Dance

Clubs: Return, disco children, to Paradise

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By Vanessa Carr

If the last Gemini Disco Paradise party was any indication (18-piece disco band Escort, performances at midnight and 3 a.m., packed crowd, go-go dancers, balloon drop, cabaret-style performances), the second Paradise this Saturday night (5/17) should deliver on its promise to be a debaucherous, all-night disco dance party channelling the spirit of Studio 54 or Paradise Garage, the infamous gay NYC nightclub from the ’80s.


Christopher McVick’s Paradise Disco Trailer

Mezzanine and Gemini Disco are bringing the original disco divas from the ’70s Sister Sledge (“We Are Family” and “He’s the Greatest Dancer”), as well as DFA’s disco-revivalists Holy Ghost! (DJ set), with local supporting DJs Derrek Love and Nicky B (Gemini), BT Magnum and Black Shag (Beat Electric), and Honey Soundsystem. Christopher McVick and his entourage help ignite the disco fever with their outlandish circus/disco/cabaret antics, including theatrical choreography, stick ponies, and glitzy drag performances.


Sister Sledge perform “He’s the Greatest Dancer”

Paradise All-Night Disco Party
May 17th, 10 pm to dawn, $15 advance
Mezzanine, 444 Jessie Street, 415-625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com

Love those Girls at Rickshaw Stop

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Girls make us dance – whether we want to or not. Photo by Jen Synder.

By Jen Snyder

I know that there’s a big battle going on about whether or not the Internet is evil – and whether or not technology is making people super-mean. But you’ve got to admit that while some things may be getting a more impersonal, others are getting a lot cooler. Like bands.

Has anyone noticed that there are a million groups out there that are actually really good? That is so weird. Remember when you used to go to the Warehouse with your dad and every other CD was completely horrible? Now I walk around a music store so bewildered by all the pretty album covers that I get an intimidation contact high and end up leaving with my 19th Leonard Cohen album. Geez. I blame the Internet and its infallible ability to get awesome stuff to anyone, even if you don’t live in a cultural hub like San Francisco.

So the next time you’re stumbling around Amoeba, wondering which disc has the sweet song your coworker played for you, just go to the G section and go pick out anything by Girls. Actually, they don’t have an official album out, but I do know that they have some great songs on their MySpace page, including a particular favorite of mine, “Hellhole Ratrace.” Their songs evoke the pleasantly masochistic feelings you get from listening to something like Nirvana Unplugged. And in an era where one can describe the ’80s and even the ’90s as vintage, Girls has this “yesterday” feel to them that makes you yearn for those years when you were sadder and more creative.

Body eclectic

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When Miguel Gutierrez left the Joe Goode Company in 1996, he was a hot dancer. He returned to the Bay Area a mature artist. In Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies, part of ODC Theater’s recent "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic" at Project Artaud Theater, Gutierrez worked at breaking down the invisible divide between performer and audience. Granted, this idea has been tried before — but few have taken it as far, or developed it as consistently, as Gutierrez has done. The result was an evening of dance theater that at times pushed beyond what I can stomach but nevertheless left me full of admiration for the skill with which he works the material and the audience.

Gutierrez’s focus of attention was the body, his and ours, individually and collectively. He raised questions about performers as narcissists and exhibitionists, and about the audience as voyeurs. He subverted expectations on timing, eliminated divisions of physical space (with brilliant lighting design by Lenore Doxsee), and embraced the authentic with the sentimental. It was manipulation of the first order, and totally autocratic.

In the opening segment when he futzed around, naked between his ankles and neck, assembling props, we learned only that he is well-built and has added a few pounds since his San Francisco days. When he then invited (actually, commanded) the audience to repeat after him, "I am Miguel Gutierrez," my reaction was, "The hell I am." The tone of confrontation wove through the evening like a cry, perhaps indicative of a love-hate relationship with performance.

Retrospective was a rich tapestry of episodes that raised questions about perception. What is more real, an ad lib monologue on video, or its imitation read live from a script? Where does the screaming singer stop and become the man spilling his guts? Do we direct our eyes to Gutierrez as a teen heartthrob in an archival clip downstage, or to the live dancer way off in a corner? Have the women disappeared in the glittering sequins of their gowns in Difficult Bodies?

When a burning candle was moved ever closer to Guiterrez’s naked butt, the performance became voyeurism at its worst. My instinct was to get up and grab the candle, saying "I am Miguel Guiterrez." Unfortunately, I didn’t have the guts.

Yo, bangerz

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Also in this issue:

Rave it tecktonik: Hard electro’s dance du jour

Bang! The clubs, the music, the mixes

Super Ego Must the French rule everything? Is Justice revenge for "freedom fries"?

Anyone who’s recently squeezed themselves into a sliced-up silver Lycra T-shirt, pushed down a pair of Day-Glo Cazals, baby-oiled their coke-spoon anklet charms, and hit the city’s glitzier underground dance floors in the past year knows that the hardcore electro sound of Paris’s laptops — lahptoops? — is everywhere they wanna be. So yeah, this shout-out to the trenchant trend is late, and the French are already being usurped by English, Aussie, and American glam-tech innovators. But I’ve got hungry drag queens at home to feed. Mama can’t afford no glittery off-the-shoulder neon silk-screen slip dry-cleaning bills.

Also, it’s taken a while for the scene to coalesce into something tangible, nightlifewise. "Electro" has always been a catch-all — as long as it emanates from adorably entangled circuitry, the genre’s sound swings wildly from lowdown industrial grind to straight-up booty smack, vocoded howl to shuddering fwump to skittery blizzard of blips. It took French duo Justice, along with a slew of other big-name like-mindeds like MSTRKRFT and Simian Mobile Disco, to crystallize some of electro’s recent, disparate past — amped-up electroclash guitars, nu-rave airhorn screech, Philly and Baltimore cybernetic cartoon sexuality, bubbly London champagne rave, and triple-filtered Daft Punk euro strip-down — into the rock-candy party sound still blowing out woofers all over town, launching a genuine style. At first dismissed as mere Daft Punk knockoffs, these earnest Ableton addicts have transformed electro into this house generation’s gleaming hair metal, complete with fussy headbands, flashing tits, and on occasion, what my bf Hunky Beau terms "the most well-scrubbed mosh pits ever."

The scene is called banger — as in Ed Banger, Justice’s Paris-based label. The sound? Warped arena rock grandeur ripped asunder by fuzzy needles, taut bass arpeggios, pounding 808s with cymbal-crash breakdowns (they’re back!), dirty childlike vocals, and anarchic Prodigy posing to — cover your ears, discriminating queens — pop-rave 2 Unlimited keyboards. Banger kids arrive stripped of quotation marks (excessive goofy accessorizing and ironic retro bombast are out), fronting the tight sheen of perfect online shopping technique, 24-inch waists, Rockstar and rye on tap, wanton pantomimed sex, and a tang of American Apparel ennui. ("I’m on the club soda diet," a model confided matter-of-factly outside one bangin’ banger club. "I need to go to the bathroom and meditate for a minute before I pass out.") If all this sounds more like "da club" then the club, well, that’s the delicious line of tension bangers like to play against.

Banger style has even given rise, in Paris at least, to a dance craze (also back!) called tecktonik. Have you seen this shit? It’s electroclash break dancing — a splash of rave liquid by way of circuit fan–twirling, coupled with random Adderall withdrawal jerks. "Tecktonik" is now a brand-name T-shirt and a haircut, of course.

The above may look iffy on paper, but it works — there’s a blinding energy to the scene, and I’m held positively rapt by some local bangers. My next column will feature a few, as well as some young upstarts taking the bang into fidgety new directions. Let’s riot.

Sweet “Dreams”

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Words, words, words. You’ve probably noticed how Shakespeare’s plays are full of them. They skip or loll on the tongue; they tickle or bemuse the ear. Sometimes, and not just for the uninitiated or casually acquainted, they come across with more music than meaning. Well, that "Shakespeherian Rag" goes raga in the international production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now taking its San Francisco bow at the Curran Theatre, where among a cast of exclusively Indian and Sri Lankan actors, Elizabethan English vies with seven languages of the subcontinent.

The words, for a change, are therefore not the most important feature of this production — unless you happen to speak one or more of the Indian and Sri Lankan languages on display, which judging by the pockets of laughter that arose at certain moments, some in the opening-night audience clearly did. This incredibly agile, imaginative, and widely praised 2005-6 production, led by UK director Tim Supple (and making its North American debut courtesy of Best of Broadway), foregrounds the play’s action, passion, physical humor, and erotic energy to such a striking degree that it reminds one persuasively of the full scope of Shakespeare’s potency as a dramatist. And the dialogue — if you don’t speak Hindi, for example — still reveals a surprising dramatic and melodic force all the same.

The words also give a thrilling sense of the vast treasure of cultural and linguistic tradition emanating from the subcontinent. At the same time, this is no museum piece; it is a vital blending of theatrical traditions and ideas. The amazingly athletic, even acrobatic cast effortlessly incorporates everything from traditional song and martial dance to Cirquelike aerial work into the enchanted forest–realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespeare’s multilayered story of love’s fickle and darker aspects. As the production’s lone Brit, Supple’s staging is highly original. At the same time, it recalls the use of vertical space in Peter Brook’s legendary 1970 staging. The backdrop is a bamboo scaffold many meters high, initially covered over in a great wavy, ruffled sheet of thick paper that beautifully absorbs and deflects Zuleikha Chaudhari’s rich lighting. Performers come bursting, crawling, and tumbling through this membrane until it’s a mess of tatters.

