Art

Experience the Joys and Panes of Metropolis

Sasha Cuttler
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Experience the Joys and Panes of Metropolis

For months, I’m been covering and working on the Temple of Flux project, a collaboration of literally hundreds of Bay Area artists and residents to create this year’s Temple at Burning Man. This amazing, inspiring effort to create a truly unique temple is being accompanied by an equally ambitious fundraising effort to pay for the project, with the last big fundraiser this Saturday night at Supperclub.

“Windows: Joys and Panes of Metropolis” features outstanding live performances, top DJs, and an auction of original artworks created by more than 20 artists from old window panes (including my painting of the Armory as seen from my roof, with windows you can peer into the see a BDSM porn collage diorama). Other artists include Peter Hudson, Rebecca Anders, Jess Hobbs, Richard Blakely, Victoria Heilweil, and Phil Spitler, while performers range from the Cheesepuffs to Clandestine.

The fun starts at 9:30 p.m. and the art auction closes at 1:30 a.m., with admission for a $15-$25 sliding scale. We hope to see you there.

– Scribe

The top 10 films of 2010’s first half — one take

John Elberling
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The top 10 films of 2010’s first half — one take

By now we’re past the halfway point of 2010, the inaugural year of another decade in movies. So far, the selection of great films has been scant –– though, as usual, the coming of winter and the iron hand of film’s favorite fascist Harvey Weinstein signal Oscar-worthy films in our future. These are the best films of 2010, so far, in alphabetical order. And yes, I have seen Inception, but I did miss The Ghost Writer. Cold Weather (Aaron Katz)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEggB8DvXP4
Aaron Katz acts as the much-needed liaison between mumblecore and non-mumblecore (what would that be? Everything Else? Screamcore?), forgoing an already tired genre (though Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha remains great) for a totally weird existential detective story. Cold Weather stirs up the naturalism of mumblecore with the more exciting draw of, say, an independent thriller.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTlm6dU2xHk
The exit of this Gift Shop could’ve led us down an enigmatic path forged by Banksy for his own self-gratification. Yet, for the most part, he turns the camera completely away from himself –– despite a few shadowy moments –– and onto Thierry Guetta, also known as Mr. Brainwash, also known as the biggest art hack of the 21st century.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjV2GXxrEMI
Speaking of mumblecore, Noah Baumbach’s (The Squid and the Whale) latest bittersweet-slice-of-life stars mumblecore muse Greta Gerwig as the bemused and socially uncomfortable Florence as Ben Stiller’s love interest (or, more accurately, emotional plaything/fuck buddy). Baumbach’s screenplay is spare, mostly plotless, yet full of the scars of real life that are mostly healed but always leave a mark.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fnojZw54ls
One of the best documentaries about show business ever, A Piece of Work is just that and more. It is the root canal of a starlet going sour, a woman trying to elevate herself above flotsam-status. Joan Rivers has never been so heartbreaking before, nor has she been this saucy.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgwjTy_cohg
This is the best tragicomedy about family in America that I’ve seen in awhile. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore note-perfectly elicit all the nuances of a very long marriage. Cholodenko works in a language that can be universally understood and in some way, I can’t help but think she’s made a great case for gay marriage.

Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi9WlsYCr-k
In Nicole Holofcener’s (Lovely and Amazing) sometimes icky dramadey, Catherine Keener is brilliant as a polarizing character who tries to have a heart of gold –– but all her liberal trappings are weighing her down. Rebecca Hall plays a woman who is sort of the opposite: a genuinely good person for whom things just don’t work out. These are some of the year’s best performances.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY80
A totally misunderstood, underrated genre romp, Shutter Island is Scorsese’s Shining: occasionally terrifying, oozing with hallucinatory visuals and an ending that could be potentially be seen as a cop-out. Leonardo DiCaprio, in all his tortured, splashing-water-on-his-face-in-front-of-the-mirror madness, has utterly convinced me he’s one of today’s great actors.

Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6o_Vl2f07Q
Splice is probably the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year. It’s fucking scary, it reeks of Freud, and Adrien Brody looks brutally hot –– again. But seriously, guys, if you consider yourself a horror or sci-fi buff at all, you’ll most likely take great pleasure and comfort in this film, and the fact that Vincenzo Natali restored my faith in horror. The most remarkable splicing is the one with thrills and laughs. This movie is mostly horrifying for its 104-minute running time, and hilarious for at least 80 of those minutes.

White Material (Claire Denis)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2noQowyoKQ
I don’t really know what the hell happened in this movie –– most of the senior citizens seeing it at the PFA didn’t know, either –– but all I need are lots of grainy handheld close-ups of Isabelle Huppert’s face to know White Material is good.

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ8kqytI_oA
Granik wow’d me with 2004’s Down to the Bone, and she’s thrown us yet another bone with Winter’s Bone, a bloody and downright biblical tale of the Ozarks. Granik is so skilled because she deals in rich, beautiful symbolism that’s never too obvious, nor is it cockeyed. She might very well be the Dardenne Brothers of the West.

HONORABLE MENTION: I almost forgot Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King). It transcends this list. It is the list-defier of all list-defiers. It’s just that good. So good, in fact, that I just can’t parse it with words.

The Performant: When I die I will be offcenter

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scoping out the local arts and culture scene …

If there were a Best of the Bay category for performance space with the catchiest moniker, I’ve always felt that Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory had a clear lock on the title. That’s just one of the many things about the place I’ll miss when it shuts its doors, possibly for good, at the end of this month (though a loose association of affiliated artists including acting MCVF director Ernesto Sopprani, have announced their intention to continue as Theoffcenter, so look for future programming from them in an as-yet-undetermined location).

Speaking of clever monikers, for a last show in a vital location, you couldn’t ask for a better than Alicia Ohs’ dance-theatre production, “When I Die I Will be Dead.” But walking into Mama Calizo’s, instead of death’s muffled pall, a scene of lively chaos immediately unfolded. Each member of the oddience was given a number upon entering the space, split into two groups, and taught a quick dance routine that none of us mastered in the few short moments we were given to try.

As the casting director, Alicia Ohs, dressed in a white button-down short exhorted us to “Eat Nails!” we shuffled our feet and flopped our arms around lamely. Clearly Broadway bound we were not. Mercifully allowed our seats after about five minutes, the rest of the mostly comical “New York, I Love You! I Hate You…Now Dance” ensued; a “Chorus Line” send-up complete with a “One” finale. The evening’s second piece, “Dokuen,” was more nuanced. From the physical comedy of an auditionee being locked in a trunk of memories (Hana Erdman), to the raw anguish of dancers José Navarrete and Ay.Lin hurling paint at the walls, flowers across the floor, and abuse at each other, the self-revelatory vignettes spoke voluminously of loss though few words were used. The reappearance of Erdman as memory’s avatar made the act of saying farewell a study in grace—an appropriate finale for yet one more casualty in the trenches of the art wars.

Meanwhile, across town, in the crowded Café Royale, loss of life, limb, and the last tattered shreds of (in)dignity were being explored by San Francisco Theatre Pub with their free staged reading of “Ubu Roi” — adapted by company member Bennett Fisher. As the oafish would-be-king of Poland played by Sam Leichter cursed, spat, and clawed his way to the top, his power-hungry wife Mere Ubu (Catherine Lardas) gave the term Machiavellian a feminine touch as she urged him forward, then stood out of the way of his inglorious fall. Though it initially seemed that as many people came to hear the guest deejay (DJ Wait What) spin as to see the classic forerunner of absurdist theatre (overheard: “I think it’s about a king. It’s set in France.”), the café crowd soon became a cheering, catcalling, mass of enthusiastic participation. Directors of reading series take note: a spoonful of alcohol helps the medicine go down. And bartenders: a spoonful of Ubu can only help the alcohol sales go up.

Café Royale
800 Post, SF
(415) 441-4099
www.caferoyale-sf.com
sftheaterpub.wordpress.com

Work and play with the Shout Out Louds

John Elberling
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Work and play with the Shout Out Louds

By John Lambert Pearson

Does life on the road effect the music of the constantly-touring Shout Out Louds? “I guess it does,” says singer Adam Olenius. “You know, I think you’re sorta living a different life on the road and you think about home and being away and returning and of course that effects you. You meet a lot of people. People that you meet and things that happen while you’re traveling and things we do as a band become [what] I sing about. I’m not sure it’s being at a certain place, it’s just…being away, and trying to figure out your life.” On the eve of the group’s recent show at Great American Music Hall in support of their new album Work, I sat down and talked with Olenius about the pleasure and the work of being in a band.
 
SFBG Your existence as a band is constantly battled by traveling, you’re always together, but you’re also trying to remain individuals at the same time. I’m wondering if there’s anything you do that helps you. Do you stay together, or do you do things by yourself?
AO It depends if you have friends or crew or other people coming along. On this tour we have Henrik [Jonzon] with us, an old childhood friend. I haven’t had time to see him for awhile and now on the road we’re catching up a lot. He’s filling in for Ted [Malmros, on bass] who got a baby a few days ago.
 
SFBG I heard.

AO That’s kinda why we took a break after the second [album; Our Ill Wills]. We felt that we should try and find ourselves a bit. It’s not that we were tired of hanging out together. As you said, you’re a band all the time, and people just need to sort of think about what they want..  We agree that we still want to be in a band, so it was great that everyone was on the same boat.

SFBG Do you think a fourth album is coming?
AO Absolutely. And I think it’s gonna be coming sooner than the others. We have a lot of ideas, a lot of things we want to try — to start doing things by ourselves, I think. I want the next one to be more… schizophrenic. I love [Work], but there’s always a reaction to what you do.
 
SFBG People have said [Work] was quite a change from your previous work, but going back to some of your older work I can hear it in the older stuff. It’s interesting that it took you quite a long time and two other albums to get to this sound that I heard a long time ago. I’m wondering if there’s something that made you want to do that.
AO I think having two albums to look at while you’re working on the third one you can see what you liked on every record. We went back to ideas and back to the way I felt about certain songs. People kept saying we found our sound – I don’t think we found our sound, but we found ourselves.

SFBG I was thinking about your music in terms of an environment and a landscape. Our Ill Wills had a kind of maritime or nautical theme, and I was wondering if you thought Work had a specific place to which it belonged.
AO We wanted every song to be like a train – we talked about very straight roads, an escalating train. When we did the arrangements for the songs, they start slow and accelerate, and end in a bombastic way. That was something we didn’t really plan, it just happened. I think [Work] belongs more in a factory, with those belts…

SFBG You talk about books and libraries a lot – are any of you big readers?
AO Bebban [Stenborg] and Carl [von Arbin] are  I read a lot, but Bebban reads like 10 books a month. She is a good writer as well, she’s writing short stories. Everything — art and music and a lot of films – inspires us. Our songs, we can talk about them more [in those terms] as well.
 
SFBG Photography seems very important to you guys.
AO Yeah, it is because we also are very involved in all the artwork. and Carl was talking about how we took a lot of inspiration from Irving Penn and his photography on this record. The title came from many different ideas, but it has to do with Warhol’s Factory, and how Lou Reed and John Cale did a song called “Work.”

SFBG So that’s an example of where your ideas for the covers of your albums come from?
AO We’ve always been negative about showing ourselves too much, even though we have a lot of photography on the homepage. There isn’t a typical band photo.
[Work] looks very nice when you have it, especially on vinyl.  Very ’70s, and because Irving Penn passed away last year, it was a tribute to him. 
 
SFBG You have a lot of people that I love remixing your songs, like Kleerup and Russian Futurists and Studio. Is there anyone you’re still looking to get?
AO Of course. I would love Daft Punk. There’s some British guys doing one right now, Punks Jump Up.

SFBG They recently did a really good one for Lykke Li. What bands are you listening to right now?

AO I saw Caribou, I like that album. I haven’t really been listening to new stuff, but I bought the new National record, and last year I liked Girls a lot.
I saw them in a small club in Stockholm about six months ago, I think they’re really good. I’ve been listening to a lot of old stuff like Todd Rundgren and old early-’70s songwriter stuff.

SFBG Do you listen to a lot of Swedish music?
AO On tour we listen to a lot of Swedish bands. But we’ve listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac on this tour – Rumours.

SFBG How would you describe your live show in comparison to your album?
AO It’s more explosive. This record sounds better live, because we didn’t have to change the songs to make live versions.
It took a couple months to find a live sound for the songs [on Our Ill Will].  

SFBG What is the song “Time Left For Love” about?
AO It’s a story. I remember writing the first sort of lines. It was a long time ago, when we recorded the first record. In Stockholm they have this truck that cleans the streets and it comes in the middle of the night, once a week — especially in Stockholm, cause we use a lot of sand in winter to get the streets dry. A lot of things had changed in my life, and that truck, that sound, every night put me to sleep.

SFBG Do you have a favorite song from Work?
AO My favorite song to write was “Throwing Stones.” It’s a song I started writing right before flying home from Melbourne, and I finished just 3 hours after I landed in Stockholm, so it’s an important song for me. It has a freedom to it. I like “Walls,” too. That was the first song I wrote for the album. Bebban actually played that piano melody on glockenspiel — I think the first time she played that was in Columbus, Ohio
I listened to the demo of “1999” recently, it’s got a more electronic and sharp sound. I think I liked the demo version more. But I like how we do it, like “Hard Rain” from the second album, that [also] has that beat with rushed melodies on top

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01oqzy-C7zw

SFBG I think “Hard Rain” and “1999” are the two closest songs from your two albums.
AO Yeah, and that’s why we made [“1999”] song number one, because it puts those two together, if you listen to our albums in a row. But who does that? Haha, I did that when I was fourteen with Guns ‘n’ Roses.  

