Visual Arts

Art Basel diary: The other side of the causeway, street art, Art Asia

Andrew Lam
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Read part one of Caitlin Donohue’s Art Basel diary: South Beach here

It would be a mistake to characterize the Art-Basel-that’s-not-in-South-Beach parts of Miami as containing more DIY/indie/anti-consumerist detritus than Art Deco land during the arty wheeling and dealing that occured last week (transactions worth, the Miami New Times helpfully noted, approximately the GDP of Guyana.)

Not-South-Beach, after all, included the Design District, where my camera memorably died for the last time during our Florida adventure as I was photographing an exhibit entitled “Architecture For Dogs.” 

So maybe lumping in all the art and murals I saw in the Not-South-Beach neighborhoods is a bit confusing. I hope this helps clarify: Wynwood is the area that has been designated as hipster city clusterfuck, centering on the murals bankrolled by the recently-deceased Tony Goldman and a handful of actually-indie art fairs. It hosts many parties featuring free beer and Chromeo.

The Design District is home to “Architecture for Dogs”, the Louis Vuitton store whose facade has been refurbished by last year’s Art Basel week darling, street artist Retna, and copious amounts of fancy bathtubs on display in local businesses (a must for your post-Basel recuperation.)

Between them, Mid-Town is bisected by a street that becomes absolutly jampacked with art and design fairs (and the patrons who love them), including SCOPE, Context, Red Dot, and more. Also, a fountain accented with brightly-colored butterfly, etc. statues by Brazilian artist Romero Britto, who my companion helpfully clarified, is “the worst.”

Snarkiness aside, should you find yourself in Miami next year Baseling, you’ll want to make the trip away from the Convention Center, fashion, high-falutin’ nightlife, and beach beauties of South Beach, because the art on the mainland can be refreshing, and freakish, and gorgeous. Here’s what we saw:  

HELLA MURALS: Street art was pretty much the reason why I went to Art Basel last year, and it continues to blow my mind, even if the crushing crowds of gawkers on Wynwood’s main drag tend to dull the shine for you after awhile. Fountain Art Fair sponsored some dope pieces, and had the only formal (indoor) showing of Miami street artists I caught at the fair. Miami graff pioneer Hec 1 had a room at Fountain he’d curated, with model trains and canvases sprayed with work by some of the city’s most iconic letter artists.

I’d never seen a pro-Israel artist collective until we wandered into the Bomb Shelter Museum‘s street art complex, where Asturian street artist Belin had done one of the most technicaly proficient murals I’ve ever seen of a stretched-out, insect-proportioned young woman. 

One of the best parts of the week was just wandering the back roads, where some super-talented street artists had taken refuge from the crush. We found Molly Rose Freeman and Danielle Brutto putting up a gorgeous pair of cats on a shack in an abandoned lot, that had been informally transmorgified into an aerosol gallery. 

ART ASIA: This year I was once again blown away by the mini-fair within SCOPE that brings Asian-run galleries from Korea, Japan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, in addition to New York and Miami. 

I’d seen its near-identical showings at Art Asia last year, but even so Miami’s Art Lexing gallery was probably my favorite gallery showing of the week, including Ye Hongxing‘s intricate Buddhist collages, shining rainbows revealed to be made of stickers you’d find on a schoolkid’s notebook when you shove your nose up close to them. Lexing showed them alongside washed-out blow-ups of Quentin Shih‘s photos for the somewhat controversial Dior “Shanghai Dreams” ad campaign. Models in Dior gowns come boxed in glass, unaffected indicators of Western glamour in the middle of prosaic scenes from Chinese country life: a market, a basketball court. 

Also in Art Asia: Buhan, Korea’s Kim Jae Sun gallery brought Sehan Kim‘s dotted homage to Keith Haring and other pop artists, the legends’ work rendered on a Asian skyscaper in a busy nightscape. Seung Yong Kwak‘s “Old Future” geisha remix of Mona Lisa sat a few booths down from Tokyo’s Gallery Tomura, whose entire showing was dedicated to Kazuki Takamatsu‘s eerie depth mapping of ringleted little girls. 

For SCOPE, Context, and more on Fountain Art Fair stay tuned for my final blogstallation

Art Basel diary: Air-kissing South Beach on day one

Andrew Lam
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Caitlin Donohue does South Beach during the country’s most excessive week of art. Check out her other Basel 2012 posts here

Faced with a daunting calendar, we went straight to the belly of the Art Basel beast on our first day in Miami: South Beach. The centerpiece of this belly, of course, is Art Basel — “Art Basel proper,” as one must call it during a week with over 20 satellite fairs in orbit around the main event.

Tip: do not try to see it all at Art Basel proper. I highly recommend doing it as Lovemonster and I did, starting out with a talk in the Art Salon. The labyrinth of galleries and their art and endless muted hush of high-level art dealings can make the whole affair seem robotic, so it was real nice to witness a coherent, out-loud discussion among human beings. 

The panel focused on Middle Eastern street art as a form of political expression. I got all fangirl about the last-minute addition of French street artist JR (level of geographical appropriateness be damned) to the talk, but was even more thrilled that the moderator was billed as ¨Princess Alia Al-Senuzzi, patron, London.¨ BASEL Other panelists included Bomi Odufunade, director of special projects at London´s outsider art mecca Museum of Everything, and Tala Sanah, author of Marking Beirut.

Conversation focused on the recent appearance of art-focused street art in the Middle East, and how it related to the political scrawls that have long served as stand-in for uncomfortable political conversations between neighbors there. I found the distinction between artists and political followers a little clunky, but the images flashed on-screen behind the panelists of Middle Eastern murals were amazing, and made me want to read Sanah´s book. JR kind of dominated the talk though, with his handwaving Frenchiness, making me wish Odufunade would moderate with a slightly heavier hand. BASEL

We left the talk early because the older Mid-West mom who sat next to us was having trouble not gawking at my pink hair. These creatures abound at Art Basel, providing quite the incongruous counterpoint to the freakish gazelles of South Beach until you realize the oldies are probably millionaires and really, who the hell am I to say that a brokeass alt-culture writer belongs in this scene any more than them? Her shoes def looked better suited to gallery stomping than my not-enough-broken in kicks, so good job lady and next time just take a picture.

Stop number two (after a brief intermission spent in a smoothie shop that was blasting techno music at 2pm MIAMI) was the massive translucent white tent on the beach that is housing Untitled Art Fair. Untitled´s a young buck in its first year of existence, and breaks from the usual fair mode in that a single dude (New York´s Omar Lopez-Chahoud) curated the whole, 50-gallery affair. The venue is flash as hell, foregoing spotlights on the art for primarily natural light, and designed to ¨flow¨ between gallery spaces.

Chicago gallerist Monique Meloche has shown at NADA and Pulse art fairs during Basel week before, but told us that participating in Untitled “is super-different. Omar calls you up and says ‘I want to do something with Justin,’ and then you pick complimentary pieces.”

Justin, of course, being Justin Cooper, whose site-specific rubber hose sculpture welcomed attendees off the beach into Untitled. A smaller creation sat on the floor in the middle of Meloche’s set-up, which also included pieces by Ebony Patterson, a Jamaican-born artist who works with mug shots of male criminals, converting them into ravishing drag queens with DIY-like touches like vinyl flowers cut from common household items. To complete the trifecta (all Untitled exhibitors were allowed three), she paired Patterson and Cooper with Iran´s Sheree Hovsepian, who manipulates dark room proofs to create deceptively simple abstracts. All three, Meloche told us, worked with elements of craft, mixing high and low materials and references. 

Throughout the exhibit you could see touches of Lopez´s personal preferences — there was a lot of abstract work, for example, although I´m not sure you could classify Paco Cao´s dead celeb tarot card prints (at $25, they were the cheapest pieces on sale at the fair) as abstract. Maybe the presentation of them, though. Cao sat in a hidey hole built with gallery walls, screaming out readings he did with the cards of fest-goers. 

Growing discomfort of my neon pink boots be damned, we made it to our third fair of the day, the free-entry (this is pretty much unheard of among Basel week fairs) New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA art fair, in the Deauville Beach Resort. We got a serious hit of hometown pride over the Bay galleries that made it to NADA — Oakland´s Creative Growth gallery for developmentally and otherwise disabled artists was showcasing William Scott´s R&B culture icon paintings, and can I just say that Cindy, Terry, Maxine, and Dawn of En Vogue have never looked lovelier. We also got to check out Oakland´s Et Al Projects, and SF´s CCA Wattis Institute and Queen´s Nails. 

And I know what you´re thinking and yeah duh, we´re partying too. Like, with mansions and shit. boychild (who along with another member of our SF-does-Basel crew, Dia Dear, were the subject of Marke B.´s Super Ego column last week) tipped us off to ¨The Body As Lightning Conductor,¨ a private party which turned out to be in a mansion you got to via yacht. We all stood around this Spanish-style mansion (or, y´know, ducked into the well-appointed library) housing drinks from the open bar with aforementioned Mid-West millionaires, high fashion West Coast club kids. All retired to the ballroom (!) to check out a vogue crew tear it down around midnight. 

Then, lacking a cab or cabfare, I got in a buncha strangers´ car (I think the dude sitting shotgun was a rapper), allowed them to buy me fries from the Wendy´s drive-thru, and then ditched them when they got mired in the standstill traffic going through Wynwood, charged my phone on some DJ´s powerstrip who was playing a set in a cigar factory, danced while it charged, and then made the Fountain Art Fair after-party with a buncha street artists/street art festival organizers BASEL

Chris Brown´s painting entitled ¨Chompuzz¨ is on display at hipster clusterfuck Basel Castle tonight, which is pretty much my only priority to see tonight. Center of the art world! BASEL!

Next level: this weekend’s SF Youth Arts Summit takes SOMArts

Andrew Lam
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Next level: this weekend’s SF Youth Arts Summit takes SOMArts

San Francisco’s next great designer, sculptor, or filmmaker could possibly be in attendance this Sat/8 at the second annual San Francisco Youth Arts Summit taking place at SOMArts Cultural Center.

Maybe the next big things will be Maeve Fitzhoward and Brandy Ruedas, two youth artists who we met who will be showcasing – and selling, hey – their printmaking projects from Out of Site youth arts center, which will help host Saturday’s science-fair-meets-arts-gala. Fitzhoward and Ruedas also dish out advice to other artists through their positions on the Out of Site youth advisory board.

The Guardian also spoke with another Out of Site participant Mari Galicer, who’s been taking the digital media class this past semester. Galicer has learned how to create and manipulate film using programs like FinalCut Pro and Photoshop. Right now she’s working on a film with a group of peers about the city’s 11th district. If you stop by to see her, smile pretty – she’s putting together footage of this weeks’ Art Summit for an upcoming promotional video for Out of Site.

The summit will feature a total of 200 teenage artists from over 20 youth arts organizations. Attendees will also get to check out autuers from YBCA’s Young Artists at Work program, the Children’s Creativity Museum, and BAYCAT‘s base of budding Bayview media types.

While you’re perusing the various works of art you may want to indulge in some printmaking at the Out of Site bartering bank and ATM (Art That Matters) machine, or unleash your inner filmmaker by creating a stop-motion video at the mobile animation studio. If you’re a wordsmith, show off your literary skills at a poetry workshop with members of the WritersCorps, SF Mime Troupe, and TILT, the independent film center for young people.

