SF

Back from Berlin…

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By Mirissa Neff

In the midst of excursions to NYC, Reykjavik and Paris I spent last week in Berlin… here are some posts from the experience:

10/3
Generally Berlin reminds me a lot of SF/Oakland… the thrift-store aesthetic, the experimental vibe, people are very willing to go out on artistic limbs here. The city is quite sprawling and real estate is cheap… e.g., anyone with a creative idea can afford to set up a storefront. This doesn’t mean that they will be successful… things seems to be in constant renewal. If a project doesn’t work out people here seem fine with picking up and starting from scratch with something else. Perhaps that attitude has historical roots… the wall coming down, etc? Hmmmm….

Last night we went to an underground party where my host’s friend Manuel was spinning. The party was very literally under ground… once we paid our $4 admission to a burly Austrian who was listening to honky tonk music on a transistor, we descended into the party via a shakey ladder propped up in a hole in the cement. The subterranean scene was very cool… tunnels full of brick arches with stalagtites hanging down, projections, art installations, a dj and a makeshift bar only serving beer, vodka (no mixers) and water. We grabbed a couple of Berliner beers and sat down to hear Manuel’s super eclectic set… he played everything from German soccer anthems to the Aryan equivalent of Frank Zappa.

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The King Kong Klub during a quiet moment…

Manuel was leaving to spin elsewhere and we followed. We ended up at the King Kong Klub… a bar saturated with red walls, hipsters and King Kong imagery. The scene had a full cast of characters…

Skate or die

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By G.W. Schulz

Gavin Newsom has made a lot of promises during his tenure. He’s even come up with a few half-baked plans to contend with the city’s highest homicide rate in 10 years. But he recently dropped the ball on a seemingly simple gesture that could have at the very least kept a few kids out of trouble.

SF PartyParty reported a while back that the mayor has slipped on a promise to build two new skateparks for the city this year. They confirmed it with a call to Parks and Rec and noted that at the very most, the city could see one new skatepark next year.

We reported earlier in the year that kids attending an after-school program at Cellspace in the heart of the Mission off Bryant Street had grown fond of a group of skate ramps that had appeared quietly in the parking lot of the long-time flea market and bike kitchen located across the street from Cellspace’s warehouse. But the non-profit’s executive director Zoe Garvin told us at the time that the lot was slated for a new housing development, and the ramps wouldn’t be permitted to stick around much longer.

A new skatepark could have been timed perfectly. What a shame. Thanks to SF PartyParty for the heads up. By the way, Cellspace is holding a fundraiser on Saturday, Oct. 14 from 7-10 pm. Attend and help out some fine folks. While you’re there, ask Henry about his idea for a veggie-fueled lowrider with solar-powered hydraulic suspension. Awesome.

Poppin’ and popcorn

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Well, this comes as absolutely no surprise. As the Hollywood Reporter noted today, Newmarket Films is running into difficulties with the distribution of Death of a President. The Toronto International Film Festival hit — which imagines the assassination of President George W. Bush, and all the Cheney-led chaos and freedom-crackdowns that follow — will not be playing at the nation’s largest theater chain, Regal Cinemas. Nor will it be opening at any theaters operated by Cinemark USA, the company that just took over the Century chain (including the brand-new SF Centre, so nope, you won’t be slidin’ on their swanky faux-leather seats while you watch the Prez eat a lead sandwich).

doap.jpg

Fortunately, the made-for-British-TV faux-doc will be coming to the Bay Area no matter what — look for Death of a President at one of San Francisco’s Landmark Theatres starting Oct 27. Though I had mixed feelings about the film (loved its shocking concept, ehh on its second-act slowdown) I’m glad to see it’s getting attention (although, come on — like this movie is just gonna casually saunter into theaters?) Too bad this smaller release means it might well end up preaching to the choir — as so many politically-themed docs (or faux-docs, as the case may be) do, tending to open only in cities already rollin’ in art-houses and progressive audiences.

Online bonanza

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Fixed gear fracas

Duncan Scott Davidson’s rant about fixed-gear bikes is causing a ruckus.

“Your article is based on ignorance, stereotypes, and one bad experience shared by your friend. You are not qualified to have written this article.”

–Jake Guy

“Dude! I couldn’t agree more! I’m glad to see someone else is finally taking up the cause against these damn hipsters! I myself have started a campaign against the entire Mission district, since most hipsters live there. I mean, respect to the old-school heads, but it’s just not all that impressive.”

–joshua

“‘The fixed-gear is to 2006 what the Razor scooter was to 1996: a wheeled freak show for wannabes.’ — a lot of other morons probably said the same thing about skateboards. Yeah, that was just a fad, you don’t see anyone riding a board anymore.”

— McBomb

Firing off at fixed-gears: Read the article with comments

Lusty Lady lowdown

Sarah Phelan’s piece about the Lusty Lady’s union vs. co-op status caught some fire.

“This story is a one-sided piece of rubbish, suitable for lining of the bottom of bird cages and nothing else.”

— 7654321

“When I was in Seattle, I used to go to the Lusty Lady there and end up spending quite a bit, because the girls were hot and the shows were hot (both stage and Private Pleasures). At the SF Lusty Lady, I only rarely see a girl I find attractive, so I go there only rarely, really just to check on whether anything has changed or not.”

— anon_voyeur

“Maybe support staff needs to spend more time mopping and cleaning, i.e. doing their job, and less time cruising the internet.”

–timmit

Lusty Lady loses its innocence: Read the article with comments

In the blogs

Pixel Vision
Johhny Ray Huston at the Vancouver Film Festival
Our virgin intern goes to Folsom Street Fair

Noise
Girl Talk talks
Junior Boys interview

Politics
Rob Black cash kerfuffle
Arnold torpedoes transparency

Writing wrongs

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If there’s one person you would expect to condemn the present state of America’s political affairs, it would be Billy Bragg, right? Surely Britain’s punk poet laureate should be grabbing every microphone within reaching distance to decry the evils of our current administration. But surprisingly, his reaction is quite the opposite. “I’m encouraged by the results of the last two elections, because I believe that America has not yet decided what kind of country it’s going to be in the 21st century,” he says on the phone from Winnepeg.
Bragg is currently on a bit of a multitasking tour to showcase his two latest works: Volume II (YepRoc), a box set, and The Progressive Patriot, a book. While Volume II is an expected retrospective that covers the second half of Bragg’s career from 1988 onward, The Progressive Patriot is uncharted territory for the singer-songwriter, a treatise that addresses Britain’s national identity, the emergence of organized racism, and the political road that weaves between the two.
Much as in Britain, Bragg sees battles of ideology as a key proving ground in the future of our country and agrees with the concept of “two Americas” as it pertains to the states’ political climate. “On one hand you’ve got the neoconservative Christian right, who are getting everybody to vote and still can’t get a majority,” he says, “and on the other side you’ve got the more compassionate idea of America as a multicultural society, which just can’t get everybody to vote.” Yet as bleak and insurmountable a problem as this may seem, Bragg takes the long view. “I’m in a fortunate position. I have the opportunity to travel around and meet people trying to manifest that ‘other’ America. Reading local newspapers in America, you see all sorts of things that are going completely against the neoconservative agenda in some states.” Volume II picks up at a crucial period of Bragg’s career, kicking off with his 1988 release, Workers Playtime (Go! Discs/Elektra). The album marked Bragg’s transition from punk iconoclast to, as he would later affectionately come to be known, the “Bard from Barking.” Instead of using just his guitar and a portable amp as on his earlier recordings, Bragg included bits of orchestration on Workers, plus a band to accompany his songs of law, love, and everything in between. “The album of lost love. It’s my great lost soul album!” he says with a wistful chuckle.
At the heart of that bittersweet collection is the amazing “Valentine’s Day Is Over,” a woman’s lament over her lover, rough economic times, and the beatings that result. “That economy and brutality are related / Now I understand,” the protagonist explains wearily. Bragg feels a particular satisfaction with that song and the topics it tackles. “I often cite that as the ideal Billy Bragg song because politics and ‘the love song’ overlap in that song. It’s a really hard thing to do, rather than being a ‘love song writer’ or a ‘political song writer.’ I hate it when people divide those two. Life isn’t divided like that.”
The ever-encircled worlds of life and politics also led Bragg to write the new book, with the ideas spurred by everything from recent elections in his hometown to raising his young son. “A far-right political party called the BNP earned a seat on the council in my hometown of Barking, East London,” the songwriter says. “That was a real shock to me because these were the people that I came into politics fighting. I realized that it needed something more than just writing a song.” Being a father further drives his desire for intelligent debate around the future of his country. His concerns about nationalism are expressed in the interest of cohesion, not the racist ideal of exclusion. He explains, “I’m interested to hear your background, but what is important to me is how my children and your children are going to get on with each other. Everything else is secondary to that.”
As you might expect, Bragg’s MySpace page also bears the mark of his beliefs and ideas. It also contains his songs: items that were conspicuously absent during his recent showdown with the networking Web site. Having successfully lobbied MySpace to retool their artist agreement so that the site doesn’t “own” any artist’s uploaded content, Bragg is now taking on MTV Flux, another networking site that features an upload ability similar to YouTube. A video featuring his challenge to Flux dots the page, along with archival footage of him at various events, such as a concert in Washington, DC, in 2002. That day he addressed the crowd and warned them of a greater looming evil — not of conservatives or imperialism but of cynicism.
He still stands behind that message. “I know from personal experience that cynicism eats away your soul,” Bragg says. “God knows Tony Blair’s been spreading cynicism around for the last few years. I’ve had to fight my own.” SFBG
BILLY BRAGG
Thurs/5, 8 and 10:30 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$30–$35
(415) 885-0750
HARDLY STRICTLY
BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL
Sat/7, 4:40 p.m.
Speedway Meadow
Golden Gate Park, SF
Free
www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com

