Dance Archives — Page 133 of 147 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Goldie winner — Dance: Shinichi Iova-Koga

November 7, 2007

Shinichi Iova-Koga’s work is grotesque, beautiful, and funny. As a dancer he is never less than mesmerizing — ephemeral like smoke, limpid like a vernal pool. And yet he is an accidental dancer. The son of two painters, he was initially drawn to photography; at age 12 his bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Then, at San Francisco State University, he became a film major. "All the while," he says, "I was involved in theater, but I thought my main line was behind the camera."

The Oakland-born Iova-Koga also trained in Tadashi Suzuki’s method for actors, through which he was introduced to Butoh. Another influence was the investigative method of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater. His most formative teacher, however, was Butoh dancer Hiroko Tamano: "While we were making rice balls one day, [Tamano] asked me if I wanted to join Harupin-Ha [Butoh Dance Theater]." After a while, like many of Tamano’s pupils, Iova-Koga needed to strike out on his own. He traveled to Japan and Germany to study and work with other Butoh masters and, not incidentally, learn to adapt the genre to his expressive needs.

Thanks to these shifts in focus, he has developed a personal form of mixed-media dance theater that integrates contradictory impulses — the ancient and the technological, the chaotic and the formal, nature and nurture. He might be called a dancer at the edge. To Iova-Koga, this may well be a compliment; he has said that "only a dance at the edge reveals the honest life." His process blurs the distinctions between categories of thinking, being, disciplines, and performing. He likes to dig into both humorous and horrible subjects. The resulting works have taken him around the world.

One of his early works, 1996’s Desert Body, showed dramatic flair but not much personal voice. Ironically, he says, "I first started with Butoh so that I could be a better director. Now by chance I am a dancer." He is very precise about what this means to him. Dancing, he has said, means "focusing on the body being danced. To mentally construct a choreography that ignores this is to create a false dance."

Iova-Koga is an avid solo performer as well as a collaborator; he is often inspired by the people around him. His harrowing Tasting an Ocean — influenced by his father’s having lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at the age of five — kept a 2003 audience at the tiny Noh Space on the edge of their seats. His most recent, highly acclaimed solo, Milk Traces, which he has performed in Europe and Japan, was prompted by the birth of his daughter. He calls her his main teacher now: "I follow her without questions."

In ensemble pieces such as Heaven’s Radio, an adaptation of a Samuel Beckett radio drama, and this summer’s Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird’s Spine (cocreated with Nanos Operetta), Iova-Koga has worked with other Bay Area theater artists (Nils Frykdahl, Ken Rudstrom, and Allen Willner) and Butoh dancers Tanya Calamoneri and Leigh Evans. The duet Ame to Ame, featuring Yuko Kaseki, another Germany-based frequent collaborator, finds the two playing out a riotous male-female relationship in terms of both meanings of the word ame, Japanese for "candy" and "rain." The absurdist Cockroach casts Kaseki as the ghostly wife to Iova-Koga’s husband; she dances through his tea-slurping last moments. His newest enterprise is C(h)ord, which he’s collaborating on with Seattle’s Degenerate Ensemble. It premieres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on April 24, 2008.

www.inkboat.com

Goldies 2007

November 7, 2007

The Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards — the Goldies — have gone through many phases since 1989, the year they first honored a group of Bay Area artists. They’ve sparked some anarchic celebrations and hosted some quiet and even tasteful affairs. They’ve honored close to two dozen people in one year and paid tribute to less than two handfuls the next. But whatever form they have taken, the Goldies have never been about courting or capturing target markets. They’ve always been a chance for the Guardian, which writes about what’s happening every week, to flip the script and do some curating of its own — to set its own date to celebrate actors, artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and people who do things that can’t be categorized.

"FREE FREE THIS WAY TO HEAVEN FREE." So reads a bit of text captured by the camera of the great photographer William Klein. In recent years the Goldies party has been a free affair. It makes sense: the Guardian is still a free newspaper, built on the ideals of a free press, so the Goldies party should be free to everyone. Though this issue is on the stands for a week, months of effort go into it, and the best and final reward is to see the winners meet one another and discover their fellows’ work, then invite their friends and everyone — that means you — to a celebration.

This year’s Goldie winners were selected by the Guardian‘s Johnny Ray Huston, Kimberly Chun, and Cheryl Eddy after discussions with our writers and critics, including Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Glen Helfand, as well as a wide range of people who make, show, and see art in the Bay Area. Look through the pages that follow and you’ll find a muse of cinema, food as weaponry, and even a different definition of sex toys (in this case, toys that have sex with each other). You’ll also find 13 reasons why the Bay Area is awesome.

Click below to find out more about this year’s Goldies winners

PORTRAITS BY SAUL BROMBERGER AND SANDRA HOOVER PHOTOGRAPHY

Goldie winner — Music: Wooden Shjips

November 7, 2007

Wooden Shjips released their "Dance, California/Clouds over Earthquake" 7-inch single (Sick Thirst) last year in much the same way as they had their instigating, self-released Shrinking Moon for You 10-inch: packaged in an unassuming, clear plastic sleeve with hardly any information besides song titles. Beyond sending bloggers and journalists into a tizzy over their sexy, squalling grooves, this set confirmed Wooden Shjips as essential California. While Devendra Banhart and Vetiver reel in mellow ’70s album rock and Comets on Fire carry the torch of scraping psychedelia in the key of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Wooden Shjips recover the dark star lurking behind flower power in groups like Blue Cheer and yes, the Doors. The A-side is all feverish face melt, but it’s on "Clouds over Earthquake" that the band really sets the agenda. A shapely guitar lead dissolves into the heat waves of a droning pulse, eventually giving way to band leader Ripley Johnson’s echo-chamber vocal: "Fire / The sun is rising / Cut through the black clouds / Over earthquake."

Their early records sold out their limited pressings long ago, a fact the band took into consideration when packaging the first 2,000 copies of its eponymous first album (Holy Mountain) with a bonus CD compiling all of the singles’ tracks. Besides being a warm gesture to new fans, the comprehensive packaging has the effect of consecrating Wooden Shjips’ reputation. It seems certain that this band is now at the helm of San Francisco’s ever-burgeoning psych-rock scene. There is also evidence of serious if subtle musical progress being made, from the cryptic garage rock of tracks like "Death’s Not Your Friend" to the artfully expansive arrangements of Wooden Shjips‘ culminating diptych, "Blue Sky Bends" and "Shine like Suns."

In keeping with their scattershot release history, Wooden Shjips have released a new 7-inch on yet another label, Sub Pop. Although many musicians are tailoring their work to iTunes, Johnson’s moved in the opposite direction, recognizing that the material nature of his band’s releases seals their music’s aura, which, redolent of ’60s and ’70s minimalist garage rock, occupies a very specific, romantic spot in many record collectors’ hearts. "It was inspired in part by private-press and limited-press records, like George Brigman’s Jungle Rot [self-released, 1975]," Johnson writes from New York, where Wooden Shjips recently played a round of CMJ festival shows. "More in the sense that if you make a record and put a lot of care into it, someone might discover it someday and dig it."

Long cognizant of the fetish for mystery objects, the singer-guitarist even went so far as to give away the first several hundred copies of Shrinking Moon for You. The gamble paid off nicely, judging by the piqued curiosity inspired by early raves the 10-inch drew from tastemakers like the Wire‘s Byron Coley and Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke. These reviews ignited the dash among critics to tease out the elements of the Shjips’ suggestive sound as so many influences; the Velvet Underground, the Doors, Terry Riley, and Spacemen 3 are most frequently named, though I’d also refer listeners to the burned-rubber daydream of Monte Hellman’s classic 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.

It would be silly to contend that the Shjips don’t work from the fierce template pioneered on the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (Verve, 1967), but their cobalt blue jams hardly tell of an anxiety of influence. What matters with Wooden Shjips is the evident relish they take in reconfiguring the shards of a particular music history and the sense of utter bliss in their fire-and-brimstone sonic landscape.

www.woodenshjips.com

www.myspace.com/woodenshjips

Goldie winner — Dance/Performance: Keith Hennessy

November 7, 2007

"Citizens. Wake Up. A new day is dawning in San Francisco and all over the world."

Keith Hennessy, "A Speech to the Poor Artists," San Francisco City Hall, Oct. 4, 2000

Keith Hennessy has made work in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, yet he has stayed at the margins all this time. Yes, his audiences are good, and they show up time after time to watch his latest work, but he hasn’t gotten the grants that would allow him to do big tours or reach a more mainstream audience. Maybe he prefers it that way. Maybe big audiences wouldn’t be comfortable with hearing what he has to say. But Hennessy is that rare artist who succeeds in transutf8g fierce social concerns into artistically satisfying creations that enlighten and entertain.

"Why are you wasting your time researching the grace, beauty, and strength of the human body in motion?"

Hennessy started out as a competitive social dancer in his native Canada and worked his way to San Francisco by clowning, juggling, and doing political street theater. In the Bay Area he studied with Lucas Hoving; in 1985 he became a founding member of Contraband, the most radical dance-theater group of the period. He has had a roller coaster existence ever since, pushing himself to develop new theatrical expressions that allow him to explode the conventions of form in order to speak to and about the marginalized: the poor, the victims, the ostracized, and the homeless. Against all odds he believes in art’s power to reassume its ritualistic and healing function.

"Stop trying to hack your way alone through hostile jungles in the dead of night. Take the FreeWay. It’s paved and easy, and a 24-hour SafeWay is always available."

One of Hennessy’s most daring and controversial pieces was his 1989 solo Saliva, for which he collected spit from willing audience members, mixed it with pigment, and painted his naked body with it. It was an extraordinary act of defiance, courage, and solidarity — as well as spectacular theater.

Spectacle, Hennessy has discovered, is a way to draw in audiences, not to expose them to mindless entertainment but to amuse and challenge them. This can be an intoxicating mix. During his four years with the French circus Cahin-Caha, he became an experienced aerialist and refined his skill of using circus, cabaret, and other popular art forms to create works that foster a sense of community and a set of shared values that are difficult to resist. Hennessy believes in the power of the imagination and in art as a spiritual practice. He also allows his collaborators the full range of their own imaginations.

Last year’s double bill "How to Die" was raw, violent, and difficult to watch. Both pieces examined the erotics of death. SDF USA (Sans domicile fixe, i.e., homeless) paid tribute to the many homeless people, primarily male, who kill themselves every year. American Tweaker honored disco diva Sylvester and an era of unprecedented sexual abandon and sense of liberation within the gay community.

This year’s Sol Niger is probably Hennessy’s best work yet. Looking at the devastation humankind has brought on itself — up to the present day — through a series of tightly structured vignettes, the work celebrates and laments the glory and the frailty of being alive. This is activist art that works — as art and as a call to action. Sol Niger returns to Project Artaud Theater from January 16 to 26, 2008.

"Citizens of San Francisco. Citizens of the second millennium. Wake up. The global city is yours. Blessed be."

www.circozero.com

Goldie winner — Theater: foolsFURY

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November 7, 2007
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One of the first things to strike you about a foolsFURY production is its sheer kinetic energy and rigorous physical vocabulary. Hovering somewhere between modern dance and mime, or maybe the fashion runway and the circus, the movement of the actors onstage suggests tightly coiled regimentation and an unpredictable, acrobatic freedom. Bodies rewrite the most seemingly inconsequential gestures as larger than life or in an altogether different register, so that you might suddenly see and wonder at them.

