Festivals

Nite Trax: DJ Rekha brings the ‘Basement’ beats to Non Stop Bhangra

-
0
Nite Trax: DJ Rekha brings the ‘Basement’ beats to Non Stop Bhangra

“I have been around the bhangra block,” says DJ Rekha, NYC’s ambassador for the highly danceable contemporary Punjabi (by way of London) sound, and founder of the popular, long-running Basement Bhangra party. “The biggest gig was definitely the White House. I have played all over the US and in Brazil, Sweden, New Zealand. I’ve done a bunch of music festivals and performed at cultural spaces including the Kennedy Center in DC.”

Talk about “world music” (even if that term has fallen from fashion). Rekha brings her Basement Bhangra spin — which includes a good bit of hip-hop and global bass influence — to our own beloved Non Stop Bhangra this Sat/11, joining the monthly party’s dholrhythms dance crew and DJ Jimmy Love for its reboot at Public Works, as I detailed in this week’s Super Ego nightlife column. In an email interview, Rekha wrote about bhangra’s changing scene, her favorite moments from the past 15 years at her club (Padma Lakshmi, anyone?), and her favorite bhangra bangers of the moment. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgfMjwfs7H0

SFBG Can you share some of your favorite moments from Basement Bhangra?

DJ REKHA There have been a few.
1) I guess the first favorite moment is the first time I saw the line extend to the end of the block. We were always crowded, but by the following summer it was all the way down the street and not single file.
2) Having Wyclef stop by in the first few years of the night.
3) Dropping the Basement Bhangra anthem the first time.
4) Playing Panjabi MC’s Beware of the Boys after it was already hitting New York radio, having playing it there so much several years before.
5) Watching Ted Forstmann (RIP) crawl and look for his date Padma Lakshmi’s phone after she dropped it dancing
6) Getting a note to the booth saying I am Anil Kapoor (the game show host in Slumdog Millionaire) — and me dismissing it as a ploy to alter the bhangra musical direction of the night to Bollywood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJztXj2GPfk

SFBG Have you been to San Francisco before, and if you have can you tell me if you think there are any differences between the bhangra scene here and in NYC?
   
DJ REKHA I have been to SF many times but I must sheepishly admit I have never been to a bhangra party there. But Non-Stop Bhangra is very well-known and regarded so I am super excited to be playing there Saturday.  My DJ experiences in SF have been awesome — most recently at the Asian Art Museum and for the 25th Anniversary of Trikone. In both cases I play a range of sounds. But SF is home to the best bhangra dance crew — Bhangra Empire — they’ve performed at the White House, professional sporting events. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKWPzTF8-sw

SFBG Besides the fact that bhangra is infectious (I grew up partly in London and have loved it since the ’80s), do you think the influx of young Indian people moving to the US in the past couple decades has helped fuel bhangra’s popularity in clubs here?

DJ REKHA I think South Asian culture is more prevalent due to many factors —  Bollywood Dreams, Slumdog, globalization. Specifically for bhangra it’s the dance teams on the college scene that really help keep the music alive. Every major city in the US has some form of regular South Asian club night but only a few are actually focused musical on bhangra. Every major university has a bhangra team.  
 
SFBG What other types of music besides bhangra are you into — anything that might surprise some of your regulars?

DJ REKHA I love many styles of music.  Being from NY, I love hip-hop, but also dancehall, electronic, tropical bass. I am big Beatles and Prince fan.

SFBG What developments do you see happening within the bhangra sound?

DJ REKHA I think the latest thing we are seeing/hearing is Punjabi vocals with no actually bhangra music in the track. For example the song Amplifier by Imran Khan.  There is also a lot more over hip-hop stylings in the song in terms of vocals and not just beats.  The lines of what is a bhangra track vs something that is desi urban are being blurred.  Its never easy to keep a genre constrained.   Also in the last year or two as a reflection of dance music today there are a lot more faster tempoed songs.

SFBG Can you share your bhangra top 5 of the moment?

DJ REKHA My top 5 joint of the moment are:

>>”Tohar,” Garry Sandhu

>>”Electro Love Boliyan,” Ranbir S. and Bikram Singh

 

>>”Jatti,” Panjabi MC

 

>>”Jogi,” Jr. Dred

 

>>”Sadi Gal Hor Yah (feat. DCS),” PBN

Live Shots: Golden Glass 2012 slow food and wine festival

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Wine was flowing freely at 11 a.m. on Sat/4 for the pre-show press tasting. We had prepped ourselves by carb-loading on whole wheat oatmeal pancakes before heading to Fort Mason for the Eighth Annual Golden Glass festival (which raised awareness and funds for slow food programs) preparing ourselves to indulge in a smorgasbord of carefully vetted, sustainably produced wines.

(Oddly, I liked the first wine we sampled, a moscato d’asti by La Caliera, all sweet and bubbly, the best. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was the first wine to hit our tongues that morning, but I really believe it was just that great. You should try it.)

The wines came from all over Italy and California, along with a sampling of delectable edibles, including hot-from-the-oven bread by Danny Gabriner of Sour Flour and a large, golden roasted pig from the Butcher Brothers. Also at the Slow Food “Ark of Taste” table were some quirky culinary finds, like the Bodega Red potato. Once the staple tater of the gold miners, over time, it disappeared and was thought to have been completely lost until it was recently found. It is now being grown in Marin County, in hopes of reviving this long-lost tuber.

We skedaddled before the show opened to the public, since the event was totally sold out and we had a feeling that wine aficionados were going to take the place by storm, or rather, sips and gulps. But we felt lucky to have tasted such a wide and delicious variety of libations, before we teetered off to find some lunch.

Sundance Diary, volume seven: up all night!

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Sundance Diary, volume seven: up all night!

In a series of posts, Midnites for Maniacs curator-host and Academy of Art film-history teacher Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports on the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Check out his first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth entries.

Park City at Midnight is what excites me most about each Sundance Film Festival. Yet, many other films screen at midnight that aren’t technically part of the actual category, which brings up the dilemma of what type of film warrants the designation of “Midnight Movie.” Late-night audiences range from the inebriated to the intellectual (and often both combined). This year’s crop of midnight films, in and out of the Park City at Midnight category, was genuinely one of the most eclectic and enjoyable group of films presented in years.

Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong — his follow-up to 2010’s unstoppable cult hit Rubber — is an absurdist journey where everything and nothing can happen, as long as it’s what you’d least expect from a narrative. The reactionary rules of this wandering wonder (don’t read any spoilers about it!) seem to have expanded David Lynch’s quietest, most awkward moments into a web of surrealist silliness that I immediately wanted to watch again as soon as it was over. As audiences were exiting at two in the morning, half of them were bleary-eyed from laughing hysterically, while the other half were in groggy, drunken stupors. For me, this confirms that Dupieux has achieved exactly what he wanted (to make the obvious joke, something so Wrong it’s right).

First-time filmmaker Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision snuck up on the audience, earning mad respect from the sold-out crowd as his film transformed from bloody fun to gory darkness, concluding with one hell of a jaw-dropping finale. While 90210 star AnnaLynne McCord truly went Method to exquisitely explore a disturbed high-schooler, Traci Lords’ passionate and complex performance as her perplexed mother should also be noted — she truly reached shades of Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976).

Jon Wright’s Grabbers had the buzz of being Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) by way of Edgar Wright. The very enjoyable Irish film (which sports a hilarious drunken performance by newcomer Ruth Bradley) quite nicely fills a void for fans of tongue-in-cheek monster movies, and would best be experienced in a theater filled with boisterous bellows from fellow Anglophiles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWlmhMSnVdM

In previous Sundance Diary installments, I discussed Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and Katie Aselton’s triumphant Black Rock. Now, it’s time talk about Gareth Huw Evans’s unruly, uncompromising, and unbelievable Indonesian action film The Raid. Not since Sundance 1992 (John Woo’s Hard Boiled and Tsui Hark’s Dragon Inn) have I experienced the type of nonstop excitement as The Raid. This movie contains inventive fight sequences and hypnotic violence so insane and intense that you have to scream at the top of your lungs while simultaneously assuming a few of the stunt people had to have died during the film! (Jot down the name Iko Uwais, for this man will be taking over the world shortly, especially if he can shine in his U.S. debut, a remake of Mortal Combat coming in 2013). The Raid offers proof positive that a martial arts extravaganza can be as profoundly affecting as any essential art film.

Up next: Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ eighth and final Sundance Diary, with his top ten from the festival!

Sundance Diary, volume six: dramarama

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Sundance Diary, volume six: dramarama

In a series of posts, Midnites for Maniacs curator-host and Academy of Art film-history teacher Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports on the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Check out his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.

So Yong Kim’s character study For Ellen is only 93 minutes long, but the experience of watching it felt like it took an eternity. But — even though the film did not win awards at this year’s festival — it resonated; it was filled with many memorable, quiet moments. Paul Dano (never before so vulnerable) takes the reigns as a struggling musician who, while taking a break from touring to sign the papers for his long-overdue divorce, is forced to confront his own selfish tendencies when his custody rights start slipping through his fingers.

Writer-director Kim (2008’s Treeless Mountain) uses long, handheld takes that often prevent the viewer from seeing the actual feelings of our anti-hero. This subtle slice-of-life portrait never wavers from its sullen tone, which might explain why many critics seemed underwhelmed after its screening. For Ellen doesn’t give its flawed protagonist an easy way out, in a way that’s reminiscent of Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler (2008). 

Ira Sachs (2005’s Forty Shades of Blue) delivered his most personal film to date with Keep the Lights On; oddly enough, it might be a little too personal for its own good. Chronicling an extremely passionate and self-destructive relationship from the late 90s to the present, Sachs transparently exposes the very modern Chelsea neighborhood life of daily phone sex, random hook-ups, and casual usage of hard drugs — all wrapped up in a self-absorbed universe that I am sure more people in this generation can relate to than would actually like to admit. The indie auteur’s latest beautifully-shot effort goes overboard with its honesty (especially toward the end) and I was left in an emotional limbo, wanting to care but feeling like I had read too much of someone’s personal diary.

Barely recognized as mumblecore’s first female director, Ry Russo-Young seems to have graduated to full-fledged indie director with Nobody Walks, which won a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Independent Film Producing. Most audience members were at the screening thanks to star John Krasinski (The Office), who delivers his usual charm. But truly stealing the show was Olivia Thirlby, whose irresponsible yet utterly motivated 23-year-old artist is so wonderfully performed that you forget about some of the major cues the film has taken from Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002) and Tom Kapinos’s Californication. Lena Dunham, who made 2011’s monumental Tiny Furniture, co-wrote the film, and her unromanticized take on strong female voices shines quite brightly here.      

But nothing in this year’s Dramatic Competition could compare to Ben Lewin’s The Surrogate, which won both the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting. Truly delivering hands-down next year’s best actor performance, John Hawkes (2010’s Winter’s Bone) portrays Berkeley, Calif. journalist Mark O’Brien, whose poetry, autobiographical writings, and physical limitations gave writer/director Ben Lewin more than you could ever ask for. O’Brien’s real-life story was already told in Jessica Yu’s 1995 Academy Award-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, which hauntingly showcased O’Brien’s inspired and difficult life. For his narrative take, Lewin has pinpointed a very specific part of the story, creating a timeless romance and life-altering drama that ranks alongside Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1938) and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnUuVxL0UJ4

But it’s the acting that makes this film so unforgettable. Hawkes conveys complicated emotions and captures O’Brien’s soft-spoken syntax without ever slipping into pretension. William H. Macy throws in some very needed humor as an understanding, catch-22’d priest, and Helen Hunt gives the film that certain extra sense of surprise and understanding. It’s a cliché to say so, but it’s true: the film left nary a dry eye in the house. The Surrogate will be “the little film that could” for 2012 and for years after.

