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The Performant: Surrealistic mellow

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Doing the Lobster Quadrille at The Mad Hatter’s Ball

A singular bit of whimsy, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland may be one of the only childhood fantasias to be embraced equally by linguists, logicians, and users of psychedelic drugs. The setting of an unlikely hero’s quest undertaken by a pedantically logic-bound child, Wonderland’s curiously ordered chaos seems designed specifically to undermine any rote adherence to convention, even to those of storytelling.

In fact, one of the defining qualities of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that exactly none of the characters, including the protagonist, are particularly sympathetic, and Wonderland itself, unlike Oz, say, doesn’t have a lot to recommend it as a vacation spot save the prevalence of the aforementioned psychedelics. But as a cultural touchstone, Wonderland has proven to have some serious staying power, and continues to baffle and inspire children and adults who remember what it is to be a child, alike.


At Saturday’s Mad Hatter’s Ball—an offshoot of the Bay Area’s annual homage to Lewis Carroll and his strange creations, The Cheshire Rock Opera—a colorful array of musicians and masqueraders sauntered around the perimeter of Oakland’s 410 Ballroom, a weird little Wonderland all its own, tucked innocuously just off of Broadway. Including Red Queens, White Rabbits, Black Cards, and almost every color and character in between, their raucous cacophony appeared slightly muted, as if tinged with aural sepia. In fact, everything about the event emerged gently sepia-toned, serving as it did as a precursor to Sunday’s Steamstock festival, billed as a steampunk’d “Woodstock from an alternate past,” and featuring many of the bands playing the Ball.

The brainchild of Sean Lee aka One Man Banjo, the Ball opened with a brief set by the Mummy Dummies, one of Lee’s many side projects, setting the alt-Americana tone for the evening which included bursts of swamp rock (The Slow Poisoner), puckish honky-tonk piano-playing (Victoria Victrola), gypsy caravan cabaret (Vagabondage) and a healthy dose of ukulele-infused skiffle (5 Cent Coffee). In between guests, the anchoring group, Lee’s “Hatter’s Band” played selections of Carroll’s own nonsensical lyrics, including the aforementioned lobster quadrille and the inevitable sing-along “Soup of the Evening,” a Mock Turtle original set to an enticingly jaunty tune, inspiring even the timid to at least sway in time. Unlike the Cheshire Rock Opera, no jousting Jabberwocks appeared on the scene to do fearsome battle, but as herald to January’s event, the ball whetted our appetites for wonder, with a tantalizing amuse-bouche of crustacean ballet, (Mock) turtle soup, and jug (band) wine.

Appetite: What’s new at Anchor? A lot.

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Appetite: What’s new at Anchor? A lot.

Inside scoop from Anchor Distilling: A new clear hops spirit, line of Japanese whiskies, rooftop bar, world’s most extensive cocktail book library, and more

Anchor Distilling is a local treasure. Fritz Maytag pioneered craft beer and craft spirits in America long before most were even thinking about it. Tracing back Fritz’ brewing days to the 1960s puts San Francisco squarely on the map as a leader and trendsetter in beer, while in spirits Fritz — alongside Jorg Rupf at St. George, and Hubert Germain-Robin of Germain-Robin — were all pioneering American craft spirits here in Northern California decades before the current renaissance.

Though I was sad to see Fritz retire and sell Anchor in 2010, I’ve been encouraged to witness the care invested by the new owners. Conversing with Anchor President David King is a pleasure. He came from London and Berry Bros. & Rudd (BBR), an iconic name in spirits and wine, now partnered with Anchor Distilling, with a historic shop in London’s posh St. James’s district (which I visited last year in my London explorations). King oversees all imports in their growing portfolio and Anchor’s spirits catalogue, maintaining a humble yet visionary mindset behind the company’s growth.

In keeping with Anchor and Fritz’s legacy, he’s been working to create a spirit different from any before it.

It will be the first Anchor spirit to be releases since Genevieve years back: a hops-based spirit, appropriately named HopHead. Though King and Anchor brewmaster (of 41 years) Mark Carpenter long ago passed the conceptual stages, there’s still the waiting game of TTB approvals, including classification of the spirit. As King explains to me, HopHead is made in Anchor’s alembic still used to craft their whiskies, but it is produced like a gin, though made solely with hops in neutral grain spirit vs. gin botanicals.

Because it defies typical classification, it may even end up being categorized as vodka, which would be a mental hurdle for countless of us cocktail geeks and industry folk who have helped spur on the cocktail renaissance of the past decade plus. But HopHead is not flavored vodka. I’ve tasted numerous hoppy whiskies (a shining example being Charbay’s R5 made from Bear Republic Beer), but this is quite different. As King expressed, the goal is to have the taste of fresh hops without the bitter finish. It’s unexpectedly clean, smooth, vibrantly hoppy but with no lingering bitterness. Granted, IPA lovers and hops fanatics crave the bitter, but I find this a fascinating expression of hops, illuminated from other angles when chilled – unique cocktail creations are waiting to be made from this one. The HopHead label is designed by the same Sausalito houseboat artist who has designed Anchor’s Christmas beer labels for years.

Months back I visited Anchor’s new rooftop bar, a window-heavy respite with chic yellow couch, wood bar, and striking views of downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. They are close to finishing a deck which will function as a beer garden of sorts, surrounded by herbs and hops. They’ve recently acquired bartending legend Brian Rea‘s cocktail library, considered to be the most extensive in the world. King says they plan to have a library room on the top floor of Anchor near the bar where industry folk can peruse vintage books (cozy on the couch with those views) and try them out at the bar with the extensive collection of Anchor spirits and imports. It will be one-of-a-kind as an industry space.

On top of this, Anchor Distilling continues to sell a number of exciting imports in an ever-growing catalogue, like Glenrothes’ brand new release of the first in a line of Extraordinary Casks from the 1960s and ’70’s, and elegant, refined Hine Cognac, the standout being Hine Antique XO poured at this year’s WhiskyFest. Especially exciting is the import of Nikka whiskies from Japan. We have had to stick to Nikka when overseas and in general, there’s not close to enough Japanese whiskies being imported into the US compared to what is available in Japan. King says he’s hoping in to soon have five or six Japanese whiskies from the Nikka portfolio here in the States, including Yoichi and Taketsuru. We sipped the latter while I learned of the compelling story of its namesake, Masataka Taketsuru. He worked in various distilleries in Scotland, married a Scottish woman, Rita, eventually returning to Japan and founding Nikka as a company (initially named Dai Nippon Kaju K.K.)

We ended our chat with a pour of 16 year Hotaling’s single malt whiskey, Anchor’s crowning beauty (and rarity – this release at only 274 bottles), which I have been privileged to taste a few times. With the view of San Francisco before us, it seems our city’s entrepreneurial, visionary spirit continues to inform Anchor’s direction, just as it has with Fritz Maytag since the 1960’s.

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Best bets for indie comic inspiration at APE

Andrew Lam
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We cried wet, hot, nerdy tears when Wonder Con moved south to Anaheim this year — but then wiped them away with the hem of our Bat Girl and Wonder Woman-printed flouncy skirt when we remembered that the Alternative Press Expo (APE) was, as ever, on its way to the Concourse Exhibition Center.

The alt-comic gathering descends with a swish of self-published zinery Sat/13 and Sun/14, and with it, passels of adorable, print-oriented babes who read. (We hear our favorite drag illustrator, the UK’s Rosa Middleton, is even around on the town, check her, and her glitterized versions of reality out.) With no furthur ado, here is a list of highlights to look out for among the speakers and on the expo floor. 

Queer cartoonist panel

One of our favorite parts of APE — besides the chance to hobnob with the best and brightest DIY, indie comic book fans — is the surplus of panels the explore the expansion of the comic universe. This year, with the closet shattering of the Green Lantern fresh in our minds, we’re excited to see what this starry panel of queer comic artists have to share. Have a seat and listen to moderator Justin Hall (of Glamazonia fame), Tara Madison Avery, Tony Breed, Dylan Edwards, Steve MacIsaac, and Leia Weathington reflect on four decades of out and proud panels.

Sat/13, 2:45pm

Watercoloring comics demo

Feel free to learn more than just watercolor techniques from San Francisco artiste Jamaica Dyer. In 2008, Weird Fishes, her graphic novel about bunny boys and a young woman who sees ducks who talk became a Internet hit, garnering a deal with a publishing house that helped give it a life outside of computer screens (that means they printed it.) Today, she’ll be showing off her brush skills, surely an inspiration to draw things just the way you like them.

Sat/13, 3pm

Comic Creator Connection

This is where the magic happens. Do you have a fab idea for a magic carpet tale through the ruined car factories of Detroit? Perhaps a super-sleuth sloth who looks for danger in the depths of the rainforest? Maybe you just want to draw the crap out of one of the above? APE provides this space specifically so that indie comic makers can find each other, in the hopes of spawning future collabs and extending the genre into the future. RSVP to assure yourself of a spot.

Sat/13, 4-6pm; Sun/14, 3-5pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLZDIUt6-d4

The Hernandez brothers

Few siblings have created a world as vast, complex, and racy as Jaime, Gilbert, and Mario Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame. The three’s graphic novel saga of Latino punks, queers, and troubled souls will discuss what it’s like to play God with your two brothers, and, probably, what it takes to work together for over 30 years without brandishing a sharp Bic at the others’ throats.

Sat/13, 5:45

“Bay Area Comics: Past, Present, and Future”

But enough about you, let’s talk about us. At this gathering of Bay comic greats (Thien Pham, illustrator of Sumo, Gene Luen Yang’s fab Level Up, and other amazing odes to the Asian American experience; Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art Museum; and Jason Shiga, who penned Empire State, an epic ode to cross-country geekery), our terrific comic legacy will be discussed — and harebrained ideas put forth about where exactly we are headed in the new millenium.

Sun/14, 4:45pm

Alternative Press Expo

Sat/13, 11am-7pm; Sun/14, 11am-6pm, $10 one day pass/$15 two day pass

Concourse Exhibition Center

635 Eighth St., SF

www.comic-con.org/ape

Zombie dogs! Neeson! Southern-fried jail tales! And more, in this week’s new movies

Sue Vaughan
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It’s finally Halloweentime! (Though Walgreens would have you believe that season started in August.) Hollywood prepares appropriately with a few spookier picks (for kids, Frankenweenie, reviewed below; for older crowds, found-footage anthology V/H/S, discussed in my interview with some of the filmmakers here.) For good measure, you can check out my interview with Dee Wallace, star of some horror classics but making the press rounds for the 30th anniversary Blu-ray release of E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Of local interest, the Mill Valley Film Festival is up and running, with some stellar picks noted here (HOLY MOTORS!) and an interview with indie pioneer Allison Anders, who debuts her new Strutter at the fest, here.

And, as always, there’s more. Read on for takes on films like The Paperboy and Taken 2, which each define “trashy entertainment” in their own special ways.

