Stage Archives — Page 119 of 135 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Les Razilles Denudes laid bare

February 5, 2008

By Matt Sussman

Should bands just stick to their guns and stay broken up? Now that the seemingly impossible has happened and the formerly estranged members of My Bloody Valentine have caught the reunion fever – along with fellow British shut-ins Portishead, who follow on last year’s much ballyhooed reunion of Scottish depressives the Jesus and Mary Chain – what’s to stop other fantasy reformations from coming true? Every other week Pitchfork’s news feed seems to include word of some impending resurrection. Sure, Marr and Morrisey won’t take the stage together until hell freezes over, but honestly, concerts these days really seem like a buyer’s market where any number of groups whose flame was once considered snuffed – whether the Pixies or the Stooges or the Fire Engines – can be seen playing alongside younger bands who openly ape their sound and cite them as formative influences.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate wish fulfillment as much as the next music nerd. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the new cross-generational formation of ESG and shaking my ass to “The Beat” played live on a loud sound-system. But I know it’s a far, far cry from hearing the Skroggins sisters and cousin Tito funk up the Paradise Garage’s last party ever. And my friends who saw the Stooges – yeah, I really missed the boat there – couldn’t stop effusing over how much it fucking rocked, despite the fact that Iggy qualifies for the Grand Slam at Denny’s. (At least art punks Wire were being frank when they said that their live dips into their classic first two albums Pink Flag and Chairs Missing were convenient means to get back into proper physical shape. I wish the Spice Girls were as forthcoming since, clearly, this last reunion didn’t exactly turn into the sisterhood of the traveling Cavalli, girl-powered slumber party it was hyped as).

But all griping and throat-clearing aside, if I had the kind of dough that Coachella and All Tommorow’s Parties regularly wave under the noses of some their more resistant would-be reformed headliners, I would send an offer, pronto, to Mizutani Takahashi and his partners in crime in ‘70s underground legends Les Razilles Denudes, who ceased activity around 1996 (even though their first official CD wasn’t released until 1991).

Late local rocker Evan Farrell rhapsodized by Japonize Elephants in Bloomington, Ind.

January 30, 2008

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Postcard from Bloomington: Japonize Elephants perform at a tribute to Evan Farrell at Bluebird Nightclub on Jan. 20.

By Dina Maccabee

A lot of emotions have been pouring out during the last month over the loss of once-Oakland-based musician Evan Farrell. I’m not even sure if the details that have been circulating on the Internet about what happened on Dec. 21 – when the Oakland house where Farrell was staying caught fire – are correct. For me, and I think for everyone, there are bigger questions than how the blaze started – like what is death, anyway? And how do I sort out my empathy for Farrell and his family from my own selfish fears and anxieties about living a worthwhile life and, ultimately, ceasing to exist?

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Evan Farrell. Photo by Jeremy Baron.

I played with Farrell in the Japonize Elephants, which why I made the trip to Bloomington, Ind., a week or so ago to participate in the Jan. 20 memorial for him. The Elephants started out in Bloomington – and Farrell had moved back a few years ago after playing with Rogue Wave, among others – so for most of the band, the trip represented an almost overwhelming mixture of grief and nostalgia, a chance to reconnect with old friends and places under heartbreaking circumstances. I had a different perspective as a newcomer eager to discover the birthplace of this fearlessly bizarre, creative, close-knit group, whom I started playing with about three years ago in the Bay Area, hoping to offer some support and comfort to Farrell’s closest friends.

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Evan Farrell. Photo by Jeremy Baron.

While no one knew quite what to do in the aftermath of Farrell’s death, one thing that seemed obvious was to get together and play music. It felt a little wrong to be excited about playing an Elephants reunion show back in Bloomington, with band members arriving from California, Colorado, and New York – but without Farrell. You could say we were getting back together because he would have wanted us to. But, of course, really, we wanted to. How else to recapture some of the absurdity, spontaneity, mirth, and adrenaline that were Farrell’s trademarks, on and off stage?

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Evan Farrell in pink with Japonize Elephants.

Caine is able

January 30, 2008

The opening scene in a tragically forgotten 1968 swinging-London artifact called The Touchables — released stateside to universal catcalls — had four model-gorgeous "birds" breaking into an off-hours Madame Tussaud’s. Goal: stealing the object of their desire, a wax dummy of Michael Caine. This proves too fleet a diversion — the glamorous gang are soon off to their next plot-dominating caper, hijacking a handsome pop star to a countryside inflatable plastic pleasure dome for extended go-go dancing and S-M games. But it does make the point that in 1968, Michael Caine was a huge pop icon. And not just in the United Kingdom but also in the United States, where Beatlemania had temporarily made all things Brit — Twiggy, Tom Jones, even Herman’s Hermits — automatically crushworthy.

We’d certainly emulated and admired England all along, after that unpleasant colonial-separation business. But in the ’60s it was no longer a matter of aristocracy envy. Suddenly the Mick Jaggers and the Lulus and so forth made being working-class British cute and desirable and ever so "now." Caine was the first Cockney sex symbol — which made him a celebrity in America but a downright cultural sensation at home.

The Mechanics’ Institute’s February "Raising Caine" series revisits some of his defining roles, though only one ventures past 1972. The first selection, 1966’s Alfie, was his breakthrough. Casting him as a rascally ladies’ man who strings along women (from Jane Asher to Shelley Winters) while entertaining us with direct-camera-address commentary, it both celebrated the sexual revolution and delivered a reassuring moral spank-down.

Caine had earlier made a major impression in 1965’s The Ipcress Files as Len Deighton’s spy hero Harry Palmer, a scruffier, less impenetrably sophisticated alternative to Sean Connery’s James Bond. The movie’s sequel, 1966’s Funeral in Berlin, is second in the Mechanics’ retrospective. (The third Caine-as-Palmer feature, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, surrendered to Bond-style fantasy excess and a surprisingly prescient anti–Yank imperialism. Recently released to DVD after decades of difficult access, it’s worth a look.)

The resulting fad was weird but laudable: Caine landed on the average side of handsome (complete with spectacles), had bad hair, and spoke like a mensch. (Memorable quotes include "I’m the original bourgeois nightmare — a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.") When Connery ditched Bond, he had to prove himself as an actor. When the Palmer films and Alfie and such were finished, Caine just kept working — sometimes brilliantly but often indiscriminately, in movies that could only have dangled as lure the money he admitted was a deciding factor. The good ones include 1971’s Get Carter and Sleuth (which complete the Mechanics’ series along with the 1983 translation from the stage Educating Rita), John Huston’s 1975 Rudyard Kipling adventure The Man Who Would Be King, and Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters (for which Caine won his first Supporting Actor Oscar).

The bad ones? For starters, twin Irving Allen "disasters" The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979). Not to mention 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge, 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol … need more be said? Only that Caine has his cited On Deadly Ground (1994) costar Steven Seagal as the only person he’d never work with again. (Good choice!) Caine (it’s "Sir Michael" now, which he must find hilarious) hasn’t lost his touch, though. As an aged Cockney hustler in 1998’s Little Voice, he gives a climatic rendition of "It’s Over" that is the most lacerating deliberate bad singing this side of Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia (1995). He was superb handling the more sentimental aspects of 1999’s The Cider House Rules (winning a second Oscar), in the underseen Brit ensemble classic Last Orders (2001), as the true protagonist of 2002’s The Quiet American, and as one brainy holdout amid the Orwellian future of Children of Men (2006).

