By Steven T. Jones
Years in development and 600 pages thick, the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan Draft Environmental Impact Report is a policy wonk’s wet dream, but perhaps a tad inaccessible for most people. That’s too bad because this is the plan that could determine whether there will still be jobs and homes for the working class 20 years from now, or whether policymakers will let the free market continue to gentrify the city. The plan (available here along with important info on upcoming hearing and a series of workshops that start on Monday) looks at three development options, ranging from maximum conversion of industrial lands to housing to maximum preservation of job-producing properties. Either way, the plan will almost double the housing entitlements in the city and create a potential developer feeding frenzy that could have irreversible results. But the plan also calls for proactive policies for creating more affordable housing, exacting more public benefits from development projects, and creating development models that take public health into consideration, all firsts for the city’s area plans. So check it out, get involved, and keep reading the Guardian for updates.
Upcoming
Shape San Francisco’s future
Eye-yi-yi!
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Knowing felines the way I don’t, I’d venture that most pussies squander a life or three every time they step out the door and off life’s balcony railing in search of their next fleshy plaything. But San Francisco vocalist Mark Osegueda of Death Angel is giving all those fur balls a run for their Meow Mix: the self-described "pretty resilient cat" who quit the music game and moved to New York City after Death Angel’s fateful 1990 tour-bus crash in Arizona was in the studio June 24 with his other, punk rock project, the All Time Highs, laying down scratch vocals at Fantasy Recording Studios in Berkeley when he got a hit by a bit more than a scratch.
"Holding a scream for a long time, you get a head rush because of the lack of oxygen. You almost feel really woozy, but usually my adrenalin is going so much onstage that I’m OK," the affable Osegueda, 38, tells me from Sun Valley, Idaho. "Instead I was standing in a little isolation booth in the studio, I had a head rush, and I passed out and fell forward, and a mic stand caught my eye."
The micless pole tore into Osegueda’s eyeball. "I was really, really fortunate that it didn’t hit the center of the eye it hit the white area of the eye and took out a big chunk of it," he says. "So I’m dealing with pain and discomfort instead of vision problems, which is nice because, had it hit the center of the eye, we’d be having a different kind of conversation now!"
When he came to, Osegueda grabbed his eye out of panic, knowing he had done something "pretty severe and pretty wrong." Delirious and separated from his bandmates, who were continuing to play through the song elsewhere in the studio, Osegueda confesses that he was tempted to just take a nice little nap right where he fell, before he stopped himself, thinking he might have suffered a concussion.
Leaping up, he ran to the bathroom to splash water on his eye, worrying all the while about the All Time Highs’ show that night at Merchant’s Bar at Jack London Square ("I didn’t want people bumping into my face!") and unable to make out exactly how wounded he was. Once the rest of the group took a look at Osegueda’s peeper, they immediately took him to the hospital, where he had the bizarre experience of attempting to explain his gouge: "So I’m holding this high note, right … ?"
On the phone from the land of the spud, Osegueda is in shockingly high spirits for a guy who has experienced such trauma to his eye (if I were in his boots, I’d never look at mic stands quite the same way again). But the vocalist says the eyeball, while still really red, is getting "way better already" as he recuperates among his bandmates in Death Angel the group he’s been in, on and off, since age 15 with pen and paper in hand, writing lyrics for the band’s next Nuclear Blast long player and letting the healing continue.
Moreover, the entire experience is nowhere near as horrific as Death Angel’s 1990 bus crash, which derailed the career of a band set to become Bay Area thrash’s next Metallica. "To this day, that bus accident was one of the most traumatic days of my life," remembers the singer, who injured his foot though he was nowhere near as badly hurt as drummer Andy Galeon, who had to undergo major reconstructive surgery for a year.
Galeon, thankfully, "now looks wonderful and plays like a workhorse!" says Osegueda, who plans to make like the aforementioned beast and hurl himself back into the thick of the two-year-old All Time Highs with a show at Annie’s Social Club on July 6. "The best description of us is AC/DC meets Minor Threat," he says gleefully. "Onstage we’re madness, flying and bumping into each other."
