Scene

WEDNESDAY

-
0

Sept. 20

Music

Mission of Burma

Much like their post-punk and art rock contemporaries of the early ’80’s, MoB were around when nobody seemed to give a shit about the American indie rock scene. Sticking it out for one full-length and an EP, the Boston quartet called it quits due to guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus, but since their reformation in 2002, they’ve chalked up two captivating releases. Touring in support of this year’s The Obliterati (Matador), Mission of Burma have reemerged into the rock world at a time when we’re all hungry for tomorrow’s anthem. (Chris Sabbath)

With 50 Foot Wave
9 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$21
(415) 885-0750
www.musichallsf.com

Film

Queens

Five variably neurotic mothers – including Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Verónica Forqué, and Marisa Paredes – descend upon Madrid when their sons are due to take part in the nation’s first legal gay nuptials, which will unite 20 same-sex couples. The men themselves have some last-minute issues to work out, but it’s the moms who bring on the bulk of this cluttered but amusing big-screen sitcom’s crises. These include a first-time heterosexual experience (with a future in-law), attempted suicide, nymphomania, and a particularly stupid gratuitous dance interlude. Queens is sheer contrivance, but no more so than the average mainstream US romantic comedy, and overall its good-natured silliness proves quite enjoyable. (Dennis Harvey)

In Bay Area theaters

Top 5 TIFF moments

-
0

(1) Sarah Polley makes her public debut as a director in the glitzy embrace of a Roy Thompson Hall gala for Away from Her, with the seats packed to the rafters, and gives the audience a manifesto on the importance of government funding and support for Canadian cinema. Yeah! Sarah Polley for cultural ambassador. Now that Lions Gate has picked up the film for distribution, there’s even a happy ending.
(2) Waiting in the green room backstage, I meet Anna Paquin, the little girl from The Piano, all grown up and articulate and serving as a member of the jury making the award decisions on Canadian cinema. We discuss the crowds of fans this year and the odd relationship between acting and celebrity. “Most actors are very shy and timid, you know,” she told me. “Those other people aren’t really actors. They’re celebrities who appear in movies.”
(3) In Away from Her, Julie Christie plays a wise, smart, ironic woman who begins to disappear into an Alzheimer’s fog. During one scene, in which her character, Fiona, seems barely aware of her surroundings, she suddenly snaps to attention as the TV news shows footage of the Iraq war. “Have they forgotten Vietnam?” she asks — more cogently than any administration official these days.
(4) At the “Dialogues: Talking with Pictures” event with Albert Maysles, who was accompanied onstage by documentarian Barbara Kopple, there was a screening of his new film composed of outtakes, The Beales of Grey Gardens. Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale explains in one scene why she’s agreed to do this film with the Maysles brothers. It’s because someone had approached her to do a fiction film based on her life and the notion horrified her. “Imagine, they wanted Julie Christie to play me! I couldn’t have that.”
(5) OK, so not all my top moments are upbeat. On the morning of Sept. 11, I woke up in my room at the Delta Chelsea Hotel to the phone ringing. When I answered, a voice said, “Oh, thank god it wasn’t you.” Huh? It was my friend Susan, who had just heard the news of a triple murder-suicide in a room five floors below mine. I was here on this same date five years ago too. (B. Ruby Rich)
For five more of Rich’s top TIFF moments and additional coverage of the festival, visit www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Bringing Knives out

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Emily Haines is not known for keeping her thoughts to herself.
As part of Toronto’s Metric, the notoriously outspoken singer-keyboardist incorporates her political beliefs into wildly infectious synth-rock songs. On 2003’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) and last fall’s Live It Out (Last Gang), Haines tackled such unlikely pop-song subject matters as war, Big Brother, and the emptiness of consumer culture with thrilling, often thought-provoking results. “Buy this car to drive to work/ Drive to work to pay for this car” — from “Handshakes” — is a typical sentiment. She’s even more articulate in Metric interviews, discussing everything from voter disenfranchisement to the futility of trying to create real change through music.
It’s strange, then, that Haines is tight-lipped when it comes to her solo debut, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, out Sept. 26 on Last Gang. During a phone conversation from England, where Metric performed at Reading Festival two days prior, she sounds annoyed by the mere idea of talking about her album’s lyrics. “Do you think you can put it in words?” she icily counters when asked to elaborate on the central theme. “If I have to name the narrative, then there’s no point in having had one there at all.” Clearly, she prefers to keep her own songs open to interpretation.
Thing is, Knives is such a huge artistic departure both musically and lyrically for Haines that some insight might prove helpful. Rather than rely on the propulsive energy and shout-it-out choruses that define Metric’s sound, Haines (who also moonlights in Broken Social Scene) has recorded an album of soft, piano-based hymns more intent on capturing a mood — and a seriously somber one at that — than whipping audiences into raucous, dance-floor frenzies. Recorded with help from members of Sparklehorse, Stars, and Broken Social Scene, the album is hardly recognizable as the work of the same feisty woman who fronts Metric.
Haines, however, insists she didn’t approach Knives’s songs any differently than those of her band. “I spend all my time at the piano,” she explains. “For Metric, we’ve always just adapted my piano songs into a rock ’n’ roll format. So it was interesting [for Knives] to keep some of them for myself and leave them as is. Because I’ve always written more music than anyone could be asked to digest, I just chose the songs that I realized it’d be kind of sad if I never, ever put them out. It’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to release them though.”
The product of a rather lengthy incubation period, Knives was written over four years and recorded in as many cities — namely, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, and New York. So it’s a bit surprising that the album comes off as such a cohesive collection of, as Haines puts it, photographs from her past. “It ended up feeling like snapshots over that period of time,” she says. “When I look back and listen to these songs, I feel like the last four years have been some of the most intense.”
As song titles such as “Our Hell” and “Nothing and Nowhere” suggest, the result is almost abysmally bleak. Turning her focus from political anger to personal turmoil, Haines ruminates extensively on pain, loss, loneliness, and despair. “Are we breathing? Are we wasting our breath?” she sings in “Crowd Surf off a Cliff.” Even more unnerving, “The Last Page” finds her cryptically singing, “Death is absolutely safe.” But while the entire album could pass as a heartrending document of one woman’s extremely troubled times, all Haines will say (and only after much prodding) is that Knives is “essentially about being grateful for what you have, even when your life is shit.”
When she comes to San Francisco this week — a sequel to her July 2004 Cafe du Nord appearance, where she offered a rare sneak preview of an in-progress Knives — Haines will be accompanied by bassist Paul Dillon and Sparklehorse drummer Scott Minor, whom she’s enlisted to help her “nail that Plastic Ono Band vibe.” She’ll then head back to England for another Metric tour and to start recording the band’s third album. Later, if time allows, she hopes to play more solo gigs and eventually perform again with Broken Social Scene.
In other words, while fans may find it odd that Haines is suddenly mum about her solo music, they can take comfort that she’s fast becoming one of the busiest artists in indie rock.
“It’s weird,” she says. “When people say to me how busy my life is, I suppose that I really am ridiculously busy. But to me, it just feels like being a musician. That’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I’m doing. I’m making music. It’s not a job. It’s my life. It’s my friends and my family. So the more the better.” SFBG
EMILY HAINES AND THE SOFT SKELETON
Fri/22, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com

