Schedules are for Wed/20-Tue/26 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ALBANY 1115 Solano, Albany; www.landmarktheatres.com. $8-10. An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson (Bateson, 2012), Thu, 7:30. With filmmaker and the subject’s daughter Nora Bateson in person.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. Free-$6. "Periwinkle Cinema: Special Friends," short films, Wed, 8. "Technophobia Film Festival," Fri, 8. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Chermayeff, 2012), Mon, 7.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Daisies (Chytilová, 1966) Wed, 7, and House (Hausu) (Obayahshi, 1977), Wed, 8:35. "Disposable Film Festival 2013," Thu, 8. Advance tickets at www.disposablefilmfest.com. "Midnites for Maniacs: Mentors Matter:" •Rocky III (Stallone, 1982), Fri, 7:15; The Professional (Besson, 1994), Fri, 9:15; and Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995), Fri, 11:30. Roar! The Roaring ’20s Musical Movie, presented by the Children’s Musical Theater, Sat, 2, 5, 8. The Ten Commandments (DeMille, 1956), Sun, 2. •Heavy Traffic (Bakshi, 1973), Sun, 7, and Heavy Metal (Potterton, 1981), Sun, 8:35. The Master (Anderson, 2012), Mon-Tue, 8 (also Tue, 3, 5).
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. A Fierce Green Fire (Kitchell, 2012), Wed-Thu, call for times. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. Ginger and Rosa (Potter, 2012), March 22-28, call for times.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. "Midnight Movies:" The Manson Family (Van Bebber, 2003) with "Gator Green" (Van Bebber, 2012), Fri-Sat, midnight.
JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF SAN FRANCISCO Kanbar Hall, 3200 California, SF; www.jccsf.org/arts. $12-25. "Mark Cantor’s Giants of Jazz on Film: Stompin’ at the Savoy Swing, Swing, Swing!," films about jazz in the 1930s and ’40s, Sat, 8.
NAPA MARRIOTT Grand Ballroom, 3425 Solano, Napa; www.napavalleyelvisfestival.com. $25-35. "Napa Valley Elvis Festival:" Wild in the Country (Dunne, 1961), Sat, 11:30am. Followed by special King-themed events, including performances by Elvis tribute artists.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. "New Parkway Classics:" Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998), Thu, 9pm. "New Parkway Family Classics:" The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979), Fri, 4; Sat, 11am; Sat, 11:30pm. Mommy is Coming (Dunye, 2012), Sat, 9. "Late Night:" Purple Rain (Magnoli, 1984) Sat, 11:30. "Thrillville: Shatfest:" Kingdom of the Spiders (Cardos, 1977), Sun, 6. "Doc Night:" Miss Representation (Siebel Newsom, 2011), Tue, 6:30.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. CAAMfest 2013, Wed-Sat. Visit www.caamedia.org for complete schedule and ticket info. "Filmmaker Provocateur: Jean Rouch:" The Lion Hunters (1965), Sun, 3. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Sun, 5.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. "Frameline Encore Screening Series:" Mississippi: I Am (Hirshorn and Linton, 2012), Thu, 7. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), Thu, 9:15. "Math Films Mathathon:" N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös (Csicsery, 1993), Wed, 6, 9; Hard Problems: The Road to the World’s Toughest Math Contest (Csicsery, 2008), Wed, 8. War Witch (Nguyen, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7, 9. K-11 (Stewart, 2012), March 22-28, 7, 9 (also Sat-Sun, 3, 5). Somebody Up There Likes Me (Byington, 2012), March 22-28, 7, 9 (also Sat-Sun, 3).
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $13. "Vortesque: The Vortex Variety Show:" Screaming Mimi (Oswald, 1958), Fri, 9, with live burlesque interludes; "Shatneresque:" Barbary Coast (1975), Fri, 11:30, with live burlesque William Shatner tribute; Secrets of a Married Man (Graham, 1984), Fri, 1:10am.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "Human Rights Watch International Film Festival:" Habibi (Youssef, 2011), Thu, 7:30. Hitler’s Children (Ze’evi, 2012), Fri-Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2.
Why would you pay $50 for an hour of hosted Skyy vodka and Peronis? Why, when it’s preceding what may well be the most self-aware (we hope) SF bro moment of the year: the two-year-old Mr. Marina competition. The winner among 10 brah-ly contestants will become VIP at various Marina businesses for 2013 and will be proud that he slapped cancer, as goes the moniker for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society booster club through which this event’s proceeds are donated to fighting disease. Swimwear competition, talent portion, and impromptu question fielded in stereotypically “Marina” outfits will help judges pick a dude-gem. (Caitlin Donohue)
Kim Gordon’s new band, Body/Head, was just here for a Noise pop show, so….let’s just get this out of the way: yes, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is the guitarist-vocalist-songwriter behind Chelsea Light Moving. And no, Sonic Youth does not have plans to reunite. Chelsea Light Moving is now on its first official tour, in support of its self-titled debut album, which came out March 5 on Matador Records, and has the bloggers buzzing. The post-rock foursome, named for an actual moving company run by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, maintains Moore’s jagged guitar work and tendency towards the fuzz, but some tracks hold a quieter calm, and lean more toward pop than Sonic Youth ever did, which is an interesting departure. San Francisco’s harmonious post-punk trio Grass Widow opens. (Emily Savage)
Where have the federal intervention of past years and the more recent steps forward in legalizing marijuana across the country left us in the fair city of San Francisco? At this talk, hear thoughts from long-haired news contributor to fellow SF Newspaper Company-owned publication SF Examiner, Chris Roberts, and ex-marijuana grower Heather Donahue who yes, also starred in the swervy shots of 1999’s Blair Witch Project. More relevant for the purpose of this blurb, Donahue wrote a book about her experience in small town NorCal weed country, and coupled with Roberts’ knowledge of Bay Area weed businesses, their thoughts should make interesting discussion. If you’ve already got a burning question for the duo, send it in advance of the event to growingpains@sfappeal.com. (Donohue)
6:30-7:30pm, free
RSVP recommended at info@ybcd.org
San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR)
The Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics presented stunning artistic spectacles (minus that whole unfortunate thing with the lip-syncing scandal), and Shen Wei, their choreographer, played a large role. The Ceremonies offers a good example of the artist’s work, which is known for its bridging of cultures and melding of the traditions of dance with innovative contemporary techniques. Shen Wei comes to YBCA with a long list of credentials — including a MacArthur Award and Guggenheim Fellowship — and a spectacular performance, “Undivided Divided,” that involves dancers moving in grids of different mediums such as sculpture and paint. (Laura Kerry)
“Chillwave” or “chill-vibe” music. Are those terms en vogue or just plain nauseating? Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping the fact that this Mashi Mashi Presents show will be an evening of electronic, dream-pop, and synth. When Mohani (Oakland’s own Donghoon Han) unleashes his own brand of K-Pop meets Joe Meek’s version of outer space, the soundscape will in fact leave you mellowed out. (This is his album release show.) Deliciously, atmospheric synth blips will rule this night featuring some truly emerging artists, while a good hook for the sake of song structure will not be forgotten. Keep your ears tuned in between acts as the DJ interweaves some carefully selected tracks to keep things moody. (Andre Torrez)
This ubiquitous LA-based rapper has eight solo albums out, one in the mix, and a hand in half a dozen side projects and collectives, often featuring in three or four different albums per year. Whether he’s going solo, rapping with Atmosphere’s Slug in their duo Felt, or getting indie-licious with Living Legends, Murs’ smart and surefooted rhymes stand out. He recently stirred up some controversy in the hip-hop community for featuring a gay kiss in one of his videos to highlight his support of marriage equality, a bold move both atypical of rappers and extremely fitting of Murs. He seems to have taken his own advice to heart when he raps on “Everything”, “Be original/Be different/Be the one to stand up and shock this system.” (Haley Zaremba)
Ducktails produces summery rock. The band’s third album, The Flower Lane, released this past January, could span a lazy day at the beach; the low-key but bright album opener, “Ivy Covered House,” provides the soundtrack to a short drive with windows down, while the breezy love song, “Letter of Intent,” underscores the last embers of nighttime bonfire. The side project of Real Estate’s Matt Mondanile, what started as a solo act has developed into a tight band that performs upbeat pop songs to full audiences. Ducktails brings to these, along with a bit of premature summer, to the Chapel tonight. (Kerry)
Let’s begin with pick-it-up, pick-it-up songs “A Message to You, Rudy,” and “Nite Klub,” and upbeat haunter “Ghost Town” — British two-tone legends the Specials released now-classic ska gems early in their career, beginning in ’79 with their self-titled debut. The band inched up through the early ’80s with followup, More Specials and more danceable two-tone tracks like anti-work anthem “Rat Race” and foggy “Stereotype/Stereotypes, Pt. 2.” Over the decades the band has broken up, gotten back together, gained and lost members, experience shiny revival popularity, and remained that of checkerboard legend. See the Specials live now, while you still have the joint strength to skank in the pit. (Savage)
For most singer-songwriters who break big, life becomes a wild ride. For Christopher Owens, the critical and commercial success of his band Girls was just another event in a lifetime of crazy trips. He’s been, among other things, a cult member, a drug addict, a knife salesman, and a punk rocker. With such experiences, he has enough material for a lifetime of therapeutic songwriting. But Owens only seems to be able to write about one thing — love. While Girls tried their hardest to perfect the indie love song, Owens’ new solo album Lysandre tries harder. The record itself is one huge love story about a girl he met while on tour with Girls in France, and the duo’s subsequent rise and fall. The music and the lyrics are earnest, simple, and heart-achingly relatable. While the loss of Girls is a blow to the San Francisco music scene, one listen to Lysandre certainly eases the pain. (Zaremba)
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s best-selling book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide inspired many of its readers to become activists. Its message has been further shared thanks to a four-hour PBS documentary highlighting international women’s rights issues, with a little celebrity help from Diane Lane, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union, and others. In honor of Women’s History Month, the Guardian’s own Caitlin Donohue hosts an abridged screening of this important film, followed by what’s sure to be a lively discussion about San Francisco’s role in advancing women’s rights worldwide. (Cheryl Eddy)
This band of young ruffians out of Copenhagen has had a whirlwind adolescence. After two albums and international acclaim, the gents in Iceage are still teenagers at 19-years-old. 2011’s New Brigade and this year’s You’re Nothing add up to one searing hour of punk rock fueled by the sort of unbridled, unfiltered fury that only coming of age can produce. Their particular sound mashes in elements of post-punk, hardcore, and industrial to create a delicious sonic mess. The group recently came under fire after a blogger posted a conspiracy theory-esque article about Iceage’s “chic racism.” Though the claims were unfounded and the research woefully incomplete, the allegations just won’t disappear. But hey, the rage and confusion stemming from this sort of injustice and abuse of modern forms of communication seems like a recipe for a great follow-up album. (Zaremba)
It’s not just that Caveman’s music is dreamy, but it also shares qualities with dreams. The band’s first album, CoCo Beware (2011) simultaneously sounds close and ambiently distant. Caveman’s self-titled second album, released April 2, will build on these effects, which have produced compelling performances and earned the band impressive recognition in the past couple of years. With beautifully pure vocals and beats that are funkier than expected, the band plays folk-pop with a vividness of a daydream or the last images before waking. Get swept up in the momentum of Caveman’s reverie at the Independent. (Kerry)
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UPDATE: Kershner has added this addendum to the piece
Some people seem to have misunderstood my point. Mays presented himself to adults far differently than to his friends. I used a TV character many people would remember to illustrate the insincerity of his text to the victim’s father. The string of text messages linked below amply demonstrates how abominably he acted toward the victim, who deserves everyone’s support.
Unfortunately, the use of that character as reference is entirely in keeping with the rest of the media’s apparent tendency to recast the rapes as youthful indiscretions. What was Eddie Haskell’s most egregious crime? Anyway, poor choice of metaphor, blog post stands.
——-
I’ll tell you how not to start your morning: like I did. I crushed my soul catching up on the Steubenville rape case. While still in bed. Really dumb.
Seriously, do not read the text message transcripts of all the lol’s and bragging-lying flip-flopping that happened during and after the atrocity commited against the 16 year old woman before you’ve hugged your loved ones. Most definitely do not watch the video that helped kick off scrutiny of the incident when KnightSec leaked it.
And I guess, don’t go to the biggest website for daily news in town, because you’re going to get kicked in the gut there, too.
This is how the Chron’s Vlae Kershner — the news director and sometimes sportswriter (UPDATE: I guess he writes about all kinds of stuff, oh current media climate!) who has been covering the case on SFGate — starts out today’s “Hot Topics” column on yesterday’s sentencing of Trent Mays and Ma’Lik Richmond.
Fans of classic TV will remember Eddie Haskell from “Leave It To Beaver”. Making mischief, getting his friends in trouble, sucking up to their parents as if he were the nicest boy who ever lived.
As a Guardian writer I am generally required by profession to digress with what the Chronicle writes in most, if not all circumstances, but this is beyond. The fucking. Pale.
How do you make young women who have been molested look like they are the aberrations? Starting off with the most innocuous sitcom in, oh, television history is a really good stab at it. Eddie Haskell? Did Eddie Haskell rape anybody? The next line of Kershner’s column is this:
If the writers had cast Eddie as the bad guy in a crime show instead of a sitcom, he might have resembled Trent Mays.
TRENT MAYS IS THE CUTEST CRIMINAL OF ALL TIME.
It goes from there. You can read the rest if you’re interested in the pathos of retro musings that’ll embarasss their author for years to come. As yesterday’s similar debacle of the fawning CNN reporters proved, we have a serious problem here.
That serious problem is not that a bunch of football players in Steubenville, Ohio are sexual predators (they are.) Those boys didn’t build a society that is built on treating women like chattel when they’re in vulnerable situations. But they are a fucked up iteration of it and no single person should feel bad for them being sentenced to years in jail.
We should feel bad that their coach, parents, small town, media, world taught them that putting it in a girl’s ass when she’s unconscious, taking photos of it, and bragging about it is what a man does in this brave new Internet era.
The problem is that people get raped all the time. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, rapes happen every two minutes in this country. And 97 percent of those rapists never spend a single day in prison.
So maybe society needs a trigger warning.
Maybe it made Kershner feel better to tell himself that Mays’ and Richmond’s behavior is just boys being boys, or boys being boys in a new weird way that 1950s TV couldn’t have predicted. Duh, boys aren’t bad! Society isn’t based on oppression, men don’t need to examine their actions, and women don’t need to adjust to the fact that they live in a society where one in six of us report having been (which is different from having been) raped.
How should we be writing and talking about this stuff? How about education? How soon is too soon to start counteracting the messages that little boys and girls get every day, all around them on buses and late-night talk shows, and in presidential debates?
I think the important thing, too, is to hear less from the people who hear “Steubenville” and think “Leave It To Beaver” and more from the people who hear “Stuebenville” and it makes their world end, albeit briefly (like this hella brave blogger who came in with the Twitter screengrab on those assholes.) That feeling is not coming out in the media, and I think if the former group is going to learn a damn thing from this episode it’s going to take the latter group stating their feelings uncompromisingly.
I bet you didn’t think this was going to end in shameless self-promotion, but surprise! The Guardian (in conjuncture with Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center and Artists’ Television Access) has been planning a Women’s History Month screening on Monday, March 25 of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof’s global look at violence against females and other women’s issues. The discussion that follows the screening will be a great opportunity to talk about what to do in a post-Steubenville world — or what to do about making it a post-Steubenville world. Please come, there will be adult beverages if you’re into that kind of thing.
