Video

L’homme de evasion: Tell No One

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By Erik Morse

Winner of four 2007 César Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor, Tell No One — aka Ne le dis à personne — stars François Cluzet as Alexandre Beck, a successful Parisian doctor whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) is horribly murdered in the disturbing opening scene. Huit ans plus tard and we learn that Beck has been investigated, harrassed and scapegoated by the gendarmerie for the crime until several key pieces of evidence link Margot’s death to the work of a local serial killer. Taken to drink and solitudinous reveries of the past, Alexandre remains consumed by the events of that night. His obsession over Margot’s death is further inflamed when he receives an email containing a surveillance video of his wife still very much alive. Her instructions to him: “Tell no one.” Is it a hoax? His imagination? Or his wife returned from the dead?

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Presidential Musical Chairs

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Musical support alone might be enough to swing undecided voters in the November presidential race.
On the one hand, you could vote for a guy who has “It’s Rainin’ McCain, Hallelujah!” kinda musical backup:

I’m sorry, but whatever way you look at it that video sucks. Unless you are an Obama supporter, which makes me wonder just who made this fiasco.

Or you could vote for a guy who has a whole string of musical support. The latest I’ve seen is Coco Tea’s reggae Obama, which is a nice mellow tune for a Friday.

but my alltime favorite remains Barack O’Bollywood:

It’s described as “east meets west meets acid”. Enjoy–and enjoy your weekend!

Lincecum strikes out SJ jinx

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By A.J. Hayes

For Tim Lincecum’s sake lets hope that there’s some validity to the phrase “What you don’t know, can’t hurt you.”

After the Giants young ace – billed as “The Freak” – was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated last week, Lincecum claimed he had no prior knowledge of the famed S.I. Jinx. Over the years the bad luck curse has claimed past cover boys ranging from Rick Barry to Barry Sanders.

“All it is s a magazine, right?” said Lincecum. “In elementary school we had Sports Illustrated for Kids. But I never heard of a jinx. I did hear of the Madden Curse though.”

Ah, the video game generation.

Sneaky Creek

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TORSTEN KRETCHZMAR


What is it that makes Torsten Kretchzmar so different, so alluring? Perhaps it’s that he knows what girls like — as proven in the music video for "I Know What Girls Like," where the bespectacled German wins a barroom bro-down against a bunch of pool-playing dudes. Perhaps it’s because he’s the best Teutonic electropop icon since Klaus Nomi rocketed up to the sky. Or perhaps it’s because he’s — quite frankly — hot. Whatever the case, all will be screaming with Kretchzmarmaniac glee when he takes the stage. (Johnny Ray Huston) With Freddy McGuire, Justine Electra, and Katrina Lamb. July 16, 8 p.m., $5–$15 sliding scale. New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom, (415) 626-5416

JEL


Oakland sound collagist Jeffrey Logan impressed the heck outta everyone and their brothers with his artful Soft Money (Anticon, 2006). Next up, a putf8um single, which will guarantee plastic surgery for his entire family. (Kimberly Chun) With the Sixteens, the Fucking Ocean, and NED. July 17, 9 p.m., $7. Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880

EXTRA ACTION MARCHING BAND VS. WHAT CHEER?


Can’t wait for the battle of the brass? The blood-spitting firestarters of the Bay’s EAMB kick off MCMF, and the 18-piece Providence, R.I., ensemble WC closes it with oodles of horn-dog action. (Chun) Extra Action Marching Band with Nurses, Fluff Girl, and Butt holes Urfers. July 18, 9 p.m., $8. Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880. What Cheer? with Tiger Honey Pot, MGM Grand, and Super Secreta Especiale July 20, 3:30 p.m. (all-ages show), $5. Million Fishes Gallery, 2501 Bryant, SF. www.millionfishes.com. What Cheer? with Super Secreta Especiale July 20, 8 p.m., $10. Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-0012

ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI


He’s baaack. (Chun) With Anavan, Late Young, Rainbow Arabia, and Hecuba. July 18, 9 p.m., $10-$15. Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF. (415) 648-7562

EARLIMART


There is life after Elliott Smith. The former Fresno-nauts have scored mucho acclaim for their layered, sonically enriched new album — pun alert — Hymn and Her (Majordomo). It’s the third most added college-radio album in the nation to boot. (Chun) With Built Like Alaska and the Parson Red Heads. July 19, 9:30 p.m., $14. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

LADY GENIUS


Volunteer Pioneer is gone but not forgotten: this SF fivesome formed in the ashes of guitarist Jason Byers’ and vocalist-multi-instrumentalist Kyle Williams’ group, emphasizing the pop bliss of boy-girl harmonies. Wait for it, wait for it: their first EP on Gold Robot Records. (Chun) With Huff This, Gwendolyn, and the Parish. July 19, 9 p.m., $7. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300

Noise to go

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Load combo Monotract inspired immediate double — nay, triple — takes as it took the stage at the label’s South by Southwest showcase at Room 710 in Austin, Texas, last year. Noise impresario Carlos Griffoni and ace drummer Roger Rimada were missing in action due to a snowstorm, and the New York City band’s sole rep turned out to be guitarist-vocalist Nancy Garcia — flailing away on guitar with massive curls and girlish frock and evoking images of early punk women before the genre’s look, and sound, became codified. Alongside Garcia was an impromptu experimental-music supergroup incarnation of Monotract — Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore also on guitar, Burning Star Core’s C. Spencer Yeh on violin, and Magik Marker’s Pete Nolan on drums — generating a memorable, noise-fueled set only tangentially related to the genuine article’s powerful album that same year, Trueno Oscuro (Load). The fourth album by the band ended up drawing praise from both Pitchfork Media and The Wire for its loud-soft waves of epic distortion ("Red Tide"), no-wave-ish blurt ("Cafu y Kaka"), and electronic-groan tribal-chant ("Big N"), which saw Garcia memorably motor-mouthing toward the reverb-bristled finale.

Apparently Garcia is not only resourceful in a jam, but something of a triple, even quadruple, threat. The Miami, Fla., native of Cuban American descent has been working in dance, video, and visual art, in addition to music, since moving to NYC eight years ago, where she studied at the Merce Cunningham dance studio and recently received a master’s in interactive technology at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. And she’s traveled far —aesthetically and geographically — from her sun-baked teen years in Miami, listening to grunge on the radio and flailing at her guitar as part of Rat Bastard’s Laundry Room Squelchers.

Her first tour with the noise group at 18 led to some "permanent damage, for sure," she says with a chuckle, speaking by phone from NYC. "I was really young and in high school, so it was just really amazing that someone invited me to go on a stage and I could play whatever I wanted. Basically there was no judgment passed, ever."

A dancer since age six, Garcia began composing music and dance at around the same time, so it was natural that one medium informed the other. Garcia’s 2007 dance piece, No Keys, for instance, juxtaposed frugging and head-banging rock moves drawn from Tina Turner and Iggy Pop with lyrics from the Slits and John Holt, beneath one of the musician’s wall-size drawings. Another work, 2005’s localstwang, saw Garcia moving and making music simultaneously, using contact mics attached to effects pedals and amps. That sense of play will factor into Garcia’s Mission Creek show — a first for her as a solo live performer: it will involve guitar, oscillators, and perhaps other "random instruments in the space," she offers. "I like to stay sort of open. Oh, also some movement. It’s hard not to move when there’s music playing."

