› 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
Stage
The soul stirrers
A sister fears Halloween in the Castro
OPINION Any attempt to organize an official Halloween in the Castro is a terrible idea, maybe even a deadly one. But before I rant, let me give a little history. In the wake of the Oct. 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake, a BBC story reported that “a massive rescue effort is now underway in what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States.”
More than 3,500 people were injured and 100,000 buildings damaged. For this reason, a few members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a spontaneous decision to stand in the Castro among the drag queens and costumed folk that Halloween to put on street theater and collect donations for the mayor’s relief fund for the victims of the earthquake. A brilliant move. We collected thousands.
This put a bee in our bonnets … er … wimples to use Halloween as a fun fundraiser the next year. A tremendous success. Each year the caliber of entertainment drew more people and brought in more donations, enabling us to entertain the otherwise unruly crowds while collecting donations for AIDS charities. The events were a hit, until we saw attendees getting hit — with bottles, bats, and other deadly weapons — by drunken gay-bashers out to get their kicks. The next year we saw that police checking for weapons had collected garbage cans full of baseball bats, hammers, knives, axes (none of these were the rubber kind), and many blunt instruments that could harm people. I saw someone with a mask running a gas-powered chain saw. But when police told us that among other weapons they had confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle, that was the year the Sisters were through with Halloween in the Castro, frightened that an event we had sponsored might bring about death.
So we tried something different. Luring people away from the Castro and into a private club, we turned the Pleasuredome in SoMa into a Halloween-themed party space with ornate All Hallows Eve–oriented backdrops and props. We had stellar entertainment, and the door charge went to AIDS and cancer charities. There was only one rule: you had to be in costume. The event was called HallowQueen, with the slogan “Evolve with the Sisters as Halloween moves to the next level.” It was successful in getting people out of the Castro and into a safe space, but we couldn’t afford to do it again on our meager budget.
The attempt to move the party to the Civic Center did not work because of poor planning and insufficient advance public relations. And since the Castro was still gated off, the queer-bashers thought that was the better locale in which to be violent. There were several stabbings that year.
There should be no official gathering in the Castro. No gates set up to make it look like an event. Police should infiltrate the area to keep peace but not harass the costumed folk. And something must be scheduled by the city outside the Castro and managed well to draw the crowd away to safety. Then perhaps the Sisters will get involved again. Then maybe the Sisters will MC and run a stage. But as it is now, the cordoned-off section of the “official” Halloween will end at Market and Castro. That is potentially deadly — inviting bashers and spoilers to assemble right at the very entrance of the Castro. Boo! SFBG
Sister Dana Van Iquity
Sister Dana Van Iquity is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
NOISE: Whoo! I mean, Wu! Rock the Bells…
Guardian assistant art director Ben Hopfer checked out the Rock the Bells rap convo on Aug. 6 in Concord:
Redman carouses backstage at Rock the Bells.
All images by Ben Hopfer.
Rock the Bells sets the bar for what a quality hip-hop festival should be all about. Last year’s lineup was good — members of the Wu-Tang Clan appeared, including Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man — and this year’s bill embodied hip-hop at its highest level. The entire Clan — excluding the RZA — performed in tribute to the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
Wu-tang Clan definitly brought the motherfucking ruckus with the highly energetic Method Man trading off on leads with Ghostface Killah.
Other members all had their own distinct styles. Pictured: Mastakilla, Raekwon, U-God, Method Man, and the GZA.
Festival organizers always find the right mix of quality hip-hop from the Bay Area and beyond. Local talent like Zion I, Del tha Funkee Homosapien from the Heiroglyphics, as well as the Living Legends were going to be on hand this time, so I knew in advance that the show was going to be insane. In addition to those artists, the lineup was back-loaded with some pretty big names: De La Soul, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Redman, and of course, the Wu-Tang Clan. Toss into this already diverse stew the politically charged Planet Asia and Immortal Technique, and you have the spectrum covered.
Planet Asia introduced energy early on at the festival.
Immortal Technique offers revolutionary music to the masses.
Immortal Technique lets me know what he thinks of the Minutemen with the Brown Berets.
When it came to the music, the festival was top-notch. I can’t say the same about the venue. Call me a purist, but I like to see my hip-hop up close. Pack me in a club well past the fire marshall’s limit — I won’t care. Hip-hop crowds need to be enclosed. We’re kind of like cattle that way. The Concord pavilion just wasn’t built for this kind of show. Some ’80s arena rock, yes. Mos Def, no.
Zion-I holds it down for the Bay backstage.
De La Soul gives the crowd some love.
I don’t want a seat when I’m seeing hip-hop — I want to rush the goddamn stage! The cheaper seats were so far back that I needed a mini-Hubble to see what was happening on stage. Hell, even a $100 ticket couldn’t get me to the stage — thank god for press passes. Big ups for the Wu-Tang Clan. They told the crowd to rush the stage, knowing that without crowd energy, things just aren’t the same. But while one bar was raised, another was missing: the lack of alcohol for the 21-and-older crowd left a sour taste in my mouth. Actually, I should say a dry taste in my mouth, as I just wanted a beer or three.
Sway from the Wake-Up show talks with Domino from the Heiroglyphics Crew. Did I just hear that Heiro is workng with Prince Paul? Shhh!
Supernatural, now the world record holder for longest freestyle (nine hours!), showed his skills by freestyling only from items handed to him by the crowd.
Redman proved once again that his presence can bring the crowd to their feet.
A Blackstar reunion of sorts: Talib Kweli (left) and the mighty Mos Def (right).
Oh snap, is that Dave Chapelle? Yeeeah!
I don’t mean to complain about the show. I mean even at $100 you got your money’s worth of unbelievable hip-hop. I understand that Rock the Bells needed a bigger venue this year to get all of these artists together for the day. I just miss the intimacy of last year’s festival. Here’s hoping next year’s will be a little more crowd friendly while still bringing some hip-hop heat.
Murs of Living Legends shows everybody that he has much love for the Bay.
The Living Legends pulls no stops when performing as a group. Pictured: Asop, the Grouch, Luckyiam, Scarub, Sunspot Jonez, and Bicasso.
The Death of me
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Wanna know the surest way to mortify me or send me skulking into the shadows? Bludgeon me with praise. Single me out with love. It just makes the misanthrope in me squirm like a worm at the end of hook. That was the sweet but unintentionally sinister sensation at the “Girls Just Wanna Have Chun” show at the Stork Club on Aug. 5 with Pillows, Liz Albee, and other all-girl bands, inspired by, I’m told, my recent cover story [“Where Did All the Girl Bands Go,” 7/19/06]. I feared some sort of roasting and de-ribbing until one of the organizers, Suki O’Kane, reassured me her intentions were honorable. “I hear you cluckin’, big chicken,” she helpfully e-mailed. Yup, fightin’ words got me to the club on time, but that didn’t stop an acute sense of self-consciousness from washing over my sorry PBR-swilling self.
