Art Archives — Page 56 of 206 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

No cheeseburger status updates

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August 29, 2012

By Aaron Carnes

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Singer-songwriter Bryan McPherson had this nagging feeling three years ago, that he needed to leave Boston and relocate to the Bay Area. Even he didn’t understand from where this itch grew.

“I came out here to go west, just to go somewhere, go as far away as possible, for whatever reason,” McPherson explains.

He didn’t know it when he left, but the new environment would instantly fuel a whole album’s worth of new material — just as political and folk-oriented as his earlier work, but now with a new level of focus.

“I wrote ‘I See a Flag’ right when I got here. I started seeing flags everywhere. I noticed all this American shit. I got in touch with this whole American theme. Then I was in Oakland during the controversy of the Oscar Grant trial,” McPherson says.

“I See a Flag,” and the rest of the new songs would eventually become the aptly titled American Boy, American Girl, which was released on Stateline Records this spring. Like much of the album, the power of “I See a Flag” is in observation, which explores the contradictory nature of American culture. (“The police shot him down/He was laying on the ground/And now the whole damn town is going to burn to the ground/I don’t understand/But I see a flag blowing in the wind.”)

Playing political folk music is obviously reminiscent of icons like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but what distinguishes McPherson from these songwriters is how emotion-centric his music is. His words aren’t just cerebral ponderings about the state of the government. It is one man belting — at the top of his lungs — his honest, emotional impressions of the world, which in this case, just so happens to be America.

“I’m not some crazy nationalist. I just grew up in America. This record was written mostly over the course of the last couple years, being broke, just working hard, not getting by, barely making ends meet,” McPherson says. “There’s stories in there about people who are forgotten, not remembered and never were mentioned. It’s all true. It’s all me or someone I know. I’m not sitting there making shit up, wondering what it’s like in Bangladesh. I’m not imagining something. It comes from real experience.”

On the surface, the songs discuss the injustices of America and the contradictions its citizens must bear in order to have a successful, easy life. But underneath the surface, the record is about the McPherson’s alienation, both as he identifies himself as an American and is surrounded by other American’s apathy.

“Americans are so ignorant now. They have no idea what this country was founded on. They’re more concerned with updating their status and throwing a picture of a fucking cheeseburger on the internet than actually thinking they have a little bit of power,” McPherson says.

Of course, his feelings of alienation were compounded while writing these songs because of his relocation to the Bay Area from the vastly different political climate of Boston.

“It’s like being in another country. I felt self-conscious. I came out here with a thick Boston accent. The culture is different. People are way different,” McPherson says.

But being an outcast wasn’t something new to McPherson. Even in Boston, as a young musician from Dorchester, which is a working class neighborhood in Boston, McPherson would play open mic nights in Cambridge, where the art section is. He says the rich kids there immediately identified him as different.

“When I opened my mouth and started talking to people and they start to look at each other, kind of be weird because of the way I talk. I’m stupid because I have this accent. I’m poor. I’m probably dangerous. I’m not them. I definitely don’t have anything to offer. That’s the vibe that I consistently got, my first experiences dealing with the status quo, those sorts of people calling the shots,” McPherson says.

He recorded his first album, Fourteen Stories, while still in Boston in 2007. McPherson already has his third album written. He just needs to record it.

BRYAN MCPHERSON

With Lera Lyn, the Lady Crooners

Thu/30, 9pm, $8

Hotel Utah

500 Fourth St., SF

(415) 546-6300

www.hotelutah.com

Heavy drinking

Andrew Lam

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August 29, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM The much-abused Malvolio in Twelfth Night is far from a great man, but he makes the definitive statement about greatness: that some are born with it, some achieve it, etc. Option number three, however, doesn’t really work for movies. No film has ever successfully had greatness thrust upon it, at least not by its maker. Yet every year there are a handful that seem to be handing themselves golden statuettes in every self-consciously majestic frame.

This often happens in the organized-crime-epic genre, where The Godfather (1972) cuts a grandiose figure many are inclined to imitate. Generally speaking, the more strenuous the aspiration, the more strained the results. In recent years Gangs of New York (2002), Road to Perdition (2002), and American Gangster (2007) have gone for the gold and come up tinsel. These aren’t bad movies, exactly, but they commit the sin of behaving as if their sprawl were iconic and tragic rather than derivative and overblown. Everyone should always set out to make the best art (or entertainment) they can; deciding from the get-go that you’ll cough up a classic, however, tends to backfire.

Now there’s Lawless, which has got to be the most pretentiously humorless movie ever made about moonshiners — a criminal subset whose adventures onscreen have almost always been rambunctious and breezy, even when violent. Not here, bub. Adapting Matt Bondurant’s fact-inspired novel The Wettest County in the World about his family’s very colorful times a couple generations back, director John Hillcoat and scenarist (as well as, natch, composer) Nick Cave have made one of those films in which the characters are presented to you as if already immortalized on Mount Rushmore — monumental, legendary, a bit stony. They’ve got a crackling story about war between hillbilly booze suppliers and corrupt lawmen during Prohibition, and while the results aren’t dull (they’re too bloody for that, anyway), they’d be a whole lot better if the entire enterprise didn’t take itself so gosh darned seriously.

Yes, the Bondurant brothers of Franklin County, Va. are considered “legends” when we meet them in 1931, having defied all and sundry as well as survived a few bullets. Mack-truck-built Forrest (Tom Hardy), in particular, is rumored to be “indestructible,” and has fists that create a Dolby sonic boom whenever they hit an unfortunate face. Eldest Howard (Jason Clarke) just tipples, follows orders, and smiles a lot. “Runt of the litter” Jack (Shia LeBeouf), however, has a chip on his shoulder, and between his whining, impulsiveness, and bad judgment, you know he’s going to cause everyone a lot of grief trying to prove himself. He is to stoic, all-seeing Forrest what Casey Affleck’s “coward” wannabe was to Brad Pitt’s fabled bandit in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — another cinematic wade into American outlaw mythology by Australians, albeit one infinitely better than Lawless.

The local law looks the other way so long as their palms are greased. But things change when the Feds send Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), a sneering, effete sadist demonstrating how you can get away with a despicable gay stereotype today so long as you include a scene where he’s with a woman (whom he’s abused). Needless to say, it’s an eye for an eye for an eye, etc. from that point on.

Hillcoat and Cave have collaborated a long time, on music videos as well as the 1988 prison cult flick Ghosts … of the Civil Dead and 2005 Australian Western The Proposition. That last was pretentious too — in exactly the way of one of Cave’s glowering psuedo-traditional death ballads — but summoned up the necessary shocks and weight to pretty well pull off its own prairie Guignol classicism. Since then Hillcoat directed (and Cave scored) 2009’s The Road, a Cormac McCarthy adaptation that was probably bound to fall short, and did, though not for want of trying.

The revenge-laden action in Lawless is engaging in a way The Road couldn’t be, though the filmmakers are trying so hard to make it all resonant and folkloric and meta-cinematic, any fun you have is in spite of their efforts. Among the big cast, only Hardy manages to inject some humor — he makes Forrest’s taciturn inarticulacy a joke about strong-and-silent machismo — and Pearce is ingeniously horrible. But everyone else seems to be playing stock figures lifted from better movies, especially (and predictably) the women. Mia Wasikowska plays an absurdity (the sheltered product of a religious sect who’s nonetheless all worldly badinage when courted by LeBeouf’s Jack), while Jessica Chastain’s Chicago b-girl refugee is costumed and lit so she’s like Jean Harlow in a Dorothea Lange photo, a laughable incongruity.

Needless to say, the rural Depression era is in other ways so exquisitely realized you can never quite believe it for a moment, from the location choices to the soundtrack Cave has laden with original songs with names like “Fire and Brimstone.” The latter create a sort of tasteful-downer equivalent to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) album (using some of its contributors). It’s pretty, but still an imitation of authenticity. Lawless proves you can’t curate blood and thunder.

LAWLESS opens Wed/29 in Bay Area theaters.

Live by the sword

Andrew Lam

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August 29, 2012

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cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM The wuxia film is as integral to China’s cinema as the Western is to America’s — though the tradition of the “martial hero” in literature and other art forms dates back well before Clint Eastwood ever donned a serape. Still, the two genres have some notable similarities, a fact acknowledged by Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, which adopts “the good, the bad, and the ugly” as a tagline in the splashy trailer for its American release.

Hardcore fans of flying swordsmen and their ilk will recognize the (ill-) fated locale of the title, previously seen in the 1962 King Hu classic Dragon Gate Inn and the 1992 Tsui-produced New Dragon Gate Inn. But don’t call Flying Swords a remake — it’s more fanboy tribute writ large.

“I hate to remake something when somebody already did a good job on it,” Tsui says from Hong Kong, where he’s filming his next project. “When I was a kid, Dragon Gate Inn was one of my favorite movies. When I started my career, I was lucky to collaborate with King Hu on [1990’s] The Swordsman. But during the preparation for The Swordsman, I spent so much time talking to him about Dragon Gate Inn, how he came up with the story and how he designed his shots.”

Pretty soon, I had the idea of writing a story [inspired by questions] that I saw as not having been answered by Dragon Gate Inn. He was laughing and said, if those are things that you feel like you can answer, that could be New Dragon Gate Inn. That film became a classic in the market in China. I wanted Flying Swords to be a continuation of the old story, with new characters: something you’re familiar with, but with a lot of new elements and people. I would say Flying Swords is a continuation. It’s not a remake or a part two.”

Dragon Gate Inn may be a familiar milieu, but Flying Swords marks the first time the dusty desert way station has been rendered in 3D IMAX. The climactic battle — between a ragtag gang of outlaws led by a mysterious wanderer, and power-mad government officials — goes down in an epic, churning sandstorm.

“It was something I wanted to try: 3D and IMAX at the same time,” Tsui says. “In my last film, [Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame], the investor wanted to make it into IMAX,” he remembers. But he didn’t want to blow up the film to IMAX size in post-production, so he held off until Flying Swords came along.

Likewise, he became interested in 3D while working on Phantom Flame. “I was looking around for the people who could tell me how to shoot a 3D movie. I [started] testing 3D with my cameraman and special effects people. When we saw Avatar, which was quite a cool experience, we invited their team to come give us advice [on Flying Swords].”

He learned so much while making Flying Swords, Tsui says, “I think it could be quite a good beginning for me to do something more fantastic, more crazy, next.”

Tsui, who also penned Flying Swords‘ screenplay, is by now an expert in the fantastic and crazy. He rocketed to infamy with 1983’s Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, a cult hit in America for its outrageously enjoyable combination of martial arts and special FX wizardry. Tsui, who honed his craft at UT Austin in the mid-1970s, has made nearly a film a year, and sometimes multiple films per year, for the past three decades. Some haven’t made it stateside, but the ones that have include the Jet Li-starring Once Upon a Time in China series; Jackie Chan’s Twin Dragons (1992); and Jean Claude Van Damme’s best (I guess) efforts, 1997’s Double Team (the one with Dennis Rodman) and 1998’s Knock Off (the one with Rob Schneider).

His 2000 Time and Tide (guns ‘n’ gangsters in modern-day Hong Kong) and 2007 Kurosawa-inspired Seven Swords were both excellent but under seen; Phantom Flame had a brief Bay Area run last year. Though it’s already a blockbuster in China, Flying Swords‘ local run is limited, touching down only in Emeryville and Santa Clara.

Just to put this in perspective, in 2000, Ang Lee picked up four Oscars for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which layered an art-house patina over gravity-defying fight scenes — “wire fu” — the novelty of which astonished only viewers who’d never seen an episode of Kung Fu Theatre. (Crouching Tiger is still the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in America.) Wire fu is now a common component in mainstream action movies — maybe even a cliché at this point — but nobody uses it more effectively than Tsui, especially when paired with Jet Li.

“I missed him when he went to Hollywood, so I was waiting for the moment when he could come back to our country, our industry, and do movies like Flying Swords with me,” Tsui says, noting that Flying Swords marked a new kind of collaboration for the duo. “I think he became more mature, and also learned so much over the years making movies in different places. I’m expecting to work with him again, hopefully soon.”

The nimble Li (last seen wearily assuring Dolph Lundgren’s character that “you will find another minority” to make fun of, before excusing himself in act one of The Expendables 2) stars in Flying Swords as Zhao Huai’an, crusading fly in the ointment of powerful eunuchs who’ve injected mass corruption into Ming Dynasty-era China. Chief among them is Eunuch Yu (Chen Kun), a preening, eyeliner’d villain intent on capturing both Zhao and a pregnant maid (Mavis Fan) who’s escaped from palace clutches. The cast expands to include a taciturn woman in disguise (Zhou Xun, as butched up here as her Painted Skin: The Resurrection co-star Chen is camp-ified) and multiple ne’er-do-wells (sinister henchmen, heavy-drinking tribal warriors, a goofy rebel who bears a strange resemblance to Eunuch Yu), all of whom descend upon Dragon Gate Inn as the menacing “flying swirl dragon” looms on the horizon.

Alliances form (and are betrayed), schemes are launched (and botched), and the fight scenes — acrobatic and dynamic, with airborne tables, snapping chains, razor-sharp wires, and clashing swords — are mind- and eardrum-blowing. Through it all, Tsui’s trademark melding of classic story and fantastic special effects achieves innovative heights.

“I think audiences are always looking for new experiences in the theater,” Tsui says, who includes himself in that number. “The action genre was always something I watched as a kid. When I became a director, I was making movies for someone like me, [a viewer] who would really look for something challenging and to experience different things on the screen.”

THE FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE opens Fri/31 at the Bay Street 16 in Emeryville and the Mercado 20 in Santa Clara.