Oral histories

-
0

By Marke B.
› marke@sfbg.com
Thousands of fantastically perverse revelers (most of them gay) will flood San Francisco for the Folsom Street Leather Fair on Sept. 23, ensuring that every cranny of the city brims with wanton copulation — which really is the way it should always be in our famously lewd burg, no? Too bad that for the other 364 days of the year, good ol’ slutty San Francisco is considered by erotic tourists to be one of the most prudish cities in the world.
Unlike other civic dens of iniquity, San Francisco has no gay bathhouses, no sleazy back rooms in bars (well, none that the cops have sniffed out yet), and a dwindling amount of mischief in the bushes. This sorry state of affairs is due partly to the advent of Internet hookup sites in 1996 (thanks, AOL) and partly to the break in gay traditions caused by the loss of a generation to AIDS. But mostly it’s due to the “sex panic” of 1984, when well-meaning gay activists looking to protect gay men from their supposedly unsafe urges convinced the city to ban all bathhouses and enforce rules that separated public sex from any sort of alcohol consumption and unmonitorable activity. Gay folks would just have to go to Berkeley to get wet and have sex. That may have made BART more fun, but for many it seemed like a forced expulsion from SF’s sexual garden by Big Brother.
In 1996, gay city supervisor Tom Ammiano tried to get the baths reopened by proposing a set of HIV-risk-reducing regulations that included no private rooms, no alcohol consumption, safer-sex education materials and condoms on-site, brighter lighting levels, and the presence of staff monitors to ensure against unsafe activity. Pretty oddly, the city adopted most of his proposed regulations — leading to the rise of today’s slick, commercially licensed sex clubs — but kept the bathhouse ban. This means that it’s now OK to pay to have sex with strangers in a public setting, but if there’s any kind of water running other than from a broken toilet, you’re in trouble.
Whether or not gay men in San Francisco should be left to their own sexual devices is still a matter of polemical debate. Or is it? Not many people seem to talk about it anymore. But you can’t stop the party. From 1989, when the last bathhouse was closed by a city lawsuit, to 1997, when San Francisco began using commercial licenses to approve sex clubs, a vibrant sexual underground ruled. Often subject to raids by police, the underground included anonymous-encounter mainstays like Blow Buddies and Eros, both of which opened on a members-only basis in hopes of circumventing any legal trouble. It also included less formal play spaces like the Church of Phallic Worship and Orgasm, naughty nooks that live on only in legend.
This dark period — or golden age — of underground sex clubs (and with the lights off, it was probably both) has largely been forgotten. But exciting tales of the past still issue forth from it, and with the current revival of ’70s bathhouse nostalgia, it’s interesting to note that bathhouse culture extended well into the ’80s — yep, folks were dropping towel to Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted Snake” — and poured out into the underground sex clubs of the early ’90s before being sucked toward the Ethernet of now. We asked a few of the scene’s regular, anonymous players for their memories of some clubs of the time.
NIGHT GALLERY, A.K.A. MIKE’S PARTY
“You’d ring a little bell at this house a few doors down from the Powerhouse — tingaling-aling — and they’d open the door, and at the top of this long flight of thickly carpeted stairs, there’d be this guy sitting in a chair who would say in this flat, uncommitted voice, ‘Welcome to my party. Friends tend to chip in $5 to help cover costs. My roommate’s in the kitchen if you want to check your stuff.’ That was Mike, and it was funny he said roommate, because you know no one really lived there.
“At the top of the stairs was this long hallway full of amateur erotic art — not like Tom of Finland, more like a horny Grandma Moses. I stole a drawing that I think was supposed to be of an S-M twink but more resembled a Christmas pixie in irons. I don’t remember much about the sex rooms, except there was a shoddy maze in the back and a sign that said ‘No talking in the fun zone.’
“In the kitchen there was a beer keg and a big aluminum bowl of shiny-looking Cheez-Its that I could just never bring myself to snack on. I knew where those Cheez-Its had been. There was also this kind of ‘Your Own Carnival Hot Dog’ maker that was more like a filthy aquarium with gray franks in tepid hot dog water that no queen would touch — despite the metal tongs provided ‘for your protection.’”
TROUBLE
“Conga-line dance-floor fucking was what I remember most about this place. Which is pretty darn difficult if you take varying heights into consideration. Trouble was a totally anything goes kind of club — after-hours alcohol served, a big dance floor with professional-looking lighting, out-in-the-open nasty sex. Like Studio 54 if Liza was a go-go whore and, you know, a sexy guy. It was in SoMa around Folsom and, I think, First.
“There were dark rooms and a maze upstairs — it was in a big warehouse space with a high ceiling. It got raided three or four times before they finally shut it down. It only lasted like eight months. During the raids the cops weren’t all, like, ‘Let’s get the faggots,’ they were more, like, bored, flashing their lights around and saying in a polite voice, ‘Please leave — you have to go now,’ like they were ushers and we had overstayed our welcome at the opera.”
THE BLACK HOUSE
“The Black House was freakin’ scary. It was this old Victorian off Castro painted completely black. I had just moved here — in 1994. I was 23 and thought the Black House was where Anton LaVey used to live and they had Satanic rituals there, but really it was just a bunch of naked guys fooling around in the basement. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but somehow my drunk feet took me there after the bars closed.
“Mostly the guys were cute in a hustler sort of way — this was when tweakers left the house to get laid. But there would be some letches. One guy followed me around telling everyone I looked like an Etruscan statue. I got really embarrassed and had to leave and go look up Etruscan. One time the hot young guy doing coat check took out his teeth to blow some other guy. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
ORGASM
“Orgasm was across the street from Endup on Sixth, so you could just stumble there and have sex at any time of the day or night, it seemed. There was this huge stage, 10 feet deep, where they had live sex shows and some really crusty Goodwill couches. One time I tricked with a guy who asked me to drop him off at Orgasm, and the minute he got there, he shed his clothes and got up onstage for a show. Where did he get the energy?
“Like most other clubs, it was in a warehouselike space, very minimal. There was a door guy and another guy inside with a clipboard, but that was just to look official — there was never anything on the clipboard. The space was divided by curtains for ‘privacy’ and had a long overhead shelf with candles on it, which added atmosphere to the ‘lovemaking.’ There were turntables, and I remember it was around the time that Boy George came out with ‘Generations of Love,’ which was a surprisingly good record.”
CHURCH OF PHALLIC WORSHIP
“I think the Church in SoMa used to have ads in the back of the Bay Area Reporter, but everyone just seemed to know about it. It had a real rough, underground feel. I don’t know if it was officially religiously affiliated, but maybe they got free parking out of it. They served beer after hours — it was like a one-stop shopping hub of gay socializing: backyard barbecue, glory holes, music, the works.
“It was run by a Santa Claus–type character called Father Frank, and every time you called the info line, he’d answer the phone by reciting a homoerotic limerick in this hilariously effeminate voice, like Rona Barrett on 33 1/3. It was a cross between a house and a warehouse — pretty big, but it could get way too overcrowded. What was so great was that it went all night, yet no one seemed like they were on speed. Everyone was just drunk and having a great time.”
1808 CLUB
“This was a big house down by Guerrero and Market near where the LGBT Center is now. I remember this huge door with a tiny window you had to knock on, like it was a speakeasy in Communist Czechoslovakia. This totally hot bald guy would answer, and I’d kind of be intimidated because he was so muscular. Years later he became my personal trainer at Gold’s Gym.
“The place was painted all black on the inside and was on two levels, one overlooking the other. Balconesque, as the French would put it. There were these little cubbyholes all over the place that two people could fit in, and maybe you could squeeze in three on occasion. On weekends it was packed. It was cheap too: $5 for the whole night, and they’d stamp your hand so you could get in and out. I didn’t go too much, because it was in my neighborhood and I like being a little incognito. That’s a little more classy.” SFBG

Notes from the underground

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Looking for hints of San Francisco’s renowned underground nightlife? It pays to keep your eyes and nose to the ground — and to be textable. That’s one of the few subtle signs that the hottest underground party in town is happening right here on an early Sunday summer morning: reedy, peg-legged hipsters standing out by the curb on this barren, bulldozed Hunters Point artery, busily texting and talking up fidgety, insomniac friends about their next landing strip. Beats bang gently in the background as fashion-damaged kids dangle from the railings along the short flight of steps to the door, smoking and guzzling from sacks like it’s recess at their own semiprivate too-cool school.
Upstairs in a long, tall space lined with huge rectangular windows, the Sixteens are getting ready for a set. And everyone else — and that’s every-fucking-body — is madly dancing on the other side to stabbing electrotech beats that come off so metallic and grimy that you could slice yourself open and get a nasty infection on ’em. Is that arch-retro-candy raver actually swinging a stretchy glow stick with one hand while trying to hold on to a mixed drink in the other? Swirling moiré patterns, projections of flames, and found industrial footage lick the walls of the room and the faces of the dancers. A burnt-orange slice of summer moon is slung low in the sky as if already hungover from the shit-hot party raging below.
Closing time — you may not know whom you want to take home, but do you know where your next party is? Above-grounders might say “you don’t need to go home, but you can’t stay here,” but you needn’t turn into a pumpkin and pass out in your car just yet. Bay Area underground parties like this one — and of every imaginable stripe and musical genre — are where sleepless scenesters flock.
So why is the underground scene continuing to blossom like a hundred Lotus Girls on a dust-caked playa in a city chock-full of wholly legit clubs? This summer, as a series of humongoid dance clubs including Temple Bar SF, prepped to throw open their doors, one had to wonder: why bother going off the grid?
Perhaps that’s where you can find the sounds you crave, a frustrating chore when clubs book conservatively — and an experience that may end all too soon with the city’s 2 a.m. last call. DJs such as Jamin Creed of BIG are seeing their grime and dubstep parties, for instance, starting to blow up now both over- and underground after gestating in after-hours soirees. “It’s a music-orienting thing, to be honest,” says underground breaks party thrower DJ Ripple, né Lorin Stoll. Citing undergrounds in Big Sur as well as the Harmony fest in Santa Rosa, the ex-Deadhead sees continuity between the city’s Left Coast vibe and “the merging of the counterculture of the ’60s with the rave culture of the ’90s, merging with the experience and professionalism of Burning Man culture in the 2000s. It’s created this nice renaissance in underground music.”
Dub it an unintended fringe benefit stemming from the failure to change the city’s last call two years ago, an effort led by Terrance Alan, chairman of the Late Night Coalition and legislative chair of San Francisco’s Entertainment Commission. That move failed — after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution urging the state legislature to make the change — when the proposed legislation got stuck in committee at the State Assembly. Despite the support of the city’s Entertainment Commission, Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Gavin Newsom, the bill was opposed by antialcohol groups and organizations such as the Oakland Police Department, whose officers testified that a later last call in San Francisco would create traffic accidents in Oakland. “Those observations were never supported in the data on changes in last call,” Alan says today.
The reality is that partly as a result of those quashed endeavors, the Bay Area underground party scene continues to flourish, via Tribe.net, lists, and those omnipresent flyers. Tomas Palermo — a DJ, Guardian contributor, and former XLR8R editor — thinks the underground warehouse and techno event circuit has been bubbling along nicely since 1988, with surges in house in the early ’90s and explosions in drum ’n’ bass during the dot-com years. And even a seasoned listener like him isn’t immune to the simple pleasures of an outdoor beatdown: “In the last two weeks I went to a free [breakbeat] sound system gathering in a tiny grassy nook of Golden Gate Park and a Sunset Party in McLaren Park,” he e-mails.
The latter gatherings, put on by Pacific Sound System, just may embody the resilient, oh-naturel vibe of the undergrounds in this area. DJ Galen began the daytime Sunset Parties on summer Sundays about a dozen years ago at Golden Gate Park. Old-school — yep. Family oriented — believe it. Ideal if you’re still tweaked the morning after — maybe. An outdoor dance floor of up to 3,000 — yikes. “I just feel events are very much the reflection of the people who put them on, and you can kind of tell when people are doing it for money or just the pure feeling of bringing people together through music and the outdoors,” says Galen, who co-owns Tweekin Records. When he started the parties, he was a shell of a raver, burned out from lifelong training as a swimmer for the 1996 Olympics. “I hadn’t felt like I lived life and came home and some friends took me to a party and just opened my eyes,” he recalls, citing the Wicked Crew’s Full Moon Raves as inspirational. “Looked at all these people having fun and a sense of community — I just got so excited that this whole other world existed and got immersed in it.”
He maxed out his credit card, bought a sound system, and began playing house music in the park as the audience grew. His three-person collective has since produced successful overground boat parties, but they’ve maintained that earthbound sense of perspective. “I think that’s one major reason why things have gone well — we’re not out of it for ego,” he says. “We are very respectful of everyone, and in turn people are respectful of us. When we leave these parks, they’re spotless, and a lot of people have told us, ‘Wow, that was a really crazy party, but everyone’s so mellow and nice!’ SFBG

More underground:


Live bait: the secret life of warehouse shows

Oral Histories: underground gay sex clubs of the early ’90s

Party primer: underground party web sites

Toronto International Film Festival: Five for the road

-
0

B. Ruby Rich reflects on some of her favorite TIFF ’06 moments.

* The scene: the world premiere of Dixie Chicks: Shut Up And Sing. Filmmakers Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck (daughter of Gregory) were in the audience, as were the Dixie Chicks themselves. The documentary tells the story of the past three years as the Chicks dealt with protests, concert cancellations, radio blackouts, and a death threat resulting from Natalie Maines’ remark: “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” When a scene played showing the decision to re-route the tour to Canada after Toronto was the only city to sell out immediately, the whole theatre erupted in wild hooray-for-us applause.

* Christine Vachon at TheatreBooks, one of Toronto’s great bookstores, signing copies of her new memoir about her experiences in the indie-film trade, A Killer Life Of course I bought one. She’s only in town for one night: she’s in the middle of shooting Todd Haynes’ new opus on Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett just finished her section, so she got a break to come to Toronto for the premiere of Infamous. Vachon tells me she’ll be in San Francisco, at the Commonwealth Club, at the end of the month.

* Camila Guzman Urzua’s screening of The Sugar Curtain, her documentary on growing up in Cuba during the golden age of socialism. One audience member, an exiled Uruguayan, objected to her clear-eyed view of the terrible failures of the Revolution in the years since her childhood era. “Why don’t you talk about the embargo?” he wanted to know. Yeah, like every other Cuban film that’s ever been made. Old patterns die hard.

