Johnny Ray Huston

Squatumentary: A Q&A with Hannah Dobbz

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By Liam O’Donoghue

Hannah Dobbz’s Shelter: A Squatumentary screens at 8 p.m. tonight at Artists’ Television Access. A 45-minute exploration of squatting in the East Bay between 2004 and 2007, it shares a bill with Sabrina Alonso’s self-explanatory 28-minute Mischief at 16th and Florida. I recently discussed the the pros and cons and politics of squatting with Dobbz, a freelance writer, editor and filmmaker.

SFBG What is your definition of squatting?
Hannah Dobbz Squatting could be using an abandoned building for a project or just for sleeping. It could be using an abandoned lot for gardening. Generally speaking, squatting is utilizing any unused space.

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Hannah Dobbz

SFBG Is there anything that could be described as a “squatting scene” in the Bay Area?
HD Hard to say, since it’s so secretive and clandestine. If people are squatting, they usually don’t want everybody to know. They might need to sneak in at night and leave early in the morning. Not all squats can be used as community spaces.
The most well-known squat was probably Hellarity in Oakland, which is featured in the film. Another squatter featured in the film is Steve DiCaprio, who is working on Banana House and another house now, but that’s more of a private project — not really part of a scene. There is definitely a community of people who would consider themselves squatters (former or current), but using the word ‘scene’ is not really applicable.

Local Artist of the Week: Noah Beil

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LOCAL ARTIST Noah Beil
TITLE San Francisco, California, 2008
THE STORY Beil’s series “Berms and Drumlins” explores man’s alteration of the landscape. From Ohlone shell mounds to gold mining sediment changing the bay shoreline, the Bay Area has long been subjected to deliberate and unintentional modifications by its inhabitants. This photograph was taken on Treasure Island, a man-made environment built entirely on landfill.
BIO In his landscape photographs, Beil compares natural and man-made features and searches for subtle embellishments to the earth’s surface that may not be readily apparent. He questions whether the reshaping of the earth should be considered destructive or decorative. He lives in Oakland.
SHOW “Eighteen Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography.” Thurs/17 through September 19; Wed.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlet Place, SF. (415) 554-6080. Opening reception Thursday, July 17, 5:30 – 7:30pm. www.sfacgallery.org.
WEB www.noahbeil.com

The return of The Americans

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In the 1950s, while Robert Frank was shooting photos for The Americans (Steidl, 180 pages, $39.95 ), a Southern sheriff told him he had “an hour to leave town.” If Frank took even one photo before splitting, then few people have ever made better use of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The Americans turns 50 this year, and to celebrate its birthday — and perhaps to more perceptively rue the lack of change in this country — it has been republished in a new edition. This version corrects cropped images from past editions and presents deep tri-tone scans of vintage prints. Frank revised the book’s design. He selected its paper and its thread-stitching. He also conceived a new dust jacket that is closest in spirit to the book’s famed 1959 Grove Press and 1969 Aperture manifestations. As ever — maybe more than ever — The Americans is a scary beauty.

A Frank exhibition will be coming to SFMOMA. For now, here are some photos from Steidl’s version of The Americans.

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Self-help books

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ISBN REAL In a recent, much-discussed Washington Post op-ed, Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp said, "There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, [major] publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively."

The "widely" Karp refers to is an advantage that major publishers lost a long time ago. A physical copy of the latest Robert Ludlum novel is far less accessible to the global community than Joe Shmuck’s online prose poem about his first drug experience. It’s the "effectively" that’s taking its sweet-ass time to materialize. After all, thanks to the ease of e-distribution, the Internet has already become a cosmic slush pile.

Karp foresees a time when the glut of options for disposable entertainment will make brand-establishment for "formula fiction" a less successful strategy, leaving attention to quality as the only way for a major publisher to stay relevant. On the contrary, it seems to me that the agoraphobic variety offered by the Internet would make brand-establishment quite successful for a major publisher. Maybe it’s defeatist thinking, but I wonder if the only truly exciting possibility for seekers of uncompromising work in the near future is that smaller enterprises might have a better chance to survive alongside the larger ones. Maybe the practical hope is that the eventual normalization of "digital distribution and print-on-demand technology" might be sufficient to sustain the talented independent writer of modest financial expectations.

One potential beneficiary of this modest revolution is novelist Carl Shuker, who is publishing his brainy horror experiment Three Novellas for a Novel all by his lonesome at www.threenovellasforanovel.com. This month, Shuker — a New Zealander now living in London — has made the second of the three titular installments, ?O Hills Park, available for download. Also available is the first novella, The Depleted Forest, about an editor in an alternate-present Japan who is proofreading the computer-translated memoir of a member of a secret society of rape-tourists. The third installment, Beau Mot Plage, will be uploaded soon. For the PDFs, he’s charging — à la Radiohead — whatever you want to pay.

Since Shuker has already published two well-regarded novels (2005’s award-winning The Method Actors and 2006’s The Lazy Boys), he’s not exactly at the bottom of the slush pile. But he’s not Radiohead, either. More to the point, while The Depleted Forest is a relatively accessible and not unmarketable story, ?O Hills Park is the kind of thing only an Internet could love. It’s the full memoir excerpted in the first novella and presented in the quasi-English of computer translation. Rushed to publication to catch the public’s fleeting interest in the first book’s sex scandal, the text of ?O Hills Park is as much a mesmerizing word puzzle as an intriguing piece of fiction. It’s also a supremely ironic comment on the publishing culture from which the work was spared — the culture whose cathartic rehabilitation Karp is so optimistic about.