Our Weekly Picks: August 29-September 4

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

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WEDNESDAY 29

Enorchestra

In between his roles as “Roxy Music co-founder” and “ambient guru,” musician/non-musician Brian Eno recorded a sequence of four visionary, distinctive solo rock records. So, when Bay Area superfans Doug Hilsinger and Caroleen Beatty released a cover-to-cover reinterpretation of Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) upon its 30th anniversary in 2004, they were overjoyed to receive compliments (and liner notes!) from Eno, himself. Having since expanded to a seven-piece, Enorchestra’s two-drummer, three-guitar assault lends a vitalic, muscular drive to Eno’s dry pop experiments. Performing the album in its entirety, they share the bill with garage-y psych-punks Thee Oh Sees, fresh off their well received Outside Lands set, at this benefit for Blixa, Sluggo from the Grannies’ 4-year-old son, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. (Taylor Kaplan)

With Dirty Power

9pm, $14

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Desaparecidos

Omaha, Nebraska’s indie rock king and side-project junkie Conor Oberst has had a busy summer. After a 10 year hiatus, his post-hardcore band Desaparecidos are back, and they’re pissed off. Continuing the harsh sociopolitical criticism established in their first and only album Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos precluded their summer tour by releasing two new scathing singles. The first, “MariKKKopa” gives voice to America’s disadvantaged immigrants and calls out Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio for taking pride in being compared to the Ku Klux Klan. The second single “Backsell” takes on capitalism by way of telemarketers. Remember when a good protest song could change the world? So does Conor Oberst. (Haley Zaremba)

With the Velvet Teen

8pm, $25

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com

Virgil Shaw and the Killer View

Get ready for a night of folk tales and Americana at the gorgeous Great American Music Hall. Headliners Virgil Shaw and the Killer have been hailed by Rolling Stone and the New York Times for their wayward wandering tales and sound. San Francisco string band the Human Condition brings songs that open with relatable, twangy refrains such as, “Well she broke my heart/and she broke my first guitar/So I moved back to the city/and now I’m playing in the bars.” Also go to check out the hauntingly beautiful solo instrumental (and some spoken poetry) project of Two Gallants’ drummer Tyson Vogel, called Devotionals. (Shauna C. Keddy)

With Betsy and Beau, Luke Sweeney and Wet Dreams Dry Magic

8pm, $13

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885- 0750

www.slimspresents.com

THURSDAY 30

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

When New York City’s the Pains of Being Pure at Heart got together, all they had was a band name, which vocalist Kip Berman took from the title of a children’s story a friend had written. After the band began writing and uploading dreamy pop songs to their MySpace page, it became clear that they had more going for them than a pretty moniker. Their fuzzed-out, whimsical music matches the name’s theme of innocence and angst perfectly and has gotten the attention of critics and music-lovers alike. The band is often compared to fellow shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, which is pretty much as high as praise gets in the indie rock world. (Zaremba)

A B and the Sea, popscene DJs

9:30pm, $17

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

RAW SF

Welcome to RAW, a monthly showcase of San Francisco’s emerging independent and underground artists. Painters, screenprinters, graffiti artists, fashion designers, makeup artists, photographers and musicians all converge to display their latest works, talk shop, imbibe a drink or two, and shake a little tail. Live artists throw down some paint in the front room, while the main gallery includes San Diego’s Jason Acton, a colorblind artist who channels his inner Andy Warhol with vivid, pop art-themed acrylic works. Slayers Club firespitter Joe Mousepad and deejay Matt Haze keep the crowd moving until the afterparty, when Oakland’s Boats and Sacramento’s Rufio drop beats, glitch, and bass. (Lee)

Show: 7pm-9pm; afterparty: 9pm-midnight, $15

1015 Folsom

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

FRIDAY 31

Vertigo

Celebrate the San Francisco-set, 1958 Hitchcock classic that just unseated 1941’s Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time* by watching it in 70mm at the Castro Theatre. (*According to a Sight & Sound critics’ poll; no word on where actual greatest film of all time, John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, fell on that list.) Vertigo is, indeed, the cinematic equivalent of a flawless diamond, following Jimmy Stewart’s fragile ex-cop as he trails impossibly glamorous Kim Novak up Nob Hill, through the Mission, and into the icy waters under the Golden Gate Bridge. Masterful filmmaking — and if you’ve only ever seen it on DVD, the experience of watching it mega-sized will be mind-blowing. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Mon/3

8pm (also Sat/1-Mon/3, 2 and 5pm), $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Tiger and Woods

Tiger and Woods are electronic music’s Batman and Robin, a mysterious disco-spinning duo whose origins are little known. They lurk in the shadows, devoting themselves to the search for the rarest funky cuts on vinyl to remix and remaster. They travel around the world, performing in masks (well, wide-brimmed hats) and concealing their identities while dropping their latest funkified remakes. Last year’s Through the Green served as both an homage to and a fun romp through 1980’s keyboard-laden, post-disco. The twosome apparently like to keep things offbeat and quirky — on their Facebook page, they use the monikers Larry Tiger and David Woods, presumably a shout out to Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. (Lee)

With Lovefingers, Kenneth Scott, Rich Korach, Brian Bejerano

9pm, $15–$20

BeatBox

314 11th St., SF

(415) 500-2675

www.beatboxsf.com

The Vaselines

In the late ’80s, Scotland’s the Vaselines released just a couple of EPs and one full-length album before calling it quits after two short years together. However, thanks to big-name fans like Kurt Cobain, who covered three of their tunes with Nirvana, and exposed the band to larger audiences around the world, new generations have rediscovered and fallen in love with the duo in the ensuing decades. Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee reformed the group for a series of outstanding shows in 2008, prompting the recording and release of a new album, Sex With An X, in 2010, which perfectly captured the unique and infectious spirit of their earlier work. Be sure to catch them tonight at one of only four US shows booked for this year. (Sean McCourt)

9pm, $22

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.independentsf.com

SATURDAY 1

San Francisco Zine Fest

Like the zines themselves, the offerings at Zine Fest are a DIY mishmosh of great things, from the Xerox’d, hand-stapled anarchist variety, to glossy, colorful graphic novels. They’ll all be on display and for sale, at the 11th annual event. And, as in years past, there will be panels and workshops for aspiring zinesters. Topics in 2012 include “From Webcomics to Print,” “Sewn, Not Stapled,” and “DIY Animation Workshop.” This year’s featured guest artist is LA-based writer and illustrator Sarah Oleksyk, who works as a writer and storyboard artist for Cartoon Network’s Regular Show, and just released graphic novel Ivy. She’ll be on hand Saturday for a workshop Q&A. (Emily Savage)

Through Sun/2, 11am-6pm

San Francisco County Fair Building

1199 9th Ave., Golden Gate Park, SF

www.sfzinefest.org

Yeasayer

“Live in the moment/never count on longevity, please” pleads Yeasayer’s Chris Keating on new album Fragrant World. It’s a line that applies to the Brooklyn-based band, which faced a difficult task of following up on the success of 2010’s Odd Blood. Never a band to stay static, Yeasayer opts for darker and moodier moods in Fragrant. Gone is the upbeat power pop on Odd‘s “O.N.E.” and “Ambling Alp,” and in comes sinister effects and sequenced electronic percussion loops. “Longevity” is a haunting, low-slung premonition filled with bass drops, while the “Devil and the Deed” sounds like a futuristic confessional/gospel. (Lee)

With Daughn Gibson 8pm, $25

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 548-3010

www.thefoxoakland.com

SUNDAY 2

Oakland Pride

Bigtime Queer Pride comes twice a year ’round these parts, pilgrim. And while the Bay has yet to experience the polarization of LGBT crowd types that affects, say, LA Pride vs. Long Beach Pride, Oakland Pride’s flavor is a lot more spontaneous and organic feeling than San Francisco’s “mega event.” Don’t expect garish floats, multiple stages, corporate logo overload (or free entry, alas, but you get a good, gay value.). Do expect a flat-out celebration of everything that makes Oakland’s queer community so vibrant, including a plethora of family entertainment and truly rainbow-like diversity (we are stoked to oompah-hoof it to rad musical acts K-Paz de la Sierra and Banda Cienega). Oh yes, there will be divas as well, including rapper Rah Digga and CeCe Peniston, whose spirited “Finally” was the least offensive of the five songs gay bars played over and over throughout the whole of the 1990s. (Marke B.)

11am-7pm, $10, $5 for 12 and under

20th St. and Broadway, Oakl.

www.oaklandpride.org

MONDAY 3

John Maus

A longtime session player (if those exist in the indie rock world) for Animal Collective, Ariel Pink, and other fuzzed-out, left-field pop entities, John Maus made his case as a solo artist with last year’s breakthrough LP, We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. Like a more electronic take on Before Today‘s faded, tape-obsessed pop sorcery, Maus’ recorded output overflows with smoke-and-mirrors studio subterfuge, raising all kinds of questions about his live approach. Will Maus take the stage all by his lonesome, or will he have some conspirators in tow to work the candy synths and synthetic drums? Come find out, and get lost in the haze.(Taylor Kaplan)

9pm, $13

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Hot Snakes

You know how band reunions can take place for one of two reasons? One, for the band to stroke its own ego, and two, to give back to the legions of loyal, desperate fans who’ve been patiently waiting, year after year. (Okay three: money, but that’s likely not the case here.) When Hot Snakes traveled to SF earlier this year, after a way-too-long hiatus, they seemed to be in it for both themselves and for those ravenous fans. The noted band of San Diego musicians, led by John Reis and Rick Froberg, looked like they were having a blast, positively ripping through thunderous post-hardcore classics off 2000’s Automatic Midnight, 2002’s Suicide Invoice, and 2004’s Audit in Progress. Given their backgrounds and sonic exercises in post-Hot Snakes bands (Obits, Night Marchers), there wasn’t a rusty nail in the bunch. So they’ve rejoined their post-Drive Like Jehu act and toured, and are now touring once again; I guess it’s post-reunion at this point, though no less exciting for the wild-eyed fans. (Savage)

With Mrs. Magician

8pm, $23

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF (415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

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Music Listings

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

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Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Black Cobra Vipers, French Cassettes, Brass Bed Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Bleached Palms, Big Drag, Standard Poodle, Apopka Darkroom Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $7.

Civil Twilight, Morning Parade, Vanaprasta Independent. 8pm, $14.

Desaparecidos, Velvet Teen Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $25.

Guella, Grand Nationals, One Way Station Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Johnny Legend, Top Ten, Chuckleberries Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $7.

Nathan and Rachel Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

"SF Underground Music Fest" 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. With Mr. Kind, Phoenix Twins, Felsen.

Virgil Shaw and the Killer Views, Human Condition, Devotionals Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $10.

Thee Oh Sees, Enorchestra, Dirty Power Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Versions, Monuments Collapse, Cascabel, Braeg Noafa Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Greg Zema vs Joel Nelson Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9:30pm.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cat’s Corner with Nathan Dias Savanna Jazz. 9pm, $10.

Cosmo AlleyCats Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo Place, SF; www.lecolonialsf.com. 7-10pm.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Bela Fleck and the Marcis Roberts Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $30; 10pm, $26.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 6:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita MORE! and Joshua J host this dance party.

Coo-Yah! Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. DJs Daneekah and Green B spin reggae and dancehall.

Hardcore Humpday Happy Hour RKRL, 52 Sixth St, SF; (415) 658-5506. 6pm, $3.

THURSDAY 30

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Black Mountain, Quest for Fire Independent. 8pm, $17.

Hello Echo, Tzigane Society, Campbell Society Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10.

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Lusjoints, Extra Classic, Sun Life Cafe Du Nord. 8:30pm, $10.

Jason Marion vs JC Rockit Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9:30pm.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, A B & the Sea, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $15-$17.

Erica Sunshine Lee, Windy Hill Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $5-$7.

Two Gallants Amoeba Music. 6pm, free.

Ugly Winner, Hazel’s Wart, Big Mittens Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Why?, Doseone, Serengti Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $18.

Yonat & Her Muse, Juanita and the Rabbit, Bye Bye Blackbirds Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bela Fleck and the Marcis Roberts Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $30; 10pm, $26.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $10.

Ned Boyton Trio Bottle Cap, 1707 Powell, SF; www.bottlecapsf.com. 7-10pm.

Savanna Jazz Jam with Eddy Ramirez Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Twang! Honky Tonk Fiddler’s Green, 1330 Columbus, SF; www.twanghonkytonk.com. 5pm. Live country music, dancing, and giveaways.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-$7. With DJ-host Pleasuremaker spinning spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). ’80s mainstream and underground with DJ’s Damon, Steve Washington, and Dangerous Dan.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more with DJs Don Bustamante, Apocolypto, Sr. Saen, Santero, and Mr. E.

FRIDAY 31

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Back Pages Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Rome Balestrieri, Jason Marion, Guido Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm.

A.A. Bondy, ESP, UFO Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $17.

B. Hamilton, Chrystian Rawk, Feral Cat Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10.

Chixdiggit!, Meat Sluts, Boats! Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

CyClub, East Bay Brass Band Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Ryan Darton Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Go Van Gogh Make-Out Room. 7:30pm, $8.

Jounce, Elephants in Mud Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 7:30pm, $5-$8.

Modern Heist Brainwash Cafe. 8pm, free.

Revision Evenodds, Under the Musical Direction of Kev Choice Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 10pm, $8-$10.

Solwave, Super Adventure Club, Major Powers and the Lo-Fi Symphony Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $10.

Swamp Angel, Fascinating Creatures of the Deep, Badmen Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $10.

Turbonegro Slim’s. 9pm, $28.

Vaselines Independent. 9pm, $22.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Black Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 9pm, $10.

Terry Disely Bottle Cap, 1707 Powell, SF; www.bottlecapsf.com. 5:30-8:30pm.

Bela Fleck and the Marcis Roberts Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8 and 10pm, $40.

Bryan Girard, Graham Bruce Palindrome Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Baxtalo Drom Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10. With live music, gypsy punk, belly dancing.

Taste Fridays 650 Indiana, SF; www.tastefridays.com. 8pm, $18. Salsa and bachata dance lessons, live music.

Chucho Valdes Pena Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, $20-$39.95.

DANCE CLUBS

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

Original Plumbing Elbo Room. 10pm, $3-$7.Trans dance party with DJs Chelsea Starr and Rapid Fire.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

SATURDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Band of Heathens, Trishas, Birdhouse Cafe Du Nord. 9:30pm, $12-$15.

Brown Bird, These United States Independent. 9pm, $14.

Burn River Burn, Fortress, Cormorant, Prizehog Slim’s. 8:30pm, $8.

Citizen’s Arrest, Yadokai, Rat Damage, Wartrash, Stressors Thee Parkside. 2pm, $10.

Foxtails Brigade, Yesway, Whiskerman Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Goldenboy, New Familiar Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Honey Wilders Band Riptide. 9:30pm, free.

Lost Bayou Ramblers Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $7-$10.

Promise Ring, One AM Radio Fillmore. 9pm, $25.

