Scene

Black man in the cosmos

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The list in surrealist

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1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey’s brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee’s dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor’s first standup film. He’s coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn’t stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he’s a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch’s mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style. My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima’s off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader’s fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

The cult of Fanaka

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cheryl@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Visitors to filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka’s MySpace page are greeted with a clip of Snoop Dogg clutching a pile of Fanaka DVDs — 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance; 1976’s Emma Mae, a.k.a. Black Sister’s Revenge; 1979’s Penitentiary; and 1982’s Penitentiary II. He quotes some choice lines and enthusiastically sings the director’s praises: "These movies right here — this is black history."

When I mention Snoop Dogg to Fanaka, he’s delighted. "All the rappers love me," he says over the phone from Los Angeles. "Also actors, like Eddie Murphy. The first time I ran into him, he was with his brother, and they recited [a scene from Penitentiary] verbatim. That happens all the time."

The Fanaka library (which also includes 1987’s Penitentiary III and 1992’s Street Wars) has also earned a following among cult-movie fans. "I love that they’re cult films, because of what a ‘cult film’ means: the film lives because the people want it to live," he explains. He’s not a fan of the term "blaxploitation" — though it’s commonly applied to his films — due to its connotations.

"There were companies that were very profitable, and all they made were ‘exploitation’ films, which meant that they made low-budget films on subjects that Hollywood didn’t want to take on," he says. "It only became a negative term once they put that prefix ‘blax’ on it. No black filmmaker ever liked that term, though it was coined by a black publicist. ‘Blaxploitation’ has evolved into a genre, like a horror film, or an action film. But black filmmakers still resent the term because of its origins."

Born in Mississippi, raised in L.A., Fanaka says was distracted from committing a crime by a pair of UCLA recruiters who made him believe he could realize his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. ("They asked me, did I want to go to UCLA? I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like to go to the moon, too, but my chances of getting there are pretty minuscule.’") He was eventually accepted into the school’s prestigious film program, where he also earned a master’s degree; his peers included Charles Burnett, who directed 1977’s Killer of Sheep.

"It was an exciting time to be a black filmmaker," Fanaka says. "People like Charles Burnett were part of my film crew, I was part of his film crew. We helped each other, advised each other. Those were the halcyon days of filmmaking at UCLA."

Even more notably, "I’m the only person in the history of filmmaking to write, produce, direct, and get theatrical distribution for three feature films I made as part of my curriculum at the UCLA film school," Fanaka says. He shot his first feature, Welcome Home Brother Charles, on the weekends when he didn’t have class.

"I felt like, if I had access to all of this equipment, and the wherewithal to make a 10-minute film, why not make a whole feature?" he recalls. "I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, and no matter how good a short film is, the audience is going to be limited. Then I went on to graduate school and I made Emma Mae and Penitentiary."

This kind of determination also extended to Fanaka’s fundraising efforts. His parents invested their life savings into his work (good call — Penitentiary, Fanaka says, was the most successful indie film of 1980), but he wondered why he was rejected for a grant by the American Film Institute. He did some research and learned that only one African American had ever been a part of the grant-awarding committee. "I wanted to give minorities a shot," he says, so he wrote a letter to then-Sen. Alan Cranston suggesting that the committee should be more diverse. The next grant cycle, he got the money to help make Emma Mae; the following cycle, he served on the committee. "That goes to show you how the squeaking wheel gets the oil," he remembers, proudly.

In less-tenacious hands, there’d certainly be no Welcome Home Brother Charles. "White slave owners used to tell white women horror stories about the size of the black males’ sexual equipment," Fanaka explains. "But rather than frightening the white females, it intrigued them. I wanted to make a film that took that myth and exaggerated it to show how ridiculous it was, and I chose to do it in a very surreal, powerful scene."

(Note to readers who haven’t seen the film: uh, think 1997’s Anaconda. The entire Penitentiary series is also a gold mine of surreal moments, particularly part three, which features a prison-dwelling, crack-smoking, snarling killer dwarf. Fanaka sums up that film in one word: "feral.")

Now in his late 60s, Fanaka has been slowed in his efforts to make Penitentiary IV by complications from diabetes. He’s also been working for the last decade on a music documentary, Hip Hop Hope. It’s an apt title for a film by Fanaka, who calls himself "a very optimistic person." He’s enjoyed the resurgence of interest in his work, with screenings at places like San Francisco’s Dead Channels Film Festival and Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse, and frequent airings of the Penitentiary films on cable.

"My most artistic film, in my estimation, was Welcome Home Brother Charles, because I had no axes to grind but to try and use the medium of cinema to attack that myth, and attack it in a way that was quote-unquote artistic. Of course, very few people took that from it because that one scene kind of colors the whole film," he chuckles. "But I think as time goes by, people are gonna realize the value of these films I’ve made and begin to understand them."

Confessions: Size matters

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By Molly Freedenberg

I have a healthy appreciation for the male anatomy, especially that scene stealer, the penis. (Too bad, testicles. Apologies, anus. You’re always going to play bit parts as long as Dick’s in the movie.) That said, I’m not particular about size. Or rather, there are so many other factors that are more important to me: color, shape, the feel of the skin, and perhaps most important, the body (and soul) it’s attached to.

In short? To me, size matters much less than just about everything else.

I realize, however, that not everyone shares my opinion. Case in point? The girl I recently overheard talking about her newest lover. (Names and places omitted to protect the guilty.)