NANCY GARCIA

With Fishbeck/Duplantier, Jane(t) Pants, and Kunsole

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $5–<\d>$15 sliding scale

New Langton Arts

1246 Folsom, SF

(415) 626-5416

Our personal Mission

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"Smaller and better and more underground" is how Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival founder Jeff Ray describes the event’s 12th annual go-around. Now immersed in his MFA studies at San Francisco State University, Ray has turned to such curators as Smile’s Neil Martinson, Numbers’ Eric Landmark, Extra Action Marching Band’s Ben Furstenberg, and the Fucking Ocean’s Marcella Gries to cast MCMF’s net wider while tightening its focus to a compact five days. Expect a new Latin series and renewed commitment to local artists and Collision programming, which mixes experimental music, sound art, dance, performance, and video. Unrest assured, Ray says: "We still have a really good ear." (Kimberly Chun)

For a complete schedule go to www.mcmf.org




>>Can’t knock the Tussle
The San Francisco instrumentalists turn mad liberation into Cream Cuts
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>Get the Drift
Sonic Memory Drawings and outward instrumental rock creeps
By Michael Harkin


>>Resurrection blues
Lazarus passes around Hawk Medicine
By Kimberly Chun


>>Dye, dye, darlings
The smile-inducing shades of Bleachy Bleachy Bleach
By Michael Harkin


>>Noise to go
Nancy Garcia unleashes her sense of play
By Kimberly Chun


>>Sketches of Spain
Peter Walker communes with a new muse
By Max Goldberg


>>Feeding the fire of Mountainhood
Delicate rusticity straight outta Almaden
By Kimberly Chun


>>Cream-colored slumbers
Foxtails Brigade float beyond experimental folk
By Kat Renz


>>I’m here with lonesome
Copping the White Buffalo stance
By Kat Renz

>>Sneaky Creek: More Mission Creek highlites

>>PLUS: Touch the Mochipet! Touch him!

All your YouTubes belong to Viacom

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Happy Independence! This is one of those creepy techie developments that I wish our incredible Techsploitation columnist Annalee Newitz would sink her privacy-defending cyberteeth into, but alas, her column has ended this week.

Basically, as Machinist’s Farhad Manjoo reports (via Wired), in an ongoing copyright infringement case brought by Viacom against YouTube, a judge just yesterday ordered YouTube parent company Google to hand over “12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) [to Viacom] that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.”

Comedy Central knows you’ve watched Busty Heart crush a six-pack with her boobs!

Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple

Viacom, idiotically, still wants to bust YouTube for transmitting copyrighted clips posted by users. “Idiotically,” I say, because if stoner/slackers didn’t put down their combo bong-remotes long enough to post “John Stewart” snippets to YouTube, I’d have absolutely no idea who the heck he was, except someone badly in need of a hairdresser.

I love Web 2.0! We’re all victims of our own pleasure. Next: US Government busts scruffy earnest dudes from Florida who trash Madonna melodically.

‘Usually I like it when you play with yourself,’ or Richard T. Walker at Iceberger

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By Ari Messer

Continuing to glide through artistic media, the Mission’s new Iceberger gallery opened its fifth show, Richard T. Walker’s video installation, “sometimes i like you more than othertimes,” with a bang on June 14.

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Walker, a British artist currently at the Headlands Center for the Arts and formerly at Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute, is drawn to our often self-interested but always interesting interactions with the natural world. In this case, two videos playing simultaneously on color flat screens face each other in the small, pristine gallery space. They showcase Walker traipsing around the golden California hills with a microphone and small amplifier, delivering a speech in different locales while looking away from the viewer. At the same time, he literally plays with himself – on guitar, vocals and drums – also looking away from the viewer, as if talking to himself all the way around the world.

The most impressive thing at Iceberger’s fifth opening wasn’t the free beer – or free pizza – but the fact that most folks stayed to watch the entire video, often following along with the conversational, poetic text, which was available as program notes. Though spoken in address alternately to “all of the grass I have ever encountered” and to “a medium-sized mountain that will stay in my thoughts forever,” the words sound like a Tarot reading from a good, if ruthlessly honest, friend, speaking directly to the viewer, such as this:

Gas takes you through the wild wood to its magic mountain

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GAS
Nah und Fern
(Kompakt)

By Erik Morse

The landmark release of Gas’ four-CD Nah und Fern (Kompakt) might well narrate a secret märchen that begins in the lowlands of the Black Forest, climaxes upon a Harz mountainside and ends in the enchanted mixing board of a Cologne studio.

One of many noms de guerre of Kompakt founder Wolfgang Voigt, Gas represented the extremes of the techno/ambient hybrid pioneered in small continental studios throughout the ’90s and released on hip electronic labels like Mego, Raster-Noton, and Mille Plateaux – Gas’ original record company. The new box set encompasses Gas’ four releases – 1996’s self-titled debut, 1997’s Zauberberg, 1999’s Königsforst and 2000’s Pop – whose sylvan intricacies appreciate from album to album in a spiritual tour of German romanticism and its putative antipode, techne.

But Voigt endeavors to merge these inconsistent paradigms head-on, finding the majority of musical sources for Gas in his collection of classical German genres, including Wagnerian opera, Webernian serialism, and alpine oompah bands, then mutating them through obsessive looping, stretching, and the ever-present bass drum. What is produced is an incredible acoustic environment overflowing with epic grandeur and religious hymnal. “Gas is Hansel and Gretel on acid,” Voigt has said. “…A seemingly endless march through the under woods – and into the discotheque – of an imaginary, nebulous forest.”


A surveillance video set to Gas music.

Domestic unrest

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Survival often depends on one’s ability to scurry around. Dancers and smaller-scale presenters must use their wits if they want to show their audiences more than homegrown fare. For the most part, the process at SCUBA — a presenters’ network that shares companies out of Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco — works. Sometimes, however, there is a glitch. Such was the case June 26–28 with one of the two dance installations presented as part of "ODC Theater Festival 2: Local Heroes/Big Picture," Kate Watson-Wallace’s House and Karen Sherman’s Tiny Town.

Watson-Wallace has made something of a reputation for herself in her home city of Philadelphia, where she takes over physical locations and transforms them through performance. Since these are acutely site-specific works, traveling with them is difficult. At Theater Artaud, she was confronted with a huge space that has a strong personality of its own. It proved particularly problematic during the first of two performances on opening night when the soft light of dusk streamed through the huge, history-crusted windows of Artaud’s loading dock. She also had to deal with memories (at least this audience member’s) of Lizz Roman, Joanna Haigood, and other artists who have presented their own — and stronger — interpretations of Artaud. Watson-Wallace works best with intimacy, and her production simply needed more confinement than the space or the budget allowed.

House consisted of what probably were three excerpts from the original piece, performed in the theater’s loading dock and lobby. To create the dining room, she placed a long table and six chairs in a corner, which afforded some sense of enclosure. This first part was choreographically the richest, and well performed by Watson-Wallace, Megan Mazarick, and John Luna with local dancers Sebastian Grubb, Jocelyn Lee, and Marisa Mariscotti. Shifting relationships — on, over, and under the table, as well as up the wall — flowed with the inevitability of clock time, yet they were filled with nuanced little fits and starts. An emotional climate redolent with suggestions of love, rebellion, and fatigue recalled tense moments around anyone’s family dinner table. People came and went, hands tentatively touched, looks were exchanged, support was given and withdrawn.

In the living room — suggested by a sofa, rug, and coffee table nailed halfway up a wall — Mazarick’s slow-paced solo had to deal with gravity as she slithered, climbed, and hung over the furniture. This was bland. Two pillows attached to Artaud’s lobby served as Watson-Wallace and Luna’s bedroom. A live video projected their movement onto a lumpy mattress. The duo’s well-danced intimacy — tender, playful, troubled — suggested two people used to each other in bed and out. I kept wondering whether an element of voyeurism was supposed to be at play between the real and the virtual performance. If there was, I didn’t see it.

