Film Archives — Page 119 of 168 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Sushi sex: Japanese art porn comes to the Roxie

June 3, 2009

By Juliette Tang

No one does weird art porn like the Japanese, and this week, San Francisco gets to ride the bizarre train all the way to Tokyo. Inexplicably sexy and intentionally funny, Silence of the Sushi Rolls is coming to the Roxie Theater (3117 16th Street) on Friday. Hurray for porn being shown in real theaters! And as a part of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s Another Hole in the Head Fest, no less.

Why is it that when porn requires active subtitles, it magically becomes more high-brow? Because there’s nothing high-brow about this movie. It’s a guilty pleasure you won’t want to write home about. And, that said, you should totally go to see it anyway. Silence of the Sushi Rolls is the fourth film in an amazingly ludicrous series of “action comedy” softcore films known as the “Female Detective Molester Buster” series. The hilarity of porn titles, it appears, transcends culture. My favorite title is the Female Detective Molester Buster 2: Catch You With My Breasts. Who knew boobs made for such great law enforcement equipment?

In true Japanese softcore fashion, Silence of the Sushi Rolls kicks off with a woman getting molested. Those sensitive to scenes depicting sexual assault should take note not to attend (and to avoid all Japanese pornography henceforth). But to be fair, the assault scenes are so obviously fake and the attacks are so staged, it reminds me way more of that scene in Lost in Translation when an escort barges into Bill Murray’s hotel room and starts rolling around on the floor screaming “Lip my stocking! Lip my stocking!” than anything else.

Return of the creatures

June 3, 2009

Zombies, werewolves, slashers, ghosts, and just plain fucked-up individuals: yep, the usual suspects are on hand for the Another Hole in the Head film festival, an offshoot of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival that’s back for a sixth unleashing of cinematic ghastliness.

David Gargani’s Monsters from the Id, named for the invisible menace in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, takes an earnest, somewhat unfocused look at how scientists were depicted in 1950s sci-fi films. Movie clips and talking heads delve into the ways in which the era’s "futuristic" flicks (Spaceships! Giant ants! Pod people!) were informed by both the era’s sense of wonder and paranoia. Monsters also notes how much less money is spent on space in these post-Cold War days; one scientist wistfully notes that the only way physicists would become heroes again would be in some kind of preventing-an-asteroid-from-hitting-the-earth type of scenario (but, duh, Doc: according to 1998’s Armageddon, oil drillers would actually save the day in that case).

Entries with local ties include James Isaac’s Pig Hunt (which screened a few weeks back as part of the Clay Theater’s midnight series). After kicking off their road trip with a meal at the Pork Store Café, a group of SF friends set out on an ill-advised hunting jaunt (their quarry: a 3,000-lb "Hogzilla," a creature that turns out to be just one of many backwoods adversaries). Even more bloody and bizarre is Oakland filmmaker Jonathan Lewis’s Black Devil Doll, an awesomely campy, proudly low-budget, X-rated cross between Child’s Play (1988) and Dolemite (1975) — the entire cast is basically comprised of strippers and a raunchy puppet that says things like "Holy shit! These white bitches is crazy!"

Also of interest for all you discerning sickos: HoleHead unleashes two films by prolific Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike, including opening night film Crows: Episode Zero (a manga adaptation) and Detective Story, about a detective and his neighbor on the trail of an organ-stealing murderer.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 5–19, see film listings for schedule, $10

Roxie, 3117 16th St, S.F.

(415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Shadowboxing

June 3, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Explosive action" may be the stuff of soppy pullquotes, but the term takes on fresh life watching the 1950s noirs of Phil Karlson. All action movies give us men and violence, but Karlson’s pictures, to a rare degree, are about men living with violence. Punches aren’t redemptive, they just hurt — the one throwing them too. Take the clenched former prizefighter in 99 River Street (1953), Ernie Driscoll (played by Karlson’s preferred actor, the aggressively nondescript John Payne). "I’m so burned up, I take it out on everyone I see," Driscoll mutters to his loyal friend after tossing him against a car in the white heat of rage. When he finally does have reasonable cause, his maelstrom of punches exceeds the pleasure principle of vengeance by a wide margin.

If this sounds like Scorsese territory, it’s probably worth mentioning that Driscoll isn’t just a broken heavyweight — he also drives a taxi. Karlson’s movies are tightly-coiled enough to make the decades slip just like that: 99 River Street has enough weird transferences and reversals to make me wonder if it’s not a worm-hole to David Lynch’s films as well. The fabulous streaks of paranoia running through the PFA selections are Cold War to the core, but the films hurdle us so quickly and illogically towards the edge of abnegation that the reactionary myth of the vigilante isn’t given time to flourish.

Karlson recouped the debt owed by Dirty Harry and The French Connection (both 1971) with his 1973 hit, Walking Tall, but the ’50s films are more eloquent by far. In them, brutality is simply a fact, like cigarettes or hats. The most severe scenes are sometimes the quietest, as is the case when Eddie Rico (Richard Conte) has to wait out his brother’s death after unwittingly acting as a crime syndicate’s bloodhound in The Brothers Rico (1957, based on a story by Georges Simenon).

Other set-ups — nearly the entire second half of the remarkable semi-documentary The Phenix City Story (1955), cowritten by Daniel Mainwaring (1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), with the same basic premise as Walking Tall — hardly give us room to breathe. The film’s corrupt Alabama police look the other way as local "vice peddlers" terrorize citizens, rig an election, and — remember this is 1955 — murder the children of a black man with reformist sympathies in broad daylight. The smug veneer of cordiality does nothing to disguise the constant threat of violence. To the contrary, it serves as an extra taunt, a superfluous flexing of power as enraging here as it is in Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Harlan County USA (1976). A trinity of resistance fighters (one of them a lawyer freshly returned from Nuremberg, an encounter with evil that still leaves him unprepared for Phenix City) can and do fight back, but resist administering the final coup de grace. They do so in deference to due process, but we’re long past a constitutional triumph, à la Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). The dark truth lurking just under The Phenix City Story‘s roiling surface is that the noble ideal these republicans embody may not actually exist.

TIGHT SPOT: PHIL KARLSON IN THE FIFTIES

June 5–26, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

That crazy feeling

June 3, 2009

>johnny@sfbg.com

Robert Frank, “San Francisco, 1956”

The world writes a story far beyond — or deeper and more twist-riddled than — any author’s imagination. How else to explain the fact that Robert Frank’s peerless photographic book The Americans turned 50 the same year that Barack H. Obama was elected president of the United States? Looking in — again, and again — at The Americans, thanks to a handsome new edition (Steidl, 180 pages, $39.95), or at "The Americans," thanks to a traveling exhibition connected to Frank’s landmark work, one finds a vision of this country that is anything but dated.

