Punk Archives — Page 52 of 70 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Cut Copy

March 10, 2009

PREVIEW Cut Copy can’t help being so likable. They’re here to dance, they’re damn happy about it, and they want you to know it — and jump in. The happy-go-lucky aesthetic worked: last year’s In Ghost Colours (Modular Interscope) debuted at the top of the Australian charts and topped scads of year-end best-of lists. The trio — a skinny bunch with swishy haircuts, delectable Australian accents, and a pathological addition to plaid — put out that luminous trove of swirly synths, Day-Glo pop, and irrepressible dance-rock groove to near-unanimous critical acclaim.

And about time, too. Downright disco raver "Lights and Music," an ecstatic summer anthem with a veritable shirt-grabber of a hook, spawned about a trillion remixes and lit up transcontinental dance floors across the globe. Vocalist Dan Whitford, who started out as a DJ and has released comps under the Fabriclive mix series, formed the band in 2001, collecting guitarist Tim Hoey and drummer Mitchell Scott along the way to the band’s 2004 debut, Bright Like Neon Love (Modular Interscope). Maybe it’s Whitford’s DJ impulses that account for In Ghost Colours‘ chimerical meldings of disparate rock and electronic elements that give the group’s music its diverse, pastiche-y textures — and, for determined music taxonomists, a certain elusive quality. Nu rave, disco-punk, synth rock? Whichever and whatever, it just sounds like a good time.

CUT COPY With Matt and Kim, and Knightlife. Thurs/12, 8 p.m. $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.livenation.com. Cut Copy DJs a Popscene after-party. Thurs/12, 10 p.m., $10. 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 541-9574, www.popscene-sf.com

Peepshow: Punk sex “Roulette”

March 9, 2009

Each week Justin Juul highlights a rad upcoming local sexy event

Who Don’t you hate it when you forget to close your browser after a hot and heavy self-petting session and then you suddenly find yourself watching porn with your brain instead of your naughty region? What is this shit, man?! Porn sucks. The plotlines are non-existent, the music sounds like it was made on a garage-sale Casio, and the production value is just total shit. But the worst part is the casting. Big beefy jocks with tribal tats and goatees, peroxide blondes with implants and tramp stamps -they may be good at fucking, but compelling character actors/artists, they are not. The problem with porn is that most of it is made in Los Angeles by brainless douchebags and clueless ex-cheerleaders looking for a quick buck. But this is San Francisco. This is the art capital of the entire world, the home of the free thinker, and the land of the awesome. Can’t we get some porn made for us? Yes, we can! Yes, we can! If you’re as sick of Barbie Doll smut as we are, then you should get to know local filmmaker/producer/writer/artist Courtney Trouble. Trouble is the founder of a “queer porn” (“queer” as in not just homo, but alternative as well) site called Nofauxxx.com and she’s the final word when it comes to smut with attitude and character. No Fauxxx is the oldest running queer porn site on the Internet and, to this date, the only spot that mixes alt, gay, lesbian, straight, trans, kink, and BBW genres into one common site. It’s sexy, artsy, entertaining, and totally DIY. In a word: ours.

Talk about the passion

March 6, 2009

There’s an argument to be made that record love really begins when you start noticing the labels. Slumberland was one of my earliest such epiphanies. I was bit by one of the label’s groups, Velocity Girl, because, as much as anything, I felt I had come to them on my own. This secret knowledge kept me satisfied until an older friend made me a cassette mix heavy on the Slumberland set: pastel guitar music by Rocketship, the Softies, Lilys, Black Tambourine, the Ropers, and Amy Linton’s much-missed Bay Area groups, Henry’s Dress and the Aislers Set. I started paying more attention to the sleeve.

Slumberland has been a byword for the more melodic runoff of post-punk since 1989, when its premier release — a three-band 7-inch titled What Kind of Heaven Do You Want? — closed the gap between New York noise and English indie-pop. This is an area of music subject to quarrelsome subdivisions (see shoegaze, C86, dream pop), but Slumberland’s common denominator is the taste and passion of Mike Schulman, former member of Black Tambourine, Powderburns, and the underrated Whorl.

Though still associated with its initial crop of D.C.-area groups, Schulman has run Slumberland from the East Bay since 1992. After a dry spell in the early aughts, the label is disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quip about second acts with a much-buzzed-about round of releases by Brooklyn pop stylists Crystal Stilts, Cause Co-Motion, and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart — an impressive slate that puts Schulman in the unusual position of encountering his own footsteps.

“I look at what we’re doing now, and I could easily imagine any of these bands being on Slumberland 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago,” Schulman tells me between sips of coffee on a gray Sunday morning in Oakland. He’s expansive about the joys of record collecting and vicissitudes of music press in spite of having been up since 4 a.m. with his new baby. Schulman’s tastes are eclectic — he ran the dance record store/label Drop Beat in Oakland’s Rockridge District from 1996 to 2000 and is happy to gab about doo-wop or Japanese noise — but Slumberland was dedicated to scruffy pop from the start. It was an obvious niche, though striking for its proximity to D.C.’s thriving hardcore scene. “I used to go see Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, and I loved those bands, but there were tons of hardcore labels,” Schulman reflects. “I couldn’t have named three labels in America that would do stuff by HoneyBunch or Small Factory. That music just seemed underserved.”

The Slumberland aesthetic was also a romance with a format. Schulman traces his own 45 rpm fixation back to his father’s R&B collection as well as a life-altering experience with the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 A-side “Never Understand” (Blanco y Negro). “It just makes so much sense — the one great song on the one great side, something that fits in your hand. You can pick it up and carry it around. You can have a little box to take it to your friends to play it for people…. Historically, it was a very economical way to transmit the most amazing three minutes of music you’ve ever heard.”

This kind of object-oriented pleasure, along with visual aesthetics and the relative gender equity of the Slumberland bands, tends to get short shrift from blog critics who take the label to task for “playing it safe” with unabashedly melodic music. “I just think rock music is inherently conservative,” Schulman weighs in. “Everyone goes back to the same 15 references. I love the Siltbreeze stuff — those are great records — but you can’t tell me that there’s something shocking or new about them.”

Of course, a credible brand has the upshot of generating its own ancestry. The Brooklyn bands are all well-versed in the Slumberland back catalog — easily navigable on the label’s smartly designed Web site — though the Pains of Being Pure at Heart earn extra points for tapping Archie Moore (Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine) to mix their eponymous debut. Listening to the first 10 declarative seconds of every song on the album is a humbling refresher course in the elevating art of the single.

The Crystal Stilts don’t play for the same caffeinated high, but their 2008 full-length, Alight of Night, is addictive nonetheless. The disc’s zoned out, organ-laced stomps pull off the neat trick of making New York City post-disco punk sound good again. The creamiest song on the album, “Prismatic Room,” lights up the same pleasure zones in my brain as those early Velocity Girl tracks. I find myself going for seconds as soon it finishes — something I didn’t think I did anymore

www.slumberlandrecords.com

Grimm tales

March 4, 2009

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "My father told me never to play covers. It’s such a hole to fall into. People want to hear stuff they’ve heard a thousand times. Especially white people — they all want to be safe, and covers just make them feel safe."

Larkin Grimm takes the briefest breath, standing beside a frozen creek next to a cowboy trading post in South Dakota’s Badlands. The ice is starting to melt, and the 27-year-old songwriter’s on a roll, talking ’bout her hippie parents — they met here, her father who once lived at the San Francisco Zen Center, and later played southern rock to "toothless hillbilly women" with an Appalachian bar band to support the family ("A huge transition from meditating all day") — as well has her studies at Yale, studies in shamanism, pals Lightning Bolt, and the Providence, R.I., noise scene she emerged from.

"My music doesn’t do that. I’m trying to do a thing where I make people feel safe and at the same time say the most brutal things I can."

She shares the name of the darkest of yarn-spinners, her music rests on a foundation of folk and acoustic instrumentation, and her sensibility — despite her queer punk past — clearly stems from the spiritual quests of her footloose forebears. But Grimm’s one of a kind — even if her soul is old, she’s been here before, and she may be here once again.

