It was a foggy, sloppy evening in Golden Gate Park, and I was activating my gloom-whine during our walk to Pasquale’s but then: HEATTECH. Thanks Uniqlo! Your Union Square pop-up, and impending West Coast flagship store opening, half-translated catch phrases, mega-cheap Hiroshima-born line of basic clothing, and all, saved my dinner date.
Though, the pop-up shop that is now open isn’t the dreamland of cheap basics and jewel tones I’d been promised — stock is mainly limited to HEATTECH, cashmere sweaters, puffy jackets and the zipper-free “easy legging pants” I am now living in. (I prefer to refer to them as “future pants,” but believe the layperson terminology would be “jeggings.”) The day we visited, it was staffed about three times as heavily as it needed to be — hyper-training sessions for the future staff of its store at 111 Powell set to open on October 5.
Clothes that make you warmer
Why should you care about another affordable shop for solid t-shirts when that neighborhood already hosts a passel of H&Ms, Forever 21s, and other number-initial combos? I don’t see those chains featuring Maru in any of their opening-day promos, firstly.
Secondly, the fog monster. I was a little skeptical of some of Uniqlo’s HEATTECH line of clothing claims (the unnamed anti-perspiration chemicals in its men’s clothes gave me pause, and the fact that the women’s line eschews these for an “extra-soft” fabric feel is not that cute.) But gender-neutrality aside, those “hollow fiber threads” that Uniqlo uses to make its patterned and plain-colored line of turtlenecks, tank tops, and long-and-short-sleeved HEATTECH shirts are on the money, when it comes to depression-producing SF freeze. Time will tell how many washes the effect will withstand, but my boatneck long-sleeve was magic on aforementioned Golden Gate hike.
I’m hoping to learn more about this miracle of wardrobe at the brand’s upcoming fashion-tech panel discussion, where Yasunobu Kyogoku, Uniqlo’s chief operating officer will chat with Refinery29 editor Katie Hintz-Zambrano, director of merchandising for the Academy of Art’s fashion school Keanan Duffty, and Brit + Co.‘s Brit Moran. They’re covering clothing technology, which includes how its marketed on ye olde social networks.
“Making Life a Little Better” Uniqlo fashion-tech panel discussion
All Ashland’s a stage at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
It’s 100 degrees in Ashland, Oregon, which makes the prospect of sitting in an air-conditioned theater an appealing one, even if it weren’t at the justifiably renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival. An Ashland institution since 1935, the OSF has grown from a humble weekend-long affair to a nine-month-long theatrical juggernaut, and although it’s mid-week in August, all three venues are packed with festival-goers.
A few things reveal themselves to the festival tyro immediately, not least of all that there’s a whole lot more than Shakespeare going on at this festival. Of the 11 plays comprising the 2012 season, just four are written by Shakespeare, two others inspired by him, and the rest, including a rowdy rendition of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, have pretty much nothing to do with the playwright at all, save that they are plays.
My festival experience gets off to a rocky start with the puzzling Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, an adaption by OSF’s artistic director Bill Rauch and Tracy Young (whose first collaborative version of same appeared onstage in 1998). An attempt to highlight the similarities between the three disparate tales, the results can only generously be described as a disjointed mish-mash. Watching an irritatingly histrionic Medea (Miriam A. Laube) plot to murder her children as a lilting Rodgers and Hammerstein tune begins to swell across the stage is disconcerting at best, and leaves me both confused and cold.
Fortunately my frustrations are short-lived, as the next production on my list is the Rob Melrose-directed Troilous and Cressida, a visually stunning, disarmingly nuanced tale of the many levels of honor, and its interpretations.
Set in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, Melrose turns Cressida (played when I see it by understudy Brittany Brook) into a blue-jeaned tomboy with a gauzy veil and a quick wit, Troilus (Raffi Barsoumian) into a preternaturally handsome yet vulnerable youth in an all-too adult uniform, Ulysses (Mark Murphey) into a taciturn career soldier, and Ajax (Elijah Alexander) into an unstable sniper with little regard for rule or law. Smoothly-paced and forcefully performed by a strong, multi-ethnic cast, T&C easily becomes one of my favorites of the festival.
Next up is a foray to Ashland’s iconic Elizabethan Stage, modeled on the 17th century Fortune Theatre, a rival to the Globe. The show, a middle-of-the-road production of Henry V, boasts a few distinctive twists, including percussionist Kelvin Underwood — firmly ensconced in the musician’s gallery on the second floor — providing vigorous accompaniment to the action on a variety of noise-making devices, and several multilingual interludes, not just Katherine’s (Brooke Parks) Shakespeare-penned, double-entendre-laden French but also the deliberate use of ASL by deaf actor Howie Seago as the Duke of Exeter and his speaking interpreter/boy (Christine Albright) which adds an unexpected layer to both the character and to my own definition of multilingual.
I miss out on seeing one of the most buzzed-about shows of the season, All the Way, by Robert Schenkkan, about the first year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, starring ACT’s Jack Willis. Instead, I saw Party People, penned by performance ensemble UNIVERSES. (Both plays commissioned by OSF as part of their ongoing American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle). Last, but definitely not least, I attend an astutely madcap production of Animal Crackers, directed by Allison Narver, starring Mark Bedard as Captain Spaulding/Groucho, John Tufts as Ravelli/Chico, and Brent Hinkley as The Professor/Harpo.
Considering that the evening before I had watched Tufts as a grim-faced Henry V murder a felonious Hinkley as Bardolph, my respect for their versatility and aggressively comedic chops grows with every scene. Quick on their collective feet, mixing in bits of off-the-cuff improv and oddience participation, the cast infuses each outrageous gag with sparkling vitality, never dropping a beat even when their characters drop their pants (“where’s the flash?”). In short, it’s a memorable end to a memorable weekend, despite not being written by the venerable Bard.
The annual Street Food Festival enlivens blocks of the Mission every year with many of our great food trucks, booths manned by the kitchen staff of our favorite SF restaurants, and a few visiting guests — which at this year’s fest on August 18 included my favorite Portland food cart Eurotrash, and the adorable Linda Green of Ms Linda’s Catering from New Orleans. The most significant addition to the Street Food lineup this year wasn’t a cart at all, but rather an entire event — the Friday night before the main festival, the Night Market took over the Alemany Farmers Market. In the whipping winds of South San Francisco we sampled unforgettable bites that were not available at the Street Food Fest. The festive, Chinese lantern-laced outdoor space made the Night Market a stand-out. I hope it becomes a yearly feature.
1. The star of the Night Market was The Boss Hog, the debut of a new project from the Bone & Gristle Boys (SF’s Ryan Farr of 4505 Meats and Rhode Island’s Matt Jennings of Farmstead).
2. One of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had, The Boss Hog is slow-roasted pork, cornmeal-fried pork cutlet, Vermont cheddar, smoked pickles, red onion, greens, jalapeno ranch dressing, Farr’s chicharrones
3. One of my favorite Portland food carts Eurotrash showed off fresh grilled prawns loaded in a baguette with spicy curry slaw
4. At the Night Market, Fifth Floor chef David Bazirgan’s delicious fava bean falafel wrap
5. Ken Ken Ramen served jellyfish at Friday’s Night Market
6. Vada Pav (spicy potato puff sandwich) from Juhu Beach Club
7. Friday’s festive Night Market — a tradition I hope continues each year
8. State Bird Stuart – State Bird Provisions’ Chef Stuart Brioza assembles burrata and fried garlic bread
9. The top taste of Saturday’s festival was State Bird Provisions’ (Bon Appetit’s 2012 # 1 New US Restaurant) hand-pulled burrata atop addictive fried garlic bread
10. A Korean favorite from the Inner Richmond, To Hyang’s braised oxtail with daikons, carrots, dates, hard-boiled egg
**AN EARLY VERSION OF THE DINNER FLYER SAID AUGUST ON IT — THIS IS INDEED HAPPENING IN SEPTEMBER!**
Pleasurable it is, to announce the announcement of Hella Vegan Eats occupying Dear Mom (2700 16th St., SF. (415) 625-3362)’s rotating pop-up kitchen spot this Sat/1. Our Street Food Festival favorites will be whipping up deep-fried butternut squash pizza nuggets (our words, not theirs), an old-fashioned doughnut stuffed with beet burger, green curry coconut rice tamales, and more from 6pm-1am. Plus, animal product-free cupcakes from West Oakland’s Fat Bottom Bakery.
