1. “Prophets of Deceit” As assorted “powers” turn the fear factor up ever higher, you don’t need to be Mel Gibson (phew) to see that an exhibition looking at apocalyptic cults — especially governmentally sanctioned ones — is a timely idea. San Francisco end-times expert Craig Baldwin and others take on messianic ideologies.
Sept. 12–Nov. 11. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Logan Galleries, 1111 Eighth St., SF. 1-800-447-1278, www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/prophets
2. “Wallace Berman” and “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle” A spring event at SF Art Institute whet my appetite for these shows, which gather the projects of artist, filmmaker, and publisher Berman, an undersung figure whose influence has laced the cosmic wonder of many neofolkies, whether or not they know it.
“Wallace Berman”: Sept. 6–Oct. 28. 871 Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 235, SF. (415) 543-5155. “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle”: Oct. 18–Dec. 10. Berkeley Art Museum Galleries, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
3. “Neopopular Demand: Recent Works by Fahamu Pecou” Fahamu Pecou is the shit. Peep his Web site and you will agree.
Sept. 20–Oct. 24. Michael Martin Galleries, 101 Townsend, suite 207, SF. (415) 541-1530, www.fahamupecouart.com
4. “Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics” Taking pages from Juan Carlos Mena and O Reyes’s book of the same name, the Yerba Buena Center hosts a show devoted to comic book, flyer, poster, and street imagery; a music video sideshow promises work by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, which can be like acid (without brain-frying side effects).
Nov. 18, 2006–March 4, 2007. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org
5. “New Work: Phil Collins” They are music videos, but they aren’t made by the man behind “Sussudio.” Turner Prize finalist Collins taps into the spirit of Morrissey rather than Peter Gabriel’s follically challenged replacement. His video installation dünya dinlemiyor (the world won’t listen) features kids in Istanbul performing karaoke versions of songs from a certain 1987 Smiths compilation.
Sept. 16, 2006–Jan. 21, 2007. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
6. “Visionary Output: Work by Creative Growth Artists” Recent Guardian Local Artist William Scott is one of a dozen people featured in this show devoted to the great, Oakland-based Creative Growth.
Sept. 7–Oct. 14. Rena Bransten Gallery, 77 Geary, SF. (415) 982-3292, www.renabranstengallery.com
7. “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” California has long been a front line and dropping-off point for visionaries, a place where people have brought new ideas about community to life (and sometimes to death). Taking its name from an essay by Philip K. Dick, this 12-person show scopes the state’s future and the state of the future, mixing work by local artists with real-life attempts at space colonizing and urban agriculture.
Nov. 28, 2006–Feb. 24, 2007. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. 1-800-447-1278, www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/universe
8. “Making Sense of Sound” Another wave of sound installations continues to overtake museums and galleries, and the Exploratorium is an ideal site for sonic exploration; this exhibition, featuring 40 new interactive exhibits, promises to be a must-see, I mean must-hear. It’ll all kick off with the arrival and ringing of a cast-iron bell driven cross-country by composer Brenda Hutchinson.
Oct. 21, 2006–Dec. 31, 2007. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) EXP-LORE, www.exploratorium.edu
9. “Kala Fellowship Exhibition, Part II” Kala’s first installment included strong work by Liz Hickok and others. The second installment features Miriam Dym, Gary Nakamoto, Sasha Petrenko, and Tracey Snelling.
Sept. 7–Oct. 14. Kala Art Institute Galley, 1060 Heinz, Berk. (510) 549-2977, www.kala.org
10. “Ghosts in the Machine” The new SF Camerawork space — directly above the Cartoon Art Museum — will open with this group show of eight international artists that relates haunting to cultural estrangement. Dinh Q. Lê’s “grass mats” constructed with stills from films such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now are one example.
Oct. 5–Nov. 18. 657 Mission, SF. (415) 863-1001, www.sfcamerawork.org SFBG
SF
Art
Seven up!
› a&eletters@sfbg.com Andromache Berkeley company Central Works remounts its 1994 production of Racine’s gripping 17th-century account of the Trojan War aftermath. Though the company likes to emphasize its collaboratively written projects, director Gary Graves’s adaptation of the play, which follows the trail of unrequited love leading to the enigmatic Andromache, was one of the first shows that brought the company critical attention. Oct. 14–Nov. 19. Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk. (510) 558-1381, www.centralworks.org Colorado After producing a successful run of Killing My Lobster member Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s first play, Hunter Gatherers, at the Thick House this past summer, Impact Theater takes on another piece by the up-and-coming dramaturge. Again the central theme is everyone’s favorite human trait: jealousy. This time a teen beauty queen disappears the day before the big pageant and everyone in her family is a suspect. Sept. 14–Oct. 21. La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk. (510) 464-4468, www.impacttheatre.com The God of Hell Entering its 40th year this season, the Magic Theatre celebrates with the latest play by the company’s erstwhile playwright-in-residence, Sam Shepard. The God of Hell is Shepard’s indictment of the Bush administration; he wrote it in 2004 with hope that Dubya wouldn’t see a second term. Amy Glazer directs this piece about a Midwestern couple whose lives are disrupted by an odd visit from a traveling salesman hawking patriotic goods. Sept. 23–Oct. 22. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, building D, Buchanan at Marina, SF. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org Passing Strange Berkeley Rep enters uncharted territory with this not-quite musical conceived and written by Stew (with music cowritten by longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald), a singer-songwriter whose solo songcraft and controversial band the Negro Problem have received acclaim from the New York Times and Village Voice. With a live band to accompany Stew and his cast, the show follows the African American on a journey from his native Los Angeles and the church community he’s raised in to an alternative life in Amsterdam and Berlin, as Stew searches for an authentic self amid people who pass for something they’re not. Oct. 20–Dec. 3. Berkeley Repertory Theatre (Thrust Stage), 2025 Addison, Berk. (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org “Pinteresque” The Oxford English Dictionary does indeed have an entry for the titular term: “Of or reutf8g to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays…. Pinter’s plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.” Eastenders Repertory Company and some aspiring