The acting is physically and emotionally strong. Joy Fernandes, for instance, delivers a particularly memorable turn as the hilariously irrepressible Bottom. Meanwhile, the musicians to the sides of the stage left and right further refine the dazzlingly dynamic action with delicate metallic strains, sweet guitar melodies, or the crashing punctuation of a massive percussion kit.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Through June 1

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $35–$80

Curran Theatre

445 Geary, SF

(415) 512-7770, www.shnsf.com

Focus on the future

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PREVIEW San Francisco Ballet just finished its 75th season with a buzz-creating festival of world premieres. But SFB hasn’t gone dormant. This week the focus shifts to the next generation of dancers: San Francisco Ballet School students who hope to take on the daunting task of defying gravity and having their bodies express the contents of their souls.

At the SFB School’s Student Showcase at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the audience can experience the stages of a dancer’s progress. From the smallest kids doing their precisely placed tendus and still-stiff port de bras to the graduates, seven years later, who are ready to compete with professionals, you can see dancers blossom and begin to be themselves. You’ll also notice that boys tend to develop later and that girls still dominate the field. The program features the American premiere of John Neumeier’s 1986 Yondering, danced to Stephen C. Foster songs. The advanced students perform Helgi Tomasson’s 1996 Simple Symphony, which he specifically choreographed for the SFB School.

But SFB isn’t the only school holding its end-of-the-year recital. The School of the Arts, a magnet school of the San Francisco Unified School District, presents its budding young dancers in Unfolding Light, which introduces dances by student and professional choreographers, including Brittany Brown Ceres, Juan Pazmino, Gregory Dawson, and Enrico Labayen. A few of these teenage artists wowed the audience when they performed during the Izzies dance awards at the end of April.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET SCHOOL STUDENT SHOWCASE Wed/14, 8 p.m.; Thurs/15–Fri/16, 7:30 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. $32. (415) 865-2000, www.ybca.org

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS’ UNFOLDING LIGHT Fri/16–Sat/17, 8 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m. Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina and Buchanan, SF. $18–$20. (415) 345-7575

Allen Oldies Band

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PREVIEW The Allen Oldies Band delivers a reckless tornado of classic hits, a retro dance party of Sham-tastic proportions. But don’t make the mistake of considering this Austin, Texas, ensemble a mere cover band. The Oldies have amassed a cult following built on the strength of a talented group of classic session players, sprinkled with a heavy dose of punk-pit sensibility. They have punctuated the beginning of South by Southwest in their hometown with an infamous 9:30 a.m. breakfast shindig replete with French maids serving jalapeño pancakes. They will play literally anywhere — but they will not play just anything. From "Wooly Bully" to "It’s Not Unusual," the Oldies are resolute in their mission to bring the dance tunes of yesteryear to your doorstep.

Allen Hill dreamed up this raucous, plaid-blazer-clad army of fun. Hill is a bit of a musical raconteur, a de facto spokesperson for the retro Austin scene who fronts his own combo with feverish enthusiasm and wisecracks. Wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes, Hill rushes from one end of the stage to the other, employing a tongue-in-cheek goofiness with the group and the audience, recalling Louis Prima at his best. Always looking to spread the message of party rock, the Oldies are no strangers to either the wedding or corporate event circuit — please book three months in advance — and have played backing ensemble to the likes of Chuck Berry and Archie Bell. Lest their paying gigs sound too staid, the Oldies have the indie cred of a live WMFU album, Live and Delirious (Freedom, 2006). While their trips outside the Lone Star State are not as frequent as their fans would like, they are finally set to grace our fair city with a dose of hyperactive twistin’ tunes.

ALLEN OLDIES BAND With the Barbary Coasters. Fri/16, 9:30 p.m., $6.
Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Yo, bangerz: Rave it tecktonik

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In this week’s Super Ego clubs column, I finally take on the banger scene’s hardcore electro glitz riot on the city’s dance floors. The sound and style originated in France, mostly, and is helping to resuscitate the much-maligned term “euro” — commonly associated with over-caffeinated, hyper-sugary tunes that fitted really awful embroidered jeans and Gucci knockoff sunglasses on a couple generations of appletini swillers. I’m much more into the new euro, needless to say, and in Paris at least, bangers are associated with a dance craze, tecktonik (also spelled tektonik). Here’s what it looks like, to the wonderfully banged-up tune of fabulous French rapstress-chanteuse Yelle‘s “A Cause de Garcons.” (Her show here at the Independent last month was off the hook, btw, and she featured a sequined pink Stephen Sprouse-like dress reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Fierceness!)

 

 

Goofy, but sweetly energetic. The dance in fact originally started in the early-mid 2000s, in Parisian megaclub Metropolis, where it was performed to a much harder sound, a direct descendant of rave music: much more trancey and happy hardcore. (It’s said the term “tecktonik” actually refers to the clash of hardcore dance styles coming in from Belgium and the Netherlands then, crashing into each other like techtonic plates.) The two somewhat over-it-looking white dancers in the Yelle video above are famous lookalike tektoniquistes VaVan and TreAxy — household names in France. Here’s a video of them performing an early version of the dance, called “jumpstyle” (some still prefer to call it that, others use the name to refer to the music) and done to a “more traditional” musical style — you can really see the liquid rave-dance origins here, and yeah, it looks more than a tad ridiculous, but why not? There’s a reason for the term “jumpstyle.” Also happening at the time — around 2005ish, as with all underground phenomena the timing is fuzzy — and in the same clubs, but to more amped-up happy hardcore, was a revival of the Melbourne Shuffle, an old rave dance from the early ’90s that really only looks good when you do it in extraordinarily baggy pants. The “shufflers” often squared off with, or at least disassociated themselves from, the tight-pantsed “jumpers.” (In my head, they’re like the Jets and the Sharks.) Also, despite its name, “jumping” is much more about the upper body and random skips, whereas “shuffling” is all about lower glide. Here’s the Melbourne Shuffle: So, OK, what does any of this have to do with Justice, and the Ed Banger Records scene and sound?

Summer 2008 fairs and festivals

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Grab your calendars, then get outside and celebrate summer in the Bay.

>Click here for a full-text version of this article.

ONGOING

United States of Asian America Arts Festival Various locations, SF; (415) 864-4120, www.apiculturalcenter.org. Through May 25. This festival, presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, showcases Asian Pacific Islander dance, music, visual art, theater, and multidisciplinary performance ensembles at many San Francisco venues.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Third St at Mission, SF; (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct, free. Nearly 100 artistic and cultural events for all ages take place at the Gardens, including the Latin Jazz series and a performance by Rupa & the April Fishes.

MAY 10–31

Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St, Oakl; (510) 637-0462, www.oacc.cc. Times vary, free. The OACC presents hands-on activities for families, film screenings, cooking classes, and performances throughout the month of May.

MAY 15–18

Carmel Art Festival Devendorf Park, Carmel; (831) 642-2503, www.carmelartfestival.org. Call for times, free. Enjoy viewing works by more than 60 visual artists at this four-day festival. In addition to the Plein Air and Sculpture-in-the-Park events, the CAF is host to the Carmel Youth Art Show, Quick Draw, and Kids Art Day.

MAY 16–18

Oakland Greek Festival 4700 Lincoln, Oakl; (510) 531-3400, www.oaklandgreekfestival.com. Fri-Sat, 10am-11pm; Sun, 11am-9pm, $6. Let’s hear an "opa!" for Greek music, dance, food, and a stunning view at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension’s three-day festival.

MAY 17

Asian Heritage Street Celebration Japantown; www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. The largest gathering of Asian Pacific Americans in the nation features artists, DJs, martial arts, Asian pop culture, karaoke, and much more.

Saints Kiril and Methody Bulgarian Festival Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga; (510) 649-0941, www.slavonicweb.org. 4pm, $15. Enjoy live music, dance, and traditional food and wine in celebration of Bulgarian culture. A concert features special guests Radostina Koneva and Orchestra Ludi Maldi.

Taiwanese American Cultural Festival Union Square, SF; (408) 268-5637, www.tafnc.org. 11am-5pm, free. Explore Taiwan by tasting delicious Taiwanese delicacies, viewing a puppet show and other performances, and browsing arts and crafts exhibits.

Uncorked! Ghirardelli Square; 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, $40-45. Ghirardelli Square and nonprofit COPIA present their third annual wine festival, showcasing more than 40 local wineries and an array of gourmet food offerings.

BAY AREA

Cupertino Special Festival in the Park Cupertino Civic Center, 10300 Torre, Cupertino; (408) 996-0850, www.osfamilies.org. 10am-6pm, free. The Organization of Special Needs Families hosts its fourth annual festival for people of all walks or wheels of life. Featuring live music, food and beer, a petting zoo, arts and crafts, and other activities.

Enchanted Village Fair 1870 Salvador, Napa; (707) 252-5522. 11am-4pm, $1. Stone Bridge School creates a magical land of wonder and imagination, featuring games, crafts, a crystal room, and food.

Immigrants Day Festival Courthouse Square, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City; (650) 299-0104, www.historysmc.org. 12-4pm, free. Sample traditional Mexican food, make papel picado decorations, and watch Aztec dancing group Casa de la Cultura Quetzalcoatl at the San Mateo County History Museum.

MAY 17–18

A La Carte and Art Castro St, Mountain View; (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. The official kick-off to festival season, A La Carte is a moveable feast of people and colorful tents offering two days of attractions, music, art, a farmers’ market, and street performers.

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area, El Sobrante; (510) 869-4946, www.bayareastorytelling.org. Gather around and listen to stories told by storytellers from around the world at this outdoor festival. Carol Birch, Derek Burrows, Baba Jamal Koram, and Olga Loya are featured.

Castroville Artichoke Festival 10100 Merritt, Castroville; (831) 633-2465, www.artichoke-festival.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $3-6. "Going Green and Global" is the theme of this year’s festival, which cooks up the vegetable in every way imaginable and features activities for kids, music, a parade, a farmers’ market, and much more.

French Flea Market Chateau Sonoma, 153 West Napa, Sonoma; (707) 935-8553, www.chateausonoma.com. Call for times and cost. Attention, Francophiles: this flea market is for you! Shop for antiques, garden furniture, and accessories from French importers.

