Once again, Jon Stewart on Comedy Central gets the story the mainstream media can’t seem to do. This time he pounces on the business reporting on CNBC. B3
Click here to read Dan Mitchell’s The Sausage blog from bigmoney.com on how Stewart’s satire trumps conventional journalism.
By Molly Freedenberg
My dear friend Hollis Hawthorne, a major force in the San Francisco art and bicycle scene, is in critical condition in India. The 31-year-old dancer, artist, and activist was in a tragic motorcycle accident near Pondicherry last Tuesday, February 24, which left her with severe head injuries and in a coma. As of today, she is at Apollo Hospital in Chennai and still unconscious, though she’s finally breathing on her own. Her prognosis is still unknown.
(For the full dramatic story, including heartbreaking details of how her boyfriend kept her alive for 30 minutes doing CPR, and the freak occurrence that rendered her motorcycle helmet useless, check out the blog www.friendsofhollis.blogspot.com. For updates on her health status, check out www.helpholligethome.blogspot.com. Donations can be collected at both sites.)
Hollis is known in San Francisco as co-founder of the Bay Area Derailleurs , an all-female bicycle dance troupe whose purpose is bike activism and female empowerment; founding member of the Cheese Puffs, a tap-dancing burlesque troupe who’ve performed at Hubba Hubba Revue, BootieSF, and for the Guardian at Maker Faire and the DeYoung Museum; member of Burning Man Organization’s DPW; and as a part of Ron Turner’s Last Gasp operation. Her community of friends, family and collaborators also extends to the Sprockettes in Portland, Oregon; Chicken John; the Yard Dogs Roadshow; Extra Action Marching Band; Cyclecide Bike Rodeo; ArtSF; promoters and owners of 1015 Folsom, the Independent, Rickshaw Stop; Los Angeles performance troupe Lucent Dossier (who starred in a Panic at the Disco video on MTV); and many more art, fashion, and activism groups. She is vibrant, creative, inspiring, and passionate – as are the communities she’s a part of.
By Tim Redmond
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has introduced a measure that might help save public-access TV, in San Francisco and elsewhere. It’s not that radical – just a nonbinding resolution calling on the federal and state government to make a small amendment to legislation that currently threatens the existence of PEG – public, educational and government – programming on cable TV.
But it’s got the giant AT&T all agitated, and lobbyists are descending on City Hall to crush it.
The background is a bit complicated, but I’ll try to make it simple. In 2006, the state of California passed a very bad law called the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act (DIVCA), which took away from cities and counties the ability to regulate cable-TV franchises. Now the state Public Utilities Commission – a crew of pro-industry hacks if there ever was one – has that jurisdiction.
One of the results: The city of San Francisco no longer has the ability to require that the operator of its cable franchise provide money for PEG programming. Meanwhile, an old federal law (from 1934) allows cities to mandate that cable franchises pay for capital facilities for PEG – but not for operating expenses.
And the city’s franchise agreement with Comcast is ending this year, and with it will go some $600,000 in operational funding for the city’s public-access TV. More than a dozen PEG channels in Los Angeles county have already gone dark; that could happen here as soon as June.
Mirkarimi wants the state and the feds (that is, our powerful Congressional delegation and our relatively powerful folks in Sacramento) to revisit this, and make a very modest change in law that would allow franchise money to be used not just for capital expenses but for operating budgets.
AT&T dashed off a letter to Mirkarimi Feb. 27th whining about the measure and insisting that the city should pay the PEG expenses out of its existing franchise-fee money. That money goes to the general fund; at a time when the entire social safety net in San Francisco is about to collapse, who really thinks that money will be diverted to public-access TV?
The measure comes up tomorrow at the board. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Who will the AT&T lobbyists get to?
You could dig up what you need to know about Baltimore, Md.’s Thank You on the Internet pretty easily: names, dates, discography, samples, and pics. Friends of mine released a real labor-of-love album recently, and a preliminary Lycos search turned up a review that was 90 percent press release. This is the kind of disappointment that makes me think rock criticism à la Richard Meltzer — the kind that trades in imaginative, frequently lazy yet still illuminating misinformation — is due for a comeback.
Judging by the name, I thought Thank You was the sort of band to be "in" on these sorts of pranks at rock’s expense. But search "thank+you+band" and blam, there it is. Thank You has a bona fide album on a serious indie, Terrible Two (Thrill Jockey, 2008), and, depending on your perspective, it can count as a long EP or short LP.
The opening track, "Empty Legs," is an oceanic expanse of faux-metal churn. The whistle toots toward the beginning reach out to fellow Thrill Jocks OOIOO’s ecstatic, kinda impenetrable Taiga (2006), but once the musicians settle in, the flashbacks are of the Don Caballero/Storm and Stress variety. It’s perverse post-rock all the way, but you probably knew that anyway, based on song titles like "Embryo Imbroglio."
Terrible Two‘s best quality is precisely that we don’t know what to make of it. That’s the point of the album and what makes the band a close fit with post-rock’s steez. Many standard-issue indie descriptors apply to Thank You’s music — it’s rhythmic and sports chanty vocals and so-called tribal percussion — but there’s a lingering question over what we’re supposed to do with it. Zone/make/freak out? The music doesn’t hang together in an album-as-statement way: it just drifts in and out of cymbal-showered cosmic grooves.
Thrill Jockey describes Thank You’s sound as a resource for "beat-diggers and electronic artists," raw material for repurposing, but don’t be discouraged by the ambiguity. The toxic assets spilling out of indie’s boom and bust aren’t crispy organs and tuned tom-toms — instead they’re everything embodied by Beirut and Jeremy Jay. Those dudes took it too far, while Thank You, like tourmates Mi Ami, take it further out. For examps, the only reason to tune out of the chugging, hypnotic middle section of the slothy title track would be to peep the mind-melting percussive discourses of N’Diaye Rose Sabar Group’s video clips — though you’d still end up coming back to finish "Terrible Two" off.
