of a tragic train accident — and that Nick (who also struggles with visions of doom) has just found out he has cancer — is a typically morbid spoke in Look Both Ways’ death-obsessed machinery. Fickle fate pulls the strings of the Meryl-Nick pairing, and of those around them, including Nick’s exceedingly angry coworker Andy (Anthony Hayes) and his reluctantly pregnant ex-girlfriend Anna (Lisa Flanagan). A pair of nearly wordless performances anchor Look Both Ways’ emotional core, as a train driver who’s run over a pedestrian and the pedestrian’s widow struggle with their grief — and eventually connect over a sympathy card featuring a seascape painted by Meryl, appropriately enough.
A festival sensation by Australian writer-director and animator Sarah Watt, Look Both Ways isn’t actually the feel-bad movie of the year. It’s probably the sunniest movie about death you’ll ever see, and one that captures the awkwardness of life with unusual accuracy. Its unglamorous characters react to disasters like real people would, tempering their shock with distractions such as kids’ birthday parties or impulsive physical intimacy. Watt’s visually inventive style keeps Look Both Ways from being too sentimental, to a point. As the film winds down, it seems overly eager for closure, resulting in pop song–montage overload and a mawkish group cry that just happens to transpire during the film’s single rainstorm. Like the double meaning of the film’s title — look before you leap, but remember it’s OK to leap! — it feels a bit shallow and glossy after all that inspired gloom. (Cheryl Eddy)
LOOK BOTH WAYS
Opens Fri/14
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth St., San Rafael
(415) 454-1222
See Rep Clock for showtimes
www.lookbothways.com.au
Polly wanna rob ya!
› johnny@sfbg.com
Hear ye! Hear ye! Step right up to the Castro Theatre. Behold a bizarre trio of crooks. One an expert ventriloquist in old lady drag. Another a Goliath whose fickle heart is bigger than his brain. The third a pint-size schemer, who thinks nothing of pretending to be a baby in a stroller in order to case a high-class joint for jewels. Witness these three sell counterfeit parrots — you heard right, counterfeit parrots! — to unsuspecting mugs in order to visit their homes and rob them blind. Watch 1925’s The Unholy Three, just one of director Tod Browning’s circus-influenced nightmares.
The treats at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival include Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and Madonna muse Dita Parlo in Au Bonheur des Dames with live music by the Hot Club. But all of this city’s imps of the perverse will be gathering for The Unholy Three (screening Sun/16 at 5 p.m.), if only to pay homage to Browning, “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney, and mein liebchen, the one and only Harry Earles (real name: Kurt Schneider), who later approached Browning with the idea of turning the Tod Robbins story “Spurs” into what became 1932’s nightmarish and unforgettable Freaks. Also based on a Robbins story, The Unholy Three might contain Earles’ best performance, especially since, as Danny Peary notes in an entry within his book Cult Movie Stars, Earles’ high-pitched voice was often “unintelligible” when transmitted through the primitive sound technology of early talkies.
He may be a dead ringer for tear sprayer extraordinaire Ricky Schroder in The Champ, but don’t cross him: Peary incisively observes that Earles’ face “was doll-like and seemed harmless until you looked closely and saw it was hard and quite eerie.” The Unholy Three mines this effectively. Earles’ character, Tweedledee, is introduced performing on a sideshow stage. When the audience within the film mocks him, it doesn’t take long for him to lose his temper and kick a laughing little boy in the face. Soon afterward he’s in infant disguise, whether locked in a stroller and acting as if ruby necklaces are mere baby beads or half in and half out of masquerade, smoking a cigarette while wearing a jumper. According to Browning biographer David Skal’s Dark Carnival, this type of outrageousness reached its apex in a child-killing Christmas Eve scene by a tree that doubtless would have given Dawn Davenport at the start of Female Trouble a run for her murderous money — if it wasn’t censored.
Though Browning’s astute biographer verges on going too far in comparing it to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s shadow play, The Unholy Three humorously and kinetically uses comic strip speech bubbles in a way that prefigures pop art and Batman on TV. Also, as writers such as Skal, David Thomson, and Carlos Clarens have observed, it exemplifies early-20th-century horror’s interest in reconfiguring common romantic and sexual aggravation into fantastic stories of vengeance. Himself forced to perform as an infant and a circus runaway who made an early living as “The Living Hypnotic Corpse,” Browning no doubt related to Earles and to Chaney (whose pantomime abilities stemmed partly from childhood communication with his deaf parents).
The Unholy Three’s titular characters form a perverse trinity of sorts, with Earles’ Tweedledee a modern child of mythical Leprechaun figures and a less lusty uncle of Cousin Lymon from Carson McCullers’ Sad Café. You don’t have to be Leslie Fiedler to recognize that both Earles and Chaney present an interested viewer with a mythic image of his or her secret self. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
Fri/14–Sun/16
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(925) 866-9530
www.silentfilm.org
One Lives to live
By Kimberly Chun
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER I fell in love with the recent Ray Davies solo album, Other People’s Lives (V2). Face it, I fall in love all the time — with records, of course — but I think I truly did love about three-fourths of the Kinks leader’s solo debut for the first four listens. Then I stopped listening and just coasted on the afterglow.
But you fall out of love. The fifth or sixth listen comes around and little things start to break down for you. The way those coveted hot pants always give you gnarly cameltoe.
In the case of Other People’s Lives, it was the song’s overblown arrangements — for which Davies completely takes the blame — complete with unintentionally cornball sax and a production sensibility that sounds like modern music really did stop with the last humongoid Kinks album, 1983’s State of Confusion (Velvel). When even the quirks annoy, like the half “yar,” half yawn that ushers in the record’s otherwise fine opener, “Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After),” and the throwaway Ricky Martin–style Latin pop treatment given to the media-lashing title track, you know love’s a goner.
An American album, conceived mainly during Davies’ stay in New Orleans, Other People’s Lives resembles Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry (Attack), another disappointingly produced and arranged album of even better songs by a great wordsmith and sometime US transplant. Perhaps you’re so happy to hear those familiar voices again, at your doorstep, that you overlook the details — the tacky suit, wilting flowers, wrongheaded arrangements — the first five times around.
Still you have to hand it to Davies — whose recent travails, like being shot in January 2004 after chasing the thief who snatched his girlfriend’s purse, have been well documented — when he decides to make a bold gesture. That’s what inspired some to call the Kinks the first indie band. “I prefer that to being called the originators of heavy metal,” says a sincere and thoughtful Davies from London. “Yes, I like that. We have a very independent spirit…. We took chances, and we failed a lot. Really, other acts’ careers would’ve been ended by some of the bold and stupid things we did on record. I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter now, and she wants to hear my music when she visits me. I find it really hard to explain some of the weird diversions I’ve taken in my music over the years.”
Bold and stupid?
“The Bold and the Stupid. It sounds like…”
A soap opera?
“Yes, stuff like Preservation, Soap Opera,” he free-associates. “You know, at the time, when Rod Stewart and Elton John were doing conventional tours and, you know, big stage-entry things… and there we are. We go indoors with a musical farce onstage. You know, it was a rock Punch and Judy show. It was a totally wrong career move, but it worked brilliantly. I mean, sometimes those things pay off really well.”
Davies obviously still can write a song — that was why Other People initially seduced me. And he knows he’s really got me — and everyone else. “I think I’ve got a fairly good fix. I can hone in on detail with people all right. You know, it’s like little things people do, habits that people have, the way they walk. I have that sort of observation with my writing, which leads it to be sometimes a bit quirky. I think I know how far to take something when I’m writing a song, and I think that’s probably one of the sort of skills I’ve developed, although I wouldn’t say you ever learn how to write songs. I think that’s one of my skills — knowing that it’s always a new inner palette, a new landscape, every time I write a song, and I think experience has taught me to be aware of that fact, that I can’t just phone them in.”
