Theater

Club kids make good

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… club sandwiches. BUT formerly local club kids Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman — aka KIKI and HERB — have really made good. They’re currently alive on Broadway at the (dear lord) Helen Hayes Theatre in “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” and they’re garnering effusive raves, like this one in today’s NYTimes.

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Way back when I was but a wee thing doing loads of drugs in the light booth at Josie’s Cabaret & Juice Joint, I totally used to groove to them, back when they were locals (they’re bigtime newyawkaws now) — and back when their combo of post-kitsch musical cabaret mentality and slyly sincere emotional buffeting was totally radical. Turns out it still is, as anyone who went to K&H’s New Year’s Eve show this year at Herbst Theater can attest. Go Justin! Go Kenny! See? Club Trash can be artistically relevant. Just like maybe murdered beauty pageant tots. Now all we need is a Jason Mecier retrospective at the Smithsonian and Ggreg Taylor on Oprah.

THURSDAY

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Aug. 17

Performance

SUPER VISION

Between birth and death certificates, our multiple data bodies circulate in a made-up universe called the datasphere, where they are both rigorously and haphazardly constructed, mined, and manipulated beyond the full awareness, let alone control, of the old physical bodies left behind. Not science fiction, of course, just the mundane information age. This weekend its ominous dimensions find sensory expression on a grand scale in SUPER VISION, a multimedia performance by New York experimental theater group the Builders Association in collaboration with high-tech design firm dbox. SUPER VISION is a tale (three actually) of the bit-based shackles made from proliferating consumer “choices” and technological possibilities. (Robert Avila)

Through Sat/19
8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
700 Howard, SF
$23-$30
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Theater

True West

Sibling rivalry is a bitch. Being the oldest of five brothers and sisters, I grew up in a semidaft household where the walls buckled with teenage angst and bratty pretensions. I can certainly sympathize with the vendetta the two brothers of Sam Shepard’s True West have against each other. Directed by Gabrielle Gomez, True West depicts the story of Austin – a conservative man with a peaceful life, caring for his mother’s house in Arizona – and his squandering brother, Lee, who unexpectedly visits him. True West marks the debut of the passionate and young Panhandler’s Theater company and features a performance by alt-country musician Jeffery Luck Lucas. (Chris Sabbath)

Through Aug. 26
8 p.m.
Artaud Gallery Theater
450 Florida, SF
$20
(415) 626-1021
www.artaud.org/theater

Joan of archaeology

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HAIRY SITUATION “Trog has a beautiful Victorian,” Matthew Martin says after giving me the address of the house where he and his castmates are rehearsing their upcoming stage production. A day later I arrive at said residence and am ushered through the front door, where cast members from Trog! — including Martin and Trog himself, Mike Finn — greet me after descending a staircase in a dramatic manner.
Joan Crawford might approve.
Not that Crawford’s approval is a viable method of judging the success of Trog!, which parodies her truly absurd final big-screen effort, a 1970 supposed horror movie that Martin brilliantly describes as “an attempt to meld Planet of the Apes and The Miracle Worker.” I first saw Trog while eating a potent batch of hash-tinged popcorn, and that psychedelic effect seems to have carried over to this theatrical version, which incorporates video projections, Finn’s circus skills, Martin’s library of movie scores, and aspects of Crawford’s life into the story of anthropologist Dr. Brockton (Crawford in the movie, Martin-as-Crawford-playing-the-scientist in the play) and the sweet troglodyte she loves and protects from a hostile, misunderstanding public.
After passing a banquet room stocked with candy bars and carbonated beverages, Martin, producer Steve Murray, and I gather around a table on the back porch to discuss Trog! “I was going to go for more of an authentic, orange-haired, Joan-in-Trog look,” says Martin. “But I thought, I’m going to seem more like Susan Hayward or the Joker than people’s iconic image of Joan.”
Martin has played Ann Miller, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and personal fave Bette Davis as both Baby Jane (in the early-’90s hit Whatever Happened to BB Jane?) and Charlotte Hollis (in last year’s Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte), but this is his first time taking on a Crawford role. You might say now he knows how Joan of Hollywood felt. “It’s another one for the gun belt,” he says with a laugh, lighting up a cigarette and observing that Crawford’s good manners were so extreme that she would “write a thank-you note to someone’s thank-you note.”
A native San Franciscan who once embodied both Addison DeWitt and Eve Harrington in the same high school speech class performance, Martin counts Charles Pierce among his early influences. “I was mesmerized by how [Pierce] could control an audience,” he says. But he also takes pains to distinguish his acting approach and experience from drag cliché — for one thing, one of his best stage roles to date was Oscar Levant in Theatre Rhinoceros’s recent production of Schönberg; for another, he concentrates on overall character rather than gender when playing a part.
Trog! allows Martin to celebrate “unadulterated ham-ola,” which his producer Murray feels is absent from most gay theater, which is obsessed with being serious or fixated on naked boys. Though Trog!’s sense of parody extends beyond the source material, it doesn’t miss the movie’s most ludicrous moments, from Crawford’s repeated requests for a “hypo gun” down to her character’s strange (perhaps drunken) reference to the “savage breast” and off-kilter pronunciation of the g in the name Trog. “I’ve rehearsed Neil Simon plays to an empty theater and worried, ‘Is this funny at all?’” says Martin. “But if nobody laughs at this, at least we’ve been entertained by our own high jinks. A lot of this show is wah-wah burlesque, very vaudeville, with physical comedy. Mike [Finn] is a trained circus performer — how many Trogs do you know that can juggle and ride a unicycle?”
Martin knows one, it soon becomes apparent, when he, Finn, and the rest of Trog!’s cast (minus a busy Heklina) run through a performance, complete with copious examples of the “fourth-wall breakage” that Martin adores. Anytime the script refers to the press or a reporter, Martin directs his gaze at me, and in one scene, I’m dragged onstage to play the role of a doctor who incites Trog’s wrath by stroking his chest under the guise of looking for a heartbeat.
If the rehearsal is anything to go by, besides Michael Sousa’s pinched-nose performance as a snotty villain, many of Trog!’s funniest moments come from the considerable chemistry between Martin and Finn — or rather, between Crawford and beast. At the end of the interview, I ask Finn what it’s like to play the role of Trog. “It’s familiar,” he says. Then he gets straight to the point. “I’m a hairy man.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
TROG!
Through Sept. 23
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
Theatre Rhinoceros
2926 16th St., SF
(415) 861-5079
www.therhino.org