And, brunch! The same day, 11:30am-5pm (feel free to sleep in, see) for a menu including vegan french toast with coconut “bacon,” fried banana, strawberry, and maple-peanut butter syrup. Also: mini-burritos. It’s not all vegan, but Mission Mission wants you to know that Dear Mom is in the middle of a veritable Pop-Up Jubilee.
The ladies are raising funds for a food truck, too. Check out their cute video:
Er, if you have $200 to spare for this flawless Nikki Dyer latex piece. Clean with warm water. Do not scrub; just wipe away dirt. And maybe keep away from kids?
There was no wine and cheese at the opening of “Leave the Beef on the BBQ.” There were massive slabs of meat though, onto which Guerrero Gallery owner Andres Guerrero slathered sauce and tried to look inconspicuous.
The crowd, which spilled out onto the sunny Saturday streets of San Francisco on August 25, was mainly there to see art anyhow. The exhibit was the most diverse graffiti-themed assemblage Guerrero had shown to date, and the graff heads in attendance had a lot to look at — not to mention reflect on. Graffiti, if the works inside were anything to judge by, is at the junction of, about 70 different artistic directions.
“We’ve got your standard graffiti piecers, you also have guys that focus on tag style, we also have real, true bombers,” Guerrero told me on the phone a few days later. The walls of the ex-White Walls gallerist’s vast, skylit gallery held clusters of works: some framed, some on canvas, some pieces seemingly translated direct from the side of a Muni bus, some a bit harder to connect to the underground art legacy that birthed them. To name all the artists assembled would take up a lot of space here (see the gallery’s website for a full list, obviously), but a few stand-outs include: Richard Simmons and Lil’ Kim album covers, artfully bubble-lettered by Pez, looping tentacles straight out of the TWS style book by Estria, and a carefully-drawn urban jumblescape by Gorey.
The mishmash highlighted graffiti’s progression into the fine art world — and its complicated, give-and-take relationship with the rest of contemporary art, Guerrero says. A dog smokes a cigarrette in an otherwise classically-themed piece. This would be the work of Kuma, who you can also find tagging over animal portraiture street art in Brooklyn. Complicated, no?
If it all seemed of somewhat dissimilar provenance on the walls, that was the point. Guerrero culled “Beef” participants from across the country, across the world — and across generations. “We have 1970 pioneers, the leaders and originators of this format,” he said. “Then there’s the current graff guys who are really taking it to another level.” Some have been showing in galleries for years, for others, Saturday marked the first time their work had popped up indoors.
It was challenging to pull it all together, Guerrero says. For chrissakes, there’s over 70 artists represented in the show. But the work was a labor of love.
“What prompted [the show], or really moved me to do it is that I really want to have fun,” he reflects. “I felt out of touch with the culture.” He reverts back to shout-out mode. “It was more to honor these guys. They’re the ones who lead the way right now in terms of a lot of contemporary works and influence.”
Black lace, kimonos, and colorful wigs ruled the day this weekend in Japantown at the J-Pop Summit Festival Aug. 25-26. Also popular this year, for those of you trend-spotting, were sweetly wobbling attenae, which announced the presence of the head attached as they weaved through the booths, stopping here and there to check out the Vocaloid dance contest, an Evangelion fan’s robotic get-up, or the Sunday performance by 18-year singer Kylee. Although there was music, food, and things to buy, it was really all about the clothes. Whether they were dressing up to be a favorite anime character or simply sporting super-sweet tights or an awesome leather jacket, those on the street were working it in some pretty amazing threads.
This year’s Outside Lands, the three-day extravaganza of some of the top musical acts in the world and quality food and drink (this is SF, after all) in the beauty of Golden Gate Park, felt more packed than ever. But despite throngs descending on SF from all over the country that turning Golden Gate Park into a sea of trash — thanks clean-up crews! — Outside Lands magic happened each day.
For example on Sunday, when performer Jack White popped up for an impromptu set, surprising fans who happened to be traversing the eucalyptus groves near Choco Lands. It was magic eating local foods in a festival setting, like dreamy Italian Del Popolo (although hour-plus lines and daily sell-outs were a drag) or everything from Ryan Farr’s two 4505 Meats stands sustaining us on those long walks between stages with the perfect “damn good cheeseburger” and “yum yum” fried chicken sandwich. You could feel the magic in the new-this-year Beer Lands, where one could sip craft beers while taking in the Foo Fighters, Regina Spektor, or Beck (Although the training given to those pouring beers was far from magic. One pourer for The Bruery on Saturday told me confidently that this incredible brewery from the O.C. was from San Diego.)
Magic occurred when Metallica, flames, lasers, and all, delivered the tightest, hardest-rocking set of the weekend. Not long after the noon hour, fun. swept up the entire Polo Field in their rousing anthems. Magic reigned at Stevie Wonder’s set on Sunday night. His voice sounded as tight and beautiful as ever, even at age 62. His joy and wisdom radiated from the moment he took the stage, streaming out to a field full of thousands basking in waves of pink, blue, and green lights, foggy Pacific Ocean air, and the voice of a legend.
Full captions:
1. Ryan Farr’s ridiculously good Chicken “yum yum” sandwich was one of the festival’s best eats. Watch for it at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market
2. 4505 Meats’ chicharrones bars were like rice krispie treats made with Ryan Farr’s unparalleled chicharrones, puffed rice, marshmallow, and Apple Jacks or Cocoa Puffs
3. Misty, dreamy lighting changes colors, illuminating Golden Gate Park trees at night
4. The hilarious, improvisational Reggie Watts rocked comedy and music Friday afternoon (and here, in the media tent following his set)
5. The Wine Lands tent impressed once again with 49 wineries. 2012 highlights included Villa Creek, Robert Sinskey, Qupe, Kermit Lynch, Palmina, The Scholium Project, and Wind Gap
6. Beck keeps the crowd happy at the Land’s End stage on Friday
7. The new-this-year Beer Lands hosted 16 California breweries selected by brewmaster Dave McLean of Magnolia Pub. Highlights included the Bruery’s brilliantly bitter Humulus APA and Sierra Nevada’s Outside Lands saison
8. Under faux Victorian facades, chef John Fink of The Whole Beast grilled eight to 10 whole lambs per day at Lamb Lands, an excellent 2012 addition to Outside Land’s food selection
9. Michael Mina’s RN74 and Bourbon Steak served whole roasted lamb gyros, lamb poutine, sweet corn in lamb sausage crumbs at Lamb Lands
10. Thousands swarm the Polo Fields
11. Saturday in the media tent, Magnolia and Alembic brewer Dave McLean (center) talks Beer Lands and The Whole Beast’s John Fink dishes on lamb
12. Choco Lands was an enchanted, Tim Burton-esque fantasy in the eucalyptus groves, with Day of the Dead accents and an array of chocolate carts and treats
13. Outside Lands ends with best set of all: Stevie Wonder exudes joy and life to thousands in the Polo Field, his voice in top form
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New York-New Jersey street artist LNY recently attended the world’s first all-female street art festival. He reports on the highs and lows of Living Walls for the Guardian
Atlanta’s Living Walls street art conference celebrated its third year of mural-making August 15-19, changing the landscape of a city where most movement is done by car at 60 miles per hour. Having established itself as one of the best gatherings of street arts out there, the festival celebrated its third year by hosting a historic first: an all-female cast of artists.