playwrights tap into and respond to those qualities with this program, which features Pinter’s The Lover and short pieces inspired by that work. Four years ago the company struck gold with a similar idea applied to Tennessee Williams, just one of its many inventive one-act programming ideas. See its take on Pinter, and then grab a pint, er. Sept. 13–Oct. 8. Eureka Theatre Company, 215 Jackson, SF. (510) 568-4118, eurekatheatre.org “SF Fringe Festival” If you can spare an hour, then get to a Fringe show. Now in its 15th year of rounding up improv troupes, comedy groups, soloists, and multimedia acts from the frontiers of the theater world, the festival delivers 40 original performances in 200 shows over 12 days. This year features Best of SF Fringe 2002 RIPE Theatre putting on a handful of new shorts, Boxcar Players doing improv on the Mexican Bus, someone rolling a boulder up Powell for 20 minutes, and a group from India performing from the Kama Sutra (oh my). Maybe you can spare two hours. Sept. 6–17. For information go to www.sffringe.org Tings Dey Happen Dat dey do, and Dan Hoyle (the son of Geoff Hoyle but a lot more than that as well) has made a show about them — specifically, the things that happened in 2005 when he went to Nigeria on a Fulbright scholarship. Malaria and militant karaoke are two of the experiences Hoyle had, along with some educational ones that give him added insight into the United States’ oil-hungry policies. Hoyle may be young, but he’s an old hand at one-man shows by this point; Tings Dey Happen follows in the Marsh- and self-directed footsteps of his previous performances, Circumnavigator and Florida 2004: The Big Bummer. Only the Almighty might know why tings dey happen the way them happen — but Hoyle probably has some clues as well. Dec. 14, 2006–Jan. 27, 2007. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org SFBG
TWO PLUS TWO
TWO PLUS TWO
ERIN GILLEY’S PICKS
1. “365 Days/365 Plays” Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play for each day of the year. They’ll be performed all year by artists nationwide, and San Francisco will be a huge part of the largest theater collaboration in history. A stunt, but a really cool one. Begins Nov. 13. SF venues TBA. www.publictheater.org
2. Big Love Not the HBO show — living, breathing theater, with a big prize for the ugliest bridesmaid’s dress in the audience. Sept. 28–Oct. 21. Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida, SF. $15–$30. 1-800-838-3006, www.foolsfury.org
Erin Gilley is general manager of Crowded Fire Theater.
JOHN WILKINS’S PICKS
1. Hamlet: Blood on the Brain In a nifty display of relocation, Campo Santo transports the classic play from Denmark to our own drug-ravaged Oakland in the 1980s. If any theater group can make concept Shakespeare soar, this is the one — simply the best acting core in the Bay Area. Oct. 26–Nov. 20. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. $9–$20. (415) 626-2787, www.theintersection.org
2. DEFIXONES: Orders From the Dead If you’ve heard Diamanda Galas sing, you’ve been amazed or shocked in the depths of your soul. Here, her three-and-a-half octave voice takes on the Armenian genocide in what promises to be a theatrical assault you won’t soon forget. Oct. 19 and 21. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission, SF. $15–$35. (415) 978-2787,
www.ybca.org SFBG
John Wilkins is artistic director of Last Planet Theatre.
The jump off
› johnny@sfbg.com
Underground Sam Green’s documentary The Weather Underground helped spark David Dorfman Dance’s ambitious new 50-minute piece about activism and terrorism, but Dorman’s own experiences growing up in ’60s Chicago during the Days of Rage are an even bigger influence. Dorfman and Green will also discuss Green’s film in a related event.
Sept. 21 and 23. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org
“Kathak at the Crossroads” Working with companies in India and Boston, Chitresh Das Dance Company has put together perhaps the biggest event ever dedicated to Kathak in this country. No better figure than the energetic, veteran Das could be at the helm of such an undertaking.
Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 333-9000, www.kathak.org
Tarantella, Tarantula The local Artship Dance/Theater, led by Slobodan Dan Paich, explores the tarantella, a dance used to ward off the poison of a tarantula bite in particular and malaises of the heart in general. This premiere is paired with a visual art exhibit based on Artship’s years of research on the subject.
Sept. 28–Oct. 8. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., SF. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org
King Arthur Mark Morris collaborates with the English National Opera and takes on Henry Purcell’s semiopera, giving it a vaudevillian spin, with costume design by Isaac Mizrahi. Productions in England have already been lavishly praised.
Sept. 30–Oct. 7. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft and Telegraph, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu
The Live Billboard Project Site-specific specialist (and Guardian Goldie winner) Jo Kreiter knows how to create a dynamic, innovative image. This time she’s doing so at the wild intersection of 24th and Mission streets (near Dance Mission, no doubt). A 10th anniversary production by Kreiter’s Flyaway company, Live Billboard Project will feature her signature aerial choreography.
Oct. 4–8. 24th St. and Mission, SF. (415) 333-8302, www.flyawayproductions.com
The Miles Davis Suite Savage Jazz Dance Company and Miles Davis is a match made in dance heaven — or whatever sphere Davis’s music reaches and thus wherever Reginald Savage’s choreography manages to follow it. If any choreographer is well suited to the late, great Davis, it’s Savage — the real question is what compositions and recordings Savage will mine.
Oct. 12–15. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., SF. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org
Daughters of Haumea Patrick Makuakane and Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu pay tribute to the women of ancient Hawaii. Both hula kahiko and hula mua will figure in Goldie winner Makuakane’s adaptation of a new book by Lucia Tarallo Jensen that is devoted to fisherwoman, female warriors, and high priestesses.
Oct. 21–29. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF. (415) 392-4400, www.naleihulu.org
Kagemi — Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors The visual splendor within the title only hints at what the classical-, modern-, and Butoh-trained Sankai Juku company might present in this performance; raves for the mind-bending talents of artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, and the still photos alone make this event a must-see.
Nov. 14–15. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.performances.org
“San Francisco Hip-Hop Dance Fest” You can count on Micaya to not only showcase the best hip-hop dance in the Bay Area but also to bring some of the world’s best hip-hop troupes to Bay Area stages. This year Flo-Ology, Soulsector, Funkanometry SF, and Loose Change will be representing the Bay Area, and Sanrancune/O’Trip House will be traveling all the way from Paris.
