Max Goldberg

Do you believe in White Magic?

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The folkish side of indie rock has been blessed with several female songwriters who have unique, affecting voices — Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom, Becky Stark — but White Magic’s Mira Billotte is in a different league altogether. Her vocal tracks thunder and shiver all over the register, fearlessly chasing down radical intonations and bold tonal colors. Where the others can all sound a little fey and princessy, Billotte’s full-spectrum blasts hark back to the possessed passion of ’60s stunners like Grace Slick, Karen Dalton, and — why not? — Janis Joplin.

Billotte’s voice hinges on form and freedom, a balance that’s been remarkably well preserved on White Magic’s recordings. Speaking from her New York home about the band’s new EP, Dark Stars (Drag City), Billotte notes, "It’s the first digital recording White Magic recording has done, and we figured that would be cool because we could record in a spontaneous way."

But while the music feels fresh and explorative, it’s clear from my conversation with Billotte that a lot of thought goes into White Magic’s release schedule, a not-insignificant point given indie rock’s de facto buzz-bin setting. To be sure, the hype machine is familiar to the duo: Billotte’s regular partner is Doug Shaw, though they’re frequently joined by other musicians like Gang Gang Dance’s Tim Dewitt and the Dirty Three’s Jim White. Back in 2004, White Magic were frequently cited as leading lights of the burgeoning freak folk movement and were invited by Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus to play the hip All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London.

Perhaps it was Billotte’s previous experience with Quix*o*tic — a band she played in with her sister Christine — that kept White Magic so even-keeled through these early waves. White Magic released an EP (2004’s Through the Sun Door), then took their time with an expansive full-length, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (both Drag City). Since putting out the album, they’ve mostly shied away from touring. If anything, the band continues to be underrated, especially Billotte’s obvious star-power talent. One wonders if it isn’t the liberties she takes with her tracks — the very things that make them so special — that’s kept mainstream acceptance at bay. Vocalists such as Marshall and Stark may lack Billotte’s range, but their voices are more consistent and pleasant and therefore more likely to nab attention through in iTunes downloads or soundtrack one-offs.

Far from being a stopgap, Dark Stars sounds like a further staking out of White Magic’s idiosyncratic musical terrain: piano-driven ballads that swallow up a field guide’s worth of sounds and textures, everything from Tin Pan Alley jazz to dub chants, West African guitar music to Old Weird America folk. Bookends "Shine on Heaven" and "Winds" spiral out with repetitive, glistening chants — Billotte tells me the first song began as an improvisation at a party with friends — while "Very Late" boasts baroque blues and "Poor Harold" a loose-limbed folk ballad–reggae stomp combination. If this all sounds a little unwieldy, that’s because it is. The EP format is a perfect fit for the duo, since it allows them a full range of exploration in individual songs while still maintaining a succinct arc. Billotte confirms my suspicion that Dat Rosa was composed of four distinct parts, or EPs: "It’s a good format for my songs … and I tend to segment things in fours … so I like that the EP is four songs."

Besides Billotte’s voice, White Magic’s intensity has a lot to do with how they draw so many splintering sounds out of a relatively limited musical palate of mostly piano, guitar, and White’s seasick drums. Their songs sometimes seem to be all incantation, yawping calls without resolution. It’s a musical formula that is intoxicating and dizzying and certainly has something to do with the way the group has retained the sense of excitement and mystery that attended its first transmissions. As freak folk’s star fades, White Magic still seem on the brink.

"Hopefully [the music] can take you to that other place when you’re really listening to it," Billotte says, "because that’s what it does for me when I’m playing it…. That’s kind of what I feel like the trance element is." She sings for the sake of the songs, in other words, making it seem all the more likely that those songs are built to last. *

WHITE MAGIC

With Cryptacize and the Dry Spells

Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., $12

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Remain in light

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Goldie winner — Music: Wooden Shjips

-
0

Wooden Shjips released their "Dance, California/Clouds over Earthquake" 7-inch single (Sick Thirst) last year in much the same way as they had their instigating, self-released Shrinking Moon for You 10-inch: packaged in an unassuming, clear plastic sleeve with hardly any information besides song titles. Beyond sending bloggers and journalists into a tizzy over their sexy, squalling grooves, this set confirmed Wooden Shjips as essential California. While Devendra Banhart and Vetiver reel in mellow ’70s album rock and Comets on Fire carry the torch of scraping psychedelia in the key of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Wooden Shjips recover the dark star lurking behind flower power in groups like Blue Cheer and yes, the Doors. The A-side is all feverish face melt, but it’s on "Clouds over Earthquake" that the band really sets the agenda. A shapely guitar lead dissolves into the heat waves of a droning pulse, eventually giving way to band leader Ripley Johnson’s echo-chamber vocal: "Fire / The sun is rising / Cut through the black clouds / Over earthquake."

Their early records sold out their limited pressings long ago, a fact the band took into consideration when packaging the first 2,000 copies of its eponymous first album (Holy Mountain) with a bonus CD compiling all of the singles’ tracks. Besides being a warm gesture to new fans, the comprehensive packaging has the effect of consecrating Wooden Shjips’ reputation. It seems certain that this band is now at the helm of San Francisco’s ever-burgeoning psych-rock scene. There is also evidence of serious if subtle musical progress being made, from the cryptic garage rock of tracks like "Death’s Not Your Friend" to the artfully expansive arrangements of Wooden Shjips‘ culminating diptych, "Blue Sky Bends" and "Shine like Suns."

In keeping with their scattershot release history, Wooden Shjips have released a new 7-inch on yet another label, Sub Pop. Although many musicians are tailoring their work to iTunes, Johnson’s moved in the opposite direction, recognizing that the material nature of his band’s releases seals their music’s aura, which, redolent of ’60s and ’70s minimalist garage rock, occupies a very specific, romantic spot in many record collectors’ hearts. "It was inspired in part by private-press and limited-press records, like George Brigman’s Jungle Rot [self-released, 1975]," Johnson writes from New York, where Wooden Shjips recently played a round of CMJ festival shows. "More in the sense that if you make a record and put a lot of care into it, someone might discover it someday and dig it."

Long cognizant of the fetish for mystery objects, the singer-guitarist even went so far as to give away the first several hundred copies of Shrinking Moon for You. The gamble paid off nicely, judging by the piqued curiosity inspired by early raves the 10-inch drew from tastemakers like the Wire‘s Byron Coley and Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke. These reviews ignited the dash among critics to tease out the elements of the Shjips’ suggestive sound as so many influences; the Velvet Underground, the Doors, Terry Riley, and Spacemen 3 are most frequently named, though I’d also refer listeners to the burned-rubber daydream of Monte Hellman’s classic 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.

It would be silly to contend that the Shjips don’t work from the fierce template pioneered on the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (Verve, 1967), but their cobalt blue jams hardly tell of an anxiety of influence. What matters with Wooden Shjips is the evident relish they take in reconfiguring the shards of a particular music history and the sense of utter bliss in their fire-and-brimstone sonic landscape.

www.woodenshjips.com

www.myspace.com/woodenshjips

All that noise

-
0

@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision/2007/10/lit_alex_ross_brings_the_noise.html@@

Seven up

-
0

1. Dans la Ville de la Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, France/Spain)

2. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada) My two favorites of the festival were both ghost stories in which a haunted protagonist (fey Xavier Lafitte in Sylvia and Maddin’s voice-over in My Winnipeg) traces his past in a city charged with memory. In Guerín’s detailed mise-en-scène and patterned compositions and Maddin’s loopy reenactments and smeared dissolves, we get nothing less than cinema as seeing, remembering, being — which is to say, a cinephile’s dream.

3. Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)

4. The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US) Terror’s Advocate and Scott Walker: 30th Century Man have their strengths, but these two documentaries gave me the greatest hope for the state of nonfiction cinema — Laura Dunn’s chronicle of an environmental crisis in Austin, Texas, for its plainspoken visual lyricism and Jia Zhangke’s observation of the fashion industry for its side-wind narration and flowering long takes.

5. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/Iran). Sometimes all it takes is lively storytelling. Fingers crossed that this pitch-perfect adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel will edge out Ratatouille for the animation Oscar.

6. Fujian Blue (Robin Weng, China)

7. La France (Serge Bozon, France) My two dark horses, each in its way about a band of outsiders. Fujian Blue‘s tender portrait of a group of friends living on the edge in southeast China (a center for human trafficking) evokes Mean Streets, while Bozon’s chronicle of a troop of World War I deserters makes delightful, if often inexplicable, use of vintage Hollywood movies (the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, the combat films of Raoul Walsh and Samuel Fuller) and sun-dappled musical arrangements that would make Wes Anderson blush.

For Johnny Ray Huston’s report on the Vancouver International Film Festival, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

More sad hits

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s been nearly two decades since Galaxie 500 broke through with their languid, fuzzed-out dream pop, and rhythm section Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang still live and record in the Ivy Leagued shadow of their Cambridge, Mass., alma mater, Harvard University. Perpetual college rock? It’s true their recordings as a duo have retained Galaxie 500’s moody overtones, but the self-consciously wide-screen canvas is gone: instead of soaring chorus and spiral-jetty guitar wails, Damon and Naomi emphasize smart pop arrangements and subdued vocal harmonies. Their latest, Within These Walls (20/20/20), is one of the coziest albums of the year, not just for its rainy-day production but also for the impression that the pair is totally comfortable in their bittersweet pop. When I ask the two by e-mail why they are continually drawn to downbeat melodies, Yang replies that it’s "the most melancholy records in our collection that get the most play — in some ways I think that you need to really appreciate the melancholy, the fleeting, to appreciate happiness."

For a project summoning such constancy, Damon and Naomi barely got off the ground running as a duo. Surprised by Dean Wareham’s stormy departure from Galaxie 500, the pair released a modest EP of songs under the name Pierre Etoile, but distribution problems waylaid the project. Burned twice in quick succession, Damon and Naomi rededicated their creative energies to Exact Change, a small press with an emphasis on reprinting experimental literature and writing by avant-garde composers and artists. Galaxie 500 producer Kramer hooked the duo for a one-off return to music, 1992’s More Sad Hits (Shimmy Disc), and five studio albums later, they’re still treading water in the afterglow.

Krukowski once remarked in an interview with the Wire that Galaxie 500 was drawn to imitate the Velvet Underground’s eponymous third record and Big Star’s Third (Rykodisc, 1978) for "the sound of a band after it’s been a rock band." Damon and Naomi are, of course, this concept’s incarnation: a band risen up from the rhythm section of a much-heralded breakthrough act, whose first full-length together was designed as a farewell.

All of their successive albums work within the narrow wall of this hushed grace, but the pair can hardly be accused of resting on Galaxie 500’s laurels. Besides running Exact Change and backing up Kate Biggar and Wayne Rogers (currently of Major Stars) on their Magic Hour project, the duo has worked extensively with Japanese psych rockers Ghost, especially with virtuoso guitarist Michio Kurihara, who has added his tasteful accompaniment to their last several albums and tours (that rare combination of genius and tastefulness, Kurihara will play with both Damon and Naomi and headliners Boris for their upcoming San Francisco date).

Damon and Naomi’s preferred status among next-wave elites like the Wire might seem surprising until you realize they were pretty well ahead of the curve in cultivating a pastoral, psych-tinged folkie sound (on prime display on "Cruel Queen," the Yang-fronted ballad that closes Within These Walls). Indeed, for how much they’ve towed the line of subdued folk pop, there’s never been any doubting the group’s interesting tastes: during our e-mail chat, Krukowski name-checks Robert Wyatt, Fairport Convention, Scott Walker, and Fotheringay as influences.

That said, the pair are never showy in their pop know-how. Indeed, the best moments on Within These Walls then aren’t about blowing minds so much as hitting the right stride. "The Well" glides on Kurihara’s guitar lines, "The Turnaround" paces back and forth with staccato strings and familiar harmonies, and "On the Aventine" finds a tender resting place between reverb guitar and soprano saxophone. It’s music for the morning after, for a foreign city, for taking cover: reposed, but still tender from the journey down. *

DAMON AND NAOMI

With Boris and Michio Kurihara

Sun/14, 8 p.m., $17

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Fresh air

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I could tell you about the river," Bill Callahan bellows on "From the Rivers to the Ocean," the opening salvo of his most recent record, Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City). There’s a pregnant pause, he drops his voice between ascending piano chords — "Or …" — and then a sweet melody buoys the rest of the line, "… we could just get in." After filing 11 albums as Smog or (smog), Callahan begins the first recorded under his own name with a promise of directness, a promise that specifically harks back to Smog’s previous full-length, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (Drag City). That album’s patterned evocations of nature and memory signaled a deep, inchoate sense of regeneration. These currents seem more matter-of-fact on the gospel-flavored Woke on a Whaleheart. Take, for instance, the first single, "Diamond Dancer," a limber bar band groove that opens with the dreamy nursery rhyme "She was dancing so hard/ She danced herself into a diamond/ Dancing all by herself/ And not minding."

Of course, with Callahan things are never so simple. In that same opening verse of "From the Rivers to the Ocean," he exhorts, "Have faith in wordless knowledge." It’s a clear sentiment made less so by the voice delivering it: a voice for which language is all, a means to both intimate and deflect. This push-pull is essential to Callahan’s aesthetic and a big part of why his records are the kind of constant companions whose grooves you wear out. I ask him by e-mail about his connection to the album format, and he writes back, "There will be an exciting time when us album makers will be Mad Max types, battling over the only analog recording equipment and vinyl pressing plants left in the world. This has already started…. Steve Albini bought all the remaining stock of paper leader in the world…. He gave me enough maybe to last the rest of my life, as long as I don’t go crazy with it."

Meaning, I suppose, that there’s still plenty of Callahan to come, a fact that should not be taken for granted. After all, many of his contemporaries didn’t make it through the murk of ’90s indie irony — a notable exception being Callahan’s Drag City labelmate Will Oldham. Callahan was readily heralded in those years for Smog albums like 1997’s Red Apple Falls and 1999’s Knock-Knock (both Drag City), but it often seemed a kind of backhand praise, with critics reductively categorizing Callahan’s music as downcast or deadpan — the same simplistic tropes attributed to Jim Jarmusch’s independent films.

Even for those of us paying closer attention to the gradual refinements across Callahan’s discography, though, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love still had the feeling of a gauntlet being thrown: a powerfully cohesive suite of songs brought off by a newly confident voice, fuller in timbre and all the more steeped in Callahan’s sly sense for forthright obfuscation. If that recording was the watershed for a surprising second act, Woke on a Whaleheart shows the newly Smog-less Callahan in a loose, expansive mood. The album’s a grower, and while I’m not wholly taken with Neil Michael Hagerty’s glitzy production, it’s nice sensing that Callahan feels at home enough in his voice to open it up to some more varied collaborations.