Schedules are for Wed/13-Tue/19 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ANSWER COALITION 2969 Mission, SF; www.answersf.org. $5-10 (no one turned away for lack of funds). “International Women’s Day Showing:” Maquilapolis (Funari and de la Torre, 2006), Wed, 7.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $7. “Other Cinema:” “Psycho-Geography,” with works by Olivia Wyatt and Marke Brecke, Sat, 8:30.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. Cloud Atlas (Tykwer, Wachowski, and Wachowski, 2012), Wed, 1, 4:30, 8. CAAMfest, Thu and Sun. Visit www.caamedia.org for complete schedule and ticket info. •The Paperboy (Daniels, 2012), Fri, 7, and Magic Mike (Soderbergh, 2012), Fri, 9:05. •The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975), Sat, 2:30, 7, and Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001), Sat, 4:30, 9:15. Les Misérables (Hooper, 2012), Mon-Tue, 1, 4:30, 8.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. 56 Up (Apted, 2012), call for dates and times. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. A Fierce Green Fire (Kitchell, 2012), March 15-21, call for times.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. “Midnight Movies:” The ABCs of Death (Various, 2012) Fri-Sat, midnight.
“EAST BAY INTERNATIONAL JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL” Various East Bay venues; www.eastbayjewishfilm.org. $10. Forty films total, with special focuses on Jewish-Muslim relations and musicals. Through Sun/17.
ELLEN DRISCOLL PLAYHOUSE 325 Highland, Piedmont; www.diversityfilmseries.org. Free. Lives Worth Living (Neudel, 2011), Wed, 7.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. “New Parkway Classics:” Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Roach, 1997), Thu, 9pm. “New Parkway Family Classics:” The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (Rowland, 1953), Fri, 4; Sat, 11am. “Late Night:” Birdemic (Nguyen, 2010), Fri, 11:30; “Sequinsomnia Burlesque,” Sat, 11:30. “Thrillville:” 20 Million Miles to Earth (Juran, 1957), Sun, 6. “International Cinema:” All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999), Mon, 7:15. “Doc Night:” Lives Worth Living (Neudel, 2011), Tue, 6:30 (free screening); Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives (Lamm and Wigmore, 2011), Tue, 7:15.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:” Salome (1971), Wed, 7. “Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:” Vertigo (1958), Thu, 7. CAAMfest 2013, March 15-23. Visit www.caamedia.org for complete schedule and ticket info.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives (Lamm and Wigmore, 2011), Wed-Thu, 7, 9:15. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (Thompson, 2012), Wed-Thu, 8:50. “Math Films Mathathon:” Taking the Long View: The Life of Shiing-Shen Chern (Csicsery, 2010), Mon, 7:45; Julia Robinson and Hilbert’s Tenth Problem (Csicsery, 2008), Mon, 6:30, 9.
VICTORIA THEATER 2961 16th St, SF; www.jakesdead.com. $10. Jake’s Dead (Graham, 2013), Sat, 8.
VOGUE 3290 Sacramento, SF; www.cinemasf.com. $10. “Rendez-vous with French Cinema:” Persecution (Chéreau, 2012), Wed, 5; You, Me, and Us (Doillon, 2012), Wed, 7:30; Granny’s Funeral (Podalydès, 2012), Thu, 5; The Suicide Shop (Leconte, 2012), Thu, 7:30.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “Human Rights Watch International Film Festival:” Bidder 70 (Gage and Gage, 2012), Thu, 7:30.
WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH There’s all of not much planned, officially speaking, for Women’s History Month this year in San Francisco. A March 6 ceremony honored a lady from each district in the Board of Supervisor’s chamber, a reception followed with refreshments and Ed Lee’s mustache proclaimed she who is Woman of the Year. (His selection hadn’t been announced by the time we went to press, but I’m pulling for a double honoree this year: fashion babe twins Marian and recently-deceased Vivian Brown.)
Truth is, not many people seem stoked on the commemorative month, which was officially created in 1987 and annually proclaimed by the President starting in 1994. The Atlantic ran a story last week that accused Women’s History Month as a symbol of irrelevant tokenism. Honestly, throughout the course of assembling this list I was surprised at just how few explicit Women’s History Month events are taking place in the Bay.
Maybe having a month doesn’t solve the problems that plague women these days, but in my book that doesn’t mean we should scrap the thing altogether. We have a proclamation, let’s use it!
Here’s some ways to do just that. Sure, little of the happenings on this page are so backwards-looking as to fit neatly into the “History Month” rubric. But the debut exhibition of an art collective on the rise (Black Salt Collective, March 17), a demonstration that’ll morph into cross-cultural performance in honor of domestic workers’ rights (Domestic Workers Bill of Rights demonstration and performance, Fri/8), a quilting show (SF Quilters Guild biennial show and sale, Sat/9-Sun/10) — the fact is, we’re making history every day. This month we just have extra encouragement to do so.
HER GIRL FRIDAY
This group from Brooklyn holds readings that promise salient takeaways for women in the media world, and its first West Coast event should be rad: editrix par excellence (who has mad Tumblr game, folks) Ann Friedman headlines, with chronicler of Latin America Martina Castro, multimedia journalist Katy Newton, and sex trade filmmaker Mimi Chakorova. One-time Guardian art director DJ Mirissa Neff will be posted up behind a mixer to soundtrack the thing, and: cocktails.
A mother and Black Panther who emerged from incarceration to become a professor of sociology, Ericka Huggins seems well qualified to speak on the power of restorative justice. She teaches relaxation and resiliency workshops for schools and community groups, so this talk promises to be a feel-good look at the tough problem that is our justice system.
Thu/7, 7-9pm, $15. California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, SF. www.ciis.edu
DOMESTIC WORKERS BILL OF RIGHTS DEMONSTRATION AND PERFORMANCE
Join the magically diverse coalition of women, people of color, and youth groups to celebrate AB 241, proposed legislation that would shore up the rights of domestic workers in the state of California. Speakers will hoist bullhorns in front of the Federal Building, then everyone is welcome to Sixth Street’s Filipino community center, where cross-cultural performances will celebrate International Women’s Day.
Fri/8, rally 5pm, SF Federal Building, 450 Golden Gate, SF. Performances 8pm, Bayanihan Community Center, 1010 Mission, SF. www.babaesf.org
OAKLAND INTERNATIONAL WOMYN’S DAY FESTIVAL
Start your day with an ashtanga yoga class at this fest, then stick around for a day of rad artists: Culture Shock’s hip-hop dance, neo-soul funkster Mama Crow, rapper-political science student Kaila Love, queer bluesperson Enajite Loicy Pela, and more. The day’s theme is raising awareness about violence against women, transfolks, people of color, everyone.
Sat/9, 11am-5pm, free. The Web, 355 12th St., Oakl. www.iwdfest.com
“SEVEN FLOWERS FOR SEVEN MURALISTS”
In honor of the original seven female muralists who created the breathtaking “MaestraPeace” work that covers the outside of this community center, the Women’s Building is inviting all comers to deck its sidewalk with chalk to create a massive bouquet of flowers.
From Ohio to India, we’re seeing so many attacks against women worldwide that something’s gotta be done. Anti-violence demonstrations and marches, like this one hosted by Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD) have seen great turnout of late, so go add your voice to its hue and cry.
From Gee’s Bend to knit graffiti posterchild Magda Sayeg, textile art has long been used by women trying to make a (needle)point. Not all the quilts at the SF Quilters Guild’s biennial showing will be militant, but they do speak to the mastery of what is often dismissed as “mere” folk art. Check out the impressive works of stitch, along with quilting challenges and demonstrations. Master quilt appraiser Nancy Bavor will also be on hand to evaluate any piece that you bring in, for a fee.
Sat/9, 10am-5pm; Sun/10, 10am-4pm, $9-10 two-day ticket. Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.sfquiltersguild.org
WOMEN WHO CODE MEET-UP
The tech community’s ability to throw successful happy hour networking events is unrivaled. Jump into the tide for Women’s Month with this group, which is open to all female-identified people hoping to fine-tune or share their coding skills. Bring a project, or jump in on one of the tutorials providing for all skill levels. Remember to register as a meet-up member and RSVP before you head over.
A documentary following women workers who refuse to take social injustice sitting down. One of the film’s stars is Carmen Durán, a maquiladora at one of Tijuana’s poverty wage-paying factories run by multinational corporations. When her company up and leaves for Indonesia’s even looser labor laws, Durán goes activista.
March 13, 7pm, $5-10 donation suggested. 2969 Mission, SF. www.answersf.org
VIVA LA VIDA
Indulge your Fridamania with this Spanish language play, which revolves around an intimate monologue delivered by Frida Kahlo herself, as the iconic Mexican artist preps a Dia de los Muertos party for Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and father of surrealism André Breton.
A jewelry maker raised in Bolivia, a painter who takes inspiration from her work with disabled adults, a multimedia artist set alit by the third eye, black soul, and the natural world — this is Black Salt Collective, which officially starts its journey with today’s exhibition. Pick up some art, sip some sangria, and reflect on what it means to represent “culture” — the stated goal of this all-female group is to express contemporary identity without the baggage of Western world anthropology tropes.
“KNOW YOURSELF, LOVE YOURSELF: SEXUAL EMPOWERMENT FOR WOMEN”
Sex educators Jessi Fischer and Julianne Carroll want to help you untangle the mess of messages we get about what female sexuality is supposed to be. Madonna-whore, no more! After this workshop, hopefully that’ll be the case in your grey matter.
March 18, 6:30-8:30pm, $20-25. Good Vibrations, 1620 Polk, SF. www.goodvibes.com
LAS TRES MARIAS
Musicians Cynthia Alexander, Diana Gameros, and Radmilla Cody weave together their experiences as a border town Mexican, a Filipina, and a former Miss Navajo Nation to create musical works that explore migration and economic struggle.
March 22, 8pm, $20-25. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. www.lapena.org
HALF THE SKY
Based on a book by New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristhof, this documentary roams 10 countries (deploying the talents of Hollywood actresses like Eva Mendes, America Ferrara, and Gabrielle Union as hosts) to create a panoramic look at global women’s issues today. Full disclosure: the event is sponsored by the Guardian and Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center — and I’m hosting a post-screening discussion. Please note the cocktail half-hour before movie.
The queer, feminist, awesome Sister Spit collective has been making some serious moves of late. Ali Liebegott just published Cha-Ching! through City Lights Sister Spit imprint (it’ll be feted at that book store on March 27) and founder Michelle Tea’s young adult novel A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (due out this spring) is amaze-balls — and we get to hear them read for free today? Lit history, folks, before your eyes.
March 31, 2pm, free. San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF. www.sfpl.org
This coming Friday marks International Women’s Day, an event geared toward promoting gender equality across the globe. As women seek greater representation in politics, media, tech and other professional realms, controversies around gender equality issues continue to arise – even in San Francisco, a city nationally recognized for its progressive commitment to equality.
A few weeks before that, San Francisco blogger and programmer Shanley Kane shook things up with a widely circulated essay blasting Silicon Valley’s “toxic lies about culture,” in which she paints the start-up world as limiting for women despite oft-expressed ideals of inclusivity:
“What your culture might actually be saying is … We have a team of primarily women supporting the eating, drinking, management and social functions of a primarily male workforce whose output is considered more valuable. We struggle to hire women in non-administrative positions and most gender diversity in our company is centralized in social and admin work.”
And when we dropped by the RSA Security Conference last week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center out of sheer curiosity to hear what the founder of Wikipedia had to say, we learned that even people who strive for an internationally inclusive open-source encyclopedia project are experiencing lopsided gender representation, and struggling to address it.
Jimmy Wales, who started Wikipedia about 12 years ago, asked his audience to “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of human knowledge” as the foundational goal of the global endeavor, which is headquartered in San Francisco. But despite this lofty objective of global inclusivity, he admitted that Wikipedia is struggling to attract more female participation when it comes to the people who are writing articles for it.
As things stand, the people who contribute entries to Wikipedia are 87 percent male, he said. “We’re not happy about that number,” Wales said, noting that it is reflective of the gender imbalance in the tech community in general. “This is a really important goal for us: To improve female participation,” he added.
Dishearteningly, it seems to follow a broader trend of a lack of female representation in traditional media. A report released a couple weeks ago by the Women’s Media Center included some eye-opening stats:
At the current pace, it will take until 2085 for women to reach parity with men in leadership roles in government/politics, business, entrepreneurship and nonprofits.
By a nearly 3 to 1 margin, male front-page bylines at top newspapers outnumbered female bylines in coverage of the 2012 presidential election. Men were also far more likely to be quoted than women in newspapers, television and public radio. That’s also the case in coverage of abortion, birth control, Planned Parenthood and women’s rights.
Forty-seven percent of gamers are women, but 88 percent of video game developers are male.
The percentage of women who are television news directors edged up from the previous year, reaching 30 percent for the first time.
This may not sound like a lot to celebrate, but come Friday, the ongoing struggle for gender equality might just give you the inspiration to check out some local activities commemorating International Women’s Day, Women’s History Month or just some remarkable female-driven projects in the Bay Area.
Pick up a copy of the Guardian tomorrow and check out our special Women’s History Month event listings, where we’ll highlight everything from a gathering honoring female media professionals, to meet-ups for female coders, to murals painted by women, courtesy of Guardian Culture Editor Caitlin Donohue.
Schedules are for Wed/27-Tue/5 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ALBANY COMMUNITY CENTER 1249 Marin, Albany; www.albanyfilmfest.org. $1-5. "Albany FilmFest," short and super-short films, Sat, noon-7.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $10. "Noise Pop Presents:" Punk in Africa (Jones and Maas, 2012), Thu, 7; Taken By Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis (Bogawa, 2011), Thu, 9 and Sun, 4; What Did You Expect? The Archers of Loaf Live at Cat’s Cradle (Bechard, 2012), Fri, 7; Bad Brains: A Band in DC (Logan and Stein, 2012), Fri, 9; Let Fury Have the Hour (D’Ambrosio, 2012), Sun, 2.
BALBOA 3630 Balboa, SF; www.cinemasf.com. $10. "Balboa Theatre’s 87th Birthday Bash:" Peter Pan (Brenon, 1924), Sun, 4, 7. Evening show features a live vaudeville performance; both shows include birthday treats.
BAY MODEL 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito; www.tiburonfilmfestival.com. Free. •Watershed: Exploring a New Water Epic for the New West (Decena, 2012), and Over Troubled Waters (Fisher, 2012), Tue, 6. With filmmakers in person.
BERKELEY CITY COLLEGE AUDITORIUM 2050 Center, Berk; www.mecaforpeace.org. $10. Tears of Gaza (Løkkeberg, 2010), Thu, 7.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963), Wed, 2:30, 7, and Modern Romance (Brooks, 1981), Wed, 5:05, 9:30. •The Central Park Five (Burns, Burns, and McMahon, 2012), Thu, 2:30, 7, and The Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Petri, 1970), Thu, 4:45, 9:15. •Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984), Fri, 7, and The Entity (Furie, 1982), Fri, 9. "Scary Cow Short Film Festival," Sat, 3. More info and tickets at www.scarycow.com. •The Great Escape (Sturges, 1963), Sun, 1, 7, and The Magnificent Seven (Sturges, 1960), Sun, 4:30. "Nitey Awards 2013," Mon, 7pm. More info and tickets at www.niteyawards.com. Chasing Ice (Orlowski, 2012), Tue-Wed, call for times.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. "Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation, Documentary, and Live Action," call for dates and times. "World Ballet on the Big Screen:" "An Evening with Crystal Pite from the Netherlands Dance Theater," Sun and Tue, 6:30. This event, $15. "International Buddhist Film Festival Showcase 2013," Fri-Sun. More info and schedule at www.buddhistfilmfoundation.org.
"CINEQUEST" Various venues, San Jose; www.cinequest.org. $5-50. The 23rd annual film fest honors a slew of stars in addition to screening global films and highlighting new film technology. Through March 10.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. "Midnight Movies:" Black Devil Doll (Lewis, 2007), Sat, midnight. With host Miss Misery.