Sands, 3 Leafs, Body Swap Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Nathan Temby, Jason Marion, Guido Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 9pm.

Ticket to Ride Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Bela Fleck and the Marcis Roberts Trio Yoshi’s SF. 8 and 10pm, $40.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Cafe, 3049 20th St, SF; www.atlascafe.net. 4-6pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Bearracuda Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $6-$8.

Bootie SF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-$15.

Haceteria Acid Meltdown with Exillon Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.decosf.com. 9pm, $5. With Nihar, Tristes Tropiques, and Jason P.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-$10. With DJs Lucky, Paul Paul, Phengren Oswald.

SUNDAY 2

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Dropdead, Bumbklaat, Permanent Ruin, Vacuum, Elegy Thee Parkside. 1pm, $10.

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Laurie Morvan Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Melody and Tyler, Ali May 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 8pm.

Men Independent. 9pm, $12.

Old 97s, Those Darlins, Rhett Miller Fillmore. 8pm, $26.50.

Sandro Perri, Steer the Stars, Max Porter Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Pharcyde Yoshi’s SF Lounge. 9pm, $26.

Tidelands, Yassou Benedict, Hannah Werdmuller Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Vektor, Hatchet, Apocryphon Thee Parkside. 8pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Mike Greensill Trio Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento, SF; (415) 474-1608. 4pm. $14-$17.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Kally Price Old Blues and Jazz Band Amnesia. 8-11pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Dancing Ghosts Raven, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.ravenbarsf.com. 9:30pm, $5. Darkwave dance party with DJs Xander and Sage.

Domingos Latinos Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; www.thebluemacawsf.com. 6pm, $10. Salsa dance party with live Afro-Cuban salsa bands.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $8-$10. With DJ Sep, Ludichris, Vinnie Esparza, and soundsystem set with Mista Chatman.

Hero White Party Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF; www.rubyskye.com. 6pm-midnight. With David Aude, and Jamie J. Sanchez.

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

MONDAY 3

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

"Cowgirlpalooza" El Rio. 3pm, $10. With 77 El Deora, Rumble Strippers, Patsychords, Kit and the Branded Men, Kitty Rose.

Damir Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Gold Panda, Doldrums, Nanosaur Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $16-$18.

Hot Snakes, Mrs. Magician Slim’s. 8pm, $19.50-$23.

John Maus Independent. 9pm, $13.

Superhumanoids, JJAMZ, Teenage Sweater Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

James Cotton Superharp Yoshi’s SF. 8, $28; 10pm, $20.

Bossa Nova Tunnel Top, 601 Bush, SF; (415) 722-6620. 8-11:30pm, free. Live acoustic Bossa Nova.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Belle Monroe and Her Brewglass Boys Amnesia. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

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

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, hip-hop, reggae, dancehall, and salsa with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

TUESDAY 4

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Business, Federation X, Pins of Light Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Fat Tuesday Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Ferocious Few, Tumbleweed Wanderers Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, free.

Heavy, Silent Comedy Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

King Khan and the Shrines, Apache Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Kishi Bashi, Last Bison Cafe Du Nord. 7:30pm, $10-$12.

Lightning Bolt, No Babies, Future Twin Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Something Fierce, Occult Detective Club Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

SparkBox, Annie Girl & the Flight, Emily Jane White Amnesia. 9pm.

Stan Erhart Band Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

True Mutants, Apogee Sound Club, Yes Gos Knockout. 9:30pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Debo Band Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $16.

Gaucho Bottle Cap, 1707 Powell, SF; www.bottlecapsf.com. 7-10pm.

Marty Eggers Pier 23, Embarcadero at Filbert, SF; (415) 362-5125. 5-8pm.

DANCE CLUBS

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

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

Henry V Presidio of San Francisco, Main Post Parade Ground Lawn, SF; www.sfshakes.org. Free. Opens Sat/1, 2pm. Runs Sat-Sun and Mon/3, 2pm. Through Sept 23. The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival celebrates the 30th anniversary of Free Shakespeare in the Park with this history play.

Twelfth Night San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, Hyde Street Pier, 2905 Hyde, SF; www.weplayers.org. $30-80. Previews Sat/1-Sun/2, 5:30pm. Opens Sept 7, 5:30pm. Runs Fri-Sun, 5:30pm (also Sat-Sun, noon; matinee only Sept 22; no performances Sept 29; evening performances only Oct 6-7). Through Oct 7. We Players board the Balclutha and the Eureka for this jazzy take on Shakespeare’s romance.

BAY AREA

Chinglish Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-99. Opens Wed/29, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no show Oct 5; no 2pm show Sept 8; additional 2pm shows Sept 6 and Oct 4); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through Oct 7. Berkeley Rep presents the West Coast premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Broadway comedy.

The Death of the Novel San Jose Rep, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose; www.sjrep.com. $23-69. Previews Thu/30, 7:30pm; Fri/31-Sun/2, 2pm (also Sun/2), 7pm. Opens Sept 5, 7:30pm. Check web site for schedule. Through Sept 23. Vincent Kartheiser (a.k.a. Pete Campbell from Mad Men) stars in Jonathan Marc Feldman’s drama about creativity in post-9/11 America at San Jose Rep.

ONGOING

Daughter of the Red Tzar Thick House Theatre, 1695 18th St, SF; www.thickhouse.org. $30. Fri/31-Sun/2, 8pm. ScolaVox and First Look Sonoma present the world premiere of Lisa Scola-Prosek’s chamber opera about a meeting between Churchill, Stalin, and Stalin’s teenage daughter.

My Fair Lady SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-70. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through Sept 29. SF Playhouse and artistic director Bill English (who helms) offer a swift, agreeable production of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The iconic class-conscious storyline revolves around a cocky linguist named Higgins (Johnny Moreno) who bets colleague Colonel Pickering (Richard Frederick) he can transform an irritable flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (Monique Hafen), into a “lady” and pass her off in high society. A battle of wills and wits ensues — interlarded with the “tragedy” of Alfred Doolittle (a shrewd and gleaming Charles Dean) and his reluctant upward fall into respectability — and love (at least in the musical version) triumphs. The songs (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and the rest) remain evergreen in the cast’s spirited performances, supported by two offstage pianos (brought to life by David Dobrusky and musical director Greg Mason) and nimble choreography from Kimberly Richards. Hafen’s Eliza is especially admirable, projecting in dialogue and song a winning combination of childlike innocence and feminine potency. Moreno’s Higgins is also good, unusually virile yet heady too, a convincingly flawed if charming egotist. And Frederick, who adds a passing hint of homoerotic energy to his portrayal of the devoted Pickering, is gently funny and wholly sympathetic. (Avila)

Rights of Passage New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sept 16. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents the world premiere of Ed Decker and Robert Leone’s multimedia play, inspired by global human rights laws in relation to sexual orientation.

Vital Signs Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. New show day and date: Sun, 7pm. Extended through Sept 16. The Marsh San Francisco presents Alison Whittaker’s behind-the-scenes look at nursing in America.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm (starting Sept 6: also Thu, 8pm); Sat, 5pm. Extended through Sept 29. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

War Horse Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $31-300. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Sept 9. The juggernaut from the National Theatre of Great Britain, via Broadway and the Tony Awards, has pulled into the Curran for its Bay Area bow. The life-sized puppets are indeed all they’re cracked up to be; and the story of a 16-year-old English farm boy (Andrew Veenstra) who searches for his beloved horse through the trenches of the Somme Valley during World War I, while peppered with much elementary humor too, is a good cry for those so inclined. The claim to being an antiwar play is only true to the extent that any war-is-hell backdrop and a plea for tolerance count a melodrama as “antiwar,” but this is not Mother Courage and no serious attempt is made to investigate the subject. Closer to say it’s Lassie Come Home where Lassie is a horse — very ably brought to life by Handspring Puppet Company’s ingenious puppeteers and designers, and amid a transporting and generally riveting mise-en-scène (complete with pointedly stirring live and recorded music). But the simplistic storyline and its obvious, somewhat ham-fisted resolution (adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s novel) are too formulaic to be taken that seriously. And at two-and-a-half-hours, it’s a long time coming. A shorter war, the Falklands say, would have done just as well and gotten people out before the ride began to chafe. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Blithe Spirit Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda; www.calshakes.org. $35-71. Wed/29-Thu/30, 7:30pm; Fri/31-Sat/1, 2pm; Sun/2, 4pm. Noël Coward’s 1941 comedy, not exactly a paean to marriage, is nevertheless a romantic romp with just enough meat on its ethereal subject to make a meal of its triangular love affair. Appearing as the relevant points on that geometric form are a witty Coward-esque writer, Charles Condomine (Anthony Fusco), his confident equal and second wife Ruth (René Augesen), and the uninvited ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Jessica Kitchens). The unwieldy ménage arises from Charles’s invitation to a local medium (Domenique Lozano), from whom he hopes to cull a juicy detail or two for his next book. He and Ruth, as well as their other dinner guests, Dr. and Mrs. Bradman (Kevin Rolston and Melissa Smith), do get a fine show out of the eccentric soiree, but soon Charles finds he’s also now being haunted by Elvira, who only he can actually see and hear and who adamantly refuses to leave. Um, yeah: awkward. Anyway, what happens next is solidly entertaining in director Mark Rucker’s polished production for Cal Shakes. Fusco and Augesen are a droll pair, while a beaming Kitchens brings a much appreciated brightness to the proceedings, even as Lozano’s exuberant innocent, Madame Arcati, comes over as perhaps the most persuasive of all. (Avila)

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Previews Wed/29, 8pm. Opens Thu/30, 8pm. Runs Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 30. Aurora Theatre Company opens its 21st season with Kristoffer Diaz’s comedy about pro wrestlers.

The Fisherman’s Wife La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 29. The latest from playwright Steve Yockey (Bellwether, Skin) is an exercise in pure pleasure, not least for the devious sea creatures preying lustily and unashamedly on the hapless human flesh of a small coastal town. There, in cracked fairytale fashion, an unsuccessful fisherman named Cooper Minnow (an endearingly nerdy but passionate Maro Guevara) is preparing to set out to sea, leaving at home frustrated wife Vanessa (a wonderfully, volcanically bitchy yet complex Eliza Leoni) and their sinking marriage, when he meets an oddly brazen pair of sexy, sassy bathers in old-fashioned beach attire (the swimmingly synchronized duo of Sarah Coykendall and Roy Landaverde). At more or less the same moment, a devilishly dashing yet prim traveling salesman (poised, nicely offbeat Adrian Anchondo) is offering a clearly aroused Vanessa an erotic woodcut featuring monstrous tentacles groping human victims at a very familiar-looking dock. Will she take the woodcut? Will she ever! And later she’ll defend her husband’s honor and swap places with him too, much to the commercial advantage of the ever-accommodating salesman who — like Yockey’s smart and sure sex farce — has a little something for everyone. Directed with smooth precision by Ben Randle for Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, The Fisherman’s Wife again finds Yockey playing productively with the fine fuzzy line separating human nature from nature at large (as in Large Animal Games, the winning 2009 co-production from Impact and Dad’s Garage). The animals come through for playwright and company once more, with a thoroughly enjoyable comedy whose borrowed maritime mythos has just enough metaphorical pull to lead those so inclined out beyond the shallow waters. (Avila)

For the Greater Good, Or The Last Election This week: Nicholl Park, Richmond; www.sfmt.org. Free (donations accepted). Thu/30, 7pm. Also Dolores Park, 19th St at Dolores, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free (donations accepted). Sat/1-Mon/3, 2pm. Various venues through Sept. 8. “Don’t they understand that without us they don’t have anything?” asks Gideon Bloodgood (Ed Holmes), investment banker at the top of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s vivisection of the “real” American Dream, For the Greater Good, Or the Last Election. But surely the hero of a Mime Troupe show cannot possibly be a billionaire? Well, sort of. Though Bloodgood enriches himself dishonestly with precarious investments and outright theft in this Occupy-era melodrama, he actually does occasionally spare a sentiment for Mom and apple pie, or anyway his daughter Alida (Lisa Hori-Garcia) and cookies baked by the unsuspecting victim of his ill-gotten gains, the Widow Fairweather (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) — now living at the last Occupy encampment standing in the city. Alida, however, displays no compunction in throwing aside his affection and her prospective seat in Congress, running off to join the occupiers for reasons that truthfully appear about as politically motivated as her father’s parasitic avarice, leaving him to join forces instead with the most unlikely of allies — the impeccable, ingenuous Lucy Fairweather (Velina Brown), heiress to a stolen legacy, and staunch patriot. Based loosely on 19th century play The Poor of New York, The Last Election attempts to turn a presumptive ode to the free market into its swan song with good-humored, if predictable, results. (Gluckstern)

Keith Moon/The Real Me TheaterStage at the March Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sept 13, 20, and 27, 8pm. Mike Berry workshops his new musical, featuring ten classic Who songs performed with a live band.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Oct 14. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Belle, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-35. Check website for schedule. Through Sept 30. Marin Shakespeare Company performs the Bard’s classic, transported to the shores of Hawaii.

Our Country’s Good Redwood Amphiteatre, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.porchlight.net. $15-30. Thu-Sun, 7:30pm. Through Sept 8. Porchlight Theatre Company presents an outdoor performance of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play about Royal Marines and prisoners in an 18th century New South Wales prison colony.

Precious Little Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $18-25. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/1 and Sept 8, 3pm); Sun, 5pm. Through Sept 16. Shotgun Players presents Madeleine George’s new play about an expectant mother who studies near-dead languages and befriends a “talking” gorilla.

Time Stands Still TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, SF; www.theatreworks.org. $23-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Sept 16. TheatreWorks performs Donald Marguelis’ drama about a couple — one a photojournalist, one a war correspondent — struggling with their recent experiences covering a war.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.improv.org. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 8. $10-25. This week: “The Fosse Posse and From Scratch” (Thu/30); “Romantic Comedy Musical” (Fri/1); “Bond…Improvised Bond” (Sat/2).