Jack Kerouac raved about the way Frank captured "that crazy feeling in America," and to be sure, even if his prosaic descriptions of Frank’s photos come off a bit redundant now, there’s still some insightful gold to be gleaned from his observation that Frank was always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins. There’s been no shortage of writing about The Americans since Kerouac’s at-times stifled response. Is there anything left to say about The Americans? If there’s anything left to say about America, the answer is yes.

There are infinite views. One is Frank’s very particular sense of place. For a San Franciscan, that means an untitled image of a couple on Alamo Square, perhaps the most iconic of at least three Bay Area pictures. Frank has cited this photo as his favorite in The Americans, because the facial expressions of the couple he’s caught unaware bring across loud and clear what an intrusive presence the photographer is by nature. But this shot also is a document of the Western Addition when it was a thriving African-American neighborhood. It’s existence confronts the face of San Francisco today.

In a Charleston, S.C., image from The Americans, a pampered, already entitled-looking snow white baby looks out from the cradling arms of a black maid whose face — seen in profile — is more fascinating and harder to read. The picture is a blunt image of race in the South, and of race in America on the eve of civil rights uprisings. It also raises an interesting side question: why did it take European exiles to photographically render that subject with candor? This keepsake of Charleston by the Swiss Frank is the black-and-white counterpart to the Technicolor ironies that German expatriate Douglas Sirk brought to the 1959 version of Imitation of Life. (Racism was flagrantly institutionalized during the making of The Americans, and Frank has long had an critical eye for U.S. institutions — a Frank film series at SFMOMA doesn’t just showcase the Beat work Pull My Daisy, it also includes Me and My Brother (1969) a look at this country’s concepts of mental illness that’s more personal than, and just as direct as, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).)

Robert Frank, “US 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas”

For any person who has lived with The Americans — spent time over the years looking through its pages, locking eyes on a particular picture and contemputf8g it — there’s a peculiar card-shuffle déjà vu-gone-slightly-askew-or-anew feeling to encountering the same photos in succession along the walls. This is the experience of looking at "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’" the Frank exhibition currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Alongside rather than on top of one another, an alphabet of American hats point in different directions, each one reflecting a viewpoint. An array of flags mask people’s faces, or point sorrowfully toward the ground.

One facet or extension of "Looking At" explores Frank’s influences, and in turn, his influences on, American photography. To be sure, Diane Arbus’s trannies and butches and Lee Friedlander’s broadcast TVs owe a debt to Frank’s visions of censored-or-taken-for-granted everyday 20th century life. The through line from the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to Frank’s look at a family crammed into a car in Butte, Mont., is obvious. Absent, though, are some definite predecessors and peers. Weegee’s hard-boiled naked city is nowhere to be seen — except in Frank (and frank) images such as one of people in Miami Beach. William Klein’s pictorial rephrasing of urban adspeak is absent save for a look at a department store in Nebraska, an arrow on the wall of a building in Los Angeles, or a newsstand in New York City or a sidewalk in New Orleans.

With one photo in The Americans, Robert Frank maDE gas pumps look like a series of tombstones, all gathered by a sign that declares SAVE. There are legions of artists today making images less contemporary or relevant. Take a look at The Americans, and you’ll find cowboys, starlets, funeral parties, boys in arcades, queens on stoops, leather rebels, bored or contemplative waitresses, street preachers, a parade of pedestrians, wheelers and dealers — and workers. Take another look at The Americans today, 50-plus years after it made its first impression, and you’ll probably find yourself.

LOOKING IN: ROBERT FRANK’S "THE AMERICANS"

Through Aug. 23, free–$15

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

ROBERT FRANK RETROSPECTIVE

Through June 27

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Revanche

June 2, 2009

REVIEW In the sex industry of Vienna, small-time criminal Alex (Johannes Krisch) has dreams of escape for himself and his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). With a ski mask and an unloaded pistol, the miscreant schlemiel allows Tamara to accompany him during the commission of a robbery, and disastrous consequences ultimately transpire. After Alex and Tamara cross paths with young policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), his seemingly idyllic small-town life is also upended by the confrontation. Robert’s wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss) fails to hearten her inconsolable husband. Instead, she finds her only comfort visiting a neighbor, Hausner (Johannes Thanheiser). But this tale of city-to-country anomie transforms into a gripping revenge play when Alex (who is, we learn, also Hausner’s grandson) suddenly appears in the town, seeking bloody satisfaction. Transforming from an urban neo-noir to a village morality play and a bedroom character study, Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (in French, the act of revenge) confronts the fundamental existential conundrum — fate’s random selection of its prey, or, as the film’s tag-line asks, "Whose Fault Is It When Life Doesn’t Go Your Way?"

REVANCHE opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE AT SFBG.COM

Pixel Vision blog: An extended version of this review.

Pop-pop-Poppins with Fagottron

June 1, 2009

By Marke B.

Writing about electronic music in this Age Of Everything Always Available seems to be more and more an exercise in nostalgia. Artists are caught up mousing over the pull-down menu of the past, widgeting it into today’s latest technology — especially in the case of video mashups. (A similar-type thing happened with the debut of the CD, when the past was rummaged through for reissue-mania, and, as the Guardian‘s Johnny Ray Huston has pointed out, reissues still hold dollar-sway and carry much label cred in the record industry). Earlier this year, I attempted to fathom how Israeli YouTube mashup genius Kutiman was working the nostalgia tip — not in the literally referential, crate-digging manner of DJ Shadow, but in a melancholic, sampladelic way all his own.

Now — joy of joys, for real — we have the latest video mashup by one of Kutiman’s indisputable forebears, Fagottron. This, you cannot deny the literal nostalgia of. Not just because he’s tapping directly into the mid-90s heyday of electronica — but because he’s freaking sampling the Disney movies of yesteryear. “The track is composed of a sine wave bass, custom drum sequences, and sounds recorded from the Disney film Mary Poppins,” the YouTube more info box relays, deliciously. Funny, that was going to be my epitaph.

