Festival

Year in Music: Too many Top 10s

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MOCHIPET’S TOP 10 NOT RELATED TO HIMSELF OR DALY CITY RECORDS


SOLO ARTIST, DALY CITY RECORDS


1. A-Trak, Dirty South Dance (Obey)

2. Dan Deacon, Spiderman of the Rings (Carpark)

3. High on Fire, Death Is This Communion (Relapse)

4. Chris De Luca vs. Phon.o, Shotgun Wedding Vol. 7 (Violent Turd)

5. Ludicra, "In Fever," Sonic Terror Surge 2007 (Alternative Tentacles)

6. Nanos Operetta

7. Larytta, Ya-Ya-Ya (Creaked)

8. GoldieLocks

9. Edaboss, "Go Left" (featuring Gift of Gab and Lateef) (Om)

10. edIT, Certified Air Raid Material (Alpha Pup)

BEN CHASNY’S TOP 10


SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE, COMETS ON FIRE, BADGERLORE


1. Sapat, Mortise and Tenon (Siltbreeze)

2. Blues Control, Blues Control (Holy Mountain)

3. Axolotl, Telesma (Important)

4. Loren Connors, As Roses Bow: Collected Airs 1992–2002 (Family Vineyard)

5. Earth, Hibernaculum (Southern Lord)

6. Om, Pilgrimage (Southern Lord)

7. Daniel Higgs, Ancestral Songs (Holy Mountain)

8. Magik Markers, Boss (Ecstatic Peace)

9. Son of Earth, Pet (Apostasy)

10. Grinderman, Grinderman (Anti-)

BART DAVENPORT’S TOP 10


SOLO ARTIST, HONEYCUT


1. Sugar and Gold, Crème (Antenna Farm)

2. Nedelle, The Locksmith Cometh (Tangram 7s)

3. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone)

4. Rilo Kiley, Under the Blacklight (Warner Bros.)

5. St. Vincent, Marry Me (Beggars Banquet)

6. Arthur and Yu, In Camera (Hardly Art)

7. The Fiery Furnaces at Fernwood Lodge, Big Sur, Oct. 20

8. Vashti Bunyan at Central Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas, during South by Southwest, March 15

9. Von Iva at the Uptown, Oakl., Nov. 9

10. Ghostland Observatory at Mezzanine, Nov. 29

RICHIE UNTERBERGER’S TOP REISSUES


WRITER


1. Pentangle, The Time Has Come: 1967–73 (Sanctuary/Castle)

2. Fairport Convention, Live at the BBC (Universal)

3. Various artists, Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 (Rhino)

4. Dusty Springfield, Live at the BBC DVD (Universal)

5. Various Artists, The American Folk-Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963–1966 DVD (Hip-O)

6. The Blossom Toes, We Are Ever So Clean (Sunbeam)

7. The Zombies, Into the Afterlife (Big Beat)

8. The Incredible String Band, Across the Airwaves: BBC Radio Recordings 1969–1974 (Hux)

9. Various artists, Stax/Volt Revue: Live in Norway 1967 DVD (Concord)

10.Various artists, The Birth of Surf (Ace)

JUMBO’S TOP 10


LIFESAVAS


1. Kanye West and Lifesavas at Quebec City Festival, July 5–15

2. Jill Scott, "Crown Royal," The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3 (Hidden Beach)

3. Talk to Me with Don Cheadle

4. Little Brother, "Step It Up," Getback (ABB)

5. My Brother Marvin musical

6. Prince, Planet Earth (Sony)

7. Nas with Snoop Dogg at Mezzanine, after the Warriors eliminated Dallas, May 3

8. Rolling Stone picks Lifesavas for "Ten Artists to Watch in 2007"

9. Kanye West, "Stronger," Graduation (Roc-A-Fella)

10. Ledisi’s 2008 album

WEASEL WALTER’S TOP 10


FLYING LUTTENBACHERS, XBXRX, BURMESE


1. The Peter Evans Quartet, The Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)

Peter Evans is one of the few musicians I’ve ever seen that have made my jaw drop. Trust me on this one.

2. Marnie Stern, In Advance of the Broken Arm (Kill Rock Stars)

She came out of nowhere, playing some unholy mixture of girlie indie pop and Orthrelm, and kicked all of our asses.

3. Mayhem, Ordo ad Chao (Season of Mist)

The gods of Norwegian black metal get weirder and better.

4. The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky DVD box (Starz/Anchor Bay)

Essential metasurrealism from this filmic genius at an insanely low price.

5. Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Sony Legacy)

Insanely lavish box from Davis’s notorious 1972–74 period, during which rhythm and skronk ruled.

6. The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 DVDs (Fantoma)

Pure eye candy for psychos.

7. The Flying Luttenbachers, Incarcerated by Abstraction (ugEXPLODE)

I would be lying if I didn’t tell you this was the best album released this year. It will destroy you with its dissonant structural complexity.

8. Hawkwind

I recently began overdosing on the early output of this mythic ur-metal space-rock juggernaut, particularly when Lemmy was with them.

9. StSanders’s Shred videos on YouTube

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve laughed as hard and long this year at anything else. Viva la suck!

10. Zs, Arms (Planaria)

This rigorously intense new music group from New York keeps delivering the rock with staggering precision.

Converting the rock

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Native American spiritual leader Marshall "Golden Eagle" Jack admits he was just a kid in 1969 when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island. They claimed that the island’s reclassification as surplus property following the 1963 closure of Alcatraz Prison entitled them to take possession of the iconic island.

But Jack says he knows enough people from the American Indian Movement, which began advocating for urban Indians in the late ’60s, to understand that "the people standing up for their rights back then didn’t have enough clout in the legal system" to keep the island and build an American Indian cultural center on its craggy slopes.

Instead, the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is operated by the National Park Service. Today it attracts 1.5 million visitors per year, the GGNRA’s chief of public affairs, Rich Weideman, says. But having a brutal former prison as one of San Francisco’s top tourist attractions is unsettling to some.

So Jack and AIM founder Dennis Banks, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, Laynee Bluebird Woman, and Rose Mary Cambra of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe have sponsored Proposition C, a nonbinding declaration on the February 2008 ballot that would make it city policy to explore acquiring Alcatraz Island and setting up a global peace center in place of the prison.

They envision a white domed conference center, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and what their campaign literature calls an "array of architecturally advanced domed Artainment [sic] multimedia centers," which sounds more like a new age resort than a Native American cultural center. But Jack said the most important thing is turning the page on the island’s bleak modern history.

"My bottom line is getting the actual prison off the island," Jack explains. "There’s a lot of crystal energy, spiritually wise, on the island. It’s an icon for a lot of tribes around the Bay Area who were here way before the Europeans. A Global Peace Center idea is just an option, but if it doesn’t manifest that way, if it becomes an ecological center, fine."

Jack serves as assistant director of the Global Peace Foundation, a branch of the nonprofit San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, which Mill Valley resident Da Vid founded in the late 1970s — about the time he first had a vision of domes on Alcatraz.

"I saw them during a Celestial Healing Festival on Mt. Tam in 1978, seven years after the Indian occupation ended," says Da Vid, who says he is a medical doctor and artist — and currently serves as treasurer of the Alcatraz Conversion Project, a political action committee whose coffers contain $30,000 from Da Vid’s mother, Miriam Ornstein.

Da Vid is also the founder of the Light Party, which he describes as "a spiritual–political party using its resources to promote the Alcatraz Conversion Project in order to garner support for the construction of a Global Peace Center."

But to the San Francisco Republican Party, Prop. C represents nothing but a tax burden. "Were this proposal implemented the burden of maintaining and operating Alcatraz would shift from the federal government to San Francisco taxpayers," San Francisco Republican Party chair Christine Hughes writes in an official ballot argument against the measure, also claiming the measure’s sponsors are "an unaccountable and loosely organized nonprofit which envisions a billion dollar project administered by a local-international trust."

Yet GPF assistant director Kevin Ohnsman told the Guardian, "We feel that the Republican Party’s opposition to Prop. C is our best endorsement.

"Once acquired by the city, a portion of the considerable revenue from the ferryboats will be shared with the city," Ohnsman said. "This income will be more than sufficient to cover the minimal administrative costs for maintaining Alcatraz."

Currently ferry tickets to Alcatraz cost $16.50 each, of which about 25 percent, or $4.5 million annually, goes to the GGNRA, with the bulk of those monies covering Alcatraz’s night security and maintenance of the buildings and sewer.

According to San Francisco controller Ed Harrington, "should the proposed policy statement be approved, it would not increase the cost of government."

But that’s only because the policy statement wouldn’t do anything.

"However, should San Francisco actually work to acquire Alcatraz Island from the feds," Harrington adds, "there would be significant costs."

But Da Vid says there’s something more important at stake than money. He asks, "The bottom line is, do we want an old, decaying prison to continue to be a prominent landmark for the Bay Area or do we want to create a new Alcatraz, which will define a new emerging paradigm committed to progressive, enlightened values?"

Weideman cites Alcatraz’s landmark status and the 10,000 birds that nest on the island each spring as major hurdles in Vid’s path: "To remove the prison, which is a national historic monument, along with the Civil War–era fort beneath it, would take an act of Congress."

Ceres business

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Brittany Brown Ceres’s dances are voluptuous and lucid. They are also finely crafted, though in her first full-evening concert, "Limits of the Marvelous" — at Dance Mission Theater on Nov. 30 — they were not always quite as finely performed. The larger ensemble numbers’ speed suggested technical challenges not always met. But for those of us who value imagination and brains, Ceres is a choreographer to watch.

