Festival

Hey, hey. hey

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m getting superfrustrated. I don’t have the highest sex drive, but it is there. However, I can’t understand why my brain and my body tell me I want to do something that inevitably makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. Even with lube, sex leaves me sore for hours. I try to just give my boyfriend blow jobs so I can avoid having to have sex. I’m 21 and have been sexually active for about three years, and I just always figured everything would get better.

And it’s not just intercourse. I can’t even get satisfaction from oral sex or masturbating. It feels good, but then, instead of feeling really good, like you’d expect an orgasm to feel, suddenly the pleasure just kind of floats away. If that’s an orgasm, it freaking sucks. It is unpleasant. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Can’t Get Me No

Dear No:

Well, you’re feeling unsatisfied because you are unsatisfied, but I don’t suppose that observation will be much use to you. I believe that your sex drive is still hanging in there because you’re a normal, healthy girl, albeit one who apparently has some issues (we call them issues when we don’t know what else to call them) about sex. In fact, I’m not even sure you have issues. I think maybe you’ve just had some pretty disappointing sex, and now you’re so expecting it to be disappointing that you’re just kind of jumping straight to the disappointment part and saving yourself some time.

I hate to punt this over to the usual suspects, but I think I have to: there are books — lots of them — on learning to masturbate and becoming orgasmic, and there are some spectacular toys out there now, toys so good that I am not altogether positive I can still promise that using them will not interfere with partnered sex, but that is obviously a topic and a worry (an issue) for another time. The old classics are Lonnie Barbach (reads like a therapist writing for Redbook) and Betty Dodson (reads like someone you’d meet at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival circa 1989, naked), but they have accumulated an Amazon wish list full of competition. Poke around in the reviews and see if you can find someone whose voice you can stand, buy their book or DVD and whatever basic toys they recommend, then buy yourself some time and use them. Oh, and if there’s a boyfriend in the picture, tell him to just hang on — you’ve got some stuff to do, after which he’s welcome to come back and try again. If this works, it should be worth the wait.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one sex partner in my life (high school to the present). My problem seems pretty basic: sex doesn’t feel all that great. I mean, the desire’s there, but after a few minutes the pleasure part just kind of slips away, despite my best efforts to keep it there, and the rest either feels like smushing body parts or else is unpleasant and sort of painful. I don’t understand how it can start off feeling good and then just go away. Maybe I’m on the right track: When I first started having sex (three years ago), it always felt pretty neutral. Now at least it feels good for a little while. I can’t masturbate to orgasm either. It is incredibly frustrating to want to have sex even knowing I always go away from it unsatisfied. What is wrong with me? How do I fix it?’

Love,

No, No, No

Dear No:

I had to reread very carefully to make sure you and your doppelgänger are not the same person, but look — you’re slightly younger! And very, very faintly less hopeless, I think, but that is open to interpretation. I do find it slightly heartening that you are experiencing a bit of pleasure now, since I’d have to agree that it would be difficult to get motivated in the complete absence of anything more exciting than "neutral" sensation.

It’s neither fair nor just but is common for women to be out of touch with their sexual-response cycles in a way that simply doesn’t occur very often in males. I hesitate — nay, refuse! — to get into any historical-political reasons why this might be so. (It’s not that they’re not interesting, but they are unfruitful and dreadfully distracting, which is exactly what we don’t need when we’re already having trouble concentrating.) I’m afraid you too will have to buy media products and a vibrator that tickles at least your fancy, put the boyfriend on hold, and get practicing. I wish I could wave a magic wand for you, but I think the motor in mine is burning out. They don’t last forever.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Video Mutants: Problem solving with Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad

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I knew I’d reached some level of pixel heaven a few minutes after putting Paper Rad’s Trash Talking (Load) into the DVD player. Or was it into the hard drive? Either way, that pixel portal to humor epiphanies opened when an animated character stopped jive walking and started telling me – in an ornery fashion – that the disc I was watching had no menu. Since the day of that digital bitch slap, I’ve encountered other brilliant uses of DVD formatting – the remote control menu of TV Carnage’s vintage-new Ouch Television My Brain Hurts is a maze of horrors, for example – but none quite so simply brilliant. The fact that it was followed by a sugared cereal version of a Duchamp-like explosion in a shingle factory helped. Paper Rad videos are seizures of pleasure.

Excerpt from Trash Talking DVD

Their latest video work subdues the frenzy, though. Some of the video mutants in this issue use YouTube to step outside of white cubes, while others – such as Kalup Linzy — are creating their own answers to TV genres. With Problem Solvers, Paper Rad are taking the latter idea to a paradoxical extreme, seeing what they can do within the time constraints of a common sitcom format. I recently spoke to collective member Jacob Ciocci.

SFBG: I know you have a performance at the Sundance Film Festival. Will it be a bombardment?
Jacob Ciocci: Cory [Arcangel] is going to do a couple of performances, and we’re going to play live music to Problem Solvers, the new 23-minute video.
It will be a bombardment, but not as much overload as some previous performances and videos, because Problem Solvers is a narrative work that tells the story of six characters.

Trailer for Trash Talking DVD

Coachella lite: where are the Valentines?

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2008lineupcoachella poster sml.bmp

coachella Poster sml.bmp

Which is the real Coachella?


By Erik Morse

Last Monday’s announcement from Mexico City of the lineup for the upcoming Coachella Festival in Indio had more than a few prospective ticket buyers flummoxed. Where were all the celebrity headliners Goldenvoice had so skillfully assembled in years past? Where were the electro hipsters and indie-rock stalwarts whose appearances had succeeded in making Coachella the American Glastonbury?

After all the behind-the-scenes campaigning and Internet rumor-mongering that promised everyone from the Smiths to Gang of Four to Aphex Twin to Leonard Cohen, the unveiling was an extraordinary exercise in bathos. Thank goodness for Portishead. The biggest omission was the newly reunited My Bloody Valentine, who performs for the first time in over 15 years beginning this summer in the UK. After the major coup that brought the Jesus and Mary Chain to Indio last year, hopes were high that a second miracle might find Kevin Shields and co. headlining over the likes of Jack Johnson or Roger Waters.

bloodyvalentine sml.bmp
My, my: My Bloody Valentine.

You are your own worst enemy

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

In his third report from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it’s Midnites for Maniacs programmer and Guardian contributor Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reflects on his personal best of the fest.

Downloading Nancy – directed by Johan Renck (Canada)
Pain and sadness inhabit most of us. Extreme anger can turn into apathy, and relentless insecurity can turn into absolute self-destruction. In Johan Renck’s debut feature, shot by Christopher Doyle, each moment, every shot, even the slightest gesture, accentuates the film’s gut-wrenching tone. A married couple of 15 years has lost their magic. More than that, they’ve lost the feel of one another. Albert (Rufus Sewell) is putting all of his energy into an interactive golf game that airport passengers can practice while Nancy (Maria Bello) spends her days attempting to connect with someone, anyone, online. While the structure of the film slowly unfolds, we are forced to figure out the whys and whens on our own. The cold blue settings, the silent snowy sadness, the frigid impending dread drifting from one scene to the next: it all traps you in this brutal way that makes you want to run out of the theater. In fact during the press screening, dozens of people were leaving and it was not it in a casual way.

The 96-minute Downloading Nancy is pure emotion. And through all of the self-effacing and self-infliction that the characters encounter, you care. You care immensely about these depressed disasters doing the best that they can. You experience their darkest moments and you feel what they cannot. In fact, you’ll feel so much that you’ll have to decide if you can stay and watch. This is not only the best film at Sundance this year, it provides insight into where you might be headed if you don’t start fighting for yourself.

Quixotically yours

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› johnny@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

75 alive

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With its 75th season, which starts Jan. 29, the San Francisco Ballet — the oldest ballet company in the country — intends to show that the dance form is a thoroughly contemporary, international art.

With the exception of the lovely Giselle (created by Adolphe Adam in 1841), the entire season has been choreographed within the company’s lifetime. When it was created in 1938, Lew Christensen’s Filling Station was considered the first American ballet. Other season highlights will no doubt include the New Works Festival (April 22–May 6), with premieres by 10 choreographers in three different programs. On this anniversary, it’s worth recalling that there may be a historic reason why San Francisco ballet audiences have often embraced the new.

Carlos Carvajal, now co–artistic director of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, danced with the SFB from 1950 to ’55 and, after a stint in Europe, worked from 1964 to ’70 as its ballet master and associate choreographer. He remembers the period as one of crowded quarters on 18th Avenue in the Richmond District — there was a hunt for theaters in which to perform because the Opera House shared space with the San Francisco Symphony at the time, and the SFB often lost out. But it was also a period of dazzling vitality.