You realize then that on some off-days you were just never psychologically prepared to leave home. Even indie rock pros like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service know what I’m blathering on about. I spoke to the DCC guitarist-vocalist while he lounged in a bus outside the big ole barn he was scheduled to play at Penn State that night, and he fessed up to the struggle to deliver when he wasn’t feeling it. “I’ll be perfectly honest — there have been times when I can be a little bitch on stage,” he said. “I’m trying to always harness my inner Wayne Coyne. Y’know, WWWCD — what would Wayne Coyne do?”
The spunky Death Cabbies I first caught at the Bottom of Hill have truly made the leap from “shows” to “concerts,” as Gibbard put it, something he jokes about with his bandmates. “We started touring in ’98, playing to nobody and eating mustard sandwiches,” he explained. “You go out a year later, and there’s maybe 50 people there, and then the next time there’s 150 people there…. It’s been such a gradual kind of build that it doesn’t feel outlandish to me. I can’t imagine what a band like the Arctic Monkeys must feel like, and I’m glad this is happening to us five records in rather than one or two records in. I think we were one of the last generation of bands to develop pre-Pitchfork, pre–blog culture, and that’s fortunate.”
Chatty, thoughtful, and up for analyzing this crazy little thing called the music biz, Gibbard has obviously given quality thought time to blogatistas’ impact on his musical genre. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens, because I have this horrible premonition that blog culture will turn the United States into the UK,” he added. “You know how the NME is this awful, horrific publication that before a band even has a single out lauds them as the greatest thing since sliced bread and then as soon as their full-length comes out says they’re past their prime?
“I’m just so kind of over fashion rock and all its different forms. Coming out of the last three or four years of dance punk and bands that want to be Wire, it’s kind of exciting to see a band that’s just really rocking out in earnest ways.”
But what about Postal Service (which Gibbard said he plans to revisit sometime next year, before DCC begin work on their next album) — aren’t they dance punk? “I don’t think if I’m involved in it in any way that it can be in any way … punk, at all,” he said with a laugh.
FASHION LASHIN’ CSS (of Sao Paulo, Brazil), a.k.a. Cansei de Ser Sexy or Tired of Being Sexy, would know a wee bit about fashion, blog jams, ad nauseated. Gibbard’s Postal Service labelmates on Sub Pop have managed something nigh impossible to our Electroclash-crashed consciousnesses: they manage to reference Paris Hilton on their new self-titled album and not sound like shopping-damaged sluts whom you want to slap.
It helps that the mostly femme ensemble kicks off its new album with the self-explanatory chant “CSS Suxxx” and goes on to charm with überdanceable joints like “Artbitch” (“Lick lick lick my art-tit … suck suck suck my art-hole”). Vocalist Lovefoxxx is one earthy, superenthused, helpful mama to boot. CSS met through common friends and photo logs. “We had daily jobs, so we’d spend all day in front of the computer,” the 22-year-old ex–graphic designer rasped from Houston. She’s since moved on. “Silly teenagers started to join it.”
The lady has an endearingly visual way of describing the band: “It’s like if you have a dog and you get your golden retriever to go with a Labrador and then you get weird puppy sex.” So help me with this picture: what is an “art tit”? “Art tit was like artist, and art hole sounds like asshole,” she explained patiently. “It doesn’t get deeper than that, Kimberly.” SFBG
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
With Spoon and Mates of State
Fri/11, 7 p.m.
Greek Theatre
Gayley Road, UC Berkeley, Berk.
$35
www.ticketmaster.com
CSS
With Diplo and Bonde do Role
Thurs/10, 11 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$15
(415) 625-8880
GET OUT
BLEEDING EDGE FESTIVAL
The Valley is alive with the sound of … art. In conjunction with the ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA gathering, the Bleeding Edge Fest presents Yo La Tengo, Black Dice, Brightblack Morning Light, the Avett Brothers, Skoltz Kogen, Sunroof!, the Chemistry Set, and others in tony Saratoga. Matmos and Zeena Parkins collaborate on an original work, as do Isis and Tim Hecker. Sun/13, noon–10 p.m., Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Rd., Saratoga. $50. (408) 961-5858, www.bleedingedgefestival.org.
FINAL FANTASY AND CURTAINS
Arcade Fire player Owen Pallett puts his love of D&D to song as Final Fantasy, while ex-Deerhoofer Chris Cohen collaborates with Nedelle Torrisi in Curtains. Fri/11, 10 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 621-4455.
QUIET, QUIET OCEAN SPELL
Brightblack Morning Light dream up an un-air-conditioned dreamscape starring Lavender Diamond, Daniel Higgs, and a special Ramblin’ surprise. Fri/11, 4:20 p.m.–12:45 a.m., Henry Miller Library, Hwy 1, Big Sur. $25. www.henrymiller.org.
HOTEL UTAH SHOWCASE
Open-mic regs toast Playing Full Out! 2006 Hotel Utah Compilation Album. Thurs/10, 8 p.m., $3–$5. Amnesia, 853 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-0012.
It’s (not) easy being Green Gartside pt. deux
Yes, I, Marke B., your friendly ghost club whore, am the Scritti Politti freak on the premises (see Johnny Ray’s post below), the kid who grew up with 1982’s vinyl Songs To Remember under his pillow right on top of Of Grammatology by the one and only Jacques Derrida.
That was in high school when I first discovered Green; in middle school it was Finnegan’s Wake and the Lotus Eaters. It was like poet Elizabeth Bishop eating stinky cheeses at Vassar — somehow I thought having such things at night would cause my dreams to be realer, and then I wrote poems about the opposite process occurring: what happens if you dream something’s real and you vomit Runny Uncle? But I digress.
Green, I love you so, not least when your bleached hair was poofy and your late ’70s Marxist collective proto-rapped such lovelies as:
Rapacious, rapacious
You can never say she ain’t
But my desire was so voracious
I wanted to eat your nation/state
from “Jaques Derrida,” or hymned almost invisibly, most relevantly:
Learn to love the beats in the bar
Make me sick with repetition
Learn to love that one note sound, boy
No surprise or definition
I guess I can learn to love what I’m used to
You can get used to just getting used by
Rock-a-boy blues …
from Rock-a-Boy Blue, pretty much a summation of all my previous relationships.