Announcing the evening as a world premiere was probably technically correct though a little misleading, since "Limits" consisted of works created independently. Ceres pulled them together by choreographing bridges and employed sections of red carpet as roads traveled or avoided. This unifying prop also allowed her to delineate performance space in a variety of manners, though after a while the constant rolling and unrolling of rugs began to look like ceremonial housekeeping.

Ceres choreographed in layers and sections that split and coalesced, sometimes so fast that the eye had difficulty catching them but was always aware of the underlying common trajectory. Often one had a sense of a single image bursting into multiple versions, not unlike a time-lapse photograph. The work was also fresh in its uncommonly imaginative use of arms, precisely placed but hugely extending into space.

Jenny Ward opened the evening with the crystalline Face, Façade, a solo performed on and around a stool encased in a square of red light. No matter where her body pulled her, her gaze kept focusing on the beyond. All of a sudden, it became apparent what she was looking for: a swiftly moving Gianna Shepard, who appeared behind Ward’s back. The lyrical Embrace, Detain (danced by Cari Bellinghausen and Claudia Hublak) consisted almost entirely of wide ports de bras that, as the title said, embraced and detained. In the lush, floor-bound Anahata, named after the "follow your heart" chakra, Bellinghausen weightily partnered Rebecca Gilbert in a duet of overlapping limbs and quietness that eventually curled back to its beginning.

In Epitaphe de Marie, former West Wave Dance Festival artistic director Joan Lazarus made an able guest appearance as a woman who belonged — and didn’t — to a group. She periodically entered into dynamic encounters with it but ultimately walked away. It’s a piece about loss, a little simplistic in its expression of friendship — entwining duets, circle dances — and probably too protracted, but as a whole carefully constructed as a series of waves of coming together and letting go. Set to Carlo Domeniconi’s increasingly raspy guitar, the work Epitaphe had a sense of ongoing welcome that was lovely, but fleeting. In one of the step-with-step duets, the dancers walked in spooning positions, the one in the back gently placing her hands on the hips of the one in front. The passage suggested an easy sense of communal intimacy that was both casual and private. What didn’t work were the several sections in which the women lifted Lazarus for overhead moves. These types of athletic maneuvers have to be immaculately rehearsed to be effective. Otherwise they look forced.

Before the two final ensemble numbers, Ceres introduced a tiny, hot solo for Bellinghausen, the company’s most distinguished dancer. The whiplash fast Angle, Angel was over before you could catch your breath. Streaming was lyrical, flowing, and oddly structured. It started out as a trio for Ceres, Bellinghausen, and Shepard. Midway through, a quartet streaked by, changing the trio’s relationships. The logic of that cause and effect escaped me. However, the smooth unfolding of torsos against precise, enigmatic arm language flowed with remarkable assuredness on a floor of shifting squares. How these people related to one another on such shifting grounds and what the significance of their initially huge shadows (designed by Max) was, I couldn’t tell.

Closing the evening was Corps de Co., which premiered this summer at the West Wave Dance Festival. It was a disappointment. Not because of the dancers, who performed reasonably well, or Ceres’s fast-paced choreography, which was multifocused and densely layered and beautifully balanced individuality with common purpose. The disappointment came from a deficiency in the venue. Integral to this piece is Austin Forbord’s excellent video derived from Ceres’s choreography. Because Dance Mission Theater doesn’t allow for backlighted projection, this key component appeared so pale that it was nearly washed out.

Purple penetrator

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Being rich and famous dupes so many into thinking they have profound life wisdom that must be shared. Is it simple narcissism? Is it that when material desires are fulfilled too easily, spirituality becomes the top high-end item left to acquire?

Guy Ritchie may do stupid things, like remaking Lina Wertmüller’s reactionary-in-1974 Swept Away as a 2002 vehicle for his wife, Madonna, whose acting kills entire movies on contact. But he’s also clever, at least regarding surfaces. Yet there’s usually nothing beneath them, unless in-joke movie references count as deep. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) are deliriously, obnoxiously showy exercises in hyperworked camera, editing, and soundtrack. Their affectedly cool ‘tude is wrought of pissing-contest testosterone, compiled genre clichés, and Ritchie’s training in music videos and TV commercials. Love ’em or leave ’em, these movies are elaborate toys for boys, their pulp roots elevated to artier status by Brit exoticism and a big bag of stylistic tricks. Tricks, you’ll recall, are for kids.

After those samey successes and one stinging flop, Ritchie was ripe to expand his range. He and Madonna developed as sentient beings too, what with childbearing and third world adoption and all that kabbalah stuff.

Yet one wonders: has spiritual evolution given Ritchie more depth as an artist? Merely considering the question hurts.

Ritchie’s latest movie, Revolver, premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival to howls of derision. More than a year later, it’s here, and — like Richard Kelly’s similarly dissed, delayed, and recut Southland Tales — it’s still terrible. Not just because it’s an unsalvageable mess, but also because it’s an expression of ersatz profundity that confirms a shallow intellect. This being Ritchie, his big stab at insight regarding the human condition arrives as a hyperstylized gangster movie, albeit with less smug jokiness than before and a stinking new pantsload of pretension.

Ritchie’s usual muse Jason Statham plays Jake Green, just released from seven years in prison and eager to avenge himself on the casino kingpin (Ray Liotta) who put him there. He signs on with nasty loan sharks Vincent Pastore and André Benjamin, who promise to abet his vengeance — but at a high price. Soon everyone wants to kill Jake, but he kills them instead. It’s all just bullet-riddled bodies flying through space. Senseless as a thriller, Revolver could be enjoyed for its textural luxuriance — Ritchie does have a gift for constructing dynamic scene-by-scene aesthetics — if not for the paralyzing pomposity that hitches onto this empty cargo train.

Revolver is so transparently about nothing that its final revelations become inadvertent punch lines at the auteur’s expense. We’re told "the ultimate con" is the ego, Jake’s own "worst enemy" his bad-boy self. That’s before the epilogue. (Warning: it involves Deepak Chopra.) There isn’t enough pot in the world to make such quasi-philosophical wankery provoke the intended whoa.

The idea of Ritchie liberating himself from the trap of ego is contradicted by every frame of this self-consciously flashy and vain movie. Revolver inhabits a fantasy man’s-man world. It’s a painful example of wannabe mysticism — riddled with kabbalah and numerological references — and it’s exactly as enlightened about women as a mid-’60s James Bond flick. Female cast members are displayed mute, surgically enhanced, open mouthed, and variably unclad, like porn models. The sole older woman (Francesca Annis) is a retro lesbian-sadist caricature modeled on Lotte Lenya in 1963’s From Russia with Love. She paws cringing younger female slaves who recall the runway look-alikes in Robert Palmer’s "Addicted to Love" video.

Revolver also finds time to be racist, via Tom Wu’s stereotyped Asian crime boss, Lord John. Why bother distinguishing? This movie is a massive, great-looking embarrassment. But Ritchie is probably so insulated he can assure himself it’s merely misunderstood. That’s his loss. *

REVOLVER

Opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters

Uncuddly Leigh

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Jennifer Jason Leigh is nearly 50 years old. She looks about 15 years younger, yet without that plastic appearance redolent of cosmetic surgery. For a while she was a real movie star, if not quite a popular one, sustaining widely seen films through performances such as her homicidal nut in Single White Female (1992) and tightly wound abuse victim in Dolores Clairborne (1995). Equally memorable, if less seen, were her turns as dirt-dumb yet sympathetic prostitutes in Miami Blues (1990) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), a working-class housewife and mother blasé about her phone-sex day job in Short Cuts (1993), an undercover cop turned junkie in Rush, and the brilliant but dysfunctional Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).

Leigh blazed through ultrastylized retro hard-boiled patter as the female reporter in the Coen brothers’ underrated 1994 flop The Hudsucker Proxy. Who saw her extraordinary performance in Georgia, a painfully astute sibling drama she produced (and her mother wrote) the next year? Hardly anyone. As time passed she could be glimpsed guest-starring on TV’s Hercules and Spawn and retreating into supporting roles (like the wife who gets killed 10 minutes into 2002’s Road to Perdition) when she wasn’t turning to animation voice gigs.

It’s true that mainstream audiences never really embraced Leigh, who enacted real disappointment and displeasure instead of fake romantic bliss while losing her virginity in her first lead role, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She hadn’t made it easy, unlike the drastically less complicated Julia Roberts. Leigh resisted being ingratiating or easy to understand and consistently played gawky characters in difficult moral circumstances. She was a nervous talk show guest, and she didn’t seem obviously sexy, despite her frequently naked screen roles.

"I’ve never been a careerist," Leigh remarked during an awkward recent onstage conversation with Ben Fong-Torres (who seemed strangely fixated on a lascivious line of questions she wasn’t buying), part of a tribute at the Mill Valley Film Festival. That remains true. She’s as gifted as any actress of her generation but hasn’t quite scaled the high-profile heights of variably contemporary thespians such as Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, or Nicole Kidman.