So is he more served or subservient playing butler to Batman? (I’d say the former.) Caine is an excellent actor who always admitted that selling out was part and parcel of the trade. Sex symbol then, willing tool now (and also then), he never blew pompous public wind or truly embarrassed himself onscreen, even when the films embarrassed themselves. He once said, with bracing honesty, "You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one." Either way, he earns the check.

RAISING CAINE

Feb. 1–29, $10

Fri., 6:30 p.m.

Mechanics’ Institute

57 Post, SF

(415) 393-0100

rsvp@milibrary.org

Video Mutants: Ryan Trecartin streams/flows into onlive timeslot, TOtal nowhere emotion expansion

January 22, 2008

In this week’s Super Ego nightlife etc. column, as part of our Video Mutants issue, I handheld display my growing obsession with young artist Ryan Trecartin, who somehow squares club culture and diverts the neon identity parade into a tributary of parodied obnoxion (with Internet hyperquotes). By which I mean, “Damn! I think I just got dissed in a nextdoor dimension, but I like it that way.”

I-BE AREA (Double Jamie, Ramada Omar, and Sally Man Pause)

Ryan – who’s represented by the bigtime Elizabeth Dee Gallery in NYC – has a total Pro Tools grasp on irreality and its obverse reality, what’s beneath people performing, and his video work combines Mardi Gras parade giddiness (he spent time living in New Orleans), Web 2.0 blank paradise, and head-trip introspection with way incredible about me’s. Electronic ghosts, phased identities, realtime spots and trailers .. the online is performed in trashy afterlife/live/death here, and it wears a sparkling wig. Plus, Ryan does fabulous things with windows. JK/JK

I like to think there’s a deep current of nightlife reference running through feature-length works like A Family Finds Entertainment and I-BE AREA. Although who the hell knows? Ryan’s worked with at least one local beloved club presence, Patrik Sandberg — of ‘90s-flashback pirate radio show “Cobain in a Coma” and “drugged out goth shoegaze dream pop party” Spaced, at the Knockout — who plays space-waif gift-giver Craig Ricky in I-BE AREA and tells me that Ryan’s “holding a mirror up to a generation that lives a significant part of their lives online, in a way that makes fun of but also adores it. Not only that, I can’t stop quoting him.”

OK Agreed. And more than guilty above. So, yeah, I freaked and zoned and freaked again when Ryan agreed to answer some art critic avatar agenda questions over one whole e-mail about his digital video mental.

SF Bay Guardian: In I-BE AREA, the Wood Shop is like the most nightmarish gay dance club I’ve never been to. I dream about it a lot. How did you put together the Wood Shop scenes?

I-BE AREA (WoodShopBoys Ramada Omar and Jamies Band)

Ryan Trecartin: It was a three shoot workout, in a space called The Woodshop Drama Room one of three rooms that make up Jamie’s Area which is a conceptual part-Cyber-hybrid Platform that obeys and functions with in both laws of Physics and virtual-non-linear reality and potential in Web 2.0/ultra-wiki communication malfunction liberation flow, add-on, and debate presentation. The main structure is the character Jamie her self- a total control damage freak with independent log-ins, muse extension people, and live-links. The Wood Shop is a situation stage where pho-male-cyber-gays login to over posted anti-productive decisive message board dead-end faggoting activities. Jamie has a composer status in this scene during another timeslot using her saw and wood dictating with wireless momentum control and influence over her haters at work, while mirroring in Dark Jam Band form, on cell-phone with Ramada Omar in Class Room separated by a closed Window (3 time slots being viewed). The Wood Shop Fags search-out wanting a free channel edge and perform a permanent Window opening on Ramada Omar Freeing it to an independent Multi-tasking shape shifting reality pool. The actual shoot was really fun. It had a script but was the most abstract shoot of the whole movie-lots of improvisations and an everyone talked at the same time, making a don’t be quiet on the set situation. Like planed home video- script-destruction theme over goal. My favorite part is when Solomon (black hair pig-tale mall goth wig) has a brick ready for the Break Down, in cell phone placement and says nothing about someone calling him on his phone an “Said”, over and over like it’s a presidential victory speech with supporters and reason promoting a total nowhere emotion expansion with self eating content, saying… what?—don’t use hotmale log out to log In father fucker.

Blow by Blow: At the beck and call of Khaela Maricich

January 22, 2008

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The Blow’s Khaela Maricich is a charmer – and lord, the girl knows how to multitask, moving into her new Portland, Ore., studio while fielding questions all the while. For the first part of the talk, go here. And she performs tonight and tomorrow, Jan. 22 and 23, at Great American Music Hall, so look out!

SFBG: So Jona [Bechtolt of Yacht] won’t be performing with you at Great American Music Hall?

Khaela Maricich: He hasn’t been performing with me for a year and haf. He’s been doing own thing with Yacht.

SFBG: How would you describe your current act then?

KM: Well, I come at performing from a lot of different angles. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I never thought of myself as a performer either and I always thought I’d be a visual artist. As a kid I remember there being video cameras from a TV station and me being under the table, not interested at all in being the center of attention. I never had a sense of being, “I want to be a musician,” and so I never think it’s going to be a great music show! I look at different angles of entertaining myself and different ways of using the stage to make a show.

I think it’s a lot like stand-up and performance and karaoke. It’s electronic music – there’s no laptop onstage. It’s just me and a microphone.

Getting impersonal with Paul F. Tompkins

January 16, 2008

By George Chen

Paul F. Tompkins might be a familiar sight, thanks to his appearances on Best Week Ever, The Sarah Silverman Program, and the cult hit Mr. Show (he also toured with the live stage show that came to the Warfield in 2005). But you may not know that he has been performing stand-up for more than 20 years and recently released an album, Impersonal, through A Special Thing, which is only available through iTunes and online mail-order (and Amoeba Los Angeles, if you are in the neighborhood). For those who aren’t familiar with his act, Tompkins is a masterful storyteller with an absurdist wit wrapped in a fairly traditional package: he doesn’t work much profanity and wears a three-piece suit. The comic spoke with me on the phone about his upcoming round of performances as part of the SF Sketchfest.

SFBG: I wanted to get some idea about what to expect for the Sketchfest. I know it’s a slightly different format than you just doing regular stand-up. Or is it? “Comedy Death Ray” is something that happens regularly in LA.

Paul F. Tompkins: “Comedy Death Ray” is a regular LA show [at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater]. It’s been going for four or five years now; it’s stand-up and sketch. As far as that goes up in San Francisco, I’m not sure if they have any sketch on tap – I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing yet. I might just be doing some stand-up or I might do some kind of sketch with somebody else – I’ve done both on that show. I’ll be doing the “Match Game” live show two nights in a row before that, which is like the old Match Game game show. We did it up there last year, and it was a big hit and a lot of fun so we’re doing it again this year.

Queen’s density

January 16, 2008

Over the past two decades Julie Queen has earned her ballsy-woman stripes. She’s played truck-driver killer Aileen Wuornos in Carla Lucero’s opera Wuornos and the lead in Robert Rodríguez’s Frida, based on the life of painter Kahlo. In the ’90s, as a member of the Qube Chix, the avant-garde singing trio lead by Pamela Z, she belted out heady Karlheinz Stockhausen atonality and defiant riot-grrrl lyrics at the same time. It never struck me that she would be as likely to go out on a limb with Shirley MacLaine as to take a leap with Ann Magnuson, the former queen of New York’s ’80s underground scene who has also set her life to song onstage.