Fagottron, “Expialidocious”

And Fagy’s not just unleashing his dizzying Avid skills on the super-famous flicks (although I’d love to see his version of Ariel) — here’s a couple he did two years ago that took me back to those misty “movie afternoons” in the grade-school gymansia of my youthfulness, albeit in slightly freakier form:

Fagottron, “White Magic”

June: Sexiest sexy festival month ever

June 1, 2009

By Juliette Tang

Queer Arts Fest

The Sex Worker Fest

This is definitely a good month for worthwhile local festivals. The 6th San Francisco Sex Worker Film, Art, & Music Festival officially kicked off this past weekend and promises to be a thrill for both the intellect and the libido. Smart, kinky, and fun, the Sex Worker Fest is a positive and educational week-long extravaganza that occurs in tandem with the ongoing 12th Annual Queer Arts Festival, a whopping month-long festival featuring over 400 artists in over 100 performances taking place in 18 venues all over San Francisco. The only question at this point is how you’re possibly going to fit everything into your schedule.

Michelle Tea

On Saturday, the Sex Worker Fest launched with a benefit at a. Muse Gallery (614 Alabama St) to support Radar Lab, a free queer writers retreat looking to accommodate 12 outstanding queer artists by this summer. Hosted by Ali Liebegott, whose IHOP Papers performs the feat of being at once witty and charming and a poignant lesbian coming-of-age novel, and Michelle Tea, prolific author and Guardian contributor whose novel Valencia joins rank with Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero in being good books named after famous San Francisco streets, the benefit featured appearances by literary luminaries Dorothy Allison, ZZ Packer, and Eileen Myles.

Appetite: Beer-battered rings, French on the fly, and a chef bacchanal

May 28, 2009

Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

Oh yes, there shall be chef: SF Chef. Food. Wine. period.

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EVENTS

August 6-9: SF Chefs.Food.Wine (calling food, wine and spirits lovers)
Start saving pennies, mark your calendar and buy your tickets now for an unparalleled event coming up in August I’m quite excited about, the first of its kind in our fair city. SF Chefs.Food.Wine is going to be a Pebble Beach/Aspen Food and Wine Classic- reminiscent event but right in an urban city center at a fraction of the price (though you’ll still shell out $150 for a one-day pass). Union Square will be turned into a sea of tents housing not only Bay Area food, wine, beer, and spirits vendors offering day-long tastings (beer garden, cocktail samplings, wine tasting, food), but each day offers over 20 sessions/panels/classes appealing to food, wine and spirits cognoscenti and uninitiated appreciators alike.

An example of just a few sessions over three days:
FOOD – "Haute vs. Bistro" cooking demo from Hubert Keller (Fleur de Lys) and Roland Passot (La Folie); "Heirloom Tomatoes" with Gary Danko and Joanne Weir; interviews with cooking luminaries and authors like Martin Yan, Joyce Goldstein, Georgeanne Brennan; a cooking competition between Jamie Lauren (Top Chef/Absinthe) and Chris Cosentino (Incanto/Iron Chef America).
SPIRITS/COCKTAILS – "Green Cocktails" with Scott Beattie (author of Artisanal Cocktails), H. Joseph Ehrmann (Elixir) and Thad Vogler (Bar Agricole); "Agave Academy" with Rebecca Chapa (Tannin Management) and Julio Bermejo (Tommy’s).
WINE – "Raid the Cellar" with Rajat Parr (Michael Mina restaurants) and Larry Stone MS (Rubicon Estate); "Sparkling Personality" with sparkling wine masters from Schramsberg Vineyards, Domaine Carneros and Roederer Estate.

These are just a few examples… there are sessions on chocolate, sushi, oysters, cheese, eggs, making the perfect coffee, beer brewing, trends in wine and spirits, marketing, design and service, food reviewing and everything of interest to those who love food and drink.

Evenings are equally enticing: the Opening Reception highlights Rising Star Chefs and Bar Stars from the SF Chronicle’s last five years of winners, as well as an advance screening of Julie and Julia, the highly anticipated Meryl Streep film. Galas run nightly, like a Pacific Rim feast from Charles Phan, Martin Yan and Arnold Eric Wong; an LBGT culinary gala at Orson with Elizabeth Falkner, Emily Wines, Harry Denton; American Culinary Pioneers Awards given to Joyce Goldstein, Judy Rodgers, Patricia Unterman, Emily Luchetti, Patrick O’Connell; a dinner honoring Master Sommelier, Larry Stone; a bluesy rock party from chefs with musical ties.

Convinced yet? The hard part now is choosing which events, days and sessions to splurge on. This surely creates a problem when your choices are this good and plentiful. Go online and take a look at the line-up and whether you’re a cocktail hound, wine imbiber, beer brewer or food fanatic, you’ll want to be a part of this momentous event.

$40-250 (discounts for Visa Signature card holders)
August 6-9
www.sfchefsfoodwine.com

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NEW OPENINGS

Spencer on the Go!
Maybe the food cart mania is getting to you, or, like the rest of us, you’re ever thrilled to find gourmet food on-the-cheap popping up around town. Well, here’s one we haven’t seen before. Laurent Katgely, Chez Spencer’s talented chef, launched Spencer on the Go! last Thursday night outside of Terroir wine bar, offering fine French fare from a shiny, converted taco truck with Spencer’s chic logo on the side. It was a long wait for food debut night, and Frog Legs and Curry were sadly sold out by the time I got there, but I hear waits have already improved, the crowd was friendly and festive, and I dig the Grilled Sweetbreads and amazingly addictive Escargot Puffs (escargot, breaded and on a stick)! With a menu all under $9, pair French snacks with Perrier and cookies or take it across the street to Terroir and order a glass of wine. Watch for the truck to soon be at Tuesday and (upcoming food cart-centric) Thursday farmers markets at the Ferry Building. It’s the bon vivant’s ideal "fast food".
6pm-12am
Thursday-Saturday
415-864-2191
http://spenceronthego.com

Urban Burger
It’s time for a new burger joint on Valencia near 16th, Urban Burger opened last week in the tiny, former Yum Yum House space, now brightly painted sporting white leather stools, orange walls, and playful signs with phrases like "Nice Buns". Besides build-your-own burger options, there’s a list of ten hefty special burgers like a Breakfast Burger loaded with cheese, bacon, fried egg and fries (yep, all together), Mission Heat, with chilies, pepper jack and chipotle, or a Cubano with grilled ham and swiss. Opening day, I enjoyed the Buffalo version with blue cheese and hot sauce. Want it a bit lighter? Choose turkey, gardenburger, or Portabella mushroom instead of beef. But if you’re downing a hearty burger, why not pair it with a Mitchell’s milkshake and beer-battered onion rings?
581 Valencia Street
415-551-2483
http://urbanburgersf.com

And justice for all

May 27, 2009

TRUMPETING TRUMBO I read Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 masterpiece of antiwar literature Johnny Got His Gun in high school. I went for anything which said that patriotic duty to die for one’s country is bullshit — hence I loved it. Rereading it last year the book hit me harder. The writing is amazing, shot through with brilliance from start to finish — scathing, bitter, funny, righteous. Now lucky Trumbo fans can watch the former blacklistee’s 1971 film adaptation of his novel, just released on DVD.

