Johnny Ray Huston Archives — Page 14 of 25 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Local Artist of the Week: Ryan Alexiev

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June 5, 2008

LOCAL ARTIST Ryan Alexiev
TITLE Postcard invite for “The Land of a Million Cereals”
THE STORY Cereal is the most popular breakfast food, and the third most popular product in American supermarkets. Currently there are more than 400 cereals, primarily distinguished by their ad campaigns. The substance of cereal is, in this light, ideology. Through prints, sculpture, video, and drawings, “The Land of a Million Cereals” explores cereal’s history and importance as a paradigmatic consumer product. In the role of a Bulgarian peasant, Alexiev does battle with Frankenberry, who wields a powerful golden spoon — free in every box!
BIO Ryan Alexiev was born in Los Angeles and raised in Alaska by Bulgarian immigrants. He received a BFA in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
SHOW “The Land of a Million Cereals,” Fri/6 through July 12. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m. or by appointment. Opening reception Fri/6, 6–9 p.m. Mission 17, 2111 Mission (Suite 401), SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org.
WEB SITE www.ryanalexiev.com

A touch of Warren Sonbert

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June 4, 2008

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Over the past month, Konrad Steiner of Kino 21 and I have presented two programs of films by Warren Sonbert. For me, it isn’t an overstatement to say the experience has been a revelation, and not just because opportunities to see this SF filmmaker’s work are rare.

The third and final night of our Sonbert series takes place Thursday, June 5, and it unites the complex montage and silent focus of the first program (Sonbert’s 1971 magnum opus Carriage Trade, which screened at SF Camerawork) with the musicality of the second program (“Pop Witness,” which connected Sonbert’s early Warhol- and Anger-inspired ‘60s films to his magnificent and distinctive return to sound over 20 years later).

Warren Sonbert

“Narrative Vertigo” has two parts. The first half belongs to the 1983 silent work A Woman’s Touch, where Sonbert takes inspiration from two mainstream Hollywood directors he especially loves, Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. The second half brings 1991’s Short Fuse, a sound film completed four years before Sonbert’s AIDS-related death in 1995 at the age of 47. Sonbert had a flair for two-word titles, and Short Fuse is a poignant example: he crams a life more vibrant than most people’s dreams into 37 minutes.

Come see it with me if you’re free.

Kino 21 presents
Films of Warren Sonbert: “Narrative Vertigo”
Thursday, June 5, 8 p.m.; $6
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
www.kino21.org

Christophe Honoré on liberty and Love Songs

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June 4, 2008

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By Johnny Ray Huston

In this week’s Guardian I write about Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs. Honoré recently answered some questions about the film via email. Dive below for thoughts on cross-dressing and Jacques Demy, and also a contemporary booklist for young gay men who read.

SFBG: Gaël Morel has a brief Hitchcock-like cameo early on in Love Songs. Was this born from your experience working together?
Christophe Honoré: Gael and I regularly meet to talk about cinema and life. I co-wrote two of his movies, including Après lui. I found it funny to have him appear in the waiting line of a theater because he’s an avid filmgoer. Après lui is a film that keeps Gaël’s particular lyrical style, but this time and perhaps for the first time, it’s a more “adult” story, focused on Catherine Deneuve’s character. The script was closer to a thriller but I guess Gaël fell in love with Deneuve while shooting and made it more of a melodrama.

Louis Garrel and Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet in Love Songs

SFBG: Love Songs is structured like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but elsewhere the similarities of spirit may not be obvious (or even exist). There is, to me, a bisexuality to Jacques Demy’s vision that one could say is extended or updated in your film. Would you agree?
CH: I do agree about the underlying homosexuality in Demy’s work. You could even say that his films deal mostly with cross-dressing. He always cast very handsome actors and filmed them in a way that made them look like icons. Love Songs is not an homage to Demy’s films but it definitely inherited something from them. And, of course, I can handle male sexuality as a filmmaker in a much more straightforward manner than what was possible in Demy’s time.

Disco intro trilogy — unexpurgated!

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June 4, 2008

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By Johnny Ray Huston

Daniel Baldelli djing

In the last three issues of ye olden newspaper version of the Guardian, I’ve used the itsy-bitsy space that I have to intro each week’s A&E section as a chance to travel the many currents of disco: present, future and retro. The fact is, in 2008, disco’s present strobe-morphs into its future, which strobe-morphs into retro disco, which then strobe-morphs back into disco’s present. Below is a guided tour of recent disco releases I mentioned in my intros, with commentary and a final note about something to look for in the immediate future.

Dancers at Baia Degli Angeli

Daniele Baldelli, Cosmic the Original (Mediane) and Daniele Baldelli Presents Baia Degli Angeli 1977-78: The Legendary Italian Discotheque of the ‘70s (Mediane)
The waves of space disco or cosmic disco activity in recent years have brought some noteworthy comps, including 2006’s Confuzed Disco: A Retrospective of Italian Records (Mantra/Vibes), Disco Deutschland Disco: Disco, Funk and Philly Anthems from Germany, 1975-1980 (Marina), and especially Dirty Space Disco (Tigersushi). But to get a true sense of the music’s energy, it’s always best to go to back to the source, and one such European font – along with Cerrone — is Daniele Baldelli.