SF Youth Arts Summit

Sat/8, 2-5pm, free

SOMArts Cultural Center

934 Brannan, SF

www.somarts.org

Live Shots: Death Grips at Slim’s

Tony Robles
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When I first saw Sacramento’s Death Grips — about a year or so ago at 1015 Folsom — they had to work especially hard. The room was half full and Stefan Burnett made up the difference, jumping down into the crowd and taunting it into action. The intervening time before a repeat performance was longer than expected (Death Grips suddenly canceled their last scheduled tour to finish their second album of the year) and at Slim’s Monday the crowd seemed prewound, eager to see the sold-out show, jockeying for position near the front, and admiring freshly purchased t-shirts showcasing the attention-baiting cover art for No Love Deep Web.

“This is a dick,” said one guy who looked older than he sounded. “It’s actually a dude’s dick. And I know whose it is.” For the uninitiated (or at work – don’t Google it), the cover is a photo of drummer Zach Hill’s erection, on which the title is scrawled with a Sharpie marker. The guy finished his observation by pointing to the part of the shaft nearest to the testicles and saying, “That’s like, the grossest part.”

Death Grips came on about two hours later, launching into No Love album opener “Come Up and Get Me,” and I didn’t last particularly long up front. Burnett released a lyrical tide of amped aggression, the feeling of being backed into a corner too many times, and the crowds answered in kind. A wave of people swelled across the pit and I ended up beneath half a dozen other people, desperately attempting to hold onto a shoe, a camera, and my default unflappable expression. But clearly I’d been flapped, and having spent a long time between sets staring at the vertical gashes on the wrists of the 15-year-old cutter in front of me, was fairly relieved to head to the back of the room as the band went into “Little Boy.”

Three albums in, I would still describe my interest in Death Grips’s brand of angst-ridden hybrid punk-rap as morbid curiosity. “Ruthless and free, it’s all suicide to me,” Stefan intoned on “Black Dice,” with the same sense of nihlism that elsewhere says “Fuck this world, fuck this body.” Since the only time I cut myself was slicing a grapefruit with a dull knife, the lyrical nihilism only goes so far. But that doesn’t diminish Death Grips as a live band. Burnett, Hill, and a backing production track layer feed into each other, forming a feedback loop of hype.

When “Guillotine” – the best song off their first album – came on, it was instantly recognizable from the clicking hi-hat that continually rides through the song. The programmed hi-hat is one of the band’s most constant features, freeing up Hill to go wild with complicated syncopated snare beats over his doubling kicks. His kit was little more than a three piece setup, and while the broken assortment of cymbals from his Hella days were noticeably absent, he bought the same furious intensity, rising out of his chair and smashing down onto the snare for full intensity.

The production track set the pace for the night. It was nonstop, peaking with “I’ve Seen Footage.” From the band’s other, slightly neglected album this year, The Money Store, the song showcases the playful variety that’s beneath the the Death Grips’ borderline single minded thematics. When the ’80s guitar riff, played out over a sped up “Push It” beat came on, a few people in the back ran forward, clearly wanting to get in on the action.

The end of the set snuck up on me. Burnett spoke for the first time outside of a song: “Thank you,” he said, and walked off. Maybe sensing that Death Grips isn’t much of an encore band — or just exhausted — the room began to file out. But one guy stood by the bar, holding a beer in is hand and noticeably not clapping. “That’s it?” he asked his friends, more of a statement than a question. “That was only a 30-minute set. That’s some bullshit.” A line from “Lock Your Doors” is stuck in my head: “I’ve got some shit to say, just for the fuck of it. Don’t even ask me.”

Opener: “Life is real, life is real,” Cities Aviv said over and over, pacing the stage as a DJ modulated some noise on a laptop, with just the hint of a beat behind the noise. As it went on, puzzled over what I was seeing and hearing, more like a performance art piece than what was billed (probably at this point more for convenience than anything else) as a hip-hop show.

Distracted, I hardly noticed building bass until I was struck by the Memphis performer dropping off the stage next to me, signaling a slam of the audience.“It’s not that I’m anywhere,” Cities Aviv continued to say in his set, toying with contradictions and asking, “Are you real or a simulation?” Could have asked him the same thing.

Free the free

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Free the free

VISUAL ART It starts with the streets. Walls, the texture of walls, rough and colored in swirls of graffiti letters. Walls you feel you could reach out and touch their cold and grit. Establishing shots — the streets of San Francisco in the dot-com era. The photos are of their times: an unattended shopping cart in the streets appears as early as page three. Soon follows the spray-painted legend, “Don’t let the good times fool you.”

The pictures are inscrutable, their sequence seemingly random. Yet other than the gnomic title (Friendship Between Artists is an Equation of Love and Survival), the only text in Xara Thustra’s self-published new book’s 500 pages is a brief intro from the author insisting that the book is meant to be read from left to right, from top and bottom in the order the photos appear. There are no captions or prompts to lead the viewer. It is the mute gravity of the photos that pulls you in. What is happening here? It’s like finding a box of photos on a trash pile in the Mission — old furniture, clothes out on the curb, a pile of books and CDs. Why is all this stuff in the trash? Did the owners die? Or get evicted? Photos of strangers. You go from one photo to the next and the outline of a missing life starts to appear. What is happening here?

The action moves in and out of the streets, cinematic — the interiors dark, claustrophobic. The streets provide narration. Everything is spray painted. Demand Community Control. Everything bright, everything clean. Everything they build be like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Familiar everyday locations have become enlisted as battlegrounds. At the Dolores Park tennis courts, someone has hung a screen on the fence, painted so that it reads “Sink the Ship” in shimmery, see-through letters. A subliminal message to the tennis players visible on the other side? Or a secret signal to an unseen underground army?

Cut to the interior. Some dim locations start to become recognizable: a performance crammed into a corner of Adobe Books, a crowd seen through a doorway at the old Needles and Pens. The images are at times grainy and low res, like bad cell phone photos or surveillance camera footage. Much is shot in indistinct rooms or hallways, tightly cropped. The people in the interiors model homemade clothing or stare back at us from unmade beds. They are dancing in high heels or fucking each other, holding whips and dildos. No one is smiling. Instead they stare defiantly into the camera as if to ask, “Who are you to watch? Which side are you on?” This is not the careless and fashionable hedonism of Ryan McGinley photos. Instead, like the subjects of Nan Goldin photos, the people in these images know how much their search for freedom costs, and who will have to pay.

Meanwhile, the battle in the streets continues. Scum bags dressed as imposter yuppies stand in front of the mall on Market Street, holding handmade signs reading, “The bombs are dropping, lets go shopping!” An effigy of Gavin Newsom burns at 18th and Castro. Back inside, homeless guys from Fifth and Market calmly eat free breakfast at the 949 Market Squat. More drab interiors, more surveillance footage, and then what is happening here? Scenes of naked people grimly carving designs into each other with razors, holding dripping, bleeding arms up to the camera. It must be 2005, I think, when we all started to give up on ever stopping the war and just started hurting each other.

Full disclosure: I am in this book. I might be too close to the people and events depicted to discern whether the images are strictly documentary or whether their arrangement is intended to create a new story. But the juxtapositions, eerie and dreamlike, pack a wallop. In one two page spread, my dead friend, Pete Lum, stairs from the left page into another photograph on the right of an unknown drag queen out front of Aunt Charlie’s on Turk Street. Their eyes seem to meet across the gutter of the book and across time and space, as if sharing a secret the rest of us cannot know.

Ultimately, perhaps the one indisputable narrative of the book is the tremendous progression in Xara Thustra’s artwork, as the early agitprop graffiti by “Heart 101” in support of street protests slowly morphs into a far more ambitious project, an ongoing collaboration with countless others through performance, print, and cinema to abandon protest and instead collectively embody through art the autonomy and ethics of a truly different world. Perhaps inevitably then, Friendship Between Artists is both a monumental achievement and something of an anti-climax. The protests, the willful art world obscurity, the dead friends — what did it all add up to?

I am certain, anyway, that nothing in the book was conceived with the idea that it would one day appear in an art book. Instead, the interventions, experiments, and protests detailed herein, while at times quite joyous, were, as the book’s title suggests, originally part of a deadly serious struggle to keep oppositional culture alive in San Francisco, and for many that struggle now feels lost. But life must go on, and this is no museum piece.

The book’s 500 pages positively overflow with life, salvaging from oblivion the raw, visceral feel of 15 years of ephemeral underground freedom. While some will be haunted by the suspicion that the answer to the above question is “not enough,” the people in these photos stare into the camera and demand we consider instead a hard-earned and far more redemptive possibility: that this isn’t an art project, it’s how we live. This isn’t representation of a different reality, but about being a different reality. And fuck you, anyway, because being free is its own reward.

For an interview with Xara Thustra, visit sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

XARA THUSTRA BOOK RELEASE AND SOLO SHOW

Thu/6, 7-9pm, free

Needles and Pens

3252 16th St., SF

www.needles-pens.com

 

Comfort, au courant

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virginia@bayguardian.com

APPETITE San Francisco doesn’t lack for comfort food. The last decade’s wave of twists on hearty, familiar fare has insured most neighborhoods aren’t without elevated burgers and grown-up childhood favorites. Two new restaurants, opened in September, continue and update the trend.

 

COMPANY

Guerrero and 22nd Street has long been one of my favorite corners. Whether enjoying a pint at the Liberties, a cocktail at retro fabulous bar Lone Palm, or house charcuterie at Beast and the Hare, at this intersection I feel transported, encouraged to linger and take in my surroundings, as if in Europe. In Company’s big picture windows, vintage red chairs and retro lamps make the space even more welcoming than it was before, as Tao Cafe. Lunch is idyllic: a book, a sandwich, and a bowl of soup becomes a way of spoiling myself.

Dinner is likewise mellow, families and couples confirming a local vibe. It’s clear in early months that while Company may not be revolutionary destination dining, chef-owners Karen Hoffman (from Four Seasons Newport Beach and Jardiniere) and Jason Poindexter (Four Seasons Chicago and San Francisco) offer tranquil surroundings and well-executed food. The ubiquitous upscale burger is there: “Breadand Butter” burger ($14), a patty of ground chuck and oxtail, topped with Madeira-glazed pioppini mushrooms and decadent triple creme brie. At lunch, vegetarian stands up to burger and pork offerings: grilled eggplant and house ricotta panini ($11) is layered with rapini/broccoli rabé and romesco sauce. Smoky eggplant and ricotta are in harmony: warm, luxurious, almost healthy. A bowl of squash soup, savory with duck confit, brightened by citrus reduction, is $8 but as an add-on cup to a lunch entree is merely $3.

At dinner, salads are vivid, unlisted vegetables one night in a “crisp vegetable salad” ($9) being beets, cucumber, and avocado over sweet gem lettuce, tossed with feta and toasted pine nuts in a basil mint vinaigrette. House-cured salmon salad ($11) is likewise fresh and silky, with cucumber and beets in yogurt dill dressing. Crispy confit chicken wings ($9) are especially tender, accented with heat (and color) from red jalapenos and fried mint leaves. Syrah-braised short ribs ($23) are cooked in harissa, evoking Middle Eastern intrigue over whipped garnet yams and charred rapini.

With four beers on draft, like intense peach notes of Widmer Bros. BRRR Seasonal Red Ale from Portland ($6), and a shorter wine list (heavy on France, Italy, California), there are cocktails sans hard liquor from Assistant General Manager Russell Morton. While I don’t get excited about soju and wine cocktails, preferring robust spirits to mild soju, Morton elevates an amaretto sour into an almond cherry sour ($6), keeping house amaretto tart rather than too sweet, with lemon, cherry bitters, and brandied cherries.

1000 Guerrero, SF. (415) 374-7479, www.companysf.com

 

JAMBER

Midwestern brother-sister duo Jess and Matt Voss opened Jamber, serving gourmet pub food from Chef Peter Baker with California-only wines and beers, all on tap. The siblings’ care shows in hand-assembled tables, chairs made from wine barrels, wines selected from wineries they personally visited, a hip, industrial vibe warmed by woods and graffiti art in the loft-like space with a walled front patio.