Chris Coady, who’s worked with fellow Charm City residents Celebration, mixed Terrible Two and gives it the saturated, subtly warped tone that sounds like a really classy 4-track, a sound Beach House also go in for. The production enhances the already-glassy quality of the songs. I imagine Thank You’s process for composing as something I christen "deep jamming": discarding the first dozen ideas that you stumble upon as a group, then reducing the 13th riff by half and looping indefinitely. In this sense, Thank You could have existed in the mid-’90s without arousing suspicions of time travel: it sounds like the ensemble mainly uses the computer to check out A Minor Forest’s brainwashed.com page and play Minesweeper.
As far as Bmore bands go, this threesome out-Apollonian Animal Collective. Or out-Dionysian. We can leave that to the unspecified future lady/dude with the sampler to figure out.
THANK YOU
With Mi Ami and JAWS
Fri/27, 9:30 p.m., $7
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923
SECA ART AWARDS
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002’s Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005’s Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television’s Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let’s raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.
From Cindy Sherman’s faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy’s return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman’s work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006’s Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.
"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don’t see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd’s response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman’s work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it’s not hard to see why.
However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman’s rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece’s hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman’s art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.
This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF’s Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.
The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other’s homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman’s delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy’s and Mike Kelley’s assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."
Holman’s collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television’s most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country’s current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.
In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."
SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN
Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third St., SF
(415) 357-4000
› paulr@sfbg.com
The password for 2009 so far seems to be "hard," as in hard times, hard luck, hard cheese. To this list we might also add Hard Knox Café, whose time has come, though it’s never really gone. By this I mean that when you can go into a place and pay $10 for three pieces of good fried chicken and two substantial side dishes, along with a complimentary cornbread muffin, chances are you’ll be back, regardless of Wall Street weather. And who needs dessert when Stella Artois on tap is just $3.50?
The ironist (a.k.a. yours truly) finds plenty to like at Hard Knox Café beyond the fried chicken and the Stella. There’s the fact that such a value-driven spot should have opened a decade ago, at the golden crest of the Clinton boom, and gone on thriving across 10 topsy-turvy (mostly turvy) years, only to find itself perfectly positioned — and named — for what we can hope will be a new era of value. (A second, and larger, venue opened last summer on outer Clement Street.) There’s also the fact that a restaurant serving American comfort-Southern-soul food should be operated by a Vietnamese family, the Huas.
But maybe that isn’t ironic at all. Maybe it’s just American. And even for confirmed ironists, non-irony has its attractions. Hard Knox’s interior design, of a roadhouse, is quietly witty, with wall panels of corrugated steel (shades of the original Straits Café!), floors of distressed wood, and booths upholstered in red vinyl. The crowd, like the neighborhood, is mixed: young and old, working class and tech-geek, people at a round table deep in conversation over piles of chicken bones while others wait just inside the front door for takeout.
It’s not hard to see why the food has such broad appeal. If you could only have one meal a day, you’d want something from Hard Knox. No, it isn’t fancy; the only foam you’ll find here is the head on your Stella. But it does have that mom-is-cooking authenticity. Everything tastes good. And the portions are big. You will not leave hungry.
We did have a slight salting issue with the beef short ribs (at $13 one of the pricier items on the menu). The meat, on its bracelets of bone, was fabulously tender but timid, like a pale partygoer clutching a plastic cup in a lonely corner, waiting to be teased out. Sprinkling salt on awkward party guests isn’t necessarily a winning strategy, but it does have a way of bringing beef to life — beef, which, even more than television, asks so little and gives so much.
The crusty fried chicken suffered from no such underseasoning: the coating was adequately seasoned, and the meat was tender, juicy, and flavorful. But we aren’t talking about Cajun or otherwise spicy fried chicken; the batter was crisp more than tasty, and while this had the virtue of letting the chicken taste like chicken — and I like the taste of chicken — it also didn’t set off any spice fireworks. Of course, none were promised.
At least as appealing as the big plates of protein are the side dishes. In fact you could make a meal of these, a kind of Southern-comfort tapas dinner. You get your pick of two with each main dish, but you can get them à la carte for $3 each, which isn’t bad at all.
The lack of glamour in the sides is almost glamorous. We were particularly taken with the stewed cabbage, the mere name of which stirred unholy memories from childhood, when "stewed" could only mean "boiled to death." And stinky! Like the reek of old shoes. But this cabbage — green, cut into thick shreds — had been gently handled; it was a little more tender than stir-fried versions, and very subtly scented with, perhaps, some bacon, fatback, or salt pork. Cabbage once filled me with fear and loathing, but I could eat Hard Knox’s version … well, maybe not every day, but often.
Mac and cheese was tasty if slightly gummy. Collard greens are underappreciated outside the South; they are among the tastier greens on their own, and when zipped up, as here, with garlic and a touch of vinegar, they can become almost addictive. Comparably underappreciated (and perhaps almost unknown) beyond the South are black-eyed peas, with their distinctive two-tone look and near-gritty texture; Hard Knox serves them with short-grain white rice, and if you feel inclined to add a jolt of hot sauce to this mildness — not a bad idea — a bottle of Crystal is sure to be near at hand.
Although Third Street has changed considerably in the last decade, with Muni Metro’s T-line now running down the median to relieve some of the tedium, the corridor is still industrial and can still have a sinister video-game sameness, especially at night. But finding Hard Knox Café is — dare I say? — easy. Look for the clumps of people milling around at the roadside. *
HARD KNOX CAFÉ
Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
2526 Third St., SF
(415) 648-3770
also 2448 Clement, (415) 752-3770
Beer and wine
MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Each week Justin Juul highlights a rad upcoming local sexy event.