Confessions of a Gofessional

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Things move fast in rap. By the time their second album, World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch), dropped in April, the Team already had a new single, the “Hyphy Juice” remix, which now rivals “It’s Getting Hot” as their biggest radio hit. Since then, Moedoe label head K.O.A.B. has inked a deal for Hyphy Juice, the energy drink he co-owns with the group, to be sold at 7-11 stores nationwide, while Team member Clyde Carson just signed as a solo act to Capitol Records. Carson’s ambitious project, Theater Music — consisting of one multisong, album-length track à la Prince’s Lovesexy (Warner, 1988) — will appear next year, cobranded by Moedoe as well as the Game’s Black Wall Street.
Yet my appearance at the Team’s condo concerns none of these matters. Instead, I’ve been summoned by Kaz Kyzah to discuss The Gofessional, his new mixtape with KMEL managing director DJ Big Von Johnson. Consisting of 19 tracks of mostly original material, The Gofessional is part of a growing trend in the Bay Area mix scene — like Husalah and Jacka’s Animal Planet and Beeda Weeda’s Homework — of blurring the distinction between the carefully crafted album and the “anything goes” approach of mixtapes. What makes The Gofessional unique, however, is its method of distribution: it’s available for free at bigvon.com.
In the first week alone, the mixtape was downloaded 7,000 times on the strength of two singles currently spinning on KMEL: “Cocaine,” a soulful love-as-addiction metaphor over a 9th Wonder beat, and the LT-produced original “Love” (featuring Jimmie Reign), an R&B-infused investigation of more serious subjects often neglected by the Bay’s current “go dumb” ethos.
STALLED PREMIERE?
Before beginning, however, Kaz clears up the lingering mystery around World Premiere’s release, not, as anticipated, through major label Universal but rather through independent powerhouse Koch.
“We were on a label of a Mexican artist, Lil Rob, and it wasn’t the place for us,” Kaz says, referring to the Universal-distributed Upstairs imprint, which caters primarily to Latino rap. “When we got over there, it wasn’t what we wanted. But it worked out where we could use it to get the album done and move on. We didn’t have to pay any bread. We actually came out winning.”
“At the same time, I was going through legal trouble,” he continues, describing continuing fallout from a robbery charge he caught at age 18. “I was worried about going to jail and house arrest. I did end up spending a couple of months in jail, so it was a real hectic time.”
While the delays of label jumping and legal woes may have muted World Premiere’s impact, the period of house arrest last year proved productive for Kaz, who with West Oakland rapper J-Stalin and East Oakland producers Tha Mekanix formed a side group called the Go Boyz and recorded an album at the condo. These late-night sessions featuring an ankle-braceleted Kaz were the genesis of the current Go Movement, which already constitutes a third front in the Bay’s hyphy and thizz campaigns.
“What I want people to understand about the Go Movement,” the Hyphy Juice shareholder stresses, “is it’s not not about getting hyphy, going dumb. But it encompasses a whole lot more and that’s what makes it so powerful. Like when I talk to Dotrix [of Tha Mekanix], we’ll use go 1,500 times and have an in-depth conversation.
“It was Dot who said, ‘You the Gofessional, man.’ And that was one of my favorite movies, The Professional, so I used it for my mixtape. I didn’t want to come out with the Go Boyz, and nobody know what Go is all about. I was talking to some people from Marin, they never even heard of the Go Movement. To us it’s old, but a lot of people are still catching on.”
GOING FOR THE STREETS
The free download format of The Gofessional is proving to be an effective means of spreading the word. (Another 5,000 hard copies have already been distributed for the benefit of those not online, and more are on the way.) For Johnson, who apart from Kaz is the author of this largess, the free mixtape is designed to boost record sales as well as keep the Bay’s current buzz alive.
“I got 7,000 downloads in a week, when I know artists who put out records that took seven months to reach that in sales,” Johnson says later that day at KMEL. “There are a lot of big artists, a lot of songs on the radio, but sales aren’t adding up. So I feel like, give some away. Instead of trying to break a song, I’m trying to break an artist in the streets. I definitely think this will stimulate album sales.”
It’s refreshing to hear such a statement these days, when the “free download” has been blamed for bringing the recording industry to its knees. To me, Johnson’s logic is irrefutable; I’m more likely to check out something for free than for $15, and I’m way more likely to buy a $15 album from someone whose previous work I have and like. As The Gofessional is easily better than dozens of albums I’ve actually purchased, the odds of me buying an eventual Kaz Kyzah solo album are extremely high. Given the current excitement in Bay rap and Carson’s deal with Capitol, the interest in Kaz’s mixtape hasn’t failed to attract the attention of majors as well.
“I got a lot of labels looking at me,” Kaz confesses. “I ain’t put out an album. They’re checking for me off of mixtapes, which is weird, but it’s a beautiful thing. People be, like, this is hotter than people’s albums. But I’m a perfectionist, so doing a solo album is going to take a minute, really sitting down and figuring out what I want to do with it. And not being too quick to jump on the wrong deal.” SFBG

EDITOR’S NOTES

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› lynn@sfbg.com
There was no better place than the Castro Theatre to watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which kicked off the 70mm Series on Aug. 11. (Future delights in store: South Pacific and Tron!) The timing wasn’t bad either: among the film’s many viscerally unsettling images (see: bludgeoned animals; HAL’s omnipresent glowing red eye; an astronaut jerkily struggling for oxygen, then floating off into deep space), one in particular for me managed to mainline a vein of depression and fear concerning where world events — and US foreign policy — are taking us, ceasefire notwithstanding. That would be the moment (melodramatic, yes, but provoking dead silence in the theater) when ape-man moves beyond territorial posturing and realizes that he has the technology to bring home dinner and brutally slaughter his neighbors.
On a less dismal note, go check out our blogs — www.sfbg.com has spawned a whopping five of them in the wake of our Web site redesign, and we’re quite enjoying our adventures in 21st-century-style online media. We’re a little creeped out to find ourselves in the company of late bloomer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, we learned at press time, just posted his first entry on his own blog (a punishing 2,000-plus words in English). But we feel good about the fact that we got the jump on the Iranian president by at least a month or so.
Ahmadinejad’s first post is packed with autobiographical tidbits and railings against, yes, US foreign policy — much like our own content! But we’ve also got Kimberly Chun’s report and pics from the Bleeding Edge Festival on our music blog, Noise. In Pixel Vision you’ll find Cheryl Eddy’s musings on the fact that, per court order, Ted Kaczynski’s copy of The Elements of Style will soon be on the auction block — plus the extended mix of Eddy’s interview with Snakes on a Plane snake handler Jules Sylvester. And in the Bruce Blog, you’ll learn what happens when a national glossy business mag has the unmitigated temerity to refer to Guardian headquarters as “grungy” in the lead paragraph of its cover story. Read all about it in “Why People Get Mad at the Media,” parts one through six. SFBG

SUNDAY

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Aug. 13

Music

David Grisman Bluegrass Experience

David “Dawg” Grisman’s long and storied career as a proponent of nonelectric music and grand master of the mandolin has brought him in contact with the best of bluegrass, jazz, and rock. Although Dawg is best known for his work with Jerry Garcia in their mid-’70s acoustic band, Old and in the Way, Grisman’s influence is much farther reaching. Including Darol Anger and Mike Marshall, the Dave Grisman Quintet founded the style known as Newgrass or New Acoustic, which melds bluegrass, classical, jazz, and other world styles and is rooted in superb instrumental skill and genre-bending songwriting. (Joseph DeFranceschi)