I, a dude, was invited to the conference as a guess speaker, so consider the following account slightly influenced by me being super-stoked about all the work going up around me.
But trust me, this was big. Living Walls’ executive director Monica Campana and communications director Alex Parrish’s curatorial direction took on the notion of street art as yet another high-walled boys club. Their team created a temporary space of mural-making, lectures, film screenings, and more that — compared with the bro-heavy character of the rest of the street art world — highlighted how gendered the whole game really is. Community, identity, agency, the female body, and issues of public space all came up during the conference – and we certainly didn’t avoid heated reactions from ATL’s citizenry, as controversy spewed from the city’s nightly news machine.
The walls that went up around Atlanta last week are definitely different. The work was fresh and daring, a step outside the standard street art box (literally — art spilled from some of the walls onto surrounding sidewalks.) The festival took over an abandoned house, artists covering its exterior and interior walls.
Half of the year’s artists had never done public art before, but the incredible works that the city was left with by the end of the conference revealed the curatorial talent of the Living Walls team – the experiment was a success.
While at the festival, I sat down with Campana and Parish to talk direction. Was Living Walls going to continue to be all-female in the future? Campana thinks not. “I think that there should be [a yearly all-female street art conference], but not Living Walls. Maybe as an extension of it… but you are limited by how many girls do graffiti, [and do] art that is not just trying to imitate what the boys are doing.”
“This has been such a huge learning experience for me and it is true that females work with space differently,” she said. “It is a different sensitivity.”
On Sunday night, we sat outside that art house as the neighbors served up roasted pig. Melbourne-based artist Miso walked up and weighed in what she’d seen so far that week. “The work of most of these artists could pass as male. For example, Fefe [Talavera] could be a dude.”
Campana chimed in. “Or Tika — Juxtapoz wrote an article on her saying she was a guy.”
Campana was unafraid that creating an all-female festival would tokenize the artists. “How many little girls will be so inspired by seeing all these women painting? We shouldn’t be too scared of classifying ourselves because…” She trails off, tired of theorizing after a hectic week. “I don’t give a shit, I really don’t care.” She was over it, and really, the walls spoke for themselves.
It wasn’t just the XX choromosone-heavy nature of Living Walls that set it apart from other street art festivals. Take, for example, funding. Constant fundraising in the Atlanta community has kept Living Walls visible year-round, has helped grow its army of volunteers, and has made it possible to avoid the corporate presence you’ll see in Miami’s mural-heavy Wynwood Walls neighborhood during the Art Basel art fair, where Living Walls has sponsored walls in previous years.
Parrish finds the Miami festival overwhelming, and is critical of its “open art museum” approach. By creating a walled-in area where murals are displayed and curated as pieces would be in a museum, she felt the organizers behind Wynwood Walls had taken the “street” out of the “art.”
“Adding that context to street art, which happens in accessible public space, takes away a huge part of it,” she said. “I don’t care how much hype you add, it still makes it into something else.”
She disagreed with “ambient marketing,” ad campaigns that appropriate the language of street art to proselytize corporate America.
“That takes away from the artwork, from the dialogue, because it immediately redirects the public’s attention to these products,” said Parrish. “I think this is why our conference and organization are becoming so much bigger. People can see that we have denied [corporate sponsorship] as a necessity.”
And yes, there was controversy. Argentinian artist Hyuro painted a wall in the Chosewood neighborhood based on one of her previous animation works. It shows a sequence in which a naked woman spins as she grows body hair, which turns into a dress that she takes off. As it falls to the ground, the dress becomes a wolf and walks off the wall.
According to Campana’s Facebook wall, the wall’s owner has ordered the mural’s removal within the week. Some residents were ruffled over the piece’s nudity, and questioned its artistic merit. The wall is near a mosque, a church, and is on a route frequented by the area’s schoolbuses. On a local news show, parents expressed concern that their children would think it’s okay for women to disrobe in public.
Herein lies a central challenge of any public mural program: how much should it cater to residents? Is pleasing everyone even possible?
“It’s really hard to place a needle in the head with that one,” said Parrish. “People are different, and they have different beliefs and cultures. [Hyuro’s] wall is only highlighting something that requires thought and discussion. If that is all that the wall does this year and if they are completely upset with it, then I’m OK with it. I think that when someone, or something, [that’s] very direct and visual makes people start a conversation then that means a lot.”
The wolf mural, she said, only brought issues to light that always have existed in that neighborhood, for example the prostitution, the poverty and disenfranchisement of some of its inhabitants.
At the end of the day, getting rid of Hyuro’s mural is not going to do anything positive toward getting rid of prostitution in the area or stop real estate prices from dropping in an neighborhood that has a prison in it. Whatever the outcome, it created a conversation about the female form in public space, and the role of art in community. I don’t think you could find a more fitting outcome for an all-female mural conference that aimed to reshape Atlanta’s urban landscape and engage its citizens in dialogue.
Granted I’m not out in Berkeley a ton, but I found it strange that someone had tagged an entire concrete side of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive the very first week that thousands of impressionable minds were invading the UC Berkeley campus and waiting in half-block lines to enjoy a free grilled cheese sandwich in between classes.
But duh, everyone (everyone in the Bay who would tag a museum wall, at least) is big on Twist. The “SNITCH” tag, just like the massive red piece that obscured the museum’s glass front doors, was engineered by McGee and his some-dozen team of be-cardiganed, baseball cap flat-brimmed artistic cohorts, many of whom were still bustling about on Thursday trying to get the exhibition ready for the opening reception mere hours away.
He came up earning tagger cred for his masterful tags and cartoon anti-heroes all over the streets of SF, but the hyper-successful and hyper-problematic museum-street art confluence is a crossroad that Twist has stood firmly atop for decades now. Of course he’s the first to tag his own opening.
I’m not going to go into too much depth about the exhibit here, because that would make the paper piece I’m going to write about it in a few weeks totally pointless, but know that it is the most ambitious spread BAM/PFA has ever undertaken (how the hell did they get that van in there? Curator Larry Rinder had no answers for the passel of press assembled at the preview), in terms of mediums it is wildly diverse, and you will probably never see any thing like it because the days of astronomical funding for art are dead and many of the rarely-seen Twist projects — he hasn’t had a Bay Area solo show since 1994 — took stacks to produce.
If you’re looking for a good moment to check out the show, I suggest that you don’t do it during university passing time unless you dig flip-flops, and that you coordinate instead with one of the rad events that BAM/PFA has scheduled to run in accordance with the show. Here’s a couple:
L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Sept. 21,curator Larry Rinder in conversation with Jeffrey Deitch 6-7pm; Lawrence Rinder; Devendra Banhart, Justin Hoover, and Chris Treggiari 7:30-9pm, $7. McGee chats with the guy who funded his biggest splashes, Deitch, and exhibit curator Rinder. The artist’s SF Art Institute fellow alum Barnhardt brings his wacky brand of folk to the L@TE night event, with Hoover and Treggiari slinging their street-based cuisine.
Oct. 19,Jim Prigoff: “Graffiti: A History in Photographs” 6pm; T.I.T.S. and Erick Lyle (Scam)7:30-9pm, $7. Prigoff, along with peers Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, Jack Stewart, Henry Chalfant, traveled the world when graff was still in its young’n stages, snapping shots of a youth-based art form that had yet to run through the commercial grinder. Tonight, he runs through some of his archival images of Bay greats like DREAM, and of course, Twist. Zinester Lyle and grrrl mob quartet T.I.T.S. raise a rebel yell later that night at L@TE.
Nov. 16, Peggy Honeywell and Bill Daniel 7:30-9pm, $7. Visual artist Clare Rojas, a.k.a. folk singer Peggy Honeywell shares an affinity with partner McGee for aliases, and is sure to turn out a hot show (check out our 2011 interview for her woman-centric, quietly lovely artwork). Bill Daniels tracks indie film and hobos with his “dirt lot cinema.”
