Scene

“Hancock”

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REVIEW This summer’s obligatory Will Smith blockbuster has the ever-bankable star playing the titular role in Hancock — a foul-mouthed antihero apt to fly into action while clenching a bottle of whiskey. Though this reluctant superman of unclear origins consistently puts bad guys behind bars, the citizens of Los Angeles are none too thrilled when he arrives on the scene; Hancock’s chaotic brand of crime fighting has been taking a devastating toll on the city’s roads, buildings, ice cream trucks, and beached whales. That is, of course, until he saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), an idealistic public relations executive who decides to help Hancock revamp his image. Smith has the kind of charisma that can make even the most poorly-written shlock at least somewhat bearable. This time around, he doesn’t have to work as hard; Hancock is teeming with the fast-paced action and destruction that we seem to crave during the summer months. Plus, it’s surprisingly funny. As you might expect, Smith brings the bulk of the laughter but Bateman exceeds his straight-man role with his playfully wry delivery. Yes, the story is predictable and there is an annoyingly telegraphed "twist" involving Ray’s wife Mary (Charlize Theron), but Smith’s foray into superhero movies manages to entertain. For those keeping track, Hancock is no Men in Black (1997). Thankfully, though, it’s no Wild Wild West (1999) either.

HANCOCK opens Wed/2 in Bay Area theaters.

Hunter, haunted

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.magpictures.com

Weekly paper dies in Cleveland

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Curious deal creates alternative weekly monopoly

By Tim Redmond
I’m a little late on this, but it’s taken me a while to figure out the back story.

The parent company of the SF Weekly, which a few months ago sold off the East Bay Express, is shedding another money-losing paper — in the process, ending alternative weekly competition in Cleveland.

Village Voice Media will sell the Cleveland Scene to Times Shamrock, a chain that owns five other alternative weeklies. Times Shamrock is also buying the Cleveland Free Times, and will merge the two papers under the Scene name.

“It’s a sad day,” David Eden, former Free Times editor, told me. “This is a strong voice that being silenced.”
It’s also a curious new chapter in a six-year-old saga involving the nation’s largest alternative weekly chain, the U.S. Department of Justice and a scheme to wipe out competition in two markets.

The Scene was losing gobs of money, more than $1 million last year alone, according to documents filed in court as part of the Guardian’s lawsuit against VVM. The Free Times, owned by The Times-News of Erie Pennsylvania, was also struggling, publisher Matt Fabyan told me, “although we were much closer to stable.”

Still, there’s been talk of shutting the Free Times for months now: Back in December, 2007, Justice Department lawyers contacted Eden and asked him if he thought the Cleveland market was big enough for two competing alternative papers. “I told them it was,” Eden said.

Among the proposals on the table: VVM was interested in buying the paper and merging it with the Scene. But federal regulators wouldn’t allow it.

The reason: Back in 2003, the Justice Department and the attorneys general of California and Ohio filed suit against New Times, then the owner of the Scene, and VVM, which owned the Free Times. The two chains, which have since merged, had entered into a shady – and, it turns out, illegal – arrangement to create alt-weekly monopolies in Cleveland and Los Angeles. VVM agreed to shut its paper in Cleveland, and in exchange, New Times shut a paper in Los Angeles that was competing with the VVM-owned LA Weekly.

Justice forced the chains to sell the Free Times to a group of investors who vowed to keep it open and continue competition. The consent decree the chains signed bared them from taking any further anticompetitive actions in Cleveland or L.A.

But although VVM couldn’t create a monopoly, another newspaper outfit apparently can.

Fabyan said he had been in contact with the Times Shamrock people for some time, and that “I told them you really want to buy both papers. I don’t think this is a market big enough for two alternative weeklies.”

Eden was willing to try to save the Free Times: He said that he’d raised enough money to make a “substantial offer” for the paper: “I’m told that VVM had offered $450,000 for the Free Times,” he said. “We were close to that figure.” But his bid was turned down.

Don Farley, who runs the alt-weekly group at Times Shamrock, said he couldn’t comment on the details of the negotiations except to say that “we’ve been back and forth looking at the Free Times, and Scene became available as well.”

That was clearly part of the appeal: Running a paper that has no competition is typically more lucrative. “We can serve the community better this way,” said Fayan, who will be publisher of the Scene.

Andy Van De Voorde, executive associate editor at VVM, told me that his company didn’t see this as a three-way deal. “We sold our paper to Times Shamrock, and that’s our only role,” he said.

But he also confirmed that VVM had wanted to buy the Free Times and merge the two papers, but had run afoul of the Justice Department. “I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why we couldn’t do this deal, but Times Shamrock could,” he said.

Well, for one thing, Times Shamrock isn’t a previous offender, under a consent decree to stop trying to monopolize markets. But I’m also curious why Justice is allowing this to happen.

I’ve been trying to get a comment out of the Justice Department since Friday. The PR people keep telling me they’ll get back to me. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

Beyond belief

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE Aurora Theater takes on — reportedly — its first gay-themed work with a West Coast premiere of Keith Bunin’s almost-too-smart The Busy World Is Hushed, a play that ultimately has as much to do with questions of Christian faith and the mixed blessing/burden of family as with sexual orientation. The play, which debuted off-Broadway in 2006 amid a fracas in the Episcopalian Church over the issue of homosexuality, concerns a middle-aged Episcopalian minister, scholar, and single mother named Hannah (Anne Darragh) who hires a young writer, Brandt (Chad Deverman), to ghostwrite her book on a newly discovered gospel that may represent more faithfully (ahem) the "authentic" Jesus.

Both characters have personal reasons for being interested in this project. Hannah was widowed when her husband walked into the sea in a possible suicide, leaving her pregnant and alone. Her sharp intellect leaves plenty of scope for criticism of the institutional and historical construction of God and the bigotry of the Church, but her faith — which she grounds in her own suffering and isolation as a way of giving them meaning and purpose — is only refined in the process. Meanwhile, Brandt, a lapsed Episcopalian, long ago moved away from a church that invalidated his identity as a gay man. But with his father dying in the hospital and unable to concentrate on his own writing, he’s eager to lose himself in Hannah’s work — at least partly because of the bitter questions his father’s cruel demise stirs up about the nature of God and religion.

Bursting into this scene comes Hannah’s wayward 26-year-old son, Thomas (an especially engaging James Wagner), just back from another of his ecstatic "get lost" adventures, a patch of porcupine quills jutting from one ankle. Soon Brandt, clearly smitten, is kneeling before Thomas plucking out one quill after another with a mischievous glee that covers for the eroticism in this little St. Sebastian moment (a tableau that morphs into another about as preposterous when, in their next meeting, Thomas dons a big leather toolbelt to put up a couple of shelves). Hannah’s delving into Christian history and exegesis mirrors her equally solitary if gregarious and promiscuous son’s own restless quest to understand his real-world father — which holds out for him a similar promise of existential meaning, moral guidance, and a quieting of the soul.

But their quests, while similar, are also in conflict. A battle is being drawn between mother and son — in some sense over, and in the name of, the father(s) — so that when Hannah practically begs the hapless Brandt to act on his feelings for her son, it’s with something less than unalloyed Christian spirit. Director Robin Stanton’s actors deliver their lines with conviction, but the dialogue gets both too pat and too constructed, at times almost Socratic, so that soon belief is a dwindling resource all around.

THE BUSY WORLD IS HUSHED

Through July 20

Wed–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 and 7 p.m.; $40–$42

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org

Rare, medium, and well-done

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When Sean Dorsey started the Fresh Meat Festival in 2001, transgendered artists were sequestered inside the alternative club scene. With this new event, Dorsey threw the doors wide open. While transgender and queer performances still have a special attraction for their constituencies, the festival’s need to move to Theater Artaud, its largest venue yet, proves its broader appeal.

This year’s presentations ranged far and wide, and so did the quality. That’s one of the perils of this type of focused programming: the desire to be supportive and inclusive can mean presenting artists who may not be experienced or even talented enough. The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival went through similar growing pains. But Fresh Meat — which is fun, balanced, and thoughtful — is on the right track.

Five groups received commissions. The Barbary Coast Cloggers and Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu presented excellent premieres; the first joyously clickety-clacking, the other lyrically flowing through new interpretations of passed-down dancing. In trying to show the breadth of its repertoire, however, Colombian Soul attempted too much. The troupe presented undeveloped, under-rehearsed fragments, including a religious procession and a same-sex partnered "maypole" dance. Musicians Nejla Baguio and Prado Gomez’s artistic partnership looked young. The tentative Who’s Your Daddy?, musings on being a parent, had a few sparks but ultimately fizzled. Also respectfully but unenthusiastically received was the transgendered Transcendence Gospel Choir and its invitation for a community sing-along.

Two artists I would like to see more of were the outstanding countertenor Jose Luis Muñoz, who sang a powerful aria from Juana (an opera-in-progress by Carla Lucero), and Scott Turner Schofield, a FTM word artist. In an excerpt from Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps, he performed a smart, witty audition for Hamlet. It was also a pleasure to see the nonchalant Shawna Virago, who performed two supersmart, edgy new songs.

Still, the evening belonged to Dorsey, and not just because he founded the festival. Lost/Found, a duet he performed with Brian Fisher, showed again how nuanced a thinker, writer, dancer, and choreographer he is. I can’t think of anybody, no matter their identity, who creates works about growing up as theatrically cogent and as tremulously alive.