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

Bitter Seeds Just what we all needed: more incontrovertible evidence of the bald-faced evil of Monsanto. This documentary on destitute Indian cotton farmers follows an 18-year-old girl named Manjusha, a budding journalist who investigates the vast numbers of farmer suicides since the introduction (and market stranglehold) of “BT” cotton — which uses the corporation’s proprietary GMO technology — in the region of Vidarbha. Before BT took over in 2004, these cotton farmers relied on cheap heritage seed fertilized only by cow dung, but the largely illiterate population fell prey to Monsanto’s marketing blitz and false claims, purchasing biotech seed that resulted in pesticide reliance, failing crops, and spiraling debt. It’s a truly heartbreaking and infuriating story, but much of the action feels stagy and false. Should Indian formality be blamed? Considering the same fate befell Micha X. Peled’s 2005 documentary China Blue, probably not. Still, eff Monsanto. (1:28) Roxie. (Michelle Devereaux)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qngB0vCmZV4

Frankenweenie Tim Burton’s feature-length Frankenweenie expands his 1984 short of the same name (canned by Disney back in the day for being too scary), and is the first black and white film to receive the 3D IMAX treatment. A stop-motion homage to every monster movie Burton ever loved, Frankenweenie is also a revival of the Frankenstein story cute-ified for kids; it takes the showy elements of Mary Shelley’s novel and morphs them to fit Burton’s hyperbolic aesthetic. Elementary-school science wiz Victor takes his disinterred dog from bull terrier to gentle abomination (when the thirsty Sparky drinks, he shoots water out of the seams holding his body parts together). Victor’s competitor in the school science fair, Edgar E. Gore, finds out about Sparky and ropes in classmates to scrape up their dead pets from the town’s eerily utilized pet cemetery and harness the town’s lightning surplus. The film’s answer to Boris Karloff (lisp intact) resurrects a mummified hamster, while a surrogate for Japanese Godzilla maker Ishiro Honda, revives his pet turtle Shelley (get it?) into Gamera. As these experiments aren’t borne of love, they don’t go as well at Victor’s. If you love Burton, Frankenweenie feels like the at-last presentation of a story he’s been dying to tell for years. If you don’t love him, you might wonder why it took him so long to get it out. When Victor’s science teacher leaves the school, he tells Victor an experiment conducted without love is different from one conducted with it: love, he implies, is a variable. If that’s the variable that separates 2003’s Big Fish (heartbreaking) from 2010’s Alice In Wonderland (atrocious), it’s a large one indeed. The love was there for 29 minutes in 1984, but I can’t say it endures when stretched to 87 minutes 22 years later. (1:27) Presidio. (Sara Vizcarrondo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHoxzRt9yBI

The Mystical Laws As The Master gathers Oscar buzz for its Scientology-inspired tale, another movie based on the teachings of a similarly-named religion, Japanese fringe sect Happy Science, opens this weekend. But that analogy is incorrect, for The Mystical Laws way more resembles 2000’s Battlefield Earth, demonstrating and preaching its source material’s tenants rather than questioning them. Visit Happy Science’s website and you’ll find a New Age mix of Christianity and Buddhism, with woo-woo about truth and love. Its founder, Ryuho Okawa, claims to the reincarnation of “El Cantare,” sort of an über-god who controls all spiritual activity on Earth. Anyway, now there’s an anime flick based on one of Okawa’s hundreds of books; it’s about an evil overlord with planet-ruling aspirations who gets smacked down by the powerful combo of aliens, a guy who realizes he’s humanity’s “light of hope” (basically a Jesus-Buddha combo, with psychic powers to boot), and an eight-headed flying dragon. There is Nazi iconography; there are Star Wars-inspired plot points. At one point, the hero preaches directly to the camera. It’s all very heavy-handed. A far more amusing use of your time would be to go to Happy Science’s website and click the tab marked “Astonishing Facts” to learn the spiritual fates of historical figures: “Currently Beethoven lives in the lower area of the Bodhisattva Realm of the 7th dimension in the Spirit world, and aims to transcend the sadness evident in parts of his music and become an expert in the music of joy,” while proponent o’ evolution Darwin “is now serving a penance in Abysmal Hell.” Hey, wait a minute! Isn’t science supposed to be “happy?” (2:00) New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.newpeopleworld.com. (Cheryl Eddy)

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

The Oranges In director Julian Farino’s tale of two families, the Wallings and the Ostroffs are neighbors and close friends living in the affluent New Jersey township of West Orange. We meet David Walling (Hugh Laurie), his wife Paige (Catherine Keener), his best friend Terry Ostroff (Oliver Platt), and Terry’s wife, Carol (Allison Janney), during a period of domestic malaise for both couples — four unhappy people who enjoy spending time together — that is destined to be exponentially magnified over the Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities. We learn much of this in voice-over courtesy of stalled-out 24-year-old design school grad Vanessa (Alia Shawkat), a second-generation Walling whose narrative subjectivity the film makes plain. No one will fault Vanessa for editorializing, however, when her Ostroff counterpart, onetime BFF and present-day nemesis Nina (Leighton Meester), returns home after a five-year absence and, amid maternal pressure to date Vanessa’s visiting brother, Toby (Adam Brody), instead embarks on an affair with their father. The ick factor is large, particularly because it takes a while to keep straight all the spouses, offspring, and houses they belong in. But Farino works to convince us that the romantic spark between David and Nina should be judged on its merits rather than with a gut-level revulsion, a reaction we can leave to the film’s principals. To the extent that this is possible, it’s possible to enjoy The Oranges’ intelligent writing and fine cast, whose sympathetic characters (perhaps excluding Nina, whose heedlessness regarding the feelings of others verges on sociopathic) we wish the best of luck in surviving the holidays. (1:30) (Lynn Rapoport)

The Paperboy Lee Daniels scored big with Precious (2009), but this follow-up is so off-kilter in tone and story it will likely polarize critics and confuse audiences, despite its A-list cast. I happened to enjoy the hell out of this tacky, sweat-drenched, gator-gutting, and generally overwrought adaptation of Peter Dexter’s novel (Dexter and Daniels co-wrote the screenplay); it’s kind of a Wild Things–The Help–A Time to Kill mash-up, with the ubiquitous Matthew McConaughey starring as Ward Jansen, a Florida newspaper reporter investigating what he thinks is the wrongful murder conviction of Hillary Van Wetter (a repulsively greasy John Cusack). But the movie’s not really about that. Set in 1969 and narrated by Macy Gray, who plays the veteran housekeeper for the Jansens — a clan that also includes college dropout Jack (Zac Efron) — The Paperboy is neither mystery nor thriller. It’s more of a swamp cocktail, with some odd directorial choices (random split-screen here, random zoom there) that maybe seem like exploitation movie homages. As a Southern floozy turned on by “prison cock” (but not, to his chagrin, by the oft-shirtless Jack), Nicole Kidman turns in her trashiest performance since 1995’s To Die For. (1:46) (Cheryl Eddy)

Taken 2 Surprise hit Taken (2008) was a soap opera produced by French action master Luc Besson and designed for export. The divorced-dad-saves-daughter-from-sex-slavery plot may have nagged at some universal parenting anxieties, but it was a Movie of the Week melodrama made on a major movie budget. Taken 2 begins immediately after the last, with sweet teen Kim (Maggie Grace) talking about normalizing after she was drugged and bought for booty. Papa Neeson sees Kim’s mom (Famke Janssen) losing her grip on husband number two and invites them both to holiday in Istanbul following one of his high-stakes security gigs. When the assistant with the money slinks him a fat envelope, Neeson chuckles at his haul. This is the point when women in the audience choose which Neeson they’re watching: the understated super-provider or the warrior-dad whose sense of duty can meet no match. For family men, this is the breeziest bit of vicarious living available; Neeson’s character is a tireless daddy duelist, a man as diligent as he is organized. (This is guy who screams “Victory loves preparation!”) As head-splitting, disorienting, and generally exhausting as the action direction is, Neeson saves his ex-wife and the show in a stream of unclear shootouts. Taken 2 is best suited for the small screen, but whatever the size, no one can stop an international slave trade (or wolves, or Batman) like 21st century Liam. Swoon. (1:31) (Sara Vizcarrondo)

The Performant: Drink up, Brunhilde

Andrew Lam
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Oktoberfest by the Bay pours it on

In vino veritas, aber in bier auch etwas.

Every year when Oktoberfestzeit rolls around, my thoughts turn nostalgic for liter-sized beers, chewy brezeln, and oompah bands playing “Country Roads.” And that this year’s Berlin and Beyond Film Festival fell smack in the middle of Oktoberfest’s traditional 16-day season only exacerbated the quasi-homesickness that feeds my Teutonic obsessions. Having lived for some time in Munich, and hoisted many a Maßkrug on the Wiesn, I’ve purposefully avoided its San Francisco counterpart, Oktoberfest by the Bay, for years. After all, Munich’s Oktoberfest is the largest beer festival in the world, boasting more than six million visitors a year, an adrenaline-pumping array of roller-coasters, and mountains of Bavarian food to soak up the rivers of beer. Any other city’s regional edition will naturally far short of this admittedly high mark.

But when it comes to beer fests, is it really the size that matters, or just the beers? I figured I owed it to myself to find out.

Unlike the pictures of this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich featuring lots of soggy umbrellas and cloudy skies, Saturday midday at San Francisco’s Pier 48 was sunny and hot, ideal conditions for cold beer and chintzy, costume shop St Pauli girl attire, both of which were in visible abundance. On a small dance floor in the middle of the cavernous warehouse, a group of folk dancers clumsily showed off their Schuhplattler skills to pre-recorded music and a smattering of applause, and the smell of grilled sausages and Underberg wafted temptingly. Patrons in hats shaped like beer steins and aprons printed with big-breasted barmaids mingled with those sporting real leather lederhosen and billowy, low-cut dirndln, as vendors hawked bags of cinnamon almonds, chicken hats, and weirdly inauthentic deep-fried pickles.

“I wonder what Adorno would say about all of this,” my fellow obsessive muttered as we searched the perimeter for the purveyor of liter-sized mugs, sold separately. Clever people had brought their own from home, and cheapskates merely purchased the beer by the pint in disposable plastic cups, but since beer-by-the-liter is really the one unalienable Oktoberfest rite, we went ahead and bought the one for sale, finding out too late that it was plastic. But it did hold a liter of beer, and getting it filled with Spaten Oktoberfest brew was definitely the highlight of our pilgrimage. The copper-colored märzen went down smooth and lightened our mood, as did the appearance of the Internationals, whose oompah renditions of American classics such as “Sweet Caroline,” and yes, “Country Roads” were torn straight from the Wiesn playbook. We amused ourselves further by checking out the German-themed t-shirts of the decidedly American crowd. Our favorite was definitely “I (heart) döner,” followed by one with an image of a St Pauli girl and the directive to “Drink up Bitches”. Not exactly the most enlightened sentiment, but certainly appropriate to the occasion.

Properly fortified the authenticity of the beer and our kulturpessimismus we headed on over to Berlin and Beyond for a special screening of Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, the West Coast premiere of the director’s cut, and part of a tribute retrospective of the work of Austrian actor Mario Adorf, who plays the luckless, venal Alfred Matzerath. The downbeat film sobered us up faster than a plate of Schweinshaxe, and fully rounded out our quota of German-ia for another year. Or at least until Weihnachten.

 

On the Om Front: The divine essence of play

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On the Om Front: The divine essence of play

Yoga can be so serious. Ever look around class while people are doing backbends or pressing their quads to their bones in a standing pose? Wrinkled brows. Flared nostrils. Gripping toes. You’d think we’re all training to go into battle. Not that I have an issue with intensity– in the right amounts and on the right occasions. But if we don’t balance passion, dedication, and hard work with lightness and ease, we may be doing warrior pose but we’re not doing yoga.

So, play. Play means different things to different people. When I was a child, play meant begging my older brother to let me cavort with him and his friends while they played fighting-soldier-shoot-out in the backyard. My brother let me play sometimes, but only if I would take on the secret code name of Mop Top.

That wasn’t the most delightful kind of play.


But as an adult, I love to play. Play keeps me connected to the lighter part of who I am. It reminds me not to take myself too seriously (and I often need that reminder). I like to play by doing handstands, Acro Yoga, laughing till the point of internal combustion with an old pal. You know who you are.

There is a word in Sanskrit for play: It’s lila. It relates to yoga and the spiritual path, though its interpretations vary. Lila can be thought of as the play of the universe, in the sense that the whole creation and dance of life is a wild game that was invented by the gods. This is often thought of as Divine Play. (If you’ve ever seen Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s a delicious commentary on Divine Play.) Lila can also be thought of as the crazy, marvelous, confusing dance between two lovers (or between the male and female energies that reside in all of us).