Just listen to her new album, Parplar (Young God, 2008). Songs like "Be My Host" may bear the folk-pop fragrance of Joni Mitchell’s early Beat-girl rambles and tunes like "Durge" may ring with the bared-skull minor-key drama of Kurt Cobain writing for a Balkan women’s choir. But listen closely to the lyrics of such songs as "Hope for the Hopeless": "I turned my head against the wicked world you’re in / So there you are I hope you are suffering / I hope you feel the hopelessness and you can’t bear the cost / of being an ungrateful shit," she intones. "… I hope the wind has marked your face and you don’t have a hope / You’re drifting free above the ground / Gently stretching out your rope." Beyond black, yet often alight with an austere beauty. Grimm — a veteran of Dirty Projectors (a band she met at Yale and describes as "what happens when you have an egomaniac trying to control everyone") — knows how to channel the most intense of spirits.

Parplar revolves around female sexuality. "I was going through a period of my life where I was having a gender crisis, and I wasn’t sure if I was a woman or not, but I was starting to get really attracted to men, which was new," she explains. The album was intended to fund her gender reassignment surgery. "I had this plan: get a dick and cut off my breasts."

But then she ended up writing all these tunes about women, including "other women who were having major crises at the time: Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, and Beyonce. All these women are fascinating and intelligent, and they’re in everybody’s mind, and they’re archetypes, and we’ve built them all up so much. They’re sort of like virgins that have been thrown into the volcano. We’ve torn them apart," says Grimm, believing Spears "reached enlightenment for a second. When she shaved her head she was turning her back on materialism. But her publicist and record label wouldn’t allow her to go through the process of rebirth and forced her back into slavery, and it’s tragic, you know. I kind of wrote this record for her, in a way."

Sisterhood — and brotherhood — is powerful: Grimm now hopes to find other kids who lived in the SF-originated Holy Order of MANS commune, which she characterizes as "a co-ed monastic order of energy healers." "We had a very magical childhood, which we lost," she says. After a near-suicide at Yale, she says, "I just live fully all the time. Don’t let anybody tell me what to do. Coincidences and amazing things happen to me all the time." For instance, she recently created an altar with a human skull and twinkling lights in her car. "I felt like it wasn’t magical enough — we need feathers! Five minutes later I see a dead pheasant on the road. Suddenly I realize everything is connected. As soon as you lose your sense of isolation, anything is possible."

LARKIN GRIMM

Fri/6, 8 p.m., $20

Swedish American Hall

2174 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

STICKING WITH THE TINDERSTICKS

What is this mysterious thing called a Hungry Saw (Constellation), the title of the Tindersticks’ new album and one of its tracks? "It’s one of quite a few songs on this record that I don’t understand totally and I don’t really want to!" Tindersticks vocalist Stuart A. Staples says almost jubilantly from France, where he now lives. "It’s something that drives me and hurts me at the same time." Staples has been on an intuitive tip of late — especially after the band’s last disc, Waiting for the Moon (Beggars Banquet, 2003), which took a year and a half to make. With the addition of new drummer Thomas Belhom and bassist Dan McKinna, and a directive to record in eight days, the group have come up with a fresh slice of Tindersticks tunefulness — almost breezy ("The Flicker of a Little Girl") and moodily somber ("Mother Dear") in turns. As for that tremulous instrument called Staples’ voice, he believes the best is yet to come: "I think it’s always changing and always growing," he says, citing French vocalist Léo Ferré as a discovery that raised his game. "I think it’s something that really drives me, finding my voice. I don’t think it’s arrived."

Sun/15, 8 p.m., $28. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

IN THE SPIRIT

ESTELLE AND SOLANGE

Kanye West took a Shine to his "American Boy" collaborator, whereas the Knowles scion attempted to break with the pop mold with her second CD. Thurs/5, 8 p.m., $35–$50. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

EFTERKLANG

Choral harmonies and impressionistic orchestrations rise from the Copenhagen, Denmark outfit. Sun/8, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Lunch-drunk love

February 24, 2009

AVANT TO BE PUNK If any artist ever self-classified as trash, it was (is?) Lydia Lunch, original ’70s New York City No Wave princess (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), ’80s underground film star (for Richard Kern, Scott and Beth B., Nick Zedd, etc.), and subsequent spoken-word performer and print autobiographer. In each medium her voice bottled the societally incriminating sarcasm of self-defined detritus, costume-partied as yesteryear’s bullet-bra’d sex object. By 1990, who beyond first-generation punk nostalgists gave a fuck? Europeans, that’s who.

That same year Lunch wrote and codirected (with Babeth Mondini) Kiss Napoleon Goodbye. The featurette — photographed by Mike Kuchar, no less — screened only in Dutch avant-garde and Berlin Film Festival–related events shortly after completion, then perhaps nowhere else until its recent release on the aptly named U.S. DVD label, Cult Epics.

It stars Lunch as Hedda, slinky spouse to Neal (Don Bajema). They’ve retreated to a lovely country château to reboot their relationship. This goes OK before Hedda hears from pal Jackson (Henry Rollins), who’s passing through on an author’s tour and wants to visit for the weekend. His arrival triggers an explosion of both Neal’s paranoiac imaginings and the filmmakers’ poetic ones.

Poet-novelist-playwright Bajema, at the time based in San Francisco and so sinewy he makes pumped costar Rollins look like an empty fitness showboat, was no trained actor. But his conviction as a man tortured by jealousy (and possibly madness) largely puts Napoleon across.

The film is a very odd duck, with aristocratic European locations juxtaposed against a primitive triangle drama, stilted lesbian scenes, bewildering historic flashbacks, Neal’s rather abstract meltdown, and the spectacle of macho lit-punk heroes muscle-tussling on a château lawn. There’s also experimental artist Z’ev as a guy aiming a trepanning drill into his own skull. Posting this under the Guardian‘s Trash umbrella is honest only in vague, associative terms: Napoleon‘s makers were clearly aiming for art beneath the coatings of irony, pop, and punk sarcasm.

An oppressive bounty of DVD extras reveal Lunch’s latter-day sub–Karen Finley spoken-word rants as heckle-worthy, and much-heckled. (Still, her core messages about institutionalized misogyny are hard to argue against.) It all makes one nostalgic for the ironic hatefuck retro sex-kittenry of 1980’s Queen of Siam, the best album Lunch ever made, with or without a band. "Pleasure is always made sweeter at the expense of others," her character says in a Napoleon voiceover. That’s not necessarily the voice of wisdom. Just the voice of Lunch.

www.lydia-lunch.org

Sabertooth Zombie

February 24, 2009

PREVIEW Savage and bloodthirsty as a werewolf in heat under a full moon, Sabertooth Zombie is heavy hardcore punk at its ear-splitting finest. The North Bay quintet mixes overdriven drums and guitar riffs with swampy stoner-metal power chords and a vocalist whose pipes ring with the same rage and ruin as legendary Discharge frontman Cal Morris. Every time this brutal cocktail hits the stage, audiences unravel into throbbing disarray. The flailing limbs, clenched fists, and furious headbanging only add to the band’s when-it-rains-it-pours aesthetic.

The group’s newest seven-song EP, Dent Face (Twelve Gauge), stares back at you with a cover adorned with infamously crazed Britney Spears fan Chris Crocker. He sports a Sabertooth Zombie shirt, his hands on his miniskirt-clad hips and a shit-eating grin on his face. The music — in stark juxtaposition with Dent Face‘s tongue-in-cheek representation of a Zombie superfan — careens across the rugged punk rock blacktop with ferocious songs for true Hessians. On the title track, an avalanche of chord progressions creates a snowball effect as the song thrashes and heaves under sarcastic lyrics about hollow-brained contemporary American youth. "Campaign" throws a curveball with multiple tempo changes, trading an enormous double bass drum intro for a cut-time juggernaut riff and rare guitar solo. The number slows to doom-metal pace, swells with a freeform saxophone solo, and ends as suddenly as it began. Such musical twists keep Sabertooth Zombie at the front of the local thrash pack.

