Festival

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

ONGOING

Audition – A Play Exit Theater, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Call for price. Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Feb 13. GenerationTheatre presents a comedy of the absurd by Roland David Valayre.

Bone to Pick and Diadem Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $15-50. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Feb 13. Cutting Ball Theatre presents a pair of plays by Eugenie Chan.

Clue Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org. $15-35. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 7 and 10pm. Through Feb 19. A play based on a film based on a board game is just the kind of tangled genealogy much goodtime theater is made of these days. So there’s nothing too new about Boxcar’s stage adaptation of the manic 1985 comedy derived from a once popular Parker Bros. diversion. In fact, it’s at least the second stage adaptation of same to be offered in San Francisco. (Impossible Productions remounted its version at the Dark Room just last year.) Nevertheless, led by adapter-director Nick A. Olivero, Boxcar’s production pursues its vision like a mad yen, with a loving fidelity and self-referential glee that are not so much inspired as just plain zealous (although Olivero’s scenic design does reach new heights: a TV-toned board-game set that the audience peers down on from six-feet-high balconies ringing the stage). Performances are dutiful and solid for the most part, with especially nice work from Brian Martin (as the butler) and J. Conrad Frank (as Mrs. Peacock). Although there’s something vaguely and not unpleasantly hypnotic about it all, groups of cult-film line-gleaners may be the best audience for this one. (Avila)

*The Companion Piece Z Space at Theatre Artaud, 450 Florida; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Call for price. Thurs 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Feb 13. Z Space presents the world premiere of a new play by Mark Jackson, with Beth Wilmurt and Christopher Kuckenbaker.

*A Hand in Desire Viracocha, 998 Valencia; www.viracochasf.com. $10-20. See website for dates and times. Through 1/29 Even though the card game of choice in Tennesee Willams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is poker, it’s fitting that the five-member cast of EmSpace Dance’s adaptation A Hand in Desire should play at hearts instead. After all, as Mitch (Christopher White) reminds us, “poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women” And besides, hearts are very much the core of each character: the heart of Blanche, a flighty bird, the heart of Stella, a string of colored lights, the heart of the doomed Allen Grey (Kegan Marling), an open wound. As the cast plays onstage with a custom-designed deck, each trump card is turned over to a laconic narrator/conductor (Heather Robinson) who names the scene they are to play next. Each evening promises a different sequence of scenes, some of which stick more closely to the original script than others. However, the ensemble is at it’s best when it lets go of text altogether, such as the scene “a cleft in the rock of the world I could hide in,” during which Stella (Natalie Greene) and Stanley (Peter Griggs) get it on, and Blanche (Rowena Richie) awkwardly waltzes with Mitch as Alan insinuates himself into their duet. Musicians Joshua Pollock and Chris Broderick tie the whole experiment together with aplomb. (Gluckstern)

Out of Sight The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Feb 13. The Marsh presents a new solo show by Sara Felder.

Party of 2 – The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Sun, 3pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through April 9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.custommade.org. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 19. Custom Made Theatre presents stories by the late writer and performer.

Treefall New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctsf.org. $24-40. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 27. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a tale of erotic attraction by Henry Murray.

BAY AREA

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs Berkeley Rep, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 27. Storyteller Mike Daisey spins a yarn about the Apple head.

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Call for times. Through Feb 13. Don Reed’s one-man show continues its extended run.

Heartbreak House Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-0999, www.berkeleyrep.org. $12-15. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Feb 13, 2pm; Feb, 17, 8pm). Through Feb 19. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents the George Bernard Shaw comedy set just before World War I.

The Last Cargo Cult Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 20. As fans of J. Maarten Troost have learned, life on an island “paradise” is far less idyllic than the imagination yearns to believe. So it’s hardly surprising that Mike Daisey’s monologue The Last Cargo Cult begins with a white-knuckle ride in a prop plane piloted by a man with a milky eye. Daisey’s destination, the Pacific island of Tanna, is the location of one of the world’s last so-called “cargo cults”, and their big celebration “John Frum Day” is approaching. Daisey’s intention to hang out at the festivities smacks a little of entitled voyeurism, but the parallel he manages to draw between the complexities of a religion dedicated to a mythical cargo of “awesome shit”, and our own dedication to the acquisition of same, is a striking one. From our almost blind faith in the value of basically valueless currency, to our even blinder faith that indenturing ourselves by debt will enrich us, the foundations of our own “cargo cult” are revealed smartly by Daisey to be just as precarious as if built at the base of a volcano as in Tanna. Still, I found the most revealing thing about the evening to be the moment when the couple next to me took off with a $100 bill they’d acquired free-of-charge at the door, to which I can’t help but ask them: “Did you get your money’s worth?” (Gluckstern)

No Good Deed Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Pear Avenue Theatre presents a world premiere noir-inflected play by Paul Braverman.

*Of the Earth – The Salt Plays Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Sun/30. If those whom the gods favor die young, it’s probably just as well for Odysseus (Dan Bruno) that Zeus (Rami Margron) happens to be irked at him. That Zeus occasionally manifests as a scary nurse with a penchant for ballroom dance is one of but many mysterious angles Jon Tracy teases out of the standard Odysseus myth. Another involves the instant-messaging potential of paper planes; a third, a blunt addiction metaphor for warmongering. In what must surely be a happy coincidence, the design elements and staging of Of the Earth are curiously similar to those of the recent Cutting Ball production of The Tempest. Characters leaping about from floor-to-ceiling ladders to physically embody shipwrecks and monsters, a handful of actors playing multiple roles, watery video installations, even the allusion to mental illness and modern psychiatry are threads that tie the two productions, however unsuspectingly, together. Happily for The Shotgun Players, their version floats above the comparison with a host of extra tension-drivers—the sinuously menacing fighting-style of Posiedon (Anna Ishida), the heart-throb pounding of Taiko drums, the sensual machinations of Circe (Charisse Loriaux), the clever usage of Penelope’s (Lexie Papedo) “tapestry” to weave together the action. And though at times the thread is broken mid-scene, we are finally given to understand that this epic tale of war’s fallout is first and finally a story of love. (Gluckstern)

Strange Travel Suggestions The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Feb 19. Jeff Greenwald stars in a one-man show about the vagaries of wanderlust.

The 39 Steps TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $24-79. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Feb 13. TheatreWorks presents Patrick Barlow’s comic adaptation of the book and movie of the same name.

World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through April 3. The Amazing Bubble Man extends the bubble-making celebration.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Gush Brava Theater, 2783 24th St; 6470-2822, www.brava.org. Call for dates and times (through Jan 29). $15-35. Brava presents a dance series curated by Joe Goode.

A Hand in Desire Viracocha, 998 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm (through Jan 29). EmSpace Dance presents a “remix” of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Women of the Way Festival Shotwell Studios, 3252-A Shotwell; and The Garage, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.ftloose.org. Call for dates and times (through Jan 30). $15-20. The dance festival celebrates it 11th anniversary with 23 new shows.

BAY AREA

Marga’s Funny Mondays The Cabaret at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Mon/31, 8pm. $10. Marga Gomez hosts a Monday night comedy series.

 

 

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam
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0

Schedules are for Wed/26–Tues/1 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-10. Broken Windows, Open Doors (Karewicz), Thurs, 8. “ATA Art and Action FUNraiser,” with live music by Grass Widow, an art auction, and more, Sat, 5.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-20. “Noir City 9:” •The Woman on the Beach (Renoir, 1947), Wed, 7:30, and Beware My Lovely (Horner, 1952), Wed, 9; •The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Godfrey, 1947), Thurs, 7:30, and My Name is Julia Ross (Lewis, 1945), Thurs, 9:30; •Crashout (Foster, 1955), Fri, 7:30, and Loophole (Schuster, 1954), Fri, 9:30; •Blind Alley (Vidor, 1939), Sat, 1, 4:30, and Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1948), Sat, 2:30; •The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Siodmak, 1945), Sat, 7:30, and So Evil My Love (Allen, 1948), Sat, 9:15; •Angel Face (Preminger, 1952), Sun, 1, 5, 9, and The Hunted (Bernhard, 1948), Sun, 3, 7. For complete program information, visit www.noircity.com. “SF Sketchfest Great Collaborators Series: Airplane! Tribute to Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker,” Mon, 7; “SF Sketchfest Comedy Writing Award:” Broadcast News (Brooks, 1987), with James L. Brooks in person, Tues, 7. For more info on these events (tickets, $25), visit www.sfsketchfest.com.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. The Illusionist (Chomet, 2010), Wed-Thurs, call for times. August to June (Valens and Valens, 2010), Thurs, 7. Filmmakers Amy and Tom Valens in person. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (Schulberg, 1948/2010), Jan 28-Feb 3, call for times.

EXPLORATORIUM McBean Theater, 3601 Lyon, SF; www.asifa-sf.org. Free. “Open Screening for Animators,” Fri, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: New Year’s Revolutions:” Sade (Jacquot, 2000), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Film 50: History of Cinema: Fantasy Films and Realms of Enchantment:” The Thief of Baghdad (Powell, Berger, and Whelan, 1940), Wed, 3:10. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (Chodorov, 2010), Wed, 7:30. “African Film Festival 2011:” One Small Step (Vaughan-Richards, 2010) with “Me Broni Ba” (Owusu, 2008), Thurs, 7; Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (Ocelot and Galup, 2005), Sat, 4:30. “Suspicion: The Films of Claude Chabrol and Alfred Hitchcock:” Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951), Fri, 7; Les Cousins (Chabrol, 1959), Fri, 9; Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970), Sat, 8:20. “World Cinema Foundation:” Touki Bouki (Djop-Mambéty, 1973), Sat, 6:30. “Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:” “Punk, Attitudinal: Film and Video, 1977-1987,” Sun, 5:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. Tiny Furniture (Dunham, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9:25 (also Wed, 2). “The Good Old Naughty Days,” vintage porn from the early 1900s, Fri-Sun, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 4). The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (Pennebaker, 1973), Feb 1-3, 7:15, 9:15 (also Feb 2, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Two in the Wave (Laurent, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9. “Bringing Up Léaud: The Antoine Doinel Cycle:” Love on the Run (Truffaut, 1979), Wed, 6:45, 8:45. “By, For, and About George Kuchar,” film series, Fri, 7; Sat, 6:45; Sun, 4. Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale (Ness), Mon, call for time. “SF Film Society Education presents: Herzog in Focus,” Mon, 7. Educational program; visit www.sffs.org for additional info. Lemmy (Olliver and Orshoski, 2010), Feb 1-2, call for times.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish (Ettinger, 2009), Wed, 6; Sat, 2.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10-12. Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (Anno, 2011), Wed-Thurs, 5, 7:15.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Volume 14: Middle East,” nine videos focusing on the Middle East compiled by ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, Jan 13-March 27 (gallery hours Thurs-Sat, noon-8; Sun, noon-6). “British Television Advertising Awards 2010,” Thurs-Sun, 2, 4, 6 (also Thurs-Sat, 8).

Stage Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Audition – A Play Exit Theater, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Call for price. Opens Thurs/20, 8pm. Runs Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. GenerationTheatre presents a comedy of the absurd by Roland David Valayre.

Bone to Pick and Diadem Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $15-50. Opens Thurs/20, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Cutting Ball Theatre presents a pair of plays by Eugenie Chan.

The Companion Piece Z Space at Theatre Artaud, 450 Florida; (800) 838-3006, www.zspace.org. $20-40. Call for price. Previews Wed/19-Thurs/20, 7pm; Fri/21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Thurs 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Feb 13. Z Space presents the world premiere of a new play by Mark Jackson, with Beth Wilmurt and Christopher Kuckenbaker.

Out of Sight The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Previews Thurs/20, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Feb 13. The Marsh presents a new solo show by Sara Felder.

Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.custommade.org. $10-25. Previews Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm. Opens Tues/25, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 19. Custom Made Theatre presents stories by the late writer and performer.

The 39 Steps TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $24-79. Previews Wed/19, 7:30pm; Thurs/20-Fri/21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. TheatreWorks presents Patrick Barlow’s comic adaptation of the book and movie of the same name.

Treefall New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctsf.org. $24-40. Previews Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm; Jan 26-28, 8pm. Opens Jan 29, 8pm. Through Feb 27. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a tale of erotic attraction by Henry Murray.

BAY AREA

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs Berkeley Rep, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Previews Thurs/20-Sat/22, 8pm. Opens Sun/23, 7pm. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 27. Storyteller Mike Daisey spins a yarn about the Apple head.

Heartbreak House Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-0999, www.berkeleyrep.org. $12-15. Opens Fri/21, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Feb 13, 2pm; Feb, 17, 8pm). Through Feb 19.Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents the George Bernard Shaw comedy set just before World War I.

ONGOING

Clue Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org. $15-35. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 7 and 10pm. Through Feb 19. Boxcar Theatre presents a play based on a movie based on a board game.

No Good Deed Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Pear Avenue Theatre presents a world premiere noir-inflected play by Paul Braverman.

Party of 2 – The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Sun, 3pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through April 9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

BAY AREA

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Call for times. Through Feb 13. Don Reed’s one-man show continues its extended run.

