› johnny@sfbg.com
One of us is wearing green short-sleeved Lacoste, the other blue short-sleeved Sergio Tacchini. We’ve looked around his apartment, where he’s leaving behind one shoebox-size tranquil bedroom — he’s now restlessly moving his belongings between two larger sun-drenched spaces. He jokingly calls one a massage room and the other a museum and talks about the patterns of shadows through his windows — how there’s a shadow that looks like a dancing lady, and how the window that faces a church is both peaceful and a passage to a fantasy about priests. Then we walk down the 37-step staircase onto 23rd Street, and Colter Jacobsen and I start talking about his art.
One of Jacobsen’s first shows took place in the exact spot we’ve just left behind. “Woods in the Watchers,” featuring pencil renderings of nudes and seminude photos Jacobsen found at the shop known as the Magazine (on Larkin), was presented in and around his bedroom. “The funny thing is what instigated the whole project was Friendster,” he says as we begin an uphill trek. “I was obsessed with it for two weeks and just started seeing everybody as a personal page — as if when they were looking at you, they were clicking on you. It was kind of fucked up. My response was that I wanted something more tactile. The idea eventually came to be one-hour timed drawings of guys wearing watches.”
We pass a couple on a stairway taking pictures of each other — the man is shooting video, the woman taking digital snapshots. Jacobsen remarks that one irony of the “Watchers” drawings, which uncover a bygone snail mail universe of intimate connections, is that they’re back on the Internet, via the Web site of local press Suspect Thoughts. I say they remind me a bit of the late artist and writer Joe Brainard’s casually hot drawings for the book gAy BCs. “[Brainard’s] stuff is amazing, it’s intimidating to me,” says Jacobsen. “It’s gestural and quick. I use a mechanical pencil and just thinking about approaching a piece of paper without a pencil scares me a little.”
If so, he has little reason for apprehension. In “Watchers” and especially in a recent group exhibition at White Columns in New York (where New York Times critic Roberta Smith singled him out for praise), and now in “Your Future,” a show at Four Star Video’s attic space, Jacobsen displays a talent for drawing images in a low-key way that can still saturate the banal with potent emotion — a truly rare ability these days.
A Mormon upbringing and contemplative community college time in San Diego, where he took a single class on color, light, and theory three times, are a few extreme shorthand examples of what led Jacobsen to San Francisco and his current work. He counts fellow artist Donal Mosher and the writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian as friendly influences; in fact, he’s created a gridlike piece charting Bellamy’s and Killian’s use of color in their fiction. “From reading their writing and not knowing what’s fiction and what’s real, I’ve gone on all these mind trips,” Jacobsen admits, as we cross paths with a woman using her cell phone like a loudspeaker. “One time on the Fourth of July I totally thought they were going to kill me.”
Jacobsen’s favorite course at the SF Art Institute was a creative writing class taught by Bellamy. There, he wrote a story — O Rings, about a blind girl obsessed with the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion — that has somewhat eerily prefigured his current art and life. He’s worked at Lighthouse for the Blind and currently is a caregiver and driver for the blind and disabled.
The walk up 24th Street has led us to Grand View Avenue, where the view is indeed grand. As we climb the coiled freeway overpass, Jacobsen talks about the “memory drawings” featured in both the show at White Columns and in the current Four Star Video show in San Francisco. “When I try to find a photo to draw from — which takes a long time — it’s like me trying to predict what I’ll be meditating on for the next couple of weeks,” he says. “I don’t take it lightly, and it’s often related to something personal.”
The element of prediction might be what Jacobsen is referring to when he says that these drawings stemming from old photos “are about the future.” In Four Star Video’s attic, Jacobsen has painted the titular words of the show over a newspaper obit page and fixed it to the corner of a wall so it can also read “Our Future.” This melancholy verging on morbidity spills from some drawings, especially a truly great one of a waterfront snapshot that uses a film-frame crosscutting technique to convey romantic heartbreak.
The show’s staircase climb to a heavenly Four Star “Future” is typical of Jacobsen’s casual yet concise use of place, and there are many elements at play, some so understated that a viewer who isn’t attentive might not even notice. Two papier-mâché teardrops hide in a corner, near the store’s rare DVDs of Salo and Lilya 4-Ever. (Images are often presented in twos and fours and eights: “Eight is my favorite number,” says Jacobsen. “It’s like two circles or two eyes.”) A pair of found-object mock columns stand next to the store’s shelving units. In a practice that updates pop art chestnuts to the current moment, Jacobsen — who first used the technique while reeling from being “totally blind” about a guy he was in love with — uses Wite-Out to cover up most of Peanuts and other strips (including his least favorite, Family Circus) in a way that reveals the wartime aggression and tension seething beneath.
Though he uses newspaper “funnies,” Jacobsen refers to these works as his “Saddies.” “I just wanted to show what I was seeing,” he says as we travel back down 24th Street past some children. Another irony: This newspaper is a space to discuss the deathly element within Jacobsen’s use of newspapers as found material. “My friend Tariq [Alvi] sees paper as death, because he once saw a mummy and the quality of its skin was like paper,” Jacobsen says when I mention the current bicoastal interest in works — especially drawings — on found or old documents.
As we near the end of our stroll, I ask Jacobsen about another walk, one in which he led a group of people — half of them blindfolded and the other half accompanying those wearing blindfolds — during a Sunday evening this June. The walk spanned from one Mission laundromat to another and included Jacobsen’s discussion of the visual theories of physicist Joseph Plateau, who went blind from staring at the sun. The choice of the event’s landmarks stemmed partly from the laundry lectures of Portland-based artist Sam Gould of Red76 and partly from Plateau’s interest in bubbles. “Does that all relate somehow?” Jacobsen asks as he explains it. “I have trouble figuring out how one thing connects to the next.”
“Usually, where I start [with a project] is where I’m stupid or ignorant — which can be anywhere, really,” he admits with a laugh, after saying that he even counted the number of steps — 313 and 168 — between the two laundromats and the walk’s starting point. Right around then, we reach those 37 steps that lead back up to his apartment, the same staircase that Jacobsen’s friend and musical collaborator Tomo (of Hey Willpower and Tussle) climbs, carrying a column, in a drawing within the Four Star Video show. When I say that the staircase’s red steps are just two short of matching a certain famous 39 Steps, Jacobsen says Alfred Hitchcock is one of his favorite filmmakers. It’s funny how one thing connects to the next — and often beautiful when Jacobsen renders the connections. SFBG
“YOUR FUTURE”
Through July 31
Daily, noon to 10 p.m.
Attic, Four Star Video
1521 18th St., SF
Free
(415) 826-2900
www.4starsf.com
Video
A present from the past
HELLO LARRY
“My basic photography lesson is this: You frame the perfect composition, exactly like you want it, and then you step forward,” says Larry Clark. “What that does is screw things up a little bit, so they’ll become more real, more like the way you see.”
We’re at a restaurant South of Market, and the man behind the monographs Tulsa and Teenage Lust and the films Kids, Bully, and the new Wassup Rockers is talking when he should be eating. I’m glad, because he has a lot to say. On the car ride to Zuppa, he reminisced about a brief late-1960s spell in San Francisco after an Army stint in Vietnam — once here, Clark’s time included a few Janis Joplin encounters. Once we’ve sat down at the table, when I mention the ties between Wassup Rockers and the underrated 1968 Burt Lancaster vehicle The Swimmer, Clark agrees that Lancaster’s performance is “extremely brave” and then serves up a real whopper: A film publicist once told him that Lancaster had a love affair with Luchino Visconti during the filming of 1963’s The Leopard, and that Lancaster was left an emotional wreck when Visconti dumped him.
Well, when in Rome …
It’s an interesting, clichéd truism to apply to Clark’s work, which doesn’t fit the tired modern sense of gay by any stretch of the imagination but is certainly appreciative of male as well as female allure. In the silly and energetic Wassup Rockers, his distinctive eye rolls with a band of Guatemalan and Salvadoran skateboarders as they travel through Beverly Hills, a gated community that starts to seem more and more like a prison. Wassup is often like a 21st-century version of a Bowery Boys comedy, with Clark (in his words) “riffing off of white people” and “riffing off of pop culture.” Before one of the title characters shares a bubble bath with Janice Dickinson, he and a friend — whose jeans and bulge would make Peter Berlin envious — have a tender tête-à-tête with some Hilton types. “Paris and Nicky were too old for me [when the film started shooting],” Clark jokes.
Born in Oklahoma but sporting a huggable Brooklynese accent and looking surprisingly healthy and sweet (if worn) at 63, Clark is still very much a child at heart, the nonsnarky and better-dressed real-life answer to Strangers With Candy’s former smack user and permanent high schooler Jerri Blank. Wassup Rockers is his third collaboration with cinematographer Steve Gainer, who picked up tricks of the trade working under Roger Corman in the 1990s. The link is an apt one because Clark is still working with genre in the Corman teensploitation or celebration-of-youth-culture sense.
Does Clark think his one-step-forward approach to camerawork dates back to the early 1970s and the speed-shooting and baby-death days of Tulsa? “It was a little more formal then,” he says, adding that he was more influenced by Robert Frank imitators — and by “the best,” Walker Evans — than by Frank, whom he knew little about when he made the book. “Tulsa is really about rooms. We’re in very small rooms, and we’re very close.”
Going back to those rooms means going down with Janis again; as the fellow Clark enthusiast with me observantly notes, a Joplin poster appears on the wall of one of those dark spaces. “The first time I met her it was early in the morning and we were walking across that big park in Haight Ashbury,” Clark recalls. “She was with someone from Big Brother [and the Holding Company] and I was with someone who knew him. I remember she was smoking a cigarette and she was holding it like this” — he imitates a loose gesture — “and her fingers were all yellow, and she said, ‘I really like these Pall Malls because you smoke them right down to the end like a junkie.’”