Queercore, many mornings after

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THE QUEER ISSUE Call it a harmonic convergence of two queer legends of indie rock and queercore. Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven and Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division got together recently to talk about the way it was, coming out in the repressed 1980s and coming into their own experientially, politically, and musically in 1990s San Francisco — each, as Krummenacher puts it, a "gay guy suddenly in Candyland." Life is still sweet — and hella active — for these old friends: Krummenacher celebrates Camper’s 25th anniversary with a June 28 show at the Fillmore, and Ginoli is unleashing Pansy Division’s new documentary, Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band, at Frameline June 26, complete with an afterparty performance at the Eagle. And naturally, this won’t be the last you’ll hear from these prolific players: Pansy Division is working on a new album and Ginoli has a memoir coming next year on SF’s Cleis Press, while Krummenacher is recording as McCabe and Mrs. Miller with the Sippy Cups’ Alison Faith Levy and recently completed a fifth solo full-length. (Kimberly Chun)

JON GINOLI Before I started Pansy Division, I’d been actively trying to find other gay musicians’ records. I’d listen to records, listen for hints, and it just seemed like I was always getting disappointed in that there were musicians I heard about who were supposed to be gay that would flat-out deny it in interviews. I thought, OK, if all these people who I think are lying are not going to come out, or really aren’t … that’s when it finally dawned on me that I should do this band. At the same time I had that idea, so did Tribe 8. It was Tribe 8 and us and Glen Meadmore in Los Angeles. When we started that’s what was going on in queer rock. The only other thing I knew about — and I didn’t know about this till I started playing — was Fifth Column in Toronto.

There really wasn’t much you could point to, and that’s partly why I wanted to be as out and blunt as I could. Because it seemed like if you were gay and you liked rock ‘n’ roll, it was something you had to hide and it was something that there was some shame attached to.

VICTOR KRUMMENACHER It was an interesting time. From my perspective, we had the [Michael] Stipe rumors and we had the Hüsker Dü rumors. But it was kind of, like, don’t ask, don’t tell. Kid Congo was always out. He was always what he was, which I admired a lot.

JG I remember meeting him in New York, in ’94, ’95, and by that time, I knew he was gay. But I’d been a fan of all bands he’d been in — the Gun Club, the Cramps, and the Bad Seeds — and I didn’t know he was gay until 10 years after I’d started buying his records.

VK A lot of the reason I was attracted to punk rock was because I knew queer people in it. My friends were gay, and I was coming out, and it was just really easy to deal with because they liked the same music, and it was fun. But it was a hard time, and the ’80s sucked. I’m 43 now, and I deal with people in their 20s who have no clue how much it sucked.

JG Only the highlights have filtered down to them.

VK There was Phranc, and there was some chatter about Morrissey.

JG It’s interesting — I was thinking, OK, it’s like a ladder. You’re taking a step at a time to reach a certain place, and I was thinking about the women’s music scene, the lesbian music scene, from the late ’70s. The folk scene.

VK Which seemed a little bit more coherent.

JG But it also seemed more insular, especially when I talk to people from that period. It was about being separate, and the thing about me wanting to do Pansy Division was that I wanted to engage by using rock music. It was kind of like taking the music that’s popular but doing something that people would consider subversive with it.

People were dying, and that’s why — even though I was horny and wanted to sing these pro-gay songs — we sang about condoms a lot. We had some songs that were cautionary tales. But for somebody who was born in 1987, there’s no way that they could have much of a clue about what we’re talking about, because they just didn’t see the people dying. I moved here in ’89 from Champaign, Illinois, and one of the first things I did was join ACT UP.

VK My experiences with ACT UP and Queer Nation meetings were rowdy good times — it was go out and be visible and be noisy — and then it got very bureaucratic, which I think was a natural progression.

JG ACT UP ran its course, which was right around the time I had the idea to do Pansy Division. I’m a political person, but I don’t like too much music that’s really didactic and up front about its politics. I didn’t want to make music that people would agree with but wouldn’t really enjoy. I thought this is my way to do cultural activism.

What I wanted to mention was I had a band [the Outnumbered] before Pansy Division that had three albums. They were indie in the ’80s, and at the time, I was out to my band members, I was out to people in Champaign, but I didn’t feel like I could write about being gay in my music because I was trying to represent the band and they were all hetero.

So did you have any bands before Camper?

VK Camper was my first band, when I was 18. It was funny — I came out, and my band broke up [in 1990]. It might have had something to do with why I wanted to leave the band at the time, but it had nothing to do with the band breaking up. Basically when I came out, they were like, "And … ?" I don’t think it was any great surprise.

But the interesting thing was as soon as I came out, it was immediate acceptance. Seldom did I run into any problem, which made me wonder, why the hell didn’t I do it sooner, and why the hell didn’t more people do it?

JG It seems to me both Michael Stipe and Bob Mould have made statements about how they didn’t want to come out because they didn’t want to be seen as role models. The problem was to me, well, you’re already role models to people and some of them are gay and some of them are straight.

My own thought about it was, well, if no one is going to come out and be out in music playing the style I like, then I’ll do it. I mean, I had nothing to lose, and I do respect that other people have a lot of pressures, record companies.

VK The truth of the matter is, you guys did a lot of legwork that did ripple up.

JG So now you’re doing Camper, and you’re out, and you’re in a long-term relationship. Were you been able to meet guys at shows, even if you wanted to back then, and now that you’re out, do you have a gay contingent at Camper shows?

VK I wind up with gay contingents usually in the strangest, most unexpected ways. It’s been more than once that I’ve gone home with a guy, and he figures out, "You look familiar." Anonymity can be something you can thrive on. Or I guess, bluntly, it’s nice to fuck around and have people not know who you are — because I’ve frequently been hit on because of who I am.

What I’m interested in is, where do you see younger people going?

JG We came along pre-MySpace, pre-Internet, really. It’s so different now. It used to be a guessing game where you’d trade rumors with other gay people about people you heard that were gay. Now Pansy Division has a MySpace page, and I’m getting messages and friend requests from other queer bands all the time and a lot of straight bands, too, that like our music. So I think it’s not that big of a deal anymore unless you’re trying to make it in the mainstream. Then there’s still a wall where you can’t make it unless you’re already successful to some point, or you set out to be. Look at Rufus Wainwright. He’s on a major label, but it was obvious from the outset that he was going to be a cult figure.

VK Especially if he’s going to be doing the Judy Garland things. Not to dig too hard, but I did actually see it the other night [on PBS], and it was, like, "Why did you do that?" In a certain way, ironically, it’s great progress — "Oh, yeah, a gay guy doing all of Judy at Carnegie Hall at Carnegie Hall." My mom used to play Judy at Carnegie Hall, and I’ve always loved Judy Garland, but then I was just going, "That’s not Judy Garland. That’s just Rufus Wainwright." I feel like he’s better in his own context.

JG Given that I’ve always chafed against the gay identity that posits show tunes as part of the essential experience, I made myself sit down with the Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall double CD, and, you know, his between-song patter was campy but he didn’t camp those songs up anymore than they already were. But I don’t want to hear anybody singing "The Trolley Song." I really don’t.

PANSY DIVISION: LIFE IN A GAY ROCK BAND

Screening Thurs/26, 7 p.m., $9–<\d>$10

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

Show begins 10 p.m., $7

Eagle

398 12th St., SF

www.frameline.org

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN

Sat/28, 9 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

In on the Outside: Howlin Rain, the Walkmen, Toot and the Maytals added to Outside Lands fest lineup

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Howl on, Howlin Rain – at Outside Lands.

This in from the publicists of Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, the first annual ticketed large-scale multi-stage event in Golden Gate Park. (A portion of every ticket sold will directly benefit Golden Gate Park):

“Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival is proud to announce new additions to the already-stellar line-up for the first inaugural event. Howlin Rain, The Dynamites, and Carney are rounding out Friday, Aug. 22. The Walkmen, Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet featuring Bela Fleck, and Everest have been added to Saturday, Aug. 23. Toots and the Maytals, Rogue Wave, Mike Gordon, and Vienna Teng have been added to Sunday, Aug. 24.

“The multifaceted, three-day festival will take place in San Francisco’s historic Golden Gate Park on Aug. 22-24, 2008. Radiohead, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Jack Johnson will headline the event. Tickets for the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival are available for purchase at www.SFOutsidelands.com.

“The updated schedule for each day is as follows:”

Friday, Aug. 22 (first band is on at 5 p.m.)
Radiohead
Beck
Manu Chao
The Black Keys
Cold War Kids
Steel Pulse
Black Mountain
The Felice Brothers
Howlin Rain
The Dynamites
Carney

Saturday, August 23 (first band is on at 1 p.m.)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals
Primus
Steve Winwood
Lupe Fiasco
Café Tacvba
Regina Spektor
Galactic’s Crescent City Soul Krewe featuring Dirty Dozen Horns
M. Ward
Devendra Banhart
Matt Nathanson
Two Gallants
Dredg
Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet featuring Bela Fleck
The Walkmen
Sidestepper
Kaki King
The Coup
Donavon Frankenreiter
Nellie McKay
Goapele
Sean Hayes
Rupa and the April Fishes
Everest

Sunday, Aug. 24 (first band is on at 1 p.m.)
Jack Johnson
Wilco
Widespread Panic
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Broken Social Scene
Andrew Bird
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
Drive-By Truckers
Toots and the Maytals
Stars
Rogue Wave
ALO
Jackie Greene
Mike Gordan
The Cool Kids
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Little Brother
Bon Iver
The Mother Hips
Nicole Atkins and the Sea
K’naan
Back Door Slam
Culver City Dub Collective

‘Tokyo Gore Police,’ ‘Machine Girl’ splash down at Hole in the Head’s finale

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machine_girl sml.bmp
One-armed bandit: Machine Girl‘s Asami lost an arm in her battle against a shady ninja family, but that doesn’t mean you should stand in the way of her quest for vengeance (witness the poor slob in the rear).