SFBG Are you close with any other bands in particular?
AO The Stockholm scene is tight, you know.  We’re good friends with the Concretes, and Peter, Björn and John. We spend a lot of time with Swedish ones. Lykke Li, she’s a neighbor — I mean when she’s home. I can hear her when she’s writing songs and she can probably hear mine, cause we don’t have day jobs and you can hear through the walls

Trashy art: Recology’s 20 years of shoving artists into heaps

Andrew Lam
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One thing I learned yesterday about the artist in residence program at the Recology dump; Sirron Norris and other alums were not wading through the mountains of lightly used diapers and rotting carrots to cull the materials for the flights of foraged fancy they produce in the program, a 20-year retrospective of which opens today, Wed/21, at Intersection 5M. No no, they pick through the goods turned up by the city’s curb-side and drop-off recycling program, which you think would be a little cleaner. I mean, look at the art they made from it. But you’d be surprised…  

“That section anyone can drop something off is where you garbage pick,” artist Sirron Norris tells me when I called him up for comment on the sweet gallery show Recology’s assembled. He assured me that the dump’s program changed his artistic trajectory, and yet “You will come across rotting food — vegetables and rotting stuff. They’ll dump fish in the styrofoam cases, a lot of vegetables — a lot. Ive seen all kinds of stuff, nasty stuff and trippy stuff, a box full of stuffed animals; a box you could fit a loveseat in [note: here Norris commenced with a story about said box I don’t feel comfortable relating to my gentle readers. Ask him for details when you see him, dear ones]. Tons of pills, so many pills. Cough syrup.” 

“It’s up to them if they want to wear a respirator,” says dump advisory board member (and program director for Intersection for the Arts, who let us into the building even though I blatantly got the day wrong of the exhibit’s opening reception – thanks!) Kevin Chen. Artists, who spend up to eight hours a day at the recycling facility, are encouraged to wear not only steel toed boats, but also steel soled boots. Tre rugged, no?

But judging from the gems assembled at the Recology retrospective, the experience is more than worth the sanitary incursions. A kicky dress made from bottle caps and junk food wrappers by Remi Rubel hung next to Sandy Drobny’s intricately woven “Caution” tape apron. I wanted them for my own, just like I wanted to sit and finger Linda Raynsford’s saws carved to resemble their enemies in nature, the majestic fir tree, every day before I head to work. 

What I saw yesterday

The retrospective provides a lot to look at, nearly all of it made from things that otherwise would have been crushed into recycling. Packard Jennings created a “Terrorist Alert” board during his 2003 residency, which he installed on Division Street to warn post- 9/11 automobile drivers of threat levels approaching the ominous “pineapple” or “far-fetched” measure of urgency. David Hevel’s trio of bright fascinators – which he reverse-melts with a blowtorch in a video installation included in the gallery – baffled me with their preciousness until Chen cleared up their providence. “Sometimes a party store will drop off a whole bunch of stuff,” he said. Ah, streamers and sparkles, got it. 

Perhaps for obvious reasons, the residency program is an SF exclusive in this country. Chen says a similar program is being plotted for Portland, Oregon, but the set up – which allows artists free range in the recycling area in exchange for giving Recology temporary ownership of the pieces created, plus a few for their permanent collection – is mainly made possible here by a dump administration who, Chen told us, “really loves art.” Thanks guys! The whole thing left me stoked to check out the actual trash heap itself, where a sculpture garden lives and where regular gallery openings give people a chance to see their waste in a whole new light. 

Just like Norris did. “You’d see these piles and the piles would have these really great stories,” the artist told me, speaking as a man who knows the worth of another’s cast-offs. “I furnished my entire apartment from that place — cool stuff too, like old displays from Radio Shack.” 

 

Art at the Dump: 20 Years of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology

opening reception: Wed/21 6-8 p.m., free

through Sept. 25

5M

925 Mission, SF

www.sunsetscavenger.com

Cloudbustin’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Cloudbustin’

What the HTML will happen when “cloud computing” renders our desktop monoliths obsolete? I drool at the thought, while thoughts are still my own, of the coming retro fashion movement, enshrining the clumsy keyboards and monstrous monitors of yesteryear: boxy eggshell skirts, CPU tower heels, flat-screen kneepads, air can earrings, novelty glasses of scratched and sneezed-on anti-glare shields, flash drive panties, Ethernet cologne, USBriefs, “laptop ass,” “modem face,” brominated flame retardant blush, tantium base, phthalate plasticizer mascara … Alt+F fashions are freakin’ toxic in 2k17.

For now we’ve only gaseous intimations of the handheld, continuously updating future. And I’ve become addicted to the free Soundcloud.com (product placement!), on/at/in which I can listen to tens of thousands of DJ sets via my Stone Age Mac.

In fact, the unrefudiatedly dirty little secret of my dance music knowledge lately has been superstar Soundcloud user R_co (www.soundcloud.com/r_co), current online master of the techno-and-house nexus, who posts up to a dozen sets a day nabbed from famous and not-yet-famous DJs, from clubs like Berlin’s Berghain and Detroit’s Oslo (and our own Temple), from as far back as the 1980s to just last night. Soundcloud’s crouching trainspotters are quick to identify tracklists, relieving me of that whole, embarrassing “whistle it into Shazam and hope” thingy.

“I’m just a regular guy with a passion for electronic music,” R_co, a.k.a. Rico Passerini told me over e-mail. “I frequented the clubs in Manchester, Leeds, and London for most of my adult life. But I needed more, so I moved to Berlin a year and a half ago for the music scene. If I told you how I got the sets I post, I’d have to kill you. Nah, to be honest I had a big collection of music that I picked up over the years, and more recently I’ve been lucky enough to get sent music from DJs, record labels, and various club nights across the globe.”

Mike Huckaby – Long Track Radiocafé, Budapest – 16-05-2009 by R_co

So, Guru Rico, what do you love? “Mike Huckaby plays the best deep house. Sven Weisemann too. I love Peter Van Hoesen’s techno right now, and of course you’ve gotta love Ricardo Villalobos. Clubs? Berlin’s Suicide Circus is my latest favorite.”

With everyone’s sets immediately available on the Internet, and musicmakers being able to respond instantly to each others’ work, is there a danger that dance music is melting into one giant stew of similar-sounding mush?

“The Internet is definitely changing how DJs and producers hear and make music,” Rico replied. “It’s a lot easier to get samples, for one thing. I do understand how all the old school DJs are saying that music is getting worse because it’s too easy to produce it now. However, if you’re a 16-year-old kid, it’s not likely you’ve got the cash to spend on hardware, more likely you have access to a laptop and some software. So in a sense it’s a good thing, it gives new artists of all capabilities the chance to experiment from home.

“But in terms of all the music out there at the moment, everyone hearing and being influenced by each other more and more, it’s probably harder to make a unique sound. I guess we’ll never see another acid house. At the end of the day, though, we don’t write the future, so there’s no point in fighting it. There will always be good music and there’ll always be shit music. I like the good shit!”

 

TRANNYSHACK SIOUXSIE TRIBUTE

Jeepers creepers, twisted drag queens will seize the red light and leave your city in dust as they genuflect before the goth goddess.

Fri/23, 10 p.m.–3 a.m., $12. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.trannyshack.com

 

TODD EDWARDS

Todd Edwards is the right hand of the house god. The New Jerseyite pioneered the prophetic cutup vocal sound that’s influenced everyone from Burial to Justice, and takes the spiritual aspect of dance music very seriously. Get lifted when he joins the Icee Hot crew.

Sat/24, 10 p.m., $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

SMACK!

Detroit takes over SF for a kicky house and techno reunion. DJs Gay Marvine and Jason Kendig handle the decks, clubkid Nathan Rapport accepts birthday wishes, and Juanita More oversees it all.

Sat/24, 10 p.m., $5. UndergroundSF, 424 Haight, SF.

 

OUT SIDE ART: A BLOCK PARTY BENEFIT

I have to keep mum for now, but this awesome-sounding block party is the start of something big on the SF nightlife scene. A huge posse of street artists pumping up a Banksy mural and a host of bigtime DJs including Richie Panic, J-Boogie, and Chris Orr join to benefit Root Division’s youth program.

Aug. 1, 11 a.m.–6 p.m., $5. 161 Erie, SF. www.rootdivision.org

According to Matthew

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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According to Matthew

It is an understatement to say that the work of Matthew Barney elicits strong reactions. Critics have alternately hailed him as “the most important American artist of his generation” (that’s the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman) and complained of his art’s Wagnerian grandiosity, needless inscrutability, pretentiousness, and icy perfection (“loveless” was one of the words the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker used to describe “Drawing Restraint 9,” Barney’s 2006 show at SFMOMA).

As someone whose initial infatuation with Barney’s work is increasingly tempered by skepticism, I think there is truth to both camps. You’ll be able to deliver — or perhaps revise — your own verdict at the Roxie Theater, which is presenting all 7.5 hours of the epic Cremaster Cycle (1995-2002), Barney’s five-part, officially-never-gonna-be-available-on-commercial-DVD magnum opus. The theater is also screening De Lama Lâmina, Barney’s near hour-long 2004 film, in which he collaborates with a Brazilian Carnaval krewe to orchestrate a performance aboard a float in Salvador da Bahia’s annual parade.

Barney’s art becomes increasingly frustrating and seductive the longer one attempts to decode its carefully staged and indisputably visually stunning pageantry, which encompasses death metal covers of Johnny Cash, the esoteric intricacies of Masonic symbolism, Busby Berkeley-style revues in football stadiums, androgynous water sprites, and the complex biology of sexual differentiation in the fetus (the series is named after the muscle that controls the descent of the testes). The one constant is Barney’s display of his body: frequently nearly-nude, but more often subject to some physically demanding ordeal or engaged in an athletic feat.

As Daniel Birnbaum astutely observes in Artforum, “Barney is a believer in ‘the meaning of meaning.'” Which is to say, nothing is done just for show in Barney’s world, even if the systems of meaning he draws upon — developmental biology, Celtic mythology, Mormonism, minimalist sculpture — are themselves enclosed within, and at times frustratingly occluded by, his art’s glossy packaging and Hollywood-level production values. It’s hard not to ask: what does it all mean? But the question easily gets lost within the Cremaster Cycle‘s lavishly appointed echo chambers.

That said, Barney’s art offers no shortage of beautiful moments and otherworldly imagery. His universe encompasses elegance (Aimee Mullins as a gorgeous cheetah woman in Cremaster 3) and horror (the conception scene early on in Cremaster 2). Whether or not all this beauty is truth is still up for debate.

 

THE ODD COUPLE

Robert Koch Gallery is currently home to quite the odd couple. From the 1960s to 1985, Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, formerly a painter, took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov using various homemade cameras made from whatever was on hand: cardboard tubes, wood, sanded Plexiglass lenses.

The photographs — creased, badly printed, all in soft focus — are as dreamy as they are creepy: Tichy often cropped off the heads of his unknowing subjects (many of whom are in swimwear), leaving their identities anonymous while reducing them to bared legs and torsos. Despite their aura of timelessness, you feel dirty looking at Tichy’s photos. It’s hard, though, not to keep staring.

Plenty of isolated gams appear in the work of Hungarian artist Foto Ada, also at Koch, but the effect is far less sinister. Ada (maiden name, Ada Ackermann, married name, Elemérné Marsovsky) created her remarkable photo-collages from the late 1930s through World War II, clipping magazine and newspaper images of soldiers, Hollywood starlets, and industrial landscapes into sharp and humorous comments on the accelerated culture of her time. The Nazis, in particular, gets theirs: Hitler and Goebbels converse in skeleton-filled catacombs, appropriately oblivious to the death that surrounds them.

THE CREMASTER CYCLE PLUS DE LAMA LÂMINA

July 30– Aug. 8, $5–$9.75

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

MIROSLAV TICHY + FOTO ADA

Through Aug. 21, free

Robert Koch Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 421-0122

www.kochgallery.com

 

Hot sexy events July 21-27

Andrew Lam
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“What was that video about Eric? Wow! Girl’s butt in your face and everything!” I hope not too many of you are keeping tabs on FOX News, because in terms of sheer entertainment value we here at the SFBG simply cannot compete with Glenn Beck and his cronies’ 2009 commentary on the SF’s pervert art scene. Just watching him pump his blonde little eyebrows up and down while saying the words “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror flick, complete with four men, three women and one gorilla,” – hey Beck, stay the hell away from my beat!

Yeah yeah yeah, what the hell am I talking about. So the National Endowment for the Arts kicks down some precious ducats from their $80 million stimulus pot to SF org’s like Cinematheque, Frameline Films, and CounterPULSE, whose series Perverts Put Out was honored with a name check on the fair and balanced news channel. What are they so tantalizingly riled over? Well my friends, check it out for yourselves when PPO hits the Center for Sex and Culture stage this weekend as part of its traditional, pre Dore Alley Fair show (Sat/24). 

 

Alex Ironrod

The semi-retired leather champ-author talks about his Leather Masters and slaves series, which follows the adventures of Tarquin and Paul and their buddies in the L.A. leather scene.

Thurs/22 7:30 p.m., free

A Different Light bookstore

489 Castro, SF

(415) 431-0891

www.adl-book.blogspot.com


Bay of Pigs

For all the fun of the street fair without the gawkers and sunshine, head to the Bay of Pigs. This is the UYA’s official Saturday pre-party, and you can bet your well oiled, mid-shin-high boots that there’ll be enough visuals to keep you stimulated; dancers, demos, and spaces to cavort and carouse like you wouldn’t believe.

Sat/24 10 p.m.-4 a.m., $50

525 Harrison, SF

(415) 777-3247

www.folsomstreetfair.org


Perverts Put Out For Dore

As seen on FOX news! Philip Huang, Steven Schwartz, and Gina de Vries will leave their hangups at the door, and Dr. Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard host.

Sat/24 7:30 p.m., 

Center for Sex and Culture

1519 Mission, Suite 1

(415) 552-7399

www.sexandculture.org


Up Your Alley Street Fair

Swing your partner round and round! Take your kinks down to SoMa for an leather SF tradition: UYA has been rocking Dore to its very soul since 1987. Just be sure to walk that fine line of legality. Nudity’s no crime, but lewd behavior, the festival website says, will get you the boot. Well, after a couple verbal warnings… 

Sun/25 11 a.m.-6 p.m., $5 suggested donation

Dore between Folsom and Howard, SF

(415) 777-3247

www.folsomstreetfair.org


Sex Positive Sex Workshop

Dr. Carol Queen doesn’t sleep. In a good way. Today she’s hosting a class for all those considering, or currently delving into, sex work. She’ll be breaking down the inter-sniping that can too often occur between divisions of work (dancer vs. escort vs. street worker), and sharing the reasons for solidarity if you’re gonna be up on that pole or on your back for cash. Hint: they’re important.