Wines (happily, there are options: 2.5 oz. and 5 oz. glasses, 1/2 or full jugs), like Darcie Kent Gruner Veltliner from Monterey or a Margerum Grenache Blanc from Santa Barbara, flow easily from taps, with beers such as Almanac’s Farmhouse Ale or a hibiscus saison, Pacific Brewing Lab’s Nautulis. In my visits, there’s a relaxed welcome from staff best experienced sitting at the rustic wood bar. Jess’ bacon jam recipe is a highlight: a savory, textured pleasure of a spread, no matter what it’s served with. Mr. Meatloaf ($15) is the star, a hefty, tender slab of buffalo meatloaf wrapped in bacon, accompanied by mashed potatoes and roasted carrots. I often find myself bored by big hunks of ground meat. Not so here. Jamber’s meatloaf is about as good as meatloaf gets.

Two more standouts: PB & Jam ($11) is a hunk of pork belly layered in a sandwich with peanut butter and that Jamber bacon jam. Most starters, like pretzels and fried mozzarella, are on the heavy side; the top one is easily Parmesan rosemary mashed potater tots ($8) — warm mashed potatoes oozing out of lightly fried breading — with, yes, Jamber bacon jam. After a decent mac ‘n cheese ($10) or freshly generous salads ($7–$9), a pot pie ($12–$14), namely ratatouille, sounded brilliant but was a soggy, funky mash of vegetables in flavorless crust. Likewise, the beet Jamburger ($10, there is a veal-beef burger for $12) made me sorry I took the vegetarian path. Despite fresh bread, it tasted like slices of beet on a bun rather than the creative beet-veggie patties I’ve had that never replace a “real” burger but can be a worthy sandwich on their own.

Despite a couple difficult dishes, there’s enough here to love at this all-day SoMa spot for a drink and a filling bite.

858 Folsom, SF. (415) 273-9192, www.jambersf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

London diary

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London diary

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Tom Cruise, clad in military drag, descended last week by RAF helicopter into Trafalgar Square in what is best described as forced entertainment but was in fact a time-wasting scene from his upcoming blockbuster All You Need Is Kill. Not quite simultaneously but with considerably more stealth, I advanced into South London’s Battersea area, in a completely uncoordinated foray, to see the latest from famed Sheffield-based pomo theater artists Forced Entertainment.

Battersea Arts Centre, a bright red and white 1893 former town hall, is midway through a restoration process called “playgrounding” (putting artists and audiences at the center of the architectural redesign), and its many arches, rococo balustrades, and mosaic tile floors thrive amid an attractive combination of new paint and weathered surfaces. The place is an enviable model for an arts organization: a warm and bustling hub of community activity that is also a serious arts incubator and presenter, boasting 72 performance-tested spaces and a live-in residency program geared to the truly experimental and exceptional.

A nice place for Forced Entertainment to land, enthused artistic director Tim Etchells in a short interview before the evening’s program. He said FE was in fact lucky to find itself there, space in London being at a premium. This is apparently true for even so internationally successful and storied a group as Forced Entertainment.

And speaking of stories, audiences would be up to their ears and eyes in them that night — or rather the loose ends of stories, volleys, and nose-dives from a meta-narrative barrage that manifested itself across a series of readings, performances, and neon. The sign aglow in the Café Bar, where I spoke with Etchells, said simply, “end of story.” Another one said, “Shouting Your Demands from the Rooftop Should Be Considered a Last Resort.”

(All the variously colored neon phrases spread throughout the foyer and adjoining bar were by Etchells, whose many projects outside FE include visual art and writing. The evening kicked off with a book launch of his Vacuum Days, a large hospital-green compendium of daily headlines and announcements — the result of a 2011 internet-based project in which Etchells riffed on the news of the moment in dada-esque fashion. Flipping through the pages was an instant reminder of two things: it had been a hell of a year, and headlines are always loaded.)

The centerpiece of the evening was The Coming Storm. Forced Entertainment’s latest piece (in an unbroken line of group-devised work going back to the company’s founding in 1984) begins unassumingly, with the six performers in their street clothes lined up onstage facing the audience. One of them holds a microphone, and begins by slowly articulating the necessary ingredients of a “good story.” Soon the other performers grow visibly dubious and restless, until one snatches the microphone away and weighs in with a whopper of a tale, never completed, because also interrupted by another greedy storyteller.

And so on through aggressive, sly, and puerile mic-swipings and gradual, unexpected permutations — as those without the microphone do any manner of things to create their own counter-narratives or merely sabotage the one dominating at the moment. It’s a confluence of fractured accounts arranged like a 20-car pile-up, or a game of keep away, or a gentle dance of despair, with occasional live score, random costume changes, and a cluster of branches embraced (and debunked) as a soothing shelter of forest.

The Coming Storm ends up an exercise in failure and resilience at once, since even if no one completes a tale, the audience rushes to fill the void —our minds trained to shape every squiggle into a recognizable human form, however personal or outlandish the starting point. In that rowdy mutual tangle comes quiet reflection from the interstices of language and history.

It left one in just the right frame of mind to receive the last performance of the night, Sight Is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First, Etchells’ monologue for New York actor Jim Fletcher (lately of the title role in Elevator Repair Service’s acclaimed production, Gatz).

Sight proved no return to narrative but rather a concatenation of eccentric observations and pronouncements, undertaken by a nameless po-faced character standing center stage and meeting the audience’s gaze in a free-associative unburdening of “meaning,” desultory definitions that went along the lines of “Socks are gloves for the feet. Snow is cold. Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger. America is a country. Korea is also a country.” Then, some time later, “Cats are afraid of dogs. Dogs like to chase cats. Some dogs like to bite the tire of a passing car.” Throughout this eccentric cataloguing and its naïve reverie, the audience again acts to complete the work wordlessly. Subtle suggestions come, vistas briefly open, demurring exceptions and musings flicker by, as the audience is tossed one wry bone after another, and a slow vague pathos accumulates.

Sing the body

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Sing the body

DANCE Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ new Director of Performing Arts, received thunderous applause even before he had said a welcoming word to the capacity crowd in the venue’s lobby. Such is this exceptional artist’s charisma. When he told them that he wanted YBCA to become accessible to people who in the past may not have felt welcome there, they roared. It was to be that kind of evening.

For “Clas/sick Hip Hop,” Bamuthi’s first program in his new position, he drew on what he knows so well — not just hip-hop as dance, but as a culture that has spread around the globe. Still an essentially urban genre, it started as a popular expression that is moving from the community into the concert hall. It’s how dance genres have always evolved, from India to Egypt to France. For the time being, hip-hop seems to thrive in both places.

While San Francisco’s yearly International Hip Hop DanceFest has a rich tradition of presenting theatricalized versions, Bamuthi went back to the origins of the art as an essentially social practice. He structured “Clas/sick” in two parts: the first half as a dance party with guest artists freestyling, the second half based on more formalized “battles” between individual practitioners.

If anybody still needs convincing of hip-hop’s potential as an expressive dance language, “Clas/sick” made as good a point as one could wish for. This sextet of bravura performers mesmerized without theatrical accoutrements, just working with music, a torso, and four limbs. They seemed to ignore physical restrictions such as gravity, balance, time, or verticality. No ballerina can slither in her toe shoes as they did in their sneakers. And who has ever of supporting turns on an ankle? While many of the moves — head spins, backspins, windmills, popping and locking — looked familiar, these soloists rethought the basic vocabulary and made them their own.

<P>Levi Allen (a.k.a. I Dummy), the 19-year-old obviously joint-less virtuoso from Oakland, dances the Oakland street-derived style Turf, while Marquesa “NonStop” Scott, who manipulates time from super slow and superfast, performs Dubstep. Arthur “Lil Crabe” Cadre turns himself into pretzels while hopping on one hand. I was previously unaware of what “Memphis Jookin” is — but it was clear that Ladia Yate’s platform shoes were a health risk even just standing, let alone dancing in them. (Sensibly she later safeguarded her feet in sneakers.) As for Ana “Rokafella” Garcia, she magnificently overcame gravitational pull by shooting horizontally along the floor only to rock up as smoothly as a tree righting itself.

But none of these physically virtuosic performers approached the depth of Rennie Harris, who some 20 years ago started the move towards developing choreographic structures that make hip-hop more than an expression of individuality. He no longer pops and locks as he used to, but he remains enthralling, with split-second mood shifts from rage to vulnerability, aggression to pride, and fatigue to full power ahead. Harris’ performance impressed the sense of a human being as complex and indomitable.

In the first half the audience danced lustily — so much fun to watch — to DJ Elan Vytal’s spinning, while the professionals brought in their own tracks. For the battles, Matthew Szemela took his fiddle to places where I didn’t know it could go. It’s not clear whether these hip-hop performers had ever faced each other, but here they had to step beyond themselves and relate to a partner. They approached each other wearily much as they might on a street or a boxing arena, throwing out challenges and invitations, finally coming to an understanding (or not). Scott and Allen’s sliding and toe moves were reminiscent of ice skating, while Cadre’s duet with Garcia came as close to a courting encounter as you are likely to find in hip-hop.

It remains to be seen where Bamuthi intends to take the performing arts at YBCA. One thing is clear: he recognizes excellence when he sees it. He also throws a helluva a good party. *

10 winter essentials

Andrew Lam
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culture@sfbg.com

MARINE LAYER HI-LO CROPPED SWEATER, $88

American Apparel’s appeal fades when we discovered this line of comfy basics made right here in the city. Marine Layer (2209 Chestnut, SF; 498 Hayes, SF. www.marinelayer.com) specializes in men’s and women’s tees, but we love its warm-yet-trendy cropped sweater, whose hemline dips low in the back.

OTTER WAX BAR, $13

Ditch the wet look and feel: wax your sneakers, jeans, and canvas or denim clothing. Seal in that fresh feeling — also available in heat-activated dressing form — at Voyager (365 Valencia, SF. www.thevoyagershop.com). Just rub it on and you’ll be fly and dry.

VAUTE COUTURE EMILY COAT, $356.25

We swoon for this online brand’s (www.vautecouture.com) animal product-free — no itchy woolens or dead cow here! — fashion. Thanks to the Emily’s tie-front belt, winter-time no longer means you have to look like a shapeless sack of spuds.

PAUL MADONNA CANVAS SHOULDER BAG, $23

Local cartoonist Madonna’s “All Over Coffee” comic and books are essential — his illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge one Crissy Field on this kicky bag is a sparkling example of his art, available at one of our favorite bookstores ever, Green Arcade (1680 Market, SF. www.thegreenarcade.com)

JENNIFER BAIR JACKET, $124

These one-of-a-kind faux suede coats with vintage-inspired print lining make great cover-ups on milder winter days. Residents Apparel Gallery‘s (541 Octavia, SF. www.ragsf.com) selection of made-in-the-city pieces is a great one-stop shop for Bay Area gear.

SAN FRANPSYCHO BEANIE, $20

We found you an everyday hat straight from the surfer-bros of San Franpsycho, whose shop (505 Divisadero, SF. www.sanfranpsycho.com) sells the makings of insta-cred among sporty, hip types in town.

BENEDUCI HANK BOOTS, INQUIRE FOR PRICE

These brass tack soles will power you down winter-wet sidewalks but honestly, you could rock Beneduci‘s (www.beneduci.com) Italian leather kicks year-round in style. Local cred: the brand makes everything right here in SF. The boots will be available at Firehouse 8 (1648 Pacific, SF) on Sat/15 and Sun/16 and on Dec. 21-22.