Nov. 17–19. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF. (415) 392-4400, www.sfhiphopdancefest.com
Dimi (Women’s Sorrow) The all-female, Ivory Coast–based Compagnie Tché Tché is renowned for pushing dance into realms that are both visually awe-inducing and physically explosive. This piece, overseen by artistic director Beatrice Kombé, entwines the stories of four dancers.
Dec. 1–2. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org SFBG
Fashion Week for the fierce, pt. II: Being Marke B.
Fab intern Justin Juul picked up the Fashion Week/Fisher Spooner pieces for me this past weekend. Here’s what he had to say.
The press people at Mystery Girl Productions invited Marke B. to the third annual SF Fashion Week sometime last month. Never one to turn his nose up at a free party, Marke enthusiastically accepted before realizing that the dates clashed with those he had previously set aside for his three-day long birthday bash. Thus, by way of simple calendar negligence, the job was handed down to me, Justin Juul, better known ‘round these parts as “The Almost Fabulous Intern” — if Marke gets an alter ego, damnit, so do I. Join me as I spend a night in Marke’s shoes.
Justin and fashionable stalker friend
Pre-Party
“What would Marke do?” I thought, as I began to get myself dolled up for the evening. “What was he saying last week about Tylenol Cold and Sinus medication? Did he say you should or shouldn’t mix it with tequila?” Since all I had was a half pint of Gentleman Jack, I figured it didn’t matter so I popped the pills, finished getting ready, then went outside to wait for my cab. While standing there, the details of Marke’s alcohol and cold medication story re-surfaced in my head. “Don’t do it, young intern,” Marke’s ghostly voice echoed, “you’ll pass out and turn blue on the dance floor like I did, wooohooo hooohoo (spooky/fabulous ghost sounds).” Fuck, I thought to myself. I spent the next half hour nursing my third Jack n’ Coke in the cab while trying to ignore Marke’s phantom presence. Despite the knowledge that I was probably going to suffocate by the end of the night, I felt I was off to a good start. Marke would have wanted it this way.
Why people get mad at the media, part 8, Business Week/McGraw Hill finally does the right thing and publishes two retractions
As you may remember from my spine-tingling serial blogs, I have now spent more than two weeks scampering up and down the hills and through the bogs with the BW/MH folks in San Francisco and their towering headquarters building in midtown Manhattan. I was trying to get a simple correction on some mistakes it made in its Aug. l4th cover story (“Valley boys: how this 29-year-old kid made $60 million in l8th months.”) Here is a recap and a play-by-play:
BW/MH in its first three lines in its first paragraph in its lead story made two bad mistakes. The lead: “It was June 26, 4:45 a.m., and Digg founder Kevin Rose was slugging back tea and trying to keep his eyes open as he drove his Volkswagen Golf to Digg’s headquarters above the grungy offices of the SF Weekly in Potrero Hill.” The first mistake: Digg.com is a tenant of the Guardian in the Guardian building at l35 Mississippi St., and its offices are above the Guardian offices. The SF Weekly is our chain competitor, owned out of Phoenix, Arizona, and its offices are on the other side of Mission Bay. The second mistake: our offices are not “grungy” and the BW/MH reporters were never in our offices.
I decided, what the hell, I’ll go through the drill and try to get a correction. And so I fought my way up the chain of command, by phone and email, from the sales offices in San Francisco to another office on the Peninsula to editorial offices high up in the BW/MG building on the Avenue of the Americas in New York. Finally, I got a call back from Mary Kuntz, an assistant managing editor who contended that the magazine had already done a correction in its online edition, replacing the SF Weekly offices with the Guardian offices.
This correction also ran in the Aug. 2l edition under a “Corrections and Clarifications” head: “The offices of Digg.com, featured in Valley boys” (Cover story, Aug. l4), are located above those of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, not SF Weekly.” Thanks, I said, noting the change from “grungy” offices to “grungy” lobby and how this was an admission that confirmed the reporters were never in our offices. I argued that leaving that pesky word “grungy” in the online edition and not taking it out of the printed edition only made the “correction” even more worse. She refused to budge, so my wife Jean Dibble, co-founder and co-publisher, went around the paper and took pictures and put them on my blog to try to prove our point that our offices weren’t “grungy.” Maybe this turned the tide. Kuntz went back to confer with some mysterious unnamed editor back in the headquarters ozone.
She called back a couple days later and said they were making another correction. Okay, I said, read it to me. The new correction said that the offices were not “grungy,” but the lobby was “grungy.” I was astounded. How in the world, I asked, can the editors in New York say that our lobby was “grungy” when they hadn’t seen it? She replied that her reporters had and they thought it was “grungy.” Well, I reminded her that the dictionary defined “grungy” as being in a “shabby or dirty in character or condition” and asked specifically what was “grungy” about our lobby? Was it our community bulletin board? Was it our community table for the city’s independent papers? Was it our “free press board” with a map from the Freedom House in New York showing the world’s free, partly free, and not free press, country by country? Was it the alerts from international free press organizations about murdered and jailed journalists? Was it our vintage UPI ticker machine, used in the old UPI office in San Francisco, one of the historic items in a San Francisco journalism museum project that we are helping establish? Was it the famous clock from the window of the old Brugmann’s Drug Store in Rock Rapids, Iowa, which the townsfolk used for decades to set their watches? (We display the clock on the wall near our reception desk.) Or was it perhaps the colorful mural of alternative San Francisco on the outside wall of the Guardian? She said no to all the questions. I then laid down the ultimate threat: Jean Dibble would this time around do pictures of the lobby, the clock, and the mural and put them up on my blog on the Guardian website. Maybe that did the trick.
Kuntz called back a couple of days later and read me the second correction. Fine and thanks, thanks, I said. It ran in the Sept. 4 edition as follows: “In our Aug. l4th cover story on Digg.com, we incorrectly described the offices of the San Francisco Bay Guardian as grungy. We regret the error.”