The Last Cargo Cult Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 20. Mike Daisey stars in a one-man show about obsession with commerce.

*Of the Earth – The Salt Plays Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Jan 30. If those whom the gods favor die young, it’s probably just as well for Odysseus (Dan Bruno) that Zeus (Rami Margron) happens to be irked at him. That Zeus occasionally manifests as a scary nurse with a penchant for ballroom dance is one of but many mysterious angles Jon Tracy teases out of the standard Odysseus myth. Another involves the instant-messaging potential of paper planes; a third, a blunt addiction metaphor for warmongering. In what must surely be a happy coincidence, the design elements and staging of Of the Earth are curiously similar to those of the recent Cutting Ball production of The Tempest. Characters leaping about from floor-to-ceiling ladders to physically embody shipwrecks and monsters, a handful of actors playing multiple roles, watery video installations, even the allusion to mental illness and modern psychiatry are threads that tie the two productions, however unsuspectingly, together. Happily for The Shotgun Players, their version floats above the comparison with a host of extra tension-drivers—the sinuously menacing fighting-style of Posiedon (Anna Ishida), the heart-throb pounding of Taiko drums, the sensual machinations of Circe (Charisse Loriaux), the clever usage of Penelope’s (Lexie Papedo) “tapestry” to weave together the action. And though at times the thread is broken mid-scene, we are finally given to understand that this epic tale of war’s fallout is first and finally a story of love. (Gluckstern)

Strange Travel Suggestions The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Feb 19. Jeff Greenwald stars in a one-man show about the vagaries of wanderlust.

World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through April 3. The Amazing Bubble Man extends the bubble-making celebration.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Gush Brava Theater, 2783 24th St; 6470-2822, www.brava.org. Call for dates and times (through Jan 29). $15-35. Brava presents a dance series curated by Joe Goode.

A Hand in Desire Viracocha, 998 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm (through Jan 29). EmSpace Dance presents a “remix” of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Women of the Way Festival Shotwell Studios, 3252-A Shotwell; and The Garage, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.ftloose.org. Call for dates and times (through Jan 30). $15-20. The dance festival celebrates it 11th anniversary with 23 new shows.

BAY AREA

Marga’s Funny Mondays The Cabaret at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Mon/24, 8pm. $10. Marga Gomez kicks off a Monday night comedy series.

Tango Buenos Aires Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. Fri/21, 8pm. $22-52. The dance company visits the Bay Area as part of a ten-week tour of North America.

On the Cheap Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Events listings are compiled by Jackie Andrews. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Weekly Picks.

WEDNESDAY 19

Tom Rachman Bookshop West Portal, 80 West Portal, SF; (415) 564-8080. 7p.m., free. Like books on tape, only better — Tom Rachman reads from his highly acclaimed debut novel The Imperfectionist, a collection of short stories set in and around an Italian English language newspaper for travelers and ex-pats. A journalist himself, Rachman’s writing has been described as alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching. Come see what all the hullabaloo is about.

THURSDAY 20

Pitchapalooza: American Idol for Books Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. This American Idol-like event for writers unfortunately doesn’t feature a drunk and effed-up-on-pills Paula Abdul, but it could take you one step closer to becoming a published author. Pitch your book in one minute or less to an all star cast of publishing experts — the most convincing scribe gets an introduction to an agent that can help them realize their book dreams. Anyone who buys a book in the store that day gets a free consultation, making this a must-do for all you struggling artistes.Bay Area

Wild World of Frogs Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, SF; (415)554-9600, www.randallmuseum.org. 7:30pm, free (donations encouraged). Dr. Jerry Kreiger, Save the Frogs! founder and director, will tell you everything you didn’t know you wanted to learn about frogs — from the interesting and funny to the downright sad (200 species of our skin breathing homies have become extinct over the last 30 years). Support the first and only public charity dedicated to amphibian conservation.

FRIDAY 21

Birds and Bees Collide Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF; (415)377-3325, www.birdlovesbee.com. 8pm, free. Celebrate the release of Birdlovesbee: Artists in Collaboration with writer Camille Ikalina Robles– founder of One Red Delicious Press — and a bevy of emerging artists. For Birdlovesbee, Robles passes her writing off to an artist who, in turn, creates a reaction in their chosen medium, resulting in beautiful, handmade zines. Collaborators include photographer Marie Dewitt and film artist Dennis Maxwell. Special musical performance by Silian Rail and DJ set by DJ Shortround.

SATURDAY 22

The Uncomfortable Zones of Fun Temescal Arts Center, 511 48th St., Oakl.; (510) 526-7858, www.temescalartscenter.org. 8pm, donations suggested. Prepare to get … uncomfortable. Frank Moore, shaman, disabled performance artist, and 2008 presidential candidate, merges music, dance, erotica, religion and improv to create an experience few people have an easy time describing.

Jewelry-making class The Bead Store, 417 Castro, SF; (415) 861-7332, www.thebeadstoresf.com. 11am-noon and 3-4pm, free (plus materials purchase). Tucked away on Castro Street amidst the countless bear bars and penis-shaped pasta peddlers lies a cozy little shop for all of your jewelry-making needs, including monthly classes. Perhaps you would like to recreate a piece of jewelry you once owned but lost after a night of too many Racer 5’s? You’ll want to attend the 11am “Bring Your Project” class. Stick around for the 3pm “Made with Love” class and make your sweetheart a heart-shaped pendant or earrings with materials provided by the shop. Call to reserve a spot because spaces are limited.

ChicaChic opening reception California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, SF; (415) 575-6242, www.ciis.edu. 6-8 pm, free. Five leading chicana visual artists show their greatly varying work, which honors the themes and iconography of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s, yet at the same time provides new imagery for a newer and faster paced media-saturated society. Reception includes a panel discussion featuring the exhibition artists and curator.

SUNDAY 23

Cal Science and Engineering Festival UC Berkeley Sutardja Hall, Berk., (510) 642-0352, www.scienceatcal.berkeley.edu/festival. 11 am-3 pm, free. Cal drops the science from astronomy to zoology. Join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, witness unicycle basketball, touch a real human brain, excavate fossils, make an earthquake, play silly animal games, and yes, there will be liquid nitrogen! Honorary UC Berkeley science degree not included.

TUESDAY 25

Delectable Delights: Tales of Food and Disaster Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF; (415) 377-3325, www.litupwriters.com. 7:30-9pm, free. LitUp Writers’ Humor Storytelling Series combines everyone’s favorite defense mechanism: humor, with everyone’s favorite coping mechanism: food. Sounds like a win-win right? Local writers perform, sharing funny stories about their obsessions with, or disgust for, the things we eat.

Crack-ups

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Crack-ups

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Who wants to die for art? That question, immortally screamed by Divine at the climax of John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974), has most recently been taken up by Darren Aronofsky’s campy psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), in which Natalie Portman’s fragile ballerina discovers that giving her all as the good and evil leads in an edgy production of Swan Lake requires giving up her sanity, and eventually, her life.

The somewhat romantic notion that an overinvestment in one’s art can lead to a psychotic break with reality also underlies Ronald Colman’s far more gripping, Oscar-winning performance in George Cukor’s 1947 backstage noir A Double Life, a film Black Swan perhaps owes as much a debt to as it does to its other cinematic antecedents such as The Red Shoes (1948) or All About Eve (1950) (2007’s I Know Who Killed Me also deserves a lesser place on that list).

In the film — which screens at the Castro Theatre in a new archival print as part of Noir City 9 — Colman stars as Anthony John, a celebrated stage actor with a nasty temper who winds up playing the title role in a production of Othello opposite his ex-wife Brita (Signe Hasso), who has been cast as Desdemona. As John gets deeper into his character, his own lingering frustrations over his failed marriage become cross-wired with Othello’s jealous rage resulting in a fatal instance of life imitating art. "What seems a fairly safe profession, acting," wrote New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther in his review of the film, "is as dangerous as they come."

Cowritten by husband-and-wife team Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin (who themselves were no strangers to the stage) and photographed with Expressionistic verve by Milton R. Krasner, A Double Life is — true to its title — filled with mirror imagery, split frames, and opposites locked in conflict. It also sets the stage, if you will, for the other titles in this year’s Noir City program, many of which turn on a character struggling to keep from splitting in two.

So often in film noir, the burden of proof is so great as to drive our hero or heroine mad as they try to convince those around them that they’re innocent, in danger, or more often than not, both. Such is the case with Pat O’Brien’s museum curator in Crack-Up (1947), who survives a horrible accident only to be told it never happened, or Barbara Stanwyck’s imperiled, bed-ridden rich girl in 1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number (Stanwyck, it should be noted, is all over this year’s festival, including a blistering starring turn as the titular addict in 1949’s The Lady Gambles).

In some cases, as with two of this year’s many not-on-DVD rarities, the protagonists actually do have evil twins. Olivia de Havilland beat Hayley Mills to the punch playing both sisters in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror (1946), in which the evil de Havilland uses her physical resemblance to frame her sweet sister (also de Havilland) for murder. Meanwhile, in Among the Living (1941), Albert Dekker goes up against himself as a brain-damaged psychopath who terrorizes a small town and the fraternal twin who must take him out.

This year’s nuttiest film by far is Fritz Lang’s Freudian roller-coaster ride The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). Faster than you can say Rebecca (1940), Joan Bennett’s naïve newlywed has been whisked off to her new husband’s big, dark house full of repressed secrets and a spinsterish head housekeeper. As gorgeous to look at is its plot is difficult to follow, The Secret Beyond the Door is a film you’d have to be nuts not to see.

NOIR CITY 9

Jan. 21–30, $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.noircity.com

Life within sound

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Life within sound

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Peer carefully at the expansive gatefold cover art of Barn Owl’s Ancestral Star (Thrill Jockey), and what at first glance looks like two interstellar vessels cruising through the night sky coalesces into something much more grounded, tethered to the spectral shadow of the image’s photographer, Barn Owl guitarist-vocalist Jon Porras, holding his hands over the light source in the foreground.

Porras took the three-minute exposure of the moon over a campfire at SF’s Ocean Beach on a cold, clear April night. “If you look closely, you can see the waves crashing,” he says. “All the light becomes saturated on film — that’s why it’s so luminescent. I actually had to go up to the fire to warm my hands, and you can see a ghostly image of me warming my hands over the fire.

“It’s become a funny joke between my friends.”

It’s also an unlikely, mysterious footnote perfectly in sync with the majestic sounds pouring from Ancestral Star, one of 2010’s best albums, and one that continues to surface new pleasures — from “Sundown”‘s opening overture of distorted guitars to the title track’s incremental, tonal tectonic shifts to “Cavern Hymn”‘s glimmering, deeply echoed fingerpicking. The enigmatic, unexpectedly earthbound image parallels the long tone and drone listening experience as well. “It requires a certain patience,” Porras, 25, muses. “I think long tone music can open up aspects of reality you may not have otherwise have seen.”

Meditative drone, black metal, Tibetan throat-singing, gliding meditations on bowed guitar, and celestial compositions sprinkled with synth, gongs, bells, and singing bowls seamlessly ebb and flow, seemingly of one mesmerizing piece, in a work that feels like the lost, alternative soundtrack to Paris, Texas, or the score to a lost Alejandro Jodorowsky western — a sound that was part of the thinking when Porras and fellow guitarist-vocalist Evan Caminiti went into the studio with friend the Norma Conquest in 2009. It was their first opportunity to record over the course of several months, refining their sound and bringing in musicians such as violinist Marielle Jakobsons (Darwinsbitch) in a professional studio setting.

“We were going for a metaphysical cinematic western,” Porras explains. “We like to have these Americana-influenced guitar passages in combination with more experimental elements to create this overall narrative. I guess the desert at night is an image we like to invoke — fog-shrouded hillsides, the awestruck feelings you get from a landscape.” The sweeping, wonder-inducing American spaces of Cormac McCarthy and Porras’ favorite, Zane Gray, were an inspiration for the two musicians, who first met each other in an American Indian science class at San Francisco State University in 2005.

Metal, as well as the long-tone compositions of Lamont Young and the American primitive fingerpicking of John Fahey, also provided common ground. “We had similar ideas,” Caminiti recalls. “I just remember wanting to combine things that hadn’t necessarily been combined before — heavy music and blues with more folk-influenced music — so we’d work on a piece that had heavy drones and do blues-influenced fingerpicking over it. There was a lot of exploration that had to be done, and we just distilled the sound over the years.”

Those sonic journeys have manifested recently in a collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts resident Ellen Fullman — who installed her room-sized long-string instrument in her old army building of a studio — out on the Important imprint. And Caminiti and Porras, who also hold down the musical projects Higuma and Elm respectively, are currently working on a new Barn Owl album with Trans Am’s Phil Manley at Lucky Cat Studio, on music sparked by Popul Vuh’s “interlocking chiming guitar passages,” according to Porras.

Now, with performances in the group’s past at such disparate spots as Grace Cathedral (“Great in particular because there’s six seconds of natural reverb, which is perfect for resonant sound,” Porras says), sometime label Root Strata’s On Land gathering, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the Supersonic Festival in the United Kingdom, the Barn Owl experience might be characterized as more metaphysical than visceral.