* Crowds jammed the sidewalk outside the Four Seasons, driven into a frenzy by a bumper crop of celebrities this year. My standards are different: Costa-Gavras at the Unifrance party was my idea of stardom. Talking to SFIFF’s Linda Blackaby and the NY Film Festival’s Marian Masone, he tried to explain the arrival of so many French films dealing with Algeria. “One million people left Algeria for France after the end of the war,” he said. “There are many stories, and different points of view. They should have been made ten years ago.”

* The moment the rain starts. Every year, mid-festival, the hot waning days of summer stop abruptly for a rainstorm. When the rain ends, the thermometer drops and fall is here. The mid-point of the festival is the change of seasons, and today I saw my first leaves turn red. Shadows of mortality. There’s nothing sadder than the end of a film festival. And at this writing, it’s only four days away.

Trash hits Toronto

-
0

FEST REPORT I’m writing hours after the start of the Toronto International Film Festival’s 31st edition. Opening nights are a ritual for film festivals, and this one is no exception. The big show is always a Canadian feature: this year it’s Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the follow-up to the same team’s hit from five years ago, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. I’ve seen the best and worst of Canadian cinema over the years at these opening nights, but I now choose to skip the red-carpet mob of Toronto’s moneyed finest in favor of an alternative: at the Elgin, one of Toronto’s best movie palaces, an international feature with high hopes unspools to an audience of cinephiles with equally grand expectations. To the collective joy of those assembled, The Lives of Others hits the giant screen with appropriate splendor. Already said to be Germany’s contender for the Oscars (a prospect that isn’t necessarily promising), this debut feature is much more than the usual polished Euro gem aiming at the global market. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck studied political science and economics as well as filmmaking, and it shows. Here is a man who can think about his society and who, moreover, trusts the specificities of history (in this case, 1984 in the German Democratic Republic) to speak to the present. Like Good Night, and Good Luck, Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others begs us to pay attention to history. In Germany — the film suggests — the days of political thugs abusing power to control a population are over. “To think that people like you used to run a country!” its writer-protagonist explodes in a pivotal scene to an ex-politician in the lobby of a Berlin theater reviving the former’s old socialist realist play. Here in George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s America (where the wiretapping that dominates Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film is a reality), no such comforting escape into the present is remotely possible. But The Lives of Others could be a lesson to US filmmakers on how to create complex characters that lead an audience through complex issues — to think and feel at the same time, as the director’s compatriot Rainer Werner Fassbinder once put it. The Elgin Visa Screening Room (yes, that’s the name — festival sponsor Visa is inescapable) vibrated with passion at film’s end. Directors aren’t supposed to come back onstage at the opening-night screening, but the standing ovation demanded it. And the applause wasn’t only for Henckel von Donnersmarck’s very real achievement as the writer and director. Lead actor Ulrich Mühe — who gives an extraordinary performance as a conflicted Stasi agent — had been an East German theater actor under heavy Stasi surveillance. There he was, onstage too, a living storehouse of historical process. At a festival where politics are already emerging as a major focus, this jewel of a flashback may well be a flash-forward to the year ahead. (B. Ruby Rich) FEST REPORT I may be an American journalist scuttling around in Canada, but so far all of my top picks at the Toronto International Film Festival hail from Asia. South Korea’s The Host is a film you will be hearing a lot about in the near future — especially if you’re anywhere near my yapping mouth, which will be (loudly) singing the praises of Bong Joon-ho’s colossal monster jam for months to come. Kinda like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Host is inspired by a true incident. According to a 2000 Korea Times article, an American civilian employee of US Forces Korea was jailed for ordering the dumping of toxins into Seoul’s Han River. That he happened to oversee a US Army mortuary was a particularly juicy detail. As The Host imagines it, the freaky chemical combo births an underwater mutant. We don’t have to wait long to get a full reveal either: it’s a huge, mouthy sea monster, complete with dexterous tentacles and the ability to gallop across land, perform graceful backflips, and swallow whatever unlucky human being gets the hell in its way. Naturally, the local population freaks — especially a sad-sack father (Song Kang-ho, who also played a sad-sack father in Park Chanwook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) who watches helplessly when his young daughter gets lassoed by the critter. The Host follows his oft-ridiculous plans to rescue her with the help of his brother (an educated drunk) and sister (a competitive archer who tends to choke when it counts). The film also chronicles the Korean government’s strong-arm approach to handling the “river incident” — with the help of the US Army, which would just as soon incite even more panic by claiming the monster is the source of a terrible and mysterious new virus. Bonus: The Host boasts killer special effects by San Francisco’s the Orphanage (Sin City, Superman Returns) and New Zealand’s Weta Workshop (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong). With cutting political and social commentary gurgling just below the surface and black humor spurting from every orifice, The Host (due for a Magnolia Pictures release in 2007) is a must-see for monster movie fans — and jeez, everybody else too. If straight-ahead action’s more your thing, keep an eye out for Johnnie To’s Exiled (Bay Area release date unknown). Touted in some circles as the sequel to The Mission, this may be the prolific To’s best gangster movie to date. The smashingly hangdog Anthony Wong anchors a cast of familiar Hong Kong faces (Simon Yam, Francis Ng, Nick Cheung); the plot, about hired guns and gangsters who do the double cross like nobody’s business, matters less than the jaw-dropping gun battles it produces. When shoot-outs come this well choreographed, the word is gun-fu — and in Exiled, the bloody results are nothing short of stunning. Also topping my Toronto experience so far: Takashi Miike’s latest oddity, surreal prison drama Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (by the time you read this, he’ll probably already have his next film in the can); The Wayward Cloud director Tsai Ming-liang’s dreamy, gritty, and near-silent I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone; and Nobody Knows helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s samurai yarn, Hana. (Cheryl Eddy) For longer takes on these and other TIFF selections, read daily festival updates on the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com.

Fringe on top

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
There’s a crisp fall edge to the heady pee-asma of the Tenderloin as huddled, roaming packs of theater scavengers move hourly among the tolerant local traffic — two unmistakable signs of the SF Fringe Festival. How like Halloween it all seems too, the greedy devouring of tricks and treats at the Fringe, that 12-day carnival of the theater world gleefully unimpeded by judges’ panels, censors’ boards, or the general plague of good taste.
The open-door policy of the Fringe makes for a thoroughly unhinged program of nearly 40 local, national, and international acts, all under an hour and all under 10 bucks. In this situation, word of mouth and capricious fortune serve as the principal guideposts for sporting patrons ricocheting from one show to the next among 10 different venues, including such nontraditional environs as Original Joe’s restaurant-bar and the mobile fiesta known as the Mexican Bus.
Amid opening night’s offerings Sept. 6 came the latest from Fringe superstars Banana Bag and Bodice. Something of a superstar satire itself, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen explores, exclaims, and explodes the mass-cultural phenomenon (“mass retardo reactions”) surrounding a legendary band, the Rising Fallen, six years defunct since playing just one glorious gig.
Part one of a longer piece, Rising Fallen unfolds as a pretentious and outlandish presentation by a grad student expert (Christopher W. White) writing his thesis on the “post-wave neo-nick nick scene.” His quickly wayward lecture includes testimonials and reenactments featuring former lead guitarist Taylor Taylor (Dave Malloy), number one groupie Janey Jane (Rebecca Noon), and some other dude (a roving protean presence played by Joseph Estlack). Amid a couple of microphones and practice amps, an electric guitar, a handheld light source, a video monitor, and a suitably quirky musical score by Malloy come various ego-refracted takes on the myth and mystique surrounding the band’s long-estranged lover-founders, Jacko and Grandma Mo. They are played remotely if indelibly via some recorded images and a pair of cell phones by BB and B’s New York founders, Jason Craig (who cowrote the piece with Malloy) and Jessica Jelliffe.
Word-struck, wryly antisoulful, but only fitfully inspired (especially by comparison with their previous shows), Rising Fallen never quite finds its legs. Ironically, Craig’s and Jelliffe’s charismatic but elusive personae might have held the piece together more had the actors actually been live onstage.
The following night saw two premieres with strangely similar themes by SF companies. Get It? Got It. Good., an absurdist three-act play by SF playwright-director Dan Wilson (Vagina Dentata), begins as a desperate hunt by two losers (Catz Forsman and Sam Shaw) for an elusive “it” sought by their clients (a frustrated couple played by Kevin Karrick and Stefanie Goldstein) and ends with an inquiry into the nature of good and bad that devolves into a Luigi Pirandello–like unraveling of the play itself. Although the play tends to substitute volume and verbosity for more penetrating writing at points, Wilson and his capable eight-person cast reach several high notes (not least actor Hal Savage’s Catholic sermon).
The ghost of Pirandello haunted the stage once more that evening. This time it was in the back room at Original Joe’s on Taylor, where RIPE Theater unveiled its latest, @six, an amusing set of interconnected scenes written by the company that eventually turns its purported premise — a series of coincidental encounters between two antagonistic couples (Sarah McKereghan and John Andrew Stillions; Mark Rachel and Deborah Wade) and a silent bystander (Noah Kelly) — inside out. Some uneven writing and thematic unraveling aside, great ensemble acting and consistently sharp humor held this one together.
Other promising fare in the SF Fringe Fest couldn’t be sampled in time for this column, including local legend-in-his-own-right Dan Carbone’s new show, Bay Area playwright Ian Walker’s Stone Trilogy, and the anticipated sequel The Thrilling Adventures of Elvis in Space II. For the whole enchilada, including audience reviews, visit the fest’s Web site. SFBG
SF FRINGE FESTIVAL
Through Sun/17
Call or see Web site for showtimes, locations, and prices
www.sffringe.org