But the next thing to strike you will surely be the words. From its first outing nearly a decade ago to recent San Francisco and New York runs of artistic director Ben Yalom’s translation and staging of The Devil on All Sides (French playwright Fabrice Melquiot’s magic-realist rumination on Yugoslavia’s civil war) and the remounting in September of its exquisite version of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw (directed by company member Rod Hipskind), foolsFURY remains wedded to deep, often darkly comical, and alluring texts steeped in the mysterious potency of words.

The physical athleticism and stylization onstage — grounded in a unique, evolving synthesis of techniques from Tadashi Suzuki and Viewpoints to commedia dell’arte and Jerzy Grotowski — are, of course, inseparable from the company’s approach to such texts, whether they’re Martin Crimp’s silky and sinister ellipses (Attempts on Her Life), Don DeLillo’s gloomy, incantatory wisecracking (Valparaiso), Kirk Wood Bromley’s neo-Shakespearean, post-American rag (Midnight Brainwash Revival), or even Shakespeare himself (in one inimitable take on Twelfth Night that went solely by its telling subtitle, What You Will). This pairing of soaring physicality and textual depth has been a driving force behind the success of the small but restlessly active, ambitious company (which has also become a vital teaching center in the theater community) since its noteworthy debut in 1998.

Together with other choice elements — including the sensitive use of music, sound, and scenic design — foolsFURY’s heightened theatrical language is, at its best, a surprise and a challenge to audiences, inspiring and even requiring them to develop new ways of receiving a performance. Yalom concedes that it has taken some time to achieve all of this, including a stable group of like-minded, technically practiced actors. He claims he wasn’t thinking beyond a single play when he almost inadvertently founded the company. "I had no idea what it meant to be a professional theater director or artistic director," he recalls. "I was working with a couple of companies, trying to get them to hire me to direct a play — specifically The Possibilities, the Howard Barker play. After a while I started to get to know the scene, and it became pretty evident that that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided I was going to produce it myself."

Novice though he was, he had long been thinking about what makes theater different and vital, a train of thought the company members have since taken up together. "After spending a lot of time experimenting, we started to find certain aesthetic forms that were interesting. But to me it really comes down to the larger question ‘What should be the role of this art form in our contemporary culture?’ Because, frankly, if it doesn’t have a specific value and something that is unique about it, then, much as I love doing it, it would be irrelevant. I don’t think that’s the case [with foolsFURY], though it’s taken me a long time to figure out how and why."

And the name? "I made it up," says Yalom. "It really fit the Barker piece, and I think to a certain extent it fits [the company]. What underlies a lot of our sensibility is a collision of things that are uncomfortable and things that are funny because they’re uncomfortable. We’ve done a couple of shows that would be categorized as comedies. The far greater amount of work has been things that have been funny but funny because they are challenging and thought provoking and, certainly sometimes, very upsetting. The Barker was a perfect example of that: the ‘fool’ and the ‘fury’ just sort of crammed together."

Goldie winner — Music: Non-Stop Bhangra

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November 7, 2007
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A swish of beaded cerulean silk, jingles of hammered gold, the rousing ring of a tabla — and it’s on, desi darlings. Over the course of the past three years, the monthly Non-Stop Bhangra club night has drawn to the Rickshaw Stop’s dance floor hundreds of often barefoot revelers eager to lose themselves in the rum-tum-tum of the deep dhol drums, the rippling chimta claps, and the spiky electronic accoutrements that make up the unique and funky, Punjabi-by-way-of-London bhangra sound.

Gloriously collaborative, Non-Stop Bhangra got its start in 2004, when DJ Jimmy Love joined forces with Suman Raj-Grewal and Vicki Virk of the Dholrhythms dance troupe to bring bhangra and the popular art of Punjabi dance to a larger audience — and to bring the party, of course. Each Non-Stop Bhangra night includes live dhol drumming and other accompaniment; an eclectic roster of global-minded DJs mixing traditional Punjabi tracks, new compositions, and tabla-tinged remixes; better-than-Bollywood visual projections; and live painting by Marcus Murray, who creates a different piece of art for each event. The night is capped off with performances by the gorgeous Dholrhythms dance troupe, whose stylized whirling and fluid poses send many a heart a-flutterin’, this writer’s included.

"Bhangra is such a joyous form of expression and can be done by anyone, regardless of age, size, gender, and background," the Punjab-born Virk says. "It’s truly universal." A former attorney licensed with the California State Bar Association, she left the staid world of lawyering to pursue her dreams of dance and helped found Dholrhythms in 2003. "I’m just so incredibly pleased that we’ve had such a successful three years bringing this form of music and dance to a larger audience and to expand the scope of people’s impressions about it all," she says. "It’s quite a dream come true."

Virk believes firmly in the spiritual association of music and dance with what she calls people’s "duty as divine beings to discover passion and manifest our highest potential in order to fulfill life’s purpose," and with Raj-Grewal, she has initiated dozens of Dholrhythms students into the world of bhangra bliss. (Non-Stop Bhangra nights also serve as showcases of her students’ newfound Punjab prowess live onstage.) But beyond the spiritual sphere, the event has also served as a nexus of the Bay Area’s world music scene, embracing, supporting, and absorbing sounds as disparate as the stony Jamaican dub pyrotechnics of the Dub Mission crew, the lively Southeast Asian electro and breakbeat mischief of Surya Dub and DJ Maneesh Tha Twista, DJ Cheb i Sabbah’s longitude-hopping dance music fusion, J-Boogie’s urban hip-hop amalgams, and the Francophone Afrobeat stylings of Soul Afrique — all of whom have made storied appearances behind Non-Stop’s decks.

Earlier this year Non-Stop’s nonstop popularity was affirmed with a packed headline gig at one of Stern Grove’s summer Sunday concerts, and the crew has recently performed at 1015 Folsom, Pier 39, the Harmony Festival, and the Power to the Peaceful Festival in Golden Gate Park, where the Dholrhythms dancers were greeted rapturously by an audience of 40,000. "Bhangra has grown into something the US can embrace, because we believe in a scene where a mix of cultures can all come together to dance and enjoy wonderful music," Virk says. "Non-Stop Bhangra is about nonstop expression — and acceptance of yourself and others."

www.nonstopbhangra.com

www.myspace.com/nonstopbhangra

Goldie winner — Visual art: Michael Arcega

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November 7, 2007
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Make your way through the twists and turnarounds of Michael Arcega’s visual puns and titular wordplay — exhibit one: El Conquistadork, the 2004 Spanish galleon constructed of Manila folders that he launched in Tomales Bay, a point in the historic trade route between Mexico and the Philippines — and you’ll find yourself connecting the dots to the Manila, Philippines, native’s first artistic incarnation: an elementary school graffiti artist who once went by the tag Design.

"Then I switched it to Sen, then I got turned in and dwindled," Arcega says, recalling his eventual bust at Upland High School in Southern California. Yet school still rules the San Francisco Art Institute graduate’s world. The 34-year-old is currently hiding out in his Stanford studio, buried in first-year course work for an MFA. One can only wonder what the teenage Arcega would have made of the immaculate grounds of the so-called Farm — he remembers thinking when he first made the move from Eagle Rock High in Los Angeles to Upland, "Oh my god, the walls are so clean here!" — though today the artist clearly channels his subversive, pranking tendencies into pointed works executed with a meticulous hand and a puckish wink. Informed by ’90s multiculturalism but intent on moving forward, Arcega’s pieces, primarily sculptures and installations, upend language and probe the hybrids formed by cultural colonizers and the colonized.

Arcega’s exhibition at the de Young Museum, "Homing Pidgin," part of the "Collection Connections" series in which local artists make new art that reinterprets the museum’s objects, seems tailored for the San Francisco resident. He riffs off the Oceanic Art collection with the acuity and seemingly personal perspective found in such previous pieces as Terrorice, in which he conflates the United States’ "aid" supplies of arms and food with the construction of a rice AK-47 and grenade. Lingering in that zone where ha-ha morphs into aha, Arcega’s massive wooden Spork wittily spears the cultural-culinary invasions of fast food and the popular carved or painted salad utensils that populate souvenir shops in the Philippines while referencing the fact that most tribal cultures ate with their hands before the arrival of European explorers. The museum’s clubs, used in war and in ceremonial dances, are made over by Arcega, reenvisioned as intricate warships and barges topping ax handles and dance clubs — one even emits pulsing disco lights — perched on table legs. The artist also revisits mystery meats of the past — and explodes them — with Spam/Maps: Oceania, which replicates every teeny Pacific atoll using the canned luncheon meat and US occupation–era military ration whose name is an anagram of maps.

It’s powerful stuff from a punny guy. "He can move seamlessly between media, with the highest level of creative skill, to create pieces that disseminate his point of view in both political and historical terms," Arcega’s gallerist Heather Marx pinpoints via e-mail. "His brilliant use of humor subtly challenges the traditional notions of art practice, thus veiling the weightiness of his messages."

Arcega has certainly traveled far from the moment he first glimpsed and then imitated the graf art in the basement of his elementary school. He’s since leapfrogged from illustration to painting, sculpture, performance, and installation before, as he says, "discovering text as a medium. Now I just pick from an arsenal of past explorations." But right now the rigors of the academy call. "I wanted to put things on hold while I was at school so I could play without consequence," he says happily. "It’s stepping back to leap forward."

www.arcega.us

www.heathermarxgallery.com

Newsom kills the party

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November 7, 2007
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EDITORIAL It was a typical Halloween night this year in New York City: two million people in Greenwich Village, 50,000 participants in a wild costume parade, national media attention … and no real problems. Since 1973, New York has managed to handle a homegrown event that exploded into a tourist attraction in an urban neighborhood. It’s a signature part of the city’s landscape, something world famous that shows the best of the city to the eyes of the world and generates a small fortune in tourist revenue.

Why can’t San Francisco, which by all rights ought to have a claim on Halloween as a national holiday, seem to get it together enough to manage its version of this event? Why was the city’s response simply to give up, to kill the party, to send out so many cops that the Castro was effectively in lockdown? Why spend millions to keep an event from happening while giving up on the small businesses that depend on that night’s revenue?

The scene on Castro Street on Oct. 31 was surreal; at least 500 law enforcement officers kept the barricaded streets blocked off. Anyone who so much as stuck a toe off the sidewalk was harshly reprimanded and pushed back. Local restaurants were shuttered — and the few that tried to stay open faced reprisals. The would-be revelers tried to be festive, but they weren’t given much support. Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Bevan Dufty had effectively cancelled Halloween.

They did so with little public input, operating mostly in secrecy, without revealing any specific plans to anyone in the community. It was a startlingly un–San Franciscan way of doing business, autocratic and mean-spirited. In fact, Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard, was almost mocking of any community concern; when we asked if the mayor or any of his staff would be holding any press events to discuss Halloween plans or let the community know what was in store, he tersely responded, "Halloween has been cancelled."

Newsom referred to the evening as "an incredible success," and if the goals were to make sure that nobody had any fun, nobody spent any money, and the Castro District was largely dead, it’s hard to argue with his logic.

On the other hand, if you think it ought to be possible for San Francisco to host a big party without creating panic and fear — that Halloween ought to be something to improve on and fix, not utterly shut down and abandon — then Oct. 31 was a civic embarrassment.

