Johnny Ray Huston

As close to the lens as possible: A (too brief) Q&A with David Weissman

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One of the strongest aspects of the film We Were Here is the intimacy and depth of its interviews (read our review here), so it’s with embarrassment and regret that I’m presenting this relatively casual Q&A with director David Weissman with the caveat that it’s been marred by a snafu. While transcribing, I discovered that the ‘Rec’ button on my ancient tape recorder had been triggered when it was in my carrying bag, and a sizable portion of the talk – including passages about archives, filmmaking, community, San Francisco, the cultural influence of The Cockettes, and a younger generation’s view of AIDS – had been replaced by the muffled sound of footsteps and traffic. The conversation is lost, but the story isn’t: We We Here is screening at the Castro Theatre through Thurs/3. Here’s some of what Weissman and I discussed.

SFBG What was the response to We Were Here like at Sundance?
David Weissman Sundance was great. We’d had a sneak preview at the Castro, and an even earlier one in Portland at the festival [the Portland Gay and Lesbian Film Festival] that I curate with Russ Gage up there, but Sundance was the first really mixed audience. The Salt Lake City screening was particularly fantastic.

SFBG How so?
DW You can feel the energy in the room, and people cry a lot at this movie. But I think that people cry in a way that by the end of the movie they feel good. That was one of the most important things to me – I didn’t want to make a movie that would just be devastating. It was important to me that it be inspiring. In almost every review and every response, people talk about it being uplifting.

Trailer for We Were Here:

SFBG In some ways We Were Here continues a tradition in San Francisco of oral history in documentary. I wanted to ask about your methodology in terms of doing interviews, because spoken interview accounts are a fundamental, powerful part of the film. You really devote time to the people whose stories you tell, or to flip it, those who tell their stories.
DW The only person I knew I was going to interview at the beginning was Ed [Wolf] and that’s because we’d known each other through doing HIV work, and I knew he had a passion about this story being told, and there was enough existing personal trust between us that I knew he would be an easy person to experiment with.
Right before I interviewed him, I woke up in the middle of the night with a start and thought, “Oh my god, I’ve done no research and have no notes. What am I thinking?” On The Cockettes [2002] we’d done tremendous research before each interview. Then I quickly calmed down and realized, “This is my story. This is my history. I lived through this entire thing.”
The interviews were totally unplanned and they went where they went. Rather than being conventional subject-object interviews, they were deep, mutually therapeutic conversations between people who shared a painful history.

SFBG How did you find and choose the film’s subjects?
DW It was completely intuitive. Other than Ed, the only way any of these people wound up in the film is that I bumped into them somewhere. In the course of conversation, I’d think, “Oh, you’d be good,” and [from] their unambiguous [affirmative] response, I’d decide to go with it. To some degree, their willingness to be interviewed is reflective of their generosity during the years of the epidemic. They clearly got a lot out of being interviewed personally. Having that kind of focus on such an intense part of one’s life for the first time is a powerful experience. But each of them really did it for the community and for the world.

SFBG Some of the answers are obvious, but how was making this film different from making The Cockettes, as an experience?
DW In many ways, the two films are very similar. The experience was different emotionally simply because there was so much pain involved in revisiting [We Were Here‘s] history. But both ultimately wound up being films in which a very large historical moment is evoked by a very small number of people, without a lot of extenuating materials to contextualize the times. The idea was to have the times emerge from the storytellers. There’s a great similarity in that choice.
The intention of the two films is also similar. In describing my intention with The Cockettes over the years, I’d say it had a twofold purpose, in validating the complexity and beauty of a period of time for the people who lived through it, and illuminating it in a rich and complex way for people who didn’t know anything about it. I’d use the exact same language for We Were Here.
The emotional aspect was much different. This film was much less celebratory and more wrenching. But there was something gratifying about being strong enough to engage with the material. The working experience with [co-director] Bill [Weber], the shared quality, was profoundly beautiful and extraordinary.

SFBG In making this film, I’d think any tasks or parts of the process you did on your own would be difficult.
DW When I see other documentaries and look at the credits, there’s name after name, but basically, it’s me and Bill. Each of us wears multiple hats. There’s also the production crew, Marsha [Kahm] and Loretta [Mollitor], who were incredible, and we had some archival help, too. But the big tasks of the movie belonged to me and Bill.

SFBG How did the film structure and approach of the film develop? Was it an intuitive process, as you suggested earlier?
DW The Cockettes had a clear narrative arc that Bill and I [as co-directors] agreed on from the beginning, and it didn’t have the burden of an entire community of people who had a stake in the story being told. The burden of how people would respond to We Were Here was a huge one that I worried about every day.
I don’t think Bill initially trusted that we could do [We Were Here] with this few people. From my vantage point, it was the fewer the better. And the less music the better. I came into it at the beginning saying, “No music at all.” Bill said, “You’re insane, we’re going to need some,” and I decided, “When we get there, let’s deal with it, but I want to start from zero.”

We evolved together, and Bill’s an enormously sensitive editor, both visually and with music. We were a good team. Bill said he kept having to unlearn his normal way of doing things, because some of what we were doing was so contrary – people are on screen for a long time, and they breathe, and they pause, and they make mistakes, and there is no augmentation of sentiment through music.

Sundance Film Festival: David Weissman:

SFBG Did you both do the film’s interviews?
DW I did all the interviews. With The Cockettes, we were co-directors. With We Were Here, I’m the producer and director, and Bill is the editor, and he got a co-director credit because his editorial role was so important.

SFBG Were there points while looking at archival material or doing interviews where you encountered anything that changed your ideas about what you were making?
DW Yes. One of the more conventional beliefs when making a film about recent events is that filmmakers generally prefer to use moving images instead of archival and still images. At a certain point, we shifted away from that, particularly when covering the pre-epidemic period in San Francisco. We focused on faces, and almost all of  the faces are looking directly into the lens. That sense of personal intimacy is central to how the whole film works.

SFBG There’s a counterbalance that works well in direct relation to that decision – you move from those still images to the footage of people in clinics.
DW Some of that footage came from Tina Di Feliciantonio’s Living With AIDS [1987], and from Marc Huestis’s Chuck Solomon film [Chuck Solomon: Coming of Age, 1987]. I don’t know if we got any clinic footage from Ellen Seidler’s Fighting For Our Lives [1987], but we got a lot of footage from it. All of those films were made between 1985 and 1986. And there’s the footage from Silverlake Life [1993]. I still can’t bring myself to watch Silverlake Life all the way through. Bill did, and he chose the footage.
When I’m interviewing – and this is also true with The Cockettes – I sit with my ear literally on the camera. I want people looking as close to the lens as possible.