Rock till you drop

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“They’re the ones that pushed E-40 into hyphy,” says Hamburger Eyes photographer Dave Potes, in reference to his friends the Mall, a San Francisco art punk trio, and the hype that surrounds them.
“Yeah, we’re part of the hyphy movement,” adds Mall guitarist-keyboardist Daniel Tierney, 27, and his bandmates erupt into cacophonous chuckling.
I’ve heard the “h” word dropped incessantly for weeks now and have pretended to be hip to the Bay Area hip-hop phenomenon. As the band continues chatting about the genre and its influence on the new DJ Shadow album, bewilderment washes over me, and I hang my head and admit to having no idea what anyone’s talking about.
“You’ve got to get on the bus then,” bassist-guitarist-vocalist Ellery Samson, 29, demands when someone mentions the “yellow bus.” In unison everyone chants a couple of “da, do, do, do”s as if the composition should strike a chord, like my sister’s favorite New Kids on the Block track. I grin and nod even though I’m still puzzled.
Whether or not the Mall seriously acknowledge an affiliation to the hip-hop movement is questionable. However, while chilling over beers on a bar patio in the Mission District, I get a sense of buoyancy and selflessness from the mild-mannered band members.
“Up until last month, we all lived within three blocks of this bar,” says drummer Adam Cimino, 28, adding that this particular area definitely inspired their recent songs.
Given the languid quiet of this cool, fogless night — punctuated by the occasional crack of a cue ball or the faint sounds from the bar jukebox — it’s hard to imagine this neighborhood spawning a band whose music brims with pissed-off aggression and agitated velocity. But then, the Mall aren’t exactly from this hood. The band’s beginnings trace back to Montgomery High in Santa Rosa, where Samson and Tierney met and became friends. The pair worked on another musical project, called Downers, but soon found themselves seeking an additional element: Cimino.
Samson gave him a call. “I want to do this screamy, art fag, punk rock thing,” jokes Cimino in a mock-Samson accent, re-creating the talk. “I was, like, ‘I get it. That sounds awesome.’”
The three obtained a practice space without ever playing a note of music together and began work on the first few songs that would end up on their EP, First, Before, and Never Again (Mt. St. Mtn., 2006). From there on, the band gelled into what has become an enterprising experience for all involved.
The group’s new debut, Emergency at the Everyday (Secretariat), is an exercise in emphatic pugnacity and loud-as-shit tumult. The 13 songs — clocking in at less than 20 minutes — are punishing in scope yet danceable. Casio-pop melodies ebb and flow along a thunderous foundation of crunching guitars, plodding bass lines, and dynamite-fueled drum pops.
“We get our sound from fucking up the amps, and we don’t use distortion pedals,” Cimino explains. “It’s just little Casio keyboards and an amp turned to 10. That’s what makes it so gritty-sounding.”
Samson’s vocals add to the mélange of fuzzed-out commotion. Imagine the throaty screech of a young Black Francis shattering through an aggro mixture of angular guitar bluster and punk avidity. During the recording of the album, Samson sang through an old rotary telephone hooked up to a PA to match the distortion of the other instruments and capture the intensity of live performance.
“The music was so blown-out it was too awkward to have clean vocals,” adds a smiling Cimino. “It’s a neat trick.”
But even without the aid from the telephone, you can’t deny the hostility of Samson’s vocals. It’s surprising considering his placid demeanor.
“Everybody’s really angry right now, and we’re just as angry as anybody else,” he says.
The band backs up Samson’s statement by discussing the unending Iraq war and their disapproval of the president, and though the Mall’s songs don’t exactly cover those topics, they certainly fuel the fire. “There’s a lot of violence and frustration and boredom going on,” Cimino adds.
“Fuck, I thought it was party music, man,” Tierney chimes in, and the band bursts into another fit of laughter.
After three years together and a national tour on the horizon, including dates opening for the Slits, the Mall’s sound continues to evolve. And who knows? Maybe their direction will cross the border into genuine hyphy. Already back in the studio recording songs for another EP, the Mall aren’t holding back anything: to them, it’s all about having fun and making great music for their friends.
“It’s totally replaced skateboarding for me,” Cimino says. “I’m off work. I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t want to eat dinner. I get to hang out and play music with these guys.” SFBG
THE MALL
With the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower and Boyskout
Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