The last is her costar in Margot at the Wedding, written by Leigh’s husband, Noah Baumbach. Baumbach is best known for writing and directing 2003’s The Squid and the Whale, though his 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming, has a cult following, and 1997’s Mr. Jealousy ought to as well. Margot pursues Squid‘s major themes: sibling and parental relationships, comings-of-age, familial wounds inflicted unintentionally and otherwise, and the emotional chaos physical intimacy wreaks. But Margot takes them out of the city, all the way to … the Hamptons. Still, that’s country enough for the neurotic, erudite urbanites who are Baumbach’s specialty. Close proximity to the outdoors can’t get them to relax their grips on historical baggage and personal grudges, even toward kin. In fact, a backyard tree turns out to be the symbolic — and physical — catalyst in the movie’s application of a lit match to blood relations long primed for explosion.

Kidman’s Margot is a type familiar in real life yet seldom so well detailed onscreen: the cunning malcontent who gnaws like a termite at other people’s happiness, convincing everyone that it’s for their own good. And Margot at the Wedding is concise, hilarious and cathartic, portraying cruel behavior sans authorial malice or even basic moral judgment. These people can’t help what they do. The quirky dysfunction feels utterly credible. There’s a moment when Kidman’s and Leigh’s characters reference a relative’s youthful sexual abuse — then erupt in inappropriate laughter. It’s shocking, yet it seems just right, because that kind of gallows humor is typically a survivor’s closely held secret weapon.

Kidman’s chilly, defensive sexpot owns the title, but Leigh’s Pauline is the movie’s emotional ballast. Playing closer to her offscreen personality (or so Baumbach says), Leigh is a one-generation-late hippie chick who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt — no matter how many times they’ve failed to return that favor. The story line and dialogue’s excoriating peak occurs when Pauline is finally driven past endurance, howling well-earned abuse at the monster sister who’s undercut her entire life. Leigh wails on 2007’s most satisfying screen rant. If Baumbach wrote it for her, the favor is returned threefold. Who else could pull off its full, verbose fury — and make sense of the story’s refusal to fade out afterwards?

Leigh’s major performances have always been the kind that people deem difficult: they’re knotty, uncuddly, indelible. This is the rare movie whose scripted complexities are equal to those she brings to it.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.margotatthewedding.com“>www.margotatthewedding.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.margotatthewedding.com

Do you believe in White Magic?

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The folkish side of indie rock has been blessed with several female songwriters who have unique, affecting voices — Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom, Becky Stark — but White Magic’s Mira Billotte is in a different league altogether. Her vocal tracks thunder and shiver all over the register, fearlessly chasing down radical intonations and bold tonal colors. Where the others can all sound a little fey and princessy, Billotte’s full-spectrum blasts hark back to the possessed passion of ’60s stunners like Grace Slick, Karen Dalton, and — why not? — Janis Joplin.

Billotte’s voice hinges on form and freedom, a balance that’s been remarkably well preserved on White Magic’s recordings. Speaking from her New York home about the band’s new EP, Dark Stars (Drag City), Billotte notes, "It’s the first digital recording White Magic recording has done, and we figured that would be cool because we could record in a spontaneous way."

But while the music feels fresh and explorative, it’s clear from my conversation with Billotte that a lot of thought goes into White Magic’s release schedule, a not-insignificant point given indie rock’s de facto buzz-bin setting. To be sure, the hype machine is familiar to the duo: Billotte’s regular partner is Doug Shaw, though they’re frequently joined by other musicians like Gang Gang Dance’s Tim Dewitt and the Dirty Three’s Jim White. Back in 2004, White Magic were frequently cited as leading lights of the burgeoning freak folk movement and were invited by Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus to play the hip All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London.

Perhaps it was Billotte’s previous experience with Quix*o*tic — a band she played in with her sister Christine — that kept White Magic so even-keeled through these early waves. White Magic released an EP (2004’s Through the Sun Door), then took their time with an expansive full-length, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (both Drag City). Since putting out the album, they’ve mostly shied away from touring. If anything, the band continues to be underrated, especially Billotte’s obvious star-power talent. One wonders if it isn’t the liberties she takes with her tracks — the very things that make them so special — that’s kept mainstream acceptance at bay. Vocalists such as Marshall and Stark may lack Billotte’s range, but their voices are more consistent and pleasant and therefore more likely to nab attention through in iTunes downloads or soundtrack one-offs.

Far from being a stopgap, Dark Stars sounds like a further staking out of White Magic’s idiosyncratic musical terrain: piano-driven ballads that swallow up a field guide’s worth of sounds and textures, everything from Tin Pan Alley jazz to dub chants, West African guitar music to Old Weird America folk. Bookends "Shine on Heaven" and "Winds" spiral out with repetitive, glistening chants — Billotte tells me the first song began as an improvisation at a party with friends — while "Very Late" boasts baroque blues and "Poor Harold" a loose-limbed folk ballad–reggae stomp combination. If this all sounds a little unwieldy, that’s because it is. The EP format is a perfect fit for the duo, since it allows them a full range of exploration in individual songs while still maintaining a succinct arc. Billotte confirms my suspicion that Dat Rosa was composed of four distinct parts, or EPs: "It’s a good format for my songs … and I tend to segment things in fours … so I like that the EP is four songs."

Besides Billotte’s voice, White Magic’s intensity has a lot to do with how they draw so many splintering sounds out of a relatively limited musical palate of mostly piano, guitar, and White’s seasick drums. Their songs sometimes seem to be all incantation, yawping calls without resolution. It’s a musical formula that is intoxicating and dizzying and certainly has something to do with the way the group has retained the sense of excitement and mystery that attended its first transmissions. As freak folk’s star fades, White Magic still seem on the brink.

"Hopefully [the music] can take you to that other place when you’re really listening to it," Billotte says, "because that’s what it does for me when I’m playing it…. That’s kind of what I feel like the trance element is." She sings for the sake of the songs, in other words, making it seem all the more likely that those songs are built to last. *

WHITE MAGIC

With Cryptacize and the Dry Spells

Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., $12

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Why I voted for Josh Wolf

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Last week’s mayoral election in my hometown of San Francisco was one of those weird moments that make you think you’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel, looking at hundreds of alternate futures peeling away from the present like little slivers of psychosis. It was a dismal election, in which the incumbent, conservative–for–San Francisco Gavin Newsom, was the only candidate who had any hope of winning. He was practically unopposed, but there was, technically, a cornucopia of candidates, spanning the gamut from qualified but unpopular to completely unqualified and silly, who were on the ballot running against him.

Things being what they are, the silly candidates got the most attention (albeit not most of the votes). Some guy named Chicken, known mostly for his participation in the art festival Burning Man, ran on a campaign pushing people to vote for him as their second choice, since San Francisco has ranked-choice voting. He definitely had great posters, given his connection to the arts community, but not much of a platform. Then there was the sex club owner Michael Powers, who ran on a platform I never quite understood. Powers does have one of the nicest sex clubs I’ve ever seen, called (appropriately enough) the Power Exchange, and I wondered briefly if that might qualify him to run the city. But in the end, he got the fewest votes. And Chicken did not come in anywhere near second.

As I said, there were a few candidates, like Quintin Mecke, with relevant experience, but none had big enough constituencies to pull off a win. So when it came time to fill in my ballot, I voted for a guy who isn’t a joke and has the kinds of political experience that might get him elected in 2035: Josh Wolf.

Media geeks may remember Wolf as the blogger who was sent to prison for refusing to identify for the police some protesters in video he posted of a political demonstration that turned violent. After he got out of prison he went on the Colbert Report, where he came across as well intentioned and with a burning passion for free speech. In the mayoral race, he ran on a platform that emphasized open democratic processes and a good wi-fi plan for the city. Nobody in his campaign thought he would win, and indeed he only garnered about 1,500 votes. But that’s saying something in an election with only 17 percent turnout.

So why didn’t I vote for somebody like Mecke, who had a good position on dealing with homelessness and had already done some work in city politics? Because, as I said, I felt like I was in this Dick novel looking into a zillion possible futures right there in the polling place. There were the sure-to-fail futures represented by good candidates with no hope of winning, and then there was the dark future of creepy joke candidates like Chicken, whose mockery of the voting process was probably part of why so few people turned out for the election. Why vote when running for mayor had been turned into a joke?

So I voted for the best possible future I could find, the future in which, eventually, smart young people who care about freedom of expression online become mature politicians who understand new technologies and the socioeconomic conditions associated with them. Maybe Wolf won’t grow into that politician, but somebody like him will. And that person will probably understand things like how to organize Internet access for low-income city residents and why entertainment companies shouldn’t be allowed to sue people for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they’ve been file-sharing. That person will also understand how easy it is to violate people’s privacy online and will push for regulations that prevent companies and governments from dipping into private digital data supplies.

Of course, the future in which we have politicians like Wolf may never happen. We can’t predict what will become of him, and we can’t know if digital natives will mature into progressives who care about access and privacy reforms. There’s always room for wired neocons and digital Puritans, whose intimate history with the Internet will make them particularly good at legisutf8g censorship purges and invasive data mining. That’s not the future I voted for, but I am always having to remind myself that’s the future I may get. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is living in an alternate future right now.

Goldie winner — Music: Wooden Shjips

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

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

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

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

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

www.woodenshjips.com

www.myspace.com/woodenshjips

Goldie winner — Music: Non-Stop Bhangra

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

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

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

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

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

www.nonstopbhangra.com

www.myspace.com/nonstopbhangra

Spooked sounds 2: more lost albums and forgotten performances for Halloween

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Pussy Galore – and scares galore.