In a city where thousands of homeless people still wander the streets, where the price of housing is driving families out of town, where the homicide rate is soaring, the fate of a party is hardly the top issue on anyone’s agenda. And it’s tempting to give up, focus on more important things, and let the city’s tradition of wild Halloween fun just die.

But this is part of a larger trend that’s been happening in this town, and it’s directly related to the gentrification that’s changing the face of San Francisco. We’ve called it "the death of fun" — anything that might make a little noise and bother some well-off neighbor, anything that might create a little mess, anything that’s just a little out of control … the folks in the Newsom administration would just as soon see it go away. These days permits for live music events are tougher to get. Street fairs are facing prohibitive fees and regulations. Dance clubs are being told to quiet down. And we’re getting sick of it.

Next year Halloween will fall on a Friday, and the Castro simply can’t shut down then. Even Dufty admits something different will have to be done, and there’s no shortage of ideas. A Halloween street fair — perhaps with a modest donation asked of anyone not wearing a costume — shouldn’t be impossible to manage. A parade, similar to that of the New York gala’s, could start in the Castro and wind down at Civic Center, thus eliminating the problems that have some neighbors up in arms. But any solution will require extensive community input, and the mayor and Dufty need to set up a legitimate community task force — now, not next summer — to start talking about plans.

Some people suggest that the mayor needs to create an office of special events, which isn’t a bad idea. But he needs to do something else first: say that he’s not dead set against fun.

Pip, pip for the Pipettes

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October 31, 2007
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By Chris DeMento

The Pipettes are a UK trio with a Supremes-meets-indie-rock popgirl sexgimmick on a North American tour come two years too late. They wear polka-dot skirts. They are hot. They dance about. They are very sexy. They sing about boys in school uniforms and dance about. They are female vocalists. Let us coordinate our dance in the old-new popstyles and dance the old-new popstyles about very much: www.thepipettes.co.uk, read the “about” page.

On paper, Bimbo’s 365 Club and the Pipettes (Oct. 29) are a decent match. One would think the girls’ bubbly, decadent act should awaken the joint’s muffy ballroom character, bring it out in (retro)fits. Dances with schizoid eyes and dated names, long cigarettes, alcoholism – I saw none of this stuff. What I did see was a priced-to-move vortex of !Fun Brand! unfun that looked like a lot of hard work and sounded mediocre at best, an embarrassing pratfall of a noisewelter. All they wanted to do between numbers was bitch at the soundperson, which only served to draw attention to the unfortunate thin of their overproduced sound. If you want to be heard, just sing louder, ladies.

There is room for escapism in popular music. People need to be moved, taken for the proverbial ride out and away from themselves, given over to suspension of disbelief, even. But at a certain point one needs to separate meaningful escapist art from driveling, crackerjack ridicule and shameless branding, especially when the latter start taking themselves too seriously. “We are the Pipettes” was one of the songs they did – it’s also an album title. The Monkeys, hey, hey, people said they monkeyed around. People also said they sucked ass. People don’t want to be goofy surf-movie extras. Not the smart ones, anyway, not anymore. Sorry to be a killjoy.

Global chilling

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October 30, 2007
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In 1994 an album came out that nearly put a class of DJs out of work. Those manning the decks at so-called chill-out rooms in countless clubs had good reason to fear Global Communication’s 76:14 (Arista), for its lush, emotive melodies and almost infinite attention to detail maintained the excitement that surrounded electronic music at the time while fostering a desultory, languid mood. Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard were the two British producers behind Global Communications, and almost 15 years later Middleton is releasing his first solo album, Lifetracks (Big Chill Recordings/Six Degrees).

Despite the iconic status that 76:14 has achieved, Middleton denies that it has cast any sort of shadow over his ensuing productions or been any kind of burden during his subsequent decade-plus of production, including more work with Pritchard as Jedi Knights (whose nü electro New School Science [Universal, 1996] inspired the likes of the Prodigy) as well as solo remixes for acts as varied as Britpoppers Pulp and New Jersey house legend Kerri Chandler. "I’m very proud of 76:14 — it was a very rewarding experience creating it with Mark," Middleton wrote via e-mail before a live performance for Lifetracks in London. It "has some amazing moments for me personally and is a constant reminder to make music from the heart and not get concerned with the restrictions of markets, tempo, or genre."

Lifetracks reflects its creator’s frank lack of fear when it comes to making beautiful music. My inner jaded hipster might have initially cringed at both the yoga-evoking title and the unabashedly emotional strings of "Prana," but there’s no way I could hate on the subtle production flourishes and the expert arrangement that builds to the expected yet still fulfilling climax. Other songs — like "Sea of Glass," with its pulsing woodwinds, and "Enchanting," with its deliberate repetition and inversion of patterns — point to Middleton’s appreciation of musicians well beyond the boundaries of dance music. "I enjoy many of Steve Reich’s conceptual sound experiments and recordings, particularly from the late 1970s and into the ’80s. Over many of his contemporaries he still manages to produce music that is intrinsically ‘pleasant’ and ‘easy’ from a listening perspective. It might be the slow evolving cyclical nature, or the gentle phase shifting in harmony that really does it for me." At the same time, Middleton professes admiration for composers Sir John Williams and Vangelis, who exist somewhere between the canons of popular and classical music.

While Middleton may be best known for his more introspective work and Lifetracks is not exactly full of cuts headed to the top of the Billboard dance charts, the producer does love a good party and has no shame about using the tools that are needed to get people on the dance floor. When pressed for a few of his recent favorite tracks that go well together, Middleton caught me completely off guard with his recollection of a pair of reedits that fit together nicely for his weekly residency at Manumission on Ibiza: "Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ mashed up with Pink’s ‘Get the Party Started’ [mixed] into a glitchy electro remix of Paul Simon’s ‘You Can Call Me Al’ mashed into Prince’s ‘1999’ — for some reason they just all flowed into each other really well and created the ideal first two tracks to set up the party vibe for the whole night." This from the man who fondly recalls a sunrise over Mount Fuji for the way it reminded him of a Katsushika Hokusai woodblock he studied in art school. It is clear that Middleton is much more than a one-trick pony.

TOM MIDDLETON

Sat/3, 10 p.m., $15

Supperclub

657 Harrison, SF

(415) 348-0900

www.supperclub.com

Raising the barre

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October 30, 2007
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Marking National American Indian Heritage Month, the American Indian Film Festival kicks off with a pair of ballet-dancer biographies. Of course, you know one of ’em is gonna be about eternally elegant George Balanchine muse Maria Tallchief — and indeed, Sandra Osawa’s Maria Tallchief will have its world premiere at the fest. Praised as the first American prima ballerina and a standout in an art form that had, until her rise to prominence in the 1940s, been largely European, Tallchief brought audiences to their feet and critics to tears. She married Balanchine, and their creative collaboration continued even after their divorce (she wanted a baby; he didn’t) — a notable result of which was her role as the original Sugar Plum Fairy in his Nutcracker.

Maria Tallchief — bound for PBS after its festival screening, a fact that’s evident in its straightforward style — spends ample time contextualizing its subject’s importance not just as a dancer during one of ballet’s most historically significant periods (stateside, anyway) but also as a Native American woman proud of her Osage heritage. Black-and-white archival footage illustrates her considerable gifts, with testimonials from peers and observers (and Tallchief herself) recalling the thrilling life of a talented artist.

More contemporary is Gwendolen Cates’s Water Flowing Together (also bound for PBS), which focuses on recently retired New York City Ballet star Jock Soto, one of the last dancers to work with Balanchine. Part Navajo Indian, part Puerto Rican, Soto — who also happens to be gay — is shown from his teens through his 40s, earning praise along the way from seemingly every ballerina he ever partnered, as well as from choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon, who saw him as an inspiration. For a guy who was initially told he didn’t have the body of a dancer (and whose dad bought him blue fishnet tights for his first ballet class), Soto’s impact on the dance world is shown to be immeasurable.

The 32nd annual AIFF also features fictional narratives (including a ghostly tale set at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation), shorts, and the American Indian Film Institute’s American Indian Motion Picture Awards Show, at which the fest awards will be presented and Native musicians and dancers will perform.

AMERICAN INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL

Nov. 2–7, $5–$10

Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF

Nov. 8–10, $5–$10

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 554-0525

www.aifisf.com

King of the dance

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October 30, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, but King’s influence on Bay Area dance goes back further than that. Veteran dancers remember his ballet classes for the musical combinations that he gave his students in the ’70s. One of them was Joanna Haigood, artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, who said, "Alonzo was a spirit master who happened to be a dancer." While she loved the challenge of the technique, she was really in his class because "he taught us to live the dance."

Not only local performers knew about King’s poetic approach to ballet. Big stars like Fernando Bujones and Natalia Makarova never missed an opportunity to work with him when they were in town. But eventually, King needed to have his own company. These days, in addition to periodic guest artist Muriel Maffre, Lines Ballet performs with nine dancers. This year it toured from France to Poland, from Austria to Greece, in addition to performing in stateside engagements and two home seasons.

King also founded the SF Dance Center, initially to support his company financially; the now-independent center offers classes for adults in a variety of styles. He then created Lines Ballet School, which teaches according to his principles. Last year, in conjunction with Dominican University, King established a BA program that allows dancers to simultaneously pursue professional and academic studies. In other words, in addition to choreographing 74 works, King has created an institution. "I know now that we have grown so much it will be more difficult to balance humanity and creativity with effective business practices," he said in a recent phone interview. "But if I have my choice, I will go with the humanity."

Aside from his choreography, King’s greatest contribution might turn out to be his challenging of preconceptions about dance, specifically ballet. To question the status quo is perhaps the birthright of this son and grandson of prominent civil rights leaders in Albany, Ga. King grew up participating in civil rights marches. His mother introduced him to dance, while his father, a follower of 19th-century sage Ramakrishna, taught him about meditation.

For King, dance is the appropriate medium for exploring a universe that he perceives to be in flux, where opposites don’t stand against but hold one another in balance. Ballet for him is not a style but a language — one that, he says, would have to be invented if it didn’t exist already. Ballet is abstraction; ballet is science; ballet is geometry. After all, a pirouette is a perfect circle, a tendu (stretched foot) a line that reaches into infinity. To King, ballet is a tool to investigate creativity, which, he insists, is everyone’s birthright. Does he think everyone can become an artist?

"No, that’s not what I mean," he explained. "But just like we all have a brain, we all have creativity. We either tap into it or we don’t. For most people, when they are educated as children it is stripped away from them because they are trained to give the answer which the teacher wants, when there are multifarious choices that could be selected. The government doesn’t really encourage it, because if you give people the ability to ascertain thought, to really deconstruct ideas, that’s dangerous because no longer can they be sheep, but at that point they are discerning lions. And when you have 300 million discerning lions, [you’ve] got a problem."

King’s ballets are nonhierarchical — no predetermined gender roles, no fixed vocabulary — and what looks like balletic distortion is simply an emphasis on a constantly shifting center of gravity instead of a stable focus on the body’s vertical axis. Women can be strong, men tender. Early in his career he paired a tall woman with a much shorter man. It looked odd. Why, King asked, do we always see male-female duets in terms of gender relationships? Couldn’t a dance be about a mother and a child or a sky and a landscape?