It’s doubtful either Karp or Shuker is making that culture hang its head in shame. Back when writers with a taste for food and shelter were at the mercy of those with the exclusive means of wide distribution, they had no choice but to pretend publishers answerable to stockholders had an obligation to publish works with all the mass appeal of a conscript military. It’s always been an honorable delusion, but it may be that such an insistence is now a waste of the energy that should be spent learning how to cut out the middleman.

Super Wofler

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Super Wofler! That’s as good a nickname as any for artist, curator, teacher, and creative tornado Jenifer K. Wofford. In Denmark, a Super Wofler is a mass-produced ice cream cone — as Wofford discovered during a recent artist-in-residence stint near Copenhagen, where she also tracked down a version of Planters’ elusive and endangered CheezBalls, as well as a school named Wofford College, founded in 1854.

But in the Bay Area and in the Philippines, the Super Wofler of Wofford College is Wofford, whose project Galleon Trade invokes and revises Spanish colonial trade routes to forge new cultural and critical exchange. Sparked by Wofford’s curatorial and organizational acumen, Galleon Trade kicked off one year ago in Manila, the Philippines, where art by 12 Californians — including Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco — landed at two galleries, accompanied by many of the artists. Last year, the Guardian gave Goldie awards to Wofford and Arcega, but many other Galleon Trade participants — such as Jaime Cortez and Gina Osterloh — have made equally striking and impressive work.

Wofford has a large San Francisco installment of Galleon Trade planned for the Luggage Store Gallery next year. For the moment, the "BAN 5" version will spotlight some local Galleon Trade–ers, and some Filipino artists — like Norberto "Peewee" Roldan of Green Papaya Art Projects — who Wofford met last summer. "A couple artists are doing work that is phenomenological as opposed to overtly political," she says, during a phone interview that includes an only half-joking reference to "carpetbaggers" when the touchy topic of including non–Bay Area artists is broached. "I could see people getting pinched about the fact that we’re expanding the idea of what should be included." Who says the Bay Area only resides in the Bay Area, anyway?

GALLEON TRADE Sept. 5–Oct. 19 in the YBCA Terrace Galleries. Opening party, Sept. 4, 5–8 p.m.

L’homme de evasion: Tell No One

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By Erik Morse

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

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Local Artist of the Week: Jen Merrill

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LOCAL ARTIST Jen Merrill
TITLE The Proportion of Perception
THE STORY Inspired by scientific anatomical studies and human interactions, Merrill uses paper, paint, and her scalpel to create a three-dimensional world of eerie, sometimes humorous figures. They are at once clinical and viscerally powerful, betraying a battle between emotional restraint and an unruly body and conscience.
BIO Jen Merrill first took scalpel to paper at San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her MFA in 2006. She continues to hone her paper-cutting skills in Oakland, where she lives and works.
SHOW “Demikhov’s Hands of Glory.” July 12 through August 10 (reception Sat/12, 7–9 p.m.). Wed., 4–7 p.m.; Sat., 1–4 p.m. Iceberger Gallery, 3150 18th St., # 109 (18th and Treat), SF. (415) 225-8932, www.icebergergallery.com
WEB SITE www.jenmerrill.com

Can’t knock the Tussle

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Playing name-that-tune with Tussle isn’t easy. The San Francisco group makes instrumentals. As founding member Nathan Burazer puts it, they’re "not very word-oriented." And neither am I, it turns out, when faced with the challenge of matching the eight out of nine songs I’ve heard from their propulsive Cream Cuts (Smalltown Supersound) with the album’s final track listing. For a minute, I try to get new member, bassist and electronics player Tomo Yasuda, to ID songs based on my descriptions, but noting that one number — "Transparent C" — has a beep-beep motif, not unlike that of a Road Runner cartoon, only gets us so far. There’s some merriment when another song with handclaps that a mutual pal describes as the "gay one" turns out to have the title "Rainbow Claw." But in the end, it’s easiest to discuss and define Cream Cuts while listening to it.

Which is fine with me, because from first listen I’ve considered Cream Cuts one of the best albums of the year — a metamorphosis in which the band’s rhythmic core becomes more sinuous, its atmospherics more expansive, and its overall sound both deeper and more party-ready. Though the foreboding planet-of-the-vampires ambience of "Third Party" would not be out of place on Cluster’s underrated Cluster 2 (Brain, 1972), Burazer is clear that he and fellow original member Jonathan Holland are striving to move beyond the "File under: ESG" or "File under: Can" download dog-tags sometimes attached to their 2004 debut Kling Klang (Troubleman Unlimited) and 2006’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Superound). In fact, "File under: Wu-Tang" would be a more interesting — and correct — frame of reference for the new release’s downtempo moments. "We listen to a lot of hip-hop," Burazer says. "A lot of Wu-Tang, Ghostface, Lil Wayne, and J-Dilla."

The cover art for Cream Cuts, by Simon Evans and Lart Cognac Berliner, uses hand-woven colored paper. The music inside is bathed in moonlight. This nighttime resplendence is apt, since all four current members of Tussle — including Holland’s fellow drummer Warren Huegel — are fans of the blind street musician and compositional visionary Moondog. But whereas Moondog’s old stomping ground was Sixth Avenue in NYC, Tussle is creating a SF city sound. It’s a sound that can be traced back to North Carolina in 1994, when Burazer and Holland first turned one room in a shared apartment into a place to make music. On new tracks such as "ABACBA" and "Titan," the jam session intuitiveness at the core of Burazer’s and Holland’s bond takes on a new finesse, momentum, and flair for drama.