This lovely little Latina with a delightfully filthy mouth was discussing, in detail, her new partner’s member. Both long and wide, it was perhaps the biggest she’d ever seen. And oh, did she like it. Much better than a thin penis, which she called “pencil dick,” or a short stubby one. “What is that, an eraser?”

Merger on the march

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Originally published August 24, 2005

THE NATION’S TWO largest alternative newspaper publishers have been in intense negotiations over a merger that would create an 18-paper chain controlled to a significant extent by venture capitalists, new documents obtained by the Bay Guardian show.

The documents, which appear to be valid, include a May 27, 2005, draft of a merger agreement between Village Voice Media and New Times. They were provided by a source close to the VVM side of the negotiations.

The draft calls for the creation of a new company controlled by a nine-member board. Five of the members would come from Phoenix-based New Times and its primary venture-capital firm, the Boston-based Alta Communications.

New Times, which owns 11 newspapers including the SF Weekly, would have 62 percent of the equity in the new venture, and VVM, which owns the Village Voice and six other papers, would have 38 percent.

The documents mention a Nov. 30, 2005, date for closing the deal, but suggest that the date may have to be pushed back, in part because of federal regulatory issues.

Rumors of a possible VVM-New Times merger have been swirling for months (see “Chain Gang,” 5/25/05). Neither of the principals has denied the reports, although employees of some VVM papers have attempted to dismiss them.

But the new documents are the first concrete confirmation that talks are indeed going on, and that the two parties are close enough to agreement that they’ve circulated draft bylaws of a new limited liability corporation that would own all of the VVM and New Times papers.

As of late May there were clearly still some issues to be resolved: The documents include a memo from VVM CEO David Schneiderman complaining that New Times wants to “renegotiate the terms of our deal” and arguing that some New Times papers, including the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, are losing a lot of money.

“In the 2004 Calendar year, SF Weekly, East Bay Express and the Cleveland Scene racked up losses of $4 million,” the memo states. SF Weekly, it says, “is locked in a brutal struggle in SF with no sign of success and the same is true in Cleveland.”

The memo concludes: “In short, they have some real losers and we don’t…. given these facts, I don’t believe a renegotiation is warranted.”

But overall, the shape of the deal appears to be fairly clear. A new Delaware-based LLC would be created, with a nine-member board. Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, the executive editor and CEO of New Times, would each have a seat on the nine-member board, as would an Alta representative. Lacey, Larkin, and the Alta rep would then choose two more members – one of whom would be New Times chief financial officer Jed Brunst – giving New Times and its banker a 5-4 majority.

Schneiderman (who is slated, the documents show, to receive a $500,000 bonus for his work on the merger) would have a seat on the board, and the final three seats would go to Goldman, Sachs & Co., Trimaran Capital Partners, and Weiss Peck & Greer, all of whom are VVM investors.

So in the end, at least four of the board members – and possibly five – will be venture capitalists

The documents state that all but two of the board members (also called “managers”) can be removed from the board for “cause” – but “the Lacey Manager or the Larkin Manager may not be removed as Managers with or without Cause, it being understood that the sole basis on which either such Manager may be removed as a Manager shall be such Manager’s conviction of a felony.”

The documents suggest that the new company has been set up with the idea of an eventual sale: They state that, for the first three years, the company can only be sold with the consent of six of the nine board members. But over the next two years, five board members could approve a sale, and after five years, three directors could make that decision.

“In the event the Board of Managers approves a Sale of the Company … all Members shall be required and hereby agree to cooperate with and participate in such sale,” they state.

The documents also address the prospect that the SF Weekly, the East Bay Express, and the Cleveland Scene could be sold off or closed if they continue to hemorrhage cash. “[I]f at any time up to and including the Third Anniversary date, the cumulative losses for any of the [East Bay, Cleveland or San Francisco units] (brackets in original document) exceed the cumulative projected losses for such unit … the Company, with the consent of five managers, shall be permitted to dispose of such non-performing unit by merger, consolidation, sale of assets or otherwise,” they state.

The new company would be required to honor the union contracts at the Village Voice – the only paper in either chain that’s fully unionized (the L.A. Weekly has some union workers). But other employees may not fare so well. The new company “may, in its reasonable discretion, transition all employees … to new compensation, benefit plans, programs or arrangements.”

One source in New York said that “as I understand it, Larkin will be the CEO and Schneiderman will run the Internet operations. I believe the rest of the VVM corporate staff (essentially finance people) will be let go.”

A separate document, dated June 1, 2005, is titled “NT/VV Proposed Business Consolidation Agreement Issues List Reutf8g to NT Draft of Contribution and LLC Agreement.” It lists some concerns – apparently from VVM executives – about the deal.

It cites a “drop date of Nov. 30, 2005,” but notes that “[t]his is too short, obtaining HSR approval may take a long time.” That’s a reference to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, which requires federal approval of any merger that may have an impact on business competition.

That might not be routine: New Times and VVM have run afoul of federal antitrust laws in the past. The two chains were charged a year and a half ago with conspiring to end alt-weekly competition in Los Angeles and Cleveland (see “New Times Nailed,” 1/29/03). Under a consent decree, the companies are required for five years to give the Justice Department notice before pursuing any merger.

We’ve spoken to several sources close to the negotiations who say it’s likely that process is already under way. But the Justice Department has consistently maintained that any such notice would be confidential.

The two parties are also keeping a tight hold on the information. Staffers at VVM and New Times papers seem unaware of the details of the talks, and top management has refused to answer their questions about the situation. The agreement includes a clause stating, “No press releases or public disclosure, either written or oral, of the transactions contemplated by this agreement, shall be made by a party to the agreement without written consent of VV Media LLC and NT holdings.”