Up next: night owl Jesse Hawthorne Ficks tackles more Park City at Midnight movies.

Appetite: Alchemical delights at Science of Cocktails 2012

-
2

Although the Science of Cocktails event may be on hiatus next year due to the Exploratorium‘s big move to the Embarcadero, this year’s party is worth highlighting. Attending since the inaugural event three years ago (check out my previous review here), I enjoy Science of Cocktails more each year.

I’m not sure if the new VIP area added much other than a bird’s-eye view from above with a few additional (but minimal) bites and drinks, the bulk of food being downstairs. Options were more enticing than ever in the ideal museum space, where one can interact with exhibits, kid-free, cocktails in hand. The cavernous space easily holds hundreds of people without feeling packed.

Drinks were poured by some of the Bay’s best bartenders and distillers, sporting white lab-coats, delivering concoctions from test tubes, beakers and hand-crafted contraptions. Cocktails were served in pre-bottled, liquid nitrogen, jello, even powdered forms. (Let us not forget the shiny, porcelain toilet spouting Speakeasy beer).

The biggest treat of the night was a special barrel from distiller Dave Smith at St. George Spirits in collaboration with bartenders Darren Crawford (Bourbon and Branch) and Russell Davis (Rickhouse). The three of them call the endeavor the Manhattan Project, a tribute to Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium — whose brother Robert was scientific director of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.

No bombs here. however. Only fine whiskey. Using St. George’s new Breaking and Entering Bourbon (B&E), the dynamic trio aged Manhattan cocktails with their own precise blend of vermouths (Punt E Mes, Dolin Rouge, Carpano Antica), serving a balanced, aged Manhattan. The unexpected came when they followed that up with a pour of B&E bourbon finished in the barrel used to age the Manhattan.

The first whiskey aged in a cocktail barrel, whispers of spice and bitters from the Manhattan up the B&E experience. This beauty won’t be for sale but you might just see the like of it at special drink events such as this.

My favorite cocktail of the night was Christina Cabrera’s (Michael Mina) Roses Foxtrot. Made with Four Roses bourbon, Calvados apple brandy, Gran Classico, Benedictine, Angostura bitters, and her own cardamom pear syrup and coffee tincture, the pièce de résistance was a thick absinthe foam and gently fried sage leaf Cabrera topped the drink with. Lush and light, the absinthe foam endowed a creamy crown and anise spirit to the cocktail. I could eat the foam and softly sugared sage leaves all on their own (and did). As a whole, the drink melded into a textural, breezy pleasure.

Other highlights included Jennifer Colliau’s (Slanted Door) mocktails using her own unmatched Small Hand Foods http://smallhandfoods.com/ line of gum syrups, grenadine and the like. Leave it to skilled hands to make some of the best drinks of a cocktail event sans alcohol (I was in love with her coconut water/orgeat drink).

It’s a long wait until 2014, but here’s to many more years of Science of Cocktails in the new Exploratorium.

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

The Performant: World on fire

-
1

The Crucible’s “Machine: A Fire Opera” puts a blowtorch on it

First off let’s just all admit that fire is freaking cool. Or, rather, hot. And fire art? That’s about as hot as it gets. ‘Cause it’s art, see, but it’s also fire, and fire is awesome. Unless it’s busy burning down your apartment, then maybe not so much. But we are talking abut fire art right now, and if it’s fire art you want, then the first place you’re going to want to go is West Oakland’s Crucible, one of the most intriguing arts studios in the Bay Area.

With a focus on the industrial arts, The Crucible offers classes in all kinds of crafting, including blacksmithing, stoneworking, jewelry-making, and leather-working. But probably the most memorable pieces to come out of the Crucible are the signature large-scale sculptures and installations with flaming components that dominate its Fire Arts Festivals and stage productions. Currently lighting up the warehouse stage is their latest exploration of fire and art, “Machine,” an opera written by composer Clark Suprynowicz and librettist Mark Streshinsky, which — probably not incidentally — manages to showcase a large spectrum of Crucible-created work.

In fact, not long into the opera, it becomes apparent that the true star of the show may be the multi-level, interactive set, designed by Jean-François Revon, which gives a solid foundation to the abbreviated tale of a man enslaved by a great machine, which in turn sustains an imprisoned goddess. Solid metal scaffolding encloses an army of percussionists as well as the center stage, and the supertitles are displayed on a chunk of detritus emblazoned with the ghostly remnants of an EXIT sign. The rest of the musicians huddle beneath a large platform, above which a bare-chested strongman turns an enormous wheel, while beside them a cage of laser-like beams keeps the Goddess, Brigid (Dawn McCarthy) in her chamber. What appears to be a modified shipping container hulks in the background of the center platform, sliding open occasionally as a portal into memory. A scattered array of monitors display an understated video montage designed by Lucas Benjamin Krech, and the low throb of factory sounds and ambience by Phil Lockwood set the overall tone, sometimes more so than the actual score. Theatre design and industrial arts nerds will find much to praise.

Whether the opera nerds will concur is somewhat debatable, not least because the singers are all miked, and the libretto often seems at odds with the musical composition. But it seems safe to say that they’re probably not the target audience anyhow. Of the performers, the true standout is Eugene Brancoveanu, whose mellow baritone and expressive features serve the staging well, even during moments when the staging fails to serve him. Playing the role of a man awakening from a 10-year-long trance during which he has worked in the machine without memories of himself as a man, he is aided in his quest to escape by one of the only self-aware individuals in the establishment, the controller Sonya (Valentina Osinski), whose Thunderdome dominatrix gear brooks no subordination. Naturally they fall in love, and naturally there are unforeseen consequences for same, but really what’s important to know is that surrounding all the action is fire and fire—especially on a cold winter night—totally rules.

Through January 21
8:30 pm, $45-$65
The Crucible
1260 7th St., Oakl.
www.thecrucible.org

Way out East

-
0
Way out East

THEATER The shows have been as varied and changeable as the weather this January in New York City, where the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) acts as catalyst for, by now, no less than four new-work festivals in the realms of theater, dance, and contemporary performance.

Near the beginning of the month, it got cold enough at night to make your nose hairs chime like little Christmas tree bells. “Every time you sneeze,” a friend explained to me, “a whole shitload of angels get their wings.”

This cheerful seasonal exchange took place in the Lower East Side during a frigid tromp to American Realness, a three-year-old festival offering a vital focus on contemporary dance and performance. Spread across three stages at the Abrons Art Center, American Realness is the brainchild of Ben Pryor, the festival’s 29-year-old curator and producing director, and once again features an eye-catching list of leading and emerging artists.

Indeed, 2012’s 11-day program (Jan. 5-15) is really pulling out the stops. Performances I’ve seen thus far have run a wide gamut, in every way, but have consistently attracted capacity houses to American Realness’s intriguing blend of the known, infamous, and brand new.

In addition to full-blown productions, the festival has added a new free series this year, “Show and Tell,” offering an opportunity to hear artists discuss their work or to glimpse work-in-progress. One recent afternoon was given over to a three-way discussion among songwriter and performance-maker Holcombe Waller, Cynthia Hopkins (at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts recently with The Success of Failure (Or, the Failure of Success)), and Miguel Gutierrez (last seen locally in July at the Garage with his solo, Heavens What Have I Done) about contemporary song-based performance. The Bay Area’s Keith Hennessy was on hand a couple of days earlier to discuss his collaborative project, Turbulence: A Dance About the Economy, which just had a two-night showing in December at CounterPulse. (Hennessy also premiered Almost, a “spontaneous performance action,” during the last week of the festival.)

American Realness opened with an evening lineup that included other San Francisco favorites, namely Laura Arrington Dance and New York–based Big Art Group. Arrington offered the New York premiere of Hot Wings (a piece born of her 2010 CounterPulse residency) to a sold-out house in the Abrons Art Center’s 100-seat Experimental Theater; while Caden Manson/Big Art Group debuted Broke House, a purposefully chaotic, multimedia camp meltdown loosely based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which sprawled across the proscenium stage in the 300-seat Playhouse Theater. The 99-seat Underground Theater, meanwhile, a cozy, brutalist semi-circle carved into the concrete basement, saw a U.S. premiere from Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang (The Heather Lang Show by Eleanor Bauer and Vice Versa).

Those three initial shows together sounded an eclectic key that has been sustained throughout. The cold weather not so much. A few days later it was unseasonably warm. People tried to act concerned about it. Surely this was another sign of impending climactic collapse. But it was just too nice to care very hard about why it might be wrong.

The relaxed mood encouraged by the sudden warming trend was further augmented by an intimate little walking tour called Elastic City. Artists Todd Shalom and Niegel Smith conduct small groups of people around the grounds of the Abrons Art Center, training everyone’s attention, with a gentle and inviting playfulness, on the smallest and most quotidian details imaginable — with low-key but delighting results. A passage down one maintenance hallway, for instance, was an invitation to notice any little detail that caught the eye and stimulated the imagination and to share it with anyone around you, turning the seemingly bare walls into a topography that might have given a 16th-century explorer the chills, or … a woody. At one point, our guides led us outside barefoot onto the wide concrete steps in front of the building, for what was no doubt originally conceived of as a brief but striking encounter with the winter elements. Everyone stood there comfortably, however, thankful for the temperate bath of fresh air. “Yeah, it’s not very cold,” agreed Shalom. “Actually, it’s not cold at all.”

A couple more memorable moments as of this writing: Daniel Linehan spinning in a circle for a very long time, declaiming, “This is not about anything” — and variations on that theme. The young choreographer-performer (who’s worked with Big Art as well as Miguel Gutierrez, among others) delivered these poetically schematic lines at intricate length, in a voice precisely doubled by an offstage “doppelganger” piped through a nearby speaker, demonstrating a fairly wowing memory and focus, while alternating both the speed and shape of his whirling form to create a kinetic sculpture of transfixing beauty.

The stunning solo Not About Everything faltered only momentarily for me, when Linehan, pulling out and “reading” a self-conscious letter about his own art and practice from his pocket, shifted from mathematical-geometric abstraction to the all-too-specific. It was an almost rude awakening from a kind of syntactic ecstasy — the motive, unmooring meaninglessness of the mantra — back into the semantics of worldly and solipsistic concerns. It was saved ultimately by a combination of Linehan’s acuity and alacrity as a thinker and performer, however, and it was as fine, moving, and memorable a solo as any seen thus far.