“We aim to create an enveloping atmosphere where everyone is sucked away into an alternate dimension for 30 minutes,” Caminiti observes. “Everything around you is just put on pause, and you’re just living within the sound in the moment. You become engulfed in the sound. The sound becomes a living organism, which is also why there’s a lot of room for improvisation in our set. For us, it leaves us centered and at peace — it’s a meditative device in a way.” 

BARN OWL

With Phil Manley Life Coach and Diego Andres Gonzalez

Tues/25, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

‘Too Much’ — and more

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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‘Too Much’ — and more

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER/DANCE/PERFORMANCE Too much of a good thing can be a good thing. That became clear to artist/curators Julie Phelps and Keith Hennessy last year with the unexpected success of “Too Much!,” a no-holds-barred marathon of contemporary queer performance originally conceived as a cheeky 20th anniversary celebration of Hennessy’s lauded yet uncompromising career as performer, choreographer, and activist.

The idea of a “queer 20th anniversary” only got the conversation started, says Hennessy, whose company Zero Performance produced last year’s event. “I’m in a really different space than I was 20 years ago. I’m now 50. I made [my breakthrough] piece when I was in my late 20s. Who are those people now? And where is queer performance at? That sort of launched our thinking about putting on a festival, and [the idea] that the thing in itself should be excessive or ‘too much.’ So we crammed everything into 10 hours.”

This spirit of polymorphous plenitude launched a one-off “queer marathon” so momentous it turns into a second annual this Sunday, over the course of another 10 hours. Between 2 p.m. and midnight, three rooms at Dance Mission Theater are given over to the work of more than 50 artists — a mix of performance, installation, video, public discussion, workshops (in street art and queer games), and dinner. It promises to complicate all the usual expectations around identity-based art and politics. The only thing not overflowing is the price: 10 bucks.

This year’s “Too Much!” is more than a reprise, though. Co-curator Phelps — a young artist who recently cofounded queer performance incubator TheOffCenter, which comes on board as coproducer — explains that she and Hennessy have broadened the program. “Last year we only had performance, live installations, or full-length shows,” she says. “This year we were interested in adding this symposium element to it. While we’re all together, we might as well talk to each other, you know? So we’ve added a few workshops. Irina Contreras, for instance, is doing a stenciling workshop aimed at reminding people of the fully accessible tools they can use to express themselves as political beings, people of action.”

The symposia quotient includes a discussion of the controversial use of blackface as a subversive performance tool, a subject both Hennessy and Phelps see as particularly contentious in local identity-based art and academic discourse.

Among some notable returns from last year are Jesse Hewit, Laura Arrington, and Mica Sigourney, who as drag persona VyvvyAnne ForeverMore returns with another installment of her “Work MORE” series. Phelps describes the series, now in its third iteration, as “decentralizing drag out of nightlife bar culture and putting it into a contemporary art scene where it can be questioned and be challenged.” In this edition, Sigourney pairs drag queens with contemporary performance artists and challenges them to come up with a collaborative piece.

Of course, San Francisco has more than the average share of venues and platforms for queer art, so why is “Too Much!” not (despite the suggestion in the name) overkill?

“The Bay Area, obviously, is one of the gayest places on earth,” acknowledges Hennessy. “There are a number of different contexts for LGBT performers to work in. We looked at those and we tried to think of what doesn’t happen there? What if we did something, in a sense, more DIY? We don’t give a fuck what happens — we’re not going to pay anyone anyway. We’re just going to do this one day, organize it all ourselves, and if you want something different you can go somewhere else.”

Hennessy says they got a small grant this year that allows artists a modest remuneration. But the lack of institutional support or control, not to mention profit motive, combines neatly with a desire to include work that slips through the usual categories. “If we’re not beholden to anything, how much could we queer even the idea of an event?” he asks. “I think we’ve pulled [“Too Much!”] even further in the direction of messing with a simple theatrical structure. That means introducing people doing time-based work, or work that doesn’t fit into theatrical contexts for a variety of reasons.”

TOO MUCH!

Sun./23, 2 p.m.–midnight; $10

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(800) 838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

Our Weekly Picks: January 12-18

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 12

DANCE

“The A.W.A.R.D. Show!”

It had to happen: life imitating television. If you’ve ever wanted to put your body on the line and participate in judging a reality TV dance show, this is your opportunity. “The A.W.A.R.D. Show!” is a six-city endeavor in which 12 local choreographers (four per night) get evaluated by you and presenters from each participating entity. You get to vote for one artist each night. Each evening’s winner proceeds to Saturday’s final, where one will walk away with $10,000 check — chicken feed in television land, but a nice chunk for choreographers trying to find the cash for their next work. First on will be Manuelito Biag, Liss Fain, Katie Faulkner, and Catherine Galasso. (Rita Felciano)

Wed/12–Sat/15, 8 p.m., $20

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org


THEATER

Clue

Who killed Mr. Boddy? Was it Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the revolver? Or was it Professor Plum in the billiard room with the candlestick? Find out in Boxcar Theatre’s Clue, written and directed by Peter Matthews and Nick A. Olivero. First a popular board game, then a cult classic movie, this new version (adapted from the 1985 film) features a life-size board game with the audience watching six feet above. Secret passageways, murderous hilarity, and multiple possible endings make this whodunnit a must-see. Hot tip: get your tickets now — presale popularity has been so high that Boxcar has already added some performances to its run. (Emmaly Wiederholt)

Through Feb. 19

Wed.–Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat, 7 and 10 p.m., $15-$25

Boxcar Playhouse

505 Natoma, SF

(415) 776-1747

www.boxcartheatre.org

 

THURSDAY 13

FILM

“For Your Consideration: A Selection of Oscar Submissions from Around the World”

So you’ve been a good little film geek and seen all of 2010’s likely Oscar contenders: The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, etc. etc. But what about those films submitted for Best Foreign Language Film consideration that get extremely limited stateside releases (if they even make here at all)? Though the films in the Smith Rafael’s “For Your Consideration” series probably aren’t destined to rake in massive box office dollars (see: 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), they still represent what each country felt was worthy of worldwide notice. “For Your Consideration” presents a handful of hand-picked selections, including Spain’s Even the Rain, starring Gael García Bernal as a filmmaker intent on making a film about Christopher Columbus; Crab Trap, about Colombia’s isolated Pacific coast community; and Poland’s All That I Love, the story of four friends who form a punk band amid early-1980s Communist unrest. (Cheryl Eddy)

Jan. 13–20, $6.75–$10.25

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St, San Rafael

(415) 454-1222

www.cafilm.org


PERFORMANCE

Women on the Way Festival

For the next three weeks, expect sassy women to please, surprise, and shake you during the 11th Women on the Way Festival. The format pairs newcomers (for example, Norwegian Muslim comedian Shabana Rehman), with established artists (like San Francisco poet Genny Lim). If you are into multimedia and dance theater, the Shotwell Studios are your place to go. If dance — more or less pure — is your bag, the Garage is opening its red door. W.O.W.’s Producer Mary Alice Fry, who has made a career of spotting new talent, says she was delighted to see that so many women are working with live and often original music. The festival’s website, www.ftloose.org, offers succinct, detailed information on the individual artists and the work they’ll present. (Felciano)

Through Jan. 30, $15–$20

Shotwell Studios

3252-A 19th St., SF

Garage

975 Howard, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/5930

 

EVENT

Bay Area Puma Project

If you’re not sick of cougar jokes by now, I feel sorry for you. After all, most of the appeal is in giving up dominance, and really honey, you were never the top predator in the first place. Real cougars — as in mountain lions — are the last large animals in California with a substantial population, aside from us; their habitat covers about half our huge state. Join wildcat conservationist Zara McDonald, founder of the Felidae Conservation Fund, to hear about the first major, decade-long study of pumas in the Bay Area, efforts to protect them, and tips on coexisting with these elusive cats. Don’t you know 2011 is the year of the silver fox, anyway? (Kat Renz)

7:30–9:00 p.m., free

Randall Museum

199 Museum Way, SF

(415) 225-3830

www.sfns.org

 

COMEDY

SF Sketchfest

In 2002, I excitedly wrote about a brand-new event right here in these very pages: the first annual San Francisco Sketch Comedy Festival, a monthlong comedy smorgasbord featuring six local acts. Organizers, I wrote, foresaw “a Fringe Festival-style expansion that will bring comedy to the masses for years to come.” Well, that totally happened. Sketchfest, now in its 10th year, is the West Coast’s premiere comedy festival (in your face, L.A.), and it annually features superstars galore. This year’s sure-to-sell-out events include a 25th anniversary tribute to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, tributes to Murphy Brown and Airplane! (1980), plus appearances by boldface names like James L. Brooks, Cloris Leachman, Dan Aykroyd, and David Byrne. And yeah, there are still some locals in the mix: SF native Greg Proops pops up in improv show Whose Live Anyway?, plus there’ll be a reunion show featuring the original six sketch groups (including Kasper Hauser and the Meehan Brothers) who got this party started in the first place. (Eddy)

Through Feb. 5, $15–$60

Various venues, SF

www.sfsketchfest.com

 

FRIDAY 14

EVENT

“Salute to Supernatural“

In the television graveyard of contemporary TV dramas centered around vampires, werewolves, or horror-related themes, one of the more mainstream ones that doesn’t deserve a stake firmly implanted in its creators is the CW show Supernatural. Following the adventures of Sam and Dean Winchester, a pair of demon-hunting brothers, the program has become a hit with viewers over the past five years. At this weekend’s special Supernatural convention, Bay Area fans can meet the two lead actors, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, along with several costars, in addition to listening to talks, going to themed parties, perusing vendors, and much more. (Sean McCourt)

Fri/14, 1–6 p.m.; Sat/15, 11:30 a.m.–7 p.m.;

Sun/16, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m., $20–$50

Westin St. Francis

335 Powell, SF

(818) 409-0960

www.creationent.com.

 

COMEDY

Norm MacDonald

Coming to fame as a cast member of Saturday Night Live from 1993-98, comedian Norm MacDonald made his name as the biting host of that show’s “Weekend Update” segment, along with his hilarious impersonations of celebrities including Burt Reynolds, Bob Dole, and Larry King. Though his departure from SNL was marred by controversy, MacDonald has continued to have a successful career in show business, punctuated by a variety of movie and television roles along with several writing gigs. Be prepared for laugh-induced side aches — the funnyman comes to the Fillmore for two special live shows tonight, taping a TV special for Comedy Central. (McCourt)

7:30 and 10 p.m., $35.25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

SATURDAY 15

FILM

A Brighter Summer Day

Tender and wise, Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) is simply one of the finest historical dramatizations ever put to celluloid, ambitiously proportioned (four hours long, a cast of hundreds) but fine-grained in the telling. Yang traces Taiwan’s tumultuous midcentury history in the erring lives of teenagers. Between the deft staging of intergenerational conflict, Proustian attention to objects, and existential portraits of alienation, there’s enough material here for several filmmaking careers. Long inaccessible in the U.S., the film has been restored by Martin Scorsese’s laudably internationalist World Cinema Foundation. The Pacific Film Archive screens a selection of the organization’s recent projects throughout the month. (Max Goldberg)

6:30 p.m., $9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

PERFORMANCE

Corpo/Ilicito: The Post Human Society

“It’s going to be a very wild performance,” performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña told Time Out Chicago about his troupe Pocha Nostra’s piece Corpo/Illicito. They’ll be performing at the closing reception of SOMArts’ group exhibit, “It’s All a Blur,” a reflection on empowerment and enfranchisement via the American dream. La Pocha Nostra is famed for using its performers’ bodies as canvases for its art, so get ready for some made-up, bound, embellished, and politically ostentatious artists gone wild. As for the exhibit’s more static installations, Dale Hoyt’s videos and drawings will be on view, as will Tony Labat’s Blanket Policy, a tent made of Goodwill paintings, and Labat’s 12-foot tall barbeque. To art and freshly grilled meat products! (Caitlin Donohue)

SOMArts Cultural Center

934 Brannan, SF

(415) 552-1770

www.somarts.org

 

MONDAY 17

EVENT

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration”

Hooray for MLK! Maybe this year we can eschew the sappy television specials and get a little work done on that old dream of his? That’s what’s going down at the Yerba Buena Gardens, where a daylong celebration dubbed “Sustaining the Dream: Through Community and Service” offers free admission to the Museum of the African Diaspora and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The event also features a kid’s reading fest and a plethora of local health care providers doling out diabetes tests, children’s dental screenings, and a passel of other helpful services. Once they’ve got you feeling good, stick around for “King in Five Vignettes” at 12:15 p.m., music and performance dedicated to the man with the plan. (Donohue)

9 a.m.–5 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens

Mission between Fourth and Third streets., SF

www.norcalmlk.org

 

TUESDAY 18

VISUAL ART

“Twist and Crawl”

The Bay Area is a major center for artists with disabilities, thanks to sites such as Oakland’s Creative Growth, San Francisco’s Creativity Explored, and the NIAD Center for Art and Disabilities in Richmond. Starting from an awareness that some major names in contemporary art work with disabilities, the new exhibition “Twist and Crawl” brings together work by 14 artists to bridge gaps and blur boundaries between traditionally-acknowledged painters, photographers, and sculptors and their disabled counterparts. “Twist and Crawl,” which takes its name from a frenetic song by the English Beat, is the first installment in a thematically arranged three-part series organized by artist and curator Timothy Buckwalter. Continuing through August, it syncs up with an upcoming traveling Berkeley Art Museum exhibition devoted to Creative Growth, Creativity Explored, and NIAD. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Through March 16

National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD) Gallery

551 23rd St., Richmond

www.niadart.org


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Stage Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Stage listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Bone to Pick and Diadem Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $15-50. Previews Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm; Sun/16, 5pm. Opens Jan 20, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Cutting Ball Theatre presents a pair of plays by Eugenie Chan.