By Erik Morse

Let’s pick up where the first installment of “Spooked sounds” left off: here are a few more notorious sonic “events,” which constitute a spectral and alternative history in recorded music’s century long canon. The more cryptic, the more incredible and the more emphatic the anecdote, the scarier the sounds. Try playing some of these at your next Halloween party and see just how spooked your guests will get.

PART TWO: THE LATER YEARS (1967-PRESENT)

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Unit Delta Plus and the Beatles – Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, London, 1967

Founded as a cooperative of sorts by electronic musicians Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, and Peter Zinovieff as early as 1965, Unit Delta Plus was an experimental adjunct to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the height of “swinging” London’s musical and multimedia explorations.

Using their knowledge and gear from the BBC days and marrying it to a more edgy, psychedelic sensibility, Unit Delta Plus hoped to accomplish an aesthetic saturation of sight and sound not unlike that being similarly developed at New York’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable or San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. With Zinovieff’s Putney townhouse as their headquarters, the members of UDP began experimenting with complex tape music and primitive EMS synthesizers. By ’66 they held a music festival in Berkshire, reputedly the first ever dedicated solely to electronic music. Although the crowd was composed mainly of academics and musicologists, the festival was a major success and catapulted Unit Delta Plus into the center of the London underground.

Romania dreamin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

REVOLUTIONS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA

Nov. 3–Dec. 9, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Raising the barre

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

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

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

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

AMERICAN INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL

Nov. 2–7, $5–$10

Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF

Nov. 8–10, $5–$10

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 554-0525

www.aifisf.com

A shot from the Sahel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Many moons ago, when I moved as a child to Africa, my mother, my sister, and I resided in the Sahel. To be precise: we lived in Bamako, the vibrant capital city of Mali — not to be confused with the medieval empire of the same name. To reside there as a Western black was strange; our Americanness placed us in the novel position of being regarded as de facto aristos, somewhere between such elevated classes as wealthy, regal descendents of the Keita clan and the dispossessed, which included Imazighen exiles. To see beautiful but abject so-called Tuareg women and girls begging in the dusty streets of Bamako from the windows of our funereal Lincoln Town Car — the incongruity of them huddled at roadsides and traffic stops in their indigo or floral clothes, their grace surpassed only by the Wolof women to the northwest in Senegal — was a mind-blowing experience that has stayed with me in the decades since.

The complexities of centuries of intraracial warfare and political mayhem derived from poisonous North African colonial legacies were largely beyond my eight-year-old mind’s grasp. As Madame l’Ambassadeur, my late mother was the one to travel up-country and beyond, nearer the heart of the Sahara, and she worked tirelessly to have any impact on the volatile situation in the country. I was restricted by the quotidian business of school and play, but my far-roving mind began a lifelong romance with Mali’s two most fabled folk of the Western Sudan, the Dogon and the Imazighen. The star-walking Dogon were remote and mysterious at the Bandiagara escarpment, but the grave injustices being done to the proud, rebel Imazighen were plain to see in Bamako rush-hour traffic.

When I listen to the music of Africa’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Tinariwen (translated from Tamasheq, "the deserts"), from L’Adrar des Iforas, this baggage comes with me, weighted with shame at not following in the career footsteps of my selfless Africanist mother and fear that people of the West will never truly comprehend the vital importance of the many Africas to their own humanity. With or without Tinariwen’s great Amassakoul and current Aman Iman (both World Village; 2004, 2007) on my iPod as I ride the Manhattan subway, when I see disenfranchised people begging down the aisle I am always jolted back to the visceral yet illusory sensation of extending my thin, childish arm through the steel of the Lincoln to help a reddish-brown-skinned Amazigh girl in elegant rags, no different than me in that she was the child of parents who wanted to be free.

Whereas my parents’ generation of young black revolutionaries sought to forge strong pan-Africanist links all the way from DC to Dar es Salaam, and their cult-nat elements experimented in folk, soul, rock, and funk genres to express the hopes and fears of the 1960s era of deliverance from Jim Crow, there in Bamako, as a child at the turn of the ’80s, I was witnessing at a remove the rise of radical culture spawned by Kel Tamasheq ishumaren (unemployed) forced to abandon traditional nomadic ways by poverty and drought. These black folks’ rebel music, tishoumaren, has found its apotheosis in Tinariwen since the group first emerged from a Libyan military camp in 1985, moving from guns to guitars in the process of wresting messages of uplift from chaos. They weave a sound web linking traditional instrumentation (like the tehardant, or lute), Maghrebi music (think Nass el Ghiwane), James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and even rap ("Arawan" on Amassakoul) — superbad, indeed.

The droning, hallucinatory blues of the Blue Men of the Ténéré may have increasingly wowed exogamous audiences since the acclaim Tinariwen’s Kel Tamasheq musicians received from jamming with Robert Plant at the 2003 Festival in the Desert, but there lies a deep source of crisis beneath the band’s international success. Recorded in Bamako, Aman Iman‘s "Soixante Trois" captures guitarist-singer Ibrahim ag Alhabib recalling the brutally suppressed 1963 Imazighen rebellion against the government of newly independent Mali. Tinariwen’s spare sound brings great joy on purely aesthetic grounds, the masterful harnessing of rolling electricity and overlapping ululation indelibly making a mark on the diasporic continuum stretching from Mali’s Ali Farka Touré to Mississippi’s Otha Turner and back again.

Yet it must never be forgotten that the mysteries of Al Baraka, the hardships of desert life and the hardcore realities of war, inform these songs, and such has been the lot of the aboriginal peoples of Tamazgha from the time of Roman and Islamic imperial incursions onto the North African sands up through current attempts to further disenfranchise the Imazighen in order to appropriate their oil-rich ancestral lands. Aman Iman‘s very title — meaning "water is life" — refers not merely to the primal law of the desert but also to the very real, enduring crisis afflicting the region’s ecology and society. As you rightly enjoy Tinariwen on tour, please remember and act on the fact that for the headliners, the fight continues on every front. *

TINARIWEN

Sun/4, 7 p.m., $20–$55

Palace of Fine Arts theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

1-866-920-JAZZ

www.sfjazz.org

Shorts

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FORESKIN’S LAMENT

By Shalom Auslander

Riverhead Books

320 pages, $24.95

It’s possible that one of the 613 commandments in the Torah is "Thou shall not read Foreskin’s Lament." Which of course means read it. If you’ve got the time, read it twice, once from right to left. You’ll still laugh. It’s that funny.

Shalom Auslander’s memoir of life as a black sheep in a black hat picks up where his first book, the short-story collection Beware of God (Simon and Schuster, 2005), left off, taking a well-hewed ax to the image of the Almighty. But unlike God bashers du jour Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, Auslander believes in the pie maker in the sky. And as his worn punch line goes, it’s been a real problem for him.

It was a problem while he was growing up in the Orthodox community of Monsey, NY, where he developed a penchant for pornography and junk food. It was a problem throughout his teens, as he padded his résumé of sin with lots of pot smoking and shoplifting. And it was even more of a problem, years later, after his wife became pregnant with their first child, a son no less. Having a family aggravated Auslander’s deep-seated religious paranoia. God, the wrathful stalker who smites first and asks questions later, was surely going to murder his family. It would be payback for years of vioutf8g the laws of Judaism. As his second-most-tired punch line goes, that would be so God.

Auslander plays the alienation and theological abuse (his wife’s words, not mine) for laughs, defiling his religious upbringing in ways that will win him friends and enemies in equal measure. But his paranoia — the idea that God will get him and his family — casts some very dark shadows over the book, not so dismal as to ruin a good time, but grave enough to bring the story to its supplicant knees. Still, Foreskin’s Lament is a romp — relentlessly unrepentant and irreverent. Auslander may be a weak man and a bad Jew, tempted by tits and traif, but he’s a better writer for it. Here’s hoping he has enough raw material for future laments over other parts of the body. (Scott Steinberg)

CONVERSATION

With Steve Almond

SF Jewish BookFest

Sun/4, 12:45–2 p.m., free

Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Kanbar Hall

3200 California, SF

(415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

SENTENCES: THE LIFE OF MF GRIMM

Written by Percy Carey; illustrated by Ronald Wimberly

Vertigo

128 pages, $19.99

While reading Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, Percy Carey’s graphic-memoir debut, it comes in handy to know a bit of the backstory — such as the recent controversy surrounding Carey, a.k.a. MF Grimm, and his former artistic partner MF Doom, onetime tight collaborators who have fallen out publicly through dis tracks. Familiarity with the innovative rapper’s street life–meets–transcendence flows is also a plus. Readers who come to Sentences fresh may be taken aback by Carey’s grittiness and what seems to be an argument that people don’t really change — they either calm down or die.

And yet Sentences, more HBO drama than MTV interview, will get you in the end. As we follow Carey, a gifted rapper but a natural fighter, from a rebellious Upper West Side youth through drug dealing, a paralyzing gunshot attack, and harsh jail time, he never stops believing that hip-hop is the most positive outlet for his particular type of raucous energy. And when he finally makes it — albeit in a wheelchair — starting multimedia label Day by Day Entertainment, we are right there with him.

