Stage

The Performant: Spank it!

Andrew Lam
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Austin invades SF with Christeene Vale, Wammo, and Guy Forsyth

There’s glamour. Then there’s Glamour. And then there’s Glamour’s myriad permutations, like Drag Glamour. And Drug Glamour. And Diva Glamour. Glamour makes respectable what might otherwise be considered merely ostentatious, excessive, or gauche. Elusive but instantly recognizable, there’s no doubt that glamour can enthrall. But frankly, sometimes it bores. 

There’s nothing boring about Christeene Vale. 

One part Iggy Pop, one part New York Dolls, and one part complete mess, Vale is pure punk rock without the guitars. Headlining Some Thing at the Stud, appropriately on Friday the 13th, Vale stumbled onto the stage dressed in decidedly unglamorous rags, a shredded t-shirt, and a flesh-colored thong, bruises decorating her hairy thighs, lipstick smeared half across her face like a terrorist clown. 

Accompanied by a burst of driving electronica, Vale began gyrating suggestively, not in a softcore “come hither” kind of way, but in a down and (really) dirty way, tugging at her g-string, spreading her literally filthy cheeks. 

Rapping over the rhythm at breakneck speed, the tweeker-twitchy tranny demanded that the crowd “Fix My Dick”. Clever and gross, lyrics such as “I’ll let you chew on my crab cake the hell with the first date just slide me the beefsteak” fell from her lips as easily as the gobs of spittle she spat at the front row. 

The rest of her set was just as confrontational—and just as hilarious: “Workin’ on Granma,” “Slowly/Easy,” “Tears from My Pussy” (a downbeat little R & B ballad with a Casio-tone hook). Creatively fearless, Vale managed to be both explicitly offensive and unexpectedly romantic. “There’s room at the table for all of us,” could well have been the anti-glamour message being propagated, though there’s an equal chance it was something a little less precious like “let’s get drunk and fuck tonight”.

Austin darlings the Asylum Street Spankers may be no more, but musicians still have to eat, y’all. Even the Sex Pistols had their Filthy Lucre tour, though that calculated stadium spectacle was a far cry from this convivial parlor act of former Spankers Wammo and Guy Forsyth, who teamed up at the Red Devil Lounge to play a few favorites. 

Blessed with a wicked slide guitar, Forsyth killed on Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Moves on the Water,” and on his own rocking, talking tune “Long Long Time” (“we used to dream about heroes/but now it’s just how to beat the system”). Wammo alternated between playing percussion on a plastic suitcase and adding “horns” to the mix with his harmonica, a kazoo, a spot of Tuvan-style throat-singing, and a jump onto lead vocals for humorous tunes such as “Beer,” and my personal favorite “Leafblower,” which sounded like a parody of a Kurt Cobain song, a sort of nasal whine ruminating on the evil of the 8 a.m. leafblower outside one’s window (“good thing I don’t have a gun”). 

They might not have an official band name yet, but as a duo, Wammo and Forsyth still managed to provide a spanking good show. 

 

 

Idol: We hate America

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Idol: We hate America

Agghh! Gakk! Sputter! Those howls you hear (and the tears in the background) are the Redmond household at 8:55, when Ryan Seacrest announced that James Durbin had been voted off and was going home. James was a wreck; he didn’t expect this, and neither did anyone else. Certainly not our readers.


What the fuck? How could the most talented person on the show — and one of the most talented ever to appear on Idol — get kicked off in favor of two half-rate singers and a guy who can’t get beyond country? I mean, Lauren and Haley aren’t anywhere near up to the level of previous Idol finalists. I love Scotty, but he’s really a one-trick pony.


James? James is the bomb. James can sing anything. He’s got stage presence to die for. He takes risks, he generates energy … he’s the rightful American Idol, 2011.


The only thing I can think of (and it makes me sick) is that he’s just too, well, un-American for Idol. Scotty did an atrocious song this week about Jesus (I don’t know anything about Iraq, but I know Jesus … Jesus. So we celebrate religious morons?) But the Jesus thing seems to work. And Lauren talked about the floods in the south. And somebody must like the bubblegum-teeny-torch-song-I’m-smiling-till-my-face-breaks shit that is Haley.


Even Vivian, who generally only likes girl singers, was shocked when it happened. “America has spoken,” says Seacrest, and Viv looks over at me and says, “I hate America.”


I think I’m done. I don’t think I’m going to watch any more. What a stupid show. What a stupid country.


 

5 Things: May 12, 2011

John Elberling
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5 Things: May 12, 2011

>>SCOBY SNACKS Lest you think that only barbarians and Bear Grylls eat their food alive, consider the case of fermentation. Sauerkraut, kombucha, bleu cheese, and kim chee are all living foods whose microbial make-ups diversify the tiny critters that live inside you (and we all know diversity is a good thing!) If we didn’t just freak you out, this week is an optimal time to learn more about making and snarfing fermented foods. House Kombucha, Omnivore Books, Cafe Gratitude, and Happy Girl Kitchen are all hosting workshops to teach you the power of a biodiverse kitchen. But the kicker is the Ferment Change festival (May 14-22), a full week of East Bay bike tours to homebrewing abodes, cocktail parties, culture swaps, and appearances by the anointed god of Planet Fermenation, Sandor “Sandorkraut” Katz himself.

>>WHO’S IN CHARGE? We’re big-time boosters of Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so once again we rode, we schmoozed, we accumulated swag — most of it aimed at luring more of us onto the streets with the promise of bigger, better, safer, kinder, gentler bike lanes. Which is why we had to wonder at the cover of the Connecting the City pamphlet, a happy-talk scenario showing a smiling woman and two darling kiddies riding along a reimagined bike lane on Market Street. Sweet — until you notice that the woman (the mother?) isn’t wearing a helmet. And neither is the woman staring off into stage-left space behind her. And that group of huddled people in black hoodies — are they supposed to be chess players? With big plastic bags of garbage at their feet? And what about that guy who appears to be rifling through the garbage? Why do we feel like the sell just got harder.

>>ASSEMBLAGE Collage artist David King was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation last year, and he’ll be showing new work later this month at the Visual Aid booth at the San Francisco Fine Art Fair, one of three different art showcases taking place in SF during the third weekend of May. He’s also showing work, along with Mark Faigenbaum, at Inclusions Gallery from Saturday, May 14 through June 19. The opening reception is this Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

>>CHUCK IT We are all well aware that our days are numbered, and that they are going to be pretty well filled up doing more loads of laundry, cleaning the cat box, working, etc. What we really don’t have time for are any more bucket lists taunting us with 100 more things we have to do, see, eat, and ponder before the old dust to dust thing takes place. That’s why we were disheartened to see that there’s a new bucket list just for Giants fans: Bill Chastain’s 100 Things … . We have nothing against Chastain, but we do wish his publisher had come up with a better marketing scheme than this tired, gimmicky genre. Besides, with post World Series prices what they are, we can barely even afford to cross off item 39, “Attend a Game at AT&T Park,” let alone item 40, “Attend a Spring Training Game in Scottsdale.”

>>THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS If there’s one thing that separates the rubes from the natives, it’s pronunciation. Only a rube-and-proud-of-it would risk the derisive sniggering of Manhattanites by asking directions to Houston Street, pronounced like that city in Texas, or the rolled eyeballs of Show-Me Staters by rhyming the last syllable of their great state with “misery.” That’s why we are mystified that Muni hired such a collection of rubes (who may even be robotic rubes) to announce pending stops on its bus lines. Who approved “Di-VEYE-sa-dero”? And who signed off on “Valen-CHA”? Yo, Muni, you never heard the phrase “hire local”?

Live Shots: Kinna Grannis at the Swedish American Hall, 5/10/11-5/11/11

Andrew Lam
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0

It’s rare these days to go to a concert and feel like you really saw something truly wholesome. It’s more likely you leave smelling of booze, covered in dance-floor sweat, and with the beat of the drums still pounding in your ears. Luckily, there are still musicians like Kinna Grannis making beautiful, simple songs that can make an audience just sit in total silence as gentle guitar chords wave over them. Grannis is performing at the Swedish American Hall for two nights this week (last night and tonight, Weds/11).

The first of these gigs left people standing out in the horribly cold wind, staring at the sold-out sign plastered to the door. Grannis, who has become famous mostly through the powers of Youtube, shared the stage with her equally talented sisters, Misa and Emi. Lots of her songs have to do with love and happy moments, which will just make you smile, and on her Youtube channel she’s explored all sorts of covers, from Tracy Chapman to Britney, bringing a bit of her own folksy twist to all of them.

Imaginary Friend started out the evening with melancholy ballads, just the thing you’d want to play when you’re all alone with that special someone.

There was something so pleasantly innocent and precious about the whole night — maybe if you’re lucky enough to get a seat, tonight you can go experience that wholesomeness for yourself.

 

Kinna Grannis:


Imaginary Friend:

 

 

Hot sexy events: May 11-17

Andrew Lam
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2
Hot sexy events: May 11-17

On the website for Kink Studios – Kink.com‘s foray into the world of arthouse porn cinema – one scrolls down a quote from, of all people, that strapping hunk of man meat Roger Ebert. It’s about The Last Tango in Paris: 

The movie frightened off imitators, and instead of being the first of many X-rated films dealing honestly with sexuality, it became almost the last. Hollywood made a quick U-turn into movies about teenagers, technology, action heroes and special effects. And with the exception of a few isolated films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and In the Realm of the Senses (1976), the serious use of graphic sexuality all but disappeared from the screen.

But being the innovators, perverts, and getting-things-done Type A’s that they are, the minds behind Kink.com decided to do something about this dearth of sexy, smart art. To wit, they made a film, Indietro, that combines all the flogging and excited screams that you’ve come to expect from the website’s more conventional BDSM flicks, with haunting piano trills and – gasp! – character development. They stocked the film with acting turns by Madison Young, Aurora Snow, and William Van Toland, and is written and directed by Vivian Darkbloom. 

It’s playing at Mission Control (via Femina Potens‘ programming) on Thurs/12, along with a Q&A with cast and crew. See it to believe it – and bring Mr. Ebert, won’t you?

 

Virgie Tovar presents “Burlesque Basics for the Shy and Awkward”

Amazing alert: the fantabulously fat burlesque star Dulce de Lecherous (Miss Tovar if you’re nasty) is doing this course on Burly Q gratis for the wonky and discombobulated set. I bet you never thought you’d be able to shimmy in stilettos, or twirl tassels with tact – but this here Virgie is ready to ease all comers – boys, girls, bois, “girls” – into stageside sexiness. Or, at least get you on the right path. We’re only talking about an hour-long class here, people. 

Thurs/12 6:30-7:30 p.m., free

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com


First Full of Kink: Indietro

Watch Kink Studios’ first foray into art porn, ask all your perverted wonderings of its cast and crew, then enjoy black and white porn and live burlesque performances. Afterwards, you can stay for the play party – if you’re a member of Femina Potens. Keep it classy, art freaks. 

Thurs/12 8 p.m.-1 a.m., $15

Mission Control

www.feminapotens.org


“Saburau: The Warrior’s Path of Service”

A educational run-down of positive power exchange practices in the Japanese samauri tradition. Sure, it’s not your run-of-the-mill Exiles class (they tend to focus on more explicitly S&M teachings), but that’s why this course sounds so cool. Ground your play time in a background of service-oriented community. 

Fri/13 8-10 p.m., $4 members/$10 non-members

The Women’s Building

3543 18th St., SF

www.theexiles.org


Dungeon monitor training

This training is not about loving control – or maybe it is, but don’t walk into it whip in hand. Being a dungeon monitor is a big deal, a crucial role in the pursuit of a healthy S&M scene. This orientation is open to everyone, and features interactive scenes showing problematic dungeon happenings in which you’re asked to practice your better judgement to mediate. Not into becoming a monitor, per se? You’re still welcome to learn and hone your skills as a member of a smart and safe community. 

Sat/14 4:30-7:30 p.m., $5-10 suggested donation

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2746

www.sfcitadel.org 


Naked Girls Reading: Burlesque legends

SF’s regularily-occurring lit night is famous for letting it all hang out. Really — the women on stage are naked as jaybirds. And though once again local luminaries like Lili St. Cyr, Lady Monster, and Cherry Galette will be orating from honored texts, this time around at least part of the show will be occuring offstage. Burlesque legends from Holiday O’Hara to Satan’s Angel will be in attendance – and you can sit next to one of the lovelies, if you’re down to shell out another five bucks. Deal! 

Sun/15 8:30-10 p.m., $15-20

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

(415) 552-7399

www.sexandculture.org

 

 

The fun side of bikes

Maria Poblet
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3
The fun side of bikes

steve@sfbg.com

Paul Freedman, a.k.a. the Fossil Fool, is a singer-songwriter and builder of elaborate art bikes who lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. Since 2001, when he decided to apply his Harvard University education to building custom bikes, accessories, pedal-powered products, and mobile sound systems, Freedman created Fossil Fool and Rock the Bike to sell his creations and provide a platform for his performances and alternative transportation advocacy work.

But anyone who’s watched Freedman build and ride his creations — such as his latest, El Arbol, a 14-foot fiberglass tree built around a double-decker tall bike with elaborate generator, sound, and lighting systems and innovative landing gears — knows this is a serious labor of love by an individual at the forefront of Bay Area bike culture. We caught up with him recently to discuss his work and vision.

SFBG How did Rock the Bike start?

FOSSIL FUEL I was working at a shop in Berkeley and I decided to make my first bike music system, which I called Soul Cycles. So I had that other job at a bicycle nonprofit, which is cool, and that was the first impetus. I did two innovative things with my first bike music system: I put the controls on the handlebars, which I’d never seen anyone do, and I put speaker back-lighting to make the speakers look nice at night. I used a really nice CFL fluorescent lamp, and I started playing around with those and it looked great, so that was our first product for those first three or four years.

SFBG What was going on in the larger culture at the time that led you to believe your interest in bikes and technology was going to be fruitful or make an interesting statement?

FF I care deeply about biking and a lot of the people I was with did too, but I felt like the bicycle advocacy scene was not very effective when it came to actual outreach. I felt like the thing that had been really formative for me was this person-to-person interaction, in my case by hanging out with the guys who started Xtracycle, and going on quests to get ingredients for dinner and riding late at night with the music systems on the tour. I felt like those experiences were what made bicycling appealing, but the bike advocacy scene was using guilt trips and telling people you should ride a bike because you’re too fat and you should ride a bike because there’s too much traffic. And I felt like we needed to shift that mindset and really start focusing on the fun aspects of biking and the social aspects to grow the scene.

