Performance Archives — Page 102 of 132 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Well-suited

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May 20, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Why would you commission a choreographer for a work featuring performers stuck into costumes that hide their bodies? This anomaly didn’t deter the 69 dancers who, in late April, auditioned at ODC Commons for a world premiere by Ronald K. Brown. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts wanted a site-specific piece to go with its current exhibition of Nick Cave’s wearable sculptures, "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" — and Bay Area dancers jumped at the chance to work with one of today’s most thoughtfully intriguing choreographers.

Brown, who initially had wanted to become a journalist, found his way into dance almost serendipitously. Though he’d been fascinated with researching and writing articles on the way people lived their lives, dance allowed him to do that more indirectly, and also more deeply. He called his company Evidence because of his belief that we are products of the things that have shaped us — our culture, our roots, our families. The dry legal term "evidence" poorly suggests the physically and emotionally rich dances that have earned such a wide following for this modern dance artist, whose choreography is influenced by West African cultures. (Brown brings his company to YBCA Feb. 18-21, 2010)

Amara Tabor-Smith, a former 10-year member of Urban Bush Women, will perform in the Cave project. She doesn’t think of Brown as a fusion artist. "The way I see him is that he modernized West African dance," she explained a few days after the tryouts. But her depth of admiration comes from a recognition that Brown’s work is "infused with spirit." She made it as one of 13 dancers although she auditioned primarily to "soak up his energy and give energy in return."

Brown, who knew and admired Cave’s evocative sculptures from afar, became interested in this project partly because of an experience at the Seattle Art Museum, where he encountered a diorama of African costumes and masks displayed on life-size figures.

"I would talk to the person with me, then slightly turn my head, and there were [the figures]. After a while I almost couldn’t tell who was who," he explained. Being aware of a mask’s mysterious power to hide as well as to reveal, he nonetheless also told the dancers he wasn’t going to turn them into witch doctors or shamans because "we live in America, in a contemporary society."

Brown also insists he did not want to "collaborate" with Cave but wanted to have "his own dream." Since the suits in the actual exhibit are too delicate for performance, he chose a set made from raffia, the natural fiber prevalent in West African dance. Though visually different, they also allow one to sense rather than see the body. Being quite heavy, they may restrict a dancer’s movement. During the audition, the choreographer worked with shuffling steps and close-to-the-body arms. He also worked on phrases from Orisha dances and Sabar steps from Senegal ("a kind of social street dance," according to Tabor-Smith.) There may be little or no music, perhaps only the sound of the dancers’ feet and the whoosh-whoosh of raffia.

Speaking from Ireland last week, where he was setting work, Brown wouldn’t commit himself to the length of the piece but revealed that, though it was originally planned for the galleries only, it would encompass YBCA’s lobby area as well. "There will be a guide to take the dancers and the audience on a journey, so that whatever feelings we have, you also have — or it hasn’t happened."

RONALD K. BROWN/NICK CAVE

May 28, 7 p.m.; May 30–31, 3 p.m.,

free with gallery admission ($5–$7)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Rock, B.C.

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May 20, 2009

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PREVIEW I have yet to touch down upon the streets of Vancouver, B.C., but was advised recently by Jexxe Taylarr of Twin Crystals that if I ever do make the pilgrimage, I should stop by the Emergency Room — a hole-in-the-wall performance space where in addition to Taylarr’s band, the likes of Shearing Pinx, Sex Negatives, White Lung, and Gang Violence tear shit up on a regular basis.

"The music scene is unbelievable," Taylarr says via e-mail. "There was a lack of places to play, so a bunch of our friends opened this DIY warehouse space and it instantly seemed to take off," he continues. "Never have we seen shows with so many rad bands."

Count Twin Crystals as one such band. With synthist Jeremiah Heywood and drummer Jordan Alexander in tow, Taylarr and company wreak serious havoc. "Punk Heart" is a tried-and-true anthem that nods back to the blown-out alt of the Screamers and Wipers. Brimming with harsh, electric current and buzzsaw electronics, the song has a J. Mascis-like lead that’ll wrap around your face and scorch you. "Witness" is one helluva of an afterburner: as Taylarr unloads into the mic with unchecked rabidity, its raw primitive roots and sludgy demeanor rattle the speaker cones.

A few years after inception, Twin Crystals has stocked its vault with a collection of self-made vinyl, cassette, and CD-R releases on banners like Needs More Ram and SLU. The trio plans to issue more classics on the Gilgongo and Split Tapes imprints in the coming months. Taylarr credits the group’s bulky catalog in part to his trusty record lathe. "I have a bunch of black 10-inch acetates from 1940 that we release little jams and ideas on," he explains. "The digital format will die and all these great jams we have will be lost forever, so we just make these lathe-cut records to preserve the audio. It’s a great art project."

TWIN CRYSTALS With Long Legged Woman, Modern Creatures. Thurs/21, 9 p.m. $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923. www.hemlocktavern.com

Black man in the cosmos

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May 20, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL "The Black Man in the Cosmos" wasn’t among the course offerings when I attended the University of California-Berkeley. The class was taught once, in 1971, by musician/composer Sun Ra (1914-93), whose lectures might include topics like the outer space origins of ancient Egypt, conceptualized as a black African culture. This cosmic tradition has a long history, particularly in Chicago, where Ra lived from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, and where Elijah Muhammad used it as the founding mythos of the Nation of Islam. Ra claimed to have influenced the NOI, though he rejected its conclusions, much as he would later criticize the Black Power movement he helped foster as too materialist.