He does follow one convention — putting women on pointe — though he noted that this doesn’t have to be a female prerogative. "If you look at most cultures, you see an appreciation of the idea of being elevated, of being above the earth. In Africa dancers use stilts. In Balkan countries men do dance on their toes." He often took barre on pointe, and during his training at Harkness House men took pointe class once a week. If enough training becomes available, one of these days King just might put men into pointe shoes.

For his anniversary premieres, King has choreographed two works, one to a new score by tabla master Zakir Hussein, the other to selections from baroque composers. The connection? Both types of music, to be performed live, allow for improvisation. According to the enthusiastic King, "That’s when the artists can go deep inside themselves and become fully who they are." *

ALONZO KING’S LINES BALLET

Fri/2, 9 p.m.; Sat/3 and Nov. 7–10, 8 p.m.; Sun/4, 7 p.m.; Nov. 11, 3 p.m.; $25–$65

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Marginalia

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October 30, 2007
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>paulr@sfbg.com

When the obituary of the Republican Party is written, it will be noted that the GOP died of war wounds, many but not all of them taken during the kamikaze mission in Iraq. For over the past half century, it has gone from being the party of cautious, America-first realism to one of reflexive belligerence; its embrace of militarism has been passionate and, perhaps, fatal. Over the same half century, meanwhile, the world’s great powers, except us, seem to have come to a gingerly understanding that war may not have much of a future on an environmentally brittle, densely interconnected Earth.

As for the obituarist: John W. Dean offers a strong audition. Dean, a self-described "Goldwater Republican," served as legal counsel in the Nixon White House and testified during the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 that he’d warned the president about "a cancer growing on the presidency." After Nixon’s crash, Dean left political life for several decades, but he has forcefully returned in the past few years as the author of an accidental trilogy about the Republican Party’s long journey into night. The books have raised alarms about the extreme right’s taste for secrecy (Worse than Watergate, 2004), the psychopathology of authoritarian conservatism (Conservatives Without Conscience, 2006), and now the extent of constitutional ruin wrought by a party interested only in power, not governance (Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, Viking, 352 pages, $25.95).

Dean’s critique carries particular weight because he is, simultaneously, a longtime Republican, a onetime White House insider, and a lawyer who understands that "proper process … produces good policy," while "compromised processes will lead to bad policy." This is a succinct definition of what is sometimes called process liberalism, the idea that if a society’s institutions are established and operated according to a set of rules and customs generally agreed on, those institutions will produce results that most of the population will be able to accept, if not always cheer. Related ideas in America are the rule of law — the notion that individuals, even self-styled wartime presidents and vice presidents, must respect certain institutional constraints — and the separation-of-powers doctrine, which contemplates that each branch of government will try to curb overreaching by the others.

It is beyond dispute that Republican abuses of process in the past 15 years have been unprecedented and calamitous. Dean is particularly interested in the Bush regime’s use of so-called signing statements to change the meaning of laws duly enacted by Congress. Neither the Constitution nor any statute gives the president such a power, and so such statements are, or should be, legally meaningless. But their plain political purpose is to create what Dean calls a "presidential autocracy"; the statements are (in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) "declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches — declarations that [Bush] hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations."

What invading body snatchers have turned the party of Lincoln and abolition into this freak show of power-crazed pod people? Dean doesn’t say, and perhaps he isn’t sure, but he is strangely silent on the military angle. The Constitution grants solely to Congress the power "to raise and support Armies," with the telling proviso that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The framers did not want a standing army sitting there like a loaded gun, waiting for some president to grab it and start shooting. And for nearly two centuries, the country’s practice was to demobilize after conflicts. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), the US Army in 1940 was smaller than Belgium’s. But over the next decade the military was to swell unimaginably, and it remained swollen, even as the "military-industrial complex" a departing President Eisenhower warned us about became a cancer growing on our politics, while its propaganda affiliates assured us that, whether the problem was poverty, drugs, terror, or Manuel Noriega, the answer was war.

The Republican Party chose to dance with this soul-sucking devil at some Mephistophelian ball, only to find later that its throat had been slit and a dagger plunged into its back. For us, the only remaining business is to assign the obituary and then find some way to operate our rickety two-party system with just one party. Unless … some nervy Republican presidential aspirant acknowledges the obvious: that given a choice between democracy and empire, a true Republican — a true American — chooses democracy. A true Republican puts America first by cutting the military budget by 90 percent and redirecting that money into a crash alt-fuel program, into education and health care and environmental protection. Rebuild America. Assuming such a braveheart didn’t soon perish in a mysterious plane crash, next year’s presidential election would immediately become more interesting. *

The big guns

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October 30, 2007
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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW Over the past 15 years, a steady stream of good, bad, and indifferent anthologies has promised to deliver the thrills of pulp fiction. But for all the retro cover art, melodramatic blurb copy, and Quentin Tarantino allusions, their contents have been shockingly deficient in what aficionados consider to be the real pulp fiction: stories that originally appeared in the luridly covered popular fiction magazines — printed on incredibly cheap pulp paper — that were the medium for popular and genre fiction during the period between the two world wars.

Even the staunchest purist, however, will be pleased with The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. No false advertising here. The Big Book is big, roughly the size of the San Francisco yellow pages. And it offers up nothing but the purest in pulp mystery fiction. Save for one story by the iconic James M. Cain, every one of the 45-odd full-length novels, novelettes, and short stories here originally appeared in the pages of long-gone pulps such as Black Mask, Clues, Detective Story, Gun Molls, and Detective Fiction Weekly.

The Big Book is packed with appearances by what is arguably the pulps’ greatest contribution to posterity: the hard-boiled private eye. Excellent, seldom-reprinted stories by Raymond Chandler ("Red Wind," "Fingerman") and Dashiell Hammett ("The Creeping Siamese," "Faith") are joined by clipped-prose gems such as Paul Cain’s ultra-hard-boiled exercise in blackmail, "One, Two, Three," and Frederick Nebel’s tough tale of nightclub murder, "Wise Guy," along with a bevy of unsentimental gumshoe stories by unfortunately lesser-known writers, among them Roger Torrey, Stewart Sterling, and Leslie White.

The pulps weren’t all about tough-talking dicks, though. In a section titled "The Villains," the Big Book focuses on the "bad" guys who often weren’t that bad. In one typical story, Raoul Whitfield’s "About Kid Deth," a sympathetic racketeer beats a bum murder rap with a few of his less-savory fellows. And rounding out the volume is "The Dames," a selection of stories featuring strong female characters. While there were no women PIs in the pulps, there were plenty of broads like the chorine protagonist of Cornell Woolrich’s "Angel Face," who could out-wisecrack the sharpest-tongued gumshoe.

Of course, picture-perfect prose is in short supply. The bulk of the material in the Big Book was written by poor bastards trying to make a living pounding out stories at a penny a word. At that rate, experimentation was idiotic and rewriting a rare luxury. But these strictures guaranteed that the stories would be relentlessly paced and action packed. Someone’s getting knocked over the head, if not shot or stabbed, on every other page.

And even in these bullet-riddled sagas, there is no shortage of rough-hewn beauty. In Steve Fisher’s "You’ll Always Remember Me," the psychopathic protagonist concludes that "one person more or less isn’t so important in the world anyway, no matter how good a guy he is." In Frank Gruber’s "The Sad Serbian," a skip tracer notes, "The noise she makes when she hits the floor reminds me of the time I got drunk at a dance and fell into the bass drum." And the opening line of Woolrich’s "Angel Face"? "I had on my best hat and warpaint when I dug into her bell." Well, who can resist?

After a thousand pages of this, you’ll never want to go back to the fake stuff. The Black Lizard Big Book puts the pulp back into pulp fiction. *

THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS

Edited by Otto Penzler

Vintage Books

1,168 pages

$25

Halloween in Rock Rapids. What really happened on Halloween Eve in l95l in the almost famous town of Rock Rapids, Iowa

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October 30, 2007
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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I was just settling down to get back into the business of blogging (I have been away at an assembly of the Inter American Press Association in Miami and a convention of the California First Amendment Coalition at USC in Los Angeles) when an ominous email from Washington, D.C., popped up on my computer.

At first I thought it was just more fear-mongering out of the Bush administration, but the head did intrigue me, “Millions of children could be exposed to dangerous toys on Halloween.” It was the announcement for a news conference call with reporters on Tuesday, to release a new report on the “toxic trade of deadly Halloween toys,” toys made in China and being recalled for containing dangerous levels of lead in violation of U.S. safety standards. Halloween was the news peg.

Meanwhile, the word was dire back in San Francisco. The mayor and city fathers were warning people to stay out of the Castro, the gay area that annually sees a tumultuous gathering of hundreds of thousands and police in full riot gear. “HALLOWEEN WARNING: KEEP CLEAR OF THE CASTRO,” trumpeted the San Francisco Chronicle in its Halloween morning edition. “City puts word out: There’s no party, just stay home.”

I was astounded. A full year has gone by since I wrote an almost famous blog disclosing in graphic detail, naming names, what really happened on Halloween Eve in 1951 in my almost famous hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa. As Halloween seems to spin out of control, the story of Halloween in Rock Rapids is worth retelling, as anybody in the almost famous Hermie Casjens gang would argue. And so I am going to do so.

There weren’t any “deadly Halloween toys” nor any toxic trade thereof nor any tumultuous hordes creating a riot situation in Rock Rapids, but there was a bit of targeted hell raising on Halloween. In fact, it was understood that Halloween was the one night of the year when the more adventurous youth of the town could raise a little hell and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops. Or, in the case of Rock Rapids, the one and only cop, Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger.

Shinny had the unenviable job of trying to keep some semblance of law and order during an evening when the Hermie Casjens gang was on the loose. Somehow through the years, nobody remembered exactly when, the tradition was born that the little kids would go house to house trick and treating but the older boys could roam the town looking to make trouble and pull off some pranks.

It was all quite civilized. The Casjens gang would gather (no girls allowed) and set out about our evening’s business, being careful to stay away from the houses of watchful parents and Shinny on patrol. Dave Dietz and I specialized in finding cars with keys in the ignition and driving them to the other end of town and just leaving them. We tipped over an outhouse or two, the small town cliche, but one time we thought there was someone inside. We never hung around to find out. There was some mischief with fences and shrubs and swings hanging in back yards.

After an evening of such lusty adventures, we would go home about ll p.m. and tell our parents what we had been up to and how we evaded Shinny the whole evening and they would (generally) be relieved. Shinny would just drive around in his patrol car and shine his lights here and there and do some honking. But somehow he never caught anybody nor made any serious followup investigation. And the targets of our pranks never seemed to make police complaints. I once asked Paul Smith, the editor of the Lyon County Reporter, why he never wrote up this bit of zesty small town lore. “Bruce,” he said, “I don’t want things to get out of hand.” During my era, they never did.

Nonetheless, the city elders decided to keep Halloween devastation to a minimum and scheduled a dance in the Community Building, with the misbegotten idea the pranksters would give up their errant ways and come to the dance. The Casjens Gang would have none of this. In fact it was the year of the dance diversion that we made our most culturally significant contribution to Halloween lore in Rock Rapids. We happened upon a boxcar, loaded with coal, parked on a siding a block or so from Main Street, which also served as a busy main arterial highway for cars coming across northwest Iowa.

