Comedy

“Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg”

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REVIEW While most Americans equate 1968 as the ground zero of political tumult in Chicago, New York City, and throughout the South, the revolutions that spread across Europe that year were of equal historical importance. Largely a reaction to the political asphyxiation of post–World War II policy and a much larger rejection of the feudal monarchist, industrial-capitalist, and communist regimes that had subjugated the masses for many years, the continent was suddenly positioned at the precipice of deconstruction. To paraphrase a Nietzsche epigram that appeared in spray paint frequently that year, Europe was discovering "the chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star."

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum’s "Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg" relives and reveals this spirit through the incredible work of former Le nouvel observateur photographer Serge Hambourg. Capturing the protests that began in the suburbs of Paris in March of that year and quickly spread throughout the country by May, Hambourg’s lens centers on the students, artists, and anarchists who swept up and down the Left Bank.

Some of Hambourg’s photographs capture an air of comedy: one shows the very photogenic Nanterre student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit shouting down the superannuated Surrealist poet Louis Aragon before a delighted crowd. Other photos — such as the image of a gas grenade shown in close-up before being thrown into a crowd — convey how quickly the protests degenerated into violence. As with the Parisian nouvelle vague auteurs, Hambourg redefines the city’s streetscapes from the singular moments of Eugène Atget or Henri Cartier-Bresson as a kinetic intersection of bodies and machines — everything in the process of becoming. As the protests wound down and the Gaullists regained control, the photos depict a city picked clean of its history — a Pyrrhic victory for the government.

PROTEST IN PARIS 1968: PHOTOGRAPHS BY SERGE HAMBOURG Through June 1. Wed., Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–7 p.m. UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

serge bozon

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–Why the title “La France”? Is there something about the soldiers’ story or plight that evokes or says something about your country in general?

To put it with the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the sixties (in the Cahiers), who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who “got lost in the shadow of victory”. They managed to escape, but died during their trip, so disappeared “en voyage”. So I wanted to deal with desertion, but in the following way: not to tell the story of the desertors who were caught by the French army (and put in jail or shoot), not to tell the story of the desertors who managed to reach their goal, no, to tell the story of the desortors “in between”, because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction, that’s why I choose the title. Just listen to “Going all the way” by The Squires or “On Tour” by The Cancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records) and you’ll understand the relation of this title (in the sense just given) to the music: “On Tour” is a song (as you could guess) about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes…) but, like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the “tour” of my soldiers… You begin by expecting some light pop uplifting on the air, but in the end it’s only imposture, frustration and anger all over the place. “Anywhere out of the world”, yes, but you won’t even manage to get out of your own town. You will die before. Like my soldiers.

–Why did you want to tell this story – during war? What do war movies mean to you?

Doing a war movie (in France) has nothing to do with doing (in France) a western, a pirate movie, a musical, etc., because this is the only classical american genre which is still alive (in France), where a lot of war movies are been made each year. So there is no manierism here. The menace of war is unceasing, or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, and so I could have done it nowadays, but what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal (in the very special way already explained) with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is only our present, and the desertion is still, in our present history, “neddles and pins”, to quote The Ramones covering The Searchers.

–Which war movies have intrigued or inspired you over time – or for this film specifically?

The american and russian war movies of the fourties and fifties. And I must press this point : the movies of Fuller, Ford, Walsh, Tourneur, Hawks… are not more important for me that the sublime russian war movies, for example “Tales of the Siberian Land” (Pyriev), “Two Soldiers” (Loukov), “Mashenka” (Raizman), “Soldiers of the Swamp” (Matcheret)… In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time : there is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance amongst the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters : “Mashenka” for example is a war movie about a woman. And you also have a non-american (but rural) way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense : as in Berlioz). For exemple, in Pyriev’s masterpiece, there is no such sense of economy as in the classical american way of directing, la “mise en scène” is a little pompous, in fact, but in a non academical way, with a lot of ingenuity. Very pictural also, but also with a lot of ingenuity. And there are a lot of changes of registers (moods), much more than in the american movies. For exemple, “A Good Lad” (from 1943) by Boris Barnet is (in one hour!) a musical (with opera singing during the war scenes), a comedy, a love story, a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. (By the way, Barnet is the best russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed russian genius like Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease. ** And it’s always very interesting to see how Barnet treats some american genres, not only the war movies, but also for example the spy movies in his fabulous “Secret Agent”.) In these different aspects, those russian movies are more like the early thirties american movies, when the exuberance of the filmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes… Just think of a typical thirties masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck by Walsh. My movie, in some of these acceptions (songs, picturality, constant changes of registers, no hard-boiled virility all along, a central feminine character, etc.) is much more russian than american.

–Some of the soldiers are cinema critics? Why did you cast them? Are you making a comment about cinema writing? How do the soldiers – and the real people who play them – strike you?

They are my friends, and I like to work with my friends, because my friends are talented, and that’s why they are my friends.
By the way, I must say that, in all my answers, all the things I said occurred to me after the editing process, when I had to watch my completed movie over and over and so thought about it like a film critic. When Axelle was writing or when I was directing, I just tried to make what I liked, lost in emergency and rushing through the material and financial problems. But the main thing is that the more you love movies, the more you can free yourself of influences. You can not be sincere when you don’t really know what you like. That’s why film critic is the best school.

–Where did the music come from? Is it one song, sung throughout? Also who did the final song over the credits? How and why did you come to choose this music?

The songs in La France are an attempt to synthesise British pop-sike (nervous, acidic, driven, tongue in cheek, and incorporating elements of Victoriana & Nursery Rhyme), and Californian sunshine pop (slow, ethereal, hallucinogenic and featuring multi-layered harmonies), two mid-sixties musical genres. However, it’s a twisted synthesis because the instruments and the recording conditions are unlike the usual recording process required for this kind of music: no bass, no guitar, no drums, no organ… the actors played live, outdoors, like the 1917 “Poilus”, on trench-made acoustic instruments, built with junk (a coal bucket, a pickle tin can): the “charbonnière” guitar, the “cornichophone”, the square violin, the Vosges spinet, etc. The songwriters and arrangers for the songs are Fugu and Benjamin Esdraffo. The first one is coming from a sunshine pop background, the other one from pop-sike, which created this hybrid result. There are four different songs played live by the soldiers in my movie. The first three are original songs, the last one in an adaptation of the song of the end credits, which is a 1969 homemade demo of another unsung sixties genius : Robbie Curtice (the music was composed by Tom Payne, the lyrics by Robbie Curtice).

–You are a big music fan and record collector, I hear. How does music play into your films? What role does it play in your cinema and your life?

I did not write the script of La France, but only the lyrics of the songs. The script-writer is Axelle Ropert. She wrote the scripts of all my movies and even shorts (La France is my third movie being released in France in the theaters). In all the movies we’ve made (because she’s also a director), there is always something related to music. In Mods, garage music was central; in Axelle Ropert’s Etoile Violette, it was folk music; in La France, it is pop; in the Wolberg Family, Axelle Ropert’s next movie (written before the shooting of La France), it’s (northern) soul. It’s always that very same idea: to handle a musical genre by putting it in self-working fiction, like Craig Brewer’s beautiful movie Black Snake Moan succeeded to do for the blues. Self-working fiction means that the action has nothing to do with the current playing (no musicians, no managers, no concerts nor parties) and fiction doesn’t call up for the usual musical imagery (no Lambretta in Mods or patchouli in Etoile Violette or Carnaby Street outfits in La France). How can one find the essence of a musical genre when the story has nothing to do with music? I think it’a an interesting question.

–What is the most valuable record in your collection? Single? Album?

The french EP of The Birds (mod freakbeat).

–What are you listening to now? In Buenos Aires?

Nothing here, in Buenos Aires, because even if I’m here with three boxes of rare 45’s, because I’m Djaying tonight, I can not listen to them, because I don’t travel with my turntable, my speakers, etc.! And I do not have any Ipod, or things like that. But, the day before my flight ot Argentina, I was listening to the last two volumes (just released) of Messthetics, the beautiful UK seventies DIY-punk compilation series of Chuck Warner (the owner of the Hyped to Death label), some obscure fifties rockabilly (compiled by Billy Miller and Miriam Linna from Norton label), and some doo-woop and psychedelic singles I bought in New York two weeks ago.

–What songs or albums are inspiring to you?

Every song I like.

–Do you prefer to act or direct? And why?

I have more immediate pleasure (to quote one of my fave groups, The Eyes) when I act, but I have more eternal pleasure when I direct

–“La France” is very beautiful. What did you hope to achieve with the cinematography and look?

Thank you. The cinematography choices came from my desire to have many night-scenes in La France, like in the best war movie of all time : “Objective Burma” (Walsh). When my sister (the cameraman) and I thought about the lighting process, we wanted to get, without any special effects, a kind of secret oniric touch far away from the usual modernistic natural chiaroscuro. Take for example in “Gerry” (Gus Van Sant) the scene where Casey and Matt speak about the ancient greeks in front of a small campfire. Everything is completely black (you just can not see anything) except the fire and the parts of the two bodies lighted up by the natural light of the fire. In my movie, on the contrary, you can see a lot more things in the night scenes, because no part of the screen is completely dark, never, thanks to the many spotlights we used. So it’s artificial, like in the fifties movies, but this artificiality is buried, is secret, so to speak, because it is used subtly to get a soft image, where the colours are less constrated, the texture of the image almost a little blurred, and the same goes for the relation between the dark parts of the screen and the light ones, etc. All the boundaries are softed, to get this “aquarium feeling” you sometimes have in the best B movies (Tourneur, Ulmer, Dwan…: in “Cat People” for example, the dramatic tension is almost always induced by this subtle “aquarium lightning”). After all, my movie deals with Atlantis, so the lights must be just like “under the sea”, with all these soft shimmering stirrings just like invisible ripples. We used a film never used before for the shooting of a movie, the Kodak 5299, which is usually used as an intermediate film in numerical post-production.

–What do you love – or find relevant – about musicals? Why are there so few? Do you have a weakness or love for Scopitone images/films and music? Do you have a favorite and why? How do you feel about current music videos?

I do not love so much the musicals and it’s the only american genre that I don’t know well. To put it frankly, I have not seen many of them. My movie is not a musical, the soldiers just sing when they have nothing else to do, just like in the classical westerns, war movies, adventures movies, etc. I will be more precise : firstly, to have songs in a war movie (and not a musical movie!) is very classical (or used to be – when the american cinema was still great); secondly, the fact that these songs are not historically accurate is also classical and almost a convention, just like in all the other movies non-musical genres (think about Ricky Nelson singing in Rio Bravo, Marilyn in The River of no Return, Marlene in Rancho Notorious, etc.: are these 19th century songs, are these movies musicals? Not at all); thirdly, singing songs from a female point of view is also common (even the brutal Victor MacLaglen sings like this, if I remember right, in The lost patrol of John Ford, which could have been the title of my movie by the way), and it was a tradition in primitive folk music from the twenties and before (listen to the Alan Lomax or Harry Smith anthologies). So I hope I made clear that I never tried to get any “out of it” originality.

–Your previous short movie was called “Mods” and appeared to touch on that subculture? How do you see that film connecting with “La France”? Were you a mod? What did you like or connect with concerning mods?

Mods was one hour long, I am (dressed like a) a mod, like some of the characters in Mods, but I do not know how Mods connects to La France.

–What do you want those who see “La France” to come away with at the end?

96 tears.

–Do you still write about film? What was the last thing you wrote? And what interests you about or in film criticism?

No, the last thing I wrote was about Paul Vecchiali for a retro of his work in the festival of Belfort.

–How would you describe the state of cinema?

Poor.

South by Cynic

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By Kimberly Chun


› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Date night, March 15, the closing Saturday eve of the South by Southwest music conference, and I swear, the biggest thrill around is my offroadin’ pedicab ride on my way to the Diesel:U:Music bash atop Mount San Jacinto, through the remains of the Mess with Texas 2 music-comedy day-party in Waterloo Park. How sad is that?

"I do yoga, so that helps," explains my "driver" Liam (his name changed to protect the innocent). The spines of his spindly, highly waxed mohawk shiver like excited mushrooms beneath a forager’s greedy digits and his wire-rimmed spectacles gently mist as he steps up and pedals hard, climbing the park’s slopes as the Texas Capitol shines reprovingly above. "Hopefully it’s not all blocked off — this is my favorite shortcut."

Some shortcut: we career down too-tight paved paths, nearly get decked by a hat vendor stand, then head off onto the grass and through the woods, plunk down a curb — with minimal lady-passenger spillage — and then get back on a path and through a parking structure and finally, somehow, we’re on San Jac. Saint Jack ‘n’ Coke be praised. Liam glances back, mildly beatific: "Wanna smoke a bowl?"