To live a life of ease, play is necessary. Not the kind of play that lands you in the ER at 5am with someone else’s clothes on after imbibing copious amounts of illicit substances in the backseat of your ex’s car. (That’s called escapism.)  But lighthearted, clean fun that helps you loosen the reins on rigid thinking, and lighten the load when your practice gets too heavy.

Acro Yoga’s Divine Play Festival (coming up next week — details below) is a sweet example of play’s importance in your yoga practice. Organizer Jenny Sauer-Klein told me that, “Play keeps you connected to innocence and wonder. It keeps you fresh. In Acro Yoga, we’re playing to create connection and see the highest and best in each other, to see the divine in each other through the vehicle of play.”

If the whole universe is just an unpredictable giant puppet laser light show dance party, we may as well get on the dance floor. Go forth and play.

——

Around the Bend: Ways to Play

Painting Yantras and Mandalas
Play with spiritual painting. Learn how to create sacred yantras and mandalas with Master Sacred Artist Pieter Weltevrede.
10/5-10/7, $150, Yoga Tree Telegraph, Berk. www.yogatreesf.com

Divine Play Festival
In its third year, the annual Acro Yoga Festival is the pinnacle of ridiculous fun for both acro newbies and old school trees and elves. Flying required—no wings necessary. The Acro Yoga mantra, which I love: “Work honestly. Meditate every day. Meet people without fear. And play.” –Baba Hari Das
10/12-14, $325 for entire event (various prices for other passes), Fort Mason Center, SF. www.acroyoga.org/acroyogafestival

Yoga Rave
Not like a rave rave. Like a yoga rave. Insane dance party minus substances. No booze equals no age restrictions. So bring your baby, bring your grandma, or just bring yourself. Presented by the Art of Living and in conjunction with Divine Play.
10/12, $20-$30, Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason Center, SF. www.yogarave.org/us

Strong Yogini
Trouble rockin’ those chatturangas or inversions? Not sure how to access your physical (or emotional) core? In this playful, strength-building workshop for women (taught by your truly!), we’ll learn ways to build muscle and confidence through yoga. Come play for the day! 
10/27, $35 by Oct. 20, $40 after, Yoga Garden, SF. www.yogagardensf.com

Slackline Classes with the Yoga Slackers
You haven’t played till you’ve gotten on a rope. Learn to walk it, learn to do yoga on it, learn to fall off it with the fabulous local Yoga Slackers, helmed by Ariel Mihic and Liz Williams.
Various dates in Nov and Dec, free, Sports Basement, SF. freeslacklineclasses.eventbrite.com

Karen Macklin is a yoga teacher and multi-genre writer in San Francisco. She’s been up-dogging her way down the yogic path for over a decade, and is a lifelong lover of the word. To learn more about her teaching schedule and writing life, visit her site at www.karenmacklin.com.

Cheap basics, side of rainbow magic: Uniqlo’s full-size store opens this week

Andrew Lam
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“We’re trying to impress you with the amount of colors we have for socks,” says Aldo Liguori, Uniqlo global director of corporate PR as he guides us through his Japanese clothing brand’s soon-to-be-open San Francisco store. There are indeed, a lot of sock colors. The three-story Union Square space is home to many wonders, however. Walls of affordably-priced cashmere sweaters, a magic mirror, color-shifting staircases, heat-generating clothing, and — perhaps most compelling to your reporter — a $9.90 special on “Japanese engineered denim.”

They have eggplant, dark gold, forest-colored jeans. An autumn palette rainbow. Grab them while they last. “They are manufactured in ChIina,” said Liguori in a reserved cadence befitting a person whose office is in the Minato ward of Tokyo. “But to Uniqlo Japanese standards.”

Not even $10. Elbows out on Friday, shoppers. 

Sure, I spent the morning touring a chain clothing store. But Uniqlo is an exciting chain clothing store, way more exciting than Target, although maybe not as exciting as Top Shop. Te Powell Street location is the fifth full-fledged US location, although a San Francisco pop-up shop has been open since August a few blocks away. Would you believe New Jersey got a full-sized Uniqlo before the Bay Area? It did 🙁

Nonetheless, Uniqlo’s been busy at the hype game here in SF — promotional gambits have included online games involving Japanese cult cat Maru, and panel discussions held in the pop-up with Goapele and Mission Chinese Food’s Danny Bowein. 

Those $9.90 jeans are one of a few opening days sales — you can also get their heavily-promoted, weirdly-lightweight down jackets for $49.90, and no less than six pairs of socks for $9.90. Uniqlo’s big on basics, but a lot of the basics come with twists, like aforementioned Heatech line of heat-producing long underwear, tank tops, etc. I swooned at the SF store over the wool cocoon coats and Double Standard by Masahisa Takino line of solid, Helmut Lang-like pieces. Slouchy sweatshirt shrugs, futuristic-looking rain trenches, etc. 

But maybe you’re in it for the majick. You’ll find it here — like I said the staircases breathe rainbow. There are rotating army of fedora-wearing rainbow-clad mannequins, LOOK: 

 

… and a mirror that, with the touch of a button, will change the color of the reflection of the fleece or down jacket you are wearing, so that you can see whether you’re more of a rose or a silver. 

DISCLAIMER: By popular demand, we’d like to remind you that clothes produced in China are not subject to the same labor laws as clothes produced here in the United States (love you, Guardianistas.) Please note, Uniqlo has a mediocre history when it comes to these issues.

Uniqlo San Francisco store opening 

Fri/5

Store hours: Mon.-Sat., 10am-9pm; Sun., 10am-8pm

111 Powell, SF

www.uniqlo.com

‘Fire’ insight: talking with David Wojnarowicz biographer Cynthia Carr

Sue Vaughan
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9
‘Fire’ insight: talking with David Wojnarowicz biographer Cynthia Carr

The following interview took place with Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury USA, 624 pp., $35), on an early fall afternoon at the old Odessa Restaurant on Avenue A in the Lower East Side, New York City — one of the few places left where you can still pretend you’re in the LES of Wojnarowicz’s day. Carr will be at the San Francisco Art Institute Wed/3 to discuss her book. Read Erick Lyle’s review of the book here.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Your book is the first real biography of David Wojnarowicz. Up until now, the best book on him I thought was that Semiotext(e) book, David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side. Your book has a lot of that same feel, the layers and layers of neighborhood detail. But, of course, your book has the advantage of having all of David’s thoughts and perspective on the same events because you have his journals and his correspondence. How were you able to access all of that material?

Cynthia Carr All of his papers are at Fales Library at NYU — all of his journals and the letters he kept. And I did get letters from quite a few other people, like his boyfriend in Paris, Jean-Pierre. At the beginning of the relationship, David wrote to JP at least every other day and later at least once a week.

When I went to Paris I took a scanner with me and back home I printed them out. The stack was like four inches thick! It was filled with information about what he was doing or working on every day. While the journals from those times are mostly about him going to the piers for sex, which he didn’t tell his boyfriend too much about! [Laughs.] The letters, though, are all about where he was living or where he was working, or … really, most of the time, he was looking for work… I was very fortunate to get that.

SFBG How long have you been working on this?

CC Five years. I started in ’07.

SFBG One of the things I think is really great about the book is how you break down the reporter objectivity and place yourself into the narrative. And I think it works because it’s really a story in a way that only you could tell, because it has the rich detail that could only come from an observer who was really here in this place the whole time. What led you to take this on? What was your inspiration to tell the story of David or of the neighborhood through him?

CC Well, David’s last boyfriend, Tom Rauffenbart, actually mentioned to me that he would really like there to be a book about David and that he thought I should be the person to write it. I had written another book and when that came out in 2006, I wasn’t at the [Village] Voice anymore. I was freelancing, which is rough, as you know. And Tom had mentioned this to me, and I thought maybe I should give it a try, writing a book about David.

I wasn’t sure of all the details of David’s life, but I thought it seemed like a compelling life story. Over the years, too, people had questioned “the mythology,” — I mean, people didn’t believe his childhood stories, so I thought maybe there was a mystery there I could figure out. It was a period of time when I had lived in the same neighborhood as David and this would give me a chance to write about the East Village arts scene, the AIDS crisis, and the culture wars of the 80s all in one book, because he was a central player in all of those things.

SFBG In the end of the book, David approaches you and starts to tell you things about his life before he dies. Do you feel like in some way he knew you were a reporter and he was choosing you to do this book?

CC That might be a little too mystical to get credence, but he did open up to me and reach out. He started calling me to come over a lot. He also chose Amy Scholder who will be on stage with me in San Francisco. She was an editor at City Lights and he got to know her and chose her to edit his journals.

SFBG Those last couple years of his life — even though we know how it ends, that part of the book is so full of suspense Because it was amazing to see someone be so driven to do everything they wanted to die before they died and to actually almost do it all! It was really amazing to see how much art he was able to make across so many different media in such a short time.

CC David had tremendous inner strength and very solid will power that got him through all of this stuff. For the last year or really eight or nine months of his life he actually wasn’t really able to work, but he always talked about it. He always wanted to. I describe him as workaholic who had trouble holding a job. He worked constantly.

There was a trip he went on with Tom and their friend, Anita, near the end of his life that I describe in the book. One day, they find David just lying contentedly in a hammock and Tom says, “Look! He’s not working!” Because David was always working. Like, if he was walking with you on the beach, he’d also the whole time be picking up twigs or shells or driftwood that he thought he could use in a piece. It was like that.

SFBG So obviously you were already pretty far along with this when the latest controversy with David’s art happened at the “Hide/Seek” show at the Smithsonian. What were you thinking when that happened?

CC In a way, I liked that it happened because it drew attention to David and a lot of people didn’t know who he was, so I thought it would be helpful for the book. But in another way, it was shocking that he would get back into the news in this absurd way, which was for about 11 seconds of a film that he didn’t even finish that was completely misinterpreted by everybody. I mean, even the art world people who defended David by saying that the film was about AIDS didn’t have it right.

SFBG It was such a weird déjà vu … I first encountered Wojnarowicz as a teen during the era of that culture war controversy. There was his work, the Piss Christ, Karen Finley, Mapplethorpe, of course. That’s when I first heard about a lot of cool art! But I couldn’t believe it was happening all over again. Like, “Are we still HERE?” Not really, I guess, but they are. It’s really incredible.

CC It shows that David still has the power to be a lightning rod.

SFBG Why do you think that is?

CC David was very blunt in both his imagery and his feelings about things. He didn’t pull any punches. He used powerful symbols that are hard to explain as sound bites, so it’s easy for the Right to pick them up and take them out of context.

SFBG Personally, I’ve always felt like David’s writing is more timeless than his art. Some of the art is so linked to the time and place of the AIDS/culture war era that it sometimes seems dated to me, whereas the writing is this beautiful, timeless narrative of the outlaw in America, the outsider. But it was interesting that those artworks from that time and place are still so triggering, so perhaps they are timeless after all.

CC There are certain themes of his that really live on. His work is in major museums, of course.

SFBG You’re doing this panel tomorrow at the Brooklyn Book Festival. What is it? “The Creative City”?

CC Yeah, I think it’s about the 70s and 80s in NYC…

SFBG Here’s the notice: “The Creative City: The 70’s, 80’s, AND BEYOND”! [Laughs] Beyond? That must be like a blank, white space on the map…

CC Right! [Laughs]

SFBG In the past couple years there has been so much nostalgia for the NYC of the 70s and 80s in books and films. It’s coming from all sides. What do you think accounts for all of the interest in this lost time and place?

CC Well, the city has changed so much and the culture has changed so much. I think people look back to the freedom of that era when there was so much more uncolonized space, even in Manhattan, and it was cheaper to live here so people could just come here and try things. There was room to experiment. You didn’t have to make a lot of money immediately. You could just, say, go to a vacant lot between Avenue B and C and put on a performance with a cast of 30 or 40 people and no one would bother you. I saw many things like that then but there’s no way that could happen today. It’s starting to feel like everything has a stricture on it.

