By Johnny Ray Huston
GROUPSHOW
The Martyrdom of Groupshow
(-scape)
My favorite Jan Jelinek endeavor since 2005’s Kosmischer Pitch (~scape), which inspired this 200 GB "live" collaboration. It all grows wonderfully spooky with "Great Art Where You Least Expect It" and "Anyone Care for a Drink?" Yes, Groupshow has a way with a song title. The overall conceit’s as strong as Jelinek’s discovery of Ursula Bogner, though not as labored.
View the previous Snap Sound here.
Barack Obama boarding an Air Force One plane for the first time. Gay calendars from the 1960s. A New York Times article on the death of a major urban newspaper. Sundays at the Alemany Flea Market. These are some of the temporal markers at play in Matt Keegan‘s exhibition “Postcards & Calendars.” The show (reviewed in the current Guardian) could be Keegan’s postcard to New York about time spent in San Francisco. It’s also an exploration of the ways in which calendars and other time keepers can be used subversively to convey forms of experience or forge communities. Keegan is no stranger to the such endeavors: his 2008 book AMERICAMERICA (Printed Matter, 140 pages, $35) gathers interviews, old People magazines, memorabilia connected to the “Hands Across America” project, artifacts from his small-scale update of that endeavor, and unorthodox archival material into a journal that doubles as a portrait of the Reagan era. The artist and I recently sat at a petite lemon yellow table with pretty lemon yellow flowers in Altman Siegel Gallery to discuss his current exhibition.
View of Matt Keegan’s “Postcards & Calendars.” All images from “Postcards & Calendars” courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery
SFBG Many shows repeat the same execution of a single theme, over and over. In contrast, “Postcards & Calendars” has many forms and facets.
Matt Keegan The thematic of this show is definitely influenced by my time in in San Francisco, but not relegated to being here. Lots of things at play are continuations of my preexisting engagement with photography.
In terms of local influences, the calendars from the GLBT Historical Society had a tremendous impact on this show. Before I met with Rebekah Kim, the Historical Society’s archivist, I was trying to figure out how to map the ways time is not only recorded but visually structured — to think about such rudimentary things as a planner, or a calendar, or a newspaper, in terms of how days and months can be iterated.
When I saw their collection of calendars, part of the power of those objects comes from the way they integrate a social history into an innocuous form. Also, some of the calendars that have a clear porn element, also have a social element. For example, Fizeek from the mid-‘60s — the back of that calendar has notations about who shot which photo and where the photographers are based, which provides it with this added level of social exchange.
Matt Keegan
SFBG In the past year I’ve amassed a stack of the 1970s SF gay magazine Vector, so it was serendipity to come across a calendar from Vector on the wall in your show. More than with microfiche of local newspapers, I get a sense of what was going on in San Francisco at the time from a publication such as that magazine, simply through the addresses in advertisements.
MK Material that might be considered insubstantial or peripheral in terms of formal archiving and recording has a historical implication. Close to the time when I met with Rebekah, I met with Gerard Koskovich, one of the founding members of the GLBT Historical Society. He told this amazing anecdote about Bois Burke placing an ad in The Hobby Directory that is significant in helping to understand a 1940s and ’50s queer history of correspondence. Within this guide, people would reach out about hobbies such as nude sunbathing and physique photography. I am very interested in the various ways that such print-based and distributed publications were activated to serve unintended purposes. And, I love the way that the calendars, specifically, embed such a social history so that it becomes part of daily and monthly activities.
Barack Obama, 31 shades of white, newspapers as endangered species, the archivist’s life, the art of interviewing, and more, after the jump
By Johnny Ray Huston
In addition to making music, Christopher Willits is a guiding force behind the art and experimental music site Overlap (www.overlap.org). In conjunction with Overlap’s next event, I caught up with him by e-mail.
SFBG What was it like to collaborate with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Ocean Fire (12k, 2008)?
Christopher Willits It was surreal. We fell into an oceanic trance, and a bunch of music suddenly emerged. Then a Godzilla-like sea monster morphed out of his piano and he vaporized it with his max patch.
SFBG You’ve also worked with Brad Laner of Medicine. Are you an admirer of that (ahead-of-its-time) band?
CW Medicine [had] a mind-splittingly original sound — it was a soundtrack to many high school adventures. Now it’s an absolute joy to be friends with Mr. Laner. Together we are the varsity band members (guitar I and II) of the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. We’re aiming for nationals next year.
SFBG What do you like about the Bay Area’s close proximity to the ocean?
CW The smell of fresh wind, and dreams of flying great white sharks.
SFBG I saw a fave list of yours once that had Magma, the Carpenters’ "Close to You" and Sun Ra’s Lanquidity on it. Who is inspiring or obsessing you at present?
CW That is a timeless list — can I say them again? Let’s add Morton Subotnick, Wild Bull (www.merlindarts.com), all Eliane Radigue, all Elvin Jones, John Coltrane, and that band that plays at El Rio on Sunday night.
SFBG You recently toured in China, including a performance with images on ice. What did you discover?
CW I discovered a resilient community of artists and experimental musicians pushing against the grain (and firewall) of this mammoth country or force. They understand my history and what I’m doing — another win for Chinese bootlegs? I also found some of the best food ever: huajiao (flower pepper) with asparagus! But hold the boiled big brains. Those I’m definitely not into.
LISTEN/VISION 06 With Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, and Classical Revolution. Sun/10, 8 p.m., $10. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016. www.overlap.org.
johnny@sfbg.com
The past is vanishing, more than ever before. Or so it seems, as so many temporal placeholders — including the newspaper you might be holding in your hands right now — give way to digital facsimiles. This quandary is a morphing source of inspiration for "Postcards & Calendars," a solo show by the New York artist and temporary San Francisco resident Matt Keegan, who is about to complete a teaching stint at California College of the Arts.
While Keegan engages a consistently time-based theme throughout "Postcards and Calendars," he does so via refreshingly varied forms and motifs. He’s dedicatedly studious enough to turn a trip to the GLBT Historical Society into an semi-installation, yet easygoing enough to use sexually-charged archival pieces as material, spontaneous enough to try out something different with each piece in his overall show, subversive (or formally perverse) enough to digitally photograph newspapers, and irreverent enough to break his own rules regarding what constitutes a record of daily life.
Keegan first stung my eyes and queer spirit with a piece from the Altman Siegel Gallery’s inaugural group show. It visually manifested the infinite recess of a ex-romantic relationship in a manner that interspersed teasing hints of still-extant attraction with a palpable sense of emotional loss. All of these aspects brought the "memory drawings" of San Francisco artists Colter Jacobsen to mind, so it’s only fitting that Jacobsen contributes a booklet to "Postcards & Calendars" that plays off of Keegan’s theme. In fact, one can draw further connections between Keegan, Jacobsen, and the NYC filmmaker Matt Wolf — three artists of roughly the same generation who share similar queer historical imperatives while allowing humor, traces of casual lust or longing and even some lovelorn aspects into their art. Keegan’s book AMERICAMERICA (Printed Matter, 140 pages, 2008), an exploration of national identity through the Reagan era’s "Hands Across America" phenomenon, possesses enjoyable parallels to Wolf’s films about the late David Wojnarowicz and Arthur Russell, and Jacobsen’s arrangements of trinkets and trash into expressions that find meaning or power in degradeability.