SFBG Do you feel like it has, and what effect do you think it had on those who weren’t already riding bikes?

FF I think it’s moving that direction. Even within traditional bike advocacy groups, those people are starting to really focus on their events and creating community, in a good way, and challenging themselves with doing so. And I think that’s really positive.

SFBG Your timing also dovetailed with heightened green awareness — with a push for renewable energy, concerns over peak oil, and things like that.

FF Yeah, I feel that transportation choices are the main thing people need to examine about their lives with respect to their impact on global warming. And that’s not just a feeling, that’s the consensus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. They say that if you want to have an impact on the planet, positive or negative, the first thing you should consider is your transportation habits. So that means flying, it means driving, and everything else. I don’t think it’s really beneficial to focus on what people need to do with a car, like they need to drop their kids off. It’s more important how people do the optional things with cars like the trips to Tahoe, and the flights to Mexico. It’s those optional things I want to focus on, which is why I’m so interested in Sunday Streets, which is like the antidote. It’s this thing you can do here, that you can walk and bike to, that’s as fun as driving to Tahoe.

SFBG Through your technology and design work, it also seems like you’re showing a broad range of what people can do on a bike, with lots of cargo or a whole performance stage setup. Do you think design is convincing people that bikes are more versatile that they thought they were?

FF Oh yeah, I think that would be a really beneficial outcome of this work. By riding through town with our music gear, of course people are going to look at that and think, oh yeah, I could probably go to Rainbow Grocery and buy a bunch of food for my household on a bike. So it would be a great outcome if people would make that connection.

SFBG Is there anything about San Francisco that makes people here more receptive to your message?

FF San Francisco is a very tight city geographically. It’s not like Phoenix. The blocks are pretty short here and the distances are pretty short here, and you can ride year-round here, which is not true in Boston where I grew up.

SFBG The focus on technology and design here also probably helps, right?

FF Oh, for sure. This is an awesome place to be prototyping and doing funky mechanical, electrical art. There’s a lot of support for it. There are places like Tap Plastics for learning about fiberglass. There are lots of electronics stores that serve the Silicon Valley tech developer communities. You can buy stuff there that’s helpful. You can learn about Arduino [an open source microprocessor] at Noisebridge. There are a lot of resources for doing interactive art here or for doing bicycle-related projects. There are a lot of welders here.

SFBG Where do you think we are on the arch with this stuff — the beginning, the middle? — in terms of gaining wider acceptance of biking as an imperative and an option for anyone?

FF I think there’s an important generational shift underway, and I don’t know whether it’s my focus on bikes that leads me to meet all these kinds of people, but it feels like I’m meeting more people these days that are going to pick their next city or their next neighborhood based on how it is to bike there. They’re bringing it up in conversation, it’s not me. So it seems like people are really considering what their daily life is going to be like and how the community feels, and biking is one of the symbols of a whole swath of other beneficial things. They know that if they see a bunch of bikes when they visit a place, then there’s probably a lot of other cool stuff like music, arts, farmers markets. Those kinds of things are sort of linked together, and the bike is the key indicator. So there’s been this generational change of thought. The idea that having a bigger, faster car is better, I just don’t think that’s popular with these people. They no longer believe it.

SFBG It’s having cooler bike.

FF It’s having cooler bike and being able to use it and not have to step into the stress of car culture if you can avoid it.

SFBG What’s your next step?

FF One of the really positive things for me has been the Rock the Bike community, with its roadies, performers, musicians — all types of people who are on our e-mail list. So I can just say, I need three roadies for a three-hour performance slot and there’s going to be a jam at the end, so bring your instruments. That’s an awesome thing and it’s just going to improve, so I think the community will grow as we continue do gigs where we have fun and the people have fun.

In terms of my own art, this tree [gesturing to his El Arbol bike] has been my focus for the last year or two, and it’s not done yet. It has to look undeniably like a tree. It looks like a tree, but with a light green bark that you really don’t see in nature, so that has to change. I want it to have brown bark, but I still want it to do beautiful things at night with translucency. And I want it to have a true canopy of leaves, so that when you’re far away from it at Sunday Streets and you’re wondering whether to go over there, you’ll see a tree. Not just a representation of a tree, but I want them to be like, how the hell did he ride a tree over here?

SFBG Why a tree?

FF I don’t know. You get these ideas, and you start drawing them and can’t shake them. There are all sorts of reasons why trees are interesting. They are gathering points.

SFBG And you’re doing some very innovative design work on this bike, such as the landing gear.  

FF The roots. Yeah, that’s never been done before. Through the course of doing the project, people would send me tips and interesting things, and one guy sent me a link to a photo of tall bikes being used in Chicago in the early 1900s as gas lamp lighting tools, and they were very tall. I’d say 10 to 12 feet tall, and they were tandems, so there was a guy on top and a stoker on the bottom providing extra power, and they didn’t have landing gears. So they would ride from one lamp to another and hold the lamp as they refilled it. And I just love that story because if you were growing up in Chicago, and you saw these gas lamp people coming by in the early evening to turn the lights on, and if you were a little kid trying to fall asleep or whatever, that would have an indelible mark on your childhood, and that whimsical quality is what I’m going for. That should be part of what it’s like to grow up in the Mission District in 2011.

SFBG How does that fit into the other cultural stuff that you’re also bringing to the bike movement, the music you’re writing, design work, the style, and the events that you’re creating?

FF Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so multipronged. I would clearly be a better performer and musician if it was the only thing I did, so I apologize to all my fans for not putting 100 percent into the music. But I put 100 percent into the whole thing, including creating bikes and running Rock the Bike, which is a business.

SFBG But are you doing all these things because you find a synergy among them?

FF It’s the fullest expression of who I am.

SFBG Where do you see this headed? What will Rock the Bike be like five years from now?

FF I would like to see the quality of our entertainment offerings steadily improve to the point where people genuinely look forward to it, and not just to the gee-whiz aspect of look what they’re doing, but just for the feeling of being there. So I’d like to challenge ourselves with the quality of the music, how it is to be engaged in the setup process — because I think the setup is cool, with biking to the event and engaging in the transition to a spectacle, where every step along the way is part of the show. I like that idea. I’d like to challenge ourselves to be a carbon-free Cirque du Soleil, a show that is slamming entertainment and they bike there and pedal-power everything: the lighting, the sound, the transportation. And I want the performers to be just as good.

SFBG Are there people in other cities doing similar things?

FF The Bicycle Music Festival is spreading to other cities, which is cool. I think there are going to be over a dozen bicycle music festivals this summer. In terms of people doing really inspiring work with bike culture or this kind of mobile art, you definitely see some amazing things at Burning Man. That’s probably one of the best venues for this type of art. But I can’t think of another city where people are doing all of this. I’m part of a group on Flickr called Bicycle and Skater Sound Systems, and there’s nothing on that whole group that I see as being on this level. I don’t know why.

SFBG When you ride a cool custom bike down the street, the reactions it elicits from passersby is just so strong and happy. What is that about?

FF It’s a reaction to an expression of personal freedom. People light up when they see you expressing yourself, and a part of them thinks, oh yeah, that would be fun, I’d like to express myself. And there are just so many ways to express yourself and be human — and that’s something that we need to remind ourselves because, in many ways, our personal freedoms are declining and there’s more surveillance.

SFBG And people might take that spark and do any number of things with it.

FF One of the very cool things about bicycle art is that it’s mobile. So you ride your bike and you might turn heads a couple dozen times a day. I ride this tree, and if it’s in the full mode where it’s 14-feet tall and there’s music on, and I’m going from here to Golden Gate Park, I’d estimate that 500 people see it. There’s probably no other art form you can do that with. I can’t think of any other that’s like that. So it’s a really cool art form. Those people aren’t paying you, but you shared art with them, and it’s a good way to get exposure. It’s a great way for a lot of people to see your art.

SFBG With your mobile, pedal-powered stages, you’re also demonstrating green ways of powering even stationary art.

FF It is an interesting time for pedal power. I feel like there’s a turning point that’s maybe beginning in the field of events with how they’re powered. I think there are going to be a lot more people who are going to festivals in the coming years who are looking at the diesel generators and saying, ‘My summertime festival experience is being powered by diesel.’ And I think there are going to be a lot of people seeing that and wanting to do something else.

SFBG Have the technologies for how much juice you’re able to get out of pedal power been advancing since you’ve been working on it?

FF Yes, it’s truly impressive right now, particularly if you’re putting that juice into music because we have very efficient generators where there’s no friction interface anymore, nothing rolling on the tire, it’s all just ball bearings rolling on the hub. Then we put that power into these new modified amps, and they have a DC power supply now, as opposed to an AC power supply, so we don’t have to put the power into an inverter. So the net sum of that is one person can pedal-power dance music for 200 people, which is pretty amazing and inspiring.

SFBG And the battery technology is also improving, right?

FF Yeah, the batteries are what you use for the mobile rides, and that’s getting better. If you’ve been to a bike party, it’s just incredible how many good, loud sound systems there are right now. It’s a very kinetic art form, although I wish people would focus more on the visual aspects of their system, because I feel like there’s a trend to get big and loud fast. But I wish there were more people doing the work that Jay Brummel is doing, where he doesn’t just want to ride on a bicycle, so he turned his bike into a deer and he steers by holding the antlers.

SFBG But there has been some push-back from the police. Have you gotten many tickets?

FF Well, I got tickets for riding up high on this quadracycle. There is a law against riding tall bikes in California. It says you shouldn’t ride a bicycle in such as manner as to not be able to stop safely and put your foot down. Obviously you can’t put your foot down on a tall bike.

SFBG The fact that you have landing gears on your bike didn’t make a difference?

FF Well the officer didn’t take it seriously, but the court sided in my favor. The judge was flipping through photos of the landing gear the entire trial — he couldn’t stop flipping through them. And he asked, ‘How do you get on? Where do you step?’ So I was like, ‘Well, you step here, you step there, and you swing.’ It was pretty fun. 

BICYCLE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday, June 18

11 a.m.–10 p.m., free

Various locations, SF

www.rockthebike.com

www.fossilfool.com


 

Stage Listings

Maria Poblet
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0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. 

THEATER

OPENING

Candide of California 1620 Gough; www.custommade.org. $10-28. Previews Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. Opens Tues/17, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through June 4. Custom Made Theatre presents this modernized version of the Voltaire tale, which was a hit at the SF Fringe Festival.

Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival EXIT on Taylor, 227 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $20-50. Opens Fri/13, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through June 25. Cutting Ball Theater closes its 11th season with a festival of experimental plays, including works by Eugenie Chan, Rob Melrose, and Annie Elias.

BAY AREA

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Avenue, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Previews Fri/13, 8pm. Opens Sat/14, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 20. Pear Avenue Theatre presents an adaptation of Mark Twain’s novella.

OPEN. Central Stage, 5221 Central, Richmond; (800) 838-3006, www.raggedwing.org. $15-35. Previews Thurs/12, 8pm. Opens Fri/13, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through June 11. Ragged Wing Ensemble presents a new Bluebeard-inspired play written and directed by Amy Sass.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason; 992-8168, www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com. $32-50. Check for dates and times. Open-ended. Not Quite Opera Productions presents a musical.

*Caliente Pier 29, The Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. $117-145. Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Open-ended. Ricardo Salinas, cofounder of famed Mission-born radical Latino comedy trio Culture Clash, penetrates the velvet enclave of Teatro ZinZanni, taking the helm for its latest Euro-style dinner-cirque cabaret show. Under Salinas’ inspired direction, the evening plays as a revolt by brown-hued kitchen and wait staff against a ruthless takeover by, what else, a Chinese conglomerate. Multiculti clashes ensue, with the underdogs led by a brother-sister team played charmingly by ZinZanni regulars Christine Deaver and Robert Lopez, and with much expert repartee and physical humor neatly enveloping characteristically stunning feats of acrobatics and circus arts that leave forkfuls of grub hovering before slack-jawed mouths. I don’t know how many actual kitchen staffers out there can afford the ticket price (though it does come with a tasty five-course meal in addition to a first-class show), but the blend of Salinas and company’s shrewd if subdued social commentary and big-heated Latin-fueled humor—not to mention the exquisite musical numbers featuring guest star Rebekah Del Rio—lead to something altogether harmonious. (Avila)

Cancer Cells The Garage, 975 Howard; 518-1517, www.975howard.com. $15. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 22. Performers Under Stress and directors Geoff Bangs and Scott Baker offer this well-conceived program of late Pinter works, a total of nine plays and poems intelligently arranged and unevenly but in some cases vibrantly performed (especially in the case of One for the Road) in a fleet 90-minute evening. With the titular poem, written as the esteemed playwright was undergoing chemo (and recited here with somewhat unnecessary emotion by Valerie Fachman), a telling definition of cancer cells arises: “They have forgotten how to die/ And so extend their killing life.” Given the unbridled political nature of the work that follows—including the devastatingly stark (yet ever articulate to the point of being unexpected) dramatic vocabulary of Mountain Language, a compact depiction and rumination on state-sponsored genocide—those cancer cells grow out of their literal referent into a literary metaphor for the warping, perverting, and devastating consequences of supreme, unchecked power and its Olympian delusions. Pinter’s late works, written with a pronounced urgency in the face of ever-widening war and genocide, advance his shrewd and potent ability for exposing the obscenity beneath the shell games of language as deployed by power in pursuit of its imperial and totalitarian aims. (Avila)

Devil/Fish 2781 24th St; www.cirquenoveau.com. $26. Fri-Sat, 7pm; Sun, 6pm. Through May 22. Cirque Noveau presents a story involving aerial performance, acrobatics, and more.

Eleanor EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 28. Though it seems fitting that a two-and-a-half-hour long epic about historical diva and queen Eleanor of Aquitane should debut at EXIT Theatre’s DIVAfest, Dark Porch Theatre’s production of Eleanor lacks the charisma of its muse. A confused tangle of unnecessary subplots and under-developed characters, Eleanor tries to fit in an 800-year-old grudge match, a thwarted celestial ascension, political chicanery, assassination, adultery, an existential chess game, a crusade, medieval grrrl power, and the quest for the holy grail into a single show, with decidedly mixed results. On the one hand, Alice Moore as the titular queen is a delicious blend of regal and calculating, and Nathan Tucker as her equally conniving consort, Henry II, makes a surprisingly vital and robust king. The design elements are strong, and Dark Porch Theatre’s trademark live music and physical-movement interludes are cleverly arranged. But on the downside, Eleanor also displays what is gradually becoming another one of DPT’s trademarks, an overly convoluted script in need of major tightening in focus. Playwright/director Margery Fairchild needs to sacrifice a good chunk of bit-player intrigue, and rely more on the strength of her iconic queen, to move the action to an endgame more rewarding than this version’s anti-climactic exile to eternal oblivion. (Gluckstern)

*Geezer Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 10. The Marsh presents a new solo show about aging and mortality by Geoff Hoyle.