Actor Timothy Bottoms was 18 when he played (via voiceover and flashbacks) Joe Bonham, who lies in an Army hospital bed pondering his fate. Hit by a mortar shell on the last day of World War I, Bonham is left a blind, deaf, and mute quadruple amputee, with only memories, fantasies, and, for a time, a sympathetic nurse. On a commentary track, Bottoms points to the film’s contemporary relevance given the staggering number of soldiers maimed in the Iraq war but kept alive by sophisticated medical technology.

Trumbo worked with Luis Buñuel on an adaptation of Johnny. Ultimately that project fell through, but by the time Trumbo directed his own script in 1971, the Spanish surrealist’s influence was palpable. At the time, Buñuel responded, "For me, the film has the same power as the novel. It has the same disturbing quality and moments of extremely powerful emotion. The film left an impression on me that is among the strongest I ever experienced."

Marsha Hunt, whose successful film career was cut short by the blacklist, played Bonham’s mother. In a phone interview, the now-91-year-old said, "I liked [Trumbo] enormously. I was so delighted that he wanted me in his film." Hunt emphasized Trumbo’s incredible discipline, which led him, during lean times of underpaid black market work, to write 12 screenplays in 16 months (a helpful doctor who prescribed amphetamines contributed to that productivity).

"It’s hard to believe that the same talent who gave us Spartacus also gave us Roman Holiday," she said. "Just as far from each other as possible in terms of style and period and everything else. He was an impressively versatile man, as well as brilliant."

The 2007 film Trumbo, featuring documentary footage and actors reading from the great man’s letters, should also be released on DVD. And some astute publisher should bring Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962 back into print. Among my favorite passages from that volume is in a 1951 letter to novelist Nelson Algren, who was prepared act as a "front" for Trumbo. Trumbo advised, "If you have any moral compunctions about such a procedure in relation to motion pictures, please forget them. Hollywood is a vast whorehouse, and any scheme by which tolerably honest men can abstract money from it for their own purposes is more than praiseworthy."

Senses and sensibility

May 27, 2009

"Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker," filmmaker Nagisa Oshima wrote in a 1961 essay. Oshima’s declaration of restlessness presages what would become a four decades-long career defined by that continual struggle to "confront circumstances" — to challenge postwar Japan’s stagnant social order by pushing filmmaking into new areas of form and content. "In the Realm of Oshima," the first major U.S. retrospective of the director’s work in more than 20 years, is a staggering reaffirmation of the now 77-year old director’s persistence of vision. Frequently hailed as Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima’s reputation and stature among a certain generation of cinephiles has often dwarfed the unavailability of all but a handful of his films (Oshima would later counter, saucily, that Mr. Godard should be known as the Oshima of France).

Like his French counterpart, Oshima’s output grazed on familiar genres, such as youth-gone-wild and domestic dramas, while freely incorporating elements from avant-garde and documentary practices. As much as he sought to break from what he saw as the sentimentalism of the previous generation of Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Oshima also spent a great deal of time dissecting the struggles and failures of the radical left, as vertiginously condensed in the debates between disillusioned former comrades of Night and Fog in Japan (1960). But Oshima’s larger interest has been with, to borrow the title of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the limits of control — and those who infract upon the social order. Fittingly, the series comes to a close with Oshima’s most extreme film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), whose Sadean lovers, Sada and Kichi, are perhaps the most terrifyingly literal embodiment of Oshima’s quest for "constant self-negation."

IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA

May 29–July 18

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Shake your Bootie, burners, and buy the book

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May 27, 2009
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By Steven T. Jones

The fabulous DJ Adrian Roberts — of Bootie SF and Piss Clear fame — will be headlining a pair of equally fabulous events tonight and tomorrow night, the latter in support of his new book: Burning Man Live: 13 year of Piss Clear, Black Rock City’s alternative newspaper.

It’s a great book, and I’m not just saying that because I contributed a few essays to it (which, like almost everything in the book, were reprinted from issues of Piss Clear). If you attend Burning Man or are curious about the event, it offers a great overview from decidedly hedonistic point-of-view. And supporting the book release party tomorrow night at Mighty will be a bevy of burner all-stars, as if they just stepped off the pages, as well as a showing of the Burning Man film Dust & Illusions.

And tonight’s gig is the Guardian’s Explore SF party at Temple party, where Adrian’s Bootie SF will be squaring off against their Popscene nemesi. See you there.

O.G. sleaze

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May 27, 2009
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

A full range of involuntary facial-muscle responses have already been triggered by the trailer to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. First 2008’s Valkyrie, now this: Brad Pitt’s Tennessee-hills-bred Lt. Aldo Raine twangily informing his Jewish-American Secret Service unit, "Each man under my command owes me ONE HUNNERD NAAATSEE SCALPS!" while Hostel auteur-turned-actor Eli Roth smirks in approval.

Will the whole turn out righteous, raucous, controversial, or just juvenile? We proles will have to wait until the film’s August theatrical release to decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is letting inquiring minds do their advance homework by reviving Enzo G. Castellari’s less orthographically challenged Inglorious Bastards, the 1978 Italian action movie Tarantino’s latest pays tribute to — though his isn’t a remake but a separate, newly crassed-up riff on The Dirty Dozen (1967).

That latter all-star World War II caper spawned umpteen "Europudding" imitations, including the QT-beloved Bastards, showing this week in a new 35mm print. A sort of Filthy Five to the original Dozen — budget reduced accordingly, with sharp eyes ID’ing the same extras experiencing different death throes in scene after scene — it centers on a quintet of U.S. Army grunts in 1944 France.

There’s Bo Svenson (who’d become a sorta-star by replacing the suspiciously car-crash-slain Buford Pusser in 1975’s Walking Tall Part II) as swaggering Lt. Yeager; Fred Williamson’s Pvt. Canfield, an incongruous 1940s fount of ’70s Black Power ‘tude; smirking wiseass, murderer, and racist Tony (Peter Hooten), who calls Canfield "Bongo;" Nick (Michael Pergolani), a long-haired hipster aping Donald Sutherland’s similar character in 1970’s hit Dirty rip Hell’s Heroes; and Jackie Basehart as fraidycat youth Berle.