It was so exciting seeing theory made pan-racial musical flesh, bopping around to the “Nazi shakedown” of “P.A.’s” (We don’t practice with P.A.’s/ We’ve got bills to pay) or puzzling out the lyrics of Bibbly-O-Tek. Then came the super-glossy, superstar Fairlight stage of Scritti Politti, and working with every cool musician alive; the Wood Beez that I remember first hearing in an ice cream shop of my hometown Rickmansworth in England in the 80s. It was astonishing: my prepubescent, queer body rose up from a melting cone.
I absolutely loved Anomie and Bonhomie, especially “Tinseltown to the Boogiedown” with Mos Def, the lyrics somehow predicting the coming apocalypse through a stardust metronome. The way Green can tuck a devastating poetical twist so far back in the spoken inanities of love that most people don’t ever get it. That’s why I love him: exclusivity. I’m a VIP bitch intellectually, and it’s a trip I like to take alone. I’m grooving to Green’s latest, “White Bread, Black Beer” and I’m still a charter member of Scritti Crush Connection, but now that Scritti Politti are being lionized a la Gang of Four, they’re no longer my dirty little secret. and that spells situationist subversive subcultural snob death. lalalala.
NOISE: I see dead people Pt. III – We LOVE you, Arthur Lee, RIP
Guardian intern K. Tighe remembers the great Love leader Arthur Lee:
After his struggle with acute myeloid leukemia, psych-rock pioneer and Love frontman Arthur Lee died peacefully at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, a little after 4 in the afternoon on August 3, 2006, with his wife Diane by his side. He was 61.
Lee’s manager and friend, Mark Linn released the following statement:
“His death comes as a shock to me because Arthur had the uncanny ability to bounce back from everything, and leukemia was no exception. He was confident that he would be back on stage by the fall.”
Arthur Taylor Porter, a Memphis native, relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Sinking his feet into the recording industry, he hired a young Jimi Hendrix to play as a studio musician on what was likely the guitarist’s first-ever studio session.
In 1965, Lee formed the band Love, first called the Grass Roots. He changed the moniker after realizing another band had beaten them to the punch. The name Love was decided on after polling an audience. Soon after its rechristening, Love became the talk of the strip, becoming the first rock band to sign to the folk label Elektra.
Though their most famous song was certainly “7 and 7 Is” from 1967’s De Capo, it was the following album, 1968’s Forever Changes, that would seal Love’s place in musical history. The latter was named no. 41 on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums of all time.
Several fundraising events were put together to help raise money for Lee’s treatment following his diagnosis. His friend Robert Plant headlined the Beacon Theatre in New York on June 23, supported by Ryan Adams, Yo La Tengo, and Flashy Python and the Body Snatchers (a side-project of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontperson Alec Ounsworth). A few days later Love co-founder, Johnny Echols played LA’s Whisky-a-Go-Go with Baby Lemonade in another benefit for Lee.
According to Linn, the ailing Lee was appreciative of the support. “When I visited with him recently, he was visibly moved by the stories and pictures from the NYC benefit concert,” Linn said in his statement. “He was truly grateful for the outpouring of love from friends and fans all over the world since news of his illness became public.”
The infamously eccentric songwriter has been named as a key influence to dozens of musicians, notably Plant, Jim Morrison, and the recently deceased Syd Barrett.
“Arthur always lived in the moment and said what he thought when he thought it. I’ll miss his phone calls, and his long voice messages, but most of all I’ll miss Arthur playing Arthur’s music,” said Linn.
So will we.
MONDAY
Aug 7
Performance
“Mortified”
Anyone who writes for a daily or weekly publication knows plenty about mortification. So it should be no surprise that newspapers and magazines are lining up to praise “Mortified,” the monthly stage show and shame game devoted to life’s most embarrassing moments. Misguided mash notes and diary stories about first kisses and worst hand jobs – in this show, all are ripped open like scabs on the psyche. Many cities get “Mortified,” but only San Francisco recently hosted a Bad Teen Poetry Slam. (Johnny Ray Huston)
8 p.m. (doors open at 7)
Make-Out Room
3225 22nd St, SF
$10-$12
(415) 647-2888
www.getmortified.com
Music
Editors
Get out your red pens and rock-out boots for this much-touted Brit band. Nice, down-to-earth blokes – look to the Noise, the Guardian’s music blog, soon for an interview conducted the last time the band was in town. (Kimberly Chun)
With Cold War Kids
9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$17.50
(415) 346-6000
NOISE: Manu Chao at the Greek
Guardian art director Mirissa Neff checked out Manu Chao and Kinky at the Greek Theater on Friday, July 28… here’s what she saw and heard:
All images by Mirissa Neff
After only playing LA and NYC when he’s made it to the states, Manu Chao finally played a Bay Area show last night. He didn’t disappoint…
A few of us did a Q+A with Manu before Kinky went on. One of the highlights was when the Chronicle’s Delfin Vigil asked Manu about the World Cup and whether he sided with France or Spain. Manu replied, “I am not a nationalist. I have a passport for both countries but I don’t understand this mentality of seeing that someone is from a different place than you and wanting them to die.”
I asked Manu if he had plans to release Siberie M’etait Contee [a French only release] here and he said, “No… maybe someday. But I have a new album that just needs to be mixed. Then it will be ready for release.” Hmmmm…
Kinky opened the night with their unique Norteno-flavored electronic funk. Ulises Lozano and Gil Cerezo got the crowd going:
People just lost their shit when Manu Chao’s Radio Bemba Sound System hit the stage. Here’s sexy guitarist Madjid Fahem:
Meanwhile bassist Gambeat held down stage right with lots and lots of reverb:
After about five encores the crowd was still screaming for more…
Close encounters
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Love is more than metaphor in Orbit (notes from the edge of forever). Love is like the intractable need connected to the exploration of space — especially when the search is bent toward the hope of some ultimate encounter: that contact with somebody, out there, who knows who you are. It’s as if an inner wilderness were turned inside out and projected to infinity.
And so Orbit starts with the mutual seduction of two lovers onstage, and with flickering TV screens (the sets dangling from long vertical skewers loaded with books and the occasional table lamp) tapping classic sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Alien, with their mix of rapture and terror. Here promise and betrayal collide with gravitational conviction, at the point where the yearning for communion meets the blind panic of a self dissolving; a body waylaid, violated, no longer your own (if it ever was). “That transmission? Mother’s deciphered it,” says Sigourney Weaver. “It doesn’t look like an SOS…. It looks like a warning.”