Unfortunately, with her solo show Ten Dollar Destiny, an hourlong multimedia performance, Queen lends her operatic voice to a series of songs that map her midlife soul search through the all-too-familiar territory of self-help experts — shrinks, psychics, and astrologists — as she tries to figure out where she got lost on the path of life and how to get back on track.

As Queen appears onstage, her opening song prepares us for a gauzy look through the pages of her life. The crew of scene designers and set constructors who formed the pop-up book of said life by creating a series of walls that pivot across the stage, each exposing a new leaf, are fantastic. The endless "I’m stuck on the road of life without a map" metaphors in every song of the five-part cycle are not.

Yet for all of her incisive criticisms of the self-help industry (her "You need yourself today" jingle for a little pill, Assurezen, is perfectly pitched at the false promises of medication), I can’t help but wonder why she’s wasting so much time worrying about where she went wrong. Queen has gone from boldly careless to overly careful, and I badly want to see a woman at the crossroads who just says "Fuck it," buys a bitchin’ car, and gets the hell out of Dodge.

TEN DOLLAR DESTINY

Through Jan. 27

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m.

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Bye bye beautiful

January 16, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in ’64 and ’79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player’s solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist’s pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. The pianist plays on, but the camera operator tracks Baker, plainly in the clutch of a lonely lothario.

The cigarette break is more revealing of Baker’s largesse — his ineffable cool and the desire it produced — than any of his softly sustaining trumpet solos for the television program are. It also sheds some light on the side-winding portraiture that marks Bruce Weber’s adoring documentary Let’s Get Lost, filmed during the last months of Baker’s life in 1987 and now playing in a restored print at the Castro Theatre.

The first interview in Let’s Get Lost is with photographer William Claxton, an early admirer of Baker’s who waxes poetic about the revelation of shooting such a naturally photogenic subject. Weber, known for innumerable sleek Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch spreads, riffles through these striking stills in contact-sheet form, a neat solution to the persistent documentary problem of how to make archival photographs move. Twenty minutes pass before we begin to explore Baker’s music, and there are another 20 minutes after that before we meet his Oklahoma mother, our first whiff of personal history. Backward, it might seem, except for Baker’s being a cipher of his own iconography.

"He was trouble and he was beautiful," an interviewee muses early in Let’s Get Lost, and it might as well be the film’s byline. He was beautiful, possessing a ravaged, introspective glamour attractive to both men and women: writing about Baker’s underfed croon in his excellent liner notes for The Best of Chet Baker Sings (Blue Note, 1953), Will Friedwald notes, "His moony voice twangs like an Oakie [sic]-cum-valley person at times, but more often he achieves geographic — not to mention sexual — ambivalence." Though less remembered today than James Dean or Jack Kerouac, Baker had a comparable rogue appeal, his missing front tooth suggestive of wounded sensitivity, his shoulders bent under the unknowable weight of being himself.

Weber’s velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn’t like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to Baker’s arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces. He is equally attentive to the silvery bleach of Santa Monica, the inky black swallowing various stage spotlights, and the shadows of heroin abuse running across Baker’s unbearably gaunt 57-year-old face — all shot in an amorous chiaroscuro evocative of the trumpeter’s West Coast cool musical phrasings, his constant drug nod, and the late-night languidness of his smoking and speech.

But, of course, Baker was trouble too, and this is where Let’s Get Lost can feel strained. Though clearly a labor of love, the film shrugs off conclusiveness as casually as one of Baker’s shopworn melodies might. For one thing, Weber isn’t much of an interviewer, asking the musician’s mother, "Did he disappoint you as a son?" and directing one of Baker’s ex-wives to "tell me something romantic." Still, with the recent documentary explosion prizing kinetic revelations at all costs, Weber’s patient accumulation is a virtue in itself. We hear several versions of a story about Baker getting his teeth knocked out, and although none of them paints a convincingly specific picture, we do get the overarching thrust of a sad decline.

Originally released the same year as Gus Van Sant’s similarly loving debut, Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost gives the lie to the notion that every gaze is created equal. Weber may wrap the disillusionment of Baker’s life in the romanticism of the latter’s demeanor, but the director also gives the spiraling musician space for self-expression (including a couple of lovely, understated full performances) and, in an empathetic final scene, offers to buy him a methadone fix. The film is as recklessly lyrical as Baker was himself, and it’s in this way that — in spite of its shortcomings as biography — Let’s Get Lost has the spiritual heft of an ample epigraph. The ragged icon mumbles about the film’s production being "a dream," and the inevitable fade to black and memorial that follows seem exactly the type of void he’d like to walk into. *

LET’S GET LOST

Opens Fri/18, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Portrait of the artist as an old cop

January 9, 2008

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Imagine Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, pondering the impact of abstract expressionism on the American zeitgeist with a far-off gaze. Or picture him dressed in fashionably tight jeans, walking his fixed-gear bike to the San Francisco Academy of Art University with a leather portfolio tucked under his skinny arm.

Does that seem incongruous to you? It does to us as well. After all, Delagnes is the very antithesis of an art school student. So why are the POA and Delagnes, a brutish former narcotics officer, lobbying the San Francisco Planning Commission on behalf of the Academy of Art?

The academy, which has been rapidly snapping up properties around town to accommodate its ambitious expansion plans, has become an entity of increasing concern in San Francisco’s dicey world of land-use politics.

The for-profit school, which costs students around $16,500 per year to attend, today owns or controls more than 30 properties across the city, half of which are used to house its students, and expects to take over nearly a dozen more to accommodate approximately 14,500 students by 2017.

In the meantime, the school is facing several enforcement actions initiated by the Planning Department for brazenly making building conversions without bothering to obtain proper permits.

Delagnes was nonetheless first in line at a September 2007 commission meeting held to address the academy’s pending enforcement cases and praised the school as a tremendous asset to the academic community.

"I think that their reputation in San Francisco is unquestioned as some of the finest, true San Franciscans that I know," Delagnes said of the wealthy Stephens family, which owns the Academy of Art. "They are heavily involved and invested in the city of San Francisco and care deeply about its future."

Delagnes’s lobbying on behalf of the academy surprised and appalled at least one commissioner, Hisashi Sugaya, who told the POA president that he was "really offended" someone representing law enforcement was carrying water for a private art school that had flouted the law by racking up alleged planning and building code violations.

Responding in the union’s newsletter, POA vice president Kevin Martin reached a dizzyingly patriotic pitch in denouncing Sugaya as a liberal and demanding he apologize not just to Delagnes but also to the entire union for "demeaning our president" and "censuring his freedom of speech."

Delagnes admitted to the Guardian that his testimony was essentially a "quid pro quo." The academy has supported the POA, even offering special summer apprenticeships to the children of its members. "I’m sure that they were thinking, ‘You know what? The POA is a pretty powerful organization. It wouldn’t hurt to get close to them,’<0x2009>" Delagnes said. "Here came this problem with the Planning Commission. They called me and said, ‘Hey, would you mind going up there and basically saying that we’re a good organization? We’re good people.’<0x2009>"

During the meeting, school president Elisa Stephens, who did not return calls, portrayed the academy as a simple mom-and-pop business ignorant of planning politics and intending to fully cooperate with the city.