Ronald Wimberly’s black-and-white artwork calls to mind Paul Chadwick’s careful inkings in Concrete (Dark Horse), with its use of shadows and silhouettes to emphasize emotional relationships. Although Wimberly has worked on fanciful Vertigo titles such as Swamp Thing and Lucifer, Sentences proves he has a knack for human antiheroics. Carey’s wandering storytelling style fits perfectly with the fluid, figurative scenes, which depict an urban reality full of countless ups and downs: watching a friend get set up by the cops; losing at the MC Battle for World Supremacy; standing face-to-face with Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, laying dreams on the table. When Carey presents his journal-style thoughts, the result is weirdly intimate, as when he admits that "in the end, it was my own stupidity that sent me to prison." Carey is usually less gushy, but be prepared: even the shoot-outs are heartfelt. (Ari Messer)

HONORABLE BANDIT: A WALK ACROSS CORSICA

By Brian Bouldrey

Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press

296 pages, $26.95

If narratives are like hikes, best begun in lighthearted whimsy before the climb to bleak summits and bracing vistas both earned and unexpected, then Brian Bouldrey’s narrative of a hike, Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica, could well be a model of its kind. The book recounts a journey by foot that Bouldrey and a friend made a few years ago across the enchanted Mediterranean island (ethnically Italian but politically part of France) where Napoleon was born. And while the tale is full of vivid detail about the expedition’s joys and travails (soaked shoes, crowded tents, sharp rocks, bad weather, wild boar, comically strange fellow travelers, the occasional glass of local wine), it also becomes, through a series of interpolated "why I walk" personal essays, a meditation on its author’s life.

Bouldrey (a former Guardian contributor) spent his young adulthood in the plague-ridden San Francisco of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the loss of a beloved to AIDS plainly still aches. Serious walking, then, is an occasion for remembering and reflecting and also, in its very meanderingness, a form of redemption: we save ourselves simply by making the effort to do so. Although most pilgrimages end up at some holy site, the literary value and interest of any pilgrimage has less to do with the destination than with the getting there, and in this sense Honorable Bandit joins a long line that begins with The Canterbury Tales.

Bouldrey has for some time been among our cheeriest bards of sorrow. As in an earlier collection of essays, Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books, 2001), he is candid about his griefs and losses without descending into self-pity over them, and his sense of the ridiculous never fails him. He is especially sensitive about his Americanness, to his being "a representative of the prevailing power" in a restive Europe. He doesn’t want to be outed as a Yank, and at the same time he is impatient with his native land and its bizarre Francophobia: "And you Americans," he thinks, "you have only one kind of mustard — and you call it French’s!" Vive les moutards. (Paul Reidinger)

READING WITH SLIDE SHOW

Nov. 13, 7 p.m., free

Get Lost Travel Books

1825 Market, SF

(415) 437-0529, www.getlostbooks.com

SHORTCOMINGS

By Adrian Tomine

Drawn and Quarterly

112 pages, $19.95

Ben Tanaka, the protagonist of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, is an ambitionless Berkeley cinema manager who attributes his outsider status not to race but to his being "a nerd with a bad personality and no social skills"; his girlfriend, Miko, is a successful organizer of an Asian American film festival who resents Ben’s attraction to Caucasian women. Every conversation between the two becomes an argument, and Ben sees every argument as a personal attack on him. So it’s with some relief that the two "take a break" while Miko’s in New York, leaving Ben free to pursue a pair of blonds.

But the girls he idealizes turn out to be just as flawed as he is, as revealed by one’s earnest but ridiculous art projects and the other’s passive-aggressive cruelty. Even Miko proves to be a hypocrite, shacking up with a "rice king" designer in Manhattan.

Compiled from the past three issues of Tomine’s Optic Nerve comic, Shortcomings isn’t all heartache and betrayal. There’s subtle comedy in small details like Crepe Expectations, the name of the café where Ben holds venting sessions with his friend Alice, a wisecracking womanizer, as well as moments of outright hilarity, as when Miko’s new white boyfriend (sorry, I mean half Jewish, half Native American) busts out a defensive karate stance when confronted by Ben on the street. And Ben’s recurring tirades about how shitty a place New York is (Tomine recently moved from the Bay Area to Brooklyn) might even be a nod to Woody Allen, the ultimate geek-cum-lothario whose wit, charm, and, above all, ability to laugh at himself are passable currency for his own shortcomings.

The thing is, Ben doesn’t seem to possess these qualities, except perhaps when courting the ladies, and we don’t get to see what he was like before his relationship went sour. So is he a sarcastic but sweet loner in need of understanding, or is he a superficial, insensitive creep who deserves a life of rejection and loneliness? Ultimately, Shortcomings is an honestly told story about the ugly end to a relationship that isn’t that black and white. (Hane C. Lee)

EVENTS

Conversation with Glen David Gold

Nov. 14, 7 p.m., free

Booksmith

1644 Haight, SF

(415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com

Visual presentation and signing

Nov. 15, 7 p.m., free

Cody’s Books

1730 Fourth St., Berk.

(510) 559-9500, www.codysbooks.com

TWO HISTORIES OF ENGLAND

By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens

Ecco

192 pages, $16.95

Jane Austen wrote her History of England when she was 16, in 1791, and she intended it to be read aloud at home. Her sister, Cassandra, drew pictures for it. These have not been reproduced in Ecco’s new edition of the history, one of several odd choices here. Various collections of Austen juvenilia include this work, and Algonquin Books published a facsimile and transcription in 1993. Why wouldn’t her fans just buy one of those? And why is her history twinned with an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s 1851–53 A Child’s History of England?

Austen’s recent pop-cultural upsurge no doubt explains this volume’s publication. And David Starkey makes a plausible case for reading both histories in his introduction, an apologia that’s longer than Austen’s entry. But he’s less convincing regarding their appearance in one volume, and Dickens’s inclusion calls to mind the useless (but equally space-consuming) footnotes T.S. Eliot provided to make The Waste Land book length. His contribution here covers a shorter period than Austen’s (although they both end with Charles I’s reign), and it’s hard to imagine Dickens devotees not searching out the complete text.

This book, then, seems suited primarily for the dabbler in English literature or history. Austen ascribes her work to "a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian"; the first two adjectives certainly apply to Dickens. The description is tongue-in-cheek, but the approach it suggests does allow these authors to write with, as Starkey says, "freshness and wit," producing unforgettable scenes and characters. Although Austen’s work is a satire of boring contemporary histories, it is amusing enough to spark the interest of a modern reader in the period she covers; meanwhile, Dickens’s was written for his Household Words journal and was meant to appeal to a broad audience — and was used in British schools until the 1950s. These writings make history interesting and even entertaining, and whatever they lack in scholarship can be picked up elsewhere. Whatever its failings, Two Histories has the potential to be an excellent gateway drug. (Juliana Froggatt)

Torn apart

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

CONTROL

Opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

CMJ 2007: Deerhunter, Japanther, Islands, Santogold, and more cake for all

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Mighty Reatard-ed. All photos by Michael Harkin.

By Michael Harkin

There had been murmurs all week among college radio music-director types that this year’s CMJ line-up wasn’t as cool as in years past, and this seems correct to a certain degree. For one thing, there should have been more hip-hop and electronic showcases than there were, even if only to break up the obvious indie-rock bent of the overall conference. That said, the showcases that did go down often felt pretty representative of the best in the various represented genres: this week saw Mariee Sioux, Erol Alkan, Mika Miko, Earthless, and the Dirtbombs pass through the city limits and give it a go amid the abundant crowds of music industry hawks.

It was a week of late nights, little sleep, and perhaps one Belgian fry too many, but there was a lot of music to be taken in each day from 1 p.m. onward, one had to arise by 11 a.m. if he/she wanted a chance at sighting the next big thing. Here are some highlights from the last three days of the NYC festival:

THURSDAY

Memphis’s Jay Reatard is still pretty young, but he’s already got a certain mythological status among garage-punk mavens: as a former member of the Lost Sounds and the Reatards, and now with his solo career, he’s had a King Midas touch of tunefulness that’s ramped up lately. The dude’s on a roll in the studio, having cranked out the spotless Blood Visions LP last year, as well as some brilliant slabs of vinyl on the side, like the glorious “I Know a Place” single, whose B-side is a stunning acoustic cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Don’t Let Him Come Back.” Tonight at a crowded Cake Shop, he greeted the crowd with “Hey douchebags!” and proceeded to play most of Blood Visions at triple speed, finishing his set in less than 20 minutes. Every song was introduced with the song title and a “LET’S GO” – superb punk from a fiery, poofy-haired, tough-looking group of dudes. Jay will be rolling through the Bay Area in November (12 Galaxies and the Stork Club), and he remarked in a conversation after the show that there are a series of singles coming next year, so look out for that!

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Double Dagger take a stab.

Following Mr. Reatard, Double Dagger brought punk of a different flavor: a more sinister, Fugazi-like intensity characterized their set, as vocalist Nolen Strals hap’ly danced about the stage in his blue, black, and white
camo tee. They didn’t face quite as thick a crowd as the preceding set did, but those that stayed paid witness to a spastic stomp-along series of howls and tight bass grooves. These guys channel the nerdy anger of Shellac and the slanted guitar riffs of Swell Maps in a convincing way, and form yet another piece of evidence that the Baltimore music scene is blooming.

Life sucks

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

By now it’s natural to expect a lot from the Arab Film Festival, which is opening its 11th annual survey of cinema from the Arab world and diaspora with veteran Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid’s excellent feature Making Of, then presenting more than 80 features, docs, and shorts from 13 countries in screenings around the Bay and, for the first time, in Los Angeles. Ghassan Salhab’s The Last Man (2006), on the other hand, delivers something probably less expected: the first Lebanese vampire movie. As it turns out, a Lebanese vampire movie not only makes perfect sense but is also the best thing to happen to the genre in a long time.