"It was a crazy, wonderful time, with such creative energy. Not just for the dancers, but musicians and designers as well," Carvajal recently recalled. Dancers regularly choreographed for the main season. His Totentanz, for instance, premiered at the SFB in 1967 and stayed in the rep until 1972. When Carvajal left the SFB, he brought the piece to his San Francisco Dance Spectrum, where it proved to be one of the company’s most popular works. The SFB functioned almost like a modern dance company whose members were simply expected to take up choreography sooner or later.

While the company was unemployed after its annual spring season, its summer workshops, called the "Ballet ’60s" series, offered creative outlets and some touring opportunities. "We used to take the wall down between two studios and converted one of them into a place for the audience. The other was the theater," Carvajal remembered. "Somebody suggested choreographing the Kama Sutra, so I took a look and figured I could do [it]." The same year, he choreographed Voyage Interdit: A Noh Play, for which he created a tape collage. The work’s second incarnation had a live rock band and a light show. "Remember," he said, chuckling, "those were the crazy ’60s, when anything went. We didn’t care about money; we only cared about dancing." And audiences, particularly younger ones, both in towns and on the road, flocked to see what was new — and what was this thing called ballet.

www.sfballet.org

Escape from planet Indie Rock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With so many indie rock bands riding the wave of all things post-punk or psych–this and that at present, it’s rare that fans of subversive music are able to listen to subterranean songs as a means of escape. I mean, Band of Horses permeate Ford commercials during the NFL playoffs, and little brothers and sisters everywhere are air-guitaring to everyone from Mastodon to the Rapture.

So it makes perfect sense that Brooklyn, NY, band Yeasayer has managed to engage even the most cynical of indie veterans with its escapist realm filled with an uncompromisingly authentic helping of psychedelic — and extremely technically proficient — guitar noodling, hypnotic pop vocals, and worldly percussion that’s as reminiscent of Carlos Santana as it is of Animal Collective or the Cure. How can you not escape when listening to something that trots along so many unexpected musical paths?

It’s no surprise that this extension of the avant-indie wing is composed of two ex–barbershop quartet members and a rhythm section that employs a bounty of instrumentation including but not limited to accordions, bongo drums, sitars, and sequencers. Driven by guitarist Anand Wilder, the group is a four-piece, genre-eradicating machine, with each member trading off vocal and instrumental duties by track. Eleven months in the making, Yeasayer’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, was snatched up by Jason Foster of Monitor Records (Battles, Early Man) and eventually became the initial — and cornerstone — release of his newest imprint, We Are Free.

After a gazillion positive reviews, rumors of the band’s outstanding performances at Austin, Texas’s 2007 South by Southwest Festival, and yes, acclaim from MTV as part of the burgeoning Brooklyn scene, the band has become one of the few tripper acts that render a true sense of escapism as indie rock’s merge with mainstream culture becomes a reality. I strongly recommend listening to the goth-pop–meets–Middle Eastern music psych-epic "Germs," followed by a serious bong rip. Then turn to the haunting, shoegazing barbershop bhangra of "Waves" and attempt to question what mental plane and planet you inhabit.

But what makes the mysticism of Yeasayer more mind engulfing than that of the mountain of other Dave Sitek– and Paw Tracks–approved artists (e.g., um, Celebration, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink)? One should first look at the group’s penchant for gospel. While it may be hard to associate any of the long-haired and art school–ish members with that genre’s religious core, just about every track on All Hour Cymbals radiates some sort of spiritual a cappella à la TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe — if he were ever a member of a South American Baptist choir. Even more interesting, the band’s lyrics take the proverbial 180 degree turn from gospel’s posi-vibes. Take, for instance, Yeasayer’s single "2080": the members switch off melodically chanting, "I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into," only to follow with "I’ll surely be dead / So don’t look ahead / Never look ahead." Now we have an apocalyptic, uplifting, shredding whirlwind of pop innovation. Whoa.

With a European tour under their belt and an extensive United States tour in progress with their fellow Brooklyn troupe of indie revolutionaries MGMT, Yeasayer are spreading the bounty of escapism worldwide. Experiencing this fearless entity, which is staring indie rock’s mainstream monster directly in the face, should be an entertaining, if not enlightening, glimpse into the future of progressive songwriting as we might know it. *

YEASAYER

With MGMT and the Morning Benders

Mon/28, 9 p.m., sold out

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Video Mutants: Eight for 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

1. CORY ARCANGEL


Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) uncovers the beauty of Nintendo clouds. Go to our Pixel Vision blog this week (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for an interview with Jacob Ciocci of Arcangel’s sometime collaborators Paper Rad and an interview with Arcangel that discusses his recent video and performance projects, such as The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum.

2. PHIL COLLINS


Dünya dunlemiyor, the Istanbul, Turkey–set entry in Collins’s World Won’t Listen trilogy of Smiths karaoke videos, wowed those who saw it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The entire trilogy is now on display and garnering raves (including an Artforum essay that pinpoints the lustiness that breaks through even the most programmatic of Collins’s endeavors) at the Dallas Museum of Art. Here’s hoping we get to see it soon.

3. SARAH ENID


Based in San Francisco but often out in the world, Enid has a roving eye. She’s made comic horror short works (in 2005’s Lovelorn Domestic she’s a mute woman with a giant bird that pecks out her husband’s eyes) and more recently ventured into the realm of new age relaxation videos — 3-D ones, to boot. The results are as amazing as they are soothing.

4. DAVID ENOS


One of San Francisco’s best underground talents, Enos has used videotape to craft a number of hand-drawn and hand-spliced animated shorts. Music biography is one recurrent subject: Enos’s trademark deadpan charm adds magic to illustrated and condensed life stories of Jim Morrison (complete with writhing snakes), Dennis Wilson (with a cameo by Charlie Manson), and Leonard Cohen. Look for a Guardian profile of Enos — as well as one of his frequent collaborator Enid — later this year.

5. GEORGE KUCHAR


Ryan Trecartin (see Super Ego) would never have star-wiped himself into art world stardom if not for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink video aesthetic of Kuchar, who has made hundreds of videos since he and his brother Mike helped create underground film. Based in San Francisco and a teacher at the SF Art Institute, Kuchar has taught or influenced every local video person on this list, and his movies continue to be as funny as anyone’s in this issue, and only slightly less energetic than Trecartin’s (maybe a good thing).

6. ANNE MCGUIRE


She’s channeled Judy Garland — in 1997’s tears-and-laughs cabaret spree I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong — and survived. She stalker-serenaded Joe DiMaggio when the slugger was still alive and walking through the Marina (in 1991’s Joe Dimaggio, 1, 2, 3). In addition to these potent short performance works, she’s also unleashed some gargantuan formal projects, such as a pair of features — 1992’s Strain Andromeda and 2007’s Adventure Poseidon The — that rearrange Hollywood films from back to front, treating each shot like a card in a deck.

7. PAPER RAD


You haven’t lived until you’ve been berated about CD-ROMs, DVD menus, and coolness by the cranky-voiced animated character at the beginning of Paper Rad’s 2006 DVD Trash Talking (Load). Turns out that rant is just the preamble to a gloriously anarchic explosion of primary colors and pop-cult iconography that has prompted a thousand commercialized graphic design rip-offs, none of them one-millionth as inspired. Paper Rad recently made mashup lively again with the Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake (now on YouTube). Go to their Web site — www.paperrad.org — for visual pleasure seizures and to get a taste of their new 20-minute video, Problem Solvers.

>>Watch Paper Rad’s “umbrella zombie datamosh mistake”

8. MATT WOLF


Wolf crosses into the realm of full-length features with Wild Combination, his subtly poignant documentary portrait of late musician Arthur Russell, which has been accepted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. But his 2003 short video Smalltown Boys was a standout at a recent Internet-vid group show at SF Camerawork, and his Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of such clips, both found (he uncovers Ryan Phillippe’s time as the first gay teen on American soaps) and made by him (his 2004 Imitation of Imitation mimics the costume-jewelry waterfall from the credits of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life).

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

In a dark and lonely place

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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

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

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

Shorts are the new features!