Sun/25 6 p.m., $10

Femina Potens gallery

2199 Market, SF

(415) 864-1558

www.feminapotens.org


The Art of Female Ejaculation

“The Fountain of the Goddess” is the subtitle for Sheri Winston’s primer on how to get your favorite va-jay-jay (ugh, no props to your proto-linguistic ingenuity, Oprah) gushing that sweet, sweet Amrita. Oh yes, she goes there. Winston will take you back into ancient India’s reverence for the “Nectar of Life,” which sadly today has been reduced to fodder for Amsterdam sideshow-porn star shooting competition. Learn how to evoke your inner squirting goddess with her.

Tues/27 6- 8 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0400

www.goodvibes.com 

 

Our Weekly Picks: July 21-27, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

WEDNESDAY 21

MUSIC

Nobunny

There’s no telling where Justin Champlin, clad in tighty-whiteys and a bunny mask, got his rabbit obsession, though Bunnicula comes to mind. Known for his stage antics, the Nobunny leader — and sole member, really, if you exclude the backing musicians shuffling in and out — is something of a rock ‘n’ roll animal classified in the punk rock phylum (or garage rock class). Love Visions (2008), with homages like “Chuck Berry Holiday,” produced catchy tracks faster than a rabbit could procreate. Champlin’s histrionics, and even messier sound, recall the Ramones or more recently, Hunx and His Punx. (Ryan Lattanzio)

With Spits, Scumby, and Carolyn the DJ

9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

THURSDAY 22

FILM

Five Easy Pieces

A few years after creating wannabe-pop group the Monkees, Bob Rafelson wrote — along with Carole Eastman — and directed 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Like Easy Rider (1969), it’s a man-is-a-lonely-island-unto-himself picture starring Jack Nicholson and the squalid splendor of the American landscape. Bobby leaves his affluent family for the life of an oil rigger, but what he finds are consequences both understated and overwhelming. Nominated for four Oscars, Pieces is not an easy film. Like the literature of Cormac McCarthy or Hemingway, it’s biblical, masculine stuff. Yet for all its ruggedness, it has a bittersweet side worth noting for Laszlo Kovacs’ muted cinematography, as well as the weepy country tunes of Tammy Wynette. (Lattanzio)

7 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

VISUAL ART

“Wondrous Strange: A Twenty-First Century Cabinet of Curiosities”

The medieval notion of a cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammern holds great fascination to this day, even though a room filled with animal bones, coins, and unmarked pottery shards would seem a fairly undisciplined display format for scientific artifacts at this point. But if the Wunderkammern is academically anachronistic, the folks at SFMOMA Artists Gallery still find it a useful vehicle for conveying art and culture. The opening of “Wondrous Strange” will feature a time traveler costume contest, burlesque performance by the Burley Sisters, and music from the Grannies. The opening ceremonies will also extend to the nearby Long Now Foundation (also in Fort Mason’s Building A), where interested parties can check out their prototypes for the 10,000 Year Clock. (Sam Stander)

Through Aug 28

5:30 p.m., free

SFMOMA Artists Gallery

Bldg. A, Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-4777

www.sfmoma.org

 

FILM

Behind the Burly Q

While relatively tame by today’s standards, burlesque was once perceived as a scandalous art form. Featuring comedians, strippers, and satire, burlesque threatened conservative views about sex and sought to undermine accepted social norms. Even though vaudeville-inspired acts have recently made a nostalgic comeback, their roots remain widely misunderstood. Director Leslie Zemeckis’ documentary Behind the Burly Q goes straight to the source to uncover more than just pasties. By interviewing many of the women and men who starred and worked in the industry, Zemeckis traces the often overlooked history of American burlesque and honors all those who managed to use a g-string as a political weapon. (Katie Gaydos)

Thurs/22-Sat/24, 7:30 p.m.;

Sun/25, 4 and 6 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

FRIDAY 23

MUSIC

Cynic

Along with most of the rest of his band, Cynic guitarist Paul Masvidal avoided an awkward ’90s-metal swan song by disappearing into the jazz scene. Suddenly, in 2006, Masvidal and his main collaborator, drummer Sean Reinert, resurfaced with a renewed sense of purpose, and the release of 2008’s Traced in Air ushered in an era of relentless touring that saw the prog-metallers quickly reestablish their towering reputation. This summer’s Decibel-sponsored headlining tour features the band playing its 1993 classic Focus in its entirety, so prepare for Mixolydian assault. (Ben Richardson)

With Intronaut, Dysrhythmia

8 p.m., $17

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

DANCE

Carmina Burana: Revisited

For a few years, choreographer Enrico Labayen disappeared from the local radar screen. He now has reemerged with an ambitious full-evening work based on two rituals from opposing sides of the planet. Turns out that Labayen, an early member of Alonzo King’s LINES Dance Company who also has 15 years’ experience as an independent choreographer, spent the intervening years in his native Philippines to study the matriarchal aspects of its culture that have long fascinated him. His new Carmina Burana: Revisited delves into Carl Orff’s raucous reimagining of Medieval European Christianity for a work that explores the choreographer’s own memory of Tadtarin, a Philippine ritual that celebrates femininity. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/23-Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 7 p.m., $30

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

MUSIC

Grouper

Portland, Ore.’s Liz Harris, who records and performs ambient drone music as Grouper, has composed a new piece specifically for the Berkeley Art Museum, which incorporates video as well as tape music and live instrumentation. This continues the “L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA” series’ dedication to avant-garde performance. Previously, L@TE has brought in such luminaries as Terry Reilly and the Residents; later this summer the series features sometime Grouper collaborator Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu. Grouper’s premiere of “SLEEP” will be preceded by music from Eugene Petrushansky, who plays early music on a harpsichord of his own construction, an interesting juxtaposition and perhaps fitting complement to Harris’ intense soundscapes. (Stander)

7:30 p.m., $5

Berkeley Art Museum, Gallery B

2625 Bancroft, SF

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

SATURDAY 24

EVENT

Tori Spelling

The Oxygen Network — the equivalent of an unclaimed baggage room for celebrities past their prime — still airs Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, where Tori Spelling can be seen redecorating her house or renewing her vows (eep!) But unlike most stars in the dreary constellation of reality TV, Spelling actually isn’t that dumb. With a resume longer than the New York Times best seller list she topped in 2008, she’s the ultimate media mogul. In her new book, uncharted terriTORI, she returns to the Narcissus pool of sTORI Telling with some fresh anecdotes like her bout with H1N1 and her life as a Twit. Err … I mean, a Tweeter. (Lattanzio)

7 p.m., free

Books, Inc.

2251 Chestnut, SF

(415) 931-3633

www.booksinc.net

 

DANCE/MUSIC

“Salsa on the Fillmore”

Why watch Dancing With the Stars when you can dance under the stars? All right, the summer fog might not stay away long enough for us to actually see any stars, but thanks to dance festival “Salsa on the Fillmore,” we can safely say, for once, a night in SF will be hot and sweaty. Forget bar hopping in the Mission. With open dance floors and live music at Yoshi’s, Rasselas Jazz Club, Sheba Piano Lounge, and 1300 on Fillmore, it’s time to go rumba hopping! Start off the night at Fillmore Center Plaza with free salsa lessons by Bay Area Latin dance instructors Juan Gil and Rebecca Miller, and live music by Los Bolores. (Gaydos)

7 p.m.–2 a.m., free–$25

Fillmore between Eddy and Geary, SF

(808) 352-4315

www.salsaonfillmore.com

 

MUSIC

Bay Area Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus

If you have any affinity at all for the American labor movement, these are depressing times. All that populist energy generated in the wake of 2008’s financial meltdown seems to have been wasted on fruitless antigovernment paranoia, while essential state services are being eliminated nationwide, taking thousands of union jobs with them. Those sympathetic to the cause of social justice can be forgiven for not feeling much like singing. On the other hand, nothing rabble-rouses like a good anthem, and no movement ever got far on despair. The Bay Area Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus realizes this, and is presenting, as part of the Bay’s yearly LaborFest, a program of union songs old and new, celebrating victories won and anticipating those still to come. (Zach Ritter)

7 p.m., $5

ILWU 34 Hall

801 Second St., SF

(415) 648-3457

www.laborfest.net

 

SUNDAY 25

MUSIC

Queensryche

Queensryche and burlesque. On the one hand, it’s a completely arbitrary juxtaposition, akin to, say, “submarines and kumquats.” On the other, it makes perfect sense. The veteran Seattle prog-metal act have always had a flair for the theatrical, the lushly orchestrated, the ever-so-slightly over the top. And during a break in the recording of its new album, the band decided to really go for broke, setting out on the road with the “world’s only adults-only rock show,” featuring contortionists, trapeze artists, jugglers, and other delights. If you’ve been waiting your entire life to combine scantily clad women and immaculately composed concept albums, wait no longer. (Richardson)

8 p.m., $40

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

MUSIC

Bomba Estéreo

While our government issues frantic safety advisories to Colombia-minded travelers, Locumbia ticks out a merry beat toward a perch atop South America’s creative culture heap. Medellín, Bogotá, Chico Trujillo, the via-L.A. party tunes of Very Be Careful — this a land where you festivate like you mean it, even if a decades-long battle between the guerrillas and army rages in the hinterlands. Lucky for media-boozled us: the international tour. Bomba Estéreo mixes hawt psychedelic cumbia beats with Caribbean folkloric sound and enough echo to qualify as a dance group. Speaking of dance group — start one under the Stern Grove green at the group’s free show. (Caitlin Donohue)

  With Jovanotti

2 p.m., free

Sigmund Stern Grove

Sloat and 19th Ave., SF

(415) 252-6252

www.sterngrove.org

 

TUESDAY 27

MUSIC

Obits

The album cover for Obits’ I Blame You claims it is “Xtra Compressed for Maximum Listener Fatigue,” and, while 41 minutes doesn’t seem like such a short album these days, the music itself has a tight, claustrophobic intensity that really good garage rock delivers so well. Lead guitarist Rick Froberg, formerly of Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu, journeys through all manner of rock in those 41 minutes, skewing the familiar sounds of surfer twang and post-punk into a nonstop groove that leaves the listener just as breathless as the cover promises. Obits knows you don’t have to break any musical barriers to crack a few eardrums. (Peter Galvin)

With Night Marchers and Moonhearts

9 p.m., $14

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

EVENT

“Visions of the Gameocalypse”

In a world where gaming is “no longer just for kids!” or nerds, and where major members of the artistic establishment (cough-Ebert-cough) take up arms against the perceived aesthetic immaturity of videogames for no good reason, it would do us all a little good to get a firmer grasp on how computerized gaming has developed. Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games and author of The Art of Game Design: a book of lenses, will be presenting his thoughts on the “social, cognitive, and technological trends” in gaming. We can only hope the event’s gloomy title, “Visions of the Gamepocalypse,” is tongue-in-cheek, though it definitely implies a refreshingly futurist approach to games. (Stander)

7:30 p.m., $10

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org 


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Fantasy island

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Fantasy island

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC The Aunt Charlie’s in the video for Myles Cooper‘s song “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” is a massive tree with a vagina dentata doorway where cupcakes, eggs, top-hatted Mr. Peanuts and white-gloved strawberries dance, while Muppets sing a chorus. Nestled in the tenderest spot of the city’s loins, just off Market Street, the Aunt Charlie’s of San Francisco is a different place, but not really. One night a week, it’s the site of High Fantasy, a club hosted by Cooper and Alexis Penney that — as Cooper says — “belongs to the fantasies of those who come and need to imagine and party.”

Aunt Charlie’s is also one nexus of a mini-movement of sorts of truly new gay pop music in 2010. Witty, both ironic and utterly sincere, and catchier than any mega-production you might hear on the radio, Cooper’s bedroom reggaeton — or, to use his phrase, digital dancehall — debut single is one of its anthems. “I made a YouTube video to remember the song when I wrote it,” he explains, when asked about “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today”‘s genesis. “I still have it. I was on Ambien late at night. The writing took like 30 seconds, but coming up with the chord changes and sound was more cognitive. I was listening to ‘Supermodel,’ the Rupaul song, and the first line is ripped off from it.”

Decked out in gonzo cartoon cover art by Skye Thorstenson, who made the song’s video, “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” has just been released as a 7-inch single by Transparent in England, where the fabled weekly New Musical Express recently placed Cooper ninth on a list of “The 50 Most Fearless People in Music,” one spot below Lady Gaga. Tonight, the fearless man with the brush cut and Mr. Rogers attire is camped out a table at Aunt Charlie’s, where DJ Bus Station John is prepping for his weekly night, Tubesteak Connection. “Bus Station, where is my boyfriend tonight?,” a regular calls out from the bar. “Oh, she’s around,” John answers.

Cooper is about to go on a summer trip to Chicago, then Africa, then Chicago again. Two nights before, at High Fantasy, a chorus of four performers serenaded him with Toto’s “Africa.” “I felt like somebody cared,” he says, with characteristic low-key geniality. Many people travel to Africa, but not many make music videos with close relatives during the trip — that’s Cooper’s goal. “I’m writing a song, an anthem called ‘You’ve Got to Love Your Family’,” he says. “I don’t always get along with my family, and I feel like this is a test. It’ll be funny to do the video with them lip-syncing the song. We’ll be on safari, and it’ll capture my family’s funny interaction with me. My mom never wants to be on camera.”

It’s this kind of true directness and simple originality that likely inspired NME to deem Cooper one of the 10 most fearless musicians on the globe. His surface appearance of intense normalcy is paired with wild creativity. “I got these shoes because they kind of remind me of a Noe Valley 50-year-old in a way that’s sexy to me,” he says, pointing down to his feet. “My fashion choices are perverse and I like to be in costume.” At High Fantasy, that costume might include a glitter-encrusted Bart Simpson T-shirt with Tupac tattooed on Bart’s stomach. At a Lilith Fair-inspired drag night he once put on at The Stud, his look included “a flannel skirt and a dolphin airbrushed on my ankle and and really ugly Doc Marten sandals and a tie-dyed shirt and gross curly wig.”

Cooper’s look and outlook has some connections to a recent day gig working with boys and girls aged 5 and 6. There might be moments where he wishes some kids’ face were an iPad so he can create or communicate on the job, but there’s an honest and committed through-line between his daytime life and nightlife. A recent show by his group Myles Cooper USA included giant acid house yellow smiley faces that were painted by the kids. He says he recently gave them a fashion poll: which label is better, Ed Hardy or Baby Phat? Baby Phat won by one vote, cast by him (“I like the cat on the logo”).