But Orbit itself is never warned off. Rather, as the title implies, it’s continually reapproaching. A new dance theater work from the Erika Shuch Performance Project — the brainchild of San Francisco–based choreographer, director, and performer Erika Chong Shuch, and the resident company at Intersection for the Arts — Orbit spirals around our obsession with UFOs, extraterrestrial life, alien abduction, and other moon-age daydreams. The piece pulls a variety of texts, media, and simulacra into its elliptical trajectory (including recorded interviews, pop music, original songs, and some wonderfully transporting interactive video segments designed by Ishan Vernalis and lll), and is a playfully eclectic, moody, and deeply romantic whirl, danced and acted by Shuch and cocreators Melanie Elms and Danny Wolohan. Joining them is an ensemble, dressed in street clothes and postal uniforms, composed of Kieran Chavez, Joseph Estlack, Daveen DiGiacomo (also responsible for the live music and sound design), Courtney Moreno, and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart.
Elms comes on as the extradimensional counterpart to Shuch’s and Wolohan’s young lovers — whom we’ve seen alternately drifting over the sensual ridges of the lunar surface projected behind them (luxuriating in the exploration of personal space), helping one another (with a touch of comic strain) to moonwalk off the walls, or defending favorite metaphors for their place in the cosmos and their search for ETs. Behind them Elms’s retro space alien glides around as if invisibly in mischievous blue gloves, the show’s intergalactic pixie, puppet mistress of hapless earthlings.
At times, moving about the stage in an idiosyncratic way coolly reminiscent of some ray gun–toting go-go dancer, Elms seems no more than a figment of the collective imagination. (In one eerily comic scene, the strange hands rooting around in a panicky Wolohan’s sweatshirt turn out not to be blue-gloved, but the hands of his lover.) From other angles, however, she becomes an active force of violently erratic potential, like a galactic succubus. The chorus, meanwhile, in alternately trancelike and frenetic motion, do everything from dance, sing, and play instruments to operate the ropes and pulleys that rearrange those TV-and-book kebabs around the stage. With Elms they circle the lovers as forces of nature both internal and external, mercurial ones too, capable of imparting a gentle caress one minute, a savage abuse the next.
One or two segments veering toward the madcap — like Wolohan’s admittedly hilarious puppet-show narration of his rescue by a friendly lighthouse (Shuch) — can be funny at the cost of some subtlety, and in truth the parts don’t contribute equally to the whole. But the surprises in store are several, and there’s a cumulative force to the loose but inspired patterning of movement, theme, and image. If part of that pattern is the idea of lives in eternal orbit around some elusive whole, always approaching and never landing, Shuch and company manage a not insignificant union all the same, joining the passion of the true believer with the wry alert eye of the perennial searcher. SFBG
ORBIT (NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF FOREVER)
Through Aug. 5
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF
$9–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 626-3311
www.theintersection.org
TCB, baby
By Cheryl Eddy
Somehow I found myself in San Jose — where temperatures broke 100 degrees yesterday — bringing the average age way down at the San Jose Stage Company’s final performance of Idols of the King. The show, which featured a cast of three including a mostly plausible (if vigorously spray-tanned) Elvis impersonator named Scot Bruce, managed to mix songs from all three EP eras (1950s hillbilly cat, 1960s Hollywood, 1970s jumpsuit) with a series of atonal vignettes, one of which actually included references to the Paul Lynde era of Hollywood Squares.
NOISE: Camera Obscura eyed
Guardian intern Michael Harkin went to the Camera Obscura show on July 20 and this is what he thought:
Scottish delights Camera Obscura treated the Great American Music Hall to a tidy set o’ fey, pretty pop on Thursday night, putting their immense songwriting abilities on display in the most modest of manners.
Singer-guitarist Tracyanne Campbell led the group through a few slower tunes at the start before playing “I Love My Jean,” a fragile, fluttery pop number that they wrote as a tribute to John Peel, eventually opening up to louder, quicker new songs like “If Looks Could Kill” and “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken.” The snappier bits prompted head-bobbing and sorta-dancing all around. That was a contrast to the back-and-forth sway that otherwise characterized the spectatorship’s movement.
The band seemed like the nicest gosh-darn people you could ever meet. Guitarist and backing vocalist Kenny McKeeve had a particularly friendly demeanor: he addressed the mezzanine sitters by asking if anyone up there could make out the insect bite on his scalp, and uttered the gently surprised reaction, “Thanks so much!” when the stage lights were turned up after his offhand observation of darkness in the room.
More humorous banter came from Campbell, who wouldn’t specify her understanding of the word “jock,” which apparently means something different “where [they] come from.”
Their two-song encore concluded an hour-long (and not overlong!) set with “Eighties Fan,” one of their finest tracks and a song originally produced by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian, a companion of theirs in the British Isles’ pop canon.
Not to be overlooked are openers Georgie James, who provided the necessary proof that cheery indie-pop has its place in DC (the District of Columbia, not to be confused with Daly City).
Singer and guitarist John Davis was most recently the drummer for Prince-ified post-hardcore squadron Q and Not U. Here, he collaborated with singer-keyboardist Laura Burhenn, letting on no indication whatsoever of his prominent former project with the sheer tightness of their melodic structures and sentiments.
Burritos of the gods
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
SFBG So what inspires you?
MICHAEL SHOWALTER You do, you inspire me.
I think about you in the morning. I doodle little pictures of your face and think about you making me a burrito. Sometimes I doodle little pictures of you making me a burrito.
OK, so maybe that isn’t exactly how it goes. Although Showalter is a doodle enthusiast, he is only mildly turned on by baby-size burritos. Being the narcissistic Bay Area dweller that I am, I immediately ask Showalter, who’s on the phone from his home in New York City, about San Francisco.
“I like San Francisco. I like beat poetry. I like gay people…. I don’t like gay beat poets.”
So he doesn’t read Ginsberg?
“My favorite books are Everybody Poops and the Odyssey. They are actually very similar.”
Showalter is a smart guy. He’s one of those smart guys who scared the hell out of his parents by going into comedy. His dad, a Yale-educated French lit professor, and his mom, a literary critic, worried that their little brainiac (680 math, 620 verbal) was going down the wrong path. “It’s not like this is something you go to grad school for,” he says.
I remind him that his buddy Eugene Mirman did design his own comedy major and that he could have done the same.
“I would have designed a doodling major. My thesis would be on doodles.”
Instead, Showalter took the smart-guy route and studied semiotics at Brown. This is the mind fuck of all possible majors. Most people who spend their formative years steeped in the philosophy of language become literary theorists or filmmakers. People who spend this much time reading Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes take a long time to recover.
Showalter used sketch comedy as a catalyst for his recuperation. This might explain why his entire body of work is (a) fanatically devoured, quoted, and forever adored by viewers or (b) dismissed as ridiculous and forgotten promptly.
Personally, I can’t take anyone who didn’t like The State seriously, but Showalter takes it in stride. “I think people that don’t like it might not get it,” he says. “It’s metahumor — a lot of people aren’t into metahumor. A friend once told me that it is better to have nine people think your work is number one than a hundred think your work is number nine.”