SABERTOOTH ZOMBIE With Grace Alley and Prize Hog. Mon/2, 7 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

All ears

February 18, 2009

ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS

Antony Hegarty’s got a delicate disposition and a hankering for the embrace of Mother Nature. His latest effort, The Crying Light (Secretly Canadian), extends the band in the direction of strange, rending meditations on life, love, and gender-line transgressions. Hegarty may never be described as a big-throated hollerer, but his are rousing intimations of human fragility that approach a chest-clenching volume of heartbreak, though he never raises his voice above a whisper. The vocalist’s got a slew of side-projects going on even as he fronts cabaret-pop mopers/maestros Antony and the Johnsons. Still, no project has achieved the Johnsons’ dimensions of fortune, fame, and critical acclaim, although Hercules and Love Affair became something of a local cause célèbre last year with its cerebral, minimalist — some would say undernourished — disco hymns. (Danica Li) Tues/24, 8 p.m., $32.50–$40. Nob Hill Masonic Center, 1111, California, SF. www.masonicauditorium.com

DEERHUNTER

They’re breaking out of their kudos-drenched Microcastle (Kranky, 2008) — and a dwarfing arena slot opening for Trent Reznor. (Kimberly Chun) With Lilofee. Tues/24, 10 p.m., free with RSVP at www.uptheantics.com/noisepop. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

STEPHEN MALKMUS

"I’m really exited about the Malkmus show," Noise Pop co-honcho Jordan Kurland told me. "It’s the first time he’s doing a solo show." Amazing, since the Stockton-bred Pavement songwriter has hovered round these parts, band at hand, for so long. (Chun) With Kelley Stoltz, Peggy Honeywell, and Goh Nakamura. Feb. 25, 8 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

FROM MONUMENT TO MASSES

The appeal of From Monument to Masses, like contemporaries Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor, pulls from a wellspring of aggressive melodicism, diverse instrumentation, and careening thrash rock one banana peel from going ass-up. Composed of Matt Solberg (guitar), Francis Choung (drums and programming), and Sergio Robledo-Maderazo (bass and synths), From Monument to Masses formed in 2001 after Dim Mak owner and fellow hardcore fan Steve Aoki took a look-see at one of the trio’s demos and decided to release it as the group’s first self-titled album, which came out the following year. And that’s not even touching on the band’s fierce dedication to activism: they’ve formed liaisons in the past with groups like Challenging White Supremacy and the Kalayaan School for Equity. (Li) With Crime in Choir and Built for the Sea. Feb. 26, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

GOBLIN COCK

Anyone who has seen a Goblin Cock album cover — giant, pierced cartoon penis, anyone? — may be compelled to think of the band as a Spinal Tap–esque side project from Pinback’s Rob Crow. With band members boasting pseudonyms like Lord Phallus and Bane Ass-Pounder, it’s easy to see why such a misstep would occur. The San Diego group, which performs shrouded in smoke and hooded black robes, describes its oeuvre as "beyond time and beyond space" and certainly has the chops to create a sinister grind. The dirge "Stumped" and the epic "Kegrah the Dragon Killer" sound like lost Sleep or Melvins tracks, and while Satan probably hasn’t invited Goblin Cock over for tea yet, the band is earnestly writing him love notes. Opener Warship will set the mood by laying down its aggro Brooklyn metalcore after Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band heats things up with its alchemic indie anthems. (L.C. Mason) Feb. 26, 8:30 p.m., $12. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

KOOL KEITH

Taking the ill flow to the next level, Kool Keith, a.k.a. Dr. Octagon among other aliases, often rhymes about defecation and isn’t afraid to blurt out sex-related slang. Think a rapper with Tourette’s Syndrome. Still, this self-professed lyrical king comes off as silly, nonsensical, and, when his satirical content shines, poignant. His work has attracted a list of admirers and collaborators ranging from Dan the Automator to Prodigy to Esham. The Bronx native has been at it since 1984 as a founding member of the legendary Ultramagnetic MCs before breaking out on his own with 1996’s Dr. Octagonecologyst (DreamWorks/Geffen), showcasing remarkable scratching from Bay Area fave Qbert. Keith has been reportedly institutionalized, which might explain his knack for multiple stage personas, albeit word has it he went in for depression, which may explain so much more. (Andre Torrez) With Mike Relm, Crown City Rockers, and DJ set by Kutmasta Kurt. Feb. 26, 9 p.m., $18. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

MAN/MIRACLE

The Oakland band has been working the local scene hard lately, providing a barrage of stinging guitars with a pop catchiness reminiscent of Modest Mouse. Even the vocals recall Isaac Brock’s hysterics at times. But it would be unfair to limit these up-and-comers with such comparisons. See "Magpies" for proof that they have a creative musical range that goes beyond any formula. (Torrez) With Scissors for Lefty and Picture Atlantic. Feb. 26, 5 p.m. doors, free. Benders, 806 S. Van Ness, SF. www.bendersbar.com

MARTHA WAINWRIGHT

If life were a movie, Martha Wainwright would be a gutsy heroine with a potty mouth, an assortment of endearing underdog friends, and a ferocious right hook. Because it’s not, Wainwright’s merely Canadian. With three albums’ worth of golden folk ditties beneath her belt, Wainwright’s more than battled free from the albatross of her illustrious musical lineage, which includes big bro Rufus and daddy London Wainwright III. A medley of folk and alt-country with tendencies toward pop structures and cabaret-style torch, her newest album, I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too (MapleMusic/Zoe, 2008), highlights a flair for incisive songwriting and powerhouse vocals. There’s still enough feminine curve to the music to belie the lyrical content, as when Wainwright warbles in her sweetly girlish voice about a "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" — a subtle reference to her famous folk-singer father. (Li) With AA Bondy, Ryan Auffenberg, and Karina Denike. Feb. 26, 8 p.m., $12. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

DEAR AND THE HEADLIGHTS

Adenoidal passion at the juncture of emo and indie from the road-friendly Phoenix, Ariz., fivesome. (Chun) With Kinch, Big Light, and A B and the Sea. Feb. 27, 8:30 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, SF, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

MAUS HAUS

Grab that opp to get a taste of the proggily imaginative power-sixpiece. (Chun) With Sugar and Gold and Tempo No Tempo. Feb. 27, 5 p.m. doors, free. Benders, 806 S. Van Ness, SF. www.bendersbar.com

THE MORNING BENDERS AND THE SUBMARINES

We’re all familiar with the addictively creamy indie of the ‘Benders — less so with the glittering Cali pop of the co-headlining duo. (Chun) With the Mumlers and Rademacher. Feb. 27, 8 p.m., $12–$14. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

ST. VINCENT

With her pale face, crazed hair, and beautiful bone structure, St. Vincent — née Annie Clark — looks something like a classically trained musician gone a little deranged in the headspace. The sense of leashed zaniness exerts an eerie tension in her music, which is all conventional pop balladry cracking open to rushes of pure weirdness and hellcat rock outros. Strictly speaking, the songwriter makes chamber pop. But it’s dissonant — with bang-a-pot dins and lyrical quirks galore. Clark centers the chaos on the strength of her deep, dark voice, bewitching in its balletic femininity. Originally a guitar player for the Polyphonic Spree and a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band, she composes songs in layers of euphoric instrumentation. From the sleekly nightmarish "Paris Is Burning" to the hair-raising child’s plea of "Now Now," the music’s got harpsichords, horns, plinking piano, children’s choruses, and sun-drenched synth riffs in spades. Fingers crossed that she’ll show up with the whole orchestra in tow. (Li) With Cryptacize, Rafter, and That Ghost. Feb. 27, 8 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

BOB MOULD AND MARK EITZEL

Watch the ‘craft soar. "Unplugged" and straight-up acoustic from the Hüsker Dü muck-amok and OG of noise-pop — with Eitzel joining in, accompanied solely by a pianist. (Chun) With Donovan Quinn and Jason Finazzo. Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., $20. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

PORTUGAL, THE MAN

Youthquakin’ and shakin’ up its hometown of Portland, Ore., Portugal, the Man loves itself a fresh blend of wide-scope pop, orchestral indie rock, and tens-of-years-after psychedelia: "I was born in 1989," wails John Baldwin Gourley. (Chun) With Japanese Motors, Girls, and Love Is Chemicals. Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $13. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