Ann Liv Young presented a desultory piece called Sleeping Beauty Part I that held few surprises for anyone remotely familiar with her work. But the audience was caught off guard at one point at least, as Sleeping Beauty, having completed a Showgirls-style dance of seduction, pleads for understanding from her Prince Charming (a blowup doll sitting in the first row of the packed Experimental Theater). At that moment a soap machine above the stage suddenly erupted with a noisy rush of air and fluff, casting a snow-like arc of fine goo down onto the heads of maybe a third of the house, producing amusement and irritation in more or less equal measure. Only one patron actually got up and left. The rest sat stoically, trying to stifle coughs and sneezes for the next 20 minutes as the finer, mistier particles of whatever is in that stuff began lining breathing passages.

The remainder of the show was given over to an invitation to have your Polaroid portrait taken with the Sleeping Beauty (two bucks a pop). There were enough takers to drag this process out about half an hour. Then the performers left the stage. More ALY concessions were on sale as you exited.

www.tbspmgmt.com/AMERICAN_REALNESS_.html

Localized Appreesh: the Cosmo Alleycats

Tony Robles
-
10

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. Each week a band/music-maker with a show, album release, or general good news is highlighted and spotlit. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Snap your fingers – jazzy San Francisco swingsters the Cosmo Alleycats have officially released their debut album, The Late Late Show. It’s the kind of story you love to hear: talented local band makes good, a group that formed as a weekly venue houseband makes the leap to fully-realized recording act. And that record beams with tinkling piano, hearty sax, the thumping backbone of upright bass, and a mix of soulful jazz numbers, vintage R&B, and poppy upbeat swing. 

Celebrating their new retro-tinged album this week, the Cosmo Alleycats play two local release shows; one at Le Colonial, at which they were hatched, and then another at Blondie’s Bar & No Grill – there’ll be a special “Alleycat Cosmo” cocktail available at the second event, here’s hoping there’s good booze contained within.

Year and location of origin: January 2010 on Cosmo Alley in SF
Band name origin: Mike: Booze & lack of foresight. Steve & Emily: A couple of us were asked to pull together a band to fill in for Kim Nalley at Le Colonial while she was on vacation for a month. Assuming that there would only be four performances, we wanted the band name to reflect the venue location. Since Le Colonial is on Cosmo Alley, “The Cosmo Alleycats” seemed like a natural fit. Soon after, we were hired as the full time Wednesday night band and started doing gigs all around the Bay Area. The name just stuck.
Band motto: Steve: Get people dancing; Mike: Don’t ask Noam about his hair; Emily: Create fun!
Description of sound in 10 words or less: Emily: Modern vintage R&B and boogaloo swing – we defy classification!; Mike: twang, honk, bang, thump, tinkle, hum.
Instrumentation: Vocals (Emily Wade Adams), Sax (Pete Cornell), Piano (Noam Eisen), Upright Bass (Steve Height) and Drums (Mike Burns). The album also features Nick Rossi on guitar and David Kellerman on keys.
Most recent release: The Late, Late Show (2011)
Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Emily: Loyal, enthusiastic, supportive fans (many of whom wow us with their secret swing dancing skills) and the opportunity to play a range of excellent venues from fun dive bars to hallowed music halls, awesome festivals, and gorgeous winery weddings; Steve: There are so many people here that love seeing live music and are tremendously loyal to bands that they enjoy; Mike: Playing in my home town.
Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Steve: Bridge traffic; Mike: DJs; Emily: Trying to park to load in!
First record/cassette tape/or CD ever purchased: Mike: Herman’s Hermits; Emily: Oh God. My first tape was either Madonna’s “You Can Dance” or George Michael’s “Faith”. First CD was Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Volume 1. When I was three, I’d listen to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour record over and over, looking at all the pretty pictures in the booklet that came with the record and wondering why all these old dudes were dressed up in costumes. I had no clue that drugs were involved until I was about 20.”
Most recent record/cassette tape/CD/or Mp3 purchased/borrowed from the Web: Emily: Other than our own? The latest releases from Amy Winehouse and the Black Keys; Mike: Arann Harris and the Farm Band.
Favorite local eatery and dish: Steve: Le Colonial’s brussels sprouts; Mike: Cordon Blue, California @ Hyde, menu #5; Emily: Where to begin? The food trucks at Off the Grid are ridiculous. I’m addicted to Curry Up Now’s chicken tikka masala burrito. Also, the veggie burger at the Plant Organic is to die for. And I love my Thursday night ‘liquid dinners’ with the band at Blondie’s Bar & No Grill.”

Cosmo Alleycats
Wed/21, 7-10 p.m.
Le Colonial
20 Cosmo Place, SF
www.lecolonialsf.com

Thurs/22, 9 p.m.-12:30 a.m.
Blondie’s Bar & No Grill
540 Valencia, SF
www.blondiesbar.com

UC-Davis: Where real education begins (3)

-
0

Madeline Perez, our correspondent at UC-Davis,  this afternoon 11/30/11) reports  that the many letters published on the opinion section of the school newspaper, the California  Aggie, reflect the issue of Davis, known for its bucolic ways,  band festivals and agriculture and viticulture classes,  suddenly finding itself thrust into the international spotlight because of the pepper spraying incident.
http://www.theaggie.org/2011/11/21/letters-to-the-editor-response-to-uc-davis-protests

Our Weekly Picks: November 30-December 6

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

WEDNESDAY 30

“Flotsam and Jetsam: The Spray of History”

The ceaselessly inventive Los Angeles filmmaker Lewis Klahr comes to town for two shows this week. Joseph Cornell’s boxes are perhaps the most convenient reference point for Klahr’s richly emotional collage animation, though his handmade films’ range of tones and complex interlacing of pop culture and personal sentiment really merits stand-alone consideration. This PFA program samples Klahr’s recent short films, while the SF Cinematheque show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday focuses on Klahr’s ongoing series of sublime musical memory pieces, Prolix Satori. The two shows have no overlapping films, which among other things means you get to appreciate Klahr’s Brill Building ear for titles (A Thousand Julys, False Aging, Wednesday Morning Two A.M., Daylight Moon, Well Then There Now). (Max Goldberg)

7:30 p.m., $9.50

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

www.sfcinematheque.org

 

Lemuria

You would think that a band called Lemuria — a hypothetical continent said to have submerged into the depths of the Indian Ocean — would sound along the lines of Vangelis or Tangerine Dream. But the trio from Buffalo, NY, takes after alternative pop-punk predecessors like Superchunk and the Breeders. Sheena Ozella and Alex Kerns started Lemuria in 2004, taking on bass player Jason Draper a year later. Since then, Lemuria has matured into a band that’s at once frisky and endearing, dynamic and biting. On Lemuria’s newest album, Pebble (Bridge 9), Ozella and Kerns alternate on vocals in such a way that inspires deep sighs, like you’ve just spotted an adorable little dog. But when Ozella’s tough and vivacious guitar playing takes a front-seat, you realize that dog can bite. (James H. Miller)

With the Pillowfights!, Matsuri

9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

FRIDAY 2

“Danzón”

It’s hard to imagine contemporary dance and performance without the seminal influence of German choreographer-performer Pina Bausch, whose work was so different when it started in the 1970s that it spawned its own genre: dance theater. Bausch’s gorgeous visual aesthetic, wildly eclectic movement, incorporation of speech and unbridled emotion, and her collaborative, searching process all contributed to a remaking of the landscape. The subject of a recent 3D documentary tribute by Wim Wenders, Bausch (who died in 2009) left behind a supreme body of work that her company continues to perform around the world. This weekend, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch offers Danzón, Bausch’s poignant, humor-filled celebration of life’s journey in the teeth of death. No 3D specs required. (Robert Avila)

Through Dec. 3, 8 p.m., $30

Zellerbach Hall, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperformances.org

 

 

“True Stories Lounge”

As the cliché goes, truth is stranger than fiction — and knowing that a story is true (or at least somewhat “based on a true story,” Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style) makes it all the more fascinating. The ongoing series “True Stories Lounge” brings together a varied slate of word-wranglers to spin compelling non-fiction tales. This edition’s storytellers include spoken word artist Alan Kaufman, who’ll read from his new memoir, Drunken Angel; comedian Marilyn Pittman, talking through a family tragedy; Salon.com founder David Talbot, reading from his soon-to-be-released book of San Francisco history; Bay Citizen editor Steve Fainaru, a 2008 Pulitzer winner, discussing Iraq; and Brando biographer Peter Manso, reading from his latest Cape Cod-set true crime book. (Cheryl Eddy)

7:30 p.m., $10

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

www.makeoutroom.com

 

 

Benoit & Sergio

“Sergio used to be my English teacher,” reads a YouTube comment for “Walk and Talk.” How hard it would be to explain a lyric like “My baby does K all day” at a parent-teacher conference? In 2009 Sergio quit the D.C. prep school racket to make music full-time with French expatriate Benoit. The electronic duo has quickly built a reputation on less than a dozen tracks released across Ghostly International, Visionquest, and DFA. With an original sound that mixes ecstatic techno house, melancholic late-night soul, and playfully barbed vocals, this will be the SF debut of the pair’s live show. (Ryan Prendiville)

With No Regular Play and DJ sets by Pillowtalk, Thee Mike B, Rich Korach, and more

9 p.m., $15-20

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

 

SATURDAY 3

Papercuts

Founder and lead songwriter of Papercuts, Jason Robert Quever, has a knack for softly wooing listeners into his songs. Part of the seductiveness is Quever’s voice. You tend to follow its breathiness until you’re deep in his weightless and roomy dream pop. On Papercuts’ Fading Parade, the band’s debut album on Subpop, which came out earlier this year, Quever can sound like a love sick ghost, padding around and whispering pleas in your ear. His vocals hover over a lulling swathe of reverb, but drums and guitars retain enough crispness so as not to become a colorless drone. It’s a carefully weighted balance, and one that’s well worth witnessing live. (Miller)

With Dominant Legs, Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick

9 p.m., $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

 

“In the Red — Flaming Lotus Girls Gallery Show”

The Flaming Lotus Girls always go big, pushing the envelope on fire arts innovation every year at Burning Man and other festivals. That’s a big reason why I profiled them in my book, The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture. And it’s also why they’re in debt, now more than most years. So come mingle, marvel at their fiery artworks, dance to DJs from Space Cowboys and the Ambient Mafia, buy some art (including photo prints of FLG projects) or shwag (from the FLG’s autographed and lipstick-kissed calendar to copies of my book that I’ll be selling and signing there), and help the Flaming Lotus Girls get out of the red and into active preparations for its next big project. (Steven T. Jones)

With Deckward, 8Ball, Olde Nasty, and more

6 p.m.-2a.m., free but donations accepted

SomArts

934 Brannan, SF

(415) 552-1770

www.flaminglotus.com

 

 

“The Bay Brewed: A Rock and Roll Beer Festival”

Live music and drinking clearly go well with together. Unfortunately, beer festivals too often conjure up images of boring C list jam bands or old-timers working their way through a bunch of Creedence covers. Not the case with The Bay Brewed, a beer festival and music showcase mash-up put on by the folks over at The Bay Bridged blog. Along with unlimited tastings from 21st Amendment, Anchor Steam, Lagunitas, and Magnolia, among others, admission includes performances by some great local bands. Pick up a complimentary mug and catch the shoegaze-y post-punk of Weekend, the psychedelic rock of Sleepy Sun, the dub-tinged Extra Classic, and the punky power pop of Terry Malts. (Landon Moblad)

2-7 p.m., $55

Verdi Club

2424 Mariposa, SF

(415) 861-9199

www.thebaybridged.com/the-bay-brewed

 

