Television

“The Caretakers”

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REVIEW As the U.S. continues to blindly race forward, wise eyes look closely at what is left behind. In the case of Bill Mattick’s "The Caretakers," this means uncovering the lives hidden within — and the haunted spirit of — a defunct train station in west Oakland. Surveying the loss that saturates the American West, "The Caretakers" makes a great companion piece to Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town (2008), screening at Artists’ Television Access this week. It also is a kindred spirit to a pair of recent railroad-themed films, Bill Daniel’s Who is Bozo Texino? (2005) and James Benning’s RR (2007). Whether focusing on abandoned landscapes, engaging in cinematic trainspotting, or both, these artists have proven shrewd and prescient (Mattick’s project dates from 2004) about this country’s paths of foolishness. They’ve tapped into the new Depression long before Wall Street would admit it.

Mattick cites the peerless Robert Frank — the subject of a major retrospective coming to SFMOMA this year — as an influence. But while his images bear tonal similarities to Frank’s, people are less likely to occupy his frame of vision. He generates strong atmosphere from mid- and late-afternoon daylight: Stairs on Platform 2004-99 (810) sets aquatic shades of blue and white against the severe shadows of a staircase; the rich green of Distance 2004-186(810) varies from Daniel’s black-and-white treatment of similar subject matter; Paul’s Flowers 2004-108(810) updates Helen Levitt’s fascination with kids’ chalk scrawlings on the streets. Yet a contemporary human story emerged from this largely "empty" setting: that of Willy and Paul, whom Mattick discovered living at the station. They’re an odd couple of sorts: one messy, the other fastidious; one a religious eccentric, the other street-smart and battling addiction. These caretakers exert small acts of control amid society’s debris — things that share their castoff societal status. Mattick’s photography is an act of collaboration with them.

THE CARETAKERS Through April 30. Tues–-Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Corden Potts Gallery at Warnock Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 211, SF. (415) 680-5997, www.cordenpottsgallery.com

She’s a magic woman

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SECA ART AWARDS




› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002’s Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005’s Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television’s Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let’s raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.

From Cindy Sherman’s faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy’s return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman’s work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006’s Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.

"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don’t see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd’s response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman’s work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it’s not hard to see why.

However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman’s rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece’s hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman’s art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.

This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF’s Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.

The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other’s homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman’s delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy’s and Mike Kelley’s assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."

Holman’s collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television’s most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country’s current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.

In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN

Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Hard Knox Cafe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The password for 2009 so far seems to be "hard," as in hard times, hard luck, hard cheese. To this list we might also add Hard Knox Café, whose time has come, though it’s never really gone. By this I mean that when you can go into a place and pay $10 for three pieces of good fried chicken and two substantial side dishes, along with a complimentary cornbread muffin, chances are you’ll be back, regardless of Wall Street weather. And who needs dessert when Stella Artois on tap is just $3.50?

The ironist (a.k.a. yours truly) finds plenty to like at Hard Knox Café beyond the fried chicken and the Stella. There’s the fact that such a value-driven spot should have opened a decade ago, at the golden crest of the Clinton boom, and gone on thriving across 10 topsy-turvy (mostly turvy) years, only to find itself perfectly positioned — and named — for what we can hope will be a new era of value. (A second, and larger, venue opened last summer on outer Clement Street.) There’s also the fact that a restaurant serving American comfort-Southern-soul food should be operated by a Vietnamese family, the Huas.

But maybe that isn’t ironic at all. Maybe it’s just American. And even for confirmed ironists, non-irony has its attractions. Hard Knox’s interior design, of a roadhouse, is quietly witty, with wall panels of corrugated steel (shades of the original Straits Café!), floors of distressed wood, and booths upholstered in red vinyl. The crowd, like the neighborhood, is mixed: young and old, working class and tech-geek, people at a round table deep in conversation over piles of chicken bones while others wait just inside the front door for takeout.

It’s not hard to see why the food has such broad appeal. If you could only have one meal a day, you’d want something from Hard Knox. No, it isn’t fancy; the only foam you’ll find here is the head on your Stella. But it does have that mom-is-cooking authenticity. Everything tastes good. And the portions are big. You will not leave hungry.

We did have a slight salting issue with the beef short ribs (at $13 one of the pricier items on the menu). The meat, on its bracelets of bone, was fabulously tender but timid, like a pale partygoer clutching a plastic cup in a lonely corner, waiting to be teased out. Sprinkling salt on awkward party guests isn’t necessarily a winning strategy, but it does have a way of bringing beef to life — beef, which, even more than television, asks so little and gives so much.

The crusty fried chicken suffered from no such underseasoning: the coating was adequately seasoned, and the meat was tender, juicy, and flavorful. But we aren’t talking about Cajun or otherwise spicy fried chicken; the batter was crisp more than tasty, and while this had the virtue of letting the chicken taste like chicken — and I like the taste of chicken — it also didn’t set off any spice fireworks. Of course, none were promised.

At least as appealing as the big plates of protein are the side dishes. In fact you could make a meal of these, a kind of Southern-comfort tapas dinner. You get your pick of two with each main dish, but you can get them à la carte for $3 each, which isn’t bad at all.

The lack of glamour in the sides is almost glamorous. We were particularly taken with the stewed cabbage, the mere name of which stirred unholy memories from childhood, when "stewed" could only mean "boiled to death." And stinky! Like the reek of old shoes. But this cabbage — green, cut into thick shreds — had been gently handled; it was a little more tender than stir-fried versions, and very subtly scented with, perhaps, some bacon, fatback, or salt pork. Cabbage once filled me with fear and loathing, but I could eat Hard Knox’s version … well, maybe not every day, but often.

Mac and cheese was tasty if slightly gummy. Collard greens are underappreciated outside the South; they are among the tastier greens on their own, and when zipped up, as here, with garlic and a touch of vinegar, they can become almost addictive. Comparably underappreciated (and perhaps almost unknown) beyond the South are black-eyed peas, with their distinctive two-tone look and near-gritty texture; Hard Knox serves them with short-grain white rice, and if you feel inclined to add a jolt of hot sauce to this mildness — not a bad idea — a bottle of Crystal is sure to be near at hand.

Although Third Street has changed considerably in the last decade, with Muni Metro’s T-line now running down the median to relieve some of the tedium, the corridor is still industrial and can still have a sinister video-game sameness, especially at night. But finding Hard Knox Café is — dare I say? — easy. Look for the clumps of people milling around at the roadside. *

HARD KNOX CAFÉ

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

2526 Third St., SF

(415) 648-3770

also 2448 Clement, (415) 752-3770

www.hardknoxcafe.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Cruising Craigslist: This week’s best personals

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Each week, Justin Juul combs the SF Craigslist Personals and Missed Connections for true gems that prove there’s enough love for everyone. View his last installment here.