RAINBOW ARABIA

Don’t heave those stony accusations of cultural colonialism at the Los Angeles duo of Danny and Tiffany Preston. Though the project spun off on Danny’s love of Middle Eastern music and his collection of microtonal keyboards from the region, the husband and wife have plundered quite varied aural booty in the past: Danny was in the dubby Pigeon Funk and Tiffany in the math rock Pink Grenade. In fact the Eastern sounds of Rainbow Arabia’s The Basta EP (Manimal, 2008), inspired by Sublime Frequencies releases, will likely morph into something poppier, more "tropical new wave," more Cambodian, and more Congotronics-esque in the near future. "We’re going wherever it works. We’ll mix it up," Preston told me from L.A., where Rainbow Arabia finds kinship with the recently relocated High Places. Of their globetrotting musical mix, he said, "It was weird to eat sushi in the ’80s — now we’re eating everything, and music and film is the same. It’s just weaving together, and everyone is taking pieces, just like other countries take pieces of our culture." For a more ethereal pop vibe, look to opening SF duo Boy in Static and their forthcoming Candy Cigarette (Fake Four). (Chun) With Themselves and Yoni Wolf. Feb. 28, 2 p.m., free. Apple Store, 1 Stockton, SF. www.apple.com

NO AGE

Get ready to be blown away by the experimental punk sounds of these L.A. darlings on the Sub Pop label. Guitarist Randy Randall’s and drummer Dean Allen Spunt’s DIY outlook includes shows at nontraditional venues like the Los Angeles River and L.A.’s Central Public Library, and Randall’s guitar parts range from simplistic and jangly to downright assaulting. Nevertheless the duo — less than four years old and two albums along — maintains an unassuming degree of minimalism, which is why the music seems to work so well. (Andre Torrez) With White Circle Crime Club, Infinite Body, and Veil Veil Vanish. March 1, 1 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, SF, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Foot Village

February 17, 2009

PREVIEW As if it were a sovereign nation of drum-toting, megaphone-wielding musical savages, Foot Village bears its own two-pronged manifesto, stating "Our national language is drumming, our national pass-time is screaming." This declaration aptly sums up the Los Angeles group’s polyrhythmic sonic attack, which is studded with explosions of feral hoots and hollers, and three drum sets’ worth of cataclysmic crashing, hissing, and banging.

The band’s witch-doctor blend of hardcore punk and noise rock is at its best on "Bones": visions of bloodthirsty, amphetamine-fueled jungle warriors out to collect heads come to mind via Grace Lee’s wild yawps over the rest of the Village’s battle cries and death-drum rolls. Foot Village’s forthcoming album of "drum essays," titled Anti-Magic (Upset the Rhythm) and out June 2009, will be the young collective’s blueprint for its war upon the ethereal as its avows to "embrace the physical and the physical alone." Considering the group’s aggressively carnal approach to music, god help anyone who gets in its way. The ensemble will perform with the Drums — a new project with John Dwyer, ex of the Coachwhips and currently of Thee Oh Sees — at Bottom of the Hill, making it a blitzkrieg of eardrum assault with no electric guitars or bass in sight. This isn’t the usual clamor we San Franciscans are fed, but the citizens of Foot Village are clearly ready to shovel their bristling wall of sound down our hungry throats.

FOOT VILLAGE With the Drums, T.I.T.S., and Casy and Brian. Wed/18, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

Punk pop riddle

February 17, 2009

Like many other newb admirers, I never knew about Zero Boys during their brief existence from 1979 to ’83. But then I got a copy of their thrice-reissued debut, Vicious Circle (now Secretly Canadian) in my hot little mitts — love that punk pop primitivism. During its short life the Indianapolis group never played the Bay Area: its 1982 SF storefront show was unceremoniously canceled. The Zero Boys broke up soon afterward, with bassist Tufty joining Toxic Reasons and relocating to the Bay, but the outfit has reunited with each reissue of Circle — a recording that’s found quite a rep for itself as a lesser-known hardcore gem.

Now, with the reemergence of Circle and History Of, a collection of unreleased recordings, a promoter fan is flying them out to play. "There’s been very little effort to revive the band on this end," said vocalist Paul Mahern, 45, from Bloomington, Ind. "It’s all fan-driven." The appeal of this record — which Mahern made at 17? "There’s a snotty kids thing, but there’s also this real musicianship. Also we were among the first wave of American hardcore that was also pop punk," he said. "Scratch the surface below Green Day, and you get the Zero Boys."

Fri/20–Sat/21, 7 p.m., $10. 924 Gilman, Berk. www.924gilman.org

Speed Reading

February 11, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS

Edited by Peter Maravelis

Akashic Books

300 pages

$15.95

San Francisco has many legacies, including the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s. But before more recent utopian impulses, SF was the Barbary Coast — and Chinatown, North Beach, and the Financial District were havens for gambling, prostitution, and crime. This gritty, nefarious reputation was enhanced in the ’30s by Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, and in the ’40s by John Huston’s film version, among other SF-set stories. SF was a noir city, defined by hard drinking and hard living. This is a legacy that the current city perhaps would prefer to forget, much like a blackout during a drunken binge.

In his excellent introduction to the first San Francisco Noir anthology in 2005, editor Peter Maravelis writes, "Crime fiction is the scalpel used to reveal San Francisco’s pathological character." With San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, Maravelis does more than pick up the scalpel once again. Using a timeline, he reprints some of the grainiest SF snapshots by Barbary Coast writers. He starts with Mark Twain’s hard-boiled description of the infernal Hall of Justice in the late 19th century — a rogues gallery of vermin, where judges drop like flies from stress-induced heart-attacks. He then traces these noir elements to a doppelganger tale by Jack London, on to Hammett, and to contemporary authors such as William T. Vollmann, who writes what Maravelis calls "splatter-noir, where plutocracy has won and the dispossessed give graphic descriptions of the tears in the social fabric." Through recent stories by Janet Dawson, Oscar Penaranda, and others, Maravelis ups the ante, as if to say: this is the real San Francisco. Always has been, always will be. (D. Scot Miller)

ST. VALENTINE’S DAY NOIR

Sat/14, 8 p.m.

Ha Ra Club

875 Geary, SF

(415) 362-8193

www.citylights.org

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WARHOL LIVE

Edited by Stéphane Aquin

Prestel

272 pages

$75

Roger Copeland has his claws out at the very beginning of "Seeing Without Participating," an essay in Warhol Live, the LP-size silver-covered brick of a monograph accompanying an exhibition of the same name devoted to music and dance within Warhol’s gargantuan oeuvre. The target of his attack isn’t as noteworthy as the argument that follows, which is in sync with Peter Gidal’s recent writing on Warhol’s distinct repositioning of traditional forms of participation and spectatorship. From there, Copeland reveals filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s influence on Warhol. Some other musings within Warhol Live spotlight obvious or over-familiar aspects of Pop or rock history. But John Hunisak convincingly argues that Warhol shared Ondine’s love of Maria Callas and recognized her as a punk pioneer; Branden W. Joseph digs up uncommon information about Warhol’s brief stint as a member of a band called the Druds; and Melissa Ragona perceptively taps into Warhol’s (by way of Brigid Berlin’s) recordings.

The book’s vibrant and powerful visual presentation hints that the exhibition — which opens this week at the De Young Museum— might be more rewarding in terms of organization than content. Fluorescent 1980s portraits and Interview covers don’t flatter Warhol, who had fallen into embracing the past-prime Cars and talent-less groups such as Curiosity Killed the Cat by the time of his death. Still, it’s refreshing to see a gathering of sleeve art for his albums, and here and there there’s a surprise pleasure, such as the potent pages devoted to the color slides used at Exploding Plastic Inevitable events. (Johnny Ray Huston)

WARHOL LIVE

Sat/14 through May 17

De Young Museum

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive

Golden Gate Park, SF

(415) 750-3600

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ANDY WARHOL: BLOW JOB

By Peter Gidal

Afterall Books

86 pages

$16

It’s too easy, really, to say that an 86-page appreciation of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job is the critical equivalent of the film’s title. One potentially funny — though also provocative — aspect of Blow Job is its 36-minute length, a span of time that would make any jawbone, even a purely imaginary one, ache. As filmmaker and writer Peter Gidal points out, that time span is partially achieved through projection — like Warhol’s screen tests, Blow Job is presented at the silent-film speed of 18 frames per second, though it was shot at 24 or 25 frames per second.