The Companion Piece Z Space at Theatre Artaud, 450 Florida; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Call for price. Previews Tues/18, 7pm; Jan 19 and 20, 7pm; Jan 21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Thurs 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Feb 13. Z Space presents the world premiere of a new play by Mark Jackson, with Beth Wilmurt and Christopher Kuckenbaker.

Out of Sight The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Previews Thurs/13 (through Jan 21). Opens Jan 22, 8pm. Runs Thurs and Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm (except Sun/16 at 7pm). The Marsh presents a new solo show by Sara Felder.

BAY AREA

The Last Cargo Cult Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Opens Wed/12, 8pm. Call for dates and times. Through Feb 20. Mike Daisey stars in a one-man show about obsession with commerce.

ONGOING

Clue Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org. $15-35. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 7 and 10pm. Through Feb 19. Boxcar Theatre presents a play based on a movie based on a board game.

Dirty Little Showtunes! A Parody Musical Revue New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sun/16. Tom Orr’s adults-only holiday show returns, with direction by F. Allen Sawyer and musical direction by Scrumbly Koldewyn.

*Forever Tango Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter; 771-6900; www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. $45-100. Call for dates and times. Through Wed/12. Luis Bravo’s atmospheric showcase is a slick, showy mélange of music and dancing whose fluid precision and assemblage of talent make it hard to resist. Cheryl Burke heads up an amazing 13-member ensemble of very stylishly draped dancers (exquisite costuming by Argemira Affonso) who singularly, all together, and of course in dramatic couplings, blend supreme control and dramatic restraint with unabashed sexual allure and volcanic energy. The orchestra, meanwhile, under direction of Eduardo Miceli, creates the intoxicating ether that sets everything in motion. (Avila)

The Lion in Winter Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.ticketweb.com. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/15. Actors Theatre of SF presents James Goldman’s play of palace intrigue.

Lost in Yonkers Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center SF, 3200 California; 292-1233, www.jccsf.org/arts. $20-39. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Jan 16. There’s a lot to like about Grandma Kurnitz (Naomi Newman), though she’d do her best to discourage you from thinking it. Her grown children are as neurotic a collection of misfits as you would expect at a Woody Allen family reunion, her grandchildren are afraid of her, and she hasn’t had a single friend in the 30+ years she’s lived in Yonkers. Set during World War 2, Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers portrays a family coming to terms with the times, and more importantly with itself over the course of ten months, as teenaged Jay (Zachary Frier-Harrison) and Arty (Noah Silverman St. John) are left in their Grandmother’s grudging care while their father Eddie (Greg Alexander) trawls the South for scrap metal to pay off an impatient loan shark. Meanwhile, their flighty yet sincere aunt Bella (Deb Fink), a grown woman with the mental attributes of a preteen Pollyanna, actually does the work of holding together the family that Grandma just can’t help but to try to scare off at the slightest provocation. A deliberately-paced production, some of the more emotional content flags a little in the translation, but a tightly-wound face-off between the boys and their Uncle Louie (Søren Oliver) — a small-time mobster with an Alexei Sayle air — and a surprising revelation from Bella are superbly played. (Gluckstern)

Party of 2 – The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Sun, 3pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through April 9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

BAY AREA

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Call for times. Through Feb 13. Don Reed’s one-man show continues its extended run.

Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. Call for dates and times. Through Sat/15. Berkeley Rep premieres the new musical, written by Lemony Snicket, with music by Nathaniel Stookey.

*Of the Earth – The Salt Plays Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Jan 30. If those whom the gods favor die young, it’s probably just as well for Odysseus (Dan Bruno) that Zeus (Rami Margron) happens to be irked at him. That Zeus occasionally manifests as a scary nurse with a penchant for ballroom dance is one of but many mysterious angles Jon Tracy teases out of the standard Odysseus myth. Another involves the instant-messaging potential of paper planes; a third, a blunt addiction metaphor for warmongering. In what must surely be a happy coincidence, the design elements and staging of Of the Earth are curiously similar to those of the recent Cutting Ball production of The Tempest. Characters leaping about from floor-to-ceiling ladders to physically embody shipwrecks and monsters, a handful of actors playing multiple roles, watery video installations, even the allusion to mental illness and modern psychiatry are threads that tie the two productions, however unsuspectingly, together. Happily for The Shotgun Players, their version floats above the comparison with a host of extra tension-drivers—the sinuously menacing fighting-style of Posiedon (Anna Ishida), the heart-throb pounding of Taiko drums, the sensual machinations of Circe (Charisse Loriaux), the clever usage of Penelope’s (Lexie Papedo) “tapestry” to weave together the action. And though at times the thread is broken mid-scene, we are finally given to understand that this epic tale of war’s fallout is first and finally a story of love. (Gluckstern)

Strange Travel Suggestions The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Jeff Greenwald stars in a one-man show about the vagaries of wanderlust.

 

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Gush Brava Theater, 2783 24th St; 6470-2822, www.brava.org. Thurs/13 through Jan 29. $15-35. Brava presents a dance series curated by Joe Goode.

Women of the Way Festival Shotwell Studios, 3252-A Shotwell; and The Garage, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.ftloose.org. Call for dates and times; Thurs/13 through Jan 30. $15-20. The dance festival celebrates it 11th anniversary with 23 new shows.

BAY AREA

SF Ethnic Dance Festival Auditions Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; 474-3914, www.worldartswest.org. Sat/8, 10am-6pm; Sun/9, 10am-7pm. $10. The second of two weekends of auditions for this year’s festival, open to the public.

On the Cheap

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Jackie Andrews. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 12
How to Build Guitars Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California, SF; (415) 831-5620, www.julianagallin.com/howto. 7pm, free (food and drink purchase encouraged). Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar lover, Mario DeSio, who began making his own damn guitars — by consulting the internet, no less — when his guitar-buying budget was slashed, will share his humble beginnings, experiences, tools, and finished (as well as unfinished) products. Afterwards, you may not be able to add “luthier” to your resume, but maybe you’ll become inspired by this DIY night.

THURSDAY 13
“The Journey That Saved Curious George” Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; (415) 655-7800, www.thecjm.org. 7pm, free with regular museum admission or $5 after 5pm. Experience the stranger-than-fiction journey of Margaret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, as they escape Paris from the Nazis on homemade bicycles, take a train ride across Europe, and finally a boat to America. Louise Borden, who wrote the book Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margaret and H.A. Rey, tells the story with an illustrated discussion and a book signing to follow — after which you will surely want to cuddle up with a sweetheart and read Curious George by the fire, er, space heater.

FRIDAY 14
Bitches Brew Park Life, 220 Clement, SF; (415) 386-7275, www.parklifestore.com. 7pm, free. A good art opening is always a great alternative to spending wads of cash on a Friday night. The possibilities of free or cheap booze and cool stuff always aim to please, and when there’s a rad band thrown in to the mix, you can’t go wrong. This Friday, check out new works from Kelly Tunstall, Marci Washington, Aiyana Udesen, Hellen Jo, and Rebecca Ebeling with special musical performance by Oakland’s Wax Idols

SATURDAY 15
Queer Porn TV Launch Party Lexington Club, 3464 19th St., SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm, free plus with drink purchase. Celebrate the launch of QueerPorn.TV, a new queer porn site, with drinks, dancing, and general all-around debauchery. Hosted by queer porn icon Courtney Trouble and porn star Tina Horn. DJs Booty Klap (Party Hole) and Jean Jamz (Party Hole, Ships In The Night) will getcha rumps shakin’, and a special performance from porn star Maggie Mayhem should no doubt be the icing on the proverbial cake.

SUNDAY 16
Scott Alexander solo performance RockIt Room, 406 Clement, SF, (415) 387-6343, www.rock-it-room.com. 8pm, free. Brooklyn expatriate Scott Alexander, a.k.a. “Cookie Man,” is that guy you may have seen recently around town hanging out on an inflatable couch while passing out free cookies. Well, he’s a Californian now and wants to make friends – and to do that he will be singing songs, passing out more cookies and, oh yes, bacon. All bases are covered here guys, regardless of whether your thing is off-beat, comedic pop music, cruelty-free baked goods, or fried pig ass.

MONDAY 17
MLK Day of Service Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; (415) 752-2483,  www.thecjm.org, www.norcalmlk.org/2011. 11am – 5pm (art poem activity from 1-3pm), free. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Yerba Buena Gardens’ sponsor a day of egalitarian activities: a march starting from the park’s MLK memorial, a fair offering free family health services, a children’s reading festival, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum will be open free to the public. Whew! See website for events schedule.

MoAD MLK Day Celebration Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission, SF; (415) 358-7200, www.moadsf.org, www.norcalmlk.org/2011. 11am-6pm, free. MoAD invites the public to enjoy a day at the museum free of charge – and to celebrate MLK’s dream, they’ve got a full slate of community-empowering activities planned. There’s a college fair of historically African-American schools from around the country, live Afro-Cuban music, chalk drawing outside the museum, MLK film screenings, and even a live jewelry-making demonstration and sale. See website for events schedule.

Beyond Berlin and Beyond

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Beyond Berlin and Beyond

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In 1996 Ingrid Eggers cofounded Berlin and Beyond, that annual Castro Theatre showcase for all things celluloid (or digital) and German-language. Fourteen years later she retired from the San Francisco Goethe-Institut after two decades of service. B and B soldiers on without her, but Eggers now has her own weekend-long independent festival at that same art-deco movie palace.

Why a second S.F. German language film festival? “Because I think that German films are not really well-represented in the various film festivals in the Bay Area, especially not in the [San Francisco] International [Film Festival],” she says. “There was always a focus on French films, particularly under [ex-SFIFF chief] Peter Scarlet. We had French and Italian film weeks, but nothing German. The other thing is that with Berlin and Beyond having a [current] director who is, I guess, going into a more international direction with lots of coproductions, I think there are enough films that come from Germany that deserve an audience here.”

German Gems part zwei is hella heavy on debuts — six out of 10 features — which Eggers says “wasn’t intentional, but came about because lots of the bigger productions are very expensive [to book] these days. It’s not unusual to pay 1,000 euros for a single screening.” Plus, Germany is admirably generous when it comes to funding not just film production, but film schools and graduation feature projects.

One such gem showing this weekend, Philipp J. Pamer’s two-hour-plus Mountain Blood, is the sort of thing even veteran commercial talents might have a hard time getting bankrolled. It’s a 19th-century epic shot high in the Tyrolean Alps, involving romantic and military intrigue between sophisticated Bavarians and rough-edged Tyrols during a period of attempted French occupation. Eggers allows that kind of budgetary challenge would be “unheard of here for a first feature, but in Germany you can pull it off.”

Opening the festival is a movie by one far-from-new director. A quarter-century ago Percy Adlon (another Bavarian) ruled the arthouse circuit with Zuckerbaby (1985) and Bagdad Café (1987). There followed a gradual slide into obscurity suggesting Adlon wasn’t a maturing talent so much as a permanently immature one who got lucky a couple times early on.

Yet his Gems-launching historical fantasia Mahler on the Couch is wise, antic, over-the-top, and controlled. It portrays last-great-musical-Romantic Gustav Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) as a neurotic egomaniac driven to the upholstery of Sigmund Freud (Karl Markovics) by worry over the professed infidelity of spouse Alma Mahler (Barbara Romaner).

This Freud is sometimes harshly insightful, to Gustav’s frequent distress. Yet this very trickily structured, farcically winking, incongruously picturesque film is less concerned with either of them than horny, tempestuous Alma — “the most beautiful girl in Vienna, from a good family, and very rich.” How disappointing, then, that she spends most of her adult life as wedded servant to a cultural behemoth. She, too, wanted to make music. But even had she turned out something well short of a genius in that regard, Adlon (cowriting and codirecting with son Felix) sympathizes with the fact that she was never allowed to discover that for herself.

Other German Gems highlights include Ina Weisse’s black comedy The Architect, in which a jaded, dysfunctional nuclear unit travels to an ancestral hamlet for a matriarch’s funeral and promptly falls apart in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Another bad dad is the subject of Lara Juliette Sanders’ documentary Celebration of Flight, about a 78-year-old ex-pilot and amateur airplane builder living on a Caribbean isle — though the film is too shy about probing the estranged family he’s basically exiled from. David Sieveking’s non-aerial nonfiction David Wants to Fly finds the incessantly onscreen director seeking an artistic father-mentor in David Lynch, though this patriarchal worship is soon torpedoed by the director’s skepticism toward his idol’s favorite cause, Transcendental Meditation.