COUNTERPULSE 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. $5. Community Action Center (Steiner and Burns, 2010), Thu. 8. Followed by a discussion with co-director A.L. Steiner hosted by Laura Arrington, Margit Galanter, and Keith Hennessy.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. "Parkway Classics:" Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986), Thu, 9pm; "Thrillville:" "TV in Acidland," with Johnny Legend, Sun, 6. "Documentary Series:" Alone Up There (Shaul, 2012), Tue, 7.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild:" A Man Vanishes (Imamura, 1967), Wed, 7. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" Spellbound (1945), Fri, 7; Notorious (1946), Fri, 9:10; Under Capricorn (1949), Sun, 5. "And God Created Jean-Louis Trintignant:" …And God Created Woman (Vadim, 1956), Sat, 6:30. "Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:" The Bomber Pilot (1970), Sat, 8:30; Malina (1991), Sun, 7:15. "Documentary Voices:" "Poetic Vision: Films of Vlatko Gilic," Tue, 7.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. "Noise Pop Presents:" Turning: A Music Documentary Featuring Antony and the Johnsons (Atlas, 2012), Wed, 7; A Little Light: A Celebration of the Music and Legacy of Bob Mould (Mitchell, 2012), Wed, 9. "Frameline Encore Screening Series:" Maggots and Men (Cronenwett, 2009), Thu, 7. Rust and Bone (Audiard, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7 (also Thu, 9:20). Sound City (Grohl, 2013), Wed, 9:20; Thu, 9:30. "Hollywood Before the Code: Deeper, Darker, Nastier!": •Five Star Final (LeRoy, 1931), Fri, 8, and Blood Money (Brown, 1933); •Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931), Sat, 3, 8; Murders in the Rue Morgue (Florey, 1932), Sat, 1:30, 6:30; and Black Moon (Neill, 1934), Sat, 5, 9:50; •Shanghai Express (von Sternberg, 1932), Sun, 3:30, 7:30, and Waterloo Bridge (Whale, 1931), Sun, 1:45, 5:30, and 9:30; •Torch Singer (Hall and Somnes, 1933), Mon, 8, and Safe in Hell (Wellman, 1931), Mon, 6:20, 9; •Man’s Castle (Borzage, 1933), Tue, 8, and Virtue (Buzell, 1932), Tue, 6:30, 9:40. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (Thompson, 2012), March 1-7, 7.
RUSSIAN CENTER AUDITORIUM 2460 Sutter, SF; www.crimeaftercrime.com. Free. Crime After Crime (Potash, 2011), Sun, 6:30.
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. "For Your Vortex Only:" •Love Slaves of the Amazons (Siodmak, 1957), Thu, 9, and Quest for Love (Thomas, 1971), Thu, 11.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "Fragments of Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1974:" Crazy Love (Okabe, 1968), Thu, 7:30.
At the Garage, you get to see a lot of choreography in progress, which is a pleasure in itself because you can imagine what the final product might be like. Not this time. Lisa Fagan and Alison Williams — friends and colleagues, who first met during that hotbed of incubation, ODC’s Pilot Programs — are offering finished work. The evening, about an hour of choreography, comes with a bonus. Fagan calls her trio, Full Grown Baby Lemon, “a dance work of fiction,” and it has a definitely odd set of characters. Williams’ Edit promises to be rollicking duet between pop and geology. That’s where the bonus comes in. Her music will be live and includes an after-performance dance party where you can dive into dubstep. (Rita Felciano)
Noise Pop borrows its name from a mid-1980s genre that merges contradictions. Noise is edgy and gritty; pop is sunny and easily digestible. The Fresh and Onlys, a San Francisco band that has taken off since its ’08 formation, represents a ’13 incarnation of these oppositions. In “20 Days and 20 Nights,” the opener of last fall’s Long Slow Dance, “I cry” repeats over and over against bright harmonies and an upbeat piano hook, leaving the listener to bop along to the singer’s misery. It is an intriguing sensation caused by the balanced mix of grit and sunshine that continues throughout the vibrant album. The band invites you to bop along to its Noise Pop contradictions at Bottom of the Hill. (Laura Kerry)
Through the progression of its three studio albums, Rohnert Park’s Ceremony has evolved from unbridled, no-nonsense bursts of hardcore punk to a more slow-burning and equally devastating aggression. While it’s certainly not unusual for punk bands to shine on stage rather than on recordings, Ceremony’s live show takes the cake. Vocalist Ross Farrar is reminiscent of Ian Curtis as he lurches, jerks, and occasionally collapses across the stage, moaning, howling, and screeching as guitarist Anthony Anzaldo and bassist Andy Nelson leap and high-kick around him. The result is a cacophonous and tightly-coiled energy that is deliciously cathartic and at times transcendent in the pissed-off way only a punk band from the suburbs can produce. (Haley Zaremba)
With Terry Malts, Comadre, Perfect Ruin, Synthetic ID
Noise Pop isn’t the only contemporary music and art festival rolling into town this week. Other Minds, an annual event that invites composers and artists to share their avant-garde work, launches its 18th year on Thursday with performances of music from far-away places such as Denmark and India. Each of the three nights includes a panel discussion and a performance to fully engage the world of music outside the mainstream. Don’t come to Other Minds expecting the same finger-snapping tunes as the other festival in town; do come to hear some innovative music and to learn something along the way. (Kerry)
How much do you know about origins of global underground punk scenes? Beyond the live shows, Noise Pop always shows a handful of creative takes on the usual music doc; Punk in Africa is no exception. It explores a too-infrequently examined continent’s aggressive punk roots, from “the underground rock music of early 1970s Johannesburg, the first multi-racial punk bands formed in the wake of the Soweto Uprising and the militant anti-apartheid hardcore and post-punk bands of the ’80s to the rise of celebratory African-inspired ska bands, which sprang up from Cape Town to Maputo in the democratic era of the ’90s.” It also spotlights current acts battling political bombs with explosive lyrics and pounding drumbeats in Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Emily Savage)
Following last November’s potent For the Love of Emptiness (danced by Jorge De Hoyos), San Francisco-based choreographer Sara Shelton Mann presents the second solo in her fascinating “Eye of Leo Series.” Peter reteams the long esteemed, ever-searching Mann with video-light designer David Slaza, joined by composer Robbie Beahrs and performer Jesse Hewit. In these highly dynamic collaborations, Mann is wont to hover on the fringes, interacting variously with the performance space. “I open the ground and track it as a guide and follow the progress of the terrain chosen by the individual,” explains Mann. “Some chose the difficult path, some chose the surreal dream of extinction, some the practice of perfection. . . . I have chosen and I do not choose. People find me. I have become a hermit in a cage and those who find me have to find the key to the door.” (Robert Avila)
If a work of art had a spirit soundtrack, what would it be? Considering the use of industrial materials such as plastic bags, electrical sensors, and colored lights, one would expect Shih Chieh Huang’s installations to play to the the robotic pop of Daft Punk. Past pieces, though, including one at the National Museum of Natural History, achieve an organic quality that recalls the sound of being submerged in water. Continuing to explore the creation of technological landscapes while engaging in the theme of psychedelia, the artist’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts installation conjures the image of a Jimi Hendrix solo played backwards over a heart monitor. Huang’s art certainly dances to the beat of its own drummer. (Kerry)
Ustad Farida Mahwash and Homayoun Sakhi — both legends in their own right — will return to Cal Performances tonight (for the first time in two years) for a pleasant and educational evening of live traditional and contemporary Afghan music. Mahwash, a popular vocalist in her home country known as “the voice of Afghanistan,” will sing over rubâb virtuoso Sakhi and his ensemble in Wheeler Auditorium. The Sakhi Ensemble is a quartet employing instruments such as the harmonium, tula, doyra, tabla, and Sakhi’s rubâb — a lute-like instrument played with a bow that’s one of Afghanistan’s national instruments; it’s likely the sound you imagine when you think of mesmerizing Middle Eastern music. (Savage)
San Francisco’s Sonny Smith has already done more in the past few years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetime. The singer-songwriter-illustrator-playwright has more side projects than Jack White and a seemingly bottomless reserve of creative energy. In 2010, Smith released 200 songs at once that he had recorded for his 100 Records exhibition, and instead of swearing off music for a period like an exhausted person might, he soon began writing the next Sunsets album, worked on 100 Records: Vol. 3 (released this January) and began planning another exhibition, basing songs off protest signs. This project, tentatively titled “Protest Factory,” is still gestating, but last year saw the release of the Sunsets’ third full-length album, which carried on Smith’s tradition of engaging narrative lyrics, though with a surprisingly fantastic country twist. (Zaremba)
San Francisco is all about celebrating the newest, hottest place — that pizza restaurant where you wait a full hour for a gourmet pie; that bar where each drink is hand-crafted using 11 exotic ingredients. So why not tip your top hat to an 87-year-old veteran: the Balboa Theatre, keeping the avenues cinematically rockin’ since Feb. 7, 1926? The party gets started at 4pm today with a 35mm screening of the 1924 silent version of Peter Pan, featuring live accompaniment by Frederick Hodges; come to the evening show for a repeat screening, plus a live vaudeville show, birthday prizes, and treats. Roaring Twenties attire encouraged! (Cheryl Eddy)
While he may not be a household name, Tom Mallon had a huge influence and impact on the San Francisco music scene, beginning the mid-1970s. As a musician, Mallon has performed with American Music Club and Toiling Midgets among others, and as a producer and engineer, he provided acts with low-cost studio time and guidance that helped document the work of countless artists. A host of musicians he has worked with over the years are performing tonight at “TomFest,” a special tribute and benefit concert for Mallon and his family (along with the SF Brain Tumor Support Group at UCSF), including Chuck Prophet, Toiling Midgets, Fright Wig, Penelope Houston, Ugly Stick, Peter Case, members of American Music Club, and many more. (Sean McCourt)
Now that our local darling Honey Mahogany is out of the RuPaul’s Drag Race due to being nice and enjoying actual fashion, we must say that Seattle drag queen Jinkx Monsoon‘s Little Edie from Grey Gardens blew away the Marilyn Monroes and Katy Perrys of last night’s celebrity impersonation challenge last night on the LOGO TV show.
But we take serious issue with Gawker’s headline proclaiming it the best Edie ever. Clearly politiqueen Anna Conda’s take, assumed for her housewarming party upon moving to a fixer-upper in the Excelsior last summer, was superior in both motivation and situation. Overturned hottubs > sparkly curtained TV sets, in this case (and many others.)
That being said, tip of the champagne flute to Monsoon for going with a celebrity impersonation slightly more challenging than Ke$ha. We cringed when the other queens gave Monsoon shade for expanding her cultural references beyond feather extensions (and then the queen doing Marilyn Monroe missed the politicians affairs reference??), but they were in turn schooled by RuPaul, who named Monsoon the winner of the night’s challenge.
Last night’s ‘Drag Race’ challenge winner, our second-favorite Edie
Monsoon choose to watch the goings-on smack-dab in the Castro at Toad Hall last night. After Mahogany’s dismissal, San Francisco may be done with Drag Race, but Drag Race just won’t do without San Francisco.
The phenomenal house DJ and experimental musicmaker on mainstream visibility, transgender globalism, Bay Area queer culture, and the “shopping mall diversity” of the current dance music scene.
Techno has always had room for theorists and intellectuals, from Derrick May to the Mille Plateaux label roster, and social activists, like Moodymann and Underground Resistance. Most of that discourse usually takes place musically, however, with concepts emerging from the vinyl itself. The celebrated DJ Sprinkles, a.k.a. Terre Thaemlitz, the American head of Japan-based label Comatonse, tops all that by making intellectually grounded music glimmering with poetic touches and expounding in interviews and writing on such heady, heated topics as essentialism, gender idenitity, surveillance, and authenticity. She leads workshops, goes on speaking engagements, and isn’t afraid to let loose in interviews. (For example — see below — rather than “born this way” platitudes, she considers her queer identity “beat this way.”)
It’s a beautiful thing, especially in the rare context of controversial truth and radical opinion pouring from the mouth and keyboard of an outspoken transgender major player on the stubbornly homogenous global house-techno DJ scene. Of course, it all comes down to the music — we’ll get a treat when Sprinkles (who chose the name because he wanted something that sounded “totally pussy” in opposition to macho DJ culture, to buck the testosteronal scene) performs Sun/24 at Honey Soundsystem — and Sprinkles certainly has the goods. He’s released umpteen pieces in an astoundng breadth of genres under multiple pseudonyms over the past 20 years. Masterpiece deep house album “Midtown 120 Blues” siezed the top of several best of 2009 charts and was, typically, followed by Soulnessless, a 30-hour “mp3 album” of music and video. Because why the hell not?
I got a chance to exchange emails with Sprinkles before her appearance here. It’ll be an interesting return to the Bay Area, where she lived for several years before decamping to Japan. Here’s all she had to say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY79cyv8pH8
SFBGIt’s been 13 years since you lived in Oakland, is that correct? Can you tell me why you decided to leave and what it was like to live here then, with regards to the music, political, and queer scene?
DJ SPRINKLES Yes, it’s been a long time. I used to live across the street from a hotel where the Unabomber once stayed. Honestly, I can’t say I miss California. I never really connected with any queer or transgendered communities in SF or Oakland. Whenever I tried, they seemed immersed in West Coast spiritualism and zodiac bullshit, which I found completely alienating. Most of the transgendered people I met there were prone to metaphysics — by which I mean they were ideologically (and economically and medically) invested in defining their transgenderism in relation to a perceived split between their “physical bodies” and their “true inner selves.” I’m an anti-essentialist, non-op, materialist, anti-spiritualist… so that clearly wasn’t a match with my own transgendered identity.
There was also a weird conservatism in SF’s queer scenes that I associated with the fact a lot of people in SF had been raised in conservative Midwestern towns, so they were in SF to “live the life.” I felt there was a lot of unacknowledged parody and role play going on — people trying to overcome a life of repression and closets by wrapping themselves in rainbow flag culture. Yet, when going to buy groceries or such, I still found myself being harassed as a “fag” on the street like in any other town in the US. I felt my four years there was all quite standard. I don’t really think of the Bay Area as a “special place” for being queer and transgendered.
US identity politics have a particularly inextricable link to the concept of the ghetto — not only as a place of economic strife and forced communal ostracization from a “white middle-class mainstream,” but also as a self-invested “safe space” for non-mainstream social movements. This is part of migrant culture. For example, after my grandparents passed through Ellis Island, they immediately moved to a place where people spoke the same language as their homeland, etc. The Castro, New York’s West Village, Little Italy, China Town… these are all migrant-based communities formed by people seeking safety in numbers in the face of not being welcome elsewhere — these two dynamics of “safety” and “alienation” are inseparable to most US identity politics. So these communal zones all display the problems and contradictions of cultural identification that plague mainstream US culture as an “immigrant nation” that is simultaneously “anti-immigrant” – because the “immigrant” is a brutal reminder that there are no “real Americans” beyond Native Americans, which the majority are not. And of course, the fact that recent generations of immigrants are primarily people of color does not jibe with conventional black/white US race discourse, which continues to be largely devoid of other browns, as well as the concept of the person of color as a willing immigrant (as opposed to the descendant of a slave). This history and context is peculiar to the US social landscape, and it creates a lot of weird identity essentialisms and hostilities around gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class…
Not to say other countries don’t have their own fucked up ways of causing and dealing with social problems, but moving to Japan and realizing that pretty much the entirety of Western identity politics did not function here was a big life experience. It was like leaving the Earth’s gravitational pull — it didn’t mean gravity no longer existed, but almost everything I had internalized and believed I understood about my relationship to gravity was no longer helpful in understanding the dynamics of dominations at work in this other context. I wasn’t freed of gravity, but lost in weightlessness. I had to learn to feel weight in a completely different way. This is why so many of my projects dealing with my own immigration and cultural issues consistently invoke the rather limited and problematic US language of black/white race relations. It is a critical gesture intended to highlight the limitations of my having been raised amidst that US language and social conditioning, yet now living within a non-US context with few tools to work with.