Clark hasn’t gone right down to the end like a junkie, though Tulsa certainly pictures exactly that type of fate with a void-gazing ferocity that no television episode of Intervention will match. It’s crazy, really, how many ways mass media — fashion and advertising and “indie” film in particular — have both copped and watered down or misinterpreted Clark’s aesthetics (a bit similar to what’s happened with John Waters, though perhaps even more subtly pervasive). The producers of MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills, original offender Calvin Klein, and now American Apparel owe him a mint’s worth of royalties for their third-rate rip-offs. At least the latter recently threw a huge party for the cast members of Wassup Rockers and their families, complete with live performances by the band featured in the movie.
If Clark is still thriving in art and life today, some credit should be given to his girlfriend, Tiffany Limos, whose candid criticism of Clark’s past movies doubtless informed his approach to Wassup Rockers. Limos is too young to be responsible for the genius choice of soundtracking Clark’s recent mammoth Manhattan gallery show, “Punk Picasso,” with Nancy Wilson’s But Beautiful, but she did tell him to place a hilarious video installation of her beyond-hyper bichon frise near the show’s end, an element that is echoed in a funny dog-attack scene within Wassup Rockers.
“That video is like the real Larry Clark,” Clark says with a laugh. “Tiff was coming home, and when she would leave I would always tell her that I could not say her name while she was gone because the dog would go crazy. I thought, ‘I’m going to show Tiffany what happens when I say her name.’ But when I made the video, never in my wildest imagination did I think I would use it. It’s funny because I’m talking to this dog like it’s a human being. Sammy runs into the street and I scold him — ‘You’re going to get killed!’ — just like I was talking to a kid.”
Limos also got her friend the fashion designer Jeremy Scott cast in Wassup Rockers as a lascivious gay photographer who looks like Perry Farrell and has a mansion full of horrendous steroidy physique shots (actual work by Tom Bianchi). “Tiffany would bring these photos of Jeremy home,” says Clark. “We had this private joke about him that if you pointed a camera at him he would always do something incredible. Then we would see photos of him at parties in magazines, and true to form, he would always be making some flamboyant pose.”
As the interview winds down, the man who began with a photography tip says he now prefers making films. Then Clark makes a final distinction. “I was never really a photographer,” he says. “I was an artist and a storyteller [when I started out with Tulsa], and I was using photography because that’s what I had.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
WASSUP ROCKERS
Opens Fri/7
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
(415) 267-4893
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
for showtimes
www.wassuprockers.net
Never mind Brookers . . .
› numa@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In the world of weird cultural appropriation that is the Web, nothing can compare to the strange tale of a Moldavian pop song called “Dragostea din Tei.” It began in 2003 as a catchy disco tune by boy band the O-Zone, who sing in Romanian and look like a queer version of Duran Duran (or perhaps a queerer version). The video for the song started circuutf8g on the Web a couple years ago and is full of silly shots in which the band dances on an airplane, its members hugging one another and randomly morphing into cartoon characters.
The infectious song became a hit in Europe and immediately inspired several parody/homage fan videos online. One, by a Finnish artist, depicted an androgynous anime character dancing to the tune, and so many people accessed her little movie that no server would host it. Soon a Japanese cartoon version appeared, in which two cats dance while subtitles supply words in Japanese that sound like the Romanian lyrics, thus producing a running commentary of Japanese nonsense.
The obvious and exuberant queerness of the video inspired many other versions, including one in which three Polish guys dance around with giant dildos and another that aired on Spanish television with the lyrics changed to include the phrase marica tu, which means “you’re queer.” Earlier this year a group of students at the University of British Columbia gave the Web possibly the last (or at least the best) word in gay appropriations of the video: Four nubile Canadian men jump around, take off their shirts, chase airplanes, and frolic by the seashore while mouthing the lyrics to the song. Although this elaborate creation was linked from Collegehumor.com, it’s hard to see the parody in it — it’s a straight homage to the goofy Moldavian original.
While these queer appropriations (or approbations) warmed up the Net, a very different group also played telephone with “Dragostea din Tei,” creating parodies of parodies inspired by a 19-year-old American named Gary Brolsma. Brolsma had recorded himself lip-synching, making faces, and chair-dancing to the song with a Web cam and posted it on his Web site. Within days, copies of the video had made it all over the Net, inspiring people to re-create Brolsma’s hand-waving and nutty facial expressions in their own videos. Over many iterations, this meme was dubbed the “Numa Numa Dance,” in reference to the chorus of “Dragostea din Tei,” which goes “numa numa iei, numa numa iei.” Although Brolsma was embarrassed by the phenomenon and stopped talking to the press about it, his happy, geeky imitators posted Numa Numa Dances from all over the world — including Thailand, Hong Kong, the UK, and, of course, Canada. My favorite was made by a couple of kids in the United States studying for a calculus exam, who dance around to the song and wave printouts of formulas and binary numbers in front of the screen.
Even the US Navy got in on the action with a video that sort of straddles the line between gay and dorky.
Despite its global popularity, few in the media paid any attention to this queer geek meme until a straight white girl named Brookers appropriated it on YouTube.com. Her version, called “Crazed Numa Fan,” shows her doing the exact same thing you see in every other Numa Numa Dance flick: She waves her arms and makes faces in front of her bedroom Web cam. But her video, which is no more or less creatively cute than the hundreds of others out there, was downloaded 1.5 million times. And a couple weeks ago it earned the skinny blond 20-year-old a development deal with former MTV star Carson Daly’s production company.
I know, I know. Predictable as hell, right?
But while Brookers’s fame will flare out, the Numa Numa Dance will continue on its merry digital way. When I watch all those happy imitators bouncing to “Dragostea din Tei” on their Web cams, I feel viscerally the utopian promise of global pop culture. I’m nodding along to a joyful tune in a language I rarely hear, and it’s been mashed up, appropriated, and reappropriated, our pleasure in it shared and reshared until it feels like everybody everywhere is doing the Numa Numa Dance along with me. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who loves any Romance language that retains the neuter, along with several Latin declensions.
For a short compendium of the best in “Dragostea din Tei,” see the online version of this column at www.sfbg.com.]
Original video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2294961099056745991
Grand Theft Auto with goombahs
(Electronic Arts; PS2, Xbox, Windows XP)
GAMER This game is not bad. It’s no God of War, but really, nothing is or ever will be. Godfather is Grand Theft Auto with bits from the beloved Coppola movie used as story line guidance and inspiration.
You play a character who lives on the periphery of the Corleone family, making his way up the Ragu-stained mafioso ladder. Fully immersed in the ravioli-gorged dimension that is Little Italy in 1947, you track down Luca Brasi’s assassin, go to movie producer Woltz’s house and sneak around with the severed horse’s head, protect the Don at the hospital, etc. These things don’t happen on-screen in the movie, but do happen in some way in this universe. Some things are just thrown in, like your character’s love interest.
Your character is the coolest part of the game. You can choose how he looks: his hair, facial hair, eyebrows, eyes, lips, body type, height — everything. There are, like, 25 faces to choose from and the facial hair–hair combos add up to an almost endless array of possible greasy Italians. There is actually a “grease” setting you can toggle to make your goombah more, or less, greasy. Up to you. At first I tried to make my guy look as much like Sonny Corleone as I could, since he was always my favorite character in the movie (yelling all the time, hitting women, etc.), but he came out looking more like Michael from Mean Streets. (“Do I look like a jerk-off to you?” That guy. He shoots Robert De Niro at the end.) I had to start over and I came up with a guy who looks more Latino knife-thrower than Sicilian. I named him Rico Brogna. Now I really like my guy.
The only problem is that playing the game itself is kind of boring, at least at the early stage. There are a lot of shoot-outs (fine), but your character dies after getting hit, like, twice (enemies have a tendency to materialize out of nowhere with fucking bazookas and just blow you away), and there is much repetition. I don’t need a game to be easy, but Jesus, I go nuts when it seems like the AI is geared to making me miserable on purpose.
But I am having fun playing it — I am approaching the halfway mark — and would recommend it to fans of both GTA and The Godfather. It’s got the same massive scope of GTA, city-wise, and the creators really chose the right characters from the movie to have big roles: You deal with Luca Brasi, Sonny Corleone, Clemenza, and Tom Hagen — all the coolest characters. It’s fun. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting all my life to interact with a video image of Abe Vigoda, but apparently I was. When he came on the screen and told me to go whack Spaghetti Righetti, or whomever, I got really excited and yelled out, “Whatever you say, Tessio!” (Mike McGuirk)
Put away the cameras
EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG
Blood brothers
› cheryl@sfbg.com
It’s Easter weekend in the Mission District, and despite the rabbit snuffling around Rick Popko’s backyard, Cadbury eggs are the last thing on anyone’s mind. "I think we’ve killed everyone we know," Popko explains grimly, grabbing his cell phone to try and recruit one more zombie for the final day of filming on the horror comedy RetarDEAD. Moments later, Popko and RetarDEAD codirector Dan West survey the scene in Popko’s basement. To put it mildly, it’s a bloodbath: The ceiling, walls, and carpet are dripping with cherry red splatters. A smoke machine sits primed for action near a table loaded with gore-flecked prop firearms.
Waste not
Several weeks later (plus several coats of paint, though a faint pinkness lingers), what had been a gruesome morgue has now reverted to its natural domestic state, save an editing station assembled at one end. A framed poster commemorating Popko and West’s first feature, 2003’s Monsturd, hangs on a nearby wall.
Monsturd is a true B-movie. Thanks to some seriously weird science, a serial killer morphs into a giant hunk of raging poop. Drawn into this sordid small-town tale are an evil doctor, a down-and-out sheriff, and an intense FBI agent, plus Popko and West as a pair of screwball deputies. Toilet jokes abound. After a three-day premiere at San Francisco’s Victoria Theatre, Monsturd found some success on video, most triumphantly surfacing in Blockbuster after the chain purchased 4,000 DVD copies.