"My grandfather was an artist…. We’re an integral part of this community," Stephens told the commissioners. "I live in this community. We’ve been here since the late 1800s. We’re dedicated to this city…. I apologize for not being involved in city politics. I’m involved in education."

But city staffers implied there’s more to the academy’s troubles than a few honest mistakes. In March 2007, the school was hit with a litany of alleged code violations, including 14 properties converted without conditional-use permits and seven made into group housing or modified for other school uses without building permits, Planning Department records show.

Before last year the academy had never submitted an institutional master plan to the city, even though San Francisco’s Planning Code has required them from universities since the 1970s, particularly for a scattered campus that’s in a position to dramatically alter the face of downtown, where the school is primarily located and its private transit buses are ubiquitous.

The academy finally turned one over in 2007 after city planners issued a citation in summer 2006. Afterward the department visited all of the school’s properties and discovered multiple problems with use permits, plus an additional property the academy had recently acquired but didn’t include in its plan.

Code enforcers tried to negotiate with the school, planning staffer Scott Sanchez told the commission. But after department personnel outlined the March 2007 violations for the academy, it simply continued onward, converting 601 Brannan for its own use without any building permits and doing the same at the Star Motel on Lombard, this time without a conditional-use application.

As the department worked to keep up, the academy purchased four new buildings and put its eye on another, all between spring and fall 2007.

"All of our information about their new facilities came from members of the public…. It wasn’t actually through the academy, with whom we thought we had a dialogue about their institutional master plan," Sanchez told the Guardian. "We had something ongoing with them, yet they were not informing us of their new acquisitions, and they weren’t obtaining proper permits for them."

The school, in fact, is accelerating plans to convert 575 Sixth St., known as the San Francisco Flower Mart, into studio space, despite opposition from the Mayor’s Office, the Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors. The 30 floral business tenants that currently inhabit the building received eviction notices dated Christmas Eve 2007.

A future academy gymnasium is slated for 620 Sutter, but building it would result in the eviction of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, a 25-year-old institution specializing in African American stage performances. The academy already converted part of the building to group housing without a permit.

So what else is the POA getting for its support of the arts? For one, the Academy of Art was a $5,000 putf8um sponsor of the POA’s 2007 charity golf tournament at the StoneTree Golf Club in Novato, beating out dozens of other donors for the top of the list. The exclusive title was used for only three other contributors.

The union’s November 2007 newsletter, which appeared just after Delagnes voiced his support for the school, announced that academy president Stephens had also given POA members working at the police department’s Southern Station in SoMa 15 free underground parking spots on Bluxome, just a short walk from the Hall of Justice and the union’s headquarters.

And that’s the art of politics in San Francisco.

Where is home?

January 9, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I’ve never been inside here before. I don’t like to come in here, because I feel alienated in my own neighborhood by this place, and that is kind of what this play is about," Danny Hoch said recently. His new solo stage production, Taking Over, opens Jan. 16 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Speaking the day before he flew out West from New York to begin rehearsals with rep director Tony Taccone and looking around in half disgust, the New York–born actor-playwright was seated inside the Roebling Tea Room, a recently opened, funkily decorated but high-end restaurant directly across the street from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he has lived for the past 20 years.

The yuppie meeting place was Hoch’s choice, as much for convenience, it seemed, as to further emphasize the point of what his new work is all about. "Williamsburg is ground zero for gentrification not just in New York but in the country, because it has provided a blueprint for how fast and how violent displacement and economic development can happen in a short amount of time," Hoch said. "And Taking Over is about how gentrification is really masking the idea of colonialism and how everybody is kind of searching for a sense of home and disconnected from where their home is. And in the kind of neofeudalism that is the new economy of North America, people looking for home wind up displacing people who are home."

As in his previous solo plays, such as the Obie Award–winning Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop — which 10 years ago also premiered at the Berkeley Rep — Hoch channels a myriad of characters of various ages, races, and genders. Embodied with his ever-sharp dry observant wit, these include a major real estate developer, a Dominican taxi dispatcher, a French real estate agent, a revolutionary gangsta rapper, and a New York University student — a "clueless hipster" from Michigan who protests that she feels "like a homeless person" after her parents cut her monthly allowance from $5,000 to $3,000.

Another engaging character is the guy who was just released from incarceration after serving time under New York’s controversial, draconian Rockefeller drug laws. But he’s been gone so long he doesn’t recognize his old hood. "When he arrives they’re shooting a movie on his old block, and he talks to a PA on the movie set and says, ‘When I was growing up here people never came to shoot a movie. People shot things all right — like [other] people or heroin — but not a movie,’<0x2009>" Hoch explained. "And then he points to [a] woman in the window and says, ‘That’s my mother.’ And the PA asks him, ‘Oh, she doesn’t want to come down and check out the movie set?’ And he says, ‘No, she’s still afraid to go outside from the ’80s.’<0x2009>"

According to Hoch, the Bay Area has consistently been the most receptive to his work. "The Berkeley Rep is one of the only theaters, if not the only theater, that would support this kind of show from its inception. A theater in New York that needs to economically sustain itself [is] not going to commission or fund a show at this level about gentrification in New York, because it’s going to alienate their very audience." In fact, for the past 10 years Hoch has been unable to make a living as a writer or an actor in his hometown. "New York stories are no longer viable in New York City because the market is being informed by Americans. This is why you have Subway and Domino’s and Applebee’s and TCBY all over New York City — so that Americans can feel at home," he said.

"Do you know how many vintage clothing stores there are around here and stores that I can’t even identify with what the fuck it is that they are selling?" Hoch asked rhetorically. "How do you economically sustain that? You sustain that with disposable income, not income income. That is how you sustain this many bars and a tearoom like this. I tell you, this neighborhood didn’t need another tearoom. We needed more teachers. We needed a hospital. We needed better schools."

TAKING OVER

Through Feb. 10, $27–$69

See Web site for showtimes

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2025 Addison, Thrust Stage, Berk.

1-888-4-BRT-TIX

www.berkeleyrep.org

Consolidating power

January 9, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

A proposal to consolidate some of the permitting functions of 10 city departments into one is currently floating through Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration as a result of his call to department heads for bold initiatives. It was developed by a department head who is receiving harsh criticism from his staff.

Isam Hasenin, the director of the Department of Building Inspection, originally unveiled the idea in a Dec. 3, 2007, memo presented to the mayor that calls for a shift into Hasenin’s department of the permitting currently reviewed by the Fire Department, the Planning Department, the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping, the Public Utilities Commission, the Redevelopment Agency, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, the Port, the Airport, the Bureau of Urban Forestry, and the Municipal Transportation Agency.

The reason offered for such massive consolidation is customer service. "A single city-wide permitting department will be better equipped to manage the needs of our citizens and deliver a more efficient, reliable, consistent and timely service with a focus on excellent customer service," the memo reads.

Hasenin told us the idea was in response to a solicitation from Newsom. "The genesis of this idea came about as a general commitment from the Mayor’s Office to improve the city … to reinvigorate and streamline the processes of the city," he said.

It follows policy pledges made by the mayor since his first run for office. In campaign literature from 2003, Newsom wrote that his economic plan would "direct city agencies to streamline regulations and meet accelerated schedules for approving worthy new public and private projects, without compromising standards."

More recently, Newsom addressed a Dec. 19, 2007, Building Inspection Commission meeting at which this memo came up. "Systemically, the organization of things are such that institutionally they can’t change to the degree that we’d like to see them change," Newsom said. "So we have to break the institutions … in order to make the kinds of changes all of us in the city expect."