Ra’s "Black Man" lectures — one of which recently surfaced on The Creator of the Universe (Transparency, 2007) — epitomize why he wasn’t taken seriously for so long. Critics who appreciated the severity of Ornette Coleman or the ferocity of Albert Ayler couldn’t accommodate the mischievous mysticism of a man who claimed to come from Saturn. Instead of playing the role of brooding artiste, Ra favored extravagant showmanship, cloaking ultimately stern spiritual messages in language as absurd as the science-fictional garb worn by his Arkestra. His strategies included Joycean deformations of words based on false etymologies and sound play. "Arkestra" itself characteristically mixes the spiritual (Ark of the Covenant) with the quotidian. According to John Szwed’s definitive 1998 biography, Space is the Place, this was how "orchestra" was pronounced in Ra’s native Birmingham, Ala.

Yet the strangeness of Ra’s music may have been the biggest stumbling block. His prodigious output is extremely diverse, continually vioutf8g unquestioned dichotomies. A product of the 1930s big band scene, when he led an orchestra under his terrestrial name Herman "Sonny" Blount, Ra was at the forefront of free jazz, yet he shocked fans and foes alike when, at its height, he began incorporating tight arrangements of swing classics by Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, and others into his sound.

Ra’s lifelong interest in synthesizers — there’s a photo of him with a primitive one in 1941(!) — developed into a command of pure sound. He adapted his style to the nuances of a particular keyboard. The 1970 recording Night of the Purple Moon (Atavistic, 2007), for instance, is a quartet disc on which he plays baroque runs on the Rocksichord, a 1960s electric harpsichord. The 1978 recording Disco 3000 (Art Yard, 2008), a live quartet performance, features Ra’s organ-like drones on the obscure, loop-enabled Crumar Mainman. Unlike some synth wizards, Ra was a virtuoso pianist, with a lightning-fast right hand and a left hand that seemingly bounced around of its own volition. While unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm, Ra’s ambidextrous precision and unorthodox chord voicings — he was unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm — place him among the top players of his time. If he’d worn a suit and stuck to piano, he’d be ranked with the likes of Art Tatum, as is evident from his previously-unreleased recital Solo Piano: Teatro la Fenice Venizia (Golden Years, 2003), possibly the best such recording.

Big bands remained Ra’s ideal, though they were giving way to smaller bop combos by the time he formed the Arkestra in the mid-’50s. Yet his insularity resulted in some of his most original works, discs that defy generic categories, like 1963’s reverb-drenched, proto-psychedelic Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Evidence, 1992), 1965’s percussive, minimalist Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, v. 1 (Esp, 2006), or 1967’s Strange Strings (Atavistic, 2007), on which the Arkestra, with no prior experience, plays various non-Western stringed instruments, accompanied by bells, tympani, sheet-metal lightning.

While the atonal Strings may be Ra’s least typical album, it embodies two of his main concerns. On the one hand, he was a tone colorist in the Romantic tradition, seeking unusual instrumentation to produce unique shades. But as that album’s untutored string section suggests, he was a highly conceptual composer — garnering attention from John Cage and others — known for arranging and conducting collective improvisation. Traditional/avant-garde, inside/outside: such oppositions didn’t exist for Ra, who even explored a "low" genre like disco on 1980’s tongue-in-cheek On Jupiter (Art Yard, 2008).

The bewildering amount of Sun Ra reissues stems from his habit of self-recording, which also dates from the 1940s. Had he not done so, albums like Strings and Cosmic Tones wouldn’t have been recorded. Nor would they have been released without his forming El Saturn Records, among the earliest artist-run labels. Given that his technological futurism seemed to stem from his preoccupation with outer space, Ra’s artistic achievements are perhaps inextricably bound to his cosmic consciousness. As with Prince, artistic activity was driven by extramusical concerns, which, if they result in an occasional lapse in "good taste," nonetheless are the ingredients that elevate Ra from artistic excellence to genius. This genius may not have given him more than a subsistence living, but it has made him immortal. Unless, of course, as an inhabitant of Saturn, he already was.

There’s a laptop in the orchestra!

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May 13, 2009

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Everybody panic. Don’t worry, electronic-symphonica mastermind Mason Bates, who I rave about in this week’s issue, isn’t gonna freak peeps out. But seriously, do not miss the premier of his orchestral suite for full orchestra and laptop, The B-Sides, which he’ll be performing for three nights with the ever-game SF Symphony, Wed/20, Fri/22, Sat/23. After Friday night’s performance (free with ticket!) you’ll get ushered into a really cool secret space by Davies Symphony Hall for an afterparty, featuring Mason’s Mercury Soul project, which kicks ambient-like trip-hop ass and will feature himself behind the decks, as well as some live, avant-garde surprises (and hottie conductor Benjamin Shwartz, *swoon*). If you haven’t been to the symphony, or if you’re in the mood for something spectacular oracular, this is the time to go.

Here’s two views of Mason, aka DJ Masonic, at Carnegie Hall with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in April, debuting the “Wharehouse Medicine” portion of The B-Sides.

The balcony view, complete with trippy visuals:

and here’s from right down in the fray (I’m dying to know what the tiny grand piano behind his is for! Hello, Carl Stalling?) Note the dramatic use of drum pad:

I would be totally, regrettably remiss if I didn’t also pump Bates’ co-performer on the program, the heartbreakingly talented and just all around fierce Yuja Wang, who’ll be performing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto #2, which at around the seven-minute-mark will honestly start to kill you with beauty. Girl’s got skills.

Here’s her performing at Carnegie Hall. Um, hi hotness.

Also featured: the majestically haunting, almost-4AD-foretelling Fourth Symphony by Sibelius, who’s all the rage among young turk composers these days.