The merger would signal the biggest step so far in the consolidation of ownership in the alternative press. The merged company (which thus far is identified only by the dummy name “Newco”) would represent 14.2 percent of the membership of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and would give one chain operation control of some of the biggest media markets in the country, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, and Houston (see “SOS: No secret New Times-Village Voice Media deal, sfbg.com).

Schneiderman, Lacey, and Larkin all declined to return messages seeking comment.

The Bay Guardian is suing New Times, charging predatory pricing by the SF Weekly.

Aspect gallery goes there Friday night

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By Juliette Tang

“All art is erotic,” Adolf Loos famously said in 1908. We say, ok maybe, but not all art is equally erotic. All you need to do in order to test that hypothesis is look at American Gothic by Grant Wood and compare it to anything Edouard-Henri Avril has ever done.


Photo by Craig Scoffone

Those who like your art on the more (i.e. blatantly) erotic side will be happy to know that, this Friday, March 15, at the Aspect Gallery (731 Polk Street), there will be a nude and erotic art show from 6:00-9:30PM. Enjoy food and refreshments (you can BYOB) while perusing a titillating selection of erotic paintings and photographs from 12 local San Francisco artists who are making the art scene sexier for us all.


Man on Bed, by Erika Meriaux.

The Aspect Gallery is injecting a much needed shot of Viagra into the San Francisco art scene.

Totally tubular

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TV OR NOT TO BE "All around is magic, just open your eyes and see it," declares either Siegfried or Roy at the beginning of A Rich Tradition of Magic, a previously VHS-only compendium of visual abuse compiled by the inimitable Pinky of TV Carnage. The man isn’t kidding. The menu of Rich Tradition is formatted to look like a remote control — with the push of a button, your screen melts like the hallucinogenic kick-off of a bad acid trip, bringing visions of spray-on hair, senior citizen aerobics, white teens moonwalking to Kenny Loggins’ "Footloose," and grunge figure skating set to "Smells Like Teen Spirit." (Is this what drove Kurt Cobain to suicide?)

Not yet prone to gutwrenchingly funny juxtapositions (Say Anything boombox scene meets child with extreme vibrato singing "Lady in Red"; John Ritter meets Rosie O’Donnell’s horrible idea of someone with Down syndrome), this early installment in the TV Carnage library veers toward the straightforwardly unsettling and outright disturbing. We get aerial performers accidentally slicing each other in half in mid-air, an elephant stomping on people in a circus tent and then rampaging through the streets, and a split-second skull-glimpse of Heaven’s Gate suicide guru Marshall Applewhite. We get Real TV footage of a methed-out man holding his baby as hostage, dangling the boy Blanket-style from a second-story window and demanding that police deliver him some beer.

Kids are people, too. A Rich Tradition of Magic‘s hapless master of ceremonies Gary Coleman ricochets between performative childhood and sad adulthood. A public service safety announcement by a Diff’rent Strokes-era Coleman is cross-cut with an Entertainment Tonight report about him assaulting an annoying fan. Later, Coleman warns us all of the dangers of "Showoff-itis."

John Travolta lipsync footage is perhaps the chief disturbing link between A Rich Tradition of Magic and The Dinah Shore Portal to Hell, another DVD whose beyond-Dante depths I’m just beginning to plumb. The opening installment is a series of lipysnc and live musical performances on Shore’s television show. A strange assortment of performers including Jeff Bridges and NFL star Terry Bradshaw try to be musical with varying degrees of success. William Shatner repeatedly attempts to be dramatic and poetic. All the while, unexpected lesbian golf icon Shore looks on admiringly, our friendly guide to the diabolical stretches of celebrity narcissism, her reliable appearance taking on an increasingly absurdist quality. Later, we are treated to Roger Ebert repeatedly tongue-lashing Gene Siskel between takes while recording promo spots. Rumor has it that it’s the later chapters devoted to alcohol, cocaine, and LSD that truly deliver the TV horror. I’ll report on those another time, if I survive them. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.tvcarnage.com

The world stage

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 20-31, various venues

www.sfiaf.org

Pics: Fake furs, fishnets, flourescence — How Weird!

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Text and photos by Ariel Soto

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An over-abundance of fluorescent fake furs, fishnets and colorful masks dominated the scene at the How Weird Street Faire this past Sunday, May 11. On every corner of the festival a different DJ mixed and bounced the huge crowds into electronic bliss, who danced and hula hooped under makeshift dance halls and spinning disco balls. Artists painted beneath the heat of the sun while others perched on the sidewalk to wolf down hot dogs and a cold beer before heading back for more booty shaking. The assortment of strange and wonderful costumes was astonishing and showed how a few bright wigs can turn us all into the weirdest kid on the block.

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Live Shots: Boy in Static celebrates sweet suspicion

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Text and photos by Ariel Soto. Read Marke B.’s take on Boy in Static’s single “Young San Francisco” here

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Alexander Chen

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Newish to the San Francisco music scene, Boy in Static already has a fledgling following. Only one of the duo could make it, but Bottom of the Hill on Wednesday, May 6, Alexander Chen used everything from a violin, ankle bells and a toy piano to play pieces that expressed both joy and melancholy.

