Music

Slim’s slimed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER There are eight jillion stories in the naked, nervous-Naughties city, and one of the increasingly common tales is that of the wannabe slicker who lays out that down payment for a little piece of gritty ‘n’ shitty, gorgeous ‘n’ porous, wild ‘n’ wooly San Francisco. And then supposed slick realizes, "Hey, I’m tired of stepping over panhandlers, looking for parking, and listening to car alarms, building fans, BART musicians, construction blare, and city hubbub in general." Translation: "I actually want to live in Concord, San Carlos, or Corte Madera." So the square spoiler in this happily unholy round hole of a town decides to wreck things for everyone.

That sort of inane, fish-outta-water resolve is, unfortunately, threatening Slim’s, the linchpin of the 11th Street–SoMa club scene since chart topper Boz Scaggs first opened the respected nightspot two decades ago, the site of many a memorable night of music and a venue that, legend has it, bands like Built to Spill have pledged their loyalty to because of its dedication to stellar sound. One of Slim’s neighbors tipped me off last month that the hall — which has consistently passed all sound tests conducted by the city’s Entertainment Commission — was being besieged weekly by a lone complainer living in Juniper Alley. All of this came to a head in December 2007 when the accuser ordered citizen’s arrests of two of Slim’s night managers on three occasions — after, Entertainment Commission industry representative Terrance Alan says, police refused to issue noise-violation citations of their own because they couldn’t hear any vioutf8g sound issuing from Slim’s. The arrests have led the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control to bring an enforcement action against Slim’s liquor license, which may close the club for 15 to 25 days after an April hearing.

"She has been threatening to do this for a while," Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday told me. The complaining neighbor and her partner have been registering noise complaints for the past two years, Holliday added, though no other neighbors have complained, and in 2000 all of the area’s condo and live-work residents signed a deed restriction making it clear that the district is a mixed-use neighborhood subject to noise, odors, and other industrial activities 24-7. Nonetheless, Holliday continued, "she calls the police on average four nights a week. The Entertainment Commission has gone into their house and done readings in the house, done readings out in front of house, and we do readings in front of their house every night with a decibel meter on the most sensitive reading you can get, and we are always compliant. It didn’t satisfy them."

One of the charges against a Slim’s manager was dismissed, but both staffers are still due to go to court for the two arrests in February and March. "I’m hoping they let these kids off," Holliday said. "I’ve gone to [San Francisco Police Department’s] Southern Station and asked them to wait for me to come over or Boz to come over and arrest us. It’s not fair that employees get arrested. We’re the two owners that live the closest, and both of us would take tickets before our employees."

Holliday is confident — after going into mediation, consulting with sound guru Charles Salter, and taking actions like installing a new insulated roof and a special four-tiered back door — that a resolution is possible. Still, the idea that one sour grape can pull down another great venue is troubling. "This is a situation where you can see how the system, which was designed to have respect for all the citizenry, can be used by this vexed complainer," Alan said. "They’ve created this history of complaints based only on their complaints. It’s going to cost Slim’s a lot of money and cost their managers a lot of sleepless nights, who want to go on and have a life. And they won’t be able to if they are found criminally liable for this. Imagine, you’re just doing your job …"

And hey, that’s another reason why so many of us come to this cow town in the first place: to work and to cozy up closer to that golden cow pumping pomegranatinis, the raucous crafters of musical ambrosia, et al. Fess up: you didn’t move to SF to feel good about driving a Prius or down Starbucks. What you can’t find regularly in Concord or Corte Madera — and what so many of us continue to crave — is that non-government-regulated minimum requirement of fun: loud, smelly, still safe, inconvenient, sprinkled with homeless parking valets, and still unlike anything you’ll get in the sticks.

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

HOWLIN RAIN MAKE THEIR MOVE

Howlin Rain and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller has plenty of news about: HR’s superfine new LP, Magnificent Fiend, will be released March 4 on SF’s Birdman label and HR’s new imprint, Columbia Records cohoncho Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Why jump? Miller told me he was enticed by larger studio budgets and the opportunity to be produced by Rubin, whom the frontman praised as someone who "seems to chip away at all those extraneous things and just draw out the essential fluids onto the tape.

"Those are the reasons," Miller said. "This is not the type of record deal where you get a million-dollar check and drive away in a Rolls-Royce, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, cool, man, they bought me a Corvette, and now everyone can just go get wasted on coke and it doesn’t matter now, man!’ And then, whoa, a year later you’re kicked off the label, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, I blew my $2 million advance now. This sucks! Now I’m a fucking nobody!’ That’s not this."

HOWLIN RAIN

With Black Mountain

Mon/4, 8 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Top o’ the world, ma

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› duncan@sfbg.com

My ex-girlfriend hipped me to TopR, short for Top Ramen, around 2003. We were driving in her car, and she cracked open the newly released Burning the Candle at Both Ends (Earthlings/DWA) and slid it into the dash. I’d like to say it changed my life, but to be honest, I can’t remember it. I do remember that she described TopR as this homeless, couch-surfing rapper who’d slept on her previous boyfriend’s couch. It was classic case of his reputation and lifestyle preceding his music.

Later I met TopR — or Topper Holiday, as he’s ceased using his first name — at 111 Minna Gallery, where I still work a side gig as a doorman. Throughout my years there he’s been a semiregular fixture, posted at the end of the bar, skeezing free drinks. He’s well loved but has this Dennis the Menace air surrounding him, like, "Oh, Topper’s here. Here comes trouble." One night in Minna alley, I remember him — a big, bescruffed white dude in a fitted New Era cap, somewhat rotund and more than a little faded — striking up a conversation with some bland, buttoned-down types, telling them he was a rapper and following up with a drunken freestyle. I came away feeling that it was a little sad, like he was busking in a BART station, trying to impress the squares.

"Fuck being glamorous — I’m cantankerous." So goes the first line on "Frankenstein’s Topster," the opener off his latest, fifth album, Marathon of Shame (Gurp City). It was playing when I walked into Dalva on 16th Street to say hello to my friend Toph One and reintroduce myself to TopR. And quite a reintroduction it was: even before Top starts rapping, the track is a fucking winner, anchored by a sample of Black Sabbath’s "A National Acrobat," the driving guitar riff married to an überfunky drumbeat by producer Dick Nasty.

A good hip-hop album is like a good comedy record: the shit’s got to be so sharp that you want to listen to it more than once, want to scan back on the CD and point out lines to your friends who are riding with you. In Top’s case it’s an apt comparison since he’s influenced by stand-up comedians as much as by other rappers and samples Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks on his previous disc, Cheap Laughs for Dead Comedians (Gurp City, 2006). Marathon is packed with lines that’ll make other rappers wish they’d written them, from favorite one-liners like "Puttin’ squares in their place like Tetris" to heartfelt couplets such as "I don’t want to fit into this banality factory / Where together we can all make profit from tragedy."

It stands to reason that TopR can come up with witty rhymes: he’s been rapping since he was 12. Now 30, he gained his rep as a battle rapper at parties and clubs. "From ’93 until 2000 all I did was battle," he says over a pint at the Richmond District’s 540 Club. "I didn’t record music. I didn’t put out anything. I just made a reputation for myself through battling. If I was putting out albums in ’95, ’96, I might’ve been an actual artist like Living Legends, Atmosphere, and Hieroglyphics. You can only be a battle rapper for so long. After a while there’s not very much creative outlet for it. You can only make fun of someone for so long before you actually want to express your real problems and your real feelings about life. And you do that through writing songs."

In a time when your average radio rap track has more advertisements for sneakers and pricey booze than a copy of GQ, TopR represents a more compelling side of the hip-hop spectrum: the storied tradition of rapper as traveling salesman, hawking CDs "out the trunk," or in his case, out the messenger bag, since, as he says on "Siren Song," "the Muni is my chariot." And while he often calls himself out as lazy in his songs, TopR’s tale is a cross between the 1984 runaway-punk movie Suburbia and the classic Horatio Alger story.