Amazing. I appreciate the corrections and I appreciate that BW/McGraw Hill did the right thing. I told Kuntz that, if she came to San Francisco, I would invite her (and that mysterious inside editor back in the stacks) for a Potrero Hill martini at the Connecticut Yankee. Or, when I come to New York, I would invite her (and that mystery editor) for a martini at the West End Bar (my old hangout on ll3th and Broadway when I was at the nearby Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.) Cheers!
Summing up: how to fight for a correction, how the media should handle reader complaints, the correction policy of the Guardian and the model policy of the Minnesota New Council, an impartial, independent, non-government organization that hears and considers complaints against the news media. The Guardian, let me note, places itself under the jurisdiction of the Minnesota News Council, as outlined in a special box in each Guardian under the letters column.
P.S. Memo to Business Week/McGraw Hill: keep your reporters and editors out of newspaper offices and lobbies. We’ll all be better off.
When the assholes take over
By Tim Redmond
What happens when the people who run the SF Weekly take over a paper in Seattle? It’s not pretty. No more endorsements, no more politics, half the staff flees … Too bad for Seattle.
Fashion Week for the fierce, pt I: Yao-za!
Fab intern K. Tighe went to Thursday’s Fashion Week emerging designers extravaganza, here’s the take:
What to wear? The big question. When I decided to attend the 3rd Annual San Francisco Fashion Week, I didn’t really think it through. You see, I’m not what one might call a “fashionable” person. Oh, I’ve got style for miles and miles — but trendy I am not. I’ve been wearing a uniform of jeans, cowboy boots and free band swag t-shirts for years — and the thought of dressing up for such an event frankly turns my stomach a little. So I did what any self-respecting journalist does in dicey situations such as these — I put on a sweater. I figure at the very least I can start a trend — the “dude ranch rocker on the slopes” look is gonna be all over the Milan runways next year, you watch.
Makeup!!!
I head to the Galleria — roughly 15th & Kansas, that highly fashionable district located just between the Mission and Potrero Hill — hoping the walk will open my mind a little. SF’s Fashion Week is not modeled after the stuff of New York and Paris events — tonight will focus on emerging local designers, and that is a cause I can get behind. I hope.
Doggie do
Bring your favorite pooch (even if he regularly snacks on your US Weekly — dude, a tooth mark right through Jennifer Aniston’s face!) to Dolores Park tomorrow for SF Dog‘s “Dog Days of August” event.
According to the event website, there’ll be “dog arts and crafts” (presumably, made by humans with dog motifs, not actual arts and crafts made by dogs), a doggie fashion show (so Project Runway!), and a screening of Best in Show hosted by the canine-friendly San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation.
UPDATE! Pics from the event after the jump.
TUESDAY
Aug. 22
Film
Robert Bresson double feature
Who do you think makes for a better Jesus Christ – Jim Caviezel or a donkey? Mel Gibson might choose Caviezel, but almost any true movie lover in existence would select the latter. One reason: Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, in which a mule takes on saintly properties. The director’s knockout 1967 follow-up, Mouchette, also screens. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Call or see Web site for times
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$6-$9
(415) 621-6120
www.thecastrotheatre.com
Music
Syd Barrett farewell
Some of our local musicians got together and decided to pay tribute to Barrett’s influence, forming an impressive lineup for the Piper’s farewell. The Dilettantes (featuring Joel Gion from Brian Jonestown Massacre), Ettiene de Rocher, the Moore Brothers, and Jean Marie anchor this free show, which also includes a rare appearance by Conspiracy of Beards, the men’s choir devoted entirely to Leonard Cohen, the folk king of goodbyes. (K. Tighe)
8 p.m.
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
Free
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
SATURDAY
Aug. 26
Event
“I Love Bugs!”
Because I am an East Coast transplant, my childhood memories are riddled with insects – from catching fireflies, swatting cicada, and burning ants with a magnifying glass. I think I might karmically owe something to the wonderful world of bugs. The folks at Habitot must have been insect-infatuated children too, because they are hosting a whole day of bug activities for kids. Get in touch with your inner exoskeleton as the Oakland Zoo presents the Zoomobile’s bug display, which includes a tarantula and walking stick. (K. Tighe)
10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Habitot Children’s Museum
2065 Kittredge, Berk
Free
www.habitot.org
Event
“Rebellion from the Inside”
Turns out the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was pretty punk rock: “The one who indulges in sense desires and commits wrong deeds goes with the stream,” he said over 2,500 years ago. “He who lives the pure, decent life goes against the stream.” Dharma Punx author Noah Levine espouses the “Buddhism is punk” philosophy and is the subject of a documentary film in progress, Meditate and Destroy, by local filmmaker Sarah Fisher. “Rebellion from the Inside” is a benefit for the film featuring dharma funnyman and author of Essential Crazy Wisdom, Wes Nisker, as master of ceremonies, plus music by DFTRAM, free massages, a juice bar, and veggie appetizers. (Duncan Scott Davidson)
6:30-9 p.m.
Yoga Sangha
3030A 16th St, SF
$15-$45 sliding scale
(415) 934-0000
www.meditateanddestroy.com
FRIDAY
Aug. 25
Music
Johnette Napolitano
In Johnette Napolitano’s world, bullets are always aimed at the innocent, ghosts make perfectly acceptable bedfellows, and Russian angels are good inspirations for tattoos. If she were a rose, she’d be tucked behind the ear of legendary river banshee la Llorona. Napolitano is the driving force behind urban gothic rockers Concrete Blonde and coconspirator on projects such as Vowel Movement with Holly Vincent and Pretty and Twisted with Marc Moreland. Join this enduring lady of darkness for an intimate solo performance before she heads off to the inaugural Summer Strummer festival in Santa Monica. (Nicole Gluckstern)
9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$16
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com http://www.cafedunord.com
Comedy
Patton Oswalt
Patton Oswalt is funnier than you are. He’s been booed off a Pittsburgh stage for his critiques of President Bush, but in San Francisco that just gives him street cred. His content is so raunchy, smart, and devastatingly on point that he makes me want to punch things. With an impressive television history – from writing for MadTV to costarring in sitcom King of Queens – Oswalt’s stand-up is of a particular brand of lewd that would have most TV execs turning red. (K. Tighe)
With Brent Weinbach
Through Sat/26
8 and 10 p.m.