SUNDAY 4

Cass McCombs

Similar to the nomadic lifestyle he’s maintained over the years, Cass McCombs creates music that can be tough to pin down. Though he was born in Concord and has considered the Bay Area home at various points in his career, the indie singer-songwriter has bounced all over the country, eschewing traditional genre expectations in the process. Wit’s End and Humor Risk, McCombs’ two 2011 albums, fully demonstrate his maturing take on sparse folk, dreamy pop, and melancholic rock spiked with just the right amount of humor.(Moblad)

With White Magic, Liza Thorn

8 p.m., $16

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

 

MONDAY 5

The Sea and Cake

Merely listening to indie veteran the Sea and Cake’s extensive catalog of material is an exhausting feat. With jazz, Brazilian, and African influences, this band has been generating a unique sound for more than 20 years. Characterized by Sam Prekop’s breathy vocals and delicate guitar work, the Sea and Cake has long provided the perfect soundtrack for mellowing out with your friends. The group embraced a more experimental sound for this year’s The Moonlight Butterfly (Thrill Jockey), its first release since 2008. Timelessly hip, yet approachable, start your week off right with the effervescent jams of the Sea and Cake. (Frances Capell)

With Lia Ices

8 p.m., $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

 

TUESDAY 6

Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard

Jeffrey Lewis is a jack of all trades. His style encompasses both cerebral folk and grungy, distorted garage rock. Though his lyrics may come across as stream-of-conscience tangents, Lewis’ witty songs are brimming with clever and heartbreaking observations. The musician is also an accomplished comic book artist, and his illustrations often accompany his live performances. Topics of discussion include LSD, farm animals, and the history of Communism. Is there anything Lewis can’t do? (Capell)

With the Yellow Dress, Tortured Genies

8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

 

Other Lives

Other Lives is building a lot of momentum in the wake of Tamer Animals (TBD Records), the band’s latest album. The five-piece from Stillwater, Okla., supported Bon Iver on tour, and afterward, played headline shows across Europe. Eclipsing its recent successes, though, was the announcement that it will support Radiohead on its U.S. Tour, beginning in February. The momentum is certainly deserved. Tamer Animals is dim folk-rock that builds on robust orchestration — violins, cellos, clarinets, and horns all have a grand presence on the record. Once an instrumental collaboration called Kunek, Other Lives still has an appreciation for the slightest sonic details, so that nearly every moment has something to call surprising, if not riveting. (Miller)

With JBM

9 p.m., $12

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

 

Anna Calvi

Praised by Brian Eno as “the best thing since Patti Smith,” dark songstress Anna Calvi also exudes the fierce swagger and edgy sex appeal of predecessors PJ Harvey and Pat Benatar. Calvi’s flamenco and blues-tinged debut earned her critical acclaim and a Mercury Prize nomination for best album of 2011. A backing band consisting of Mally Harpaz on harmonium and percussion and Daniel Maiden-Wood on drums heightens the drama of Calvi’s cinematic anthems. Armed with a guitar and a voice that’s both sultry and operatic, the fiery Calvi seduces everything in her path. (Capell)

8 p.m., $17 Great American Music Hall 859 O’Farrell, SF (415) 885-0750 www.slimspresents.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.

The Performant: Revenge of the nerds

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Gaiman and Palmer, the Bay Area Science Festival, and a live game of Frogger

Nerd might still be a four-letter word in high school locker rooms (assuming these are still high school locker rooms to be found), but there’s really never been a better time in history to be an adult nerd. No matter if your inclinations lie in language, linux, or the laws of thermodynamics, a nerdish life lived well is truly the best revenge for all those real or imagined slings and arrows of awkward youth.

Epitomizing this truism, geek-elite power couple Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer launched a joint mini-tour across the West Coast entitled simply “An Evening with Neil Gaimna and Amanda Palmer,” which turned out to be exactly that, no more and no less.


Though shades of goth tinge both artists’ output, their overall aesthetic is more playful than grim. Neil Gaiman, a prolific writer in many mediums, will perhaps always be best known for his long-running graphic novel series The Sandman, while Amanda Palmer, first hit international acclaim as co-founder of the antique punk/Weimer cabaret act The Dresden Dolls. During a pleasurably meandering three-hour evening at the Brava Theatre (two days before their appearance at The Palace of Fine Arts), the two performed bits of their own work—Neil reading from his 2006 collection of short stories Fragile Things, she playing the ukulele and piano with her singular panache. The songs that they performed together were naturally the highlights. Who knew that Neil Gaiman had a torch singer tucked within his black garb and quiet English reserve? He also penned the lyrics for some of the more notable tunes, including a lovelorn lament “I Google You,” plus one of opening act The Jane Austen Argument’s tunes: “Holes.”

It was a brainiac weekend all around, thanks to the Bay Area Science Festival, which hosted a plethora of walking tours, lectures, exhibitions, and hands-on activities for all. Ducking into my friendly neighborhood Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror fiction bookshop, Borderlands, I got an earful from science fiction authors Scott Sigler, Mira Grant, and Jeff Carlson about the “Science of Science Fiction,” primarily about how much research goes into being able to create with a mostly scientific justification for “melting faces” and “zombification”.

Last but not least, the Come Out and Play Festival, wrapped up a week’s worth of street games with an intensely-packed weekend of battle-scaled dodgeball, cardboard tube fighting, city-wide scavenger hunts, and labyrinths. In Everett Middle School’s vast playground, about forty adults plus a handful of kids, showed up to play a few rousing rounds of Field Frogger, a completely analog twist on the classic arcade game of yore. Participants playing “froggers” sat on giant yoga balls and bounced through an obstacle course of banner-carrying “cars,” “turtles,” and ”logs.” By the end of the morning, there were six froggers hopping through the roads and rivers at the same time, which gave the playing field more of an appearance of a collision course than in the original Konami version, combining innovation with chaos and homage with humor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDgqJjht2vQ

GOLDIES 2011 Lifetime Achievement: Ingrid Eggers

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2011 Lifetime Achievement: Ingrid Eggers

GOLDIES In a city that boasts far more film festivals than movie theaters, one of the most singularly focused is the annual Berlin and Beyond Film Festival — the largest German-language film festival in the United States. Carefully curated for 14 years by Dr. Ingrid Eggers, former program coordinator of the San Francisco branch of the Goethe-Institut, Berlin and Beyond has showcased an eclectic mix of movies by established filmmakers, debut features, documentaries, shorts, and silent films, from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Eggers’ major criteria — that the movies be filmed primarily in German, a language she felt was often missing from San Francisco’s foreign film scene — still left plenty of room for variety. Over the years, quirky documentaries about East German break dancers (Nico Raschick’s 2006 Here We Come) have shared screen space with gritty culture clashes such as Fatih Akin’s 2004 Head-On, wartime dramas such as Margarethe von Trotta’s 2003 Rosenstrasse, and non-traditional romances, such as Andreas Dresen’s 2008 Cloud 9.

Now, two-and-a-half years after her unanticipated removal from the Berlin and Beyond helm, which shocked the San Francisco film community, Eggers insists on looking forward. “We have made our peace,” she says genially, referring to the current incarnation of Berlin and Beyond, which just celebrated its sweet 16 in October.

When Eggers talks film, whether in a café in the Mission or on the stage of the Castro Theatre, her whole face lights up, a beatific glow. She may have reached Germany’s mandatory retirement age of 65 a few years ago, but her youthful vigor attests to a university background in physical education (along with history and literature) and her personal propensity for sport. Every film of the over 500 she’s presented — from the smallest short to the biggest blockbuster — has received a notably warm introduction, and more than one person has remarked in my presence that it is as if she were born to be a festival host. Yet it’s Eggers’ unassuming, collaborative nature rather than any kind of cult of personality that made Berlin and Beyond so successful. For example, it was by working closely with Anita Monga, former Castro programmer, that Eggers learned the ropes of festival scheduling.

“For our opening night in 1996 she insisted we show Fassbinder’s Martha,” Eggers reminisces. “A very difficult film; we had people walk out.”

From early partnerships with the then-San Francisco-based International Film Financing Conference and Kinofest Lünen, a sister festival in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia state, to later ones with corporate sponsors such as Kuehne + Nagel, who underwrote the shipping costs of the film canisters, Eggers’ ability to forge unique partnerships has served her in good stead. Her current film festival project — the smaller-scale German Gems — is set to screen for a third year in January 2012.

After that, Eggers is not so sure. “It’s incredibly expensive to put on even such a small festival,” she admits ruefully, though her many years of festival directing has provided her with the unquantifiable currency of influence. The first German Gems festival, a jam-packed day in 2010 at the Castro (with an encore performance in Point Arena), included von Trotta’s biopic of Hildegarde von Bingen, Vision, and received an official blessing from Dieter Kosslick, director of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival.

Since she’s less interested in competing with than enhancing the selections at Berlin and Beyond, Eggers has shifted German Gems’ focus toward student and first feature films, one of her favorite components of B and B festivals past. But like any proud parent, she still speaks fondly of her first-born festival, pointing out the big-name film personalities who graced Berlin and Beyond’s stage: Bruno Ganz, Michael Verhoeven, and Wim Wenders — coups that put the event on the map, even in Germany. It won’t ever be quite the same without her, but thanks to Eggers’ persistent efforts over the years, the future of San Francisco’s premiere showcase of German cinema seems assured.

Rhythm nations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Rhythm nations

DANCE Watched over by two pink carousel horses, a rainbow. and a big lotus flower, they sway, stomp, and slide even as they chant, clap, and body slap in increasingly complex rhythms. They are SlamDance, Keith Terry’s sextet of musician-dancers, and they are rehearsing their upcoming performance at the fourth International Body Music Festival, held this year at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Last year, the (free) festival took place in São Paulo, Brazil; next October it will happen (also free) in Istanbul, Turkey. “Free performances [are] something we could never do in this country,” Terry ruefully observes. Still, the plan is to have a local festival (2011 tickets start at $25) every other year.

Terry, who organized the first festival in 2008, started out as a percussionist. He was the first drummer for the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and he is a founding member of Berkeley’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya. So the beat has been in his body for a very long time — yet early in his career he changed from “a seated musician to a moving musician,” as he calls himself. Using one’s body as a musical instrument, he says, sometimes is called “body percussion” or “body drumming.” Terry prefers the term “body music” because it includes melodic and harmonic aspects as well as its rhythmic components. SlamDance performers, for instance, use their voices to percussive effect as well as in simple part-singing.

Using your body to make music is pretty basic. We all do it, perhaps starting as toddlers with patty-cake, progressing into clapping games at recess, and ending up as oldsters who play the spoons. Much of these practices go back to folkways rooted in ritualistic endeavors. But there are also innovations: the gumboot dance, for instance, was developed by South African miners early in the 20th century, while African American fraternities popularized a particular form of step-dancing.

Body music is both a communal practice with a sense of freedom even as it demands great discipline and precision. “That’s what makes it fun,” Terry explains. Often it integrates improvisation and fixed passages, not unlike what happens in both hip-hop and jazz.

Noticeable from a dance perspective is the SlamDancers’ slight sway in the torso. “It helps with the breathing,” Terry notes, though he was surprised to see how practices change from culture to culture.