Who Kool Keith is an underground hip-hop artist who raps about dinosaurs, aliens, robots, Elvis Presley, and murder. But that’s all beside the point because the only thing Kool Keith really cares about is sex. An adventurous and non-discriminating fornicator, Kool Keith writes eroto-biographical lyrics so weird and raunchy they make Too Short sound like a thugged out version of Dr Seuss. It’s true that he’s matured a little since the release of “Sex Styles,” “Dr. Octogynecologist,” and “Spankmaster,” but…actually, scratch that. Kool Keith hasn’t matured at all. I mean, sure he talks about global warming sometimes, but his most recent albums feature songs/skits with names “Booty Clap,” “Our Operators are Masturbating,” and “Eat It.” Plus, he hangs out with Ice T and Princess Superstar every day. ‘Nuff said.
What This show is called “Kool Keith: Dr. Octagon vs. Dr Doom,” which probably sounds confusing if you’re not familiar with Keith’s multiple personalities. Here’s a little background. Keith’s most famous alter ego, Dr. Octagon, is an extraterrestrial time traveling gynecologist from Jupiter who likes anal sex and shark meat. He has yellow eyes, a green face, and a pink-and-white Afro. Dr. Doom is a serial killer who eats other humans and breeds rats. Doom and Octagon got into a little scuffle about 10 years ago and Octagon lost. He died. Or at least that’s how it seemed. Somehow Dr. Octagon managed to record an album and make some videos back in 2006. This really pissed Dr. Doom off so now they’re having a musical re-match that’s bound to last an eternity (check the video footage here). Expect Dr. Sperm, Alien Man, Mr. Nogatco, Willie Biggs, Jimmy Steele, and many many others to appear. Mike Relm, Crown City Rockers, and Hopsin will also be performing. Dj set by Kut Masta Kurt. This show is part of Noise Pop.
Where The Mezzanine (444 Jessie, SF). Tickets ($18).
When Thursday, February 26th. 8pm.
Why “Big Sniff is back. Word to honey’s ass crack.” –Kool Keith, The Mack is Back
I love to grab me some winks. And who doesn’t enjoy a blazing ray? Ergo, Sleepy Sun — bred in Santa Cruz but oh-so-appropriately bunked down these days in the Sunset — is my new cozy cuppa Vitamin D dream-psych — bursting with fuzzed-up, furry freak riffs, drums that skip and play freely in Ginger Baker–ed fields of jazz-inflected groove things, and dizzying layers of narcotic vocals.
Less noise-besotted and heavy on the heaviness than other once-‘Cruz-centered kindred like Comets on Fire and Mammatus, Sleepy Sun hit its own lazy-day high with Brightblack Morning Light–style blues-rock. The band drifts on the gnarly curlicues of guitar and limpid washes of organ before crashing headlong into what sounds like a simian love-in on "White Dove" from Embrace, due for worldwide release in May on ATP Recordings. I spoke to vocalists Brett Constantino and Rachel Williams as they sat in a tree and puttered around during a Golden Gate Heights Park video shoot for the aforementioned song. Next up: the band, which has barely toured, will live in a van for the next three months, playing South by Southwest and All Tomorrow’s Parties in England.
"I’d say our music is honest rock ‘n’ roll," says Constantino. "It’s a concoction of six different songwriters that pick up on different things and are attracted to different sounds. But we’re not going to shy away from the fact that there seems to be a psychedelic music movement. We don’t have a problem with being lumped in with that!
"The funny thing is when we all moved to Santa Cruz to go to school, Comets [on Fire] had just left there. Everyone would always talk about, ‘Oh, Comets on Fire — they’re the Santa Cruz flagship band.’ ‘But where are they and why aren’t they ever playing?!’ I always found that interesting."
"[Santa Cruz] is a very unusual bubble, a beach bubble," opines Constantino. "I find that it’s the perfect place to develop as an artist and as a person, y’know — just because the culture there is so open and forgiving to weirdness, to eccentricity."
"We all met in school in Santa Cruz," says Constantino. "We wanted to make a career out of this or give it a shot, so we moved out of our house in Santa Cruz. We still do live together. It’s like a big giant family."
"Brett and I live in same room — it’s great," Williams says later. As a couple? "We just sleep in the same room — in two different beds. But we love rumors, so spread it!"
SLEEPY SUN
With Lumerians, True Widow, and Kings and Queens
Feb. 25, 8 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
How to push misty, watercolored memories of home and a past forged on the other side of the globe through the filter of today and still hold onto the mirror shards of identity? There’s a bittersweet irony to the idea that now, with the release of Sholi’s evocative, impressively detailed self-titled album on Quarterstick, the Davis-born Bay Area band might be forever known in some parts of the Iranian American community for its take on Iranian pop icon Googoosh’s "Hejrat (Migration)," a song of mourning to a departed lover.
"We kind of reinterpreted the song and framed it as being about the Iranians who left Iran and that whole migration," vocalist-guitarist Payam Bavafa. He grew up listening to Persian music with family at home and to Western sounds among friends. "When some of my relatives heard it, they said, ‘Omigod, when I heard this I started crying. This is the song of our migration.’ I was like, "Really? That’s how you think about it, too?"
The quickie recording — tracked to tape by Greg Ashley in his home, made in response to the anti-Iranian rhetoric of November 2007, and eventually included on a Believer comp — stands in contrast to the careful, lengthy process Bavafa, drummer Jonathon Bafus, and bassist-vocalist Eric Ruud undertook in creating their first full-length. The graceful, ever-growing, and seamless-seeming full-length was assembled in part at Eli Crews’ New and Improved Studios in Oakland and in part at various members’ homes, with the help of co-producer Greg Saunier, who began his contributions to Sholi in 2006 via e-mail while on tour with Deerhoof. Much like "Hejrat," the album revolves around memory and the way we construct it, a focus of Bavafa’s work as an engineer in a neuroscience lab.