 

Rediscovery: The hypnotic appeal of Jeff Phelps’ Magnetic Eyes

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“That album is something I’ve known about for a long time,” Dâm Funk says of Magnetic Eyes, which was written, recorded and produced by Jeff Phelps in 1985. Thanks to the German label Tomlab, more people are finding out about Magnetic Eyes today. Along with the Tony Cook compilation produced by Dâm’s cohort Peanut Butter Wolf and released on Stones Throw, Magnetic Eyes is a rediscovered jewel of ’80s funk. But whereas the Cook album has roots in classic soul, Phelps’ album is a cool, synth-powered collection that brings techno figurehead the Electrifying Mojo to mind. It’s also blessed with peerless cover art and — as you’ll find out after the jump — it inspired a fantastic music video.

If the Pointer Sisters danced with neutrons, then Phelps — to paraphrase Magnetic Eyes’  “K-Shell” — danced with electrons, making bedroom recordings with a Tascam Portastudio 244. Sleek and minimalist, his compositions are on point. Electronic elements mingle with delicate jazz touches. The most powerful and pop example is “Hear My Heart,” where a Yusef Lateef-like woodwind briefly duets with a beguiling, raw (no studio enhancement trickery whatsoever) vocal by teenager Antoinette Marie Pugh. Beginning with a basketball game and moving on to closeups of red fingernails and tearful eyes (not to mention scenes of champagne fireside romance), the video for “Hear My Heart” is, like the best Jan Terri videos, a no-budget delight. The song itself is lovely and hit-worthy.

Jeff Phelps, “Hear My Heart,” from Magnetic Eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUppqNiR_NM

While Phelps lived in Houston, TX at the time, the sound he crafts on Magnetic Eyes’ title instrumental track is a precursor to Detroit techno (the plaintively moving “Don’t Fall Apart On Me” could be an Inner City demo), not to mention the retro-informed future funk that Dâm Funk creates today; Dâm’s collaborator Ramona Gonzalez of Nite Jewel is also a fan of the album. Knowing this, I had to ask Dâm about the Electrifying Mojo, whose late-night radio sets — bringing together Kraftwerk and Parliament — helped forge the Detroit techno sound.

A sample of the Electrifying Mojo on late-night radio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXu3Alw0-Hw

“I have some old tapes of his,” Dâm said, “His concepts were great, and he played great music. It’s all about the delivery and the passion. That’s what I try to do with my selector sets [as a DJ]. I want them to be special, more to the left angle and the dark side.”

The dark angle and the left side are both abundantly present in the cover art of Magnetic Eyes, which was created by an artist named Garry Hollie that Phelps knew at the time. While introverted instrumentals frame the album, it has a round-the-way creative and collaborative essence, with one lyric (“On the Corner”) penned by Phelps’ wife, and another (“Wrong Place, Wrong Time”) by one of his co-workers. Phelps still makes music today, and in a recent interview, he says he listens to a lot of Steely Dan (a likely influence on Magnetic Eyes), as well as Gil Scott-Heron, Tupac, and…Nite Jewel.

   

Snap Sounds: Forest Swords — and the spirit of Aaliyah

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FOREST SWORDS
Dagger Paths E.P.
(No Pain in Pop/Olde English Spelling Bee)

High on the “Ideas I Wish I Had” list is Forest Swordscover of Aaliyah’s “If Your Girl Only Knew,” a different (if equally idiosyncratic) take on R&B than that of fellow Olde English Spelling Bee act Autre Ne Veut. The group’s M. Barnes taps into the recessive, almost ghostly shade-throwing of the original — one reason why Aaliyah was a unique pop phenomenon — and slows it down to near-Gothic stasis, while adding another twist to the lyric’s romantic intrigue by flipping the gender of the vocalist. The spirit of Aaliyah haunted dubstep and its mutant kin in 2010, thanks to Forest Swords’ “If Your Girl,” and also James Blake’s “CMYK,” which sends the vocals of her best-known hit, “Are You That Somebody?,” through a series of flying-floating transformations. Check out the originals and covers/updates, as well as some more ruminations about this phenom, after the jump.

Of course, Aaliyah’s influence has been seeping into non-pop or R&B places for some time, from the Gossip’s live interpretation of “Are You That Somebody?” (which followed in the footsteps of Northwest no-bass counterparts the Spinanes cover of the same song)  to Gang Gang Dance’s professions of love for her around the time of Saint Dymphna. The vinyl version of The xx’s debut album includes the group’s cover of “Hot Like Fire,” which, like “If Your Girl Only Knew,” comes from Aaliyah’s 1996 album One in a Million, where her lithe mystique found a perfect home within Timbaland’s shadowy and spacious yet rhythmic production.

It’s tempting to view Aaliyah’s eternal return as an outgrowth of the fact that some if not many of these artists (and others) were probably kids swept up in radio love back when she was a major phantom of the airwaves. But as time passes, the summer and fall of 1998 — when “Are You That Somebody?” was topping the charts, Missy Elliott’s songwriting was in full effect, Brandy and Monica were fighting over a boy, and R. Kelly was beginning to explore musical narratives with Sparkle and Kelly Price — is starting to seem like a halcyon era of R&B pop. While I like some of the tributes to Babygirl I’ve just outlined, I can confidently say her originals stand supreme.

Forest Swords, “If Your Girl,” from Dagger Paths EP:

Aaliyah, “If Your Girl Only Knew,” from One in a Million:

James Blake, “CMYK,” from CMYK EP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6nd8kr3Chk

Aaliyah, “Are You That Somebody”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EymH-COrGk

Rediscovery: Peanut Butter Wolf puts Tony Cook’s and Dâm Funk’s ’80s jams in the spotlight

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In conjunction with this week’s Noise Pop cover story on Peanut Butter Wolf (a.k.a. Chris Manak) and Dâm-Funk (a.k.a. Damon Riddick), over the next two days I’ll be sharing some quotes from the two, as well as music and video from a couple of recently-issued mid-1980s recordings that the pair love. First up is Tony Cook’s Back to Reality, which has just been released, with equally terrific orginal cover art, by Manak’s label, Stones Throw.

Back to Reality is a result of Manak’s passion for assorted independent singles by Cook, who drummed for James Brown and Etta James and performed odd jobs while recording his own music. Manak has remixed ten Cook tracks, some of them previously unheard, putting together a song collection that should draw some long-overdue attention to an artist who too often has had to put his creativity aside in order to pay the bills.

