Johnny Ray Huston

Seasonal, effective

David Talbot
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Seasonal, effective

johnny@sfbg.com

FILM In taking on the subject of family in the documentary October Country, co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher face some imposing specters, and I’m not just talking about the varied stories of the Mosher family, who step in front of the camera. If there’s any micro-genre within documentary that has become embattled over the past decade, it’s the family portrait, thanks to controversial or contentious works such as Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (both from 2003), son-of-Gray Gardens freakouts which incited claims of exploitation and sensationalism on their paths to a larger public profile.

Palmieri’s and Mosher’s movie is a quieter work, yet it isn’t folksy in a complacent Sundance manner, either. (It’s worth noting that October Country has picked up its fest-circuit awards outside of Park City.) The list of the maladies plaguing the Mosher clan — physical abuse, drug abuse, war trauma, custody battles, and abortion, to name a handful — would provoke an ambulance-chasing impulse in some filmmakers, blood ties be damned. But Palmieri (who edited and did cinematography) and Mosher (a former San Francisco resident whose photo essays on his family were shown at Artists’ Television Access) realize these are common American problems, and their treatment of them is at once deeper and more ephemeral. They use the passage of a year from one Halloween to the next to reveal the changes wrought — or evident — on a person’s face, and when they can, a person’s life.

While volatile men have left a mark on the Mosher women, October Country makes a quiet case for the family as an enduring matriarchy by beginning with introductions of its female generations: grandmother Dottie, daughter Donna, granddaughters Daneal and Desi, and infant great-granddaughter Ruby. (Wiccan sister-in-law Deniece soon hovers at the fringes of the domestic drama, in semi-alignment with co-director Donal’s Halloween framework.) Tweenage Desi is the film’s chief scene-stealer, through gruff observation rather than cutesy antics. "Videogames don’t really make you smarter, but they make your hands move faster," she observes minutes into the film, describing the hobby as "education for your fingers." The stoic and sole father of the house is Vietnam vet Don. Foster son Chris deploys his callow charm while nursing penchants for pill popping, weed dealing, and shoplifting. By film’s end his masculine good looks show signs of giving way to gauntness and gender ambiguity.

October Country has a light touch, rarely giving way to easy associations, and avoiding the reality television ploy of inciting arguments in all but one scene. Its look at Daneal’s young motherhood is just a side of a many-sided die, yet more perceptive than whole hours devoted to the subject by MTV documentaries. Cigarettes in hand, Dottie, Donna, and Daneal hold forth on life, while the camera lights upon abandoned GED books and other forms of abandonment signified by clutter. If this sounds grim, the beauty of the cinematography — attuned to the colors of fall and winter and the beauty of these people and their home — offsets the futility and depression. The structure of the story is loose enough to allow the filmmakers to sync up with Desi’s playful creativity and droll truths ("Nobody is fighting for anything" in the war, she notes later on) and the harsh American irony within Don’s fear of 4th of July fireworks.

This is the kind of documentary that looks closely enough to notice the sensitivity on a person’s face after she has been forced to break one of her creeds. Yet Mosher and Palmieri are selective as to when they allow their point-of-view to merge with that of the person on camera, only allowing this to happen once the family has become more familiar to the viewer. The story comes to a close where it began, on another Halloween, but with most everyone dressed up in costumes that hint at their true spirits, some more repressed than others. The moment brings one back to the film’s beginning, and its dedication to the Mosher family. A movie that might help its subjects understand and appreciate one another better, October Country also manages to look good in the process. All praise queer sensibility.

OCTOBER COUNTRY

Opens Fri/7

Roxie Cinema

3117 16th St, SF

(415) 863-1087
www.roxie.com

From Cleveland with love

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
From Cleveland with love

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC Baby Dee is not your generic person in a band, with dull quotes about the process of recording an album. Baby Dee has something to say, and she says it with light power, ever so occasionally punctuating a comment with a machine-gun laugh that’s love-at-first-hearing. Some would say Baby Dee’s music is more of an acquired taste, but the new A Book of Songs for Anne Marie (Drag City) strips her musicality down to its essence, and the result, while owing a generative debt to German Lieder, is crystalline in a manner that trumps more affectation-laden contemporaries like Joanna Newsom and the musician most often compared to Dee, her friend Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. Mabel Mercer comes to mind. On the eve of Dee’s SF visit, I got her on the horn, and the result was good enough that I didn’t want to write or talk around it. So here it is — 100-proof Baby Dee.

On the use of the Baby Dee song “Cavalry” in Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ movie To Die Like A Man: “He told me [it was the heart of the film] when I met him and I thought he was just blowing smoke up my ass. But so many reviews have said that he lavished all his gifts on that one scene.

How truly wonderful. Most people get a song in a movie and just an inconsequential fragment is playing in the background, but here the whole movie stops and everyone listens to the song — you can’t ask for more than that.

On her hometown: “I love Cleveland. It took me a long time to love Cleveland. I hated it all the time growing up. I left when I was 18 years old like a bullet out of a gun and never went back for more than a day at a time for almost 30 years.

The house I actually live in now, my recurring nightmare was to walk into the front door of that house. That was my end-of-the-world dream, instead of a holocaust or a great tsunami.

About ten years ago I went back there and ended up staying because my parents were in such bad shape. I was just experimenting with good behavior. [Laughs]

When they died I was stuck there, I’d lost my apartment in New York. I quit music and had a tree business. Then I woke up one morning and realized that I liked Cleveland. But it took me a lifetime. I’ve loved it ever since.

I never really toured the states, I’d toured Europe, and seeing what the rest of America is like made me love Cleveland. In Cleveland there is zero attitude at all. Nobody is cool in Cleveland, and if they are, it sure as hell isn’t because they live in Cleveland. The cool cities in America are New York, New Orleans — or what’s left of it — and San Francisco. In it’s own crazy way Vegas is cool. And maybe Niagara Falls.

New York is the city that never sleeps. I used to call Cleveland the city that shits the bed.”

On Marc Almond: “I adore, I worship Marc Almond. He’s one of the greatest people in the world in addition to being a great singer. People tend to think he’s a sweetheart, but in his case it’s absolutely true — he’s as good as gold. And we’ve got history — I gave him reasons to not be as good as gold to me. [Laughs] He’s just a prince.”

On German Lieder and classical music: “It had its influence on me, but in strange ways. When I grew up, I would leave the room when people would play Schubert. I couldn’t take it. It was an irrational hatred, and I haven’t had many musical ones. But there was history there — we took piano lessons, and my father had sort of been cast [by life] in the role of the Erl King with the dying child. Ooo, oogedy-boogedy, don’t go there! That kind of thing. We had to play some simple child’s version of Schubert’s Der Erlkönig, and my father was really into it without even having self-awareness why. He’d say “Play that one again” over and over, not even realizing it was about the death of his own soul. Hideous.

I was more at home with really, really old music. As a matter of fact I avoided the entire 19th century. It isn’t that there wasn’t beautiful music — Chopin, Beethoven — but I avoided the whole thing. I discovered Bach and went backwards from there. I was fascinated by Gregorian music and I finally got as a far as the Renaissance and became obsessed with [Giovanni Pieruigi da Palestrina] and the Spanish composer [Juan Evo] Morales [Ayma] and [Tomas Luis de] Victoria.”

On Joey Arias: “It’s not like Joey Arias is underrated. He might be the most beloved living drag singer. But he’s sort of ghettoized, very unfairly. I think he’s one of the greatest vocalists alive. If you’ve ever heard Joey get serious, there’s no greater heartbreaker.”

On her relation to the New York club scene: “The whole time cool things were happening in New York, I was in some dusty old piano loft in the South Bronx playing Palestrina on an organ.”

On her drink of choice: “It depends on when and where. If it’s before dinner, J&B Scotch on the rocks. If it’s after, it would definitely be Armagnac.”