$15-$20
Cobb’s Comedy Club
915 Columbus, SF
(415) 928-4320
www.cobbscomedyclub.com
THURSDAY
Aug. 24
Lecture
Feinstein on global warming
Hear US Senator Dianne Feinstein’s take on global warming and plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from businesses through legislation. (Deborah Giattina)
6 p.m.
JW Marriott Hotel
500 Post, SF
$30, $15 for members
(415) 597-6700
Performance
“Living in the Jungle”
Cultural Odyssey received a Goldie Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guardian in 2003 because coartistic directors Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones bring their lives to work – and Ackamoor and Jones’s musical dramatic work has blazed both activist and artistic trails many local theater groups have since followed. Presented in conjunction with the AfroSolo Arts Fest, “Living in the Jungle” offers a free teaser of what Cultural Odyssey has in store for the future. The African American Shakespeare Company will also present scenes from a quartet of plays, including a drag-tinged Cinderella, a Taming of the Shrew. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Through Sat/26
8 p.m.
Buriel Clay Theater
762 Folsom, SF
Free, but reservations are required
(415) 292-1850
www.culturalodyssey.org/tickets
WEDNESDAY
AUG. 23
Fundraiser
Clean Keefer
Join Terry Baum, former Green Party candidate for Representative in the 8th district, at a fundraiser for her successor in grassroots representation – Krissy Keefer, the local activist, Dance Brigade founder, and now Green Party candidate for US Congress. Unlike Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Keefer is not accepting any corporate donations for her campaign. Musician Scrumbly Koldewyn and singer-songwriter Austin Willacy perform. (Deborah Giattina)
7-9 p.m.
Bazaar Cafe
5927 California, SF
Campaign donations accepted
(415) 835-4748, krissyforcongress@yahoo.com
Music
Japanther
If Brooklyn’s Japanther weren’t people, they’d be gas-powered robots straight off the mean streets. Employing the plowing force of gutter punk and the tinny hooks of bedroom-recorded pop, their music is a potent mixture: it’s punk and they play it fast, but there’s a certain whimsy and strong sense of melody hiding behind the muscular grind. This particular show benefits the Prisoners Literature Project and Berkeley Liberation Radio. This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, who play a folky variety of jittery, socially conscious punk, share the bill. (Michael Harkin)
With This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, Two Gallants, KIT, and Stripmall Seizures
8 p.m.
$7-$10
LoBot Gallery
1800 Campbell, W. Oakl
(510) 798-6566
www.lobotgallery.com
Also Thurs/24
With This Bike is a Pipe Bomb and the Punks
9:30 p.m.
$7
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923
www.hemlocktavern.com
The soul stirrers
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The set is modestly spare, a disheveled if not quite ramshackle affair, being the basement studio of an imaginary low-watt radio station run by a solitary disc jockey (Peter Newton) with a thing for Japanese culture, an anguished relation to the American scene, and an insomniac disposition. But just as the deepest truths can rise immaculately from the muffled vibrations of a scratchy old blues record, so does Bay Area playwright Gary Aylesworth’s new play See That My Grave Is Kept Clean slyly and unassumingly sound nothing less than the soul-stirring chords and discords of an embattled American imagination.
The play’s DJ-everyman, sitting at his desk and console in a kimono, his samurai sword on one side, his classic blues discs on the other, coos into the microphone to whomever might be listening to the evening’s program. Caught between suicidal despair and a desire for revitalization, he’s fending off the highly bankable depression of a Prozac nation with the ameliorative properties of Japanese rice balls. He’s also bent on finding a little truth amid the “tsunami of propaganda” that characterizes the society outside. To this latter end, he’s got the classic recordings from the Anthology of American Folk Music on heavy rotation, markers of another era of American depression — marvelous songs Newton and Aylesworth actually perform live (including the song borrowed for the play’s title) in lilting harmonies to their own musical accompaniment.
But our DJ sets some archival interviews spinning too, in counter-rotation to one another, as it were. The other characters (played by Aylesworth, acting out the interviews the DJ intersperses throughout the program) are two formidable contemporaries and spiritual adversaries of the mid-20th century: Edward Bernays and Harry Smith. The juxtaposing of these two figures, polar extremes yet both highly influential in the economic and cultural spheres, becomes the motive propelling Aylesworth’s deceptively casual, humorous, melodious, and intriguing new play.
Bernays, considered a father of the public relations industry (“public relations” being a phrase he coined to substitute for the tarnished term “propaganda”), was by the 1920s and for decades afterward the much sought-after guru of ballyhoo. He sold everything from cigarettes to presidents to a bloody US-backed coup in Central America on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Bernays was also (not incidentally) the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he put to pioneering use in the realm of what he called “the engineering of consent.”
On the other side of the stage (and every other important extreme) is Harry Smith, the play’s prickly patron saint. A character too protean and idiosyncratic for a neat label, Smith was among other things an experimental filmmaker and the musicologist who compiled the legendary multivolume Anthology of American Folk Music, recordings largely made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Originally issued on the Folkways label in 1952, it was so influential in the folk music revival and beyond that Bob Dylan (our DJ reminds us) once boasted that he would not have existed but for Harry Smith. Along the way, the play broaches Smith’s other passions as a jazz enthusiast, painter, and even a record producer (he recorded the Fugs’ debut album in 1965, which leads to the story recounted in the play of how he came to be consulted on the best way to levitate the Pentagon as part of a famous 1967 antiwar action).
Aylesworth plays the nonagenarian Bernays with a high, rasping voice and a set of repetitive, almost cartoonlike gestures that (along with a tendency for the “taped” interview to slow down and speed up at odd, sometimes telling moments) poke fun at the self-congratulatory figure. Bernays is a man so far from shy about bragging of his connections and achievements that he unconsciously paints an entirely grim view of modern society with the cheeriest of dispositions. By contrast, Smith (played with equal facility and a slightly hyperbolic, wry affect) has a cantankerous air about him. While forthcoming enough, he casts back a knowingly cautious, skeptical, even sarcastic tone to his various interviewers.