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When dinos go wild: Dengue Fever scores ‘Lost World’ at the Castro

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By Kimberly Chun

Surprise: no theremins in earshot at the Castro Theatre on May 5 when Dengue Fever unleashed its new score for the 1925 silent adventure film, The Lost World, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Instead the seemingly sold-out audience got plenty of laughs, the compelling Wallace Beery as the seemingly mad Professor Challenger, herky-jerky yet still marvelous stop-motion dinosaurs, shameful black-face in the form of Sambo sidekick (Jules Cowles), and the fab scene of an astonishingly resilient Brontosaurus crashing through London city streets before plummeting from the famed bridge. The latter moment clearly evoked King Kong – and no wonder: the special effects were produced by Willis O’Brien, who also coaxed Kong to life.

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New art and style on Geary

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With a calm demeanor and a pulled-together, no-nonsense appearance, Claudia Altman-Siegel isn’t an obvious suspect when it comes to identifying the driving force behind a conceptual art show that draws well-heeled European tourists and people clad in Converse shoes and skinny jeans. Both types, and more, are drawn to Matt Keegan’s "Postcards & Calendars," where they’re confronted by an eight-foot list of days of the week and a larger-than-life photograph of a New York Times reader hidden behind dismal headlines.

The four month-old Altman Siegel Gallery is set apart from neighboring galleries by its inclusion of a window, a trait that trades art hermeticism for the possibility of sunshine. Street noise is present but not disruptive — a reminder that another world exists beyond the space’s light cocoon of images and ideas. It has a distinctively different aura from the other galleries in the 49 Geary St. building, something Altman-Siegel says she is "sort of blind to."

After 10 years of work in New York City, Altman-Siegel slipped over to San Francisco to fill a gap in the West Coast gallery scene, bringing emerging local and internationally established artists who are still early on the trajectory to significance in the art canon.

Local art or specificity is prominent in Altman-Siegel’s curatorial work to date. The current show, though by a New York artist, includes sketches of familiar San Francisco street corners. Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen’s surreal cosmic photographs were the focus of the gallery’s first solo show.

Across the street, mannequins wearing teal trousers topped by black, multipocketed jackets and craftily reconstructed vintage dresses stand defiantly among an installation of birch tree branches and rusted machinery. A former STA travel office has been transformed into Shotwell, a cutting-edge update of a funky Aunt Edna boutique.

Newlyweds Michael and Holly Weaver needed somewhere to hawk their extensive collection of vintage clothes. When they landed a lease at 36 Geary St., the shop expanded to fuse groundbreaking European fashion and clothes by Bay Area designers. Denim from local menswear line B.Son is paired with chic shirts by Parisian collective Surface2Air. Shape-shifting square dresses from the San Francisco duo Please Dress Up! hang alongside bold separates by British label Scout. On the other side of Silverman Gallery’s recent move to Sutter Street, the openings of Shotwell and Altman-Siegel suggest that something new and bold is creeping up on Union Square.

Shop local, City Hall!

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news@sfbg.com

On Dec. 3, 2008, just before noon, Mayor Gavin Newsom arrived at a press conference in Noe Valley to remind city residents why it’s important to shop locally. The mayor climbed out of his shiny new hybrid SUV, walked into the Ark Toy Company, showed charts and graphs, and talked about how money spent in town helps the local economy. Joined by Steve Falk, president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Newsom urged holiday shoppers to look first in San Francisco before buying something on the Internet or in some suburban mall.

The mayor’s shop-local press conference was a clear sign that the debate over the role of small business in the San Francisco economy is over. Everyone from the mayor’s business advisors to the Chamber of Commerce to small business advocates and progressive economists now agrees that small local businesses provide the vast majority of the jobs, keep their money in town, and generate more tax dollars, more wealth, and more prosperity for this city than the big out-of-town chains.

It was a picture-perfect scene, until KPIX-TV reporter Hank Plante asked the mayor an embarrassing question: Why, he wanted to know, did the Mayor’s Office buy Newsom’s new car in Colma?

Newsom said he didn’t have a clue.

Actually, the reason was pretty simple: the dealership in Colma submitted the lowest bid. But San Francisco lost out on the sales tax, a local Chevy dealer that was going out of business lost a local sale, San Francisco workers lost a commission — and in the end, the city almost certainly lost more on the deal than it saved with the Colma discount.

That’s the untold story behind the mayor’s promotion. San Francisco, as a buyer of goods and services worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, does a terrible job at shopping local. Indeed, for years small business advocates have been trying to get city officials to make it easier for local merchants to get city contracts — and they’ve made very little progress.

"I’ve worked so hard on this, year after year, and nothing ever happens," Scott Hauge, a small business activist and organizer, told us. "After a while, I just threw in the towel."

Hauge is devoting his energy these days to statewide issues. But on the local level, there’s a growing sense that the city needs to do more to help small local businesses get their share of the massive public spending pie.

"The Small Business Commission has made it clear that this will be a priority over the next year," Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the commission’s acting director, told us.

Nobody knows exactly what percentage of city contracts for goods and services go to local businesses. Hauge said the Mayor’s Office did a limited survey about a year ago, but the data wasn’t very good. And while Newsom signed an executive order in 2005 directing departments to look for ways to patronize local businesses, there’s not much to show for it.

"I think probably less than 10 percent [of city spending] goes to local businesses," Hauge said.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, a former small business commissioner, agrees. "I think it’s accurate to say that at least 70 to 90 percent of all city contracts go to out-of-town businesses," he told us.

As Dick-Endrizzi pointed out, city purchasing has strict rules — and for good reason. "In most cases, you have to put out a request for proposals and take the lowest bid," she said. "If you didn’t have that, you’d have a big problem with favoritism."

But when the lowest bid is the only criterion, San Francisco businesses are at a distinct disadvantage.