BABY DEE

With Karl Blau, Jeffery Manson

Fri/30, 9 p.m., $12

Amnesia

853 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-0012

www.amnesiathebar.com

Live on screen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Live on screen

johnny@sfbg.com

SFIFF All those with curious minds, step right up, we have live cinema waiting for you in this dark room. The idea of “live” or performance-generated movies has taken on a new vitality recently via the light-projecting likes of Bruce McClure, whose ear-splitting and eye-blasting appearances in San Francisco usually sell out. On a smaller local level, Konrad Steiner’s neo-benshi programs have united local writers and a wide variety of filmic subject matter in creative and sometimes entertaining ways. At the San Francisco Film Festival, live music by bands for silent works has become a reliable main attraction. But Sam Green’s and Dave Cerf’s new meta-documentary Utopia in Four Movements adds a new facet to the phenomenon: instead of utilizing an over-familiar voice-over, it unites live narration by Green with a musical performance overseen by Cerf, allowing for degrees of spontaneity and change.

Utopian, isn’t it? At the Mission bar the Phone Booth on an early Monday evening, Green can’t help but tease out his thoughts on the very word. “To me, utopia is almost a metaphor for hope, or hope in the imagination,” he says, shortly after we’ve been flirted with (and flashed) by one fierce female patron. “It’s about trying to be hopeful these days, which is hard. Utopia is almost a way to make up hope. In some ways it’s so preposterous. The word even has negative connotations these days — people are told not to be utopian.” Half an hour later, he returns for another analogy or two: “Utopia is a thing that never really exists. It’s like a flower — it always wilts. Even if there’s a moment of great utopian energy, it can’t last.”

Utopia may not exist in fully realized forms, but the quartet of mutations in Utopia in Four Movements (five if you count the movie) fascinate as real-life fables. The first segment explores Esperanto, which was invented in the late 19th century with the aim of its becoming a universal, international language. As Green puts it, Esperanto is “a wonderful idea that can’t be,” an idea that he illustrates with short direct portraits of contemporary Esperanto speakers that, uncannily, takes on a colors-of-Benneton feel.

Esperanto has also yielded some memorable black-and-white cinema, namely a 1965 Esperanto horror film shot in Big Sur by Conrad Hall, which stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. San Francisco movie maniacs may recognize Incubus through the efforts of Will The Thrill and Other Cinema’s Craig Baldwin. “William Shatner wrote a memoir in which he talks about it,” Green says, before adding some information that reflects Utopia‘s ever-changing nature –and utopia’s pitfalls. “I’m trying to do an interview with him because he’s practically the most famous person to have spoken Esperanto. But the world’s most famous Esperanto person is probably [financier] George Soros.”

The idea of utopia isn’t new to Green, whose best-known feature The Weather Underground (2002) digs deep into the multi-faceted realm of ’60s radicalism, riding out its actions and repercussions. The second part of Utopia, set in Cuba, adds a new chapter to Green’s explorations of thorny political contradiction. Like Assata Shakur, the segment’s subject lives in Cuba as a fugitive. In the present, she’s engaged with Cuban hip-hop, but she remains tied to her past as a radical in America. “It’s about the last embers of revolution,” says Green.

One of Utopia‘s movements examines the potential of forensice science in a manner quite different from pro-law enforcement US true crime television, showing how the smallest reinforcement can be regained from sites of mass tragedy. But the movie’s sojourn in China is in some ways its most vivid. There, Green takes an extended trip to the world’s largest shopping mall, in China. The subject matter is akin to dramas such as Jem Cohen’s Chain and Jia Zhangke’s The World (both from 2004), but this is a case of reality trumping fiction. “Almost every article I read about China and capitalism talked about how the world’s largest mall was there now,” says Green. “But nobody described it as a total failure. We were at the mall for ten days, and it was soul-killing. There’s something about a gigantic failed mall that is profoundly depressing.” Luckily, an encounter with a Teletubby who eventually removed its mask added some life to the experience.

The world’s largest shopping mall — at least for now: Green says it is slated to be bulldozed — may be grim, but it’s also richly symbolic when history is integrated to the picture. “Victor Gruen who essentially invented the [shopping] mall in the US in the 1950s was a socialist who came to America,” Green says, as “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” gives way to “I Feel Love” on the Phone Booth jukebox. “In turn the mall has gone to China, and the grounds of cultural revolution became the site of a government-funded bust of a mall. In a way, it’s the trajectory of the 20th century.“

Today, we tiptoe into the 21st century, with a new president and old-new ways of seeing and making movies. “A year ago, when I was looking at [Utopia], people were saying ‘Aren’t you going to change everything because of Obama?’,” Green remarks. “It felt like cotton candy hope. When [U.S. presidents] are the limits of your possibility, it’s pretty lame.” Truth: Green may have used utopia in his title, but perhaps it’s time to come up with some fresh formulations of hope as well. *

UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS

Sun/25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

Red, blonde, and blue

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Red, blonde, and blue

johnny@sfbg.com

SFIFF The evening breeze caresses the trees tenderly early on in João Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die Like a Man. This shift from the furious winds of Rodrigues’ Odete (a.k.a. Two Drifters, 2005) is a signal that the director, ever aware of the lexicon he’s blooming, is adopting a languid pace. Rodrigues’ third feature film isn’t immune to irony, a main one being that slow death allows his cinema to breathe most deeply.

At the onset, To Die Like a Man does not seem like the story of a drag queen perishing from poisonous silicone implants. Rodrigues begins in a nighttime jungle of young male longing, in a nod to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), though his vision is much less chaste. Greasepaint is applied to a beautiful young soldier’s face, and upon wearing that militaristic form of drag, he’s soon fucked by the masculine makeup artist. Moments later, the two enlistees happen upon a lone mansion and peer through a window. The pair of ladies within are … not quite ladies. We are in a world where a lush garden is gradually revealed to be a terrarium, and that terrarium is soon visually rhymed with an aquarium. Nothing is what it seems, except that which flowers and dies.

It isn’t until after a gunshot and Rodrigues’ trademark blood-red letter credits that we are introduced to Tonia (Fernando Santos), a buxom blonde who bears a familial relation to one of the soldiers. Not quite weary enough to dispense with her wry wit, Tonia makes her living performing drag numbers at a club, where a beautiful and quite opposite heir apparent (Jenni La Rue) looks down at her from the other side of a mirror. At home, she cares for her drug-addled, dress designer boyfriend Rosario (Alexander David). Her chief confidante, her little white dog Augustina, appears to be slightly more obedient.

Santos’ presence at the heart of To Die Like a Man opens up Rodrigues’ distinctive world view, giving this musical without (much) music a true voice besides that of the director — quite literally in one bravura sequence, where Tonia half-whispers, half-sings a song long after Rosario angrily snuffs it from the car radio, as the world passing by is reflected in a car window adorned with raindrops. The hot-as-hell garbageman of Rodrigues’ O Fantasma (2000) and the leggy lunatic of his schematic Odete are as mute as they are ravishing, but Tonia has something to say, in tones that are smoky and relaxed and resigned to fate. Within English-language films, Divine’s siren song in Hairspray (1988) and Dorian Corey’s backstage aria of wit in Paris is Burning (1990) are the best touchstones for Tonia — ones that reveal the heft of Santos’ performance.

In life, Tonia has not fully crossed over to the other side. To illustrate her ladylike sensitivity, she complains to her transsexual friend and hairdresser, Irene (Cindy Scrash), about a doctor’s blunt, origami-like demonstration of how a penis is transformed into a vagina through surgery. But the man beneath Tonia isn’t immune to a cruise through the dark for a grope in the park.

A true auteur who hasn’t fallen prey to the excessive worship that has hindered influences such as Tsai Ming-liang, Rodrigues is cultivating his craft. He’s aware that he’s still developing, yet comfortable enough about his formidable command that he can casually deploy the motifs of great filmmakers as pivot points. If Odete‘s peculiar double-vision was constructed from the eyes of Hitchcock and Warhol, To Die Like a Man is his In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), or 1999’s All About My Mother changed to All About My Father. (A Marnie poster hints which wing of the Hitchcock library Rodrigues currently resides in, exploring patriarchal and matriarchal ties.) Fassbinder and the larger specter of "’60s and ’70s European art film is hilariously invoked through the character of Maria Bakker (the superb Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida), a sweet beacon of death prone to epigrams and fits of vamping. In the film’s key moment of ominous reverie, she and Tonia and their sidekicks sit down in the woods and are softly serenaded by Baby Dee’s song "Cavalry."