Not everybody looks back with longing for those days, of course. And when I look back with longing, I try to remember how dangerous it was then, because it really was very dangerous here. There was more crime, more rats, more garbage…

SFBG The price of freedom!

CC [Laughs] Right! But it starts to look like this golden age of Bohemia because there’s nothing like it now. Everyone’s so spread out. Williamsburg is completely gentrified. There are artists living all over the city from Red Hook, Brooklyn, all the way up to the Bronx. Also, people are starting out in MFA programs and artists are going to graduate school, so it’s a different way of coming up in the art world. David was so uneducated. I was thinking tomorrow on the panel I would read something about the piers. Not just the sex piers but the two art piers where David sometimes painted and took photos. There you had people making this art in this abandoned space with a total freedom and also working with the knowledge that it was not going to last, that it would be destroyed. David loved that part of it.

SFBG That’s one of the most poignant things about the book. David really identified with this idea that the Empire was falling, that the civilization was in ruins. Like the painting he titled, Some Day All of This Will Be Picturesque Ruins. But then it turned out that it was really just his own civilization or community that would soon crumble and disappear. And now a generation later, the inhabitants of this new Lower East Side are walking around on top of this lost civilization that has disappeared without a trace and is buried just under their feet. Could anyone at that time have imagined that the neighborhood would turn into what we have here today?

CC Oh, I think not. It was clear from as early as 1990 that the neighborhood was undergoing changes. The galleries had to leave because the rents were going up. I lived between Avenue A and B and I heard about someone buying an apartment for $250,000 on my block! I couldn’t believe it. But now you have luxury hotels up in the LES and every old parking lot has a high-priced condo on it. But when you’re younger, I guess, you don’t really think about what things will turn into.

SFBG Do you still live in the neighborhood?

CC Yes, I do. I can’t afford to move! I have a rent-stabilized apartment and have been there since the 70s. When I moved in there was only one bodega between Houston and 14th street on Avenue A – that and the Pyramid Club. Before that I lived between Avenues C and D, and people wouldn’t come over to visit me.

SFBG Where do you think your book fits into this flow of books full of nostalgia for that era, then? To me it’s almost a corrective to the nostalgia, since it’s not romantic at all. It shows the struggle and loss that happened from there to here.

CC I don’t know that those other books really went into what happened in the AIDS crisis. The AIDS epidemic is a shadow that was behind the East Village arts scene the entire time right from the beginning and no one knew it. I found news stories about people coming down with Kaposi’s Syndrome as early as the late 1970s. It was starting to spread then and no one knew it. And the people that died from AIDS were the biggest risk takers, the people who were most creative… the people who had the biggest impact on the arts scene. Losing all those people changed the world for the worse.

SFBG So, the building where David lived his last few years and where he died was his late best friend, Peter Hujar’s loft. Am I right that Hujar’s loft is now that multi- screen movie theater on Second Avenue at 12th?

CC Yeah.

SFBG Have you been to see movies there?

CC Oh yeah! It’s really weird! I haven’t seen a movie there in a few years, but I do think about, about David dying right upstairs. I’ve been told that the loft is now an office space. The first time I went to the theater part of the building was for Charles Ludlum’s memorial service. It was still being converted then from an old Yiddish theater into the cinema multiplex. It’s been a couple years, and I can’t remember what I saw there last, but, sure, I’ve gone to see films there.

SFBG Where was David’s room in the building? It’s such a strange layout for a theater.

CC Well, he was up on the Third floor. There are windows shaped like Old West tombstones that face 12th street and that was where his kitchen table was, where he sat and worked. Recently, I was thinking that out of all of us who were there taking care of David in those last months, none of us took a picture of the place. I wish now I could remember what all the piles of stuff were, because David was just such a pack rat. There were piles not just of art projects and supplies, but piles of paper, The NY Post — he liked using the tabloids in his collage pieces…

SFBG That Nan Goldin photo in the book is so great. What is he sitting with here? Like are those giant sperm?

CC Yeah, they are sperm — homemade props from his In the Shadow Of Forward Motion performance. And there is his baby elephant skeleton. And some movie posters he must have brought back from Mexico…

SFBG Well, let’s talk about David and San Francisco. For such a noted queer artist and activist, he seems to have surprisingly limited connection with San Francisco. But he did make it to the city a couple of notable times, right?

CC One of his early goals in life was to go to City Lights Books and he actually took a bus all the way across the USA just to go there.

SFBG Well, he’s not the only one. That’s so great!

CC And when he took this early hitchhiking and rail-riding trip in 1976, he went to SF and stayed there at the YMCA in the Tenderloin for awhile. He liked San Francisco.

SFBG Did he also appear at the SF Arts Institute?

CC I believe he performed In the Shadow Of Forward Motion there. But he also did a reading for Close To The Knives in SF at the bookstore, A Different Light. That was the only reading he did for that book tour. His first idea was to drive across the country and do readings here and there, but he just wasn’t feeling well enough. So he decided he would only do one reading and it would be in San Francisco. That same day, he joined in a march about AIDS awareness in SF.

SFBG What do you think is next for you?

CC It might be time for me to move my work out of the East Village. My first book was a collection of my Village Voice articles and now there’s this book, so maybe I’ve told all of my story here. I got so exhausted with this. I really worked every single day except Christmas Day, working around the clock, and I got really depleted. So I’m recovering from all of that work.

SFBG Well, that work really paid off! This book is very special. Is there anything you want to add to this?

CC Well, one thing I’ve noticed is that reviewers tend not to talk about the love stories in the book. The importance of Peter Hujar and Jean Pierre to David. And Tom Rauffenbart. And maybe it’s natural that people focus on the art and the AIDS crisis. But the love stories are to me really important.

SFBG I got that from the book. His life was so improvised. He never reached a place of safety or security where he had the luxury of saying, “OK, here’s what I’m going to do next.” It was like he was reacting all of the time to whatever came up. He had difficulty trusting in the future or in relationships with other people. I think all of that is common with people who have abuse histories and I think you got that across.

CC Yes, he always reacted to stuff. Like he found an obscene drawing on the street where someone had scrawled “Fuck you, faggot fucker!”. So he used it in a painting and based a whole work around the drawing and called it Fuck You Faggot Fucker! He was always responding. The things that troubled him became the subject of his work. That is what inspired him.

David Wojnarowicz: Cynthia Carr and Amy Scholder in Conversation
Wed/3, 7:30pm, free
Lecture Hall
San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut, SF
www.sfai.edu/event/CynthiaCarr

Horizons expand for the e-book with new literary app

Andrew Lam
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0

When you think about it, e-readers haven’t done much to change the reading experience. Besides their portability and the easy access they provide to catalogues of titles, the level of interaction, font, even the physical motion involved with turning pages are pretty much identical to “brick and mortar” books. E-readers and their e-books, especially compared to the world of apps, can seem downright ordinary. But bored tech-novel enthusiasts have cause to rejoice. An app-literary project launched yesterday, from the minds behind McSweeney’s — and backed by everyone’s favorite radio nerd, Ira Glass — named The Silent History aims to change up the e-reading experience.

The cohort behind this undertaking is comprised of the former publisher of McSweeney’s Eli Horowitz, McSweeney’s alum Russell Quinn, and authors Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett, all of whom have had many a fancy byline. Inspired by Charles Dickens, The Wire , Studs Terkel, and Lawnmower Man, the four banded together to create an app that we found on a Guardian test run to be an intriguing and lively combination of GPS-based storytelling and serialized fiction. (Glass is said to be a fan of the app, he and twee filmmaker Miranda July lend their narration to the app’s promotional trailer.)

The idea for Silent History originated from Horowitz’s refusal to believe that digitized technology and print are naturally adversarial. 

“It seemed like people were viewing technology and novels as enemies,” Horowitz told us in an email interview. “As if books had to surrender to some wave of progress —- but actually these new devices should open up new possibilities. We wanted to take an early step down that path.” 

Users of Silent History can dive into prose in two ways. The app’s “testimonial” section is a nod to the serialized fiction series of magazine past. The app’s testimonials are organized into volumes in which characters deliver 15 minutes of storytelling, with a new testimonial uploaded daily to the user’s device so that the story unfolds as it is read. The first novel on the new app will be an eponymous-titled 160,000-word work written by all four of the authors.

GPS-linked “field reports” are another way to explore — browse the globe for user-generated storylines connected to spots on Silent History’s global map. As of this writing there are 20 of these reports in San Francisco. 

Unfazed by the fact that he and his group are not among the first to attempt to remake the e-book, Derby predicted that his team’s take is the one that will stick. 

“Our ambition was to go as big as possible with the project. We’re certainly not the first people to do location-based storytelling or serialized digital fiction, but I think one reason that the existing attempts haven’t gotten a ton of traction has been the lack of depth. We’ve written an entire novel. And that’s just part of the project — it doesn’t take into account all of the field reports spread throughout the world. If this project tanks, it won’t be because we sacrificed narrative richness to achieve some technical goal. It’ll be because of something else we obviously didn’t think of when we were making this thing.” 

Download the app at www.thesilenthistory.com

Stealing the American dream back from Chuck Norris

Andrew Lam
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4

Why’d we let him do it, United States of America? All of a sudden (maybe this happened awhile ago), the face of “America” was no longer the face of the people who’d been there for millenia, but rather a gun-toting, karate-chopping, Christian blogging white guy (there may have been steps in between the two.)

Reminder brought to you by Gerardo de Sepulveda, the painter behind the comically-rendered “Chuck Norris and the Theft of the American Spirit” and one of the Bay Area Native Americans featured in Galeria de la Raza and the Indigenous Arts Coalition‘s group exhibition “Native Diaspora Now.”

 

Richard Castaneda’s “Sacred Pipe”

The show is an at-times wry look at Native American life in America today. In another corner of the gallery hangs a multimedia piece by Richard Castaneda. It’s deals in American spirit, too — the kind you smoke. Baby blue and yellow headdress-adorned cigarrette boxes, arranged in the shape of a cross, adorned with feathers hanging from Pepsi bottlecaps. It’s instantly recognizable as coming from a Native tradition, but will cause cognitive woe to anyone whose concept of Native art borrows from the “ethnic print” section of Urban Outfitters.

The same can be said of the rest of the show, which ranges from leather vests hanging in space to video clips that expose deep, wailing wells of hurt, to the bright, witty work of Spencer Keeton Cunningham (who uses those working class-iconic ramen noodles to represent a figure’s heart in one memorable work, aptly titled “Chief Ramen Heart”.) It’s totally — oh dang, am I going to say this? — American in a way that any dude who campaigned for Mike Huckabee could only dream of encapsulating. 

Formed in 2008 as a San Francisco Art Institute student group, the Indigenous Arts Coalition is focused on promoting First Peoples art in the Bay Area. The work deserves to be lauded, and the show marks the ascedence of the group, insofar as its website debuted at the interactive computer that is set up by Galeria de la Raza’s front door if by no other metric. Let’s hope “Native Diaspora Now” is a sign of more insightful projects to come.  

You can drop by to see the show any time Galeria de la Raza is open, but for a more interactive look, we recommend attending Sat/6 when artists from the Indigenous Artists Coalition will speak on a panel moderated by publisher-poet Mica Valdez. Stick around afterwards for readings from Turtle Island to Abya Yala, music from The Genie and Daniel Rodriguez on the acoustic guitar, and snacks from Rocky’s Frybread. 