Hey, I’ve only downed a few gratis cans of Lone Stars and a tall sweet tea ‘n’ vodka so far tonight — and with only a giveaway energy bar to absorb it all. Welcome to Austin, Texas, and SXSW, the now unfailingly polite, organizationally fine-tuned, and increasingly disappointing group-grope-n-grip for the increasingly somber, not-so-extravagantly partying music biz. Sure, the numbers are there — the fest appears to be doing well, with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 showcased acts, while pouring more than $77 million in expenditures into Austin coffers, according to 2007 stats — and the nontoiling gawkers and stalkers still filled the streets for what has become the nation’s fave musical spring break. But how to quantify the new wave of malaise? Roughly parse the leavings in the tea cup: where were the conference heavies when Dolly Parton bowed out due to health issues, as did, ahem, the Lemonheads? Was 60-ish ex-Oakland R&B elder Darondo’s much-talked-of Ubiquity appearance the best of the fest — or was it Yeasayer or Vampire Weekend? Does Ice Cube really wanna forsake Friday for the rap game? Can all the Euro and overseas showcases sub for the dampened-down US major label presence due to layoffs and cutbacks? At the troubled heart of 2008’s decentralized music biz, few could be heard whooping it up or mourning over at the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who as the state’s attorney general oversaw the uncovering of $50 million in unpaid royalties to musicians and served subpoenas against labels while investigating payola. Is it true, as so many I spoke to at SXSW have said, that "everything I’ve seen that I’ve liked, I’ve already seen before"? My, South By, how lame you were this year. (Can this trend bottom out? See Sonic Reducer’s 2007’s judgment: "But for a three-time SXSWhiner like myself … the fest generally underwhelmed this year," and 2006’s description of "the ground-level, vaguely dissatisfied vibe at this year’s fest — one studded with sentiments ranging from "there’s too many people here" to "everyone I’ve talked to is complaining about working too hard and not having any fun.")

Sure, there were plenty of free shows and oodles of guest-list jockeying, but when the most talked-about soirees were Perez Hilton’s hush-hush hoedown, Rachael Ray’s bid for day-party indie cred ("There better be good food!" one warily groaned), and natch, the Playboy after-hours warehouse rave — complete with more empties and Porta-Johns than you can shake a Hefty bag at — you can just toss the teacup and throw up your multi-wristbanded hands. The truth: do these brands, celebs, or marketing pipe dreams have anything to do with music? The sonic sustenance of SXSW has become secondary to product placement, relegated to background noise amid a recession-jittered hard sell. No surprise that my extremely random sampling of music lovers were uniformly disgruntled. They weren’t hearing the sounds that made it worth braving the yeehawing and puking hordes, risking podiatric agony for five whole nights.

Sure, there were revelatory moments: the grinning electro-diva Santogold, the crowd-entrancing the Whip, and teased blonde soulstress Duffy (dimpled Kate Bosworth-like everygirl to Amy Winehouse’s trouble-lady) were fab, as were Sightings and Evangelista. Lou Reed cracked mordantly wise even while hawking his new concert doc recreating Berlin (RCA, 1973), shades of Neil Young and Heart of Gold two years ago. SXSW organizers oughta take a cue from the packed "Vinyl Revival" panel, the teeming unofficial shows off the beaten Sixth Street path, where Monotonix raised the roof — and drum kit — at the Typewriter Museum, and where experi-punks screeched under sunny skies at Ms. Bea’s at shindigs hosted by Brooklyn party-starter Todd P, who was given his own official showcases this year. You can already make out signs of the next-gen underground filtering into Moby’s Girl Talk–like Playboy finale and folkie Liam Finn’s noise climax on DirectTV. Is the life-support-via-corporate-sponsorship worth the tourist buck, South By? Next time bring the focus back to the truly smokin’ sounds.

Also glad I saw: Black Moth Super Rainbow (spewing glitter and piñata), Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong (let the nouveau-mod boy-band revolution begin), Ra Ra Riot (kids love Arcade Fire!), High on Fire and Motorhead, Blitzen Trapper with Adam Stephens on harmonica, Justice and Moby’s DJ sets, Torche, High Places, Half Japanese (with a wiggly David Fair and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on sax), Deer Tick, Scary Mansions, Inca Ore and Grouper, a musically unimaginative but enthusiastic Carbon/Silicon, Goat the Head, Lightspeed Champion, Sons and Daughters, the Kills, "Body of War," Yacht, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Smalltown Supersounders Lindstrom and Kim Hiorthoy, Naked Raygun, the Dicks, the Ting Tings, Paper Rad, Samara Lubelski, and Black Helicopter.

Regret I missed: the Rascals, the Wombats, Barbara Mason, Jaymay, Bun B, the Bo-Keys, Game Rebellion, These New Puritans, Robyn, Pete Rock, Ruby Suns, Napalm Death, the Touch Alliance, Snowglobe, Kayo Dot, Ola Podrida, Bowerbirds, Dark Meat, White Rabbits, White Rainbow, El-P, Herman Dune, Holy Ghost!, Digitalism, Arp, Juiceboxxx, Supagroup, Daryl Hall, Meneguar, Black Ghosts, the Mirrors, Van Morrison, 17 Hippies, Afrobots, Working for a Nuclear Free City, Boyz Noize, Peggy Sue and the Pirates, Death Sentence: Panda!, Christian Kiefer, Megafaun, Salvador Santana Band, Psychic Ills, Devin the Dude, Passenger, the Morning Benders, the Tennessee Three, the Switches, Sera Cahoone, Little Freddie King, A-Trak, Kid Sister, the Clipse, Headlights, Los Llamarada, Pissed Jeans, Rob G, Wale, Dax Riggs, Neon Neon, These Are Powers, WILDILDLIFE, Clockcleaner, Look See Proof, the Cynics, Dusty Rhodes and the River Band, Rahdunes, Stars Like Fleas, and Cheveu.

Pigeon vs. Fuck: Pidgeon, the Pigeon Detectives, Pigeon John, and Woodpigeon go up against Fuck Buttons, Holy Fuck, and Fucked Up, umpired by CunninLynguists.

BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW

Wed/19, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

Saint Peter

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› a&e@sfbg.com

Arguably no modern film director made a better sustained entrance than Peter Bogdanovich, whose first four features were all triumphs. Targets (1968) was a chilling conceit that brought Hollywood pretend terror (Boris Karloff basically playing himself) against a modern real-world horror, the randomly mass-murdering sniper. That critical success led to a major studio deal to adapt (with then wife and collaborator Polly Platt) Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show (1971), a melancholy black-and-white flashback to 1950s rural Texas. It won two Oscars, was nominated for five more, and served as a launching pad for actors including Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd. Next came What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a delightful, San Francisco–set nod to 1930s screwball comedies with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Its huge success was equaled by 1976’s Paper Moon, with O’Neal and daughter Tatum as a Depression-era confidence duo.

That’s a heady four hits in five years — and they’ll all be shown at the Castro Theatre in a tribute to the director presented by Midnites for Maniacs’ Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. Another four films will be seen in director’s cuts different from original theatrical versions. Further, Bogdanovich himself will be on hand at all but the earliest matinees. He’s a great raconteur who’s insightfully frank about the ups and downs of an eventually checkered career.

"Ups and downs" puts it mildly. While Bogdanovich started out on top, Hollywood relished kicking him with each downward step. But he’s still here — and especially visible recently, thanks to his role on The Sopranos as Lorraine Bracco’s shrink. Behind the camera too, he’s gotten love lately from the four-hour DVD documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Bogdanovich, who hasn’t directed a big-screen movie since 2001’s lamentably underseen The Cat’s Meow with Kirsten Dunst, hopes to soon start shooting an adaptation of Tracey Letts’s jet-black stage comedy Killer Joe — and he’s got other irons in the fire.

If it’s thus a fine moment to be Bogdanovich, there have been many not-so-great ones. Phoning recently from Los Angeles, he recalls that before the debut of Daisy Miller (1974), his first commercial failure, critic Judith Crist asked him, "Is it good? It better be … because they’re waiting for you." Catching major flack for that film was Shepherd, the model-turned-actress he left Platt for.

"Peter and Cybill" were inseparable, possibly obnoxious. They cohosted The Tonight Show for a week and were reportedly arch as hell. They occupied the inaugural cover of People, with the headline "Living Together Is Sexy." The director quotes Cary Grant (doing a perfect vocal imitation) advising, "Petah, please stop telling people you’re happy and in love!" Asked why, Grant said, "Because they aren’t happy and in love."

Even those who liked Daisy Miller went Attila on 1975’s At Long Last Love, a lavish tribute to ’30s musicals with Cole Porter songs recorded live by some actors who were trained singers (Madeleine Kahn) and others who weren’t (Shepherd, Burt Reynolds). It was meant to be charming. It got the most vitriolic reviews this side of Battlefield Earth. Bogdanovich now says, "We rushed and fucked it up. The first preview in San Jose was an unmitigated disaster. Then we recut and remixed, and it played quite well. But I made some calamitous changes after that, and didn’t preview it again before release. We were just killed. Later we made a different edit. When Jesse called me to say he was showing it, I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I like it.’ ‘Oh, you’re the one.’<0x2009>"

The Castro will screen that improved edit — which is charming. Although the title is still a pseudonym for "turkey," At Long Last Love has never been released on video or DVD. In a town where success usually excuses all egotism, Bogdanovich had still somehow crossed a line. His failures were blamed on sheer arrogance. "I got a lot of that," he says — though back then a purportedly imperious on-set demeanor and statements like "I’m not modest, I’m not humble, and the more success I have, the more critics will resent me" surely didn’t help. He’d had the temerity to befriend Hollywood legends including Grant, John Ford, and Orson Welles — who was practically a permanent houseguest. Who the hell did he think he was?

Cynics had already interpreted Bogdanovich’s hit homages to Hollywood’s past as evidence he didn’t have an original thought in his head. Then they gloated over his nonhits. Despite the star power of Reynolds and both O’Neals, Nickelodeon was a 1976 Christmas flop. (Forced to shoot in color, Bogdanovich says, "It’s another movie in black and white" — which is how he’ll show it at the Castro.)

Despite excellent reviews, 1979’s Paul Theroux adaptation Saint Jack didn’t find an audience. Ditto 1981’s They All Laughed, an enchanting, ensemble romantic comedy. It was (among other things) a valentine to his new love and protégée, erstwhile Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten — who shortly after filming ended was killed by the thuggish promoter-husband she’d tried to leave amicably. That murder-suicide was followed by more ugliness: a war of words between Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner; "dramatization" of the tragedy in 1983’s Star 80 ("I begged Bob Fosse not to do it") and a TV movie; and distribution problems for They All Laughed that cost him millions. Sympathy soured when Bogdanovich became involved with Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise — who was all of six months older than his own daughter. (Nonetheless, their eventual marriage lasted 13 years.)

Bogdanovich had a left-field comeback in 1985’s Mask, with Eric Stoltz as Elephant Kid and Cher as biker-chick mom. But even that was marred by public sparring with both Cher and studio execs. The latter substituted Bob Seger tunes for Bruce Springsteen ones key to the story’s real-life inspiration. (The Castro’s "theatrical world premiere" cut restores all the Bruuuuce.) Whether good, bad, or indifferent, his subsequent ventures flopped. In an eerie echo of past events, 1993’s The Thing Called Love came out (barely) after star River Phoenix OD’d. Bogdanovich turned to directing TV episodes (including for The Sopranos) and cable movies. It wasn’t a comedown, he says. "The scripts were good … and I got to work with actors like Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, and George Segal."

Bogdanovich also relit an acting career abandoned decades earlier. Having written essays about film history (notably for Esquire) before moving to Hollywood, he thinks his industry hater trail is partly due to perception of him as critic turned filmmaker. He considers the roughly 45 stage productions he acted in (and the 6 he directed) from age 15 to 24 as his real prior job.

Given all past tempests, Bogdanovich seems on good terms with his exes — Shepherd (in town with the play Curvy Widow) has promised to show up at the Castro late Friday for The Last Picture Show and At Long Last Love; Louise is flying in to talk about her late sister when They All Laughed shows on Sunday.

Is it painful for them to see Dorothy Stratten onscreen? "Yeah, especially now that [costar] John Ritter has died," he says. "But you know, when you see it with an audience, it’s OK — it takes the pain somewhat away. One of the peripheral tragedies [to Stratten’s death] was that the movie was never properly seen in its day. You couldn’t really look at it in the way it was meant to be enjoyed."