Daniele Baldelli (left) with Grace Jones and cute friend named Mozart at Baia Degli Angeli

The influential DJ has released two mixes that convey and revive two sides of –and two clubs from — his heyday. Cosmic: the Original is the dark half, with new wave from Fad Gadget and even a pre-Boy George Culture Club. Baia Degli Angeli is the bright side, with ebullient moments from Cerrone, crooner John Forde (who is also on Dirty Space Disco), two tracks from Black Devil (aka Black Devil Disco Club) and the wonderfully shameless mix of Donna Summer-or-Brigitte Bardot orgasmic moans and Love Unlimited Orchestra strings that is “Pazuzu,” by Tony Silvester and the New Ingredient. Both collections are worth it for their booklets alone, with numerous amazing photos of the clubs where Baldelli made his name.

Demy more

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June 4, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Jacques Demy’s raindrops keep falling on the heads of French filmmakers. While Jean-Luc Godard has to be the French new wave’s historical and critical favorite, the legacy of Demy has arguably inspired more imitation or homage. In the past decade, François Ozon (2002’s 8 Women) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (1998’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have mined or mimed Demy’s distinct use of color and musicality, though even Ozon’s bright red is blue-blooded, and the charms of Ducastel and Martineau’s effort don’t include Demy’s graceful staging and assured storytelling. Now, with his third feature Love Songs, new wave lover Christophe Honoré has forged an uneasy marriage. He’s set out to connect and update the romantic wisdom and classical dramatic structures of Demy with the arch political wit of ’60s Godard.

Love Songs proves few movies are entirely terrible or terrific. Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening. It begins well, because Honoré is attuned to the mood-setting power of well-deployed credits. Handsome, last-name-only opening titles are the first of the film’s textual nods to Godard, which continue when various books play cameo roles much as they do in Godard’s 1961 musical A Woman Is a Woman. Tomes by Henri Michaux and Hervé Guibert become effective shorthand for characters’ desires. But novelist and playwright Honoré’s sole moment of spine-chilling — as opposed to groan-inducing — wordplay takes place when he simply makes his protagonist Ismaël (Louis Garrel, attempting to channel Jean-Pierre Léaud) read the nighttime signs of the 10th Arrondissement.

Garrel’s character is the focal point of Love Songs, but the film’s hidden star is Honoré’s longtime musical collaborator Alex Beaupain, who appears in a pivotal scene, performing the lovely piano ballad "Brooklyn Bridge." Beaupain is stuck with the job of bringing Michel Legrand’s jazz-inflected pop orchestrations for Godard and Demy into the 21st century. Melodically, he’s up to the task, especially when evoking the neo-Gainsbourg rock of Benjamin Biolay. But he isn’t helped by Honoré’s libretto contributions, because Honoré seems to misinterpret the pop opera of 1964’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a basic copying of old Hollywood musical traditions, when in fact it was a radical yet classical revision. Honoré assumes the casual multigenre musicality of Love Songs is more contemporary, but that’s arguable.

In their previous film together, 2006’s Dans Paris, Honoré and Beaupain discovered naturalistic, inventive intersections between drama and music sequences. Love Songs is more traditional in form, saving its radical aspect for a view and presentation of sexuality that’s far more fluid than one finds in contemporary cinema, straight or gay. Honoré is out to disavow exactly those kinds of divisions, and if he’s not helped greatly by Garrel, he’s aided immeasurably by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, whose arrival in the film’s second half takes the story out of a tritely fatalistic ménage-a-trois realm. He’s also saved by Chiara Mastroianni. Her presence is Honoré’s ultimate invocation of Demy, since she’s the daughter of signature Demy star Catherine Deneuve. (She also brings the off-camera baggage of a recent breakup from chanson specialist Biolay to her part.) Her role might appear secondary, but her solo number signals the return of the melody at the film’s heart. Her melancholic understatement testifies that Honoré hasn’t lost the attraction to eroticism that inspired his brash attempt to bring Georges Bataille to the screen with 2004’s Ma mère. He’s just made it as pop as he possibly can by setting it to music.

LOVE SONGS

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

So much “Useless” beauty

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June 4, 2008

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Perhaps cinema is useless. Jia Zhangke entertains this idea — as a subtext — in his 2007 documentary Useless.

As the waves of raves for Jia have rolled in, I’ve felt a bit detached. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on clothing and to some extent fashion, he takes on subjects I find inherently filmic. (I’ll watch documentaries about Yves Saint-Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and yes, I’m a Project Runway devotee). More important, he appears to be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of Jia’s movie, reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes its title partly from a clothing label of that name started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the film’s three sections. After she muses on the "shame" of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods, Jia films the unveiling of her debut collection for Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up from the ground after a period of burial.

The potential meaning of such moments ricochets silently — yet far from painlessly — off the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory in the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fengyang at the close. Some reviews have faulted Useless for not relying on literal touches such as intertitles or voice-overs. But when Ma Ke’s deluxe car heedlessly speeds by a tailor on foot, Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke — my guess is that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.

NEW WORKS BY JIA ZHANGKE

Thurs/5 and Sun/8, call for times

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Lit: The illustrated Magazinester

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June 2, 2008

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This past week, Magazinester pledged its love for Edie Fake and Matt Furie, and threw a tomato at overpriced rags featuring the thin talents of Terence Koh. Somehow, it forgot to conclude with the message that Tila Tequila is on the cover of Blender — are ya interested?

The beauty of Fake’s and Furie’s recent zines means it’s time to expand Magazinester. It’s time for annotated examples of imagery!