Popko and West hope Monsturd‘s cult notoriety will aid RetarDEAD, which happens to be its direct sequel. It starts exactly where Monsturd ended. "Dr. Stern [the mad scientist played by Popko-West pal Dan Burr] rises from the sewer," West explains. "He gets a job at an institute for special education and starts a test group on these special ed students. They become remarkably intelligent, and then the side effect is they become zombies."
"In a nutshell, we kind of liken it to Flowers for Algernon meets Night of the Living Dead," Popko interjects.
"It’s a background gag to get the whole premise of the joke title. People go, ‘Well, why is it RetarDEAD?’ It’s because we needed a gimmick," says West, adding that the title came before the film (and was settled upon after an early choice, Special Dead, was snatched up by another production).
Best friends since bonding over a shared love of Tom Savini, circa 1984, at Napa’s St. Helena High School, Popko and West are so well matched creatively that Burr describes them as "like the left hand and the right hand" on the same body. Both are keen on beguiling titles. Monsturd‘s original moniker (Number Two, Part One) was dropped after being deemed too esoteric; Monsturd, they figured, would solicit more interest in video stores.
"We knew it’s such a stupid title that you would have to rent it just to see if it was as dumb as you thought it was," West explains. And for self-financed filmmakers like West and Popko (who both have full-time jobs and estimate they spent $3,000 on Monsturd and $12,000 to $14,000 so far on RetarDEAD), clever marketing strategies are essential.
"We have to think, when we’re making these movies, what can we sell, what can we get out there, what can we make a name for ourselves with?" Popko says.
"On this level, you go to the exploitation rule, which is give ’em what Hollywood cannot or will not make," West adds. "And they’re not gonna make Monsturd."
Dirty deeds . . .
Monsturd took years to complete and taught the duo scores about the capriciousness of the DVD distribution biz. Though one review dubbed it "the greatest movie that Troma never made," Popko and West actually turned down a deal with the famed schlock house, unwilling to sign over the rights to their film for 25 years. After hooking up with another distributor, they didn’t see any money from their Blockbuster coup. Still, they remain proud of Monsturd and its success.
"We tried to make it the best movie we possibly could, but we had nothing," West explains. "We didn’t piss it out in a weekend. It took a year to shoot it, then it took a year to put the thing together."
"We didn’t just shit out a crappy movie, pardon the pun," Popko says.
Neither filmmaker seems concerned that their trash-tastic subject matter might prevent them from being taken seriously as artists. And it doesn’t bother them that Monsturd‘s joke tends to overshadow the film itself — not just for viewers, but for critics, who were by and large polarized by the killer shit-man tale.
Popko also recalls unsuccessfully submitting Monsturd to a half dozen film festivals intended to showcase DV and underground flicks. Quickly pointing out that the film got picked up anyway, he blames image-conscious programmers: "It’s like, how can you have a respectable film festival when you’ve got a shit monster movie playing in it?"
Though Popko and West live in San Francisco and filmed both Monsturd and RetarDEAD in Northern California, they say they don’t feel like part of the San Francisco filmmaking scene. Again, they suspect the whiff of poo might have something to do with it.
"We’ve kind of been ignored," West says. "We’re not bitter about it, but it would be nice to be acknowledged for what we’re doing — we’re making exploitation films, and we don’t really have any guilt about what we’re doing. It’d be nice for somebody to develop a sense of humor and acknowledge it once in a while."
. . . done dirt cheap
As with Monsturd, RetarDEAD is a nearly all-volunteer effort, pieced together when the responsibilities of real life permit. Despite the obstacles — say, a sudden insurance crisis involving a rented cop car — unpredictability is clearly part of the thrill.
"When you undertake this shit, it’s an adventure: ‘What did you do this weekend?’ ‘Well, I was chased by 42 zombies, and the weekend before that, a bunch of burlesque dancers ripped our villain apart and ripped his face off,’” West explains. "It’s like, how else would you spend your free time?"
This sentiment extends to the film’s cast, several of whom have known Popko and West for years and reprise their Monsturd roles in its sequel. Coming aboard for RetarDEAD were members of San Francisco’s Blue Blanket Improv group, as well as the Living Dead Girlz, a zombie-flavored local dance troupe.
Beth West, who jokingly calls herself a "fake actor," stars in both films as the X-Files-ish FBI agent (Dan West’s former wife, she was roped into the first production after the original lead dropped out). Despite both films’ bare-bones shoots — and other concerns, like trying (and failing) to keep continuity with her hairstyle over multiple years of filming — she remains upbeat about the experience: "I loved being part of such a big creative effort."
Though his character is torn to shreds in RetarDEAD, Burr agrees. "This film is going to be 100 times better than the last one, as far as direction, camera shots — everyone was more serious this time," he says. He hopes that RetarDEAD will help Popko and West expand their audience. "Someone’s gonna notice the talent there. Maybe not in the acting, but this is these guys’ lives. It’s never been my whole dream, but it’s always been their whole dream."
Splatter-day saints
For RetarDEAD, technical improvements over Monsturd, including the introduction of tracking shots, were important considerations. However, first things first: "We knew we wanted this to be gory as fuck," West says. An ardent fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis — notorious for stomach turners like 1963’s Blood Feast — West once hoped to lens a biopic of Lewis and his producing partner, David Friedman. Though it was never completed, he did get the Godfather of Gore’s permission to use a snippet of dialogue from the project in RetarDEAD.
"This whole thing begins with his intro — it’s like that Charlton Heston thing for Armageddon, where it’s like the voice of God — but it’s Herschell Gordon Lewis talking about gore," West says. "It was the one way I could go to my grave saying I finally figured out a way to work with Herschell Gordon Lewis."
Appropriately enough, RetarDEAD pays homage to Lewis’s signature style. "Monsturd had a couple of bloody scenes in it, but it was pretty tame," Popko says. "This here, we’re planning on passing out barf bags at the premiere because, I mean, it’s gross. We’ve got intestines and chain saws and blood all over the place."
Overseeing the splatter was director of special effects Ed Martinez, one of the few additional crew members (and one of few who were paid). A late addition to the production, he "made the movie what it is," according to West.
"A zombie film in this day and age, you can’t do amateur-quality makeup and get away with it — it’ll be a flop," says Martinez, who teaches special effects makeup at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University and is a veteran of films like The Dead Pit. "And [Popko and West] know that."
Though Martinez is used to working on bigger projects, he stuck with RetarDEAD — dreaming up such elaborate moments as a Day of the Dead–inspired man-ripped-in-half sequence — because, as he says, "In a way, I’m a coconspirator now." He also appreciates the directors’ sheer enthusiasm and appreciation. After a killer take, they were "literally high-fiving me. Most low-budget filmmakers are so egocentric they would rarely do anything like that. Good effects are important, but they’re not the only things that are important."
Dawn of RetarDEAD
Though a third movie in the Popko-West canon is already in the planning stages (Satanists!), it’s looking like several months before RetarDEAD — still being edited from 30-plus hours of raw footage — has its world premiere.
"We only get one to two nights a week to do this," Popko explains. Making movies for a living is the ultimate dream, but for now, both men view their films as being in the tradition of early John Waters: made outside the system and laden with as much bad taste as they please. Potential distributors have already advised the pair to adjust RetarDEAD‘s divisive title, a notion they considered "for about five minutes," according to West.
Popko and West’s films may be throwbacks to the drive-in era, but their outlook on the movie biz is actually quite forward-looking. Popko — "the carnival barker" to West’s "guy behind the curtain pulling levers and switching things," according to Burr — anticipates a day when tangling with queasy distributors won’t even be necessary, because many films will simply be released directly over the Internet. Both directors are also very interested in high-definition technology; they plan to upgrade from their old DV camera to a new HD model for their next effort, for reasons beyond a desire for better visual quality.
"What HD has done is bring grind house back," West says. "Now you can make stuff on a level that can compete, aesthetically, with what Hollywood’s doing — almost. As far as your talent, you’ll be able to compete realistically with other movies. Now people can make good horror movies on their own terms."
"If you really want to make a movie, you can," Popko notes, stressing the importance of production values. Though the cutthroat nature of the indie film world is always on their minds, they welcome the new wave of B-movies that HD may herald.
"Now, there aren’t movies like Shriek of the Mutilated that were done in the 1970s, which could compete [with Hollywood]. These movies can now come back into the fold as long as they’re shot on HD — and there will be a shit fest like none other," West predicts, adding that he’s looking forward to the deluge. "The world’s a better place with shitty movies in it." SFBG
The Guardian presents Monsturd
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Thimk!
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
When my husband and I first got together in our mid 40s 10 years ago, he was fairly adventurous in bed, and I’m sure you saw this coming, but now the sex is really boring. No spontaneity, nothing different than intercourse, no passion. It’s like brushing your teeth — a necessary nuisance — except it gets the sheets dirty.
I know I have half the blame, but when I’ve come on to him at other than the "usual" time and location, he’s tired or has something else important to do that I didn’t know about. He does work long hours. I’ve tried fancy underwear. Sex toys don’t really interest him. Bubble baths are history. He prefers to shower alone. I’m reluctant to arrange for an X-rated video because the ones I’ve seen can be really distasteful. And I don’t want to get sexually aroused by something that doesn’t excite him.
We love each other very much, and neither of us is getting any action on the side. Suggestions?
Love,
Midlife Stasis
Dear Stace:
See, this is why I hate sex advice columns. We’ve been out here for decades, dishing out the same old tired cure-alls (well, not me, of course!) without, frankly, really having the slightest idea if they work or not. There are efficacy studies on therapy but not, as far as I know, on fancy underwear or weekends away, and yet off everyone dutifully trudges to the bed-and-breakfasts and the Kama Sutra Dust and the surprise appearances naked except for (choose two) frivolous footwear, plastic wrap, leather collar, chocolate sauce. Is it any wonder that by now people with troubled sex lives just sort of automatically print out one of these mental checklists and grimly put themselves and their partners through the paces, exactly the same way they got themselves into trouble in the first place? Keeping a sex life lively takes thought, not just a menu of goofy variations, and bringing one back from the dead takes just as much thinking, if not more. Put down the list and let’s think about this.
