Film

A rictal dysfunction

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According to Peter Bogdanovich, 1928 remains unique in film history as Hollywood’s greatest year. The latter-day American director cites landmark silent film contributions such as King Vidor’s The Crowd, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind, and Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. as evidence that synchronized sound — first used in 1927’s The Jazz Singer — initially limited rather than expanded the cinematic medium. Alongside those celebrated pictures, Bogdanovich also praises a 1928 German Expressionist classic produced in the United States: Paul Leni’s macabre mutilation drama The Man Who Laughs.

Based on an 1869 novel by Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs is a mordant and often morose satire about a deformed clown in the Stuart Court. It follows the sad character of Gwynplaine, the son of a British duke who is orphaned and forsaken to die at the command of the British sovereign.

Gwynplaine survives, but with a horribly butchered mouth permanently twisted into a smile, He grows up amid a wandering freak show, becoming its main attraction. His only pleasure comes in the form of his adopted family — carnival mountebank Ursus the Philosopher and the blind beauty Dea, who loves Gwynplaine and remains unaffected by his strange visage. But when word reaches Queen Anne that an heir to the dead duke remains alive, she commands that Gwynplaine be installed as a lord and made to marry the reigning duchess Josiana. Forced to leave Dea and Ursus for the royal court, Gwynplaine soon bears the brunt of a royal freak show whose insidious machinations are alien to the golden-hearted clown.

The Man Who Laughs was produced by Universal in the wake of its increasingly popular horror pictures, particularly the 1925 blockbuster The Phantom of the Opera. Budgeted at the then-unprecedented amount of $1 million, Leni’s film became a flamboyant melding of costume melodrama and Expressionist mise-en-scène. It stars Mary Philbin as the blind heroine Dea and Conrad Veidt — a German Jewish actor featured in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) — as the mutilated clown. Without reliance on dialogue, and beneath a rictus held in place by prosthetic hooks, Veidt produces an extraordinary gamut of emotion through little more than a lachrymose stare. Often mantling his disfigurement with a cape and moving with the rigid gait of a trauma victim, his Gwynplaine becomes a kind of paralytic, living and communicating only from his goitered eyes. He is a casualty of what Hugo declares "an art/science of inverted orthopedics." The film’s image of Veidt influenced comic book writer Bob Kane when he created Batman’s arch-nemesis The Joker.

Leni’s film hasn’t enjoyed the immediate critical attention of Expressionist classics such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). But its anticipation of the horror genre’s waves of mutilation — from Georges Franju through to David Cronenberg — is remarkable.

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

Sat/12, 7:45 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com


THE 13TH SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL runs July 11–13 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF. Advance tickets (most shows $12–$17) are available by calling 1-800-838-3006 or visiting www.silentfilm.org

Man with a plan

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Environmental groups have voiced cautious optimism about the California Air Resources Board’s new draft plan for fulfilling the legislative mandate of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. It relies primarily on greater conservation and efficiency, and a push for new technology.

But skeptics await the forthcoming details behind the plan’s vague outlines and openly worry that the complex "cap and trade" system for selling the right to pollute, an approach favored by industry executives, could be counterproductive. Many experts say we need a more radical reevaluation of the current system, such as that proposed by California’s S. David Freeman in his book, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How (Gibbs Smith, 2007).

Freeman has advised presidents and governors on energy policy, run the Tennessee Valley Authority and major municipal utility districts, and recently activated a fleet of all-electric vehicles as head of the commission overseeing the Port of Los Angeles.

His book lays out a plan to phase out Big Coal, Big Oil, and nuclear (which he dubs "the Three Poisons") over 30 years while meeting the needs of our high-energy society by implementing renewable technologies that already exist: sun, wind, and renewably generated hydrogen, supplemented by small hydroelectric, geothermal, and certain biofuels.

"[I]t is entirely practical and feasible to get all our energy from renewable resources and to do so with today’s technology," Freeman writes, contradicting energy industry spin that beginning the switch would take decades. Footnoted calculations and renewable resource maps show that renewables will cost the public less, with supply "over twice as large as what we may need," if used efficiently.

The transition he proposes could eliminate many of the physical, economic, and political risks of our current unsustainable oil addiction, but only if environmentally concerned Americans — which, he posits, are a majority — close ranks and demand a national renewable energy policy that started immediately.

Freeman’s plan also relies heavily on conservation: it recommends federal government-mandated efficiency programs for utilities, auto companies, manufacturers of energy-using equipment, and homebuilders to offset rising consumer demand. Increasing fuel mileage standards by 1 mpg per year for 24 years (to 48 mpg), for example, would push automakers to steadily improve their products.

His second step: retire aging, highly polluting coal and waste-generating nuclear plants, outlaw new ones, and phase in renewable power-generating alternatives using sun, wind, geothermal, biomass, and municipal waste (going from 9 percent renewable now to 60 percent in three decades, at five-year intervals). Forest, agricultural, and municipal waste are preferable to food-based ethanol.

Freeman encourages consumers to get vocal with manufacturers and demand flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid cars (with batteries you can recharge at home) and, ultimately, all-electric cars. Rechargeable types require less gasoline, freeing us from reliance on foreign oil, a militaristic foreign policy, and habitat destruction at home. An excess-profits tax can supply consumer and manufacturer incentives to speed production within a decade.

Because green cars mean more demand for electricity, Freeman looks beyond new thin-film solar rooftop panels, calling on the federal government to develop "Big Solar": desert installations capable of generating 500 MW of power (the largest US solar farm now generates 16). Such a facility could fuel the energy-intensive electrolysis process needed to free clean-burning hydrogen from water (to replace gasoline), which can then be piped and stored.

Sure, this kind of approach will be expensive. But it would be attainable when looked at against the high cost of oil wars and steadily rising gas prices; habitat and health benefits further tip the scales.

To supplement lulls in sun and wind, the "cleanest of the fossil fuels — natural gas plants — should be allowed to continue to generate power … to assure reliability during hours when the renewables are not available," Freeman writes.

Freeman incites a people-power surge to usher in the big transition: "A favorite trick of the energy establishment is to say our problems are so big that we have to try everything, which means drilling where oil companies want to drill, strip mining coal, and building prohibitively costly, high-risk, toxic nuclear reactors.

Freeman said we need that same strong commitment to transition away from the Three Poisons, because "coal, oil, and nuclear cause the problems while renewables are the solution."

Sonic Reducer Overage: Police cuff Elvis, Sun City Girls gather kudos, Flobots love those “Handlebars,’ and more

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The Sun City Girls also rise.

Too much time on your hands? Guitar Hero III and Gossip Girl not doing it for you? Have I got some high-quality musical fun for you.

Maria Taylor
The Omaha, Neb., songstress strips it all down for her latest release, the digital EP Savannah Drive, while teaming with Now It’s Overhead’s Andy LeMaster. Wed/9, 9 p.m., $12-$14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.

Sun City Girls and Charles Gocher Tribute
Alan and Richard Bishop keep picking up kudos for their acoustic performances – Will Oldham recently praised their recent Slim’s show. This time around they present a 40-minute film of Charles Gocher’s videos, The Handsome Stranger. Thurs/10, 9:30 p.m., $13-$15. Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakl. www.maxwellslounge.com

Gore gone global

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(SHOULD BE A) CULT FILM Pakistan: land of the Markhor goat (a twisty-horned national animal), major software industry, ancient civilizations, field hockey, purported terrorist training cells, and extremely good-looking people of both sexes. The latter, at least, was suggested by those who went to my midwestern university a couple decades back: they were terribly urbane, funny, and cool. Admittedly, they were the next-generation cream of the country’s privileged-liberal economic elite. But they endeared me to a country that, at least as they reflected it, couldn’t harbor anything too religio-fanatical. Could it?

Such first impressions linger — never mind that I have since become slightly less of an overgeneralizing idiot. Proof that Pakistan retains a freethinking, Western-influenced minority — no insult intended against its more conservative Muslim majority — arrives in the unexpected form of Hell’s Ground (a.k.a. Zibahkhana), which plays the Hypnodrome as a Dead Channels presentation. Omar Ali Khan’s debut feature is a frantic pileup of horror genre tropes whose energy never flags. Purportedly Pakistan’s first gore film, it’s funny as well as grotesquely over-the-top.

Much as the movie might strike some as proof of the Great Satan’s poisonous cultural influence — and indeed it offers shameless tribute to the accumulated clichés of Western horror trash — it nonetheless hews to the genre’s most essential moral conservatism. (And unlike traditional slashers, no T&A is bared to justify lethal punishment.) Among the film’s quintet of teens sneaking out of town to a rock concert they’ll never reach, who do you think is gonna survive? I wouldn’t place bets on the amiable pothead, jaded party girl, or overgroomed stud. Poor virtuous scholarship student Simon? Good girl Ayesha (nicknamed Ash, à la Evil Dead‘s Bruce Campbell), who wears a "God Is Great" pendant? Maybe.

After someone has the bright idea of taking a dirt road shortcut, the fivesome run across zombies (including midget undead), then the freaky inbred family of a mystery-meat-selling matriarch whose offspring are Texas Chainsaw Massacre brethren reincarnated way off the Bible Belt. The crazy hitcher guy is now a long-haired religious fanatic; as in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original, he’s got an unpleasant surprise to spring once he gets in the van. Khan’s Leatherface equivalent substitutes a blood-spattered burqa and a lethally wielded mace for a dried-human-skin-mask and a buzz saw.