Let’s start off with Furie’s boy’s club. Whenever I cross paths with a Bay Area-n stranger who has copious frazzled head and face hair — you know, like every time I step outside — I think of Furie’s drawings and paintings. I especially like the ones where someone removes his or her sunglasses to reveal no eyes beneath. Furie’s “Nature Freak” show at Jack Fischer Gallery this winter was like a fun version of The Ruins. More recently, he brought “Heads” to Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. Heads. Now there’s a good-ass topic or theme for an art show!

Some pages from boy’s club

Though they’re love at first sight as a viewing experience, I don’t immediately understand Edie Fake’s Rico McTaco and Gaylord Phoenix zines — in other words, I’m looking forward to re-reading and re-re-reading them. They don’t have many words, but they do have many worlds.

A page from Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix

Edie Fake makes me happier than almost any SF artist right now. I’d long ago given up hope there’d be a gay feminist artist as talented as Edie Fake, and yet Edie Fake is here.

Another page from Gaylord Phoenix, by Edie Fake

Some zine makers just find the right topic and the hard work is already done. So it is for the people who bring you the stories, drawings, photos and lists in Dead Pets Zine.

Cover of Dead Pets Zine

What would a list of dead animal movies be without Gates of Heaven (back when Erroll Morris wasn’t a pompous windbag) and Pet Sematary (back when Mary Harron was making videos for Madonna)? Fish float up to the surface on many pages, but pet rodents fare especially poorly in Dead Pets No. 1. Try out deadpetstories@gmail.com.

A page from Dead Pets Zine

And yeah, Freddie Mercury deserves an illustrated book that celebrates almost every facet of his life. Until someone makes a Freddie Mercury book for 5-to-8-year-olds, Killer Queen: The Freddie Mercury Story will have to do. In fact, it’ll do fine for people those ages and people ten times older.

A page from Killer Queen

Lit: Erick Lyle on rehab for Newsom and SF, the awful flair of Willie Brown, book box mansions and life in the City

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May 28, 2008

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This week’s Lit features a review of Erick Lyle’s new book On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City (Soft Skull Press, 272 pages, $14.95). Liam O’Donoghue recently talked with Lyle, who will be appearing at Get Lost Travel Books on June 4th and AK Press Warehouse in Oakland on June 5th:

By Liam O’Donoghue

SFBG: The phase “secret history” is in the subtitle of your book and the term “urban archeology” is used to describe it. Did it feel like an archaeological project — like you were digging up this buried history of the city — when you were compiling the book?
Erick Lyle: When I moved to San Francisco I was lucky enough to be around a lot of older folks who told me their stories about the city and I fell in love with this place instantly. I feel like I’ve got all those stories filed away in my mind, so that when I’m out, riding my bike around the city, if I’m at a certain intersection, for example, I’ll think, “Oh, this is where that punk club was in 1988, but it’s also where so-and-so broke up with her boyfriend in 1995 and there was that one time when a guy tried to hit me with a 2×4.” But I can see all these layers simultaneously in my mind, and for me, part of the enjoyment of living here for awhile is seeing how these layers fit together over time. It gives an added dimension to, for example, a protest event you might be doing, to understand how that event fits into the longer history of the area.

Erick Lyle, in his secret mansion enjoying the high life

As far as thinking about it as archeology at the time, I wouldn’t say that we were so self-conscious that we would do generator shows in the street so we could say, “This is history.” But if we don’t write this shit down, no one is, it’s not making it in the Chronicle or anywhere else. The things that happen in the doorsteps of the Mission or on the dance floor at the punk club or are spray-painted on the walls: these are the things that make up our lives. That’s the fabric of life in the city.

Magazinester

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May 27, 2008

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MAGAZINESTER

This month’s Magazinester saves the best for first: in conjunction with an art show, Needles and Pens has fantastic zines by Edie Fake on display. Rico McTaco stars a four-legged dyke not averse to carrot strap-ons and dizzying black and white lines Bridget Riley might admire. Issue four of Gaylord Phoenix adds color and erotic examinations by a quartet of wizards with entwined beards to the many-sexed picture.

In Matt Furie’s boy’s club, Andy, Bret, Landwolf, and Pepe bro down with Nintendo, pizza breakfasts, and T-shirt jokes when they aren’t fending off dust mites. The hug department in boy’s club is always open. Dead Pets No. 1 relates tales of tarantula starvation, ferrets crushed by futons, black-eyed white mice slain by children’s tea-party merriment, and many ill-fated betta fish. The centerfold lists five dead pet movies. Published in deluxe gold-embossed color by Blue Q, Killer Queen: The Freddie Mercury Story‘s terrific illustrations portray Mercury’s overbite and stamp collection. Issue 116 of Belladonna presents Dodie Bellamy’s Mother Montage, a combination of writer and subject matter (one’s mother, not motherhood) that sparks a demonologist’s wit — the kind that doesn’t pander. John McCain’s gizzard does not escape unscathed.

Best free mag honors go to Arthur for following Erick Morse’s superb Fantomas survey with an extensive critical hurrah for the music of Sparks. (Also, Arthur‘s comics page features Furie and mocks blogs.) Expensive-mag-to-browse honors go to Aperture for features on James Bidgood, Robert Frank, and Trevor Paglen, and a wild series of Iraq War vets portraits. A cheap raspberry to $29-and-up rags such as Paradis, Purple Fashion, UOVO, and Fantastic Man: most or all feature the saggy yet nonexistent ass of the overexposed, under-talented Terence Koh.