A self-described "troubled kid," TopR left his parents’ home in Santa Cruz at 15, living in squats and hitchhiking to San Francisco to hit open mics and do graffiti. He was arrested for vandalism, went back home, and left again, sleeping on couches if he was lucky and outside if he wasn’t. He attributes his notoriety in the bar scene to necessity: "The fact that I was homeless — I had to be in bars every goddamned night, looking for places to stay. I had nothing better to do."

Slumming, bumming, and battling eventually led to some Greyhound cross-country tours and a devoted following of party kids and misfits, unhappy with the status quo and, like him, struggling to get by. There’s no shortage of the usual hip-hop bravado on Marathon: "I’m a piss artist who spits darkness at bitch targets," TopR raps on "Siren Song," "<0x2009>’cause the music that’s honest is the music that hits hardest." True, but the track isn’t merely empty braggadocio: it’s nothing less than an existentialist crisis with a beat, one rapper’s The Sickness unto Death, asking the eternal questions of the artist and, ultimately, everyone who’s been "up against it."

And while it’s the struggle — and the willingness to cop to it — that makes Marathon so compelling, it seems TopR might finally be on the bus toward Figuring It All Out. On a tour in 2005 he met his fiancée, Kelly-Anne, perhaps the muse of "Siren’s Song," bartending at one of his shows in Asheville, NC. He stayed in the South for more than a year before getting an apartment, with a couch and a bed, in San Francisco’s Sunset District. "I came up as ‘the homeless kid who slept on couches,’<0x2009>" he explains. "But I was good at graffiti young, and I was a good rapper. I got away with a lot of stuff that some punk little kid wouldn’t because people respected me for my talents or whatever. But I’ve mellowed out." Here Top takes a contemplative pull on his pint. "I mean, I’m fuckin’ 30. I’ve got a dog now."

I’m going to do my part to go tell it on the mountain, to put this disc on when we’re cruising down the street, to make sure you hear the hilarious lines and crucial cuts. But on the other hand, one reason why it’s so good is because you ran into him in the bar and bought a disc so he could have beer money. TopR may have reached escape velocity from his day job, but he’s still orbiting the homelessness of his recent past. The line that sums up TopR for me is from "I’m on One" on Cheap Laughs: "It doesn’t take a genius to see that we’re livin’ stressful / The secret to my success is that I’m unsuccessful." It might be better for him if he got the juice to leave orbit altogether and rocket into the outer galaxies of hip-hop superstardom, but would it be better for his music if he weren’t "livin’ stressful?" Living hand to mouth myself, I’m heartened to see someone who keeps grindin’, who tries to live a creative life in the face of SF-size rent, the approaching years, and a music industry that may never give a shit. To quote TopR’s MySpace page, "Even when nothing goes right I still prevail."

TOPR CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Quest, Conceit, Delinquent Monastery, Thunderhut Project, Ras One, and DJ Delivery

Fri/1, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Nailed

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The name should tip you off right from the get-go: the Pine Box Boys. Now, I don’t want to venture any guesses about your mama, but my mama didn’t raise any fools, so when I hear the words pine box, I see the words dead body. Then I shudder: caskets creep me out.

Not so for the San Francisco foursome. These long-haired death defiers give the Grim Reaper a nipple twist or two with their waggishly pitch-black tales of murder, misery, and mayhem, and we shouldn’t want it any other way. Gallows humor has been around just as long as we as a species have been able to tell our stories, and this raggle-taggle band of bluegrass ne’er-do-wells is a bold keeper of the tradition, knowing exactly how to spin a dark and bloody yarn and still bust a gut while doing it.

So let’s consider the pine box: basic, humble, and nothing highfalutin compared to the mind-dizzying, bankroll-sapping array of caskets out there nowadays. It’s strictly old-school: no fancy modern gilded inlays or polished brass handles here but rather a nice, solid vintage construction ready for getting the job done. Much like the Pine Box Boys, who — well, they don’t do fancy, from what I’ve seen.

There are no state-of-the-art production techniques on either 2005’s Arkansas Killing Time or 2006’s Stab! (both Hi Horse), nor are there nods in the direction of any recent, decidedly rockist musical trends. Instead, this largely acoustic quartet wreak unholy havoc from the sounds of their grandpappies’ era — and probably even that of their grandpappies’ grandpappies. All those banjos and strummed guitars might conjure images of barn dances, but underneath the floorboards lays a trail of dead.

The band — fronted by hillbilly-twanged, wide-eyed maniac Lester Raww — has referred to its singular strain of mockingly malevolent roots music as "darkgrass." I’ve also seen it described as "Southern horrorbilly," a tag that makes sense in view of the Pine Box Boys’ thrilling, ante-upping delivery on subjects such as murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia. Supported by banjo thwacker Possum Carvidi’s hot-wired backing vocals, Raww’s chronicling of the most sordid of transgressions gives the same sort of glorious release as a slasher flick, assuming one is willing to suspend disbelief. Not that this requires much effort: Raww’s whoppers are tautly constructed and often brimming with chuckleworthy turns of phrase, and the frenzied rhythm section of Col. Timothy Leather on bass and "Your Uncle" Dodds on drums provides a rollicking, engaging backdrop for surrendering to such giddy, grisly fictions.

"One look into my eyes, and a wise man would lock up his daughters," Raww sings with devilish charm on Arkansas Killing Time‘s "When the Moon Moves the Waters," before going on to explain his blood thirst with all of the juicy detailed satisfaction of a Clive Barker or, hell, Nick Cave. The specifics of the beginnings and middles vary from song to song, but they all end the same: someone dies. And someone laughs — at the ridiculous brilliance of it all. The easily offended will miss out on the point of the Pine Box Boys, but hey, they’ll miss out on all the fun too.

THE PINE BOX BOYS

Feb. 9, 8 p.m., $13

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Digging the new-old roots

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yodeling is African? Well, one could certainly trace the practice from the Ituri of the Congolese rainforest, described as the first people by ancient Egyptian chroniclers, to country icons such as Jimmie Rodgers — who, incidentally, recorded with Louis Armstrong — but also to less-explored sonic shores like James Brown’s iconic scream or Marvin Gaye’s version limning his legendary 1970s LP cycle. However, if this is too far a leap for you to make, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ appearance as part of the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival might be a bit of a head-scratcher. The Chocolate Drops — Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson — don’t straight-up yodel, but their harmonies and banjo-and-fiddle-anchored instrumentation reach back not only to the halcyon days when Africans in America entertained themselves at fiddle-scored frolics but all the way to the griot tradition of Western Sudan.

To be sure, the Durham, NC, band — yes, their moniker invokes the Tennessee Chocolate Drops and Mississippi Mud Steppers of yore — is neither superurban nor contemporary. Its members play strictly prewar African American string-band repertoire, as evidenced by their current release, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (Music Maker): see "Tom Dula," "Ol’ Corn Likker," and yep, the ever-contested "Dixie." Still, being young, hip children of the postdesegregation era, the trio have a musical expression and an aesthetic that are informed as much by the hybridity and daring of the 1960s and ’70s golden age of black rock and psychedelic soul as by classic country and western and ethnographic studies of the genre’s African antecedents. If only by pursuing their dusky twang muse in reaction to the deplorable, moribund state of today’s urban music, these Drops live in a world that differs from that of their 1920s and ’30s predecessors chiefly in that (a) the wages of desegregation include black audiences’ will to eschew arts reminiscent of their past of bondage and hard times and (b) the dominant society’s prevailing and most popular stereotype of blackness has an inner-city face — "Makes me wanna holler!" — that rejects any other ways of being or seeing.