A GENUINE TRIBUTE TO PETER BOGDANOVICH

Fri/7–Sun/9, $10 per day ($25 weekend pass)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com, www.ticketweb.com

SFIAAFF: Multiculti cock-meat sandwich

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› superego@sfbg.com

When we last left crazy-ass Kumar (Kal Penn) and his more straitlaced college pal Harold (John Cho), at the end of the 2005 stoner epic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, they’d just victoriously satiated their munchies with enough sliders to block a rhino’s colon. That movie was a classic bong-wielding buddy road-trip flick — Question: How long does it take two potheads to get to a drive-through? Answer: Neil Patrick Harris on ecstasy — that was improbably hailed by serious critics as a multicultural breakthrough. Kumar is Indian American and Harold Asian American, a combination of lead ethnicities that was new to the American mainstream. And even though lineage figures little in the characters’ daily realities, Harold’s and Kumar’s difference from the cartoonish honky inbreds and skinheads (and candid others of color) that exist beyond their postmillennial collegiate bubble — and who often mistake them for Arabs — fuels the plot. Dude, where’s my kufi?

White Castle screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg giddily foreground the first movie’s subtext in their follow-up (which they also directed), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, a special presentation at this year’s San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. Mistaken for terrorists when they’re caught with a "smokeless bong" on a flight to Amsterdam, weed capital of the world, our hapless heroes ("North Korea and al-Qaeda working together," gloats their bumbling FBI nemesis) are imprisoned in Gitmo. After being presented with a jailer’s massive "cock-meat sandwich" — "I’ve never sucked dick before," quips Kumar. "I bet it sucks dick!" — and submitted to various tortures, they eventually escape, crashing a "bottomless" hot tub party, impersonating Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice, and lighting up with George W. Bush himself. No shit.

I caught up with Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and actor Cho — a surprisingly intellectual type who studied English at UC Berkeley — as they prepared to promote the new movie at wacky comics convention WonderCon.

SFBG For Arab Americans like me, this movie is like a nightmare come true. People gasp whenever I stand up on an airplane, and 9 times out of 10 I’m the one who’s pulled over for "random" searches. I know that Indian Americans often experience similar treatment. But Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay seems revolutionary in that it expands that situation to include the feelings of Asian Americans, and it’s playing at the [SF International] Asian American Film Fest. Do you think Asian Americans relate?

JOHN CHO I would assume that every immigrant group has their own bag of individual problems. I don’t know if Asian Americans get hassled at the airport — maybe they do. Traveling with Kal on the publicity tour for the first film, I got to see firsthand how he was treated — and that’s real; he was patted down all the time. We were traveling together, and he’s the one that got pulled aside. I’m really happy that the film’s playing at the festival. I feared that Asian Americans wouldn’t accept this movie — the subject matter isn’t discussed much in the community — but it seems that the programmers feel they will.

SFBG Not to state the obvious here, but Jon and Hayden, you’re a couple of white guys. I’m wondering if these scripts come from your own experiences, or if you do a lot of research?

JON HURWITZ We’re white guys, but we’re Jews. So we’re already a minority subset, but I don’t really know if that plays into it. We’ve always had a large group of multicultural friends and been able to observe and have conversations with people with different points of view. As a writer and director you’re just hoping to put something out there that’s new. Something with Asian American and Indian American leads was something that hadn’t been done in the way that we were doing it. We felt that we had enough perspective as huge fans of comedy to pull it off.

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG We didn’t set out to make this big statement, although I have to say when we looked at the first one when it was done, we said, "Wow, this is so much better than we thought." It went way beyond the fart jokes, weed humor, and nudity that we love to put up on-screen. But it’s really just a classic comedy trope. Two guys, a baggie, a voyage. . . . It was the right time to have someone finally throw ethnicity into the mix. The script took off from there. The only question now is, where else can we take this? Harold and Kumar Fly the Space Shuttle?

JC And the focus is always on being funny first. The characters’ races are almost secondary. I find that so refreshing because a lot of Asian American cinema is just about being Asian American, how hard it is. Not to denigrate anyone’s work, but those movies get really repetitive, and fewer people want to see them.

SFBG Speaking of space — John, you’re about to be mobbed at WonderCon because you’ve accepted the role of Mr. Sulu in the upcoming Star Trek film. Following in actor George Takei’s footsteps must feel huge.

JC I’m delighted. As a kid it meant so much to me to see an Asian American on television and say, "Whoa! He’s not wearing a cone-shaped hat or teaching kung fu!" It was very important, a legacy that I desperately wanted to be a part of, and something I feel my work on the Harold and Kumar movies pays tribute to. Now Asian Americans can be stoners too.

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sat/15, 9:15 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

Borts Minorts

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PREVIEW Leap year is here! Looking for a suitably unusual event to celebrate this once-every-four-years occurrence? I strongly suggest scampering over to the Hemlock Tavern for a Club Chuckles lineup that’s poised to scramble the brain of any comedy connoisseur. Headliners Borts Minorts defy simple description. See, there’s this guy in a hooded white unitard and a headset mic who sings and flails and contorts — he might be an alien or an android, but it’s doubtful anything but an actual human would be able to bring such pure and bizarre joy to the stage. Equally enthusiastic are the Borts backup dancers, who flaunt leotards and fishnets (and the occasional pair of lederhosen), and whose energetic choreography demonstrates limber limbs and an admirable appreciation of jazz hands. Borts’s music is similarly befuddling, in the best possible way — a combination of samples, keyboards, horns, drums, theremin, slide whistles, a single-stringed bass made out of a snow ski, and god knows what else, but I guarantee you’ll not see anything as sense-assaultingly entertaining this leap year, or any other year. Local duo Ramshackle Romeos render classics like "Feelings" with nearly as many instruments as a full orchestra (including a mean musical saw), and comedians Drennon Davis and Alex Koll rock the mic between musical numbers.

BORTS MINORTS With Drennon Davis, Alex Koll, and Ramshackle Romeos. Fri/29, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

“Cinema Piemonte”

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PREVIEW The northwestern Italian region of Piemonte is noted for production of wine, wheat, and Fiats. Its principal city, Turin, a.k.a. Torino, was briefly the nation’s capital after unification — and soon afterward became the focus of its early film industry as well. While both crowns were eventually stolen by Rome, the area maintained a role in Italian cinema through the decades. That history is sampled in this weekend of features set in Piemonte, presented by the Associazione Piemontesi of Northern California in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and Regione Piemonte. The four programs run a wide gamut, not least because they span 90 years between them. The closer on Sunday should be a major occasion: a restored print of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 Cabiria, the apex of the lavish costume epics that dominated Turin’s industry and proved a huge influence on the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. This three-hour tale of ancient Rome will be accompanied live by pianist Stefano Maccagno, playing his original score. Another big international hit was 1949’s Bitter Rise, a heady brew of neorealism and noir melodrama that made Silvana Mangano — at the time a very well-developed 19 years old — into the first postwar Euro bombshell. Packed into tight clothes as a scheming peasant rice harvester, she seemed the very embodiment of wanton s-e-x years before Bardot, Monroe, and Loren came along. Mario Monicelli’s 1963 I Compagni, a.k.a. The Organizer, is a somewhat more serious labor drama, with Marcello Mastroianni, superb as usual, portraying a professor agitating for improved textile worker conditions at the dawn of the 20th century. Opening the weekend, and serving as its lightest note, is Davide Ferrario’s Dopo Mezzanote (After Midnight, 2004), a whimsical romantic comedy set in Turin’s Mole Antonelliana — a beautiful 19th-century structure that happens to house Italy’s National Museum of Film.

CINEMA PIEMONTE Fri/29, 7 p.m.; Sat/1, 4 and 7:30 p.m.; Sun/2, 4 p.m., free

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

www.piemontesinoca.com, www.fortmason.org

Text-messaging the apocalypse

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HORROR FILM Jacob Gentry, one of the three codirectors of The Signal, assures me he’s "fully prepared for the zombie apocalypse." His cohorts, David Bruckner and Dan Bush, agree that they love zombie movies. But they would also like to make it clear that The Signal — which supposes that "a rift in the electromagnetic sector" has infected cell phones, televisions, and other devices, inspiring all who experience it to inflict terrible violence — is not a zombie movie.

"If you took all 360 channels of your satellite TV and spat them out in one single signal and turned the volume up, would you become a little bit more frantic?" Bruckner asks. "If it pushed one person to the point of pushing another person, could it start a giant chain reaction of violence across the country?"

Bush adds, "I look around me and I see a lot of pissed-off people that are really close to some sort of violence as it is. In our movie the people are conscious, they’re rational, they’re aware of their decisions — they’re not bloodsucking morons."

Yep, they’re rational — and that’s what makes them so spooky. The Signal unfolds in three chapters, each helmed by a different director. Every segment is told from the point of view of a different character: cheatin’ wife Mya (Anessa Ramsey), her lover Ben (Justin Welborn), and her jealous husband, Lewis (A.J. Bowen).

"The first section is visceral and straightforward," Bruckner explains. "Then we get into the second section and we get inside the head of someone who’s very, very signalized. From his perspective it takes on a black-comedy tone. Then we get to the third section and we focus on the hero and his journey."

Cinematic gore and chaos are always enjoyable, and The Signal, which taps into the totally legitimate notion that humans are slaves to their technology, conveys an overall feeling of psychic dread. But the film’s middle section, in which a weapons-wielding Lewis home-invades a failed New Year’s Eve party, is the film’s strongest. Perhaps it’s because humor is the most comfortable way to digest the film’s suggestion that anarchy is just one fucked-up frequency away.

THE SIGNAL

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

Mother of all indie?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Is indie rock back? Did it ever go away? Is it to safe to wax naïf and twee once more? Is my shirt ill fitting yet modest? Will Converse ever go out of style? Do the Strokes suck? Wait, who are the Strokes?

Thoughts worth flexing one’s gray matter around on the verge of the indie-oriented Noise Pop music festival — though, well, the RCA-aligned Strokes ain’t indie, really. Nor can one imagine their jumpy once-new-rock appearing on the shock chart topper for the week of Jan. 27: the Juno soundtrack. The disc bounded bashfully up Billboard’s Top 200 over the course of a month till it reached the peak at a mere 65,000 copies, allegedly delivering a first-time number one to Warner Bros.–affiliated Rhino Records and inspiring many a question mark. Such as, isn’t 65,000 awfully low for the number one album in the country — surely those crack six digits?

Well, no more, apparently, in the many-niched, entertainment-rich marketplace (the sole exception: triple or quadruple threat Jack Johnson?). Sure, geeks are once again chic — as Superbad, Rocket Science, Eagle vs. Shark, and numerous other awkwardness-wracked cinematic offerings could tell you. And don’t forget, brainy indie rockers à la the Shins and Modest Mouse have been making inroads in chartland of late. Even the woman pegged by mainstream movie critics as the soundtrack’s breakout star, the Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson, has been around since the turn of the century, when she was banging her bleached ‘fro against Adam Green’s tennis headband onstage at the Fillmore. Please, indie, let’s not even go into how long Cat Power, Belle and Sebastian, and Sonic Youth have been doing the do — and how canonical the Kinks, Mott the Hoople, and Velvet Underground are. Has indie — and its primary sources — simply reached an apex of popularity by virtue of low overall CD sales?

Like its music, Juno the film doesn’t quite reinvent the wheel but instead delivers the hormonal, feminine flip side of Rushmore‘s protagonist, less an antihero than a talented misfit learning from a young person’s mistakes. Pregnant with meaning, Dawson’s frail, wobbly voice — buttressed by her verbose, brainy lyrics — embodies that character and aesthetic as much as her clear inspiration, the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, who sings the ever-sweet-‘n’-lowly "I’m Sticking with You" on the soundtrack.

It’s not so much that everyone is discovering indie rock: instead, perhaps the soundtrack gets much of its shine from the fact that the music is such an intrinsic part of the film’s emotional power — it’s as memorable as Juno’s rapid-fire, perhaps overly arch one-liners. Playing the film’s title tyke, Ellen Page at times sounds like a 35-year-old woman in a 16-year-old’s body. And in its no-fail, crowd-pleasing selections, the soundtrack similarly plays like a cultured 35-year-old’s music collection in teen comedy maternity garb. Now how fair is that? I’m tempted to call foul for the outclassed Hannah Montana 2 soundtrack (Walt Disney/Hollywood). *

KIMYA DAWSON

Thurs/21, 7 p.m., call for price

924 Gilman Street Project

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

SIX-SIX-SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE TIME!

Six Organs of Admittance’s new CD, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City), rocks ‘n’ drones the most — but don’t expect the project’s winter tour–besieged Ben Chasny to scrape together too many thoughts on the making of the album: his "brain is on zombie mode," he concedes during a drive to Minnesota. Yet he does let on that the lovely Shelter was the result of simply bunking down, looking around his Mission District neighborhood for musical assistance (including from Comets on Fire kin Noel Harmonson and Fucking Champs chief Tim Green, who dwell nearby), and enlisting his live-in paramour, Magik Marker frontwoman Elisa Ambrogio, and Matt Sweeney, who happened to be in town for a wedding.