All of the above reach anthemic immediacy on Cream Cuts‘ "Night of the Hunter." There, the chunkiness of past Tussle recordings gives way to a more fluid and formidable funkiness. It takes a certain nerve to give a song the same name as a classic film, but Burazer has an innate understanding of the Southern menace and beauty within Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterwork. The electronics player’s childhood in Carolina included time spent in a cult. "My parents and I were full-time volunteers in this hospice in the mountains [that turned into a cult]," he explains. "There was a guru, everyone met on the full moon, and there was wife- and child-swapping. There were no drugs or sexual violence — it was mild. But it was a cult."

The experience — one I relate to somewhat — left Burazer "allergic to holier-than-thou authority figures." Instead of a follow-the-leader dynamic, he and Holland built Tussle on a foundation of cooperative intuition, and they’ve discovered another level of open, even-handed collaboration with the group’s newest member, Yasuda. "Tomo puts me at ease," Burazer says. "He’s so easy to work with and so brilliant. He has a calming quality. Things are light with him, even though he’s carrying the low end musically. As a person, he’s playful." This playfulness is just as fruitful in another of Yasuda’s current projects, Coconut, where he and visual artist Colter Jacobsen create meandering folk and jazz improvisations that Arthur Russell might appreciate.

Tussle in 2008 aren’t without a sense of humor or adventure, whether it involves playing under the influence of natural hallucinogens in a Museum of Natural History or bringing a Gay.com Frisbee in their percussion bag to a show at CellSpace. In the end, naming what they do or attempting to define it is beside the point. "Some of the [song] titles come from [playing] Mad Libs on tour," Burazer offers when I ask how this group of instrumentalists deals with words. It makes sense: Cream Cuts is Tussle’s mad liberation from past constraints, a ‘shrooming world of sound that offers pleasure right now, and hints of greater possibilities to come.

TUSSLE

With Christopher Willits, Mi Ami, the Drift, and Eyes

July 17, 9 p.m., $8

Gray Area Gallery

1515 Folsom, SF

www.mcmf.org

COCONUT

With Waters and Hollers, and Shygrape

July 17, 9 p.m., $5

Argus Lounge

3187 Mission, SF

www.mcmf.org

Local Artist of the Week: Praba Pilar

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LOCAL ARTIST Praba Pilar
TITLE Performance still from The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno
THE STORY Reverend Praba Pilar of the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno travels the world offering fantastical prophesies, outrageous sermons, incantations, neorituals, and a freshly minted techno-communion with emerging technology. Inverting phobic cries for a precautionary principle, the church proclaims a liturgy that drives these technologies: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience — forward into the neoteric millennium.
BIO A Bay Area/Colombian multidisciplinary artist, Praba Pilar explores the intersections of art, science, technology, and community through site installations, performances, street theater, and Web sites. Her wildly diverse work has been presented at museums, galleries, universities, and on streets around the world while winning multiple honors, including the Creative Capital award and the Creative Work Fund award.
SHOW “Bay Area Now 5,” opening July 19 (performance: Aug. 10, 2 p.m.). Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $3–$6, (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. “We Remember the Sun,” through Sept. 13 (performance Sept. 11, 7 p.m.). Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. Free, (415) 749-4563, www.sfai.edu
WEB SITE www.prabapilar.com

Frameline: Project Runway’s Jay and the perils of PR

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By Jason Shamai

Part of what makes Project Runway so good is that it loves its clever queers. By no means is the show light on standard-issue drama, but one thing its producers and editors don’t abide is bullshit fabulousness comedy routines. They love their bitchy overcompensators (Christian) and their angelic peacekeepers (Danny V.) and their hyperbaric chambermaids (Austin Scarlett, and Malan Breton from Taiwan) and their everything-but-the-sodomy queens (Vincent Libretti), but they would not put up with a Carson Kressley. Or at least they wouldn’t give him much face time.

The producers and editors, of course, are the master tailors behind all the sartorial pageantry. Their jobs seem pretty similar to the trials imposed upon the designers:

Production team, your challenge was to take the painfully young, dumb, and talented Christian Siriano and craft his insecurities into a compelling dramatic arc. You perhaps overplayed your hand in the beginning by setting him up as Machiavelli’s pet rat, but the disarming late-arrival accents of warmth and anxiety brought the whole together boldly if not seamlessly.

And so on.

You sense they are really sweating the final product, resenting the challenges that are comparable to designing ice-skating outfits or fitting teenagers for prom dresses and reveling in the opportunity to make top-notch originals with quality materials.

If the judges aren’t voting solely on craft (and if you think they are, I have a Saturn Astra to sell you at bluefly.com), they don’t just handicap for drama queens—the dry editorialists are always given high consideration. When Chris March and Steven Rosengard were on the chopping block last season, my loins voted for Steven to stay but the rest of me knew Chris was the wiser choice. The show needed his class more than it needed Steven’s lips. It knew he was that season’s color bearer of wry, thoughtful faggotry. And in Season Two, Santino’s Tim Gunn impersonations were an inspired collaboration with the editors. His Red Lobster bit, generously featured as it was, instantly made the world a better place.