If Friday means Some Thing — the popular late night drag performance showcase at the Stud — then tonight means something More: opening night of “Work MORE! #5,” the hybrid performance installation headed up by Some Thing’s charismatic and catalytic hostess, Vivvyanne Forevermore, alt-persona of artist-curator Mica Sigourney.
Tonight has even a little more More than that: it’s also four years to the month since Vivvyanne Forevermore first stepped onto the San Francisco stage. It’s an auspicious moment, in other words, for one of Sigourney’s more ambitious Work MORE! undertakings to date (with the possible exception of next year’s planed tour of Work MORE! #4, but more on that below). Number five brings together (at CounterPULSE this weekend) a group of drag queens, visual artists, dancers and performance artists in an overlapping series of collaborative performance installations that do away with the usual proscenium setting in favor of a loosely compartmentalized stage that’s more like a haunted gallery.
“Logistically, I’ve never done anything like this at all,” says Sigourney, speaking at a SOMA café last week. “It’s going to be too hot, it’s going to be too loud, and it’s not going to be easy.” But then, he immediately adds, “that’s not any different from a drag bar.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhWyKkUgRI
The Work MORE! series has been chipping away at the wall between nightlife and theatrical performance through five iterations and counting, so maybe people will understand that without much prompting. “Hopefully people will realize how much agency they have.”
As Work MORE! continues to grow in scope, it’s also grown in popularity, enough that Sigourney is able to float a little money in the direction of the artists. Not a lot yet, he admits, “but you don’t have to worry about buying your wig — and you can keep it afterwards.” Beyond the ambitious tour next year, Sigourney hopes to make Work MORE! a sustaining enterprise.
“I’d like it to be, not an institution, but a program that happens yearly or twice yearly that can support itself and can support the artists,” he says, explaining that that means supporting unique collaborations unlikely to take place anywhere else. “I mean Dean [Disaster] and Philip [Huang] as a collaborative team? I would never have thought of that,” marvels Sigourney.
“Or like Jonathan Solo, who is a beautiful illustrator and artist, a favorite of mine, and the fact that he’s working with Diamanda Kallas, that’s a valuable creative collaboration. I want to be able to facilitate that kind of work,” says Sigourney. “That’s what I want to do.”
More of last week’s conversation with Mica Sigourney follows.
San Francisco Bay Guardian When did you start doing drag? You started in theater; those were separate things entirely?
Mica Sigourney Yeah, I did theater for a long time. I started doing theater when I was five, like outside of school, continued in college for two years and then stopped. I moved to San Francisco in 2004. I had a residency at Jon Simms Center. Then I stopped again doing any performance from 2004 to 2008. I was drawing at that point, doing screen-printing and fine art, soft sculpture.
Then I started doing parties and nightlife. I started doing this party, which was called Tiara Sensation and is now called Some Thing. We moved to the Stud two months after it started. And when we moved to the Stud, I knew they had a stage there, and if we had a stage I had to host, because I was the host of the party. I mean that was my job. So it happened organically. I really didn’t want to. Like the first two numbers I did were terrible. I had no idea how to make a thing. But part of it too.
By the time I met Fauxnique I was already doing drag, but meeting Fauxnique — she came from a technical background in dance — just seeing the way different people had navigated it and gone through it was really helpful. So I started doing it four years ago this month.
SFBG You never had any drag inclinations before?
MS No, that’s not true. When I was younger I used to dress up a lot. You could say I was a club kid. I collected women’s clothes and high heels but I never bothered to do drag with them. As a teenager going out in New York I idolized drag queens, but I just never thought that I’d be able to do it right. There was like one time in 2001, when I was in San Francisco, where I stepped out in drag, but never did it again. It wasn’t until I met the right people that I felt supported, that I felt like I could try it.
SFBG These people gave you the knowledge you needed?
MS Completely. One of the ideas behind Work MORE! is that drag is a folk art. There’s not really a technique, drag is more like the modality that you participate in, so your knowledge comes from either directly witnessing it from somebody else, and studying them, or by watching someone else and having them teach you like a parent or a mentor. So my mentors would be Glamamore, who’s my drag mother; Kevin, the DJ at my party who’s a drag queen and has had an influence on me; Hoku Mama Swamp; and Fauxnique are all probably my immediate inspirations and people who significantly helped me in different ways.
SFBG How did Work MORE! start?
MS It started the first year of Too Much!, the Keith Hennessy thing when it was at the Off Center. Julie [Phelps] just reached out and asked me if I wanted to do something. And my club had just moved to Friday nights from Monday nights, so I’d been curating a show for that for a while, and I wanted to try to curate something outside of my nightclub scene. I was just getting into the dance world more, the art world more, and so I wanted to try writing a real curatorial statement, and so I just did and they let me do it. And every time I’ve been super moved by the amount of effort and what people make for it.
I just kept doing it as a side project for myself so I could stay fresh. And we’re going to tour next spring so last year we made this really big piece—so it’s different every year, which also keeps me interested.
SFBG What’s the show you’re touring with?
MS It’s going to be the show we did last year. The premise for that was that we took 11 solo artists and allowed them to sub-organize and create pieces together. It was hugely collaborative. We made a master list of 20 numbers. Then I cut it down. So each person was set up as a director of each number, and then cast different performers for each number, so it was just this network of people working together on these different pieces. It was very like segmented but overlapping. I’m hoping to take a modified version of that show on tour, starting with colleges, in April of next year. My goal is to do West Coast, Midwest, and South, and see if it has legs and try to take it to the East Coast and abroad if we can.
I mean, I never booked a tour so I didn’t realize how expensive it is. Also how expensive it is to travel with drag queens, because they need two hours to get ready, so you can’t, like, roll into a venue. You need to get there three hours ahead. Somebody has to be doing tech. It’s not like a literary tour or a band where you roll up and unload. It’s not that.
SFBG It’s a complex show too, as you were just describing.
MS Yeah, though now that we have the framework I can look at the video and say this [part] was directed this way by someone who may or may not be in the cast but that’s how we’re going to do it. The way it was generated was more in line with the mission of Work MORE! than the output. The output is a beautiful drag show that has a lot of people in it, more than you usually see because drag queens are usually solo artists. And you get to see them changing, there’ s exposure of the artifice and all that.
SFBG Have you toured before?
MS I went to London with Fauxnique [in her show, Faux Real]. We did it at the Hot August Fringe Festival.
SFBG How was that?
MS It was really cool. I didn’t know people were going to get all the references, because it’s so American — well, not completely American, but being a teenager in America and listening to Morrissey is really specific. People loved it. I think they were really confused by a woman doing drag, though.
SFBG It’s more unusual there?
MS I guess so. Also, in London all the drag queens sing their songs, whether or not they should. It’s live singing. So Fauxnique lip-syncing was a little different.
It makes sense when you call drag a folk art, especially considering the way things are learned and traded, but you also bring up the way it can be really regionally specific.
MS Absolutely. In San Francisco you have the new strong tradition of gross out, like lots of blood, taking off your clothes, what Trannyshack was really good at [fostering], which is beautiful and genius but really specific to here. I think with RuPaul’s Drag Race and the advent of Facebook and all that, things are probably becoming less specific, which is kind of sad to me.
But actually in the first Work MORE!, the assignment wasn’t collaborative. It was after the second Work MORE! that it became focused specifically on collaboration. The first one was about just tradition. Let’s go back to the traditions of lip sync, glamor and femininity. That was the assignment. You had to use those three things in extreme ways. It was about finding roots. Where does drag come from for us now? What are the things being ignored or that can be enhanced more? But a dream for me is to do a Work MORE! where it’s a collaboration between artists not from the U.S. and some from here. Because the social aspect [of Work MORE!] is about the sharing of traditions, and the strengthening of queer community, crossing lineages or genealogies. So I think that would be really interesting.