After being sent to the brig for various misdeeds, they escape their captors, intending to flee to neutral Switzerland. En route they pick up a nice Nazi (Raimund Harmstorf, horny hero of 1971’s The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried) and bare collective musculature to some bathing Rhine maidens. But mostly they machine-gun everyone in sight, unfortunately including Yankee spies disguised in Third Reich uniforms.

Penitent, our protagonists vow to take over their late comrades’ dangerous mission. This culminates in an exploded train, and an SS commander foaming "All Americans are mongrels! Negro, Jew, Polish, Italian, Irish — every possible race! And your vimmen are whores! Coca-Cola! Hollyvood! Chewing gum! Stupid cowardly bastards!" just before his ass is whupped by Canfield. Musta been that soda remark.

Inglorious begins with psychedelic-silhouette images underlining two key things about Castellari: 1) he honed his energetic macho action style in spaghetti westerns; and 2) he isn’t considered "the poor man’s Peckinpah" for nothing, being absolutely addicted to balletic slow-mo violence. About a bazillion Germans here do the spastic dance of death, riddled by bullets or leaping from yet another explosion.

Yet the film’s tone is larky, at times even goofy. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, or a campy delight like some of Tarantino’s other retro faves, it’s a good example of another era’s disposable entertainment. Unlike the grim check-cashing air emitted by many similar Europudding exercises, here you can sense the fun that went into making it.

His big-screen career of Westerns, policiers, Mad Max and Escape from New York clones eventually tapped out, Castellari moved on to TV work. But at age 70, Castellari is still capable of rising to the exploitable moment. Currently being hawked at Cannes — alongside the considerably more hyped you-know-what — is his Caribbean Basterds, which appears to cobble together nods to Tarantino, contemporary sea piracy, Point Break (1991), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

Fri/29, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/31, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival

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May 26, 2009
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PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.

COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org

Afro-lunacy in bloom

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May 20, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

LOST TELEVISION

"Ticket to Heaven," the last of the series of Our Gang comedies, was produced by Oscar Micheaux in 1944, with music provided by Babs Gonzales and his band, Three Bips and a Bop, on a makeshift sound stage constructed inside of a Harlem tenement building. The plot summary is as follows: With the help of Farina, Pineapple, and Stymie, Buckwee runs amok after reading an early Nation of Islam pamphlet that promises a place in heaven to any Black Muslim who killed a white person for Allah. The throats of the entire gang are slashed with unsheathed straight razors. Alfalfa is forced to sing "Ole Man Ribber" before his throat is slit by a young Robert Blake in blackface. Directed by Spencer Williams, the script was written by Flournoy Miller, who dedicated this final episode to the memory of his late partner, Aubrey Lyles. Miller then moved on to penning scripts for Gosden and Correl’s. Amos ‘n’ Andy television show. The controversial episode aired last Nov. 22, 1963, much to the glee of the N.A.A.C.P.

LOVE SPELL

You can’t eat with everybody. You got to have the right vibrations. —

Vera Grosvenor, dancer-vocalist, Sun Ra Arkestra

Menstrual blood, in both the Hoodoo folk traditions of the American South and the Straga traditions of southern Italy, is used to bind one’s affection to another. In Sicily, for example, a few drops of blood pricked from a woman’s finger is stirred into a man’s coffee. In the southern states, a man might get Hoodoo’d with a few drops of menstrual blood mixed into his red beans and rice. This spell is also quite effective when worked in the reverse by men substituting menstrual blood for the obvious. The following is an excellent recipe a lady might serve a gentleman caller for lunch.

Tomato with Basil Dressing

diced tomatoes

1 bunch basil

4 Tbs. balsamic vinegar

5 Tbs. olive oil

2 cloves garlic

3 tsp. of menstrual blood

Salt and pepper

Let stand for 30 minutes. Serve with Toscanini bread, Parma ham, salami, and a carafe of red wine. Bon appetit!

R.J. AT THE CROSSROADS

"What fool coon nonsense is this?" the Devil asked. "You call this a sacrificial offerin’? These ain’t nothin’ but some greasy, chewed-up chicken bones! What happened to my sammich?"

"Ah’ done et’ it" R.J. replied. "Ah gots hongry on de way ober ‘cheer!"

"Well how in the hell do you expect to play the greatest blues guitar in the history of the world if all you got to show for it is some splintered chicken bones all spit up with some nasty ol’ nigger slobber? What’s wrong with your head, boy? I’m the devil! You gots to give me somethin’ … !"

In the moonlight, R.J. turned his empty lint-lined pockets inside out. He gave the Devil a helplessly pathetic half-smile. "You is ’bout the most pitiful colored boy I done ever laid these infernal eyes on," the Devil said. "But I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do …. "

CRAB CORNER, MI, MAY 19

A report released late last night from the Crab Corner sheriff’s department confirmed recent rumors concerning retired physical education instructor, D.T. Ward, 68, who alleged over the weekend that a spectral, feral-eyed black man passed through the walls of his newly-paneled basement Saturday morning, and greeted him with a strange but cheery salutation.

"At first, I thought he was askin’ for a plate of ‘green eggs ‘n’ ham,’" D.T. told a disbelieving deputy. "Like in them Dr. Seuss books. But now that I think on it, what he said sounded somethin’ more like what them magician fellas say ‘fore they pull a rabbit outta their hats — Wham! Bam! Alley Ka Zam! — only this nigra fella was more dicty an’ foreign soundin’, like he was addressin’ royalty or somethin’, lookin’ at me with them flint-fire eyes. Gave me the Willies!"

According to Ward, whom long-time neighbors suspect is rapidly degenerating into senility, the red-haired apparition floated into the upstairs kitchen, where he took a box of Cap’n Crunch from a kitchen cupboard and prepared a large bowl of the sugar-coated cereal, using close to a full quart of milk. The sepia-tinted spectre then returned to the basement, sat on the sofa, nestling the bowl on his lap, and watched cartoons on the family’s new big-screen television with the Wards’ three visiting grandchildren — Ralph, Edwina, and Skip. The children chirped that he enjoyed early-vintage Popeye cartoons best.

"Right neighborly fella," D.T. said. "Real nice to the kids. Didn’t drink, smoke, or cuss. Helped around the yard. Wore a bowtie".

"MORE FRIGHTENING THAN A CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT" — LON CHANEY SR.