First off, I ask you to differentiate between "seriously no more exciting than brushing your teeth" and "normal for 10 years into a midlife relationship." Not that I think the latter has to be tooth-brushingly dull, mind you, but let’s all give ourselves a break and remember that things do tend to get a little, well, let’s call it "familiar," once we have enough years together under our belts. There are worse things than familiarity.
Next, I wonder if you have any idea what, if anything, he might be interested in trying. And not to slag your personal tastes or anything, but showering together and bubble baths are not sex acts; they’re hygiene acts, and rather femmy ones at that. Nice enough as far as they go, but I’m not surprised he wasn’t overcome with passion at the mere idea of sharing a moisturizing lilac-hibiscus bath bomb with you. The only thing on your list I see as having any serious hotcha-hotcha potential is the porn, which you are shying away from. I have no doubt that you’ve seen something icky, but there’s so much choice out there that I hate to see you shrug off the entire category without even taking a peek at the reviews on sex toy sites like Blowfish and Good Vibrations. Hardworking lesbians were paid inadequate wages to watch and review all that stuff! They’re bound to have seen something that both you and your husband would find acceptable. I notice that you didn’t say he finds porn distasteful, just that you have, in the past. Your concern that you might be turned on while he isn’t — well, if that isn’t a bridge to cross when you get there I don’t know what is.
I don’t, by the way, recommend just swapping out his Sopranos DVDs for Driving Miss Daisy Crazy II without warning. You are not trying to trick him into an accidental resurgence of passion. Here’s what I suggest: You didn’t specify “the ‘usual’ time and location," but you did say you have one. If it isn’t earlyish in the morning, in bed, try that. Few men, even busy, tired men, will turn down a roll in the hay if all it takes to get one is rolling over. If it works, you can talk later, emphasizing not the part about how unsatisfied and neglected you’ve been feeling, but how nice it was to rekindle things all accidental-like this morning — what fun! And damned if it didn’t leave you feeling a bit frisky. Would he like, perhaps, a little blow job? Or how about you set aside Friday evening to watch some of these prevetted, guaranteed nondisgusting, and yet oddly stimuutf8g DVDs you rented? I don’t expect this to work in the absence of an afterglow or some reasonable facsimile thereof, so strike while the iron is, if not exactly hot, at least still plugged in.
Love,
Andrea
Doing the Cannes-Cannes, Part Two
Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the second of his reports.
What a day! They’ve moved things around. Problems with my accreditation badge mean I can’t get into the movies. Offices that used to be in the Palais are at the other end of the Croisette, a 20 minute walk. The lines are huge and don’t seem to move. Finally I get my problems cleared up but every screening is full. Even my friends connected with some movies can’t get me in. The day is almost over and I haven’t seen one film yet. BUZZZZ. “Good morning. This is your 7am wake up call. Have a nice day.” Anxiety dreams are the worst here. I am feeling guilty that I only saw four films yesterday, but that was all there was worth seeing.
The morning started promisingly. Ken Loach’s newest, The Wind that Shakes the Barley , is generally well-received. Cillian Murphy proves that his acting turns in Breakfast on Pluto and Red Eye were not flukes. He stars as a young doctor faced with an offer to practice medicine in London — or stay in his village and become increasingly involved in forming a guerilla army to fight the “Black and Tan” army from England, sent to squash Irish independence. Set in the 1920s, the film has contemporary relevance. The first half is exciting, playing like a grand adventure with a political conscience, just as we have come to expect from Loach. The second half slows a bit but still worked for me.
Continuing in the history vein, with sociology and myth thrown in, is Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes. This Dutch director has developed a small but faithful following with his diverse filmography of under-distributed movies including The Quiet Room, Dance Me to My Song, and Alexandra’s Project. Ten Canoes was developed with actor David Gulpilil (most known for starring in Walkabout) who was interested in the stories of his own tribe, the Ramingining people. Gulpilil narrates (in English) simultaneous stories related to forbidden love but separated in time by many generations. There is a certain irreverence in his storytelling that is surprising: What is a flatulence reference doing in a story set hundreds of years ago? But then one realizes people have passed wind as long as they have existed. The guilty warrior is moved to the back of the line as they go through the forest — and more bawdy humor reminds us that dirty jokes aren’t new.
Ten Canoes is an impressive accomplishment on many levels. Though its austerity may be off-putting for some audiences, the fascinating stories, stunning visual delights, and truly unique experiences make it worthy of distribution.
The next two films shouldn’t be watched on a full stomach … but a viewer might not want to eat afterwards either. Taxidermia is the second feature from Hungarian director György Pálfi, after his astonishing Hukkle. Like Ten Canoes — another film dealing with several generations in a family — Taxidermia opens with a story of an orderly masturbating while observing his master’s young daughters, and servicing the man’s rather large wife on a monthly basis. The accidental offspring grows up to become a champion eater, winning contests while becoming a national, very fat, hero. Just as the sexual escapades of his father were graphically portrayed, we are shown huge amounts of vomit following the son’s competitions. The absurdity of it generates nervous laughter from those who haven’t turned away from the screen. He grows older, and becomes so large he cannot move. When he explodes, his son, a taxidermist, does what you might expect — and then what you won’t expect.
In some ways Taxidermia is a brilliant piece, with incredible cinematography, black humor, and a couple of visual treats. A brief sequence in a pop-up storybook and one exploring the myriad of uses for a bathtub are moments I should like to see again. But this is a hard movie to recommend to most; the gross outs just keep coming, each topping the previous one. Obviously, it’s only for those who can stomach it.
If one hasn’t lost his or her appetite after Taxidermia, the fiction film adapted from Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book Fast Food Nation could move anyone in that direction. The author developed the screenplay with director Richard Linklater (whose animated science fiction film, A Scanner Darkly, screens here next week). The story centers around an executive at a thinly disguised hamburger chain — “Mickey’s” — who is sent to Colorado to investigate reports concerning fecal matter in beef. Along the way he encounters a number of characters working at the slaughterhouse and at the chain’s local burger joint.
In trying to cover as many controversial bases as he can, Schlosser may have taken on too many issues (the treatment of illegal aliens, sexual harassment, America’s poor dietary habits, the lack of sanitary conditions in both the meat-processing plant and the retail outlets, corporate neglect for bigger profits, etc). But the over-ambitious narrative rarely makes the impact these issues deserve. Following Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, Schlosser’s investigative book confirmed that things aren’t much better in the 21st century. Though trying to reach a wider audience with a narrative film is a noble idea, it doesn’t succeed as either entertainment or piece of muckraking. The French seemed to generally like Fast Food Nation, probably because it makes for an easy anti-American target. But they also eat fast-food burgers in huge numbers.
High concept
The Marche is a massive film market that happens simultaneously with the film festival. More junk that you ever imagined is produced all over the world, and thousands of films are being sold here. Some are finished and others are in development. Many will never be finished.
We can always expect ripoffs of Hollywood blockbusters. There is no description for Sacrament Code or Stealing the Mona Lisa in the ads because the makers are probably hoping for some down and dirty direct-to-international video and cable sales. I’ve seen ads for at least three pirate movies, each looking very much like the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean II, with supernatural elements floating through the art work and featuring casts of total unknowns who look a lot like Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley.
One of my favorite things at Cannes is seeking out the most ridiculous titles for movies selling in Marche. Are you ready for a horror film about “hair extensions that attack the women that wear them?” Japan’s Toei is selling it here. Exte will star Chiaki Kuriyama, the crazy chain-swinging schoolgirl in Kill Bill.
And how about Motor Home Massacre? No description offered and none is needed.
Whatshisnamesnewfilm
The masses gathered at Cannes rarely refer to upcoming Festival movies by their title. We are asked, “Are you going to see the new Almodovar?” or “Did you see the Turkish movie?”
We say: “I liked the first feature from the director of that short Wasp,” and “Don’t miss the Indonesian documentary about the tsunami aftermath.”
This puts the film in a context that is easier to explain than “Are you going to see Volver? Iklimler? Red Road? Serambi?”
What do those titles mean? Until enough people have seen or heard about them, they are merely strange words or odd phrases. Volver is the new film from Pedro Almodovar; it’s a bit more subdued than some of his over-the-top recent entertainments. Penelope Cruz, who returns to her roots in Spanish cinema, plays a mother dealing with a teenaged daughter, a lonely sister, and an aging aunt. When the aunt dies, her dead mother appears, first as what the women assume is a ghost — but, maybe she never died in the fire that took their father? Initially the filmmaker continues his homage to Hitchcock with a surprise murder (and Bernard Herrmann-like music) before moving more to melodrama. While not a great film, Volver is wonderfully entertaining, full of surprises, and features a performance by Cruz that made me an instant fan. The buzz is great.
Iklimler has an English title of Climates, an appropriate description of the hot and cold relationship between a man and a woman who break up during a beach vacation and meet again in the snow. Like director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film Uzak (Distant), the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2003, this film could be best described as contemplative. On the surface it is a simple story of a relationship, but the emotions and motivations dig much deeper. The characters are believable, the emotions real, and the performances powerful. With virtually no camera movement, the filmmaker beautifully composes each shot; so impressed with his work, the camera stays in that one position for long sequences. Some raved about this “work of art,” but gorgeously composed images don’t make a movie. For me, this slowed too much midway. I stayed with it and appreciated the ending, but as with so much at the festival, Iklimler is an acquired taste. No doubt I will be damned for my comments.
Red Road is another story. Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s first feature is a tense and original thriller. Working from a concept proposed by Lars Von Trier’s team, three different filmmakers set out to create original stories based on the same main characters. Each were given notes; the same two actors will star. Red Road is the first to be made. A woman works for a security company watching various video monitors for possible troublemakers in a rough neighborhood. She concentrates on a man recently released from prison for a crime obviously committed against someone close to her. This variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window grows increasing more tense as details are carefully revealed. Despite a few missteps, the film works well and Arnold is a talent to watch (her Oscar-winning short, Wasp, was a knockout).