KURABO BLACK 13 OUNCE MENS DENIM PANTS, $128

The perfect pair of pants, proudly produced in SF by Taylor Stitch (383 Valencia, SF. www.taylorstitch.com) for stylish gents? Possibly. Dig the local provenance — Taylor Stitch is bursting with hometown-made style. And the deep black will hide unsightly rain splashes.

RAINSHIELD O2 UNISEX CYCLING JACKET, $25

Ultralightweight, breathable, packable, and insanely cute, these zip-ups, available at Market Street Cyclery (1592 Market, SF. www.marketstreetcyclescom) will keep the drops off your pop-a-wheelie while helping up your mist-shrouded visibility factor.

CAT WALKING STICK UMBRELLA, $30

Yes, yes, we get the raining cats and dogs joke, but this is the purrfect shield against the storm: a sky-blue kitty cavorting on a midnight blue canvas, protecting you on this seriously sturdy yet lightweight piece from the San Francisco Umbrella Company (www.sfumbrella .com). Cats!

Our Weekly Picks: December 5-11

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 5

Jill Tracy

Spooky chanteuse Jill Tracy describes her new holiday release, Silver Smoke, Star of Night, as “the Christmas album for those who prefer the October chill.” She celebrates its release with three festive events, starting with tonight’s “Fragrance: The Allure and Magical History of Perfumes,” an after-hours party at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. The evening is both concert and launch of her limited-edition fragrances (appropriately, devoted to “dark elegance”), created with local perfumers Nocturne Alchemy. Sat/8, the Hypnodrome (where Tracy has been known to perform with the Thrillpeddlers) hosts “Creepshow Christmas” — a family-friendly show mixing ghost stories with live accompaniment. Finally, Silver Smoke‘s official CD release shindig is Dec. 19 at the DNA Lounge. Spirits will be bright! (Cheryl Eddy)

Tonight, 6-10pm, $13

San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers

Golden Gate Park, 100 John F. Kennedy Dr., SF

Sat/8, 8pm, $13–$25

Hypnodrome

575 10th St., SF

www.jilltracy.com

 

Blue Scholars

The young MCs in Seattle rap duo Blue Scholars met, quite appropriately, in a hip-hop club at the University of Washington. You can hear these academic roots clearly in DJs Sabzi and Geologic’s smart, searing rhymes. The heady lyrical content of their work tackles serious, political issues such as socioeconomic mobility, empowerment, and questioning authority. Even more impressively, these boys don’t just talk the talk. Geologic’s history of activism in the Filipino-American community and the duo’s headquarters in 98118, the country’s most ethnically diverse zip code, is the perfect recipe for the smart, relevant hip-hop that the scene most desperately needs (we’re looking at you, Chris Brown). (Haley Zaremba)

With The Physics, Brothers From Another

8pm, $19.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

Get Carter and The Trip

Verrrry clever, Castro Theatre — programming back-to-back screenings of Get Carter (1971) and The Trip (2010). Gritty Get Carter follows a snarling Michael Caine as he prowls around Newcastle, punching his way through the local gangster contingent he holds responsible for his brother’s death. The Trip, a travelogue featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing exaggerated versions of themselves), contains some genius and quotable comedy — ABBA sing-offs, mock-epic speeches — but none more memorable than the two actors going head to head with their Caine impressions: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” Truly, an inspired double feature. (Cheryl Eddy)

Get Carter 2:40 and 7pm; The Trip 4:50 and 9:10pm, $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com


THURSDAY 6

“Drag Queens on Ice”

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … er, definitely something, flying at you with the unstoppable momentum of a two-story wig and a pair of birdseed-filled balloons. You already know what’s green and ice skates (Peggy Phlegm) now come find out what’s queen and ice wobbles — all those years in man-stilletos can’t help you out on the rink, honey. This cherished annual hoot features a wealth of San Francisco’s beloved gender clown personalities threading their way through bewildered tourist families in Union Square (who actually get really into it, and by the end it’s a heartwarming family affair, full of squeals of delight). You can even skate with these swanning lovelies! No money back if you end up with a weave in your face. The great Donna Sachet — she of the stunning, form-fitting, fake-fur-trimmed ravishing red holiday dress — mistresses the ceremonies. Grab a warming adult beverage from nearby Emporio Rulli Il Caffe and join in the fun. But don’t you dare judge, or you might get Nancy Kerrigan’d. Skates are blades, remember. (Marke B.)

8-9:30pm, $10 entrance, $5 rentals

Union Square Skating Rink

Post and Geary, SF

www.unionsquareicerink.com

 

The Family Stone

I’ve had some good times listening to San Francisco’s Sly and the Family Stone — both letting my mind wander the groove of their funky sound and feeling the sense of pride in one’s self that Sly Stone sings so well — and I’d venture a guess that you have too. Though that innovate teacher and leader has opted for life out of the spotlight, three of the original members, Jerry Martini (saxophone), Cynthia Robinson(trumpet), and Greg Errico (drums), are keeping the music alive with the help of a few younger talents. Mostly hailing from the Las Vegas area, these new members are all performers with rich experiences listening to Sly’s music. This new Family Stone recreates the old hits in a fresh show, hoping to bring the music to all generations. (Molly Champlin)

7-8pm, $40–$45

Rrazz Room

222 Mason, SF

(800) 380-3095

www.therrazzroom.com

 

Streetlight Manifesto

Streetlight Manifesto was pretty late to the ska game, releasing its first album in 2003, well over a decade after the genre’s revival heyday. Though in a way, the band’s timing was actually perfect. Born out of the ashes of previous Jersey ska-punk heroes Catch-22 and One Cool Guy, Streetlight’s catchy tunes and punk rock virility have been nearly single-handedly keeping third-wave ska alive in a world dominated by hip-hop, mainstream pop, and EDM. The band is ringing in the new year with the release of its fifth album, The Hands That Thieve. During this tour, Streetlight Manifesto promises to play new songs, old favorites, and everything in between; so put on your skanking shoes and lace ’em up tight. It’s gonna be a good night. (Zaremba)

With Hostage Calm, Lionize

8pm, $21

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

 

FRIDAY 7

Hope Beyond

Kim Gordon, artist and gallery director at Modern Eden, has curated the one-night-only art show, Hope Beyond, a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. The assembled line-up includes an impressive selection of artists representing a variety of pop-surreal and contemporary styles. The work ranges from the graffiti style sharpie drawings of Kidlew to intricate fusion of nature images and Hindi symbolism by Inge Vandormael. Personally, I’m excited to see what all of these artists will contribute to the show. Especially Serge Gay Jr. — an artist whose paintings collage and reproduce pop culture images to create dichotomies between what’s real and what’s fake and make you to take a second look at his subjects: beauty, violence, drugs, and race. With all art priced below $100 and the proceeds going to Hurricane Sandy victims, what’s not to love? (Champlin)

6pm, free

Modern Eden Gallery

403 Francisco, SF

(415) 956-3303

www.hope-beyond.com

 

SFBallet’s Nutcracker

The folks in Imperial Russia loved The Nutcracker and kept it alive during Soviet times. But the West never saw it until some White Russians, who had escaped to San Francisco, nagged then San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Willam Christensen to choreograph it in 1944. By now there are hundreds of versions all over the world; the oddest one I ever saw had Drosselmeyer arrive on a spaceship. SFB’s, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson in 2004, is set during the 1915 Panama International Exhibition. It lacks the cloying sweetness and sentimentality that infects so many others. Tomasson’s is a love letter to the City — cool, transparent, a little reserved and superbly elegant. (Rita Felciano)

Through Dec. 28, 7pm, 2pm matinees; $20–$270

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 865-2000

www.boxofficesanfrancisco.com


SATURDAY 8

Misfit Toy Factory II

Did you ever feel cheated as a kid when you would see cartoons and hear stories about elves making toys from scratch, then you got a Barbie doll or video game that obviously wasn’t cobbled at the North Pole? Well, now is your chance to watch the toys actually being made. Not by elves though, but by local artists. There will be over 35 of them at Root Division Art Space bringing creativity from their various fields (painting, sculpture, and illustration mostly) to the art of toy making. All the work will be sold for a flat rate of $40. Bring cash for some shopping, or just come to enjoy the atmosphere of creativity complete with music by DJ Yukon Cornelius. (Champlin)

6pm, free

Root Division Art Space

3175 17th, SF

(415) 863-7668

www.rootdivision.org

 

John Prine

I think I need to start with a disclaimer: I love John Prine. Yes, I’m completely biased when I say that he is one of the greatest living lyricists and you’d be lucky to go see him. But why take my word for it? His more than 40 years of successful songwriting can speak for themselves. Starting off as a Chicago-area postman doing open mics in his spare time, Prine eventually got noticed — by a young Roger Ebert. Now, almost 70 years after that glowing review, Prine is still an incredible songwriter and performer, and each song is a charming, witty, and poignant labor of love. In his time as a performer, many trends and genres have come and gone, but a great folk song never goes out of style. (Zaremba)

With Justin Townes Earle

8pm, $39–$59

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com


SUNDAY 9

San Francisco Crab Fest 2012

Continuing a long-running San Francisco tradition that takes advantage of the fact that the crab fishing season along the California coast coincides with the holiday season, the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District 2012 Crab Fest will offer up a tasty fete featuring the crustacean prepared in a variety of ways by local restaurants, along with exhibits, cooking demonstrations and more. A host of sustainably-produced regional wines will provide the perfect way to raise a toast to the annual event, which donates all proceeds to the San Francisco Firefighters Toy Program and the San Francisco Police Department’s Youth Fishing Program. (Sean McCourt)

Noon-3pm, $25–$30

Waterfront Terraces, Fisherman’s Wharf

145 Jefferson St., Third Floor, SF

www.visitfishermanswharf.com

 

Queer Rebels Winter Shindig

Though the weather outside is frightful, the smolderingly creative queers performing tonight at El Rio are more than capable of keeping your toasty warm. The lineup alone is worth the sleigh ride to El Rio — burlesque from the bountiful Ms. Vagina Jenkins, jazzy moves courtesy East Bay punker Brontez Purnell, the release performance of drag king blueser K.B. TuffNStuff’s Trans of Venus album, and so much more hotness. But as if that wasn’t enough to draw you like a moth to flame, this: the evening is a benefit for Queer Rebels’ year-round lineup of genderbending, empowering art events like the Exploding Lineage! experimental film fest, two-day summit of Asian American activists, and the group’s annual eponymous production of queer takes on the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. (Caitlin Donohue)

8-11pm, $7-20 sliding scale

El Rio

3158 Mission, SF

www.elriosf.com


SUNDAY 9

John Cale

Whereas Lou Reed was the primary source of the Velvet Underground’s swagger, and hard-bitten lyricism, John Cale took charge of the group’s more avant-garde leanings. Even 45 years after leaving the band, Cale continues to challenge and surprise his listeners, as evidenced by the title of his latest LP: Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood. Largely devoid of the splintering bursts of noise that defined his formative years, and the rootsy pastoralism of Paris 1919 and Vintage Violence, Cale’s latest is an art-rock record in the tradition of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush: affecting in its ability to experiment and take risks while working squarely within the pop template. Another gutsy effort from an aging icon whose renegade streak hasn’t gone anywhere. See him while you can. (Taylor Kaplan)

With Cass McCombs

8pm, $32–$48

Regency

1290 Sutter, SF

(888) 929-7849

www.theregencyballroom.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 5

“Hidden in Plain Bite: Overlooked Opportunities for Food System Reform” 371 10th St., SF. (323) 828-7040, www.ffacoalition.org. 6:30-9pm, $8-12. Come for this informative and eye-opening discussion that tackles new and innovative measures to reform our dastardly food system. Organic food offerings and a silent auction will follow the talk.