Pop lives

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› johnny@sfbg.com
REVIEW There are different doors through which one can enter dunya dinlemiyor (the world won’t listen), a 2005 video installation by British artist Phil Collins. One can chart the many passages that lead from Collins’s work to the music of the Smiths, whose vocalist Morrissey chose an image from Andy Warhol’s Trash to adorn the cover of the group’s second attempt at creating a proper first album. In turn, those doors lead to Warhol’s earlier screen tests, which Collins deliberately invokes through dunya dinlemiyor’s song-length portraits of Smiths fans in Istanbul. These connections form more than one circuit — in fact, they do more than a figure eight. Even when out of fashion, pop art has a three-degrees-of-Warhol relationship to contemporary art. Is it really so extraordinary?
In this case the answer is yes. Whereas Warhol’s screen tests are powered by the egos of his superstars and other art movers and makers, Collins’s portraits shock through their anonymity and most of all, their unexpected emotional profundity. “15 minutes of shame,” reads the T-shirt of one of the two girls who sing “Panic” at the beginning of dunya dinlemiyor’s karaoke box versions of the songs that make up The World Won’t Listen, a 1987 Rough Trade compilation from the Smiths’ last year of creative life. The time-based phrase plays off both an oft-repeated — and garbled — Warhol quote and an early Morrissey lyric. But most of dunya dinlemiyor bypasses such referentiality to lay bare the perhaps singular universality of Smiths songs.
There are some other knowing nudges early on, as when a young man performs “Ask” in the manner of 1983–84 Morrissey, shirt unbuttoned and flowers sprouting from his ass pocket. Even in this pantomime or imitation, the gender liberation of Smiths songs — the way in which Morrissey-worship has allowed straight and gay men to enact or express unconventional forms of masculinity — is apparent. But this liberation takes an even more revelatory form with some of Collins’s female subjects. Their performances engage with and bloom from the lyrics in a manner quite different from the traditional courtship roles when female fans respond to words written by a man.
The most joyous, spine-tingling example has to be a pair of girls who hold hands while duetting on “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Here, the substitution of someone else in the Morrissey role works wonders. Absent the frontperson’s overbearing persona, the music takes flight in unexpected directions. Using generic vacation-spot photos as a backdrop, Collins separates these Smiths fans from any stereotypes viewers might attach to Turkey. The closest thing to a culturally specific Old World reference is the twist of a woman’s muezzin prayer-wail approach to the finale of “Rubber Ring,” with its “Don’t forget the songs” litany.
The best door through which to enter dunya dinlemiyor is that provided by Collins, a simple passage surrounded by the flypapered advertisements that attracted his collaborators. This show is the absolute opposite of American Idol. Its most haunting and sublime interpretation has to be “Asleep,” sung by a young man with fresh scars on his forehead. His face is framed in extreme close-up in a manner that admires his beauty and aches to reach out to him, as if Carl Theodor Dreyer were lusting for Maria Falconetti. The Smiths have inspired no shortage of books, movies, and music, but this might be the best response to their songbook I’ve encountered.
In “Neopopular Demand,” Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou takes a rather more acidic view of popular music and Warhol’s pop legacy, specifically the decadent Interview years. His large paintings depicting himself as a magazine cover star were partly inspired by the almost action-figure aspect of 50 Cent’s rise to rap fame. Which is to say, Pecou’s work is both a response to 50’s exaggeration of a hip-hop hypermasculine bravado (a front that toys with and embraces caricature) and a commentary on the enthusiasm with which American culture consumes thug routines. Don’t get it twisted: Pecou loves hip-hop. He just doesn’t worship it.
The presence of imitation Jean-Michel Basquiat chalk scribbles at the edges and sometimes centers of Pecou’s paintings brings recent art history into the equation — in a manner that taunts potentially clueless buyers. Pecou possesses a post-Basquiat dandified flair (as with another compelling artist, Kehinde Wiley, it manifests in self-portraiture) and a skepticism that can only come from viewing the fatal footsteps of such a talent. He is in the process of making a film about his own self-creation as an art and media star, an endeavor that isn’t as revealing about his bright future as the edges of his canvases. That is where handsome paint renderings of magazine photos and fonts give way to shades of white that more than hint there are many other areas that he wants to explore. After painting himself into commercial boxes, Pecou leaves a space open so that he might perform a Harry Houdini–like escape. SFBG
“NEW WORK: PHIL COLLINS: DUNYA DINLEMIYOR (THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN)”
Through Jan. 21, 2007
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third St., SF
$7–$12 (free first Tuesdays; half price Thursdays after 6 p.m.)
(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org
“NEOPOPULAR DEMAND: NEW WORKS BY FAHAMU PECOU”
Through Nov. 20
Michael Martin Galleries
101 Townsend, suite 207, SF
Free
(415) 543-1550
www.mmgalerries.com
To read an interview with Fahamu Pecou, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Naughty is nice

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Once upon a time, a fair number of people, heartened by the Sexual Revolution and the corresponding collapse of censorship in movies, thought porn was just the preliminary phase to the next obvious step: soon, they assumed, mainstream films would also have real, explicit sex.
The last time anybody thought that was probably 1975 — or if really stoned, 1977. But for a while there, that wild idea seemed not only possible but inevitable. Deep Throat pretty much closed the obscenity conviction book on consenting adults watching adult content in public venues. Hugely successful mainstream films such as Carnal Knowledge and Last Tango in Paris seemed to be tearing down the last “good taste” barriers protecting viewers from having frank discussions about sex and its explicit simulation.
The wide-open ’70s offered a variety of liberated lifestyle choices. Cities had singles bars and sex clubs; the suburbs had hot tubs. Top 40 radio was smirking “Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box” and “More, More, More.” Even network TV had gone raunchy with “jiggle” shows (Charlie’s Angels) and odd one-off leering atrocities like the 1979 Playboy Roller Disco Pajama Party. In the midst of all this sex, sex, sex, it seemed a logical end point would be the total de-shaming of America. Fuck movies would become “real” ones, and “real” movies would include fucking.
Who could imagine how far back the pendulum would swing? Porn would survive, but it and sex would retreat behind closed doors. These days the annual art house succes de scandale, like Brown Bunny and Baise-Moi, is invariably depressing and negative.
Ergo, it is worth all kinds of cheering that somebody has finally made that movie. The one that has talented actors having plot-relevant and unfaked sex, that is beautiful, touching, funny, and artistic enough to be one of the best films of the year. It’s John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which knows exactly how anomalous it is and where it fits into the current zeitgeist. (The most quotable line occurs when one character surveys an orgiastic scene: “It’s like the ’60s but with less hope.”) Mitchell is defiant enough to create hope, even his own zeitgeist if need be.
Cute New York City gay couple the “two Jamies” (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy) are considering spicing up their routine, so they consult sex therapist Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee). In a frazzled moment, she admits she’s never had an orgasm, something she’s never told her husband (Raphael Barker). These questing characters intersect with others at the sex party held regularly at chez Justin Bond (with the performer playing himself).
Shortbus finds narrative room for stalking, attempted suicide, three-ways, and every numeral on the Kinsey Scale. Yet the film never feels cluttered or sensational. In fact, its openhearted seriocomedy (the script is a collaboration between Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer-director Mitchell and the cast) integrates sex so fully into a plaintive, affirmative call for communality that shock value is only intermittent — and deliberately funny when it occurs.
Will Shortbus occasion new local obscenity challenges? Probably not. But 40 years ago, censorship battles were a constant source of news and box-office draw. Before the United States graduated from softcore to hardcore, with many court decisions en route, the hot spot for all things smutty was several thousand safe yet alluring miles away.
This passing rage for cinematic “sin” from parts North will be chronicled by SF-to-Denmark émigré Jack Stevenson at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week. He’ll present three programs (a clip show and features Venom and Without a Stitch) during “Swinging Scandinavia: How Nordic Sex Cinema Conquered the World.”
It really did. This “myth of total sexual freedom” — as put forth in Stevenson’s book Totally Uncensored!, due in 2007 — was particularly seductive to uptight Americans. By and large, Sweden and Denmark enjoyed remarkably progressive social attitudes at the time. After preliminary taboo-nudging efforts, one dam broke with I, a Woman, a notorious tell-all turned into a show-all (by 1966 standards) portrait of the sexually restless “new woman.” It grossed an astonishing $4 million in the United States alone. But that was nothing compared to I Am Curious (Yellow), a Godardian “kaleidoscope” of hard-to-separate documentary, improv, and staged elements encompassing all the era’s sexual, political, and intellectual questionings. Finally allowed to screen in America (over 18 months after its late-1967 Stockholm premiere), it was probably the most-seen and most-loathed crossover hit prior to The Blair Witch Project — similarly drawing audiences who expected familiar genre exploitation but got something much rawer and more challenging.
A whole series of Danish porn comedies and angsty Swedish sex dramas continued to be churned out until the mid-’70s. The Scandis had brought down many original barricades: Torgny Wickman’s 1969 Language of Love (which Robert de Niro takes Cybill Shepherd to see in Taxi Driver) might be the first commercial feature to show unobscured intercourse. But they soon found themselves intellectually bored and pushed aside marketwise by the expanded allowance for soft- and hardcore production elsewhere. The yahoos (us folks) had won by simultaneously commercializing and marginalizing the Sex Rev. SFBG
SHORTBUS
Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.shortbusthemovie.com
“SWINGING SCANDINAVIA: HOW NORDIC SEX CINEMA CONQUERED THE WORLD”
Thurs/5, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/7, 7 and 9 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–$10
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Roughin’ Justin