Elsewhere, Thomas Stiller’s She Deserved It offers lurid teenage-bullying moral instruction à la Larry Clark, without the graphic sex. Andreas Pieper’s Disenchantments interweaves four stories about variously unhappy Berliners coping with “the dialectics of enlightenment.” (Now that is German.) For some welcome absurdism, there’s Björn Richie Lob’s Keep Surfing, which is Cali fragi-licious: its real-life subjects ride stationary river waves in the middle of Munich, which is like “water skiing in a wind tunnel.” Cowabunga, freunde!

GERMAN GEMS

Jan. 14–16, $11–$20

429 Castro, SF (415) 695-0864 www.germangems.com

Sawako’s choice

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Sawako’s choice

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Sawako Decides, the most recent feature by the talented 27 year-old Japanese director Yuya Ishii, might not be the best film of 2010 that you never saw, but it certainly ranks as one of last year’s funniest — and perhaps more debatably, most feminist.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Ishii double feature “Lost in Japan,” which pairs Sawako with Ishii’s previous film To Walk With You (2009), is an all- too-brief introduction to a director whose modestly budgeted films about losers, misfits, and the socially marginalized in a Japan as depressed as they are have been garnering critical praise and catching the attention of festival programmers since his 2006 debut Rebel, Giro’s Love. Sawako Decides leaves no doubt that Ishii is one to watch (and to watch repeatedly).

Five years after winding up in Tokyo after a failed post-high school elopement, 20-something Sawako (a wonderful Hikari Mitsushima) has landed herself a thankless pink collar job serving tea at the offices of a toy manufacturer and an equally lame coworker boyfriend, whose young daughter from a previous marriage seems just as indifferent to Sawako as her father is. A human doormat in the extreme, Sawako is the first to agree the chorus of detractors that surround her that she’s, “not really much … a lower-middling type, really.” This routine existence is upended when her boyfriend arranges for Sawako to take over her estranged and terminally ill father’s freshwater clam packing business, and Sawako must face down the rural community — most notably, the pack of sniping older female employees she now oversees — who view her as a selfish deserter.

Although Sawako is a far cry from Emma Stone’s sass-spouting Olive in Easy A (2010), Ishii still wants his underdog to come out on top, and eventually the fates smile kindly, albeit crookedly, on her. By the time the film reaches the climactic scene in which a newly-emboldened Sawako leads her shocked employees in a rousing anti-government anthem, there is no denying that she has — to borrow the title phrase of another recent coming-of-age film anchored by a strong female character — true grit, and that Ishii is not only a wildly inventive filmmaker, but one who possesses a true heart.

Ishii — who also frequently edits and writes his films — combines humor and pathos in a way that mimics his bumbling antiheroes’ oft-failed attempts to integrate themselves within the world around them: jokes are frequently followed up a beat too late so as to go practically unnoticed or are delivered in a deadpan that verges on D.O.A. He also has a penchant for peppering his narratives with absurdist detours, out-of-the-blue dance numbers, and enough idiosyncratic supporting characters to make Miranda July proud.

Unlike July’s work, however, Ishii’s films leave no aftertaste of preciousness. Ishii’s characters are often as laughably insufferable as their peers make them out to be, but Ishii takes their funny-sad struggles to exist quite seriously, putting his work more in line with that of, say, Woody Allen or even Todd Solondz, than of anything Michael Cera has mumbled his way through. Ishii’s films are “existential” — a descriptor they’re frequently tagged with — to the extent that his characters, through much hilarious trial and error, transform their failure to achieve what society expects of them into a new ethics for living.

Thus, Sawako Decides‘ most radical proposition is that “nothing special” is not simply a demoted way of being, but grounds for collectivization. Japanese culture’s drive toward upper-middle class exceptionalism is exposed as a myth that should have died with the Bubble Economy (in To Walk With You, the protagonist discovers everybody’s mother wants them to be a lawyer largely for lack of imagination). Like Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, Sawako turns staying within one’s station into an act of defiance. To be the best at being a “lower-middling person” is not defeatist. Rather, it is to embrace one’s stunted potential as a generative constraint. If everyone’s a loser, than no one is. *

 

LOST IN JAPAN: THE EXISTENTIAL COMEDIES OF YUYA ISHII

Jan. 13–15, $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF (415) 978-2787 www.ybca.org

Dark end of the street

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Dark end of the street

DOCUMENTARY CLASSIC This column space is usually devoted to pop culture detritus. But this week we’ll bend the Trash definition to encompass human detritus, as in such timeless phrases as “Those people are nothing but trash.” The occasion is the Roxie’s restored re-release showcase of On the Bowery, a 1956 piece of early U.S. independent cinema that won major prizes. But it also struck many observers at the time as akin to literal trash: they wanted it dragged into some dark alley under cover of darkness, then quietly removed, lest polite society sift through the unflattering mess.

The 65-minute feature echoed Italian neorealism’s influence, as it mixed documentary footage with dramatic elements using amateur actors basically playing themselves. It provided a filmmaking “school” for debuting director Lionel Rogosin, a son of well-off New York City Jewish textile manufacturers who, like many of his peers, felt the need to make work addressing social equity rather than just “enjoy life” after the Holocaust. He hit on film as his chosen medium, South Africa’s apartheid system as desired subject — but as he knew nothing about filmmaking, taking on some smaller project first seemed apt.

Interviewed just before his turn-of-millennium death for 2009’s The Perfect Team: The Making of On the Bowery, which the Roxie is also showing, Rogosin recalls approaching this endeavor (initially planned as a short) with characteristic immersive fervency.

Having decided to focus on New York’s Skid Row district — the onetime flourishing heart of Manhattan whose slow degeneration began when an overground rail built in the 1870s bypassed stopping there — he spent a full six months befriending and bar-crawling with “Bowery bums,” occasionally slinking back to his Village apartment. (To neighbors’ consternation, sometimes these new pals would come uptown to pound on his door at 4 a.m., shaking the rich guy down for gin money.)

In the saloons and flops he found his cast, even his crew: cinematographer Richard Bagley, who shot 1948’s Oscar-nominated The Quiet One (another neorealist semidocumentary, about a Harlem juvenile delinquent), was found carousing thereabouts. (He died of cirrhosis in 1961 at 41. That was six years later and four years younger than Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe James Agee, who’d written The Quiet One and drank himself to death before he could write Bowery.)

Bagley understood what Rogosin meant in wanting the film to look like Rembrandt’s portraits of 17th-century Amsterdam’s poor and diseased — black and white On the Bowery has stunning passages of nothing but faces ruined by hooch and hardship, soulful in their grotesquerie. (Probably many were beyond registering being filmed.) The slim story, dialogue improvised within a barely scripted structure, centers on itinerant railroad worker Ray. Drifting into town between jobs, this uncomplicated rural Southerner has the ill fortune to get buddied up by the older Gorman, a.k.a. Doc (he claims to have blown a legit surgeon’s career), who spies a soft touch. Umpteen glasses later, Ray is left unconscious at the curb, his battered suitcase stolen by Doc to buy a few hours’ privacy in one flophouse’s chicken wire “room.”

Ray awakens the next day sobered but not sore, determined to stay dry long enough to clean up, get some work, and get outta here. Knowing his weakness for the sauce, he recognizes Bowery life as a pit he might easily vanish in. But after an abortive night at a depressing church mission, he answers the siren call of Doc’s mooching hospitality and gets in worse straits than ever. There’s both surprising redemption and a stone-cold reality check at the end of this woozy-view slice of gutter life.

On the Bowery won great acclaim in Europe and an eventual Oscar nomination as Best Documentary. (It was also inducted into the National Film Registry in 2008.) Yet it was scarcely distributed here, and outright condemned in some quarters. Eisenhower America preferred the less seemly aspects of its domestic life be kept hidden from view. Bagley’s shocking vistas of bruised, broken, passed-out “forgotten men” littering already decrepit city sidewalks at dawn — like extras in a Cold War sci-fi scare film about the Bomb — seemed not just an ugly truth but an unallowable one.

The New York Times and other commentators assailed the filmmakers for wallowing in gratuitous filth. At an otherwise triumphant Venice Festival premiere, socialite ambassador Clare Boothe Luce and publishing tycoon husband Henry snubbed Rogosin, the first Yank to win its Documentary Grand Prize. She reportedly encouraged the U.S. State Department to suppress Bowery‘s further exposure abroad — and was no doubt appalled when it became a runaway hit in certain Eastern Bloc nations.

Rogosin did make that South Africa film (1958’s Come Back, Africa, another Venice sensation) as well as several other little-seen social-justice documentaries, before continual funding shortages forced his mid-1970s retirement from the medium.

On the Bowery‘s “stars” imitated the art that had replicated their lives. Having been told by a real physician that he wouldn’t survive even one more binge, Gorman “Doc” Hendricks honored the crew’s pleas and stayed sober as long as the film was being shot. Once it wrapped, he promptly relapsed and died, never seeing a frame of the end product.

Handsome, affable 42-year-old Ray Salyer helped Rogosin promote the movie, dignified and frank about his own alcoholism in a Today interview excerpted in The Perfect Team. That publicity attracted Hollywood acting offers, including a purported $40,000 contract Salyer refused. When the attention got to be too much, he simply “hopped on a freight train and nobody ever saw him again.” Legend has it he later returned to the Bowery, dying there. A surviving nephew recalled his father (Ray’s twin among a brutal Kentucky Methodist minister’s 12 children) saying this wayward brother “returned permanently screwed up” from World War II military service. He was “still the charming, witty, engaging guy he had been, but with a deep sadness in his eyes. And he couldn’t drink enough to make it go away.”

ON THE BOWERY

Jan 14–20, $5–$9.75

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com

 

So dreamy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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So dreamy

Of all the indie bliss-bands to break through in the last year, Teengirl Fantasy — coming to town Sat/8 — is the dreamiest. Not just in the heart-dotted Tigerbeat vein, although TF’s spangly Angelfire website (teengirlfantasy.angelfire.com) certainly plays on giggle-driven hormone rushes.

No, Oberlin College students Logan Takahashi and Nick Weiss also meticulously tap into a subconscious slipstream of musical influences — 1990s R&B, ’70s soul, Balearic house, Windham Hill new age, bubblegum pop — that roils with allusive energy but never jolts upright into blunt nostalgia or jokey parody. The meticulously layered synth-and-sample compositions on debut album 7AM don’t lead directly to the dance floor either. Instead, they amble ecstatically down some long, spectral hallway toward a distant rave. When performing live, however, Teengirl Fantasy moves multitudes.

SFBG Are you guys still in the midst of your big tour? And did you really play the Great Wall of China?

Nick Weiss We still have one semester left of school, so we tour constantly during school breaks. We played a festival near the Great Wall in August. It was amazing — China was such a nuts place to be. Even though the government attempts to create such a restrictive environment, there are plenty of punks and people who party really out of control. One night we were taken to a Go Kart track around 1 a.m. The place where you bought your tickets was also a bar, so everyone was drunk driving!!! It ruled!!

SFBG You’ve mentioned before that one of the aims of your music is to capture a certain dreaminess or “half-asleep” sensation. There’s a rad sound art exhibition going on from L.A.’s 323 Projects right now that reminded me of you. It’s called “from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.” Basically, you call this number, (323) 843-4652 from anywhere until Jan.17 and it plays an array of sound art pieces made by different people. What would you put on a Teengirl Fantasy Hotline?

Logan Takahashi My voicemail answering message is a recording of one of those Buddha Machines made by FM3. I’ve always thought that was a pretty clever idea for a product or a piece, just a bunch of simple, really pleasant infinite loops.

SFBG Speaking of dreaminess and loops, I think one of the best tracks of the year is “Dancing in Slow Motion” from 7AM. It totally reminds me of how everything sounds when you’re trying to say something in a dream and you wake yourself up — this kind of shivery mumbling. Guest singer Shannon Funchess’ sublimated diva delivery is right on.

NW We met Shannon through her Light Asylum bandmate Bruno Coviello, who coincidentally lived at the studio we were working in. However, we had already seen Light Asylum a bunch of times and knew how amazing her voice was. We wrote the song pretty quickly, but our initial impulse was to make a huge ballad, the size of The-Dream but with a dreamier twist …

SFBG: I also adore the “Dancing in Slow Motion” video, directed by Mark Brown. Between that and the “Cheaters” and “Portofino” videos, you’ve been tagged as adopting a “visualizer” aesthetic. How much input have you had with your videos and the visual manifestation of your music?  

NW: We really just choose an artist whose work we really love, give them the track, and let them do whatever they want. Working with Mark Brown, Kari Altmann, and the legendary IASOS has been so cool… we really love the videos each of them made. I wouldn’t call them pure “visualizer,” I’d say that their looks are pretty intentional rather than automated.  However maybe we just have a pretty high tolerance for rave graphix. I could watch fractals pulse to trance for hours.

LT: Honestly we never intentionally were looking for a unifying aesthetic between our videos, but it is kind of funny to go back and look at the things they have in common. I spent a lot of time watching ‘beyond the mind’s eye’ videos as a child and I think that had an effect on my threshold for abstract 3D FX.