Funded by entrepreneur Khan’s Lahore ice cream parlors, Hell’s Ground is a fun and accomplished tree-shaking of Pakistan’s once-lively, now largely moribund "Lollywood" film industry. It did well when the country’s censorship board finally approved its theatrical release early this year. It emerges stateside this month via TLA Releasing, a normally gay-centric DVD distributor whose Danger After Dark label has recently given exposure to a gamut of international horror, fantasy, and suspense films. So far they’ve ranged from cheesily enjoyable (Greece’s first zombie flick, 2005’s Evil) to brilliant (Simon Rumley’s 2006 Brit madness portrait The Living and the Dead).

Despite all of the English comic book–panel intertitles ("Little did they know … ") and nods to Western horror classics, Hell’s Ground is shot through with Pakistani cultural totems (like a glimpse of hijiras, transvestite eunuchs), vintage pop, and in-jokes. Not least is the cameo by long-retired actor Rahan of 1967 Pakistani cult smash The Living Corpse. As a chai shop proprietor, he warns our hapless youngsters that they’ve already "strayed off the right road" and that "good Muslims should be getting ready for evening prayers." Later he’s heard pronouncing "You’re on the road to hell my children. Ha ha ha. HA HA HA!"

"The characters in Zibahkhana are part of the urban elite," Khan said in an interview with British newspaper the Guardian. "It’s true that class lives in a privileged bubble. The real, frightening, ‘unknown’ Pakistan is out there in the countryside, and that is why in the film it is when the kids leave the city that they starting encountering trouble."

HELL’S GROUND

Wed/2, 7:30 p.m., $5

Hypnodrome Theatre

575 10th St., SF

(415) 377-4202, www.deadchannels.com

“Jim Campbell: Home Movies”

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REVIEW The West Coast electronic artist Jim Campbell returns to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum to reprise his popular 2006 installation "Home Movies," a screening of amateur, low-resolution family films projected through a tapestry of LED lights. Strung from ceiling to floor, the highly pixilated reflections of quotidian family life become nothing less than digital simulacra when magnified to such extremes. Building on the conceptual linkages of his Illuminated Averages (2001-03) and Ambiguous Icons (2000-03) series, the technophile artist has arrived at a startling depiction of memory and magic. Campbell’s explorations of communications apparatuses since the mid-1980s largely mirrors the hypermodernist theories of Jean Baudrillard — problematizing rather than simply fetishizing the digital domain — and rejects the scientific utopianism of Bergsonian temporality for the more radical slippages of personalized memories and nostalgia. For Campbell, the question surely remains whether digital perception has elevated or mutated our inscriptions of the past.

The answer, of course, is far from conclusive and further still from novel. In fact, "Home Movies" is reminiscent of cinema’s magical roots in the 18th century Fantasmagorie shows, which posed similar concerns in their embrace of new technologies. Spectral and hypnotic in their visual imperfections, these magical lantern exhibitions introduced the sublime moment when the still painting became animate, reaching out from its crypt of secrets to grab hold of the spectator in a living darkness. The Fantasmagorie often thrived on intimate family images, using projected portraits of recently deceased ancestors to unsettle or mesmerize the audience. In his brilliance, Campbell has recognized a similar power in manipuutf8g the iconography of America’s recent past, using the omnipresent home movie as a prop of sorts for his own digital legerdemain.

Historical and aesthetic precedents aside, "Home Movies" is a supreme cinematic delight, re-presenting the primal pleasures of film-going but refracting this nostalgic glow through a matrix of increasing digital deconfiguration.

JIM CAMPBELL: HOME MOVIES Through Aug. 1. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs.). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Hunter, haunted

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," says the reporter in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a film about the importance of living up to one’s image, even when that image is predicated more on fiction than fact. It’s a burden either way, and the dilemma is echoed in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a lively new documentary by Alex Gibney, who directed 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and picked up an Oscar this year for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Gonzo focuses on Thompson’s most fruitful professional period — 1965 to 1975, a decade that saw the New Journalism proponent (who committed suicide in 2005) write Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. During that time, he also launched an ill-fated campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., and shaped his public persona into that of a gun-toting, drug-crazed, booze-soaked, authority-bashing champion of outsiders, capable of churning out pages of brilliant and utterly unique prose, always written in first person and most often written while under the influence.

Speaking over the phone from New York City, Gibney reflected that he was drawn to his latest subject largely because of that persona. "He was a guy who didn’t play by the rules, and it seems like we need a guy like that around now, when the rules are being used against us by people in power," the director said. "Also, he seemed like a fun character to do, this larger-than-life character that — for at least for a brief period of time — became this outlaw that we all wanted to live by."

Gonzo taps quite a bit of home-movie footage, photos, and audiotapes to flesh out Thompson beyond his words (read by Johnny Depp, who bonded with the author while prepping for the 1998 Fear and Loathing movie). A diverse array of contemporary interviews (Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger, both of Thompson’s wives, Pat Buchanan, illustrator Ralph Steadman, George McGovern, and Jimmys Buffet and Carter) bears out the wide range of Thompson’s influence. According to Gibney, the only interview he would have liked to have gotten but didn’t was with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who would only speak off the record.

"My first day on the job was to go out to [Thompson’s funeral] — the one Johnny Depp paid for — and hang out, try to get a bunch of people to talk, and then shoot the funeral itself. I shot the funeral, but nobody much wanted to talk to me," Gibney recalled. "But once I let everyone know I was doing this film and that it was really gonna focus on his work, that opened people up, and inevitably they started talking about Hunter the character as well."

The funeral, briefly shown in Gonzo, is a surprisingly tasteful spectacle involving taiko drums, a giant cannon, and glimpses of famous friends (John Kerry, Bill Murray). The film doesn’t spend much time on Thompson’s suicide, though in its first scene it speculates how the writer might have lost his trademark edge. In Gibney’s eyes, Thompson’s Dr. Gonzo alter ego was the reason for both his success and his ultimate downfall.

"Initially [his persona] just grew out of a natural journalistic instinct to supply your own perceptions, to put yourself in the story, to be the lens through which viewers would see whatever you were covering," Gibney said. "But over time it became [less of a] lens [and more of a] bubble in which he got trapped. So I think that was the trick. Sometimes this mythical character he created just kind of took over. As he remarks in the film, ‘Sometimes I don’t know who to be, whether to be Duke or Hunter.’<0x2009>"

Duality also manifested itself in Thompson’s private personality, which Gibney was surprised to discover as being "almost bipolar."

"Hunter’s mood swings kind of represented his ability to see the kind of schisms or splits in the American character," he said. "I knew he was always a very perceptive writer about the American character, but I think maybe he was so perceptive because he — more than a lot of people — is like America. Sort of the best and the worst. I didn’t really understand till I started the film just how many-sided he was."

Visually dynamic and entertaining for Thompson devotees as well as those who only know him from Depp’s portrayal in Fear and Loathing, Gonzo is nonetheless tinged with the melancholy that eventually tempered Thompson’s considerable lust for life. Blame health problems, professional frustrations, the re-election of George W. Bush, or more existential concerns — Thompson’s quest for the American Dream, documented in Fear and Loathing and elsewhere, was never really satisfied. Instead, Gibney speculated, "I think he ended up finding how elusive it is, and how much-desired it is — but how rare it is to ever find it. And that’s what he found in Vegas, I think: what a perfect vehicle for the death of the American dream, this place where you go hoping to fulfill that rags to riches dream, yet in some fundamental way knowing that the house always wins."

GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.magpictures.com

Burning Man film revives key conflict

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fundraiser.jpg
A new film about Burning Man – Dust & Illusions, which has its first public screening tomorrow night at CELLspace in a benefit for the fire arts collective Flaming Lotus Girls – revives questions about whether the rapidly growing event has missed an opportunity to transform itself from the best party on the planet into an important and enduring sociopolitical movement.

San Francisco filmmaker Olivier Bonin has been shooting footage for the film (which is still in rough form and awaiting final editing and a soundtrack) for more than four years. Much of his time has been spent with the Flaming Lotus Girls, who we were each embedded with when I did a nine-month immersion journalism project with the group in 2005.

Bonin has collected some amazing archival footage from the event’s early years and he scored insightful interviews with significant originators such as John Law and Jerry James, offering viewers a sense of what a collaborative effort the creation of the modern event was. Founder Larry Harvey comes off as sort of the last man standing and the often uncomfortable interview footage with Harvey certainly doesn’t help dispel the accusations that there’s a leadership vacuum at the heart of an event that has come to consume so much financial, emotional, and creative capital in San Francisco.

Tom Morello makes some noise for Cindy Sheehan this weekend

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The Nightwatchman in the film Berkeley.

This just in for Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello‘s people:

“Tom Morello’s solo project and alter ego, the Nightwatchman, will play a San Francisco benefit for anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, best known for her extended demonstration at a camp outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch. Sheehan’s son, Casey was killed during his service in the Iraq War on April 4, 2004.

“Says Morello, ‘I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate until now. It is an honor to perform at Cindy Sheehan’s fundraising event because I strongly believe she is the kind of uncompromising righteous voice for justice that this country so desperately needs. Her unwavering commitment to peace and human rights as well as her intelligence and fortitude are inspiring and stand in dramatic contrast to the lame parade of mealy-mouthed sell-outs and red state war-mongers we are normally forced to choose between.’

“Morello will headline the fundraising show for Sheehan at San Francisco’s Fat City on Saturday, June 28, alongside Malcontent, an acoustic performance by Travis Bilenski, and a reading by Eric Victorino.


Raging with RATM: “Bulls on Parade.”