Too bad the Mars Volta had to swipe Chasny’s Ouija board rock ‘n’ roll thunder with their supposedly magic-derived new LP. "I was actually designing a Ouija board to sell during this tour — there are some really beautiful ones out there," he says. "And I ended up looking up Ouija on Wikipedia and found out about the Mars Volta, and I just gave up on the whole project." Of course, there are upsides to that downer. Chasny adds, "Elisa was, like, ‘It’s turning into a Six Organs tchotchke revue.’<0x2009>"

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

Sat/23, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Glad to be unhappy

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance — and MGM-level musical magnitude. Davies is one of the greatest directors of the final quarter of the 20th century. He’s created at least two acknowledged classics, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), and I count his 1992 rendering of a movie-mad childhood, The Long Day Closes, as one of my all-time favorite films. In a single shot that passes across the floors of a family apartment, Davies captures the magic of nature mingling with artifice (a waterfall of raindrops, reflected from a window, passing over the leaf pattern of a carpet), then conveys the passage of time with a potency that never fails to bring a tear to my unsentimental eye.

Time, free-flowing through mental mazes of negative space that Manny Farber would have to admire, is at the center of Davies’s autobiographical work. He connects music with memory in a manner that yields greater returns each time one returns to his movies. At the Pacific Film Archive, he’ll appear at screenings of The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), Distant Voices, The Long Day Closes, and The Neon Bible (1995) and lead an audience through a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices. In anticipation of this visit, I recently spoke with him on the phone.

SFBG It’s disheartening to read about the various funding problems you’ve been encountering over the past eight years.

TERENCE DAVIES We don’t have a cinema in this country — we just have an extension of television. You’ve got 25-year-olds who don’t know anything and think cinema started with [Quentin] Tarantino. We’re just little England. We’ve become virtually another state of America. In 20 years’ time, if we don’t watch it, we’ll be just like Hawaii, but without the decent weather.

SFBG Within British cinema, your films don’t fit into the contrasts that place David Lean–like literary adaptations or the documentary base of directors like Lindsay Anderson against more flamboyant directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Joseph Losey. You have elements of all of the above: your work is autobiographical and learned, but it has also has a flamboyance I relate to, though it isn’t outrageous.

TD I suppose my influences were very simple: the British comedies from the period when I was growing up and American melodramas and musicals. I remember being taken by my two older sisters to see Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing [1955] or All That Heaven Allows [1955] and going by myself to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954] or The Pajama Game [1957] and any comedy that attracted Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim.

My films are an amalgam of those things and of the fact that I was brought up Catholic. I was very devout until I was 22. What a waste that was!

Also, I was influenced by classical music, particularly [Jean] Sibelius and [Dmitry] Shostakovich and my beloved [Anton] Bruckner. And poetry. [My family] got our first television in 1961, and about two years later, over the course of four nights, Alec Guinness read [T.S. Eliot’s] entire Four Quartets from memory.

SFBG Your current documentary project, Of Time and the City, is about your hometown of Liverpool. I came across an interview from the era of Distant Voices, Still Lives in which you talk about its utter transformation and deterioration. That interview dates from almost 20 years ago. Have the changes continued?

TD Yes, inevitably. At the time I left, Liverpool was very down at heel. I left it at its worst. It’s getting better now, but there’s still an awful lot to be done. The evocation of war that Humphrey Jennings did in Listen to Britain [1942] I’m trying to do for Liverpool. I wanted to try and capture what it was like when I was growing up. Even I was shocked at some of the footage of the slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. I grew up in one, and when you grow up in one you don’t realize it, because everyone else is in the same boat. But seeing footage of it now, it’s absolutely appalling. When you think that in 1953 this massive amount of money was spent on the coronation of the present queen, it’s just obscene. They get away with it — it’s quite extraordinary. I’m very much a republican; I’m not a monarchist. When you juxtapose the coronation with the footage that we’ve found, it’s shocking.

SFBG Solitude and rich sensory experience are qualities at the core of your movies. Those qualities take on specific aspects in cinema — your use of darkness in relation to light is connected to, and even a few times directly about, the experience of being in a dark movie theater.

TD You have to see the films in the cinema. It’s lovely to see, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948] on the telly, but if you see it projected, it’s even more ravishing. The only way to see a film is in the cinema — nowhere else.

SFBG I first saw my favorite of your films, The Long Day Closes, at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.

TD The Castro is a beautiful theater. But I remember that when I was there, two men were walking down the aisle and one asked, "What did you see last night?" The other said he’d seen the [Terence Davies] Trilogy. The first asked, "What did you think?" And the other said, "Not very good."

SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.

TD Another man said to me, "These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," which I thought was a wonderful insult — practically a compliment. Isn’t that fabulous?

CLOSELY WATCHED FILMS: TERENCE DAVIES

Feb. 20–27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Bang! Comedian John Witherspoon comes to Oakland

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By Erik Morse

Few comedians can leave me in complete stitches the way John Witherspoon can. He is quite simply a legend of the giggle, the guffaw, and the frustrated wince.

Although he’s best known as the grouchy father Mr. Jones in Ice Cube’s Friday trilogy and as Pops on the WB comedy series, The Wayans Brothers, Witherspoon has had a long and eclectic career since his earliest days as a fashion model in Detroit.

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He’s also blessed with the dulcet tones of Johnny Mathis if you can ever convince him to hum a few bars. Now the bow-tied curmudgeon is coming to the Bay Area for a four-night showcase to spread a bit more of his charm. The Guardian caught him on the phone just as he was packing up for his trip to the East Bay.

SFBG: So did you follow the election at all on Tuesday?

John Witherspoon: Yeah, my wife is an avid Obama fan. I voted but I never tell her who I voted for or she’d go crazy. I tell her it’s the only thing I got that I don’t have to give anyone. It’s my vote.


Friday: Classic ‘Spoon.

Furries, for real

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Super Furry Animals are a mischievous lot. Having marked the universe with their tech-pop grandeur for 15 years, they must now keep the world wondering where their music will pop up next and in what form. For their new album, Hey Venus! (Rough Trade), the Welsh quintet maintain their love of vast, Donald Fagen–esque noodling but have stripped down into a craftily introspective niche. In keeping with their new sound, they have a secret weapon in the studio, and it isn’t bleeding-edge sonic wizardry or Timbaland at the desk. It’s a dulcimer — a hammer dulcimer, to be exact, and it’s wielded on some songs with as much aplomb as any siren, blip, or squawk that’s graced any of their previous seven full-lengths. What gives? "For some reason, [the album] has a ‘band playing in a room’ kind of mood," lead vocalist Gruff Rhys offers simply, speaking on the phone from Cardiff, Wales, in early January. "Nobody brought any samplers to the recording sessions."

Super Furry Animals emerged from the Welsh capital city amid a wave of other acts, effectively marking a movement that included bands like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Catatonia. The core members of the group had originally come together as a techno outfit — a background that set them apart from their contemporaries. The group’s first album, Fuzzy Logic (Creation, 1996), saw the combo establish its mastery of cheekily strident pop tunes. Its next release, Radiator (Flydaddy, 1997), upped the ante with an inventive melodic complexity that the Furries had obviously already mastered.

The band made its mark by continuing to issue fearless, originally crafted indie rock that stemmed at least in part from Rhys’s schizoid musical background: he was in a jangle-pop band called Emily before moving on to noise ensemble Ffa Coffi Pawb. The Furries’ next release, Guerilla (Flydaddy, 1999), is a densely layered technorock symphony that ranges between the cheeky blips of songs like "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)" and the introspective balladeering of tracks like "Fire in My Heart." Each disc since has been notable for a particular reason, whether it’s an all-Welsh double album (2000’s Mwng [Placid Casual]), a special DVD with a video crafted for each song (2001’s Rings around the World [Sony]), or the quirky explorations into spaced-out country rock and überharmonic ruminating on recent albums Phantom Power (XL, 2003) and Love Kraft (XL/Beggars, 2005). Hey Venus!, Rhys explains, is partially based on the mellow mood he described earlier in our conversation. "In the past I wrote all the lyrics, and then the last two years [the band has become] more confident and has started to bring complete songs to the soup." He pauses, then confirms, "I suppose this was a songwriting kind of record."

Which brings us back to that dulcimer, most prominently used on the bittersweet "Carbon Dating." It’s a signature Furries multicultural hash: a kaleidoscopic ballad that begins as a carnival waltz before morphing into Motown–meets–Ennio Morricone doo-wop surrealism. Rhys credits its composer, keyboard player Cian Ciárán, calling it "the most beautiful song on the record" before explaining that Ciárán also played dulcimer on it. Demonstrating the band’s virtuosity and playfulness in the studio, the dulcimer is showcased like a sonic effect throughout Hey Venus!, echoing like a ghost as all other instruments drop away. Lest fans think the Furries have gone fully folk, Rhys laughs and explains the instrument’s lure: "Dulcimer for us represents a lot of the old Michael Caine cold war spy movies. He always had [it] going on in his soundtracks."

Cosmopolitan kitsch aside, Hey Venus! runs an emotional and socioeconomic gamut, albeit with a wink of the eye. On the Shangri-Las throwback "Runaway," lovers flee each other while wistfully recalling the other’s "banking details." (The video is an ’80s-inspired romp with Matt Berry of United Kingdom comedy series The Mighty Boosh.) There are also moments of quintessential SFA lyrical humor, as on "Baby Ate My Eightball," which offers the apologetic understatement of the decade, "See you on the other side / Sorry to cut your life so short." Equally acerbic is the track "Suckers!," which offers a straightforward litany of gripes concerning the world and its gullible inhabitants. Rhys wryly calls it a "miserable, complaint-rock song" that came to him at a dark moment on a rainy day in Cardiff: "Sometimes I sing that song tongue in cheek, and at other times I sing it and it’s absolutely sincere."

Rhys sounds like he’s still skating on that schizoid musical past. Yet while Hey Venus! seems to function as a musical exorcism of sorts, the frontman sees it as part of the natural order of the Super Furried Universe, with each recording a reaction to the last. He suggests that the next effort will depart from their current space age moodiness. "Maybe next time we’ll bring back the electronics," he says. He pauses and laughs before adding, "And I can start writing lyrics that are less exposed!"

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

With Holy Fuck and Here Here

Sat/9, 9 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

G-Spot: Valentine’s Day events

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

Amor del Mar Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5326, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Feb 14, 6pm, $100. Celebrate San Francisco’s love affair with the bay and support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation at this gala celebration featuring global cuisine, decadent drinks, live music, and exhibitions.

Erotic Playground One Taste, 1074 Folsom; www.tantriccircus.com. Sat/9, 8pm; $30 single women, $50 single men, $60 couples. The Tantric Circus presents a sexy evening of burlesque, striptease, male lap dance, fruit feeding, DJs, and more.

Eternal Spring SomArts Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan; 1-888-989-8748, eternalspring08.com. Sat/9, 2-10pm, $7. Celebrate life, love, arts, and creativity at this all-day event including a fashion show, performances, free classes (hoop, poi, yoga, and more!), DJs, and shopping.

Heroes and Hearts Luncheon Union Square; 206-4478, www.sfghf.net. Feb 14, 11:30am, $300. Celebrate those who have helped the community and support the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation by attending this luncheon and auction of artist-created tabletop heart sculptures.

My Sucky Valentine XIII ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $15-25. Listen to tales of tainted love and bad sex by good writers including Thomas Roche, Carol Queen, Michelle Tea, and mi blue, all to benefit the Women’s Community Clinic and the St. James Infirmary.

One Night Stand X ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Sat/9, 6-11pm, $15-25. Support the Center for Sex and Culture and the SF Artists Resource Center at this sexy multimedia event including live nude models, paint wrestling, erotic food feeding, and performances.

PINK’s 2nd Annual Valentine’s Day Party Look Out Bar, 3600 16th St; 703-9751, www.mypartner.com. Sat/9, 8pm-2am, $25. MyPartner.com cohosts this year’s party and benefit for the GLBT Historical Society. About 300 single gay guys are expected to enjoy an open Svedka vodka bar and hobnobbing with guests like Assemblymember Mark Leno and Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Poetry Battle of (All) the Sexes Beat Museum, 540 Broadway; 863-6306, www.poormagazine.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $20 to fight, $15 to watch. Challenge your partner (or future partner) to a battle of spoken word, hip-hop, poetry, or flowetry in the ring at this benefit for Poor magazine.

Prom Pete’s Tavern, 128 King; 817-5040, www.petestavernsf. Feb 14, 9pm, $10. What’s more romantic than prom? Prom in the ’80s! Enjoy music, decorations, mock gambling, and dancing, all to benefit Voices, a nonprofit that works with emancipated foster youths. Admission includes one drink, gambling chips, and a photo.

Queen of Arts: A Profane Valentine Coronation Sssshh…!, 535 Florida; www.anonsalon.com/feb08. Feb 15, 10pm, $10-20. The production team that brought us Sea of Dreams presents a sexy night of DJs, dancing, art, and performance, including Kitty-D from Glitch Mob, Mancub from SpaceCowboys, Fou Fou Ha!, and Merkley.

Queen of Hearts Ball Mighty, 119 Utah; 974-8985, www.goodvibes.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $25. Good Vibrations and Dr. Carol Queen host this decadent fairy-tale-themed costume party featuring MC Peaches Christ, circus performances by Vau de Vire Society, a fetish fashion show, and dancers from the Lusty Lady.

Romancing the Reptiles: Wild Love! Tree Frog Treks, 2112 Hayes; 876-3764, www.treefrogtreks.com. Sat/9, noon-2pm; $40 adults, $25 kids. Join animal care director Ross Beswick as you learn about how animals pick their mates and where baby animals come from.

Sensualité 111 Minna, 111 Minna; www.celesteanddanielle.com/party.html. Feb 15, 9pm; $15 advance, $20 at the door. Wear something sexy to this multimedia Valentine’s Day event featuring aphrodisiac appetizers, exotic rhythms, tarot readings, performances, a raffle, and a no-host bar.

Sweet Valentine’s Cruise Pier 431/2; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. Feb 14, 5pm; $48 adult, $34 youth. Join the Red and White Fleet for a romantic, fun, two-hour cruise of the San Francisco Bay, including a lavish appetizer buffet by Boudin and a complimentary beverage.

Transported SF Valentine’s Singles Party Pickup at Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom; transportedsf.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm, $21.49. Join DJs Ana Sia and Felina aboard the biodiesel Transported SF bus for sultry sounds, schmoozing with other singles, and stops at gorgeous outdoor dancing locales.

Woo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo; Sloat at 47th St; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Sat/9, Feb 13-15, 6pm; Sun/10, Feb 17, noon; $75. This multimedia event, conducted by Jane Tollini of the now-defunct Sex Tours, explores the sexual and mating behaviors of animals. Also featuring champagne and romantic refreshments.

BAY AREA

Flamenco, Candlelight and Roses Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 287-8700, www.cafedelapaz.net. Feb 14, 5:30, 6, 8, and 8:30pm; Feb 15-16, 6:30pm; $75-115. The nuevo Latino café celebrates the sweet side of love with three days of dinner plus a show, featuring the acclaimed Caminos Flamencos dance company.

Nest Firecracker Valentine Event Nest, 1019 Atlas Peak, Napa; (707) 255-7484. Sat/9-Sun/10, 10am-6pm, $5. Celebrate Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day together while shopping for unique gifts and making art projects with scrapbook artist Janine Beard, all to benefit the "Nest Egg" fund through the Arts Council of Napa.

Sweetheart Tea Yerba Buena Nursery, 19500 Skyline, Woodside; (650) 851-1668, www.yerbabuenanursery.com. Sat/9, noon, $25. Enjoy a traditional tea service with a special Valentine’s Day menu, followed by a stroll through the nursery’s gorgeous gardens.

Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Fri/8-Sat/9, 9:30am-4:30pm; Feb 12-14, 9:30am-1pm; $6 per child, $5 for accompanying adult. Contribute to a large heart sculpture and create handmade cards from recycled materials. Bring valentine-making supplies to receive a free adult admission pass.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave; 1-866-912-6326, www.legionofhonor.org. Feb 14, 5:30pm, $10-20. The Cinema Supper Club at the Legion of Honor presents this film as part of "The Real Drama Queens" series, including a special exhibition opening at 5:30pm, dinner seating at 6pm (reservations made separately; call 750-7633), and film screening at 8pm.

BATS Improv Valentine’s Day Show Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Feb 14, 8pm; $10 advance, $15 at the door. Whether you’re flying solo, with friends, or on a date, this audience-participation show is the perfect place to enjoy the funny side of romance.

The Best American Erotica Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia; 282-9246, www.moderntimesbookstore.com. Feb 13, 7:30pm, free. Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series with this showcase of standout stories, including a hot and edgy piece from Susie Bright.

Boston Marriage Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Feb 7-March 2, call or see Web site for schedule, $15-35. Join Anna and Claire and their crazy maid for Theatre Rhinoceros’s version of David Mamet’s same-sex romp.

Brainpeople Zeum, 221 Fourth St; 749-2228, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 16. $20. American Conservatory Theater presents the world-premiere production of this newest work by José Rivera, screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries, about two women who reckon with their pasts in an apocalyptic future.

The Eyes of Love Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post; 393-0100, www.milibrary.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $15 members, $25 public. Back by popular demand, chanteuse Helene Attia will select from her vast repertoire of love songs, classic and contemporary. Admission includes hors d’oeuvres, libations, and dessert.

Hope Briggs and Friends: A Musical Valentine Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Feb 17, 3pm, $25-50. Celebrated soprano Hope Briggs shares favorite opera arias alongside 15-year-old singing sensation Holly Stell and virtuoso violinist Dawn Harms.

How We First Met Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.howwefirstmet.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $22-35. Real audience stories are spun into a comedy masterpiece in this one-of-a-kind hit show.

In Search of the Heart of Chocolate Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero; 310-0290, www.chocumentary.com. Tues/12, 6:30 and 7:30pm, $10. Bay Area filmmaker Sarah Feinbloom screens her new chocumentary, about Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered and its customers. Screenings followed by a chocolate reception featuring art and live music.

I Used to Be So Hot Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. Feb 14, 7 and 9pm; Feb 15-16, 8pm; $20. InnerRising Productions presents comedian Mimi Gonzalez, a Detroit native who’ll take you on a journey through sexual politics and queer discovery.

Lovers and Other Monsters Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; 377-4202, thrillpeddlers.com. Feb 12-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 7pm; $20-34.50. With a diabolical nod to Valentine’s (and Presidents’) Day, Thrillpeddlers presents a weeklong rotating lineup of live music, exquisite torture, and expert testimony, including Jill Tracy, Jello Biafra, and Creepshow Camp horror theater.

Miss Ann Peterson’s Broken Heart Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom; 1-800-838-3006, www.tangolamelodia.com. Feb 13-16, 8pm, $15. See the premiere of Tango la Melodia’s new multimedia production, a three-night concert featuring original music, poetry, and performance set in the romantic, sexy Roaring ’20s.

Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com, www.getmortified.com. Fri/8, Mon/11, 8pm; $12 advance, $15 at the door. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen-angst artifacts. The creator of the nationwide and NPR phenomenon, David Nadleberg, will be in attendance in celebration of the release of Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield (Simon Spotlight).

Not Exactly Valentine’s Show Purple Onion, 140 Columbus; 567-7488, www.talkshowsf.com. Mon/11, 7pm, $18-20. Presented by Talk Show Live, Beth Lisick talks about her latest work and performs from her slam repertoire, chocolatier Chuck Siegel of Charles Chocolates gives an interview and tasting, Vicki Burns performs a program of "sort-of romantic standards," and Kurt Bodden reads a short story by James Thurber.

Philosophy/Art Salon: What is Erotic? Femina Potens Art Gallery, 2199 Market; 217-9340, www.feminapotens.com. Feb 16, 6:30-8:30pm, $10-25. Philosopher Rita Alfonso joins erotica writer Jennifer Cross and artist Dorian Katz for a brief show-and-tell followed by a Socratic dialogue on the question "What makes for erotic art?"

Romeo and Juliet: Gala 40th Anniversary Screening Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; 863-0611, www.thecastrotheatre.com. Feb 14, 7pm; $25 adult, $12.50 youth. Marc Huestis and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura present a 40th-anniversary screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic classic, with star Olivia Hussey in attendance and a live musical performance.

Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, McBean Theater; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

The Gin Game Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Feb 14, 8pm, $10 special Valentine’s Day price. Bay Area theater vets Norman A. Hall and Shirley Nilsen Hall star in D.L. Coburn’s production of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which two residents of an "aged home" find comfort and competition in the constant shuffling of cards and eventually unravel bits of their past they may rather fold than show.

Giselle Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk; (510) 642-9988. Feb 14-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 3pm; $34-90. Cal Performances presents Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia performing the beloved ballet, accompanied by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

Love Fest La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $12 advance, $14 at the door. HBO Def Poet Aya de Leon hosts this alt-V Day evening of spoken word and music that focuses on love of self, spirit, community, family, peace, and democracy, including readings from her collection of "Grown-Ass-Woman" poems.

Songs of Love Two Bird Cafe, 625 Geronimo Valley, San Geronimo; 488-0105, mikelipskinjazz.com. Feb 14, 7-9pm, free. Jazz vocalist duo Mike and Dinah Lee present a Valentine’s Day concert at Two Bird, which will feature a special menu.

Viva la Musica! St. Mark’s Catholic Church, 325 Marine View, Belmont; (650) 281-9663, www.vivalamusica.org. Feb 14, 8-10pm, $15. Share a romantic musical evening with heart-melting chamber music, intimate solos, sassy choral numbers, and gifts of chocolate for audience members.

ART SHOWS

Flowers from a Nuclear Winter: A Live Art Installation by Rod Pujante Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Phyllis Wattis Webcast Studio; 561-0363, www.exploratorium.edu. Feb 16, 11am-4pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Cosponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation and the Exploratorium, Burning Man artist Rod Pujante performs a live demonstration of transparent-flower making, converting waste into a dreamscape.

Modern Love Lost Art Salon, 245 S Van Ness; 861-1530, www.lostartsalon.com. Feb 14, 5:30-8:30pm, free. Celebrate Valentine’s Day at an opening reception for this show of work selected from Lost Art’s library of more than 3,000 pieces from the mid-20th century.

BAY AREA

Red Cake Gallery: February Open House Call for directions to private home; (510) 759-4516, www.redcakegallery.com. Feb 23, 6-10pm; Feb 24, March 1, 1-4pm; Feb 25-29, 6-8pm; free. Have your cake and eat it too at this post-Valentine showcase of work by Red Cake artists, to be held in a private San Francisco home.

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Aphrodisiac Cooking Class Sur la Table, 77 Maiden; 732-7900, www.surlatable.com. Feb 15, 6:30pm, $170 per couple. Learn to make a delicious, sensual meal at this couples’ class hosted by chef Diane Brown, author of The Seduction Cookbook (Innova, 2005).

Chocolate, Strawberries and Lapdancing Center for Healing and Expression, 1749 O’Farrell; (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com. Tues/12, 8pm; $110 per couple, $160 per threeple. Be the best seat in the house at the Slinky Productions lap dance class for couples, which includes chocolate, strawberries, and champagne.

Letterpress Valentines San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro; 565-0545, sfcb.org. Fri/8, 2-5pm, $65 (including materials). Experienced and novice printmakers alike can enjoy an afternoon making letterpress cards with Megan Adie.

Valentine Special: Xara Flower-Making Workshop Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Skylight Area. Feb 14 and 16, noon-2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Attorney and Burning Man artist Mark Hinkley teaches attendees how to make fake flowers from recycled bottles. All materials provided; ages 6 and up.

BAY AREA

Celebrating the Masculine and Feminine Odd Fellows Hall, 839 Main, Redwood City; (650) 780-0769. Feb 16, 10am-6pm, $150-175. Join Valerie Sher, Jackie Long, and Jim Benson on a journey toward wholeness as we explore who we are as men and women.

A Night of Bond, James Bond Bay Club of Marin, 330 Corte Madera, Corte Madera; 945-3000. Feb 14, 7pm, $35-45 (includes drinks and appetizers). Skip the prix fixe dinner and join certified matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom for a Bond-themed workshop about cultivating passionate relationships, including a contest for best male and female Bond-inspired costumes.

Top o’ the world, ma

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› duncan@sfbg.com

My ex-girlfriend hipped me to TopR, short for Top Ramen, around 2003. We were driving in her car, and she cracked open the newly released Burning the Candle at Both Ends (Earthlings/DWA) and slid it into the dash. I’d like to say it changed my life, but to be honest, I can’t remember it. I do remember that she described TopR as this homeless, couch-surfing rapper who’d slept on her previous boyfriend’s couch. It was classic case of his reputation and lifestyle preceding his music.

Later I met TopR — or Topper Holiday, as he’s ceased using his first name — at 111 Minna Gallery, where I still work a side gig as a doorman. Throughout my years there he’s been a semiregular fixture, posted at the end of the bar, skeezing free drinks. He’s well loved but has this Dennis the Menace air surrounding him, like, "Oh, Topper’s here. Here comes trouble." One night in Minna alley, I remember him — a big, bescruffed white dude in a fitted New Era cap, somewhat rotund and more than a little faded — striking up a conversation with some bland, buttoned-down types, telling them he was a rapper and following up with a drunken freestyle. I came away feeling that it was a little sad, like he was busking in a BART station, trying to impress the squares.