Rodrigues has a way with sound and image, and the queeniness of the characters here allows him and longtime partner and art director João Rui Guerra da Marta to indulge their own flouncier yet symbolically rich impulses. Tonia wraps a car gift for Rosario in silver foil, and her cell phone holder is a porcelain leather pump — with a puff ball at the heel. Her backstage mirror is decorated with photo mementos of Brad Renfro and Cristiano Ronaldo, and one of her chief stage outfits is like Dorothy’s red slipper turned into an entire dress. In a single shot, a bath towel, bath mat, and dog offer variations of furry whiteness. Twice, the aesthetically heightened naturalism of Rui Poças’s cinematography gives way entirely to fluorescent pastel hues.

Tonia’s story is about uncovering what is buried before one’s body is laid to rest. Her journey crosses through some of the Lisbon landmarks of Rodrigues’ previous films — the fatal intersection and cemetery walls of Odete, for example — while finding rare blooms on the edges of urbanity. A farewell tour as long as Cher’s, To Die Like a Man never tests one’s patience. Forget-me-not is one of the ever-referential Rodrigues’ secret mottoes as a director. Even if life and drag — and the drag of life — persist beyond the end of Tonia, he’s created a film to remember.

TO DIE LIKE A MAN

May 1, 9 p.m., Clay

May 3, 12:15 p.m., Kabuki

May 4, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

The O word

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The O word

johnny@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART There is no doubt that “James Castle: A Retrospective” is a treasure trove. On view at the Berkeley Art Museum, this comprehensive gathering of the self-taught artist’s many and varied works would be utterly overwhelming if its many miniature pieces and slight changes of form and approach didn’t encourage a certain freedom on the viewer’s part. In this regard it’s quite different from the recent traveling Joseph Cornell retrospective that had a stay at SFMOMA, where in a single viewing Cornell’s box constructions quickly became exhausting to engage with due to the sheer relentless volume and repetition of the presentation.

Cornell’s name is a charged one to evoke in relation to Castle, because just as one could — though perhaps few writers do — draw comparisons between the artistic themes and tactics of Cornell’s art and the art of Henry Darger, Castle also shares some traits with Cornell (and, in turn, with Darger). In the realm of Castle, it is helpful to flip the script so to speak, and see that whereas Cornell is renowned for his boxes, Castle frequently turned box material — cardboard — into imaginative open space. Of course, a certain invisible wall separates, or separated, the eccentric but successful Cornell from Darger, who toiled in near-absolute obscurity and isolation, and from Castle, a deaf man who created at home in a familial farm environment with little public recognition until late in his life.

Which brings us to the word outsider, ever-present in art-speak during Darger’s 1990s rise to posthumous cult stardom, yet curiously absent from the majority of writing about Castle. To be sure, notions of outsider art far predate Darger, even if he has become its best-known recent representative. Roger Cardinal’s book Outsider Art, first published in the U.S. in 1972, catalogs its definition of the term, with an emphasis on outré words such as madness and primitive, and a focus on violent creative forces such as Adolf Wölfli. With the coronation (however rightful) of Darger, it’s as if outsider art became cuter, with even Darger’s romantic and gender-bent view of little girls discussed in relative terms of endearment. Kid gloves, as it were — since Darger was so thorough an outsider, locked in imagination instead of literal action, he was safe.

No such illegal undercurrent runs through Castle’s work, even if, like Cornell and Darger (and a plethora of artists and other human beings today) he recreates pop images of childhood and innocence. But the measured focus of the meticulous and valuable discourse around Castle’s work — traits shared by Tom Trusky’s biography James Castle: His Life & Art; Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary of the same year, James Castle: Portrait of an Artist; and editor-writer Ann Percy’s monograph for the Castle retrospective — risks the creation of an overtly (perhaps the t should be subtracted from that last word) self-aware viewpoint. The evidence is in the flatness of the titles. If Castle is to claim a rightful place among great American 20th-century artists, here’s to future dialogue about him that allows for the same irreverence and uncensored opinion afforded those who were wined and dined and made megabucks. In addition, he could be spoken of in the same breath as talents as disparate as Darger and Wölfli in a manner that rescues outsider art from shame-based erasure.

The aforementioned o word doesn’t appear until the halfway point of James Castle: A Retrospective, which also rejects the idea of Castle as folk artist. (Interesting, since Darger’s commercial apex has occurred with New York folk museum realms.) Even then, it’s placed within conversational quote marks by the painter Terry Winters. Encouragingly, Winters later flips the notion and mentions “insider” art, a notion that probably is intended in commercial terms, but could just as easily signify those artists whose creative life has an inbuilt insularity. For now, the atmospheric and perhaps emotional darkness of so many of Castle’s soot-and-spit works is in the light, and it would be an honest mistake to view those works as cute. His books, assemblages, and drawings are as complicated as the people they render, and possess as many open doors as the houses or homes they depict. 

JAMES CASTLE: A RETROSPECTIVE

Through Sun/25, $5-$8 (members and children under 12 free)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510)642-0808

Dreams on 45

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Dreams on 45

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC Sonny Smith is sitting at a window table at the Latin with a cap on his head and a small glass of red wine and some 7-inch single cover art by Stephanie Syjuco in front of him. I get a whiskey and sit down to talk about the matter at hand: art, music, mythologies, and “100 Records,” the gargantuan yet in some ways quite local show of sounds and images he’s putting together at Gallery 16. One man, 100 records — with help from dozens of artists, a number of musicians, a carpenter, and an electrician, Smith not only has created a number of 45s by fictional musicians and bands, he’s built a jukebox to play them.

The due date for Smith’s mammoth creation is a week away, and he’s in the final stages of assembling it. “I’ve been struggling to write down all the bios,” he says, as we talk about some of his imaginary recording acts, which range from New Orleans drag queens to Utah nature lovers. “They’re not Wikipedia-esque, but more like entries in a Rolling Stone Encyclopedia [of Rock & Roll]. At the beginning, I was swapping names and titles all the time — if a surf jam turned out to be a folk song, I could give it to another character. But now, with the last three [records], it has to be what it is.”

What is it? An open-ended project, not solo and self-enclosed in the manner of the Magnetic Fields’ 1998 69 Love Songs, where Stephin Merrit’s formulaic writing reached its apex. Instead, Smith is allowing “100 Records” to form itself as he assembles it. “I’ve only brushed up against the edges of it all becoming interwoven,” he explains over the post-work barroom din. “It’s almost as if I’d rather it not be — if you read the Harry Smith Anthology [of American Folk Music], or a biography of a musician, it’s enjoyable that there are so many loose ends.”

The visual artists contributing to “100 Records” — including William T. Wiley, Alicia McCarthy, Harrell Fletcher, Paul Wackers, and Mingering Mike (who knows a thing or two about creating folk musical figures) — have responded to Smith’s call for cover art in a variety of ways. “Alice Shaw was this character Carol Darger, and I was Jackie Feathers,” Smith says, to give one country-tinged example. “Their biography is that they’ve gotten married and been divorced twice. We took photos together for cover art. And Jackie Feathers also has solo records with art by different artists.”

When one thinks of Sonny Smith, band names don’t come to mind, though his latest endeavor Sonny and the Sunsets plays wittily off of his current San Francisco neighborhood. For years, Smith has put his plain name forward rather than come up with musical monikers. “100 Records” changed all that. “What’s weird is that I tried for years to come up with cool band names,” he says. “I’d come up with one and think, ‘That’s dumb.’ I’ve never had a knack for it. But because [the acts in “100 Records” are] fictional, it was easy to come up with band names — the names came left and right. A lot of the names that came to me I’d be happy to use as real band names. In fact, I’m trying to get a couple of the bands to become real bands.”