Hugh Jackman, in Performance at the Curran Theatre Curran Theatre, 445 Geary; (888) 746-1799, www.shnsf.com. $40-150. Tues-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 15.The shout that went up the moment he came onstage was enough to let you know this entertainer could do no wrong with this audience. But perhaps just to be on the safe side, Hugh Jackman immediately began courting the 1700 people packed into the Curran from the front rows to the balcony, speaking to many individually, embracing one or two, bringing some onstage, or just flashing them his leading-man smile. Jackman’s limited and exclusive San Francisco engagement, courtesy of producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, wasn’t my cup of tea, or whatever they drink Down Under, but devotees of the Aussie star from Hollywood (X-Men) and Broadway (The Boy from Oz) got the love-fest they wanted. And the multifaceted actor is all pro, likeable and impressive even amid the cheesier aspects of a throwback form: a song-and-dance varietal in an old-school showbiz vein, featuring much personal and professional reminiscing, joking around (including tussles with his personal trainer [Steve Lord] over a dancing prohibition in the buff-up period before his next Wolverine pic), musical routines, and somewhat incongruous medleys backed by an 18-piece band (under direction of Patrick Vaccariello) and flanked by Broadway talents Merle Dandridge (Rent, Spamalot, Aida) and Angel Reda (Wicked). (Avila)

Loveland The Marsh, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through June 4. Ann Randolph’s popular one-woman show about a misfit returning to Ohio from L.A. extends its run.

*Lucky Girl EXIT Studio, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 28. Honey (Cheryl Smith) talks about “the shoes” first, the shoes repeatedly, against even her analyst’s power to retain a common interest in the footwear of her attacker. Why should she so concern herself with this detail of the man who assaulted her, wounding her in ways too subtle and deep to measure—unless through the wayward precision of the poetical imagination some measure might actually be taken. That is the force and beauty of Lucky Girl, a notable new stage adaptation by Tom Juarez of poet Frances Driscoll’s 1997 collection, The Rape Poems, which premieres as part of Exit Theatre’s DIVAfest 2011. Juarez crafts an engagingly dynamic and delicate narrative arc from Driscoll’s thematically joined but otherwise disparate poems, gorgeously formulated verses that delve into a devastating subject with an unexpected range of humor, insight, and compassion. This supple range is acutely grasped and exquisitely interpreted by Smith, whose gripping performance (keenly directed by Kathryn Wood) eschews anything remotely sentimental for a complex and moving portrait of the enduring aftermath of terror. (Avila)

A Most Notorious Woman EXIT Stage Left, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through May 28. The axiom “well-behaved women seldom make history” comes to mind when watching a reenactment of the strange but true tale of the meeting between renegade pirate “queen” Grace O’Malley and Queen Elizabeth I. Both exceptionally powerful women in their day, they must surely have found some novel comfort in the presence of the other. Christina Augello plays both divas for DIVAfest with swashbuckling verve in Maggie Cronin’s historical drama, A Most Notorious Woman. Also inhabiting several bit characters along the way, Augello infuses Grace with a matter-of-fact, workaday groundedness, while her Elizabeth is all fuss and neuroses, chattering away to “Leicester” on a thoroughly modern cell-phone while plotting political intrigues. Watching Augello shift between the two strong-willed characters is the production’s greatest pleasure, along with some clever set and costuming flourishes courtesy of John Mayne and Laura Hazlett. There are some awkwardly-paced attempts at shadowplay which interrupt the overall flow, and the presence of an omniscient narrator, a sea-queen wrapped in kelp, is a puzzling distraction, but as staged history lessons of ill-behaved women go, Notorious is both informative and entertaining. (Gluckstern)

Party of 2 — The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Fri, 9pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

The Real Americans The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm (also July 10, 17, and 24, 2pm). Through July 24. Dan Hoyle’s popular show about city and small-town life, directed by Charlie Varon, continues its run.

Secret Identity Crisis SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter; 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/14. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents a story about unmasked heroes.

Shopping! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.shoppingthemusical.com. $27-29. Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. A musical comedy revue about shopping by Morris Bobrow.

Silk Stockings Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $24-44. Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 22. 42nd Street Moon presents a Cole Porter production.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 4. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennessee Williams tale.

Talking With Angels Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $21-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through May 21. A play by Shelley Mitchell set in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

*Vice Palace: The Last Cockettes Musical Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 31. Hot on the high heels of a 22-month run of Pearls Over Shanghai, the Thrillpeddlers are continuing their Theatre of the Ridiculous revival with a tits-up, balls-out production of The Cockettes’ last musical, Vice Palace. Loosely based on the terrifyingly grim “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, part of the thrill of Palace is the way that it weds the campy drag-glamour of Pearls Over Shanghai with the Thrillpeddlers’ signature Grand Guignol aesthetic. From an opening number set on a plague-stricken street (“There’s Blood on Your Face”) to a charming little cabaret about Caligula, staged with live assassinations, an undercurrent of darkness runs like blood beneath the shameless slapstick of the thinly-plotted revue. As plague-obsessed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her right-hand “gal” Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz) try to distract a group of stir-crazy socialites from the dangers outside the villa walls, the entertainments range from silly to salacious: a suggestively-sung song about camel’s humps, the wistful ballad “Just a Lonely Little Turd,” a truly unexpected Rite of Spring-style dance number entitled “Flesh Ballet.” Sumptuously costumed by Kara Emry, cleverly lit by Nicholas Torre, accompanied by songwriter/lyricist (and original Cockette) Scrumbly Koldewyn, and anchored by a core of Thrillpeddler regulars, Palace is one nice vice. (Gluckstern)

BAY AREA

Cripple of Inishmaan Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley Campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. $68. Wed/11-Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm. The Irish theater company Druid presents a send-up of rural Irish life, written by Martin McDonagh.

Disassembly La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (through June 11). Impact Theatre presents the world premiere of a dark comedy by Steve Yockey.

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm (except Sat/14, 8pm). Through June 18. Don Reed’s one-man solo show extends its run.

Lady With All the Answers Center REPertory Company, Lesher Center for the Arts, Knight Stage 3 Theatre, 1601 Civic Center, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerrep.org. $45. Thurs-Sat, 8:15pm; Sun, 2:15pm. Through Sun/15. Center REPpresents Kerri Shawn’s one-woman play about Ann Landers.

Not a Genuine Black Man The Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 7:30pm. Through June 16. Brian Copeland’s solo show about Bay Area history continues its successful run.

Passion Play Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $10-15. Fri-Sat, 7pm (also Sun/15, 2pm). Through May 21. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents the West Coast premiere of a time-travel play by Sarah Ruhl.

Three Sisters Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-73. Check for dates and times. Through May 22. Berkeley Rep presents a new version of Chekhov’s 1901 play by Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, Eurydice), directed by Les Waters. The language sounds generally and pleasingly modern in the mouths of the titular Prozorov sisters—Olga (Wendy Rich Stetson), Masha (Natalia Payne), and Irina (Heather Wood)—although the production is rather traditional in staging (period set by Annie Smart, and corresponding costumes by Ilona Somogyi). We follow the restless siblings and their flock of soldier-admirers through a handful of years in their provincial town, where their late father was an elite military officer. In this period, the dashing officer Vershinin (Bruce McKenzie) brings a spark of new life—especially to the unhappily married Masha—and stokes the sisters’ ultimately unanswered desire to return to their beloved Moscow. The production breathes a good deal of life into the play, whose half-foolish and heartbreakingly funny characters so palpably exude a complex set of longings and misplaced desires, but it labors under an initial stiffness and a somewhat jagged set of performances. (Payne’s twitchy Masha, for instance, whose features maintain throughout a look of unwelcome surprise, feels incongruent at times). Some of the more moving turns concentrate here in the supporting characters, including James Carpenter as Chebutykin, the fawning old doctor who has forgotten all he used to know; Thomas Jay Ryan as Tuzenbach, the self-conscious Russian of German descent desperately smitten with Irina; and Alex Moggridge as the sisters’ much put-upon, feckless, alternately gentle and petulant brother, Andrei. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Through July 10. The Amazing Bubble Man performs.

PERFORMANCE

Bay Area Black Comedy Competition Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakl; www.blackcomedycompetition.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $25-45. Don “D.C.” Curry hosts the finals of the competition

Boars Head Cafe Royale, 800 Post; 641-6033. Mon/16, 7:30pm. Free. SF Theater Pub revisits Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.

Cabaret Lunatique Pier 29 on the Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. Sat/14, 11:15pm. $25-25. Teatro ZinZanni’s cabaret presents “Celebrate the Mission,” the third of nine performances focusing on specific neighborhoods.

The Devil-Ettes Present…Go Go Mania! Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.devilettes.com. Fri/13, 9pm. $10. A night of burlesque and rock.

DIVAfest EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, www.theexit.org. Through May 28. Check for times and prices. Plays and performances by women artists, including Maggie Cronin, Christina Augello, Margery Fairchild, and Diane DiPrima.

Gods of San Francisco Shotwell Studios, 3252 19th St; Fri-Sat, 8pm (through May 21). $15-20. Ko Labs presents a one-act musical about a mother and daughter in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake.

Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock Show Park Library,1950 Page; 355-5656, www.sfpl.org. Thurs/12, 11am. (Also Bernal Heights Library, 500 Cortland; 355-5663, www.sfpl.org. Thurs/12, 3:30pm.) Free. A free performance that is part of a two-week residency.

Katya Takes You Home Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida; www.russianoperadiva.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Tues/17, 8pm; Sun/22, 4pm). Through May 22. $20-30. Katya Smirnoff-Skyy presents an original cabaret.

SF Merionettes Synchronized Swimming Show Balboa Pool, 51 Havelock; (206) 240-0488, www.sf-merionettes.org. Sun/15, 5pm. $10 (suggested donation). The team of swimmers from eight to 17 holds an exhibition of 2011 routines.

Theatresports and Improvised Noir Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm (through May 28). $17-20. BATS Improv Theatre presents competition and noir performances.

Lilias White Fairmont Hotel, Venetian Room, 950 Mason; 392-4400, www.bayareacabaret.org. $45. The singer pays tribute to Cy Coleman with “My Guy Cy.”

Words and Voices: Litquake Tribute to Gertrude Stein Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and 3rd; 543-1718, www.ybca.org. Tues/17, 12:30pm. Free. One of 90 events at this year’s Yerba Buena Gardens Festival.

Yale Glee Club Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter; 771-6900, www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $75-125. The club is joined by Darren Criss and the SFGC Alumnae Chorus for a performance benefiting No Bully and YouthAware.

BAY AREA

Alameda Children’s Musical Theatre Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High, Alameda; (510) 521-6965, www.acmtkids.org. Fri/13, 7:30pm; Sat/14, 2 and 7:30pm. $7-13. A production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Sara Kraft.

DANCE

CubaCaribe Festival Dance Mission, 3316 24th; 273-4633, www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 7pm. $10-24. A program including performances by Colette Eloi’s El Wah Movement and Danys Pérez’s Oyu Oro.

Copious Dance Theater Z Space, 450 Florida; www.copiousdance.org. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 5pm. $18. The company brings four works to the stage, including Portals of Grace, Little Voices, and Secret’s Lament.

Luminous Connections Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon; 695-5720, www.sfsota.org. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. $14-24. San Francisco School of the Arts Pre-Professional Dance Program presents a dance concert, under the direction of Elvia Marta.

Moveable Feast The Garage SF, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Wed/11, 8pm. $10-20. Tanya Bello’s Project. B. presents a full-evening show.

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission; 978-2787, www.ybca.org. Wed/11-Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm; Sun/15, 2pm. $20-62. Smuin Ballet presents a spring program, including choreography by Choo-San Goh, Amy Seiwert, and Michael Smuin.

BAY AREA

Company C Contemporary Ballet Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.lesherartscenter.org. Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm. $15-40. The company presents three world premieres.

Savage Jazz Dance and Napoles Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts Theatre, 1428 Alice, Oakl; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Thurs/12-Sat/14, 8pm. $5-25. The companies present “Gonzo,” which includes three world premieres by Savage Jazz Dance Company. 

Grrrl Brigade Stands Up! this weekend

Andrew Lam
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Back in the day, despite the fact that we went to a super jock high school, my friend Lex and I decided we would be part of the after school dance theater workshop. There were definitely some good times, especially when the big show came along at the end of the year, which gave us a chance to prance around on stage to “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” while wearing Ring Pops covered in glitter and dresses that made us look like we should be on maternity leave. So last night when I stopped by the final dress rehearsal of Stand Up! A Show of Resistance at Dance Mission, there were a lot of reminders of those dance-tastic times, of getting to run around stage with friends and get dressed up in cool costumes, but then the dancing actually started, and all I could think was “Where the heck was GRRRL Brigade when I was in high school?”

There were no Ring Pops, but there was floor-shaking taiko drumming and powerful Amazonian women dancers, all tied together with feminist stories from past and present. The strength of the performance didn’t come solely from the message of girl power exploding from every corner of the room — the talent and skill of the young dancers were incredibly real and striking.

The show starts tonight, Friday, May 6, and runs through the weekend. It’s worth stopping by to see the next generation of strong and devoted young dancers take center stage — and I promise the lack of glitter Ring Pops is absolutely a plus.


Stand Up! A Show of Resistance

Fri/6 and Sat/7, 7.p.m.; Sun/8, 5 p.m., $12

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/171334 

 

American Idol: Hell’s Kitchen edition

Zelda Bronstein
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American Idol: Hell’s Kitchen edition

It’s Gimmicks R Us Idol, and in between the Ford videos, another Fox production, Hell’s Kitchen, got its own special promo. Chef Ramsay (who is way more of an asshole than Simon was and his shows really suck, too) forced the Idol contestants to make omlettes. The results all looked awful and he made fun of them. Then they had to blind-taste-test tofu, and Jacob had to spit it out because he thought it was gross. At least the last part was funny.


I’ve already heard J-Lo sing “On The Floor,” and with all the hunkorama male dancers it was interesting enough, but not anything profound or dramatic. The constestants were more entertaining singing The Turtles’ “So Happy Together.” (THIS JUST IN: The “live” J-Lo performance was a fake, and there’s a disappearing ass brace to prove it. Is nothing sacred anymore?)