Ho boy, are you ready for the nightmares? That’s practically guaranteed this weekend as the Another Hole in the Head fest closes out with its final mow-down. Fans of arterial spray, extreme Japanese filmmaking, random acts of unkind dismemberment, and fatal flying guillotines will be able to get their geek on one last, but hella amazing time with this last-minute double feature of Japanese shock-and-argh at Brava, showcasing the late add Tokyo Gore Police and crowd fave Machine Girl. The quickie downlow:

MACHINE GIRL

Possibly the most exuberantly bloody and cartoonish offering in the fest, which bites off/pays homage to Grindhouse AND Kill Bill. This archetypal Japanese revenge story – passionate and cruel by turns – hinges on the trials and tribulations of Ami Hyuga (Asami), a high-school basketball nut, fresh-faced daughter of an accused killer, and loyal big sister. Her younger brother becomes snared by spiralling gambling (!?) debts and ends up in hock to the local budding young hoods, including the son of a yakuza/ninja kingpin (whose devil ‘do bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Prodigy’s lead vocalist) – it doesn’t end prettily. Something snaps in Ami, and she goes after the kids responsible for her bro’s death, only to come up against a formidable array of monstrous parents driven to protect their equally rotten offspring. Losing her arm – slowly – in a nasty torture scene just sends her over the edge. Don’t even ask yourself how she can possibly operate a attachable machine gun with a stump – Rose MacGowan figured out how in Planet Terror, so can she.

You won’t soon forget the memorably ’60s-ish comicbook-like action sequence opener, evocative of both Seijun Suzuki and Sin City, or the finale, less a balletic bloodbath than a completely over-the-top showdown between the “Super Mourner Gang” of grieving parents (just because your son chose to become a ninja doesn’t mean you don’t hurt), giant holes blasted in bodies, a driller bra donned by the meanest mama ever, and a scalping scene that combines disco strobing and an almost Looney Tunes-esque dark comedy.

TOKYO GORE POLICE

Also produced by the venerable exploitation house Nikkatsu (well, they made all kinds of films, though their “roman porno” and “pink” softcore films brought them infamy) with a few of the same actors popping up, Tokyo Gore Police is the eagerly awaited, latest turn by the cruelly beauteous Audition S&M star Eihi Shiina. Here, she’s a girl cop – part of a sinister Philip K. Dick-ish privatized police squad commissioned with ridding the world of monstrous psychopaths who grow weapons out of whatever body part they lose. Sound familiar? Yes, these are the same good – or bad, depending on how you feel about this level of gore – people at Nikkatsu who gave you Machine Girl.

Directed by first-time auteur Yoshihiro Nishimura (who crafted special effects makeup for Machine GIrl, the also memorable Hole in the Head features Exte and Meatball Machine), Tokyo Gore Police is chock-full of disturbing scenes: point-blank exploding heads (recurring like a child’s bad dreams), exposed brains, intimations of limbless sexual servitude, and natch the Snail Girl, above. But the movie’s blend of Ultraman live-action monster brouhahas and a Burner-y, nouveau goth-steampunk aesthetic that, personally, pulls me out of the narrative. I felt a little less invested in Tokyo Gore Police than the more, ahem, classically B-minded Machine Girl. But, hey, this isn’t a competition – unless you want to see how far I can throw a severed hand – so stick around for both flicks. Shock fiends won’t be disappointed.

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Creepy crawlies: Snail Girl

MACHINE GIRL AND TOKYO GORE POLICE
June 22, 6 and 8 p.m., call for price
Brava Theater
2781 24th St., SF
For tickets or more information, call (415) 820-3907
www.sfindie.com

All’s Phair in ‘Guyville’?

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exile in guyville.jpg

By Laura Mojonnier

The last time Liz Phair figured so prominently in the critical discourse was back in 2003 following the release of her self-titled collaboration with the Matrix. While Phair retained her trademark sexual frankness on the disc and even produced a hit, “Why Can’t I,” the album rendered her fans utterly apoplectic.

What happened? Phair had been slowly moving in the “adult contemporary” direction for years – but the Matrix? The duo that produced Avril Lavigne and Christina Aguilera? If any one had lingering doubts as to whether or not the ’90s were over, this album was the fourth horseman.

With the reissue of her classic debut, 1993’s Exile in Guyville (Matador/ATO), slated for June 24, Phair is back in the spotlight. This time around, the questions she’s provoking about how music has changed since she arrived on the scene are tempered by a healthy dose of nostalgia. Newly signed to Dave Matthew’s ATO Records, Phair seems more comfortable than ever, even telling Billboard that she’s feeling “creative” for the first time in 15 years and is working on a new album scheduled for the fall.

Blood in, blood out

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In John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, when Parma’s bright and talented Giovanni (Michael Hayden) confesses to Friar Bonaventura (Steven Anthony Jones) his passion for his equally exceptional sister, Annabella (René Augesen), the friar is quick to understand the stakes, declaring, "We have need to pray." He advises Giovanni to turn from so unnatural a desire to repentance and sorrow. "Acknowledge what thou art," he tells him, "a wretch, a worm, a nothing." But this strikes us as something of a denial of nature too, especially given our protagonist’s rare qualities. And it’s soon clear that religion will give him no solace or cure anyway. This is unsurprising, since the church — headed by a slimy cardinal (Jack Willis) — is a thoroughly dishonest institution deeply implicated in the pervasive corruption of the age. So where should Giovanni’s faith and ultimate allegiance lie in such a world? And where, in turn, should our sympathies lie?

Such questions go to the heart of what remains provocative and compelling in John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy four centuries on. It makes a kind of irrefutable sense within the context of the play that Giovanni and Annabella (clearly intended as a darker version of Romeo and Juliet) would pursue a mutual affinity and blood bond to the extremes of physical and emotional passion — with tragic consequences of course. But the surprise is that while tragic, the consequences are also, morally speaking, far from straightforward. Forging a bond that denies and defies a fallen world and its judgment, their relationship finally succumbs to the order of the day — which is to say, the disorder of violence — by self-destructing in an orgy of blood vengeance.

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Ford’s best-known work — whose central incest plot comes wrapped in intervening subplots driven by jealousy, power, and revenge — plumbs moral confusion and the individual conscience in a hypocritical and vicious age. No wonder it feels thematically and dramatically vital in our own spiraling time. Ford depicts a world — the tumultuous mid–17th century — where the Elizabethan certainties of Shakespeare’s day have dissolved and authority has blurred. Meanwhile, material and carnal appetites have bloomed like overripe fruit in a dilapidated garden that looks more like a jungle. The cruelty and gore here barely merit a raised eyebrow by today’s brassy standards, whether in the realm of entertainment, art, or politics. But in Ford’s time and ours, taboos don’t so much disappear as they become tantalizingly flimsy, porous and seductive, Guantánamo being one byword for this.

The still-burning fire in Ford’s tragedy is inconsistently sustained, however, in American Conservatory Theater’s new production, requiring a wade through a fairly static and fitfully persuasive first act to get to the juicier scenes and forceful momentum of the second. Artistic director Carey Perloff puts wonderful care into the production values and her casting is generally shrewd (in addition to leads Augesen and Hayden, who really heat up by the end, Anthony Fusco, Susan Gibney, and Gregory Wallace turn in particularly noteworthy performances). The baroque world of Ford’s play and our time is architecturally bridged, meanwhile, in Walt Spangler’s multileveled scenic design — an abstracted cathedral in its jewel-like beaded curtains, scattered candles in soft-colored glass, steep metallic stairways, and a treelike cluster of massive dangling organ pipes enshrouding composer-musician Bonfire Madigan Shive and her cello on a recessed tier. The "avant-baroque" cello score and Shive’s occasional anguished vocal lines add a somewhat thinner aural texture to character and scene than seems intended. But the set is stunningly integrated with Robert Wierzel’s sensual lighting design, evoking baroque canvases while draping the action in a sense of carnal luxury and exquisite decadence.

It’s a bumpy ride, but the end is well played and gripping, casting a memorable image of Giovanni drenched in the blood of his sister and lover, having utterly retreated into himself — literally into the womb of his flesh and blood, where sibling, wife, and child have all become horribly blurred. In the play’s crowning and irresolvable tension, incest is both a fundamental violation of natural order as well as an assertion of blood as the only terra firma in a world of quicksand. *

‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $14–$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

Bag drag

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER As a once-impressionable protein unit who wrapped my eyeballs around any and all TV comedy, I’m slightly abashed to say I haven’t caught Saturday Night Live regularly in many a year. So I was surprised to hear rumors a while back that the series was allegedly biting off one of the Bay Area underground music scene’s fave figures: Jibz Cameron — known and loved for her garage-rock spaz-outs with the Roofies and her pretension-leveling levity behind the counter at Lost Weekend Video. And then there’s her super-girl-group of sorts, Dynasty, with Numbers drummer Indra Dunis and Neung Phak vocalist Diana Hayes, and her solo spin-off project, Dynasty Handbag.

“I don’t watch it either,” Cameron says from Brooklyn, as pet Chihuahuas struggle over a chew toy in the background. “But I get a phone call every other Saturday, ‘Omigod, you won’t fucking believe it…’ and I say, ‘I already know.'” She’s talking about SNL‘s house DJ Dynasty Handbag, a character that first popped up on the show in 2005, hosting a faux-MTV talk show. The occasional Kenan Thompson character is a far cry from Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag, a crazed kitsch-waver — a kind of schizo Bride of Peaches and Krystle Carrington — that Cameron developed on petite SF music stages before moving east four years ago. The project started life as the portable version of Dynasty and turned into a multi-referent alter ego.

The SNL character hasn’t reappeared in the last year, but it still offends. “It’s still on their DVDs, and I do performance that’s comedy-related,” she says. “People research me on the Internet, and my site comes up first, but they’re there, though I’m the OG, the OD, the OGD.” She says she sent SNL a cease-and-desist letter and when “that didn’t go anywhere, I took it to Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. I’m not in a full-blown lawsuit with them, but we’re sort of in discussion with them.” At press time, SNL representatives have not responded to requests for comment.

Cameron says she does have a new “plan of attack.” Her friend Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio will be producing a podcast radio show called Radio Woo Woo, which she will cohost. “My plan is to just keep talking about it on the air,” she says, adding that the podcast will premiere TV on the Radio’s new album this fall.

The low-broiling brouhaha hasn’t stopped Cameron from developing her Dynasty Handbag performances into narratives. This week she’ll unveil three short pieces at CounterPULSE. One, Bags, revolves around Cameron’s relationships with five empty shopping bags: “Each one sucks my soul in a different way, like bad relationships in my 20s. One is really needy; one’s really demanding; and one just wants to get fisted.” A work in progress, O Death, sees Cameron attempting to bury her own dead body.

Cameron has been far from dead and buried in New York: within months of moving to the Big Snapple she was crowned Miss Lower East Side in Murray Hill’s annual pageant, and she has presented solo shows at PS 122 and Galapagos Art Space. “Everybody works so hard here — it’s really influenced me to go ahead with my stuff. And there’s just the intensity of seeing so many insane people every day,” says Cameron, who was raised by hippie parents in Mendocino County (“My childhood was peppered by characters with beards and long, droopy fun bags”). “That’s really helpful, too.” *

DYNASTY HANDBAG: TALES FROM THE PURSE

Thurs/19 and Sat/21, 8 p.m., Fri/20 and Sun/22, 10 p.m., $20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.directfromnyc.com

MAGIC NUMBERS, FLYING DRUMS: THESE NEW PURITANS

Southend-on-Sea, UK’s These New Puritans purvey an austere, twinkling breed of synthetic/organic art-pop — one that evokes both Wire and the Klaxons. Who suspected the murky mystical inclinations embedded in the band’s debut, Beat Pyramid (Domino)? “Pyramids are about secrets and chambers,” vocalist Jack Barnett, 20, offers from his band’s tour stop in Chicago. “Some of the songs have to do with magic.” He claims 16th-century occultist-mathematician John Dee plays into his searching New Puritans as much as the Wu-Tang Clan, which Barnett praises for the “eerie, tiny little sounds in the background” of their productions.

Now the combo is attempting to write music that marries “the round canons of Steve Reich” with the beats of dancehall — provided Barnett manages to dodge the projectiles heaved by his drummer twin, George. When making music with your twin, Jack says, “you’re honest to the point of getting completely out of hand. As in drums being thrown at me. On a regular basis.”

Thurs/19, 8 p.m., $12–$13. Popscene, 333 Ritch, SF. www.popscene-sf.com

THE HAPPENINGS?

 

100 YEARS AT THE HOTEL UTAH

The 1908 edifice where Robin Williams, Cake, Counting Crows, and countless others broke out brings back witnesses and whoops it up. With Penelope Houston, Paula Frazer, Jesse DeNatale, Colossal Yes, Greg Ashley, Blag Dahlia, and others. Thurs/19; reception 7 p.m., ceremony 7:30 p.m., music 9 p.m.; $8 show. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300

 

JAYMAY

The bookish Long Island chanteuse flirts with song stylings slouching betwixt Feist and Keren Ann. Thurs/19, 9 p.m., $12. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

 

GEORGE MICHAEL

He’s never going to dance again through this sort of arena show, the UK pop star hinted recently. Thurs/19, 8 p.m., $56–<\d>$176. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. (415) 421-TIXS

 

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Narrow Stairs finds the Seattle cabbies stretching into darker realms. With Rogue Wave. Sat/21, 8 p.m., $39.50. Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Berk. www.apeconcerts.com

 

Earth, here and now

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"I’m a big fan of Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton and Merle Haggard’s guitarist, Roy Nichols. I also like a lot of western swing, like Hank Thompson and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Jerry Reed. Waylon Jennings is one of my favorite guitar players."

Listening to Dylan Carlson rattle off a list of his favorite country pickers might seem a little strange. After all, this is the guy who practically invented the drone-metal genre in the early 1990s as the leader of Sub Pop outcasts Earth. Their snail-paced, sludge-caked drone explorations might be termed "primordial," yet they were anything but traditional or rootsy. Some probably questioned whether they were music at all.

The band’s landmark Earth 2 (Sub Pop, 1993) is a legendary lease-breaker of an album thanks to its wall-rattling sonics. For years the recording — and the band in general — puzzled onlookers, who wondered what Nirvana’s old label was doing releasing something so unseemly. Earth once played a music-biz festival in New York during the early ’90s, and as Carlson recounts by phone from Seattle, "I had friends telling me, ‘Oh, yeah, there were all these industry people here, and they were totally confused.’ They thought we were assholes and stuff, like we were making fun of them."

The joke’s on them now, even it wasn’t back then. Thanks to Earth worshippers Sunn O))) and the scads of other low-end drone specialists who have cropped up in recent years, the band’s once-misunderstood sound has come to be seen as pioneering, opening the way for a range of experimentalists operating at the crossroads of metal, improv, and avant-garde rock. The thing is, Carlson doesn’t have much interest in that sound anymore.

"Obviously it’s flattering to be liked by people and to influence people," he says. "But for me, it’s not something I would do again, since I don’t like repeating myself and I’m trying to move somewhere else."

Earth’s more recent recordings, including 2005’s Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method and this year’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Den (both Southern Lord), move at the same slow hypnotic pace of the older material, but they do so with less volume, more space, and a surprising twang element. These discs have come with the help of a new cast of supporting musicians — including trombonist-keyboardist Steve Moore and Master Musicians of Bukkake members John Schuller and Don McGreavy on bass — and a new, more clearheaded approach for Carlson. They also come in the wake of a long hiatus that led many to assume Earth was finished as a band.

"I got dropped by Sub Pop [after 1996’s Pentastar] and wasn’t sure I wanted to play music anymore," he explains. "And I had a lot of [personal] wreckage to take care of, so that’s pretty much what I spent those years doing."

He started playing the guitar again in late 2000, but found himself less interested in feedback and doom-laden riffs and more interested in country music. As he explains, "For some reason, every so often I’ll go to my collection, and for whatever reason something will catch my fancy, and I’ll become obsessed with it for awhile. And that was the stuff."

He started playing with drummer Adrienne Davies in 2001, whose minimalist, mostly brushed sound has been a fixture on the newer Earth albums. He wasn’t planning on playing live again or even using the Earth name, he says, but things fell into place thanks to a reissue of some old recordings and a coinciding East Coast mini-tour. As a result, Earth was reborn — with a different lineup and a different sound.

"I mean, there are similarities between everything I do just because it’s me doing it," Carlson says. "But I’m just always trying to expand with each record and grow as a musician, hopefully, rather than repeating the same thing over and over again." Even so, he adds, "I kind of hear how musics are linked, rather than how they’re different."

Earth: Mach II’s brand of sparse, loping, desert minimalism is a far cry from the wall-of-sound drones of the many Earth-inspired bands currently operating. It’s not metal, but it’s certainly not country either. It’s more like some sort of bizarre-world Americana, with its mantra-like repetition, subtle guitar twang, and wide open sense of space. Jazz guitarist and fellow Seattleite Bill Frisell, who has developed his own skewed take on Americana over the years, makes a guest appearance on Bees, and a Ry Cooder cameo wouldn’t be out of place.

Carlson credits the open-minded, genre-crossing Seattle scene for helping the new Earth evolve and branch out. "It’s not like during the ’90s when everyone was trying to get signed and was worried about playing a specific genre. It’s just people who are into all kinds of music and just want to do the best stuff that they can."

EARTH

With Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter and Aerial Ruin

Fri/20, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

What’s a “Mater”?

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1. Unholy howler monkey!

2. The first murder victim delivers hilarious faux-archaeologist lines. She resembles Christopher Guest stalwart Catherine O’ Hara.

3. The dark circles under Asia Argento’s eyes and the scour-rough warm wool of her voice. She’s a star.

4. This time, Dario Argento’s trademark homicidal attack on a character’s eyes is a steel version of the nyuk nyuk nyuk treatment that Moe used to give Curly.

5. Daria Nicolodi’s character looks like a video game avatar. Plus, her appearance and her role create an entire other story that surrounds the story onscreen: one in which Asia, her child by Dario, saves the world from occult apocalypse (but dutifully showers before her daddy’s camera and dives into a putrescent soup of corpses first).

6. Best baby-killing scene since Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977).

7. Asia has to fend off Eurotrashy new wave cackling witches, Japanese Goth cackling witches, and International Male–model cackling witches — all of which love public transit.

8. Instead of a Helena Marcos–like Suspiria crone, the lead villain is an underdressed nymphet. Someone I saw the movie with deemed her "Boob Lady."

9. It delivers more gruesome guts and gore than every mechanical Hollywood horror remake of the past 10 years put together. If you walk into the theater in a state of frustration, you will leave it in a state of blood-sated jubilation.

10. It’s the third part of the Three Mothers trilogy, fool!

MOTHER OF TEARS

Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters

www.motheroftearsthemovie.com

Have another Soju

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

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

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

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

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

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Opens Fri/20 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas

www.sffs.org

Frameline 32: The Horror, the horror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTHULHU

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

THE GAY BED & BREAKFAST OF TERROR

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

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE

June 27, 11 p.m., Castro

SOCKET

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

Hypnodrome Theatre

575 10th St., SF

www.deadchannels.com

To surcharge, without love

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OPINION With the first linen pants of 2008, this city commenced collecting employer contributions to the Healthy San Francisco universal health care program. Employers that don’t provide insurance now must pay the city for the public health care their employees use anyway. A number of restaurants have added "Healthy San Francisco" surcharges of 2 to 4 percent to diners’ tabs. These surcharges are at best sour grapes and at worst a diabolical plan to thwart democracy.

Present spite notwithstanding, I spend all my discretionary income on dining. My economic stimulus check stimulated some duck confit and tarte tatin. I’d trade a kidney for dinner at Coi. My disaster preparedness kit includes a Zagat Guide. The stokers of my culinary flame deserve to be treated well. Our restaurant scene should attract the best, the brightest, the most ingenuously-tattooed epicureans. The people of San Francisco deigned to achieve this noble goal by providing a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, and now universal health care. Oh, the decadence! We’re drifting dangerously close to becoming a civilized society, which could get us invaded. Don’t be surprised when Blackwater goes hunting for Tom Ammiano in a spider-hole.

Some disgruntled restaurants have decided to assess a surcharge rather than raise prices. But all prices fluctuate. When the cost of electricity or halibut goes up, menu prices rise. Regulation affects cost. We knew that when we passed the laws. A surcharge instead of a menu price increase is restaurant owners’ way of saying that workers are less valuable than halibut.

Let them have health care. I enjoy clogging my own arteries so much more when the people feeding me get their cholesterol checked.

Owners claim their profit margin can’t absorb higher labor costs, hence the price hike. Restaurants have high failure rates and run a tight margin.

But raising prices wouldn’t be Armageddon for fine dining in Baghdad by the Bay. Heck, it’s not even Shock and Awe. Maybe I’d notice if Bar Tartine raised prices by 4 percent. Maybe I’d be annoyed. But if my $60 meal became $62, I wouldn’t head to a taqueria. The amount surchargers would have to jack prices before surchargees stay home is quite high. Most of us eating at Bar Tartine can suck it up like so many amuses bouches.

San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer is wont to blame every restaurant closure on our labor largesse. But restaurants fail for any number of reasons. Could be labor costs, or it could be that Bauer panned them, or that their concept, food, and location were bad, or that the manager was on coke.

Some restaurateurs can’t abide the people of San Francisco reguutf8g them. But that’s life in a democracy. The same people excusing the surcharge as mere kindly consciousness-raising are currently appealing the Healthy San Francisco law. In fact, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association opposes any improvement in labor standards. The folks there hope that diners, our fury stoked by surcharges, will finally rebel against our labor-loving local legislators, stop imposing our so-called values on restaurants, and demand to be served by disease-ridden, malnourished indigent waiters as God and Milton Friedman intended.

Instead of an irascible surcharge, menus could note: "Our food is organic, local, and sustainable. And the cook gets his asthma treated." People who care will be happy, and people who don’t will blithely resume checking the NASDAQ on their iPhones.

So quit grousing. Enjoy the short ribs. See your doctor. Everybody wins. *

Nato Green is a San Francisco-based comedian who has meddled with the primal forces of nature and must atone.

Homonuptial stories: Persian sugar cones, matching fedoras, and princess bouquets

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Janna Brancolini reports from City Hall

gaymarryariel1.jpg
Photo by Ariel Soto

At 3 pm, everyone in the City Hall rotunda erupted into cheers as two women in beautiful white gowns walked down the grand stairway.

I glanced over at a nearby sign, “Quiet Please. Business of the City and County of San Francisco is in progress,” which was being thoroughly ignored despite its strategic location.

Cameras flashed as the two women pumped their brightly colored bouquets in the air, grinning and cheering like excited kids at a birthday party.

String music floated through the air, and the hall’s echoing acoustics made it difficult to determine which direction it was coming from. I later identified the lone violinist on the second floor balcony, who was creating enough sound to be heard from everywhere in the room.

The women in white, like every other couple getting married today, were greeted with cupcakes, congratulations, and camera companies, in addition to the applause.

The marriage stations, unceremoniously identified with folding plywood chairs and “Ceremony Location X” printed on plain white paper, seemed to all be on the second floor.

charlmarryfedoraa.jpg
2 cute. Photo by Charles Russo

Although the sites of the ceremonies were less than impressive, they afforded an incredible view and an attention-grabbing exit. Every couple had to descend the great stone steps.

During their descents, the couples were backlit by a small dome, stone carvings, and arches. Cherubic stone carvings in the walls decorated the scene, and the third-story windows leaked natural light into the room. The scene kept reminding me of a fairy tale wedding, as the princess gracefully leaves the balcony and walks down the stairs with all eyes on her.

Trouble in Hayes Carll’s mind

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By Todd Lavoie

Looks like the third time’s a charm for Texan singer-songwriter Hayes Carll – the rough ‘n’ tumble country-folk outlaw has just released album number three, Trouble in Mind (Lost Highway), and it’s a huge leap forward for the guy. Not only does his move to a major label give an extra boost of exposure beyond the Texan scene and onto the national level – his first couple of discs were either self-released or issued on a small regional label – but along the way he’s landed himself a sweet supporting slot, opening for the similarly boot-stomping Old 97’s. You’ll see what I mean this Tuesday, June 17, when Carll works his storytelling woo-ha on the Fillmore crowd.

You can’t miss that Texan drawl: Carll’s is as thick as a brick, perhaps even given a little extra layer on top just to be sure no one’s confused about his point of origin. Inevitably, Steve Earle comes to mind – particularly his first couple of decades’ worth of recordings, rather than the genre-hopping excursions of recent years – thanks to a similarly evocative dusty whine, equally capable of a sneer and a leer as it is of hitting heartstrings with a broken admission of weakness.

Then there’s the choice of subject matter. Much of Carll’s material shares the barroom bluster of Earle’s ’80s and ’90s output. Drugs and drink, hard-luck men and women, tight-lipped drifters itching for a brawl – sound familiar? Perhaps so, but Carll also tends to inject most of his character sketches and roadhouse recollections with plenty of wit and a no-nonsense poet’s grasp of language. As much as I’d imagine he might argue that his songs are nothin’ fancy, there is considerable complexity at work here. Sure, Trouble in Mind doesn’t put on any airs, but the disc is a wordsmith’s delight, loaded with lingering images and sly turns of phrase.

13 and life

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HORROR CLASSIC The scene: Camp Crystal Lake, 1958. The song: "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." As a full moon looms overhead, someone sinister enough to get their own POV shot creeps into a cabin where two fresh-faced counselors are groping each other with wanton glee. "We weren’t doin’ anything!" the boy protests. Too late, sucka! With a scream, a freeze-frame, and a title card that zooms forward so fast it apparently shatters the camera lens, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th begins. Already, two key facts have been established: summer camps are inherently hotspots of evil, and the series’ signature sound effect (all together, now: "Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma!") is a sure sign that whoever’s onscreen is about to meet a gruesome end, courtesy of effects make-up god Tom Savini.

Back in Crystal Lake, circa "present day" — a time of feathered hair and Dorothy Hamill hair and side-ponytailed hair — a young woman soon to be employed at the reopened camp bums a ride from a friendly townsperson. But not before the appearance of my favorite Friday character, Ralph the bicycle-riding town drunk. "You goin’ to Camp Blood, ain’t ya?" he slurs. "You’ll never come back again! It’s got a death curse!" As we’ll soon see, this is the third truth taught by the Friday the 13th series: the town drunk is always right! Before long, the assembled counselors (including a very young Kevin Bacon, awww) start expiring with all the glorious gore a killer named Voorhees can supply. Other highlights: dope-sniffing cops, errant snakes, more Ralph ("I’m a messenger of God — you’re doomed if you stay here!"), a heated game of strip Monopoly, archery-range fun, a clothes-soaking rainstorm, and a conveniently-timed power outage.

Friday the 13th, made for far less than a mil, came out in 1980; it was modeled after 1978’s Halloween and met with such success that numerous slasher flicks followed — including several that picked up on Halloween and Friday‘s special-occasion theme: Happy Birthday to Me, My Bloody Valentine, Graduation Day, and the original Prom Night all dropped before 1981 was over, with many more to come (including 1993’s Leprechaun). And that’s without even mentioning all 11 Friday sequels. With the best ending (and dénouement) of any slasher film before or since, Friday the 13th features a strong performance from final girl Adrienne King and a menacing turn from Betsy Palmer. That fisherman’s sweater? Far more iconically terrifying a garment than any hockey mask could hope to be.

Oh, and about that Friday the 13th remake, due out in 2009 and helmed by Marcus Nispel, who’s already on notice for sullying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Let’s hope it’s doomed. (Cheryl Eddy)

FRIDAY THE 13TH

Fri/13–Sat/14, midnight, $8.50–$10.50

Clay Theater

2261 Fillmore, SF

(415) 346-1124, www.landmarkafterdark.com>.

Facing the music

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Mini video-enhanced chamber operas seem to be the flavor of the month, at least in a certain stretch of the Mission District. Only three weeks ago, Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s solo opera Mordake began its world premiere run at Shotwell Studios (as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival) with inimitable tenor John Duykers in the part of the titular medical mystery and suicide — a pampered Victorian gentleman with the seemingly sentient face of his sisterly "evil twin" pasted to the back of his head. Beautifully constructed throughout (beginning with Wold’s prerecorded but generally enthralling minimalist score and Dukyers’ expansively human turn as "the man who ate his family"), Mordake availed itself of an exquisite and all-encompassing video design that cunningly developed the opera’s themes while allowing traditional lighting, costumes, and sets to be kept to a select minimum.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Lab on 16th Street, composer-librettist Lisa Scola Prosek’s Trap Door followed suit with a one-hour chamber work on the plight of a US soldier in Iraq accused of killing an unarmed civilian. Billed as a "video opera," Trap Door is in fact performed live by a cast of seven and another six musicians (including composer Prosek at the piano) but unfolds against a wall-projection (designed by filmmaker-videographer Jacob Kalousek) whose purpose is to open up and to some degree comment on action otherwise constrained by a physically tight, nontraditional stage with minimal scenic components.

Like Wold, Prosek is a gifted local composer happy to work at or near the Bay Area’s new-theater fringes, and is well versed in its multimedia possibilities. Her last chamber opera, Belfagor, based on Machiavelli’s satirical comedy and set to an Italian libretto, also incorporated an elaborate video-based design scheme as part of its impressive debut at the Thick House. But the results in Trap Door prove far less successful this time around.

Only part of the problem has to do with the multimedia dimension: missing Kalousek’s synched video contains some arresting images and evocatively incongruous backdrops (such as the negative image of a revolving Ferris wheel overlapping one particularly dramatic scene), but others feel either less inspired or arbitrary, simultaneously being difficult to read or fully take in against the multiple surfaces at the back of the stage.

Beyond these individual elements, it’s the underlying theme that proves problematic. Based on a dream of the composer’s, Trap Door uses music as both vehicle and metaphor for exploring the moral agency of a hapless soldier, Private Able (Clifton Romig), who is presented with an impossible situation in which his simple human wants and patriotic dreams run up hard against the chaos, hypocrisy, corporate double-dealing, and native outrage that dwell at the bloody forefront of American empire. As promising as that may sound, it seems to have been too complex an idea to adequately develop here, at least not without falling back on overly compressed musical motifs and a kind of stiff dramatic shorthand that skirts mere caricature.

Director Jim Cave’s solid staging ensures that the many swift scene changes come over gracefully. But the condensed action means that even the main character and his Iraqi counterpart — the taxi driver Omar (tenor Mark Hernandez) — have little dramatic depth, while characters like Jane the Journalist (soprano Bianca Showalter) can only come across as cartoons. The more choice aspects remain, unsurprisingly, the musical ones. Romig’s smooth, rich bass meshes nicely with a set of agreeable voices, including several fairly strong duets with sopranos Maria Mikheyenko and Eliza O’Malley. But in general, even the music feels too cramped and underdeveloped, like a series of tantalizing abstracts for some larger vision.

TRAP DOOR

Thurs/12–Sat/14, 8 p.m., $15–$20 sliding scale

Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org

Scramble for Africa 3.0

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Africa is not a monolith. Africa is not even Africa: the outsider bastardization kicked off in earnest when the Roman misnomer of a finite North African region was allowed to stand for the entire continent. However, for the West’s millennial hipsters currently emuutf8g such early adopters of 30 years ago — the oft-cited David Byrne and Brian Eno/Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and the Police — the space formerly known as the Dark Continent has come to resemble the Golden Corral.

Vampire Weekend and other indie participants in the sonic Scramble for Africa 3.0 obviously see midcentury and postcolonial African pop culture as a cheap date, a provider of organic rock mystery where one can queue for heaping sides of hi-life, soukous, mbaqanga, mbalax, juju, rai, township jive, and Ténéré desert blues. La Présence Africaine is renewing rock ‘n’ roll — again. Striving ahead of the pale pack of black Yankee rockers is retired Nuer boy soldier Emmanuel Jal, justly a current press darling for his fine new second release, Warchild (Sonic 360).

Yet the acclaim for Jal has not outstripped the simultaneous giddiness and hand-wringing of a music press delighted by indie’s abrupt romance with African styles — hot on the heels of a new generation’s overlapping yen for English folk and Balkan gypsy sounds — but vaguely concerned about white exploitation of same, wagging fingers concerning musical "miscegenation." Race mixing yielded my family, cultural exchange has been the way of the world since antiquity, and as a critic whose mission involves exposing audiences to new sounds, I would never deny peoples’ enjoyment of genres seemingly beyond their ken. However, as Jal bitingly reminds us on Warchild‘s unabashed "Vagina," the rape of Africa — that blood-soaked project most essential to modernity — has gone down long enough.

Vampire Weekend, “A-Punk”

The problem with indie’s Karen Blixen close-up is that the transference of African mystery is going one-way — as usual. Vampire Weekend (XL) has sold 27,000 and counting and debuted on Billboard at no. 17, whereas, according to writer Robert Christgau in the New York Times, Sterns’ recent anthology encompassing the career of Congolese soukous master Tabu Ley Rochereau, The Voice of Lightness, has sold barely 9,000 copies.

Meanwhile, indie’s gone natives — including Mahjongg, the Dirty Projectors, Rafter, Yeasayer, and, from across the pond, Foals (Oxford), Courteeners (Manchester), and Suburban Kids with Biblical Names (Sweden) — seem to consider themselves smugly above postcolonial guilt (per DP’s Dave Longstreth) and the 1980s-vintage political correctness that plagued Simon and his apartheid-chic Graceland (Warner Bros., 1986). Vampire Weekend is good enough indie entertainment when you find Björk’s favorite Congolese likembé ensemble Konono No. 1 too repetitive and prefer songs about summertime splendor in the grass. But when Vampire Weekend’s unapologetically preppy white/white-ethnic musicians dub their music "Upper West Side Soweto" and seemingly aspire to come on like Brazzaville Beach Boyz — without any consciousness of such late 20th-century African titans or tyrants as Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu Sese Seko, respectively — it rankles this daughter of third world coalition builders raised in the ’70s and ’80s postcolonial era. Further, when Mahjongg’s Hunter Husar can tell Rhapsody’s Play blog that "to steal musically from another culture is to do a service to humanity," and "we don’t care about Africa any more than any other place," my everything-but-the-burden radar rings sharply.

Certainly there is energy around Africa on the independent music scene: black string band revivalists like Ebony Hillbillies have made the crossing back to West Africa in deep study of old-timey and country’s African ancestry. Funky Africa reissues are all the rage among crate-diggers: think Lagos Chop Up (Honest Jon’s, 2005), etc. And that Western-Kenyan summit Extra Golden was purposely omitted from the above indie roll call, for this multiracial quartet and their latest recording Hera Ma Nono (Thrill Jockey) suggest a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac their trendier fellows are already trapped in.

Further, the tug-of-war between disenfranchised folk of African descent who desired preservation of their mysteries and the white folks who possessed inchoate love for same has raged throughout modern times. As my friend Wendy Fonarow, author of Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Wesleyan, 2006), recently told the UK Guardian: "There are interesting theories as to why rock ‘n’ roll happened when it did. There’s evidence to suggest Christianity, which exists as a missionising religion, had run out of ‘exotic others’ to missionise after the fall of colonialism. Therefore it was in their interests to get adolescents to act like heathens, so they had a supply of unconverted people to convert. So what we did was produce a heathen in our own midst to act out all the same things we’d accused other societies of doing."

Extra Golden promo for “Hera Ma Nono”

By Fonarow’s reckoning it would seem what Longstreth and company are up to is a necessary will to neotribalism, their recorded work a reversal of the detrimental European separation of mind and body. I would counter that these groups’ appropriation of African sounds is a means to the end of escaping the internally imposed authenticity rules of indie rock, a refutation of the linear trip between Greg Ginn and Kurt Cobain when their monoculture reduced them to the last of their race. Then again, options are at the heart of white privilege, as is the agency to cherry-pick from the non-Western bounty. It remains utterly disappointing that millennial musicians can quote Africana without making reference to kwassa kwassa‘s source in the Congo, where millions people have died, young boys mercilessly conscripted and countless women raped as tool of war, while their own blessings of Ivy League degrees and the lack of a draft amid a resurgence of American imperialism permit them a guilt-free stance toward postcolonial upheaval and their gentrification of longtime black neighborhoods. Vampire Weekend’s Brooklynites apparently see no irony in their song "Walcott": "Hyannisport is a ghetto / … Lobster’s claw is sharp as knives / Evil feasts on human lives."

Evil definitely feasts on human lives in the Congo, but evildoers are also harvesting bones in New York City, where the 50 bullets martyring Sean Bell’s body are currently being reduced to mere accident. These white African prodigals don’t and will never suffer the psychic angst of being black and oppressed. Vampire Weekend can always go home again, but we’ve got no home.

EXTRA GOLDEN

June 22, 7 p.m., $15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstopcom

E-Z Sleaze

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SUPER EGO "You’ve gotta have the graphics," 26-year-old party promoter extraordinaire, Floridian transplant, smart-talkin’ electro DJ, and graphically explicit designer Sleazemore (www.myspace.com/sleazemore) recently whispered into my tender, somewhat incredulous ear. "The scene’s gotten to a point where it’s not only about who you bring in, what you wear, and who’s there to document your clubs — it’s also about the look you project in your promotions. Everything ties into style."

I just knew graphic designers would someday rule the world. Too bad I’d never risk smudging my minty-fresh nail art on an Axiotron Modbook.

Still, I can’t deny Mr. S’s drag-and-drop skills when it comes to flyers: he’s got the Stanley Mouse-meets-bored-goth-girl’s-notebook thing down, though he often jumps visual genres, and his musical taste is top-notch: Lazaro Casanova’s bowel-shaking banger "Venganza," Nacho Lovers’ mix of Style of Eye’s minimal-bleepy, Dirty Birdish "The Big Kazoo," and classic Brit lush-raver duo Underworld’s "Ring Road (Fake Blood remix)" are Sleazemore platters du jour.

Plus, he seems to be everywhere at the moment: when not inflaming the woofers of gritty ground zero Club 222’s bimonthly Lights Down Low (www.myspace.com/lightsdownlow) or lending a hand to occasionals like the Are Friends Electric? parties, he’s popping the spots for his mostly free and carefree weekly Infatuation shindig with his partner in grime Rchrd Oh?! — of whom you’ll hear a lot more from me later — at the incongruously fancy-shmancy Vessel. "I’m slowly convincing our electro crowd that it’s OK to be there, to mix with the fruity cocktail people," Big Sleazy said with a laugh.

Sleazemore acknowledges, too, that right now electro’s undergoing the same micro-niching that techno, house, and hip-hop did more than a decade ago. "Everybody’s making music right now. It’s great and almost too much, and not all of it’s good." That’s an opinion oodles of other electro DJs I’ve spoken with hold. "Everyone wants to hype their sound as unique, which is cool — if they can back it up," he added. "In fact, lately I’ve been getting into the Crookers, Boy 8-BIT, Drop the Lime, and Fake Blood sound — fidget house, kind of like the speed garage thing revisited."

Envision a chipmunk on steroids riding a ravey beat so skittish it can often cross over into traditional Latin American dance styles — ay, like the Crookers’ kick-ass crunk-samba remix of Bonde do Role’s "Marina Gasolina" — and that’s fidget house. Yes, I’m a trend whore. Italian duo Crookers themselves will steal fidgety thunder June 24 at Infatuation after DJ Assault assaults the crowd’s ass cracks June 18 and latest scene sweethearts Shit Disco fuzz up Vessel’s needles June 11. But is it art? Who cares, it’s infatuating.

Crooker, “Wassup” (Video by Pommes)

INFATUATION

Wednesdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free (Crookers, $10 — advance tix $5 at www.blasthaus.com)

Vessel

85 Campton, SF

(415) 433-8585, www.vesselsf.com

Greater Goode

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Actors are advised to avoid sharing the stage with kids and dogs because they steal the show. Maybe puppets should be included. Joe Goode’s hero in Wonderboy is a not-quite-three-foot concoction of wood, plaster, and cloth. He is adorable and you can’t take your eyes off him. Master puppeteer Basil Twist gave him his body; Goode and his dancers gave him a soul.

With this world premiere Goode has created one of his most poetic works in years. It is not to be missed. He has done so with five new dancers who seem to have inspired choreography as richly physical as any he has done. The piece’s floating lifts, wrestling holds, and tumbling rolls looked spontaneous but were finely shaped. A male-female duet spoke of tortuous relationships with fury and compassion; a quartet for four bare-chested males came across as erotic and tender.

Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, and Jessica Swanson gave the puppet its brittle and slightly raspy voice for a narrative by Goode and what he called "some of the wonderboy artists and thinkers" he has known. He explored a question that has preoccupied him for his entire career: how does an outsider find a place for himself in life? Bringing his customary tenderness, wit, and melancholy to the inquiry, he rarely hit a wrong note. Wonderboy‘s outsider character begins life as a sensitive little boy who watches the world from the safety of his home (designed by Dan Sweeney). Gradually he steps out and encounters rejection, rage, and love — especially with dancer Andrew Ward — before finally finding a community of his own. Twist coached Goode’s six dancers in the nuances of puppetry to exquisitely animate the nuances of the boy’s trajectory.

The program opens with excerpts from the 1996 installation piece, Maverick Strain. The Western barroom scene includes two hard-drinking hookers (Patricia West plays the confused one, Swanson the tough one). As a lounge singer (music by the brilliant Beth Custer), Goode is never less than a star — as is Alexander Zendzian as a transvestite rape victim, in a performance that chills the soul.

JOE GOODE PERFORMANCE GROUP

Fri/13–Sat/14, 8 p.m.; Sun/15, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

700 Howard, SF

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

The house that Hiero built

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**Update: The Paid Dues Independent Hip Hop Festival has been cancelled. See below for more details.

I’m not accustomed to receiving rappers at my home at 8 a.m. — an hour most rappers have only heard of — but I made an exception for Tajai Massey, member of Souls of Mischief and Hieroglyphics. A self-confessed early riser and the first MC to ever accept my offer of a cup of coffee, Massey is a busy man.

While gearing up for the Hieroglyphics’ Freshly Dipped tour, which kicks off June 14 with the Paid Dues Festival at the Berkeley Community Theatre, the lanky 33-year-old head of the group’s Hiero Imperium label was about to head to Seattle for a spot date with his new rock outfit, Crudo, with Dan the Automator and ex-Faith No More frontman Mike Patton. Meanwhile Massey’s been juggling two upcoming projects, one of which he hopes to release in the fall: a new, self-produced Hieroglyphics disc and the fourth studio release by Souls of Mischief, produced by legend Prince Paul. In the interim, he’s prepping fellow Souls-member Opio’s second solo album, Vulture’s Wisdom, Vol. 1 (Hiero Imperium), for July.

Yet none of this accounts for our meeting. Our conversation instead focused on Massey’s other job: overseeing his own imprint within Hiero, Clear Label. Though begun in 1999 to release his SupremeEx trip-hop collaboration with Hiero Web designer StinkE, Projecto: 2501, Clear Label really established itself circa 2005 with two artists of a very different sort: Shake Da Mayor of "Stunna Shades" fame and Beeda Weeda, whose 2006 full-length, Turfology 101, yielded the hit "Turf’s Up."

While Shake has since departed, Beeda has cemented his Clear Label connection, moving his whole camp, Pushin’ the Beat (PTB), into Hiero’s two-story East Oakland compound, which was purchased by the veteran collective in 2004. Known within Hiero as "the Building," though designated "Hiero" by everyone else, the space houses nine rooms, five studios, and a small warehouse of T-shirts, CDs, and other goods. Soon Beeda’s friend and collaborator, J-Stalin — himself signed to one of the Bay’s biggest rap independent labels, SMC — began bringing his own Livewire crew by, including Shady Nate, Clear Label’s next signee.

Bulging with the usual conglomeration of computers, mixing boards, rough-hewn vocal booths, and a fine layer of empty 1800 bottles and Swisher Sweet ashes, PTB’s two ground floor studios contrast with the Building’s general tidiness, like a kids’ playspace in an otherwise adult house. Yet they also exhibit an atmosphere of dedication. Dropping by on any given day, among the crowd of just-past-high-school aspiring MCs, you might see Beeda and Stalin studiously hunched over spiral notebooks with Mistah FAB, working on their NEW (North-East-West) Oakland project.

And FAB isn’t the only high profile visitor: everyone from San Quinn to the Federation comes through. Too $hort stops by regularly, and even national acts like Dem Franchize Boyz and Cease of Junior Mafia have found their way here. Given that Beeda and Stalin are two of the hottest young Oakland rappers and attract such elite company, Hiero suddenly finds itself at the center of what might be called the Bay’s post-hyphy moment, one embodied in a tougher, less dance-oriented sound, combined with classic Bay slap and tempered by R&B overtones.

"I wasn’t after a bunch of streeter-than-street dudes," Massey said, laughing. "But I sure ended up with some."

THE OTHER BAY BRIDGE


Intentional or not, the current emphasis on street rappers is consistent with Clear Label’s overall mission.

"Our fans aren’t that forgiving. Even bringing up other acts like Knobody or Musab, who are on the same tip as Hiero — our fans want Hiero music," Massey said, in reference to Hiero Imperium artists and the group’s demanding backpacker following. "So we’ll give it to them, and let Clear Label be the outlet for other acts, especially my relationship with PTB/Livewire."

HieroSlideShow.gif
Oakland hip-hop converges on the Hiero HQ. Photos by Alexander Warnow

It helps, Massey continued, that J-Moe, the CEO of PTB, has a vision. "That dude is a genius," the Clear Label honcho said. "He’s called the Machine, because he’s always working." With an uncanny ability to spot new talent — like 17-year-old phenom Yung Moses, who J-Moe dubs "the future face of the franchise" — the Machine is a crucial part of the evolution of Clear Label.

But Clear isn’t just a "street label," Massey continued. He’s working with a "rock ‘n’ roll" dude, Chris Maarsol, as well as League 510, which he describes as working in "really a new genre." Hailing from East Oakland, 510 blends lyrical, positive rap and house-influenced grooves in a mix the group calls "Town Techno." "It’s like bridging the hyphy movement and the alternative crowd," Massey said. "I know they’ll do well in cities like Miami, Chicago — where they have a house scene — and in Europe."

Interestingly, according to Massey, European fans have been more receptive to Hiero’s new connections than the domestic audience. "It’s crazy," he said with a laugh. Among other acts, Massey also scooped up Baby Jaymes, digitally re-releasing his 2005 debut, The Baby Jaymes Record (Ghetto Retro), and dropping a new single, "The Bizness," including Turf Talk. "Baby Jaymes is huge in Germany and Belgium, even Australia," Massey added. "I’m in Amsterdam and people are like, ‘Where’s Beeda Weeda?’ Out there people understand the association, whereas in Oakland, they have no idea. It’s odd how Europeans look deeper into it, and it’s a whole different language."

‘WE ALL FROM OAKLAND’


Perhaps it isn’t so odd. The language barrier may even facilitate European acceptance, because despite the differences between Hiero’s conscious lyricism and PTB/Livewire’s grimy topics, the musical bond is already there.

"There are more similarities than differences," Opio told me. "We all from Oakland. Hiero looked to Too $hort and E-40 when we began our independent hustle."

Though he admittedly can’t keep track of the crews’ ever-expanding rosters, former Hiero Imperium head Domino — who, after helming the organization from its mid-’90s inception, stepped down in 2006 to concentrate on production — also welcomes the influx of young talent. "As you get older," he said, "there’s not the same excitement as an artist. You can’t totally get it back, but you can feed off their new energy."

Beyond their shared approval, members of Hiero have already begun to collaborate with PTB/Livewire. Souls member A-Plus, for example, produced the dancehall-inspired opener, "Da Town," on Beeda’s new all-original mixtape, Talk Shit Swallow Spit — possibly the hottest Bay Area disc this year — while Casual appears on Beeda’s forthcoming album, tentatively titled Turf Radio. PTB, moreover, has added a more conscious lyricist, Tre Styles, upsetting what Opio describes as "the boxes the corporate market puts people in."

Massey agrees. "Look at Beeda or Shady. Their mentality isn’t ‘go dumb, go stupid,’<0x2009>" he noted. "Their lyrics are militant, and these guys are growing." Massey was also quick to point out the multidimensional side of J-Stalin, whose crime-ridden raps are infused with melancholy ambivalence about street life. "Stalin could be big like 2Pac," he opined. "He’s not trying to look hard. He’s a little dude, but he’s got all this heart and emotion."

Stalin himself is more modest, albeit slightly, at least concerning his upcoming SMC disc, The Pre-Nuptial Agreement. "Pre-Nup is going to be one of the greatest Bay Area albums ever," he said. "I ain’t saying I’m the best rapper. I’m saying I put together a great album." Judging by the songs he played for me that day — including the radio-ready "Get Me Off" with E-40 — he’s right. SMC’s Will Bronson is sufficiently confident in Stalin — and Beeda — to partner with Thizz Entertainment this summer to bring out the former’s Gas Nation as well as the latter’s The Thizzness, both pre-albums designed to tide fans over before their full-lengths in the fall.

"Stalin and Beeda are the only two new artists really buzzin’," Bronson said. "I couldn’t go a week without hearing about them."

As a result, Stalin and SMC plan to collaborate on future Livewire projects, including a group disc showcasing up-and-comers Shady and J Jonah, longtime members such as ROB, Lil Blood, and Ronald Mack, and newer recruits like Philthy Rich and 17-year-old Lil Ruger, whose wild, almost Keak-esque flow foretells fame.

The connection to SMC and Vallejo’s Thizz, moreover, suggests a serious new coalition which, given the waning of hyphy, threatens to become the next major force in Bay Area rap. "We’re just trying to keep the unity," Stalin concluded. "Because we’re all from different places, we wouldn’t be able to do this in the street."

UNITED FRONT


Such unity, always in short supply in the Bay, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Hiero/PTB/Livewire situation. "We’ve got a movement, but it’s not a movement," said Jamon Dru, who, along with DJ Fresh, Tower, and others, formed the Whole Shabang, an autonomous production squad linked to both PTB and Livewire. "We’re trying to make music everyone will feel, not just the Bay. That’s put a hurt on us because we do have a ‘fuck everyone else’ attitude, like, ‘I don’t care if anyone else likes this shit.’ But we got families, friends, people in jail we gotta feed. We can’t be half-steppin’ like that."

Like Traxamillion, and unlike many local producers, Dru is candid about the influence of the radio on his sound. "It’s a little Southern-influenced," he said, "a little East Coast with Fresh chopping up samples, but with the 808s and a West Coast bassline. Every beat we make with samples, we gotta put an 808 knock in it." While it’s difficult to generalize, given the work of so many producers, Dru’s statement is a good sketch of the PTB/Livewire sound: it looks to the Bay’s older mob music through the modern lens of hyphy, even as it sheds the more gimmicky excesses of the latter.

Beginning his career under Beeda Weeda’s wing, Dru is already a mogul of his own, currently developing 19-year-old Gully, whose work can sampled on his mixtape Hustla Movement. Like Yung Moses, the saltier-voiced, vowel-stretching Gully is considered one of the most promising rappers in the camp, and the two are already slated for a collaboration. A song like Gully’s "Bush," imagining the life of a ghetto youth who suddenly finds himself a soldier in Iraq, even suggests that Hiero’s more politically progressive themes are creeping into the youngster’s work.

At present, however, Beeda remains the "face of the franchise" for PTB and Clear Label.

"Beeda’s got the biggest buzz," Massey said, "so it makes sense to lead off with him. I just want to set him up properly." Proper set-up in the Bay generally involves a "pre-album," and Beeda’s got three. Besides the all-original Talk Shit mixtape and The Thizzness, Beeda’s collaboration with DJ Fresh, Base Rock Baby — an ’80s-themed disc referring to Beeda’s generation as the first to be born after the crack epidemic began — appears in July.

"We’re going to push that online," Massey said, though there will be hard copies for sale. "Right now, if Beeda’s record sales matched his popularity, I’d be ready to retire." Still, he confessed, "everyone has Turfology, but only a few people bought it," citing the difficulties of selling albums in the era of burnt CDs and file-sharing, not to mention ongoing recession under the George W. Bush administration.

Another problem was the lag between Beeda’s video for "Turf’s Up" becoming popular on YouTube and the actual release of Turfology, confusing consumers who assumed the CD was already out. "This time we got the timing down," Beeda said. "We’ll build that buzz first, and everything will be ready to go." Nonetheless, as falling numbers of mainstream releases attest, selling albums has grown increasingly difficult regardless of timing.

"That’s not how we eat anymore," Dru said. "You put out an album to get shows and verse features [guest appearances on other artists’ songs]. So we gotta look at these songs as bait." Massey, meanwhile, is seeking other income streams to support his label and artists, like soundtracks and licensing.

As Massey confirms, street rap comes with headaches not usually associated with Hiero. A few weeks ago, as Clear Label began preparing Shady Nate’s debut, Son of the Hood, for release, Shady was arrested on an alleged weapons violation and remains incarcerated pending trial.

"They’re trying to throw the book at him," Massey said. "I’m hoping we can work it out because Shady’s a good dude, and his album is great." Even if Shady has to do a stretch in prison, Son of the Hood will probably see the light of day sometime later this year.

Ultimately the big question for PTB/Livewire is whether the coalition can achieve the mainstream success that eluded the hyphy movement. Beeda and Stalin think so, and with the support and mentorship of the Hiero camp, they have as good a chance as any in the Bay — and maybe even the best.

With the long view of a rapper 15 years into his career, Massey is philosophical about the prospects of his Clear Label empire. "If we break even it’s cool," he said. "If we make money, even better. But if I break even, I’m happy, because it wasn’t a loss for me to put out great music."

PAID DUES FESTIVAL***

With Hieroglyphics and others

Sat/14, 5 p.m., $40

Berkeley Community Theatre

1900 Allston, Berk.

www.ticketmaster.com

***This show has been cancelled. From the promoters: Guerilla Union and MURS 3:16 regret to announce that the PAID DUES INDEPENDENT HIP HOP FESTIVAL scheduled for Saturday, June 14 at the Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, CA, has been cancelled due to matters beyond our control.

For fans that have purchased tickets to the show, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Refunds are available for ticketholders at the point-of-purchase.

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