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Don’t be tripping, sit your sexy back down slowly, and I’ll try to break the news to you gently: Justin Timberlake and I have a history.
OK, it’s not like we sat around in Pampers and OshKosh B’Gosh, playing gastroenterologist with Barbie and GI Joe and gurgling along to “White Lines.” Though I am getting a dose of feverish white-line nostalgia listening to coke-daddy ode “Losing My Way” off dusty Justy’s new Jive album, Speakerboxxx … whoops, I mean FutureSex/LoveSounds. And it’s not as if we met on The Mickey Mouse Club, brawling over mouse ears and bawling about diaper rash and paltry camera time. We don’t go that way back.
But Kimberly discovered Timberly long before a certain sheepish someone made contact with that Jackson scion’s nipple ornament. I first saw el Cueball, as I so lovingly dubbed my mousy darling’s shaved pate, fronting *NSYNC at the Santa Clara County Fair around ’98. You know, back when the strings were still apparent. I was there with a few other geezer peers, measuring the hype on the opening local Filipino American vocal group, when the budding boy banders entered prancing and the 14-year-old girls went positively cuckoo, clutching photos and near weeping with longing as Timberlake and company worked the whistled theme to Welcome Back, Kotter into the encore.
Then I met up with Timby again at the Oakland Arena when the “Justified and Stripped” tour broke away from the rest of the bubblegum boys and strapped on Christina Aguilera. Whatever you think of Aguilera’s dirty-girl front, she certainly displayed pipes and pride live, strutting around like Femlin in a black corset and short pants and belting out “Beautiful.” But that was forgotten when Timberhunk emerged — thin voice or no, the little girls were still going utterly nutzoid. They screamed, freaked, and gaped like ravenous baby birds beneath the catwalk he beatboxed upon. That’s the power of cute, man.
But Just-oh doesn’t want to be just cute anymore, as the cover of FutureSex attests: suited up in a skinny black suit like a baby Reservoir Dog, little buckeroo looks outright pissed, crushing a disco ball beneath his heel. If Justified hasn’t made it perfectly clear, Timberlake wants to be considered a force — artistic, tough-guy, whatev — to be reckoned with. Pity the poor pop-pets — Madonna, Britney, Justy — they all have such an ambivalent relationship with le fickle dance floor. FutureSex reeks of such ambition — as the swinging singles prince offers up a kind of archaic devotion to the album format and a familiar if downbeat trajectory tracing a loverboy’s woozy weave from lust to lovesickness. Witness the first half of the full-length: “FutureSex/LoveSound,” “Sexyback,” “Sexy Ladies.” Either someone’s out of synonyms for doing the doity or someone’s ob-sexed.
Musically kitted out by Timbaland in the Neptunes’ absence, FutureSex is clearly intended to be a kind of Prince-ly, sensual opus, and for having the good taste to imitate the most original funk rock stylists of the ’80s, Timba-lake should be commended. But all the CD images of Timbo smashing disco balls seem out of character, overwrought. To wax crassly, Justin tries to show us he has the balls to both musically embrace Grandmaster Flash, Queen, Lil Jon, and yes, the alpha and omega, libertine and spendthrift couple of ’80s soul, Prince and Michael Jackson, and strike out on his own. Just ignore the slimness of Timberlake’s vanilla soul. It’s barely flavored, not quite iced, with techno, barebacked beats, and retro soul, and despite the disc’s initially fluid, almost mirror-ball-like reflective programming, it opens into a dull middle section that’s broken up only by the frisky groove of “Damn Girl.” It makes you wish Timberlake had the courage of his initial fantasy-fueled single’s conviction. If only this disco baller had left it at FutureSex and Timberlake stuck to his, er, cheesy pistols and the Prince of schwing’s original program.

CALIFONE DREAMING Califone’s Tim Rutili can probably understand the urge to try out new personae. While talking about his new, gorgeous album, Roots and Crowns (Thrill Jockey), the frontperson and soundtrack composer fessed up to believing in past lives — and indeed relying on that knowledge when it came to penning tunes about kittens that see ghosts, lost eyes, and black metal fornication. “The writing process is all about that — just letting things bubble up,” he says from Chicago, where the band is rehearsing. And what does he imagine the members of Califone were in a past life? “Circus clowns.”
The ex–Red Red Meat member doesn’t seem to spook easily. Case in point: the last time Califone played San Francisco, their van was broken into. Treasured gear such as Rutili’s grandfather’s 1917 violin and a custom-made acoustic guitar, which he says was “nicer than my house,” were stolen. “They were nice enough to leave stuff that looked shitty,” he waxes positively. “It was heartbreaking, but in the end it forced us to learn a lot of new tricks, open up our ideas, and gather new things. It really did inform the recording to not have to lean on any of the old stuff.”
The scattered Califone seems to be working out the kinks in its evolution, with Rutili in Los Angeles writing music for film and the rest of the band in Chicago and Valparaiso, Ind. “I see us getting older and becoming more creative,” Rutili muses. And most people just get older and watch more TV. “That doesn’t seem to be happening with us, but it makes it more difficult too. TV is easy — keeping your eyes open and your ear to the ground and trying to remain connected and in touch with creativity is difficult.” SFBG
CALIFONE
With Oakley Hall and D.W. Holiday
Tues/10, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455

Mild to wild

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› paulr@sfbg.com
“Mandarin” is a word that suggests a certain grandeur or even haughtiness. Mandarin English is the language of such pompmeisters as William F. Buckley Jr., George F. Will, and all those other East Coast bow-tied toffs with Roman numerals after their names. As for mandarin food: if you are enjoying this style of Chinese cooking, you must sit up straight, keep your napkin in your lap, and not eat with your fingers. Can you see Buckley or Will eating pot stickers with their fingers?
Perhaps that is a needlessly nightmarish image. Mandarin need not mean “chokingly formal.” Even the Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square, despite much plushness and high style, retains an agreeably casual air — and the Mandarin is not the exclusive home of mandarin cooking in the city. Although mandarin cuisine is sometimes known as “the food of the emperors” and is strongly associated with Beijing — China’s imperial city — it can be found in creditable form here in such neighborhood restaurants as Ah Lin, which opened last year on Cathedral Hill in a space left behind when the peripatetic the Window returned to its original home on Valencia.
If you’re looking for cathedrals, Cathedral Hill isn’t a bad place to start your search: at one end of Ah Lin’s Bush Street block stands Trinity Episcopal, an imposing gothic edifice that looks as if it were transplanted from some village in the north of England. If that doesn’t suit, there are plenty of alternative choices just a brief journey down Gough. And at the other end of Ah Lin’s little urban world (to complete our sacred-and-profane cycle) is Wheel Works, a temple of the automotive, whose large, white, mostly windowless garage takes up most of the view through the restaurant’s windows.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to look outside, because the interior of the restaurant is appealing in its modest way: walls done up in a paint scheme of rich blue, with peach accents and some framed art pieces, along with a good-sized light box whose ground-level plantings give it the look of a big (and slightly tippy) terrarium. Linoleum? Didn’t notice any, but then, I wasn’t looking, and one of the reasons I wasn’t looking — apart from the childish hope that if I didn’t notice it, it couldn’t be there — was because I was too engrossed in the food.
As a devotee of spicy food, my Chinese preferences over the years have tended toward Szechuan and Hunan cooking, each of which makes liberal use of chiles — and chilis — to kindle that characteristic blaze on the lips. Mandarin dishes, on the other hand, tend to be milder, but mild does not mean bland, and as the kitchen at Ah Lin proves over and over, even even-tempered dishes can have their own sort of savory intensity.
The restaurant’s chow fun ($6.95), for instance, sounded very Clark Kent–ish to us — wide noodles with a restful choice of chicken, beef, shrimp, or vegetable — but while the array of these last was routine (snow peas, broccoli florets, sliced mushrooms), the noodles themselves tasted as if they had been cooked in some kind of broth. (Chicken, perhaps? Vegetarian sticklers will want to inquire.) This is a very easy and effective way to enliven starches, but just to make sure, the kitchen also added shreds of basil for some freshening perfume.
Another subtly addictive, peppery broth was the basis of the ocean party soup ($5.50 for a small bowl that was more than enough for two people), a mélange of shrimp, bay scallops, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and snow peas. Having sampled this soup and the chow fun, we did feel we probably could have passed a pop quiz on what the restaurant’s vegetable bin held.
The menu is full of classic preparations. I fell into a Proustian reverie — memories of long ago and far away on Halsted Street — while engulfing the excellent mu shu pork ($7.50), notable here for its tender pancakes. Even more impressive was a roasted half duck ($8.25). The bird carried a faint and unsurprising whiff of five-spice powder, but its real power lay in the combination of wonderfully crisp, cognac-colored skin and confitlike meat, juicy and tender. At the price, it’s one of the best bargains going.
There is some spice to be had, mainly at lunch. Orange-peel beef ($5.75) is one of those cardiac-arrest dishes you know you shouldn’t have but can’t resist, and there’s a good reason you can’t resist: the knobbly shreds of meat are perfectly crisp and the dark-brown sauce intense with citrus and basil; this is just the kind of thing we might find Homer Simpson gorging on from a big paper bucket, if only it were a little dryer. Hunan fish ($5.75), meanwhile, featured a tangy-sweet sauce with a discreet hint of heat, but what was more striking was the fish itself — fish cakes, really, with a certain sponginess of texture the price of uniformity in size (for more reliable cooking) and the chance to mix seasonings with the flesh. The cakes aren’t unmanageably rubbery, but they can’t match the more usual cod or flounder filets for velvetiness. Lunches come with a cup of soup, a quite lively sweet-and-sour maybe, and rice — brown rice, if you prefer.
Although the restaurant is quite small, service can be stressed. The noontime crowd is sizable, and in the evening take-out orders pile up on the cashier’s podium at the rear of the dining room. So: serenity now, and your order will be along soon enough. SFBG
AH LIN
Continuous service: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., noon–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 4:30–9:30 p.m.
1634 Bush, SF
(415) 922-5279
www.ahlinrestaurant.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible

Divorcing Columbus

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OPINION This year may go down in history as the one new immigrants reignited a civil rights mobilization in the United States. Their efforts, like those of the black liberation movement of the ’60s, will certainly become a catalyst for progressive action from many communities. As southern Italian Americans, this Columbus Day we have to ask our community the age-old question — which side are we on? Unfortunately, many of us have chosen exactly which side we are on: supporting racist immigrant bashers, whether they are legislators in the halls of Congress or vigilante Minutemen. As progressive Italian Americans, we support new immigrants because of the simple fact that our folks were once in the same situation that newcomers find themselves in: overworked, exploited, and demonized for quick political gain. It’s time for the Italian American community to finally reclaim our social justice tradition, divorcing the dazed and confused explorer who discovered a country that was already inhabited. Instead of Columbus, we honor the Italians, Cubans, and Spaniards of Ybor City, Fla., who worked in the cigar industry and were able to create a Latin culture based on values such as working-class solidarity and internationalism (see “Lost and Found: The Italian American Radical Experience,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 8). We also remember the Italian American radicals who were a part of labor actions in the early 1900s, including the Lawrence textile, Paterson silk, Mesabi Iron Range, and New York City Harbor strikes. This year, instead of conquest, we acknowledge those who stood up for justice. Everyone knows about Al Capone, but what about Mario Savio, a founder of the free speech movement in Berkeley in the ’60s? Most people can recite the names of Italian American singers such as Madonna and Frank Sinatra, but they don’t know Cammella Teoli, the 13-year-old southern Italian girl who appeared before Congress in 1912 to testify in her broken English about the horrible working conditions in America’s sweatshops. It’s not surprising that Italian Americans forgot those things. We faced a lot of discrimination when we arrived: two unionists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were falsely accused of murder and executed. Italian Americans in the south were lynched by white supremacists. During World War II, thousands were relocated or jailed on suspicion of being enemy aliens. After the war, the anticommunist witch hunts began with the arrest and deportation of Italian American radical Carl Marzani. Today, Italian Americans don’t have to face these threats, yet those who immigrate from Central and South America, Asia, and the Middle East do. It is unlikely that Congress will pass any form of legislation reform this year, and many cities have instituted local statutes designed to run immigrants out of town. Minutemen and similar groups are harassing day laborers in the Bay Area and beyond. As Italian Americans, we call upon our paesani and paesane to remember our roots. Emboldened racists can be stopped — when those of us they claim to represent support the work of grassroots organizations of color bravely confronting these throwbacks. By divorcing Columbus, we start to break down the logic of conquest, which invariably leads to wars abroad and repression at home. SFBG Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy are Italian American radicals who organize the annual “Dumping Columbus” reading. This year it’s Oct. 9, 7 p.m., City Lights, 261 Columbus, SF, featuring the legendary Diane DiPrima.

MONDAY

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Oct. 9

Music

The Knitters

There’s an epiphany that strikes almost every aging rocker that country music is the perfect medium for tempering youthful, knee-jerk angst into a superficially more contained yet white-hot righteousness that sizzles to the core. Perhaps it’s because affecting a nasal twang is much less taxing on matured vocal chords than outright shrieking, and given the right arrangement, the effect is surprisingly intoxicating. Enter the Knitters, combining members of seminal LA punk band X with members of rockabilly revivalists the Blasters, creating what their old label Bloodshot Records refers to as an “insurgent country” sound and what I like to call a hoedown for the low-down. (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter
8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero
$25
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com

Music

The Bluetones

Citing Buffalo Springfield, Love, and the Stone Roses as influences, London indie favorites the Bluetones have, over the course of their 12-year career, produced a catalog rich in spiky sing-along Britpop with a reverential nod in the direction of ’60s songwriters. The band has grown artistically through an enthusiasm for incorporating new elements into their vision, while many of their contemporaries from the mid-’90s Britpop scene have either dissolved or stagnated. After exploring Southwestern themes, country twang, gentle folk, and even a bit of velour-smooth ’70s disco-soul, these popsters are adventurers of the first order. (Todd Lavoie)

9:30 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$15
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com

SUNDAY

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Oct. 8

Music

Residual Echoes

Besides having one of the sweetest, smokiest names around, Residual Echoes summon a potent mix of sounds: kraut rock, drone, and SST noise, all hammered into relentless grooves. Coming from Santa Cruz like fellow journeyers Comets on Fire, Residual Echoes can do spacey and heavy with equal aplomb, though it’s the louder stuff – Adam Payne’s squalling guitar swimming upstream against the band’s tight Sabbath groove – that will win converts. (Max Goldberg)

With LSD-March and New Rock Syndicate
9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$7
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

Event

Italian Heritage Festival

In a city as filled with pride as San Francisco, it should come as no surprise to discover that we are host to the nation’s oldest Italian Heritage Festival (formerly the Columbus Day Parade), which celebrates its 138th year today. Belly up to one of the sidewalk cafes lining Columbus Avenue and catch an eyeful of parading I-talians, presided over by this year’s grand marshal, Michael Chiarello of Chiarello Family Vineyards, and graced by the presence of “Queen Isabella” (Daniela Maria Romani) and her royal court. The parade begins from Jefferson at Powell and will end at Washington Square Park. (Nicole Gluckstern)

12:30 p.m.
Columbus Parade: Jefferson at Powell to Columbus at Vallejo, SF
Free
(415) 703-9888
www.sfcolumbusday.org

SATURDAY

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Oct. 7

Visual Art

ArtSpan Open Studios

Art, it’s often argued, is in the eye of the beholder. During ArtSpan’s 31st Open Studios, you’ll have the opportunity to behold a lot of it as more than 700 working artists open their studios to the public over the course of four weekends. Art aficionados like the Open Studios event as a time to spot emerging trends; artists like it for the chance to display and sell their backlog; plebs such as myself enjoy the accompanying Havarti cubes and two-buck chuck. There will also be a number of events held at SomArts, including a free opening reception on Fri/6 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., plus an exhibition of over 400 pieces. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Through Oct. 29
Times and locations vary
(415) 861-9838
www.artspan.org

Dance

Smuin Ballet

You can pick any of three reasons to see Smuin Ballet this month. Reason one: the dancers. Each of the 15 is a strong, well-trained, uniquely talented individual – including the three new ones. Reason two: the rep. It’s a pungent mix of the new and the old. Top billing has to go to the world premiere of Amy Seiwert’s Revealing the Bridge, based on Claude Monet’s painting The Japanese Bridge. Michael Smuin’s new Obrigado, Brazil, set to João Gilberto’s music, probably will rouse the bossa to the point where you wish you could join the dancers. Smuin is also bringing back Shinju, which will be performed to Paul Chihara’s magical score. This piece just might be the most erotic you’ll ever see in ballet form. Reason three: the Palace of Fine Arts. With good sight lines and a relaxed setting, it’s the perfect theater for a company of this size. (Rita Felciano)