Sherman resides in Minneapolis but was born in St. Louis. The person sitting next to me at the show was familiar with the choreographer’s birthplace and caught local references that escaped me. Tiny Town was a sardonic but curiously affectionate portrait that peeled away the layers of what the program described as a "Midwestern landscape," yet this could be any small town. It’s a place where everyone minds everyone else’s business, where residents frantically try to keep up and fit in — and woe to those who can’t.

Tiny was meticulously crafted with rich production values. It ran a little flat toward the end, but showcased fine performances from dancers Sherman, Joanna Furnans, Megan Mayer, Morgan Thorson, and Kristin Van Loon. You knew that not everything was right behind the set’s picket fences when a rising cloud revealed two atomic reactors and a woman with her legs tied literally turned herself upside down to "walk." She ended headfirst in a stack of pancakes, and that was just for starters. In this world of superficial prettiness — flowers stuffed in mailboxes, glittery party dresses — tomboys get beaten up and toothy housewives are indeed desperate.

The dancing was appropriately stiff-legged and fractured, full of moments infused with a dogged persistence. It spoke volumes about discomfort within one’s skin, if not outright self-hatred. And all of it was presented with pasted-on smiles.

Nine years of everything

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I’ve been writing this column for nine years. I was here with you through the dot-com boom and the crash. I made fun of the rise of Web 2.0 when that was called for, and screamed about digital surveillance under the USA-PATRIOT Act when that was required (actually, that’s still required). I’ve ranted about everything from obscenity law to genetic engineering, and I’ve managed to stretch this column’s techie mandate to include meditations on electronic music and sexology. Every week I gave you my latest brain dump, even when I was visiting family in Saskatchewan or taking a year off from regular journalism work to study at MIT.

But now it’s time for me to move on. This is my last Techsploitation column, and I’m not going to pretend it’s not a sad time for me. Writing this column was the first awesome job I got after fleeing a life of adjunct professor hell at UC Berkeley. I was still trying to figure out what I would do with my brain when Dan Pulcrano of the Silicon Valley Metro invited me out for really strong martinis at Blondie’s Bar in the Mission District and offered me a job writing about tech workers in Silicon Valley. My reaction? I wrote a column about geeks doing drugs and building insanely cool shit at Burning Man. I felt like the hipster survivalist festival was the only event that truly captured the madness of the dot-com culture I saw blooming and dying all around me. I can’t believe Dan kept me on, but he did.

Since then, my column also found a home in the Guardian and online at Alternet.org, two of the best leftist publications I’ve ever had the honor to work with. I’ve always believed the left needed a strong technical wing, and I’ve tried to use Techsploitation to articulate what exactly it would mean to be a political radical who also wants to play with tons of techie consumerist crap.

There are plenty of libertarians among techie geeks and science nerds, but it remains my steadfast belief that a rational, sustainable future society must include a strong collectivist vision. We should strive to use technologies to form communities, to make it easier for people to help the most helpless members of society. A pure free-market ideology only leads to a kind of oblivious cruelty when it comes to social welfare. I don’t believe in big government, but I do believe in good government. And I still look forward to the day when capitalism is crushed by a smarter, better system where everyone can be useful and nobody dies on the street of a disease that could have been prevented by a decent socialized health care system.

So I’m not leaving Techsploitation behind because I’ve faltered in my faith that one day my socialist robot children will form baking cooperatives off the shoulder of Saturn. I’m just moving on to other mind-ensnaring projects. Some of you may know that I’ve become the editor of io9.com, a blog devoted to science fiction, science, and futurism. For the past six months I’ve been working like a maniac on io9, and I’ve also hired a kickass team of writers to work with me. So if you want a little Techsploitation feeling, be sure to stop by io9.com. We’re there changing the future, saving the world, and hanging out in spaceships right now.

I also have another book project cooking in the back of my brain, so when I’m not blogging about robots and post-human futures, I’m also writing a book-length narrative about, um, robots and post-human futures. Also pirates.

The past nine years of Techsploitation would have been nothing without my readers, and I hope you can picture me with tears in my eyes when I write that. I’ve gotten so many cool e-mails from you guys over the years that they’ve filled my heart forever with glorious, precise rants about free software, digital liberties, sex toys, genetic engineering, copyright, capitalism, art, video games, science fiction, the environment, and the future — and why I’m completely, totally wrong about all of them. I love you dorks! Don’t ever stop ruthlessly criticizing everything that exists. It is the only way we’ll survive.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who is slowly working on fixing her broken WordPress install at www.techsploitation.com, so eventually you’ll be able to keep up with her there again.

The carfree challenge

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>>For our complete Towards Carfree Cities conference coverage, including video, interviews, and pics, click here.

› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A large group of San Francisco’s top alternative transportation advocates traveled to Portland, Ore., for the Towards Carfree Cities international conference June 16-20, marveling at a transportation system widely considered to be the most progressive in the United States.

"Portland is light-years ahead of everyone else in this country," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, who attended the conference along with representatives from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, San Francisco State University, prominent urban design firms including Arup (which is designing the new Transbay Terminal project), architect David Baker, and other institutions.

Public transit in Portland is extensive, cheap, frequent, and easy to use, with the Max line — unlike Muni — allowing bicycles on the trains. Walking is encouraged by new design standards and public information campaigns. A riverside freeway was replaced by open space years ago. And the large network of bicycle paths and other improvements to promote cycling have made Portland the only large city to earn the putf8um designation from the League of American Bicyclists (San Francisco is one tier down at gold).

"But the reality is Portland is far from being great," was the sobering assessment from keynote speaker Gil Peñalosa, the former parks director of Bogotá, Colombia, who pioneered carfree policies there before pushing the issues internationally through the nonprofit Walk and Bike for Life.

Cities are facing multiple crises connected to over-reliance on the automobile — declining public health, environmental degradation, resource depletion, loss of community, and not enough space in US cities to handle the 100 million people they’ll need to accommodate in the next 35 years. And Peñalosa said most are responding with baby steps that deny the scope of the challenge.

"We’re not doing enough," he said, noting that even the best US cities are way too dependent on automobiles compared to cities that have made the biggest advances in reducing automobile use, such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and Vancouver.

"That’s where Portland belongs, and that’s the challenge," Peñalosa said. "Under existing conditions, we have to make major leaps instead of baby steps."

It was the first time that this eighth annual conference has been held in the United States, and organizers said they hoped its message will resonate in a country that needs to change profoundly if it is to efficiently manage its growth while playing a positive role in dealing with global climate change.

Many of the ideas raised at the conference and pursued in Portland are beginning to spread. The conference opened with Depaving Day, a pavement-removal effort that has many adherents in the Bay Area, and closed with Sunday Parkways, during which a six-mile loop in North Portland was closed to cars. Such "Ciclovias," which Peñalosa started in Colombia, are planned this August in New York City and San Francisco.

"There are people from all over the world doing amazing work," said local conference coordinator Elly Blue of the Portland group Shift, which organized the conference to coincide with Portland’s annual Pedalpalooza, two weeks of fun bike events and other festivities.

Many attendees noted that global warming, high gasoline prices (and the specter of Peak Oil), worsening public health, and persistent traffic congestion have made many big city leaders more open to carfree concepts than they’re ever been.