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Here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m going to get home from work, make a grilled cheese sandwich, and then smoke cigarettes and complain about my boss for two hours while you check your email and pretend to listen. Then I’m going to force you to watch a movie we’ve both seen before. About half way through it, I’ll say something like “Hey baby, this shit’s boring. Can we please do something else?” I’ll turn off the television, grab some water, and head into the bedroom. You will hesitate for a moment and then decide to follow me. When you get into the bedroom, you will immediately remove your sweatpants. Then you’ll jump under the covers and grab a book. “Hey baby,” I’ll whisper. “Can you please stop turning the pages so fast? I’m super tired.” You will give me an irritated look and then turn out the light. We will sleep together all night long and then go to work in the morning.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve ever been in a monogamous relationship, then your answer is probably “yes.” Of course, it’s not so boring every night –sometimes you stay up until sunrise having wild, drunken sex, and sometimes you go on vacation and do naughty things you thought only porn stars were capable of. But more often than not, the reality of your day-to-day sex life is probably about as thrilling as a trip to the DMV (well, hopefully a little better than that). No big deal. That’s what fantasies are for.

Sexual fantasies come in all shapes and sizes, but there is one fantasy that seems to stand out, at least in San Francisco, and that’s rape. Some of the following Craigslist cruisers want to abuse you and some of them want to be abused. Just don’t take any of their words too seriously. These people (probably) aren’t real rapists or wannabe victims. They’re just regular folks like you and me who occasionally yearn for a break from their routines. Thank god for Craigslist for providing a safe outlet! And thank god for the human brain. If it wasn’t such a mischievous and randy sex organ, personal ads would sound like my intro paragraph, we’d never have exciting sex, and this job would be a whole lot harder!

Johnny on the spot

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"Hello, I’m Johnny Cash." Anyone who’s listened to the Man in Black’s 1968 live album At Folsom Prison (Columbia) knows that’s how the record kicks off. What you may not know, before watching Bestor Cram’s Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, is that the crowd of prisoners was coached not to applaud the vocalist when he appeared onstage, but rather to save their hollerin’ until he greeted them first.

I kind of expected Cram’s doc to simply let the album roll alongside images from the day — though the concert wasn’t filmed, San Francisco–raised rock photographer Jim Marshall took reams of still photos — but it reaches way beyond the music. Cram, whose filmmaking credits include episodes of Frontline and other politically themed works, emphasizes the record’s importance to Cash’s career, drawing on interviews with Merle Haggard, Cash bandmates, and others, and focuses in particular on how it bolstered his regular-man image as a prison-reform advocate, although the performer himself had never spent significant time behind bars.

Of particular interest is Cram’s investigation into the life of Glen Sherley, an aspiring musician who was jailed at Folsom when Cash came to play. The night before the show, unbeknownst to the inmate, Cash crash-coursed Sherley’s song "Greystone Chapel." He then performed it live as a stunned and flattered Sherley watched from the front row. The two men, who looked and sounded alike, formed a bond that led to Cash guiding Sherley’s music career after his release. But as Sherley’s children recollect, it’s one thing to be a famous, if bedeviled, star singing about prison, and another entirely to be an ex-con trying to grapple with the music biz.

Also among this year’s Noise Pop Film Festival offerings: a Wilco concert doc; a look at the career of Andre "Mr. Rhythm" Williams; a short film about Bible-flinging ’80s rockers Stryper; a tribute to indie record stores; and a "cinebiography" of Os Mutantes’ Arnaldo Baptista.

JOHNNY CASH AT FOLSOM PRISON

Feb. 25, 7 p.m., $9–$10 (Noise Pop Film Festival continues through March 1 at Roxie Theater and Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

Ask a Porn Star: Privacy issues, small penises

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In which super sexy porn people answer questions — each week — from Bay Area locals. View the last installment here.
Mediated by Justin Juul

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Fielding your questions this month is local celebrity, Lorelei Lee. Lee specializes in fetish porn (water torture, whips-n-chains, electrocution, etc.) and has a blossoming side-career as a writer. Check out some of her movies/pics here and then stop into The Makeout Room on Valentines Day (02/14/09) to hear her read at Writers With Drinks.

Michelle M: Are you ever concerned about your privacy?

Lorelei Lee: I’m not exactly sure what aspect of my privacy this question is meant to refer to. I’m not that famous. I mean, no one (to my knowledge) is searching through my garbage or anything, although I do occasionally get recognized in the grocery store or at a bar or walking down the street.

Sometimes people will come up to me and say hello or stutter something endearingly unintelligible. Often, people will say, “you look so familiar,” but they won’t be able to remember why they recognize me. They’ll ask me if I’m “on television” and I’ll say, “Sort of.” Recently I was leaving a BART station and a boy riding by on his skateboard actually fell down on the sidewalk and shouted, “Holy shit!” I was startled and looked at him, and he said, “Uh… you’ve been in movies, haven’t you?” I couldn’t help but laugh. I shook his hand and said, “nice to meet you,” and he kind of stumbled off in the other direction.

All mod cons

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› johnny@sfbg.com

How can any of us forget 1835, and the heady discovery of spherical amphibians, blue goats, and petite three-foot zebras frolicking on the moon? In Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders (New Press, 245 pages, $24.95), Paul Maliszewski relates that time, when the New York Sun brought news of lunar life to an increasingly large readership that craved delightful information during an economic drought. Maliszewski doesn’t have to work to make the story funny — he merely has to relate how the paper’s moon-discovery serial likened a typical blue goat to "a young lamb or kitten," and presented scientists pretending to tickle the creature’s beard as seen through a telescope, only to witness it "bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of earthly impertinence."

Within the context of Maliszewski’s sprawling look at fakery, the Sun saga is a light vacation, because of its relative datedness and good-natured imagination. Before and after, Fakers largely avoids such Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds–style nostalgia for more contemporary tales: the stories of Stephen Glass, James Frey, and JT Leroy, for example. It places Glass’s accounts under a microscope that highlights their pandering corniness. It relates the life and times of Leroy — and his feverish endorsement by the likes of Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon (more on him later), as well as his editorship of an installment in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series — without losing sight of the fact that Leroy’s much-celebrated writing is mawkish.

Such targets and views might suggest that Maliszewski likes to wag his finger and tut-tut, but his viewpoint is much more variable — he isn’t out to condemn various literary liars, for example, so much as critique them. Early in the book, he relates one of his own adventures in the creation of phony identities, a Walter Mitty–scale satire somewhat akin to the letters that Joe Orton used to write to newspapers as "Edna Welthorpe," a make-believe housewife outraged by Orton’s plays. Here, and in other instances, such as a discussion of George W. Bush’s use of the word "confidence" when discussing economics, Fakers suggests that the Bush years have not just eroded but demolished the value of truth.