I ask him, foolishly perhaps, if he feels like he has a fuller sense of himself after completing these records. "I don’t reckon so," he replies. "It’s more like a chess move. You watch to see what happens, and then you make your next move."

BILL CALLAHAN

Sun/7, 2:15 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Porch Stage

Also with Sir Richard Bishop

Sun/7, 9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com


HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Atmosphere and an actress

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Olivier Assayas’s films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round. Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination. We frequently lose our bearings in cinema Assayas — as in two poetic refractions of the same scene in Irma Vep (1996) and Demonlover (2002): the female lead donning an alter ego, scurrying through hallways, committing a crime in a space that seems to overlap reality, dream, and fantasy — but there is always an underlying trust in the director’s guiding hand, earned by his hyperkinetic narration and apparent devotion to his actors. Assayas’s résumé does indeed resemble the archetypal new wave trajectory (from Cahiers du Cinéma critic to what Manny Farber calls a termite filmmaker), but the connection runs deeper still: like his forebears, he makes films about what it means to live in the modern world.

It’s a world that invariably entails the restless confusion and complex social systems of the globalized marketplace. He arrives in this slipstream through any number of inputs. For starters, his films are multilingual, multilocation affairs (in this respect they resemble spy thrillers, though it’s only Assayas’s most recent film, Boarding Gate, that feels pointedly designed along genre lines). Second, his plots usually revolve around business people. Even in Les Destinées (2000), an intimate fin de siècle period piece, a lapsed minister struggles for "new methods and new machines" to capture the American market for porcelain. This concern for France’s mediated role in global trade — it supplies luxury items in Les Destinées, film production in Irma Vep, and Internet pornography in Demonlover — is a constant in Assayas’s work, as are characters who are swallowed whole by an abstract marketplace. In Irma Vep, the film that still seems like Assayas’s most intuitive work, it’s a film director (played by new wave favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) who succumbs to the impossibilities of postmodern enterprise, in this case remaking a French classic (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires) with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung).

Film Comment critic Amy Taubin is right to point out that Boarding Gate is "closer to Feuillade than [Assayas’s] Irma Vep," though it seems to me that this is as much a matter of the film’s riveting embodiment of Feuillade’s metaphor of society as so many trapdoors and secret passageways as it is "because [Boarding Gate‘s Asia] Argento is a contemporary Musidora [the star of Les Vampires]." Feuillade confined his lucid vision to the backstreets of Paris, whereas Assayas snaps between the City of Light and Hong Kong. More disconcertingly, he evokes virtual realities as well. In Irma Vep and Demonlover, alter egos take on a confusing, extrareal presence befitting the Internet age. Compulsively drawn to modern, floating spaces, Assayas frequently sets his action in glassy airports and offices. In this respect, the director’s use of Brian Eno’s ambient music, in Boarding Gate, seemed a long time coming, though Sonic Youth’s harmonics had previously supplied the same glide to Irma Vep and Demonlover.

Of course, all of these touches are only so much window dressing for Assayas’s mesmerizing female leads. Godard’s dictum that cinema is a matter of "a girl and a gun" falls short with Assayas: for this director it takes atmosphere and an actress. Irma Vep, Demonlover, and Boarding Gate all abide by the "a woman in trouble" scheme espoused by David Lynch, but with cleaner lines and punchier scrambles. Is there any doubt that Irma Vep conveys the plight of an actress lost in the marketplace with greater grace and acuity than Lynch’s slogging Inland Empire (2006)?

Because really, cinema Assayas could hardly be called glum or even despairing in spite of its heavy themes. Indeed, some of the filmmaker’s champions were upset with Demonlover for crossing that line into David Cronenberg country (the film is being screened at the PFA with the Canadian director’s 1983 Videodrome), but in Irma Vep and Cold Water (1994) it’s striking just how light Assayas’s touch remains even when he broaches oceans of malaise. Some of this, of course, is simply a matter of finely honed cinematic storytelling: fluid editing, detailed soundscapes, and restless handheld-camera work all give his films a stylishness that seems miles away from Dogma austerity.

Despite lacking the dreamlike depths of Irma Vep and Demonlover and the closely observed social mores of Les Destinées and Cold Water, Boarding Gate might just be the smoothest machine Assayas has built yet. The film’s minimalist, on-the-run scenario allows the director to intensify his stylistic template — the cutting has never been more electric, the natural light never so beautifully pale. And to return to Taubin’s point, Argento may well be the perfect Assayas heroine for all of her different looks — in Boarding Gate she’s alternately terrifying and terrified, spasmodic and inert, in control and at a loss. Unlike so many damsels in distress, she’s essentially active — as is cinema Assayas.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS IN RESIDENCE: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA WEEK

Oct. 4–11, $5.50–$9.50

See Rep Clock for schedule

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The afterworld

-
0

› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW "Stress eternal life." Irène Némirovsky inscribed these words in her diary on July 1, 1942, less than two weeks before she was arrested under Vichy race laws, a month and a half before her death at Auschwitz. She wrote concerning a cycle of novels conceived to reflect the everyday qualities of life during wartime — a portrait emphasizing pettiness and pity, fear and loathing. The manuscripts for the two she finished were published as Suite Française in 2004, a discovery that seemed the improbable product of luck and literary heroism. A Russian-French Jew who converted her family to Catholicism in 1939, Némirovsky held no illusions regarding her bleak fate but maintained a Herculean work ethic during the occupation, drawing on a strong conviction — palpable in both the fiction and the journals — regarding the immemorial qualities of inner life and writing.

It would be dishonest to ignore the extratextual aura of such works, how they arrived in our hands, the time and lives bridged. And yet, Suite Française‘s literary flaws — chief among them a tendency toward simplistic moralizing and characterizations freighted with cliché — are unmistakable. What a welcome relief, then, to hold in one’s hands a slim volume of few wasted words called Fire in the Blood — another, earlier novel rescued from Némirovsky’s notebooks.

Whereas Suite‘s indirect narration delivers Némirovsky’s closely observed social realism with a brittle, didactic tone, the first-person narration of Fire in the Blood‘s Monsieur Sylvestre, a solitary, middle-aged landowner hoping only to be left alone to his gardens and journal, offers this same sensibility in fuller bloom. When Sylvestre’s reticent voice invokes the thick, guilty-by-association social atmosphere in the provinces, where the book is set, it is with the shadow of self-implication.

It being the provinces, everyone in Fire in the Blood is related, if not by blood than by deeply intertwined personal experiences, unspoken proprieties, and the land itself. Sylvestre is a cousin of Hélène, the matriarch of a proud family of landowners, and the book first takes up the narrative of the younger generation, specifically Hélène’s daughter Colette and her drowned husband, Jean.

Far from resting in peace, Jean in death reveals a web of infidelity and foul play, and the specter of an older story emerges via the youthful indiscretions at hand. Unfolding with slow mystery at first (Némirovsky occasionally overplays her hand in this regard, interjecting foreboding drumrolls), it picks up speed and urgency, until the past fully overtakes the present in the final thundering pages of the book: an enfolding, transmuting structure designed to convey the "roaring, all-consuming tidal wave of love."