The wretched inherited the earth. And the Man spurt a glorious rain. His underwear was left sticky with seed.

Witches taught naming was power. To name was to know and exert influence over the world of things. The ability to name determined the fuction of a thing. To name was to tame. But we learned otherwise. Real power lay in un-naming.

We refused names, numbers, and codes. We refused stamps, marks. We acted anonymously and moved beyond the Man’s mechanisms of global economic and social control. If the Man could not name us, he could not know or tame us. Once he declared us one thing, we become another. We were an invisible and ever changing alphabet. The Man found our meaning more difficult to grasp than a bead of mercury.

He lamented. The cornerstone of the corporate nation-state, the family, had crumbled.

"Errant fathers! Sluttish mothers! Bastard births! Negro music! What is the world to do?" he mourned. "Return to the power of prayer!" So when the robots rolled into the cities, chirping "Automaton Christian Solidiers," we became the robots. The Man did not and could not know. We was them.

Even at the end, in the euphoria of his avarious wet dreams, he thought the tumors raging within were of his own making. But how could he know?

We shifted gender, race, and class. And hopped from one species to the next. We were flora and fauna. We were never what we seemed to be. We were never what he expected. We were random, illogical, varied. He could not predict us.

Then he turned on himself. "To restore order," he said, "we must restore the family. We must attempt to rebuild our moral foundation with the assistance of God."

In his megalomania, the Man resurrected the biblical Abraham from the dust. The ancient patriarch stood before the people and lifted his simple robes. He turned and bent over and exposed the halves of his pimpled ass. His asshole puckered and spoke in gaseous bleats. Throngs of people shuddered in awe. The Savior had come at long last in the mask of Abraham’s encrusted asshole.

"The father is the spirtual leader of the househould," it said, "the model of God’s love. And he must wash his wife in the waters of that love. He must also instruct his children on matters God’s word with diligence. It is his moral obligation, a duty bestowed on him by heaven. It is the responsiblity of men to teach and reaffirm God’s word."

A rancid pungency wafted through the crowd in fog-like densities. The people swooned and were overtaken by uncontrollable nausea and diarrhea. Soon, the streets were flooded with the waters of God’s love. And the waters clogged the circuitry of the robots under the Man’s control.

It was then the Man expired, jacking off in pools of his own shit.

Darius James is the author of the novel Negrophobia and the film survey That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury).

Ain’t I a werewolf?

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May 20, 2009
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AFRO-SURREAL Stylistic rigor and as full an embrace of progressive technologies as budgets allow have made Underworld Trilogy (Sony Pictures DVD, $93.95) a pleasurable extension of epics from fang-face past. Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of Len Wiseman’s cycle about immortals warring for supremacy is an updated recognition of the post-1960s liberation strides of blacks and women in our society. It is reflected in the power and intellect of the first film’s heroine Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her fellow vampiric rebels (like Robbie Gee’s tech-wizard Kahn) and lycan foes ("Razahir/Raze," played by Underworld concept engineer Kevin Grievoux). The last and best installment, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, is a virtual remix of my generation’s seminal televisual event, Roots. If that ain’t Afro-Surreal, then what is?

It was 30 years ago — not long after the historic airing of the adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots fundamentally changed public perceptions of America’s "peculiar institution" — that I moved to the Sahel and immediately became obsessed with Dogon lore about the Sirius star system and a family of deities including the trickster Pale Fox. Blood debates about antiquity and provenance continue to rage between disdainful classicists, denizens of the moribund field of Egyptology, and independent scholars of varying stripes devoted to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987). My view supports linkages between the overlapping subcultures of the Dogon, Amazigh, "Egyptians," Zulu, and others, resulting in a kozmic fusion wherein the primordial werewolf (some would prefer jackal or werehyena) is a key deity from the dawn of civilization in the Motherland.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans finds the great Irish actor Michael Sheen’s "lycan" leader character Lucian subbing for Kunta Kinte. In the stark, nightmarish Eastern European fiefdom of vampire lord Viktor (Bill Nighy), the decadent, pale vampires are pampered aristocrats guarded and served by their dark, subhuman lycan slaves (hybrids of humans and wolves). Lucian changes from pet house nigger fettered by shackles of the flesh and mind — condescendingly deemed "a credit to his race" by Viktor — into an enlightened, empowered rebel leader who brings deliverance to lycan-kind by forging an alliance with despised animal spawn of William Corvinus in the wooded wilds.

Yet all is not Molotovs and roses — there are sadistic spectacles of whipping at the hands of cruel overseer Kosta, Nubian ally Razahir is forced to submit to lycanthropy, and Lucian suffers the ultimate price for miscegenation with Viktor’s daughter Sonja (the underrated Rhona Mitra). Rise of the Lycans may not be Blacula, but it is often a winking mash-up of Roots and the even more hardcore, honest Mandingo (1975). In a time when America has just elected its first (official) black president but open dialogues on slavery — and reparations for same — remain muted at best, it’s heartening to witness product straight out of Hollyweird somehow serving as an optic Trojan horse for the oft-forgotten and misrepresented radicalism of antebellum culture heroes like Nat Turner, Cinque, and the O.G. Black Moses herself, Harriet Tubman.

Rise of the Lycans has been roundly panned by fanboys and critics alike, which is hardly shocking considering America’s unwillingness to face the major episodes of its bloody past — the enslavement of Africans via the Triangular Trade, and the genocide of the First Nations. Yet to these eyes and ears, the film’s a first sign in the Age of Obama that a willingness to finally address the West’s hateful legacies can emanate from "low" culture, despite the will to bliss out in the opiated mass of post-racial utopia.

Natural light

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May 20, 2009
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REVIEW The abundant drama of natural light is reason enough to see Summer Hours, a family drama by Olivier Assayas aspiring to Proustian profundity and Chekhovian chambering. I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales (2000) for Assayas’ novelistic mode, but the new film still has plenty to like. This will be especially true for Antiques Roadshow fans, who will have a field day with all the Musée D’Orsay-approved furnishings, even if the characters themselves don’t seem quite so sturdy. The film opens with an annual reunion at the beautiful country estate where matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob, the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face) has tended the reputation and archive of a long-dead artist relation. When Hélène dies, the question of the house and all those beautiful objects falls to the three adult children. Being an Oliver Assayas film, this a globalization issue. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is the only one who remains in Paris (an economist who doesn’t believe in economics, he’s more susceptible to sentimentality than the other two). Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) has gone after the art market in New York, while brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) covers the financial sector in China. A clear opposition — perhaps too clear — is erected between the memory of provincial France and the dislocated pulse of the contemporary, but to Assayas’ credit, Summer Hours doesn’t feel like it has its mind made up between the two: the darting camera courts the promise of speed and movement, while the luxurious play of light nurses what’s been lost. The characters are never more than their scenes, but there are a few breathtaking ones, including two bookending portraits of footloose youth that recoup Summer Hours‘ air of inconsequence.