"Postcards & Calendars" is a direct array of works, often candid, and at times (in the case of the gay calendars from the ‘1970s) full-frontal. But the show’s lingering strength comes from more elliptical gestures, such as a wall of personal imagery that Keegan has rendered more enigmatic and evocative through an unconventional series of drawing and photo processes. In fact, to tap into the depth of what Keegan does here, you need to look closely at the walls themselves, where you might discover 31 passages of time.
MATT KEEGAN: POSTCARDS & CALENDARS
Through May 23
Altman Siegel Gallery
49 Geary, fourth floor, SF
(415) 576-9300
With a calm demeanor and a pulled-together, no-nonsense appearance, Claudia Altman-Siegel isn’t an obvious suspect when it comes to identifying the driving force behind a conceptual art show that draws well-heeled European tourists and people clad in Converse shoes and skinny jeans. Both types, and more, are drawn to Matt Keegan’s "Postcards & Calendars," where they’re confronted by an eight-foot list of days of the week and a larger-than-life photograph of a New York Times reader hidden behind dismal headlines.
The four month-old Altman Siegel Gallery is set apart from neighboring galleries by its inclusion of a window, a trait that trades art hermeticism for the possibility of sunshine. Street noise is present but not disruptive — a reminder that another world exists beyond the space’s light cocoon of images and ideas. It has a distinctively different aura from the other galleries in the 49 Geary St. building, something Altman-Siegel says she is "sort of blind to."
After 10 years of work in New York City, Altman-Siegel slipped over to San Francisco to fill a gap in the West Coast gallery scene, bringing emerging local and internationally established artists who are still early on the trajectory to significance in the art canon.
Local art or specificity is prominent in Altman-Siegel’s curatorial work to date. The current show, though by a New York artist, includes sketches of familiar San Francisco street corners. Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen’s surreal cosmic photographs were the focus of the gallery’s first solo show.
Across the street, mannequins wearing teal trousers topped by black, multipocketed jackets and craftily reconstructed vintage dresses stand defiantly among an installation of birch tree branches and rusted machinery. A former STA travel office has been transformed into Shotwell, a cutting-edge update of a funky Aunt Edna boutique.
Newlyweds Michael and Holly Weaver needed somewhere to hawk their extensive collection of vintage clothes. When they landed a lease at 36 Geary St., the shop expanded to fuse groundbreaking European fashion and clothes by Bay Area designers. Denim from local menswear line B.Son is paired with chic shirts by Parisian collective Surface2Air. Shape-shifting square dresses from the San Francisco duo Please Dress Up! hang alongside bold separates by British label Scout. On the other side of Silverman Gallery’s recent move to Sutter Street, the openings of Shotwell and Altman-Siegel suggest that something new and bold is creeping up on Union Square.
a&eletters@sfbg.com
Using dystopian prophet William Burroughs’ landmark essay The Limits of Control as his titular and narrative starting point, auteur Jim Jarmusch meditates on language and travel in his latest cinematic offering. While it’s undeniable that Jarmusch has always worn his Burroughsian influences on his black velvet sleeve, his own Limits of Control is less an explicit pastiche of Burroughs’ theories than a nod to his unique creative methodology.
"[Burroughs’] theories on language and the use of control are really fascinating," Jarmusch explained during a recent phone interview from his downtown New York City office. "But I would say more important for me from Burroughs were his notebooks and scrapbooks, in which he would cut up things from newspapers and magazines. That whole philosophy of the cut-up is very important to me in the construction of The Limits of Control."
Jarmusch’s Limits follows a laconic Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) as he travels through the extreme landscapes of Spain, seeking out unnamed contacts and cryptic ciphers that propel him toward some unforeseen climax. Lone Man wanders through the maze of clues with rarely a word spoken. This is not the garrulous Jarmusch of 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Rather, language exists here through an intimate series of picaresque exchanges. Soliloquies are eschewed for images of De Bankolé’s contoured face and the striking architectonic wonders of Madrid and Seville; dialogue is equally parsimonious, with moments of wiry, philosophical meandering and hip, pop-culture musings bubbling up spontaneously between visitors before retreating into long swathes of silence and static.
In their repetitions of catchphrases and rituals, these vignettes — staged by actors Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Paz de la Huerta, among others — become increasingly oracular, Rivette-inspired performances communicated in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Are these inexplicable codices part of an elaborate conspiracy through which Lone Man will complete his mission, or are they simply coincidental cut-ups leading him toward the lost horizon of the Spanish desert?
With a typically austere, Jarmuschian cool, The Limits of Control cites numerous French and American gangster-outlaw films of the 1960s and ’70s in its hermeneutic, almost mystical, field-study of the nomad. Despite its lack of conventional narrative action, The Limits of Control is largely about the postmodern experience of traveling and experiencing "foreign" lands and languages, a theme recounted in Jarmusch films from Stranger than Paradise (1984) to Mystery Train (1989) to Broken Flowers (2005).
Jarmusch points to Claude Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques and Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as two anthropological inspirations for his own recurring explorations of transition and translations. "[Traveling] used to be a bit more of an adventure," Jarmusch said. "When I was younger and traveled to Europe for the first time, at the airports people would dress up to travel. Now it’s just a frustrating exercise in getting from one place to the next, and the act of travel itself seems almost erasable." *
THE LIMITS OF CONTROL opens Fri/8 in San Francisco.
MORE AT SFBG.COM
Pixel Vision: Erik Morse’s full interview with Jim Jarmusch.
a&eletters@sfbg.com
An anthology of poets who allegedly combine mainstream and avant-garde aesthetics, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (WW. Norton and Co., 512 pages, $25.95) — edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John — is an idea whose time hasn’t come. The word "hybrid" is suspect, its trendiness invented by the auto industry to delay real electric cars, hence the cover’s Prius-green font. Like a hybrid car, American Hybrid is half-bad by design, the mainstream filling the role of nonrenewable fossil fuel, the avant-garde serving as electricity. I want an anthology without gas.
Obviously I speak from one side of this divide, having much admiration for Swensen as poet and translator, and little knowledge of St. John. Nor do I care to know a poet whose intro claims "Contemporary American Poetry is thriving on every front" like a hedge-fund brochure. Swensen’s intro, however, is substantial, her account of the post-Victorian split between mainstream and avant-garde poetries — and their uneasy dialectic — both excellent and provocative.
However, her conclusion that the best new poetry has become a hybrid of the two isn’t convincing. The decision to trace a hybrid tradition among older practitioners instead of spotlighting the generation supposedly defined by it only foregrounds the dichotomy. You could make a case for, say, Jorie Graham as hybrid, but turning the page to Barbara Guest, you find no resemblance, despite Swensen’s assertion that Guest is "the quintessential hybrid poet." Guest worked in the tradition of high modernist abstraction. Why project a concept onto her that didn’t exist in her lifetime?