American lie

-
0

› johnny@sfbg.com
One of the many refreshing aspects of Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated is that it doesn’t focus on an obvious topic. Documentaries have begun reaching more viewers in recent years, but few take on the many-fangled foibles of the Bush era in an imaginative manner. Dick’s new film does, in addition to providing a lesson about the intersection between film history and American history, a convergence that isn’t as petty or easily dismissed as one might think. This is a smartly comedic private-eye movie with a feminist, even lesbian sensibility. It’s just dressed up in doc clothes.
Leaving aside Dick’s last name, in This Film Is Not Yet Rated the real private dick is Becky Altringer, a PI the director hires to spy on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — to reach inside its seemingly impenetrable gated fortress and help reveal its inner workings. Taking a cue from Michael Moore, Dick foregrounds Altringer, a woman normal enough to admit that she gets a thrill (necessary amid the waiting and drudgery that make up most of her day) out of spying on people who don’t know she’s watching them. It also sets her portrait against the entitled eccentricity of the MPAA’s oft Republican and rich members, who discriminate against the likes of Altringer on a daily basis in the name of their own supposed normalcy. Needless to say, they’re a pretty kooky bunch.
Dick’s strongest subtext is female pleasure. Here is a filmmaker who has read his Laura Mulvey yet somehow not wound up with a starchy collar. Considering his past work on subjects such as artist and masochist Bob Flanagan, it isn’t a stretch to say that a Bay Area brand of feminism informs Dick’s latest work, which devotes a lot of time to female (and often queer) filmmakers whose visions of sexuality have made the MPAA uncomfortable. Sitting before a movie poster that spells out her attitude toward recently retired MPAA president Jack Valenti, a Peppermint Patty–rasping Kimberly Peirce tells how the ratings board was much more threatened by a close-up of Chloë Sevigny’s face in orgasmic bliss from lesbian oral sex than it was by, say, Boys Don’t Cry’s protagonist getting a bullet in the head. Mary Harron is even more perceptive in her discussion of the organization and its reaction to her American Psycho. A scene in which the killer literally chomps cannibalistically on a woman’s crotch bothered them less than an orgy scene.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated moves rather quickly through the Hays Code clampdown, a very conservative period in Hollywood. But it does take the necessary time to dig into the ascent of Lyndon B. Johnson underling Lew Wasserman. His influence lingers: for decades under the Wasserman-appointed Valenti’s command, the MPAA has worked in tandem with the major studios to squash individuality and independence. Bearing the IFC and Netflix stamps of approval, Dick’s movie arrives at a time when home video receipts dwarf theatrical box office numbers, and thus the ratings system (outside of Blockbuster country) might not matter as much as it once did. But right now is better than never when it comes to tarnishing a corrupt institution’s legacy.SFBG
THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED
Opens Fri/15
See film listings for theaters and showtimes
http://www3.ifctv.com/thisfilm/about.php

FRIDAY

-
0

Sept. 8

Visual Art

“Coprophagiology”

This is a colossal week for art openings – and the people behind “Coprophagiology” are out to grab your attention with a photo postcard that proves this tiny exhibition’s title refers to the act of eating your own shit. But the more interesting aspect of Anna Maltz and Haden Nicholl’s double-trouble show (at onetime Guardian critic Clark Bruckner’s gallery) might be its exploration of mental instability. (Johnny Ray Huston)

6-9 p.m. reception; through Oct. 7
Mission 17
2111 Mission, suite 401, SF
Free
(510) 467-1818
www.mission17.org

Film

“Friscophilia”

Artist’s Television Access welcomes four shorts of the extremely local variety for “Friscophilia: An Exploration of San Francisco Locations and History.” Included are deep cuts of bike messengers in action, SF’s tourist scene, gentrification, and, in the wonderfully titled Mischief at 16th and Florida, history as seen from one grimy street corner. Together, the films constitute a decidedly bottom-up look at the city. (Max Goldberg)

7:30 p.m.
Artist’s Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
$5-$10
(415) 824-3890
www.atasite.org

The man with the golden guns

-
0

ACTION HERO Soft-spoken and dare I say, petite, Tony Jaa hardly looks like the kind of guy who could annihilate a room full of underground pit fighters. Of course, anyone who’s seen Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior knows this appearance is deceiving. The 30-year-old Thai superstar’s latest film, The Protector, features elephants and a one-take sequence of, as Jaa describes it, “me fighting the bad guys from the ground floor to the fourth floor” — but, as in Ong-Bak, there are no CG, wires, or Jaa stunt doubles during the fight scenes. On a recent visit to San Francisco, Jaa paused to discuss his skyrocketing career.
SFBG Your films are famous for their fight scenes. Which comes first, the stunts or the story?
TONY JAA (through interpreter Gilbert Lim, also his manager) It has to be the story first. After the script is done, all the stunt people — my [martial arts] master Panna Rittikrai, the director [Prachya Pinkaew], and me — will sit down and decide what sort of action would fit into each particular scene. Then we try them all out before we actually film them.
SFBG Before Ong-Bak, Muay Thai hadn’t been featured in many films. What makes your way of fighting different?
TJ Muay Thai is something I would really like to show to the rest of the world. With my style of shooting a film — not having a stunt man for myself — it creates a more realistic film for the audience.
SFBG CG effects have come a long way in recent years, so it’s kind of ironic that the future of martial arts, which is what you’ve been called, keeps it so old-school.
TJ I feel that CG is not something to be taken lightly. I’m OK with it, but I feel a sense of pride in doing the stunts. I want my audience to feel amazed by something I did myself.
SFBG Do you plan to do the Jackie Chan thing and make an American movie? In Ong Bak there was that graffiti shout-out to Steven Spielberg …
TJ Yes! [Laughs] It was something the director put in. For the time being, I’m extremely busy with my next film, Ong-Bak 2, which I’ll be directing myself. As to whether I would go to the US [to make a film], when Spielberg calls … [Laughs] I’m just joking! But the time might come when I will make the move.
SFBG Will Ong-Bak 2 be a direct sequel to the first film?
TJ No, it’s actually a period piece. You’ll see me using weapons and showing Thai martial arts styles that will be very new for the cinema.
SFBG OK, I have to ask. If you only had one punch to bring a guy down, where’s the best spot to aim to do the most damage?
TJ [Laughs] A lot of the basis of martial arts, it’s not about hitting the other person, it’s about self-discipline. Although in many parts of our bodies there are weak spots which you could actually hit to knock the person out. But I’m not gonna name them! (Cheryl Eddy)
THE PROTECTOR
Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.theprotectormovie.com

Songs in the key of quirk

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“Let’s bleed orange and brown all over this town.” Is it possible for such words of wisdom to induce skull fractures? Try inhaling this foul stench of a battle cry from doomed Cleveland Browns fans for 22 seasons as an Ohio resident, and you tell me if your gray matter doesn’t feel starved for another kind of enlightenment. Hailing from “the Mistake on the Lake,” a.k.a. northeastern Ohio, does have its share of rewards and quirks. The rent is supercheap and Black Label Beer is a staple in every twentysomething’s diet. We have LeBron James — ’nuff said. If Drew Carey says it’s cool, then our shit don’t stink, right? Maniacal football fiends, burning rivers, insatiable femmes, sweltering summer humidity versus punishing winter blizzards, and Dave Grohl — nothing resonates louder than these two Buckeye Belt principles: we like to put things into perspective and we have our dignity.
Musically speaking, Ohio’s rock ’n’ roll scene is engrossing and tends to personify a hearty DIY blend of blue-collar garage rock and trash punk. Given the nature of its factory-fraught makeup and economic turmoil, it only seems natural that listening to bands such as Deep Purple and David Lee Roth–era Van Halen never really goes out of style. Just 30 minutes south of Cleveland, in the tar-smothered tire kingdom of Akron, the shoddy atmosphere hasn’t changed much either. On any given night, it’s common to walk into a pub and see drunk boys and girls washing down greasy cheeseburgers and salted vinegar potato chips with pint glasses of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the soundtrack of gnarled fuzz and pealing feedback blowing out of a guitar amp. Sure, northeastern Ohio might lack the utopian hipster hangouts of Brooklyn and post-rock wet dreams of neighboring Chicago, but it makes up for it with character and remains home to a neglected crew of groundbreaking art rockers, new wavers, and experimental weirdos: the Dead Boys, the Pagans, Devo, the James Gang, Pere Ubu, and the Rubber City’s favorite twosome of blues breakers, the Black Keys.
The band’s drummer, Patrick Carney, reassured me in a recent phone interview that the “bright lights, big city” aspect of places like New York is nothing to write home about. “I find it all to be very boring,” he says. “I’d much rather hang out with someone who delivers pizzas and watches Roseanne all day than with someone who has a cool electronic record collection.”
Since the duo’s inception five years ago, Carney and vocalist-guitarist Dan Auerbach have gone from packing small clubs to selling out big concert halls with their raw, bluesy hooks and vintage rock harmonies — and they show no signs of letting up any time soon. Already three albums deep, the Keys unleash their most emphatic and primal offering to date on their Nonesuch Records debut, Magic Potion. Sporting a grittier AOR edge than some of the band’s past records and proving their loudest effort since 2003’s Thickfreakness (Fat Possum), Magic Potion is dynamic in rhythm and scope and effectively captures the Midwestern sound the group was aiming for.
“Basically, we wanted to make a loud fucking rock ’n’ roll album,” Carney says with a laugh. “One you can drink a beer to and everything’s turned up to 11.”
The beauty of the Black Keys is their unpretentious approach to songwriting. Rather then tearing a song apart measure by measure, Auerbach and Carney zero in on the medley and let their instruments do the rest of the talking. The pair write songs that are straight from the heart — integrating the southern blues swagger of Junior Kimbrough and Jimmy Reed with the stripped-down, FM-friendly magnificence of Led Zeppelin and Cream, with heavy emphasis on the latter. Auerbach’s vocals stretch from raspy howls to soothing strains while he coats infectious riffage and fiery chops with muddy layers of distortion.
Carney is no slouch either — pummeling his kit like Bill Ward on yellow jackets. The two structure the songs on Magic Potion in a fashion that sounds genuine and antiquarian without contrived overdubs, those that Carney describe as “very hi-fi.”
“Just Got to Be” opens the album with husky, Southern-rooted guitar and crashing cymbals, then hushes up for a second as Auerbach pleads, “I’ve got to go because/ Something’s on my mind/ And it won’t get better/ No matter how hard I try.” Tenderly felt ballads (“You’re the One”), psychedelic Brit-blues (“The Flame”), and monolithic rockers (“Give Your Heart Away”) follow.
It’s obvious that success hasn’t gotten to the heads of Auerbach and Carney, even after notable tours opening for the likes of Beck, Sleater-Kinney, and just earlier this summer, Radiohead. They have definitely grown as musicians since their days of banging up basement walls with muck-covered din yet still manage to firmly hold on to their signature sound and bust out solid pieces of reputable work. Ultimately, the band contradicts the age-old myth of rock ’n’ roll: it never really vanished — it just needed a good kick in the ass to get it out of bed. SFBG
BLACK KEYS
With Beaten Awake
9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$22
(415) 346-6000
www.livenation.com