In the court of Charlemagne Palestine

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charlemagne.jpg


Charlemagne Palestine
From Etudes to Cataclysms
(Sub Rosa)

By Erik Morse

Charlemagne Palestine (real name: Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine) has long been an unrecognized co-star in the avant-celebrity tradition of minimalism. Born in Brooklyn and working alongside his more famous brethren for decades, Palestine blends entrancing keyboard intervals with stylized performance and mythmaking. In his newest two-CD collection of compositions, From Etudes to Cataclysms, the musician gets second billing to the unique piano he plays.

Christened the Borgato by its eponymous inventor, a musician from Padua, the instrument consists of two grand piano bodies, constructed vertically, with the first containing all 88 keys and sitting at normal playing height while the second contains only the lower 37 notes and rests near the feet. Having previously learned to perform on the carillon, a medieval bell instrument played with the fists and feet, Palestine was reportedly eager to test his dexterity on the mutant machine. Recorded over three days at the Church of Saint Apollinare Monticello in Lonigo, Italy, the end product is a 140 minute tour de force of mindful possibilities and mindless boredom.

The first disc (“Etudes”) consists almost entirely of Palestine’s exercises with repetition and formality as he builds enormous ghostly overtones from long periods of high- and low-end trilling. From the opening “super high tones” to the closing “tritone octave ½”, there is an ongoing struggle, in both performance and perception, between obscure mathematical process and arcane artistic license. The tension builds further and further as the individual notes blur into less delineated “clusters” of sound without harmonic resolution. Drones, secreted beneath the surface sounds, phase in and out with a spectral menace.

As with most extended minimalist compositions, there are various levels of intention and thus appreciation simultaneously at work. While the abstractionist and musicologist might luxuriate in so-called “microtonal” resonances spiriting between the Western intervals of the piano, casual listeners may simply gape at Palestine’s superhuman playing endurance. Regardless, the listener hangs on to this sonic maelstrom half in suspense and half in stupor. The hypnotic effect is not very different from that produced by LaMonte Young’s The Well Tuned Piano (Gramavision, 1988) or the film soundtracks of Ligeti or Donaggio. And most of the pieces do have a strong kinaesthetic component to them, eschewing the aural for a chimerical cinematography.

The second disc exudes similar hypnomonotony but the pianist’s trills reside more on the lower end as he seems to take full advantage of the “bass” piano at his feet. In “Cataclisma 2” and “Cataclisma 3,” the use of tension and resolution is particularly effective, again invoking the nocturnal soundtrack moods of Eyes Wide Shut or any of a dozen “metaphysical” crime films. By “Cataclisma 4,” a behemoth piece clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, the divisions between tracks seem arbitrary or beyond a dilettante’s comprehension. Unfortunately, the recording fails to present the overall image of a Charlemagne Palestine recital, where the performer in question often surrounds himself with stuffed teddy bears, books, and aged cognac. Such knick-knacks probably connote a humor and playfulness that is sorely missing in the heavy intellectual conceits of From Etudes to Cataclysms. Nonetheless, for followers of the current avant-garde, the work of this renegade pianist has few equals.

Frameline: Project Runway’s Jay and the perils of PR

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By Jason Shamai

Part of what makes Project Runway so good is that it loves its clever queers. By no means is the show light on standard-issue drama, but one thing its producers and editors don’t abide is bullshit fabulousness comedy routines. They love their bitchy overcompensators (Christian) and their angelic peacekeepers (Danny V.) and their hyperbaric chambermaids (Austin Scarlett, and Malan Breton from Taiwan) and their everything-but-the-sodomy queens (Vincent Libretti), but they would not put up with a Carson Kressley. Or at least they wouldn’t give him much face time.

The producers and editors, of course, are the master tailors behind all the sartorial pageantry. Their jobs seem pretty similar to the trials imposed upon the designers:

Production team, your challenge was to take the painfully young, dumb, and talented Christian Siriano and craft his insecurities into a compelling dramatic arc. You perhaps overplayed your hand in the beginning by setting him up as Machiavelli’s pet rat, but the disarming late-arrival accents of warmth and anxiety brought the whole together boldly if not seamlessly.

And so on.

You sense they are really sweating the final product, resenting the challenges that are comparable to designing ice-skating outfits or fitting teenagers for prom dresses and reveling in the opportunity to make top-notch originals with quality materials.

If the judges aren’t voting solely on craft (and if you think they are, I have a Saturn Astra to sell you at bluefly.com), they don’t just handicap for drama queens—the dry editorialists are always given high consideration. When Chris March and Steven Rosengard were on the chopping block last season, my loins voted for Steven to stay but the rest of me knew Chris was the wiser choice. The show needed his class more than it needed Steven’s lips. It knew he was that season’s color bearer of wry, thoughtful faggotry. And in Season Two, Santino’s Tim Gunn impersonations were an inspired collaboration with the editors. His Red Lobster bit, generously featured as it was, instantly made the world a better place.

jay2.jpg
Jay McCarroll and hot air balloons in Eleven Minutes

Jay McCarroll was just such an object of appreciation on Season One, and possibly the most worthy of the series. More power to him, then, that he’s got himself a proper documentary, which is showing this Wednesday as part of Frameline. Eleven Minutes, directed by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, follows McCarroll as he prepares to show at New York’s Fashion Week—his first not under the auspices of Project Runway. In the film, McCarroll worries that any success he might have as a designer will always be thanks to an alloy of aptitude and personality. He’s well aware that the cameras continue to roll because he entertained us way back when on Bravo and he’s ambivalent about it at best.

Where there’s Will …

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER The cormorants know, the red-winged blackbirds have heard, and the quail would wail: the Marin Headlands and surrounding environs are imbued with more than a little magic. You don’t need to spend much time there to know this, rolling through pebbly Rodeo Beach or tromping down Tennessee Valley Road, soaking up the sagey scents and painting the digits dark red with crushed blackberries, as little girls wander by talking on seagull-feather faux cellies.

They will testify, as will Will Oldham — a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, a.k.a. ace Palace Brother, singer-songwriter, and star of Old Joy (2006) and Matewan (1987) — to the area’s healing properties and the way its fresh breezes, rippled clouds, and hills in every hue of green ignite the imagination. After all, until recently Oldham was squirreled away at the Headlands Center for the Arts as an artist in residence. In one of the few interviews he’s consented to lately, Oldham told me he ended up doing much songwriting, including a commissioned piece with his Superwolf partner Matt Sweeney intended for a new Wim Wenders film.

"I felt super-fortunate," said the jovial, easygoing Oldham from Louisville, Ky., where he’d driven to from the Bay Area only three days previous. No matter that tornado warnings were all over the local media as he cast his mind back. "It was kind of a dream situation, because out there in the Headlands, there’s no cell phone reception. And once you cross through that tunnel, you’re in something you can imagine as wilderness and by the sea, and there’s a fair amount of wildlife — snakes and skunks and turkeys and deer and coyotes and bobcats and seals, which, if you choose to, you can see more of than you see any human being on any given day."

He’ll be back in the Bay after touring Europe and playing a handful of US dates, ending in San Francisco. The occasion is Lie Down in the Light (Drag City), Oldham’s worthy, rootsier follow-up to the transcendent The Letting Go (Drag City, 2006). If the latter is colored by the otherworldly ambience of its Icelandic origins, then the new album is touched by the tender humidity of its Tennessee recording site, encompassing, according to Oldham, "a couple songs that sort of address — using terms of love, devotion, and even lust — songs themselves."

"I think," he offered, "at the end of the day, sometimes it can be the truest form of comfort, especially if you’re a singer. You can find in music just about any ideal emotional landscape you crave, whether it’s angst or rebellion or celebration or union or dissolution. It’s all there, and none of it’s going to call you back or text you at four o’clock in the morning or blame you for anything you did or didn’t do or slap you with a paternity suit."

Not that Oldham can speak on paternity suits. "My lawyer says I can’t answer questions like that," he demurred mirthfully. Meanwhile there’s some heavy weather to consider. "I do have a cellar," he said, not worried at all. "But I’m not the hiding kind. I want to see it if it comes. I think I can run faster than a tornado." *

KICKING, LICKING, GOOD

LOWER CLASS REVOLT


Kicking it blue-collar style, the comp celebration includes Rademacher, Tigers Can Bite You, and Light FM. Wed/25, 10 p.m., $4. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. www.theknockoutsf.com

JONAS REINHART


Kicking it Krautrock, the Citay collaborator’s Kranky release promises near-exotica grooves. Wed/25, 9:30 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DILATED PEOPLES


Kicking it old-school, the Los Angeles underground hip-hoppers unleash The Release Party DVD in July. Thurs/26, 9 p.m. doors, $20 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

GRAND ARCHIVES


Kicking it Vivaldi styley, if the composer wore Converse. The ethereal Sub Pop indie-rockers get with their folk label mate Sera Cahoone. Sat/28, 9 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 333 11th., SF. www.slims-sf.com

MUTE SOCIALITE


Kicking it free-noise mode — with such Oakland exploratory musical surgeons as Moe! Staiano, Ava Mendoza, and Liz Allbee. Sun/29, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

ALL THAT GLITTERS: LADY GAGA

It takes a lot of g-g-guts to name your act after the Queen tune "Radio Gaga," ‘fess up to the fact that you attended Catholic school alongside Nicky Hilton, and make it your personal mission to make pop cool once more. Lady Gaga, 22, has the moxie to undertake all of the above, having gone from setting hairspray afire on fringy NYC stages and attending Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to hammering out songs for Britney Spears, and making her own brazen dance-pop à la "Beautiful Dirty Rich." Why did she name her debut, The Fame (Streamline/Interscope)? "The concept is that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you have, as long as you can embody a sense of inner fame and value of your own ideas, you can really be whoever you want," Lady Gaga opined huskily on her way to a Raging Waters gig in San Dimas. "I was nobody, and I’ve been jerking people for years into thinking I’m somebody I’m not. I used to get into clubs like when I was 16. I’d usually just walk right in because of the way I carried myself, the way I dressed, the way I spoke to people."