“Native Diaspora Now” 

Through Oct. 13


Indigenous Artists Coalition artist talk

Sat/6, 6-10pm, free

Galeria de la Raza

2857 24th St., SF

www.galeriadelaraza.org

Happy 50th birthday to tesseracts and Mrs Whatsit

Andrew Lam
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0

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L’Engle

She was living proof that not all Christian young adult authors feel the need to concoct elaborate vampire metaphors decrying sexual intimacy. Madeleine L’Engle, in fact, counts as one of the most beloved writers among religious and secular readers of youn adult lit alike (well, some religious people — others condemned her depictions of crystal balls and treatment of Jesus as a learned man.) Her Wrinkle in Time turns the ripe old age of 50 this year, and the SF Public Library has drummed up a line-up of authors just as devoted to its tesseract-traveling plot as you are to commemorate its golden anniversary

For proof that Wrinkle‘s power has hardly taken that tesseract elsewhere, one need only head to 100 Larkin on Sat/13 to hear from a lineup of authors and artists who have been inspired by L’Engle’s most famous work. Rebecca Stead, Gennifer Choldenko, Lewis Buzbee, and Hope Larson, the latter of whom recently released a graphic novel adaptation of Wrinkle, will be talking about how the tale of Meg and Charles Wallace Murray helped guide their creative careers. 

L’Engle went from bit role player on Broadway, to celebrated author, to Connecticut general store owner when she and her partner moved to a dairy village to take a break from the hustle and bustle of NYC. Right as she was discovering her Christian faith, she found herself unable to drum up publishers’ interest in her 11th novel, Meet The Austins. That book began with a death, which apparently wasn’t an easy sell in the children’s lit scene in those days (as, one would think, it continues to be now.) She wrote another book, and then, Wrinkle in Time. In 1979, she told Christianity Today:

It was rejected and rejected. I would put the kids to bed, walk down the dirt road in front of the house, weep, and yell at God. I’d say, “God, why are you letting me have all of these rejection slips? You know it’s a good book. I wrote it for you.” 

Of course, it was eventually picked up. And, as you can see from the multitudinous book covers we dug up (above), it’s been republished again and again. We love centaurs, and we love Wrinkle. Plus, (as Larson reminds in a recent Huffington Post piece) who else wrote books in 1962 in which the female protagonist spent the entirety of the plot with a black eye? L’Engle’s Meg saved the universe, which we enjoy on a daily basis.

Wrinkle in Time 50th anniversary celebration

Sat/13 2pm, free

San Francisco Main Library

100 Larkin, SF

www.sfpl.org

Appetite: New whisk(e)y releases and WhiskyFest

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: New whisk(e)y releases and WhiskyFest

I’ll take whisk(e)y year round. But as summer evolves to fall, it seems all the more appropriate enjoyed on crisp nights, preferably fireside. Thankfully, WhiskyFest approaches this Friday/5, in the usual massive, underground Marriott ballrooms. Recapping past years, VIP early pours of rare whiskies and seminars tend to be highlights. There’s another seminar this week with the legendary, delightful Parker Beam, exploring Japanese Whisky with Suntory brand ambassador Neyah White, and I’m particularly looking forward to beer and single malt pairings with Highland Park brand ambassador Martin Daraz.

There’s a number of  new pours this year, including Glenfiddich’s Malt Master which I review below, Parker’s Heritage Collection release for 2012, the Master Distiller’s Blend of Mashbills (Parker Beam’s annual, limited edition releases are among the most exciting American whiskies made), and for the first time ever Nikka Japanese whisky, which I’ve long had to enjoy when in Europe, as you can’t get it here in the US… until this fall, thanks to SF’s very own Anchor Distilling here in SF. Anchor is importing Nikka with, as Anchor President David King told me recently, a few more Japanese whiskies to come — a huge win for whisky lovers like myself who’ve been longing for more imports from Japan. I sampled Taketsuru 12 year, which will also be poured at WhiskyFest, while Anchor will soon import their 17 yr and 21 yr whiskies.

If you aren’t going to WhiskyFest, or even if you are, here are three recently-released American whiskies and two Scotches worth seeking out:

AMERICAN WHISKEY

High West American Prairie Reserve Whiskey ($40; 46%/92 proof) – Besides being a real value at $40, I’d deem Prairie Reserve (named after the largest wildlife reserve in the lower 48 states, a 5000 square miles reserve in the works in northeastern Montana) another winner in High West’s Utah-distilled catalogue. With 10% of all sales going to this reserve, High West expresses its love of Western land through whiskey — a blend of two bourbons, to be exact: six-year-old Bourbon from the old Seagrams plant in Lawrenceberg, Indiana (a corn-dominant whiskey at 75% corn, 20% rye, 5% barley malt), and a 10-year-old Four Roses Bourbon (60% corn, 35% rye, 5% barley malt). Orange spice dominates on the nose, there’s the expected bourbon characteristics of vanilla caramel, and sweet, nutty, dark cherries to taste. Though not made from a High West mashbill, it is in keeping with their style, is an elevated cocktail base, yet also a joy sipped neat. 

Balcones “1” Texas Single Malt Whisky ($69; 52.7%/105.4 proof) — This new release from the always interesting Balcones Distilling feels Texan namely in its robust character. You could call it a Texas whiskey for the cowboy set but actually their Brimstone smoked corn whiskey, which goes down like a campfire of scrub oak, exhibits a greater ruggedness. The Single Malt, though bracing, is simultaneously smooth, even silky, unfolding with pear, cinnamon spice, even dusty earth. Even though I find Master Distiller Chip Tate’s Brimstone more grab-you-by-the-cojones fascinating, his Texas Single Malt is ultimately more sophisticated and balanced. 

WhistlePig TripleOne ($111; 55.5%/111 proof) – The splurge, out this month at a limited 1100 cases, is WhistlePig’s TripleOne from Master Distiller Dave Pickerell, who you may know as Maker’s Mark master distiller for 14 years. As Pickerell said, I was the very first to try TripleOne at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this July. TripleOne is WhistlePig rye but at 111 proof (vs. 100), aged 11 years (vs. 10). The bracing TripleOne doesn’t boast quite as long a finish as the flagship rye, but it’s even more complex, surprisingly akin to applejack or Calvados at first sip, opening up into spicy rye body with citrus and chocolate notes. It’s a beauty showing the elegance possible in rye whiskies. 

SCOTCH WHISKEY

Balvenie DoubleWood 17 year ($130; 43%/86 proof) – Balvenie’s new DoubleWood release has been aging 17 years (vs. their classic 12 year), or essentially 17 years in bourbon casks (for 17 years) and 3 to 6 months in Oloroso sherry casks. I prefer  bourbon cask liveliness in my Scotch and with the sherry finish there’s merely a whisper of sweet muskiness. Nougat and apples unfold, caramel peeks out, but the body is light and smooth, while still standing up with a hint of briny robustness. 

Glenfiddich Master Malt Edition ($90; 43%/86 proof) – This brand new, limited-edition whisky was just released in September from the classic distillery, one of only four in Scotland still owned and run by the same family since the 1800’s. At merely 18,000 bottles, it’s small production for Glenfiddich, celebrating their 125th anniversary. Malt Master Brian Kinsman crafted their first double-matured whisky, which spent roughly 6 to 8 years in used Bourbon barrels, then 4 to 6 years in sherry casks. Sherry sweetness hits first on the nose but thankfully doesn’t overpower the whisky though sherry characteristics dominate (of course there are devotees on both sides of the bourbon or sherry cask-aged whisky spectrum). With whispers of brine, fruitcake and cinnamon, Mitch Bechard, Glenfiddich’s Brand Ambassador, West, said over lunch that it, “Goes down like a penguin in a wet suit”… that is to say, smooth.

If you find a way to taste it, I especially love the new, but already sold out in the States (only 1000 bottles) 1974 edition ($800; 46.8%/93.6 proof), a cask strength single malt, that is surprisingly bright for such age, with pear, vanilla, even passion fruit notes, and a long, spiced finish. A drop of water brings out briny, salty characteristics. 

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com 

 

This year, Banned Books Week matters more than ever

Andrew Lam
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25

Have you ever listened to KPFA’s “Flashpoints”? A friend described it to me, as we listened to an episode featuring San Francisco’s newest poet laureate – our first Latino laureate – Alejandro Murgía, as a “very pointed” radio show. The host, poet Dennis Bernstein, asked a very pointed question about Obama and Romney’s reactions to the anti-Muslim video that’s causing uproar in the Middle East. 

But Murgía changed the subject. What about the racism of the Tucson Unified School District, he asked? Why doesn’t its removal of the Mexican American studies program, and with it books like The Tempest and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and other books that “emphasize students’ ethnicity rather than their individuality” get talked about more? The more he talked, the more I became convinced that yes, this was a very big deal. 

Luckily, the country has an opportunity to talk about the issue of free speech repression via next week’s 30th annual national celebration of Banned Books Week, Sun/30-Oct. 6.

Ethnic studies isn’t the only literature with targets on its back. The national Banned Books Week site has a handy list of the top 10 titles banned in 2011. People get riled up about Hunger Games? Whoa, we’re still incensed by To Kill A Mockingbird and Brave New World?

Free speech suppression is real! Here’s where you can go to break the ban next week. You’ll also want to keep your eyes on the City Lights blog, where you’ll see talks by famous authors on their fave banned books – we’re waiting eagerly for them to post the John Waters’ reading of Lady Chatterly. On a national level, check the Banned Books Week website for information on joining the country-wide “virtual read-out” that the group is organizing.

“Cracking the News with Project Censored”

Every year, the Guardian publishes Project Censored’s list of the top most suppressed stories in the news. (Because sometimes banning starts before publishing does.) On Monday, get a sneak peek with Mickey Huff from PC, who will break down the big events of the year that you didn’t get to hear about. 

Mon/1, 7:30pm, free

The Booksmith

1644 Haight, SF

www.booksmith.com

“Let’s Talk 50 Shades of Grey”

Perhaps, given the issues we’ve already discussed, the fact that the soccer mom version of a BDSM novel getting restricted in libraries across the country doesn’t seem quite so dire. But sexuality, of course, is still very much a part of us. The library’s conscripted Emily Morse, star of Bravo’s Miss Advised reality show and local self-styled sexpert, to lead a discussion of this bestselling, racy tale of a CEO and his virginal submissive. 

Tue/2, 6pm, free

San Francisco Main Library

100 Larkin, SF

www.sfpl.org

“Out of Print” art reception

The students at City College respond to free speech issues with their art at this Banned Books Week group show.

Tue/2-Wed/5, opening reception Tue/2, 5-8pm, free

Cesar Chavez Student Center gallery, City College of San Francisco 

1650 Holloway, SF

www.ccsf.edu

“Read Banned Books Naked”: Naked Girls Reading 

Ophelia Coeur de Noir, Carol Queen, and members of the Twilight Vixen Revue strip down and start turning pages for you from their favorite piece of restricted literature at the SF edition of this national network of nudie-bookworm readings. 

Tue/2, 8pm, $20-25/$35 for two

Stagewerx Theater

446 Valencia, SF

www.nakedgirlsreading.com

‘LOOPER’ IS HERE! Plus: a boatload of other new movies

Sue Vaughan
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‘LOOPER’ IS HERE! Plus: a boatload of other new movies

Wait, what are you doing reading this? Why aren’t you watching Looper, the best time-travel movie to come out of Hollywood in ages? Check out Lynn Rapoport’s review below, go see the damn thing (it’s gonna be huge, like Inception huge), and start planning your “Gat Man” Halloween costume this instant.

In this week’s film column, I check out the Northern California Action/Sports Film Festival (a new venture from SF IndieFest, which, by the way: just another month or so until DocFest!), let’s-talk-about-our-feelings indie Liberal Arts, and docs Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and Peter Ford: A Little Prince. 

Marke B. takes on another doc, Detropia, and dubs this look at his hometown “important and beautiful;” full review here.