Some of my colleagues — and doubtless myself — have been obliquely accused of holding up emerging progressive black artists on the rock scene and satellites such as the Drops as examples of uplift and enshrining their hard work beneath a welter of sociological wankery stretching back into the prewar mists of time to Talented Tenth big daddy W.E.B. DuBois. Yet if some of that giddiness at Afro-futurist striving is sloughed off, there remains the central, inescapable fact that in much of the West, rock is still seen as "black music played by white people" and country is this nation’s most racially separatist genre.

Much was made this past fall of Rissi Palmer’s Billboard debut with "Country Girl," since it was the first such charting by an African American in the two decades after the long-forgotten Dona Mason’s fleeting dent with "Green Eyes (Cryin’ Those Blue Tears)." Critics worked overtime to display color-blind bona fides, bending themselves over backward in the attempt to downplay the role of race in Palmer’s ascent and note the singularity of the event while also sugarcoating their general consensus on the disc’s mediocrity. Personally, I wish Sister Palmer much success and far better material plus production, but what struck me most was the cover of her eponymous release. Only a sliver of Palmer’s brown face is to be seen, the overabundance of russet curls perhaps meant as commerce-inducing allusion to the Great Reba. It’s certainly baffling that 42 years since Charley Pride’s debut was released sans artist photo, one still has to mince around difference.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops have more to overcome, seeing as they play an earlier, unplugged form of twang that’s light-years away from not only the patriotic-pandering, reheated Southern boogie and suburban soccer mom–and–sippy cup sentiments of mainstream Nashville but also the ambitious incursions of Palmer and Cowboy Troy and the recent bluegrass syncretism of Merle Haggard and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. Now sharing management with fellow Carolinians the Avett Brothers, the Drops are garnering just acclaim from roots-friendly media and making fruitful incursions into important arenas, like the annual MerleFest. Yes, the trio are benefiting from both the breakdown of a music industry in turmoil that’s reliant on streams from independents and a more reflective moment among media and listeners who have come of age in an era of omnivorous multiculturalism. And let us not discount the Drops’ sheer talent and charm.

Nevertheless, as a mere Negress observer, this critic finds her attention inevitably straying to the lack of intraracial institutions to advocate for artists in the Drops’ vein — in addition to an infrastructure for developing and sustaining nonwhite audiences’ taste for the music. Since, y’know, they’re isolated from the rural. (Must Dona be retroactively screwed and chopped?) It would be nice to see the band embraced as part of a continuum by progressive audiences, just as there’s some energy around soul-folk as a viable trend. Will the Drops’ version of young fogydom garner as much breathless critical attention and community building as the so-called freak-folk scene does? Of course, cross-cultural exchange is possible: current Nashvegas superstar and Troy’s boy "Big" Kenny Alphin traveled to Sudan last October to do his bit for the struggle and got the country press to cover his contribution. Now if only the media would turn its attention to the best acolytes of medieval traditions created by Africans not abject but divinely inspired.

THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Feb. 7, 8 p.m., $18.50–<\d>$19.50

Freight and Salvage Coffee House

1111 Addison, Berk.

(510) 548-1761

www.thefreight.org

CRITICAL ‘GRASS

The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival runs Feb. 1–9. For information on other shows and events, go to www.sfbluegrass.org.

Hey, hey. hey

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m getting superfrustrated. I don’t have the highest sex drive, but it is there. However, I can’t understand why my brain and my body tell me I want to do something that inevitably makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. Even with lube, sex leaves me sore for hours. I try to just give my boyfriend blow jobs so I can avoid having to have sex. I’m 21 and have been sexually active for about three years, and I just always figured everything would get better.

And it’s not just intercourse. I can’t even get satisfaction from oral sex or masturbating. It feels good, but then, instead of feeling really good, like you’d expect an orgasm to feel, suddenly the pleasure just kind of floats away. If that’s an orgasm, it freaking sucks. It is unpleasant. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Can’t Get Me No

Dear No:

Well, you’re feeling unsatisfied because you are unsatisfied, but I don’t suppose that observation will be much use to you. I believe that your sex drive is still hanging in there because you’re a normal, healthy girl, albeit one who apparently has some issues (we call them issues when we don’t know what else to call them) about sex. In fact, I’m not even sure you have issues. I think maybe you’ve just had some pretty disappointing sex, and now you’re so expecting it to be disappointing that you’re just kind of jumping straight to the disappointment part and saving yourself some time.

I hate to punt this over to the usual suspects, but I think I have to: there are books — lots of them — on learning to masturbate and becoming orgasmic, and there are some spectacular toys out there now, toys so good that I am not altogether positive I can still promise that using them will not interfere with partnered sex, but that is obviously a topic and a worry (an issue) for another time. The old classics are Lonnie Barbach (reads like a therapist writing for Redbook) and Betty Dodson (reads like someone you’d meet at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival circa 1989, naked), but they have accumulated an Amazon wish list full of competition. Poke around in the reviews and see if you can find someone whose voice you can stand, buy their book or DVD and whatever basic toys they recommend, then buy yourself some time and use them. Oh, and if there’s a boyfriend in the picture, tell him to just hang on — you’ve got some stuff to do, after which he’s welcome to come back and try again. If this works, it should be worth the wait.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one sex partner in my life (high school to the present). My problem seems pretty basic: sex doesn’t feel all that great. I mean, the desire’s there, but after a few minutes the pleasure part just kind of slips away, despite my best efforts to keep it there, and the rest either feels like smushing body parts or else is unpleasant and sort of painful. I don’t understand how it can start off feeling good and then just go away. Maybe I’m on the right track: When I first started having sex (three years ago), it always felt pretty neutral. Now at least it feels good for a little while. I can’t masturbate to orgasm either. It is incredibly frustrating to want to have sex even knowing I always go away from it unsatisfied. What is wrong with me? How do I fix it?’

Love,

No, No, No

Dear No:

I had to reread very carefully to make sure you and your doppelgänger are not the same person, but look — you’re slightly younger! And very, very faintly less hopeless, I think, but that is open to interpretation. I do find it slightly heartening that you are experiencing a bit of pleasure now, since I’d have to agree that it would be difficult to get motivated in the complete absence of anything more exciting than "neutral" sensation.

It’s neither fair nor just but is common for women to be out of touch with their sexual-response cycles in a way that simply doesn’t occur very often in males. I hesitate — nay, refuse! — to get into any historical-political reasons why this might be so. (It’s not that they’re not interesting, but they are unfruitful and dreadfully distracting, which is exactly what we don’t need when we’re already having trouble concentrating.) I’m afraid you too will have to buy media products and a vibrator that tickles at least your fancy, put the boyfriend on hold, and get practicing. I wish I could wave a magic wand for you, but I think the motor in mine is burning out. They don’t last forever.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

A shout out to Pants Yell!

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By Alex Felsinger

Until now, indie-pop band Pants Yell! seemed as if they were doing everything in their power to stay under the radar. First, they named their group Pants Yell! – seriously, what the hell? – and then in 2003 they released their first album on cassette through an obscure German imprint. This was followed closely by their home-country debut on Asaurus – a small-run, handmade CD-R label. Then, to make sure no one besides Massachusetts locals and a few computer nerds ever hear their music, they’ve hardly toured at all in the last five years.

But now they’re making a move. Just released last month, their fourth album, Alison Statton (Soft Abuse), makes a few slight changes to their downhearted and downtempo pop melodies. The three-piece brought in a small horn section for a few songs, as well as some female friends to sing harmonies, which blend nicely with the lead vocalist’s nasally, perfect-for-pop voice.

But really, even with all the changes, they’re still as minimalist as a bubblegum version of Shellac. The biggest difference comes with the presentation: the release is a professionally duplicated CD with a jewel case and everything. And their new record label actually took the time to send the Guardian a promotional copy. This alone is evidence that Pants Yell! has some big plans.