The temporal is one main focus of Gidal’s heady interpretation of Blow Job, which comes and goes much like the many-reeled subject, and which is art historical and philosophical more often than theoretical, and never vogue-ish when it tends toward the latter. One of the unexpected rewards of this book is Gidal’s discussion of paintings in relation to Warhol’s films, in particular Diego Velázquez’s sinister Luncheon or Three Men at a Table and Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). His passage about Warhol’s Shadow series of silkscreens is revelatory. Gidal persuasively removes Warhol from mere camp interpretation, even if his recognition of or devotion to the sensual aspects of Blow Job and Sleep (1963) is fleeting at best. At times, one wishes he could mirror rather than admire and explicate Warhol’s knack for expressing complex ideas in simple, monosyllabic terms. Like Roger Copeland in the new monograph Warhol Live, Gidal is most insightful when addressing the mortal themes and pull of Warhol’s art, and the challenging — and not merely transgressive — manner in which he reframes notions of acting and watching. (Huston)

Valentine’s Day Music

February 10, 2009

PREVIEW There couldn’t be a more disaster-prone pairing than Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day, but if the Black Valentine’s Masquerade on Feb. 13 at Mighty has anything to do with it, everything’s going to go horribly, horribly right. UK electro weirdo James Lavelle of UNKLE and DJ duo Evil 9 are slated to kick off a party that includes shambling zombies, friendly demonic folk, blasts of electro-metal, and horror-movie synths. To be sure, it’s a costume party, so try to remember that the ghouls and ghosties aren’t actually anything more than people in disguise.

John Cameron Mitchell, director of Shortbus (2006) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), which he also wrote and starred in, proposes to tip off V-day with nothing less than a showcase on the origin of Love — or so the name of his gig and film screening would have you believe. Mitchell’s set to belt out a few numbers live onstage at the landmark Victoria Theatre, then screen his cult hits Feb. 13–15. The show also promises an exclusive director’s commentary on the goings-on behind the scenes, plus a slew of titilutf8g readings on sex, love, and romance.

If a more traditional concert is more to your taste, minus drippy musings on the perfume of roses and a huddle of cooing lovebirds, consider the Valentine’s Day punk rock soiree at Hemlock Tavern. The defiant lo-fi anarchists of Hunx and his Punx — a side project of Gravy Train!!!! keyboardist/vocalist Hunx — will bring their take on distorted garage rock to the fore, just as V-day winds down. Pitiless amounts of noise, anyone?

BLACK VALENTINE’S MASQUERADE Fri/13, 10 p.m., $15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 626-7001, www.mighty119.com. John Cameron Mitchell and Hedwig and the Angry Inch Sat/14, 7:30 p.m., and Sun/15, 8 p.m., and Shortbus Fri/13, 8 p.m., and Sat/14, 11 p.m., $25. Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF. (415) 863-7576, www.victoriatheatre.org. Hunx and his Punx with Dreamdate and Shannon and the Clams Sat/14, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Chasing Wild Thing’s gritty punk

February 5, 2009

You’re gonna miss me: an old Wild Thing poster.

By L.C. Mason

Newly emerged and ready to rip every show to shreds, the San Francisco-stationed Wild Thing are, as described by their MySpace page, “punk, punk, punk.”

The group’s rough-hewn repertoire and unsigned outsider status certainly fit the punk canon like a glove. Gritty guitars and beer-soaked group vocals are found all over tracks like “You’re a Punk” and “I Can’t Stand It.” Disaffected lyrics and clanging cymbals that sound like Animal of the Muppets got himself a legitimate band, complete with humans, mean you can make Wild Thing your excuse for coming home with inexplicably ripped clothes, lost valuables, or a sore neck.

Having just returned from the Dummer Bummer fest in Portland, Ore., with Bay Area rock denizens Apache and Nobunny, the brazen quartet will get stomping this Sunday, Feb. 8, at Thee Parkside – which may be hell on you come Monday, but will be well worth once you watch this combo spread its wings.

WILD THING
With Annihilation Time, A.N.S., Sabertooth Zombie, and Futur Skullz
Sun/8, 6 p.m., $8
Thee Parkside
1600 17th St., SF
(415) 252-1330

Married with band

February 4, 2009

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER They play together yet dislike each other — that’s Fucked Up. Literally. The Toronto legends of hardcore — add as many "post-"s as you like to that descriptor — and their grew-up-together-but-grew-apart relationship may sound like the tale of so many other long-running rock bands, sticking it out for the big checks, groupies, coke binges, and Courvoisier. Instead the Fucked Up folks appear to be more interested in putting together albums that will stand up against the punk singles on Kill by Death and Dangerhouse that made major indents in their consciousness.

"We were obsessed with those records and wanted to put ourselves in that continuum," says vocalist Pink Eyes, a.k.a., Damian Abraham, 29, sometime TV writer, onetime-reality TV star ("There were some choice moments of me going record shopping juxtaposed with my wife eating a cheap hotdog on the street, me going to an expensive dinner and her going home and doing laundry," he says of Newly Wed Nearly Dead), and frothing, rabid record collector. Eventually, he adds, "we realized that as much as we don’t get along and hate being on the road together, this is the most exciting, most creative thing that any of us will ever do. So we’ll see how it goes."

For their trouble, the group managed to make one of the best rock, punk, or what-have-you releases of ’08 with its second full-length, The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador).

But all that’s natural, normal, and Fucked Up. "We’ve been a band a long time," confesses Abraham. He’s known guitarist Mike Haliechuk, a.k.a., 10,000 Marbles, for about 14 years — since they were 16 — and grew up in the same neighborhood, played in bands, or shared radio shows with the rest. So does familiarity breed hatred? "A lot of us don’t have any shared interests anymore," the vocalist says by phone on the way to a New Orleans show. "But we’re still held together by this thing that is Fucked Up."

After all, "I’m diagnosed with mental problems," Abraham continues with the barest hint of mirth. "But I think there are several people who have undiagnosed mental problems. So we have a bunch of people who are undermedicated and one guy who is overmedicated. People who have crippling record-buying addictions and people who have crippling tastes in techno.

"We do all like sushi."

That search for commonality had to happen after the combo’s first album, Hidden World (Jade Tree, 2006), which made Fucked Up "transition into a quote-unquote real band," explains Abraham. "Prior to that we did a band that was mainly putting out 7-inches and playing the odd show, but then we put out Hidden World and we had the responsibilities of touring and actually playing full-length shows! It wasn’t just kids paying to see a show — it was kids paying to see us, which we weren’t really used to before that."

With Chemistry the members all retreated to their corners to work on lyrics and music separately. "No one person’s voice silenced any one else’s," Abraham says. "I think it was a survival method." The result was a kind of call and response between extremely different makers, a strategy that resolved into a shockingly rich recording that draws from the clean, epic qualities of classic rock as well as the bodyslamming force of hardcore.

"From my perspective [Hidden World] was about identifying social ills," offers Abraham, "and this record was more about trying to understand those social ills, trying to accept and work with the world around us, the forces of nature, government, and religion especially."

And in some ways, among the resonant instrumentals and pummeling rock-outs — music that scrambles the "conventions of punk," as Abraham puts it, much like the sound of Mind Eraser, Cold World, and No Age — Chemistry is about the search for that hard-won community among hardheaded, hardcore individuals. Call these anthems of a kind of togetherness for lone wolves who might wear "Jesus Should Have Been Aborted" T-shirts. "Hands up if you think you’re the only one," the frontman hollers during "Twice Born." The response: "We all got our fucking hands up!"

Still, the fights over the van radio must be monumental. "Mike is the techno fan," Abraham says. "It’s unfortunate because he’s very persuasive and he’s convinced several other members of the band to like it too. I’m resistant, as well as Jonah [Falco, a.k.a., drummer Guinea Beat]. All I can say is thank god for the invention of personal music players."

FUCKED UP

Sun/8, 8 p.m., $13

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

—————-

LOVE TO HATE YOU, BABY

FICTION FAMILY

Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman plus Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins equals dreamy pop. Thurs/5, 8 p.m., $20. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

FORTUNE RECORDS SHOW

The local label gets down with new CDs by Trevor Childs and the Beholders, Hey! Brontosaurus, and Cyndi Harvell. Fri/6, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

RZA

Wu-Tang’s five-year-planner breaks out his latest digi-snack, the Afro Samurai Resurrection OST soundtrack (Wu Music/Koch). Sun/8, 8 p.m. doors, $20–<\d>$26. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

P.O.S.