Hats Off America Car Show Bollinger Canyon Rd and Camino Ramon, San Ramon; (925) 855-1950, www.hatsoffamerica.us. 10am-5pm, free. Hats Off America presents its fifth annual family event featuring muscle cars, classics and hot rods, art exhibits, children’s activities, live entertainment, a 10K run, and beer and wine.

Himalayan Fair Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 869-3995, www.himalayanfair.net. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-5:30pm, $8.This benefit for humanitarian grassroots projects in the Himalayas features award-winning dancers and musicians representing Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Mongolia. Check out the art and taste the delicious food.

Pixie Park Spring Fair Marin Art and Garden Center, Ross; www.pixiepark.org. 9am-4pm, free. The kids will love the bouncy houses, giant slide, petting zoo, pony rides, puppet shows, and more at this cooperative park designed for children under 6. Bring a book to donate to Homeward Bound of Marin.

Supercon San Jose Convention Center, San Jose; www.super-con.com. Sat., 10am-6pm; Sun., 10am-5pm, $20-30. The biggest stars of comics, sci-fi, and pop culture — including Lost’s Jorge Garcia and Groo writer Sergio Aragonés — descend on downtown San Jose for panels, discussions, displays, and presentations.

MAY 18

Bay to Breakers Begins at Howard and Spear, ends at the Great Highway along Ocean Beach, SF; www.baytobreakers.com. 8am, $39-59. See a gang of Elvis impersonators in running shorts and a gigantic balloon shaped like a tube of Crest floating above a crowd of scantily clad, and unclad, joggers at this annual "race" from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean.

Carnival in the Xcelsior 125 Excelsior; 469-4739, my-sfcs.org/8.html. 11am-4pm, free. This benefit for the SF Community School features game booths, international food selections, prizes, music, and entertainment for all ages.

BAY AREA

Russian-American Fair Terman Middle School, 655 Arastradero, Palo Alto; (650) 852-3509, paloaltojcc.org. 10am-5pm, $3-5. The Palo Alto Jewish Community Center puts on this huge, colorful cultural extravaganza featuring ethnic food, entertainment, crafts and gift items, art exhibits, carnival games, and vodka tasting for adults.

MAY 21–JUNE 8

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues, SF; (415) 399-9554, www.sfiaf.org. The theme for the fifth year of this multidisciplinary festival is "The Truth in Knowing/Threads in Time, Place, Culture."

MAY 22–25

Sonoma Jazz Plus Festival Field of Dreams, 179 First St W, Sonoma; (866) 527-8499, www.sonomajazz.org. Thurs-Sat, 6:30 and 9pm; Sun, 8:30pm, $40+. Head on up to California’s wine country to soak in the sounds of Al Green, Herbie Hancock, Diana Krall, and Bonnie Raitt.

MAY 24–25

Carnaval Mission District, SF; (415) 920-0125, www.carnavalsf.com. 9:30am-6pm, free. California’s largest annual multicultural parade and festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with food, crafts, activities, performances by artists like deSoL, and "Zona Verde," an outdoor eco-green village at 17th and Harrison.

MAY 25–26

San Ramon Art and Wind Festival Central Park, San Ramon; (925) 973-3200, www.artandwind.com. 10am-5pm, free. For its 18th year, the City of San Ramon Parks and Community Services Department presents over 200 arts and crafts booths, entertainment on three stages, kite-flying demos, and activities for kids.

MAY 30–JUNE 8

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Check Web site for ticket prices and venues in and around Healdsburg; (707) 433-4644, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.com. This 10th annual, week-and-a-half-long jazz festival will feature a range of artists from Fred Hersch and Bobby Hutcherson to the Cedar Walton Trio.

MAY 31

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival North Shattuck, Berk; (510) 548-5335, www.northshattuck.org. 10am-6pm, free. Create chalk drawings and sample chocolate delights while vendors, musicians, and clowns entertain the family.

Napa Valley Art Festival 500 Main, Napa; www.napavalleyartfestival.com. 10am-4pm, free. Napa Valley celebrates representational art on Copia’s beautiful garden promenade with art sales, ice cream, and live music. Net proceeds benefit The Land Trust of Napa County’s Connolly Ranch Education Center.

MAY 31–JUNE 1

Union Street Festival Union, between Gough and Steiner, SF; 1-800-310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. For its 32nd anniversary, one of SF’s largest free art festivals is going green, featuring an organic farmer’s market, arts and crafts made with sustainable materials, eco-friendly exhibits, food, live entertainment, and bistro-style cafés.

JUNE 4–8

01SJ: Global Festival of Art on the Edge Various venues, San Jose; (408) 277-3111, ww.01sj.org. Various times. The nonprofit ZERO1 plans to host 20,000 visitors at this festival featuring 100 exhibiting artists exploring the digital age and novel creative expression.

JUNE 5–8

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. $30-99. One of the largest progressive-lifestyle festivals of its kind, Harmony brings art, education, and cultural awareness together with world-class performers like George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Jefferson Starship, Damian Marley, Cheb I Sabbah, and Vau de Vire Society.

JUNE 7–8

Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center; 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $6. The Pacific Crystal Guild presents two days in celebration of crystals, minerals, jewelry, and metaphysical healing tools from an international selection of vendors.

BAY AREA

Sunset Celebration Weekend Sunset headquarters, 80 Willow Road, Menlo Park; 1-800-786-7375, www.sunset.com. 10am-5pm, $12, kids free. Sunset magazine presents a two-day outdoor festival featuring beer, wine, and food tasting; test-kitchen tours, celebrity chef demonstrations, live music, seminars, and more.

JUNE 8

Haight Ashbury Street Fair Haight and Ashbury; www.haightashburystreetfair.org. 11am-5:30pm, free. Celebrate the cultural contributions this historical district has made to SF with a one-day street fair featuring artisans, musicians, artists, and performers.

JUNE 14

Rock Art by the Bay Fort Mason, SF; www.trps.org. 10am-5pm, free. The Rock Poster Society hosts this event celebrating poster art from its origins to its most recent incarnations.

BAY AREA

City of Oakland Housing Fair Frank Ogawa Plaza; Oakl; (510) 238-3909, www.oaklandnet.com/housingfair. 10am-2pm, free. The City of Oakland presents this seventh annual event featuring workshops and resources for first-time homebuyers, renters, landlords, and homeowners.

JUNE 14–15

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, 1200-1500 blocks of Grant and adjacent streets; 989-2220, www.sfnorthbeach.org. 10am-6pm, free. Touted as the country’s original outdoor arts and crafts festival, the North Beach Festival celebrates its 54th anniversary with juried arts and crafts exhibitions and sales, a celebrity pizza toss, live entertainment stages, a cooking stage with celebrity chefs, Assisi animal blessings, Arte di Gesso (Italian street chalk art competition, 1500 block Stockton), indoor Classical Concerts (4 pm, National Shrine of St. Francis), a poetry stage, and more.

BAY AREA

Sonoma Lavender Festival 8537 Sonoma Hwy, Kenwood; (707) 523-4411, www.sonomalavender.com. 10am-4pm, free. Sonoma Lavender opens its private farm to the public for craftmaking, lavender-infused culinary delights by Chef Richard Harper, tea time, and a chance to shop for one of Sonoma’s 300 fragrant products.

JUNE 7–AUG 17

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove, 19th Ave and Sloat, SF; www.sterngrove.org. Sundays 2pm, free. This beloved San Francisco festival celebrates community, nature, and the arts is in its with its 71st year of admission-free concerts.

JUNE 17–20

Mission Creek Music Festival Venues and times vary; www.mcmf.org.The Mission Creek Music Festival celebrates twelve years of featuring the best and brightest local independent musicians and artists with this year’s events in venues big and small.

JUNE 20–22

Jewish Vintners Celebration Various locations, Napa Valley; (707) 968-9944, www.jewishvintners.org. Various times, $650. The third annual L’Chaim Napa Valley Jewish Vintners Celebration celebrates the theme "Connecting with Our Roots" with a weekend of wine, cuisine, camaraderie, and history featuring Jewish winemakers from Napa, Sonoma, and Israel.

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds, 14480 Hwy 128, Boonville; (917) 777-5550, www.snwmf.com.Three-day pass, $135; camping, $50-100. Camp for three days and listen to the international sounds of Michael Franti & Spearhead, the English Beat, Yami Bolo, and many more.

JUNE 28–29

San Francisco Pride 2008 Civic Center, Larkin between Grove and McAllister; 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Celebration Sat-Sun, noon-6pm; parade Sun, 10:30am, free. A month of queer-empowering events culminates in this weekend celebration: a massive party with two days of music, food, and dancing that continues to boost San Francisco’s rep as a gay mecca. This year’s theme is "Bound for Equality."

JULY 3–6

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas-Sierra Fairgrounds, Quincy; (510) 547-1992, www.highsierramusic.com. Ticket prices vary. Enjoy four days of camping, stellar live music, yoga, shopping, and more at the 18th iteration of this beloved festival. This year’s highlights include ALO, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Built to Spill, Bob Weir & RatDog, Gov’t Mule, and Railroad Earth.

JULY 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July Waterfront Celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero at Beach; 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1-9:30pm, free. SF’s waterfront Independence Day celebration features live music by Big Bang Beat and Tainted Love, kids’ activities, and an exciting fireworks show.

JULY 5–6

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy; www.fillmorejazzfestival.com.10am-6pm, free. More than 90,000 people will gather to celebrate Fillmore Street’s prosperous tradition of jazz, culture, and cuisine.

JULY 17–AUG 3

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various Bay Area venues; (415) 392-4400, www.midsummermozart.org. $20-60. This Mozart-only music concert series in its 34th season features talented musicians from SF and beyond.