After the Showalter- and David Wain–penned Wet Hot American Summer was released in 2001, some critics gave the boys a very hard time for the scene that involved someone slipping on a banana peel. “The joke was that we made a banana peel joke,” explains Showalter.
Still, one has to wonder, how the hell do these guys come up with this stuff? How does the absurdist sketch comedy show Stella get so far out there? Do Michael Ian Black, Wain, and Showalter just sit around a table bouncing ideas off each other?
“Yeah, exactly like that,” says Showalter. “It is that cliché situation with guys sitting in a room with a Nerf basketball. Only we don’t put it into the net. Ever.” All three members of Stella contribute equally to the creative process — “If we all think it’s funny, then it’s funny,” Showalter observes.
Last year’s film The Baxter marked a departure from sketch comedy. As the writer, director, and star of the romantic comedy, Showalter admits it wasn’t all tweed and roses on the set. “There were problems between the director and the star,” he says. “We just didn’t get along. I found it difficult to deal with myself.”
After his experience writing the film, Showalter joined the faculty of the Peoples Improv Theater. He currently teaches a course on writing comedic screenplays. Yeah, he’s a real teacher. He has a syllabus but doesn’t use textbooks. Instead, he shows movies to illustrate his points. “I show bad comedies like Annie Hall and good comedies like Porky’s.”
Showalter plans to continue teaching, possibly adding a sketch comedy class to his schedule. As far as acting goes, he says, “I’m working on a reality show for a major television network. That’s all I can say.”
The tour is also on his mind. Although stand-up is a pretty new thing for Showalter, he doesn’t worry much about people not laughing: “Pretty much everyone who comes to see me already thinks I’m funny, so I don’t really get heckled.”
Good thing. A heckler at a Showalter show would probably throw canned vegetables on stage. The Blue Collar Comedy tour made a movie. The Comedians of Comedy tour made a TV special. The idea of Showalter, Mirman, and Leo Allen traipsing up and down the West Coast in a van makes me nervous.
Will there be groupies? Drugs? Booze? “It will be like that part with the red snapper in the Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods,” he deadpans. “Very Zeppelin-esque. I have already said too much. Let’s just say it has a lot to do with sushi.”
Sure, Showalter gives a good interview, but I don’t think I’d let him near me with a fish. SFBG
MICHAEL SHOWALTER WITH EUGENE MIRMAN AND LEO ALLEN
Tues/25, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$15
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
Flame on
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER To the naked eye — and deep-fried, extra-crispy spirit — working fast food is a lot like what the Flaming Lips call the “sound of failure” on their latest album, At War with the Mystics (Warner Bros). It’s the worst of times … and the worst of times. And I can feel the pain — I once broke my back and suffered hypothermia of the right hand for Häagen-Dazs.
That’s probably why I found it so poignant when, in the recent Lips doc by SF filmmaker Bradley Beesley, The Fearless Freaks, Wayne Coyne went back to the Long John Silver, the spot where he’d donned a ludicrous pirate getup and tossed salted bits of seafood as a fry cook for more than a decade. And it was inspiring — because Coyne, now 45, is so shameless and proud about his contributions to our fast food nation. “I think that kind of mindless manual labor really does save the world in a way because you’re just busy doing stuff,” he told me over the phone from his Oklahoma City home in April. “Being busy keeps you out of trouble — keeps you away from too much existential doubt.”
Who’d’ve thunk that grease monkey in the plumed hat would become the blood-spattered, bubble-riding, balloon-shoving ringleader to a Flaming Lips nation? Certainly not me when I caught their brave but somewhat ineffective Walkman experiment at the Fillmore in ’99, during their Music Against Brain Degeneration/Soft Bulletin tour. Tuning into the selected radio channel, I could barely hear anything of the show through the flimsy headsets. But I guess word spread because the scene at this year’s Noise Pop opening show with the Lips was beyond standing room.
The opening moments of the show were worth it — the band tore into the stirring, trebly melody of “Race for the Prize,” Coyne whipped a lit-up sling around his head, smoke poured off the stage, and Santa-suited techs threw far too many balloons into the sold-out crowd. The punks had taken acid, to paraphrase the title of the 2002 Lips compilation, and it was a genuine spectacle, replete with darkness (in the form of Coyne’s monologues critiquing the Bush administration) and light (the cute animal costumes) and sing-alongs to Queen’s seemingly uncoverable “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The key to regime change lay with each individual, declared pop philosopher Coyne, suggesting that his audience make it “popular to be gay, smoke pot, and have abortions” throughout the country, not just in San Francisco.
“Maybe I’m a fool, maybe I’m embarrassing, maybe it’s humiliating, but at least it opens it up to say, ‘Well, you speak your mind,’” Coyne said later. “In San Francisco, you guys don’t grapple with the same problems that you would in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City doesn’t have a tolerance of smoking pot, and gay people are on the verge of having all their rights taken away. You almost wonder, will people at some point try to reverse the civil rights movement.”
Speaking about the Lips’ 1983 inception, Coyne told Staring at Sound biographer Jim DeRogatis that “he’d like to be in a band like the Grateful Dead, throw big parties with people coming to them and having a great time.” DeRogatis said, “[Coyne] also said, ‘We’d like to be different; we’d like to still make records that don’t suck.’ They have elements of a jam band following, they have people from the indie rock ’80s. They have people who’ve discovered them in the alternative era. They have new Gen Y fans that downloaded The Soft Bulletin and think it’s incredible. Their audience is all over the map — they don’t fit into any demographic in terms of the way that corporations are slicing up the audience.”
The trick, said Coyne, is to never get too comfortable. “We always force ourselves to do something new, even if we’re not comfortable with it. I don’t think we really have any agenda other than to freak ourselves out.”
Ushered in with The Fearless Freaks; 20 Years of Weird: the Flaming Lips 1986–2006 (a collection of live recordings and oddities), their current tour, the DeRogatis book, the Fearless Freaks documentary, and next year with luck Christmas on Mars (Coyne’s feature film debut as a director), At War turns out to be, indeed, a war album, questioning uses and abuses of power with the opening track, “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song.”
But that’s not to say Coyne shies away from the band’s evangelical tendencies. “We’re using drama and music and sort of heightening the whole experience to be somewhat of a religious experience,” he explains. “I think all good rock ’n’ roll has that. But hopefully the agenda is that you, as an individual, at the end of the day, decide what’s great about your life instead of looking to some rulebook or some invisible force up in space somewhere. Music is just one part of it, and at the end of the day, to me, it’s dumb entertainment.” Aye, aye, matey? SFBG
FLAMING LIPS
With Ween and the Go! Team
Sat/22, 6:30 p.m.
Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Berk.
