Television

The orbs

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In Thorsten Fleisch’s five-minute Energie! (2007), an untamed 30,000-volt current exposes photographic papers that are then sequenced in a manner that suggests or reveals systems of electrons. Fleisch’s film is a blast. Its black-and-white lightning formations resemble angry veins in the eyeball of an electrical beast — and the veins in your eyes will sprout similarly after gazing at this strobe attack by Fleisch, a student of Peter Kubelka.

The orb that gradually rises to the center of the screen during Energie could be a ferocious cousin of the eclipse that forms the insignia for the digital projects of Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin’s space for visions in the Mission. It also serves as a core symbol for Other Cinema’s latest calendar-closing "New Experimental Works" program.

Here’s an orb, there’s an orb, everywhere’s an orb, orb! There’s one at the center of Shalo P’s Vengeance 2.0, which begins with a word of warning from Michael Jackson before mixing Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1958) and numerous Batman symbols into a brew fans of Paper Rad and Michael Robinson might enjoy. There’s even a character named Orb in Apple, a sword-clanging, sprite-eared, and typically ingenious vision from "from the hideous director of Dawn of the Evil Millennium," Damon Packard, whose movies are as potent as laughing gas and better than all other drugs.

Eli Marias’ and Amos Natkin’s An Internal Camaraderie might not feature an orb, but its new age mix of hilarity and potent hypnotism includes just about everything else, including fluorescent rainbow colors, a sea of testifying infomercial faces, and one well-deployed white turtleneck.

Other highlights among "New Experimental Works" that this reviewer was able to see include: Roger Deutsch’s Act Your Age, where a pencil is not just a pencil; Tony Gault’s Count Backwards From 5 (2007), in which images of water — with a powerful use of voice-over — convey the mystery of family and death; and Danny Plotnick’s Out of Print, a four-minute testimonial that should be placed in a time capsule.

OTHER CINEMA: "NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS"

Sat/31, 8:30 p.m.; $7

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

No rest for the ‘No Wave’: author Marc Masters chats up his tome

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What’s the story behind the music movement that cried, “No”? I recently caught up with No Wave author Marc Masters via e-mail, as he prepared for a series of Bay Area appearances: Saturday, May 24, at Amoeba Music in SF and 21 Grand in Oakland and Sunday, May 25, at Artists’ Television Access in SF.

SFBG: How did the book project come about?

Marc Masters: Black Dog approached me about writing a book about another subject, but for various reasons that fell through. They mentioned they had been considering doing a no wave book for a while. I¹d always liked no wave and wanted to delve further into it, since there have been lots of theories about it when it happened, which bands were part of it, and so on. So I was really excited to get that chance. I was intimated, too – so I contacted Weasel Walter for advice, since he¹s been researching and collecting this stuff forever. When he agreed to help with material and proofreading (and eventually write the foreword), I felt a lot less daunted.

Fly boys

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER I never swooned over Jemaine Clement when his clueless geek-goon was busily copping quasi-Street Fighter moves in 2007’s Eagle vs. Shark, and I never noticed the spacey Middle Earthly beauty of Bret McKenzie when he was striking sultry elfin poses in The Lord of the Rings. But somehow, two discs of season one of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords and a couple jillion listens to the duo’s new self-titled Sub Pop album later, I’m hooked. I woke up this morning with the cyborg-gut-busting "Robot" roving through my head ("The humans are dead / We used poisonous gases / And we poisoned their asses…. It had to be done / So that we can have fun"), and I silently sang the lusty-nerd verses of "The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)" ("You could be a part-time model / But you’d probably have to keep your normal job") to myself for the rest of the morning. Apart from those lyrics, I’m at a loss for words — for a change. All I can say, doltishly, is "uhhh, they funny." Otherwise I’m considering a leg transplant and dye job so I can become the "Leggy Blonde" of FOC dreams — or at least a Rhys Darby tat.

What have they done to deserve such gushery? The way they sweetly snark at my rock, garbed in the amiable skin of a fumbling indie-rock-folk duo. The manner in which they poke at pop clichés, letting them fly well above the heads of those who don’t grasp the Shabba Ranks and Marvin Gaye references — and somehow those unfortunates still crush out on FOC. The botched trysts and fumbled musical careers of the pair, played by the half-Maori Clement and the sometime reggae musician McKenzie, which make all and sundry adore them that much more. Their humanizing humor, which stems primarily from FOC’s New Zealanders-straight-outta-Middle Earth naïveté.

Much has been made of the rise of so-called indie rock comedians like David Cross and Eugene Mirman — who both, coincidentally or no, are FOC labelmates — but lo, Clement and McKenzie are the real thing. They have the facial hair. They swill water. They hail from the land of the Clean and Tall Dwarfs. They combine pop-savvy wit and wiseacre lyrics, while sending up genres ranging from between-the-sheets R&B swoons ("Business Time") to backpacker hip-hop ("Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros" with Clement trotting out a ringer imitation of Del tha Funkee Homosapien) to art-rock nipple-antenna anthems ("Bowie"). A good deal of FOC’s appeal hinges on the fact that pop is so utterly ripe for lampooning — after all, doesn’t the title of E=MC2 (Island) sound like Mariah Carey is attempting a self-conscious, FOC-style jab at her own intellectual prowess?

It also helps that FOC come so often with the hooks: I can’t stop replaying "Inner City Pressure" — and reveling in its low-budg, pseudo-seedy Pet Shop Boys video tropes — repeatedly in my skull. My only critique of their recently released full-length might be that the songs cry out for a DVD clip or eight: while some tracks sport lyrics with built-in yuks that allow the songs to hold their own, still others like the puzzling opener, "Foux du Fafa," completely lose the original, necessary context — FOC was hitting on patisserie workers while frolicking through a color-coded Scopitone-esque Gallic pop reverie — that justifies, for instance, its litany of French baked goods. Some numbers such as "A Kiss Is Not a Contract" are sweet and strong enough to include on the CD, though you miss the series’ accompanying Serge Gainsbourg video parody even if the tune itself bears little musical resemblance to Sir Serge’s oeuvre. Still, most of FOC’s soaring sonic moves don’t fall too far from the tree shaken during the more larky outings of producer Mickey Petralia’s other client, Beck. And who knows, this high-school-friendship-turned-comedy-act could be the start of a beautiful musical career, considering that the other would-be beautiful "Loser" kicked off his illustrious catalog with what many considered a joke song as well: there have been stranger flights of fantasy. *

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS

Tues/27, 8 p.m., $32.50

Masonic Auditorium

1111 California, SF

Also May 29, 8 p.m., $32.50

Davies Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

OUT THERE

DESTROYER AND DEVON WILLIAMS


Dan Bejar pulls Destroyer out of the garage, while intriguingly minimal nouveau-’80s-popper Devon Williams unleashes Carefree (Ba Da Bing). Wed/21, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

MATES OF STATE


Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel polish their indie-pop to a bright sheen on Re-Arrange Us (Barsuk). Thurs/22, 9 p.m., $17–$19. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

DEAD MEADOW AND DAME SATAN


Yes, we’re weirded out that Jimmy McNulty’s spawn dug Dead Meadow on The Wire. The Bay’s Dame Satan cast a spell with the new Beaches and Bridges (Ghost Mansion). Sat/24, 9 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

NO WAVE EVENTS


The definitive book on awesome atonal negheadedness is fêted by author Marc Masters and no wave authority Weasel Walter. Sat/24, 2 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com; Sat/24, 9 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl., www.21grand.org; Sun/25, 5 p.m., $6. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. www.atasite.org

WHITE RABBITS


The NYC nibblers have been ruling the boroughs since the announcement that they were joining Radiohead on ATO subsidiary TBD. Tues/27, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

SPORTS: Black baseballers MIA

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By A.J. Hayes

It may seem overly dramatic to call Giants rookie shortstop Emmanuel Burriss a member of baseball’s “lost generation” — but if you have any doubts just look at the numbers.