In a seeming act of first-person tit-for-tat, Maliszewski shares an example of an instance when he fell for a hoax, though the chosen subject — a tall tale that might qualify as an urban legend if it weren’t set in the wilderness — cops out in terms of allowing a truly personal and thus uncomfortable examination of the various aspects of being duped. The most curious of Maliszewski’s practices is the frequent weaving of e-mail interviews — a format that would seem to allow for flights of fancy — into his investigative text. A correspondence with former New York Times journalist Michael Finkel, for example, stays soft-focus when it could have questioned the presumptuous audacity of a middle-aged white man assuming the voice of a West African boy.

In a recent Bookforum review, Hua Hsu describes Fakers as vaguely paranoia-inducing, and indeed, at the very least, this reader — a journalist who has been duped — wonders if any of the facts or stories that the author relates might contain creative twists. In an extended conclusion about a fraudulent Michael Chabon essay, Maliszewski essentially asserts that to lie for the sake of lying is a cynical, selfish act. True. But Fakers is more interesting when it is ambivalent and discomfiting, or when Maliszewski’s examples and anecdotes prompt ideas about various permutations of truth and falsehood in the media landscape. (Take CNN’s Nancy Drew, I mean Nancy Grace, and the way she is currently using a compulsive liar — Caylee Anthony — to co-author cable news television’s version of a radio serial.) Blue goats are cute, but — as Fakers makes clear — white lies have many facets.

Dudes and don’ts

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All right, I’m not gonna try and pretend The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans and Deadgirl have all that much in common, other than they’re both playing the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. But they do both focus on folks with peculiar obsessions, healthy and otherwise.

Camera in hand, television commercial director Eddie Chung descended upon the 2004 Lebowski Fest — since 2002, an annual gathering of fans of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult phenom The Big Lebowski — and discovered a bona fide subculture. Who are these people? Why are they addicted to Lebowski? What makes ordinary working stiffs fiendishly create movie-inspired costumes (severed toe, Sioux City Sasparilla bottle, walrus, "camel fucker") as detailed as they are obscure?

At 66 brisk minutes, The Achievers can’t help being fun, although I imagine it would be difficult to enjoy the doc without having seen Lebowski. (If you haven’t seen Lebowski, or you saw it when it came out and — like most audiences and critics at the time — didn’t get it, you’re long overdue for a viewing.) Still, that’s probably not gonna be a problem for IndieFest attendees, considering the fest hosts an annual bowling-infused salute to the Dude. Dilettantes will appreciate The Achievers’ many Lebowski clips, which pop up to contextualize lesser-known references; diehards will thrill to the interviews with bit-part actors like "Saddam," the Hussein look-alike who hands the Dude bowling shoes during his dream sequence. Also featured are the real-life inspirations for the Dude, Walter Sobchak, and Little Larry Sellers (you know, the kid who steals the Dude’s car and leaves his D-grade homework paper behind — incredibly, a true story, more or less.) The Coens are absent, but bemused star Jeff Bridges does make an appearance.

As Chung discovers, the most hardcore of the Lebowski fans found each other over the Internet, becoming acquainted via a message board dedicated to the film and the fest. Many have become real-world friends above and beyond the organized Lebowski gatherings, which now attract thousands of White Russian–drenched revelers. Really, they’re no different than heavy metal fans, or Rocky Horror junkies, or Civil War reenactors, tapping shared interests to build a tribe whose activities (Maude Lebowski tattoo, anyone?) might be viewed by the mainstream as crossing the line into low-level insanity.

Far more wackjobby are the protagonists of IndieFest’s closing-night film, Deadgirl, which is described in the fest program as resembling the early films of David Cronenberg. Body horror? Yes! Disturbing? Indeed! The work of filmmakers (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel) with innovative, artistically daring careers ahead of them? I’m not yet convinced. Deadgirl starts off promisingly enough, as a pair of ne’er-do-well high schoolers (pretty boys Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) stave off boredom by exploring an abandoned mental hospital. But this ain’t slow-burn creepiness like Session 9 (2001); the film’s most original twist — the boys find a zombielike woman chained in the basement — comes early, and the shocks soon revert to tired torture-porn gross-outs. Naturally, the friends are torn apart by the discovery, even as they both become consumed by it. One’s horny enough to declare the woman/monster do-able, while the other’s a tad more sensitive; it’s not long before an unbelievable mix of emo and necrophilia, and a li’l dab of misogyny, oozes to the surface. Queasy does it.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

American Apparel battle heads for Planning Commission

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Early Saturday morning, Jan. 31, about 40 protesters stood on the sidewalk near the corner of Valencia and 21st streets — the site of a proposed American Apparel store — holding up signs that read, "Your Mission — Not Theirs." An endless stream of honks — even one from a cop car — echoed support for the anti–American Apparel cause. The next day, protesters met at Ritual Roasters for a letter-writing party and on Feb. 2, they rallied and wrote letters at an anti–A.A. event hosted at Amnesia. The movement to block the chain store is gaining momentum in advance of a Feb. 5 Planning Commission hearing.

The overwhelming majority of independent businesses in the neighborhood — including Ritual Roasters, Modern Times Bookstore, Borderlands Books, and Aquarius Records — have taken a stand against the chain, which boasts 200 outlets in 19 countries worldwide. There are three AA stores in San Francisco, including one on nearby Haight Street.

A.A. spokesperson Ryan Holiday says the sentiment is misplaced. "People think we’re a big-box retailer, but that’s not true," he told the Guardian.

The company has been pushing a different image: "We don’t like the mall-ification of America any more than you," reads a sign on the empty storefront. "But that has never been what American Apparel is about."

Many store opponents claim the campaign is not a crusade against American Apparel, a Los Angeles company that has a progressive record on labor and immigration issues. It’s about formula retail, which is already banned in several San Francisco commercial districts.

"I’m wearing American apparel underwear right now," said Kent Howie, a longtime staffer for Artists’ Television Access, which is housed in the storefront next to the proposed clothing outlet. "Our street just doesn’t want chain stores. It’s about survival."

Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the district where A.A. would be located, has not taken a public position. But several months back, he met with American Apparel representatives and suggested a number of ways to do outreach in the neighborhood.

"I have seen no such evidence," Dufty told us. "Major retailers often don’t make an active contribution to the neighborhood."

Holiday insists that it’s the community’s decision, although A.A. has signed a multiyear lease for the space. "We don’t need to dictate the conversation and we don’t need to trick the people into thinking they want an American Apparel."

>>View more of our American Apparel controversy coverage here.