"Say a city agency wants to buy five hammers," said Steven Cornell, owner of Brownie’s Hardware. "I have the hammers for $6, but somebody in Nowhere, Miss., can sell them for $5.99.

"Well, the shop in Mississippi doesn’t have to pay San Francisco’s minimum wage, doesn’t have to pay for sick days, doesn’t have to pay for health care … We’ve asked businesses to contribute to all these good social policies, then those businesses get penalized because someone else can sell something cheaper."

Cornell — who says he agrees that local businesses should pay well and give their workers benefits — is frustrated that when it comes to purchasing, the city doesn’t give anything back. "We lost S&C Ford, we lost Ellis Brooks Chevrolet," he said. "Those were all union jobs, with good benefits. And how many cars did the city buy from them?"

When Cornell was on the Small Business Commission, he remembered some small locally owned cabinet-making shops came to complain about a $4 million city contract for woodwork. "They told us that they lost the contract to a Canadian firm," he said. "The costs of operating in San Francisco were higher than in Canada, so they couldn’t compete."

"We do not as a city reflect the fact that we ask employers to do good things for their workers," Chiu added. "When we spend perhaps $1 billion a year in city contracts, those employers don’t have a level playing field."

Sure, on the surface and in the short term, the city gets a better deal when it awards contracts based entirely on price. But San Francisco has, as a matter of public policy, already decided there are good reasons to give minority-owned contractors some advantage in bidding, and that public contractors should pay prevailing union wages and offer benefits to domestic partners. Local enterprises get a modest advantage in some bids, but nowhere near enough to make up for the cost difference of operating in San Francisco.

And as Newsom himself has made clear, spending money locally has a long-term economic benefit that almost certainly outweighs the price differential in most bids. "When Newsom bought his car in Colma, the city lost the sales taxes, and lost the multiplier effect of the money being spent in town," Cornell noted.

In fact, a 2007 study by Civic Economics, sponsored by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, showed that if city residents shifted just 10 percent of their purchasing from national chains to locally-owned businesses, the city would gain 1,300 new jobs and $200 million in economic activity every year.

Imagine the activity — the positive benefits to the local economy — that would come with the city shifting, say, 25 percent of its spending to local businesses.

Obviously the city can’t buy everything in town. "Nobody in San Francisco makes Muni trains," Cornell noted. But a lot of what city departments buy, from hammers and paper to cars and trucks, is available from local suppliers — or could be. "If the city made it known it was looking to buy something locally, some entrepreneur would come along and figure out a way to supply it," Cornell said.

So how could this work on a policy level? It’s not that complicated. The city controller, or the Human Rights Commission, which oversees contracting policy, could devise a formula showing how much the cost of complying with city laws like the minimum wage, health care, and sick days (laws that most of us, and many small businesses, fully support) drives up the cost of doing business in San Francisco. Then give local merchants an equivalent advantage in the bidding process.

In other words, if the hammers at Brownie’s Hardware cost 25 cents more than the hammers in Nowhere, Miss., because Cornell pays for his workers’ health insurance, he should only have to come within 25 cents of the cut-rate suppliers’ price to get the city’s business. And if the taxpayers have to fork over a few cents more to buy local hammers, the money will come back, and more, from the demonstrated benefits of shopping locally.

Chiu thinks that’s a good idea, and he’s already taken the first steps to forcing the city to shop local. Chiu introduced legislation in April requiring the city to set aside a portion of all contracts for locally-wned businesses and to increase the financial advantage local firms get in bidding.

And at Chiu’s request, the HRC will appear before the supervisors Land Use Committee May 11 to present the latest data on how much city spending goes to local businesses. "I’ve been asking for this for two years," Chiu said.

"It is unwise for our city not to take $1 of public money and give it to a local business that will pass that dollar onto its local employee, who will then spend it at another local business," he added. "The multiplier effect of this is that money spent locally is better for the economy, and for the taxpayers."

Great expectations?

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Equality has been achieved: this recession is kicking everyone’s arse. But I couldn’t help but squirm at a few recent music-biz disjunctions. How does one reconcile the scene at a South by Southwest "Great Expectations" label panel last month, listening to Tony Kiewel describe 2008 as one of the Sub Pop’s best years, with the bad news from Touch and Go’s Chicago HQ a week later? After shuttering its distribution — which once supported imprints ranging from Drag City to Estrus — in February, the 25-year-plus label laid off its entire staff. Owner and ex-Necros bassist Corey Rusk was going to run the enterprise solo.

A second major blow, especially when one considers Touch and Go’s history releasing important discs by Big Black, Scratch Acid, Die Kreuzen, Slint, Jesus Lizard, and of course, the Butthole Surfers (though the label’s 1999 loss in a legal battle with that band likely hasn’t helped). "Touch and Go basically allowed Merge to exist as something other than a singles label," Mac McCaughan of Merge Records stated in February. "If a company that did everything the right way can’t survive in this environment, then who can?"

Are these simply the latest surges and sucks of free-market capitalism’s death throes and toilet-bowl flows? And what’s the state of independence for local labels eking it out in this still-roiling stew of sorry economic news?

"The black and white fact is that [Sub Pop] is not Touch and Go," opines Cory Brown, owner of Bay Area independent Absolutely Kosher and general manager of Misra Records. He notes that Sub Pop is partially owned by Warner Bros. and that Touch and Go had the tough luck of losing some of its biggest artists, including TV on the Radio, Blonde Redhead, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Those departures "all went down not very well," says Brown, who believes Touch and Go’s contraction was "as much an emotional decision as a business one," considering the company had big releases by Pinback and Three Mile Pilot planned.

