Video Archives — Page 102 of 118 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Noise Pop: Running with Wale

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February 20, 2008

Back in 2006, when Washington DC music veteran Ronald "Dig Dug" Dixon, of legendary go-go band the Northeast Groovers (NEG), first got wind that some rap upstart named Wale (pronounced Wah-lay) had not only sampled NEG’s music without permission but also jacked Dixon’s stage name for his single’s title and refrain, he was not happy. But when Dixon learned that Wale also hailed from the nation’s capital, better known for its go-go scene than its hip-hop, and that the single "Dig Dug" was in fact a heartfelt homage to both NEG and go-go, all bad vibes soon subsided and the young hip-hop hopeful got his elder’s blessing.

In the two years since, Wale’s career has taken off at an accelerated pace. The unsigned artist performed at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, appeared on the cover of Urb, and gathered countless other write-ups and gushing features in such publications as XXL, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, which honored him as one of the top eight new faces to watch this year. And Wale, who has rightfully dubbed himself "the ambassador of rap for the capital," seems poised to live up to all this hype, especially since last July’s mixtape 100 Miles and Running caught the attention and respect of one Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen), who has since produced the still-unsigned rapper.

Wale, who performs at Mighty on Feb. 29 as part of Noise Pop, is taking all of this in stride. Speaking recently by phone as he drove around Los Angeles with his manager, the MC — who was born Olubowale Folarin 23 years ago in DC to Nigerian immigrant parents — proclaimed confidently that talent is what got him to the position he’s in today.

"Lucky?" he asked, somewhat surprised when I questioned him about the recent hype and accolades bestowed on him. "Lucky? That implies that I don’t have talent. I do. And that comes first. And after that, there is some luck….

"My manager is good at his job."

And what label will the much-sought-after artist sign with? "Actually, I may not even sign with a label. I may not need to…. Just wait and see how it goes," said the ambassador, who seems destined to put DC firmly on the rap map.

WALE

With Trackademicks and Nick Catchdubs

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $15–$20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 626-7001

www.mighty119.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Noise Pop: Fuck yeah

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February 20, 2008

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Most articles and reviews about Holy Fuck begin with some comment about whether the band’s music did or did not make the writer exclaim, "Holy fuck!" So insert your own exclamatory joke about the group’s name here, and let’s move past the moniker and go on to the music.

Holy Fuck straddle the rock and electronic divide: they mash together techno beats, dirty lo-fi electronics, and loud kinetic-rock rhythms. It’s a perfect of-the-moment sound — the type that indie rock kids love to dance to, balanced with enough chaotic experimentalism to appeal to noise rock and electronic fans. We live in weird times, and this band gets the times.

Perversely, as bad as the war and the economy are, kids are having a great deal of innocent fun these days. You can catch a sweaty, spazzy groove to the not-so-faux-naïf, party-starting sounds of Video Hippos. Or you can bang your head to Holy Fuck’s embodiment of that dance-party spirit.

The songs on their latest record, LP (XL), drive forward kraut rock–style, but the dirty layers of electronic noise on top of their propulsive rhythms have a purer rock vibe: they’re raw, primitive, and energetic. On my MP3 player, "Choppers," the last track on LP, fits snugly up against my next loaded disc, a Can anthology. The sound of Holy Fuck’s recorded output lies somewhere between Trans Am and Suicide, although they don’t stake out the confrontationally icy ground of the latter nor cloak themselves in the distancing self-awareness of the former. Instead, onstage a few weeks ago at the Great American Music Hall, Holy Fuck bopped around unselfconsciously, with quick-change mixes, effects-pedal tweaks, and keyboard jams. It’s a friendly, accessible show, performed by a band dedicated to making electronic music without laptops or sequencers. In fact, not only will you not find a laptop on Holy Fuck’s stage, but you’ll also discover instruments that come with a junkyard aesthetic: film modulators, and a Casio mouth organ.

The group has emerged from a Toronto scene with a vast and supportive music community, one that embraces many genres and in which most performers have more than one musical project going. Although Holy Fuck don’t want to be perceived, as the group’s Brian Borcherdt puts it over the phone, as "hippie lovefest" musicians, their writing process has been somewhat loose, improvisatory, and collaborative. The band has also included a rotating cast of Toronto musicians, which has led some to dub the ensemble an "evil supergroup," Borcherdt says. Still, regardless of what they play and whom they play with, Holy Fuck remain an exciting live band — though I’m still not going to use the easy exclamatory.

HOLY FUCK

With A Place to Bury Strangers, White Denim, and Veil Veil Varnish

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Going solo

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February 19, 2008

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Regarding the recent column on women who can’t have orgasms [1/30/08]: I hate to say it, but it looks like you phoned this one in. Where are the partners in the equation? If you were the boyfriend, wouldn’t it seem rude for your girlfriend to say, "I’m going to put you on hold while I play with toys to feel better sexually"? I think it would be better for her to say, "We need to talk," then describe what’s going on with her sexual responses and feelings. Why shut him out? That doesn’t help the relationship. They can figure it out together; maybe it can even be a playful exercise in experimentation. If he can’t deal, then he wasn’t the right boyfriend for her anyway.

I really do enjoy your column.

Love,

All about the Teamwork

Dear Team:

Hey, that’s OK. I really do enjoy your feedback. I actually didn’t phone this one in, though. I told the young women to put their boyfriends on hold for a while because partnered sex was not working for them. And desperately trying to have a good time works about as well in bed as it does out on the town on New Year’s Eve, which is to say, not at all. If I neglected to tell the young women that they ought to at least notify the boyfriends that they would be checking out for a bit to do some exploration on their own, well, that was sloppy, and I do apologize. (Girls, tell your boyfriends why you’re not having sex for a while, OK?) But I stand by my original suggestion that they should, indeed, skip the partnered sex in favor of masturbation until they can at least say with some conviction that they know what an orgasm feels like.

I said in the original column that it isn’t fair, but women often get out of touch with their sexual responses in a way that’s pretty rare for men. And although women certainly have no lock on extreme self-consciousness, what gets in our way is a mostly female blend of "Oh no, he’s looking at me and he’ll see I don’t look like [insert current icon here]" and "Oh no, I’m taking too long. What if he thinks I’m selfish or gets bored?" plus fear of losing self-control and looking slutty. And sometimes the only way to ditch all of that stuff is to run away alone.

I also mentioned Lonnie Barbach and Betty Dodson but somehow forget to include Julia Heiman and Joseph LoPiccolo, whose Becoming Orgasmic (Prentice Hall, 1976) has been around since the ’70s and originated some of the ideas I toss around as though they were obvious, which I realize they are not. Heiman and LoPiccolo do not begin their program with "tell your partner what you like" or "masturbate in front of him" or any of the other fairly advanced techniques that sex experts throw at women who are having trouble with orgasms (I’m sorry, I’m enough of a geek that I can’t see that phrase without thinking, immediately but unhelpfully, of tribbles). Instead, it starts way back, with examining your history and your ideas about sexuality before you even get close to literal physical examination — and when you do get there, you get there alone. (For those who prefer their sex help with early ’90s hair, there is a video version, also called Becoming Orgasmic [Sinclair Institute, 1993], which you can order online.)

The idea of solo exploration before allowing the partner back into the bedroom reminds me of something else (besides tribbles, that is), and now I realize what it is. It’s all very similar to the late, lamented (he seemed like a nice guy, and he sure wrote a useful book) therapist Bernie Zilbergeld’s well-known program for overcoming premature ejaculation in his (please forgive me) seminal book The New Male Sexuality (Bantam, 1984), which was rooted in the work of Masters and Johnson. You start slowly, with guided imagery and masturbation, and not even particularly fun masturbation. Gradually, over weeks or months, you add partnered activities. The program works much better for men in stable partnerships, but that doesn’t mean the partner is involved every step of the way.