Several department spokespeople contacted by the Guardian had only heard vague suggestions about consolidation. Hasenin stressed that the proposal was still in an early, conceptual stage and that discussions among staff and all of the relevant stakeholders had yet to occur.

One department that hasn’t held back criticism of the proposal is the San Francisco Fire Department. "The administration, the Fire Commission, and Fire Fighters Local 798 are all aligned. We’d be concerned about any changes," department chief Joanne Hayes-White told us.

She first learned of the plan at an impromptu Dec. 6, 2007, meeting with the mayor at which, she says, she outlined several immediate concerns with the idea, including the fact that it may not be legal. She reported this to the Fire Commission at a Dec. 13, 2007, meeting: "There is specific language in the state’s Fire Code that the authority for these types of inspections rests with the Fire Department and the fire chief or the fire marshal."

Hayes-White also said, "I think it is important also — which we pointed out to the mayor — that there be appropriate checks and balances … and that there is no rubber-stamping of things." The Fire Commission echoed her sentiments and sent a letter to the mayor on Dec. 19.

Newsom’s Sept. 10, 2007, call for his senior staff to offer letters of resignation has had a chilling effect on his remaining administration, with some heads contacted by the Guardian reluctant to speak out against a policy that’s perceived to be coming from him. In some ways, that’s given the mayor even more power to advance potentially controversial ideas. Among those recently replaced by Newsom are the heads of the Planning Department, the Department of Public Works (which oversees the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping), the SFPUC, and the Redevelopment Agency.

"There’s an opportunity right now because of all these resignations to manipulate policy," said Debra Walker, president of the BIC. She stressed that she wasn’t sure whether that was an intention of this proposal, but she was unaware of the memo until concerned members of the Fire Department brought it up at the Dec. 19 meeting of the BIC. She said her department has since received a copy but has yet to discuss its implications as a commission.

Hasenin is a relatively new employee who joined the city about nine months ago from a previous post in San Diego. His leadership has already garnered a lengthy anonymous letter addressed to Newsom from a contingent of DBI staff outlining a raft of concerns about their new leader, including specifics like "Plan check engineers are afraid they will be fired unless they keep up with unreasonable turn around times and sign off on plans that are not ready for issuance because they do not comply with code."

Thou shalt have icons

January 2, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

DVD "I put John Coltrane up in my headphones." So said innovative producer Madlib’s sped-up alter ego, Quasimoto, on 2000’s breakthrough hip-hop album The Unseen (Stones Throw). Although the brave crate diggers of hip-hop are doing their best to bring forth the horns of yore, as on local duo Zeph and Azeem’s phenomenal 2007 album Rise Up (Om), these days jazz is too often relegated to the unseen background or exploited by marketing giants that find ways to slap a few select jazz masters onto dorm room posters and cheap best-of holiday gift CDs. They want to sell the idea of John Coltrane to your headphones, and that’s the end of it: there’s no incentive to get out and see some live shows, whether jazz ensembles or DJ-MC combos, or to make music yourself.

So thank the most high for seven recent releases in the ongoing Jazz Icons DVD series (Reelin’ in the Years Productions). The series’s recently released second round showcases Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Wes Montgomery, and Charles Mingus in cleanly remastered, previously unreleased video recordings from the 1950s and ’60s. The vivid black-and-white images offer an almost palpable sense of communication among the musicians, partly because the studio and stage settings are so carefully arranged — many of these performances were for strikingly lit, modernist-looking European TV shows — and partly because those cats played with their entire bodies. The up-close shots emphasize this in beautiful, often artfully angled ways.

During the three performances included on Montgomery’s disc, Live in ’65, the guitarist’s brain seems to be solidly in his right thumb, which he uses like a huge guitar pick with eyes as he feels out new rhythms on "Here’s That Rainy Day" and kicks out some unparalleled octave soloing on "Twisted Blues," evidence of what Carlos Santana, in his brief afterword to the liner notes, labels Montgomery’s "ability to transform thought into music." During Ruud Jacobs’s bass solo on "The End of a Love Affair," you can only see his right hand plucking the strings, not his left hand creating the notes, and it’s as if the entire group he’s playing with is moving the missing left hand together. Pianist Harold Mabern’s contributions to the Montgomery disc, on "Here’s That Rainy Day" and "Jingles," both recorded in Belgium with Arthur Harper on bass and Jimmy Lovelace on drums, typify his talent for leaping back and forth between waterfall chord clusters and bluesy droplet lines that dance intimately with Montgomery’s chordal romps. When I worked at the Stanford Jazz Workshop with an almost 40 years older Mabern, he was known as a man whose stories were as entertaining as his musical tutorials. The Belgium session captures his sense of musical storytelling before the music and the storytelling separated.

The Coltrane disc, Live in ’60, ’61 and ’65, consists of recordings from Germany in 1960 and ’61 and Belgium in ’65. The Belgian water must have been terrific. The DVD includes three tunes performed during Coltrane’s last appearance in Europe (he died in 1967), with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums; they sound — and look — like a release and cleansing of demons. "Naima" presents especially transcendent musical communication. You can’t call it a comeback, but put on a Jazz Icons DVD at a holiday party and watch as the room illuminates and people start to play together.

www.jazzicons.com

Twelve for the road

January 2, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The past year’s many exhilarations are here condensed into a month-by-month format. Let a veil of silence fall over the frustrations, and remember the yin and yang in everything, dance included.

January: Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, Marin Civic Center Auditorium, San Rafael. "Hungarian Concerto: Hommage à Béla Bartók," a brilliant presentation of traditional folk material, was choreographed within a sophisticated, contemporary setting that highlighted how the future and the past can coexist perfectly with each other.

February: Forsythe Company, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. Making a stunning debut with Three Atmospheric Studies, a piece that is as politically astute as it is formally challenging, William Forsythe’s new independent company confirmed his status as one of the most original contemporary thinkers about the role of dance in society.

March: Jess Curtis/Gravity, CounterPULSE, San Francisco. Under the Radar, Jess Curtis’s life-affirming cabaret, was probably the year’s single most inspired show, as poetic as it was inventive. The performers were as diverse as they come, and every one was top-notch. Radar did what good art always does: change our perceptions about who we are.

April: San Francisco Ballet, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. A rich month from the SFB, with the now-departed Gonzalo Garcia glorious in a slight work, Elemental Brubeck, and two of my SFB favorites, Kristin Long and Gennadi Nedvigin, in a problematic piece, Concordia. Julia Adam’s Night also returned. Adam’s choreographic voice is idiosyncratic and spunkily irreverent. Watch for her take on Sleeping Beauty this April.

May: Pick Up Performance Company, ODC Theater, San Francisco. David Gordon, who has been creating art for more than 30 years, is a master craftsman who works brilliantly with language and movement. In Dancing Henry Five he interwove formalized and pedestrian dance with Shakespeare’s language to stunning effect.

June: Joe Goode Performance Group, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. We may know what Goode thinks of the frailties of the human heart, but we continue to watch because he keeps exploring ways to express his loves and concerns. Humansville was a fine example of dance as installation.

July: West Wave Dance Festival, Project Artaud Theater, San Francisco. The best West Wave in years — focused and straightforward — was also the last under Joan Lazarus’s stewardship. Let’s hope that showcasing quality artists (think Amy Seiwert and Kate Weare) will be utmost in the minds of future organizers.