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By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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

sundance_marquee.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky 13

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Since 1996 the Goethe-Institut’s annual Berlin and Beyond Film Festival has been bringing German-language cinema from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to the Europhiles of San Francisco. As 2008 marks the festival’s 13th year — which signals a transition toward maturity in many cultures — it’s perhaps appropriate that several offerings come from directors who have already brought their first or second films here. One example is Robert Thalheim, winner of the fest’s 2005 Best First Feature Award for Netto, who returns with his fictional account of a young German’s experience of working in Auschwitz today, And Along Come Tourists. But perhaps no triumphal return is more anticipated than that of Fatih Akin, whose The Edge of Heaven comes to San Francisco after garnering multiple awards on the festival circuit, including best screenplay honors last spring in Cannes.

Akin is a director much concerned with connection. After exploring the tenuous alliances of family and homeland in 2002’s Solino and the complex, at times violent bonds of love in 2004’s Head-On, he meditates on death’s unanticipated capacity to unite the living in his newest film. The slow pace and nonlinear construction of his latest offering might initially surprise audiences looking for the visceral force of his previous movies, but it’s a surprise worth following to the film’s introspective conclusion.

Heaven begins by focusing on characters of Turkish descent living in Germany, a diaspora of more than two million people. When aging pensioner Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) seeks comfort in the arms of middle-aged prostitute Yeter (Nursel Köse), it is their common language, not just the blow job, that excites him. Ali also speaks Turkish to his son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a fastidious intellectual, but divines that otherwise their relationship lacks closeness. Nejat and Yeter quietly ally after she reveals she is prostituting herself in order to put her daughter through school in Istanbul, and when an act of unexpected violence shatters their fledgling harmony, he resolves to find Yeter’s daughter and finance her studies himself.

At this point Heaven breaks away from simple narrative to trace the intricately entwined paths of three strong-willed women. Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), is not a student after all, but a revolutionary and a freedom fighter. Following a police raid on her flat, she comes to Germany to find her mother. Instead, she finds Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a headstrong German girl who offers her a place to stay. Soon they embark on an almost gratuitous (yet earnestly portrayed) lesbian relationship. Former Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla’s nuanced performance as Susanne, Lotte’s disapproving mother, is one of the film’s strongest. Struggling to relate to her stubborn daughter, she adds a necessary ballast of reason, even as Lotte abruptly leaves home to follow Ayten, who’s been deported to Turkey and jailed.

Another death is all it takes to draw the survivors together, discovering in one another and themselves the attributes they thought were lost with the deceased. Susanne and Nejat in particular find solace in their unifying memories, creating a link that, though forged from tragedy, speaks more to life. Leaving all final reconciliation offscreen, Akin deftly ends his film on a note of pensive ambiguity, a restraint that befits his rising reputation as a director entering his prime.

Another Berlin and Beyond alum, Christian Petzold, delivers a film that — though it couldn’t be more texturally different from Akin’s — is strangely complementary to Heaven. Disassociation, not connection, is the overriding theme of Yella, propelling the titular protagonist from East to West, desperation to determination, the bottom of a river to the head of a boardroom. Nina Hoss plays a woman haunted in every sense of the word. After leaving her small East German village and abusive husband behind in search of a new life as a corporate drone in Hannover, she can’t keep remnants of her past from resurfacing in disorienting ways. Even though you can spot the supposed surprise plot twist an hour away, Hoss’s slow unraveling casts a spell. *

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

Thurs/10, 8 p.m., Castro (opening-night party 6:30–8 p.m., $35)

YELLA

Sat/12, 8 p.m., Castro

BERLIN AND BEYOND FILM FESTIVAL

Runs Jan. 10–16 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF, and the Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF, and Jan. 19 at the Arena Theater, 210 Main, Point Arena. For tickets (most films $10) and additional information, call (415) 263-8760 or visit www.berlinandbeyond.com

Angels with dirty faces

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The Bay Area boasts some of the most forward-thinking film programmers in the country, but even here there’s often no getting around the circuitous, arbitrary workings of foreign film distribution. No matter how big a hit in its festival travels, the foreign film must dutifully wait untold months until it is dressed up by Sony Pictures Classics or released to no fanfare by a small distributor like Film Movement. That particular company is backing the belated American opening of Francisco Vargas’s The Violin, a plainly appealing sleeper that picked up major festival awards from Cannes to San Francisco as well as major props from star director Guillermo del Toro (quoted as saying, "In The Violin lies the future of Mexican cinema").

I mention all of this here only to emphasize that it’s something of a coincidence that The Violin is opening in the shadow of several American movies obsessed with death in the open West, a landscape in which violence congeals as fast as the pop of an air gun or the rush of an oil geyser. A coincidence perhaps, but a bracing one for the way it compounds the eerie calm of Vargas’s debut feature, which, completely contrary to the excellent No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (let alone Redacted), works to profess the fullness of the soul locked in dubious battle.

As with many overtly lyrical westerns, The Violin‘s coordinates — mountains and village, the bar and the barracks, guerrillas and soldiers — aren’t specific. Whichever war is being fought, it has already spiraled into abstraction; the opening credits roll over a ravishingly composed torture sequence in which military men maim peasants for no reason other than their being indistinguishable from the guerrillas. The sequence establishes the tone through its look, with soft black-and-white cinematography suffusing the villagers’ tragedy with an ennobling grace reminiscent of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men portraiture.

This prologue is unnerving for being a composition before it is an action — even as that action is so despairingly brutal. As Vargas slips into the main of The Violin, though, this predilection for romantic chiaroscuro inscribes his fable with the dangerous delicacy of a daydream. The plot, such as it is, gets under way when an old man and his adult son go busking with their violin and guitar, the youngest member of this patrilineal trio, Lucio, collecting the change. Later the adult son, Genaro, slips into the back room of a bar (another space painted in shadow and smoke) to procure weapons for his village’s guerrillas. It’s to no avail, since by the time he returns to the town with his child and his violinist father, the magisterial Don Plutarco (the Cannes-awarded Ángel Tavira), the Army has already done its cruel work, taking over the village and its hidden cache. Flashing modesty and feigned foolishness as another person might their teeth, Plutarco wins the favor of the presiding captain, serenading with his creaky violin ballads while surreptitiously smuggling out supplies with every adios.

Instead of drumming up dramatic impact with the story’s inherently suspenseful elements, Vargas’s film floats by with its head in the clouds, tragedies and trivialities enfolded in caressing close-ups and violin whistles. This dreamlike ambiance paradoxically seems to dovetail with Vargas’s laudable neorealist technique, especially in his work with a nonprofessional cast and his easy command of direct sound. So many films overplay their hand here; drunk on Terrence Malick movies, the nature score is often magnified to absurd sharpness, crickets chirping in your ear, blades of grass aflame in song. Vargas’s sound is comparatively obscure, but besides being pleasurably spacious, it’s true to his vision of a humble poetry of the everyday. The music too is appreciably authentic, as Vargas (who spent five years producing radio shows featuring traditional Mexican melodies) uses Tavira’s wobbly pitch to seam together his loose narrative.

All of this lyricism can have a flattening effect, as scenes of torture and vignettes of tacos hold the same smoky finesse. Innumerable close-ups of Tavira’s cracked hands aside, there is nothing gritty about the film, which is a problem insofar as it can give The Violin‘s realism a bitter aftertaste of simplistic moralism. And yet, in the film’s refined emotional palette (the final shot seals it), Vargos achieves something that the recent tongue-tied American pictures don’t. Wordless in long stretches, The Violin demonstrates a visual command of faces and editing on par with those of D.W. Griffith’s expert melodramas — minor masterpieces that recognize cinema’s strange ability to summon reality without being beholden to it.

THE VIOLIN

Opens Fri/11

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

http://www.roxie.com

www.filmmovement.com
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Stephen Stills’s surgery successful

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This just in from Stephen Stills’ publicists: “Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist and legendary guitarist Stephen Stills was successfully operated on today for prostate cancer in Los Angeles. ‘Stephen’s procedure went remarkably well and he couldn’t be better. He will be home by noon tomorrow and the pain will be minimal,’ his wife Kristen Stills said.

“The legendary artist is scheduled to attend the Sundance Film Festival in Utah for the Jan. 25 world premiere of CSNY/Deja Vu. The feature, directed by Bernard Shakey, was filmed during the 2006 “Freedom of Speech” tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It is a moving tribute to the power of music to provoke and provide inspiration.

“Stephen Stills is also scheduled for a North American solo tour this spring in support of his recently released Just Roll Tape album on Rhino Records.”

Twelve for the road

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The past year’s many exhilarations are here condensed into a month-by-month format. Let a veil of silence fall over the frustrations, and remember the yin and yang in everything, dance included.

January: Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, Marin Civic Center Auditorium, San Rafael. "Hungarian Concerto: Hommage à Béla Bartók," a brilliant presentation of traditional folk material, was choreographed within a sophisticated, contemporary setting that highlighted how the future and the past can coexist perfectly with each other.