"Fuck being glamorous — I’m cantankerous." So goes the first line on "Frankenstein’s Topster," the opener off his latest, fifth album, Marathon of Shame (Gurp City). It was playing when I walked into Dalva on 16th Street to say hello to my friend Toph One and reintroduce myself to TopR. And quite a reintroduction it was: even before Top starts rapping, the track is a fucking winner, anchored by a sample of Black Sabbath’s "A National Acrobat," the driving guitar riff married to an überfunky drumbeat by producer Dick Nasty.

A good hip-hop album is like a good comedy record: the shit’s got to be so sharp that you want to listen to it more than once, want to scan back on the CD and point out lines to your friends who are riding with you. In Top’s case it’s an apt comparison since he’s influenced by stand-up comedians as much as by other rappers and samples Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks on his previous disc, Cheap Laughs for Dead Comedians (Gurp City, 2006). Marathon is packed with lines that’ll make other rappers wish they’d written them, from favorite one-liners like "Puttin’ squares in their place like Tetris" to heartfelt couplets such as "I don’t want to fit into this banality factory / Where together we can all make profit from tragedy."

It stands to reason that TopR can come up with witty rhymes: he’s been rapping since he was 12. Now 30, he gained his rep as a battle rapper at parties and clubs. "From ’93 until 2000 all I did was battle," he says over a pint at the Richmond District’s 540 Club. "I didn’t record music. I didn’t put out anything. I just made a reputation for myself through battling. If I was putting out albums in ’95, ’96, I might’ve been an actual artist like Living Legends, Atmosphere, and Hieroglyphics. You can only be a battle rapper for so long. After a while there’s not very much creative outlet for it. You can only make fun of someone for so long before you actually want to express your real problems and your real feelings about life. And you do that through writing songs."

In a time when your average radio rap track has more advertisements for sneakers and pricey booze than a copy of GQ, TopR represents a more compelling side of the hip-hop spectrum: the storied tradition of rapper as traveling salesman, hawking CDs "out the trunk," or in his case, out the messenger bag, since, as he says on "Siren Song," "the Muni is my chariot." And while he often calls himself out as lazy in his songs, TopR’s tale is a cross between the 1984 runaway-punk movie Suburbia and the classic Horatio Alger story.

A self-described "troubled kid," TopR left his parents’ home in Santa Cruz at 15, living in squats and hitchhiking to San Francisco to hit open mics and do graffiti. He was arrested for vandalism, went back home, and left again, sleeping on couches if he was lucky and outside if he wasn’t. He attributes his notoriety in the bar scene to necessity: "The fact that I was homeless — I had to be in bars every goddamned night, looking for places to stay. I had nothing better to do."

Slumming, bumming, and battling eventually led to some Greyhound cross-country tours and a devoted following of party kids and misfits, unhappy with the status quo and, like him, struggling to get by. There’s no shortage of the usual hip-hop bravado on Marathon: "I’m a piss artist who spits darkness at bitch targets," TopR raps on "Siren Song," "<0x2009>’cause the music that’s honest is the music that hits hardest." True, but the track isn’t merely empty braggadocio: it’s nothing less than an existentialist crisis with a beat, one rapper’s The Sickness unto Death, asking the eternal questions of the artist and, ultimately, everyone who’s been "up against it."

And while it’s the struggle — and the willingness to cop to it — that makes Marathon so compelling, it seems TopR might finally be on the bus toward Figuring It All Out. On a tour in 2005 he met his fiancée, Kelly-Anne, perhaps the muse of "Siren’s Song," bartending at one of his shows in Asheville, NC. He stayed in the South for more than a year before getting an apartment, with a couch and a bed, in San Francisco’s Sunset District. "I came up as ‘the homeless kid who slept on couches,’<0x2009>" he explains. "But I was good at graffiti young, and I was a good rapper. I got away with a lot of stuff that some punk little kid wouldn’t because people respected me for my talents or whatever. But I’ve mellowed out." Here Top takes a contemplative pull on his pint. "I mean, I’m fuckin’ 30. I’ve got a dog now."

I’m going to do my part to go tell it on the mountain, to put this disc on when we’re cruising down the street, to make sure you hear the hilarious lines and crucial cuts. But on the other hand, one reason why it’s so good is because you ran into him in the bar and bought a disc so he could have beer money. TopR may have reached escape velocity from his day job, but he’s still orbiting the homelessness of his recent past. The line that sums up TopR for me is from "I’m on One" on Cheap Laughs: "It doesn’t take a genius to see that we’re livin’ stressful / The secret to my success is that I’m unsuccessful." It might be better for him if he got the juice to leave orbit altogether and rocket into the outer galaxies of hip-hop superstardom, but would it be better for his music if he weren’t "livin’ stressful?" Living hand to mouth myself, I’m heartened to see someone who keeps grindin’, who tries to live a creative life in the face of SF-size rent, the approaching years, and a music industry that may never give a shit. To quote TopR’s MySpace page, "Even when nothing goes right I still prevail."

TOPR CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Quest, Conceit, Delinquent Monastery, Thunderhut Project, Ras One, and DJ Delivery

Fri/1, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Political probe

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the final anxiety-ridden whimper to register from the year of the "shmashmortion," and it’s particularly preoccupied with pregnancy and the decisions that come with it. There was an apparently very good doc about abortion politics and some movie about a waitress that I didn’t see, but I caught the two "Papa Don’t Preach" comedies we all went to and can’t say I see much to link those two with Mungiu’s excellent Romanian film.

It was often observed that the dollhouse pregnancies and abortion debates of Juno and Knocked Up — movies that both oscillated between very good and unwatchable — would never have been fodder for a Hollywood (or Hollywood-lite) comedy if the mothers weren’t white and middle-class. The expecting character in 4 Months wouldn’t have looked out of place in either of those films, but her predicament is wildly different. She has to make her decision in Romania in 1986, under the watchful eye of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, whose policies on abortion make the pressures of the current American culture wars — certainly as experienced by the heroines of Juno and Knocked Up — comparable to those of a celebrity roast. Mungiu’s movie differs, additionally, in a refreshingly depressing way: you kind of want to smack the mother.

Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) isn’t even the film’s core. That distinction goes to her college roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who’s relied on to handle nearly every level of preparation necessary for an illegal abortion, from the Kafkaesque frustrations of securing a hotel room to the frightening process of meeting and negotiating with the abortionist. Everyone in Otilia’s unpleasant story is to some degree selfish and irresponsible, and Gabita is no exception. The ultimate impression she gives is of being the kind of person Otilia will never be able to truly feel good about sacrificing so much for. Otilia will always feel vaguely duped.

If 4 Months is only nominally related to those American comedies, its connections with another recent Romanian film about the Ceausescu era, the sad and funny 12:08 East of Bucharest, are just as tangential. Though the titles of both films, interestingly, suggest an obsession with a ticking clock, 12:08 East of Bucharest uses it as an almost absurdist device in relation to a bystander’s attempt to find a personal foothold in history. The characters in 4 Months are all getting more personal history than they could possibly handle, much less want.

Mungiu’s movie is much closer kin, then, to fellow Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu’s dark wonder The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which was also shot by cinematographer Oleg Mutu. Both are gloomy, virtuosic naturalist films inseparable from their sociopolitical backdrops — in Lazarescu‘s case, Bucharest in the middle of this decade — and both traverse their stations through a soup of reluctant humanism and outright moral fatigue. 4 Months feels like a companion piece to Lazarescu, the latter being a tour of the indignities of the Romanian medical bureaucracy and the former negotiating a similar path through the black-market system created in response to those inadequacies of officialdom.

What separates the two primarily and acutely is the distinct emotional tangs brought about by the way they were shot and edited. Lazarescu works with short, unassuming shots (save for the final, fatalistic scene); 4 Months, on the other hand, encumbers the audience with claustrophobically long takes, filled with the tension not only of Otilia’s widening burden but also of the actors sustaining such choreographed naturalism.

The most ambitious example of these crosscurrents is a conceptually ostentatious dinner scene at the birthday party for Otilia’s boyfriend’s mother, into which Otilia must detour before returning to the evening’s greater exigencies. Traumatized and anxious to return to Gabita, she is stuck for the moment in the cross fire of unwittingly oppressive small talk. Though there is a whiff of contrivance in the scene (Lazarescu, marching along its downward spiral with its head bowed, elicits more sympathy by making less conspicuous appeals), it moves quickly beyond a one-note dark joke simply by persisting. Otilia stares off ahead while the surrounding actors deliver their lines at her — in a manner closer to living than acting — in a long, confining take.

Stubbornly stationary, this sequence is as impressive as that famous kinetic take in Children of Men. And the subtleties of the conversation, together with a chillingly apropos conversation with her boyfriend shortly after (he’s a massive shit, but is she also covering her bases?), prove the party to be less a dramatic contrast with the preceding events across town than a thickening of the septic social context in which those events occur. It is, as much as abortion, what the film is about.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

Opens Fri/1 in Bay Area theaters

www.4months3weeksand2days.com

Quixotically yours

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› johnny@sfbg.com

In a multiplex in San Francisco (whose name I do not care to recall) there is at least one movie intent on bludgeoning viewers with a bombastic soundtrack, a mechanical approach to emotion, and a conclusion that is obvious before the story has begun.

In contrast, in a smaller theater, Albert Serra’s Honor of the Knights offers one of the best windows onto a current phenomenon that might be tagged somnambulant cinema.

Amid contemporary sensory overload, it’s unsurprising that somnambulant cinema – meditative and ambient, often set outdoors and yet never fully outside society – has begun to flower. Does the darkness of a movie theater have to be a site of sonic and visual assault? A recent spate of films, perhaps led by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), has answered that question with a low-key rebuff, choosing quietude and nature instead, evoking contemplative wonder in the process. By revivifying a literary classic – Don Quixote de la Mancha – that through sheer proliferation has become a myth of modernity, Serra’s first feature announces itself as a worthy Spanish answer to Apichatpong’s Thai fables.

To be sure, what I’m calling somnambulant cinema might easily be tagged “boring art films” by detractors. Any style or subgenre contains failures and successes. But Serra’s movie succeeds – partly because of its lightness, a quality not found in the hordes of festival films that confuse slowness or idyll with turgidity. In following the progress – or lack thereof – of Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó) and Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), Honor of the Knights immerses viewers in hypnotic rhythms. Using only natural light and shooting primarily during the magic hours of dusk and dawn, Serra gives the moon one of its most gorgeous scenes since the time of Georges Méliès and constructs a symphony from the way an orchestra of insects varies in pitch depending on the time of day or night.

As embodied by Carbó, the Don Quixote of Honor of the Knights is disheveled, with the matted hair of a bear and rusty armor, and he careens convincingly from senility to spryness. One minute he’s muttering to his lumpen sidekick as if Sancho (who still has traces of disobedient boyhood on his face) were nothing more than an extension of himself; the next he’s taking a dip in a stream with renewed vigor – even swimming while wearing heavy boots. Transutf8g an almost 1,000-page work into a 90-minute film with only a few hundred words of dialogue, Serra has inspired more than one critic to claim he’s bringing Samuel Beckett to bear on Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. But while this Don Quixote doesn’t seem to know where’s he’s going or even what time it is, after parrying phantoms with a sword and retreating from the wind, he leads Honor of the Knights to moments of offhand beauty and old joy.

Those last two words are no accident: juxtaposing various degrees of a fraternal bond against a varying but uncaring landscape, Honor of the Knights is closer to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) than it is to Gus Van Sant’s more overtly Beckett-like and aloof Gerry (2002). Comedy moves to the fore when the archaic Don Quixote urges Sancho to look up at the sky and cry, “God, you are the best,” but the character’s final musings on mortality hint that – within himself at least – he isn’t as lost as he might appear. “Chivalry is civilization,” he asserts, and with fealty the movie records his avoidance of all humanity besides Sancho. Serra’s movie ends on literal notes of melancholy, plucked and strummed on Ferrant Font’s solitary acoustic guitar.

When Don Quixote addresses the sky, Honor of the Knights takes on a simple grandeur not far from that found in Marcos Prado’s extraordinary, underseen 2004 documentary Estamira, a portrait of a sage madwoman who lives in an apocalyptic Rio de Janeiro landfill. In appearance, Carbó also somewhat resembles fellow journeyman traveler Vargas, the threatening protagonist of another recent somnambulant cinema work, Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos (2004). Much like Serra’s Apichatpong-influenced debut, the Argentine Alonso’s recent films reflect a conversation between filmmakers from different countries that is beginning to emerge from the somnambulant style. Just as Los Muertos shares traits with Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours, Alonso’s more recent Fantasma (2006) resembles Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn more than it does any recent work of new Argentine cinema.

By moving Tsai’s and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s updates of Michelangelo Antonioni’s slackness from urban settings to mountains and jungles, Apichatpong helped establish the tone, atmosphere, and characteristics of somnambulant cinema, which treats the screen of a movie theater as a wide-open rather than narratively enclosed site for conscious and unconscious dreaming. The most literal example of the form has to be Paz Encina’s 2006 Hamaca Paraguaya, which confronts the audience with an extended shot of a rural hammock, using this sight and the voice-over banter to represent Paraguay’s place in the world.