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Through Nov 6. $15-50. Veteran political comedian Will Durst emphasizes he’s watching the news and keeping track of the presidential race “so you don’t have to.” No kidding, it sounds like brutal work for anyone other than a professional comedian — for whom alone it must be Willy Wonka’s edible Eden of delicious material. Durst deserves thanks for ingesting this material and converting it into funny, but between the ingesting and out-jesting there’s the risk of turning too palatable what amounts to a deeply offensive excuse for a democratic process, as we once again hurtle and are herded toward another election-year November, with its attendant massive anticlimax and hangover already so close you can touch them. Durst knows his politics and comedy backwards and forwards, and the evolving show, which pops up at the Marsh every Tuesday in the run-up to election night, offers consistent laughs born on his breezy, infectious delivery. One just wishes there were some alternative political universe that also made itself known alongside the deft two-party sportscasting. (Avila)

“RAWdance presents the Concept Series: 12” 66 Sanchez Studio, SF; www.rawdance.org. Sat/1-Sun/2, 8pm (also Sun/2, 3pm). Pay what you can. Informal and intimate salon of contemporary dance, with Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts, Yayoi Kambara, Palanza Dance, detour dance, and Chris Black.

Brian Regan Cobb’s, 915 Columbus, SF; www.cobbscomedyclub.com. Fri/31, 8 and 10:15pm; Sat/1, 7:30 and 9:45pm. $45. The comedian performs a rare club date.

“The Romane Event Comedy Show” Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, SF; www.pacoromane.com. Wed/29, 8pm. $10. Comedy with Joe Tobin, Mike Spiegelman, Sergio Barajas, Sandra Risser, and host Amy Miller.

“Tagabanua” Union Square Park, Geary and Stockton, SF; www.kularts.org. Sun/2, 2pm. Free. Kularts attempts a world record for largest Palawan dance event with an outdoor performance of Jay Loyola’s folkloric work. Learn the choreography at Kularts’ website and join the flash mob.

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

0

Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 29

Martin Lee: Smoke Signals The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. Given the current tumult gripping the cannabis world, it behooves us to learn a little about the history of marijuana in the United States. Enter author Lee, whose new book promises a panoramic look about where the leafy green plant has been, a boon to pot activists everywhere.

Twin Peaks Tunnel screening and discussion California Historical Society, 678 Mission, SF. twinpeakstunnel.eventbrite.com. 6-8pm, free. Learn all about the 1914-’16 dig through the mountains from this rare 28mm print of a 1917 film about the project. Historians Rob Byrne and Woody LaBounty will be on hand to describe the utter coolness of the original Big Dig.

THURSDAY 30

Paws For Consideration book release The Women’s Building, 3543 18th St., SF. www.womensbuilding.org; www.amybutcher.com. 7-8:30pm, free. Celebrate the release of Women’s Building board member Amy Butcher’s new mystery novel, which features a wheelchair-bound protagonist bound to investigate a mysterious death by the appearance of a nervous Boston terrier named Skittles.

FRIDAY 31

Lunchtime artmaking in Nomadic Grove Jessie Square, 736 Mission, SF. www.thecjm.org. 12:30-1:30pm, free. Learn pencil drawing techniques from artist Jen Ewing at this midday drop-in tutorial, designed by the Contemporary Jewish Museum to foster public engagement with the museum itself.

SATURDAY 1

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae. www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. Small town fair fun abounds in Millbrae this weekend – head over for live tunes, silly spuds potato spirals, giant sausages, shady bar seating, kid’s activities, and a classic car show.

Belmont Greek Festival Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Cross, 900 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont. www.goholycross.org/festival. Through Mon/3. Sun.-Sat., noon-10pm; Mon., noon-8pm, $5/day. A few words, and you should be good to go. Souvlaki. Dolmades. Baklava. Kourambiedes. Galactobouriko. Whether those words ring a bell for you or not, head out to this cultural fest, and dance off the calories of your new vocabulary with traditional kalamatiano, tsamiko, and zeimbekiko numbers, performed by the intrepid Sons of Ulysses.

Mark Benson: “Get the Flu” Ever Gold Gallery, 441 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 796-3676, www.evergoldgallery.com. Through Sept. 27. Opening reception 6-10pm, free. Artist Benson subjects participants to varying temperatures in this exhibition of space heaters and air conditioners, evoking ever-growing feelings of discomfort. Couple that with a nurse administering actual flu shots and you have a uniquely participatory look at human control and the modern definition of comfort.

Beasts and Beats: Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com. 9pm-2am, $5-8. Celebrate the half-empty city vibe during Burning Man at this art buffet. Peruse works from over 50 San Francisco artists while moombahton, global bass, and house pump from the DJs’ sets.

Rawdance: Concept Series 12 66 Sanchez Studio, SF. www.rawdance.org. Also Sun/2. Sat., 1 and 8pm; Sun. 3 and 8pm, sliding scale admission. Five guest artists join Rawdance in this diverse lineup, from Palanza Dance’s excerpt from an interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina and detour dance’s “Imitations of Intimacy.”

SUNDAY 2

Oakland Pride 19th St. and Franklin, Oakl. www.oaklandpride.org. 11am-7pm, $10. Maybe it’s not as large as the SF Pride throwdown, but Oakland’s celebration of LGBT gettin’ does a much better job of representing the diversity of the Bay. Headliners CeCe Peniston (remember her ’90s dance hit “Finally”?), Flip Mode Squad’s Rah Digga, and Duranguense band K-Paz will provide beats, and the kids garden will have temporary tats, ballet performances, bubbles, and bouncy castles for the whole fam.

Gay Men Draw Vaginas art party Dolores Park (Gay Beach), Church and 20th St., SF. Facebook: Gay Men Drawing. 1-5pm, free. Sure, the book that editors Shannon O’Malley and Keith Wilson are putting together is pretty well explained by this party’s moniker, but if you’re not a male homo you’re still welcome – put your idea of the female genitalia to paper, on a fine Dolo Sunday.

The Blue Angel Berkeley Underground Film Society screening The Tannery, 708 Gillman, Berk. berkeleyundergroundfilms.blogspot.com. Doors 7pm, film 7:30pm, donations accepted. BUFS brings little-seen films to the masses with this pay-what-you-can screening of a 1930 tale of scolding professor who falls in love with a speakeasy dancer, directed by Josef von Sternberg.

TUESDAY 4

The News queer performance series SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF. www.somarts.org. 7:30-9pm, $5. A monthly display of the wisest and wackiest of queer stage art, a typical edition of the News can include trash fashion, passionate odes to black beauty, and improvisational dance. Tonight, check out Philip Huang, Alexander Alvina Chamberland, Ryan Crowder, and more.

Feeding a movement

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

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yael@sfbg.com

Keith McHenry was in Tampa, feeding fed-up (and hungry) Republican National Convention protesters, when we spoke by phone. Next he’ll head to Charlotte to do the same for those protesting the Democrats, and then to New York for Occupy Wall Street’s anniversary on Sept. 17.

Everywhere he goes, he’ll feed the masses home-cooked vegetarian meals. But unlike the other protesters, McHenry helped invent the system that gets them fed. He helped to found Food Not Bombs, the organization that salvages food that would otherwise be thrown out, cooks it up, and serves free, tasty meals in public squares throughout the world.

McHenry served the first meal in Boston Common in 1980, then moved to San Francisco a few years later, bringing the movement with him. Now, there are 500 chapters in the United States and hundreds more throughout the world.

“We provided food for 100 days at the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine,” McHenry recalls. “We fed a two-year occupation in Sarajevo. We provided food at Camp Casey,” Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war stakeout at then-President George W. Bush’s ranch.

The FNB approach to hunger is pretty simple: There’s enough food to go around, it’s just not distributed right. So activists find ways to distribute food that would otherwise be thrown out. San Francisco FNB gets donations of extra, unsold food from places like Rainbow Grocery and Other Avenues food co-op.

It was started by anti-nuclear activists, thus the “Not Bombs” part. But there’s more to their analysis than a cry for peace. As the group states, “For over 30 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth and its beings.”

A typical Food Not Bombs operation features a table with a vegetarian or vegan meal, maybe some produce, and anti-war and other leftist literature and banners. In 1988, this is what was on the table when the San Francisco Police Department cracked down on Food Not Bombs, arresting dozens for serving food at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at Haight and Stanyan.

“We had our sign such that when you walked in at the corner of Haight you would see the words Food Not Bombs for a block and a half,” McHenry recalls. “What was good about that was you had tourists, and local business people, and local workers, and you had the people in the Golden Gate Park, all coming together to eat at that place. It was really perfect.”

FNB still serves there on Saturdays, but that perfection was disrupted by a high profile series of arrests in 1988, then again a few weeks ago, when Parkwide, the Recreation and Parks Department’s new bike rental program, set up in their old spot.

Food Not Bombs still runs into conflicts with police and courts. Last year, McHenry was one of 24 arrested in Orlando, Florida, spending 19 days in jail after protesting an ordinance making it a crime to feed the homeless in the city’s downtown.

Last week, FNB held its world gathering at Occupy Tampa’s tent city, serving daily breakfast and dinner while planning the future of the movement. Occupy Tampa has only grown in recent weeks as it hosts people in town to protest the RNC. Sharing food and shelter, making art, and protesting politicians doing the bidding of greedy corporations is McHenry’s vision made reality — and one he got to see bloom last fall with the birth of Occupy.

As McHenry tells it, he and others from Food Not Bombs have been part of a decade-long buildup to the “occupy” tactics that erupted into the world in 2011. “I was promoting the idea of occupation ever since a meeting that was held in 2003 after Cancun,” he said. Protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun were part of a growing trend of disrupting international conventions in which political and business leaders make agreements that further exploitation and neo-liberalism. But McHenry says that more was needed.

“There was a group of us that got together and said these one-off events, like summits, were just becoming more disempowering rather than successful,” he said.

After years of calling for occupations, the notion clicked last fall. “We had seen the Arab Spring, so that made it that much easier to imagine the occupation concept. And the Spanish occupations were just then happening.”

“That’s a common thing,” McHenry said. “People try all these different ways of organizing and then all at the same time, the same thing will start to click. And there’s no real way to say, ‘oh, it started here, it started there, this person started it.'”

When Occupy encampments sprang up, Food Not Bombs was behind many of the kitchens and food sharing efforts — it even had a guide to building a tent city kitchen at foodnotbombs.net/occupy_supplies.

“In the beginning of some of the first occupations like Chicago, DC, Wall Street, we made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because we didn’t know if we would get busted,” McHenry said. “We ended up behind the scenes helping provide free meals to the occupations.”

McHenry said he hopes the spirit of occupying grows again. “It’s so important,” he said. “It would be great if we could regroup and retake public space.”

Eat to the beat

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August 28, 2012

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emilysavage@sfbg.com

EAT BEAT Good food was never the part of the concert plan. In high school, the punks and shredders ate giant Pixy Stix, filled to the plastic brim with unnaturally purple sugar dust — purchased from the all-ages venue snack counter — followed by late night Del Taco red burritos slathered in Del Scorcho and stuffed with crinkle fries. Flash forward a decade or so, and the vegan Malaysian nachos with spicy peanut sauce and pickled veggies from Azalina’s were all I could talk about after Outside Lands, save for the requisite “oh my god” Metallica utterance.

I wasn’t the only one. From every corner of that packed festival, people — and of course, bloggers — were raving about The Whole Beast (featuring pop-ups from the Michael Mina Group) tucked away by Choco Lands, Andalu’s fried mac and cheese, and Del Popolo’s massive, industrial-looking rustic pizza truck.

While the higher-end meal options have now been going strong at Outside Lands for a few years — and, granted, food has long been a part of the festival equation — the gourmet pop-up thing, and locally-sourced, quality food offerings are on the menu more and more in brick-and-mortar music venues in San Francisco. Last week, the Great American Music Hall hosted an event dubbed the Great American Pop-Up. Seems it’s more open to experimentation in the slower summer months.

The one-off (for now) event was a family affair for the Great American Music Hall. There were six pop-up food vendors set up in between the grand bronze pillars of the Tenderloin venue, chosen by security guard Drake Wertenberger, who stepped forward at a managers meeting to coordinate. Jessica DaSilva, who works in the box office at both GAMH and sister-venue Slim’s, was there selling imaginative sweet treats for Milk Money/Dora’s Donuts Shut Yer Hole Truck, including a strawberry cheesecake push-pop, and the chewy chocolate raspberry cookie I devoured. There was also local, sustainable sushi by Ricecrackersushi, some colorful Asian fusion dishes via Harro-Arigato & Ronin, and a whole lot of sausages sliced by the Butcher’s Daughter.

It felt nearly illicit to be in the venue without the anticipation of a live set, like we were sneaking in. And the warmer lighting opened up the intricacies of the architectural design. But this event was focused squarely on the food, with the tables pushed out onto the floor, and a flannel-clad DJ spinning inoffensive hip-hop while munching on something from a paper plate.

Last year, Slim’s created something similar, but broke it down to one chef at a time hosting rotating gourmet pop-ups once a week for the month of August. Those too were more about the unique food offerings, less about music. There were dinners served in the venue by Jetset Chef Alex Marsh and Cathead’s BBQ (which now occupies its own legitimate space down the street from the venue).

GAMH and Slim’s both already serve dinner nightly at live shows, but publicist Leah Matanky tells me there were no hard feelings from the in-house restaurant staff.

On regular show nights even, Matanky says she’s seen an increase of interest in gourmet food at the venues. “We have seen our kitchen sales numbers increase noticeably over the last couple of years. We’ve started running nightly food and drink specials that include things we don’t normally offer and people have really responded to that. We still offer the full array of bar food…but you can also get gourmet specialties like the baked polenta pizza with smoked mozzarella or the grilled tri-tip steak with garlic-herb potatoes.”

Mountain View’s infinitely larger Shoreline Amphitheater also recently got an in-house food upgrade. So the story goes, when the GM of Shoreline dined at Calafia in Palo Alto, Chef Charlie Ayers pointed out the stadium’s lackluster food, and was then summoned to create a tastier menu. Ayers now has a “Snack Shack” at Shoreline that generates $8,000 per show, selling vegan lentil bowls, pork bowls, and salad wraps with Dino kale and feta cheese.

At the bars-with-bands level, El Rio seems to also be upping its epicurean pop-ups. Along with the now-frequent Rocky’s Fry Bread (side note: Rocky is also in the band Sweat Lodge, which often plays El Rio) stand, there’s Piadina homemade Italian flat bread, and the occasional Mugsy pop-up wine bar, which offers bubbly and red wine varieties.