So no, I didn’t mean to imply that the anorgasmic girls’ club ought to nail up a permanent "No boyz allowed" sign, and of course I think it would be silly and almost certainly destructive to embark on such a program without fully informing any partners first. But if the problem is compounded of various parts self-consciousness, bad messages, fear of judgment, and just plain fear, then no, I don’t think taking one’s very first, faltering steps toward sexual self-confidence in front of an audience is necessarily the best idea.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Bent empire

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February 19, 2008

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REVIEW Holy glowing gonads! That’s what popped into my head — as my eyes popped out — when I entered the second room of the de Young Museum’s gorgeous "Gilbert and George" exhibition, which encompasses 30 years and 65 pieces of the British duo’s video, graphic, and two-dimensional sculpture work. There, two neon-explosive series of four humongous photomontages — Death Hope Life Fear (1984) and Shitty Naked Human World (1994) — are hung directly opposite each other, tugging the viewer into a phosphorescent hallway of actual shit and roses.

The first quadripartite series is peppered with the pair’s customary images of ethnically diverse underage hustlers, English roses, and collaged ziggurats of the artists themselves, magically combined to suggest all that was evil and delicious about the Thatcherite ’80s. The second, famously, floats giant turds against a backdrop of luminescent color and naked shots of the artists’ ass cracks and shriveled penises. Both sets are gloriously naughty, and when I caught a glimpse of prim society matron Dee Dee Wilsey standing perplexed beneath World‘s giant ball of flying crap, I almost lost it.

The rest of the exhibit goes on like this: feces fly, sperm spurts, blood boils, men and boys bare all, and enough sacred cows are roasted to fill a few Sizzler menus. And always, the deadpan artists peek through the mayhem like two chipped teacups adrift on a postcolonial ocean of desire. Even though Gilbert was born in Italy, the inseparable pair, with their matching worsted suits, impeccable manners, and sexually coy public personae, are so very British. Surely they’re commenting, from their tidy little studio in Spitalfields, East London, on the wreck and temptations of empire?

The show’s first room, dedicated to the artists’ early graphic work, contains some excellent aesthetic tingles but mostly concerns itself visually with a rote investigation of the possibilities of red, white, and black. You can sense Gilbert and George limiting their palette to a trio of fussy tones perhaps to excuse their content, fairly outré for the ’70s fine art world: spray-painted penis graffiti (1978’s The Penis), sticky puns on orientalism (1974’s Cherry Blossom No. 1), and other furtive steps into the realm of rebellious hyperinfantilism they would soon make their own.

It was during this nascent period that Gilbert and George developed their singular style: mixing multiple photographs of themselves with those of their immediate environs to make a single image, then blowing it up enormously and subdividing it into a grid of framed panels hung flush with one another, like a stained-glass window of perfect squares. As their artistic journey progressed and as the show winds through the basement galleries, their pictures burst with clashing tints and increasingly weirder experiments with displaced symmetry.

Various themes — ’80s youth-culture fetishism (for hipsters infatuated with fluorescent leg warmers, this is the show of the century), the tormented and fashionable spiritual journeys of the ’90s, a pungent streak of antipapism, and more than a few dips into pedophilia — are given the scatological Manic Panic rainbow treatment. Then the 2006 Terror pictures arrive, made in response to the London bus bombings, and the palette recollapses into a stunned black, red, and white, the English roses become torturous thorns, and pilfered headlines like "Police Quiz Bomb Suspect’s Father" are scrawled across each panel. So maybe there are limits?

Crime cameras for the defense

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February 19, 2008

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EDITORIAL We’ve always been dubious about San Francisco’s crime cameras. Filming everyone who passes through a public space creates severe civil liberties problems. There are real First Amendment issues. And as far as we can tell, the spy cams don’t work very well: none of the 178 cameras on Housing Authority property have ever led to an arrest in a homicide case. Chief Heather Fong told the Police Commission on Feb. 6 that her officers have requested footage nearly 80 times but only twice was it at all useful.

From the first days when the city began talking about installing the cameras, the American Civil Liberties Union and others pointed out that all the electronic surveillance on high-crime street corners would do was drive crime to other places. The commission has mandated that the cameras be turned off during political demonstrations, and some critics, including commissioner David Campos, are watching very closely to see if all of this intrusive electronic surveillance is making the city any safer.

But if we’re going to have crime cameras, they ought to be used to protect the innocent.

As G.W. Schulz reports on page 16, the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office has an interest in using the footage. Last August two young African American men were arrested and charged with robbing a pair of airline workers at the corner of 14th Street and Mission. The alleged robbers insisted they hadn’t been at that corner; in fact, they said, they were two blocks away, at 16th Street and Mission, the entire time.

That should have been easy to prove: there are cameras at 16th Street and Mission. But the city’s Department of Emergency Management refused to turn over the video footage to the public defender. Only by chance and the intervention of a conscientious police inspector was the lawyer for the two men able to get the tapes — which proved that the young men, who faced long prison sentences, were entirely innocent.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi says there are at least a dozen other examples of incidents when the cameras could have proved one of his clients innocent — but the local law enforcement authorities won’t give up the pictures.

That’s crazy. If the cameras can be used for prosecution, they ought to be available to lawyers for people who want to establish an alibi. There’s little or no risk here: defense lawyers are officers of the court, sworn to protect confidential evidence, and they are routinely given access to sensitive law enforcement information. The entire principle of a fair trial requires that the defense have as much opportunity to prove innocence as the prosecution does to prove guilt — and in most cases all of the state’s evidence has to be turned over to the defense. If cops and prosecutors can see the city’s crime-camera tapes, why can’t the other side?

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, a former public defender, has introduced legislation that would allow defense lawyers access to the tapes; it’s a sensible, practical measure that ought to win easy approval. But Kevin Ryan, the Republican former United States attorney who runs Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office of criminal justice, is trying to scuttle Sandoval’s bill. This is exactly the sort of thing we were worried about when Newsom gave that job to an old-fashioned law-and-order type.

Newsom needs to show his cards on this issue. Does the mayor really think the cameras should be used only to lock people up and never to set them free? That would be an astonishing stance for a San Francisco mayor. Instead of leaving this to his aides, Newsom needs to come out in support of Sandoval’s bill and give Ryan a little primer on justice, San Francisco–style.

From Juliet to Mother Teresa and Mrs. Bates

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February 12, 2008

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Born in Argentina and raised in England, Olivia Hussey was just 15 when she was chosen to play li’l miss Capulet in the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. Since then she’s had a bewilderingly diverse career that encompasses work with Burt Lancaster ("a lovely gentleman"), Vanessa Redgrave ("such a giving lady"), and Michael Jackson (Hussey acted in an unreleased Jackson music video that also featured Lou Ferrigno), as well as legendary softcore directors Radley Metzger and Zalman King. Hussey has played the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa, and Norman Bates’s mom. She’s done voice work on Pinky and the Brain and Nintendo games. She appeared in the infamous 1973 musical version of Lost Horizon and starred in the 1974 mother of all slasher flicks, Black Christmas. She’s been in adaptations of Sir Walter Scott, Stephen King, and Harold Robbins. Her résumé also includes Turkey Shoot (a.k.a. Escape 2000), a particularly nasty and effective 1980 Australian spin on "The Most Dangerous Game."

In addition to acting gigs, the still gorgeous 56-year-old Hussey remains busy with her clothing line of romantic kaftans and tunics, which are quite beautiful. She’s also a sales rep for mangosteen beverage ZanGo (the health benefits of which had not yet been determined as of deadline by yours truly). She recently spoke with me by phone from her Los Angeles home. The interview had been delayed by a home emergency.

OLIVIA HUSSEY I really have to apologize for missing your call earlier.

SFBG No problem, but as punishment my questions will now be limited to Lost Horizon and Turkey Shoot.

OH Oh god! But people do ask me about Turkey Shoot. I laugh about it as one of the worst movies ever made. Yet a friend of mine in Rome loves it — he hosts regular screenings.

SFBG I actually heard your Romeo and Juliet before seeing it. A junior high English teacher played the soundtrack to our class, which laughed uncontrollably because there’s so much panting. Of course, it made sense in context later on.