Sat/28, 8 p.m., $45. Temple, 540 Howard, SF; www.templesf.com. Sun/29, 6:10 p.m., Pride Festival, Civic Center, SF; www.sfpride.org

“Chop Shop”

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REVIEW Ramin Bahrani’s first feature, Man Push Cart (2005) — about a struggling Pakistani service worker selling coffee and bagels from a midtown Manhattan pushcart — signaled the arrival of a genuine talent for atmospheric and absorbing realist drama, and an unpreachy champion of America’s disregarded immigrant working-class. Like a New York City Ken Loach with the anxious psychic interiors of a Cassavetes, Bahrani’s portraits (using nonprofessional actors and an ambient soundtrack) prove so highly attuned to character and evocative of place that you might overlook what a good storyteller he is. Chop Shop, his second feature (cowritten with Bahareh Azimi), delves further into the social terrain limned by the first, while relocating to New York’s urban periphery — the industrial sprawl of Willets Point in outer Queens, a teeming maze of auto shops and chain-linked yards ringed by turnpikes, erector-set bridges, and Shea Stadium. Here 12-year-old Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), alone in the world but for his sister (Isamar Gonzales), works jobs in and around the auto body shops to save money for a dilapidated food van he hopes will be the economic foothold that will keep them together. Admittedly lacking some of the sureness of Bahrani’s debut, Chop Shop‘s nevertheless compelling exploration of everyday drama on the harried, often undocumented margins of immigrant life has never felt more timely or deserving of attention.

CHOP SHOP opens Fri/27 at the Roxie Film Center. See Rep Clock.

Far “Encounters”

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Last seen playing a priest in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007), Werner Herzog is back behind the camera with Encounters at the End of the World. Guided by Herzog’s trademark droll narration, Encounters journeys to Antarctica, starting at the McMurdo Station research facility, where the director talks with people who’ve chosen to make a living in the world’s most isolated community. Though grubby McMurdo is hardly picturesque, the surrounding land — where Herzog visits divers who daringly study sea life below the ice, volcano researchers, and penguin and seal experts — is as breathtaking as it is stark.

Filming in Antarctica, Herzog made what he called "a couple of good decisions." One was to hand over his camera for the underwater sequences, leaving the diving to experts. The other was more elemental. "Normally I am a man of celluloid, but filming on celluloid when it’s very cold becomes a clumsy affair," he explained during a recent phone interview. "You have to keep your raw stock warm enough because film doesn’t bend when it’s extremely cold. It’s like uncooked spaghetti that you bend, and then it breaks. So I decided against my normal procedures to film with digital cameras. And therefore there was not much of a challenge — Antarctica is easy. It’s not like the times of [Robert Falcon] Scott."

If you think that title only refers to geography, think again. "[Global warming is] not the predominant subject of discourse in Antarctica. What is all-pervading is that many of the scientists are — rightfully in my opinion — convinced that the human presence on this planet is quite limited and not sustainable," Herzog said. "But it doesn’t make me nervous. Martin Luther said something very beautiful when he was asked once, ‘What would you do if tomorrow the world would disappear?’ He said, ‘I would plant an apple tree.’ And I find this a very good attitude. I don’t plant apple trees, but I make films."

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Opens Fri/27 at Bay Area theaters

www.encountersfilm.com

Welcome to the jungle

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE Mark Twain’s observation (cribbed from poet Thomas Campbell) that "distance lends enchantment to the view" could serve as a guiding axiom for the languorous, enchanting films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Apichatpong shows more than he tells, and his camera often obscures rather than explicates the minute, alchemical operations taking place before it.

Somnambulant features such as the day-tripping Blissfully Yours (2002), the shape-shifting gay fable Tropical Malady (2004), and the double-exposed parental portrait Syndromes and a Century (2006) have left many critics bewildered but entranced. Others just seem confused by the elliptical, dream-like logic of the films, in which local lore and landscape shape the narrative as much as characters’ peripherally observed actions. Viewers hoping for glints of elucidation in Apichatpong’s juvenilia and nonfeature projects will probably be disappointed by "Mysterious Objects," the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ latest program honoring the director, for as its title indicates, his short films may be his most enigmatic.

All of Apichatpong’s signature traits — a fascination with the local and mundane, an unabashed love of syrupy pop songs, and a flair for throwing curve balls — are present in this grab bag of films made between 1994 and 2007. In the gleeful Anthem (2006) three elderly women listen to a supposedly blessed techno-lite number. Inexplicably, they are dropped, table and all, into a busy gym (and into the dead center of a badminton match), around which the camera makes multiple 360-degree circuits. Other such narrative jumps merely frustrate. Malee and the Boy (1999) begins with the scrolling text of a transcribed comic book, then switches to footage of hospital visitors. Whereas Anthem suggests a leap of faith, Malee just feels indecisive.

The program’s heart is Worldly Desires (2005), a half-hour trek across the same superstition-laden terrain of Tropical Malady. Dedicated to his "memories of the jungle," Worldly Desires is Apichatpong’s most meta film yet: a music video, a romantic drama, and a composite document crafted from "behind the scenes" footage.

In the opening sequence, a forest’s nighttime choir of insects is interrupted by a bossa nova groove. Suddenly a spotlight washes out the middle ground, illuminating the camera and lighting rigs trained on a singer and her background dancers as she lip-synchs a love song with familial undercurrents. The next few shots follow a man and woman as they hurry through the brush. It takes a few seconds before one can disambiguate the crosshairs in the center of the frame from the dense foliage.

Apichatpong keeps us at the periphery. Each re-shoot of the video is from the same, distanced vantage point. The couple’s arduous journey to find an enchanted tree unfolds through playback monitors, the director’s instructions, and the grumblings and random musings of an exhausted crew. We’re never told if the lovers cross paths with the pop star, or whether what we’re watching is the staging of something staged or a video diary.

Though Tropical Malady‘s first half focuses on a gay love story, it feels somewhat disingenuous to pin a queer sensibility on Apichatpong, even if he is gay. However, with its humorous foregrounding of the labor-intensive means by which the pop culture industry packages "normal" heterosexual love, Worldly Desires certainly invites queer labeling — if not at least queer readings such as this critic’s.

MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS

Thurs, July 3, 7:30 p.m. (program 1) and Sun, July 6, 2 p.m. (program 2), $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

A different light

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› johnny@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE It’s best to begin at the edge. Gay urban photography has a fleeting yet reliably revelatory home at those places where water laps up against land. On the East Coast, from 1975 through 1986, Alvin Baltrop explored the Hudson River side of Manhattan, capturing black-and-white visions of sex, murder, and architecture by cruising the piers as a peer rather than as an exploitative outsider. On the West Coast, during the ’50s and ’60s, Denny Denfield used Baker Beach and its nearby wooded areas to invent an Adam-only Eden best glimpsed solo through 3-D. And around the same time in Montreal, Alan B. Stone was hiding in a shed, looking through a shutter at the dock-working men and sunbathing boys who populated the city’s port. In the zone known as the city’s historical heart, his camera cautiously hinted at desires that could lead to prison time.

Curated by David Deitcher, the SF Camerawork exhibition "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" proves Stone’s photographic versatility ranged from a low-key form of William Klein–like typographic artistry to extremely subversive pastoral romanticism — in commissioned Boy Scout photos — to the candid portraiture of the beefcake genre. Such a showcase isn’t Deitcher’s intent, though — he’s structured the show (and written about it, in an autobiographical essay) to foreground a specifically gay vision and experience of Montreal from a time when men were arrested and publicly vilified in newsprint for being homosexual. Stone provides the nuanced vision; Deitcher identifies its facets and identifies with it. His analysis of Montreal through Stone’s camera takes on special resonance when placed next to Douglas Crimp’s look at post-Stonewall New York through Baltrop’s camera in a February 2008 Artforum piece.

The difference between the liberated time of Baltrop and the closeted era of Stone is evident in their views of waterfront lazy sunbathers. Perhaps the brightest — in tone and in quality of light — of the Baltrop photos showcased in Artforum (also on view at www.baltrop.org) gazes from a few hundred feet away at a half-dozen naked men as they soak up the sun, converse, and dangle their feet off the edge of a pier. The gay-lib visibility inherent to the men’s affectionate nudity is doubly emphasized by Baltrop’s distanced yet full-frontal perspective. In contrast, Stone’s 1954 photo Untitled (Lachine Canal) glimpses the back of a boy in a swimsuit seated at the Port of Montreal’s shoreline — the identity of his solitary subject remains poignantly invisible to the photographer, who, as Deitcher notes, was stricken with arthritis at an early age.

There’s a similar echo to a pair of photos — one by Stone, one by Baltrop — that depict men standing at the sunlit thresholds of waterfront warehouses. Stone’s 1954 Untitled (Dock Workers, Port of Montreal) is a furtive from-behind vision of a shirtless, assumedly heterosexual dockworker. One image from Baltrop’s "Pier Photographs, 1975-1986" glances at a shirtless man, also from behind, but from a much nearer vantage point. Attired in tight jeans and black boots, he’s the painter Alva, at work on a large piece of sexually explicit graffiti. The picture’s dominant darkness and the roughness of its lit threshold — a window-size hole in a warehouse wall — suggest an edge of menace that Baltrop’s photos of body bags make plain. An unauthorized space for gay sexuality in a bombed-out urban zone, the piers were rife with dangers unknown.