8 p.m.
Roda Theater
2015 Addison, Berk.
$29.50
(510) 548-1761
www.thefreight.org

Film

Rough Cut Film Festival

Since its inception in 2003 the festival has provided film folk with an incredible opportunity for market research and audiences with the chance to get involved, laugh aloud, and appease their inner film critics in a constructive, social way. After the festival, grab something to eat and return for the Dark Room’s now infamous Bad Movie Night and Cool as Ice – the biopic about Robert Van Winkle’s rise to fame as Vanilla Ice. (K. Tighe)

Rough Cut Film Festival
5 p.m.
$3-$5

Bad Movie Night
8 p.m.
$5 (free popcorn)
Dark Room
2263 Mission, SF
(415) 401-7987
www.darkroomsf.com

THURSDAY

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Aug. 10

Music

Ryoji Ikeda

Earlier this year Ryoji Ikeda released Dataplex (Raster-Norton), a CD composed of computer malfunction sounds that includes a final track designed to mess up CD players and stereos without causing permanent damage. The surprising thing about Dataplex is how beautiful its seemingly random melody formations can sound. That’s just one reason why Ikeda’s SF unveiling of “datamatics [ver.1.0b]” – a surround sound concert in which ultrasonics are paired with multidimensional images – promises to be a hard-driving adventure into unseen and unheard-of vistas. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7 and 10:30 p.m.
Recombinant Media Labs
Call for location
$15
(650) 255-8467
www.recombinantmedia.net
www.ryojiikeda.com

Theater

Release the Kraken

Fans of over-the-top, no-quarter-granted, no-pun-left-unspoken Thunderbird Theatre Company also know that these parody-loving jokesmiths organize but one full-length show a year. Happily, it’s that time of year again! After sending up noir fiction with The Collected Works of Frank Cullen; The Magnificent Seven with a battle between evil Quakers and masked Mexican wrestlers; and our undeniable obsession with pirates in Lusty Booty, Thunderbird proudly presents Release the Kraken, a retelling of the Perseus myth … set in a strip mall. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Through August 26
8 p.m.
New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom, SF
$17-$20
(415) 289-6766
www.thunderbirdtheatre.com

Mood elevation

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Among proper names that suggest height or loftiness, few have a grander pedigree than Ararat, the moniker of the mountain or mountain range where, according to the book of Genesis, Noah’s ark was supposed to have made landfall after riding out the flood. Today’s Mount Ararat, a volcano rising nearly 17,000 feet above sea level, lies in northeastern Turkey, near that country’s borders with Iran and Armenia. Perhaps Noah and his menagerie washed up there, perhaps not; biblical scholars seem to love a good controversy, and various contrarian speculations bring the ark to ground on this or that mountaintop in Iran.
Whatever. While we wait for intrepid researchers to sort it all out with their satellite photos and expeditions and deconstructions of scripture, we can enjoy ourselves at Ararat, a Mediterranean tapas place opened by Koch Salgut in March at a Castro location not quite 17,000 feet above sea level but far enough above the street — 18th Street, if it matters, and for the people watchers among us it does — to provide a definite aerie experience. For a number of years the space housed North Beach expatriate la Mooné, and while that restaurant didn’t set any longevity records in the Castro, it did survive long enough in its comfy second-story digs to suggest that lack of a street-level presence isn’t necessarily fatal — not, at least, in a location with as much foot traffic as you find at 18th Street and Castro. Look for the sidewalk placard and the broad white staircase in need of a paint job and you are there, in a dining room the shape of a fat L with a groined ceiling and surveillance-friendly windows.
The chef, Caskun Bektas, has cooked in Istanbul, so there is a definite Turkish-metropolitan spin to the food. He turns out some dishes you aren’t likely to come across anywhere else, but even the more usual “Mediterranean” stuff confirms the sharp rise in Castro cooking standards in recent years. Despite the many distractions of the neighborhood’s street theater, people expect better food and know what to look for — and at Ararat, they are getting it.
Oddly, the one item on the menu we weren’t enthusiastic about is the first one listed and bears a distinctively Turkish name. It is ezme ($7), a mushy blend of barbecued eggplant, tomatoes, lemon juice, garlic, and roasted red bell peppers. We found it to be a little bitter, which is hardly an unfamiliar issue when dealing with eggplant.
But … the rest of the tapas (“mezes” is the authentic term) ranged from good to superb. (You can get a mixed platterful with warm pita triangles for $13; individually, they are all in the $5 to $7 range.) Falafel, tabbouleh, dolma, and hummus were all as expected, while the savory pastries — flutes of whole-wheat filo dough filled with feta cheese and herbs and crisped in oil — were like something from a Pepperidge Farm package and seemed to expand the field of possibilities for a cuisine that has come to occupy a spot in this country much like the one Mexican food held a generation ago. Restaurants serving the foods of the eastern Mediterranean have proliferated in recent years, and more and more people like the food and are comfortable ordering it, at least if they stay within the well-lit bounds of the familiar: dolma, shawarma, and falafel, nothing weird or unpronounceable, please.
Speaking of which: I have never had a preparation quite like Bektas’s signature dish, beyti kebab ($16). I have eaten and loved kebabs of various kinds, of course, and I like lavash (the Syrian flatbread), so I expected I would like “lavash rolls filled with delicate ground sirloin served with garlic flavored yogurt and marinara.” And I did. But I did not expect the beauty of the form. The lavash had been rolled around the meat like a wrapper — the meat wasn’t ground, incidentally, but it was surpassingly tender: filet mignon? — and then the package had been cut into thin coins that fanned out nicely on the plate. It was a little like a miniature beef Wellington, with yogurt instead of mushroom sauce.
The kitchen’s other savory showstopper is a shrimp casserole ($8), a crock of prawns swimming in a thick tomato sauce with bits of green bell pepper, caramelized onions, and mushrooms under a cap of melted mozzarella. This dish seemed more Provençal than Turkish, but it disappeared so fast it was hard to be sure. Running respectable races in the same heat were kakavia ($10), a stew of salmon, clams, mussels, shrimp, and scallops in a watery pepper-paprika broth, and kalamarika ($8), batter-fried calamari accompanied by batter-fried slices of lemon and potato, which were hard to tell apart without biting into them.
Also respectable, if not quite memorable, were a braised lamb shank ($18) served with couscous and an herbed tomato-Chianti sauce and mercimek kofte ($6), a hummus relative with red lentils substituted for chickpeas. Weaker — in fact disappointing — was the Ararat salad, a fey compilation of mixed greens, dried apricots, and walnuts, with a crotton of fried goat cheese on top. The promised balsamic vinaigrette was undetectable. Were we being set up for dessert?
If so, we must be grateful, for the dessert menu too includes a sublime dish: the nightingale’s nest ($5), a coil of baklava filled with lavender honey and finished with whipped cream and scatterings of crushed pistachios. Baklava so often flirts with being a cliché, like flan, but in imaginative and conscientious hands it can sing a lovely song, an ethereal melody from on high. SFBG
ARARAT
Dinner: Mon.–Fri., 4–11 p.m.
Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
4072 18th St., SF
(415) 252-9325
www.ararat-tapas.com
Full bar
Somewhat noisy
AE/MC/V
Not wheelchair accessible

Mary, Mary, quite contrary – and often brilliant

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The one and only Mary Woronov is a novelist, a memoirist, and the kind of movie star who is too sexy, too campy, and much too smart for contemporary Hollywood (Rob Zombie excepted).