Indeed, one of the groups on “100 Records,” the Loud Fast Fools, will soon make the transition from fiction to the reality of today with a gig at the Knockout. Smith’s recording process for the project has been varied. He’s taken instrumental passages from obscure ’50s, ’60s, and ’80s songs, patched and lopped them with Guitar Hero, and put vocals on top. He’s recorded solo. He also knocked out dozens of songs with a multi-instrumentalist group of largely San Francisco musicians, some of whom he refers to by last name: Stoltz, Dwyer.

“There are a couple of balls-out, crazy ‘Louie Louie’-type numbers, and Spencer [Owen] played drums on those,” Smith says, describing the sessions. “It was some of the best drumming I’ve ever played with. He had these bizarre beats and fills. I thought, ‘This is so perfect — this is probably how a song like “Louie Louie” happened.'”

A spaghetti-narrative project like “100 Records” is a natural for Smith, a storyteller who has documented his life in comic book form and written plays. Later in the interview, with the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You on the stereo at my apartment, he tells me that one of the first singles he bought was by Mick Jagger. “I didn’t buy it because I knew anything — the guy at the record store just told me to buy it,” he says. “It was a record store in Fairfax that was Van Morrison’s parents’ record store. He just bought the store and put his parents there to run it.” This anecdote then spirals into a funny one that a member of Morrison’s band told him about being stuck playing an endless version of “Domino” on a darkened arena concert stage while Morrison secretly caught a cab and a plane to L.A.

Smith has a keen eye for the mythologizing involved in music, and how a college radio DJ can build the guy down the street into a mysterious cult figure. Around the release of one album, his label pestered him to write a fake Pitchfork review, but he declined. “I’d be more into writing a fake Playboy interview,” he says. Ironically, Pitchfork has come calling of late, writing about Sonny and the Sunsets.

Internet career-makers come and go. For now, Smith is more concerned with opening night of “100 Records” and the debut of his own art contribution to the show, a customized jukebox. “It’s a hell of a thing, ” he says, after breaking down the differences between Wurlitzers and other brands, and explaining that a rat-infested jukebox buried under stacks at Adobe Books first inspired the idea. “My friend who is a master carpenter used this German ’50s jukebox as a reference. It’s almost like a joke — like making a stove from scratch. Why would someone do that? But someone did.” That someone is Smith, and he’s hosting a jukebox party this week.

SONNY SMITH: 100 RECORDS

With music by the Sandwitches and Sonny and the Sunsets

Fri/9, 6–9 p.m. (through May 14), free

Gallery 16

501 Third St., SF

(415) 626-7495

For Jim: Jim Marshall, 1936-2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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For Jim: Jim Marshall, 1936-2010

Legendary Bay-based rock photographer Jim Marshall, who was featured in a Guardian cover story on March 3, 2010, passed away in his sleep Tuesday night in New York at the age of 74. The people who worked with him on the cover story, Johnny Ray Huston and Mirissa Neff, remember him.

Johnny Ray Huston, writer: When someone dies it’s impossible not to think of the last time you saw them. With Jim Marshall, I wish that last time had been different. Jim had called me in the morning to see if I wanted to meet him at his favorite dinner spot. That night, I arrived about 15 minutes late, finding him alone at a table in the center of the place with a glass of wine. It was noisy, and I had to shout more than usual for Jim to hear what I said. I showed him some crummy digital shots I’d taken of a few Bay Area musicians I’d daydreamed about him really photographing, but he seemed distracted, quieter than usual. When we said goodbye later on the corner by his apartment, I assumed his mind was on the future. He was about to leave on a trip, first going to Texas for the monster that is South by Southwest, and then to New York, for a gallery show of his photography and the release of Match Prints, his latest book, a collaboration with Timothy White.

Jim was unfailingly generous. On the day the article I’d written about him was published, he called to say he wanted to give me a print, any print, from his body of work. This kind of offering was second nature for him, but overwhelming for me to contemplate considering the breadth of his vision. At a time when music photography is consumed and tamed by style, all one has to do is look to Jim’s photos for their untamed depth. When my boyfriend Cedar recently interviewed Nancy Wilson, he was amazed to hear her say she had always styled herself for album cover photos. Jim’s peak photos are of true musical artists who had been styling themselves for years. They stepped in front of Jim’s camera without some trite go-between in the way, and with a trust forged by their relationship to him and respect for what he did.

One night after some whiskey at my apartment, I coerced Jim to go to a birthday party for one of my friends, even though it was a Chinese restaurant and Jim hated Chinese food. Jim’s matter-of-fact profanity or vulgarity could be hilarious, as when crab rangoon was placed on the table in front of him and he suspiciously grabbed some, muttering under his breath, “This better not make me puke.” Jim took the tab, even though he had only met the birthday host an hour before. Jim always took the tab.

Jim loved Cadillacs. It was a pleasure to ride with him because of how well he knew his cars. In his newest model, it could also be funny — he didn’t wear a seat belt, so a drive with him meant listening to the incessant ringing of the seat belt alarm coupled with the instructive but useless voice of the GPS. He was blissfully oblivious to both, thanks to deafening encounters with the likes of Jimi Hendrix.

My best friend Corina works at the place where Jim most loved to eat, and while I’m forever grateful to Tim Redmond for encouraging me to meet Jim, I’d first heard about him from her. One Sunday Corina texted me that Jim was at the restaurant and wanted me to come over for drinks after dinner. Corina, Cedar, Corina’s boyfriend Nathan and I all wound up at Jim’s place, as well as a young woman visiting from another country who Jim was romancing when I first got to the restaurant. She had been eating at a different table, but he’d soon gotten her to sit with him. Back at Jim’s apartment, as we talked and drank, the woman put on a CD. It turned out she was a musician, and she wanted us to hear her band. They weren’t bad in an avant-folk 12-piece way, but Jim’s critique of their off-kilter noise was merciless and entertaining. (And it didn’t stop him from getting a kiss from her later.)

When Jim – “Jaguar Jim” back in the Beat era’s heyday – found out that Cedar was a poet with a book due from City Lights, he gave him some rare volumes, including one by David Meltzer. I remember standing on Jim’s front steps that night talking with Nathan about how great the young year was, and how glad I was to be getting to know Jim. At that moment, partly through Corina’s affection for him, I found myself alone with my boyfriend and two best friends in the city, something that wasn’t happening often enough.

Jim had lived in his apartment in the Castro for decades, and he liked to joke that they’d have to wheel him out of it, so it’s one of those deep ironies of life and death that he left this world in New York City. To have met Jim so late in his life is something I can’t fully understand right now. There are so many people I wanted Jim to meet and get to know. But he knew plenty, and many of the best, perhaps better than they could know him. Because of how well he saw them. I feel lucky to have met him, and am grateful he showed me the scrapbook he kept when he was first dreaming about owning a camera. More attention is going to be paid to Jim’s work in the coming months and years. He had a lot of famous admirers, but his day-to-day life in San Francisco was buoyed by people like his friend and assistant Amelia Davis, and Corina and the people at La Med. I can still hear Jim’s pirate-y laugh, and that craggy, lively voice that Corina and I loved to imitate. I can still see his photos.

Mirissa Neff, art director: I met Jim Marshall just a few weeks ago. Our senior arts editor Johnny Ray Huston was interviewing him for the cover story and thought I should meet Jim to go over images, saying “he’d love you.” We all met at his Castro apartment and then walked around the corner to his regular lunch spot, La Mediterranee. For a little guy of 74 Jim had an outsized personality, a gruff demeanor, and a nose that showed signs of his old coke addiction (he was happy to complain to anyone who’d listen that his doctor had made him quit a few years back).

Yet Jim remained completely endearing. As Johnny and I flipped through hundreds of Jim’s stellar portraits, attempting to choose a few images to run (which was no easy task), Jim centered the conversation around an art opening he wanted to attend that night. After describing the event he looked at me and said, “So I’ll pick you up in my Cadillac around 7?” It was less of a question than a directive. I couldn’t make it… which of course I now regret. But being in his presence for that afternoon was a gift.