Lemony Snicket The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 5-8pm, free. Beleaguered children’s book hero Lemony Snicket will be on hand at the Booksmith this evening for a meet and greet promoting his latest effort, entitled Who Could That Be at This Hour?

FRIDAY 7

“Terra e Asfalfo: Around the World on a Vespa” The Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno, SF. (415) 500-2323, www.terraeasfalto.it. Through Dec. 16. Opening reception: 6-10pm, free. How anyone can travel all around the world on those speedy little cosmopolitan numbers is beyond us. But Italian couple Giorgio Serafino and Giuliana Foresi did it — and the duo will be presenting their travels via this photo exhibit, where pictures of destinations such as Thailand, South Africa, and Italy will be on display.

Mission Holiday Block Party Various businesses on Valencia from 23rd to 14th Sts. and surrounding blocks, SF. www.valenciastreetsf.com. 5-10pm, free. Get half price on sangria at Locanda, 20 percent off clothes and accessories at Five and Diamond (while Shovel Man plays!), check out a George Chen-hosted comedy program at Lost Weekend Video’s CineCave and more at this holiday celebration in Valencia’s neighborly businesses.

“Snapshot” Southern Exposure, 3030 20th St., SF. (415) 863-2141, www.soex.org. Through Dec/20. Opening reception: 7-9pm, free. The Youth Advisory Board of Southern Exposure’s new exhibit explores the relationship between the medium of photography and the notion of memory. An experimental work, “Snapshot” features young artists’ take on fact and fiction through digital manipulation.

“Aloha on Ice” Embarcadero ice rink, Justin Herman Plaza, SF. (415) 392-2235, tinyurl.com/alohaonice. 4-7pm, free. Come bask in the warm aloha spirit at this pop-up luau. You’ll have a number of ways to get tropical at this event, like sampling Hawaiian food, making fresh flower leis, and mugging in a Hawaii-kitsch photo booth. Drink umbrellas and hellacious sunglasses tan not included.

DIY Library Party Mission Bay Branch Library, 960 Fourth St., SF. (415) 626-7512, www.friendssfpl.org. 7-10pm, free for members and friends of members, $35 for membership. The DIY aesthetic has permeated nearly all facets of our contemporary culture, so it’s past time for our local library to get in on the low budget fun. Get engrossed by an impromptu arts and crafts project, and mingle with cocktail-sipping fellow literary fans at this free event.

Hurricane Sandy Benefit Show Modern Eden Gallery, 403 Francisco, SF. www.hope-beyond.com. 6-9pm, free. We on the West Coast are lucky to not have to deal with terrors of hurricanes, which is why we urge to attend this art show benefiting our fellow Americans on the other side of the nation.

SATURDAY 8

East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest Berkeley City College, 2050 Center, Berk. eastbayalternativepressbookfair.blogspot.com. 10am-5pm, free. The good folks behind this event decided to go bigger with the third installment of the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest. There’ll be workshops on zines, screen-printing, letterpress, and comic illustration in addition to speeches from dozens of local writers.

Vagabond Indie Craft Fair Urban Bazaar, 1371 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 664-4422, www.urbanbazaarsf.com. Also Dec/9. Noon-6:30pm, free. Etsy addicts take note! Urban Bazaar in conjunction with Etsy and the SF Etsy team will be putting the third annual holiday-themed Vagabond Indie Craft Fair. Come peruse with your keen shopper’s eye the emporium of hip, fun, and crafty items. Also probably a good idea to do some holiday shopping while you’re at it.

Holiday Indie Mart Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans, SF. www.indie-mart.com. Noon-6pm, free. If you’ve never made it out to Speakeasy’s Bayview brew factory, now’s the perfect time. Indie Mart is assembling over 45 vendors, who will come equipped with DIY giftables you’ll be stocked on for your family and friends. Bonus round: today the brewery will unveil its new taproom, designed by Indie Mart creator Kelly Malone and friends.

KPFA Crafts Fair Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. (510) 848-6767 ext. 646, www.kpfa.org/craftsfair. Also Dec/9. 10am-6pm, free–$10. Go to the Vagabond Crafts Fair on Saturday and the KPFA Crafts Fair on Sunday, or vice versa or do a crafts fair crawl by attending both on the same day! Sponsored by the progressive-minded folk at the KPFA 94.1 radio station in Berkeley, this festivity is going all out by bringing craftwork from over 200 local artisans featuring glass, leather, and stone items.

MONDAY 10

Pladra Holiday Launch 5-8pm, free. 111 Minna, SF. www.pladra.com SF flannel company Pladra shows off its latest line of shirts for men and women at this holiday party and trunk show. Everything’s sourced and made in the Bay Area, for a hyperlocal, winter-ready shopping experience.

TUESDAY 11

A Long Day’s Evening Translation City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF. (415) 362-1901, www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. Turkish experimental modernists rejoice! Aron Aji has finally translated A Long Day’s Evening by Bilge Karasu for our literary loving. Attend this talk today by Aji to hear how the process took shape.

 

Phantasms

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Phantasms

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Scene: Midnight, Tiara Sensation drag pageant, Rickshaw Stop, September. A naked, enormously white-and-purple-bewigged figure in two-foot-high Plexiglass heels, laid across three raised Plexiglass pillars, faces away from us. The pitched down strains of Frank Ocean’s “Pyramid,” his voice syrupped into a slo-mo Judy Garland phantasmagoria, drown us in waves of bass. Sheee’s wooorkiiing at the Pyyyramid toniiiight.

Awkwardly, riskily the figure rises almost to the rafters, its back still to us, spreads its legs, and begins to pull a tangled string of multicolored Christmas lights from her crotch. It performs this deliberately, turning the Rickshaw stage into a pressure cooker of strobe lights, sexual horror, and incipient danger — a strip club where no one can hear you scream. The atmosphere is so tense that when the figure finally turns around to reveal her eyeless, bloody-mouthed, death-pale self, as Ocean’s voice tweaks a level higher, shivers and gasps run right through the audience. Shiva the Great Destroyer, her tits bound with duct tape, a makeshift pouch at her crotch the source of her glittering lights.

It’s an out-of-body look that works. And it’s emblematic of a new glitchy-nightmare drag style (or the reboot of one) that’s bewitching clubgoers.

DIA DEAR

The performer was the amazing Dia Dear, one of a number of recent young arrivals who’ve zapped nightlife to another level by unselfconsciously — and quite organically — raiding the shelves of performance art, horror films, contemporary R&B, club kid history, and the Walgreen’s down the street to create striking personae for themselves, and electrify the city’s drag stages. They’re also so freaking smart it scares me, no Christmas crotch lights required.

Drag as confrontational, sometimes blood-spilling performance art has a long history here, of course, from the Cockettes in the 1970s, through the Popstitute and Club Uranus scenes in the early ’90s, through Trannyshack into the ’00s. It’s currently found a home at the Some Thing party every Friday at the Stud, High Fantasy every Tuesday at Aunt Charlie’s, and the Dark Room monthly party at Hot Spot. Iconic, sensibility-scrambling club kid styles like those of Michael Alig, Desi Monster, James St. James, our own Phatima Rude and Ggreg Taylor, and the ultimate drag inverter-perverter Leigh Bowery are all the rage in this retro-minded, post-Gaga moment. But something about this fresh wave, something about how it’s coming from people with no nightlife background at all, is different. Drag stages have become the affordable breeding ground for committed performance artists, expressing essential truths about our moment. Mere lipsyncing is so last century.

boychild

“I never even knew who Leigh Bowery was until people started mentioning his name this summer,” boychild, another of this new tribe, told me over the phone. (I live next door to boychild, and it’s not rare to find a neon-yellow spray-painted birdcage, a chandelier made of wigs, or an entire store display case sitting outside, waiting to become part of a perspective-shattering outfit or brandished onstage in a cyber-Wiccan, dystopian android ritual.) Like Dia, boychild just started going out to clubs very recently — pretty much arriving out of nowhere, both of them declining to share their pasts — and when she did she was almost fully formed as a stage presence, with a genius sense of makeup and a cerebral agenda.

http://www.vimeo.com/49244470

“Everything I do is a reaction to being categorized: as a person of color, as a female-bodied queer,” she said. “It’s really bad right now, because it’s so hip to be black, “urban culture” is being fetishized to an enormous extent. I feel I encounter so much that makes me angry just existing in this world as a queer creature. My performance and look ties everything to my experience through my body. That’s where I express myself most fluidly, more acutely and vividly than through language.”

“Horror is where I’m coming from and where I exist,” Vain Hein, another performer, told me. Unlike Boy Child and Dia Dear, Vain Hein is open about his past: raised as a Born Again Christian in both Puget Sound and Phoenix, Arizona — “My childhood consisted of traveling between extremes” — he eventually found his way to the San Francisco Art Institute to study New Genres (this is actually a program there!) Vain Hein, who also performs to music he chops and screws at home, most explicitly ties sex to horror in his work — it’s chockful of surprise lactations, menstrual blood, live births, prosthetic triple breasts, and weird asses.

VAIN HEIN (Photo by Eric Harvieux)

“I think a lot about the apocalypse, it’s how I filter and understand the world. Decay, destruction — everything I wear is just what’s at hand around my house, held together with scotch tape and nail glue, the shitty, shitty, shittest things ever that just fall apart during the night, even when I’m not performing. I literally shed my skin.”

Yet even as a queer art student in San Francisco, liberated from fundamentalism, he never went out until last year. “I just had preconceived notions about what going to a gay club involved. Then my friend dragged me to a drag show in the spring, and I was like, ‘I can do this.’ I had studied mostly performance art and video so it was a good fit.”

Being a young queer and not going to the clubs is incomprehensible to me — but of course these 20-somethings grew up with the Internet, where you can be gay by yourself, and which looms like a Poltergeist vortex over their work.

“Oh, the vast blessing of the Internet,” boychild half-laughs. “I wish I was better at it. We’re so bombarded with information and images, just so much shit. That can be great because my generation has all of the past available. But we’ve been drowning in this stream of complete crap, too. I can define myself as a freaky-freak just by how I navigate it. But the power of live performance is channeling all that into immediate emotion, a moment when everyone’s together, something that can’t and should never be documented as just images.”

The charming and soft-spoken Dia Dear, who has become kind of a mother the nascent phantasmic drag scene — even though she, like boychild and Vain Hein, operates mostly outside traditional drag house family structures — says, “I haven’t quite figured out my relationship to the Internet. I feel like it’s a positive tool because it can connect us to the spirit of people who are dead. But it’s also this kind of dark rectangle in the corner that can suck out all your energy. It exists for its own sake. But to be on the Internet now, you have to have a certain level of narcissism and self-interest. A lot like you have to have as a performer. Performance and the Internet should be natural lovers, in a sense. Twisted together …entwined.”

 

DISQUIET NIGHT

This live experimental music concert at the Luggage Store Gallery is the brainchild of one of the brainiest yet approachable people I know, Marc Weidenbaum, who started his fascinating daily music site, Disquiet.com, 15 years ago — way before blogs were invented. His project Disquiet Junto challenges Soundcloud members to respond to a prompt with unique compositions. This round: field recordings of Hurricane Sandy, with Cullen Miller, Subnaught, Jared Smith, and more.

Thu/6, 8pm-10pm, $6–$10 sliding scale. Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, SF. www.luggagestoregallery.org

 

DEE-TOY

Over the past year we’ve been treated to some tasty South African contemporary dance music flavor, from Black Coffee to Die Antewoord. (Somebody please get the Tshetsha Boys out here!) DJ Dee-toy, of Sebokeng Township continues this great microtrend with deep, deep house vibes and off-your-seat Afrofunk jams.