In a given day there will rarely be a logical pattern to the order of film-watching — and the segue from one to the next can be very strange. Following Red Road with Serambi was such a radical shift. This documentary explores the aftermath of the tsunami, following children, young adults, and adults who search for their friends and relatives while coming to the realization they must rebuild their lives and city.
Another documentary, Boffo! Tinsletown’s Bombs and Blockbusters proved a good way to end a day that also included a program of shorts and a long Korean film about young soldiers that left me cold (The Unforgiven). Boffo! is by onetime Bay Area director Bill Couturie. Packed with film clips and great interviews, it tries to help us figure out why a movie is a hit or flop — even if people from filmmakers to studio heads come back to writer William Goldman’s quote: “Nobody knows nothing.”
Cannes journal #1:
FEST REPORT The trip to Cannes always starts when I get on the plane in San Francisco looking to see if anyone I know is aboard. The 747 was huge, but full exploration didn’t reveal any obvious candidates for the festival.
Once in Paris things change. On the transfer to Nice I always run into several friends making the final leg of the journey to the south of France and 10 days of movies, morning till dawn. We compare stories about how much sleep we did or didn’t get, before leaving and on the plane. And make the inevitable jokes about being jet-lagged and surely taking naps in films.
Each year I also spot someone famous getting on my plane. One year I chatted with French superstar Jeanne Moreau. I had been involved in distributing a movie she directed, L’Adolescente. Another time, Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) was nervous about the trip. It was his first time in France, and he was appearing at the premiere of the movie Unstrung Heroes. He was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phones and was scared by security and certain he would never find his way to the right gate at De Gaulle (a reasonable worry). I befriended him and showed the way.
This year, as the long line waited to board the flight, Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson was escorted to the front of the line. A member of the Cannes jury, he had a hat pulled down so he’d only be half-recognized. Someone in the line called out, "I’ll see you in Cannes," to make sure we all knew where they were both headed.
Arriving a day early has its benefits. The crowds haven’t assembled. One can take care of accreditation and press orientation and study the various program books. A press screening of The Da Vinci Code was the only scheduled event. I had already seen it and instead chose to have dinner with friends.
On the first day of the festival I saw three films, all of them official selections caught at press screenings. A good way to start off the morning was with something not too demanding: Paris Je T’Aime is a collection of 20 five-minute films by an eclectic group of international directors — including Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuar??n, Alexander Payne, Gurinder Chadha, Tom Tykwer, and Wes Craven — guiding a superstar cast that ranges from Natalie Portman to Gena Rowlands, Sergio Castellitto to Fanny Ardant. (Ben Gazzara, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Bob Hoskins are also featured.) Each piece is about love in Paris. They are like simple short stories; the best ones aren’t overly ambitious.
Next up was a film from Paraguay, Hamaca Paraguaya. At only 78 minutes, it was still not the kind of movie to see when jet-lagged. When the lights went up, I asked my neighbor, author Phillip Lopate, if I’d snored. He said I was a very considerate napper and wanted to know how he had done. Just fine, I guess, as he didn’t wake me up. I have no doubt it will be hailed as a work of art by someone.
Much better was Summer Palace, the first competition film. Director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) has constructed a complex story of relationships, starting in 1989 China. A student leaves her small town and boyfriend to attend university in Beijing. She discovers both friendship and sex, with the pleasures and confusion they can bring. We journey through the political changes in China and Germany (where some of the characters go) over the next 15 years as the group of friends separate and rejoin. The result is often powerful, vibrant, and involving. The film overstays its welcome at 140 minutes; some careful editing will help make it even better.
Summer Palace is the only Asian film in the competition, and it arrives amid controversy. The Chinese government has complained that the producers didn’t get censorship approval and have broken the law by submitting it to Cannes. But the filmmakers claimed they didn’t submit it to Cannes — it must have been the sales agent in France. This won’t be the first time Chinese censorship has garnered attention here. The highest-profile case was with Zhang Yimou’s 1994 To Live.
My favorite overheard comment to date: Sitting in front of a sandwich stand, a young British woman told her companion that film sales have been tough and that the DVD market has slowed to practically nothing — "We are looking for video on demand, computer downloading," she said. "Anything where people don’t have to leave their homes." (Gary Meyer)
Prep’s cool
› kimberly@sfbg.com
The unassuming men of Ral Partha Vogelbacher are a lot like those nondescript, quietly simmering step sitters of high school — their noses buried in books of arcane geography, color theory, and Hapsburg history, mentally dancing along a thin pink and green line between fact and fantasy while their butts are parked in concrete, institutional reality. Imagine Ral Partha as a country and what its five-year plan might be. They might come up with harebrained projects like sending a million monkeys to Mars, or scoring a gig as the house band for The Colbert Report.
But what else would you expect when it comes to a band named after a Dungeons and Dragons figurine manufacturer — and chief instigator Chad Bidwell’s eighth-grade friend-nemesis, a Pierre Vogelbacher who later got his, when his nose was sliced off by falling dishes?
Folded into a chair across from fellow songwriter, guitarist, and suitcase manipulator David Kesler and drummer Jason Gonzales, Bidwell looks like the kind of guy you might pass on the street and never think twice about, despite his soft, lingering aura of amiableness. Similarly, his Dolores Park apartment sports few distinguishing stylistic flourishes — it’s more like a serviceable space to sleep in. And judging from his bandmates’ admiring comments — "This band is basically about steering around an idiot savant, waiting for his next good idea, and in between trying to weather the lows," says Kesler — and the songs on 2003’s Kite vs. Obelisk (Megalon) and his latest, third album, Shrill Falcons (Monotreme), Bidwell obviously spends a lot of quality time in his imagination, rather than on Dolores Street. Shrill Falcons glides away from the folkier lo-fi of Kites vs. Obelisk and ventures into a more expansive musical habitat of distortion, feedback, minimalist pop, and drone that cribs from Wire, Pere Ubu, Neu, and Slint without aping by the numbers. Toiling at Kesler’s "Frozen Skeletor Ice Castle Studio" in Oakland, the trio worked in the rich, gurgling, and bleating textures for which Kesler and Gonzales’s Thee More Shallows and contributing friend Odd Nosdam of Anticon are known. "We all collectively have a desire to make music that’s more aggressive," Kesler explains.
Composing most of the album’s tunes while traveling in China and casting aside his onetime writing preoccupation with old girlfriends, Bidwell lyrically burrowed into family, loss, and travel.
The album was first titled Scandinavian Preppy, to go with the initially bright sound and the pink and green flag that adorns Falcon‘s cover, but, Orlando, Fla., native Bidwell says, "I think it actually sounds more swampy and murky, like Florida. ‘Garden Assault’ is about growing up in Orlando, next to this park and this lake. Me and my friends would swim in the lake and sneak into the park and go into the fountain and steal quarters and go play video games."
The death of Bidwell’s father six years ago surfaces on songs like "Party after the Wake." In it, the patriarch roams his own funeral, until the family has him lie down, placing coins on his eyes. "It talks about seeing him at the viewing, his face all distorted, and I’m kind of probing his skin," says Bidwell with a bemused expression on his rubbery features, offering what might seem to be a painful life story with the puzzled distance of a perpetual observer.
Kesler first met Bidwell when the latter auditioned to be the drummer for Kesler’s pre-TMS band Shackleton. As Bidwell begins to tell the tale, Kesler pipes up, in the same way that they say they wrote songs for Falcons: "Can I edit this story? This is our relationship — he gives me material, and then I edit it.
"Chad tried out," Kesler continues, "and he literally could not play a single beat. I looked over, and I thought this guy must be joking, and he was over there, totally placid, smiling." Bidwell gave a tape of his songs to the band, and Kesler was immediately impressed: "I still think Chad’s lyrics are the best I ever heard."
After Bidwell recorded one album, 2001’s The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes (Megalon), Kesler and Gonzales began to back him up, making Kite with him. So when Falcons’ songs appeared to be going slowly, Kesler offered to give Bidwell a few of the "tons of musical ideas" he had lying around.
Sounds like the solitary confines of one’s own imagination have loosened up for Bidwell, a software programmer and ex–Geek Corps volunteer who began his Megalon label because, he owns, "I thought that it would make my, at that point, lonely, desperate life a little less lonely. More meaningful."
"You didn’t tell me that when you told me you wanted to put out the Thee More Shallows record!" jokes Kesler.
"I just realized it at this moment," Bidwell says, smiling. "We should have just hung out more or something." SFBG
Ral Partha Vogelbacher
with Thee More Shallows
and the Mall
Thurs/25, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
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$8–$10
(415) 621-4455
Doing the Cannes-Cannes
Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the first of his reports from the Croisette and the theater trenches:
Getting there — No snakes on the plane
The trip to Cannes always starts when I board the plane in San Francisco, looking to see if anyone I know is aboard. The 747 was huge but full exploration didn’t reveal any obvious candidates for the Festival.
Once in Paris things change. On the transfer to Nice I always run into several friends making the final leg of our journey to the south of France and 10 days of movies, morning till dawn. We compare stories about how much sleep we did or didn’t get before leaving and on the plane. And the inevitable jokes about being jet-lagged and surely taking naps in films.
Each year I also spot someone famous getting on my plane. One year I chatted with French superstar Jeanne Moreau. I had been involved in distributing a movie she directed, L’Adolescente. Another time Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) was nervous about the trip. It was his first time in France and he was appearing at the premiere of the movie Unstrung Heroes. He was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phones, scared of the security and certain he would never find his way to the airport gate at DeGaulle (a reasonable worry). I befriended him and showed the way.
This year as the long line waited to board our flight, Snakes on a Plane‘s Samuel L. Jackson was escorted to the front of the line. A member of the Cannes Jury, he had a hat pulled down so he’d only be half recognized. Someone in the line called out, “I’ll see you in Cannes,” to make sure we all knew where they were both headed.