Even John Ashbery doesn’t fit. He hasn’t "moved into the mainstream"; the mainstream moved to him. But mainstream adherents are tiresome. Ralph Angel’s "Someone remembers something that happened a long time /ago. She forgot it, it changed everything" summarizes rather than achieves an Ashberian mode. Only two lines into the first Ashbery selection we find: "The laurel nudges the catalpa." The word "nudges" is comically inapplicable to trees, yet it gradually begins to seem viable — a quick breeze might whip the branches of one against another, like a jab of the elbow to silence an indiscreet remark. Yet this possibility fails to exhaust Ashbery’s indeterminate line, as much what Swensen calls "an event on the page" as the work of more obviously disjunctive poets.
Mainstream poetry is ephemeral. Ever hear of Stephen Phillips? William Watson? Austin Dobson? Some of the most popular mainstream poets in 1890s England, they’re forgotten today. We remember innovators like Yeats. At best mainstream poetry echoes what was avant-garde but is now condoned. It’s the poetry of bourgeois comfort, of received ideas wrapped in clichés. When Albert Goldbarth depicts a black woman "whose rump thumpthumped in walking /like a pair of bongos" he invokes a jungle stereotype as corny as it is offensive. His poems can’t disappear fast enough. At the same time, much avant-garde poetry will disappear. Techniques like constraint writing and manipulation of extant text have become pat workshop formulae, and the formulaic isn’t really avant-garde.
The younger poets I’ve read — in, say, Sara Larsen and David Brazil’s biweekly zine Try — aren’t sweating the hybrid question. They don’t express the assurance of previous generations on the political efficacy of postmodern investigation of language’s structures of power. They’ve seen its impotence in the post-9/11 world. But I don’t see a generational rupture; the avant-garde is the only place where such poets can breathe. New poetry is always avant-garde, and they’re trying something new, not repudiating their elders. Some of these elders are writing the best poetry today, for in art, the new isn’t simply the prerogative of youth. American Hybrid contains many great poems, but I refuse to concede that poets I admire — like Norma Cole, Andrew Joron, even Swensen herself — are related to the mainstream.
a&eletters@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Remember Y2K, the dot-com boom … electroclash? Born when the 9/11 attacks were but a glimmer in Terror’s eye, electroclash flickered into view swiftly, a punk/DIY movement of sorts as every imaginative slut ‘n’ buck plugged into easily accessible music-making technology via no-band-backtalk laptops. It all climaxed with a 2003 tour and then an electroclash backlash, as associated artists distanced themselves from the tag. Now, much like a sexy, robotic zombie designed to sell booze with sleek chrome boobs, it seems to be clattering back to life, à la the Star Trek franchise or any other once-future-forward artifact from a distant age.
It’s been too long. After dance-punk, plain ole electro, Bmore moves, laser booty, bass crazes, and the like, the crass class of 2000 is threatening to strut its kicks ‘n’ kinks once again. May 5 was apparently ground zero for electroclash’s survivors. The man who coined the genre, Larry Tee, returned then with Club Badd (Ultra), and Perez "My Penis" Hilton, Amanda "My Pussy" Lepore, and Princess Superstar on board with him. Fischerspooner came back the same day as well, promising Entertainment (FS Studios) before a May 22 live production at the Fillmore. Casey and company select the path of earnest synth-pop and downbeat soundscape explorations ("Money Can’t Dance"), while Mr. Tee’s, er, full-length comes off as a "badd" joke or novelty toss-off at best and embarrassing at worst, thanks to its tone-deaf paeans to "Agyness Deyn" and "The Noughties" (sorry to inform Tee that the aforementioned is nearly over). Yet both recordings pale in comparison to another May 5 entry in the mini-revival. I Feel Cream (XL) is the latest effort by an original who creeps into the oddest cultural crannies, from Gap ads to 2003’s Lost in Translation: Peaches.
OK, I’m still hot for ex-teacher Merrill Nisker. I cherish those sexy dialed-in giggles over her Itty Bitty Titty Club, back around the time that The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo/XL, 2000) thrust into view. And I’m rooting for Peaches — 40 and onto her fourth long-player — to snatch the dance floor crown from Lady GaGa. With her now-well-foregrounded singing and still-girlish-sounding dirty party raps, she’s equipped to do it.
Just dance? There’s no denying that Peaches is feeling the creamy, gooey fluidity of life beneath the mirror ball, assisted by producer James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, among others. But her orgies are crammed with sharp edges and jagged corners; the at-times- gorgeous arrangements are preoccupied with candy-hued horror show synth textures, rave airhorns, whinnying house effects, and last-days-of-disco tropes. Yes, Peaches has been busy, much like her album. Teaming with Yo Majesty’s Shunda K on "Billionaire" — a faux-gold-digger-on-gold-digger track that sounds like the first single off a Gwen Stefani solo missive — Peaches concludes with a curdled snarl, "Until they tie the noose /never overproduced." Is the irony intentional?
Half self-aware smartass, half full-blown art babe caught up in the carnival, Peaches has moved from the more politically confrontational Impeach My Bush (XL, 2006) toward the rave era’s pacifying teat. The video for the designed-to-be-a-hit "Talk to Me," in which a mohawked Peaches tears at a Dorian Gray-like portrait, daisy-enchained by wiggy Grudge-style spectral waifs, says it all. Most divas — Yo Madgesty comes to mind — would be content to get the seduction right, but the liberal sprinkling of Peaches’ imperfect raps gives you a taste of why she has stood the test of time. She’s the dutifully iconoclastic daughter of Madonna. She’s also mother superior to legions of raw solo geeks who want to kick it roughly, bravely at center stage. "I drink the whiskey neat /You lick my crow’s feet," Peaches coos on "Trick and Treat." A proper lady Madonna would never be quite so frank about her age or sexuality.
And few can scheme up a playground chant-turned-pop tune like Peaches, whose school kid yelps on "Show Stopper" — "Show stopper, panty dropper /Everybody’s favorite shocker … I’m a stage whore /I command the floor /Rock you harder than a martyr in a holy war /Can’t help but engage you /Never mind my age /It’s like breaking out of a cage" — dare you to call her ODP (Ol’ Dirty Peaches). Peaches may not have the smoothest flow in the room, but does anyone brave the muddy psychosexual rapids of identity and abandonment quite like her? Call this Electra clash, Oedipus.