And then, Oh The Drama! James has to go to one side of the stage, Lauren has to go to the other, then Haley joins James and Jacob joins Lauren and we all know what’s going to happen. Jacob’s clearly done. But we have to wait a full 30 minutes to figure that out — and finally, Scotty, alone on the couch, gets called up, told he’s safe and asked to go join the group that he thinks is moving forward. A horrible, awkward moment; what moron thought THAT up? Scotty, of course, won’t go, so Ryan Fucking Seacrest has to push him over next to James and Haley before he drops the bomb on poor Jacob while Lauren bursts into tears.


I guess this shit drives ratings. It drove me to the liquor cabinet.


Too bad about Jacob; although I was never a big fan, he was a good kid and did his best. But for once, America made the right choice.


Next week Lauren goes home, then Haley, and it’s a Scotty/James final, as it should be. Unless Haley pulls off another amazing night and beats out Scotty. They’re  both too cute for words, but I don’t see it. It’s the two boys at the end.


Place your bets. I’m finally starting to get this right.

American Idol: The Final Five

Zelda Bronstein
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American Idol: The Final Five

It’s getting down to the end, and as Randy says, this is where you figure out who’s in it to win. And last night, with the possible exceptions of Jacob and Lauren, they all were.


The theme: One classic song and one modern song. Each of the five remaining contestants gets to sing twice. J-Lo has a flower in her hair. Steven has some kind of crazy red coat. The mentor of the week: Sheryl Crow, who looks fabulous at 49.


First up: James, “Closer to the Edge.” Not his best performance (that was later), not a great song, but he’s a rock god. (ivian is convinced he’s going to the final no matter what, since Steven Tyler promised to sing with him on stage in the final performance and nobody wants to give up those ratings.) Jacob: “No Air.” Viv says it’s “terrible.” I just thing it’s the wrong song for him (trying to do both parts of a duet is a bad idea) and the judges agree. After the first round, he’s not looking good.


Lauren: “Flat on the Floor.” She rocks it. Good song choice, nice upbeat performance. Nothing stellar, but fine. Scotty: “Gone.” A different side of him. Steven is thrilled: “You danced with the devil.”


Haley takes a huge risk and sings an unreleased Lady Gaga song, which sucks. But she sings it well, as well as she’s done all year. the problem: Nobody’s ever heard the song before. Nobody wants to hear it again.


Now Round Two, the classics. and all I can say is, Wow.


James: “Without You.” Epic. Over-emotional sap about his family, and he didn’t hit all the notes perfectly, but damn he’s a performer. He had the audience spellbound. He is, I think, the next Idol.


Jacob: “Love Hurts.” I’m not a big fan of Jacob, and there were some screachy moments here, but again: He had the audience. Great performance. Not enought to save him tonight, but great.


Lauren: Whoa, who chooses her outfits? Some sort of blue-striped dress that’s a cross of cowgirl at the state fair, hospital volunteer and antebellum pajamas. “Unchained Melody.” Boring song, but she can belt it out. J-lo: “Nothing to judge.” I agree. Nothing much.


Scotty: Elvis, of course. “Always on my Mind.” Perfect for him. A little slow, but the audience loved it.


Haley: Holy shit. I’ve never seen “House of the Rising Sun” done like that. For once, she’s actually sexy and not goofy; the teeny-bopper smile is gone, replaced with a New Orleans bluesy-edgy voice and look that counts as a verifiable Idol Moment. She just saved herself. Performance of the night, maybe of the month.


Tonight: James, Scotty and Haley are clearly safe. Jacob and Lauren are in the bottom, and Jacob goes home. Finally. But don’t believe me; I’m never right.

Nick Waterhouse and the Tarots: New music for old souls

Maria Poblet
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Nick Waterhouse knows what he likes, and as the old adage goes: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Recording entirely in analog on vintage equipment — including an original Muscle Shoals mixer — and performing with beautiful tube amps and old guitars, his attention to detail and historical accuracy pays off. The result is a classic R&B sound that at times is gritty and raw and at others smooth and viscous as warm molasses.

He is a sharp-dressed man, that Waterhouse, adorned in suits and ties, with an angel face framed by horn-rimmed glasses. I imagine he gets constant cliché comparisons to Buddy Holly, but when he and his new group, the Tarots, stepped out on stage for a sold-out show at the Knockout last Saturday, April 30, my first impression of him was of one of those characters in a Daniel Clowes Eightball comic who collects old jazz and soul records — on vinyl. He probably listens to NPR on a Bakelite radio, I thought, albeit a bit snarkily in retrospect. My apologies, Nick.

The vinyl-collecting part is not far from the truth, it turns out. A DJ and regular at any of the many soul parties in San Francisco, like The Make-Out Room’s Lost and Found or the O.G. 1964 at the Edinbugh Castle, Waterhouse clearly knows his stuff, and it should come as no surprise that his uber-knowlege and ear for sound should translate so nicely to his live sets — the music sounds authentic, yet somehow fresh and not dated — backed by a horn-driven band and three beautiful “divas” (that a little bit of Googling identified as The Naturelles) who belt it better than any cheeseball of the same self-declaration ever could.

His debut release, the 45 rpm “Some Place”  — performed and recorded with the Turn-Keys, which includes the legendary Ira Raibon on sax — is currently available from Waterhouse’s own Pres Records. You can catch him tonight, Wed/5, performing with his new lineup for live sets, the Tarots, at the Asterisk Magazine anniversary party (see events listings).

Nick Waterhouse, “Some Place”:

Hot sexy events: May 4-10

Andrew Lam
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Hot sexy events: May 4-10

I’ve been informed that there is an art installation being installed at the English bohemian seaside town of Brighton that will change my life – “the lives of all women, forever”! It’s a wall of 400 plaster cast lady’s genitals, entitled “The Great Wall of Vagina.”

Included in the nine meter wall installation (which will debut at the Brighton Fringe Festival, according to Juxtapoz) are the pussies of transgendered folks, recent mothers, family members, before and after shots of a woman who underwent labiaplasty. It seeks to represent the genitalia gamut, defy the cult of normalcy that’s been drummed into us by the perfect pussies of mainstream pornography. 

It is a phenomenal work — it took five years to cast the participants and then cast their body parts – and I applaud anything that brings feminine sexuality into the public mindframe. I want to like this project, I do! And yet, and yet… 

A one Jamie McCartney was the brave soul to undertake the project, which explains but does not excuse his lack of anatomical knowledge (the casts rarely show their subjects’ vaginas, but rather their labias, “vaginal vestibule,” and clitoris).

Anatomy lesson, for those inclined.

And change the lives of women? That’s what his website says about the piece, and though I think the “Wall” is a neat idea, if we’re digressing with the over-Barbification of women’s sexuality, we need to think about who exactly that message needs to be addressed to. If nothing else, every woman has her own vagina to look at – the same cannot be said of men. 

And before I escort you onto the weekly sex events, let me beat my fist once more against the Wall. 400 vaginas, all makes and models, all bald as a cueball. In the interest of education, can Mr. McCartney please post a plaque next to his pussies that says “not pictured: pubic hair”?

 

“100 Ways to Play: A Catalog of Kink”

“A plethora of perversity.” “It still seems scary, but now in a good way.” “Like drinking from a fire hose. I attended, twice.” God bless participant surveys at sex events. The Citadel hosts this buffet of BDSM every once in awhile so that newbies can sample a taste of all sorts of sex play (fetish, impact, medical, and psychological are all represented) and old hands can get out of that metal-studded rut they may have found their dungeon-time stuck in. 

Thurs/5 7-10:30 p.m., $15-25

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2746

www.sfcitadel.org


Lube Wrestling Party

We’re taking “bump and grind” to the next level here. Because not only will the lovelies from Red Hots Burlesque be shimmy-shaking all over El Rio’s stage – getting down on the floor will be some sweaty, shiny girls hammerlocking and elbow dropping (maybe?) all over the damn place. Well, hopefully in the designated lube wrestling area, unless you like a little slick in your seven and seven. 

Thurs/5 9 p.m., $10-15 sliding scale

El Rio 

3158 Mission, SF

(415) 282-3325

www.elrio.com


Essence: On Fire

Calling all Sagittari, Leos, and Aries(es?): Mission Control’s sacred sexuality party turns the dial to fire for this month’s celebration of the life force-giving powers of Eros. New Age? In fact, Essence features a temple of innocence, temple of deep Eros, and chamber of dark arts. So leave your cynical friend at home – this is not their sex party. 

Sat/7 10 p.m.-3 a.m., $25-35 members only

Mission Control 

www.missioncontrolsf.org


Get your master’s in the filthy arts

Do you faun behind your drink at our city’s dirty storytelling nights, yearning to be among the foul-mouthed floozies onstage? Bawdy Storytelling’s grande dame Dixie De La Tour recognizes your needs, and to help out her less filthily verbose community members, is offering this three week course in staged dirty storytelling. Participants receive a diploma, a coursebook, and a video of themselves regailing classmates to study and share (perhaps with some special someones?)

Sun/8, May 15, and May 22 2-6 p.m., $250 for three class series

The Jellyfish Gallery

1286 Folsom, SF

www.dirtystorytellingworkshop.eventbrite.com


The San Francisco Men’s Spanking Party

Now don’t get this party wrong, this isn’t a play party for the hardcore leathermen. No no, this is more for the frisky fella interested in a little “fraternity hazing” or a scene where daddy spanks his bad boy into submission (um, leathermen: don a polo and flip-flops or maybe a tie?). Traipse on down to this safe environment to explore your yen for a little punishment (given or received) in your life. 

Sun/8 1-6 p.m., $20

Power Exchange

220 Jones, SF

www.voy.com/201188


“Give Spanks: Spanking for Sexual Pleasure”

So our story on Mistress Minax’s toy box piqued your pleasure points – but now you’re not quite sure how to make that first step down the BDSM dungeon stairs? Your wish is Good Vibes’ command – Minax will be lending a strong, swift hand to the sex toy company’s spanking workshop. A clothed demo will accompany this class, as well as tips on how to coax an unsure partner into the pleasure of pain. 

Tues/10 6-8 p.m., $20-25

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com

Hot house Magic

Andrew Lam
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Hot house Magic

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Talk about community theater. New York City drag artist Taylor Mac doesn’t just bring his Obie Award–winning 2009 show to town, but a good swath of the town to the show. That includes six local directors and something like 40 local actors and musicians, with host Magic Theatre producing in collaboration with queer performance collective THEOFFCENTER and a large handful of other Bay Area players (Climate Theater, Crowded Fire, elastic future, Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, Shotgun Players, and TheatreWorks).

That’s probably as it should be for a sprawling, gleefully elaborate five-hour performance spectacle that revolves — with good camp humor, extravagant Theatre of the Ridiculous gestures, and devilishly arch songs set to composer Rachelle Garniez’s evocative genre-spanning musical score — around a simple message of brother-sister-otherly love.

A simple message, but couched in a most extravagant presentation. To begin with: Mac as the play’s titular flower, done up stunningly in garish green sequined fabrics and glittering makeup to match, a corolla of five spongy petals around his neck. As some wisenheimer points out in the first act, five petals in a corolla is actually one short for a normal lily, but there’s nothing normal about this Lily: an organic loner raised in a basement studio apartment in Daly City who decides one night to go to the theater. And anyway there are only five acts, so one per.

Suburban bumpkin Lily is audibly charmed and bewildered by what he sees onstage in Act I: a “princess musical” titled “The Deity” (directed by Meredith McDonough) that pops up vociferously from an array of frilly doll-like bodies, all named Mary, strewn over a patchwork wallpaper stage.

The musical would like to be a standard wedding tale, centered on a blustery latter-day maiden (Casi Maggio) chomping at the bit — just a typical romantic story overseen by the proscenium curtain, who goes by the name of The Great Longing (Mollena Williams). But opposing it all is no less than Time herself, played with a sort of airy gravitas by Jeri Lynn Cohen, decked out in a see-through plastic hourglass and a cuckoo clock for a hat. (The costumes, all stars in their own right, are by Lindsay Davis.) Time balks at the repressive hold of this narrative paradigm. To this end, she draws intellectual support from a random daisy (Julia Brothers) reawakened into her former life as a Berkeley critical theorist in comfortable outerwear named Susan Stewart, who recites from her book-length essay, On Longing (an actual book by an actual Susan Stewart, as it happens), attacking nostalgia as inauthentic attachment to an imaginary past at odds with the here and now (or something like that).

In short (not that there is anything short about this show), Time persuades Lily, as a creature grounded in the here and now, to join the proceedings. And Lily, his own love-struck ego asserting itself, decides to embark on a metamorphosis — to shed his flower self for a hoped-for underlying manhood, operating perhaps under a curse of one sort or another — so that he might win the bride for himself (and away from the all-too-male groom in Speedo and accordion, played gamely by Paul Baird).

It will be a shame if the run-time keeps the otherwise Lily-curious away. This was one five-hour extravaganza that really seemed to fly by. (I’ve sat through much longer 90-minute one-acts just this month.) If the plot of The Lily’s Revenge is not exactly designed to keep its audience guessing — our potted hero must live up to the title — the production does keep its audience moving, interacting, and generally engaged when not outright delighted by a steady stream of madcap turns and gaudy mayhem that spills joyfully off the stage and out into the lobby (where Jessica Heidt directs a series of Kyogen segments) and beyond.

A spirited platinum blonde called the Card Girl (Kat Wentworth) corrals the audience for no less than three intermissions, designed to encourage mingling, fraternizing, and face-time with fellow audience members and cast alike. (Meanwhile, Andrew Boyce’s sets and the seating arrangements are rapidly and inventively rearranged.) The intermissions come complete with an optional dinner, dance parties, songs “flushed from the show” performed in and around the lavatories, and other sideshow offerings (solid advice from a garrulous sock puppet, for instance, or a glad-handing glory hole) — all in compact 15-minute increments.

Each act has its own particular character as it advances the merrily convoluted plot. Act II (directed by Marissa Wolf) is set in the round in a flowerbed and features a verse-off between Lily and assorted garden varieties. Act III is a “dream ballet” directed and choreographed with inspired exuberance by Erika Chong Shuch, in which a hilarious second pair of marriage hopefuls (Joe Estlack and Rowena Richie) devolve, amid an onset of “options” and a frenetic set of macabre bridesmaids, into a comically horrifying orgy of indulgence. In Act IV we enter a virtual realm called Ecuador (long story), with animated video sequences to live voice-overs directed with wry sophistication by Erin Gilley.