“One of the things that fascinates me about these festivals is how differently these musicians, who come from all over the world, carry themselves. It was one of the most profound experiences with my first body music festival because we are, basically, all just clapping and stepping. It’s definitely a cultural thing. You put a French group next to a Brazilian one and you can immediately see the difference.”

One of the first groups Terry identified with as kindred spirits was Çudamani, an astounding troupe of male dancer-musicians from Bali. They perform kecak, a rhythmic, chanting-and-swaying “monkey dance” that originated in trance rituals. Six of its dancers bring new choreography as part of this year’s International Body Music Festival line-up, which features a total of eleven companies.

Others include the theatrical Cambuyón, from the Canary Islands, which integrates tap and hip-hop into other percussive forms, and Kantu Korpu, which draws on flamenco and tap to translate regional Greek music into motion. Both of these groups are making their US debut. KeKeÇa’s five performers interpret Turkish songs within Near Eastern movement traditions. Fernando Barba from Brazil draws from samba and maracatu; Danny “Slapjazz” Barber is a hambone virtuoso; the Las Vegas-based group Molodi pulls in theater and just about everything with a beat. A gentler soul is Quebec’s Éric Beaudry, who will also team up with a trio of Oakland step dancers.

 

INTERNATIONAL BODY MUSIC FESTIVAL

Fri/4-Sat/5, 8 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m., $25–$50

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF.

www.internationalbodymusicfestival.com

Dancing with the dead at Día de los Muertos

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Candles were lit, marigolds were trimmed, and white face paint was spread carefully over cheeks.

A large crowd gathered by sunset, meandering their way through Garfield Park to look at all the exquisitely decorated altars that honored friends and family who have passed on. The annual Día de los Muertos procession and display is always such a vibrant and colorful event, embracing the reality that eventually we’ll all disappear, to who knows where, but buoyed by the thought that we’ll never be forgotten. There is sadness, but that’s part of life — so why not have an amazing night party in the park to make things just a little happier!

¡Felíz Día de los Muertos mis amigos!

Frame missing

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Frame missing

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Of all Elliot Lavine’s noir programs for the Roxie, “Not Necessarily Noir” is both the toughest sell and the most creative from a curatorial perspective. There are two programs in this abbreviated “Not Necessarily Noir” run that should have built-in audiences — a slam dunk Joan Crawford double bill of Johnny Guitar (1954) and Female on the Beach (1955), and a full course of Ed Wood — but the terrifically nervous movies at the start of the series do the most to stake out its intuitive terrain.

As a thorough revision of Robert Siodmak’s classic adaptation of the Hemingway story, Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964) is a fine place to begin. Siegel’s remake was initially contracted for television, but that fell through when the director littered the film with mean specks of violence; a sniper sequence seemed in especially poor taste after the Kennedy assassination. If they only knew: in the movie version it’s Ronald Reagan pulling the trigger.

The wild casting combinations are dynamite in Siegel’s hands: the future president and John Cassavetes brawl and killer pair Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager pursue the story of a big heist. Marvin’s hired gun wants to know what made former racecar driver Johnny North (Cassavetes) die without a fight. Gulager’s goofy psychopath needs the suggestion of a million bucks to get interested. Ducking Siodmak’s smooth noir style, Siegel gives us hard daylight, cheap motels, and actors sweating through their makeup. The director approaches fatalism matter-of-factly, leaving the expressionistic language of seduction and madness without much purchase. With characteristic perversity, Siegel has Johnny accuse femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson, a Kennedy friend) of betrayal when his head is wrapped up following an auto accident. It should be an emotional peak and we can’t even see his eyes.

Against the odds of its title, the unjustly obscure Brainstorm (1965) charts a well-plotted crackup. With its glinting surfaces, jazz score, and debauched party scenes, the William Conrad film can evoke a pulp La Dolce Vita (1960) or La Notte (1961). Jim (Jeffrey Hunter) is a chiseled intellectual manning room-sized computers. In a dreamlike prologue, he discovers a beautiful woman (Anne Francis) wrapped in mink in the backseat of her car. She’s unconscious, and her car is parked in the path of a train. After the rescue, Jim finds out she belongs to Jim’s boss Cort Benson (Dana Andrews in a fine menacing turn). A little later Cort finds out the two youngsters have been playing around and uses his power to cast Jim as a lunatic. Jim begins to play along when he realizes it could make for a persuasive alibi for murder.

Brainstorm never ventures into the underworld, but Conrad’s squeezed widescreen framing gives the sense of being underwater. Along with the hard horizontals of modernist offices and passing references to the Nuremberg Trials, the film’s self-conscious tripling of female threat (the traditional femme fatale, a woman psychologist, a hired hand who accuses Jim of lewd phone calls) insinuates deep pathological reserves of noir anxiety. Brainstorm‘s disintegration isn’t quite up to Shock Corridor (1963) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but they’re all stirring the same pot.

If Clint Eastwood’s avenging cop in Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) was a neo-noir lodestar, his directorial debut of that same year pushed in a different direction. In Play Misty for Me, an extreme amplification of the femme fatale into a castrating bitch (many fatal attractions followed) obscures his character’s masculine code. As Dave, Eastwood appears every bit the New Hollywood playboy driving along the Pacific Coast Highway to his nighttime disc jockey gig. After the show he has a drink with his barkeep friend (Siegel, naturally) and soon looks to pick up a swell-looking babe down the bar (Jessica Walter). Back at her place Evelyn admits she’s the one always calling in with a request for “Misty,” and things only get stickier from there.

Dave grasps at Evelyn’s movie-romance psychosis with the same hard stare reserved for bad dudes in the spaghetti westerns and crime movies, but here this front signals disbelief, frustration, and ineffectuality. Instead of trapping his onscreen persona in the frame, as in the classical noir, Eastwood pictures himself enjoying a false mastery of space. Dave strolls with a good girl in sylvan nature (shades of 1947’s Out of the Past), but the unnervingly distant framings anticipate the knockout moment when Evelyn’s hand strikes menacingly into the foreground of one of these shots. Play Misty for Me isn’t necessarily noir, but Eastwood’s cunning extension of the “deadly is the female” trope doesn’t play nice with the audience’s identification — and that’s maybe the coolest killer of all.

“NOT NECESSARILY NOIR II”

Nov. 4-8, $5–$9.75

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

 

The Peformant: Neither bloody nor bowed

Andrew Lam
-
0

Bullfighting Cali-style

If you want to go to a bullfight in California, you have to do a little preliminary sleuthing. Just why you would decide to go in the first place can’t be easily explained. But it helps to note that unlike more traditional forms of bullfighting, California bullfighting is billed as “bloodless.” That is to say, no bulls are killed in the ring.

It helps too that bullfighting in California is allowed only in conjunction with religious festivals, conducted primarily by and for a tightly-knit yet far-flung community of Portuguese-Americans who travel long distances to attend, and connect with family from all across California, even farther.

Your bullfight-savvy buddy sleuths away. One website in particular yields good information. The last bullfights of the season are scheduled during the “Festa de Nossa Senhora de Fatima” in Thornton, California. You make a plan.

It’s a hot day, but the seats of the Praça de São João are packed. Portuguese is the vernacular language of the day; all announcements and introductions will be conducted in it, as well as much of the multi-generational spectator chatter. Portuguese bullfighting differs from its Spanish counterpart in its proscribed cast of characters. The first to enter the ring is a cavaleiro on horseback, who performs in tandem with two bandarilheiros whose job it is to distract the bull with capes at crucial times during the fight.

The cavaleiro rides slowly around the arena and cautiously approaches the bull, allowing it to rush at him whereupon he aims a Velcro-covered staff at a Velcro pad positioned on the back of the bull, then repeats in a series of daring passes. Once the cavaleiro has reached his quota of strikes, it’s time for the forcados to perform. 

What could possibly compel a team of grown men to approach an angry bull unarmed, wait for it to charge, and grab onto its face (the pega de cara) for a joyride is truly a mystery, but there they are, one man strutting in front of the bull in a green-and-red elf cap, the others hanging back behind him in a line, ready to rush the bull and rescue their buddy as soon as his feet leave the ground. One experimental maneuver has the line of backup forcados waiting in the stands rather than standing in the ring. The audience becomes concerned—this is not the norm. 

“What the hell is this?” grumbles the vocal gentleman in the row behind you. The experiment does not go well, a dramatic trampling ensues, not once but twice. A collective sigh of relief rises from the stands as once more, all eight men stand together in the ring, ready to pounce. Once they have successfully completed their counter-intuitive task, the bull is led out of the ring by a docile herd of cows, and the fighting team makes a circuit of the ring to be showered with flowers from the women, hats from the men.

Lest Ernest Hemingway enthusiasts feel completely left out, Spanish matador Sánchez Vara also displays his gracefully balletic bullfighting skills: drawing the bull in close with a flutter of an iconic red cape, pretending to ignore it by turning his back to it, then paying homage to it on bended knee, the ultimate bravery. Outside the ring, the prayerful begin to gather for the outdoor mass and the candlelight procession to honor “our lady of Fatima”. You eat lukewarm linguiça and piping-hot tacos from stands lining the road and ride off into the sunset—not on horseback, nor even clinging to the face of a charging bull — but in that ubiquitous new-world contraption, the rental car. You still aren’t entirely sure how you feel about California-style bullfighting. But at least you can say you went.

 

Swiss (don’t) miss

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Swiss (don’t) miss

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Heidi stand down. The Berlin and Beyond Film Festival celebrates its sweet 16 with a clutch of Swiss films that catapult that oft-overlooked alpine land into the cinematic big leagues. From this year’s centerpiece film Bold Heroes, set in a juvenile cancer ward, to How About Love, a tense love story set on the troubled border between Myanmar and Thailand, Swiss cinema is hogging some of the German-language spotlight generally dominated by its Northern neighbor. My personal picks, Sennentuntschi, a Halloween-appropriate horror flick, and The Sandman, a quirky comedy about a man who becomes a walking sandstorm, aren’t the festival’s biggest movies, but may prove to be among the most memorable.

An Alp-traum, combining bits of The Blair Witch Project (1999), Deliverance (1972), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Sennentuntschi unfolds in a series of sometimes confusingly non-linear flashbacks from 1975. After the presumed suicide of the church sacristan (Thomas Landl), a bedraggled mute (Roxane Mesquida) stumbles into the village. Immediately suspicion for the young man’s death falls on her, especially when the parish priest (Ueli Jaggi) denounces her as evil, demonstrating as proof her apparent fear of the crucifix. Certain there is a rational explanation for her unexplained presence, the village cop (Nicholas Ofczarek), a slow-witted, big-hearted John Elway look-alike, begins the search for her true identity as discontent and rumor simmer around him.

Meanwhile, on top of the mountain, uncouth goat herder Erwin (Andrea Zogg), his mentally-challenged protégé Albert (Joel Basman), and his city-slicker volunteer Martin (Carlos Leal) court codified horror-film comeuppance by crafting a straw-filled sex puppet, a Sennentuntschi, and “inviting the devil” to turn her into a real woman. The cruelly violent treatment meted out to their “supernatural” helpmate, naturally the mysterious mute, is rendered all the more disturbing once it’s revealed that she may in fact be a feral innocent rather than a demonic succubus. The movie boasts some remarkable cinematography, with a palette that renders even slaughtered goats attractive, and haunting shots of the misty mountains that would do Peter Jackson proud. And though the film occasionally gets bogged down in police procedure and missing persons’ bureaus, there’s enough splatter and chill to satisfy the blood-thirst of most horror fans, from slasher-flick fan kids to aficionados of refined psychological terror.