Sounds like the archly self-aware narrator of “The Tourist,” which appears to center on New Orleans slumming, is a lot like the songwriter within Davies — and that songwriting and stepping into other people’s lives is a kind of imaginative tourism.
“It is,” replies Davies. “I’m somewhat of a tourist. I also write on different levels. Obviously with ‘The Tourist’ it’s not just somebody going for a holiday somewhere. It’s someone who’s in a sense a tourist, an emotional tourist… and is probably not such a good person because of it.”
“It’s a different kind of writing when you write a pop single,” he confesses. “Writing on this record — there’s a long span to it and it’s a slow burn…. So it’s going to have a certain amount of depth to it to hold my interest because maybe as a writer I need to be fired up by the subject matter…. Maybe I write for listeners who probably want to dig and delve into it and realize there’s a bigger picture there, bigger story there.”
And perhaps, being a creature of little faith, as the Other People song goes, I should keep listening for the bigger story and fall back in love.
NO TEARS Speaking of Nawlins’s musical dwellers, Quintron and Miss Pussycat have been firing on all pistons and Drum Buddies since Katrina flooded their Spellcaster Lodge. Phoning from Los Angeles, Quintron says the rebuilding is almost complete on the lodge but they’re going to wait for the hurricane season before finishing work because the city’s infrastructure isn’t quite together yet. “I don’t wanna do this shit twice,” he offers.
Since the pair lacked insurance, the rebuilding was funded by benefits around the country organized by other musicians. “All our fucking friends are rebuilding our house. It just blew my mind,” says Quintron. Their first show at the Lodge is scheduled for Sept. 15 with a promise from bounce king DJ Jubilee to perform — and don’t expect Quintron to get bogged down in blustery sentimentality. “I’ve already written a song called ‘Hurricane,’” he says. “At this point I can’t do a maudlin blues record, like ‘O Katrina.’ It would be so cliché and stupid. . . . That’s not what’s coming out — I’m making more and more happy songs now, musically.” SFBG
RAY DAVIES
Thurs/13, 8 p.m.
Warfield Theatre
928 Market, SF
$29.50–$35
(415) 775-7722
QUINTRON AND MISS PUSSYCAT
Fri/14, 9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
$10–$12
(415) 970-9777
Swear an oaf
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
After several bad relationships I started seeing someone new. She’s into “playful” spanking. She started spanking me on the street one day and I told her it made me want to hit her. She seemed to like it, though, so I said OK, just not in public. Then I came over and she seemed really happy to see me and she was giggling about spanking me. And I was, like, “OK, this is kind of funny,” rolling with it.
Then later, lying in bed, she spanked me. I said, “Don’t do that,” in a very clear and stern way. She spanked me again. I hit her in the head. Then she hit me in the head. This pretty much killed things and I’m just about totally destroyed as far as being able to feel anything toward anyone.
I feel unhappy with myself for hitting her but also angry at her for spanking me again. I tried to work things out with her, but she seemed barely able to understand my side of things. She implied that I would hit our kids. She works as a dominatrix and seems very businesslike about her job. But aren’t there safety words or something like that? Doesn’t no mean no? Should I have begged her not to hit me?
Love,
Spankmonkey
Dear Spanky:
Gag, gross, no. Of course you should not have begged her. You should have grabbed her wrist and lowered her hitting hand back onto the bed while saying, very clearly, “I told you I didn’t want you to spank me. If you can’t respect that, I’m leaving.” Of course, in order for something like this to work, you would first have to not be a wishy-washy washrag who gives the spanking go-ahead and then changes his mind. She might be a bit of a bitch, but you do understand that from her perspective you were a total psycho, don’t you?
Whatever your internal process (which appears to have little to do with what you want and who you like and everything to do with wanting desperately — and rather unattractively — to be liked), your outward behavior was, “Oh please don’t throw me in the briar patch, Miz Dominatrix!” pretty much from the get-go. She couldn’t read your mind, and then you hit her in the head. Doesn’t no mean no, you ask? Indeed it does. For everyone involved.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
Things are going well with my boyfriend, except for one thing. He is too rough in bed. He penetrates too deep and too hard. He is also rough with his fingers and mouth. I have noticed a tear a few times on the edge of my vagina. I get really freaked out afterward when I see what it looks like down there. Does it make me more prone to infection? I have brought this up to him a few times, and he says he feels bad and doesn’t want to hurt me, but I’m not sure if he really understands. I am not always sore afterward, but at least half the time I am. I have a serious problem with confrontation (especially in the bedroom), which makes these things hard to talk about. Is this something I should end the relationship over?
Love,
Sore Loser
Dear Sore:
Poor guy. He’s not a brute; he’s just some sort of lummox, or perhaps an oaf. He doesn’t know his own strength; plus, he is not so smart. He means no harm, though, and if you like him I see no reason you should have to lose him over this. Nor, of course, do I see why you should have to poke around checking for damage and holding cold compresses to your nethers every time he’s done with you.
See, I’m imagining you emitting tiny squeaks of dismay every time he handles you roughly, and maybe passing him neatly folded little notes that say “ouch.” Speak up! He’s barely registering your complaints, if indeed you’re making any, and then later you say, “Too rough,” and he says, “Sorry,” and then you both let it happen all over again. You don’t want to be a wishy-washy dishrag like Spanky up there, do you? Lummox-boy is not going to shape up on his own. The good news is, you probably don’t have to hit him in the head.
Of course an open wound will make you more prone to infection, although if he isn’t carrying anything he can’t give it to you, no matter how clumsily he goes at it. I suggest putting him on notice that you intend to stop him the next time it hurts and show him some alternative moves. You don’t have to put on a show — just ask him to start with the gentlest, most lubed-up touch he can manage and move up from there till you say “when.” If he’s actually concerned about hurting you and wants to do better, he will be motivated to pay attention. If he isn’t … well, what are you doing there?
Love,
Andrea
But I love it!
Valley of the Dolls
(Fox Home Entertainment)
PRESS PLAY My favorite anecdote about Susan Hayward hides in a Nicholas Ray biography. When director Ray first met Hayward before the filming of 1952’s The Lusty Men, he launched into one of his characteristic orations about methods of acting. Hayward knitted. Ray jabbered. After a while she cut him short. “Listen, honey, I’m from Brooklyn,” she said with a trademark from-the-gut growl that could stop a linebacker short. “What’s the story?”
In the case of 1967’s Valley of the Dolls, the story was Jacqueline Susann’s — at least until Mark Robson’s botched-in-so-many-wondrous-ways movie landed like an Evening in Paris smoke bomb in theaters. It’s easy to forget what, um, rich material Val Lewton acolyte Robson was failing to work with here, and you can’t count on today’s Castro clone to point out the protofeminism or the latent and perhaps Ethel Merman–inspired lesbianism in Susann’s novel, a megapopular follow-up to a best seller about her pet poodle. If heterosexual men fuck the way Susann’s book claims they do, no wonder Neely O’Hara was just the dame to prove Ted Casablanca was “not a fag!”
“Finally!” exclaims a sticker affixed to the Valley of the Dolls DVD in the window display of Streetlight Records on Market, and indeed it feels like it has taken longer than forever for Valley of the Dolls to make the transition from VHS to headed-for-obsolescence disc. The wait has brought us some average packaging and a number of extras, including a documentary about Susann that’s no deeper than the biodrama Isn’t She Great? (wasn’t that terrible?) and some mercifully brief clips of Judy Garland’s screen tests for the role of Helen Lawson. But we didn’t buy this thing for an E! network facsimile’s commentary. We bought it for the movie, 200 proof, “straight,” no chaser.
It’s all here. Dionne Warwick’s rendition of the title song, still as cold as New England snow. The other awful musical numbers, copenned by Dory “Midgets” Previn before Mia Farrow gave her a reason to beware of young girls. Sharon Tate’s absurd calls from “Mother” (surely the inspiration for Julianne Moore’s phone chats in Todd Haynes’s Safe) and Lee Grant’s stage-wings glare (ditto Grant’s own performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive).