Songs like "Spy in the House of Memories" embody the disc’s overall "spirit of fragmented recordings and recycled ideas," as Bavafa puts it, though others such as "November Through June" play with the "idea of wanting to be where you’re not currently. This idea of wanting to be somewhere else or someone else — and essentially everything is right in front of you."
All of which sounds like no small amount of the immigrant experience of Bavafa’s parents is making its way into the music of Sholi, a moniker taken from the vocalist’s childhood nickname. Elements of an exiled culture also pop up in the puckishly po-mo "Hejrat" cover art, which depicts Bavafa’s parents watching a hulking, fireplace-like TV appearing to air a YouTube video of Googoosh. "Our parents look at Iranian TV and radio — they have their own portal," muses Bavafa, "and I have mine."
SHOLI
With the Dead Trees, Everest, and Jake Mann
Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $12
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
REVIEW Art is in the air at City Hall, thanks to Bill Fontana’s "Spiraling Echoes" installation. In contrast, an ambitious exhibition at New Langton Arts explores the visual properties of musical pieces. Curated by Artforum contributor Christoph Cox, "Every Sound You Can Imagine" is rife with inkjet or offset prints of compositions — Morton Subotnick’s smudgy pencil jottings are an exception. A hefty percentage of works avoid standard notation to create sight-based sonic suggestions. To glean from just one small segment or wall, devoted to late-1990s works: Ryoji Ikeda’s Variations for Modulated 440hz Sinewaves is wonderfully nauseating in its op art effect, the score for Signal’s Lines conjures clouds in the sky, and William Basinski’s Shortwavemusic suggests the jagged lines of a seismograph or Richter scale.
These works are strictly black-and-white, but Cox’s survey contains many small rainbows of playful pencil and Magic Marker musicality. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses isn’t alone in its crayon radiance — Jim Hodge’s Sea of Love, Leon Kirschner’s Study for "String Quartet No. 3," Allan Bryant’s Pitch Out, Yasuo Tone’s Ten Haikus of Basho, and John Cage’s Aria (which likens jazz to dark blue and Marlene Dietrich to the color purple) all deploy the color chart as musical chart. Barry Guy’s Witch Gong Game includes felt-tip images of mandalas, pointed stars, graphic diagrams, and moon slivers, while Rainer Wehringer’s responds to Györgi Ligeti’s Artikulation by creating black and brown combs or hair clippers. Kinetic geometric designs — the circles of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, the bird flock of check marks that is Cage’s Study for Piano and Orchestra — aren’t far from the graphic potency found in Jonny Trunk’s handsome 2005 monograph of LP covers The Music Library.
Splicing songbooks to fuse Mendelsohn to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the collage aesthetic of Hodges’ A Line Drawn in the Dark is, along with a piece by Steve Roden, one of the more inventive works here. The late Bruce Conner’s Untitled (music) has an effect similar to Will Yackulic’s recent experiments in drawing with a typewriter, while his contemporary, Wallace Berman, mines language and numeric systems. Downstairs, Christian Marclay’s video, Screenplay, sets many of these free-thinking compositional concepts into motion.
EVERY SOUND YOU CAN IMAGINE Through March 28. Tues.–Sat., noon–6 p.m. New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom, SF. (415) 626-5416, www.newlangtonarts.org
Compiled by Breena Kerr — with a little romance, for the occasion
Mistress Tatiana talks bondage on Mon/16
>> Romance For the Rest of Us with Marcia Baczynski
Ever wondered what to do when your partner asked you to “be more romantic?” According to relationship coach Marcia Baczynski, real romance is not what you think. For anyone who wants to plan an original Valentines day or put more V-day in their day today.
Thu/12, 7pm-8:30pm, $20 sliding scale
The Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission, SF.
415-255-1155
www.centerforsexandculture.com
————
>> My Sucky Valentine!
Thomas Roche invites other San Francisco’s funniest underground writers to share their Valentines holiday horror stories of February 14th foibles and love gone awry. Don’t just sit at home and be jaded- go to this event and turn your V-day disgust into laughter and passion for the spoken word.
Fri/13, 7pm-10pm, $10-$20 sliding scale at door (no one turned away)
The Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission, SF.
415-255-1155
www.centerforsexandculture.com
————
>> Bound Gods Video Party Plus- Male Dungeon Party
Van DarkHolme, producer/director of Kink.com hosts a screening, signing, reception and part-ay that includes BD/SM porn viewing upstairs and “fully equipped” (ie also with lots of willing volunteers) dungeon downstairs. A few volunteer spots are still available — to inquire, email brochlex@comcast.net.
Fri/13, 8pm-1am, $10 for membership, Partners get in free
1277 Mission St, San Francisco
415-626-1746
www.sfcitadelmen.org.
By Marke B
Dickinson fetes dick
Do those “Oscars of gay porn,” the GayVN Awards, actually help premium homosexual video productions gain a wider audience? Sure there’s the “recognition of your peers” aspect for directors, actors, key grips, etc — you may be surprised, but down those stubbly, grunting faces run the tears of several clowns — but do you honestly rush out after the awards are announced and snatch up the winning discs?
Well, we don’t know about that, but the whole shiny shirted shebang — hosted this year at the Castro Theatre on March 28, with satellite events all weekend — sure is a lot of septum-searing fun. (We’ll have all the details on the wild pre and after parties here as the “big event” approaches.)
SFBG TV goes to Le P’tit Laurent restaurant in Glen Park. Video slideshow by Ariel Soto
By Molly Freedenberg
All Benni wants for Valentine’s Day is you … and another tattoo.