PEACHES
June 5, 9 p.m., $25–$27
Grand Ballroom at Regency Center
Van Ness and Sutter, SF
(415) 673-5716
>>More on SFBG.com EMPLOYEE-OWNED BUSINESS AWARD CHURCH STREET FLOWERS "It was really all about trust," says Stephanie Foster of Church Street Flowers, when asked about the benefits and perils of transferring ownership of the delightful bouquet boutique — and perennial Guardian Best of the Bay winner — near the Castro to the employees. Foster, along with Rachel Shinfeld and Brianna Foehr, took over in December 2008 from previous owners Michael Ritz and Thomas Teel, who’d run the shop for a decade. "The three of us had worked here for a while and we knew our stuff, so Michael and Tom knew they could rely on us to preserve the legacy. And the outpouring of support from our neighbors and regular customers has been overwhelming." The ownership change of the cozy shop, bursting with vibrant blooms and friendly energy, went off without a hitch. "We were part of the lucky few who received a small business loan before the economic collapse," Shinfeld says. "But our business plan was smart, and the bank saw that we knew what we were doing." And, even in the current climate, business is thriving. "Our arrangements aren’t your standard cookie-cutter stuff," Foster says. "People nowadays want personalized, reasonably priced, green-minded, and locally sourced. We fit into all that — most of our flowers are from the downtown flower market and we keep an eye out for organic. Plus we strive to create a real connection with our customers, so we can give them exactly what they want." "Sure, there have been some adjustments," Shinfeld adds. "There’s a lot of paperwork — and the first thing we needed to tackle was a Web site redesign. But our experience working here helped us through, and I think we’re just beginning to blossom in our new roles." (Marke B.) CHURCH STREET FLOWERS 212 Church, SF (415) 553-7762 ———– GOLDEN SURVIVOR AWARD GREEN APPLE BOOKS What is the special ingredient that transforms a business from just another store into a place that makes people feel inspired and connected? After 42 years as a San Francisco independent bookseller, Green Apple Books and Music seems to have found it. Located on Clement Street in a building that predates the 1906 quake, it’s a "big, sprawling, dusty and funky new and used bookstore," as co-owner Pete Mulvihill describes it, creating an atmosphere for interactions that might seem impossible in a big-box store. Several weeks ago, for instance, a customer approached the store clerks, presented a CD, and requested that they play it. He also asked them to clear out the philosophy room. "I want it to myself for just a minute," he explained. The staff complied, the music started, and the man whisked his girlfriend into the philosophy room and proposed to her. "To me, that’s an honor that somebody loves the place so much that they would propose to their girlfriend here," says Mulvihill, one of three owners and an employee for more than 15 years. A founding member of the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, he has been at the forefront of a push to identify and promote the city’s small, independent businesses. "Locally-owned businesses recirculate more money in the local economy than national chains," the SFLOMA Web site points out. "Frankly, we’re invested in the community," Mulvihill explains. "[We] love San Francisco, and we don’t want to go anywhere." (Rebecca Bowe) GREEN APPLE BOOKS 506 Clement, SF (415) 387-2272 ———– CHAIN ALTERNATIVE AWARD HUT LANDON Hut Landon is responsible the past few years for helping direct millions of dollars into small business in San Francisco and beyond, and millions more into the local economy. He does it through his energetic and creative leadership of two key organizations that promote the interests of locally-owned small business. Landon has been the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA), which promotes the interests of 200 independent bookstores in the region. He is also executive director of the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance (SFLOMA). Under Landon’s stewardship, the two groups commissioned a pioneering 2007 study that quantified the value of locally-owned businesses in the city. Their stunning finding: if consumers redirected l0 percent of their retail purchases from chains to locally-owned merchants, the result would generate about $200 million for the economy, l,295 jobs, and $72 million new income for workers. Landon’s timing could not have been better. As the economy tanked, local merchants and neighborhood business organizations used the l0 percent consumer shift as a mantra. The study also pointed out that the local economy could get another big boost if the city would shop locally with the tens of millions it now spends outside the city for goods and services. Landon likes to use the example of two brothers who live together. One works on Potrero Hill and eats lunch at one of the many locally-owned restaurants. The other works at Stonestown shopping center and eats at a chain restaurant because that’s all there is out there. The Potrero Hill money, he points out, stays in the community. The chain store money is sent back to headquarters. (Bruce Brugmann) HUT LANDON Northern California Independent Booksellers Association 1007 General Kennedy, SF (415) 561-7686 ———– SMALL BUSINESS ADVOCATE REGINA DICK-ENDRIZZI Small business owners often feel as if they don’t have many advocates at City Hall. But they do have Regina Dick-Endrizzi. Dick-Endrizzi, acting director of the Small Business Commission, has been moving rapidly on ways to help small businesses feel more comfortable dealing with the city — and to help them thrive in a tough economic environment. She helped establish the Small Business Assistance Center, which guides local merchants and prospective entrepreneurs through the thicket of city regulations. "It’s a tremendous asset," she told us. "When people walk through the door, we can take the time to help them develop a roadmap to doing business here." And she’s a driving force behind the Shop Local campaign, which will launch this month with bus shelter and bus-side ads designed to encourage San Franciscans to keep their money in town (co-sponsored by the Guardian). Known in political circles as a former aide to Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, Dick-Endrizzi has a solid background in business. She moved to San Francisco in 1986 to open the Haight Street Buffalo Exchange store, and worked with that company for 13 years. "We bought our inventory from local people, and I had to have a close relationship with local small businesses," she said. "I have an intimate understanding of what it takes to run a business." After several years in Mirkarimi’s office, she learned of the opening at the Small Business Commission, and plans to stay there for a while. "I truly believe in what this department offers to small business," she said. "There’s such a tremendous need." (Tim Redmond) REGINA DICK-ENDRIZZI OFFICE OF SMALL BUSINESS 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF (415) 554-6134 ———— GOOD NEIGHBOR AWARD URBAN SOLUTIONS Urban Solutions has its roots in the South of Market Foundation, an economic development corporation formed in 1992 in response to what SoMa merchants, residents, and community-based organizations felt was a lack of accountability in their neighborhood’s development. A decade later, the organization changed its name and Urban Solutions was born. Two years after that, the burgeoning nonprofit opened a second office, this time in the Western Addition, becoming an important source of service in both neighborhoods. Urban Solution’s executive director Jenny McNulty says she is currently excited about her organization’s Green Business initiative, which helps educate small business on how to conserve resources and reduce their carbon footprints — and save money in the process. McNulty is also amped about Urban Solution’s effort — undertaken with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency — to revitalize Sixth Street’s commercial corridor. "We’re expanding our Green Business Initiative program, which offers free consulting to help small businesses go green by implementing cost-saving practices to increase the sustainability of their business operations," McNulty said. Urban Solutions’ Sixth Street revitalization effort includes beautifying the area and helping businesses, in conjunction with Redevelopment Agency grants, by improving their facades, installing new awnings, repainting buildings, and replacing windows, storefronts, and entrance ways. "Our focus is low-income businesses," McNulty said. (Sarah Phelan) URBAN SOLUTIONS 1083 Mission, SF (415) 553-4433 ———— GOOD NEIGHBOR AWARD JENS-PETER JUNGCLAUSSEN Jens-Peter Jungclaussen had a dream: Buy a gutted, camouflage-painted