Attention, Class of 2007: No matter your age, please read all the way to the end of this conversation with Vincent Gallo to discover what he hopes you will contribute to our future.
All curious others, get ready for an illustrated chat that moves through some of Gallo’s fave screen idols and non-auteur films to explore his ideas about making music and movies, and also includes my story about a lifesize wax candle of Richard Nixon’s head.
Cameos by Hilary Duff and Michael Jackson.
Attention, Class of 2007: No matter your age, please read all the way to the end of this conversation with Vincent Gallo to discover what he hopes you will contribute to our future.
All curious others, get ready for an illustrated chat that moves through some of Gallo’s fave screen idols and non-auteur films to explore his ideas about making music and movies, and also includes my story about a lifesize wax candle of Richard Nixon’s head.
Cameos by Hilary Duff and Michael Jackson.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2
The Last Days of Yasser Arafat (Sherine Salama, Australia/Palestine, 2006)
When Australian filmmaker Salama finally does get to sit down with Yasser Arafat, she remarks that it’s the second-generation Palestinians who come back to their ancestral homeland. Salama, in any event, can’t seem to stay away; Last Days chronicles her two months-long attempts at interviewing Arafat in his Ramallah compound. The filmmaker has a weakness for stating the obvious and her visual style is nil, though her plight does open up a starkly comic portrait of Palestinian bureaucracy. Last Days is most compelling in its final minutes, when, without the voice-over, Salama documents Arafat’s coffin touching down in Ramallah, the helicopter swarmed by a startling crowd of thousands. 1:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/6, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Max Goldberg)
The Last Days of Yasser Arafat
COSTUME One gray Garfield sweatshirt; a blue wool sleeveless sweater with little birds and a white sheep stitched on it; clean Chuck Taylor high-tops; an orange Kawasaki motorcycle T-shirt; a little red hoodie; a beige suede vest with tassels. These are some of the clothes sported by Logan (Malcolm Stumpf), the gender-jumping cusp-of-teens boy at the center of Cam Archer’s debut feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known.
"At that age you aren’t concerned with what other people think. You choose what [clothing] appeals to you – you’re just going for it," says Stephanie Volkmar, the film’s costume designer, as cars whiz by on Guerrero Street. "Logan’s outfits are sometimes outrageous, or some might say a little risque. Cam has an obsession with short-shorts and tank tops. He’ll be mad if that makes it into print, but it does help express the character’s vulnerability. We wanted Logan to wear things that would make him seem awkward and different."
One reason I’m asking Volkmar about her no-budget costume work for Wild Tigers is that she works at the store we’re sitting next to, Painted Bird. Over the past two years, I’ve assembled a Painted Bird wardrobe about as expansive as Logan’s, though riddled with the occasional label (Dior, Gucci, Adidas – all cheap), thus proving Volkmar’s point that in comparison to adults, kids just don’t care.
It turns out that Painted Bird’s connection to Archer’s movie – which, after debuting last year at the Sundance Film Festival, plays as part of the Mission Creek festivities – is also familial. The director’s brother, Nate, who did the movie’s layered, impressionistic sound design, is (along with Sonny Walker) one of the shop’s co-owners. "Nate is good at finding [music] that blows me away," Volkmar says. He certainly succeeds in Wild Tigers, braiding everything from the hand claps and "oo-oowoh" ‘s of the Michael Zager Band’s disco classic "Let’s All Chant" to the drowsy, faraway loneliness of Laura Nyro’s "Desiree" and the Langley Schools Music Project around Logan’s daydreams.
According to Volkmar, both Wild Tigers and Painted Bird emerged from family or familylike bonds formed in Santa Clara, where she met Cam Archer and worked on about 10 other short projects with him. Judging by the many five-star reviews for Painted Bird on sites such as Yelp, I’m not the only one who wants to rave about Walker and Nate Archer’s shop while also being protective of it. Why? It avoids the kitsch pitfalls and the overdressed look favored by SF vintage and secondhand places, and most important, its low prices correspond with a friendly atmosphere. Keeping an eye out for quality moderate vintage labels as much as typical high-end names, the Painted Bird folks are in the clothing biz because they like clothes, and they have a definite, yet easygoing, sensibility.
In Wild Tigers, Logan has a unique sensibility too, but his run through lust is a mostly solitary one. Though its conflation of the titular animals with desire might be a nod to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (as well as drawn from Santa Clara’s untamed suburban terrain), Archer’s movie emerges from the still too-small genre of US queer kids’ films that includes Todd Haynes’s Dottie Gets Spanked, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and SF director Justin Kelly’s new Cannes-bound short, Front. (Also, one of Wild Tigers‘ executive producers, Darren Stein, was behind the pre-Tarnation queer childhood doc Keep the Camera on Me.) Without a doubt, Volkmar’s costumes have a role in some of the movie’s best scenes, such as when Logan’s friend Joey (Max Paradise) – complete with a golden bowl cut and a striped shirt buttoned all the way up to its collar – tries to get him to contribute to a "ways to be cool" list.
A cynic might point out that there isn’t a huge gap between the outfits sported by the children of Wild Tigers and the clothes favored by San Francisco’s eternal youth of today. (I stand semiconvicted.) In fact, Volkmar drew extensively from the shop where she works while dressing the movie’s primarily preteen and teen characters. But the spirit of Painted Bird’s staff is a lot like Logan from Wild Tigers: not too cool for school, just – as Volkmar says – going for it. (Johnny Ray Huston)
WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN
Wed/16, call or see Web site for time, $4-$8
Roxie Film Center
3117 and 3125 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
www.roxie.com
www.paintedbird.org
> a&eletters@sfbg.com
Guy Maddin, that demented dealer in antiquities responsible for such cinematic curiosities as The Saddest Music in the World and the much-loved short The Heart of the World, has a new film showing at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. The semiautobiographical Brand upon the Brain! – a silent quasi-horror film about an orphanage that harvests life-giving brain juice from its wards – will be accompanied by a live orchestra, Foley artists, a castrato, and narration by local star Joan Chen. Maddin, winner of the Persistence of Vision Award at last year’s festival, spoke with the Guardian about his new film and a whole lot of other stuff.
SFBG How involved were you in orchestrating the live performance of Brand upon the Brain!?
GUY MADDIN Well, I was pretty involved in insisting on it. I really, really, really wanted it. In its first incarnation at the Toronto Film Festival, the directors of the festival were good about it. They were gracious, and they made it possible, and then it sort of set the standard for subsequent shows…. I never worried before. You know, when you’re a filmmaker, there’s something in the word film that almost seems to imply the creator is making it more for him or herself. But when you’re putting on a live event, you just automatically …
SFBG You think more about the audience?