Stone’s and Baltrop’s photographs could form chapters within an imagined monograph about the changing relationship between gay sex and the city. Such a book could venture into the garishly colorful Times Square seen in Gary Lee Boas’ 2003 book New York Sex, 1979-85 (Gallerie Kamel Mennour) — the title alone prompts comparisons to Baltrop’s equally unsentimental vision of a different space within pre-Giuliani, pre-Disney Manhattan. It could draw from David L. Chapman’s and Thomas Waugh’s recent San Francisco–set monograph Comin’ At Ya!: The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield (Arsenal Pulp), to show the California-dreaming answer to New York grime, and to further reveal — through the inherent solitude of the 3-D stereoview process — the inner recesses of a pre-gay lib experience far from Baltrop’s and Boas’ sights and sites of group sexuality.

Such a book could open into film as well, since movies such as João Pedro Rodrigues’ O Fantasma (2000), Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2002), Tsai Ming-liang’s The River (1997) and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), and William E. Jones’ V.O. (2007) foreground age-old connections between the edges of urban society and sexuality. The portrait of Montreal that emerges from "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" hints at the possibilities of such a project — and leaves one wondering about the worlds of desire that can exist outside computer screens today.

ALAN B. STONE AND THE SENSES OF PLACE

Through Aug. 23

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org, www.baltrop.org

The Queer Issue

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In this issue:

>>Scandalous Pride events

>>The Hot Pink List 2008: up-and-comers

>>Where to get married

>>Why not to get married

>>Charo spills the cuchi

>>Superhero tranny flushed into the ’70s

>>Visions of cruising past

>>Queercore makes a comeback

>>Once a riot grrrl, always an artist

>>Fresh Meat still breaks transgender ground

>>Lesbian pregnancy from hell

>>A gay pornocopia

>>The Busy World is Hushed

>>Apichatpong offers filmic bliss

Oh, hai, happy Pridez! Time again to lean back languidly and reflect — not just in your makeup mirror lined with curlicue lavender CFLs, but on where we are as a community. As usual, we straddle an odd queer moment. Yes, legalized same-sex marriage, California-style, is all the rage. Even my radical queer eye teared up when happily balled and chained couples streamed out of City Hall June 17. And you can bet I’ll be on the front lines fighting that awful November ballot initiative, defining marriage as exclusively between one tree and one Mormon.

Some queers want to get married (see "Tie the same-sex knot,"), some don’t ("Down with legitimacy,"). Others, like me, are simply hiding from their boyfriends. It’s yet another great diversity among us. The overall feeling at City Hall, though, besides sheer jubilance, was one of relief more than revolution. Four years ago, during the Winter of Love, rebellion — even talk of secession — crackled in the city’s air. But that scary "M" word, marriage, went the way of The L Word long ago into mainstream territory. Wedding rings were the new septum rings; now they’re just the new freedom rings. "What’s the big deal?" is the whole point.

The weird thing is that right as we’re being carried over the threshold of legal normalization, our outlaw history is roaring back in a big way. Eight years ago, a DJ named Bus Station John set out to highlight gay men’s bathhouse and hi-NRG disco heritage by playing old-school records, many of which he’d amassed from people who’d passed on from AIDS. This was a revelation to the new queer generation, raised with effective HIV meds but led to believe that gay musical history started with Madonna. It was a return of the repressed — an inspiring, AIDS-obscured swath of yesteryear suddenly came to light.

Now you can’t go anywhere without seeing mustaches, aviator glasses, and hipster variations of the clone look. The filming of Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic Milk this winter costumed the city in pristine White Riot chic. Wonder of wonders, we even have a brand new SoMa leather bar, Chaps II, named after Miracle Mile’s infamous ’80s watering hole, Chaps — joining the great new retro Truck bar, expanded Hole in the Wall Saloon, Eagle Tavern, and Powerhouse. Take that, Internet! Queercore homeboy innovators Pansy Division ("Queercore, many mornings after,") get canonized with a doc at this year’s Frameline Film Fest. Most intel queers I know are gobbling up Terence Kissack’s recent tome, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917 from Oakland’s AK Press.

But the past isn’t just for gay men. The Fresh Meat festival has been breaking transgender performance ground since the millennium began ("Rare, medium, well-done,"). Nineties riot grrls are making strong artistic marks ("Heart shaped box," page 49), and I can’t step into a dyke bar lately without being immediately corralled into a Journey sing-along by Runaways look-alikes. The turbo-awesome current exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society (www.glbthistory.org), "Dykes on Bikes: 30 Years at the Forefront," reminds us not only that boobs are still illegal, but that rad women of all shapes and colors have led us from Gay Freedom Day to this week’s Pride. And it’s no surprise that the original Daughters of Bilitis, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to get legally married here, 53 years after starting the first official, highly persecutable, lesbian organization.

As we move seemingly inexorably toward mainstream acceptance, it’s nice to know that the heroes of our struggle, people who did things differently, are still fresh in our minds. This year the Guardian pays tribute to the LGBT underground past and present, and raises a toast to our deliciously shameless future.

› marke@sfbg.com

Pride 2008 events

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› culture@sfbg.com

ONGOING

Frameline Film Festival Various locations; see Web site for dates and times, www.frameline.org. The humongous citywide queer flick fest is still in full eye-popping effect.

Golden Girls Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 690-9410, www.voicefactorysf.org. 7 and 9pm, $20. Through Sat/28. Revisit all the "gay" episodes of this classic and tragic sitcom, as performed with panache and pratfalls by gender clowns Heklina, Pollo Del Mar, Cookie Dough, and Matthew Martin.

National Queer Arts Festival Various locations; see Web site for details, www.queerculturalcenter.org. Experience scandalously good spoken word, cabaret, art installations, and so much more as this powerhouse monthlong celebration of queer revelations continues.

THURSDAY 26

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Marriage Is Not Enough: Radical Queers Take Back the Movement New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin, SF; (415) 864-1278. 7pm, $7 donation. Spread-eagled with one foot in the past and the other in the future, Radical Women host a forum to honor the efforts of drag queens and queers of color in 1969’s Stonewall rebellion and to discuss the docile nature of LGBT leadership in the face of poor and working-class queer issues today.

"Our Message Is Music" First Unitarian Church and Center, 1187 Franklin, SF; (415) 865-2787, www.sfgmc.org. 8pm, $15-$35. The world’s first openly LGBT music ensemble will kick off Pride Week with a range of music from Broadway to light classical. Includes performances by the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band.

Pansy Division Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF; (415) 626-0880, www.pansydivision.com. 9pm, $7. Homoerockit band Pansy Division plays a live set with the handsome help of Glen Meadmore and Winsome Griffles following a screening of the film Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Body Rock Vertigo, 1160 Polk, SF; (415) 674-1278. 10pm, free. Incredibly energetic tranny-about-town Monistat hosts a bangin’ electro night for queers and friends featuring San Francisco’s favorite crazy DJ Richie Panic. Expect wet panties.

Cockblock SF Pride Party Minna, 111 Minna, SF; www.cockblocksf.com. 9pm-2am, $5. DJs Nuxx and Zax spin homolicious tunes and put the haters on notice: no cock-blockin’ at this sweaty soiree.

Crib Gay Pride Party Crib, 715 Harrison, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.thecribsf.com. 9:30pm-3am, $10. The hopefully soothing Ms. Monistat (again!) and the irritating — in a fun way — Bobby Trendy set it off at this homolicious megaparty popular among the 18+ set, complete with a Naked Truth body-art fashion show and a T-shirt toss, in case you lose the one you came with in the melee.

The Cruise Pride Party Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm-2am, free. Hey, dyke sailor! Hike up your naughty nauticals and wade into this ship of dreams (yes, it’s a theme party) with DJs Rapid Fire and Melissa at the lovely lesbian Lex. Land, ho.

The Tubesteak Connection Aunt Charlie’s, 133 Turk, SF; (415) 441-2922, www.auntcharlieslounge.com. A warm and bubbly tribute to early Italo house, wonderfully obscure disco tunes, and outfits Grace Jones would die for. With DJ Bus Station John.

FRIDAY 27

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Same-Sex Salsa and Latin Ballroom Dance Festival and Competition Magnet, 4122 18th St., SF; (415) 581-1600. www.queerballroom.com. 7pm-12am, free. With $100 awarded to the winner of this fancy-footwork competition, the stakes for this event’s salsa-hot dancing surpass the single bills slipping into thong strings this week.

San Francisco Trans March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th Sts; (415) 447-2774, www.transmarch.org. 3pm stage, 7pm march; free. Join the transgender community of San Francisco and beyond for a day of live performances, speeches, and not-so-military marching.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Bibi: We Exist and We Thrive Pork Store Café, 3122 16th St., SF; (415) 626-5523, www.myspace.com/BibiSF. 9pm, $20. The Middle Eastern and North African LGBT community hosts a charitable happy hookah party to native tunes spun by DJs Masood, Josh Cheon, and more.

Bustin’ Out III Trans March Afterparty El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325. 9pm-2am, $5-$50, sliding scale. Strut your stuff at the Transgender Pride March’s official afterparty, featuring sets from DJs Durt, Lil Manila, and giveaways from Good Vibes, AK Press, and more. Proceeds benefit the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee.

Charlie Horse: No Pride No Shame The Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF; (415) 776-4162, www.myspace.com/charliehorsecinch. 10pm, free. Drag disaster Anna Conda presents a bonkers night of rock ‘n’ roll trash drag numbers, plus Juanita Fajita’s iffy "gay food cart" and Portland, Ore.’s Gender Fluids performance troupe.