February: Forsythe Company, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. Making a stunning debut with Three Atmospheric Studies, a piece that is as politically astute as it is formally challenging, William Forsythe’s new independent company confirmed his status as one of the most original contemporary thinkers about the role of dance in society.

March: Jess Curtis/Gravity, CounterPULSE, San Francisco. Under the Radar, Jess Curtis’s life-affirming cabaret, was probably the year’s single most inspired show, as poetic as it was inventive. The performers were as diverse as they come, and every one was top-notch. Radar did what good art always does: change our perceptions about who we are.

April: San Francisco Ballet, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. A rich month from the SFB, with the now-departed Gonzalo Garcia glorious in a slight work, Elemental Brubeck, and two of my SFB favorites, Kristin Long and Gennadi Nedvigin, in a problematic piece, Concordia. Julia Adam’s Night also returned. Adam’s choreographic voice is idiosyncratic and spunkily irreverent. Watch for her take on Sleeping Beauty this April.

May: Pick Up Performance Company, ODC Theater, San Francisco. David Gordon, who has been creating art for more than 30 years, is a master craftsman who works brilliantly with language and movement. In Dancing Henry Five he interwove formalized and pedestrian dance with Shakespeare’s language to stunning effect.

June: Joe Goode Performance Group, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. We may know what Goode thinks of the frailties of the human heart, but we continue to watch because he keeps exploring ways to express his loves and concerns. Humansville was a fine example of dance as installation.

July: West Wave Dance Festival, Project Artaud Theater, San Francisco. The best West Wave in years — focused and straightforward — was also the last under Joan Lazarus’s stewardship. Let’s hope that showcasing quality artists (think Amy Seiwert and Kate Weare) will be utmost in the minds of future organizers.

August: Zaccho Dance Theatre, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Beckett, Mass. Watching Joanna Haigood’s haunting Invisible Wings performed in a place that served as an Underground Railroad station was both chilling and inspiring.

September: Nora Chipaumire, ODC Theater, San Francisco. Always a stunning dancer, the regal Chipaumire returned to the Bay Area with equally impressive choreography, including Chimurenga, inspired by her life in Zimbabwe.

October: Oakland Ballet Company, Paramount Theatre, Oakland. Whether this company’s tale will become a rags-to-riches story remains to be seen, but watching the hundreds in the audience give the fledgling new troupe their rousing support was not be missed.

November: San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Treading a fine line between the community groups that form her primary base and the main-stage artists that are pushing the genre ahead, producer Micaya again put on a smart, well-paced, and highly enjoyable weekend of hip-hop dance.

December: Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Project Artaud Theatre, San Francisco. Other Suns is the first piece in a trilogy that Jenkins is crafting with China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company. If the remaining parts push as fiercely at the edges of the physically possible, they will be something to look forward to in 2009.

There will be cocktails

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It’s a premiere night at the new Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, and publicists, requisite reporters, and lobby loiterers are looking for Robert Redford. After driving into the city from a stay in Carmel, he’s here — at least until he disappears down a hall or around a corner. While available, he sings the praises of Emile de Antonio (soon to get a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) but says he isn’t privy to odd rumors that — while some crucial and truly independent SF film spaces are struggling — one of the Sundance’s upscale theaters might be devoted to local and experimental film.

SFBG What connections will there be between the Sundance Cinemas and the large number of film festivals that happen in the Bay Area? For example, the American Indian Film Festival happens in San Francisco every fall, and I was wondering if it might take place here.

ROBERT REDFORD I can’t answer that — I would love it if it could, both from a personal standpoint and from a political standpoint in working to free Leonard Peltier, which hasn’t happened yet, which is a crime. I think the fact that [Bill] Clinton didn’t pardon him and yet pardoned Mark Rich was a complete failure on his part.

Two festivals that I can guarantee we’ll have a strong connection to, though, are the San Francisco International [Film] Festival and the [SF International] Asian American Film Festival. (Johnny Ray Huston)

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: Tonight we dine in hell

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Ah, 2007: as of this writing, the five top-grossing movies of the year were three-quels (Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), a chunk of Harry Potter’s golden calf (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), and the world’s flashiest ad for eBay (Transformers). That the biggest box office hit (Spidey raked in more than $336 million) was also the biggest disappointment is only fitting in a year that was characterized by new heights of hype. Did anyone really like 300 beyond its campy and mockable aspects, or did they just think they liked it because the Internet told them to?

I’ll admit I’m crabby, but I’m a victim of hype as much as anyone else. (The trailer for Iron Man and hell, even just the poster art for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are making me greet 2008 with giddy anticipation.) I probably saw more than 300 movies (including 300) this year, many from the Tinseltown factory — a place that saps originality, force-feeds us things like fat suits and the Rock, and still leaves us frantically panting for more. And when I say us, I mean me. But although the overriding trend for 2007’s mainstream movies was mediocrity and there’s a feeling as December ends that the past 12 months were full of a whole lotta nothing, there were also some thematic similarities worth noting. (Note: there might be some spoilers here, so if you’ve been eagerly awaiting Death Sentence‘s cable debut, you’ve been warned.)

BUNS IN THE OVEN As I noted in my Juno review ("Birth of a Sensation: Ellen Page and Juno," 12/12/07), that film, combined with Waitress and Knocked Up, made 2007 the year the ever-popular celebrity-baby trend jumped from the pages of US Weekly to the big screen. In Waitress an unhappily married small-town gal is impregnated by her surly hubby; she soon falls for the hunky new guy in town, who happens to be her doctor. In Knocked Up a hot, mysteriously single TV reporter decides she’ll pop out the kid of a one-night stand she can barely stand to look in the eye. And in Juno a tart-tongued high schooler — in a family way after an experimental dalliance with her best friend — plucks her kid’s adoptive parents from the PennySaver. Each of these films have unique moments: Keri Russell’s Waitress postbirth epiphany; Knocked Up‘s awkward baby-on-board sex scene; and Juno‘s simple acknowledgement of the fact that abortion is a safe, legal option for women who find themselves unprepared for motherhood. By contrast, check out Romanian import 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, opening in early February 2008. A harrowing look at the illegal abortion trade in that country’s Communist 1980s, it well earned the top prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and contains nary a hamburger phone.

WESTERNS First the pirate movie made a comeback, and now we’ve got all kinds of westerns filling up our eyeholes — including the year’s best film, No Country for Old Men, a contemporary spin on the genre that imagines the Wild West as not just a place but a state of mind. More cut-and-dried was 3:10 to Yuma, which featured good guys, bad guys, shoot-outs, stagecoach robberies, and some seriously old-school hat fetishizing. Harder to classify: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a hypnotic, arty, lengthy study of the western myth from within the myth. The title characters — portrayed in great turns by Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck — are neither heroes nor villains, but rather men with guns and very few morals, those they have applying to loyalty, decency, and respect for human life. In short, fascinating.

SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE It’s true, I’m a Charles Bronson fanatic who has often and loudly praised the wonders of the Death Wish films, including my personal favorite, Death Wish 3. So I anticipated the double-decker revenge sandwich of Death Sentence and The Brave One with a certain gruesome glee. Too bad neither movie really rocked it. Death Sentence — directed by Saw‘s James Wan and starring Kevin Bacon — went the distance by offing women and (oh god, no!) children. The Brave One offers a few pleasures, namely that scene on the subway in which Jodie Foster pops a guy for, basically, getting up in her face. Mostly, though, both films spent way too much time showing how their protagonists felt after committing acts of violence: fear, guilt, elation, excitement, or otherwise.

True vengeance films don’t bother with that shit — they start with a grievous act (in Death Wish 3 it’s the senseless killing of Bronson’s military buddy, whose biggest crime is living in a crummy neighborhood overrun with cartoonish gang members) and move right into the payback’s-a-bitch phase. Cops who secretly support the good work of heavily armed vigilantes are also a traditional staple; I don’t think Terrence Howard’s sad-eyed, Foster-followin’ Brave One detective really qualified. I can see updating the vengeance film for these more sensitive times, but — wait, no I can’t. Vengeance films with morals bad. Who needs ’em?

OH YEAH, THAT WAR THING You know when you turn on the news, and you see that story that was on yesterday, and last week, and last year too, about that business going on in Iraq? Wait, you don’t watch the news? Nah, neither do moviegoers, who didn’t give two poops about movies with Iraq war themes (I’m including everything from In the Valley of Elah to The Hills Have Eyes 2 here). I suppose if Blades of Glory can’t heal a broken nation, neither can Paul Haggis.

HORROR IS DEAD I almost forgot about The Hills Have Eyes 2 until I typed it above. There was no singular horror sensation this year, or even a really good sleeper, like 2006’s The Descent. Other releases that underwhelmed the horrorati: 1408, Resident Evil: Extinction, 30 Days of Night, Halloween, The Reaping, Vacancy, 28 Weeks Later, and Saw IV (already in the works: Saw V). As usual, the best horror films were in limited release (The Last Winter) or foreign — spooky Spanish thriller The Orphanage, which pays homage to Poltergeist among others (including The Others), hits theaters Dec. 28.

THE MAGIC NUMBER? This was the year of third sequels, some already mentioned above, of which only The Bourne Ultimatum did anything interesting. The slate for 2008 is pretty much locked in — this time next year, Avatar! — and it’s choked with a fair amount of sequels. Batman, Hellboy, Harry Potter, the Mummy, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Rambo, the Narnia kids, and the Star Trek crew are all poised to lead you back into butter-flavored temptation. Now, I don’t think the fact that a film is a sequel automatically means it will suck: I’m willing to sit through just about anything, because no matter how much crap I see, or how many films start off great and veer horribly off course (here’s lookin’ at you, I Am Legend), I never give up hope for the movies. And if that makes me no better than one of 300‘s digitally enhanced Spartans facing certain doom, so be it. See you next year! *

CHERYL EDDY’S TOP 10

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

2. Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie, US)

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

4. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US)

5. Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

6. Superbad (Greg Mottola, US)

7. The Wizard of Gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis, US, 1970) with Lewis in person, Clay Theatre, Nov. 2

8. Mister Lonely (Harmony Korine, UK)

9. Control (Anton Corbijn, UK/US/Australia/Japan) and Joy Division (Grant Gee, UK, 2006)

10. SpaceDisco One (Damon Packard, US)

Year in Film: The other side of the mirror

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Is defining I’m Not There the same thing as defending it? Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic antibiography of, to quote the tagline, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" has inspired all sorts of platitudes since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so many that it’s hard not to feel late for the party only a few months after. Still, the fact remains: from listening to Biograph cassettes in the backseat of my mom’s car to reading Greil Marcus’s visionary accounts of The Basement Tapes and "Like a Rolling Stone," I’ve had Dylan on my mind, always prepared to apprehend another side of him.

It’s hard not to feel privileged watching I’m Not There as both a Dylan enthusiast and a cinephile. You can read it between the lines of an erudite review like J. Hoberman’s — didja catch the references to Suze Rotolo and Masculine Feminine? So then, a solipsistic designation for a solipsistic movie: I’m Not There is a catalog and a critique, a hall of mirrors, multivalent and prismatic, like Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) turned inside out. It is epigrammatic rather than evocative, and made to be written about.

It is also a twisted kind of biopic, something worth noting with everyone from Ray Charles to Scott Walker getting the treatment. The fad for music biopics and documentaries isn’t unrelated to the tendency toward remakes and tie-ins now apparent everywhere in the entertainment business. Only a couple of years after Walk the Line and Ray, some biopic conventions are already brittle enough to encourage both a throwaway parody like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and a hardcore dissertation like I’m Not There (the films have more in common than you might think). Haynes takes the biopic’s tendency toward flashback-reliant storytelling, for instance, and transforms it into a looping, fractured portrait. Name-dropping is the biopic’s natural territory, but Haynes’s esoteric (Moondog in the opening credits) and cryptic (it’s alright, Ma, it’s only Ritchie Havens) references only add to his film’s foggy rendition.

This is as it should be with Dylan, the singer who at the tender age of 22 began a protest song with the lyric "Oh my name it is nothing, my age it means less." The feedback loops produced by the film’s strategy of quotation and fragmentation work to elucidate Dylan’s critical velocity, the way his different eras seem both terminal (the electric Dylan played by Cate Blanchett is shown in a morgue, and there are intimations that other versions of him are dead too) and porous. Where other music biopics seek to ground a singer’s aura in terms of biography and motif, Haynes runs in the opposite direction, prioritizing an abstract organizing principle like that of D.W. Griffith’s innovative 1916 foray into multiplanar cinematic storytelling, Intolerance.

It should be noted that Weinstein’s ad campaign pointedly undercuts Haynes’s game. Dylan only materializes twice — in text during the opening credits and in person for the movie’s final, mesmerizing close-up — but the I’m Not There poster lists the main cast with the misleading line "All are Bob Dylan."

Blatant Oscar pandering? Perhaps. But what does it say that some of my favorite sequences in I’m Not There are the most conventional? Haynes accesses the "romantic" Dylan of Blonde on Blonde–New Morning–Blood on the Tracks with an interesting Russian-doll trick — Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is introduced as an actor portraying Jack Rollins (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Dylan, played by Christian Bale) in a biopic within the biopic titled Grain of Sand. With the exception of an Arthur Rimbaud insert, Robbie is the only Dylan facsimile who never plays a guitar, and this makes sense since the Dylan of "I Want You," "Shelter from the Storm," and "Idiot Wind" always seemed more man than musician. Meanwhile, Robbie’s thorny relationship with Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) provides I’m Not There with some desperately needed warmth. A François Truffaut–ish meeting in a diner, a montage of bohemian New York, and a divorce in the late-day light of the Richard Nixon era: they’re all strands of a singular story, which is exactly what I’m Not There is not.

I felt fully prepared to dig Haynes’s panoply, and after seeing the movie three times I’m pretty sure I do. In its constant double-edged critiques and heady invocations of the nonexistent, I’m convinced the film represents one of the most energetic (and perhaps cathartic) directing performances of the year. And yet something’s lost in I’m Not There‘s reshuffling of the biopic deck. Dylan has indeed spent much of his career putting us on, but this is only one part of his impact, with the other more elemental component encompassing the sound of his voice, the exciting bite of his phrasing, and the lightning crack that opens "Like a Rolling Stone."

These sparks of electricity are, after all, the kind of thing rock biopics were made for. The brute power of cinema is such that with a Dolby soundtrack, heavy close-ups, and a gliding camera, even the hammiest dramatization can achieve moments of rock ‘n’ roll bliss. Insofar as Anton Corbijn’s portrait of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Control) prizes re-creation over fragmentation, it might fairly be seen as the polar opposite of Haynes’s broken mirror. Corbijn takes the biopic conceit of mimicry to dizzying, self-aware heights thanks to location shooting, a performer (Sam Riley) who learned to match Curtis’s every twitch, and brilliant cinematography evocative of Corbijn’s own iconic photographs of the band.

Control is very good, with excellent acting and convincing performance scenes (two things that go a long way toward making a satisfying rock biopic), though it fails where biopics typically do. Indeed, it’s always a bad sign when a voice-over is introduced more than an hour into a movie. As Curtis shuts down, Corbijn flails to unpack the singer’s psychology, and the voice-over contrivance only fudges the moment of Curtis’s maximum anguish. Still, there is at least one unforgettable scene here — when Curtis stalks the street toward his day job, the soundtrack raw with punk, a graceful camera turn revealing the back of his jacket, emblazoned in chalky white with the word "HATE" — that offers the euphoric, sexy blast that is so often lost in I’m Not There‘s complex din.

There are other forms of music biopic, including the kind that’s genuinely happy to take liberties (see: 8 Mile, Almost Famous). Kurt Cobain about a Son sounded like an interesting experiment on paper, with a soundtrack culled from Michael Azerrad’s late-night interviews with Cobain jutting up against lyrical images from the Pacific Northwest. But the film is ultimately soured by its unresolved discrepancies (it’s hard to make out what such self-consciously pretty images are doing running under Cobain’s gravely, often vitriolic voice-over) and its discussion-ending lack of original Nirvana music. Cobain relates his thrill at hearing "Love Buzz" on college radio for the first time, and we listen to … Iggy Pop?

What does it say about Cobain’s legacy that both cinematic attempts at his life (the other being Gus Van Sant’s evocative 2005 Last Days) have been narrated from such a remove? For one thing, that the slightest morsel of Kurt is good enough to buy distribution. The parade continues, leading one to compile a wish list of future biopic subjects. Arthur Russell, maybe, or perhaps Nina Simone? Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, is certainly building toward a good one with all of those onstage breakdowns behind her, and I’d like nothing better than for Haynes to take an honest crack at Karen Dalton or Judee Sill. What of Big Star, John Fahey, Tropicália’s icons, Elizabeth Cotten, Galaxie 500 (directed by Andrew Bujalski), or the Mamas and the Papas? And won’t someone think of poor Donovan, patiently waiting his turn ever since being put down by you know who in Don’t Look Back? *

MAX GOLDBERG’S BAKER’S DOZEN

ON BEAUTY


•<\!s>Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, US/France)

•<\!s>Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)

•<\!s>En la Ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, Spain)

•<\!s>Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France)

•<\!s>In Between Days (Kim So-yong, US/Canada/South Korea)

REMNANTS OF THE REAL


•<\!s>Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

•<\!s>My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

•<\!s>V.O. (William E. Jones, US)

•<\!s>The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US)

NERVOUS NIGHTMARES


•<\!s>Zodiac (David Fincher, US)

•<\!s>Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/US)

•<\!s>Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/Belgium)

•<\!s>No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US)

Benjamin Tinker’s top 10 musical experiences and releases

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richardpinhas.jpg
‘Fro sure: Richard Pinhas Trio.

The Society of Rockets member ushers in his favorites for 2007.

1) Hanging out on Jean Herve Peron’s farm in Schiphorst, Germany, at his annual Avant-garde Festival, and hearing sounds differently afterward.

2) Being part of something that led to a 12-inch vinyl gatefold, the Society of Rockets’ Our Paths Related (Underpop)

3) Reissues, good for oldsters and kids alike: from Bee Gees: The Studio Albums 1967-1968 (Rhino) to Cluster’s Sowiesoso (Water).

4) Two nights of the Richard Pinhas Trio live.

5) Ornette Coleman with his son on drums and three bassists at the Masonic Center, Oct. 28. Not the soaring, almost liturgical music of 2005’s SFJAZZ performance, but a blistering of angry, almost punk evaluation on the state of the union.

Check it twice

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ALEXIS GEORGOPOULOS’S TOP 10


WRITER/EDITOR, ARP


•<\!s><0x0007>Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks). One of the few albums that deserved the hype, Person Pitch delivered what Animal Collective could not.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Zanzibara, Volume 3: Ujamaa (Buda Musique). Ujamaa focuses on 1960s Tanzania and recalls the ecstatic languidity of Tabu Ley Rocehrau and the imprint’s Angola ’60s compilations.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Dirty Space Disco (Tigersushi). Parisians Pilooski and Dirty Sound System are some of the most exciting discoveries of the year.

•<\!s><0x0007>Thomas Fehlmann, Honigpumpe (Kompakt). This was the year I got back into minimal techno after a few years away. Lodged somewhere between Kompakt’s "Pop Ambient" series and Superpitcher, Fehlmann made his strongest album since 2004’s Visions of Blah.

•<\!s><0x0007>Lilith Records. In 2007 the enigmatic new label that appears to come from the Russian Federation reissued lavish vinyl versions of Caetano Veloso’s Araca Azul, Harmonia’s De Luxe, Tim Hardin 2, No New York, Claudine Longet’s Colours, Black Merda’s Black Merda, and Cluster’s Zuckerzeit. The only reissue imprint that rivals them in scope and quality is the Bay Area’s Water Records.

•<\!s><0x0007>Iasos, Inter-Dimensional Music (Iasos Unity/Em, 1975). With so many new artists taking the easy electronic-prog route, it’s good to realize there’s much more where that came from — in the place between space rock and new age. This makes me think of Alice Coltrane and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Evening Star (Editions Eg) but doesn’t really sound like any of them. The sleeve is incredible.

•<\!s><0x0007>Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel DVD (Sublime Frequencies). The last 15 minutes, focusing on Tuareg musicians, contain some of the most ecstatic and tranced-out jams I’ve heard or seen.

•<\!s><0x0007>Various artists, Brazil 70 (Soul Jazz). No longer borrowing from John Cage or the Beatles, Jards Mascale, and Novos Baianos ushered in what may be the most exciting time in Brazil’s musical history.

•<\!s><0x0007>Frank Bretschneider, Rhythm (Raster-Noton). He may be working in the domain of clicks and cuts, but instead of pursuing pure sine wave research, Bretschneider — picking up where SND left off but surpassing them — mimics the rhythms of dubstep, minimal techno, and hip-hop. Listen loud and your mind will be rearranged.

•<\!s><0x0007>Shit Robot, "Chasm"/"Wrong Galaxy" (DFA). Yes, the name is awful. Nevertheless, DFA’s recent signing of this Markus Lambkin project is too good to pass over. Lambkin has been learning from the best of Carl Craig and Berlin and Cologne techno, and his full-length is eagerly awaited.

WILL YORK’S TOP 10


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

(2) <0x0007>Ace Records: Bob Lind, Elusive Butterfly: The Complete Jack Nitzsche Sessions; various artists, Phil’s Spectre III: A Third Wall of Soundalikes; and various artists, Hard Workin’ Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story, Vol. 2

(3) <0x0007>Bloodcount, Seconds CD/DVD (Screwgun)

(4) <0x0007>Clockcleaner, Babylon Rules (Load)

(5) <0x0007>Terminal Sound System, Compressor (Extreme)

(6) <0x0007>ugEXPLODE label: Nondor Nevai, The Wooden Machine Music, and Flying Luttenbachers, Incarceration by Abstraction

(7) <0x0007>Down, Over the Under (Down)

(8) <0x0007>The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes (Cherry Tree/Interscope)

(9) <0x0007>Slough Feg, "Tiger! Tiger!," Hardworlder (Cruz del Sur)

(10) <0x0007>Tesla, "Ball of Confusion," Real to Reel (Tesla Electric Co.)

MARCUS CROWDER’S TOP 10-PLUS


WRITER


•<\!s><0x0007>Aretha Franklin, Aretha Live at Fillmore West (deluxe edition) (Rhino). So electric you’ll get goose bumps.

•<\!s><0x0007>Jason Lindner Big Band, Live at the Jazz Gallery (Anzic)

•<\!s><0x0007>Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy, Cornell 1964 (Blue Note)

•<\!s><0x0007>Sam Yahel Trio, Truth and Beauty (Origin). Talented friends get into the groove of a young man and his keyboard.

•<\!s><0x0007>Joshua Redman Trio, Back East (Nonesuch)

•<\!s><0x0007>Joe Henry, Civilians (Anti-). Fiercely literate adult rock without acronyms.

•<\!s><0x0007>Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Mondavi Center, UC Davis, Feb. 2.

•<\!s><0x0007>Jason Moran with T.S. Monk and ensemble, the Monk Town Hall Concert, Herbst Theatre, May 19. A large band swings very, very hard.

•<\!s><0x0007>SFJAZZ Collective, Live 2007: Fourth Annual Concert Tour (SFJAZZ). Smart arrangements with the necessary new blood of underrated pianist Renee Rosnes.

•<\!s><0x0007>Kiki and Herb, American Conservatory Theater, July 13. We need their holiday show.

•<\!s><0x0007>The Sea and Cake, "Up on Crutches," Everybody (Thrill Jockey). The song I couldn’t stop playing.

AMANDA MARIA MORRISON


WRITER


•<\!s><0x0007>MIA, Kala (Interscope)

•<\!s><0x0007>Feist, The Reminder (Cherry Tree/Interscope)

•<\!s><0x0007>Calle 13, Residente o Visitante (Sony)

•<\!s><0x0007>Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Motown)

•<\!s><0x0007>Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella)

•<\!s><0x0007>Apostle of Hustle, National Anthem of Nowhere (Arts and Crafts)

•<\!s><0x0007>Jose Gonzalez, "In Our Nature" (Mute)

•<\!s><0x0007>El-P, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (Definitive Jux)

•<\!s><0x0007>The Federation, "It’s Whateva" (Southwest Federation/Reprise)

•<\!s><0x0007>Chingo Bling, They Can’t Deport Us All (Asylum)

THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Aaron Ross, Shapeshifter (Grass Roots Record Co.). The Hella member’s solo LP is ragged singer-songwriter stuff that seems to do everything wrong. It’s strident, too long, and too loud; it’s chirpy and pained; it must have broken a guitar’s worth of strings. And then, somewhere around the point it stops being ugly, it becomes transcendent — an album with more heart than any I’ve heard in a while.

(2) <0x0007>The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge). How quickly you realize the stunning last song, "My Body Is a Cage," will be a testament to the trust the Montreal group has built, understood, and not yet defaulted on. Few groups have a better sense of what they are and mean, and the Arcade Fire know what they do right: write hymns.

(3) <0x0007>MIA, Kala (Interscope). On her second album, Maya Arulpragasam turned a government-forced world tour into an excuse to make her music even better traveled.