It is not clear to this day who came up with the idea of rolling the boxcar across Main Street and blocking all traffic coming from both directions. We massed behind the car and pushed and pushed but it wouldn’t budge. Then Bob Babl came up with a brilliant stroke: to use a special lever his dad used to move boxcars full of lumber for his nearby lumberyard. Bob slipped through a fence behind the yard and somehow managed to find the lever in the dark. We massed again, now some 20 or so strong, behind the car and waited for the signal to push. Willie Ver Meer climbed to the top of the car and wrenched the wheel that set the brakes. We heaved in unison and the car moved slowly on the tracks until it reached the middle of Main Street. Willie gave a mighty heave and ground the car to a dead stop, bang, square in the middle of the street. Almost immediately, the cars started lining up on both sides of the car, honking away. Grace under pressure. An historic event. Man, were we proud.

We slipped away and from a safe distance watched the fruits of our labor unfold. Shinny, the ever resourceful police chief, soon came upon the scene. He strode into the dance in the nearby Community Building and commandeered enough of the dancers to come out and help him move the car back onto its siding. We bided our time and then went back and pushed the car once again into the middle of the street. Jerry Prahl added a nice touch by rolling out a batch of Firestone tires onto the street from his Dad’s nearby store. Suddenly, Main Street was a boxcar- blocked, tire-ridden mess. Again, the cars started lining up, honking away. Then we fled, figuring we were now wanted pranksters and needed to be on the lam.

The Casjens gang and groupies have retold the story through the years at our regular get togethers at the Sportsmen Club bar at Heritage Days in Rock Rapids and at our all-Rock Rapids Cocktail Party and Beer Kegger held in the back lawn of the Mary Rose Babl Hindt house in Cupertino. We would jokingly say that the statute of limitations never runs out in Rock Rapids and so we needed to be careful what we said and ought not to disclose fully the involvement of Dave Dietz, Hermie Casjens, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Jerry Prahl, Bob Babl, Romain Hahn, Willie Ver Meer, and lots of others, some who were there working in peril, others who declared they were there safely after the fact.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, I was invited back to Rock Rapids to speak to a fund-raising event for the local high school. It was a a crisp clear night just like the night of Halloween in l95l and a perfect setting to tell the story publicly in town for the first time. The event was at the new community building, on Main Street, just a block or so from the old Community Building, and a block or so from the siding where we found the boxcar. I told the audience that Shinny had assured me the statute of limitations had run out in Rock Rapids and that I could now, 54 years later, tell the boxcar- across -Main -Street caper with no fear of prosecution. And so I did, with relish.

Chuck Telford was in the audience and I recalled that he had driven up to us that night, as part of a civilian patrol, and inquired as to what we were doing. When he could see what we were doing, he just quietly drove off. “Very civilized behavior,” I said. Afterward, I told Chuck I would back him for mayor, on the basis of that incident alone. Craig Vinson, then the highway patrolman for the area, came up to me and said he remembered the incident vividly because he was on duty that night and came upon the boxcar blocking the highway with long lines of honking cars. “I got ahold of Shinny that night and told him it was his job to move the boxcar and get it off the highway,” he said. Others said they had gotten a whiff of the story but were never able to pin it down. The high school principal and superintendent didn’t say much and, I suspect, were worried my tale might lead to the Rock Rapids version of the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

For years, I said in my talk, I didn’t think that Shinny ever knew exactly what happened or who was involved in the caper or how we pulled it off, twice, almost before his very eyes. Shinny retired in Rock Rapids and I saw him twice a year when I came back to visit my parents. But I never said anything and he never said anything but finally a couple of years ago I found the right moment and cautiously filled him in. He chuckled and said, “Let’s drink to it.” We did. And we have been drinking to it ever since. He calls me now and then in my office in San Francisco. He always tells the receptionist, “Tell Bruce, it’s Shinny. I’m his parole officer in Rock Rapids.”

Those were the days, my friends. The days of Halloweens without dangerous toys and toxic trade with China and riots on Main Street. B3

Superfriends for world peace

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October 25, 2007
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Get your tights in a twist for peace with the cwaaazy kids of Sugar Valley this Saturday before the UN Anniversary and Peace Parade! Oh — and don’t forget that the event (that includes a die-in at Dolores Park) will coincide with the world’s attempted biggest “Thriller” dance-a-thon!

Join Sugar Valley artists on United Nations Day at the San Francisco Parade for World Peace
Sat. Oct 27
UN Plaza, 7th Street and Market, SF
Event at 1pm, parade starts at 2pm
At 4:15, 67 doves released — plus formation of a human peace sign
Superhero attire encouraged — look for others underneath the big red ballon!
More info: www.sugarvalley.org

Giddy, yup! New Young Pony Club makes us frisky

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October 25, 2007
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By Todd Lavoie

“New Who What Huh?!” All right, maybe the name doesn’t exactly flow from the tongue in gently rolling syllables on the first go-round, but try it with me now, slowly, steadily: New Young Pony Club. Ah, there you are. Very nice. Again. New Young Pony Club. Great. Quick – now three times fast. Now you’re in fine shape for this coming Monday. Why, you ask? That’s when London indie disco-new wave revivalists New Young Pony Club storm the Mezzanine stage, silly.

The five-piece of hip young things and fashion-forward synth lovers insist on their Web site that New Young Pony Club isn’t just a mere dance band, but that they have a mission, a manifesto, even. A subtle manifesto, they add, but a manifesto nonetheless. Since they seem to keep their MO shrouded in mystery – unless, of course, my days of staying two steps ahead are sadly behind me and I just straight up missed the deeper gist of the sloganeering, a serious possibility I must grant as I catch another wisp of gray in my sideburns – I’m going to hazard some crazy-ass guesswork here and offer a theory to NYPC’s driving force. Ready?

Party hard. Oh, and look great doing it.

From our Bay to Norway

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October 24, 2007
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› johnny@sfbg.com

I hear a new world calling me. It’s beeping transmissions from some faraway place in the future and the past where a mysterious craft hovers near calypso rock and choruses of friendly voices — some human, some not — echo or call to each other. It’s a free-floating territory charted by someone obsessed with creating and sharing sounds that would otherwise go unheard. Only those with a similar obsession seem to respond to its clarion call.

I hear a new world, so strange and so real. Something tells me this world has ties to Norway and the Bay Area, that it streams from Oslo to San Francisco and back. Along the way it opens doors — some familiar, some not — to unheard-of zones. In Norway it can’t help isoutf8g and celebrating a conga rhythm from a vintage Michael Jackson track. It also combines the famous chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the roller coaster sensuality of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced "I Feel Love" in order to fill and feel space with as much pleasure as possible. In San Francisco it forms warm electronic waves, uses white magic to surf those waves’ white diamond tips at midnight, and then wakes up the next morning with a heartbreaking conversational hymn.

I hear a new world, haunting me from beyond the known realms of space disco, the shorthand term writers have applied to the music of Norway’s Lindstrøm (who has combined Strauss with Summer), Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje (the aforementioned Jackson mix master). It asks me to explore the songs of San Francisco musicians who offer clues to — and share — those Norwegians’ vast and prodigious love of sound and song. It suggests I contact Sorcerer (a.k.a. Daniel Judd) and Hatchback (a.k.a. Sam Grawe), brothers in oceanic melody and rhythm, who have both been remixed by Thomas. It tells me to talk with Dominique Leone, whose gorgeous and deranged pop will soon be released by Lindstrøm on his Feedelity label. It implores that I reach across this small town of super sounds to speak with Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos, who has forged a cluster of electro-Nordic projects in which beauty emerges — with a sunlike glow — from intensity.

I hear a new world, calling me to chart links between musicians in San Francisco and in Norway, to discover that neighboring, unacquainted San Francisco sound makers can share friendships with the same Norwegian musicians. Perhaps this musical passage from Norway to our Bay is pure folly. Perhaps the seaside Northern European kingdom recently voted the most peaceful country in the world by the Global Peace Index doesn’t share the same spirit as coastal Northern California. Perhaps the country that remained neutral in World War I and rebelled against insurgent World War II Nazism doesn’t have much in common with Bay Area resistance. Perhaps Oslo and San Francisco only share a pocket-size but ferocious love of black metal. I still hear a new world — how can I tell what’s in store for me?

THE BEACHSIDE BRAIN WAVES OF SORCERER

Donna Summer has already come and gone on the jukebox of the Van Ness corner bar with the bright yellow sign as Sorcerer’s Daniel Judd looks at the cover art for Prins Thomas’s Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo). Thomas’s epic, oft-resplendent two-CD mix opens with "I Hear a New World," the title track of producer Joe Meek’s innovative 1960 exploration of the outer spaces of stereo and studio sound. It then segues into the country twang and power-chord dub of "Devil Weed and Me," by the late-’70s Nashville, Tenn., session-player supergroup Area Code 615. "It’s funny that the CD starts that way," Judd says with characteristic almost-sly-or-shy understatement. "My friend Sam [Grawe, of Hatchback,] is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love "I Hear a New World." The fact [Thomas] put those two songs together is weird, like he was reading our minds."

Encyclopedic musical passions bring serendipity. But Thomas and Judd’s bond dives deeper: Thomas has remixed "Surfing at Midnight," the slow-blooming single from White Magic (Tirk), the first album Judd has recorded as Sorcerer. White Magic is a casual labor of love (all too rare in these studied-yet-throwaway days) that’s easy to fall for on the first listen. Judd — who sometimes writes about music for the Web site Dream Chimney — is still capable of the Johnny Marr–like rush, push, and spangled jangle he brought to the band Call and Response, but freed from group strictures he lands on a relaxed approach to writing and recording that allows for gorgeous chord changes, compositions that morph, and keyboards and guitars that shimmer.

White Magic’s track listing primarily consists of two-word titles — "Airbrush Dragon," "Egyptian Sunset," "Bamboo Brainwave" — that inspire visualization, and on MySpace, Judd invents a variety of apt and funny pseudogenres, such as "’80s montage music," to describe the Sorcerer sound. "So many friends, when I played [Sorcerer’s] music for them, would say, ‘This would be great for an ’80s movie scene or a montage,’" he explains when asked about the various substyle terms he coined on a lark. "I definitely grew up during that period and watched the movies, so it’s ingrained. I thought I might as well just go for it. I like having some humor and playfulness, like Thomas Fehlmann, the Kompakt [label] guy who was in the Orb…. At some point [more recently] electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new. That’s fun for the musician but not always for the listener. In my stuff the beat isn’t what’s making you go, ‘Oh wow.’ If it’s happening, it’s from the chords."

Judd and his girlfriend recently moved from Oakland — where he’d also spent much of his early childhood with a mom who loves Prince — into the Mission. Sorcerer, however, can usually be found loitering on either side of a magic door where kitsch transforms into loveliness. One side of that door definitely opens onto the beach. White Magic‘s "Blind Yachtsman" is a love child born from Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and yacht rock. Judd often draws on whatever he’s listening to or watching, but other seafaring Sorcerer songs, such as "Surfing at Midnight" and "Hawaiian Island," flow directly from his experiences while surfing and scuba diving.

"Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and technology," Judd posits when I mention that Norwegian counterparts such as Terje (whose MySpace interests are "Coconuts, Hawaiian sunsets, moose/dolphins/unicorn/practically everything in a sunset") share his fondness for littoral motifs. Whether discussing his girlfriend’s most recent Midnites for Maniacs–ready movie rental (Side Out, a beach volleyball drama starring C. Thomas Howell) or a weekend visit to Nippon Goldfish Co. on Geary ("You’re so close to the animals, and they look kind of crazy"), Judd keeps returning to the waterfront. "In the ocean," he notes, "you feel like there’s almost no rules. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun — a kind that you don’t find in the city."

THE RISING AND SETTING SUNS OF ARP

A setting sun, bisected by clouds, hovers over darkening ocean waves on the cover of In Light, the first album by San Francisco’s Arp; the title, drawn in slim neon-tube cursive by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, is suspended from the upper left-hand corner of a tangerine and gold sky. The summer sun happens to be setting outside the upper Guerrero living room window of Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos as he talks about this image (partly inspired by the melancholic found-film cosmograms of visual artist Tacita Dean) and how it relates to the music on the album, which will be released by the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound next month.

"An overwhelming number of people still tend to think of electronic music as being cold," Georgopoulos says while sitar notes from an LP quietly resonate through his and roommate Kathryn Anne Davis’s blue-walled apartment, where a large chunk of coral rests on a clear Plexiglas coffee table. "I wanted to make something that was warm, that had human qualities, that was a little worn, and that — along with the imagery of the record — dealt with memory, the degradation of memory, and revisionist memory. I also wanted to make something that referenced landscape and light and natural things in a way that wasn’t new age." I point to a fat tome about the proto–new age label ECM on a nearby bookcase, which Georgopoulos built. "Proto–new age music, if you select carefully, can be amazing," he responds. "Even the kernels of early sequencing in Ash Ra Tempel sound really radiant."

If a new age of electronic music spanning from San Francisco to Oslo is dawning (or setting), then Georgopoulos — a chief member of Tussle until just after the group recorded last year’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound) — has taken it to the bridge and maybe even been the bridge. In 2002, after writing about the graphic design of Smalltown Supersound’s Kim Hiorthøy for Tokion, Georgopoulos — who edits the music section of SOMA magazine and sometimes contributes to the Guardian — offered to put together a Bay Area showcase at Club Six for the label. "I don’t think he had done anything like that before; he just wanted to have us over, which was very generous," label owner Joakim Hoaglund recalls via e-mail before turning to a discussion of his and Georgopoulos’s latest collaboration. With Arp, "it’s a relief [for me] to do a small personal project. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel [In Light] has this great and unique mix of US West Coast art and culture with European avant-gardism and kraut rock. It’s a very special album."

Clutter and clusters are on Georgopoulos’s mind as we discuss music and its surroundings. "I was a huge stacker [of books and records]," he says when I mention his well-ordered home studio. "But I take after my mother — she’s very neat and feels like she can’t do the work she needs to do unless things are organized." The first-generation American child of parents from France and Greece, Georgopoulos has chosen the dreamy, maternal lull of a track titled "St. Tropez" to open In Light before "Potentialities" surges out of speakers (or from headphones) with a subtly rising force that’s ultimately awesome to behold. Most of In Light‘s seven meditative tracks were first showcased in a 2006 group exhibition at New Langton Arts, where up to two listeners could climb into a feather bed enclosed in a small podlike space. "It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t about dissecting a suspended space," Georgopoulos says. "Though with a lot of [Arp]’s music, suspension is one of the effects I’m trying to create."

For Georgopoulos, Arp’s state of suspension runs counter to different kinds of tension. While discussing his love for the analog organ-drum machine sounds employed by groups such as Cluster (a few of whose albums have just been reissued by Oakland label Water), Suicide, and Spacemen 3, he notes that "too much electronic [today] sounds like coke-related music." In contrast, Arp’s electronic music is humane — a rarity not just in electronic music but also on the streets of San Francisco during the Gavin Newsom era, when homelessness has become more difficult and abject and attitudes toward it more hostile. "I can’t remember the last time I left the house and didn’t have a confrontation with a very disturbing sight, and after a long time that really starts to chip away at you," Georgopoulos says. "I drove a cab for four years, until 2004, and when I think about it I can’t believe that I did. It suited my life at the time, but you’re interacting with [people on] PCP, meth, and all kinds of shit — you just never know. Now that I don’t drive a cab I’m hardly ever in the Tenderloin."

PRINS THOMAS, LINDSTRØM, AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND

Wearing a pair of shades, Prins Thomas is chatting with the doorman of his hotel in the Tenderloin when I stumble out of a taxi to interview him. It’s a sunny, hot late afternoon, but Thomas — who has just woken up — isn’t exactly on Norway time or California time. Later in the evening he’ll be DJing Gun Club’s night at Temple Nightclub. Right now, though it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, the moment calls for a meal, so we settle into a restaurant on Polk Street. "I used to play in Oslo for the same people again and again," he says after we order food. "Now I can travel and meet like minds. It’s inspiring to meet people who can help you out and who you can help out."

In San Francisco two such people are Sorcerer’s Judd and Hatchback’s Grawe. Only after remixing tracks by Judd’s and Grawe’s solo projects did Thomas discover (by following Web links) that they also record together as Windsurf. Next year he plans to release some Windsurf recordings on a new label, Internasjonal, that will step outside the Norwegian and dance music confines of his established label, Full Pupp. This season, though, he and Lindstrøm have released — in addition to a variety of vinyl projects — a full-length collaboration (Reinterpretations, the beat-driven follow-up compilation to their 2006 debut on Eskimo) and individual mix CDs. Lindstrøm has contributed a chapter to the mix series Late Night Tales (released by the label of the same name), while Thomas has unleashed Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo), a two-and-a-half-hour CD cornucopia that moves from strange and delightful multigenre tracks by Glissandro 70 (the bizarrely beautiful "Bolan Muppets") and Metalchicks (the awesome "Tears for Fears/Conspiracy") through Hawkwind into the classic disco of "Get Down Boy" by Paper Dolls.

"I thought it fit the whole collection as an introduction," Thomas says when I ask him about Cosmo Galactic Prism‘s opener, "I Hear a New World," which Arp’s Georgopoulos also says he’s included in mixes. "It kind of sets the tone — it’s so freaky that anything that comes after it is going to sound pretty normal. When I first heard it I couldn’t tell if it was new or old. There’s a similar quality to a track by Art Blakey called "Oscalypso" [from the 1956–57 album Drum Suite, now on Dusty Groove]. The drums are so distorted that it sounds relevant next to new, compressed dance music, even though it’s 50 years old."

It isn’t surprising that Thomas’s expansive love for and knowledge of music stems from his family. "My stepfather has been as obsessed with music [as I am]," he explains while charting Lindstrøm’s background in country and gospel bands and his own early days DJing hip-hop records at youth clubs. Thomas’s stepfather "would play Ry Cooder and the Sex Pistols for me. He had the Robert Christgau Consumer Guide books, which are great. I think it’s funny how [Christgau] can write similarly about an Eric Clapton album and a Chic album. For me, it really isn’t about bad music or good music, but about music that excites you and music that doesn’t."

It also probably isn’t surprising that one genre Thomas’s stepfather didn’t like — prog rock — figures heavily in his and Lindstrøm’s music. As for newer terms or styles, like Lindstrøm (who good-naturedly told me, "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me I invented a genre"), Thomas has a sense of humor about the phrase space disco. "It could have been a lot worse," he says. "It could have been called crunk or syrup [Houston’s cough syrup–influenced hip-hop sound]. In my hometown, at underage school dances 15-year-old girls used to soak their tampons in moonshine. I guess that’s the Norwegian version of syrup."

UP, UP, AND AWAY WITH DOMINIQUE LEONE

When I meet Dominique Leone, he’s sitting in a San Francisco café that might have the highest number of laptops per square foot. Leone has one too, but instead of staring into its screen he’s feverishly using a pencil to draw on a page in a sky blue Strathmore sketchbook. I’m not surprised, because scribbler nonpareil Sol LeWitt caps a list of audio and visual influences on Leone’s MySpace page. That site also offers an opportunity to hear the gorgeous song "Conversational," on which Leone’s spare keyboard arrangement and ascendant choirboy-gone-slightly-cuckoo voice update the plaintive yet celestial highlights ("I’ll Be Home," "Living Without You") of Harry Nilsson’s classic 1970 cover collection Nilsson Sings Newman (Buddha).

Leone’s MySpace page contains audio treats, but what about his sketchbook page? It turns out he’s drawing, in his words, "a giant skyscraper-sized robot that streams music and scents into the air and every 10 minutes or so spews out free kittens." Indeed, Leone’s sketch does look a bit like that, so when he says he’ll try his hand at an idea I have — a constellation that playfully demonstrates links between San Francisco and Norway musicians — I take him up on the offer.

Though Leone doesn’t include himself in the finished rendering ("More an exploding molecule than a constellation," he says), which accompanies this article, he belongs in a nearby orbit, thanks to his collaborations with Lindstrøm. In addition to providing the quiet heart of that artist’s Late Night Tales mix, "Conversational" is also featured on an EP, simply titled Dominique Leone, that Lindstrøm is releasing next month on Feedelity (with art by Hiorthøy) as a precursor to Leone’s album. The gonzo centerpiece of the EP is "Clairevoyage — a Medley Performed by the 16th Rebels of Mung," on which Lindstrøm and Oslo Bee Gees maniacs Mungolian Jet Set, responding to Leone’s song "Claire" (on the EP’s B-side), construct a 12-minutes-plus propulsive fantasia that builds to a helium-voiced climax not far from the munchkin antics of Meek’s "I Hear a New World." Leone is no slouch at reaching countertenor octaves naturally or through tape manipulation. But since the EP also credits Mungolian figures named Katzenjammer and Izzy Tizzy as vocalists, it’s anyone’s guess as to who has inhaled a few balloons before singing.

Leone says he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and the latter’s influence is especially apparent in the semielated, semiagitated high harmonies that fly through intricately braided compositions like his "Nous Tombons dans Elle." A self-described "band nerd" in high school and music major at Texas Tech University, he feels a kinship with the more overtly postmodern academic songwriting approaches of friends such as Matmos and Kevin Blechdom. To Lindstrøm, though, he’s a 21st-century answer to the progressive pop of Todd Rundgren (who happens to be a favorite of Sorcerer as well). "I remember the first time Lindstrøm wrote to me [about my music]. He was talking about Paul McCartney, but his big thing was Rundgren," Leone says with a laugh. "I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but [Lindstrøm] wasn’t the first person to listen to my music and mention Rundgren.

"The first track [‘Forelopic Bit’] on Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from prog and fusion influences," Leone notes before adding some observations that probably stem from his experience as a freelance music writer for Pitchfork more than from his far-flung everyday listening tastes, which have ranged from salsa to bluegrass over the past few months. "A lot of people are trying to [bring prog and fusion to dance floors] right now. You can go out [to a club] and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrøm is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences."

A HATCHBACK DRIVE TO WINDSURF

Sam Grawe of Hatchback and Windsurf sings the praises of his Sony tape recorder as I place my old, cheap, and wonderful Panasonic next to some glasses of wine on a table in his home recording studio. Plastic owl wall fixtures and a rug with shaded steps of color that resemble the volume bars of a digital stereo rest above and below the assortment of keyboards (including that prized prog possession, the Rhodes) in the room. "You can listen to instrumentals as background music, but I’ve always been into [moments] when music connects you with what’s happening or what you’re doing," Grawe says. "So much of my [youth] was spent driving around the rural countryside and finding the perfect song. Sound can fulfill an opening or void in your emotional experience. Images can be part of it, smell can be part of it, but sound can take it to another level."