Certainly, the very idea of somnambulant cinema brings the prospect of loud snoring two seats away or two rows down, but amid the cavalcade of cell phone rudeness in movie theaters today, that possibility is more humorous than annoying. There is a difference between a slow film and a boring film, and Honor of the Knights is lively – it doesn’t require a prescreening blast of black coffee and sugar-free Red Bull (one veteran online critic’s diet before watching Pedro Costa’s literally awesome 2005 Colossal Youth).

What is the dark good for, if not dreaming?<\!s>2

HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS
Thurs/13 and Sat/15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/16, 2 p.m.; $6-<\d>$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Oops! They did it again

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The best comedians always shear close to the bone with their truths, but believe it or not, few are necessarily a gut bust in conversation. Why is this a surprise? After all, the comic is on the interviewer’s mic, not on the clock and on script. Yet W. Kamau Bell plays against type and comes with not only the insights you wish you had spewed first but also the wit, centered on the issues of race that he’s been grappling with since childhood.

The rising incidence of racist cracks that reveal the persistent fissures in a country seemingly disinterested in identity politics — and those emerging from the 34-year-old San Franciscan’s own milieu, the alternative comedy scene — has led Bell to sharpen his attack with The W. Kamau Bell Curve, which focuses on the ugly slurs spilling from Sarah Silverman, Michael Richards, and Rosie O’Donnell, as well as other, unexpected quarters. And the nastiness keeps coming — cue Golf Channel commentator Kelly Tilghman’s recent remark that young players who want to defeat Tiger Woods would need to "lynch him in a back alley" — and spurring Bell to continue updating the show he first performed in October 2007.

According to Bell, racism is on the comeback trail with a crucial difference: "This time it’s coming from liberals and creeping in through pop culture in some weird way. I call it political correctness acid reflux. People are just burping out racism." The comic rose to the occasion to make Bell Curve after reading a story about Southern blackface comic Shirley Q. Liquor in Rolling Stone. He was outraged by the fact that the article even questioned whether the Liquor act was racist, much as he was troubled by the things coming from his own field. "It’s, like, wait a minute — this is my industry, and again, it’s not coming from redneck comics or blue-collar comics. It’s coming from alternative comics who are supposed to be liberal comics.

"It’s, like, ‘Look, you know I like black people, so it’s allegedly OK for me to use a joke with the word nigger in it’ — even though there’s no black people in the audience and you don’t have any black friends!" he continues. "Like I say in the show, the most racist things that have ever happened to me have come from people who were friends of mine. I had a friend who once said to me, ‘Kamau, I like you. You’re black, but you’re not black black.’ What does that mean? I’m black but you still have your wallet?"

The only child of author Janet Cheatham Bell, Bell is all too familiar with that kind of chum, having moved from private to public to private school throughout his life. "A lot of times I would be the only black person in school," recalls Bell, who now teaches solo performance at the Shelton Theater and frequently opens for Dave Chappelle. "And when you’re that person, either they forget you’re black, so things happen and you’re, like, [in a meek squeak] ‘Wait a minute — don’t forget I’m black, everybody,’ or because you’re black they unburden their, you know, ‘Kamau, lemme tell you something about black people I’ve never been able to tell any other black person.’ Oooh, please don’t!"

Be glad, however, that Bell is telling us about it all.

THE W. KAMAU BELL CURVE

Thurs/24, 8 p.m., $20 (bring a friend of a different race, who gets in free)

Shelton Theater

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 433-1227

www.sheltontheater.com

In a dark and lonely place

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

Back with his second report from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it’s Midnites for Maniacs programmer and Guardian contributor Jesse Hawthorne Ficks.

In Bruges – directed by Martin McDonagh (UK)
Colin Farrell is the most underrated, overhated actor of the the past few years. His range was genuinely stunning in Sundance’s opening night film. This purposefully offensive comedy follows two hired guns (Farrell and Brenden Gleeson) as they are sent to do an unknown job by their boss (Ralph Fiennes) in the yuppie little town of Bruges (in Belgium). Written and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, the film has a David Mamet sense of misanthropic morality that is quite rewarding for those with a similar anger towards the world. Farrell has the perfect delivery for this sensibility — watch In Bruges and his pitch-perfect performance in Woody Allen’s misunderstood masterpiece Cassandra’s Dream, and you too will become a believer.

Diary of the Dead – directed by George Romero (USA)
As the 67-year-old horror director spoke after his latest zombie movie-social satire, I truly felt a sense of joy exuding from the man. George Romero’s newest entry confronts our confused and destructive world once again, this time by following a crew of film students who, while making their student film, realize that zombies have taken over their town and that they suddenly need to make real choices for the first time in their lives. The film is filled with some of the most inventive zombie deaths this side of the UK and has a friendly sense of humor to go along with its deeply cynical view. While Diary of the Dead is not as powerful as Frank Darabont’s adaption of Stephen King’s The Mist, Romero has made an honorable attack on our society while having a whole lot of low-budget fun.

Shorts are the new features!

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

From the Sundance Film Festival: Midnites for Maniacs programmer and Guardian contributor Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports on some fest favorites so far.

sundance_marquee.jpg

Aquarium – directed by Rob Meyer (17min)
Even though you’ve seen Rushmore and Freaks and Geeks, this awkward white kid angst flick delivers exactly what you’ve come to want. Plus with Kaitlin Kiyan’s nuanced ethnic girl-next-door performance, it almost makes-up for the genre’s mind-bogglingly racist Su-Chin from current quirkfest Juno.

Sick Sex – directed by Justin Nowell (12min)
Ever thought your lover was lookin’ hella hawt while they were sick in bed? This dude does his best to pitch the idea of “sick sex” to his sickly grrrlfriend, resulting in some depressingly hilarious results.

Sikumi (On the Ice) – directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean (15min)
This quiet cinematic journey evokes the realism of Nanoonk of the North , enabling the viewer to ponder the purpose of our existence. And that’s all in 15 minutes. Someone’s gotta give the director the money to turn this thesis project at NYU into a feature film.

Welcome – directed by Kirsten Dunst (12min)
Winona Ryder arrives at her Lost Highway-esque home one night only to experience some pretty freaky sounds happening in all the rooms she’s not in. I genuinely jumped out of my skin while watching this creepfest.

Spider – directed by Nash Edgerton (9min)
If you’re the kind of boyfriend who loves pulling mini-pranks on your partner, watch this heartbreaking shocker immediately before pissing them off again. I guess this is a comedy — but Jesus, this movie is traumatizing.

Pariah – directed by Dee Rees (27min)
Not only the best short of the festival, Pariah could be the best film of the festival. Actress Adepero Oduye is hypnotic as a 17-year-old lesbian struggling with her identity at school and at home. Complex dialogue and powerful situations will leave you emotionally wrenched. Plus, Wendell Pierce (Bunk on HBO’s The Wire) packs quite a punch as the confused father.

Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People – directed by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung (7min)
Winning best title of the fest, this collage of hyperactive video game footage has meticulously detailed designs of political figures fighting each other while inhabiting celebrity bodies. MC Paul Barman narrates this clusterfuck, bringing it to the level of downright brilliant. Also worth watching is Hung’s five minute Gas Zappers.

Getting impersonal with Paul F. Tompkins

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Camera Trouble paul tompkins.JPG

By George Chen

Paul F. Tompkins might be a familiar sight, thanks to his appearances on Best Week Ever, The Sarah Silverman Program, and the cult hit Mr. Show (he also toured with the live stage show that came to the Warfield in 2005). But you may not know that he has been performing stand-up for more than 20 years and recently released an album, Impersonal, through A Special Thing, which is only available through iTunes and online mail-order (and Amoeba Los Angeles, if you are in the neighborhood). For those who aren’t familiar with his act, Tompkins is a masterful storyteller with an absurdist wit wrapped in a fairly traditional package: he doesn’t work much profanity and wears a three-piece suit. The comic spoke with me on the phone about his upcoming round of performances as part of the SF Sketchfest.

SFBG: I wanted to get some idea about what to expect for the Sketchfest. I know it’s a slightly different format than you just doing regular stand-up. Or is it? “Comedy Death Ray” is something that happens regularly in LA.

Paul F. Tompkins: “Comedy Death Ray” is a regular LA show [at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater]. It’s been going for four or five years now; it’s stand-up and sketch. As far as that goes up in San Francisco, I’m not sure if they have any sketch on tap – I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing yet. I might just be doing some stand-up or I might do some kind of sketch with somebody else – I’ve done both on that show. I’ll be doing the “Match Game” live show two nights in a row before that, which is like the old Match Game game show. We did it up there last year, and it was a big hit and a lot of fun so we’re doing it again this year.

Material world

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The year 1988 marked the apex of David Mamet’s celebrity. He’d won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, and American Buffalo was being produced by every little theater on the planet. He’d scripted several mostly admired films and had just directed his first, the coldly ingenious House of Games.

It must have been a heady time. One doesn’t get the impression that Mamet is the type to enjoy simply being celebrated. So it’s logical that at the moment when whatever he premiered next would be a guaranteed BFD, he both seized the opportunity and fuck-you’d it. Speed-the-Plow was a biting-the-hand-that-feeds-me satire of Hollywood-industry soulessness whose subject alone guaranteed wide attention. Then Mamet cast Madonna as the girl. By all accounts, she was a complete zero. But needless to say, the show was a massive event.

Two decades later the hype has long settled. Loretta Greco’s revival at American Conservatory Theater reveals Speed-the-Plow as what it always was: an acidic comedy that isn’t one of Mamet’s best plays but is too entertainingly brash to resist. The notion that Hollywood is essentially soulless — all about business, not art, as the characters keep repeating — was hardly news back then. And now everybody from key grip to Dairy Queen day manager analyzes what did and didn’t sell in the Monday-morning tally of last weekend’s box office. Why do we care? Is it because Hollywood, more than ever the focus for so many putative proletarian dreams, inspires gloating resentment as much as fascination?

Speed-the-Plow was never really controversial, even within the biz. Mamet clearly loves the winner-take-all crassness of his male characters here, for whom every interaction is a dominance game. Top dog Bobby Gould (Matthew Del Negro) has just been promoted to head of production at a major studio. His expensively minimalist new office (a movable set piece by G.W. Mercier) hasn’t been even been fully assembled when erstwhile coworker Charlie Fox (Andrew Polk) comes calling.

From Polk’s flop-sweating, highly physical performance you immediately glean that Charlie thinks he should be the man behind the desk — but since he’s not, he’ll do all the begging required of him. Actually, he’s got a very big bone to offer: out of the blue, a huge star has offered to make a prison buddy picture Charlie has a temporary option on. This is such a stroke of fortune that both men impulsively share their glee — the language getting a lot more sexual — with pretty, clueless temp secretary Karen (Jessi Campbell).

Once she exits, Charlie wagers this "broad" is too high-minded for Bobby to seduce — though B’s power and influence would lure just about any other Los Angeles underling into the sack in five seconds. Bobby arranges for Karen to visit his house that very night, on the pretext of her giving him a "report" on the loftily symbolic, probably unfilmable literary novel he’s been told to give a "courtesy read."

One shudders to think of Madonna stonewalling in the second-act scene, in which a garrulous Karen tries to sell Bobby on how he could "make a difference" by green-lighting a movie based on this apparently life-changing (though insufferable-sounding) tome. He plays along, trying to steer the evening in a horizontal direction. Yet the next morning, with Charlie anxiously awaiting their planned triumphant prison-flick pitch to the studio chief, Bobby is a changed man — a born-again wishbone pulled between commerce and conscience.

Satisfyingly cruel as this final tug-of-war is, it makes the play’s credibility vanish: Bobby is too content an admitted "whore" to turn Mother Theresa overnight. And with the epically tall, jock-handsome Del Negro in a part Joe Mantegna originated, the character radiates such golden-boy confidence that one can’t believe he’d have much use for a merely cute flunky like Campbell’s Karen.

Greco lets the lines breathe — her cast’s naturalistically varied delivery avoids that Morse-code monotony the playwright prefers for his staccato Mametspeak. But she doesn’t lend much weight to the ultimate question of who’s manipuutf8g whom, as this production’s Karen doesn’t seem capable of calculation. The lack of ambiguity makes this a frequently very funny Speed-the-Plow, but sans much suspense or climactic sting. *

SPEED-THE-PLOW

Through Feb. 3

Tues.–Sat, 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; no matinee Wed/16); Sun., 2 p.m.; $14–$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Rain on me

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER How can two goods get mashed so bad? How can an act of generosity get so twisted? What sort of storm hath Radiohead wrought? And in an age of easy digital reproduction and reappropriation, a mashup era, what kind of rights do listeners have regarding music disseminated, seemingly so freely, online — namely, the United Kingdom band’s In Rainbows album? Why can’t hip-hop and indie rock values segue together as gracefully, as artfully, as Oakland DJ-producer Amplive’s trip-hop–tinged remix of "Nude," a suturing together of his group Zion I’s "Don’t Lose Ya Head" and Radiohead’s ethereal hum, with classic Yay touches of Too $hort?