SFBG The title of your album, 7AM is kind of an in-joke to old-school ravers, conjuring up both the kooky bombast of KLF’s “3AM Eternal” and warehouse bragging, as in “Dude, I was there at 7 a.m. when Richie Hawtin dropped ‘Pacific 707.'” Do you guys deliberately build references and concepts into your tracks beforehand, or do they come out of a more organic jamming process?

NW It really is an organic process. We won’t usually start talking about a track until after we’ve written and recorded it. Once we start mixing, we might talk references. But when we’re writing, it’s really more about capturing the live feeling and strengthening improvisations.

LT It helps for us to keep that element of viscerality and response as part of the songwriting process.

SFBG Detroit techno seems a touchstone for you …

LT Detroit!!!! Still trying to make it to the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, hopefully this year. Huge fan of the music that comes out of that city.

TEENGIRL FANTASY with Pictureplane, Tormenta Tropical, and Donuts DJs. Sat/8, 10 p.m., $5––$10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com.

Our Weekly Picks: January 5-11, 2011

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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THURSDAY 6

THEATER

Strange Travel Suggestions

Jeff Greenwald’s life is a trip, and he’s happy to take you along for the ride. The Oakland-based travel writer has made a name for himself slaking an unquenchable wanderlust in lively, enlightening books like Shopping for Buddhas and, most recently, Snake Lake, a memoir of one year (1990) that saw a poignant collision between Nepalese revolution and personal upheaval. But many who know the writer don’t know the performer. A natural storyteller, Greenwald returns this week to the Marsh with his improvised, low-key but engrossing Strange Travel Suggestions. Making use of an idiosyncratic “wheel of fortune,” the journey changes each night, relying like all good wanderings on the collective mood and dumb chance. (Robert Avila)

Through Jan. 22

Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m., $20–$50

Marsh Berkeley Cabaret

2120 Allston, Berk.

1-800-838-3006

www.themarsh.org

 

MUSIC

Blaqk Audio

Alas, I lost the thread and completely missed the moment when emo reached its New Romantic period. Which is sad, because right around 2007, I really could have used a sharp-shirted, electro-emo stomper from Blaqk Audio called “Semiotic Love.” I think at that point in my mope-rock attention, I was too busy gawking at footage of the punks vs. emos riots breaking out across Mexico. (According to one punky hater, emos “are stupid, they cry about stupid things.”) Too bad those rowdy Mexican kids didn’t know about Blaqk Audio, a side project of Davey Havoc and Jade Puget of Ukiah stalwarts AFI, which fluffs a punk pedigree and emo self-longing into synthy, baroque, slightly dark power pop. Think Depeche Confessional or maybe My Chemical Numan — or just be pulled into Blaqk Audio’s chilly, wriggling embrace at weekly club Popscene. (Marke B.)

With DJs Aaron Axelson and Nako

9 p.m., $18

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.popscene-sf.com

 

MUSIC

George Winston

Grammy-award winning pianist George Winston is known in the music world for a wide variety of his projects, ranging from his own outstanding original material to his reworkings of Vince Guaraldi’s beloved Peanuts compositions, as well as reinterpreting music from the Doors. During his 30 years and counting music career, Winston has long worked with various food banks and service organizations throughout the country when he tours — he donates 100 percent of his merchandise sales to the organizations he works with at each show. Tonight benefits the Berkeley Food Bank, so prepare for an evening of good music for a good cause. (Sean McCourt)

8 p.m., $39.50

Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse

2020 Addison, Berk.

(510) 644-2020

www.thefreight.org

 

FRIDAY 7

MUSIC

Velvet Teen

This month sees the release of the Velvet Teen’s first new material since 2006, an EP titled No Star. That’s a big gap in the band’s discography, particularly for a group that released three albums and a handful of EPs between 2000 and 2006. But tragedy takes priority in life, and while fans of the Santa Rosa indie rockers certainly have been eager for new sounds, there’s also a sense that things take time, particularly after the loss of original drummer Logan Whitehurst in 2006. Tonight’s show, the CD release, is a chance to see what the Velvet Teen has made of the intervening years. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Silian Rail and Low-five

10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

SATURDAY 8

MUSIC

“Bowie and Elvis Birthday Bash”

Used to be, you’d have to choose which rock superstar to celebrate come Jan. 8. Would you meticulously apply glittery makeup and sway to “Life on Mars?” or slick your hair into a pompadour and pound a peanut-butter-and-banana concoction to the beat of “Suspicious Minds”? This year, head to the Edinburgh Castle’s “Bowie and Elvis Birthday Bash,” offering equal time to each rock titan on their shared birthday (Ziggy’s 64th, and what would’ve been the King’s 76th). Shindog and Skip spin tunes “from Hound Dog to Diamond Dog,” poet Alan Black pays tribute, and there’ll be a costume contest in the image of each legend. If you already own a sparkly jumpsuit, a two-in-one homage is certainly possible. (Cheryl Eddy)

9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Edinburgh Castle Pub

950 Geary, SF

www.castlenews.com

 

MUSIC

Optimo

There was no single club whose aesthetic ruled world dance floor sensibilities in 2010 (this may be a good thing). No Berghain, no Misshapes, no Hollertronix, no Body & Soul, no Fabric, no Space — and unfortunately no Optimo (Espacio), the wee Glasgow joint that helped birth one of the most thrilling recent trends in DJ styling, the “never know what you’re gonna get, but it’ll be amaaazing” thing. Optimo shut down in April, and the San Francisco scene mourned the loss of a sister spirit. Honey Soundsystem even mounted an elaborate wake on the same night Optimo closed. Fortunately, Optimo’s wildly diverse musical policy lives on. DJ JD Twitch founded the club with JG Wilkes — Twitch will hopefully beat through the snow to bring his club’s still-thriving vibe to 222 Hyde, along with unexpected sonic goodies from Midnight Star and Chicks on Speed to Gui Boratto and beyond. (Marke B.)

9:30 p.m., $5–$10

222 Hyde, SF

www.222hyde.com

 

FILM

“Hitchcock”

Rear Window   (1954), Vertigo   (1958), Psycho   (1960) — not only have you seen ’em multiple times, you can recite all the dialogue and catch yourself miming along with the shower scene. It’s likely even Alfred Hitchcock diehards haven’t gotten around to watching all of the prolific director’s 60-something works. But thanks to the Castro Theatre, you can skip a random TV viewing and catch some of Hitch’s lesser-known but no less compelling films on the big, glorious screen (as he’d no doubt rather prefer). Highlights include The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rope (1948), The Trouble With Harry (1955), and The Wrong Man (1956), though there’s not a bad double-feature during the six-day event. (Eddy)

Jan. 8–13, $7.50–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

EVENT

Oshogatsu Matsuri Festival

Traditions central to the Japanese New Year: the pounding of boiled sticky rice into mochi, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and well-meaning gaijin galuts asking everybody where the Chinese dragon is. Unversed in the dawn of the new year in the Land of the Rising Sun? This Japantown community center is holding a day to honor the Year of the Rabbit’s arrival, which Japan celebrates in tune with the Gregorian calendar along with the Western world. Bring the kiddos for art activities and make yourself comfortable for demonstrations of mochitsuki (the aforementioned rice preparation), kendo sword-fighting, and odori, the dance to welcome the dead. (Caitlin Donohue)

11 a.m.–3 p.m., free

Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California

1840 Sutter, SF

(415) 567-5505

www.jcccnc.org

 

MUSIC

Los Lobos

Had he not died in a helicopter crash after leaving a 1991 Huey Lewis concert, legendary San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham would have turned 80 today — local music fans can celebrate his birthday at tonight’s concert, featuring Los Lobos and Jackie Greene, all benefiting the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation. Run by a group that includes members of Graham’s family and other community leaders, the foundation strives to raise money for a variety of social and charitable causes. Raise your glass to Wolfgang (a childhood nickname for Graham, born Wolodia Grajonca) at this fitting tribute — remember, the reason Graham was at the concert that fateful night was to plan a benefit show to help victims of the 1991 Oakland firestorm. (McCourt)

9 p.m., $50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

MUSIC

Talib Kweli

What does it mean to be a “conscious” rapper? That label has been applied to Talib Kweli ever since he emerged on the musical scene in the mid-1990s, particularly for Black Star, a 1998 collaboration with fellow Brooklyn artist Mos Def and DJ Hi-Tek. Beyond charity work, it means being able to get past the divisive beefing that plagues hip-hop. That ability has kept Kweli busy with guest appearances between albums, on tracks with the Roots, Little Brother, UGK, Gucci Mane, and beyond. His new album, Gutter Rainbows, is out Jan. 25. (Prendiville)

With Be Brown, Skins and Needles, My-G and Rose, and Lowriderz

10 p.m., $25

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

www.publicsf.com

 

SUNDAY 9

MUSIC

Willie Nelson

“Outlaw” is a term that tends to be thrown around a little bit too liberally these days, particularly when it comes to discussing musicians. But one man who undoubtedly deserves that title is Willie Nelson, whose five-decades-and-counting career as a singer, songwriter, poet, author, and social activist has been forged entirely on his own terms. Known for his own recording hits, his partnerships with artists such as Johnny Cash, his slew of songwriting successes (notably the classic tune “Crazy” as made famous by Patsy Cline), and more recently his newsmaking, weed-related tour bus arrests, the 77-year-old icon continues to prove that he is a musical and social force to be reckoned with. (McCourt)

Through Jan 12

9 p.m., $55

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

MONDAY 10

EVENT

BCS National Championship Game

The University of Oregon Duck is a champ. Omnivorous, excellent paddler, wearer of fetching sailor shirts — a gentleman and a scholar, truly. Except when he’s beating up the University of Houston’s Cougar (as seen in a popular YouTube clip), but that happened all the way back in 2007! This year, his football Ducks ended the regular season undefeated to face the Auburn Tigers in the national championships. Though we may not have the benefit of a fine Oregon drizzle to fully appreciate the Duck’s waddle, there is a lovely vantage point from which to watch the mayhem: the Independent, where the game will be played on its pull-down movie screen and microbrews will flow like the mighty Willamette. (Donohue)

5:30 p.m., free

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-4421

www.theindependentsf.com


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Music Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 5

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Artwork Jamal Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Funky C Elbo Room. 9pm.

Slim Jenkins, Swamp Angel Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $7.

Ohio Players Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $25-35.

Ash Reiter, Pentacles, Thralls Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Gaucho, Michael Abraham Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Michael Parsons Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Cannonball Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. Rock, indie, and nu-disco with DJ White Mike.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes. Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

Red Wine Social Triple Crown. 5:30-9:30pm, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Death Valley High, I’m Dirty Too Knockout. 9pm, $5.

Havarti Party, Buffalo Tooth, PM, Maston Stud. 8pm, free.

Doug MacLeod Union Room at Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $12.

Megafauna, Suite Unraveling, Quinn Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Ohio Players Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $25-35.

Oona, Con Brio, Karyn Page Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Titan Ups, Wicked Mercies, Franco Nero, DJ Dr. Scott Café Du Nord. 8pm, $12.

Verna Beware, Danvilles, Nervous Wreckords Thee Parkside. 9pm, $7.

Jimmy Warren Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $18.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Chris Clark Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Loe and the Nastys Red Poppy Art House. 7pm, $10-15.

Valerie Troutt Jazz and Soul Quartet Coda. 9pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Dark Hollow Band Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.fringesf.com. 9pm, $2. Indie music video dance party with subOctave and Blondie K.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With resident DJs Haylow, A-Ron, Prince Aries, Boogie Brown, Ammbush, plus food carts and community creativity.

Guilty Pleasures Gestalt, 3159 16th St, SF; (415) 560-0137. 9:30pm, free. DJ TophZilla, Rob Metal, DJ Stef, and Disco-D spin punk, metal, electro-funk, and 80s.

Holy Thursday Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Bay Area electronic hip hop producers showcase their cutting edge styles monthly.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Lacquer Beauty Bar. 10pm-2am, free. DJs Mario Muse and Miss Margo bring the electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Popscene Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $18. With Blaqk Audio.

Studio SF Triple Crown. 9pm, $5. Keeping the Disco vibe alive with authentic 70’s, 80’s, and current disco with DJs White Girl Lust, Ken Vulsion, and Sergio.

FRIDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

BlackMahal, Afrolicious, DJ Timoteo Café Du Nord. 9pm, $10.

James Intveld, Red Meat Independent. 9pm, $14.

Monkey, Rule 5 DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10.

Jackie Payne Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Phenomenauts, Tornado Rider, Manzanita Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Slowburn, Planting Seeds, Ben Benkert Band, Aspect Slim’s. 9pm, $11.

Soft White Sixties, Trophy Fire, Bird By Bird, Beta State Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $11.

Space Vacation, Gypsyhawk, Green and Wood Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Velvet Teen, Silian Rail, Low-five Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Musical Art Quintet Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $10.

“San Francisco Tape Music Festival” Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Bay at Buchanan, SF; www.sfsound.org. 8pm, $8-15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Michael Winegard Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Braza! Som.10pm, $10. With DJs Vanka, Elan, and Caasi.