The push and pull of relationships is a great basis for a dance piece. Not only are relationships intimate, beautiful, and at times frustrating, but they also create magnetic moments, and sometimes pain. This weekend, two dance companies, Detour Dance and the Caitlin Elliott Dance Collective, have collaborated (see? Relationships) to present Along the Way, a production that includes all the basics: love, lust, plain old allure. I stopped by the final rehearsal to check out the romance and have come to the conclusion that it’s ready to seduce all comers.
Along the Way
Fri/24-Sun/26 8pm, $30-20 general admission, $15 artist or student admission
Of the several films I looked at this week, two must be mentioned up top: The Master and The Expendables 2. These films are notable not just because I spent my own hard-earned dollahs for entry (usually I see stuff for free, being a critic and whatnot), but also because I loved them both, despite one being a bound-for-Oscars effort by one of America’s most exciting filmmakers, and the other being a silly showcase for America’s most beloved aging action heroes. Only one, however, contained a scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger riding in a teeny Smart Car. Your guess which.
Mark your calendar using my guide to fall film happenings in the Bay Area and beyond in this week’s Guardian; and don’t miss Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ interview with Compliance director Craig Zobel. Jesse’s Compliance review is below the jump, along with more short takes on other films opening (and rep events happening) this week. This week also heralds a pair of horror movies (and, well, Halloween candy has started making appearances in Walgreens aisles…): The Apparition (review below) and Sinister (not screened for critics).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj2lR6Yp-gY
Alps Yorgos Lanthimos is well on his way to a reputation for sick yet oddly charming high-concept spectacles. Here, a group calling themselves Alps offers substitution services for the recently bereaved — that’s right, they’ll play your dead loved one to fill that hole in your life. Pitch-black comic moments abound, and the sensibility that made 2009’s Dogtooth so thrilling is distinctly present here, if not quite as fresh. Beyond the absurd logline, the plot is rather more conventional: things get out of hand when Alps member Anna (Aggeliki Papoulia, the eldest daughter from Dogtooth) gets too invested in one of her assignments, and the power structure of Alps turns on her. If Alps is not exactly a revelation, it’s still a promising entry in a quickly blossoming auteur’s body of work. (1:33) Roxie. (Sam Stander)
The Apparition Does this horror flick stand a ghost of a chance against its predecessors? So many bodies, so many mysteriously slammed doors, so many girl ghouls — they all surface in this obviously low-budget cash-in on the coattails of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Look to the signs: the slow build of zero-CGI/bucks tension-building devices like flung-open doors that are supposed to be locked, scarily grainy, nausea-inducing handheld video footage and spastic editing, and screams in pitch blackness—with a dash of everything from 1979’s Phantasm to Fulci to J-Horror. Prefaced by the story of psychics’ attempts to rouse a spirit, then a flashback to a group of college students’ try at recreating the séance by magnifying their brainwaves, The Apparition opens on the cute, perfectly made-up, and way-too-glamorous-for-suburbia Kelly (Ashley Greene) and her boyfriend Ben (Sebastian Stan), who have just moved into a new faceless development in the middle of nowhere, into a house her family has bought as an investment. Turns out they aren’t the only ones playing house, as the building’s alarm is continually bypassed, mysterious mold appears, and the neighbor’s adorable pup whimpers at thin air and obligingly dies in their laundry room. Matters go from bad to worst, as some invisible force does in Kelly’s cactus, messes up her closet, and blows the lights — all of which also sounds like the antics of a lousy roommate. Add in choppy, continuity-destroying editing; throwaway dialogue; music that sounds like it came from Kelly’s favorite store, Costco; overt appropriations like a slithery, long-haired ghoul girl that slimes her way out of a cardboard box; and that important, indelibly spooky image that comes far too late to count — and you’ll find yourself rooting for the fiend to put these kids out of their misery. (1:22) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdONydDX44I
Compliance No film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival encountered as much controversy as Craig Zobel’s Compliance. At the first public screening, an all-out shouting match erupted, with an audience member yelling “Sundance can do better!” You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Every screening (public and press) that followed was jam-packed with people hoping to experience the most shocking film at Sundance, and the film does not disappoint. (Beware: every review I have happened upon has unnecessarily spoiled major plots in the film, which is based on true events.) What is so impressive about Zobel’s film is how it builds up a sense of ever-impending terror. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the film steps into Psycho (1960) terrain, specifically in the final act of the film. Compliance aims to confront a society filled with people who are trained to follow rules without questioning them. Magnolia Pictures, which previously collaborated with Zobel on his debut film Great World of Sound (which premiered at Sundance in 2007), picked up the film for theatrical release; if you dare to check it out, prepare to be traumatized. You’ll be screaming about one of the most audacious movies of 2012 — and that’s exactly why the film is so brilliant. (1:30) (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)
Cosmopolis With end times nigh and the 99 percent battering the gates of the establishment, it’s little wonder David Cronenberg’s rendition of the Don DeLillo novel might rotate, with the stately rhythm of a royal funeral and deliciously tongue-in-cheek humor, around one of the most famed vampire heartthrobs at the cineplex. Sadly, a recent paparazzi scandal threatens to eclipse this latest, enjoyably blighted installment in the NYC urban nightmare genre. Robert Pattinson’s billionaire asset manager Eric Packer takes meetings with his new wife Elise (Sarah Gadon) and staffers like his monetary theorist Vija (Samantha Morton) in his moving office: a white, leather-bound stretch limo that materializes like a sleek, imposing extension of his pale frame. Seriously disassociated from reality on multiple levels, Eric is a 28-year-old boy in a bubble, speaking of himself in third person and willing to spend all day making his way across town to get a haircut at his father’s old barbershop, even though his head of security (Kevin Durand) warns him that at least one “credible threat” has designs on his life. The passing of his favorite Sufi rapper (K’Naan), a possible Rothko for sale, a mad pie-thrower, and an asymmetrical prostate all threaten to capsize those, as it turns out, not-so-humble plans. Warning: the brainier members of Team Edward might plan on finding their minds blown by this thoughtful and mordantly humorous meditation on this country’s cult of money, while Cronenberg watchers will be gratified to pluck out his recurring themes, here dealt with a lighter hand than usual. At this date, rather than telegraphing how one might feel about a scene by way of, say, music, the director is increasingly comfortable with the ambiguity — and the uneasy, pleasing mix of sneaking repulsion and gimlet-eyed humor, of these scenes and their language. Thus the autoerotic-car fetishism of Crash (1996) and hallucinatory culture grazing of Naked Lunch (1991) — and that fascination with how a body intersects sexually or otherwise with a machine or “other” — seems completely natural here. Or perhaps it’s a measure of how much Cronenberg’s preoccupations and cinematic language have made themselves at home in the vernacular. (1:49) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwNMGdWyjcc
“Global Threats Film Series” The San Francisco Film Society’s “Global Threats” series continues with a double dose of stuff that’ll kill ya. Though separated by six decades, both features are remarkably similar for their matter-of-fact, location-shot, non-pulp treatment of a prime (if infrequently used) thriller topic: the desperate attempts by health officials to contain a deadly virus before it spreads to the whole population. While in some quarters it was criticized for being too docu-drama-esque and not “thriller” enough, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion last year was admirably cool-headed in its depiction of various global, national, and local authorities (played by an all-star cast) frantically coping with an outbreak of something that yuppie slut Gwyneth Paltrow brought home from a business trip. A year before A Streetcar Named Desire (which was, contrastingly, almost entirely shot on studio soundstages), Elia Kazan ventured to the real New Orleans for Panic in the Streets (1950), in which another traveler imports an actual plague to the Big Easy. US Public Health Service physician Richard Widmark is tasked with tracking down the rapidly growing number of the infected, which is complicated by the fact that several of them (including Jack Palance and Zero Mostel) are criminal-underground types naturally averse to cooperating with the cops or any other governmental representative. If Contagion irked some for being a little too nuts-and-bolts procedural, the brilliantly black-and-white-shot Panic excited audiences and critics at the time for its unusual realism. That extends to the warmly credible marital relationship between workaholic Widmark (very appealing in one of his few nice-guy leads) and neglected but understanding spouse Barbara Bel Geddes. SF Film Society Cinema. (Dennis Harvey)