Because music’s value is so often tied to an essentialist concept of racial authenticity, it becomes difficult and risky to ask an audience to question their relationships to the very value systems through which they likely purchased the album – but that is also why I choose to work with audio. Not because of its possibilities, but its all-too-clear limitations. Since I am unable to believe in the authenticity or purity of identities of any kind, when I invoke “identifiable” sounds (a “queer” sound, a “black” sound, etc.) I am doing so to question the social relationships around their construction, proliferation, and distribution. The moment we become lazy about our use of those “identifiable” sounds — the minute we take it for granted that the essentialist associations they have come to carry are unquestionable and real reflections of material social experiences — everything becomes one-dimensional and shallow. This is why almost all music is one-dimensional and shallow! [Laughs.] For example, if I can beat a dead horse, my problem with Madonna’s “Vogue” is not that it was “inauthentic,” but that its terms of discourse misrepresented its relationship to vogueing by actively erasing the very contexts of Latina and African-American transgendered culture that inspired it (via lyrics about “It makes no difference if you’re black or white, a boy or a girl”… it TOTALLY made a difference, and THAT SOCIAL REALITY is where any real discussion on vogueing BEGINS.). So I’m interested in these other directions of audio discourse that cannot even occur if one is preoccupied with conflated essentializations of identity and sound. There is never a true point of origin for anything. It’s all referential and contextual. In my opinion, there is no point in discussions focussing on identifying the source of a sound or style — that is a hopelessly futile exercise, although it is the dominant exercise! It’s a distraction from the real discussions needing to be held, and those are discussions on relations of domination.
As a DJ in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were a lot of drag queens asking me to play Madonna’s “Vogue” when it first came out. I refused, but I could understand their requests. We all have very complicit and complex relationships to dominations, and a perverse desire to celebrate our visibility within the dominant mainstream, no matter how unfamiliar or distorted that reflection may be… often because we are conditioned to feel so unhappy with what we see in the mirror to begin with. Mainstream visibility is like getting approval of the Father. It’s a mental and abusive process. It is also totally standard. So I get it… But there is also that which remains unrepresented and invisible to most. That which existed, and may have already been lost, but did so without seeking approval of the Father. And again, this is generally not a freed or liberated space, but a space of intense hatred for the Father. These are difficult things to speak of and represent, because any act of representation has the potential to be a violation of the cultural site it wishes to speak of. So to speak of them requires obfuscating or complicating the usual functions of language – not through vague poetry, but unexpected flashes of clarity coming from unexpected vectors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2iKF_11WbY
SFBGYou left during the first Internet boom I believe, and now SF is in the middle of a second one (although a bit different than the first — the first wave seemed to have much more geeks and freaks in it, while this one seems much more regimented and Ivy League, even while many longtime residents are still feeling the results of “global recession”). When was the last time you were back here? And what are some of your recent thoughts on how house music is being affected by economic circumstances?
DJ SPRINKLES I was only back once about 10 years ago, visiting friends for a few days. When I moved away at the end of 2000, internet and web development had already undergone a rigid formalization. Years earlier, a web designer did a bit of everything. By 2000, developers were already split into specific teams focussing on interface, coding, page flow, etc… all processes were specialized, departmentalized, corporatized. I hadn’t heard about the “second internet boom” there, but the way you describe it doesn’t surprise me since it would surely be an extension of that regimentation that took place in the first boom.
And in a way, the same can be said of this “second boom” (third?) around house music. In the same way almost all websites have taken on the same continuity and feel, so has electronic dance music. You buy an album, and all the tracks sound similar — as opposed to the old days when an electronic dance track like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was tacked on to the end of an otherwise standard soul-band album that didn’t sonically match it at all. Today’s music consumer experience is much more streamlined and organized, which affects how people produce an album as well. Younger generations — 20-somethings — grew up amidst this homogenization, so I am fairly sure they do not feel what I am speaking of… although they may recognize it as a historical process.
I try to play with discontinuity and mixing things up, like in my K-S.H.E album, “Routes not Roots,” which had monologues and ambient tracks interspersed between house cuts. But I once made the mistake of reading people’s blog comments, and they really seemed upset about this kind of thing. “Way to ruin the mix,” or “Why the fuck didn’t you put that monologue at the end of the album?” They have no patience for non-homogeneity. The same goes for my Comatonse Recordings website itself — people seem utterly confused and helpless. If one doesn’t do everything completely standard and at the same level, people get disoriented. It’s a kind of cultural compression going on, similar to audio compression, where everything has to be “punched up” to the same intensity or people feel lost. What the fuck is so wrong with being lost? Why would you expect — let alone insist — your interactions with non-mainstream media to be completely mainstream in process?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8iF7JQiz50
SFBGI’ve been hanging out recently with the new, young generation of ACT-UP activists who are transcending mere ’90s revival and undertaking a lot of energizing political discourse and action. Were you involved in the queer activist movement back then — or now? Would you characterize your musical project as a form of activism, especially in its more intellectual and challenging aspects?
DJ SPRINKLES That’s nice to hear. Although you use the term “action,” I assume the real interesting stuff has little to do with demos and “direct actions,” and more to do with communal education initiatives, etc.? My direct action days were mostly during the late ’80s and early ’90s, while living in New York. Most of those activities were in conjunction with various caucuses in ACT-UP, and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action & Mobilization).
I do consider my audio and other projects “political” — in theme, and also in their attempts to (dis)engage with standard industry practices. But clearly this is something different than direct action “activism” or community outreach, because my main social engagements are with people working for labels, distributors, music festivals, museums, and other culture industries. Maybe “culture jamming” is a better way to put this kind of political activity. Personally, I found myself distanced from direct action groups because the terms of identification they cultivated out of strategic necessity so often folded back into essentialisms that excluded me on a personal level. So I was always advocating for the recognition and acceptance of something other than myself (like the way “born this way” ideologies take over discussions of LGBT rights… I consider myself more “beat this way,” my queer identity being primarily informed by material ostracism and harassment than by some mythological self-actualization and pride). That, combined with the mid-’90s move away from direct action toward CBO’s (Community Based Organizations) — largely because the tactics of direct action had been so thoroughly coopted by mainstream media – was pretty much the end of my serious direct action involvements. Over the years, enunciating this process has become the core political act of my projects and activities. I do not do this to discourage people from forms of direct action, but as a simultaneous form of critical analysis that hopefully contributes in other ways to our various attempts to react to dominations.
SFBGDo you feel that, as the means of production and distribution have been more and more democratized in the past decade, house and techno music-making and DJing have been living up to their potential as a form of resistance to mainstream capitalism and culture, or do you feel they’ve become more homogenized and/or annexed by neoliberal, bourgeois culture?
DJ SPRINKLES I do not believe the means of production and distribution have become more democratized. I take issue with the way people always confuse “commercial accessibility” with “democratization.” The breadth and variation of today’s music production strategies is no more than a shopping mall diversity. We are all working with similar software on similar platforms. Mac, Windows, Unix… Banana Republic, Abercrombie & Fitch, The Gap… Having said that, if these musics had a potential, I believe it was lost back in the ’90s when anti-sampling legislation (mostly focusing on hip-hop) laid the groundwork for today’s electronic music. It basically reinvigorated house with “musicianship,” “authorship,” and all that crap which used to play far less of a role in this genre’s early days. And the younger generation – basically, today’s 20-somethings who grew up after the whole sampling debates — really don’t seem to understand how record label legal departments work.
So they list up all the samples they recognize in a track in the comment fields of music websites, which is putting the producers they wish to support at risk. There is no sense of how we can cultivate — let alone protect — “underground” media and information in this online era. Everything is about “sharing,” when in fact we need to be developing a parallel discourse around meaningful information distribution patterns, including strategically withholding information from the web. The cliché idea of making “everything accessible for everyone” is not only naîve, but negates the social and cultural specificities that give certain forms of media their alternative values, in particular collage and sampling. Anyone who has used a random image taken from a Google image search on their blog page, and then gotten an email from Getty Images’ legal department asking for back royalties, knows what I’m talking about. Treating subcultural musics as though they are meant for “everyone” — whether this is being done by fans, or the labels and online distributors themselves — is the biggest sign of people not understanding the media they are dealing with. And since all of that is SOP these days, it’s pretty much a sign that the sample-based genres of house is dead. Is talking about house’s political potential in 2013 really all that different than the trend of talking about the radical politics of ’60s rock during the ’80s?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4M3-t9lw7o
SFBGI feel like, with parties like Honey Soundsystem, there is a huge resurgence of interest in an underground queer dance music culture — a kind of new underground opposed to corporate or low-quality dance music (yet still taking place in corporate spaces). Is this phenomenon occurring in Japan as well? Do you feel there are specific possibilities with this, not just in terms of opportunity for queer DJs to travel but of transformation of queer discourse and politically actualizing a new generation?
DJ SPRINKLES Hey, low-quality is where it’s at. It’s what it’s all about. What was Chicago house if not low quality? It’s important to place value within the “low” in order to counter conventional associations between the terms “good,” “high quality” and “upper class.” I’m not talking about celebrating kitsch, or that kind of petit-bourgeois trivialization of the “low.” I’m talking about finding other values in the “low” that cannot find expression within a language developed to express everything in terms of “low vs. high.” This is ultimately about the identification of other values amidst class struggle.
I don’t think house resonates as a queer medium anymore. Those days are over. Today it is primarily a white, heterosexual, European phenomenon. That was the case early on. I mean, how many Americans became aware of house music in the ’80s by buying Chicago house sold back to us on UK compilations? The US has always treated its own history of electronic music like utter shit… The US is such a fucking rock’n’roll shithole. So I think for people to appreciate house music’s queer roots, and to actively invest in those themes today, requires people becoming deliberate and explicit about those interests. But whether that deliberate action would focus on “queer visibility” or not is another issue. It doesn’t have to focus on “visibility” — especially since visibility has become such an oppressive aspect of dominant LGBT movements. Explicitness can also be about closets. Not only the usual closets born of heterosexism, but less considered closets around sexuality and gender that have been formed by the actions of the “born this way” LGBT mainstream. Well, that’s the direction I try to take it… reflecting on, and constructing, queer and transgendered histories that are as skeptical of Pride[TM] as they are angry about violence. And I do believe, globally speaking, queer and transgendered experiences are much more informed by violence than pride. So this should be reflected in how and where we make noise. In my opinion, music that functions in completely standard ways – socially and economically – does not have much potential for reflecting queer or transgendered contexts in politically precise, helpful or meaningful ways. You end up with essentialist, humanist shit like Lady Gaga’s, “Born This Way.” She is not somebody I would consider an ally.
You know, American media is so fixated on the idea that sexuality and gender must either be biologically predetermined, or a personal choice. The “it’s not a choice” argument is a common theme in television shows, etc. Both of these options revolve around a fiction of free will. Like, if it’s not a choice, then the only other possibility must be some supra-social, biological reason that cannot be questioned. Both of these conclusions preserve the status quo brutality of how culture forces gender and sexual binaries upon us. The thought that our absence of choice might be rooted in social tyrannies – not biological predispositions – remains unthinkable. The mainstream has it half right when they say, “it’s not a choice,” but it’s a half-truth that has been twisted into a decoy from the real issues at hand – the inescapability of the hetero/homo and female/male paradigms. We are given no other choices through which to understand our genders and sexualities. Sexuality is far greater than two or three. The same goes for gender — and yes, I’m speaking biologically, human bodies are way more diverse than A or B. To argue that the reason you deserve rights under a humanist democratic system is because of genetics is a retreat into feudalist logic. It’s the same as an aristocrat arguing that their rights and privileges were deserved because of their family blood-line and DNA. “Born this way” is antithetical to any democratic argument for rights rooted in a social capacity for understanding and transformation. It is astounding that the majority of people cannot comprehend that any “born this way” argument is a complete obliteration of their social agency. “I can’t help it, so give me the same rights as you…” Fuck that. We shouldn’t be asking to participate in the rights and privileges of those who have oppressed us. We should be trying to divest those groups of privileges. That is the best way to help ourselves and minimize the violence we enact on others.
Humanist legislative practices are still rooted in feudal ideologies, and I am convinced the long-term repercussions of this is a cultural entrenchment that makes any democratic project (including US-brand democracy, socialism or communism) an impossibility. We can already see how the post-Cold War world is retreating into clan-based, privatized, anti-state organization structures. Capitalism is increasingly liberated of democratic agendas because — surprise! — capitalism works better with slavery. Capitalism is not about the distribution of wealth, and everyone’s equal chance to partake in a petit-bourgois lifestyle. It is about the isolation of wealth. There is no doubt in my mind that today’s moral insistence that all people must work at whatever job society throws them, and the accompanying presumption that all lower-class unemployed people are “lazy” (which is perpetuated by many lower-class peoples themselves), is an argument for slavery: forced labor in return for base subsistence at best. How is that not the reality of poverty under globalized capitalism?
…and that’s why I hate Lady Gaga. [Laughs.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JtoRxqK8s
SFBGYou have some fascinatingly poetic thoughts about the intersection of transgender issues and immigration, the idea of “living as a ghost” in politicized and police-monitored spaces. Do you have any current thoughts on how globalization continues to affect transgender issues?
DJ SPRINKLES I think the fact that the world’s two largest economies around gender transitioning are in Thailand and Iran, yet the aesthetics of those economies follow largely western models of beauty and body, says a lot about how globalization affects transgendered issues. Thailand’s dominant transgendered culture revolves around the “Ladyboy” — a very essentialist transgendered model that is rooted in heterosexism and the cultural/ideological necessity for some men to “unbecome-man” in order for “straight men” to have sex with other men. Western transgendered discourses love to fetishize the “Ladyboy” as some kind of locally celebrated and accepted third-world transgendered native other, but this is patent orientalism. It refuses to envision how the strict regimentation of social codes for those transgendered people can be oppressive, or how the mythical “transgendered native’s special place at the edge of the village, possibly as a shaman” is a form of segregation. People also never address how such cultures are invariably patriarchies, and their models for transgenderism almost exclusively revolve around the MTF paradigm. And far as I know, Thailand has still not lifted their government prohibition on homosexual government employees, which is relatively new legislation passed just a few years back. This is all part of that context of transgendered production.
Meanwhile, Iran is a country where Islamic law prohibits homosexuality by fatwah. Since the ’70s, gender transitioning has been promoted as a way for men who have sex with men to avoid the death penalty, although many transitioned people still face the possibility of being murdered by their families or local communities. The cost of their procedures is partially subsidized by the Iranian government itself. While some Westerners have attempted to portray that as “progressive,” clearly it is the opposite. Many post-op transsexuals find themselves ghettoized, unemployed and cut off from the family structures that play such important roles in Iran’s social structure.
In both Thailand and Iran one can see how the global growth of gender-transitioning economies is connected to heterosexism and homophobia — something current Western gender analyses attempt to separate from gender transitioning through clear ideological divisions between gender and sexuality. While I believe these divisions between gender and sexuality are important and do have social value in the West, it is clear that the West is not the world. And the West has surely not overcome its heterosexism and homophobia, either. I believe it is more than coincidence that the global proliferation of gender transitioning technologies is happening parallel to medical industries’ attempts to divest of their previously blatant attempts to cure homosexuality, due to such methods falling out of cultural favor in the West and elsewhere. I also believe it is more than coincidence that today’s inescapable “born this way” arguments serve and justify today’s medical agendas so well.