JULY 18–AUG 8

Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival Menlo School, 50 Valparaiso, Atherton; www.musicatmenlo.org. In its sixth season, this festival explores a musical journey through time, from Bach to Jennifer Higdon.

JULY 21–27

North Beach Jazz Fest Various locations; www.nbjazzfest.com. Various times and ticket prices. Sunset Productions presents the 15th annual gathering celebrating indoor and outdoor jazz by over 100 local and international artists. Special programs include free jazz in Washington Square Park.

JULY 26, AUG 16

FLAX Creative Arts Festival 1699 Market; 552-2355, www.flaxart.com. 11am-2pm, free. Flax Art and Design hosts an afternoon of hands-on demonstrations, free samples, and prizes for kids.

JULY 27

Up Your Alley Dore Alley between Folsom and Howard, Folsom between Ninth and 10th Sts; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, free. Hundreds of naughty and nice leather-lovers sport their stuff in SoMa at this precursor to the Folsom Street Fair.

AUG 2–3

Aloha Festival San Francisco Presidio Parade Grounds, near Lincoln at Graham; www.pica-org.org/AlohaFest/index.html. 10am-5pm, free. The Pacific Islanders’ Cultural Association presents its annual Polynesian cultural festival featuring music, dance, arts, crafts, island cuisine, exhibits, and more.

AUG 9–10

Nihonmachi Street Fair Japantown Center, Post and Webster; www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Japantown’s 35th annual celebration of the Bay Area’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities continues this year with educational booths and programs, local musicians and entertainers, exhibits, and artisans.

AUG 22–24

Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival Golden Gate Park; www.outsidelands.com. View Web site for times and price. Don’t miss the inaugural multifaceted festival of top-notch music, including Tom Petty, Jack Johnson, Manu Chao, Widespread Panic, Wilco, and Primus.

AUG 25–SEPT 1

Burning Man Black Rock City, NV; www.burningman.com. $295. Celebrate the theme "American Dream" at this weeklong participatory campout that started in the Bay Area. No tickets will be sold at the gate this year.

AUG 29–SEPT 1

Sausalito Art Festival 2400 Bridgeway, Sausalito; (415) 331-3757, www.sausalitoartfestival.org. Various times, $10. Spend Labor Day weekend enjoying the best local, national, and international artists as they display paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and more in this seaside village.

AUG 30–31

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae; (650) 697-7324, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. The "Big Easy" comes to Millbrae for this huge Mardi Gras–style celebration featuring R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and soul music, as well as arts and crafts, food and beverages, live performance, and activities for kids.

AUG 30–SEPT 1

Art and Soul Festival Various venues, Oakl; (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. 11am-6pm, $5-$10. Enjoy three days of culturally diverse music, food, and art at the eighth annual Comcast Art and Soul Festival, which features a Family Fun Zone and an expo highlighting local food and wine producers.

SEPT 1–5

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival Various Bay Area locations; www.sfshakes.org. This nonprofit organization presents free Shakespeare in the Park, brings performances to schools, hosts theater camps, and more.

SEPT 6–7

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn, Mountain View; (650) 968-8378, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Known as one of America’s finest art festivals, more than 200,000 arts lovers gather in Silicon Valley’s epicenter for this vibrant celebration featuring art, music, and a Kids’ Park.

SEPT 20–21

Treasure Island Music Festival Treasure Island; treasureislandfestival.com. The second year of this two-day celebration, organized by the creators of Noise Pop, promises an impressive selection of indie, rock, and hip-hop artists.

SEPT 28

Folsom Street Fair Folsom Street; www.folsomstreetfair.com. Eight days of Leather Pride Week finishes up with the 25th anniversary of this famous and fun fair.

Listings compiled by Molly Freedenberg.

Dandelion Dancetheater

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PREVIEW The San Francisco Ballet closes its season this week, but Bay Area dance keeps pulsing. Across town in the Mission’s modest CELLspace, Dandelion Dancetheater is starting its own rather remarkable program of new dance. The two-week run — which heads to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the third week — features the company’s own performers plus guest artists from Montreal and Madrid. Collectively these performers and choreographers call what they are doing "physically integrated dance," the moniker folks who have long been expanding the concept of who is a dancer seem finally to have settled on. It’s a movement pioneered by Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, so it should be no surprise that these programs draw heavily on former AXIS dancers Jacques Poulin-Denis, who has returned to Canada, and Nadia Adame, who has gone back to Spain. Eric Kupers, Dandelion’s codirector and a former AXIS collaborator, initially became interested in working with nontraditional dancing bodies for the challenges it poses to his own creativity. Kupers has investigated ideas of identity, body image, beauty, intimacy, loneliness, ability, and disability. In The Undressed Project series (2002 to present), he asked his very diverse group of dancers to perform in the nude, challenging their vulnerability and our willingness to look. In his Physically Integrated Dance Program at California State University-East Bay, he works with performers with emotional and physical challenges. They will perform in one program with his newest company dancer, a young man with a learning disability. Kupers’ work-in-progress, oust, and Adame’s 9 días y 20 horas a la deriva look at issues of displacement, particularly surrounding immigration. Poulin-Denis, with Mayday Dance, will bring Les Angles Morts (2007), while his DORS investigates sleeplessness.

Dandelion Dancetheater Fri/9-S0un/18, 7 (Program A) and 8:30 p.m. (Program B), CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF. $10–$20. (510) 885-3154, www.brownpapertickets.com

Small Business Awards 2008: Community Spirit Award

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El Rio is the kind of place that makes your head spin. So much happens in this neighborhood bar and venue, affectionately referred to as "your dive." On any given night, DJs play an eclectic mix of music while neighborhood locals shoot pool. Every Sunday night, revelers dance salsa and enjoy BBQ on one of the most spacious back patios in the city. Local bands rock out old-school punk and metal in the adjoining live music space several times a week. Once a month, women of color meet for a Saturday afternoon salsa event, Mango. It’s also where the annual MadCat Women’s International Film Festival will be held for the 11th year in a row.

All this makes El Rio one of the most diverse intersections of San Franciscans you’ll ever find.

For the last 13 years, the club has been owned and run by Dawn Huston, who sees herself more as support for her staff — the overflow person doing whatever needs to be done — than the boss. Mostly she thinks of herself as someone who enables communities. Send her an e-mail about the kind of event you want to put on and, if inspired, she’ll figure out how to make it happen.

She started out working the door when Malcolm Thornley (who passed away this year) and Robert Nett owned the place. The two started the business 30 years ago, primarily as a Brazilian gay men’s bar. Thornley and Nett branched out beyond the typical role of neighborhood watering hole proprietors to help a lot of people, especially in the LGBT community and the Mission District. The partners eventually made a very reasonable financial arrangement with Huston so she could take over when they were ready to retire.

Continuing in the spirit of the original owners, the staff at El Rio makes its rental prices accessible so that a constant flow of benefits — as many as 250 per year — can be held. Day after day, El Rio helps teachers, public schools, the women’s surf club, the Dyke March, various AIDS riders, independent filmmakers, and animal rescuers raise money so they can contribute to the community at large.

By aiming to break even, the club maintains its bent toward fundraising. The whole point is not to make profit but to make the business something that allows all of us — drinkers, dancers, musicians, activists — to live in the city comfortably and to keep doing it so brilliantly.

EL RIO

3158 Mission, SF

(415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

SFIFF, day eight: Bed, bath and beyond the ordinary

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I love the festival’s crazy Late Show selections, but sometimes I miss them. Luckily, Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales screened for a third time on Wednesday afternoon. It’s very reminiscent of John Cassavetes’ 1974 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but not as focused. (Ferrara’s style is even more rambling.)

Willem Dafoe plays Ray Ruby, a man living his dream by running a strip club. The trouble is that the club is failing, the girls haven’t been paid and Ray loves to blow all his money on lotto tickets. A series of miniature dramas play out over the course of one night. Old friends stop in, new customers come and go, strippers dance and complain, and a man tries to sell organic hot dogs! A tanning booth explodes, nearly burning down the joint. The abrasive landlady (the great Sylvia Miles) shows up, threatening to let Bed, Bath and Beyond move in. A stripper called Monroe (Asia Argento) brings in her dog, which gets in the way. (She uses the dog in her act, and more or less makes out with him on stage.)

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Bed, bath and beyond, baby!: The peerless Sylvia Miles with Go Go Tales director Abel Ferrara

I hear a symphony named Kimya Dawson

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By Alex Felsinger

When the Moldy Peaches became increasingly popular in the ’90s, Kimya Dawson decided she wanted out. She hoped to avoid the mainstream music industry and its managers, bookers, and publicists. Her band-mate Adam Green continued within that realm, and has even been known to sell-out stadium concerts in Europe. Dawson, however, latched onto the growing global do-it-yourself punk scene, booked her own shows, and released all her albums on small, independent labels.

In the past, Dawson has always performed in smaller Bay Area venues. Two years ago, I booked a show for her at a Haight Street coffee house that could barely seat 40 people, but it was canceled at the last minute along with the rest of her tour.

Then Juno happened. It put Dawson back in the spotlight, even more than before. Her last stop in the Bay Area, at 924 Gilman Street, reflected an attempt to hold on to her underground ethos. But when it sold out in less than an hour, it was clear (at least for the time being) that she’d outgrown the facilities that the Bay Area punk scene has to offer.

So, a couple months later, what was the next logical step? Maybe the Independent? Slim’s? Nope — Dawson was asked to play the Herbst Theatre. Yes, the famous seated venue where the United Nations Charter was signed in 1945, a place typically reserved for classical music performances, theater, and dance.

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A spoonful of Kimya Dawson helps the Juno hype go down

But Dawson’s down-to-earth demeanor turned the room’s paneled mosaics into finger paintings and shortened the figurative distance from seat-to-stage to mere feet. She knew that she was out of place, and she didn’t mind saying so. “I’ve never played a show in the Bay Area that cost more than five dollars,” she said to the crowd, who’d paid $20 per ticket. “Next time, it’ll be free.”