The fact that Burriss is young, African-American and playing professional baseball makes him a rarity in today’s game. It’s no different in college baseball.

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Emmanuel Burriss

Sixty-one years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, the influx of new black in the sport’s elite ranks has all but dried up.

“It’s sad,” Burriss, 23, said. “I don’t think many young African-Americans kids would even know who Willie McCovey or Reggie Jackson is today.”

Born and raised in Washington, D.C. before playing three seasons at Kent State University, Burriss is the first product of the District’s public school system to be drafted by a major league baseball club since 1989.

A “sandwich” pick (33rd overall) by San Francisco in the 2006 amateur draft, the speedy Burriss batted .360 and led the nation with 42 stolen bases in his final collegiate season.

Now, less than two seasons later, Burriss has already graduated to the major leagues. In 22 games, the middle infielder has batted .255, and has demonstrated a sturdy glove and strong arm.

“I didn’t even know they had baseball in D.C.,” said the former African-American big league infielder and current Giants cable television commentator Bip Roberts, with a sadness tinged sigh. “When I watch Manny the thing I notice is that he has good baseball instincts. He has ability that a manager likes. He’s a switch hitter, has great speed and instincts to play shortstop at a high level. I can see why they kept him up here.”

Burriss also has a sense of social consciousness to match his high baseball I.Q. If Major League Baseball is really about making baseball attractive again to inner city kids, Commissioner Bud Selig should make it a point to pick Burriss’ brain ASAP.

For a number of reasons, including the skyrocketing costs of playing organized youth baseball, lousy promotion of the game’s top black stars and competition from other sports, baseball’s popularity in the inner city has dropped off the charts over the past 20 years in the inner city.

The Giants currently have four African-American players on their active roster. Across the bay, Oakland has three.

Burriss said it was so rare to run into an African American player in college his first two seasons of minor league ball, that he immediately forms a bond with them.

“I always thought it was exciting whenever I’ve run into another African-American on the field. It’s like ‘Wow there’s someone else. I’m not alone in this,” Burriss said. “I always make it a point to meet them and talk about the fact that we are African-Americans and that we have to work hard to keep the population up in baseball.”

Flying Luttenbachers sax on auction block

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Care to grab a slice of experimental rock/no-wave history? Flying Luttenbachers impressario, XBXRX player, and no wave authority Weasel Walter is putting his Conn C-Melody saxophone up on the eBay action block here. The Bay Area musician and fire-starter says he played the instrument on such recordings as the Flying Luttenbachers’ Revenge and Gods of Chaos as well as To Live and Shave in L.A. 2’s The 300 Dollar Silk Shirt.

Says WW: “I got this horn in 1988 and played it (terribly) on a lot of my high school 4-track recordings (the best of those were released on CD by Savage Land Records in 2006). After I moved to Chicago I got the beast fixed up and repadded and played it a lot more. This is a working instrument, and you can basically take it out of the box and play it. Basically bills must be paid and I really don’t pursue playing saxophone at all anymore – let’s leave it to the pros! – so I’m selling it off.

“To some elite weirdos i suppose it’s a small piece of history. Let the bidding begin.”

(You can also catch Weasel Walter at events for the book **No Wave,** alongside author Marc Masters. Those happen Sat/24, 2 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. With Death Sentence: Panda and Ettrick. Sat/24, 9 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. Sun/25, 5 p.m., $6. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF.)

When tools race

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San Franciscans love to make shit and they love weird spectacles. And the The Power Tool Drag Races is the perfect combination of both. The name says it all: drag racing between custom vehicles made from belt sanders, skillsaws, grinders or other power tools. This quirky event has garnered national recognition and was even briefly a television show, but there’s nothing like just spending the day in the beautiful sunshine out at Ace’s Junkyard, drinking too much beer, watching the weirdness, and flirting with the gearheads behind these strange Frankenmachines.
PTDR put on a good show at the Maker’s Faire a couple weeks ago, but that was sanitized for families and prudes. This weekend’s show is the one to attend if you want racing sex toys and other adult thrills. Check it out this Saturday and/or Sunday.
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Driving reign

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Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive (XBOX360, PS3)

GAMER Since its April 29 release, more than 6 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have been purchased. While Take-Two Interactive is still taking contractor bids on Scrooge McDuck–style cash swimming pools, the gaming press has worked itself into a frenzy, bestowing five-star reviews and expostuutf8g on how GTA IV will revolutionize gaming, culture, and possibly the world.

This hyperbole exemplifies gaming’s innate pathologies. Since their inception, video games have been portrayed as the puerile inferior to other entertainment media, and game designers, players, and critics have long coveted a seat at the table alongside the realist novel and the feature film. When a game as ambitious as GTA IV is released, advocates are quick to frame it as the "future of the medium," a kind of messianic product that will show those old-media Luddites what they’re missing.

GTA IV is not video Jesus. Still, by any reasonable standard, it’s an incredible game, taking the hallowed legacy of the previous GTA games, striving to be bigger and better, and mostly succeeding. At this late date, weeks after its debut, describing it as "only" the next Grand Theft Auto game can seem like very faint praise. Then again, criticizing the game using the metric of its hype is like getting a Benz for your 16th birthday and complaining that you didn’t get a Batmobile.

The GTA series is credited with inventing the "sandbox" game, which drops the player into a vast interactive world with little or no agenda. Complete the missions that drive the story forward — or don’t. Murder passersby until the police have to call in the National Guard — or don’t. Furnished with the power of today’s consoles, Rockstar Games has created a staggering sandbox, recreating New York City’s five boroughs (and a miniaturized New Jersey) in such loving, exhaustive detail that it’s hard to list all the coolness concisely. There’s a working subway system, multiple hours of fake, satirical television — one could go on forever.

In addition to the huge strides the game makes in environmental design and artificial intelligence, it also delivers the latest in interactive storytelling. You play Niko Bellic, a veteran of Balkan strife who disembarks in Liberty City hoping to escape his past and embrace the American lifestyle his previously arrived cousin Roman has touted as luxuriant and easy. Of course, it is not, and Niko is inexorably drawn into the criminal underworld he tried to leave behind.

While it doesn’t quite deliver the reinvention of the immigrant narrative parsed by some reviewers, the game provides an engrossing tale, full of three-dimensional characters (in both senses of the phrase), magnificent action sequences, and deft plot twists. The voice acting is superb and extensive; many conversations have alternate versions, expecting you to get killed and end up listening to them twice. The character animations — in a sense the game’s other kind of acting — convincingly capture the most esoteric gestures, down to the shudder of a crime boss as a line of Colombia’s finest explodes into his sinus.