A gem of minimalistic absurdity, The Sandman opens innocuously enough, following an uptight philatelist and failed conductor, Benno (Fabian Krüger) on his daily rounds from stamp shop to café, shower to bed. Navigating the world and his relationships with the special arrogance of a congenital loser who doesn’t recognize his own shortcomings, Benno’s limited horizons take on a surreal cast once sand inexplicably begins to trickle from his body, leaving a pebbly trail wherever he goes. Possibly even more disturbing to his equilibrium are the romantic dreams he begins having about Sandra (Irene Brügger), the barista he despises, who runs the café directly below his apartment and keeps him awake at night practicing her “one-woman orchestra” act with sousaphone and loop machine.

Horrified to discover they are sharing the same dream, the two join forces to determine both the source of the nightmare and of the endless streams of sand, which eventually turn Benno’s formerly pristine apartment into a treacherous dune. Krüger and Brügger each deliver gracefully understated performances, circling each other with wary exasperation even as circumstance forces them into ever closer proximity. Although a couple of plot points never really get fully developed (it appears that the sand has soporific properties, but selectively so), The Sandman‘s guileless commitment to its own playful illogic makes it a genuine pleasure to watch. And while it’s never entirely clear whether or not they find the secret of stopping the sand, Krüger and Brügger’s final musical collaboration is a show-stopper.

BERLIN AND BEYOND FILM FESTIVAL

Oct. 20-26, most shows $12

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.berlinbeyond.com

 

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.

THEATER

OPENING

Fear SF Playhouse, Stage Two, 533 Sutter, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $12-25. Opens Tues/25, 8pm. Runs nightly through Oct 31, 8pm. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs improvised horror stories.

Pellas and Melisande Cutting Ball Theater, Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Previews Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 5pm. Opens Oct 27, 8pm. Runs Thurs, 7:30; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 27. Cutting Ball Theater performs Rob Melrose’s new translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s avant-garde classic.

Race American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10-85. Previews Fri/28-Sat/22 and Tues/25, 8pm (also Sat/22, 2pm); Sun/23, 7pm. Opens Oct 26, 8pm. Runs Tues-Sat, 8pm (Nov 1, performance at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm (no matinee Oct 26; additional show Nov 6 at 7pm). Through Nov 13. ACT performs David Mamet’s wicked courtroom comedy.

Richard III Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; 1-888-746-1799, www.shnsf.com. $35-150. Opens Wed/19, 7:30pm. Runs Tues-Fri, 7:30pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 29. Kevin Spacey plays the lead in this Sam Mendes-directed production of the Shakespeare classic.

The Rover, or the Banish’d Cavaliers, The American Clock Hastings Studio Theater, 77 Geary, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org. $10 ($15 for both productions). Oct 19-Nov 5, performance times vary. American Conservatory Theater’s Masters of Fine Arts program presents plays in repertory by Aphra Behn and Arthur Miller.

Savage in Limbo Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Opens Wed/21, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 3. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs John Patrick Shanley’s edgy comedy.

You Will Gonna Go Crazy Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $7-17. Opens Fri/21, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 30. Kularts presents a multimedia dance-theater play.

BAY AREA

Doubt: A Parable Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Opens Fri/21, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Nov 13, 2pm. Through Nov 19. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley performs John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning drama.

Rambo: The Missing Years Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Thurs/20, 7pm. Runs Thurs-Fri, 7pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Dec 10. Howard “Hanoi Howie” Petrick presents his solo show about being an anti-war demostrator — while also serving in the Army.

Sam’s Enchanted Evening TheaterStage at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Thurs/20, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Nov 26. The Residents wrote the script and did the musical arrangements for this musical, featuring singer Randy Rose and pianist Joshua Raoul Brody.

ONGOING

“AfroSolo Arts Festival” Various venues, SF; www.afrosolo.org. Free-$100. Through Thurs/20. The AfroSolo Theatre Company presents its 18th annual festival celebrating African American artists, musicians, and performers.

Almost Nothing, Day of Absence Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; (415) 474-8800, www.lhtsf.org. $43-53. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Nov 20. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre performs one-act plays by Marcos Barbosa and Douglas Turner Ward.

Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief Boxcar Theatre Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $15-35. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Nov 5. Written in 1979 by a 28-year-old Paula Vogel, Desdemona retells a familiar Shakespearean tragedy, Othello, through the eyes of its more marginalized characters, much as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead did with Hamlet in 1966. In Vogel’s play, it is the women of Othello — Desdemona the wife, Emilia her attendant (demoted down to washer-woman in Vogel’s piece), and Bianca, Cassio’s lover, and the bawdy town pump — who are the focus, and are the play’s only onstage characters. Whiling away an endless afternoon cooped up in the back room of the governor’s mansion, the flighty, spoiled, and frankly promiscuous Desdemona (Karina Wolfe) frets over the loss of her “crappy little snot-rag,” while her subservient, pious, but quietly calculating washer-woman Emilia (Adrienne Krug) scrubs the sheets and mends the gubernatorial underpants with an attitude perfectly balanced between aggrieved, disapproving, and cautiously optimistic. Though the relationship between the two women often veers into uncomfortable condescension from both sides, their repartee generally feels natural and uncontrived. Less successfully portrayed is Theresa Miller’s Bianca, whose Cockney accent is wont to slip, and whose character’s boisterous nature feels all too frequently subdued. Jenn Scheller’s billowing, laundry-line set softens the harsh edges of the stage, just as Emilia’s final act of service for her doomed mistress softens, though not mitigates, her unwitting role in their mutual downfall. (Gluckstern)

Honey Brown Eyes SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-50. Tues-Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through Nov 5. Bosnia in 1992 is divided in a horrifying civil war, some characteristics of which play out in parallel circumstances for two members of a single rock band in SF Playhouse’s west coast premiere of Stefanie Zadravec’s new play. In the first act, set in Visegrad, a young Bosnian Muslim woman (Jennifer Stuckert) is held at gunpoint in her kitchen by a jumpy soldier (Nic Grelli) engaged in a mission of murder and dispossession known as ethnic cleansing. The second act moves to Sarajevo and the apartment of an elderly woman (Wanda McCaddon) who gives shelter and a rare meal to an army fugitive (Chad Deverman). He in turn keeps the bereaved if indomitable woman company. Director Susi Damilano and cast are clearly committed to Zadravec’s ambitious if hobbled play, but the action can be too contrived and unrealistic (especially in act one) to be credible while the tone — zigzagging between the horror of atrocity and the offbeat gestures of romantic comedy — comes over as confused indecision rather than a deliberate concoction. (Avila)

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Nov 13. Acclaimed solo performer Don Reed (East 14th) premieres his new show, based on his post-Oakland years living in Los Angeles.

Making Porn Box Car Theatre Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-50. Thurs, 8pm; Fri-Sun, 7pm (also Fri-Sat, 10pm). Through Oct 29. Ronnie Larsen brings back his crowd-pleasing comedy about the gay porn industry.

“Master Harold” … and the Boys Phoenix Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 601, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $18-40. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 19. Off Broadway West Theatre Company performs Athol Fugard’s South African-set drama.

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs/19-Fri/21, 8pm; Sat/22, 8:30pm; Sun/23, 3pm. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

Nymph Errant Eureka Theater, 215 Jackson, SF; (415) 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $20-50. Wed, 7pm; Thurs/19-Fri/21, 8pm; Sat/22, 6pm; Sun/23, 3pm. 42nd Street Moon performs Cole Porter’s madcap 1933 musical.

*The Odyssey Aboard Alma, Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, SF; www.weplayers.org. $160. Oct 28-29, Nov 4-6, 11-12, and 18, 12:30pm. Heralding their hugely ambitious Spring 2012 production of The Odyssey, which will take place all over Angel Island, the WE Players are tackling the work on a slightly smaller scale by staging it on the historic scow schooner Alma, which is part of the Maritime National Historical Park fleet docked at the end of Hyde Street Pier. Using both boat and Bay as setting, the essential chapters of the ten-year voyage — encounters with the Cyclops, Circe, the Underworld, the Sirens, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Calypso — are enacted through an intriguing mash-up of narration, choreography, sea chanteys, salty dog stories (like shaggy dog stories, but more water-logged), breathtaking views, and a few death-defying stunts the likes of which you won’t see on many conventional stages. High points include the casual swapping of roles (every actor gets to play Odysseus, however briefly), Ross Travis’ masked and flatulent Prometheus and sure-footed Hermes, Ava Roy’s hot pants-clad Circe, Charlie Gurke’s steady musical direction and multi-instrumental abilities, and the sail itself, an experiential bonus. Landlubbers beware, so much time facing the back of the boat where much of the action takes place can result in mild quease, even on a calm day. Take advantage of the downtime between scenes to walk around and face forward now and again. You’ll want to anyway. (Gluckstern)

On the Air Pier 29 on the Embarcadero (at Battery), SF; (415) 438-2668, love.zinzanni.org. $117 and up (includes dinner). Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Dec 31. Teatro ZinZanni’s final performance at Pier 39 riffs on the company’s own struggles to stay in San Francisco. Geoff Hoyle and Duffy Bishop are the headlining guest stars.

*red, black & GREEN: a blues (rbGb) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $5-25. Thurs/19-Sat/22, 7:30pm. This remarkably protean new piece from Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project searches for common ground between the environmental movement at large and movements for social justice rooted in poor communities of color (where ecological crisis is only one among multiple life-threatening issues). Structured as a vibrant multimedia installation and performance work at once, red, black & green transforms co-commissioner YBCA’s Forum stage into an evolving environment audiences can walk through and linger in, as performers Bamuthi Joseph, Theaster Gates, Tommy Shepherd, and Traci Tolmaire deliver a multifaceted narrative road-trip through Chicago, Huston, New York, and West Oakland, following the “Life Is Living” festivals bringing arts, education, and activism to urban parks. The highly attuned ensemble conveys and accentuates this narrative with a commanding mix of firsthand accounts, poetry, dance, song, and percussion (tapped out on surfaces with fingers, palms, or carving knives). Theaster Gates’ gorgeous set design, meanwhile, blends repurposed materials into mobile environments — floating island habitats beautifully lit by James Clotfelter, decorated with sculpture and video designs (evocative media collages composed by David Szlasa), and continually reconfigured as neighborhoods, shotgun houses, storefronts, and other environs. Intended to provoke discussion about social justice struggles in the age of environmental crisis, the production’s ambitious balancing of history, contemporary politics, center and periphery, personal idealism and doubt, and individual voices feels perhaps inevitably uneven and incomplete, but the attempt is frequently bracing and the delivery as sure as it is urgent. (Avila)

“San Francisco Olympians Festival” Exit Theater, 156 Eddy, SF; www.sfolympians.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 28. No Nude Men Productions presents a festival of 12 new full-length plays written by 14 local writers. Each play focuses on one of the Olympian characters from ancient Greece.