One ATH MySpace pal hailed Osegueda with "Heal well, ya knucklehead," but I’ll keep it simple with a "Watch out for low-flying projectiles at all times."
SWEET HOME CHARLESTON Or rather, Mount Pleasant. Band of Horses vocalist-guitarist Ben Bridwell, 29, has relocated from Seattle to that town along with his bandmates, also South Carolina natives. The former Carissa’s Wierd member decided to make the move amid writing his upcoming, untitled Sub Pop album. "Definitely two fighting little forces there, happiness and sadness," he says, attempting to describe the recording, to which he still feels far too close. "I’m not trying to say I’m a tortured artist or depressed kinda dude," Bridwell adds. "Being affected by the Seattle weather had some effect, and relationships falling apart and falling in love again or being around my family."
But did he have any hesitation about getting close to the land still living down Hootie and the Blowfish? "I’ve heard about it since the day I was born!" Bridwell says of South Carolina’s rep. "You mean for starting the Civil War and continuing to fly the [Confederate] flag over the state Capitol? There’s definitely some stigma attached to my home state, but every place has some good people and bad people and ignorant people. I love South Carolina. I love my beautiful house, though of course I don’t really get to hang out in it. But I can walk to my dad’s house, have some beers, and stumble home." Schweet, indeed. *
ALL TIME HIGHS
With Bimbo Toolshed and Seize the Night
Fri/6, 9 p.m., $8
Annie’s Social Club
917 Folsom, SF
(415) 974-1585
BAND OF HORSES
With A Decent Animal and Stardeath and White Dwarfs
Thurs/5, 8 p.m., $20 (sold out)
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Late Night Picture Show
Midnight Mass, held at the Bridge Theatre, may be the sparkling, dressed-to-the-nines jewel in Landmark Theatres’ cult-movie crown. But with a newly invigorated programming focus, the Clay’s Late Night Picture Show (and its aimed-more-at-college-kids Berkeley equivalent, the Shattuck’s Midnight Special) is also holding it down for folks who’re willing to sacrifice their sleep in the name of offbeat cinema. Curated by the self-dubbed Late Night Picture Show Films Committee (among its members: Clay manager Chris Hatfield; Peaches Christ’s alter ego, Joshua Grannell; and Late Night host Sam Sharkey), the series’ spring 2007 edition featured after-hours classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) as well as more esoteric choices, including a two-night run of Cannibal Holocaust (1980). For the upcoming fall season, the committee hopes to book Suspiria (1977) and (fingers crossed!) both the original and the remake of The Wizard of Gore (1970; 2007).
"In its mission statement, the Late Night Picture Show is more oriented towards classic cult films and more high-brow fare," Sharkey says. "We did Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle [19952002] films that we feel are important but don’t necessarily get shown at midnight screenings."
While the programming definitely reflects a sense of fun (1985’s Re-Animator, 1973’s Enter the Dragon), the Late Night Picture Show offers a different filmgoing experience than Midnight Mass’s signature antics. "Our original intentions were to screen interesting films that we find have more critical merit and could also appeal to that midnight crowd," Sharkey explains. "Additionally, instead of having a full preshow, we’ve had special guests and people that talk before the films. Like last fall, when we did Phantom of the Paradise [1974], we had Paul Williams in person, who wrote the music. We did The Monster Squad [1987], and we had all the kids from the cast appear. Barry Gifford, the author of the Wild at Heart book [Grove Press], was there when we did a weekend [of David Lynch films]. I was proud of that stuff that we were able to do with that, as far as getting important guests." (Cheryl Eddy)
Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?
The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.
Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.
Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.
Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."
The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.
When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.
Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineoinspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).
"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."
Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense sometimes alarming devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."
Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.
Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."
That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.
As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).
The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*
MIDNIGHT MASS
Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person
July 13, midnight, $12
Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person
July 14, midnight, sold out
Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?
The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.
Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.
Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.
Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."
The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.
When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.
Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).
"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."
Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense sometimes alarming devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."
Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.
Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."
That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.
As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).
The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*
MIDNIGHT MASS
Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person
July 13, midnight, $12
Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person
July 14, midnight, sold out
Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?
The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.
Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.
Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.
Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."
The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.
When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.
Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).
"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."
Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense sometimes alarming devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."
Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.
Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."
That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.
As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).
The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*
MIDNIGHT MASS
Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person
July 13, midnight, $12
Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person
July 14, midnight, sold out
The Muppets take San Francisco
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Be warned: the following is in no way a professional, measured critique of the career and oeuvre of one Jim Henson, master puppeteer, kiddie empire creator, and upcoming Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective honoree. Oh, no. Below are the semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac Henson fangirl. One whose first experience of the legitimate thea-tah was not The Pirates of Penzance but "Pigs in Space." One whose initial exposure to the ways of l’amour involved a pig and a frog getting it on after extensive rounds of bike riding and loaded sexual repartee. One who breaks into Muppet palsy spastic flailings of staccato, head-wagging ecstasy whenever she hears The Muppet Show siren song of "It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights." One who, in her aggressively weird late teens, sported a sassy shag haircut dyed a deep shade of Grover blue because, perhaps, she secretly wished she were a Muppet.
And who could blame me, uh, her? After all, Muppets can do anything, and they usually have a good time doing it. These anarchic, orgiastic amalgams of felt, foam, and fun fur are investigative reporters, musicians, demolition experts, hack comics, boomerang-fish throwers, mad scientists, misunderstood performance artists, masters of the ancient art of ka-rah-tay, and so much more. Above all, they are vaudevillians with the incessant desire to entertain just like their ingenious creator. Part Walt Disney (minus the Nazi sympathizing), part Groucho Marx and looking like the cloned offspring of Lyle Lovett and Jesus Christ the late Henson was nevertheless about as unassuming as they come. He is universally remembered as the nicest guy you’ve ever met (or, in my case, wish you had). But while his Muppets may have gained superstardom on Sesame Street, it may surprise some to know that cooperation didn’t always "make it happen" in Henson’s working relationships.
"We were very competitive with each other," director and longtime Henson collaborator Frank Oz (the voice of the inimitable Miss Piggy) admitted when I used a recent promotional tour for an Oz project as a chance to quiz him, quickly, about his Muppet past. "We put each other in lousy situations and tried to screw each other over." Of course, that’s not to say Henson was the Eve Harrington (as in All About Eve) of the puppet world. He valued collaboration with his fellow artists above all else; competition was a creative catalyst. "He appreciated everybody else’s work too," Oz, who calls Henson a "genius," clarifies. "There was a camaraderie, a great affection amongst all of us."
Henson’s creative fervor and Puritan work ethic helped make the Muppets a success, but so did his business acumen, something he leavened with that patented nice-guy attitude. "He really wanted everyone to be happy in a business deal," says Muppet performer (the Great Gonzo) and Marin resident Dave Goelz, who worked with Henson from the early ’70s until Henson’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1990. "The reason Jim was such a good businessman was very simple: people loved to work with him." Goelz, who will make appearances at the YBCA on June 21 and 22 to introduce "Muppets 101," fondly remembers the sense of community Henson fostered, having never experienced the tug-of-war that characterized Henson’s relationship with Oz.
The YBCA retrospective is thrillingly comprehensive, although it could be more cohesive. The three Muppet features being screened comprise what I like to call "the real original trilogy": 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper (viva Charles Grodin!), and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Also included are assorted Muppet marginalia (Mike Douglas appearances, the infamous "Sex and Violence" Muppet Show pilot, some fantastic behind-the-scenes footage), forays into less kid-friendly puppetry (a betighted David Bowie in the Terry Jonespenned Labyrinth, the gloriously strange Dark Crystal), early commercial and experimental work, and later TV work like Fraggle Rock, the corny yet inspired (the Muppet modus operandi) ’30s gangster-movie send-up Dog City, and episodes of the gothic fairy-tale theater The Storyteller.