OH Oh yes. Franco [Zeffirelli] really pushed us for what he called "that breathlessness of youth." He was obsessed with it.

SFBG Speaking of which, your breasts were so pushed-up — you must have been extremely tightly corseted.

OH I was! A lot of the clothes were very imperial style, [with] high-breasted velvet. But to get them even more so I had interior corsets pulled tight — it was really hard to breathe. Sometimes they had to take breaks between shots simply because the costumes drenched me with sweat.

SFBG Your Romeo, Leonard Whiting — are you still in touch?

OH We’re still close; I just spoke to him last week. Most actors do maybe a hundred films, and they’re lucky if they do one real classic that’s remembered. Romeo and Juliet is still shown to students everywhere. I get e-mails from young people all over the world. It’s such an honor.

SFBG What was it like working with Zeffirelli on both Romeo and Juliet and Jesus of Nazareth?

OH He’s the best. In a perfect world I would have worked with him only, forever. People always ask if I had a crush on Romeo, but I had a crush on Franco! The man had so much passion for what he did.

SFBG Your career slowed down for a few years immediately afterward.

OH I was offered all kinds of things. But when I was the hottest young actress in the world, I didn’t feel like acting. I’m that kind of person.

SFBG You got very busy later on, though. What are some of your other personal favorite movies or roles?

OH I loved doing a 1974 low-budget film in Canada with a new director, Bob Clark — Black Christmas. We had a blast. Much later I auditioned for the Steve Martin film Roxanne, and he stuck around just to meet me. He said, "You starred in one of my favorite films of all time." I said, "Oh, Romeo and Juliet?" But it was Black Christmas. He’d seen it 10 or 12 times.

SFBG Any particularly unpleasant experiences?

OH I didn’t like doing [the all-star 1978 Agatha Christie mystery] Death on the Nile. I had agoraphobia at the time, and that was really hard. On the other hand, Peter Ustinov was so much fun, Angela Lansbury an absolute delight, and David Niven lovely. We were all so excited to meet Bette Davis — she was such a legend. But it’s awful to work with someone who’s just unpleasant.

Also, three weeks into rehearsals for Lost Horizon, I knew it was going to be bad. [Costume designer] Jean Louis kept asking me, "Are you eating too much?" and letting out my waistlines. I was afraid to tell the studio I was pregnant.

Activism brings hyphy back to Berkeley

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February 8, 2008

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hyphy flyer_front sml.bmp

By Jamilah King

Almost a week before the media was glowing with tales of unprecedented numbers of youth voters hitting the poles in this week’s primary elections, hundreds of young activists and music heads made their power known in Berkeley.

Last week, Cal’s Activism Right There conference brought new attention to the intersection of art and politics. The week-long conference culminated in a night of performances last Friday, Feb. 1. The night began with a panel that featured five generations of Cal activists, including Bettina Abtheker and onetime Guardian columnist Jeff Chang, who dissected everything from organizing during the Free Speech Movement to the myth of defeat during the Reagan years. The event also featured sick performances by spoken word artists, including a group from the Philadelphia called Ammo and iLL-Literacy and thieir band the Hi-Lifes.

But the climax of the event came when Zion I took the stage. Savvy bloggers have already detailed the sheer energy of the performance. As dozens – it looked like hundreds – of young folks crowded onto the stage and went dumb in what Zion I called one of their livest performances, the power of the hip-hop generation was felt loud and clear (pardon the poor video quality):

Ficks’s Sundance (and Slamdance) picks

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February 6, 2008

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1. Downloading Nancy (US) As the movie unfolds, the self-destructive couple at the center of Johan Renck’s film enabled me to feel what they could not. I was hypnotized by Nancy‘s bitter, snowy sadness (emphasized by Christopher Doyle’s camera work); it forced me to sob and, at the same time, made me want to run toward the exit. In fact, dozens of people left during the press screening, and not in a casual way. Watching it twice in two days made it clear that knowing the plot would affect the experience. Just watch this film.

2. Momma’s Man (US) A man hides at his parents’ home to figure out his mid-midlife crisis while his wife and newborn child await his return. Filmed with director Azazel Jacobs’s real parents in their real home, this is a throwback to the great films that Sundance showcased in the early 1990s.

3. Funny Games U.S. (UK/US/France) For those who don’t understand why Austrian bad boy Michael Haneke remade his 1997 intellectual torture-porn classic shot for shot, blow for blow … well, how about the fact that Americans don’t like subtitles? For those who haven’t seen the original, prepare to be traumatized.

4. Paranormal Activity (US) A couple buy a video camera to record the unexplained occurrences happening in their house while they sleep, and I was holding my breath though most of the film’s subtle freakiness. Oren Peli’s chiller, which played at the Slamdance Film Festival and is about to screen at San Francisco IndieFest, is worthy of its comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.

5. Pariah (US) A young lesbian struggles with her identity at school, at the clubs, and at home in this short by Dee Rees, which presents the most honest 27 minutes you’ll see this year. Luckily, it’s going to be extended into a feature. Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire) packs quite a punch as a confused father.

6. My Mother’s Garden (US) Cynthia Lester’s bare-all documentary (winner of the Slamdance Jury Honorable Mention) sensitively explores a mother’s hoarding disorder and her children’s difficult job of helping her understand her problem. Directed by the woman’s daughter, it conveys a similar familial love as Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation.

7. Because Washington Is Hollywood for Ugly People (US) With the best title of the fest, Ken Tin-Kin Hung’s hyperactive video game collage has meticulous designs of political figures fighting one another while inhabiting celebrity bodies. MC Paul Barman narrates this clusterfuck, bringing it to the level of downright genius. Also worth watching is Hung’s five-minute prepresidential election battle Gas Zappers.

8. Hamlet 2 (US) Finally, a movie that made me laugh! This vehicle to help British comedian Steve Coogan make his United States crossover has him playing a Dudley Moore–esque high school teacher who decides to write and direct a sequel to Hamlet. Andrew Fleming’s satire was purchased for one of the highest prices in Sundance history ($10 million, by Focus Features), and its first and last half hours are some of the funniest things I’ve seen in years. Thank gawd, because all of those cynical films were starting to take their toll.

Hungry men

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February 6, 2008

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"This is not a midlife crisis," 51-year-old John Zeigler insists. "I see this as a wonderful adventure." But when the this in question is a 3,000-mile rowboat race across the Atlantic Ocean, it’s hard not to speculate about his motivation. Zeigler’s teammate, 41-year-old Tom Mailhot, shares Zeigler’s determination, not to mention his daddy issues — as Row Hard, No Excuses is quick to point out, both men feel they have something to prove to their respective fathers (perhaps by coincidence, the doc’s director, San Francisco’s Luke Wolbach, coproduced the film with his father). After a failed hockey career and an early exit from college, Mailhot is dead set on rowing his way to victory: "It’s important to me to finish what I’ve said I’m going to do."

But back up a sec. Yeah, I said 3,000 miles, all the way from the Canary Islands to Barbados. The Atlantic Rowing Challenge is no joke, with duos spending 50 to 100 days at sea in hand-built boats that contain all of their food and other supplies. It also requires $19,000 in entry fees, not to mention time away from jobs and families. "This is really a mind game," one of the other participants notes; the race draws a colorful, international crowd of serious athletes who, necessarily, are all a little nuts. At least, that’s what Zeigler and Mailhot discover once they’re adrift on the ocean: close quarters shared between "a perfectionist and a bull" draw subterranean personality conflicts into the boiling sun; the task of rowing, rowing, rowing can cause inconceivably bizarre injuries (including a tremendous butt rash that nearly cripples one of the men); and transcendent moments, when they finally come, can involve some mighty trippy hallucinations.