That’s because Salhab (whose fine Terra Incognita screened at the fest in 2005) opens the field to new resonance with a deft artistry that recapitulates the vampire film’s enduring tropes while making nearly every shot a fresh, unexpected surprise. Like Terra Incognita (whose hip, desultory, and existential multicharacter drama remains a kind of companion piece), The Last Man unfolds in the limbo that is present-day Beirut. Here a handsome fortysomething bachelor doctor (a haunted, quietly mesmerizing Carlos Chahine) becomes involved in a rash of bizarre murders. Meanwhile, his personality appears to be undergoing a profound transformation, which leaves him progressively alienated from his surroundings.

The narrative unfolds masterfully, punctuated by a visual and aural economy and style that are immediately riveting, like those of a subtle hallucination or waking dream that takes hold of you on a lethargic and very bright summer day. As daylight slowly bleeds from the screen and night takes over, familiar themes at the heart of the vampire film — the centrality of vision and the gaze, for instance, and the collision of scientific modernity with some premodern, even timeless mystery of nature — return, ingeniously wedded to a specific social and political context.

Beautifully painted, The Last Man‘s context is the half-ignored backdrop of Beirut and the background of war, invasion, civil strife, political crisis, and looming uncertainty (aggravated by TV chatter about US-occupied Iraq) that constitutes what one passing remark calls "the situation" — which has brought an existential malaise in its wake, a sense of heightened expectation that is also a socially paralyzing numbness. In this agonized slumber, this halfway world between life and death, is the last man the one who, alone and haunted, wakes fully to the visceral nightmare of being? *

ARAB FILM FESTIVAL

Oct. 18–28, most shows $10

Call or see Web site for program info

(415) 564-1100

www.aff.org

THE LAST MAN

Sat/20, 7 p.m., $10

Roxie Film Center

3117 and 3125 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

Seven up

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1. Dans la Ville de la Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, France/Spain)

2. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada) My two favorites of the festival were both ghost stories in which a haunted protagonist (fey Xavier Lafitte in Sylvia and Maddin’s voice-over in My Winnipeg) traces his past in a city charged with memory. In Guerín’s detailed mise-en-scène and patterned compositions and Maddin’s loopy reenactments and smeared dissolves, we get nothing less than cinema as seeing, remembering, being — which is to say, a cinephile’s dream.

3. Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

4. The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US) Terror’s Advocate and Scott Walker: 30th Century Man have their strengths, but these two documentaries gave me the greatest hope for the state of nonfiction cinema — Laura Dunn’s chronicle of an environmental crisis in Austin, Texas, for its plainspoken visual lyricism and Jia Zhangke’s observation of the fashion industry for its side-wind narration and flowering long takes.

5. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/Iran). Sometimes all it takes is lively storytelling. Fingers crossed that this pitch-perfect adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel will edge out Ratatouille for the animation Oscar.

6. Fujian Blue (Robin Weng, China)

7. La France (Serge Bozon, France) My two dark horses, each in its way about a band of outsiders. Fujian Blue‘s tender portrait of a group of friends living on the edge in southeast China (a center for human trafficking) evokes Mean Streets, while Bozon’s chronicle of a troop of World War I deserters makes delightful, if often inexplicable, use of vintage Hollywood movies (the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, the combat films of Raoul Walsh and Samuel Fuller) and sun-dappled musical arrangements that would make Wes Anderson blush.

For Johnny Ray Huston’s report on the Vancouver International Film Festival, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Visions of excess

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Trucks of day-old bread emptied into landfills, a sea of chicks shoved through an assembly line — the horrors of the global food industry make for wildly surreal and yet all-too-real images in We Feed the World, one of six feature documentaries at this year’s CounterCorp Film Festival. Erwin Wagenhofer’s movie views excess, waste, and animal torture from a European point of view, so you can only imagine how much more hellish an American counterpart would be — though the cinematography’s attentiveness to the way slaughterhouse machinery robs adult chickens of their features wordlessly says as much as any commentary in 2000’s The Natural History of the Chicken. A final in-office meeting with the CEO of Nestlé, who sings the praises of "foodstuffs" (and uses Mike Tyson and "an undernourished Bengali" in one tortured allegory), adds a bitter layer of megaprocessed frosting to the movie’s paradoxes. You say tomato, farmers say you no longer know what a tomato tastes like.

Any movie that splices Bryan Boyce’s State of the Union (and its Teletubbies images of George W. Bush blowing up oil towers and little bunnies) into an opening-credits sequence is worth a look. Narrated by author Naomi Klein, Freedom of Expression is an effective primer on corporate censorship and culture jamming — a window into movies such as Craig Baldwin’s creatively inspired Sonic Outlaws, one hopes. In addition to Boyce, Negativland (partly via the hilariously brilliant Ethel Merman track "No Business") and www.illegal-art.org are also featured. (Johnny Ray Huston)

COUNTERCORP FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/18–Sat/20

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

1-800-838-3006

www.countercorp.org

41st Anniversary Special: Blast from the past

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33 YEARS AGO (OCTOBER 5, 1974)


Dianne Feinstein takes off her gloves

By Katy Butler


White gloves still haunt Dianne Feinstein’s political life. She has been wearing them ever since she first went to dancing class, and fellow politicians have accused her of refusing to take them off for politics. Her old political allies bring up the image again and again: those little white gloves seem to crystallize their irritation with her Pacific Heights femininity, the world of the Junior League, the chauffeur and the Goody Two Shoes approach to politics. In 1971 during her disastrous campaign for Mayor, she did her best to reach beyond her background. She promised a Hunters Point crowd she’d never shuck or jive. But she was still wearing those little white gloves.

The white gloves are off now. Feinstein learned from her 1971 defeat and she doesn’t want to lose this time around. She is jostling with state senators Milton Marks and George Moscone for first place at the starting gate in next year’s Mayor’s race, and she is no longer a political dilettante operating on intuition and integrity.

The new Dianne Feinstein is a canny political animal, assiduously cultivating the "homeowner vote" in the foggy reaches of the Avenues while nursing along her original liberal constituency. "She’s dropped the Goody Two Shoes act and she’s willing to play hardball politics," one of her fellow supervisors says admiringly. "She’s moving toward the center and she’s getting very good advice."

"How can you be for the vice squad, for police helicopters, against nude shows and for gay rights?" asks Harvey Milk, a gay former candidate for supervisor. "It doesn’t add up."

31 YEARS AGO (OCTOBER 8, 1976)


Staggering with Bukowski

By William Graham


The beer, the day, whatever the reason, [poet Charles] Bukowski is not reading well — with little enthusiasm, little animation, little inflection in his voice, save the long drawl on certain words. He rarely looks up from his script while reading, as if he hasn’t seen the poems before. Hunched over, his glasses reflect the two spotlights and act as mirrors, blocking the audience from his eyes. At his best he is poetical, distant. At his worst, he is an old man reading the news. And finally the warning, "This is going to be my next-to-last poem." A few say "No, no." Bukowski asks, "Are there any questions?" Again, mixed shoutings answer, a few voices mimic animals, and far from the rear, the high nasal voice says "Bullshit". Bukowski replies, "Lay off that cheeeeeep, rot-gut wine or you’re not going to live a weeeeeeek. If the wine doesn’t get youuuuuuu, I might." The crowd likes this. Shifting gears, the poet says, "Any young girls want my phone number — try Joe Wolberg." Several replies follow, many sound dubious, and the poet says, "Okay, Babe-A."

31 YEARS AGO (OCTOBER 8, 1976)


EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES. By Tom Robbins. Houghton-Mifflin, $4.95.

Reviewed by Don McClelland


Tragedy ensues but is softened by the cosmic good humor that shines throughout the book. For this world and its languages, Robbins shows an infectious love that is constantly leading him into literary excesses guaranteed to get him hanged in more proper circles. Didactic, discursive, anthropomorphic, loaded with enough outrageous similes to send a basketful to each poet in the American Academy, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues operates on the refreshing premise that the whole world is alive. This book will make you laugh out loud in the elevator. This book should have champagne and tears spilled on it. This book is Cervantes born again. Thank you, Tom Robbins.

31 YEARS AGO (OCTOBER 29, 1976)


The Film Festival

By Robert Di Matteo


The 20th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, which was held at the Palace of Fine Arts Oct. 13-24, was another one of those Sacred Monster affairs that exist above and beyond almost anything that can be said about them.

For me, there was the added excitement this year of the Guardian‘s Banned-from-the-Festival status (see Guardian 10/8, 10/22/76). Because of our reporting on the Film Festival last year, the Guardian was not allowed to attend this year’s event on the same basis as the 98 acceptable representatives from the press. But we went ahead and bough some tickets on the sly, and on the nights of the showings I slunk in to take my place in the audience, glancing furtively around to make sure I hadn’t been spotted. As something of a natural-born outsider, I found the role of a party crasher to fit like a glove.

Still, my perspective on the festival has not really changed. I doubt that I could ever really resolve my attitudes about culture to fit the festival’s concept of Culture. Movies are still just movies to me, and charging an extra dollar to see them does not alter that fact.