The Muppets aren’t lowering the stage curtain anytime soon. In addition to a planned Dark Crystal sequel, a Fraggle Rock movie is in the works. Disney bought the rights to the Muppets in 2004 (something, believe it or not, Henson was trying to make happen shortly before his death, recognizing that the juggernaut could give his franchise the protection it deserves). And the Jim Henson Co. continues to produce work in part inspired by Henson, like the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask. Still, no one has the gall to suggest it’s like it used to be. "Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day," Oz notes. "There’s no other Sammy Davis Jr., and there’s no other Jim Henson."
Why exactly have the Muppets managed to endure? The answer, according to Goelz, is simple. "They are us," he says. "They describe a world that’s filled with conflict, but nonetheless they’re motivated by charity. It all came out of Jim’s philosophy. He believed that people are basically good, and he operated that way."
So it turns out I am a Muppet after all. The really good news, it seems, is that we all are. Corny? Maybe. But also pretty damn inspired.*
MUPPETS, MUSIC, AND MAGIC
June 21July 1; $6$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787
Bus shows
here are some upcoming show ideas:
if your free some time
here is a list of up coming bus shows.::: for locations and final list of bands
call 510-bad-smut near the date.
{if anyone out there wants to help in anyway please email me ;
promote/drive/location ideas/ pick up bottles/ donate mics cords and stands/ 15″speakers/battle drunk rich boys who say “duuuude” too much….}
june 14: west oakland
Duke Nukem Forever
Scott’s Band
Vitimin Piss
Big Digits
casy + brian,
birds of every flavor,
jackies house
june 17th:
future adults
black rainbow
chief death ray
june 22nd:
s.f.
daniel higgs
dead western
chiara giovando
vis visa
evil wikkid warrior
june 23rd:
dolores park
movies and picknic potluck
june 24:
robin williams on fire, bizzart, lacoste, child pornography
june 27th:
david copperfuck
eggs on legs
june 28th:
destroy tokyo, long legged woman, better people, maybe Yvonne
Kimberly Chun
hey no prob – think the bus is awesome! hope the show goes well…
Kimberly Chun
Senior Arts and Entertainment Editor
San Francisco Bay Guardian
135 Mississippi St., San Francisco, CA 94107
415 487 4613 phone
415 487 2506 fax
—–Original Message—–
From: john benson [mailto:followthatparade@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 12:25 AM
To: Kimberly Chun
Subject: Re: thanks for interview; also wondering…
thanks kim.
just read the bus article. i liked it – im glad you mentioned the part about rocking out with your cock out’ ha ha
take care..
john
Kimberly Chun
if it’s OK to publish this email as a place for people to contact if they want more info on that free Feb. 3 Oakland show? Thanks!
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http://www.myspace.com/evilwikkidwarrior
~how the worst can make the not so good seem great.~
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Food fight? Enjoy some healthy debate
in the Yahoo! Answers Food & Drink Q&A.
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http://www.myspace.com/evilwikkidwarrior
~how the worst can make the not so good seem great.~
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pictures at www.flickr.com/pictures/followthatparade
Welcome to my pop nightmare
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Gazing disdainfully from the cover of their album Strange House (Loog), the Horrors greet listeners with the air of Edward Gorey characters on a smoke break. Together, they are a scarily beautiful organism: a slick plastic spider with 10 spindly legs and a penchant for manic, blood-soaked coffin rock. Their shows, in contrast, are short, riotous affairs that revolve around a schizoid brand of gothabilly and the shrieks and antics of lead vocalist Faris Badwan. The Horrors have graced the cover of NME, dumped garbage on industry bigwigs at South by Southwest, and amassed a throng of fans worldwide. They’ve also, of course, sent the pointy-shoe market skyrocketing.
The Horrors were born, appropriately enough, in the bowels of a rotting Victorian hotel, the home of the fashionable Junk Club in Southend-on-Sea in London’s neighboring Essex County, in the summer of 2005. Rhys "Spider" Webb, keyboardist for the Horrors, recalls that the transition from clubgoers to band was not a prolonged one. "We were actually sitting around a table, and it was, like, ‘Let’s go into the studio for rehearsal next week.’ Faris had a couple of cover versions he wanted to work on. We’ve been playing ever since, to be honest."