There was an entirely separate event that took place Aug. 4 in San Francisco, which combined all of this: the high-end food, the live music, the ubiquitous pop-ups. It was a food and music festival (Noisette) at a brick-and-mortar venue (Public Works, where it moved after switching venues from Speakeasy Brewery).

The event was put on by Noise Pop Industries. The production company, which does Noise Pop and the Treasure Island Festival, began dipping into independent food culture a few years back with the Covers dinners, pairing well-known chefs with corresponding cover songs for a relatively small group. Noise Pop’s Stacey Horne came up with the Noisette concept after talking with DJs Darren and Greg Bresnitz of New York promotion company Finger on the Pulse, who do an event out there called Backyard Barbecue, which also pairs live music and gourmet food.

From the beginning, the Dodos were the first choice of headliners at Noisette. Merrick Long is a “professed foodie,” has worked in the restaurant business, and was on a panel at SXSW talking about food and music. Horne says they chose chefs that do things a little differently, and are more attuned to the pop-up mentality.

“Something that struck me at Noisette that I loved was that we were eating such good food and then were able to wander over and hear amazing music. It wasn’t one or the other. It was nice to have that as an option,” Horne says. “The chefs we’re focusing on are kind of the indie version of that world, and that’s what Noise Pop has always been interested in, independent music, independent film and art. It just seems like a logical extension.”

Noise Pop is also again looking to do a variation on the Covers dinners with the upcoming Treasure Island Festival. Sound Bites is more of a passed appetizer event with little bites inspired by the bands playing at the festival.

So what does it all mean? Are we, as the generalized concert-going public, getting soft, both physically from all those readily available treats, and mentally because we’ve expanded beyond a minimalist punk rock lifestyle? Should we all go back to Pixy Stix and Del Scorcho hangovers?

“Look, the reality is that most nights that you go to hear a band in a club, there’s no food or if there is food, it’s not going to be anything great. So you can still have your punk rock experience, but something like Noisette and other events like ours that are popping up around the country are just offering another type of event, and people are interested in it, as we’re seeing,” Horne says.

I guess, if you want to see your life as a black and white cookie, you’ll see this change as against type. Or maybe if you’re in the teenage angst subset, you’re just getting in to the greasy post-concert routine. But perhaps this mashup is just another trend — participate if you will. It goes far beyond the music scene, to the way Americans eat now, looking for quality, locally sourced food, seeking creative options.

“Speaking for myself personally, I still love going to see shows,” Horne says, “but if I can have both things in one place, it’s win-win.”

www.slimspresents.com

www.noisepop.com

www.elrio.com

shoreline.amphitheatermtnview.com

Graffiti, now: Guerrero Gallery shows USDA prime street writers

Andrew Lam

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August 28, 2012

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There was no wine and cheese at the opening of “Leave the Beef on the BBQ.” There were massive slabs of meat though, onto which Guerrero Gallery owner Andres Guerrero slathered sauce and tried to look inconspicuous.

The crowd, which spilled out onto the sunny Saturday streets of San Francisco on August 25, was mainly there to see art anyhow. The exhibit was the most diverse graffiti-themed assemblage Guerrero had shown to date, and the graff heads in attendance had a lot to look at — not to mention reflect on. Graffiti, if the works inside were anything to judge by, is at the junction of, about 70 different artistic directions.

“We’ve got your standard graffiti piecers, you also have guys that focus on tag style, we also have real, true bombers,” Guerrero told me on the phone a few days later. The walls of the ex-White Walls gallerist’s vast, skylit gallery held clusters of works: some framed, some on canvas, some pieces seemingly translated direct from the side of a Muni bus, some a bit harder to connect to the underground art legacy that birthed them. To name all the artists assembled would take up a lot of space here (see the gallery’s website for a full list, obviously), but a few stand-outs include: Richard Simmons and Lil’ Kim album covers, artfully bubble-lettered by Pez, looping tentacles straight out of the TWS style book by Estria, and a carefully-drawn urban jumblescape by Gorey.

The mishmash highlighted graffiti’s progression into the fine art world — and its complicated, give-and-take relationship with the rest of contemporary art, Guerrero says. A dog smokes a cigarrette in an otherwise classically-themed piece. This would be the work of Kuma, who you can also find tagging over animal portraiture street art in Brooklyn. Complicated, no?

If it all seemed of somewhat dissimilar provenance on the walls, that was the point. Guerrero culled “Beef” participants from across the country, across the world — and across generations. “We have 1970 pioneers, the leaders and originators of this format,” he said. “Then there’s the current graff guys who are really taking it to another level.” Some have been showing in galleries for years, for others, Saturday marked the first time their work had popped up indoors.

It was challenging to pull it all together, Guerrero says. For chrissakes, there’s over 70 artists represented in the show. But the work was a labor of love.

“What prompted [the show], or really moved me to do it is that I really want to have fun,” he reflects. “I felt out of touch with the culture.” He reverts back to shout-out mode. “It was more to honor these guys. They’re the ones who lead the way right now in terms of a lot of contemporary works and influence.”

“Leave the Beef on the BBQ”

Through Sept. 3

Guerrero Gallery

2700 19th St., SF

(415) 400-5168

www.guerrerogallery.com

Removal of large homeless encampment scheduled for tomorrow morning

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August 27, 2012

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The Coalition on Homelessness received word that a homeless encampment at Fourth and King is scheduled for eviction tomorrow. According to an outreach report from John Gallagher, a human rights organizer at the coalition, about 40 people live in the encampment including at least two children. It has approxamitely 15 tent and 3-4 mobile structures.

Some excerpts from the report:

There are essentially two campsites, one under the overpass on Cal Train property and subject to the jurisdiction on the CHP and a sidewalk next to a bike path subject to SFPD.
4 persons using wheel chairs – and most of the people had at least some disability (their own words).
The camp community is clean and free of any smells and what rubbish there is has been set out of the way. They seem in general to be a law abiding community even keeping their tents away from the fire hydrant. There are bathrooms across the street in a park that is kept neat and clean.
Residents of this small community were proud to tell me that people who park cars next to the camp felt more security than those who parked away from camp. This camp is so peaceful that I saw more that four people on their way to work walk unafraid right down the middle of camp.
I was informed that several of the residents are “working poor.” they get up for 9 to 5 daily. There were two American flags displayed and potted plans are scattered around works of “Art” decoratively in from of most tents. There is a community garden bordered and well keep by the residents at the part of the overpass that receives the most sun. Clean laundry hangs drying on a chain link fence. This is a community of families, Artists, writers (two brothers), displaced persons and pet owners. ( Three healthy well fed dogs)

The eviction will likeley occur at 8 or 9am tomorrow. As Gallagher says in his report, part of the camp is on SFPD turf, and part is CalTrain property policed by the California Highway Patrol. Neither agency could be reached for comment.

Walls born at the world’s first all-female street art fest — including one now slated to die

Andrew Lam

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August 27, 2012

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New York-New Jersey street artist LNY recently attended the world’s first all-female street art festival. He reports on the highs and lows of Living Walls for the Guardian

Atlanta’s Living Walls street art conference celebrated its third year of mural-making August 15-19, changing the landscape of a city where most movement is done by car at 60 miles per hour. Having established itself as one of the best gatherings of street arts out there, the festival celebrated its third year by hosting a historic first: an all-female cast of artists.

I, a dude, was invited to the conference as a guess speaker, so consider the following account slightly influenced by me being super-stoked about all the work going up around me.

But trust me, this was big. Living Walls’ executive director Monica Campana and communications director Alex Parrish’s curatorial direction took on the notion of street art as yet another high-walled boys club. Their team created a temporary space of mural-making, lectures, film screenings, and more that — compared with the bro-heavy character of the rest of the street art world — highlighted how gendered the whole game really is. Community, identity, agency, the female body, and issues of public space all came up during the conference – and we certainly didn’t avoid heated reactions from ATL’s citizenry, as controversy spewed from the city’s nightly news machine.

The walls that went up around Atlanta last week are definitely different. The work was fresh and daring, a step outside the standard street art box (literally — art spilled from some of the walls onto surrounding sidewalks.) The festival took over an abandoned house, artists covering its exterior and interior walls.

Half of the year’s artists had never done public art before, but the incredible works that the city was left with by the end of the conference revealed the curatorial talent of the Living Walls team – the experiment was a success.

While at the festival, I sat down with Campana and Parish to talk direction. Was Living Walls going to continue to be all-female in the future? Campana thinks not. “I think that there should be [a yearly all-female street art conference], but not Living Walls. Maybe as an extension of it… but you are limited by how many girls do graffiti, [and do] art that is not just trying to imitate what the boys are doing.”

“This has been such a huge learning experience for me and it is true that females work with space differently,” she said. “It is a different sensitivity.”

On Sunday night, we sat outside that art house as the neighbors served up roasted pig. Melbourne-based artist Miso walked up and weighed in what she’d seen so far that week. “The work of most of these artists could pass as male. For example, Fefe [Talavera] could be a dude.”

Campana chimed in. “Or Tika — Juxtapoz wrote an article on her saying she was a guy.”

Campana was unafraid that creating an all-female festival would tokenize the artists. “How many little girls will be so inspired by seeing all these women painting? We shouldn’t be too scared of classifying ourselves because…” She trails off, tired of theorizing after a hectic week. “I don’t give a shit, I really don’t care.” She was over it, and really, the walls spoke for themselves.

It wasn’t just the XX choromosone-heavy nature of Living Walls that set it apart from other street art festivals. Take, for example, funding. Constant fundraising in the Atlanta community has kept Living Walls visible year-round, has helped grow its army of volunteers, and has made it possible to avoid the corporate presence you’ll see in Miami’s mural-heavy Wynwood Walls neighborhood during the Art Basel art fair, where Living Walls has sponsored walls in previous years.

Parrish finds the Miami festival overwhelming, and is critical of its “open art museum” approach. By creating a walled-in area where murals are displayed and curated as pieces would be in a museum, she felt the organizers behind Wynwood Walls had taken the “street” out of the “art.”

“Adding that context to street art, which happens in accessible public space, takes away a huge part of it,” she said. “I don’t care how much hype you add, it still makes it into something else.”

She disagreed with “ambient marketing,” ad campaigns that appropriate the language of street art to proselytize corporate America.

“That takes away from the artwork, from the dialogue, because it immediately redirects the public’s attention to these products,” said Parrish. “I think this is why our conference and organization are becoming so much bigger. People can see that we have denied [corporate sponsorship] as a necessity.”

And yes, there was controversy. Argentinian artist Hyuro painted a wall in the Chosewood neighborhood based on one of her previous animation works. It shows a sequence in which a naked woman spins as she grows body hair, which turns into a dress that she takes off. As it falls to the ground, the dress becomes a wolf and walks off the wall.

>>CLICK HERE FOR A SEGMENT FROM A LOCAL ATLANTA NEWS STATION SPOTLIGHTING NEIGHBORHOOD REACTION TO HYURO’S WALL

According to Campana’s Facebook wall, the wall’s owner has ordered the mural’s removal within the week. Some residents were ruffled over the piece’s nudity, and questioned its artistic merit. The wall is near a mosque, a church, and is on a route frequented by the area’s schoolbuses. On a local news show, parents expressed concern that their children would think it’s okay for women to disrobe in public.

Herein lies a central challenge of any public mural program: how much should it cater to residents? Is pleasing everyone even possible?

“It’s really hard to place a needle in the head with that one,” said Parrish. “People are different, and they have different beliefs and cultures. [Hyuro’s] wall is only highlighting something that requires thought and discussion. If that is all that the wall does this year and if they are completely upset with it, then I’m OK with it. I think that when someone, or something, [that’s] very direct and visual makes people start a conversation then that means a lot.”

The wolf mural, she said, only brought issues to light that always have existed in that neighborhood, for example the prostitution, the poverty and disenfranchisement of some of its inhabitants.

At the end of the day, getting rid of Hyuro’s mural is not going to do anything positive toward getting rid of prostitution in the area or stop real estate prices from dropping in an neighborhood that has a prison in it. Whatever the outcome, it created a conversation about the female form in public space, and the role of art in community. I don’t think you could find a more fitting outcome for an all-female mural conference that aimed to reshape Atlanta’s urban landscape and engage its citizens in dialogue.

Barry McGee, you tricked me

Andrew Lam

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August 24, 2012

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Granted I’m not out in Berkeley a ton, but I found it strange that someone had tagged an entire concrete side of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive the very first week that thousands of impressionable minds were invading the UC Berkeley campus and waiting in half-block lines to enjoy a free grilled cheese sandwich in between classes.

“SNITCH,” the 15-foot-tall graff screamed, with a bubble dotting its “I.” Wow, I thought, proceeding to the media preview of Barry McGee a.k.a. Twist a.k.a. Lydia Fong a.k.a. Ray Fong’s first mid-career retrospective (opening today, through Dec. 9) — someone’s not big on Twist.

But duh, everyone (everyone in the Bay who would tag a museum wall, at least) is big on Twist. The “SNITCH” tag, just like the massive red piece that obscured the museum’s glass front doors, was engineered by McGee and his some-dozen team of be-cardiganed, baseball cap flat-brimmed artistic cohorts, many of whom were still bustling about on Thursday trying to get the exhibition ready for the opening reception mere hours away.

He came up earning tagger cred for his masterful tags and cartoon anti-heroes all over the streets of SF, but the hyper-successful and hyper-problematic museum-street art confluence is a crossroad that Twist has stood firmly atop for decades now. Of course he’s the first to tag his own opening.

I’m not going to go into too much depth about the exhibit here, because that would make the paper piece I’m going to write about it in a few weeks totally pointless, but know that it is the most ambitious spread BAM/PFA has ever undertaken (how the hell did they get that van in there? Curator Larry Rinder had no answers for the passel of press assembled at the preview), in terms of mediums it is wildly diverse, and you will probably never see any thing like it because the days of astronomical funding for art are dead and many of the rarely-seen Twist projects — he hasn’t had a Bay Area solo show since 1994 — took stacks to produce.