"The climate is changing," League of American Bicyclists director Andy Clarke said. "This is our time. It’s our moment to seize the opportunity and change our communities."

Mia Birk, Portland’s former bicycle-policy coordinator, added, "We’re not anti-car, but we’re trying to create a system where walking and biking are viable transportation options." Birk now runs Alta Planning and Design, which is working on carfree and car-light projects with hundreds of cities around the world, including some in the Bay Area.

"What we’re talking about is a true cultural revolution to encourage that kind of shift," Birk said, inviting the crowd to "be a part of that revolution."

Video: San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival 2008

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Guardian videographers Rhyen Coombs and Eric Zassenhaus reported from the Bicycle Music Fest on June 21.

Lennar asks feds for help–Republican senator blocks bill

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Are we worried, yet? With San Francisco having climbed deeper into bed with Lennar thanks to Prop. G’s passage, the bad news coming from Wall Street and beyond can’t exactly be music to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ears.

As Lennar reported bigger-than-expected quarterly losses today, Lennar’s Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller expressed hope that the federal government would soon belly up and help bail out the beleagured housing industry.

Miller cited increased foreclosures, higher unemployment rates and diminished consumer confidence as reasons why the Florida-based mega developer experienced a 61 percent loss in revenues this quarter.

“With the U.S. housing inventory growing in excess of absorption and limited credit available, the prospect of further deterioration in the homebuilding industry will likely become reality absent Federal government action,” said Miller, who is apparently hedging his political bets by making the maximum campaign contribution to both presidential candidates.

“To that end, we are hopeful that the Federal government will acknowledge the need for further reform and will institute programs designed to stabilize and facilitate the recovery of the housing market.”

But a government plan to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis hit a roadblock in the Senate yesterday in the shape of a Republican from Nevada, Sen. John Ensign.

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Sen. John Ensign (Nevada) wants $7 billion for renewable energy tax credits before he’ll support foreclosure bill.

This isn’t the first time that Ensign has played the role of lone obstructionist.

In September 2007, the Senate discovered that Ensign was using the “secret hold” to obstruct a bill that requires senators to file fund-raising reports electronically, rather than bury the identity of their benefactors in paper filings.

And for a short period in March 2006, Ensign blocked the nomination of Vice Admiral Thad Allen (who replaced FEMA director Mike Brown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) to become the next Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.

But now Ensign, who reportedly has been tasked with assembling a staff to win back the U.S. Senate for Republicans in November 2008, is blocking a foreclosure rescue plan that has broad bipartisan support until he gets a vote on his amendment to provide almost $7 billion in renewable energy tax credits.

As a result, passage of the housing bill to create a multi-billion fund to aid thousands of homeowners refinance costly mortgages into more affordable government-backed loans, will likely be delayed until after July 4.

“In an election year, very few things are actually going to make it into law,” Ensign told reporters, “So if you actually want to get something done, you need to be on that train that is basically going to be leaving the station.”

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While Lennar spent $5 million to defeat a grassroots coalition that wanted 50 percent affordable housing in the Bayview, the City applied for $25 million in grants to bail out Lennar’s Shipyard development.

Here in San Francisco, Lennar Corp. has assured elected officials that there is no relationship between LandSource, a land and development company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, June 8, and Lennar’s Bayview Hunter’s Point project.

In a June 9 letter to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lennar Corporation’s Chief Investment Officer Emile Haddad wrote, “We anticipate that there may be some effort to link LandSource to other Lennar ventures, including Hunters Point Shipyard. Let me be clear: There is no relationship between the two entities. Hunters Point has its own capital structure and financial partners.”

Haddad does not however explicitly mention that LandSource, which owns properties in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas and New Jersey, does have a relationship with Lennar Mare Island, which also filed bankruptcy June 8, leaving city officials in the already bankrupt Vallejo doubly stressed.

And nowhere does Haddad guarantee San Francisco a smooth, obstacle-free redevelopment of Bayview Hunters Point, which apparently is already facing a potentially fatal $25 million funding gap, according to City officials.

“Lennar is committed to continuing to work closely with our community partners and the City and County of San Francisco to overcome any obstacles and to work toward a successful venture,” Haddad writes. “You have my personal reassurance that we will keep you fully informed of any and all significant developments that may impact the project.”

“Likewise, we will continue to utilize the development’s partnership experience and qualifications to leverage all state and federal funding sources to enhance the project and ensure its timely completion.”

As for Lennar’s CEO Stuart Miller, he told investors that “notwithstanding the bleak operating environment, Lennar made significant progress during our second quarter.”

This progress included reducing unsold completed inventory. “We now have on average less than one completed unsold home per community.”
Lennar also reduced selling, general and administrative expenses by 60 percent.

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“Given our success with asset reduction, we have shifted our primary focus to the execution of an efficient homebuilding model through the repositioning of our product to meet today’s consumer demand and by aggressively reducing our construction costs.”

Sounds like a potential Triple Uh–oh.

‘we are very pleased to end our second quarter with approx $880 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings under our credit facility. We have reduced our maximum joint venture recourse debt by approximately $1 billion from its peak level in 2006, which reflects a decrease of over 50 percent.”

“We recognize that the remainder of 2008 will likely see further deterioration in overall market conditions; however, we are confident that we will remain well positioned with a strong balance sheet and properly scaled operations to navigate the current market downturn as a leaner and more efficient homebuilder.”

Meanwhile, following a posting of a video showing some community members less than positive take on Lennar, someone replied with a video about Lennar’s homebuilding operations in Texas.

Seems like some folks in the Bayview aren’t the only ones, er, frustrated with Lennar.

Towards Carfree Cities: Wrapup

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carfree.jpg
Bay Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones covered Towards Carfree Cities, an international conference held last week in Portland (the first time it was in the U.S.), and wrote the following reports.

Video of Portland’s first Ciclovia-style street closure, Sunday Parkways, from www.streetfilms.org

What is carfree? — A look at the concept behind the conference

“We’re not doing enough” — A clarion call for U.S. cities to join an international movement

Everybody into the streets! — Portland created a carfree Ciclovia, just like San Francisco plans to do in August

From geeks to freaks, a look at Portland bicycle culture — The movement in motion

Depaving Day — Transforming urban spaces from asphalt to soil

San Franciscans in the house — Local thinkers played a big role at the conference

Treasure Island as case study — Could we build a model carfree project just off the San Francisco shoreline?

Spreading the word — Streetsblog and other media innovators make the carfree case

Aboard a Portland-bound train — Riding the rails with the San Francisco contingent

Welcome to the jungle

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE Mark Twain’s observation (cribbed from poet Thomas Campbell) that "distance lends enchantment to the view" could serve as a guiding axiom for the languorous, enchanting films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Apichatpong shows more than he tells, and his camera often obscures rather than explicates the minute, alchemical operations taking place before it.

Somnambulant features such as the day-tripping Blissfully Yours (2002), the shape-shifting gay fable Tropical Malady (2004), and the double-exposed parental portrait Syndromes and a Century (2006) have left many critics bewildered but entranced. Others just seem confused by the elliptical, dream-like logic of the films, in which local lore and landscape shape the narrative as much as characters’ peripherally observed actions. Viewers hoping for glints of elucidation in Apichatpong’s juvenilia and nonfeature projects will probably be disappointed by "Mysterious Objects," the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ latest program honoring the director, for as its title indicates, his short films may be his most enigmatic.