ShEvil Dead Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Fri/21 and Oct 28-29, 8pm. Primitive Screwheads return with a horror play (in which the audience is literally sprayed with blood, so leave the fancy suit at home!) based on the Evil Dead movies.

“Shocktoberfest 12: Fear Over Frisco” Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; (415) 377-4202, www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 19. In its annual season-scented horror bid, Thrillpeddlers joins forces with SF’s Czar of Noir, writer-director Eddie Muller, for a sharply penned triplet of plays that resurrect lurid San Francisco lore as flesh-and-blood action. In the slightly sluggish but intriguing Grand Inquisitor, a solitary young woman modeling herself on Louise Brooks in Lulu (an alluringly Lulu-like Bonni Suval) believes she has located the Zodiac killer’s widow (a sweet but cagey Mary Gibboney) — a scenario that just can’t end well for somebody, yet manages to defy expectations. An Obvious Explanation turns on an amnesiac (Daniel Bakken) whose brother (Flynn de Marco) explains the female corpse in the rollaway (Zelda Koznofski) before asking bro where he hid a certain pile of money. Enter a brash doctor (Suval) with a new drug and ambitions of her own vis-à-vis the hapless head case. Russell Blackwood directs The Drug, which adapts a Grand Guignol classic to the hoity-toity milieu of the Van Nesses and seedy Chinatown opium dens, where a rough-playing attorney (an ever persuasive Eric Tyson Wertz) determines to turn a gruesome case involving the duplicitous Mrs. Van Ness (an equally sure, sultry Kära Emry) to his own advantage. The evening also offers a blackout spook show and some smoothly atmospheric musical numbers, including Muller’s rousing “Fear Over Frisco” (music composed by Scrumbly Koldewyn; accompaniment by Steve Bolinger and Birdie-Bob Watt) and an aptly low-down Irving Berlin number — both winningly performed by the entire company. (Avila)

Sorya! A Minor Miracle (Part One) NOHSpace, Project Artaud, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $12-18. Sun/23-Mon/24, 7pm. Each year, NOHspace residents Theatre of Yugen present a program of short Kyogen and Noh pieces, demonstrating the building blocks that define their unique approach. Blending classical Japanese theatrical styles with original and contemporary works, the company’s multi-cultural ensemble has been performing their specialized brand of East-West fusion since 1978. This year’s Sorya! program includes two modern-day works written by Greg Giovanni, a Philadelphia-based playwright and Noh artist, directed by Theatre of Yugen artistic director Jubilith Moore, and one traditional comedy, Boshibari (Tied to a Pole), directed by company founder Yuriko Doi. This piece is by far the strongest of the three, a tale of two servants pulling one over their master, who has tied them up in order to prevent them from breaking into the sake cellar. Lluis Valls and Sheila Berotti as Taro and Jiro execute the highly-ritualized aspects of the Kyogen farce with deft mobility and expressiveness, working together to overcome their captivity just enough to enjoy a few drinks before being discovered by their irate master (Sheila Devitt). The other two pieces, one set in Narnia and the other based on an Irish folk ballad, are less compelling, though no less ambitious, and Stephen Siegel and Karen Marek’s joint performance as a pair of squabbling dwarves is worthy of praise. (Gluckstern)

*Tutor: Enter the Enclave Exit Studio, 156 Eddy, SF; (415) 673-3847, www.darkporchtheatre.com. $15-25. Thurs/19-Sat/22, 8pm. Dark Porch Theatre performs Martin Schwartz’s play, inspired by an 18th century German drama, about a tutor who realizes the creepy family he works for is not quite what they seem.

*Wallflower Little Theatre, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway, SF; creativearts.sfsu.edu. $8-12. Thurs/20-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. One by one a baker’s dozen appears in the otherwise abandoned gymnasium: high schoolers in their awkward finery all fleeing prom night, which rages away on the other side of the wall like a blast furnace and shrieks like a jet engine every time the double doors are thrown open in escape. Here, in relative silence and stillness, begins a dream-dance of its own, largely wordless but speaking volumes through a brilliantly devised choreography of hesitation, alienation, attraction, and repulsion — the push-and-pull of fear and desire epitomized by adolescence in all its desperate and beautiful vulnerability (but of course from this school no one ever really graduates). At turns hilarious, raucous, wrenching, and sweetly, smolderingly sensual, Wallflower is another must-see collaboration between Bay Area director Mark Jackson and a remarkably adept cast and crew from San Francisco State’s theater department — collaborations that have blazed a regular path out to Lakeside for discriminating theatergoers. Like last year’s stunning Juliet, Wallflower draws equal inspiration from Shakespeare (here A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and the personal insecurities and compulsions offered up by the performers themselves. Impressively designed throughout — including a choice and supple sound design by Teddy Hulsker — this dance-theater performance is an elating mixture of flooring choreography and the mesmerizing personalities and relationships registered in the subtlest of words and gestures. It’s all as enchanting and revelatory as the intoxicating dream it describes. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Bellwether Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; (415) 388-5208, www.marintheatre.org. $34-55. Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs/20, 1pm; Oct 29, 2pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Oct 30. Marin Theatre Company performs Steve Yockey’s spooky fairy tale for adults.

Clementine in the Lower 9 TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Oct 30. TheatreWorks presents the world premiere of Dan Dietz’s post-Katrina New Orleans drama.

*A Delicate Balance Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-48. Wed/19-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2 and 7pm. Aurora Theatre performs Edward Albee’s comedy of manners.

How to Write a New Book for the Bible Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no matinee Sat/22; no show Nov 18); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 7pm). Through Nov 20. Berkeley Rep performs a world premiere by Bill Cain.

Inanna’s Descent Codornices Park, 1201 Euclid, Berk; www.raggedwing.org. Free. Sat-Sun, 1pm. Through Oct 30. Special Halloween show Oct 31, 5-8pm. After last year’s memorable presentation of the Persephone myth as a site-specific, Halloween-heralding, multi-disciplinary performance in the wooded glades of Codornices Park, it seemed inevitable that Ragged Wing Ensemble would want to build on that success by following it up with an equally memorable exploration of another mythological underworld. This year’s chosen subject, the descent of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, Queen of the Heavens into the Underworld where her jealous sister Ereshkigal reigns, is enacted as a half-hour play as well as a self-guided, seven-station circuit around the park, from the tunnel to the fire pit, where the central performance is held. Each station is hosted by a different character from the play, who engages each passing audience member in a series of activities: from wishing on the future to coloring in a self-portrait of “meat.” The play itself stars Kelly Rinehart as Inanna, “the bombshell of the story,” who appears onstage clad in a dress of shredded reflective insulate and a giant leonine headdress. The other ensemble-created costumes are cleverly constructed of equally non-biodegradable materials: a faux-fur cloak decorated with remote controls, robes of state made entirely from rustling plastic shopping bags, a bandolier of empty water bottles. More genial and thought-provoking than a typical trip to a haunted house, Inanna’s Descent is an inventive Halloween expedition for children of most ages, and adults with young hearts. (Gluckstern)

*Phaedra Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-26. Wed/19-Thurs/20, 7pm; Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 5pm. Catherine (Catherine Castellanos) is the loveless matron in the impeccably tidy, upper-class home of middle-aged right-wing judge Antonio (Keith Burkland), secretly infatuated with her stepson (Patrick Alparone), the prodigal returning home from jail and rehab for a new start. Catherine’s cold, obsessively ordered run of the household — with heavy-lifting by her cheerful, steadfast housekeeper (a wonderfully genuine Trish Mulholland) — masks a desolation and chaos inside her, a churning emptiness evoked in the deliberately listless pace of act one and the skudding clouds we can see reflected in the walls of designer Nina Ball’s impressively stolid, icily tasteful living room. Portland Center Stage’s Rose Riordan directs a strong cast (which includes Cindy Im, as the stepson’s rehab partner and sexual interest) in a modern-day adaptation of the Greek myth by Adam Bock (The Shaker Chair, Swimming in the Shallows), in a worthy premiere for Shotgun Players. The drama comes leavened by Bock’s well-developed humor and the dialogue, while inconsistent, can be eloquent. The storm that breaks in the second act, however, feels a bit compressed and, especially after the languid first act, contributes to a somewhat pinched narrative. But whatever its limitations, Catherine’s predicament is palpably dramatic, especially in Castellanos’s deeply moving performance — among her best work to date and alone worth giving Phaedra a chance. (Avila)

*Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tues-Sun, showtimes vary. Through Oct 30. The life of stage and screen legend Rita Moreno is a subject that has no trouble filling two swift and varied acts, especially as related in anecdote, song, comedy, and dance by the serene multiple–award-winning performer and Berkeley resident herself. Indeed, that so much material gets covered so succinctly but rarely abruptly is a real achievement of this attractively adorned autobiographical solo show crafted with playwright and Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through Nov 20. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

DANCE/PERFORMANCE

*”PanderFest 2011″ Stage Werx 446, 446 Valencia, SF; www.panderexpress.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 29. $20. San Francisco’s Crisis Hopkins and (PianoFight’s S.H.I.T. Show makers) Mission Control join forces for a tag-team evening of sketch and “improv” (quotes kind of necessary this time). Claiming dubiously to fill a need for yet another festival in this city (though at the same time striving for above-average fawning of the public), the show delivers two acts of mostly spot-on comedy by two agreeable ensembles and is thus a fine night out anyway. The program (based rather loosely on online-video–generated audience suggestions, interspersed with the sneezing Panda baby and other YouTube perennials) also inaugurates Stage Werx’s cozy new Mission District venue — the former digs of Intersection for the Arts and a huge improvement over Stage Werx’s old subterranean lair on Sutter Street. Highlights of a ridiculous evening include a two-part Crisis Hopkins sketch detailing a site visit by a ball-wrecking contractor (Christy Daly) to her chary foreman (Sam Shaw) and his withering cherries; and Mission Control’s pointed ’70s TV show homage with a twist, Good Cop, Stab Cop. (Avila)

Space Mayans and techno-African kuduro: Treasure Island, day one

Tony Robles
-
0

Treasure Island Music Festival rewards the stout of heart and non-possessive of blanket space. The way the island fest is set up, no two concerts overlap – if one feels up to it, one can traverse the 100-some meters between the Bridge and Tunnel (get it?)  stages to catch any given day’s entire. Music. Lineup. Upshot? I spent a solid hour in the press tent with my feet on a card table, tapping away on my smart phone as though taking notes, incredibly unstout.

But the music!

We got there on one of the first, cushy shuttle buses of the day. Chair foursomes facing each other over tables with cupholders? A bike workshop run by Levi’s was set up next to the SF Bike Coalition’s valet services at AT&T so our cycles were tuned and gleaming by the well-deserved end of the festival day? Clearly, TIMF is doing it’s best to ameliorate the rage caused by the long shuttle lines one must endure after the headliner’s close.

Our haste was due to one man: Aloe Blacc (though we managed to catch the also-rad performance by local indies Geographer). Blacc might have been a slightly unconventional choice for the electro-dominant festival but it is, after all, not a bad idea to provide refuge from driving beats and plaintive whines for just a moment. He appeared onstage the embodiment of dapper, and went out of his way to inspire audience participation (singing and soul line) for his singles “You Make Me Smile” and “I Need a Dollar.” A late-in-the-set switch to reggae showcased his range.