HermanoAs a child, Julio (Eliu Armas) discovered foundling Daniel (Fernando Moreno) abandoned in a dumpster; taken in by the former’s mom (Marcela Giron), the two boys are raised as brothers. They’re close as can be, even if Julio is physically slight, shy, and straight-arrow, while strapping Daniel is a born leader and survivor quite willing to cross the legal line when it serves his purposes. One area in which they’re of the same mind is the soccer field, where both (especially Daniel) are talented players with hopes of going pro. But that seems a remote dream in their violence-ridden slum. Marcel Rasquin’s Venezuelan sports-crime drama is built on some hoary clichés — the “good” brother/”bad” brother dynamic, the tragedy that sparks revenge that sparks more tragedy, etc. — but is so unpretentious, energetic, sincere. and well-cast that skeptical resistance is futile. It’s a modest movie, but a true, satisfying pleasure. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZlXB5okeo Hit and RunAnnie (Kristen Bell) has a Stanford doctorate but is treading in the academic backwaters until the prospect is raised of an ideal department-heading position at UCLA. She’s thrilled, but also conflicted, because live-in beau Charlie (Dax Shepard) is in the Federal Witness Protection program, and can’t leave the nowhere burg he lives in incognito — particularly for Los Angeles — without risking serious personal harm. However, for love he decides he’ll risk everything so she can take the job. Unfortunately, this fast attracts the attention of various people very much interested in halting this exodus, for various reasons: notably Charlie’s inept U.S. Marshall “protector” (Tom Arnold), Annie’s psycho ex (Smallville‘s Michael Rosenbaum), and a guy with an even more serious grudge against Charlie (Bradley Cooper in a dreadlock wig). A whole lot of wacky chases and stunt driving ensues. The second feature Shepard’s co-directed (with David Palmer) and written, this aims for a cross between 1970s drive-in demolition derbies (1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, 1974’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, etc.) and envelope-pushing comedy thrillers like 1993’s True Romance. There’s a lot of comic talent here, including some notable cameos, yet Hit and Run is one of those cases where the material is almost there, but not quite. It moves breezily enough but some of the characters are more annoying than funny; the dialogue is an awkward mix of bad taste and PC debates about bad taste; and some ideas that aim to be hilarious and subversive (naked old people, a long discussion about jailhouse rape) just sit there, painfully. Which makes this only the second-best Dax Shepard movie with incarceration rape jokes, after 2006’s Let’s Go to Prison. (1:38) (Dennis Harvey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn6ie1zCkZU
Premium Rush“Fixed gear. Steel frame. No brakes. Can’t stop … don’t want to.” Thus goes the gear breakdown and personal philosophy of New York City bike messenger Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an aggro rider who uses his law school-refined brain to make split-second decisions regarding which way to dart through Midtown traffic. Though bike messengers had a pop culture moment in the 1990s, Premium Rush is set in the present day, with one of Wilee’s numerous voice-overs explaining the job’s continued importance even in the digital era. One such example: a certain envelope he’s tasked with ferrying across the city, given to him by the troubled roommate (Jamie Chung) of the pretty fellow messenger (Dania Ramirez) he’s romantically pursuing. The contents of the envelope, and the teeth-gnashingly evil-cop-with-a-gambling-problem (Michael Shannon, adding some weird flair to what’s essentially a stock villain) who would dearly love to get his mitts on it, are less crucial to Premium Rush than the film’s many, many chase scenes featuring Wilee outwitting all comers with his two-wheeled Frogger moves. Silly fun from director David Koepp (2008’s Ghost Town), but not essential unless you’re a fixie fanatic or a JGL completist. (1:31) (Cheryl Eddy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiFqT5-6JQg
Robot and FrankImagine the all-too-placid deadpan of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) coming out of a home-healthcare worker, and you get just part of the appeal of this very likable comedy debut with a nonrobotic pulse directed by Jake Schreier. Sometime in the indeterminate near future, former jewel thief and second-story man Frank (Frank Langella) can be found quietly deteriorating in his isolated home, increasingly forgettable and unable to care for himself and assemble a decent bowl of Cap’n Crunch (though he can still steal fancy soaps from the village boutique). In an effort to cover his own busy rear, Frank’s distracted son (James Marsden) buys him a highly efficient robotic stand-in (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), much to his father’s grim resistance (“That thing is going to murder me in my sleep”) and the dismay of crunchy sibling Madison (Liv Tyler). The robot, however, is smarter than it looks, as it bargains with Frank to eat better, get healthier, and generally reanimate: it’s willing to learn to pick locks, participate in a robbery, and even plan a jewel heist, provided, say, Frank agrees to a low-sodium diet. Frank flourishes, like the garden the robot nurtures in a vain attempt to interest his human charge, and even goes on a date with his librarian crush (Susan Sarandon), though can the self-indulgent idyll last forever? A tale about aging as much as it is about rediscovery, Robot tells an old story, but one that’s wise beyond its years and willing to dress itself up in some of the smooth, sleek surfaces of an iGeneration. (1:30) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3CaXSIgi4o
$upercapitalistGreed is good … fodder for cinematic drama these days as all assembled struggle to get out from under the Great Recession and look to immerse themselves in the boardroom battlefields of films like 2011’s Margin Call. Spinning off his time working for CNN in Hong Kong in the halcyon mid-’00s, lead actor, writer, and producer Derek Ting stars as a bright, eager-to-please hedge fund trader from New York, transplanted in the wild, wild East, and forced to learn a lesson about unchecked, profit-driven gamesmanship. In Hong Kong, Conner (Ting) only looks as Chinese as the rest — otherwise he’s American through and through. Unlike, say, the old-fashioned family-run corporation he’s assigned to take down, Conner is estranged from his family and has few loyalties, apart from Quentin (Darren E. Scott), the fellow trader who shows him the ropes and gets him hooked on hand-tailored suits, flash cars, and attractive arm candy, and Natalie (Kathy Uyen), a publicist who’s as brainy as she is beautiful. Unfortunately the game Conner’s playing has real costs for the people around him — and he finds himself questioning his loyalties. Ting and director Simon Yin have the makings of a compelling thriller — nothing is more tempting than a peep behind the curtain of a closed world like Chinese big business — and though the overall narrative pulls you in, they get tripped up on the details, namely easy clichés like $upercapitalist’s pampered, playboy son of a business dynasty, or the rote devices like the middle-class family rigged to reveal that Conner does indeed have a soul. Much like their hero, Ting and company take a bit for granted, from the viewer’s patience with tired Hollywood conventions to the very system — capitalist, supercapitalist, or socialist market economy — that supports them. (1:36) (Kimberly Chun)
1. Hop on over to Marin County’s highly-recommendedRCA Beach, where Hanauer affirms driftwood dragons can sometimes be spotted. “Want to recharge your life? … a single stopover at the beautiful beach will probably inspire you to keep coming back.”
2. No, not that spot by the GG bridge. Humboldt County’s Baker’s Beachhas a differently-placed apostrophe, as well as a carpeting of sesame seed-sized pebbles just perfect for your naked footsies. “Baker’s features a quarter moon-shaped shoreline lined with tide pools and agates that make it one of the best beaches in Humboldt County,” says Hanauer. Sold!
3. Although nude-levels rarely approach those of its heyday, when hundreds of unclothed sunbathers could be seen dotting its sand, Devil’s Slide (Gray Whale Cove)in Santa Cruz County is boxed in by orange-colored sandstone heights. Says Hanauer: “Devil’s Slide is a great place to read, tan, jog, play Frisbee, or watch (true to its state beach name) gray whales, pelicans, and surfers.”