The orbs

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May 27, 2008

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In Thorsten Fleisch’s five-minute Energie! (2007), an untamed 30,000-volt current exposes photographic papers that are then sequenced in a manner that suggests or reveals systems of electrons. Fleisch’s film is a blast. Its black-and-white lightning formations resemble angry veins in the eyeball of an electrical beast — and the veins in your eyes will sprout similarly after gazing at this strobe attack by Fleisch, a student of Peter Kubelka.

The orb that gradually rises to the center of the screen during Energie could be a ferocious cousin of the eclipse that forms the insignia for the digital projects of Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin’s space for visions in the Mission. It also serves as a core symbol for Other Cinema’s latest calendar-closing "New Experimental Works" program.

Here’s an orb, there’s an orb, everywhere’s an orb, orb! There’s one at the center of Shalo P’s Vengeance 2.0, which begins with a word of warning from Michael Jackson before mixing Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1958) and numerous Batman symbols into a brew fans of Paper Rad and Michael Robinson might enjoy. There’s even a character named Orb in Apple, a sword-clanging, sprite-eared, and typically ingenious vision from "from the hideous director of Dawn of the Evil Millennium," Damon Packard, whose movies are as potent as laughing gas and better than all other drugs.

Eli Marias’ and Amos Natkin’s An Internal Camaraderie might not feature an orb, but its new age mix of hilarity and potent hypnotism includes just about everything else, including fluorescent rainbow colors, a sea of testifying infomercial faces, and one well-deployed white turtleneck.

Other highlights among "New Experimental Works" that this reviewer was able to see include: Roger Deutsch’s Act Your Age, where a pencil is not just a pencil; Tony Gault’s Count Backwards From 5 (2007), in which images of water — with a powerful use of voice-over — convey the mystery of family and death; and Danny Plotnick’s Out of Print, a four-minute testimonial that should be placed in a time capsule.

OTHER CINEMA: "NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS"

Sat/31, 8:30 p.m.; $7

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

SPORTS: The 2008 French Open

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May 23, 2008

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By Johnny Ray Huston

When the French Open kicks off this Sunday, there will be a major void in one of its two main events. Earlier this month, three-time women’s defending champion Justine Henin announced her retirement at the age of 25, a move that caught even some of the sport’s main journalistic voices by surprise. Once Henin’s goodbye sunk in, it all began to make a strange sort of sense. Her fantastic game if not personality is respected by all fans — male and female — of the sport, even if she’s remained obscure to casual observers who only recognize the names Federer, Sharapova, and Williams. But because of her short stature and relatively small physique, that same well-respected game was built on a level of effort and commitment that even some of Henin’s greatest opponents might not understand.

Justine Henin reaches

Henin regularly faced and beat players four to nine inches taller and twenty to forty pounds heavier (if not always stronger). A fierce one-handed backhand was her chief weapon, at a time when that shot seems endangered amongst top professionals. In an insightful reaction piece for ESPN, Stephen Tignor of Tennis magazine (a rock journalist cohort at Puncture in the ’90s) wrote about watching Henin in-person at Roland Garros last year. According to Tignor, instead of grunting like so many players or squealing Sharapova-style when she hit the ball, Henin made a different, less audible noise: she gasped. With her fretful, almost panic-stricken looks to coach Carlos Rodriguez between every point of a match, Henin long seemed on the verge of bolting. That’s precisely what she did in the second set of a notorious 2006 Australian Open final against Amelie Mauresmo, when her mid-match forfeit due to stomach pains (which Henin attributed to anti-inflammatories) permanently soured many people’s opinions of her. A few years later, a somewhat more personable Henin’s retirement from tennis while ranked #1 in the world — though amid a string of notable losses — is almost an inverse of that notorious match. She’ll decide when to stop, and how to write her own story.

On the men’s side, Roland Garros is hosting a very different kind of three-time defending champ, the never-say-die 21-year-old Rafael Nadal, who has yet to lose a match at the tournament. Nadal goes into this year’s French Open as the favorite, having won 108 out of his last 110 matches on clay. That status hasn’t been so easy to attain in 2008, though. Nadal entered this spring’s clay season facing perhaps the longest title drought of his young career, as if he’d never quite shook the hangover of his loss to Roger Federer in last year’s painfully-close Wimbledon final. (Since that match, Nadal’s near-peerless record in tournament finals noticeably nosedived.) He’s since won three events, but has had to do so within a compressed time frame that left his feet blistered. His most recent victory at a tournament in Hamburg required him to vanquish the top men’s player of the year so far, Novak Djokovic, in a nearly three-hour three-set marathon that qualifies as one of the best matches of 2008 — then turn around and beat a relatively well-rested Federer the next day.

Nadal vs. Djokovic; May 17, 2008 (highlights)

Lit: Rediscovering Philip Lamantia

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May 23, 2008

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An upcoming article will feature Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman (City Lights, 138 pages, $12.95), the latest — and 59th — volume in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series, edited by poet, hip-hop devotee and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples. For now, I’d like to get the word out, if it ain’t too late, about a reading and book party this Sunday. Caples hosts the event, which justifiably celebrates the publication of the lost second book by the influential surrealist Lamantia, who in turn was devoted to the writing of the comparatively obscure Hoffman, who died at the age of 25. Here’s the info, and after the jump, a choice Hoffman poem from the book.