GM Yeah, I’ve become more of a showman…. I sort of staged it as an event as a form of boredom insurance, because I do know that you only buy so much audience goodwill with live performances. But then that wasn’t enough for me – I had to add Foley and an interlocutor, and I’m lucky enough to know a bona fide castrato.
SFBG Wait, this is a bona fide castrato?
GM He is, but, well, you know, he wasn’t castrated by the pope [laughs] or anything like that…. He’s an old friend of mine, and I met him many years ago in a steam bath in Winnipeg. I just heard from out of the thick steam a very unearthly voice and for a few nanoseconds thought I was in the wrong steam bath. He sings in a boys’ choir still to this day even though he’s 45 years old. I think his voice just never changed.
SFBG What are you working on right now?
GM I’m pleased to tell you I’m finishing up a documentary on my hometown of Winnipeg. And I’m collaborating with a poet, John Ashbery, on a feature-length Internet interactive movie labyrinth, so that’s kind of exciting for me. And I’m also collaborating on a script in its early stages with Kazuo Ishiguro.
SFBG I heard on some commentary track that you put together features in 20 days or something nuts like that.
GM Yeah, I really like to work quickly. But though most people would never suspect this of me, I really care about scripts being in good shape. And I’m especially proud of the script for Brand upon the Brain!. I feel it’s accessible without at all compromising anything I’ve ever wanted to do. One thing I’ve learned how to do is to become more honest about myself, about how horrible a person I’ve been over the years, and somehow the more honest I am, the more literarily solid my scripts feel.
SFBG Yeah, that’s the dirty secret of film and literature: the nastier you are about yourself –
GM Yeah, the more self-loathing you are, the more self-loving you come off. In this case the protagonist in the movie is actually named Guy Maddin, so it enabled me to be supermasochistic. I just don’t have the imagination to think up the kind of things that are in this movie. There are things that I’ve just outed my family on.
SFBG Really?
GM It’s all there. I just don’t have the time or the genius to –
SFBG To think of nasty things that aren’t true?
GM Yeah, I just had to transplant them pell-mell and wholesale into the body of this thing, and then it was just a simple matter of putting them in order. *
BRAND UPON THE BRAIN
Mon/7, 8 p.m., $20
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
For a longer version of this interview and for short reviews of other films from the second week of the San Francisco International Film Festival, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
> johnny@sfbg.com
If Vincent Gallo turned himself into pure music, what would it sound like? For now, I know how the Gallo I’m talking with sounds: enthusiastic, upbeat – occasionally letting loose an endearing rascally cackle – and extremely alive. Over the course of a great couple hours, he’s raved rather than ranted, giving himself over to rapture while rapping about everyone from Joe Spinell (star of 1980’s gory Maniac and bit-part actor extraordinaire) to Michael Jackson. Vibe, connection, beautiful, and phenomenal are key words in the current Gallo lexicon, and his passion reaches its peak when he discusses RRIICCEE, his new group with Corey Lee Granet and Eric Erlandson, which will be premiering at this year’s Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival.
"I’m in love," Gallo says. "I’m so proud when we’re playing together. Not proud because I think we’re better, but proud I was able to make myself open in this way."
Openness has been key to Gallo’s music to date, as the snaky, at times Moondog-like press-record-and-play charms of his 2002 collection, Recordings of Music for Film (Warp), prove. While Gallo refers to those songs as "documents of creation," he’s still in the discovery process with his new band. To prioritize recording is to "be part of the problem of music," he says, paraphrasing what Erlandson told him during an encounter at a health food store that led to the group’s formation.
"Someone said today, ‘It sounds like a jam band,’ and that was the most gross comment I’ve ever heard in my life," Gallo goes on to clarify, lest anyone mistake his current activities for hoary hippy shtick. "A jam is a disorganized version of the most ordinary cliche habits – that’s the furthest thing from what we’re doing." While he’s quick to distinguish his current project from what he calls the "cabaret" mentality of big-name acts, the man also known as a cinematic lightning rod is out to divine something, perhaps something kindred to the current free-jazz renaissance: "Improv is not a good word [for what we’re doing]. It’s more a gesture of composing and performing at the same time."
The main difference between the Gallo I’m talking with and the one I briefly met during his 2004 road tour for The Brown Bunny is that this guy isn’t as road weary and battle scarred. Understandably so – it’s hard to think of a little movie that sparked such a big furor, not to mention so many misunderstandings. "To hear people say, ‘Oh brilliant, you made a film just so you could get blown,’ in a world where it’s so hard not to get blown," he says, with some exasperation.
I mention that long before he made The Brown Bunny, Gallo once compared its portrait of an unredeemable man to the one within Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom. "I guess it had a similar effect on that filmmaker’s career," he agrees. "People have a hard time swallowing a person like me. I evoke, I irritate in general. I wish that people liked me. I’m just not willing to become anything different to get that [approval]."
A little later, while discussing the way the media can directly distort some talented people’s sense of their own gifts, he utters a telling aside. "Maybe secretly I’m smart enough to know that even in what appear to be self-destructive gestures I have to solve the problem again."
The name Vincent Gallo might not fly to mind when the term likable is invoked, but in fact he’s a charming interview subject, as quip-flaired as Morrissey was once upon a time and genuinely humane in an old-school manner that differs from today’s era of abbreviated cell phone chats. Most of all, he’s in love, and not just with his new group. Tuxedo Moon, the collage artist Jess, the "high" beauty of Taj Mahal guitarist Jesse Ed Davis III, the 1970 movie The Only Game in Town, and the encyclopedic movie knowledge of Sage Stallone (Sly’s son) receive verbal bouquets over the course of our conversation. At one point he plays Jackson’s "I Can’t Help It" (from 1978’s Off the Wall) for me over the phone and says that he often cries when he listens to it.
"My creativity is always motivated by what’s missing, the same way it comes from what’s broken, what needs to be cleaned, what needs to be prepared because I don’t have it," he says, falling into an incantation. "It always comes from loss or from the seed of something that needs to be protected and grown."
Though still lodged in California, the man who made a point of emphasizing his total solo control over The Brown Bunny has moved on in spirit from that East Coast-to-West Coast journey. "If what I do is 50 billion times better than me, then it’s pure crap, because I’m just a jerk," he says. "When you get together with people and transcend yourself, it’s really an exciting moment, and that happened right away with this band." *
RRIICCEE
May 19, call for time and price
Q&A WITH VINCENT GALLO
May 20, call for time and price
Swedish American Music Hall
2174 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
www.mcmf.com
> johnny@sfbg.com
The oldest film festival in the United States and Canada, the San Francisco International Film Festival reaches its golden anniversary this year. That’s half a century of bringing movies from all over the world to one area of America that doesn’t assume America is the world.