Rusk declined to comment, although one wonders what will become of his label’s newer bands, among them the Bay Area’s Mi Ami and Sholi. Still, should he strike up a new alliance, all systems could be go at Touch and Go once again. As Brown puts it, "Geoff Travis has closed Rough Trade multiple times now and come back with it."

What of the local label landscape? Lookout! and Jackpine Social Club have ceased new releases, whereas Tigerbeat6 and Anticon have left town. Slumberland is surfing a twee rock revival, and hip-hop’s SMC has taken on bigger fish like Killer Mike. As newbie Bright Antenna appears on the horizon, veterans such as Alternative Tentacles, Fat Wreck Chords, Runt/Water, Quannum Projects, Birdman, Daly City, Dirtybird, and Hook or Crook are staying alive. AT celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. "As music and media become increasingly accessible instantly from anywhere, the role of curator is more important than ever – if I can access 10 millions songs instantly from my phone, how do I choose?," Isaac Bess, director of business development at SF’s IODA (Independent Online Distribution Alliance) writes via e-mail.

Business is bright, thanks to smart planning, for SF distributor Revolver USA and Midheaven Mailorder, which supports labels such as Gnomonsong and DiCristina Stair Builders. "We’re doing well, and I think that has a lot to do with what our expectations are, and not looking for a big record to be carried by Walmart and Target," says general manager Mike Toppe, who thinks it’s more important to "keep connecting with people who are passionate about music."

Fat Mike, who started Fat Wreck Chords to put out music by his bands NOFX and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, has a more hardcore perspective. "In the ’90s, every fucking band we signed sold a shitload of records and got popular all over the world. It was ridiculous," he e-mails from NOFX’s current European tour. "Now only the really good bands can sell a decent amount. That’s okay, though. This industry collapse is mostly killing mediocre bands." As for the decline in CD and recorded music sales, the SF road warrior believes that’s not going to stop: "The record industry party is over, but great live bands will always do okay."

But what about the groups that can’t pick up blogosphere buzz? Both Jacobs and Brown acknowledge the difficulty in developing emerging or even mid-level bands via traditional avenues. Add in the complicating factor of so-called 360 deals, in which a label takes a percentage of all artist revenue in exchange for promotion, and you have what Brown calls a "destructive" outlook. "The bottom line is musicians should get paid," he said. "Forget about how labels are doing — how are musicians doing in this climate?

"I think new ideas really have to come into play, and those have to be based on the quality of life for the musician, not the company that comes up with an application," he continued, touching on the lack of public funds for musicians and lack of official recourse for bands if, for instance, they don’t get paid by a club. "It’s basic stuff, but it’s harder to look past those things. It has to go back to the content provider."

Reel Talk

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At last year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, in his State of Cinema address, Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly spoke of a media landscape inundated with screens, in which you’re as likely to watch a movie on your PDA, or even a grocery checkout screen, as you are in a theater. The message was clear: the way in which we create and consume films is changing. To some extent, we have been living in this brave new world for some time, so SFIFF’s choice of photographer Mary Ellen Mark to deliver this year’s State of Cinema address carries with it an implicit nostalgia for cinema’s old world. Mark, who has frequently turned her camera on marginal subjects — Indian prostitutes, homeless American teens, circus performers — has also periodically worked as an on-set photographer over her four decade career, capturing moments of behind the scene candor on the sets of directors such as François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Milos Forman, Tim Burton, and Francis Ford Coppola. The images, collected last year in Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographing on Set (Phaidon), present Mark as an anti-Annie Liebovitz. She manages to catch her subjects unaware — as with the hilarious image of Dustin Hoffman making faces behind a quite serious Sir Laurence Olivier between takes on 1976’s Marathon Man. Others — among them Marlon Brando caught with a bug resting on his bald pate on the set of 1979’s Apocalypse Now — seem to square off with the camera. Incidentally, two of this year’s major SFIFF honors are going to Coppola and fellow child of the ’60s Robert Redford, so there’s a bit of a love fest for the era going on at this year’s fest. Undoubtedly Mark has as many fascinating stories as she does compelling images, but hopefully her talk won’t just be a stroll down memory lane.

"STATE OF CINEMA ADDRESS BY MARY ELLEN MARK"

Sun/3, 1 p.m., $12.50

Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

Men and their Moogs: Junior Boys vs. Sebastien Tellier

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By Andre Torrez

I went to Bimbo’s to see Junior Boys on a whim. I knew someone who had an extra spot on the list. I didn’t know what I was getting into, and was just happy to hang with my friend. Parking was a bitch, but we settled on a lot and made our way into the swank club. North Beach was definitely in the house.

Looking around, I couldn’t help but notice that this wasn’t exactly my scene. I felt like I was in an episode from The O.C. where the kids somehow get to hang in the bar and watch the latest “cool indie band” circa-2004. Waiting in anticipation of a band you don’t know usually proves to be anti-climactic, but there was something about the performance itself that was amiss. It didn’t take long for me to put my finger on it: I was annoyed at the lack of camaraderie between the band members, especially the core songwriting duo: the front man and the mysteriously silent man on the Moog synthesizer directly to his left. The drummer was in the background as expected, albeit all Genesis-looking because of the cool lighting, but the lead singer and this Moog man were placed prominently next to one another even though Moog man never spoke a word. I guess he had a cool haircut and all, but if you’ve got nothing to say and little to do, why take the spotlight? He might as well have been a prop. It was almost as if a wall was dividing front man and Moog man — they had little to no interaction with one another on stage. Not even a glance.