Cooper used to play in the Passionistas, a three-piece that put out one excellent pop-punk album in 2007 before disbanding. Going solo allows him to edit himself while giving his imagination free rein. That means he can incorporate his visits to Chicago (and greater journey to and from the Windy City and Africa) into the music he’s making today; the city is where he filmed the video for his next single, “Hair,” a many-voiced delight that places him alongside Morrissey and Jens Lekman in the hairdo-song hall of fame. “House music has always been a mysterious thing to me, because I’ve always thought of it as this perfected music that wasn’t made by people,” he says, when asked about the sound of Chicago. “I don’t think that anymore, I see how human it is. Even if the people I see are just playing records, I want to see what tempo they are, what key they’re in, what people are doing as they hear the music, and what they’re looking like when they do it.”

 

BIG LOVE

“I had a crush on Myles for a while, I thought he was so hot and the perfect boyfriend for me,” Alexis Penney says at Aunt Charlie’s. It’s a few weeks later, and Penney is prepping the bar for another night of High Fantasy. We’ve met at the apartment she shares with Dade Elderon of Party Effects, where she puts Band-Aids in a pair of high-heeled shoes before we head out, a little move that seems especially necessary less than half an hour later, when she’s scaling — quickly and faultlessly — a wooden ladder-like staircase to find and gather decorations. “The trick to having a club is that you have to go out a lot, so people know you,” Penney declares, gathering and arranging a train of white tulle that’s just long enough for the Bride of Godzilla.

Thing is, Penney — who grew High Fantasy out of Thing, a night she put on with Seth Bogart of Hunx and His Punx — shouldn’t necessarily need to go out to be known. Her first recording, “Lonely Sea,” produced by Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy, could be the number one hit of 2010 for anyone who ever had a heart. Like Cooper’s “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today,” it takes touchstones of gay pop past — in this case, the churchy keyboard sounds and insistent crossover house beat of songs like “Supermodel” and Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” — and adds some plaintive MIDI saxophone sounds at just the right moment, while wedding it to a beautifully frank and completely modern vocal about a broken relationship.

Penney is a busy girl. She edits, writes and photographs for SORE, an online magazine that captures San Francisco gay nightlife. SORE was born in Kansas City, where Penney is from, when she and a friend named Roy and Cody Critcheloe from the group SSION decided they wanted “a sort of punk answer” to the popular lifestyle magazine BUTT. “I photograph things because I think they look funny, I don’t do it because it’s nightlife photography,” Penney says, bunching a ball of electric blue tulle into a ball against the back wall of the bar. “My ultimate fantasy for SORE, which will never happen, would be for it to be a print magazine. None of this ‘We talk about sex, but we make $100,000 a year’ material. Real gay life.”

Penney’s gay life, buoyed by friends like Monistat, is realer than most. “I wander around in my T-shirt and jeans a lot in the daytime, that’s normal,” she says. “But I needed to challenge myself with fashion. And [cross-dressing] went in line with the fact that I was dating someone [Bogart] who owned a vintage store. We were constantly thrifting and I had so much clothing at my disposal. I decided I’d just wear a bra, because you just don’t see a guy wearing a bra. Or I’d wear a bra and a lift, or a really slutty cocktail dress. I dress in women’s clothes interchangeably. I don’t trip about it. As much as people in SF say they’re trans-friendly, people really trip about gender. A lot of drag queens, they’re in or they’re out. I don’t even care.”

True. Except in Penney’s case, not caring is actually caring more than most people have the guts to in a society where every micro-subculture seems to breed conformity. It’s this directness, different from Cooper’s, or Bogart’s flirty and radically seductive candor, that distinguishes the music that Penney has made so far with Weiss. “I instantly felt a musical connection with Alexis, and the shine of her confident aura,” Weiss writes, when asked about first meeting Penney and the making of “Lonely Sea.” “My celebratory buoyant house beat mixed with Alexis’ love-lost lyrics so instantly I knew we had a hit.”

Both Penney and Bogart (as H.U.N.X.) have been recording with Weiss, and the results are everything from moving (“Lonely Sea”) and slinky and ebulliently powerful (Penney’s “Like the Devil”, the sun to “Lonely Sea”‘s elemental moon, and every bit its equal) to sexy in an existentially lonely way (H.U.N.X.’s “Can A Man Hear Me”) and hilarious (H.U.N.X.’s vampire cruising track “I Vant to Suck Your Cock”). For the prodigious Weiss, the connection to Penney might go back to a shared childhood love of Annie Lennox, particularly her 1992 album Diva. “Seth and Alexis are both really hyper-specific about what they’re going for,” he says, breaking down the collaborations. “Seth likes to work really fast and doesn’t usually go over two takes on a song. Alexis likes to throw out tons of reference points while we’re writing: ‘Give me something a little more trip hop-acid-tropical-wave-current please! And could you make it a little more world?'”

“Myles [Cooper] and I nerd out over music and songwriting over text message. He’s totally a visionary,” Weiss goes on to enthuse. In the separate but connected sounds of Cooper, Penney, H.U.N.X. and Teengirl Fantasy, all the wonderful gender-blur and sexuality of 1992 — when Lennox went solo and Boy George burst back into the limelight via The Crying Game — are remade anew, at a time when lifestyles feels like strait-jackets. There is inspiration to be taken from these artists’ love and support for one another on a daily and a big-picture basis. It’s the kind of force that can make changes within a broader culture, at least on small, rippling levels. This is gay pop in 2010: not striking mannered classic gay or rock poses, but instead allowing fabulous and tricky versions of one’s self to manifest and bloom.

“I could talk for days about nothing,” Penney says at one point, just before another night of High Fantasy begins. But really, she has something to say: “My relationship with music is that if I can’t connect emotionally with it, I just don’t like it.” And another thing: “I get really messy and really wasted but I always know where I’m at and who I am.” And another: “I always respect the person who you remember from the party. I want to be irreverent and confident enough to look like a freak.” And another: “Everyone wants to be something, but not everyone admits it to themselves.” And yet another: “I’m 23, I’ve tried every drug, I’ve never said no to sex, and here I am — I’m totally crazy.”

And — what the hell — one more thing: “I’ve got a lot to give. I’ve got a big heart, and a big boner.”

www.mylescooper.com
www.myspace.com/alexispenneymusic
www.myspace.com/gayestmusicever
www.myspace.com/mylescooper

State of interdependence

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
State of interdependence

DANCE There’s no question that dance and music live and breathe together. Anyone who has been moved to motion by a rhythmic beat or catchy melody can attest to that. Yet where the two art forms intersect and drive each others’ creative process is often harder to pin down, for they exist both independently and interdependently.

Like their respective art forms, choreographer Kara Davis and composer Sarah Jo Zaharako of Gojogo inspire and influence each other. Part of Dance Mission Theater’s Down and Dirty series, their recent performance “Symbiosis: An Evening of Music & Dance” (July 11) not only marked five years of collaboration and creative dialogue, but proved to be a stunning display of talented dancers and musicians.

The first half of the evening featured Davis’ dance company project agora, opening with Davis’ 2009 piece A Softened Law. It began with a line of dancers walking away from and yet always returning to a bright light in front of them, as if in prayer. When one dancer broke away from the repetitive and confined ebb and flow of the group, her series of expansive steps summoned a sense of freedom emerging from confinement. Under beams of gold light, the dancers — dressed in desert-toned hues — ran, leapt, and fell to the floor with passionate intensity and athletic agility. Ethereal yet grounded, Davis’ choreography flowed like a cool stream through a desert.

Because every step seamlessly initiated the next, Davis’ movement style never felt forced. This was particularly true in One Tuesday Afternoon (2008), where the dancers entered and exited the stage in interweaving duets. While the project agora dancers embody the spirit of Davis’ choreography, there is something extra special about watching Davis perform her own work. In the romantic duet Exit Wound (2006) — the first piece Davis and Zaharako created together — she and Nol Simonse graced the stage with captivating rapport. Whether swaying through simple waltz-like steps or intricate entangled arms, they never lost sight of each other. Zaharako and bassist Eric Perney were equally involved in the intimate duet. The warm violin parts of Zaharako’s composition fueled the couple’s dancing as much as their dancing seemed to fuel the music.

It was fitting that Davis ended the dancing part of the evening with the world premiere of her most recent collaboration with Zaharako, Symbiosis. Dancing with an awareness of Zaharako and her ensemble and incorporating elements of improvisation, Davis made the solo feel more like an exploration than a formulation. Each of her gestures, whether slowly moving her hand to her chin or stretching her white shirt overhead like a veil, implied a weighty yet inexplicable significance. Through their navigation of the parameters of dance and music, Davis and Zaharako brought the potential beauty of symbiosis to life.

Against nostalgia

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Against nostalgia

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART/MUSIC Whether through the distorted visual crackle of old videotape or the gauzy gaze of a photograph, there is a class of artwork that challenges the spectator to engage with something not immediately present. It’s as if there is something floating behind the image at hand, which the mind is desperately hungry to grasp, but cannot perceive. This effect we call “haunting,” and often leave it at that. But 17 years ago, French philosopher Jacques Derrida developed a way of thinking about the concept of the ghost in terms of its symbolic relevance to our experience of history, and his “hauntological” approach continues to inform strains of art and music criticism as well as political philosophy.

Inspired by Derrida along with a recent spate of hauntologically inclined British electronic music, the Berkeley Art Museum’s “Hauntology” exhibit assembles an array of such unsettling works across several media. Curated by local artist/musician Scott Hewicker and BAM director Lawrence Rinder, the small but affecting gallery is composed mostly of selections from BAM’s collection that fit in one way or another into the rubric of hauntology.

Working, with a few exceptions, from within the museum’s existing collection was ultimately liberating, according to Hewicker. “I think we wanted to take it another step further in some other open direction, and kind of be very poetic about it, and not be in this defined realm that doesn’t really have a very strict … defined realm,” Hewicker laughingly explains, on the opening day of the exhibit.

Besides that circumstantial constraint, the idea of a hauntology show presents a couple other interesting conundrums. For one thing, hauntology is not a genre of art; it’s an I-know-it-when-I-see-it affair at best, more of a critical framework than a set of conventions. For another thing, there is no defined hauntological movement in visual art (though there is arguably one in music), now or at any point in the past.

What defines hauntological art is loosely derived from Derrida’s idea, as quoted in the exhibit’s manifesto, of “the persistence of a present past,” a past not immediately perceptible but always exerting itself on the present. Hewicker and Rinder interpret this in a number of ways through their selections. The 1820 painting by an unknown artist View of Providence, Rhode Island invites questions of context — who painted this? and why? — and its ominous black grids of windows necessitate a similar curiosity: what’s behind them? In Roger Ballen’s Twirling Wires (2001), on the other hand, the question has more to do with what is actually transpiring in the photograph of a blanket-swaddled man seemingly menaced by a floating mass of wires.

Besides Derrida’s foundational 1993 book Specters of Marx, the curators point to British music journalist Simon Reynolds’ writings on electronic musicians such as Burial and the various artists on the Ghost Box label. Reynolds seems to have opened up the field for discussing hauntological aesthetics in modern popular culture. Another acknowledged inspiration is Adam Harper’s blog, Rouge’s Foam (www.rougesfoam.blogspot.com), which treats music and visual art from a hauntological perspective. Hewicker elaborates: “He was sort of the motivation for the show in the sense that he called for kind of a nonstylistic approach to art in a hauntological sense — that it wasn’t just about spooky images, necessarily, but … these things that have these layered meanings beneath them.”

Perhaps the most exciting issue raised by the show is that of medium — what it communicates (i.e. artistic medium as spirit medium), and what it means to make the medium the subject of a piece. Much of the exhibit consists of two-dimensional visual art, but the few deviations stand out. On the inclusion of video, audio, and sculpture, Rinder muses over e-mail, “People don’t think in as clearly material or disciplinary categories as they used to. So it felt natural to select from this broad range of works.”

Despite the fundamental role music plays in the exhibit’s conception, only one audio piece was incorporated into the exhibit, Ivan Seal’s Stuttering Piano (2007). Seal has produced cover art for such releases as the 2008 reissue of Persistent Repetition of Phrases by hauntological ambient project the Caretaker, but none of his visual art was in the collection. His audio works often accompany his paintings, so the curators saw this as an intriguing “solution” to that unavailability.

Lutz Bacher’s video piece Olympiad (1997) is a silent stuttering image, the deteriorated quality of which makes it disorienting to watch; many works in the exhibit similarly hound the viewer via their chosen medium. Paul Sietsema’s 2009 diptych Ship Drawing, oriented as the gallery’s centerpiece, is as concerned with medium as any piece in the show. One side depicts a drawing of a ship — note, specifically a drawing of one, since the weathered paper it appears on is also rendered in ink. The other half simply shows a blank bit of the same paper. Thus, the medium becomes the subject. In this way, even the nature of their own production is part of the past that haunts these works.

So all this art, spanning centuries, cultures, and movements, brought together at BAM — why now? Hewicker cites “ghosts that people are not addressing” as evidenced by the “Tea Party movement, the sort of revisionist nostalgia, the rewriting of textbooks in Texas.” Derrida’s ideas are still relevant to today’s political world, and that resonates in how this art affects us, whether it was created in 1658 or 2008.

As one would hope from a thoughtfully curated show, motifs emerge among the included works. There are myriad obscured faces, indecipherable objects, and artworks within artworks, as well as subtler commonalities. This conspires to reinforce the sense of hauntedness in the exhibit, as if something has come down through the ages to inspire art that not only, as Rinder puts it, “[evokes] futuristic ruins, displaced subjectivities, and uncanny silences,” but more important, leaves us ill at ease.

HAUNTOLOGY

Through Dec. 5, $5–$8 (free for students and children)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Here’s lookin’ at you, Vic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Here’s lookin’ at you, Vic

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Ah, Friday night at the movies: chatty mobs, unable to detach from their smart phones or fathom seeing a movie that isn’t both brand-new and unnecessarily 3-D’d. With such a bummer scene in the outside world, might as well stay home and watch edited-for-TV Seagal flicks on TBS, right?

Insert screeching needle-on-a-record sound here. Third option: head to one of the city’s most offbeat repertory theaters, collectively-run Haight Street landmark the Red Vic, which celebrates its 30th birthday this week.