(4) <0x0007>Ferraby Lionheart, Ferraby Lionheart EP (Nettwerk). Lush, antique, richly sung pop that plays like an argument for Jon Brion. Wes Anderson will one day base an entire script on a Lionheart disc.

(5) <0x0007>Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder). The best moments on this gorgeous, out-of-nowhere release are when you’ve been listening to sweetheart old-time country pop, then realize you are listening to Robert Plant. There’s a whisper of "Gallows Pole" in "Fortune Teller" and "Going to California" in "Please Read the Letter," and that’s the great pleasure here: an almost mystical Led Zeppelin overlay in music that’s nowhere near classic rock.

(6) <0x0007>Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface). Psychedelia wouldn’t have a bad name if more of it were like this. The rural Pennsylvania group counters séance vocals and guitar and keyboard spazz-outs with focus and snappy drums.

(7) <0x0007>St. Vincent, Marry Me (Beggars Banquet). Anne Clark is a Sufjan Stevens crony, but Marry Me is eventually hers alone. Sinister electrofuzz, deft polyrhythms, and scarily chameleonic vocals give her indie pop a postmodern turn.

(8) <0x0007>Blitzen Trapper, Wild Mountain Nation (Lidkercow). At turns pure classic rock — all jammy blues riffs and sun-dappled vocals — countrified songwriter stuff, and something loudly proggy and textural, Wild Mountain Nation sends salvos in several directions.

(9) <0x0007>UGK, UGK: Underground Kingz (Jive). Bun B and Pimp C sound ecstatic to be back at it, and they turn in a two-disc Southern hip-hop epic with cameos that are actually exciting. André 3000 is drawly and perfect on "Int’l Players Anthem," and hearing Dizzee Rascal over this beat is a treat.

(10) <0x0007>Miracle Fortress, Five Roses (Secret City). Montreal’s Graham Van Pelt shoots straight for the Beach Boys here, which means his songs sound a little derivative and a lot lovely. Pop’s melodic purism, dressed up for audiophiles.

BROLIN WINNING’S TOP 10


442 RECORDS, MP3.COM


•<\!s><0x0007>Percee P, Perseverance (Stones Throw)

The long-awaited solo album from Bronx legend Percee P does not disappoint, with its intricate rhyme schemes and exceptional production from Stones Throw’s resident maestro Madlib. Alarmingly dope from start to finish, with collabos with Diamond D and Vinnie Paz. Look for the remix album in January.

•<\!s><0x0007>Prodigy, Return of the Mac (Koch)

A lot of older fans gave up on Mobb Deep years ago, and their horrible last record seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. But on this independent release, Prodigy comes alive, spitting flagrant murder raps over Alchemist’s outstanding blaxploitation-style beats. Unfortunately, P is heading into a three-and-a-half-year bid — I hope he finishes his new solo joint first.

•<\!s><0x0007>Kamackeris, Artz and Craftz (Mindbenda)

Also known as Kwite Def or KD, Kamackeris is a New York rapper best known for his work with Monsta Island Czars and a show-stealing appearance on the first MF Doom album. He’s blessed with one of the grimiest voices in hip-hop, and his rugged yet introspective wordplay shines over X-Ray’s cinematic tracks. Completely slept on but crazy good.

•<\!s><0x0007>Camp Lo, "Ticket For 2" (self-released)

These cats have been MIA for a minute, and it’s been a full decade since their classic debut, but Cheeba and Suede come back something serious on this ultrasmooth single produced by longtime homey Ski Beatz. Unfortunately, it’s not on their recent album, but it’s all over the Internet.

•<\!s><0x0007>Snoop Dogg, "Sexual Eruption, a.k.a. Sensual Seduction" (unreleased)

Man! While T-Pain, Akon, and countless others assault the airwaves with their hypercomputerized, later-era Cher-style "R&B," Big Snoop takes it back to the Roger Troutman essence, freaking the (virtual) talk box on this ode to female orgasm. The song is awesome enough, but the throwback video, complete with flying saucers and a keytar, is something to behold.

•<\!s><0x0007>50 Cent, "I Get Money," Curtis (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope)

He lost the sales battle with Kanye West, G Unit is fading fast, and Curtis is his worst LP to date. However, even his millions of haters have to admit: this song is a banger.

•<\!s><0x0007>Devin the Dude, live at South by Southwest, March 14

Mild-mannered but funny as hell, Devin has been putting it down for a long time now, winning fans with his mellow storytelling rhymes, low-key singing, and affinity for all weed and women. I saw him live three times this year, but this show in his home state was the best: he rolled with the Coughee Brothaz and injected some much-needed funk into the indie-centric convention.

•<\!s><0x0007>Third annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival

Unlike the more hyped-up "Rock the Bells," this festival got everything right. Free show, great location on the water in BK, and all-day performances from Ghostface, Sean P, Large Professor, El Michaels Affair, Dres from Black Sheep, and others. Throw in surprise appearances from Chubb Rock and Jeru, and you’ve got middle-aged rap fan heaven.

•<\!s><0x0007>Sonic Youth at the Berkeley Community Theatre, July 19

As part of the "Don’t Look Back" concert series, in which artists perform a classic album in its entirety, Thurston Moore and the gang revisited their 1988 epic Daydream Nation (DGC) to the delight of a sold-out crowd. Next time I hope they do Bad Moon Rising.

•<\!s><0x0007>ZZ Top at Konocti Harbor, April 21

All I can say is "wow." Despite my driving several hours to and from Clear Lake and getting rained on the entire time, this was amazing. These dudes are mad old, but they put on a better show than most kids a fraction of their age.

KANDIA CRAZY HORSE’S TOP 10


WRITER


(1) <0x0007>Rufus Wainwright, Release the Stars (Geffen)

(2) <0x0007>Tinariwen, Aman Iman (World Village)

(3) <0x0007>Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder)

(4) <0x0007>Betty Davis, Betty Davis (Light in the Attic)

(5) <0x0007>Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

(6) <0x0007>Donnie, The Daily News (SoulThought Entertainment)

(7) <0x0007>Gogol Bordello, Super Taranta! (Side One Dummy)

(8) <0x0007>Hanson, The Walk (Three Car Garage)

(9) <0x0007>Babyshambles, Shotter’s Nation (Astralwerks)

(10) <0x0007>Beirut, The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing)

VICE COOLER’S TOP GIGS


XBXRX, HAWNAY TROOF, KIT


•<\!s><0x0007>Playing to a confused crowd in Beijing, China, then riding on the back of a motorcycle cab. The next day I was eating at a vegan buffet in a mall where you paid not by what you ate but by how quickly you finished.

•<\!s><0x0007>In the Netherlands, I performed to 550,000 people on drugs who think that camping out in sewage is "awesome." Lots of moms and dads with huge glazed eyes, hula-hooping and juggling glow sticks at 4 a.m.

•<\!s><0x0007>XBXRX having to sleep at a (dirty and unkempt) brothel. There were bloodstains and tire treads (?) on my pillow. *

For more lists, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Year in Music: Move me

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It was during my early teens that the obsession struck. I oversaw the building of a stage, booked a bunch of bad garage bands, and charged $10 for admission to boondocks Maryland’s first semiannual Punk Fest. During my high school years I snuck into the seediest venues that Baltimore and Washington DC had to offer — still the scariest I’ve seen to date. By my arrival in San Francisco, I was a full-fledged music scene devotee, immediately taking a job at the Great American Music Hall to pay the rent during college. My SoMa warehouse hosted concerts a few times a month — my bed was a futon unrolled over a segment of 58 Tehama’s stage. For years my drinks were comped, my seats were great, and I was always on the guest list.

It wasn’t until the final months of 2006 that I realized I’ve spent most of my postpubescent life inside concert venues. It was getting increasingly difficult to ignore my ringing ears, to justify the copious waves of shift-off cocktails, and to keep my love for music intact. Flag down any soundperson, bartender, or bouncer working anywhere in the city tonight, and they’ll tell you the music industry breeds bitterness.

How to live in San Francisco without working in the music business? At least my job kept me firmly in the so-called creative class — a label that made me feel much better about my financial situation. Moving to a less expensive city could mean a better standard of living and a way to cut the industry apron strings for good. My husband, having spent more than a decade working in music stores, was game. His only stipulation was that he would not, under any condition, be taking a record store job ever again.

We caught a train to Chicago, where my husband promptly took a job at a record store. I managed to stay away from music for a month, instead focusing my energies on writing food reviews for local publications. But by the time the festival season rolled around, the prospect of seeing Patti Smith perform against the impressive skyline of my new hometown ruined everything. The University of Chicago recently published a study comparing the music scenes of American’s top metropolises. Chicago kicked some serious ass. The study described Chi-town as "a music city in hiding."