4. In the mood to earn your naked? Check out the listing for Sykes Hot Spring in Monterrey County, six warm pools stationed a 10-mile hike in from a Big Sur ranger station. Afterwards, a couple of campsites await you so that tomorrow you can wake, soak, and luxuriate in your natural state.
5. Of course, not all nudies have autos. And in light of that, let us highlight an easy-to-get-to, A-rated gem in the guide: North Baker Beach. Tucked up by the Golden Gate Bridge, Hanuaer’s source on the spot Santosh affirms you have nothing to worry when it comes to leering voyeurs — “Jedi mind tricks” are employed by the naked community to get creeps to shove off. And what community! Quoth the guide: “‘I sometimes invite people into my duney [sheet-covered driftwood structure] to get out of the sun'” says Santosh, who lives about 20 blocks from the beach. ‘We even have a driftwood bar. It’s like a day at Club Med.'”
While the Performant is off hugging trees in Oregon, please enjoy this series of interviews with the curators of three innovative performance spaces
There’s nothing about the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in North Berkeley that particularly speaks of abstract performance, but that element of the unexpected is possibly what makes it the perfect venue for Karen Penley’s fledgling performance series, Retard. Inhabited by out-of-the-box, outré performers such as Dan Carbone, Edna Barron, Herb Heinz, and Catherine Debon, Retard is a low-key, all-inclusive, no-judgment sort of event where the weird get a chance to shine, and everybody gets to eat cake. After an evening spent nibbling clafoutis and ducking clowns, I caught up with Karen via the magic of the Interwebs to pick her brain about her brave new experimental showcase.
SFBG: What was the original impetus for this showcase? What sets it apart?
Karen Penley: I have an interest in brave unconventional work and I wanted to be able to have room to let that happen instead of having to fit into the structure of poetry and music open mics…. I think the thing that sets Retard apart is a feeling of support for adventurous, innocent work. I really love raw art, as well as the feeling of people being so immersed in…their artistic work and caring about it so much. It’s this feeling of creating different worlds as well. You can do anything, theater, movement, improvisation, music, or some hybrid of such. Also, it’s kind of homey, easy, non pretentious. I really wanted that. There are special Retards, the evenings called “Crack,” where I curate more carefully and then the other retards are more a jambalaya and are open to people I don’t know their work as well so they can just come and perform and I can get a sense of them.
SFBG: What is your ultimate vision for these evenings?
KP: Well, ultimately, I would love to have them be ‘Crack’ every Friday, with lots of people coming, and I’d love to rent the church another day a week and have it be ‘Pretard’ which I tried to do for five months, but there wasn’t enough participation and I couldn’t afford it. ‘Pretard’ was a place to work on and develop material just for a warm audience, not a workshop, just a place to try out stuff, and then I wanted to take that work and curate it into cool evenings. But I’d love to connect with people that I admire, all different kinds of performers, and curate great evenings so that it really is a network of daring work.
SFBG:Do you bake your own cake? What do the cake and tea signify for you?
KP: I love cake and I can’t eat a whole one so this gives me an opportunity to bake all those great cakes on the internet that I couldn’t bake just for myself. I always like food to be involved in performing and watching performance. It feels more cozy and fun and more warm-y to have cake and tea for people.
SFBG: “Retard” sounds intentionally provocative, though you do offer a rather nonconfrontational definition for it on the webpage. What prompted you to use that name, and has anyone had an uncomfortable reaction to it?
KP: I HAVE had some uncomfortable reactions to the name. One girl was labeled in her high school and I really liked her and wanted her to perform, but we had a long email back and forth about it and she just couldn’t condone the use of the word. My feeling is that using it for my show changes the derogatory feeling associated with that word. I feel like a retard myself, always have. I want to be more retarded; i.e. slow down. In my mind, to be retarded is a good thing. Plus it’s just funny (the name).
Retard
Fridays 7-9pm, $10 sliding scale
1823 Ninth Ave., Berk. (side building next to The Good Shepherd Church)
Jenny was visiting from Portland and Sam Love and I decided to take her on a field trip to the Alemany Farm. Portland is well known for their community and sidewalk veggie gardens, so we were excited to show her what SF had to offer in the realm of urban farming. [Ed. note: while they still can! Check out this week’s story in the print edition about the impending death of many of the city’s agriculture spaces.]
But first we got kind of lost and ended up making a rather huge loop through the neighborhood. Then we saw it, four-and-a-half acres of soil covered in vibrant veggies, trees dripping with stone fruit, and gigantic, golden sunflowers. There was a group of high school students helping with weeding, a volunteer tending to some baby greens and even a windmill. And it just keeps going and going. You start walking up the hill and end up finding loquat trees, huge chard bunches, artichokes. It’s all growing next to each other — a zucchini vine here, an apple tree here — a random quilt of edibles.
The only downside is the proximity to the freeway, which adds a background humm to the farm. (Just pretend like it’s bees.) The garden is volunteer-run and has work days on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It hosts a u-pick program on Wednesday evenings for folks in the neighborhood. Get down there and get your paws dirty!
Fabulous food-and-junk-drawer-oriented collage artist (and legendary SF club denizen) Jason Mecier is back in our virtual orbit lately. His meme explosion beef jerky portraits of Obama and Romney seemtobeeverywhere. And his wonderful makeup-y likeness of Phyllis Diller, RIP, is giving us sad LOLs. But wait, the “meatraits” of Obameat and Meat Romney are sponsored! And there’s a video! Let’s go to the jerky tape:
No film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival festival encountered as much controversy as Craig Zobel‘s Compliance. At the first public screening, an all-out shouting match erupted, with an audience member yelling “Sundance can do better!” You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Every screening that followed was jam-packed with people hoping to experience the most shocking film at Sundance, and the film does not disappoint. (Beware: every review I have happened upon has unnecessarily spoiled major plots in the film, which is based on true events.)
Compliance aims to confront a society filled with people who are trained to follow rules without questioning them. Magnolia Pictures, which previously collaborated with Zobel on his debut film Great World of Sound (which premiered at Sundance in 2007), picked up the film for theatrical release (it comes out Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters); if you dare to check it out, prepare to be traumatized as well as intellectualized. You’ll be screaming all the way home about one of the most audacious movies of 2012 — and that’s exactly why the film is so brilliant.
San Francisco Bay Guardian I have attended Sundance since I was 11 years old, and there have been a handful of particularly volatile screenings in which audience members passed out, threw up, stormed out of the theater, or berated the filmmakers during the Q&A: Bryan Singer’s Public Access and Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog in 1993; Mary Harron’s American Psycho and Kim Ki-Duk’s The Isle in 2000; Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible in 2002; and Johan Renck’s Downloading Nancy in 2008. Now, you’ve joined the ranks of the infamous Sundance elite. Were you prepared for how vulnerable your film Compliance was going to make audience members?
Craig Zobel Absolutely not. It really caught me off guard.
SFBG People became quite angry at you at the first screening’s Q&A, correct? How did you adapt in the subsequent screenings and are you prepared for people’s reactions once the film gets released?
Zobel I did not try to make a movie just to piss people off. I’m picking movies to make that are like, “I’ve never seen anyone doing that as a movie.” If I saw this movie I’d say, “Whoa, I want to have a conversation about what that director was trying to do.”
When I was writing Compliance, I had been attached to make a studio comedy and some other things, and for one reason or another all of the other projects weren’t happening. And I wanted to make a film right [then]. Which, if you look at the landscape of independent movies that get [made] these days, they seem to have the kind of money and star caliber as a studio film. There are all these 20-something relationship films that are basically just romantic comedies. I would rather watch a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock, who will at least give me what I want from the genre, while these other ones aren’t really satisfying to me.