Reliving his former passions, Sylvestre muses, "I felt as if I’d been asleep for twenty years and had woken to pick up my book at the very page I’d left off." Back, then, to that tonic of literary heroism and luck. We are, in the end, moved by this writing not just because the books did endure but because one senses Némirovsky willing it to be so. With 20 pages left, we finally get "But wait. Let’s start from the beginning …" As Sylvestre the narrator ends his story suspended in timeless reverie, so too does Némirovsky the writer end her book singing out to us: "What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose cinders would continue to glow for years to come." What he could not foresee, she knew beyond doubt.*

FIRE IN THE BLOOD

By Irène Némirovsky

Translated by Sandra Smith

Alfred A. Knopf

160 pages

$22

“American Dirge”

-
0

REVIEW I confess: despite having a disproportionate appetite for ’60s leftovers — from the children of Coca-Cola and Marx to the Mamas and the Papas, I eat it all up — I’ve felt my enthusiasm flagging in the past couple of weeks. Is it Summer of Love indolence? Brightblack ballyhoo? Regardless, what a stirring relief to come upon "American Dirge," a solo show at Tartine Bakery spotlighting the charmed collages of local up-and-comer Ryan Coffey. Using cutouts summoning fashion and the occult — shades of Kenneth Anger — advertising, and rebellion, Coffey isolates the decade’s ephemera against a clean white backdrop. Arranged into mysterious pyramids and ovals, his collages are simultaneous efforts in decontextualization and reanimation. As a whole, the collection emits an unmistakably mystic aura — echoing watercolor drips suffuse the show with a heavy, droning undertow befitting its title.

In his notes to "American Dirge," Coffey draws inspiration from Jimi Hendrix’s version of "The Star-Spangled Banner," itself a primary document of the notion of artist as alchemist. Given our culture’s inclination to neatly package the ’60s, Coffey’s scrambling of the era’s colors, poses, and moods seems almost radical: rather than emphasizing generic catchalls — peace and love, wild in the streets, Vietnam time — he keeps his eye on the more abstract side of the equation, the epoch’s discord and dream life. That "American Dirge" is as much about the incantatory act of looking back as it is about finding a kind of past-present communion is clear from the work’s healthy imperviousness to simplistic interpretations.

AMERICAN DIRGE Through Oct. 3. Mon., 8 a.m.–7 p.m.; Tues.–Wed., 7:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; Thurs.–Fri., 7:30 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–8 p.m.; free. Tartine Bakery, 600 Guerrero, SF. (415) 487-2600, www.tartinebakery.com

Ephemera, etc.

-
0

Technology induces unrealistic leaps of optimism, and so it was that usually reliable New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently imagined a future in which "you will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want." Drawing back a hair, Scott admitted that "there are still hundreds more titles awaiting transfer to digital media." The reality is a good deal grimmer, with thousands of titles lost or languishing in various states of disrepair — and such estimates do not take into account the colossal numbers of nonfeatures, everything from promo spots to pornography.

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents two programs emphasizing some of the bygone era’s lost treasures. "More Amazing Tales from the Archives" (Sun/15, 10:30 a.m., free) is an education in itself, with representatives from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Rochester, N.Y.’s George Eastman House demonstrating preservation techniques and spoils. This year’s program features films restored from 28mm (even the formatting is archaic!) and rare ephemera (Clara Bow fragments, San Francisco newsreels, something called Mushroom Growing). Parisian collector Serge Bromberg looks to be packing a lot of heat in his artfully arranged "Retour de Flamme" program (Sun/15, 12:45 p.m., $13) of early French cinema: trick films, travelogues, skin flicks, Josephine Baker, a "strange music-hall performance from 1907, with a dancing pig," and other confectionary surprises along the way.

Notes on Nazimova

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Audiences at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be treated to several strong roles for leading women — Lois Wilson’s heartbreaking humble pie as Miss Lulu Bett (1921), Louise Brooks’s gender-bending hobo in 1928’s Beggars of Life — but now as then, there can be only one Nazimova. The Russian-born enchantress (who dropped her first name, Alla) stars in 1921’s Camille, a version of Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel set in swinging Paris and a perfect vehicle for her insanely overwrought performance style (it would have to be: beyond her stirring salary, the actress had final say on the film’s director and script). It seems a cruel joke that the better-known version of Camille is the 1936 rendering with Greta Garbo, since, in the reductive annals of film history, it was Garbo who displaced Nazimova as the reigning ice-queen, only-one-name-necessary androgynous European beauty. That said, those who associate the silents with musty hokum are in for a surprise when this Camille splays across the screen, a vintage blast of Hollywood Babylon tangled up in Nazimova’s nest of black curls.

A little history might be helpful here, and besides, it’s too fun not to recount. Born Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon to a brawling family of Russian Jews, Nazimova fled for the arts and notoriety early, taking up the violin and, when that didn’t work, joining Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. A couple of love affairs and one fruitless marriage later, the actress embarked for New York to perform Henrik Ibsen with Pavel Orlenev, a personal friend of Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky. From here she went to Hollywood, where she was presented with her unusual paychecks and creative control (whenever a gentleman tries to kiss her Marguerite in Camille, Nazimova sniffs, "Not until you put a jewel in my hand"), eventually producing her own films (including 1923’s notorious Salomé) and establishing residence at 8080 Sunset Blvd., a sprawling compound that came to be called the Garden of Allah and played frequent host to both icons and outrage. A typically delicious Nazimova story: the actress hired art director Natacha Rambova to design Camille‘s sets, and the two may or may not have had a love affair before Rambova married Nazimova’s costar, fishy Rudolph Valentino.

And that’s not even touching Nazimova’s lavender marriage with Charles Bryant or, weirdest of all, her being Nancy Reagan’s godmother. If Nazimova’s personal life seems spun or at least exaggerated, it was all at the service of her queenish persona — something on prime display in Camille, thanks in no small part to Rambova’s logic-defying art deco set designs. The many arches and frills that appoint bedrooms and ballrooms accentuate Nazimova’s sinewy bends, beaky sneers, and bomber swoons.

Susan Sontag begins the inquiry in her seminal "Notes on ‘Camp’ " essay with a useful criterion for considering Nazimova’s flamboyant performance: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." The tragedy of this Camille has nothing to do with Dumas’ plotting but instead lies in the decline that inevitably accompanies pure camp’s straining seriousness. In Camille, Nazimova’s wilting is foreshadowed in Valentino’s naturalistic glide, the unaffected air that purportedly prompted D.W. Griffith to wonder, "Is this fellow really acting or is he so perfectly the type that he does not need to act?" Nazimova was all aura, without a trace of naturalism; regardless of the actress’s personal tumbles, this image would have been impossible to sustain with the coming of sound. In the end, it seems, she was simply too big for real life. *

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Fri/13–Sun/15, most programs $13–$15

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.silentfilm.org

Night on Earth

-
0

Gus van Sant’s films are as thick as the Oregon sky. Swept with dreamy remove and elliptical narration, his work strikes me as being the cinematic equivalent of shoegaze music (sorry, Sofia). Now that the writer-director seems to have given up middlebrow commercial filmmaking (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to return to the art house (Elephant, Last Days), it feels like the right time for a revival of his shoestring 16mm debut, Mala Noche. Originally released in 1985, the understated story of a scraggly Portland liquor store clerk infatuated with a Mexican street youth is based on poet Walt Curtis’s novella of the same name, with the author’s beat-tinged style re-created in actor Tim Streeter’s affecting, wise voice-over.