school bus on eBay, convert it to biodiesel, and put it to use as a mobile classroom by day and a party on wheels by night, a rollicking omnibus of education, culture, and sustainability. With a few flicks of his wrist, Jungclaussen, a former German windsurfing pro and biology and PE teacher, transforms the bus to suit the need at hand — pulling down a movie screen from the roof; unpacking a buffet table, wet bar, or set of turntables from beneath the seats; or simply switching on the "party lights." Dubbed das Frachtgut ("the good freight"), the bus has hosted dinner parties on Twin Peaks, ecology classes in Muir Woods, sunrise raves on undisclosed beaches, and screenings of The Big Lebowski (complete with bowling and White Russians). It also serves as a mobile billboard for its various local, eco-friendly sponsors and can be rented for field trips and corporate events. The ever-enthusiastic and tireless Jungclaussen recently turned his attentions to youth education, this year offering for the first time a "mobile summer camp." Teaming up with fellow teachers Michael Murnane, Gretchen Nelson, Justin Ancheta, and Leah Greenberg, he’ll present three, 11-day sessions on wheels that will introduce young people to a variety of Bay Area natural, artistic, and historical treasures. But don’t worry, the parties will still keep rolling. As Jungclaussen promises of the bus, "What you want it to be, it will become." (Marke B.) JENS-PETER JUNGCLAUSSEN (415) 424-1058 ———— ARTHUR JACKSON DIVERSITY IN SMALL BUSINESS AWARD IRENE HERNANDEZ-FEIKS It’s easy to assume that the purpose of Chillin’, the brainchild of Mexico City native Irene Hernandez-Feiks, is simply to have a good time. But the multimedia parties Hernandez-Feiks has been throwing for 11 years are much more than entertainment. Their actual purpose is to stimulate the economy and support one of the most difficult small businesses to sustain: the business of art. A former designer herself, Hernandez-Feiks started out organizing weekly happy hours at 111 Minna where she would feature up to five independent Bay Area designers. Her philosophy? Charge the designers nothing for the opportunity and take no commission. The formula worked so well that Chillin’ eventually grew from weeknight happy hours to Saturday night events, complete with DJs. Now Chillin’ is a full-fledged happening — indeed, the June 13 anniversary show at Mezzanine features 180 photographers and artists, 40 filmmakers, 80 fashion designers, and 12 DJs. But watching Chillin’ grow — and seeing participating artists transform themselves from local to international names — isn’t enough for Hernandez-Feiks. She also devotes much of her time to charity work, including involvement with Gen Art, the Mexican Consulate Cultural Affairs division, the United Nations and Natural World Museum, and the Art Seed Apprenticeship Program benefiting Bayview- Hunters Point youth. "Because of Chillin’, I have relationships with so many artists," she says. "I want to use those connections to help everybody out." (Molly Freedenberg) IRENE HERNANDEZ-FEIKS Chillin Productions (415) 285-1998
Our 2009 Small Business Awards
Why can’t City Hall shop local?
Photo by Pat Mazzera
Photo by Charles Russo
Photo by Charles Russo
Photo by Abi Kelly
Photo by Abi Kelly
PREVIEW In addition to making music, Christopher Willits is a guiding force behind the art and experimental music site Overlap (www.overlap.org). In conjunction with Overlap’s next event, I caught up with him by e-mail.
SFBG What was it like to collaborate with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Ocean Fire (12k, 2008)?
Christopher Willits It was surreal. We fell into an oceanic trance, and a bunch of music suddenly emerged. Then a Godzilla-like sea monster morphed out of his piano and he vaporized it with his max patch.
SFBG You’ve also worked with Brad Laner of Medicine. Are you an admirer of that (ahead-of-its-time) band?
CW Medicine [had] a mind-splittingly original sound — it was a soundtrack to many high school adventures. Now it’s an absolute joy to be friends with Mr. Laner. Together we are the varsity band members (guitar I and II) of the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. We’re aiming for nationals next year.
SFBG What do you like about the Bay Area’s close proximity to the ocean?
CW The smell of fresh wind, and dreams of flying great white sharks.
SFBG I saw a fave list of yours once that had Magma, the Carpenters’ "Close to You" and Sun Ra’s Lanquidity on it. Who is inspiring or obsessing you at present?
CW That is a timeless list — can I say them again? Let’s add Morton Subotnick, Wild Bull (www.merlindarts.com), all Eliane Radigue, all Elvin Jones, John Coltrane, and that band that plays at El Rio on Sunday night.
SFBG You recently toured in China, including a performance with images on ice. What did you discover?
CW I discovered a resilient community of artists and experimental musicians pushing against the grain (and firewall) of this mammoth country or force. They understand my history and what I’m doing — another win for Chinese bootlegs? I also found some of the best food ever: huajiao (flower pepper) with asparagus! But hold the boiled big brains. Those I’m definitely not into.
LISTEN/VISION 06 With Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, and Classical Revolution. Sun/10, 8 p.m., $10. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016. www.overlap.org.
REVIEW It’s time to dance — to sashay from the video installation within Nick Cave’s "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the video aspect of Desirée Holman’s part of the SECA exhibition, now in its last days at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. To hustle between the two is revealing. Not only do Cave and Holman share an irreverent interest in choreography and the unity or community that can spring from mutual movement, they also devote considerable creative energy to costuming. Most compelling of all, these strange kin tap into and surrealistically subvert (in Holman’s case) or explode (in Cave’s instance) conventions regarding race relations in the early Obama era. Think about it. Dance to this.
Closer to the Tenderloin at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Holman turns her attention to the feminine and maternal in "Reborn," a solo show that, much like her SFMOMA contribution, mixes drawings, mask-making (or more precisely here, doll-making), and video involving choreography. Holman’s drawings for the exhibition are as sickly they are lovely — a woman’s split ends take on a windswept weeping willow quality. In the alluring yet disgusting series of images, milk spills from mothers’ mouths as they nurse unsettlingly complacent babies. The video Reborn, nestled perversely in the cement block back room — or should I say back womb? — of Silverman Gallery, mines comedy and the type of incipient frustration that can grow into rage. It does so via games of duck-duck-goose, hummed lullabies, and the occasional bedazzled burka.
DESIRÉE HOLMAN: REBORN
Through May 30. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter, SF. (415) 255-9508. www.silverman-gallery.com
OPINION Two SF police officers stood; another was in the car at the curb, door ajar, lights flashing onto the sidewalk. It was 3:00 p.m. and the lights, the three police officers, and the squad car were all focused on one small man huddled next to a shopping cart and a torn Hefty bag, shining steel handcuffs glittering off his deep brown wrists. The man said nothing as they arrested him. His "crime": sitting, standing, sleeping while houseless in San Francisco.
It’s illegal to be houseless in the United States. In fact, arguably it’s illegal to be poor in a nation that has somehow equated urban messiness with the presence of youth, adults, and elders sitting, standing, and convening in public and cleanliness with emptiness and the lack of people, color, and things. Since the new $2.7 million Community Justice Center (CJC) — a.k.a. the poverty court — opened in San Francisco, police have been out in droves drumming up customers.
There are so many wrong things about the CJC, beginning with criminalizing people in poverty just for being poor. As a poverty scholar and formerly houseless child and young adult who was incarcerated for the sole act of living without a home, I can say for a fact: it didn’t matter how many times you arrested me or my Boricua houseless mama — it didn’t take us out of homelessness. In fact, it made our situation more compounded, more complicated, more intractable.
The city is grappling with a $350 million budget deficit — it has been cutting back and closing vital emergency services for houseless people, like the Tenderloin Resource Center (TARC) and Caduceus, for example, which does truly revolutionary work with houseless folks who struggle with a psychological disability.