Mason Bates, Yuja Wang, and the SF Symphony
Wed/20, Fri/22, Sat/23
8 p.m., $35–$130
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness
(415) 552-8000
www.sfsymphony.org

From the shadows

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May 13, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The cheapest special effect in the world is having one actor fire a cap gun as another cries, "Ow, ya got me!" Ergo crime did pay, in spades, for Hollywood’s "Poverty Row" studios in the disillusioned years between World War II and Eisenhower-era prosperity. Subsequently dubbed "film noir," this period’s myriad violent melodramas were cranked out fast, exhibited briefly, then forgotten.

Yet recent years have left very few stones unturned in the quest for buried gems. Back when he was programming at the Roxie Theater, Elliot Lavine did much to foster their cult with retrospectives showcasing both the genre’s acknowledged classics and dustiest obscurities. When he left in 2003, noir fans wore mourning black — though were consoled by the start of SF’s annual Noir City festival that same year.

Still, watching lurid old B-flicks at the funky Roxie had an extra frisson lacking amid the Castro Theater’s grandiose respectability. Very good news, then, that Lavine is bringing bad guys (and duplicitous dames) back to Valencia Street with "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." Its two weeks emphasize noir’s lesser-sung efforts from the cinematic sweatshops of Monogram, PRC, Eagle Lion, and other economy-class companies where production values were low and the hard-boiled sleaze factor was often cranked high to compensate. Many of the 29 features haven’t been seen theatrically for decades, and few are available on DVD.

On Poverty Row, young talent proved itself; mainstream luminaries landed there once their box-office clout had expired. Thus velvet-voiced 1930s glamazon Kay Francis briefly descended to Monogram after Warner Bros. dumped her. In Allotment Wives (1946) she’s a socialite coolly fronting a polygamy racket targeting returned GI’s, while enduring Mildred Pierce-like torments from an ingrate daughter whose every action screams "Mother, slap sense into me." (Oh yes she will.)

Another WB castoff, ingénue Joan Leslie, starred in that year’s unique Repeat Performance. She’s an actress-turned-murderess who gets her wish to live the last fateful year over again — only to watch as the same deadly events unfold, only worse. Having outgrown a famous-juvenile heyday, Bonita Granville was ready to play twins — one good, one a "cheap little chiseler" — embroiled in a murder mystery in The Guilty (1947). (And to think just months earlier she’d been crushing on Andy Hardy at MGM.)

These programmer factories promoted personalities who only rated bit parts at the majors. Where else could sneering, square-faced Lawrence Tierney’s bullying malevolence float entire movies like The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hoodlum (1951)? Some noirs risked having no familiar faces at all. The docudrama-style Canon City (1948) uses real locations and (some) real inmates to recreate a Colorado prison break — one thwarted, in part, by a gutsy, home-invaded gramma-with-hammer.

While most titles here are known only to the most fanatical buffs, two come with minor cult status already attached. The craziest among fabled screenwriter Ben Hecht’s odd few directorial efforts, Specter of the Rose (1946) is an amour very-fou tale set in the ballet world, its prima ballerina imperiled by a dancing partner-spouse who experiences homicidal ideations when not husking heavy mush stuff: "Hug me with your eyes." "I am." "Harder!"

Likewise linguistically challenged in the best possible way is 1955’s Shack Out on 101, in which a young Lee Marvin unforgettably limns "Slob," bus boy extraordinaire forever pawing unaroused waitress Terry Moore. Meanwhile, lurking Commies plot to overthrow the American Way of Life, off-ramp greasy spoons included. With its hilariously pissed-off dialogue no obstacle to red-blooded patriotic display, Shack is a Cold War trash classic so plutonium-hot it smokes.

I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF THE B FILM NOIR

May 14–28, $10

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415)-863-1087, www.roxie.com

Uphill climb

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May 12, 2009

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steve@sfbg.com

Bicyclists generally try to avoid hills, so one of the most popular bike routes in town is a series of turns called the Wiggle, which snakes along a valley through the Lower Haight. The route — a sort of bridge between east and west — is traveled by a growing number of bicyclists, from hipster kids on colorful fixies to grizzled seniors on comfortable touring bikes.

I ride the Wiggle every day. Coming from the Panhandle, the most harrowing approach is the three blocks I have to travel on busy Oak Street, competing for space with impatient motorists who often seem to forget that they’re wielding deadly weapons. Many times I’ve had cars zip by me within inches, honk (a very startling sound when you’re not wrapped in metal and glass), zoom up right behind me, or flip me off.

But then I turn right onto Scott Street — and the world suddenly changes. My heart rate drops and I breathe deeply. Rain or shine, there are almost as many bikes there as cars. The cyclists smile and nod at one another and even the motorists seem more respectful, sometimes waving us through the stop signs even when it’s their turn. It feels like an informally functional community. It’s how traveling around this city ought to be.

Even though the citywide percentage of vehicle trips taken by bicycle in San Francisco is still in single digits (compared to more than 20 percent in many European cities), and even though a court injunction that’s expected to be lifted this summer has banned any new bike projects in the city for the past three years, bicycling is booming in San Francisco, increasing by almost 50 percent since 2006. I’m never alone these days on my solo commute.

My decision to ride a bike and sell my car wasn’t about joining a movement. I just like to ride my bike, a simple joy that I really began to rediscover about 10 years ago. It’s fun, cheap, and an easy way to get exercise. And it connects me with my surroundings — the people, buildings, and streetscapes of this beautiful city — in a way I didn’t even realize I was missing when I drove.

But as pressing political and planetary realities have welled up around my personal transportation choice, I’ve come to see that I am part of a movement, one that encapsulates just about every major issue progressive San Franciscans care about: public health, environmentalism, energy policy, economics, urban planning, social justice, public safety, sustainability, personal responsibility, and the belief that we can make our communities better places, that we’re not captive to past societal choices.