Inspirationstitute

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Inspirationstitute

I don’t do regrets, but I do wish that I’d arrived in San Francisco early enough to catch more than the hot tail end of the Popstitute years. (A show of Popstitute-related archival objets d’art is on display at Goteblud starting Sat27.) In another way, though, the Popstitute era continues, perhaps more forcefully, now. Whether or not the participants have ever encountered or read about Popstitute, the spirit of the postmodern — savor the late ’80s-early ’90s-ness of that term — music-art-and-protest group is reborn in various forms within the most fab current Bay Area happenings, from the Thrillpeddlers to Hunx and His Punx to High Fantasy.

The past year or so has seen Marc Huestis’ 1982 new wave movie Whatever Happened to Susan Jane get a digital facelift, and Patrick Cowley’s 1976-79 recording project Catholic introduced to different generations thanks to Honey Soundsystem. For the thirstiest seekers left in SF and its stronger wings, the time is right for a fresh taste of Popstitute, and “Boredom=Death: The Popstitutes 86-95” is set to deliver the DayGlo dyed-hair mania to old friends and lovers and new eyes. On display at the zine treasure trove Goteblüd, it promises a barrage of ready-to-rule-today paper mementos, as well as banners, photographs, and Mylar photo ornaments. Opening night deserves to be a scene. A happening. An event that inspires wild ideas that bloom into wilder actions.

It’s overly simple to call Popstitute a punk and new wave next-generation answer to the Cockettes, even if there are corollaries between Hibiscus’ role as the Cockettes’ chief fount of inspiration and the late Diet Popstitute’s (a.k.a. Michael Collins) galvanizing role in Popstitute the band, club(stitute), and overall entity. The Goteblüd show is accompanied by a terrific fluorescent zine that gathers flyers (featuring Alvin Popstitute, now a writer), newspaper articles (by Don Baird and others), and zine excerpts, which all hint at Popstitute’s untamed variety.

The “Boredom=Death” zine includes some fantastic pages from Tantrum, a zine put together by Tyler (a.k.a. Tyler-Bob, or Tylenol) Popstitute. Behold Tyler’s drawing of Truthstar the Unicorn — Tyler was way ahead of the unicorn trend curve — bungee-jumping with Yoda and current 73-year-old-of-the -moment Yoko Ono. Clip out his mortifying Madame mask and wear it to a party. A few years back Butt magazine included a photo of one of my favorite art acts ever in SF, Tyler’s amazing H.R. Giger-like gay male circuit queen gym body, which was plaster cast and made from a latex-like material. I remember running into Tyler one night at a SoMa club when he was wearing it. It was pure Popstitute art: irreverent, brilliant, pop-influenced in a completely inventive and unpredictable way, both fun and scathing at the same time. Like Popstitute, it wasn’t sterile art for art’s sake. It was art brought to life.

 

BOREDOM=DEATH

Sat/27, 6-8pm (continuesw through May 29)

Goteblud

766 Valencia, SF.

www.goteblud.com

Snap Sounds (and Q&A): Art Museums

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds (and Q&A): Art Museums

THE ART MUSEUMS

Rough Frame

(Woodsist)

San Francisco’s Josh Alper and Glenn Donaldson lightly place these love songs within comic frameworks. The opening track describes a shy, lovelorn music fan too shy to twist and shout, peppering the scenario with observations such as, “He’s worn his pants like that / For a very long time.” It also mentions a Buggles record, but Television Personalities and Guided By Voices are better reference points to the Art Museums’ sound. In their world, a sculpture garden is a good place to discuss cinema. The Bay Area fey pop tradition carried on by Slumberland bands gets a wry twist here with couplets like “What’s this rain inside my eye / She’s always been a better man than me.” Want to know more? Donaldson was gracious enough to answer some questions about the Art Museums’ aesthetic.

SFBG What are some of your favorite museums? What do you like about them?
ART MUSEUMS Record stores. The records.

SF What sculpture gardens do you like? If you could design one, what would be in it?
AM I prefer arboretums.

SFBG You’re at a Paris cafe — what would you order, and what would you want to do there?
AM After cappuccino, I would take the train to Barcelona.

SFBG If you could bring only one book of poetry to the cafe, what would it be?
AM Anything by Johnny Rogan.

SFBG What are your favorite films about mods? Who do you enjoy discussing cinema with?
AM The Style Council — Far East and Far Out. Girls who wear glasses.

SFBG When the Art Museums hits the road, what do you pack in your suitcases?
AM Corduroy pants, vintage guitars, Roland electronic drums and Walgreens sunglasses.

 

Snap Sounds: Etienne Jaumet

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: Etienne Jaumet

ETIENNE JAUMET
Night Music
(Domino)

The idea of nocturnal sound is circulating at the moment, though maybe it always does where electronic music intersects with clubland. Overseen by none other than Carl Craig, Jaumet‘s trip into the dark has a smart structure.

Comprising the first half, the 20-minute “For Falling Asleep” escorts the listener to dreamland through seduction rather than boredom — its slinky synth melodies coil around one another like snakes moving forward at the speed of trains, before the music winds down into languorous sax, Goblin-like ominous throbbing sound waves and delicate acoustic melodies. Shorter and comparatively stripped down, the four tracks that follow either suggest or approximate different unconscious states.

Raya’s light

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Raya’s light

FILM Like only the very best filmmakers, 25-year-old Raya Martin knows that a movie screen in a theater is a site for waking dreams — and also a window into forms of sleep. Martin’s first feature-length effort A Short Film About the Indionacional (2005) commenced with an extended foray into one woman’s nocturnal restlessness. His new and stunning work Independencia (2009) is sprinkled with stark sequences of characters lying down to fight or embrace their dream lives.

The second entry in a trilogy devoted to the history of the Philippines, Independencia takes place during the first American occupation, and is set and shot in a manner evocative of American studio films of the time. Its lush jungles are largely lensed in stunning black-and-white by Jeanne Lapoirie, and foliage commingles with painted backdrops. A young man (Sid Lucero) and his mother Allesandra De Rossi) flee to the forest when invasion by American troops is imminent. There, they encounter a young woman (Tetchie Agbayani) who has been raped by soldiers, and in time, the young man and woman raise a son born from colonialist violence.

If the forest domain and its invocation as a place of temporary respite and sensuality calls the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul to mind, Martin is the first director who doesn’t come up entirely wanting in comparison to Apichatpong. This is partly because his use of these elements is distinct, and also because his recreation of early cinema techniques isn’t mere stylistic whimsy but a alluring, barbed form of commentary, a prodigious act of imagination in zones of erased or abandoned memory. At 78 minutes, Indepedencia‘s braiding of incident and interlude is light in feel and heavy in content in a manner that lingers within and teases the mind after viewing. As a writer (with Ramon Sarmiento) and director, Martin uncovers and reimagines the folk tales and myths buried beneath official histories. His feat, as his late friend Alexis Tioseco wrote, is akin to that of an inventive jazz musician. This movie’s siren call — embodied by Lutgardo Lubad’s stark and lovely score — is strong, and will remain for years to come.

INDEPENDENCIA

Fri/12, 7 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

Sun/14, 4:30 p.m.

Sundance Kabuki 5

“Cruising” — Hunx and His Punx

John Elberling
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It’s hard to keep up with Justin Kelly‘s video endeavors — he’s got new clips for Harlem (“Gay Human Bones”), Alexis Penney (the sublime “Lonely Sea”), and a few from Hunx on the way. Here’s another one of his Hunx collabos, for the handclap-fantastic “Cruising,” with its unmatched climactic bridge realization that “I’ve blown all the straight boys in L.A.” Three hundred and sixty degrees of neon, cutoffs, and best of all Brande, coming your way.

“Belong” — Washed Out

John Elberling
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As a friend wrote the other day, if you can’t exorcise your demons, exercise them. To motivate my sullen self to run and swim, I’m skipping right past Nagi Noda‘s justifiably famous poodle freeweight extravaganza Ex-Fat Girl and heading straight to the Fonda-riffic video for “Belong” by Washed Out. 1-2-3-4, star wipe!

Marshall amps

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Marshall amps

johnny@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART/MUSIC I’m walking with Jim Marshall from his apartment in the Castro to his favorite restaurant just around the corner. The T-shirt he’s wearing showcases one of his more famous photos, of Johnny Cash flipping the bird. Marshall tells me and his friend and assistant of 13 years, Amelia Davis, about another time he was wearing the shirt. When the person he was with said he wanted one, he promptly took it off and gave it to him. We sit down at a table, I turn on my old tape recorder, and Marshall asks me for my first question. I say, “Well, it’s not a question, but I guess the first thing I could observe about you is that you’ll give someone the shirt off your back.” He laughs.

This story, itself born from a story from Marshall, suits an article about him, because as the title of his one of his new books makes clear, a major foundation of his photography is trust. Almost every page of Trust: Photographs of Jim Marshall (Vision On, 165 pages, $34.95) illustrates the deep implicit bond between photographer and subject in Marshall’s work, an element largely lacking from the prefab realm of music photography today. At times, this trust makes for startling juxtapositions: more than once Marshall’s camera catches a singer — Mahalia Jackson at Carnegie Hall; BB King at the Fillmore West; Janis Joplin at an outdoor concert in San Jose; Big Mama Thornton in a San Francisco recording studio; Nina Simone at New York Town Hall; Big Joe Turner at Berkeley Folk Festival — wholly unguarded, with arms open wide. The gesture reflects Marshall’s wholehearted embrace of music, an approach that makes his best images sing.

Marshall is a San Francisco photographer. “I was just starting out during the Beat era, in 1959, hanging out in North Beach,” he says. “They called me Jaguar Jim because I had a Jag 120. I photographed at the Hungry Eye. Lenny Bruce was the first roll of color I ever shot — 10 frames. Fantasy Records called me up about 10 years ago and said, ‘Jim, we’ve got some of your shots here.’ I figured there was some Creedence [Clearwater Revival] stuff, or Otis Redding. But there were 10 slides [of Bruce] that had been stuck under a cabinet for 35 years.” One of those 10 frames can be found in Match Prints (HarperCollins, 208 pages, $40), a just-published collaborative monograph that juxtaposes photos by Timothy White with photos by Marshall. In the shot, Bruce is standing before a brick wall, and he has his arms outstretched — almost like he’s expecting to be arrested. He’s on stage.

The back and forth between White’s photos and Marshall’s in Match Print — also on display at New York’s Staley-Wise Gallery later this month — is partly a conversation between on-the-scene verité images and the carefully set designed studio shots that tend to dominate magazine profiles. But it’s also about iconography and a memorable pose: Jim Morrison taking a drag from a cigarette for Marshall, Robert Mitchum inhaling (unlike Bill Clinton) for White. Match Prints has a casual sense of humor, evident in the pairing of Cash giving the finger with a White shot of Elizabeth Taylor flipping two birds after stepping out of a limo. (It’s also made clear by Alice Cooper’s playfully catty comments about his sister-in-leopard-skin-boots Lil’ Kim.) But the lingering moments of the book, and ironically, the most contemporary visions, come from older black and white Marshall photos, such as one of a zaftig Mama Cass in the back of a car, or bouffant-and-eyeliner beauty Little Richard lost in thought. Cass’s style and Richard’s drag are very Bay Area rock n’ roll 2010.

Marshall’s photography is 2010 enough to be lodged in the White House at the moment. President Obama has a Marshall shot of John Coltrane (also within Trust) on the wall. “He [Obama] had a White House photographer take a picture of him reflected in the [frame’s] glass,” Marshall explains with pride. “He signed it, ‘To Jim — I’m a big fan of your work … and Coltrane!” A little later, back at Marshall’s apartment, I look at this photo, and think of Obama’s image and trust. In deed, is the President doing right by the artists?

At lunch, Marshall zooms in on a telling moment from Obama’s recent State of the Union address. “He said, ‘This administration this year will end discrimination against gays in the military.’ The camera was on four generals and admirals in front of Obama. The whole place stood up and applauded. Those motherfuckers didn’t blink, didn’t move — nothing. They just sat there stone-faced. That’s the last thing they wanted to hear.”

The trust recorded in Trust is a different kind of commitment than one offered by a political figure. The photo of Coltrane — itself reflective, a bit melancholy, even haunted — that Obama sees himself within is a chief example. “Miles [Davis] saw my pictures of Coltrane and saw that John trusted me, and that was good enough for Miles,” Marshall explains, after I tell him about a great Davis interview in which he proclaimed that his favorite thing to do was watch white people act stupid on TV. “Miles, he didn’t like white people a whole lot. But for some reason he liked me. He said, ‘You’re as crazy as me.'” The truth is, in America, then and now, that’s as good a reason as any to like someone.

Truth is another strong element of Trust. Marshall’s investment in emotional truth means that his opinions aren’t always orthodox. Trust contains some photos of the infamous 1972 Rolling Stones American tour — “I must have done two pounds of blow on that tour,” Marshall crows — also documented by Robert Frank in the movie Cocksucker Blues. “I was never a big Robert Frank fan, and I’ll tell you why,” Marshall says, with trademark intimate candor. “As good as [Frank’s classic 1958 monograph] The Americans is — and it’s one of the all-time great photo books, damn near as great as [1955’s] Family of Man — what Frank failed to do is this: he didn’t show in one picture, as far as I can remember, the joy of being an American. It’s cynical. That bothers the shit out of me.”

As much as Frank, Marshall is a primary documentarian of 20th century America, well aware of a time when great filmmakers and photographers had enough faith in the government to work for it. “I had a Baby Brownie [camera] when I was a kid,” he says, when asked how he found his calling. “Everything was blurry — you had to take the picture when the sun was at your back. But I won a track meet, the 50 yard dash, and a guy was taking pictures for the school. He had an early Leica. When we go back to my apartment I’ll show you my scrapbook — it has pictures of cameras cut out of magazines and pasted on the paper, with their prices written in pencil. He took a picture of me that was razor sharp, and I thought, ‘This guy has a magic box.'”

Marshall’s Leica images have their own magic, evident in monographs such as Tomorrow Never Knows — The Beatles’ Last Concert (1987), Monterey Pop (1992), Not Fade Away (1997), Proof (2004), and Jazz (2005). Trust distinguishes itself by the dominance of color images — Marshall laughs heartily when I tell him that the blue sky found in a pair of outdoor concert photos of Joplin is a California blue. The color in Marshall’s photos is super-real, to re-deploy a word Anthony DeCurtis applies to White in the introduction to Match Prints. It isn’t the cliché hallucinogenic vision found in so many recreations of drug trips or the ’60s, but instead an extra intensity, utterly pure.

“The single greatest performance I ever saw in my life was Otis Redding in Monterey [at Monterey Pop in 1967],” Marshall says, as we page through Trust. “Brian Jones was there as a guest, and he said, ‘I think Mick [Jagger] is one of the greatest singers, and our band is one of the best, but personally, you couldn’t give me a million pounds to follow Otis Redding on stage.’ It was that shattering of a performance.” The photo we’re looking at as he says this is deep black and rich blue, with fists to the fore. It’s a cry — a shout — into the night.