Through Oct 15. Opens Sat/7, 8 p.m. Runs Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m., except Sat/7); Oct 15, 2 p.m.
Palace of Fine Arts
Bay and Lyon, SF
$40-$55
(415) 978-2787
www.smuinballetorg

FRIDAY

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Oct. 6

Event/Visual Art/Music/Film

“The Illuminated Corridor”

Let’s face it – live loud music and large projected images don’t take over cities nearly as often as they should. Why in the hell should a street fair be required for it to happen? The visionaries behind “The Illuminated Corridor” have been righting this problem. Their latest collision of sight and sound includes movie-esque stuff by Cinepimps, featuring Canyon Cinema filmmaker Alfonso Alvarez. Music will be made by folks such as Nicholas Chase, Admiral Ted Brinkley, the DC-to-Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Sharon Cheslow, and a trio that includes Guardian contributor George Chen. The fact that Veronica de Jesus is also involved in this shindig is exciting, because while the Bay Area is full of great drawings these days, hers might be the best around. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7-11 p.m.
25th St. between Broadway and Telegraph, Oakl.
Free
www.illuminatedcorridor.com

Film

“Midnites for Maniacs”: They Live

Ours is a culture of obligatory consumerism. The streets and airwaves have become a canvas for messages from corporate entities, and we cannot help but obey. It sometimes seems as though the world is run by an invisible group of aliens who exploit our inferiority complexes to ensure widespread complacency. If only we had some bionic sunglasses that would enable us to distinguish the aliens from the humans. We could lend them to a washed-up professional wrestler and relax as he busied himself chewing bubble gum and kicking ass. So goes the story line of John Carpenter’s seminal sci-fi horror classic, They Live. At once a comment on greed, subliminal messaging, conspicuous consumption, and horrible acting, They Live is widely regarded as the best movie of all time. (Justin Juul)

With The Return of the Living Dead and Sid and Nancy
7:30 p.m.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$10
(415) 621-6120
www.midnitesformaniacs.com
www.thecastrotheatre.com

THURSDAY

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Oct. 5

Visual Art

“Who’s Afraid of San Francisco?”

Who’s afraid of San Francisco? The whole world, it sometimes seems, including the people who live here. A new group show at Frey Norris Gallery brings together more than 20 works by local artists that examine San Francisco and what it stands for in the public consciousness. Recent “Bay Area Now”-er Frederick Loomis’s apocalyptic work reps the visionary side of matters, while an attractively vivid painting by Enrique Chagoya that chows down on Ellsworth Kelly is one of at least a few works dealing with immigration. (Johnny Ray Huston)

6-9 p.m. reception
Through Nov. 16
Frey Norris Gallery
456 Geary, SF
Free
(415) 346-7812
www.freynorris.com

Music

ADULT.

The Detroit duo, formed in 1997, don’t adhere to the whims of popular youth culture: it is this very aversion that helped inspire their very mature handle. ADULT.’s calculated sparse beats, often reminiscent of kitchen utensils clattering, collide with ominous synthesizers and seething vocals to form a heavily dissonant brand of no wave techno that demands a visceral reaction. They don’t care if it’s love or hate, as long as it makes you listen. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

With Hardplace and Landshark
9 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$13
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com
www.adultperiod.com

WEDNESDAY

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Oct. 4

Event

Don Ed Hardy

What does it take to earn the status of “the Godfather of Tattoo”? Ask Don Ed Hardy, a practitioner of skin art for 30 years, who’s known for his arresting designs and for melding Western and Eastern aesthetics. It is this cross-cultural mixing of horimono, or classical Japanese tattoo, with Americana iconography that has garnered Hardy his formidable reputation and a specialized creative edge. Find out more about the Bay Area native when he lectures at Mills College in Oakland. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

7 p.m.
Mills College, Music Building Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur, Oakl.
Free
(510) 430-2164
www.mills.edu
www.donedhardy.com

Event

Harmon Leon

Living in one of the bluest corners of blue-state America, it’s easy to forget how the other half lives. This is where Harmon Leon comes in. Leon dives headfirst into the right wing and lives to tell the tale with hilariously savage aplomb. He volunteered on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, joined abortion protests, went to Christian rock concerts, dined with a group of white supremacists at an Applebee’s. Leon is having a release party for his book The Infiltrator: My Undercover Exploits in Right-Wing America at the Rockit Room. (Aaron Sankin)

7 p.m.
Rockit Room
406 Clement, SF
Free
(415) 387-6343
www.rock-it-room.com

The final frontier

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› cheryl@sfbg.com
Ask Aron Ranen about his filmmaking philosophy, and he won’t pause long. “I’m a reality surfer. Things pop up as I’m quote-unquote traveling around the world with my camera.”
When he says “pop up,” he ain’t kidding. While attempting to uncover the truth about the Apollo 11 moon landing in Did We Go? (which screened in 2000 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art), Ranen stumbled upon the fact that the magnetic tapes used to record the 1969 event had gone missing. This peculiar nugget resurfaced in the news lately, generating enough buzz beyond the conspiracy fringes to nudge NASA into a response via its Web site: “Despite the challenges of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.”
A month ago Ranen appeared on CNN to discuss the controversy. Host Glenn Beck tried awfully hard to paint the doc maker as a wackjob; the segment ends with a joke likening those who believe the moon landing was faked to those who are “still wondering why Darrin One was mysteriously replaced by Darrin Two.” This kind of reaction doesn’t seem to bother Ranen, who between movies teaches digital filmmaking at DV Workshops, the school he runs out of his Mission District studio.
“My motto is film the obvious,” he explains. (Later in our conversation he expands that motto to include “trust reality … and also don’t fuck it up.”) “I’m just trying to illuminate some of the things that are going on in our culture.” Did We Go? is actually not a wackjob’s manifesto; it features interviews with Apollo 11 flight director Gene Krantz and astronaut Buzz Aldrin — as well as the NASA employee who physically closed the hatch on the rocket before its launch. The film doesn’t try to discredit the moon landing; it tries, with sincerity, to prove that it actually happened. (In other words, there’s a reason it’s not titled We Didn’t Go.)
A filmmaker since he was 13, Ranen has made so many short documentaries that he’s lost count. Over the years the self-funded artist has developed his own approach to shooting. His films are generally unstructured — expecting the unexpected — and are guided by Ranen’s first-person voice-overs, delivered in a tone that hovers between curiosity and amazement.
“Everyone trusts me and talks to me in my films,” he says. It’s a claim backed up by the openness displayed by his diverse array of subjects, many of whom Ranen meets on the fly. His film Power and Control: LSD in the 60s — a tangent-riddled exploration of the drug’s influence on politics and counterculture — features chats with an ex–Stanford University researcher whose simian LSD tests earned him the nickname “Monkey Mike” and a now-elderly professor who was among the Harvard students who participated in Timothy Leary’s 1962 Good Friday experiment. Ranen attributes this kind of access to his lone gunman style.
“I refuse to let anyone go with me. I believe so much of documentary is about the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject. I don’t want a crew or a sound man to mitigate my relationships with these subjects,” he explains. “When I’m talking to someone, you can see their enthusiasm in talking to me.”
Ranen’s go-with-the-flow methodology extends to postproduction. He “edits organically,” subscribing to what he calls “the pinball effect: as you’re watching it, the edit speaks to you and says, no, take that stuff in the middle and put it up front.” He’s also not opposed to altering his films after they are finished. Power and Control screened as a 70-minute feature at the 2005 San Francisco Independent Film Festival; the version at Other Cinema this weekend hovers closer to 40 minutes. Eventually, Ranen hopes to add a chapter exploring the possible LSD-KGB connection.
His most recent film, Black Hair, is also his most widely seen, thanks to a strategy of free distribution via YouTube. The doc, which Ranen says has been viewed some 100,000 times, delves into the racial and economic issues raised by the fact that most of the black hair-care industry’s retail and wholesale markets are controlled by Korean, not African American, businesspeople.
Ranen’s film inspired Bay Area hair-product manufacturer Sam Ennon to found the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association, or BOBSA, now a national organization aimed at what Ennon calls “reorganizing the whole industry in terms of the distribution channel. It’s not that we want to run the Koreans out of business — we just want to share in the business. We want to recirculate the black dollar.”
Ennon says Black Hair gave BOBSA’s cause a major assist. “A picture speaks better than words. The film is really what turned it completely around.”
It’s all in a day’s work for Ranen, who seems to attract unexpected spontaneity and the not-occasional weird coincidence. His DV Workshops was funded with a settlement he received after learning that Nine Inch Nails had sampled one of his films without permission. The dialogue snippet, taken from Ranen’s film Religion in Suburbia, just happened to include this phrase: “do you believe in miracles?” SFBG
POWER AND CONTROL:
LSD IN THE 60S
Sat/30, 8:30 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
$5
(415) 824-3890
www.atasite.org
www.dvworkshops.com