As a bicyclist and a journalist, I’ve been actively engaged in these struggles for many years. I understand that bicyclists are criticized in many quarters as a vocal minority with a self-righteous sense of superiority and entitlement, and that I’m personally accused of bias for writing empathetically about bicyclists in dozens of bike-related stories.

Well, guess what? I don’t apologize. We are better than motorists, by every important measure. We use less space and fewer resources and create less waste and pollution. Bikes are available to almost every segment of society, and we don’t need to fight wars to power them. They improve the community’s health and happiness. And when we get into accidents, we don’t kill or maim the people we hit.

And you know what else? This really is going to be the Year of the Bicycle, as it’s been dubbed by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the city’s largest grassroots civic organization, with more than 10,000 dues-paying members. There are more of us than ever, politicians now listen to us, and San Francisco is on the verge of the most rapid expansion of its bike network that any American city has ever seen.

This is the moment we’ve been moving toward for many years, a turning point that the Guardian has meticulously chronicled and proudly promoted. The bicycle has become a metaphor for progress that is long overdue. So mount up on May 14, Bike to Work Day, if you’d like to be a part of the solution to what’s ailing our city and planet.

I love my bike, and so do most people who see it. San Franciscans appreciate the little things, like someone who rides a silly-looking bike.

It started as a basic used mountain bike, but I styled it out for Burning Man a few years ago, covering it with heavy red acrylic paint that looks like stucco, a big basket covered in fake fur and ringed with electro-luminescent wire, and custom-welded high handlebars topped by a lizard horn.

Maybe you’ve seen me around town — and if so, maybe you’ve seen me blow through stop signs or red lights. Yes, I’m that guy, and I only apologize if I’m stealing a motorist’s right-of-way, which I try to avoid. Rob Anderson, who successfully sued San Francisco to force detailed studies of its Bike Plan (and blogs at district5diary.blogspot.com), regularly calls me and my ilk the "bike fanatics."

I’ve interviewed Anderson by phone a few times and tangled with him online many times. He’s actually a pretty well-informed and well-reasoned guy, except for his near pathological disdain for bicycling, which he considers an inherently dangerous activity that government has no business promoting and is not a serious transportation option.

But San Francisco would be a gridlocked nightmare without bikes. Transportation officials say this is already one of the most traffic-choked cities in the country (second after Houston), a big factor in Muni never reaching its voter-mandated 85 percent on-time performance. During peak hours, most Muni lines reach their holding capacity. Imagine 37,500 additional people (the estimated number of San Franciscans who primarily travel by bike) driving or taking Muni every day.

Conversely, imagine the transportation system if bicycling rates doubled and some of those bulky cars and buses became zippy bikes. Quality of life would improve; the air would be cleaner; we would emit far less greenhouse gases (transportation accounts for about half of the Bay Area’s carbon emissions); housing would get cheaper (building parking increases costs and decreases the number of housing units); pressure would decrease to drill for oil offshore and prop up despotic regimes in oil-rich countries; pedestrians would be safer (about a dozen are killed by cars here every year); and public health would improve (by reducing obesity and respiratory ailments associated with air pollution).

Increase bicycling rates even more, to the levels of Berlin, Copenhagen, or Amsterdam, and San Francisco would be utterly transformed, with many streets converted to car-free boulevards as the demand shifts from facilitating speeding cars to creating space for more bicyclists and pedestrians.

Sure, as Anderson points out, many people will never ride a bike. The elderly, those with disabilities, some families with kids, and a few other groups can credibly argue that the bicycle isn’t a realistic daily transportation option. But that’s a small percentage of the population.

For the rest of you: what’s your excuse? Why would you continue to rely on such wasteful and expensive transportation options — a label that applies to both cars and buses — when you could use the most efficient vehicle ever invented?

At the SFBC’s annual Golden Wheels Awards banquet on May 5, SFBC director Leah Shahum described a bike movement at the peak of its power, reach, and influence. "In the last two years, we’ve seen an unprecedented political embrace of bicycling," she said, praising Mayor Gavin Newsom for his championing of the Sunday Streets car-free space and calling the progressive-dominated Board of Supervisors "the most bike-friendly board we’ve ever seen."

In just a few years, the SFBC went from fighting pitched battles with Newsom over closing some Golden Gate Park roads to cars on Saturdays — a two-year fight that ended in a compromise after some serious ill-will on both sides — to Newsom’s championing an even larger Sunday Streets road closure on six days this spring and summer, even fighting through business community opposition to do so.

As with many Newsom initiatives, it’s difficult to discern his motivation, which seems to be a mixture of political posturing and a desire to keep San Francisco on the cutting edge of the green movement. Whatever the case, the will to take street space from automobiles — which will be the crux of the struggles to come — is probably greater now than it has ever been.

Because at the end of the day, Anderson is right: bicyclists do have a radical agenda. We want to take space from cars, both lanes and parking spaces, all over this city. That’s what has to happen to create a safe, complete bicycle system, which is a prerequisite to encouraging more people to cycle. We need to realize that designing the city around automobiles is an increasingly costly and unsustainable model.

"The streets do not have to be solely — or even primarily — for cars anymore," Shahum told an audience that included City Attorney Dennis Herrera, top mayoral aide Mike Farrah, and several members of the Board of Supervisors (including President David Chiu, a regular cyclist and occasional bike commuter), drawing warm applause.

Shahum was certainly correct when she called the politically engaged community of bicyclists "one of the strongest and most successful movements in this city," one she believes is capable of moving an ambitious agenda. "During the next six weeks, we have the opportunity to win a literal doubling of the city’s bike network."