A pair of photos in Trust capture confidences exchanged between Johnny Cash and a top-of-the-world Bob Dylan — a country-folk echo of the gestures of confidence between Marshall, Coltrane, and Davis. Marshall laughs when I tell him of an anecdote about the great folk artist-archivist and magician Harry Smith slamming the door of his Chelsea Hotel room in the young Dylan’s face with a loud “Fuck off!” When Marshall first began to photograph Cash and Dylan, the upstart musician was uncooperative, until his idol set him straight about the man behind the lens. “Bob Dylan respected without equivocation two people,” says Marshall. “Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger.” Indeed, Trust’s American history isn’t just a rock star history, it’s a secret history, a braided folk tale that extends from Elizabeth Cotten to the unlikely yet perfectly logical friendship between Sly Stone and Doris Day. Its stunning photos of the Carter Family can inspire a conversation about Redding’s and Anita Carter’s individually magnificent versions of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”

Back at Marshall’s apartment, a photo of his late friend Tim Hardin at Woodstock broods as quietly as one of Hardin’s ballads, near the fireplace. “A million people around him, and he’s totally alone,” Marshall says, as if he took the shot yesterday. The hallway is lined with photos, not just by Marshall, but more often by famous acuaintances, many of them layered gestures of friendship that need no inscription. Marshall takes out his teenage scrapbook and sets it down on a table by his autographed images of Obama and Joe DiMaggio. “This was from the late 1940s!” he says, his voice rising in amazement. “Isn’t that a mindfuck?” It sure is. Another mindfuck would be for the best musicians and biggest personalities of the Bay Area to step in front of Marshall’s Leica today.

 

 

A NEW LOOK: JIM MARSHALL AND FRIENDS PUT THE FOCUS ON MS

VISUAL ART/EVENT This month, from March 5–19, one of Jim Marshall’s iconic images of Janis Joplin will be showcased in Union Square. The shot, of Joplin at the Palace of Fine Arts with arms outstretched as she sits atop a colorful Volkswagen Beetle, is just one of a number of prints being auctioned up for sale by photographers such as Baron Wolman, Michael Zagaris, Herb Greene, Robert Altman, Bobby Klein, and Marshall.

The cause is treatment of — and public awareness and conversation about — multiple sclerosis. All of the proceeds from sales of the photography goes to MSFriends, a grass-roots nonprofit begun by Marshall’s longtime friend Amelia Davis. Marshall hired Davis as an assistant knowing she had MS, and one encounter with Davis makes it easy to see why: she’s committed and dedicated. In the case of MSFriends, this dedication involves providing 24/7 telephone peer support, running an organization staffed by people who have MS, in an effort to help people with MS and others understand and respond to a misdiagnosed and misunderstood disease. 

For more information about MSFriends Rock for MS and MSFriends, go to www.msfriends.org  

 

“Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” — Myles Cooper USA

John Elberling
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What’s as inspiring as Myles Cooper‘s 2010 anthem “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today”? The video for “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today,” directed by another San Francisco talent, Skye Thorstenson. It’s true. SF is home to singing strawberries, dancing cupcakes, Mr. Peanuts, cherubic choirs, floating hearts and flaming hearts. Find yourself a cutie and watch it.

Brother Theodore hallucinates on tap water

John Elberling
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Brother Theodore hallucinates on tap water

In honor of the Brother Theodore documentary screening tonite (Thu/25) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the time is ripe — as ripe as rancid pork — to dig into a YouTube treasure trove. The trove contains clips of Theodore on Late Night With David Letterman. Here’s my fave. Remember: One shouldn’t try to sell roses at a fish market.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzX84SXvFt4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t01hnYVOrrw

Unhappy days

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Unhappy days

FILM Brother Theodore had a way with words. Possessed by a message he had to deliver, in monologue he’d refer to days of yore when his articulate charisma could cause “duchesses [to] laugh freely and dance like dervishes” and “the sick at heart, same-day cleaners, women’s clubs and horseflies [to follow] me in a whirlwind of ecstasy.” Those last three words, so pulpy they’re worthy of George Kuchar, are vintage Theodore. With his trademark guttural voice shifting from deep rumble to surface quake, he’d compare his sweaty skin to “rancid pork” and say he’d “rather be a contented pinworm than a tormented Brother Theodore.” But a tormented Brother Theodore he was, an E.M. Cioran-caliber comic of melancholy and misery who viewed life as a fatal disease.

Jeff Sumerel’s documentary portrait To My Great Chagrin layers performance footage of Brother Theodore (birth name: Theodore Gottleib) from different eras to create a baying chorus of Theodores: young ones, older ones, almost always sporting a furrowed brow and a silly mini-bouffant haircut. Sumerel also has small puppets mouth Theodore’s words, in a nod to the existential curse at the core of his subject’s dramatic philosophy — a philosophy born from life experience and unflinching intelligence. It turns out that the boy who became Brother Theodore played chess in a Vienna apartment with his mother’s lover, Albert Einstein, before the Nazis annihilated his family and changed his fortune from one of tremendous wealth to abject poverty.

To My Great Chagrin is at its best when it presents unfiltered — and even magnified — Brother Theodore. A fixture of the New York stage who in some ways presages performance art, Brother Theodore dedicatedly honed his monologues over the course of decades. His mid-’80s appearances on Late Night with David Letterman were such a revelation to me as a teenager that my first visit to Manhattan had to include a trip to see him perform in Greenwich Village. His hostility towards that fraternal show’s host (I remember him likening Letterman to a “fishwife”) paved the way for similar though less substantive TV stunts and pranks by the likes of Crispin Glover. In the YouTube era, those clips of Brother Theodore are beginning to find an audience again, but Sumerel’s movie provides a much fuller dose of the Teutonic titan’s towering, glowering torment. Through the wonders of recording, this fiery orator and cosmo-dynamic personality lives on, long past the prime of his senility.

TO MY GREAT CHAGRIN: THE UNBELIEVABLE STORY OF BROTHER THEODORE

Thurs/25, 7:30 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

“Sha-Boo-Lee” — Brontez shakes it

John Elberling
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1

Reasons to watch the Younger Lovers‘ “Sha-Boo-Lee,” directed by Irwin Swirnoff: hula hoops; cotton candy; Vespas; Mission Adult Superstore; pay phones, Fag School; naked sunbathing; dance instructor Brontez shaking it; sounds like if Henry’s Dress were on Stax.

Yoko Moments: “Why”

John Elberling
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Yoko Moments: “Why”

In honor of Kimberly Chun’s cover story this week on Yoko Ono, the time is right to post some Yoko moments here and there when the time is right. What better place to start than “Why,” a 1970 Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band track that has been hugely influential, both instrumentally and vocally. (A good game: name the people and bands it has influenced, and times it has been sampled.) It still sounds futuristic today.

That’s probably part of the reason why YouTube responses to it can be so hateful. Yoko does her thing. Thank god — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt exactly like what she sings here. It must have been brutally exhausting to wail like this. Try for even a few seconds and you feel like your vocal cords have been shredded. Very primal scream therapy-era, with no bad Werner Erhard aftertaste.

 

Someone wonderful

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Someone wonderful

Written with Cedar Sigo

Nancy Wilson has been quoted as saying that she doesn’t play clubs, she plays Yoshi’s. That’s the truth this weekend, especially on Feb. 20, when Miss Wilson will be celebrating her 73rd birthday on stage with a pair of shows. There is only one Nancy Wilson, only one singer who can bring a fusion of longing and attractiveness to a recording such as “He’s My Guy.” On the occasion of her birthday and upcoming Bay Area visit, I asked someone near and dear to me, the poet Cedar Sigo, if he’d like to interview Miss Wilson. He did.

SFBG It’s always a pleasure to hear you live. I have so many of your recordings, from the Capitol and Columbia albums to the more recent ones, and some of the live tracks really stand out to me.

NANCY WILSON I love [The Nancy Wilson Show] Live at the Coconut Grove (1965, Capitol).

SFBG Listening to “Don’t Take Your Love From Me” [off The Nancy Wilson Show], it’s a recording, nothing visual, but I can see you under the spotlight.

NW I understand what you’re saying.

SFBG Over the years, have you gotten a lot of crazy fan mail?

NW No, it’s been calm. I haven’t had a lot of crazies in my career.

SFBG Have fans painted portraits of you?

NW I’ve gotten some portraits [laughs]. Some of which were quite good. One was not at all good.

SFBG I’ve always been fascinated by your image, particularly during your albums with Columbia. Did you work with one particular stylist?

NW I never had a stylist.

SFBG The cover of Something Wonderful (Capitol, 1960) is terrific.

NW Oh yeah. My hands on my knees, right?