Cream DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-1409, www.creamsf.com. Two levels of sexy girl energy and a catwalk to scratch your lipstick claws on, plus a Latin lounge with hip-grinding tunes from DJs Carlitos and Chili D.

GIRLPRIDE Faith, 715 Harrison, SF; (415) 647-8258. 8pm-4am, $20. About 2,500 women are expected to join host DJ Page Hodel to celebrate this year’s Pride Weekend, and that’s a whole lotta love.

Hot Pants Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF; (415) 703-8964, www.myspace.com/hotpantsclub. 10pm, $5. DJ Chelsea Starr and many others make this alternaqueer dance party a major destination for hot persons of all genders and little trousers.

Mr. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF; (415) 762-0151, wwww.mighty119.com. 10pm-6am, $20. Darling promoters Big Booty, FSLD, Beatboxevents, and Big Top join forces to produce the party premiere of Pride week with DJ Kidd Sysko and Lord Kook spinning alternative techno sounds, and a special deep and dirty set from soulful house god David Harness.

Sweet Beast Transfer, 198 Church, SF; www.myspace.com/beastparty. 10pm-2am, $10. Reanimate your fetish for leather and fur by dressing up as fiercely feral fauna for the petting-zoo of a party. This week, after all, is mating season.

Tranny Fierce Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF; (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com. 8pm dinner, 10pm afterparty. $85 dinner, $15-$25 afterparty. Total ferosh! Project Runway winner Christian Siriano hosts a four-course meal of trash-talking and looking fierce. The afterparty serves up drag nasty from Holy MsGrail, Cassandra Cass, and more.

Uniform and Leather Ball Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 777-0333, www.frantix.net. 8pm-midnight, $25 & $40. The men’s men of San Francisco’s Mr. Leather Committee want you to dress to the fetish nines for this huge gathering, featuring men, music, and more shiny boots than you can lick all year. Yes, sirs!

SATURDAY 28

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Dykes on Bikes Fundraiser Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF; (415) 626-0880, www.dykesonbikes.org. Noon. Dykes on Bikes can’t drink and drive: they need your help. A pint for you means a gallon of gas for them. Stop by before heading to the march.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-6pm, free. Celebrate LGBT pride at this free outdoor event featuring DJs, speakers, and live music. This is the first half of the weekend-long celebration sponsored by SF Pride. Also Sun/29.

Pink Triangle Installation Twin Peaks Vista, Twin Peaks Blvd parking area, SF; (415) 247-1100, ext 142, www.thepinktriangle.com. 7-11am, free. Bring a hammer and your work boots and help install the giant pink triangle atop Twin Peaks for everyone to see this Pride Weekend. Stay for the commemoration ceremony at 10:30am to hear Mayor Gavin Newsom and Assemblymember Mark Leno speak.

Pride Brunch Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 777-0333, www.positiveresource.org. 11am-2pm, $75-$100. Raise a mimosa toast to this year’s Pride Parade grand marshals with many of the community’s leading activists.

Same-Sex Country, Swing, and Standard Ballroom Dance Festival and Competition Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.queerballroom.com. 6:30-8pm, free. The Queer Jitterbugs get reeling at this one-of-a-kind contest that’ll shine your spurs and get you swingin’ out of your seat.

San Francisco Dyke March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th Sts, SF; www.dykemarch.org. 7pm, free. Featuring music from the Trykes, Papa Dino, Las Krudas, and more, plus a whole lot of wacky sapphic high jinks.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Bearracuda Pride Deco, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025, www.bearracuda.com/pride. 9pm-3am, $8 before 10pm, $10 after. Hot hairy homos generate serious body static on the dance floor at this big bear get-down.

Bootie Presents The Monster Show DNA Lounge, 375 11th St, SF; (415) 626-1409, www.bootiesf.com. The city’s giant mashup club hosts a drag queen bootleg mix extravaganza, as Cookie Dough and her wild Monster Show crash the Bootie stage.

Colossus 1015 Folsom, SF; (415) 431-1200, www.guspresents.com. 10pm-8am, $40. The beats of mainstream club favorite DJ Manny Lehman throb through the largest and longest, uh &ldots; dance party of Pride week.

Deaf Lesbian Festival Dyke Ball San Francisco LGBT Center, Rainbow Room, 1800 Market, SF; (415) 865-5555, www.dcara.org. 8pm, 440. Feel the music, close your eyes, and dance to the rhythm of your smokin’ partner at the Deaf Lesbian Festival’s first ever Dyke Ball.

Devotion EndUp, 401 Sixth St, SF; (415) 357-0827, www.theendup.com. 9pm, $15. This storied dance party is back with "A Classic Pride." DJs Ruben Mancias and Pete Avila spin all-classic soulful and stripped-down house anthems for a sweaty roomful of those who were there back when.

Dyke March After Affair Minna, 111 Minna, SF; www.diamonddaggers.com. 8pm-11pm, $12-$20 sliding scale. An early-ending party featuring drag queens, burlesque stars, and belly dancers ensures that beauty sleep comes to the next day’s easy riders whose love of bikes and beer rivals that of any Hell’s Angel or fratboy. Or, stick around for Minna’s ’80s night, Barracuda.

Manquake The Gangway, 841 Larkin, SF; (415) 776-6828. 10pm, $5. Disco rareties and bathhouse classics in a perfectly cruisy old-school dive environment with DJ Bus Station John.

PlayBoyz Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.clubrimshot.com. 10pm-3am, $10. The stars of legalized gay marriage, Obama’s candidacy, Pride week, and Black Music Month all align for this hip-hop heavy celebration.

Queen Pier 27, SF; www.energy927fm.com. 8pm, $45. Energy 92.7 FM brings back the dynamism of the old-school San Francisco clubs for this Pride dance-off. Chris Cox and Chris Willis headline. Wear your best tear-away sweats and get ready to get down, Party Boy style.

Rebel Girl Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; wwww.rebelgirlsf.com. 9pm-2am, $12. Rebel Girl brings the noise for this one with go-go dancers, Vixen Creations giveaways, drink specials, and, you know, rebel girls.

SUNDAY 29

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-7pm, free. The celebration hits full stride, with musical performances and more.

LGBT Pride Parade Market at Davis to Market and Eighth Sts, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. 10:30am-noon, free. With 200-plus dykes on bikes in the lead, this 38th annual parade, with an expected draw of 500,000, is the highlight of the Pride Weekend in the city that defines LGBT culture.

True Colors Tour Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley Campus, Hearst and Gayley Streets, Berk; (510) 809-0100, www.apeconcerts.com. 5pm, $42.50-$125 Cyndi Lauper, The B-52s, Wanda Sykes, The Puppini Sisters, and queer-eyed host Carson Kressley bring it on for human rights and limp wrists.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Big Top The Transfer, 198 Church, SF; (415) 861-7499, www.myspace.com/joshuajcook. A circus-themed hot mess, with DJs Ladymeat, Saratonin, and Chelsea Starr, plus Heklina’s "best butt munch" contest. Will she find the third ring?

Dykes on Bikes Afterparty Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 1pm, free. How do they find time to ride with all these parties?

Juanita More! Gay Pride ’08 Bambuddha Lounge, 601 Eddy, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.juanitamore.com. 3pm, $30. Juanita More! hosts this benefit for the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial, with DJs Robot Hustle and James Glass, and performances by fancy-pants Harlem Shake Burlesque and the Diamond Daggers. Fill ‘er up, baby!

Starbox Harry Denton’s, 450 Powell, SF; (415) 395-8595, www.harrydenton.com. 6pm-midnight, $7 High atop the Sir Francisc Drake Hotel, the swank Harry Denton’s presents DJ Page Hodel’s patented brand of diverse and soulful bacchanalia.

Sundance Saloon Country Pride Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.sundancesaloon.org. 6pm-11pm, $5. Hot hot bear husbands on the hoof, line-dancing for the pickin’ at this overalls-and-snakeskin-boots roundup.

Unity Temple, 540 Howard, SF; www.templesf.com. Legendary kiki-hurrah club Fag Fridays rises again with a sure-to-be-smokin’ DJ set from the one and only Frankie Knuckles, the goddess’s gift to deep house freaks and friends.

Quickies: Fast reviews of Frameline fest films

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lost1.jpg
Still from The Lost Coast

FRIDAY, JUNE 20
The Lost Coast (Gabriel Fleming, US, 2008) Writer-director Fleming recorded location sound for Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006), and all that time spent in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains must have rubbed off on him. His sophomore film is also steeped in a fog-kissed poetic naturalism, and it gives as much screen time to California’s rugged coastline — and its urban approximation in Golden Gate Park — as it does to the pair of longtime male friends at its center. Old Joy’s homosocial hiking retreat is swapped for a listless Halloween all-nighter, after which Jasper and Mark must confront the lingering memory of a high school tryst. Ian Scott McGregor and Lucas Alifano’s fine performances give this brief feature’s familiar premise unexpected emotional weight. (Matt Sussman)
10 p.m., Victoria
Saturn in Opposition (Ferzan Ozpetek, Italy, 2007) Keats’ epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” could just as well apply to Lorenzo, the handsome, successful sun around which orbit a fractious but loving circle of forty-something friends in Ferzan Ozpetek’s anticipated return to Frameline. Ozpetek (Steam, 1995) takes his time introducing Lorenzo’s makeshift family of ex-lovers, coworkers, yakhnes and admirers — each beautifully acted — before the character suffers a freak stroke. The sudden tragedy causes the group to reevaluate the forces that undermined and sustained their relationship with Lorenzo — and with each other — as they struggle to confront their grief. Ozpetek has crafted an unassuming but deft ensemble drama that earns every hanky it calls for. (Sussman)
9:15 p.m., Castro

Hurting herders

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REVIEW Set in Inner Mongolia’s dry and inhospitable plains, Tuya’s Marriage comments on capitalism’s suffocating ability to suppress other ways of living. Tuya (Yu Nan — last seen in Speed Racer, of all places) is a Mongolian sheep herder struggling to make ends meet. China’s growing economy has made it almost impossible for herders to survive — not only has it forced them to leave their lands, it has created industries that exploit the natural resources herders traditionally have taken advantage of. So when Tuya’s husband Bater (played by a real Mongolian herder) is incapacitated while digging a well, things become even harder. Tuya is left in charge of their two toddlers, the flock, and securing their daily supply of water. When the strained woman suffers a physical breakdown that warns of graver consequences if she keeps exhausting herself, everyone advises her to divorce Bater and marry another man. Unable to deal with the hardships surrounding her, Tuya starts looking for a groom on the outrageous condition that whoever agrees to take her for his wife must also be willing to provide for Bater. Having glimpsed the potential outcome of marrying a Mongolian oil tycoon and living in the city, Tuya chooses to continue the life she knows — at a high price. Aesthetically beautiful and emotionally complex, the film records the customs and mores of a culture that’s slowly disappearing, and the sadness of a people who have become marginalized.