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Jay McCarroll and hot air balloons in Eleven Minutes

Jay McCarroll was just such an object of appreciation on Season One, and possibly the most worthy of the series. More power to him, then, that he’s got himself a proper documentary, which is showing this Wednesday as part of Frameline. Eleven Minutes, directed by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, follows McCarroll as he prepares to show at New York’s Fashion Week—his first not under the auspices of Project Runway. In the film, McCarroll worries that any success he might have as a designer will always be thanks to an alloy of aptitude and personality. He’s well aware that the cameras continue to roll because he entertained us way back when on Bravo and he’s ambivalent about it at best.

Local Artists of the Week: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and James Luna

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LOCAL ARTISTS Guillermo Gómez-Peña and James Luna
TITLE Photos of El Mexican’t and The Shame-man
THE STORY Chicano performance artist Gómez-Peña’s and Native American conceptual artist Luna’s ongoing project The Shame-man meets El Mexican’t challenges stereotypes, assumptions, and lazy thinking about race and culture. Their latest collaboration within the series, La Nostalgia, reveals how that term can be used as a mechanism of cultural defense, as a stylistic device, and as a way of revising the artist’s careers. In a pair of performances last year, the artists staged their ritual deaths inside coffins and then engaged in a poetic dialogue while Luna cooked Indian stew and Gómez-Peña played roulette.
SHOWS: La Nostalgia Re-mix (Best hits and outtakes for an imaginary bar). Thurs/26, 8 p.m.; $10–$20. The LAB, 2948 16th St., SF. (415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org. (Also, on July 11, Gómez-Peña’s group La Pocha Nostra will present four performance/installation pieces at the de Young Museum.)
WEB SITES www.pochanostra.com, www.jameslunaprojects.com

Heart shaped box

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"Let’s pretend we own the world today," Kathleen Hanna sings midway through the uncharacteristic Bikini Kill ballad "For Tammy Rae." In her new solo show "An Archive of Feelings," the woman Hanna was singing for, Tammy Rae Carland, breaks down and reframes some of what she owns from a queer, feminist perspective that upsets emotional and financial conceits. Carland can wittily point out the beauty of mold and frame it in gold, but her show’s largest C-prints are perhaps the most powerful. My Inheritance presents 21 objects that belonged to her late mother. The widely varying forms of worth that might be ascribed to bingo memorabilia and domestic objects take on a tough, acidic irony here — through the piece’s title, and through a presentation that resembles and critiques the kind of white-page auction presentation found in Sotheby’s catalogs. One Love Leads to Another similarly presents the tape culture (via cassettes such as Let’s Rock from the 1980s that kick-started K Records in Carland’s onetime home of Olympia, Wash. Like Carland’s mother’s keepsakes, these punk feminist objects have a colorful Yard Birds’ aesthetic specific to Washington state, but their countless communal and creative connections showcase the power of sisterhood beyond bloodline.

AN ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS

Through July 27

Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m., free.

Silverman Gallery

804 Sutter, SF

A different light

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› johnny@sfbg.com

THE QUEER ISSUE It’s best to begin at the edge. Gay urban photography has a fleeting yet reliably revelatory home at those places where water laps up against land. On the East Coast, from 1975 through 1986, Alvin Baltrop explored the Hudson River side of Manhattan, capturing black-and-white visions of sex, murder, and architecture by cruising the piers as a peer rather than as an exploitative outsider. On the West Coast, during the ’50s and ’60s, Denny Denfield used Baker Beach and its nearby wooded areas to invent an Adam-only Eden best glimpsed solo through 3-D. And around the same time in Montreal, Alan B. Stone was hiding in a shed, looking through a shutter at the dock-working men and sunbathing boys who populated the city’s port. In the zone known as the city’s historical heart, his camera cautiously hinted at desires that could lead to prison time.

Curated by David Deitcher, the SF Camerawork exhibition "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" proves Stone’s photographic versatility ranged from a low-key form of William Klein–like typographic artistry to extremely subversive pastoral romanticism — in commissioned Boy Scout photos — to the candid portraiture of the beefcake genre. Such a showcase isn’t Deitcher’s intent, though — he’s structured the show (and written about it, in an autobiographical essay) to foreground a specifically gay vision and experience of Montreal from a time when men were arrested and publicly vilified in newsprint for being homosexual. Stone provides the nuanced vision; Deitcher identifies its facets and identifies with it. His analysis of Montreal through Stone’s camera takes on special resonance when placed next to Douglas Crimp’s look at post-Stonewall New York through Baltrop’s camera in a February 2008 Artforum piece.

The difference between the liberated time of Baltrop and the closeted era of Stone is evident in their views of waterfront lazy sunbathers. Perhaps the brightest — in tone and in quality of light — of the Baltrop photos showcased in Artforum (also on view at www.baltrop.org) gazes from a few hundred feet away at a half-dozen naked men as they soak up the sun, converse, and dangle their feet off the edge of a pier. The gay-lib visibility inherent to the men’s affectionate nudity is doubly emphasized by Baltrop’s distanced yet full-frontal perspective. In contrast, Stone’s 1954 photo Untitled (Lachine Canal) glimpses the back of a boy in a swimsuit seated at the Port of Montreal’s shoreline — the identity of his solitary subject remains poignantly invisible to the photographer, who, as Deitcher notes, was stricken with arthritis at an early age.