She’s referring to the imminent completion of environmental studies that support the city’s Bike Plan, which will allow the courts to lift the nearly three-year-old injunction against new bike projects in the city. The SFBC has been aggressively organizing and advocating for the immediate approval of all 56 near-term bikeway improvements outlined in the plan, which have been studied and are ready to go, most with grant funding already in the bank.

"I think San Francisco is hungry for a higher use of public space," she said. "Imagine streets moving so calmly and slowly that you’d let your six-year-old ride on them."

That’s the standard advocated by the international car-free movement, which I interacted with last year when I covered the International Carfree Conference in Portland, Ore. These influential advocates believe bikeways should be so safe and insulated from fast-moving traffic that both the young and old feel comfortable riding them.

"Streets belong to us — they are the public spaces of the city — but they don’t feel like they belong to us," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, a sponsor of Sunday Streets, which was honored at the Golden Wheel Awards. The streets, he told the crowd, "don’t need to be the objects of fear."

Later, as we spoke, Radulovich said it’s not enough to create narrow bikes lanes on busy streets. One of the great joys of riding a bike with a friend is to be able to talk as you ride, something he said transportation advocates around the world refer to as the "conversational standard."

Politically, there’s a long way to go before San Francisco embraces the conversational standard, the creation of permanent car-free bike boulevards, or traffic law changes that promote bicycling. Anderson and his ilk reacted with outrage last year when the Guardian and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission began discussing adopting Idaho’s bike laws here, in which bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs (see "Don’t stop: Bike lessons from Idaho," 5/14/08).

Yet until bicycling is taken more seriously as a real transportation option, all this talk about sustainability and green-everything is going to continue falling woefully short of its objectives.

The powerhouse environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council held a gala awards dinner May 9 at the California Academy of Sciences for its first Growing Green Awards, an effort to honor innovators in the growing sustainable food movement.

The award selection panel was chaired by journalist Michael Pollan, whose The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006) and other works have made him a leading voice calling for recognition and reform of a corporate food system that is unsustainable, unhealthy, and harmful to the environment.

That movement has garnered some high-profile support and attention, but has so far failed to effectively counter the influence of agribusiness interests, he told me. "We need an organization like the NRDC in the food area, or we need to get NRDC to embrace our issues."

The awards banquet showed that Pollan and his allies have made progress with the NRDC, which should be a natural ally of advocates for better food and transportation systems, two realms that have the biggest impact on this country’s natural resources.

But when I left the ceremony as hundreds of guests were being seated for dinner, I rode away — on the only bicycle there.

The world stage

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May 12, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Recently I was lucky enough to land at an international theater festival in Wroclaw, Poland, jostling elbows with a transnational mix of theater folk on the occasion of the 13th annual European Theatre Prize, this year awarded to the great Polish director Krystian Lupa. It was an eye-opening glimpse at some awesome theatrical muscle rarely if ever seen in the Bay Area, or even the United States. Globally-renowned powerhouses like Italy’s Pippo Delbono and Belgium’s Guy Cassiers were there with some extraordinary work, not to mention that of Lupa, whose utterly brilliant and plotless eight-hour fantasia on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Factory 2, proved an absolute highlight of my theatergoing career thus far.

While dreaming of the day Factory 2 takes its local bow, I can only appreciate all the more what places like UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall or San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts do in bringing us news of the theatrical world — or news of the world, theatrically. Another local presenter of exceptional international work has been the San Francisco International Arts Festival, whose sixth season begins this week. SFIAF and executive director Andrew Wood have increasingly made world theater a vital part of the fest’s eclectic performance mix. This year is no exception, with three must-sees in the lineup.

First, South Korea’s Cho-In Theatre makes its U.S. debut with The Angel and the Woodcutter, an original physical theater piece reutf8g the Korean folk tale in a wordless, poetical drama as uncompromising as it is unexpected. Then, Russia’s famed, immensely creative performance ensemble, the Akhe Group — proponents of what they call "Russian Engineering Theatre" and favorites at SFIAF in 2005, where they presented White Cabin — return with the U.S. premiere of Gobo.Digital Glossary, a wild and captivating conglomeration of video projections, animation, ambient music, lasers, clowning, and trompe l’oeil.

Also receiving its Bay Area premiere is Beyond the Mirror, an unprecedented collaboration between New York’s Bond Street Theatre and Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre. The description of this first American-Afghani theatrical outing might ring a bell: Mirror had been slated to open Brava’s theatrical season in fall 2008, when the U.S. government’s inexplicable delays in processing visas for the Afghan performers forced its last-minute cancellation. That disappointment will happily be rectified by SFIAF when Mirror opens at Cowell Theater. (A second San Francisco appearance follows as part of foolsFURY’s Fury Factory festival in June.)

The two companies began crafting the play after meeting by chance in 2002 among the refugee camps outside Peshawar in northern Pakistan, where the activist, physical-theater–based Bond Street went after 9/11 to develop links to the Afghan people and work with a German NGO building schools in the devastated country. Exile, meanwhile, had formed as a group of refugee playwrights, actors, and other performance professionals committed to keeping Afghan arts alive and reflecting the concerns of the Afghani population living as second-class citizens in Pakistan.

Never more timely, the play ranges over the last three decades of Afghanistan’s history, using an expressive mélange of theatrical forms and techniques — including oral history, mythology, live music, traditional dance, drama, acrobatics, puppetry, and film — to tell a story of war and hope at the cusp of yet another turbulent chapter in the country’s unfolding story. Notably, the eight-member half-American, half-Afghani cast includes Afghanistan’s most famous actress, Anisa Wahab, who grew up in happier times on camera as a child star and has continued to act despite its still dangerous implications for women.