The Minneapolis rapper takes his blend of rock and hip-hop up a notch to Never Better (Rhymesayers). Mon/9, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Tube socks lust: Director Eon McKai gets Vivid about his altporn mission

February 4, 2009

By Juliette Tang. Read her indepth article about the ironic hipster-altporn connection here.

They may look like a slightly trashier, more dolled up version of the run-of-the-mill American Apparel clad hipster, but the girls above aren’t really hipsters at all. They’re porn stars dressed as hipsters, and they make movies for Vivid-Alt, a subsidiary of Vivid Entertainment dedicated solely to, quite frankly, heterosexual hipster porn. And no, I’m not talking about those Richard Kern photographs in Vice Magazine. I’m talking about hardcore sex — in tube socks.

Alternative porn, or “altporn,” is nothing new, at least not since the advent of the Internet. While magazines like Hustler and Playboy have formulated the aesthetic of mainstream print pornography, the Internet created a democratic space inside which divergent interpretations of sexuality could be easily presented. Altporn began in the late 1990s with Web sites like GothicSluts and EroticBPM and was initially just an Internet anomaly. But due to the popularity of early altporn sites, new Web sites began to appear, altporn gained a measure of popularity, and by the time SuicideGirls surfaced in 2001, altporn was a full-fledged genre of pornography in and of itself. Seeing as early altporn followed the popularity of subcultures like the goth, punk, and emo movements, it was only a matter of time before altporn ‘turned all hipster’ (as everything is, it seems, these days).

A clip of The Doll Underground, directed by Eon McKai

I got a chance to chat with director Eon McKai, who has made movies for Vivid-Alt like Girls Lie, Debbie Loves Dallas, and The Doll Underground, a movie that, as improbable as it seems, is actually inspired by the Weather Underground. Eon, who calls himself an “aging hipster,” says that everyone at Vivid-Alt is “a part of the subcultures that we represent, so if you look at the people who are behind it, I think you’ll find that they are pure to the street, and everything is authentic.” And he is totally, completely serious about his mission.

Isn’t it ironic?

February 3, 2009

› culture@sfbg.com

Under harsh, clinical lighting, with a background cloaked in darkness, a zaftig, heavily tattooed woman fellates an enormous and alarmingly hairless penis. The hairless penis ejaculates, and a ominous computer voice intones that dribbling cum stains resemble "writing in Arabic, or sometimes Sanskrit." As the woman stares at the cum, the voice dramatically pronounces that "if she could learn to read that writing, she would know her … entire … future." The penis writes a tiny bit more Sanskrit, and the scene fades to black.

What is this? It’s not Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). It’s the opening blow-job scene from a movie called Hospital, produced by Vivid Alt, an imprint of the mainstream porn production studio Vivid. Vivid Alt produces alternative pornography, or "subcultural erotica." Altporn is, on a basic level, porn that features models who are representatives of real-life subcultures like goth, punk, rave, emo, rockabilly, and hipster. Instead of buxom blondes who appear to have traipsed out of the Playboy Mansion on a cloud of pink boas, altporn features models who are often tattooed, pierced, and generous with the DIY Manic Panic hair dye. In a weird porn-imitating-life-imitating-porn switch, two big stars of altporn, Sasha Grey and Charlotte Stokely, currently star in campaigns for American Apparel.

Alternative porn is nothing new, at least not since the advent of the Internet. While magazines like Hustler and Playboy have formulated the aesthetic of mainstream print pornography, the Internet created a democratic space inside which divergent interpretations of sexuality could be easily presented. Blue Blood is generally credited as launching counterculture erotica in 1992 with the glossy, erotic zine that featured punks, goths, and erotic fiction. But Altporn did not take hold on a large scale until the late 1990s with Web sites like GothicSluts and EroticBPM. By the time alt-erotica site SuicideGirls appeared in 2001 (not quite full-blown porn, but a contributor to the altporn genre just the same), altporn was a full-fledged subset of porn. Today there are hundreds of altporn Web sites, with names like Crazybabes, Burning Angel, Broken Dollz, Razor Dolls, Supercult, and DeviantNation.

For Eon McKai, founder of Vivid Alt, porn is an intensely personal form of expression. "I’d say at no time — especially at Vivid Alt — no one is told to make a certain type of movie that isn’t coming from some place inside of them." McKai states that he and other altporn directors are merely "expressing the aesthetic that they find in their life, that they live in their life." In fact, many people involved in the altporn industry believe that what they are creating is a meaningful form of personal expression. Most people involved in altporn view their work as fundamentally different than mainstream pornography. Cutter, of AltPorn.net, explains, "AltPorn makes the trends and porn-porn tends to follow them. Traditional porn is conservative in a weird insular way. It tends to copy outside things." Cutter doesn’t think that altporn appropriates or copies from existing subcultures. He and others view altporn as being organic, DIY, independent, and fundamentally authentic.

All alternative subcultures are inherently interested in the notion of authenticity, and particularly in determining that which constitutes genuine membership into the group. Maintaining authenticity is a crucial part of how subcultures survive. Because subcultures are groups that are in part defined by their opposition to the mainstream, they are innately concerned with the "authentic" or original moment of resistance. Members of the altporn community are just as interested in the notion of genuine membership as the subcultures they depict. Eon McKai vehemently appeals, "We are a part of the subcultures that we represent, so if you look at the people who are behind it, I think you’ll find that they are pure to the street, and everything is authentic and this is who we are. We are just making porn about it, and this happens to be who we are. It’s really artist and filmmakers who make porn who are really expressing the aesthetic that they find in their life, that they live in their life." But what, really, is authentic porn? Isn’t a bona fide cumshot enough to prove authenticity? Eon McKai’s own name is a point toward the absurd, as his moniker is a play on the name Ian McKaye, the Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman who was a leader of the straight-edge movement that rejects alcohol, drugs, and casual sex.

From what I gathered from those in the altporn community, authenticity necessitates that creators of altporn be actual members of the subcultures they represent on camera. Smith elaborates, "All the originators in this genre were driven to create sexual media that appealed to their own community and their own communities’ aesthetics. So, the goths created goth erotica and the punks created punk erotica and the ravers created raver erotica. So, on an aesthetic level, altporn offers an alternative look, as well as the community interactivity, to prove it’s authenticity." Whether they are "true" punks, goths, or hipsters, shouldn’t really matter if the work speaks for itself, right?

It wasn’t until after I watched hipster porn videos like Sugar Town and Honey Bunny that I realized why altporn needs to paint itself as authentic. Smith puts it best when he says, "Without genuine subcultural attributes, it quickly becomes self parody." For porn that banks on its subcultural attributes, being perceived as inauthentic means dismissed as a joke. Of all forms of cinema, porn — with its skeletally thin plots, poverty of character development, and cheap production values — is most vulnerable to lampoon. For those who have ever watched porn, I am sure you know that embarrassed, cringey, oh-my-god-ew feeling of watching a particularly ludicrous moment in any scene. That feeling is magnified tenfold when watching a hipster porno that features stars discussing Sartre while wearing nothing but tube socks, such as in Honey Bunny.

While altporn might have originated under the auspice of DIY amateurism, it has proven to be lucrative and, as a result, has carved a niche for itself in the porn market. Because of the push to earn money, altporn has become less concerned with representing certain aesthetics than it is with latching on to new trends and then marketing them to get more customers. Annaliese of Gods Girls reflects, "I think that altporn will always be a representation of what is in-the-now for the customer that it is appealing to, the models that it features and the culture that it represents. The Y generation are furious followers of now trends in fashion, art, music, film, etc., and our site is a reflective of those nuances. Altporn will go where ever the models go and will evolve as the culture evolves. I personally see fewer and fewer applications from stereotypically ‘goth’ models, so perhaps that look has become less trendy." What’s the next big thing in altporn? Hipsters.