I doubt I’ll ever shake music totally, but living in Chicago has taught me it doesn’t have to be a way of life anymore. When it comes to the scene these days, I’m nothing more than a music fan in hiding.

TOP 10


1. During my last night at the Great American Music Hall, I danced like crazy to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

2. Tyva Kyzy. Anyone who missed this all-female group of Tuvan throat singers is probably still kicking themselves.

3. Barbarasteele’s 7-inch release party at Cafe du Nord blew some minds. Rest in peace, Mike J.

4. Patti Smith performing at Lollapalooza in the pouring rain.

5. No, I wasn’t among the Milanese elite who got to see Ennio Morricone at La Scala opera house, but just knowing about this show makes me a better person.

6. Rediscovering Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas (Snapper UK).

7. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir (Bloodshot).

8. Thanks, Sopranos, for making Journey relevant again.

9. Happy centennial to the glorious buildings that house the Great American Music Hall and the Cafe du Nord.

10. De la Soul closing out the Pitchfork Music Festival in style — with a little help from Prince Paul.

Year in Music: Keep on truckin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

I do a lot of driving, which sucks. I don’t like cars. They stress me out, they mess up the environment, and even 10-year-old minivans are stupidly expensive, but I live in the sticks and do a lot of traveling to places where public transportation is an urban myth, so I don’t have much of a choice. However, one thing makes long trips in the car bearable: DJ mixes. Whether it’s neck-snapping hip-hop (perfect for manning up and not letting that 18-wheeler cut you off) or relentless techno (tailor-made for the final miles of an eight-hour jaunt to Oregon), a solid DJ mix is the perfect accompaniment to hours spent trying to go as fast as possible without getting yet another speeding ticket.

This year offered more than the usual share of potential candidates for the perfect driving mix. In addition to the typically top-notch offerings from the likes of Fabric (check James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s Fabric 36 for a spectacular romp along the edges of past and present disco) and the typically abysmal efforts by DJs voted number one by tasteless trance lovers all over the world (Armin van Buuren’s Hoover festival Universal Religion 2008 on Ultra, replete with synchronized crowd noise and snare rolls, tops that list), two stuck out in particular.

More often than not I found myself reaching for Future Soul Sessions Vol. 1 (Bagpak), on which the stop-and-start rhythms’ broken beat perfectly matched the stop-and-go traffic one usually faces when attempting to escape the Bay. Ernesto Vigo of Elevations Radio on Harlem’s WHCR did a stunning job of charting a trip through broken beat’s best, from international figures like Ty, whose flowing rap for "What You Want" is up to his usual smooth snuff, to New York cats like Bagpak boss Yellowtail, who teams up with Alison Crockett for "You Feel Me," an absolutely smashing future soul classic with a vocal break that had me frequently causing consternation in nearby drivers with my attempts to match Crockett’s vocal prowess.

Once free of the urban congestion, I invariably turned to some good old four-on-the-floor. Only one mix survived my periodic pogroms of the iPod Shuffle that stores my house and techno mixes: "Hot Oven Hand," by San Francisco’s DJ Worthy. Worthy is a rising star within the twisted techno world centered around the dirtybird Records camp, and "Hot Oven Hand" came from the label’s Web site, though there isn’t a single dirtybird track in the mix. Fair enough, since I already have all of their damn stellar output and look to mixes for the new. Instead, we’re treated to the pop-locking percolation of "Back the Beat," by Ran Shani on CR2, and the spaced-out synth swirl of Swag’s "Just Pull It Dub" of Jimpster’s "Don’t Push It" on Freerange. Yet the highlights of the mix are Worthy’s compositions, particularly the grin-inducing, squelchy bounce of "Crack El" (Leftroom) and the speaker-testing tension of "Bass Quake," on his Katabatic Records. With an absurdly stuttering, chittering hook and a progression that belies its creator’s relative newcomer status, "Bass Quake" was one of 2007’s high points. But be warned: although the impulse to stupidly wave your hands in the air is perfectly acceptable on the dance floor, it’s not advisable while doing 90 over the Tehachapi Pass in a thunderstorm. *

TUNES FOR DANCING IN YOUR CAR


1. LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great" (DFA/EMI)

2. Baby Oliver, "Primetime (Uptown Express)" (Environ)

3. Square One, "Vesuvius (Justin Martin Mix)" (Freerange)

4. Bassbin Twins, "Woppa" (Bassbin)

5. Lanu, "Disinformation" (Tru Thoughts/Ubiquity)

6. Riton, "Hammer of Thor (Roman Fluegel Mix)" (Souvenir Music)

7. Sebo K and Metro, "Transit" (Get Physical)

8. Chateau Flight, "Baltringue (Henrik Schwarz and Dixon Mix)" (Innervisions)

9. Titonton Duvante, "Oishii Manko" (Refraction)

10. Paranoid Boyz, "Paranoid" (mothership)

Year in Music: Grievous angel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

An archival recording can assume many forms, contexts, meanings. This year saw the reissue of an album unappreciated in its time (Jim Ford’s The Sounds of Our Time [Bear Family]), the compilation of genre-bound obscurities (Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series), the live performance (Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1 [Amoeba]), the stripped acoustic set (Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 [Reprise]), the radio sessions (Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 [Water]), the reconstructed unfinished work (John Phillips’s Jack of Diamonds [Varese Sarabande]), the singles collection (Vashti Bunyan’s Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964–1967 [FatCat/Dicristina]), and, perhaps closest to the bone, the fabled home recording.

Of course, some vocalists bend these categories by the nature of their performance style. This is certainly the case with Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), a double CD documenting a lovely set by Karen Dalton at a Colorado coffeehouse in 1962. It might as well be a home recording for the intimacy of the performance space — owner Joe Loop explains in the liner notes that his club held only 50 — and the entrancing, private nature of Dalton’s folk arrangements. Such a record is notable for a performer as studio-phobic as Dalton: she only recorded two albums in her lifetime (1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best [Koch] and 1971’s In My Own Time [Light in the Attic]), and rumor has it the takes for her debut were captured on the sly, when she didn’t know the tape was rolling.

All of this would be mere intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that Dalton was one of the major talents of the first folk revival, though mostly unappreciated in her own time. She died in 1993 after a bitter struggle with drugs and alcohol. Cotton Eyed Joe is educational in contextualizing this mystery voice in terms of the coffeehouse circuit, but any such historiography quickly fades when faced with her strange, time-stopping interpretations of traditionals and tunes by the likes of Ray Charles, Woody Guthrie, and Fred Neil. The voice shakes with unresolve, surrounding you and then disappearing before you can pin it down, buckling with some unknowable duress, slipping into untold dimensions.

It only takes a few bars of Dalton’s possession of Charles’s "It’s Alright" to cast the spell. Her minimal 12-string guitar work drags on the tune, her voice searching the depths of the verse for a smoldering, emotional core. Elsewhere Dalton runs through the songs she would record for her studio albums, and it’s bracing to think how long she lived with these ballads. Forty-five years later, we hear a unique act of disembodiment, a self-eulogizing worthy of critic Greil Marcus’s illustrious "Invisible Republic."

Each glimpse deepens the appeal of so many other performers from that era, and it’s tempting to see these collections as filling a specific niche in today’s music market: a hunger for mystery, substance, and story in the face of a downloader’s paradise. As more music is rendered instantly accessible, many of us wish to burrow further into the secret histories of rock, folk, and soul. We sift for treasure, perhaps wondering if the Internet isn’t inherently anathematic to the idea of discovering forgotten greatness. Such recoveries can and will proliferate online, but ground must first be broken elsewhere — in a magazine or a basement, among audio tapes or old notebooks. Performers and promoters are becoming increasingly canny in using the Web to deliver icons and bylines, but it takes a set like Cotton Eyed Joe to make the singer a saint. *

TOP 10


•Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks), and Animal Collective at the Fillmore on Sept. 17

•Jim Ford, The Sounds of Our Time (Bear Family)

•Jana Hunter, There’s No Home (Gnomonsong)

•Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), and Judee Sill, Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 (Water)

•Entrance at the Ben Lomand Indian Summer Music Festival on Sept. 1 and at the Cafe du Nord on Nov. 18

•The Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans)

•Lightning Bolt at LoBot Gallery on April 9

•Michael Hurley at the Cafe du Nord on April 18

•Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)

•Little Wings, Soft Pow’r (Rad)

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