SUMMER HOURS opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

SFIAF’s dance events

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May 20, 2009
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PREVIEW Perhaps the best part of this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival is that it’s happening at all. After the dispiriting news of the demise of the Oakland Ballet, one is grateful for anybody who is surviving. SFIAF’s dance offerings are not as many as most of us would like, but they are excellent and splendidly varied. The hottest ticket in town, of course, is Sasha Waltz and Guests. The Goethe Institute also includes her work in its concurrent film series. Scott Wells and Dancers are bringing two weekends of sometimes unruly but ever-so-cheeky testosterone-laden work to CounterPULSE, while Jess Curtis/Gravity is leaving its home at CounterPULSE to take a version of its Symmetry Project to Union Square. Curtis and Maria F. Scaroni, in the company of local dancers, will perform their new Transmission. Gravity will appear as part of the free "Jewels in the Square" series, daily noontime performances by local and international dancers throughout the festival. Last, but by no means least, Gamelan Sekar Jaya celebrates its 30th anniversary during the fest. May they have many more and may we have many more SF International Arts Festivals.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL May 20-31, various venues. www.sfiaf.org

The list in surrealist

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May 19, 2009
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1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey’s brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee’s dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor’s first standup film. He’s coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn’t stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he’s a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch’s mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style. My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima’s off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader’s fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

The cult of Fanaka

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May 19, 2009
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cheryl@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Visitors to filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka’s MySpace page are greeted with a clip of Snoop Dogg clutching a pile of Fanaka DVDs — 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance; 1976’s Emma Mae, a.k.a. Black Sister’s Revenge; 1979’s Penitentiary; and 1982’s Penitentiary II. He quotes some choice lines and enthusiastically sings the director’s praises: "These movies right here — this is black history."

When I mention Snoop Dogg to Fanaka, he’s delighted. "All the rappers love me," he says over the phone from Los Angeles. "Also actors, like Eddie Murphy. The first time I ran into him, he was with his brother, and they recited [a scene from Penitentiary] verbatim. That happens all the time."

The Fanaka library (which also includes 1987’s Penitentiary III and 1992’s Street Wars) has also earned a following among cult-movie fans. "I love that they’re cult films, because of what a ‘cult film’ means: the film lives because the people want it to live," he explains. He’s not a fan of the term "blaxploitation" — though it’s commonly applied to his films — due to its connotations.

"There were companies that were very profitable, and all they made were ‘exploitation’ films, which meant that they made low-budget films on subjects that Hollywood didn’t want to take on," he says. "It only became a negative term once they put that prefix ‘blax’ on it. No black filmmaker ever liked that term, though it was coined by a black publicist. ‘Blaxploitation’ has evolved into a genre, like a horror film, or an action film. But black filmmakers still resent the term because of its origins."

Born in Mississippi, raised in L.A., Fanaka says was distracted from committing a crime by a pair of UCLA recruiters who made him believe he could realize his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. ("They asked me, did I want to go to UCLA? I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like to go to the moon, too, but my chances of getting there are pretty minuscule.’") He was eventually accepted into the school’s prestigious film program, where he also earned a master’s degree; his peers included Charles Burnett, who directed 1977’s Killer of Sheep.

"It was an exciting time to be a black filmmaker," Fanaka says. "People like Charles Burnett were part of my film crew, I was part of his film crew. We helped each other, advised each other. Those were the halcyon days of filmmaking at UCLA."

Even more notably, "I’m the only person in the history of filmmaking to write, produce, direct, and get theatrical distribution for three feature films I made as part of my curriculum at the UCLA film school," Fanaka says. He shot his first feature, Welcome Home Brother Charles, on the weekends when he didn’t have class.

"I felt like, if I had access to all of this equipment, and the wherewithal to make a 10-minute film, why not make a whole feature?" he recalls. "I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, and no matter how good a short film is, the audience is going to be limited. Then I went on to graduate school and I made Emma Mae and Penitentiary."

This kind of determination also extended to Fanaka’s fundraising efforts. His parents invested their life savings into his work (good call — Penitentiary, Fanaka says, was the most successful indie film of 1980), but he wondered why he was rejected for a grant by the American Film Institute. He did some research and learned that only one African American had ever been a part of the grant-awarding committee. "I wanted to give minorities a shot," he says, so he wrote a letter to then-Sen. Alan Cranston suggesting that the committee should be more diverse. The next grant cycle, he got the money to help make Emma Mae; the following cycle, he served on the committee. "That goes to show you how the squeaking wheel gets the oil," he remembers, proudly.

In less-tenacious hands, there’d certainly be no Welcome Home Brother Charles. "White slave owners used to tell white women horror stories about the size of the black males’ sexual equipment," Fanaka explains. "But rather than frightening the white females, it intrigued them. I wanted to make a film that took that myth and exaggerated it to show how ridiculous it was, and I chose to do it in a very surreal, powerful scene."

(Note to readers who haven’t seen the film: uh, think 1997’s Anaconda. The entire Penitentiary series is also a gold mine of surreal moments, particularly part three, which features a prison-dwelling, crack-smoking, snarling killer dwarf. Fanaka sums up that film in one word: "feral.")

Now in his late 60s, Fanaka has been slowed in his efforts to make Penitentiary IV by complications from diabetes. He’s also been working for the last decade on a music documentary, Hip Hop Hope. It’s an apt title for a film by Fanaka, who calls himself "a very optimistic person." He’s enjoyed the resurgence of interest in his work, with screenings at places like San Francisco’s Dead Channels Film Festival and Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse, and frequent airings of the Penitentiary films on cable.

"My most artistic film, in my estimation, was Welcome Home Brother Charles, because I had no axes to grind but to try and use the medium of cinema to attack that myth, and attack it in a way that was quote-unquote artistic. Of course, very few people took that from it because that one scene kind of colors the whole film," he chuckles. "But I think as time goes by, people are gonna realize the value of these films I’ve made and begin to understand them."