For sure, my stance on medical transitioning has always been that I support peoples’ abilities to transform their bodies as they see necessary. Considering how few options for gender identification are offered to us, I can understand how a person can become no longer able to live within one’s body as it has been defined and shaped by social gender constraints. But, for obvious reasons, I am unable to believe those medical systems which propagated today’s gender binary are capable or willing to offer us a way out of our gender crises. Those industries move us further and further away from cultural environments that enable transgendered people to build medically unmediated relationships to our bodies. I just can’t accept that the medical industry’s methods for mediating our suffering are the only way. It really angers me… particularly since so many transgendered people are impoverished and without health care…
Hmm, you’re probably getting an idea as to why I am never invited to perform my more thematic projects in the US — just to DJ some house and go back home to Japan. [Laughs.]
SFBG Speaking of essentialism, ha: Any food or restaurants you miss from living here?
DJ SPRINKLES Mexican food…! It’s shockingly absent in Japan… and when you do find some, you generally wish you hadn’t. But what a weak note upon which to end this interview. [Laughs.]
While hyperbolic coverage of what many news pundits called the ‘storm of the year’ raged across the Tri-State area, Manhattan’s would-be-mammoth blizzard arrived in the Big Apple as a pint-sized flurry that the Weather Channel dubbed Nemo. Nemo did little to deter the stilettoed, snow-shoeing pack of fashion-forward who started the morning of Feb. 8 filing into the tents at Lincoln Center for New York Fashion Week hullabaloo around 6 am.
This is the world of fashion, where a steel backbone is required. Plus, “this is New York, we have noreasters,” said a publicist with whom I scored post-show beers. “This is not a some kind of apocalypse blizzard. This is a snow storm. Put on your big girl boots and get over it.”
The action outside the white-tent runway shows of NYFW has become something of a spectacle recently thanks to the hyper-documentation of show attendees by bloggers, fashion journos, and Instagrammers. The evolution of the street scene has become almost as hyped as the collections themselves — outside-the-tent has converted into a place where writers, buyers, and industry professionals rub shoulders with blogosphere self-starters and editorial wanna-bes. Once you’ve crossed the threshold, however — moved past security and secured your seat — the herd thins out. Inside the shows, attention shifts from the amateur peacocking out front onto the belabored fashion lines themselves.
I attended two shows on February 8 — Project Runway‘s, and that of my Bay Area peers from the Academy of Art University.
Project Runway: Lacking any true designer start that has emerged from this TV series, the jury is still out on whether reality show competition breeds success or mediocrity. Regardless of who will sink or swim in Project Runway’s 11th season, fierce competition certainly yielded entertainment at NYFW.
Usually by Fashion Week, the Project Runway panel — composed of designers Michael Kors and Zac Posen, fashion editor Nina Garcia, and supermodel host Heidi Klum — has winnowed competitors down to the final three. This season, NYFW crowds were treated to the work of seven. The normal Project protocol was thrown to the wind, each designer remaining anonymous, a move that forced them to compete solely on the strength of their garments, without the crowd bias based on on-air personality.
Fashion is an exhibitionist’s sport, but flashiness is not always effective when it comes to style. Some collections at the show came out swinging, trying too hard to define a point of view. Others showed up more quietly, using complicated shapes and silhouettes without appearing self-indulgent. Most resisted the urge to disguise imperfect results with fluff. Michelle Lesniak Franklin’s collection hit the highest note, with several structured pieces rendered in soft quilted fabric, giving way to an ethereal easiness. It appeared elfin or even Zelda-esque, but retained it’s modernity in the silhouette and layering. She took the road less traveled, mixing 1980s-inspired jacket shapes with earth tones, rendering their severe structures soft in wools and knits.
In short, the show was a mixed bag, and no one went home a true winner.
Academy of Art University: Pressure is an odd catalyst. Some respond to it favorably, combining time and tension to yield extraordinary results. For others, pressure works against success, internal combustion evident in the resulting design.
Where Project Runway’s contestants are forced into a pressure cooker for 12 weeks to design, shop for, sew, and style their collections, San Francisco Academy of Art University students are incubated in a better-paced program. Here, years of planning and months of preparation produce the impressive work that the school has come to be known for. These student-designers are not working for cheap airtime or a bump in ratings for their network television handlers, but instead are putting in the hours of work for genuine academic recognition, fashion futures the old-fashioned way.
As an Academy fashion journalism student myself, I have witnessed the rigorous, extremely exhausting, but equally rewarding process firsthand. In last weeks leading up to the end of the semester, there is a pronounced hush in campus design studios, the only audible noises come in deep hums of the sewing machines, the incessant clicking of mechanical needles, and the hissing of industrial-grade irons. Each student, earbuds in, rips, measures, presses, tapes, pins, and repeats. One feels guilty even walking past such determination on the way to the bathrooms, so intense is the creative process.
This year, the collections from AAU’s multi-national student body were marked by a range of culture fusions. The show’s focal point was the visual negotiation between student, fabric, form, and heritage.
The runway sequence ebbed and flowed between moments of sparse minimalism, as in Yuming Weng ‘s simple monochromatics and plays on texture and structure, in Chenxi Li’s over-sized crushed velvet coats, rendered unique by combining elements of ‘50s Americana with traditional Chinese armor. Knitwear student Heather Scholl’s sexually charged, gender-explorative neon psychedelics stalked the lane.
Stand-out collections included show openers Janine M. Villa and Amanda Nervig’s marriage of tailored suiting and free-falling knitwear, which gave the rigid geometric patterns that adorned both fabrics fluidity, and embued the suiting with an astonishing sense of movement. Inspired by traditional Welsh blankets, Villa and Nervig’s work felt eclectic and free-spirited on the runway, the print-on-print combinations of chunky knits and embellished tailoring gave the collection an exciting and unexpected visual depth.
Heather McDonald took taut silhouettes to new heights with soaring shapes that defied gravity. These exaggerated forms were rendered in deeply-saturated angoras and wools, which brought the avant-garde down to earth. The final act was perhaps the most impressive. Qian Xie’s crystal-encrusted coat dresses and lattice-woven leather overcoats followed her apt theme “50 Shades of Grey”, and the results were lust-worthy.
Schedules are for Wed/20-Tue/26 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $5-10. “Stop and Go 3D: Stop Motion Animation Festival,” works by 27 artists curated by Bay Area animator Sarah Klein, Fri, 8. “Small Poetry: Recent Highlights of the Chicago 8 Film Festival,” Sun, 7:30.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. “Banana Republic presents:” Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (Vreeland, 2011), with director Lisa Vreeland in person, Wed, 8. This event, $12; advance tickets at www.ticketweb.com. •Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006), Thu, 2:15, 7, and Quantum of Solace (Forster, 2008), Thu, 4:55, 9:40. Skyfall (Mendes, 2012), Fri, 2, 5, 8. The Lion King (Allers and Minkoff, 1994), Sat, 1:30, 3:45, 6, 8:15. Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away (Adamson, 2012), Sun-Mon, 2:30, 4:45, 7, 9. Argo (Affleck, 2012), Tue, 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. 56 Up (Apted, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. “Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation, Documentary, and Live Action,” call for dates and times. “Science on Screen: Water, Water, Everywhere…?”: Valley of Saints (Syeed, 2012), with presentation by water expert Peter Gleick, Thu, 7. This event, $12. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Herzog and Vasyukov, 2012), Feb 22-28, call for times. Still Moving: Pilobolus at Forty (Ruoff, 2012), with Pilobolus’ Jun Kuribayashi in person, Sat, 4:30.
“CINEQUEST” Various venues, San Jose; www.cinequest.org. $5-50. The 23rd annual film fest honors a slew of stars (Harrison Ford, Chuck Palahniuk) in addition to screening global films and highlighting new film technology. Feb 26-March 10.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. “Midnight Movies:” The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975), Sat, midnight. With live performance by the Bawdy Caste.
FAIRFAX WOMEN’s CLUB 46 Park, Fairfax; (415) 454-9898. $5-10 suggested donation. Symphony of the Soil (Koons Garcia, 2012), Fri, 7.
GLBT HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM 4127 18th St, SF; www.glbthistory.org. $5. Submerged Queer Spaces (Dubowsky, 2012), Fri, 7.
MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, milibrary.org/events. $10 (reservations required as seating is limited). “CinemaLit Film Series: In the Name of Love:” A Man and a Woman (Lelouch, 1966), Fri, 6.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. “Parkway Classics:” Valley Girl (Coolidge, 1983), Thu, 9pm.
NEW PEOPLE 1746 Post, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-40. What’s the T? (Asuncion, 2013), Thu, 5:30 and 9.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “On Location in Silent Cinema:” Love and Duty (Bu, 1931), Wed, 7; The Bargain (Barker, 1914), Thu, 7; The Ghost That Does Not Return (Room, 1930), Fri, 7. “Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:” Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Fri, 9. “Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:” The Kingdom of Naples (1978), Sat, 6. “Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild:” Human Bullet (Okamoto, 1968), Sat, 8:30; Shura (Matsumoto, 1971), Sun, 2. “Documentary Voices:” 48 (de Sousa Dias, 2009), Tue, 7.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. SF IndieFest, Wed-Thu. For advance tickets (most shows $12) and full schedule, visit www.sfindie.com. “Sexual Politics: The Occasionally Autobiographical and Always Personal Films of Joe Swanberg:” •Silver Bullets (2011) and Art History (2011), Fri, 7; •Caitlin Plays Herself (2011) and Marriage Material (2011), Fri, 10; LOL (2006), Sat, 3:30; Alexander the Last (2009), Sat, 5; •Uncle Kent (2011) and All the Light in the Sky (2012), Sat, 7; Autoerotic (2011) and The Zone (2011), Sat, 9:30; Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), Sun, 7; Nights and Weekends (Swanberg and Gerwig, 2008), Sun, 8:30.
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. “For Your Vortex Only:” •The Love-Ins (Dreifuss, 1967), Thu, 9, and The Love War (McCowan, 1970), Thu, 11.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “Fragments of Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1974:” “Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Films by Terayama, Matsumoto, and Miyai,” Thu, 7:30. *
Ten years ago, Kim Jiang-Dubaniewicz sat outside the Chinatown gates nursing an existential crisis; she had serious doubts about pursuing her longtime dream of a career in acting. Just then, she looked up and saw a familiar face drinking coffee next to her. It was Sean Penn, and she asked him for a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke. He told her to stick with acting.
Apparently one doesn’t ignore the advice of Sean Penn.
After several years of acting, the discovery of a store that sold 25-cent paperbacks (including the works of playwrights William Saroyan and Eugene O’Neill), and a move to San Francisco, Jiang-Dubaniewicz wanted to try something new. Last October, she embarked on her first production as a director. The resulting work, The Saroyan O’Neill Project, just finished a two–weekend run at the Postage Stamp Theater in the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.
In a room that hosts senior lunches by day in a building that has served as a community gathering place for a almost a century, her New City Company staged an energetic piece that worked best in the narrowly focused and understated moments when the play made no attempts to disguise the modesty of the production (the simplicity of the set in the second of two one-acts, a panel of bars in the center of the stage, was probably a reflection both of artistic choice and of the fact that practicing for free in the community room of a police station tends to impose some limits). Hello Out There, the starker of the plays with two characters continuing a mostly linear dialogue that builds into romance, came across beautifully. Gift Harris gave a tight and compelling performance as Photo-Finish, taking us with him through the varying shades of desperation, loneliness, and hope in the repeated cry, “Hello out there!” from which the play earns its name.
The director cast the play well. In the script of Hello Out There, Saroyan describes Photo-Finish simply as “A Young Man,” a phrase that certainly contained an internal set of assumptions about race and ethnicity in 1941 when the play was written. Jiang-Dubaniewicz chose Harris, an African American man who has performed a number of roles on television and stage, because he just seemed to fit. Similarly, she decided to cast The Long Voyage Home, an Irish play from 1917, without regards to race or other qualities that typically account for typecasting in theater.
Discussing what she refers to as “inclusive casting,” the director cites her own experiences struggling with the scarcity of roles for Asian American actors. The same is true with other racial minorities, she says. Many of the African American actors in her cast have opted not to join Actor’s Equity because the number of available roles doesn’t justify the union fee. Not only does Jiang-Dubaniewicz view this as an injustice, but she also sees it as a failure to mirror the reality of the world around us, an aim of theater. “This is our city,” she says. “This is what we look like.”
The “we” implicates the audience, merging the play and the community. The direction of the show emphasized this. Little separated the two rows of guests and the stage, and while this was sometimes unsettling — the larger cast and chaotic drunken merriment of A Long Voyage Home at times felt too big for the space and distanced the audience — it mostly added to the feeling of intimacy. In the quieter, more finely tuned Hello Out There, the characters spoke facing outward toward the audience, inviting us into the burgeoning love between outcasts.
And the audience participation did not end with the bows. At the end of the performance, Lewis Campbell, the indispensable executive producer, addressed the audience with a half-joking plea for help transforming the space back to its daytime function. In 30 minutes, it would become a senior lunch room once again.
Will the senior lunch room ever transform back into The Postage Stamp Theater? Jiang-Dubaniewicz is considering a number of future projects for the New City Company, including more of the rich anti-hero tales of Saroyan and O’Neill. After the success of this first project, hopefully she won’t need a fortuitous Sean Penn run-in to make it happen.
FILM The late 1950s saw Japanese film production and attendance at all-time highs. Soon the expanding television market would steadily draw audiences away, but in the meantime the industry was robust enough to encourage the promotion of assistant directors and other next-generation talents influenced by the era’s various artistic avant-gardes to make their own features. This resulted in a flowering of bold new voices parallel to France’s New Wave and other radical filmmaking shifts around the globe. As elsewhere, ideas and influences from the underground began bubbling up to the mainstream surface.
Unlike other places, however, Japan had its own conglomerate means of importing, producing, and exhibiting (in a micro-chain of specially designated theaters) more experimental work in direct if modest competition with commercial product. That means would be the Art Theater Guild of Japan, which a group of cineastes, filmmakers, and critics launched in 1961; by spring of the next year they’d secured 10 venues across the nation to showcase the work ATG distributed and, eventually, created in-house.
Two concurrent local retrospectives highlight the Art Theater Guild’s important but (at least in the West) underseen contributions. The organization is tangentially related to the roster of experimental shorts (plus Michio Okabe’s mondo-like 1968 feature counterculture overview Crazy Love) in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque’s two-week “Fragments of Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1974” series, which begins this week. But it’s central to the Pacific Film Archive’s already in-progress “Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild,” continuing through month’s end.
Raised in a society whose rigid codes for behavior and loyalty enabled a remarkable post-World War II economic recovery, but which could also stifle individual expression, Japanese filmmakers emerging in the 1960s were if anything even more eager than young Americans and Europeans to tear apart inherited thematic, stylistic, and commercial conventions. Whether advocating for full-on revolution, critiquing the status quo, or playing with form, ATG’s productions pushed both medium and audiences out of the comfort zone.
That aim couldn’t have been more apparent in the company’s first original feature (co-produced with Nikkatsu Corp.), 1967’s A Man Vanishes by the celebrated Shohei Imamura (1963’s The Insect Woman, 1966’s The Pornographers, 1983’s The Ballad of Narayama). Ostensibly an investigative documentary about a salaryman who’s gone missing for two years, it’s a poker-faced prank that slowly grows more convoluted and bizarre until the film becomes a chronicle of its own unmaking, and an accusation directed at any notion of truth in cinema.
More traditional subjects are turned inside out in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Shura (1971). The former is drawn from a 300-year-old tragic romance written for bunraku (puppet) theater; mixing abstraction and naturalism, actors human and otherwise, it’s a jewel that questions artifice itself. In contrast to the prolific Shinoda, Matsumoto made very few features, most famously 1969’s pop art-camp extravaganza Funeral Parade of Roses, which transplants Oedipus Rex to the Tokyo gay underground with cross-dressing singer-actor “Peter” as its ruthless glamazon protagonist.