Row Hard, No Excuses relies quite a bit on video-diary footage shot by the men, and as the days stretch on the film’s themes of competition, masculinity, and — no matter how in shape these dudes are — aging come into undeniable focus. Similar in some ways to Touching the Void (2003), Row Hard is especially effective in illustrating how extreme physical conditions can lay bare a person’s true self; the race also helps both men gain new appreciation for their lives on dry land. The press notes specifically ask reviewers not to reveal how the men fare in the race — so I won’t — but even as it approaches, the finish line seems less important than Row Hard‘s deeper message of self-improvement by any means necessary.

After seeing the muscle-bound geezer posing in the promo photo for The Bodybuilder and I, you might be surprised to hear the film is pretty similar to Row Hard, No Excuses. Made by Canadian Bryan Friedman, it is ostensibly about Friedman’s father, Bill, a 59-year-old who found his way into the competitive bodybuilding world after a self-esteem-crushing second divorce. But Bryan, who spews some unnecessarily literal voice-over, quickly lets us know he never liked his father because Bill was basically AWOL for Bryan’s entire life; he also finds Bill’s new pursuit utterly ridiculous. After witnessing Pops bake under a tanning lamp, Bryan muses, "Here’s a guy who could spend so much time and energy on a bizarre hobby but who could never spend any time and energy on a relationship with his own son."

It soon becomes clear that The Bodybuilder and I is more about the I than anything else. Oh, you get well-oiled, senior-discount-qualifying beefcakery, but you have to sit through some major family drama to get there. Still, the circumstances are so oddball (seriously — would you want to see your estranged dad in a Superman Speedo?) and Bryan Friedman so unflinchingly honest about his misery that the film’s shortcomings are eventually overcome. Once Bill’s big competition rolls around, the weepy father-son bonding feels well earned — plus, you won’t want to miss cinema’s most gob-smacking "How does that head go on that body?" moment since 2001’s Ichi the Killer.

THE BODYBUILDER AND I

Sat/9, 5 p.m.; Sun/10, 2:45 p.m.; Roxie

ROW HARD, NO EXCUSES

Feb. 16, 2:45 p.m.; Feb 17, 9:30 p.m.; Victoria

The 10th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs Feb. 7–20 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF. For tickets (most films $10) and additional information, see www.sfindie.com.

Furries, for real

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February 6, 2008

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Super Furry Animals are a mischievous lot. Having marked the universe with their tech-pop grandeur for 15 years, they must now keep the world wondering where their music will pop up next and in what form. For their new album, Hey Venus! (Rough Trade), the Welsh quintet maintain their love of vast, Donald Fagen–esque noodling but have stripped down into a craftily introspective niche. In keeping with their new sound, they have a secret weapon in the studio, and it isn’t bleeding-edge sonic wizardry or Timbaland at the desk. It’s a dulcimer — a hammer dulcimer, to be exact, and it’s wielded on some songs with as much aplomb as any siren, blip, or squawk that’s graced any of their previous seven full-lengths. What gives? "For some reason, [the album] has a ‘band playing in a room’ kind of mood," lead vocalist Gruff Rhys offers simply, speaking on the phone from Cardiff, Wales, in early January. "Nobody brought any samplers to the recording sessions."

Super Furry Animals emerged from the Welsh capital city amid a wave of other acts, effectively marking a movement that included bands like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Catatonia. The core members of the group had originally come together as a techno outfit — a background that set them apart from their contemporaries. The group’s first album, Fuzzy Logic (Creation, 1996), saw the combo establish its mastery of cheekily strident pop tunes. Its next release, Radiator (Flydaddy, 1997), upped the ante with an inventive melodic complexity that the Furries had obviously already mastered.

The band made its mark by continuing to issue fearless, originally crafted indie rock that stemmed at least in part from Rhys’s schizoid musical background: he was in a jangle-pop band called Emily before moving on to noise ensemble Ffa Coffi Pawb. The Furries’ next release, Guerilla (Flydaddy, 1999), is a densely layered technorock symphony that ranges between the cheeky blips of songs like "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)" and the introspective balladeering of tracks like "Fire in My Heart." Each disc since has been notable for a particular reason, whether it’s an all-Welsh double album (2000’s Mwng [Placid Casual]), a special DVD with a video crafted for each song (2001’s Rings around the World [Sony]), or the quirky explorations into spaced-out country rock and überharmonic ruminating on recent albums Phantom Power (XL, 2003) and Love Kraft (XL/Beggars, 2005). Hey Venus!, Rhys explains, is partially based on the mellow mood he described earlier in our conversation. "In the past I wrote all the lyrics, and then the last two years [the band has become] more confident and has started to bring complete songs to the soup." He pauses, then confirms, "I suppose this was a songwriting kind of record."

Which brings us back to that dulcimer, most prominently used on the bittersweet "Carbon Dating." It’s a signature Furries multicultural hash: a kaleidoscopic ballad that begins as a carnival waltz before morphing into Motown–meets–Ennio Morricone doo-wop surrealism. Rhys credits its composer, keyboard player Cian Ciárán, calling it "the most beautiful song on the record" before explaining that Ciárán also played dulcimer on it. Demonstrating the band’s virtuosity and playfulness in the studio, the dulcimer is showcased like a sonic effect throughout Hey Venus!, echoing like a ghost as all other instruments drop away. Lest fans think the Furries have gone fully folk, Rhys laughs and explains the instrument’s lure: "Dulcimer for us represents a lot of the old Michael Caine cold war spy movies. He always had [it] going on in his soundtracks."

Cosmopolitan kitsch aside, Hey Venus! runs an emotional and socioeconomic gamut, albeit with a wink of the eye. On the Shangri-Las throwback "Runaway," lovers flee each other while wistfully recalling the other’s "banking details." (The video is an ’80s-inspired romp with Matt Berry of United Kingdom comedy series The Mighty Boosh.) There are also moments of quintessential SFA lyrical humor, as on "Baby Ate My Eightball," which offers the apologetic understatement of the decade, "See you on the other side / Sorry to cut your life so short." Equally acerbic is the track "Suckers!," which offers a straightforward litany of gripes concerning the world and its gullible inhabitants. Rhys wryly calls it a "miserable, complaint-rock song" that came to him at a dark moment on a rainy day in Cardiff: "Sometimes I sing that song tongue in cheek, and at other times I sing it and it’s absolutely sincere."

Rhys sounds like he’s still skating on that schizoid musical past. Yet while Hey Venus! seems to function as a musical exorcism of sorts, the frontman sees it as part of the natural order of the Super Furried Universe, with each recording a reaction to the last. He suggests that the next effort will depart from their current space age moodiness. "Maybe next time we’ll bring back the electronics," he says. He pauses and laughs before adding, "And I can start writing lyrics that are less exposed!"

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

With Holy Fuck and Here Here

Sat/9, 9 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

G-Spot: Everyone’s a wiener

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February 5, 2008

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› marke@sfbg.com

You’d think that amid all of the bell tolling and hand-wringing about DIY online media proliferation, professionally produced gay porn would have gone the way of the floppy disk and dial-up modem long ago. (Remember waiting 20 minutes for free stud-muffin bitmaps to download, pixel by aching pixel, onto your 10-inch monitor? Ah, AOL blue balls. Whither the ’90s?)

But no – gay porn is the new fireplace. You can hardly turn around in most finer homo homes and gardens without some two-dimensional boy butter spattering your delicate cheekbones. Gooey! And every edgy hetero is at least partially versed in the extensive oeuvres of quasi-professional online sites like Bait Bus or His First Huge Cock, if only because sticky fingers often click too quickly on flickering banner ads.

Gay porn’s also big business, of course, and an especially homegrown one. Almost all of the most profitable studios are based in San Francisco – a rare case of several giants of an industry being located within mere blocks of one another. SoMa has become the Wall Street of Crisco.

The reasons behind this multimillions-generating clusterfuck are myriad: mainly, the local economic advantages, cultural environment, and plethora of scruffy multiculti boys (all the rage among a rapidly globalized audience) make SF a much more fertile gay porn hot spot than the traditionally down-and-dirty San Fernando Valley. Also, many big studios are the bastard children of SF’s Falcon Studios, the granddaddy purveyor of male video erotica headed by the late, irascible Chuck Holmes, for whom our groundbreaking Charles M. Holmes LGBT Community Center was affectionately named.