$41.50
www.ticketmaster.com
SAY WHAT?
ROOTS OF OCHIS
Get down with these pulsating Northern Cali indie darlings. Just do it. No questions. Wed/19, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $7. (415) 923-0923.
PAPERCUTS
The lovely Bay Area indie rockers’ album is coming out on Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s label, Gnomensong. Thurs/20, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $7. (415) 861-5016.
RACONTEURS AND KELLEY STOLTZ
Midwestern rock supergroupies meet the Detroit native–SF vinyl diehard (who was pals with Brendan Benson back in the day). Sat/22–Sun/23, 8 p.m., Warfield, 982 Market, SF. $29.50–$37.50. (415) 775-7722.
MINDERS
Enter It’s a Bright Guilty World (Future Farmer); then enter the dragon. The Kingdom and Junior Panthers also perform. Sun/23, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 621-4455.
MAVIS STAPLES
Legendary gospel-soul sister communes with the eucalyptus. Sun/23, 2 p.m., Stern Grove, SF. Free. sterngrove.org.
Pan stanzas
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS After three or four days of sleeping under stars, swimming in rivers, and staring into the fire, I have nothing in me but poetry — so don’t bother looking for any restaurants in this restaurant review.
Here’s one I caught while my brother and friends were fishing for fish. Let’s call it “Water Bug Poem.”
On the American River, in it, up to my gut, watching water bugs. Who said that corn and cows were beautiful to the extent that they were what they were? Water bugs disprove you, existing more fully in their river bottom shadows, perfect circle feet on slapstick-figure bodies, skitting over rocks, mud, rocks. Every now and then a dead one floats by and what’s the difference, under water? I don’t care where, I’ll say it again, in bubbles: You’re beautiful. I have a big straw hat and sunscreen, stand alone, shriveled and shivering, no longer feeling my big white feet beneath me. You know how it is? When all you can do to be warm is piss yourself.
That’s a poem, even though it might not look like one and has urine in it. Come to think of it, damn me, there was a psychiatrist on this camping trip with us, and I forgot to ask her why a chicken farmer in his or her forties would still be fascinated by scatology. Of course she was pretty much stoned the whole time almost, I think, so I don’t know how professional an opinion it would have been.
One e-mailer wonders if I secretly hate my readers. I don’t think so, but I’m willing to wonder anything in the world or even sometimes just outside of it. So…
No, I really don’t think so. Or if I do secretly hate my readers, I secretly love them too, so the two you would think would cancel each other out, right, rather than make me shit on their heads every week in July, year after year? My own uneducated guess, dear reader, is that if there is any secret hatred behind all this, it’s not about you. It’s between me and me — and I promise to try to work that out in therapy next week. Because your point is well-taken: “Life is hard enough on a bad day without getting besieged with the contents of [my] intestines.”
Another possibility is that “shit happens,” and maybe I personally have managed to make my peace with that fact. But that doesn’t mean I have to rub it in everyone else’s face. I could very easily flush, light a match, open a window, exit stage left in a cloud of shame and sheepishness, and find something more universally entertaining to be proud about in print.
Like pee! Just kidding. Farts? Farts are funny to everyone, right? And they always were and always will be? Right? Can we compromise and have a Toot-Toot Pride Month?
I’m still kidding. Sorry. And I do have another poem to tell you. Call it, um, “Someone in the Kitchen,” because someone’s been in mine. Can you tell?
I succeeded in not thinking about you sometimes, actually, in the mountains. Then, winding home on the nearly no-lane road, I started seeing blackberries. Already itchy and pinched, I pulled over and started picking, easily overflowing a tin bowl and cup before it hit me: Dude, you have my pie pan. I want it back.
That there is a true-story poem, and I ate all those blackberries before I got out to the main road, for the record. It’s that black teeth time of year again for me, hooray! Almost drove off the road several times, smiling at myself in the rearview mirror, for kicks. It would have been a very scenic death at least.
Well, once you get to 80 West, you have to drive past Ikeda’s twice, once just outside of Auburn and then again just inside of Davis. I made it past the first but could not resist the second, partly because I needed gas and to pee real bad anyway.
Take the Mace Boulevard exit. And never mind all the produce and other stuff. I think the Auburn one even has burgers. But the important thing about Ikeda’s, if you don’t already know, is the pie. They make the best homemade pies that weren’t made by anyone you know (because someone has his or her pie pan, ahem).
I found a day-old mini peach one for half price ($3.00). It’s like 6 inches across by 2 1/2 inches deep, which is a lot of wonderfulness for, say, two people, or one person twice, if you’re me.
But it’s not a restaurant. SFBG
IKEDA’S
Daily, 9 a.m.–7 p.m.
26295 Mace Blvd., Davis
(530) 750-3379
Takeout only
MC/V
Quiet
Fire…cool
By Scribe
Tis the season to burn bright, what with all the fire arts festivals and other events leading up to Burning Man’s 20th anniversary. And burners have definitely been stepping things up recently. A couple months ago, San Francisco and Black Rock LLC (the group that stages the event) teamed up to throw an amazing fire arts festival at Candlestick Park, going bigger than the Crucible in Oakland usually does for its annual Fire Arts Festival with a stage of great acts, cutting edge pyrotechnics, and, of course, amazing fire spewing contraptions. Well, Michael Sturtz and his Crucible crew accepted that challenge and blew up this weekend’s festival to crazy proportions. This place was just GOING OFF! San Francisco’s Flaming Lotus Girls showed why they’re still queen of the hill with the debut of their new project: Serpent Mother (OK, perhaps I’m a little biased). And the festival’s stage rocked with the Mutaytor, a fantastic entrance and performance by the Extra Action Marching Band, super fresh fire dancing by the San Francisco Fire Conclave, and Dr. Megavolt and friends rockin’ the Tesla coils. I was already excited about this year’s Burning Man — now, it’s all I can do to not want to flee to the desert immediately. The man burns in 48 days. How are your preparations going?
NOISE: Sonic on Sonic – Vice Cooler’s best 24th B-day ever and Sonic Youth Kim and Thurston’s drop-by
Whoa, did Vice Cooler of XBXRX, KIT, and Hawnay Troof have an awesome birthday or what at 21 Grand in Oakland July 15? The topper came around midnight: Mirror/Dash, Sonic Youth twosome Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s seldom-performed experimental side project.
Moore and Gordon arrived after finishing up their opening set for Pearl Jam at the Bill Graham Civic, sans entourage; set up and plugged in their own gear; and then played a short set of textural fragments with Kim Gordon on drums and then guitar. It was rad to see Gordon and Moore performing together outside of an SY context – a first for me. I dug the piece that featured Gordon playing a propulsive rhythm guitar.