All of Apichatpong’s signature traits — a fascination with the local and mundane, an unabashed love of syrupy pop songs, and a flair for throwing curve balls — are present in this grab bag of films made between 1994 and 2007. In the gleeful Anthem (2006) three elderly women listen to a supposedly blessed techno-lite number. Inexplicably, they are dropped, table and all, into a busy gym (and into the dead center of a badminton match), around which the camera makes multiple 360-degree circuits. Other such narrative jumps merely frustrate. Malee and the Boy (1999) begins with the scrolling text of a transcribed comic book, then switches to footage of hospital visitors. Whereas Anthem suggests a leap of faith, Malee just feels indecisive.

The program’s heart is Worldly Desires (2005), a half-hour trek across the same superstition-laden terrain of Tropical Malady. Dedicated to his "memories of the jungle," Worldly Desires is Apichatpong’s most meta film yet: a music video, a romantic drama, and a composite document crafted from "behind the scenes" footage.

In the opening sequence, a forest’s nighttime choir of insects is interrupted by a bossa nova groove. Suddenly a spotlight washes out the middle ground, illuminating the camera and lighting rigs trained on a singer and her background dancers as she lip-synchs a love song with familial undercurrents. The next few shots follow a man and woman as they hurry through the brush. It takes a few seconds before one can disambiguate the crosshairs in the center of the frame from the dense foliage.

Apichatpong keeps us at the periphery. Each re-shoot of the video is from the same, distanced vantage point. The couple’s arduous journey to find an enchanted tree unfolds through playback monitors, the director’s instructions, and the grumblings and random musings of an exhausted crew. We’re never told if the lovers cross paths with the pop star, or whether what we’re watching is the staging of something staged or a video diary.

Though Tropical Malady‘s first half focuses on a gay love story, it feels somewhat disingenuous to pin a queer sensibility on Apichatpong, even if he is gay. However, with its humorous foregrounding of the labor-intensive means by which the pop culture industry packages "normal" heterosexual love, Worldly Desires certainly invites queer labeling — if not at least queer readings such as this critic’s.

MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS

Thurs, July 3, 7:30 p.m. (program 1) and Sun, July 6, 2 p.m. (program 2), $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The Hot Pink List 2008

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>>ALLAN AND LEO HERRERA



Yes, they’re gay brothers, which is, like, totally hot. But even if they weren’t related, their individual artistic creations would have us on the hook. Heads of HomoChic (www.homochic.com), the new gay mafia collective that combines gallery shows, fashion design, and nightlife craziness into mind boggling events, they’re inspiring the latest generation to revel in its scandalous past. Leo’s photography mixes porn with historical reference to dizzying, stimuutf8g effect. Allan’s costuming and styling brings bathhouse and backroom gay culture to light. Currently the Chihuahua, Mexico-born siblings have pieces in the queer Latino "Maria" show at Galería De La Raza. Leo features pants-raising boy-pics and a video installation centered on Harvey Milk. Allan, whose Money Shots underwear line graces many an alternaqueer’s backside, displays a chandelier made of 2,000 pink condoms.

MARIA

Through July 4

Galería De La Raza

2857 24th St., SF

(415) 827-8009

www.galeriadelaraza.org


>>ANNIE DANGER



Who’s the superbusy M-to-F artist and activist stirring up trouble with the mighty force of a Dirt Devil — the one they call Annie Danger? She’s sketched flora and fauna for environmental manifesto Dam Nation (Soft Skull Press, 2007), appeared as a blackjack-playing nymph in a shit-stirring Greywater Guerillas performance, dressed like a wizard at a recent Gender Pirates party, and just played Pony Boy in a queered-up "Outsiders." Right now at Femina Potens gallery (www.feminapotens.org), you can see her as Sister Wendy, the wimpled PBS art nun, in her video for "Untold Stories: Visual and Performative Expressions of Transwomen." In a rare occurrence, you can meet Annie Danger as herself at the National Queer Arts Festival’s edgy "TransForming Community" spoken word event. Who she’ll be when she MCs Friday’s thrilling Trans March (www.transmarch.org) is anyone’s delightful guess.

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITY

Thurs/26, 7:30 p.m., $8–$15

LGBT Community Center

1800 Market, SF

(415) 865-5555

www.queerculturalcenter.org


>>DEXTER SIMMONS



"I worry not just for fashion, but for the future of television," this multitalented fashion designer, stylist, hair and makeup artist, model, and Oakland native told us with a laugh backstage at the Vans Warped Tour, where he was frantically preparing bands for the stage. "There’s a cheesy aspect creeping in right now because of fashion reality TV that scares me. It looks too easy, and creates too many followers. Wise people want one-of-a-kind, personalized looks. That’s why I love San Francisco," he adds. "It’s small but big — global even — and it likes to take risks." Dexter’s company, FLOC (www.teamflocouture), formed with his best amigo Lauren Rassel, has been taking local runways and nightclubs by fierce, feathery storm since it was formed two years ago, and local rockers like Von Iva and Svelt Street swear by FLOC’s Warriors-inspired designs. Now working as a stylist for SF-based online retail giant Tobi.com, Dexter seems destined for the big time — his designs are penetrating the world and making heads turn a wee bit sharper.


>>CHELSEA STARR



She’s too-too much, this Miss Starr. A genre-straddling DJ and ubiquitous promoter celebrated for her many regular parties (including new weekly Buffet at Pink, a fabulously popular all-female DJ weekly shindig, and Hot Pants, a queer biweekly that draws out the crème de la crème of the city’s thigh-baring night owls), as well as a groundbreaking writer who just toured the country as part of the Sister Spit all-girl spoken word road show, and a fashion designer with her very own eponymous line of eminently wearables — there are just so many ways to love her. This week she’ll find time to spin at umpteen Pride parties, as well as at her very own special Pride edition of Hot Pants. "I’m also a twin, a Gemini, and a cookie monster," Chelsea tells us with a wink.

HOT PANTS

Fri/27, 10 p.m., $5

Cat Club

1190 Folsom, SF

(415) 703-8964

www.myspace.com/hotpantsclub


>>JOSH CHEON



We can’t fib — smarties turn us on. So when we heard that cutie DJ Josh Cheon, host of West ADD Radio’s thuper-queerific "Slave to the Rhythm" program (www.westaddradio.com/slavetotherhythm) held advanced degrees in cell biology, neuroscience, and psychology, we suddenly had to hide our pointiness. An integral member of San Francisco’s gay vinyl-fetishist collective Honey Soundsystem (www.honeysoundsystem.com), Cheon just got back from rocking London’s premiere alternaqueer club, Horsemeat Disco. While his radio show’s name pays homage to Grace Jones, his eclectic sets encompass Candi Staton classics and Detroit Rock City jams. As a featured disc-meister at Bibi, San Francisco’s glorious, charitable party for Middle Eastern and North African queers, he taps his Lebanese roots with Arabian and Persian pop and disco favorites like Fairuz, Googoosh, and Dalida — and some surprise grin-givers from the likes of Boney M.

BIBI

Fri/27, 9 p.m., $20

Pork Store Café

3122 16th St., SF

(415) 626-5523

www.myspace.com/BibiSF


>>MONISTAT



She’s everywhere, lately, this feisty mistress of the night. Trash drag fanatics, glamorous electro freaks, after-hours hipster hot tub revelers — she’s a muse to many, with a sharp tongue and handmade Technicolor outfit for all. Plus, just in general: hot Asian tranny fierceness. "I’m thoroughly inspired by the pigeons in the Civic Center," she tells us. "Also, parties full of beautiful people worshipping me." She’ll be hosting the Asian and Pacific Islander stage at this year’s Pride festivities. But first this plus-size supermodel, trainwrecking DJ, oft-blacklisted performer, and dangerous skateboarder will be throwing a sleazoid party called Body Rock on gay-historic Polk Street "for the musically impaired and fans of a man in a dress, which would be me. I’ve walked through the fire and come out blazing!"

