Technology

North Baker Beach

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Rating: A

Social activists have begun streaming onto the sand of America’s biggest urban nude beach, creating what visitor Santosh calls “a tone that’s like Burning Man,” with regulars bringing guitars, drums, and Frisbees to the sand, putting up art work best described as eclectic, and occasionally staring down gawkers.

“There’s no requirement that you go nude,” says Santosh, an artist, graphic artist, and producer of San Francisco’s How Weird Street Faire, an outdoor street fair held each year in the SoMa neighborhood as a fundraiser for the World Peace Through Technology Organization. “But if a creeper dude plops down next to a (nude) person or if they are staring at someone’s private parts and it’s happening close to where we are, on the far north end (of North Baker), then they will start being the object of ridicule.”

“But it’s done in a nonconfrontational way,” he adds. “Our approach is like the Jedi Mind Tricks (in “Star Wars”). Pretty soon they get it and leave.”

Self-policing of the beach isn’t the only change happening at Baker. Art work has also been springing up. Included in an array of driftwood projects taking shape in the clothing-optional area of the beach is a 10 foot tall object that Santosh calls a “seaweed art tree.” “I keep adding new seaweed,” he says, “but don’t worry, the seaweed doesn’t really smell after it dries. It’s really trippy. People stop by to photograph it. Others are constantly asking me what it is and why I’d spend all year working on it, which is greatly satisfying to hear. That’s what being an artist is all about.”

Nearby are up to 10 shade structures dubbed “dunies” by regulars. Similar to tents without walls, each is made by affixing a bedsheet to the top of four driftwood sticks and another bedsheet to the bottom. “I sometimes invite people into my duney to get out of the sun,” says Santosh, who lives about 20 blocks from the beach. “We even have a driftwood bar. It’s like a day at Club Med.”

Not everyone likes the newly emerging beach community at Baker. “They demand tolerance,” says one detractor who wanted to remain anonymous, “but if you disagree with them, they come across as very close-minded.”

“They even changed the rules to make the beach volleyball games less competitive,” adds the visitor. “They lowered the net because they felt it was too high for some players. And they give women another serve if they fail to get it over the net, but don’t do the same for men.”

Whatever the case, like everywhere else, things are continuing to evolve at Baker, where “duney” isn’t the only new term on the sand. Another is “Baker Day,” which is described as being any day when the sun’s out and it’s not overly windy.

“The threshold is really 68 degrees,” says Santosh. “Of the 100 or so days a year I go to the beach, maybe only 30-40 are primo Baker Days.”

Legal status:

Part of the GGNRA. See Land’s End entry for policy.

How to find it:

Take the 29 Sunset bus or go north on 25th Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard. Turn right and take the second left onto Bowley Street. Follow Bowley to Gibson Road, turn right, and follow Gibson to the east parking lot. Head right on the beach to the nude area, which starts at the brown and yellow “Hazardous surf, undertow, swim at your own risk” sign. Some motorcycles in the lot have been vandalized, possibly by car owners angered by bikers parking in car spaces; to avoid trouble, motorcyclists are urged to park in the motorcycle area near the cyclone fence.

The beach:

A long, narrow beach. If you have a moment, be sure to check out Baker’s “secret spot”: its intriguing tide pools! They’re tucked away at the north end of the beach. Access is possible only during low tide, so consult a tide table and then, to find them, walk around the big rocks at the northern tip of the nude beach. Also at the far north end of the north portion of the beach: most of the beach’s regular visitors. According to some users, a so-called “bubble effect” significantly magnifies temperatures at the far end of Baker, giving it a micro-climate that is warmer than much of the rest of The City.

The crowd:

On the hottest afternoons, over 100 persons visit North Baker. “We get maybe 50-70 people on an average good day,” estimates Santosh. On afternoons that are warm but not hot, the beach usually draws 30-40 regular visitors, plus a few newbies. While more women than ever are on the sand, there’s still a heavy male to female ratio at Baker, where you’ll find a wide range of humanity, from lawyers with neither business suits nor swim suits to job seekers who aren’t dressed for success or anything else and retirees who have retired their clothing. “You’ll see young people, older types, men, women, Bay Area residents, tourists, gays, and straights,” says former Baker veteran Ray Brokowski. Adds a beach regular: “It’s like the cantina in the first Star Wars.” 

Problems:

Fog; wind; parking lots fill early; some gawkers (especially in the afternoon); large crowds on hot days; sand may be very hot; hazardous waves; cold water; increased visits by rangers in 2008 and 2009 after several reports of sexual activity in the beach bathroom and near middle Baker, where the nude area begins.

The year in film

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The year in film

YEAR IN FILM More than $10 billion in movie tickets were sold in 2009 — a new all-time high in a year stuffed with so many all-time lows, cinematic and otherwise. Many of those tickets, I’m afraid, provided entry to the garish, ghoulish Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, far and away the year’s top-grossing release, though the top 10 did include at least one movie I can recommend (Star Trek) without feeling like a sellout. Nestled at No. 5 is The Twilight Saga: New Moon, part of a cultural phenomenon so huge the movie itself seemed like an afterthought. You have to scroll all the way to the 27th slot to find the year’s true top grosser: Paranormal Activity, which earned over $100 mil off a reportedly sub-$15,000 budget (less than a third what it cost to make 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, an obvious influence).

Paranormal Activity‘s success gives me hope, though I fear its inevitable shaky-cam imitators more than unexplained bumps in the night. Where there’s a buck, Hollywood will follow. This year, big-budget movies stepped up their games, employing IMAX, 3-D, and ever-more sophisticated CG to lure crowds on opening weekend. Avatar, which uses all three to greater effect than perhaps ever before, appears to be attracting gobs of people who’re simply curious to see what the fuss is about (my take: effects good, story crap. And for the record, I actually liked 1997’s Titanic). Multiplexes, with their corporate hookups and direct lines to movie studios, are thrilled by cinemaniacs eager to binge on new technology; brisk business proves 10-foot tall alien Smurfs are alluring enough to fill seats with butts that usually spend Friday nights at home, on the couch, watching DVR’d TV on a 60-inch flat-screen.

Of course, small, independently-owned theaters that can’t afford to upgrade their projection equipment to accommodate films like Avatar just might be screwed in 2010 and beyond. Hell, even the big guys have to contend with ever-shorter time periods between theatrical and DVD releases — sometimes these events happen simultaneously — and increasingly popular video-on-demand services offered by cable companies. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between versions that can affect the experience: Norwegian chiller Dead Snow was available to home audiences in dubbed form weeks before it rolled out at the Roxie, with subtitles (FYI: Nazi zombies are far more enjoyable when subtitled).

Still, think of all the scary shit you have to put up with simply by going to the movies: incessant texters; $15 tickets; people who cart their wee ones to hard-R fare; chatterboxes; seat-kickers; teenagers; jerks who sit in the middle of the row despite their pea-sized bladders; I could go on. Can you blame people who’d rather unspool their bootlegged copies of District 9 from the comfort of their own La-Z-Boys?

Yes! I can (and will) blame ’em — because true movie magic absolutely must include a big screen, preferably one that won’t fit into your living room. Even if you fear the megaplex, in the Bay Area we have access to a huge array of rep-house, art-house, and independently-owned screening venues. In short, there are still plenty of places to kick it old-school, movie geeks. So get out there and pass the popcorn!

Dick Meister: Too damn old!

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The right to protection from age discrimination will remain a second class civil right

(Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.)

Racism and sexism we know plenty about. But what of ageism?

Ageism can strike anyone once they reach a certain age – sometimes as early as 40 – and it can make the victim feel unwanted, unneeded and oppressed by all in this work and youth oriented society.

It doesn’t matter if you’re white or black, brown or Asian, man or woman. What matters is your age.

Federal law and several state laws say employers cannot consider your age in deciding if you should be hired, fired, retired, promoted, laid off or whatever. But the laws are widely violated, and sometimes invalidated by courts.

Some of the court decisions have been downright bizarre. One recent ruling, for example, found that an employer who told a worker he was being fired because “you’re too damn old for this kind of work” was not violating the law. Another court said a boss who told a worker he had to make way for younger workers was simply stating “a fact of life.”

The Supreme Court recently made a key ruling that workers who are fired because of their age will have to prove that their age was the decisive factor in the firing, not just a contributing factor. A bill currently in Congress would invalidate that ruling.

The number of workers filing legal complaints of age discrimination has been growing steadily. Between 2007 and 2008, the number grew by 30 percent to nearly 25,000 cases. The actual number of older workers discriminated against is undoubtedly even higher, if only because many victims can’t afford the court proceedings that often follow the filing of complaints.

Age discrimination is expected to become an even greater problem as the number of older workers continues to grow steadily and because of current economic conditions that are forcing more and more older workers of retirement age to seek jobs.

The drying up of pension funds and the increase in the Social Security retirement age has also led more older people to seek jobs – jobs that are hard enough for anyone to find, but particularly hard for many older workers. Their unemployment figures have been consistently higher than those of most other groups.

Not all the unemployed older workers want or need jobs. But most do, as has been shown repeatedly in studies by private and public agencies. Many badly need the income. Most also seek jobs as the way to gain self-esteem and an active, meaningful existence.

But younger workers, of course, can be paid less than older workers with seniority and usually are less demanding and more easily directed because of their inexperience and eagerness to secure a foothold.

Employers also are greatly influenced by the myths about older workers that many people still accept as fact.

The widely-held assumption that as workers age their productivity declines, for instance, is simply not true on a general basis, As a matter of fact, the studies show that among white-collar workers, those 45 or older produce more than their younger counterparts, thanks to their greater knowledge and experience. Among blue-collar workers, there is no substantial difference in output.

Older workers also have lower rather than higher rates of absenteeism than younger workers, fewer on-the-job accidents and at least as great a capacity to learn new skills required by new technology.

Generally, older workers also are more stable and dependable. They show more satisfaction with their jobs and hold them much longer.

Those facts alone should be enough to cause employers to mend their prejudicial ways. But they haven’t been, and aren’t likely to be in the future. The right to protection from age discrimination, the right to protection from ageism sadly will remain what one writer calls a second-class civil right.

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

NIMBY warehouse is fighting for its life

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By Steven T. Jones

Another East Bay workspace for Burning Man artists is being threatened by a code compliance crackdown. The operators at NIMBY warehouse – an amazing Oakland warehouse instrumental in the creation of artworks such as Streampunk Tree House, Colossus, and Dance Dance Immolation – have spent thousands of dollars getting up to code and are now have a hard time making rent.

The Shipyard, a workspace in Berkeley run by artist Jim Mason, barely survived a similar struggle two years ago, one that sidetracked his work on project using gasification technology that generates usable power from waste products such as coffee grounds and walnut shells. Mason says he’s donated $1,000 to NIMBY and he’s urging others in the Burning Man and artist communities to help out as well.

“Each of us has been here. Each of us is really still here in some manner. And each of us will most likely continue to be here in some manner or other forever,” Mason wrote. “I don’t really think these institutions are beatable. I’ve lost my idealism on this one. the best we can hope for is management of a chronic problem to a state of tolerable pain. And the next project we do, the creatives vs standards enforcement dance will start again, with blood soon flowing across the dance floor.”

For more information or to learn how to help, contact NIMBY’s Michael Snook – who was also involved with La Contessa — at snook@nimbyspace.org.

SCENE: N.I.C.E. Collective designs a community

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The N.I.C.E. boys. All photos by Spencer Hansen

Designers Joe Haller and Ian Hannula of burgeoning San Francisco fashion brand N.I.C.E. Collective (www.nicecollective.com) met in a club more than a decade ago and started collaborating on projects — the first one was repurposing an electric blanket into a jumper — complete with tag and plug. Their big idea was to fuel fashion with a musical and nightlife sensibility, enabling the duo to build a community of artists. N.I.C.E. (an acronym for “navigate, inform, create, explore”) rocked New York Fashion Week last spring with a show that felt more art installation/dance party than runway presentation, and whose backdrop included a 19th century carriage and much charred wood. The impeccably edgy Time Machine line they introduced there took off and now holds its own on the floors of retail boutiques next to editorial darlings Rag & Bone and more established brands like Comme des Garcons.

But what next? Between constant trips back and forth from New York to the site of their “live fashion installment” in Bolinas, we managed to snag Joe and Ian for a moment to ask them about the concept for their latest, “communal” clothing line.

DJ nice collective.jpg

SFBG When did you start cultivating the concept for a communal line launch?
N.I.C.E. We came across this stretch of land in Bolinas, and we looked over it and thought, “with the economy tanking, why don’t we just set up a little commune together?” This thought became the jump-off point for our design inspiration for spring 2010. We decided to name it the Gathering.

Then when we didn’t find what we were looking for to show the clothes in New York during Fashion Week this fall, we thought back to Bolinas and decided to go ahead and actually set up a temporary community there. Instead of art directing an outdoor photo-shoot, we would live it and take pictures of our line that way.

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SFBG How did it go? Were any of the models eaten by bears?

N.I.C.E. It was absolutely fantastic. We underestimated how difficult it would be. We could only drive so far, and had to carry everything to the site for a quarter mile. We didn’t finish unloading until 3 a.m. We were up there for four-and-a-half days, with perfect weather, building domes and tents and art installations.

The models were great: they were pitching tents and carrying sound equipment. Even models are creative: they were building visual platforms that had a good flow. We ended up chasing light a lot of the time to capture what was going on, and the images were not as haphazard as we had envisioned. But in the end, it was really a magical experience.

The biggest thing for us is to be able to share our thought process. The design is so close to our hearts, but I think oftentimes it’s missed by the customer. We want to give people a path to see it.

Spencer Hansen nice collective 383.jpg

SFBG Do tell a bit about the clothes, then.
N.I.C.E. The idea we’re focusing on is pioneering, which highlights utilitarian use. But we try to make the utilitarian component hidden, and clothes that fit and work no matter what environment you’re in. Nothing is too precious: everything is beautiful but still sturdy. Each garment has a little way of achieving a secondary use; technology is layered in to communicate that a little more. We have a fabric that has stainless steel woven into it, so it holds where you form it, creates a great wrinkle. And garments reconstructed from military tents that can be worn as either a parka or a skirt.

ENCOURAGEMENT nice colletive.jpg

SFBG Brilliant. So seems like you’ve entirely eschewed New York.
N.I.C.E. In New York, there is this typical fashion noise where everyone is kind of vibrating at the same pace. San Francisco lets us be apart from that and do our own thing. It is a challenge working here. The fashion industry is not here, but it’s such a great, inspiring city to work in that the benefits are worth it. When we came back from Fashion Week, we needed a month to recover. But since we’ve been back from the Gathering, we’ve still got an inspirational glow.

NIMBY warehouse is fighting for its life

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By Steven T. Jones

Another East Bay workspace for Burning Man artists is being threatened by a code compliance crackdown. The operators at NIMBY warehouse – an amazing Oakland warehouse instrumental in the creation of artworks such as Streampunk Tree House, Colossus, and Dance Dance Immolation – have spent thousands of dollars getting up to code and are now have a hard time making rent.

The Shipyard, a workspace in Berkeley run by artist Jim Mason, barely survived a similar struggle two years ago, one that sidetracked his work on project using gasification technology that generates usable power from waste products such as coffee grounds and walnut shells. Mason says he’s donated $1,000 to NIMBY and he’s urging others in the Burning Man and artist communities to help out as well.

“Each of us has been here. Each of us is really still here in some manner. And each of us will most likely continue to be here in some manner or other forever,” Mason wrote. “I don’t really think these institutions are beatable. I’ve lost my idealism on this one. the best we can hope for is management of a chronic problem to a state of tolerable pain. And the next project we do, the creatives vs standards enforcement dance will start again, with blood soon flowing across the dance floor.”

For more information or to learn how to help, contact NIMBY’s Michael Snook – who was also involved with La Contessa — at snook@nimbyspace.org.

SCENE: Lazer Sword zaps the boom-blap

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By Michael Krimper. From SC ENE: The Guardian Guide to Nightlife and Glamour, on stands in the Guardian now!

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Lazer Sword photo by Beryl Fine

San Francisco-bred electronic duo, Lazer Sword, has a secret weapon. Bryant Rutledge (a.k.a. Low Limit) and Antaeus Roy (a.k.a. Lando Kal) have developed a musically enhanced dehydration gun that zaps the sweat out of dance crowds like a soul-sonic Super Soaker. There’s no escaping it. Inside investigators report that this weapon emerged mysteriously from a Mission District apartment building in 2006, conceived from a reactive mixture of 1980s sci-fi psychedelia and a futuristic bass-rattling force unanticipated by even the most forward-thinking predictions of the oncoming 2010s. It’s manufactured out of grime-ridden computer technology and 8-bit video game parts, designed with the stuttering ferocity of electro-house synthetics and drum machines, and blessed by the hustlers and gangstas of swagger rap. Welcome to Lazer Sword’s boom blap.

And just like one of those vintage sci-fi films, Rutledge and Roy seem to be on their way to world domination. The duo just returned from their second European tour, slaying dance floors from London, England, to Bialystok, Poland. “Crowds overseas are pretty open to electronic music in general,” says Rutledge, “but I get the feeling that two guys jamming on their midi controllers making weird rap beats mixed with dolphin noises and Hanna Barbera samples is a little different and new for them.” Unabashed, Lazer Sword welcomes the challenge of converting unknowing club fiends, wallflowers, and beat heads alike to their leftfield, electro hip-hop bounce. “There’s always an awesome feeling when the crowd doesn’t know what to expect at first,” Roy weighs in, “then over time, cats are dripping in sweat and falling over themselves.”

Flashing lights

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Flashing lights

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Guardian illustration of DJ AM, Daft Punk, and Steve Aoki by Matt Furie and Aiyana Udesen

DECADE IN MUSIC Good lord. Who can remember all the strobe-lit twists and turns that Bay Area nightlife slid down in the past decade? Even if I wasn’t utterly and gloriously hung over from 10 years of being 86ed, it would still be a sweat-drenched, dry-iced, hypnotic blear. That’s a lovely thing. The ABC crackdown on underground parties in the late 1990s still held strong — and lively licensed spaces like Café Du Nord, Slim’s, Buckshot, and DNA Lounge as well as many music-oriented street fairs are still feeling the pressure of the War on Fun. But you can’t stop the party. And, baby, we lived through it.

One point about nightlife in general this decade: no one could ignore it. From hip-pop’s odiously capitalist-utopian "da club" to the tourist-trap explosion of global dance music festivals, club culture was on everyone’s radar. Today’s pop stars blithely name-check underground nightlife legends like Leigh Bowery and Larry Levan, and middle-school kids fill their notebooks with fantasy club outfits. Oh yeah, edgy nightlife has been completely commodified — thank you, Steve Aoki and DJ AM — but it’s a testament to its amazing versatility that going out is still enormously subversive fun, and the onslaught of bottle service and stretch-limo-packed music vids have had little impact on a vibrant independent scene. (In fact, the independent scene has gotten a ton of mileage out of parodying and reinterpreting mainstream club dreams.)

The last 10 years of the local club scene certainly gave me a lot to write and think — and drink — about. That was probably nightlife’s most distinctive feature: it finally came into its own as an art form, one that welcomed multiple interpretations while devilishly playing with our heads. The best party promoters in the Bay worked hard not only to present immersive subcultural experiences but also to contextualize their parties in terms of global movements. You couldn’t just fly in a supastar DJ and set the light show on random anymore. Clubgoers rejected that kind of dollar-driven cynicism. They wanted to know how a party would plug them into something different, something relevant, something uniquely of the moment, something beyond.

In short, they wanted personality. At times, this meant that concept trumped music — how many times did you find yourself spazzing on the dance floor to someone’s hodgepodge iPod playlist in 2005, just because that someone was ironically amazing? But it sure was fun for a while, giving dance culture a kick in the fancy-pants and throwing open the door to a glittering array of musical styles. And everybody looked fantastic. Irony freed us from previous expectations like beat-matching, genre hegemony, fashion anxiety, and bland slickness. (It also introduced a flood of unicorns and neon accessories.) Deconstruction at last! For good or ill, but mostly for good, anyone could be a DJ, throw a party, design a flyer, work a look. All you needed was a little space, a big idea, and a sense of adventure. A crowd helped, too, but only if you worried about something as mundane as paying the bills. Reality? Oh, really.

That mid-period chemical peel of irony neatly divided the decade. We cruised and shmoozed into the new millennium on the Boom-bubble back of a lazy lounge wave — the sunny house-lite sighs of Naked Music and Miguel Migs, the mushroom jazz of Mark Farina, OM’s smooth-beats Kaskade, and the friendly turntablism of Triple Threat popping the pink Champagne. That wave soon crested, churning up a foam of pink-slip parties, when discount daytime raves and increasingly baby-powdered coke binges took over. Luckily, happy hour took credit cards. Clubland reverted to a pre-Internet sensibility, with small spaces ruling and breakbeats all the rage again.

Alongside the breaks (a sound the Bay actually had a big hand in developing) the club music menu was still hogged by chunky techno, diva house, Burner trance, retro overload, and sing-along hip-hop. Post-punk, electro-funk, radical eclecticism, and global-eared sounds popped their heads up at times: Joy at Liquid, Milkshake at Sno-Drift, Club KY at Amnesia, Knees Up at Hush Hush, Popscene at 330 Ritch, Step at An Sibin, Fake at Cat Club, roving Bardot-a-Go-Go, and one-offs at 26Mix, Blind Tiger, Jezebel’s Joint, Pow!, Annie’s, Tongue and Groove, Storyville, and Justice League. Electroclash had its brief moment, too — anyone remember Electro Rodeo at Galaxy? — and reggaeton made a thrilling brief appearance. But in general the Bay was a little late in breaking free from the ’90s.

That sounds absolutely pukey, but it wasn’t. Some beautiful nights came out of this period — I’m half-remembering Said’s Afro-house Atmosfere, David Harness’s deep-souled Taboo, and anything at the Top, EndUp, or the Cellar. And living in the ’90s wasn’t so bad considering primo parties like Qoöl, Wicked, Stompy, Thump, Death Guild, and New Wave City maintained a presence. Also, if you were looking for "exotic" sounds, you could easily find them at some of the best ethno-audio spaces, like Bissap Baobab and Café Cocomo. But yes, those four-four beats got tiresome.

Then, around late-2004, came a return of the repressed, an explosion of Day-Glo styles that had been incubating in a clutch of neon-oriented, omnivorous-eared parties like Le Freak Plastique at Hush Hush and DJ Jefrodesiac’s Sex With Machines (later Frisco Disco) at Arrow. Soon San Francisco was in the midst of a small-venue, independent promoter golden age — and a rosy flush of youth. Finally, more than the same four people were throwing parties! And you were never sure of what you’d hear.

After a few debauched months of those rag-tag iPod-oriented shindigs, things sorted out into a handful of heady genres. Technology spookily inserted itself — almost every dance floor was bathed in the light of a little half-eaten apple. Serrato and Ableton software made live edits and mind-boggling mashups, like those heard at Bootie, possible, and timelines fell away to reveal gleaming ahistorical sonic landscapes. Beat-matching gradually came back into vogue, but wittily revealing the seams between tracks became the ne plus ultra of DJ craftsmanship.

The French invaded in the form of Daft Punk- and Justice-inspired electro bangers, spraying young clubbers with American Apparel and shutter shades. To my ears, Richie Panic and Vin Sol were our best balls-out interpreters of this fuck-all party sound and spirit, and Blow Up at Rickshaw Stop its finest venue. Minimal techno made sure hot nerds with little glasses were still in control — Kontrol at EndUp, in fact, was the club that did the most to nurture the Berlin-based sound here, with venue Anu and now the near-perfect 222 Hyde offering various party backup. Genius local minimal players like Nikola Baytala and Alland Byallo worked hard to stretch the boundaries, while Claude Von Stroke and the Dirty Bird Records crew added some much-needed humor.

There was a backlash to all the technology, which revolutionized gay clubs. DJ Bus Station John’s all-vinyl, unmixed bathhouse disco sets goosed the moribund queer scene into exploring its AIDS-shrouded past, and threw open the back door to the far-reaching sets of freestyle and rare ’80s fetishist Stanley Frank and the kiki-technotics of Honey Soundsystem.

London’s dubstep sound morphed into glitch-tipsy future bass — another genre the Bay can claim as its own — before it got a firm party foothold here. Which is more than all right, considering that mutation spawned beloved duo Lazer Sword and led Burner techno giant Bassnectar to change his sonic stripes. Most inspiring to me was the outpouring of global sounds in the Bay, from NonStop Bhangra’s whirling saris to Surya Dub’s growling dubstep-bhangra hybrid, from Tormenta Tropical’s bass-bomping nueva cumbia to Kafana Balkan’s breathless, Romani-delirious funk.

So where are we now? If any moment could be called "post-whatever," this is it. Anything goes, excellently, but it’s accompanied by a feeling that we’ve informed ourselves fully of the past, that we’ve mastered the technology of the present, and that, no matter how intelligent the music, we can still have a damn good time. My only gripe about the past decade in nightlife — other than I wished we’d had a more conscious reaction to war — is, alas, the same one as last decade. Where are all the women? Big ups to Ana Sia, Sarah Delush, Forest Green, J. Phlip, Felina, Dulcinea, Miz Margo, Nuxx, Black, and the Stay Gold, Redline, and B.A.S.S. sisterhoods. But seriously, I hope the teens see less testosterone-driven talent behind the decks. We’ve got the style down — now let’s change the look. OK?

Our weekly picks

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Our weekly picks

WEDNESDAY 9th

DANCE/PERFORMANCE

Keith Hennessy: Saliva: The Making of and Saliva


Saliva is probably Keith Hennessy’s best known and least seen work of the last 20 years. When it premiered on a cold December night in 1988 under a San Francisco freeway overpass — and when it was performed again in March 1989 — it had not been advertised, word got around in the underground arts community. Saliva was a ritualistic solo in which Hennessy forcefully, poetically, and hopefully spoke for his own manhood and for a community caught in the anguish of AIDS. To use spit — an "uncouth" bodily fluid — as healing balm was a revolutionary act in both humanistic and theatrical terms. It may be difficult in 2009 to recreate the sense of pain, helplessness, and fury that generated the work. But isn’t that what memorials are for? Lest we forget, these events are the opening act of a celebration of Hennessy’s work and contribution to the Bay Area that continues in January. (Rita Felciano)

Saliva: The Making of discussion and screening: 7:30 p.m., free

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

Saliva performance: Sun/13, 8 p.m.; $15–$25 (no one turned away)

check www.circozero.org for location, SF

www.brownpapertickets.com

THURSDAY 10th

MUSIC

Espers


Don’t expect fairy folk and mythical critters to prance through the new Espers album, III (Drag City) — regardless of song titles like "Trollslända." That’s Swedish for dragonfly, band member Meg Baird assures me. Despite appearances and a name that evokes paranormal-minded cultists, it’s clear the group of mostly Philadelphians is more earthy and no-nonsense, as Baird reels off the various scratch song names and ideas Espers toyed with as they were making III — a witchy, intoxicating blend of psychedelia, prog, and English folk revival. For Baird’s interview, see this week’s Noise blog. (Kimberly Chun)

With Wooden Shjips and Colossal Yes

8 p.m., $13–$15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.independentsf.com

EVENT

Historic Libations


San Franciscans have long enjoyed a romance with alcohol — from the debauchery of the Barbary Coast era to the modern renaissance of the artisan cocktail, the City by the Bay knows how to knock ’em back. You can celebrate this high-proof history at Historic Libations, a party inspired by Cocktail Boothby‘s American Bartender (Anchor Distilling, 152 pages, $14.95), an expanded reprint of a classic 1891 book by one of the city’s earliest and most influential mixologists. Revelers can sample a variety of uniquely San Francisco cocktails, including the pisco sour and the Martinez. At the end of the festivities, they’ll be given their own copy of the book to take home and consult to perfect historic and potent concoctions. (Sean McCourt)

6 p.m., $40–$50

California Historical Society

678 Mission, SF.

(415) 357-1848, ext. 229

www.californiahistoricalsociety.org.

THEATER

SF Mime Troupe 50th Anniversary Exhibition Birthday Bash


Even if 50 is the new 40, it’s rare for many 50-year-olds to be as robust as the SF Mime Troupe. Challenging entrenched racism, endemic poverty, and politics-as-usual regionally and nationally since 1959, the Mime Troupe has earned theatre’s greatest awards — three Obies, a Tony, and an obscenity trial. Celebrate a half-century of provocative street performance — and toast the next 50 with one of San Francisco’s most venerable, anti-institutional institutions— at this birthday party, which includes a special staging of its 1981 Christmas Carol remix Ghosts, an ode to those displaced by the building of the nearby Moscone Center. Stop back on Saturday for a four-hour interactive workshop with Mime Troupe collective members Ed Holmes and Keiko Shimosanto in which participants will be called upon to create their own "anticonsumption" pageant and parade it through downtown SF. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Performance: 7:30 p.m., free

Workshop: Sat/12, 12:30 p.m., $15

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

www.sfmt.org

FRIDAY 11th

FILM/MUSIC

Artists’ Television Access 25th Anniversary


The year 1984 contained delights and horrors, some more Orwellian than others: Ronald Reagan, Apple computers, Cabbage Patch Kids, Mary Lou Retton, Gremlins, Dynasty, New York’s "subway vigilante," American punk rock, etc. Amid that churning, neon-wearing, Cold War-tensed milieu, Artists’ Television Access was formed, and the activism-through-art hub has been keeping tabs on news and culture ever since. Toast 25 years of independent, radical, community-oriented programming at ATA’s Valencia Street gallery, the site of both a decades-spanning screening of works by staff and associates (Lise Swenson, Craig Baldwin, Rigo 23, Konrad Steiner) and a day-long musical get-down (with Ash Reiter, Eats Tapes, a raffle, and much more). (Cheryl Eddy)

"ATA 25: Quarter Century of Alternative Work": 7:30 p.m., free

"Underground — Experimental — Unstoppable": Sun/13, 11 a.m.–10 p.m., $10

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.atasite.org

MUSIC

Eyehategod


Hell yeah, y’all: New Orleans’ legendary Eyehategod is coming to town, seeping into your eardrums on a slow-moving sludge tide of doom, noise, reefer smoke, and fuck-the-system politics. Singer Mike Williams famously overcame his heroin addiction during a post-Katrina jail stint, and the band — semi-dispersed since the early aughts, with most members engaged in other projects (Down, Mystick Krewe of Clearlight, Soilent Green, etc.) — is at last back on the road. Everyone who’s been fiending since 1993’s Take as Needed for Pain (Century Media) can finally feast on what Decibel magazine called "a series of buzzing, lurching dirges steeped in feedback and contempt." (Eddy)

With Stormcrow, Brainoil, Acephalix

8 p.m., $20

DNA Lounge

375 11th St, SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

DANCE

Mark Morris Dance Company: The Hard Nut


If you have never seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’ extraordinarily musical and equally touching and hilarious version of the holiday classic, go now. The times are a-changing in Berkeley as well, and it may be quite some time until this glittering jewel comes back. The company is not scheduled to perform it here again in the near future. Morris set the piece in a cartoon version of the ’60s, removed some of the sugar but not much of the sweetness, kept the family spirit (though somewhat reinterpreted) alive, and heard things in the music as only he can. You will never see a dance of the Snowflakes — brilliant — like that and the grand pas de deux becomes a glorious grand pas de tutti. The score — Morris used every single note — will be performed live by the Berkeley Symphony conducted by Robert Cole. (Rita Felciano)

7 p.m., (through Dec. 20), $36–$62

Zellerbach Hall

UC Berkeley Campus, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

SATURDAY 12th

EVENT

Tetris Tournament


Hey Tetris Master, here’s your chance to finally go out on Saturday night, do something semi-social at an art gallery, and win a prize — all while playing your favorite game of Tuck-Every-Tile-Rack-In-Snugly. But don’t get carried away: although you’ll have a chance to impress everyone with your phenomenal organizational skills, you won’t be taking anyone home. One other thing: you’re not going to have those cute little Tetris ditties to keep you in rhythm. Instead, there will be live bands (Microfiche, White Cloud, and Middle D). They might remind of those well-worn synth loops, but they’re more dynamic, more human. This is the night you’ve been waiting for; don’t let that sheep baaaaaah. (Spencer Young)

8 p.m., $5–$15 (free with membership)

The Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864 8855

www.thelab.org

FILM

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Winter Event


Perfectly timed as an antidote for all the year-end noise at first-run theaters, the SF Silent Film Festival Winter Event dips into cinema history, unspooling films made long before Peter Jackson got his mitts on CG technology or Guy Ritchie decided Sherlock Holmes should learn kung fu. The four selections include a 1927 Thailand-shot adventure from the future minds behind the original King Kong (1933), Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness; a U.S. premiere (90 years after the fact!) in Abel Gance’s 1919 World War I epic J’accuse; the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney collabo West of Zanzibar (1928); and a pair for Buster Keaton fans: the 1921 short The Goat, and delightful 1924 featurette Sherlock Jr. (Eddy)

11:30 a.m., $14–$17 per film (all-day pass, $52)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

1 (800) 838-3006

www.silentfilm.org

EVENT

Bazaar Bizarre


Handmade letterpress stationery, Scottish shortbread, dolls dressed up in home-knitted pinafores, wind chimes made from rusted dining utensils — love those old fairs and festivals. This local incarnation of the nationwide Bazaar Bizarre includes a one-woman metal studio, ceramic wares, boutique cupcakes, children’s clothes, hand-bound books, silk-screened apparel — and birds as finger jewelry. There will also be music by Slide and Spin Studios, crafty workshops, and giveaways. Get ready to overdose on cuteness and creativity. (Jana Hsu)

Noon–-6 p.m. (also Sun/13, noon–6 p.m.), $2 (children free)

San Francisco County Fair Building

Golden Gate Park

Ninth Ave and Lincoln, SF

(415) 831-5500

www.bazaarbizarre.org

SUNDAY 13th

MUSIC

Jenny Scheinman


As any music aficionado knows, describing an act that avoids prescribed categories can result in verbal apoplexy of a most unfortunate kind. How then to best convey the many talents of one Humboldt County-born Jenny Scheinman, whose collaborative projects and studio sessions have ranged over the years from avant-garde jazz to moody blues, and whose formidably-wielded violin is the perfect foil for her straight-shooting, honky-tonk-inflected voice? From John Zorn’s Tzadik label to Lucinda Williams’ recording sessions, Sheinman’s been making a widening splash since leaving the Bay Area in 1999. Skillfully combining a wiser-than-her-years strain of down-home melancholia with sturdy yet evocative multilayered orchestral composition, her appeal lies not in a narrowness of focus, but an expansive, expressive musical palette. She’s showcasing her range in three separate sets — an instrumental duet with pianist Myra Melford, a vocal set with guitarist Robby Giersoe, and a final act with singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn. (Nicole Gluckstern)

8 p.m., $18.50–$19.50

Freight and Salvage

2020 Addison, Berkeley

(510) 644-2020

www.freightandsalvage.org

www.jennyscheinman.com

TUESDAY 15th

MUSIC

Kid Cudi


More Urban Outfitters than the rooftops of Brooklyn, Kid Cudi has successfully capitalized off of Kanye West’s hipster niche. For the MTV crowd in search of someone less embarrassing than West, Kid Cudi is their go-to neon hoodie. He makes intergalactic pop-hop mixed with lazy lyrics like "The lonely stoner needs to free his mind at night" and "I’ve got some issues that nobody can see<0x2009>/And all of these emotions are pouring out of me." A poet he ain’t. It’s more spectacle than speculation. The songs "Heart of Lion" and "Up Up & Away" are infectious with youthful ambition, and we’re reminded this is a kid from Cleveland who now wears his Air Yeezys on the streets of Brooklyn. Is this the future of hip-hop? I don’t know. I just came here to get high and dance in my skinny jeans. (Lorian Long)

8 p.m., $29.75–$33.00

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

415-673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Attention cultural mutants

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Attention cultural mutants

arts@sfbg.com

“Jacob Ciocci is,” as Wikipedia attests, “an American [Pittsburgh] visual artist, performance artist and musician … he is one of the three remaining founding members of Paper Rad, an artist collective … He also performs and tours regularly … in the band ‘Extreme Animals’…” Ciocci’s work, especially with his recent video collection release, 2 Blessed 2B Stressed (Audio Dregs), is almost entirely not his own. His videos recycle pop cultural detritus as fast and furiously as his band freaks beats. I spoke with Jacob in person, via e-mail, and through Transcendental Meditation to collage the meaning, authenticity, and artifice of collage.

SFBG What questions are you most frequently asked?
JACOB CIOCCI Questions about appropriation, sampling.

SFBG These are obviously huge aspects of your work. What’s your relationship with these forms?
JC Whenever I have used or “sampled” something from some cultural source I really feel like there is always an equal amount of change or recontextualization happening. I strive for a 50/50 yin-yang balance between me/the world, or culture’s voice/my voice. Of course I recognize this is sort of absurd, since you can never separate yourself from the yin-yang wheel — you can never fully know when you are being “you” and when you are being a puppet for culture.

SFBG Any questions you’re sick of hearing?
JC I guess the questions that bug me the most imply that all I do is regurgitate culture from the ’80s. My interests really are much wider than just approaching 8-bit video games like Mario Brothers or sampling cartoons from the ’80s. My art, has always been interested in a much more ambiguous and wider set of concerns. It’s not about any specific period of pop culture and cannot be reduced to any kind of term like “appropriation.”

SFBG It could be argued that ’80s culture is also the one you grew up with and thus are most familiar with.
JC I think that when I was doing work that was referencing certain time periods, it was more an investigation of how certain technologies or cultural tropes affected my consciousness. I was using my current consciousness, or my subconsciousness as a way to talk about the shaping of my brain — but not ’80s culture, all culture: the vacuum of past, present, and future. It’s not interesting if it just regurgitates the past. It’s best if the work deals with the past via your perspective in the present.

SFBG So rather than simply reviving and representing these old cultural tropes, you try to give them new meaning by reflecting on them via a cultural mirror — albeit a fractured, holographic one of your own design? Does this transcendence then create a new aesthetic?
JC I think that if you hold up a mirror to society in the right way — if you have constructed the mirror good enough (and the definition of what works as a good mirror is constantly changing based on context), then it does take the viewer and society as a whole to a new place, and thus probably will create some sort of “new aesthetic” or cultural direction. When you interpret the past (even the past meaning one minute ago on YouTube) with clarity in the present, you create the future. This seems to be a neverending cycle. Some would say that through technology it is happening at a faster and faster rate. But I really can’t say because time seems so relative.

SFBG Speaking of technology, your work is explicitly couched in the crude pixel aesthetics of outmoded technologies, like Geocities and Angelfire Web sites. Why is that?
JC When I started working with computer technology in college with some other friends, we realized computers were becoming too advanced. It was impossible to learn every new tool and actually understand not only it’s technological but cultural implications — to master it.
The model instead was to just focus on something a bit older, that had a fixed architecture, so that even if it’s outdated, if you just stuck with it and really investigated that interface, then you would be able to get something interesting and “contemporary” out of that tool. Otherwise you just end up being a superficial user of every piece of software that comes out.
But I think the big light bulb that went off when I started to work with Paper Rad was that there is something just as interesting happening when you are a superficial user of technology. A recreational Geocities user isn’t interesting because he or she is a hardcore DIY “master HTML programmer” computer hacker wizard, but because of what he or she exposes about the Internet. I like the cultural mutant model: Geocities users were mutants who unconsciously stumbled on an interesting representation of how the Internet was affecting culture.

SFBG What is it that usually catches your eye culturally?
JC The relationship between ideas of authenticity and artifice. The version of celebrity that Paramore [a contemporary pop punk band] or Miley Cyrus represent is really interesting because it’s wrapped up in a kind of conservatism, but it’s also about being young and rebellious.

SFBG And you’re attempting to exfoliate that gap between authenticity and artifice?
JC I’m interested in the possibly pointless task of trying to separate artifice from authenticity. I feel that a lot of times what I try to do is to help people who are cynical be a little more open-minded about what’s happening around them culturally, so that they can possibly see that other people are struggling as much as they are to define themselves within this very limiting cultural soup. Or that these ideas of politics and constructions that we have in our head about who we are and what our beliefs are, are really, really rigid, and then by reevaluating culture that we deem as foreign or outside that we can rethink ourselves. I’m not trying to say that “we can all get along and we can all be friends.” But there’s something to that process of expanding your mind that is important.
This can be really hard to make work about because it can seem disrespectful sometimes. People, including myself, make art using images of people they have never met, and that becomes highly questionable — which in my opinion is a good thing. I think that questionable aspect of art can be productive if handled correctly.

www.audiodregs.com; www.jacobciocci.org; www.paperrad.org

Do it naturally

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Do it naturally

culture@sfbg.com

SEX Future sexologists will pinpoint the 2000s as the decade in which the sex toy industry finally crawled from its toxic swamp toward the green light. Before now, mainstream sex toys were garish in appearance, sloppily constructed, and intended to be dumped in a landfill after a few months of use. Made in shady overseas factories by exploited workers, many contained chemicals, like phthalates, that have been linked to cancer and were powered by frequently disposed-of batteries. Virtually nothing about the assembly or life cycle of the average sex toy indicated any consideration of consumer safety, labor standards, or environmental sustainability.

Fast-forward to today. Toys are available in a range of medical-grade, recyclable, and body-safe materials that don’t threaten users with possible tumors. There are rechargeable, recyclable, hand-cranked, organic, or solar-powered erotic accoutrements for the picking. A growing number of businesses manufacture locally. Retailers are using their influence to spread the natural sex toy word. And the products are actually selling.

The Bay Area has been pivotal in catalyzing these changes. Many of the most influential and promising environmentally-minded sex entrepreneurs, retailers, and advocates are based here — we house more green-compliant adult manufacturers than any other city. In a city where the word "sexual" is happily associated with innumerable prefixes — homo-, bi-, poly-, pan-, a-, omni- — we’ve earned a new variation: ecosexual.

If you’ve turned yourself on in the past 33 years, you probably know about Good Vibrations (www.goodvibes.com), the sex-toy juggernaut that evolved from a small women-owned cooperative into a worldwide phenomenon. I met with Carol Queen, PhD and staff sexologist, and Camilla Lombard, publicity manager, at Good Vibes’ Polk Street retail location, where large posters announced a new "Ecorotic" line: "Have Sustainable Sex! Kiss uninspired evenings goodbye!" The candy-colored Ecorotic toys, rechargeable and organic, occupied the most prominent display tables and cases.

Good Vibes has influenced some of the industry’s most important ecosexual developments. In 2001, the popular German magazine Stern ran the first feature on the harmful effects phthalates in sex toys, and Queen recalled, "The [journalists] stopped at Good Vibrations on their way back from Asia, after having gone to enormous toy factories in China and Hong Kong. They thought they were going to do a Life magazine-type spread on sex toy factories there. But their photographer was a medical doctor and when he smelled the air in the factories, he knew something was wrong. So they came to us the day after they got off the plane from Asia looking for alternatives. We started that conversation well over 10 years ago." (More than 70 percent of the world’s sex toys are still manufactured in China, where safety and environmental standards can be sketchy.)

Good Vibrations was among the first major retailers to phase phthalates out of their inventory, but they are, to this day, among the minority to do so. Included in this minority is Libida (www.libida.com), which like Good Vibrations is a local, women-centered adult e-boutique. Libida’s founder, Petra Zebroff, has a doctorate in human sexuality. (While most cities can’t boast of a single sex shop with PhD-certified sexologists on staff, San Francisco, perhaps unsurprisingly has several). I asked Petroff for advice on choosing a safe product. She warned, "If you smell a strong chemical smell or it’s unusually inexpensive — phthalates are the cheap way to make a rubber pliable — it probably contains materials that are not good for you or the environment."

As an alternative, the staff at Libida and Good Vibes suggests silicone, a recyclable, hypoallergenic, and nonporous substance also used in cookware and medical devices. Both retailers stock products by Vixen Creations (www.vixencreations.com), a local woman-owned dildo company celebrating 17 successful years. Vixen develops and manufactures popular silicone toys at its San Francisco factory, where each toy is crafted by hand and given a lifetime warranty — something unprecedented in the field.

Like silicone, wood is used in body-safe and eco-conscious sex toys, but has the added benefit of being naturally beautiful. Founded in 2005, NobEssence (www.nobessence.com) sells handmade sculptural toys that resemble antique curios. CEO Jason Yoder has an environmentalist’s background, having worked as an auditor for SA8000, a global accountability standard of ethical working conditions. During a phone conversation, Yoder remarked, "We hold ourselves to that standard not because we want to seem greener but because it’s self-evident that it’s the right thing to do." NobEssence sources sustainably farmed and harvested hardwood, and suppliers sign a code of conduct designating penalties for labor or ecological violations.

Borosilicate glass is another aesthetically pleasing material option. Sexual locavores who enjoyed the recent Dale Chihuly retrospective at the de Young Museum must visit Glass Kandi (569 Geary, SF. www.glassdildome.com), where each uniquely hand-blown toy is a gleaming parcel of sexy sui generis. "I have more glass dildos in my kitchen than I do in this store," owner Samantha Liu told me mischievously. "I’d been using this stuff for years." When I heard her say "kitchen," my eyes instinctively fell upon her "Produce Collection": halcyon dildos of garden-variety cucumbers, jalapenos, and bananas — plus a Chinese bitter melon and a cob of corn. "I’ve had people send me pictures with one of these in a fruit basket," Liu said. Liu designs most of the toys herself and works with local glassblowers to materialize them into objects of desire. Borosilicate glass may not be the recyclable kind, but these crystalline baubles would be criminal to discard.

Stationary toys like glass and wood dildos have their advantages, but sometimes it’s helpful when a toy moves on your behalf. With unique technical innovations, two local companies, JuicyLogic (www.juicylogic.com) and Jimmyjane (www.jimmyjane.com), have introduced impressive reinterpretations of the traditional vibrator, clearly illustrating that the demand for green solutions has never been higher than now.

JuicyLogic, started by Zebroff of Libida, is the company behind the only solar-powered vibrator on the market. "I started JuicyLogic in an ongoing effort to focus on finding and making green sex toys," she explained. "The idea of Sola Vibe came up when we found out that the only solar-powered vibrator on the market was being discontinued. We knew there was nothing else available, and we wanted to make sure solar power was an option for vibrator users." Like many green crusaders, Zebroff hopes to reduce battery waste. "The average person uses up eight batteries per year, leaving 2.4 billion batteries disposed of each year. I thought of how vibrators use batteries as their main source of power, and I felt an obligation to advocate for other sources of energy for vibrators." When the alternative source didn’t seem to exist, she created it herself: a silicone vibrator equipped with a solar panel containing 2.5 hours of vibrating bliss.

Jimmyjane, like JuicyLogic, is an inventive young company. Founded in 2004 by Ethan Imboden, an industrial designer and engineer, Jimmyjane is recognized as the industry’s current technological leader. With patented external docking devices that power a lithium ion battery, Jimmyjane’s vibrators are sleeved in silicone, hygienically sealed, and fully operable three meters underwater, displaying a thoughtfulness of design, a mechanical know-how, and a cavalier extravagance that distinguish them from others. Jimmyjane just released the Form 2, a smaller vibrator using similar technology. The nifty items in the Form series have more functions than most cell phones and rival Apple products in sleekness of design. Why the detail? Imboden answered, "We realized early on that if Jimmyjane is going to be a part of peoples’ sexuality — because sexuality is such an intimate and a vulnerable aspect of our lives — there are a whole set of responsibilities that go with that. We don’t market ourselves as an eco-company because for us, it’s an assumption that that’s our responsibility." They’ve certainly done their part: the Forms require not a single alkaline battery.

Thrillingly, the city’s DIY-oriented sexual community is also producing ecosex craft innovations that are as groundbreaking as they are thought-provoking. Madame Butterfly (www.butterflyrope.com) is a textile artist who handspins bondage rope out of raw silk, bamboo, and other natural materials. On the more steampunk side of things, SFSU student Martin Cooper recently unveiled an attention-grabbing, water-powered fucking machine in a nine-foot wood and metal frame. If it looks a little medieval, well, that’s part of the attraction.

Back at Good Vibrations, I asked Queen why San Francisco has become the crux of the ecosex movement. "It’s the sex-positivity," she said. "I think it’s because in the Bay Area — I hate the word ‘normal’ when talking about sex — but here this discussion is normalized in a different way than it is everywhere else." It’s true that savvy entrepreneurs are just a small part of our larger, sex-positive culture. Still, the ecosexual movement may be the proof that our culture as a whole is pushing forward toward a more sustainable future. After all, everything starts with sex.

Police seize DJs’ laptops

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Police seize DJs’ laptops

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco Police Department officers have added a controversial tactic to their aggressive raids on house parties (see "Fun under siege," 4/22/09): they’re seizing laptop computers from DJs at the events.

While SFPD officials deny the laptop seizures is a new policy, they admit it has been condoned by Police Chief George Gascón, who took over in August and last month told the Guardian‘s editorial board he wants to make the SFPD more transparent and accountable to the public (see "New coach, new approach," 10/14/09).

"The police chief is aware that officers are being proactive in gathering evidence," Sgt. Lyn Tomioka told the Guardian when asked about a string of laptop seizures by undercover cops over the last 10 months, most of them in cases in which the DJs weren’t even charged with a crime.

Many of the raids have occurred in SoMa, and were spearheaded by undercover officers who penetrated the parties and were followed by uniformed officers. San Francisco Entertainment Commission member Terrance Alan called the crackdown a "disappointing and dangerous trend."

Tomioka said it’s a judgment call for officers to seize laptops as evidence of an illegal party, but Alan said the tactic is a punitive measure that proves nothing: "Taking laptops [is] not necessary to prove the underlying crime, and in many cases damages people’s ability to earn a living."

One of the most recent raids happened on Halloween. It was about 2:30 a.m. and music was pumping out of a warehouse party on Sixth Street. The people throwing the party had hired a doorman, and attendee Eric Dunn was standing in line waiting to get in.

"We were right at the front of the line," Dunn told the Guardian, when, he said, two plainclothes officers drove up on the sidewalk, jumped out of an unmarked car, and rushed up to the doorman. "[The officers] pretty much started demanding entry right away. The doorman was really polite. He basically told them that you have to know somebody to get into the party."

Dunn said the officers waited until an exiting guest opened the door from the inside and then made their move. "One guy barged in, and the other guy followed. They never asked permission or received permission to enter the building," Dunn said.

Inside, the two undercover officers immediately shut down the event. Justin Miller, a DJ at the event, said she remembers it very clearly. "The cops at that point were telling everybody to leave the party, telling me to turn the music off. I turned the music off. Everyone was quietly leaving."

But Miller said it didn’t stop there. One of the undercover officers approached her and asked if she had a laptop. She said she did. "I was a little confused at this point because I didn’t know what my laptop had to do with anything. I was playing CDs." She said she pulled her computer out from underneath a table and unzipped it from a case. The officer then "grabbed it from me."

The undercover police officer — later identified by witnesses and the evidence receipt as Larry Bertrand — instructed Miller to follow him down to the street to get a property receipt for her laptop.

At this point there were uniformed officers on the scene as well. Miller started to cry. "I begged him. I said, ‘This is my livelihood. You’re talking my laptop. This is my livelihood. I hope you realize that.’ He said, ‘This is how you’re going to learn then, I guess.’"

Miller said Bertrand (who did not return Guardian calls for comment) then told her he was "going to take it upon himself to shut down every illegal party in San Francisco."

She said he then opened the trunk of his car, revealing several other laptops. A person at the party pointed out that one of the laptops belonged to a friend of his, and asked if he could get the property receipt for the laptop. Miller said Bertrand turned to the inquiring person and said, "You will never see this laptop again."

She continued: "He then looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to make sure your paperwork gets so tied up that maybe you won’t see this laptop until December, January, February, who knows when.’ I felt so violated."

Miller has been working as a DJ in the Bay Area, under the name DJ Justincredible, for more than 10 years. She says she’s never had any of her equipment confiscated by the police before. But at that party, three DJs had their laptops confiscated, even though none were charged with a crime.

Shortly after the Halloween incident, Miller and the two other DJs who were at the party contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group specializing in technology and privacy issues. Jennifer Granick, a civil liberties lawyer with EFF, said most people haven’t heard about this because few of these DJs, if any, ever get convicted of a crime.

"DJs and the police department know that sound equipment and laptops are being unlawfully seized. But the public and the courts haven’t heard much about it because every time a DJ asks for a hearing, the cops just give them their property back rather than show up and defend the practice in open court before a judge," she said.

Sean Evans has been working as a DJ in San Francisco, under the name DJ 7, for more than 10 years. He said that over the summer he had his laptop seized by police during an after-hours party in SoMa. He was given no property receipt, and his case was dismissed. But it took him three months to get his computer back.

"To lose our sole means of income, it’s a huge setback. It puts us out of work. In this recession, we’re struggling, and we need our laptops to get by," he said. Evans grew up in the Bay Area and he said has never had anything like this happen to him before.

Granick argued it is illegal for police to seize property without issuing citations or arrests. She also said there are serious privacy issues at stake. "If we were to find out that the police were doing something else with the laptops, like searching through them or copying the data, we would definitely go to court," she said.

SFPD Sgt. Wilfred Williams said he could not say what was currently being done with the laptops. In general, he said, private events that emit "extraordinary amounts of sound" need permits. And if they don’t have the proper permits, he said, property can be seized as evidence, "be it the speakers, be it the laptops, be it a mixer."

Both Tomioka and Williams say the seizures aren’t a new policy. "If you look back in time, laptops haven’t been used for music," Williams said. "There used to be old types of equipment that was taken in the past. But now laptops are being used. So yes, today, laptops [are] being seized."

Entertainment advocates have called on Mayor Gavin Newsom and Gascón to come forward with an explicit policy concerning these raids and seizures. The Mayor’s Office did not respond to Guardian inquiries. Critics of the policy say it’s having a chilling effect on nightlife in San Francisco.

Should taxpayers subsidize desalination?

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Should taxpayers subsidize desalination?

rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Should the state of California hand over a multimillion dollar tax break to a company that is poised to build the largest desalination facility on the continent, just north of San Diego? That question will be decided early next year when Poseidon Resources, a water-infrastructure developer, formally submits its request for more than $500 million in tax-exempt bonds to the California Debt Limit Allocation Committee (CDLAC).

The decision will demonstrate whether California is willing to roll out the red carpet for desalination, an energy-intensive technology that has many questioning whether it’s a wise path to take. Proposals for desalination projects are cropping up across the state, including one for a smaller facility in Marin County, and water bonds recently approved by the Legislature as part of the state’s historic water package include $1 billion earmarked for water recycling and desalination.

With the state well into a three-year drought that has left some agricultural operations high and dry, calls for new reliable water sources such as desalination plants are only growing louder. But critics worry that the private operations will suck in tax dollars the way their intake pipes suck in saltwater, and they’re urging decision-makers to focus on more cost-effective strategies like low-flow showerheads, waterless urinals, drought-proof landscaping, or other comparatively thrifty ways to address water shortages. Poseidon’s Carlsbad desalination plant is projected to be the largest project of its kind in California, but it’s also just the beginning of an emerging trend.

A coalition of organizations, including the Sierra Club, Service Employees International Union, and Food & Water Watch, has been sounding the alarm that San Diego’s Carlsbad Desalination Project is a bad deal that shouldn’t be encouraged with public subsidies in the form of tax-exempt bonds. "Our group, along with most of our partners and allies, are not anti-desalination," says Renee Maas, who works for Food & Water Watch in Los Angeles. "But we think it should be a last resort," after opportunities for conservation have been exhausted.

"Aside from doing nothing about conservation and continuing to require huge amounts of energy for transmission, these plants also have no real community benefit, minimal job creation, and, most importantly, a questionable success and effectiveness," members of Service Employees International Union Local 721 wrote in a letter to the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s water wholesaler. "We believe we can conserve more water by installing waterless urinals across L.A. County than we would obtain from the proposed desalination plant."

Yet the facility boasts a long list of powerful endorsements, including that of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a member of CDLAC. The governor was listed as a supporter on a preliminary application submitted to the three-member committee. The two other committee members are State Treasurer Bill Lockyer and State Controller John Chiang.

The facility already has its ducks in a row, with permits approved and a contract with MWD to provide as much as 10 percent of San Diego’s water supply (MWD also agreed to $350 million in subsidies for the plant over 25 years). Poseidon expects the plant to be up and running by 2012. According to company spokesperson Scott Maloni, the project will proceed even if the state rejects its request for tax-exemption.

The plant will use ocean water as a raw ingredient to produce fresh drinking water by pushing the saltwater through reverse-osmosis membranes. With a capacity for producing an estimated 50 million gallons of drinking water a day, the hulking facility will share a site with a 52-year-old beachfront power plant equipped with an antiquated system that draws in ocean water to cool its machinery. Heated seawater issuing out the tail end of the power plant will be pumped into the desalination system and converted to tap water.

Although the plant will provide a localized freshwater source in a dry region without impacting ecologically sensitive rivers or wetlands, it comes with a steep price tag and requires a tremendous amount of electricity. Proponents estimate that the energy consumption in a single day would be the equivalent to the energy used by 16,790 homes. But Maas says even this estimate is low, because if the power plant’s water-cooling system is phased out by 2017, as state law mandates, then the desalination facility would have to start with cold water instead, requiring a substantial power boost. Poseidon spokesperson Scott Malone disputed this claim, telling the Guardian, "The plant will require 28-30 MW to operate during warm water or cold water operations."

Cost and energy consumption aren’t the only concerns advocacy groups have raised. Mark Schlosberg, a program director at Food & Water Watch in San Francisco, considers Poseidon’s last foray into desalination, in Tampa Bay, Fla., to be a cautionary tale. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, the plant opened five years late, cost $40 million more than expected, and hasn’t ever hit its target of supplying an average of 25 million gallons a day as originally promised. After Poseidon’s business partner for that affair went bankrupt, a public utility had to take control of the facility.

"They have a bad track record on desalination," Schlosberg said. "It never performed close to its advertised capacity."

Asked about the challenges in Tampa Bay, Maloni said, "Before Poseidon was bought out, the project was 30 percent constructed, on time and on budget. After Tampa Bay Water took over, the plant wasn’t constructed as designed and later failed to pass performance testing."

Critics have also decried the high cost projections for water. San Diego County now uses water imported from northern territories via the State Water Project, at a cost of around $750 per acre-foot (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons), according to San Diego County Water Authority figures. Poseidon estimates that the water from its plant will cost about $1,300 per acre-foot, but has promised not to charge customers more than the price of imported water. Two years ago, Poseidon told the California Coastal Commission that it intends to absorb its losses "for an unknown number of years" until the price of imported water rises enough to equal the cost of desalinated water.

"Poseidon has entered into 30-year contracts with nine different San Diego County public water agencies that guarantee the cost of the desalinated water will never cost more than the agencies would otherwise pay for imported water," Maloni told the Guardian. "This pricing structure is possible because imported water rates are projected to increase significantly in the years to come, while the cost of desalinating water will stay relatively flat."

Shlosberg’s organization requested public records from the Tampa Bay facility so they could calculate a price estimate that they say is more realistic. Food & Water Watch hired James Fryer, an environmental scientist, to crunch the numbers. Fryer concluded that if the Carlsbad project experienced the same pitfalls as Tampa Bay, the water would cost $3,507 per acre-foot — a sky-high projection. If it ran without those bugs, it would still cost $2,175 per acre-foot, he determined.

The overarching question, in Maas’ view, is whether the state is willing to take conservation seriously enough to put water-saving measures into practice before subsidizing costly, energy-guzzling technology. "By sitting a desalination plant, it really distracts people from solutions that are more environmentally sustainable," she said. "The average water use per person per day is 200 gallons, and 60 percent of it goes to landscaping. With this desalination plant, people think, ‘we don’t have to change our habits.’"

Merry mayhem

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Merry mayhem

arts@sfbg.com

Though gamers will have plenty to choose from, 2009’s holiday shopping season is defined in part by the titles that won’t make it to store shelves in time. Starcraft II (Blizzard/Activision), Bioshock 2 (2K Games), and Mass Effect 2(Bioware/EA) have all been pushed into 2010, and the list of notable upcoming games reads more like a "best of the rest."

Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft)

Xbox360, PS3, PC

The first Assassin’s Creed took place in a Crusade-torn Holy Land, giving players control of a medieval master killer who used subterfuge and his considerable gymnastic talents to surprise and dispatch a number of deserving 12th-century tyrants. The sequel shifts the setting to Renaissance Italy, and would-be assassins will have full run of Venice, Rome, and Florence when they take command of Ezio, a wronged nobleman seeking acrobatic revenge. The series’ core mechanic — unfettered parkour-style urban exploration — will return, along with lovingly recreated environments and an expanded arsenal of weapons. Those who complained about the original’s repetitive structure have been placated, as the game promises a new, diversified mission system, and Ezio’s methods of assassination will be similarly varied, thanks in part to the participation of a young Leonardo da Vinci, who uses his engineering genius to help the historical hitman pwn noobs with scientific alacrity. (Now available)

Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve/EA)

Xbox360, PC

Valve touched off an Internet firestorm when it announced this title. The company has a long history of providing robust post-release support for its games, and fans of the original were outraged that they would have to pony up for a sequel so soon after the first Left 4 Dead hit shelves in November 2008. Though the embers of the debate still smolder, most of the naysayers have been swayed by the obvious attention paid to the forthcoming product, which features new characters, a new game mode, a creepy Southern-fried setting, and a wealth of new additions to the zombie-slaughter toolbox. The "AI Director" — a groundbreaking piece of technology that coordinates the actions of the shambling, brains-starved hordes — has also been completely overhauled. (Now available)

The Saboteur (Pandemic/EA)

Xbox360, PS3, PC

Even if you only have a passing affinity for video games, you’ve probably killed a Nazi or two at some point. World War II is notoriously well-worn territory, a fact that makes Pandemic’s unique approach all the more interesting. You play as Sean Devlin, an Irish ex-pat living in Paris during the German occupation. Initially neutral, Devlin’s loyalties are thrown in with the Free French when some of his friends are murdered, and he embarks on a mission of resistance and, well, sabotage. The game’s most interesting feature is its use of color: at the outset, neighborhoods living under the yoke of the jackboot are depicted in black-and-white, blossoming into full color the more your character’s actions harry the Third Reich. If Red Faction: Guerrilla (Volition/THQ) meets Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar) meets Medal of Honor (Various/EA) is a description of your dream game, consider the jackpot hit. (Dec. 8)

Komeback Kink

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Komeback Kink

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC MLK’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, shaken confidence in Vietnam after a bloody and vengeful Tet Offensive, Haight-Ashbury’s rapid dissolving into a breeding ground for lost and burned-out hippies pathetically clinging to the idyllic notion of a "Summer of Love," and a free Charles Manson settling in Laurel Canyon to plot the perverse and gruesome murders his "family" would soon commit. Yes, 1968 was the year the darkness had arrived. Certainly flower power had gone wrong, wilting its way toward a strong sense of paranoia that not only seeped its way into society’s psyche and politics, but into popular music as well.

Stripped in tone and oftentimes more raw-sounding than the overly-produced psychedelia that dominated the previous two years, the Kinks’ masterfully produced November 1968 classic The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is a prime example of Ray Davies’ maturing writing skill. It especially shines as an artist’s profound expression of his own insecurities. Village Green is loaded with accounts of Davies’ vain obsessions and his fears. It’s a document of the human condition — in particular, people’s longings to leave a lasting legacy and be remembered.

Thematically, Davies works himself into a frenzy, unable to live for the moment, facing the pressures of fading British tradition (on the title track) and changes in technology ("Last of the Steam-Powered Trains"), both of which symbolize a changing of the guard and uncertainty about how the album’s protagonist fits into the world. Don’t underestimate Davies’ fears of growing old. The bitterness on "Do You Remember Walter?" is almost too much to bear. It fits well, though, making Village Green a cohesive unit. Here he criticizes an old friend who he assumes has grown old, boring, and out of shape. But his disdain stems from Ray’s fear of being Walter (i.e., washed up), and is connected to the fact that Walter has moved on in life and perhaps wouldn’t even recognize or remember his dear old friend.

With its simple and bucolic flair, "Sitting by the Riverside" seems familiar enough. The ditty should be relaxing, with its nice, easy-going melody, but Ray even corrupts something seemingly innocent with a manic "la-da-da" that chimes in on occasion before bursting to a near crescendo during the song’s outro, sounding like a bad drug experience.

Listening to Village Green‘s "All of My Friends Were There," I’ve always imagined it playing at someone’s birthday party, with — of course — all their friends present. But it seems to be more of a performance with all eyes on Davies, because he’s built it in his head to be the biggest day in his life. Once again we see his sick longing to feel love, attention, and validation, this time through the power of numbers. Unfortunately, his gathering backfires to disastrous results. It’s just as well. Somehow I have a feeling that no matter how many people were present, he still feels alone and empty.

Two Village Green songs, "Picture Book" and the album-closing "People Take Pictures of Each Other," focus on how photographs are supposed to fill some sort of void, making us seem more important than we really are — as if a photograph is necessary to validate our feelings of love for one another and emotions from our past. Davies argues that we take pictures of one another to prove our existence. At the same time, he’s caught up in paranoid visions of what his own photograph will look like when he’s an old man: "Picture yourself, when you’re getting old." Finally a bit of optimism peeks through, but in an unsure way, when he sings, "People often change, but memories of people can remain." That is to say, I can remember you however I choose.

RAY DAVIES

Thurs/12, 8 p.m., $40–$57

The Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

The problem of happiness

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The problem of happiness

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Sometimes it just takes one word, and this week’s one is shoehorn. There. I’m done. And you barely even got your pants down, or your skirt up. Skype is an amazing thing, as is technology in general. As are words.

Yesterday morning, outside a coffeehouse in Guerneville …

Today, inside a coffeehouse in Oakland …

One night I put my laptop on the pillow next to me and slept while she went about her business.

It’s weird (or maybe not) that many of the men who mistreated, malpracticed, or underwhelmed me last year are trying to reconnect right now. Proving once again that straight guys just love a lesbian. Had I thought of this, I would have faked it.

Can I tell you how much pleasure I get from not doing anything at all? Well, I do read their e-mails. After months and months of silence, they suddenly can’t stop thinking about me, they’re sorry they blew it, blah blah blah. And I don’t write back, not even to say, Thank you for blowing it. I met someone a lot better than you.

And a lot better for me. Last month in Joshua Tree she taught me how to be more ladylike. Instead of saying, "I gotta go pee," I can now say, in German, Ich muss mich frischmachen, or roughly, "I have to freshen up" … which is really fun to say before going behind a cactus and squatting over some dirt, then wiping your hands on your jeans.

In New Jersey last week I returned the favor. I taught her how to put gas in a car. She’s never owned a car in her life, but loves to be the driver, and loves to do all the more classically manlier things, like getting the gas. So I showed her how. While the pump was pumping we stood straddling the hose (not really) and kissed real slow and long (really). I forgot where I was.

When the kiss was over, I looked away and accidentally into the wide eyes of a man filling his pickup truck next pump over. His mouth was a little bit open — more from pain, I think, than disbelief. I smiled. He didn’t. His hands were in his pockets.

It’s fun outside of the Bay Area, but good to be back too. This morning I had breakfast at Sconehenge with my friend Hickymajig, and we had a contest to see who was nervouser. She won. But I did not go down without a tremor. And a twitch. And a lightheaded feeling in my legs. And a fluttery stomach, cold sweat, shaky hands, and other more serious symptoms, like I only ate half of my huevos rancheros ($7.50).

The second half is on the floor in my car, fantasizing about lunch. For a restaurant called Sconehenge, Sconehenge has very few things called scones on the menu. But they do have them, and they’re supposed to be great.

But we both ate Mexican breakfasts. Very good. Very very very good. And cheap! And big! My huevos had a huge pile of salsa on top, and a ton of melted cheese. Warm flour tortillas that I slathered with butter, rolled up, and poked into my egg yolks. The rice and beans were delicious. Nevertheless, if Hickymajig reads this it will be from a hospital bed, so I would like her to know that the entire Bay Area, including me, is thinking about her and wishing her well, on buses, in bathrooms, and wherever else Cheap Eats is read. Behind a cactus …

My thing is partly a problem of happiness, which is a good problem to have. My armchair therapists tell me I deserve to be happy, get over it. And I’m trying, I swear. I breathe, I read, I write, I laugh. But my body continues to act as if it’s about to get run over by a minivan.

Maybe I drink too much coffee. And that’s another good thing about Sconehenge. Their coffee sucks. You can only drink one cup, if you’re lucky.

I told you this column was over after the first sentence. So if you made it this far, don’t blame me. It’s nighttime already where my heart is. And here I haven’t even gone to work yet! Kids need me. Their moms, more so. Oy.

Or, take my word for it: schuhlöffel.

SCONEHENGE BAKERY & CAFE

Mon.–Sat., 7:30 a.m.–3 p.m.;

Sun., 8 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

2787 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-5168

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Encapsuutf8g pulses

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Encapsuutf8g pulses

I happened upon the opening of "Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine," a sound installation by Jacqueline Gordon at Queen’s Nails Projects that has inspired noisy throngs both inside and outside the gallery’s small walls. The work relays miked sound from the sidewalk and street outside QNP, ricocheting it through the gallery’s innards via four white constructions of paneled vinyl and protruding, point-less (but sharp with meaning) pyramids. The result is a lot of fun; outsiders can create sound from outside the gallery’s walls, while those inside are subject to an echo of cacophony. Inspired by anechoic chambers, John Cage, Brutalist architecture, the limitations of technology, utopia and dystopia, and, of course, sunshine, "Our Best Machines" is simultaneously intimidating and intimate, especially when visited alone. I recently sat down with QNP director Julio Cesar Morales and Gordon on the gallery’s comfy floor cushions to get a sense of why this is, and what’s so special about sunshine.

SFBG How did you arrive at the gap and tension between nature and machines?

Jacqueline Gordon I’m interested in the history of technology and how we create — or not necessarily how we create, but why we create — and the kind of tools that we create for ourselves. In particular, the tools and the ideas and machines created in pursuit of utopia, and how that approach can actually be a confining thing. So it’s that push-pull between the search for an escape and then the confinement of that search. To me, this search is a universally human, psychological phenomenon.

SFBG Why or how does this search become confining?

JG It could become limiting because maybe you’re only focused on one thing, and you kind of get stuck.

I started knitting when I was really depressed, which I think a lot of people do (laughs). And I was noticing that I couldn’t not knit for eight hours a day. I got really into it. But then I started noticing that I wasn’t progressing; I was just continuing on and I wasn’t necessarily improving on certain aspects of my life. Instead, I was just totally obsessed with knitting.

SFBG It just became really repetitive.

JG Yeah, it was really soothing and comforting, but just total escape.

SFBG Would you say that "Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine" is an attempt to elucidate or expose the push of technology and its tools toward a utopia, or an attempt to break out and disrupt that occurrence?

JG I’m investigating that occurrence by asking "What is that?" or "Why do we do these things, and how do we see them related to our lives?"

SFBG I’ve noticed that some of your earlier work, such as "Black Matters," takes its design direction from the natural world. And the title for this work obviously privileges sunshine (the natural) over the man-made (machine). How does this inform its form?

JG All the designs came from the natural environment. These patterns [the cone or stud-looking shapes that house the speakers] came from a building on the corner of Market and 11th streets. The vinyl pieces come from log cabin quilting patterns. It’s very simple. All of it is from the world. I like to think of it as actually coming from reality.

SFBG So, architecturally speaking, you’re interested in being "site-specific." What else?

JG In terms of architecture, in terms of inspiration, I was looking at a lot of Brutalist architecture.

SFBG How come?

JG I think that in a way it demonstrates a striving for progression. Brutalist architecture was a kind of symbol for, or the epitome of, progress. Yet the buildings are so derelict; they’re not good to live in. But they are these emblems of power and structure — they symbolize utopia.

SFBG Why did you choose to house the speakers in the Brutalist forms as opposed to the quilted patterns? Could it have been the other way around?

JG I wanted the sound to come out of something hard. I also wanted it to be a little, I don’t know if "scary" is the word, but a little intimidating.

When I first started working with sound I got the idea that I wanted to make an anechoic chamber. I had read about John Cage’s theory of the anechoic chamber and I eventually got to experience an installation of one in New Jersey. The walls’ insides were patterned, and wedges come out in different directions.

SFBG Aside from the obvious "white cube" connection, why else did you choose white?

JG I’m interested in the manipulation of the senses and perception. I wanted to do something that was all white, but it’s also a way of creating sensory deprivation. (Spencer Young)

OUR BEST MACHINES ARE MADE OF SUNSHINE

Through Nov. 20,

(music performance with Wobbly, Nate Boyce and Greg Zifcak, Thurs/12, 8 p.m.)

Queen’s Nails Project

3191 Mission, SF

(415) 314-6785

www.queensnailsprojects.com

Events listings

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Events listings

Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 11

Food for Thought Participating restaurants in the Mission District, SF; www.missiongraduates.org/foodforthought. All day, free. Enjoy some of what the Mission has to offer while helping to invest in it’s future at this annual dine-out fundraiser for Mission Graduates, a nonprofit that prepares Mission youth for college careers. Participating restaurants will donate 25-100% of your total bill.

THURSDAY 12

From the Hood to the House San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; (415) 674-6117. 7pm, $75-500. A benefit to honor Reverend Cecil Williams’ 45th anniversary at Glide featuring Maya Angelou, Rita Moreno, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows, San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and more.

Sugar Rush 111 Minna, 111 Minna, SF; (415) 626-5470. 7pm, $60. Attend a sweet fundraiser benefiting Spark, a local youth empowerment organization that organizes one-on-one apprenticeships, featuring unlimited dessert-tastings from high end restaurants like Boulevard, Chez Panisse, Range, Humphry Slocombe, and more.

FRIDAY 13

A Country Called Amreeka Arab Cultural and Community Center, 2 Plaza, SF; (415) 664-2200. 7pm, $5-10 suggested donation. Hear Syrian- American civil rights lawyer and author Alia Malek discuss her new book A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories.

Drinking and Dancing The Lab, 2948 16th St., SF; (415) 407-0225. 8pm, free. A sport under recognized, dancing with a drink-in-hand requires coordination with your beverage, your partner, the music, and your liver. Join in the open floor competition followed by a knockout tournament. Stronger drinks awarded more points.

Farming and Food Golden Gate University School of Law, 536 Mission, SF; (415) 442-6636. 9am, $30. Attend this Environmental Law and Policy Conference that takes a look at the role law and policy plays in shaping aspects of food.

Green Festival Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th St., SF; 1-800-58-GREEN. Fri. Noon-7pm, Sat. 10am-7pm, Sun. 11am-6pm; $15. Discover the latest in renewable energy and green technology, savor Fair Trade, organic, and natural foods and beverages, and learn how to incorporate sustainability at home at this annual festival that integrates all aspects of environmentalism into one fun and educational event.

Masked Soirée DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-1409. 9pm, $18. Enjoy a sexy soirée with live music, performances by Burlesque Deviant Nation models, suspension acts, an art auction, and a costume contest with free subscriptions to Deviant Nation magazine.

Young Workers United Station 40, 3030B 16th St., SF; (415) 621-4155. 7pm, free. Buy art, dance, and donate money to benefit Young Workers United, a nonprofit dedicated to improving working conditions of young people and immigrants in low wage, service sector jobs.

SATURDAY 14

Coats for Cubs Buffalo Exchange, 1210 Valencia, SF; 1555 Haight Street, SF; 1-866-235-8255. Starting Nov. 14 through Earth Day on April 22, 2010. Bring your real fur apparel, including trims and accessories, to any Buffalo Exchange store and help provide bedding and comfort to orphans and injured wildlife. Condition of fur is unimportant.

Golden Gala Castro Theater, 429 Castro, SF; (415) 863-0611. 8:15pm, $35. Attend this tribute to Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, appearing live in-person, featuring performances by SF Golden Girls and a "Golden Girls Gone Wild" contest with cash prizes.

Mural Walks Café Venice, 3325 24th St., SF; (415) 285-2287. 11am, $12. Tour over 60 murals in this 10-block walk organized by Precita Eyes Mural Arts and Visitors Center. Other walking tours available, go to www.precitaeyes.org for details.

BAY AREA

A Day at Pixar Pixar Animation Studios, 1200 Park Ave., Emeryville; (415) 227-8666. 11am for VIP and 1pm for Family ; $35-149, advanced tickets required. Experience the world of Pixar films behind the scenes at this fundraiser for San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum. See art, sculptures, and other items from the Pixar archives, get a crash course on how to draw Pixar characters, and watch a selection of Pixar short films. VIP ticket holders can also enjoy special full length movie screenings, discussions with crew and staff, and discounts at the Pixar store.

SUNDAY 15

Outdoor Bootcamp Kezar Stadium Track, Frederick at Stanyan, SF; www.02athletics.com. 7am, free. Get motivated and start moving your ass at this free weekly workout session.

BAY AREA

Fur Ball Fundraiser Hopalong Animal Rescue, 5749 Doyle, Emeryville; (510) 267-1915×103. 1pm, $40. Help support Hopalong Animal Rescue at this fundraiser featuring live music, hors d’oeuvres, wine tasting, a silent auction, and special guest KTVU anchorman Frank Somerville. Hopalong offers rescue, placement, prevention and outreach programs to the community and strives to eliminate the euthanasia of adoptable animals.

MONDAY 16

Amy Goodman First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing, Berk.; 1-800-838-3006. 7pm, $15. Hear investigative journalist, Democracy Now! host, and New York Times best-selling author Amy Goodman discuss her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier. Event to benefit KPFA radio.

TUESDAY 17

Gardening in Small, Urban Spaces San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4500. 6pm, free. Permaculturist Fred Bove takes us beyond the herb garden with a discussion about the possibilities, and produce, that can be coaxed out of tiny spaces for little effort or money.


Film listings

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Film listings

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, Matt Sussman, and Laura Swanbeck. The film intern is Fernando F. Croce. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

The Box Donnie Darko (2001) director Richard Kelly’s latest is an adaptation of the Richard Matheson story about a mysterious box causes both riches and destruction. Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella star. (1:56) California, Four Star, Presidio.

Disney’s A Christmas Carol Jim Carrey plays multiple roles in this 3-D animated take on the Dickens classic, directed by Robert Zemeckis (2004’s The Polar Express). (1:36) Presidio.

The Fourth Kind Milla Jovovich stars as an Alaska doctor investigating alien abductions. (1:38)

Gentlemen Broncos The latest from Napoleon Dynamite (2004) director Jared Hess is about a Utah teen (Michael Angarano) who is obsessed with science fiction. (1:51) Embarcadero.

The Men Who Stare at Goats Jon Ronson’s nonfiction book about government psy-ops gets the lighthearted screen treatment, with George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, and Ewan McGregor. (1:28) Cerrito, Presidio, Shattuck.

*Skin This is one of those movies that works in large part because you know it’s a true story –- its truth is almost too strange to be credible as fiction. In 1955 the Laings, a white Afrikaner couple (played by the blond and blue-eyed likes of Sam Neill and Alice Krige) gave birth to a second child quite unlike their first, or themselves. Indeed, Sandra (Ella Ramangwane) was, by all appearances, black. Mrs. Laing insisted she hadn’t been unfaithful –- further, the couple were firm believers in the apartheid system –- and it was eventually determined Sandra’s looks were the result of a rare but not-unheard-of flashback to some "colored" genes no doubt well-buried far in their colonialist ancestry. Living in rural isolation, the well-intentioned Laings were able to keep Sandra oblivious to her being at all "different." But when time came to send her off to boarding school, she got a rude awakening in matters of race and class, resulting in court battles and myriad humiliations. Sophie Okonedo (2004’s Hotel Rwanda) plays the rebellious adult Sandra, who must reject her upbringing to find an identity she can live with –- as opposed to the wishful-thinking one her parents insist upon. Based on the real protagonist’s memoir, Anthony Fabian’s first feature observes the institutional cruelty and eventual fall of apartheid from the uniquely vivid perspective of someone yanked from privilege to prejudice. It’s a sprawling, involving story that affords excellent opportunities for its very good lead actors (also including Tony Kgoroge as Sandra’s abusive eventual husband). (1:47) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

(Untitled) The sometimes absurd pretensions of the modern art world have –- for many decades –- been so easily, condescendingly ridiculed that its intelligently knowing satire is hard to come by. (How much harder still would it be for a fictive film to convey the genius of, say Anselm Kiefer? Even Ed Harris’ 2000 Pollock less vividly captured the art or its creation –- better done by Francis Ford Coppola and Nick Nolte in their 1989 New York Stories segment –- than the usual tortured-artist histrionics.) Bay Arean Jonathan Parker attempts to correct that with this perhaps overly low-key witticism. Erstwhile Hebrew Hammer Adam Goldberg plays a composer of painfully retro, plink-plunk 1950s avant-gardism. (His favorite instrument is the tin bucket.) His lack of success is inevitable yet chafes nonetheless, because he’s a) humorlessly self-important, and b) sibling to a painter (Eion Bailey) whose pleasant, unchallenging abstracts are hot properties amongst corporate-art buyers. But not hot enough for his gorgeous agent (Marley Shelton), who puts off showing him at her Chelsea gallery in favor of cartoonishly "edgy" artists –- like soccer hooligan Vinnie Jones as a proponent of lurid taxidermy sculpture –- and takes a contrary (if unlikely) fancy to Goldberg. (How could her educated like not know his music is even less cutting-edge than the brother’s canvases?) (Untitled) holds interest, but it’s at once too glib and modest –- exaggerative sans panache. This is equivalently if differently problematic from Parker’s 2005 Henry James-goes-Marin County The Californians. It can’t compare to his 2001 feature debut, the excellent Crispin Glover-starring translation of Melville’s Bartleby to Rhinoceros-like modern office culture. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Visual Acoustics Chances are you’ve seen one of Julius Shulman’s photographs. As the premiere architectural photographer during an outpouring of California-based creativity, Shulman captured the work of legends like Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright, transutf8g their constructive triumphs into powerful, iconic images. He is the subject of Visual Acoustics, a documentary by director Eric Bricker, which splits its time between the photographer’s long history and his current activities. A vital, avuncular nonagenarian, Shulman’s wit, optimistic outlook, and undimmed passion for design provide the film’s best moments; he is frequently found strolling arm and arm with the owner of some Modernist marvel, dispensing wisdom with a smile. The film is not strictly for the architectural cognoscenti, and though a familiarity with the medium is recommended, it holds up well enough as the story of a lovable, talented old man. (1:24) Lumiere. (Richardson)

ONGOING

Amelia Unending speculation surrounds the fate of aviator Amelia Earhart, who, with navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared in 1937 over the Pacific while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. However, Mira Nair’s biopic Amelia clarifies at least one fact: that Earhart (played by Hilary Swank) was a free-spirited freedom-loving lover of being free. We learn this through passages of her writing intoned in voice-over; during scenes with publisher and eventual husband George Putnam (Richard Gere); and via wildlife observations as she flies her Lockheed Electra over some 22,000 miles of the world. Not much could diminish the glory of Earhart’s achievements in aviation, particularly in helping open the field to other female pilots. And Swank creates the impression of a charming, intelligent, self-possessed woman who manages to sidestep many of fame’s pitfalls while remaining resolute in her lofty aims. She’s also slightly unknowable in her cheery, near-seamless virtue, and the film’s adoring depiction, with its broad, heavy strokes, at times inspires a different sort of restlessness than the kind that compels Earhart to take flight. Amelia is structured as a series of flashbacks in which the aviator, while circling the earth, retraces her life –- or rather, the highlights of her career in flying, her marriage to Putnam, and her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), another champion of aviation (and the father of author Gore). And this, too, begins to feel lazily repetitive, as we return and return again to that cockpit to stare at a doomed woman as she stares emotively into the wild blue yonder. (1:51) Oaks, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Antichrist Will history judge Lars von Trier as the genius he’s sure he is? Or as a humorless, slightly less cartoonish Ken Russell, whipping images and actors into contrived frenzies for ersatz art’s sake? You’re probably already on one side of the fence or the other. Notorious Cannes shocker Antichrist will only further divide the yeas and nays, though the film does offers perhaps the most formally beautiful filmmaking von Trier’s bothered with since 1984’s The Element of Crime. Grieving parents Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreat to a forest primeval enabling widescreen images of poetic succulence. Yet that beauty only underlines Antichrist‘s garishness. One film festival viewer purportedly barfed onto the next row — and you too might recoil, particularly if unaccustomed to gore levels routinely surpassed by mainstream horror. Does Antichrist earn such viewer punishment by dint of moral, character, narrative, or artistic heft? Like slurp it does. What could be more reactionary than an opening in which our protagonists "cause" their angelic babe’s accidental death by obliviously enjoying one another? Shot in "lyrical" slow-mo black and white, it’s a shampoo commercial hard-selling Victorian sexual guilt. Later, Dafoe’s "He" clings to hollow psychiatric reason as only an embittered perennial couch case might imagine. Gainsbourg’s "She" morphs from maternal mourner to castrating shrike as only one terrified of femininity could contrive. They’re tortured by psychological and/or supernatural events existing solely to bend game actors toward a tyrant artiste’s whims. There’s no devil here — just von Trier’s punitive narcissism. (1:49) Lumiere, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Astro Boy How can a robo-kid so cute be so sad? That’s the beautiful paradox of Astro Boy, the atomic age Japanese manga-cum-Pinocchio parable here given loving new life. Genius creator Osamu Tezuka’s original Astro Boy cannily grappled with the seductions and dangers of Japan’s economic miracle, the country’s conflicted emotions about the technology that fueled both Astro Boy and the war machine, and the struggle between industrialization and the environment. This update adds the recurring favorite sci-fi leitmotif of artificial intelligence — and by extension what it means to be human and non-human — to the mix. This adorable toaster (voiced by Freddie Highmore) awakens with memories of Toby, the brilliant, rebellious son of robotics genius Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage), believing he is a boy not a robot. The grief-stricken Tenma built him after the original Toby was killed during the test of a new robotic weapon. Eventually cast out by his Frankenstein father-creator and coping with some major identity issues, Astro Boy finds his place among a slew of outcasts on the now garbage- and robot part-strewn Wall-E-esque Earth, where his sense of compassion and mega powers threaten to bridge the seemingly insurmountable differences between humans and robots. Despite the speed with which director David Bowers and his team put together this animated feature, which boasts the voicings of stars like Charlize Theron and Nathan Lane, Astro Boy succeeds in delivering that crucial hybrid of action, comedy, and emotional heft that the best of classic animation offers, while touching lightly out relevant ideas about technology. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

*The Beaches of Agnès Director’s commentaries are par for the course in the DVD age, but few filmmakers posses the élan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory machine — she claims it’s her last — cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective, and installation. We begin on the beach, with the 80-year old Varda spryly instructing her young assistants on the placement of various mirrors. "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes," she explains of her motivation for filmmaking, before embarking on an unclassifiable daisy chain of reenactment and reminiscence. The film moves at the leisurely pace of the flâneur’s walk, the better to relish Varda’s joie de vivre and sweet bawdiness. Her chameleon colored bowl cut dares us to keep abreast of her quicksilver digressions on the past (fact or fiction matters less than then and now). As with 2000’s The Gleaners and I, she’s most free with the things she adores: blurry foregrounds, old photographs, heart-shaped potatoes, ancient frescoes, the human body and neighbors. "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, referring to her great love, Jacques Demy, and their life together loops The Beaches of Agnès with a beauty not soon forgotten. (1:40) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

*Bright Star Is beauty truth; truth, beauty? John Keats, the poet famed for such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and Jane Campion, the filmmaker intent on encapsuutf8g the last romance of the archetypal Romantic, would have undoubtedly bonded over a love of sensual details — and the way a certain vellum-like light can transport its viewer into elevated reverie. In truth, Campion doesn’t quite achieve the level of Keats’ verse with this somber glimpse at the tubercular writer and his final love, neighbor Fanny Brawne. But she does bottle some of their pale beauty. Less-educated than the already respected young scribe, Brawne nonetheless may have been his equal in imagination as a seamstress, judging from the petal-bonneted, ruffled-collar ensembles Campion outfits her in. As portrayed by the soulful-eyed Abbie Cornish, the otherwise-enigmatic, plucky Brawne is the singularly bright blossom ready to be wrapped in a poet’s adoration, worthy of rhapsody by Ben Whishaw’s shaggily, shabbily puppy-dog Keats, who snatches the preternaturally serene focus of a fine mind cut short by illness, with the gravitational pull of a serious indie-rock hottie. The two are drawn to each other like the butterflies flittering in Brawne’s bedroom/farm, one of the most memorable scenes in the dark yet sweetly glimmering Bright Star. Bathing her scenes in lengthy silence, shot through with far-from-flowery dialogue, Campion is at odds with this love story, so unlike her joyful 1990 ode to author Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (Kerry Fox appears here, too, as Fanny’s mother): the filmmaker refuses to overplay it, sidestepping Austenian sprightliness. Instead she embraces the dark differences, the negative inevitability, of this death-steeped coupling, welcoming the odd glance at the era’s intellectual life, the interplay of light and shadow. (1:59) Elmwood. (Chun)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Albany, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

Couples Retreat You could call Couples Retreat a romantic comedy, but that would imply that it was romantic and funny instead of an insipid, overlong waste of time. This story of a group of married friends trying to bond with their spouses in an exotic island locale is a failure on every level. Romantic? The titular couples — four total — represent eight of the most obnoxious characters in recent memory. Sure, you’re rooting for them to work out their issues, but that’s only because awful people deserve one another. (And in a scene with an almost-shark attack, you’re rooting for the shark.) Funny? The jokes are, at best, juvenile (boners are silly!) and, at worse, offensive (sexism and homophobia once more reign supreme). There is an impressive array of talent here: Vince Vaugh, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Jean Reno, etc. Alas, there’s no excusing the script, which puts these otherwise solid actors into exceedingly unlikable roles. Even the gorgeous island scenery — Couples Retreat was filmed on location in Bora-Bora — can’t make up for this waterlogged mess. (1:47) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Peitzman)

*The Damned United Like last year’s Frost/Nixon, The Damned United features a lush 70’s backdrop, a screenplay by Peter Morgan, and a commanding performance by Michael Sheen as an ambitious egotist. A promising young actor, Sheen puts on the sharp tongue and charismatic monomania of real-life British soccer coach Brian Clough like a familiar garment, blustering his way through a fictionalized account of Clough’s unsuccessful 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United. Though the details of high-stakes professional "football" will likely be lost on American viewers, the tale of a talented, flawed sports hero spiraling deeper into obsession needs no trans-Atlantic translation, and the film is an engrossing portrait of a captivating, quotable character. (1:38) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Richardson)

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Albany, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Good Hair Spurred by his little daughter’s plaintive query ("Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?"), Chris Rock gets his Michael Moore freak on and sets out to uncover the racial and cultural implications of African-American hairstyling. Visiting beauty salons, talking to specialists, and interviewing celebrities ranging from Maya Angelou to Ice-T, the comic wisecracks his way into some pretty trenchant insights about how black women’s coiffures can often reflect Caucasian-set definitions of beauty. (Leave it to Rev. Al Sharpton to voice it ingeniously: "You comb your oppression every morning!") Rock makes an affable guide in Jeff Stilson’s breezy documentary, which posits the hair industry as a global affair where relaxers work as "nap-antidotes" and locks sacrificially shorn in India end up as pricey weaves in Beverly Hills. Maybe startled by his more disquieting discoveries, Rock shifts the focus to flamboyant, crowd-pleasing shenanigans at the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show. Despite such softball detours, it’s a genial and revealing tour. (1:35) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Croce)

*Heart of Stone With metal-detectors blocking its entrance, gang fights breaking out in the halls, and teachers wearing bulletproof vests, it’s clear that Weequahic High School is not your usual blackboard jungle. Once one of the nation’s most respected schools, the Newark, NJ institution was by 2000 plagued by the urban violence that claimed an alarming number of lives. Beth Toni Kruvant’s first-rate documentary chronicles the place’s gradual recovery thanks to Ron Stone, the passionate principal who, using a mixture of diplomacy and compassion, struggled to control the brutality that loomed over a new generation of students. Though similar in subject to Rollin Binzer’s recent The Providence Effect, Heart of Stone is easily the better film, less an infomercial for enrollment than a tough-minded analysis of the historical upheavals and social conditions forming Weequahic’s fall and rise. "Inspiring" is an abused term when it comes to movies about teachers, but Kruvant’s inquiry and Stone’s dedication earn it. (1:24) Roxie. (Croce)

Inglourious Basterds With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be. The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Mélanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual; brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (2:30) Oaks. (Harvey)

The Invention of Lying Great concept. Great cast. All The Invention of Lying needed was a great script editor and it might have reached classic comedy territory. As it stands, it’s dragged down to mediocrity by a weak third act. This is the story of a world where no one can lie — and we’re not just talking about big lies either. The Invention of Lying presents a vision of no sarcasm, no white lies, no — gasp —creative fiction. All that changes when Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) realizes he can bend the truth. And because no one else can, everything Mark makes up becomes fact to the rubes around him. If you guessed that hilarity ensues, you’re right on the money! Watching Mark use his powers for evil (robbing the bank! seducing women!) makes for a very funny first hour. Then things take a turn for the heavy when Mark becomes a prophet by letting slip his vision of the afterlife. Faster than you can say "Jesus beard," he’s rocking a God complex and the audience is longing for the simpler laughs, like Jennifer Garner admitting to some pre-date masturbation. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Law Abiding Citizen "Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) as re-imagined by the Saw franchise folks" apparently sounded like a sweet pitch to someone, because here we are, stuck with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler playing bloody and increasingly ludicrous cat-and-mouse games. Foxx stars as a slick Philadelphia prosecutor whose deal-cutting careerist ways go easy on the scummy criminals responsible for murdering the wife and daughter of a local inventor (Butler). Cut to a decade later, and the doleful widower has become a vengeful mastermind with a yen for Hannibal Lecter-like skills, gruesome contraptions, and lines like "Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten." Butler metes out punishment to his family’s killers as well as to the bureocratic minions who let them off the hook. But the talk of moral consequences is less a critique of a faulty judicial system than mere white noise, vainly used by director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer in hopes of classing up a grinding exploitation drama. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness. (Croce)

*Michael Jackson’s This Is It Time –- and a tragic early death –- has a way of coloring perception, so little surprise that these thought pops into one’s head throughout This Is It: when did Michael Jackson transform himself into such an elegant, haute-pop sylph? Such a pixie-nosed, lacy-haired petit four of music-making delicacy? And where can I get his to-die-for, pointy-shouldered, rhinestone-lapeled Alexander McQueen-ish jacket? Something a bit bewitching this way comes as Michael Jackson –- now that he’s gone, seemingly less freakish than an outright phenomenon –- gracefully flits across the screen in this final (really?) document of his last hurrah, the rehearsals for his sold-out shows at O2 Arena in London. This Is It is far from perfect: this grainy video scratchpad of a film obviously wasn’t designed by the perfectionist MJ to be his final testament to pop. Director Kenny Ortega does his best to cobble together what looks like several rehearsal performances with teary testimonials from dancers (instilled with the intriguing idea that they are extensions of the surgery-friendly Jackson’s body onstage), interviews with musicians, minimal archival footage, and glimpses of Jacko protesting about being encouraged to "sing through" certain songs when he’s trying to preserve his voice, urging the band to play it "like the record," and still moving, dancing, and gesticuutf8g with such grace that you’re left with more than a tinge of regret that "This Is It," the tour, never came to pass. It’s a pure, albeit adulterated, pleasure to watch the man do the do, even with the gaps in the flow, even with the footage filtered by a family intent on propping up the franchise. Amid the artistry and kitsch, critics, pop academics, and superfans will find plenty to chew over –- from Jackson’s curiously timed physical complaints as the Jackson 5 segment kicks in, to the surreally CGI-ed, golden-age-of-Hollywood mash-up sequence. (1:52) Cerrito , Empire, Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

My One and Only (1:48) Opera Plaza.

New York, I Love You A dreamy mash note to the city that never sleeps, New York, I Love You is the latest installment in a series of omnibus odes to world metropolises and the denizens that live and love within the city limits. Less successful than the Paris, je t’aime (2006) anthology — which roped in such disparate international directors as Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron and Olivier Assayas — New York welcomes a more minor-key host of directors to the project with enjoyable if light-weight results. Surely any bite of the Big Apple would be considerably sexier. Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo tease out a one-night stand with legs, and Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q generate a wee bit of verbal fire over street-side cigs, yet there’s surprisingly little heat in this take on a few of the 8 million stories in the archetypal naked city. Most memorable are the strangest couplings, such as that of Natalie Portman, a Hasidic bride who flirtatiously haggles with Irrfan Khan, a Jain diamond merchant, in a tale directed by Mira Nair. Despite the pleasure of witnessing Julie Christie, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman in action, many of these pieces — written by the late Anthony Minghella, Israel Horovitz, and Portman, among others — feel a mite too slight to nail down the attention of all but the most desperate romantics. (1:43) Bridge, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (1:16) Castro.

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Saw VI (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Marina. (Chun)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Stepfather (1:41) 1000 Van Ness.

Where the Wild Things Are From the richly delineated illustrations and sparse text of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, director Spike Jonze and cowriter (with Jones) Dave Eggers have constructed a full-length film about the passions, travails, and interior/exterior wanderings of Sendak’s energetic young antihero, Max. Equally prone to feats of world-building and fits of overpowering, destructive rage, Max (Max Records) stampedes off into the night during one of the latter and journeys to the island where the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Michael Berry Jr.) live — and bicker and tantrum and give in to existential despair and no longer all sleep together in a big pile. The place has possibilities, though, and Max, once crowned king, tries his best to realize them. What its inhabitants need, however, is not so much a visionary king as a good family therapist — these are some gripey, defensive, passive-aggressive Wild Things, and Max, aged somewhere around 10, can’t fix their interpersonal problems. Jonze and Eggers do well at depicting Max’s temporary kingdom, its forests and deserts, its creatures and their half-finished creations from a past golden era, as well as subtly reminding us now and again that all of this — the island, the arguments, the sadness — is streaming from the mind of a fierce, wildly imaginative young child with familial troubles of his own, equally beyond his power to resolve. They’ve also invested the film with a slow, grim depressive mood that can make for unsettling viewing, particularly when pondering the Maxes in the audience, digesting an oft-disheartening tale about family conflict and relationship repair. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Whip It What’s a girl to do? Stuck in small town hell, Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page), the gawky teen heroine of Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, faces a pressing dilemma — conform to the standards of stifling beauty pageantry to appease her mother or rebel and enter the rough-and tumble world of roller derby. Shockingly enough, Bliss chooses to escape to Austin and join the Hurl Scouts, a rowdy band of misfits led by the maternal Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig) and the accident-prone Smashley Simpson (Barrymore). Making a bid for grrrl empowerment, Bliss dawns a pair of skates, assumes the moniker Babe Ruthless, and is suddenly throwing her weight around not only in the rink, but also in school where she’s bullied. Painfully predictable, the action comes to a head when, lo and behold, the dates for the Bluebonnet Pageant and the roller derby championship coincide. At times funny and charming with understated performances by Page and Alia Shawcat as Bliss’ best friend, Whip It can’t overcome its paper-thin characters, plot contrivances, and requisite scenery chewing by Jimmy Fallon as a cheesy announcer and Juliette Lewis as a cutthroat competitor. (1:51) SF Center. (Swanbeck)

*The Yes Men Fix the World Can you prank shame, if not sense, into the Powers That Be? Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, the jesters-activists who punked right-wing big-business in the documentary The Yes Men (2003), continue to play Groucho Marx to capitalism’s mortified Margaret Dumont in this gleeful sequel. Decked in sharp suits and packing fake websites and catchphrases, the duo bluffs its way into conferences and proceeds to give corporate giants the Borat treatment. The stunts are often inspired and, in their visions of fantasy justice, poignant: Bichlbaum and Bonnano pose as Dow envoys and announce the company’s plans to send billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, and later appear as HUD representatives offering a corrective to the shameful neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Yes Men may not fix the world, but their ruses once more prove the awareness-raising potential of comedy. (1:30) Oaks, Roxie, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Croce)

*Zombieland First things first: it’s clever, but it ain’t no Shaun of the Dead (2004). That said, Zombieland is an outstanding zombie comedy, largely thanks to Woody Harrelson’s performance as Tallahassee, a tough guy whose passion for offing the undead is rivaled only by his raging Twinkie jones. Set in a world where zombies have already taken over (the beginning stages of the outbreak are glimpsed only in flashback), Zombieland presents the creatures as yet another annoyance for Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nearly finished morphing into Michael Cera), a onetime antisocial shut-in who has survived only by sticking to a strict set of rules (the "double tap," or always shooting each zombie twice, etc.) This odd couple meets a sister team (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who eventually lay off their grifting ways so that Columbus can have a love interest (in Stone) and Tallahassee, still smarting from losing a loved one to zombies, can soften up a scoch by schooling the erstwhile Little Miss Sunshine in target practice. Sure, it’s a little heavy on the nerd-boy voiceover, but Zombieland has just enough goofiness and gushing guts to counteract all them brrraiiinss. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

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Editorial: The next Gavin Newsom

EDITORIAL It’s possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn’t what he wanted right now. It’s possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one’s political career." It’s possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

But since it’s also possible — even likely — that Newsom still hopes to have a political career, and that his decision to drop out of the governor’s race was as much about his failure to gain any traction as it was about his family obligations, it’s worth talking about why his campaign failed and what he can and should do next.

For starters, Newsom never expected to beat Attorney General Jerry Brown in the big-donor fundraising battle. He was hoping to put together a grassroots operation, to mobilize the Obama constituency, and build a war chest with tens of thousands of small donors organized through social media and technology. And that kind of effort could have worked — Brown has name recognition and money, but not much else. It’s hard to imagine large masses of young activists donating time and energy to his primary campaign.

The problem was, those legions of California activists weren’t terribly excited about Newsom either. And there are good reasons for that — reasons Newsom needs to understand if he wants to run for statewide elected office in the future.

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn’t support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement in a Democratic primary.

Now he’s back from the campaign trail — and he has two years to pick up on the lessons of his ignominious political collapse. If he wants any kind of a political future, he needs to change. First, he needs to start engaging and working with the supervisors — even the ones who disagree with him. (Showing up for "question time" would be a huge step). He needs to take the city’s structural budget deficit seriously and present plans for progressive taxes to help close it. He needs to show he can take on big powerful local interests — PG&E, for example — by opposing the utility’s anti-public power initiative and putting his political capital on the line to support community choice aggregation.

Newsom the imperial mayor has, we hope, been a bit humbled. Let’s see if he comes out of this chapter as an embittered, angry (and ultimately unsuccessful) mayor committed to punishing his enemies — or a serious city leader who can live up to his own hype.

Film listings

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Film listings

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, Matt Sussman, and Laura Swanbeck. The film intern is Fernando F. Croce. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

SF DOCFEST

The eighth annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival runs through Oct 29 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets ($11) are available by visiting www.sfindie.com. All times p.m.

WED/28

American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art 7. The Great Contemporary Art Bubble 7. The Philosopher Kings 9:15. Pop Star on Ice 9:15.

THURS/20

Nursery University 7. Speaking in Code 7. Trimpin: The Sound of Invention 9:15. Cropsey 9:15.

OPENING

*The Beaches of Agnès Director’s commentaries are par for the course in the DVD age, but few filmmakers posses the élan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory machine — she claims it’s her last — cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective, and installation. We begin on the beach, with the 80-year old Varda spryly instructing her young assistants on the placement of various mirrors. "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes," she explains of her motivation for filmmaking, before embarking on an unclassifiable daisy chain of reenactment and reminiscence. The film moves at the leisurely pace of the flâneur’s walk, the better to relish Varda’s joie de vivre and sweet bawdiness. Her chameleon colored bowl cut dares us to keep abreast of her quicksilver digressions on the past (fact or fiction matters less than then and now). As with 2000’s The Gleaners and I, she’s most free with the things she adores: blurry foregrounds, old photographs, heart-shaped potatoes, ancient frescoes, the human body and neighbors. "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, referring to her great love, Jacques Demy, and their life together loops The Beaches of Agnès with a beauty not soon forgotten. (1:40) Opera Plaza. (Goldberg)

Brain Dead With the zombedy combedy genre — I’m sick of "zomcom," aren’t you? — having reached mass impact via Zombietown, you might be hungry if not chalk-facedly ravenous for more of the same. In which case you’ll enjoy this Thrillville-presented West Coast theatrical debut of 1980s horror fave (1986’s Witchboard) Kevin Tenney’s own more modestly scaled mixup of undead mayhem and laughs. When a tiny asteroid lands in a rural area — instantly turning one unlucky fisherman into green-faced chomper and his buddy into lunch — it’s not long before shambling carnivores are imperiling the requisite cabinful of ill-matched strandees. Their number include a televangelist, lost sorority sisters, and two escaped convicts, one nice and one psycho-mean. While the latter takes everyone hostage at gunpoint, those carnivorous ghouls gathering outside have a strictly take-no-hostages policy. They’ll take brains, though. BRAAAAAAAAINS!!! Brain Dead is fun — if kinda dumb fun, compared to Shaun of the Dead or even Zombieland. (Let alone Peter Jackson’s 1992 splatsterpiece Braindead, or the 1990 Bill Paxton-Bill Pullman non-zom horror faceoff also called Brain Dead). But if it lacks that special edge of originality and/or wit, it’s still a whole lot better than 2008’s Zombie Strippers, of which we shall never speak again. (1:35) Four Star. (Harvey)

*Bronson In 2000’s Chopper (2000), Eric Bana killed as Australia’s most notorious psychotic extortionist-killer-jailbird-celebrity autobiographer — more vividly than in any part serving his subsequent, slightly bland leading-hunk status. Tom Hardy is another handsome bloke at risk of looking competent and versatile without fully impressing. Yet here comes Bronson, a film (and role) offering up a dramatized "Man. Myth. Celebrity" (as per its ad line) of actual "worst prisoner in Britain." The real Michael Gordon Peterson, better known as "Charles Bronson" (a PR-minded friend fitted the Death Wish star as nom de notoriety), was an extreme anger-management case whose working-class struggle ended when he robbed a post office in 1974. As the film details, prison spectacularly agreed with him. He enjoyed the tension and violence — between himself and fellow inmates as well as guards — so much that he got sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital. Worry not: even drugged to the gills, he managed to create ruckuses that won national attention. This is the second English-language directing effort by Dane Nicolas Winding Refn, of the crime-drama Pusher trilogy. Bronson is utterly revved up in a way that’s showy but not at all dumbed-down, and it’s pure cinematic inspiration at least half-transcending even a case of snarkish homophobia as you haven’t seen since … well, Chopper maybe? (1:32) Lumiere. (Harvey)

The Canyon See "Into the Wild." (1:42) Opera Plaza.

Gentlemen Broncos The latest from Napoleon Dynamite (2004) director Jared Hess is about a Utah teen (Michael Angarano) who is obsessed with science fiction. (1:51)

*Heart of Stone With metal-detectors blocking its entrance, gang fights breaking out in the halls, and teachers wearing bulletproof vests, it’s clear that Weequahic High School is not your usual blackboard jungle. Once one of the nation’s most respected schools, the Newark, NJ institution was by 2000 plagued by the urban violence that claimed an alarming number of lives. Beth Toni Kruvant’s first-rate documentary chronicles the place’s gradual recovery thanks to Ron Stone, the passionate principal who, using a mixture of diplomacy and compassion, struggled to control the brutality that loomed over a new generation of students. Though similar in subject to Rollin Binzer’s recent The Providence Effect, Heart of Stone is easily the better film, less an infomercial for enrollment than a tough-minded analysis of the historical upheavals and social conditions forming Weequahic’s fall and rise. "Inspiring" is an abused term when it comes to movies about teachers, but Kruvant’s inquiry and Stone’s dedication earn it. (1:24) Roxie. (Croce)

Michael Jackson’s This Is It This concert doc compiles behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage for what would have been Jacko’s run of London shows. (1:52) Cerrito , Four Star, Marina.

Walt and El Grupo This highly authorized documentary chronicles the 1941 South American tour Disney staff took as part of the U.S. "Good Neighbor" policies. The creative results were several fascinating wartime pastiches, including 1944’s anarchic, marvelous feature Three Caballeros. But that last is inexplicably not excerpted here — while tedious home-movie footage with Walt and company on their well-recorded trip, not to mention surviving relatives’ clucking over how wonderful it all was, go on and on. It’s worth noting that this studio vanity project has reached theaters, if minimally — while John-Paul Davidson and Trudi Styler’s The Sweatbox, an unvarnished behind-scenes portrait of the thorny processes behind latter-day Disney ‘toon The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), mysteriously vanished from the planet after its 2002 festival debut. That documentary offered real insight without reducing appreciation for its original talents. This one is a timid, worshipful bore. (1:46) (Harvey)

*The Yes Men Fix the World Can you prank shame, if not sense, into the Powers That Be? Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, the jesters-activists who punked right-wing big-business in the documentary The Yes Men (2003), continue to play Groucho Marx to capitalism’s mortified Margaret Dumont in this gleeful sequel. Decked in sharp suits and packing fake websites and catchphrases, the duo bluffs its way into conferences and proceeds to give corporate giants the Borat treatment. The stunts are often inspired and, in their visions of fantasy justice, poignant: Bichlbaum and Bonnano pose as Dow envoys and announce the company’s plans to send billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, and later appear as HUD representatives offering a corrective to the shameful neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Yes Men may not fix the world, but their ruses once more prove the awareness-raising potential of comedy. (1:30) Oaks, Roxie. (Croce)

ONGOING

Amelia Unending speculation surrounds the fate of aviator Amelia Earhart, who, with navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared in 1937 over the Pacific while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. However, Mira Nair’s biopic Amelia clarifies at least one fact: that Earhart (played by Hilary Swank) was a free-spirited freedom-loving lover of being free. We learn this through passages of her writing intoned in voice-over; during scenes with publisher and eventual husband George Putnam (Richard Gere); and via wildlife observations as she flies her Lockheed Electra over some 22,000 miles of the world. Not much could diminish the glory of Earhart’s achievements in aviation, particularly in helping open the field to other female pilots. And Swank creates the impression of a charming, intelligent, self-possessed woman who manages to sidestep many of fame’s pitfalls while remaining resolute in her lofty aims. She’s also slightly unknowable in her cheery, near-seamless virtue, and the film’s adoring depiction, with its broad, heavy strokes, at times inspires a different sort of restlessness than the kind that compels Earhart to take flight. Amelia is structured as a series of flashbacks in which the aviator, while circling the earth, retraces her life –- or rather, the highlights of her career in flying, her marriage to Putnam, and her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), another champion of aviation (and the father of author Gore). And this, too, begins to feel lazily repetitive, as we return and return again to that cockpit to stare at a doomed woman as she stares emotively into the wild blue yonder. (1:51) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Antichrist Will history judge Lars von Trier as the genius he’s sure he is? Or as a humorless, slightly less cartoonish Ken Russell, whipping images and actors into contrived frenzies for ersatz art’s sake? You’re probably already on one side of the fence or the other. Notorious Cannes shocker Antichrist will only further divide the yeas and nays, though the film does offers perhaps the most formally beautiful filmmaking von Trier’s bothered with since 1984’s The Element of Crime. Grieving parents Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe retreat to a forest primeval enabling widescreen images of poetic succulence. Yet that beauty only underlines Antichrist‘s garishness. One film festival viewer purportedly barfed onto the next row — and you too might recoil, particularly if unaccustomed to gore levels routinely surpassed by mainstream horror. Does Antichrist earn such viewer punishment by dint of moral, character, narrative, or artistic heft? Like slurp it does. What could be more reactionary than an opening in which our protagonists "cause" their angelic babe’s accidental death by obliviously enjoying one another? Shot in "lyrical" slow-mo black and white, it’s a shampoo commercial hard-selling Victorian sexual guilt.

Later, Dafoe’s "He" clings to hollow psychiatric reason as only an embittered perennial couch case might imagine. Gainsbourg’s "She" morphs from maternal mourner to castrating shrike as only one terrified of femininity could contrive. They’re tortured by psychological and/or supernatural events existing solely to bend game actors toward a tyrant artiste’s whims. There’s no devil here — just von Trier’s punitive narcissism. (1:49) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Astro Boy How can a robo-kid so cute be so sad? That’s the beautiful paradox of Astro Boy, the atomic age Japanese manga-cum-Pinocchio parable here given loving new life. Genius creator Osamu Tezuka’s original Astro Boy cannily grappled with the seductions and dangers of Japan’s economic miracle, the country’s conflicted emotions about the technology that fueled both Astro Boy and the war machine, and the struggle between industrialization and the environment. This update adds the recurring favorite sci-fi leitmotif of artificial intelligence — and by extension what it means to be human and non-human — to the mix. This adorable toaster (voiced by Freddie Highmore) awakens with memories of Toby, the brilliant, rebellious son of robotics genius Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage), believing he is a boy not a robot. The grief-stricken Tenma built him after the original Toby was killed during the test of a new robotic weapon. Eventually cast out by his Frankenstein father-creator and coping with some major identity issues, Astro Boy finds his place among a slew of outcasts on the now garbage- and robot part-strewn Wall-E-esque Earth, where his sense of compassion and mega powers threaten to bridge the seemingly insurmountable differences between humans and robots. Despite the speed with which director David Bowers and his team put together this animated feature, which boasts the voicings of stars like Charlize Theron and Nathan Lane, Astro Boy succeeds in delivering that crucial hybrid of action, comedy, and emotional heft that the best of classic animation offers, while touching lightly out relevant ideas about technology. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Big Fan The Wrestler screenwriter Robert Siegel continues to trawl tri-state working class blues for his directorial debut, Big Fan, a darkened fairy tale of sports mania and the male ego. Sandpaper rough comic Patton Oswalt is Paul Aufiero, a thirtysomething New York Giants nut who lives with his mother and scripts huffy raps for his nightly 1AM "Paul from Staten Island" call to the local sports radio station. Siegel locates a revealing stage for anxious performances of masculinity in the motor-mouthed rituals of sports talk radio. Big Fan is at its best when Aufiero is locked in dubious battle with abstract foes like "Philadelphia Phil," but the film starts to slow down as soon as our anti-hero and his lone pal Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spot Giants QB Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm) at a Staten Island gas station. They tail him to a strip club in New York City, where Bishop gives Aufiero a bruising upon discovering he’s been followed, thus compromising the Giants’ playoff chances. What a tangled web we weave and all that. It’s telling of Siegel’s limited talents that the best part of the fateful trip into Manhattan is Oswalt’s grimace when faced with a nine buck Budweiser. We’re so hungry for any kind of regionalism in mainstream filmmaking that even Big Fan‘s cheapest shots (all its women characters, for instance) don’t overpower the pleasure of Oswalt’s marshy profanities and the provincial jabber of New York vs. Philadelphia and Staten Island vs. Manhattan. (1:35) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

*Bright Star Is beauty truth; truth, beauty? John Keats, the poet famed for such works as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and Jane Campion, the filmmaker intent on encapsuutf8g the last romance of the archetypal Romantic, would have undoubtedly bonded over a love of sensual details — and the way a certain vellum-like light can transport its viewer into elevated reverie. In truth, Campion doesn’t quite achieve the level of Keats’ verse with this somber glimpse at the tubercular writer and his final love, neighbor Fanny Brawne. But she does bottle some of their pale beauty. Less-educated than the already respected young scribe, Brawne nonetheless may have been his equal in imagination as a seamstress, judging from the petal-bonneted, ruffled-collar ensembles Campion outfits her in. As portrayed by the soulful-eyed Abbie Cornish, the otherwise-enigmatic, plucky Brawne is the singularly bright blossom ready to be wrapped in a poet’s adoration, worthy of rhapsody by Ben Whishaw’s shaggily, shabbily puppy-dog Keats, who snatches the preternaturally serene focus of a fine mind cut short by illness, with the gravitational pull of a serious indie-rock hottie. The two are drawn to each other like the butterflies flittering in Brawne’s bedroom/farm, one of the most memorable scenes in the dark yet sweetly glimmering Bright Star. Bathing her scenes in lengthy silence, shot through with far-from-flowery dialogue, Campion is at odds with this love story, so unlike her joyful 1990 ode to author Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (Kerry Fox appears here, too, as Fanny’s mother): the filmmaker refuses to overplay it, sidestepping Austenian sprightliness. Instead she embraces the dark differences, the negative inevitability, of this death-steeped coupling, welcoming the odd glance at the era’s intellectual life, the interplay of light and shadow. (1:59) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Chun)

*Capitalism: A Love Story Gun control. The Bush administration. Healthcare. Over the past decade, Michael Moore has tackled some of the most contentious issues with his trademark blend of humor and liberal rage. In Capitalism: A Love Story, he sets his sights on an even grander subject. Where to begin when you’re talking about an economic system that has defined this nation? Predictably, Moore’s focus is on all those times capitalism has failed. By this point, his tactics are familiar, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. As with Sicko (2007), Moore proves he can restrain himself — he gets plenty of screen time, but he spends more time than ever behind the camera. This isn’t about Moore; it’s about the United States. When he steps out of the limelight, he’s ultimately more effective, crafting a film that’s bipartisan in nature, not just in name. No, he’s not likely to please all, but for every Glenn Beck, there’s a sane moderate wondering where all the money has gone. (2:07) California, Empire, Grand Lake, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (1:48) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (1:21) Oaks.

Coco Before Chanel Like her designs, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was elegant, très chic, and utterly original. Director Anne Fontaine’s French biopic traces Coco (Audrey Tautou) from her childhood as a struggling orphan to one of the most influential designers of the 20th century. You’ll be disappointed if you expect a fashionista’s up close and personal look at the House of Chanel, as Fontaine keeps her story firmly rooted in Coco’s past, including her destructive relationship with French playboy Etienne Balsar (Benoît Poelvoorde) and her ill-fated love affair with dashing Englishman Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). The film functions best in scenes that display Coco’s imagination and aesthetic magnetism, like when she dances with Capel in her now famous "little black dress" amidst a sea of stiff, white meringues. Tautou imparts a quiet courage and quick wit as the trailblazing designer, and Nivola is unmistakably charming and compassionate as Boy. Nevertheless, Fontaine rushes the ending and never truly seizes the opportunity to explore how Coco’s personal life seeped into her timeless designs that were, in the end, an extension of herself. (1:50) Albany, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Swanbeck)

Couples Retreat You could call Couples Retreat a romantic comedy, but that would imply that it was romantic and funny instead of an insipid, overlong waste of time. This story of a group of married friends trying to bond with their spouses in an exotic island locale is a failure on every level. Romantic? The titular couples — four total — represent eight of the most obnoxious characters in recent memory. Sure, you’re rooting for them to work out their issues, but that’s only because awful people deserve one another. (And in a scene with an almost-shark attack, you’re rooting for the shark.) Funny? The jokes are, at best, juvenile (boners are silly!) and, at worse, offensive (sexism and homophobia once more reign supreme). There is an impressive array of talent here: Vince Vaugh, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Jean Reno, etc. Alas, there’s no excusing the script, which puts these otherwise solid actors into exceedingly unlikable roles. Even the gorgeous island scenery — Couples Retreat was filmed on location in Bora-Bora — can’t make up for this waterlogged mess. (1:47) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

*The Damned United Like last year’s Frost/Nixon, The Damned United features a lush 70’s backdrop, a screenplay by Peter Morgan, and a commanding performance by Michael Sheen as an ambitious egotist. A promising young actor, Sheen puts on the sharp tongue and charismatic monomania of real-life British soccer coach Brian Clough like a familiar garment, blustering his way through a fictionalized account of Clough’s unsuccessful 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United. Though the details of high-stakes professional "football" will likely be lost on American viewers, the tale of a talented, flawed sports hero spiraling deeper into obsession needs no trans-Atlantic translation, and the film is an engrossing portrait of a captivating, quotable character. (1:38) Elmwood, Embarcadero. (Richardson)

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Albany, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Good Hair Spurred by his little daughter’s plaintive query ("Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?"), Chris Rock gets his Michael Moore freak on and sets out to uncover the racial and cultural implications of African-American hairstyling. Visiting beauty salons, talking to specialists, and interviewing celebrities ranging from Maya Angelou to Ice-T, the comic wisecracks his way into some pretty trenchant insights about how black women’s coiffures can often reflect Caucasian-set definitions of beauty. (Leave it to Rev. Al Sharpton to voice it ingeniously: "You comb your oppression every morning!") Rock makes an affable guide in Jeff Stilson’s breezy documentary, which posits the hair industry as a global affair where relaxers work as "nap-antidotes" and locks sacrificially shorn in India end up as pricey weaves in Beverly Hills. Maybe startled by his more disquieting discoveries, Rock shifts the focus to flamboyant, crowd-pleasing shenanigans at the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show. Despite such softball detours, it’s a genial and revealing tour. (1:35) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Croce)

Inglourious Basterds With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Nonetheless, Basterds is more fun, with less guilt, than it has any right to be. The "basterds" are Tennessee moonshiner Pvt. Brad Pitt’s unit of Jewish soldiers committed to infuriating Der Fuhrer by literally scalping all the uniformed Nazis they can bag. Meanwhile a survivor (Mélanie Laurent) of one of insidious SS "Jew Hunter" Christoph Waltz’s raids, now passing as racially "pure" and operating a Paris cinema (imagine the cineaste name-dropping possibilities!) finds her venue hosting a Third Reich hoedown that provides an opportunity to nuke Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering in one swoop. Tactically, Tarantino’s movies have always been about the ventriloquizing of that yadadada-yadadada whose self-consciousness is bearable because the cleverness is actual; brief eruptions of lasciviously enjoyed violence aside, Basterds too almost entirely consists of lengthy dialogues or near-monologues in which characters pitch and receive tasty palaver amid lethal danger. Still, even if he’s practically writing theatre now, Tarantino does understand the language of cinema. There isn’t a pin-sharp edit, actor’s raised eyebrow, artful design excess, or musical incongruity here that isn’t just the business. (2:30) Oaks, SF Center. (Harvey)

*The Informant! The best satire makes you uncomfortable, but nothing will make you squirm in your seat like a true story that feels like satire. Director Steven Soderbergh introduces the exploits of real-life agribusiness whistleblower Mark Whitacre with whimsical fonts and campy music — just enough to get the audience’s guard down. As the pitch-perfect Matt Damon — laden with 30 extra pounds and a fright-wig toupee — gee-whizzes his way through an increasingly complicated role, Soderbergh doles out subtle doses of torturous reality, peeling back the curtain to reveal a different, unexpected curtain behind it. Informant!’s tale of board-room malfeasance is filled with mis-directing cameos, jokes, and devices, and its ingenious, layered narrative will provoke both anti-capitalist outrage and a more chimerical feeling of satisfied frustration. Above all, it’s disquietingly great. (1:48) SF Center. (Richardson)

The Invention of Lying Great concept. Great cast. All The Invention of Lying needed was a great script editor and it might have reached classic comedy territory. As it stands, it’s dragged down to mediocrity by a weak third act. This is the story of a world where no one can lie — and we’re not just talking about big lies either. The Invention of Lying presents a vision of no sarcasm, no white lies, no — gasp —creative fiction. All that changes when Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) realizes he can bend the truth. And because no one else can, everything Mark makes up becomes fact to the rubes around him. If you guessed that hilarity ensues, you’re right on the money! Watching Mark use his powers for evil (robbing the bank! seducing women!) makes for a very funny first hour. Then things take a turn for the heavy when Mark becomes a prophet by letting slip his vision of the afterlife. Faster than you can say "Jesus beard," he’s rocking a God complex and the audience is longing for the simpler laughs, like Jennifer Garner admitting to some pre-date masturbation. (1:40) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Law Abiding Citizen "Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) as re-imagined by the Saw franchise folks" apparently sounded like a sweet pitch to someone, because here we are, stuck with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler playing bloody and increasingly ludicrous cat-and-mouse games. Foxx stars as a slick Philadelphia prosecutor whose deal-cutting careerist ways go easy on the scummy criminals responsible for murdering the wife and daughter of a local inventor (Butler). Cut to a decade later, and the doleful widower has become a vengeful mastermind with a yen for Hannibal Lecter-like skills, gruesome contraptions, and lines like "Lessons not learned in blood are soon forgotten." Butler metes out punishment to his family’s killers as well as to the bureocratic minions who let them off the hook. But the talk of moral consequences is less a critique of a faulty judicial system than mere white noise, vainly used by director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer in hopes of classing up a grinding exploitation drama. (1:48) 1000 Van Ness. (Croce)

My One and Only (1:48) Opera Plaza.

New York, I Love You A dreamy mash note to the city that never sleeps, New York, I Love You is the latest installment in a series of omnibus odes to world metropolises and the denizens that live and love within the city limits. Less successful than the Paris, je t’aime (2006) anthology — which roped in such disparate international directors as Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron and Olivier Assayas — New York welcomes a more minor-key host of directors to the project with enjoyable if light-weight results. Surely any bite of the Big Apple would be considerably sexier. Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo tease out a one-night stand with legs, and Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q generate a wee bit of verbal fire over street-side cigs, yet there’s surprisingly little heat in this take on a few of the 8 million stories in the archetypal naked city. Most memorable are the strangest couplings, such as that of Natalie Portman, a Hasidic bride who flirtatiously haggles with Irrfan Khan, a Jain diamond merchant, in a tale directed by Mira Nair. Despite the pleasure of witnessing Julie Christie, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman in action, many of these pieces — written by the late Anthony Minghella, Israel Horovitz, and Portman, among others — feel a mite too slight to nail down the attention of all but the most desperate romantics. (1:43) Bridge, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (1:16) Castro, Grand Lake.

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning Important: though it does star the original’s Tony Jaa, this is not a sequel to 2003 Thai hit Ong-bak, about a pious martial-arts master who journeys to the big city to retrieve the stolen head of his village’s sacred Buddha. Rather, Ong Bak 2 travels back in time so that lethally limber star Jaa (who also directs) can portray a young man adopted by bandits after his noble parents are slaughtered by a corrupt general. Along the way, he learns multiple fighting styles; bones are crunched, elephants are charmed, and emo flashbacks abound. The cool thing about Ong-bak was that it showcased Jaa’s unique Thai fighting style in an urban environment — his country-bumpkin character took down mobs of petty hoods and smugglers, and he faced an array of ridiculous foes in underground pit fights (for righteous reasons, natch). Ong Bak 2‘s historic setting feels a tad generic, even if it does provide an excuse for a crocodile-wrestling scene. Also, the tragic storyline calls for the kind of acting depth Jaa simply doesn’t have. Though he glowers with conviction, his fists and feet are the most charismatic things about him. (1:55) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*Paranormal Activity In this ostensible found-footage exercise, Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young San Diego couple whose first home together has a problem: someone, or something, is making things go bump in the night. In fact, Katie has sporadically suffered these disturbances since childhood, when an amorphous, not-at-reassuring entity would appear at the foot of her bed. Skeptical technophile Micah’s solution is to record everything on his primo new video camera, including a setup to shoot their bedroom while they sleep — surveillance footage sequences that grow steadily more terrifying as incidents grow more and more invasive. Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Oren Peli’s no-budget first feature may underwhelm mainstream genre fans who only like their horror slick and slasher-gory. But everybody else should appreciate how convincingly the film’s very ordinary, at times annoying protagonists (you’ll eventually want to throttle Micah, whose efforts are clearly making things worse) fall prey to a hostile presence that manifests itself in increments no less alarming for being (at first) very small. When this hits DVD, you’ll get to see the original, more low-key ending (the film has also been tightened up since its festival debut two years ago). But don’t wait — Paranormal‘s subtler effects will be lost on the small screen. Not to mention that it’s a great collective screaming-audience experience. (1:39) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Paris Cédric Klapisch’s latest offers a series of interconnected stories with Paris as the backdrop, designed — if you’ll pardon the cliché — as a love letter to the city. On the surface, the plot of Paris sounds an awful lot like Paris, je t’aime (2006). But while the latter was composed entirely of vignettes, Paris has an actual, overarching plot. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much more effective. Juliette Binoche stars as Élise, whose brother Pierre (Romain Duris) is in dire need of a heart transplant. A dancer by trade, Pierre is also a world-class people watcher, and it’s his fascination with those around him that serves as Paris‘ wraparound device. He sees snippets of these people’s lives, but we get the full picture — or at least, something close to it. The strength of Paris is in the depth of its characters: every one we meet is more complex than you’d guess at first glance. The more they play off one another, the more we understand. Of course, the siblings remain at the film’s heart: sympathetic but not pitiable, moving but not maudlin. Both Binoche and Duris turn in strong performances, aided by a supporting cast of French actors who impress in even the smallest of roles. (2:04) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Saw VI (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

*The September Issue The Lioness D’Wintour, the Devil Who Wears Prada, or the High Priestess of Condé Nasty — it doesn’t matter what you choose to call Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. If you’re in the fashion industry, you will call her — or at least be amused by the power she wields as the overseer of style’s luxury bible, then 700-plus pages strong for its legendary September fall fashion issue back in the heady days of ’07, pre-Great Recession. But you don’t have to be a publishing insider to be fascinated by director R.J. Cutler’s frisky, sharp-eyed look at the making of fashion’s fave editorial doorstop. Wintour’s laser-gazed facade is humanized, as Cutler opens with footage of a sparkling-eyed editor breaking down fashion’s fluffy reputation. He then follows her as she assumes the warrior pose in, say, the studio of Yves St. Laurent, where she has designer Stefano Pilati fluttering over his morose color choices, and in the offices of the magazine, where she slices, dices, and kills photo shoots like a sartorial samurai. Many of the other characters at Vogue (like OTT columnist André Leon Talley) are given mere cameos, but Wintour finds a worthy adversary-compatriot in creative director Grace Coddington, another Englishwoman and ex-model — the red-tressed, pale-as-a-wraith Pre-Raphaelite dreamer to Wintour’s well-armored knight. The two keep each other honest and craftily ingenious, and both the magazine and this doc benefit. (1:28) Presidio. (Chun)

*A Serious Man You don’t have to be Jewish to like A Serious Man — or to identify with beleaguered physics professor Larry Gopnik (the grandly aggrieved Michael Stuhlbarg), the well-meaning nebbishly center unable to hold onto a world quickly falling apart and looking for spiritual answers. It’s a coming of age for father and son, spurred by the small loss of a radio and a 20-dollar bill. Larry’s about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed son is listening to Jefferson Airplane instead of his Hebrew school teachers and beginning to chafe against authority. His daughter has commandeered the family bathroom for epic hair-washing sessions. His wife is leaving him for a silkily presumptuous family friend and has exiled Larry to the Jolly Roger Motel. His failure-to-launch brother is a closeted mathematical genius and has set up housekeeping on his couch. Larry’s chances of tenure could be spoiled by either an anonymous poison-pen writer or a disgruntled student intent on bribing him into a passing grade. One gun-toting neighbor vaguely menaces the borders of his property; the other sultry nude sunbather tempts with "new freedoms" and high times. What’s a mild-mannered prof to do, except envy Schrodinger’s Cat and approach three rungs of rabbis in his quest for answers to life’s most befuddling proofs? Reaching for a heightened, touched-by-advertising style that recalls Mad Men in look and Barton Fink (1991) in narrative — and stooping for the subtle jokes as well as the ones branded "wide load" — the Coen Brothers seem to be turning over, examining, and flirting with personally meaningful, serious narrative, though their Looney Tunes sense of humor can’t help but throw a surrealistic wrench into the works. (1:45) California, Embarcadero, Empire, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Stepfather (1:41) 1000 Van Ness.

The Vanished Empire Pink Floyd records may become contraband once behind the Iron Curtain, but coming-of-age clichés remain the same in Karen Shakhnazarov’s seriocomic tale of adolescent ecstasies and agonies in 1973 Moscow. Lenin’s words are taught in school, though 18-year-old Sergey (Alexander Lyapin) is more interested in chasing girls, scoring pot, and savoring such illicit pop pleasures as jeans and rock music. Cool Kostya (Ivan Kupreyenko) and geeky Stepan (Yegor Baranovsky) are his contrasting cohorts, forming a trio of pubescent anxiety whose rites of passage are complicated by the arrival of Sergey’s girlfriend, Lyuda (Lidiya Milyuzina). The empire of the title is an ideological one, crumbled by a pleasure-seeking new generation who sell their grandfathers’ Marxist tomes in order to pay for Mick Jagger’s latest hit. Despite its evocative sense of time and place, however, the film’s teen nostalgia remains frustratingly amorphous, squandering the chance to find the youthful pulse of the nation’s transitory upheavals. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Croce)

Where the Wild Things Are From the richly delineated illustrations and sparse text of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, director Spike Jonze and cowriter (with Jones) Dave Eggers have constructed a full-length film about the passions, travails, and interior/exterior wanderings of Sendak’s energetic young antihero, Max. Equally prone to feats of world-building and fits of overpowering, destructive rage, Max (Max Records) stampedes off into the night during one of the latter and journeys to the island where the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Michael Berry Jr.) live — and bicker and tantrum and give in to existential despair and no longer all sleep together in a big pile. The place has possibilities, though, and Max, once crowned king, tries his best to realize them. What its inhabitants need, however, is not so much a visionary king as a good family therapist — these are some gripey, defensive, passive-aggressive Wild Things, and Max, aged somewhere around 10, can’t fix their interpersonal problems. Jonze and Eggers do well at depicting Max’s temporary kingdom, its forests and deserts, its creatures and their half-finished creations from a past golden era, as well as subtly reminding us now and again that all of this — the island, the arguments, the sadness — is streaming from the mind of a fierce, wildly imaginative young child with familial troubles of his own, equally beyond his power to resolve. They’ve also invested the film with a slow, grim depressive mood that can make for unsettling viewing, particularly when pondering the Maxes in the audience, digesting an oft-disheartening tale about family conflict and relationship repair. (1:48) Cerrito, Four Star, Grand Lake, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Whip It What’s a girl to do? Stuck in small town hell, Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page), the gawky teen heroine of Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, faces a pressing dilemma — conform to the standards of stifling beauty pageantry to appease her mother or rebel and enter the rough-and tumble world of roller derby. Shockingly enough, Bliss chooses to escape to Austin and join the Hurl Scouts, a rowdy band of misfits led by the maternal Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig) and the accident-prone Smashley Simpson (Barrymore). Making a bid for grrrl empowerment, Bliss dawns a pair of skates, assumes the moniker Babe Ruthless, and is suddenly throwing her weight around not only in the rink, but also in school where she’s bullied. Painfully predictable, the action comes to a head when, lo and behold, the dates for the Bluebonnet Pageant and the roller derby championship coincide. At times funny and charming with understated performances by Page and Alia Shawcat as Bliss’ best friend, Whip It can’t overcome its paper-thin characters, plot contrivances, and requisite scenery chewing by Jimmy Fallon as a cheesy announcer and Juliette Lewis as a cutthroat competitor. (1:51) SF Center. (Swanbeck)

*Zombieland First things first: it’s clever, but it ain’t no Shaun of the Dead (2004). That said, Zombieland is an outstanding zombie comedy, largely thanks to Woody Harrelson’s performance as Tallahassee, a tough guy whose passion for offing the undead is rivaled only by his raging Twinkie jones. Set in a world where zombies have already taken over (the beginning stages of the outbreak are glimpsed only in flashback), Zombieland presents the creatures as yet another annoyance for Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nearly finished morphing into Michael Cera), a onetime antisocial shut-in who has survived only by sticking to a strict set of rules (the "double tap," or always shooting each zombie twice, etc.) This odd couple meets a sister team (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who eventually lay off their grifting ways so that Columbus can have a love interest (in Stone) and Tallahassee, still smarting from losing a loved one to zombies, can soften up a scoch by schooling the erstwhile Little Miss Sunshine in target practice. Sure, it’s a little heavy on the nerd-boy voiceover, but Zombieland has just enough goofiness and gushing guts to counteract all them brrraiiinss. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

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