Video Mutants: Problem solving with Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad

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I knew I’d reached some level of pixel heaven a few minutes after putting Paper Rad’s Trash Talking (Load) into the DVD player. Or was it into the hard drive? Either way, that pixel portal to humor epiphanies opened when an animated character stopped jive walking and started telling me – in an ornery fashion – that the disc I was watching had no menu. Since the day of that digital bitch slap, I’ve encountered other brilliant uses of DVD formatting – the remote control menu of TV Carnage’s vintage-new Ouch Television My Brain Hurts is a maze of horrors, for example – but none quite so simply brilliant. The fact that it was followed by a sugared cereal version of a Duchamp-like explosion in a shingle factory helped. Paper Rad videos are seizures of pleasure.

Excerpt from Trash Talking DVD

Their latest video work subdues the frenzy, though. Some of the video mutants in this issue use YouTube to step outside of white cubes, while others – such as Kalup Linzy — are creating their own answers to TV genres. With Problem Solvers, Paper Rad are taking the latter idea to a paradoxical extreme, seeing what they can do within the time constraints of a common sitcom format. I recently spoke to collective member Jacob Ciocci.

SFBG: I know you have a performance at the Sundance Film Festival. Will it be a bombardment?
Jacob Ciocci: Cory [Arcangel] is going to do a couple of performances, and we’re going to play live music to Problem Solvers, the new 23-minute video.
It will be a bombardment, but not as much overload as some previous performances and videos, because Problem Solvers is a narrative work that tells the story of six characters.

Trailer for Trash Talking DVD

Product overload! The latest MacWorld post ever

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Yeah, yeah, this is like two weeks late — we were drunk(er), and our minds were still struggling to encompass the sheer overwhelmingness of it all. Guardian assistant art director Ben Hopfer toured MacWorld. Here’s his report.

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12 iGalaxies

Ah MacWorld, the one place in the world where I can completely geek out and still not be the biggest dork in the building. I’ve been going to MacWorld for almost 10 years now; originally because I got to talk my dad into buying me a bunch of cool computer shit I couldn’t afford myself and now so I can play around with a bunch of cool computer shit I still can’t afford. Never less here’s my quick and dirty breakdown of this years’ event.

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Mac me in slick Louis

My first thought this years MacWorld was where are all the computers? It seemed like every booth was either for speakers for you iPod, a case for your iPod/iPhone, or some fancy smancy bag for your laptop. Now at one point I had a nice rubber case for my iPod, but all it was useful for what getting dust and grime on itself. Now I know there’s millions and millions of iPod’s out there, but how can one product spawn so many companies wanting to wrap it up on rubber and plastic cases? Haven’t we hit critical mass yet?

The same can be said for all the companies trying to sell speakers for the iPod. It seemed like every other booth had something you could stick your iPod in. I mean being able to listen to your music without the need of earbuds is awesome, but do they all have to look so ridiculous? I mean until recently I was just using a cheap pair or battery powered speakers to play my music, do we really need a toilet paper holder with built in speakers so we can listen to music while we take a crap?

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iWipe

Cover me: Embracing Burial’s noirish dubstep

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By Todd Lavoie

Let’s get lost, shall we? Lately, whenever I’m in the mood to disorient myself in some head-scratching sonic geography, I reach for my copy of Untrue (Hyperdub/Cargo), the November-released sophomore-stunner from the let-the-music-speak-for-itself dubstep savant Burial.

While the willfully anonymous English electro-experimentalist’s self-titled debut was certainly an impressive introduction to his – and here we are guessing it’s a “he,” based on what little I’ve seen in the way of public statements from whoever’s lurking behind the evocative moniker – dead-city tour-guiding, Untrue feels like a bold leap forward.

More inventive, more cohesive, and definitely more affecting, the disc isn’t reflective of a change in aesthetic, but rather a fully confident refinement of those artistic ideals. I could stay in these headspaces for days, but honestly I’d be a bit afraid for myself when it came time to emerge back out of ’em. The culture shock might be too great.

Video Mutants: Kalup Linzy washes your eyes (and mind) out with soaps

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Welcome to the party, welcome to the show. What are sweetberry club cakes? Wouldn’t you like to know!

To find out, you’ll just have to listen to “SweetBerry Shuffle” by Kalup Linzy, where Labisha will break it down for you. It’s worth the search: Whether it manifests as phone-crazed soap opera societal satire, animation, painting, or music, Linzy’s creativity — which can be glimpsed and heard on his own site and MySpace pages and seen in person through his gallery, Taxter and Spengemann — is pointedly funny. I recently spoke to him for a profile in this week’s video issue.

Asshole

Guardian: I want to begin by talking about the role or presence of soap opera within your videos. Did you have affection for the soaps and for melodrama?
Kalup Linzy: I grew up watching soap operas. I was raised by grandmother, but it sort of goes back to my great grandmother – she used to listen to Guiding Light on the radio. When it switched over to TV, she grew deaf, and somehow she would sit and watch soap operas all day long. We couldn’t turn the channel. If we were playing and went over to one of our aunt’s houses down the street, the same soap opera would be on.
By the time I turned 10 or 11, I knew what was going on [on the shows] and I started watching them as entertainment. They sort of inspired me to want to act and write. They struck that chord in me.

The Pursuit of Gay (Happyness)

Video Mutants: Booby call

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can bring together cast-off crocheted critters and KISS? Early ’70s Ann Arbor, Mich., art noise and the Whitney Biennial? Vampires toiling in cubicles and Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty (DGC)? Mike Kelley, man, can.

Ouch — the allusions get bumpy after almost three hours of mind-altering video candy. The medium may be the favored art material of the moment, but it’s only one weapon at the disposal of the cofounder of Destroy All Monsters — the Stooges’ weirder kissing cousins — and the Dirty cover artist. Kelley’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he’s collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan. 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Religious icons, ’80s modern dancers, lousy Nazi rappers, bad comedians, and spacey witches and vampires dance, sing, and hold forth throughout the video musical’s 32 chapters, augmented by a Kelley-written soundtrack that encompasses gospel and techno, light pop and monkish drone. Say I’m lost in pop idolatry, but the most wonderfully bizarre moment in this lengthy bizarre wonder arrives during a painful singles mixer furnished with irksome chair-desks as the differences among the assembled women — two African Americans, a white lost Hee Haw extra, a rocker in full KISS makeup, and a gloomy witch — are highlighted by portraits of their respective all-American idols: Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, Garth Brooks, Gene Simmons, and Brandon Lee, all painted with clunky, thrift store–style passion. After getting an, erm, tongue lashing from the KISS girl for nattering about the largeness of some big stuffed bananas, the hick chick is forced to defend her painting of Brooks staring at a bare breast (in reality painted by Kelley). "But it ain’t even my tit — it’s my momma’s," the backwoods boob protests as the KISS fan sneers with all of Detroit Rock City’s blood-spitting wrath. "Gosh, I hope Garth don’t go for my momma and not for me!"

The rejoinder "That bitch is nuts!" might be a punch line to a half-cocked sitcom, but it’s also the perfect response to the old biddy dressing down a would-be school pageant Madonna for her posture or the blood-drenched hawker of a putf8um MasterCard that supports the "educational complex" — or any other denizen of Kelley’s jet-black-humored, bleakly antic fun house.

Looking back at the video now, however, Kelley can still picture changes to Day Is Done — each chapter a live-action re-creation of an extracurricular activity photo culled from a high school yearbook. For instance, the many students and office workers dressed as depressed vampires and gleeful witches seem a bit too trendy today, even for a man with a taste for monsters. "If I thought about it more, I would have done something less … au courant, I guess," Kelley drawls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Does he still glimpse kids in full goth regalia? A heavy sigh, then, "Yeah. Also, it’s kind of gone into the art world. A lot of gothy art is being made."

A self-described "maximalist" who has made noise for years as part of Destroy All Monsters — a forerunner of experimentalists here and abroad — and later on his own, the man once pegged as a major proponent of installation-oriented "clusterfuck aesthetics" is clearly driven to strike out in fresh directions all the time. Day Is Done, for example, emerged from his work with repressed memories and his Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school the Detroit native ever attended, with, he says, "all the parts I couldn’t remember left blank." The original idea for the video — shot over a few weeks in 2005 at an LA park, Kelley’s studio, and his alma mater, California Institute of the Arts — was to "fill in the blanks with screen memory."