The first Suicide Girls event I attended was a prom several years ago, before SGs became minor celebrities, appearing on Real Sex and in Dave Grohl’s video and touring the country with Warped Tour or their own burlesque show. It was held at some dive bar near the Tenderloin, the kind of place where you drink cheap beer and don’t want to put your jacket on the ground. My how things have changed. Now, the alt pin-up site will co-host an event at the swanky Supperclub for Valentine’s Day. The event promises to be interesting eye candy for casual observers and hardcore SG fans alike, as not only will tattooed and Manic Panic-ed sexpots be in attendance, but performing aerial tissu and go-go dancing. And since SGs also have come a long way since their original underwhelming live performances — thanks to an influx of models who also are talented performers, as well as better stage management and choreography — chances are the shows will be worth seeing for more reasons than just witnessing your online masturbation material come alive. (Though that’s as good a reason to go as any.)
Feb. 14, 7:30pm-2am, $100
Love is Hell (in Bed)
Supperclub
657 Harrison, SF
(415) 348-0900
www.supperclub.com
American Apparel, which is known for sexy ads and fairly progressive labor practices, failed to convince San Franciscans to let them open a fourth store here.
By Ben Terrall
Yesterday, after a long afternoon of statements from a few supporters and many opponents of American Apparel opening a new store at 988 Valencia Street, the San Francisco Planning Commission voted 7-0 to deny the Los Angeles-based chain the permit they needed to open.
The Commission Chambers at City Hall were packed to capacity as the Planning Commission began its regular meeting. The extra attendees, many of them organized by the hastily-formed “Stop American Apparel” campaign, were moved to two rooms with video monitors which broadcast the meeting.
It was strong show of force by grassroots organizers, one that forced a vote that few thought would be so decisive.
REVIEW For anyone who has attempted to stare down one of Bridget Riley’s hypnogogic vortices or contemplated the point at which two color blocks mesh in a Rothko, Takako Yamaguchi’s recent set of paintings at Jancar Jones Gallery should produce some pleasantly familiar sensations. Upon entering the shoebox-size space, one sees five three-by-four-foot canvases that form a seemingly continuous horizontal vista of graduated lines and patterned strips done in earth tones and blues, with the occasional wink of metallic shimmer. (This panorama effect is offset when one realizes that an outlier has been sneakily hung in the back office area.)
Viewed individually, Yamaguchi’s warm bands of color and geometric repetition start to take on the cast of Southern Californian geography — oceanic expanse, suburban sprawl, and stretches of desert. Interlocking white donuts and intestinal curlicues suggest clouds; hills and waves roll ad infinitum; distant mountains have the repetitive crenulations of a side-scrolling video game; the faintest line of gold leaf could demarcate city lights twinkling midground, or a sliver of sunset. And yet your eyes never fully adjust to the precise play of blurred and crisp elements, which is especially forceful in the two halves of Strangely Familiar. What looks fuzzy in your peripheral vision sometimes stays that way when studied head-on, just as Yamaguchi’s palette toggles between subtle abstraction and figurative hooks. In this sense, her canvases are Magic Eyes in reverse: if you stare long enough, the geographic reference points start to flicker into the background, like unstable mirages. So meticulous and subtle are the gradations of color — so light is Yamaguchi’s brushwork — that at times you forget you are looking at a painting. (This is underscored by the way in which each landscape continues around the sides of the canvas, as if the image were sprayed onto it and then stretched onto a slightly too-small frame.). Jancar Jones may be the smallest gallery in the city, but from the vantage point of Yamaguchi’s landscapes, you can see for miles and miles.
TAKAKO YAMAGUCHI Through Feb. 28. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, suite 120, SF. Thurs–Sat, noon–6 p.m. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com
Because the Bay Guardian is the go-to source for Bay Area audiences, I thought your readers would be interested to know about the latest happenings at Mills College with the opening of its new concert hall and exciting all-star contemporary music festival.
From February 21-April 5 Mills will celebrate their rich music legacy with a six-concert festival, Giving Free Play to the Imagination. An elite group of musicians who have helped shape contemporary music around the world, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Roscoe Mitchell, Joan Jeanrenaud, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Arditti Quartet, and Fred Frith, among others, will perform pieces of their own design, including several world-premiere pieces, and of Mills composers past and present. At this time Mills will also celebrate the reopening of the Mills Concert Hall, a venue that has inspired audiences for more than 80 years. Oliveros will play the first sounds in the Hall on February 21.
Mills College is the international leader in contemporary music, which is why musicians from around the world come to Mills, and how Mills has become an incubator for the evolution of contemporary music, with the likes of Dave Brubeck, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Burt Bacharach, Darius Milhaud and Phil Lesh among students and faculty. As the Bay Guardian has covered Mills’ music in the past, I think your readers would be interested to know about this exciting festival, the Bay Area’s latest greatest concert venue, and what’s new in the world of Mills as its musicians inspire communities in the Bay Area and around the world.
Please let me know if we can arrange an interview with Mills music leadership or the performers to help you build your story. A summary of the Festival program is below, with further details available at www.mills.edu/musicfestival.
Best regards,
Victoria Terheyden
Victoria Terheyden
MacKenzie Communications, Inc.
600 California Street, Suite 1590
San Francisco, CA 94108
Tel: 415.403.0800 ext. 30
Fax: 415.403.0801
www.mackenziesf.com
Media Contacts:
Quynh Tran, Mills College
Media Relations Manager
510.430.2300
qtran@mills.edu
Victoria Terheyden
MacKenzie Communications, Inc.
415.867.2516
vterheyden@mackenziesf.com
Mills College Celebrates 80 Years of Musical Innovation with
Giving Free Play to the Imagination Music Festival
OAKLAND, CA—Feb. 3, 2009. Mills College celebrates 80 years of musical innovation as it reopens the historic Mills Concert Hall after an extensive 18-month renovation with a music festival featuring some of the world’s leading contemporary musicians. The six-concert series, Giving Free Play to the Imagination, runs from February 21 through April 5, 2009.
Musical innovators such as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Joan Jeanrenaud, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Arditti Quartet, and Fred Frith, among many others, will celebrate Mills College’s leadership in defining contemporary music.