There’s a similar echo to a pair of photos — one by Stone, one by Baltrop — that depict men standing at the sunlit thresholds of waterfront warehouses. Stone’s 1954 Untitled (Dock Workers, Port of Montreal) is a furtive from-behind vision of a shirtless, assumedly heterosexual dockworker. One image from Baltrop’s "Pier Photographs, 1975-1986" glances at a shirtless man, also from behind, but from a much nearer vantage point. Attired in tight jeans and black boots, he’s the painter Alva, at work on a large piece of sexually explicit graffiti. The picture’s dominant darkness and the roughness of its lit threshold — a window-size hole in a warehouse wall — suggest an edge of menace that Baltrop’s photos of body bags make plain. An unauthorized space for gay sexuality in a bombed-out urban zone, the piers were rife with dangers unknown.

Stone’s and Baltrop’s photographs could form chapters within an imagined monograph about the changing relationship between gay sex and the city. Such a book could venture into the garishly colorful Times Square seen in Gary Lee Boas’ 2003 book New York Sex, 1979-85 (Gallerie Kamel Mennour) — the title alone prompts comparisons to Baltrop’s equally unsentimental vision of a different space within pre-Giuliani, pre-Disney Manhattan. It could draw from David L. Chapman’s and Thomas Waugh’s recent San Francisco–set monograph Comin’ At Ya!: The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield (Arsenal Pulp), to show the California-dreaming answer to New York grime, and to further reveal — through the inherent solitude of the 3-D stereoview process — the inner recesses of a pre-gay lib experience far from Baltrop’s and Boas’ sights and sites of group sexuality.

Such a book could open into film as well, since movies such as João Pedro Rodrigues’ O Fantasma (2000), Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2002), Tsai Ming-liang’s The River (1997) and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), and William E. Jones’ V.O. (2007) foreground age-old connections between the edges of urban society and sexuality. The portrait of Montreal that emerges from "Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place" hints at the possibilities of such a project — and leaves one wondering about the worlds of desire that can exist outside computer screens today.

ALAN B. STONE AND THE SENSES OF PLACE

Through Aug. 23

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org, www.baltrop.org

The Hot Pink List 2008

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>>ALLAN AND LEO HERRERA



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

MARIA

Through July 4

Galería De La Raza

2857 24th St., SF

(415) 827-8009

www.galeriadelaraza.org


>>ANNIE DANGER



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

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITY

Thurs/26, 7:30 p.m., $8–$15

LGBT Community Center

1800 Market, SF

(415) 865-5555

www.queerculturalcenter.org


>>DEXTER SIMMONS



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


>>CHELSEA STARR



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

HOT PANTS

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

Cat Club

1190 Folsom, SF

(415) 703-8964

www.myspace.com/hotpantsclub


>>JOSH CHEON



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

BIBI

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

Pork Store Café

3122 16th St., SF

(415) 626-5523

www.myspace.com/BibiSF


>>MONISTAT



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

BODY ROCK

Thu/26, 10 p.m., free

Vertigo

1160 Polk, SF

(415) 674-1278

www.myspace.com/monistat7


>>CHRIS PEREZ



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

KIKI: THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

Fri/27, reception 6–8 p.m., free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org


>>HUNTER HARGRAVES



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


>>ALICIA MCCARTHY



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

ALICIA MCCARTHY

Through Sat/28, free

Jack Hanley Gallery

395 Valencia, SF

(415) 522-1623

www.jackhanley.com


>>MON COUSIN BELGE



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

QUELLE HORREUR LAUNCH PARTY

Sat/28, 10pm, $6

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

The Guardian Queer Issue 2008

Quickies: Fast reviews of Frameline fest films

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Still from The Lost Coast

FRIDAY, JUNE 20
The Lost Coast (Gabriel Fleming, US, 2008) Writer-director Fleming recorded location sound for Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006), and all that time spent in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains must have rubbed off on him. His sophomore film is also steeped in a fog-kissed poetic naturalism, and it gives as much screen time to California’s rugged coastline — and its urban approximation in Golden Gate Park — as it does to the pair of longtime male friends at its center. Old Joy’s homosocial hiking retreat is swapped for a listless Halloween all-nighter, after which Jasper and Mark must confront the lingering memory of a high school tryst. Ian Scott McGregor and Lucas Alifano’s fine performances give this brief feature’s familiar premise unexpected emotional weight. (Matt Sussman)
10 p.m., Victoria
Saturn in Opposition (Ferzan Ozpetek, Italy, 2007) Keats’ epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” could just as well apply to Lorenzo, the handsome, successful sun around which orbit a fractious but loving circle of forty-something friends in Ferzan Ozpetek’s anticipated return to Frameline. Ozpetek (Steam, 1995) takes his time introducing Lorenzo’s makeshift family of ex-lovers, coworkers, yakhnes and admirers — each beautifully acted — before the character suffers a freak stroke. The sudden tragedy causes the group to reevaluate the forces that undermined and sustained their relationship with Lorenzo — and with each other — as they struggle to confront their grief. Ozpetek has crafted an unassuming but deft ensemble drama that earns every hanky it calls for. (Sussman)
9:15 p.m., Castro

Tell it like it is

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ISBN REAL Samuel R. Delany is best known as a science fiction writer. And it’s a good bet that once people see the documentary The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman — screening this week at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival — Delany will be equally well known as a prolific tea-room queer (50,000 and counting), a lifestyle that has informed much of his fiction. By all rights, either of these enthusiasms should provide the best inroad to Delany’s work. But I’m not so sure that’s true.