Shura (a.k.a. Demons) is as cramped as that film is extravagant. Turning its extreme physical and budgetary limitations into the stuff of claustrophobic nightmare à la Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) or Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll (1957), it’s the tale of a samurai who gives everything up for love of a geisha — you know that’s a bad idea when early on she asks the question that needs no answer, “How dare you call me a vixen?” Once he realizes he’s been betrayed, all hell breaks loose in bursts of over-the-top violence that might be real or imaginary, given the film’s penchant for showing us successive alternate versions of the same scenes.
Arguably the series’ wildest stylistic leap is Shuji Terayama’s 1974 Pastoral: Hide and Seek, a bracing phantasmagorical chronicle of a very troubled mother-child relationship that reels from circus surrealism and mime makeup to porno sex and quiet lyricism. Perhaps its bitterest statement comes in the form of 1971’s The Ceremony from a pre-In the Realm of the Senses (1976) Nagisa Oshima. Rigorously formal in presentation (and taking place almost exclusively during public rituals), it traces the gradual soul crushing of a protagonist whose forced lifelong hewing to the model of a “pure and perfect Japanese” sacrifices any possibility of happiness. One of the ultimate “You think you hate your family?” horror films, it features multiple suicides and gruesomely joyless sexual interludes testifying to the suffocation of bourgeoisie conformity.
While its stature and role changed over time, ATG hung on through the mid 1980s, its final releases including such memorable ones as Yoshimitsu Morita’s anarchic social satire The Family Game (1983), an international hit. *
“CHRONICLES OF INFERNO: JAPAN’S ART THEATER GUILD”
Schedules are for Wed/13-Tue/19 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. "Periwinkle Cinema: recLAmation with live narration by Hilary Goldberg," Wed, 8. "Dirty Looks NYC Presents:" "Pickle Surprise! The Eyes of Tom Rubnitz," Fri, 8. "Short Films About Sexuality: Fourplay," Sat, 8:30.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942), Wed, 2:20, 7, and Revanche (Spielmann, 2008), Wed, 4:40, 9:20. "Marc Huestis presents in association with Earl Dax:" "Joey Arias: Love Swings!," Valentine’s Day concert with guests Veronica Klaus and Connie Champagne, Thu, 8. Advance tickets ($28-75) at www.ticketfly.com. Cloud Atlas (Wachowski, Wachowski, and Tykwer, 2012), Fri, 1, 4:30, 8. "San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents Silent Winter:" Snow White (Dawley, 1916), Sat, 10am; "Think Slow, Act Fast: Buster Keaton Shorts" (1920-21), Sat, noon; The Thief of Bagdad (Walsh, 1924), Sat, 2:30; My Best Girl (Taylor, 1927), Sat, 7; Faust (Murnau, 1926), Sat, 9. All films with live musical accompaniment; advance tickets ($5-15) at www.silentfilm.org. •The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, 2001), Sun, 1; The Two Towers (Jackson, 2002), Sun, 4:15; The Return of the King (2003), Sun, 7:30. Special admission, $10-13. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012), Mon, 1, 4:30, 8.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. "Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation, Documentary, and Live Action," call for dates and times. "World Ballet on the Big Screen:" La Bayadère, from the Bolshoi Ballet, Moscow, Sun, 1; Tue, 6:30. This event, $12-15. 56 Up (Apted, 2012), Feb 15-21, call for times.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. "Midnight Movies:" Harold and Maude (Ashby, 1971), Thu-Sat, midnight.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6-10. "Parkway Classics:" Harold and Maude (Ashby, 1971), Thu, 9pm. Oakland International Black LGBT Film Festival: Stud Life (Ex, 2012), Fri, 7; "Just Shorts," Sat, 2; Taboo Yardies (Blake, 2011), Sun, 2:30; You Are Not Alone (Clay, 2012), Sun, 4:30. Visit www.blacklgbtfilmfest.com for more info. "Thrillville:" The Vampire Lovers (Baker, 1970), Sun, 6. "Documentary Film Series:" The Central Park Five (Burns, Burns, and McMahon, 2012), Tue, 7.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:" The Smiling Star (1983), Wed, 7; Eika Katappa (1969), Sun, 5:30. "Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild:" Pastoral: Hide and Seek (Terayama, 1974), Thu, 7; Double Suicide (Shinoda, 1969), Fri, 7; The Ceremony (Oshima, 1971), Sat, 6. "The Sounds of Silence:" The Silence (Bergman, 1963), Fri, 9; Into Great Silence (Gröning, 2005), Sun, 2. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" Strangers on a Train (1951), Sat, 8:30. "Documentary Voices/On Location in Silent Cinema:" Chang (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1927) with "Land Without Bread" (Buñuel, 1933), Tue, 7.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. SF IndieFest, through Feb 8-21. For advance tickets (most shows $12) and full schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. "For Your Vortex Only:" •Mad Love (Freund, 1935), Thu, 9, and Crazy Love (Deruddere, 1987), Thu, 11.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "Fragments of Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1974:" "Gewaltopia: Motoharu Jonouchi’s Radical Visions (1960-1974)," Thu, 7:30; "Films By the Group of Three: Iimura, Obayashi, Takabayashi," Sat, 7:30. "The Wooster Group On Screen:" To You, The Birdie! (2002), Sun, 2.
How Do I Look? asks a seminal weighty tome addressing queer film and video theory from 1991. “Dirty!” I always wanted to shout back to my dusty bookshelf when it caught my eye. Well, hey — 22 years later along comes NYC’s Dirty Looks collective, which showcases queer experimental film and video with startling freshness. The edgy gems on offer in its two-night visit to SF may have slipped through your Youtube crack. Thu/14’s “Yesterday Once More” at SFMOMA, www.sfmoma.org, gives you contemporary coolness from Matt Wolf, Zachary Drucker, Mariah Garnett, and Chris E. Vargas. Then check out Fri/15’s “Pickle Surprise! The Eyes of Tom Rubnitz” at Artists Television Access, www.atasite.org, which has me jumping for joy — this ’80s underground clubkid, filmmaker, and musician caught the spirit of one of our civilizations most vividly glorious times before he died of AIDS. Legendary drag queens and trashy foodstuffs galore! (Marke B.)
As the name subtlety implies, this event will showcase humor. Hosted by the sardonic upstart comic Cameron Vannini, this event, billed as a standup show for comics and by comics, will be the first ever comedic event at the nascent Chapel, signaling more standup shows in its future. Going up to bat tonight will be an all-local slate featuring Kevin O’Shea, Clare O’Kane, Jules Posner, Sean Keane, Brendan Lynch, and Kevin Camia. O’Shea, O’Kane, Posner, Keane, and Vannini will all be coming fresh off recent gigs at Sketchfest. The blunt and jabbing Camia, whose record Kindness was voted among the top 10 best comedy albums on iTunes in 2010, is a stalwart of the local scene and recently has been rumored to be making “the move” down to LA. A night like this should be the perfect respite for those still pining for Sketchfest. (George McIntire)
Remember rock’n’roll? You know, that dynamic and gritty music before the age of synthesizers? The Stone Foxes show at the New Parish might jog your memory. Launching into experimentation from strong roots in blues, the band plays a range from the catchy interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” (“Everybody Knows”) to the elegy in minor, “Battles, Blades and Bones,” which repeats, “We need someone to sing/’Cause we’ve turned everything/To battles, blades, and bones.” In their third album, Little Fires (which came out Feb. 12), collaboration with Girls’ producer Doug Boehm proves that polish doesn’t mean sterility, that good production doesn’t mean overproduction, and that good old rock’n’roll lives on. (Laura Kerry)
Sam Yagan might be as qualified as anyone to decipher the formula for love. Yagan and his three Harvard classmates founded the online dating site OKCupid as a spin off from the Spark Notes study guides they created at the turn of the millennium. Since then, Internet matchmaking has become a booming business, and Yagan and Co. capitalized in 2011 by selling OKCupid to rival Match.com. Yagan, now Match.com’s CEO, uses data from 8 million users to quantify the unquantifiable, to dissect what exactly goes into fuzzy feelings and unexplainable attractions. Bay Area matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom and SFGate blogger Beth Spotswood will be on hand to help translate the love equation. (Kevin Lee)
The Wooster Group/New York City Players: Early Plays
However it pans out as a performance, this has to be one of the theatrical events of the year: A rare Bay Area appearance by the famed Wooster Group in collaboration with another NY-based contemporary experimental theater company of renown, Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players. Maxwell directs members of both companies in a trio of “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill —three one-acts also known as the Glencairn plays, after the ship on which work the men of Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home. Each unfolds in the director’s emblematic affectless style, which seeks out the unfamiliar beneath layers of received theatricality and, in the case of these young yet also experimental plays, lingering melodrama. (Robert Avila)
Britain’s Jon Gooch has many alter egos. He’s a producer and a DJ, he’s Spor and he’s Feed Me. No matter what the role or the moniker, however, Gooch remains constant and consistent in his creation of unrelentingly catchy electro and yes, dubstep. Teeth, Gooch’s newest creation, is the element that pushes Feed Me’s act over the line from just another EDM act and into the realm of a truly spectacular performance that’s going to keep you talking about it for quite a while. The Teeth are comprised of 20 jagged LED screens that create a huge, crooked grin that flashes and pulses in sync with Feed Me’s expert mixing. Dancing shoes required, party provided. (Haley Zaremba)
Last time Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad’s Body Cartography Project performed locally downtown, it was difficult to tell the dancers apart from the mingling pedestrians. Shortly after that the company left its home turf of SF for greener pastures, Minneapolis, as it turned out. From there Body Cartography has taken its expanded investigations of physicality — both geographically and the mediums within which it works — around the globe. For its return engagement as part of CounterPULSE’s Queer Series (running through March), Body Cartography is bringing a relatively small group, Ramstad with sibling Emmett. One is a dancer, the other a visual artist. They look very much alike; they are even dressed alike. They have called what they do Symptom, a work they say is “sculpture, drawing, movement and text.” (Rita Felciano)
Here are some of the themes that the sculptures of Rachel Mica Weiss undertake: human vulnerability, large-scale disasters, self-inflicted limitations. Does an image come to mind? I’m guessing that it does not resemble Weiss’s black net installations. But when you see the twisted rope, the rough stones, and the tarnished wood that comprise Weiss’s previous work, idea and object click. The artist condenses so much conceptual work into physical pieces of inexplicable poignancy. Let’s throw a few more themes in: boundaries, environmental change, cultural constructs. All of it will be on view in the windows of the Arts Commission Gallery. (Kerry)
The metal life isn’t for everyone. Constant touring, an over-crowded industry, and headbang whiplash causes many bands to give up their brutal dream early into their career. Buffalo, NY’s Every Time I Die isn’t one of those bands. ETID has been churning out its distinctive Southern-tinged hardcore since 1998. Six studio albums, a billion bassists, and a tour with Steve-O later, the Buckley brothers are still going strong. Incredibly, their high-energy live show has shown no signs of fatigue in well over a decade, and their reputation for intensity continues to be well-earned. Come for the snarky lyrics and clever songwriting, stay for the circle pit. (Zaremba)
With the Acacia Strain, Vanna, Hundreth, No Bragging Rights
My first compact disc was Salt ‘N Pepa’s masterful ode to minding one’s business, safe sex, and superlative/godawful male companions, 1993’s Very Necessary. Imagine my confusion, then, upon my discovery that the rest of the hip-hop world was hardly as empowering for females as that power-sass had led me to believe. But hip-hop has always been a site of subversion, where societal rules are flipped, and so it makes perfect since that some day, its lovers would take back the form from the silly misogynists on the Billboard charts. So, yay: tonight, nu-world griots Aya De Leon, Raquel Gutierrez, Chinaka Hodge, Carrie Leilam Love, Dawn Robinson, and Kity Yan examine hip-hop’s queer-feminist revolutionary potential through spoken word. It’s the first of five La Peña events in 2013 focused on breaking down hip-hop’s gender barriers. (Caitlin Donohue)
If you’re into dub, electronic, Middle Eastern, and psychedelic sounds, you must meet Ott. Ott — a veteran electronic British musician-producer who has worked with big names like Sinéad O’Connor, Brian Eno, and Simon Posford (Shpongle) — makes rich, ambient, trancey electronic dub jams under the moniker Ott and the All-Seeing I. “Owl Stretching Time,” one of the band’s signature tracks, could just as easily be the anthem to a Jamaican surf trip as the soundtrack to a night out in Berlin. Ott handles electronics alongside Naked Nick (guitars, synths, percussion), bassist Chris Barker, and drummer Matt White. (Mia Sullivan)
Before we begin, let’s establish a few definitions. Buke: an altered six-string baritone banjo. Gase: a blend of a guitar and bass. Surely, a band that carries its own invented glossary approaches music differently. Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, the duo that with its homemade instruments manages to sound more like an offbeat orchestra, alters language, genre, and the overall assumptions of the listener. The driving cacophony in the recently released General Dome shouldn’t make sense. Somehow, though, with Dyer’s expressive singing, the building repetition of sounds, and the band’s confidence in its own inventiveness, it all comes together. See Dyer and Sanchez create their own rules at Café Du Nord. (Kerry)
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She wears a Guess Collection spotted lynx coat, Manolo Blahnik boots, Isabel Marant dress, La Perla lingerie. She has to figure out how to have sex with a quadriplegic. She is gentle, the most sweet. The Christeene Vale that stars in the “San Francisco” segment of Fourplay, a collection of sex-themed shorts that will screen in part at Other Cinema’s “Eros” lineup at Artist’s Television Access on Sat/16 is not the same filthy drag-terror I remember slapping and dredging her sweaty stomach over the faces of other front row admirers at her Public Works appearance last year.
In part, this is due to the fact that in Fourplay Vale (or rather, Paul Soileau, her real world alter ego) is interpreting the cross-dressing SF sex worker who is sitting across the table from me in a SoMa cafe. Her name is Chloe, and she is explaining to me why her job is a lot like being a therapist.
Here is the plot of Fourplay‘s “San Francisco”: Soileau’s Chloe is called out to North Bay house with an unusual challenge. The wife of a quadriplegic man wants a professional to give him his first experience with a biological man. He’s not gay, the wife explains upon Chloe’s arrival. It’s just something he wants to do.
The ensuing scene between Soileau and the prone man will convince anyone of the need for experienced, compassionate sex workers. It will also introduce you to ways of sexual pleasure you perhaps had not previously considered (spoiler alert, but: toe.)
The story is loosely based on an experience that real-life Chloe recounted to director Kyle Henry when they were introduced by a mutual friend in San Francisco. They changed a things about the plot to make it simpler for audiences to digest. It was actually the quadriplegic’s mother who called Chloe. In the film version of Fourplay the disabled man is older — in real life he was 23 years old, having had an awful motorcycle accident at 18. The real-deal sex took place in Post Street hotel, one with adequate handicapped access so that the mother could position the man in the room, leave the money in an envelope on the desk. The next time real-life Chloe heard from mom, it was three years later. She had called to let him know her son had passed away in his sleep.
“All I could think was ‘god, this woman loves her son so much,’” Chloe tells me over tea at the new 111 Minna cafe. In person, it is easy to see similarities between the queen in front of me and Soileau that may have lead to the casting of the Fourplay short. Both of them have big eyes that look at you — Vale’s through freaky contact lenses, but you imagine the spirit is the same behind the plastic. In person, Chloe affirms, Soileau is actually quite gentle and Southern. Christeene hadn’t yet been born when the short was filmed almost three years ago, or when the two drag queens spent time studying each other before the short was shot.