And it doesn’t hurt that Silicon Valley is a whip flick down the freeway. Gay porn studios have been aggressively savvy about riding the online wave to solvency, even if lately that’s meant a hilariously regrettable spate of behind-the-scenes blogs and vids that feature pec-implanted gym queens sashaying nude around Palm Springs pools and fussing over which pair of snakeskin trousers go with which Tony Lamas. Decisions.

Yet despite the buttloads of profit, cornered markets, community accolades, and extensive and rabid fan bases, gay porn studios – like cuddly-wuddly gay porn stars themselves – have massive inferiority complexes. They want recognition, dammit! Thus the annual Golden Globes of filmed homosexual obscenities, the GayVN Awards, presented by venerable gay porn insider news source GayVN (recent headline: "Jock Itch in the Can!"). Last year’s awards presentation at the Castro Theatre — open to the public – was a raucous, substar-studded affair featuring MC Kathy Griffin and more fashion nightmares than you could shake a spangled man boa at. This year’s awards show expands to the Giftcenter Pavilion – because, really, doesn’t this celebration require an entire pavilion? – and although no D-list host has been announced, fan tickets are being snatched up at a robo-thrusting pace.

A quick and gleeful scan gleans from among the 2008 nominees: Gaytanamo for Best Leather Video (when, oh when, will someone make Fahrenheit 9"x11"?); Tiger’s Eiffel Tower: Paris Is Mine!, Gunnery Sgt. McCool, and Rocks and Hard Places for Best Video; the mathematically challenging Bottom of the Ninth: Little Big League 3 for Best Direction, and, inevitably, Buckback Mountain (Best Specialty Release) and Bi Pole Her (Best Bisexual Video, duh). There are awards for Best Box Cover Concept, Best Music, and the always bracingly racist Best Ethnic-Themed Video: (Arabian Tales 1-2? Spilling the Tea? Queens Plaza Pickup 2, surprisingly not about migrant-worker prostitution? Only the judges can decide.

But most enticing of all, barring any prerecorded acceptance speeches — and despite the writer’s strike – there will be actual humans in attendance, the real faces behind the fornication, in all of their fleshy solidity, crossing their powder-encrusted pinkies and gazing hopefully, hazardously into the glare of their peers’ applause or opprobrium. The meltdowns will be spectacular!

GAYVN AWARDS

Feb. 16, 6 p.m., $100

Giftcenter Pavilion

888 Brannan, SF

(415) 861-7733

www.gayvnawards.com

Dinner for Dr. Paul

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February 5, 2008

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It was a casual dinner affair for the supporters of Ron Paul on election night, with roughly thirty people showing up for dinner under the big screen at Thai Stick, 925 O’Farrell St. As the results came in from around the country, party-goers casually looked up from their animated conversations to remark at the TV screen.
George Gaboury, self-described “media support”, struggled with a projector and screen, but was finally able to set up a slide show of the groups’ past exploits – including the staged Ron Paul “TeaParty” in December. The projected video showed attendees throwing boxes with words like “Patriot Act” and “WTO” written on them off of a pier near the Ferry Building.
“For people who have been abused by the government for so long, this is almost therapy,” Gaboury said, watching the screen.

ZZ top — the return of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

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January 31, 2008

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The loaded title of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait promises a rendering of the iconic and volcanic footballer and of the century in which we reside. This Friday, Gordon and Parreno’s one-of-a-kind film begins a return engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In honor of the film, and in conjunction with our recent “Video Mutants” cover package, here is a link to my extensive interview with Gordon about the film from last year, and a trailer that gives you a mere taste of Zidane‘s sensurround properties when experienced in a movie theater.

Kuchar coup

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January 30, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The drawings and paintings of George and Mike Kuchar are brightly colored, bosomy, and bulbous bouquets of bodacious flesh. Those bountiful breasts belong to women in George’s 1962 painting Voodoo Ceremony and in his 1977 Missionary Attack, in which a topless lady sporting an octopus skirt threatens to spear another wearing tiger skin pants and leather boots. But in Mike’s art the big bazookas belong to men. Margaret Tedesco, whose [2nd floor projects] space is presenting work by the Kuchar brothers, says one local filmmaker who recently visited her gallery compared the nipples of the men in Mike’s drawings to pacifiers.

The counterlogic of that observation is perfect, even if the nipples of a man in Mike’s Gay Heart Throbs, No. 3 also look like flying saucers. In that acrylic painting a guy in black leather holds a gift of flowers behind his perky buttocks as he talks to a young blond buck busting out of his tied-up shirt and cutoff shorts like a male Dolly Parton — or like a country version of George and Mike’s fellow underground filmmaker Peter Berlin.

Early on in the poignant and pungent memoir Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (Zanja Press, 1997), George writes that his and Mike’s interest in art began when their mother gave them paper and pencils and told them to have fun. Though their materials have since switched to film, video, watercolor, marker, and acrylic, the fun remains: without even trying, Tedesco’s show is a rebuff to the unfortunate abundance of contemporary art spaces, big and small, that have lost a sense of pleasure. Both George’s commercial art schooling — which included a spell spent drawing the weather on television, detailed wonderfully in Reflections — and Mike’s commissioned work for gay publications like Manscape and First Hand possess great humor, as well as perspectives so distinct that they might reach out and playfully nipple-tweak one’s assumptions about female and male beauty.

"I don’t care too much for macho," Mike tells the poet and novelist Eileen Myles in a short essay Myles wrote for the [2nd floor projects] show. "I like cuddly; sweetness." That warmth radiates from pen-and-ink pieces such as the idyllic Beefcake BC, in which, as Myles notes, a man rides a brontosaurus as if it were a surfboard. In the G-rated Triassic Terror a tyrannosaur and a pterodactyl wreak havoc, but there are emotional undercurrents in Jungle Jeopardy, in which one Tarzan rescues another who is Christlike in his pain.

Taking a different comic book tack, George renders mythic creatures such as Bigfoot (who has pendulous pecs, of course) and the Jersey Devil. Like his twin brother, though, he’s not afraid to try a little tenderness. From 1976, Jon is subtly in thrall to the hills and valleys of its subject’s nude backside. The acrylic-on-canvas Bocko (1970) complements and perhaps predates Joe Brainard’s wonderful oil portraits of his boyfriend Kenward Elmslie’s whippet Whippoorwill — even if George’s beloved Bocko weren’t an Alsatian, he would still make an ideal cover star for J.R. Ackerley’s classic 1956 book My Dog Tulip (Random House). Add these once-hidden treasures to Bruce Conner’s assemblages and ink works and to the lively circles of Manny Farber’s paintings, and you have the seeds for a lively survey dedicated to art by Bay Area filmmakers and critics.

GEORGE AND MIKE KUCHAR: PAINTINGSDRAWINGSPAINTINGS DRAWINGSPAINTINGS

Through Feb. 24

For details go to projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com

Video Mutants: Mike Kelley on chopping, screwing, and playing with Superman

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January 29, 2008

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day is done dancer sml.jpg

We’re not quite done with artist Mike Kelley, profiled this week in Sonic Reducer. Easy-going, amiable, and eager to ramble at length on the phone from his base in LA, Kelley – a founding member of influential Ann Arbor, Mich., art-noise band Destroy All Monsters – will show his first feature, Day Is Done, Thursday, Jan. 31, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

SFBG: Day Is Done has been changed significantly since its installation at Gagosian Gallery?

Mike Kelley: Oh yes, it’s been radically changed, completely chopped up and intercut. When it was installed, it was on multiple screens and computer-synched, and because the space was so large, we would have it run at two points simultaneously. Nevertheless you couldn’t take it in as you would a normal film – it was spatialized and treated more as a sculpture, so you could sit and watch sections and follow it over to here and over to there. But it would be hard to follow it in a very linear way. And also you wouldn’t have this very purposeful crosscutting that you have in a single-channel version, where we take all the various scenes and treated them as if they were simultaneous action and played with that kind of filmic language.