Novellas may be easier to adapt than poems, but it’s still important that van Sant is working from a poet’s material, as he possesses a penchant for pure lyricism that puts him in league with Terrance Malick. Mala Noche has the woozy, restless rhythm of hanging around, playing hard to get. A couple of voice-overs on white privilege aside, van Sant’s rendering doesn’t feel like it’s about anything in particular — not inconsequential, considering its chronicling of a gay, biracial love triangle (Streeter’s Walt loves Johnny but ends up sleeping with his friend Roberto). Instead of identity politics, we get longing, laughter, working-class blues, weather. There are dramatic elements here, to be sure — disappearances, lockouts, even death — but they float by, washed out in wistfulness. The narration inevitably sags in places, though John J. Campbell’s low-key black-and-white cinematography is frequently stunning, imbuing van Sant’s handheld close-ups with surprising depth (reason enough for the new print from Janus Films). With a crooked smile and a purring voice, Streeter’s character is every bit the likable asshole, and the object of his desire (Doug Cooeyate) is magnetic. It’s easy enough to see Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho coming, though one doesn’t necessarily want to leave this Mala Noche.

The hot rock

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s strange taking on a profile of a band so steeped in a musical language with which you were once not just fluent but even obsessed. I would have adored New York City rockers Battles when I was 19, their power-through-precision métier appealing to my penchant for all things prog and post, the words "ex-Helmet drummer" (that would be the band’s John Stanier) acting as foolproof elixir. But if I’m not so easily impressed by intensity and general hugeness these days, that only makes my response to the evident dynamism on Mirrored (Warp) seem all the more incontestable.

Not that anyone ever doubted Battles’ credentials: in the school of rock, these guys are definitely PhDs. Beyond Stanier’s heavy days with Helmet, Ian Williams’s guitar tapping was a cornerstone of Don Caballero’s pioneering math rock. Guitarist Dave Konopka put in time with Lynx. Multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton still gets tied to his dad — avant-garde jazz colossus Anthony Braxton — though it’s worth noting he’s done lots of compelling work on his own, including 2002’s History That Has No Effect (JMZ).

There’s plenty of firepower here, though Mirrored doesn’t sound like the work of a typical, ego-fueled supergroup. Reflecting on the ensemble’s beginnings in 2003, Williams relates, "It was about starting from scratch rather than having it be the guy from Helmet doing what he’s supposed to do and the guy from Don Cab doing what he’s supposed to do and so on." Battles’ music is certainly cohesive, to the point of being migraine inducing. Williams is on the road between shows in Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta when we talk, and he sounds a bit mystified that some people still view Battles as a side project. "The reality is this band has taken up all of our time these past few years."

Part of this lingering getting-to-know-you talk clearly has to do with the group’s measured ascent: Battles took four years to release their first album, after all. While Williams says that part of why Mirrored took so long is simply a matter of the logistics of England’s Warp Records repackaging the band’s 2004 EPs — EP C (Monitor) and EP B (Dim Mak) — it’s clear that there were designs to build from the ground up. "One thing about the EPs was that they originally came out in the States on three separate small indie labels, and it took people a while to find out about it, and that was a conscious thing … just to have it be more word-of-mouth," Williams explains. "Another purpose of taking our time was in wanting to find our own sound, our own reason for being a band."

That sound — fractal, propulsive, profoundly stimulated — is mapped out in Mirrored‘s opening minutes. A tightly wound snare part rides the rails of muted guitar runs before "Race: In" blooms into a giant, Tortoise-size crescendo. The quartet then doubles back on the core rhythmic elements, which are projected through a half-dozen modes during the song’s five prismatic minutes. The video for the full-length’s glam-inflected single, "Atlas," offers a spot-on visual approximation: the band members play in a mirrored cube, their bobbing, duplicated forms angling in on one another as their respective parts interlock in so many different combinations.

"I guess it is a tension between enjoying far-out music that can sound inaccessible … but at the same time not thinking it should be unnecessarily difficult," Williams says of Battles’ strategy. "I think our approach is that there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit you on a primal level … even though you can take it in a thinking way too." I think it’s safe to say plenty of people are, none more than the 19-year-olds surely losing their minds to Battles and Mirrored this very minute.*

BATTLES

With Ponytail

Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

Wayfaring stranger

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I never imagined doing this." It’s a sentiment that Mariee Sioux, a singer-songwriter from Nevada City, returns to many times in our phone conversation: specifically, her genuine surprise that adapting her poetry to music has resulted in a life as a touring musician. "I was terrified playing at that show," she says mirthfully, describing her first big out-of-town gig at Brightblack Morning Light’s Quiet Quiet Ocean Spell Festival in Big Sur. "The whole tour that followed helped me get used to performing…. It sucks being scared all the time."

Sioux did seem a little shy — or quiet, anyhow — the first time I saw her play, but it only served to underline the concentrated energy of her music. Spiritual poems attuned to animals and ancestors, songs like "Wizard Flurry Home" and "Buried in Teeth" burrow deep inside you, with reams of words propelled by intuitive, circular guitar patterns. The circumstances of the show — organized by friends in a eucalyptus grove overlooking Berkeley — certainly helped, though I imagine Sioux’s diamond-in-the-rough talent would have been just as readily apparent in a club.

The compositions Sioux performed that night — most from her self-released EP, A Bundled Bundle of Bundles — seemed pointedly unhurried, more akin to the folk sprawl penned by Michael Hurley and Joni Mitchell than your typical verse-chorus-verse songwriting. Her guitar melodies are often a step behind her alliterative narrations, so it makes sense that the words came first. "I always wrote, since I was little … weird writing," she explains. "And I was just surrounded by music, so I guess this all started when me and a couple of friends wanted to start learning guitar. We formed this little girl band." She laughs. "And on my own time I started making these songs."

As is so often the case, the turning point came on a journey. "I left for Patagonia for three months, and I took my guitar with me because that was my new thing I had found. So I took it with me, and I had lots of solitary time in Patagonia," she recalls. "So I just wrote more songs and practiced and basically taught myself guitar." It was only through the prodding of friends that Sioux entertained the idea of recording these new songs: "I wouldn’t have even thought that people would want to hear it."

If word hadn’t gotten out of Grass Valley, it’s easy to imagine Sioux’s music being rediscovered some years down the line. Unshaped, personal to the point of being hermetic, this is the stuff record collectors live for. As it happened, though, Brightblack Morning Light has employed the singer-songwriter in a steady opening gig following that Quiet Quiet appearance, and now Nevada City’s Grassroots Records is readying her first full-length album, Faces in the Rocks, for a September release.

When talk turns to the album, Sioux gushes about collaborating with Gentle Thunder, an American Indian flute player who "felt this immediate connection to the project," and her bluegrass musician father (the two duetted at the Great American Music Hall a few months ago). And it sounds like she’s found a good partner in Grassroots, a homespun label with plenty of singer-songwriters on the roster. Label founder Marc Snegg writes, "Mariee’s songs, poetry, singing and performance dig deep in time, soar high in spirit, and possess a breadth of natural wisdom beyond her years or any years."

Still, while it might just be the jet lag following a European tour with Brightblack talking, Sioux sounds a little tentative about the musician’s life on the phone. She’s stoned on the album but wondering when things might settle down. "I’ve just been going for over a year. I haven’t really lived anywhere. I need a fixed point…. I want to decorate a room," she says. When focusing on the music, though, her view on itinerancy takes on a different, more redemptive cast. "It’s hard to pour your heart out so many times," she muses, "but it’s also refreshing, or even renewing in a way."*

MARIEE SIOUX

With Alela Diane, Aaron Ross, and Lee Bob Watson

Tues/26, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Sweet and lowdown

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Scattered throughout Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep are shots in which the camera recedes from the street action — kids throwing rocks, blundering thugs stealing a television — to the yearning treble of the blues-spiritual soundtrack. There are many examples of patterned poetry in Burnett’s 1977 debut, but none are so affecting as these elisions, which literally pull at the viewer, casting the pall of memory over bittersweet scenes of life among the Watts working poor.