August: Zaccho Dance Theatre, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Beckett, Mass. Watching Joanna Haigood’s haunting Invisible Wings performed in a place that served as an Underground Railroad station was both chilling and inspiring.

September: Nora Chipaumire, ODC Theater, San Francisco. Always a stunning dancer, the regal Chipaumire returned to the Bay Area with equally impressive choreography, including Chimurenga, inspired by her life in Zimbabwe.

October: Oakland Ballet Company, Paramount Theatre, Oakland. Whether this company’s tale will become a rags-to-riches story remains to be seen, but watching the hundreds in the audience give the fledgling new troupe their rousing support was not be missed.

November: San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Treading a fine line between the community groups that form her primary base and the main-stage artists that are pushing the genre ahead, producer Micaya again put on a smart, well-paced, and highly enjoyable weekend of hip-hop dance.

December: Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Project Artaud Theatre, San Francisco. Other Suns is the first piece in a trilogy that Jenkins is crafting with China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company. If the remaining parts push as fiercely at the edges of the physically possible, they will be something to look forward to in 2009.

Golden Girls: Ghetto Fabulous!

December 28, 2007

Oh, Mary! The girls spend Christmas in a homeless shelter.

REVIEW There’s something about performing old television shows (i.e. “The Twilight Zone”) on a bare-bones stage two feet from the front row that accentuates what was good about them in the first place–the snappy dialogues, the solid story construction, the tinge of the absurd. Needless to say, the additional bonus of having the parts of four scrappy gran’mas living together in Miami, played by a snazzy quartet of the Bay Area’s finest drag queens puts the icing, as it were, on the Hostess cupcake. Heklina as Dorothy-makes the (ahem) perfect straight-woman. The sarcasm practically drips from her three-inch long eyelashes, without her even having to say a word. Cookie Dough plays her ribald Sicilian mother, Sophia, stage veteran Matthew Martin channels racy southern belle Blanche, and Miss Trannyshack 2007, Pollo del Mar embodies spacey airhead Rose Nyland. In “Sisters of the Bride,” Blanche’s baby brother Clayton (Mike Finn) announces his plans to marry his boyfriend Doug (Laurie Bushman). Consternation and eventual acceptance ensue, along with some great one-liners (Blanche: “What will the neighbors think when they see two men in my bedroom?” Sophia: “They’ll think it’s Tuesday.”) The highly-anticipated Christmas episode, set in a homeless shelter, does lay on the schmaltz a bit thick, but after all, ’tis the season, even in Miami, where–the girls remind us–it is 103 degrees. Santa, how ’bout a plane ticket? Or maybe just a ticket to the next sold-out Golden Girls show… (Nicole Gluckstern)

Fri/28-Sat/29
8 and 10 p.m.
The Finn Theatre
814 Grove, SF
$20 cash donation
waiting list starts at 7:30
www.trannyshack.com
www.cookievision.com

Woo! Wu-Tang Clan sized up

December 28, 2007

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Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man mounted a stack of speakers. All photos by Ben Hopfer.

By Ben Hopfer

What do you do when the cold weather kicks in and all your friends are out of town? If you’re like me you go see the Wu-Tang Clan. Braving the cold and rain, I arrived at Ruby Skye on Dec. 27 to check out the Wu, out on their “8 Diagrams” tour. I find it kind of funny that they named the tour after their latest album, one that multiple members have publicly stated that they are unhappy with. Yet my curiosity drew me in to see the group for the umpteenth time.

The opening act, a local artist Benflows, got off to a slow start. While it wasn’t a terrible performance, he should have known that openers shouldn’t try to pull a call-and-response session with a crowd that wasn’t warmed up at all. He called, but no one responded. Bay Area crew Rec League was up next. Now I may come off as a hater, but member Richie Cunning is far and above the best member of the group. While the rest went through the rap-show paces, Cunning actually put on a respectable performance and stood out individually due to his efforts. If only it was a solo act. The Bayonics closed out the opening set and brought live hip-hop to the stage the way it’s supposed to be done.

RichieC sml.bmp
The uncanny Richie Cunning of Rec League.

Chair and chair alike

December 27, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

What we owe one another, whether family, friends, fellow human beings, or just fellow creatures — and how we define we in the first place — is a perennial question of both politics and art. In Adam Bock’s tightly drawn, funny, and engaging new play about political commitment, this sense of communion — a frisson of recognition of the interconnectedness of our lives — works neatly as both theme and theatrical strategy as a kindhearted and intelligent middle-aged woman, perched in comfortable middle-class seclusion atop her new Shaker chair, straddles two long-standing relationships that force her to weigh her responsibility to public and private suffering.

Marion (the wonderfully sympathetic Frances Lee McCain) couldn’t be happier with her recent acquisition: a stylish if somewhat austere straight-backed wooden chair in imitation of a Shaker original, which makes up what it lacks in comfort with its thrilling built-in legacy of righteous action — a reminder to "get up and do something," she enthuses to sister Dolly (Nancy Shelby). Dolly, by contrast, is curled up in a comfy and well-worn armchair, the only other significant furnishing in scenic designer James Faerron’s elegantly focused wood-lined living room (exquisitely lit through varying moods by Heather Basarab). A hog for attention and wallowing in self-pity, the comically pathetic Dolly remains very much the aging little girl her name suggests, not only unmoved by the Shaker chair’s greater associations but completely oblivious to anything outside the crass little domestic drama she shares with philandering husband Frank (Will Marchetti).

Marion’s childhood friend Jean (Scarlett Hepworth), meanwhile, an environmental and animal rights activist, scoffs openly at Dolly and her self-absorbed, contented victimhood, a role Jean dismisses as "stupid" (a word that gets thrown around a lot in a work whose vastly different priorities call up a kind of playground defensiveness in their holders). She has shown up to borrow Marion’s car for an action against a nearby industrial pig farm, which is spilling noxious waste into its surroundings. No doubt inspired by her newfound Shaker spirit, Marion not only lends the car but also agrees to accompany Jean and her much younger associates (sharply played by Andrew Calabrese and Marissa Keltie) on their late-night deed.

Marion’s initial thrill is soon dampened by a sense of betrayal when she discovers the group’s political act of vandalism went much further than she was led to believe it would. Although Jean attempts to justify the measures taken by introducing Marion to a liberated pig (one animal being a palpable miracle, according to Jean, while thousands are only an abstract blur), Marion remains pitched between Dolly’s obsessive private life and Jean’s dangerous radical commitments.

Finally, a violent act compels her to negotiate this gap between the public and the private for herself. It’s then that Marion fully attempts to confront the contradictions between a socially enervating middle-class solipsism and the responsibilities that come with awareness of the world around her.

The extremes represented by Dolly and Jean nonetheless share something in common. For Dolly’s banal romantic plight comes to loosely parallel (in less drastic form) the larger realm of cruelty and oppression against which Jean and her cohorts feel bound to take direct action. Indeed, in a scene in which the caddish Frank expertly turns Dolly from smoldering hurt and resentment back into compliant second-class spouse, the fine cast carefully bleed away the comedy from this one-way negotiation to end on a chilling note of humiliation and underlying violence.

Bock, a former Bay Area and now New York playwright best known locally for the 2002 production of his runaway hit Five Flights and the more recent Typographer’s Dream, has a seemingly effortless knack for unusual and inventive scenarios whose often painful subject matter comes leavened by a keen and warm brand of humor. In this splendid Bay Area premiere, gracefully directed by Tracy Ward and coproduced by the Shotgun Players and the Encore Theatre Company (both early and steadfast supporters of his work), Bock has fashioned a theatrical experience as well honed, poised, and resonant as the eponymous piece of furniture at its center. *

THE SHAKER CHAIR

Through Jan. 27

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $20–$30

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 841-6500, ext. 302

www.encoretheatrecompany.org

Barber of gore

December 18, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street works so well you might not notice that it’s based on a Broadway musical, and one that’s close to opera. Which is the idea, of course. Pop musicals have been making a slow, tentative comeback of late by packaging numbers as mind’s-eye fantasies (Chicago), as actual stage performance (Dreamgirls), or with an ironic camp gloss (Hairspray, Enchanted).

But Sweeney Todd is something other than a pop musical — it’s by Stephen Sondheim, for god’s sake, who translates strangely to the movies because his sensibility is complicatedly, wholly theatrical. No one else has so consistently used their reluctance about or contempt toward musical-theater conventions to transcend them; no other stage composer’s so-called flops are so treasured for their good points and risk taking. Sondheim’s characteristic mix of sentimentality, misanthropy, and high art is as Broadway as an $18 souvenir program. And Burton’s best movie since Ed Wood 13 years ago succeeds precisely because it finds ways to be faithful to the source material in particular details while turning the whole into a Tim Burton film — a black comedy–cum–horror movie, albeit one blacker and more horrific than any he’s made before.

Sweeney (Johnny Depp, with Susan Sontag–as–Bride of Frankenstein hair) returns to 19th-century London after escaping a prison island and being rescued by young sailor Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower, who bears an alarming resemblance to Clare Danes). Arriving incognito in his sooty, verminous old neighborhood, he’s recognized by his torch-bearing former landlady Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). She tells him his wife poisoned herself long ago and that their daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), is now the close-watched ward of the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who’d framed Sweeney in order to facilitate the rape of his beautiful spouse. Sweeney has just one goal now: wreaking vengeance on Turpin and his wormlike flunky the Beadle (Timothy Spall). Woe to anyone who gets in his way.

Setting himself back up in business as a barber, Sweeney first dispatches an inconvenient rival, Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), then commences seriously decimating the male-customer populace out of frustration after a first shot at the judge is thwarted. Tenderhearted — she takes in Pirelli’s boy assistant, Toby (Ed Saunders) — but also eminently practical, Mrs. Lovett uses this corpse crop to transform her self-deemed "worst pies in London" into a cannibalistic culinary smash.

The acclaimed John Doyle production of Sweeney Todd recently seen at the American Conservatory Theater was ingenious. But by stripping down the production elements (for example, slain characters donned smocks tastefully daubed with red), it drained this musical thriller of, well, blood. Burton doesn’t stint: the sticky stuff flows in geysers here, accompanied by plenty of gore, brutality, and perhaps the single nastiest demise doled out to a leading screen character all year.

The show’s mordant humor remains. Yet from the unusually (for Burton) stark, somber production design to the restrained principal performances, this is a story-driven, serious Sweeney Todd. The original Broadway production’s Len Cariou was a grimacing ghoul and Angela Lansbury a comedy gorgon — together they were a Grand Guignol Punch ‘n’ Judy. Despite their Edward Gorey look, however, Depp and Bonham Carter aren’t playing caricatures but recognizably tormented souls.

But can they sing? Er … kind of. Burton lets the near-incessant, brilliantly orchestrated music provide the ballast, allowing his leads to act their songs, making their small, reedy voices work for them. Even the best singers here (Bower, Saunders, Wisener) have high lyric instruments, not big Broadway guns. The result won’t necessarily please Sondheim purists, but it does lend the material more pathos than usual, especially in the quintessentially macabre-sweet take on "By the Sea" and the empty comfort of "Not While I’m Around." The best movie adaptations of other forms usually succeed because they take the spirit of the original and make it cinema, absolute fidelity be damned. This Sweeney Todd is a practically perfect expression of Burton’s art. But Sondheim comes off all right too. *

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

Opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.sweeneytoddmovie.com

RZA: better to give…

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December 17, 2007
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By Chris DeMento

Tuesday night, Dec. 11, and I was feeling really zoned in: got the good word that the RZA and his stagemate Monk were just getting to town after a long drive up the coast, and that meant I didn’t need to stress about getting
down there all that early. I happened to be on their clock.

The openers – Audible Mainframe, Mr. Sayre, and Benflowz – held it down as a packed-full Independent waited for its headliner. Didn’t seem like all that much time to me, although more than one audience member expressed disrelish while waiting for a such a “prima donna.” Feeling really zoned in, completely ignorant of time, I reminded more than one audience member it was the RZA about to come on, be patient, dudes. Have youse a Heinekin.

Whatever route the RZA and Monk took from LA to SF had inspired them. First thing they did was soak the crowd in bubbly. Later they fed it Black Label and Grey Goose. Having officially dropped the Wu’s brand-new album that very same day, 8 Diagrams, Bobby Digital was in quite good spirits, lolling around the stage with a smile, stumbling upon a set of hand drums to beat on, feeling zoned in: “I’m feeling really zoned in,” he said.

The art of the Eagle men’s room: “Walls of Glory”‘s one-night stand

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December 14, 2007
0

A portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Christina Empedocles was stolen from its perch over a toilet just before the bar opened for the show.

By Stacy Martin

For one night only, the three bathrooms at one of San Francisco’s all-time favorite leather bars were multipurposed into mini-fine-art galleries. “Walls of Glory,” a temporary, site-specific installation at the Eagle Tavern debuted at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 12, and closed that same night at 10. Curated by California College of the Arts graduate student Luke Butler, the show included works by 18 artists.

Butler’s idea for the event came from his desire to stage an exhibition in an undesirable location, a place that’s the complete opposite of a gallery and its white, pristine walls. He also wanted to bring artworks to a place everyone eventually has to go to, and one of the great equalizers of humanity is, indeed, the toilet.

After much convincing, skeptical Eagle bartender Doug agreed to let Butler stage the event, though the show was kept to its brief viewing hours due to potential environmental hazards. But some work was designed to handle the rough environment.

Muddy waters: Danny Keith showed paintings of dudes getting down and dirty.

Take Erik Scollon’s series of tiny porcelain figurines of nude men lewdly posing in the urinals, all begging to be pissed on – and pissed on they were. Jason Kalogiros’s sneaky and rusty tin tea box sat on a shelf above another urinal, with its image of King Edward sporting a black bar of tape over the monarch’s eyes. The object is actually a pinhole camera, and removing the tape lets Edward get a peek and take an image of the visitors to the loo.

Danny Keith’s paintings of guys wrestling in the mud shared stall-wall space with Travis Meinolf’s homey embroidered motto piece, while a photograph by Larry Sultan adorned one wall across from a sink sporting Elisheva Biernoff’s specially molded hand soap in the shape of a nude male reclining on a bed.

One unfortunate consequence of this fun, but risky installation came just an hour or so before the official opening time when a painting of Queen Elizabeth hung over one of the toilets was stolen. The artist Christina Empedocles, realizing that the show must go on, quickly fashioned a response piece for the thief. She embroidered “Hello Teeny” in pink thread onto black fabric and hung it in place of the missing work. Works by Butler, James Gobel, Erin Allen, Jordan Kantor, Keith Boadewee, Jason Hanasik, John Jenkins, Brian Murphy, Jessica Rosen, Patrick Hillman, and Guardian critic Glen Helfand rounded out the show.