Sun./25, 5 p.m., free
City Lights Books
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193

Human beat, motorik city

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May 20, 2008

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There is probably no more stellar act of connect-four in popular music than Michael Rother’s Flammende Herzen (Radar/Water, 1977), Sterntaler (Skyclad/Water, 1978), Katzenmusik (Skyclad/Water, 1979), and Fernwärme (Polydor/Water, 1982). After a childhood that was equal parts Chopin, Pakistan, and stints as a member of Kraftwerk, Neu!, and — along with Cluster’s Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius — Harmonia, Rother knew how fly solo from the get-go, reaching the realm of the sublime every time.

In the liner notes for Water’s recent reissue of Flammende Herzen, Sam Grawe of San Francisco instrumentalists Hatchback and Windsurf deems the album a "motorik All Things Must Pass," a wise music lover’s comparison that touches on the recording’s status as a glorious debut venture and its all-too-rare (in popular music, at least) quality of blessed warmth. In interviews, Rother has viewed solo music as an isolated creative endeavor along the lines of writing or sculpting, while claiming group efforts involve members collaborating to help one another overcome individual artistic obstacles. But on Flammende Herzen‘s title track, he required help from producer Conny Plank to realize his ideas about the values of simplicity and repetition and turn his love of silence into music. From there, their glorious course was set.

Rother devotees have their favorites among his first four efforts. Mine is Sterntaler, where his love of Jimi Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner" might be most apparent. Like a German Hendrix, Rother mines purity from guitar distortion, though in place of Hendrix’s mangled American blues, his guitar forges onward and skyward through introspective yet anthemic tunes such as equally epic "Stromlinieun" and the title track. Others prefer the quieter friend-of-felines touch of Katzenmusik, which pairs a gorgeous Rother cover photo of a plane’s vapor trail with a dozen morphing variations of a melodic theme. The black sheep might be Fernwärme, which finds Rother venturing away from Plank’s production and Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s more mathematical and truly motorik take on Neu!’s propulsive heartbeats into darker, lonelier realms not far from the forlorn new world occupied by Joe Meek’s Globbots.

Outside his role in Neu!, many people have primarily known Rother as the guy who, according to legend, turned down an offer from David Bowie to contribute to Bowie’s Heroes (Rykodisc, 1977). (Rother has suggested that Bowie’s management and record label prevented the pairing.) But thanks to Water’s re-releases, the Russian label Lilith’s recent reissues of Harmonia’s fresh and clean Musik von Harmonia (Brain, 1974) and golden-honeyed Deluxe (Brain, 1975) — and Kompakt artist Justus Köhncke’s ambitious all-electronic cover of Flammende Herzen‘s "Feuerland" — Rother’s music is reaching new ears. It sounds as modern now as it did when it was created. Blue rains, flaming hearts, sun wheels, streamlines, and silver linings are timeless.

Strange powers

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May 20, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Witch! The accusation — or is it rallying cry? — that slices through Goblin’s pounding score for Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is newly pertinent. Witchery reigns within strains of black metal and the long-awaited third chapter in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy (which began three decades earlier with Suspiria), this summer’s invigoratingly zany naked bloodbath Mother of Tears. It’s tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer’s clairvoyance, because the "Witchcraft Weekend" he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient.

The centerpiece of "Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s imaginatively and near-immaculately selected quartet of movies — the dark void or blinding light around which the other three orbit — is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 Day of Wrath. I’ll be brazen enough to admit that my first encounter with this masterpiece occurred one evening while flipping channels, when its flaming dramatic core — a harsh counterpoint to the heroic final stakes of his peerless 1927 The Passion of Joan of Arc — flickered before my eyes and basically branded my psyche (and soul?) for eternity. There are few scenes in cinema as bluntly harrowing as the demise of accused witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier): her defiance and her fear of death — but not of God — rage as forcefully as the man-made inferno that consumes her.

Day of Wrath might be the most quietly terrifying or suspenseful art film ever made (though it shouldn’t be blamed for the form’s current crimes against patience or intelligence), because Dreyer seamlessly connects realism with a deeply ambiguous understanding of spirituality and fate. That is no small achievement, and one that’s been increasingly rare with the passage of time. The fate of Herlofs Marte is evident from the film’s first scene, where she hands herbs from a gallows garden to another woman, stating, "There is power in evil." Seconds later the bells begin to toll for her and — thinking of a past secret — she flees to seek refuge in the household of Absalon (Thorkild Rose); his bear of a mother, Marte (Sigrid Neiiendam); and his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who seems to possess strange powers.

In the feline, fiery-eyed Movin, Dreyer finds this lonelier film’s answer to Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc: in other words, an actor whose face becomes (to paraphrase André Bazin quoting Béla Balasz) a timeless and more ambivalently transcendent "document." Critics have pointed out Day of Wrath‘s abundant visual similarities with Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, particularly the works of Rembrandt (James Agee went so far as to point out one sequence’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1632 Lesson in Anatomy), and Bazin is intuitively and perhaps more insightfully correct in invoking the film’s influence on Robert Bresson’s equally classic 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. But it takes Pauline Kael to sympathetically hone in on the feminine "erotic tensions" of what she deems "the most intensely powerful film ever made on the subject of witchcraft." As she puts it, "Dreyer dissolves our terror" as characters are "purified beyond even fear." But the sense of fear and terror he instills is purer than that engendered by the horror genre’s gleeful scare tactics.

"Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s trio of other films steer clear of Blair Witch and Harry Potter terrain as well as the easy, if extremely enjoyable, kitsch of Teen Witch (1989) or The Craft (1996) to explore and connect less obvious instances of celluloid sorcery. In a manner that magnifies the resonance of Day of Wrath‘s austere use of black and white, Shepard brings in a pair of contrasting Technicolor sights: the Queen or Witch (spine-chillingly vocalized by Lucille La Verne) from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the scorpio-rising bikini sacrifices of William O. Brown’s 1969 cult obscurity The Witchmaker. The program’s series of spells begins with the wicked Witchcraft Through the Ages, a 1968 abbreviated revision of Benjamin Christensen’s energetically episodic 1922 silent work Häxan, featuring a frenetic and playful jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and mordantly misogynist narration by William S. Burroughs. *

WITCHCRAFT WEEKEND

Thurs/23–Sun/25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Love songs and Benjamin Biolay

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May 20, 2008

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I walked past the 200 white roses (no exaggeration) outside of my Mission shack’s front window this morning. A lot more fallen petals on the bricks. Don’t go, spring. My path was to a morning screening of Christophe Honore‘s most recent film Love Songs. What can I say — for much of the first half of Honore’s tribute to and update of the one and only Jacques Demy, I was skeptical. Thirty or even forty minutes in I was ready to chalk it up as a failure. But somehow by the end I was just about totally seduced. I’ll write more about the film when it’s released.

Trailer for Love Songs

If you’re at all tempted to see Love Songs, take a listen to “Bien Avant,” the opening track of Benjamin Biolay‘s most recent album Trash Yeye. This static fan vid hasn’t garnered the 20,000+ views that some of Biolay’s performances and promotional videos have, but it pairs my favorite song on the album with some images from the album’s Bruce Weber sleeve art. There’s about one degree of separation between Biolay’s chansons and Honore’s chansons d’amour. Her name is Chiara Mastroianni, and when she finally sings in Love Songs, the movie really blooms.

Do you know the way to Jose James?

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May 20, 2008

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The Dreamer by Jose James is one of those rare debut recordings that is going to grow in popularity due to people’s genuine love for it rather than paid-for hype about James being a major talent. No doubt about it, James is talented, and in a manner not so common these days. James isn’t getting a Clive Davis kind of hype; his album’s on Gilles Peterson’s label Brownswood. Those trappings hint at a type of acid-jazz shallowness that the instrumentation sometimes skates near but generally averts. As for James, he’s a vocalist who loves the music of Pharoah Sanders. There should be more singers like him.

The video for James’s version of Freestyle Fellowship’s “Park Bench People” is an unaffected extension of the track’s lyric. This version of the track is abbreviated, and the song itself doesn’t vie for my favorite moment on The Dreamer. The two songs I keep returning to are the title track and “Winter Wind,” where James’s tenor reaches its highest (almost young Jimmy Scott-like) androgynous realms and also the moments when his phrasing is most reflective and measured. Both of those ballads are lovely, suggestive of a 21st century Gil Scott-Heron (though James has yet to touch Scott-Heron’s political profundity) or at least the spirit of Jeff Buckley. Calling all bookers: I don’t see San Francisco or Oakland on James’s list of upcoming tour dates.

Jose James, “Park Bench People”

Cannes can’t — specific views from afar

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May 19, 2008

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As I use spare change to pay off medical debts, they both seem further away than ever, but I swear that one day I’m going to roll directly from the Cannes Film Festival to the French Open. This spring, I may not be there in person (cue violins) while Rafa Nadal tries to make it four titles in a row at Roland Garros and the Dardenne brothers compete for another Palme d’Or, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy some specific aspects of both events from afar.

When the films in Cannes’ Official Competition were first announced, the best news for me wasn’t that Jia Zhangke, Lucrecia Martel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan had new works competing against the Clint Eastwoods and Charlie Kaufmans of the world. It wasn’t even that one of Philippe Garrel‘s rare films had also landed a coveted Official Competition slot. I was happiest about two things:

Still from El Cant dels Ocells

1: Albert Serra’s new movie El Cant dels Ocells — co-starring my colleague and pal (and sometime Guardian contributor) Mark Peranson as the Christ child’s dad, Joseph — was playing Director’s Fortnight. Peranson first told me about his role in the movie last fall, after I’d expressed love for Serra’s previous film Honor of the Knights, aka Quixotic. I’m as eager to see Cinema Scope editor Peranson in a biblical role as I am to see Serra’s next move (and next bouts of stasis). What with this and Nadal’s Roland Garros campaign, everything’s coming up Catalan.

Stills from Serbis

2. Brillante Mendoza’s new movie Serbis is part of the Official Competition at Cannes, making it the first Filipino film in 24 years up for the Palme d’Or. The Guardian has spotlit some film activity in the Philippines in recent years, and Mendoza is just one current of a creativity that ranges from independent narratives to the more experimental works of Raya Martin (also present as part of the Director’s Fortnight, with his fourth film, Now Showing) and others. A few months ago I raved at length about the melodrama of Mendoza’s Foster Child and the politicized action of Slingshot. It’s great to see him reaching an even higher profile now via a film that sounds like it is confrontational and far from mainstream in content.