To live and cry in Albany

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Remember the first time you strolled into the Ivy Room? The rec room wood-panel walls, a bar with a clear shot of a view into a homey live space, a jukebox that spun 45s, a pinball machine, the regulars in cutoff T- and Hawaiian shirts (always accessorize with a bulbous gut, please) who warmly welcomed hoodies and strangers alike. The gun emporium down San Pablo Avenue was the first indication that you were in an interzone between then and now, us and them, where a free-speech, increasingly affluent Berkeley began to cave to a live-free-or-eat-hot-lead working-class East Bay. The down-low Albany spot has been one of the last bastions outside Oakland, nay, the entire Bay, where you could imagine yourself in the thrall of the red state blues once again. Where you could imagine peeling yourself off the floor and walking out into some Southwestern furnace to roast like a relleno.
When the late Dot and later her son Bill MacBeath first took on the ’40s-built Ivy Room in ’92 (moving up the street from the It Club, which Dot had watched over since 1978), a point was made in cultivating a roots, country, rockabilly, and blues scene that was slowly vanishing from the area — with the exception of Downhome Music, the Arhoolie label HQ down the street. At the time, MacBeath says, “it was a really scary old-man bar that I would never have thought of walking into.” But the Ivy proved a bigger tent than that — taking on indie rockers and hip-hop crews and providing a sweet little platform for performers like Jonathan Richman, Sugar Pie De Santo, Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Neil Michael Hagerty, Jon Auer, Wayne “the Train” Hancock, the Lovemakers, the Loved Ones, Pinetop Perkins, Deke Dickerson, Gravy Train!!!!, and oodles of others.
“I tried to create a place where musicians could play and express themselves,” explains MacBeath, who booked the music until 1999, when Sarah Baumann took over. “People can appreciate that, and it was also a regular neighborhood bar at the same time.” Why hang in Albany if you don’t live close enough to stumble home in a drunk? These acts gave you a reason — along with the Ivy-clad crew and their genuine, rapidly vanishing, and all-too-often-remodeled-out-of-existence vibe, a relic of a time when the Embers in the Sunset served up sad clown paintings along with sloe gin fizzes and Mayes in the Tenderloin offered crab, cocktails, and comfort in ’20s-era wood booths.
But that was then — MacBeath is ready to move on and has sold the venue, which plans a final blowout weekend Sept. 15–17 showcasing Ivy fans and friends before the ownership changes Sept. 18.
MacBeath can’t say this chapter will entirely close on the club, yet one can naturally expect change to come to a beloved relic like the Room. “I’m trying not to be sad about that,” he says. “The bar is not going away.” However, he adds, “I don’t think it’s really current anymore.” We the flesh and blood relics appreciate it, but we’re “not really here as much as I think they should be — for how cool it is.”
DONDERO’S NOT DONE According to the online list of auspicious locals who have played the Ivy Room, stellar songwriter Dave Dondero has never graced the joint. But I’m sure he would if he could — and maybe even start a semistaged brawl with his drummer, Craig D, as he did at the Hemlock Tavern so long ago. True to the title of his 2003 Future Farmer album, The Transient, the man continues to wander: I caught up with him in Austin, where he had just completed the recording of his latest album for Conor Oberst’s Team Love imprint, tentatively titled When the Heart Breaks Deep.
The songs, Dondero says, revolve around his life in the last year when he was living and bartending in Alaska and San Francisco. “I actually tried to write a real love song,” he explains, prepping for a tour with Centro-matic. “It’s always been a smarmy, poking-fun-at-love song. I felt like trying out that side of my brain, love expression in music, though I’m not sure what side of the brain love comes out of, mixed in with heart and guts, all working together.” “Simple Love,” for instance, concerns an SF relationship that didn’t pan out due to Dondero’s rambling ways.
In all, he’s happy with the new countryish, more piano-oriented album, which reputedly continues to show off Dondero’s considerable writing choppage. “It’s got a folk song called ‘One-Legged Man and a Three-Legged Dog,’ inspired by a one-legged man walking a three-legged dog in Golden Gate Park,” says the songwriter. “A match made in heaven.”
Recorded in a studio called the Sweat Box, sans Pro Tools (the faux funk-metal-country record is next, he jokes), the disc was designed to tug the heartstrings, Dondero explains. “It sounds kind of beachy. Easy listening. Soft rock. Adult contemporary,” he observes. “I’m 37. I’m making music for myself and hoping to try and make my mother cry on this one.” SFBG
DAVID DONDERO
With Centro-matic and the Decoration
Wed/6, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
IVY ROOM FAREWELL SHOWS
With Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days, the Moore Brothers, the Loved Ones, Carlos Guitarlos, Rusty Zinn, Mover, Ride the Blinds, Eric McFadden Trio, “Soundboutique,” and Nino Moschello
Sept. 15–17, call or see Web site for times and prices
Ivy Room
858 San Pablo, Albany
(510) 524-9220
ivyroom.com

THURSDAY

-
0

Aug. 31

Music

Sampling Oakland Performances

Oakland’s immensely vital arts scene gets some much-deserved reverence in one of the Yerba Buena Center’s current visual art installations, Sampling Oakland. The work of artists like Erik Groff attempts, through various media, to navigate the space presented by the city of Oakland and the gallery space at YBCA in thoughtful, unconventional ways. In addition to regular viewing, this evening the exhibit plays host to a number of adventurous local guest musicians selected by curators from the 21 Grand, an interdisciplinary arts space in Oakland. (Michael Harkin)

6:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
Free with gallery admission ($4-$6)
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org

Film

Soylent Green

We’re still a sweet 16 years away from 2022, when strawberry jam costs an arm and a leg and everyone eats mysterious foodstuff made by the Soylent Corporation. What, you don’t believe a reanimated Chuck Heston will be around to try to get to the cannibalistic bottom of a dystopia-in-the-making? Recent news about body-part harvesting companies like Donor Referral Services and Biomedical Tissue Services might change your mind. Chew on them – and salute programmers who realize that there is no better site than a humanist hall to screen Soylent Green. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7:30 p.m.
Humanist Hall
390 27th St., Oakl.
$5 donation
(510) 393-5685
www.humanisthall.net

NOISE: O, we come in praise of those random acts of music

-
0

Yes, Virginia, there’s much to catch up on since last week.

Red Hot Chili Peppers and Mars Volta for two, last Thursday at Oakland Arena. The scene was dumpy out in the parking lot before the show — doesn’t this look like the SUV pooped tin? Yeesh, clean up after yourselves, jerks.

cans.JPG
Sloppy tailgaitin’ Pepper-heads. All images by Kimberly Chun.

We got inside just in time to see the start of Mars Volta’s set. Cedric was swiveling around like a mini-James Brown and the entire band got down admirably for some rad psych-prog jams despite the always-lousy arena sound. Nice pseudo-Satanic backdrops and occaisional sax skronk. For the finale the sax dude put his horn aside, sat behind a kit, while another player started wailing on a set of congas. Groooooovy.

As for the Chili Peppers, well what can I say? They are my guilty pleasure – I secretly love their pop hits and give them their props for being the first punk-funkers on the block. Yet why do all their other non-hit songs sooo similar. Despite the musicianship on Flea and Frusciante’s part, I must admit I was downright bored for most of the show – must they jam endlessly on the most mundane riffs? Must Anthony Keidis cavort like a graceless goblin? His voice seemed just fine but his dance moves paled after the agile MV. I’d much rather read his recent, strangely fascinating autobio (which memorably kicks off with an injection by a sexy nurse).

Next up, Friday night: 7 Year Rabbit Cycle with XBXRX and Murder Murder. I’m sorry I missed XB but I got there early enough to see a new lineup for Guardian contributor Paul Costuros’s Murder Murder, with Sic Alps’s Matt Hartman and Comets on Fire’s Noel Harmonson joining Costuros on sax and Ches Smith on vibes. Noise -and two drummers – t’was compelling.

murdermurder.JPG
Paul Costuros gets down with Murder Murder.

Then 7 Year Rabbit Cycle came on – and dang, did they tear it up. Ches Smith on drums has sort of become the centerpiece of the band, propping his foot up on a snare to reach a China cymbal, rattling and shaking, as everyone – partner Miya on bass, Rob on guitar, Kelly on vocals, fellow Xiu Xiu member Jamie Stewart, and Guardian contributor George Chen clustered around. Powerful stuff. Appreciative audience. Who could ask for anything more?

7rb1.JPG

7yrc2.JPG
7 Year Rabbit Cycle don’t go through the motions – they’ll impress the fur off youse.

I took a break to head up north to Lassen volcanic national park. Awesome bubbling mud pits and cute bluejays. But then last night I was back to see Jean-Jacques Perrey – protege of Cocteau, Piaf, and Disney and Incredibly Strange Music star – play a special RE/Search event at Asphodel Records’ Recombinant Labs in SOMA. Perrey fan Jello Biafra introduced the man.

jello.JPG
Here’s your Jello.

Perrey was a hoot – loved his jams particularly on “Mame” and “The Typewriter,” his tribute to Spike Jones. I dare anyone not to crack a smile once during a performance.

perrey1.JPG
Jean-Jacques Perrey shook his lil’ stuffed pal along with the beat.

The man oozes infectious glee while pounding his beloved Ondioline, an early synthesizer – hard to believe he made so many of the sounds he creates with tape records, scissors and the sheer urge to splice. The much-sampled “EVA” was his closer – pure hip-shaking mod fun.

perrey2.JPG
At 77 years young, Perrey proves you’re never too old to mug for the camera.