Deeper 222 Hyde, 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 345-8222. 9pm, $10. With rotating DJs spinning dubstep and techno.

Dirty Rotten Dance Party Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Morale, Kap10 Harris, and Shane King spinning electro, bootybass, crunk, swampy breaks, hyphy, rap, and party classics. Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Original Plumbing: Fashion Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Fashion show with DJs Rapid Fire and 100 Spokes.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strangelove Cat Club. 9:30pm, $6. “Back to School Night” with old school vs. new school goth and DJs Tomas Diablo, Bryan Hawk, Melting Girl, and Daniel Skellington.

Vintage Orson, 508 Fourth St, SF; (415) 777-1508. 5:30-11pm, free. DJ TophOne and guest spin jazzy beats for cocktalians.

SATURDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

ArnoCorps, Judgement Day, A Band of Orcs Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Blisses B, Moonlight Orchestra, Vandella Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Blvd, Pink Mammoth Independent. 9pm, $15.

Communist Kayte, Basements Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Flash Gilmore and the Funbeatles, Lance Burden, Chineke, Organ Trail Kimo’s. 9pm, $7.

Melvins Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $21.

Radishes, Hounds and Harlots, Weekender Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

E.C. Scott Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Walken, Cutthroats 9, Moses El Rio. 10pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Pete Cornell Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

Patrick Wolff Quintet Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $10-15.

“San Francisco Tape Music Festival” Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Bay at Buchanan, SF; www.sfsound.org. 8pm, $8-15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 8:15pm, $22.

Whisky Richards, 77 El Deora, Bootcuts, Songs Hotbox Harry Taught Us Café Du Nord. 9pm, $13.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with Adrien and Mysterious D.

Bowie and Elvis Birthday Bash Edinburgh Castle Pub. 9pm, $5. With DJs Shindog, Skip, and special guests.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $7. Queer dance party for homos and friends with DJ Nuxx and guests.

Fire Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. Rare and outrageous ska, rocksteady, and reggae vinyl with Revival Sound System and guests.

Frolic Stud. 9pm, $3-7. DJs Dragn’Fly, NeonBunny, and Ikkuma spin at this celebration of anthropomorphic costume and dance. Animal outfits encouraged.

Hacienda Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.decosf.com. 10pm, free. Underground dance music with Inqilab and Tristes Tropiques plus guest Tal Klein.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip-hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Same Sex Salsa and Swing Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; (415) 305-8242. 7pm, free.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Spotlight Siberia, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 552-2100. 10pm. With DJs Slowpoke, Double Impact, and Moe1.

Tormenta Tropical vs. Donuts Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $5-10. With Teengirl Fantasy, Pictureplane, Disco Shawn, Oro11, and Pickpocket.

SUNDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Jake Bellows, Whispertown, Heather Porcaro and the Heartstring Symphony Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Grass Widow, Babies, White Fence Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Swann Danger, Bellicose Minds Knockout. 8pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“San Francisco Tape Music Festival” Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Bay at Buchanan, SF; www.sfsound.org. 8pm, $8-15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Afro Lungs Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

*Willie Nelson Fillmore. 8pm, $55.

West Coast Ramblers Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Call In Sick Skylark. 9pm, free. DJs Animal and I Will spin danceable hip-hop.

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJs Sep, Maneesh the Twister, and guest Sake1.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Champagne Champagne, Mad Rad, C U Next Weekend, Moe Green Elro Room. 9pm, $8-10.

Foreign Objects, Neocon, Sydney Ducks Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $5.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Lavay Smith Swinget with Jules Broussard Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; (415) 982-6223. 7pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Toshio Hirano Amnesia. 9pm, free.

*Willie Nelson Fillmore. 8pm, $55.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Joe Radio, Decay, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP Ex Masheena, Baysic Wonder, Stork Biscuits and Blues. 9pm, $8. Fat Tuesday Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15. Rooftop Vigilantes, Primary Structures, Freddi and the Aztecs Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6. Roomful of Blues Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $30. Sweet Chariot, Sparrows Gate, Montra, Nico’s Georis, Matt Baldwin Slim’s. 8pm, $5. FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY *Willie Nelson Fillmore. 8pm, $55. JAZZ/NEW MUSIC Nick Culp Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free. DANCE CLUBS Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ Aesop Dekker and DJ Denim Yeti. Bombshell Betty and Her Burlesqueteers Elbo Room. 9pm, $10. With Fromagique. Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro. Extra Classic DJ Night Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 10pm. Dub, roots, rockers, and reggae from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Fashion Feud Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, free. With designers Crystal Hermann and Mary M. Yanez. Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz. Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house. Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.<\! *

Stage Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Lost in Yonkers Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center SF, 3200 California; 292-1233, www.jccsf.org/arts. $20-39. Previews Thurs/6-Fri/7, 8pm. Opens Sat/8, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Jan 16. The jewish Theater presents Neil Simon’s coming of age tale.

ONGOING

*Candid Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St; 273-4633, www.sweetcanproductions.com. $15-60. Call for dates and times. Through Sun/9. Sweet Can’s cosy pocket-circus at Dance Mission holds plenty of big-tent talent in its five-person cast (Jamie Coventry, Natasha Kaluza, Kerri Kresinski, Nobutaka Mochimaru, Matt White), backed by the ample multi-instrumental musicianship of Eric “EO” Oberthaler. This fleet 60-minute charmer (directed with strong ensemble choreography by Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Joanna Haigood) finds opportunities for creative expression and dazzling feats with whatever comes to hand (including using hands as feet). Performers dance around in trashcans, make hay with newspaper, or get seriously Fred Astaire with a broom (in White’s wowing solo). Goofy, family appropriate, but widely appealing and frequently eye-popping (Kaluza rocking 20 hula hoops, for inst, or Kresinski’s powerful aerial dance), Candid is can-do entertainment. (Avila)

Dirty Little Showtunes! A Parody Musical Revue New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Jan 16. Tom Orr’s adults-only holiday show returns, with direction by F. Allen Sawyer and musical direction by Scrumbly Koldewyn.

*Forever Tango Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter; 771-6900; www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. $45-100. Call for dates and times. Through Jan 12. Luis Bravo’s atmospheric showcase is a slick, showy mélange of music and dancing whose fluid precision and assemblage of talent make it hard to resist. Cheryl Burke heads up an amazing 13-member ensemble of very stylishly draped dancers (exquisite costuming by Argemira Affonso) who singularly, all together, and of course in dramatic couplings, blend supreme control and dramatic restraint with unabashed sexual allure and volcanic energy. The orchestra, meanwhile, under direction of Eduardo Miceli, creates the intoxicating ether that sets everything in motion. (Avila)

The Lion in Winter Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.ticketweb.com. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Jan 15. Actors Theatre of SF presents James Goldman’s play of palace intrigue.

Party of 2 – The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Sun, 3pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through April 9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

Siddhartha, the Bright Path The Marsh Studio Theater, 1074 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Call for dates and times. Through Sun/9. Marsh Youth Theater presents a holiday celebration, directed by Lisa Quoresimo.

BAY AREA

Becoming Julia Morgan Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; (510) 984-3864, www.brownpapertickets.com. $24-30. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Sun/9. Janis Stevens stars in Belinda Taylor’s play about the trailblazing architect.

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Call for times. Through Feb 13. Don Reed’s one-man show continues its extended run.

Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. Call for dates and times. Through Jan 15. Berkeley Rep premieres the new musical, written by Lemony Snicket, with music by Nathaniel Stookey.

Of the Earth – The Salt Plays: Part 2 Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Jan 30. Shotgun Players present the second half of writer and director Jon Tracy’s Odyssey-inspired tale, with music by Brendan West.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

All My Children The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Tues/11, 7:30pm. $10-15. A Marsh Rising performance of a play by Matt Smith, directed by Bret Fetzer.

Comedy Returns to El Rio! El Rio, 3158 Mission; 522-3737, www.koshercomedy.com. Mon/10, 8pm. An evening of comedy with Maureen Langan, Harmon Leon, Ray Ferrer, Candy Churilla, and Lisa Gedulgig.

Will Franken: “Scenes in Every Sunset” Purple Onion, 140 Columbus; www.willfranken.com. Fri/7, 8pm. $20. The comedian presents a one-man show.

A Funny Night for Comedy Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.NatashaMuse.com. Sun/9, 7pm. $10. Natasha Muse and co-host Ryan Cronin present an evening of comedy, with headliner Mary Van Note.

Tim Lee Punch Line Comedy Club, 444 Battery; 397-7573, www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Tues/11, 8pm. $20. The local comedian and former biologist performs.

BAY AREA

SF Ethnic Dance Festival Auditions Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; 474-3914, www.worldartswest.org. Sat/8, 10am-6pm; Sun/9, 10am-7pm. $10. The first of two weekends of auditions for this year’s festival, open to the public.

Rep Clock

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Schedules are for Wed/5–Tues/11 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-12. Tron: Legacy (Kosinski, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 1:30, 4:15, 7:00, 9:30. “Midnites for Maniacs: Swords and Sorcery Triple Feature:” •The Princess Bride (Reiner, 1987), Fri, 7:30; Time Bandits (Gilliam, 1981), Fri, 9:30; Deathstalker (Sbardellati, 1983), Fri, 11:59. All three films, $12. “Hitchcock:” •The 39 Steps (1935), 2, 5:35, 9:05, and The Lady Vanishes (1938), Sat, 3:45, 7:15; •I Confess (1953), Sun, 2, 5:30, 9:05, and Rope (1948), Sun, 3:55, 7:30; •Torn Curtain (1966), Mon, 2:15, 7, and Stage Fright (1950), Mon, 4:45, 9:25; •The Trouble With Harry (1955), Tues, 3, 7, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Tues, 5:05, 8:55.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. “Short Films from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival,” Wed-Thurs, call for times. “San Francisco Grand Opera Cinema Series:” Lucia de Lammermoor, Thurs, 7 and Sat, 10am. Bhutto (Baughman and O’Hara, 2010), Jan 7-13, call for times.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World (Gibney, 2005), Wed, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: New Year’s Revolutions:” Viva Zapata! (Kazan, 1952), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Closed until Jan. 13.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Gibney, 2010), Wed, 2, 7, 9:15. Enter the Void (Noé, 2009), Thurs-Sat, 7, 9:45 (also Sat, 2). The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Alfredson, 2009), Sun, 2, 5, 8 and Mon-Tues, 7:30. ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. The Strange Case of Angelica (de Oliveira, 2010), Jan 7-13, call for times.

Woman on the verge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Woman on the verge

FILM Sometimes a performance stands out and grabs attention for embodying a particular personality type or emotional state that’s instantly familiar yet infrequently explored in much depth at the movies. What’s most striking about Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is the primary focus it lends Michelle Williams’ role as the more disgruntled half of a marriage that’s on its last legs whether the other half knows that or not. Ryan Gosling has the showier part — his Dean (the actor’s second bad husband in a month, following All Good Things) is mercurial, childish, more prone to both anger and delight, a babbler who tries to control situations by motor-mouthing or goofing through them.

But Williams’ Cindy has reached the point where all his sound and fury can no longer pass as anything but static that must be tuned out as much as possible so that things get done. Things like parenting, going to work, getting the bills paid, and so forth. Dean hasn’t just lost his antic charm; his act is now clearly a poor cover for basic incompetence. He is an obstacle, an irritant whose clowning, fits of pique, and perpetual failure to be useful have become the domestic equivalent of fingernails on chalkboard.

It’s taken a few years for Cindy to realize that she’s losing ground in her lifelong battle for self-improvement with every exasperating minute she continues to tolerate him. Williams’ bile-swallowing silences and the involuntary recoil that greets Dean’s attempts to touch Cindy are the central emotional color of Blue Valentine: that state in which the loyalty, obligation, fear, pity, or whatever has kept you tied to a failing relationship is being whittled away by growing revulsion. Cindy is quiet because if she were to stop bottling it up for just a moment, ugly final truths would scream out.

It’s only a matter of time before that moment arrives, though Valentine maintains suspense (and avoids turning into a dirge) by scrambling time — we see this couple at their start and end, the chronology a bit confusing at first. Their paths cross when she’s an aspiring med student and he works for a moving company. Scenes of their courtship are charmingly spontaneous but also a bit conspicuously actor-improv, the two stars trotting out cute unexpected skills (he sings like a 1920s crooner, she demonstrates how to memorize all the presidents’ names) that seem to be their own, not Dean and Cindy’s.

Making only his second narrative feature after 12 years of documentaries, Cianfrance has said he’d sat on Valentine‘s finished screenplay that entire span, so that by the time funding was in place he’d become “bored” with it. He now wanted the actors to use it only as a structural springboard for their own character insights and dialogue. (You have to wonder how credited cowriters Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne felt about that decision, particularly since they’ve barely been mentioned in all the film’s acclaim since the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.) That approach works better in the flashback scenes between Cindy and her problematic family (as well as Mike Vogel as her then boyfriend Bobby) than those with Dean, or his own with coworker Marshall (Marshall Johnson), which somewhat heavy-handedly spell out Dean’s need to belong to somebody.