Woronov is coming to town this weekend for Midnight Mass and a screening of the great, underrated Death Race 2000. I recently spoke with her, and she had sharp and funny things to say about loving Playhouse of the Ridiculous, hating Warhol, loving and hating Picasso, despising the Bush era, and channeling Joan Crawford.

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Guardian: Were the other Warhol superstars afraid of you and Ondine?
Mary Woronov: People were very intimidated by Ondine. People were mystified by me, not intimidated. For one thing, I didn’t have sex. For another, I acted like a guy, merely as a counterbalance to the transvestites and the female energy that was there. I was not one of the girls who wanted to be a star, I was a really good actress. I did theater and I ‘got’ the theater world, so I was different from the desperation of the other girls who thought Warhol was somehow going to make them a star. That’s what he was selling, fame for 24 hours. That was not my plan, and I never got hooked.

Whew! What a Best of Party last night!

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What a splendid Best of Party last night at Club Six down in the inner Mission in San Francisco. Almost all of this year’s Best of winners were there, more than 300 of them, to pick up their Best of certificate, and to pose in a group photo that will stand as one of the year’s most eclectic gatherings in San Francisco and certainly the Best San Francisco photograph of 2006. (We will publish the photo in next week’s Guardian).

There was Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry from the Rock Bottom Remainders, Chris Middlestadt of the Fruit Guys, the best beer-soaked bingo brigade, local heroes Tony Kelly of thick Description Theater, Barry Hermanson and the Greenaction Gang of closing-down-the-Hunters-Point-power-plant fame, (Marie Harrison and Bradley Angel), the best drag queen who plays the accordion, Breda Courtney of the Best Bloomin’ Thespians, Robin and Joe Talmadge and Cinder Ernst from World Gym, the Primitive Screwheads (best goofy gore), Press Secretary Peter Ragone and other reps from the mayor’s office (yes, Mayor Gavin Newsom did win an award, the best mayor we love to hate), best neighborhood newspaper publisher (Ruth Passen of the Potrero View), and scores more of the city’s best and brightest and most diverse.

The Keeping it Real with Will and Willie gang were there from the Quake (Comedian Will Durst, Ex-Mayor Willie Brown, producer Paul Wells) to accept their award as the “Best Herb Caen column on the radio.”
They exemplified the spirit of Caen by being “visible” at the party (a key Caen quality in his man about town role at the old Chronicle) and by talking genially to everyone who came in range in the massed crowd, including some who have tilted politically with Willie through the years. Caen had to do that, whether he liked it or not, because he was a target and a celebrity wherever he went. One key difference is that Will and Willie, out on the town regularly, can comment and do their reviews the next morning. Caen’s nocturnal adventures were always in his column a day later in the morning Chronicle. Caen also had l,000 word columns. Will and Willie have three hours every week day morning, from 7 to l0 a.m. in prime time, and can handle lots of live interviews in the studio or on the phone. Most important, Caen could only hint at his political proclivities, but Will and Willie announce they are Democrats and go after Bush and the war and local sacred cows with great glee.

This morning, Will and Willie led off their show on 960 the Quake with a report on the event, which they obviously enjoyed. My journalistic point: There will most likely never be another Herb Caen in San Francisco, or probably on any other daily paper, because he was a creature of another era, the hell-for-leather competitive newspaper wars in San Francisco, which were some of the most colorful in the country. Once the old Hearst Examiner and the old Chronicle formed a JOA in l965, they had no more real use for Caen but the Chronicle kept him on because of his ability and reputation. The Chronicle family owners were always nervous and often agitated about Caen and his enormous influence but they really couldn’t do much about him. Now, with the new Hearst Chronicle as the dominant daily here, with the coming of Singletonland in the Bay Area, no publisher has any use for a powerful independent talent such as Caen, particularly a strong union voice. Al’as.

The Caen formula lives

Will and Willie demonstrated the point again in this morning’s show with a snapshot of Caen’s San Francisco with a nostalgic interview of Mort Sahl, who Caen helped make a celebrated fixture at Enrique Banducci’s Hungry I. They were making the most of the fact that Sahl was reemerging in San Francisco and opening tonight at the Empire Plush Room (Willie said he would in the front row). And Sahl responded with some good political jokes: The Democrats are proving they can defeat Democats, he said of the Lieberman race. But can they defeat Republicans? Jerry Brown is putting Oakland “up for adoption.” On the Mel Gibson incident, Sahl said there was talk in Hollywood that he would now be boycotted. But Sahl quoted Jack Warner of Warner Brothers about an earlier star: “He’ll never work in this town again– until we need him.” And Sahl mused at one point, “Just how many wars are we fighting today.”

Sahl also had some news. Banducci was alive and well in Hayward, sharp as ever. Sahl lived in San Francisco and Sausalito for many years and is now living in LA and working regularly. The I in Hungri I stood for Intellectual. ON and on, making the point on the show that Sahl is back. Hurray!

Back on the monopoly journalism front

Just in: story from the Mercury News by Pete Carey with the arresting head: “Area’s new media king is having fun, industry leader started with one small paper at age 20.”

He quoted Singleton as telling a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Seattle in April, on a podium he shared with McClatchy’s Gary Pruitt,
“We do a lot of things because they’re fun.” Impertinent questions: who else is having fun as Singletonland comes to town? Is there no way that any of the reporters covering Singleton on any of his papers can utter a discouraging or realistic word about his form of discount journalism, or find someone who can do? (Carey, incidentally, a veteran reporter, has done the best job of covering the sale of Knight-Ridder and subsequent developments).

The newspaper unions have been quiet and have not even commented on what happened to their offer to buy the Merc and the other McClatchy castoffs. And the few statements they have issued took the line of the Hearst unions in San Francisco in dealing with its monopolizing issues: lay low and wait till negotiations on the next contract (when, from my point of view, it may be too late.) The Merc employees are working without union contracts. The crunch will come when Singleton starts “consolidating” and making the deep cuts in production and newsrooms and quality that he must do, sooner or later, probably sooner, with his mountains of debt, his unmanageable forest of papers and presses, and his “lean Dean” cost-cutting modus operandi. Stay tuned. B3

FRIDAY

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Aug 4

Music

Bloc Party

As the audio-spiritual godchildren of the Clash and Fun Boy Three, Bloc Party are riding the whole post-punk revival thing hard, and, despite having only one heavenly angst-ridden album to their credit (Silent Alarm, Vice Records), their constant touring schedule and rabid online fanbase might ensure that they outlast the ebbing wave of post-post-punk darlings. Performing with the Canadian ABBA of emo, Broken Social Scene (and emotive upstarts Mew) at the Greek Theater, the Blocs should deliver a solid set of jangling pangs. (Marke B.)