I also like the way hundreds of people suddenly materialized when the SYers appeared (despite the sketchy sign at the door stating “Sonic Youth are NOT playing” – oh yeah, OK, technically, no). I guess folks got busy texting their pals when Vice, performing as Hawnay Troof, announced that Mirror/Dash was coming up soon.
After a few songs, Moore and Gordon warmly wished a happy birthday to Cooler, grinning from ear to ear up front after helping with setup. Is it too much to see them as Cooler’s spiritual parental units? Troof-ully, they seem to adore Vice. To drive the point home further, Moore jumped into the audience and tackled the birthday boy. Someone was in a hugging mood…
And on a complete side note, can we all agree that Gordon is probably the hottest (and coolest) 50-something lady in rock, resembling a downtown Charlotte Rampling? Madonna and her aerodynamic thighs have nothin’ on her. She also pulled a nice kid-like, twirly dance off at the previous night’s Fillmore performance.
Get Hustle didn’t make the bash, and Friends Forever canceled due to the girl drummer’s back injury. I missed Sharon Cheslow’s improv set with Magik Marker’s Elisa Ambrogio, as well as Always. But I did catch the spunky Dinky Bits. Cute costumes, guys.
Harry Merry was a maniac, playing a fairly long set of his looney, loveable bizarro tunes. This number was about a bus driver who refused to obey.
The Vice, in his Hawnay Troof guise, got on stage, rocked the mic, and worked the crowd up to a lather.
Cooler continued sweating his heart out, as Thurston Moore peered over the top of heads from the sidelines. A cornucopia of local bands also represented in the audience, including sundry peeps from Comets on Fire, Erase Errata, Xiu Xiu, So So Many White White Tigers, Curtains, and Death Sentence! Panda.
At the end of Hawnay Troof’s set, three lovely ladies jumped on stage and led a “Happy Birthday” singalong. Awww, shucks.
Oh, well, my camera sighed and died before Quintron and Miss Pussycat got into the music, but let it be said, they were busy busting out some manic jams when I made my way out of the sweaty, steamy 21 Grand. Outside, venue honcho and bartender Sarah told me she ran out of booze and beer and that the worst drink she resorted to serving was a gin and coke in someone’s used beer bottle. Yum. Better luck with the beverages next year – but just try to top this party.
THURSDAY
JULY 13
MUSIC
Kid Beyond
If there was an Olympic gold medal awarded for beatboxing, Kid Beyond would win it. It’s not just his vocal flexibility that impresses, but the way he weaves these sounds into accomplished arrangements of complex tunes. (Nicole Gluckstern)
With Shotgun Wedding Quintet,
Zoe Keating, and Rondo Brothers
9 p.m.
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
$11
(415) 255-0333
www.slims-sf.com
THEATER
Troijka
That bullet-domed voleur Jean Genet, always scheming. Whether it was inspired by French history or sprang forth in full filth and glory from the author’s mind, The Balcony counts as one of his best-known theatrical pieces about class and sex and power. Troijka is an adaptation of the play from No Nude Men Productions, which isn’t into pandering of the Falcon-video- star-as- stage-actor variety. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Through Sat/16
8 p.m.
Climate Theatre
285 Ninth St., SF
$15
(415) 621-1203
www.horrorunspeakable.com
WEDNESDAY
JULY 12
PERFORMANCE
“Flappers, Femmes Fatales, and Vitriol”
Does history get any better than this? From Eskimo women smoking cigarettes to Japanese women lopping off their hair, the Flapper movement of the 1920s had some serious legs. Learn all about Flapper culture and Weimar Berlin’s own “Priestess of Decadence,” Anita Berber. Berber was the quintessence of the femme fatale, and her behavior was scandalous even by today’s standards. UC Berkeley professor Mel Gordon has re-created two of Berber’s dances, Morphine and Shipwrecked, both banned in most European cities. This Bastille Day celebration intends to soak you in smut, so stick around for the Thrillpeddlers adaptation of Rene Breton’s 1930s opium thriller, The Drug. It takes place in Saigon, and a truly horrific Grand Guignol climax has been promised. (K. Tighe)
7 p.m.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum
401 Van Ness, fourth floor, SF
$10
(415) 255-4800
www.sfpalm.org
THEATER
The Legendary
and Fabulous Passion Play
Combining drag and messiah figures is an almost foolproof formula for success, so el Gato del Diablo Theatre Company are onto something with their latest production. The follow-up (but not sequel) to last year’s The Rise and Fall of the Monkey King, also by Shawn Ferreyra, The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play is inspired by the ongoing battles over same-sex marriage in our oozing-with-talent United States. Throw Bertolt Brecht, Butoh dance, and Bard-style baddies into the mix, and the result promises to be bizarre. (Johnny Ray Huston)
8 p.m. (Fri.-Sat., through Aug. 19)
EXIT Stage Left
156 Eddy, SF
Previews, pay what you can;
$20 after Fri/15
1-800-838-3006
www.elgatotheatre.org
Polly wanna rob ya!
› johnny@sfbg.com
Hear ye! Hear ye! Step right up to the Castro Theatre. Behold a bizarre trio of crooks. One an expert ventriloquist in old lady drag. Another a Goliath whose fickle heart is bigger than his brain. The third a pint-size schemer, who thinks nothing of pretending to be a baby in a stroller in order to case a high-class joint for jewels. Witness these three sell counterfeit parrots — you heard right, counterfeit parrots! — to unsuspecting mugs in order to visit their homes and rob them blind. Watch 1925’s The Unholy Three, just one of director Tod Browning’s circus-influenced nightmares.
The treats at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival include Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and Madonna muse Dita Parlo in Au Bonheur des Dames with live music by the Hot Club. But all of this city’s imps of the perverse will be gathering for The Unholy Three (screening Sun/16 at 5 p.m.), if only to pay homage to Browning, “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney, and mein liebchen, the one and only Harry Earles (real name: Kurt Schneider), who later approached Browning with the idea of turning the Tod Robbins story “Spurs” into what became 1932’s nightmarish and unforgettable Freaks. Also based on a Robbins story, The Unholy Three might contain Earles’ best performance, especially since, as Danny Peary notes in an entry within his book Cult Movie Stars, Earles’ high-pitched voice was often “unintelligible” when transmitted through the primitive sound technology of early talkies.
He may be a dead ringer for tear sprayer extraordinaire Ricky Schroder in The Champ, but don’t cross him: Peary incisively observes that Earles’ face “was doll-like and seemed harmless until you looked closely and saw it was hard and quite eerie.” The Unholy Three mines this effectively. Earles’ character, Tweedledee, is introduced performing on a sideshow stage. When the audience within the film mocks him, it doesn’t take long for him to lose his temper and kick a laughing little boy in the face. Soon afterward he’s in infant disguise, whether locked in a stroller and acting as if ruby necklaces are mere baby beads or half in and half out of masquerade, smoking a cigarette while wearing a jumper. According to Browning biographer David Skal’s Dark Carnival, this type of outrageousness reached its apex in a child-killing Christmas Eve scene by a tree that doubtless would have given Dawn Davenport at the start of Female Trouble a run for her murderous money — if it wasn’t censored.