Communicating partly with some mutual English, and largely in terms of both distinct and shared physical vocabularies, the artists developed what became Mirror in a nonlinear, highly abstract way, according to Bond Street artistic director Joanna Sherman, who codirected it with Exile’s Mahmoud Shah Salimi. That in no way diminishes its rootedness or poignancy.

"We went around the countryside and interviewed different people, and videotaped them as they would allow," Sherman explained by phone from New York. "Our challenge was to portray these terrible stories in a way that was not gruesome or impossible to watch. We used our physical techniques in a way that it would be watchable and compelling but not exactly ‘realistic.’"

Since Mirror‘s premiere at the second Kabul Theatre Festival in 2005, much has happened in the U.S. and Afghanistan, prompting a small but significant revision, a new final scene, according to Sherman. "We do leave on a thought of hope," she stressed. "But [we’re] doing some interviewing again and getting some additional video. We’ll see what happens."

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 20-31, various venues

www.sfiaf.org

Aerosol melodies

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May 12, 2009

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marke@sfbg.com

Ah, Le Poisson Rouge — how I yearn for you. The edgy New York City club and performance space has become a golden nexus for the current rich collision of the indie, electronic, and contemporary classical worlds. Zing go the avant-garde, filter-bent strings in the Bay often enough, of course, especially through the out-there provenance of sfSound (www.sfsound.org), the biannual Soundwave Series (www.projectsoundwave.com), and Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (cnmat.berkeley.edu). But it took last August’s sold out Herbst Theater one-off by Wordless Music, the Poisson-based org that brings big indie names to the new music stage, to finally hold SF’s flannel-clad fixie pixie population enraptured by the freakier side of symphonica, with the white-noise-drenched West Coast premiere of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and soul-loosening pieces by Bay boys Fred Frith (“Save As”) and Mason Bates (“Icarian Rhapsody”).

It’s been a massive year for 32-year-old Virginia native Bates, who told me over the phone that he moved from NYC to North Oakland four years ago because he “wanted a house and a short commute to a great city.” In March the Julliard grad debuted a six-movement work, Sirens, commissioned by local vocal greats Chanticleer, right after he wrapped up a three-season young-composer-in-residence program with the California Symphony. Perhaps his biggest break came last month, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, assembled via audition vids and led by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, made its debut at Carnegie Hall, playing a portion of Bates’ latest orchestral suite, The B-Sides. Like many other professional cynics, I had my nails sharpened and painted Jungle Red for this dreadful-seeming Internet marketing buzz-blast, but the inclusion of Bates’ forward-thinking work helped rescue the affair from maudlin crowd-pleasing.

Speaking of gimmicks, here’s what many perceive as Bates’: he plays a laptop onstage with the orchestra. Good heavens! Mere gimmickry’s a sad assumption — sure enough, his YouTube gig has reignited that tired technology vs. “true” classical debate that has periodically raged ever since the theremin took the Paris Opera stage in 1927. But Bates, who has toured clubs in his DJ Masonic guise for years, rises above all that with a deep knowledge of dance music history, which itself claims a long and fruitful entanglement with contemporary classical, and a mission of sonic integration.

“The laptop is a piece of the enterprise, a means of augmenting the texture of an orchestral arrangement and adding a richness that evokes new sonic landscapes,” says Bates, who considers his keyboard a “specialized extension of the percussion family.” As for snap judgments about technology, “it actually goes both ways,” he says. “Of course, some traditional symphony-goers can’t really go there. But it’s important for people from the club world to know that I’m not just orchestrating techno” — like the Balanescu Quartet’s version of Kraftwerk or the Williams Fairey Brass Band’s take on acid house. “I’m not Richie Hawtin for woodwinds and booming tubas. I’m coming from a more ambient, electronica place — I’m always aware that I’m playing off something while delving into unique textures and expanded sonari.”

The B-Sides, which will have its full debut for three nights with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall, consists of five movements inspired by archetypal ambient moods — from the buzzing insects and tropical evocations of “Aerosol Melody Hanalei” to astronautical voice transmissions and blankets of static in “Gemini and the Solar Winds.” “Wharehouse Medicine,” which the YouTube Symphony debuted, is like a nifty bit of Leonard Bernstein pumped up with chattering clicks and back-ear bass that energetically summons up the chillout rooms of yore. If it seems odd that Bates references vinyl in his title, while combining laptop rumination and live orchestration, don’t sweat it. “I was thinking back to the experimental freedom that B-sides once afforded to groups like Pink Floyd — surgical strikes into trippy terrain.”

Bates will also be bringing his outstanding Mercury Soul project (www.mercurysoul.org), conceived with conductor Benjamin Shwartz and visual artist Anne Patterson, to Davies after the May 22 symphony performance and to Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com) on May 28. Mercury Soul “is almost a negative image of what I do with an orchestra,” Bates says, “where I DJ and we create a club atmosphere interspersed with live performances of contemporary works by the likes of Steve Reich and John Luther Adams.”

“Look, I know a laptop is never going to be as expressive as a fiddle,” Bates says, a twang of his Virginian upbringing coming through. “And a CD installation pack may never rival the power of a written score. But if I can expand and screw around with orchestral space that way, then it definitely meets my intent.”