Video Mutants: Problem solving with Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad

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January 28, 2008

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I knew I’d reached some level of pixel heaven a few minutes after putting Paper Rad’s Trash Talking (Load) into the DVD player. Or was it into the hard drive? Either way, that pixel portal to humor epiphanies opened when an animated character stopped jive walking and started telling me – in an ornery fashion – that the disc I was watching had no menu. Since the day of that digital bitch slap, I’ve encountered other brilliant uses of DVD formatting – the remote control menu of TV Carnage’s vintage-new Ouch Television My Brain Hurts is a maze of horrors, for example – but none quite so simply brilliant. The fact that it was followed by a sugared cereal version of a Duchamp-like explosion in a shingle factory helped. Paper Rad videos are seizures of pleasure.

Excerpt from Trash Talking DVD

Their latest video work subdues the frenzy, though. Some of the video mutants in this issue use YouTube to step outside of white cubes, while others – such as Kalup Linzy — are creating their own answers to TV genres. With Problem Solvers, Paper Rad are taking the latter idea to a paradoxical extreme, seeing what they can do within the time constraints of a common sitcom format. I recently spoke to collective member Jacob Ciocci.

SFBG: I know you have a performance at the Sundance Film Festival. Will it be a bombardment?
Jacob Ciocci: Cory [Arcangel] is going to do a couple of performances, and we’re going to play live music to Problem Solvers, the new 23-minute video.
It will be a bombardment, but not as much overload as some previous performances and videos, because Problem Solvers is a narrative work that tells the story of six characters.

Trailer for Trash Talking DVD

Video Mutants: Reflections of Damon Packard

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January 24, 2008

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Though Damon Packard considers himself a filmmaker, not a video artist, his wonderfully unique and often bizarre works are right at home in our Video Mutants issue.

Watch and learn, kids!

The trailer for The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary.

Reflections of Evil trailer.

Video Mutants: Kalup Linzy washes your eyes (and mind) out with soaps

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January 23, 2008

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Welcome to the party, welcome to the show. What are sweetberry club cakes? Wouldn’t you like to know!

To find out, you’ll just have to listen to “SweetBerry Shuffle” by Kalup Linzy, where Labisha will break it down for you. It’s worth the search: Whether it manifests as phone-crazed soap opera societal satire, animation, painting, or music, Linzy’s creativity — which can be glimpsed and heard on his own site and MySpace pages and seen in person through his gallery, Taxter and Spengemann — is pointedly funny. I recently spoke to him for a profile in this week’s video issue.

Asshole

Guardian: I want to begin by talking about the role or presence of soap opera within your videos. Did you have affection for the soaps and for melodrama?
Kalup Linzy: I grew up watching soap operas. I was raised by grandmother, but it sort of goes back to my great grandmother – she used to listen to Guiding Light on the radio. When it switched over to TV, she grew deaf, and somehow she would sit and watch soap operas all day long. We couldn’t turn the channel. If we were playing and went over to one of our aunt’s houses down the street, the same soap opera would be on.
By the time I turned 10 or 11, I knew what was going on [on the shows] and I started watching them as entertainment. They sort of inspired me to want to act and write. They struck that chord in me.

The Pursuit of Gay (Happyness)

Video Mutants

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January 23, 2008

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Welcome to our video issue. Video is exploding, and the mutants have taken over the means of production. YouTube ululations, Day-Glo animation, and crazed acts of appropriation are stretching like Shmoo from black boxes to boob tubes to white cubes and from laptop screens to live performances. Each video-active blast favors impulse and expression over obedience to old conventions — and further blurs forms and styles. Check out the below for our takes and double-takes on video artists who have us pressing play. (Johnny Ray Huston)

>>The man with the video camera
Douglas Gordon hits San Francisco with an image blitz
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Booby call
Lost in bizarre pop idolatry with Mike Kelley
By Kimberly Chun

>>Chopping, screwing and Superman
An interview with Mike Kelley
By Kimberly Chun

>>Prince of theme parkness
Damon Packard strikes back
By Cheryl Eddy

>>Rave damage
Ryan Trecartin cubes the internet death code
By Marke B.

>>Total nowhere emotion expansion
An interview with Ryan Trecartin
By Marke B.

>>Guiding light
Kalup Linzy will set you free
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Ride to da club
An interview with Kalup Linzy
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Shirtless on YouTube
The Passionistas take on Chris Crocker
By Myles Cooper

>>Trash talking
An interview with Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Thrower’s flames
The video nasties of Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Eight for 2008
Video activity to watch out for, from SF to beyond
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>VIEW:
***Paper Rad’s umbrella zombie datamosh mistake
***More vids by Paper Rad
***Vids by Damon Packard
***Vids by Ryan Trecartin

***Vids by Kalup Linzy

Video Mutants: Shirtless on YouTube

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January 23, 2008

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The Passionistas, “Wild West”

GAZE ON THE INTERNET I guess I’m a true romantic. I like my porn softcore. When I get in that certain mood, I visit YouTube to watch videos because I know they’ll never go too far. I’ll get off watching a mustached Austrian take a shower while fully clothed or a drunken dad mooning the camera. It’s repulsive enough to be sexy but harmless enough to be cute.

I must have watched thousands of videos like these without ever considering making one of my own. It wasn’t until I stumbled across an early viral video, "This and That" by Chris Crocker (of "Leave Britney alone!" fame), that I seriously considered making one for the Internet. What I saw was a young gay white boy with a Jennifer Aniston bob, screaming out "to the bitches that wanna fight me" in an accent halfway between Mo’nique’s and a Tennessee grandma’s. It wasn’t necessarily erotic, but there was something completely invading about Crocker’s gaze into the webcam — it was as though he activated that little gray box perfectly. He had the excitement of a Pinocchio with his strings recently cut and the entertaining intent of a sociopath like Chucky. I knew this was a car crash waiting to happen, and I immediately became addicted to Crocker’s videos.

I became Crocker’s friend on MySpace in December 2006 and followed the flood of video monologues posted almost daily. In topics that ranged from sarcastic beauty secrets and arguments with his grandmother to sexy dance videos and relationship advice, there was something very lonely about him. He wanted to be famous but was stuck living with his grandparents in a rural part of the South. With only the Internet and a camcorder, Crocker was able to independently create, in a little more than a year, an infrastructure of hundreds of thousands (and now millions) of viewers. A mixed audience of fans and haters, they all waited on his every move because he would do anything for the camera. As an artist, I was jealous of his popularity and brilliant consistency. I wanted in on his game.

My bandmate Aaron Sunshine and I decided we would start making Internet videos for our band, the Passionistas, as this would be a simple way to sate our incessant needs for humiliation and self-promotion. After our first attempt, an underviewed series of videos titled Haterz Beware targeted at a fictional group of people who spend their lives hating our band, we decided to make a short that would encapsulate everything that makes Internet video popular. Or so we thought.

Our goal was Internet popularity, so we wanted to make sure something sexy happened, and something violent too. We decided that the concept of Aaron burning me with a cigarette while we were both shirtless sounded too perfect not to do.

We sat in front of my iMac, a gift from my parents for my graduation from San Francisco State University two anticlimactic years ago, and took off our shirts. We opened QuickTime and clicked Record. Aaron seemed transfixed by the moment. He stared at the camera, then at the tender white of my forearm. He showed the glowing cigarette to the camera. Then, leering, he sadistically burned my wrist. It hurt like an Alien baby popping out of my arm. Fifteen minutes later it was on YouTube. Stupidity being a mainstay of the format, I was expecting grand popularity. We made sure to include lascivious and lurid tags in the video description, like twinks, shirtless, naked, burned, owchie, and sexy, so anyone searching with these words, or a combination thereof, would stumble upon our video. It reached about a thousand views in a little more than a week.