This retrospective vision seems all the more acute for the circuitous path Killer of Sheep has taken to a theater near you. Burnett produced the film as his master’s thesis during the heyday of UCLA’s film program, shooting it in his native Watts part-time and, without thought of distribution, artfully arranging his slice-of-life narration over tracks from his rich record collection: selections ranging from Paul Robeson to Earth, Wind and Fire. Word began to spread about Burnett’s lyrical neorealism, but the essential soundtrack proved a sticking point for a commercial release, with licensing costs being prohibitively expensive — a very modern problem that more recently affixed itself to Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. The film never really went away, winning a major award at the 1981 Berlin Festival and getting selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, but theatrical distribution remained elusive until a coalition of backers came through to ensure that UCLA’s recent 35mm restoration (in its earlier incarnations the film was shown in 16mm, befitting its film-school origins) could tour the country’s big screens.

Thirty years later the film sings. The plot, such as it is, mostly follows Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a broad-shouldered, kindhearted husband and father of two who works long shifts at a slaughterhouse (hence the plainly descriptive title). The family struggles, but not in any particular direction: which is to say, they live. The episodic narrative is borrowed from the Italian neorealists and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but the sensuous film style is Burnett’s own. His framing techniques — close-ups cut off at the head are thick with characters’ midsections — emphasize physicality, while the use of natural light sends shots into a free-floating daydream. There is always this give-and-take between the earthy and the ethereal, never more so than in the digressions of children playing, in which Watts simultaneously seems depressingly abject and dreamily beautiful: a fragile balance, again suggestive of memory.

It is, after all, important to remember that if Killer of Sheep feels timeless, it’s probably because Burnett made it that way. The film was produced in 1977, but it frequently seems as if it had been made decades earlier: it’s the soundtrack, of course, but also the compositions styled after Walker Evans portraits, the camera movements evoking city symphonies, and the dissolving montage sequences, which link the film to the purest strains of silent cinema.

What makes Killer of Sheep frankly overwhelming is the way Burnett brings this evocative style to every part of his narration — a scene in which two hoods try to involve Stan in a murder gets the same attention as one in which two boys see how long they can stand on their heads. Off-the-cuff humor cuts against plaintive despair, one deepening the other. Aestheticized poverty is always a risky proposition, but Killer of Sheep is miles from style for style’s sake: its nebulous, contradictory beauty reaches out to touch the full variety of experience, leaving the audience to feel everything at once.

In the film’s centerpiece (strikingly paralleled in Lynne Ramsay’s memory of underdevelopment, 1999’s Ratcatcher), Stan and his wife rock in each other’s arms to Dinah Washington’s exquisite "This Bitter Earth." It’s a scene of stark relief and a perfect summation of the smoky mix of emotions everywhere apparent in Killer of Sheep. "And this bitter earth," Washington intones, "may not be so bitter after all." As with the great blues singers, so too with Burnett — the lyrics tell the story, but it’s the voice that makes you cry. *

KILLER OF SHEEP

Opens Fri/18

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

MCMAF: This magic moment

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

YACHT has cancelled his May 11 appearance with Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword and Luke’s Anger.

Enthusiastic and optimistic – Jona Bechtolt would have to be both to schedule back-to-back shows in Bloomington, Ind., and Big Sur, as he did on his most recent tour.

"I’m pretty much into playing wherever there is a desire for me to do so," Bechtolt e-mails en route to Seattle. "Once I played in a bathroom in the basement/rec-room of some kid’s grandparents’ house in St. Louis because he really wanted me to."

Infectious enough to rock the wood paneling of any suburban pad, conceptual enough to win over the crowd at New York’s premier performance-art space, the Kitchen, Bechtolt’s YACHT is a one-man dance-party extravaganza. Tourmate and fellow genre-masher Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors describes Bechtolt’s jams as "positive energy rainbowe dome musick from a next-generation West Coast healer," while pal Devendra Banhart terms it "megaphysical" music: the kind of thing that makes you want to slam and shimmy, which is just what Bechtolt does in his workout-pace performances.

A couple months ago I interviewed BARR’s Brendan Fowler and was wowed by his hyperproductivity as a performer, an artist, and a magazine maker. Bechtolt, against all odds, seems to up the ante. Drawing from Portland, Ore.’s collaborative creative spirit ("Everyone I know that’s making music or videos or whatever is fully supportive in a way I haven’t really seen anywhere else"), Bechtolt is the resident connector, beat maker, blogger, and shaker. In between programming the Blow’s electronica, maintaining a killer video-text blog (www.teamyacht.com), and spitting out remixes (States Rights recently released a collection of these sides called Our Friends in Hell), Bechtolt’s found time to help create the Portland-centric Urban Honking blog collective, play drums with Banhart and Little Wings, and embark on several tours in recent years (he spent this past New Year’s Eve at Oakland’s 21 Grand). Oh, and he’s produced a new full-length YACHT album, I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real (Marriage), to send the dance party home with you.

"It’s definitely important to me for YACHT to be all mine," Bechtolt muses. "I love collaborating, and it totally keeps me on my toes." Still, he explains, "I love making stuff on my own even more because I don’t have to worry about making anyone happy other than myself." The sense of liberation shows: I Believe in You is a freewheeling record replete with cameos (Bobby Birdman, Eats Tapes), shout-outs, and hooks galore. "See a Penny (Pick It Up)" sets the tone with a simple, sunny vocal line layered over crushing synths, snuffed-out beats, and nervous guitar notes. And Bechtolt brings a remixing sensibility to his work: each song piles up tracks before a deconstructive juncture – call it a break or a bridge – reasserts the crucial elements of rhythm and melody. The album gets increasingly eclectic – and identifiably Northwestern – as it moves past its early run of hardcore dance anthems. "I Believe in You" in particular sounds like tricked-out K Records pop, and "Women of the World" is unabashed Nirvana-love (Bechtolt publishes his songs under the motto "I learned it from watching grunge").

The ultimate magic act would be for YACHT to actually score a crossover with any one of these pop romances. Bechtolt’s clearly got the production chops to do some commercial damage, but his sound is probably a little too goofy to have Timbaland worried. No matter: the stage is where YACHT comes into full bloom. (Fittingly, the actual recording seems like almost an afterthought to the gonzo release party Bechtolt has planned for Portland: YACHT on a yacht, rocking the Willamette River.)

"Performance is totally something I think about a lot," the artist confesses. "Sometimes I write songs with big speakers, call-and-responses, and specific dance moves in mind, and other times songs just happen, and I hope that the same energy that comes out at shows comes out on the document of the song." It only takes a quick spin through YouTube – one especially compelling clip pictures Bechtolt in silhouette, pulling off pop-and-lock dance moves to the beat of album opener "So Post All ‘Em" – to know that with YACHT, seeing is believing. *

YACHT

With Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword, and Luke’s Anger

May 11, 9 p.m., call for price

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

MCMAF: Gary Higgins

-
0

A couple years after Drag City reissued Gary Higgins’s 1973 album Red Hash, the recording stands tall as one of the prime excavations of the ongoing psych-folk gold rush. As with Vashti Bunyan, Higgins’s resurgence comes with a mythic narrative: where Bunyan left behind Just Another Diamond Day for a bucolic family life in England’s north country, Higgins floated upriver in a different way after Red Hash, serving time for a marijuana bust in rural Connecticut. The disc was recorded while he was out on bail, in the few days between his arrest and sentencing. If Red Hash‘s spectral, overcast tone is any indication, Higgins spent the time in a reflective, worried mind: the full-length’s opening lines – "What do you intend to do young man? / Where do you intend to go? / Will you take a trip to the deep dark South / down into Mexico?" – sound like those of a poet rather than of an outlaw.