BODY ROCK

Thu/26, 10 p.m., free

Vertigo

1160 Polk, SF

(415) 674-1278

www.myspace.com/monistat7


>>CHRIS PEREZ



Which highly influential SF gallery owner brought John Waters, Todd Oldham, the mayor, and hundreds of sweaty kids together (with a couple kegs) under one roof this spring for photographer Ryan McGinley’s West Coast solo debut? Chris Perez of Ratio 3, whose shows also helped artists score Artforum covers and big time awards. Perez pairs an intuitive talent for identifying a popular hit with innovative curatorial decisions. But his space is no mere white box in the gourmet ghetto: "You’re never just walking down Stevenson," explains this escapee from Catholic school and former San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts volunteer. "Unless you’re hooking up or getting cracked out." Or peeping great art. On Friday, Ratio 3 dresses up as ’90s queer-radical gallery Kiki, for "Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding," a group tribute to late curator-activist Rick Jacobsen.

KIKI: THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

Fri/27, reception 6–8 p.m., free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org


>>HUNTER HARGRAVES



If you think constant AIDS activism is exhausting, try doing it in drag. Stanford grad Hunter heads up StopAIDS (www.stopaids.org) community initiatives by day, and is a board member of diversity-seeking And Castro For All (www.andcastroforall.org), through which fellowships in his name are awarded to young queer activists every year. By night and early morning he becomes Felicia Fellatio, a precariously-heeled tranny who’s single-handedly hauling grunge back onto drag stages — a recent flannel-drenched lipsync of Pearl Jam’s "Jeremy" teared up many a jaded eye — and he DJs queer punk parties like Trans Am (www.myspace.com/transamtheclub) and Revolution, the hot monthly tea dance for HIV-positive men at Club Eight (www.positiveforce-sf.com). Felicia also auditioned for America’s Next Top Model (seriously) but was eliminated when her man hands slapped someone prettier. You can catch Hunter and Felicia, although probably only half of each, at the StopAIDS booth at this year’s Pride celebration.


>>ALICIA MCCARTHY



Hipsters sporting $80 faux-penciled rainbow patterns and glossy-mag ads with jagged color intersections are fronting a style artist Alicia McCarthy helped originate — but she does it a hundred times better. Her current show at Jack Hanley takes off in a dozen different directions from her signature shapes and spectrums in a manner that reflects an honestly fractured identity. Coiled thought forms, a wooden chair facing the backside of a scruffy penguin flying toward a wall of mirrors, and a show-within-the-show by friend Stormy Knight that includes sketches by a parrot named The National Anthem and sculpture by Redbone the dog. McCarthy’s latest exhibition also displays more than a few small works subtly placed where a wall meets the floor, which goes to show that she’s still making some art that only people who pay attention will discover.

ALICIA MCCARTHY

Through Sat/28, free

Jack Hanley Gallery

395 Valencia, SF

(415) 522-1623

www.jackhanley.com


>>MON COUSIN BELGE



Half-naked, goo-spitting art rock in a sling never got so deliciously tawdry. When this San Francisco quartet of self-professed "bunch of fags with vision and bacon cheeseburgers" takes the stage and launches into "Tweaker Bitch" or "Pigdog" off their new album Quelle Horreur (World Famous in SF Records), anything involving titilutf8g revulsion can happen and usually does. Fronted by enigmatic singer Emile, a Belgian addicted to plastic surgery — 39 procedures to date — and leather thongs, Mon Cousin Belge (www.moncousinbelge.com) updates queercore for the ambivalent masses with "deep faggotry jams" and knickers-wetting live performances. Bring a towel to their launch party at Thee Parkside bar in Potrero Hill. You’ll definitely need it — the crowd of cute intel-queers they draw is over-the-top steamy.

QUELLE HORREUR LAUNCH PARTY

Sat/28, 10pm, $6

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

The Guardian Queer Issue 2008

Bag drag

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER As a once-impressionable protein unit who wrapped my eyeballs around any and all TV comedy, I’m slightly abashed to say I haven’t caught Saturday Night Live regularly in many a year. So I was surprised to hear rumors a while back that the series was allegedly biting off one of the Bay Area underground music scene’s fave figures: Jibz Cameron — known and loved for her garage-rock spaz-outs with the Roofies and her pretension-leveling levity behind the counter at Lost Weekend Video. And then there’s her super-girl-group of sorts, Dynasty, with Numbers drummer Indra Dunis and Neung Phak vocalist Diana Hayes, and her solo spin-off project, Dynasty Handbag.

“I don’t watch it either,” Cameron says from Brooklyn, as pet Chihuahuas struggle over a chew toy in the background. “But I get a phone call every other Saturday, ‘Omigod, you won’t fucking believe it…’ and I say, ‘I already know.'” She’s talking about SNL‘s house DJ Dynasty Handbag, a character that first popped up on the show in 2005, hosting a faux-MTV talk show. The occasional Kenan Thompson character is a far cry from Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag, a crazed kitsch-waver — a kind of schizo Bride of Peaches and Krystle Carrington — that Cameron developed on petite SF music stages before moving east four years ago. The project started life as the portable version of Dynasty and turned into a multi-referent alter ego.

The SNL character hasn’t reappeared in the last year, but it still offends. “It’s still on their DVDs, and I do performance that’s comedy-related,” she says. “People research me on the Internet, and my site comes up first, but they’re there, though I’m the OG, the OD, the OGD.” She says she sent SNL a cease-and-desist letter and when “that didn’t go anywhere, I took it to Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. I’m not in a full-blown lawsuit with them, but we’re sort of in discussion with them.” At press time, SNL representatives have not responded to requests for comment.

Cameron says she does have a new “plan of attack.” Her friend Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio will be producing a podcast radio show called Radio Woo Woo, which she will cohost. “My plan is to just keep talking about it on the air,” she says, adding that the podcast will premiere TV on the Radio’s new album this fall.

The low-broiling brouhaha hasn’t stopped Cameron from developing her Dynasty Handbag performances into narratives. This week she’ll unveil three short pieces at CounterPULSE. One, Bags, revolves around Cameron’s relationships with five empty shopping bags: “Each one sucks my soul in a different way, like bad relationships in my 20s. One is really needy; one’s really demanding; and one just wants to get fisted.” A work in progress, O Death, sees Cameron attempting to bury her own dead body.

Cameron has been far from dead and buried in New York: within months of moving to the Big Snapple she was crowned Miss Lower East Side in Murray Hill’s annual pageant, and she has presented solo shows at PS 122 and Galapagos Art Space. “Everybody works so hard here — it’s really influenced me to go ahead with my stuff. And there’s just the intensity of seeing so many insane people every day,” says Cameron, who was raised by hippie parents in Mendocino County (“My childhood was peppered by characters with beards and long, droopy fun bags”). “That’s really helpful, too.” *

DYNASTY HANDBAG: TALES FROM THE PURSE

Thurs/19 and Sat/21, 8 p.m., Fri/20 and Sun/22, 10 p.m., $20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.directfromnyc.com

MAGIC NUMBERS, FLYING DRUMS: THESE NEW PURITANS

Southend-on-Sea, UK’s These New Puritans purvey an austere, twinkling breed of synthetic/organic art-pop — one that evokes both Wire and the Klaxons. Who suspected the murky mystical inclinations embedded in the band’s debut, Beat Pyramid (Domino)? “Pyramids are about secrets and chambers,” vocalist Jack Barnett, 20, offers from his band’s tour stop in Chicago. “Some of the songs have to do with magic.” He claims 16th-century occultist-mathematician John Dee plays into his searching New Puritans as much as the Wu-Tang Clan, which Barnett praises for the “eerie, tiny little sounds in the background” of their productions.