At this moment a solo videomaker has to kill at least a few dozen people to storm the multinational media palace. Yeah, this thought crashes the SFIFF’s party. But it adds context to the fest’s contents. One Guardian contributor recently forwarded me a news story that drew specious links between the Virginia Tech tragedy and Park Chan-wook’s 2003 movie Old Boy. The presence of The Bridge (a documentary that uses images of death in a problematic manner) at last year’s SFIFF proves that film festivals also face ethical dilemmas about what they present. Does increasingly pervasive digital imagery correspond with a decrease, rather than an increase, in imagination? Does it prompt a lazy way of seeing and corrupt the meaning of an image?
The SFIFF offers a chance to enjoy – not just ponder or ignore – such questions. As a major progenitor of the festival model that has come to dominate cinema outside of Hollywood, this event often celebrates and represents the establishment, as Sam Green and Christian Bruno’s 2000 short film Pie Fight ’69 makes clear. But unlike many younger festivals, the SFIFF’s programming favors substance over sensation.
George Lucas, Robin Williams, and Spike Lee will be feted this year, but the Guardian‘s SFIFF 50 coverage has an eye for diamonds in the rough: great, quiet films such as Heddy Honigmann’s Forever; a definitely maddening but possibly classic work of art, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth; and digital animator Kelly Sears’s hilarious short works – in step with hallucinatory digital mind-blowers and eye-blinders such as Paper Rad – which feature in the type of one-time-only SFIFF collaborative event that can yield a memorable night.
I’d like to draw attention to the SFIFF’s two entries from the New Crowned Hope series recently curated by Peter Sellars (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt and Garin Nugroho’s dazzling Opera Jawa) and to close by freestyling the praises of Veronica Chen’s gorgeous Agua. In its regard of two generations of men, of male physicality and psychology, it is a pleasurable, less-austere improvement on Claire Denis’s highly acclaimed Beau Travail and part of a possible new wave of cinema – led by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane – that trailblazes the cinematic potential of contemporary sports performance and its portraiture. Dive into it and SFIFF 50. *
The San Francisco International Film Festival is offering a rare treat this year with its presentation of Otar Iosseliani’s latest film, Gardens in Autumn, and Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary about Iosseliani, Otar Iosseliani, The Whistling Blackbird. The director of 2003’s Since Otar Left, Bertuccelli has worked as Iosseliani’s assistant director, so her portrait goes well beyond a primer on his body of work, which began in Soviet Georgia in the late ’50s and continued through his relocation to France in 1982.
After a shaky beginning that has Iosseliani quoting Aleksandr Pushkin at length without translation, the doc moves quickly into the meat and potatoes of Gardens in Autumn‘s construction, such as a poetic demonstration of the transition from storyboarding to shooting. The sisterly abuse Iosseliani endures from his producer, though, is probably the best stuff in the film ("You took that idea from another screenplay"; "You’re not Rivette! Cut it down!"; "This ending is stupid"). Bertuccelli’s document of the bumpy road to a final product is a fascinating counterpoint to the sensuous languor of Iosseliani’s film.
Gardens in Autumn starts as unpromisingly as the doc, as a broadly Bunuelian satire of the bourgeoisie (a comic wife buys expensive junk, a bureaucrat quietly smokes a cigarette as a labor demonstration swells), but the story almost immediately makes a welcome 180-degree turn. As if our hero Vincent (Severin Blanchet) can sense the satire in progress, he abruptly resigns his post as a government minister and returns to the town of his youth, where his mother (Michel Piccoli, a fixture in Luis Bunuel’s French work, in convincing drag) holds court in an extravagant mansion and drunken clergymen with frat boy temperaments roam the streets. The film fans out into a thinly plotted waltz through the good life, where even the occasional bursts of violence look like they might be fun. It’s the type of film in which a man can shrug off the squatter inundation of his apartment and move into the secret back room behind the bookcase.
The critic J. Hoberman described one of Iosseliani’s recent ensemble films somewhat dismissively as a "genteel circus," but the tag can also serve as an affectionate characterization of his best work. His latest exercise in modulated hedonism may not have much to say on the politics of happiness, but sometimes that can be a blessing. (Jason Shamai)
GARDENS IN AUTUMN (Otar Iosseliani, France/Russia/Italy, 2006). Sun/29, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 6, 8 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki
OTAR IOSSELIANI, THE WHISTLING BLACKBIRD (Julie Bertuccelli, France, 2006). Fri/27, 4 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 3, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki
We here in San Francisco and the Bay Area might have it better than anywhere else in the US when it comes to breadth and variety of movie programming. We’ve got different rep houses, the usual chains, some daring museums, possibly the best independent spaces, and so many festivals I’ve given up counting. Yet while there’s no avoiding a coming blockbuster, there’s still a chance that a great movie or a movie that at least sounds like it has potential might not come to town. In that spirit, with a monumental SFIFF 50 banquet set to commence, I’m throwing down a list of 50 movies I’d like to see — films or videos that (I think) have yet to play here. I’ve spoken with enough programmers to know that some things listed below might be impossible or overly expensive dreams, while others might simply turn out to be rotten. If something below has played SF, email me at johnny@sfbg.com, and I’ll take it off the list and replace it with something else. This list is now open — to endless revision. What do you want to see? Post your suggestions; I wanna know!
Long before Al Gore saw green in front of a blue screen and Hollywood used the Academy Awards to congratulate itself for suddenly becoming ecofriendly, Tsai Ming-liang braided more than a half dozen superb movies set in parts of a poisoned planet that Americans rarely contemplate. Resulting in at least a pair of classics — 1997’s The River and 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn — Tsai’s one of a kind linked works to date have been distinguished by their not just rare but entirely singular realism and prescience about everyday pollution. Along with Todd Haynes’s similarly radical 1995 melodrama, Safe, The River uncovers the taken-for-granted toxicity of human-made environments and does so with a depth that realizes there is no easy diagnosis, let alone cure.
Tsai’s palette changes a bit in his latest film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the first set in his birth country, Malaysia. Instead of the soaked Taipei that dominates most of his alienated romantic comedies, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone occupies a Kuala Lumpur beset by nearby fires. While painterly, the colors aren’t so glossy, partly because smoke gets in Tsai’s eyes and those of the film’s lovers, who of course include his frequent star Chen Shiang-chyi and his muse, Lee Kang-sheng. If (as Tsai once suggested to me) Lee’s characters are connected to — if not directly reflective of — Tsai’s view of whatever Lee’s going through in his offscreen life, then Tsai must be annoyed to the point of murderous thoughts. This time Lee is leading a double life, leaving the gorgeous Norman Atun to pine for him just as Lee once pined in what was previously Tsai’s most literal musical-beds narrative, 1994’s Vive l’Amour. Unrequited love has a long life in Tsai’s world, where hearts are pure while water and air are toxic. (Johnny Ray Huston)
PIANO MAN On April 13, 1957, at an assembly room in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, George Michalski gave his first piano recital. He played John W. Schaum’s "Snake Dance" and "The Sphinx" and closed with "My First Waltz," by Bjarne Rolseth, from G. Schirmer’s Piano Solo series for students. "My mom was so excited leaving the house that she tripped and sprained her ankle," Michalski remembers. "She went to the show anyway and stayed for the whole recital — then we took care of her leg."