"Also because this show was in New York, I thought doing something with a Broadway overtone would be funny because that’s something cultured New Yorkers are embarrassed about!" Kelley says, laughing.

Kelley is obviously still eager to venture into unexamined office parks of discomfort, provoking his viewers by pushing them into the dead spaces that fill the back lots of corporate break rooms and school yards. The artist’s well-known stuffed-animal works similarly evolved from an unspoken exchange with his audience. "When I first starting using that stuff, I was only working with things that were handmade, and it didn’t matter to me what they were — I was more interested in the idea of love and labor," Kelley explains. "But people were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there’s a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the ’80s."

Shortly after one of those discarded dolls popped up on the cover of Dirty, Kelley, bandmate Cary Loren, SY’s Thurston Moore, and critic Byron Coley put together the 1994 three-CD retrospective Destroy All Monsters: 1974–1976 for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label to document the original lineup’s work before the arrival of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton and the MC5’s Michael Davis in the band. The founding group re-formed, while Kelley has continued to work sound components into his artwork and make and release music on his Compound Annex imprint.

Has music video ever been part of Kelley’s Wagnerian compendium of interests? "I’ve never been asked!" he says. "I don’t think I would do one for myself — who would show it? It’ll just be another thing that sits in a box in storage, like all my records." Still, his freshly edited feature might work. "It generated a tremendous amount of music," the artist muses. "In a sense, Day Is Done is one giant music video." *

DAY IS DONE

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m., $6–<\d>$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.mikekelley.com

Escape from planet Indie Rock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With so many indie rock bands riding the wave of all things post-punk or psych–this and that at present, it’s rare that fans of subversive music are able to listen to subterranean songs as a means of escape. I mean, Band of Horses permeate Ford commercials during the NFL playoffs, and little brothers and sisters everywhere are air-guitaring to everyone from Mastodon to the Rapture.

So it makes perfect sense that Brooklyn, NY, band Yeasayer has managed to engage even the most cynical of indie veterans with its escapist realm filled with an uncompromisingly authentic helping of psychedelic — and extremely technically proficient — guitar noodling, hypnotic pop vocals, and worldly percussion that’s as reminiscent of Carlos Santana as it is of Animal Collective or the Cure. How can you not escape when listening to something that trots along so many unexpected musical paths?

It’s no surprise that this extension of the avant-indie wing is composed of two ex–barbershop quartet members and a rhythm section that employs a bounty of instrumentation including but not limited to accordions, bongo drums, sitars, and sequencers. Driven by guitarist Anand Wilder, the group is a four-piece, genre-eradicating machine, with each member trading off vocal and instrumental duties by track. Eleven months in the making, Yeasayer’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, was snatched up by Jason Foster of Monitor Records (Battles, Early Man) and eventually became the initial — and cornerstone — release of his newest imprint, We Are Free.

After a gazillion positive reviews, rumors of the band’s outstanding performances at Austin, Texas’s 2007 South by Southwest Festival, and yes, acclaim from MTV as part of the burgeoning Brooklyn scene, the band has become one of the few tripper acts that render a true sense of escapism as indie rock’s merge with mainstream culture becomes a reality. I strongly recommend listening to the goth-pop–meets–Middle Eastern music psych-epic "Germs," followed by a serious bong rip. Then turn to the haunting, shoegazing barbershop bhangra of "Waves" and attempt to question what mental plane and planet you inhabit.

But what makes the mysticism of Yeasayer more mind engulfing than that of the mountain of other Dave Sitek– and Paw Tracks–approved artists (e.g., um, Celebration, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink)? One should first look at the group’s penchant for gospel. While it may be hard to associate any of the long-haired and art school–ish members with that genre’s religious core, just about every track on All Hour Cymbals radiates some sort of spiritual a cappella à la TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe — if he were ever a member of a South American Baptist choir. Even more interesting, the band’s lyrics take the proverbial 180 degree turn from gospel’s posi-vibes. Take, for instance, Yeasayer’s single "2080": the members switch off melodically chanting, "I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into," only to follow with "I’ll surely be dead / So don’t look ahead / Never look ahead." Now we have an apocalyptic, uplifting, shredding whirlwind of pop innovation. Whoa.

With a European tour under their belt and an extensive United States tour in progress with their fellow Brooklyn troupe of indie revolutionaries MGMT, Yeasayer are spreading the bounty of escapism worldwide. Experiencing this fearless entity, which is staring indie rock’s mainstream monster directly in the face, should be an entertaining, if not enlightening, glimpse into the future of progressive songwriting as we might know it. *

YEASAYER

With MGMT and the Morning Benders

Mon/28, 9 p.m., sold out

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Video Mutants: Eight for 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

1. CORY ARCANGEL


Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) uncovers the beauty of Nintendo clouds. Go to our Pixel Vision blog this week (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for an interview with Jacob Ciocci of Arcangel’s sometime collaborators Paper Rad and an interview with Arcangel that discusses his recent video and performance projects, such as The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum.

2. PHIL COLLINS


Dünya dunlemiyor, the Istanbul, Turkey–set entry in Collins’s World Won’t Listen trilogy of Smiths karaoke videos, wowed those who saw it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The entire trilogy is now on display and garnering raves (including an Artforum essay that pinpoints the lustiness that breaks through even the most programmatic of Collins’s endeavors) at the Dallas Museum of Art. Here’s hoping we get to see it soon.

3. SARAH ENID


Based in San Francisco but often out in the world, Enid has a roving eye. She’s made comic horror short works (in 2005’s Lovelorn Domestic she’s a mute woman with a giant bird that pecks out her husband’s eyes) and more recently ventured into the realm of new age relaxation videos — 3-D ones, to boot. The results are as amazing as they are soothing.

4. DAVID ENOS


One of San Francisco’s best underground talents, Enos has used videotape to craft a number of hand-drawn and hand-spliced animated shorts. Music biography is one recurrent subject: Enos’s trademark deadpan charm adds magic to illustrated and condensed life stories of Jim Morrison (complete with writhing snakes), Dennis Wilson (with a cameo by Charlie Manson), and Leonard Cohen. Look for a Guardian profile of Enos — as well as one of his frequent collaborator Enid — later this year.

5. GEORGE KUCHAR


Ryan Trecartin (see Super Ego) would never have star-wiped himself into art world stardom if not for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink video aesthetic of Kuchar, who has made hundreds of videos since he and his brother Mike helped create underground film. Based in San Francisco and a teacher at the SF Art Institute, Kuchar has taught or influenced every local video person on this list, and his movies continue to be as funny as anyone’s in this issue, and only slightly less energetic than Trecartin’s (maybe a good thing).

6. ANNE MCGUIRE


She’s channeled Judy Garland — in 1997’s tears-and-laughs cabaret spree I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong — and survived. She stalker-serenaded Joe DiMaggio when the slugger was still alive and walking through the Marina (in 1991’s Joe Dimaggio, 1, 2, 3). In addition to these potent short performance works, she’s also unleashed some gargantuan formal projects, such as a pair of features — 1992’s Strain Andromeda and 2007’s Adventure Poseidon The — that rearrange Hollywood films from back to front, treating each shot like a card in a deck.

7. PAPER RAD


You haven’t lived until you’ve been berated about CD-ROMs, DVD menus, and coolness by the cranky-voiced animated character at the beginning of Paper Rad’s 2006 DVD Trash Talking (Load). Turns out that rant is just the preamble to a gloriously anarchic explosion of primary colors and pop-cult iconography that has prompted a thousand commercialized graphic design rip-offs, none of them one-millionth as inspired. Paper Rad recently made mashup lively again with the Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake (now on YouTube). Go to their Web site — www.paperrad.org — for visual pleasure seizures and to get a taste of their new 20-minute video, Problem Solvers.