Now the combo is attempting to write music that marries “the round canons of Steve Reich” with the beats of dancehall — provided Barnett manages to dodge the projectiles heaved by his drummer twin, George. When making music with your twin, Jack says, “you’re honest to the point of getting completely out of hand. As in drums being thrown at me. On a regular basis.”

Thurs/19, 8 p.m., $12–$13. Popscene, 333 Ritch, SF. www.popscene-sf.com

THE HAPPENINGS?

 

100 YEARS AT THE HOTEL UTAH

The 1908 edifice where Robin Williams, Cake, Counting Crows, and countless others broke out brings back witnesses and whoops it up. With Penelope Houston, Paula Frazer, Jesse DeNatale, Colossal Yes, Greg Ashley, Blag Dahlia, and others. Thurs/19; reception 7 p.m., ceremony 7:30 p.m., music 9 p.m.; $8 show. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300

 

JAYMAY

The bookish Long Island chanteuse flirts with song stylings slouching betwixt Feist and Keren Ann. Thurs/19, 9 p.m., $12. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

 

GEORGE MICHAEL

He’s never going to dance again through this sort of arena show, the UK pop star hinted recently. Thurs/19, 8 p.m., $56–<\d>$176. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. (415) 421-TIXS

 

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Narrow Stairs finds the Seattle cabbies stretching into darker realms. With Rogue Wave. Sat/21, 8 p.m., $39.50. Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Berk. www.apeconcerts.com

 

What’s a “Mater”?

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1. Unholy howler monkey!

2. The first murder victim delivers hilarious faux-archaeologist lines. She resembles Christopher Guest stalwart Catherine O’ Hara.

3. The dark circles under Asia Argento’s eyes and the scour-rough warm wool of her voice. She’s a star.

4. This time, Dario Argento’s trademark homicidal attack on a character’s eyes is a steel version of the nyuk nyuk nyuk treatment that Moe used to give Curly.

5. Daria Nicolodi’s character looks like a video game avatar. Plus, her appearance and her role create an entire other story that surrounds the story onscreen: one in which Asia, her child by Dario, saves the world from occult apocalypse (but dutifully showers before her daddy’s camera and dives into a putrescent soup of corpses first).

6. Best baby-killing scene since Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977).

7. Asia has to fend off Eurotrashy new wave cackling witches, Japanese Goth cackling witches, and International Male–model cackling witches — all of which love public transit.

8. Instead of a Helena Marcos–like Suspiria crone, the lead villain is an underdressed nymphet. Someone I saw the movie with deemed her "Boob Lady."

9. It delivers more gruesome guts and gore than every mechanical Hollywood horror remake of the past 10 years put together. If you walk into the theater in a state of frustration, you will leave it in a state of blood-sated jubilation.

10. It’s the third part of the Three Mothers trilogy, fool!

MOTHER OF TEARS

Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters

www.motheroftearsthemovie.com

Golden prawn afternoon: Regent Thai in Noe Valley

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Guardian video slideshow journalist Ariel Soto spent an enlightening Friday afternoon at Noe Valley’s Regent Thai restaurant.

Dead men walking to cost shit-tons more

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It’s one of California’s oldest prisons still in operation if not the oldest. The San Quentin State Prison was first built in July of 1852 at Point Quentin in Marin County just north of here on more than 400 pristine acres of Northern California land.

It’s history is illustrious. Johnny Cash performed a live concert there in 1969, you might have heard. Metallica shot the video for “St. Anger” there as well in 2003, which would have been a lot cooler if it was 20 years before and the song was “Dyers Eve,” but whatever.

San Quentin’s also the place where the major news cable networks like to go when they want to do a two-hour reality special titled something like “Dudes Looking Murderous in Front of a Camera While a Voiceover Describes the Prison’s Simple Day-to-Day Operations, But No One’s Really Paying Attention to the Reporter Because They’re Engrossed by the Distant Prospect That the Guy With Tattoos on His Head Playing Cards Might at Any Moment Stab in the Throat the Guy Playing Bones Nearby.”

Larry King did one recently where he kept asking a group of pre-selected inmates to detail their stories of prison rape and clandestine drug use, but they mostly wanted to talk about rehabilitation and missing their kids.

Anyway, San Quentin also houses all of California’s male condemned inmates, the people scheduled to be executed for committing murder and/or littering in Marin County and/or not voting for Mark Leno. Pumping poison into condemned jail inmates is a costly business, more costly than simply jailing them for life, anti-death penalty advocates contend, if you factor in all of the appeals and the special housing requirements.


Metallica in San Quentin

Facing the music

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Mini video-enhanced chamber operas seem to be the flavor of the month, at least in a certain stretch of the Mission District. Only three weeks ago, Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s solo opera Mordake began its world premiere run at Shotwell Studios (as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival) with inimitable tenor John Duykers in the part of the titular medical mystery and suicide — a pampered Victorian gentleman with the seemingly sentient face of his sisterly "evil twin" pasted to the back of his head. Beautifully constructed throughout (beginning with Wold’s prerecorded but generally enthralling minimalist score and Dukyers’ expansively human turn as "the man who ate his family"), Mordake availed itself of an exquisite and all-encompassing video design that cunningly developed the opera’s themes while allowing traditional lighting, costumes, and sets to be kept to a select minimum.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Lab on 16th Street, composer-librettist Lisa Scola Prosek’s Trap Door followed suit with a one-hour chamber work on the plight of a US soldier in Iraq accused of killing an unarmed civilian. Billed as a "video opera," Trap Door is in fact performed live by a cast of seven and another six musicians (including composer Prosek at the piano) but unfolds against a wall-projection (designed by filmmaker-videographer Jacob Kalousek) whose purpose is to open up and to some degree comment on action otherwise constrained by a physically tight, nontraditional stage with minimal scenic components.

Like Wold, Prosek is a gifted local composer happy to work at or near the Bay Area’s new-theater fringes, and is well versed in its multimedia possibilities. Her last chamber opera, Belfagor, based on Machiavelli’s satirical comedy and set to an Italian libretto, also incorporated an elaborate video-based design scheme as part of its impressive debut at the Thick House. But the results in Trap Door prove far less successful this time around.

Only part of the problem has to do with the multimedia dimension: missing Kalousek’s synched video contains some arresting images and evocatively incongruous backdrops (such as the negative image of a revolving Ferris wheel overlapping one particularly dramatic scene), but others feel either less inspired or arbitrary, simultaneously being difficult to read or fully take in against the multiple surfaces at the back of the stage.

Beyond these individual elements, it’s the underlying theme that proves problematic. Based on a dream of the composer’s, Trap Door uses music as both vehicle and metaphor for exploring the moral agency of a hapless soldier, Private Able (Clifton Romig), who is presented with an impossible situation in which his simple human wants and patriotic dreams run up hard against the chaos, hypocrisy, corporate double-dealing, and native outrage that dwell at the bloody forefront of American empire. As promising as that may sound, it seems to have been too complex an idea to adequately develop here, at least not without falling back on overly compressed musical motifs and a kind of stiff dramatic shorthand that skirts mere caricature.