There are so many wacky moments to love, like the lingering seconds when a necklace around Patty Duke’s neck assumes a bra shape over what her character would call “boobies” midway through one musical number. There is Duke’s rollicking performance, which careens from cross-eyed lousy to directly — not just campily — wonderful and back again with a fervor matched only by Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. There are the tossed-off lines — so true — about how bitchy fags can be, and how booze helps dolls work faster. And finally there is Hayward, marching forward through this stinkin’ show, rolling with the below-the-belt punches, with or without a wig, but always with dignity. When Hayward’s Helen Lawson declares that you need a “hard core” to survive — you know, shortly after her yapping former understudy has tried one scheme too many — you better believe it. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Strap it on
CULT MOVIE It’s finally here. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox Home Entertainment), a top contender in my sordid little mind for the greatest movie ever made (next time you see me in a bar and have two or three hours to kill, I can give you the complete list) has arrived in splendid, special-edition DVD form. Has Hollywood ever been so satirically skewered? Has a single film ever crammed in so many genres — musical, comedy, melodrama, youth-gone-wild, slasher? Has the Bentley vs. Rolls sex question ever been so definitively answered?
From its opening, mind-blowing tease to its hilariously somber coda, Russ Meyer’s brilliantly colored, brilliantly bizarre 1970 classic (scripted by Roger Ebert, it was Meyer’s first major-studio release) stands well enough on its own. But in this two-disc package you also get commentaries (one by Ebert, one by cast members); a giddy making-of doc; featurettes spotlighting the film’s rockin’ tunes, groovy dialogue, and more; and screen tests featuring future Carrie Nation members Cynthia Meyers (Casey) and Marcia McBroom (Pet).
But it gets better, superwoman. This week, pry your sweaty claws off your BVD DVD and look on up at Peaches Christ, who’ll be hosting a reunion of stars McBroom, Erica Gavin (Roxanne), and John La Zar (Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell). Midnight Mass unspools two nights of gentle people and mayonnaise on the big screen, and the cast — currently on a mini–promo tour that also includes stops in Austin, Los Angeles, and Phoenix — will descend on Amoeba with Peaches for a DVD signing.
“This is gonna be so much fun for me,” La Zar enthuses over the phone from LA. “San Francisco is my hometown — I was raised in the Richmond District, 36th Avenue right off Fulton. This will be the first time I’ve worked in San Francisco since [I performed with] American Conservatory Theater in 1967.”
Cast as the Phil Spector–ish, flowery-tongued Z-Man after he was spotted by 20th Century Fox scouts doing a play in Hawaii (“They needed a young man who could do kind of a weird classical thing”), La Zar isn’t surprised BVD has enthralled a new generation of fans. “It’s a youth film, isn’t it — there’s still a rebelliousness to it.”
La Zar reveals he wasn’t initially fond of the film’s most memorable line — “This is my happening, and it freaks me out!” — later aped in the Ghost World comic and by Austin Powers, among others. “I thought the line sucked, but Russ Meyer shamed me into it. He said, ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you?’ And lo and behold, that’s what I’m most famous for in the film!”
Prior to BVD, Hollywood native Gavin starred in Meyer’s 1968 smash, Vixen! “I was much smaller than most of his women, but he figured maybe women could relate to me better,” Gavin says, speaking from her SoCal home about the famously breast-obsessed director, whom she recalls with great fondness. “He was a big teddy bear — tough on the outside and mushy on the inside.”
Gavin, who’s thrilled that BVD is receiving such grand DVD treatment, remembers how excited Meyer was while making the film. “The budget was huge for him. He was like a babe in toyland — he had all these resources at his fingertips.”
The film has endured, she thinks, because of its humor. “It’s almost like, no matter what generation, it’s so silly — almost like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Spinal Tap. It’s not a comment on today, or life as it is. It’s really life as it isn’t. It’s cuckoo!” (Cheryl Eddy)
MIDNIGHT MASS
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls reunion show
With Erica Gavin, John La Zar, and Marcia McBroom
Fri/7–Sat/8, 11:59 p.m.
Bridge Theatre
3010 Geary, SF
$12
(415) 751-3213
www.peacheschrist.com
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS DVD SIGNING
Sat/8, 2 p.m.
Amoeba Music
1855 Haight, SF
Free
(415) 831-1200
www.amoebamusic.com
Explosive
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
China, the burgeoning frontier of unfettered capitalism these days, naturally gives rise to much scholarly and popular commentary as one market follows another. Much of this is predictably pervaded by a sense of inevitability, as if so-called globalization were nothing but the natural march of human reason toward a higher evolutionary plain, and not the hodgepodge of policies, rules, initiatives, laws, power grabs, scams, offices, organizations, strong-arm tactics, lies, capitulations, and conspiracies that it is.
Two news stories out of China — the explosion of a school where children also assembled firecrackers for a factory and the torching of an illegal Internet café by two teenagers — served as inspiration for We Are Not These Hands, a new play by Sheila Callaghan that questions just the sort of assumptions basic to the neoliberal program busily rending the world in the name of inexorable economic laws.
The play follows two desperately poor teenage girls, Moth (Juliet Tanner) and Belly (Cassie Beck), natives of a riverside city in an imaginary, rapidly developing country not unlike China, with their noses habitually pressed to the glass of an illegal Internet café. The “café” (handily realized by scenic designer Joel Frangquist) is a ramshackle affair of plywood walls and foldout tables with barely a functioning computer and not a drop of actual java. But to the girls it represents the great big beautiful world leaving them behind.
All the more alone since their school blew up (in an accident kindled by the makeshift firecracker factory in the lunchroom), their outsider status is underscored by their private language, childish pet terms and patterns of speech as imaginatively askew as their understanding of the world across the river (patrolled, we learn ominously, by men with machetes) or flashing across the working screens inside the Internet café.
Soon they spot a meal ticket and maybe more in a Western man they dub Leather (Paul Lancour) working at one of the terminals. When they don “the sex clothes” and approach him in a naive and humorously grotesque imitation of professional soliciting, the ensuing interaction is one of mutual incomprehension, but somehow a transaction of sorts takes place. The more amenable Moth returns with Leather to his room at the hostel, beginning what turns into an offbeat and lopsided but semiviable romance, with the promise of salvation attached. “He not a hinky scuzzer,” she assures her friend later on. “He from across the river.”
Leather, it turns out, is a “freelance scholar” writing a thesis on the region’s development, determined to ride the cresting market to private glory on a particularly pathetic raft of economic gobbledygook. His imitation of academic jargon is another instance of mangled language, although with Leather it never leads anywhere, trailing off in ellipses, doubting parenthetical notes, and brilliant points “to be determined at a later time.”
As Moth spends time with Leather at the hostel, Belly takes the coins she’s stolen from his room to the Internet café, later describing to Moth, in terms vaguely mystical and full of wonder, her temporary escape to a paradisiacal beach encountered somewhere in cyberspace. A plan is hatched to get back there, across the river, with Leather as the key.
The play never quite registers the intensity it seems at times to be going for, but Callaghan’s characters reflect a set of tensions, affinities, and contradictions as they negotiate love and survival that speak fluently of their mutual alienation from a half-illusory world of winners. Kent Nicholson’s direction is lively and sure, capturing well the play’s pent-up energies — a mostly satisfying if kooky mix of the satirical, madcap, and bizarre — while also paying due attention to its darker surfaces. Beck and Tanner somehow make natural the comic physicality and verbiage of their characters, successfully plumbing the humor and poignancy in Belly and Moth’s playful but vital dependence on one another. Lancour’s fine, focused performance as the frazzled, disturbed, lonely, and beset Leather, meanwhile, is a nicely original creation, broadly absurd yet also shaded by a deep ambivalence. SFBG
WE ARE NOT THESE HANDS
Through July 16. Thurs.–>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Ashby Stage
1901 Ashby, Berk.
$10–$30
www.crowdedfire.org
The Wolf that Peter built
Prohibition saw the blossoming of alcoholic communing. Antismoking laws brought smokers closer together. So what about this musical wolf craze, Wolfmothers and Wolfkings, the endless urge to shape-shift? We’re becoming more human.