Broken social scene

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Brooklyn, like Oakland and the Mission District, has swelled in the last decade with postadolescents: beards and black hoodies wandering streets on the verge of gentrification. This intermediary space is the setting and premise for indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski’s latest, Mutual Appreciation. Bujalski first made a splash with Boston-based Funny Ha Ha (2002), an unassuming feature made in the tradition of talky indie forbearers John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, and Richard Linklater. Mutual Appreciation again collects a group of guarded postgraduates for its cast, but the film is no angsty trifle. Bujalski pulls off that impossible trick — always surprising no matter the influences — of affecting a naturalistic, improvisational flow while maintaining a clear authorial voice. It’s a dynamic that picks up steam with each exquisitely staged scene, making Mutual Appreciation as absorbing as anything you’re likely to see at the movies this year.
How then do we account for this guided freewheel? Cinematography is, as always, at least part of the answer. The grainy 16mm black-and-white film stock isn’t mere affectation but rather a functional stylistic element, underscoring the drab reality of the movie’s unsettled spaces: apartments with everything secondhand and mismatched, unmade beds on nicked hardwood floors, and rooms that are either too big (making one fret over the lack of proper furniture) or too small (making one crouch). Bujalski and cinematographer Matthias Grunsky court these challenging spaces, always coming up with a revealing composition that frames characters in depth — splayed against walls or hunched in makeshift chairs.
While Bujalski has clearly done his homework on no-budget cinematography, his narration style seems more instinctual and basic to the film’s shape. Like exemplar François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Mutual Appreciation pivots on a youthful, untested ménage à trois: boyfriend-girlfriend Lawrence (Bujalski) and Ellie (Rachel Clift) have lived in Brooklyn for some time, while Lawrence’s old friend Alan (Justin Rice) is new in town, lost in an existential quandary over his life and music (“It’s like pop”). Like so many of his progenitors, Bujalski has an innate sense for particular rhythms of talk. This isn’t just a matter of dialogue (“If you kiss me now, my breath’s going to be all beery and burrito-y”) but also of editing — knowing, for example, how to exit a scene, convey a relationship with an unevenly paced phone conversation, and let the camera run on a given close-up to register a character’s unguarded reactions.
More impressive is the way Bujalski subtly orchestrates little one-acts to achieve genuine drama. The principle instance of such narrative structuring is in the many scenes between Lawrence and Ellie, and Alan and Ellie, but none between the old friends in question (until the closing minutes anyhow). If Mutual Appreciation’s narrative seems accidental, it’s a testament to Bujalski’s understated technique. There is certainly method here, from repetitions of dialogue (“That’s flattering”) and theme (gender confusion) to the patient unveiling of character, the apotheosis of which is a sequence of scenes tracing Alan from one Warholian party to another, no better for the omnipresent tallboys of beer.
What begins as nonchalant talk blooms into compelling drama by movie’s end. It seems no coincidence that one of Mutual Appreciation’s three main characters is an indie rocker. Bujalski, after all, registers the fear and trembling that twentysomethings expect from music (middlebrow Indiewood being as unlikely to produce something relatable as the French “cinema of quality” from which the New Wave broke away). But Mutual Appreciation is more than an outlet; in its illuminating narration, many will see a mirror, an ode to these transitional places in which one blusters toward adulthood, talking all the way. SFBG
MUTUAL APPRECIATION
Opens Fri/29
Red Vic Movie House
1727 Haight, SF
$4–$8
(415) 668-3994
www.redvicmoviehouse.com
www.mutualappreciation.com
For an interview with Mutual Appreciation director Andrew Bujalski, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Grizzly man

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New York City band Grizzly Bear’s gently ambient Yellow House (Warp) manages to delicately conjure bittersweet associations of musty, memory-cluttered childhood homes and reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist-modernist novel The Yellow Wall-Paper — but the real household dirt on this band has to remain in one’s imagination.
Vocalist-keyboardist-guitarist-autoharpist Edward Droste is up-front about his own sexuality — saying he’s been in a relationship with one man for most of the band’s existence — but when it comes to the love lives of his straight mates, the sometime journalist and Pro Tools bedroom recordist is the soul of discretion. Grizzly Bear’s tales of random hookups are just “too dirty” to pass along, he explains on the phone from the East Coast college campus where the group is playing before joining the TV on the Radio tour in October. “I usually bond with the girls,” says Droste, 27, miming his role as the band’s father confessor. “It’s cool — we’re leaving town. But it’s totally cool.”
And a certain ethereal cool marks the foursome’s gorgeous soundscapes, now lifted above the tape-hiss fray of their fake-fur-embellished 2004 debut, Horn of Plenty (Kanine; later reissued in 2005 with a CD of remixes by Dntel, the Soft Pink Truth, Final Fantasy, and Solex). Yellow House sounds warm and welcoming, thanks to the production prowess of the band’s brass and woodwinds player Chris Taylor and the recording site: Droste’s mother’s Boston-area home, the yellow house of the disc’s title. The seductive tug of nostalgia takes over as Beach Boys–style harmonies skate over fingerpicked acoustic guitar and strings, bird chirps, and wah-wah pedal flit together on “Little Brother.” Horns lumber alongside busy insectlike electronics and Droste’s and guitarist Daniel Rossen’s cooing vocals during “Plans.” By the time the album breaks into “Marla” — a slowed-down, strings-swathed dusky dirge based on a 1930s-era tune penned by Droste’s great-aunt of the same name, a failed singer who eventually drank herself to death — resistance becomes futile. This is seriously lovely music, a reflection of the group’s recent communal music-making — and far removed from groupie dish.
“Initially, we wanted to record an album before we had a label and didn’t have any money,” recalls Droste, who shares the name of the Hooters cofounder, a distant relation. “My mom was going to be away, it was my old childhood home, and I was, like, ‘Well, we can all have our own bedrooms, record in the living room, and there’s a backyard, and every night we’d have chips and salsa and beer.’”
The laid-back atmosphere and ensuing musical productivity led to a bidding frenzy among indie labels when the recordings emerged, and now Droste is relaxing into a tour schedule that brings him back to San Francisco for the first time since February 2005, when Grizzly Bear — jokingly named after a Droste boyfriend who was anything but — played the Eagle Tavern. How did Droste’s hetero bandmates handle the attentions of SF’s finest bears — and those of the bandleader himself?
“They’re total cock teases. They love attention from boys, but they never do anything,” Droste offers laconically. “Never say never, but I kind of feel like if you’re hanging with me in New York City and there are a million fags everywhere and dozens of opportunities … I’m just gonna drop it and accept the fact.” (Kimberly Chun)
GRIZZLY BEAR
Fri/29, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1421
www.grizzly-bear.net