Interview: “The English Surgeon”

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May 18, 2009
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By Sean McCourt

In the medical world, there are serious risks associated with any kind of surgery. If a mistake is made during a procedure on a leg or arm, there might be some loss of movement or ease of mobility, but the patient can still generally go about their lives, perhaps with a slight physical handicap. If something goes wrong during a brain surgery, however, a person can lose their memory, their control of motor skills, even the ability to think. This is the challenge that faces British neurosurgeon Dr. Henry Marsh every time he operates on somebody, and is one of the personal revelations about his work that he shares in the film The English Surgeon, which has its San Francisco theatrical premiere at the Red Vic from May 17-20.

Director Geoffrey Smith tells the story of how Marsh has been traveling to the former Soviet republic of Ukraine since 1992, volunteering on his own time to help in a region of the world that has a medical system that lags many decades behind those in the industrialized west — and where many cases of brain tumors and other illnesses go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for so long that what would have been easily taken care of with a routine operation or procedure at Marsh’s hospital in London have now progressed to the point that there is little doctors can do to save the patient’s life.

Bicycle Art: Bike dance with the Derailleurs

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May 13, 2009
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In honor of Bike to Work week, we’re featuring one aspect of bicycle art per day. Check back regularly for homages to Cyclecide, Bicycle Porn, the Bicycle Film Festival, and more. By Molly Freedenberg

de rail leur [di-rey-ler]. noun:

1. a gear shifting mechanism on a bicycle that shifts the drive chain from one sprocket wheel to another

2. a Bay Area-based group of badass girls who dance on, with, and about bikes

The Derailleurs. Clockwise from left: Agents Contrary, Flux, Chaos (Eliza Strack), Joke Star, Agitator, Verve (Hollis Hawthorne), Take the Lane, DoubleOO, and Edge. Photo by Alicia Sangiuliano.

Perhaps my favorite development in the world of bicycle art is bike dance, the strange and beautiful hybrid between high school drill team and BMX bike crew.

It all started – in its current form, at least – with the Sprockettes, who formed almost six years ago in Portland. A group of bold, fun-loving ladies donned pink and black outfits and performed synchronized dance and bike tricks at the Multnomah Bike Fair, a one-time show that was so popular, it not only grew into a regularly-performing dance troupe, but spawned a bona fide movement.

Inspired by the Sprockettes, bike enthusiasts in other cities began to form their own troupes, each choosing their own “power colors” and establishing unique identities with their own combination of synchronized moves, bike tricks, acrobatics, and fire. (Check out a full description of the history of bike dance here.)

Film review: “Treeless Mountain”

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May 13, 2009
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By Natalie Gregory

So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain follows two young Korean sisters, Jin and Bin, and their transient lifestyle. Their mother leaves them with their aunt to search for their father, whose absence is unexplained. What’s remarkable is how Kim captures the independence experienced by these young girls (Jin, the elder sister, is six). The film is told mainly from Jin’s perspective, following her as she mourns the absence of her mother and ponders how to protect her sister. As they are passed to their aunt, the girls’ are told that their mother will return when their piggy bank is full. They sell grasshoppers to quicken the process and begin to fill the bank in hopes of their mother’s return. Jin’s realizations of her and her sister’s reality are heartbreaking. In the end, the pair ends up in a happier home, but have grown up all too quickly. Evoking emotions without the benefit of an overbearing musical score, it is a thoughtful, melancholy picture.

Treeless Mountain opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

Velo-mutations

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May 13, 2009
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P>I’ve been aware of the intersection between alternative culture and bicycles since 1996, when I saw my first tall bike at Reed College in Portland, Ore. Since then, I’ve seen bikes at Burning Man tricked out with paint, fun fur, and EL wire. Bikes at Critical Mass made to look like animals or disco balls. Bike-powered carnival rides at Coachella. And punk girls, dressed in pink, dancing on minibikes at Tour de Fat.

But it wasn’t until "The Art of the Bicycle," an underground multimedia art show and party held in a warehouse in the Mission District last May, that I came to understand how these were each parts of a greater whole — spokes in the wheel of a bicycle culture that centers around creativity, empowerment, and, above all, fun. It also became clear, as I sipped cheap beer and listened to live punk rock in an unpermitted space, that this culture was very different from the road bike culture my dad (and his Spandex shorts) was a part of in the 1980s — or even the activist culture my friends in the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are in now.

No, this bike culture is something else. Rooted in DIY principles, punk and anarchist values, a good dose of geekiness, and rejection of the mainstream, the alternative bike culture that exists in San Francisco and beyond is an entirely different animal — and it’s growing up fast.

In the Bay Area alone, there’s Cyclecide, a bicycle club known for mutating found and rejected bikes into new forms and pedal-powered rides, as well as for their carnie aesthetic and rodeo-inspired antics; the Derailleurs, a group of women who dance on, with, and about bicycles; and the Trunk Boiz, an Oakland-based community of kids who pimp out their bicycles the way their older brothers might’ve pimped out their low-riders; and many others — all of whom operate outside the realm of traditional bike culture or politics.

And each of these are connected to a greater network of bicycle artists across the country and the world. The past decade has seen the birth of the Portland-based Bicycle Porn festival, which screened films showing the sexiness of (or near) bikes at Victoria Theater last November; as well as the New York City-based Bicycle Film Festival, which had its first West Coast showing in San Francisco several years ago and now visits 39 cities per year. There are now more than 120 bicycle clubs all over the world, with originals like Black Label growing so big it has 40 chapters of its own. And only five years after the first bicycle dance troupe, the Sprockettes, was formed in Portland, there are 11 bicycle dance troupes worldwide.

But who are these people? Why are they so inspired by bikes? And why make art with or about them, rather than just ride them? The answer is complex. For some, the bike is simply a beautiful machine, an engineering problem whose solution hasn’t changed much since the 1600s but whose application is infinite. For others, it’s the bike’s democracy that’s so appealing: cheap, accessible, and available to all kinds of riders. Some see the bike as a vehicle for change, undermining car culture and the politics involved in non-people-powered transportation.

But what seems to tie all these people together is a counterculture instinct. These are artists, musicians, and math geeks. They’re the same people who may have been drawn to skateboarding or surfing (before both became commercial and mainstream), punk shows, Dumpster diving, or even Stitch ‘n’ Bitch parties. It’s a community of people dissatisfied with the status quo and filled with the imagination and ambition to work outside it — if not against it.

"We wanted to have fun," said Jarico Reesce, about founding Cyclecide in 1997. "And we wanted to break every rule we could." (Molly Freedenberg)

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