Also with Two Gallants
6:30 p.m.
Greek Theater
Gayley and Stadium Rim, Berk.
$35-$125
(415) 421-TIXS
www.ticketmaster.com

Dance

“3 Drops of Blood”

With installment X, Nanos Operetta concludes its eclectic “3 Drops of Blood” series. While the music ensemble’s cabaret format has included many artistic medias – from spoken word to film – it has been particularly welcoming to Bay Area dance. In addition to bringing their work outside the regular dance circuit, Nanos provided dancers with a home away from home and the opportunity to collide with brilliant composers and performers in other genres. So it’s only appropriate that the last show includes two prominent representatives of the Bay Area dance community: Sara Shelton Mann and Kunst-Stoff. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/4-Sat/5, 8 p.m.
Project Artaud Theater
450 Florida, SF
$16-$19
(415) 561-1444
www.artaud.org/theater
www.nanosoperetta.com

THURSDAY

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Aug 3

Visual Art

“Altered Barbie”

Barbie has undergone many changes since her first appearance in 1959, when she was a teenage fashion model. But she’s never been to hell or lived in a trailer park. Nor has she been the Virgin Mary, a stripper, or a raver – until now. At the fourth annual “Altered Barbie Show,” more than 70 artists will mutate the American icon. Through the use of painting, photography, collage, sculpture, and video, artists will reinterpret and reassemble the idealized plastic doll. The gallery reception includes a screening of Susan Stern’s Barbie Nation. (Kellie Ell)

5:30 p.m.
Market Street Gallery
1554 Market, SF
Free
(415) 290-1441
www.marketstreetgallery.com

Performance

Lethe

Renowned San Francisco playwright Octavio Solis takes audiences down the river of forgetfulness this weekend with the world premiere of Lethe, an uncommon collaboration between Bay Area seniors, caregivers, and theater artists, presented by Cornerstone Theater Company and directed by Cornerstone and South Coast Rep’s Juliette Carrillo. Lethe draws its storyline and theme from more than a year’s immersion in discussion about caregiving, memory, and change. Mixing potent drama, sly humor, and original music by composer-musician Beth Custer, Lethe promises a memorable ride into uncharted waters. (Robert Avila)

7:30pm (also Fri/4, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/5, 2:00 p.m.)
Presentation Theater
2350 Turk Blvd
University of San Francisco, SF
Suggested donation $10
1-800-409-5322
www.cornerstonetheater.org

Proud Mary

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ACTRESS AND AUTHOR If you love to watch cult movies and pay tribute to the stars that make them great (and in San Francisco, who doesn’t?), Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass screening of Death Race 2000, featuring a live appearance by Mary Woronov, is something special. Woronov isn’t your average actor — she’s a painter, great writer, and performer whose roots in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous are often unjustly obscured by her Warhol-era exploits, both of which predate her Roger Corman–produced bouts with Hollywood. And Death Race 2000? We’re now six years past the date targeted by Paul Bartel’s 1975 movie, yet its nightmare vision of fascist TV remains hideously funny — right on time, if not ahead of it.
“It is,” Woronov agrees by phone from Los Angeles. “As a country, we’re out of our minds! We’re the greatest polluter, we have the most corrupt government, and we have the biggest weapons of mass destruction. We’ve conducted the most wars since World War II. And I’ve been living here under the illusion that we’re democratic.”
“The media has completely lulled us into nothingness,” she continues. “People can be told that their pensions will be taken away but the head of the corporation will increase his own pension two million dollars — and they don’t do anything! They don’t riot! They just go, [assumes a zombie voice] ‘OK.’ What happened to us?”
A big question, but Woronov’s next novel, What Really Happened, might answer some of it — even if she makes a point of saying the book isn’t political. What it is, though, is the latest outgrowth of a creative birth that took place when Woronov, facing the idea of death (“I got an illness that was merely an infection, but they told me it was cancer”), kicked drugs at the age of 50. “My brain started working and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I started writing,” she says.
The results have included one memoir (1995’s Swimming Underground), one short-story collection (2004’s Blind Love), and two novels (2000’s Snake and 2002’s Niagara, which sports this great first sentence: “I started drinking in the day, and by the time I got to the supermarket I was so loaded I need a cart to stand up”). Publisher Amy Scholder discovered Woronov, and Gary Indiana has raved about her work, but even if she’s now able to call herself a “great writer,” she can also be hilariously blunt. “I wrote Swimming Underground because I thought it would make me famous,” she says. “To my disappointment, I got a review in the New York Times that said I was too busy crawling around the bathroom floor to say anything real about Warhol.”
As if the New York Times qualifies as an authority. In fact, Woronov’s take on the Factory uptown era, praised by Lou Reed as the best of what is surely now a library bookcase worth of efforts, is as distinct and dominant as her appearance in films such as 1966’s Chelsea Girls. Were the other Superstars intimidated by her and by the whip wit of her friend, the infamous Ondine? “People were very intimidated by Ondine,” she says. “People were mystified by me. For one thing, I didn’t have sex. For another, I acted like a guy, merely as a counterbalance to the transvestites and the female energy there. I did theater and I was a really good actress, so I didn’t have the desperation of the other girls who thought Warhol was somehow going to make them a star.”
The theater that Woronov “did” wasn’t exactly forgettable Broadway nonsense. Along with Ondine (who once played the role of Scrooge there), she took part in the Café Cino scene memorably described in Jimmy McDonough’s Andy Milligan biography The Ghastly One. She also worked with Playhouse of the Ridiculous’s great Ronald Tavel and John Vaccaro. “Their sensibility was extremely feminine, extremely bizarre,” she says. “They were camp at its highest level, where you accept the most strange things and are entertained by them.”
This sensibility inspired some of Woronov’s most memorable film performances, such as Miss Togar from 1979’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School. “I dressed like an aberration of Joan Crawford,” Woronov says. “Everyone else is in modern dress and I look like I’m from the 1930s. The thing about [Miss Togar] is that, you know, she’s a fucking pervert. What makes it wonderful is that I don’t play a pervert. I play someone commenting on perversion — just like a transvestite plays someone commenting on female-ism.”
Woronov’s own female charms suit Death Race’s Calamity Jane, and another classic collaboration with Bartel, 1982’s Eating Raoul, truly allows her Amazonian sexiness to bloom. “I knew I was sexy, but there was still a dichotomy of gender slippage,” she says, discussing prude-turned-dominatrix Mary Bland. “I was still denying [sexiness] and yet showing it — like an underslip.”
At the forefront of ’90s new queer cinema with roles in movies by Gregg Araki and Richard Glatzer, Woronov continues to add to one of the world’s most colorful filmographies. Recently, she appeared in The Devil’s Rejects, and she praises the film’s director, Rob Zombie, as an honest man and class act in an industry full of phonies.
Today, Mary Woronov remains in LA. “For writing, you can’t beat it, it’s such a peculiar place — it’s like a swamp,” she says with a laugh. “Everybody I know is moving to Europe or talking about moving but not moving. I have decided I’m not going to move. I really want to stay here and wait for the revolution. I do believe there will be one.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
MIDNIGHT MASS: DEATH RACE 2000 AND MARY WORONOV
Sat/5, 11:59 p.m.
Bridge Theatre
3010 Geary, SF
$12
(415) 267-4893
www.peacheschrist.com
www.maryworonov.com
For a complete Q&A with Mary Woronov — and to find out why she hates Warhol — go to the Guardian’s Pixel Vision blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

NOISE: Manu Chao at the Greek

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Guardian art director Mirissa Neff checked out Manu Chao and Kinky at the Greek Theater on Friday, July 28… here’s what she saw and heard:

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All images by Mirissa Neff

After only playing LA and NYC when he’s made it to the states, Manu Chao finally played a Bay Area show last night. He didn’t disappoint…

A few of us did a Q+A with Manu before Kinky went on. One of the highlights was when the Chronicle’s Delfin Vigil asked Manu about the World Cup and whether he sided with France or Spain. Manu replied, “I am not a nationalist. I have a passport for both countries but I don’t understand this mentality of seeing that someone is from a different place than you and wanting them to die.”