Note the outpouring of pop collectives that are truly collective. Observe Austin, Texas’s Peter and the Wolf, Red Hunter’s experimental folk project, whose acoustic performances in graveyards, in abandoned buses, even on an island, have put them on the map. For the island gig, Hunter said, speaking from his hometown the day before his current tour began, “People rowed out! We’re not trying to get back to nature; we’re just all about finding weird places to play.”
On the East Coast, Hunter will be joined by Jana Hunter — no relation — and the Castanets for a tour via sailboat. Originally just “bar talk” about alternative-energy means of touring, the sailboat is now ready and willing. The quest for “polypropylene Bermuda shorts” has trumped other logistical concerns.
On Peter and the Wolf (Whiskey and Apples), Dana Falconberry adds an angelic vocal counterpart to Hunter’s raw folk sound. Imagine the Ditty Bops — who’ve been touring by bicycle — without the in-your-face theatricality. Each acoustic, indie-loungey tune on Peter and the Wolf is punctuated like a single snippet of conversation. In “How I Wish,” the duo beckons, “Meet me on the wooden bridge/We will smoke and then we’ll wander.” In the postbeat dreamscape “What Happened Up There …,” past lives mingle with present lusts.
In Scotland, I drank surprisingly trippy alcoholic homebrew, a friend’s Irish family recipe. Moonshine. Hooch. Stumpblaster. Whatever, man, if we’re on the road to ruin, we might as well see it up close and personal. For Hunter and his hunters this summer, every campfire is a carnival waiting to happen. When, someday, we finally tell our stories, he predicts on the animistic “The Fall,” we will be gloriously “Desperate and serious/The chasing will be furious.”
Apocalypses aside, everyone’s talking about two things these days: the energy crisis and Matthew Barney’s annoying insistence on big-budget “restraint.” Well, Prokofiev probably wouldn’t have produced his every-instrument-is-an-animal Peter and the Wolf without Stalin’s caustic commie prodding. But Hunter needs no such restriction. His energy leaps through the seams. “Do you think of me when he’s boring you/I’ll bet you do,” he sings on “Silent Movies.” Now that’s a man I can believe in. (Ari Messer)
PETER AND THE WOLF
With Viking Moses, Casual Fog, and Terrors
Sun/9, 9 p.m.
Hotel Utah
500 Fourth St., SF
$6
(415) 546-6300
www.thehotelutahsaloon.com
What’s the Damaged?
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Look, I tried — as much as any 35-year-old can be expected to try — to get excited by, or even minimally interested in, the Warped Tour. Excuse me — what I mean is the Vans Warped Tour, featuring the Volcom Stage, and the Guitar Center Warp Your Summer with NOFX contest, and the Energizer Encore, wherein you can vote to see your favorite Warped band play 10 minutes longer. Why, if I could only see Davey Havok’s frontal mullet, Cure fan circa ’86 hairdo for one-sixth of an hour longer, I think I’d need to change my underwear. Oh, wait — AFI aren’t playing? Well, I’m sure that haircut will be prominently featured on a good percentage of soul-crushing, woe-is-me, mall-rock bands out there on Piers 30 and 32 on July 8. They’ll be soaking in the ultraviolet-ultraviolent radiation of sun and prepubescent adoration, smashing the state, and killing you softly with their songs and pouty lips.
OK, you got me. For someone with a master’s degree in writing, a five-year-old kid, and a copy of Damaged on vinyl, poking fun at the Warped Tour is like hunting geriatric cows with a shotgun.
Warped just isn’t my thing, nor is it supposed to be. Like it or not, gramps, punk rock — and all of its attendant bastard children, Emo, Screamo, Puddin’, and Pie, and the rest of the seven dwarves — is big business. An uncool outcast who just can’t relate to mainstream society, man is the cool thing to be. The punks are now the jocks. The hipsters are the cheerleaders, and the whole thing plays in Peoria quite well, thank you. It plays in the food court as your little sister and her friends compare the bitchin’ spiked belts they just purchased over chicken nuggets and coconut-banana Frappucinos.
Having graduated from high school in 1989, I missed both the Sex Pistols at Winterland and the Warped phenomenon, and here I am — stuck in the middle with you. I had a couple friends who went one year, mainly to see the Descendents and Bad Religion, and I almost joined them, but discretion is the better part of valor, and the whole circus atmosphere just didn’t seem like it’d be fun. More specifically, it didn’t seem like it would be punk rock in the way that I thought punk rock was fun. It wasn’t a dark, dangerous club with dark, dangerous individuals singing from their dark, dangerous hearts about dark, dangerous things. Of course, all of this dark dangerousness has been an illusion since Iggy rolled around on broken glass during the recording of Metallic K.O. (Skydog, 1976). Nonetheless, punk rock shouldn’t require suntan lotion and plenty of hydration.
But that’s precisely the point. I can’t keep carrying this cross around. It’s covered in Iggy’s blood and Dee Dee Ramone’s track marks. The Warped Tour is not about punk rock. It’s about the kids having fun in the sun, and I’m no longer a kid. Point blank, whoot — there it is. It’s time to put the dharma where my mouth is — no more ignoring reality. I’m not a kid, but I’ve got one, a rock ’n’ roll kid who, like her dad, loves Joan Jett and would go positively ape-shit hearing “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” live for the first time.
Aside from Jett, there are a handful of other acts confirmed or rumored to be playing Warped who are actually worth checking out. Duane Peters’s band Die Hunns is performing, despite his vow to “never play that fuckin’ thing again,” and you know that’s got to be good — the Master of Disaster has no off switch, and his wife, Corey Parks, is a surgically augmented, tattooed, fire-breathing rock Valkyrie.
Peters told me that the Buzzcocks are playing, though I’ve yet to see it in print. They’re probably on a tiny stage in the back, next to the generator truck, the burrito shack, and the roadie break room. You know, where the good artists play. Artists like Mike Watt, God of the Thunderbroom and flannel-flying Pedro (that’s Pee-dro to you, youngster) good guy. And despite how bored you may be with lowbrow prankster punks turned political activists NOFX — the last time I saw them was at the Stone in ’86 — they are guaranteed to be entertaining.
Finally, the Warped tour features some bad-ass BMXers and skaters. I’m not really sure who, as finding a list of the athletes on the tour is harder than finding a complete band list. I will say that Vans sponsors skaters like flowmaster Tony Trujillo and tech king Bucky Lasek, as well as BMX wunderkinder Ryan Guettler and Scotty Cranmer, who can both do front flips 10 feet out of a spine, so it’d be worth it to go on the chance of seeing one of those guys. There’s bound to be enough wheeled heroics and side-stage real rock action that even a crotchety parental type like myself can get something out of the whole fandango. And that’s what I’m gonna do, 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old niece in tow. Long live the new breed. SFBG
VANS WARPED TOUR 2006
Sat/8, 11 a.m.
Piers 30 and 32, SF
$29.99
(415) 421-TIXS
www.warpedtour.com
Comedy with overbite
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Legendary critic Pauline Kael once described Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman as “crap on a motorcycle.” It might be as cheese-constipated as movies get, she argued, but at least it has the good sense to amplify the cheese to mind-obliterating excess: Junk this big and fast is bound to satisfy an audience — or at least stupefy it into submission.
The tactic is especially relatable to that dubious summer movie subgenre, the TV-show-to-movie adaptation. If most television shows are crap, most shows made into films attempt to shine up the turd with tremendous torque: over-the-top set pieces, deafening pyrotechnics, gimmicky postmodern conceits, and general crap-tasticness (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was even accommodating enough to throw in some actual motorcycles).