26 YEARS AGO (NOV. 4, 1981)


From the personal ads:

Plug Me In

Says my refrigerator. Very attractive lesbian who lacks only cooking skills would like sympathetic Jewish woman to offer either her knowledge of the art or dinner for the rest of my life. Write P.O. Box 11528 SF CA 94101

Wanted: Wife

Long hours, no pay. For a good-looking San Francisco man, 29. Qualifications: must be beautiful, intelligent, easygoing. No experience necessary. Please, no Republicans.


WM, 38, angry, depressed, timid, gentle, understanding seeks similarly minded F with whom to wait for Godot and/or etc.

My Marriage Was No Fun

Finally my wife and I figured out that we would be happier if we weren’t together. Since then, I have discovered freedom, but it hasn’t been in single bars. It has been squeezing the toothpaste any way I please, or being able to change plans at the last minute. I am 44, nice-looking, secure, and I would be interested in meeting a woman, younger or older, who would like to share her freedom with me.

I am an R.C. priest who takes his religious calling very seriously. But God also made me a man. I have thought about leaving the Church, but feel that that would be very wrong. God didn’t create us to live half lives, He will understand. While I’m sexually inexperienced, I am attractive, accomplished and sincere. Obviously discretion is a must.

Women Are Taught to Say "No"

This one is happy, bright, and attractive, and she is ready to begin saying "Yes." Now, what are the questions?

Plug in, turn on, and feel the noise at the Headphone Fest

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Yep, it’s that time of year again – time to break out the old headphones and plug into some experimento sounds at [:]PLUG3[:], San Francisco’s third annual Global Headphone Festival. Expect the transmission of 48 live local performances, in conjunction with the tenth annual International Headphone Festival, Le Placard X, a self-organized, nonstop streaming, migrating “interaural” experiment.

Organizers advise you to BYOH or bring your own headphones to the event running Sat., Oct. 13, to Sun., Oct. 14, 1 p.m.-1 a.m. both days., at the Lab, 2948 16th St., SF. $5 sliding scale. (415) 864-8855.

Performers include:
100S OF DISMEMBERED HANDBAGS
666GANGSTAZ
ANTHONY MARIN
BEATLE
BEYTAH
BLUE VITRIOL
BLOODY SNOWMAN
CATSYNTH
CONRAD LEWBEL
CYPOD
DELETIST
DOUBLE VISION
DUD
FILTHMILK
FORMS OF THINGS UNKNOWN
GATHER THE BONES (trance viola drone)
HALCYON HIGH
HEADBOGGLE
HEARTWORM
HORAFLORA
JUSTINO
LANCE GRABMILLER
LES TROIS FEUILLES / 3 LEAFS
LNA
LX RUDIS
MAGNANIMOUS
MATT DAVIGNON
MNEMOTH (black noise)
MOISTURE
MY HELICAL ELK
NOMMO OGO
NO NO SPOT
OZMADAWN (sci-fi noise drone)
PAGAN/PRESLEY (electronic improvisation)
PATRICE SCANLON
PISTOLS WILL AIR
PU22L3
RASTER ROOBIT (strings & pedals)
RESPECTABLE CITIZEN
SAKANA
SLITHER SYNDICATE
SOUNDTRACK FOR A MOVIE ABOUT A DREAM ABOUT NOTHING
TROY BYKER (ambient/experimental)
TELEPATHIK FRIEND
TULLAN VELTE
WELDSCHMERTZ (dual cello drones by members of FILTHMILK + DELETIST)
WESTERN ADDITION
ZENTROPIA

The Living Word

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By Amber Peckham

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When I heard the phrase “Living Word Festival” my first instinct was to think of some sort of religious revival in the back woods somewhere, with white robes and bathing in the river and people dancing with snakes. I was very far wrong, as any informed cultural citizen of the Bay probably already knows.

The Living Word Festival is a series of events that began on October 6 and ends on November 3. These events are taking place on both sides of the Bay, in all forums and flavors, from a day long discussion, concert, and dance battle tonight, Oct. 12 at Yerba Buena Gardens to the return of internationally acclaimed theater piece Scourge, which began its tour in San Francisco and will return as one of the key closing events for the festival in November. A full listing of events is available at the website of the event’s sponsor, Youth Speaks.

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Scourge

Youth Speaks is an organization that originated in San Francisco with the goal of providing youth the ability to express themselves through all forms of media, a goal that is evident in the vibrant showcase of events the festival is offering. And even though they aren’t dancing in the woods with snakes — there is much more class here — there is a spirituality to their mission and in their events, a desire to express, to connect, and ultimately, to enact positive change through culture.

My favorite part about this whole event is the way the invitation is signed — “With A Radical Acceptance and Abundance”. To me, that is exactly what this event, with the theme of “Traditions in Transition”, embodies; a celebration of the state of flux our society is in, and a promise for acceptance, whatever your story may be.

Youth Speaks Presents: The Living Word Festival
Curated by the Living Word Project
under the direction of Marc Bamuthi Joseph
contemporary urban poetry/ dance/theater/funk/hip-hop

Oct 6- Nov 3, 2007
Events vary in price and age restriction.
www.youthspeaks.org

Fashion en-CAPSULE-ated

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By Amber Peckham

If you were inspired by the cool and quirky products in our Style insert this week, make sure you take a few hours to check out the CAPSULE Design Festival this Sunday in Hayes Valley (all around the Hayes Valley Green). Around 140 Bay Area and West Coast designers will be there, all independent, all unique, and all chic.

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Mediums To Masses

This showcase of Bay Area creativity goes above and beyond the normal street fair fare, offering everything from Hilary Williams’s handmade stuffed toys made from scrap fabric to the meticulously crafted tablewares of Mediums to Masses. (And of course, waaaay too much adorable clothing and jewelry to even begin to mention.) Whatever your tastes or price range, there is sure to be at least one must-have in the two block spread of style, and a complete list of the designers who will be there is on the event’s website, with each named handily linked to an information page. If you intend to go check it out, it might be wise to scout out your favorites ahead of time, as odds are the products will be going fast—over 6000 people are expected to attend.

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Creepy? Doll from Hilary Williams

CAPSULE Design Festival
Sunday, October 14, 2007
11:00 am-6:00 pm
Hayes Valley Green
Octavia and Hayes Streets, SF
www.capsulesf.com

Scavenging’s new spirit

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› culture@sfbg.com

>>Click here to check out our Style 2007 Guide

It’s a warm September night, and I’m standing in a crowded art gallery in South San Francisco, staring at a metal octopus that moves its tentacles when you press a button. In many ways, it’s like every other reception I’ve been to: a table with snacks and wine, a healthy feeling of snobbery in the air, and a swath of hipsters blocking my view of everything. But as I walk around I notice some differences. The smell of decomposing flesh, the sound of heavy machinery, the walk-in "free shed," dozens of trash cans, and the mounds of refuse on the horizon all suggest that I’m standing in the middle of a landfill. Which, well, I am. It’s the site of the art exhibition "Waste Deep," by Nemo Gould, the San Francisco Dump’s artist in residence. And what’s most striking? I feel completely at home.

After spending most of September with junk collectors, vintage clothing nerds, and art diggers, I’m now completely accustomed to wallowing in trash and noticing freebies. For example, before driving to the SF Dump this evening I ate free baked goods at the X-rated Cake Gallery in SoMa, scrounged through leftovers at an estate sale in Bernal Heights, and knocked back pints of free Pabst at Broken Record in the Excelsior.

Yes, friends, I have become a bona fide freeloader. But like my newfound partners in grime I shun the connotations of the term. I choose instead to see myself as a sort of hip cultural revolutionary, one of the loose band of entrepreneurs and artists I’ve met over the past month who shamelessly revel in their personal gain because, at the end of the day, they know they’re "working" for a good cause. Not only are we getting a lot of cool free shit, but we’re also helping to transform the traditional hippy-dippy recycle-reuse-redistribute ethos into something more refreshing.

The freestyle movement is growing. Freeganism, a ragtag philosophy of cost-free living in a gift economy, has gained some national attention of late — especially in these economically challenging times — and the freegan ethos incubated in San Francisco, where groups like the Diggers gave away food during the ’60s. This city knows a thing or two about priceless give-and-take. And thanks to the freegan types I’ve been hanging out with, I now look at scavenging as an art form, a party, and a necessary lifestyle, one that has more to do with fashion, art, music, booze, and friendly competition than with fighting world hunger, globalization, or the war machine. Oh, most scavengers are concerned with all of that too, but creating awareness (about irresponsible consumption and the effects of wastefulness on the environment and humanity) is the fortunate by-product of the lifestyle, rather than its focus — which is, of course, copping free stuff.

THRIFTY EYE FOR THE HIP GUY


My journey from a life spent paying to consume to one consumed by the pursuit of freebies began two years ago, when I moved into a new building in the Mission. My neighbor was Aaron Schirmer — a reclusive artist who lives in a world of secondhand designer denim, seminew Macintosh computers, and used sound systems — whom I’d occasionally run into on my way to buy cigarettes and Jim Beam. Usually we’d smile and nod. But one day while he sat smoking on the stoop, he flagged me down. "Check out what I found today," he said.

At his side sat a large bag of American Apparel man panties and a crate of old-school electro cassettes. When I asked where they’d come from, he rambled on about free markets, dumpsters, and swap meets. Then he stopped abruptly, fished for the keys to his house, and said, "Here, I’ll show you."