SF Opera under the glass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
There is no lack of world-class talent in the upcoming fall season, but as far as the portentous tenants in the Civic Center are concerned, the new season’s repertoire stands out as an exercise in artistic tepidness. Perhaps still traumatized by the Bush economy’s brutal impact upon the arts, the San Francisco Opera and Symphony and other big Bay Area arts presenters are taking few chances. Projects with even the subtlest hints of experimentation this season — such as the SF Symphony’s multimedia production of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights — are being served to the public in carefully marketed packages, brandishing favorite performers with tried-and-true creative teams that have been thoroughly tested over the years.
So as the curtains go up next week, the best performance to watch may well be the one that is taking place offstage: David Gockley, the SF Opera’s new general director, heads his first full season as the top choice for the job. With the company’s somewhat contentious regime change (Pamela Rosenberg vacated the lead post last season), Gockley knows that his every move is being scrutinized by the opera world.
Rosenberg was the only woman leading a major American opera company during her tenure at the SF Opera, boldly introducing on the War Memorial stage the US premieres of major contemporary works such as Olivier Messiaen’s massive St. Francis of Assisi, György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, and the world premiere of John Adams’s Dr. Atomic. Even while facing the funding challenges of a deflated economy, Rosenberg chose to focus the company’s resources on creating the daring, provocative concept-driven productions that are common in Europe. Instead of squandering her production budgets on expensive star singers, Rosenberg brought a fertile artistic sensibility to the company that was wholly fresh and exciting.
Yet the lack of recognizable marquee names combined with the high level of abstraction in her productions displeased the opera’s more conservative, traditional constituencies. Typically, the anti-Rosenberg camp was made up of Metropolitan Opera–jealous patrons and the shrill, mercilessly critical traditionalists who prefer museumlike productions — the kind of stagings populated with ornate period costuming and opulent sets that are often mere vanity vehicles to glorify star singers. So, faced with the criticism of diva-starved patrons and the prospect of having to devote an enormous portion of her time on the job to fundraising, Rosenberg chose not to renew her five-year contract with the SF Opera when it expired.
Attempting to find a less polarizing replacement, the SF Opera’s search committee came up with Gockley, the highly respected former general director of Houston Grand Opera. Chief among Gockley’s strengths is the rapport he has with top talent in the field, paired with a proven ability to entice them into high-profile collaborations.
“I would like to pursue a policy of bringing more of the most prominent stars back to San Francisco, similar to the kind that the public enjoyed during the [Kurt Herbert] Adler and [Terence] McEwen years,” Gockley said in a phone interview last week. “People expect that of a great international company — to provide the big personalities and the most glamorous performers.”
Yes, the divas are back, though certainly not in the abundance suggested by the opera’s tacky marketing campaign launched during the summer season. But what could be the rationale behind the extreme conservatism of SF Opera’s 2006–07 season, in which the most modern entry is Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and the production rosters are populated by stalwart traditionalists such as Michael Yeargan, Thierry Bosquet, and John Conklin? “This year is not mine,” Gockley pointed out, indicating that it was planned by his predecessor before his arrival.
Not unlike Rosenberg, in Houston, Gockley was also known as an innovator and risk taker. In the heart of Bush country, he ushered in Adams’s Nixon in China, a momentous premiere in the history of American opera. A few years later, his controversial commission of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk was picketed by the religious right.
So what does he have in store for those who actually like more daring theatrical statements?
“Nothing this year,” he said dryly. “But we have already announced a world premiere by Philip Glass [an opera based on the Civil War battle of Appomattox] for next season and will announce the new season in January. Much as I did in Houston, we will have a blend of some core and peripheral repertory work, new works, and premieres — done with great singers and great musical and theatrical values.”
In all fairness, Gockley has the difficult job of being all things to all people during this transitional phase. Of course, this is only the beginning, and before he has the buy-in from all the locals, this former Texan will still have much to prove. SFBG
CHING CHANG’S TOP CLASSICAL AND OPERA PICKS
HENRY PURCELL’S KING ARTHUR
Philharmonia Baroque and Cal Performances join forces to present Purcell’s 1691 dramatic masterpiece in a new, fully choreographed staging by Mark Morris. The original cast from the production’s UK premiere is featured. (Sept. 30–Oct. 7. 510-642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu)
HILARY HAHN AND THE SF SYMPHONY
More than any so-called diva, violinist Hilary Hahn provides compelling evidence of the divine with her mesmerizing gifts. Appearing with the SF Symphony, Hahn is the soloist in the rarely heard Violin Concerto by Eric Wolfgang Korngold, a composer of forbidden music during the Nazi era. (Dec. 6–8. 415-864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org)
RICHARD WAGNER’S TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Soprano Christine Brewer’s rendition of Isolde’s orgasmic, transcendent “Liebestod” at the end of this five-hour opera will be well worth the wait, while iconoclast David Hockney’s colorful sets will be mere icing on the cake. Thomas Moser sings Tristan, and Donald Runnicles conducts. (Oct. 5–27. 415-864-3330, www.sfopera.com)
THOMAS ADES
In the rarest of opportunities, the brilliant British composer and pianist Thomas Ades pays a visit to San Francisco to play a recital of his music at Herbst Theatre. Ades created a sensation when, as a fresh-faced 23-year-old composer, he premiered his opera Powder Her Face (containing the now-infamous fellatio scene) in Britain in 1995. (Dec. 9. 415-392-2545, www.performances.org)

The transformer

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Every time I think of change, I think of robots cutting my hair. Possibly this is because I ate a lot of toothpaste as a kid. But even more possibly, it’s because each time I used to come to on the sidewalk outside the old Transformer hair salon at Page and Laguna, I’d think, “Listen, Wanda. You seriously gotta do something different with your eternal teenage life.” Then I’d cheerily swoosh the asphalt off my mismatched Keds and go again.
But all the signs were lately lining up for a cosmic automatonic buzz cut, at least in clubland. Yes, yes, I know we’re trapped in a the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same apocalyptic retro loop, but things were getting seriously weird on the spinning wheels tip. I dashed to the Hush Hush Lounge for a supposedly glam party a couple Saturdays ago, but when I got there it was closed, dark, shuttered, boarded up. Sold overnight (again) — everyone expelled. So I jetted to the Expansion to meet cute Israelis for Jager shots — same thing, dammit. What the hell was going on? Was I a bar curse?
Then three new hot spots were revealed in quick succession, all with highly confusable names: Shine (shinesf.com), Stray (straybarsf.com), and Slide (slidesf.com). I’d like to think the sibilant lisp of their similarity is yet another Snakes on a Plane viral marketing strategy, but really, are we there yet? And to power-top it off, some new bling-bling break-dance bar called Double Dutch opened in the old Cama spot, biting both name and concept from Double Dutch Disco, the superstar alternaqueer party of the past eight months. Way to be tone deaf to the scene, brahs.
But the real hot hearsay on the transformation front was Bruno’s, reopened after months and months of remo, shedding its smoky mobster steak house past for a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Mission via Marina makeover. Hell, I’ll bite — it sounded horrifying. Besides, I’d been needing to hit up more straight hangs, really. When even your boyfriend says you’re getting too gay, it’s time to toss out the fuchsia wrist limpers and purchase a nice George Foreman or something. Worse, in the blizzard of mind-blowing gay-las I’d been attending lately, I’m afraid I’d come to think of het bars in general like I think of Toronto, which, to quote my club chum Cyril, is a place where all the trannies are named Chris. I hate that.
So me and Hunky Beau hop on the sexy motorbike and head out, eager to sip Corzo Cadillac margaritas by a (hopefully fake) fireplace and pretend to pick up nubile blond sales executives with our extensive ironic vocabulary, Norelco-groomed stubble, and wacky printed shirts. At last, a change was a-gonna come!
But just look what I get for being prejudicial. We’re cruising up Mission Street, trying to remember exactly where Bruno’s is, admiring the dazzlingly slumped-over fauna of the local panorama, when — bam! We crash headlong into the trunk of a parked cop car. Whoops. I pull a total John Woo and flip over the wreck, landing fabulously spread-eagled on the uneven pavement. Dazed, I look up into a halo of stunned hunky cops and the curious gang members they’d been interrogating, flashing lights eerily glinting off jet-black visors and tarnished gold teeth. So this is heaven, I thought. Well, pass me a box of Trojans. Looks like I’ve got work to do.
We’re OK, the bike and the cop car are totaled, and the next night we hauled our bruised egos to Bruno’s for a chill-out dose of Peach Bellinis, leopard-skin carpeting, Lauryn Hill on the turntables, copious Kewpie doll paintings, and busty servers kneeling to take our order. Sure enough, BtVotD was looped on the giant plasma screens, but the fireplace was real, the gimlets were strong, the booths had been replaced by a long communal dining table, and the ahi burgers were under $20. And hey, guess what? Some guy even tried to pick me up in the men’s room. Miraculous! SFBG
BRUNO’S
2389 Mission, SF
Nightly, 5:30 p.m.–2 a.m.
(415) 550-7455
www.brunoslive.com

The soul stirrers

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The set is modestly spare, a disheveled if not quite ramshackle affair, being the basement studio of an imaginary low-watt radio station run by a solitary disc jockey (Peter Newton) with a thing for Japanese culture, an anguished relation to the American scene, and an insomniac disposition. But just as the deepest truths can rise immaculately from the muffled vibrations of a scratchy old blues record, so does Bay Area playwright Gary Aylesworth’s new play See That My Grave Is Kept Clean slyly and unassumingly sound nothing less than the soul-stirring chords and discords of an embattled American imagination.
The play’s DJ-everyman, sitting at his desk and console in a kimono, his samurai sword on one side, his classic blues discs on the other, coos into the microphone to whomever might be listening to the evening’s program. Caught between suicidal despair and a desire for revitalization, he’s fending off the highly bankable depression of a Prozac nation with the ameliorative properties of Japanese rice balls. He’s also bent on finding a little truth amid the “tsunami of propaganda” that characterizes the society outside. To this latter end, he’s got the classic recordings from the Anthology of American Folk Music on heavy rotation, markers of another era of American depression — marvelous songs Newton and Aylesworth actually perform live (including the song borrowed for the play’s title) in lilting harmonies to their own musical accompaniment.
But our DJ sets some archival interviews spinning too, in counter-rotation to one another, as it were. The other characters (played by Aylesworth, acting out the interviews the DJ intersperses throughout the program) are two formidable contemporaries and spiritual adversaries of the mid-20th century: Edward Bernays and Harry Smith. The juxtaposing of these two figures, polar extremes yet both highly influential in the economic and cultural spheres, becomes the motive propelling Aylesworth’s deceptively casual, humorous, melodious, and intriguing new play.
Bernays, considered a father of the public relations industry (“public relations” being a phrase he coined to substitute for the tarnished term “propaganda”), was by the 1920s and for decades afterward the much sought-after guru of ballyhoo. He sold everything from cigarettes to presidents to a bloody US-backed coup in Central America on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Bernays was also (not incidentally) the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he put to pioneering use in the realm of what he called “the engineering of consent.”
On the other side of the stage (and every other important extreme) is Harry Smith, the play’s prickly patron saint. A character too protean and idiosyncratic for a neat label, Smith was among other things an experimental filmmaker and the musicologist who compiled the legendary multivolume Anthology of American Folk Music, recordings largely made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Originally issued on the Folkways label in 1952, it was so influential in the folk music revival and beyond that Bob Dylan (our DJ reminds us) once boasted that he would not have existed but for Harry Smith. Along the way, the play broaches Smith’s other passions as a jazz enthusiast, painter, and even a record producer (he recorded the Fugs’ debut album in 1965, which leads to the story recounted in the play of how he came to be consulted on the best way to levitate the Pentagon as part of a famous 1967 antiwar action).
Aylesworth plays the nonagenarian Bernays with a high, rasping voice and a set of repetitive, almost cartoonlike gestures that (along with a tendency for the “taped” interview to slow down and speed up at odd, sometimes telling moments) poke fun at the self-congratulatory figure. Bernays is a man so far from shy about bragging of his connections and achievements that he unconsciously paints an entirely grim view of modern society with the cheeriest of dispositions. By contrast, Smith (played with equal facility and a slightly hyperbolic, wry affect) has a cantankerous air about him. While forthcoming enough, he casts back a knowingly cautious, skeptical, even sarcastic tone to his various interviewers.
Here are two spiritual fathers, you might say, of the 20th-century United States, whose diametrically opposed outlooks constitute and reflect something like a metaphysical rift in the culture at large. Blended with Aylesworth’s simple yet choice staging, the acute and droll performances, and the laid-back but excellent renditions of selections from the Anthology, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean approaches its themes with a charm all the more forceful for being quirky and understated.
And if our DJ channels the despair of the age, it’s clear that despair cuts two ways too. It leads either to the acquiescence and metaphysical poverty of Bernays-style fables of freedom and plenty or to the awakened, agitated thought, action, and social conscience of a Harry Smith, which seeks nothing in the end more than the obliteration of myth and the reanimation of the senses. With its rousing good humor and a shrewd theatrical assurance whose crystalline simplicity resonates with far-reaching themes, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean gives eloquent voice to the restless rebel wide awake beneath the glossy, manufactured surface of the American dream. SFBG
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN
Through Sun/27
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Traveling Jewish Theatre
470 Florida, SF
$15–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 831-1943
www.constructioncrewtheater.com