THE B-SIDES

With the San Francisco Symphony

Wed/20, Fri/22, and Sat/23

8 p.m., $35–$130

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness

(415) 552-8000

www.sfsymphony.org

Lizz Roman and Dancers

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May 12, 2009

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PREVIEW The last time we saw Lizz Roman, her dancers were parading on Project Artaud Theater’s catwalk, climbing its scaffolding, and dangling from its imposing industrial crane (relics from the time the place buzzed as a canning factory). Now, three years later, she has taken over another popular performance venue, Dance Mission Theater. This time she doesn’t restrict herself to the interior; At Play starts outside at the corner of Mission and 24th streets, then moves upstairs into the various areas that most of us consider to be adjuncts to the main theater. It’s one of the peculiarities of Bay Area dance that so many choreographers are drawn to creating site-specific installations. Some work with an existing space, others add their own touches. Roman belongs to the former. I can’t help but think that — DMT’s architectural properties aside — Roman was attracted by its spirit as a home to so many artists and dance students. Roman is not the first to use DMT; Keith Hennessy has orated from its fire escape, and Jo Kreiter has dangled from its parapet. Joining longtime Roman dancers Sonya Smith and James Soria are Tara Fagan, Brian Fisher, and Kelly Kemp. Most encouragingly, Roman is again working with cellist Alex Kelly and DJ-percussionist Clyde Sheets. They worked magic at Artaud, and I’ll bet that they’ll do it again in the heart of the Mission.

LIZZ ROMAN AND DANCERS Through May 24. Fri-Sun, 8 and 9:30 p.m., $20. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF. (415) 273-4633. www.brownpapertickets.com

LISTEN/VISION 06 speaks

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May 7, 2009

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By Johnny Ray Huston

In addition to making music, Christopher Willits is a guiding force behind the art and experimental music site Overlap (www.overlap.org). In conjunction with Overlap’s next event, I caught up with him by e-mail.

SFBG What was it like to collaborate with Ryuichi Sakamoto on Ocean Fire (12k, 2008)?

Christopher Willits It was surreal. We fell into an oceanic trance, and a bunch of music suddenly emerged. Then a Godzilla-like sea monster morphed out of his piano and he vaporized it with his max patch.

SFBG You’ve also worked with Brad Laner of Medicine. Are you an admirer of that (ahead-of-its-time) band?

CW Medicine [had] a mind-splittingly original sound — it was a soundtrack to many high school adventures. Now it’s an absolute joy to be friends with Mr. Laner. Together we are the varsity band members (guitar I and II) of the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. We’re aiming for nationals next year.

SFBG What do you like about the Bay Area’s close proximity to the ocean?

CW The smell of fresh wind, and dreams of flying great white sharks.

SFBG I saw a fave list of yours once that had Magma, the Carpenters’ "Close to You" and Sun Ra’s Lanquidity on it. Who is inspiring or obsessing you at present?

CW That is a timeless list — can I say them again? Let’s add Morton Subotnick, Wild Bull (www.merlindarts.com), all Eliane Radigue, all Elvin Jones, John Coltrane, and that band that plays at El Rio on Sunday night.

SFBG You recently toured in China, including a performance with images on ice. What did you discover?

CW I discovered a resilient community of artists and experimental musicians pushing against the grain (and firewall) of this mammoth country or force. They understand my history and what I’m doing — another win for Chinese bootlegs? I also found some of the best food ever: huajiao (flower pepper) with asparagus! But hold the boiled big brains. Those I’m definitely not into.

LISTEN/VISION 06 With Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, and Classical Revolution. Sun/10, 8 p.m., $10. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016. www.overlap.org.

Live review: Kreator and Exodus deliver the quality bangover

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May 6, 2009

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By LC Mason

Kreator at a German fest earlier this year

Quality bangover: the gloriously painful aftermath that results after a night of heavy headbanging to brutal bass drum runs and diabolic guitar solos, characterized by roaring tinnitus, aching neck muscles, bruises and scrapes from slamming and stomping into others, as well as stiff hands from gratuitous handing and devil horn-throwing.

This was my condition when I woke up the next morning, ringing ears and all, after witnessing the merciless onslaught of the Kreator and Exodus show at Slim’s on Tuesday, April 28. Except I wasn’t brave enough to enter the roiling whirlpool of 200-pound man-bodies, because a lot more than bruises and scrapes would have gone down, especially as Kreator vocalist-guitarist Mille Petrozza repeatedly and ravenously commanded the audience to “kill each other in the mosh pit.”

In a rhapsodic homecoming performance that surely sated the entire pantheon of thrash metal gods, San Francisco’s legendary sons Exodus played faster and harder than any band half their age and challenged their fans, both young and old, to act accordingly.

Electric gypsies

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May 6, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Tommy Weber (né Thomas Ejnar Arkner, 1938 — 2006) was a trickster, so I cannot help but love him.

Comin’ from where I’m from — three tribal peoples: Pamunkey, Scottish, mystery African — I have always adored the Afro-Kelt über alles, and been at least inchoately hip to the centrality of the trickster, whether Eshú Elegbara, the Diné Coyote, or the Danes’ own Loki and his spawn Fenrir the apocalyptic Wolf. Such figures surf the spaces between the rational world we animals feel duty-bound to shore up for civilization’s sake, and the great vast unconscious world beyond the reach of imposed order.

The disenfranchised, rejected Dane and deracinated Anglo-African Tommy Weber — the fatally charming and irrepressible antihero of Robert Greenfield’s new A Day In the Life — One Family, the Beautiful People, & the End of the ’60s (Da Capo) — seems a trickster by default. He was left to his own devices by his estranged parents to play among the excreta of Empire well before any 11th-hour attempts by his roguish grandfather, R. E. Weber, to finish him off as a proper, upper-crust, English gentleman. The man famously dubbed "Tommy the Tumbling Dice" by his pop doppelgängers Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg had an ingrained loathing for authority, yet the right accent to charm anyone in his relentlessly class-obsessed society.