“So often we hear people say, ‘Oh, we love the Red Vic! But we haven’t been there in years,'” collective member Claudia Lehan says. “That’s our biggest joke. We’re still here, we’re hanging in, but we need people to come to the movies. We’re doing our best to provide what people want.”

For the past three decades, that has meant a unique space (bench-style seating; organic popcorn and home-baked treats) with programming that reflects the theater’s eclectic spirit. Along with films skating the gap between first-run cineplex and DVD (Kick-Ass, The Runaways), a recent Red Vic calendar also lists the Burning Man Film Festival, local-interest doc It Came From Kuchar, a surf-movie night, a San Francisco Museum and Historical Society-presented program on the Haight, and the cult classic Freaks (1932).

“I think we’re a unique night out,” Lehan says. “The whole experience — the movie itself, it’s such an intimate theater, and it’s community-based.”

On a recent afternoon, I met with current collective members Lehan, Jack Rix, and Susie Bell; the fourth and newest member, Sam Sharkey (who late-night movie fans will know from Landmark Theatres), was out of town. Also joining us was Jack’s wife, Betsy Rix; she, along with Jack, Brad Reed, and Terry Seefeld, cofounded the Red Vic in 1980, with the help of other key players, including Martha Beck (who appears in the Red Vic’s adorable pre-show trailer) and Gary Aaronson.

 

RED HEADS

“We were all door-to-door canvassers in the ’70s,” Betsy remembers. “We’d go out after, and say, ‘There’s gotta be something better out there for us to do.’ We started thinking about starting a business together: a bookstore, or a movie theater. Movie theater seemed like a really good idea. At that time, there was a thriving repertory scene. We talked right away about having couches, nondisposable popcorn bowls — just to make it a totally different kind of movie theater. We plugged away on the idea for over a year.”

After some scouting, the group found its first venue, just down the street from its current location at 1727 Haight. “The Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast had an international marketplace that was closing up. It was a great big space,” Betsy says. “We got a lease for 10 years and renovated it.”

Visit the Red Vic’s cozy lobby, and you’ll see their first calendar hanging on the wall. You might be fooled into thinking the theater opened in 1980 on July 14, with a screening of the 1942 classic Casablanca. That was the original plan — until all of the projection equipment was stolen. Fortunately, the group was insured, but they had to delay their debut until new equipment could be ordered. When it arrived, they opened with the film scheduled for that day, July 25: 1977’s Outrageous!

Within the first month, Betsy says, they had their first bomb (1969 Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy) and their first hit, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). From the beginning, Red Vic audiences were determined to support the theater’s more unexpected film choices. A recent favorite has been Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003), a terrible-amazing vanity project that’s drawn hoards of devotees to its frequent Red Vic midnight showings. At $25 a pop, Wiseau bobbleheads are an in-demand item at the concession stand.

 

BIG(GER) RED

Though the Red Victorian hotel would give the Red Vic its name, the theater’s address would eventually change. “We’d had a fairly antagonistic relationship with the landlady,” recalls Betsy. “We knew for many years that in 1990, when the lease was up, we had to go.”

Fortunately, “it worked out better for everyone,” Jack Rix says. He and Betsy ended up buying the building that houses the Red Vic today, flanked by Escape from New York Pizza and the Alembic Bar. “Awesome neighbors,” agree the collective members, who tend to cheerfully talk over each other like family members. Though Jack suggests that the success of a collective is “like making sausage — you don’t really want to delve into it too much,” it’s clear the unique structure of the theater’s “management” has enabled it to thrive. The non-collective members at the Red Vic are volunteers who work in exchange for free movies.

The Red Vic’s permanent home holds 143; in keeping with the theater’s cinephile roots, “we remain committed to 35mm. We really try to show things in 35mm,” Jack says.

This dedication can sometimes lead to extremes (thanks to a distributor snafu, they once had to contact director Jim Jarmusch directly to borrow one of his films). But you’ll never see video at the Red Vic, unless the work was specifically made for it.

“If it’s made on video, and meant to be screened on video, we do have a pretty kick-ass projector,” Lehan says. “But if it’s made for 35mm … “

That projector comes in handy when local filmmakers, whose projects are often created using the more accessible video format, are on the calendar. “We really enjoy showing local films that people aren’t going to get to see anywhere else,” Jack says. “Lately something that’s worked pretty well is to rent the theater to filmmakers. It seems to work well both ways, because we get a minimum amount of business that’s guaranteed, and filmmakers get their movie shown.”

 

RED-HOT TICKETS

Though making gobs of money isn’t exactly the Red Vic’s goal, it has had some certified hits over the years. Used to be you couldn’t pick up one of the Red Vic’s signature red-and-black calendars without seeing trippy, time-lapse-heavy Baraka (1992) on the schedule. “We’re taking a break [from Baraka] for a little bit,” Lehan says with a chuckle.

Other success stories (besides The Room, as noted above) include two films coming up in August, El Topo (1970) and Dead Man (1995), plus anything by Werner Herzog, 1998 big-wave surf film Maverick’s (“Lines around the block,” Susie Bell recalls), and The Big Lebowski (1998), which returns every year on April 20, the high holiday for stoners. The Red Vic’s political leanings also draw crowds (“A new Noam Chomsky documentary will always do well,” per Bell), along with “stuff that’s really beautiful that looks good up on the big screen,” according to Jack.

For the past several years, the Red Vic has screened Hal Ashby’s 1971 dark comedy Harold and Maude on its birthday, July 25. It was a favorite of the late Steve Kasper, a friend and regular customer from the Red Vic’s earliest days. “He loved Harold and Maude,” Betsy says. “I don’t think we had really thought about showing it, but he brought it in. He was the one who started handing out daisies [after the film, a tradition that continues]. And it just really caught on.”

For 30 years, its cozy sense of community has remained unchanged. But the Red Vic, like other repertory theaters, has felt the 21st century pinch: DVDs, video-on-demand, and the Internet mean that less people bother seeking out off-the-beaten-path exhibitors. For the most part, though, collective members remain cautiously optimistic about the decades ahead.

“The first time we showed Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), which is a movie I really love, it did really well. I remember being amazed that we could show something like that and people would show up to see pure art on the wall of your funky little movie theater,” Jack says, before turning philosophical. “These are tough times for repertory theaters. To a certain extent, it’s use it or lose it. If people don’t support little theaters, they’re definitely not going to be around much too much longer.” 

HAROLD AND MAUDE

July 25–28, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.

(also Sun/25, 2 and 4 p.m.; July 28, 2 p.m.), $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Benefits: July 21-July 27

David Talbot
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Benefits: July 21-July 27

Ways to have fun while giving back this week


Thursday, July 22

“Battles Yet to be Won”
This benefit for political prisoner Marie Mason, who was sentenced to 22 years in 2009 on charges of property destruction related to her involvement in animal rights and environmental activism, will feature speakers Jeff Luers, Linda Evans, and Karen Pickett and tunes by KUSF DJ Carolyn Keddy. The speakers will contextualize Mason’s severe sentence with the U.S. governments past attempts at supressing the Black Panthers, the American Indian movement, Chicano rights, Puerto Rican Independentistas, and other political movements.
7:30 p.m., $5-$20 sliding scale
Submission Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
www.supportmariemason.org

Beer, Bites, and Bikes
Eat organic and locally made sausages and drink fine brews at this fundraiser for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s Green Streets Project to improve Market street for cyclists.
6 p.m., $20
Show Dogs
1020 Market, SF
www.sfgreatstreets.org

Saturday, July 24

Pet-a-palooza
Help raise funds for the Alameda Animal Shelter, the Northern California German Shorthaired Pointer Rescue, and Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter at this annual benefit party featuring an afternoon street fair from 1pm-6pm with a photobooth, a doggie fashion show, vendors, and more and an evening silent auction with entertainment.
1 p.m.-9 p.m., $20
Autobody Fine Art
1517 Park, Alameda
(510) 865-2608

Tuesday, July 27

Vote Health
Attend this 25th anniversary party for Vote Health, an Alameda based public health care advocacy group that supports a universal, single payer health care system for both the state and national levels. Featuring guest speaker Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a founding member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and renowned advocate for a  national single payer health system.
7 p.m., $15 suggested donation
California Nurses Association
2000 Franklin, Oakl.
(510) 658-1147

Quick Lit: July 21-July 27

David Talbot
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Quick Lit: July 21-July 27

Literary readings, book tours, and talks this week

Classic SF Noir, Cooking from the Farmer’s Market, sustaible design in the California Academy of Sciences, holistic tips for the  mind and home, Richard Walter, Yogiraj, and more.

Wednesday, July 21 

Cooking From the Farmer’s Market
Jodi Liano presents her book that helps home chefs identify, select, and prepare over 100 types of fruits and vegetables fresh from the market.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc. Berkeley
1760 4th St., Berk.
(510) 525-7777

Deep Medicine
Surgeon and holistic healer Dr. William Stewart explains how to tap into the mind’s power to heal the body.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc. Laurel Village
3515 California, SF
(415) 221-3666

Share This!
Deanna Zandt discusses the importance of social media as tools for change.
7:30 p.m., free
Books Inc. Marina
2251 Chestnut, SF
(415) 931-3633

Trust
Australian journalist and author Kate Veitch discusses her new novel about one woman’s journey to define what it means to her to be a “good woman,” balancing being a daughter, sister, wife, and mother.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

Thursday, July 22

“A Roof Full of Wild Flowers”
As part of the Bone Room Presents natural history lecture series, California Academy of Sciences Senior Curator and Botanist Frank Alameda will talk about the living, growing, 2.5 acre roof on the new California Academy of Sciences building. Alameda will discuss the construction of the roof and the part that it plays in the sustainability of the museum as a whole.
7 p.m., free
Bone Room
1573 Solano, Berk.
(510)526-5252

“Down with Stereotypes”
Alison Owings will read from her two books, Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray and the forthcoming Indian Voices / Listening to Native Americans, and discuss how the tales of Beulah Compton, a waitress union leader in Seattle in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and Tom Phillips (Kiowa), a powwow emcee and drug counselor at the Friendship House American Indian Healing Center, have in common.
7 p.m., free
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, SF
www.mtbs.com

Essentials of Screenwriting
Veteran screenwriter and legendary professor at UCLA’s film school, Richard Walter will read from his new book filled with his tricks of the trade that have led to many award-winning films.
7 p.m., free
Borders
400 Post, SF
(415) 399-1633

Feng Shui Your Mind
Holistic healers Jill Lebeau and Maureen Raytis share their strategies for decluttering and destressing your life.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc. Berkeley
1760 4th St., Berk.
(510) 525-7777

San Francisco Noir 2 vs. Los Angeles Noir 2
Hear from the editors of the lastest installments in the Noir series, San Francisco Nior 2 and Los Angeles Noir 2: the Classics. Featuring San Francisco Noir 2 editor Peter Maravelis, contributor Eddie Muller, and special guest Cara Black and Los Angeles Noir 2 editor Denise Hamilton.
7 p.m., free
Cantina
580 Sutter, SF
www.akashicbooks.com

The Thousand Autumns of Jocob de Zoet
David Mitchell brings us a new novel, set in coastal Japan in 1799, that follows a Dutch accountant that loses himself in a world of Japanese intrigue and danger.
7:30 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

Saturday, July 24

“The Bard in Bollywood”
Shakespearean scholar, Gitanjali Shahani, will explore the many adaptations, manifestations, and appropriations of Shakespeare in popular Hindi cinema using clips from Shakespeare Wallah, Maqbool, and Omkara to illustrate how Bollywood has re-imagined Shakespeare through the ages.
7 p.m., $8-$10 sliding scale
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
www.thirdi.org
 
“Fly Trap Theater”
This kid-friendly presentation by staffers from the Conservatory of Flowers offers an up close look at carnivorous plants and how they attack and eat bugs. There will even be a fly trap dissection, so onlookers can see the plants’ trapping mechanisms, followed by bug and plant puppet crafts.
2 p.m., free
Paxton Gate’s Curiosities For Kids
766 Valencia, SF
(415)252-9990

Himalayan Kriya Master Yogiraj SatGurunath Siddhanath
Attend this gathering where Yogiraj will discuss life from an enlightened viewpoint and share his mission of Earth peace through self peace.
7 p.m., $20 suggested donation
St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church
500 DeHaro, SF
1-866-YOGI-RAJ

Redstone Labor and Culture Walk
Learn about the history behind the murals in the lobby of the Redstone Building, a building that was the headquarters of the 1934 General Strike, followed by a guided walk through the vibrant surrounding neighborhood highlighting the Mission’s art, ethnic history, and class struggle.
1 p.m., free
Meet at Redstone Building
16th St. and Capp, SF
RSVP at (415) 841-1254

Sunday, July 25

Barak Obama and the Jim Crow Media
Author Ishmael Reed will read and discuss his new book, Barak Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers, about how Obama’s opponents use modern reincarnations of the ugly demons of slavery-era tactics to “break” black people.
2 p.m., free
Koret Auditorium
San Francisco Main Library
100 Larkin, SF
(415) 557-4400

Laborfest Book Fair and Poetry Reading
All day long, the Mission Cultural Center will feature multiple rooms where authors, activists, educators, and organizers will present labor themed panel discussions, book discussions, poetry readings, historical lectures, tabling, socializing, and more.
9:30am-5pm, free
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts
2868 Mission, SF
www.laborfest.net

Tuesday, July 27

Death is Not an Option
Suzanne Riveca’s new collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide.
7 p.m., free
Books Inc. Berkeley
1760 4th St., Berk.
(510) 525-7777

Found in Translation Book Group
Once a month, Scott Esposito of the Center for the Art of Translation and the Quarterly Conversation hand-selects fiction from around the world for a spirited discussion. Learn about the classic novel by Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, and his epic 100- book series Comedie humaine which provides an immense panorama of post-Napoleon France.
7 p.m., free
The Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688

“Jesse Schell: Visions of Gamepocalypse”
Hear game designer and CEO of Schell Games Jesse Schell discuss the social, cognitive, and technological trends in computer game design and use.
7:30 p.m., $10
Novellus Theater
YBCA
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787

Music listings

David Talbot
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0

Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Barenaked Ladies, Kris Allen, Angel Taylor Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $48-75.