TUYA’S MARRIAGE opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

Tell it like it is

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ISBN REAL Samuel R. Delany is best known as a science fiction writer. And it’s a good bet that once people see the documentary The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman — screening this week at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival — Delany will be equally well known as a prolific tea-room queer (50,000 and counting), a lifestyle that has informed much of his fiction. By all rights, either of these enthusiasms should provide the best inroad to Delany’s work. But I’m not so sure that’s true.

What I’ve read of Delany’s science fiction is ambitious, path-clearing, and fearless in its treatment of sex and race. It also tends to let ideas outperform style. Some selections of his work tighten the gap more successfully than others. Triton (Bantam, 1976), sometimes published as Trouble on Triton, is simultaneously much more effective and much less ambitious a work of art than its megahit predecessor Dhalgren (1975), a book of commendable narrative and sociological experimentation that still feels, page by page, overdetermined and overly dependent on dialogue for orientation.

When Delany writes about sex beyond the speculative landscape, he has no less a tendency to dote on ideas, often leaving the reader bloated with enlightenment and blue-balled by the promise of a tight story. His "pornotopic" novel Mad Man (Voyant, 2002) is in many ways a beautiful rumination on the staggered evolution of social tolerance, the ways in which our complex alliances and prejudices can work at cross-purposes. While it’s also admirably brutal on the average reader’s gag reflex, it’s still probably best to select a few boutique items — like maybe the scat play and interspecies fellatio — and save the cavernous foreskin tubes of smegma for another novel. Similarly, while Dark Reflections (Running Press, 2007) is equal to Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 A Single Man at exposing the animal humility of an aging literary life, it relinquishes its eerie sad hush to a bulbous interlude of bathroom-sex protocol.

Really, Delany is too forgiving of his enthusiasms — be they technological, sexual, or literary — to exclude what thoughts they might inspire, to avoid treating fiction as specimen capture. Some of the most impressive bits of Mad Man are simple lists of autonomous thoughts discovered in the notebook of a deceased philosopher. But the beauty of the lists make them no less transparent an opportunity for Delany to do some housecleaning. And while he was able to parlay his mania for inclusion into the artistic success of Phallos (2004), a great little faux-academic novel about an erotic text of mysterious provenance, writing about writing seems an awfully limiting way of solving the problem.

Unless you do it up right, in nonfiction. Though they are not by and large what have earned him his notoriety, works of criticism, memoir, and pedagogy shine brightest on Delany’s mantle. His elegy to the egalitarian sex culture of pre-Giuliani Times Square, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NYU Press, 1999), is deservedly well known. Though not as prominent, About Writing (Wesleyan, 2005) is a fantastic collection of essays, letters, and interviews on writing as a craft. Equally worthy is Silent Interviews (Wesleyan, 1994), a collection of souped-up interviews that deftly handle many of the concepts he has tried, with mixed results, to illuminate in his fiction. One particularly memorable piece in the collection is "Toto, We’re Back!", a 20-page crucifixion of some insidiously parochial questions posed by a couple of poor professors who thought they were being obsequious. Not only is it a brilliant demonstration of intellectual sadism, it’s also an intriguing examination of the nature of genre as well a solid beginner’s guide to the notables of science fiction. Though he is but one such notable, there are few better places to start.

THE POLYMATH, OR THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF SAMUEL R. DELANY, GENTLEMAN

Fri/20, 8 p.m., $9–$10

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 703-8655

www.frameline.org

Have another Soju

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Drinking with Hong Sang-soo is an intense experience. Supremely awkward conversations transpire over tables littered with empty soju bottles. The primary topic is sex — and the details quickly get personal. It’s exactly like a scene from one of his films. Or so it seemed during a group dinner honoring Hong at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Drinks vanished. Secrets were told. And all present tried to forget about it by the next day.

Scenes of clumsy inebriation are the essence of Hong’s cinema, and 2006’s Woman on the Beach is no exception. Over the course of seven movies (excluding the new Night and Day), Hong has repeatedly examined the complicated romantic entanglements of heterosexual Koreans. His scenes often take place in restaurants or domestic parlors, as people sit, drink, talk, and ultimately either seduce or reject each other during extremely long takes. Reportedly, Hong gets his actors drunk before shooting these scenes.

Invariably, Hong’s films focus on a male protagonist trying to bed a woman. These men are always artists; frequently they are film directors. In these respects, Woman on the Beach is quintessential Hong. It also revives his focus on troubled Seoul-dwellers who leave the city for peace of mind. But there’s an essential shift in emphasis: the woman in the story ends up as complex a creation as the men. A female musician pursued by a film director and his set designer, she’s no virgin stripped bare by her bachelors.

Woman on the Beach isn’t as formally rigorous as Hong’s previous films, and it spells out matters that might have been implicit in an earlier work. But this should only matter to hardcore Hong-heads. The biting observations remain, and they’ve never been funnier.

The woman at the center of Woman on the Beach says she "[doesn’t] respect Korean men too much." Hong’s male characters are indeed selfish, unreliable drunks. But they’re bastards with charm.

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

www.sffs.org

Sour sixteen

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Tom Kalin’s 1992 Swoon was a signature feature from the New Queer Cinema movement. Its dramatization of the 1920s Leopold and Loeb case seemed arresting for both its crisp black-and-white photography and flagrant disregard for still-prevalent sentiments that gay screen imagery need always be case-pleadingly positive. Here was talented Kalin, making his first feature about two notorious Chicago thrill-killers — privileged young gay lovers who murdered a 14-year-old boy they vaguely knew simply to fulfill their self-identification as Nietzschean supermen. However, their perfect crime was detected quickly, to public revulsion that no doubt cast a long, dark shadow over gay-rights struggles for decades afterward.

Swoon was striking but superficial — a cool-looking, attitudinal performance piece riding on gallery aesthetics, fashionable moral ambiguity, and Kalin’s professed admiration for the real-life protagonists as anarchic revolutionist souls. (To which I say: bullshit.) It certainly got him enough attention to leg-up a career. Yet he’s only now finished a second feature.

Two feature films in 16 years provide thin grounds for trend-spotting. Still, it’s hard to ignore that Savage Grace is another true-crime dramatization involving murder and decadence within the social elite, one that replaces Swoon‘s amoral Jazz Age gay Chicagoan youths with postwar transatlantic jet-setters. Kalin has a Dominick Dunne–like nose for bloodlust among the powerful and privileged. It led him to the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland by her son Antony, an act that subsequently exposed years of incest, adultery, substance abuse, questionable parenting, and rampant craziness — all within the glittering A-list milieux befitting beneficiaries of the Bakelite Plastics fortune

The 1985 book Savage Grace used interviews, letters, and diary entries to tell the gruesome story in first-person pastiche. Redirecting that saga toward conventional dramatic narrative, Kalin and scenarist Howard A. Rodman can’t replicate that tome’s multiplicity of voices, nor do they try — after all, the toxic mixture of lurid acts and privileged environs inevitably compels interest. But just as Swoon displayed a detached appreciation of — rather than deep insight into — its glamorously bent protagonists, Savage Grace exhibits an infatuation with the glitterati who turn out scandalous freakazoids minus any palpable sense of what went wrong.

"Everything that happened, happened because of love," says grown-up Antony (Eddie Redmayne) in voiceover. But love isn’t the precise term one would apply to life with his high-end transient family: codependency, manipulation, and massive narcissism are more apt. Raised poor but pathologically ambitious, ex-model Barbara (Julianne Moore) snagged old money — at least by US standards — when she snagged Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane).

Their union already had degenerated into relentless social climbing and mutual cheating — along with the occasional hatefuck — by the time little Antony arrives. Prone to smother-motherdom and jags of irresponsible neglect, Barbara raises him to become a filigreed rich-hippie Eurail dandy. He gains a male lover, then a girlfriend poached by Dad, then becomes involved in a three-way with Mom and her suave older beard (Hugh Dancy). Meanwhile, scenes shift from Manhattan to Catalonia to Paris to London. A boy could go crazy from so much disorienting change — though you might not realize from this film that the true-life Antony had exhibited signs of schizophrenia at an early age.

Also missing from Savage Grace are such telling real details as the Baekelands’ refusal to allow Antony therapy, or Antony’s prior knife-wielding threats toward Mom, or her failed attempts to make him heterosexual by hiring dates for him. These elements might have enriched a movie that comes off as entirely outside-in. Kalin’s visual attention to lifestyle particulars doesn’t deepen these characters. It merely accessorizes them.