On April 13, 2007, Michalski will put on another piano recital in San Francisco. This time it won’t be at the library, but his mother will attend. So will some special guests — unsurprising, since in the 50 years after his first performance, Michalski’s ivory-tickling talent has led to collaborations with everyone from Blue Cheer to Barbra Streisand.
"The most exciting thing about making music is to go from Blue Cheer to someone like Streisand," Michalski says while discussing his special anniversary show, which one friend has described as vaudevillian. "Blue Cheer is so far into [pure volume and distortion] that I think of them as classical music. The biggest challenge of playing with them was peer pressure. When I worked with Streisand [on songs such as "The Man I Love" and the soundtrack to 1979’s The Main Event], I tried to get her to listen to blues. She was very open-minded."
A member of Foxtrot — the onetime house band at both Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go and its chief competitor, the Starwood, and also the first white group signed to Motown Records (where Smokey Robinson gave Michalski a piano and Berry Gordy’s mother, Bertha, signed his checks) — Michalski has rubbed creative shoulders with everyone from Don Johnson to some of the best-known mimes in the world and crossed paths with political figures such as Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu.
The ’70s television mainstays Shields and Yarnell, currently on a reunion farewell tour, are the aforementioned mimes. "Robert [Shields] was discovered right here in the Bay Area, in Union Square — the term street mime was invented to describe him," Michalski says, then adds some funny details that could cause someone wearing pancake makeup to become red-faced. "Robert hates most street mimes — because they’re not very good and they give mimes a bad name. I’ve seen him stand there, watch a mime, and rip the guy to shreds. And when mimes recognize that it’s Robert watching them, boy, do they get nervous."
In recent years Michalski has been making music with the original tabloid target, Eddie Fisher. "Confidential magazine got started by writing about him — he was on their first cover," Michalski says, while praising Fisher’s gentle nature. "The whole notion of the paparazzi partly started with him and Liz [Taylor]. That guy has seen a lot, and what he hasn’t seen, his daughters have — Carrie Fisher is no slouch."
To put together his anniversary show, Michalski drew from an idea he first landed on with his friend the late Vince Welnick, keyboardist for the Tubes, in which a strange array of friends stop by his apartment to perform. In addition to unconventional cover versions of songs that have made a few of the special guests famous and some dueling piano boogie-woogie interludes, the evening — presided over by MC Steve Parrish — will likely include numbers from Michalski’s most recent recordings, including San Francisco (Masia Music, 2002), which transforms his love of the city into a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, song-by-song portrait. "This show is different, but there’s no dead time," Michalski says at the end of our conversation before leaving to meet his mother. "It runs like an Italian train system." (Johnny Ray Huston)
AN EVENING WITH GEORGE MICHALSKI
Fri/13, 7:30 p.m., $20
Fat City
314 11th St., SF
www.ticketfusion.com
www.georgemichalski.com
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Frame by Frame” presentation last Friday (April 6) at the Pacific Film Archive of his lovely 2004 pain in the ass Tropical Malady didn’t provide much in the way of explanations. Armed with a DVD player remote and an unpretentious appreciation of his own film, the Thai director instead offered truckloads of tiny, personal details as reassurance that the thick-growth trail through his story is a simple one if we just let it be.
Whereas David Lynch at times utilizes all the excesses of a bad rock video to give form to the dream logic of his films, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul creates quietly evocative cinematic reveries. Paced to the unhurried rhythms of their character’s lives and structured around the landscapes (frequently, the verdantly green jungles of his native Thailand) in which they unfold, Apichatpong’s films invite introspective contemplation as much as they have puzzled many an audience and critic. His elliptical narratives, shot through with moments of sharp humor and unexpected beauty, are imbued with a sense of openness, a kind of responsive flexibility that allows their course to be redirected by other forces: a song, memories, folktales. These last two items, in particular, kept coming up as Apichatpong discussed his latest feature Syndromes and a Century (a twice told tale loosely based on how his parents met, showing April 13-15 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), his love of American disaster movies, and the magical potential of film. (Matt Sussman)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actor Sakda Kaewbuadee accepting the Jury Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival
Guardian: You are doing a scene by scene breakdown of Tropical Malady at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. How do you feel about that kind of engagement with your film?
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I’m not sure. I’m excited about it, because it’s a film that’s quite difficult to explain. One part of my mind thinks that it’s not good to talk about this film because it’s very open to interpretation, but another part thinks that it’s a very nice way to get the audience’s feedback. And I may learn that we can also maybe adapt [the format] and do similar events in Thailand, where very few people relate to my films.
› johnny@sfbg.com
Into the past or on to the future? That’s the push-pull current that charges the Junior Boys. The tension is even casually present during an interview with the Canadian duo’s singer and veteran member, Jeremy Greenspan. Discussing the ’80s new wave influences floating through the second Junior Boys album, 2006’s So This Is Goodbye (Domino), Greenspan stresses that he discovered such sounds through dance music — Goldie sampling Japan, for example — rather than stadium rock or indie rock, and then declares, "I listen to OMD and Ultravox and Japan and Simple Minds and hear a lot of potential for new and exciting things." Yet later, when the conversation turns to So This Is Goodbye‘s lyrics, he says, "For me the central theme of the album is nostalgia."
Greenspan isn’t contradicting himself. One of the rich pleasures of So This Is Goodbye, a rare modern-day recording that keeps on giving in the manner of a well-crafted album, is the way it delves deep into music and personal memories from decades past while also crafting a signature sound. One of its best tracks, "Count Souvenirs," blooms from the instantly haunting chime motif Greenspan and partner Matt Didemus create, a melody that echoes Depeche Mode’s "Strangelove." Yet the subtlety of Greenspan’s singing and his words could give Dave Gahan a lesson in how to channel the crooner era without being as tacky as an endless engagement in Las Vegas purgatory.
"I had this idea of our record being a kind of electronic crooner record," says Greenspan, who cites the likes of Nat King Cole, Chet Baker, and Frank Sinatra as inspirations. An arctic cover of one of Sinatra’s staple sad ballads, the Sammy Cahn–Jimmy van Heusen composition "When No One Cares," is perhaps So This Is Goodbye‘s major fulcrum, with lyrics that hook backward into the titles of songs that precede it, such as the trinket-obsessed "Count Souvenirs" and the deathly call for affection "Like a Child," in which Perrey and Kingsley–like blips slowly give way to ghostly harmonies.
A mordant, morbid sensibility has long been dominant within the Junior Boys. This is a group that titled its debut Last Exit (Kin, 2004) and has now given a new EP of remixes the name Dead Horse (Domino, 2007). Loss and melancholy are a major part of the duo’s history — Greenspan’s original partner, Johnny Dark, departed before they’d finished a full-length recording, and Nick Kilroy, a friend who ran the group’s original label, Kin, died in 2005. So This Is Goodbye begins with "Double Shadow," whose core image suggests both self-recrimination and a sense of being haunted. "I suppose there is some Freudian way of reading it as a song directed inward," Greenspan says when asked about the track, which builds to a taut climax, at which its complex syncopation seems to turn inside out.
As an interview subject, Greenspan has a flair for dramatic phrasing that is comparatively subdued in his Junior Boys lyrics. He discusses styles of vocalization and the direct sensuality of his speech-based approach in comparison to current singing clichés, targeting "the U2 syndrome" (of "trying to sound as big and histrionic as possible") and "the American Idol effect" (in which "whoever can sing the loudest with the most notes" is deemed especially emotional). There is a Morrissey-esque quality to some of his pronouncements, such as his early Smiths–like notion that "love songs never accurately portray what love and sex is all about."
Morrissey could use a songwriting partner as creatively sympathetic as Didemus, whose relatively silent presence seems to have helped Greenspan as a singer and a figurehead. His voice is front and center more often and more assuredly within his own vast, spare arrangements. It’s no wonder a kindred neodisco spirit such as Metro Area’s Morgan Geist has recently called on him for vocals. "I think for modern bands of all descriptions, the tendency is to push the vocal as another instrument in the mix," Greenspan observes. "But with [So This Is Goodbye], I had more confidence. Listening to crooner records, I noticed how present the vocals can be, so I kept pushing my own voice louder and louder while mixing." Subtly rising up out of the past and away from loss — that’s the current sound, and the voice, of the Junior Boys. *
JUNIOR BOYS
April 25, 9 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
(415) 625-8880
Delroy Lindo has appeared in dozens of films over the years. Currently, he’s directing Tanya Barfield’s Blue Door at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Lindo, who played Herald Loomis in the Broadway run of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, has only recently returned to the stage. He brings the intensity and drive that comes through on the screen to his directorial work – this is the first time he’s directed in the Bay Area – and to his conversation. Tommy Amano-Tompkins recently spoke with him.
Delroy Lindo
Guardian: There’s a scene in Blue Door in which the protagonist, Lewis, the only black man at a faculty party, looks at his hands and feels a kind of cosmic dislocation – misunderstood and out of place. You’re nearly six feet four inches tall – did you ever wish you were a few inches shorter?
Delroy Lindo: You mean as a black man? Did I ever wish I stood out less because of how people react to me? No, never. Would I prefer because of my size that I not be responded to the way I am? Certainly. Because often people don’t respond to the way a person is but to the way they think a person is. That’s the problem. And that’s exactly one of the things that the play is examining.
No one knows more about timing than Lypsinka, who could school every MTV video clone of the past two decades on the art of talking silent and saying something. The lady is in town at the Plush Room with her most recent show, The Passion of the Crawford. While Passion draws upon an onstage interview with a drunk, fiesty and almost huggable Joan Crawford for much of its material, Lypsinka’s portrayal is still hypnotically scathing, while also appreciative of the star’s pre-feminist power. It’s completely amazing how Lypsinka can mouth the words of someone long dead more convincingly than just about any stage actor can deliver words using his or her own voice.
Lypsinka as (and in front of) Joan
I recently gave Lypsinka’s leading man, John Epperson, a call to discuss matters of great importance: After Dark magazine, Marilyn Maye, Greer Garson, Grayson Hall, Bette vs. Joan, Pepsi, and the glory of The Fury. Click and ye shall find.
LIP SERVICE "Why are gay men fascinated with Joan Crawford?" John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, asks contemplatively over the phone from New York. "One reason I’m drawn to her is because of her face, which is so graphic — beautiful and scary and ridiculous at the same time. It became even more so in the 1950s, and then in the ’60s and the ’70s, it softened somehow."
All alone in a hallowed spot somewhere above great female impersonators from the past who lack a feminist consciousness and contemporary drag queens who don’t know how to act, one finds Lypsinka, the role of a lifetime for Epperson, who translates cinematic gestures to the stage like no other performer. Lypsinka’s new show, The Passion of the Crawford, portrays the great movie star through a different avenue than that used by most post–Mommie Dearest drag queens. The show’s source material is Joan Crawford Live at Town Hall, an onstage interview with Crawford late in her career. "When I moved to New York in 1978," Epperson says, "I remember that across the street from Radio City Music Hall there was a whole window in the Sam Goody store promoting the vinyl recording of Live at Town Hall. It had this multiple Andy Warhol–like image of her, and of course I had to have it."
The Crawford captured on Town Hall is more than a little tipsy. A recent bootleg CD reissue has fun with her awkward asides about planes flying through thunderheads and her many portentous declarations, ending with a remix that splices her comments for maximum comedy: "I wish I were Duke Wayne, really. Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way." Considering Lypsinka’s incredible offstage talent for editing dialogue, it’s safe to assume that The Passion of the Crawford won’t play things straight either.
But in sticking to a thorough portrait of Crawford rather than using dialogue from dozens of movies to form the ultimate movie megadiva, The Passion of the Crawford marks a departure for the peerless Lypsinka, whose visits to San Francisco’s Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint in the ’90s might be the last peaks of an era when there was art instead of just commerce in the Castro. This show returns for its second run at the downtown cabaret mainstay the Plush Room, which is fitting since Epperson mentions the celebrated cabaret return of 75-year-old Marilyn Maye as one recent inspiration.
There’s a fun irony to a phone chat with Epperson, the real voice behind the lip-synching star of some of the most hilarious phone call scenes ever staged, and by the end of our interview, we’re as tipsy as Crawford at Town Hall. But in this case, we’re drunk on camp, whether discussing Pauline Kael’s rave review of Brian de Palma’s The Fury ("She totally got it," Epperson says), an After Dark review of Little Edie Bouvier Beale’s post–Grey Gardens cabaret show ("Did it talk about the eye patch she wore over her eye with the flower attached to it?" he asks), or the many splendors of Dario Argento’s Suspiria ("I love it when Joan Bennett says, ‘We’ve got to kill that bitch of an American girl,’ " he declares, doing a perfect Bennett impression). Of course, a mention of Suspiria-era Bennett can only lead to her Dark Shadows costar Grayson Hall. I tell Epperson that I have a biography about Hall titled A Hard Act to Follow. "A hard actress to follow," he retorts.
During a recent Washington, DC, engagement of The Passion of the Crawford, Epperson used his time offstage to dig through the Library of Congress’s film collection and see movies such as 1971’s Pretty Maids All in a Row, directed by Roger Vadim and starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson. "Roddy McDowell and Keenan Wynne are also in it," Epperson says. "And an actress called Joy Bang. Have you ever heard of Joy Bang?
"What else can I tell you?" (Johnny Ray Huston)
THE PASSION OF THE CRAWFORD
Through April 22
Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $42.50–$47.50
Plush Room
940 Sutter, SF
1-866-468-3399
For a Q&A with John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
› johnny@sfbg.com
No one turns the tables on the turntable quite like Otomo Yoshihide. San Francisco is a renowned turntablist holy land, thanks to the Return of the DJ comps David Paul has put out on Bomb Records, and the stylus-stylish feats of Q-Bert and the Invisibl Skratch Picklz. Yet the most audio-inventive and visionary SF-set turntable achievements to date probably reside within the new CD-DVD Multiple Otomo (Asphodel), largely recorded during the artist’s recent Bay Area visit. There, Otomo attacks the turntable’s potential for sound from dozens of wholly inventive angles, playing it as a musical instrument rather than using it as a piece of stereo equipment. Vinyl isn’t a necessary ingredient. Otomo shows a system that broadcasts music can also be used to make music. He turns an outmoded machine inside out and invents it anew.
Such praise for Multiple Otomo, while based in truth, likely means little to its chief creator. Whether he’s recording, engaged in sampling, or warping the parameters of live performance, he’s expressed little interest in consumer products and little regard for music that subjugates itself to words.
Nonetheless, the audio-only component of Multiple Otomo, Monochrome Otomo, is a CD of 18 tracks, each of which has a title and all of which trigger a writer’s descriptive imagination through their sonic properties. "Generator and Records" tracks rhythms of crackle — albeit with even less interest in pop repetition than snap-crackle-pop contemporaries such as Ryoji Ikeda and Thomas "Klick" Brinkmann. "Turntable Feedback" sculpts rusty, serrated chunks of cacophony with an authority that noise guitarists such as Nels Cline might covet. "Records" sounds like an infernal engine attempting to come back to life. Discarded technology doesn’t possess soul, but Otomo excavates soul from it. "Cardboard Chip Needle" features howls and horn squawks that are equivalent to nails on a chalkboard in terms of primal abrasiveness, yet Otomo — a free jazz heir of Masayuki Takayanagi, whose guitar assaults once famously caused student radicals to riot against him — also can use a six-stringed electric as a steel drum of sorts and create a gorgeously spooky, Harry Partch–like journey into a night forest.
But rather than chart new shades of purple with simile and metaphor, it might be better — or at least less silly — to use analogy when discussing Multiple Otomo. One track on the CD portion, "Cut Records," possesses a quality that isn’t far from what Peter Tscherkassky does on film: what might be the soundtrack to an old movie sounds like it’s fighting to escape the broken stereo that traps it. As Tscherkassky does in his mind-blowing celluloid reworks of Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity, Otomo taps into the convulsive properties of his media (equipment) and his medium.
One of Otomo’s behind-the-camera collaborators on the frequently awesome DVD portion of Multiple Otomo is filmmaker Michelle Silva of San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema, who has a definite appreciation of Tscherkassky. Like Tscherkassky, Otomo is the type of experimental artist whose work is directly pure and powerful rather than arcane or deliberately hard to understand. The visual component of Multiple Otomo is intimate with Otomo’s methods. Semiabstract close-ups rule, and Otomo’s hands get into all kinds of trouble. Indeed, Otomo is frequently multiplied, as the title promises, but he’s also got a trickster’s proficiency for disappearing from the scene.
In addition to textural visual splendor — overlays, scratched surfaces, kaleidoscopic reflections, screens within screens, the hypnotic spinning dances of fluorescent records, the hot, tarlike gleam of burning black vinyl — there are numerous humorous treats within some of Multiple Otomo‘s DVD chapters. While many of Otomo’s activities are a retro audiophile dude’s worst nightmare come to life, "Vinyls" is also playfully disrespectful in its approach to the collector mentality, putting an Al Green Hi Records classic through tortures while ultimately saving the worst violence for Evita and Supertramp. (Ah, sweet justice.) Though Otomo frequently proves you don’t need records to play a record player, on "Tinfoil," two bits of the titular object begin to resemble the legs of a dancer with an extreme case of the jitters.
Frankly, any object that finds itself near the hands of Otomo Yoshihide should have a case of the jitters. It’s bound to discover that its end justifies his means. *
www.japanimprov.com/yotomo
› johnny@sfbg.com "The only way out is forward!" a character exclaims roughly 65 minutes into 1972’s 111-minute-long The Poseidon Adventure. The same guy says the same thing around 46 minutes into Anne McGuire’s 2006 remake-reversal of exactly the same length, Adventure Poseidon The. Yet no matter how or when it’s sliced, the soon-to-be-doomed character’s sentiment isn’t quite right. In Ronald Neame’s original, the way out is actually up — albeit through the bottom of a capsized ship. In McGuire’s version, the way out isn’t exactly backward (she doesn’t merely rewind The Poseidon Adventure) but rather forward in reverse. By faithfully following the bread-crumb trail laid down by the 1972’s film’s editor, Harold F. Kress, McGuire rescues the film’s huge cast of survivors and casualties and its gargantuan ship. In the process, McGuire gives viewers a chance to see a beloved cult movie anew. She may not have time for on-deck shuffleboard, but her rigorous reshuffling and storyboarding of The Poseidon Adventure is a rare example of formal art practice that never loses touch with the pop appeal of its source material. Ambivalent passion for the too-abundant things and people of pop culture is at the root of McGuire’s admirably varied movies to date and even her current official biography, which begins by stating that she was born in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant (meaning Minnesota). In 1991’s classic Joe DiMaggio, 1, 2, 3, McGuire stalks-serenades the actual slugger as he takes a senior stroll through the Marina, and in 1997’s equally great I’m Crazy and You’re Not Wrong, she sings and rambles like a wigged-out ghost who’s emerged from cracks in Liza Minnelli’s and Judy Garland’s skulls during one of their black-and-white TV duets. Adventure Poseidon The isn’t the first time McGuire has hopscotched from an original film’s end to its beginning — she did so with 1992’s Strain Andromeda The. But in this case, as with her more performative work, she’s overtly drawing from life experience — she has survived a shipwreck. In that sense, this latest project is directly connected to a movie like 1996’s When I Was a Monster, in which McGuire takes a long mirrored look at her injured body shortly after she’d literally fallen off a cliff. Circling against itself, Adventure Poseidon The‘s choppy dramatic momentum — each shot moves toward an end, then connects to the start of a scene that originally came before it — heightens the visual properties of Neame’s original. Characters retreat from dynamic deaths. Fatal falls through rings of fire become burning baptisms. Lit from below, dazed onlookers could have wandered in from a Euro art film of the ’60s. The ebbs and flows make one of John Williams’s less sappy scores more interesting. A viewer can dwell on the strange ’70s trend (see also: Dario Argento’s 1976 Suspiria) of people plummeting through stained-glass windows and wonder whether it’s Neame’s movie or John Waters’s 1974 Female Trouble that contains the most surreally violent abuse of a Christmas tree. And of course there’s Oscar-winning Shelley Winters, the movie’s underwater swimming champ and "600-pound swordfish," giving a truly heroic performance, triumphant even when her rump’s tinsel-strewn in close-up. Lacking a Charlton Heston who has since gone gun crazy or a tainted O.J. Simpson, the cast of The Poseidon Adventure is both Ernest Borgnine–ed and benign in comparison to those of the disaster films that followed. When Jennifer Jones fell from a great glass elevator in 1974’s The Towering Inferno, she was following in the footsteps of Poseidon‘s Stella Stevens, and Ava Gardner’s fatal drowning in Earthquake‘s Los Angeles sewer tunnels the same year is another variation on that doomed-lady theme. One suspects that just as McGuire was born in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant, she also grew up in the era of the disaster movie. With Adventure Poseidon The — a perfect movie for what one can only pray is the end of the George W. Bush era — she returns to the scene of a catastrophe and proves that if there’s got to be a morning after, there’s also got to be a night before. * ADVENTURE POSEIDON THE (THE UNSINKING OF MY SHIP) Thurs/29, 6:30 p.m. (screening and artist talk), $5–$7 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Phyllis Wattis Theater 151 Third St., SF (415) 357-4000 www.sfmoma.org www.vdb.org Look for an interview with Anne McGuire this week at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
If she could turn back time
40-Year-Old Virgin:
55-Year-Old Money-Guru Lesbian Virgin:
All hail the promiscuous creative and collaborative imagination of Chelonis R. Jones. He recently teamed up with Marc Romboy on the sick single “Helen Cornell,” a slice of voice-over-beats that is bettered only by Jones’s “Black Sabrina” in terms of fierceness. (There has never been a spoken track as fierce as “Black Sabrina.”) Jones singing is even better than Jones speaking, especially on tracks such as “One and One” and “I Don’t Know?,” which he put together with Booka Shade, who are due at Mezzanine soon.
His own website is a feast of tracks, paintings and other stimuli, and Chelonis recently debuted his MySpace page, which features an article I wrote about his amazing debut Dislocated Genius, as well as some preview tracks from his next album, Chatterton. (Check out “Pompadour” — amazing.) The time seemed right for Mr. Jones to list some of his favorite albums. “I wanted to tell someone about all these,” he said during a recent phone chat. “People always think I have all these techno gods on my list of favorites, when really it’s far from that.”
› johnny@sfbg.com
Life on tour isn’t just about partying. It’s partly about crafty use of time and space. In that sense, the German electronic duo Booka Shade are expert pragmatists. Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier don’t just attempt to write songs while they’re on planes or in hotel rooms — they’ll record them as well. "In a traditional studio you always have the same atmosphere. Day and night changes, of course, yet it’s basically the same," Kammermeier explains over the phone from Berlin. "But if you travel and have a laptop with you, you can look out the window and see a new, completely different thing while recording."
Such flexibility is at the core of Booka Shade’s second album, on their self-run label, Get Physical. Its very title, Movements, reflects a recording process propelled by the touring connected with flagship club hits such as "Body Language" and the irresistible dance floor stormer "Mandarine Girl," which boasts a melody that sounds like it was made with a gargantuan electronic woodwind. "We had a good time meeting people internationally, and all that energy went into Movements," Kammermeier says, discussing the record, which like most of the group’s releases sports Hannah Hoch–like cut-with-a-kitchen-knife body parts on its sleeve art. "That’s probably why it’s a lot less dark than Memento [the duo’s 2004 debut] and has more drive."
It would be hard for Movements to be darker than Memento, considering Booka Shade’s first album, complete with a name that might have been borrowed from Christopher Nolan, repeatedly digs into the realm of film ("16MM") and especially film noir ("Vertigo"). "It’s not like we have a library of 10,000 DVDs, but we like the combination of pictures and music," says Kammermeier, who also scores commercials with Merziger. "One thing we did for [Memento] was put a film on with the sound off and watch the pictures while we were working — that atmosphere gave us a lot of inspiration."
Booka Shade’s inspiration and reputation stem from their label as much as their music. In recent years Get Physical has garnered a critical rep that calls to mind canonical imprints such as Warp and the still thriving house-inflected Kompakt. This praise is due to Booka Shade’s constant collaborations with mix-oriented labelmates such as DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. and to their production work on tracks such as a pair of classic early singles by Chelonis R. Jones, "One and One" and "I Don’t Know?" Those tracks are peerless in both a pop and a club sense, with "I Don’t Know?" suggesting what would happen if a male diva from the heyday of Chicago house who possessed encyclopedic brilliance hooked up with "Blue Monday"–era New Order. "The chorus of ‘One and One’ wasn’t originally a chorus as Chelonis had sung it," Kammermeier says while discussing the collaborations. "We placed it there, like part of a puzzle."
Working with a talent as singular as Jones is a far cry from the duo’s early days in the music business, when they created Europop for Spice Girls–esque major-label prefab acts such as No Angels, a girl group for whom they designed a cover of Alison Moyet’s "All Cried Out." The dead-end results of those efforts and of Merziger and Kammermeier’s first venture as a group, called Planet Claire, led them to start Get Physical. That, and a desire to broaden the formulaic boundaries of techno in particular and electronic music in general — a desire further sparked on hearing well-arranged ’70s- and ’80s-tinged tracks by the likes of Metro Area.