This fall Radiohead released their In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-will download, allowing listeners to grab the sounds for free if they chose and inspiring Amplive to remix their music as a measure of his admiration. The gesture conjures Dangermouse’s hybrid hijack of Jay-Z’s The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella, 2003) and the Beatles’ The Beatles (Apple, 1968), otherwise known as "The White Album," for his Grey Album (2004), though Amplive went as far as to get contributions from Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Jurassic 5’s Chali2na.

"I just did it to do it, and I love the In Rainbows album — it was just tight!" Amplive told me on the phone this week from the East Bay. "And especially in this age, with remix culture, a lot of people do them. I just did the same. I just wanted to do a hip-hop version of their stuff, and I guess I underestimated what would happened. It just took off."

Word spread, and listeners urged Amplive to remix the entire In Rainbows, a project he dubbed Rainydayz Remixes. As news arrived of the producer’s plans to give away the remix album free of charge online on Jan. 10 to those who had already downloaded In Rainbows or supported a Radiohead-favored charity, Friends of the Earth, the forces that be — i.e., Radiohead publisher Warner/Chappell — moved to put a stop to the fun and games, tribute or no tribute. Amplive had received 3,000 orders when, a few weeks ago, he was sent a cease and desist letter stating that he needed to get approval "before making arrangements of other writers’ work, especially if you have plans to commercially exploit the arrangements/remixes or make them publically available."

Preferring not to get into a legal battle royal and instead appealing to Radiohead online via a video posted on his MySpace page, Amplive decided to put the project on hold. Meanwhile Gigwise.com spoke to Radiohead’s manager Bryce Edge on Jan. 7; he claimed the issue was the use of an image of Thom Yorke to promote Rainydayz Remixes, which implied the Radiohead frontman was involved in the project, and that management had a problem with fans being asked to forward their In Rainbows purchase e-mail in order to receive a free remix LP, which he described as "a bit naughty!" "To be honest, I’m not sure the band have even heard [the remixes]," Edge continued, adding they will meet Jan. 8 to discuss the matter.

Perhaps Edge and company need to take a cue from "Don’t Lose Ya Head"<0x2009>‘s verses. Amplive told me he hadn’t used Radiohead images to promote Rainydayz and instead pointed to music blogs like Hood Internet, which regularly splices together photos of mashed artists. One wonders if Radiohead’s suits have scoped out the other mashups on that specific site (Eve and Thom together at last!) and whether they’re aware of how hypocritical the group appears in putting the kibosh on free remixes — from which Amplive stands to gain nothing apart from praise for his production skills — for what appeared to be a free recording. There’s little talk these days about the other Black Album remixes spawned by the tracks Jay-Z freely released: maybe those reworks failed to capture critics’ imaginations. Amplive’s remixes have caught listeners’ ears, making him the beneficiary, and victim, of too much positive press.

After being hailed as both visionary and realistic in their release of In Rainbows, Radiohead stand only to get a public relations black eye from this entire affair, and perhaps Amplive — who is working on Zion I’s new CD — simply made the mistake of doing deft work and getting more attention for it, from The New York Times among others, than some kid chopping beats on his PC in Pinole. "I just hope Radiohead listens to [the Rainydayz Remixes] and thinks, ‘This is pretty tight. As long as it’s free, let ’em do it,’<0x2009>" the humble Amplive said. "I definitely didn’t want to disrespect their management and infrastructure. I did it totally out of support and love for the group and the music. And it could give them a different kind of exposure — not that they need any help!" *

ZION I

Sat/12, 9 p.m., $20–<\d>$22

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

MUSIC WITH A SIDE OF MAYORAL POKES

Mary Van Note has it made: in addition to hosting two nights of the San Francisco Sketchfest at the Hemlock Tavern, the local comedian and mistress of the monthly "Comedy, Darling" show at Edinburgh Castle (the next is Feb. 6) was recently tapped to make shorts for the Independent Film Channel, thanks to her online videos. Too bad the Gav had to ruin everything. "The videos were going to be about me getting a date with Gavin Newsom, and just the other day I saw he’s getting married," Van Note says. "Now it’s going to be about me breaking up his marriage."

Tues/15 and Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk St., SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DAVID DANIELL


The San Agustin guitarist, onetime Thurston Moore collaborator, and Douglas McCombs cohort works a vein of electronic and acoustic composition and improvisation. With Tom Carter, Donovan Quinn, and Barn Owl. Wed/9, 9:30 p.m., $12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

NEVER HEALED


Thrash like those eardrums never quite stopped bleeding. With Skin like Iron and Grace Alley. Sat/12, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

THAO NGUYEN


The Kill Rock Stars starlet hopes to make music more than a hobby once she graduates from college. With Ray’s Vast Basement and the Dry Spells. Sat/12, 9:30 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

EMILY JANE WHITE


The Cat Power–like Bay Area vocalist waxed hauntingly on her recent Dark Undercoat (Double Negative). With the Complications and Mylo Jenkins. Sun/13, 8 p.m., $6. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. www.makeoutroom.com

RICKIE LEE JONES


The many moods of the beat poetess shift with each performance of this intimate, monthlong residency. Tues/15, Jan. 22 and 29, and Feb. 5, 8:30 p.m., $25–<\d>$30. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Acting pleasant

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

George Bernard Shaw once titled a bound collection of his dramas Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, thus inadvertently summing up any year in any theater scene anywhere. But this is a happy time, so we can concentrate on the former.

The pool of local acting talent, in particular, spoils us in the Bay Area. While it’s not hard to find a strong performance from last year, finding room to list them all is another story, and a much longer one. But there’s space enough to list a few especially deft turns from 2007, including feats of physical and verbal dexterity, like the trio of weirdly gesticuutf8g women in Crowded Fire’s wowing production of Lisa D’Amour’s word-struck trailer-park gothic, Anna Bella Eema. Cassie Beck, Julie Kurtz, and Danielle Levin never left their chairs, but watching them — under the superb direction of Rebecca Novick (who stepped down as CF’s artistic director this year) — you didn’t want to leave yours either.

Then there was Alias‘s Carl Lumbly, skipping rope like a welterweight throughout his opening monologue in Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. A world-class actor with an East Bay address, Lumbly crossed the bridge this spring to appear in SF Playhouse’s excellent local premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s raucous drama. As in many Playhouse productions, the cast (astutely directed by the ensemble’s Bill English) was strong as a whole, but the moments when Lumbly’s upbeat, ever-hopeful death-row sociopath played unlikely mentor to a young neophyte out of his depth (a solid Daveed Diggs) were truly prime time.

The physically and comically nimble cast of writer-director Mark Jackson’s notable premiere, American Suicide — a smart, lively, and very funny adaptation of Soviet Russian Nikolai Erdman’s scathing 1928 comedy that had its lock-solid debut at the Thick House in February — also merit special mention for their fine fleshing out of the play’s arch, cartoonlike histrionics. Headed by the pitch-perfect pair of Jud Williford and Beth Wilmurt in what would have been a suicide mission in lesser hands, they managed the mishmash of zany caricature, a certain 1930s allusiveness, and macabre social satire with engrossing panache. The Coen brothers might have attempted something similar in The Hudsucker Proxy, but remember: they had special effects and coffee breaks. These actors work without a net — though the show’s madcap pace put them at risk of ending up in one.

Although not necessarily as athletic as the title might lead you to expect, Sex (at the Aurora Theatre) threatened to be hard enough, given that the play, while an interesting theatrical relic, has little in its lippy melodrama to shock audiences 80 years after its scandalous Broadway opening. Furthermore, stepping into Mae West’s shoes is a fine-line idea that had better be managed with grace and attitude. Fortunately, Delia MacDougall (in the attention-grabbing role West wrote for herself) proved a dazzling tightrope walker in pumps, creating a West-worthy impression in no way reducible to a mere impersonation (which is still fine at parties). (MacDougall, incidentally, was a hilarious part of Jackson’s American Suicide cast.) Costume designer Cassandra Carpenter decked out MacDougall and the rest of the company beautifully in pristine period threads indicative of the unexpected degree of life director Tom Ross and his thoroughly fine cast found in the play.

And as memorable costumes go, I wonder who among us present for Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway (at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater in July) could forget that frilly-legged chiffon number (by designer Marc Happel) on Justin Bond as the singing, slinging half of those two lounge legends? Needless to say, in the brilliant haute tastelessness of the Kiki and Herb aesthetic, this was genius swathing genius.

But back to casts (and premieres): the Custom Made Theatre Company scored a real coup, if not a coup d’état, with the Bay Area premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The small black box company assembled a terrific cast and offered a smart production design in no way lessened by its clearly low-budget proportions. Artistic director Brian Katz’s agile execution, if that’s the right word, of Sondheim’s musical-drama rumination on the men and women who tried to assassinate various American presidents was one of the year’s little big surprises and, heading into election year 2008, left us on a feel-good note.

Chair and chair alike

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What we owe one another, whether family, friends, fellow human beings, or just fellow creatures — and how we define we in the first place — is a perennial question of both politics and art. In Adam Bock’s tightly drawn, funny, and engaging new play about political commitment, this sense of communion — a frisson of recognition of the interconnectedness of our lives — works neatly as both theme and theatrical strategy as a kindhearted and intelligent middle-aged woman, perched in comfortable middle-class seclusion atop her new Shaker chair, straddles two long-standing relationships that force her to weigh her responsibility to public and private suffering.

Marion (the wonderfully sympathetic Frances Lee McCain) couldn’t be happier with her recent acquisition: a stylish if somewhat austere straight-backed wooden chair in imitation of a Shaker original, which makes up what it lacks in comfort with its thrilling built-in legacy of righteous action — a reminder to "get up and do something," she enthuses to sister Dolly (Nancy Shelby). Dolly, by contrast, is curled up in a comfy and well-worn armchair, the only other significant furnishing in scenic designer James Faerron’s elegantly focused wood-lined living room (exquisitely lit through varying moods by Heather Basarab). A hog for attention and wallowing in self-pity, the comically pathetic Dolly remains very much the aging little girl her name suggests, not only unmoved by the Shaker chair’s greater associations but completely oblivious to anything outside the crass little domestic drama she shares with philandering husband Frank (Will Marchetti).

Marion’s childhood friend Jean (Scarlett Hepworth), meanwhile, an environmental and animal rights activist, scoffs openly at Dolly and her self-absorbed, contented victimhood, a role Jean dismisses as "stupid" (a word that gets thrown around a lot in a work whose vastly different priorities call up a kind of playground defensiveness in their holders). She has shown up to borrow Marion’s car for an action against a nearby industrial pig farm, which is spilling noxious waste into its surroundings. No doubt inspired by her newfound Shaker spirit, Marion not only lends the car but also agrees to accompany Jean and her much younger associates (sharply played by Andrew Calabrese and Marissa Keltie) on their late-night deed.

Marion’s initial thrill is soon dampened by a sense of betrayal when she discovers the group’s political act of vandalism went much further than she was led to believe it would. Although Jean attempts to justify the measures taken by introducing Marion to a liberated pig (one animal being a palpable miracle, according to Jean, while thousands are only an abstract blur), Marion remains pitched between Dolly’s obsessive private life and Jean’s dangerous radical commitments.

Finally, a violent act compels her to negotiate this gap between the public and the private for herself. It’s then that Marion fully attempts to confront the contradictions between a socially enervating middle-class solipsism and the responsibilities that come with awareness of the world around her.

The extremes represented by Dolly and Jean nonetheless share something in common. For Dolly’s banal romantic plight comes to loosely parallel (in less drastic form) the larger realm of cruelty and oppression against which Jean and her cohorts feel bound to take direct action. Indeed, in a scene in which the caddish Frank expertly turns Dolly from smoldering hurt and resentment back into compliant second-class spouse, the fine cast carefully bleed away the comedy from this one-way negotiation to end on a chilling note of humiliation and underlying violence.

Bock, a former Bay Area and now New York playwright best known locally for the 2002 production of his runaway hit Five Flights and the more recent Typographer’s Dream, has a seemingly effortless knack for unusual and inventive scenarios whose often painful subject matter comes leavened by a keen and warm brand of humor. In this splendid Bay Area premiere, gracefully directed by Tracy Ward and coproduced by the Shotgun Players and the Encore Theatre Company (both early and steadfast supporters of his work), Bock has fashioned a theatrical experience as well honed, poised, and resonant as the eponymous piece of furniture at its center. *

THE SHAKER CHAIR

Through Jan. 27

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $20–$30

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 841-6500, ext. 302

www.encoretheatrecompany.org

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