>>Watch Paper Rad’s “umbrella zombie datamosh mistake”

8. MATT WOLF


Wolf crosses into the realm of full-length features with Wild Combination, his subtly poignant documentary portrait of late musician Arthur Russell, which has been accepted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. But his 2003 short video Smalltown Boys was a standout at a recent Internet-vid group show at SF Camerawork, and his Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of such clips, both found (he uncovers Ryan Phillippe’s time as the first gay teen on American soaps) and made by him (his 2004 Imitation of Imitation mimics the costume-jewelry waterfall from the credits of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life).

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

Video Mutants: Guiding light

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>Click here to view some Kalup Linzy vids

A phone interview is a routine aspect of writing an article, but there’s a uniquely rich comedic irony to conducting a phone interview with Kalup Linzy. Since 2001, Linzy has been making soap operatic short videos in which a host of characters, most played by himself, converse by phone. In Conversations Wit De Children IV: Play Wit De Churen (2005), for example, one of Linzy’s personae, or churen, budding art star Katonya, is fired via phone by her boss — then dumped via phone by her boyfriend when he finds out she lost her job.

"I grew up watching soap operas," Linzy says when asked about the soapy underpinnings of pieces such as Da Young and Da Mess (2005), As Da Art World Might Turn (2006), and the installments of his All My Churen series. "I was raised by my grandmother, but it goes back to my great-grandmother — she used to listen to Guiding Light on the radio. When it switched over to TV she was going deaf, but somehow she would sit and watch soap operas all day long. We couldn’t turn the channel, and if we were playing and went to one of our aunt’s houses down the street, the same soap opera would be on. [The soaps] sort of inspired me to act and write. They struck that chord in me."

Whether set in the South or the Manhattan art world, Linzy’s videos dig deep, past the generic surfaces found in Springfield, Pine Valley, Genoa City, or any other fictional TV town. Cumulatively, his recurrent video presentations of phone conversations satirize social power plays — and unexpectedly create and illustrate familial and romantic bonds. Like the filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though in a less languid manner, Linzy is capable of lacing his affection for the soaps’ dramatic pleasures with sharp referential observation: Da Young and Da Mess features a shot of Linzy’s woebegone character Taiwan that updates Édouard Manet’s Olympia, for example.

Linzy has stolen the show at a number of New York group exhibitions, and he’s represented by a gallery in Manhattan, Taxter and Spengemann. But his work and creative identity extend beyond traditional art spaces via YouTube, an official Web site, and two different MySpace accounts. Collectively, they present video excerpts, performance clips, and songs. One highlight on Linzy’s Web site is a clip of him (as Taiwan) at New York’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center performing the gospel-inflected dirge "Asshole," accompanied only by keyboard. "Asshole, asshole, asshole, why’d you do this to me?" Taiwan bellows in the chorus, his blunt question arriving with gut-busting comic impact after a melancholy and poetic intro. As the song goes on, Taiwan shifts the focus to his body, wondering, "Why did my asshole fuck it up for my soul?"

Returning to the subject of rich ironies — or in this case paradoxes — none other than Modern Painting magazine published perhaps the most incisive recent piece about new waves of video art activity. Author Michael Wang uses work by Linzy and this week’s Super Ego star Ryan Trecartin to assert that queerness is perhaps the preeminent form of postmodernism; his opening salvo suggests that the old dialectical relationship between experimental video and commercial television has effectively exploded in the Internet era. Considering this, it’s hard not to note similarities or connections between the outrageously popular — or perhaps antipopular — gay YouTube phenom Chris Crocker (see Trash, page 24) and figures such as Jonathan Caouette, Trecartin, and Linzy. Crocker’s housebound, familial acting out forms dozens of tiny sequels to Caouette’s performative diary feature Tarnation (2004). When Crocker asks "What’s your tea?" he might as well be wishing he were on a party line with a character from one of Linzy’s videos.

More evocatively, the helium-high and macho-low voices of the characters in Linzy’s videos are similar, though not of a piece, with the manic munchkin voices of the Day-Glo "streaming creatures" (to use the Jack Smith–inspired title of Wang’s article) who cavort through videos by Trecartin; and like Trecartin’s art, though again in a more casual manner, Linzy’s has strong connections to club culture. In fact, Linzy’s currently working on a project that, framed by original and dance versions of "Asshole," translates Taiwan’s misadventures, as well as a scathingly funny cameo by Labisha, another Linzy alter ego, into songs.

"Basically, [the album] tells the story of someone sad at home who goes out to the bar and ends up getting laid by trade and wakes up the next day with a hangover," Linzy explains with a laugh. He drops hints about a couch-potato parody of Otis Redding’s "(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay," adding that whenever he tells people he’s making a video anthology for the album, they mistakenly "ask if it’s going to be like R. Kelly."

Based on tracks such as "Melody Set Me Free," with its drag-ball life-as-an-awards-show lyric, and "SweetBerry Shuffle," with its baton passes between feisty female Labisha and depressive gay boy Taiwan, Linzy’s debut album might be an American cousin of the amazing, unjustly obscure Dislocated Genius (Get Physical, 2006) by Chelonis R. Jones. There and on singles such as the fierce "Black Sabrina" (sample lyric: "Black Sabrina never pushes or shoves / She’s a foot up your ass / She then questions why you walk so funny / And utters ‘Punk bitch’ under her rum-tinted breath"), Jones embraces and expresses a multitude of voices, transcending prejudicial diagnoses of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. (You could also draw a line from a cover version of Klymaxx’s "Cherries in the Snow" by veteran artist Vaginal Davis — like Jones, an American expat living in Germany — to "Asshole." Or, in return, from Linzy’s videos to "Gossips," a scandalously hilarious YouTube excerpt from Davis’s most recent show, Cheap Blacky.)

Betty Davis, Dorothy Moore, and Dionne Warwick are just three of the ladies of song who’ve provided Linzy with inspiration recently. Though some of his recent video projects — especially the offhandedly brilliant black-and-white linguistic mystery The Pursuit of Gay (Happiness) — have lampooned old Hollywood, lately he’s been looking at ’80s music videos when he isn’t visualizing his music. "Back then the medium was new to [bands and video makers]," he says. "They were excited and it came across, even though some of the videos are cheesy." Today Linzy represents a new wave of audio and video excitement — hold the cheese. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.kaluplinzy.com

www.myspace.com/kaluppresents

www.myspace.com/kalup1

www.youtube.com/kklinzy

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

Sonic Reducer Overage: Toumani Diabate, Ingrid Michaelson, La Otracina, Poison the Well, and the art overfloweth

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What to do when the gloom descends and the sky thunders? Double your pleasuuuur with art-music selections that didn’t make it into print last week and the worthy live shows that slipped betwixt the cracks this time around.

Ingrid Michaelson
The new Lisa Loeb or… the latest waif in a Nellie McKay cute suit? Something to ponder when listening to the MySpace star best known for her Grey’s Anatomy and Old Navy commercial tunes. This is so sold out I think you’ll have to contact your fave Hannah Montana/soccer mom scalper for assistance. With Greg Laswell. Wed/23, 7:30 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333.

Zak%20Wilson%20-%20bob sml.jpg
Amoebic art: Zak Wilson’s acrylic My Roomate Bob Ate My Last Piece of Chicken, So I Had to Shoot Him.

“Amoeba Music‘s Second Annual Art Show”
Wonder what those talents scowling in the aisles do on their off hours. More than 30 toil in the trenches of art-making, we hear. The second annual event includes more than 100 pieces by staffers at the SF, Berkeley, and LA stores. Get an eyeful at the reception Fri/25, 7 p.m.-2 a.m., when organizers raffle off prizes as a fund-raiser for Creativity Explored. Show runs through Sat/26. Daily 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF. (415) 377-3325.