But I think one of the most terrifying aspects of the CJC is the institutionalization of a new form of criminalized service provision. This stems from the idea that the delivery of services, advocacy, mental health, physical health, and housing are somehow more urgently needed, deserved, or valid if they are triggered by arrest and adjudication.
At the hour of 3:00 p.m., near the corner of Hyde and Larkin streets, the system was triggered by Richie, a 56-year-old who used to hold down a construction job until he was laid off. Arresting him didn’t get Richie a job. The CJC didn’t get Richie a job. But, the folks there would argue, they referred him to job training and a temporary shelter bed. And guess what? Other organizations that didn’t arrest Richie also referred him to job training and a temporary shelter bed.
My mother and I didn’t get affordable housing, mental health services, or access to free child-care for my infant son because I was arrested.
Acts of revolutionary legal advocacy, art, support networks, and political awareness, like the ones I learned through the Suitcase Clinic, POOR Magazine, WRAP, the Coalition on Homelessness, and People Organized to Win Employment Rights, were what took me out of the sorrow and desperation and depth of struggle of poverty.
Criminalization, arrest, and adjudication of people in poverty really accomplishes only one thing: it brings the prison industrial complex to a neighborhood near you. *
Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia is the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America and the cofounder of POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork.
By Juliette Tang
If I were to wear something in lieu of a shirt, it probably wouldn’t be a breastplate cleaved onto someone else’s even smaller breastplate. But looking at these photos from the Alchemy fashion show that took place earlier this month at the California Modern Art Gallery, I can’t help but be intrigued.
Thown by False Profit LLC, the annual Alchemy party showcases an eye-catching fashion production by Missing Piece, a San Francisco based artist representative agency promoting some of San Francisco’s most talented emerging designers. Included in the show were collections by Joshu + Vela, Montree, Miranda Caroligne, Callibug Designs, and Antiseptic Fashion and Ivana Ristic.
Michael Bowen, who died March 7 in Sweden at the age of 71, was a seminal Beat figure who inspired the famous “Turn On, Tune in and Drop Out” dictum of the “Human Be-In” in San Francisco in 1967. Click here for a photo essay of his life and art.
By Marlena Donohue
(Marlena Donohue is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and Managing Editor of ArtScene in Los Angeles.)
Michael Bowen recently passed away in Sweden after five decades of exhibiting art in major international art museums and private collections. He passes away before his career or work could be adequately evaluated in the context of history, particularly those epoch-altering years marked by the 1960s-1970s he is most closely associated with.
Born in Beverly Hills to a famous dentist into a legacy of great wealth, Bowen was the quintessential drop out from consumer culture long before the term was made popular in SF cafes. On the road, so to speak, from his teens, Bowen traveled the globe, engaging life and making art alongside some of the art world’s major luminaries.
Primarily self taught, Bowen coined an art style and remained committed to it for over forty years of changing art world styles and alternatively hip and conservative social mores. He is associated with a distinct visionary surreal art whose nearly hallucinatory intensity came to be identified with the Beats and with the drug and underground culture.
Photo captions by Phil Johnson, a longtime friend of Michael Bowen and a patron of his art.
Click here to read Marlena Donohue’s evaluation of Michael Bowen’s life and art from the Bruce blog.”
Michael in Indian Head Dress: this is from Life magazine in 1967 article on the Hippy movement.
Michael in Kristiansand, Norway museum show with one of his early pieces. This is from the Radar Wennesland collection which was donated to a two schools in Kristiansand. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art turned down the collection of over 500 works of art back in the 70’s as they did not see enough art “of worth”. Now this collection is considered the definitive collection of Beat art. Bowen is the most represented artist in the collection.
By Laura Peach
Feed Your Soul image by Tara Hogan
Since everyone seems to be keeping a tight clamp on their cash these days, projects considered less necessary are being cast aside. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of going above and beyond spring cleaning and in favor of a full spring interior redecoration. It’s wonderful when your interior mirrors the sunny, blossomy exterior world (even if it’s raining right now). Also, getting out of bed on Monday morning is a little easier when your home feels happy and new.
Feed Your Soul image by Michelle Cavigliano
Stop feeling stuck in your domestic space.
Each week Justin Juul highlights a rad upcoming local sexy event
Who: Madison Young is a local porn star who also directs films, makes art, teaches sex classes, and co-owns the coolest “feminist, tranny, queer” art gallery/performance space thing in the whole entire world. It’s called Femina Potens Art Gallery and it’s the best place to visit in SF if you’re looking to balance out your interest in smut with your love of paintings and sculptures and stuff. If you read SEX SF regularly, you probably already know about Femina Potens and you probably go there at least twice a week. But if you’ve somehow missed the boat, go right now. Girls who are boys who want boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys flock to FP daily and nightly to stare at sexy paintings, watch dirty movies, and talk about art.
By Molly Freedenberg
A high-flyin’ Vagaboom! participant
Some of my favorite memories of elementary school are due to arts programming: watching singing science duo Janet and Judy or a traveling theater troupe act out The Jabberwocky in the round; playing flute in the band and dancing to Broadway hits in our annual musical; studying — and then making my own versions of — pointillist, Impressionist, and landscape artwork. Who would I be if I’d never learned to read music? To appreciate silent theater? To identify Georgia O’Keeffe? And what will the world be like in the future if today’s kids don’t learn to explore their creativity? The artists and activists behind Vagaboom! hope we never have to answer that question. The group of acrobats, musicians, actors, and artists — including Del Arte graduate Martina Oskarsson, Cirque Destino cofounder Marina Karadjieva, and Think13 visionary Dee Kennedy — have pooled their resources and channeled their individual expert training into creating a nonprofit that brings arts programs to kids, particularly those least likely to be exposed to art and music. Lucky for us, we adults will get a taste of what Vagaboom! does at its May 2 fundraiser. The action-packed event features music by Think 13, Cohen, Scattershot Theory, and DJ Centipede; dance performances; acrobatics; and scenes from the experimental theater piece Simple Matters. Sure beats math class …
Vagaboom! Fun(d)raiser Sat/2, 8pm. $10-$20. SomArts, 934 Brannan, SF. www.vagaboom.org
‘Tis the season — San Francisco is alive with movie brilliance. To what do I refer? George Kuchar’s latest class production at San Francisco Art Institute. If you don’t have a job right now, or if you don’t have to work on International Worker’s Day, go to SFAI to see Zombies of Zanzibar.
Spring cinema in the Bay Area hits a peak with a free screening of a movie made by Kuchar and his film production class. Billing them as the Studio 8 Players, the characteristically alliterative Zombies promises a zany array of “ACTION!…ROMANCE…TERROR…AND SPECTACLE.” Did I say it was free?
ZOMBIES OF ZANZIBAR
Fri/1, noon, free
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut, SF
(415) 771-7020
www.sfai.edu/
To get you in the mood, some Kuchar on YouTube after the jump:
Compiled by Molly Freedenberg
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>> Latex Fashion School
Polly Pandemonium of the Moral Minority hosts this class in Latex clothing construction, which includes not only learning to sew with the fabulous fabric but how to spot a well-made garment. The course might seem pricey, but you’ll leave with materials and instructions to make your wardrobe even steamier.