If you’re looking for a good moment to check out the show, I suggest that you don’t do it during university passing time unless you dig flip-flops, and that you coordinate instead with one of the rad events that BAM/PFA has scheduled to run in accordance with the show. Here’s a couple:

L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA

Sept. 21, curator Larry Rinder in conversation with Jeffrey Deitch 6-7pm; Lawrence Rinder; Devendra Banhart, Justin Hoover, and Chris Treggiari 7:30-9pm, $7. McGee chats with the guy who funded his biggest splashes, Deitch, and exhibit curator Rinder. The artist’s SF Art Institute fellow alum Barnhardt brings his wacky brand of folk to the L@TE night event, with Hoover and Treggiari slinging their street-based cuisine.

Oct. 19, Jim Prigoff: “Graffiti: A History in Photographs” 6pm; T.I.T.S. and Erick Lyle (Scam) 7:30-9pm, $7. Prigoff, along with peers Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, Jack Stewart, Henry Chalfant, traveled the world when graff was still in its young’n stages, snapping shots of a youth-based art form that had yet to run through the commercial grinder. Tonight, he runs through some of his archival images of Bay greats like DREAM, and of course, Twist. Zinester Lyle and grrrl mob quartet T.I.T.S. raise a rebel yell later that night at L@TE.

Nov. 16, Peggy Honeywell and Bill Daniel 7:30-9pm, $7. Visual artist Clare Rojas, a.k.a. folk singer Peggy Honeywell shares an affinity with partner McGee for aliases, and is sure to turn out a hot show (check out our 2011 interview for her woman-centric, quietly lovely artwork). Bill Daniels tracks indie film and hobos with his “dirt lot cinema.”

Barry McGee

Fri/24-Dec. 9

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu

More ‘Work MORE!’ with Mica Sigourney/Vivvyanne Forevermore

Sue Vaughan

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August 24, 2012

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More ‘Work MORE!’ with Mica Sigourney/Vivvyanne Forevermore

If Friday means Some Thing — the popular late night drag performance showcase at the Stud — then tonight means something More: opening night of “Work MORE! #5,” the hybrid performance installation headed up by Some Thing’s charismatic and catalytic hostess, Vivvyanne Forevermore, alt-persona of artist-curator Mica Sigourney.

Tonight has even a little more More than that: it’s also four years to the month since Vivvyanne Forevermore first stepped onto the San Francisco stage. It’s an auspicious moment, in other words, for one of Sigourney’s more ambitious Work MORE! undertakings to date (with the possible exception of next year’s planed tour of Work MORE! #4, but more on that below). Number five brings together (at CounterPULSE this weekend) a group of drag queens, visual artists, dancers and performance artists in an overlapping series of collaborative performance installations that do away with the usual proscenium setting in favor of a loosely compartmentalized stage that’s more like a haunted gallery.

“Logistically, I’ve never done anything like this at all,” says Sigourney, speaking at a SOMA café last week. “It’s going to be too hot, it’s going to be too loud, and it’s not going to be easy.” But then, he immediately adds, “that’s not any different from a drag bar.”

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

The Work MORE! series has been chipping away at the wall between nightlife and theatrical performance through five iterations and counting, so maybe people will understand that without much prompting. “Hopefully people will realize how much agency they have.”

As Work MORE! continues to grow in scope, it’s also grown in popularity, enough that Sigourney is able to float a little money in the direction of the artists. Not a lot yet, he admits, “but you don’t have to worry about buying your wig — and you can keep it afterwards.” Beyond the ambitious tour next year, Sigourney hopes to make Work MORE! a sustaining enterprise.

“I’d like it to be, not an institution, but a program that happens yearly or twice yearly that can support itself and can support the artists,” he says, explaining that that means supporting unique collaborations unlikely to take place anywhere else. “I mean Dean [Disaster] and Philip [Huang] as a collaborative team? I would never have thought of that,” marvels Sigourney.

“Or like Jonathan Solo, who is a beautiful illustrator and artist, a favorite of mine, and the fact that he’s working with Diamanda Kallas, that’s a valuable creative collaboration. I want to be able to facilitate that kind of work,” says Sigourney. “That’s what I want to do.”

More of last week’s conversation with Mica Sigourney follows.

San Francisco Bay Guardian When did you start doing drag? You started in theater; those were separate things entirely?

Mica Sigourney Yeah, I did theater for a long time. I started doing theater when I was five, like outside of school, continued in college for two years and then stopped. I moved to San Francisco in 2004. I had a residency at Jon Simms Center. Then I stopped again doing any performance from 2004 to 2008. I was drawing at that point, doing screen-printing and fine art, soft sculpture.

Then I started doing parties and nightlife. I started doing this party, which was called Tiara Sensation and is now called Some Thing. We moved to the Stud two months after it started. And when we moved to the Stud, I knew they had a stage there, and if we had a stage I had to host, because I was the host of the party. I mean that was my job. So it happened organically. I really didn’t want to. Like the first two numbers I did were terrible. I had no idea how to make a thing. But part of it too.

By the time I met Fauxnique I was already doing drag, but meeting Fauxnique — she came from a technical background in dance — just seeing the way different people had navigated it and gone through it was really helpful. So I started doing it four years ago this month.

SFBG You never had any drag inclinations before?

MS No, that’s not true. When I was younger I used to dress up a lot. You could say I was a club kid. I collected women’s clothes and high heels but I never bothered to do drag with them. As a teenager going out in New York I idolized drag queens, but I just never thought that I’d be able to do it right. There was like one time in 2001, when I was in San Francisco, where I stepped out in drag, but never did it again. It wasn’t until I met the right people that I felt supported, that I felt like I could try it.

SFBG These people gave you the knowledge you needed?

MS Completely. One of the ideas behind Work MORE! is that drag is a folk art. There’s not really a technique, drag is more like the modality that you participate in, so your knowledge comes from either directly witnessing it from somebody else, and studying them, or by watching someone else and having them teach you like a parent or a mentor. So my mentors would be Glamamore, who’s my drag mother; Kevin, the DJ at my party who’s a drag queen and has had an influence on me; Hoku Mama Swamp; and Fauxnique are all probably my immediate inspirations and people who significantly helped me in different ways.

SFBG How did Work MORE! start?

MS It started the first year of Too Much!, the Keith Hennessy thing when it was at the Off Center. Julie [Phelps] just reached out and asked me if I wanted to do something. And my club had just moved to Friday nights from Monday nights, so I’d been curating a show for that for a while, and I wanted to try to curate something outside of my nightclub scene. I was just getting into the dance world more, the art world more, and so I wanted to try writing a real curatorial statement, and so I just did and they let me do it. And every time I’ve been super moved by the amount of effort and what people make for it.

I just kept doing it as a side project for myself so I could stay fresh. And we’re going to tour next spring so last year we made this really big piece—so it’s different every year, which also keeps me interested.

SFBG What’s the show you’re touring with?

MS It’s going to be the show we did last year. The premise for that was that we took 11 solo artists and allowed them to sub-organize and create pieces together. It was hugely collaborative. We made a master list of 20 numbers. Then I cut it down. So each person was set up as a director of each number, and then cast different performers for each number, so it was just this network of people working together on these different pieces. It was very like segmented but overlapping. I’m hoping to take a modified version of that show on tour, starting with colleges, in April of next year. My goal is to do West Coast, Midwest, and South, and see if it has legs and try to take it to the East Coast and abroad if we can.

I mean, I never booked a tour so I didn’t realize how expensive it is. Also how expensive it is to travel with drag queens, because they need two hours to get ready, so you can’t, like, roll into a venue. You need to get there three hours ahead. Somebody has to be doing tech. It’s not like a literary tour or a band where you roll up and unload. It’s not that.

SFBG It’s a complex show too, as you were just describing.

MS Yeah, though now that we have the framework I can look at the video and say this [part] was directed this way by someone who may or may not be in the cast but that’s how we’re going to do it. The way it was generated was more in line with the mission of Work MORE! than the output. The output is a beautiful drag show that has a lot of people in it, more than you usually see because drag queens are usually solo artists. And you get to see them changing, there’ s exposure of the artifice and all that.

SFBG Have you toured before?

MS I went to London with Fauxnique [in her show, Faux Real]. We did it at the Hot August Fringe Festival.

SFBG How was that?

MS It was really cool. I didn’t know people were going to get all the references, because it’s so American — well, not completely American, but being a teenager in America and listening to Morrissey is really specific. People loved it. I think they were really confused by a woman doing drag, though.

SFBG It’s more unusual there?

MS I guess so. Also, in London all the drag queens sing their songs, whether or not they should. It’s live singing. So Fauxnique lip-syncing was a little different.

It makes sense when you call drag a folk art, especially considering the way things are learned and traded, but you also bring up the way it can be really regionally specific.

MS Absolutely. In San Francisco you have the new strong tradition of gross out, like lots of blood, taking off your clothes, what Trannyshack was really good at [fostering], which is beautiful and genius but really specific to here. I think with RuPaul’s Drag Race and the advent of Facebook and all that, things are probably becoming less specific, which is kind of sad to me.

But actually in the first Work MORE!, the assignment wasn’t collaborative. It was after the second Work MORE! that it became focused specifically on collaboration. The first one was about just tradition. Let’s go back to the traditions of lip sync, glamor and femininity. That was the assignment. You had to use those three things in extreme ways. It was about finding roots. Where does drag come from for us now? What are the things being ignored or that can be enhanced more? But a dream for me is to do a Work MORE! where it’s a collaboration between artists not from the U.S. and some from here. Because the social aspect [of Work MORE!] is about the sharing of traditions, and the strengthening of queer community, crossing lineages or genealogies. So I think that would be really interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yZK0QRGpTw

Work MORE! #5

Thu/24-Sat/26, 8pm, $15-$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org

The Performant: Let ‘em eat cake

Andrew Lam

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August 23, 2012

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While the Performant is off hugging trees in Oregon, please enjoy this series of interviews with the curators of three innovative performance spaces

There’s nothing about the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in North Berkeley that particularly speaks of abstract performance, but that element of the unexpected is possibly what makes it the perfect venue for Karen Penley’s fledgling performance series, Retard. Inhabited by out-of-the-box, outré performers such as Dan Carbone, Edna Barron, Herb Heinz, and Catherine Debon, Retard is a low-key, all-inclusive, no-judgment sort of event where the weird get a chance to shine, and everybody gets to eat cake. After an evening spent nibbling clafoutis and ducking clowns, I caught up with Karen via the magic of the Interwebs to pick her brain about her brave new experimental showcase.

SFBG: What was the original impetus for this showcase? What sets it apart?

Karen Penley: I have an interest in brave unconventional work and I wanted to be able to have room to let that happen instead of having to fit into the structure of poetry and music open mics…. I think the thing that sets Retard apart is a feeling of support for adventurous, innocent work. I really love raw art, as well as the feeling of people being so immersed in…their artistic work and caring about it so much. It’s this feeling of creating different worlds as well. You can do anything, theater, movement, improvisation, music, or some hybrid of such. Also, it’s kind of homey, easy, non pretentious. I really wanted that. There are special Retards, the evenings called “Crack,” where I curate more carefully and then the other retards are more a jambalaya and are open to people I don’t know their work as well so they can just come and perform and I can get a sense of them.

SFBG: What is your ultimate vision for these evenings?

KP: Well, ultimately, I would love to have them be ‘Crack’ every Friday, with lots of people coming, and I’d love to rent the church another day a week and have it be ‘Pretard’ which I tried to do for five months, but there wasn’t enough participation and I couldn’t afford it. ‘Pretard’ was a place to work on and develop material just for a warm audience, not a workshop, just a place to try out stuff, and then I wanted to take that work and curate it into cool evenings. But I’d love to connect with people that I admire, all different kinds of performers, and curate great evenings so that it really is a network of daring work.

SFBG: Do you bake your own cake? What do the cake and tea signify for you?

KP: I love cake and I can’t eat a whole one so this gives me an opportunity to bake all those great cakes on the internet that I couldn’t bake just for myself. I always like food to be involved in performing and watching performance. It feels more cozy and fun and more warm-y to have cake and tea for people.

SFBG: “Retard” sounds intentionally provocative, though you do offer a rather nonconfrontational definition for it on the webpage. What prompted you to use that name, and has anyone had an uncomfortable reaction to it?

KP: I HAVE had some uncomfortable reactions to the name. One girl was labeled in her high school and I really liked her and wanted her to perform, but we had a long email back and forth about it and she just couldn’t condone the use of the word. My feeling is that using it for my show changes the derogatory feeling associated with that word. I feel like a retard myself, always have. I want to be more retarded; i.e. slow down. In my mind, to be retarded is a good thing. Plus it’s just funny (the name).

Retard

Fridays 7-9pm, $10 sliding scale

1823 Ninth Ave., Berk. (side building next to The Good Shepherd Church)

theretardshow.wordpress.com

Shoot to thrill

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August 23, 2012

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FALL ARTS At some point in the last 30 years game publishers decided that releasing in the summer was financial suicide. Maybe these publishers were under the mistaken impression that everyone is out enjoying the sun and, I don’t know, hiking? But as those of us who also enjoy gaming will tell you, you make time for video games.

So it’s been a pleasure to see the fall gaming season inch ever earlier into August, where it can leverage gamers’ anticipation about autumn releases and avoid being subjected to the intense scrutiny of a more competitive schedule. Two games released last week teeter on that precipice and officially ring in what looks to be another big season of gaming.

Darksiders II is a tad rough but an immense undertaking for a still-unproven license. Playing as Death himself, you must undo the end of the world and save your brother, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Dabbling in light heaven-hell mythology, the art style of Darksiders II is vigorously heavy metal, but it’s the game play homages to Zelda, God of War, and even Portal that make this epic game a pleasure. Dungeons and puzzles are faintly familiar but that’s part of the charm, and the series’ new RPG elements and abundance of treasure chests make the game irresistibly fun to play.

Similarly rugged, Sleeping Dogs sometimes struggles to match the fluidity and detail of Rockstar’s best efforts, like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, but it’s also not nearly as self-serious and has one of the best open-world environments the genre has seen. In this sandbox game set in Hong Kong, you play an undercover cop working his way up the ranks of the triads, playing both sides of the law. In terms of sheer delight, few games this year can match the unique experience of cruising through a neon city listening to traditional Chinese string music while vendors call to you to try their pork buns. And then running them over with your SUV.