I asked Manu if he had plans to release Siberie M’etait Contee [a French only release] here and he said, “No… maybe someday. But I have a new album that just needs to be mixed. Then it will be ready for release.” Hmmmm…

Kinky opened the night with their unique Norteno-flavored electronic funk. Ulises Lozano and Gil Cerezo got the crowd going:

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People just lost their shit when Manu Chao’s Radio Bemba Sound System hit the stage. Here’s sexy guitarist Madjid Fahem:

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Meanwhile bassist Gambeat held down stage right with lots and lots of reverb:

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After about five encores the crowd was still screaming for more…

SATURDAY

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JUlY 29

PERFORMANCE / OPERA

The Case of the Headless Murder

Cantonese opera was very likely the first opera performed in San Francisco. Taking its name from a vine native to China’s Guangdong province, the Red Bean Cantonese Opera House is helping it thrive. This weekend Red Bean celebrates a decade of Cantonese opera with a Sunday vignette collection and today’s performance of The Case of the Headless Murder. (Johnny Ray Huston)

1:30 p.m. (also, medley event Sun/30, 12:45 p.m.)
Great Star Theatre
636 Jackson, SF
$15-$50
(510) 663-8216
www.redbeancantoneseopera.com

EVENT

Paul Reubens’ Day IV

The Drunken Redheaded Sluts take the party out of the playhouse and onto the streets of the Castro, with the fourth annual Paul Reubens’ Day Celebration. The tequila-infused crawl around the Castro ends at the Dark Room for Reubens trivia, red-bike photo ops, the Miss Yvonne Beauty Pageant, film clips of “the movie” – not Pee Wee’s Big Adventure but the blue movie playing at the Sarasota theater “that fateful night” – and a lineup of the most scandalous variety acts San Francisco has to offer. (K. Tighe)

Meet up, 1 p.m.
Café Flore
2298 Market, SF
Free

9 p.m.
Dark Room Theatre
2263 Mission Street, SF
$10, $7 in costume
www.darkroomsf.com

FRIDAY

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JULY 28

MUSIC

Manu Chao

Manu Chao has referred to himself as a “human sampler” and his unmistakable style showcases multilinguistic lyrics of love, ghetto life, and leftism. Most recently his turn producing Amadou and Mariam’s Dimanche á Bamako (Nonesuch, 2005) put him back on the pop-culture radar. Don’t miss this rare stateside appearance … what with his open criticism of US international policy and globalization, who knows when Homeland Security will allow him through the borders again. (Mirissa Neff)

7:30 p.m.
Greek Theater
Gayley and Stadium Rim, Berk.
$29.50
(415) 421-TIXS
www.anotherplanetent.com

MUSIC
David Pajo

If singer-songwriters wore Boy Scout uniforms, you could bet that David Pajo’s would have a whole lot of merit badges. His eclectic résumé includes Slint, Tortoise, and Zwan, and he’s staked out a quiet solo folkster career as M, Aerial M, and Papa M. Performing as “Pajo” on a self-titled release last year and on the forthcoming 1968 (Drag City), he rolls out wispy, contemplative yarns that’ll remain intact if given a gentle enough listen. (Michael Harkin)

With Holly Throsby and Garrett Pierce
9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$10
(415) 923-0923
www.hemlocktavern.com

Close encounters

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Love is more than metaphor in Orbit (notes from the edge of forever). Love is like the intractable need connected to the exploration of space — especially when the search is bent toward the hope of some ultimate encounter: that contact with somebody, out there, who knows who you are. It’s as if an inner wilderness were turned inside out and projected to infinity.
And so Orbit starts with the mutual seduction of two lovers onstage, and with flickering TV screens (the sets dangling from long vertical skewers loaded with books and the occasional table lamp) tapping classic sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Alien, with their mix of rapture and terror. Here promise and betrayal collide with gravitational conviction, at the point where the yearning for communion meets the blind panic of a self dissolving; a body waylaid, violated, no longer your own (if it ever was). “That transmission? Mother’s deciphered it,” says Sigourney Weaver. “It doesn’t look like an SOS…. It looks like a warning.”
But Orbit itself is never warned off. Rather, as the title implies, it’s continually reapproaching. A new dance theater work from the Erika Shuch Performance Project — the brainchild of San Francisco–based choreographer, director, and performer Erika Chong Shuch, and the resident company at Intersection for the Arts — Orbit spirals around our obsession with UFOs, extraterrestrial life, alien abduction, and other moon-age daydreams. The piece pulls a variety of texts, media, and simulacra into its elliptical trajectory (including recorded interviews, pop music, original songs, and some wonderfully transporting interactive video segments designed by Ishan Vernalis and lll), and is a playfully eclectic, moody, and deeply romantic whirl, danced and acted by Shuch and cocreators Melanie Elms and Danny Wolohan. Joining them is an ensemble, dressed in street clothes and postal uniforms, composed of Kieran Chavez, Joseph Estlack, Daveen DiGiacomo (also responsible for the live music and sound design), Courtney Moreno, and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart.
Elms comes on as the extradimensional counterpart to Shuch’s and Wolohan’s young lovers — whom we’ve seen alternately drifting over the sensual ridges of the lunar surface projected behind them (luxuriating in the exploration of personal space), helping one another (with a touch of comic strain) to moonwalk off the walls, or defending favorite metaphors for their place in the cosmos and their search for ETs. Behind them Elms’s retro space alien glides around as if invisibly in mischievous blue gloves, the show’s intergalactic pixie, puppet mistress of hapless earthlings.
At times, moving about the stage in an idiosyncratic way coolly reminiscent of some ray gun–toting go-go dancer, Elms seems no more than a figment of the collective imagination. (In one eerily comic scene, the strange hands rooting around in a panicky Wolohan’s sweatshirt turn out not to be blue-gloved, but the hands of his lover.) From other angles, however, she becomes an active force of violently erratic potential, like a galactic succubus. The chorus, meanwhile, in alternately trancelike and frenetic motion, do everything from dance, sing, and play instruments to operate the ropes and pulleys that rearrange those TV-and-book kebabs around the stage. With Elms they circle the lovers as forces of nature both internal and external, mercurial ones too, capable of imparting a gentle caress one minute, a savage abuse the next.
One or two segments veering toward the madcap — like Wolohan’s admittedly hilarious puppet-show narration of his rescue by a friendly lighthouse (Shuch) — can be funny at the cost of some subtlety, and in truth the parts don’t contribute equally to the whole. But the surprises in store are several, and there’s a cumulative force to the loose but inspired patterning of movement, theme, and image. If part of that pattern is the idea of lives in eternal orbit around some elusive whole, always approaching and never landing, Shuch and company manage a not insignificant union all the same, joining the passion of the true believer with the wry alert eye of the perennial searcher. SFBG
ORBIT (NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF FOREVER)
Through Aug. 5
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF
$9–$20 (Thurs., pay what you can)
(415) 626-3311
www.theintersection.org