At the heart of the aesthetic and educational mission of music at Mills is a tradition of experimentalism. Breaking free from preconceived notions about music, Mills composers and performers embrace new sounds and musical forms while pursuing creative, exploratory, and individual approaches to music. It is this unique approach that has made Mills College the destination for sonic pioneers. And it is why some of the top names in contemporary music—Darius Milhaud, Dave Brubeck, Joëlle Léandre, Phil Lesh, John Cage, Anthony Braxton, and Pauline Oliveros, to name just a few—have been part of the faculty and student population at Mills.
“Because of our long history of support for an experimentalist tradition across barriers of genre, cultural identity, or perceived hierarchy, Mills is uniquely placed to cultivate, appreciate, and celebrate musical pioneers,” said Fred Frith, head of the Music Department and internationally known composer, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser.
Mills music faculty, students, and visiting artists from varied musical traditions come from as far away as Argentina, China, France, and Turkey to study musical forms from electronic music to classical performance to jazz improvisation.
“Ever since renowned French classical composer and Mills’ professor Darius Milhaud encouraged soon-to-be-renowned jazz pianist composer and Mills’ student Dave Brubeck to ‘be himself,’ our students have been discovering how to ‘be themselves’ with single-handed determination,” said Frith. “As a Music Department that encourages experimentation while respecting tradition, we are second to none.”
“We are continually inspired by the influence and impact of our music graduates in their artistic pursuits,” said Janet L. Holmgren, president of Mills College. “Whether they are composers, performers, professors, or music producers or whether they are working in the film, video game, or music industries, or in leading technology and digital media companies, our graduates reflect the College’s mission to encourage creativity and experimentation, all within a global context.”
Giving Free Play to the Imagination also marks the completion of the $11 million renovation of the Mills College Concert Hall, to be renamed for well-known Bay Area philanthropist and Mills alumna Jeannik Méquet Littlefield, MA ‘42. Designed by noted California architect Walter Ratcliff Jr., the Mills Music Building has received widespread acclaim since its opening in 1928.
Improvements to the Concert Hall include new acoustic panels for enhanced sound quality, an expanded stage area for larger performances, installation of a dedicated mixing station, soundproofing for performance and recording quality, new seating and improved layout for a better audience experience. The multicolored frescoes and murals created by California painter Raymond Boynton were restored by two teams of art conservators to return them to their original vibrant colors.
The festival’s name, in fact, derives from Boynton’s vision for his murals, “to produce a scheme of decoration that would give free play to the imagination.”
Mills Music Festival Honorary Committee:
Charles Amirkhanian* – composer, percussionist, sound poet, radio producer
Laurie Anderson* – performance and visual artist, composer, vocalist, musician
Dave Brubeck*+ – jazz and classical musician, pianist, composer
Robert Cole – director of Cal Performances
Merce Cunningham – choreographer and founder of Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Evelyn Glennie – percussionist, composer, motivational speaker
David Harrington – violinist and founding member of the Kronos Quartet
Phil Lesh* – musician and founding member of the Grateful Dead
George Lewis – improviser-trombonist, composer, computer/installation artist
Jeannik Méquet Littlefield* – philanthropist and patroness of the arts
Annea Lockwood – composer, professor emeritus at Vassar College
Rebeca Mauleón* – Latin and world music pianist, composer, educator
Meredith Monk – composer, singer, director/choreographer
Michael Morgan – music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony, pianist, educator
Pauline Oliveros+ – composer, performer, first director of the Center for Contemporary Music (formerly the Tape Music Center)
Lauren Speeth* – CEO of the Elfenworks Foundation, member of the Mills Board of Trustees, violinist, recording artist
Roselyne Swig+ – philanthropist, activist, and patroness of the arts
Michael Tilson Thomas – music director of the San Francisco Symphony, composer, recording artist
* Mills alumnae/i
+ Mills honorary degree recipient
Program
Saturday, February 21, 2009 8:00 pm
OPENING NIGHT: Pauline Oliveros with Tony Martin; Terry Riley; Joseph Kubera performs Roscoe Mitchell; Joan Jeanrenaud
Solo performances of works by pioneers in the experimentalist tradition. Oliveros will play the first musical sounds in the renovated Concert Hall. A champagne reception follows.
Sunday, February 22, 2009 3:00 pm
A CELEBRATION OF THE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
More than 40 years of electronic innovation featuring Pauline Oliveros, Tony Martin, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, William Winant, Joan Jeanrenaud, James Fei, and John Bischoff. Pre-concert talk with performers at 2:00 pm.
Friday, February 27, 2009 8:00 pm
LEGENDARY COMPOSER AND IMPROVISER MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS with special guest Roscoe Mitchell
Saturday, February 28, 2009 8:00 pm
DARIUS MILHAUD’S BRAZILIAN CONNECTION
Dazzling orchestral works conducted by Nicole Paiement. A celebration of the renaming of the Concert Hall in honor of Mills alumna Jeannik Méquet Littlefield follows.
Sunday, March 8, 2009 3:00 pm
ARDITTI QUARTET
The world-renowned string quartet plays works by Mills composers past and present
Sunday, April 5, 2009 3:00 pm
THE MUSIC OF FRED FRITH
A rocking birthday concert of new music with Fred Frith and Cosa Brava (Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, Zeena Parkins, The Norman Conquest), Liz Albee, Minna Choi, Beth Custer, Joan Jeanrenaud, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, Ikue Mori, Larry Ochs, Bob Ostertag, and William Winant.
TICKETS / PUBLIC INFO:
General admission: $20/concert; $100/series
Seniors: $12/concert; $60/series
For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit http://www.mills.edu/musicfestival
Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is named one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, one of the Best 368 Colleges by the Princeton Review, and ranks 75th among America’s best colleges by Forbes.com. Visit us at www.mills.edu.