Finally, as the wedding party assembles amid the “divine madness” of Act V (directed by Jessica Holt) and ceremonial noises erupt under direction of the domineering Curtain, the Revolutionary Flowers, having infiltrated the proceedings, suddenly burst forth from low-rent disguises and storm the stage, while an enormous papier-mâché turd floats across the stage ahead of a dyspeptic visit by the Pope and a giant black Tick holds the White Rose captive and — I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on by this point, to be honest. But as a debauched melee ensues, it’s pretty clear things are tending toward one hell of a climax. It’s all followed by a denouement too. This featuring an address by Mac, now in immaculate dress, the details of which are too charmingly candid to want to relate here. Better you see and hear for yourself.

The five-petaled Lily is most certainly the star of the show, but Mac is also a generous performer, giving ample space for his talented collaborators to shine. If some of the best moments are naturally centered on Mac’s riveting presence, the sweetness and childlike impetuosity in his endearingly comic character, and not least his enthralling power as a singer, there are many more highlights to be had, big and small, among the general bloom.

THE LILY’S REVENGE

Tues–Sat, 7 p.m.; Sun, 2:30 p.m.;

Through May 22; $30–$75

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center

Bldg. D, Third Floor, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

 

Northwest passage: Kelly Reichardt on “Meek’s Cutoff”

Sue Vaughan
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Northwest passage: Kelly Reichardt on “Meek’s Cutoff”

Over the past decade, Kelly Reichardt has consistently created an alternative cinema that is in opposition to modern Hollywood blockbusters. Her films, which emphasize minimalist and highly visual storytelling, transcend even the industry’s edgiest darlings (think Darren Aronofsky and Quentin Tarantino). Her films Ode (1999), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and now Meek’s Cutoff (2010) cannot be categorized in the decade’s overhated mumblecore movement of Andrew Bujalski or the Duplass Brothers. Neither are they part of the world of extreme experimental artists, a la James Benning or Sharon Lockhart.

Somehow Reichardt has found a cinematic middle ground, balancing quiet and poetic allegories with accessible and emotional journeys — an achievement that present and future audiences will be hypnotized by for generations to come. After interviewing her for Wendy and Lucy, I spoke with her after Meek’s Cutoff played the 2011 Sundance Film Festival; it recently had its local debut at the San Francisco International Festival, and opens theatrically Fri/6.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: I recently saw your earliest films at the Pacific Film Archive retrospective and your adaptation of the Robby Benson-starring Ode to Billy Joe (1976), Ode (1999), was amazing! You shot the whole thing on Super 8, right? Do you like your earlier films?

Kelly Reichardt: Ode is very near and dear to my heart. It set me on my own way of making films. I don’t think I’m naturally a non-narrative person. And definitely not as much as I revere those kind of filmmakers like my colleagues: Peggy Ahwesh, Peter Hutton. I love seeing how their films unfold and really make the viewer be interactive in deciding what they’re about and what they mean to them. That’s what I’d like to do as a filmmaker. But I can see myself learning in all of my films, which is painful. A couple of students walked out of that screening of my earliest short films and I wanted to run out after them and say, “I totally understand!”

SFBG: You and [screenwriter] Jon Raymond seem to be consciously aware of just that! I know I have told you this before but I find your films so inspired. Your films are like the kind of classes I always wanted to have in college. You’re never telling me what to think, yet you are very precisely leading me towards something extremely imminent. And along the way, I get to experience my own journey with these characters and situations. Do you run into problems getting your films made and released because of this structure?

KR: That part of it, the endings, is [an element] coming from the world of non-narrative filmmaking. It doesn’t hand things over to the audience. It’s like a series of questions unfolding which is like a dream, which is something I want to bring into a more narrative form. It opens up the traditional genre a little which you already know how its’ suppose to go. Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy were both released through Oscilloscope, while Old Joy was distributed by Kino. These are all small independent distributors and the things that they are looking for are not for everyone.

The hard part with filmmaking is getting the money to make the film. Everybody has a camera now. You can shoot a video. But if you’re not into naturalism and you’re trying to make things that are more extravagant, that vision is going to be much harder to just do on your own. If I were a student right now, my biggest fear would be how to rise up out of such a huge sea of voices. When I submitted my first feature, River of Grass, to Sundance in 1994, they had 600 entries that year which seemed overwhelming and huge. Six hundred and they were only gonna pick 16. And what was it this year? Didn’t they have something like 6,000 entries?

Getting your film out … worry about that later. Get your film made first. Plus there’s always the fear of even having something to say at the age of 20! Before you’ve lived on your own and been connected to the big black hole of employment, and public transportation and all those things. That could be good “big” fear to have as a young filmmaker.

SFBG: In your Q&A after the screening of Meek’s Cutoff at the Egyptian Theatre [in Park City, Utah], I was very excited about your bringing up forgotten and unavailable older films like Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952).

KR: Me too! I was trying to make that point and I became so distracted by the woman sitting behind you filming. It’s just such a weird thing to look out and see 15 people videotaping you and you realize that no experience can ever just be with the people in the room again. Everything has to be some bigger purpose and I completely quit thinking about the film and the interaction. I think it’s a bizarre that people feel completely free about videotaping you and posting it on the Internet without asking me.

SFBG: Not only is it exciting that your films feel influenced by older cinema but you do it in a way that’s very much like Peter Bogdanovich, where it feels as if you truly understand the film’s themes and goals and you’re not just making a mixtape of your favorite scenes. Wendy and Lucy feels like a Vittorio De Sica neo-realist film, while Meek’s Cutoff feels like an existential William Wellman Western by way of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). I mean, you even used the old Hollywood aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on Meek’s Cutoff! And it doesn’t come off kitschy; in fact, it feels even futuristic.

KR: It’s funny that you mention the aspect ratio. If anything is kitschy, and when you read back about the period, widescreen was what was kitschy. It was a gimmick! It’s what 3D or IMAX is to us today. What did Fritz Lang say, “Widescreens are for funerals and snakes.”

It’s funny now that this memory of widescreen is so embraced but it’s such a diminished landscape in a way. That question is always being asked to me in some tone of like, “When you accidentally picked the wrong aspect ratio did you have to just keep going with it?” (laughs) Though I knew going into it that it would limit the amount of theatres we can play Meek’s at. Sadly, very few theaters have the capabilities. 

SFBG: I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns this year and your horizons in every single shot of Meek’s Cutoff are truly spectacular. Your multi-layered colors! Your floating cowboys! The lined-up pioneers! I could just go on. All of it is so particular. How did you design this film? Did you do it on the landscape or storyboard it first?

KR: I storyboard but I can’t draw. (laughs) I have many different notebooks. Color is an early thing. But everything comes first from relentless scouting.  Scouting, scouting, scouting, scouting. I get familiar with the light and the colors of the day. The places you’re gonna be shooting in at certain times of the day. These locations were really remote and very hard to get to. And we ended up spending such a huge amount of time in that desert.

SFBG: Did you have to sleep out on the plains?

KR: We stayed in this town, Burns, Oregon. It’s a good two-street town and we’d drive off-road for two hours into the desert each day. This is where the actual wagon train got lost. There was nothing out there. We were actually finding pieces of wagon from the 1840s! So it would eat up a huge amount of our shooting day, which is already short because when you’re shooting in the mountains, the sun is gonna go behind them. So that’s four hours already out of your day.

My shooting schedule was so restricted that other producers would have said “You are sinking your ship by shooting out on these locations.” Fortunately my producers backed me and off we went, for better or worse. So you have to be on top of it when you’re there, knowing that there will be unexpected things to occur especially when you are dealing with oxen and mules and donkeys. All of that is to be embraced.

I also have to have a plan because we move so quickly. My DP [Chris Blauvelt] and I are talking, talking, talking. I have some books that are references, that I’ll steal frames from. Some that are location photos, people standing in the locations, some from old films. And some are just really crappy drawings I’ve done because I cannot draw, which I consider a huge handicap as a filmmaker. People always ask “Are you improvising?” We don’t have time for improv! Of course because of the weather, and the terrain, and rattlesnakes and the animals there’s certainly a certain amount of adjustment because when I storyboarded this, it wasn’t snowing. But you can’t go out there without a plan. The camera for me is the storyteller.

SFBG: Now you edit your own movies. Is that because you are a tyrant and you have to have it your own way or have you tried working with others? And by “tyrant,” I mean it in the nicest way possible.

KR: (laughs) You go through different stages: I have my writing partner [Jon Raymond] and that’s one stage and then it becomes very public and you’re working with a bunch of people when filming. Then editing is where you get your film back and it’s when I get to find my film. It’s a great moment when I’m in the editing room an I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s what Jon was originally talking about!” or “I felt that in Jon’s short story!”

But when you’re in production, there’s just so much going on! And editing is where you learn where you fucked up and should have put the camera. It’s the big payoff for me and I don’t want to hand it over to anyone else. It’s the interesting part of filmmaking. It’s where you can manipulate space and completely change the dynamic of a conversation or situation just by adding or taking away time. It’s not fun to edit with me, so I stopped using editors (laughs).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEmL9at6JT0

Meek’s Cutoff opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University and programs the film series Midnites for Maniacs.

Our Weekly Picks: May 4-11, 2011

Maria Poblet
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WEDNESDAY

MAY 4


MUSIC

Wanda Jackson

Over her 50-plus years in show business, she’s been called “the Queen of Rockabilly” and “the Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice” — and now fans can rightly call Wanda Jackson a true musical icon, with her recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Don’t let that enshrinement fool you into thinking she’s retired, though. She can still belt out tunes like nobody’s business, and proved that yet again with the release of The Party Ain’t Over, her Jack White-produced album that came out earlier this year. Forget about the recent big fuss over in England; come to tonight’s show if you want to see some real royalty. (Sean McCourt)

With Red Meat and DJ Britt Govea

8 p.m., $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com


MUSIC

J Mascis

It has been a good couple of years to be a Dinosaur Jr. fan. In 2005, lead singer J Mascis and bandmate Lou Barlow put aside their grievances enough to play shows as the original lineup, along with drummer Murph. In an era of live record performances from bands well past their prime, that would have been enough, but the band released new albums that were as good as ever. (In the case of 2009’s Farm, maybe better.) So now, almost just to show that he can, between Dinosaur Jr. tours and recording sessions, Mascis releases the solo album, Several Shades of Why. Exchanging shredded electric guitars for (still a little fuzzy) acoustics, it’s another surprise, but in the best way. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Black Heart Procession

8 p.m., $20

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com


THURSDAY

MAY 5


MUSIC

Frank Fairfield

Frank Fairfield’s adaptations of blistering American ballads are proudly faithful, but his ability to coax the rightness from battered banjos and fiddles (and to squeeze his voice as if onto fresh shellac) goes way beyond technique. “I don’t even know if [this music] has that much to do with tradition,” Fairfield told one interviewer. “I think it’s just people doing whatever they feel like doing. A lot of this stuff just gets mished and mashed, and that’s the beautiful thing about America.” The fact that he’s a young Angeleno who dresses the old-timey part may raise eyebrows — but trust your ears. He makes an intriguing opener for Cass McCombs, a troubadour cut from a different cloth. (Max Goldberg)

With Cass McCombs

8 p.m., $15

Swedish American Music Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com


FRIDAY

MAY 6


DANCE

Ahdanco/Abigail Hosein Dance Company

While dance can be described as poetry in motion, Ahdanco’s 2011 home season offers both poetry and motion in a dynamic dialogue. For one of the two new works on the program, the dancers share the stage with spoken word artists from the Bay Area Poetry Slam Circuit, weaving Abigail Hosein’s choreography with powerful narrative stories. The other dance is a trio set to an original score composed of four loop stations, trumpet, cello, upright bass, guitar, and female vocals performed live by ambient band, Entamoeba. Hosein’s strong female dancers (many of whom are Mills College alumni) skillfully balance the physical and theatrical. (Julie Potter)

Thurs/6–Fri/7, 8 p.m.; Sun/8, 6 p.m., $20

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 837-0776

www.ahdanco.org


EVENT

“Bikes and Beats”

In response to SF’s burgeoning biking scene — and that empty moment on the first Fridays of the month when you realize that the SF Bike Party is over and the rest of your evening is TBA — comes this night club-bike club. Organizers’ goal for this fundraiser for Sunday Streets and the Wigg Party is to make bike culture as un-scary and fun as possible — even to those without handlebar calluses. Bike crafts and fashion will be on display, as well as a dope, divergent musical lineup featuring the Polish Ambassador, Non-Stop Bhangra, Madrone’s Motown on Mondays crew, and that party on two wheels well known to SF cruisers, DJ Deep. (Caitlin Donohue)

10 p.m.–3 a.m., $6–$10

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

Facebook: Bikes & Beats


DANCE

“SCUBA 2011”

A terrific idea, SCUBA, a small presenters consortium, has been pooling resources for close to a decade to offer gigs to hot young choreographers, whether homegrown or invited from participating venues. So far, ODC Theater director Rob Bailis’ choices have always been worthwhile. The mix has been rich and varied. On this program, SF’s own Katie Faulkner, who will premiere Sawtooth, will be joined by Amelia Reeber from Seattle and Chris Yon from Minneapolis. Reeber is bringing this is a forgery, a multimedia work that examines choices and transformation. Yon draws on husband-wife vaudeville acts for his duet, The Very Unlikeliness (I’m Going to Kill You), with partner with Taryn Griggs. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/6–Sat/7, 8 p.m.; Sun/8, 7 p.m., $15–$18

ODC Theater

3153 17th St. SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org


SATURDAY

MAY 7


MUSIC

“Walk Like An Egyptian”

What’s Zambaleta, you say? In Egypt, Zambaleta is a spontaneous chaotic street party that happens when everyone is participating, through music or dance. In the Mission, Zambaleta is a world music and dance school with an inclusive environment and celebratory spirit. This weekend’s “Walk Like An Egyptian” festival captures that spirit, featuring Bay Area music from blues and folk to jug bands and indie. The lineup of 18 bands includes an appearance by Annie Bacon’s Folk Opera — plus, proceeds from the festival support community programs at the world music and dance center. Come walk — and party — like an Egyptian. (Potter)

Sat/7, 1 p.m.–midnight;

Also Sun/8, noon–8 p.m., $5–$20

Restoration Workshop

630 Treat, SF

(415) 341-1333

www.zambaleta.org


EVENT

CELLspace Birthday Benefit Funkathon

Celebrate the 15th birthday of CELLspace, San Francisco’s original hub for artistic work and gatherings, by partying down at a Funkathon featuring Action Jackson and other funky music and dance acts. And this is just one event among many, including an art auction May 5, a swap meet and dance party May 6, and a party May 8 that coincides with the Sunday Streets closure of Mission District streets to automobile traffic. CELLspace, a venerable institution that offers classes on everything from welding to breakdancing, is going through ambitious fundraising efforts as it seeks the permits and resources to expand its nightlife offerings, so come have a funky time while supporting a great cause. (Steven T. Jones) 9 p.m., $10–$20