Grawe’s sympathy for trusty old tape recorders, his playfully decorated recording space, and the attentiveness to setting in his reminiscence all make sense — by day he is the editor in chief of the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. By night and whenever else he can find the time, he listens to and makes music. It’s an enduring passion that goes back to high school years spent using MIDI to put music theory into practice and compose fugues in the manner of Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "The guy who stocked the import section [at a nearby record store] was some crazy prog freak," Grawe remembers. "A friend of mine had The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, so I could read about some crazy Italian or German band and then go to the mall and buy the CD."

"White Diamond," the 21st-century prog rock of Gibraltar that Hatchback has just made public (on the UK label This Is Not an Exit), showcases the fuguelike interplay between simplicity and complexity in Grawe’s compositions. While a 17-minute remix by Prins Thomas adds club elements, the original version, with its hallucinatory, starlit varieties of arpeggio, makes for an ideal personal soundtrack. Hatchback’s next 12-inch release on This Is Not an Exit, a track called "Jet Lag," is funkier yet similarly majestic, layered, and emotive. In both cases vocals would be a pointless distraction — synthesizers seem to sing to one another, becoming increasingly, endearingly creaturelike by song’s end. "Friends chide me for not knowing the words to songs I’ve heard a thousand times," Grawe says after testifying to his love for the film scores of Vangelis, Piero Umiliani, and Francis Lai. "But often a little synth part [in a song] is more interesting to me."

Grawe sings on some of the Windsurf songs that he and Judd have recorded for Prins Thomas to release on Internasjonal. Windsurf allows him to tap into a longtime interest in duos and groups ranging from the many projects of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Neu!’s Michael Rother (Grawe recently contributed liner notes to an upcoming reissue of Rother’s first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, by Oakland’s Water) to … Steely Dan. "To a lot of people they embody what’s wrong with music," Grawe says of the last. "But to me they embody everything that’s right. Not only is their music well crafted, but some of their lyrics, to me, are on a par with [Bob] Dylan."

As for Oslo and San Francisco, Grawe — who recently created a Venn diagram for Mike Bee of Amoeba Music that illustrates the fusion of influences within Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf — welcomes the growing, glowing galactic prism formed by artists from both areas who have an affinity for one another’s music. "I think it’s interesting that all these records happened without [the people involved] ever meeting in person or sometimes even talking on the phone," Grawe says. "It’s all been through the Internet. It was great to finally see [Thomas] when he came to town and hang out, have dinner, and play records. We connected instantly."

I HEAR A NEW WORLD

To trace musical connections between a pair of geographical areas is reductive. The artists I’ve written about love music from a number of other countries (Germany and Brazil, to name just two) and cumulatively have friendships with contemporary musicians from all over the globe. But in focusing on sonic signals being sent forth between Norway and our Bay, signals that have yielded some of my favorite recordings of the past year, I also discovered unexpected commonalities that open into new words about — and worlds of — sound. Almost all of the San Francisco musicians I spoke with also write about music, and three of them are journalists, for example. It seems the divisions between writers and musicians continue to blur, leading to the formation of a new music of the spheres.

When Joe Meek composed and recorded I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy (RPM) in England in 1960, his intense, obsessive love of music and sound resulted in the audio equivalent of what is called visionary. But he remained isolated. Today it’s great to see — and hear — figures such as Meek and disco innovator Arthur Russell living on, their spirits floating through many people’s songs and being revived in upcoming documentaries. Meek heard a new world of sound, calling him and haunting him. He couldn’t tell what was in store for him, but his new world of sound has arrived. It spans from Norway and our Bay to the farthest reaches of inner and outer space.

Hear it!

www.dominiqueleone.com

www.feedelity.com

www.myspace.com/feedelity

www.myspace.com/arp001

www.myspace.com/dominiqueleone

www.myspace.com/fullpupp

www.myspace.com/hatchback76

www.myspace.com/mungolianjetset

www.myspace.com/prinsthomas

www.myspace.com/sorcererjams

www.myspace.com/toddterje

www.myspace.com/windsurfmusic

www.smalltownsupersound.com

www.sorcerermusic.com

Palencia

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October 23, 2007
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› paulr@sfbg.com

Palencia so nicely fills such an obvious niche in the city’s restaurant universe that we are left only to wonder why it wasn’t filled sooner. The niche is white-linen or upmarket Filipino cuisine, and it’s an obvious one in the sense that the connection between the Philippines and the United States — the West Coast in particular — has been strong for more than a century. It’s at least as obvious in the sense that Filipino cooking, like Singaporean, is an interesting mishmash to begin with, an earthy yet worldly blend of Asian, tropical, and European influences that takes well to a bit of California-style styling.

The restaurant (a project of the Palencia family) opened over the summer on a — comparatively — quiet and leafy stretch of 17th Street in the Castro. The nearby buildings are mostly residential rather than commercial, and on an autumnal evening of early darkness you could easily walk right past Palencia. There is, as of yet, no street signage beyond a panel of frosted glass bearing the restaurant’s name, along with a sheaf of menus posted at the door. Restaurant rows do have their advantages, among them the slowing down of foot traffic as prospective patrons move from one threshold to the next, pondering menu cards and making sure not to miss any. But there is an exhilaration in finding a restaurant all on its own, as if it’s a secret.

Palencia’s interior design adds to the sense of elegant hush. A votive candle flickers on each table, and the restaurant’s butter-colored walls dance with suggestive shadows cast by these small brightnesses. Dark wood trim gives a hint of medieval flavor, while whimsical light fixtures that resemble woven baskets remind us that yes, we are still somewhere in the Castro early in the 21st century.

Chef Danelle Valenzuela’s food matches up quite gracefully with the atmospheric setting. If your experience of Filipino cooking has heretofore been limited to eating fancified lumpia at Pres a Vi or the various tasty but plain adobos ladled over white rice at New Filipinas, you’re likely to find that Palencia’s kitchen has caught just the right tone. The dishes appear to be, by and large, authentic, but they are carefully prepared and plated, with dashes of artful juxtaposition.

If you love lumpia (the plump little pot sticker–burrito hybrids) but suffer from fried-food anxiety, you might open with Palencia’s "fresh" version ($7.50 for two), which are almost like soft tacos: steamed crepes, about the size of hot dog buns, enveloping leaves of red leaf lettuce enveloping shrimp and shredded carrots and cabbage. The dipping sauce on the side looks like the spicy peanut kind but isn’t; it’s made of garlic and soy and has a viscosity like that of homemade mayo.

While I cherish soy sauce as a reliable fund of umami, I felt it played too prominent a role in the chicken adobo ($8), boneless thigh meat and potatoes stewed to aching tenderness in what was meant to be a lively bath of garlic, red pepper, vinegar, and bay leaf. The broth was tasty enough; it just tasted a bit too much of soy saltiness. But this small off note was struck on an early visit; when we returned some weeks later we found no such imbalance in any of the dishes.

The least fried seeming of the fried items is probably ukoy ($7.95), an array of shaggy-looking shrimp-and-vegetable fritters served with a mignonettelike dipping sauce whose vinegary sharpness helps cut the fat. Once you reach the main courses you’re largely past the perils of the deep fryer. Simmering is a large motif, even beyond the adobos; the tongue-twistingly named guinataang kalabasa at hipon ($11.25) is a Thai-like coconut-milk curry studded with prawns and chunks of kabocha squash, along with a shower of dark green Chinese long beans, like the remains of a splintered river raft. (Spanish speakers will notice that kalabasa is just a respelling of calabasa — "squash" — and of course the Philippines were a Spanish possession until the Spanish-American War of 1898.)

Also Thai-ish in tone is the BBQ chicken ($10.95) on a triad of skewers. The marinated flesh takes a nice blistering from the grill but remains juicy inside. For textural and flavor contrast the skewers are plated with a small heap of achara: threads of pickled carrot and papaya. We were offered white rice to go with this dish, asked for brown rice instead, and settled for garlic rice ($3.50). The garlic rice nonetheless turned out to be at least as brown as most brown rice, and quite a bit tastier. Scooped from its cantaloupe-size bowl, it made a nice bed for the chicken skewers and prawn curry alike and was quite good on its own.

Although in the matter of dessert I am now a subprime customer who as often as not is pleased to settle for some chamomile tea — or nothing at all — I still feel a slight thrill in proclaiming an excellent sweet. Palencia has one: it’s the sans rival ($8) and looks like a peanut butter sandwich sliced in half and sexily posed. In fact, the sandwich consists of two layers of cashew meringue, separated by a narrow stratum of vanilla buttercream. It’s unusual and irresistible; all it needs is a little color on the plate, a sprig of mint, a splash of berry coulis. A lump of vanilla ice cream, on the other hand — as accompanies the turón ($8), a pair of crisp-fried crepes stuffed with bananas and jackfruit — would be overkill, even rivalrous. *

PALENCIA

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 2–5 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

3870 17th St., SF

(415) 522-1888

www.palenciasf.com

Beer and wine

Moderately noisy

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Crazy quilt

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October 23, 2007
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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO I like weather. It’s everywhere this season. But it’s also all over the map: patches of drizzle here, swaths of squinty sunlight there, chilly threads of breeze, and a soft, wet batting of fog. Should someone call People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on dog days? Are Indian summers racist? What color Converse matches my knockoff Burberry umbrella? Weather’s so confusing!

Fortunately, the forecast in Clubland is much more predictable: crazy, as usual. Partly rowdy with a high chance of gusty accordion and slight pratfalls on the runways. Now’s the time when dance floors get "wild" and club folks scramble like chipmunks to store up glowing insanity for the long winter ahead. I’m reminded of boob-tube scream queen Elvira’s immortal "Monsta Rap": "Somethin’ put his nuts on tha side of his head / What in the world were they thinkin’?" Below are some upcoming offbeat joys to enjoy.

PS Every day is Halloween, duh. Check out the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music for my depraved fright-night party picks.

Face the fear and drink it anyway! That’s my motto. It’s tattooed on my inner thigh, right next to a butterfly on a Harley, a rainbow of dancing M&Ms, and Tweety Bird pulling dental floss out of his ass with a pair of scalpels. I live for scary cocktail confrontations. But I’ve never quite been able to overcome my fear of clowns. It’s not so much the clowns themselves that terrify but the flesh-eating bacteria that live in their eyes and squirt out when they blink. Honk, honk!

Still, the line between a good night out and a full-on circus grows ever thinner with each new Burning Man, and circus-themed parties are starting to develop subgenres. For instance: Big Top, which successfully mixes double entendre (it’s a queer thing: "big top" — get it?) and three-ring silliness into one whapping flapdoodle of a monthly Sunday shindig. Promoters–club whores Joshua J and Rayza Burn, who fervently insist to me that they’re in no way "hot for clown," lay on the DIY pancake pretty thick. No slick fire-twirler troupes here — just a tipsy bunch of drag queens in rainbow fright wigs, guest DJs devoid of shame, and cross-eyed kids sporting giant shoes. Somehow it works. This month: a homo fashion costume ball with designer Kim Jones in the DJ booth.