Tony Cook, “Heartbreaker” (feat. Vanesia Jean), original version:

Manak on Cook: “You’d think [the songs on Back to Reality] were 24-track, but he only worked on an 8-track. He was a good musician and producer. When you’re bouncing tracks, you have to have a good idea of what you’re doing. In those days it was hard to achieve such a full-sound [with an 8-track]. With Tony, I just started collecting his songs, and luckily enough, he had a MySpace page.

[In putting together Back to Reality] Tony was really cool about everything, really open to all of my ideas. He’s enjoying the accolades. We really want to get a band together.”

At Noise Pop, Manak shares a bill with Dâm-Funk, whose ’80s recordings Manak gathered and selected for last year’s Stones Throw release, Adolescent Funk. “When I first met Dâm,” Manak recalls, “I was DJing rare ’80s soul and funk, and he said, ‘Oh man, I’m so glad someone else is doing this.'”

m-Funk, “I Appreciate My Life,” from Adolescent Funk:

The duo’s shared sensibility was a factor in the genesis of Adolescent Funk. “Dâm said, ‘Wolf, this Adolescent Funk is yours, you pick the songs,'” Manak recalls. On the subject of Adolescent Funk‘s cover image of “kids getting excited to go out at night,” also drawn from Dâm-Funk’s archives, Manak comes correct: “I’ve never seen a cover that looks like that.”

Snap Sounds: Prefab Sprout

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PREFAB SPROUT
Let’s Change the World With Music
(Tompkins Square)

Strange world we live in, where the likes of Björk and Stephin Merritt have written musicals, but we don’t have one by Paddy McAloon, whose songs far outdo contemporary Broadway’s best in terms of melody, emotional poignance, and poetic wordplay. It’s a tragedy that a composer and vocalist of such unashamed purity has been stricken with Ménière’s disease, which effects hearing. But it’s a blissful pleasure to hear previously-unreleased music by one of the late-20th century’s greatest pop songwriters.

McAloon honored and even eclipsed the spirits of Elvis, Moondog, and ABBA on his masterwork, 1989’s Jordan: The Comeback, throwing in a pair of sublime songs about Jesse James, to boot. In the tradition of 1989’s Protest Songs, Let’s Change the World with Music is a remastered version of a previously-unreleased collection of demos, dating from 1992. It presents romantic music as religion, and for an atheist or agnostic or unsparing anti-sentimentalist, its fervor can be off-putting. But the loveliest moments — “God Watch Over You,” “Music is a Princess,” “Angel of Love” — are the stuff of conversion, as tuneful as Paul McCartney, and with a lot more integrity.

Prefab Sprout, “Music is a Princess,” from Let’s Change the World With Music:

Prefab Sprout, “God Watch Over You,” from Let’s Change the World With Music:

 

Printed matters: A specific glance at the 44th California International Book Fair

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Do you want the pristine first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for 45 grand, or the slightly worn copy for 25 grand? Such were the questions that presented themselves at the 44th Annual California Antiiquarian Book Fair, which took place at SF’s Concourse Exhibition Center from February 11 through 13. A special shout out to local merchants Serendipity Books and Bolerium Books, both of whom had some of the event’s most interesting and affordable pleasures and treasures on display.

Rock you like a hurricane: Brontez and Brilliant Colors at BAM

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Brontez brought new energy to the “L@te: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA” series on Fri/11. The evening began with DJing by Myles Cooper, then an all-too-brief ear-scouring set by Brilliant Colors that left the audience asking for an encore. Next, people crawled over Thom Faulders’ orange BAMscape sculpture to see a series of short dance films by Gary Gregerson that was one of the evening’s highlights: the sound boomed from the speakers and the stark-black-and-white imagery popped from the screen, a lively marriage between Brontez’s spirited choreography and Gregerson’s affectionate knowledge of vintage TV dance shows. The centerpiece of the program, curated by Betty Nguyen, was a live performance by the Brontez Purnell Dance Company that, at its best, met raging two-piece rock accompaniment with spine-chilling results. After an improv dance class, the evening drew to a close with some music by Adeptus.

To the bone

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DANCE/MUSIC There are a lot of interesting things in Brontez Purnell’s room. Giant self-made posters of Josephine Baker (“The most famous black party kid ever,” he says), Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, and the legendary Harlem Renaissance publication Fire!!. An arrangement of Polaroid Instamatic nude shots of old flames and interview subjects from his zine, Fag School. A few more Instamatic shots – of him and his mom and grandmother. A framed letter from Kathleen Hanna. An autographed copy of the Go-Go’s’ Talk Show. A typewriter. Effects pedals. On a window ledge, a CD by his uncle, the late blues guitarist J.J. Malone. On his bed, a well-worn paperback of Lady Sings the Blues, next to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillow. But the most interesting presence in the room is Brontez himself.

“I grew up with a strong Southern Baptist influence,” Brontez says, when I ask about the role of ritual in his dance projects. “These days I’m not as likely to disregard what that did to me and how it set my way of thinking about the world into motion. I talk to my mom, who is a devout Christian and also totally wild-ass, every day. But for the first 15 years of my life, I was at a place where, every Sunday, the most conservative people could scream their heads off. It wasn’t pretentious, it was to the bone. It’s part of the reason I’ve never had trouble dancing at [rock] shows or getting into the energy of the moment.”

Long before Brontez burned up the stage as a key member of Gravy Train!!!!, he was the talk of the Bay Area rock scene because of his uninhibited energy. “Sometimes, in Gravy Train!!!!, or especially when I was younger, people would sexualize me in this way that was weird to me,” he recalls. “I just felt like I was being more punk than sexy. Sometimes I’d jump in the crowd and people would finger me, or rip off my underwear, and I was put off or taken aback. I felt like I was this baby with whiplash.”

No longer a baby with whiplash, the Brontez of today is still punk rock, but also well-read – and a dancer. This Friday, he’s debuting a trio of live dance pieces, and a trio of dance films (The Beats are Falling Down, Itxel, and Free Jazz) made with Gary Gregerson, as part of a Berkeley Art Museum program curated by Betty Nguyen. Shot in black-and-white and kindred in spirit with works by Yvonne Rainer (“Her ideas about task-oriented choreography, and choreography that deals with the everyday, are so fact-based,” he says), the movies are a natural extension from the dynamic dance video that Irwin Swirnoff made for “Sha-Boo Lee,” by Brontez’s band, Younger Lovers. They’ve got an electric charge — they’re inspiring.

“What I like about Gary [Gregerson] and Irwin [Swirnoff] is that there is always a sense of naturalness with them,” says Brontez. “In the Bay Area, there can be this cult of clutter – everyone has their Cockette thing going, and everything has to be splattered with glitter and fuzzy purple rhinestones. With the art I make, there isn’t a lot of high concept and high camp going on. I’m literally trying to tell a story that I want to let breathe. Both Gary and Irwin are respectful of that.”