CELLspace

2050 Bryant, SF

(415) 410-7597

www.cellspace.org


FILM/PERFORMANCE

“Ultimate Mommie Dearest“

Oh, I know you’ve already seen 1981’s Mommie Dearest. And I know you can quote all the famous lines (personal favorite: “Tina! Bring me the ax!”) But you’ve never experienced the ultimate Mommie Dearest — because it’s never been attempted until this once-in-a-lifetime event. Marking the cult classic’s 30th anniversary is a dame who surely has never touched a wire hanger in her life, Peaches Christ, and celebrated Peaches cohorts Heklina, Martiny, and (in honor of Mother’s Day), Mrs. Christ herself! A restored print of the film caps a night that also includes the musical stage spectacular Trannie Dearest, a drag tribute to Joan Crawford’s unfailingly dramatic life. Do I even have to add that costumes are encouraged? (Cheryl Eddy)

8 p.m., $25–$40

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.peacheschrist.com

 

EVENT

Urban Cycling Workshop

If I had a nickel for every car devotee or exasperated Muni rider who’s lamented, “Oh, I would totally ride a bike if there weren’t so many scary cars!” I’d be, well, not rich but could certainly buy some fresh handlebar tape ($16 per roll). How awesome, then, that the hardworking bike advocates at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are offering a four-hour, in-classroom, free introductory course geared toward newbies and cyclists who want to feel more comfortable riding our tiny but intense peninsula. The class covers all the basics, from choosing the best bike to pulling emergency maneuvers, to knowing your legal rights. Ding, ding! (Kat Renz)

2 p.m., free (preregistration required; ages 14 and up)

Fort Mason Center, Bldg. C, Rm. 362

Laguna at Marina, SF

(415) 431-2453 x312

www.sfbike.org/edu


MONDAY

MAY 9


MUSIC

Mogwai

Much like the mythical creatures from Gremlins (1984) that they are named after, Mogwai’s sound can be soft and serene at one moment, then morph into an entirely different dynamic, with blistering guitars and noisy effects multiplying around you. The Glasgow-bred rockers returned in February with its seventh record, and its first Sub Pop release, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, which continues the band’s mostly instrumental and highly successful approach to making music. Creating lush sonic soundscapes richly textured with a wide array of different riffs and tones, the five-piece group is definitely one to catch live if you can. (McCourt)

With Errors

8 p.m., $23.50–$26

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

1-800-745-3000

www.theregencyballroom.com


TUESDAY

MAY 10


DANCE

Project.B.

If you have seen Tanya Bello dance — Shift Physical Theater, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Janice Garrett + Dancers come to mind — you won’t have forgotten her. She probably was the shortest (but also the fastest and fiercest) tearing across the stage. Bello is small but she dances big. Lately she has taken advantage of the Garage’s RAW (Resident Artist Workshop) program to hone her choreographic skills. Moveable Feast, her first full-evening work, is plugging into her experience working with choreographers both here and on the East Coast. The idea is to show three versions of one piece in which components — lights, dancers, sets, music — get shuffled around. In the end the audience decides which one worked best. (Felciano)

May 10-11, 8 p.m., $15

Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 518 1517 www.brownpapertickets.com 

 

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Stage Listings

Maria Poblet
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Silk Stockings Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $24-44. Previews Wed/4, 7pm; Thurs/5-Fri/6, 8pm. Opens Sat/7, 6pm. Runs Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 22. 42nd Street Moon presents a Cole Porter production.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason; 992-8168, www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com. $32-50. Check for dates and times. Open-ended. Not Quite Opera Productions presents a musical.

*Caliente Pier 29, The Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. $117-145. Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Open-ended. Ricardo Salinas, cofounder of famed Mission-born radical Latino comedy trio Culture Clash, penetrates the velvet enclave of Teatro ZinZanni, taking the helm for its latest Euro-style dinner-cirque cabaret show. Under Salinas’ inspired direction, the evening plays as a revolt by brown-hued kitchen and wait staff against a ruthless takeover by, what else, a Chinese conglomerate. Multiculti clashes ensue, with the underdogs led by a brother-sister team played charmingly by ZinZanni regulars Christine Deaver and Robert Lopez, and with much expert repartee and physical humor neatly enveloping characteristically stunning feats of acrobatics and circus arts that leave forkfuls of grub hovering before slack-jawed mouths. I don’t know how many actual kitchen staffers out there can afford the ticket price (though it does come with a tasty five-course meal in addition to a first-class show), but the blend of Salinas and company’s shrewd if subdued social commentary and big-heated Latin-fueled humor—not to mention the exquisite musical numbers featuring guest star Rebekah Del Rio—lead to something altogether harmonious. (Avila)

Cancer Cells The Garage, 975 Howard; 518-1517, www.975howard.com. $15. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 22. Performers Under Stress and directors Geoff Bangs and Scott Baker offer this well-conceived program of late Pinter works, a total of nine plays and poems intelligently arranged and unevenly but in some cases vibrantly performed (especially in the case of One for the Road) in a fleet 90-minute evening. With the titular poem, written as the esteemed playwright was undergoing chemo (and recited here with somewhat unnecessary emotion by Valerie Fachman), a telling definition of cancer cells arises: “They have forgotten how to die/ And so extend their killing life.” Given the unbridled political nature of the work that follows—including the devastatingly stark (yet ever articulate to the point of being unexpected) dramatic vocabulary of Mountain Language, a compact depiction and rumination on state-sponsored genocide—those cancer cells grow out of their literal referent into a literary metaphor for the warping, perverting, and devastating consequences of supreme, unchecked power and its Olympian delusions. Pinter’s late works, written with a pronounced urgency in the face of ever-widening war and genocide, advance his shrewd and potent ability for exposing the obscenity beneath the shell games of language as deployed by power in pursuit of its imperial and totalitarian aims. (Avila)

Collected Stories Stage Werx, 533 Sutter; Z(800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/ 7. Stage Werx presents David Margulies’ drama about art, ethics, and betrayal.

Cordelia NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $18-20. Wed-Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/7. Theatre of Yugen presents world premiere of an abstraction of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Devil/Fish 2781 24th St; www.cirquenoveau.com. $26. Fri-Sat, 7pm; Sun, 6pm. Through May 22. Cirque Noveau presents a story involving aerial performance, acrobatics, and more.

*Geezer Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 10. The Marsh presents a new solo show about aging and mortality by Geoff Hoyle.

*Killer Queen: The Story of Paco the Pink Pounder Michael the Boxer Gym and Barbershop, 96 Lafayette; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Sun/8. The boxing ring is no metaphor in Killer Queen, a vital and walloping new solo play by Peter Griggs set in a small, real-life boxing gym in SoMa (before moving to another in Los Angeles later in the run). And yet the ring—around which a privileged audience is excitingly pressed—encompasses so much of the queer American experience since the 1970s and ’80s that every punch, literary or otherwise, reverberates with wider significance and poetical precision. Griggs, as a gay youth of color who grows up to be the first openly gay title holder in his class, occupies that ring and that life with a rare and utterly persuasive intensity as he alternately cajoles, flirts with, dismisses, and even menaces his audience between a captivating narrative and highly credible boxing choreography (including a tense training scene with the gym’s Michael Onello). An effeminate boy growing up in a violently homophobic society, “Paco” (as he’s nicknamed despite not being Latino) discovers boxing—and Queen—in time to save his life, thanks to two crucial surrogate fathers. Set to the music of the seminal rock band (sometimes using original recordings, sometimes interpretations by nearby piano accompanist Stephen Mello), the music is, like the ring, anything but arbitrary, and beautifully deployed overall. There are some rough or abrupt transitions and some muddiness in the underscoring of dialogue, but these are minor and passing and hardly take away from a unique, enthralling work directed with incisive attention to emotional as well as social truths by Wolfgang Wachalovsky (cofounder of queer performance incubator THEOFFCENTER, which co-produced with Burning Monk Collective). Indeed, it’s the very rawness around the edges of this studiously developed piece—including a passionate digression concerning the current “It Gets Better” campaign pitched at queer youth—that gives it an immediate and politically-charged quality above and beyond the electricity of the setting and the pulsating athletic movement it foregrounds. Beyond the stage-ring, moreover, the play remains as serious as its site-specific setting: its development has led to the founding in LA of an Empowerment Center for disadvantaged queer youth as well as the first Gay Boxing League. (Avila)

Loveland The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-35. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm (also Sun/8, 7pm). Through Sun/8. Ann Rudolph’s one-woman show continues its successful run.

Party of 2 — The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; 1-800-838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Fri, 9pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

Secret Identity Crisis SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter; 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show Sat/7). Through May 14. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents a story about unmasked heroes.

Shopping! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.shoppingthemusical.com. $27-29. Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. A musical comedy revue about shopping by Morris Bobrow.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 4. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennessee Williams tale.

Talking With Angels Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $21-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through May 21. A play by Shelley Mitchell set in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Vice Palace: The Last Cockettes Musical Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 31. Thrillpeddlers presents composer Scrumbly Koldewyn’s revival of the 1972 musical revue.

BAY AREA

East 14th – True Tale of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Sun/8. Don Reed’s one-man show continues.

*Eccentricities of a Nightingale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Sun/8. Bracketed literally from beginning to end by fireworks, Aurora Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale offers some serious bang. On the surface, a tragic-comic tale of unrequited love in small-town Mississippi, Eccentricities plunges into deeper waters, exploring the ever-waged war between societal norms and its misfits — and the struggle to remain true to oneself — with a subtly layered approach. Protagonist Alma (Beth Wilmurt), the titular Nightingale, isolated by her complicated family circumstances and her own mild eccentricities, carries a long-burning torch for the boy-next-door, a rather callow young doctor (Thomas Gorrebeeck) with a terrifyingly overprotective mother (Marcia Pizzo). But Alma’s yearning, as much habit as attraction, has less to do with a dream of settling down with a nice doctor husband, but rather of freeing herself from the conventions that threaten to crush her spirit. Alma’s nervous artistic temperament hides a solidly pragmatic core, and when she has her young doctor alone in a hotel room at last, her plea for him to “give me an hour and I’ll make a lifetime of it,” rings not of desperation but of the adventure she craves. Director Tom Ross deftly brings out the gentle humor and bittersweet victory in the text via a strong cast and stellar design team. (Gluckstern)

Lady With All the Answers Center REPertory Company, Lesher Center for the Arts, Knight Stage 3 Theatre, 1601 Civic Center, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerrep.org. $45. Thurs-Sat, 8:15pm; Sun, 2:15pm. Through May 15. Center REPpresents Kerri Shawn’s one-woman play about Ann Landers.

Not a Genuine Black Man The Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 7:30pm. Through Thurs/5. Brian Copeland’s one-man show continues.

Out of Sight The Marsh Berkeley, Theaterstage, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 5pm (no show Sat/9); Sun, 3pm. Through May 8. Sara Felder’s one-woman show returns.

Passion Play Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $10-15. Fri-Sat, 7pm (also Sun/8, and may 15, 2pm). Through May 21. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents the West Coast premiere of a time-travel play by Sarah Ruhl.

Three Sisters Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-73. Dates and times vary. Through May 22. Berkeley Rep presents a new version of Chekhov’s 1901 play by Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, Eurydice), directed by Les Waters. The language sounds generally and pleasingly modern in the mouths of the titular Prozorov sisters—Olga (Wendy Rich Stetson), Masha (Natalia Payne), and Irina (Heather Wood)—although the production is rather traditional in staging (period set by Annie Smart, and corresponding costumes by Ilona Somogyi). We follow the restless siblings and their flock of soldier-admirers through a handful of years in their provincial town, where their late father was an elite military officer. In this period, the dashing officer Vershinin (Bruce McKenzie) brings a spark of new life—especially to the unhappily married Masha—and stokes the sisters’ ultimately unanswered desire to return to their beloved Moscow. The production breathes a good deal of life into the play, whose half-foolish and heartbreakingly funny characters so palpably exude a complex set of longings and misplaced desires, but it labors under an initial stiffness and a somewhat jagged set of performances. (Payne’s twitchy Masha, for instance, whose features maintain throughout a look of unwelcome surprise, feels incongruent at times). Some of the more moving turns concentrate here in the supporting characters, including James Carpenter as Chebutykin, the fawning old doctor who has forgotten all he used to know; Thomas Jay Ryan as Tuzenbach, the self-conscious Russian of German descent desperately smitten with Irina; and Alex Moggridge as the sisters’ much put-upon, feckless, alternately gentle and petulant brother, Andrei. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Through July 10. The Amazing Bubble Man performs.

PERFORMANCE

DIVAfest EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, www.theexit.org. Check for times and prices. Through May 28. Plays and performances by women artists, including Maggie Cronin, Christina Augello, Margery Fairchild, Cheryl Smith, and Diane di Prima. 

Steady rollin’ once again: Two Gallants return at Bottom of the Hill

John Elberling
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Steady rollin’ once again: Two Gallants return at Bottom of the Hill

The San Francisco pop-folk duo Two Gallants played to a sold-out crowd on April 23, at its familiar stomping grounds, Bottom of The Hill. It was a reunion show of sorts. Two and a half years had passed since Adam Stephens (lead vocals/guitar/harmonica) and Tyson Vogel (drums/vocals) played together. In the interim, Stephens went by his full name, Adam Haworth Stephens, when gigging solo, and Vogel played guitar under the moniker Devotionals. While those endeavors were undoubtedly strong, they didn’t match Stephens’ and Vogel’s musical synergy as a duo.

Following Portland, Ore.’s The Bad Backs and Los Angeles’ Rumspringa, Stephens and Vogel took the stage to chants of “Two Gallants!  Two Gallants!” and roaring applause. The duo both sported new ‘dos: a longer, feathered look for Stephens, and shorter locks for Vogel.

As Stephens began to play, a (possibly drunk) woman got on stage, standing with her back to the crowd, and danced to the first measures of “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Thankfully, she was escorted off by security seconds later. During this song, and throughout the show, Stephens turned to Vogel in between verses and got down on his knees while playing his cherry-red electric guitar. The set list was written on the top of his left hand in black Sharpie ink. Vogel’s chin-length hair became drenched in sweat during his frenetic yet controlled drumming over the course of the night.