Classical, remixed

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Ten world premieres in three days is a huge deal, even for a troupe as accomplished as the San Francisco Ballet. Even so, it was disappointing that the choreographic choices for the New Works Festival — the culmination of a season-long celebration of SFB’s 75th anniversary — were, for the most part, so extraordinarily conservative. Artistic director Helgi Tomasson has been far more adventurous in the past in challenging audiences and dancers alike. Despite these limitations, the performances were a festive end to an important company milestone. That four of the 10 anointed choreographers were homegrown added a special luster. Generally, ballet companies are not known for fostering in-house talent; this one does. Val Caniparoli, Julia Adam, and Yuri Possokhov, who all have international careers now, started choreographing while still dancing with the company. Margaret Jenkins, who taught modern dance at SFB for years, could not be farther removed from being a ballet choreographer. Hers was Tomasson’s single most daring commission.

Even within the conventions of the ballet medium, the four pieces were worlds apart. Ballet, after all, is a language that can be modulated and used for poetic, dramatic, humorous, and narrative purposes, just like English or French. Though not totally successful — due to issues of timing and some musical disconnects — the originality of the concept and of its realization made Adam’s A rose by any other name the festival’s winner for me. A sly yet ever-so-elegant take on the apogee of 19th-century classicism, The Sleeping Beauty, A rose tweaked conventions thoughtfully and charmingly.

Jenkins’ Thread translated her free-flowing approach to movement onto a ballet company. She explored the myth of Ariadne, who spun a thread to keep her lover Theseus safe from the Minotaur and was later betrayed by him. Though Jenkins kept the story on the metaphoric level, using language both balletic and individualized, it was as clear a narrative as she has worked with in a long time. Caniparoli’s enthusiastically acclaimed portrait of repressed womanhood in Ibsen’s House appealed because of his proven ability to create easily flowing phrases, but his character delineations needed to be much sharper. SFB resident choreographer Possokhov’s fine Fusion put the spotlight on styles of male dancing and included three sparkling pas de deux. There would be many more of them to come in the following week.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET’S "NEW WORKS FESTIVAL"

Through May 6

See Web site for schedule, $20–$265

War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 553-4655, www.sfballet.org

Sara Shelton Mann

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PREVIEW Only a few seasons into a more extensive performance schedule, ODC Theater began an extensive remodeling of its well-appointed building on 17th Street at Shotwell — and found itself without a space to showcase its work. What to do? Artistic director Rob Bailis seized the opportunity to move a few blocks up the street to the much beloved but lately much neglected Theater Artaud. For the rest of the year, ODC Theater plans to take advantage of the cavernous space, decent technical equipment, and stadium seating with a series of mini-festivals. "For the Record," the first in the series, examines the relationship between the body dancing and the body politic with three separate programs.

Few in the Bay Area dance world have examined this nexus more extensively than Sara Shelton Mann, whose works make up the second week of the festival. Founder of the highly praised Contraband, she revolutionized multi-disciplined dance theater, launching the careers of original thinkers and artists as Kim Epifano, Jess Curtis, and Keith Hennessy. Shelton Mann is working with fewer dancers these days but is no less committed to digging into the flesh. For proof, watch her dance/video trilogy Inspirare, three years in the making. In Telios/Telios, two couples — Kathleen Hermesdorf and Yannis Adoniou, and Hana Erdman and Alex Zendzian — reprise their passionate give-and-take roles of 2006. In Inspirare, Hermesdorf and Maria Francesca Scaroni expand notions of the body’s physicality. The triptych opens with its newest section, the ensemble piece RedGoldSky, which Shelton Mann describes as a "stream of consciousness ramble that touches on the absurd."

SARA SHELTON MANN Thurs/1-Sat/3, 8 p.m., Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. $20–$25. (415) 626-4370, www.odctheater.org

Loaded

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REVIEW How do you say Kier? "Kia" like the car, if you had asked former Deee-lite diva Lady Miss Kier, when she was, er, hea for a special performance at monthly, genre-defying club Loaded on April 4.

The once de-groovy entertainer whose Brooklyn drag queen persona, complete with exaggerated accent that can best be described as a Rosie Perez-RuPaul collision, charmed audiences back in the early ’90s when she convinced us we could bomb the world with ecstasy, armed only with the power of love and a good beat.

Maybe the routine’s grown stale, maybe the drugs have worn off, or perhaps I’ve become too jaded for a World Clique (Elektra/Wea, 1990) mentality after watching bombs over Baghdad, part two, but Kier’s performance this time around lacked sincerity. In fact, the once vibrant and agile songstress, who worked video screens and club stages in retro-futuristic catsuits and platform boots as part of the groundbreaking Dee-lite two decades ago, could no longer bring us together — or even get it together — that night, even aided by a skilled backing band including P-Funk’s Ronkat and trippy background visuals.

Before the set began, Kier — in a lime and aqua space-age church dress, topped off by an over-the-top monster weave that housed more extensions than AT&T — kept the ironically mustached and spectacled crowd waiting for a good 20 minutes while rigging up her PowerBook. The purpose of this preliminary step became clear as Kier opened with her new material, including the less-than-stellar "Go Down on Me."

If she managed to maintain her soulful vocals, it was difficult to hear, since they were so heavily processed. If her eyes were still glimmering beacons of hope, it was impossible to see, since they continually searched her computer screen for lyrics. And forget about high kicks, when tightly trussed-up Kier could only manage the occasional hand-chopping move. As expected, Kier’s closer — the perennial favorite "Groove Is in the Heart" — continues to set the dance floor ablaze. Still, Kier should heed her own wise words: "You’re only as good as your new material." I wonder: if that’s true, how one might say, deee-sappointed?

LOADED First Fridays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $20. Rickshaw Stop, 188 Fell St, SF. www.myspace.com/clubloaded

Dance, horn dogs and damsels, dance

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Warning: listening to the Brass Menazeri is addictive — once they start, you can’t stop. After a sold-out show at Ashkenaz in Berkeley last month, the band of nine was dragged out for an encore or six — not an easy feat for an exhausted group of horn players. Meanwhile, the crowd got busy losing their minds the old-fashioned way: dancing and moving any way they knew how.

Though unquestionably exciting, brass band music from Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece sounds exotic to most American ears. But vocalist and baritone horn player Rachel MacFarlane isn’t concerned about being written off as an novelty act.

"It’s not a flash in the pan," she says of the growing interest in Eastern Europe and Romani, or Gypsy, culture in the wake of successful acts like New York City’s punked-out, spectacle-oriented Gogol Bordello. She sees the band’s success as part of a wider public engagement with cultures of the world, with roots in the folk revival of the 1970s.

Not that Balkan brass music has become mainstream, exactly. When vocalist Briget Boyle signed up for a college course on music from the former Yugoslavia, she says she had never even heard of the Balkans. Then she listened to the music. "Once I got it in my head," she remembers, "I couldn’t stop." Boyle developed a serious cultural crush, not just on a collection of poignant melodies, but on a way of life in which music, rather than being a commodity, represents a "life-giving force."

I knew what she meant that evening at Ashkenaz as I unselfconsciously sang along to refrains in the Romani language, without a clue as to what I was saying. That vitality, though, is part of what makes the flair and pathos of native Romani and Slavic performers so hard to replicate. Though band member Peter Jaques has cultivated phenomenal stylistic command on both trumpet and clarinet, he’s the first to admit this. In his efforts to learn from some of the region’s master musicians, he resembled a nonnative speaker trying to shed a foreign accent: "No one needed to tell me that there were nuances I just didn’t have," he explains. Still, Jaques says his teachers encouraged him, sending the message: "This is our music. We love it. You should play it, too!"

Moving toward a musical identity of their own, the Menazeri plans to include original tunes alongside the traditional picks on their second, still-untitled CD, which is slated for recording in May. It seems the group is feeling justifiably emboldened by steady support from wildly disparate Bay Area audiences, from folk dance enthusiasts and Balkanophiles to supporters of Romani culture and urban tastemakers like the Monterey Jazz Festival and Amnesia proprietor Sol Crawford.

Indeed, every band member I spoke with singled out Amnesia as a tinderbox for just the kind of music-driven near-rioting Brass Menazeri encourages. And it turns out the song I joined in with, "Opa Cupa," translates as a colorful invitation to work it out on the dance floor. So whether or not you can find Serbia on a map, the rat-a-tat of the tupan (a Balkan drum) mixed with sparkling, agile trumpets, unabashedly soulful vocals, and the gut-rattling throb of the low, low sousaphone is likely to send the same unignorable message as a New Orleans brass band during Mardi Gras. That message is: no matter who you are or what you know, dance!

BRASS MENAZERI

With Rupa and the April Fishes

Sat/3, 1 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

Mission and Third streets, SF

(415) 543-1718

www.ybgf.org

Also the Herdeljezi Roma Festival

Sat/3, 6:30 p.m., $15

Ives Park, Sebastopol

(707) 823-7941

www.voiceofroma.com

Black, white, and color

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Clip this article. Put it on your refrigerator to remind yourself, your roommates, your friends and family to see Medicine For Melancholy.

The story seems simple. In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence with no attempt to reconnect. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance. Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world.

It’s always enriching to see talented artists at work. In mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. The city he sees is the city we know. From the grassy lands of Noe Valley to the quiet hush of the Tenderloin at dawn, Laxton’s eye makes the nearly deserted SF that the two main characters inhabit lush, promising, and sinister.

Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF’s changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways.

Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America’s major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF’s black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie’s couple: Micah doesn’t do SFMOMA; Jo hadn’t known that MoAD existed. Micah sees himself as black first and a man second. Jo refuses to define herself.