What I’ve read of Delany’s science fiction is ambitious, path-clearing, and fearless in its treatment of sex and race. It also tends to let ideas outperform style. Some selections of his work tighten the gap more successfully than others. Triton (Bantam, 1976), sometimes published as Trouble on Triton, is simultaneously much more effective and much less ambitious a work of art than its megahit predecessor Dhalgren (1975), a book of commendable narrative and sociological experimentation that still feels, page by page, overdetermined and overly dependent on dialogue for orientation.

When Delany writes about sex beyond the speculative landscape, he has no less a tendency to dote on ideas, often leaving the reader bloated with enlightenment and blue-balled by the promise of a tight story. His "pornotopic" novel Mad Man (Voyant, 2002) is in many ways a beautiful rumination on the staggered evolution of social tolerance, the ways in which our complex alliances and prejudices can work at cross-purposes. While it’s also admirably brutal on the average reader’s gag reflex, it’s still probably best to select a few boutique items — like maybe the scat play and interspecies fellatio — and save the cavernous foreskin tubes of smegma for another novel. Similarly, while Dark Reflections (Running Press, 2007) is equal to Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 A Single Man at exposing the animal humility of an aging literary life, it relinquishes its eerie sad hush to a bulbous interlude of bathroom-sex protocol.

Really, Delany is too forgiving of his enthusiasms — be they technological, sexual, or literary — to exclude what thoughts they might inspire, to avoid treating fiction as specimen capture. Some of the most impressive bits of Mad Man are simple lists of autonomous thoughts discovered in the notebook of a deceased philosopher. But the beauty of the lists make them no less transparent an opportunity for Delany to do some housecleaning. And while he was able to parlay his mania for inclusion into the artistic success of Phallos (2004), a great little faux-academic novel about an erotic text of mysterious provenance, writing about writing seems an awfully limiting way of solving the problem.

Unless you do it up right, in nonfiction. Though they are not by and large what have earned him his notoriety, works of criticism, memoir, and pedagogy shine brightest on Delany’s mantle. His elegy to the egalitarian sex culture of pre-Giuliani Times Square, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NYU Press, 1999), is deservedly well known. Though not as prominent, About Writing (Wesleyan, 2005) is a fantastic collection of essays, letters, and interviews on writing as a craft. Equally worthy is Silent Interviews (Wesleyan, 1994), a collection of souped-up interviews that deftly handle many of the concepts he has tried, with mixed results, to illuminate in his fiction. One particularly memorable piece in the collection is "Toto, We’re Back!", a 20-page crucifixion of some insidiously parochial questions posed by a couple of poor professors who thought they were being obsequious. Not only is it a brilliant demonstration of intellectual sadism, it’s also an intriguing examination of the nature of genre as well a solid beginner’s guide to the notables of science fiction. Though he is but one such notable, there are few better places to start.

THE POLYMATH, OR THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF SAMUEL R. DELANY, GENTLEMAN

Fri/20, 8 p.m., $9–$10

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 703-8655

www.frameline.org

What’s a “Mater”?

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1. Unholy howler monkey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOTHER OF TEARS

Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters

www.motheroftearsthemovie.com

Frameline 32: Sex changes

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TAKE ONE In Iranian director Tanaz Eshagian’s Be Like Others, fear hovers over a whole nation, leading to schizophrenic behavior. By concentrating on three different individuals before and after they went through sexual reassignment operations in Iran, Eshagian reveals an incredibly sad and asphyxiating society — one where homosexuality is banned and punishable by death but changing one’s sex is legal.

No matter how progressive the act of changing one’s sex might sound, Be Like Others proves that it has conservative and oppressive connotations in Iran. Most of the people considering surgery in Eshagian’s film do so because they feel that it’s their only alternative to a gay male or lesbian identity that involves disrespect, harassment, and the possibility of a horrible death. Yet instead of finding acceptance post-operation, many are even more alienated.

The reason for this insanity, as explained by one official: being gay or a cross-dresser allegedly disrupts the “social order.” In other words, gender-bending blurs the distinctions between the sexes, making Iranian social role-assignment — largely determined by sex — a confusing task.

Mind-boggling and utterly scary, Be Like Others is a great comment on people’s obsessive need to label and compartmentalize, and a statement about our disgusting fear of anything that lacks clear delineation. At first, Eshagian’s documentary might make you feel lucky to live in a country where measures against homosexuality are not as extreme. But as it sinks in, it will make you question how far removed the situation in Iran really is from that in the United States. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO At first the Iranian laws that make Tanaz Eshagian’s movie necessary seem not just cruel, but absurdly and arbitrarily so. How could homosexuality be illegal and punishable by death, while the government not only sanctions sexual-reassignment surgery but acts as its facilitator?

In Be Like Others, the answer comes from Cleric Kariminiya, a so-called Theological Expert on Transexuality, during an information session for prospective patients and their families. While Islamic law explicitly forbids homosexuality, he explains, there is no such explicit restriction on changing one’s gender.

In other words, the binary sexual politics of Iranian authority are undermined by the existence of queer citizens, whose mannerisms or predilections suggest a continuum. Eshagian’s powerful film follows a few citizens who, too visibly close to the middle of that continuum, are forced to decide between the suffering and danger of their current lot and an abrupt surgical introduction into social legitimacy.

The decision-making process these individuals face is extremely difficult viewing. Those people who successfully transition often have no other option but sex work to survive. Suicide is rampant.