Two Gallants, “Steady Rollin'”:

Stephens’ voice was as gorgeously sandpaper-coarse as ever as he rasped, replete with torment, “You must have seen me ‘neath the pool hall lights/ Well, baby I go back each night/ If you got a throat/ I got a knife…Death’s comin’/ I’m still runnin’.” Nearly all of the crowd knew “Steady Rollin’” by heart, singing along to the point of almost drowning out Stephens’ amplified vocals.

Two Gallants played songs from its entire catalog, from its self-titled 2007 album on Saddle Creek to its first proper release, 2004’s The Throes. Its second and last encore song, “My Baby’s Gone,” seemed very fitting for the concert’s end. “Now my wave breaks down on me/ Whole world seems out to sound me,” Stephens sang. “I’ll drown, no one to show me/ Can’t swim, I lost my floaty.”

American Idol: Casey was robbed!

Zelda Bronstein
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American Idol: Casey was robbed!

Damn, did America ever get it wrong this week. Casey’s the best all-around musician on the show. He’s got a great voice, performs well on stage, and was saved by the judges the first time the texting morons voted him off. And yet, after a solid performance April 28 — one of the best of a shaky lot — he was sent home last night. Bogus. Who the hell are these 53 million Americans who voted, anyway?

See, the problem is that Casey’s not a pop singer, not even a rock ‘n’ roller. He’s really a jazz guy who loves to play the upright bass. Not sexy enough, I guess.

At any rate, this is the biggest mistake since Pia (even bigger; Pia should have stayed longer, but she was leaving eventually). Casey was in my final three. And Jacob, Haley and Lauren, who just aren’t in the same league, get to stay another week. Damn.

Oh well, the show.

A couple of good musical interludes. Crystal Bowersox rocks. I like Bruno Mars. I have to love any song about doing nothing all day and not answering the phone. (“I’m gonna kick up my feet then stare at the fan/ Turn on the TV throw my hand in my pants …”) Party on, Bruno.

But the individual segments are getting longer and longer as the number of contestants dwindles and Ryan still has an hour to fill. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be hearing how everyone did in fifth grade. This time, the audience got to submit dumb questions for the contestants, who had generally dumb answers.

And the drama! Pull them up on stage, tell them America has voted, then …. send them back to sit down and wait. Duh, Ryan, America has voted; that’s why we’re putting up with all the Ford commercials. Get to the point.

And the point was wrong.

People! Americans with sense and taste! You’re not voting! The last time you did that a guy named Bush became president! Get with the program! If Scotty and James don’t make the final two, I’m moving to Canada. 

 

5 Things: April 28, 2011

John Elberling
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5 Things: April 28, 2011

>>POP-UP-TASTIC Oh pop-up phenomenon…why are you so enticing? Is it because our hype-heavy culture is so ADHD that the newest and coolest bar, gallery, restaurant, or what have you is “out” even before it’s torn down and replaced by the next “it” concept? The once failing Corner restaurant on 18th and Mission is now bustling thanks to the eatery’s new format of hosting a different recession-plagued talent with a menu to die for every night of the week. So, too, are venues supporting a great idea, but not necessarily one with enough gas to keep it going long-term, like the coffee shop-record store-music venue-rehearsal space-anarcho bookbindery of our adolescent dreams. Enter the People’s Gallery, host to the Big Things pop-up shop this Sat/30, which will feature everything from a bookbinding workshop to sidewalk sale-type treasures, handmade goodies, photo exhibitions, and food. Get there early, for it might poof into the ether before you even get a chance to check out the buzz.

>>ANOTHER WEDDING OF THE CENTURY! As the media breaks out its best British accents, the complete mayhem engulfing the royal wedding reaches its fevered pitch tomorrow with the event itself. For the truly die-hard, there is but one place to take in the beauty of clan-building: the British consulate, where the official viewing party kicks off at 9 a.m. with remarks by UK Counsel General Julian Evans. Call Renee at (415) 407-7424 to RSVP.

>>BEATS AMBASSADOR When the publicity ploy involves bad-ass Ghanian American hip-hop, count us as happily-enlisted marketing allies. Blitz the Ambassador plays La Peña Cultural Center tonight, and is offering up a free stream of his new album Native Sun so that you can learn the words before you shake ass. The album is a powerful barrage of traditional percussion, guitar licks, and fly verses – worth banging in your headphones even if you can’t make Berkeley tonight.

Blitz the Ambassador, Native Sun:

>>TRUCKING COMPANY Do you dream of owning a food truck but aren’t quite sure how to fund it? Stop squirreling away your Tooth Fairy money and learn how to apply for a loan — and get approved — from a panel of finance experts, fellow foodies, and food truck owners. Tonight, our friends at Renaissance Entrepeneurship Center are sponsoring this workshop for only 10 bucks, but the free publicity that comes with Chicken John threatening to vomit all over your new local economy-boosting venture is absolutely priceless.

>>BACK TO THE BEACH The last eighteen months have brought a bunch of repeat-listen recordings from bands that invoke the oceanside, including Beach House, Dirty Beaches, and Beach Fossils, who return to San Francisco a week from today, taking the stage at Slim’s to play songs from their 2010 debut album and the more recent EP What a Pleasure.

 

Hot sexy events: April 27-May 3

Andrew Lam
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Hot sexy events: April 27-May 3

Hey there sexy, how’s life on the other side of the Intertubes? I wanna get real with some real questions in this week’s sexy events column. Don’t worry, it’s about you. Namely, we here at the SF of BG would like to know just what you feel is missing from sex coverage in this age of Aquarius (ha!) in which we live. Are you feeling like you have pressing sex ed questions that need answering? Are you wishing that there was more event coverage of the parties and perv-a-thons in our fair Sodom By the Bay?

See, we’re going through an evolution with our sex coverage, and though we’ve got some pretty hot and wild ideas up in our noggins, youse the readers are just that, and maybe you’re thinking something we missed. So how bout it – new voices, dildo reviews, heavy breathing monolouges? The Guardian’s mission is to be a voice for the community of San Francisco, so have at us. Um, our safe word is spelt. 

 

Erotic Reading Circle

Share your thoughts, air out those tired old insecurities – get real pervy with, whatever. The monthly Erotic Reading Circle at the Center for Sex and Culture provides a safe space for writers to share their bedroom-related materials. Carol Queen and Jen Cross of Writing Ourselves Whole facilitate the gathering, pretty much a must-do for any aspiring sex scribe. 

Weds/27 7:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation

Center for Sex and Culture 

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org


Hot Draw

Unleash your wild, artistic side at these live drawing sessions – one need only peep the galleries on Mark I. Chester’s website to see that he doesn’t play when it comes to drawing dirty players. Kinky leathermen strut about for a crowd of strictly sketchy, strictly gay male artist scribblers.

Thurs/28 6:30-9:30 p.m., free

Mark I. Chester Studio

1229 Folsom, SF

(415) 621-6294

www.markichester.com


Art of Restraint

How would you like to be situated right in the center of a high-art, surround sound bondage performance? It’s all within your grasp, baby – this week’s Femina Potens event at Mission Control will string up local lovelies Fivestar and Madison Young, while adult film performers and submissives offering up chocolate-covered strawberries romp about. Does it sound too good to be true? Believe, child, believe. 

Sat/30 8 p.m.-3 a.m., $50-75

Mission Control 

www.missioncontrolsf.org


How Weird Street Faire

While not sexy per se, this fair sure is freaky: How Weird takes over a good portion of SoMa for stage upon stage of electronic ass-shaking, and community bonding. What community, you say? Bonding how, you ask? Well maybe just maybe that’s up to you, sailor. Head over in whatever state of disarray you like and get funky. 

Sun/1 noon- 8 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Howard and Second St., SF

www.howweird.org 


Kentucky Fried Woman’s Guilty Pleasures

You need this bucket of crispy, greasy, lip-smackin’ queers stripping down to their burlesque bundles like you need to watch your cholesterol intake. For reals, put down the trans fat. Instead, pop on over to Oakland’s Bench and Bar bar, and feast your eyes on the talents of Alotta Boutté, Scotty the Blue Bunny, and oh! So much more. Heart-stopping, in a good way. 

Sun/1 7:30-10:30 p.m., $10

Bench and Bar

510 17th St., Oakl.

(415) 374-1924

Facebook: Kentucky Fried Woman’s Guilty Pleasures 


“Finding and Maintaining a Happily Ever After: A Relationship Workshop for Lesbian Couples”

How do you make relationships last past the original courting period? Davina and Molly have married each other countless times in protest of unequal civil rights, and so they’re uniquely qualified (maybe) to talk about how to make matrimony mutually awesome (in and out of the bedroom).

Tues/3 6:30-8:30 p.m. $20-25 for singles $35-45 for pairs

Center for Sex and Culture 

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org

 

 

Snap Sounds: PJ Harvey

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: PJ Harvey

PJ HARVEY
Let England Shake
(Vagrant)

It’s not really a subtle couplet, “Weighted down with silent dead/ I fear our blood won’t rise again,” but with it the title track for PJ Harvey’s newest offering Let England Shake sets the stage for the songs to come. A surprisingly melodic exploration of the still reverberating effects of World War I on England’s shores and English mores, Let England Shake is both a call to arms and a plea to lay them down again. And despite its deliberate focus on atrocities past, the album can’t help but to implicate all current and future wars within its narrow rifle scope.

At the core of every song in the collection lies a degraded yet determined Britannia, plowed with “tanks and feet,” shot down, blown apart, bitter, bloodied, and bowed. Yet despite the ignominy, it’s a land that inspires almost absurd loyalty -— in the singer as well as the soldier. “I live and die through England,” Harevey confesses on the song “England,” as if she can’t quite believe it herself, “to you…I cling.” It’s hard to imagine an American rock star pledging allegiance to any state on that soul-baring level, and it’s part of what makes Let England Shake a fascination for an American listener. Its uniquely British nationalism, built on a foundation of grief, defies direct translation.

The instrumentation is a melancholic mélange of spare, driving percussion with plenty of cymbals, reined-in, jangling guitar riffs, an autoharp, subtle layers of piano, occasionally awkward brass, and a cornucopia of extras: a xylophone here, a zither there. On the album’s third song, “The Glorious Land,” the clarion call of a war bugle insinuates itself into the otherwise stripped-down drum and guitar track while Harvey’s clear voice swoops through, a flock of startled birds surrounded by the muck of war.

Harvey stretches her register to its upper limit on track six, “On Battleship Hill,” leaving all traces of her trademark low gravel behind with a clarion call of her own. On songs such as “The Last Living Rose” and “In the Dark Places,” Harvey drapes herself not only in her flag but in soldier’s drag, evoking the hopeless trenches and “damned mountains” as if observing them first-hand. The album is not without flaws, a seemingly random sampling of Niney the Observer’s roots-reggae jam “Blood and Fire” on “Written on the Forehead” does the original no justice, and the sing-song quality of “England” jars somewhat after the considerably more powerful “On Battleship Hill,” but overall, Let England Shake stands out as a cohesive ode to a complicated love.

PJ Harvey, “Let England Shake” (from Let England Shake):

Age against the Machine

Andrew Lam
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Age against the Machine

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Death-defying acts of autobiography enliven the main stage at the Marsh this week in Geoff Hoyle’s unadorned yet dazzling new solo show. Developed with director David Ford — and one of the very best things to come from the Marsh’s fertile performance breeding grounds all year if not longer — Geezer takes a serpentine course through the accomplished career of the longtime Bay Area actor and physical comedian to confront the challenges, epiphanies, and qualified, but nonetheless quality, opportunities of aging and mortality.

There’s something undeniably stirring already in an actor as protean as Hoyle talking about metamorphoses beyond his control or ken, but to watch the English-born 64-year-old master showman, without props or costumes, convert aging into a frenetic, heart-pounding, hilarious virtual-reality game of 3-D megaplex proportions lets you know his game, at least, is a long way from over.

But this is a clear-eyed confrontation with the inevitable, as well as a backward glance, half-bemused and half-knowing, at the accumulations of a life. As enthralling as the sure comedy on display are the memories and questions, political awakenings and philosophical musings, that buttress a beautifully crafted script, a fascinating and poignant memoir animated by flights of whimsy and physical poetry that few performers of any age can muster.

Dwelling with a mix of palpable emotions on his working-class roots in postwar Yorkshire, childhood Hoyle was the hyperactive class clown bursting with an unbridled but unguided desire to perform. He’d probably have been medicated anywhere else, but Yorkshire in those days could still provide class clowns with a fighting chance. Crucial assists come from a handful of role models and supporters (all deftly brought back to life before our eyes), one English university’s spanking-new drama department (a fine opportunity for Hoyle to relive for us his hysterically clueless audition), and the French government, which financed the young university graduate’s study with master of corporeal mime Étienne Decroux in Paris (where the uprising of May 1968 called the young, instinctively socialist artist to the barricades in his off-hours).

The journey of this journeyman artist ultimately lands in the Bay Area, where Hoyle becomes a Pickle Family Circus performer with a budding family of his own (including Marsh star Dan Hoyle, quite a chip off the old block). But the germ of his peripatetic career can be found in the pivotal half-intended gestures of his humble parents, especially those of his father, an otherwise reserved typesetter with a fondness for the jocular tunes of the English music hall — one of which winds its way cleverly through the narrative — who also bequeathed his son a volume of Shakespeare’s collected works. His father had little grasp of the Bard himself but a sure sense of the bulky tome’s importance as a cultural step up. Indeed, some key lines from Shakespeare — ruing life as “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” — form another of the play’s supple leitmotifs.

Macbeth’s soliloquy, committed to memory by the young Hoyle long before its full import could possibly accrue, is no gratuitous Bartleby citation either but lines deeply connected to his narrative — immortal lines, no less, and testament to the potential in art to simultaneously look without illusion at oblivion and still defy it anyway by the sheer projection, across many lifetimes, of such exquisite perfection and courage.

What a dissection this is — of a life, of an artist, of the purpose of art, and of the conundrum of memory and loss that gathers darkly over the heads of those blessed and cursed with longevity. The fusing of mesmeric physical performance, searching autobiography, subtle humor, raucous hilarity, and tender regard all come together to form a thematic whole of pronounced charm and beauty.

GEEZER

Wed.–Thurs., 8 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun., 5 p.m.; through July 10

The Marsh

1062 Valencia, SF

(415) 826-5750

www.themarsh.org

 

This place

Andrew Lam
-
0
This place

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Begun in part as a series of maps accompanying public lectures, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95) is a remarkable act of gathering, one that presents myriad versions and visions of San Francisco and its surrounding areas that can inform a reader’s experience.