Strangers with Candy offers a perversely ingenious spin on this sad state of affairs. The late-’90s Comedy Central TV series (created by longtime collaborators Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello) was in essence a parody of a bad TV show to begin with, so it’s only appropriate that the movie plays like a parody of a movie based on a bad TV show.
The story revolves around the tribulations of Jerri Blank (Sedaris), a skeezy 46-year-old former junkie, prostitute, and child runaway. After being released from prison, Jerri decides to start her life over. (“Can we chay-ange?” she asks in dramatic voice-over as she shanks a fellow inmate in slo-mo.) She returns to her childhood home, promptly enrolls in her old high school as a freshman, and tries her best to fit in — which for the clueless Jerri means showing up wearing the highest waisted jeans ever while carrying a copy of the yellow pages in lieu of a textbook.
If the show was an excuse to satirize the fertile ground of straight-faced coming-of-age melodrama, the movie is an excuse to take the satire full tilt: Virtually every scene ends with a swell of the climactic, emotional score as characters come to terms with their feelings (“I wasn’t pushing you away, I was pulling me towards myself”). And the crap-on-a-motorcycle principle culminates with the purposefully sitcomish main plotline — which hinges on Jerri and her team winning the science fair with a feces-powered battery — leading to a Carrie-style “fire” and rampage in the gym.
Strangers was a relatively obscure cult success on basic cable, and many mainstream moviegoers probably won’t know what to make of this odd little gem. Dedicated fans, however, have little to worry about. The principals reprise their roles (including Dinello as the naive, not-so-ambiguously gay art teacher Mr. Jellineck and Colbert doing a variation of his self-satisfied asshole talk-show persona as Mr. Noblet), and the nasty spirit at the core of the show hasn’t been diluted.
That nasty spirit is personified by walking, talking track mark Jerri Blank, and Sedaris gamely destroys any shred of personal vanity she might have had left after the series to portray her again. Jerri’s pathetic desperation and her obliviousness to her shortcomings make her part childlike rube, part vicious opportunist, and Sedaris revels in every poisoned aside she spits through her contorted overbite. “I was thinking about pussy,” she deadpans. “Science fair is for queers.” Despite Jerri’s rottenness, she’s more of a comic-tragic figure than someone simply to laugh at. Her gameness to try and fail over and over (without ever realizing she’s failed) makes her, if not entirely lovable, at the very least endearing. She may be a bitter pill to swallow, but Candy is still one of the sweeter surprises in a movie season inevitably stinking of a certain number two. SFBG
STRANGERS WITH CANDY
Opens Fri/7
Bridge Theatre
3010 Geary, SF
(415) 267-4893
California Theatre
2113 Kittredge, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
for theaters and showtimes
www.strangerswithcandymovie.com
HELLO LARRY
“My basic photography lesson is this: You frame the perfect composition, exactly like you want it, and then you step forward,” says Larry Clark. “What that does is screw things up a little bit, so they’ll become more real, more like the way you see.”
We’re at a restaurant South of Market, and the man behind the monographs Tulsa and Teenage Lust and the films Kids, Bully, and the new Wassup Rockers is talking when he should be eating. I’m glad, because he has a lot to say. On the car ride to Zuppa, he reminisced about a brief late-1960s spell in San Francisco after an Army stint in Vietnam — once here, Clark’s time included a few Janis Joplin encounters. Once we’ve sat down at the table, when I mention the ties between Wassup Rockers and the underrated 1968 Burt Lancaster vehicle The Swimmer, Clark agrees that Lancaster’s performance is “extremely brave” and then serves up a real whopper: A film publicist once told him that Lancaster had a love affair with Luchino Visconti during the filming of 1963’s The Leopard, and that Lancaster was left an emotional wreck when Visconti dumped him.
Well, when in Rome …
It’s an interesting, clichéd truism to apply to Clark’s work, which doesn’t fit the tired modern sense of gay by any stretch of the imagination but is certainly appreciative of male as well as female allure. In the silly and energetic Wassup Rockers, his distinctive eye rolls with a band of Guatemalan and Salvadoran skateboarders as they travel through Beverly Hills, a gated community that starts to seem more and more like a prison. Wassup is often like a 21st-century version of a Bowery Boys comedy, with Clark (in his words) “riffing off of white people” and “riffing off of pop culture.” Before one of the title characters shares a bubble bath with Janice Dickinson, he and a friend — whose jeans and bulge would make Peter Berlin envious — have a tender tête-à-tête with some Hilton types. “Paris and Nicky were too old for me [when the film started shooting],” Clark jokes.
Born in Oklahoma but sporting a huggable Brooklynese accent and looking surprisingly healthy and sweet (if worn) at 63, Clark is still very much a child at heart, the nonsnarky and better-dressed real-life answer to Strangers With Candy’s former smack user and permanent high schooler Jerri Blank. Wassup Rockers is his third collaboration with cinematographer Steve Gainer, who picked up tricks of the trade working under Roger Corman in the 1990s. The link is an apt one because Clark is still working with genre in the Corman teensploitation or celebration-of-youth-culture sense.
Does Clark think his one-step-forward approach to camerawork dates back to the early 1970s and the speed-shooting and baby-death days of Tulsa? “It was a little more formal then,” he says, adding that he was more influenced by Robert Frank imitators — and by “the best,” Walker Evans — than by Frank, whom he knew little about when he made the book. “Tulsa is really about rooms. We’re in very small rooms, and we’re very close.”
Going back to those rooms means going down with Janis again; as the fellow Clark enthusiast with me observantly notes, a Joplin poster appears on the wall of one of those dark spaces. “The first time I met her it was early in the morning and we were walking across that big park in Haight Ashbury,” Clark recalls. “She was with someone from Big Brother [and the Holding Company] and I was with someone who knew him. I remember she was smoking a cigarette and she was holding it like this” — he imitates a loose gesture — “and her fingers were all yellow, and she said, ‘I really like these Pall Malls because you smoke them right down to the end like a junkie.’”
Clark hasn’t gone right down to the end like a junkie, though Tulsa certainly pictures exactly that type of fate with a void-gazing ferocity that no television episode of Intervention will match. It’s crazy, really, how many ways mass media — fashion and advertising and “indie” film in particular — have both copped and watered down or misinterpreted Clark’s aesthetics (a bit similar to what’s happened with John Waters, though perhaps even more subtly pervasive). The producers of MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills, original offender Calvin Klein, and now American Apparel owe him a mint’s worth of royalties for their third-rate rip-offs. At least the latter recently threw a huge party for the cast members of Wassup Rockers and their families, complete with live performances by the band featured in the movie.
If Clark is still thriving in art and life today, some credit should be given to his girlfriend, Tiffany Limos, whose candid criticism of Clark’s past movies doubtless informed his approach to Wassup Rockers. Limos is too young to be responsible for the genius choice of soundtracking Clark’s recent mammoth Manhattan gallery show, “Punk Picasso,” with Nancy Wilson’s But Beautiful, but she did tell him to place a hilarious video installation of her beyond-hyper bichon frise near the show’s end, an element that is echoed in a funny dog-attack scene within Wassup Rockers.
“That video is like the real Larry Clark,” Clark says with a laugh. “Tiff was coming home, and when she would leave I would always tell her that I could not say her name while she was gone because the dog would go crazy. I thought, ‘I’m going to show Tiffany what happens when I say her name.’ But when I made the video, never in my wildest imagination did I think I would use it. It’s funny because I’m talking to this dog like it’s a human being. Sammy runs into the street and I scold him — ‘You’re going to get killed!’ — just like I was talking to a kid.”
Limos also got her friend the fashion designer Jeremy Scott cast in Wassup Rockers as a lascivious gay photographer who looks like Perry Farrell and has a mansion full of horrendous steroidy physique shots (actual work by Tom Bianchi). “Tiffany would bring these photos of Jeremy home,” says Clark. “We had this private joke about him that if you pointed a camera at him he would always do something incredible. Then we would see photos of him at parties in magazines, and true to form, he would always be making some flamboyant pose.”