Here are two spiritual fathers, you might say, of the 20th-century United States, whose diametrically opposed outlooks constitute and reflect something like a metaphysical rift in the culture at large. Blended with Aylesworth’s simple yet choice staging, the acute and droll performances, and the laid-back but excellent renditions of selections from the Anthology, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean approaches its themes with a charm all the more forceful for being quirky and understated.
And if our DJ channels the despair of the age, it’s clear that despair cuts two ways too. It leads either to the acquiescence and metaphysical poverty of Bernays-style fables of freedom and plenty or to the awakened, agitated thought, action, and social conscience of a Harry Smith, which seeks nothing in the end more than the obliteration of myth and the reanimation of the senses. With its rousing good humor and a shrewd theatrical assurance whose crystalline simplicity resonates with far-reaching themes, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean gives eloquent voice to the restless rebel wide awake beneath the glossy, manufactured surface of the American dream. SFBG
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN
Through Sun/27
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Traveling Jewish Theatre
470 Florida, SF
$15–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 831-1943
www.constructioncrewtheater.com
Pedro’s progress
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Poor Generalissimo Franco, not yet dead a decade before the Spanish film industry he’d so carefully censored gained its new leading tastemaker: a plump, girly homo fond of gender blur, anticlericalism, and nuclear-family meltdowns. Twenty-two years have passed since What Have I Done to Deserve This? made Pedro Almodóvar “enfant terrible of Spanish cinema” — a title that still sticks in his late 50s — as well as a dominating cultural force.
New movies “by Almodóvar” (like Picasso or Cher, he became an institution early on) are international events as those by Fellini or Bergman used to be in the ’60s. There remain good Spanish movies by directors working in entirely different styles. Yet in terms of what gets seen abroad, you might reasonably judge the whole industry to have gone Almodovaresque — a term applicable to select hit films by established talents like Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) and Álex de la Iglesia (Ferpect Crime), not to mention rising talents like Ramón Salazar (20 Centimeters) and Manuel Gómez Pereira (Queens). There may well be too many shrill, candy-colored Spanish comedies in which women act like hysterical drag queens and men like horndogs — but the master himself is no longer making them.
His ongoing evolution is partially charted in “Viva Pedro,” an upcoming four-week retrospective at the Castro and Shattuck theaters. The eight films in this series are what Sony Classics could get its hands on. “Viva” has to skip over his first five features (including What Have I Done?), leaving little of the John Waters–style anarchy that dominated his early work. (Like Waters, Almodóvar started out making campily offensive 8mm silents with nonsynch soundtracks, up through Fuck Fuck Fuck Me Tim!, his 1978 feature debut.) Particularly missed is Labyrinth of Passion, the quintessential all-purpose Almodóvar title and one of his funniest films. Also left out are early-’90s titles Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down; High Heels; and Kika.
Still, there’s plenty of good stuff in a package encompassing his two most outré forays into homoeroticism (1986’s Matador and the following year’s Law of Desire, both with Banderas), his most successful farce (1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), and the strange, still-in-progress trip toward profundity commenced in 1995 with The Flower of My Secret.
Almodóvar reportedly often shoots scenes in alternate funny and serious modes. The eccentric Flower is said to have found its largely serious tenor in the editing room. This high-wire balance between baroque ideas and earnest emotions was less wobbly in 1997’s wonderfully lurid Live Flesh. Two years later, Almodóvar surprised critics by delivering All About My Mother, a waterfall of Douglas Sirk–ian suffering female tears universally hailed for its newfound maturity. I (resistant) imagined Susan Hayward hammering her coffin lid, yelling, “Manny, you son of a bitch agent, that shoulda been my script!”
Almodóvar came out (in all senses) of the Madrid-centered Movida arts movement, whose late ’70s–early ’80s explosion of punk, camp, and transgression personified the most radical forces behind Spain’s rapid transformation from Franco-era repression to today’s extremely liberal culture. Traditional Spanish obsessions with death, sex, and religion plus post-Franco giddiness toward finger-diddling every hitherto taboo subject needn’t be “read into” Almodóvar movies — they’re spelled out on every flamboyant, melodramatic surface.
But not until his most recent two films did all these themes blend together in sardonic yet sympathetic wide-screen perfection. These are 2002’s Talk to Her — in which the main female characters are comatose, leaving the men to do the emotional weight lifting — and 2004’s Bad Education, a Catholic black comedy cum sexual-horror film oddly, elegantly redolent of Vertigo. In November we’ll get Volver, with Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura returning to the fold. Whether or not it matches his recent achievements, Almodóvar has already earned the right to seem larger than life. SFBG
“VIVA PEDRO”
Begins Sept. 1
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
www.clubcultura.com
www.sonyclassics.com/vivapedro
VIDIOT’S DELIGHT
With the simultaneous advent of personal computers and video games on a massive scale in the early ’80s, it was unsurprising that Hollywood tried to fit all things virtual into the exploitable framework of cheesy teen comedies. The latest Midnites for Maniacs triple bill reprises three of the era’s daffier such efforts.
The eccentric Heartbeeps, a major flop released in 1981, puts Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters in constrictingly ingenious makeup as two servant robots who run away from their factory warehouse in the brave new world of 1995. Despite meeting such over-the-top types as Randy Quaid, Christopher Guest, Mary Woronov, and Paul Bartel en route, their comic odyssey is weirdly sentimental, even inspirational — it’s like Jonathan Livingston Seagull for androids.
More successful but equally derided was 1985’s Weird Science, which struck many as several juvenile steps backward for writer-director John Hughes after that year’s The Breakfast Club. Alas, he was never so silly or immature or funny again. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are dweebs who create an “ideal woman” (Kelly LeBrock) on their computer; she of course comes to life and teaches them all sorts of valuable life lessons while embodying a world of adolescent male masturbation fantasies.