At Micah’s apartment, a poster with a 1962 quote from the Redevelopment Agency sparks a conversation. Jo wants to let go of the past. Micah, the native, sees the poster as relevant to Mission Bay.

"Why is everything that is ‘indie’ mean ‘not black?’" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them.

Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF’s soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

Wed/30, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/4, 8:15 p.m., PFA; May 7, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

Future blaps

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› superego@sfbg.com

>>Lazer Sword sizzles — read the interview

>>Lazer bass-ics: view the vids

SUPER EGO The Millennials have landed on the dance floors, and they come bearing lazers. Electro bangers are raving tecknotik. The blipswitch just got flicked. Hard is the new soft is the new pink is the new blog.

Stay with me, I got breakfast.

The past few years have seen the largest graduating classes in US history, and fresh, fizzy kids are flooding Clubland. They’re cranking full-tilt volume and lobe-throbbing loops, tinged with aggressive glamour. Good for them. A little hyperactive angst to soundtrack that stunned gazelle look so in vogue these days seems perfect for the new electorate. The next few Super Ego columns are gonna get wonky on the youthful nightlife sounds and styles already exploding for summer, so push up your super-flat Takahashi Murakami bifocals, slip on a virtual mindpod, and let’s get kinetic. I’m a hype machine!

First up: Canada. No shit. The Great no-longer-so-White North’s on fire right now, following its recent indie rock onslaught with a tide of dance music innovation. Somehow, dubstep’s abstract rhythmic dynamics, the paranoid wooze of crunk, and the ghosts of the unjustly smacked-down ’90s glitch and IDM scenes have outsourced to Montreal, spawning a kickass, woofer-blowing bbbrrraaa-aaappp!

That’s the sound of Turbo Crunk, the MTL’s superinfluential monthly party and underground movement, which filters hip-hop thumpers through a fuzzy pair of Korgs to spit out jittery ragga and zipper-ripping beats. Last month, New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones dubbed the cataclysmic sound "lazer bass," which fits, since the prolongated sizzle of the low-end slices through your innards like a subsonic chainsaw. Live performers and remixers Megasoid, Blingmod, and Mofomatronix are a few of the Turbo Crunk prime movers, but they took their cue from the genre-bending Bounce Le Gros party thrown by totally crushable speaker-wobbler Ghislain Poirier from 2005-07. Poirier, who blew through San Francisco on tour last September and scorched many a virgin ear, records for Ninja Tune and does to dancehall riddim what labelmate Amon Tobin did to Brazilian samba more than a decade ago — chomp and warp it inside out — and there’s your Turbo family tree.

Lazer bass has originators in the states, too, especially on the West Coast. L.A. is repped by protean producer Daddy Kev, cosmic dubster Flying Lotus, and poster-boy hip-choppers Glitch Mob, a quartet of DJs and knob-fiddlers — comprising Ooah, ediT, Boreta, and Kraddy — that’s managed to appeal to both the gangsta rap and Burning Man crowds. So yeah, the apocalypse is upon us. Grab a fruity cocktail.

The Bay seems exceptionally lazerable, even though there’s no regular party yet to slice up the glow. Glitch came of age here — howdy, Kid606 — and Club Six’s sprawling techno-ragga club Surya Dub has become the epicenter for the kind of dread bass antics that lazer bass takes to a gut level. Montreal is Canada’s Silicon Valley, so the demographics of pan-global, tech-savvy immigrants and natives matches up. And despite its mechanical logistics, the lazer bass sound has a certain grinning innocence to it. These are kids whose dads turned them on to Star Wars, probably. The low-tech skronks and squelches riding high atop that neato bass blare — and those pixellated CMYK Space Invaders graphics — aren’t ironic comments, they’re a great space coaster to the electronic womb. The recent bathhouse hi-NRG, Italo disco, and minimal techno revivals shared a similar ga-ga exploration of the synth-driven mysteries of the cosmic past.

Local duo Lazer Sword, a.k.a. LL and Lando Kal, are our gunners for the scene. (Ethereal wunderboy Ghosts on Tape and trancey duo Hours of Worship deserve mention as well). LL describes what he and Lando do when they’re bent backbreakingly low over their displays as "future-blaps." Yep. The two hit hard on the hip-hop side: their bastard detonation of 50 Cent’s "I Get Money" and live robo-raze of Lil Wayne and Birdman’s "Stuntin’ Like My Daddy" torch floors, while their own stuttery blowout "Gucci Sweatshirt" (from Oakland label Pish Posh’s 2007 comp Got Howls) is a c-c-cult classic. Lazer Sword’s got an EP dropping on the B.E.A.R. label this spring, they just headlined Turbo Crunk April 26, and you can catch them twice in May. Who’s up for sonic bikini waxes?

LAZER SWORD

With XO Skeletons and VC4

Fri/2, 9 p.m., call for price

Balazo 18

2811 Mission, SF

(415) 255-7227

www.myspace.com/lazersword

GLITCH MOB

With Lazer Sword and Flying Lotus

May 9, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

Area 51

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I agree with my cohort Dennis Harvey — it is always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. There’s something so special about the bodiless head trapped under a glass jar in that movie. As Jan Compton, a.k.a. "Jan in the Pan," actress Virginia Leith seethes and cackles, bringing across pure existential pain more forcefully than any French philosopher with a perma-creased brow. The fact that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die figures in local mad magician Craig Baldwin’s new antic investigation Mock Up on Mu is just one of at least 51 reasons why I’m excited to see it premiere at the 51st SF International Film Festival.

The Guardian‘s deluxe coverage of SFIFF 51 kicks off with a portrait of Baldwin. Elsewhere, Cheryl Eddy discusses blood ties with the sickest father-daughter team around, Dario and Asia Argento. Our stories this week also scope out a pair of life-and-death documentaries; a mod, mod, mod war movie; some new Mexican filmic journeys; the merits of festival awardees; and, last but not least, the eternally fatal allure of the late Gene Tierney. So, before you drown in the dark, before hours of unmapped SFIFF excursions have you feeling like the son or daughter of the brain that wouldn’t die, read all about it here. In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, "we should see cinema as a separate continent" — and we should be cheered by what we see. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.

>>For more reviews, previews, news, and daily coverage of SFIFF 51, check out SFBG’s Pixel Vision blog.

>>Highway 51
A road map to SFIFF 51 — films to ride with (and some speed bumps)

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>>Explosive stuff!
Craig Baldwin turns space junk into magickal treasure with Mock Up on Mu
By Dennis Harvey

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>>Blood ties
Asia and Dario Argento go go for a SFIFF trifecta
By Cheryl Eddy

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>>Ashes to ashes
A dance between Dust and Profit motive and the whispering wind
By Matt Sussman

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>>On tour
Mod auteur Serge Bozon makes the war go pop in La France
By Kimberly Chun

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>>Critic’s choice
In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia
By Max Goldberg

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>>Apolitical animal
Mexico’s SFIFF thrillers aren’t thrilling, but Cochochi turns loss into victory
By Jason Shamai

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>>Fierce perm
Robert Towne still knows how to give an award-winning Shampoo
By Maria Komodore

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>>Color her deadly
Leave Her to Heaven‘s strange allure will pull you under
By Johnny Ray Huston

SFIFF: Highway 51

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THURS/24

• The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations — 2006’s Anatomy of Hell — to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, Mick Jagger–lipped Ryno de Maginy (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decades-long affair with the magnetic mistress — telling the tale to his fiancée’s grandmother, who is rapt. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years — not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., Castro.

FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra‘s 70-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven, but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role, opera veteran Vishnevskaya doesn’t need to sing to etch a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

• Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a parable, set on the eve of World War II, about the use of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)

8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair alone. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki.

• The Golem with Black Francis (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Codirected by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history, and political commentary. (Harvey)

9:30 p.m., Castro.

• Just Like Home (Lone Scherfig, Denmark, 2007) Dogme95 filmmaker Scherfig hones her flair for bittersweet comedy with this goofily enjoyable ensemble piece about a misfit small town that falls into chaos. Much of the film’s story is seen through the eyes of a newcomer who has escaped from a bizarre religious cult; in accordance, Scherfig records the earnest bumbling of town folk through a unique lens, sometimes smeared with streaks of overexposed or double-exposed shapes and colors. The result is only as deep as a standard-issue Hollywood romantic comedy, but it’s deftly handled and slyly endearing. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

• Lady Jane (Robert Guédiguian, France, 2007) Lean and mean as a killer B-movie, Lady Jane shows that the French noir still possesses a powerful measure of chilly fire. Its namesake, played by the 50-ish, formidable, and fierce Ariane Ascaride, perfectly embodies the genre. Roused from bourgeois slumber when her son is suddenly snatched, Lady Jane reconnects with two old partners in crime to raise a ransom. Director Guédiguian is overly fond of his flashbacks but redeems himself with the care he puts into imagery that avoids Bogart-by-way-of-Belmondo clichés. (Chun)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/ 27, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

• You, the Living (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway, 2007) There is one thing wrong with Swede Roy Andersson’s movies: there aren’t enough of them. His fourth feature in 30 years is another almost indescribable gizmo that strings together absurdist tableaux to increasingly hilarious and elaborate effect. From an incongruous Louisiana brass band to unhappy barflies forever facing last call, the characters here are comic Scandinavian-miserabilist pawns in a cosmic joke told largely through music — and painted a fugly shade of lime green. Bizarre and delightful. (Harvey)

6:15 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/27, 8:30 p.m., PFA; Tues/29, 7 p.m., Kabuki

SAT/26

Fados (Carlos Saura, Portugal/Spain, 2007) Attempting to do for the Portuguese torch song what he once did for Spain’s gypsy blues with Flamenco (1995), Saura soars and stumbles with Fados, presenting wonderful performances and a few unfortunately dated modern-dance treatments. Chico Buarque, Mariza, Lila Downs, and Césaria Évora lend their varied styles and impassioned voices to the form. But one wishes Saura would have stepped aside further for the effervescent, soulful lilt of Caetano Veloso; the plush, liquid tones of Lura; the arch, curled-lip warble of Ana Sofia Varela; and old world narrative grace of Carlos do Carmo. (Chun)