A flickering light

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Acclaim is often decreed as much by fashion as by accomplishment. While Frank Borzage spent four decades as a well-paid Hollywood director and was honored with two Oscars, his talent wasn’t — and still isn’t — fashionable. In his hundred or so features, he routinely elevated or rescued contrived material. Typed as a director of romances and melodramas, he made myriad movies that were phony in concept — but never in their treatment.
Indeed, purity was often his subject, transcendence a running theme. What sometimes looked like “mush stuff” to critics now seems an oft-extraordinary intensity of unforced emotion. “Frank Borzage’s Philosophy of Desire,” a retrospective starting at the PFA this week, just scratches the surface of a very deep filmography. Its 12 titles can match up against any dozen by John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, and Howard Hawks.
Making his unlikely way into showbiz from a working-class Catholic immigrant family in Salt Lake City, the strapping, athletic Borzage entered movies as a popular mid-1910s actor. Disgusted by the poor product of a fledgling company he signed on with, he offered to direct himself, and early two-reel westerns distinguished him as an innovator with sophisticated visual and psychological instincts.
He abruptly jumped to the A-list when chosen to direct the first film version of Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque. This tale of a concert violinist rising from New York City’s Jewish ghetto was detested as “too realistic” by its own producer (Paramount’s Adolph Zukor) but became a surprise smash — winning praise from Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein and Europe’s surrealists. As Herve Dumont’s fine Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic puts it, Borzage’s usual narrative centered on “the young couple facing adversity.” Using poetical imagery and few words (Borzage admitted to being a de facto silent film director well into the sound era), his genius lay in mixing beauty and pain, happiness and sorrow in profoundly telling sequences he often invented himself.
These near-mystic surges of human yearning found quintessential expression in films he made for Fox during an eight-year stint starting in 1925. That year brought his first masterpiece, Lazybones, which cast cowboy star Buck Jones against type as a country layabout who ends up raising a local girl’s abandoned child. There’s one scene when the tot is crying because she’s teased and shunned as a “bastard,” and he comforts her with a self-deprecating lie. The moment is classic Borzage — character stoicism and directorial restraint at a point of crushing sadness — and for anyone who likes an honest cry at the movies, it is almost unbearably good.
Lazybones was not a hit, but the later films (most famously, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel) that Borzage made with newcomers Janet Gaynor (herself the subject of a current PFA program) and Charles Farrell were huge. Later the director found another elfin, fragile, yet morally fibrous favorite femme in Margaret Sullavan, heroine in a trilogy that subtly charted the growing fascism in Germany: 1934’s Little Man, What Now?, 1938’s Three Comrades, and 1940’s The Mortal Storm. These ambitious movies blended comedy, romance, thriller, and drama to unpredictable effect. But no film of the era exemplified Borzage’s penchant for unclassifiable projects more than 1937’s History Is Made at Night, an exquisite-corpse narrative lent total emotional truth by his handling of Jean Arthur’s flight from a demented rich husband into the arms of headwaiter Charles Boyer.
Demands for more focused escapism and propaganda during WWII paired Borzage with inappropriate projects, and the postwar cynicism and penchant for spectacle made him seem even less relevant. What snowball’s chance in hell is there that 1959’s The Big Fisherman (which former Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg, and Hitchcock cinematographer Lee Garmes called “the finest thing I ever did — a visual masterpiece”) might ever get restored? Holding one’s breath is ill-advised.
Borzage died of cancer at 68 in 1962. Back then, his greatest films seemed antique. Now we know better. The summer of 2006 has brought the latest universal insights by M. Night Shyamalan and Kevin Smith. Guess what — the least worthy work by Borzage never stunk up the joint like Lady in the Water or Clerks II, nor auto-serviced such undeserved directorial narcissism. SFBG
“FRANK BORZAGE’S
PHILOSOPHY OF DESIRE”
Through Aug. 23
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft, Berk.
$4–$8
(415) 642-0808
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Hot times

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By Steven T. Jones
I finally got around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth on Friday night, just as the realities of global warming couldn’t be more clear. It was downright balmy at 10 pm when I stepped out of the theater and the weekend only got hotter from there, breaking heat records all over the country. I spent Sunday with my kids in Modesto and endured 115 degree heat, the kinda weather that convinces some bodies to simply drop dead. And it’s only going to get worse, a truth both incontrovertible and inconvenient to our status quo political and media establishment, which love to mock progressive voices like the Guardian that urge radical change. Even here in San Francisco, we’re still fighting about whether to facilitate bicycling and other measures that discourage driving cars. It’s maddening. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will this Friday at 1:30 hold a hearing on Peak Oil before LAFCO — which will likely be belittled by the Chron and the Ex’s resident blowhard Ken Garcia. They prefer small potatoes BS like clean streets and playing nice with downtown and love to mock supervisors who talk about war, human rights, or saving the planet. But in the absence of leadership at the state and federal levels on the most important issues of the day, maybe it does become incumbent on San Francisco to step up and lead. Maybe radical proposals have become the most reasonable. And for the rest of us, even the small stuff will help.

Hot times

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By Steven T. Jones
I finally got around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth on Friday night, just as the realities of global warming couldn’t be more clear. It was downright balmy at 10 pm when I stepped out of the theater and the weekend only got hotter from there, breaking heat records all over the country. I spent Sunday with my kids in Modesto and endured 115 degree heat, the kinda weather that convinces some bodies to simply drop dead. And it’s only going to get worse, a truth both incontrovertible and inconvenient to our status quo political and media establishment, which love to mock progressive voices like the Guardian who urge radical change. Even here in San Francisco, we’re still fighting about whether to facilitate bicycling and other measures that discourage driving cars. It’s maddening. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi will this Friday at 1:30 hold a hearing on Peak Oil before LAFCO — which will likely be belittled by the Chron and the Ex’s resident blowhard Ken Garcia. They prefer small potatoes BS like clean streets and playing nice with downtown and love to mock supervisors who talk about war, human rights, or saving the planet. But in the absence of leadership at the state and federal levels on the most important issues of the day, maybe it does become incumbent on San Francisco to step up and lead. Maybe radical proposals have become the most reasonable. And for the rest of us, even the small stuff will help.