Last and ever-so-least — save in camp value — is Joysticks, the Roller Boogie of video arcade movies, from the director (Greydon Clark) of Satan’s Cheerleaders, Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate, and Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. A mean politician (Joe Don Baker, not walking so tall career-wise in 1983) tries to shut down the local arcade, believing it to be a hotbed of underage sin. Our heroes (cute guy, nerd guy, fat and desperately-trying-to-be-a-young-John-Candy guy named “McDorfus”) thwart him and save democratic freedom amid many Porky’s-style jokes. What you need to know: sequences are separated by the graphic of a Pac-Man biting its way across the screen; “punk” subsidiary villain King Vidiot is played by Napoleon Dynamite’s future Uncle Rico (Jon Gries); and the theme song really is just about playing video games (“Jerk it left/ jerk it right/ shoot it hard/ shoot it straight/ video to the maaaaaax!!!”). (Dennis Harvey)
MIDNITES FOR MANIACS: “DIGITAL SEX: 80’S STYLE!” TRIPLE FEATURE
Fri/25, 7:30 p.m.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$10
www.midnitesformaniacs.com
Lap lessons
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS This week’s madcap adventure begins with a cute little kitten toddling into the chicken farmer’s life and saying, in effect, “Help!” Must of been abandoned by its mama. People sometimes abandon cute little kittens too, in the wild, but usually not out back behind the water tank. They leave them in a box by the road.
So OK, what to do with a cute little kitten, so small it can barely stand and doesn’t quite know how to eat yet? I took it inside my shack and showed it to a platter of milk and Weirdo the Cat. Maybe in the back of Weirdo’s indoor-atrophied peanut brain she would have enough residual mothering instinct to teach a hungry helpless furball how to lap up milk.
Weirdo sniffed the cute little kitten, hissed, and went and hid behind the wood stove. The c.l.k. toddled across to the milk, did a little Jesus dance, and continued to cry and whine. I called my brother and sister-in-love, who both have better brains than mine. “What to do with a cute little kitten?” I asked their voice mail.
Deevee called me back almost immediately and said, “No way. I just ran into Jen Hallflower today and she asked me if I knew where she could get a kitten!”
I was on my way to the city anyway, so I packed up the c.l.k. and took her with me. At the gas station in Petaluma, I got some medicine that came with a dropper, rinsed the dropper out with water, filled it with milk, and squirted it into the kitten’s eye. She cried little white tears onto her leg and licked them. So she knew how to clean herself. Good.
I dirtied her up with milk, and after practice that night we crashed at Earl Butter’s, me in the closet, where I like to sleep for nostalgic reasons, and the c.l.k. in bed with Earl, who, it turns out, has more residual mothering instinct left in the back of his indoor-atrophied peanut brain than Weirdo the Cat. By morning he had taught our kitten how to lap up milk from a saucer.
I wish you could of seen the chicken farmer at the height of his or her popularity, sitting outside at Martha’s on Cortland Street, waiting for Jen Hallflower. Almost everyone in the world wanted to talk to me and touch the c.l.k.
So, this is what it’s like to be a woman, I thought.
Psych. Well, Jen showed up and of course fell in love, because it really was the cutest thing you ever saw, so there went my five minutes of popularity. Oh well. And even though I did have a very delicious wild blueberry crumb cake with my coffee, that’s all I’m going to say about Martha’s on Cortland Street.
The Hallflowers are a band, with Jen and her sister and mom, and they sing so pretty you don’t know what to do with yourself. Kittenless, Earl Butter and me walked to the Castro and ate a proper Thai meal with the Cookie Diva, who’s in town for the summer from North Carolina. Remember? She’s the one who flew me a to-go order of pulled pork, hush puppies, and sweet tea, thereby becoming my Friend for Life and one of the first Cheap Eats Hall of Famers.
This was back when you could bring barbecue on an airplane. Remember?
Well, wait’ll you hear what I ate at Thai Chef on 18th Street, just past Castro. Fried chicken fried rice! You read me rightly. Fried. Chicken. Fried. Rice ($6.95).
I had never heard of such a thing before, but maybe because I rarely if ever even look at the Fried Rice section of a menu. Does this happen? Does fried chicken fried rice occur in nature or just at my new favorite Thai restaurant, Thai Chef?
In any case I ordered it of course and it was a strip of juicy breaded boneless chicken pieces, like a Mohawk haircut over a huge head of fried rice, with just the egg and not much else. Simple and soulful.
Earl Butter and the Diva ordered their things, and everything was great, but my favorite memory is of the prawn salad ($7.95), which was minty and lemony and oniony and just delicious. We discussed the difference between prawns and shrimp and I think decided that it all depends on what you’re wearing while you eat them.
I forget. Overalls? SFBG
THAI CHEF
Sun.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight
4133 18th St., SF
(415) 551-2433
Takeout available
Beer and wine
MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible
Shack chic
› paulr@sfbg.com
The crab shack is a species of restaurant indigenous to the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States, and so in these Pacific parts is something of a rarity. Back East, crab shacks tend to be found near beaches — my first experience of one was at Rehoboth Beach, Del., in the summer of 1987 — and to emphasize freshness and immediacy over elaborate preparation. Hence the omnipresence of crab and lobster rolls, french fries, fried clams, steamed crustaceans presented whole and chilled, and other simple, honest fare from the sea.
(A word to the wise: according to the Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com, “crabshack” also means “crusty slut.” Use of condoms is advised when approaching same, but why? Do rubbers stop critters?)
If you were to launch a search for crab shacks in San Francisco, you would probably not begin at the bustling vortex of Market, Church, and 14th streets — our version of Piccadilly Circus, with not a beach in sight but zillions of streetcars and buses and a subway line underfoot and a zillion transit connections with a zillion pedestrians to make use of them, or not. Also: cars beyond number; you are well advised not to drive into this maelstrom. But do go, by foot or bike, Muni or horse, because at this insane intersection you will find, in the longtime Café Cuvée space (subsequently and briefly occupied by World Sausage), the Woodhouse Fish Company, a cheerfully clattery simulacrum of a crab shack with a to-the-point menu of crab-shack greatest hits, convincingly rendered.