This directness is present in Rock Flawless (Bachelor), the latest Younger Lovers album, which features contributions from Bare Wires’ Matthew Melton and drummer Taaji Malik (who is also present in Gregerson’s films), as well as bandmate Mateo Corona. Recorded next door to Aunt Charlie’s Lounge at a studio on the corner of Turk and Taylor in SF, Rock Flawless trades the vagaries of romance for the truth. “When I wrote about a boy on [2008’s] Newest Romantic, it was ‘la la la’ and flowery, but on Rock Flawless I’ll write about a specific boy, in a specific neighborhood – like the Lower Haight – that fucked me over.”

Brontez also throws in a killer cover, of “Heartbroken,” by T2 featuring Jodie Aysha. He’s typically candid about its inspiration. “I first heard [the song] during this Adam4Adam trick,” he says. “I went to this guy’s house and he was a total freak. He had this way-too-close relationship with his dog. I hugged him and the dog ran off the bed and he said, ‘She hates when you take my energy away like that.’ We were fucking and he had on his Pandora and that song came on, and I was like, ‘What is this? This is what’s up!’”

What’s up for Brontez today? For starters, his neighborhood in West Oakland, where warehouse spaces like Sugar Mountain, Ghost Town, and Copland are putting on shows. “On the weekend, you see so many white kids it’s like Woodstock,” he laughs. “What’s happening here isn’t going on in San Francisco. But during the weekdays, you see the nice cars that drive by to get heroin and crack, and the regular neighborhood people.”  

What’s also going on is a strong dedication to making things happen, and making dance. “My biological clock is ticking, ticking, going ‘What have you done, girl?’,” Brontez jokes. “It’s nice to sit around waiting on boys to love you, but in the meantime…” In the meantime, he’s reading up on Rainer, Katherine Dunham, and Martha Graham. He’s watching AXIS Dance Company rehearsals. He’s drawing on his studies with choreographers Eric Kupers and Nina Haft. He’s getting set to act with Jesse Hewit and others in a film by Travis Mathews. He’s leading dance workshops. And he’s giving any “fucking squares” in dance a loving “a kick in the ass,” flyering shows punk rock-style, and choreographing pieces involving witch dancers and preachers, with titles like Whenever I Hit the Floor, I’m Like a Fucking Hurricane.

“Thank god I also read a lot of rock ‘n’ roll autobiographies,” Brontez says. “Because all of my favorite artists say the same thing: ‘They did not love me enough.’ This year, I’m going to find out who my brothers and sisters are, so we can start doing shows together.”

L@TE FRIDAY NIGHTS AT BAM/PFA: BRONTEZ WITH BRILLIANT COLORS
7:30 p.m. (DJ Myles Cooper at 6:30 p.m.), $7
Berkeley Art Museum, Gallery B
2626 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Snap Sounds: Darwin Deez

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DARWIN DEEZ
Darwin Deez

(Lucky Number)

Phoenix is the most obvious reference for Darwin Deez‘s crisp, clean, and commercial tunefulness, with occasional traces of El Guincho — and Beck’s hipster clowning, which makes sense, as Deez made an unofficial 2009 video for Cornelius’s 2001 song “Fly.” (I’d hazard a guess that both Phoenix and Deez are influenced by the light beauty of Lô Borges.) My favorite aspect of lead member Darwin Smith’s songwriting and recording is the melodicism of his guitar sound — counter-melodic grace notes whirligig through the air on songs like “Deep Sea Divers,” “The City,” “Up in the Clouds,” and “Bed Space.” His lyrics and look are way too precious for my taste, but I might succumb with the repeated listens the better songs here attract. Guitar pop alert: In addition to some Deez clips, after the jump you’ll also find Damon Packard‘s HILARIOUS video for Buva’s “Hide Away,” with absolutely unparalleled animal control puppetry!

Darwin Deez, “Up in the Clouds,” from Darwin Deez:

Buva, “Hide Away,” directed by Damon Packard:

Darwin Deez, “Bed Space (Paramore-Style Music Video),” from Darwin Deez:

Speed Reading: Edie Fake’s Gaylord Phoenix

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The moment I saw Edie Fake‘s book Gaylord Phoenix (Secret Acres, 256 pages, $17.95) on a table at a local shop was a lifesaver. Not much contemporary art or stuff actually reaches me — and jolts me — at the mysterious and elusive spot(s) where my imagination and spirit reside, and the drawings and stories of Fake do exactly that. I have some issues of Gaylord Phoenix from when it was in serial form, and Fake’s comic Rico McTaco, but I had no idea a lavish color book of Gaylord Phoenix existed, and the discovery was about as close to finding a treasure as I’ve had in recent daily life.

Over the last few weeks I’ve looked at Gaylord Phoenix a lot in bed, on the verge of sleep and dreams, and occasionally while in transit from one place to another. Both experiences, if not ideal, seem right for entering the book’s universe. It is the kind of epic journey in which a reader — not to mention the characters — can get lost. Gaylord Phoenix is a love and lust story. It’s a quest through terrain that is strange yet also familiar, especially if you have access to your queerness or inner experience. It is funny, it is disturbing, it is gorgeous, it is mesmerizing.

Gaylord Phoenix the character has a projector for a nose; webbed hands which can morph into other shapes; a hairy chest, arms, and legs; and (most of the time) tubular genitals that can penetrate and be penetrated, fill or envelop. There is a slightly woeful or stricken quality to Gaylord’s personality, as rendered via facial features and half-capsule head. Yet hexes, spells, “crystal bloodlust,” orgiastic oceans of tears, experimental examination rites, and periods of bereft solitude are not enough to stop Gaylord Phoenix from searching for pleasure and communion with the surrounding world.

That world — a world of many worlds — is one of the things that makes Gaylord Phoenix special. Fake’s hand-rendered cubes, pyramids, hexagons, Bridget Riley-like black-and-white vortexes (referred to in the ultra-spare, brilliant dialogue), wizard cone hats, mazes, temples, wood grains and vines, crocodile skins, fish scales, clouds and cave formations, and plumage accumulate detail and color over the course of the book. What might have been interpreted as technical improvement within Gaylord Phoenix‘s serial manifestations as a comic is revealed in the book to be material for a dramatic and visionary climax and denoument.

In the realm of comics and graphic novels, Gaylord Phoenix could be seen as a fantastic inverse of the sexual horror in Dash Shaw‘s BodyWorld. It arrives at a time when various musicians and visual artists are also tapping into mystic and occult energy, though its singularity of vision reminds me of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger channeled from archival celluloid strip to contemporary line drawings on the printed page. Ultimately, there is nothing like it.

A few years ago, Fake lived in SF, and attended one of the Guardian’s Goldies celebrations with Amanda Kirkhuff, whose pencil drawings and oil paintings of female pop icons and news figures transmit an equally pure power. They aren’t here now, they’re each moving onward in their own ways, but this city was lucky to play host to them for a while, and it would be great to see them again. 

Snap Sounds: Demdike Stare

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DEMDIKE STARE
Tryptych
(Modern Love)

There is the fraud that is witch house, and then there is the musical spell cast by Demdike Stare, a duo that takes its name from 17th-century accused witch Elizabeth Southerns. Tryptych gathers three near-LP-length EPs, and its highlights are numerous. While Liberation Through Hearing delivers on the title’s promise, my pick of the trio might be Voices of Dust, thanks to the swelling charge “Black Sun,” the frenetic “Hashshashin Chant,” and the seductive dirge “A Tale of Sand.” These songs conjure dark visions on their very own, but after the jump, check out some montage videos that Jonny Redman of the European cult movie site www.lovelockandload.net has created for Demdike Stare tracks. If you can I.D. any of the amazing source material he’s using, I’d love to know.

Demdike Stare, “Forest of Evil (Dawn),” from Tryptych and Forest of Evil:

Demdike Stare, “Hashshashin Chant,” from Tryptych and Voices of Dust:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0QCy-Nd40w

Snap Sounds: Charanjit Singh

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CHARANJIT SINGH
10 Ragas to a Disco Beat
(Bombay Connection)

Pure zaniness: acid house from 1982 — up to four years before the genre was invented — that demonstrates Bollywood composer Singh’s intuitive and innovative proficiency with the genre’s prototypical Roland keyboards and drum machines. This reissue removes the word synthesizing from the beginning of the album’s initial title, to downplay the kitsch factor, I guess. The mix of repetition and raga variation runs from meditative to maddening and is sometimes outright revelatory. One of a kind. After the jump, check out a comic and informative short movie from last year in which an enthusiast seeks out and meets Singh, and a few tracks from the album. As one online commentator suggests, it’s time to put a bindi on the acid smiley.

 

Charanjit Singh: 2010 (short film):

Charanjit Singh, “Raga Bhairav” (from 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat):

Charanjit Singh,  “Raga Megh Malkar” (from 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat):

 

Snap Sounds: James Blake

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JAMES BLAKE
James Blake
(Atlas)

This is probably the most-anticipated album of 2011, thanks to the promise of Blake’s lavishly praised EPs, which have conjured the ghost of Aaliyah (“CMYK” draws brilliantly from “Are You That Somebody?”) while deploying a innovative sense of dubstep’s space and silence. (See the starts and stops and teasing not-there quality of “I Only Know (What I Know Now)” for an example.) Here, Blake adopts a more traditional pop vocal songwriting approach akin to his cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love,” which is included. The result teeters between Kid A-era Radiohead angst and something a lot more interesting and unique — a singular interplay between the possibilities of composition and production.
Whereas most recording artists are at best producers or composers, Blake fuses the two, wielding textural shifts like chord changes. The studio version of “Wilhelm Scream” isn’t as revelatory as the one from his recent BBC session, but other tracks on James Blake share that songs’ effective foregrounding of a simple, endlessly reworked, three-or-four-line lyrical mantra. The offhand conversational honesty of “I Never Learnt to Share” — entire lyric: “My brother and my sister don’t speak to me / And I don’t blame them” — goes from confessional solitude to Stevie Wonder-like funky freedom, remaining compellingly unhinged from start to finish. Where he goes from here will be interesting to see — and hear.

James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream” (Live BBC Session):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCeKI4ck0sg

James Blake, James Blake album sampler:

Love, Gainsbarre

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FILM/INDIEFEST “Oh, it’s a problem with women,” Serge Gainsbourg says in an interview clip only a few seconds into Pascal Forneri’s entertaining and energetic made-for-TV documentary Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women. For Gainsbourg, the problem was a rewarding one — women were the vehicle by which he moved from a brooding writer of chanson into a national and international provocateur and icon. On an artistic front, Gainsbourg arranged and delivered one musical bouquet after another for a multitude of female singers, to a degree that Forneri’s movie has to adopt a breakneck pace just to include some of his best songs. As time goes on, his accomplishment seems equal to, if not greater than, that of the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, and other English-language rock icons.

Opening with over-the-top Gallic narration and arranged into a series of commercial-ready chapters, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women isn’t pretentious, and it takes care to deliver some of Gainsbourg’s most infamous televised moments, such as a talk show where he — by that time fully and fatalistically given over to his messy, dissolute Gainsbarre mode — informed a young and imperial Whitney Houston he’d like to fuck her. We also get to enjoy young France Gall naively telling an amused and appreciative Gainsbourg that his latest hit song for her, “Les sucettes,” is about “a young girl named Annie who loves lollipops.”

But Forneri’s movie also reveals the sensitivity beneath Gainsbourg the provocative “women’s tailor” of French songwriting. After all, it was Gainsbourg who had Gall sing of herself as “a lonely singing doll.” In one interview excerpt, Gainsbourg says that he prefers writing songs for actresses because they are “more spontaneous than your typical moron,” then criticizes a market that celebrates and throws away young starlets as inherently “fucked.” “It’s very hard to find work, and they don’t do it for the money,” he says bluntly.

Aside from the bombastic narration, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women‘s primary commentary comes from the women who worked with and knew Gainsbourg, an illustrious group that includes Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Juliette Greco, Francoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. One of Forneri’s chief stylistic gambits is to leave these interviews off-screen — aside from appearances within archival footage, Gainsbourg’s women are present only as voices. In one sense this sharpens a critical view of Gainsbourg the man, but it also masks the individuality of the women’s perspectives, turning them all into a single femme.

Nonetheless, there are numerous moments where the likes of Birkin assert their personality. Hardy states that writing for women allowed Gainsbourg to express his “sensitivity” and “sentimentality,” an idea that might not be as true when applied to the partnership of Christopher Wallace and Lil’ Kim half a decade after Gainsbourg’s death. Hip-hop’s Bonnie and Clyde duos only follow in the footsteps of Gainsbourg and Bardot, even if Bardot would rather think of herself as George Sand to his Chopin.

Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women is a story that tells itself. There’s an epic’s worth of turbulent romanticism in the still photos of a blissful and radiant Gainsbourg and Bardot recording the original, suppressed version of “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” and the television footage of a cynical Gainsbourg and a brash, irrepressibly coltish Birkin discussing their version of the song. The man himself says that he came up with both “Je t’aime” and “Bonnie and Clyde” in a single night after Bardot said (commanded?), “Write me the most beautiful song you can imagine.” Thanks to “Je t’aime,” Gainsbourg’s name is irrevocably associated with sex. But as anecdotes from Greco and Birkin make clear, he’d just as soon stay up all night talking and drinking with a woman. Instead of orgiastic pleasures, Gainsbourg and Birkin’s first night in a hotel concluded with her gifting a 45 of Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (as in “I got love in my tummy”) to Gainsbourg as he slept.

In focusing on Gainsbourg’s relationships with female singers, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women ignores his musical partnerships with men, most notably Jean-Claude Vannier, with whom he composed and arranged many of his greatest works. But Forneri’s movie arrives at a time when another wave of interest in Gainsbourg is growing in the U.S. and other countries outside France. The past few years have seen Light in the Attic reissue some of Gainsbourg’s greatest recordings, such as 1971’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, the 1969 album version of Je t’aime (which contains Birkin’s “Jane B,” the model for vocals by Blonde Redhead, Deerhoof, and countless others), and Birkin’s 1973 solo debut, Di Doo Dah. This month, a new compilation of Gainsbourg’s pre-starlet compositions, Discograph’s Le claquer de mots, shines light on the big-eared outsider right before he hit the pop jackpot. If the 1990s saw a surface-level revival of Gainsbourg the cult icon, today, his eternal return runs deeper.

GAINSBOURG, THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN

Sat/5, 2:30 p.m., Roxie;

Sun/6, 9:15 p.m., Roxie

www.sfindie.com

 

Speed Reading: Matt Furie’s Hot Topik and boy’s club 4

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I got an orange Pepe T-shirt at Needles and Pens’ release party for Matt Furie‘s new comic Hot Topik. What better way to also celebrate the fourth and latest issue of Furie’s boy’s club, in which Pepe and pals Andy, Brett, and Landwolf are joined by two new characters, Whitey (a zit), and Bird-Dog? Somewhat reminisicent of a stoned Big Bird, Bird-Dog lectures Pepe on the history of weed in one of the comic’s highlights, though I’m also fond of the episode in which a Vaporizer turns Landwolf into a viper with a craving for pepperoni pizza. Here are some of the characters in Hot Topik, as well as a few pieces by Furie on the walls of Needles and Pens.

Love, Gainsbarre

0

FILM/INDIEFEST “Oh, it’s a problem with women,” Serge Gainsbourg says in an interview clip only a few seconds into Pascal Forneri’s entertaining and energetic made-for-TV documentary Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women. For Gainsbourg, the problem was a rewarding one — women were the vehicle by which he moved from a brooding writer of chanson into a national and international provocateur and icon. On an artistic front, Gainsbourg arranged and delivered one musical bouquet after another for a multitude of female singers, to a degree that Forneri’s movie has to adopt a breakneck pace just to include some of his best songs. As time goes on, his accomplishment seems equal to, if not greater than, that of the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, and other English-language rock icons.

Opening with over-the-top Gallic narration and arranged into a series of commercial-ready chapters, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women isn’t pretentious, and it takes care to deliver some of Gainsbourg’s most infamous televised moments, such as a talk show where he — by that time fully and fatalistically given over to his messy, dissolute evil “Gainsbarre” mode — informed a young and imperial Whitney Houston he’d like to fuck her. We also get to enjoy young France Gall naively telling an amused and appreciative Gainsbourg that his latest hit song for her, “Les sucettes,” is about “a young girl named Annie who loves lollipops.”

But Forneri’s movie also reveals the sensitivity beneath Gainsbourg the provocative “women’s tailor” of French songwriting. After all, it was Gainsbourg who had Gall sing of herself as “a lonely singing doll.” In one interview excerpt, Gainsbourg says that he prefers writing songs for actresses because they are “more spontaneous than your typical moron,” then criticizes a market that celebrates and throws away young starlets as inherently “fucked.” “It’s very hard to find work, and they don’t do it for the money,” he says bluntly.

Aside from the bombastic narration, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women‘s primary commentary comes from the women who worked with and knew Gainsbourg, an illustrious group that includes Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Juliette Greco, Francoise Hardy, and Vanessa Paradis. One of Forneri’s chief stylistic gambits is to leave these interviews off-screen — aside from appearances within archival footage, Gainsbourg’s women are present only as voices. In one sense this sharpens a critical view of Gainsbourg the man, but it also masks the individuality of the women’s perspectives, turning them all into a single femme.

Nonetheless, there are numerous moments where the likes of Birkin assert their personality. Hardy states that writing for women allowed Gainsbourg to express his “sensitivity” and “sentimentality,” an idea that might not be as true when applied to the partnership of Christopher Wallace and Lil’ Kim half a decade after Gainsbourg’s death. Hip-hop’s Bonnie and Clyde duos only follow in the footsteps of Gainsbourg and Bardot, even if Bardot would rather think of herself as George Sand to his Chopin.

Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women is a story that tells itself. There’s an epic’s worth of turbulent romanticism in the still photos of a blissful and radiant Gainsbourg and Bardot recording the original, suppressed version of “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” and the television footage of a cynical Gainsbourg and a brash, irrepressibly coltish Birkin discussing their version of the song. The man himself says that he came up with both “Je t’aime” and “Bonnie and Clyde” in a single night after Bardot said (commanded?), “Write me the most beautiful song you can imagine.” Thanks to “Je t’aime,” Gainsbourg’s name is irrevocably associated with sex. But as anecdotes from Greco and Birkin make clear, he’d just as soon stay up all night talking and drinking with a woman. Instead of orgiastic pleasures, Gainsbourg and Birkin’s first night in a hotel concluded with her gifting a 45 of Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (as in “I got love in my tummy”) to Gainsbourg as he slept.

In focusing on Gainsbourg’s relationships with female singers, Gainsbourg, The Man Who Loved Women ignores his musical partnerships with men, most notably Jean-Claude Vannier, with whom he composed and arranged many of his greatest works. But Forneri’s movie arrives at a time when another wave of interest in Gainsbourg is growing in the U.S. and other countries outside France. The past few years have seen Light in the Attic reissue some of Gainsbourg’s greatest recordings, such as 1971’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, the 1969 album version of Je t’aime (which contains Birkin’s “Jane B,” the model for vocals by Blonde Redhead, Deerhoof, and countless others), and Birkin’s 1973 solo debut, Di Doo Dah. This month, a new compilation of Gainsbourg’s pre-starlet compositions, Discograph’s Le claquer de mots, shines light on the big-eared outsider right before he hit the pop jackpot. If the 1990s saw a surface-level revival of Gainsbourg the cult icon, today, his eternal return runs deeper.