Thurs/30, 7-10pm. $200.
Mission Control
2519 Mission, SF
kinkysalon.com
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>> A Touch of Pleasure
Sex educator and porn star Madison Young hosts this event featuring art and installations like steam-punk vibrators, Kink.com fucking machines, and a display of antique sex toys, all in honor of National Masturbation Month.
Sat/2, 7-10pm. Free.
(Show runs Thurs-Sun, 12-6pm, through May 31)
Femina Potens Art Gallery
2199 Market, SF
www.feminapotens.org
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>> IXFF: The Second Coming Tour at the Masturbate-a-thon
Oh lordy, it’s voyeur heaven. The Indie Erotic Film Festival kicks off its national tour of last year’s best shorts with a stop at the Center for Sex and Culture Masturbate-a-thon: as though watching featured masturbators compete to get themselves off wasn’t titillating enough. All proceeds benefit the Center. (If you want to compete in this year’s film festival, visit www.gv-ixff.org.
Sat/2, 11am-close. $15-25.
Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission, SF
www.maturbate-a-thon.com
johnny@sfbg.com
LABELS Look for the label: that shopper’s instruction has carried a wealth of meanings over the years in the music industry. Stax and Motown have soul. Jazz has Verve. Kudu has that bluesy voodoo. If you want a symbol of vindictive business dealings, look up Savoy. If you’re obsessed with the history of post-punk and indie rock, see Factory, Rough Trade, and Creation. Yet what does a label mean in 2009? Do labels still matter in an ever more ephemeral music industry? In fact, does matter itself matter anymore in a world where the C in CD might as well stand for coffin-bound? God save EMI?
I put the first question to a number of label owners and representatives recently, hoping their answers might provide an entry into a discussion of the role of labels and the potential of music today. Their answers did not disappoint. "Anyone saying [labels] are dead and gone is not factoring in the talented, but brainless, American Idol contestant," quipped Ken Shipley, founder of the vaunted reissue and archival label Numero Group. "They’re backed by liquor companies and weapons manufacturers, and as long as the Army needs music for commercials at movie theaters, they’ll be in business. The labels that are about to be useless are the large indies — crippled by an infrastructure and overhead built for the ’90s CD bonanza — and the micro-indies, [that are] doing what any band’s manager can already do."
Such a perspective suggests that reissue labels have the truest vital stake in the future of commercially produced music, and this passionate music lover has to admit that it sometimes feels this way: over the last few years, archival entities such as Numero Group, Omni Recording, Trunk, Light in the Attic, and the local Water label have played as major a role in my listening experience as any indie dedicated to new groups and artists.
Yet even as iTunes demands that everyone stand under its umbrella, the meaning and importance of a small label can persist in very simple and profound ways. "I pay attention to records coming out on good labels that I know I can trust," says Filippo Salvadori of Runt Distribution, the Oakland home to reissue labels including Water and 4 Men with Beards. "A record label is an important hub for art and idea exchanges between music lovers and musicians," Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey likewise declares, her directness and use of the word record born of past and recent experience.
"I think labels are as important as ever," maintains Mike Schulman of the Bay Area indie pop shrine Slumberland, which is currently experiencing a new burst of recognition thanks to bands such as Crystal Stilts and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. "With the increasing fragmentation and atomization of genres and scenes and markets, customers rely on labels as a curatorial enterprise, a shorthand signifier for what they’re into, and a useful tool to help sort through the mountain of new music."
The curatorial corollary, or an editorial variant, comes up more than once among small label owners. "In an sense, we serve as editors, but to do more than edit," says Andres Santo Domingo of Kemado Records. "We actively promote the artists on our roster and help make their life easier so they can dedicate themselves to being musicians [at a time when making] music is less financially viable than it was in the past."
Joakim Hoagland of the Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound has a more idealistic view of the label owner’s enterprise. "In my opinion, running a label is an artform," he writes, still passionate in the wake of a recent public debate with Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay, a staunch opponent of music labels and other aspects of copyright culture. "I am in general a label fan and have read most books available on labels like Elektra, Impulse, Creation, Rough Trade, Factory, and so on. I love labels, and sometimes am more interested in a label than an artist."
While Hoagland makes a case for the label identity that is forged as a labor of love for new music, Shipley of Numero Group feels that reissue labels have a "brand identity" that most labels devoted to contemporary music currently lack. Indeed, this might be the case, thanks to the manner in which iTunes seems to have swallowed the experience of listening to recorded music. "Although millions of labels sell their music through iTunes, the only brand name that is really involved and talked about through the process is iTunes, which isn’t even a label," notes Jonny Trunk of the U.K. reissue treasure trove Trunk. "You cannot search on iTunes by label. Which is rubbish, really."
Matt Sullivan of the Seattle-based label Light in the Attic fuses Hoagland’s appreciation of past labels with Shipley’s and Trunk’s devotion to discovering old "lost" music. "There was something so beautiful about labels like Stax, early Sub Pop, Creation, or even Reprise/Elektra/Warner when Stan Cornyn was at the helm in that golden age of the late 1960s and early 1970s," he observes. "No one’s done it better since."
For Sullivan and Light in the Attic, a label functions as a way to right past industry wrongs, and find or create new audiences for abused and neglected artists. "Most managers, labels, publicists, booking agents, etc. are crooks and cheats, better suited for a position at Enron or Madoff Investment Securities," he notes. "After all, though, this is the entertainment business and it feeds on low-lifes." He contrasts this bleakly funny outlook with the dedication required in reissuing a choice recording from long ago: "Folks have no idea the amount of time that goes into a reissue. On the other hand, I have no idea the time that’s invested in making a tube of toothpaste." This dedication results in a recorded object with artwork in the case of Light in the Attic, or Trunk, whose namesake is an expert on music library treasures, and the author of a deluxe book of artwork (with a CD) related to the subject, The Music Library (Fuel Publishing).
As CDs pile up in landfills, vinyl is returning from the dead with ever-increasing commercial vitality, even if on a smaller scale. "From a personal level, I wish the CD would die," says Chris Manak, a.k.a. Peanut Butter Wolf of Stones Throw Records. "I don’t have an effective way of storing mine without losing them all the time. I wish everybody who liked music would buy a damn turntable or two, like me." Richards of Thrill Jockey sees growing vinyl activity, if not that level of popularity. "A great example of the trickle-up effect is the surge in LP sales," she says. "It is a great adventure to be a part of, and be on the hunt for new sounds without limitation to form."
But what does it all mean for the musician? "There may be some brave new world wherein the artists can do all the work themselves, but I think that notion, at least from the current perspective, is a pipe dream," says Joel Leoshke of Kranky, home of groups such as Deerhunter. "Can you name three artists that work without a label at the moment? I think not."
"Labels needs bands, not vice-versa," counters the acerbic Shipley. "The sooner every band in the world realizes that, the better off they’re going to be. Labels are for the lazy, the incompetent, and the cash-poor. Sadly, this represents 99 percent of all musicians. Good luck." Asked about the future role of labels within the industry, he makes a comparison. "The label’s role is a business version of child support: Wednesdays and every other weekend until your artists hit their teens and hate you."