Opening night
Arriving a day early has it benefits. The crowds haven’t assembled. One can take care of accreditation, press orientation and study the various program books. A press screening of The Da Vinci Code was the only scheduled event. I had already seen it and chose to have dinner with friends.
Film festivals like to open with a high profile movie that is sure to attract big stars, tons of media attention and a major post-screening party that will last all-night. Allowing a film to open a festival, especially Cannes, is taking a big chance. The movie will come under extra heavy scrutiny from critics. The Da Vinci Code is a logical choice to open the 59th Cannes International Film Festival. It is based on a huge best-selling book and largely set in France. Starring a major American movie star, Tom Hanks, and one of France’s most popular actresses, Audrey Tautou, it also features numerous important European actors. As I write this, over my left shoulder I can see them walking up the red carpet for the opening night ceremonies. Thousands of people jam the streets in front of the Palais. TV cameras and photographers catch the face of every person who ascends the steps to make certain they don’t miss anyone of importance.
The press has now seen The Da Vinci Code. The response isn’t too good. But despite the criticism you will read, Columbia Pictures made the correct choice. Director Ron Howard’s last film, Cinderella Man, was invited in 2005 but the producers passed. And the film failed at the box office. This time they aren’t about to miss out on the glitzy stamp of approval that comes with opening the world’s most famous film festival.
Day one
I’ve seen three films the first day of the Festival — all official selections caught at press screenings. I’ll catch a few more tonight.
A good way to start off the morning is with something not too demanding. Paris je t’aime is a collection of 20 five-minute films by an eclectic group of international directors including Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuaron, Alexander Payne, Gurinda Chadha, Tom Twyker, Wes Craven and many more guiding a superstar cast from Natalie Portman to Gena Rowlands, Gerard Depardieu to Fanny Ardant. (Ben Gazzara, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Bob Hoskins also are featured.) Anthology films inevitably are a mixed bag. Each piece is about love in Paris. They are like simple short stories; the best ones aren’t overly ambitious. Paris looks lovely of course and I enjoyed most of it.
Next came a film from Paraguay, Hamaca Paraguaya. At only 78 minutes, this is the kind of movie not to see when still jet lagged. It is all voice-over dialogue (subtitled) with stagnant camera shots. When the lights went up, I asked my neighbor, author Phillip Lopate, if I snored. He said I was a very considerate napper and wanted to know how he did. Just fine, I guess, as he didn’t wake me up. I have no doubt it will be hailed as a work of art by someone.
Much better was Summer Palace, the first competition film. Director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) has constructed a complex film of relationships starting in 1989 China. A student leaves her small town and boyfriend to attend university in Beijing. She discovers both friendship and sex, with the pleasures and confusion they can bring. We journey through the political changes in China and Germany (where some of the characters go) over the next 15 years as the group of friends separate and rejoin. The film is often powerful, vibrant and involving, if a bit difficult to follow at times. It overstays its welcome at 140 minutes; some careful editing would help it become even better.
Summer Palace is the only Asian film in the Competition. It arrives amidst controversy. The Chinese government has complained that the producers didn’t get censorship approval and have broken the law by submitting it to Cannes. But the filmmakers claimed they didn’t submit it to Cannes. (Must have been the sales agent in France.) The Chinese censors turned the film down. Some suspect it is for the highly erotic nature and political reasons. There have been reports that the film has been withdrawn and the director has returned to China. This won’t be the first time claims of censorship by China have garnered attention here. The highest profile case was Zhang Yimou’s To Live.
Overheard
Sitting in front of a sandwich stand a young British woman told her companion that film sales have been tough and that the DVD market has slowed to practically nothing: “We are looking for Video In Demand, computer downloading — anything where people don’t have to leave their homes.”
Free kitten?
SONIC REDUCER Mother’s Day: the primo time to think about reasons why mom rules. So why did I spend it listening to Grandaddy’s new, possibly last album, Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2)? I also lost about four solid hours watching Amon Duul, MC5, and Scott Walker videos on YouTube and thinking back to my adolescent years, when my household chores fell by the wayside and dear ole mum would threaten to spirit away a sackful of our 20 or so semiferal "fambly" cats and kittens and abandon them by some desolate roadside pineapple cannery. Thanks, ma!
Really, Hallmark and the assorted commercial pressures that guilt you into shuffling to the post office with an annual tribute to motherhood bring out the absolute worst — namely, inappropriate memories — in me. Though that certain special someone never carried out those acts of probable feline-cide, it’s clear not all of us come psychologically, emotionally, and financially equipped to be parents — just as many of us were not well kitted out to be pet owners. We try: Glance through the approximately 17,000 cat videos on YouTube — John Lennon’s scant 415 refs are no match against the cuddly-wuddly, flea-bitten hordes. The majority are amateurish, dull, full of "aw-isn’t-she/he/it-cute — quick get it on the cameraphone" tumescent adoration.
Still, between the anticlimactic "Puppy vs. Cat" snippets, music fans can kill an entire Mother’s Day watching Magma serenade Catholic padres in some strange French B-movie or study a drowsy Velvet Underground supposedly writing "Sunday Morning" ("They all look so fucked up. Heroin is bad for you," comments one viewer) or check out the most viewed music-related vid that day (perhaps related to the new service that started last week allowing users to upload footage directly from a phone or PDA): a blurry, too-loud, obviously cellie-derived clip of Guns n’ Roses blasting out "Welcome to the Jungle" at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom on May 12.
How perfect then that I stumble across a few Grandaddy videos on my YouTube travels, including a slightly oogy bit showcasing, as its maker puts it, "a slug on a cucumber listening to Grandaddy." A comment on the lysergic lethargy embedded in the Modesto band’s tunes? Animals, or rather people in animal suits, operate as stand-ins for nature in the group’s shared videos, representing a star-crossed love for the junky delights of an infinitely disposable, shareable information culture, as well as the earthly attractions of the Central Cali natural world. I can totally relate, dudes.
Sluggish Grandaddy fans who can’t break away from waxing their own cucumbers will be pleased to know that Just Like the Fambly Cat is a suitably great, elegiac outro for the disbanding band (so says songwriter Jason Lytle). A pop symphony to that final solution to dissolution and aimlessness: death. If Grandaddy always seem to teeter betwixt stoner listlessness and slacker lack of focus, the threat of imminent nonexistence and looming loss has brought a sense of purpose, opening with a child’s repeated, lisping, "What happened to the fambly cat?" and closing with Lytle’s grandiose finale, "I’ll never return!" The act of recording melts into biography, as Lytle angrily mourns his broken engagement with all the infectious pop trappings ("Jeez Louise") and then gets lost in dusty, hermetic yet elegant reveries reminiscent of such peers as Air ("Oxygen/Auxsend"). There are, as Lytle sings, about "fifty percent less words" here, breaking from pop formulae, but the writing is more than up to providing the mental visuals for Fambly Cat‘s aural invocation of the last, sad days of summer.
Nonetheless, YouTube comes through with some Fambly Cat imagery, as Lytle has come out from behind the animal costume on a lo-fi video for the "single" "Where I’m Anymore." He bicycles down orchard and suburban lanes, bridging Modesto’s agri and aggro environs, as a papier-mâché cat head jumps into the frame for the slow-jamz chorus of lost-pussy meows. This shy number may have emerged after Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s similar catcentric number, but Grandaddy’s easy, sensuous paw tracks promise to stick with you longer, even after Lytle supposedly says good-bye to Modesto, a place tied tightly to another dubbed Grandaddy. After all, Magnet magazine recently reported that Lytle has sold his Modesto house and is moving to Montana, with no plans to perform Fambly Cat songs live ("If we go on tour, somebody’s gonna fucking die"). But perhaps this media-lavished long good-bye isn’t what it seems — and Grandaddy fans can dry their tears — because it appears Lytle will play those tunes after all, at Amoeba Saturday. Like a cat that always comes back, all may not be lost. SFBG
JASON LYTLE OF GRANDADDY
Sat/20, 6 p.m.
Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF
Free
(415) 831-1200
No way of knowing
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS I was sick. I couldn’t get out of bed, and I couldn’t sleep either. If I tried to talk on the phone, I sounded like Don Corleone smoking helium. People didn’t know who I was, and after a while I didn’t know who I was either.
Weirdo the Cat remained Weirdo the Cat and tried her best to keep me oriented.
Weeks in the woods are not very conversational for me, anyway. I express myself, cry out to the universe, assert my existence, and endear myself to my neighbors by tapping on steel with an eight-pound sledge hammer. When that gets old, I clack plastic and make a little poem or Cheap Eats happen. Sometimes I talk to myself. Sometimes I laugh out loud, which weirds out Weirdo and makes me feel crazy — which, in turn, helps me to know that I’m not.
Now I had no way to know. I couldn’t hammer, clack, or blabber, and nothing was funny. I’m not a sickness reviewer, but laryngitis I find to be every bit as discombobuutf8g, almost, as an inner ear infection. Pretty much, more or less.
Well, I’d asked for it. I hadn’t been sick, really, in two years. Which was long enough to notice, and so I noticed and then started to talk about it.
"I haven’t been sick in two years!" I said. Out loud. To people.
Bad medicine. This is not a matter of juju; it’s mental and physical and automatic: You start bragging, you let your guard down. Bam! No voice, no sleep, no energy, no soup, no NyQuil, no more Jane Austen novels to read, no one to go to the library for you, and nothing to watch on video except The Deer Hunter.
Ever watch The Deer Hunter? Bad medicine. Good movie, bad bad medicine. Now even if I could’ve slept I couldn’t have slept. Me!
But enough about me. Eventually you just get tired of being sick, and you realize that lying around in bed isn’t going to get you better, so you kiss Weirdo the Cat on the lips, drag yourself out to your pickup truck, drive down to Balboa Park, tie on your spikes, strike out twice, ground weakly to second, ground even weaklier to third, take a shower, and go look for a bowl of duck noodle soup.