My rational mother somehow found out about the video and got very upset. She is a grade school teacher who lives in a pine tree–infested coastal art community. She made some really popular shabby-chic birdhouses in the 1990s. She’s recently returned to watercolors and has always loved making smiling figures with clay. My mother had no idea why somebody would make something so awful and hurtful. She was not at all thrilled when I explained that this video was an experiment done in the name of art. I told her that one day she’d understand, and I reluctantly removed it from YouTube.

So, to get back at her, I asked Santa for a camcorder and staged a Passionistas video for our song "Wild West" in her hot tub. Following one of the rules of Internet video popularity, I was, of course, shirtless and in my underwear. To contrast with my forest-filled hot tub scenes, I filmed Aaron brushing his hair and teeth and smoking in San Francisco — shirtless, of course. My second attempt at a viral video is doing all right in terms of views at the moment, but its popularity is not comparable to that of Crocker’s videos.

Crocker is more pathetic than me. Aaron and I had a chance to catch him in one of his first public appearances, in October 2007 at the Crib in San Francisco. It was that night that he proclaimed, "I don’t have talent — I only have fans." There is a certain sexy courage we possess only when we are alone. Crocker is in the vanguard, the best of many new artists broadcasting from the bedroom.

www.youtube.com/thepassionistas

>>Back to Video Mutants: The Guardian video art issue

Video Mutants: Booby call

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January 23, 2008

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can bring together cast-off crocheted critters and KISS? Early ’70s Ann Arbor, Mich., art noise and the Whitney Biennial? Vampires toiling in cubicles and Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty (DGC)? Mike Kelley, man, can.

Ouch — the allusions get bumpy after almost three hours of mind-altering video candy. The medium may be the favored art material of the moment, but it’s only one weapon at the disposal of the cofounder of Destroy All Monsters — the Stooges’ weirder kissing cousins — and the Dirty cover artist. Kelley’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he’s collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan. 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Religious icons, ’80s modern dancers, lousy Nazi rappers, bad comedians, and spacey witches and vampires dance, sing, and hold forth throughout the video musical’s 32 chapters, augmented by a Kelley-written soundtrack that encompasses gospel and techno, light pop and monkish drone. Say I’m lost in pop idolatry, but the most wonderfully bizarre moment in this lengthy bizarre wonder arrives during a painful singles mixer furnished with irksome chair-desks as the differences among the assembled women — two African Americans, a white lost Hee Haw extra, a rocker in full KISS makeup, and a gloomy witch — are highlighted by portraits of their respective all-American idols: Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, Garth Brooks, Gene Simmons, and Brandon Lee, all painted with clunky, thrift store–style passion. After getting an, erm, tongue lashing from the KISS girl for nattering about the largeness of some big stuffed bananas, the hick chick is forced to defend her painting of Brooks staring at a bare breast (in reality painted by Kelley). "But it ain’t even my tit — it’s my momma’s," the backwoods boob protests as the KISS fan sneers with all of Detroit Rock City’s blood-spitting wrath. "Gosh, I hope Garth don’t go for my momma and not for me!"

The rejoinder "That bitch is nuts!" might be a punch line to a half-cocked sitcom, but it’s also the perfect response to the old biddy dressing down a would-be school pageant Madonna for her posture or the blood-drenched hawker of a putf8um MasterCard that supports the "educational complex" — or any other denizen of Kelley’s jet-black-humored, bleakly antic fun house.

Looking back at the video now, however, Kelley can still picture changes to Day Is Done — each chapter a live-action re-creation of an extracurricular activity photo culled from a high school yearbook. For instance, the many students and office workers dressed as depressed vampires and gleeful witches seem a bit too trendy today, even for a man with a taste for monsters. "If I thought about it more, I would have done something less … au courant, I guess," Kelley drawls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Does he still glimpse kids in full goth regalia? A heavy sigh, then, "Yeah. Also, it’s kind of gone into the art world. A lot of gothy art is being made."

A self-described "maximalist" who has made noise for years as part of Destroy All Monsters — a forerunner of experimentalists here and abroad — and later on his own, the man once pegged as a major proponent of installation-oriented "clusterfuck aesthetics" is clearly driven to strike out in fresh directions all the time. Day Is Done, for example, emerged from his work with repressed memories and his Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school the Detroit native ever attended, with, he says, "all the parts I couldn’t remember left blank." The original idea for the video — shot over a few weeks in 2005 at an LA park, Kelley’s studio, and his alma mater, California Institute of the Arts — was to "fill in the blanks with screen memory."

"Also because this show was in New York, I thought doing something with a Broadway overtone would be funny because that’s something cultured New Yorkers are embarrassed about!" Kelley says, laughing.

Kelley is obviously still eager to venture into unexamined office parks of discomfort, provoking his viewers by pushing them into the dead spaces that fill the back lots of corporate break rooms and school yards. The artist’s well-known stuffed-animal works similarly evolved from an unspoken exchange with his audience. "When I first starting using that stuff, I was only working with things that were handmade, and it didn’t matter to me what they were — I was more interested in the idea of love and labor," Kelley explains. "But people were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there’s a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the ’80s."

Shortly after one of those discarded dolls popped up on the cover of Dirty, Kelley, bandmate Cary Loren, SY’s Thurston Moore, and critic Byron Coley put together the 1994 three-CD retrospective Destroy All Monsters: 1974–1976 for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label to document the original lineup’s work before the arrival of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton and the MC5’s Michael Davis in the band. The founding group re-formed, while Kelley has continued to work sound components into his artwork and make and release music on his Compound Annex imprint.

Has music video ever been part of Kelley’s Wagnerian compendium of interests? "I’ve never been asked!" he says. "I don’t think I would do one for myself — who would show it? It’ll just be another thing that sits in a box in storage, like all my records." Still, his freshly edited feature might work. "It generated a tremendous amount of music," the artist muses. "In a sense, Day Is Done is one giant music video." *

DAY IS DONE

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m., $6–<\d>$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.mikekelley.com

Thrower’s flames

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January 23, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW You can judge a book by its cover when the cover is as scarily impressive as the one for Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (Fab Press, 528 pages, $79.95). It’s a map of the United States, with each state composed of a fragment from a low-budget horror film. Blood drips from the edges of the South. The entire top of the Midwest is blocked by a large image of someone in an asbestos suit. He’s aiming a lively flamethrower directly at you and me.

Also sporting a pair of amazing inset spreads that showcase the title credits of 300 films, Thrower’s tome deserves a spot next to Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn, 1967), Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton University Press, 1992), Michael Weldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (Ballantine, 1983), and Bill and Michelle Landis’s Sleazoid Express (Simon and Schuster, 2002) on a healthily horrific bookshelf. Its closest relative in terms of loose format and interview content might be Incredibly Strange Films (RE/Search, 1986), but Thrower casts aside V. Vale’s coolness for the passion found in Danny Peary’s series of Cult Movies books.

More pointedly, Thrower’s study of American exploitation film from the 1970s through the mid-’80s applies terribly to the current moment. For one thing, recent Hollywood torture porn owes a multimillion-dollar influential debt to the small-time labors of twisted love celebrated by Nightmare USA. For another, Thrower is flashing a spotlight — or beaming a flashlight — on the American death drive at a time when this country seems increasingly or wholly out of touch with, and idiotically clueless about, its violent id. It helps that this catalogue of what United Kingdom censors called video nasties proves as visually and verbally lively as the toothy title grubs in The Deadly Spawn (1982).

And for a book bathed in blood and drawn to depressing and despairing expressions of murder such as the infamous Maniac (1980), Nightmare USA is surprisingly and endearingly warmhearted. "Watching the materialistic beach babes and sexist volleyball hunks of Slumber Party Massacre 3 (Sally Mattison, 1990) driving down a coastal road in an open-topped car listening to awful AM pop-rock, I hug myself with excitement, treasuring my affection for these bubbleheads and jackasses," Thrower writes. "They are my friends and I can’t wait to see them die." Themes of friendship also emerge from the book’s profiles — along with some equally unexpected juxtapositions. Deadly Spawn director Douglas McKeown now runs a storytelling group at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Center. Frederick Freidel, the director of Axe (1974), says his assistant consulted with esteemed critic Manny Farber. Joseph Ellison, director of Don’t Go in the House (1979), discusses jazz and watching Federico Fellini films and shares a photo of his film’s producer with a beaming Frank Capra.