Of course, the months of true autumn are still where you’ll find the big titles, and it’s impossible to list upcoming games without acknowledging that there is another Call of Duty game coming out this November, and it will undoubtedly sell more copies than any other game in 2012. The first sequel from odd-year, back-up developer Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II occurs partly in the Cold War era and partly in the near future, where the PRC have taken control of US revolutionary drone warfare technology and are using it against us.

In lieu of a new Battlefield game, publisher Electronic Arts hopes a new Medal of Honor will fill the shooter-sized hole in their schedule this year, but Medal of Honor Warfighter seems unlikely to compete with Black Ops, considering the player reaction to its 2010 prequel.

No, the Call of Duty franchise’s nearest competitor this year is 343 Studios’ Halo 4. It’s been five years since the last numbered entry in the Halo series and a new developer aims to repeat the mammoth sales of Halo 3 (a game with such crossover appeal that I picked up my copy at 7-11) with another blockbuster. Halo 4 will once again star iconic space soldier Master Chief, and promises a renewed focus on exploration and discovery over straightforward alien bombast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3Y8Ws3plI

Fan favorite Resident Evil has slowly evolved from its deliberately-paced survival horror roots into an action series — resulting in both uproar and increased sales. And we all know which result matters more to publishers. But in an effort to satisfy fans new and old, Resident Evil 6 has two protagonists, and for all intents and purposes two separate storylines. One plays it slow and scary while the other delivers on the explosions and firefights that likely mean big sales this October.

Another series that developed a new identity based on fan feedback, Assassins Creed III brings the time-traveling franchise to the USA during the American Revolution. Playing as a Native American assassin, you hobnob with the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in a dynamic recreation of 18th century Boston and New York. You’ll probably also murder a lot of redcoats. Like Call of Duty, Assassins Creed has a new entry each year, and its dependable quality is its greatest asset.

Then there are games whose futures are less certain. New IP Dishonored looks to take BioShock’s steampunk aesthetic one generation earlier, into the Victorian era, with a stealthy first-person-shooter soaked in atmosphere. Borderlands 2 takes its predecessor’s successful basic characteristics — a boatload of loot, focus on cooperation and tongue in cheek humor — and ratchets them up to 11. Also, releasing in the typically untouchable month of December, Far Cry 3 explores an entire tropical island, complete with psychedelic mushrooms and a very nasty pirate villain.

All of the above for the new season, without even touching Nintendo’s new Wii U. We know it’s coming, but no release date, price, or game lineup yet. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Nintendo’s slow approach to starting the next generation of hardware may be a case of wanting to fully size up the competition before committing. With games like these, it’s never been clearer that people crave good games above new hardware.

John Santos Sextet at this week’s Friday Nights at the de Young

Maria Poblet

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August 23, 2012

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This Friday night, August 24, 2012, bring out the dancing shoes and salsa with the John Santos Sextet. Five-time Grammy nominee John Santos and his sextet are among the vanguard of today’s Latin jazz artists, performing and recording adventurous original compositions and arrangements firmly rooted in the Caribbean traditions where jazz was born. The band features Dr. John Calloway on flute, Melecio Magdaluyo, on sax, Saul Sierra on bass, Marco Diaz on piano, David Flores on drums, and John Santos on percussion. Find them live in Wilsey Court at 6:30pm!

Also, the Artist Studio Tamar Assaf features her installation Bay Invaders: Non-Native Species Are Changing the San Francisco Bay Ecosystem. Join her for exciting hands-on art making featuring the plants and animals of the Bay.

Live music, hands-on art, and the Artist Studio are FREE and open to the public. Every week through November 23, the museum hosts cocktails, prix-fixe in the Café, and more at Friday Nights at the de Young.

Tickets are required to view the permanent collection galleries now featuring Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection and Chuck Close and Crown Point Press: Prints and Processes.

For more information, visit this link.

Friday, August 24 from 5-8:45pm @ The de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park, SF

Don’t blink

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August 22, 2012

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FALL ARTS If there’s such a thing as seasonal themes in the art world, then we’re about to see the summer of performance art gradually give way to the autumn of geography. Look for big institutional shows and smaller gallery projects that present ideas about places and spaces. To that point, this roundup starts with two exhibits that should get you out of the city.

Barry McGee Arguably the most famous and influential visual artist to emerge from the Bay Area in the last few decades, McGee is getting the mid-career survey treatment at the Berkeley Art Museum. His activist-leaning work pulls from graffiti, comics, sign painting, and hobo art, usually in ways that interrupt and transform the spaces where they’re installed. The exhibition promises a broad retrospective sampling from early work to new projects, and if for some reason you haven’t already heard of Barry McGee, this is your chance to get up to speed. Through Dec. 9; bampfa.berkeley.edu

ZERO1: Seeking Silicon Valley ZERO1, the Silicon Valley-based (and funded) art and tech biennial, is curated this year to showcase international perspectives on place and placelessness in the post-Internet world. Over 150 artists from 13 countries will participate. Take heart, commute-averse, projects will be hosted at venues throughout (and in the sky above) the Bay Area. Among those, Nelly Ban Hayoun’s space opera music video penned by Bruce Sterling and performed by NASA employees; ISHKY’s Pi in the Sky, which utilizes skywriting planes to remind you of what comes after 3.14; and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive pirate radio station. Sept. 12-Dec. 8; www.zero1biennial.org

Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art Comparing six global cities that are important regional cultural centers but not global art commerce centers, Six Lines of Flight brings together progressive artists from San Francisco; Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Columbia; Cluj, Romania; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Tangier, Morocco. If it’s as good as I hope, the exhibition will showcase possible models for social art making that bridge regional and transnational identities. Sept. 15-Dec. 31; www.sfmoma.org.

re(collection) In the wake of the March 2011 tsunami that devastated northern Japan, volunteers and cleanup workers salvaged and preserved more than 750,000 family snapshots and photos, a community performance both defiant and touching. Some of those photos make up this exhibition, alongside collaborations and new work by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Ariel Goldberg, Mayumi Hamanaka, Taro Hattori, Sean McFarland, Kari Orvik, and Kelli Yon. Sept. 12-Nov. 3; www.theintersection.org

Guy Overfelt: Blacklight I confess. I’m sending you on a blind date to Guy Overfelt’s October show. I have no idea what he has planned, but if recent work — which usually involves burning rubber, inflating stuff, and performance — is any indicator, the 2012 SECA nominee will not disappoint. Oct. 6-Nov. 3; www.evergoldgallery.com

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg Dazzling, funny, and unsettling, “The Parade” combines kaleidoscopic, person-sized bird sculptures with five stop-motion animated films by Djurberg featuring ingenious synchronized soundtracks scored by Berg. I caught this in a rush at the New Museum in New York; can’t wait to spend more time with it here. Oct. 12-Jan. 27; www.ybca.org

Liam Everett Liam Everett’s lovely and haunting minimal abstract paintings usually incorporate alcohol, paint, and salt to distress and age unstretched canvases, making vibrant palimpsests and riffing on color field painting and installation work. Nov. 1-Dec. 22, www.altmansiegel.com

Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye Elder statesman of the American post-war period and pop art master sees a new major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Organized with Johns and spanning the last 60 years, this latest survey of Johns’ work will include 85 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, many of them from Bay Area collections. Nov. 3-Feb. 3; www.sfmoma.org

Win free tickets to SFMOMA!

Maria Poblet

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August 22, 2012

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In Celebration of the Cindy Sherman exhibition on view at SFMOMA now until October 8, the Guardian would like to invite our art-loving readers to have a chance to test their photography knowledge and win tickets to the Cindy Sherman exhibition.

The contest begins August 22 and ends August 24. Everyday at noon over this three-day period, log on to our Facebook page here, where we will post a series of photographs from famous female photographers throughout time. The user who responds back with the most correct answers will win tickets to this fun, female-powered, exhibition!

Localized Appreesh: The Seshen

Tony Robles

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August 22, 2012

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Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

As is often the case these days, the Seshen grabbed attention with a video. The Bay Area band’s first official music video – for its song “Oblivion” off the self-titled LP released earlier this year – has gained more than 10,000 views since it went up in June.

The black and white clip is like a mini art film, with a fuzzy countdown clock ticking off cerebral scenes of shadowy figures, singer Lalin St. Juste in an abandoned alleyway, and close ups of blinking eyes.

And then there’s the song itself, a beat-driven pop song, with these echoing, soulful vocals, bouncy keys, and hypnotic layers of electro effects. Given all those harrowing echoes, you could picture the song (which has a sort of Little Dragon meets Erykah Badu feel) featured in horror flick, as the heroic female lead tears away from the chaos, running to safety.

This week, the Seshen plays for a good cause in Oakland: a fundraiser for the Women’s International Fund for Education (W.I.F.E).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkubxzD4gY

Year and location of origin: March of 2010 in El Cerrito, Calif. We all met or re-connected at Aki (bass player and producer)’s and his girlfriend Lalin (lead singer)’s house parties in El Cerrito. Lots of like minded musicians jamming in their basement led to the first incarnation and lineup of the Seshen.

Band name origin: Egyptian for blue lotus, a symbol of the sun and creation or rebirth. That, and it also sounds like “session”.

Band motto: In the absence of an official motto, we’d say “Roast Beef”.

Description of sound in 10 words or less: Beat driven electronic music that balances pop and abstraction.

Instrumentation: Vocals, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion and samples. Almost everybody has some kind of MIDI device or effects pedal in order to reproduce the layered electronic sounds of the studio album in a live situation.

Most recent release: Our self-titled debut dropped on February 28, 2012. It streams for free here.

Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Eclectic audiences, amazing musicians, great venues, different scenes (East Bay vs. San Francisco).

Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Trying to be heard and remembered amongst all the other awesome musicians the Bay produces.

First album ever purchased: (Aki) I think the first album I purchased was Green Day’s Dookie, which I got in the 5th grade.

Most recent album purchased/downloaded: (Aki) The last album I downloaded was TNGHT by Hudson Mohawke and Lunice.

Favorite local eatery and dish: In the year and a half it took to record the first album, we ordered the large veggie from Americana Pizza and Taqueria in San Pablo probably a million times. Honorable mention to the multiple bottles of Sriracha we topped them with.

Seshen
With Fast Piece of Furniture, DJ Black
Fundraiser for Women’s International Fund for Education
Fri/24, 9pm, $10-$20 sliding scale
Geoffrey’s Inner Circle
410 14th St., Oakl.
www.wifeducation.org

Enter the abyss: Gay men draw vaginas (and you can too!)

Andrew Lam

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August 22, 2012

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A black whorl navigated by a rowboat. A luscious pair of pink lips, gaping wide. Earmuffs, a box of muffins, a crawling rodent and a wide-eyed kittycat. All at once. Such is Anthony of New York City’s intrepretation of female genitalia. Gay men draw the darndest things! Writer Shannon O’Malley and photographer Keith Wilson — the same team behind the macabre-beloved Apocalypse Cakes — have cobbled together a whimsical Tumblr of such images, donated from around the country. Plus, they invite all comers to draw vag imaginings of their own at Dolores Park Gay Beach art parties (the next one is Sept. 2, fyi.)

Why is this happening? We emailed the two to find out.

SFBG: Why are you having the gays draw vaginas?

Shannon O’Malley: I want to know what they think of vaginas. No one really knows. Sometimes gay guys say they are afraid of them. But some of them revere the vag. It’s all so complex. It’s neat to tease out all this convoluted psycho-sexual-cultural stuff through drawing. We’re collecting lots of vaginas and putting them all in a book called Gay Men Draw Vaginas, which we are self-publishing by the end of the year. We are already enthralled with the drawings we’ve collected thus far, so I can’t wait to see what the entire collection is going to look like.

Keith Wilson: As a gay myself, I wanted to see what other homos thought about the lady part that baffles us. Aside from some amazing visual insights into the vagina, it’s also led to some entertaining (and important!) conversations about the vagina versus the asshole and how one is gross but the other is to be worshipped. Sometimes they turn into heated arguments about gay men’s disrespect for women’s bodies and gay male social power blah blah blah. Awesome.

SFBG: Where have you held the drawings?

KW: I hold them between my legs.

SO: Recently, we held a mass public collection at Castro and Market one Sunday. And we’ve had one at my house. That was a party that happened to be full of a lot of guys, so I put pens and markers in front of them and asked them to whip up some vaginas. But spontaneous vag art can happen at any time, at any place.

SFBG: How would you characterize the vagina drawings you’ve seen?

SO: A lot of them attempt to visually replicate a vagina. But a minority are more conceptual. We have several dentatas. Lots of flowers. Some are on the rag.

KW: The drawings so far have been way more diverse than I thought. As we build our inventory, I see some categories of inspiration emerging: animals, Georgia O’Keefe, the all-pink palette, floral, and gestural.

Gay Men Draw Vaginas Drawfest #2

Sept. 2, 1pm, free

Gay Beach, Dolores Park

facebook.com/gaymendrawvag

Talking with ‘Compliance’ director Craig Zobel: a spoiler-free interview!

Sue Vaughan

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August 22, 2012

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Talking with ‘Compliance’ director Craig Zobel: a spoiler-free interview!

No film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival festival encountered as much controversy as Craig Zobel‘s Compliance. At the first public screening, an all-out shouting match erupted, with an audience member yelling “Sundance can do better!” You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Every screening that followed was jam-packed with people hoping to experience the most shocking film at Sundance, and the film does not disappoint. (Beware: every review I have happened upon has unnecessarily spoiled major plots in the film, which is based on true events.)

Compliance aims to confront a society filled with people who are trained to follow rules without questioning them. Magnolia Pictures, which previously collaborated with Zobel on his debut film Great World of Sound (which premiered at Sundance in 2007), picked up the film for theatrical release (it comes out Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters); if you dare to check it out, prepare to be traumatized as well as intellectualized. You’ll be screaming all the way home about one of the most audacious movies of 2012 — and that’s exactly why the film is so brilliant.

San Francisco Bay Guardian I have attended Sundance since I was 11 years old, and there have been a handful of particularly volatile screenings in which audience members passed out, threw up, stormed out of the theater, or berated the filmmakers during the Q&A: Bryan Singer’s Public Access and Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog in 1993; Mary Harron’s American Psycho and Kim Ki-Duk’s The Isle in 2000; Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible in 2002; and Johan Renck’s Downloading Nancy in 2008. Now, you’ve joined the ranks of the infamous Sundance elite. Were you prepared for how vulnerable your film Compliance was going to make audience members?