For his next curatorial adventure, Butler is hoping to flip the environment from the masculine to the feminine – perhaps creating a new installation in one of the city’s public women’s restrooms.

Glen Helfand introduced a book installation to the Eagle Tavern men’s room; Jason Kalogiros, a King Edward tobacco/tea can-cum-pin-hole camera. Curator Luke Butler presented collages of nude men with presidential heads – the Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon noggins were notable – lounging in natural settings.

Year in Music: Move me

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December 12, 2007
0

It was during my early teens that the obsession struck. I oversaw the building of a stage, booked a bunch of bad garage bands, and charged $10 for admission to boondocks Maryland’s first semiannual Punk Fest. During my high school years I snuck into the seediest venues that Baltimore and Washington DC had to offer — still the scariest I’ve seen to date. By my arrival in San Francisco, I was a full-fledged music scene devotee, immediately taking a job at the Great American Music Hall to pay the rent during college. My SoMa warehouse hosted concerts a few times a month — my bed was a futon unrolled over a segment of 58 Tehama’s stage. For years my drinks were comped, my seats were great, and I was always on the guest list.

It wasn’t until the final months of 2006 that I realized I’ve spent most of my postpubescent life inside concert venues. It was getting increasingly difficult to ignore my ringing ears, to justify the copious waves of shift-off cocktails, and to keep my love for music intact. Flag down any soundperson, bartender, or bouncer working anywhere in the city tonight, and they’ll tell you the music industry breeds bitterness.

How to live in San Francisco without working in the music business? At least my job kept me firmly in the so-called creative class — a label that made me feel much better about my financial situation. Moving to a less expensive city could mean a better standard of living and a way to cut the industry apron strings for good. My husband, having spent more than a decade working in music stores, was game. His only stipulation was that he would not, under any condition, be taking a record store job ever again.

We caught a train to Chicago, where my husband promptly took a job at a record store. I managed to stay away from music for a month, instead focusing my energies on writing food reviews for local publications. But by the time the festival season rolled around, the prospect of seeing Patti Smith perform against the impressive skyline of my new hometown ruined everything. The University of Chicago recently published a study comparing the music scenes of American’s top metropolises. Chicago kicked some serious ass. The study described Chi-town as "a music city in hiding."

I doubt I’ll ever shake music totally, but living in Chicago has taught me it doesn’t have to be a way of life anymore. When it comes to the scene these days, I’m nothing more than a music fan in hiding.

TOP 10

1. During my last night at the Great American Music Hall, I danced like crazy to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

2. Tyva Kyzy. Anyone who missed this all-female group of Tuvan throat singers is probably still kicking themselves.

3. Barbarasteele’s 7-inch release party at Cafe du Nord blew some minds. Rest in peace, Mike J.

4. Patti Smith performing at Lollapalooza in the pouring rain.

5. No, I wasn’t among the Milanese elite who got to see Ennio Morricone at La Scala opera house, but just knowing about this show makes me a better person.

6. Rediscovering Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas (Snapper UK).

7. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir (Bloodshot).

8. Thanks, Sopranos, for making Journey relevant again.

9. Happy centennial to the glorious buildings that house the Great American Music Hall and the Cafe du Nord.

10. De la Soul closing out the Pitchfork Music Festival in style — with a little help from Prince Paul.

Year in Music: Nonplussed and pissed

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December 12, 2007
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Usually around Halloween, I start a top 10 list in my head of the best musical moments of the past year, both live and recorded. Maybe it’s my fucked-up state of late — I’m not feeling too thrilled about anything — but the idea of making such a list didn’t cross my mind until a week ago. I had no obsessions, no CD that wouldn’t leave the deck. But I could remember a few dismal concertgoing experiences:

Jan. 26: The Heartless Bastards play 12 Galaxies on a Friday at the end of a crappy workweek, wherein I was nearly moved to violence against one of my coworkers. Not proud of it, but woot! — there it is. You can only push the Dunc so far before his Cro-Mag DNA reveals itself. So this show, which I had been looking forward to for so long, may simply have been an example of "kicking the dog," or what psychologists get overpaid to call "transference." In the middle of the show some yahoo got within inches of my date’s face, talkin’ about "Hey, what’s up?" She turned to me in horror, I told him to go away, he pleaded his case with his hands waving too close to my face, and the next thing you know he’s on his knees and I’m pounding him on top of the head, which hurts the hand more than the head. It’s still the Age of Quarrel.

Sept. 24: I finally get to see the almighty Bad Brains live, only to have my nose broken in the pit by the back of some Fred Durst wannabe’s exceptionally hard dome as he does the "nookie" dance. Punk rock may not be dead, but it’s sure been infiltrated.

Oct. 8: Turbonegro play Slim’s, and I use my plus one on a sweet but very stoned German girl I don’t know at all. Everything is going swimmingly until the barricade, which appears to be made from San Francisco Police Department fencing and kegs, starts collapsing around security and the band leaves the stage.

In the ensuing soccer chants of "Oh-oh-oh-oh, I got erection!" some tool with an erection starts chatting up my Teutonic friend. That’s all well and good — she wasn’t my girlfriend and we weren’t even dating, but nonetheless, she came to the show with me and I’m standing right next to her. When I tell him to go away, he goes through a beer-soaked nightclub version of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. (1) He denies that there is any issue. (2) He gets angry and gets in my face, saying he isn’t "scared of an old man." (But if I crack you in the face, it’s going to hurt, unless you’ve got the adrenaline from being afraid, so fear might be beneficial.) (3) He bargains with me, trying to bro-down with some rock-lock handshake. (4) He gets depressed when I refuse to be his rock ‘n’ roll, Turbo sailor buddy and keeps yapping in amazement how he can’t understand why I won’t talk it out with him. (5) In a reversion to the anger stage, he gives me his best hockey shoulder check as he walks by, at which point I am compelled to jack his arm behind his back and pray to whatever god or gods might be listening to restrain me from bringing my knee to his face. I do this praying by shouting, "Someone get this motherfucker out of my face!" Security takes him out the back door. I’m sure the cold night air ushered in feelings of acceptance.

Of the three times I’ve seen Turbonegro, the first was flaccid and boring, the second was incredible, and the third was, well, this.

My New Year’s resolution is going to be to meditate more regularly so I’m not driven to aggravation and violence at shows. Or perhaps I’ll just see bands more sparingly. With a little heavy mental excavation, I’ve come up with some good to great musical moments in 2007, which I have saved for my top 10 list.

TOP 10

1. Grinderman at the Great American Music Hall, July 26, and Slim’s, July 27

2. The Stooges at the Warfield, April 19

3. Qui, Lozen, and Triclops! at Cafe du Nord, Sept. 12. Qui’s Love’s Miracle (Ipecac) is most certainly top 10 material as well.

4. Love Me Nots at the Elbo Room, Aug. 31

5. The Shout Out Louds, "Blue Headlights," Our Ill Wills (Merge)

6. King Khan and BBQ Show at 12 Galaxies, Nov. 16

7.Rykarda Parasol and the Tower Ravens at Cafe du Nord, Jan. 5

8. The White Barons, Up All Night with the White Barons (Gearhead)

9. Neil Young, Chrome Dreams II (Reprise)

10. Les Savy Fav, Let’s Stay Friends (French Kiss)

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TOP 10

Year in Music: Nonplussed and pissed