That photo couldn’t be stranger, considering that Ellison’s truly scarifying film provides Nightmare USA with the fire on its front cover. That man in the asbestos suit is grafted from an infamous scene, set in a steel room, that — after decades of deciding it was beyond my threshold of experience — I recently discovered (thanks in part to my brave cohort Cheryl Eddy) is both superior to and an obvious source for Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). "Horror has always been sad to me," Ellison remarks with casual profundity to Thrower, who rightly states that Don’t Go in the House‘s scorching early centerpiece "takes the viewer through shock into a kind of stunned admiration." It’s up to you whether you go in the house, but I’ll be breaking the bank and getting ready for some heavy lifting when Thrower flames readers with volume two of Nightmare USA.

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Video Mutants: Prince of theme parkness

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January 23, 2008

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>>Click here to view some Damon Packard vids

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Try explaining a Damon Packard film to someone who hasn’t seen one and you will fail. The best you can achieve is a description: "It’s a sequel to Logan’s Run, kind of, but with a lot of 1984, clips from Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, and roller skaters jamming to ‘Never Knew Love like This Before.’<0x2009>"

Seriously, can you even imagine what that’s like? Step inside 2007’s SpaceDisco One and enter the world of a filmmaker who makes movies unlike anything you’ve seen before — except for the parts you have seen before. Every time he uses nonoriginal footage, it’s worth paying extraclose attention; though Packard would rather use only his own material, his choices of appropriated footage are never random. Why else would he include a clip of Dirk Benedict (Starbuck on the original Battlestar Galactica) padding dejectedly around the British Celebrity Big Brother house in a film that pays homage to — and mourns the lost aesthetic of — 1970s sci-fi movies?

"I’m not really into mashup-type stuff," the Los Angeles–based Packard explained to me. It was New Year’s Eve eve, and we were sitting in the basement at Artists’ Television Access — a dark, chilly space crammed with TV monitors and other electronic odds and ends. "In SpaceDisco, I didn’t plan on using any [nonoriginal] footage. It’s just a case of not having the money. It takes money to go out and shoot original footage. You need actors, props, costumes, and locations. That’s the short answer to it. [The nonoriginal footage] was just replacing things that I needed — I needed some shots of spaceships and things like that. For the most part the film is all original."

SpaceDisco One, in which Hollywood’s Universal City Walk stands in for the Ministry of Truth during the film’s 1984-inspired scenes, works real news footage into its narrative. At one point, a giant screen beaming the face of radio host Alex Jones attracts the attention of SpaceDisco‘s Winston Smith character — himself a result of Packard’s interest in recontextualizing familiar or favorite characters.

"I love the idea of taking characters from other films and utilizing them in some way — taking Arthur Frayn from Zardoz [and using him in] SpaceDisco," he said. In keeping with SpaceDisco‘s positioning as a Logan’s Run sequel, several of Packard’s leads are written as the daughters of characters from that film. "And of course Smith and O’Brien from 1984 — all sort of meeting up in the same universe. I like that idea, taking characters and settings from other films and coming up with a new adventure."

Anticipating my next question, he added, "I don’t know how that will ever translate into something in the [mainstream film] world professionally, because of copyright issues."

So far Packard hasn’t run into any cinema-related problems with the law, aside from being booted from a theme park while grabbing shots for 2002’s Reflections of Evil, an epically surreal study of LA paranoia. "[My films have all been] independent films made for no money and no distribution, or very minor distribution," he said. "Once it gets to a point where I have a budget and there’s real distribution, [using copyrighted material] would be a whole different situation."

He’s also never heard a peep from his celebrity targets, specifically Steven Spielberg (his childhood idol, who might frown on Reflections‘ depiction of Schindler’s List: The Ride) or George Lucas, who’s showered with ire in 2003’s The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary. That film manipulates DVD featurettes from the newer Star Wars films, with wraparound footage (reaction shots, responses to conversations, the occasional porn snippet) adding a whole new level to the average Jedi’s beef with Lucas. It’s payback for Greedo shooting first and Jar Jar Binks, but to Packard, Lucas’s addiction to technology is symptomatic of a bigger issue — how Hollywood films have changed dramatically in the past 30 years.

"I don’t dislike Lucas," Packard noted, though a viewing of the hilarious Mockumentary might suggest otherwise. ("Angry black people became a strong inspiration for George," a faux Industrial Light and Magic animator notes while working on the schematics for a character described as Mace Windu’s streetwise brother, pointedly referencing the observation that some of Lucas’s Phantom Menace creatures seem ever so slightly racist.) "I would actually hope that he would have a good laugh at it if he ever saw it. [With Mockumentary] I was just expressing my disappointment in the new generation of Star Wars films and how Lucas has become part of that whole system of becoming obsessed with CGI and digital effects."

But Lucas is hardly alone, according to Packard. "It seems like all of the film industry is operating in this vacuum where they aren’t aware of what they’re doing. They’re out of touch with what audiences are interested in seeing — [although] maybe it’s just the reality that I’m experiencing. I don’t understand how most [mainstream] films get green-lighted; it’s just more of the same thing over and over, just variations on playing-it-safe themes, following the same formulas. Like Transformers. It was a film that I just — why? I was baffled by that film. It was kind of entertaining — I saw it in IMAX — but who would think that was a great idea? There’s nothing new or special about doing a Transformers movie."

That’s not to say Packard hates every new movie; you may have noticed he submitted a top 10 list to the Guardian‘s 2007 year in film issue, with favorites like No Country for Old Men and Paris, Je T’Aime. One of his friends in LA gave him a hard time for not including Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

"He was really upset," Packard said of the Dead fan. "He thinks it’s Sidney Lumet’s best film. I disagreed. I thought it was OK, but it doesn’t compare to his early works at all. It would have been much better if it was made in the 1970s with a sleazier cast, sleazier characters, and not [set in] a modern strip mall. The characters didn’t feel credible — they just weren’t very interesting. Things aren’t that interesting these days."

Watch a Packard film — and if you haven’t, you must; Other Cinema is working on a release of SpaceDisco One for later in 2008, and at least one version of Reflections of Evil is available at Amazon.com — and it’s clear he’s inspired by the 1970s and more than a little nostalgic for them. At 40, he’s too young to have been part of what he views as Hollywood’s last golden age.

"The late ’70s and early ’80s were the beginning of the downfall of cinema — the beginning of the blockbuster film and special effects. Suddenly the quality levels, the character-driven films, were diminishing [in favor of] special-effects extravaganzas," he said. "If I went back in time, it would probably be even more difficult to get into the film business [than it is now]. Still, I think it was a better time in a lot of ways. My films are always making a statement about the way things have changed for the worse."

Though he’s a YouTube user and sees the finer points of shooting on video (though he prefers film), Packard’s view of his future as a filmmaker is surprisingly old-school. Specifically, he would like to make more narratives. His dream projects are an "analog fantasy film without the overuse of CGI" and a longer version of SpaceDisco One, which now clocks in at less than an hour.

"I’ve always wanted to make big films, not small independent art movies. But my creative sensibilities seem to be so off the wavelength of the average person. The way people react to my films — they can’t understand them. They need to have something palatable," he said. He blames Hollywood — at one time a creative haven where up-and-coming directors like Robert Altman could make offbeat films like 3 Women — for creating the apathetic-audience monster. "I don’t know if there’s any hope [for the future of movies]. That should be a theme of [your] article: is there any hope? God only knows." Insert your own A New Hope wraparound — the exploding Death Star, perhaps? — here.

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