There you have it. All better. New favorite Vietnamese restaurant: Pho Ha Tien, just down the road, toward the Sunset, on Ocean. Duck noodle soup ($4.95/$5.95). Jalapeños, hot sauce, that other kind of hot sauce, and . . . you can talk again, if you’re me.
"Blah blah blah, blah blah," I said. "Blah blah blah."
There was even someone there to hear me. Yay! My cousin the Choo-Choo Train and his boyfriend, Ding-a-Ling-a-Ling, meaning I can also tell you these things: goi cuon chay ($4.50). Bun bi thit nuong ($6.50). And com ca nuong sa ($6.75).
Got that? That’s cold vegetable spring rolls, which were good, shredded pork and barbecued pork over vermicelli, which was good, and a charbroiled sole filet, over rice, which was also good. Allegedly. I didn’t get any. Choo-Choo eats so fast his plate was clean by the time I’d finished applying all the proper hot sauces, cilantro leaves, bean sprouts, jalapeños, and other medicinal touches to my soup.
And letting Ding-a-Ling-a-Ling taste some before I infected it, which favor he kindly and gentlemanlikely returned by chopsticking some of his pork and pork onto a little plate for my particular pig-partaking pleasure.
"Thank you, sir," I said.
"Thank you, Chicken Farmer," said he.
Meanwhile, the loco locomotive is licking his plate, wondering what’s for dessert.
Anyway, the soup was good, but not as good as my old favorite duck soup because the noodles were overdone, one, and, two, it had too much slimy bamboo in it that could have been ducks. And the ducks that there was didn’t have skin, just bones. A lot of bones. You have to eat with your hands and leave a big pile somewhere on the table.
Other atmospheric touches: general quaintness, funny little 3-D paintings, TV, and my personal favorite: side-by-side, the requisite Buddha shrine and a gratuitous wooden plaque of Mickey and Minnie Mouse saying, Welcome.
You know what I say to that, Mickey, Minnie, now that I have my voice back? I say, "One shot." SFBG
Pho Ha Tien
Wed.–Mon., 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
1900 Ocean, SF
(415) 337-2168
Takeout available
Beer and wine
D/MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible
Arctic vessels
› johnny@sfbg.com
The significance of a different numeral is noted near the finale, but the number in the title of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 makes it clear that the film is but one chapter within a gargantuan project that Barney has been working on for close to two decades, the first seven entries an array of vitrines and video installations predating and possibly even anticipating his Cremaster cycle. Barney has stated that this ninth chapter signals a shift away from the libidinal restraints and hypertrophy (a persistent muscular motif) of earlier installments, into a condition of atrophy. Got that?
A skeptic could view all of the above as a deflective shield used to ward off any criticism that is rooted in basic cinematic practice. How can Drawing Restraint 9‘s ponderously juxtaposed ceremonies and abundant array of symbols — from the many variations of the artist’s signature bisected ovular "field emblem" to the multiple manifestations of whales and other sea creatures — be analyzed if they are mere parts of a broader cosmology that the filmgoer isn’t taking into consideration? The worlds of Barney tend to be epically expansive in scope, making even Wagnerian opera seem smallish in terms of narrative configuration (though not in terms of emotional currency). Yet for all their majestic dives into goopy baths and slippery slides through lubricated passages, they remain clinically hermetic.
Perhaps the most expensive wedding video ever made, Drawing Restraint 9 isn’t short on spectacle. Origami-wrapped fossils, an "Ambergris March" street parade, women in white cooing as they dive for pearls, citrus-scented baths, and an enormous petroleum Jell-O mold are just a handful of the first half’s ingredients. Most of these somehow relate to the "Occidental Guests" (Barney and real-life mate Björk), who are bathed and shaved — and, in Björk’s case, given hair extensions that incorporate objects from the ocean and forest floors — before being adorned in furry variants of Shinto marriage garments. Ultimately, the couple meet, mute, at the end of one chilly hall in the Japanese whaling vessel Nisshin Maru before joining a tea master in a ceremony that gives way to an aquatic mating dance. Then out come the flensing knives.
Barney and Björk might be exploring a kinship between Japan’s and Iceland’s cultures. Is the result expensive indulgence? Yes. While the discourse around Barney’s museum exhibitions tends toward solemnity, his ventures into film have met with some irreverence that, however knee-jerk, might also be deserved. In a 2005 interview conducted by Glen Helfand for the local film publication Release Print, J. Hoberman clearly elucidated a film-focused critique of Barney, labeling his "big-budget avant-garde" movies "deeply uninteresting" in relation to the "crazy, quasi-narrative" (though usually more concise) works made in the ’60s and ’70s by underground filmmakers such as Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, and Bruce Conner. Certainly, any spellbinding aspects of Barney’s visuals seem schematic in relation to Kenneth Anger’s or Maya Deren’s alchemy.
One could — perhaps unfairly — make a case that Drawing Restraint 9 is an act of class war against similar, barely funded efforts on film or video today, but more tellingly, it also comes up wanting in relation to similarly expensive efforts, whether they be "experimental" short works — the stunning aerial photography in Olivo Barbieri’s San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award New Visions winner site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 makes Barney’s seem clumsy and unimaginative — or the type of contemporary "art" film that lives primarily on the festival circuit. Both Tsai Ming-liang and Barney have created interlinked cinematic works that spotlight masculinity, but Tsai’s delve into the psyche more acutely than Barney’s phallic drag routines. Tsai’s work is also superior in cinematic terms: Both the editing and the mise-en-scène in his films deliver comic punch lines and emotional sucker punches. At the moment, at least, those are two things that Barney just can’t buy. SFBG
DRAWING RESTRAINT 9
Opens Fri/12
Bridge Theatre
3010 Geary, SF
(415) 267-4893
That’s amore
› cheryl@sfbg.com
There are some serious-minded films on the program of this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, like Cracked Not Broken, about a stockbroker turned crack addict, and The Chances of the World Changing, about one man’s crusade to save endangered turtles. But when there’s an option in life to sample something called Pizza! The Movie, there’s really no way around it. You have to go for the pie.
Director Michael Dorian is good-natured enough to include a clip from "the other" Pizza: The Movie — a low-budget 2004 comedy about a lovelorn delivery dude — in his doc; he’s also clever enough to wrap his film around the theme that pizza is, by nature, a competitive sport. Rivalries lurk in all aspects of the business. The simple question of whose pizza tastes the best is paramount; dozens of parlors, from New York to Los Angeles to an Ohio spot famed for its meat-laden "butcher shop" special, are visited, and many friendly opinions are shared. But other points of contention run deeper than Chicago-style crust, including which trade magazine can claim superiority (bad blood runs twixt upstart PMQ and old-school Pizza Today); mass-market (i.e., Pizza Hut) versus artisan-style pies; and who invented which new twist when, exemplified by a chef who claims he created all of California Pizza Kitchen’s original recipes.
So, clearly, the pizza industry attracts strong personalities. But the absolute highlight of Pizza! The Movie is the Bay Area’s own Tony Gemignani, a champion acrobatic pizza tosser whose skill with dough is as awe-inspiring as his deadly serious approach to his craft. Frankly, I can’t believe Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell hasn’t starred in a feature film based on this guy; the entire 90 minutes of Pizza! The Movie are worth watching just to see Tony’s take on The Matrix, complete with bullet-time dough-throwing. Good thing DocFest goes down in the Mission, where pizza is plentiful — after the movie, there’s no way you won’t be in the mood for a slice.
Another DocFest film with a tempting title is Muskrat Lovely, Amy Nicholson’s affectionate study of a small-town Maryland beauty pageant. The specter of Corky St. Clair looms over the proceedings, which transpire during a festival with twin highlights: the crowning of Miss Outdoors, of course, and a muskrat-skinning contest. (In a tidy display of synergy, one of the pageant girls skins a muskrat as her talent.) The importance of glamour — even when one is a teenager living in an isolated Chesapeake Bay community — is addressed, as is the importance of removing the muskrat’s musk gland before you cook it.
A less triumphant tale unfolds in The Future of Pinball, local filmmaker Greg Maletic’s ironically titled work-in-progress doc about pinball’s painful decline. He focuses on a 1999 invention optimistically dubbed Pinball 2000, a wondrous machine dreamed up by the industry’s most talented (and increasingly desperate) pinball designers, a dedicated group whose job titles were made nearly extinct by the video game boom. Despite a groovy lounge music soundtrack, Pinball weaves a sad tale of creativity being stamped out by big business; also, as it turns out, the eventual fate of the Pinball 2000 happens to be one more thing we can blame on Jar Jar Binks.
The hour-long Pinball plays with Natasha Schull’s 30-minute ode to gluttony, Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas. Drawn in by such gimmicks as the $2.99 shrimp cocktail, self-proclaimed buffet connoisseurs arrange incredible and unlikely food combinations on enormous plates; casino employees, used to dealing with gob-smacking amounts of consumption, ponder how a horseshoe-shaped restaurant really allows for "more flow." Meanwhile, Sin City pigs grunt on a farm outside town, eagerly awaiting the leftovers. After all, as the farmer’s wife points out, humans and pigs have nearly identical digestive tracts. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
Fri/12–May 21
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th St., SF
$10
www.sfindie.com
Also Women’s Building
3543 18th St., SF
Heartthrobs
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER I used to think of myself as the ultimate freak magnet, fending off moist-haired gents with a fetish for girl bands. Damp palms. Foam bubbling at the corners of the mouth. Barely discernable vertigo spirals in their bloodshot eyes. Cute, huh?
But the Court and Spark have me beat. We were sitting around the high-ceilinged kitchen of their Alabama Street Station studio/flat and talking about making their new album, Hearts (Absolutely Kosher), when vocalist-guitarist MC Taylor and guitarist Scott Hirsch suddenly leapt to their feet and started pawing through a drawer by the stove. Drummer James Kim bolted down the hallway. Was it something I said or … ate?