It seems like everything is getting hipstered out these days. From clothing to music to even the rebranding of the Pepsi logo, everything is getting a hipster makeover. Porn is no exception. If you look at the logo for Vivid Alt, you’ll notice that it’s tricked out to resemble an Urban Outfitters catalog. In the videos, the actresses are decked out in American Apparel. Hipster culture subsumes and dismantles the aesthetics of popular culture, appropriates its sincerity, and transforms it into a pastiche of irony. Likewise, hipster porn subsumes and dismantles the aesthetics of hipster culture, appropriates its irony, and transforms it into something utterly sincere: porn. For what can be more sincere than a cumshot? Is it possible to get ironic oral? Hipsters belong to a subculture that is incredibly concerned with image — and with defining, controlling, and protecting that image. They can now watch as their vaingloriously crafted personae are subsumed by the porn industry and transformed into fetish. How ironic.

Photos, video, and a full interview with altporn director Eon McKai on our new SEX SF blog

>>More G-Spot: The Guardian Guide to love and lust

Festival for Freedom

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February 3, 2009
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PREVIEW It doesn’t take six degrees of separation to link the new breed of local bands performing at the University of San Francisco’s Festival for Freedom benefit show. They’re an interwoven clan of West Coast outfits with garage rock tendencies and psychedelic leanings. And they’re just about all in each other’s MySpace top eight. If I had to label, I’d consider the term "flower punks" for ’em. I mean, c’mon, San Francisco has a huge Haight-Ashbury legacy to live up to. So, in the spirit of hippiedom and smiling on your brother, the undergrads from the university’s Erasmus Community has decided to take on the cause of fighting modern-day slavery and is planning an immersion trip to Uganda and Rwanda, where they will focus their efforts on rehabilitating child soldiers.

This benefit show for that trip is a culmination of the group’s efforts in social justice awareness and activism, combined with a dose of peacenik-punk rock. Taking the stage on campus: Ty Segall, Man/Miracle, and a very Birthday Party-era Nick Cave sounding Depth Charge Revolt, among others. The bands will bring the noise, so you should bring your bucks to help support this worthwhile cause for the marginalized children of Uganda.

FESTIVAL FOR FREEDOM: USF BENEFIT FOR THE REHABILITATION OF UGANDAN CHILD SOLDIERS With A Quantum Visionary, Depth Charge Revolt, Travis Hayes, Ghosttown Refugees, the Vox Jaguars, James Rabbit, Ty Segall, and Man/Miracle. Fri/6, 6:30 p.m., $5–$8. McClaren 250, Phelan Building, University of San Francisco campus, SF. (831) 588-3537

‘Because you showed your ass’: ‘Black Lips in India’ peek

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February 3, 2009
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Culture clash? The trailer for The Black Lips in India

This in from peeps with the Black Lips (known for their adventurous wandering in Israel and about):

“Like the Sex Pistols’ January ’78 tour of the Deep South, the Black Lips recent expedition to India was marked by a series of fairly seismic culture shocks. Everything from bottle-throwing fans at a gig in Pune, to livid show promoters in Chennai, all in response to a bunch of full-frontal punk rock provocateurs from Atlanta. For those that still haven’t heard the story, the band was booked to play on India’s equivalent of American Idol, The ‘Campus Rock Idol’ Tour, a big-ticket televised series with large corporate sponsors.

“Last Saturday, in Chennai, the band entertained the crowd with what stateside fans would consider a typically raucous Black Lips show, replete with intra-band lip locking, and Cole de-pantsing, mooning the crowd, and attempting to play his six-string with, well, his privates. Barely OK in America, definitely not OK in India, the band was subsequently chased out of the country and the sponsors pulled the plug, effectively canceling the rest of the tour and the television season. The events have caused an international wave of news coverage, rounded out by everything from defensive “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll” stories to meatier pieces that tease out the more nuanced concepts at play here, namely artistic freedom versus cultural respect.

Hunx and His Punx’s camp, fired-up fun

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January 28, 2009
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Gotta love Hunx and His Punx (check Brandon Bussolini’s interview with the multitalented Seth Bogart in this week’s new garage rock issue). One of the primo reasons why? Well, in addition to the band’s gritty pop-rocks, stage sets, and kitsch-Querelle sailor suits, there’s the Justin Kelly-directed “Gimmie Gimmie Back Your Love,” coming in the fine, camp-fired fun tradition of the Gravy Train!!!! vids.

See Hunx and His Punx at punk-rock central Gilman Street Project this week, in honor of Punk Rock Joel’s birthday. Also promised: Thorns of Life, the latest project from Blake of Jawbreaker and Aaron Cometbus, as well as free birthday cookies! (Get onboard the Cookie Train!!!!?)

HUNX AND HIS PUNX
With Thorns of Life, ReVolts, Off with Their Heads, Comadre, and free birthday cookies for Punk Rock Joel
Sat/31, 7:30 p.m. doors, $8
924 Gilman Street Project, Berk.
(510) 525-9926
www.924gilman.org

Seeing starzzz

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January 28, 2009
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Pitchfork Media has sort of become synonymous with junk-food news in recent years, sensationalizing almost every aspect of the independent music world for the hungry masses through dirt-dishing bites on the latest breaking headlines and scale-tipping — or dipping — album reviews. While some may see the Chicago online music publication as a rock-snob tabloid, there’s no denying the influence it’s had upon some independent musicians: artists such as Animal Collective and No Age have collared a kind of A-list celebrity status almost overnight thanks, in part, to the site of music sites.

But when I met with San Francisco group Nodzzz at drummer Eric Butterworth’s Upper Haight apartment, the three seemed averse to any hype they may garner from Pitchfork. When I mentioned that the publication had just reviewed the band’s self-titled, 10-song long-player on What’s Your Rupture? that very morning, the three met my remark with silence. Then Butterworth opined: "Pitchfork is lame, and it doesn’t even matter because that shit is stupid. If you base your musical interests on Pitchfork — fuck yourself."

Fair enough. While Nodzzz managed to capture an above-average 7.6 rating for its efforts, the outfit agreed, as vocalist-guitarist Anthony Atlas put it, that "[Pitchfork] reviews are always kind of contradictory" and "a positive review would be just as problematic as a negative review."

"It’s pretty fucking crazy how many people that goes out to," guitarist and backup vocalist Sean Paul Presley added. "It makes you feel pretty nervous because you already hold your own material pretty close to yourself and you wonder what’s gonna happen when you get a review like that, because Pitchfork is single-handedly responsible for making bands, what bands do well, and what bands sell records. It’s been an auspicious day not knowing what it actually means. I’m on the fence about whether it means anything more than just another review."

This review does come at a point not long after Nodzzz’s "I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)" single, issued on Butterworth’s Make a Mess imprint. That release ended up on quite a few best-of-2008 short lists. But while the group’s name has amassed a wave of chatter on the blogosphere, Nodzzz have obvious convictions concerning the objectification of its image and the commercialization of its sound — even going so far as to turn down an opportunity to play at this year’s South by Southwest festival.

"I like pop and punk music when they cater to an audience and to fun," said Atlas, who formed the band with Presley and original drummer Pete Hilton in the fall of 2006 after relocating from Olympia, Wash., to the Bay Area for school. "Something about SXSW seems too market driven — kind of like a rock ‘n’ roll tradeshow. There’s a ton of fantastic bands playing, and I’m sure it’s a fun time, but I don’t feel like asserting ourselves in this broader rock ‘n’ roll market is what we’re all about."

Released in November 2008, the album channels the slapdash garage-pop urgencies of ’80s groups like the Feelies and Great Plains. "Is She There" opens the recording with a burst of amp crackle and drum jolt that’s over before you know it. On songs such as "In the City (Contact High)" and "Controlled Karaoke," the bright-eyed harmonies of Atlas and Presley bait you with nagging, sing-along choruses that get lodged in your skull for days on end, while "Highway Memorial Shrine" and "Losing My Accent" smother you in fuzz and chaos with a scrappy, twin-guitar assault of chiming hooks and jangly lo-fi, as well as Hilton’s trash-can rumble.

As Atlas sees it, his band’s fortunes can be chalked up to simply "tunneling through the fog" as each of its "little goals" are accomplished.