As the interview winds down, the man who began with a photography tip says he now prefers making films. Then Clark makes a final distinction. “I was never really a photographer,” he says. “I was an artist and a storyteller [when I started out with Tulsa], and I was using photography because that’s what I had.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
WASSUP ROCKERS
Opens Fri/7
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
(415) 267-4893
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
for showtimes
www.wassuprockers.net
Johnny bravo
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Just a few summers ago, we were all snickering into our popcorn tubs: a Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Yo-ho-no! But what could’ve sucked harder than The Haunted Mansion turned into a monster 2003 hit, buoyed by ghostly buccaneers, showy effects, and Johnny Depp’s impeccably bizarre turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, surely the most inventive character yet to emerge from a 21st-century blockbuster. Long before Depp’s Oscar nomination, plans were afoot to increase Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl’s bootylicious haul with a pair of sequels filmed back-to-back. So, how can you love a series based on a rather sedate Disneyland attraction — films accompanied by a merch deluge not seen since fanboys were still jazzed about gettin’ to know Darth Maul?
Pretty much, it’s the pirates. Peg legs, cannon battles, talking parrots, mutiny on the high seas, rum chugging — pirate shit is damn near irresistible, especially when Depp’s riding the mast. Within the first reel of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, a chorus of arrrs is raised, a mangy bird plucks out some poor soul’s rotting eyeball, and a crew member remarks that Captain Sparrow is acting “strange … er” than usual. Chest’s plot is more convoluted than Pearl’s, but every character — including Sparrow, feisty Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), heroic Will (Orlando Bloom), and prissy Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) — is searching for someone, or something, with single-minded determination. Chest also shares Pearl’s ticking-clock pacing, with lives and relationships and eternal souls hanging perilously in the balance. Naturally, all these quests become interwoven and complicated by distractions, including a detour to a Skull Island–meets–Joe Versus the Volcano atoll, a gung ho swordfight, a beast bearing giant and aggressive tentacles, and the salty whims of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), whose ghostly Flying Dutchman operates like a kelp-strewn variation on the Philadelphia Experiment.
Unlike, say, flicks based on beloved comic books, Chest has no touchstones to hit or homages to pay, other than dropping in a few references to the first film. This allows director Gore Verbinski and scripters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (like sultan-of-slick producer Jerry Bruckheimer, all back from Pearl) the freedom to toss whatever they want into their Chest, which runs almost as long as Superman Returns but is infinitely more jolly, Roger. For a big-budget studio confection, there’s actually a lot of imagination at play; Nighy’s sneering performance, coupled with the special effects used to create Davy “Fishface” Jones’s slimy visage, allows for a character who’s equal parts Phantom of the Opera and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Of course the main reason the Pirates movies are so fun is Depp, without whom we’d be talking about a few hours of flashy CG and a couple of pretty faces (Bloom, you’re still on notice for Elizabethtown). Sparrow prances, turns tail, delivers flowery double-talk, and cares only about saving his own skin (and, of course, his precious hat) — yes, he’s a showboaty clown, but Depp manages to make him likable where others (Jim Carrey?) would simply come up annoying. I’m still not sold on Depp’s Willy Wonka interpretation. But it’s with good reason that Sparrow’s the only film character he’s played more than once.
And he’ll play him again, to be sure. It’s not spoiling anything to say that Chest ends with classic middle-film-of-a-trilogy ambiguity; fates and loyalties wind up shakier than the points on Sparrow’s discombobulated compass. The third Pirates is due next summer, so you won’t have long to wait to see what happens. In the meantime, Chest is a solid adventure with a sense of adventure — cinematic currency that’s as good as gold these days, ye scurvy dog. SFBG
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN:
DEAD MAN’S CHEST
Opens Fri/7
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates
Ra, Ra rah-rah
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Wassup Lauryn Hill? Well apparently she’s been busy morphing into Sun Ra.
A staight-skankin’, massive fro–sportin’, partyin’-with-Method-Man-at-the-Clift-Hotel, “la, la, la, la”-ing Sun Ra.
The lady had about 13 people onstage at Great American Music Hall on June 29 for two last-minute “rehearsal” sets: two drummers, two keyboardists, at least three guitarists, the works. Because the lady clearly wanted to play a bandleader from a galaxy far, far away — and frankly, I haven’t been so interested in Lauryn Hill in years.
She was an artist in her own little world, all right — miming Bitches Brew, turning her unrehearsed Arkestra into an engorged rock-steady big band, and at around 2 a.m., at the end of the second show, launching passionately, stubbornly, into her most popular tunes.
The lights went up. The stage lights flicked off. The power to the mics finally ebbed. And Hill had found her own power trip of a groove — in the dark, where it’s safe — and the audience was in deep doo-doo in love, shouting, “One more! One more! Lau-Ren! Lau-Ren!” At about 2:15 a.m., after much shushing, she began singing “Killing Me Softly” a cappella. Softly. Then she descended into the crowd like an empress to meet her biggest fans.
FISHIN’ MUSICIAN But enough Arkestra-ted diva tripping, we gotta work together, so follow the lead of Aesop Rock and longtime Bay Area artist Jeremy Fish, who have done an ace job in collaborating on a new book playing off those golden children’s record-and-storybook combos. The release of their The Next Best Thing book–7-inch comes with a mini-multimedia promo juggernaut July 6: Fish (who has a load of product in the works, including a new vinyl toy and a board series and short film for Element Skateboards titled Fishtales with a soundtrack by Rock) will show his paintings at Fifty24SF Gallery. And then later that night Aesop Rock will bump up against Rob Sonic, DJ Big Wiz, Murs with Magi, and producer Blockhead at a benefit concert at the Independent for 826 Valencia.
The pair met through a mutual friend and discovered that they’re mutual fans: Rock owned a Fish piece, and the artist had been an avid Rock listener for years. “I saw a lot of his work had cute stuff mixed with evil stuff, which is a lot like what I write about,” says the jovial Rock.
Aesop Rock, of late, has found his work skewing toward the more narrative side of hip-hop: He already has about five “really linear stories” for his next album, expected in 2007. That recording is likely to include more instrumentation by musicians like Parchman Farm, which includes Rock’s wife, Allison “the Jewge” Baker.
Rock moved from New York City to San Francisco to be with her. Romantic — not many superstar underground rap bros will drop everything and uproot for their, um, ho, no? As a result, the music has definitely become “reflective in the sense that I moved out of New York City, turned 30, and got married all in the same year,” he explains. “Those three things all have me doing stories about random childhood stuff, super-folktaley story songs that are almost like the stories you’d read to a child.”
CORE CREW Director Dick Rude was enlisted to make Let’s Rock Again, a documentary of his friend Joe Strummer’s time with the Mescaleros around the time of 2001’s Global a Go-Go. And he captured Strummer in deep working-musician mode. “Having done the Clash and having reached that height of stardom, he was really just consumed with getting his music heard and not reaching that level again, so there was a real humility and passion to his approach on the tour,” says the LA videomaker. “It became about breaking the record so he could have a chance to record another record.”
Rude, who met Strummer while he was working as an assistant to director Alex Cox on Sid and Nancy, calls the film — which will be screened one time in San Francisco and is now out on DVD — more of a “memoir of that time” than a biopic of Strummer. As for Strummer’s posthumously released music on Streetcore, Rude believes, “There are tracks on that record that rival any Clash tune. There is no pretension, nothing to prove, just straight-out passion.” SFBG
JEREMY FISH
Opening Thurs/6, 7 p.m.
Fifty24SF Gallery
248 Fillmore, SF
(415) 252-0144
AESOP ROCK
Thurs/6, 9 p.m.
Independent
626 Divisadero, SF
$17
www.independentsf.com
LET’S ROCK AGAIN
Wed/5, 7 p.m.
Roxie Cinema
3125 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
OH, MY STARS
SARA TAVARES
Sweetness from the Cape Verdean–Portuguese vocalist. Wed/5, 8 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $25. (415) 771-1421.
MAGIK MARKERS
Bookish by day at last year’s ArthurFest. Howling and riding seated audience members in performance. Thurs/6, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $8. (415) 923-0923.
THEE MORE SHALLOWS
Don’t turn your back on these indie experimentalists. Thurs/6, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $8. (415) 861-5016.
LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
Did you eat the Dots — and their glowering psychedelia? Sat/8, 9 p.m., Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. $16–$18. (415) 522-0333.
GOD OF SHAMISEN
Members of Secret Chiefs 3 and Estradasphere create likely the first metal unit bearing down on the Japanese instrument. Mon/10, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $8. (415) 861-5016.
PARENTHETICAL GIRLS
Let’s talk about (((GRRRLS))) — with exploding viz-art mover–rad dude BARR. Mon/10, 6 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923.
Going topless
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
My girlfriend is really into BDSM. At first I tried and played a convincing (I think) top/dom, but it just wasn’t hot for me, so I looked some stuff up to get inspired. As I was reading/watching, I would really get off on it, but the sex with my girlfriend still wasn’t hot. Then I realized that when I was masturbating to all this, I was fantasizing about subbing. Oops. I am way in love with my girlfriend, but she is a bottom, period. She might switch it around if it meant a lot to me, but I would know that it wasn’t really making her happy. I don’t know what to do. Can I become a top? Can I teach myself to like it? I’m going to do it either way, but I really want to get into it, so please help! I want us to be good in bed together, but two bottoms don’t make a top. Help!
Love,
Topless
PS: We’re lesbians, if that matters.
Dear Tops:
It sure doesn’t, but thanks for the info!
I was just thinking about this last night when a friend was catching me up on her latest dating adventures. She was lamenting that some potential dates seem to come equipped with a set of kinks perfectly matching her own, and though that sounds good, it is, of course, no use at all. As you have discovered to your frustration, one wants a date with a complementary set of kinks, not a matching one. It’s not an uncommon problem, and its most common manifestation is exactly the one that’s driving you nuts: There are too many bottoms in this world and nowhere near enough tops to keep them satisfied. Why this is (beyond the fact that topping is hard work) I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I bet any number of eager grad students are currently proposing theses on the subject to bored advisors who have read enough similar stuff already.
Here’s my theory: There are people for whom BDSM is a core part of their identity, running as deep as, say, homosexuality or monogamy. Some may always have recognized this element in themselves, even before they had the language to express it (these are the kids who always want to play pirates or whatever game involves somebody getting tied to something or the intentional infliction/receiving of pain, even when the other kids are long since ready to move on). Others don’t realize it until they’re exposed to S-M in some more adult context, but then it just clicks in, key into lock, and they know. Your girlfriend sounds like one of those BDSM lifers, who tend, in my experience, to be pretty set on their preferred role even if they do switch experimentally on occasion (a good idea, if only to find out how painful/exhausting it is to experience/produce any particular sensation).
Then there are the “anything goes” people, who are happy to pick up a flogger or don a dog collar, what the heck, as long as it’s fun. This type of player may not identify as an S-M person per se, but may enjoy a little power exchange on the occasional Friday night, no biggie. You may fall more on this end of the spectrum, but even “what-the-heckers” usually discover some sort of preference, as you have. The perfect 50-50 switch is almost certainly as rare as the perfect 50-50 bisexual.
Plenty of people find something to like in either role, and I think you can develop an appreciation for topping and get some satisfaction out of a job well done (there are resources like The New Topping Book, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, to help you). But you can enjoy and get good at it without ever really becoming a top the way both of you are currently bottoms. Be careful about taking on a role that isn’t really “you.” Nobody loves a martyr, and you’re still going to want to bottom sometimes. I worry about you starting to resent your girlfriend for getting to have all the fun.
I have a suggestion that might save your relationship or might strike you as all sorts of wrong and make you hate me, but here goes: You guys find a willing top, maybe somewhere in your social circle, maybe online or in a BDSM social organization, and bottom together sometimes. This kind of shared adventure can be hot, hot, hot and very bonding, sort of like getting lost in the woods together and surviving through mutual trust and interreliance — but a lot more fun. I think if you do that sometimes, and play top sometimes, and stick with the vanilla sometimes, you’ll probably be OK, provided you both take care of getting your itches scratched. Love conquers … much.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her archived columns.
Nth loop
superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO “I’m from Indiana,” confided the partly melted drag queen, after nailing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” in a wicked patent-leather Duchess of Spades dress. “You know we do things different out there. I just got here a couple weeks ago, and when I first pulled my hair out the box, the other girls asked if it was three wigs or one.”
BRUNCH
“So you’re a Hoosier,” I replied. My observation went ignored. “The scene here’s much more weave than cone,” she winked, then disappeared behind a wall of mirrors. A tape-recorded version of “Is That All There Is?” kicked in. Metaphors!
I wish I could remember what she called herself, but I was knee-deep in my English Summer, an acrobatic concoction hovering halfway between a mojito and a Pimm’s Cup. Mnemonic device, it wasn’t. We were at Harry Denton’s, 46 stories atop the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, peeping Scarlet Empress Donna Sachet’s swank new “Sunday’s a Drag” brunch show — me and a posse of party kids looking so out of place we may as well have been Skittles in the deviled eggs. The combined total of our online ages was probably half that of any one of the cackling grandes dames around us.
But no matter: “Sunday’s a Drag” blasted off into outer space and gladly took us with it. A parade of energetic old-school queens teased the roomful of swilling octogenarians into Depends-dampening titters, and the whole affair took on the air of legendary drag club Finocchio’s, circa 1985 — but with better prosthetics. (“A lot of money and a lot of surgery,” rasped the nonorganically gorgeous Cassandra Cass as she handed me a “Cassandra Cass: Fantasy Girl 2006” calendar. Memo to Cassandra: It’s June.)
Donna Sachet’s one of those amazing creatures who do so much I often think there are two of her. (“Well, alcohol is a fuel,” the little voice in my head pipes up, the one I call Deficit of the Doubt.) And it was somehow fitting that I was applauding our fair city’s 30th Empress that afternoon, seeing as how I’d come to three hours earlier on brand-spanking-new Jose Sarria Court in the Castro, named after the ass-kicking queen who’d started the whole gay Emperor-Empress dealie — the Widow Norton, her Big Kahuness, Madame Awe. I had Jose Sarria pebbles in my y-fronts, bits of Jose Sarria laurel bush drifting from my hair.
The afternoon launched to another cosmic level when Hoosier-name executed a full-on backbend to Taylor Dane and one of her press-on nails flew off, somersaulted in midair, and landed on the table next to my blueberry pancakes. Which made me lose my bacon.
BRATS
“It’s like Mabuhay Gardens or the Deaf Club, only gay,” I thought the first time I went to Sissy, the new punk rock monthly run by my favorite obnoxious club brat, Foxy Cotton. When people see Foxy a-comin’ they usually take to runnin’ — he’s kind of like an amped-up Woody Woodpecker with half the feathers missing — but the queen’s got talent pumping somewhere through his veins and an impecc-pecc-peccable sense of style. Plus, he’s actually kinda sweet to me.
Sissy hit me as the potential realization of all my stuck-in-the-Midwest teenage dreams, which imagined the underground punk scene of ’80s San Francisco as a writhing network of gay-friendly mohawks, complete with carpeted dance floors, passed-out hotties, and who-knows-what in the bathrooms. Dead Kennedys in the front, Mutants on the roof. Plus it’s after hours. Rad!