Other label owners imagine even more dystopian scenarios. "As J.G. Ballard predicted, you will soon see musicians taking cruise ships and airliners hostage to hold private and compulsory listening parties," half-jokes David Thrussell of Omni Recording, which has uncovered vanguard audio explorers such as Bruce Haack. "Naturally, record labels will support artists to the maximum of their ability in these brave new marketing ventures." Slightly more seriously — only slightly — he lists his and Omni’s future goals as at attempt to "pry as many strange or under appreciated records out of musty vaults and attics as we can until the Earth explodes in a cloud of tepid dust (not that far off)."
Some label reps see labels taking on an even more encompassing role in relation to musicians. "I think some of the larger labels will be demanding much more from their artists — these 360-type deals where the labels want to own the artist, their recordings, their publishing, their gig rights, the merchandise, the outfits, all online activity, everything, everywhere," says Trunk. Hoagland of Smalltown Suerosund envisions a similar scenario in kinder, gentler, smaller terms. "My opinion is that labels should do more booking and publishing as well as releasing music. I think it is better for artists if you have one team or label work for you rather than three or four working against each other. I am not sure if 360-type deals work well with the majors, but the indie could make them into something cool."
"I know I’m a bit of a music geek about labels," admits Schulman, who once was more cynical about the industry machinations he’s moved through. "But I think that as the group of people who actually buy music continues to shrink down to a core of those who really care about it, they’ll continue to coalesce around the labels whose taste they trust."
REVIEW Call it the tumbling dice effect: dice keep appearing within Bay Area art this spring. First there was the gigantic 16-sided polygon by Brian Wasson at Ping Pong Gallery — a prediction device freed from its Magic Eight ball. Now viewers can roll with enigmas of a dice-centered video installation that is the most intriguing facet of Kent and Kevin Young’s "Jury Breaks DNA Deadlock" exhibition at Steven Wolf Gallery. They can also stare deep into a large-scale C-print of a many-sided die that doubles as a calendar in Matt Keegan’s show at Altman-Siegel Gallery, "Postcards & Calendars." Yet the best invocation of chance and rolling dice takes place just out of sight — or does it? — in a knockout piece within Dean Smith’s "thought forms 2003-2009" at Gallery Paule Anglim. Smith’s 2005 colored-pencil drawing thought form #11, from 2005, was generated by repeatedly rolling a tetrahedron. Smith’s process renders an object — a meta-die — that is both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and that ultimately collapses or blooms free from dimensionality. The piece’s shades of blue make this state of play a flirtation with the sublime.
The dice games mentioned above are something different from the clichéd forest animals and color-theory rainbows that invaded Bay Area art during stretches of the last decade, or the skulls that took over Artforum in the wake of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007) and Don Ed Hardy’s mass-production of tattoo imagery — they aren’t trendy gestures so much as chance manifestations. Smith’s thought form #11 is one expression within a multiyear project that yields ever-changing graphite on paper works and video. The pieces at Paule Anglim span from 2003 to 2008 and evoke everything from space ships or outer space community outposts to totems and medieval devices, while never remaining stuck in specificity. They’re well-paired with a one-room, four-piece show by Dean Byington, whose oil-on-linen extensions of collage are a Beatrix Potter-meets-Brueghel-in-paradise hallucinatory delight. "Oh my god, this is all diamonds!" a young girl exclaimed upon looking closely at one of Byington’s works, which seem like minimalist experiments with color from a distance. Step in closer and you’ll discover endless mountains, forests, and quarries; caves with cute yet unsettlingly prison-like windows carved into their sides; stacks of stalagmites; and greenhouses that resemble giant Cartier eggs. Oh, and the occasional strange half-fox half-rodent. Be sure to say hi.
DEAN SMITH: THOUGHT FORMS 2003-09 and DEAN BYINGTON Through Sat/2. Wed-Fri, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary, SF. (415) 433-2710. www.gallerypauleanglim.com
By Lynn Rapoport
Mabel (Gena Rowlands, in an Oscar-winning Oscar-nominated performance) has a rare calm moment in A Woman Under the Influence.
The first weekend of the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival produced a cheerful, if windblown, bottleneck along Post between Fillmore and Webster. The one outside the Castro on Sunday night had a slightly more shell-shocked emotional tenor. The crowd seemed in good enough spirits (though this reviewer admits to getting a bit misty-eyed) while giving Gena Rowlands a standing ovation when the 78-year-old actor came onstage before John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence (1974). But the film’s two and a half hours of abrasive familial dysfunction and poorly attended-to mental illness are rough going, and no one could be blamed for wandering home in a torn-up, overwrought fugue. (Think happy thoughts: like the 2008 restoration of the film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, underwritten by Gucci.)
Less emotionally brutalizing was Friday evening’s screening of Art & Copy (screening again Tues/28, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki), where doc maker Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise) expressed satisfaction at finally getting a film into SFIFF and noted that this one was centered on “the idea that if you hate advertising, make better advertising.”
Radio, radio: a scene from Art & Copy.
DVRs, defaced billboards, and legislation to calm the traffic of branding on virtually every visible surface of public space also spring to mind. However, these and other options are left unexplored in favor of a brief history of the revolution that occurred in advertising midcentury; commentary by some of the rebel forces and their descendants, including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners); entertaining behind-the-scenes tales of famous ad campaigns (Got Milk?, I Want My MTV); and stats sprinkled throughout on advertising’s cultural presence, nationally and globally.
Self-comparisons to cave painters and a sequence near the close that feels like an advertisement for advertising (emotionally evocative images of children’s faces upturned in wonder to the sky: check) are somewhat uncomfortable to witness. But Pray has gathered together some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their vocation intelligently, thoughtfully, wittily, and often thoroughly earnestly. It would have been interesting to hear, amid the earnestness, and the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this branding and selling gets us, in an age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a somewhat deleterious effect on the planet. Or to learn from these creatives whether there were any ad campaigns they wouldn’t touch, such as one centered on nuclear energy, or the reelection of George W. Bush. After all, many of the interviewees come across as shaggy ex-hippies and liberals. (Last fall, trade paper the Denver Egotist referred to “the entire creative world uniting against John McCain in support of Barack Obama” in a piece on Goodby, Silverstein-made anti-McCain spots that the agency cofounders reportedly underwrote personally.) Still, the film is successful in humanizing and developing a richer picture of a vilified profession. And what it reveals about the visions of its subjects (one compares a good brand to someone you’d like to have over for dinner; another asserts that “great advertising makes food taste better”; another that “you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture”) makes it worth watching, even if you make a habit of fast-forwarding past the ads.
Photos and text by Ariel Soto
The Red Poppy Art House, an artist community and intimate performance center in the heart of the Mission, welcomed Karamo Susso, a world famous kora player from West Africa, who performed this Saturday, April 25th. Susso, who was raised in Mali, is a master of the kora, a 21-stringed instrument originally from Gambia, that is played solely with the thumbs and index fingers, creating tones that sound somewhat like a harp, a guitar and maybe just a bit of toy piano.