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Moog man and frontman.

The two main men of Junior Boys would be better off pursuing separate musical paths, instead of catering to trends by fusing the electronic with the organic. With his scruffy look, the lead singer-guitarist came across as more of a traditional songwriter. He focused on lyrics and on connections with the audience. He was adept at banter and seemed to thrive off the audience’s energy. The man at the Moog admittedly held down the electronic portion of the show, but he was utterly detached. Given the opportunity to let loose, I’m sure he’d come alive — if he just wasn’t stifled by that other guy with the words and guitar. Both parties would flourish creatively if they just ditched the commercial combination sound. But who am I to judge? It’s probably payin’ the bills.

One night later at the Independent, Sebastien Tellier had the Moog-and-guitar combo down to a science. His sound was a perfect balance of heavy, deep, and dark elements. He had a lot more fun mixing synthesizers and rock star posturing, with a guitar representing a full-on phallus.

A weekend under the influence: SFIFF 52

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By Lynn Rapoport

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Mabel (Gena Rowlands, in an Oscar-winning Oscar-nominated performance) has a rare calm moment in A Woman Under the Influence.

The first weekend of the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival produced a cheerful, if windblown, bottleneck along Post between Fillmore and Webster. The one outside the Castro on Sunday night had a slightly more shell-shocked emotional tenor. The crowd seemed in good enough spirits (though this reviewer admits to getting a bit misty-eyed) while giving Gena Rowlands a standing ovation when the 78-year-old actor came onstage before John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence (1974). But the film’s two and a half hours of abrasive familial dysfunction and poorly attended-to mental illness are rough going, and no one could be blamed for wandering home in a torn-up, overwrought fugue. (Think happy thoughts: like the 2008 restoration of the film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, underwritten by Gucci.)

Less emotionally brutalizing was Friday evening’s screening of Art & Copy (screening again Tues/28, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki), where doc maker Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise) expressed satisfaction at finally getting a film into SFIFF and noted that this one was centered on “the idea that if you hate advertising, make better advertising.”

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Radio, radio: a scene from Art & Copy.

DVRs, defaced billboards, and legislation to calm the traffic of branding on virtually every visible surface of public space also spring to mind. However, these and other options are left unexplored in favor of a brief history of the revolution that occurred in advertising midcentury; commentary by some of the rebel forces and their descendants, including locals Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein (Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners); entertaining behind-the-scenes tales of famous ad campaigns (Got Milk?, I Want My MTV); and stats sprinkled throughout on advertising’s cultural presence, nationally and globally.

Self-comparisons to cave painters and a sequence near the close that feels like an advertisement for advertising (emotionally evocative images of children’s faces upturned in wonder to the sky: check) are somewhat uncomfortable to witness. But Pray has gathered together some of the industry’s brighter, more engaging lights, and his subjects discuss their vocation intelligently, thoughtfully, wittily, and often thoroughly earnestly. It would have been interesting to hear, amid the earnestness, and the exalted talk of advertising that rises to the level of art, some philosophizing on where all this branding and selling gets us, in an age when it’s hard to deny that breakneck consumption is having a somewhat deleterious effect on the planet. Or to learn from these creatives whether there were any ad campaigns they wouldn’t touch, such as one centered on nuclear energy, or the reelection of George W. Bush. After all, many of the interviewees come across as shaggy ex-hippies and liberals. (Last fall, trade paper the Denver Egotist referred to “the entire creative world uniting against John McCain in support of Barack Obama” in a piece on Goodby, Silverstein-made anti-McCain spots that the agency cofounders reportedly underwrote personally.) Still, the film is successful in humanizing and developing a richer picture of a vilified profession. And what it reveals about the visions of its subjects (one compares a good brand to someone you’d like to have over for dinner; another asserts that “great advertising makes food taste better”; another that “you can manufacture any feeling that you want to manufacture”) makes it worth watching, even if you make a habit of fast-forwarding past the ads.

Newsom’s kitchen

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By Tim Redmond

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Okay, I know this is totally unfair, since the real-estate agents typically do a staging setup for these photos, but if this is really Gavin Newsom’s kitchen, I have to ask: Does he ever eat there? Nothing in the scene suggests that anything is ever cooked here. No knives, no pans, no cutting boards … on the other hand, that there is one hell of a well-stocked liquor cabinet — and since the mayor doesn’t drink, he must be quite the host. (One advantage of brown — it doesn’t show the spills.)

SFIFF 52: Opening night

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The scene: the Castro Theatre. The event: opening night of the 52nd annual San Francisco International Film Festival. The crowd: mob-sized.

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Benjamin Bratt prefers it slow and low.

Before I say anything else, I know what you’re really wondering: what was in the gift bag? Besides Pop Chips — which seem to be engineering some kind of snack food takeover via film festivals (see also: the Noise Pop Film Festival) — there was a battery-operated sticky-note dispenser, a DVD of Vanaja (when I used to co-host the San Francisco Film Society-affiliated SF 360 Movie Scene on Comcast’s local channel — we got canned in August — that title was the top giggle-attack-getter on the set. You try saying “Vanaja” five times fast), a yo-yo, and a piece of biscotti. I devored the edibles, pocketed the yo-yo, and settled in for La Mission, a locally-made drama from writer-director Peter Bratt; his brother, Benjamin (a Law and Order vet whose career admirably survived 2004’s Catwoman), stars.