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“Enter the Center”
Call ’em Ribbons. Call ’em Ship. Just don’t call ’em late to this long-awaited exhibit. The dynamic Bay Area duo whoop it up at the opening reception honoring their new book, Enter the Center, on Sat/26, 6-10 p.m. – stay for the screening of the pair’s new video album, the treeVD. And look for more special soirees at Ribbons’ month-long quasi-arts center, ala Feb. 2’s get-down with White Rainbow, Lucky Dragons and a classical Indian ensemble, and Feb. 9’s fete with Brendan Fowler of BARR, Pocahaunted, and ARP. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama, SF. (415) 867-7770.

Blow by Blow: At the beck and call of Khaela Maricich

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blow smller.jpg

The Blow’s Khaela Maricich is a charmer – and lord, the girl knows how to multitask, moving into her new Portland, Ore., studio while fielding questions all the while. For the first part of the talk, go here. And she performs tonight and tomorrow, Jan. 22 and 23, at Great American Music Hall, so look out!

SFBG: So Jona [Bechtolt of Yacht] won’t be performing with you at Great American Music Hall?

Khaela Maricich: He hasn’t been performing with me for a year and haf. He’s been doing own thing with Yacht.

SFBG: How would you describe your current act then?

KM: Well, I come at performing from a lot of different angles. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I never thought of myself as a performer either and I always thought I’d be a visual artist. As a kid I remember there being video cameras from a TV station and me being under the table, not interested at all in being the center of attention. I never had a sense of being, “I want to be a musician,” and so I never think it’s going to be a great music show! I look at different angles of entertaining myself and different ways of using the stage to make a show.

I think it’s a lot like stand-up and performance and karaoke. It’s electronic music – there’s no laptop onstage. It’s just me and a microphone.

Into the Abyss

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Sometimes you just have to change things up: come to work late, eat lunch for breakfast, change around your office furniture, have a post-work Happy Hour at your desk. Last Thursday was one of those days – just in time for the arrival of a bottle of Deschutes Brewery’s The Abyss.

See, one of the perks of my job is that people send me stuff. A particularly good perk is that Deschutes, a brewery in Bend, Oregon that makes the kind of fantastic, creative beer that’s made the Pacific Northwest famous for its microbrews, is one of those “people” who sends me “stuff.” In fact, I’ve also had a bottle of its Green Lakes Organic Ale sitting by my desk for a month, just waiting for a taste test.

So. I invited some colleagues up to my office. I switched off the Misfits (which is PBR-drinking music) and switched on Elvis (which, somehow, seemed more like microbrew-drinking music). And I popped open the Green Lakes and The Abyss (whose cap, by the way, is covered in wax, like a fancy bottle of whiskey).

The-Abyss_BottlePint.jpg

Bark if you’re psychic

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My furry fourlegged friend is a 17-year-old former dog clothing model and lives in a loft in NYC (the bitch made it as a model in Manhattan and left me behind! America’s Top Meanie!) Back when she was young, we’d huddle together, homeless, in shells of buildings in Detroit and Pontiac, MI. She never got the royal treatment until she was discovered by a talent scout who took one look at me and sniffed — and I’m not sure how she’d respond to this:

dogsongs.jpg

Oh yes, it’s real. And it gets better. This CD was “created by Skip Haynes and Dana Walden of the L.A. based Laurel Canyon Animal Company (the only record label that creates music about, for and with animals), who utilized the talents and expertise of intuitive animal communicator Dr. Kim Ogden to translate for them,” according to the press release.

“Canine focus groups selected from over 250 dogs nationwide were assembled and questioned by Dr. Ogden as to their preferences in music and content. The dogs’ responses were then used as guides for the music and lyrics resulting in a CD of songs that dogs love. ”

The CD, apparently, has already yielded a hit, “Squeaky Deaky” — which is accompanied by possibly one of the best videos EVER.

People on YouTube have already posted vids of their dogs reacting to the music. Straight up viral woofiness?

Love me some Dolly…and pass the birthday pie at El Rio

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dollyparton.bmp

By Todd Lavoie

All right, I’m giving some heads up time here so you can plan your weekend accordingly: Dolly Parton turns 62 this Saturday, Jan. 19. Oh, the possibilities for celebration are endless, aren’t they? Maybe a spin of her 1971 classic Coat of Many Colors (RCA), or how about slappin’ 9 to 5 (oh, my sweet baby Jesus, so that flick is really from 1980?! Now I feel old) into the ole DVD player, or if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you could always fry up some catfish and hush puppies (two of the Dixie diva’s favorite dishes, which must always be paired together: “One without the other is like pickin’ without grinnin’,” she once famously declared, and who am I to disagree?) Or, how about this: you could Dolly yourself up and swing on over to El Rio this Saturday night for their Tennessee Mountain Birthday Bash! Yep, a night of Dolly music, movies, and homemade pie! Ah, pie – who doesn’t love pie? And did I mention the Dolly-look-alike contest? I smell a photo op!

Whatever your plans may be, methinks some serious Happy Haps are in order for Ms. Parton. Sure, we’ve all probably succumbed to Dolly the caricature at one point or another, but the fact remains this: she’s one of the sweetest-voiced, savviest, and most successful artists of our lifetime: 25 number-one singles at last count, and 41 top 10 country albums so far – no one else comes close, even. She has penned some of the most touching, soul-baring, achingly tender melodies of the past five decades. But wait, there’s more: a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, inductions into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the distinction of being honored as a Living Legend by the US Library of Congress, as well as being rewarded the National Medal of Arts (the highest honor given by the US government for cultural excellence.)

Oh, and let’s not forget: she wrote “Jolene.” Covered by everyone from Olivia Newton-John to the Sisters of Mercy to the White Stripes to Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, it’s an absolute classic in the whole infidelity-song genre, an area with plenty of competition, particularly in country music. Here, in a more recent performance, she gives a shout-out to her drag-queen fans, then kicks up a mighty row with a wicked bluegrass version of the song.

Get Health! The LA noise combo gives up their secrets

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Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout Health – as well as Dan Deacon, who the LA noise combo plays with tonight, Jan. 17, at Great American Music Hall. It’ll be an awesome show. I traded e-mails with the outfit this week, and here’s what they graciously coughed up.

SFBG: How did your name come about?

John: We wanted a name like Television, an everyday word. Went down a list with the interweb. Health was left.

SFBG: What makes you play music?

John: Gets me AMPED, man. Unless you’re a little kid, music is the only way you get someone to rage with you.

Jake: Is that a big question or a small question?

SFBG: What sort of “Health”-y things do you do?

John: Kombucha

Jake: Watch out for excess sodium.

Holy fuckin’ wonderful!

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By Jennique Mason

This documentary film by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace achieves the unbelievable feat of capturing Greenwich Village’s two most notorious folkies: Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. In the wake of the Beats and the
dawn of the hippies, the Holy Modal Rounders destroyed what was then the relatively predictable boundaries of the folk genre. Discovered by most through the Easy Rider soundtrack (“If You Wanna Be A Bird”), they stand as the remnants of a generation who knew if Khrushchev and Kennedy would only drop LSD together, there would be world peace. If it’s hoop snake you’re after or you wanna make your own party, at the end of the day in the words of Rounder Harold Reisch, “once you get past the humiliation of it all, there’s some fun to be had.”

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Fiddler Peter Stampfel and guitarist Steve Weber forge a bond based on a shared fascination with American roots music and psychedelia.

The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose plays tonight, 7 p.m. at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center. Wavy Gravy and co-director Paul Lovelace appear in person.

Is that your sleeve face – or are you just happy to see me?

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By Joshua Rotter

Few of the MP3 generation can recall a time when music-lovers excitedly listened to entire records. But putting needle to groove was only half of a process that included poring over the often arty jacket itself and the internal sleeve to uncover the album’s many intricacies: the song lyrics and the names of the band members, studio musicians, and producers. To many aficionados the packaging was as prized as its contents.