Two more from H-wood open this week (3D animated monster comedy Hotel Transylvania and YA young-angst tale The Perks of Being a Wallflower), as yet unreviewed — but there’s a bunch more short reviews, including Dennis Harvey’s take on the Vortex Room’s “Aerobicide” triple feature, after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6G_AXzOJKY

“Aerobicide Sunday: A Marathon of Murder in Tights” Two things that made the 1980s taste great, slasher movies and aerobic exercise, were each too crassly, promiscuously commercial not to hook up a few times — even if the sub-sub-genre they created together is even less well remembered than the Lambada musical. Sun/30, however, it shall reign as king at the Vortex, where a triple bill of exer-psycho obscurities will really make you feel the burn. First up is 1987’s Aerobicide a.k.a. Killer Workout, in which the fitness emporium owned by Rhonda (Marcia Karrof of 1984’s Savage Streets) — as sour a grape as you’ll find in pastel spandex and pouf-shouldered Valley Girl dresses — experiences a rash of hard bodies being reduced to bloody pulp by an unknown killer wielding a large killer safety pin. Totally gross! We get many close-ups of overexposed thighs and over assisted cleavage gyrating to heinous dance tracks with inexplicable lyrics like “Hey baby! I’ve got your number! Red and juicy, warm and sweet” — plus some feathered-hair beefcake too — before the culprit turns out to be exactly who you think it is.

This was but an early effort among 32 features to date by writer-director David A. Prior, and based on the evidence present there’s a reason why you’ve never heard of any of them. Slightly slicker was 1990’s Death Spa (a.k.a. Witch Bitch), in which a computer automated gym goes all HAL-slash-The Shining, to the mortal danger of its highly toned staff and clientele. We’re talking death by blender, sauna paneling, and reanimated frozen fish products. The facility’s bitchy programmer is played by Merrick Butrick, who’d portrayed Captain Kirk’s son and a Square Peg earlier in the decade, and died of AIDS before this movie was released. Directed by Austrian Michael Fischa, it’s comparatively glossy but definitely senseless nonsense with a Eurotrash-genre feel. Lastly, in the same vein, and even slicker, there’s 1984’s Murder Rock: Dancing Death a.k.a. Giallo a Disco a.k.a. Slashdance (one of, incredibly, no less than three movies with that third name), a lesser exercise by that occasionally great horror director Lucio Fulci. Rather than a health club, the setting here is a dance school where choreography seems less indebted to Balanchine and Martha Graham than Jane Fonda and Shabba Doo. For that crime the punishment is, of course … death by hatpin? Whatever. If you survive this evening, you will be sore, winded, and desperate to sweat the toxins out of your system. Vortex Room. (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrf8xoQJ5Ms

Backwards Athletic disappointment is not a new feeling for Abi (Sarah Megan Thomas, who also wrote the script), who has just learned she’s been named the alternate for the Olympic crew team — a bench warming role she was also relegated to in the last Olympics. But after she quits the team in a huff and moves home, it’s not long before she realizes that her life off the water is pretty depressing, too. Enter former boyfriend Geoff (James Van Der Beek), now the athletic director at the high school where Abi honed her rowing talents, who gives her a job coaching the talented but undisciplined girls who make up the current team. Will this new venture help Abi finally grow up and regain her self-confidence? Will she re-ignite her spark with Geoff? Will there be a last-act conflict involving yet another chance at the Olympics? Will there be multiple training montages? As directed by Ben Hickernell, Backwards hits all of the expected themes about following one’s heart and Doing the Right Thing. Thomas, a former rower herself, has an ordinary-girl appeal, but even Backwards‘ attention to authenticity can’t elevate what’s essentially a very predictable sports drama. (1:29) Sundance Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI3ju17W070

Looper It’s 2044 and, thanks to a lengthy bout of exposition by our protagonist, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), here’s what we know: time travel, an invention 30 years away, will be used by criminals to transport their soon-to-be homicide victims backward, where a class of gunmen called loopers, Joe among them, are employed to “do the necessaries.” More deftly revealed in Brick (2005) writer-director Rian Johnson’s new film is the joylessness of the world in which Joe amorally makes his way, where gangsters from the future control the present (under the supervision of Jeff Daniels), their hit men live large but badly (Joe is addicted to some eyeball-administered narcotic), and the remainder of the urban populace suffers below-subsistence-level poverty. The latest downside for guys like Joe is that a new crime boss has begun sending back a steady stream of aging loopers for termination, or “closing the loop”; soon enough, Joe is staring down a gun barrel at himself plus 30 years.

Being played by Bruce Willis, old Joe is not one to peaceably abide by a death warrant, and young Joe must set off in search of himself so that — with the help of a woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) and her creepy-cute son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) — he can blow his own (future) head off. Having seen the evocatively horrific fate of another escaped looper, we can’t totally blame him. Parsing the daft mechanics of time travel as envisioned here is rough going, but the film’s brisk pacing and talented cast distract, and as one Joe tersely explains to another, if they start talking about it, “we’re gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws” — in other words, some loops just weren’t meant to be closed. (1:58) (Lynn Rapoport)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siEHekc-1oE

Pitch Perfect As an all-female college a cappella group known as the Barden Bellas launches into Ace of Base’s “The Sign” during the prologue of Pitch Perfect, you can hear the Glee-meets-Bring It On elevator pitch. Which is fine, since Bring It On-meets-anything is clearly worth a shot. In this attempt, Anna Kendrick stars as withdrawn and disaffected college freshman Beca, who dreams of producing music in L.A. but is begrudgingly getting a free ride at Barden University via her comp lit professor father. Clearly his goal is not making sure she receives a liberal arts education, as Barden’s academic jungle extends to the edges of the campus’s competitive a cappella scene, and the closest thing to an intellectual challenge occurs during a “riff-off” between a cappella gangs at the bottom of a mysteriously drained swimming pool. When Beca reluctantly joins the Bellas, she finds herself caring enough about the group’s fate to push for an Ace of Base moratorium and radical steps like performing mashups. Much as 2000’s Bring It On coined terms like “cheerocracy” and “having cheer-sex,” Pitch Perfect gives us the infinitely applicable prefix “a ca-” and descriptives like “getting Treble-boned,” a reference to forbidden sexual relations with the Bellas’ cocky rivals, the Treblemakers. The gags get funnier, dirtier, and weirder, arguably reaching their climax in projectile-vomit snow angels, with Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins as grin-panning competition commentators offering a string of loopily inappropriate observations. (1:52) (Lynn Rapoport)

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

Solomon Kane Conceived by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, this 16th-century hero is cut from the same sword-and-sorcery cloth, being a brawny brute of slippery but generally sorta-kinda upright morals. Solomon (James Purefoy) is slaughtering his way to a North African treasure trove when demons swallow up his likewise greedy, conscience-free cohorts and damn his soul for a lifetime of bad deeds. Suddenly committed to the greater good, he returns homeward to cold gray England, where Jason Flemyng’s evil sorcerer soon imperils both our protagonist and the Puritan family (complete with love interest) he’s befriended. This movie has been around a while — since 2009, to be exact, yet barely beating director Michael J. Bassett’s new Silent Hill: Revelation 3D to U.S. theaters — and is a good illustration of what can happen when you make a fairly expensive ($45 million) fantasy-action adventure without major stars nor any marketable novelty. Which is to say: not much. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the good-looking, watchable but generic-feeling Solomon Kane, save that nothing about it feels remotely original or inspired. It’s the perfectly okay, like-a-thousand-others mall flick you’ll forget you saw by Thanksgiving, despite being peopled with such normally interesting actors as Max Von Sydow, Alice Krige, and the late Pete Postlethwaite. (1:54) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mZIwD4K544

“Stars In Shorts” Outside of the festival circuit, it’s an uncommon feat for shorts to make it to the big screen, so it can’t hurt to make name recognition a prerequisite for selection. In writer-director Rupert Friend’s Steve, Keira Knightley plays an embattled Londoner under siege by her lonely, pathologically odd neighbor (Colin Firth). Written by Neil LaBute, Jacob Chase’s After School Special sets up a semi-flirtation between two strangers (Sarah Paulson and Wes Bentley) at a playground, only to deliver the kind of gut-level punch you might expect from the writer-director of 1998’s Your Friends and Neighbors. LaBute’s own Sexting is an entertaining exercise in stream-of-consciousness monologuing by Julia Stiles. As with most shorts programs, “Stars” is a mixed bag. Robert Festinger’s The Procession, in which Lily Tomlin and Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson play reluctant participants in a funeral procession, sounds promising, but the conversation palls during the 10-plus minutes we’re stuck in the car with them. Benjamin Grayson’s sci-fi thriller Prodigal, starring Kenneth Branagh, reaches its predictable crisis points several minutes after the viewer has arrived. More successful are Jay Kamen’s musical comedy Not Your Time, starring Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander as an old Hollywood hand whose writing career has stalled out, and Chris Foggin’s Friend Request Pending, which treats viewers to the sight of Dame Judi Dench gamely wading into the social network in search of a date. (1:53) (Lynn Rapoport)

Won’t Back Down If talk of introducing charter schools into the public education mix tends to give you collective-bargaining-related hives, Daniel Barnz’s Won’t Back Down is unlikely to appeal, unless perhaps as the object of a boycott or a picket line. Two embattled mothers, Jamie Fitzpatrick (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Nona Alberts (Viola Davis), both with children at a failing Pittsburgh elementary school and the latter a teacher there, join forces to change the institutional culture by leading a parent-teacher takeover, with the goal of creating a charter school. As the bureaucratic process for doing so is described by a school district employee, it should take them three to five years to discover that they’ve been hurling themselves at a brick wall; Jamie, an efficient combination of fireball and pit bull, is determined to pulverize the wall in about two months.

Watching her and Nona try to secure more than a third-rate, treading-water education for their kids, it’s hard not to root for the possibility of a transformation, and even an upper-level teachers’ union staffer played by Holly Hunter finds herself climbing the fence. The details of what lies on the other side (and inside Jamie and Nona’s 400-page proposal) stay fairly fuzzy, though. And while Barnz lets his warring factions — desperate mothers and educators, a union boss (Ned Eisenberg) watching the deterioration of the labor movement, a pro-union teacher (Oscar Isaac) ambivalently engaged in the chartering project — impassionedly debate their way through the film, a little more wonkiness might have clarified the arguments of those done waiting for Superman. (2:00) (Lynn Rapoport)

The Performant: Love is (not) a battlefield

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Our Genocides and “Combat Paper” speak out for peace.

Along with playing host to all of the fun and fabulous festivals occurring this past weekend (hopefully you managed to make it out to at least one), San Francisco also played host to a more sobering event—the sixteenth play in a cycle of seventeen on the topic of genocide. Penned by Eric Ehn, all seventeen are being prepared and presented in various corners of the country before coming together at La MaMa in New York in November for a complete run entitled “Soulographie: Our Genocides.” Last May, the tenth play in the cycle, “Cordelia,” a Noh-inflected reimagining of King Lear was presented by Theatre of Yugen, and this weekend “Dogsbody”, directed by Rebecca Novick, turned the Mission Street headquarters for Intersection of the Arts into a Ugandan battlefield. 

Humming and singing, the three-person cast enters the room, clad respectively in the garb of a jungle soldier, the mismatched scraps of a peasant child, a flowing white garment and incongruous leggings.

We meet Scovia (Rami Margron), kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army, first as a kitchen slave, second as a spoil of war, with all the violent implications that entails. Over the course of the play we see the tape rewound to the moment when Scovia’s life is changed for the worse—hiding in a schoolyard tree where she is found first by bees, then by the LRA. In a dreamlike, non-linear narrative, Scovia recounts her traumas with expressionistic text and expressive dance (choreographed by Erica Chong Shuch), while a menacing Reggie D. White and sympathetic Catherine Castellanos flank her on either side, unshakable traces of an endless nightmare. 

Drained and devastated, Margron finally describes the moment she is forced to kill her own father, flour falling from her fingers to the stage as she speaks, like handfuls of graveyard dust. In the second half of the play, set in a futuristic, war-torn Texas, this same dust will be thrown over her body by White during a described act of violence, turning her, appropriately, into a funereal witness to her own destruction. In this segment, White as “Dogface” and Margron as “Nipple” navigate the chaotic battlegrounds of Texas, the days of arrows, the death of human compassion. Although not every Ehn-penned message is completely clear, the ultimate implication is: in the brutal arena of war, there is no place for love.

There might be a space for redemption, however, and at Southern Exposure this idea is being explored with a series of interactive paper-making workshops through September 29. Spinning old uniforms into new paper, artist Drew Cameron crafts the materials of war into a civilian statement of catharsis. Himself a former soldier, Cameron’s Combat Paper workshops have been presented on both coasts, geared particularly towards veterans and their families, but embracing participation from all. Just the act of cutting up and pulping a set of fatigues can be an emotional liberation of sorts, and the resultant paper perfectly embodies the idea of a blank slate with the potential to become an expression of peace.

 

On the Om Front: A path with heart

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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On the Om Front: A path with heart

I’ve been practicing yoga for 12 years. Over the years, my practice has changed depending on the basic conditions of my life: my age, my health, my schedule, my location, my physical and spiritual interests and needs, my romantic relationships, my relationship with chocolate chip cookies. Each time I’ve come to a point of transition in how I practice, or where I practice, or with whom I practice (and, more recently: how I teach, where I teach, and for whom I teach), I start to question why I’m doing what I am doing and what is the ultimate goal. 

The questioning is uncomfortable—who wants to question a thing they love? 

It feels dirty, disloyal. It creates murk in a stream that once felt swimmingly clear. But I’ve learned that it’s an inevitable part of any path. Whether we like it or not, questions arise—if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have some version of this symbol in every language: “?” Luckily (or unluckily), I come from Jewish heritage, so questioning is in my blood. In Judaism, it’s godly to question. 

So, I’m questioning.

And I’m reading this book right now called A Path With Heart. It’s by Jack Kornfield, one of the founders of Spirit Rock, a Buddhist meditation retreat center up in Marin that runs regular residential silent meditation retreats. (It’s a top local joint that I highly recommend, especially if you’re one of those people who thinks you “could never” sit in silence for a week, which is nearly everyone unless you’ve actually done it and know that you could, in fact, have.) 

Anyway: In the first few pages of his book, Jack gets down to the crux of the matter. He says that no matter what road you’re driving your spiritual chariot down, you’ve got to keep coming back to the question of whether or not your path has heart. To paraphrase, you could be touching your first metatarsal to your crown chakra or chanting Om Namah Shivaya until the cows come home (and if you’re doing that in India, it won’t be very long—the cows are always coming home), but if you’re not practicing from a place of love, there’s no point to it. Or, maybe there’s some point to it … but it’s not the point.

This isn’t just about yoga or meditation. The same is true for anything you do. Take art, for instance. If your art has no heart, it may look or sound pretty, but its cosmic shelf life is going to be shorter than a wink. Good art creates soul grooves. It has a ripple effect. It’s a rechargeable battery that powers up each time it connects with a new source. It needs to be infused with real juice, the kind that comes from that metaphorical, physiological blood pumper that sits just to the right of center—in your chest.

There’s a lot of heart in our city.

I went to see a play last weekend called Dogsbody at Intersection for the Arts by Erik Ehn, a gifted spiritual warrior who has crafted 17 poetic theatrical works on genocide as part of a project called Soulographie to wake us up to the realities of war. (The project is en route to NYC, so if you’re out there November 11-18, get in on it.) I also hit Martin Scott’s Saturday morning yoga class at Union Yoga, for which all proceeds generously go to Headstand.org, an organization that brings yoga to at-risk youth. Both Erik and Martin are heart-ists. 

Here’s a line from Kornfield’s book, which I’ve been reading to my own classes this past week. He’s quoting Carlos Castaneda who’s referring to a teaching by Don Juan: 

“Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question …. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”

Not a bad one to pull out when faced with a moment of evaluation. Here’s to landing in a place where that question has the right answer.

********

Around the Bend 

(some upcoming events with heart)

 

Sweat and Study: Chants and Invocations for Yoga 

If you love chanting to Ganesh and the other colorful yoga deities, this workshop is the place to be this Sunday. You’ll learn several of the basic yoga mantras and—if you’re already a regular chanter—you’ll learn how to lead them. Sean Feit is a gem. It’s worth the trip to Berkeley.

9/30, 2-5, $20, Yoga Tree Telegraph

 

Sivananda Poetry Night

The Sivananda center in San Franciso has a new monthly poetry satsang. This week, hear Virginia Barrett (Vidya devi) read poems from her forthcoming  book, I Just Wear My Wings, and bring a short poem (your own or one from a spiritual teacher/writer). Tea and snacks available.

9/28, 7:30 – 9:15 p.m, suggested donation $5-$10, Sivananda Center in SF

 

Union Yoga’s Donation-Based Vinyasa for Headstand.org

This fun, challenging flow class taught by Martin Scott on Saturday mornings is entirely donation-based, and all of the profits support the non-profit organization Headstand.org, which brings yoga classes to at-risk youth in underserved schools. It fills up (as it should) so register online beforehand.  

Every Saturday, 9am, suggested donation $15, Union Yoga

 

KFOG Harmony by The Bay

KFOG shows some love to yogis in its Harmony by the Bay concert by offering a special yoga stage. (If you go, please report back on what this actually looked like—I’ve no idea!) Musical acts for the outdoor concert include The Shins, Tegan and Sara, and the holy rapper Matisyahu.

9/29, $40-$75, Shoreline Amphitheatre. More info: www.harmonybythebay.org/2012

 

Karen Macklin is a yoga teacher and multi-genre writer in San Francisco. She’s been up-dogging her way down the yogic path for over a decade, and is a lifelong lover of the word. To learn more about her teaching schedule and writing life, visit her site at www.karenmacklin.com.

Tonight, a film that will change how you see mental illness

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What does it mean to be mentally ill? Mentally well? If a person feels debilitating rage and sadness faced with the realities of the world around them, does the problem lie with the person or with society? What exactly needs fixing?

These are some of the questions raised by Crooked Beauty, a 30-minute film that originated in San Francisco and has been translated and distributed internationally.

Filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal will screen Crooked Beauty tonight, along with other footage from his ongoing work exploring alternative ways of seeing mental health.The screening is part of the 10-year anniversary celebration of the Icarus Project, a network of support groups, discussion forums, writers and artists, challening the definition of mental health. In their own words, the Icarus Project “envisions a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences of ‘mental illness’ rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework.”

It was some of that new language, lines in a book Rosenthal found lying around his Mission Distrtict apartment one day, that first inspired Crooked Beauty.

“The world seemed to hit me so much harder and fill me so much fuller than anyone else I knew,” the lines read. “Slanted sunlight could make me dizzy with its beauty and witnessing unkindness filled me with physical pain.”

The book was Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: A Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds, and the writer of the words was Jacks McNamara, one of the Icarus Project’s founders.

The lines made sense to him. “They spoke so much to my experience of the world,” Rosenthal told me in an interview. “They create such a vivid image for me of relating to the world in a skewed way, as opposed to a very bright, shiny, clear way.”

He found that McNamara lived just across the Bay in Oakland “two days later I was sitting with them, talking and proposing this film.”

Rosenthal did several interviews with McNamara that he used for the film’s narrative. McNamara’s storytelling is unscripted and strikingly poetic.  Images, all shot in San Francisco by Rosenthal, illustrate the story– fog rolling in over hills, birds flocking on power lines and trees shaking in the wind as if trying to escape.

The film, Rosenthal said, is “About using [McNamara’s] crucial and critical narrative as a touchstone for the much broader issue of madness, which is not just a biochemical knot from the neck up. That madness is also a reflection of a social condition.”

As McNamara says in the film: “Saying that it is nothing but a biological brain disorder let’s everybody off the hook. Then you don’t have to look at oppression, and you don’t have to look at poverty and injustice and abuse and trauma, and makes it this situation where it’s just the individual versus his of her inevitable biological madness”

Through getting involved in the Icarus Project, Rosenpaul said, “I’ve been radicalized. But that’s not to say that I’m out on the street burning my bra. Or, you know, burning my prescription bottles.”

Instead, he makes films that explore the complexities of mental health beyond the persciption bottle, what he calls “that idea that wellness exists in a pill.”

Rosenthal’s current project, Mad Dance: A Mental Health Film Trilogy, will use archival footage from educational mental health films, which distance the viewer from the patients that need to be “fixed.”

Tonight, Rosenthal will present some of that footage along with Crooked Beauty.

“Mad Dance film screening and Icarus Project benefit”

Thu/27, 8-10pm, $5-10 suggested donation

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

Facebook invite

TIFF happens, part three! Plus top films of the fest

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF happens, part three! Plus top films of the fest

Read Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ first and second reports from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

Dial M For Murder 3D Remastered (Alfred Hitchcock, US) The digitally remastered re-release of Alfred Hitchcock’s only 3D production was introduced by none other than film historian David Bordwell, whose introductory textbooks Film Art (1979) and Film History (1994) have shaped countless film students. After an insightful Hitchcock introduction that left me feeling as if I had downloaded an entire book to my central nervous system in only 12 minutes, the 4K, 3D digital restoration began.

What was most exciting about this often-dismissed Hitchcock flick (aside from the highly effective 3D itself) was recognizing how incorrect critics in 1954 had been when they complained about how pathetic the 3D was utilized. Re-evaluating Dial M For Murder in the present 3D age, it is overwhelmingly clear that Hitchcock understood the complexity of his technique; instead of overusing the “in your face” gimmick he directed his attention toward utilizing the depth of the sets and perfectly placed props near the camera. Fifty-eight years later, even one of Hitchcock’s “lesser” films (even according to himself) is still paving the road for future films and filmmakers.


Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, US) The adorably awkward Greta Gerwig has been this generation’s “It Girl” since arriving on the indie scene in 2006 by way of director Joe Swanberg’s LOL. Frances Ha has given her what should prove to be her defining role in Noah Baumbach’s equally effervescent effort.
Baumbach’s mumblecore-anticipating, French New Wave-inspired films — Kicking and Screaming (1995), Mr. Jealousy (1997), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and Greenberg (2010) — showcase flawed characters who some find so intolerable that watching a Baumbach film feels like getting stuck at an upper-class dinner party with the most unlikable people on the planet. But as in a Coen Brothers or Woody Allen film, these characters’ ugly truths are the key to what makes them so memorable.

In fact, it’s why all of Baumbach’s films have struck such a chord with me for 15-plus years. I keep seeing my own personality pitfalls in these Gen X-ers’ self-destructive decisions (I will literally say out loud, “I just pulled a Greenberg.”) And Frances Ha‘s hilarious train-of-thought odyssey is as profound as it is whimsical. With a cast pulled straight out of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls and added to the glorious black and white cinematography by Sam Levy (2008’s Wendy and Lucy), this ode to Allen’s Manhattan (1979) most definitely will make it to the top of a ton of critic’s lists. But more importantly you’ll find yourself thinking about the film as it relates to the most embarrassing moments of your own life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THh1krqYwo4

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark) Easily one of the most horrific and disturbing films ever made, and what’s even more frightening is that it’s a documentary. I have tried to explain this film to numerous people since being utterly transfixed and totally destroyed by it and often I see an odd glaze creep across the listener’s eyes. Filmed over a six-year period in Indonesia by filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing plays out like a misanthropic satire, where the characters are so honest about their pure apathy towards other human lives that you as a viewer become unaware of what psychological quicksand lies ahead.

Again, this is a documentary and as it painstakingly introduces you to a group of elders in a small Indonesian village, self-revered war heroes from the military coup of the Communist government in 1965. Their leader, Anwar, and his friends decide they don’t want to just tell their war stories for a documentary, they want to re-enact each type of their actual killings in all the flair and glory of the movies that they grew up watching — John Wayne Westerns, extravagant musicals, and gangster epics like Scarface (1983). What ensues feels like Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930) or even the third act of Hamlet and could leave you absolutely accosted, obliterated, and feeling an unwanted amount of affectionate understanding. Either way, you will never be the same after watching this movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKG63WoOFGI

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK) My favorite film of the festival takes place on the post-production set of a Dario Argento-esque, Italian horror film in the late 1970s-early 80s. This hypnotic, nostalgic, and ultimately transcendental experimental exercise will test the patience of just about every audience member. But anyone who has worked at a job (much less on the production of a film) where the possibility of losing the concept of time, as well as one’s grasp on reality, is a possibility may be able to conquer this monotonous, mind-bending ode to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981). (Actual quote from a fellow press member leaving the screening: “Are you kidding me?!”)

Another quote — this one by filmmaker Paul Schrader, in his life-altering book Transcendental Style In Film (1972)  — says it best: “I would rather do something really small of some value than do what Marty Scorsese’s doing. I don’t see the fun in that.”

Top films of the 32 films I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival:

1. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (UK)
2. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (Denmark)
3. Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (Canada)
4. Michael Haneke’s Amour (Austria)
5. Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem (US)
6. Jun Lana’s Bwakaw (Philippines)
7. Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (Portugal)
8. Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (US)
9. Brian De Palma’s Passion (Germany/France)
10. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths (UK)
11. Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season (Iran/Turkey)
12. Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (India)

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

(Buzzed-about fest favorites that I was sadly unable to screen: David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, Ben Affleck’s Argo, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, and Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy).

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University and hosts Midnites for Maniacs, a film series devoted to underrated, overlooked, and dismissed cinema.

Party with us (and toast the Cindy Sherman show) on SFMOMA’s roof

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Party with us (and toast the Cindy Sherman show) on SFMOMA’s roof

This evening, Thu/27, the Guardian is teaming up with SFMOMA for a super-neato event marking the coming end of the awesome Cindy Sherman show: “A toast to Cindy Sherman.”

Every Thursday evening, 6pm-8:45, is half-price admission to the museum (thats when all the cool people go). Now, throw in the gorgeous rooftop sculpture garden, complimentary wine from local vintners Bluxome Street Winery, and wild popup drag performances from three of the queens from our Tastes of Cindy photospread.

All this plus full access to the Cindy show itself and the rest of the mueum? You’re Sherman me! Full info after the jump:

Toast the final days of Cindy Sherman at SFMOMA (closing Oct 8) with a fabulous evening on SFMOMA’s Rooftop presented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian!

Come check out pop-up drag performances by Lil’ Miss Hot Mess, Boychild, and Ladybear — artists who re-created works by Cindy Sherman for the SF Bay Guardian’s fantastic piece, “Tastes of Cindy.”

Guests are encouraged to bring cameras and be inspired to create their own photographs. There will be a cash bar + complimentary wine from Bluxome Winery.

This is the perfect opportunity to catch Cindy Sherman’s blockbuster retrospective at SFMOMA before it closes. Don’t forget to invite your friends!

This event is FREE with half-priced Thursday evening admission! All ages are encouraged to attend

“A TOAST TO CINDY SHERMAN”

Thu/27, 6pm-8:45pm, free with half-price admission to museum

SFMOMA

151 Third St., SF

Facebook invite


 

TIFF happens, part two!

Sue Vaughan
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Read Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ first report from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival here.

In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea) This highly enjoyable Éric Rohmer-esque vehicle for Isabelle Huppert continues Hong’s tradition as being the Korean Woody Allen by making a highly personal comedies. Huppert is masterful bouncing in and out of each random-yet-interconnected sequence, but Yu Jun-sang steals the show as the local lifeguard who hilariously channels Roberto Benigni (circa Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 Down By Law). It’s one of the funniest comic performances of 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kveNw8uD2kY

Passion (Brian De Palma, Germany/France) Brian De Palma is back, and primed for those of us who love the way he remixes his favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies (see: 1976’s Obsession, 1980’s Dressed To Kill, 1984’s Body Double, and 2002’s Femme Fatale). This time, though, De Palma remakes a French thriller: Alain Corneau’s 2010 Love Crime. It begins with a whiter-than-Wonder Bread color scheme and structurally devolves into something much more sinister combined with a crisp HD cinematography by Jose Luis Alcain (of Pedro Almodovar fame.)

De Palma said in the press that he really wanted someone who “understood how to make a woman look beautiful” — and by gawd, leads Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace not only look flawless but deliver deliciously diabolical performances. Passion also boasts what has to be one of De Palma’s most exciting conclusions. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again! Who says De Palma peaked with Scarface (1983)?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-AkWDkXcMY

Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap, India) Only 10 critics (yes, I counted) at the festival completed both parts of Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, which runs five hours and 15 minutes long. But I feel those of us who did are bonded together forever.

This historical Hindi gang epic, which begins in 1941 ends in the present day, is massive film that transcends generations and should make Ram Gopal Varma (of Sarkar films fame, clearly an inspiration here) proud. Director Anurag Kashyap pays attention to the details: wonderfully changing fashion and hair styles, ever-evolving movie posters on the alley walls. Not only is Gangs a tribute to the history of Hindi cinema, it establishs quite brilliantly where and what time period the characters are in — and during a five and half hour movie, you need all the help you can get.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SiHa6gVuyI&feature=related

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, US) This extremely hyped Harmony Korine dream project does exactly what you could ever fantasize about by delivering a T&A-filled exploitation film, led by James Franco as a grimy, gold-grilled-grinning, dreadlocked drug dealer who lives to prey on bikini-clad young girls (which is perfectly punctuated by the brilliant casting of Disney darling Selena Gomez.)

Spring Breakers is poised to become Korine’s most popular film to date, but its commercial appeal will likely overshadow perhaps his greatest film: Lotus Community Workshop, which played the San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this year and features a legendary performance by the almighty Val Kilmer! Don’t miss either of these soon-to-be contemporary cult classics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgzkzVI5O3c

Aftershock (Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez, US) Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez’s earthquake horror flick Aftershock is a gleefully mean-spirited grindhouse thriller that sends a group of annoying American tourists (led by Roth himself, as the dorkiest douchebag of the year) into earthquake-ridden Santiago, Chile. Throw in every tried and true obstacle from 70s genre flicks such as Mark Robson’s Earthquake (1974) and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) and you’ve got either one helluva hilarious tongue-in-cheek horror roughie, or, as some critics leaving the press screening were saying: “One of the worst films of the year. It definitely should go straight-to-streaming.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YjIWEky81M

Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, Canada) Winner of the Best Canadian Feature at this year’s fest, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways is yet another OCD, gorgeously-designed love story; it fits perfectly alongside his extremely personal I Killed My Mother (2009) and his devastatingly spot-on hipster classic Heartbeats (2010).

Once again, Dolan’s characters are allowed to feel obsessive about one another while encased in jaw-dropping mises en scène. Some critics seem to take issue with this 24-year-old’s influences (Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodovar), which led many reviews suggesting that Dolan needs to hire an editor (Laurence Anyways clocks in at two hours and 41 minutes).

But I would argue that this epic, gender-bending love story needs to take its time to do what no other film has ever done right. By humanizing not only Laurence, the transgendered lead character (epically performed by Raúl Ruiz’s ingenue, Melvil Poupaud), but also his life-long lover Fred, performed with an Elizabeth Taylor-esque guttural passion by Suzanne Clément, who won the Best Actress prize in this year’s Cannes Film Festival’s sidebar competition, Un Certain Regard.

For those willing to give in to a decade’s worth (1989-1999) of hypnotic set and costume designs, cryptic character development, a crew of campy castaways, and a killer soundtrack ranging from Visage to Celine Dion, Laurence Anyways should elevate Dolan from Canada’s best kept-secret to being an integral leader of a post-gender film movement that is just about to explode.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University and hosts Midnites for Maniacs, a film series devoted to underrated, overlooked, and dismissed cinema.

“Z is for Zest”: A kids book of alphabet affirmations

Andrew Lam
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Perhaps you have run aground of late, or know someone who has. Maybe you’ve forgotten your alphabet (or know somebody who has.) At any rate, a Bay Area couple would like to help. Rebecca Kovan and Daniel MacIntyre have put together a lovely, illustrated ABCs book perfect for remembering your values. Its name is Alphabet Living, and we challenge you to click through the above slideshow and not dissolve in a puddle of love. Or a stain of irritation, depending at what point in your Folsom Street Fair comedown you are.

The duo (“Hobo Dan” and “Dr. Bee” as they are calling themselves for the sake of the printing) found it necessary to craft their own A-to-Z exploration when they got pregnant with their babe Julien, who now figures in the book’s promotional video. Hobo Dan and Dr. Bee wanted to make a book talking about life they way they want to live it, which as you can tell from these images include acting zestfully and questioningly, and being . Each letter’s accompanied by a poem, which reinforces said letter’s lesson.

And lest you think that the project is just a bunch of hippies with paintbrushes, consider this: the book’s already gone through its Kickstarter process and been funded completely, which makes Hobo D. and Dr. Bee the first authors in awhile to send their press release out after the funded creation of their book. 

So congratulations Alphabet Livers! And congratulations to us, because gosh darn we’re worth it. 

 

Politics, love, and photography: ‘Time Stands Still’ in Mountain View

Sue Vaughan
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Some people need to take photos to snap their chaotic perspective into focus. This is the theme of the 2009 Tony-nominated play Time Stands Still, which just enjoyed a successful run (ending Sept. 16) at TheaterWorks in Mountain View. I saw both the TheatreWorks version and the play on Broadway, and as a comparison, I found that this production kept the set and acting to high standards.

Two journalists, a couple, return from Iraq after documenting the affects of the American occupation. The woman photojournalist, Sarah Goodwin, was badly injured from a roadside bomb while on the job. This occurred when her partner, James Dodd, had already returned to New York City after witnessing an incident of especially traumatizing civilian deaths.

Although the play shows us the aftermath of their time documenting civilian casualties, their trauma is tangible. The play sparks many philosophical debates as you watch the couples personal lives, as they struggle to regain steadier footing back on home soil.


The juxtaposition between the main couple and their best friends — Goodwin’s editor Richard Ehrlich and his young, happy-go-lucky partner, Mandy Bloom — is fascinating. On Broadway the young woman was played by Christina Ricci, and in this production Sarah Moser does an exquisite job with this complex role.

Although Goodwin (Rebecca Dines, who did an amazing job portraying the fierce temperament of her character) has the most lines in the play, Moser as Mandy created a stereotype and then unpacked that two-dimensional portrayal. At first it’s easy to judge the personality type that Mandy embodies, and to assume that she “just doesn’t get it” compared to these worldly journalists. In comparison she seems shallow, fluffy and even stupid.

But Mandy has the pleasure of delivering one of the most striking lines in the play — as she turns to James and Sarah after a charged debate they were having with Richard, Mandy is able to have the last word, in complete exasperation and disbelief: “Why can’t you just let yourself enjoy life? You are always focusing on war and death, and I think if you can’t also enjoy being alive, then really, what’s the point?” This line drew an audible murmur of acknowledgement from the audience.

As a journalist and human rights activist I found this play incredibly fascinating. It highlights the differences between a passive observer and someone who can affect change, and the obligation some Westerners feel to forsake comfortable lifestyle options and put themselves in dangerous situations. How much can taking a photo of the slain bodies of innocent civilians in foreign countries really show respect to the victims? I would call the play an exploration of the lines between personal and professional, one country and another, taking a photo and actually understanding what is being photographed.

The production was amazing, and despite that some lines were delivered in exaggerated tones, I think that the hearts of Donald Margulies’ script and those bringing it alive, including director Leslie Martinson and scenic designer Erik Flatmo, shone through. (Playwright Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play Dinner with Friends.)

A powerful work like Time Stands Still has the ability to motivate audience members to become politically aware and active. “Well, what’s the point of preaching to the choir?” James complains after he and Sarah return home from a political play with Mandy and Richard. “The audience is just going to say, oh how awful, how unjust! And then go back to taking a huge bite of their fancy appetizer.”

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