"Walter and I were both kids of the ’80s," says Kammermeier, who grew up with a jazz musician father and guitar- and piano-playing siblings, while Merziger was raised by a Richard Wagner–loving father. "Anything that came out of England — Soft Cell, the Smiths, Depeche Mode — was very influential to us." Last year the duo’s ’80s influences came full circle when Booka Shade remixed and shared concert bills with the last group. And it turns out Kammermeier is listening to Soft Cell again, having recently downloaded both their underrated aggro 1984 finale, This Last Night in Sodom, which includes early studio work by the influential producer Flood, and their 1983 sophomore effort, The Art of Falling Apart. "I just listened to [Art] again," Kammermeier admits. "There’s so much frustration and darkness in those songs."
There’s so much frustration that it might seep into Booka Shade’s sound, if song titles are worthwhile clues. One single from The Art of Falling Apart was the club ho litany "Numbers," and it turns out the first single from Booka Shade’s next full-length recording will bear the same name. "We want to introduce a vocal side on the next album," Kammermeier says when describing "Numbers" and some of the group’s other songs, including a track created by Merziger in a Rio hotel room. "We’ll introduce it in a different way — not verse-chorus vocal but little parts that we perform. We’re not great fans of these ‘featured artist’ albums, where people just get a handful of star vocalists to perform on different tracks. Also, we can’t bring a bunch of vocalists or a session vocalist on the road."
That said, Booka Shade do aim to put their show on the road in the old-school sense — an ambitious plan at a time when many of the best electronic music makers are still better off DJing than pulling rock star poses on a stage. "People always ask what instrument I play, and I say, ‘I’m one of those guys who hangs out with musicians — I’m a drummer,’ " Kammermeier jokes. He’ll have to put that joke into practice as he and Merziger embark on their second US tour — and maybe he’ll write and record some songs while in flight as well. *
BOOKA SHADE
With Future Force and Hours of Worship
March 23, 9 p.m., $14 advance
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
(415) 625-8880
www.getphysical.com
For a top 10 list from Booka Shade’s Get Physical labelmate Chelonis R. Jones, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.
› johnny@sfbg.com
First things first: even if there’s been a Michael Mann remake of Miami Vice between the day that Pusha T and Malice first rhymed about Tubbs and Crockett and now, Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury (Re Up Gang/Star Trak, 2006) also hath no shortage of extraordinary future-sounds. It never lets up, from the three tracks before the cold Clipse calypso of the new-money anthem "Wamp Wamp" through the seven tracks after the harp strum, extended and echoed for maximum shimmer, on "Ride Around Shining" — a startling use of the instrument that ain’t Alice Coltrane and sure as hell ain’t Joanna Newsom. On "Keys Open Doors," ah harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place on Philip Glass’s project-haunting Candyman soundtrack back up a title chorus that turns passage metaphors inside out.
Then there’s "Chinese New Year," on which Clipse’s Malice and Pusha T are joined by the hilariously named Roscoe P. Goldchain for a drive-by in which the ammo is punch-line rap: "Mask on face / Glock in hand," Malice is "in and out of houses like the Orkin Man," while Pusha T has a vixen who’ll "eat your face like Ms. Pac-Man." Speaking of white lines and dots and those who gobble and snort them, the Neptunes’ production backs these boasts with keyboard squiggles that aren’t far from the noises vintage video game monsters make when they’re turned into ghosts.
The trademark Neptunes sound has never been better than on Hell Hath, but their touch is a curse as well as a blessing for Clipse. It’s a curse because of Pharrell Williams’s overexposure and because the long-delayed Hell Hath finally dropped at the exact time that Williams and fellow Neptune Chad Hugo unveiled their worst overdecorated cake of a pop production — the yodeling monstrosity known as "Wind It Up," Gwen Stefani’s leadoff single from The Sweet Escape. Some East Coast bloggers have given themselves a hand for helping boost Hell Hath ‘s sales numbers, but commercially speaking, the album has underperformed like, well, a Pharrell solo effort.
But I’d much rather blast Hell Hath than Pharrell’s In My Mind (Interscope, 2006), not to mention all but a handful of other albums released last year. The reasons why are too many to be named in full. But one is that Pharrell takes a backseat, doing less MCing and fewer pint-size Curtis Mayfield impressions than on 2002’s Lord Willin‘. In fact, his misleading front-and-center presence on the first single, "Mr. Me Too," probably didn’t do Pusha T and Malice any sales favors. On Hell Hath, the track signals the arrival of a bottom end after two lean and mean cuts — the organ-based church of coke testifying of "We Got It for Cheap" and the polka minimalism of the accordion-laced "Momma I’m So Sorry." That bottom end goes Jules Verne deep, whereas Pharrell’s version of boasting — all Diddy parties and skateboard contracts — comes off cartoony and corny next to Pusha T and Malice’s dealing drama. The only category in which he’s fresher is a stale one, bling: he mentions "Lorraine" (Schwartz), and Clipse refers to the oft-cited Jacob the Jeweler on another track. On Hell Hath‘s closer, "Nightmares," it’s Bilal rather than Pharrell who does the Mayfield impression, just one reason why as a paranoid anthem — that rap paradox with Robert Johnson roots, an affirmation of sketchy solitude — it’s closer to the Geto Boys’ classic "Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me" than it is to Rockwell’s "Somebody’s Watchin’ Me."
"No hotta / Flow droppa / Since Poppa," Pusha T asserts at the kickoff of "Wamp Wamp." Though he follows that up with a truly terrific double-edged pun ("You penny ante niggaz see I know copper" — and also "no Copper"), it’s a bit of a stretch to claim he and Malice are in the Biggie leagues. Take Life after Death‘s "What’s Beef?" (Bad Boy, 1997), on which Biggie begins with a vainglorious "ha ha ha ha ha," declares himself the "rap Alfred Hitchcock," and rhymes "I see you" and ICU. On that track he also serves up the couplet "Think good thoughts, die while your skin starts to glisten / Pale blue hands get cold, your soul’s risen." In comparison, on "Chinese New Year," Clipse threaten they’ll turn you "Cookie Monster blue." Scary cute but no don’s cigar.
But they’re closer to Biggie than most anyone else these days, save maybe their rival, Bush-bashing Lil’ Wayne. Hell Hath is packed with almost as many cleverly phrased disguises for cocaine as it is amazing noises, yet Pusha T and Malice’s brand of brotherly love and hate is at its best when it surrounds the drug with an image-laden story, as on "Dirty Money." There, one track after his big bro demonstrates how to cook drugs like a "black Martha Stewart," Pusha T gets so high on his ability to transform substances and words that Benjamin Franklin’s face starts to look 3-D and silly on some "new crisp billies." By the time he and Malice are dealing with the inevitable comedown on "Nightmares," the substance of their words could turn the warmest smile upside down. *
CLIPSE
With Low B of Hollertronix
Wed/14, 9 p.m., $20
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
www.clipseonline.com