The space has always been a little awkward, despite its high profile at a busy crossroads. There isn’t a proper entryway — you step in and are among tables — and the street presence can seem a little too immediate when a bus roars by or an ambulance shrieks or (less frequently, but surprisingly frequently this summer) a hot wind blows. The lack of a buffer zone was a burr under Cuvée’s elegant saddle, but it matters less for an urban crab shack.
Although tumult from the outside world does seep in with regularity, the place doesn’t look like a shack. It’s been redone in handsome white and green tiles, with a bit of kitschy crab iconography worked into the floor. The look is clean and low maintenance, if reverberant. But tidying up does have its price; a glance at the menu card reveals plenty of numbers in the upper teens, with a few over $20 — not exactly shacky. On the other hand, $29 for a one-and-a-half-pound Maine lobster, served chilled, with drawn butter and coleslaw, isn’t a bad deal. Lobster is best when tinkered with little; the meat has a subtle sweetness that builds if left alone but is easily drowned by sauces. However, some sauce work might have helped the disappointing coleslaw. The cabbage shreds were pretty enough, a mélange of purple and green, but the dish was a little thin in the creaminess department.
A near relation to the slaw, but better equipped, cream-wise, is the iceberg wedge ($5.50), a quarter head of iceberg lettuce showered with bread crumbs, in the manner of a gratin, and lounging amid a supplicant pool of blue cheese dressing dotted with garlic croutons, tomato wedges, and slices of ripe avocado. The truth is that there is too much boring lettuce here — iceberg’s dim reputation is hardly undeserved — but the peripheral players are zesty enough to conceal much of the boringness. A more sophisticated sort of chilled salad is the stuffed avocado ($16); the fruit is peeled and halved and the halves stuffed with, respectively, crab meat (whose sweetness, like that of lobster, benefits from light handling) and peeled prawns. Sauces stand ready at the sides of the platter: a decent cocktail sauce and a distinctively clean-flavored lemon mayonnaise instead of the usual suspect, tartar sauce. I dunked both garlic bread and fries in the mayo and was pleased.
The clam chowder is excellent and is available by cup ($4.50) or bowl ($6) or as part of the Gloucester lunchá ($8.75). This midday option (available until 3 p.m.) also includes half a crab roll — with a seam of melted cheddar cheese that seems out of place — a stack of good fries, and a watermelon point. The roll’s roll was soft and toasty warm, but I wondered: if this is a half roll, how big is a full roll? The answer must be that if you have to ask, you don’t want to know.
You can also get fried Ipswich clams (flown in from New England) on a roll, but at dinnertime one does not favor sandwiches, so we go instead to the platter version ($20), a formidable mass of clam meat liberated from shells and given a knobbly breading before the quick swim in hot oil. Impressions: excellent rough-tender texture, clam meat has a chicken-livery flavor I’d never noticed before, and a plateful of fried clams with french fries is a lot of fried. A squeeze or two from a lemon wedge cuts the greasiness a little though not a lot, but even a little is better than nothing.
An excess of fried food during a dinner’s savory sequence can induce panic about dessert — i.e., should I have fries and a slice of chocolate mousse cake with a scoop of gelato? should I phone ahead for an ambulance? — but Woodhouse solves this problem by not offering dessert. You might luck out at dinner and score, gratis, a thumbnail-size brownie for everyone in your party: petits fours, crab-shack-style. I admire this cheerfully stern no-sweets policy. And … a hint for you sugar sluts: Just Desserts is just around the corner. SFBG
WOODHOUSE FISH COMPANY
Daily, 11:45 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
2073 Market, SF
(415) 437-CRAB
www.woodhousefish.com
Beer and wine
MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
NOISE: Skating along the Bleeding Edge
You ran into the most intriguing pairings – and people – at the Bleeding Edge Festival Sunday, Aug. 13: what other event would find SF duo Matmos and a handful of other familiar SF rock folk down amid the leafy, upper-crusty environs of Saratoga (inspiring the question: just how many McMansions and outright mansions can one small town include?). I can’t help but compare the event to last year’s ArthurFest in LA – it was a similar wide-ranging if somewhat smaller gathering of intriguing artists in an unlikely, grassy, very non-clubby space. And as with Yoko Ono at that 2005 event, you could catch one-time events like this collabo between Matmos and Zeena Parkins below.
Zeena Parkins beats long-stemmed red roses and Matmos takes a stab at the duo’s recent “Roses and Teeth Ludwig Wittgenstein.” All images by Kimberly Chun.
But unlike ArthurFest, the selections seemed a wee bit random: I still don’t quite get the connection between the fine but not quite as experimental Yo La Tengo and, say, sound artist William Basinski, who impressed many in the Carriage House theater and also installed a site-specific tape loop piece, in collaboration with James Elaine, in the Main Hall.
Considering the long haul from other parts of the Bay Area to the site (the location makes it superconvenient for San Jose fans and Zero One attendees but necessitated carpools for Oaklanders), I’d say that if the organizers wanted to make draw listeners to this event they should have charged $10 or $15 for the fest rather than $50. The prohibitive ticket price didn’t help the shockingly sparse audience in the Garden amphitheater for lesser-known bands like Flying.
Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan hunkers down with a cozy, lengthy jam on “Autumn Sweater.”
Also admirable, with mixed results, was the juried competition winner showcase. Pardon my igornace but when did this competition occur? Who was invited to compete? Questions, questions – the mind is a-whirl. In any case, the best of the bunch was Canned Corpus Callosum, here shown below, cranking out the rickety-rock Tom-Waits-and-Dresden Dolls-like sounds.
Canned Corpus Callosum peel open their roots-industrial-noise-classical songbook.
In the end however despite power problems for Black Dice, who played for three seconds then blew out for about an hour (heard they were incredible, if reminiscent of their last Great American Music Hall show), the event was a pleasure – set in startlingly beautiful environs. You could take a nature walk and check out Jeff Cain’s Dead Air sound installation along a hill trail that had recently boasted mountain lion sightings. Toothy! Essentially for your average experimental music-noise connoisseur who wanted to spend a Sunday with mom amid pink lilies and sound art – this was the place to be.