The save system is still frustrating, and the prospect of replaying a long, violent confrontation after failing right at its end is often almost too much to bear. Despite GTA IV‘s unfettered gameplay, the missions are still very conventional and leave little room for creative problem-solving. Sure, there are a number of red pill–blue pill dilemmas. But in a game that allows you as much freedom as GTA, having to stick to the plan in each attempt becomes annoying. The new multiplayer mode provides a panoply of game types, ranging from traditional death-match and racing modes to cops-and-robbers high jinks that exploit what’s best about the game. Unfortunately the interface is confusing and finicky, and the online player-base seems to still be enmeshed in the game’s vast single-player story.

Grand Theft Auto IV is not without its faults. It may not establish video games as a serious medium. But if you want to have 300-odd hours of fun, there’s no better way to spend $60.

The Internet dystopia

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple of weeks ago I went to the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, an event where people from all over the world gather for a giant DIY technology show-and-tell extravaganza. There are robots, kinetic sculptures, rockets, remote-controlled battleship contests, music-controlled light shows, home electronics kits, ill-advised science experiments (like the Mentos–Diet Coke explosions), and even a barn full of people who make their own clothing, pillows, bags, and more. Basically, it’s a weekend celebration of how human freedom combined with technology creates a pleasing but cacophonous symphony of coolness.

And yet the Maker Faire takes place against a backdrop of increasing constraints on our freedom to innovate with technology, as Oxford University researcher Jonathan Zittrain points out in his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press). After spending several years investigating the social and political rules that govern the Internet — and spearheading the Net censorship tracking project OpenNet Initiative — Zittrain looks back on the Net’s development and predicts a dystopian future. What’s chilling is that his dystopia is already coming to pass.

Zittrain traces the Net’s history through three phases. Initially it was composed of what he calls "sterile" technologies: vast mainframes owned by IBM, which companies could rent time on. What made those technologies sterile is that nobody could experiment with them (except IBM), and therefore innovation related to them stagnated.

That’s why the invention of the desktop PC and popularization of the Internet ushered in an era of unprecedented high-tech innovation. Zittrain calls these open-ended technologies "generative." Anybody can build other technologies that work with them. So, for example, people built Skype and the World Wide Web, both software technologies that sit on top of the basic network software infrastructure of the Internet. Similarly, anybody can build a program that runs on Windows.

But Zittrain thinks we’re seeing the end of the freewheeling Internet and PC era. He calls the technologies of today "tethered" technologies. Tethered technologies are items like iPhones or many brands of DVR — they’re sterile to their owners, who aren’t allowed to build software that runs on them. But they’re generative to the companies that make them, in the sense that Comcast can update your DVR remotely, or Apple can brick your iPhone remotely if you try to do something naughty to it (like run your own software program on it).

In some ways, tethered technologies are worse than plain old sterile technologies. They allow for abuses undreamed of in the IBM mainframe era. For example, iPhone tethering could lead to law enforcement going to Apple and saying, "Please activate the microphone on this iPhone that we know is being carried by a suspect." The device turns into an instant bug, without all the fuss of following the suspect around or installing surveillance crap in her apartment. This isn’t idle speculation, by the way. OnStar, the manufacturer of a car emergency system, was asked by law enforcement to activate the mics in certain cars using its system. It refused and went to court.

Zittrain’s solution to the tethering problem is to encourage the existence of communities like the ones who participate in Maker Faire or who edit Wikipedia. These are people who work together to create open, untethered technologies and information repositories. They are the force that pushes back against companies that want to sterilize the Internet and turn it back into something that spits information at you, television-style. I think this is a good start, but there are a lot of problems with depending on communities of DIY enthusiasts to fix a system created by corporate juggernauts. As I mentioned in my column ("User-Generated Censorship," 4/30/08), you can’t always depend on communities of users to do the right thing. In addition, companies can create an incredibly oppressive tethering regime while still allowing users to think they have control. Tune in next week, and I’ll tell you how Zittrain’s solution might lead to an even more dystopian future.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks up dystopias in her spare time.

SFIFF notebook: Ludivine Sagnier x 2

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

That blond firecracker Ludivine Sagnier, 28, turned up at the festival to accompany her new film A Girl Cut in Two, directed by the French new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, and she was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat. Sagnier is happy to talk about her character Gabrielle Deneige (or “Gabrielle Snow” in the English subtitles), a television weather girl who becomes torn between two men, an older, married author and a younger, rich, spoiled brat. But she’s tickled to tell stories about her legendary director.

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Ludivine Savignier times two.

“It was amazing,” she says. “I thought I would never work with him because I didn’t have that high society profile. I wasn’t bourgeoisie enough to work with him. I actually felt like I was suddenly printing my name in the history books. Chabrol is such a monument in France. Not even working with him, but only talking with him was amazing. He would talk to me about Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Oh Alfred asked me if I wanted to shoot a sequence in this movie.’ Suddenly he’s speaking about something that’s far away, that belongs to history, but it’s next door. Those were privileged moments to be able to share all those stories with him.”

Go Daddy-o

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CULT FILM STAR Veteran actor Robert Viharo apparently doesn’t like talking about the shlockier stuff in his résumé. Of which there is a lot — although maybe no more than typical for any long-term Hollywood player who didn’t reach that plateau where one can be picky.

For each prestigious film he was involved in — Romero (1989) with Raul Julia, television’s Evita Perón (1981) with Faye Dunaway, even 1967’s endlessly campy but hugely popular (even before gay people were invented) Valley of the Dolls — there were gigs of lesser repute. He guest-starred in network series from good (Hill Street Blues, The Fugitive, Kojak) to iconically beyond-good-and-evil (Dark Shadows, The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team). He appeared in independent features both cool — notably Over-Under, Sideways-Down, SF collective CineManifest’s forgotten agitprop 1977 feature — and crappy. The following year in The Evil, he got electrocuted by Victor Buono as a cackling Satan.

Ironically, the very private Los Angeles resident’s son is East Bay "Thrillville" impresario Will Viharo, a man who looooves his retro shlock. Expressing filial affection — if perhaps not exactly as dad might prefer — Will "The Thrill" presents two of pop’s prime ’70s big-screen vehicles in a Thrillville "Papa-Palooza" at Oakland’s Parkway. Neither assignment likely thrilled a Lee Strasberg–trained Actor’s Studio protégé who had hoped his career would turn out more Brando and less CHiPs. But they’re both fun throwbacks that he brings considerable presence to.

Return to Macon County (1975) has him as a Georgia cop in pursuit of hot-rodders who royally ticked him off: then-unknowns Nick Nolte (Bo) and Don Johnson (Harley). This quasi-sequel to the 1974 hicksville hit Macon County Line (which featured Max "Jethro" Baer Jr. as Viharo’s equivalent) is a larkier affair, all ’50s nostalgia, wacky car chases, homoerotic undercurrents (when Bo gets a girlfriend, Harley bridles), and dialogue like so: "Arright, skin ‘er on back, Jack, and don’t talk back!"

Viharo got the too-rare chance to carry a movie in 1977’s Bare Knuckles. Los Angeles bounty hunter Zachary Kane, clad in shiny leather and tight denim throughout, is friendly-to-flirty with every street denizen, including tranny hookers — yet he kicks snarling leatherman ass in a gay bar scene. Message: sure he’s hep, but still a man, muthablowahs! (Even if in private moments he assumes the lotus position to play the flute.) Kane rescues a mistress (Sherry Jackson) from her abusive sugar daddy … in a Pizza Hut parking lot, no less. Naturally she ends up menaced by the ladykiller (Michael Heidt) Kane is hunting down, psycho son of a Hollywood socialite mother ("Bring me another double Bloody!") resented both for commencing and ceasing incestuous relations.

Thespian (Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Green Acres) turned occasional director (1975’s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS) Don Edmonds here combines blaxploitation-style action with proto-slasher horror. But the centerpiece is Viharo Sr. With frizzy ‘do, thick ‘stache, and middling fitness (despite a training montage), he’s like a more realistic Looking for Mr. Goodbar take on Burt Reynolds, then riding high on big-budget versions of Bare Knuckles and Macon County. Kane is hardboiled sexy ("I’m in a rough business! I don’t need a woman tellin’ me how to do it!"), but you’d best get an STD check after sharing that hot tub.

Robert Viharo ditched commercial gigs by the early ’90s, eventually finding worthy screen work again in Rob Nilsson’s improv-based "9@Night" series, which premiered in recent years at the Mill Valley Film Festival. With tenderness and rage, he plays the homeless Malafide, who as much as any character connects all nine films together. The whole cycle is expected to play Bay Area theatres this fall, an occasion the actor might even be willing to comment on.

But don’t expect him to show up for "Papa-Palooza," where his vintage visage shares the bill with the live Twilight Vixen Revue.

"PAPA-PALOOZA"

Thurs/8, 7:30 p.m., $10

Parkway

1834 Park Blvd, Oakl

(510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Of Katie Couric and Dan Rather

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One female anchor is losing her job; another, her clothes

By Leslie Griffith

When Katie Couric was given the title of “America’s sweetheart it was a death knell. America relishes devouring its sweethearts.

If the news magazines and newspapers are correct, Katie Couric’s career at CBS, much like Dan Rather’s, is toast. The last chapters of this complex and revealing human drama are not written yet. But the plot, the sub-plots, the dialogue, the public’s perverse interest, and the motivations are nothing if not Shakespearean.

Two years ago, Couric was the first woman to anchor the evening news broadcast on one of the big three networks. On that day, I was called by local reporters for a quote. My own career in television began 26 years ago, about the same time as Couric’s. “It’s about time,” I told the newspaper reporters.

Couric and I have a few things in common. Bay Area viewers watched as I grew up before their eyes just as Katie Couric grew up in full view of the nation. Wives use to say in various ways, “You are the only other woman I will let my husband bring into the bedroom.” The intimacy of television is still very real, but the truth tellers of old are becoming history.

SFIFF: A magic act from Claude Chabrol

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Jeffrey M. Anderson looks at the latest sinister magic act from veteran auteur Claude Chabrol:

Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two is about as good as any of his films, which is to say, it is highly skilled and hugely entertaining. Yet it will probably come and go fairly quickly. Chabrol made his fiftieth film a few years back, and when you make your fiftieth film, no one cares. If the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson live long enough to make fifty films, just see if anyone notices. If the quality of their films falls, people will complain, but if it stays the same, they’ll be taken for granted, just like Chabrol. I guarantee it. Look at Ingmar Bergman. He cracked fifty films, and when his last, the great Saraband, opened in 2005, people could scarcely be bothered to even yawn.

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Since Claude Chabrol has fewer unlicensed YouTube clips than feature films to his name, this still from A Girl Cut in Two will have to do

In any case, Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two tells the story of a love triangle. Beautiful, ambitious television weather girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) falls for the much older, but successful, married writer Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand). At the same time, a snotty, rich younger man, Paul (Benoît Magimel) is swept away by her and is even more intrigued by her utter indifference to him. The strong characters show at least two sides, slyly seducing one another while selfishly scheming. Chabrol moves the story ahead with a deceptively deft combination of humor and suspense. And of course, there’s more. It just wouldn’t be a Chabrol film if there weren’t a murder or something equally sinister.

A Girl Cut in Two screens Tues/6, 9:30 p.m. at the Clay.

Merc circ up despite newsroom bloodbath

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How is it possible that one of the only major daily newspapers in the United States to show an increase in circulation over the last six months is the closest to up and dying? The San Jose Mercury News added 4,000 weekday copies over the last half-year, according to their most recent figures.

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The Merc, once the prestigious gem of the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers, has undergone heartbreakingly massive staff cutbacks and turnovers of top editors over the last two years. One editor even tragically took his own life. Knight-Ridder was one of the few chains in the United States that aggressively challenged the White House on the war, something they didn’t get proper credit for until much later when Bill Moyers made his triumphant return to public television.

Besides the Merc, everybody’s down in circulation by several percentage points these days: the LA Times, the Chronicle, the Sacto Bee, the Orange County Register. And we all know why, of course. People don’t want to pay for paper anymore. So how could a paper product like the Merc, which is losing all of its talent and enduring the infamous operations consolidations of parent company MediaNews that predictably lead to more boring and error-laden copy, actually be raising the number of people who read the deadwood version at home?

Their circ is up by a seemingly small 1.7 percent, but when you consider the most attention the Merc has gotten lately came from a series of depressing photos portraying the Merc newsroom as a graveyard, this seems like a pretty big deal for the Silicone Valley daily. We couldn’t actually find a good explanation for why their circ is up … anywhere. Folks linked to the news but no one explained the turnaround. We weren’t able to reach anyone in the Merc‘s circ department right away either. They may have blitzed the city with subscription deals, but that seems unlikely if MediaNews CEO Dean “Obama Bin Laden” Singleton, like everyone else, is gravitating toward the Web, even if the Web formula he’s come up with for all of his newspaper holdings frankly looks like crap. I mean really, Dean. The MediaNews sites aren’t nice to navigate or look at. Moyers and Singleton videos after the jump.

Chefs that go crunch

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Watching people cook provides its share of voyeuristic pleasures while also, in theory, offering bits of edification. It’s far easier to learn how to make a dish by watching somebody else make it than by tip-toeing your way through a recipe’s thicket of words, and this is true whether you’re watching in person or via television. In the 1980s I was a faithful viewer of Jacques Pépin’s cooking shows on public TV, and I still use several recipes he demonstrated offhandedly.

But those were the old days, when the point of putting chefs on the tube was to transmit knowledge, skills, and confidence to the viewing public. Today’s chef shows are quite different. Recently I spent a long, not-quite-voluntary interval watching several episodes of Bravo’s "Top Chef," and was reminded not so much — or really, not at all — of Jacques Pépin but of "The Real World" and "Survivor." The themes are pressure, ruthlessness, panic, and triumph, leavened with desire. Ancient Rome had its gladiators, and we have this. And is this, I wondered, any way to treat food and the people who make it? You scorch your broccolini and are voted off the island by a celebrity tribunal to the strains of Wagnerian doom music? And what about your crush on one of the judges, not to mention some of the other tasty chefs? Emotional confusion and torment must make for high ratings, if "Top Chef" is any indication. Still, I’m not sure they conduce to a better world, or even a better-fed world.

It isn’t surprising that cooking has become an occasion for competition in America. We turn all subjects, no matter how inappropriate — even poetry! — into competition. We hallow competition and competitive people, particularly when televised, and don’t seem to recognize that civilization is, at its core, a cooperative venture. Competition is no better than a necessary, well-regulated evil in a civilized regime, and the unthinking American exaltation of it is, possibly, part of the reason we are a warrior society rather than a civilized one.

What happens to the dismissed? I wondered. Do they fall on their knives, one by one, alone and unmourned, off camera? Or do the survivors conspire to cook the lost a send-off meal, in which food is a gesture of love rather than a commodity?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Locus Solus

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"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event," declares Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 phenomenology of domesticity, The Poetics of Space. In its attempts to reconcile a science of atomic futurism with visions of quotidian psychology, to link the aberrations and fetishes of modern design with the traditions of hearth and home, Bachelard’s unique poetics are largely identical to the cinematic worlds of Guy Maddin. The Canadian director’s latest film, My Winnipeg, a so-called "docu-fantasia" of his birthplace, engages headfirst in a surrealist topoanalysis (to borrow from Bachelard’s ideas) of the city in which his own poetics of childhood dwell.

Speaking by the phone from his current Winnipeg home, the affectionately christened Atelier Tovar, Maddin waxes rhapsodically of a dream life bound by interiors and interiority. "After 30 years of dreaming about people I miss, I now dream almost exclusively of architecture," he confesses. "Sometimes my old house, sometimes other people’s — neighbors’ — houses, that I never went into. I think my dream self is trying to empathize with what those houses must have meant to someone else. But they’re always missing every second [floor] board, and are incredibly drafty and filled with this incredible longing and unspeakable joy. It always comes down to the house now, there are rarely any people in these dreams. Just houses."

In My Winnipeg, Maddin has taken his lexicon of family trauma and frigid Manitoban climates and deposits it on the doorstep of his childhood home. Raised in a storefront at Winnipeg’s 800 Ellis Street — which was divided into his aunt Lil’s beauty salon, an extended family wing, and an immediate family suite — Maddin was imprinted with the sights and sounds of multidimensional living. A television echoing around catalog furniture and muffled radio sounds droning through thin walls provided the soundtrack of a bee-hived gynecocracy. To this day, the 52-year-old still luxuriates in the simple pleasures the dreamy house afforded him — specifically orange Jell-O, his answer to Proust’s madeleine, and hairdryer slumbers. "I’ve taken many a nap under a hairdryer," he laughs. "I’ve still got a couple of old ones and you have to wear a hairnet or you get sucked up into the propellers. You wake up with a dehydrated head and a pounding headache, but it’s fantastic. My sister [does it], too. We’re like Beckett characters, sitting across from each other with these roaring domes on our heads."

As the youngest of four children, Maddin admits constructing a phenomenology of dreams from his first waking moments — culled mainly from wonder and boredom. "I spent a lot of time imprinting myself on the couch, listening and watching, not particularly attentively. I think I could have averted disaster if I had just been more attentive," he recalls, zeroing in on the instant when, at seven, he learned of his brother Cameron’s untimely death. "I remember when my brother died: he had gone missing and I was sitting on the couch reassuring my parents that he would come back. And that was the last time I ever felt confident about predicting anything. There was this comfortable rug underneath me, and I remember how it just fell away when I found out he wasn’t coming back.

"And that was the final, important piece of the universe for me," he laments. "There seemed to be these trap doors everywhere in my model of the universe — this place of great comfort, and more comfort, and more comfort, and great tracts of idle time. These secreted trap doors could open at anytime in your own home. And that made the place even more exquisite."

Like Proust and Bachelard before him, Maddin’s artistic communion with spirits long gone originates in the everyday objects and machines that share space with the living and the dead. From within the protection of the house, or rather from within its cavernous isolation, he continues to dream his way backward into the perfect womb of the past.

MY WINNIPEG

Sat/3, 8:30 p.m., PFA

SFIFF: Explosive stuff!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF The pop detritus of today is the archaeological evidence of tomorrow, to be pieced together by future generations — should there be any — who will no doubt want to know what the hell we were thinking. Their conclusions may be bizarre. But will their conjecture be any stranger than our present-tense realities?

Inventing tomorrow’s conspiracy theories today is Mock Up on Mu, the latest pseudodocumentary, sci-fi historical dig, Situationist prank, and thinly veiled fight-the-power rant by San Francisco’s collage king, Craig Baldwin. In the mode of his prior cult faves Tribulation 99 (1992), O No Coronado! (1992) and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) — albeit with a higher percentage of new staged sequences mixed into the ingeniously assembled archival errata — it again grinds fact and fiction into a tasty genre-defying pulp. For many, Mu‘s world premiere is the most eagerly awaited event in the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival’s goody-laden schedule.

It’s 2019 AD on the Empire of Mu — the Moon — where L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard) is building theme parks, selling crater-naming rights, and beaming corporate logos back to "that prison planet called Earth." Having been banished from our planet, he must dispatch "Agent C," a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron (Michelle Silva), back to the blue ball to engage in some espionage involving the seductions of both Ra-worshiping rocket scientist Jack Parsons (Kal Spelletich) and sleazy defense contractor Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke). Realizing "Commodore" Hubbard’s purposes may be more nefarious than professed, she finds the truth is out there … way out there. It’s naked and shameless, in fact. Those hippies were right: free love will save us all.

As ever, there is a certain investigative method behind the Oakland-born Baldwin’s jigsaw madness. The real Parsons was the founder of the pre-NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an avid occultist. He started a private boat dealership with none other than Hubbard, before Hubbard absconded with some money and Parsons’ girlfriend (whom he married). Soon thereafter, Hubbard wrote the original Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, which in turn led to that gift to mankind we call Scientology. As for Parsons, he went on to marry painter, author, and psychic Cameron, who, like him (as well as Hubbard) was an early American devotee of Aleister Crowley and a participant in sex magick rituals.

Thus you don’t need six degrees, let alone Kevin Bacon, to connect Wernher von Braun, Kenneth Anger, and Tom Cruise. History is fun! As is Mu, with its antic use of everything from old propagandistic footage to clips spanning eras of cinematic sci-fi: Georges Melies’ 1902 Trip to the Moon, the original Flash Gordon serial and 1936’s H.G. Wells–based Things to Come, drive-in trash (it’s always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die), and Star Trek. The resulting fair-use frolic nonetheless reveals a serious side or three while exploring the dense and slightly demented history of military and aerospace business in sunny California.

Baldwin recently took a break from his numerous other roles — programmer at Other Cinema; teacher at SF Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and Artists Television Access — to sound off on Mu.

SFBG I hate to ask such a blunt question, but what is this movie about?

CRAIG BALDWIN My "Mu-vie" is about how utopian visions of technology and space exploration became compromised by the military in the late 20th century. And [about] how the lives of [technological and space travel] pioneers afford a rich trace of California regional history after World War II: the complex crossing of alternative tech research, personal belief systems, lifestyles, artistic practices, newly organized and newly imported religions, and spiritual institutions. Plus that era brought an explosion of the formerly marginalized sci-fi genre, of which Mu is of course the very latest iteration!

Mu is also about the cult of film, especially experimental film. I’m trying to work though a new model of historiography or storytelling that I am calling collage-narrative. It’s a humble stab at opening up a new space in film practice that is not only of interest to historians but also to aesthetes. And, my dear, I don’t have to tell you that these groups are certainly not mutually exclusive!

SFBG Your father worked for a rocket manufacturer. Has that made you more interested in Cold War and military-industrial complex themes?

CB Yes, my dad worked for Aerojet. He was born the same year as Parsons! And I was born the year Parsons died. I am his reincarnation. But the point is something like 30 percent of Californians were involved in the aerospace biz at its height.

SFBG How much real Scientology material is in Mu?

CB [The film] remains at the level of Swiftian allegory or satire, spinning off of their Genesis story and [acting as] a meta-gloss on Hubbard’s own autobiography.

SFBG I wish Unarius had become the growth religious cult of our time. They’ve certainly made better movies. But regarding yours, the real life connections between Parsons, Hubbard, Crowley, "Mother of the New Age movement" Cameron, occultism, and scientific and military work are stranger than fiction.

CB Everyone has been very influenced by the New Age, uh, belief systems. But more than anything, I identify with postwar bohemians, beats, and hippies. Those days when rocket scientists and sci-fi pulpmeisters and occult conjurers and proto-Wicca ritual carnal orgiastic pagans intermingled may be long gone — though Kenneth Anger is still around.

SFBG Mu uses a lot of excerpts from mainstream and low budget entertainment. But where does the less familiar material — educational, promotional, and so forth — come from? You must spend infinite hours looking for the perfect clip.

CB It comes from my usual source: My basement archive of 2,500 industrial films. I do spend time in there, but could hardly claim to find the perfect clip. Au contraire. I call it "availabilism" — making what I do have work for me, through editing and audio techniques, overwriting it all into an associational stew hopefully akin to the half-memory, half-fantasy, sublinguistic colloid of thought itself.

SFBG What reaction does your work get from students? They presumably grok the pop culture stuff, but do they get the political undercurrents?

CB People can be responsive to the pop-cult clips, or the regional history, or the antiwar sentiments. But methinks [Mock Up on Mu] will be a touchstone for legions of occult or subcult partisans ravenous for these almost mythic tales of the roots of alternative religions.

SFBG Sir, your Thetan level must be off the charts.

MOCK UP ON MU Mon/28, 9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; April 30, 8:55 p.m., Pacific Film Archive


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

Violet Blue vs. Violet Blue

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By Justin Juul

I totally got hoodwinked.

Two years ago, I bought expensive tickets to the 2006 Exotic Erotic Expo because the flyer for the event advertised a live appearance by Violet Blue, who is one of my favorite sex writers, and who I’d wanted to meet for a very long time. I never got to meet her though. Turns out there’s a porn star also named Violet Blue, and she was the one appearing. So, instead of schmoozing with a journalist, I spent my time at the expo drinking cheap beer and stalking a porn star. Snore.

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The real Violet Blue

Naturally Violet Blue the writer is pretty pissed about this kind of mix up — she claims the fake Violet Blue is using her name to attract a bigger following — and the name feud has finally made it to the courthouse. (Full disclosure: I’m a witness for the writer’s side – my story was a direct catalyst for the suit.) It seems after our missed encounter, the real Violet Blue decided she’d had enough and started looking into patent laws and ways to challenge the star of Who Violet Blew, Planet of the Gapes 4, and Beauty and the Bitch. The initial court proceedings went down last October, but the case is far from over. The porn star has been quite successful under her moniker – winning multiple AVN awards, getting countless roles, and even hosting her own radio show — and she doesn’t want to give the name up (she “officially” changed it to Violetta Blue, but continues to use the original name whenever she appears at events or stars in videos).

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The other Violet Blue (not posing with the author!)

What’s the big deal, you ask? Both of these women are involved in porn aren’t they?

Well, yes and no. The writer, whose real name actually is Violet Blue, has dedicated her entire life to showing the good side of the sex industry, whereas the other Violet Blue is just a plain ol’ sex worker. In her award winning blog, www.tinynibbles.com, and in her books, the real Violet Blue tries to show that an obsession with sex is totally natural and that “sex people” can be funny, smart, technologically advanced, artistically inclined, and full of unique ideas. She tours the world holding sex seminars on college campuses and even makes appearances on popular television shows to champion her conviction that any sex is good sex as long as it’s safe and consensual. She also believes that, contrary to popular belief, women like to watch pornography as much as men. Good deal.

But the issue isn’t about whether or not Violet Blue the imposter should be doing porn or whether or not she’s a good role model. The issue is that the real Violet Blue is constantly being mistaken for a so-so porn star and it’s fucking with her career. She can’t even win national awards, like Forbes’ Top 25 Web Celebs of 2007 (in which she won 25th place as the best pornstar/blogger) or get invited to conventions without someone thinking she does double anal for extra cash when her book sales are down. Not that that’s bad in itself, but come on. I’d be pretty pissed as well. Especially about Planet of the Gapes 4.

Guide to greener living

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Click here for even more green businesses and services, including Green Citizen, Green Zebra, PLANTSF and more!

ERECYCLE CAMPAIGN


Want to obey the bumper stickers and kill your television? That’s OK. But be careful where you bury it. TVs, as well as computers, DVD players, and all kinds of electronics, have no business in landfills. They’re made of plenty of metal which can be recycled, along with plenty of chemicals that are hazardous to the public. The eRecycle campaign, sponsored by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, maintains a Web site of local pickup and drop-off services for your e-waste — and thankfully, just in time for the high-def TV changeover in 2009.

www.erecycle.org

ECO HOME IMPROVEMENT


Want a greener home from the ground up? This is your one-stop shop. From flooring and cabinets to decor and lighting, everything here is natural, sustainable, and eco-friendly.

2617-2619 San Pablo, Berk. (510) 644-3500, www.ecohomeimprovement.com

DR. NAMRATA PATEL


Finding the right dentist is tough. But Dr. Namrata Patel makes your decision easier with her new LEED-certified (that’s Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design) office. Patel uses nontoxic products — keeping PVC, formaldehyde, and chlorine out of everything from floors to cabinetry. She’s careful about reducing waste. She uses minimal radiation and a special filtration system for dealing with mercury fillings. Even her office furnishings are made with recycled materials. And yes, she accepts insurance!

360 Post, Suite 704, SF. (415) 433-0119, www.sfgreendentist.com

SAN FRANCISCO GREEN BUSINESS PROJECT


Want to make sure your favorite restaurant or preferred electrician uses green practices? This online resource will point you toward businesses in SF, from bars to baby clothes retailers, who are committed to the environment.

www.sfenvironment.com/greenbiz

LUSCIOUS GARAGE


The actual act of driving isn’t the only reason having a car is hard on the environment. Maintaining it is too. But Luscious Garage is trying to help on both accounts. This woman-owned and operated facility specializes in hybrids, and runs the whole business as sustainably as possible, from the machine shop to the office. And for these luscious ladies, sustainably goes beyond chemicals and objects — they also sustain their community by hosting classes and a hybrid car club in their beautiful facility.

459 Clementina, SF. (415) 875-9030, www.lusciousgarage.com

PAT’S GARAGE


Like Luscious Garage’s brother, Pat’s also focuses on environmentally friendly business practices. Bring your Honda, Acura, or Subaru for services you can feel good about. Or, if you have a hybrid, you can work with Pat’s partners, Green Gears, to upgrade your hybrid with plug-in capabilities. Bonus? They offer free car classes for women.

1090 26th St., SF. (415) 647-4500, www.patsgarage.com, www.greengears.com

KEETSA


This SF-based business wants you to rest easy with their eco-friendly mattresses. With recycled steel in the coils, bamboo and unbleached natural cotton for fabrics, nonchemical odor-controlling and antibacterial treatments, and ingenious use of scrap memory foam bits, every mattress is as kind to the earth as it is to your body. Keetsa further reduces its carbon footprint with its innovative mattress compression technique, allowing for easier and more efficient transport. But are they good mattresses? They must be. After less than a year in business, they’re already opening a store in Fairfield.

271 Ninth St., SF. (415) 252-1575, www.keetsa.com

ECOHAUL


Just bought a new Keetsa and want to get rid of your tired old Sealy? Don’t just throw it in the trash. If you don’t live on one of those SF streets where a stranger will pick up your stuff from the sidewalk within an hour, call San Rafael–based Ecohaul. This nationwide service will pick up your furniture, appliances, yard waste, and just about anything else you can think of. Then they’ll reuse, recycle, and repurpose everything they can, diverting as much from the landfill as possible.

1-800-ecohaul, www.ecohaul.com

THE ORCHARD GARDEN HOTEL


You’ve greened up your home, so why not find an eco-friendly home away from home? The Orchard Garden was the third hotel in the United States to be given LEED certification for its key card energy control system (SF’s first — it’s based on the European model), organic bath products, natural materials, and general commitment to sustainability. Also check out its sister hotel, the Orchard, on Union.

466 Bush, SF. (415) 399-9807, www.theorchardgardenhotel.com

EPI CENTER MEDSPA


Ten years ago, Epi Center was the first spa in the country to combine traditional spa treatments and medical procedures. Now it celebrates its anniversary with a new innovation: the ecomedspa. This LEED-certified arm of the original spa combines regular procedures with organic treatments in a healthy environment, all according to the principles of William McDonough’s "Cradle to Cradle."

450 Sutter, SF. (415) 362-4754, www.skinrejuv.com

NEPALESE PAPER


Based in Penngrove, this company imports handmade Nepali paper made from bark of a white shrub called lokta, which regrows after pruning. Not only does this mean no trees are cut down, it also means employment for many women in Kathmandu Valley and financial support for village regions of Nepal. Plus, the paper’s gorgeous. Order online, or find it at Stylo, Autumn Express, Kinokuniya Stationery and Gifts, or San Francisco State University.

(707) 665-9055, www.nepalesepaper.com

MORE DIRT


Make a fashion statement with these simple, 100-percent organic T-shirts by Heidi Quante. The shirts, which are brown with white lettering saying "More Dirt" on the front are meant to capture attention and send people to Quante’s Web site, which shows people how to combat global warming through planting trees, establishing community gardens, and using permaculture techniques. Inks are made without PVC or phthalates, and shirts come in sizes for men, women, and babies.

www.moredirt.org

A. MACIEL PRINTING


Family owned and operated since 1984, A. Maciel specializes in recycled and tree-free papers as well as soy-based inks. What’s even better? The shop is completely wind-powered. Though the print shop is capable of doing corporate jobs, A. Maciel caters to nonprofits and community groups like the American Land Conservancy, Forest Ethics, and Greenpeace. They’re also part of Northern California Media Workers/Typographical Union. Sure beats Kinko’s.

50 Mendell, Unit #5, SF. (415) 648-3553, www.amacielprinting

TRANSPORTEDSF


All aboard the ecobus! This organization takes Das Frachtgut, the veggie oil–fueled bus Jens-Peter Jungclaussen uses as a mobile classroom, on an ecofriendly party tour. Movie nights are all about watching modern classics and then doing some kind of relevant outdoor activity (e.g., see The Big Lebowski, then bowl outside). Dance nights turn the bus into a mobile DJ booth and an instant, impromptu club. It’s fun, safe (no drunk driving, kids!), and above all, Earth friendly.

www.transportedsf.com

Clubs: Bootyful action at Full Figure Friday

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Party with me, plus. All photos by Joshua Rotter.

By Joshua Rotter

Going out dancing can be a confidence-buster for peeps of all sizes. But the extreme shame imposed on plus-size women often outweighs their desire to hit da club. Full-figured party promoter Lady Tigress was no different. “I was never a clubber in my twenties because I didn’t feel like I would be comfortable in a nightclub setting,” Tigress said. “I bought into what I saw on TV and thought everyone in bars or dance clubs looked like Beyonce or Britney.”

In a world where the Barbie doll reigns supreme, these notions are only reinforced by a media that has little love for big girls. Rarely on the covers of magazines, large women remain the laughing stock of hip-hop videos, the early eliminations on reality showmances, and stand-up fodder for late night television: think Jay Leno’s Jonah and the whale jokes about Lewinskygate. And Lady Tigress knows that clubland is no kinder.

“There are gorgeous plus-size women in all types of clubs all over the Bay,” Tigress said. “But even if they are confident, there is snickering that sometimes happens when a crew of big girls shows up at a mainstream club, or they are sometimes ignored because a lot of people don’t want to admit that they are attracted to women who live outside of the super-skinny American beauty standard.”

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After Tigress started going out to Bay Area BBW parties such as Big Boogie Nights, Sexy at Any Size, and Heavy Rotation in her thirties, she realized that if the event was fat-friendly, these women would come out and party. So Tigress was inspired to create an even larger night, a hip-hop party for plus-size women and their fans called Full Figure Friday, and decided to host her evening, unlike similar hotel-based events across the Bay, at the stylish San Francisco club Bambuddha Lounge.

Take a stanza: Verse and song for National Poetry Month

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By Todd Lavoie

Guys, commence with the stroking your beards in thoughtful poses! Girls, grab your journals and set yourselves a-scrawling! April is National Poetry Month, so now’s the time to start looking deep and sensitive and positively brimming over with penetrating insight. Spring is in the air – the flowers are blooming and birds are chirping – so why not summon your muse and whip up an ode or a sonnet to celebrate all this marvelous rebirth? No way, you say? OK, how about a haiku, then? A limerick? Something cribbed from a restroom wall, perhaps?

If putting words to paper isn’t your thing, or if reading poetry doesn’t float your boat, either, fret not. All hope is not lost for giving April the rune-and-rhyme lovin’ it deserves. How about a little poetry-in-song, then? Sure, I suppose you could say most songs are poetry, in a sense – I mean, you don’t need an MFA to take the average pop song and dissect it into meter, rhyme, verse structure, and all of its other little bits ‘n’ pieces – but strip away the music and much of the power of the argument is lost.

Put it this way: if you simply read aloud the lyrics of most songs, unaccompanied, they’d sound like pretty weak excuses for poetry. Embarrassing, even. And no, I’m not hatin’ – I’m just sayin’, that’s all. Nah, you won’t catch any poetry snobbery from me – hell, I adore Marc Bolan, but you won’t sneak me passing off any T. Rex ditties as shining examples of poetic form. Still, I’ve always been fascinated with intersections of poetry and song; I did a little scraping around in my thought-box and here are a few successful experiments of music/poem collisions which came to mind:

Ken Nordine, Colors (The Nordine Group/Asphodel)
“Word Jazz”, he called it – in fact, the rumbling, rich-baritoned radio/television voiceover maestro liked the phrase so much that he used it as the title of his 1957 debut. Over the course of a series of inventive, parameter-pushing Word Jazz recordings made in the ’50s and ’60s, Nordine married loose, free-association musings to bongo-friendly bohemian-jazz – yep, very Beat Generation, daddy-o.

Newsom’s torch plays SF for fools

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First the route for the Beijing Olympic Torch relay was changed, following a brief opening ceremony.
Then, the closing ceremony was shifted to an undisclosed location.

These last minute changes left all the thousands of people who came to support, protest or simply witness the torch’s historic relay thwarted.

And they meant that China has got some relatively upbeat television footage to show back home, featuring an unencumbered torch being run through the protest-free streets of San Francisco! Talk about a far cry from reality.

“Disgraceful and shameful” said Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin of the City’s switch and bait.

‘I have every reason to believe this was a well developed plan by Gavin Newsom and his chief of police in conjunction with the government of China and the US State Department,” Peskin continued. “It was designed to please the government of China and give them the TV footage they want to portray to their people. The bottom line is that Newsom has deceitfully and repeatedly misled the public. Frankly, these are the tactics that the Chinese government uses on its people. It’s a move straight from the Richard Nixon playbook.”

Asked if there was evidence to support the City’s decision to redirect the torch relay and relocate the closing ceremony, Peskin said he’d seen and heard none.

“I went down the route at 11 am, the supporters and protesters were all peaceful. This was a large decoy operation. Only Newsom played the people of San Francisco for fools. I don’t care if you were a supporter or an opponent of the torch, people brought their children, families and friends to San Francisco for a once in a lifetime experience. This was the biggest charade perpetuated by any mayor in anyone’s memory and possibly in the history of this town. The only difference between Newsom and President Hu Jintao is none. Both manipulate, are deceitful and do not run transparent governments.”

The torch, which was variously concealed in a waterfront warehouse, shipped to Van Ness with a Quackers bus in tow, and diverted through the Marina to elude protesters, was taken to SFO for a surprise closing ceremony–presumably so it could be shipped out of SF as fast as possible, away from the whiskey and fandangos–and all those people, inconveniently protesting uncomfortable stuff like China’s abysmal track record of human rights abuses and its support of dictatorship in Burma and genocide in Darfur.

Bigger than life

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

How would you define an improbable Tilt-A-Whirl Technicolor or Vistavision or Cinemascope view of American virtue and vice? Jean-Luc Godard’s term for it was Tashlinesque. Watching the feverish films in the Pacific Film Archive’s short Frank Tashlin retrospective, we see an artist pushing the outermost limits of cinematic realism, gorging 1950s America on its desire for bigger, better, and faster.

The Tashlinesque land of excess encompasses Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, Kool Aid-red convertibles, and bubblegum teenagers. If there is a milk bottle in a Tashlin film, it will cream when a pin-up walks by. Ten-gallon hats spontaneously ejaculate oil. "The room temperature is changing, if you catch my cruder meaning," Mansfield coos in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and we do, over and over again. Tashlin’s America is a nation of alcoholics and dupes, softheaded nincompoops and sexpot cynics. France had Jacques Tati, and we had — and have — Tashlin.

Just as it did with other stateside pulp visionaries, it took the French to recognize Tashlin’s genius. "There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust [1956] and It Happened One Night [1934]… but a difference of kind," Godard wrote in a 1957 assessment for Cahiers du Cinéma. There’s a touch of cruelty (and a trace of the director’s cartoon roots) in Tashlin’s preference for physically excessive actors like Mansfield and Jerry Lewis, though the way he uses these figures to channel the distorting nature of American gluttony and naïveté is brutally effective.

It’s not just the bodies that are inflated. The frame itself seems to be stretched over the course of these films, with camera angles and props used to accentuate the horizontality of the widescreen image. Just as Preston Sturges outdid his era of talky screwballs with dialogue-mad farces, Tashlin amplified ’50s Hollywood’s taste for grandiosity and crudeness to a pointedly unmanageable extreme. His self-aware movies give a sharp sense of the studio system in its death throes.

As satire, Tashlin’s send-ups of ad men and agents are as prescient as they are unsparing. A typical Tashlin alarm is sounded when Dean Martin’s character in Artists & Models (1955) announces at the outset that he moved to New York to make money in order to study art. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall’s title character turns on the television to hear what the starlet Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) is saying to reporters on his front lawn — an apt commentary on the way technologies abstract reality and invade our privacy. The spin cycles continue to gain speed: the ’90s were an especially prime slice of the Tashlinesque, what with a booming economy, celebrity sex tapes, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Cinematically speaking, Richard Kelly just tried his hand at Tashlinesque with Southland Tales (2006), though I can’t help thinking the originator would have done better with the musical numbers.

Tashlin’s burlesque is dexterous, but it doesn’t hatch from any stable logic. Television is clearly the enemy, but the movies aren’t much better. With every bathing beauty and each overripe burst of Technicolor, the director indulges and implicates our most blithering desires. (One feels like a child reaching out for a lollipop while watching Tashlin’s films: when Godard famously quipped that there was no blood in his own 1965 Pierrot le fou but only red, he might have been quoting his American forebear.) If the plots nominally resolve themselves, the tone and visual style remain pitched between splendor and disgust.

"By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically," Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker. It was Tashlin who taught us to see this way. If there were any justice to art history, he would be in the pantheon of Pop Art, not just for his content, but also for his bold use of color and scale. But he of all people would have known that artistic success is on the same shaky ground as achievement in politics, entertainment, and business — same as it ever was.

FRANK TASHLIN: AMERICAN NONSENSE

Fri/11 through April 18

PFA Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The blind feeding the blind

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During my three decades of life, I’ve had the chance to do quite a few things wearing a blindfold — play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, whack a piñata, wait for a lover to find my clitoris – but eating has never been one of them. Until now.

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“Waiter, I don’t know what’s in my soup.” AP photo.

I’m sure you’ve heard of this phenomenon: fancy restaurants blindfolding their patrons so they can fully focus on the subtle, complex, upper-middle-class flavors of haute cuisine. Or perhaps you’ve heard of it from dieting gurus, who profess you’ll enjoy your food more, and eat less of it, if you aren’t distracted by stimuli like television, books, or, you know, sight.

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Chef Craig Patzer prepares our meals – and probably tries not to laugh at our blindfolded shenanigans.AP Photo.

What I experienced was a version of this phenomenon crossed with the PR machine: a joint event between Jardiniere and Tazo teas where media types were blindfolded to taste entrees and alcohol pairings made with, or inspired by, Tazo blends. And it was rad.

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“The rest of you are blindfolded too, right? This isn’t some kind of April Fool’s joke?”

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