Craig Zobel Absolutely not. It really caught me off guard.

SFBG People became quite angry at you at the first screening’s Q&A, correct? How did you adapt in the subsequent screenings and are you prepared for people’s reactions once the film gets released?

Zobel I did not try to make a movie just to piss people off. I’m picking movies to make that are like, “I’ve never seen anyone doing that as a movie.” If I saw this movie I’d say, “Whoa, I want to have a conversation about what that director was trying to do.”

When I was writing Compliance, I had been attached to make a studio comedy and some other things, and for one reason or another all of the other projects weren’t happening. And I wanted to make a film right [then]. Which, if you look at the landscape of independent movies that get [made] these days, they seem to have the kind of money and star caliber as a studio film. There are all these 20-something relationship films that are basically just romantic comedies. I would rather watch a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock, who will at least give me what I want from the genre, while these other ones aren’t really satisfying to me.

So I wanted to make something that [didn’t] just feel like light entertainment.

SFBG The film seems to be taking its toll on audiences due to how relentless the experience is, though it’s not a long film at all.

Zobel I originally wanted to make the film 85 minutes. That’s what I hung on the wall. The script is 80 pages long. It ended up 90 minutes, but it has a lot of momentum that helps make the film not feel boring. I was trying to make sure that every 10 minutes a major thing would happen. We would do something once and that would be enough. We broke it down into a five-act story instead of a bigger three act structure.

SFBG The film exposes so much about each audience member that experiences it. When I saw it at Sundance, the woman sitting behind me was nervously texting every few seconds and so we all could hear her iPhone confirmation dinging over and over and over until ultimately she stromed out in a huff. The guy next to me was laughing yet fidgeting so much that the person in front of him had to tell him to stop.

You force us the audience to be stuck in the same predicament as the characters we are watching which leads me to kind of an odd question: what kind of student were you?

Zobel In high school? A good one! [Laughs.] I wasn’t the guy yelling at the teacher all the time. Maybe a little bit when I was in college but recently I was able to teach as an adjunct for a directing class at Columbia. It was really interesting and fun and I now have so much more respect and admiration for teaching. But I wasn’t that student who constantly had questions for the teacher.

SFBG I don’t think your film is trying to push people’s buttons just for the hell of it. And this is why I compared it to Psycho, not only because of the film’s intelligent yet deeply disturbing exploration of our society, but how each character is given some seriously mind-melting dilemmas. Without spoiling anything from the film, how did you pull out such haunting performances?

Zobel A lot of it was casting. And in some ways it was even easy to cast because the people who came in to the casting room were as curious about it as I was. It just made sense very quickly. All of the actors were running into situations during the shoot where they would go, “I can’t understand how this character could do this but it sounds hard and I am curious to try and think about it more.”

I think they all gave amazing performances by virtue of the fact that they were in it for the exploration. They were all fascinated with the type of story we were trying to tell and made sure to not make anything just black and white. Also, we shot more takes of a scene than I thought we ever would, not because anything was wrong, [but because after] a few takes we would say, “Well, what are the other ways or what other attitudes or possibilities can we try?” So in the editing room, we had the opportunities to dip into that one for a line here and maybe go back to the initial take.

SFBG I have read online how a few audience members are proud of walking out of the film, and it seems pretty damn ironic for people to leave before the conclusion. They literally do not want to confront or even try and figure out what it is you are attempting to explore. You’ve got philosophy behind this picture, and I feel like you’ve got an exciting future ahead.

Zobel I really appreciate that. I do know what I am trying to do next, which is a screenplay that I previously wrote; it’s very close to happening and I’m very excited about it. It’s also based on a true story — it’s about this Swedish mafia member who becomes a technology executive. I get to explore money and why people decide to devote their lives to seek that stuff.

COMPLIANCE opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches full-time as the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University, curates/hosts MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, a film series that showcases underrated, overlooked and dismissed cinema in a neo-sincere way and can be contacted at: midnites4maniacs@gmail.com

Styles for miles

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August 22, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS Most folks going to dance performances have a sense of how they want to spend their time and dollars. For some, a show must be conceptually edgy. For others, it’s got to be ballet. Still others want choreography that resonates with socio-political implications — or they only want to see choreography grounded in indigenous traditions. I’m more of an omnivore: show me a piece, no matter its style, in which the forces at work arise from some internal necessity and play off each other convincingly, and I’m in.

The next three months are bursting with dance offerings. In downtown San Francisco, many are free. Zaccho Dance Theatre reprises its hauntingly poetic Sailing Away (Sept. 13-16, Powell and Market, SF; www.zaccho.org); it pays tribute to the exodus of a remarkable group of African Americans. In only three years, the Central Market Arts Festival (Sept. 28-Oct. 21, various locations, SF; www.centralmarketarts.org) has exploded into a major event with dozens of performances that have probably contributed just as much to the area’s revitalization as those high-rent dot coms. Not to be missed is the world premiere of Jo Kreiter and Flyaway Productions’ Niagara Falling (Sept. 26-29, Seventh St. and Market, SF; www.flyawayproductions.com), projected and danced on an exterior wall of the Renoir Hotel. And how about the easy-riding Trolley Dances (Oct. 20-21, various locations, SF; www.epiphanydance.org) that offer unexpected site-specific encounters?

If you are willing to take another look at what may be already familiar, and your budget allows it, the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra (Oct. 10-14, Zellerbach Hall, Berk; www.calperformances.org) brings Swan Lake to Berkeley. It may be the most popular ballet in the world, and it is also one of the greats. Another old-timer, the 40-year-old Mummenschanz (Nov. 23-23, Zellerbach Hall, Berk; www.calperformances.org), can’t be beat for its skill, magic, and gentle humor. Take a kid. If your taste oscillates between new and old, check out Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu (Oct. 20-28, Palace of Fine Arts, SF; www.naleihulu.org); its mix of traditional and new-style hula — which this year includes hip-hop — will be time and money well spent.

Keith Hennessy, probably the Bay Area’s most radical theatrical thinker, moves his pulverizing Turbulence (a dance about the economy) from COUNTERPulse to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Sept. 27-29, YBCA Forum, SF; www.ybca.org). There you will be invited to participate in the concept’s actualization.

Ticket-buying decision time kicks into high gear in October, with the season’s most intense concentration of big-time artists both local and visiting. Making its Bay Area premiere with the full-evening After Light (Oct. 13-14, YBCA, SF; www.performances.org) will be another of San Francisco Performances’ finds, Britain’s Russell Maliphant Company. The work, set on three performers to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes, is inspired by dance genius Vaslav Nijinsky’s photographs, choreography, and drawings. Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (Oct. 18-21, Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, SF; www.mjdc.org) presents a first look at Times Bones, for which the choreographer excavated ideas in her rep to re-examine for new content.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet‘s collaboration with musicians and lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler are well known. Increasingly, King seems to be searching also for innovative scenic collaborators to contextualize his mythic choreography. A preview last spring of the as yet un-named premiere (Oct. 19-28, YBCA, SF; www.linesballet.org), at the very least, promised that Jim Campbell’s set of hundreds of LED globes will create its own rhythmic motion.

African and African American voices will be heard at YBCA as part of its commitment to showcasing contemporary dance from that continent. Voices of Strength (Oct. 19-20, YBCA, SF; www.ybca.org) is a quartet of four African women — among them Mozambique’s well-known Maria Helena Pinto — who will show one work each. New YBCA Program Director Marc Bamuthi Joseph concocted “Clas/sick Hip Hop” (Nov.30-Dec.1, YBCA, SF; www.ybca.org) for which he matches a violinist with five radically different hip-hop artists, including the legendary Rennie Harris, who 20 years ago pioneered the art’s theatrical potential.

Others I will try not to miss: smart dance with RAWDance‘s Burn In/Fall Out, (Nov. 2-4, ODC Theater, SF; www.rawdance.org); Deborah Slater’s in progress collaboration with dancer-vet Private Freeman, Private Live (Nov. 2-3, CounterPULSE, SF; www.deborahslater.org); and Sebastian Grubb‘s Workout (Dec. 14-15, CounterPULSE, SF; www.counterpulse.org). At the Garage (Garage, SF; www.715bryant.org), it will be Human Creature Dance Theatre for Halloween (Oct. 31), neo-Finnish punkkiCo (Nov. 16-17), and contemporary Congolese, now SF-based dancer Byb Chanel-Bibene (Dec. 5-6). Perhaps I’ll also return to the Garage for Burlesque Basquiat, Dorian Faust‘s birthday tribute to the late painter (Dec. 21-22).

Howdy, strangers

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August 22, 2012

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arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse were obsessed with Americana long before the two Bristol-based performance makers (known collectively as Action Hero) ever set their cowboy boots in the United States. In fact, they’d performed their site-specific first piece, a barroom exploration of the Western (called simply A Western) for years before lobbing it into the belly of the beast, where it appeared as part of Austin, Texas’ Fusebox Festival in 2010.

“We were shitting it,” remembers Paintin, in a British phrase meaning mighty fretful. But the crowd loved it; Paintin calls it their best audience ever. She and Stenhouse have worked together since 2005 on pieces that engage the audience as co-conspirators as well as subjects in their own right. A good example is their piece, Watch Me Fall, which had the audience cheering on a series of ridiculous, slightly risky stunts from either side of a long runway, a work that Paintin explains was inspired by the duo’s interest in motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

>>VIEW OUR FULL FALL ART 2012 PREVIEW

A diminutive woman with bright blond bangs, Paintin spoke last week at a sidewalk table outside BrainWash Café, fresh from a rehearsal at CounterPULSE, where she and James were in the fifth day of leading a collaborative performance workshop with a selected group of Bay Area–based American artists (Laura Arrington, Andrea Hart, Xandra Ibarra, Richie Israel, Elizabeth McSurdy, Mica Sigourney, and Ernesto Sopprani).

Stenhouse was not able to join the conversation — rehearsal had run long and he was following its willy-nilly course to a local karaoke bar, where he and the rest of the group were planning to take turns singing Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” A couple of days earlier, the group had gone tailgating at a pre-season NFL game in Oakland. Such are the trails, happy or otherwise, down which the adventurer in Americana must travel. (You can follow some of the research results thus far — in a process McSurdy calls “aesthetically polyamorous” — in the group’s blog posts at www.counterpulse.org.)

The workshop sets out to investigate American cultural mythologies using the concept of the stranger or outsider as starting point. Hosted by CounterPULSE with leadership from program director Julie Phelps, the program is part of a major cultural exchange project by CounterPULSE’s collaborator on Stranger in a Strange land, the arts-based University of Chichester in the South of England.

“All the work of the Department of Performing Arts is about making radical new work, and we have a reputation for working with exciting and challenging artists, hence our connection to Action Hero,” explained Ben Francombe, head of the department, by email. “The University of Chichester has instigated this overall project as a way to explore different interdisciplinary working methods,” he continues, “which involve the idea of exchange.” Francombe adds that the University is keen to continue having a presence in the Bay Area.

“It’s been really fun actually,” enthuses Paintin, clearly pleased with how experienced and open-minded her American counterparts have proven with collaboration. “We’re trying to just be about the process.”

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

Mon/27, 8 p.m., $10-$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org

TAKE ANOTHER BOW, LAZARUS

The fall theater season includes several worthy returns (in addition to shiny new premieres) worth keeping in déjà view:

Chinglish The new comedy about East-West miscommunication from David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) has already been to Hong Kong but rebounds to the West Coast courtesy of Berkeley Rep. Aug. 24–Oct. 7; www.berkeleyrep.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s a phoenix, really, rising each September like a sassy, gangling, 41–headed bird of play. Sept. 5–16; www.sffringe.org

Invasion! Crowded Fire delivers its own politically pointed comedy of miscommunication and cultural misconceptions in its West Coast premiere of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2011 Obie-winner. Sept. 6–29; crowdedfire.dreamhosters.com

Geezer and The Real Americans The Hoyle boys — veteran clown and physical actor Geoff Hoyle and bounding son Dan, a theater sensation in his own right — return to the Marsh for re-runs of their respective, wildly popular solo shows. The Real Americans: Sept. 7–29; Geezer: Oct. 6–Nov. 18; www.themarsh.org

The Normal Heart Larry Kramer’s 1985 play returns (in the new Broadway revival directed by George C. Wolfe) at a time when the history of the AIDS crisis has become endangered by a vague “normalizing” narrative of American progress, or what Sara Schulman aptly calls “the gentrification of the mind.” Here’s an opportunity to remember lots of things, not least those who died and fought, a great play, a vital movement, a continuing health emergency, and the importance of mass resistance. Sept. 13–Oct. 7, www.act-sf.org

Roughin’ It 2: Theater. Oysters. Campfire. Booze. Again. Fresh from sold-out success with Duck Lake, PianoFight heads back up to Point Reyes for a second season of woozy waddling, shucking and jiving along the shore of Tamales Bay, featuring everything in the subtitle including brand new short plays harvested from a bed of delicious local playwrights. Sept. 15 and 22; www.pianofight.com

Assassins Shotgun Players mount the Sondheim musical about presidential recalls made and attempted from John Wilkes Booth onward, an election-year favorite directed by Susannah Martin. Sept. 26–Oct. 28; www.shotgunplayers.org

Rhinoceros Paris-based Theatre de la Ville’s production of the Ionesco play — a modernist classic on individual resistance to tyrannical conformity — is a remounting of the company’s acclaimed 2004 production, making its first US tour. Sept. 27–28, www.calperformances.org

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass “Be Here Now” all over again in Lynne Kaufman’s new play — not so much a theatrical return as a serious flashback — starring the exceptional Warren David Keith as the titular giant of 1960s counterculture, a Harvard prof turned LSD advocate and spiritual teacher. Oct. 4–Nov. 24, www.themarsh.org

Einstein on the Beach Composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson reinvented the opera in 1976 as an enthrallingly weird-ass piece of avant-garde spectacle and the world has not been the same since. This remounting —overseen by the original team of Glass, Wilson, and choreographer Lucinda Childs — marks the first performances of the five-hour formalist extravaganza in 20 years. The international tour takes its highly anticipated Bay Area bow courtesy of co-commissioner Cal Performances. Oct. 26–28, www.calperformances.org