Higgins only served 13 months of his 5- to 10-year sentence, but the seeds of Red Hash‘s legend had been sown. The album finally got its due thanks to Drag City’s Zach Cowie, who, after being indoctrinated by Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, spent a couple of years tracking Higgins down. He found the redheaded stranger back in his Connecticut home, with master tapes ready for the remastering. To hear Red Hash now is to know you’re coming across one of those great, lost records. There is, of course, a strong patchouli vibe throughout, but it’s the sad-eyed, searching beauty of Higgins’s voice and melodies that consecrate the album as an American beauty. The songs are fractured, but gently so: "My brothers and I were born of the sky," Higgins wistfully sings on "Unable to Fly." "The curse lay on me unable to fly / But in the first few months of our lives / Carefree in the sun we all would lie." (Max Goldberg)

GARY HIGGINS

With PG Six and Sean Smith

May 12, 7:30 p.m., $17

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.swedishamericanhall.com

Cinema brut

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Early on in A Parting Shot, Isild Le Besco’s character curls up at a bar, crowded by two leering men ordering her the hard liquor with which she courts abnegation. A couple cuts later, she’s teasing one of her throwaway lovers for asking her to be tender, warning the next in line that she’s "pas douce," or "not soft." Pas Douce is the original title of Jeanne Waltz’s finely calibrated debut, though it could pass for several French offerings with similarly bruising and bruised heroines at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

French art cinema has been rife with sex of the pas douce sort for years now: a diverse group of filmmakers (Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Francois Ozon, and more recently, Jean-Claude Brisseau, of Exterminating Angels infamy) has coalesced, marked by the provocative blend of hyperrealism and hardcore. The French have never shied away from showing a little skin – it would be silly to think the original new wave didn’t owe some of its cachet to it – but these latter-day sexual misadventures represent something pointedly unpleasant in form and content. Critic James Quandt dubbed it new French extremism, though cinema brut works just as well.

In SFIFF films such as On Fire, 7 Years, and Flanders, this tendency is toned down but still embedded in narrative and character. Being French, all three feature some manner of love triangle: in Claire Simon’s On Fire, teenage Livia (Camille Varenne) plays like Lolita, teasing a boy her age while imagining herself the object of a swarthy fireman’s desire (hello metaphor!); in 7 Years, Jean (Valerie Donzelli) has sex with her prisoner husband’s warden on tape, nominally for hubby’s benefit; and in Flanders, sad-eyed Barbe (Adelaide Leroux) opens her legs to two neighbors going off to fight an unnamed war in the Middle East.

They are all Mouchette’s daughters, these women. Mouchette, the title character of Robert Bresson’s stark 1967 film, is perhaps French cinema’s gold standard of female suffering (with all due respect to Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc). She’s there in the shots of Barbe on her back, staring skyward in full surrender to a man’s grunting weight; in the way Livia sighs while putting a cup of coffee on for her father; and certainly when Le Besco’s Frederique rides her bike into a lake in a fit of ecstatic despair (Mouchette ends her own life rolling into a bog).

Bresson’s content was indivisible from his unadorned film style, and here too these new directors toe the line, shooting in long takes, often on location, with a handheld camera and a resourceful approach to sound. As far as formulas go, this one’s a pretty safe bet in film festival circles (see: the Dardenne brothers and Abbas Kiarostami). Flanders director Bruno Dumont (The Life of Jesus, Humanite) is already well established in this regard, and while On Fire, 7 Years, and A Parting Shot all have their good points, his latest film is the clear standout among the SFIFF’s cinema brut. It strikes me as Dumont’s version of (and perhaps, improvement on) Michael Cimino’s 1978 The Deer Hunter in the way it mediates battleground and home front as two complementary parts of one continuous, damaged landscape. The Flanders segments work better than the ones in the desert, both for Leroux’s unnerving performance and for Dumont’s painterly compositions (the director grew up in this part of northern France). Flanders occasionally breaks down in its long silences, but it’s a beautifully wrought film, full of carefully plotted mirroring and harrowing disruptions. It’s also unremittingly physical – the sound design of boots squashing and sucking the Flanders mud is all the exposition we could ever need.

Flanders possesses a formidable style indeed, but the closing lines of Quandt’s essay still demand satisfaction: "The authentic, liberating outrage – political, social, sexual – that fueled such apocalyptic visions as Salo and Weekend now seems impossible, replaced by aggressiveness that is really a grandiose form of passivity." Or maybe there are simply too many of these films and scenes piling up, diluting the resonance of any one effort. An uncomfortable question: how would we respond to Mouchette if it were released in this deluge?

It’s impossible to say, but I have little doubt that burnout had something to do with the pleasure I took in Christophe Honore’s new wave-meets-J.D. Salinger yarn, Dans Paris. Honore’s film is steeped in Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer, and while individual bits feel too cutesy (e.g., Louis Garrel skipping down a Paris street in fast-motion), most of this nervy technique has retained its bite, thanks to the staid but lurid minimalism of new French extremism. Honore’s characterizations are tenderly muted rather than brutishly absent; he’s more concerned, in proper new wave fashion, with the talk before and after sex than the act itself. Rather than aiming for extremism (and let it be said that 2001’s Amelie represents, in its own way, as extreme a vision as that year’s Fat Girl), Honore charges Dans Paris with eclecticism: of tone and thought and most likely meaning too. *

DANS PARIS (Christophe Honore, France, 2006). May 4, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 7, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

FLANDERS (Bruno Dumont, France, 2006). May 6, 5:15 p.m., PFA. Also May 8, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

ON FIRE (Claire Simon, France/Switzerland, 2006). May 5, 1:45 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 7 p.m., PFA

A PARTING SHOT (Jeanne Waltz, France, 2006). May 5, 7 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 8, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 10, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki

7 YEARS (Jean-Pascal Hattu, France, 2006). May 5, 9:30 p.m., Clay. Also May 7, 7 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 1 p.m., Kabuki

The departed

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

The idea that death is the great equalizer only seems true in the narrowest sense. As with life, it takes all kinds: romantic deaths and pointless ones, iconic casualties and anonymous mortalities. One might fairly expect a documentary about Paris’s Pere-Lachaise Cemetery to be a macabre portrait of death cults, given its status as a tourist trap. But Forever, the latest film by Heddy Honigmann, finds solace in more introspective rituals. It’s no surprise, then, that Honigmann forgoes Jim Morrison’s grave, though a Doors fan does wander by during an interview with three widows – one clucks that her husband will never be lonely with Morrison around and returns to her reverie.

For all the guru talk about the benefits of being in the moment, there is a different kind of heightened consciousness that comes with the temps perdu territory where memory and sensory detail intersect. Pere-Lachaise is of course famous for its artists, and so Forever is specifically concerned with the way art prompts this transubstantiation, though Honigmann casts a wide net in her interviews. Equivalences emerge between the way we internalize great art and how we carry forward memories of parents, lovers, and homelands. All the film’s conversations are about communion, and as such, subjects frequently blur: a concert pianist’s devotion to Frederic Chopin turns on her memories of her father; a woman explaining her husband’s death ends up reflecting on being forced out of Francisco Franco-era Spain; a former art student’s passion for Amedeo Modigliani’s transformative portraiture inspires his work as an embalmer.