I can’t tell you how to make money, but I can tell you that every time I hear the word milonga I pitch a yard’s worth of tango tent. Let’s pitch together — to the lively plucks and wheezes of local sensations Tango No. 9, an all-star Bay Area quartet celebrating the release of their self-released CD Here Live No Fish with a big ole Piazzola party at Café Cocomo (lessons luckily offered for us absoluto beginners). This is one of those nightlife events I occasionally recommend not because it’s going to be a drunken orgy of unfortunate plumbing leaks but because there’ll be an element of seductive danger. As in, how many heels will I break trying to get to the center of one of my several hot Argentine dance partners? Three licks.

"If there’s anything close to the authentic madness that is true Balkan partying in the Bay Area, it is us," Boban, promoter of the raucous quarterly Kafana Balkan party, told me over the phone. "People come to let it loose in true Balkan-region style. They get up the next morning, maybe with a little hangover, ha, and then they are refreshed in their daily maintenance of the machine." I should add here that Boban has the kind of deep, heavily accented, tinged-with-grins voice that could probably lead anyone into mountainous, oud-and-cümbüs-driven bliss. Lately, indie rock has embraced the Balkan spirits, but Kafana’s no mere Gogol Bordello–Beirut–Balkan Beat Box hoedown: DJ Zeljko brings the Rom and rakiya-fueled real, with selections from the likes of Boban Markovic Orkestar and Fanfare Ciorcarlia. It all whirls round in a carnivalesque atmosphere that includes clowns from Bread and Cheese Circus and live Bay Area Balkan band Brass Menazerie. Plus, Kafana’s a benefit for Humanitarian Circus, which performs for Kosovar orphans. Grab your dumbek and get — sorry — Mace-down-ian.

Vegan donuts are on fire. Nondairy sprinkles litter the runways; free-trade glazing greases the underground wheels of Monday nights. WTF? I’m talking about the sweet monthly Club Donuts, a manic multimedia fiesta that’s celebrating its hole–in–one year anniversary next month. Fab fashion shows, live bands, dance troupes, kitsch movies, and a hot mess on the dance floor have been Donuts’ delicious MO for a fat and fluffy year now, and the anniversary party promises to hit new monthly-Monday-night heights, with a live performance by Hey Willpower and DJs Calvin Johnson and Ian Svenonius joining resident Pickpocket on the decks. (It’ll be "ambrosial, ecstatic," the club’s breathtakingly hottt promoters Kat and Alison promise me. "Total visual and aural immersement, with lots of free vegan donuts.") Plus, you know, cute young Mission party artists. I’ll take half a dozen to go. *

BIG TOP

Fourth Sun., 7 p.m.–2 a.m., $3

Transfer

198 Church, SF

(415) 861-7499

CLUB DONUTS

Nov. 12, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $8

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

www.myspace.com/donutparty

KAFANA BALKAN

Nov. 10, 8 p.m.–2 a.m., $10–$25, sliding scale

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

www.12galaxies.com

www.myspace.com/kafanabalkan

TANGO NO. 9

Nov. 4, 7:30 p.m. tango lesson, 8:30 p.m. performance and party

$15, $20 with lesson

Café Cocomo

650 Indiana, SF
www.cafecocomo.com

Silencers, please

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October 23, 2007
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The James Bond movies had a cultural impact like no other film series in the 1960s, spawning umpteen imitations, from cheap Europudding productions (the ones directed by Mario Bava and Jess Franco are quite delightful) to Hollywood spectaculars. There were rival series too. The most popular — and critically loathed — starred Dean Martin as Matt Helm. In Donald Hamilton’s original books Helm is a tough customer involved in relatively realistic adventures. But the Helm movies — the prime inspiration for Austin Powers — are consummate ’60s expressions of Playboy middle-class-male masturbation fodder, surrounding the leather-skinned, martini-slurred star (Martin’s line readings often suggest he’d been propped up for the take) with chesty starlets half his age, clad in the loudest possible peekaboo showgirl or allegedly mod attire.

As pungently nostalgic as a lapful of spilled Old Spice, 1966’s The Silencers at one point has the relatively mature Cyd Charisse (singing voice dubbed by Vicki Carr) performing a nightclub number. She wears a flesh-colored body stocking adorned with black suction cups that have what look like deflated yellow condoms dangling from them. Our hero delivers wheezy bons mots — more like bones mots — while fending off bombshells, including his secretary Miss Lovey Kravezit (Beverly Adams). Ever the gent, he asks each eager beaver if she has been vaccinated. Elevating matters somewhat is the presence of Stella Stevens as Gail, a haplessly klutzy tourist inadvertently pulled into Helm’s bullet-dodging realm. Her wide-eyed, good-natured screwball turn brings a little heart into this silicone fantasy — even if the movie insists on finding ways to humiliate her.

Dino’s Helm weaved his unsteady way through three more adventures. Murderer’s Row at least has Ann-Margret in a great go-go dance wig out on the hippie discotheque floor. Anyone reckless enough to watch all four garishly remastered features collected in Sony Pictures’ Matt Helm Lounge DVD set (guilty as charged) is going to lose more brain cells in approximately seven hours than Martin did in, er, an average week.

THE SILENCERS

Fri/26, 6:30 p.m., $10 donation (free for members)

Mechanics’ Institute

57 Post, SF

(415) 393-1000

www.milibrary.org

Torn apart

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October 23, 2007
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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Let’s start with the Ian Curtis dance. Part march in place, part ecstatic flail, it conveyed the singer’s trancelike connection to Joy Division’s music; it also eerily echoed the epileptic seizures he began suffering at age 21, just as his band was becoming famous. If you don’t have the Curtis dance down — let alone his gaunt frame or haunted eyes — you don’t have Curtis.

Fortunately, Control director Anton Corbijn — making his feature debut after a long career photographing musicians including Joy Division — found Sam Riley, an unknown who more or less resembles Curtis physically. But beyond that, the performance is uncanny — the dance is there, along with the anguish and the hunger of a first-time lead actor anxious to do right by the star he’s portraying, not to mention his own career. Apologies to Joaquin Phoenix, but imitation isn’t always the best route. If you want to make your troubled-artist biopic feel authentic, the spirit of desperate urgency is well in order.

Of course, Johnny Cash lived a long life; post-punk poster child Curtis only lived to be 23, though he packed a lot of drama into his adult years. Control swoops in circa 1973; we first meet Curtis as a David Bowie–obsessed, William Wordsworth–quoting, dreaming-of-a-way-out-of-Manchester high school student. Soon after, he marries Deborah Woodruff (Samantha Morton), and the film hustles ahead to Joy Division’s formation, with early gigs, recordings, and a performance on Tony Wilson’s Granada Reports TV show (sparked when Curtis passes a note to Wilson urging him to book the group in so many words: "Joy Division you cunt"). Though Control is based on Deborah Curtis’s biography of her husband, Touching from a Distance (Faber and Faber, 1996), the film devotes ample attention to dynamics within the band, with Factory Records mogul Wilson (Craig Parkinson), and with manager Rob Gretton (Tony Kebbell). Concerts are re-created with keen realism, enhanced by Corbijn’s decision to shoot in no-frills black and white, a choice that also complements the dreary, working-class surroundings that inspired the band’s music. (For more on Joy Division and late 1970s Manchester, check out Grant Gee’s richly detailed doc, Joy Division, which screened alongside Control at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and should be hitting theaters in 2008. Or there’s always Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 goofy-insane look at the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.)

The heart of Control, though, is Curtis’s tangled home life. After impulsively marrying at 19, he tries to fit the role of dutiful family man, even keeping his desk job (while wearing his coat with "HATE" written on the back) as Joy Division takes off. Deborah gives birth to Natalie, and despite his intentions of doing the right thing, Curtis can’t help but fall for Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), a bewitching journalist who’s portrayed as sympathetically here as any Other Woman could hope to be.

So yeah, you have your wife (whom you feel incredibly devoted to, despite everything), your mistress (whom you love more than anything), your burgeoning fame (which you’re not sure you want), and a mysterious disease that requires you to take so many pills your sense of self is completely compromised. What do you do? Everyone knows what happened to Curtis, and while Control — beautifully filmed and performed — can’t quite crack his entire enigma, it’s almost enough that it hints at answers. Control‘s final shot, a haunting image as gorgeous as it is morbid, is a lingering wonder. *

CONTROL

Opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Going after the Go! Team

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October 22, 2007
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By Chris DeMento

If I had been liquored up, like good and wedding-reception drunk, the Go! Team, who appeared Oct. 19 at Mezzanine, would have doubtless been an even more enjoyable show. They crammed their set full of frenetic, fizzpop, indie-hop dance numbers, deviating only twice to play something softer, slower, more coquettish. The better part of it was all getaway cars, poprocks, and coke.

The old stuff – like “Panther Dash” and “Lady Flash” – is written with a recipe that calls for one part rock ‘n’ roll posturing, one part disco synthfunk, and one part hip-hop brio. Mix in a simplistic glockenspiel, substitute semi-inspired harmonica lines, tinker about on toy instruments – and smile pretty and laugh and keep it genki! And throw your hands up in the air and jump and yell, “Yay!” and “Go!” and “Whoo!” a whole bunch of times. The stuff they played off the new album bears a listening, if only for the sake of close comparison to the old. The crazydancy rock-hop formula still works.

The Go! Team should be noted for doing what so many UK bands before them have also succeeded in accomplishing – that is, for putting fundamentally American tropes to colorful, original use. Not to call them Lennons
– far from it. But it’s undeniable that the warm reception they received from their 35-and-younger Mezzanine audience had much to do with their manipulation of popular American forms, specifically hip-hop. Their approach presents itself just clearly enough, without overpowering the other ideas in the music – a convenient influence that remains almost topical so as not to scare off the alt-indie-dance-pop rockers. For the Go! Team, hip-hop works best as a component, a third of their sum polyphony, and in this way, lead vocalist Ninja provides a more rhetorical, rhythmically additive element than any real semantic purpose or tonal value – perfect for white folks who don’t own any Nas records but fondly recall the Rob Bass days. (And this is all right crafty on the part of the band, if you ask me.)

Hey gay Arabs, get down

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October 18, 2007
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One of my favorite parties of the year, Bibi, is having an encore this Saturday — a sultry, kitschy, haremesque masquerade! Bibi is a raucous party for gay Southwest Asian and North Africans (SWANAs) — not just those of Arabian persuasion, of course — and their friends (my Jewish bf had a blast — unity on the dance floor!). The last one was out of control — the promoters only expected a few people, and yet hundreds crammed their beautiful, hipshaking female, male, and other asses into Club Eight for a pre-Pride Arab hoedown. Alalalalalalala-y!

DJs BaBa Q., Bahman, and Emancipacion take you to funky motherland with a fusion of Middle-Eastern North African & International Beats, and, yes, there’ll be wild bellydancing sendups by drag queens SooozhyQ & Freyja. Nazli Hanem & Femme Fuego host, and Rostam and J. Maximillian put it all together. Plus it’s a masquerade — so wear something extra fab. I’m telling you it’ll be hot — and not just cuz I’m a naughty Lebanese homo. Here’s a little taste of the tunes:

Bibi
Sat, Oct. 20, 9pm – 2am, $15
Club Eight
1151 Folsom, SF.
www.myspace.com/bibisf

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