By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
Ficks interviews Kelly Reichardt, director of Wendy and Lucy, which opens in the Bay Area Fri/30. (For Guardian reviewer Lynn Rapoport’s take on the film, go here.)
San Francisco Bay Guardian: Why are all the hipsters moving to Portland? They heard there were no jobs.
Kelly Reichardt: That’s a good one. It’s actually not even a joke. Did you know 66,000 people moved to Portland last year? We (filmmakers) Todd Haynes, Gus (Van Sant), myself, we’re all ruining it for Portland by making films there.
SFBG: Both of your last films were shot in Portland. Why did you start making films there?
KR: Todd Haynes is a close friend and moved there about nine years ago. He kept calling me and saying, “These people are so great!” And I was like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up.” So I started visiting him out there and started making some short films. Then Todd introduced me to Jon Raymond who ended up writing Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy and now we’re working on a new film together. Jon also wrote a novel that I really fell for, The Half Life. If you don’t want to take my word for it, it’s one of Thurston Moore’s favorites. In any case, Jon’s writing is so region specific (born and raised in Portland) and his writing ties people into their surroundings in a way that is really appealing to me. There’s also a lot of space in his writing, which makes it easy as a reader to bring your own self to the table. I’m making films again because I found a writer that really fits with my filmmaking style. And the films are so much the better for it.
SFBG: While watching Wendy and Lucy I kept thinking this film is the perfect antithesis to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007).
KR: It’s funny, when I saw the trailer for Into the Wild I was like, “oh no, that’s our movie!” But his film is more like, Nature on Speed.
SFBG: Michelle Williams was so wonderful in Wendy and Lucy, especially her scenes with the older man who played the security guard.
KR: The security guard is an interesting guy in real life too! His name is Walter Dalton — Wally. I can’t even remember what the character’s name was suppose to be in the script but it just became Wally because he so embodied it. His other life before Wendy and Lucy was that he was a writer for TV like [for] the Smothers Brothers, Laverne and Shirley and Barney Miller. I love the Smothers Brothers. Plus he’s a total lefty, awesome guy. And he just came down from Seattle to read for us one day. He’s such a good guy, that when he would leave the set, we would all go, “Oh Wally.”
SFBG: Wendy and Lucy, like Old Joy, feels like the answer to what’s dragging down the recent indie cinema scene. Do you make a conscious effort to take that step when making your films?
KR: That’s so nice of you. Come to my class and tell my students that. My students are all like “You’re gonna show us this again?”
Wendy and Lucy trailer:
SFBG: I really do think your films are that next step. A neo-indie scene, which is less marketed to them and can deliver something that they didn’t know they wanted.
KR: Well, I teach visual storytelling up at Bard College. It’s a very groovy place. I get to work with a bunch of filmmakers that I really admire like Peter Hutton, Jacqueline Goss, Peggy Ahwesh, Les LeVeque. It’s this hardcore, mostly avant-garde group who are all so badass. And that’s the funny thing with me there; I’m like the sell-out narrative person of the group! (Laughs)
SFBG: What a great role to play!
KR: I’m what they can handle as far as narrative goes. So I teach visual storytelling, and the gist of my class is kinda old school in the way of telling a story through camera placement and movement. I do sort of feel that this is going by the wayside, how to tell a story visually, just by the nature of video cameras and the whole mumblecore movement which is the opposite to what I’m trying to teach. Though I can’t say that my students have embraced mumblecore as much as I feared they would.
SFBG: Are you attracted to working with other filmmakers, or working in a community like the mumblecore directors?
KR: (Laughs) I’m in a community. I swear I am! Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, 2005), Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter, 2006), and I all used to share an office back in the day so we all like showing each other our latest films. It’s true we don’t act in one another films or anything. I have Todd Haynes watch cuts of my films and give me notes as well as Phil Morrison who directed Junebug (2005). Actually Todd Haynes did make an appearance in one of my films once when he stopped by the Wendy and Lucy set, by walking into a really long take, wearing an Old Joy t-shirt! I was like, “Who’s that asshole? Oh Todd, thanks for stopping by.” I also keep up with So-Yong Kim (In Between Days, 2006). So yeah, I’m in a community.
SFBG: Why did you start teaching?
KR: They say, “Those who can’t do, teach” but they never talk about the actual teaching part. When teaching is good, it’s really, really good. Being at Bard College is a place I have wanted to be at for a long time. There’s eight students to a class and they don’t let you just major in film. When my students are coming into my class saying things like, “I just built a theremin in music class!” it really charges me. One of my classes is Intro to Moving Image and all these kids who are growing up with computers are suddenly getting to go into the Cascades with a Bolex in their hands for the first time and it’s awesome. Plus, I love to talk about film. As I said, I’m working on a new film, a Western with Jon (Raymond) and so I’ve been slipping Westerns into my teaching, which keeps me thinking about my own things in a new way. These kids who are studying avant-garde filmmaking more than narrative, will hear me say something I take perfectly for granted like “objective shot” and they’ll bring in a shot of a beetle and ask if it’s objective. And I’ll get to go, “I don’t know, let’s sit here and think about it!”
SFBG: How do you continue to make these little masterpieces?
KR: I haven’t put the burden of having to make my living on filmmaking. I mean it just didn’t work for me. I think these films, the way we’re making them really works because that burden isn’t there. You go off and no one’s paying attention to you and you have privacy and have six months to edit and then you can still go back and shoot and redo some things. There aren’t too many hands in the pie. It’s all just very small stuff. And since no one’s getting paid on these movies, we can take that burden off the filmmaking process and I’m able to be put in the realm that’s more feasible for me.
SFBG: Please just keep making more of these kinds of movies.
KR: Thanks, man.