SUNDAY

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JULY 23

Event

Progressive Dems potluck

Come to the second annual Progressive Democrats-East Bay Picnic and Politics Barbecue and meet current and new members. Bring something to grill and something to share. (Deborah Giattina)

Noon-4 p.m.
Codornices Park
Near intersection of Euclid and Eunice, Berk.
(510) 636-4149

Theater/event

SF Theater Festival

They say that three’s a charm, and we’re betting that the third annual San Francisco Theater Festival in Yerba Buena Gardens will be just as charming, not to mention action packed, as its predecessors were. Prepare to be amazed by the sheer audacity of a festival showcasing 70 performances by 36 theater companies, 14 solo performers, 10 improv groups, and 10 children’s theater productions, on 10 stages in just six hours. (Nicole Gluckstern)

11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Yerba Buena Gardens, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Zeum Theater
Third and Mission; Fourth and Howard, SF
Free
(415) 291-8655
www.sftheaterfestival.org

SATURDAY

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JULY 22

MUSIC

Raconteurs and Kelley Stoltz

Midwestern rock supergroupies meet the Detroit native-SF vinyl diehard (who was pals with Brendan Benson back in the day). (Kimberly Chun)

Also Sun/23, 8 p.m.
Warfield
982 Market, SF
$29.50-$37.50
(415) 775-7722

theater

Ragnarok

Whether you consider it the “doom of the powers” or “twilight of the gods,” Ragnarok is definitely Norse slang for the beginning of the end. It might be realistic to state that the United States and the world – what? the United States isn’t the world? – have already reached that point. Goldie winners the Shotgun Players are taking on a live outdoor interpretation of the epic tale. Previewing on the same weekend that Patrick Dooley and company are holding a fundraiser, Ragnarok allows you to donate to Shotgun and take in some free theater. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Noon (also Sun/23); through Sept. 10
John Hinkel Park
Southampton between San Diego Road and Somerset Place, Berk.
Free (with pass-the-hat donation after show)
(510) 841-6500
www.shotgunplayers.org

“Guardians” of the universe

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By Cheryl Eddy

Coming soon to a theater near you … it’s The Guardian!

Before you (or we) get too excited, the Internet Movie Database lists no less than ten films and/or TV shows with that same title (including William Friedkin’s legendarily derided version … there are nannies, there are Druids). The latest Guardian is a Coast Guard thriller from the action-obsessed director of The Fugitive (not to mention multiple entries in the Steven Seagal canon); it stars Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner, who’s clearly in violation of his post-Waterworld no-movies-set-on-large-bodies-of-water bargain with the celluloid gods.

There’s no official site yet for this Buena Vista Pictures (read: Disney, currently drowning in mad Pirates booty) release, but our latest li’l cinematic namesake is currently slated for a September 29 release. Until then, you too can admire the huge cardboard stand-up trumpeting this soon-to-be-classic, now on view in the Metreon lobby.

High tide, low tide

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Moving the WestWave Dance Festival (called Summerfest/dance until two years ago and now in its 15th year) to the Project Artaud Theater was a smart idea. Even though the cavernous former warehouse dwarfs some of the smaller companies using the space, Artaud lays out an altogether funky welcome mat, squeaky stairs included.
Due to philosophical and financial considerations, WestWave has always focused on up-and-coming choreographers. That means there’s an abundance of new work — at least half of the pieces in this year’s fest are world premieres — as well as a lot more duos, rather than pieces for six and more. On opening night two works exemplified the vitality of local dance: You and You and You by EmSpace Dance’s Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and RAWdance’s Drained. The two couldn’t have been more different. Both were terrific.
In Stuart’s piece, three dancers (Damara Ganley, Noel Plemmons, and Julie Sheetz) began very far apart but oozed toward each other like streams of lava. Voluptuous without being erotic, the dancers pressed themselves together, piled on top of each other, and rearranged limbs in order to find space for themselves. This was dancing about mass and weight but also softness and yielding. At the end Plemmons encased Sheetz so tightly that you couldn’t be sure whether he was strangling or embracing her.
RAWdance’s Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith are high-stakes gamblers. In Drained, performed with Dudley Flores and Laura Sharp, they threw themselves into a game of kamikaze dancing that was as exacting as it was freewheeling. They had at their disposal a defined number of moves and gestures for two men, two women, and two boxes. So how many permutations were possible? To find out, the dancers dove in at top speed. Drained may be a one-idea piece, but watching the choreography test the body’s limits with such skill and exuberance was great fun.
The rest of the program was more of a mixed bag. Poorly projected visuals undercut Fellow Travelers Performance Group’s spare and reticent Warning Signs (by Ken James, with Cynthia Adams). Still, the juxtaposition of the live dancers with their “talking” portraits was intriguing. In the wispy In Closing, Fresh Meat Productions’ Sean Dorsey (with Courtney Moreno) looked at the inevitable winding down of a relationship in which love and tenderness survive only as memories. Delicately weaving its components, the piece was a little thin but evoked the situation’s mix of tenderness and regret.
Cathleen McCarthy’s passionately danced quintet Driven to This started with a protracted but not uninteresting solo, though the piece quickly lost its way. It almost felt like the solo belonged somewhere else. Driven needs a backbone and pruning. The evening’s low point came when Kyoungil Ong (who runs quite a good Korean dance company, Ong Dance Company) performed her Flower Tears II. This was a derivative and shallow excursion into dance theater. Centered on a huge white paper gown from which legs or arms periodically emerged, the work was so overwrought and cliché that it bordered on self-parody.
On WestWave’s second night, four of the six pieces were by beginners. Showcasing truly inexperienced artists in a festival doesn’t do anybody a favor, not least the artists themselves. However, even this decidedly subpar program yielded one discovery. Alena Odrene Cawthorne’s delicious Face It embraced weight and phrasing for a vernal celebration of maidenhood in a way that has not been seen since the very early days of modern dance. The choreographer sent her quartet of elegant, pastel-clad dancers (Kathleen Franklin, Angela Pasalis, Susan Tobiason, and herself) into José Limón’s swooping circles, serpentine trajectories, wide pliés, and stretching arms — all without a trace of irony. It was hard to believe that this companionable bliss was for real. In stepped Pamela Wood, an older woman in African dress. She couldn’t believe it either. The dancers tried to “convert” her by drawing her in. She wasn’t having any of it. In the end, they simply danced around her. Bravo!
The program also featured Apryl Renee’s buffoonish Trope of Seuss, a rather miserable take on Green Eggs and Ham. Renee acted as the narrator and Susan Donham as the reluctant object of Charlotte Mayang’s manic nuturer. The same trio, joined by Kate Joyce, returned in the obscure Traveling Companions. Heavy on atmosphere but light on movement invention, the piece rather crudely explored the push and pull of a calling, based on the Book of Ruth.
The earnestness and focus of young Catalina Jackson in danceNAGANUMA’s Pallid Faeries were enchanting. Claudine Naganuma tried to portray four different versions of the mythic creatures as both youngsters and adults — but why? She had a concept; she needed to translate it into stageworthy choreography. Even less intriguing were Rebecca Wender’s Afterward and Amy Lewis’s Conversion, neither of which belonged in a program of professional dance. SFBG
WESTWAVE DANCE FESTIVAL
July 27–30, 8 p.m.
Project Artaud Theater
450 Florida, SF
$18–$20
(415) 863-9834
www.westwavedancefestival.org

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