Regaining consciousness

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“I want to be a mainstream artist,” says East Oakland rapper and spoken word poet Ise Lyfe, discussing his rejection of the label “conscious rap.” “I’m not trying to be some backpack cat performing in Davis. I want to be …”
The 23-year-old trails off thoughtfully. “I think the only way to do it harder than Jay-Z is to have a real movement, something tangible that will effect change in the world through music. I’d like to be that big but at the same time put a dent in the Earth.”
At first glance, it’s hard to imagine a rapper less like Jay-Z than Ise Lyfe, whose 2004 self-released debut, SpreadtheWord, is devoid of the big pimpin’, cheese-spending exploits that have endeared Jiggaman to millions. But like James Baldwin — who once said he didn’t want to be the best black novelist in America, he wanted to be Henry James — Ise isn’t talking about betraying his identity for success. He’s simply saying he wants to be the best, period. If there’s anything common to all four of these artists, it’s the awareness that in order to be the best you must change the game. With the rerelease of SpreadtheWord, complete with new artwork, a bonus DVD, and a mildly retooled track list, on fledgling independent Hard Knock Records, in addition to his recently concluded nationwide tour with the Coup, Ise Lyfe is hoping to do just that.
Born in 1982, Ise was raised in Brookfield, deep in East Oakland next to the notorious Sobrante Park. “I grew up as a young kid right when the crack epidemic was flourishing and having a real effect on our families,” he says. “My father had been affected by drugs. For me, growing up in a single-parent home was the manifestation of that existing in our community. But I also came up amongst a large level of social justice activity and youth organizing. That influences my music. I think Oakland has a history that unconsciously bleeds into everyone from here.”
The legacy of this history — which includes a spoken word scene at least as old as Gil Scott Heron’s mid-’70s albums for underground label Strata East — endures in Oakland, where Ise first made a name for himself as a teen slam poet. “I would be three years deep into performing spoken word before there was any place I could go and perform hip-hop,” he says. “Hip-hop was all 21-and-up venues, where I was the number one slam poet in the country when I was 19.” Repping the Bay in 2001 at the Youth Speaks National Poetry Slam, Ise would achieve a modicum of fame through appearances on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.
“When I started recording,” he confesses, “folks didn’t even know I was making a hip-hop record. They thought it was a spoken word record, but I fused both in there.” The success of this fusion of art forms is all the more apparent on the rereleased SpreadtheWord, the continuity of which has been improved by a few judicious edits. Ise’s flow is so dexterous that the moments of purely a cappella poetry enhance rather than disrupt the musical experience. In fact, musicality underscores an important difference between SpreadtheWord and most conscious hip-hop recordings, for most of the beats on even otherwise impressive efforts sound like they were made sometime in 1993. The lack of curiosity about the sound of contemporary hip-hop gives such music a perfunctory air, while the tracks on SpreadtheWord are infinitely fresher even after two years. While it’s not exactly hyphy, a tune like “Reasons” still sounds like a Bay Area slap that would work on a mixtape with other new tunes.
“My fan base is predominantly young people of color,” Ise says, articuutf8g his other major difference from most rappers who fall under the conscious rubric. “I think it’s all good. The music is for everybody. But I’m proud of seeing the music connect with who it’s really written to, directly from, and for. I don’t want to be distant from the community.” In the face of the failure of so many conscious rappers to continue to appeal to their original listeners, it’s hard not to attribute Ise’s own success to his closeness to both his audience and hip-hop.
“It’s important for me to have real community work behind what I say,” he explains, commenting on a busy schedule that includes everything from teaching classes to street sweeping to performing at the Youth UpRising community center on the bill with Keak Da Sneak on Aug. 25.
Moreover, his refusal to place himself in opposition to the hyphy movement despite his very different approach to hip-hop lends him a credibility unavailable to others.
“I consider myself just the other side of hyphy,” he concludes. “I don’t think there’s anything different in what I’m saying than what they’re saying. Those cats is positive — they’re talking about uniting the Bay. I just think it’s important that we set a standard for what’s acceptable. When we calling a 13-year-old girl a ripper, it’s just abusive music. But even in its industrial prepackaged form hip-hop comes from the hood, and I think that going dumb or getting hyphy is revolutionary in principle. I’m-a jump on this car, I’m-a shake these dreads, I’m-a be me. I think that it’s a positive energy.” SFBG
ISE LYFE
Youth UpRising’s “Lyrical Warfare”
with Keak Da Sneak
Fri/25, 4–7 p.m.
8711 MacArthur, Oakl.
(510) 777-9909
Free
www.youthuprising.org

Basehead of the class

-
0

Low-key yet brutal, Half Nelson is exactly the kind of movie Hollywood will never make. Notably, it’s entirely cliché free. There’s no deliverance for Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), an eighth-grade teacher whose raging crack habit is steadily taking over his life. There’s no real turnaround for 13-year-old Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of Dan’s students who’s being eyeballed for drug-delivery service by the neighborhood dealer, Frank (Anthony Mackie). And though Dan and Drey forge an alliance amid their unstable worlds — they kinda have to after Drey discovers Dan, who’s also her basketball coach, hitting the pipe after a game — the friendship is a shaky one. “I want to know consequences,” Dan tells his class, trying to get them excited about his latest history lesson (later, he’ll engage in an arm-wrestling contest to illustrate “turning points”). But in his own life, Dan can barely face another day without getting high first.
The first feature from producer-writer Anna Boden and director-writer Ryan Fleck, the unflashy Half Nelson uses subtlety to speak volumes. Its beats are succinct but intense: when Dan’s ex-junkie ex-girlfriend briefly appears, she’s rosy cheeked and sporting an engagement ring — pretty much the embodiment of the kind of hope for the future that Dan can’t imagine ever having. The film doesn’t spend much time on exposition. We never learn how or why Dan started using. Like last year’s Down to the Bone, Half Nelson burrows into the mind of a full-blown addict whose ability to fake normalcy becomes more precarious by the day. The first time the stern principal hooks Dan into an emergency meeting, it’s to reprimand him for straying from the lesson plan. The second time, he’s just taught a class on hyperdrive, with an oozing nosebleed to boot, and his double life is in full crumble.
Even as she comes to terms with her favorite teacher’s shortcomings, Drey has plenty of her own problems. Her weary mother barely has time for her between double shifts; her father is merely a voice on the telephone; and her older brother is incarcerated, a circumstance that’s the direct result of his association with Frank. To Dan’s dismay, the candy-chomping Frank insinuates himself into Drey’s largely unsupervised life, and an odd tug-of-war results. Clearly, neither man is a good father figure, not by any stretch. There’s a tense confrontation between Frank and Dan that perfectly illustrates Half Nelson’s ability to inject unpredictability into familiar movie moments. The scene also picks up a key thematic thread — can one man make a difference? — that’s echoed by Dan throughout the film, particularly in a late scene involving a visit to his grossly liberal (and liberally inebriated) parents.
Half Nelson is a film with no wasted space, and that goes double for its acting. Epps (stoic) and Mackie (charmingly manipulative) are excellent, but this is Gosling’s game from the start. His layered, sympathetic performance conveys not just Dan’s jittery freak-outs and frustrations but also his deep inner anguish. It’s what makes watching Half Nelson a wholly satisfying experience. (Cheryl Eddy)
HALF NELSON
Opens Fri/25
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
www.halfnelsonthefilm.com

Eye spy

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’ve found myself a femmy boy who’s willing — nay, enthusiastically prepared — to wear green eye shadow in public. This is delicious. However, we live in Colorado Springs, which is for its size a wealthy and well-educated town but also is headquarters for Focus on the Family, New Life Church, Will Perkins, Ft. Carson, NORAD, and the Air Force Academy. One of my femmy-boy friends was recently chased down an alley downtown by some of the local military simians for the apparently gender-treacherous crime of wearing a top hat. It was lucky for him he knew the area well and wasn’t nearly as plastered as they were.
My two questions about the eye shadow thing are these: first, and I understand if you’re not able to answer because you don’t live here, if we do go on a date while he’s wearing it, what do you think our chances are of finishing the evening without getting the shit beaten out of us? And second, what’s your opinion on where he should put his feet while treading the fine line between staying safe and taking a stand for the right to do what he wants with his body if it’s not hurting anyone else?
I guess the question is along the same lines as, how do you feel about him wearing a ball-gag and leash to the local Starbucks? Eye shadow is just a less overtly sexual signal. Well. To some people. Not to me.
Love,
Don’t Kick Me
Dear Kick:
Gotcha. And no, I surely do not live there, nor would I, but we did blow out a tire there on a cross-country trip once and got stranded for a couple days. Pretty town. Really nice park. I knew all that stuff (Air Force, antigay groups, etc.) was there, but you can’t tell by visiting — it’s not like there are giant “FAGS GO HOME” banners flying gaily over Main Street or anything. But would I, were I a guy, dress up in my gayest glad rags and sashay down the same main drag in a pair of darling red wedge espadrilles and a panty girdle? I would not. I suspect you would not either, were you a guy (you’re not, right?). It would be no safer for you to accompany your new girly-boy while he did it, either. There is sticking up for your inalienable right to be a weirdo, and there is stupidity. I draw the line at stupidity in any other context, so why would I make an exception for this one?
There was a time in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the all the cool kids were making a spectacle of themselves in the name of political action: “visibility,” I think we called it. All you had to do was print up some T-shirts or stickers and show up en masse where you weren’t expected, and you got to feel all brave and thrillingly transgressive and challenging to heterosexual hegemony and stuff. It was great. It was also kind of a fake — when you’re surrounded by a few dozen or hundred or thousand of your closest friends and you’re in San Francisco or New York or Washington, not Jakarta or Beijing or rural Rwanda, you’re pretty safe. Even if the cops get you, you’re going to be cited and set free; protesters in the United States are rarely brought to trial, let alone found bound and beheaded in a ditch. That doesn’t mean that nothing we do here is dangerous, though, and unfortunately walking certain streets in a state of visible gender ambiguity can still get you kicked in the face.
There is no set point on the continuum from safe but stifled to “kick me” that I can recommend you find and cleave to, never again to stray. I do not think it would be very smart to dress your boy up and parade him around near the base at bar closing on a Saturday night; nor do I think those of us who fail to conform in every particular to local community standards for gender performance need cower at home forever for fear of attracting a disapproving glance. Somewhere between “don’t frighten the horses” and “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” lies the perfect level of public self-expression for you two as individuals of your particular place and time. Find it. Also consider finding some fellow gender traitors with whom to make your scene, even if that scene is no more transgressive than going out for fish and chips (I’m pretty sure that’s what I ate at your local brew pub while waiting for our truck to be fixed so we could get the hell out of there) and the late showing of Snakes on a Plane. I think you’ll be OK. I wouldn’t recommend the Starbucks-and-ball-gag excursion, but that’s because it’s in bad taste, not because it could get you killed. You’ll have to use your common sense. If you haven’t got any, I really do think you’d better stay home.
Love,
Andrea