Then: ferris wheel. If you want to really see this festival, you will do it from the whooping, screeching heights of an amusement park ride ($5, meh). Do this early in the day because by the time it gets dark, you’ll have lines all the way out to the Burning Man shipping container area (where the bonneted “grahamas” handed out graham crackers and freaky faux-old-woman coddling). Also, do the Silent Disco early in the day for the same, line-related reasons.

Shabazz Palaces was great, the Naked and Famous were great. Battles, I was tickled to learn upon reading my program prior to its set, holds in down in New York for “math rock,” which surely you can imagine as the climbing and descending wash of sounds that it is. I felt the unexamined logarithms washing over me… but it was time for Dizzie Rascal.

Why has this emcee achieved more renown in the United States than nearly any of his non-US peers? (Which I typed out just before being reminded by Wikipedia that Drake is from Canada) It’s been a long time since his 2003 debut album Boy in Da Corner. The Ghanian Brit gave us dubstep because he heard “Americans like dubstep,” got everyone dancing to the sound of police sirens, and generally set the international stage for Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema, which jounced around the stage in a techno-African kuduro whirl.

One thing. Why is Native American the design motif of choice at festivals these days? I blame Urban Outfitters, but the numbers of TIMF-supplied teepees didn’t help, and to a lesser extent, neither did Workshop’s adorable and well-meaning dreamcatcher classes. Kids, dressing up as an ethnic group you do not belong to is a total no-no, even if you LOVE that neon feathered headdress. Just say no. I saw an awesome group on the Jumbotron whose crowd-locator totem pole had a plush broccoli strapped to it — you are welcome to try an animal, vegetable, or mineral theme. Chromeo turned in a good show, even if the duo doesn’t seem to have switched up its song retinue much since 2007’s Fancy Footwork album.

We stayed at the larger Bridge stage after that to begin the slow push to the front for the Australian end of the day one-two punch: Cut Copy and Empire of the Sun. This was the end of the day, and the well-prepared among us was revving up for the night while the rookies were drooping and falling backwards onto me every fucking time I was looking straight at their wobbly backside.

Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? I’d like to hear a reaction from someone in the back of the audience during that show, because honestly I feel bad for you. If you couldn’t see the costumes that the gaggle of space Mayans onstage were sporting, what was that like? If the epaulet-wigs weren’t easily visible flying through the air, if you couldn’t pick up the subtlety in the way the dolphin head dancers were cutting through the stage’s energy currents – the Jumbotron was tuned to the group’s Stargate-esque visuals instead of the close-up shots of the performers that had shown on it for every other show. Anyway, we were at the front and I will tell you right now what the show was like: awesome, even if most of the people around us were frozen looking at the stage in place of actually moving to the beat.

That was it. Then we waited in line for the shuttles. Which was fine, because we had a lot to talk about, like how there was no way in hell we’d be able to do this again the next day. (Unstout).

 

Click here for day two.

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
-
0

WEDNESDAY 12

“Hoarding in the Digital Age” lecture Scanners bookstore, 312 Valencia, SF. www.scannersproject.com. 6:30 p.m., free. Renaissance woman Rebecca Falkoff is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian studies at UC Berkeley, but today she’s talking about her other passion: hoarding. Falkoff examines hoarding as a symptom of anxiety in our transient digital age in today’s lecture at flash new pop-up print bookshop Scanners.

THURSDAY 13

“Jack Davis’ Penis Show” Good Vibrations, 1620 Polk, SF. (415) 345-0400, www.goodvibes.com. 6-8 p.m., free. Crochet artist Jack Davis finds inspiration below the belt. The man has been creating foreskinned wonders (they come with drawstrings and double as nifty sacks!) for decades, and his phallic work is a sight to be seen. Look it up and down at this free reception at your friendly neighborhood sex shop Good Vibrations.

“A Simple Revolution” Group Reading with Judy Grahn Francis of Assissi, 145 Guerrero, SF. www.auntlute.com. 5:30 p.m., free. Foundational activist, author, and scholar Judy Grahn revisits the 1960s roots of San Francisco’s lesbian community along with four other reading panelists. A Q and A with the revolutionary ladies will follow.

FRIDAY 14

Green Empowerment Party and Discussion Luminalt Warehouse, 1320 Potrero, SF. (415) 641-4000. www.greenempowerment.org. 6:30-9 p.m., free with RSVP to greenempowerment@luminalt.com. Bike, bus, walk, or Prius down to the Mission for a casual discussion of renewable energy’s potential across the world. Meet fellow solar enthusiasts, check out Luminalt’s organic garden, and hear about some recent work in the Philippines before walking out a little greener.

“2 Blocks of Art” art walk Sixth St. between Market and Howard, SF. www.urbansolutionssf.org. 4-8 p.m., free. Hobnob with upwards of 50 local artists and musicians in some nontraditional spots – a laundromat, optometry office, and of course, the sidewalk. Maybe not the best time to tackle that load of laundry, but definitely a good one to wander out in search of cheap eats and eye-pleasing sights.

SATURDAY 15

Potrero Hill Festival 20th St. between Wisconsin and Missouri, SF. www.potrerofestival.com. 1 a.m.-4:30 p.m., free. Ah, to be young and have unquestioned admittance to bouncy castles. No matter. One of our favorite neighborhood festivals – now in its 21st year – holds plenty for those lucky tykes as well as anyone deemed too old for petting zoos. Bring your little one, find a goat, and wander through the food, music, and art.

Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival Main, Half Moon Bay. www.miramarevents.com. Also Sun/16. 9 a.m.-5 p.m., free. Grab some gourds in Half Moon Bay, our lovely little neighbor and (who knew?) pumpkin capital of the world. Gargantuan orange beasts are the theme of this festival; you can expect weigh-offs, tasty pies, carving, ale, and lots of “smashing” jokes, not to mention live music, contests, a parade, tons of arts and crafts, and a haunted house.

Hackmeet 2011 Noisebridge Hackerspace, 2169 Mission, third floor, SF. www.hackmeet.org. Also Sun/16. 11 a.m., free. The West Coast hackmeet, a conference and workshop session exploring the overlaps between technology and social change, goes underway this weekend. Topics include digital security and rights, privacy, Wikileaks, and way more. Food is provided to fuel all those radical typing fingers.

Jimmy’s Old Car Picnic Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.jimmyspicnic.com. 7 a.m.-4 p.m., free. Dust off that barbeque grill. Everyone is welcome to roast and roam among Mustangs and motorized barstools alike at the not-for-profit picnic event now in its 22nd year. Jimmy scours the meadow with an eagle eye for the car he deems worthy of the “Jimmy’s Choice” award.

Children’s Creativity Museum Opening Weekend 221 Fourth, SF. www.creativity.org. Also Sun/16. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., free. Zeum, reopening as the Children’s Creativity Museum, houses wonders that rival anything out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Exhibits are highly interactive and extremely creative: animation, music, design, and movie studios in which your child can play around to their little heart’s content. Plus, free carousel rides throughout the weekend.

“An Afternoon of Soccer Culture” reading with Simon Kuper Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary, SF. www.castlenews.com. 3-5 p.m., free. Reading from his new book “The Soccer Men,” Simon Kuper discusses the secret lives of all-star soccer players. Classic matches will play in the background. This all takes place in a castle-themed pub. If you don’t feel British, order a Newcastle.

Vagabond Indie Craft Fair Urban Bazaar, 1371 Ninth, SF. www.urbanbazaarsf.com. Also Sun/16. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., free. The boutique, already known for supporting local arts and craftspeople, hosts 30-plus folks selling their work. Perfect for snagging tons of gifts to sort through later come the holidays.

SUNDAY 16

Textile Bazaar: Treasures from Around the World St. Anne’s of the Sunset Church, 1300 Funston St., SF. (415) 750-3627. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Run your hands over this. Woven goodies from across the globe, brought to you by nearly thirty members of the Textile Arts Council.

23rd Annual Fiesta on the Hill Cortland Ave., SF. www.bhnc.org. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Can’t make it to Saturday’s Potrero Hill Festival? Can, but just want to support another beloved SF neighborhood? Really like petting zoos and great music? Take in the sights and eats in Bernal Heights with over 20,000 others.

 

On the Cheap listings by Lucy Schiller. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

One last cannabis fest? Despite IRS ruling, medical community soldiers on

Andrew Lam
-
1

Last week, the IRS’ two year audit of Harborside Health Center ended poorly for the medical marijuana industry. The federal government agency decided that the dispensary (Oakland’s largest, as the Bay Citizen reported in its coverage of the craziness — check out our story in today’s paper about the additional threats that have been made) couldn’t deduct standard business expenses, a move that left Harborside in the hole for $2 million and the rest of its industry in need of a joint. 

Such was the setting for the West Coast Cannabis and Music Festival this weekend (Fri/7-Sun/9). Things got a little weird. Which is not to say that things weren’t also good. The 215 legal smoking area was ample proof that medical cannabis is alive and thriving, especially in the here and now. How else to explain the booths hawking aphrodisiac cannabis drinks and medicated vanilla chai truffles? Outside, the fresh-faced and strongly-quadricepped carried forth at the Rock the Bike music stage, its live and DJ offerings projected into the Cow Palace parking lot by a woefully shallow pool of volunteers. The muscle mass we pay for music… 

Even the charming gentlemen at the Harborside booth were all kinds of upbeat, eager to talk about their new Discovery Channel reality TV show. They were handing out copies of their dispensary’s newsletter, the Harborside Illuminator. In it, general manager Andrew DeAngelo’s column, which contained a transcript of a conversation he had with the show’s producer, Chuck Braverman:

DeAngelo: Chuck, I really liked the name Cannabis Confidential — why did they go with Weed Wars?

Braverman: Bigger tent

DeAngelo: What do you mean bigger tent?

Braverman: The title Weed Wars will get more people into the tent to watch the show.

DeAngelo: But we don’t call it ‘weed’ and there is no war.

Of course, some would say there is a war on now. It certainly felt like I was being drafted by Sunday afternoon, when California state senator John Vasconsellos’ time to occupy the speaker’s stage was approaching. A barker alternatively sang and cajoled into the microphone, eventually resorting to bribes. “Anyone who sits down over here will receive a free joint. People, you need to hear this!” Ever obliging, we sat and listened to the woman who introduced the senator. She informed us she was filming the talk, although the final destination of the video was unclear to those of us who had just made her acquaintance. 

“Senator,” she trilled. “Look at all these people here who love you!” You and free marijuana, doll. 

Which is a really snarky thing to say, because we had little to say against the senator’s speech, which was 45 minutes of a call to arms to save patients’ right to access their medicine. And truly, we had to agree with the woman who had repurposed an electric green sleep sack as a dress, but not before cutting out the tits, donning a black mesh garment underneath, affixing a fake weed plant to the crotch area, and boldly Sharpie-ing across the front of it all “Obama can you replace our tax revenue?”

She giggled and posed in front of a strangely perfect WCCMF logo-ed wall when asked by (more than one) photographer if they could digi-capture her. Probably because she knew we all agreed with her, which come to think of it is a big part of these festivals: meeting other stoners that share your concerns. 

Like, does that aphrodisiac stuff really work or what?

1...91011...19Page 10 of 19

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org