Though Browning’s astute biographer verges on going too far in comparing it to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s shadow play, The Unholy Three humorously and kinetically uses comic strip speech bubbles in a way that prefigures pop art and Batman on TV. Also, as writers such as Skal, David Thomson, and Carlos Clarens have observed, it exemplifies early-20th-century horror’s interest in reconfiguring common romantic and sexual aggravation into fantastic stories of vengeance. Himself forced to perform as an infant and a circus runaway who made an early living as “The Living Hypnotic Corpse,” Browning no doubt related to Earles and to Chaney (whose pantomime abilities stemmed partly from childhood communication with his deaf parents).
The Unholy Three’s titular characters form a perverse trinity of sorts, with Earles’ Tweedledee a modern child of mythical Leprechaun figures and a less lusty uncle of Cousin Lymon from Carson McCullers’ Sad Café. You don’t have to be Leslie Fiedler to recognize that both Earles and Chaney present an interested viewer with a mythic image of his or her secret self. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
Fri/14–Sun/16
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(925) 866-9530
www.silentfilm.org
One Lives to live
By Kimberly Chun
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER I fell in love with the recent Ray Davies solo album, Other People’s Lives (V2). Face it, I fall in love all the time — with records, of course — but I think I truly did love about three-fourths of the Kinks leader’s solo debut for the first four listens. Then I stopped listening and just coasted on the afterglow.
But you fall out of love. The fifth or sixth listen comes around and little things start to break down for you. The way those coveted hot pants always give you gnarly cameltoe.
In the case of Other People’s Lives, it was the song’s overblown arrangements — for which Davies completely takes the blame — complete with unintentionally cornball sax and a production sensibility that sounds like modern music really did stop with the last humongoid Kinks album, 1983’s State of Confusion (Velvel). When even the quirks annoy, like the half “yar,” half yawn that ushers in the record’s otherwise fine opener, “Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After),” and the throwaway Ricky Martin–style Latin pop treatment given to the media-lashing title track, you know love’s a goner.
An American album, conceived mainly during Davies’ stay in New Orleans, Other People’s Lives resembles Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry (Attack), another disappointingly produced and arranged album of even better songs by a great wordsmith and sometime US transplant. Perhaps you’re so happy to hear those familiar voices again, at your doorstep, that you overlook the details — the tacky suit, wilting flowers, wrongheaded arrangements — the first five times around.
Still you have to hand it to Davies — whose recent travails, like being shot in January 2004 after chasing the thief who snatched his girlfriend’s purse, have been well documented — when he decides to make a bold gesture. That’s what inspired some to call the Kinks the first indie band. “I prefer that to being called the originators of heavy metal,” says a sincere and thoughtful Davies from London. “Yes, I like that. We have a very independent spirit…. We took chances, and we failed a lot. Really, other acts’ careers would’ve been ended by some of the bold and stupid things we did on record. I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter now, and she wants to hear my music when she visits me. I find it really hard to explain some of the weird diversions I’ve taken in my music over the years.”
Bold and stupid?
“The Bold and the Stupid. It sounds like…”
A soap opera?
“Yes, stuff like Preservation, Soap Opera,” he free-associates. “You know, at the time, when Rod Stewart and Elton John were doing conventional tours and, you know, big stage-entry things… and there we are. We go indoors with a musical farce onstage. You know, it was a rock Punch and Judy show. It was a totally wrong career move, but it worked brilliantly. I mean, sometimes those things pay off really well.”
Davies obviously still can write a song — that was why Other People initially seduced me. And he knows he’s really got me — and everyone else. “I think I’ve got a fairly good fix. I can hone in on detail with people all right. You know, it’s like little things people do, habits that people have, the way they walk. I have that sort of observation with my writing, which leads it to be sometimes a bit quirky. I think I know how far to take something when I’m writing a song, and I think that’s probably one of the sort of skills I’ve developed, although I wouldn’t say you ever learn how to write songs. I think that’s one of my skills — knowing that it’s always a new inner palette, a new landscape, every time I write a song, and I think experience has taught me to be aware of that fact, that I can’t just phone them in.”
Sounds like the archly self-aware narrator of “The Tourist,” which appears to center on New Orleans slumming, is a lot like the songwriter within Davies — and that songwriting and stepping into other people’s lives is a kind of imaginative tourism.
“It is,” replies Davies. “I’m somewhat of a tourist. I also write on different levels. Obviously with ‘The Tourist’ it’s not just somebody going for a holiday somewhere. It’s someone who’s in a sense a tourist, an emotional tourist… and is probably not such a good person because of it.”
“It’s a different kind of writing when you write a pop single,” he confesses. “Writing on this record — there’s a long span to it and it’s a slow burn…. So it’s going to have a certain amount of depth to it to hold my interest because maybe as a writer I need to be fired up by the subject matter…. Maybe I write for listeners who probably want to dig and delve into it and realize there’s a bigger picture there, bigger story there.”
And perhaps, being a creature of little faith, as the Other People song goes, I should keep listening for the bigger story and fall back in love.
NO TEARS Speaking of Nawlins’s musical dwellers, Quintron and Miss Pussycat have been firing on all pistons and Drum Buddies since Katrina flooded their Spellcaster Lodge. Phoning from Los Angeles, Quintron says the rebuilding is almost complete on the lodge but they’re going to wait for the hurricane season before finishing work because the city’s infrastructure isn’t quite together yet. “I don’t wanna do this shit twice,” he offers.
Since the pair lacked insurance, the rebuilding was funded by benefits around the country organized by other musicians. “All our fucking friends are rebuilding our house. It just blew my mind,” says Quintron. Their first show at the Lodge is scheduled for Sept. 15 with a promise from bounce king DJ Jubilee to perform — and don’t expect Quintron to get bogged down in blustery sentimentality. “I’ve already written a song called ‘Hurricane,’” he says. “At this point I can’t do a maudlin blues record, like ‘O Katrina.’ It would be so cliché and stupid. . . . That’s not what’s coming out — I’m making more and more happy songs now, musically.” SFBG
RAY DAVIES
Thurs/13, 8 p.m.
Warfield Theatre
928 Market, SF
$29.50–$35
(415) 775-7722
QUINTRON AND MISS PUSSYCAT
Fri/14, 9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
$10–$12
(415) 970-9777