‘Because you showed your ass’: ‘Black Lips in India’ peek

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Culture clash? The trailer for The Black Lips in India

This in from peeps with the Black Lips (known for their adventurous wandering in Israel and about):

“Like the Sex Pistols’ January ’78 tour of the Deep South, the Black Lips recent expedition to India was marked by a series of fairly seismic culture shocks. Everything from bottle-throwing fans at a gig in Pune, to livid show promoters in Chennai, all in response to a bunch of full-frontal punk rock provocateurs from Atlanta. For those that still haven’t heard the story, the band was booked to play on India’s equivalent of American Idol, The ‘Campus Rock Idol’ Tour, a big-ticket televised series with large corporate sponsors.

“Last Saturday, in Chennai, the band entertained the crowd with what stateside fans would consider a typically raucous Black Lips show, replete with intra-band lip locking, and Cole de-pantsing, mooning the crowd, and attempting to play his six-string with, well, his privates. Barely OK in America, definitely not OK in India, the band was subsequently chased out of the country and the sponsors pulled the plug, effectively canceling the rest of the tour and the television season. The events have caused an international wave of news coverage, rounded out by everything from defensive “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll” stories to meatier pieces that tease out the more nuanced concepts at play here, namely artistic freedom versus cultural respect.

The recipe

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

A few weeks ago, while I was writing about the sensation created by the release of the "bonding hormone" oxytocin at orgasm, I attracted the attention of a dear friend and major geek, whom we will call Bill. His wife is, um, Bachael. "Bachael and I have long been fans of the "warm gooey" feelings (as you so aptly described them) created by sex," wrote Bill. "Turns out: you can get these feelings from your partner cooking you a really, really good meal, too. Who knew?"

"Oh yeah?" I responded. "Is there research?"

So he sent this:

R___g, B., "The Way to a Man’s Heart: Field Trial of a New Stuffing Recipe," Journal of Warm Gooey Feelings, Vol. 12, No. 11, November 2008, p. 23.

Abstract:

Subject (n=1, a 43-year-old domesticated male) was conditioned with ethanol and fed an experimental diet consisting of stuffing and baked chicken to examine changes in behavior and neurochemistry. The chicken diet had been previously tested on the subject with good results but the stuffing was novel to this laboratory and was created as published in [1]. During the course of the experiment the subject was heard to make auditory noises commonly associated with sexual pleasure and exhibited "clingy" behavior toward his mate. Subject then exhibited postprandial narcolepsy and went to sleep at 8:15 p.m. while muttering endearments to his wife.

[1] "Italian Chard Stuffing", Sunset, November 2008, p. 79.

Hey. I thought it was funny. You don’t have to. Bill also sent along a New York Times article (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/us/24sex.html) which I had read and meant to get to. It was about a pastor in Texas who assigned his married parishioners seven days of warm gooeyness: the Rev. Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of "congregational copulation" among married couples Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed. Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible, emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.

Since I don’t believe in God, I ought to find the idea of tucking up under the covers with him no more discomfiting than cuddling up with the Easter Bunny or Harvey or any other invisible rabbit, and yet I do. Then again, if you’re comfortable with making room for invisible rabbits or comfortably capable of ignoring that part of the plan, the pastor is indubitably right. More sex does make for more intimacy, which does make for a better marriage or marriage-equivalent (you’ll notice that the latter is not included in the prescription).

"If you’ve said ‘I do,’ do it," Young said. As for single people, he said, "I don’t know, try eating chocolate cake." Lame, if you ask me. But, of course, it is not the job of a pastor in Texas to address the relationship-maintenance issues of the sin-living and the homo-sekshual. It’s mine, though, and at the risk of pointing out the tediously obvious, the same goes for all persons of coupledom.

The article cannot help but mention two books I’d been meaning to get to, 365 Nights and Just Do It, competing memoirs by members of married couples who agreed to have sex every night for a specified period (a solid year for the Mullers and 101 days for the Browns). Both couples claim that getting a book out of it never crossed their minds at first, and despite my generally jaundiced view of people who relate the super-intimate details of their lives on daytime TV, I do believe them. It’s tempting but probably unfair to lump the Browns and the Mullers in with stunt-memoirists like A.J. Jacobs, who first read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and then followed every commandment in the Bible for a year, or Morgan Spurlock, who did the gross stunt with the McDonalds diet. Especially when considering that Jacobs shaved his beard and went back to wearing mixed fibers (and forgot most of what he learned from the encyclopedia), and Spurlock de-Supersized himself and shudders when he passes the Golden Arches, both the Browns and Mullers report greater intimacy and more (although, of course, also less) sex in the aftermath of their experiment. The Browns also reported being really, really tired.

Both books and all the participants may be eminently mockable (the couples are extremely perky and it’s easy to imagine them singing medleys of Christmas songs while wearing matching turtlenecks), but they are not stupid, and it’s not so easy to mock the results. And while I will never get a book contract for Twice a Week, OK?: The Warm-Gooeyness Method Will Save Your Relationship, I can at least try to sell it here. Hell, I may try it myself. But if I do, you won’t hear about it.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

Art: There’s a little homo cholo in all of us

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By Justin Juul

Art Exhibition: Dino Dinco at Project One

dinco1a.jpg

Who Dino Dinco is a Los Angeles-raised photographer/filmmaker/writer/designer who takes pictures of gangsters engaged in intimate behavior (brews in the bathtub, hairy balls in bed, etc), factory workers engaged in life, people wearing fancy clothes, and graffiti (among other things). His images have appeared in Vogue Brazil, Surface, Tokion, and BUTT and his films have been screened all over the world in fancy galleries and art museums like The Louvre and Tate Modern. Dinco also does television, film, and advertising work.

The Mission vs. American Apparel?

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By Juliette Tang

cropped-amappprotestposter31a.jpg

The Mission District is gathering its forces in a fight against American Apparel. Yes, native Missionites are rebelling against skinny jeans, hoodies with white zippers, and colorful tights. (Irony! — Ed.).

American Apparel is trying to build a store at 988 Valencia Street, right next to the Artist Television Access, an artist-run, non-profit experimental media arts gallery that has been around since 1984, on an extremely vibrant corner of the Mission that includes independent, locally-owned gems like Dosa, the Sidewalk Juice Cafe, Herbivore, and Minnie Wilde.

“Oh, hell no!” says local writer Stephen Elliott of the Progressive Reading Series and other actively opposed Mission denizens. .

Calvin Johnson

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PREVIEW It’s not hard to see Calvin Johnson as the obverse of Henry Rollins in the protean world of ’80s underground rock. Johnson’s teddy-bear huggability, and the straightforwardness and purity of sentiment of a track like his old band Beat Happening’s "Honey Pot," has nothing to do with Black Flag’s macho angst. Rather than burying his emotional life under muscle, Johnson’s appeal came from an embarrassing vulnerability. While he’s better known for his historic role and his work as K Records’ head honcho than for his current endeavors, Johnson remains au courant: his most recent release, Calvin Johnson and the Sons of the Soil (K, 2007), finds him backed by the likes of Adam Forkner, a.k.a. Portland, Ore., drone chief White Rainbow.

At press time, San Francisco opening act Grass Widow tentatively canceled its performance due to multiple family emergencies, so this Club Sandwich event will likely be rounded out by screenings of Heart of Nowhere, a stream-of-consciousness documentary about life in Alabama, and Crisis in the Credit System, a 2008 film by Melanie Gilligan. If you’re missing the cold, these hits of sunshine might not be for you.

CALVIN JOHNSON With screening of Heart of Nowhere and Crisis in the Credit System. Mon/26, 8 p.m., $6. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org, clubsandwichbayarea.com

Bettye LaVette to perform at Inauguration, alongside Beyonce, U2, Mary J. Blige, Springsteen, and others

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Let it reign: Bettye LaVette on the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me.”

This in from Bettye LaVette’s people:

“Bettye LaVette is starting off 2009 with a bang by performing Sam Cooke’s revered anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” at Barack Obama’s Inaugural Celebration kicking off at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, Jan. 18. A partial list of additional musical performers includes, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Sheryl Crow, Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Usher Raymond IV, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, U2 and Stevie Wonder. Among those reading historical passages will be Jack Black, Steve Carrell, Rosario Dawson, Jamie Foxx, Tom Hanks, Martin Luther King III, Queen Latifah, Laura Linney and Denzel Washington.

“At the moment, ‘Bettye is speechless.’

“HBO will televise the event on an open channel (Sunday, Jan. 18 live at 2:30 p.m. ET and 11:30 a.m. PT and later from 7-9 p.m. ET/PT), working with all of its distributors to allow Americans across the country with access to cable, telcos or satellite television to join in the Opening Celebration for free. It will also be streamed live on www.hbo.com. Since the actual event is free and open to the public, more than 800,000 are expected in the audience.

Speed Reading

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MIXING IT UP: TAKING ON THE MEDIA BULLIES AND OTHER REFLECTIONS

By Ishmael Reed

Da Capo Press

320 pages

$15.95

Ishmael Reed is one of the most prolific writers, seers, and pundits of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author of nine novels, six books of poetry, six plays, and four books of political essays has been a constant presence and persistent thorn in the sides of various official experts. What I love about Reed is his refusal to be classified, stereotyped, or labeled. From his first book, 1967’s wildly experimental Freelance Pallbearers, through a turbulent and often silly surge of academic quarrels, he has shared his vision with bravado and courage.

His latest book of political essays continues his crusade for mother-wit in the face of a consistently homogenized culture, whether through an insightful interview with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, or writing that tackles America’s anti-black lending practices. Reed’s take is plainspoken and no-nonsense, yet an element of whimsy seems to permeate even the most uncomfortable subjects. In an essay about the Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant trials, for example, his observation about hip-hop "pimp-culture" is that "Blacks are just as incompetent in this area of crime as they are in all others. Nearly four hundred years on this continent and not a single Martha Stewart or Ken Lay."

The only drawback of this book is that I get the impression that Reed is spending too much time in front of the television. It’s rumored that he has several sets stacked one on top of another so he can watch them simultaneously.

ISHMAEL REED

With Justin Desmangles

Sat/17, 2 p.m.; free

Koret Auditorium

San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin, SF

(415) 557-4400

www.sfpl.org

Welles well

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Many years before the word got sullied on the campaign trail, Orson Welles took up the maverick badge during his acceptance speech for the 1975 AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Welles used the platform to show clips from The Other Side of the Wind, his comic portrait of an old-time director (played by John Huston) making the rounds in the "New Hollywood" of the 1960s and ’70s. Auteur-worship, Hemingway machismo, and Pauline Kael all come under fire in Wind, a radical film deceptively clothed in shaky handheld camera. The project was in chronic need of funding, and Welles surely hoped that some dues-paying member of the American film society that had recouped Citizen Kane (1941) as a Hollywood classic might step forward to support his new work. They did not, and the film remains unreleased.

For all the fantastic myths that still circulate about Welles, his annotated filmography is the single most intriguing evocation of his career. To be sure, there has been progress since Charles Hingham’s willfully reductive 1985 biography, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. Touch of Evil (1958) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) are widely admired today despite existing in compromised cuts, and the tragic story of RKO’s knee-jerk butchering of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) has passed through generations of cinephiles.

And yet, a full appreciation of Welles’ career continues to be hampered by the notion that it ended with Touch of Evil. Criterion’s stellar edition of F for Fake (1974) helps correct this view, but with even a masterwork like Chimes at Midnight (1965) still unavailable in America, Welles’ late period remains mired in obscurity. Every time a critical appraisal trots out the tired tropes of Rosebuds and wunderkinds, we lose sight of the indefatigable productivity of Welles’ wilderness, etched in the fragmented traces of The Dreamers, Don Quixote, and The Deep, the forays into television and video, the unproduced scripts (The Big Brass Ring) and monologue performances (Moby Dick).

Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Drössler’s traveling program "Unknown Orson Welles" offers a rare chance to glimpse this material, much of it locked up in legal contestation. It’s an especially invaluable assemblage for a new generation of Welles scholars, a group who will not feel obliged to reconcile Welles’ degraded performance of his personality (the wine commercials and bit parts that financed his work) with his tremendous record of creative freedom. Following the breadcrumb trails of his genius, we find a wellspring of possibility — and little use for regret.

"UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES." Sat/17, 5 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m. $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berkley. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The news from Rock Rapids, Iowa

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The news from Rock Rapids made the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC cable television. Watch the report below.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last night my daughter Katrina Perez called me from her home in Santa Barbara, quite excited, with a field report to the San Francisco correspondent on breaking news from Rock Rapids, Iowa. That would be me, of course.
She reported that Keith Olberman featured an item about Rock Rapids on his evening MSNBC cable news show. Something about a deer breaking into a bank.
She suggested I watch the show, which airs an hour later in San Francisco, and get all the details.

I did and to my surprise found that the show, which featured news on the Obamas in Washington, the worst person in the world (Bill O’Reilly of Fox News), fighting in the Gaza strip, and the latest moves to seat the senator=designate from Chicago, also featured a breaking news item from Rock Rapids.

A deer on Sunday had “busted” the window in the Frontier Bank in Rock Rapids which had “loads of money,” according to Keith. The deer tripped the alarm, got into the bank, and wandered around. The bank’s video camera caught the deer in action and Keith showed it as he commented on what the caption said was “Deer Day Afternoon.”

As to motive, Keith said the “coppers” reported that the deer was “looking for a few bucks,” attempting to “pass along fawny checks,” or “simply trying to reign in spending.” By the time the “coppers” got to the scene, the deer had fled the scene of the crime. And Keith, having exhausted all his bad puns for the night, moved on to the next item.

So, as Paul Harvey would say out of his Chicago radio station, “what’s the rest of the story?”

To me, the rest of the story was how this deer-in-the-bank incident from a small town in northwest Iowa and got to New York and on to the Keith Olberman national television show. I promptly emailed Ken Barker, the star page two columnist of the local Lyon County Reporter, to check it out for me. He said he was worried that the deer had gotten in to his account. But he said he would nail down the rest of the story and get back to me. I’ll keep you posted.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Speed Reading

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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Top tendencies

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› johnny@sfbg.com

1. Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2008)

A masterful film was made in San Francisco by someone who doesn’t just live for the city, but does the city know it? Dorsky’s latest (along with the superb companion piece Winter) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was part of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archive, but as far as I know it has yet to have a public screening in his hometown, where he resides on the avenues that separate the filmmakers and film lovers of SF’s streets, and the Film Society in the Presidio. This summer, along with kino21’s Konrad Steiner, I put together a program devoted to Dorsky’s one-time peer and brother filmmaker of sorts, the late Warren Sonbert, whose revelatory explorations of editing and direct vision lead up — in far more frenetic and sprawling sense — to what Dorsky is doing today. Sarabande is the time and place where Dorsky’s devotional cinema reaches the sublime. This country priest of a film critic may be misreading the signs, once again, in making such a claim — but so be it.

2. The Exiles restoration (Kent MacKenzie, USA, 1961)

This night in the life of urban American Indians occupies a one-of-a-kind place and time. The title renders any description superfluous — what form of exile is stronger than the one discovered while drifting through a stolen home? MacKenzie’s movie, with the life-and-death tunnel vision of its gorgeous Weegee-inflected vérité cinematography, revealed a lost United States. Today it’s a haunting marker of a moment before this country’s commercial independent cinema went in countless stupid and phony directions, and of an area of Los Angeles that has vanished. People are rendered disposable. Lonely spirits continue to gather.

3. Wimbledon Men’s Final 2008: Rafael Nadal def. Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (8-10), 9-7

If you believe what you read and what you see, Raise the Red Lantern and Hero director Zhang Yimou’s production of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony was the spectacle of the year — so dazzling it erased the torch’s troubled travels from what’s left of a collective memory. Television networks have it on rerun, art publications like Artforum can’t stop parsing and usually praising it. (It also garnered an excellent lengthy "movie review" in the magazine Cinema Scope.) Yet Zhang’s endlessly-rehearsed and prefabricated festivities paled in comparison to the marathon drama and dazzling finale of this year’s last match at Wimbledon. The spine-tingling aspect came from fate, not machination, as night crept into a stadium that doesn’t use lights, and the victor’s triumph gave way to an outrageous spontaneous ovation of flashbulbs. It didn’t hurt that Rafael Nadal is the sport’s version of his idol, Zinedine Zidane. Lil Wayne said it best: "I love his motivation and his heart is so big. He leaves it on the court."

4. The Juche Idea (Jim Finn, USA, 2008) and Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, USA 2007)

Convulsive cinema is radical cinema, one of the reasons the gut-busting aspects of these two movies are vital. Finn’s look at Kim Jong-Il’s film theories (yes, "Dear Leader" is a film theorist with publications to his name) is uncannily timely, from its clips of North Korean stadium parades — shades of Zhang Yimou’s Beijing bombast — to its satirical insight that little separates dreaded (and oft-ridiculous) socialism from the broken-down ghost of late capitalism. Also, best use of ski jumps, rodents, and fly-face sculptures this year. Robinson finds a Satanic kaleidoscope within the fractured pixels of an episode of Full House, making the discovery roughly around the time one of the Olsen twins re-manifested as an angel of death. His statement for the movie still might be the definitive one: "Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive." Dying of laughter has rarely felt better.

5. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)

The growing wave of top 10 raves and critic’s awards for Alfredson’s deeply subversive eternal preteen romance is a rare heartening aspect of this year’s feature film malaise.

6. California Company Town (Lee Ann Schmitt, USA, 2008), Viva (Anna Biller, USA, 2007), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008), and When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 2008)


The heart of American cinema in 2008 is as wild and strong as these directors’ visions. Schmitt’s scorched-earth exploration of California’s abandoned past, closing with a final chapter on Silicon Valley that refreshingly breaks its own rules and throws down the gauntlet, is the timeliest movie in a year of ever-accumuutf8g economic disaster. Biller’s tribute to the bodaciously vivid soft-core fantasies of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger couples enthusiasm with smarts with kinky results. It also features a character whose incessant cackling laughter practically becomes hallucinogenic. Reichardt starts off what could have been just another shaggy dog story by paying tribute to the Polaroid Kidd (she’s also sussed out the new depression), and allows her lead actress’s offscreen back story to silently color in a thousand shades of loss. In sync with Skuli Sverrisson’s incandescent score, Reeves’ movie makes love to nature. The past-tense in the title proves she’s looking ahead.

7. Wild Combination (Matt Wolf, USA, 2008)

In his feature debut, the talented 25-year-old Wolf chooses a documentary subject he has an affinity for, and Russell’s still-blooming musical legacy automatically gives the film a unique soulful beauty. While the pastoral and waterfront imagery is expected, Wolf’s humane insight as an interviewer is a wonder to behold. It results in one of the year’s most emotionally powerful films, when following the reticent Russell could have been futile. The final 10 minutes are a complete rebuke to all the idiotic discourse that rails against (and perhaps even for?) gay marriage.

8. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK/Ireland, 2008) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008)


Is hunger sated by milk? Can milk alone get rid of hunger? Steve McQueen is the last art star with film director aspirations, and Gus Van Sant is a movieland auteur who always seems to look longingly at the art world’s white cubes. Both have made bio-dramas about political icons: McQueen speculates about the life and death of IRA leader Bobby Sands, while Van Sant, in case you haven’t heard, has realized his fascination with a certain trailblazing gay San Franciscan. Funny, then, that McQueen makes a riveting experimental work that devolves into a standard heroic final passage, while Van Sant crafts a traditional film in drag. In interview, McQueen told me that he thought of Hunger‘s standout confrontational scene as a bit like the 1982 Wimbledon final. (See, tennis is uniquely cinematic.) But his visceral perspective is most effective early on, when scarcely any words are spoken, and his oblique references to everyone from Jean Genet to Van Sant’s old love Alfred Hitchcock don’t seem merely precocious.

9. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008)

I may have enjoyed this movie because I know next to nothing about (and don’t give a damn about) Mickey Rourke’s misadventures. He arrived in my frame of vision as a modern-day American version of Jean Cocteau’s Beast, blinking out some perfectly round tears when he isn’t pulling staples out of his leathery salon-tanned hide. Look no further than the corrupt endgame of Hulk Hogan — better yet, try to avoid looking at it — for proof that such a figure suits the late-Bush era, though of course Rourke’s brawler has true working-class heart. A working class hero is something to be.

10. Manny Farber, 1917-2008

A lot of critics, ranging from musty well-off bores to young upstarts, wrote tributes to Farber upon his passing. But I have to wonder, who in the current era’s echo chamber of Web-bound opinion has actually learned from him? Ten years ago, there were at least a few voices (Chuck Stephens, Edward E. Crouse) whose writing carried traces of Farber’s spiky structures and wonderfully disorienting shifts in point-of-view. Now, I don’t see hear anyone with a voice like his, but more troubling, I don’t see newer generations of film critics picking up on the fact that he approached the medium as something other than a passive "entertain me" observer. Farber’s vision of film was anything but literal. He was, and is, an artist.

>>More Year in Film 2008

Mother trumpers

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We had a slab of smoked salmon from Grocery Outlet, Ritz crackers, and a bottle of Crystal hot sauce. These things were on the coffee table. The Mrs. was in the bedroom, cracking up over something funny on television. She has a beautiful, booming laugh and a bad right shoulder. There’s a TV in the living room, too, but her Mr. and me were swapping crazy mom stories on the couch, and she likes to give us space when that happens.

"My mom believes in angels and space aliens," the Mountain said.

"My mom thinks people can live for 500 years," I said.

"My mom started a cult," the Mountain said.

"My mom’s been to jail," I said.

It wasn’t a competition. Now that I’m writing it down, though, I see we sound like school kids, instead of 40- and 50-something kooks-in-our-own-right. But it wasn’t a competition.

"My mom has visions, and students, and hears voices," the Mountain said. "An angel told her to move to Scandinavia."

"My mom calls late-night talk shows and the White House, and sends love letters to Garrison Keillor," I said. "She lives in Snow Belt, Ohio, without running water or electricity. Her phone’s tapped."

The Mountain pulled off a big chunk of fish with his fingers and hot sauced it and it wasn’t a competition but here’s where, if it was a competition, he played his trump card: "My mom has a beard," he said.

"My mom shits in a bucket," I said, playing mine.

And we sat there and shook our heads, chewing on smoked salmon with Crystal and Ritz.

"Do you want anything to drink?" the Mountain said.

I was already drinking a big glass of tomato juice with hot sauce in it, and as the glass got emptier and emptier, I kept pouring more and more hot sauce in so that now it was basically hot sauce, with a dash of tomato juice.

The Mountain was sipping red wine out of a beaker. I finished my juice and said I’d try some, and as he poured it he said it was leftover from Thanksgiving.

Oxidation builds character, but I realized, upon first sip, he meant Thanksgiving ’07.

"I ought to sue my mom," he said.

"I used to fantasize about killing mine," I said, swirling my swill.

"Here," he said. "Let me find a picture." And while he was rooting through his closet, I visited the kitchen sink and brought a bag of potato chips back to the coffee table. I noticed that our bottle of Crystal, which we’d just started, was already half empty.

Oh, and it’s great on potato chips too.

Funny, my case of fucking Floyd’s and fucking Fred’s hasn’t even fucking arrived yet, and already I have a new favorite hot sauce! Crystal is just cayenne peppers, vinegar, and salt. Floyd & Fred’s is lime juice, habaneros, salt, and xanthan gum. They both taste great, and are addictive, so now I’m going to have to start carrying two bottles of hot sauce in my purse, and pretty soon I’ll have a bad shoulder too, just like my mountainous seester.

But what’s nice about my new favorite hot sauce, compared to my old one, is that Crystal doesn’t break their bottle on a rock and then jam it shard-side first up your ass. My meaning here is figurative, and financial. See, Crystal is 79 cents for a 6 oz. bottle, compared to $5 for a 5 oz. bottle of F-ing F & F’s. You can get a case of 24 6-oz. bottles of Crystal for $18.93. Fuck and Fuck’s 12-pack of 5-oz. bottles? Fifty bucks. Um, that’s more than twice the price for less than half the goods. And, best of all, you don’t have to go to Whole Paycheck to get a bottle.

Now that that’s settled, I wish I could print a picture here of Mama Mountain, because she’s round, as advertised, and bearded and beautiful, in addition to insane. I’d sue her too, if I was her kid.


My new favorite restaurant is Talavera Taqueria in Berkeley. Two great green salsas, a tomatillo-based and an avocado-based. And the chips are good and fresh. It’s a nice place to sit and eat an al pastor burrito, or probably any other kind as well.


TALAVERA TAQUERIA

Daily: 9 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1561 Solano Ave., Berkeley

(510) 558-8565

Beer

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

Frontier Bank

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Scott Schneidermann
Frontier Bank
Rock Rapids, IA 51246

Once we were able to enter the bank on Sunday afternoon and assure ourselves that the coast was clear, someone asked if our security cameras might have filmed the intruder while he was in the bank. We took a look at the security equipment and were please to see that everything worked. We actually had some decent footage of the deer strolling through the middle of the lobby. I was able to export the recording to my PC, which I thought I would keep to use as evidence years from now when I told the story of the buck who broke in the bank.

On Monday morning we started having some customers ask if the bank had been robbed over the weekend. I guess the boarded up windows that the deer had crashed through were sending an unintended message. After visiting with other bank management, we decided that a good way to get the word out locally about the deer would be to take the video from my PC and post it on YouTube. We then sent out a few emails thinking that word would spread around Rock Rapids and Lyon County that we had a deer and not a bank robber over the weekend. It ended up working a little too well.

Someone forwarded the video to the Sioux Falls, SD television stations who called the next day wanting an interview with a bank official, which ended up being me. After a busy day of doing interviews and showing a couple of reporters around the bank, I came home to tell my family that “Dad was going to be on TV.” We had fun watching the coverage and couldn’t believe that the Sioux Falls stations actually covered our story. I certainly thought this would be the end of it. Boy was I wrong.

On Wednesday morning, I had media calls from Sioux City, Des Moines, Davenport, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. I had friends calling me and telling me that they had seen our deer on their local news coverage in Las Vegas, NV and Albuquerque, NM. I found out that we had made the news on Good Morning America and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I started wondering how far our deer might travel?

The good news is that these 15 minutes of fame appear to be winding down. We haven’t heard from anyone for several days now. Although I did hear that a deer tried to break into a bank during business hours in Dell Rapids, SD. I wonder if our deer could have made it that far.

To read past Bruce Blog coverage of the bank heist, click here.

Save Muntader al-Zaidi!

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By Tim Redmond

Okay, let’s get this straight right away: I don’t believe anyone should throw a shoe at the president. In fact, I told my son this morning (perhaps a bit too loudly) that just because a reporter threw a shoe at George W. Bush doesn’t mean he can throw things at his sister.

But seriously: After all that Bush has done in Iraq — after all the Iraqis killed and maimed, after the devastation that country has seen — it’s hard to blame the guy.

But already, the Iraqi security forces have beaten him pretty badly — they “kicked him and beat him until he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party. You can hear him howling on the YouTube video; it’s almost painful to listen. And he faces seven years in prison. I’m sure the prisons in Iraq are just lovely, too.

What a way for Bush to end his presidency — watching a guy who threw shoes at him get beaten and dragged away to a long, harsh prison term that may well involve abuse and torture.

I’m sure the Bush administration even now is trying to finalize the list of corrupt politicians and white-collar crooks who will walk away with presidential pardons on the last day of his term. I think we should all call on Bush to ask the prime minister of Iraq to pardon Muntader al-Zaidi.

Hustle in hard times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

U Don’t Hustle U Don’t Eat, the appropriate title of the March 2009 album by up-and-coming Menlo Park-East Palo Alto rapper A.G. Cubano, pretty much sums up the state of the once vibrantly lucrative local rap music economy. Profit-wise, it has steadily slid and deteriorated during the past decade amid an extremely tough and competitive environment, forcing artists into creative ways of generating cash.

"It’s ugly out there," said Walter Zelnick of City Hall Records in San Rafael, which has distributed independent local hip-hop since its beginnings in the 1980s. "Numbers are down all around. The numbers of stores out there are down. I don’t think kids even buy CDs anymore." San Francisco’s Open Mind Music, which closed on Halloween, and Streetlight Records in Noe Valley, which closes Jan. 31, are just two of latest retail victims.

"Just getting in the stores is hard as fuck nowadays. I didn’t realize it had gotten so bad," said Dave Paul, whose prolific long-time local indie label just released the Bay Area artists-filled Bomb Hip-Hop Compilation, Vol. 2, a sequel to the 1994 premier volume, which sold way more than the "maybe 600 or 700 CDs" he expects to move of the new disc.

Zelnick also fondly recalls the golden 1990s when local rap compilations like D-Shot’s Boss Ballin’ (Shot, 1995) and Master P’s West Coast Bad Boyz: Anotha Level of the Game (No Limit, 1995) would sell in numbers that now often qualify as No. 1 on Billboard‘s national pop albums chart. "When [E-40’s group] the Click first came out, they were selling over a 100,000. But then sales for artists went down to 50,000 or 40,000," Zelnick said. Now "average CD sales are more like 2,000. And many people are lucky to sell that."

"It’s not as nearly as easy as it once was out here when we could fuck around and sell 50-, 60-, 70,000 copies independently," said longtime Fillmore rapper San Quinn who just released From a Boy to a Man (SMC) and will soon follow up with the collaborative Welcome to Scokland (Ehust1.com) with Keak da Sneak. "I literally grew up in this Bay Area independent rap scene."

Known for his affiliation with JT the Bigga Figga’s Get Low Playaz and more recently for his ongoing feud with his cousin rapper Messy Marv, the 30-year-old rapper is a well-established artist. But even a high-profile performer like Quinn accepts that he will be lucky if he sells the 22,000 that his last solo CD, The Rock: Pressure Makes Diamonds (SMC) tracked on SoundScan. That was in 2006, two long digital years ago. As with many veteran rappers, downloaded music has hurt San Quinn. "The majority of my fans are white boys and Latinos and Asians that have that shit mastered," he said. "And it’s even harder for someone like me who is based out of the capitol of technology here in the Bay Area, home of Silicon Valley."

"Since the selling of CDs in stores has gone down, way down, everyone has had to step up their game," Cubano said. Two months before the release of U Don’t Hustle U Don’t Eat, the shrewd rapper will pave the way with the Feet to the Street mixtape in collaboration with Oakland’s Demolition Men, the accurately self-described "Bay Area mixtape kings," whose trusted brand has helped further fuel the careers of such local rap faves as J-Stalin, the Jacka, and Shady Nate. San Quinn and the Jacka, as well as C-BO and Matt Blaque, are among the names the ever-resourceful Cubano has enlisted for his upcoming releases.

"But then there are so many different ways to make money nowadays," Cubano added. "You can get money out of ringtones. You can sell your songs one at a time for $1 a piece on iTunes or from your MySpace even now. I love MySpace. It is great in so many ways, like connecting with artists straight away and not beat around the bush, waiting for a phone call, or waiting for a nightclub to see someone."

MySpace is also San Quinn’s lifeline where, the rapper said, his music’s daily plays are in the thousands. San Quinn generates money beyond CD and digital music sales. "I do ringtones. I do shows. I have a San Quinn skateboard that I put out through FTC," the rapper said. "On our first pressing we just had, I sold a thousand skateboards at $50 a piece and I get $25 off every skateboard."

He also makes a tidy income doing guest appearances or "features" on other artists releases ("They pay me for a verse"). "I’ve done over 3,000 features," he said of the feat that earned him an inclusion in Guinness World Records for the most collaborations with other artists. Landing on television or video game soundtracks can be highly profitable but also highly competitive.

But for an up-and-coming Bay Area hip-hop artist, it is even more challenging to make a buck. On one recent evening on the Pittsburg/Bay Point-to-San Francisco BART train, Macsen Apollo of Oakland’s V.E.R.A. Clique was putting a new spin on the "dirt hustlin’" sales approach pioneered in the 1990s by Hobo Junction and Mystik Journeymen by walking from car to car hawking copies of his hip-hop group’s CD, keeping a watchful eye out for BART police, in an effort to make some money from his music.

Meanwhile back at the City Hall Records offices and warehouse, where Zelnick works on orders for new releases from local rap cats Balance and Thizz artist Duna, things have changed a lot in a decade. "We’re really at a turning point here," he said. "We’re still here and someone is buying music, but I don’t know how much longer." Last week in the UK, with just a few weeks till Christmas, Britain’s key indie label distribution company Pinnacle Entertainment declared bankruptcy, leaving 400 imprints with no way to get their music into the diminishing number of music retail stores.

"Next year I ‘m going to put out Return of the DJ, Vol. 6 and that will be the final physical release I will ever do," said Bomb’s Paul, who believes the only way for rap artists to make money is to be increasingly innovative and to constantly tour and sell merchandise, including music, along the way. "In the very near future I think the only place left to buy a CD is to go a show. Artists have to come up with new ways to generate cash. I heard of some artists who will sell backstage passes for $300 — or whatever they can get."

Cubano concurs. "If you’re sitting around waiting for that call, it ain’t gonna come," he quipped. "You have to get out there. You gotta be in traffic. People have to expand their hustle. Otherwise you don’t eat."

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