GAINSBOURG, THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN

Sat/5, 2:30 p.m., Roxie;

Sun/6, 9:15 p.m., Roxie

www.sfindie.com

 

Snap Sounds: Bill Orcutt

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BILL ORCUTT
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
(Editions Mego)

Recorded at 24th and York in SF in the early summer months of 2009, these 14 songs are characteristically live enough to give the impression of hanging out in the same room as Orcutt, or an adjacent one, rather than hearing him filtered through a studio. The approach suits the furious storms of broken-neck blues — literally: Orcutt plays a repaired acoustic Kay guitar with two strings removed — that are unleashed from start to finish. Along with the Berkeley Guitar compilations and recent solo albums by Ava Mendoza and Sean Smith, A New Way to Pay Old Debts is a sure way to prove the Bay Area is a guitar nexus. Check out a track from the album after the jump.

Bill Orcutt, “My Reckless Parts” (from A New Way to Pay Old Debts):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0cHfjiyCtE

Snap Sounds: Deerhoof

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DEERHOOF
Deerhoof vs. Evil

(Polyvinyl)

Why “vs.” evil, Deerhoof? Wouldn’t Deerhoof is Evil be more challenging? No matter, while navigating familiar territory, the 12 songs here show the band is still inspired, and more graceful. The melodicism and gleaming decorative touches of “Behold a Marvel in the Darkness” and “No One Asked to Dance” match a romanticism that is winning. “Secret Mobilization” is a straight-up rocker, and the time-lapse bloom of “I Did Crimes for You” is just about gorgeous. In moving further beyond a Jane Birkin-meets-1990s-noise realm, East Coast counterparts Blonde Redhead seem to have gotten lost as of late. Not Deerhoof. A song from the album and album release show info after the jump.

 

Deerhoof, “Behold a Marvel in the Darkness” (from Deerhoof vs. Evil):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYK9rdkqL8c

 

DEERHOOF (ALBUM RELEASE SHOW)
with Ben Butler and Mousepad, Fred Frith and Prhilip Greenlief Trio
Fri/28, 9 p.m.; $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750

Snap Sounds: Reuber

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REUBER
Ring
(Staubgold)

This is the most characterful techno album in a long, long while. Instead of obeying minimalist trends, Reuber goes for something epic — Ring is Kosmische, but much more enthusiastic and lively and cheerfully vulgar (the finale verges on trance) than anything that sound’s huge cluster of revivalists have put forth in the past few years. The surging syncopation is Moroder-esque or Tangerine Dream-y rather than studious, and the album’s energy verges on gonzo, from the coiling, roiling metro-ride momentum of “Ringer” — the centerpiece and highlight — to the tribal fervor that lingers at the far edges of the two tracks before and after it. Performance clips of his Tuvan throat techno after the jump!
 

Reuber live — Nov. 16, 2008 (clip 1)

Reuber live — Nov. 16, 2009 (clip 2)

 

Close-up: Lauren DiCoccio’s “Remember the Times”

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Lauren DiCoccio is interviewed in this week’s issue. One major element of “Remember the Times,” DiCoccio’s current exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is a trio of shelves on which objects are arranged in a manner that suggests vanitas paintings or memento mori (she’s even constructed a fabric skull) for endangered or near-extinct media and disposable or recycleable objects. Unlike paintings, though, DiCoccio’s works possess a three-dimensionality that allows one to hone in on details and view them from a variety of perspectives. Here are fifteen close-ups from the show.

Now and then

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arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART “My ideal world [while making art] is to be on a comfortable chair by a sunny window listening to a baseball game,” says Lauren DiCioccio. For DiCioccio, such a setting is possible, because sewing is an integral part of her work, whether she’s hand embroidering The New York Times, creating cotton facsimiles of 35mm film slides and currency, or making organza replicas of plastic bags and bottles.

The new exhibition “Remember the Times” moves DiCioccio’s unique collection of handmade-readymade hybrids from the “wundercabinet” (to use DiCioccio’s term) of Jack Fischer Gallery to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. On the second floor, she’s arranged a variety of objects on three shelves, adapting the acute vision and evocative perception of still-life painting, vanitas, and memento mori to today’s flurries of consumption and erasure. “Remember the Times” is the only current show at YBCA that can be photographed by visitors, and to be sure, adopting a photographer’s point is an ideal way of appreciating the individuality and interaction of DiCioccio’s pieces, and — especially — her attention to detail. I recently met with her at the museum.

SFBG What drew you to newspaper as a material? The ways in which you use it are unconventional — what are the challenges of working with it?

Lauren DiCioccio All of the work I’m making right now began with the newspaper. For about two years before I was showing my work or thought I could be an artist, I was making paintings. I began painting on newspaper as a material I felt comfortable about using, and that transformed into making sculptures with newspaper. At a certain point with the paintings, I realized I was more interested in the materials.

It hit me after college, when I traveled in Australia, and for six months lived in a town in the outback. It was 12 hours down a dirt road, with a 360-degree view of nothing, and 250 people, mostly aboriginal, lived there. It was a secluded world. We would get our mail twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, so we were one step up from the horse and buggy. The days the mail came, they would bring the newspapers, and even though they were two days old, people would just gather around and pore over them.

I became interested in the material as this trusted resource and definition of time and physical embodiment of a day. When I came home and unpacked all my paintings, I realized I was more interested in the way the newspaper itself located me in time and place.

When I moved to the Bay Area in 2004, I began working as the resident manager for the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside. I lived on site there, on a cattle ranch, pretty much isolated, and getting the newspaper delivered every day. Again, it was a situation where the newspaper was connected to how people would socialize and gather in the morning. People would really welcome it: “A newspaper! Let’s read that!”

I decided that painting wasn’t doing it for me — I wanted to do something more tactile and physical and also approachable. I set out this challenge to make a sculpture out of one newspaper every day for as long as I could. Then I made a quilt out of the newspaper, and that triggered my interest in the craft medium, which has always been a part of my life. It made me realize that craft and the newspaper have the same language, and I started to explore that more through sewing.

SFBG How did you come to select The New York Times as one subject? Also, the tactile emphasis you’re mentioning extends to the “Thank You” bags you’ve made.

LDC They are definitely specific materials — the plastic of a shopping bag, the soft paper of the newspaper are so unique to those objects, and are familiar feels and sounds and experiences for us. They’re disposable in nature, but they’re engrained in our human memory.