2:45 p.m., Castro. Also Mon/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

Ice People (Anne Aghion, USA/France, 2007) The movies have long made the Antarctic the terrain of terrifying monsters and cute creatures, but the beings discovered by Anne Aghion in this documentary bare fatigue, not fangs, and they are far more prickly than cuddly. Aghion’s portrait of the inhabitants of the McMurdow Research Station spends most of its time with a satellite group of four geologists looking for 20-million-year-old leaf fossils. There’s more depth in the fantastic landscapes, which Aghion lenses far more flatteringly than she does her human subjects. (Sussman)

6:45 p.m., Kabuki. Mon/28, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki

Mataharis (Icíar Bollaín, Spain, 2007) Charlie’s Angels this ain’t: these investigators and would-be Mata Haris of an all-female Madrid detective agency have the unwashed hair, sensible shoes, and bad marriages of everyday wage slaves. Actress-director Bollaín’s skillful, empathetic knack for capturing the grubby, low-light details of working women’s lives glimmers through the pale haze of this promising film. But she falters with the application of narrative-flattening sentiment, predictably reassuring story arcs, and the occasional cheesy slo-mo effect. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 7:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 1:15 p.m., Clay

Walt & El Grupo (Theodore Thomas, USA, 2007) In 1941, Walt Disney and a band of animators, writers, and other artists — which came to be known as El Grupo — journeyed to South America on a goodwill tour. This documentary, codirected by the son of one voyager, gathers wonderful photos, home movies, and a dazzling collection of drawings and cartoon clips to re-create the trip. The trouble is that there’s no real drama. The cumulative view is as sharply Eurocentric as Disney’s was when he went on to make cartoons such as 1942’s Saludos Amigos. (Anderson)
1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/28, 6 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki

SUN/27

• Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowksi, Australia, 2007) Norma Khouri made headlines and toured the talk show and lecture circuit as a crusading heroine when her 2003 international bestseller Forbidden Love highlighted the phenomenon of honor killings in pockets of the Muslim world. Trouble was, her heartrending story turned out to be a fabrication. As filmmaker Anna Broinowski grows increasingly exasperated with her subject’s fibbing and evasiveness, this documentary develops from an exposé into a portrait of a serial con artist one would be quite happy to see writing her next book from behind bars. (Harvey)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also April 30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Clay; May 4, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki

• Picking Up the Pieces (various, 2007) The most intriguing piece in this shorts program about things lost and found is Death Valley Superstar, Michael Yaroshevsky’s half-hour documentary focusing on Marc Frechette, who was picked off the street to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point. Taking his role as a student revolutionary into real life, he subsequently tried robbing a bank, was arrested, and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Also excellent is Radu Jude’s 25-minute Romanian drama Alexandra and John Magary’s The Second Line, a narrative revolving around a FEMA worker in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Harvey)

11:45 a.m., Kabuki. Also April 30, noon, Kabuki.

A Stray Girlfriend (Ana Katz, Argentina, 2007) Writer-director-actress Katz maps out post-breakup transience with a wandering handheld camera and oblique dialog. As her titular character explores a rural township on Argentina’s coast, each scene teeters between bewilderment and menace. Lynne Ramsay covered similar terrain in her minor masterpiece Morvern Callar (2002), though with a dream-inducing soundtrack and enigmatic ellipticism far beyond Katz’s more vanilla approach. (Goldberg)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 1, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:15 p.m., PFA

MON/28

• Cachao: Uno Más (Dikayl Rimmasch, USA, 2008) Actor, would-be bongo player, and Cuban music fanatic Andy Garcia does right by his idol, the late Cuban musical great Israel "Cachao" Lopez, in this passionate tribute sprinkled with SF sights and centered around a Bimbo’s 365 Club concert. The show was apparently a hot one — it also showcased Bay Area Latin music scholar John Santos, timbalero Orestes Vilato, and vocalist Lazaro Galarraga — and director Rimmasch does it justice by using the performance as a narrative framework for a history that parallels that of contemporary Cuban music. (Chun)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki.

TUES/29

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008) After profiling Robert McNamara in 2003’s The Fog of War, Morris jumps down the chain-of-command to summon US soldiers punished for the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. Ever the showman, he cuts from burnished interviews and photos to reenactments and slow-motion rumbles — we "see" Saddam’s egg frying, giant prison ants, and an exploding helicopter. Such obsessive visualizations seem misplaced and morally confused. The Abu Ghraib story is, among other things, about the unstable, delicate nature of photographic representation. Yet Morris can’t resist auteur-stamped fireworks — how else to explain the typically nutty (and utterly incongruous) Danny Elfman score? (Goldberg)

Part of "Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award: An Evening With Errol Morris," 7:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: On tour

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SFIFF His last letter read, "Forget me" and "I’m never coming back." But instead of crying, waiting, hoping he’ll return, or pleading, "Please, Mr. Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter, a letter for me," she decides she will follow him, wherever he may go, because maybe, just maybe, one fine day, they’ll meet once more, and he’ll want the love he threw away before.

What follows is the sublime La France (2007), a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the same chapel of pop that houses tearful penitent Brian Wilson, radiant nun Anna Karina, and verse-scribbling choir boy Jacques Brel — and stage-set with the mist-swathed romanticism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

After our heroine and "Dear Jeanne" letter recipient Camille (Sylvie Testud) dons the boyish garb of a wartime Viola to unearth news of her soldier husband, she stumbles on a mysterious military troop slumbering uneasily in the woods. Camille wants to eat like them, march like them, and become one of them, with the sacrificial passion of a lover desperate to wear the garments and walk in the footsteps of her pined-for mate. But in the fall of 1917, all is not-so-quiet far from the Western front as director Serge Bozon’s band of brothers — many played by the actor-auteur’s fellow French film critics — pick up impromptu instruments fashioned from canteens and pots to play the sweetest yet strikingly barbed lovelorn tunes. What better way to meet doom while their country takes some of the heaviest casualties of World War I? What better way to mend a broken heart?

La France is "a war movie but almost in the absence of war and a love movie almost in the absence of love," as Bozon explains via e-mail while attending a Buenos Aires film festival. It turns gracefully on "a quest — just like the war, because we are never in the battlefields. So the war is more a horizon — something outside, always close but almost never reached.

"The unifying impulse is this magnetization, by definition from outside," he continues. "I think here the master of magnetization is Jacques Tourneur, the Henry James of cinema: how to drive la mise en scène by the absence of something at the (double) center of the story."

Balancing the visually sumptuous La France (lensed by the director’s sister Céline) on what he describes as the edge and arrogance of English pop-sike and the narcotic etherealness of California sunshine pop, Bozon has made one of the most unique films in the festival. No joke. He sports only two shortish works — the 84-minute L’Amitie (1998) and the 59-minute Mods (2002) — beneath the belt of his modish slacks: La France is his first feature. It’s also inadvertently launched something of a burgeoning DJ career for the music-obsessed director, who promises to draw from his healthy garage rock and Northern soul singles collection for at least one dance-party during the fest.

SFBG Why did you title the film La France? Does the soldiers’ plight say something about your country in general?

SERGE BOZON To put it in the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the ’60s (in Cahiers du Cinéma) 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."

I wanted to deal with desertion, not to tell the story of the deserters who were caught by the French army, not to tell the story of the deserters who managed to reach their goal, but to tell the story of the deserters "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 chose the title.

Just listen to "Going All the Way" by the Squires or "On Tour" by the Chancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records), and you’ll understand the relation of this title to the music. "On Tour" is a song, as you can 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, but in the end it’s only frustration and anger.

SFBG What do war movies mean to you?

SB It is the only classic American genre that is still alive in France, where a lot of war movies are made each year. 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, so I could have done it in a present-day setting. But what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is in our present and desertion is, still, in our present history — "needles and pins," to quote the Ramones covering the Searchers.

SFBG Which war movies have intrigued you or inspired La France specifically?

SB The American and Russian war movies of the ’40s and ’50s. And I must press this point: the movies of [Samuel] Fuller, [John] Ford, [Raoul] Walsh, Tourneur, [Howard] Hawks are not more important for me than the sublime Russian war movies — for example [Ivan] Pyryev’s Tales of the Siberian Land (1947), [Leonid] Lukov’s Two Soldiers (1943), [Yuli] Raizman’s Mashenka (1942), [Alexander] Macheret’s Soldiers of the Swamp (1939).

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 among 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. You also have a non-American, rural way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense, like Berlioz).

For example, 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, and 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 geniuses like [Sergei] Eisenstein, [Andrei] Tarkovsky, and [Alexander] Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease.

In these different aspects, those Russian movies are more like the early ’30s American movies, when the exuberance of the filmmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes. Just think of a typical ’30s masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck (1933) by Walsh. My movie, with some exceptions, is much more Russian than American.

SFBG What do you want those who see La France to come away with?

SB Ninety-six tears.

LA FRANCE May 2, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 6, 6:45 p.m., Clay


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Ashes to ashes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF One of the greatest pleasures of the 50th SF International Film Festival was Forever, Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 study of the living among the dead at Paris’ Père-Lachese cemetery. Between footage of the sun-dappled necropolis in all its hushed, springtime glory, Honigmann (who received last year’s Persistence of Vision award) profiles several regular visitors, who in the course of discussing an attachment to a particular resident — whether that dweller be Frédéric Chopin or a deceased husband — reveal a great deal about how we commune with memory in our daily lives.