“Bomb Tracks n Cognac Starring Andre Nickatina” Slim’s. 7:30 and 11:30pm, $29. With Bizzy Bone and Glasses Malone (late show) and Smoov-E, Tmills, and Dot Dot Curve (early show).

Debbie Davies and Robin Rogers Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Grand Archives, S, Northern Key Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Liturgy, Common Eider King Eider, Base of Bass Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Jay Nash, Joe Firstman, Rachael Sage Café du Nord. 8pm, $12.

*Jonathan Richman, Olof Arnalds Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café du Nord). 8pm, $15.

*Spits, Nobunny, Scumby, Carolyn the DJ Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Tom Shaw Trio with Laurie De Seguirant Martuni’s, Four Valencia, SF; (415) 241-0205. 7pm, $7.

Gaby V., Tracorum Hotel Utah. 9pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Ballyhoo, Mike Pinto, My Peoples Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

Michael Abraham Jazz Sessions, Gaucho Amnesia. 8pm, free.

Drew Piston and Melissa Jones Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Darryl Anders’ AgapeSoul Coda. 9pm, $10.

*Dead Weather, Harlem Warfield. 8pm, $42.

Foreign Exchange Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $25.

Foxtail Somersault, Vir, Astral, Tomihira Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.

Glassines, We are Kings Road, Sunshine Factory Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

Graves Brothers Deluxe, Human Toys, Juanita and the Rabbit Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $8.

Artwork Jamal Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Leela James Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $30.

*Lecherous Gaze, Lazy Dogs, Red Handed, Mojo Hand Eagle Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Pat McGee Hotel Utah. 7:30pm, $15.

*Me in the Zoo, Sonya Cotton, Ben and Ashi Café du Nord. 9pm, $12.

“School of Rock presents Live Aid Remade” Thee Parkside. 8pm, $15.

Sick of It All, Trash Talk, 50 Lions, Alpha and Omega Slim’s. 8pm, $15.

Jimmy Sweetwater, Vandella Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $14. Farewell tribute to Sweetwater with various artists.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Ayme and David, Golden Aarow Holy Face Amensia. 7pm, free.

Brave New Girl Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Jeannie and Chuck’s Country Roundup Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

Paul Manousos Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-7. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afro-tropical, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Coyu Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 515-4091. 9:30pm, $10-$20.

Dirty Dishes The LookOut, 3600 16th St., SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $3. With food carts and DJs B-Haul, Gordon Gartrell, and guests spinning indie electro, dirty house, and future bass.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Gigantic Beauty Bar. 9pm, free. With DJs Eli Glad, Greg J, and White Mike spinning indie, rock, disco, and soul.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Gymnasium Matador, 10 Sixth St, SF; (415) 863-4629. 9pm, free. With DJ Violent Vickie and guests spinning electro, hip hop, and disco.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Meat DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $2-5. Industrial with BaconMonkey, Netik, and Melting Girl.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Solid Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, free. With DJs Daddy Rolo and Tesfa spinning roots, reggae, dancehall, soca, and mashups.

FRIDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Admiral Radley, Sea of Bees, Built Like Alaska Biscuits and Blues. 10pm, $14.

*Cynic, Intronaut, Dysrhythmia Slim’s. 8pm, $19.

Foreign Exchange Amoeba, 1855 Haight, SF; (415) 831-1200. 6pm, free.

Foreign Exchange Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $25.

Leela James Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $30.

Candye Kane Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $22.

Neckmeat, Dylan Connor, Eli Braden Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Miniature Tigers, Spinto Band, Angel Island Hotel Utah. 9pm, $12.

Mushroom, McCabe and Mrs. Miller Make-Out Room. 7:30pm, $8.

Odessa Chen Band Art Tap, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. 6pm, free.

Ray Band Coda. 10pm, $10.

Tainted Love Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $23.

Chantelle Tibbs, Sharon Hazel Township, Battlin’ Bluebirds El Rio. 9:30pm, $5.

Tigers Jaw, Sidekicks, Hard Girls, Albert Square Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Toad the Wet Sprocket Fillmore. 9pm, $32.50.

White Cloud, Red Blue Yellow, Paranoids Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“The Art of the Duo: Complex Stories, Simple Sounds” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. 8pm, $25. With Kinan Amzeh and Dinuk Wijeratne, and Ben Goldberg and Myra Melford.

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Baxtalo Drom, The Lucky Road Amensia. 9pm, $5.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

Mercury Falls Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:45pm, free.

Rob Reich and Craig Ventresco Amensia. 6pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Kinan Azmeh’s Duo, Ben Goldberg and Myra Melford YBCA Forum and Sculpture Court, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787. 8pm, $25.

DANCE CLUBS

*Afrobeat Lab Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Featuring a live performance by ALBINO! with DJs Señor Oz and guests.

*Duniya Dancehall Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; (415) 920-0577. 10pm, $10. With live dance performances by Duniya Drum and Dance Co. and DJs DubSnakr and Juan Data spinning bhangra, bollywood, dancehall, African, and more.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs Romanowski, B-Love, Tomas, Toph One, and Vinnie Esparza.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

House of Voodoo Medici Lounge, 299 9th St., SF; (415) 501-9162. 9pm, free. With DJs voodoo and Purgatory spinning goth, industrial, deathrock, glam, and eighties.

Psychedelic Radio Club Six. 9pm, $7. With DJs Kial, Tom No Thing, Megalodon, and Zapruderpedro spinning dubstep, reggae, and electro.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Slam! Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10. Electro techno costume party with DJs Havoc, Tracer, Denise, and Mean Chaveen.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Trannyshack DNA Lounge. 10pm, $12. Siouxie Sioux tribute.

SATURDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Fishbear, Bob Hill Band, Moonlight Orchestra Slim’s. 8pm, $15.

Funk Revival Orchestra, Destruments Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $12.

Leela James Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $30.

Francesca Lee and the New Believers, Welcome Matt, Owen Roberts Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Nerv, Negative Trend, Grannies, Lewd, Nihilist Cunt Submission, 2183 Mission, SF; www.sf-submission.com. 8pm, $7.

Off With Their Heads, Static Thought, In Defence Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

River City Tanlines, Top Ten, Leaders Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Robyn Amoeba, 1855 Haight, SF; (415) 831-1200. 7pm, free.

*Robyn, Kelis, Dan Black, Far East Movement Mezzanine. 7pm, $25-40.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Little Teeth, miRthkon Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $19.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Sore Thumbs, Code 4-15, Dynamite 8, Switchblade Riot Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Tainted Love Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $23.

Tang!, Crazy Ballhead Elbo Room. 10pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Dinner set Coda. 7pm, $5.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 8pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil Vox Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:45pm, free.

Mark Digiacomo Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

Fuzzpod, Ableton Andy, Amalgamation, Freddy McGuire, DF Tram Amnesia. 6pm, $7-$10. Presented by the Songbird Festival.

Moore Brothers, Paula Frazer, Sweet Chariot Amnesia. 9pm, $7.

Orquesta America The Ramp, 855 Terry Francois, SF; (415) 621-2378. 5pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Barracuda 111 Minna. 9pm, $5-10. Eclectic 80s music with Djs Damon, Phillie Ocean, and Javier, plus free 80s hair and make-up by professional stylists.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with a birthday set by Mysterious D.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 100m, $7. DJs Nuxx and Zax spin dance music for homos and friends.

Colombia y Panama Coda. 10pm, $5. With DJs Beto, Vinnie Esparza, and Guillermo.

Gemini Disco Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Disco with DJ Derrick Love and Nicky B. spinning deep disco.

Go Bang! Deco SF, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025. 9pm, $5. Recreating the diversity and freedom of the 70’s/ 80’s disco nightlife with DJs Tres Lingerie, Steve Fabus, Nicky B., and more.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Reggae Gold Club Six. 9pm, $15. With DJs Daddy Rolo, Polo Mo’qz, Tesfa, Serg, and Fuze spinning dancehall and reggae.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Smack! Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Hosted by Juanita MORE with DJs Chuck Hampton and Jason Kendig spinning underground Detroit club music.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

DJ Hit Force, Thunderbleed Blind Vengeance Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $3.

Lycaon Pictus, MC Subzero Permafrost, Kemo Sabe, DJ Junk Drawer Amnesia. 9pm, $7-10.

Memorials, Points North, Ben Nenkert, Burnouts, Seth Chapla Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15.

Nihlotep, Locusta, Argentinum Astrum, Pale Chalice Thee Parkside. 8:30pm, $8.

Queensryche Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $40.

100 Monkeys, Kissing Club Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $14.

Thollem, Dieterich, Amendola, Shudder Café du Nord. 9pm, $10.

Toadies, Dead Country, Famous Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $16.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTY

Country Casanovas Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Forro Brazuca The Ramp, 855 Terry Francois, SF; (415) 621-2378. 5pm, free.

Jovanotti, Bomba Estéreo Sigmund Stern Grove, 19th Ave at Sloat, SF; www.sterngrove.org. 2pm, free.

Alex Walsh Bazaar Café, 5927 California, SF; (415) 831-5620. 6pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJs Sep, Ludachris, and guest McPullish.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Lowbrow Sunday Delirium. 1pm, free. DJ Roost Uno and guests spinning club hip hop, indie, and top 40s.

Play DNA Lounge. 5pm, $35. House with Joe Gauthreaux.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

MONDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bear in Heaven, Twin Sister, Beach Fossils Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

“Cat’s Pajamas” Make-Out Room. 8pm, $7-12. With Dusty Rose, Mr. Lucky, Ramshackle Romeos, and Cabaret Nouveaux with Allison Lovejoy.

Dangerous Summer, Morning Of, Places and Numbers Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $12.

Warnwulf, Whiskey Thieves, Intrinsic Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Gentry Bronson and Kaitlin McGraw Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

Earl Brothers Amnesia. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Michael Beach Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Delta Mirror, Borneo, Here Comes the Saviours Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, $10.

Goodnight Loving, Touch-Me-Nots, Switchbacks Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Laura Marling Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $20.

Neon Trees, Civil Twilight, Paper Tongues, Pacific Hurt Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

*Night Marchers, Obits, Moonhearts Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15.

Prayers for Atheists, George Watsky, Aquifer Thee Parkside. 8pm, $7.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

West Coast Singer/Songwriter Competition Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. “Stump the Wizard” with DJ Wizard and DJ Goat Leg.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

On the Cheap listings

David Talbot
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P>On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 22

RitLab Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; (415) 655-7800. 6pm, $5. Roll up your sleeves and create art with your friends at this weekly installment of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s D.I.Y. craft workshop focusing on personalized amulets that celebrate womanhood. Featuring snacks, drinks, creative guidance, and free materials.

BAY AREA

“A Roof Full of Wild Flowers” Bone Room, 1573 Solano, Berk.; (510)526-5252. 7pm, free. As part of the Bone Room Presents natural history lecture series, California Academy of Sciences Senior Curator and Botanist Frank Alameda will talk about the living, growing, 2.5 acre roof on the new California Academy of Sciences building. Alameda will discuss the construction of the roof and the part that it plays in the sustainability of the museum as a whole.

FRIDAY 23

Black Rock Roller Disco SOMArts, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 863-1414. 8pm; $7 in disco or playa garb, $10 no costume, $5 skate rental. Skate to some old school funk and roller disco with the Black Rock Rollers and help raise funds to bring a roller disco rink to Burning Man 2010. Participants must be 21 and over and Black Rock Roller Disco is not responsible for alcohol related crashes.

BAY AREA

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakl.; (510) 465-6400. 8pm, $5. Enjoy a true vintage movie experience complete with period newsreels, cartoons, previews, live music from the Mighty Wurlitzer organ, and audience participation games at this screening of E.T. in the classic, art deco Paramount Theater.

Ransanble! Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakl.; www.raratoulimen.com. Fri. 6pm-9:30pm, Sat. 11am-9pm, Sun. Noon-6pm; free-$20. Gather with dancers, musicians, community leaders, scholars, activists, dance and music educators, linguists, cultural and food enthusiasts and supporters of Haiti for this Haitian arts and culture festival featuring film screenings, dance workshops, Haitian cuisine, art, lectures, performances, Kreyol language classes and more.

SATURDAY 24

“The Bard in Bollywood” Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF; www.thirdi.org. 7pm, $8-$10 sliding scale. Shakespearean scholar, Gitanjali Shahani, will explore the many adaptations, manifestations, and appropriations of Shakespeare in popular Hindi cinema using clips from Shakespeare Wallah, Maqbool, and Omkara to illustrate how Bollywood has re-imagined Shakespeare through the ages.

“Fly Trap Theater” Paxton Gate’s Curiosities For Kids, 766 Valencia, SF; (415)252-9990. 2pm, free. This kid-friendly presentation by staffers from the Conservatory of Flowers offers an up close look at carnivorous plants and how they attack and eat bugs. There will even be a fly trap dissection, so onlookers can see the plants’ trapping mechanisms, followed by bug and plant puppet crafts.

Redstone Labor and Culture Walk Meet at Redstone Building, 16th St. and Capp, SF; RSVP at (415) 841-1254. 1pm, free. Learn about the history behind the murals in the lobby of the Redstone Building, a building that was the headquarters of the 1934 General Strike, followed by a guided walk through the vibrant surrounding neighborhood highlighting the Mission’s art, ethnic history, and class struggle.

Urban Youth Arts Festival Precita Park, Folsom at Precita, SF; (415) 285-2287. 1pm-6pm, free. Over 2,000 square feet of portable wall space will be open for artists of all ages to express themselves with free paint, brushes, and aerosol paint cans to get things started. There will also be mural performances, live music, breakdancing, spoken word performances, and free refreshments.

SUNDAY 25

Prepare for the Playa Café Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF; www.preparefortheplaya.com. Noon-7pm, free. Over 60 burner businesses and designers will be showcasing their playa specific products and services, including lights, faux fur, goggles, dust masks, costumes, sexy playa outfits, and more. There will also be a fashion show, how-to demonstrations for playa survival, virgin burner makeovers, and more.

Laborfest Book Fair and Poetry Reading Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; www.laborfest.net. 9:30am-5pm, free. All day long, the Mission Cultural Center will feature multiple rooms where authors, activists, educators, and organizers will present labor themed panel discussions, book discussions, poetry readings, historical lectures, tabling, socializing, and more.

Symphony in the Park Dolores Park, Dolores at 18th St., SF; www.sfsymphony.org. 2pm, free.Pack a picnic basket and bring your friends and family for the San Francisco Symphony’s free concert in Dolores Park, including a special tribute to Mexico with conductor Alondra de la Parra to celebrate the bicentennial of the independence of Mexico.