Director Jim Cave’s solid staging ensures that the many swift scene changes come over gracefully. But the condensed action means that even the main character and his Iraqi counterpart — the taxi driver Omar (tenor Mark Hernandez) — have little dramatic depth, while characters like Jane the Journalist (soprano Bianca Showalter) can only come across as cartoons. The more choice aspects remain, unsurprisingly, the musical ones. Romig’s smooth, rich bass meshes nicely with a set of agreeable voices, including several fairly strong duets with sopranos Maria Mikheyenko and Eliza O’Malley. But in general, even the music feels too cramped and underdeveloped, like a series of tantalizing abstracts for some larger vision.

TRAP DOOR

Thurs/12–Sat/14, 8 p.m., $15–$20 sliding scale

Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org

E-Z Sleaze

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO "You’ve gotta have the graphics," 26-year-old party promoter extraordinaire, Floridian transplant, smart-talkin’ electro DJ, and graphically explicit designer Sleazemore (www.myspace.com/sleazemore) recently whispered into my tender, somewhat incredulous ear. "The scene’s gotten to a point where it’s not only about who you bring in, what you wear, and who’s there to document your clubs — it’s also about the look you project in your promotions. Everything ties into style."

I just knew graphic designers would someday rule the world. Too bad I’d never risk smudging my minty-fresh nail art on an Axiotron Modbook.

Still, I can’t deny Mr. S’s drag-and-drop skills when it comes to flyers: he’s got the Stanley Mouse-meets-bored-goth-girl’s-notebook thing down, though he often jumps visual genres, and his musical taste is top-notch: Lazaro Casanova’s bowel-shaking banger "Venganza," Nacho Lovers’ mix of Style of Eye’s minimal-bleepy, Dirty Birdish "The Big Kazoo," and classic Brit lush-raver duo Underworld’s "Ring Road (Fake Blood remix)" are Sleazemore platters du jour.

Plus, he seems to be everywhere at the moment: when not inflaming the woofers of gritty ground zero Club 222’s bimonthly Lights Down Low (www.myspace.com/lightsdownlow) or lending a hand to occasionals like the Are Friends Electric? parties, he’s popping the spots for his mostly free and carefree weekly Infatuation shindig with his partner in grime Rchrd Oh?! — of whom you’ll hear a lot more from me later — at the incongruously fancy-shmancy Vessel. "I’m slowly convincing our electro crowd that it’s OK to be there, to mix with the fruity cocktail people," Big Sleazy said with a laugh.

Sleazemore acknowledges, too, that right now electro’s undergoing the same micro-niching that techno, house, and hip-hop did more than a decade ago. "Everybody’s making music right now. It’s great and almost too much, and not all of it’s good." That’s an opinion oodles of other electro DJs I’ve spoken with hold. "Everyone wants to hype their sound as unique, which is cool — if they can back it up," he added. "In fact, lately I’ve been getting into the Crookers, Boy 8-BIT, Drop the Lime, and Fake Blood sound — fidget house, kind of like the speed garage thing revisited."

Envision a chipmunk on steroids riding a ravey beat so skittish it can often cross over into traditional Latin American dance styles — ay, like the Crookers’ kick-ass crunk-samba remix of Bonde do Role’s "Marina Gasolina" — and that’s fidget house. Yes, I’m a trend whore. Italian duo Crookers themselves will steal fidgety thunder June 24 at Infatuation after DJ Assault assaults the crowd’s ass cracks June 18 and latest scene sweethearts Shit Disco fuzz up Vessel’s needles June 11. But is it art? Who cares, it’s infatuating.

Crooker, “Wassup” (Video by Pommes)

INFATUATION

Wednesdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free (Crookers, $10 — advance tix $5 at www.blasthaus.com)

Vessel

85 Campton, SF

(415) 433-8585, www.vesselsf.com

Knock three times

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am a happily married man (16 years). My wife and I’s lives are pretty good. But I have a recurring fantasy about swapping with a couple who are our friends. We flirt and play around (no touching) but we have skinny-dipped, flashed our parts, etc. What I can’t figure out is why I want to do more. Thinking about it turns me on a lot. I have spoken to my wife about it in a general way — but never mentioned it to our friends — and she typically just laughs. What do you think?

Love,

Hopeful

Dear Full:

I think you have to go back and change, "My wife and I’s sex lives are pretty good" to "My wife and I have a pretty good sex life." Unless you:

A) want people to think you and your wife have two completely separate sex lives and

B) want people to think you’re a moron.

If no one else is going to take a stand against pronoun abuse, then by golly, it’s going to have to be me. I. Me.

Grammar aside, I don’t see what’s so terribly confusing about this situation. I assume all of you are semi-youngish, still cuteish and hornyish, and often quite drunkish, or at least that’s the picture I’m getting. There’s nothing wrong with being any of those things, of course. I do not judge! It turns you on because other naked cuteish drunkish bodies are meant to turn you on, and because while many men in particular (although this is not in any way limited to either the young or the male) may find themselves satisfied day-to-day with who and what they’ve got at home, they would jump at the chance for some free (that is, wife-approved) alternative nookie. Nobody will be shocked to hear this, I assume? Some fidelity, granted, is fueled by honest-to-God "I only have eyes for you"-ness. But another substantial chunk is inspired by the "I’d like to, but she’d kill me" sentiment. Swapping, presumably, removes imminent murder from the equation, hence its appeal — at least in theory.

Since you used the word "swap," I’m assuming that the lure here is the other wife. Of course it is possible that you, Mr. "My wife and I’s," do not so much value precision in language and really meant "all get together in a great heaving heap of miscellaneous body parts," in which case it’s even less surprising. Nothing like a nice old-fashioned orgy to get those unnamed, unconfessed itches scratched before pretending they never itched in the first place. But whatev. It doesn’t matter why you want to do this: you want to, that’s all. Too bad you’re not going to get to.

What? How do I know? Because, silly rabbit, you have asked your wife (and more than thrice, I suspect), and she just laughed. If she was interested and had been waiting for you to bring it up, she would have laughed, yes! and then gone on to say: "We should ask them (giggle)! I mean, just for a joke! And see what they say, you know, just for laughs (giggle)." She would have said that, and she didn’t. And now you have to drop it. You get three tries with most things like this. After that, it turns into pestering or, depending on the dynamic in a given household (no aspersions cast), bullying. There are always exceptions. It is acceptable, for instance, to mention more than three times that you think your partner ought to be getting more of the oral sex. Even that would wear thin pretty quickly, though, if not actually accompanied by more of the aforementioned oral sex.

When it comes to more controversial acts, though, like wife-swapping or bondage or anal play, I think most people say no when they seriously mean no. By the second offer, most people who might be a little — or even a lot — interested but don’t feel comfortable copping to that yet will whisper, "Let me think about it, OK?" And you have to back off and let them. By the third time, they should be ready to say yes or no. What’s to be gained by a fourth try, or a fifth?

There are, of course, subjects that can only be brought up once and then they must be banished forever. If you want to raise one of those, you have to bring it up the right way, which goes like this:

"Honey, come watch this video with me."

"What’s it about?"

"Um, pooping on people."

If you receive a resounding "EEEEEEEEEW! NO!", you will know to drop it. If you don’t drop it, there is no help for you. Compared with pooping on people, your fantasy is pretty tame. But you still only get three tries and then it’s back to the "flirting and flashing" for you. Be glad you’ve got that.

Love,

Andrea

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

Andrea is also teaching two classes: "You’ve Really Got Your Hands Full" — a realistic look at having twins — at Birthways in Berkeley, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

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