Since its early days (no naked mosh pit, alas), Sissy’s expanded its musical format — but it’s still the ginchiest metal-heavy queer experience out there. Where else you gonna hear L7 nowadays outside a lesbian jukebox? And it’s fun to drop that brainy “post” from post-punk and just let loose. Although clubs may have stopped moving into the future, they’re at least digging into the past with sharper queer nails.
BOOBS
“Did you hear about Kevin Aviance?” It was a friend from New York City calling me, which always means more now that there’s e-mail. Kevin was one of the fiercest things of the ’90s, a club queen with chart-topping dance records, a towering hulk of ferocious, ebony-skinned femininity. Like Eartha Kitt on stilts, but breathier. And bald.
He was famous for never wearing falsies. Now he was in the hospital with a fractured jaw and a useless knee, felled as he left a Manhattan gay bar by six kids shouting “faggot” as they kicked him in the chest. People just stood around and watched.
Every year around Pride I overhear some visitor squealing, “Your Pride here’s so political!” and I think, what’s the opposite of politics? Advertising? Circuit music? Sex on marijuana truffles? This year when I heard it, I wanted to spin around with my slapping hand out and scream, “Kevin just got gay-bashed, dammit! Everything’s political!” But when I turned I saw the person who had said it was smiling. He had a “Queers Bash Back” bumper sticker on his bike bag. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, “It’s The Tits.”
BABES
Suddenly I was surrounded by munchkins. They were everywhere — in the lobby, on the dance floor, hanging over the balcony railing. “Oh, no,” I thought with a pang, “my cocktails are interacting. Better dance it off.” I slammed another Stoli Cran and wobbled through the knee-high crowd toward the speakers.
“When I stop the music and yell freeze, everybody freeze!” hollered DJ Sake 1 over “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-lite. “Freeze!” I looked around again. Dear god, these were children. Even more horrifying, I was at Ruby Skye. It was Saturday afternoon. Obviously my medication wasn’t working. I backed slowly off the dance floor before anybody’s parents mistook me for a Pampers snacker.
Luckily, the ’rents were too busy mobbing the bar. I had landed at “Baby Loves Disco,” the mind-blowing summertime monthly new wave and disco dance party for toddlers ($10 for walkers, free for crawlers). The place was packed with young ’uns running every which way, occasionally chased after by their stumbling progenitors. The club was completely trashed. The music veered from “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang to “Controversy” by Prince, and the whole thing had more than a whiff of bar mitzvah party, but less mature. What’s less mature than a bar mitzvah party? Oh yeah, Ruby Skye.
I made my way upstairs to the VIP lounge — why not? To get there, I passed chilluns with pink mohawks, chilluns with sunglasses, chilluns with full-on ’80s-fierce attitude. I entered the dimly lit backroom. There, on a VIP chaise, reclined the most beautiful toddler I’d ever seen. His little fedora was pushed back on his perfectly round head. His leg straddled the chaise’s red velvet arm. He may have been smoking an inflatable cigar. For a moment our eyes locked, my being immersed in the crystal clear beam of his unjaded, baby-blue gaze.
“Someday,” I realized, “this baby will rule the world.”
SUNDAY’S A DRAG Sundays, noon and 3 p.m. Harry Denton’s Starlight Room 450 Powell, SF $30 (415) 395-8595 www.harrydenton.com SISSY CLUB First Fridays, 10 p.m.–4 a.m. Deco Lounge 510 Larkin, SF $5 (415) 346-2025 BABY LOVES DISCO July 15 and Aug. 19, 2–5 p.m. Ruby Skye 420 Mason, SF $10 (415) 693-0777 www.babylovesdisco.com
Queen of the double feature
HORROR-LARITY If there’s anything better than peaches and cream, it would have to be Peaches and Elvira. Movie maniacs will get a taste of the two great horror hosts this weekend, when Peaches Christ kicks off this year’s tantalizing Midnight Mass series with a pair of prizes — two nights costarring the queen of the double feature, the famous alter ego of Cassandra Peterson.
Peterson sees Elvira as a variation of herself as a teenager: “know-it-all, really sassy, and treats the guys like crap.” She and Pee Wee’s Playhouse writer John Paragon collaborated on the screenplay for the underrated 1988 satire Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, which whips the religious right of the Reagan–Bush Sr. years. Besides featuring a wickedly witty lead performance, Mistress also boasts a great villain in Chastity Pariah, perhaps the best busybody role ever given to feisty Edie McClurg, who along with Peterson and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens was a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe. “Our relationship was always similar to the movie,” says Peterson. “Edie would always say, ‘Are you wearing that tonight?’ — she was worried I wasn’t covered up enough.”
A poor farm girl from Kansas and Colorado who played with Frankenstein and Dracula dolls while her peers favored Barbie, Peterson brought a love of Vincent Price (“especially his Roger Corman movies loosely — and I mean loosely — based on Edgar Allan Poe”) with her when she first arrived in Hollywood. Her time in the haunted hills has included some strange pit stops, such as a guest appearance on CHiPS (“Erik Estrada was the most egotistical jerk. I hope he’s gotten a little more humble because then he was at the top of his game and he thought he was god’s gift to women”) and televised exercise with Richard Simmons (“He was really fun. He could be a little overly energetic. He kept calling me ‘Ellie,’ and I remember him screaming down the hall: ‘ELLIE!’ It could burst your eardrums”). Her own TV shows, pairing terrible movies with commentary and comedy in the grand style of Ghoulardi and others, will soon be reissued on DVD.
What’s the question that Peterson most often gets regarding Elvira, and what does she wish people would ask? “The most frequently asked question is probably ‘Are they real?'” she says. “I assume they are talking about my fingernails.”
“The question I wish people would ask? … I think they’ve gotten everything. I don’t think there’s anything left they haven’t had.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
MIDNIGHT MASS
Friday/30, 11:59 p.m.
“Uncut Night of the Living Dead Spooktacular with Elvira”
Saturday/1, 11:59 p.m.
“Carrie with Elvira”
$12
(415) 267-4893
www.peacheschrist.com
www.elvira.com
Slay time!
THEATER If you love comedy, horror movies, and the singular sensation of being doused with oddly fruity stage blood, you’re probably already a Primitive Screwheads fan. If you’re not, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the madcap masters of mayhem behind such spectacles as Re-Animator of the Dead: The Tale of Herbert West and the inimitable Evil Dead: Live. Named for a favorite Army of Darkness quote, the young company was founded by a group of San Francisco State theater students in 2003; now something of a splat-stick phenomenon, they’ve also mounted two hugely successful shows as part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival.
A few weeks back, a rowdy HoleHead crowd greeted their latest, The Chainsaw Massacres — a riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with The Devil’s Rejects, Saturday Night Fever, and other pop culture insanity tossed in) that’s now returning to CELLspace. Codirectors Sean Madeira and Robert Selander — the troupe’s standout ham, who played Evil Dead’s Ash and has a juicy role in Chainsaw — are in the process of attaining nonprofit status for the Screwheads. It’s an exciting development for a group that basically runs on a self-fueled (and self-funded) mix of ingenuity, enthusiasm, and a staggering ability to multitask.
“Sean is our main writer, and I’m our main blood technician and fight choreographer, but we split directing evenly,” Selander explains. Madeira, who dreamed up the Evil Dead play while at a comics convention, drew on his screenwriting background for the company’s first production, filling a previously undiscovered niche in the San Francisco theater scene in the process.
“Everyone’s seen Shakespeare,” Madeira says. “I figured I’ll just give them something different, something wild.” The Sam Raimi cult classic was chosen because of its single location and handful of characters — and, of course, its gore-tastic possibilities, though the company’s audience-splattering ways (now a trademark) were stumbled upon with utter spontaneity.
“I knew we were gonna have a lot of blood, because it was Evil Dead,” Madeira recalls. “But then once it started accidentally hitting the audience, they went crazy.”
“By the end of the first run, Sean was, like, ‘Well, they liked it! We should just spray it at the audience,’>