Up Your Alley Dore Alley at Folsom, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.org/alley. 11am-6pm, $5 suggested donation. If you like bondage, animal role play, kink, leather straps, whips, paddles, latex outfits, suspension, and hardcore BDSM pastimes, than the Dore Alley street fair is for you! This smaller, more gay male-focused event features demonstrations, kinky vendors, and local DJs setting the mood.

BAY AREA

Last Sundays Fest Telegraph between Bancroft and Dwight, Berk.; www.lastsundaysfest.com. Noon-7pm, free. Enjoy a whole day jam packed with East Bay culture at this street festival featuring live indie pop and rock music, craft, food, and contemporary merchandise vendors, children’s exhibits, and more.

For Lit, Talks, and Benefits listings, visit the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

Sasha Cuttler
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Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

While downtown-oriented politicos and out-of-touch corporate columnists tout the political potential of targeting public employee unions with pay reductions and pension plan take-aways – and say the Public Defender Jeff Adachi may be mayoral material for doing so – they forget that electoral success requires coalitions, particularly in savvy San Francisco.

Unlike his cheerleaders, Adachi seems to understand this, downplaying the personal political upside when he talked to the Guardian and other media outlets. Sure, he might just be sandbagging, as his boosters hope he is, but there’s good reason to believe that this move could hurt Adachi’s chances of becoming mayor more than it helps it.

Much has been written and said about how Adachi’s move alienated labor unions and much of the progressive movement. “They urged me not to do it,” Adachi told the Guardian in the final days of his successful signature-gathering effort for a measure that would save the city about $167 million per year by taking that amount out of employees’ paychecks.

It’s not that pension reform isn’t needed. Indeed, San Francisco voters just approved a measure in June to increase the pension contributions for all new city employees, and politicians ranging from Sups. John Avalos and David Campos on the left to Sup. Sean Elsbernd and Mayor Gavin Newsom on the right all agree that more needs to be done, pledging to work with unions on the issue. And given the surly mood of the electorate, Adachi’s measure will probably pass.

But that still doesn’t make him mayoral material. Unlike Newsom, whose Care Not Cash initiative to take money from poor people helped propel him into Room 200, Adachi doesn’t have a strong constituency behind him, unlike the full strength of downtown and the Willie Brown machine that Newsom had behind him.

Downtown will never get behind a mayoral campaign for Adachi, a heavily tattooed defender of criminals who has a strong independent streak, even if they like the fact that he’s socking it to the public employee unions, an effort they helped fund. And progressives will now have a hard time ever trusting Adachi to work with them, seeing him now as someone hostile to political process and coalition-building, much like Newsom.

And even Newsom has come out against Adachi and his proposal, even though he loves the pension reform issue and shares some stylistic similarities with Adachi, including a certain political petulance. “Mayor Newsom has been clear that effective, long-term pension reform will come by doing it with our public employee unions, in partnership, not to and against them, in contrast to the Adachi measure,” Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker wrote to the Guardian this week. It was a laughingly hypocritical statement from a mayor who has repeatedly demonized unions and refused to work cooperatively with them, but it’s a true statement nonetheless.

Finally, while socking it to public employees may be in vogue right now, during this moment of real economic uncertainty and political myopia, this sort of divisive politics might come to be seen more as opportunistic than courageous. And it’s hard to see how the approach that Adachi has taken will somehow add up to an effective political coalition capable of stealing the Mayor’s Office from wily politicians like Mark Leno, Leland Yee, or Aaron Peskin.

Consider the fact that even the Police Officers Association – the most conservative, downtown-oriented employee union in San Francisco – also opposes the Adachi measure and other efforts to blame the city’s fiscal problems on employees, rather than the large financial institutions that don’t even pay any kind of business tax to the city.

So I leave you with the words of POA President Gary Delagnes, writing in the May issue of the POA Journal, sounding a bit like a Guardian editorial writer on this politically sensitive issue: “Even more problematic is the rapidly developing notion that public employee pensions serve as the root of all evil, and are almost solely to blame for all of our economic woes.

“Opportunistic Wall Street insiders, politicians, and robber baron CEOs have manipulated and pilfered our country’s financial well-being. They have unconscionably – if not also illegally – lined their deep pockets with the hard-earned savings and pensions of the middle class working man and woman. Accountants from coast to coast have coached multi-millionaires on the art of avoiding paying their true tax obligations. Millions of people were allowed to qualify for mortgage loans by greedy bankers and mortgage brokers that led to trillions of dollars in bailout money. The result is a public incensed about fat cats taking advantage of them. Now, the backlash has set up public pensions and the unions that negotiated them as the scapegoats for his anger.

“Those of use who long ago made the decision to forgo large salaries in exchange for a life of public service, are now being portrayed as greedy and self-centered, taking unwarranted pensions and benefits after 30 years of service as firefighters, police officers, teachers, and nurses. These are shameful accusations, and utterly without merit.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, but unlike one of our editorials, this is the perspective of cops and other unions and progressive constituencies that will shape their actions in elections to come.

Our Weekly Picks: July 14-20, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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WEDNESDAY 14

MUSIC

Sean Bonnette

Sean Bonnette is the guitar player for Andrew Jackson Jihad, the band that proved punk rock sounds better unplugged. He’s been with the group since its inception in 2004, and along with his comrade-in-arms Ben Gallaty, has spent the last six years writing hilariously irreverent lyrics, cutting a swath through the country’s basements, parks, and concert halls, and slowly pushing folk-punk into the mainstream consciousness. Bonnette’s solo show promises to be a showcase of the loveliest, messiest, raggedy-ist tunes this side of Neutral Milk Hotel and a reminder that, 924 Gilman’s financial woes notwithstanding, DIY’s not dead. (Zach Ritter)

With Kepi Ghoulie and Gnarboots

9 p.m., $8

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(414) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

MUSIC

Bardot A Go Go

In America, Bastille Day is the only day of the year where Francophiles, if they’re not storming a prison, can revel in their obsession en masse. With drink specials and a night of decadence that would make Louis XIV’s wife blush, the Rickshaw Stop offers its very own discotheque. If Austin Powers and Marie Antoinette put their wits together and threw a party, Bardot A Go Go would be it. With swinging ’60s pop — Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, and the titular femme fatale, to name a few — and its very own go-go girls, this long-standing shindig stares hipsters in the face and dares to ask the unaskable: Parlez-vous francais? So put down your Balzac, put on a beret, and get the hell down to Fell. (Ryan Lattanzio)

8 p.m., $7

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

THURSDAY 15

VISUAL ART

Japanese Art Kite Show

What could be better than a Matt Furie painting? Well, maybe a Matt Furie painting on a kite. Furie is one of 21 artists contributing sky-ready works to “Japanese Art Kite Show,” a group exhibition co-curated by Shoko Toma and Yukako Ezoe that brings together kites by 21 artists from Japan and the Bay Area. Bay Area residents from the Hamamatsu City prefecture in Japan have taken part in the Berkeley Kite Festival for the past five years, while Hamamatsu kites — created with washi and rice glue — date back at least 450 years. The kites here vary in size and utilize hemp for string. On Naoki Onodera’s kite, stars evoke another historical marker: the Kanrun Maru’s journey across the Pacific from Japan to the U.S. 150 years ago. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Through July 29

5:30 p.m., free

Chandler Fine Art and Framing

170 Minna, SF

(415) 546-1113

www.chandlersf.com

 

COMEDY

Zane Lamprey

Do you like to go out drinking? Me too! Oh, and so does Zane Lamprey, host of Three Sheets, a TV show that’s survived the move to three different channels as Lamprey travels the world exploring fine libations, drinking games, and hangover cures. With the future of the show uncertain — again — Zane has taken to the streets with the “Drinking Made Easy Comedy Tour,” a celebration of all things alcoholic. No one can fault you for not knowing about Three Sheets, it’s had a hell of a time staying on air. But show me a San Franciscan who doesn’t look happier with a drink in their hand, and I’ll show you a liar. (Peter Galvin)

8 p.m., $29.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

 

MUSIC

Mary Gauthier

The story of Mary Gauthier’s rise in the ranks of musicians — a career she chose at the ripe age of 35 after stints as a teenage runaway, substance abuser, philosophy major, café manager, and restaurant owner — is full of lucky breaks and an almost charmed trajectory. Yet her first year of life, spent in the charity wards of St. Vincent De Paul, was far removed from the good fortunes of her eventual transformation to masterfully frank folk lyricist and guileless performer. In The Foundling, her sixth album, Gauthier chronicles her own history from birth date to birthright, searching for answers and finding only more questions. Her Café Du Nord appearance, however, answers our question: When’s Mary Gauthier going to come back around? (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Peter Bradley Adams

8:30 p.m., $20

Café Du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

MUSIC

Sextreme Ball

It’s been 15 years since the Lords of Acid-My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult Sextacy Ball Tour stomped across the continent. But since sex, drugs, and mass murder have never really gone out of style, this summer’s reprise is far from feeling dated. Maybe it’s just the humidity, but there’s an almost palpable electric charge in the air — could it be the promise of a) tissue-throbbing, groin-grinding beats b) the cheerfully lewd lyrics of classics such as “Mr. Machoman” or creepier implications of “Sex on Wheels” or c) the prospect of catching latest Lords of Acid chanteuse Lacey Conner in a leather-clad catfight? I’m going with d) all of the above. (Gluckstern)

9 p.m., $23

DNA Lounge

375 11th St, SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

 

FRIDAY 16

DANCE

Run for Your Life! and Gadung Kasturi

Run for Your Life! … it’s a dance company! and Gadung Kasturi Balinese Dance and Music are unlikely bedfellows, but trust Dudley Brooks — he knows how to make a match. After all, he is “sleeping” with both of them. Run for Your Life! is his long-running comedy-dance theater company; Gadung Kasturi is a classical Balinese dance company whose music Brooks has performed for more than 20 years. How he keeps the two identities apart is anybody’s guess. Stylization is what keeps him going. His comedy, often with puppets, is smart, hilarious, and musical. Included in this program are the LOL-worthy Les Sillyphides, Cirque du So Little, and Roaring ’20s, Mafioso-inspired The Soldier’s Tale. Gadung, with eight-year old Chandra Ayu Davies — who blew everyone away at this year’s Ethnic Dance Festival — offers the new Nyapuh Jagat. Watch for Brooks, he’ll be hammering away in the gamelan orchestra. (Rita Felciano)

Through Sat/17

8 p.m., $18

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

MUSIC

Antibalas

Afrobeat keeps growing and mutating, revitalizing club music and giving indie rock a much-needed groove. Twelve years into since their summertime birth, Brooklyn’s Antibalas can be seen and heard as true veterans of the sound, with ties to two generations of the Kuti legacy. At the same time, afrobeat is the base from which the group — who worked with producer Tortoise’s John McEntire on 2007’s Security — reach deep into other genres. Antibalas plays out often enough to have seen the world and then some, and one of its most recent songs, “Rat Race,” suits the current socioeconomic moment. Prepare to dance. (Huston) With Sway Machinery

9 p.m., $23

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

1-888-233-0449

www.gamhtickets.com

 

DANCE

Post: Ballet

Choreographer and dancer Robert Dekkers is making himself known in the dance world for seamlessly merging contemporary and classical movement styles. The name of his new SF-based contemporary ballet company, Post: Ballet, says it all. Much like his stylistic sensibility, the words Post: Ballet imply an affiliation with and departure from the conventions of classical ballet. The company’s inaugural performance, Concert One, features classically-trained, versatile ballet dancers in a series of innovative and thought-provoking works. Dekkers’ fierce choreography — along with live music by SF composers Daniel Berkman and Jacob Wolkenhauer, as well as the engaging music of Grizzly Bear, Steve Reich, and Department of Eagles (to name a few) — will keep those who ordinarily fall asleep at the ballet wide awake. (Katie Gaydos)

Through Sat/17

8 p.m., $25

Cowell Theater

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

www.postballet.org

 

VISUAL ART

David Byrne and Dave Eggers

Former Talking Head David Byrne and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers are no strangers to other disciplines of art. Both have dabbled in screenwriting and visual art outside their respective fields of popular music and prose fiction. Now SF’s Electric Works is hosting simultaneous galleries by the two Renaissance men. Byrne’s exhibition shares the name “Arboretum” with his 2006 book of branching diagrams. Eggers’ “It Is Right To Draw Their Fur” treats more animate subjects — animals, to be exact. As it happens, Eggers studied art before switching to writing novels, so these grease pencil drawings are hardly the work of a naïf. Judging from their past works and unconventional worldviews, Byrne and Eggers ought to complement each other well. (Sam Stander)

Through Aug. 21

6 p.m., free

Electric Works

130 Eighth St., SF

(415) 626-5496

www.sfelectricworks.com

SATURDAY 17

FILM

Little Shop of Horrors

Midnight movies are alive and well in San Francisco, and the Landmark Theatres are active participants in the historic cult tradition. For the next month, the Bridge plays host to a “Rocksploitation”-themed midnight program, featuring local cinephile band Citizen Midnight playing pre-show music for a variety of rock-inspired flicks. This week the series features Frank Oz’s incredibly campy 1986 musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin. Check back in the coming weeks for Brian De Palma’s gothic rock opera Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and an uncut version of David Lynch’s 1990, Palme d’Or-winning, Elvis-fueled Wild at Heart. (Stander)

Midnight, $10

Bridge Theatre

3010 Geary, SF

(415) 668-6384

www.landmarkafterdark.com

 

FILM/MUSIC

Psycho with the San Francisco Symphony

The symphony’s probably the last thing you’d associate with a shower scene. (Although if we’re talking porn here, maybe you missed Wet ‘n Wagner or Rusty Tromboners 2: Spit Valves Under Spray Heads.) It’s definitely the last place you’d expect to hear the stabbing “EE! EE! EE! EE!” of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to pop up — unless you’ve an ear for esoteric snatches of Webern. But Bernard Herrmann’s fiendishly clever orchestral score for this mother of all classic slashers is catnip for the adventurous San Francisco Symphony, which will be performing it in full as the 50-year-old flick unfurls above them in all its chocolate-syrup-spattered glory. Expect expert deployment of sinister ostinato and hair-curling counterpoint throughout. Don’t forget to invite Mom. (Marke B.)