But it pays off richly in Blue Valentine‘s present-tense majority, which finds several years’ passage has exposed rather than strengthened a commitment originally made under considerable duress. (Bobby’s carelessness had left Cindy pregnant at the worst possible time, allowing barely-known suitor Dean to rush in as rescuer. The scene in which she nearly has an abortion will strike many as the film’s most uncomfortably intimate — certainly more so than the two tame bits of mimed cunnilingus that initially won Valentine a ridiculous NC-13 rating.) Now the couple are settled in working-class suburban New England, with a modest house, an adorable daughter of about five (Faith Wladyka as Frankie), and a dog that has ominously been missing some hours.

Cindy works as a nurse in an area hospital; Dean appears to be a stay-at-home dad. But we immediately sense the extent to which his not handling that job very well compounds the exhaustion created by hers. Daddy is a great playmate, beer and cigarette already in hand at high noon. Ergo it seems like a fun idea that he and Frankie should jump on the bed to wake up mommy — never mind that her shift probably ended just hours before and her cries to be allowed more sleep sound desperate. Breakfast is another time Dad wants to play, heedless of the reality that a squirmy child must be fed and dressed in time for Mom to drop her off at daycare on the way to work.

His notion of a tension releaser is to insist that Frankie stay overnight with grandpa so her parents can “get drunk and make love.” Though Cindy insists, “I’m not going to some cheesy sex motel” (one that, further, will require she drive back two hours to work first thing the next morning), that is exactly the plan forced on her.

Said motel’s stupid fantasy “Future Room” (resembling a community-theatre USS Enterprise) becomes the stage for their marital Götterdämmerung. Cindy starts pounding drinks to dull the pain. Dean tries turning on the old wacky charm, prompting her comment, “I thought the whole point of coming here was to have a night without kids.” It’s downhill from there.

Blue Valentine is raw and uncompromising, if not quite great. It suffers from the fact that while we fully understand where Cindy’s coming from (particularly the horrors of her parents’ marriage, a model she’s determined not to recreate), Dean remains something of a blank. Gosling provides his usual detailed performance, but grasping the insecure failure Dean is now — and that she should have recognized from the start — doesn’t fully compensate for our having no idea how he got that way. A couple mumbled sentences about a missing mother and musician father feel forced. Like the actor’s role in All Good Things, Gosling’s Dean is trying very hard to impersonate the man he’d like to be. But in that film we glimpsed some formative void; here the void is structural, the character self-invention not a condition so much as an actor filling in a surface without getting beneath it. Gosling’s excellent stab at an underwritten part is also at a disadvantage in that Williams just about burns a hole through the screen. It’s hard to believe she spent years as a fairly interchangeable teen star and Next Big Thing before 2005’s Brokeback Mountain revealed a startling propensity for very serious, ordinary, long-suffering women doggedly bailing out sinking canoes.

Her range is as yet an unknown — next up is My Week With Marilyn (yes, Monroe), which might not sound a natural fit, though clearly she has the craft to go way past mere breathy sexpot imitation. As her very different role in Valentine underlines, she has an uncanny knack for capturing every nuance in essentially uncomplicated personalities. Cindy is probably the least colorful, exciting, or humorous major female role of last year by conventional fiction standards. Williams manages to make her very ordinariness completely engrossing.

 

BLUE VALENTINE opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters.

Boogie blows up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Boogie blows up

“It was an honor to be a part of history. The rest is history.” Spray paint artist Chor Boogie (www.chorboogie.com) is hanging out amid spurts of December rain in Clarion Alley, standing before his mural debut in the heralded Mission community art space. But he’s talking about a different piece, on a different chunk of creative community space, in a city halfway around the world: The Eyes of the Berlin Wall, which Boogie painted on an actual section of the Berlin Wall and was reported to have sold for 500,000 euros this fall.

The real story is a bit more complicated — and perhaps speaks to the uncertain position in which street art finds itself. After all, we’re at the close of a few years of pop culture re-ascendance, during which Banksy made a stencil art photographer of every major city tourist and that are ending with Brazilian muralist Blu’s commission of a massive mural facing a World War II memorial by Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art that was subsequently whitewashed when he painted a wall of coffins draped with dollar bills.

What is street art’s role today? A form once used by inner city youth to reintroduce their stifled voices into their surroundings is now heralded in the upper echelons of the art world and hipsterdom alike. Still, many so-called street artists are getting stuck in stale, reductive modes of being presented to the public — stale because many do public art as a form of getting known, fluidly moving back and forth between the corner and the gallery. What are we to call these artists?

I know one name for them: Chor Boogie. After a tough youth spent tagging in San Diego, Boogie, borne on the wings of a technique and style that pushes the capabilities of the aerosol can (he never paints without it) has achieved artistic notoriety. His low pressure, inverted style of spraying and rejection of stencils and other tools gives birth to kaleidoscopic psychoscapes — but why don’t we let Boogie describe Boogie?

“A surrealistic expressionism of a street romantic voodoo. Emotional landscapes of a melodic symphony through color therapy — that’s my style in a nutshell,” he tells me, pointing up at the twisted face-in-purgatory that he recently completed in Clarion, a piece that extends a full foot above the boundary delineated by the alley’s mural collective and onto the high priced condo above.

Boogie has painted at the Beijing Olympics, done portraits for Hugh Hefner and Jay-Z, has vast, stained glass-cosmos murals all over town, and gallery shows up and down the coast. His name gained widespread recognition when some kids tried to steal a few of his cans while he painted a Market Street mural in late 2009. He chased them into a dark alley and was stabbed twice. “I didn’t feel it at all because I was drawing,” he says, despite one wound landing an inch from his lower intestine.

His distinctive style may have been what drew the fateful attention of Patrice Lux at Berlin’s Stroke Urban Art Fair. For two days, the German art collector had scrutinized Boogie while painting at his festival booth. Boogie had no idea who the guy was. “He was studying my every move — finally, he walked up to me, asked me what my name was, and asked me if I’d like to paint the Berlin Wall. He took me up to his studio and he had a piece of the wall with Michael Jackson painted on it. I was like, ‘You want me to paint over that? Because I will!’ I think he thought it was kind of cool to have an American artist painting over this American pop star.”

Boogie was signing up to paint on a piece of graffiti history. When first erected, artists came from around the world to cover the western side of the wall in color, often working under the ominous gaze of East Berlin patrollers who kept the eastern surface sterile. “Artists risked their lives painting that wall. You went there at night and painted quickly,” says James Prigoff, an international street art photographer.

But by his visit in 1985, Prigoff was underwhelmed by what he saw. “It had become a funny zoo,” he remembers, tourists gawking at East Berliners and tagging the wall with shout-outs to relatives in Des Moines.

Although Keith Haring and Quick subsequently created memorable pieces on the wall, Prigoff thinks the site’s sociopolitical significance has shrunk. “Chor Boogie is a great artist, he deserves all the attention he gets. But [his painting on the wall] doesn’t do anything for me in the context of art. There are a lot of walls in the world, and that’s just one of them.”

Not everyone agrees. Lux tipped off Die Bunte Zeitung, one of Berlin’s major newspapers, that he would be looking for 500,000 euros for the piece of the wall Boogie had painted — dwarfing sales of individual wall pieces in the past. The day after the article ran, they had an offer. The piece still wasn’t finished. After that, Boogie had an audience of 100-plus people watching him complete his cash cow.

Back in San Francisco among the streets he’s helped to make more beautiful, Boogie’s not sure what’s going on with the deal — and perhaps almost as important, all that cash — vagaries of “contracts and commissions,” he says. Improbably, he’s washing his hands clean of the matter, for now.

“What’s the next one?” He smiles, possibilities dancing across his face. “The Great Wall of China!” He’s joking, but the future for Boogie — and street art in general — will invariably include larger canvasses. 

 

CHOR BOOGIE’S URBAN OSMOSIS NYE OPENING PARTY

Fri/31 7 p.m.–late, free

Space Gallery

1141 Polk, SF

www.spacegallerysf.com

March Fourth Marching Band reveals its gypsy secrets

Andrew Lam
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One of these days, I’ll hop a bus outta this town. Pullin’ out of here on the wind, if you want to quote the Boss (sometimes I do). One of the groups I’ve been keeping my eye on as a possible accomplice is March Fourth Marching Band. You can find the million-piece ensemble’s rig parked at nearly every festival, ever – always with a few stilters or trombone players spilling out the door, sprawled on a tarp nearby, or if you’re lucky, tapping out a cheerful marching band symphony by a campfire at around five in the morning (hello, High Sierra!) 

And onstage! They’re like a big, loud circus onstage – until all of a sudden they’re off the stage and you’re engulfed in 360 degrees of marching band madness, now having a dance party with its frenzied audience. In anticipation of the band’s upcoming pre-NYE show at The Independent (Thurs/30), March Fourth’s bandleader John Averill sat down at his email portal to tell us all his secrets about where he found the mail order balls needed to make touring with so many moving parts possible.

 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: When March Fourth got together, was touring part of the original concept? How’d you get the balls to take such a massive group on the road?

John Averill: Well, the band was put together for a Fat Tuesday party, so at that time the main concern was learning seven songs to play. Touring was never part of the original concept.  After our first road trip, though, it was pretty evident to me that one, traveling as a group was fun, and two, our project had potential to reach audiences outside of our hometown. We purchased the actual balls to take this massive group on the road by fund-raising and applying to www.theballsyouneed.com. I think we spent like $172 or something. Most balls are less expensive, but M4 is a large group and therefore required extra large balls. But, to anyone out there looking for balls: it’s definitely worth it to spend the money for big balls, if you really need them. I think this year we’re going to purchase an extra set of back-up balls just in case.

 

SFBG: How many musicians do you typically have touring? What’s the toughest part of rolling so deep on tour?

JA: About 13 musicians, five dancers, and two bus drivers is what we’ve been touring with lately. The toughest part is making payroll, which is why we’ve been traveling with a “smaller” group (we used to travel with upwards of 30 people). When we go on tours that are longer than three weeks, there are also issues with accruing very little sleep and not having much personal space. We’re lucky that we get along so well or this thing would be a disaster after a couple of weeks. 

The whole gang. Photo by Andy Batt

SFBG: I’m really into the bus — I’ve seen your rig all over the place, camped out at festivals, etc. What do you keep on there? Does everyone sleep on it? Where’d you get the bus and what’s it’s make and model?

JA: Our bus is a 40-foot MCI coach. It was built in 1984 in Roswell, New Mexico, presumably by aliens. We bought it on eBay 3 years ago and converted it to suit our needs. It can sleep 10 people comfortably, or 20 semi-comfortably. It has become our home on wheels and is probably the single wisest investment we have ever made. It’s where we cook, get dressed, etc. Most promoters can’t pay for lodging for 20 people when we’re on tour so we sleep in, on top of, and around the bus. We keep our camping gear on top and set up tents when we can, and when it’s not miserable outside. Our bus doesn’t doesn’t have an official name, although it is called “Razzle Dazzle” by many. I personally refer to it as “The Shire,” although the idea to have round doors installed was not practical.

 

SFBG: Where do the costumes come from?

JA: The costumes are designed by the people who wear them, for the most part. Most of us are pretty good at finding cool vintage stuff and thrift-store items and then augmenting them to fit us. All of our dancers have mad costume skills — some are bona-fide full-time designers and they help out the musicians who don’t know how to sew.  

 

SFBG: What genre does March Fourth classify as? Are there groups out there that you see as your peers?

JA: I don’t know what our genre is. Is there a genre for rockin’ crazy fun global groove tribal symphony with stilts?  Actually, one of my favorite things about this project is that we don’t have a genre, and we’re not easy to pigeonhole. Yet, at the same time we’ve developed a “sound.”  There are some groups, like Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box, Ozomatli, Yard Dogs Road Show, and Mucca Pazza who I see as energetic peers and/or kindred spirits, even though we don’t sound like any of them.

 

SFBG: Who are the group’s role models?

JA: You’d probably have to poll everyone in the band to get an accurate answer. Part of the original inspiration for putting the group together was after seeing Extra Action Marching Band and The Infernal Noise Brigade at Burning Man in 2002. Myself and a few others, were thinking “hey let’s try doing something like this in Portland,” but we never sought to emulate those groups in terms of the style of music we performed or how we presented ourselves. Now there’s an alternative marching band in just about every major city in the US and there are a couple of festivals like HONK! in Boston and HONK! Fest West in Seattle that have become a sort of mecca for large brass and drum-heavy bands to converge and play together. On a personal level, I’ve been inspired by the model created by the Grateful Dead, big bands of the 1930s, large contemporary ensembles such as Polyphonic Spree, and some of the stuff coming out of Brooklyn, Dap Tone Records in particular. I’m inspired by anyone who can actually make ends meet doing this.

 

March Fourth Marching Band

Thurs/30 9 p.m. $15-17

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 

Rep Clock

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Schedules are for Wed/29–Tues/4 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-12. Check website for program information.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. “San Francisco Grand Opera Cinema Series:” Tosca, Thurs, 7. “Short Films from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival,” Dec 31-Jan 6, call for times.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Closed until Jan. 13.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. Check website for program information.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Hadewijch (Dumont, 2009), Wed-Thurs and Sat-Tues, call for times.<\!s>*

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