Fri/7, 10pm-4am, $15–$20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. afrofunk.eventbrite.com

 

GIGAMESH

Yeah, yeah, the phenomenally successful Minneapolitan remixes pop hits into slick little machines of hummable electro-disco bliss. He is also very, very fun.

Fri/7, 10pm-3am, $15–$20. Monarch, 101 Sixth St., SF. www.monarchsf.com

 

TORMENTA TROPICAL 5-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

This monthly party launched the nu-cumbia sound in SF, splashing some much-needed Latin electronica onto our shores, while introducing global bass to a new generation of underground-minded clubgoers. Some major players have stomped the floor here, and quite a few sonic permutations of TT’s sound have found more mainstream success — but founders Shawn Reynaldo and oro11, who brought their inspiration directly from Argentina, are keeping it crazy and real with a marathon tag-team set in celebration.

Sat/8, 10pm, $5 before 10pm, $10 after. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

ACCIDENTAL BEAR!

Gay people won’t stop rapping and blogging, and that’s OK! Our favorite local blogger (and perpetual crush) Mike “Accidental Bear” Enders covers way too much ground online. Now the super-enthusiastic cutie is celebrating two years of cybergossip by hosting a cartoon-colored gay rapstravaganza with Big Dipper, Rica Shay, and MC Crumbsnatcher, plus singer Tim Carr and DJs Medic and Dav-O of Double Duchess. There’ll be a lot of cute gay guys with beards.

Sat/8, 9pm, $3. Truck, 1900 Folsom, SF. www.accidentalbear.com

 

ATTACK OF THE TYPEWRITERS

Writer, drinker, arts-minded political activist, and bon vivant Hiya Swanhuyser is combining her interests in this neato, monthly, potentially wonderfully absurd thingie. Come to the Makeout Room, grab a drink, and then bang out a letter to any politician you have beef with. “One letter = 100 votes,” she says. Cocktails and truth to power, yasss. She’ll bring the actual, clickety-clackety typewriters! You bring the drink-fueled rage!

Tue/11, 6pm-8pm, free. Makeout Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. www.tinyurl.com/typeattack

 

Burning Man’s new Cargo Cult art theme intrigues

Sasha Cuttler
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Burning Man’s new Cargo Cult art theme intrigues

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey sent burners scrambling to Wikipedia on Friday when he announced the art theme for the 2013 event, “Cargo Cult,” and posed the intriguing question, “Who is John Frum?” It was perhaps the most esoteric and obscure theme ever, but one that I heard only positive reactions to at a couple of burner-populated parties over the weekend, including the Black Rock Art Foundation’s Artumnal Gathering.

The theme draws from stories of indigenous cultures in the South Pacific that have been awed by the advanced technology of American visitors, forming cults and rituals to beckon them and their airplanes back. As an art theme, it then morphs into our own modern fascination with the cargo dropped on us by mysterious visitors, whether they be multinational corporations or extraterrestrial life forms.

As Harvey wrote in a description of the theme that’s well-worth reading, “All we can do is look beyond the sky and pray for magic that will keep consumption flowing.” The base of eponymous Man will be a crudely formed flying saucer, artistically trying to summon back alien visitors and their transformative gifts (that is, if they didn’t already arrive on 12/21/12).

In an interview with the Guardian, Harvey cast the Cargo Cult theme as the first one since 1996’s Hellco, in which a demonic corporation had supposedly taken over Burning Man, to have a theme that he called “satirical,” although he’s quick to say this satire sparks layers of meaning as people ponder it.

“People seem to be imagine this in multiple dimensions and that was the intention,” Harvey said, noting the nods it gives to consumerism, religion, anthropology, metaphysics, and a variety of other disciplines and frames of reference. “You see all kinds of glosses on it.”

He said the kernel of the idea began with a rumination on Polynesian themes, sparked by reading Paul Theroux’s book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. When he hit on the notion of cargo cults, Harvey said the ideas and possibilities of it began to immediately expand in his imagination.

They continued to grow ever outward as he collaborated with others on it, include Stuart Mangrum, a Cachophony Society stalwart who Harvey worked with on the Hellco theme (possibly raising the questions for old-school burners, “Who is John Law?” and might he someday return?), and the architect Lewis Zaumeyer, who designed the Man’s UFO base before he died earlier this year

Harvey said the theme prompt is already triggering lots of creative interpretations. “It’s a spur to invention. People are finding all kinds of ways to riff off of it,” Harvey said of that creative, collaborative spark that he tries to provide. “This is what Burning Man has always been about and what we try to give to the world.”

Unlike past years, when themes such as Fertility, Rites of Passage, Metropolis, and Evolution have been easy to safely ignore, Harvey said the intrigue and excitement around the 2013 theme is causing the event organizers to plan on incorporating references and reminders throughout Black Rock City.

“We want to work this in more thoroughly into the event than we’ve done before,” Harvey said, hoping that it prompts all kind of unpredictable and imaginative manifestations. “The beauty of it is it’s ambiguous even when you look at it in the academic literature.”

Looking up: Apex One’s Mid-Market rooftop street art gallery

Andrew Lam
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0

I was a little devastated when I found that the owner of Ricardo “Apex” Richey’s Market and Sixth Street studio — where he painted his canvases of street art abstractions — had sold the building to a new owner intent on converting the raw space to tech offices. What of the Asian-run garment factories, the rickety elevators? And what, more importantly, of the rooftop that Apex had the run of, where he’d let his street art friends paint huge burners? Over the years, the space had converted into a guestbook of sorts, with murals done by Mona Caron, Neon, Chez.

In our recent interview, which appeared in this week’s paper, Richey told me that the owner had mentioned that though he intended to gut the structure, he may leave the rooftop gallery standing. Hopefully, that’s the case. In the meantime, here’s some shots from those sky-level works — and a few snaps of Richey’s murals from the Sixth Street neighborhood’s past and present. Hopefully whatever ‘hood he finds for his next studio space will benefit just as much from the aerosol artist’s work. 

Chopping spree

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Chopping spree

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Unlike the San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s flagship event and its popular DocFest, which more or less put roots down at the Roxie, genre fest Another Hole in the Head spreads its horror, sci-fi, and just plain weird wealth around to various venues. Yeah, the Roxie’s still on its list, but HoleHead also hosts events down 16th Street at the Victoria Theater, and at SOMA’s Terra Gallery and the Vortex Room — the latter an inspired addition, given the Vortex’s reputation as a haven for mondo cinema.

This year, HoleHead opens with a screening of Richard Elfman’s 1982 cult musical Forbidden Zone, presented in — holy Tyrrell! — remastered and colorized form. Elfman will be on hand to answer all your Sixth Dimensional questions, and a party (complete with Oingo Boingo cover band) follows.

Closing night looks to be a decidedly less festive affair, with Austrian director Michal Kosakowski’s unsettling Zero Killed — a feature film spun from his video installation and short film project, Fortynine. From 1996 to 2006, Kosakowski interviewed people about their murder fantasies, then used the tales (suicide bombings, school shootings, dog attacks, dinner-party poisonings, stabbings, shoving people into traffic or letting them slip off cliffs, etc.) as short-film inspiration, starring the storyteller as either perpetrator or victim.

A haunting musical score ups the creep factor, as Kosakowski tracks down each participant (many, but not all, are actors by trade) to interview them about their specific fantasies and other troubling topics, like revenge, torture, and “What is evil?” Zero Killed is a uniquely disturbing mix of fiction and documentary, cutting between horrific, blood-soaked vignettes and clinical talking-head interviews — often featuring the same subject.

There’s plenty of blood gushing forth in slick British standout Axed (listed as “Fangoria presents Axed” on the HoleHead schedule, so that right there should assure you of its splatter cred). When a businessman is, uh, axed from the corporate gig that turned him into an uptight prick long ago, he goes all Jack Torrance on his wife and teenage kids. As you might guess, the titular implement figures prominently in his plans, and Ryan Lee Driscoll’s film spirals from satirical to sadistic as each new body drops.

Changing gears, from in-your-face to perhaps too subtle: posting recently to his Observations on Film Art blog, scholar David Bordwell scrutinized what he called “discovered footage” horror films, with a focus on the Paranormal Activity series. Bordwell took particularly interest in the “rewards and risks” of the genre’s “narrow set of stylistic choices.” In these films, the camera itself occupies a heightened presence within the story. By now, everyone knows the psychological effect that’s supposed to have: if we’re aware of the camera, and it seems like an actual person is filming what we see, the images appear more real — and hopefully, “the reward” translates to genuine shrieks in the dark.

But for every Paranormal Activity sequel that’s seen by millions and rakes in hundreds of millions, there are dozens of copycats. And why not? Found-footage horror is non-traditional filmmaking at its most democratic. It can be made on the cheap, and wobbly production values are de rigueur. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to get ahold of a camera than to come up with an original idea, much less one that yields actual moments of fright.

With that said, The Garlock Incident does make an effort to tread new, albeit Blair Witch-y, ground. The set-up is that a group of Los Angeles actors — appealing 20-somethings all — are en route to Vegas for a movie shoot. Also in the van is ambitious director Lily (Ana Lily Amirpour), who obsessively films everything. After taking a spontaneous detour to visit a ghost town with a sinister back story, they discover a couple of maybe-abandoned shacks — and soon realize that getting off the main road was a bad idea. Oh, kids. It’s always a bad idea, especially for city slickers who can’t function without cell service.

Garlock‘s frustrating ending, which I wouldn’t dare spoil even if I fully understood it (even after watching it several times), is a letdown. Until its last act, though, Garlock is actually a pretty interesting look at how quickly relationships can break down when circumstances slide from uncertain to dire. But once you start puzzling over the ending, other doubts surface — like, by what logic would the actors’ audition footage be neatly edited into this roughly-shot, “found” chronicle of wilderness terror?

Speaking of wilderness terror and, alas, unsatisfying finales, retro-styled sci-fi adventure The 25th Reich screeches to a halt with a “to be continued” cliffhanger, just when shit is starting to get mind-blowingly insane. Argh! Fortunately, for the most part, the film — about a group of World War II soldiers who time-travel back and forth, squabbling among themselves as they pursue UFOs and Nazis — works just fine as a stand-alone, though its gleeful reliance on stereotypes (the Jew, the Italian, the Southern redneck, etc.) feels less like a nod to classic war films than a way to avoid actual character development.

The best gimmick centers on Captain O’ Brien, an erstwhile matinee idol not above reciting cornball lines from his own films at crucial moments. That he’s played by Jim Knobeloch — who also appeared in 2012’s other Nazi sci-fi flick, Iron Sky — is a perfect bit of obscure-genre synergy.

It wouldn’t be HoleHead without zombies. Comic The Living Corpse gets the (re-)animated treatment in The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse, which follows the titular beastie’s existential crisis after he — oops! — rips apart almost his entire family. Spared is a young son who is sent to a creepy boarding school for orphans, though he’s soon plucked from its halls to apprentice under a mad scientist. Meanwhile, the guilt-ridden corpse — real name: John Romero; memo to creative types: naming anyone “Romero” in your zombie-related whatnot is no longer a novel idea — roams the underworld and the land of the living, meting out occasional supernatural ass-kickings but mostly searching for his long-lost offspring.

The haunted-school scenes (complete with a kids vs. demons showdown) are clever, and the catchy soundtrack has punky flair, but the sheer number of plot threads nearly overwhelms the 82-minute film — maybe cool for fans of the comic, but viewers new to the material might wonder why, say, the “Spectral Protection Society” is elaborately introduced and then discarded. The overall effect is not nearly as fun (or “amazing”) as it should be.