Chloe remembers that she was insistent that the tenderness she felt for the disabled man be apparent on screen, that Soileau bring back to life the humility she felt in that moment.
“It wasn’t about getting pleasure,” she says of the quadripligic man. “It was more about him giving pleasure.” Which makes sense – a man who has to be waited on 24/7 for his own survival would fantasize, one supposes, about the moment when he could give happiness to another. “It changed my definition of what sex could be.”
Chloe’s career began when a drag queen named Chocolate who worked the door at Trannyshack Tuesdays at the Stud asked baby-drag Chloe what her “price” was. Chocolate became her teacher, learning her the best way to work with clients. Judging from the way Chloe divined, diagnosed, and prescribed a cure for my Valentine’s Day anxiety, she’s definitely attuned to the needs of others — one of those “givers.”
“Very quickly,” Chloe remembers “the fear subsided when I saw how powerful touching the skin of another person, having them touch yours – how remarkable and transformative that can be.” Through the power of drag, she was able to take charge of each rendezvous and, she feels, really help people. “We’re not criminals. We’re artists, we’re shamans,” she tells me. Chloe was active in 2008’s defeated Proposition K, which would have prohibited the SFPD from using resources to instigate and prosecute sex work.
“We live in a lonely world. People can go for days without speaking [in real life] to anyone.” She saw lots of self-identified straight men during those days of the first dom com boom in San Francisco, the kind of guys desired by the same burly gay men who the slight, nerdy Chloe felt rejected by in bars before she started sex work (“tranny’s revenge,” she laughs.) But when I ask how it felt to be so intimate with people who were in the closet, Chloe bridles.
“As I understand, there’s a big difference between sexual identity and sexual practice.” Let them be straight if they say they’re straight, she avers. “I believe everyone should have the power of self definition.”
Her caretaking spirit is evident in the short that Henry and the rest of his Austin-based collective created (Henry’s partner is one of Vale’s back-up dancers — the making of the “San Francisco” segment was somewhat of a family affair.) The partial screening on Saturday will be the second for Fourplay in San Francisco after last year’s Frameline debut. Who know, maybe Christeene will make an appearance — she was just announced as a guest judge for Fri/15’s Trannyshack Star Search pageant.
Chloe’s excited that more of her SF friends get a chance to see the piece that they put together so many years ago. “It was so easy because Paul is so sweet, so fearless, he understood the complexity of the piece. And he fit perfectly in my clothes.”
Yep, that fuzzy feeling wasn’t the only thing Chloe contributed to Fourplay – lady offered up the clothes off her back.
Schedules are for Wed/6-Tue/12 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $15-50. "Cast Shadows," sound-film performances with Barn Owl, Marielle Jakobsons, John Davis, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Paul Clipson, Sat, 8. Benefit for ATA.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Chasing Ice (Orlowski, 2012), Wed, 3, 7, and The Eiger Sanction (Eastwood, 1975), Wed, 4:30, 8:35. •Killing Them Softly (Dominik, 2012), Thu, 7, and Animal Kingdom (Michod, 2010), Thu, 8:50. "SF Sketchfest:" Welcome to the Dollhouse (Solondz, 1995), Fri, 7, hosted by Peaches Christ with star Heather Matarazzo in person; Pootie Tang (Louis CK, 2001), Fri, 10, with star Lance Crouther in person; The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (Zucker, 1988), with David Zucker, Pat Proft, and Priscilla Presley in person, Sat, 1; Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008), presented as "The Benson Movie Interruption" with Doug Benson and friends, Sat, 4:20; Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992), hosted by Patton Oswalt with star Bruce Campbell in person, Sat, 8:30. For advance tickets ($20-50) and more info, visit www.sfsketchfest.com.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. Quartet (Hoffman, 2012), call for dates and times. The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar and Delesvaux, 2011), call for dates and times.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. "Midnight Movies:" The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight. With host Sam Sharkey.
MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, milibrary.org/events. $10 (reservations required as seating is limited). "CinemaLit Film Series: Hollywood Dames: In the Name of Love:" Marriage Italian Style (di Sica, 1964), Fri, 6.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $8. "Documentary Film Series:" Zipper (Nicholson, 2012), Tue, 7.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "On Location in Silent Cinema:" Terje Vigen (Sjöström, 1917), Wed, 7. "Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild:" Silence Has No Wings (Kuroki, 1966), Thu, 7; Ecstasy of the Angels (Wakamatsu, 1972), Fri, 7; She and He (Hani, 1963), Sat, 8; Children Who Draw (Hani, 1956); The Inferno of First Love (Hani, 1968), Sun, 5. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" Saboteur (Hitchcock, 1942), Fri, 9. "Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:" Dress Rehearsal (1981), Sat, 6. "Documentary Voices:" Free Land (Martin, 2009), Tue, 7.
RED POPPY ART HOUSE 2698 Folsom, SF; www.redpoppyarthouse.org. $5-15. "Red Reels:" Throw Down Your Heart (Paladino, 2008), Sun, 6:30. Screening followed by a performace by Fat Opie’s Scott Mickelson.
RHYTHMIX CULTURAL WORKS 2513 Blanding, Alameda; www.rhythmix.org. $5. "Albany FilmFest’s Greatest Hits," short films, Fri, 8.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Beware of Mr. Baker (Bulger, 2012), Wed, 6:45. Sound City (Grohl, 2012), Wed-Thu, 7:15, 9:30. "SF Sketchfest:" Animal House (Landis, 1978), Wed, 9. With John Landis in person; for advance tickets ($20) or more info, visit www.sfsketchfest.com. SF IndieFest, Feb 8-21. For advance tickets (most shows $12) and full schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10. "For Your Vortex Only:" •Love at First Bite (Dragoti, 1979), Thu, 9, and The Love Machine (Haley Jr, 1971), Thu, 11.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "San Francisco Cinematheque presents Jan Jost: American Dispatches," Fri, 7:30. Jan Jost in person. "The Wooster Group On Screen:" House/Lights (1999), Sun, 2.
The City Attorney’s Office just announced that a federal court has upheld San Francisco’s ban on public nudity. From the press release:
The court found that the nudism advocates’ challenge to the ordinance based on the First Amendment lacked merit because “public nudity alone is not expression protected by the First Amendment,” and because the ordinance was “not substantially overbroad.” Judge [Edward] Chen additionally rejected plaintiffs’ arguments that exemptions for such permitted events such as Bay to Breakers and the Folsom Street Fair violated constitutional Equal Protection guarantees, holding that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the exceptions lacked a rational basis. Though the nudism advocates’ facial challenge to the ordinance was dismissed without leave to amend, the court left the door open for nudism advocates to amend their pleading with subsequent “as-applied” claims, provided they were able to do so.
In San Francisco next week, it will remain perfectly legal for a 50-year-old man to seduce an 18-year-old, impregnate her, ridicule her physical appearance until she is brought to tears, walk out on her, seek out her mother, seduce that mother for no other reason than to further hurt the jilted daughter, draw a graphic novel of the whole sordid chain of events, and publish in on the Internet. But it’ll be illegal for him to be naked outside. Does anyone think the resulting moral signal is desirable?
There’s a long discussion of Judeo-Christian values, the Bible, Adam and Eve, etc. But the conclusion really makes the point:
Americans are bombarded with images of semi-clothed people all the time. It just happens that they’re all beautiful actors and actresses, magazine cover girls, television underwear models, and porn stars. The average person sees lots of naked bodies, but very little real variety. While that may be more aesthetically pleasant, it skewers our notion of what a normal human body looks like. In an age of Victoria’s Secret in the mall, substantial nudity on primetime television, and ubiquitous YouPorn, a ban on nonsexual street nudity begins to seem absurd. Society needs some relatively unattractive people to be naked in public now more than ever before.
Schedules are for Wed/23-Tue/29 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. dreambody/earthbody (Alli, 2012), Fri, 8. With director Antero Alli in person. "Trance Mutations," live musical performances with accompanying projections curated by Micah Danemayer, Sat, 8.
BALBOA 3630 Balboa, SF; cinemasf.com/balboa. $7.50-10. Let Fury Have the Hour (D’Ambrosio, 2012), Wed-Thu, 3, 5, 7:15.
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Daisies (Chytilová, 1966), Wed, 3:15, 7, and Pierrot Le Fou (Godard, 1965), Wed, 4:45, 8:35. "SF Sketchfest Opening Night: Rifftrax Presents Night of the Shorts IV: Riffizens on Patrol," Thu, 8. This event, $30; advance tickets and info at www.sfsketchfest.com. Noir City: The 11th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival: Gun Crazy (Lewis, 1950), Fri, 8, with post-film conversation with star Peggy Cummins; •Curse of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957), Sat, 1, 5, and Hell Drivers (Endfield, 1957), Sat, 3; •Try and Get Me! (Endfield, 1951), Sat, 7:30, and The Hoodlum (Nossek, 1951), Sat, 9:20; •Repeat Performance (Werker, 1947), Sun, 1, 5, 9:10, and Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), Sun, 2:50, 7; •A House Divided (Wyler, 1931), Mon, 7; The Kiss Before the Mirror (Whale, 1933), Mon, 8:25; Laughter in Hell (Cahn, 1933), Mon, 9:45; •Native Son (Chenal, 1951), Tue, 7, and Intruder in the Dust (Brown, 1949), Tue, 9. More info at www.noircity.com; advance tickets ($10-15) at www.brownpapertickets.com.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Amour (Haneke, 2012), call for dates and times. My Worst Nightmare (Fontaine, 2012), call for dates and times. The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar and Delesvaux, 2011), call for dates and times.
CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9-10. "Midnight Movies:" The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975), Sat, midnight. With live performers the Bawdy Caste.
GRACE CATHEDRAL 1100 California, SF; gracecathedral.org/concerts. $10-20 (both films, $17-24). "An Evening of Silent Films at Grace Cathedral:" The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925), Sat, 7; Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), Sat, 9. With organ accompaniment by Dorothy Papadakos.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6. "Documentary Film Series:" Brooklyn Castle (Dellamaggiore, 2012), Tue, 7.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "African Film Festival 2013:" Microphone (Abdalla, 2010), Wed, 7; Black Africa, White Marble (Bicocchi, 2011), Sun, 3; Monica Wangu Wamwere: The Unbroken Saint (Murago Munene, 2011), Tue, 7. "Film 50: History of Cinema: The Cinematic City:" Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, 1927), Wed, 3:10. With lecture by Marilyn Fabe; advance tickets (special pricing: $5.50-$11.50) recommended as programs often sell out. The Saddest Music in the World (Maddin, 2003), Thu, 7. Tenth anniversary celebration. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" Rear Window (1954), Fri, 7. "The Hills Run Red: Italian Westerns, Leone, and Beyond:" Navajo Joe (Corbucci, 1966), Fri, 9:10; Sabata (Parolini, 1969), Sun, 5. "Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema with Title Designer Kyle Cooper:" Se7en (Fincher, 1995), Sat, 8. With Kyle Cooper in person. "Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:" Mondo Lux (Mikesh, 2011), Tue, 7.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Holy Motors (Carax, 2012), Wed, 9:15; Thu, 9. "SF Film Redux:" So I Married an Axe Murderer (Schlamme, 1993), Wed, 7. This event, $18.50. The Law in These Parts (Alexandrowicz, 2012), Wed, 9:15; Thu, 7, 9:05. How to Survive a Plague (France, 2012), Thu, 7. Beware of Mr. Baker (Bulger, 2012), Jan 25-31, call for times.
VOGUE 3290 Sacramento, SF; www.mostlybritish.org. $12.50-35 (festival pass, $99). Mostly British Film Festival, new and classic films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa, Wed-Thu.
VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; Facebook: The Vortex Room. $10-15. "Fabulous Film Femmes: Anna Biller and Sietske Tjallingii," short films with directors in person, Sat, 8. "Vortex II:" •Genesis II (Moxey, 1973), Sun, 6; Planet Earth (Daniels, 1974), Sun, 7:30; Brave New World (Brinckerhoff, 1980), Sun, 9.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. "2012 British Arrows Awards," showcase of the best television, online, outdoor, and cinema commercials made by British ad agencies and production companies, Thu-Sun, 4, 6, 8 (no 8pm show Sun).
Note: don’t miss Ryan Prendiville’s article on SF Sketchfest’s Harmontown event in tomorrow’s paper.
“I like to talk,” Dan Harmon said at the end of our Harmontownphone interview, while I was apologizing for going over the scheduled time. “And then everyone goes ‘I’m sorry, I love this but you know this is a 50-word piece next to the weather.’ I get, I get it.” Given that, post-Community, Harmon co-created a series for Cartoon Network, successfully crowd sourced an animated Charlie Kaufman film, pitched a Harmontown spin-off Dungeons & Dragons web series, and written pilots for Fox and CBS, there were a lot of topics to cover. Here’s an extended Q&A for the Harmonites.
San Francisco Bay Guardian With the options you have now with the internet and cable channels like Cartoon Network, why go back to network TV?
Dan Harmon That’s easy. Because nobody gets offered those opportunities, and although the networks are losing out to an increasingly fragmented media, you can still reach more people with a CBS sitcom in a half hour than with other things in a few weeks.
These next coming years are our very last chance to engage in the beautiful art form called the plain old sitcom. There’s these sound stages that have been erected in a time that there was big money changing hands and that system still exists, and you can have 200 of the most qualified people in the world helping you put on a little play about characters for a massive amount of people. That is why, because if CBS asks you, “Would you like to write something that has a five percent chance of getting on CBS on a weeknight when your mom will see it?”, you say yes.
And I have all the time in the world to do a great basic cable show, because we’re living in a golden age of great basic cable shows and it’s gonna be at least five years before that opportunity is gone for a writer who’s willing to put the work in. Then I’ve got the next 20 years until I die to make a video about me dancing around in my underwear, which will probably be the most satisfying thing I ever do.
SFBG On one of the earlier Harmontown podcasts, you were sort of threatening to not work so hard on your next project. Is that still the case?
DH When I wrote the pilot for Community, no one was around for that conversation because I hadn’t created Community yet, let alone gotten fired from it in a high-profile online scenario. But when I was writing the pilot for Community I was saying the exact same thing. I was saying I want to buy a house, I want to work less hard, to say “yes” to the system and play with its rules.
I apparently have a tendency to self-destruct by instinct. I’m sure praying mantises wonder why they’re ripping their husband’s heads off while they have sex but they can’t help it. If praying mantises were to have a religion I think a healthy one would be “I swear to God I’m not going to rip my husband’s head off next time.” I think that’s a good approach since every fiber of your being says you’re gonna do it anyway.
I tend to rip my own head off after having sex when I write these TV shows, because I start by going, “Oh, let’s just not do what we did last time, let’s not fall in love with this thing, and become obsessed with it, and become so emotionally attached to it that it becomes the most important thing in our life.”
That’s what I did with Community and the result was a great pilot script that got shot and turned into a great pilot. Then I nestle in and I get attached and it becomes me, it becomes my identity. So this time, now Community is over, that happened, and I’m saying the same thing again, let’s go to CBS, let’s go to Fox, let’s do this right this time, and you know, it’s part of a beautiful cycle, each time I say it. Three years is the longest job I’ve ever had, so maybe this time I can do it for six. And that’s a long-running show.
Taking a step back, the truth is when you write a pilot your job is to write something that feels as mainstream as possible. Community‘s pilot felt pretty damn mainstream in a very satisfying way. Like this is what TV is supposed to be: a warm friendly story about a group of misfits coming together. But you take three months to write a pilot, and then if it gets picked up you have 200 people working with you on a show that gets pumped out once a week, so everything changes.