8 p.m., $30–$70

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

 

SUNDAY 18

MUSIC

New Pornographers

Have you been craving propulsive choruses? Hunting for hummable harmonies? Longing for a variety of vocalists? Seek no further — Canada’s foremost power pop supergroup, the New Pornographers, is now touring on behalf of its fifth album, Together. Their continued togetherness is a bit unexpected, since members Neko Case and Dan Bejar (of Destroyer) have full-blown careers of their own. But the New Porn engine keeps chugging along, a full-fledged entity rather than a side project. The latest record is perhaps their most bombastic yet, but they haven’t sacrificed the diversity of lyrical voices that makes them consistently worthwhile. They’re supported at Oakland’s Fox Theater by local concern the Dodos as well as sometime-Yeah Yeah Yeahs member Imaad Wasif. (Stander)

With Dodos and Imaad Wasif

7:30 p.m., $27.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.thefoxoakland.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Gryp the surgeon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Gryp the surgeon

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The bass. The accents. A scary little man in a hooded jacket. On first introduction to Die Antwoord via the video for their breakthrough jam, “Enter the Ninja,” I was officially freaked out: intimidated by their honest anger, rank lyrics and ultrahip haircuts. It was early February of this year when the Ninja, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, and DJ Hi-Tek of South Africa entered my life, and only days after we met on the ‘interweb,’ I was officially obsessed.

Blowing up their videos to full-screen, I inhaled their stench, injected their music-laden virus, and swallowed mouthfuls of diseased, infectious theatrical genius for hours on end, letting all that is Die Antwoord swim to my brain, pump through my veins, and wallow in the depths of my stomach. I felt sick, happy, and addicted — and apparently, so did the rest of the world.

Die Antwoord blew up almost immediately after a couple quick posts from influential music tasters. Only six months into their new-found fame, these sick bastards have already played — and wooed — Coachella, signed with Interscope, and gained shows with MIA on their first official U.S. tour. Even gross celebrities like Fred Durst and Katy Perry have typed their praises. Their show at the Rickshaw Stop sold out in less than an hour.

They’re white trash with skills: super-slick production, extra-catchy hard core beats, and personas that should be employed by the traveling carnival. Images of sexpot Yo-Landi and her tween-like frame rotate between cracked-out fiend, a shy classmate I met in the fourth-grade, and a sexy, antiestablishment Swedish lesbian. It’s probably not OK that I find her at all attractive. The tiny-lady MC is totally cool being covered in rats, freely kisses the critters, and holds them upside down by their tails. I am quite jealous of her ability to rock wicked-short bangs.

Then there’s Ninja; a rail-thin, pasty man with a mouth as rotten as San Francisco’s Sixth Street. His collection of tattoos are horrible. My favorites include a large, erect penis; his non-gangster “very secret fairy forest”; and phrases like “If you don’t like funerals, don’t kick sand in a ninja’s face.” His prime video moment: a close-up of his seemingly giant balls aggressively keeping beat to a sick bass line, hidden only under the thin fabric of his “Dark Side of the Moon” boxers.

Die Antwoord’s third member, DJ Hi-Tek, is basically mute and/or hasn’t fully developed his character quite yet. Stay tuned.

So nasty. So raw. So are they real? The Web is stocked with videos of Max Normal TV, Ninja’s, a.k.a. Waddy Jones’, former project that included Yo-Landi Vi$$er as his assistant. They’re art punks and all their projects before now simply laid the groundwork for Die Antwoord.

People’s concern with the legitimacy of the group is out of style. Since when don’t we like people who take on alternate public personas? Would we really like them more if they were, as one Videogum writer put it, “actually borderline mentally retarded poor children from ghettos covered in generic Cheetos dust and meth crumbs?” No. Because either way they’re fokken intense, intoxicating, absurd, and pumping some serious Zef flow. (Says Ninja: “Zef = flavor, ultimate style, fokken cool, more than fokken cool. A zone. A level. And we’re on the highest level.”)

What any fan needs to figure out is how to translate the crazy-thick accent and constant use of Afrikaans slang. Yo-Landi finds it hilarious that fans attempt to sing along, unknowingly screaming absurdities that would make anyone blush. The song “Jou Ma se Poes in ‘n Fishpaste Jar” translates to “Your mother’s cunt in a fishpaste jar,” which, unsurprisingly, has a corresponding picture. Just don’t go around spouting off the lyrics in front of Grandma.

DIE ANTWOORD

With DJ Jeffrey Paradise

Fri/16, 8:30 p.m., sold out

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Group think

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Group think

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL “Calder to Warhol,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s giant introductory survey of the Fisher collection, isn’t the only big summer show happening right now. With its wanted poster-style flyer design and a menacing title that could have come from a hardboiled paperback, “They Knew What They Wanted” is an exquisite corpse of a group show, pieced together and then strewn across town by four artists at four different galleries: Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel, Robert Bechtle at John Berggruen, Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery, and Jordan Kantor at Ratio 3.

Allusions to criminality aside, the artists/curators of “They Knew What They Wanted” would more likely be found on the forensics team than the wrong side of the law. All are steely observers whose art could broadly be said to share a focus on the dynamics of surveillance at work within postwar portrait and landscape photography, particularly photography that looked at what was booming outside of America’s urban centers. Although Grannan is the sole photographer in the group, Ebner’s temporary installations of handmade signage placed in public settings — which she then photographs in black and white — and Bechtle and Kantor’s photo-based oil paintings also fall under the sign of the photography.

It’s not surprising then that multiple pieces by each of the curators can be found across all four galleries, as well as certain names (Lee Friedlander, Miriam Böhm, Trevor Paglen, and Ed Ruscha in particular) whose work shares an aesthetic affinity with that of the curators. This form of cross-gallery display gives “They Knew What They Wanted” a cohesion that is often rare in group shows, while still not being so insular as to make it hard to differentiate each artist-curator’s own aesthetic sense.

Bechtle’s selections offer the least surprises, summoning the same post-1960s Western suburban milieu evoked by his photorealistic paintings of driveway-bound vintage cars. After a few rounds of viewing, though, Robert Adams’ vintage snaps of Colorado ‘burbs, Friedlander’s skewed takes on small town architecture, Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ aquatint etchings of backyard swimmers, and Tom McKinley’s oils of cool modernist interiors start to add up to the visual equivalent of tract housing.

Ebner and Kantor’s picks are more interior-minded than the mainly street-level and exterior scenes crowding John Berggruen. They also veer the furthest from each artist’s own work. For example, Sol LeWitt’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it painted electrical wall plate at Altman Siegel is just a few Home Depot aisles away from Rachel Whiteread’s stainless steel castings of light switches over at Ratio 3. Back at Altman Siegel, Fletcher Benton’s 1983 bronze tennis racket, “Adjustable Racket for Short Heavy Hitters,” leans dejectedly in a corner, in wait for a yard sale that will never come. Grannan’s grab bag at Fraenkel is the most photo-heavy, and her selection ventures furthest — with mixed success — from the thematic territory staked out by Bechtle, Ebner, and Kantor.

In a way, Ebner, Bechtle, Grannan, and Kantor have beat SFMOMA to the punch. The museum is set to restage the landmark 1975 photography exhibit “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” — which presented dispassionate documentation of parking lots, construction sites, and other forms of ex-urban development — at the end of the month. But for a sustained exploration of the meteor-like impact of “New Topographics” on the photography and painting that followed in its wake, one couldn’t ask for a better art historical crash-course than “They Knew What They Wanted.” *

 

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED

Through July 31, free

John Berggruen Gallery

228 Grant, SF

(415) 781-4629

www.berggruen.com

Through Aug. 7, free

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

Through Aug. 13, free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

Through Aug. 21, free

Fraenkel Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 981-2661

www.fraenkelgallery.com

Free as the breeze?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Free as the breeze?

arts@sfbg.com

>>Read Robert Avila’s interview with Joe Goode here

DANCE/THEATER Walking behind the tour guide who led us through the old San Francisco Mint’s elegant rooms for the Joe Goode Performance Group’s striking Traveling Light, I kept thinking of the Medicis and the Ming Dynasty. For their own selfish purposes, these corrupt supercapitalists commandeered and bought great beauty, of which we are the beneficiaries. On a more modest scale, the Mint, as so accurately described by Goode, was a temple of money. It was also a splendidly designed locus of hope for ordinary Joes and Janes who placed their trust, and their cash, in a place that promised the security that an expanding, institution-building nation could provide.

That’s why the Mint’s exquisite architecture speaks loudest in the basement. Jack Carpenter’s magisterial lighting creates shrines to the ordinary citizens on whose shoulders the Mint — and the country — was built. Carpenter ignores the presence of chandeliers — in a basement of all places! — and places red spots along the brick walls, transforming the hallway into a gallery.

Deep inside the safes — protected by exquisitely crafted steel doors — Goode places his works of art: a woman knitting, another in a bathtub, a perhaps homeless couple, and a tea-drinking Victorian lady tied down by propriety. Masterfully, Carpenter’s murky lighting transforms them into silent witnesses of a problematic past. Yet the atmosphere feels like one of your favorite watering holes on a Friday night.

Upstairs, Goode moves his seven dancers, supplemented by eight additional ones, through the Mint’s ostentatious public rooms and stark courtyard. For the next hour, they bring to life finely designed mini-dramas that possess a diorama-like quality. Watched over by a splendidly uniformed Fire Marshall who is quite at home in the building’s opulence, Traveling Light becomes an elaborately designed machine with interlocking gears that shuttle witnesses from one station to another.

I happened to be with the people who first see wealthy and bored Damara Vita Ganley abandon her “exalted” position to mingle with the groundlings. Here, worldly goods mean clean water. At least, the thinking went, these folks have each other. Out of robust duets and trios two men peel off, sent into a better future. Noble sentiment, terrible dramatic ending.

In the courtyard, which suggests a prison yard thanks to Carpenter’s lighting and Goode’s omnipotent voice from above, Filipe Barrueto-Cabello struggles as a poor working man. Haunted and perhaps supported by female spirits, he is barricaded against the elements, but longs for beauty. Andrew Ward and Alexander Zendzian are marvelous as W.C. Fields-like storytellers. The courtyard yields one of the evening’s most poignant moments: Barrueto-Cabello hugging and losing some cabbages as a solo clarinet wails. (Jay Cloidt’s score is first rate and invaluable throughout.)

In one of the inside rooms, Carpenter covers the chandeliers and hangs empty picture frames to better facilitate a detailed trip down memory lane. Jessica Swanson, a proper middle class lady, muses about a summertime affair with a young man (Melecio Estrella) whose calloused hands linger on in her mind. Their stiff-limbed yet passionate struggle doesn’t need words to be eloquently rendered. Elsewhere, in a Virginia Woolf-like touch, Patricia West searches desperately for a quiet place to get her life on track. Buffeted by intruders, she is caught in a turmoil that has more than a current of violence. It leaves her wan, alone, with only the echoes of her own words.

The carefully-honed Traveling is a very special vehicle for Goode’s excellent dancers-actors-singers, who are well supported by the additional cast. At one point Cloidt gives a quartet a four-part a cappella harmony, and they sail through it with ease. Goode badly wants the world to be a better place, but that’s not why we keep watching him and listening to him. We go back because his work sings, dances, and speaks with rare eloquence. I think what we want — and get — is what Barrueto-Cabello hungered for: beauty.

TRAVELING LIGHT

Wed-Sun, 8 p.m. (also Fri.–Sat., 10 p.m.), through Aug. 1, $29–$44

The Old Mint Building

88 Fifth St., SF

(415) 561-6565

www.joegoode.org

 

Whitman criticized for opposing high-speed rail

Sasha Cuttler
-
10
Whitman criticized for opposing high-speed rail

By Brittany Baguio

Although Republican gubernatorial Meg Whitman claims job creation is one of her top priorities, she recently stated that she opposes the plan to build a high-speed rail system in California – a project that is being eagerly anticipated in San Francisco, its northern terminus.

Whitman says the state does not have enough money to fund the project because of the state’s current budget deficit, but labor, environmental, and other groups say it will be a boon to the state’s economy and environment. Voters approved Proposition 1A in November 2008, supporting the construction of a high-speed rail system with an initial investment of $9.95 billion in bond money.

Proponents say the project will alleviate freeway and airport congestion and provide a green transportation option that has both short- and long-term economic benefits. According to the California High-Speed Authority website, the project would create 160,000 constructed-related jobs as well as 450,000 more jobs by 2035. The construction of the rail system would also improve the movement of people, goods, and services throughout California and ultimately raise more than $1 billion in surplus revenue a year.

“We are eager to thoroughly brief whoever the next governor is on this project and work with him or her to make California’s high-speed rail system a reality,” California High-Speed Rail Authority representative Rachel Wall told the Guardian.

Supporters of the bullet train disagree with Whitman’s analysis and contend that the construction of a bullet train would create revenue and jobs. In a press release, California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski said, “In her glossy TV ads, Whitman says she understands the daily hardships facing our state’s unemployed, but it’s clear that’s just more campaign rhetoric. In opposing high-speed rail, she’s shown her true colors on jobs. It’s shocking that a candidate for Governor could be so detached from the economic hardships facing our state’s families. With one in eight Californians out of work, how can we afford not to invest in the creation of hundreds of thousands of permanent, good new jobs?”

Communications director of the California Labor Federation, Steve Smith, believed that Whitman’s opposition exhibited her political inexperience and uninformed decisions. “She’s out there talking a big game about job creation, but no specifics about how she would create jobs,” Smith told us. “Her proposals would be devastating to California and would lead to higher unemployment in California. She says that California can’t afford the project, but what we can’t afford is not to take advantage of improving our economy and environment.”

Whitman isn’t the only one opposing the project. Bay Area cities of Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Burlingame, Belmont, and Atherton have all voiced concerns about the project and the impact of trains move rapidly through those communities, filing a lawsuit seeking to halt the project.

The bullet train project was awarded $2.25 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last January and is currently undergoing supplemental environmental reviews. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2012, with improvements such as rail electrification expected to improve rail service on the San Francisco peninsula even before the high-speed trains start running around 2020.

Assuming the public-private project isn’t derailed politically and can raise the estimated $40 billion total cost, the trains will travel at speeds of up to 220 mph and take passengers from the LA Union Station to San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal in less than 2 hours and 40 minutes.

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