Amazing, however, is one of many gushing adjectives I might use to describe my top pick of the festival: Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s — a jazzy, lovingly-compiled homage to some of the trashiest, most mean-spirited films ever made. Everyone’s heard of Spaghetti Westerns, but poliziotteschi movies have yet to make a true cult breakthrough (or be remade by Quentin Tarantino, but I’m sure he’ll get there eventually). A groovy-sleazy score and endless clips, posters, and still shots set the tone for Eurocrime!, which gathers some of the genre’s biggest stars (laid-back John Saxon; gracious Franco Nero; bratty Antonio Sabàto) to look back at their years chasing each other across rooftops, brawling in junkyards, and working with directors like Umberto Lenzi (“the screaming-est director I ever met in my life,” according to actor Henry Silva).

The doc, a tad long at 137 minutes, also explores why the films became so popular, despite the fact that their scripts were often ripped wholesale from American “angry cop” films (and, later, from each other) — and why that popularity didn’t last (possible culprits: laughable dubbing, distracting mustaches, brutal violence against women). Newcomers won’t believe that such a world of insane film exists, longtime aficionados will dig the nostalgia, and both camps will enjoy Eurocrime!‘s high-energy appreciation of a genre long overdue for this kind of treatment. 

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

Nov. 28-Dec.9, $10-$12

Various venues, SF

www.sfindie.com

All reflected

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
All reflected

caitlin@sfbg.com

VISUAL ARTS Glossy and matte stripes alternate across the walls and floor of the 941 Geary gallery in the Tenderloin, occasionally illuminated by striking reflections from the exhibition’s 10 hanging canvases. These are perfectly symmetrical morphs of traditional letter-form graffiti, each done in Easter-ready pastels, save for a black-and-white tag that takes up one enormous gallery wall.

“I just want to continue painting different visions I have,” says the creator of this immersive art experience, visual artist Ricardo “Apex” Richey. He got his start tagging the streets of San Francisco in the early 1980s, perfecting his now-revered, precise hand forms inside Muni buses and walls around the city.

“Reflected,” this new solo show, plays on the entrance into the gallery world of an art form once done covertly on exterior walls. He’s taking graffiti and, like artists before him, skewing and reimagining it. “Abstracting the notion of Apex,” he tells me.

>>CHECK OUT OUR SLIDESHOW OF APEX’S ROOFTOP GALLERY AND SOME OF HIS TECHNICOLOR WORKS FROM AROUND THE SIXTH STREET NEIGHBORHOOD

With the current mania for street art-inspired pieces, Apex has been able to make a career of his work. He capitalizes on the legions of graff-nerd followers on his social networks, and his drive to refract and skew the recognizable shape of graffiti in endless ways. The 941 Geary show was inspired by an iPhone app that allowed him to mirror pre-existing works. After speaking with Justin Giarla, founder of 941 and the rest of the White Walls family of urban art galleries, the two decided the idea merited more exploration.

But during the same week “Reflection” opened, Apex’s personal life was morphing as well. After three years in an epic factory-cum-studio on Market and Sixth Street, his building was sold and he was out. Goodbye to its 13-foot ceilings and the rotating, 10-foot high windows that look out on Market.

http://vimeo.com/21421094

And goodbye to the museum he’d been curating upstairs on the roof, where SF street artists Chez and Neon had contributed massive works, among others. Painted vegetation by muralist Mona Caron curled to the sun in a piece one could nearly see from Trailhead, the pop-up cafe down the street in the Renoir Hotel whose back wall, by chance, is graced by a collaboration mural done by Caron and Apex.

If you wander around the Mid-Market neighborhood, it’s not hard to see that Apex spends his nights working in a neighborhood studio. He’s certainly left his mark. The first piece in the area was Yerba Buena Liquors’ sign, years ago. Since then he’s painted all over the place. The corner of Turk, Mason, and Market Streets is graced by a super-burner of his, a phrase coined to describe his pieces that use hundreds of hues of aerosol.

“I would love to stay there,” he tells me at his new FiDi day job (more on that in a sec.) “In that regard, this is kind of sad.” But Apex knew he was in the studio and roof space on borrowed time — rumors had swirled since he first moved in that the building was for sale. He sees the “gradient” of real estate prices, that Sixth Street was an anomaly in a ridiculously expensive city to live in.

“On one hand it sucks, on the other, I understand it. Overall, it’s better for the city.” He’s looking for a new space anywhere in the “industrial band” that loops between his old studio and Potrero Hill, hoping to get lucky with one of the city’s few remaining industrial spaces.

And, as his solo show is testament, he’s not letting the forced move stop him. That day job? He bought a coffee kiosk. The business is about him “trying to be mature,” he says, laughing as he talks about Otis Cafe, the Four Barrel-equipped stand he’s set up in the Otis Lounge nightclub entryway (25 Maiden, SF) where you can now find him weekdays from 7am to 3:30pm.

“This idea popped into my head,” he says. ‘Coffee cart, that’s a low end startup.” The Maiden Lane micro-‘hood lacks designer coffee, and on the day I visit, new regulars are already lining up.

For Apex, the kiosk is just product of a creative mind. “I feel very blessed, fortunate,” he muses. “Like, I’m an idea person. Painting, art allows me to get the most of those ideas to come to light.” The Otis Cafe sandwich board and cart bear Apex’s signature loops of color — a new home in the downtown area for the artist himself.

“REFLECTED”

Through Jan. 5

941 Geary, SF

(415) 931-2500

www.941geary.com

 

Art school confidential

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Art school confidential

arts@sfbg.com

LIT If you’re seeking the perfect present for the music obsessive in your life, consider picking up a copy of David Byrne’s How Music Works (McSweeney’s, 332 pp., $32). A thorough exploration of the many facets of music-making, including music industry contracts, philosophical musings on the art of creation, and the scientific principles of tonality, Byrne’s book can be read like a field guide by aspiring musicians, and as an armchair adventure for those whose knowledge of music begins and ends with Pandora.

Intelligent without being overly-analytical, detailed without being didactic, what Byrne conveys most successfully is his own exuberant curiosity for his chosen topic. Like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which Bryson painstakingly researched the scientific foundations of the universe in order to be able to make sense of them himself, How Music Works often reads like an earnest inquiry conducted by a passionate amateur. That Byrne comes by his knowledge of the workings of the music industry a little more easily — as an elder statesman of art rock, he has decades of personal experience and anecdotes to draw on — fortunately doesn’t render his presentation self-aggrandizing or abstruse.

Although the title of the book seems to indicate a focus on the principles of music theory, a large bulk of the book actually focuses on the technological processes that music has been subjected to over the centuries — from the invention of the first musical instruments to that of Edison cylinder recorders and eventually MP3 players. In his first chapter, “Creation in Reverse,” Byrne presents the theory that specific music has been created to fit certain acoustical contexts. He examines a variety of musical styles — unamplified, percussive ensembles of West Africa, whose music sounds most optimal when heard outdoors, unconfined; long notes and modal structures of Medieval church music, created to fill the vaulted echo chambers of Gothic cathedrals — speculating on how they evolved first to fit the given architecture, and how architecture subsequently evolved to fit the music, as with Wagner’s uniquely-designed opera house in Bayreuth.

He points out how the architecture of even a respected venue like Carnegie Hall might actually be detrimental to the overall sound of a percussion-heavy, experimental rock band, while later he describes the perfect balance of architectural elements that conspire to support such a band and its satellites.

Organized in ten chapters, each tackling a specific thread of thought, the flow of the book can be likened to that of a rock album: a few obvious hits, a couple of minor throwaways. One of the latter is the chapter entitled “How to Make a Scene,” which is also one of the shortest, a moderately interesting rumination on what it takes to create an identifiable music “scene” in terms of architecture, policy, and business philosophy (his exemplar being the now-defunct CBGB). While it makes some interesting points, it could just as easily be missing from the book and no one would particularly mourn its absence. Another, entitled “Collaborations,” is similarly brief, and its appearance between a chapter on the mechanics of recording and the financial realities of the music business doesn’t make for a smooth transition, tonally or thematically.

On the other hand, chapters such as the two entitled “Technology Shapes Music” (covering both analog and digital) are as thorough as they are fascinating. Beginning with the earliest sound recordings in 1878 to an in-depth user’s guide to the music software that has become the industry standard (even for confirmed oddballs such as Byrne), these chapters offer a thoughtful analysis on not just how music works, but also how it’s worked. Finally, in chapter ten (“Harmonia Mundi”), a mere 302 pages in, Byrne turns to the scientific and spiritual principles of music and music theory. Music, it appears, has been around about as long as human beings have, as fragments of 45,000 year-old flutes and pictorial evidence found in Mesopotamia and Egypt help prove. He veers off into Pythagorian territory by expounding upon the so-called Music of the Spheres, and ventures into tantric philosophy, which asserts that the vibration of the universe is generated by Shakti and Shiva having sex.

The book ends on a note of bittersweet optimism, contemplating a future where human composers could actually become obsolete. It’s a future Byrne claims not to fear — while still expressing admiration for music makers past and present, and gratitude for his own place, in this moment, within their ranks.

Event Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Listings compiled by George McIntire. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 28

The Guardian presents: GOLDIES Afterparty 111 Minna, SF. www.sfbg.com. 9pm, free. Perhaps you caught the paper a couple weeks ago — you know, the one with all the mega-talented rising art stars? That’d be the Goldies. Tonight, our honorees get their actual awards and to celebrate, we’re throwing a totally free, totally amazing afterparty featuring DJ Bus Station John and performances by Kat Marie Yoas, Mad Noise, and Dr. Zebrovski. Gold attire is encouraged, as are winter formal looks.

Grant 121: The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists Green Apple Books, 506 Clement Street, SF. (415) 387-2272, . 7pm, free. Brazil well on its way to becoming an economic super power, and it’s going to need some adept writers to chronicle its ascent. Scratch that, it already has plenty: Cristhiano Aguiar and Vinicius Jatoba are among their number. The two will be reading about modern Brazilian society from the latest issue of Granta Magazine.

Ferocious Reality Tosca Café, 242 Columbus, SF. (415) 986-9651, . 7-9pm, free. Eric Ames penned Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog, an examination of more than 25 of Werner Herzog’s films. If you’re a Herzog head or simply curious about his work, come for a conversation and Q&A at this book-signing with Professor Ames.

THURSDAY 29

Collecting 2.0 Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. (415) 655-7800, . 6:30-8pm, free–$5. Does the Internet enhance or detract from experiencing art? How has the Internet affected our ability to collect art? These questions and others like them will be at the center of the discourse at this event where curators, gallerists, collectors, and other art world denizens will come together to expound on the Internet’s influence on modern creativity.

FRIDAY 30

SCRAP Art Fair Arc Gallery, 1246 Folsom, SF. (415) 298-7969, . Through January/9. Opening reception: 6:30-9pm, free. One person’s trash is another person’s art supply. Arc Gallery presents its fourth exhibition of creatively-used pieces of scrap taken from landfills and used as tools for art. The show’s purpose, however, isn’t just to say, “hey you can make art out of trash!” Rather, it expands our notion of where art can come from, and promotes reuse.

Call Me Home Gallery Carte Blanche, 973 Valencia, SF. (415) 821-1055, . Through Jan. 23. Opening reception: 6-9pm, free. If you’re a proud San Franciscan, check out this event to make your chest swell and tears surface. “Call Me Home: A Photographic Journey in San Francisco” is presented by the one-year old Carte Blanche Gallery and features the works of five photographers

SATURDAY 1

Paxton Gate Anniversary Party Paxton Gate, 824 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-1872, . 8-10pm, free. The eccentric shop will be celebrating two decades at its Valencia location in carnival-like fashion. Among the fanfare will be contortionists, stilt walkers, and the sounds of “Shovelman” in addition to an open bar of courtesy of Hendrick’s Gin.