So I wanted to make something that [didn’t] just feel like light entertainment.
SFBG The film seems to be taking its toll on audiences due to how relentless the experience is, though it’s not a long film at all.
Zobel I originally wanted to make the film 85 minutes. That’s what I hung on the wall. The script is 80 pages long. It ended up 90 minutes, but it has a lot of momentum that helps make the film not feel boring. I was trying to make sure that every 10 minutes a major thing would happen. We would do something once and that would be enough. We broke it down into a five-act story instead of a bigger three act structure.
SFBG The film exposes so much about each audience member that experiences it. When I saw it at Sundance, the woman sitting behind me was nervously texting every few seconds and so we all could hear her iPhone confirmation dinging over and over and over until ultimately she stromed out in a huff. The guy next to me was laughing yet fidgeting so much that the person in front of him had to tell him to stop.
You force us the audience to be stuck in the same predicament as the characters we are watching which leads me to kind of an odd question: what kind of student were you?
Zobel In high school? A good one! [Laughs.] I wasn’t the guy yelling at the teacher all the time. Maybe a little bit when I was in college but recently I was able to teach as an adjunct for a directing class at Columbia. It was really interesting and fun and I now have so much more respect and admiration for teaching. But I wasn’t that student who constantly had questions for the teacher.
SFBG I don’t think your film is trying to push people’s buttons just for the hell of it. And this is why I compared it to Psycho, not only because of the film’s intelligent yet deeply disturbing exploration of our society, but how each character is given some seriously mind-melting dilemmas. Without spoiling anything from the film, how did you pull out such haunting performances?
Zobel A lot of it was casting. And in some ways it was even easy to cast because the people who came in to the casting room were as curious about it as I was. It just made sense very quickly. All of the actors were running into situations during the shoot where they would go, “I can’t understand how this character could do this but it sounds hard and I am curious to try and think about it more.”
I think they all gave amazing performances by virtue of the fact that they were in it for the exploration. They were all fascinated with the type of story we were trying to tell and made sure to not make anything just black and white. Also, we shot more takes of a scene than I thought we ever would, not because anything was wrong, [but because after] a few takes we would say, “Well, what are the other ways or what other attitudes or possibilities can we try?” So in the editing room, we had the opportunities to dip into that one for a line here and maybe go back to the initial take.
SFBG I have read online how a few audience members are proud of walking out of the film, and it seems pretty damn ironic for people to leave before the conclusion. They literally do not want to confront or even try and figure out what it is you are attempting to explore. You’ve got philosophy behind this picture, and I feel like you’ve got an exciting future ahead.
Zobel I really appreciate that. I do know what I am trying to do next, which is a screenplay that I previously wrote; it’s very close to happening and I’m very excited about it. It’s also based on a true story — it’s about this Swedish mafia member who becomes a technology executive. I get to explore money and why people decide to devote their lives to seek that stuff.
Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches full-time as the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University, curates/hosts MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, a film series that showcases underrated, overlooked and dismissed cinema in a neo-sincere way and can be contacted at: midnites4maniacs@gmail.com
Here are a few highlights in photos of another SF Chefs, San Francisco’s food, wine, spirits “classic” (aka week-long festival in tented Union Square), a whirlwind of excellent bites, drinks, wine, demos, and parties.
There are highpoints every year, but no party has yet been as memorable as this year’s Late Night Cocktail Adventure/Campari after party on Saturday, August 4. The Redwood Room at the Clift Hotel was as magical as it was meant to be outfitted for the South Seas by way of Milan with Afrolicious providing the addictive, live reggae-funk soundtrack of the evening we couldn’t stop dancing to. Drinks were high-caliber, including a brilliant rum and passion fruit punch by Steven Liles (Smuggler’s Cove), and rum, coconut milk, and kaffir lime beauty by Brooke Arthur (formerly of Wo Hing, now House Spirits’ Director of On Premise Outreach and Education).
It wasn’t too long ago that shopping locally meant hitting up your neighborhood Safeway. But seemingly overnight (in retrospect), farmers markets sprung up like healthy tomato plants. A weekend doesn’t go by during which I don’t see someone toting their re-usable canvas bag down the street to fill up with fresh produce from local growers.
This is just one sign of a big revolution that is happening in the food world. Having visited night markets across the globe, from Taiwan to Morocco, I’ve always wondered when the States would figure out their own version of these late-night-snack shindigs. Lo and behold, this weekend night markets hit our soil. The Street Food Festival hosted its first night market to eager eaters on Friday the 17th at the Alemany Farmers’ Market. The happily matched location housed live music, dancers, hot toddies (a useful weapon for battling the chilly evening fog) and of course, delicious street food. Night markets often highlight grilled meats and one-bite-wonders for foodies who want a little taste of it all. This night was no different, with a food-filled dream of delicious dumplings, tiny tacos, and pork sandwiches sprinkled with chicharones. The greasier, the better, thank you very much!
It wasn’t until I was lying on an office park lawn just south of Jack London Square yesterday, staring back at the Transamerica Pyramid-studded fog bank that currently consitutes our city, that I could acknowledge that Seasonal Affective Disorder is effectively ruining my life and most likely, everyone else’s in San Francisco these weeks.
Thankfully, that epiphany was quickly followed by a visit to the antidote, the Post-Car Travel Agency. It’s easy for city-dwellers to forget, but it is possible to access sunshine, san automobile, whenever one has the saddlebags to do so. The pop-up agency has popped up on Shotwell Street at the Storefront Lab, where it will be offering bike trip planning know-how, way-flash pannier bags in Bay-inspired colorways handmade by Seattle’s Swift Industries, more park guides than you can shake a stick at, and a photo show by Eric Jensen everyday through Fri/24. They also had PBR on my trip to the shop’s daily happy hour from 6-9pm yesterday, because any good bike tourist knows malty beverages make the road less rough.
Pardon the pun, but the shop is geared towards beginners. “There’s some people who need help getting into this,” says Post-Car tour agent Kelly Gregory, who along with Kristin Saunders applied to Yosh Asato and David Baker when they learned of the couple’s plans to open an experiment in neighborhood storefronts on Shotwell. The Agency is the space’s second tenant (there will be eight total), after Deep Craft Atelier and its handmade longboards. The idea was based on the Post-Car Press guidebooks written by Gregory and Justin Eichenlaub, which we profiled in last year’s Summer Guide.
So what did I find to remedy my fog hangover at the shop? Four ready-made bike trips, each encapsulated in a helpful brochure and neatly displayed next to a steed that would be perfect for the adventure. My personal favorite was the 106-mile “Big Sur to Boot Camp” trip, whose pamphlet included information on public transit to and from the Big Sur area, directions to nearby hot springs, local foraging tips, and notes on the Fost Hunter Ligget Hacienda, a guesthouse ($50 for the “cowboy room”) located inside an active military base that has both a bar and a bowling alley on premise.
Other trips included “The Lush,” a mosey about East Bay wineries, a trek between Tahoe and Yosemite, and “The Down and Dirty,” which takes riders over Planet of the Apes Road (yesterday’s Highway 1, and a convenient option for those looking to dodge the nasty, shoulder-lite bits of that particular thoroughfare) to Half Moon Bay. Each $10 brochure includes a helpful packing list, map, and info on rad side trips for those looking for the scenic route. Combine a trip guide with a PCTA patch and Swift Industries tool roll for $37, the so-called “Tender Spoke Getaway.”
All you need to get started, really. For those looking not just for biking tips but biking buddies to boot, the women of Post-Car Travel Agency will be leading a group ride to Samuel P. Taylor Park (and it’s bike-in campsites tucked beneath massive redwood trees) on Sat/25. The four-hour, 30-mile ride will be just great for breaking out of this dismal cloud cover.
Post-Car Travel Agency at StoreFrontLab
Open 6-9pm through Fri/24; ride to Samuel P. Taylor State Park departs Sat/25, 2pm