No, they all simply hit on their most memorable piece of fan mail, which Kim pulled from his shadow files. "This is classic," Taylor said, forking the letter over. "This explains to you what the Court and Spark journey is all about."
The script on the wide-rule binder paper was large, loopy, and ever so shaky, and its author told of hearing a song from the band’s last EP, Dead Diamond River, then embarking on his own river of no return: "My life is rough. In May my mom died after having colon cancer surgery. I lost my dad months earlier to lymphoma. For 41 years I’ve been struggling since a child living with severe type 1 diabetes. Not having any health insurance is difficult. My yearly medical expenses are now over $5,000, not including doctor and lab costs. I do without. I hope you will seriously consider sending me a promo copy of your new amazing CD to brighten my life at this difficult time." The missive closed with a San Jose address and came with a checklist of meds.
Of course, the soft hearts of C and S sent the letter-writer the disc — and never heard from their diabetic sad case in the South Bay again.
Score one crazy diamond for C and S, but what’s the attraction? Are the crazies seeking the healing qualities in the band’s shimmering Cali rock ’n’ soul? Are they looking to levitate alongside the group’s increasingly psychedelic yet still hard-to-quantify sound. Am I asking the wrong people? Not for nothing did Taylor first consider titling the new album I Want to Be a Gallant Rider Like My Father Was before Me, after a line in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser. Like Herzog, C and S seem to draw, or be drawn to, those blurry border towns between Insanity, Texas, and Epiphany, Mexico.
Despite Hirsch’s disbelief that their audience actually comes to see them perform rather than the other bands on their bills, C and S are 50 times more comfortable in their collective skin than the first time I spoke to them, around 2002, shortly after the release of their lovely 2001 second album, Bless You.
"We’ve always been the lone wolves out there," Taylor ponders. "But we’ve also played on every kind of possible bill you can possibly imagine, and on good nights, actually, we’ve been able to make it work. We’ve played with everyone from Devendra to Bob Weir."
It’s at home, however, that the onetime UC Santa Barbara students found a sense of freedom last year, tinkering with Hearts to their hearts’ content, experimenting with instruments like harp and hammered dulcimer, and falling in love with Farfisa organ and throwing it, along with a wah pedal, over everything — all while also working on Michael Talbott and the Wolfkings’ new album and the beginnings of Willow Willow’s record. They’d rent, say, a really good, $10,000 mic and then cram everyone into their space to share costs. "We’d wake up earlier than anybody else, since we lived here, and we’d set up and drink coffee and do it," says Hirsch, who also teaches recording at Bay Area Video Coalition.
It may sound too pat for these courtly Mission dwellers, but it looks like they got out of their musical comfort zone by digging deeper into their literal one. "It’s like that Steely Dan quote, ‘We used to spend five months just trying to figure out what chair we were going to sit in in the studio,’" Hirsch says with a laugh. "That’s the kind of freedom that we like and that we found for ourselves — and that maybe they had too, because they would also record a million things and pick just one thing from that. That’s why their records sound so good, I guess." SFBG
Court and Spark
With Jason Molina, Black Fiction, and the Finches
Fri/12, 9 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$12
(415) 885-0750
King of Shadows
TRIBUTE Days of Our Lives had Patch and Kayla; Passions had Precious, Timmy, and Zombie Charity (don’t ask). But Dark Shadows had werewolves, time travel, ghosts, a vampire protagonist (Jonathan Frid), and plots that revolved around such curious objects as the severed hand of one Count Petofi (much sought after for its mystical powers). Dark Shadows — the original version of which ran from 1966 to 1971; it also spawned multiple films and revivals — was clearly a singular sensation, and much of the credit goes to its beloved creator-producer, Dan Curtis.
Curtis, who passed away March 27 at the age of 78, was also noted for his many 1970s TV films. Most contained gothic elements, includingThe Night Stalker and the Karen Black –tastic Trilogy of Terror, plus versions of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula (the latter two starring Jack Palance). On the big screen he directed Black in the haunted-house tale Burnt Offerings; he also helmed the anthology tale Dead of Night, written by frequent collaborator Richard Matheson.
These days, The Montel Williams Show tapes in Dark Shadows’ old New York City studio (not among Dark Shadows’ horrors, as far as I can tell, are unexpected paternity test results). But the soap’s cult lives on, much like lovelorn vamp Barnabas Collins, with multiple DVD collections from MPI Home Video (www.mpihomevideo.com) — endearing flubs from the show’s live tapings intact. For more information on Curtis, visit the frighteningly complete www.collinwood.net, operated by European fanzine Dark Shadows Journal. (Cheryl Eddy)
Kill-er dude
Kill the Moonlight
(Plexifilm)
PRESS PLAY It coulda been Slacker, and instead, true to "Loser" form, it got lost. That was the fate of Steve Hanft’s 1994 "underground classic" feature Kill the Moonlight.
Kill has a rep for being rarely seen but, weirdly, widely disseminated — due to the fact that its title character, would-be race car driver, fish hatchery feeder, and toxic waste cleaner Chance, provided the direct inspiration for Beck’s first Gen X–Rosetta stone single, "Loser." Samples from the movie ("I’m a driver/ I’m a winner/ Things are gonna change/ I can feel it," drones the never-say-die, ultimately unkillable Chance) popped up in the sleeper pop hit itself, and clips of the movie surfaced in the song’s video, directed by Hanft (who also played with Beck in a band called Liquor Cabinet).
Alterna-strippers, Kiss revivalism, and bitchin’ Camaros — how much more ’90s can you get? With the release of this DVD — which includes a bonus soundtrack CD of music by Beck, the Raunch Hands, and Go to Blazes — you can finally bask in the low-budget, occasionally funny, often stiff, yet extremely atmospheric lo-fi glory of this 76-minute feature, which Hanft seems to have spun off with his bigger-budget 2001 feature,Southlander, starring a goofy musician named Chance and, well, Beck. (Kimberly Chun)
Devil times four
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Campo Santo’s Haze slips comfortably into the 10th anniversary season of a company that’s built its rep (repertoire and reputation) on close collaborations with leading American fiction writers. This lean, shrewd, and forceful staging of stories by Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson, and Vendela Vida turns a literary buffet into a raw and atmospheric performance piece. Call it tragicomic episodes loitering at the brink — on the vaporous edges of an otherwise solid sense of self — or just a rambling confession addressed, "Dear Satan …"
In Vida’s What Happens When These Things Happen (the first chapter of her novel And Now You Can Go), the narrator (Catherine Castellanos) recounts the day her 21-year-old self was accosted by a man with a gun in New York’s Riverside Park. Eggers’s piece, Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance, takes a hilarious road trip to Bakersfield with the slightly unhinged Fish (Danny Wolohan), who is obligated to visit his pathetic cousin (Donald E. Lacy Jr.), a veritable suicide manqué, hospitalized after yet another bungled attempt on his own life. Then Lacy gets into the driver’s seat for Diaz’s high-spirited tale, The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, playing a guilty two-timer intent on salvaging his deteriorating relationship with the perfect girl, Magdalena (Luera), by taking her on a vacation to the Dominican Republic, his (and the author’s) home country, where he may have to settle for an uncomfortable moment of enlightenment in some sacred cave.
The carefully arranged stories flow smoothly into one another. Words are passed like batons between storyteller-protagonists, while a few mysterious lines from that letter to Lucifer wend their way through the evening in lonely and darkly comical reverie before finally roosting in the Starlight Recovery Center, temporary home to manic letter-writer Mark Cassandra (Wolohan) in Johnson’s Starlight on Idaho. Despite another devilishly sharp and boisterous performance by Wolohan, this thematic pulse actually loses some strength by the end, ironically, in Johnson’s funny and beautifully written but more episodic narrative, along with some of the focus and cohesion of the play as a whole.
Still, Haze‘s blend of text and mise-en-scène succeeds throughout in fresh and winning ways (perhaps nowhere as effectively as in Vida’s opening story). Director Sean San José, who concentrates more on tone than on the baroque inventiveness of a Word for Word–style approach to the verbatim staging of literature, garners bold and enjoyable performances from his four actors and skillfully manages the spaces, onstage and between the words, left open for the play of imagination. To this end, Joshua McDermott’s spare stage comes partially illuminated by shifting centers of light pitched onto the floor out of large four-sided shades overhead. When not actively participating in a scene, members of the ensemble often slump in half-shadow against the exposed brick at either side. Meanwhile, Victor Cartagena’s video installation loops a few select images on a screen at the back or projects them onto the walls left and right, and David Molina’s delicate soundscape adds still another moody dimension in which to roam.
Small Tragedy: Now and then
Tragedy seemed like such a simple, straightforward thing to the ancient Greeks. Why is it so hard for us to grasp? All that emphasis on hubris, pity, and terror, nobody seems to know exactly what they’re really talking about. So why bother? Aurora Theatre inaugurates its new Global Age Project — an initiative centered on work exploring life in the 21st century and beyond — with the West Coast premiere of Small Tragedy, by Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul), a play that slyly approaches the horrors of the war-torn modern age through the seemingly incongruous fumblings of a comically amateur production of Oedipus Rex.
It’s a great beginning to a lively backstage comedy that steadily becomes an engrossing reflection on tragedy in a time of ethnic cleansing. But one gets the sense, somewhere after the second act’s startling turn of events, that the playwright may have been less certain how to end his work. Moreover, the second act raises the dramatic ante considerably, but its refocusing on two of the six characters also leaves it a bit thinner by comparison. If not a perfect play, however, Small Tragedy — especially as fueled by director Kent Nicholson’s fine and thoroughly enjoyable cast — is a sharp and intriguing one. SFBG
HAZE
Through Sat/29
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF
$9–$20
(415) 626-3311
SMALL TRAGEDY
Through May 14
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.
Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison, Berk
$28–$45
(510) 843-4822