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Light-up wonders, deep sea explorers, jelly apps: Marine biology at the Bone Room

Andrew Lam
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You don’t have to travel far to enter foreign waters. Just a few miles off San Francisco shores lies a world more alien to us than anything dreamed up by the likes of Ridley Scott or James Cameron. And as Doctor Steve Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute told us in his lecture, entitled “No Bones About It: The Diversity of Gelatinous Invertebrates in the Deep Sea” at Berkeley’s Bone Room last Thursday night, this world — otherwise known as Monterey Bay — holds 4,000 meters of uncharted underwater territory , miles of yet-to-be-discovered ecosystems, organisms, and almost unimaginable possibilities of new life.

Monterey Bay is one of the most biologically diverse bodies of waters in the world due to the massive sub-oceanic Monterey Canyon, one of the deepest of its kind off the coast of the United States. It stretches about 4,000 meters in depth, surpassing the depth of the Grand Canyon. 

Bioluminescence and zooplankton expert Haddock came up for air from his research to tell tales about the diversity of the underwater world, not to mention his discoveries regarding siphonophores, ctenophores, and various other classes of jellyfish — which turned out highly mysterious creatures, as far as science is concerned. 

Through his dedicated and highly specified research, Haddock is shedding light on what lies beneath. Reconsidering previous discoveries and challenging everything previously known about these deep-sea and open-ocean ctenophores, siphonophores, radiolarians, medusae and deep-sea gelatinous zooplankton, the scientist has discovered many new species, and has put out a call to realign and redefine some of the branches on marine biology’s tree of life.

He offered us a simplified glimpse into the world he is slowly but assuredly helping to piece together, proving that sometimes, all it takes to reach a sound conclusion is to turn off the lights.

More specifically, the lights on his submersible, which allowed Haddock to see the light, meaning bioluminescence.

This became the highlight of Haddock’s lecture on Thursday. He closed his talk with video slides of various jellies lighting up the layers of sea where the sun don’t shine, using a chemically-produced mechanism to hunt prey, defend themselves, find mates, and survive in the unfamiliar world of the deep.

Want to help Haddock and his team put together a more comprehensive look at the behaviors of jellies? There’s an app for that. (And it rocks). Next time you see a jelly, a bloom of jellies, or an an unidentifiable invertebrate washed up on a beach, snap a pic and upload it to Jellywatch — it’s available on iTunes for free. Happy jelly-watching! 

The Bone Room 1573 Solano, Berk. (510) 526-5252, www.boneroompresents.com

Watching models eat: On and off-runway shots at NY Fashion Week

Andrew Lam
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1

“New York inspires me to be more ambitious and to push my work to higher levels,” reflected Academy of Art University shutterbug Aldo Carrera on his recent trip to document his school’s Fashion Week runway collections.

“I also love watching models eat.”

Truly, that most elusive of NYFW moments.

As it turns out, AAU sends one of its own each year to document the proceedings on its NYFW. (Coincidentally, ur intern Jessica Wolfrom who was in NYC reporting for the Guardian on a few shows is a AAU student as well.) We checked in with Carrera upon his return to San Francisco to hear about what it was like to student-snap the shows. He told us he’s big into fashion photogs who push the limits of documenting lewks — Helmut Newton and Nick Knight among them. 

SFBG: Tell us about your degree program. How does school prepare you for fashion photojournalism?

Aldo Carrera: At the Academy of Art my focus is fine art and fashion photography. Mixing the two actually is what I enjoy most. As far as photojournalism, I would say it is something that comes as more of an instinct, I don’t think any school can teach a photographer how to be at the right place and right time with your camera. Especially now with our cell phones, anyone can be a great photojournalist. Although, being in school I have learned how to tell a story with my camera.

SFBG: What do you think fashion photojournalism is lacking these days?

AC: Sometimes it seems as though photographers these days care more about constantly clicking their shutter rather than reading into their subject.

SFBG: What was your favorite part of New York Fashion Week? Least favorite? How long were you out there?

AC: This was actually my first time being able to attend a show for NYFW, being around the amazing work of emerging artists and designers have their work recognized with such honor. It was truly inspiring to be around (and be able to photograph) that type of creative energy. The only negative moment I can think of the experience is how cold New York can get! Following the show, I stayed in the city for another week to do some of my own editorial shoots.

SFBG: How did it come about that you came to be shooting your school’s NYFW show?

AC: The PR department at the Academy invited me to shoot backstage. It was also an incredible experience to see some of my friends in the knitwear department throughout their processes and then able to see it go down the runway in a Mercedes-Benz NYFW show. 

 

FYI ‘Drag Race’, SF is still doing it better

Andrew Lam
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FYI ‘Drag Race’, SF is still doing it better

Now that our local darling Honey Mahogany is out of the RuPaul’s Drag Race due to being nice and enjoying actual fashion, we must say that Seattle drag queen Jinkx Monsoon‘s Little Edie from Grey Gardens blew away the Marilyn Monroes and Katy Perrys of last night’s celebrity impersonation challenge last night on the LOGO TV show.

But we take serious issue with Gawker’s headline proclaiming it the best Edie ever. Clearly politiqueen Anna Conda’s take, assumed for her housewarming party upon moving to a fixer-upper in the Excelsior last summer, was superior in both motivation and situation. Overturned hottubs > sparkly curtained TV sets, in this case (and many others.)

That being said, tip of the champagne flute to Monsoon for going with a celebrity impersonation slightly more challenging than Ke$ha. We cringed when the other queens gave Monsoon shade for expanding her cultural references beyond feather extensions (and then the queen doing Marilyn Monroe missed the politicians affairs reference??), but they were in turn schooled by RuPaul, who named Monsoon the winner of the night’s challenge. 

Last night’s ‘Drag Race’ challenge winner, our second-favorite Edie

Monsoon choose to watch the goings-on smack-dab in the Castro at Toad Hall last night. After Mahogany’s dismissal, San Francisco may be done with Drag Race, but Drag Race just won’t do without San Francisco. 

Staff of shut-down Mission dispensary opens SoMa’s newest cannabis club

Andrew Lam
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Staff of shut-down Mission dispensary opens SoMa’s newest cannabis club

Today was the grand opening for a new dispensary just steps from the front door of Mezzanine and right down the block from a rapidly-changing Sixth Street. Long-time medical marijuana patients may recognize some familiar faces — Bloom Room employs many of the staff and management from Medithrive, the Mission Street dispensary was was forced to close “for the children” back in November of 2011.

“I was the manager of a store, and then I was the manager of a delivery service,” Bloom Room manager Stephen Rechit tells me, sitting in the dispensary vaporizing lounge area. When federal government agencies informed the cannabis club that it was too close to Marshall Elementary School, Medithrive switched to a $50-minimum, delivery-only service that owners continue to operate. 

The Bloom Room’s open for business, with space for on-site vaporizing steps from the cash register

Did Rechit — who says he became Medithrive’s first employee as a new University of San Francisco graduate — consider a career change in the face of unyielding federal agents? Not for a second. 

“I know this is definitely what I want to do,” he reflects. “I just really — I don’t want to get cheesy, but I believe in the plant.”

>>THROUGH MARCH 1, NEW BLOOM ROOM PATIENTS GET A SAMPLER OF THREE MARIJUANA STRAINS WITH ANY PURCHASE OF $50

Bloom Room’s downtown design, with its exposed brick walls and translucent glass marijuana leaf panels reappropriated from the defunct Medithrive storefront, may be the perfect fit for a Sixth Street neighborhood that’s on a definite upward economic swing. Rechit points out the window to the corporate offices of Burning Man, perched atop a skyscraper alongside the rest of the Mid-Market buildings that tech tenants are filling up. Burning Man’s been an earlier contributor to Bloom Room’s “Community Corner,” a space for neighborhood fliers, business cards. 

Bloom Room plans to stock six to 10 strains each of indicas and sativa, and sells blackberry chocolate bars from Kiva, Auntie Dolores caramel corn, and oen of Rechit’s favorites, TerpX concentrates. 

Sticky: TerpX concentrate

“TerpX is like the Girl Scout Cookies of last year,” Rechit comments, unrolling a piece of waxed paper so I can check out the golden goo. 

As we chatted, Tenderloin resident Jim Murray (who, happily, bore a striking resemblance to Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic in his navy beanie) pulled up in the narrow, tall table to inquire about the availability of the clould of OG Kush pumping into the vaporizer bag between Rechit and I. 

I’d seen Murray complaining about the quality of Bloom Room bud he’d picked up previously, and now he was interested in the “toast,” the spent flower already used in the vaporizer that was sitting on a piece of paper in the ashtray. 

“The reason why I’m sensitive to this is because I am a senior living on a VA pension,” he informed me. “What compassionate care programs do you have here?” he asked Rechit. 

FYI, Rechit says the dispensary gives away free product to patient on holidays and keeps prices low in general. Back when Medithrive’s doors were open at its Mission Street location it made monthly donations to the school around the corner that was eventually used as the excuse by the federal government to shut it down. Let’s hope Bloom Room has more luck in its new SoMa spot. 

Bloom Room, 471 Jessie, SF. (415) 543-7666, www.bloomroomsf.com

Live Shots: ‘Dance + Diaspora’ at ODC Theater

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Strong drum beats, hip shimmies laden with bells and voices coming together in song. This show has it all. Presenting “Dance + Diaspora” two performances this Friday and Saturday — pics above are from the dress rehearsal — by choreographers Jill Parker (with her Foxglove Sweethearts troupe) and Tania Santiago (with her Movendo con Capoeira troupe)   — a showcase of steamy belly dancing and heart-pumping Capoeria.

The belly dance performance includes solos, but is a mainly a group dance, with multiple belly rolls and wrist rotations happening in unison by all the dancers. Their piece also includes live music, like some pretty great clarinet and double-reeded zurna tunes. After intermission, the mood shifts and takes you to Brazil, for an energizing Capoeira piece, mixing both incredible acrobatics and traditional Afro-Brazilian folk dance. The show as a whole is a wonderful combination of music and dance, creating a true cultural dance experience.

Dance + Diaspora, Fri/22 and Sat/23

More info here

 

A taste of Jill Parker and the Foxglove Sweethearts

 

Countdown to the Oscars! Plus: Cinequest and new flicks

Sue Vaughan
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Countdown to the Oscars! Plus: Cinequest and new flicks

Important: the Oscar broadcast starts at 4pm on Sunday on ABC. If tradition holds, the ceremony won’t actually begin until a little later, but if you want to soak up the full awkwardness of the red carpet, with its “Who are you wearing?” and its reporters mistaking Denzel Washington’s daughter for his wife (true story), you will want to tune in on time. (If you’re a true fiend, E! starts their red-carpet coverage at 2:30pm.)

As far as Oscar winners go, I thought I had it figured out, but really … it’s anyone’s game, unless your name is Daniel Day-Lewis. Fingers crossed for local filmmaker Sari Gilman to win Best Documentary Short for her Kings’ Point.

This week, I took a look at San Jose’s Cinequest festival (zombie lovers, get on this one!) Among the new releases, the Rock goes undercover for the DEA to clear his son’s name in Snitch, and Keri Russell battles supernatural suburban invaders in Dark Skies. Reviews below the jump of mystical drama Bless Me, Ultima; Oscar-nominated doc The Gatekeepers; and Werner Herzog’s latest doc, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yg9kkqCul0

Bless Me, Ultima A mysticism that melds the Latin American shamanism with old-world Catholicism suffuses this bildungsroman of a memory movie, warmly rendered by director Carl Franklin, perhaps best known for his noirish tendencies in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and One False Move (1992). Here, working with Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark Chicano novel and material steeped in curandera, or shamanistic, folkways, he continues to exhibit that close attention to detail and the emotional truth of his characters that he brought to his more sensational genre work. This is a smaller, yet no less powerful, story: Antonio (Luke Ganalon) is the youngest son of a vaquero father (Benito Martinez) and a mother (Dolores Heredia) who hails from a farming family — yet perhaps his most important connection is with the woman who midwifed him, Ultima (Miriam Colon), who is taken in by his family out of respect for her deep folk magic and knowledge as a healer. Under Ultima’s close tutelage — while faithfully attending church and working his uncles’ fields — Antonio learns about life and the earth’s bounty, dangers, and cycles, particularly when one of his uncles falls prey to wicked brujas who practice blood sacrifice and Ultima is called in to help him. All of which makes for emotionally resonant storytelling that imparts the impact of Anaya’s tale and his reverence for spiritual practice — of all sorts — and our planet’s power and magic. (1:46)  (Kimberly Chun)    

The Gatekeepers Coming hard on the heels of The Law in These Parts, which gave a dispassionate forum to the lawmakers who’ve shaped — some might say in pretzel form — the military legal system that’s been applied by Israelis to Palestinians for decades, Dror Moreh’s documentary provides another key insiders’ viewpoint on that endless occupation. His interviewees are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. Their top-secret decisions shaped the nation’s attempts to control terrorist sects and attacks, as seen in a nearly half-century parade of news clips showing violence and negotiation on both sides. Unlike the subjects of Law, who spoke a cool, often evasive legalese to avoid any awkward ethical issues, these men are at times frankly — and surprisingly — doubtful about the wisdom of some individual decisions, let alone about the seemingly ever-receding prospect of a diplomatic peace. They even advocate for a two-state solution, an idea the government they served no longer seems seriously interested in advancing. The Gatekeepers is an important document that offers recent history examined head-on by the hitherto generally close-mouthed people who were in a prime position to direct its course. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1pOjj49d9Y

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga The ever-intrepid Werner Herzog, with co-director Dmitry Vasyukov, pursues his fascination with extreme landscapes by chronicling a year deep within the Siberian Taiga. True to form, he doesn’t spend much time in the 300-inhabitant town nestled amid “endless wilderness,” accessible only by helicopter or boat (and only during the warmer seasons); instead, he seeks the most isolated environment possible, venturing into the frozen forest with fur trappers who augment their passed-down-over-generations job skills with the occasional modern assist (chainsaws and snowmobiles are key). Gorgeous cinematography and a curious, respectful tone elevate Happy People from mere ethnographic-film status, though that’s essentially what it is, as it records the men carving canoes, bear-proofing their cabins, interacting with their dogs, and generally being incredibly self-reliant amid some of the most rugged conditions imaginable. And since it’s Herzog, you know there’ll be a few gently bizarre moments, as when a politician’s summer campaign cruise brings a musical revue to town, or the director himself refers to “vodka — vicious as jet fuel” in his trademark droll voice over. (1:34) (Cheryl Eddy)

The World’s Best Artist©: Getting weird with Mitch O’Connell

Andrew Lam
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Can you guess which of the 290 pages of Mitch Connell‘s jampacked new, puffy-covered-like-cheap-tablecloth art anthology he is most proud of? It is not the vaguely seedy Hanna Barbera art, commissions all for Warner Brothers that were never utilized commercially. It’s not the illustrations for porno mags, the public works benches in Chicago, several Newsweek covers, untold numbers of event flyers, or his late-1980s pop art aerial views of reclining women hoisting hot dogs.

It’s the crazy shit he drew after he discovered his wife had been chronically cheating on him. You thought the rest of it was wacky!

But hoist a copy of Mitch O’Connell: The World’s Best Artist — you should, it’s awesome — and there’s no telling where you’ll get lost amid the artist’s decades of work. The book is a (puffy-covered) homage to an insane career of drawing and illustration, accomplished by a man (PS, not this guy) who has managed to raise a family on his skills while steadfastly pushing the bounds of good taste. The Chicago-based artist is coming to the Bay Area tonight (Thu/21, Berkeley) and tomorrow (Fri/22, San Francisco) for book tour dates. If you like insane, and talent, and professionally insane talent, you’ll most likely be there. 

We email-interviewed him, to talk.

SFBG: You did a few series of drawings for Warner Bros., how on earth did that come about? What was your highest hope for that collaboration?

 Mitch O’Connell: After doing this drawing thing forever, it would be hard NOT to accumulate a long list of clients. If I hadn’t, I’d be writing this from my cardboard box estate situated on the sidewalk of Michigan Avenue.

I’ve done little bits and pieces for Warner Brothers over the years, working with art directors who must have just seen my art here and there, but the “Hanna Barbera” series was the most fun and involving. I think I pushed a few of the paintings into PG-13 territory, but they encouraged me to be irreverent. Which might not have been a good thing. Once they got the finished art and started pondering how it might look on a kid’s lunchbox it seems they rethought their initial enthusiasm and put the job on the shelf. Where it’s still collecting dust. But I still like ’em!

Your next lunchbox

SFBG: You’re favorite and/or most disturbing tattoo you’ve done?

MO: ALL the tattoos I actually tattooed into peoples flesh were disturbing. Mostly because the clients kept on squirming, screaming, and bleeding. How the hell am I supposed to get any work done with those type of folks?! Actually, now I’m just sticking with simply designing the tattoos, and leaving the actual permanent engraving to the professional tattooists. It was much too nerve-wracking trying to get the art right the first time. As for my best ones, I’m working on my fourth set off flash [ink newbs: “flash” refers to the 11″x14″ sheets of sample ink that hang in tattoo parlors] now, and I like how it’s turning out the best of all. But I’m biased. Tattoo shops, start clearing some room on the walls!

SFBG: How long did your “covering up the naughty bits” gig for Fox Magazine last?

MO: The Fox mascot will hopefully be on the cover blocking out nipples and vaginas as long as there’s a Fox magazine. I did the painting a dozen years ago, it’s all up to them where/when/how often it appears. The more the merrier!

SFBG: Besides its puffy cover (please explain that feature) what are you most proud about with this book?

MO: The graphic design work of my pal Joseph Allen Black (yes, that would be www.josephallenblack.com). He took my rough placement of where I wanted everything and made it look stunning. Think of me as the guy who delivers the 4000-pound block of marble to Michelangelo. As for the puffy glittery cover, a) I loved the look, and b) wanted my book to stand out from the millions of others. At least I’ll have a better chance of folks actually picking it up out of curiosity. Then, considering what’s inside, the better chance of them putting it back.

I kid! They’ll LOVE it!

SFBG: Advice for aspiring freelance illustrators?

MO: Try to be more creative, distinctive, easy to work with, and talented than anyone else. Sadly, you’ll never be able to be the best, because I’ve already copyrighted it.

SFBG: We must know: What does makes you the World’s Best Artist?

MO: One reason was that no matter who reviews it, they have to use the title [of the book]. That way if the opinion is “Mitch O’Connell the World’s Best Artist sucks!” I can turn that into “‘The world’s best artist!,’ raves the New York Times!”

Also, if you keep on repeating something, at some point folks might start falling for it. Think “weapons of mass destruction,” “trickle down economics,” and “guaranteed to add inches to your penis!”. And I’m STILL waiting for my money back!

Mitch O’Connell: The World’s Best Artist book tour

Thu/21, 7-9pm, free

Pegasus Books

2349 Shattuck, Berk. 

www.pegasusbookstore.com

 

Fri/22, 7-9pm, free

Mission Comics and Art

3520 20th St., SF

www.missioncomicsandart.com

Pressure, two ways: Academy of Art and Project Runway at NY Fashion Week

Andrew Lam
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While hyperbolic coverage of what many news pundits called the ‘storm of the year’ raged across the Tri-State area, Manhattan’s would-be-mammoth blizzard arrived in the Big Apple as a pint-sized flurry that the Weather Channel dubbed Nemo. Nemo did little to deter the stilettoed, snow-shoeing pack of fashion-forward who started the morning of Feb. 8 filing into the tents at Lincoln Center for New York Fashion Week hullabaloo around 6 am.

This is the world of fashion, where a steel backbone is required. Plus, “this is New York, we have noreasters,” said a publicist with whom I scored post-show beers. “This is not a some kind of apocalypse blizzard. This is a snow storm. Put on your big girl boots and get over it.”

The action outside the white-tent runway shows of NYFW has become something of a spectacle recently thanks to the hyper-documentation of show attendees by bloggers, fashion journos, and Instagrammers. The evolution of the street scene has become almost as hyped as the collections themselves — outside-the-tent has converted into a place where writers, buyers, and industry professionals rub shoulders with blogosphere self-starters and editorial wanna-bes. Once you’ve crossed the threshold, however — moved past security and secured your seat — the herd thins out. Inside the shows, attention shifts from the amateur peacocking out front onto the belabored fashion lines themselves.

I attended two shows on February 8 — Project Runway‘s, and that of my Bay Area peers from the Academy of Art University. 

Project Runway: Lacking any true designer start that has emerged from this TV series, the jury is still out on whether reality show competition breeds success or mediocrity. Regardless of who will sink or swim in Project Runway’s 11th season, fierce competition certainly yielded entertainment at NYFW.

Usually by Fashion Week, the Project Runway panel — composed of designers Michael Kors and Zac Posen, fashion editor Nina Garcia, and supermodel host Heidi Klum — has winnowed competitors down to the final three. This season, NYFW crowds were treated to the work of seven. The normal Project protocol was thrown to the wind, each designer remaining anonymous, a move that forced them to compete solely on the strength of their garments, without the crowd bias based on on-air personality.

Fashion is an exhibitionist’s sport, but flashiness is not always effective when it comes to style. Some collections at the show came out swinging, trying too hard to define a point of view. Others showed up more quietly, using complicated shapes and silhouettes without appearing self-indulgent. Most resisted the urge to disguise imperfect results with fluff. Michelle Lesniak Franklin’s collection hit the highest note, with several structured pieces rendered in soft quilted fabric, giving way to an ethereal easiness. It appeared elfin or even Zelda-esque, but retained it’s modernity in the silhouette and layering. She took the road less traveled, mixing 1980s-inspired jacket shapes with earth tones, rendering their severe structures soft in wools and knits.

In short, the show was a mixed bag, and no one went home a true winner.

Academy of Art University:  Pressure is an odd catalyst. Some respond to it favorably, combining time and tension to yield extraordinary results. For others, pressure works against success, internal combustion evident in the resulting design.

Where Project Runway’s contestants are forced into a pressure cooker for 12 weeks to design, shop for, sew, and style their collections, San Francisco Academy of Art University students are incubated in a better-paced program. Here, years of planning and months of preparation produce the impressive work that the school has come to be known for. These student-designers are not working for cheap airtime or a bump in ratings for their network television handlers, but instead are putting in the hours of work for genuine academic recognition, fashion futures the old-fashioned way.

As an Academy fashion journalism student myself, I have witnessed the rigorous, extremely exhausting, but equally rewarding process firsthand. In last weeks leading up to the end of the semester, there is a pronounced hush in campus design studios, the only audible noises come in deep hums of the sewing machines, the incessant clicking of mechanical needles, and the hissing of industrial-grade irons. Each student, earbuds in, rips, measures, presses, tapes, pins, and repeats. One feels guilty even walking past such determination on the way to the bathrooms, so intense is the creative process.

This year, the collections from AAU’s multi-national student body were marked by a range of culture fusions. The show’s focal point was the visual negotiation between student, fabric, form, and heritage.

The runway sequence ebbed and flowed between moments of sparse minimalism, as in Yuming Weng ‘s simple monochromatics and plays on texture and structure, in Chenxi Li’s over-sized crushed velvet coats, rendered unique by combining elements of ‘50s Americana with traditional Chinese armor. Knitwear student Heather Scholl’s sexually charged, gender-explorative neon psychedelics stalked the lane.

Stand-out collections included show openers Janine M. Villa and Amanda Nervig’s marriage of tailored suiting and free-falling knitwear, which gave the rigid geometric patterns that adorned both fabrics fluidity, and embued the suiting with an astonishing sense of movement. Inspired by traditional Welsh blankets, Villa and Nervig’s work felt eclectic and free-spirited on the runway, the print-on-print combinations of chunky knits and embellished tailoring gave the collection an exciting and unexpected visual depth.

Heather McDonald took taut silhouettes to new heights with soaring shapes that defied gravity. These exaggerated forms were rendered in deeply-saturated angoras and wools, which brought the avant-garde down to earth. The final act was perhaps the most impressive. Qian Xie’s crystal-encrusted coat dresses and lattice-woven leather overcoats followed her apt theme “50 Shades of Grey”, and the results were lust-worthy.

 

The Performant: Love bites

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Celebrating romance with power ballads, Spandex leggings, fancy panties

Although there are about 364 days of the year when I can do without it—one day of the year seems custom-made to celebrate the ignoble rise of hair metal and its greatest contribution to the musical landscape — the power ballad. From “Love Bites” to “Is This Love,” “(I Can’t Live Without) Your Love and Affection,” to “The Power of Love” — all the saccharine sentiment of brooding, pouty millionaires in ripped jeans, tight leather, and all those glorious manes — power ballads can and probably should form the soundtrack to Saint Valentine’s Day now and forever. They so perfectly tap into both the cynicism of the single person facing “the dread VD” alone, as well as offering a soaring guitar-solo boost to the cuddly nostalgia of the happily coupled.

While innamorati for hundreds of years have used February 14 as a date to shower their beloved in flowers and cards, Jeff Ross and the SF IndieFest team have used it as another excuse to party, with an annual Power Ballad Sing-along at the Roxie Theatre. Just three years after its San Francisco debut (a similar party tears it up each year in Brooklyn), PBS pours its sugar and motors through the packed house, screening subtitled MTV videos turned up to 11 of all the best bands you’d love to forget to a theatre full of eager inebriates, cutting loose in a veritable bacchanalia of communal song.

If you’re lucky enough to squeeze into the perpetually sold-out event, you’ll be handed a lighter at the door, the essential prop of the power ballad lover and although no extra credit points are handed out for costumes, this being San Francisco, plenty of people do show up in them. Spandex leggings, ripped stonewash denim, studded wristbands, and plenty of Aquanet. One enterprising soul even comes dressed as Slash — right down to the guitar — a handy prop during the obligatory screening of Guns ‘N Roses’ nine-minute orchestral dirge “November Rain”.

Unlike a karaoke night full of awkward people who have to be cajoled into singing at all, let alone bellowing REO Speedwagon songs at full volume, a sing-along allows everyone to a) hide in the dark and b) therefore sing with the full confidence that almost everyone around them sounds even worse than they do, especially after the effects of cheap whiskey and rampant silliness settles in. It’s about as egalitarian as it gets, and even though this year’s blowout was marred by technical difficulties, my sorrow at missing out on the ultimate elation of singing “You Give Love a Bad Name” en masse couldn’t spoil the gleeful satisfaction of mangling an otherwise extensive playbook of all the worst bands with the best hair: Def Leppard, Cinderella, Whitesnake, Journey.

Meantime, just up the block at the Little Roxie, Liz Worthy’s window display aka “Heist Boutique” offers a poignant love letter to the ever-changing landscape of the Mission district via a few carefully-curated *objets d’art* used to represent a psychogeographical survey of “old-school” Mission businesses taken over by others in recent years. There’s the Self Edge VHS tape (asking price $714, in honor of the address), commemorating previous tenant and nostalgic favorite Leather Tongue video store (represented cheekily by a pair of red jeans), a pair of Modern Times sunglasses ($888) named for the bookstore that until recently inhabited the space where Fine Arts Optical now resides, a Wang Fat Fish Market bikini in turquoise and red ($2199) honoring the fish store of yore, (now Zoe Bikini). The display will be up until at least the middle of March, so swing by soon to relive your own fond memories of a Mission gone by. It may be too late to hang out at the Café Macondo or Jivano’s Cutlery, but, like the power ballads of the past, it’s still not too late to reminisce about them awhile.

On the Om Front: Bhakti by the Bay

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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On the Om Front: Bhakti by the Bay

Some people go out to bars and drink on a Friday. But, you want to know what I do for a good time? I chant. I chill in a room full of yogis and I sing mantras in Sanskrit and I get really happy.

If you’re in the yoga tribe, you might be nodding your head here. If you’re not, you may be thinking I sound like a New Age freak who’s sniffed a little too much patchouli. I understand. I’m the city girl who first resisted yoga 15 years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, saying, “Yeah, right, I’m going to just sit there and breathe.” Like yoga, chanting can be something of an acquired taste. But, also like yoga, it can be acquired very quickly. The biggest obstacle is just getting into the room for the first time to do it.

Chanting events are often called kirtan, which is call-and-response singing led by a kirtan artist (also known as a kirtan wallah). The chants are in Sanskrit, a language that has an innate meditative quality, and the repetition of the words put you into an ecstatic mindset. Though the songs are mostly honoring Hindu gods — like Rama, Lakshmi, and Shiva — you don’t have to be Hindu (or a theist at all) to sing them. I mean, anyone can find joy in offering a Christmas gift, or have a spiritual experience while eating a latke, right? The gods are thought by most to be symbolic, representing different aspects of life and humanity. Ultimately, kirtan is a practice of devotion or bhakti. It doesn’t matter what it is you are devoted to — God, trees, your pup or your honey — so long as love is at the center.

There are kirtan events frequently happening in the Bay (see the listings below), and there are touring kirtan bands constantly coming through here to share their music. One of my favorite kirtan musicians is David Newman (aka Durga Das), a Philly-born yogi who has the soul of an angel and the vibe of an indie rock singer-songwriter. He and his band (pictured above: Dave Watts, Clay Campbell, David Newman, and Philippo Franchini) played a small, intimate house concert this past weekend. It was my favorite kind of Friday night: music, tea, a dimly lit room, and a feeling like each person in the room was somehow destined to be there. But that’s often what it feels like at kirtan. It’s as if time somehow stops, and we’re all just there to linger in the pause.

Video of David Newman and band by Dazza Greenwood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNzopGaXyQA

Karen Macklin is a writer and yoga teacher in San Francisco — her On the Om Front column appears biweekly here on SFBG.com.

PLACES TO FIND KIRTAN IN THE BAY AREA

by Joanne Greenstein

Weekly:

Wednesday Night Kirtan around the fire pit
8pm–9pm, by donation
Yoga Society, 2872 Folsom, SF.
More info here

Sunday Night Kirtan
7pm, $10-$15
First Sunday: Stephanie Winn
Second Sunday: Kozmik Kirtan with Evelie Posch
Third Sunday: Art of Living Foundation
Last Sunday: Sean Feit
Yoga Tree Telegraph, 2807 Telegraph, Berk.
More info here

Monthly:

Open Secret Kirtan with Mirabai & Friends
3rd Thursday of the month
This month: Thursday, 2/21, 7:30–9pm, $10-$20
Open Secret, 923C Street, San Rafael
More info here

Kirtan: An Evening of Devotional Chanting & Music with Bhakti Heart
Last Saturday of the month with some exceptions
This month: Saturday, 2/23, 7:45–9:15pm, by donation
Mindful Body, 2876 California, SF.
More info here

Upcoming:

Community Kirtan with Andrew Thomas Fisher and Erin Lila Wilson
All are invited to lead a chant, join in the response or listen to the sweet sounds.  Feel free to bring instruments.
Sat, 2/23, 7–8:30pm, by donation
Integral Yoga Institute, 770 Dolores, SF.
More info here

Complete Immersion:

Bhakti Fest
A full-on kirtan festival in the Joshua Tree desert, the September Bhakti Fest (and its May sister festival, Shakti Fest) features around-the-clock chanting, premiere yoga classes and inspiring lectures.  All the top international kirtan artists play at these festivals.
Shakti Fest, May 17-19
Bhakti Fest, September 5-9
More info here

 

Sundance 2013: a local tragedy, an ongoing romance, and top picks

Sue Vaughan
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Sundance 2013: a local tragedy, an ongoing romance, and top picks

Ryan Coogler’s Bay Area story Fruitvale picked up the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize; it is, of course, based on the life and death of Oakland’s Oscar Grant, a young man gunned down by a BART cop on New Year’s Day 2009. I emerged from this important, wonderfully-made debut like everyone around me in the sold-out theater — in devastated tears.

Lead actor Michael B. Jordan is absolutely gripping as Oscar — no surprise for anyone who saw him as Wallace on the first season of HBO’s The Wire, or as one of Josh Trank’s accidental superheroes in 2012’s surprisingly gritty Chronicle. Coogler is a skilled director; the way he slowly builds toward his story’s inevitable conclusion is worthy of praise.

But as I thought about it in the days after the screening, I realized I had some reservations about Fruitvale‘s script, despite all of its good intentions. Its characters, including the BART policemen and Oscar, tend to be one-dimensional, which drains the story of nuance. Instead of guiding the viewer though the situation, it ends up telling us what its point of view is.

Rounding out this year’s Sundance picks is the latest film in Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke’s Before series, Before Midnight. I heard multiple critics complaining that they were annoyed with “yet another entry;” frankly, that made me wonder if they themselves are tired of their own lives. The random-yet-precise-ness that Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have allowed these two characters to explore over 18 years has to be experienced to be understood.

Before Sunrise (1995) is perhaps the series’ most relatable, since it embodies the excitement of traveling around in one’s carefree early 20s. Hawke and Delpy embodied their characters’ journey so well that I have actually plotted my own travels over the years with that film in mind.

Then came Before Sunset (2004), with the characters in their mid-30s, and their lives haven’t necessarily gone the way they’d hoped. If you revisit Sunset you may find how spot-on Linklater and company are in capturing the progressive pitfalls of the know-it-all generation.

Heartbreaking and somehow still romantic, neither film can prepare you for what Before Midnight has to offer. Now in their 40s, both Hawke and Delpy have said in interviews that they developed the characters of Jesse and Céline alongside their own hopes and dreams, and use these alter-egos to help understand their own limitations in life.

As for Linklater — who emerged on the Sundance scene with 1991’s Slacker, losing the Grand Jury prize to Todd Haynes’ Poison — even if you don’t have a mini-breakdown as each Before film ends (every time … sniff), there’s no denying his spontaneous yet meticulous Before series has produced magic over 18 years, and is on its way to being the narrative equivalent of Michael Apted’s monumental Up series.

TOP FILMS OF SUNDANCE (and SLAMDANCE) 2013

1. Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (UK/New Zealand)
2. Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (USA/Greece)
3. Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (USA)
4. Sebastián Silva’s Magic Magic (Chile)
5. Matt Johnson’s The Dirties (Canada)
6. Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Waaseypur (India)
7. Sebastián Silva’s Crystal Fairy (Peru/USA)
8. Nicole Teeny’s Bible Quiz (USA)
9. Alexandre Moors’ Blue Caprice (USA)
10. James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now (USA)
11. Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie & the Boxer (USA)
12. Sean Ellis’ Metro Manila (UK/Philippines)
13. Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love (UK)

Small space, big ideas: New City Company debuts

Sue Vaughan
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Small space, big ideas: New City Company debuts

Ten years ago, Kim Jiang-Dubaniewicz sat outside the Chinatown gates nursing an existential crisis; she had serious doubts about pursuing her longtime dream of a career in acting. Just then, she looked up and saw a familiar face drinking coffee next to her. It was Sean Penn, and she asked him for a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke. He told her to stick with acting.

Apparently one doesn’t ignore the advice of Sean Penn.

After several years of acting, the discovery of a store that sold 25-cent paperbacks (including the works of playwrights William Saroyan and Eugene O’Neill), and a move to San Francisco, Jiang-Dubaniewicz wanted to try something new. Last October, she embarked on her first production as a director. The resulting work, The Saroyan O’Neill Project, just finished a two–weekend run at the Postage Stamp Theater in the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.

In a room that hosts senior lunches by day in a building that has served as a community gathering place for a almost a century, her New City Company staged an energetic piece that worked best in the narrowly focused and understated moments when the play made no attempts to disguise the modesty of the production (the simplicity of the set in the second of two one-acts, a panel of bars in the center of the stage, was probably a reflection both of artistic choice and of the fact that practicing for free in the community room of a police station tends to impose some limits). Hello Out There, the starker of the plays with two characters continuing a mostly linear dialogue that builds into romance, came across beautifully. Gift Harris gave a tight and compelling performance as Photo-Finish, taking us with him through the varying shades of desperation, loneliness, and hope in the repeated cry, “Hello out there!” from which the play earns its name. 

The director cast the play well. In the script of Hello Out There, Saroyan describes Photo-Finish simply as “A Young Man,” a phrase that certainly contained an internal set of assumptions about race and ethnicity in 1941 when the play was written. Jiang-Dubaniewicz chose Harris, an African American man who has performed a number of roles on television and stage, because he just seemed to fit. Similarly, she decided to cast The Long Voyage Home, an Irish play from 1917, without regards to race or other qualities that typically account for typecasting in theater.

Discussing what she refers to as “inclusive casting,” the director cites her own experiences struggling with the scarcity of roles for Asian American actors. The same is true with other racial minorities, she says. Many of the African American actors in her cast have opted not to join Actor’s Equity because the number of available roles doesn’t justify the union fee. Not only does Jiang-Dubaniewicz view this as an injustice, but she also sees it as a failure to mirror the reality of the world around us, an aim of theater. “This is our city,” she says. “This is what we look like.”

The “we” implicates the audience, merging the play and the community. The direction of the show emphasized this. Little separated the two rows of guests and the stage, and while this was sometimes unsettling —  the larger cast and chaotic drunken merriment of A Long Voyage Home at times felt too big for the space and distanced the audience — it mostly added to the feeling of intimacy. In the quieter, more finely tuned Hello Out There, the characters spoke facing outward toward the audience, inviting us into the burgeoning love between outcasts.

And the audience participation did not end with the bows. At the end of the performance, Lewis Campbell, the indispensable executive producer, addressed the audience with a half-joking plea for help transforming the space back to its daytime function. In 30 minutes, it would become a senior lunch room once again. 

Will the senior lunch room ever transform back into The Postage Stamp Theater? Jiang-Dubaniewicz is considering a number of future projects for the New City Company, including more of the rich anti-hero tales of Saroyan and O’Neill. After the success of this first project, hopefully she won’t need a fortuitous Sean Penn run-in to make it happen.

Next chapter: Adobe Books hopes to transition into co-op

Andrew Lam
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Adobe Books lives on… we hope. The Mission’s beloved 23-year-old bookshop – which reported it would be going out of business multiple times last year – now has plans to stay open as a collective.

Adobe owner Andrew McKinley first reported his shop would be closing in spring of 2012, and then again late summer. His reason: an excessive rent increase for his storefront, in a building at 16th and Valencia Streets. Unless someone was planning to swoop down to be the store’s financial superhero, the proposed rent was too high and McKinley was sure he could no longer afford to keep the shop afloat.

In January, Adobe announced it would hold a final farewell celebration honoring what McKinley has done for the neighborhood. But despite this so-called goodbye ceremony, the shop did not close. McKinley’s superheroes have at long last arrived, in the form of a co-op board.

http://vimeo.com/59473131

Jeff Ray, a longtime member of the Rainbow Grocery collective, is a main player in Adobe’s new phase. Ray became a Mission resident 15 years ago. He remembers Adobe as one of the first neighborhood spots he connected with. “They call it the living room of the Mission and it was kind of my living room for awhile,” he says. “I went to a lot of events and met a lot of people there.” 

Ray and fellow Adobe collective member Kyle Knobel say the first thing they are working out is a location. They are in the process of negotiating the costly rent that was McKinley’s stumbling block, but are also considering relocating to different space nearby if necessary.

The nine-or-so core members – who meet at Adobe on a weekly basis – are also sorting out what type of co-op suits them best. Ray mentions following the business model of Chicago–based co-op, Seminary Bookstore – who list Michelle and Barack Obama as members. With over 50,000 members, anyone can buy in when they purchase three $10 shares. Seminary Bookstore has shareholders all across the globe, a worldwide support system Ray would love for Adobe. 

Ray and Knobel say they envision incorporating additional elements to their new shop’s bookshelves to keep it profitable. The recession-friendly phrase “pop-up” is thrown around quite a bit. Ray says they plan to set up a small pop-up space with Inner Richmond retail shop and art gallery Park Life and has an idea for transforming bookcases into miniature pop-ups for local music labels and magazine companies, possibly selling original artwork, maybe even setting up an art subscription for interested customers. All of this will not be possible without a little help, which is why they have recently launched a fundraising IndieGoGo campaign.

Will the shop’s current beloved owner Andrew McKinley be sticking around? Ray says, “we wanted to make sure he was part [of the switch]. He has been present at every meeting and is hopefully going to stay on.”

On paper, these plans sound ideal – a dying bookshop rising from the ashes in a familiar, yet updated form. It will likely be a long process before the new collectively-run shop becomes a reality. But if we’ve learned anything about the seemingly invincible Adobe Books, it’s that it will manage to stick around, somehow.

 

SFMOMA reveals new look, it is sexy

Andrew Lam
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We were a bag of mixed artfan emotions when SFMOMA sent us a peek at what the museum will look like in early 2016, when the renovations that will shutter its doors in June are complete. The bad: our city’s preeminent modern art museum will be sorely missed — after all, who else would have let us bring Boychild, Lil Miss Hot Mess, and Lady Bear to run amok in the upstairs cafe on a Thursday night? (Memories.) But, the good: there is a lot of good. Read on for the highlights of what we can expect from the museum’s new incarnation, and what’s going to be happening while we wait.

– In the new building, designed by Oslo-NYC firm Snøhetta, gallery capacity expanded by 130,000 square feet. 

– That number up there includes a 15,000 ground floor that won’t have to pay to access, but which is nonetheless packed with exhibitions. For when the admisison price just isn’t stoking your creative fires.

– SF’s largest public native plant vertical garden, located on a brand-new seventh-floor outdoor terrace. The perfect place for checking out the expressive skyline that exists in those parts of downtown — two floors higher than the sculpture garden, two floors of view, baby. 

– A new all-white performance space that’ll be the spot for dance, sound, etc. in addition to the Phyllis Wattis Theater, which is also getting a facelift.

– More space designated for education — that means the amount of schoolchildren benefiting from programming will go up to 55,000 from 18,000. 

– “SFMOMA is more than just a building,” said SFMOMA director Neal Benezra in the press release. “We’re a set of intersecting cultural communities.” That’s good for us — it means the museum’s collections won’t be moldering in a basement somewhere (entirely) during the two-and-a-half years of renovations. First up: “100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art,” a multi-denominational show that opens June 27 that examines art inspired by faith, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. 2014 offerings will include a multimedia meditation on intimacy during apartheid in South Africa at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a look at what “gorgeous” means by divergent art pairings at the Asian Art Museum.

– Other things to look forward to include a Chrissy Field site-specific installation of Mark di Suvero sculptures, the largest exhibition of the work of that artist, who moved to SF from Shanghai and was constantly inspired by the same Golden Gate Bridge that’ll look over the exhibition, which’ll set up shop in June through May 2014. That’s the first of many SFMOMA outdoor exhibitions that’ll take place in Los Altos and elsewhere.

More details on the renovations available here and here

The Performant: Playing in the Sandbox

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Performant: Playing in the Sandbox

SF Playhouse’s Sandbox Series puts play back into playwriting

It’s getting harder each year to determine when exactly the “off-season” is in terms of things to do in the City, considering that this past, random weekend in February alone saw collisions of three major festivals — SF Sketchfest, SF Indie Fest, and SF Beer Week — on top of all the usual openings and closings and goings on. In fact, it’s been so hectic (albeit muy divertido) that the Performant is going to break protocol and look ahead to an event lingering just on the horizon, to ensure it doesn’t get lost in the onslaught of events to come.

Founded in 2010, SF Playhouse’s Sandbox Series is a play series (beginning Feb. 27) that inhabits a region somewhere between staged reading and full production — offering new plays a full run and technical support, without breaking the bank on design and promotion.

Past playwrights have included William Bivins (“The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry”), Daniel Heath (“Seven Days”), and Kenn Rabin (“Reunion”). This year, the ladies will take centerstage with Inevitable, penned by SF Playhouse’s own Literary Manager, Jordan Puckett, and the next play in the series a commissioned piece from Lauren Gunderson on the life of artist Rudolf Bauer.

I caught up with SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English and artistic associate Lauren English to get the scoop on playing in the “Sandbox.”

SFBG When you founded the Sandbox Series in 2010 did you anticipate it having this kind of staying power?

SF Playhouse (Initially) we were worried we were taking on too much by starting an alternate season of World Premieres, but this is our fourth year and the funding has miraculously kept up with our needs.

SFBG What’s the selection process for plays like?

SFP We started by soliciting scripts from the outside and three of our Sandbox plays were commissions of Playground—a new play incubator—that provided part of their funding. Now we are trying to feed our own commissions into the Sandbox, while still accepting scripts from outside SF Playhouse

SFBG It appears that these productions straddle a line between staged reading and full production, care to break down the dynamic a bit.

SFP The gulf between readings and full productions is an area where not many theatres dare to tread, but one where there is a great need. Sandbox offers a unique experience for both the playwright and the audience. It’s not a full production nor is it a staged reading, it’s in that gorgeous “in-between” phase of play development that is not often seen by the public. We look to create simple design gestures to support the story, while keeping the focus on the story itself. We try to stick with scripts that have five or less actors and fairly simple technical demands.

SFBG Have any of these plays gone on to fully staged productions at SF Playhouse or elsewhere? What is the future for a Sandbox series play?

SFP Not yet, but we are still working on some of them and our aim is to have Sandbox plays track to the mainstage or productions at other theatres. We always meet with the playwrights after run closes to do a post mortem and make recommendations.

SFBG Anything you’d like to add?

SFP If theater is to continue to be a part of our culture and thrive into the future, it is essential to develop new voices. Playwrights are the prophets of our culture, with sensitive antennae poised to see, hear, and feel the essentials of being alive in our time and to translate those insights into stories that give us much needed perspective on our lives. We need them and our Sandbox program is our commitment to nurture these voices.

SF Playhouse Sandbox Series
previews begin Feb 27, $20
Unscripted Theatre
533 Sutter, SF
(415) 677-9596
www.sfplayhouse.org

Black Choreographers Festival takes flight

Andrew Lam
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This weekend, go watch some dance. Sam Love and I stopped by Dance Mission this week to check out a final rehearsal of a piece choreographed by Gregory Dawson and left feeling elated. Dawson has gathered a group of ridiculously limber and supremely talented dancers for refined, minimalist, yet achingly beautiful pieces that pulse with a strong, affirming spirit. His company is just one of several featured at the Black Choreographers Festival, a celebration of African American dance, art and culture. The piece we saw clearly stemmed from classical ballet roots, but also found inspiration in contemporary dance, creating a performance that displayed awe-inspiring athleticism (those extensions!) as well as thought-provoking drama, tension, and story. Go get your tickets already. It will be fabulous!

Black Choreographers Festival

Fri/15-Sun/17 and Feb. 22-24, various times, $15

Dance Mission Theater 

3316 24th St., SF 

www.bcfhereandnow.com

Sundance 2013: love and confusion

Sue Vaughan
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Sundance 2013: love and confusion

I only got to experience half of this year’s US Dramatic Competition films (unfortunately, missing David Lowery’s buzzed-about Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which shared the Best Cinematography Award with Andrew Dosunmu’s breathtaking Mother of George).

Still, among the films I saw, I was pleasantly surprised by James Ponsoldt’s brutally poignant coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now. With a straight-ahead script that avoids clichés, the film benefits greatly from a pair of standout performances by its young stars. Miles Teller, from John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole (2010) and Craig Brewer’s underrated remake of Footloose (2011), perfectly embodies a high-school asshole, while Shailene Woodley (so good in Alexander Payne’s 2011 The Descendants) is spot-on as the class loner.

The Spectacular Now offers a reminder that high school sucks just as much as it did when you were a teenager. Along with last year’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it’s John Hughes, 21st-century style.

Elsewhere, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (following his much-praised, much-debated 2004 Primer) put me into an Inception-like trance, to the point of me probably needing to see it again before I can speak logically about it. Jill Soloway’s Afternoon Delight won the Best Directing award and featured noteworthy performances by Kathryn Hahn and Juno Temple, but its bafflingly regressive conclusion has left me wondering if a studio forced the director to change it at the last minute. (That said, I enjoyed it immensely.)

Lynn Shelton’s latest entry Touchy Feely was only superficially engaging; it seemed to lack the bold direction and poignancy of Humpday (2009) and Your Sister’s Sister (2011). Jordon Vogt-Roberts’ Toy’s House sent the audience into hysterical laughter (supposedly at every screening) due to a memorable performance by Disney Channel star Moises Arias as the creepy third wheel in what’s more or less a suburban Lord of the Flies. (Fans of NBC’s Parks and Rec won’t want to miss Nick Offerman in this, either.) Could Toy’s House be this year’s Little Miss Sunshine?

From the counter: Shots from Reformation Foods’ pop-up dinner

Andrew Lam
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“This should be put in a frame and hung on the wall,” said our table mate Jo. The food really did look like pieces of fine art. Chef Keven Wilson has an eye for color. He said he even has a painting in his home that he made using spoons as the brushes. A true chef-artist! We were all gathered around a kitchen counter in a large Victorian in the Mission for a Sunday evening five-course tasting menu that used local, fresh ingredients.

Each course brought together a balance of wonderful textures (think crunchy hazelnut and soft pork belly, ending with smooth chocolate milk) and a wild variety of flavors (horseradish, sea urchin, even squab). Although there were other tables around the building, our kitchen counter was the best spot in house because that’s where all the action was happening. We had great foodie discussions with our two counter friends Jo and Colin, and as soon as a new dish arrived, we all whipped out our cameras to take a snapshot of the edible masterpiece placed before us. Portions were generous and very filling and chef Keven even wrapped up some of our leftovers so we could take them home. A few pieces of succulent squab came home wrapped in a tinfoil squab. Pretty adorable.

Be sure to check out more fun pop-up events with the Naked Kitchen in the coming months – they are bound to be scrumptious gatherings!

 

 

Technical difficulties mar main Burning Man ticket sale

Sasha Cuttler
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So much for the lack of drama around ticket sales for Burning Man this year. Today at noon was when 40,000 tickets went on sale to the general public, and while some burners got their tickets in less than an hour, others endured a frustrating wait of several hours and then found themselves unexpectedly kicked out of line.

There was lots of online grumbling about the bad old days when demand for tickets would often crash the servers and griping about why the generally tech-savvy Black Rock City LLC and their inTicketing partners seem to have such a hard time building a more robust system.

“I think there have been some technical difficulties, but we’ve seen worse,” BRC board member Marian Goodell told the Guardian. She said high demand pushed the system toward a crash, so they slowed the queue and added more servers. “The queue should start moving pretty soon,” she said at 4:30pm.

With people being denied tickets, the rumor circulated online around mid-afternoon that the event had already sold out, as it has each of the last two years, which BRC employees denied. [UPDATE: Tickets sold out that evening, a couple hours after this post wentup.] Some of those who got kicked off received this perplexing message: “At this time Burning Man Tickets does not have any tickets available for purchase for this event. Note: This does not mean this event is sold out. Contact the venue to purchase tickets.”

But Goodell said that as of now, there are still tickets available and she wouldn’t offer a prediction about whether they will sell out today. For those who don’t get tickets now and still want to go, BRC has an online ticket exchange started Feb. 28 and it will make at least another 1,000 tickets available shortly before the late-August event.

Sundance and Slamdance 2013: powerful docs

Sue Vaughan
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Sundance and Slamdance 2013: powerful docs

Scroll on up Pixel Vision for Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ previous Utah festival reports.

In recent years, Sundance has become well-known for its strong documentary offerings — to the point of overshadowing its dramatic films. And with good reason, when docs like Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s After Tiller are among the selections.

The film follows the four remaining doctors in the United States who continue to perform third-trimester abortions; it’s a decidedly direct character study that uncovers the complex and difficult choices these physicians go through on a daily basis. (Not to mention the element of danger they face, as the title’s reference to the murder of Dr. George Tiller suggests. With that in mind, there was a protective police presence at all of After Tiller’s Sundance screenings.) The doc’s impact didn’t end when the lights came up; for days after the screening, I found myself drawn into fascinating conversations with folks who were eager to discuss their feelings about the film and the issues it explores.

Roger Ross Williams’s God Loves Uganda has the same type of power to ignite discussion. It follows the misguided and even diabolical misrepresentation of homosexuality that’s been perpetuated by American missionaries in Uganda — an Evangelical Christian crusade that has encouraged the African country to impose the death penalty on gay people. An indictment of how religion can lead to hate crimes, God Loves Uganda uncomfortably uncovers a modern-day witch hunt that’s brought tragic results.

On a happier note, Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer shares the 40-year love story between Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, married artists who have been through everything together and yet still keep their passion alive. The look and feel of this film is just as artistic as the subjects themselves (which is saying a lot — I was lucky enough to see their work first hand at the J GO Gallery in Park City). Don’t miss this feel-good film — winner of the US Documentary Directing Award — when it’s released by Radius/TWC later this year. The closing credits alone are one of the most exhilarating moments of 2013!

Down the road at Slamdance, Nicole Teeny’s sensitive Bible Quiz, which won the Grand Jury Sparky Award for Feature Documentary, stuck with me like no other film this year. It’s a quiet, moving look at a Tacoma, Wash. team of teens deeply involved in the titular competition, which involves memorizing and reciting verses and even entire books of the Bible.

But while the film achieves the same kind of drama that earned Jeffrey Blitz an Oscar nod for his spelling-bee tale Spellbound (2002), director Teeny has much more up her sleeve here. The real subject of the film is 17-year-old Mikayla, whose heartbreaking honesty is a reminder that every new generation has to learn things the hard way to survive high school and beyond. Programming Bible Quiz was a major coup for Slamdance — it was the best documentary at the fest and topped any at Sundance, too. It has the potential to be a film that people will remember for years to come.

Silents are golden

Sue Vaughan
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Silents are golden

The 2013 San Francisco Silent Film Festival isn’t until July, but the fest’s Silent Winter offshoot offers a day packed full of classic delights to tide over its legions of fans until summer. Sat/16, Castro Theatre plays host to four features and one shorts program, all of which boast live musical accompaniment.

Silent Winter’s earliest (1916) and latest films (1927) are both buoyed by charismatic leading ladies: Marguerite Clark, in J. Searle Dawley’s Snow White, and Mary Pickford in Sam Taylor’s My Best Girl. Clark, who found early fame as a Broadway star, was already in her 30s by the time film acting became a viable career option. No matter — she’s believably girlish as the princess with “skin white as snow,” hated by her jealous stepmother, whose own beauty comes courtesy of witchcraft. (Dig the proto-Witchiepoo who helps the conniving queen in her various evil schemes, and her giant kitty helper, too.) A teenage Walt Disney saw the film in 1917 and made animation history with the same story 20 years later — though his version of the fairy-tale heroine lacks Clark’s easy effervescence.

Pickford’s own joie de vivre has been exhaustively documented, but she’s particularly charming in My Best Girl, a later-career film that marked her final silent film, as well as her only onscreen pairing with the man who’d become her third husband, Buddy Rogers (in a marriage that would last from 1937 until her death in 1979). Watching My Best Girl is an excellent reminder that the romantic comedy structure still used with great frequency today — boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back just in time for a happy ending — is very much an old-school invention. Here, Pickford plays sassy shopgirl Maggie, who has no idea her cute new co-worker, Joe (Rogers), is actually the store owner’s son pulling an Undercover Boss.

Though My Best Girl is ostensibly a comedy, Pickford’s standout scenes are the film’s most melodramatic: first, when she conveys equal parts mortification and heartbreak when she realizes who her new crush really is, and later, when she pretends to be a gold-digging jazz baby to chase him away, believing he’s too good for her. Sob. Suck it, Reese, Julia, and whoever else — Mary (who was actually Canadian) is America’s sweetheart forever.

Buster Keaton, another actor (and director) much-beloved by silent film fans, is spotlighted in “Think Slow, Act Fast,” a program of three early shorts. The Scarecrow (1920), about a pair of farm hands battling over the farmer’s comely daughter, features a winning turn by one of Hollywood’s first canine stars — Luke, a pit bull owned by Keaton mentor Fatty Arbuckle. One Week (1920) follows a hapless newlywed couple as they attempt to assemble their pre-fab house; it’s a set-up that offers ample opportunity to showcase Keaton’s physical-comedy gifts. Third entry The Play House (1921) opens with what was a dazzling special-effects achivement at the time, as multiple Keatons play all of the parts in a minstrel show (yes, there’s blackface). After this Keaton-opoly is revealed to be a backstage dream, the rest of the short follows the comedian as he woos a twin he can’t quite tell apart from her sister — pausing here and there to crash different shows, including one where he impersonates a monkey.

Rounding out Silent Winter are a freshly restored Douglas Fairbanks classic, Raoul Walsh’s high-flying fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924); and Nosferatu (1922) director F.W. Murnau’s take on Faust (1926), his final German film.<0x00A0><cs:5>2<cs:>

SILENT WINTER
Sat/16, $5–$15
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
www.silentfilm.org

SFAI’s Gutai exhibit opens with a dirty good time

Sue Vaughan
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SFAI’s Gutai exhibit opens with a dirty good time

The crowd cheers as a man decked out in stars and stripes makes his way through a packed staircase. He pauses at the landing and raises his arms over head in a salute of glory to the whooping and clapping masses below him.

“San Francisco, we give you the death match of the century,” a voice booms from speakers.

The costumed figure presses through to the opening in the center of the room and circles the white platform where his foe awaits. He slaps the hands of a few children sitting in front before disrobing until he wears only blue knee-length tights and a bushy brown beard. He enters the square and stands above his opponent.

The announcer continues: “Mud versus the man himself, Jeremiah Jenkins.” The man dives into a brown mass that resembles a giant pile of feces.

This was the scene at the San Francisco Institute of Art last Friday, where the Gutai Historical Survey and Contemporary Response exhibition opened with a bang — or rather with the revving of the dirt bike that Guy Overfelt blasted through four paper screens later in the evening. The event, which included the two theatrical pieces by local artists Jenkins and Overfelt, brought the Japanese avant-garde movement to life by recreating the sense of revelation upon which Gutai formed in 1954.
Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of the post-war movement, challenged his followers to “do something no one’s ever done before.” For the members in the Gutai Art Association, originality emerged in the form of a dress comprised of electric lights, earth-toned compositions created by scraping fingernails across the surface of paint, and large-scale records of feet spreading thick paint around canvas. Gutai means “concrete,” or “embodiment,” and the artists physically (and sometimes literally) threw themselves into their work. A range of the resulting pieces hung on walls at SFAI.

Before their temporary plastic coverings heralded flying mud, though, the paintings spoke for themselves; even without the context of their unique creative process, the works convey a sense of kinetic vitality. In one of the most compelling pieces, a 1960 oil painting by Kazuo Shiraga, Chisonsei Isshika, a red mass of paint on the right meets blue-black on the left and both spread outward over a white base in three-dimensional sweeps and splatters that testify to the physical gestures of their creation.

Though some of the works reflect the more whimsical side of the quest for novelty (the side that the performance pieces expanded on to a comic degree), Shiraga’s painting captures something coarser, more intense. The physicality of the paint seemed to manifest raw expression.

Gutai, however, is not the only artistic movement to employ a doctrine of bodily expression. Both the principles and the pieces they produced recall Action Painting of Abstract Expressionism, practiced by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The connection has a historical basis. Though Gutai did not intersect with the New York-based movement, Gutai aligned itself with Abstract Expressionism’s European counterpart, Tachisme, after a French critic visited the Japanese school.

The American school’s rejection of Tachisme partially accounts for why Gutai has largely remained under the radar. Upstairs in the gallery, a display of Gutai books and posters of past exhibitions — taking place in Japan only — demonstrate the lack of awareness in the United States. But the exhibition also shows a shift. Shozo Shimamoto, the Gutai artist who used his bald head as a canvas, died in January, and in order to pay tribute to the man and his “mail art” associations, curator John Held, Jr. sent out a call for mail responses. The many captivating pieces of DIY art Held received show both Shimamoto’s legacy and the expanding legacy of Gutai in America. Last year, an exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art featured Gutai, and a Gutai retrospective opens this week at the Guggenheim in New York.

(SFAI’s “Experimental Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Winter Burning Sun,” whose name borrows from a 1955 Gutai Art Association exhibition, is the only one to include a mud pit and a dirt bike.)

For all of the spectators who experienced the mud pit and dirt bike, who not only saw art but also witnessed Overfelt crash through the panels and Jenkins fight vigorously against a pile of mud, Gutai is more than static paint and the facts on the labels beside the pieces. It is an art of playfulness, of energy, and of innovation. Undertaking the directive to do something that’s never been done before is a greater challenge 41 years after its initial presentation, but by experimenting in the space between parody and earnestness, the exhibition succeeded.

The farcical wrestling match between man and mud yielded more than absurd and gimmicky entertainment. After the artist left through a side door (it was unclear whether in triumph or defeat), several people approached the stage and began photographing the sludge that Jenkins had moved with his body. It had scattered around the square platform, piling up in some places and spreading thinly in others. Then the gallery lights came on and the plastic came off the paintings, revealing that the mud on the stage mirrored the large all-red Shiraga with roughly textured paint behind it. All of a sudden, the mud became more of a work of art and the art became more of a physical work. Only after the comedic performance could we see that we had witnessed an act of creation. A WWE-style act of creation.

“Experimental Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Mid-Winter Burning Sun: Gutai Historical Survey and Contemporary Response”

Through March 30

San Francisco Art Institute

800 Chestnut, SF

www.sfai.edu

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