Moore may be incapable of a bad performance, yet this seemingly ideal role elicits one of her thinnest characterizations. She’s duly alluring and grasping, and unpredictably profane when she’s raging. But Kalin and Rodman haven’t given this monster mother any substance. Considered by many to be the story’s true villain, Dillane’s neglectful Brooks makes a too-vague impression. However, the reliable Dancy is excellent as a dedicated follower of fashion, and Redmayne’s nervous eyes convey the ratcheting instability of a boy-man who instinctively knows his worldview is tragically wrong.

Sixteen years haven’t made much difference for Kalin. Even in color, his shallow vision of imploding personalities feels like tabloid artsploitation. Other New Queer Cinema mavericks have gone on to make films that challenge artistic, thematic, and commercial assumptions. In comparison, Savage Grace is oddly conservative. *

SAVAGE GRACE

Opens June 27 at Bay Area theaters

www.ifcfilms.com

Frameline 32: The Horror, the horror

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Will queers ever get the horror movie they deserve? Granted, with the recent coast-to-coast ratifications of same-sex marriage, LGBT folk have more pressing issues than debates over genre cinema on their mind. Besides, that intransitive verb — deserve — provides an extra soupçon of tastelessness to an already loaded question: wasn’t the golden age of the celluloid closet defined by giving onscreen queers "what they deserved," doling out silent suicides and grisly homicides as the price of representation? And aren’t we faced with enough real-life horrors? Homophobia and AIDS are still killers on the loose. So why appeal for terror?

To put it simply, there is pleasure in being scared. And to put it more complicatedly, there can be empowerment in that pleasure. Two of New Queer Cinema’s most lauded films — Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), and its "Horror" section in particular, and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) — critically queered horror’s generic conventions and Hollywood’s coded positioning of gay men as monstrous. A few years later, queer critic Paul Burston and feminist critic Amy Taubin separately penned defenses of Cruising (1980) — arguably the first gay slasher film — and Basic Instinct (1992), based on then-contrarian grounds of personal enjoyment.

Since then we have entered a post-Scream world where everyone knows horror’s hanky codes. Rewiring them for LGBT audiences doesn’t always yield a film the caliber of Poison, just as enjoying "bad" images of gays and lesbians doesn’t necessitate a printed confession. While casual homophobia is still permitted in mainstream releases such as Hostel, the price of representation, at least for most of the handful of horror films that tour the LGBT festival circuit, seems to be mediocrity. I know I wasn’t the only one woefully disappointed with the West Hollywood bloodbath HellBent (2004). And let’s not even get into Scab (2005).

Luckily for all the rainbow-colored Fangoria fans still bloodthirsty after catching local director Flynn Witmeyer’s Imp of Satan earlier this year at Another Hole in the Head, late June is bearing an unexpected slasher crop of queer horror films. It includes Dead Channels’ one-off presentation of Sean Abley’s Socket (2007) and some scary fare at Frameline’s SF International LGBT Film Festival. (Full disclosure: I was on the staff of last year’s festival.)

A sexy sci-fi tinged thriller whose ideas are sometimes brighter than its execution, Socket puts a queer twist on Cronenberg-ian body horror. After surviving a freak electrocution, Dr. Bill Matthews (butch thing Derek Long) strikes up a relationship with his hunky caretaker, hospital intern Craig Murphy (Matthew Montgomery), and sparks literally begin to fly. Craig reveals that he is a fellow survivor and introduces Bill to a covert group of energy junkies who juice up together via a portable generator. Talk about a circuit party! Now insatiable, Bill surgically enhances his and Craig’s socket fetish — and adds an extra jolt to their sex life — but his increasingly manic behavior leads to the kind of shock he never could have anticipated.

It is perhaps too easy to read Bill’s degenerative energy dependency as an allegory for meth addiction, and the film certainly invites such comparisons. More interesting is Socket‘s rewiring of gay sex, with Bill and Craig’s retractable, fang-like wrist plugs and dorsal wrist sockets multiplying the permutations of top and bottom as orienting poles of identity and desire. It’s something I wish the film spent more time on.

Abley also produced and has a supporting role in Jaymes Thompson’s The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, one of three horror features screening at this year’s Frameline fest. What Socket has in brains, the sophomoric and arch Bed makes up for in buckets of blood. A Showtime original series’ worth of gay and lesbian stereotypes roll up to the remote Sahara Salvation Inn, only to find out too late that the B ‘n’ B is a front for the Bible-thumping proprietresses to do "God’s work." There is a certain glee in watching the asshole Mr. Leather or naive lesbian folksinger characters get violently disposed of — if only because they’re so obnoxious — but Thompson’s film wheezes through its final 20 minutes with all the faux-hilarity and dull-edged political commentary of a Mad TV sketch.

Dan Gildark’s ambitious Cthulhu more successfully mobilizes horror’s ability to reflect the zeitgeist back at us as something uncanny and unsettling. Screen adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s writings usually don’t work out well (perhaps because of "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents," as the author wrote at the opening of 1926’s Call of Cthulhu), but Gildark is smart enough to stop short of showing the full-tentacled monty. Instead, he cultivates an atmosphere of mounting dread and unstoppable evil that is extremely faithful to Lovecraft’s bitter misanthropy — and applicable to the last dark days of the Bush régime. Did I mention Tori Spelling appears as a Dagon-worshipping baby mama?

Another Frameline fest brings another hot mess of a Bruce LaBruce movie, Otto; or Up With Dead People! This one can be summed up in three words: gay zombie sex. Really, the gash-fucking scene is both the film’s highlight and LaBruce’s lasting contribution to porn and horror. There’s a loose story here about the titular incredibly strange gay twink who stopped living and became a heartbroken zombie (and the ridiculous goth auteur who makes him an underground film star), but as with all LaBruce films, that narrative thread mainly stitches together a series of amateurish sex scenes. Still, I would take LaBruce’s messiest effort over another Hellbent any day.

Coda: it’s worth pointing out that some of the most radical LGBT reinterpretations of horror in recent memory have occurred off screen. Kevin Killian’s Argento Series (2001) and Daphne Gottlieb’s Final Girl (2003) both energize horror cinema to create a queer poetics of loss. Killian finds a way of writing about the AIDS crisis through Dario Argento’s bloody and supernatural gialli, while Gottlieb ventriloquizes a dozen slasher film heroines who got away — along with a Greek chorus of academics — to reframe "what it feels like for a girl" as a matter of posttraumatic survival. Read them and be frightened, and inspired.

CTHULHU

Sat/21, 11:15 p.m., Castro

THE GAY BED & BREAKFAST OF TERROR

Fri/20 11:45 p.m., Castro

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE

June 27, 11 p.m., Castro

SOCKET

Wed/18, 7 and 9:15 p.m., $5

Hypnodrome Theatre

575 10th St., SF

www.deadchannels.com

Frameline 32: Sex changes

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TAKE ONE In Iranian director Tanaz Eshagian’s Be Like Others, fear hovers over a whole nation, leading to schizophrenic behavior. By concentrating on three different individuals before and after they went through sexual reassignment operations in Iran, Eshagian reveals an incredibly sad and asphyxiating society — one where homosexuality is banned and punishable by death but changing one’s sex is legal.

No matter how progressive the act of changing one’s sex might sound, Be Like Others proves that it has conservative and oppressive connotations in Iran. Most of the people considering surgery in Eshagian’s film do so because they feel that it’s their only alternative to a gay male or lesbian identity that involves disrespect, harassment, and the possibility of a horrible death. Yet instead of finding acceptance post-operation, many are even more alienated.

The reason for this insanity, as explained by one official: being gay or a cross-dresser allegedly disrupts the “social order.” In other words, gender-bending blurs the distinctions between the sexes, making Iranian social role-assignment — largely determined by sex — a confusing task.

Mind-boggling and utterly scary, Be Like Others is a great comment on people’s obsessive need to label and compartmentalize, and a statement about our disgusting fear of anything that lacks clear delineation. At first, Eshagian’s documentary might make you feel lucky to live in a country where measures against homosexuality are not as extreme. But as it sinks in, it will make you question how far removed the situation in Iran really is from that in the United States. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO At first the Iranian laws that make Tanaz Eshagian’s movie necessary seem not just cruel, but absurdly and arbitrarily so. How could homosexuality be illegal and punishable by death, while the government not only sanctions sexual-reassignment surgery but acts as its facilitator?

In Be Like Others, the answer comes from Cleric Kariminiya, a so-called Theological Expert on Transexuality, during an information session for prospective patients and their families. While Islamic law explicitly forbids homosexuality, he explains, there is no such explicit restriction on changing one’s gender.

In other words, the binary sexual politics of Iranian authority are undermined by the existence of queer citizens, whose mannerisms or predilections suggest a continuum. Eshagian’s powerful film follows a few citizens who, too visibly close to the middle of that continuum, are forced to decide between the suffering and danger of their current lot and an abrupt surgical introduction into social legitimacy.

The decision-making process these individuals face is extremely difficult viewing. Those people who successfully transition often have no other option but sex work to survive. Suicide is rampant.

Eshagian’s project is exceptional because it leaves the viewer enlighteningly confused about Iranian attitudes toward gender and law. The most fascinating character in the film is a transgender woman dedicated to the care of patients in transition. She is supportive, devoted to her patients’ well-being, and fully entrenched in the traditional Iranian views of men and women. (Jason Shamai)

BE LIKE OTHERS

Mon/23, 7 p.m., Victoria

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