SFBG That’s the kind of music I put on when I’m trying to look totally hot and go out for the night. More recently, I like R.S.V.P. (MCG, 2004).

NW It’s hard to find songs, in fact I was just talking to MCG the other day and saying, ‘Just go through Gershwin and Cole Porter and Billy Strayhorn — is there anything I haven’t done?’ Finding something I have not recorded, that’s the hardest thing. I’ve done so many of the really great things already, and finding things of the same caliber is difficult.

SFBG When you were recording for Capitol, would you do many albums in a year?

NW At Capitol, we’d record every six months. Myself, Nat Cole, Peggy Lee, Tennessee Ernie Ford.

SFBG Are you still a quick study with a song? The impression I get is that you can instinctively or innately put your stamp on a song.

NW I just sing. I am what I am. It’s painless, it’s not a painful process.

SFBG When I listen to “Blame It on My Youth” [on R.S.V.P.], I think that your voice is not that different from when you first recorded. How do you account for that?

NW I don’t!

SFBG The same applies regarding your face, your body, your spirit.

NW Hey, listen, it is what it is!

SFBG I’ve heard you acknowledge Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott as vocal influences.

NW Dinah — more the humor. Jimmy Scott, the sound and the phrasing. I guess my dad had recordings of when Jimmy was with Lionel Hampton. I was about 10, I guess. When he came out with his own album, my dad bought that, and I loved it. It just so happens that we phrase similarly, not so much that we sound alike. We phrase alike.

SFBG Yes, the long notes. Are there others besides Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott you’d name?

NW Lena Horne.

SFBG What about instrumentalists?

NW I don’t know that any instrumentalists have influenced my vocal style. I don’t know that anyone has influenced my vocal style. I don’t recall wanting to be like or sound like anybody. It’s just been there.

SFBG That is completely true of you. It’s common for people to talk about a singer sounding like an instrument, but you’ve always brought a sense of drama.

NW I’m a lyric person. I’m not interested in vocalizing. I want to get the story across.

SFBG It seems now that the art of being an entertainer as well as a great singer is being lost. You bring that.

NW Yes. Hopefully it will come back, and there will be places for people to learn and hone their craft. It’s out there, you just have to hunt for it, whereas what I sing today was the pop music back in the day.

SFBG Lena Horne, whom you mentioned earlier, is an example of someone who could sing but also entertain.

NW Exactly.

SFBG One of my favorite of your albums is I Know I Love Him (Capitol, 1973). That one has “Don’t Misunderstand,” by Gordon Parks.

NW I’m the godmother to one of his children. I love Gordon.

SFBG Did he write a lot of music?

NW No. I don’t know where that one came from. But it’s a goodie.

SFBG Do you enjoy playing in the Bay Area?

NW I love Yoshi’s. I love that club.

SFBG It’s a nice size.

NW It’s the perfect size. If you’re going to choose a place to hang out and have some fun with a guy, that’s the place to do it.

SFBG I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing you there again.

NW There are certain songs I’ll have to sing — “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and “Guess Who [I Saw Today]?” Certain songs, you’ve just got to do them.

SFBG I don’t think people would let you off stage until you’ve done “Guess Who [I Saw Today]?” [Laughs] Songs like that one and “Face It Girl, It’s Over” have a gay appeal. Have you always had a strong gay following?

NW I would assume so. [Laughs]

SFBG Going to see you, one of the best things is the audience — they’re usually a great group of people who seem happy to be together.

NW I’ve been blessed, I’ve been fortunate.

SFBG Thank you. It’s an honor to talk with you after appreciating your music for so long.

NW I’m glad you called. It was enjoyable just to talk with someone who knows the body of work and appreciates it.

NANCY WILSON

Thurs/18–Sat/20, 8 and 10 p.m., $50

Yoshi’s Oakland

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

Snap Sounds: Myles Cooper (and High Fantasy)

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: Myles Cooper (and High Fantasy)

MYLES COOPER

“Gonna Find Boyfriends Today”

(demo; www.myspace.com/mylescooper)

 

Yeah, 2010 needs some anthems, so thank Mr. Cooper for bringing one, dedicated to all those who want to “find guys to buy us drinks / And tell us that we’re young and funny.” The whimsical reggaeton touch, the yearning keyboard lines, Cooper’s friendly and understated vocal, and most of all the backing choir send this one over. It’s a shame the Passionistas aren’t releasing music, but if this and California Sunshine are what we get instead, it’s all good (and it’s ready to inspire fab YouTube vids). Gimme gimme more.

PS:

If you want to go out on a Tuesday night, you can’t do much better than High Fantasy, the new night Cooper puts on with Alexis Penney at Aunt Charlie’s. Rumor has it that a blitz of Boy George is on the agenda of this week’s edition.

 

HIGH FANTASY

Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m.

133 Turk, SF

www.auntcharlieslounge.com

 

 

Snap Sounds: Alexis Penney

John Elberling
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0
Snap Sounds: Alexis Penney

Alexis Penney

“Lonely Sea”

(demo)

“I’M A HARD-LIVING, YOUNG QUEEN WITH A BIG HEART AND A LOT TO SAY.”

I’m listening. Alexis Penney is part of Party Effects, which Marke B. wrote about recently. This solo track is like if a badass version of Erasure and Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” had a love-hate child. But way better. “Lonely Sea”  makes me wish Frankfurt was next door to Oakland, so I could program a club night with performances by Alexis and Chelonis R. Jones. For now, I’ll just listen to this song, and its classic throwaway (as in throw your heart away) lines about good pillows and last names – at least a few times a day.

Snap Sounds: Moon Duo

John Elberling
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1
Snap Sounds: Moon Duo

MOON DUO

Escape

(Woodsist)

I’ve been thinking about how Moon Duo‘s name sounds a little like Amon Düül. Maybe that’s just tangential coincidence, but the SF twosome’s songs allow for the kind of daydreaming that produces such thoughts.

Escape delivers on the great promise of Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada’s earlier recordings, especially last year’s Killing Time (Sacred Bones). Like that EP, Escape is made up of four songs, but the lunar flares sprawl ever outward to album length. We’re only a month into 2010, but here’s a contender for Bay Area album of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXD_uA7c4w

Double vision

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Double vision

The just-reissued Vampires of Dartmore album Dracula’s Music Cabinet (Finders Keepers) includes a track titled “Hallo, Mr. Hitchcock,” in which beloved Hitch silently answers a series of phone calls from a manic, murderous prankster. The track isn’t used in Johan Grimonprez’s latest unconventional film essay Double Take, but it would be ideal material for the movie. Like his fellow Europeans the Vampires, Grimonprez has a fatal attraction to the master of suspense — an exploration of the nature of fear, particularly Cold War fear (and its relevance to 21s century scaremongers), his movie toys and teases its way toward a climax in which the master director meets his doppelganger.

Double Take‘s voice-over narration — co-authored with Tom McCarthy — suggests that such an encounter can only be bad: any man who sees his double, even the great Hitchcock, is doomed. This conceit is really just an element of drama within Grimonprez’s masterful many-layered montage. He combines Hitchcock’s appearances in movies and on television with footage of vocal and physical Hitchcock impersonators, creating a hall-of-mirrors experience that is frequently funny. More incitefully, he forwards the idea that The Birds (1963) has connections to the Bay of Pigs and to terror by air both then and now. If this seems like a ludicrous theoretical stretch, it helps to know that Grimonprez has a wry sense of humor, and that his 1998 movie Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y still might be the best movie about September 11, 2001, even if it predates that landmark moment by over three years. In other words, Grimonprez is prescient.

He’s also rather sweet. Double Take‘s final scenes linger on one Hitchcock impersonator, Ron Burrage, and what seems to be his lifelong male partner. This particular Hitch has a nuanced appreciation of the absurdity of his life and dual identity, which makes his singular mortality all the more poignant. Grimonprez is anything but a sentimentalist, but unlike many filmic theorists, he allows himself to have a heart as well as a brain.

DOUBLE TAKE

Fri/12, 7:15 p.m., Roxie

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