I spent the 1980s back and forth between Africa, Europa (especially not-so fair Albion), and Ray-Gun Amerikkka, chased by those primordial Saharan tricksters Wepwawet and his altar-ego the Pale Fox Yurugu. One film my late Mamanne, sister, and I loved during that period was 1984’s Another Country, starring Rupert Everett as aristo U.K. spy-turned-Russian defector Guy Bennett (i.e., Guy Burgess). The character’s final line has stuck with me. Queried about whether or not he missed the Motherland, his response is, "I miss the cricket." This immortal bit of immortal dialogue is key for Tommy Weber, me, and anyone else brought up along the black Atlantic continuum. It sums up Tommy’s unconscious longing as a patchwork Englishman to rove to the British Empire’s far-flung, dusty, darker outposts. It applies to the cricket pitch desires of émigré "Indians" (from East and West). And I connect it to my early-1980s Anglophilia, stoked by Top of the Pops, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, and NME.

Having (perhaps foolishly) strived to find myself in those sonic fictions, I feel connected to a description of late-period Tommy by Spacemen 3’s Pete Bain: "He’d come staggering in, talk shit at you for an hour with garbled words like a radio that had to be tuned to a certain frequency, and then stagger out again like a drunk" We are all animals of the machine age, hoping to belong, struggling amid turbulent cultural waves. We navigate denatured empire (which yields ordered beauties like cricket, classical music, and the world-famous English gardens tended by such experts as Jake Weber’s aunt, Mary Keen) and the dirty, excreta-slathered murk of primordial tribal tradition (which yields transcendence).

Accompanied by a soul mate nicknamed Puss, Tommy the Tumbling Dice gambled on a folkway that would provide that transcendence — a Swinging London milieu of sex-drugs-rock ‘n’ roll wherein religious and social apostasy was de rigueur. When he crapped out, as a Trickster always does, what came next was relentless nihilism at the prick of a needle. Yet here’s the thing about tricksters: death often means rebirth for them — And Shine swam on, you dig?

Once upon a time, circa America’s bicentennial year, I chanced to view a strange, twisted, little film called Performance (1970) that was far too advanced for my innocence. Every summer in Virginia, my favorite pastime — even above slopping hogs and barn dancing — was handling the snakes. But lil’ ol’ me was yet unprepared for being ensnared in Anita Pallenberg’s chamber of smoke-and-mirrors.

My old soul arose like the fabled Kemetic Bennu bird of prehistory from that befuddling, dazzling screening, leaving me a lifelong devotee of the occultist, pirate triumvirate that is my beloved doom fox Pallenberg, interiors aesthete Christopher Gibbs, and the film’s auteur par excellence — the late, great Scot Donald Cammell. (Yes, Nicholas Roeg was essentially the technical director, but the film’s peculiar psychosexual tangle and audacious vision could come from no other brilliant cerebellum than Cammell’s.)

And so I was transfixed by the cover of Day In The Life. There stared a witch even more lovely and remote than my muse Anita. Looking inside, I discovered that she was Puss Weber, and that the young Fata Morgana boy from a Stones memorabilia photo that I’d long obsessed over was her eldest son, Jake. Alongside his bruh’ Charley, he had an inadvertent ringside seat to Mick and Keith’s maiden voyage into the rough black Atlantic. You can read all about it in this book, a great gift from the cosmos.

"Fantasy" by Earth, Wind, & Fire was the private, tacit anthem of my family’s feminine trio in the 1970s — which paralleled that of the Weber boys. Strange and beautiful it is that Jake, son of Tommy the Tumbling Dice, should find himself co-starring on a show called Medium, wherein his character, Joe DuBois, has a witchy-empowered wife he must support and nurture much as he once did his beloved mother Puss. As Marshall McLuhan proclaimed during the year of Jake’s birth (in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man): "The medium is the message." Although W.E.B. DuBois (no relation) famously said the problem of the 20th century of is that of the color line, it can now also be argued that the past century-plus has been marked more than almost anything else by the problems stemming from the interface of man and machine — spirituality vs. technology.

In this light, it seems no accident that Tommy Weber has become an antihero fit to rival his fellow Archer, Duane "Skyman" Allman, in my internal spiritual pantheon. I would hazard a guess that both of his sons are currently fulfilling what Tommy wrote to Jake in 1982: "There is a very important secret. Work is much more interesting than play and if you are lucky enough to be able to make your work your play and your play pay, well then you’re in clover."

One cannot claim "Tommy the Tumbling Dice" and his beautiful, free spirit wife Susan Ann Caroline "Puss" Coriat should not have had children, for their now grown sons are vital contributors to our black Atlantic culture and are fine human beings. Still, these rather tortured Swinging Londoners’ families rival the pathology often on display around the corners of my ‘hood in high Harlem.

I am far less enchanted by A Day in the Life‘s testimonials on Puss and Tommy’s pre-Stones circle in London than I am arrested by their families’ collective African history. Greenfield’s book aims to shoot an arrow straight into the heart of Boomerville, yet it also unwittingly works as a strong resource for the far opposite realm of postcolonial studies. In fact, with some tweaking, it could serve as one of that discipline’s core works — a testament to its riches.

One of my most cherished passages in Greenfield’s book deals with Tommy’s haphazard management of the pioneering Afro-rock band Osibisa. A crazy trip through northern Africa is bookended by him, Jake, and Charley enduring a harrowing stay in jail in Lagos. To a degree, Puss and Tommy were confined by being products of their class and times. Yet they cannot be judged now via the uptight lenses of today. On the strength of their private soul-gnosis and Herculean striving to escape the lot dealt them by the hands of cosmic fate, these extraordinary Webers are folk out of — no, beyond — time. We’ll still learn from them on the far side of 2012.

Listen/Vision 06

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May 5, 2009

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PREVIEW In addition to making music, Christopher Willits is a guiding force behind the art and experimental music site Overlap (www.overlap.org). In conjunction with Overlap’s next event, I caught up with him by e-mail.