Snap Sounds: Dan Deacon

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By Michelle Broder Van Dyke

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Dan Deacon
Bromst
(Carpark)

Dan Deacon’s latest album forfeits one-man prowess for a more expansive sound — realized on tour by a 15-piece ensemble — that swaps electronic exclusivity for a tightly woven tapestry of bleeps, samples, and acoustic instruments like the guitar, glockenspiel and marimba. The resulting sound is less alienating-irritating than on previous releases.

Bromst still has endorphin-inducing tracks, like “Woof Woof,” a bouncy, buoyant opener that spazzes out with animal calls that loop backward as the rest of the song moves forward into catchy cacophony. Deacon has honed his skill at building suspense all the way up to a climactic finish, as in the standouts “Build Voice” and “Paddling Ghost,” which crescendo and then plummet like a roller coaster ride. I imagine the noisy culminating track “Get Older” as a scene in Fantasia 3.0, filmed shortly after the apocalypse, in which abstract butterflies and birds repetitiously stream through a realm of light and darkness before lightness finally wins out.

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Dan Deacon gets a hand. Photo by Josh Sisk.

All of Deacon’s work possesses an inherent sense of humor, exemplified by the fold-up tent that is central to his current iconography. But Bromst taps some emotional depths, thanks to “Slow Horns/Run For Your Life,” with its moving staccato piano break, and “Snookered,” with its poignant lyric, “We’ve done this so many times before…but never quite like this.” Such new hints of maturity leave me anticipating the next act by this mad scientist of electronic noise.

DAN DEACON
With Future Islands, Teeth Mountain
Thurs/23, 9 p.m., $13
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
www.gamh.com

Deacon talks about Bromst, after the jump:

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

I was over at the San Francisco Public Defender’s office the other day, headed for a press roundtable, and I’d forgotten what room the event was in so I wound up at the reception desk on the second floor. When I arrived, a man was standing at the counter, highly agitated, trying to explain that something was wrong with his case, and that nobody was listening and he was getting the runaround — the kind of scene you see every day at the bottom level of the legal system, where people who don’t have money scramble constantly to figure out which end is up.

And on the other side of the counter was a young guy who was calmly collecting the information, analyzing the problem, and explaining exactly what the client needed to do. He sent him a few doors down to another service then said, with a smile: "But don’t worry, if they can’t help you, just come right back here and we’ll get you taken care of." He was the model of what a good public employee ought to be — professional, friendly, polite, smart, and (particularly important in this office) sympathetic.

And as I stepped up to ask him where the press event was, I realized I knew his name. He still looks just like he did when his picture ran on the front page of the Guardian on Sept 3, 2003, the day he was released from prison after serving 13 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

John Tennison works for the guy who devoted years to winning his freedom, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and as far as I can tell, he’s a perfect fit for the job. He survived 13 years of hell with no visible bitterness. And he’s a reminder, for all those who like to forget, that everyone in prison is not a violent thug — or even guilty.

Coincidentally, if there is such a thing, I had just been working on a story about a move to criminalize cell phones in California prisons. The wardens have gone beyond drugs and weapons; phones are the new contraband. I posted an item on the politics blog about it and got the typical responses: Why should prisoners have access to cell phones? Aren’t they supposed to be punished? Give ’em bread and water and that’s it.

I get that cell phones can be a safety issue if they’re used by gangs and violent criminals to conduct business. But I also get that prisoners (or more truthfully, their families) have to pay exorbitant rates to make collect calls on the pay phones in prisons, and that there is often a wait, and that calls can only be made at certain times.

I’m not going to make cell phones for prisoners the biggest crusade of my life, but you know, a sizable number of the 170,000 California inmates did nothing other than buy and sell drugs that ought to be legal anyway; a fair number did nothing at all and were wrongly convicted; and most of the rest will get out at some point — and the more contact they have with their families (and potential employers), the better and safer we all are.

Something to think about. *

SFIFF: Oaktown fugue

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The stillness inhabiting Bay Area director Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New is broken periodically by the sounds of familial battle and the bemused, unemotive back-and-forth of a trio of men perplexed by the circumstances they have drifted into. The most dramatic intrusion, though, is instrumental, an occasional frenzied jigging of horns and strings that seems to signal the internal noise experienced by one of these uneasy men, a carpenter and family man named Wayne (Jerry McDaniel), who is trudging through his middle years in a state of unhappy wonder.

Shot in Oakland, the film uses a series of portrait-like scenes of house exteriors to convey the static emptiness in Wayne’s life, which he describes in voiceover monologues, his voice rising and falling just outside the boundaries of monotone. The contrast between these still lifes and the recurring shock of the soundtrack is almost painfully discordant, though the landscape intruded on is far from idyllic. When the camera moves inside one of the houses, the one where Wayne coexists with his wife, Renée (Beth Lisick), and their two sons, it’s filled with signs of residence but seems as empty and still and dead as the outside world, as if the family has just retreated from some personal apocalypse. Later the camera trails through a gutted Victorian as Wayne and Renée are heard quarreling, then processing as modeled by some couples’ counselor in their past — more emptiness and a sense of unending minor tragedy. Wayne presents a marriage sapped by financial exigencies such as the now-familiar house worth less than their debt.

These signs of trouble are plain enough, but emotionally expressive. Occasionally Bradshaw leans a little heavily on the symbolic, as when we see Wayne as he envisions himself, in the getup of a clown, and when the film runs backward through a trafficked street scene. More problematic, though, is the awkward shift in direction and shape that occurs when the resident stillness is interrupted by something more sharply horrific than the characters’ day-to-day suffering.

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW

Sun/26, 8:45 p.m.; Tues/28, 4:15 p.m.; May 2, 6:30 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

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