Trailer for Slingshot

Windsurfing with El Guincho

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May 19, 2008

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There aren’t any official videos for songs from El Guincho‘s splendid Alegranza (Discoteca Oceano), but a wonderful windsurfing fan video has appeared. Matching edits to antic beats, its no-budget creativity suits the spirit of a musical project that first generated word of mouth as a CD-R.

This wavy spray will have to sate us West Coast admirers of Pablo Diaz-Reixa until he makes his first visit to Californian stages:

To “Romance,” times two

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May 14, 2008

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In 2006, Sally Shapiro’s album Disco Romance (Diskokaine) added a cooler shade of pale to the Nordic pop of Annie and a femme counterpoint to the boy’s own space disco zone charted by Lindstrøm and others. Shapiro — not her real name — used an understated, happy-sad vocal approach to navigate the vast, austere Europop soundscapes created by songwriter Johan Agebjörn. Tracks such as "Find My Soul" and "Hold Me So Tight" shimmered with an eerie grace. Agebjörn cited specific warm strains of Italo disco as his inspiration, but a Shapiro song sounds just as home in the Swedish snow.

Disco Romance deservedly received a deluxe North American release on the Paper Bag label last fall, with three additional songs. This year it’s getting the revision treatment through a pair of Remix Romance collections on the same label. The second one, which includes a mix by Europop touchstone Alexander Robotnick, is due next month. The first volume, out now, isn’t as solid as the original recording, but has its unique charms. Annie’s roommate Skatebard strips down one track, and the Cansecos’ version of "Hold Me So Tight" is the best Saint Etienne track that Saint Etienne never recorded. The Junior Boys, whose glacial crooner’s laments might be the masculine counterpart to the Shapiro sound, entreat the vocalist to speak instead of sing on "Jackie Junior." But the spoils go to Holy Fuck, whose take on "Find My Soul" magnifies the source material’s already potent sense of lost-in-space loneliness. Who is Sally Shapiro, and where is Sally Shapiro? I don’t know, but I like how she sounds on my stereo. (Huston)

www.johanagebjorn.info/sally.html, www.myspace.com/shapirosally

That girl

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May 14, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The saga or psychodrama of Britney Spears mirrors the crash-and-burn George W. Bush era like a reflective toxic bio-dome. Robyn is that girl on the outside whose story is so vast and smart that it’s been invisible to everyone hypnotized into suffering blackouts.

Back when the Swedish star first kicked her way onto an MTV that played music videos in the summer of 1997 (around when Bill Clinton became a horny lame duck), the writer-producer partly behind the perfectly calibrated beats of her semi-hit "Do You Know (What It Takes)" was none other Max Martin, the man about to bring a little ditty called "(Hit Me Baby) One More Time" to the ears of the world. Spears soon took that abuse victim’s idea of first love to the top of the US pop charts, ushering out the Spice Girls’ version of girl power in the process. As for Robyn, she wound up resonating on a different level.

While reviewing 1997’s Robyn Is Here (RCA/Jive), I joked about a sub-coincidence: vocalists named Robyn and Robin S were both vying for success with tracks called "Show Me Love." Unlike me, the movie director Lukas Moodysson recognized dissent beneath the slick surfaces of Robyn’s music: how else to explain his use of her "Show Me Love" as the signature (and in English-speaking countries, title) theme of perhaps the best teen film of the ’90s, the 1998 girl’s coming-out tale Fucking ?mål? Though Moodysson has since veered toward anti-commercial visions of degradation, he still recognizes a talented woman stuck in conservative surroundings: he recently liberated Jena Malone from Hollywood and indieland for the unseen and just-about-unknown 2006 movie Container.

As for Robyn, a decade after her debut, she’s returning to America sharper than the Knife. The evidence is there on "Who’s That Girl," a standout track from her new — to the US — album, Robyn (Interscope). Coproduced by Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, the song has greater vitality and wit than the duo’s own critic’s-darling recordings as the Knife. After a Jacuzzi-set intro that parodies rap and R&B boasts via claims that Robyn taught moves to Bruce Lee, "Who’s That Girl" kicks off the initial 2005 version of Robyn released on Robyn’s boutique label, Konichiwa, in Sweden. The marketing wizards at Interscope have messed with that sequencing: through some additional tracks and a revised order, their version of Robyn seems out to position her as a blond MIA.

No matter. Regardless of how you shuffle recent songs by Robin Miriam Carlsson, her unpretentious humor, melodicism, and neurotic toughness remain upfront. With its casually careful cataloguing and then rejection of all the things that good girls do, "Who’s That Girl" winds up containing more everyday wisdom than Spears’ entire output. (Ironically, Spears’ team turned to Robyn for a contribution to 2007’s Blackout on Jive.) If that doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, factor in that it’s also twice as good as that old Madonna song called "Who’s That Girl" and exactly the type of effervescent catchy tune that the Material Girl is no longer capable of writing, and you have a better idea of Robyn’s talent. It’s a talent that extends from string-laden stalker confessions ("Be Mine!") to statements of independence ("Handle Me," Chris Crocker’s MySpace anthem for a spell earlier this year), staying honest all the while.

A decade since Robyn Is Here, more people in the States are wise enough to know that Sweden’s honey-dripping groups and tough alliance of solo acts could fill an ark of the world’s best pop music. Robyn is here again to prove it.