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Hola, age of change. My 2K9 nightlife motto: less musing, more cruising — just watch out for the bruising, child. A few blurry dawns ago, out of nowhere, I got bopped full-on in the kisser by some drunk fool outside the club. Tragedy struck.
Luckily, my impeccable cheekbones are fashioned from silky Teflon and my major Ukrainian modeling contract survived intact. But it was a good reminder, a "slap in the face," if you will — and you will: always be aware of your surroundings and don’t drink yourself too unfunctional. Hear me alike, dear macho bar queens, PBR fixie pixies, Bebe-clad bachelorettes, darling dragzillas, electro-spandex starlets, popped-collar wannabros, and pretend hip-hop producers. Let’s be careful out there. For more tips on surviving your midnights out, San Francisco’s guardian angels of the dark, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, are, as usual, eager to provide at their Web site under “features.” Now, let’s get it on.
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THE ID LIST
This glorious cabaret monthly brings a touch of Weimar Berlin to San Francisco by way of NYC nightlife impresario Earl Dax. This time around, wacky Seattlean hostess Dina Martina wilkommens tunesmith Spencer Day, space-gother Kiddie, harpist Deirdre Egan, and more, ol’ chum. Wed/28, 9:30 p.m., $16. Café Du Nord, 2174 Market, SF. www.tingeltangelclub.com, www.cafedunord.com
Part of LCD Soundsystem never dies? Not if the indie dance juggernaut’s members stay true to their retro-underground roots. LCD drummer Pat Mahoney keeps it fresh by pumping up the past as he DJs the West Coast debut of this roving club classic. Cheekbone bonus: a special Hercules and Love Affair DJ set. Thurs/29, 9 p.m., $10-$15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com
Don’t let the serious name put you off — that UK queen of intel freak-uencies, BBC Radio’s Mary Ann Hobbs, is flying in to curate a dance explosion of razor-sharp local talent, including Ghosts on Tape, Lazer Sword, Kid Kameleon, Disco Shawn, Shane King, and more. Now, if only the BBC would archive her streaming weekly broadcasts for more than a month. Thurs/29, 9:30 p.m., $5. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com
The electro-rap trio of trouble destroyed the Guardian‘s Best of the Bay 2008 party and sent Jello Biafra to the hospital. Now they’re inaugurating a new monthly by two solid party producers, Popscene vs. Loaded, at the Rickshaw — and celebrating their latest record release. Watch out for blood puddles. Fri/30, 10 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com
Proto-dubstepper? Future-glitch engineer? Global grooves genius? Let’s just say all three, then drool all over this singular Brazilian legend’s laptop. Stunned noggin-nodders at last year Treasure Island fest know he’s made a seamless live transition from vinyl to electronics — and teases serious dance breaks from the wizardly ambience. Fri/30 and Sat/31, 9 p.m., $23. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.independentsf.com, www.hacksawent.com
Burning Man meets alternaqueer for a multimedia pajama party, with trippy visuals and outré drag performances. Wait! Don’t stop reading! Video artist III is truly talented, and his projections, combined with edgy queen antics, add up to more than the sum of my whole first sentence. Honey Soundsystem brings the noise. And, yes, wear pajamas. Sat/31, 9 p.m., $12 in pajamas, $20 without. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. www.supperclub.com
Too many puns to count in the name, too many too-hot queer rock bigwigs involved to miss this new live showcase and dragstravaganza monthly at DNA. Charlie Horse’s Anna Conda teams up with the Trans Am boys and Revolver’s Lucy Borden for alterna-excess, with the Ex-Boyfriends and Ethel Merman Experience all plugged in. Feb. 4, 10 p.m., $5. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com
Swank Brazilian resto Bossa Nova, in the old CoCo Club space, just opened its lusciously remodeled basement up for late-night affairs — and is going big from the get-go with this kaleidoscopic affair. Detroit techno slayer Mike "Agent X" Clark headlines, with soulful spinner David Harness, funky househed Greg Eversoul, and live jazziness from Lovelight Liberation. Feb. 6, 9 p.m., $10. Bossa Nova, 139 Eighth St., SF. (415) 558-8004.
Those ambassadors of dread bass, Surya Dub, are bashing for their monthly club’s second anniversary, with Dutch dubstep (Dutchstep?) heavyweight 2562, who couches his rumble in deep techno soundscapes. Also reverbin’: Los Angeles low-low lover the Gaslamp Killer, who can rip a slice of perilous psy-hop quite rightly. Local boy Lud Dub leads the congratulatory proceedings. Feb. 7, 9 p.m., $15. Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com
PREVIEW What does avant-garde Japanese dance look like? Butoh is 40 years old. Eiko and Koma have been working their version of slow dancing for three decades. What about dancers who have grown up in a high-tech, high-velocity, video-drenched urban environment? We at least get glimpses of the movies, comics, and pop music that are part of their lives. Once in a while, a company like the Condors will come through town on their way to somewhere else. But for the most part, our exposure to that type of edgy new dance — highly influenced by electronic media and sophisticated in its use of those elements — remains nil.
Now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is making an attempt to open minds and ears to new moves from Japan. Next month they bring back Papa Taruhamara, and this weekend they present three companies in a performance titled "Japan Dance Now" on their first stop of a three-city tour of the states. Baby-Q, a multimedia company that includes a robotics specialist, is directed by choreographer Yoko Higashino. The group stages her solo E/G-Ego Geometria. Nibroll’s seven athlete-dancer-comedians are taking on the everyday in their excerpt of Coffee. Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club is an all-female ensemble with serious hair. The company describes The End of Water as an exploration of aspects of femininity from a pop butoh perspective.
JAPAN DANCE NOW Thurs/29–Sat/31, 8 p.m., $25–$30 (On Sat/31 audience members receive special entrance to the post-performance "Big Idea" party, 9 p.m.-midnight, in the Grand Lobby and Galleries). Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org
REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.
The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.
Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.
WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com
LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