One of the covers that Badwan had chosen, Screaming Lord Sutch’s "Jack the Ripper," eventually became the Horrors’ debut single. It was paired with an original composition, "Sheena Is a Parasite," a bombastic microtune of a minute and 42 seconds, the tale of an enigmatically vile heroine set to a pulsating bass and a skittering, looped backbeat. The song attracted the attention of one Chris Cunningham, the creative force behind Aphex Twin’s infamous "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" videos, who allegedly found it on MySpace. Cunningham had soured on videos and hadn’t made one in seven years when the Horrors caught his ear and sent him into a storyboarding frenzy. Webb remembers, "He contacted Polydor and said, ‘Who’s doing the video? I’d love to do it.’" The finished product shows Samantha Morton falling victim to her own exploding viscera amid a frenetic doomscape. Apparently not bothered by disemboweled women, MTV banned the video for its use of strobe lights, promptly creating more publicity for the piece and the Horrors than it would have otherwise garnered.
As heirs of death rock, the Horrors come across like the naughty grandchildren of the Birthday Party, with Badwan channeling bits of Nick Cave as he screams his ghoulish repertoire, his large frame weaving across the stage. (In fact, Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos appears in the credits for Strange House, having produced their single "Count in Fives.") But while blood pours out of their lyrics and violence peppers their shows, it is the Horrors’ love of music all music that grants them a sense of humor and keeps them from buying into their gloomy hype. A club DJ for many years, Webb explains that playfulness further, saying, "The music I like to buy could be Robert Johnson or the Sonics, the Contortions, or DNA." He recalls a group walking into the Horrors’ dressing room and getting a surprise: "I think they expected us to be listening to ’60s garage and punk and rhythm and blues, and they caught us all dancing to drum ‘n’ bass records."
In the song "Draw Japan," Badwan tackles manifest destiny as Bauhaus beats rush past and Webb’s organ hiccups away in counterpoint. "I will draw Japan with a ravenous pen / Hungry for oil and iron and tin," he barks. It’s almost more Christian death than the Cramps, a perfect example of the Horrors’ genre blend ‘n’ bend. The key to that meld is guitarist Joshua Third, a.k.a. Joshua Hayward, possessor of the Horrors’ hugest mane of hair and, coincidentally, a physics degree. Webb describes Third as "a bit of a mad scientist" who spends his free time "locked in his cupboard, building strange components." For a recent issue of the band’s fanzine, Horror Asparagus Stories, Third taught readers how to build their own effects pedal. Webb is already gearing up for the next edition, having created a compilation called "Top Tracks about the Unstable State of Human Minds."
For all their conceptual flourishes, the Horrors have encountered a backlash from people who take exception to their meticulously crafted aesthetic. Webb concedes, "If you see a band like us, it looks like this kind of package," but notes that their look is inspired by friends such as album artist Ciaran O’Shea, who worked with Webb before the Horrors existed. Detractors aside, the tacit test for the Horrors will be their upcoming US tour. Webb recounts being warned before their first transatlantic jaunt that crowds in the States would be anything but enthusiastic. Instead, he was happy that "we’ve never found that anywhere in the world. The music provokes the same kind of reaction wherever we are." *
HORRORS
Tues/19, 9 p.m., $13
Popscene
330 Ritch, SF
(415) 541-9574
Betting on the mayor
By Steven T. Jones
I’ll be the first to admit that I barely understand the complexities of futures markets, but I’m proud to say that I’ve already made a few hundred bucks off this fall’s mayor’s race. OK, it isn’t real money, and this market for who will be our next mayor is a contrivance of the SF Usual Suspects. Yet it’s a fun and interesting new way to handicap the upcoming race. BTW, I’m swimming in Ross Mirkarimi shares in case anybody wants to make me a good offer.