Coming off the three-year job like that, of course you’re gonna go, “OK, on my next show it’s gonna be different,” but what I’m remembering now that I’m writing these pilots is of course it’s gonna be different — you’re writing a pilot, dummy! You get to relax a little bit — not take your time (in case anybody from Fox or CBS is listening), but you get to be healthy, you don’t have to chew Adderall like candy, or yell at anyone, and fret about what the people on Onion AV Club are gonna say in the comments, because it’s a pilot script. I get to be a writer again and not a politician anymore.
SFBG Speaking of the AV Club, you have a reputation for reading your own critics, down to the level of online message boards. Do you think you do that more than other people, or are you just outspoken about it?
DH Reading about ourselves on the internet is like masturbation that we absolutely can do without anyone ever knowing about. So not only can you choose to lie to others about how often you do it, you can even lie to yourself about how you do it, because as humans, reality for us is largely based on other people’s perceptions. If there’s 20 bodies in your crawl space but you haven’t been caught yet, you tell yourself you’re still a birthday clown, and that’s how you keep doing it.
When Community was running, I specifically made a point to not read any reviews, beyond whether the critics thought it was a decent episode. And definitely not to read the comments section under the reviews, especially if it’s a positive review. Because if it’s a positive review I know the comments section is going to be a kite tail of people being heroes in their own story trying to topple the tower of the good review, and it’s gonna get inside my head and it’s gonna fuck up my writing for other people who just want to see a nice TV show.
I think I do it probably less than others who do it, like, really egregiously and absolutely lie about it. But I also think there’s people out there who are complete heroes to me, because they’re able to not do it at all. I have three years at Community plus the Chevy Chase debacle plus my firing. That was pretty much being locked in a closet of cigars by my dad as far as reading about myself written about other people.
Whether you should or shouldn’t read about yourself on the internet, five years ago that was a completely different question. Five years ago if your laptop was open and you were typing your name into Google that meant you were doing a very specific thing, but now what are you doing? And if you’re Instagramming a picture of your cat and someone says, “I’m sick of seeing pictures of your cat on your Instagram,” and you comment back “Go fuck yourself, stop following me on Instagram, this is where I post pictures of my cat,” and you’re a showrunner of a sitcom, now what are we saying about that?
If I get a job running a show am I supposed to approach my Instragram differently? Then that question proliferates through Tumblr, Twitter … and now I’m gonna show my age by trailing off very quickly.
SFBG It’s confusing, too, because it used to be a certain measure of celebrity was just that people were talking about you in a formal way. There were articles, things you could look up and find. For most people, go back ten years, there’d be very little, almost nothing a person could find where someone would be commenting on what they did. Now everyone has that.
DH And that person would be called the critic and they would have almost perceptively gone to critic’s school or something. It would seem that way anyway. And their job, they had a practical job too. But what practical role does the critic play, outside of reviewing Iron Man 3? Because they’re not saving you time by printing a three hour synopsis of your half hour television show.
The odd thing in our culture now, the role of the critic has become a cultural thing so as consumers we’ve been given voices. We all like to pontificate why something is good beyond saying we enjoyed it; we like to be the guy that explains why something is good or bad. You’re right, everyone is doing that, including me. I have a podcast where I get to stand up and say I didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises and I get to make fun of the way Bane talks. Do I want Christopher Nolan tuning in and crying? No, I don’t want him to hear it. It’s my comfort zone as a consumer.
I think your point is — in the old days, if you were Cary Grant and you wanted to kind of preen in front of a media mirror, you could have your assistant run down to the newsstand and get that magazine that just did a piece on you. And you open it up with your physical hands and see whether they did a fluff job or they skewered you, and you could throw the magazine across the room or feel good about yourself in a binary way.
Now it’s just a sea of human writhing. And it’s an orgy. So there are people that come to the orgy that are creepy and there are people that dive in and roll around, and I’m sure we all fluctuate being creepy and joyful as we writhe in this thing. The reason for my reputation in that regard is in that metaphor is, I’m the guy you can hear across the room going “What an orgy!”, and everyone else is saying “Who is that guy? Jesus Christ!”
HARMONTOWN Jan. 31, 8pm, sold out Punch Line Comedy Club 444 Battery, SF www.sfsketchfest.com
Schedules are for Wed/16-Tue/22 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.
ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $5-10. "The Best of Periwinkle Cinema 2012: The Year in Review," Wed, 8. "OpenScreening," Thu, 8. For participation info, contact programming@atasite.org. Heritage (Giordano), plus shorts, Fri, 8. "A Benefit for Jay Korber," with films and live performances, Sat, 8.
BALBOA 3630 Balboa, SF; cinemasf.com/balboa. $7.50-10. Let Fury Have the Hour (D’Ambrosio, 2012), Jan 18-24, 3, 5, 7:15 (also Fri-Sat, 9:40).
CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Holy Motors (Carax, 2012), Wed, 2:30, 7, and Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999), Wed-Thu, 4:45, 9:10. •Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), Thu, 7, and Drive (Winding Refn, 2011), Thu, 9:10. •Thunderbirds Are Go (Lane, 1966), Fri, 7, and Team America: World Police (Parker, 2004), Fri, 8:50. Django (Corbucci, 1966), Fri, 11. "Pam Ann: Cockpit Live," Sat, 7:30. Tickets ($30-45) at www.biggaycomedy.com. •Tess (Polanski, 1979), Sun, 5, and Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), Sun, 2:30, 8:15. •Wattstax (Stuart, 1973), Mon, 3, 7, and Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap (Ice-T and Baybutt, 2012), Mon, 4:55, 8:55. •Chasing Mavericks (Hanson and Apted, 2012), Tue, 7, and Bones Brigade (Peralta, 2012), Tue, 9:15.
CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. My Worst Nightmare (Fontaine, 2012), call for dates and times. "For Your Consideration: A Selection of Oscar Submissions from Around the World:" Clandestine Childhood (Ávila, 2011), Wed, 6:30; Thu, 8:15; The Deep (Kormákur, 2012), Wed, 8:30; Kauwboy (Koole, 2012), Thu, 6:30. Amour (Haneke, 2012), Jan 18-24, call for times. The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar and Delesvaux, 2011), Jan 18-24, call for times.
FIRST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH Nine Ross Valley, San Rafael; www.mitfamericas.org. $10-20. •Precious Knowledge (Palos, 2011), Sat, 5:15; Sin Pais (Rigby, 2010), Sat, 7; and Which Way Home (Cammisa, 2009), Sat, 8.
MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; www.milibrary.org. $10. "Cinemalit: New Years Revolution Redux 3:" V for Vendetta (McTeigue, 2006), Fri, 6.
NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $6. "Documentary Film Series:" Chasing Ice (Orlowski, 2012), Tue, 7.
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Alfred Hitchcock: The Shape of Suspense:" Rebecca (1940), Wed, 7; Young and Innocent (1937), Fri, 7; The Lady Vanishes (1938), Fri, 8:40. "The Hills Run Red: Italian Westerns, Leone, and Beyond:" A Bullet for the General (Damiani, 1966), Thu, 7; China 9, Liberty 37 (Hellman, 1978), Sat, 8:45. "Werner Schroeter: Magnificent Obsessions:" The Death of Maria Malibran (1972), Sat, 6:30; Willow Springs (1973), Tue, 7.
ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Only the Young (Mims and Tippet, 2012), Wed-Thu, call for times. The Law in These Parts (Alexandrowicz, 2012), Jan 18-24, call for times.
VOGUE 3290 Sacramento, SF; www.mostlybritish.org. $12.50-35 (festival pass, $99). Mostly British Film Festival, new and classic films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa, Jan 17-24.
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. Hellbound? (Miller, 2012), Thu-Sat, 7:30 (also Sat, 4); Sun, 2 and 4. Director in person at Thu/17 screenings.
Musicians often look to roots for inspiration, but I don’t think any have interacted as deeply with their musical ancestors as those in the freak-folk genre. Animal Collective recorded a companion piece to Sung Tongs with Vashti Bunyan, inspiring her cult revival, and, in similar fashion, Devendra Banhart’s label has been releasing Michael Hurley’s wonderfully weird folk, endorsed by Julian Lynch, Cat Power and more. His simple guitar plucking and vocals feel different from his contemporaries; he’s more intent on creating imaginative, often nonsensical, stories than being a folk artist. The show will connect past and present, he says, as a new experience for the nightlife crowd rather than for those anthropologically interested in “the sociological impact of Doc Snock” (his ’70s pseudonym). (Molly Champlin)
Steadily building a following since forming 10 years back in Duluth, Minn., bluegrass rockers Trampled By Turtles kicked off a banner year in 2012 by releasing their newest album, Stars and Satellites (BanjoDad Records) last April, and making their first national television appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. In August, they were one of the standout acts at Outside Lands, packing in the Sutro side stage with their infectious brand of Americana and folk-tinged tunes. Newly minted fans from that gig are in for a special treat at tonight’s headlining show at the Fillmore: a chance to see them up close and personal, and with a much-deserved longer set time. (Sean McCourt)
From the blue vinyl and neon-lit window piece you might have seen at the Yerba Buena Center, to the most-wanted terrorists poster recreated with beads at Intersection for the Arts, it’s clear that Taraneh Hemami’s output chooses its own medium. Originally from Iran, her work looks at the relationship between Persian and American cultures, particularly in terms of personal freedom. Her work is humble and precise, yet manages to convey a deep message — creating much needed space for conversations on international relations and race. Her latest show, “Resistance,” (opening at the Mission School hot spot, the Luggage Store Gallery) features banned and censored print matter belonging to the Iranian Students Association of Northern California and should be a rich, informative experience. (Champlin)
Even if you know the artists, when you catch them at one of the Garage’s RAW (resident artist workshops) performances, they will surprise you, because what you see is “in progress”, i.e. an unfinished product. The choreographers want feedback; the audience can enter into the process. It’s fun and a good deal for both. This week two very different dance makers are pairing up. What they have in common is a fascination with the power of the female body. Bianca Mendoza, sensually theatrical in her athleticism, has spent a major part of her career in Los Angeles. Malinda LaVelle — with a ballet background — started her Project Thrust at the SF Conservatory of Dance, but the company has been ready for a while to step into the wider Bay Area limelight. (Rita Felciano)
“Coke! Meth! And Cheap Beer!” are the cries of the Los Angeles-based garage rock band that manages to stay catchy and offensive at the same time. The band’s skater phrase name stands for, “Fuck it Dog; Life’s a Risk” and sums up their deep life philosophy of not giving a fuck. Yes, theses musicians like drugs, girls, and Mexican food; and what, everyone in the band has a hip-hop side project? Between its personality, experimentation, and serious talent, it’s clear why the band has gotten the attention and love it has — and not just in its Southern California home. Its sweaty, drunk, and high-speed traveling punk show should feel right at home in San Francisco, where the band will be stopping Friday, touring on its new and (and hotly anticipated) self-titled EP. (Champlin)
Springing to life just down the coast in Santa Cruz, Moon Eater has quickly made a name for itself with hard-charging, incendiary garage and punk-fueled rock’n’roll. Formed in 2011 by longtime veterans of the South Bay rock scene — members have played in bands including Riff Raff, Yaphet Kotto, and Time Spent Driving — the frenetic four-piece self-released its excellent self-titled debut album last November, which was produced by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt and Hot Snakes fame. Moon Eater comes to the city tonight to play a benefit for the American Red Cross and the Equilibrium Institute, alongside Edge City Ruins, Leviathan, and more. (McCourt)
Some things never go out of style. Blue jeans, hamburgers, a good, thoughtful ballad — you know, the stuff America’s made of. San Diego’s Pinback has made itself into an indie rock staple by consistently and quietly churning out solid, un-tarnishable pop songs for several decades now, and managing to remain charmingly under the radar all the while. Seemingly impervious to cultural peaks and valleys as well as a revolving-door lineup, Rob Crow and Zach Smith have been tightening their songwriting and musicianship since the late ’90s. Their fifth studio album, Information Retrieved, is the worthwhile result, an ode to the fundamentals: earnest lyrics, consistent flow, and a good hook. (Haley Zaremba)
Despite being named for an enclave in Hong Kong, Kowloon Walled City is San Francisco through and through. The local inspiration behind albums such as Turk Street and Gambling On The Richter Scale is obvious. With new offering Container Ships, the allusion is more oblique, but if you listen to the band’s inimitable down-tuned guitars, they evoke the album’s title, groaning and churning like a 40,000-ton behemoth on its way into the Port of Oakland. This week, the noisy, sludgy outfit disembarks for a record release show. (Ben Richardson)
Do any two words go together better than “midnight” and “movie”? Once the strict territory of cult horror, the phrase now encompasses any great film that’s made even better by late-night viewing — and made even even better by sharing the experience with a theater full of like-minded, similarly-caffeinated fans. The Clay kicked off another round of midnight screenings a few weeks back, but there are still plenty of gems on the schedule. Tonight is The Princess Bride (1989); future dates include multiple showings of 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (with live performance by the Bawdy Caste) and 2003’s The Room (bring spoons!); 1968’s Night of the Living Dead; 1971’s Harold and Maude; and 2007’s Black Devil Doll. No sleep for you! (Cheryl Eddy)
Fri.-Sat. (some films Fri. or Sat. only), midnight, $9–$10
Brothers of Brutality Tour feat. Whitechapel and Emmure
Death metalheads’ wildest wet dreams are about to come true as hardcore heavyweights Whitechapel and Emmure team up to melt faces in this extreme tour de brutality. Whitechapel’s Knoxville-flavored, highly focused intensity (the band’s Facebook page lists their only interest as “being heavy”) will be matched up against the hardened ruthlessness of Queens-bred Emmure’s unrelenting sonic assault to create a metal experience that is certain to give you whiplash. Both bands have extremely dedicated fan bases that promise to make this the hardcore event of the year. Even if you have to drag out your old hockey pads to face the pit, you won’t want to miss it. (Zaremba)
As a much-beloved rock crusader of the ’90s post-hardcore movement, Quicksand was sorely missed when internal tensions caused the tragically short-lived band to dissolve in 1999. When the group reunited for a one-off show in 2012, it re-ignited a post-hardcore spark in a very arid musical landscape. In a world saturated with dubstep breakdowns, Bieber-related headlines, and certain reprehensible, abusive R&B stars that just won’t go away no matter how baffling their cultural stronghold becomes, the people cried out for something — anything! — harder, better, faster, and stronger. Quicksand, despite its age and lengthy hiatus, delivered. Its awesome, razor-edged sound (think Fugazi meets Jane’s Addiction) provided a much needed honesty, angst, and edge in an EDM world. (Zaremba)
Every Tuesday, the New Parkway Theater is serving up true stories alongside its regular menu of pizza, burgers, and beer. Tonight’s pick, last year’s Chasing Ice, investigates climate change via the stunning, grimly revealing work of glacier photographer James Balog. Upcoming notables from 2012 also include Brooklyn Castle, about a junior high school chess team, and Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five, a sobering look at a famous New York City rape case and the men who were wrongfully convicted of the crime. Titles are still being added to this promising series, so check out the New Parkway’s website for updates. (Eddy)
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The Easy Leaves formed north of the Golden Gate in 2008 when songwriters Kevin Carducci and Sage Fifield combined influences and distilled their first batch of original material. With both immersed in the diverse sounds of flailing rockers, gospel skeptics, and country outlaws – the resulting collaboration meanders from grassland stomps into personal spirituals, from minor swings to honky-tonk grinds, and conveys subtle grooves reminiscent of the golden age of R&B. They’ve crafted a versatile sound that never wanders too far from it’s roots, while continually sprawling out in new directions.
With Tiny Television and Misisipi Mike. For more info and to purchase tickets, follow this link.
To win a pair of tickets, email your full name to sfbgpromos@sfbg.com. Winners will be notified on Thur/3 while supplies last.
Friday, January 4 at 9pm @ Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF | $15