Documentary

The stranger

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Where to begin with Jandek? First, a definition: Jandek is a phenomenon, as plainly uncanny as a lightning storm. Then on to the facts of the case: initially emerging in 1978 with the Ready for the House album (Corwood), Jandek has since released a steady stream of haunting LPs: 51 at last count, each talismanic of a cumulative mystery. The records originate from Corwood Industries, PO Box 15375, in Houston, a company that seems to exist solely to disseminate Jandek music. The discs contain no supplemental information, and the whole enterprise propagates with pseudocorporate anonymity — the performer is usually invoked as the "Representative from Corwood."

These inputs are nothing in and of themselves, but like a Rubik’s Cube, they have become a source of tantalizing fascination for a few. The music, which ranges from the inscrutable to the harrowing, comes on like icebergs in the night. The first full-lengths (especially 1981’s Six and Six) lay out the basic Jandek sound: immersive death-letter blues, unstudied and intense. Misshapen chords crumble in his clanking tunings and obtrusive picking patterns. Songs end with the dull thud of a stopped tape recorder.

There have been additions and subtractions since this first period: a thudding racket of drums on a string of releases in the mid-’80s, cryptic collaborations ("Nancy Sings"), a wonderfully severe "breakup" album (1987’s Blue Corpse), and a short phase of unlistenable a cappella (2000’s Put My Dream on This Planet, 2001’s This Narrow Road, and 2004’s Worthless Recluse). Evaluative criteria have been junked, lyrics and titles scrambled, and explications left unanswered. Even something as basic as Jandek’s chronology is up in the air: many of his closest listeners do not believe the albums are released in the same order in which they were recorded.

The covers further channel these constantly shifting parameters, as well as the intensely desolate nature of the Jandek persona. Like the recordings, they are pointedly unprofessional, evoking the titular hero without pinning him down. When the figure does appear, he is inevitably alone and dour. Like the lyrics, multiple album covers are drawn from a single photo session, if not from one single photograph (2006’s What Else Does the Time Mean and The Ruins of Adventure).

Jandek has carved a tremendous field of negative space and achieved a collusion with his devotees as remarkable, in its way, as the one associated with the Grateful Dead. As far as dedicated fandom goes, Seth Tisue’s annotated Web site (tisue.net/jandek) is simply amazing. While looking over Tisue’s notes, it’s easy to appreciate how much the Representative from Corwood rocked the boat when he announced his first live performances in 2004. Thirty shows later, he is making his first scheduled West Coast appearance at the appropriately chaste Swedish American Hall.

Unprecedented perhaps, though not necessarily as shocking as it might first appear. A proper recluse doesn’t want any kind of attention, whereas Jandek simply seems to want to tightly regulate the flow of information. There’s an unexpectedly illuminating moment in a 1985 phone interview highlighted in the Jandek on Corwood documentary (2003) when Jandek confesses he only decided to go on with his project after Ready for the House received a good notice from now defunct OP magazine. Is it such a stretch, then, to connect Jandek’s decision to begin performing live to the increased attention following the film?

Regardless, any fears that Jandek would be sacrificing his essence have been allayed by the fiery quality of the concerts. He pens a new set of lyrics for each, performing the compositions with an unfamiliar nest of collaborators plucked from the local experimental music community. San Francisco is especially rich in this regard, and two of the area’s best will fall into Jandek’s orbit Jan. 12: Ches Smith (Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows) is marked down for drums and Tom Carter (Charlambides, Badgerlore) for bass.

Carter wrote to me about a previous experience playing with the Representative from Corwood, "It was one of the heaviest playing situations of my life. He didn’t demand much specifically from the other musicians, but there was definitely a sense that there was something he wanted, and that if you didn’t figure it out yourself, it was on your head if the performance fell flat."

The shows may last longer than the records, but this seems less of an issue when you acknowledge the elastic, architectural quality of the music. The recordings, in any event, are an apt preparation for the appearances, as they too seem to unfold in stuttering real time. After we listen, our throats are dried out, our blinking irregular, and it seems the preceding minutes have passed through a dark star. We do not ask for music to move us like this, but once it does it is hard to imagine anything else.

Some fans think the performances and recent spike in releases indicate that the Representative from Corwood has retired from his day job. Regardless of whether he has, he’s certainly earned the right to embrace his artist self. Whether we choose to visit his terrain or keep away is inconsequential next to the fact that Jandek is undeniably there. Insofar as this body of work represents the buzzing strangeness lurking just behind the flecked curtains of everyday Americana, the Representative from Corwood is on a track similar to that of Thomas Pynchon or David Lynch. Ever inscrutable and increasingly undeniable, the Jandek discography has somehow wormed its way onto the map. 2

JANDEK

Sat/12, 7:30 p.m., $25

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Great Scott!

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Though orchestra leader and electronics pioneer Raymond Scott may not exactly have been a household name, his sonic inventiveness succeeded in seeping across the larger social synapse of America’s television generation. Credited with founding 20th-century music’s dubiously named exotica genre — a kind of pop counterpart to art brut that included everything from Claude Debussy’s Javanese tribalism to Clara Rockmore’s theremin, Arthur Lyman’s vibes and chimes to electronic voice phenomena séances — Scott created a corpus that was as unique as it was bizarre.

In fact, Scott’s variety of assorted musical approaches was extraordinary: he composed everything from syncopated so-called cartoon jazz to proto-synthesizer radio jingles to ambient albums for toddlers. "The concept of electronic music for babies in the early 1960s usually strikes folks as either extremely clever and useful or totally insane," says Jeff Winner, aficionado, RaymondScott.com archivist, and coproducer of many Scott reissues. And truly, Scott’s role as a radiophonic designer and a thoroughly American surrealist in the autodidactic tradition of Joseph Cornell or Stan Brakhage is unparalleled in the almanac of recorded music.

It’s appropriate, then, that this new year marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of a man in whose absence the ether of the 20th century may have sounded radically different — or, at the very least, would have had fewer blurbs, blips, and zoinks. In celebration, the Raymond Scott Archive and Basta Records — the geniuses behind the comprehensive Manhattan Research Inc. (2000) and the 1997 reissue of Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, Volumes 1–3 (Epic, 1963) — are planning a yearlong audio bacchanal that will revisit every major era in the composer’s 50-year career. According to Winner, this will include the release of a documentary by Scott’s only son, Stan Warnow; a series of electronic and jazz rarities recordings; and live tribute concerts on the East and West Coasts.

Born Harry Warnow in 1908 to a Jewish Russian immigrant family in New York City, Scott pursued his early passion for science and music by attending a local Brooklyn technical school before entering the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) in the late 1920s. He began his professional career as an in-house musician at CBS, where he worked in varying capacities for the television and radio network — as a session man, orchestra conductor, and creative director — for decades.

In the interim, the always resourceful musician recruited five compeers and formed the Raymond Scott Quintette — so called because, according to Scott, using the correct "<0x2009>‘sextet’ might get your mind off music." Under Scott’s direction, the Quintette produced a striking oeuvre that blended the compositional and stylistic aesthetic of big band jazz, the amorphous motifs of soundtrack and sound effects records, and the playful narratives of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The song titles alone are surrealism in miniature — "New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room," and Scott’s most celebrated and oft-repeated piece, "Powerhouse." So successful were these instrumentals that within months of their debut the Quintette were contracted with 20th Century Fox to score major motion pictures. These songs would also become the adolescent soundtrack of Saturday morning after Warner Bros. secured the rights to the Quintette’s catalog in 1943 and Warner musical director Carl Stalling inserted huge swathes of Scott’s work into the immensely popular Looney Tunes.

Using the generous salary from his work at CBS, Scott bankrolled his own electronics studio — a sort of junior BBC Radiophonic Workshop — which he christened Manhattan Research in 1946. Though its initial function was to produce radio ads and jingles, the Long Island, NY, laboratory’s true purpose was to develop unheard and unimagined forms of electromechanical and synthesized tones. Predating the widespread use of integrated circuits and analog synthesis, the photocell tone generators and polyphonic sequencers constructed at Manhattan Research were completely unprecedented in sound technology.

"Given the amazing, tiny, and cheap technology that’s everywhere today, it’s a real challenge for us moderns to appreciate how difficult and s-l-o-w the process was," Winner explains. "It was always laborious, tedious, and extremely time-consuming. Designing, theorizing, soldering, then testing…. Wiring, rewiring, and testing again and again…. Hour after hour, year after year — literally — decade after decade."

The records spawned from these contraptions — the Clavivox, the Electronium, and the Circle Machine — often consisted of limpid pools of sustained sound multitracked with sharp sine wave helices and processed glitches. The almost childlike primitivism and free-form tonality that template Scott’s work bely its enchanting subtlety, prefiguring the kraut rock pastoralism of Brian Eno and the lush microtones of contemporary digital artists Christian Fennesz and Nobukazu Takemura. In fact, Winner recalls that when a colleague introduced Eno to Scott’s music years ago, Eno "was indeed impressed. He agreed that some of Scott’s electronic music is similar to some of his own."

Though his success as a producer and inventor was subordinated to his very popular role as an orchestra conductor and jazzman — creating a kind of night-and-day personality that alternated between the smiling TV bandleader and the dial-twisting mad scientist — Scott continued his nocturnal research unabated. Along the way, the once-gregarious musician became more obsessive and secretive regarding his unwieldy instruments, some of which extended wall to wall with their untranslatable, blinking consoles.

The fruits of his labor only became clear later, as the impact of Scott’s brilliance was measured in the younger technologists and musicians who joined his mission in the ’50s and ’60s. Budding musical technician Robert Moog began working with Scott long before he invented the first modular synthesizer that bears his name. Motown impresario Berry Gordy was so impressed with Scott’s mysterious Electronium that he recruited the inventor to the label’s expanding R&D department and bankrolled Manhattan Research’s 1971 move to California, where Scott would spend his final professional years toiling unapologetically on the apparatus.

"During [those years,] among the very few who were thinking about electroinstruments, no one foresaw a consumer market for hardware," Winner explains of Scott’s lifelong work. "Almost no one wanted those kinds of sounds yet." With this centennial celebration — and a bevy of new studio discoveries — Scott’s work may finally be recognized for its uncompromising beauty and understood as the revolving soundtrack for a century of technology and dreams, human and machine.

The Year in Film: Rest in pieces

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Good-bye, movies of 2007, we hardly knew you. Auteurs to ashes, digital to dust. (Oh, wait — Dust is the title and subject of the documentary I’m most hoping to see in 2008.) Because this year brought the last days of some beloved directors (including Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Curtis Harrington), and because United States leaders and moviegoers have endorsed the American tradition of soldiering forward blindly into the future with no memory, it seems appropriate to render this year’s film issue as a memorial.

The past 12 months brought a pair of great films specifically devoted to memorials, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever and John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind. Honigmann’s sublime movie is largely set in the famed Paris cemetery Père-Lachaise, where the dead from many countries receive tributes from a world of visitors. Gianvito’s feature pensively visits monuments to US activist heroes and events, finding most of them alone and ignored, some in a state of disrepair. The final moments of Gianvito’s film rally hope, but the discrepancy between these two movies is telling.

This week’s cover stars are Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza, the director-producer and composer-star of Colma: The Musical. A musical that sings and dances through an amazing and oft-ignored Bay Area zone where the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of a thousand to one, Wong and Mendoza’s movie sparks life from death instead of ignoring mortality. No surprise, then, that its life has been a long one. After more than a year of festival travels, Colma received a national theatrical release in 2007 — a truly rare feat for a no-budget film. It’s just been released on DVD, so now the whole world can come to Colma. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The Year in Film 2007

Johnny Ray Huston’s Top 12
A dozen keepers from 2007
By Johnny Ray Huston

Cinema 2007
Top 10s, rants, and raves from some of our favorites

Tonight we dine in hell
A look back at 2007, for better and mostly worse
By Cheryl Eddy

The other side of the mirror
The year the rock biopic swelled with self-awareness
By Max Goldberg

Cartooning the war
Transformers and 300 turn the conflict into comic book blockbusters
By Kimberly Chun

Things we lost in the theater
Score one for escapism, zero for political reality
By Dennis Harvey

Number nine — with a bullet
At least the fourth-best article ever about the folly of top 10 lists
By Jason Shamai

Western promises
Back from pasture — cinema’s cowboys of 2007
By Jeffery M. Anderson

Beauty lies
A look beneath the surface splendor of 2007’s most haunting documentaries
By Kevin Langson

Year in Film: Cinema 2007

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COVER STAR RICHARD WONG’S VIEW OF 2007


I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 films this year, so my list would basically be No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There, and Beowulf (two of those movies were painful, they were so aesthetically pleasing — guess which ones). But I’m going to say Paranoid Park was a huge influence on me this year. The risks it took and its loose narrative and utter disregard for convention were extremely inspiring. I saw it in Toronto at a press screening, among all the jabbering sales agents and distribution reps, and it still managed to drop my jaw — despite the guy next to me answering his phone midway through, telling the guy on the other line how "half baked" the movie was. Afterward I talked to a fellow aspiring filmmaker about the film, and he told me how much he disliked it because he thought it was a "mess." Exactly. It feels like a rough cut, only not — a work in progress, but that’s the point. Perhaps that’s why I identified with it so much. Besides, maybe a little messiness is not such a bad thing to embrace right now.

Richard Wong is the director and producer of Colma: The Musical.

JEM COHEN’S FAVORITE MOVIE MOMENT


James Benning’s Ten Skies at New York’s invaluable Anthology Film Archives: with a description like a parody of avant-garde impenetrability ("Ten shots of the sky — feature length"), it sounds daunting. Instead, it was an experience of mysterious joy that brought me back to why movies are entertaining and why seeing them can be so communal. After a few restless, fidgety minutes, both audience and film hit a groove so sublime that I kept laughing with pleasure. Each sky has its revelations and dramas, each viewer "makes" their own film, but in a shared hallucination that filmmakers and venues rarely allow, much less encourage. Sure, we’ve all seen the sky before, but when’s the last time you fell in so deeply and for so long, undistracted yet free to drift, stunned by both the thing itself and the amazing mirror of moving pictures? And I love that Benning says it’s a political film, "the opposite of war."

Jem Cohen (www.jemcohenfilms.com) is the director of Instrument, Benjamin Smoke, Chain, Building a Broken Mousetrap, and other films.

VAGINAL DAVIS’S FLESH FOR LULU: A LETTER FROM TEUTONIA


So glad I live in Berlin as an expat, far away from icky, tired Los Ang, that sad, pathetic film industry towne. When I worked for the Sundance Film Festival in programming I watched what seemed like a zillion of the same kinds of films. This year I created (with the art kollective Cheap) the Cheap Gossip Studio installation as part of the Berlin Film Festival. It was housed in the atrium of the Kino Arsenal. Film historian Marc Siegel brought Callie Angel out to show some rare, seldom-screened Andy Warhol films, as well as Jerry Tartaglia, who restored Jack Smith’s noted oeuvre. I even got to meet my sexy feminist heroine, Jackie Reynal of the Zanzibar movement, and Phillip Garrel, who brought his delicious young thrombone of a son, the actor Louis Garrel.

During the year, I started a new monthly performative series at Kino Arsenal called "Rising Stars, Falling Stars." It featured experimental silent classics from filmmakers like Louis Delluc, Man Ray, and the grandmama of the avant-garde, Germaine Deluc.

A lot of filmmakers send me rough cuts of their new films hoping I will write something on my blog, which gets a million readers a day. I just saw Bruce La Bruce’s allegorical zombie flick Otto; or Up with Dead People, and it’s beyond brilliant, and I am not saying that just because I have starred in Bruce’s other films Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White or because he directed my latest performance piece, Cheap Blacky. I am harsh on my filmmaker friends. I told Bruce that he shouldn’t act in his own movies anymore, just like Woody Allen and Spike Lee shouldn’t act in theirs. I even scolded Todd Haynes that Far From Heaven was overrated, but I adored Velvet Goldmine and his latest, I’m Not There. (Though I can’t stand Cate Blanchett; after seeing her as Queen Elizabeth yet again all I could say was, "Glenda Jackson, Glenda Jackson.")

I watched Superbad twice with the 14-year-old twins of my Cheap Blacky costar Susanne Sachsee, and I even got off on the ‘roid rage of Gerard Butler in the epic 300. No one does brittle white lady like my Tales of the City costar Laura Linney in The Savages. Tony Leung is so elegant and sensuous in Lust, Caution that everyone will want a Chinese boyfriend as the hot new fashion accessory this year. And if Sweeney Todd doesn’t bring back the musical genre, nothing will.

Vaginal Davis (www.vaginaldavis.com), who now lives in exile in Berlin, will be in the Bay Area on March 29, 2008, for the opening of her installation Present Penicative at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; it will also feature her performances "Bilitis — A Lesbian Separatist Feminist State" and "Colonize Me."

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL DOCUMENTARY TOP 10

1. Absolute Wilson (Katharina Otto-Bernstein, US/Germany)

2. All in This Tea (Les Blank, US)

3. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

5. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

6. My Kid Could Paint That (Ami Bar-Lev, US)

7. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, US)

8. Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US)

9. Romántico (Mark Becker, US)

10. Zoo (Robinson Devor, US)

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALARMING PORN TITLES, 2007 EDITION


All thanks to the Internet Movie Database, without which we would remain in blessed ignorance.

Brad McGuire’s 20 Hole Weekend

5 Guy Cream Pie 29

Abominable Black Man 8

Ahh Shit! White Mama 4

Anal Chic

Apple Bottom Snow Bunnies

Be Here Now

Blondes have More Squirt!

Bore My Asshole 3

Bring’um Young 23

Campus Pizza

Catch Her in the Eye

Even More Bang for Your Buck

Go Fuck Yourself

I Scored a Soccer Mom 3

Old Geezers, Young Teasers

Seduced by a Cougar 4

Swallow My Children

Thanks for the Mammaries

Trantasm

You’ve Got a Mother Thing Coming

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributor.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S PICKS


1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania). This debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two young women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime.

2. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US). Uncovering the layers of human identity has been a career-long, disturbing theme of Cronenberg’s. But with his most recent films he’s figured out how to deconstruct our psychotic and schizophrenic patriarchal society in a minimal, confrontational manner.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, US/UK). This minimasterpiece follows the downward spiral of two nice, middle-class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom loosen their moral codes just to better their lifestyles. Striking camera work (by Vilmos Zsigmond) encloses the characters in an unrelenting nightmare.

4. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US). Forever you’ll be able to bust out the statement "What did you think of the end of The Sopranos?" and people will get all lit up.

5. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US). Thanks to audacious writing and powerful acting (especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bittersweet sincerity is pitch-perfect.

6. Californication, season 1 (various directors, US). David Duchovny is alive and hilarious. Creator Tom Kapinos cuts right through our progressive relationship era, devilishly developing each character over 12 episodes. This is heavy-duty stuff mixed with dirty, dirty sex.

7. Year of the Dog (Mike White, US). White brings heartfelt storytelling to his directorial debut.

8. Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal, Canada)

9. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US). This Wes Craven–produced Iraq war allegory deserves more attention than Brian De Palma’s patronizing Redacted.

10. Hostel 2 (Eli Roth, US). Baddie Roth again makes social commentary on America’s xenophobic world colonization by torturing the pathetic children of the apathetic parents who make our lovely world go round.

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany). Reygadas updates the transcendental religious overtones of Carl Theodor Dreyer by way of a Mennonite community.

12. At Long Last Love (Peter Bogdanovich, US). Never released on VHS or DVD, this throwback to the musicals of Ernst Lubitsch — featuring Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan — was dismissed and despised on its only theatrical release in 1975. All of the Cole Porter musical numbers were filmed live, with the actors using their own voices. Not only are these numbers brilliantly executed (inspiring realistic musicals like Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), but the film also attains the rapid-fire interaction and casual kookiness of late ’30s screwball comedies. Did critics really overlook the fact that this is clever cheekiness? It’s a true treasure that serves as a ’70s time capsule and should inspire future filmmakers to take their chances all the way. It may have taken 32 years, but your time has come, Mr. Bogdanovich. Thank you.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and curates Midnites for Maniacs (www.midnitesformaniacs.com) at the Castro Theatre.

JAMES T. HONG’S TOP 11, STARTING FROM 0


0. The 70th anniversary memorial of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing, China, and especially survivor Xia Shuqin’s reaction to her re-created wartime house, where most of her family was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers.

1. The passing of House Resolution 121 (the "Comfort Women" resolution) on C-Span, July 30.

2. Yasukuni (Li Ying, China/Japan). The power of the shrine isn’t fully captured, but this is the closest an outsider has come to doing so that I’ve seen. All captured on a Japanese mini-DV video camera, in American NTSC.

3. Nanking (Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, US). AOL + Iris Chang = Woody Harrelson and the Nanjing Massacre.

4. A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (various, US). The alpha and omega of Asian America. For those with the required assets and skills, Playboy and the Internet can make you, regardless of race, a bisexual American celebrity — the end and a new beginning for all the so-called angry Asian Americans.

5. Summer Special Olympics in Shanghai, China. Globalization was transformed into music by Kenny G during the opening ceremony.

6. Pride: The Moment of Destiny, or Puraido: Unmei no Toki (Shunya Ito, Japan). Finally found a good DVD copy of this, in Canada of all places. This could also be called Tojo: The Hero.

7. Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic (various, US). Pride and Prejudice for the heavyset, on the Learning Channel.

8. Major League Eating’s Thanksgiving Chowdown (various, US). The purest American professional sport and the fall of Japan’s greatest hero, Takeru Kobayashi, on Spike TV.

9. Mock Up on Mu, in progress (Craig Baldwin, US)

10. Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa, Russia)

The works of San Francisco filmmaker James T. Hong (www.zukunftsmusik.com) include Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is, The Form of the Good, Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms, 731: Two Versions of Hell, and This Shall Be a Sign.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10


1. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

2. Brand upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, Canada/US)

3. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

4. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Malaysia/China/Taiwan/France/Austria)

5. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

6. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada)

7. Makeshift 2007 grindhouse double feature: The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, US) and Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, US)

8. The Wire, season four (various, US)

9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

10. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributor.

MARIA KOMODORE’S 10 WORST


In addition to bringing some very good movies to the screen, 2007 was also a really good year for bad films. But among them all, these are the ones I feel had lack of intelligence, conservatism, and conventionality on a whole different level:

1. Hitman (Xavier Gens, France/US)

2. Good Luck Chuck (Mark Helfrich, US/Canada)

3. License to Wed (Ken Kwapis, US)

4. The Brothers Solomon (Bob Odenkirk, US)

5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, US)

6. P.S. I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, US)

7. The Final Season (David M. Evans, US)

8. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, UK/US)

9. The Perfect Holiday (Lance Rivera, US)

10. P2 (Franck Khalfoun, US)

Maria Komodore is a Guardian contributor.

CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER’S TOP 10 DOCS


With a very special mention and heavy props for the fantastic TV doc series Nimrod Nation.

1. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Jason Kohn, Brazil/US)

2. Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, US)

3. Summercamp (Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price, US)

4. This Filthy World (Jeff Garlin, US)

5. A Man Named Pearl (Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, US)

6. King Corn (Aaron Wolf, US)

7. An Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, US)

8. Crazy Love (Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, US)

9. Big Rig (Doug Pray, US)

10. Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa (Jeremy Stulberg and Randy Stulberg, US)

San Francisco filmmakers Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer codirected the award-winning documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (www.saltonseadocumentary.com).

SYLVIA MILES’S TALES OF GO GO TALES


Go Go Tales was filmed at Cinecittà, so I had a location like I did in the ’60s. Cinecittà was thrilling. When the film premiered in Cannes, you would have thought I was the lead from the reviews. What’s her name in the New York Times gave it a wonderful review that got picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

Abel [Ferrara] got mad at Burt Young, who played my husband, and cut him out of the film. Be that as it may, we still managed to keep that story together The irony is that the rap that I do [at the end of the movie] was ad-libbed at 10 o’clock on the last night of filming. I give my all and know that something good will happen.

From what I hear, [Bernardo] Bertolucci is the one who chooses the film from Italy that gets into the New York Film Festival. Because they were renovating Alice Tully Hall, Go Go Tales had one of its screenings at the Jazz Center. It was exciting to look out my apartment window and see the lines of people outside [Frederick P.] Rose Hall waiting to see the movie. People even came to the 4 p.m. Sunday screening. At 4 p.m. on a Sunday they should have been out to tea instead of at that film!

Two-time Academy Award nominee Sylvia Miles has starred in Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol’s Heat, Evil Under the Sun, She-Devil, and Abel Ferrara’s soon to be released Go Go Tales.

JACQUES NOLOT’S TOP 10


1. The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akim, Germany/Turkey)

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)

3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

4. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

5. Le Dernier des Fous (Laurent Achard, France)

6. The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy)

7. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/US)

8. Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, France)

9. La Graine et le Mulet (Abdel Kechiche, France)

10. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France)

Actor-director Jacques Nolot’s latest film, Before I Forget — John Waters’s second-favorite film of 2007 — will be released theatrically in 2008.

DAMON PACKARD’S TOP 10


I have no shortage of rants about the sad state of cinema. Of the 25,000-plus films released each year, it’s impossible to keep track or be aware of anything above the overrated Oscar contenders or mindless mainstream crap that floods the market. Anything slightly worthwhile not on this list would be a smaller independent (foreign or documentary) film, such as Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter or The Life of Reilly.

1. Paris, Je T’Aime (various, France/Liechtenstein)

2. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

3. Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, UK)

4. Sicko (Michael Moore, US)

5. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, US)

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

7. Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, US/Spain)

8. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, US)

9. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, US)

10. Death Proof, driving sequences only! (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Damon Packard (www.myspace.com/choogo) is the director of SpaceDisco One, Reflections of Evil, and other films.

JOEL SHEPARD’S TOP 11


1. Bug (William Friedkin, US)

2. The Kingdom trailer (Peter Berg, US; editors Colby Parker Jr. and Kevin Stitt)

3. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China)

4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

5. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, US)

6. An Engineer’s Assistant (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Japan)

7. Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, US)

8. "Made in America," The Sopranos (David Chase, US)

9. The Pastor and the Hobo (Phil Chambliss, US)

10. You and I, Horizontal (Anthony McCall, UK)

11. Kara Tai in the Front and the Back (Bangbros.com, US)

Joel Shepard is the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 5


1. Following Sean (Ralph Arlyck, US). Thirty years after making a legendary short film about Sean, the lawless four-year-old son of Haight-Ashbury hippies, filmmaker Arlyck reconnects with his subjects. The result is the most complicated study of baby boomers and their kin ever made.

2. Artist Statement (Daniel Barrow, Canada). Winnipeg artist Barrow uses an old-school overhead projector and layers of transparent drawings to create manual animations with music and live narration. His second US performance brought to life his imaginative, queer, literary, and delicate personal manifesto.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria). Apichatpong’s latest radical narrative film focuses on a rural Thai hospital and its inhabitants. Among its meditative episodes is an unresolved love story between a female physician and an orchid farmer.

4. Real Housewives of Orange Country (various directors, US). Bravo’s reality television program about a contrived community of rich middle-aged women living in Coto de Caza is unexpectedly compelling. Because their lives are so boring, there’s nothing left to explore in this show except their complex emotions.

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US). Crushworthy Jake Gyllenhaal, genius cinematography from legend-to-be Harris Savides, and incredible reconstructions of a beautiful and scary San Francisco in the 1970s.

Matt Wolf (www.mattwolf.info ) is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (premiering at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival) and Smalltown Boys.

Year in Film: Things we lost in the theater

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The economy: Apocalypse Now — or at least soon. Iraq: No End in Sight. Israel: "Putting Out Fire with Gasoline (Theme from Cat People)." China, in its role as the principal backer of our colossal national debt: I Spit on Your Grave. Our president: National Lampoon’s Permanent Vacation.

In 2007, as life increasingly resembled lurid or delusional fiction, movies stepped up to the social-responsibility plate and started presenting a franker version of reality.

That is, the movies nobody saw.

The ones everyone did see, in quantifiable box office terms, were Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, the third Bourne and Pirates flicks, a fifth Harry Potter, and … Transformers. In other words, movies whose major reference points are other movies, comic books, and video games. (The Bourne films are refreshingly low-CGI, but they offer only a pretense of institutional critique.) If most multiplex patrons’ level of caring or knowledge about international and domestic politics was turned into a film, it could be titled Whatever-Man 3.

The summer — that silly season of things blowing up and boob jokes — is likely to spread even wider across the calendar henceforth, because this fall and winter offered serious year-end awards-bait stuff, and nobody wanted it.

Europeans have branded this the best year for United States cinema in a long time. But the ambitious, uncompromising two-and-a-half-hour-plus dramas released late in the year — 1970s ambling-epic throwbacks such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild, and There Will Be Blood — are against-the-wind efforts. Even intelligent dramas wrapped in easy-access thriller form, like Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Zodiac, Rescue Dawn, and Gone Baby Gone, have attracted few takers. (You could deem the long, self-important American Gangster an exception, were it not so derivative. Check out Larry Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar.)

Commercially speaking, this fall’s glut of somber dramas — including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Reservation Road, We Own the Night, and Lions for Lambs — collapsed like a row of dominoes. Their failure was variously blamed on an overcrowded marketplace and being pushed prematurely off screens by the latest CGI extravaganzas. Several of them just weren’t good, but even the best expired quickly.

Two films likely to face off for Academy Awards, No Country for Old Men and Atonement, have drawn larger numbers, though in their different ways neither has much to say about the world we live in now. No Country turns a minor Cormac McCarthy novel into a major Coen brothers effort that’s still just a great genre piece at the end of the day. Atonement turns a brilliant Ian McEwan novel into a sumptuous Merchant-Ivory-like affair, muffling the book’s bitter heart.

Every movie that did try to wrestle with our extremely precarious, morally compromised place in the scheme of things basically tanked. Maybe that’s less surprising than the fact that so many filmmakers actually got to make works dealing in one way or another with the current American realpolitik, if only on the relatively neutral, empathetic trickle-down level of grieving military spouses (Grace Is Gone), traumatized soldiers readjusting to civilian life (Home of the Brave), or World Trade Center widowers (Reign Over Me).

The Crash crowd shunned scenarist Paul Haggis’s much better (though not politically daring or even pointed) second film as director, In the Valley of Elah. It fictionalizes a real-life case (Iraq vet Richard Davis’s 2003 murder), as did Brian De Palma’s Redacted, drawn from a 2006 incident in which several US soldiers gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her entire family. An atrocious movie because of its ill-chosen mockumentary form, loutish tone, and garbled message, Redacted ironically attracted widespread notice due to the loud protestations of Bill O’Reilly and other conservative pundits who proclaimed it treasonous. They didn’t say it was fraudulent — as Republican saint Ronald Reagan once told us, "Facts are stupid things."

Despite the lure of Angelina Jolie and the publicity stumping of her producer–spouse–love slave Brad Pitt, Michael Winterbottom’s more overtly fact-based A Mighty Heart — about kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s murder by Pakistani jihadists — got no audience love. Ditto Rendition, with America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon as another agitating spouse with a missing husband, this one an Egyptian-born US citizen imprisoned and tortured by the CIA on dubious terrorism charges.

That the year’s better feel-bad dramas didn’t take off despite their star power is disappointing, if not unexpected. But it truly depresses that Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, the year’s best documentary — and arguably best movie, period — failed to break out despite universal raves. This engrossing, incendiary, genuinely balanced chronicle of how the George W. Bush administration destroyed and betrayed Iraq — and probably doomed everyone to a general fucked-up-ness only global warming might trump — doesn’t even bother indicting the reasons we attacked in the first place. It’s busy enough simply detailing the arrogance and ineptitude that have turned our supposed reconstruction of the nation into a lit match hovering beside the tinder of pissed-off former allies worldwide.

No End in Sight should have been a must-see that marshaled voter-taxpayer opposition to the freaks in the seats of power. It should at least have ignited as much enthusiastic outrage as An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11. But it was an intended bombshell that landed like a softball on Astroturf.

There are a few more politically charged movies in the pipeline, notably director Kimberly Peirce’s first feature since Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss. But given the commercial cold shoulder such films have received lately, what can we expect from a post–writers’ strike Hollywood that will be looking to restore its brief income slowdown as safely as possible? Gems like Norbit, Because I Said So, Bratz, Good Luck Chuck, Daddy Day Camp, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Halloween, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, License to Wed, Saw IV, and Wild Hogs — not to mention the three- to fivequels. Even when those movies bombed, they landed softly enough (often redeemed by profitable DVD releases) to affirm the wisdom of sticking to strict formulas.

Escapism: good. Wholesale obliviousness: better. Will there be a 2010 equivalent to 2007’s finest narrative flick, The Assassination of Jesse James (estimated cost: $30 million; domestic gross: $3 million, despite a career-best Brad Pitt)? Not likely.

DENNIS HARVEY’S ALPHABETICAL NARRATIVE TOP 10

1. Adam’s Apples (Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark)

2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)

3. Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, US)

4. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, US)

5. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al., US)

6. Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, US)

7. The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, US/Iceland)

8. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US)

9. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, US)

10. Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, Australia)

Switching sides

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Following the waves of layoffs that have occurred over the past year at several newspapers in the Bay Area, former top editors and reporters are reinventing themselves as media spokespeople, also known as "flacks," after the jackets that deflect incoming rounds of ammunition. At least a half-dozen prominent journalists have succumbed so far.

Their job now is to stamp out unsettling questions from their former colleagues or put a positive spin on bad press, like calling a slight dip in San Francisco’s homicide rate last year a huge success for Mayor Gavin Newsom or characterizing his lurid affair with a subordinate as a chance for him to heal emotionally.

They’re perhaps most famous for the phrase "no comment," but flacks the world over would likely prefer a more honorable description, like the one promoted by the Public Relations Society of America: "Public relations helps our complex, pluralistic society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions."

Spoken like a true flack.

So who better to work as a media relations executive than a former reporter? Newspaper insiders know more than anyone else how to kill a story or at least blunt its impact by instilling doubt in the mind of the reporter. It’s not uncommon for journos to hear "That’s not a story" from the new flacks.

Another tactic, used by C.J. Cregg, the fictional flack in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing, is to invite uncooperative reporters out for coffee and off-the-record chatter until they’ve been befriended. District Attorney Kamala Harris’s press office is famous for coffee invites.

Among the newspaper expatriates:

•Chris Lopez, an editor of the Contra Costa Times who was laid off by parent company MediaNews Group last year, took a job as a communications director for the Denver host committee of the Democratic Party’s 2008 convention.

•Paul Feist, formerly the Sacramento bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this year to serve as a communications secretary for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency.

•Tom Honig, who recently departed as the longtime editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, accepted a job with Armanasco Public Relations, an affiliate of Hill and Knowlton, which represents such illustrious clients as McDonald’s, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Starbucks. Hill and Knowlton helped McDonald’s diminish fallout from the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempted to survive exclusively on the fast-food chain’s food for 30 days, with disastrous results (his health condition plummeted).

Honig, however, promised Sentinel staffers Nov. 30 that he wasn’t betraying the values of news reporting and proclaimed himself a martyr hoping to save the Sentinel from further staff cuts enacted by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton.

"Just because you’re in public relations does not mean you’re a liar," the paper quoted Honig as saying. "What I do now is tell people’s stories. This is just another way to tell people’s stories."

He’ll make a praiseworthy spinner indeed.

Lopez and Honig could not be reached by deadline. Nor could we get hold of a spokesperson for the spokespeople at the Public Relations Society of America. Feist wouldn’t comment when we contacted him.

There are other defectors. A former Chronicle reporter from the paper’s Sacramento bureau, Lynda Gledhill, is now a spokesperson for State Senate leader Don Perata, and a San Jose Mercury News capitol reporter, Kate Folmar, is working for the press office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen. And former Chronicle City Hall reporter Charlie Goodyear is now working for the high-powered SF flack firm Singer Associates.

Newspaper giant MediaNews set the trend this year for pushing career journalists into public relations. The company laid off scores of people after it purchased several newspapers in the Bay Area, including the Sentinel, the CoCo Times, and the Mercury News. But other Bay Area newsrooms, including the Hearst Corp.–owned Chronicle, today have literally half the staff they had just a few short years ago.

Lopez previously worked for Singleton’s flagship paper, the Denver Post, which he helped earn a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. Columnist Charles Ashby of the Post‘s rival Pueblo Chieftain pointed out Dec. 10 that two more former Post staffers are now working as press secretaries for Colorado governor Bill Ritter and reporters from other large Colorado papers are today handling public relations for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the University of Colorado.

Gene Rose of the National Association of Government Communicators insists citizens are better served by bureaucracies that contain former reporters.

"With the shrinking news hole and with less reporters to cover news, agencies and governments are being forced to figure out ways to communicate more directly with people one-on-one," Rose, also a former reporter, said.

The interim dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school, Neil Henry, documented the phenomenal rise of public relations in this year’s book American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press). In particular, he notes, TV news organizations have grown increasingly reliant on polished video news releases produced by flacks, which sometimes air verbatim, as opposed to expending their own dwindling newsroom resources. The VNRs, as they’re called, give "coverage" of a product or idea the veneer of journalistic credibility, when in fact they’ve been created by professional manipulators.

"For the concerned citizen and certainly for the dedicated American journalist, it is horrifying to see how significantly business and political advertising has compromised the mission of the news industry, at times with the industry’s full participation," Henry writes.

He adds that in 2004, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson lured more than 20 journalists, including some of the state’s best, into his administration with the promise of good pay.

So who else in the Bay Area plans to depart for the dark side? No comment.

Gifts for good causes

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› molly@sfbg.com

Everyone loves the two-birds-with-one-stone approach to gift giving: a piece of furniture that covers both Mom and Dad, a pair of event tickets for your SO that means you get to go too, or the ever-popular this-item-is-so-big-it-covers-Christmas-and-your-birthday gift.

But in most cases, this gift-that-keeps-giving approach only benefits you and the giftee. How about letting one of the worthy organizations below in on some of the action? These gifts for good causes will benefit your loved ones and the planet, giving you the gift of a good conscience.

UNDER ONE ROOF


For everything from sleek kitchenware to funky, rainbow-themed holiday ornaments, this HIV/AIDS service provider has it covered with its "A Home for the Holidays" holiday store and event center, through Dec. 31.

2278 Market, SF. www.underoneroof.org

826 VALENCIA


Pirate gear from this Mission District store helps support mentorship programs in writing skills.

826 Valencia, SF. (415) 642-5905, www.826valencia.org

GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCY


Books, art, toys, and games from the Crissy Field Warming Hut Bookstore and Café (Presidio Bldg. 983, SF; 415-561-3040), the Crissy Field Bookstore (603 Mason, SF; 415-561-7761), Alcatraz Island Bookstores (415-561-4922), and the Muir Woods Visitor Center (415-388-7368) all benefit the conservancy.

www.parksconservancy.org

CREATIVITY EXPLORED


When you choose the ceramic masks, tiles, handmade pillows, note cards, or other wares at the Creativity Explored Holiday Art Sale going on through Dec. 28, 50 percent of the proceeds go directly to the artist, while the rest helps maintain this nonprofit visual arts center for artists with developmental disabilities.

3245 16th St., SF. (415) 863-2108

ARC OF SAN FRANCISCO


DRAWBRIDGE


Buying ArcAngel holiday cards will benefit Arc of San Francisco, which serves, supports, and advocates for individuals with developmental disabilities. Or get individual cards or 10-packs from San Rafael’s Drawbridge, a program for homeless children. In both cases, the cards are designed by clients.

www.thearcofsanfrancisco.org

www.drawbridge.org

iGIVE


GREATERGOOD


Shopping online doesn’t disqualify you from do-gooding — even if you want to shop at major retailers. Before buying that radio from Best Buy or that towel set from Target, check online malls that donate a portion of proceeds to organizations like the March of Dimes and the Nature Conservancy (at no extra cost to you).

www.igive.com

www.greatergood.com

WORLD OF GOOD


You can also try the more direct approach at World of Good, a Berkeley organization that works with artisan cooperatives around the world to import high-quality goods, like fuzzy scarves from India and olive trays from Tanzania, while providing living wages, safe working conditions, and career stability to the artisans.

www.worldofgood.com

ORGANIC BOUQUETS


If you’re a sending-flowers kind of gifter, try Organic Bouquets, the Marin florist that not only sells and delivers organic flowers, plants, and chocolates online, by phone, and at Whole Foods Markets nationwide but also dedicates a percentage of its profits to charities like the Red Cross and the National Wildlife Federation.

1-877-899-2468, www.organicbouquet.com

FIFTY CROWS FOUNDATION


The purpose of this organization is to effect positive social change through documentary photography. Support it by gifting one of its prints.

49 Geary, Suite 225, SF. (415) 391-6300, www.fiftycrows.org

CASA BONAMPAK


This Mission fair-trade shop’s paper cutouts, party streamers, clothing, and Day of the Dead items are gorgeous — and proceeds support indigenous artisans from Chiapas and central Mexico.

3331 24th St., SF. 1-888-722-4264, www.casabonampak.com

Year in Music: Hot tomboy love

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I’ve been slowly falling out of love with pop in 2007. The ambulance-chasing addictions of the late George W. Bush era are sick. But I’ve been slowly falling more and more in love with Keyshia Cole.

Not only is Cole the only pop star I care about, but she’s also an Oakland-raised inspiration. Not only am I kinda crushed out on her, but I’ve also been looking to her as an example of how to live better. Cole’s sophomore album, Just like You (Geffen), is being outsold by Alicia Keys’s As I Am (Sony), but the grade school girls singing "Love" on YouTube understand that Keys’s "No One" affectedly imitates the so-raw-it’s-off-key stance of Cole’s 2005 breakthrough ballad, a diary-true piece of songcraft that brought back Stacy Lattisaw’s heyday. Like "Love," Cole’s "Fallin’ Out" — pop song of the year, hands down — reveals more emotion and insight with each listen.

A major reason: the fills. Those little threaded backing vocals, usually provided by the lead vocalist, define contemporary R&B. Mary J. Blige mastered them on her superb first three albums: check out the soul-wrenching bridge of "Mary’s Joint" on 1994’s My Life (MCA) to hear how deeply a track’s so-broken-it’s-frightening heart can be hidden. Cole has studied Blige instead of the narcissistic, self-applauding lesser talents of neosoul. That much was clear at a concert this year when I heard her sing Blige’s favorite covers, including fellow Oakland girl Chaka Khan’s "Sweet Thing." It’s more subtly apparent at the end of Just like You‘s "Give Me More": Cole hums the woebegone final fill of "I Love You," a track from My Life that taps into Billie Holiday’s spirit more genuinely than any of the countless weak-peeping chicks who’ve tried baby pool–shallow impersonations of Lady Day.

The fills are the little treats that reveal themselves on the 25th listen, the new shivers you discover on a song that was already your favorite because of its catchiness. For a lot of contemporary R&B stars, especially the kind who don’t need a wig to sport putf8um hair, fills or backing harmonies are a chance to show off and yell. But for early Blige and now for Cole, a fill or a backing harmony is a chance to testify and bring out a whole other side of a song’s story. Dig beneath the Pussycat Dolls gloss that executive producer Ron Fair brings to Just like You, and the examples are abundant: the weary and wary "Now you’re comin’ back this way" she adds just before the chorus of "Didn’t I Tell You"; the way her voice picks up intensity with each word of the verse in "Get My Heart Back," a my-life-in-song autobiographical track as stormy as Shara Nelson–era Massive Attack, but deeper; and, most of all, those final moments of "Fallin’ Out" right before and after she cries out, "I’m tired of giving my all."

The other thing about Cole that has made me even more of a full-on fan is her BET show. Keyshia Cole: The Way I Is is the black answer to the ’70s TV documentary An American Family, the superior PBS prototype of almost all reality TV shows. It brings her together with her sister Nefe and mother Frankie, who has been to prison as many times as Keyshia has ticked off years of her life. Keyshia lets them act out; she keeps a poker face and sports an array of hot tomboy looks while demonstrating a wisdom beyond her years. In one episode she matter-of-factly decides no men should be allowed in the house they share, a pragmatic move that flies in the face of any crossover poses. Over time it’s become poignantly clear to me that Just like You‘s collage cover portrait and title track are addressed to Cole’s mother and sister more than to any lover or listener. At this point in her life and career, she is secure enough in her beauty and talent to speak plain logic in her lyrics and stay independent. When she recently talked about her Etta James–like lineage and her fatherless upbringing on Tyra, that show’s dreaded host was clearly intimidated by her smarts and lack of fakery.

Flicking channels while recuperating from a broken wrist this summer, I saw Kanye West and some forgettable MC or producer hyping themselves on one of MTV’s channels. They were being interviewed on the corner of a requisite rough-looking city block when a man yelling from a window many stories above interrupted their sales shtick. "Can you give me Keyshia’s phone number?" the guy asked.

I second that.

A DOZEN NEW FAVES


•Arp, In Light (Smalltown Supersound)

•Gui Boratto, Chromophobia (Kompakt)

•Keyshia Cole, Just like You (Geffen)

•Kathy Diamond, Miss Diamond to You (Permanent Vacation)

•Kirby Dominant, STARR: Contemplations of a Dominator (Rapitalism)

•Chelonis R. Jones, "The Cockpit" and "Pompadour" (MySpace), "Empire" with Remo (Dance Electric), and "Helen Cornell" with Marc Romboy (Systematic)

•Dominique Leone, "Clairevoyage" and "Conversational" (Feedelity)

•The Passionistas, God’s Boat (New and Used)

•Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance (Paper Bag)

•Sorcerer, White Magic (Tirk)

•Prins Thomas, Prins Thomas Presents Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo)

•Caetano Veloso, Cê (Nonesuch)

I’m dreaming of a green Christmas

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› culture@sfbg.com
In the words of Rev. Billy, mock evangelist and star of the newly released documentary What Would Jesus Buy?, the dreaded “shopocalypse” is upon us. If he and his Choir of Stop Shopping had their way, we would all be blissfully exchanging simple gestures of peace and love for the holidays rather than heaps of overly packaged plastic stuff.
But if you already know deep in your gut that peace and love just aren’t going to cut it for your demanding sweetheart, whining child, or needy pet, procuring green gifts from local Bay Area shops is the next best thing. Consult this well-edited list to help you navigate the buying frenzy, thrill your giftees, and sidestep some of the residual guilt. For extra points, pass on the parking pandemonium and try riding your bike or taking public transit to your shopping destinations.
ADULTS

  • Treat your pals or paramour to a rejuvenating treatment at Evo Spa (216 Strawberry Village, Mill Valley; 415-383-3223, www.evo-spa.com), a green, holistic beauty and wellness haven in Mill Valley. Evo also carries paraben-free and organic skin care products.
  • Keep everyone on your list well hydrated with SIGG nontoxic, ecofriendly water bottles (Lombardi Sports, 1600 Jackson, SF; 415-771-0600, www.lombardisports.com). They’re crack-resistant, reusable, and recyclable, and their lining is 100 percent leach free, ensuring all your giftee will taste is their favorite libation.
  • Help those busy parents in your life clean up their act with a visit from Greenway Maid (415-674-3266, www.greewaymaid.com), a local, worker-owned green cleaning service that uses only ecofriendly cleaning products.
  • Get your honeybunch a Gremlin clutch (Eco Citizen, 1488 Vallejo, SF; 415-614-0100, www.ecocitizenonline.com) to help her tackle those San Francisco hills in style. Made from recycled car upholstery fabric from 1975 AMC Gremlins, this hot-rod handbag will sizzle on your lady’s arm.
  • Invite your family and friends to hop on the localvore bandwagon with a subscription to Farm Fresh to You (1-800-796-6009, www.farmfreshtoyou.com). Each box contains seasonal organic produce — grown at small, local, sustainable farms and delivered right to your door.
  • Wrap your darling in a Flow Scarf (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) by Hiroko Kurihara, handcrafted in the East Bay from European Union–ecologically certified virgin wool. For each scarf sold, one is donated to help those who are homeless or in transition.

KIDS

  • The Recycled Plastic Radio Flyer Earth Wagon (Green Home, 850 24th Ave., SF; 877-282-6400, www.greenhome.com) is the ultimate gift for that budding environmentalist in your life. The body of the wagon is made from 100 percent recycled postconsumer high-density polyethylene. More than 230 plastic milk jugs were diverted from landfills to make each Earth Wagon.
  • Bundle your baby in Kate Quinn 100 percent certified organic cotton clothing or entertain your favorite tots with Plan Toys (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from preservative-free rubber woods and decorated with nontoxic paints.
  • Warm the tootsies of your loved ones with Eco-terric 100 percent organic felt wool slippers from Kyrgyzstan (Green Home Center, 1812 Polk, SF; 415-567-3700, www.thegreenhomecenter.net).

PETS

  • Reduce, reuse, and rewoof with Planet Dog’s RecyleBone and RecycleBall (Bow Wow Meow, 2150 Polk, SF; 415-440-2845, www.bowwowmeow.net) chew toys, made from 100 percent recycled materials.
  • Thrill your kitty with a cat tree by Everyday Studio (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). Made right here in San Francisco, these modern scratching posts offer good-looking design and a nontoxic paint finish.
  • Help a friend take care of their dog’s dirty business with Business Bags by Spike (Osso & Co., 501 Broderick, SF; 415-447-8543, www.eurocanine.com). These biodegradable poo bags are fully compostable and biodegrade.

STOCKING STUFFERS

  • Reduce your friends’ junk mail by up to 90 percent and have 10 trees planted on their behalf! Sign them up at Green Dimes (www.greendimes.com).
  • Wow them with one-of-a-kind wood rings by Natalie Trujillo (Paxton Gate, 824 Valencia, SF; 415-824-1872, www.paxtongate.com), handcrafted from found wood pieces and garden clippings.
  • Give the gift that keeps giving. Jimi Wallets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) are made from 100 percent recycled plastic, come in a variety of colors, and are priced so you won’t burn a hole in yours.
  • Send ecofriendly Night Owl Paper Goods holiday cards (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from sustainably harvested wood.
  • Surprise someone special with a super Kobo soy candle (Spring, 2162 Polk, SF; 415-673-2065, www.astorecalledspring.com). Each has a burn time of 70 hours and is healthier for indoor air quality than petroleum-based candles.
  • For the person who has everything, there’s Plant-Me Pets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). These squeaky toys have seeds for eyes and are made from compostable natural latex rubber. Should they ever outstay their welcome in the home, their owners can simply plant them in soil and watch ’em sprout.

All about Bob

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s not that I’m anti–Bob Dylan. I’ve just never been a fan in particular. I’m too young or too fond of metal or too shallow or some combination of the three. But I found I’m Not There — Todd Haynes’s sorta biopic of the icon — entirely fascinating. By now you’ve heard the pitch: six actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw) play facets of Dylan without actually playing Dylan, though Bale and Blanchett come dangerously close. The movie begins with the death of this nebulous character, identifiable only by his distinctive mop of dark curls, and a somber narrator informing us, "Even the ghost was more than one person." And I’m Not There is nearly more than one movie, with different film stocks, casts, tones, and styles deftly stitched together by Dylan’s music (performed, appropriately enough, by an array of artists).

Perhaps you didn’t realize that one of Dylan’s personae is an African American boy (Franklin) obsessed with boxcars, guitars, and Woody Guthrie. Strangers are drawn to this nostalgic little soul, including a kindly woman who feeds him before sternly advising him to "live your own time." This sweet tale, filmed in warm hues with touches of magical realism, is a more abstract reading of Dylan — unlike the story of Jack Rollins (Bale), which is told documentary-style and features Julianne Moore as a Joan Baez clone reminiscing about Jack’s impact on the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. He was a visionary, using traditional folk stylings to comment on contemporary concerns. His life becomes intertwined with the showbiz fate of Robbie Clark (Ledger), a James Dean–ish young actor whose starring role in a Jack Rollins biopic catapults him to stardom.

After a freewheeling courtship — with montage-spun happiness undermined by televisions constantly broadcasting the Vietnam War — Robbie marries Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who later leaves him when fame and ego turn him into something of an asshole. But aside from big-head syndrome, Robbie’s worst offense is saying that women can’t be poets. The sins of Jude (Cate Blanchett) are far dirtier, and it’s no coincidence that Jude’s saga — a black-and-white British tour from hell, with snooty reporters and drug-enhanced moments of surreality — is I’m Not There‘s most magnetic segment.

Sexy androgyne Blanchett’s probably got her next Supporting Actress win sewn up with this one, or she should. Her performance is the heart of the movie — snarling, weary, uncanny, and able to make David Cross’s hairy cameo as Allen Ginsberg seem totally logical. Don’t Look Back would be the most obvious frame of reference here, but Haynes is less interested in Dylan’s performances or fans than his inner conflicts. It’s hard to sing about the oppressed when you are rich, famous, and beloved. It’s hard to keep your head on your shoulders when everyone views you as the voice of a generation. It’s hard to be patient when the Man (Bruce Greenwood — OK, his character has a name, but he’s the Man nonetheless) digs into your past, unable to beat you in a war of words but smugly proud of finding dirt that cracks your cooler-than-thou armor. Whoa, you mean his name isn’t really Bob Dylan?

Less compelling are a pair of shorter segments — Whishaw as Arthur (as in Rimbaud), who pops up occasionally to drop science via actual Dylan quotes, and Gere as Billy the Kid, a retired outlaw in hiding whose Halloween-obsessed hometown appears art-directed by Tim Burton. As in other chapters, there are surely nuances that sailed past me but that Dylan obsessives will seize on. Thankfully not represented are Dylan’s less-interesting years — the Victoria’s Secret pitchman era, for example.

As a rock doc–slash–biopic, I’m Not There is proof that the best rendering of a legend isn’t necessarily done with straight, tidy lines. I may not have been a huge Dylan fan before I’m Not There, but I was a Haynes fan. With this, his most ambitious work to date, the director’s affection for re-creating the past finds its match in his innovative dissection of a complex artist’s soul. *

I’M NOT THERE

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com“>www.imnotthere-movie.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com

How you hate me now?

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Hated (Special Edition)

(Music Video Distributors)

Our Favorite Things

(Other Cinema)

DVDS I must have passed the G.G. Allin documentary Hated (1994) a dozen times in the video store over the years without ever mustering the nerve to rent it. Having finally watched it, I can only ask myself, "What took me so long?" Not because it’s a pleasant viewing experience, but because it’s such a massive train wreck: the (il)logical end point of years of self-destructive punk shock tactics and performance antics.

Hated was filmed by Todd Phillips — who went on to direct Old School and Starsky and Hutch — while he was a film student at New York University. It depicts what ended up being the final few years in the life of a genuinely disturbing and disturbed dude.

The film is built around — but not limited to — in-the-trenches footage of the tattooed, scarred, and frequently naked and/or bloody Allin onstage with his band, the Murder Junkies. This footage is not meant to showcase his vocal range — he had none — or the band’s sterling musicianship. Instead, it finds Allin assaulting audience members, getting wrestled down by cops, and genuinely scaring the crap out of everyone in the room. We also see footage from a surreal appearance on Geraldo and an appalling "spoken word" performance at NYU that ends with Allin sticking a banana up his tailpipe, the cops coming — a recurring theme — and Phillips nearly being expelled for booking the whole atrocity.

The rest of the video shows that, for better or worse, Allin’s live act really wasn’t an act. He was a genuinely angry, sociopathic fellow who lived his life as recklessly as he performed, in constant squalor and literally on the run from the police. This DVD reissue adds a recent interview with his poor mother, whose reclusive, mentally ill husband insisted on naming the boy "Jesus Christ," whence the nickname "G.G." originated. There’s also two full audio commentaries from Phillips as well as the Beavis and Butthead–like duo of Murder Junkies Merl Allin, G.G.’s brother, and Dino Sex, the band’s sicko naked drummer. I absorbed every second of it.

Next to Allin, Bay Area cutups Negativland might look like Goody Two-shoes, but don’t be fooled. Granted, you won’t find them cutting themselves or shitting onstage. In fact, you won’t find the group’s members at all in most of the videos on their recent anthology Our Favorite Things (Other Cinema). Make no mistake, though: there’s something to offend just about everyone on this DVD.

Pushing people’s buttons is nothing new for Negativland, but what’s striking about this release is how well the video format suits the group’s meticulous cut-and-paste approach. The editing sleight of hand is simply amazing at points. These are some of the most involved, detail-oriented music videos I’ve ever seen, which may sound like faint praise given the laziness that’s typical of the medium, but stay with me here.

Drawing on music from throughout their career, Negativland go after such familiar targets as firearms (the found-footage extravaganza of "Guns"), advertising ("Truth in Advertising" and perhaps one too many videos from the Dispepsi CD), and religion ("Christianity Is Stupid," in which a series of Hollywood Pontius Pilates are seen driving nails into Jesus’ hands in sync with the song’s thumping industrial beat).

That said, some of the best moments are much less pointed, including the eerie "Time Zones" — an oddly entertaining bit about the number of time zones in the Soviet Union — and the short and surreal "Over the Hiccups," a bunnies-in-outer-space Claymation piece that is black comedy at its most brutal.

Yes, Negativland are as relentless — and self-referential — as ever on this DVD, and if you watch it for long enough, you’re bound to get annoyed at something. But when has that not been the case with this group? Even so, Our Favorite Things is one of the best things they’ve done in any format, with moments that are as jaw-dropping in their way as anything on the grisly Hated. 

Remain in light

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"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Goldie winner — Visual art: Colter Jacobsen

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Four years ago this month Colter Jacobsen got his biggest break, his most bruising teardown, and his greatest opportunity in one 24-hour period. He’d been tapped to do a project in a much-talked-about exhibition, "17 Reasons," alongside John Baldessari, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, and Chris Johanson, organized by California College of the Arts curator Kate Fowle and Mission gallerist Jack Hanley. Jacobsen worked for weeks on the sort of public art-slash-intervention the curators wanted, "inserting new works into street life," and finally draped the midsize bronze commemorative tablet erected by the state at the corner of Albion and Camp with a sculptural suite of water-stained packing boxes and fruit crates, altered with paint, glue, collage, watercolors, and pencil into a text-laden carousel of raw forms (and, incidentally, a tribute to Kylie Minogue). When the art walk began all was well, but as afternoon wore into evening road workers discovered the desecration, and by morning the piece had been demolished. Luckily, Matthew Higgs, whose work was also in "17 Reasons," had viewed Jacobsen’s project just before dusk and invited him to stage an even grander installation at White Columns in New York City.

And when New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith singled out Jacobsen’s work at the resulting 2005 exhibition, his crew in San Francisco cheered from afar. Since then it’s been one thing after another for our lad. (He appears in and created the titles for The Key of G, Robert Arnold’s 2006 documentary on the struggles of Gannet Hosa-Belonte, who lives with Mowat-Wilson syndrome in the Mission. Jacobsen was one of his caregivers for several years.) Finally, with gallery representation and a growing international fan base, Jacobsen, now 32, can devote himself to his art full-time. In a town rich with brilliant visual and conceptual artists of all stripes, it can be hard to get attention; in some ways Jacobsen’s lucky, and he knows it. You won’t find a humbler guy.

At a recent Jack Hanley Gallery show Jacobsen tried a lot of new things, but you couldn’t get away from the doubling. A found photograph of a baptismal scene in a spooky arts and crafts church hung low on one wall. Across the gallery, just as low, Jacobsen had hung a tiny painting of the same scene — same muddy colors, same dimensions. His delicate drawings seem to be already in ruins, as if commenting on the urban realities of life in the Mission. Many are what he calls memory drawings — each an image taken from life and then matched with an identical one drawn from memory. The work’s sort of scary that way, recalling Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, who keeps the terrorists’ secrets locked up in his brain and recites them under compulsion.

Just as impressive as Jacobsen’s draftsmanship is his brilliant infusion of old-school, Mission school, DIY junk assemblage with a sophisticated gay semiotics. When the poet and curator Bill Berkson uncovered a series of texts he’d written 25 years back, he decided, well, Joe Brainard’s no longer around to do the job, so why not ask Jacobsen? (The result, Bill, in 20 panels, was included in the spring exhibit at Hanley.) I wonder if you can judge a person by their artistic heroes; Jacobsen’s wild grab bag includes Brainard, Fran Herndon, Jack Smith, Jess, Kenward Elmslie, Denton Welch, and Jack Spicer — artists and writers with a vision off-kilter and sublime. Just like a burning radio, Jacobsen gives off sparks and a crazy echo of music.

www.jackhanley.com

www.daftalliance.com/artists/colter.html

Romania dreamin’

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Programmers in the film festival, cinematheque, and rep-house exhibition worlds are forever hunting for undiscovered cinematic flavors. They are like truffle-sniffing pigs. No offense intended — after all, truffles are valuable for their rarity. During the past few years, such programmers have witnessed a stunning renaissance of native film activity in Romania, which has no business being so exciting onscreen because (a) it’s Romania, for god’s sake, still hobbling out of Nicolae Ceausescu’s 20th-century dark ages, and (b) it only produces six features per year. They can’t all be good, can they?

Oh yes, they can. Romanian movies are sweeping international prizes and have even scored a couple of theatrical releases in a US art-house market resistant to intelligent, complex, starless films in a foreign tongue. Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days reaches US theaters next year, and Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’ is likely to follow.

You can catch California Dreamin’ now in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Revolutions in Romanian Cinema" series. The process of severance from the Ceausescu dictatorship — Communist Eastern Europe’s most paranoiac and corrupt — is, naturally, a frequent subject. Catalin Mitulescu’s warmly observed The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006) views the regime’s final chapter in 1989 from a teenage girl’s perspective. Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue (2006) is a gritty you-are-there reenactment of the street chaos and random shootings that occurred on the night of the government’s overthrow. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08: East of Bucharest (2006) ingeniously reexamines the same events as antiheroic satire, with the contradictory recollections of a TV call-in show’s guests making hash of the revolution’s already mythologized story. Another fascinating flashback, Alexandru Solomon’s The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004), provides documentary scrutiny of an infamous crime in a nation where folks were too terrified to rob anyone, let alone the all-powerful government, suggesting that the case was quite likely a frame-up designed to rid the party of its high-ranking Jewish members.

Other films look beyond Ceausescu to the more recent past and still-problematic present. Cristi Puiu’s acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is like Sicko as directed by Aki Kaurismäki, a deepest-black comedy whose hapless elderly protagonist complains of chest pains — though it’s his endless, Kafkaesque odyssey through a broken-down public health system that kills him. California Dreamin’, subtitled Endless because it will never truly be finished (its 27-year-old writer-director died in a car crash before completing the final edit), is nonetheless a marvelously accomplished, sprawling, affectionate, barbed canvas. Set in 1999, it finds a top-priority NATO mission commanded by gung ho veteran jarhead Cpt. Jones (Armand Assante) waylaid by provincial officials who stubbornly demand paperwork, even if the bureaucratic logjam creates an international incident. Forced to cool heels, the visiting soldiers enjoy free-flowing local booze and celebrations in their honor. This cross-cultural tragicomedy might have been shorter had Nemescu lived to complete postproduction. As is, it’s close to perfection.

These new Romanian films are special for their attentiveness to individual characters and larger social scales, for their balance of rueful humor and genuine sympathy, and for the unpredictable yet organic intricacy of their narrative courses. Technically, they’re all highly polished, without a whiff of the stylistically self-indulgent territorial pissing typical of young filmmakers. The new Romanian cinema isn’t personal in the familiar auteurist sense. It’s populist — a term not to be confused with stupid in this case — storytelling, accessible to anyone willing to brave the Balkan barrier of subtitles. *

REVOLUTIONS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA

Nov. 3–Dec. 9, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

On the verge

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The title of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary, Terror’s Advocate, evokes Keanu Reeves’s role as Kevin Lomax, a lawyer seduced by Satan (Al Pacino) in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate. Reeves’s character crosses the line into evil when he gets a child molester off on a technicality; next thing you know, he’s living in Manhattan, making big bucks, and being seduced by the lesbian minions of Satan in an elevator while his wife (Charlize Theron) has her womb ripped out. In Terror’s Advocate we follow the equally colorful career of lawyer Jacques Vergès, which begins with ideological and erotic clarity — defending gorgeous Algerian bombers during their struggle for independence from France — but spirals into mystery and monstrosity.

The point where Vergès crosses the line that leads him into relationships with dictators, Nazis, and Carlos the Jackal is less distinct than the line crossed by Reeves’s lawyer in The Devil’s Advocate. Schroeder frames Vergès’s story as a mirror of the recent history of terrorism in Europe, with attention to all of the ambiguity that term implies. If one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter and the term itself a strategy to disparage the warfare of those without governments, it doesn’t follow that every act of terror is ethically equivalent. "There’s a magnificent, heroic heart, which is Algeria," Schroeder has said, discussing the film. "This is the matrix, the place where our lead character finds himself, reveals himself, and experiences the most intense moments of his life…. All of this is something very beautiful, very pure: an ideal."

On Armistice Day in 1945, the French massacred 10,000 to 45,000 Algerians for waving their flags. During the years that followed, Algerian attempts to purge their boorish occupiers would include blowing up European establishments in the African capital. In 1957, Djamila Bouhired was found guilty of placing a bomb in the Milk Bar and condemned to death. She became an international sensation, partially through the inspired efforts of her lawyer — Vergès. He developed what became known as the rupture defense — instead of having his clients apologize or plead for mercy, he provoked the opposition and used the trial to redefine the terms of the debate, calling attention to the French use of torture.

His tactics paid off. Bouhired was pardoned and released from prison, after which she returned to Algeria and married Vergès. But in the ’70s he abandoned her and his children and vanished for eight years under circumstances that remain unclear, despite Terror’s Advocate‘s sometimes tedious examination of that narrative gap. By the time Vergès finally reappeared, the lines had begun to blur — between political action and sociopathic adventuring, between terrorism and foreplay. One of Schroeder’s most inspired subtexts is that organized violence, whether state sponsored or revolutionary, offers an arena for unconventional erotic pleasures, such as rape, torture, or simply rescuing sexy women involved in the deaths of others — like Bouhired or Vergès’s other great love, Magdalena Kopp, girlfriend of Carlos the Jackal.

In Reversal of Fortune (1990), Schroeder fictionalized the relationship between Claus von Bülow and Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who defended him against charges that he’d lethally poisoned his wife. Did von Bülow get away with murder or was he innocent and akin to Frankenstein’s monster at the hands of the lynch mob? Schroeder has always been interested in monsters — his documentary subjects include Idi Amin, Charles Bukowski, and Koko the gorilla — and drawn to moral ambiguity, the seductive power of evil, and the erotic appeal of violence. Combine Before and After (1995), Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) and Murder by Numbers (2002), and you have an oeuvre with more murderous teenage boys than anything this side of William Burroughs. In his Single White Female (1992), Kiss of Death (1994), and Desperate Measures (1997) there is a twinship between monsters and heroes and a surprising sympathy for the violently unhinged. Consistently, Schroeder examines people of conscience who are seduced into doing evil’s bidding, and he lets them speak for themselves. Even Vergès’s defense of Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie is framed as an opportunity to attack French hypocrisy, imperialism, and butchery. Asked if he’d defend Hitler, Vergès says, "I’d even agree to defend [George W.] Bush. But only if he agrees to plead guilty."

Terror’s Advocate is dense with information. Its structure is complex and indirect and requires unfaltering attention. Yet Schroeder succeeds at creating a surprising amount of suspense, especially considering the amount of screen time given over to talking heads. Meanwhile, he quietly explores what must be one of the central enigmas for our tortured planet, the human relationship to violence. Violence and money, violence and sex, violence and political change, senseless violence and goal-oriented violence — Schroeder nimbly navigates all of the above, creating a visceral ethical disquiet. *

TERROR’S ADVOCATE

Opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters

Fellini in Arkansas

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"Ahm tired uh yer uppity, citified ways!" leering slob Odis (Gene Ross) tells houseguest Helen (Norma Moore) in S.F. Brownrigg’s Poor White Trash II, a 1974 movie also known by the equally savory title Scum of the Earth. The late Brownrigg’s gasp-producing moonshine swaller of incest-cum-insanity is one of several delights in the new program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ film curator Joel Shepard, "Red State Cinema: Rural Auteurs," which spans from Harry Revier’s 1938 Child Bride (which was aimed at traveling tent cinemas) to Joe Pickett and Nick Preuher’s new documentary Dirty Country (a profile of factory worker and raunchy composer-performer Larry Pierce). Jennifer Baichal’s terrific 2002 The True Meaning of Pictures looks at the controversy surrounding Shelby Lee Adams, whose memorable photographs of dirt-poor Appalachia residents were accused of artificially heightening hillbilly squalor for a fascinated upscale audience. Then there’s Arkansas auteur Phil Chambliss, who makes films of varying length starring friends, family, and gravel-pit coworkers. Chambliss’s aren’t home movies but eccentric narratives as bizarre, humorous, and strangely familiar as the weirdest relative in your family.

RED-STATE CINEMA: RURAL AUTEURS

Nov. 1–16, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Thinking big with Vig

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THE MONASTERY: THINKING BIG WITH VIG

All of my prior attempts to write about The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun came to a screeching halt on describing the physical presence of the man at the documentary’s center, Jørgen Lauersen Vig. The sullenness of Vig’s features (accentuated by long white hair that, together with an outrageously wild-looking beard, forms a halo of sorts around his face) and his tall, slender, and raggedy-clothed figure cause him to resemble a hero from a novel by Nikolay Gogol. But unlike the Russian writer’s characters, Vig is very much real. His harsh, imposing appearance is hard to overlook.

The enigmatic Vig’s attachment to the run-down castle he’s determined to convert into a monastery only adds to his mystique. The Monastery‘s basic scenario suits its crude aesthetics. As if the presentation of a hard-boiled, aged man who spends his days alone in his slowly decaying shelter weren’t enough, the documentary’s rough human and physical landscape is completed by Sister Amvrosija, the leader of a delegation of nuns that the Russian Patriarchate sends to Denmark in order to evaluate the castle and help with its renovation.

Clad in her long black gown and immersed in her ascetic ways, Sister Amvrosija is as stubborn and opinionated as Vig. Filming their difficult coexistence with a sometimes unobtrusive and other times questioning camera, Danish filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær clearly intends to add a bit of lyricism to this true story. She observes as the childlike energy and enthusiasm that the octogenarian initially brings to all of the bureaucratic and material needs of his estate give way to stronger displays of frustration. It’s clear that the numerous confrontations Vig has with Sister Amvrosija are gradually wearing him down.

Although Vig’s initial motives for forming a monastery are hard to comprehend (at one point it’s even suggested that he turned to the church as a source of free labor), it becomes evident that he urgently wants to create something enduring. Grønkjær’s film reveals a sensitive person in great distress. Faced with the revelation that fighting his mortality is hopeless, he reevaluates (and sometimes even shows signs of regretting) his past and is under the painful and somewhat false impression that he’s emotionally crippled. This man — fierce looking, socially awkward, romantically immature, with the temperament of a little boy — is one of the most fascinating and inspiring characters to emerge from a film in some time.

THE MONASTERY: MR. VIG AND THE NUN

Oct. 26–31

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Urinal kinds of trouble

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William E. Jones’s documentary triptych Massillon came out in 1991 — a landmark year for queer film — yet it didn’t receive near the popular attention given to Poison, another narrative three-way that is the arguable flagship of the new queer cinema. It’s no real surprise, since Todd Haynes’s impish and emotional experiment — as well as most other queer films associated with the early ’90s — has a drama, not to mention a generous degree of hanky panky, that Massillon eschews.

In an article by Jenni Olson included on Jones’s Web site, Jones likens his approach to that of new German cinema’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in Too Early, Too Late, pointing to that 1982 film’s materialist renunciation of "seduction or false spectacle." Even when detailing an abrupt advancement in his sexual education, courtesy of a public restroom, Jones speaks in a near-comical, and surely defiant, soporific tone as his camera lingers on the restroom’s exterior. If not for the frank narration and the conspicuous level of attention evident in Jones’s static townscapes, it would be hard to distinguish Massillon (though kitsch is nowhere in sight) from an old high school slide show of some prosaic industry. The film has nothing so attention grabbing as the theatricality of Derek Jarman’s Edward II or Tom Kalin’s Swoon, the literate romanticism of Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times, or the cuddly nihilism of Gregg Araki’s The Living End. In fact, even though it’s a balls-out investigation of sex in the margins, its distinguishing audaciousness lies in its presentational chastity.

Working its way from the personal to the legal to the historical, the film is divided into a trio of corresponding sections. The "Ohio" section overlays images of quiet roads and the architectural husks of the once-thriving industrial town of Massillon, where Jones grew up, with a narrative mapping his sexual development; "The Law" is a brief and perhaps overly dry summary of American sodomy laws, tied to obvious but compelling shots of various legislative buildings; and "California" attempts a genealogy of queer marginalization — making it a filmic cousin of Mike Davis’s chapters on early Los Angeles boosterism in City of Quartz (Verso, 1990) — that examines the ways that nonnative values, traditions, and other guidelines for self-identification are bred into the framework of planned Southern California communities.

Much of Jones’s work has an air of intended distance — it can range in effect from the warm, generous irony of 1997’s Finished to the sensual parsimony of 2004’s too-tentative Is It Really So Strange? — but his new film, also screening this week, is so detached that he didn’t even make it. (His Web site bills the project as "a document presented by William E. Jones.")

In his research for a planned documentary about the 1962 convictions under state sodomy laws of men engaged in public sex in a Mansfield, Ohio, restroom, Jones came into possession of 16mm surveillance footage captured from behind a two-way mirror. This footage is being presented with minimal editing as Tearoom. What is on offer here is a fascinating and important historical document of societal and particularly sexual repression and the stone-faced, eyes-on-the-door gay subculture it created. The film is at once much less viewer friendly than Massillon (the best-kept secret about cruising is the dullness factor) and much more in step with contemporaneous American media consciousness, thanks to the recently exposed indiscretions of so many throbbing pillars of moral authority.

Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, and Larry Craig, all subjected to the philosophically corresponding charges of both the right and the left, have provided an unbeatably complex backdrop for the viewing of Tearoom. The dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed is now shakier than ever, and to watch the film is to be torn between angered solidarity with the subjects and feverish speculation about the varying levels of hypocrisy on view. There’s a queasiness too in further exposing men — the younger of whom are still alive — who didn’t ask to be surveilled then and may very well not want to be celebrated now. The film’s moral ambiguity puts it on board with the new queer cinema’s ambivalence. *

TEAROOM AND MASSILLON: THREE NIGHTS WITH WILLIAM E. JONES

Tearoom Fri/26–Sat/27, 7:30 p.m.; Massillon Sun/28, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Come as you are Kurt Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad: On “Kurt Cobain: About a Son”

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nirvana.jpg

By Sean McCourt

As singer, songwriter, and frontperson for Nirvana, Kurt Cobain helped lead a musical revolution in the early 1990s whose effects on popular music and culture are still felt today. Yet after his death in 1994 at the age of 27, he continues to remain a figure somewhat shrouded in mystery. The new film Kurt Cobain: About a Son aims to show a more personal side of the gifted musician, told in his own words.

Director A.J. Schnack has taken interview tapes of Cobain done with music journalist Michael Azerrad for his 1993 book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana – considered by many to be the definitive biography of the band – and filmed scenes of the places that played an important role in Cobain’s life, including his hometown of Aberdeen, Wash., along with Seattle and Olympia, to accompany the introspective and revealing words of the late musical icon.

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Michael Azerrad.

The project came to fruition when Schnack was working on a documentary about They Might Be Giants, Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, and he included an appearance from Azerrad, who in addition to the Come As You Are has written hundreds of articles about music, along with the excellent tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, a look at some of the most influential underground music artists of the 1980s and early 1990s.

“A cautionary tale, carefully delivered”

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› duncan@sfbg.com

Make no mistake: Eugene Robinson is a throwback — to a time when people used words like honor without being ironic or embarrassed. The vocalist for the 18-years-running art-rock-noise machine Oxbow, Stanford graduate, and Mac Life senior editor is also, to use his descriptor, a "fightaholic." As he says in the introduction to his forthcoming book Fight: Or, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking (Harper), he shares his "obsession with the eternal, unasked, ‘Can I take him?’" Contrary to what one might assume, people who beat the bloody hell out of each other for fun or profit — Robinson is a mixed-martial-arts cage fighter — are not suffering from antisocial personality disorders but often adhere to a strict moral code. Though, he confessed during our interview in South San Francisco, sitting in my car and looking out over the bay, "I definitely have antisocial reasons as well."

How much of this testing one’s mettle in the "crucible of conflict" is just a dick-measuring contest? Only in the movies, or perhaps in cage fights whose opponents are carefully matched, does the victor triumph because he wants it more. In any given fight a win can usually be attributed the basic physical facts of size and strength, so what’s the point of fighting if you’re merely measuring attributes?

Robinson told me about a fight he had with a Red Sox fan while loading Oxbow’s van in Maine. The Sox, who serve as the home team even for the New England hinterland, had just been humiliated by the Yankees to the tune of 19–2. Three Sox fans strolled by, and one inevitably asked the frontperson what the fuck he was looking at. Given multiple chances to bow out, the guy kept pushing, and ultimately had his ass handed to him. "At that point," Robinson said, "I was honor bound to deliver the lesson he had so aggressively been seeking. Whatever happened in that exchange, it wasn’t dick measuring. It was a cautionary tale, carefully delivered."

But do people really learn from being whupped on? My thinking on this subject has evolved along the lines of my employment. When I delivered pizzas for Pizza Hut in a hot pink Lacoste-style shirt, I was forced to eat spoonfuls of shit doled out by every disgruntled lard ass whose Meat Lover’s Special arrived 10 minutes late. "Someday," I thought, "someone is going to fuck that guy up." Needless to say, it was a precarious act to hang the smothering cloak of my rage on that altogether insufficient nail of "someday." When I moved on to working security at clubs, I realized that yes, someday someone will kick that guy’s ass, and it may as well be today. As the old activist saw goes, "If not now, when? If not me, who?" But after some time, I realized that the behavior of others wasn’t worth getting upset, let alone violent, over. Not because it wasn’t satisfying to deliver lessons, but because no lessons were learned. In this way, I found working in nightclubs as dissatisfying as substitute teaching.

If you fight someone and they win, then might is right, and whichever asshole behavior they were indulging in before the fight is justified. If you fight them and they lose, they will immediately work the victim angle for sympathy and punitive damages. Any attitude adjustment is clearly fleeting.

"This is a valid critique," Robinson told me, but it doesn’t derail his motivations. "The few seconds that we’re together, I’ve got to hope for the best." He recounts a situation when a member of another band was having a high-volume conversation at the edge of the stage while Robinson and Oxbow guitarist Niko Wenner were playing as an acoustic duo. After Robinson warned the musician to "shut the fuck up," things got heated. Audience members tried to cool things out, but, in Robinson’s words, "this evenhanded, kind of neutered approach didn’t pay heed to the reality of the moment. Which is, you had an enemy of art, and you had somebody who was trying to be the standard-bearer of Eros." He pauses. "Forget about all that. If I’m standing at a café and somebody is screaming at the top of his lungs next to me, I’m asking him 100 percent of the time to shut the fuck up. You don’t have to live all over me. It’s boorish. And rude. And uncouth. And in that way, it’s a form of bullying."

While it may seem excessive to put a spindly, long-haired dude in a Texas boogie-rock band in a submission hold called an ultimate head and arm, I can’t argue with Robinson’s reasoning: "Disrespect begets disrespect." In any case, the vocalist does allow for the possibility of walking away. But walking away for him has more to do with the Japanese concept of saving face, of avoiding conflict with honor, than with the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek. "Am I doing this out of graciousness or am I doing it out of fear?" he asked. "I think way too many people will choose to look the other way out of fear. My whole life has been a testament to avoiding base fears."

For this, I’ve got to respect the guy. Robinson may be derided on the Web as a prick, a sadist, and an egomaniac, but let’s look at the lessons: (1) You are honor bound to follow through on a promise. (2) Art is worthy of respect. (3) Fear should be avoided as a motivation. Sounds pretty fucking reasonable to me. Though, in my own top five, I try — and sometimes fail — to add: (4) Violence should be avoided as a teaching tool.

Really, though, we live in a time when shit talking is considered a sport in itself. Go to theoxbow.com and look at some of the live footage. Robinson trances out onstage and strips down to his underwear, and the band plays the sound of a psychological meltdown. Knowing what you know and seeing what you see, why would you fuck with him?

"To a certain degree, culturally, we’ve been neutered. And that’s what civilization is about: to get us to places of greater peace," Robinson said. "But clearly, that aspect of it is not working." I’d have to agree that it’s not working, especially in social situations, where people seem to assume a disconnection in the causal, karmic links between action and consequence. Witness the hapless Scotsman in the 2003 Christian Anthony documentary Music for Adults. He gets pantsed in front of a crowd by Robinson, who asks, with what seems genuine concern, "Did that hurt? Did I hurt your feelings?" before adding the rejoinder "It’s an Oxbow show. That’s what happens." *

OXBOW

Wed/17, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

www.12galaxies.com

EUGENE ROBINSON

In conversation with V. Vale and James Stark

Nov. 8, 6 p.m., $5

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, SF

www.sfcamerawork.org

Trans Iran with Afsaneh Najmabadi

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Still from Daisy Mohr and Negin Kianfar’s 2006 documentary “The Birthday,” about sex changes in Iran

One of the weirder outcomes of combining fundamentalist religion with national governance is that you have the leader of your country say things like “There are no gays in Iran. We do not have this phenomenon,” at an American university, only to be practically laughed offstage and spend the next week backtracking on the statement.

Another is that your country finds itself in the somewhat awkward position of punishing homosexuality with death, yet publicly funding gender reassignment surgery. According to this recent report in the Guardian UK, Iran is second only to Thailand in the amount of sex change surgeries performed there. Yep, folks – sharia law commands that gays be killed for having sex with each other only once, and that lesbians be executed if they have sex four times (talk about double standards!). But it’ll foot your trans bill.

Yet another strange thing to emerge from this situation is that your country is so fucked up that the leader of the major transsexual organization can say, as Maryam Khatoon Molkara recently did, “Transsexuality is a real disaster. It’s a one-way street. But if somebody wants to study, have a future and live like others they should go through this surgery.” Eek. (She herself convinced Khomeini to make transsexuality legal — no small potatoes!)

Iran’s fundamental answer to gay love is change one of the partners into a woman. Shazam!

Who wrote the book of love?

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At first glance, For the Bible Tells Me So comes across as a fairly conservative film. Technically and aesthetically speaking, there are no surprises: interviews, found footage, a cute short cartoon, and familiar traditional documentary techniques are mixed with a certain amount of predictability and sentimental cheesiness. But is cinematic form all that defines whether a movie is conventional or groundbreaking? In terms of content, Daniel G. Karslake’s first feature is anything but unchallenging.

In fact, no better word than challenge comes to mind when thinking about For the Bible Tells Me So. First, there’s the film’s questioning of the widely held belief that spirituality and same-sex attraction are mutually exclusive. The many different acclaimed and respected theologians featured in the documentary make it clear that popular literalist interpretations of the Bible, according to which homosexuality is an abomination, show complete disregard for the historical and social context in which it was written (a time when the concept of homosexuality wasn’t even existent).

Through interviews with figures such as Rev. Peter Gomes, Rev. Irene Monroe, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the film makes it clear that religion and the church are two different things — and that scripture is used to promote and justify hatred toward homosexuality in the same way that it can be used to defend racism and sexism.

In the process of critiquing church authority, For the Bible Tells Me suggests that one revisit one’s system of belief. This suggestion extends from and connects to the families interviewed in the movie. Focusing on five religious couples who grew up being told that homosexuality is a sin but who later discovered that their children are gay, Karslake portrays people struggling between their love for their offspring and their idea of faith as a guide to truth in life. Some parents get involved in fighting prejudice, while others discover that they can at least try to understand their children. Because Karslake approaches all of his interview subjects with respect and affection, For the Bible Tells Me So‘s plea for tolerance is almost omnipotent. (Maria Komodore)

FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

Opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters

www.forthebibletellsmeso.org

Lovejoy and company

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Think about the children!"

That cry, most memorably a mantra for Reverend Lovejoy’s wife, Helen, on The Simpsons, encapsulates the pervasive movement to childproof American life. Parents no longer have the time, will, or ability (so they claim) to properly censor all aspects of culture their kids might be exposed to, so a rising chorus demands the government do it for them.

Yet these efforts only underline the scattershot nature of an institutional overview of today’s wide-open mediascape. The FCC heavily fines cusswords and wardrobe malfunctions on network TV, yet cable can do whatever the fuck! it pleases. Men lured via fantasy underage chat rooms into bogus real-world meetings by FBI agents can be imprisoned for crimes of intent. Meanwhile, the hugely popular Bratz empire sells trendy updates on Jodie Foster’s Taxi Driver li’l ho look to preteen girls as ersatz self-empowerment.

The closely aligned flip side of that salaciousness is the market for angelic innocence — those Keane-eyed Olsen twins tap into commingled public fascinations with child precocity, with jailbait allure and its righteous condemnation, and with women starving themselves back to a pubescent size-zero ideal. How often has such high-end childsploitation led to balanced adult life? Face it: we already think about the children way too much.

A whole worm can of child adorability, complicity, ability, and above all, parental responsibility (or lack thereof) is opened up by My Kid Could Paint That. Amir Bar-Lev’s excellent documentary starts out as a straight-up chronicle of a way-underage artistic phenomenon, until unforeseen developments suggest some sort of mass-media con job based on dreams of squeaky-clean white suburbia.

The Olmsteads of Binghamton, N.Y., are a catalog family, so wholesomely good-looking you might think they were assembled by a casting agent. They are nice too. You might expect any thirtysomething heterosexual couple this L.L. Bean–clad to be yuppies, but in their modest upstate New York burg, they get along like everybody else. Mother Laura is a dental assistant. Father Mark works at the Frito-Lay factory. And their offspring? Marla and little brother Zane are well adjusted and beyond cute. If you don’t like kids, picture a basket of golden Lab puppies or something.

Not long after she turned two, Marla insisted on joining Daddy’s off-clock pastime as an amateur artist, painting her own pictures. The attractive, oddly sophisticated-looking results were hung at home. Eventually, a friend suggested they be exhibited in his café, where they elicited actual purchase offers. Another friend, professional artist Anthony Brunelli, then proposed a mid-2004 show at his gallery. It all still seemed kind of a lark.

Then a local newspaper story leads to another — in the New York Times. Normal life ends: so-called pint-size Picasso Marla is the human-interest novelty du jour for every national magazine and TV show. Collectors bid up to $25,000 per canvas. Art critics weigh in and are, for the most part, as impressed as they are nonplussed. Both senior Olmsteads apparently take pains not to pressure Marla toward more art making or media glare than her four-year-old temperament desires. (They also try not to make her older brother feel any less special, though a couple of moments in this movie make you think he has years of therapy ahead.) Yet Mark Olmstead does seem eager to seize the moment. Is this the art-world entrée he’d always wanted for himself?

That question becomes a matter of discomfiting public conjecture once something very bad happens. The Sunday-evening staple 60 Minutes — having stationed a surveillance camera in the Olmsteads’ home (with their permission) to observe Marla’s artistic process — airs a segment that strongly implies the whole child-genius thing is a fraud. Footage is shown with Mark rather aggressively directing Marla’s painting. The tide turns: collectors froth at the mouth, journalists and critics harrumph, hate mail arrives in bulk, and the Olmsteads feel shunned in their own community. They take steps at vindication, but things only get more complicated.

If you watch many documentaries these days, you’re sick of filmmakers putting their mugs and ruminations on camera, whether germane to the subject or not. But there’s a real intensity to Ben-Levy’s soul-searching in My Kid Could Paint That, as he weighs emotional attachment to the Olmsteads — and their expectation of loyalty — against his own nagging doubts and the golden prospect of a vérité exposé.

My Kid Could Paint That provokes on numerous levels. Regardless of whether she’s all that or not, can so much scrutiny — cynical or flattering — be good for Marla? As the title suggests, Ben-Levy’s film also examines deep populist hostility toward abstract (as opposed to traditional representational) art. Perhaps the only question this fascinating documentary doesn’t address is one that lands between artistic-value and cult-of-personality terrains. If Marla Olmstead turns out not to be sole creator of these paintings, why are they suddenly worth less? The oil canvases are vividly colored, complex, often ravishing. I’d be thrilled to have a print, let alone an original.

The creepiest folks in My Kid Could Paint That are those whose art appreciation gets turned off the moment it occurs they’ve enjoyed something possibly not created by an adorable, towheaded child. They’ve invested so much in the prodigy image they can’t see the still-beautiful product that remains. They are pederasts of an acceptable sort — people who only wuv something as long as it comes from a certifiably "pure" source. Innocence-fetishizing Mrs. Lovejoys are always the first to condemn adults who might well be damaged former prodigies themselves. It’s a microcosm of the hypocrisy that raises hysteria over mythically elevated levels of child sexual abuse, while caring little about those myriad ill-raised kids who end up welfare mothers or otherwise inconvenient adults.

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

Opens Fri/12 in Bay Area theaters

www.sonyclassics.com/mykidcouldpaintthat

PARKed in our hearts

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So PARKing day is over and the city’s metered spots all belong to cars (and cigarette butts, and urine, and unidentifiable slimy objects) once again. But thanks to the good folks over at Rebar, we can all bask in the memories of last Friday’s adventure in creating our own urban spaces: the arts collective has updated the website www.parkingday.org, with photos from PARKing Days across the world, an interactive map of SF’s version, and a trailer for their just-finished documentary on this fabulous new phenomenon.

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Though much of the PARKing Day activity was centered around downtown, my friends and I strolled past nearly five parks in the Mission just on Valencia between 16th and 22nd streets. The best, by far, was outside Ritual. The strangest interpretation of the day’s purpose? An outdoor massage and chiropractic demonstration.

And in case you were wondering why we’re still talking about PARKing Day, it’s because we love every single thing about it: engaging in guerrilla art; inspiring people to manifest their own realities; drawing attention to the need for more green space; questioning our reliance on cars (and where to put them when we’re not driving them); finding solutions to problems with legal irreverence; and just being goddamned cool.

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