"I have no agenda with this band, but I do have goals, and I just see them as they become possible," he explained. "I feel like we have to have a healthy relationship with it because it can just end quickly. It’s so rewarding, but yet it’s a rock ‘n’ roll band — it’s a project with three people. You can’t stake a life on it."

www.myspace.com/nodzzz

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Bunny ballin’

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January 28, 2009
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Nobunny loves you — that much is clear by the end of the first track on his debut, Love Visions. But where did the masked maven of caffeinated garage-punk come from? I met with the leather-jacketed, now Bay Area-based "half-rabbit, half-jackalope, half-human" at an Oakland bar, angling for two rabbit-earfuls of explanation. It’s hard not to be curious: the aforementioned Visions, released last year by 1-2-3-4 Go! and Bubbledumb, motorbiked outta left field to become 2008’s most delightful lo-fi slab of clambake party jams. Even heavy-hitter Jay Reatard recently designated it as his new favorite record "to jump around in [his] underwear and eat pizza in bed to!"

Eight years ago, Nobunny was conceived as "The No-Money Bunny" near the mountains west of Tucson, where, after having cleaned up a hard drug habit, the soon-to-be bunny-eared dude thought he ought to become "a rabbit Elvis impersonator … no joke!" He followed a peculiar familial precedent for masked musicianship — mom with the Moos Brothers and the Blues Chickens, dad donned punk garb in the Blues Burgers, and Nobunny himself prefers to remain anonymous — and busked on Tucson’s avenues before his first paid gig: an April 2001 show at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl on Easter Sunday. As it turned out, it was also the day Joey Ramone died — a strangely appropriate DOB for a project that would pick up the Ramones’ pink punk shoelaces and tie them to what Nobunny calls a "no boundaries, all id" ‘tude.

After early gigs opening for Blowfly and the Black Lips ("There was no competition for the cool slots in Tucson," Nobunny says), the live performance bug has since had him by his oft-visible balls. "Anything from a tape deck to a nine-piece band" backs him up as he cranks out tunes with a rousing, familiar-feeling bubblegum jubilance. He admittedly enjoys "Frankenstein-ing" together fragments of songs he loves, but make no mistake: such sugary album cuts as "I Am a Girlfriend" and "Church Mouse" are the keyboard-drum grind of Nobunny and nobody else!

Since the LP’s release, he has put out a 7-inch single, "Give It to Me"/"Motorhead With Me" (HoZac, 2008), and when we spoke he alluded to several new releases on the way, including an new album. "Not a single review of the other album could apply to the next one," which he said will be "all acoustic," powered by handclaps, beer bottles, and stomped-on phone books. For a good time, look up Nobunny’s line — it’s probably scrawled on a bathroom wall somewhere.

NOBUNNY

With Thee Makeout Party

Feb. 4, 8 p.m., $5

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

www.theknockoutsf.com

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Rage onstage

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January 28, 2009
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kimberly@sfbg.com

Yep, you too are essential to the band, especially your super-sweet triangle solos. But roughly speaking, garage rock — be it in, out, or lurking merrily on the fringes — often comes down to one visionary or prime mover, though in the tight local music scene, one never rules out the cosmic convergence of several git-‘er-done leader types.

GREG ASHLEY — THE GRIS GRIS, THE MIRRORS, SIR LORD VON RAVEN

The Gris Gris may be dormant, but the life this producer, solo artist, and guy-with-seemingly-a-jillion-bands-up-his-sleeve pulls out of his organ and guitar with Oakland’s psychy-garage Sir Lord Von Raven makes us sit up, rub our eyes, and wiggle our bee-hinds a little harder as we fetch ourselves another PBR.

www.myspace.com/sirlordvonraven

DREW CRAMER — THE MANTLES, PERSONAL AND THE PIZZAS

"I Can Read" — an excellent reminder. Personal and the Pizzas is not only the funniest joke band — and Dictators jab/mash note — in town, but Mantles dude Drew Cramer can’t stop writing catchy songs, even in the service of a Bowser-riffic group that began as an idea for a TV show. "We were going to do a sitcom — The Young Ones–style," Cramer told me this fall. "It just turned into a band. The idea is we sit around all day eating pizzas, listening to the Stooges, and drinking beer." Makes you wonder about the next warp in the more ethereal weave of the Mantles.

ANDY JORDAN — THE CUTS, THE TIME FLYS, BUZZER

The Cuts appeared to go out with a bang following From Here on Out (Birdman, 2006) and the Time Flys seemed to have flown, but don’t lose hope for this manic son of a record-store man: Buzzer takes its cues from the wild-child kicks of ’70s glitter punk and messes with hole-in-the-head stranger dangers à la "Trepanation Blues."

Buzzer with Photobooth and Die RotzZz. Sat/31, 8 p.m., call for price. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. www.myspace.com/buzzeroakland

TINA LUCCHESI — THE BOBBYTEENS, THE BACI GALOOPIS, TOP 10

The lady keeps the up-dos swinging at Down at Lulu’s, but she also finds plenty of time to pour a lotta love into the rock scene. Top 10 makes us wanna mix cornrows in our pop charts.

MATTHEW MELTON — SNAKEFLOWER 2, PHOTOBOOTH, BARE WIRES

Photobooth is now in the mustachioed, Oakland-by-way-of-Memphis rock ‘n’ roll maven’s past, Snakeflower 2 is still simmering, and Bare Wires — the Jay Reatard photog’s old band with his River City Tanlines cohort Alicia Trout — has risen once more, peopled by Paul Keelan and ex–Time Flys member Erin Emslie. Looking forward to BW’s Artificial Clouds LP (Tic Tac Totally).

Bare Wires with Static Static and Fun Blood. Feb. 5, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.myspace.com/thebarewires

RUSSELL QUAN — THE MUMMIES, THE DUKES OF HAMBURG, THE BOBBYTEENS, THE COUNT BACKWARDS, THE PHANTOM SURFERS, THE FLAKES, THE MERSEY WIFE BEATERS

He’s the OG of garage rock in the Bay, a madman on drums — and the dude can also whip out a mean rock ‘n’ roll DJ set. Does he get extra points because he’s a genuine garage rocker? Auto repair is his forte when he isn’t bashing out beats and generating positive vibes.

TY SEGALL — TRADITIONAL FOOLS, THE PERVERTS

The one-man rock-out machine fronts the Traditional Fools, temped in the Mothballs, and recently saw his super-energized self-titled solo debut come out on John Dwyer’s Castle Face label.

Feb. 6, 5 p.m., $5. University of San Francisco campus, SF. www.myspace.com/tysegall

SUPERCHARGED: MORE BANDS

MAYYORS

Everyone loves a mystery: the Sacto band has almost zero Web presence. Also no interviews and nada on promos. According to their kinda-sorta rep, Mark of the mount saint mountain (mt.st.mtn.) label, both of Mayyors’ mt.st.mtn. singles, Marines Dot Com and Megans LOLZ, were sold out in days and re-presses for show sales evaporated just as quickly. Tough, love. Yet somehow the chatter — the old-school mouth-to-mouth variety — is on, thanks to the blitzkrieg force of tunes like "Airplanes," bruising ultra-lo-fi Brainbombs allusions, and memorable performances like their set at 2008’s Budget Rock. About as garage rock as the Coachwhips or the Hospitals, Mayyors sports FM Knives’ Chris Woodhouse on guitar and Sexy Prison’s John Pritchard on the mic. Oh, and me likee the outfit’s soundtrack to Jay Howell’s The Forest City Rockers Motorcycle Club animation.

THE OKMONIKS

The Tucson, Ariz., terrors have a way of bending an organ to their will — and word has it they’re moving to the Bay Area. www.okmoniks.com

THE PETS

I’m in love — with the boy-gang vocals, delivered with the proper nasality and snot levels, on the Oakland band’s latest LP, Misdirection (Static Impulse). Midwestern proto-punk in the Dead Boys mode and bad-boy fast-loud-hard à la the Saints, with a dab of MC5 to do ya. With Buzzer and Bare Wires. Feb. 21, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, SF. www.myspace.com/thepetsoakland

SIC ALPS

The SF duo always had the pop chops and ideas but somehow they just keep getting better. Garage rock gone noisy and classic rock-y at the same time. www.sicalps.com

>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

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