Palestinian Gifts Bazaar Middle East Children’s Alliance, 1101 Eighth St., Berk. (510) 548-0542, . Also Sun/2, 10am-5pm, free. Come peruse this superb emporium of elegantly fashioned items from across the Middle East. If you got someone special in your life who lives from things like pure olive oil soap, exotic scarves & shawls, and hand-blown glassware, make sure you circle this event for your holiday shopping to-do list.

SUNDAY 2

Psychotherapy Institute Art Show and Sale Psychotherapy Institute, 2322 Carleton, Berk. (510) 548-2250, . Noon-5pm, free. Support local artists and the advancement of the study of psychotherapy at this art sale benefiting the Psychotherapy Institute of Berkeley. The event, which also celebrates the 40th anniversary of the institute, features work from artists like Joan Alexander, Jim Fishman, and Jane Reynolds.

Readings on Cinema: The Truman Show Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-1124, . 5:20pm, $5.50-13.50. I’m sure we’ve all had the feeling that each one of us is the star of our very own “Truman Show” because if someone else had his or her own Truman show, you’d know about it right? Well this feeling of screens staring at you is what motivated Bay Area film historian David Thomson to pen his latest book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies—and What They Have Done to US. In this book event Thomson plans to illustrate the concepts of his book via the existential comedy The Truman Show.

TUESDAY 4

Wood Shoppe Free Concert Series Brick and Mortar Music Hall, 1710 Mission, SF. (415) 371-1631, . 8pm, free. A free concert is like a 72 degree day in the city — you’ve just gotta take advantage. Participating in this free concert series occurring on the first Tuesday of every month is Oakland DIY pop outfit Trails and Ways, music theorist Cayucas, and garage psych-poppers The Tambo Rays.

Stage Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

A Christmas Carol Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Opens Fri/30, 7pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 7pm (no evening performance Dec 6, 11, or 18; also 2pm matinees Sat/1, Dec 8, 12, 15, 21, and 22; Sun, 5:30pm (also 1pm matinees Dec 9, 16, 23); Dec 24, 1pm. Through Dec 24. American Conservatory Theater’s annual holiday performance features James Carpenter as Scrooge.

The Marvelous Wonderettes New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $27-46. Previews Fri/30-Sat/1 and Dec 5-7, 8pm; Sun/2, 2pm. Opens Dec 8, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm (no show Dec 23). Through Jan 13. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Roger Bean’s 1950s pop-hit musical.

The New California Traveling Jewish Theater, 470 Florida, SF; www.pianofight.com. $20-25. Opens Wed/28, 8pm. Runs Wed, 8pm. Through Dec 19. PianoFight Productions’ female-centric sketch comedy group ForePlays presents an all-new variety show.

Pal Joey Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Previews Wed/28, 7pm; Thu/29-Fri/30, 8pm. Opens Sat/1, 6pm. Runs Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 16. 42nd Street Moon performs the Rodgers and Hart classic.

BAY AREA

Big River TheatreWorks, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $23-73. Previews Wed/28, 7:30pm; Thu/29-Fri/30, 8pm. Opens Sat/1, 2 and 8pm. Runs Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 30. TheatreWorks performs the Tony-winning musical based on Mark Twain’s Huck Finn stories.

Dracula Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview, Berk; www.infernotheatre.org. $12-25. Opens Thu/29, 8pm. Runs Thu and Sat-Sun, 8pm; Fri, 9pm. Though Dec 16. Inferno Theatre Company performs Giulio Cesare Perrone’s adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic.

Woyzeck Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $23-35. Previews Thu/29 and Dec 5-6, 7pm; Fri/30-Sat/1, 8pm; Sun/2, 5pm. Opens Dec 7, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Jan 27. Shotgun Players presents Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan, and Robert Wilson’s tragic musical, based on an unfinished 1837 play by Georg Büchner.

ONGOING

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

History: The Musical Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 22. The Un-Scripted Theater Company performs “an unscripted romp through Western history.”

Hysterical, Historical San Francisco: Holiday Edition Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $25-40. Fri-Sat and Dec 26-31, 9pm. Through Dec 31. Comedian Kurt Weitzmann takes on San Francisco history, adding some holiday flair along the way.

The Rainmaker Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. $38. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 22. Shelton Theatre preforms N. Richard Nash’s classic drama.

Slugs and Kicks Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-30. Previews Wed/28, 8pm. Opens Thu/29, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 9. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s play about the offstage drama at a college theater company.

Speed-the-Plow Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Extended through Dec 21. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs the David Mamet drama.

The Submission New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 16. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jeff Talbott’s drama about a playwright who falsifies his identity when he enters his latest work into a prestigious theater festival.

Superior Donuts Gough Street Playhouse, 1622 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $25-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 2. Consider the doughnut: an infinite ring of fried dough and glaze, simple, unassuming, ubiquitous. Once a staple of on-the-go breakfasts and on-the-road snacking, the doughnut has gone into decline, assaulted on all sides by nutritionists, tastier pastries, and luxury branding. Arthur (Don Wood), the aging protagonist of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, has failed to see the writing on the wall, perhaps for decades, as his family doughnut shop, whose regulars include a feisty bag lady (Vicki Siegel) and a pair of beat cops (Ariane Owens, Emmanuel Lee), struggles to compete with the Starbucks across the street and the changing mores and values of the neighborhood demographic. Enter Franco (Chris Marsol), a likable youthful hustler in desperate need of a job, who sees potential in Arthur’s decrepit shop: poetry readings! Bran muffins! A liquor license! Drawn to each other by mutual loneliness the two warily navigate the waters of friendship, despite their obvious gaps in age, ambition, and fashion sense (Franco to Arthur: “the Grateful Dead aren’t hiring anymore”). Custom Made’s production, directed by Marilyn Langbehn, breathes vibrancy into a gentrifying corner of Chicago, thanks especially to Chris Marsol, whose Franco is bold, intelligent and thwarted, and Don Wood, who plays Arthur like a man frozen in ice, whose eventual thaw speaks to the restorative powers of possibility. (Gluckstern)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through Dec 8. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through Jan 5. Lynne Kaufman’s new play stars Warren David Keith as the noted spiritual figure.

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $36-57. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/1 and Dec 15, 2pm; Dec 6, 1pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 16. Marin Theatre Company performs Joe Landry’s live radio play adaptation of the classic Capra film.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 16. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability. Even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

The Sound of Music Julia Morgan Theatre, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $15-35. Thu-Sat, 7pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, noon and 5pm. Through Dec 2. Berkeley Playhouse opens its fifth season with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

Toil and Trouble La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Thu/22). Through Dec 8. For a theater company known for its radical interpretations of the Shakespearean canon, a play such as Lauren Gunderson’s Toil and Trouble, a goofy Generation Why retelling of Macbeth, is a particularly good fit for Impact Theatre. Whittled down to a dynamic three-character chamber play featuring delusionary slackers plotting to turn their MBAs and nebulous SF Giants connections into a bloodless takeover of a remote island nation rather than get crappy café jobs to pay the rent, Toil throws baseball, investors, Wikipedia, fortune cookies, hypothetical sex, and real violence into one cauldron, letting them bubble and froth throughout the piece. The so-crazy-it-might-just-work plan hatched by Adam (Michael Delaney), a relentlessly cheerful narcissist, quickly leads to tension between the three, especially once the potential payout is estimated at 30 million dollars, and before their plot is even finalized, a tenuous, murderous alliance forms between the insufferably wimpy Matt (Will Hand) and the rage-aholic Beth (Jeanette Penley). All three actors play their all-too-familiar characters to the hilt, and Josh Costello’s direction is deft and assured. A surprise twist subverts the expected lull of tragedy, and all is resolved, more or less, in a manner more appropriate to this time and place than Shakespeare’s, though not without some grand sound and fury beforehand, signifying both. (Gluckstern)

The White Snake Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Nov 29, Dec 13, and Sat, 2pm; no matinee Dec 1; no show Thu/22); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 23. In Mary Zimmerman’s The White Snake, nothing is quite as it seems. A mysterious stranger and her faithful servant are, in reality, a pair of shape-shifting serpents, the humble village pharmacy they build (with stolen money) is a front for their magical healing powers, a venerated Buddhist Abbott is actually a small-minded tyrant with a remarkably unholy obsession. Based on a Chinese myth dating to the 10th century, elements of “The White Snake” can be found in other mythologies around the world — from the biblical tempter in the Garden of Eden, to the healer snakes of Asclepius. However, in accordance with the tale’s historical evolution, from horror story to romance, Zimmerman’s treatment focuses mainly on the unusual love affair between Madame White (Amy Kim Waschke) and her karma-selected husband Xu Xian (Christopher Livingston). Weaving together fanciful design (a rainfall of ribbons, parasol puppetry, elegant period costuming and evocative video), elements of Chinese drama (amusingly described by narrators as they take place on stage), and a stirring reflection on the transformative power of love, complete with themes of self-sacrifice and endless fidelity, The White Snake, is a delicately-rendered fairytale which may not offer a way to enlightenment, but certainly clears a path to the heart. (Gluckstern)

Wilder Times Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 9. Aurora Theatre performs a collection of one-acts by Thornton Wilder.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Fri/23-Sun/25, 11am. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl brings his lighter-than-air show back to the Marsh.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. $20. “Theatresports,” Fri, 8pm, through Dec 21.

“The Buddy Club Children’s Shows” Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Wy, SF; www.thebuddyclub.com. Sun/2, 11am-noon. $8. Juggling and acrobatics with the Keith Show.

“Clas/sick Hip-Hop” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/30-Sat/1, 8pm. $15-20. Violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain accompanies hip-hop dancers Rennie Harris, Rokafella, and others.

“Instrument” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through Dec 9. $15-20. Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique, performs her new solo show.

“Life with Laughter” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.975howard.com. Tue/4, 8:30pm. $10-20. comedy, storytelling, spoken word, and music.

“Murderous Little World” ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. Mon/3, 8pm. $15-30. NEXMAP and ODC present the US premiere of Linda Bouchard’s experimental musical theater work, based on poems by Anne Carson and performed by Canadian trio Bellows and Brass.

“The Romane Event” Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, SF; www.pacoromane.com. Wed/28, 8pm. $7-10. Comedy with Alex Koll, Johnny Taylor, Leslie Small, Andrew Holgren, Lynn Ruth Miller, and Paco Romane.

San Francisco Comedy College Purple Onion at Kells, 530 Jackson, SF; www.sfcomedycollege.com. $5-15; all shows ongoing. “Laughter Hour,” Thu-Fri, 7pm. “Destini and Yonatan’s Stand-Up Rebellion,” Thu, 8:30. “Comedy Bottle,” Fri-Sat, 8:30pm. “Kells Comedy Saturday,” Sat, 7pm. “New Talent Shows,” Tue-Wed, 7. Also Larkspur Hotel, 524 Sutter, SF. “Rocket Salad,” Sun, 7.

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

BAY AREA

“Hear Me Now” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/3, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents cell phone monologues as part of its First Person Singular reading series.

“A Memory from the Future/Un Recuerdo del Futuro” Studio 8, 2525 Eighth St, SF; www.theteadancers.org. Sat/1 and Dec 8, 8pm; Dec 9, 2pm. $20. The Tea Dancers/Ballet de la Compasion perform a bilingual multimedia show.

“Risk for Deep Love” Temescal Art Center, 511 48th St, Oakl; www.eroplay.com. Sat/1, 8pm. Free. “Improvised passions” with performance artist Frank Moore. *

 

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