Infinite City was recently selected by the Northern California Independent Booksellers as one of its 2011 winners. Duality is a fundamental aspect of the book’s breadth and depth and sense of sharply critical appreciation — structurally, Solnit pairs distinct maps with corresponding chapter-length essays. In keeping with that characteristic, and also with the book’s group spirit (though admittedly on a much smaller and less intensive scale), I asked different Guardian contributors to share appraisals of one, or in most cases two, of the 22 sections. The result provides just a hint of what can be found within Infinite City. (Johnny Ray Huston)

MAP 3. “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo“

The map for this chapter tracks the San Francisco life of Eadweard (sic) Muybridge, alongside landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bay Area masterpiece Vertigo. In “The Eyes of the Gods,” Solnit, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for her 2003 Muybridge bio River of Shadows, writes of the 19th century artist’s breakthrough high-speed photography, “It was as though the ice of frozen photographic time had broken free into a river of images.”

Many such rivers flowed all over this fair city when Vertigo premiered at the Stage Door Theatre at 420 Mason St. on May 9, 1958. Alas, only 10 of the more than 60 single-screen venues extant that year, all demarcated on Shizue Seigel’s fine map, are still functioning. Solnit rightly describes the shift to watching films on various digital delivery mechanisms as leaving contemporary culture with a “curious imagistic poverty.” As she concisely describes watching Milk and Once Upon a Time in the West on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, we’re reminded that there is no comparison between enjoying cinema in such a grand setting and staring at a laptop. The great 20th century memoirist and observer Quentin Crisp wrote, “We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to a church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are as deeply suspicious as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast that they never go to church.”

That applies to you too, Netflix subscribers! The Roxie, Castro, Red Vic, Clay, and a small number of other houses of worship are still in business, so what are you waiting for? (Ben Terrall)

MAP 4. “Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust”

In “The Sinews of War are Boundless Money and the Brains of War Are in the Bay Area,” Solnit argues that antiwar, green, and left Bay Area hotspots are well known and don’t need to be charted again — unlike military contractors and assorted other forces of reaction in the region.

Solnit notes that many military bases that used to operate in the Bay Area are closed, “but the research, development, and profiteering continue as a dense tangle of civilian and military work, technological innovation, economic muscle, and political maneuvering for both economic and ideological purposes.”

Among the hard-right compounds providing counterevidence for that demonstration chestnut “the people united will never be defeated”: Lawrence Livermore National Labs (birthplace of Star Wars — the Reagan era money pit, not the George Lucas movie); Lockheed Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor; the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s reactionary think tank; and Northrop Grumman, missile component designer. It’s useful to have so many of them in one place, if queasy-making.

On the lower left of the map sits Sandow Birk’s beautifully warped code of arms, which features the Cicero quote (Nervi belli pecunia infinita) that Solnit cites in her chapter title, under a half eagle/half dove, a rifle-toting soldier, and a scythe-clutching skeleton. It should be on the door of every U.S. military recruiting center. (Terrall)

MAP 6. “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habits and Queer Public Spaces”

“How thoroughly the lexical landscape of gay history is invested with [a] paradigm of emergence,” notes poet Aaron Shurin in “Full Spectrum,” the chapter accompanying Infinite City‘s sixth map. Like one of the dazzlingly-named butterfly species rendered by Mona Caron on the map, Shurin flits gracefully between memoir and historiography as he tracks San Francisco’s ongoing evolution as a locus for queer emergence.

From North Beach to Polk Gulch, from Folsom to Castro, LGBT folk — be they American painted ladies, Satyr angel wings, or Mission blues — have continually migrated to and within the city to shed their cocoons and show their true colors. Local faux-queen Fauxnique traced this metamorphosis at the 2003 Miss Trannyshack Pageant when she climatically emerged as a regal butterfly to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (apropos to Shurin’s royalty motif, she won the crown). So too did the late Age of Aquarius painter Chuck Arnett, who often nestled butterfly imagery into his portraits of SoMa’s leather demimonde, and whose murals once adorned some of the many now-extinct bars also denoted by Ben Pease’s cartography. Only more than half a dozen of these “wildlife sanctuaries,” in Shurin’s parlance, have survived, with the Eagle Tavern’s announced closure marking another loss of habitat. Queers, though, are if anything adaptive, and my hope is that the future fluttering tribes of San Francisco will keep alighting on new ground to unfurl their wings. (Matt Sussman)

MAP 7. “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body”

“Food is part of the Bay Area you hear about nowadays, exquisite upscale food at famous restaurants and gourmet markets. But it’s so boring we couldn’t stay focused on it in this map.” These refreshing, if rarely uttered words come two-thirds of the way through the chapter that accompanies the “Poison/Palate” map, Rebecca Solnit’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Gourmet.”

The phony Tuscany of Napa and the once-orchard-filled, now-EPA-Superfund-site-speckled Silicon Valley are wisely singled out for derision, a convenient duality in both geography and culture and the perfect framework on which to hang a critique of the local culinary community’s smug, myopic self-indulgence, by raising the not-so-elite-specters in Bay Area food history (the It’s It, the Popsicle, the Hangtown Fry, the Rice-a-Roni), and reintroducing the politics of food into the conversation, in the form of the chemical tonnage used to produce wine grapes, food giveaways at community gardens, Diet for a Small Planet, and Black Panther breakfast programs for school-kids. The sprawling topic is almost given too short a shrift, threatening to leap its mutant-mermaid-bedecked map.

Better is the 18th chapter, “How to Get From Ethiopia to Ocean Beach.” Solnit begins by loosely charting the ingredients that go into your cuppa joe: the water from Hetch Hetchy, the milk from West Marin, the coffee that courses through the port of Oakland, and, impishly, the leavings that flow toward the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant. All that’s missing from the equation is the sugar that I need to make the darkest, brandy-and-cherry-tinged brew palatable. SF’s cafe culture is also deservedly lionized — though some might want to hurl china due to the exclusions on the accompanying map: why, for instance, call out Blue Danube Coffee House and not the grungier, more Chinese-populated Java Source? (Kimberly Chun)

MAP 8. “Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II”

Though author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro opens this chapter, subtitled “High Tide, Low Ebb,” with an eloquent invocation of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — penned in Sausalito, by the way — it was the slight mention of Lowell Fulson’s “San Francisco Blues” that most resonated with me. “Ohh, San Francisco,” the lyric goes, “Please make room for me.” The facts presented in “Shipyards and Sounds” record The City’s answer as a genteel and progressive “No nigger.”

Beginning at the start of WWII, when Southern blacks migrated to the Bay Area to build ships in Hunters Point, Jelly-Schapiro points out that the main areas of wartime shipbuilding (Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City) are “places that today remain centers of black population and of black poverty.” Indicating, to me, that little has changed since the 1940s in some significant ways. Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it. Jelly-Schapiro did.

Jelly-Schapiro also shows how terms like “redevelopment” displaced black Fillmore District residents to housing projects they’d been banned from during the war and land-grab euphemisms like “urban renewal” decimated black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Electoral laws mandating that the SF Board of Supervisors be elected by citywide contests and not by district allowed a city that desegregated its schools and transit system in the 1860s to remain progressive and very, very white.

Jelly-Schapiro’s conclusion contains a critique of Bay Area celebrations when “Negro president” Barack Obama was elected in 2008. What he won’t say is covered in Shizue Seigel’s map. A sidebar shows the dwindling soul of a city, while the headers cover the founding of the Black Panthers and Sylvester’s solo debut at Bimbo’s. (D. Scot Miller)

MAP 9. “Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone”

After the damned disheartening facts presented in the previous chapter, it’s both merciful and hopeful that “Little Pieces of Many Wars” — though just as rage-inducing — establishes some kind of equilibrium.

Gent Sturgeon’s incredible Rorschach-inspired artwork opens a thoroughly-researched piece on Fillmore Street and its many incarnations. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s abolitionist work and her eucalyptus trees — which still stand on the corners of Bush and Octavia streets — are a starting point for a leisurely stroll with Solnit, who runs the voodoo down, “The war between the states left its traces here,” she says, “as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war of racism, and the various forms of freelance violence.”

She remembers San Francisco as an abolitionist headquarters, and Fillmore Street as the first place Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” Recalling the Fillmore’s rich heritage of jazz, poetry, and art, Solnit takes it even further, adding, “The wealthy sometimes claim to bring civilization to rough neighborhoods, but the Upper Fillmore neighborhood that was so culturally rich when it was the property of poor people in the 1950s is smoothed over in significance now.”

The tragedy of Japanese internment, and the cross-cultural exchange that was demolished by it and redevelopment loom like white sheets over the city to this day. But Solnit closes with an optimistic sense of resurgence, even though Nickie’s has gone Irish.

Ben Pease’s cartography shows the cross-currents of culture of yesterday’s Fillmore Street, but not much else. That’s not a complaint, really. (Miller)

 MAP 13. “The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe”

Two 2009 shootings on 24th Street pop out, in blood red, on the map accompanying Adriana Camarena’s “The Geography of the Unseen,” in much the same way that the spate of shooting deaths the previous year marked my brief time spent living in the Mission. In ’08, I lived in a Victorian flat at Treat and 23rd, distinguished by the fact that it was a favorite hang for the teenaged homies — its steps were slightly tucked back off the street, ideal when it came to hiding out, smoking dope, and snacking out — until my landlords installed a fence, ostensibly to keep the steps free of spit.

We were on the same block as an appliance-loaded junkyard; the last stop of an ancient Mission industrial railroad; and the Parque Niños Unidos, with its swampy, grassy corner, so often cordoned off to keep the tots from wading in the mud, its circling ice cream carts and its de facto refreshment stand, El Gallo Giro taco truck; and the community garden, where the feral kittens tumbled and hid and fresh produce was given away free every Sunday afternoon.

The Parque likely was the last thing 18-year-old poet Jorge Hurtado saw when he was shot and killed on our corner at 1 a.m. that year. I remember waking up that night to what sounded like a cannon boom, only the first of a slew that sweltering, ominous summer — Mark Guardado, president of the SF chapter of the Hells Angels, was killed a little over a week later, down Treat, in front of Dirty Thieves. The tension was thick and gooey in the air — who was next? The beauty of Shizue Seigel’s Mission map lies in how intimate it is, how it’s threaded around the shaggy-dog snatches of yarns Camarena catches among the day laborers waiting at Cesar Chavez and Bayshore, from the long litany of splintered families, time spent in the refuge of gangs at 24th and Shotwell, and then, in Frank Pena’s case, lives cut sadly short farther up 24th at Potrero. The included stories, rarely straying beyond the tellers’ voices and the facts they choose to reveal, stay with you — even if her sources’ internal lives remain, as the chapter’s subtitle goes, “the Geography of the Unseen.” (Chun)


NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS 2011 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS

 

FICTION

 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)

Nonfiction

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach (W.W. Norton and Company, 336 pages, $15.95)

Honorable Mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (University of California, 760 pages, $34.95)

 

POETRY

Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon, 96 pages, $16)

Food Writing

My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South, Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher, and Shelley Lindgren (W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pages, $35)

Children’s Picture Book

The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood and Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 32 pages, $12.95)

Honorable mention: Zero, Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids, 32 pages, $17.95)

 

TEEN LIT

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson (Dial, 288 pages, $17.99)

Honorable mention: The Mockingbirds, Daisy Whitney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 352 pages, $16.99)

 

REGIONAL TITLE

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California, 167 pages, $24.95)

Honorable mention: A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)

 

Going back

Andrew Lam
-
0
Going back

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Speaking from her home in New York, choreographer Lucinda Childs recalls the unfavorable reception to her 1979 piece Dance. “People walked out saying that I didn’t have a vocabulary and that anybody could do that kind of dancing.” Fortunately, perceptions and concepts of dance have evolved.

Childs’ one-hour pure dance piece, set to music by Philip Glass and accompanied by Sol LeWitt’s film, is presented this weekend by San Francisco Performances in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It is a rare opportunity to see a work by one of the seminal artists from the Judson Church movement, named after the New York City location that hosted the revolution.

In the early 1960s, choreographers tried to wipe the slate clean of what dance was, could, should, or need be. Technique, virtuosity, a codified vocabulary, and style — whether Balanchine’s, Martha Graham’s, or Merce Cunningham’s — were out. Everyday movement, improvisation, matter-of-factness and wysiwyg’s were the “cool” of the day. These at one time radical ideas were largely responsible for democratizing dance.

Today the movement has run its course. Its practitioners — with a few exceptions, such as Trisha Brown and David Gordon, who have continued onto international careers — are part of history. Childs is one of them — a legend in her own time whose choreography is almost never seen, in part because she works primarily in Europe. After the end of this tour, she is heading to Nice in France, then returning to the Ballet du Rhin, where she has been in residence for the last decade. “I am looking forward to going back,” says Childs, “It’s nice to work with dancers you know.”

So why Dance, and why now?

Even though her recent rigorous choreography is more conventionally theatrical, Childs is at heart a classicist. A piece like Dance transcends time and place even as it changes. Childs takes pedestrian movements — walking, skipping, running, hopping — and strips them of whatever context the steps might imply. They are performed with utmost clarity, without personal inflexion, giving the illusion that they are pure designs in space. But they are not. Repetition, accumulation, retrograde, overlaps, and mirroring are the formal devices that create incremental change, similar to the way it happens in Glass’ music. The whole dance becomes a shimmering unit and you begin to recognize differences among dancers. Geometry comes alive.

No surprise, therefore, that LeWitt was drawn to Childs. His work is as conceptually exacting as hers. His paintings and wall drawings are as meticulously planned and “impersonally” realized as her choreography. It probably also helped that Childs has a highly developed visual sense; she once took a section from a Seurat painting and danced its dots — backward.

For Dance‘s film element, shot by Lisa Rinsler, LeWitt superimposed a grid on the floor and captured sections of the choreography. He used split screens, odd angles, and close-ups. The film is synchronized with the live dance, initially making the performers dance with themselves. In 1979, video wasn’t as pervasive, so the effect of seeing the same dancers simultaneously on screen and on the stage was startling.

In the contemporary version of Dance, a gap has opened between the live and virtual performers. “The dancers today, are very different from what they were,” Childs explains. “They are much more technically trained, they also are different people.”

But the biggest change will be in the solo, which, when I saw the work a decade ago, Childs still danced herself. While it was fascinating to see contemporary and earlier dancers cohabiting the same universe, to see Childs dance against her younger self was breathtaking. Time collapsed into an eternal present.

At 70, Childs no longer performs the solo, yet she believes it’s in good hands. “I told Caitlin [Scranton] not to dance it like I did — to make it her own.”

LUCINDA CHILDS: DANCE

Thurs/28–Sat/30, 8 p.m.; $35–$60

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

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