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But once vinyl became mostly obsolete in the age of iMacs, so did these once-cherished album covers. Conversely vinyl’s rarity has turned its “frames” into an art form for diehard record fanatics – and nowhere is this more apparent than in the art of so-called sleeve face, where one conceals oneself with the face or body on an album cover in a seamless fashion so that the two merge harmoniously.

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In today’s climate of non-contextual music downloading, some feel compelled to buck the trend, attempting to more intimately access the artistic process by riffing Guitar Hero, lip-syncing on YouTube, or even just aesthetically, by getting “into the artist’s head” via sleeve facing.

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Does it suck?

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Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles

(Konami; Sony PSP)

GAMER I have a friend who only likes really, really hard games — the kind in which fast-moving, shooting things spawn more fast-moving, shooting things at an exponential rate. When he said Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles is hard, I didn’t laugh and call him a sissy.

Dracula X is actually a remake of a game for PC that came out in Japan in 1993, where it was concisely titled Demon Castle Dracula X: Rondo of Blood. It hailed from the end of the era when the purpose of a game was to devour as many quarters as possible. In both games you play Richter, a vampire killer. Dracula has kidnapped some hot, nubile females, and your job is to whip and beat your way through armies of his demonic minions in order to rescue them from secret rooms in his 2-D, side-scrolling castle.

You can only get hit a few times before you die, and almost everything deals damage. If you die three times, you have to start the level again, which is hair-pullingly frustrating if the thing killing you is at the end. You can unlock the ability to play one of the women, the spirited Maria, who has more powerful attacks than Richter but less life and takes more damage.

Your character gets one main weapon and one subweapon. The number of the subweapon’s uses depends on how many hearts you have collected by beating up the scenery. One of Maria’s subweapons is a cat. That’s right — you can hurl cats at your enemies! "Look! It’s a giant floating skull! Kitty bonzai!"

The graphics are pretty highly improved over the original: the game has been redone with excellent 3-D cut scenes and 3-D-rendered sprites. It looks better than most of the other things I’ve seen on the PSP. Most of the music consists of disco remixes of songs from various games in the Castlevania series. It took me a while to get used to it, and it kind of hampers one’s immersion in the game. The reason that I decided to check out Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles is that it comes with both the original Rondo of Blood — in English — and the well-loved Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which came out in 1997 for the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn.

Konami has made no changes to Symphony of the Night, which is good for fans of the original, and the quirks that were there in 1997 are still present. The new version handles the difference in shape between a TV screen and a PSP screen with vertical letterboxing, which struck me as both a bit cheap and a lot annoying. But the player adapts to it fairly easily. One suspects that Konami included the old games as a gimmick to sell copies of the Rondo remake, but having spent a good 20 hours replaying Symphony of the Night, I’m not going to complain too much.

In short, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles is a pretty decent remake of Rondo of Blood. Its downfall is that it’s frustratingly hard compared to other platformers today. But the inclusion of Symphony of the Night makes the game well worth the money — if you have the cockroachlike persistence to battle through Rondo of Blood to the point where you unlock it!

Pop op

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Omigod, I totally love that." A doll-faced, teenage dead ringer for Zooey Deschanel gawks dreamily at a dabbed dwarf cactus drifting off the edge of a cream-colored sheet of paper — jaw a-dangling, china blue eyes a-gobbling. It’s not often you catch a snatch of pure rock ‘n’ roll idol worship amid the pristine white walls of a museum space, yet here it was, flowering quietly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art room that hosts the shifting collection of Paul Klee prints gathered and loaned by San Francisco’s father of the pill, Carl Djerassi. These days the Klee pieces are sharing space with the whimsy-washed ink, watercolor, and graphite works by San Francisco Art Institute graduate and international psych-folk rock emissary (and Guardian copydesk swear-jar star) Devendra Banhart, who performs at the museum Jan. 17 in celebration of "Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart."

The small show opened quietly, but judging from the cool kids reverently orbiting the pieces, word is slowly leaking out about this charming clutch of images, which displays both opera lover Klee’s most music-inspired, antic pieces — is that the musical fruit of a bean burrito or bassoon emerging from a posterior in Der Fagottist (The bassoonist)? — and Banhart’s sweetly humorous paper pieces depicting a fictitious fan called Smokey, who’s also the center of his recent, somewhat decentered LP, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL). Banhart is clearly a man of many gifts: here, Flowering Corn Maiden Smokey and Banded King Snake and Thunder Maiden show off a playful yet refined eye and an overflowing though focused imagination with a transfigurative bent that conjures Giuseppe "Fruit Face" Arcimboldo.

While the word show is increasingly, happily confused in both its musical and visual art contexts — and the term pop becomes more relevant in the art world than in the shiny plastic disc marketplace — the exhibit arrives as yet another instance of the healthy, ever-bubbling and brewing cross-pollination going on between the two types of media since the turn of the century. That highly consensual crossover fever dream is evident at art openings throughout the Bay every first Thursday, and it’s heartening to know that just as music becomes a harder proposition to tackle commercially and art has become a bigger business, musicians are finding their way toward new audiences and artists are coursing toward pop. And while spaces like 21 Grand and LoBot Gallery weather their share of hassles, newbs like the month-old Fort Gallery are throwing open their doors undeterred. The last, a Mission District space, is currently showing collage and sculpture by Ryan Coffey by appointment only — "Until we quit our day jobs," co-owner Jesi Khadivi says with a laugh — but Khadivi and cohort Vanessa Maida promise a mix of art, barbecue, live music, and special soirees like the Jan. 16 movie night that will juxtapose Ranu Mukherjee’s Sustenance short with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripindicular The Holy Mountain (1973).

The blend of high art and lowdown sounds isn’t new, ace genre bender Chris Duncan asserts: music-art hybridization "has always been around on different levels, but I think most people who make art also make music, or are very much influenced by music. As far as different mediums and different ways of doing things, the lines are so blurred at this point. For me, I like to keep busy, and I like getting a lot of people involved in stuff. I can get lost in my studio for a long time, and it gets kinda lonesome."

This may explain why Duncan — whose visual art career has been far from dormant, considering his fall solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery — has been dipping his toes into other creative wellsprings: on Jan. 18 he’ll celebrate the first release of SF twosome Pale Hoarse’s The Gospels on his new label, the Time Between the Beginning and the End. Call it a handmade labor of love: Duncan stitched and silk-screened about 100 multihued covers for the limited-edition record. Each one — available at Aquarius Records and via Duncan’s Hot and Cold Web site — promises to shimmer with different tones beneath the pink fluorescent-ink silk screen.

It’s the first record the Oakland artist has made, though he once designed a cover for a Jade Tree split with Songs: Ohia and My Morning Jacket, as well as for Battleship’s Presents Princess (Ononswitch, 2005). "There’s a total Sub Pop Singles Club influence, for sure. Music has always been part of my whole trip, and record collecting was such a big part of my growing up," says Duncan, whose also recently edited his first book, My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories (AK Press), a project that mushroomed from a slim zine, and he’s embarking on the next issue of the wonderful art zine he assembles with Griffin McPartland, Hot and Cold. (The next issue sounds like a doozy and will include contributions from Colter Jacobsen, Chris Corales, and Hisham Bharoocha and a CD by Golden Bears, a new project from the Quails’ Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi.) "Making a record fulfilled the need to hand-make stuff," Duncan continues. "A lot of projects I do outside painting are about gathering and collecting things, doing records, zine assembling. Now I’m inspired to put out a record every year." *

MOVIE NIGHT

With Sustenance and The Holy Mountain

Wed/16, 8:30 p.m., $5 donation

Fort Gallery

83B Wiese, SF

www.fortgallery.com

DEVENDRA BANHART

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$20

Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

PALE HOARSE

With Raven and Hannah, visuals by Chris Duncan, and shorts

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

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