SFBG The “Thank You” bags are so commonplace, but they carry a lot of connotations.

LDC When I began making them, it started a divergent path in my work that I think I’m still in the fork of — I’m making these very loving recreations of both types of objects, and they both have disposable or waste aspects. The newspaper is more of a renewable resource, so the work is also about the loss of the form itself. But with the “Thank You” bags, in making them to talk about their obsolescence, I kind of think of them as ghosts of the actual object — I’m hoping for that.

I use bridal organza for the “Thank You” bag sculptures. When I first bought some, I expected it would fray and fall apart and be too delicate to embroider, but it actually stands up well. I just overlay the organza on the beg and draw with a waterproof pen on the surface before I embroider.

With the newspaper, the main series of works actually has a day’s newspaper in it. That introduces a sense of history or time. It’s important to me that the actual paper is in those pieces. It creates all these issues about conservation, and the newspaper not being acid-free, God forbid. The question would be asked, “What if 100 years the newspaper is just crumbly dust inside a bag?” — as if it that were a problem in terms of presenting it as art. But I actually think that it’s the most interesting thing about those pieces, how they’ll age and evolve.

SFBG Artists who work with paper today face those kinds of problems when dealing with those who view art primarily in economic terms.

LDC It’s so hard as an artist when you’re broached with that problem. When someone buys my work, that’s so special to me — I want them to have it as long as they want to have it, looking exactly like how they want it to look. But at the same time, conceptually, anyone who looks at [one of the newspaper pieces] should understand that it’s about decay and the life cycle and the way we all age — though now with plastic surgery, everyone wants to look as scary as possible [laughs].

SFBG How do you choose a particular page to spotlight? Is it the stories, the images, or both?

LDC It’s a combination. It’s an instinctive decision. I look for something that leaps off the page and speaks to me. At first I was only doing people who were communicating — politicians gesturing, or caught mid-speech. But I’ve loosened up the reins on that. I like sports images because they lend themselves to the way trailing thread can show the blur of time.

With all of my work I try to ride this line between precious and pathetic. There’s something somewhat pathetic about even creating these objects in such an obsessive way. It’s excessive, almost an overly tender act to sew this detailed work through functionless media.

SFBG It creates odd keepsakes.

LDC They’re happy and sad. I’m interested in the bittersweet, and nostalgia contains feelings of joy and sadness. With the images, I try to finish them up to the point where it looks like you could pull one of the threads and the whole thing would unravel.

LAUREN DICIOCCIO: REMEMBER THE TIMES

Through March 27, $5–$7

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Gorgeous George

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TRASH She’s an unstoppable force, that Sherri Frankenstein. As embodied by Linda Martinez in an anything-but-soggy serial by George Kuchar, Sherri is endlessly buffeted by life — shoved, mutilated, or worse by rapacious characters ever-eager to administer injections. She’s prone to oracular gestures so lengthy and dizzyingly impulse-driven that their conclusions directly contradict the reality around her. But whether she’s carousing at a go-go club or distractedly presiding over a Dracula’s castle-turned-home for wayward women, Sherri’s is a spirit that will not be snuffed.

Sherri’s odyssey begins in 2003’s Kiss of Frankenstein, a screen adaptation of a 2003 play’s torrid and torrential vomitous verbiage. Shot in three hours for $500 and post-dubbed in a bathroom, Kiss is an orgy of all that Kuchar in dramatic mode has to offer — a DayGlo video update of the old dark house scenario of his and Curt McDowell’s classic Thundercrack! (1975) with live action-meets-animation interiors that outdo Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) in terms of lurid décor. Martinez’s sheer organza negligee is only the raciest fabric in a dance of the 700 veils to rival Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949). The dreamy-eyed male lead’s hairy chest and right nipple peeks out from a torn pajama top. A maze of maniacal monologues and mythical machinations — listening to Kuchar’s characters rattle off narration, one can’t help but ponder the narcissistic nature of memoir — in the form of a hungry Hungarian “pilgrimage for the palate,” the first chapter in Kuchar’s monstrous equivalent to Wagner’s Ring includes a sudden ax attack rendered in the style of William Castle.

Fresh from an acid facial, Sherri is back and pig-biting mad in 2005’s The Fury of Frau Frankenstein, another of Kuchar’s collaborations with his students at San Francisco Art Institute. Abandoning Kiss‘s monologues for title cards and visual tale-spinning, Fury introduces Sherri’s buxom niece Leticia, whose fate is watched by a Ryan Gosling-like newspaper reporter named Bruce. (In a bit part, young filmmaker Sarah Hagey almost steals the movie while her man is stolen.) Kuchar unleashes a blitz of post-production video effects, placing party scenes within envelopes and sprinkling digital glitter on Sherri’s face. Shot for $100 less than its predecessor, Fury is pure cinematic gluttony on a budget: a stew is stirred with a dismembered hand, a glimmering spider web curtain from the previous movie returns as one character’s cape, and a bat scurries across a floor in a manner that evokes not just the ravenous killer brains of the 1958 British horror flick Fiend Without a Face, but also furry slippers.

Technical difficulties prevented a viewing of the climax of Kuchar’s Frankenstein Cycle, 2008’s Crypt of Frankenstein. But Sherri returns in a sequel to the series, 2010’s Jewel of Jeopardy, whose cast includes an M.D. A little weary and slurry and lost in the length and relentlessness of her monologues, she’s soon helpless — gleefully so — to stop a Dracula who “burns quite easily” as he feasts on the “nubile necks” of her female charges, administering “hellish hickeys.” Here, the prop-mad and pixelated fervor of Kuchar’s meta-montage reaches its apex: digital blood drapes the screen, hairdos morph into spider webs, a character is beaten with his own severed leg, a Santa Claus wall hanging beams green rays from its eyes, Martinez’s flesh is visually rhymed with a Frankenstein mask, and the cast is momentarily lost in a blizzard of animated hearts and stars that would bring a blush to the face of the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

It’ll end in puke, of course, but anyone with a hungry eye should welcome the Roxie’s decision to put three nights of movies by George Kuchar on its menu. Or a hungry heart: the cheerful gastric onslaughts of Kuchar’s Frankenstein cycle are countered by the disarmingly poignant mortal attention to digestion and bodily function in his recent diary films, Vintage Visits, The Nutrient Express, and Dribbles, all from 2010. The time is right to gorge with George. 

BY, FOR, AND ABOUT GEORGE KUCHAR

Fri/28–Sun/30, $6–$10 (Fri/28: The Frankenstein Cycle; Sat/29: It Came From Kuchar plus two Kuchar shorts; Sun/30: new video diaries by George Kuchar)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com