I followed him into a hallway lined with half-finished paintings and strategically cracked mirrors, through a ’50s-style kitchen, and into his living room. In the corner, beneath a dangling gold and green Eames-style lamp, sat a 50-inch color television. His bedroom walls were lined with random bric-a-brac and outsider art, and his couch was a row of velvet-lined theater seats. Schirmer spread his arms and did his best Vanna White. "Here it is," he said. "I found all of this shit on the streets. People leave piles everywhere, and I just roam around all day and pick through them."

I quickly fell into a routine with Schirmer, a retired world-traveling DJ who now spends his days spinning rare records, tending his garden, and scavenging. I would come over to his house after work, crack a beer, and check out his finds, occasionally claiming certain items for myself. We’d then scroll through the Free section on Craigslist to devise a tentative map for the following day’s scavenge. I rarely had time to join him on his daily hunts, but I quickly learned that the free pot is virtually bottomless. And I was hooked.

These days I roam the neighborhood (corporate dumpsters are always a good bet) or scour the Internet anytime I need something. On my most recent search I found a stuffed bunny, a six-foot-tall stack of records, a pair of cowboy boots, and — I shit you not — Sharon Stone’s old couch. But I’m no expert. Anyone can search a Web site, but it takes a true connoisseur, someone like Kelly Malone, to build a business from scavenging.

FREE-MARKET ECONOMY


Malone, cofounder of the Mission Indie Mart, spent 10 years climbing the retail ladder at places like the Gap and Limited until she worked her way up to a glamorous life as a traveling designer. But then tragedy struck — in the form of ovarian cancer and its debilitating treatment process — and she had to quit. After spending the first few days of her indefinite vacation watching television, drinking too much at the Phone Booth, and watching old movies, she decided to revisit an old hobby: scavenging. "I just started over and kept positive," Malone said. "When I wasn’t sick from the chemo, I was trash-picking for cool stuff to sew and reconstruct." Malone began meticulously scouring estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales for that perfect owl clock or a one-of-a-kind sundress. She also got into interior and exterior design, grabbing spare paint and building materials off the streets, then enlisting her friends to help construct a backyard oasis.

Soon, though, Malone’s home had morphed into a retro junk museum. Her backyard was now dotted with old benches, barbecue grills, sculptures, and a sound system. Clothes were spilling out all over the place, and she had enough paint to cover a mansion. It was time to expand.

Malone began taking her stuff down to the flea market in South San Francisco. She set up a booth with music and goodies, offered free beer and hot dogs to friends, and spent whole weekends selling dolled-up vintage goods and making friends with others who did the same. It was there that she struck up a business relationship with Charles Hurbert, a public relations representative at a marketing firm who has a penchant for outsider art and found fashion. Soon Malone and Hurbert combined forces and decided to look beyond sanctioned venues. Malone’s backyard beckoned. The Mission Indie Mart was born.

The first mart went off without a hitch. Malone and Hurbert invited swap meet–interested friends to set up booths in Malone’s backyard. Cheapo flyers were designed, beer was purchased and resold at cost, and reimagined found apparel was offered for sale. It was a thrifty one-off that felt like an illegal rave, and people loved it. Mission District locals swarmed Malone’s backyard and nearly bought up her entire inventory. When she held it again the next month, the mart was even more successful and attracted more people — so many that her landlord threatened to evict her. So Malone sought sponsors and a new venue. The next Mission Indie Mart will be at 12 Galaxies and will feature a set by DJ Lovedust, extremely cheap Stella Artois, and an even bigger collection of vendors.

The mart’s success suggests that this model benefits its founders, who make some income from the event, and attendees, who get cheap goods, as much as it does San Francisco’s thriving community of independent designers, vintage-clothing dealers, and the recycling-scavenging movement in general. Malone and Hurbert are proving again that with a little effort and creativity, free shit can be turned into gold.

FRUGAL PHILANTHROPY


That’s also what Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez, the founders of SwapSF, are doing at CELLspace — but for them the party and the product are more important than the money.

The couple started SwapSF a few years ago as a way to poach their friends’ unwanted apparel. "I had this friend who owned like a million pairs of limited-edition sneakers that he never wore," Lewis said. "The swap idea started as a way for me to get my hands on some of them." So Hernandez and Lewis, who have been throwing events since they met at a party five years ago, did what came naturally: they drew up a flyer, bought a bunch of cheap beer and pizza, and invited their friends to get down.

The idea has taken off, as I witnessed Sept. 22 when I threw a few shirts, a pair of pants, and some old hats in a bag and pedaled down to Bryant and 18th Street to volunteer at their recent event, the Most Hyperbolically Stupendous Clothing Swap Ever. It was to be a win-win situation: a little time in exchange for first dibs at free clothes. I arrived at CELLspace at 11 a.m. to find a DJ spinning downtempo hip-hop, a handful of kids sorting through bags, and Hernandez, who greeted me with a smile, a name badge, and a beer. I’d envisioned spending a leisurely afternoon sipping beer provided by Trumer Pilsner (the event sponsor) with about a hundred other scavengers, and the day seemed to be turning out that way.

But neither I nor the organizers were quite prepared for the four-hour clusterfuck that awaited us. Soon the volunteers were drowning in a mile-high volcano of pants, shirts, scarves, and underwear. By noon, the event’s official start time, a line wound around 19th Street. At 12:30 p.m. the place was packed. It was as if every hipster in the Mission had gotten wind of an opportunity for free music, beer, and dancing and had gathered up their unwanted clothes to join the party — a party that happened to result in free clothing for charity organizations like A Woman’s Place, the AIDS Emergency Fund, and San Francisco General Hospital.

FREE YOUR MIND


Since starting in Lewis and Hernandez’s apartment and then relocating, the SwapSF event has become so popular that it’s getting hard to handle. Even the duo have been surprised by its sudden and exponential growth. It seems that by using sarcastic graphic design on their flyers, guerrilla promotion techniques (word of mouth, stickers, blogs, etc.), and a refrigerator full of beer, Hernandez and Lewis have tapped into a new way to market charity events to a community of self-obsessed hipsters. Like Malone, the SwapSF duo see something wrong with the way our culture consumes and wastes, but they’re reluctant to jump on a soapbox — or even stand close to one.

Which may be why their parties have been garnering more attention and support than have the more traditional free markets that have been held across the nation for years. Malone and her contemporaries are creating awareness with no pretenses, no preaching, and no Hacky Sack–playing hippies. They are nurturing a world of gift exchange that speaks to a new generation of recyclers who enjoy the selfish thrills of scoring, a good party, and daytime drinking more than — or at least as much as — the satisfaction people find in collective self-sacrifice and charity.

Even San Francisco Dump artist Nemo Gould isn’t making his garbage art purely, or even mostly, as a political statement. "By virtue of it being made out of garbage, my art does make a statement about waste and overconsumption," Gould said. "But that’s not what it’s really about." Although Gould sees the danger in the complex environmental situations that create places like the SF Dump, his desire to work there had more to do with personal satisfaction than with changing the world. The dump’s Artist in Residence Program offers one of the most coveted positions in the city because it guarantees lifelong access to free garbage.

"There’s a scavenger spirit," Gould said. "Whoever has it is compelled to collect. Whatever comes after that is up to the scavenger."

The scavenger spirit is currently creating a subculture. Like skateboarders who view the city’s byways as a concrete playground, the new breed of scavengers looks at the urban environment from a different perspective. In their eyes the streets of San Francisco are aisles in a seven-mile-by-seven-mile warehouse of free shit. Their primary goal is to decorate their homes with one-of-a-kind furniture, dress their bodies in fly gear, and pad their pocketbooks, all while avoiding overdraft charges and, on the side, helping to generate awareness. In their separate and edgy styles, Gould, Malone, Hernandez, Lewis, and Schirmer have managed to turn this spirit into a lifestyle that doesn’t alienate people with its self-righteousness. I mean, everyone wants free shit, right? Who can’t relate to that?

THE (FREE) SHIT LIST

There’s a fine line between scavenging to make a statement and being a straight-up freeloader. Luckily, it’s up to the individual to decide exactly where that line is drawn. Here are some resources for learning more about the score.

FREEGAN.INFO


Information about strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism; includes freegan hot spots in San Francisco.

freegan.info/?page=SanFrancisco

REALLY, REALLY FREE MARKET


A monthly alternate-economy festival and a really good place to get rid of your old stuff.

www.reallyreallyfree.org

MISSION INDIE MART


Kelly Malone and Charles Hurbert’s unique party take on the freegan ethos.

www.myspace.com/missionindiemart

SWAPSF


Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez’s fabulous swap bonanza.

www.swapsf.com

MYOPENBAR.COM


A list of every open bar, happy hour, and extremely cheap alcohol event in the city.

sf.myopenbar.com

GOING.COM


A cross between MySpace and Yelp that focuses entirely on events, including a free section featuring happy hours, art openings, and concert ticket giveaways.

www.going.com

SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT


Official city site for recycling, disposal, and reuse information.

www.sfenvironment.org

SAN FRANCISCO DUMP


Learn about our city’s unique take on garbage and strategies for recycling.

www.sunsetscavenger.com

SCRAPEDEN SF


An art foundation dedicated to transforming trash into interactive public sculptures.

www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf

ARTGOODHITLERBAD


Mission Indie Mart cofounder Hurbert blogs his best scavenger finds.

www.artgoodhitlerbad.com

NEMO GOULD


The latest artist in residence at the SF Dump has been making cool stuff from garbage for years.

www.nemomatic.com

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