Boys? What boys?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I meet bandleader, videographer, and Mission District indie icon Leslie Satterfield at Ritual café on a summer evening as she walks up Valencia Street looking weather-beaten and weary from her recent travels. Is she just back from a cross-country tour, I wonder? No, she was precisely where you’d expect the guitarist from Boyskout to have been: camping. She survived days of deer watching and near–bear sightings in the Sierras, and despite her desire for a hot shower and warm bed, Satterfield settles in with a cappuccino and some good stories.
Satterfield may be best known for her post-punk quartet Boyskout, a band that’s risen the ranks since its inception in 2001 to tour around the United States and Germany and headline major local venues including Mezzanine and Bimbo’s 365 Club. But the sandy-blond, late-20s songwriter has been also turning heads of late with her filmmaking.
Her video for Film School’s song “11:11” — a minimalist travelogue set in San Francisco streets and tunnels — is the latest work for her own Sharkbone Productions, which has also produced Boyskout videos shown internationally at major gay and lesbian film festivals. Her latest projects include a video for Rough Trade UK–signed act Scissors for Lefty and a self-produced experimental film that she describes as “being about love and creating what you believe.”
“Most of my films have been about how we create our own realities with our mind and how powerful the mind itself is — how your thoughts create everything that happens to you,” Satterfield says.
With her Mission artist garb — black boots and worn dark denim — I figure Satterfield had a youth spent in mosh pits and zine-collective punk hangouts. On the contrary, she grew up listening to the Beatles, Olivia Newton-John, and Simon and Garfunkel, while spending a lot of time drawing. She earned a BA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and resided in Amsterdam for a year before moving west. Now in addition to classics from Elton John and Heart, her iPod holds songs by Coco Rosie, the Libertines, and Tapes ’n Tapes. It’s an eclectic collection of music, similar to the local bands she holds dear and performs with regularly. The list includes up-and-coming acts like the Fucking Ocean, Tartufi, Full Moon Partisans, Death of a Party, and the Mall, as well as Shande — the group fronted by her sometime–guest guitarist Jennifer Chochinov.
Admittedly a shy, coy romantic who’s just completed an all-acoustic album, Mixing Memory with Desire (Dial), as J-Mod, Satterfield was initially a reluctant lead vocalist. You wouldn’t know it from Boyskout’s recent rock-out performances: Satterfield’s steely, saucerwide blue eyes zap the audience playfully while she mixes it up with her bandmates onstage. Along with bassist Piper Lewine, keys and violin player Christina Stanley, and drummer Ping (and occasionally adding guest guitarists like Chochinov or Daniel Dietrick to the lineup), Satterfield slayed audiences at South By Southwest this year in Austin and returned immediately to begin recording Boyskout’s now completed second album, Another Life (Three Ring). At the time we speak, eight of the planned 11 songs are done but won’t be out, well, until they’re done. “I’m a huge perfectionist,” Satterfield confesses. “The biggest in the world. I really like to take my time and do things to a tee.”
The songs I’ve heard from the project, including the Nocturne-era-Siouxsie-sounding “Spotlight” and the jittery dance-rock slab of “Lobby Boys,” are as refreshing as local underground music can get (word to Live 105). Meanwhile, Satterfield’s singing on the J-Mod disc (fantastically recorded at Hyde Street Studios) resembles Nico or Hope Sandoval in their darkest, most mysterious moments. Each album serves as an introduction to Satterfield’s thoughtful and dissonant guitar playing, a style that compliments her alabaster-smooth voice. Based on her range of projects and contacts, I get the impression that Satterfield has some big opportunities on the horizon.
Other recent adventures include a trip to Portland to teach at the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. “I taught last year in New York, and it was really fun. I worked with a group of 8-year-olds who formed their own band called Pink Slip.” Which reminds me, I never did get to ask Satterfield what her day job is. For now I’ll just assume it’s the professional term for “brilliant multidisciplinary artist.” SFBG
BOYSKOUT
With the Mall and the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
Oct. 5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.boyskout.com

TUESDAY

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Oct. 3

Music

Man Man and Pink Mountaintops

With band members identifying themselves as masters of such unusual instruments as the beduggering demonstration and the illustrious quesadilla special, Philadelphia’s Man Man are nothing if not unconventional. Wielding a mightily transfixing power with a carnival-clown playful sound, they bring to mind images of unrelentingly caffeinated children’s choirs playing musical chairs with Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart in Federico Fellini’s junkyard. Providing additional mind-messing are Vancouver’s Pink Mountaintops, whose latest album, Axis of Evol (Jagjaguwar, 2006), is a hypnotically propulsive piece of deliciously twisted modern psychedelia. (Todd Lavoie)

With Dodo Bird
8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com

Visual Art

“Palimpsest; New Paintings” and “Le Silence des Choses”

The shock, misery, and loss of control that a “Dear John” letter recipient experiences are tough topics to sell. In his show “Palimpsest; New Paintings,” Mark Stock captures the dull resignation in the eyes of his subject and builds layers of weight atop it. Catherine Jansens’s watercolors are an inspired complement to Stock’s works. “Le Silence des Choses” shows off her incredible eye for light and unwavering control of the medium. Each exhibit explores a heaviness both in technique and in content that is palpable and startling in the light, airy, whitewashed gallery space. (K. Tighe)

Through Oct. 28.
Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Modernism
685 Market, SF
Free
(415) 541-0461
www.modernisminc.com

MONDAY

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Oct. 2

Film

Jesus Camp

Fascinated disgust and aghast amusement are two feelings I don’t experience often enough. Jesus Camp elicits both in spades. This doc by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (The Boys of Baraka) travels into the darkest heart of America’s evangelical Christian movement: a North Dakota summer camp that whips born-again children – most already home-schooled into such beliefs as the nonexistence of evolution and global warming – into religious frenzies. The film also places emphasis on the palpable evangelical presence in American politics – with a chilling look toward the future, when this brainwashed-from-birth generation will eagerly join the right-wing voting bloc. (Cheryl Eddy)

In Bay Area theaters
www.jesuscampthemovie.com

Visual Art

“Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston”

Intended as an archive for the monumental partnership between two major artistic figures, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Mexico as Muse” serves more as a teaser to Modotti’s life and work. While Weston’s images of earthen pots and Mexican skies build a foundation for later works, his portraits of his artistic partner are by far his most interesting contributions to “Mexico as Muse.” Modotti chose her subjects carefully, opting for the limitless possibilities of telephone lines stretching over the rural Mexican landscape and flimsy, partially ajar doors instead of the immobile nature of Weston’s content. Her most famous photo featured here is a bundle of white roses, clumped together in limp and fragile decay. (K. Tighe)

Through Jan. 2
Fri.-Tues., 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-8:45 p.m.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third St., SF
$12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free under 13 and members (free first Tuesday; half price Thurs., 6-8:45pm)
(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org

SUNDAY

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Oct. 1

Music

Sonic Youth

For 25 years, Sonic Youth have dutifully served as a gateway band. Just as the group has made room in its discography to accommodate elegant noise rock and more avant-garde explorations, so too have its members cashed their cred to draw attention to their own favorites, some pop (e.g., Nirvana), most not. Many record hounds of a certain age can attribute much of their most challenging music to Sonic Youth’s generous thumbs-up – for me, this list includes titles like Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and Wolf Eyes’ Dread. Though the band’s trademark noise rock is refined with each new release, its taste for adventure remains, here showing its face in the band’s cherry-picking local favorites Erase Errata and 16 Bitch Pile-Up as openers. (Max Goldberg)

8 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$25
(415) 346-6000
www.thefillmore.com
www.sonicyouth.com

Music

The Mass and Triclops!

Oaktown’s Golden Bull has been having some pretty bad-ass Sunday evening shows, thanks to Scott Alcoholocaust. Such as? Such as the Mass, one of the heaviest rock bands going, and Triclops!, which features the brutalized vocals of John Geek from the Fleshies as well as members from Bottles and Skulls, Victim’s Family, and Lower Forty-Eight. Their Web site states their musical goal is “to keep rock music uncomfortable for themselves and others.” Listen to “Bug Bomb” and you’ll see what they mean … somewhere in the instrumental break, you’ll swear the ghost of Steel Pole Bath Tub had crawled into your ear and laid eggs. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

With Grayceon and We March
7 p.m.
Golden Bull
412 14th St., Oakl.
$5
(510) 893-0803
www.myspace.com/bigbulls
www.themass.us
www.triclopsband.com

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