ROBYN

Fri/16, 9 p.m., $20

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com, www.robyn.com

Speed Reading

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May 14, 2008

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THE TEN CENT PLAGUE: THE GREAT COMIC BOOK SCARE AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA

By David Hadju

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

448 pages

$26

David Hajdu is an antidote to ersatz historiographers. He’s unearthed and analyzed formative but forgotten figures (such as Billy Strayhorn) and moments of 20th-century Americana. In The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, the Columbia University journalism professor turns his attention to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of the 1940s and early ’50s, when a cadre of young outsiders engendered a new and controversial artistic medium: the comic book.

Hajdu surveys Famous Funnies pioneer Harry Wildenberg, eccentric militant Major Nicholson-Wheeler, Crime Does Not Pay impresario Charles Biro, psychological activist Frederic Wertham, and Superman creator Jerry Siegel. But milquetoast EC Comics owner Bill Gaines, partly responsible for the horror and sci-fi craze that accompanied the atomic age, is at the center of the book’s narrative.

The Ten Cent Plague thoroughly documents the censorship struggles and creative flourishes of a subculture and revolutionary art form, but it lacks the freewheeling energy of earlier histories. For all of his rhapsodizing about the authentic juvenile experience within comics, there is a dearth of playful and existential perspective. Instead, the writing takes on an insipid encyclopedic tone, forcing cohesion on a subject matter renowned for random creativity. Large portions of text come across as just the kind of parental lesson comic book enthusiasts might shun. Nonetheless, Hajdu provides a necessary investigation into the moment when America stepped from a black-and-white past into a Technicolor future. (Erik Morse)

UNCREDITED: GRAPHIC DESIGN AND OPENING TITLES IN THE MOVIES

By Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu

Index Books

313 pages

$55

Initially, Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu’s survey of credit sequences in movies sported the title The Art of the Title Sequence. But now it is called Uncredited: Graphic Design and Opening Titles in the Movies, a gesture of solidarity toward the legion of graphic artists, particularly in Hollywood, who have designed credits for movies without being acknowledged for their efforts. Early sections of this hardcover slab of imagery and text — which weighs a good five pounds, in case you want to strengthen your biceps — explore the white-on-black and title-as-logo roots of studio movies from the first half of the 20th century. The creators of signature sequences such as the umbrella-twirling opening of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) are praised while remaining anonymous. Even when credits were credited, as with Pacific Title and Art Studio’s splendorous text for Gone with the Wind (1939), it was under a corporate blueprint.

Uncredited‘s latter chapters right those wrongs committed by the film industry by exploring the efforts of Otto Preminger’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s frequent partner-in-design Saul Bass (probably the only credit specialist to receive exhibition and monograph showcases) and his wife Elaine, as well as Jean Fouchet (an influence on Jacques Demy?), Pablo Nuñez (who created the credits for Victor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive), Dan Perri, and others. A climactic section about current trends displays work that uniformly pales in comparison to the work by Arcady, Fernand Léger, and especially Mary Ellen Bute and Jean-Luc Godard in a central chapter devoted to concepts. Uncredited is lavishly, gorgeously illustrated (complete with a DVD) and playfully designed. There are errors galore in the informative text though — a sharper editorial eye was needed. And who exactly is that mysterious “QT” who seems to have provided captions for a number of the illustrations? (Johnny Ray Huston)

SFIFF notebook: Ludivine Sagnier x 2

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May 8, 2008

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By Jeffrey M. Anderson

That blond firecracker Ludivine Sagnier, 28, turned up at the festival to accompany her new film A Girl Cut in Two, directed by the French new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, and she was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat. Sagnier is happy to talk about her character Gabrielle Deneige (or “Gabrielle Snow” in the English subtitles), a television weather girl who becomes torn between two men, an older, married author and a younger, rich, spoiled brat. But she’s tickled to tell stories about her legendary director.

Ludivine Savignier times two.

“It was amazing,” she says. “I thought I would never work with him because I didn’t have that high society profile. I wasn’t bourgeoisie enough to work with him. I actually felt like I was suddenly printing my name in the history books. Chabrol is such a monument in France. Not even working with him, but only talking with him was amazing. He would talk to me about Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Oh Alfred asked me if I wanted to shoot a sequence in this movie.’ Suddenly he’s speaking about something that’s far away, that belongs to history, but it’s next door. Those were privileged moments to be able to share all those stories with him.”

SFIFF award winners: Up the Yangtze and Ballast

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May 8, 2008

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The SF International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards ceremony took place last night. Below, Jeffrey M. Anderson sounds off on two films that nabbed honors: Best Documentary Feature winner Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, and FIPRESCI winner Ballast, by Lance Hammer:

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The documentary Up the Yangtze is a perfect companion piece to Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. Both deal in specific ways with China’s humongous Three Gorges project, although neither film ever goes into detail as to what the project — which will displace some 2 million people — is supposed to accomplish.

A trailer for Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze.

Lit and Film: Mostly True and Who is Bozo Texino?

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May 8, 2008

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“I hear you callin’, baby, but you ain’t gettin’ me. Not today, anyhow.”

This week’s Guardian features a trio of railroad-related stories. On the Lower Frequencies author Erick Lyle writes about the train-hopping photos of the Polaroid Kidd and the words and images of William T. Vollmann. Cinema Scope chief and film programmer Mark Peranson talks with James Benning about his new movie RR. And Bill Daniel talks about the passions and motivations behind his new book Mostly True, which mixes a wealth of new and vintage print material with excerpts of his beautiful train-tagging movie Who is Bozo Texino?.

The epic account of the improbable discovery of the world’s greatest boxcar artist.