Echoes of Honigmann’s film can be heard on the breezes that float and whip through John Gianvito’s lean and hypnotic Profit motive and the whispering wind (Gianvito’s use of lowercase is intentional). In focusing on a very different kind of memorial landscape, Gianvito uses Howard Zinn’s oft-revised 1980 radical assessment of American history, A People’s History of the United States, as a roadmap. He’s constructed an hour-long pilgrimage to the graves, minor monuments, and commemorative plaques erected to honor America’s freethinkers and radicals.

Static shot after static shot shows names etched in stone, carved on wood, or stamped on metal: Red Jacket, Sacagawea, Thomas Paine, Mary Dyer, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Daniel Shays, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer (whose eloquent protest, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired," is now her epitaph), Malcolm X, Dorothy Day, and César Chávez, to name just a dozen. America is a nation of defectors, suffragettes, abolitionists, Wobblies, anarchists, union members, community organizers, and conscientious objectors. We see commemorations of the labor movement’s bloody struggles: the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Mass., the Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh, and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Occasionally we see signs that others have visited these sites: small tokens of solidarity left on graves, graffiti, piled pebbles. But many of the markers exhibit the creep of age and neglect.

Eschewing narration or interviews, Profit motive is near-silent, save for the ambient sounds of each site: chirping birds, the lazy buzz of insects, the occasional whiz of traffic, and most prominent, the whistling wind — though a whisper is only one part of its range. As Honigmann does in Forever, Gianvito periodically turns his camera away from the ground to watch the dance of sighing boughs or rustling plains. These almost animistic sequences remind us that the landscape has borne witness to the people who shaped it long before our time, underscoring the transience of human life and, by extension, political struggle.

The film’s jarring final minutes, however, break its meditative silence in a move that aims to establish affinities between the left’s scattered history and current protest movements. Gianvito’s dedication to Zinn seems to get the better of him, and the closing montage of contemporary protests juxtaposed against McDonald’s and Wal-Mart signs comes off as crudely didactic. The answer — or, at the very least, some incendiary spark out of the past — it seems, was blowing in the wind after all.

If Gianvito’s film is part eulogy and part rallying cry for America’s radical left, then Hartmut Bitomsky’s more conventionally structured documentary Dust (Straub) is a vanitas for late capitalism. Just as Gianvito marshals a certain poetic charge from his footage of rustling branches and swaying grass, Bitomsky’s cold yet compelling study also mines the many-faceted existential resonance of the particulate terrain it surveys.

Bitomsky’s gravelly-voiced narrator is fond of repeating a Raymond Queneau quote: "Dust always leaves a trace, no matter what; then, a trace of the trace. There’s always a trace you’ll never get." Indeed, dust is as ubiquitous as it is unremarkable. It is both the byproduct of human industry and what accretes once our industriousness has stopped. It is a bugaboo for museum preservationists, vacuum cleaner engineers, and clean room custodians. It is the cosmic prima materia from which the universe was born and to which we will all return long after the worms have had their fill. And as we are reminded in the documentary’s opening frames, dust is the very substance of film itself. What we watch are the shadows of dust, shot through with light.

From an industrial paints manufacturer, to a frighteningly OCD housewife, to a sweetly loopy artist who creates sculptural dust taxonomies, to military scientists testing for radioactive fallout from ballistics currently being used in Iraq, Bitomksy lets his unnamed subjects speak with little interruption on their Sisyphean efforts to analyze, sift through, and eradicate dust. At times, the extended and often extremely technical explanations of particle acceleration and filtration assembly can be tryingly dry. But the straightforward and de-personalized presentation of information is fitting with the film’s po-faced tone.

Bitomsky’s deadpan facade is tied on extra-tight. But faint traces of a smirk can be made out whenever he pauses on a particularly cruel irony (for instance, when he quotes military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz over photos of American and Iraqi babies deformed by in utero exposure to depleted uranium dust) or takes note of a pathetic one (a hulking, former GDR housing block imploded to make way for a shopping mall). As entropic as it is constant, dust is indifferent to human life or regime change.

Gianvito’s film clearly seeks to offer a momentary defense against our country’s tendency toward historical amnesia, though it also suggests that history may be one more notch on finitude’s marble bedpost. For Bitomsky, on the other hand, history is a dustbin.

DUST May 3, 1 p.m., PFA; May 5, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

SFIFF: Blood ties

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

You can keep those classy, highbrow Coppolas. I’ll play the low card with the Argentos any day. This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival is a feast for fans of the father-daughter team: Dario directs Asia in Mother of Tears, his long-awaited final entry in the cultishly beloved "Three Mothers" series, which includes 1977’s Suspiria and 1980’s Inferno. Asia also stars in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, as well as the fest’s opening-night film, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress.

I first encountered the duo under the least relaxing of circumstances at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Press interviews for Mother of Tears were held in a hectically crowded hotel restaurant. Waiting for my turn, I watched as team Argento chowed down a quick lunch, chattering together in Italian about who knows what (witches, ancient artifacts, the weather?). I clutched my tape recorder, feeling possibly the same mixture of fear, awe, and excitement that filled Suspiria’s Suzy Bannion when she arrived at a certain cursed ballet school.

Fortunately, my chat with the pair was devoid of ceiling maggots, underwater zombies, or — as featured in Mother of Tears — demonic monkeys. Probably the most frequent question Dario Argento has had to answer is the most obvious: why did he decide to finish the trilogy now, nearly three decades post- Inferno? "We have a time for everything," he told me, because of course that’s exactly what I asked him first off. "You wait until the idea comes."

There’s no doubt Mother of Tears sprang from Argento’s brain; his signature occult themes, glorious violence, and attention to style (instead of, say, plot) are all accounted for. He cowrote the film’s script with a pair of Americans he met while working on Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (Simona Simonetti and Mother of Tears editor Walter Fasano are also cocredited). The film, which opens theatrically in San Francisco in June, received mixed reviews on the festival circuit. Variety critic Dennis Harvey, who also writes for the Guardian, called it a "hectic pileup of supernatural nonsense." True enough, but I would argue that while Mother of Tears is flawed, it’s enjoyably flawed.

The story revolves around a museum worker named Sarah (Asia Argento) who must summon previously dormant spiritual powers (inherited from her late mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother and Dario’s former partner, Inferno star Daria Nicolodi) to defeat an evil witch’s plot to take over Rome and eventually the world. Eyes are gouged out. Cleavers make short work of necks. Underground pools of muck must be navigated. Udo Kier, playing an exorcist, very nearly reprises his Suspiria role as Exposition Guy. Characters, including witches, take the time to use public transportation. Silly? Yeah, a bit.

Waiting to make Mother of Tears enabled Argento to take advantage of CG, one of his favorite cinematic inventions. His 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome (which also starred Asia) was reportedly the first Italian release that used CG. In Toronto, Argento told me the film has more than 180 visual effects — including a church on fire — which were created in conjunction with Lee Wilson, another Masters of Horror veteran.

The freedom Argento has enjoyed with CG (now, he says, "it’s possible to fly high!") is matched by another door that has opened since the releases of Suspiria and Inferno: the censorship that plagued his early career is less of an issue in these accustomed-to-gore times.

"I hate censors," Argento assured me in our second interview, conducted over the phone in late March. "For Mother of Tears, I talked to the producer, the distributor, the financier [and told them], ‘I want to be free. I want to show my natural reality after so many years.’ And I did that."

In Rome prepping for his next film, simply titled Giallo (sorry, fellow horror nerds, I couldn’t get him to spill any dirty details), Argento reflected on working with his daughter. Stateside, Asia Argento is known chiefly as an actor (she tangled with Vin Diesel in 2002’s XXX and pissed off corpses in 2005’s Land of the Dead). But she’s also directed a handful of films, including 2000’s Scarlet Diva (which Dario co-produced) and the 2004 J.T. LeRoy adaptation, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things.

"She understands what it means to be in the project — not just thinking about her character, but the other parts of the film," Argento said. "Since she was a child, she’d follow me on the shooting of many of my films. She grew up on the sets of my films. She’s very comfortable in this world, this show business."

In Toronto, Asia Argento stepped in as translator for both my questions and her father’s answers. She said that when she heard about the Mother of Tears script, she asked to be a part of the film. As in previous Argento-Argento collaborations like The Stendhal Syndrome, the part called for some grueling physical scenes. Still, the pair seem to have an easy rapport, laughing over the aforementioned underground pool of muck ("That was really gross to do," Asia remembered. "He prepared that for three days, this horrible soup. I would watch him prepare that soup, but I wouldn’t say anything!") Later, over the phone, Dario described he and his daughter as "big friends."

Onscreen, Asia Argento has a certain magnetism that few other performers can claim. In Go Go Tales, she appears in only a few scenes, playing a surly dancer who drags her giant Rottweiler with her everywhere, including into her stripper dance routine. Abel Ferrara, who also directed her in 1998’s New Rose Hotel (she directed him in the 1998 short doc Abel/Asia), calls her a "very, very special actress."

"She’s courageous, she gets out there, and she’s not afraid to take chances with the character or with herself," he said, calling from New York, where he’s working on a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. "When you write a script like [Go Go Tales] obviously you’re looking for the women to bring it to life. We knew we needed people who could really bring something to the table. She’s got that something — it’s indescribable."

Mother of Tears offers Argento a juicier part as a woman who may or may not be totally crazy. But it’s her role as the titular character in The Last Mistress that ranks among her best work to date. It’s a dramatic, passionate period film about an upper-class man’s insurmountable attraction to his moody, impulsive woman on the side (guess who?). Her character pinballs from ecstatic howls to anguished wails, glamorous salon-lolling to beachside pipe-smoking, and dinner table stare-downs to horseback smackdowns. Indeed, it’s a bit over the top, but she pulls it off. As a pair of striking careers can attest, it’s an ability that’s surely imprinted on the Argento genes.

GO GO TALES Sat/26, 11:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/28, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki

THE LAST MISTRESS Thurs/24, 7 p.m., Castro

MOTHER OF TEARS Fri/25, 10:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

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