Eshagian’s project is exceptional because it leaves the viewer enlighteningly confused about Iranian attitudes toward gender and law. The most fascinating character in the film is a transgender woman dedicated to the care of patients in transition. She is supportive, devoted to her patients’ well-being, and fully entrenched in the traditional Iranian views of men and women. (Jason Shamai)

BE LIKE OTHERS

Mon/23, 7 p.m., Victoria

Frameline 32:That’s us

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him. That’s the highest praise I can think of for Matt Wolf’s movie about the composer and musician, who died of AIDS in 1992. Clearly enamored with Russell’s wonderful and unique world of echoing sound, Wolf breaks free from the all-too-familiar generic commercial tropes of music documentaries to try a little tenderness. The gesture of affection is more than fitting: though Russell wasn’t a pop sentimentalist, he was capable of writing entire songs (such as "A Little Lost" and "Lucky Cloud" from the 1994 album Another Thought) about equally entire days spent thinking about his lips pressing against those of his beloved. As he sang, "Kissing I go overboard."

That beloved is Russell’s boyfriend Tom Lee, whose generous intimacy while being interviewed is one of the qualities that makes Wild Combination special. Though the Talking Heads are mentioned more than once as Wolf’s movie follows Russell’s idiosyncratic paths through the creative spots of downtown ’80s New York, the film’s chorus of commentators never falls into the kind of talking-heads detachment one associates with documentaries. There is a rare, moving intimacy to the camera’s rapport with Lee and with Russell’s Iowan parents, Chuck and Emily. That rapport only builds in the emotionally powerful final moments, yielding a story about love and family that, through sheer openhearted understatement, is a revelation. Think of it as a nonfiction answer to Brokeback Mountain: more shattering, nuanced, and hopeful because it is based in a commitment to creative life rather than manufactured myth.

"I’m watching out of my ear," Russell’s voice declares, with characteristic quiet softness, as Wild Combination first flickers onto the screen. This synesthetic intuitiveness seems to guide the film as it simultaneously travels his life story and communes with his spirit. The cinematography of Jody Lee Lipes passes like wind through the corn fields of Russell’s youth and the New York piers of his adult life, both of which provided lyrical inspiration. By simply tapping into Russell’s relaxed and meditative creativity (at least when Russell was working solo), Wolf makes the film’s charm and depth seem so easy. But subtly potent structural corollaries emerge, as when Chuck Russell’s remembrance of a physical fight with his gentle yet maddening son is mirrored — same words, but a recollection of a different situation — by musician and friend Ernie Brooks.

Wild Combination is the first feature film by the 25-year-old Wolf, whose Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of gay sensibility and whose early short films suggested an affinity for this kind of project. Wolf has already made a short fictive documentary about the late artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, a contemporary of Russell’s — in a Guardian article on Russell (see "Prince Arthur, 03/04/04), I compare the two — who followed similar paths. That 2003 film, Smalltown Boys, possesses the acutely critical parodic imagination of early Todd Haynes movies, a rare characteristic. But Wolf has since graduated from Haynes’ academic tendencies. He’s soulfully true to Russell, whose idiosyncratic gifts and personality led him to butt heads with avant-garde heartlessness and dance through underground discos. While alive, Arthur Russell never found a creative home outside of himself and those he loved. But in Wild Combination, Wolf proves those homes are more than enough. *

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

Sat/21, 9:45 p.m.

Roxie

FRAMELINE

The 32nd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 19–29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $10) are available at www.frameline.org.

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston interviews Matt Wolf. Plus: an Arthur Russell discography and short Frameline reviews

Local Artist of the Week: Julie Chang

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ridinghome.bmp

LOCAL ARTIST Julie Chang
TITLE Riding Home
THE STORY This is part of a series of 10 paintings interpreting the early Buddhist “Ox-Herding Pictures” describing the path to enlightenment. While the first depictions can be traced to the 12th-century Chinese zen master Kuoan Shiyuan, Chang’s translation is rooted in her experience as a first generation Chinese American growing up in Orange County. Recycled imagery — from family photos, textile designs, pop culture, and logos on Chinese takeout bags — forms the basis for much of the work.
BIO Julie Chang received her MFA from Stanford in 2007 and is currently an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
SHOW “Summer Reading: Artists Interpret Literature.” Thurs/21 through August 9; Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Hosfelt Gallery SF, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454. Solo show at Hosfelt Gallery in New York in April 2009. www.hosfeltgallery.com
WEB SITE www. juliewchang.com

Lit: Interview with Favianna Rodriguez

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By Liam O’Donoghue

Favianna Rodriguez is from Oakland and she lives there today. She is the co-editor, along with Josh MacPhee, of Reproduce and Revolt: A Graphic Toolbox for the 21st Century Activist (Soft Skull Press, 192 pages, $19.95). On the eve of the book’s release party, she recently spoke about the project’s origins, forging connections between groups and the Bay Area’s role in activist art.

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Cover of Reproduce and Revolt

SFBG: Even in the socially conscious art world, it’s usually men who get the most spotlight.So, first of all, I want to give you props for raising the profile of so many radical womyn artists with this book. Can you tell me about any challenges or goals specifically related to gender issues that you had with this project?

Favianna Rodriguez: I’m a first generation woman of color. My parents were immigrants. So it was very important to me for the book to represent not just women, but women of color. We’ve got lots of artists from Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina in this book.
My co-editor, Josh MacPhee, is a white male – he’s cool, very anti-racist – but he understood that with a project like this, which involves getting global artists to submit royalty-free art, it was very important to have a woman of color in a leadership position. Of course, the political art world is male-dominated, so some of the sections, especially the “war and peace” chapter, were overwhelmingly male, and we really had to work on creating the balance of perspectives that we wanted [throughout the book].
But women of color aren’t the only ones that are generally under-represented – black men are another example. This book is just the first phase. We’re just getting started, because we’ve got a good selection of Latin American artists [featured in the book], but we want to expand to include more Asian and African artists with the next editions. It’s all about building networks.