Pandora boxing

-
0

OK OK yes I should be getting back to work, but hey — I’m the clubs columnist, it’s my job to be braindead on Mondays. So I’m about to slip into the wormhole of Pandora.com, which got a few good mentions on NPR (I heard this from friends — I can’t get NPR where I live). It’s part of the Music Genome Project, which aims to categorize music by subjects other than “scene” or “genre.” Basically, you type in a song or artist you like, and a virtual panel of distinguished musicologists creates a radio station of songs that share basic affinities to your choice — I’m imagining things like “melancholy” and “string section” and “Peruvian by way of Iceland” to be examples of the qualifying characteristics that link all the songs together. Or maybe it’s colors and flavors — like “Since U Been Gone” is brunette cheesecake and “Hollaback Girl” is purple baking powder. Or maybe it’s like computer dating, MP3-style. But who knows? I’m always game to learn more about myself from computers, and lord knows with all the wealth of music out there in Webland I’m totally eager to have someone pick out my jams for me. — Marke B

Joan of archaeology

-
0

HAIRY SITUATION “Trog has a beautiful Victorian,” Matthew Martin says after giving me the address of the house where he and his castmates are rehearsing their upcoming stage production. A day later I arrive at said residence and am ushered through the front door, where cast members from Trog! — including Martin and Trog himself, Mike Finn — greet me after descending a staircase in a dramatic manner.
Joan Crawford might approve.
Not that Crawford’s approval is a viable method of judging the success of Trog!, which parodies her truly absurd final big-screen effort, a 1970 supposed horror movie that Martin brilliantly describes as “an attempt to meld Planet of the Apes and The Miracle Worker.” I first saw Trog while eating a potent batch of hash-tinged popcorn, and that psychedelic effect seems to have carried over to this theatrical version, which incorporates video projections, Finn’s circus skills, Martin’s library of movie scores, and aspects of Crawford’s life into the story of anthropologist Dr. Brockton (Crawford in the movie, Martin-as-Crawford-playing-the-scientist in the play) and the sweet troglodyte she loves and protects from a hostile, misunderstanding public.
After passing a banquet room stocked with candy bars and carbonated beverages, Martin, producer Steve Murray, and I gather around a table on the back porch to discuss Trog! “I was going to go for more of an authentic, orange-haired, Joan-in-Trog look,” says Martin. “But I thought, I’m going to seem more like Susan Hayward or the Joker than people’s iconic image of Joan.”
Martin has played Ann Miller, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and personal fave Bette Davis as both Baby Jane (in the early-’90s hit Whatever Happened to BB Jane?) and Charlotte Hollis (in last year’s Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte), but this is his first time taking on a Crawford role. You might say now he knows how Joan of Hollywood felt. “It’s another one for the gun belt,” he says with a laugh, lighting up a cigarette and observing that Crawford’s good manners were so extreme that she would “write a thank-you note to someone’s thank-you note.”
A native San Franciscan who once embodied both Addison DeWitt and Eve Harrington in the same high school speech class performance, Martin counts Charles Pierce among his early influences. “I was mesmerized by how [Pierce] could control an audience,” he says. But he also takes pains to distinguish his acting approach and experience from drag cliché — for one thing, one of his best stage roles to date was Oscar Levant in Theatre Rhinoceros’s recent production of Schönberg; for another, he concentrates on overall character rather than gender when playing a part.
Trog! allows Martin to celebrate “unadulterated ham-ola,” which his producer Murray feels is absent from most gay theater, which is obsessed with being serious or fixated on naked boys. Though Trog!’s sense of parody extends beyond the source material, it doesn’t miss the movie’s most ludicrous moments, from Crawford’s repeated requests for a “hypo gun” down to her character’s strange (perhaps drunken) reference to the “savage breast” and off-kilter pronunciation of the g in the name Trog. “I’ve rehearsed Neil Simon plays to an empty theater and worried, ‘Is this funny at all?’” says Martin. “But if nobody laughs at this, at least we’ve been entertained by our own high jinks. A lot of this show is wah-wah burlesque, very vaudeville, with physical comedy. Mike [Finn] is a trained circus performer — how many Trogs do you know that can juggle and ride a unicycle?”
Martin knows one, it soon becomes apparent, when he, Finn, and the rest of Trog!’s cast (minus a busy Heklina) run through a performance, complete with copious examples of the “fourth-wall breakage” that Martin adores. Anytime the script refers to the press or a reporter, Martin directs his gaze at me, and in one scene, I’m dragged onstage to play the role of a doctor who incites Trog’s wrath by stroking his chest under the guise of looking for a heartbeat.
If the rehearsal is anything to go by, besides Michael Sousa’s pinched-nose performance as a snotty villain, many of Trog!’s funniest moments come from the considerable chemistry between Martin and Finn — or rather, between Crawford and beast. At the end of the interview, I ask Finn what it’s like to play the role of Trog. “It’s familiar,” he says. Then he gets straight to the point. “I’m a hairy man.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
TROG!
Through Sept. 23
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
Theatre Rhinoceros
2926 16th St., SF
(415) 861-5079
www.therhino.org

Confessions of a Gofessional

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Things move fast in rap. By the time their second album, World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch), dropped in April, the Team already had a new single, the “Hyphy Juice” remix, which now rivals “It’s Getting Hot” as their biggest radio hit. Since then, Moedoe label head K.O.A.B. has inked a deal for Hyphy Juice, the energy drink he co-owns with the group, to be sold at 7-11 stores nationwide, while Team member Clyde Carson just signed as a solo act to Capitol Records. Carson’s ambitious project, Theater Music — consisting of one multisong, album-length track à la Prince’s Lovesexy (Warner, 1988) — will appear next year, cobranded by Moedoe as well as the Game’s Black Wall Street.
Yet my appearance at the Team’s condo concerns none of these matters. Instead, I’ve been summoned by Kaz Kyzah to discuss The Gofessional, his new mixtape with KMEL managing director DJ Big Von Johnson. Consisting of 19 tracks of mostly original material, The Gofessional is part of a growing trend in the Bay Area mix scene — like Husalah and Jacka’s Animal Planet and Beeda Weeda’s Homework — of blurring the distinction between the carefully crafted album and the “anything goes” approach of mixtapes. What makes The Gofessional unique, however, is its method of distribution: it’s available for free at bigvon.com.
In the first week alone, the mixtape was downloaded 7,000 times on the strength of two singles currently spinning on KMEL: “Cocaine,” a soulful love-as-addiction metaphor over a 9th Wonder beat, and the LT-produced original “Love” (featuring Jimmie Reign), an R&B-infused investigation of more serious subjects often neglected by the Bay’s current “go dumb” ethos.
STALLED PREMIERE?
Before beginning, however, Kaz clears up the lingering mystery around World Premiere’s release, not, as anticipated, through major label Universal but rather through independent powerhouse Koch.
“We were on a label of a Mexican artist, Lil Rob, and it wasn’t the place for us,” Kaz says, referring to the Universal-distributed Upstairs imprint, which caters primarily to Latino rap. “When we got over there, it wasn’t what we wanted. But it worked out where we could use it to get the album done and move on. We didn’t have to pay any bread. We actually came out winning.”
“At the same time, I was going through legal trouble,” he continues, describing continuing fallout from a robbery charge he caught at age 18. “I was worried about going to jail and house arrest. I did end up spending a couple of months in jail, so it was a real hectic time.”
While the delays of label jumping and legal woes may have muted World Premiere’s impact, the period of house arrest last year proved productive for Kaz, who with West Oakland rapper J-Stalin and East Oakland producers Tha Mekanix formed a side group called the Go Boyz and recorded an album at the condo. These late-night sessions featuring an ankle-braceleted Kaz were the genesis of the current Go Movement, which already constitutes a third front in the Bay’s hyphy and thizz campaigns.
“What I want people to understand about the Go Movement,” the Hyphy Juice shareholder stresses, “is it’s not not about getting hyphy, going dumb. But it encompasses a whole lot more and that’s what makes it so powerful. Like when I talk to Dotrix [of Tha Mekanix], we’ll use go 1,500 times and have an in-depth conversation.
“It was Dot who said, ‘You the Gofessional, man.’ And that was one of my favorite movies, The Professional, so I used it for my mixtape. I didn’t want to come out with the Go Boyz, and nobody know what Go is all about. I was talking to some people from Marin, they never even heard of the Go Movement. To us it’s old, but a lot of people are still catching on.”
GOING FOR THE STREETS
The free download format of The Gofessional is proving to be an effective means of spreading the word. (Another 5,000 hard copies have already been distributed for the benefit of those not online, and more are on the way.) For Johnson, who apart from Kaz is the author of this largess, the free mixtape is designed to boost record sales as well as keep the Bay’s current buzz alive.
“I got 7,000 downloads in a week, when I know artists who put out records that took seven months to reach that in sales,” Johnson says later that day at KMEL. “There are a lot of big artists, a lot of songs on the radio, but sales aren’t adding up. So I feel like, give some away. Instead of trying to break a song, I’m trying to break an artist in the streets. I definitely think this will stimulate album sales.”
It’s refreshing to hear such a statement these days, when the “free download” has been blamed for bringing the recording industry to its knees. To me, Johnson’s logic is irrefutable; I’m more likely to check out something for free than for $15, and I’m way more likely to buy a $15 album from someone whose previous work I have and like. As The Gofessional is easily better than dozens of albums I’ve actually purchased, the odds of me buying an eventual Kaz Kyzah solo album are extremely high. Given the current excitement in Bay rap and Carson’s deal with Capitol, the interest in Kaz’s mixtape hasn’t failed to attract the attention of majors as well.
“I got a lot of labels looking at me,” Kaz confesses. “I ain’t put out an album. They’re checking for me off of mixtapes, which is weird, but it’s a beautiful thing. People be, like, this is hotter than people’s albums. But I’m a perfectionist, so doing a solo album is going to take a minute, really sitting down and figuring out what I want to do with it. And not being too quick to jump on the wrong deal.” SFBG

1...123124125...128Page 124 of 128

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org