SFBG: What inspired you to start this project?
FR: Josh was collecting graphics and I’d been talking with Bay Area women artists about doing something like this, so we decided to merge our projects. I wanted to make it a multilingual project and I brought in tech people so we could make this all happen online. This book was totally compiled and edited online. We did artist authorization documents and design and had political discussions online.
The book has over 300 images from 12 countries, and the Web site that will launch on July 1 is also going to be bilingual. It’s going to have all the graphics in high-resolution, available for download, because nobody wants to scan images anymore if they don’t have to.

Local Artist of the Week: Tara Tucker

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LOCAL ARTIST Tara Tucker
TITLE Double Trouble
THE STORY “My work is about natural history and human psychology. All the animals in Double Trouble are from Africa. The secretary bird eats snakes. The snake in Double Trouble is a green mamba, a really dangerous part of the cobra family. The baboon is ‘me,’ and I’m hanging with my friend that is a bit of a user, but eats snakes.”
BIO Tara Tucker lives in Berkeley and teaches at Creative Growth in Oakland. She has an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts and is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, where she had a solo show in 2007.
SHOW “Resisting Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives,” Thurs/12 through August 16. Wed.–Sat., noon–5 p.m. Opening reception: Thurs/12, 6–8 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Art Gallery, 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 554-6080. www.sfacgallery.org
WEB SITE www.taratucker.blogspot.com

Lit: Beautiful Children and what doesn’t stay in Vegas

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By Todd Lavoie

The notion that Las Vegas is a playground for complete id-indulgence certainly holds resonance for a nonstop onslaught of tourists. But what is the city like for folks who work and live in such an environment?

It’s a question worth considering. Unfortunately, many answers are prone to the hypocritical grandstanding trotted out by self-described moralists such as William Bennett (whose fondness for Vegas’ betting tables, once it became public, ultimately proved more than a bit inconvenient for such posturing). Truth be told, one could probably gain more meaningful insight from the storylines of CSI: Las Vegas than from the wild-eyed Sodom and Gomorrah depictions of the city whipped up by preachers and political pundits. At least the TV show explores motives and surrounding circumstances rather than summarily damning everyone to hell.

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The glitter-glue cover of Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children

A more valuable contribution to the dialogue has arrived with Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children (Random House, 417 pages, $25), a sweeping portrait of the author’s home town which strips away the city’s glittering veneer to reveal a degraded core. At the epicenter of Bock’s troubled Las Vegas landscape sits twelve-year-old Newell Ewing, a coddled, almost joyless boy — comic books are his chief source of comfort — who suddenly disappears from his affluent suburban home. Newell’s parents, Lincoln and Lorraine, are both haunted by personal compromises. They also have never bridged an understanding with their only child.

Tennishero on Roland Garros and The French

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By Johnny Ray Huston

With this year’s French Open entering its last few dramatic days, the time is right to consult the Swedish duo Tennishero for their thoughts about the event. Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson have the qualifications. They hail from Sweden, the home country of six-time French Open champ Bjorn Borg. On MySpace, they initially described their music as “Roland Garros techno,” though that witty tag has since been joined by others such as “snowjogger acid,” as well as the wise declaration that they want to “sound like a David Hockney picture.” They’re off to a good start at that with “Alone,” their first single, one version of which features Chelonis R. Jones on vocals and a Lego fragment of the two-handed great Monica Seles on the sleeve art. According to Andersson, Tennishero has left 2006’s “Alone” behind to explore new realms of melody.

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Tennishero’s Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson shake hands

I have to genuflect for days to Andersson for telling me about a tennis movie by the great William Klein, one of my all-time favorite photographers, who is experiencing a resurgence of sorts as of late. I have to argue with his assertion below that there are no tennis players today with the good-bad taste and intellect to enjoy Serge Gainsbourg, though. I once saw some Gainsbourg albums in the background of an at-home picture of the devilishly handsome and somewhat mad Marat Safin, whose kid sister Dinara is the story of this year’s tournament so far. You could say Dinara’s 4th-round match with Maria Sharapova was a “requiem pour un con” — especially since Sharapova, no wilting lily, mouthed some hilariously off-color words during the defeat.

SFBG: Who is your pick to win the French Open this year on the men’s side?
Jens Andersson: I don’t really know. The Swedes aren’t at the top of their game right now so I have to go with (Roger) Federer. Has he ever won Roland Garros? Tennis players today are boring and mundane. Hopefully there will be some new guy with the headband over — not under — his hair and the attitude of Serge Gainsbourg, but we doubt it. Now, you only see players like Nadal — I mean, come on.

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The sleeve art for Tennishero and Chelonis R. Jones’s “Alone”

SFBG: Do you have any favorite and least favorite tennis players, past and present? (I ask this since older or vintage tennis styles have had an influence on your look.)
JA: Actually, we are more fascinated by the atmosphere surrounding tennis in the past – for example the culture around old French tennis clubs, like in the Truffaut movie La femme d’a cote. Another great film is William Klein’s The French, a documentary about Roland Garros in 1983 that captures this old charming atmosphere in a fantastic way. Back then, it was all about personality. McEnroe and Yannick Noah were inspiring in their own ways.

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