For a documentary about a cemetery, Forever is remarkably attuned to the living; more surprising still, it avoids oppressive gloominess. This is partly a matter of the way Honigmann punctuates her interviews: with the pianist’s performance of Chopin, close-ups of carvings and notes left graveside, and carefully observed shots of women tending to the stones and watering the flowers. The cemetery footage is awash in daylight and spring; ambient sounds of birds and wind mean the frame might be sometimes lonely but never lifeless. Such poetic naturalism certainly softens the film’s light touch, though it’s only support for what is fundamentally a matter of disposition. The film spends a lot of time at Marcel Proust’s grave, and one admirer (dedicated to rendering In Search of Lost Time as a graphic novel) evocatively rhapsodizes about the author’s concept of involuntary memory: when a sensory detail takes us back in a way that supercedes ordinary recollection, we are in two places at once, overwhelmingly and truly.

This is the mood – ebullient, reflective – that Honigmann is after, and while it arrives naturally enough in these interviews, she’s not afraid to push her subjects to connect the dots of art, memory, and self. She also asks the questions that matter to her personally, which, as a Peruvian-born, Netherlands-based itinerant daughter of Holocaust survivors, have a lot to do with homeland and exile. She’s trod this ground before – especially in 1998’s The Underground Orchestra – and here she finds immigrants both buried and alive. When a reticent Iranian Frenchman describes author Sadegh Hedayat’s accomplishments in exile, Honigmann wonders aloud, "Why did you leave your country?" The taxi driver’s answer – that he was tired of the people around him – is wrenching in the context of the quiet cemetery, but Honigmann’s larger point is clear: one’s homeland can take on the same qualities as the dead, of being at once not there and so very there.

It’s a tricky thing Honigmann is doing, engaging people about a profoundly internal process with a documentary technique that’s necessarily obtrusive and spoken aloud. Her gift as a filmmaker lies in the moment-by-moment flow of interview and observation. Patience and curiosity: these are the stuff of Honigmann’s persistence of vision. An interview with a South Korean Proust admirer is exemplary in this regard. The young man struggles to answer Honigmann’s questions in English, and the filmmaker, sensing that language is acting as an unnecessary impediment of expression, asks her subject to tell her what he admires about the author in his own language. She doesn’t understand a word, and neither will most of the audience, but we get something greater in his effusive speech and gesture. Where there are ghosts so too is there spirit, over and over again in Forever. *

FOREVER May 2, 7 p.m., PFA

GOLDEN GATE PERSISTENCE OF VISION AWARD: AN EVENING WITH HEDDY HONIGMANN Includes a screening of Forever. Tues/1, 8 p.m., Kabuki

Seattle’s finest

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Crime Watch column was far and away the most entertaining part of my hometown’s local paper. Police Beat, a week-in-the-life account of a Seattle-by-way-of-Senegal bike cop named Z (played by nonprofessional actor Pape S. Niang), is structured around these strangely revealing public records, culled from the real Seattle blotter by writer Charles Mudede. Reenacted and filtered through Z’s layered immigrant experience, the episodic busts and false alarms are woven with off-key comedy and vague apprehension: a formulation that makes the film the rare work to merit the overused "Kafkaesque" tag.

The various crime scenes Z happens on are only connected in their general weirdness. Director Robinson Devor (previously celebrated for his 2000 debut, The Woman Chaser) drops us into these digressions midstream, denying us context or even clarity of tone. A man ravages raw meat in a supermarket; a woman with a gash on her head has been hit by an errant tree branch; a pimp has two chubby prostitutes doing sit-ups at gunpoint: these scenes hover uneasily between humor and menace. Their oddness reverberates against Z’s unwieldy English; he mediates with the strange lyricism that comes from being lost in translation (shades of Jim Jarmusch), instructing the tree-battered woman, for example, that "your tree is dead, and if it’s not chopped down, it will continue to harm and disturb the living."

If the audience is peculiarly disassociated from the nominal action in Police Beat, it’s only to match Z’s dreamy remove. We get his strange little koans in English, but the voice-over, in which he ponders his immigrant status (Police Beat articulates the notion of being a stranger in a strange land to an extreme degree) and worries over his spectral girlfriend’s faithfulness, is rendered in his native Wolof. Z’s musings aren’t readily locatable in either time or space, and while thoughts and action frequently seem to overlap, the echoes between the two only thicken the obscure narration.

And yet, if Police Beat ‘s montage is something of a hazy daydream, it’s hardly a formless one. The glue holding the picture together is Devor’s responsive mise-en-scène. Seattle — with its forested city streets, overgrown industrial sites, and ubiquitous water passageways (and bridges) — is a landscape of in-betweens, everywhere suggestive of Z’s placeless condition. In framing too, Devor frequently denies us a fully contextualized picture, casting Z against abstracted dark blues and greens. When Z rides his bicycle, the director allows the background to blur out of focus, creating an effect reminiscent of those deliriously dreamlike rear-projection shots once preferred in Hollywood productions.

Police Beat is marked by indirection on all levels, a risky modus operandi rarely found in mainstream or independent cinema. The prioritization of situation over characterization recalls Robert Bresson’s classics (as do the detached voice-over and the use of a quotidian occupation to frame the "action" of a film), and while Police Beat isn’t Pickpocket, sometimes a film’s ambition seems validating in its own right, regardless of whether it ties together as a neat package (Police Beat doesn’t).

Or maybe I’m just more willing than usual to forgive loose ends because of my sense that Devor and Mudede had fun making this movie — in compiling the crime reports and scouting Seattle, yes, but also in playing with the police procedural. They pay heed to the genre’s standard emphasis on temporality (a title occasionally breaks in, specifying the day of the week; every night ends with Z composing his police report), but instead of orienting these narrative ploys toward some guiding goal or payoff, Devor and Mudede allow them to overripen and underscore Z’s elusive existence: their film is more Eternal Sunshine of the Punch-Drunk Mind than Zodiac. This shift in emphasis makes Z the rare cop character I can actually relate to. His profile may seem unusual — I did, after all, have to look up the spelling of "Wolof" — but his experience is intensely familiar to those of us who regularly lose ourselves in the city. "I was in my own world," we say, though Z would surely have a more interesting way of putting it. *

POLICE BEAT

Opens Fri/6

Roxie Cinema

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

www.policebeatmovie.com

Innervisions

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but cinema’s eternal enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard did direct Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine-Feminine, Two or Three Things I Know about Her, and Weekend (and a few others too) in the four years leading up to the political explosions of 1968. These trenchant, tenacious films are as good a record as any we have of an era when light-speed changes in culture and politics only seemed to make history grind to a halt. Each represents a blast of here-and-now consciousness.

Given the feverish tenor of this output, the relative quietude of 1967’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (playing at the Castro Theatre in a striking new 35mm print from Rialto Pictures) comes as something of a surprise 40 years on. Sandwiched between the hyperventiutf8g back-and-forth of Masculine-Feminine and Weekend ‘s apocalyptic moan, the film is the eye of the storm of Godard’s ’60s, that crucial moment between impact and explosion. The director supposedly got the idea for Two or Three Things from reading a news piece on the phenomenon of middle-class Parisian women working as prostitutes to pay for their bourgeois accoutrement. This loaded role comes to life in Juliette, introduced to us twice, via a typically Brechtian flourish, as both character and actress (Marina Vlady).

Her life’s arrangement is not a story so much as a situation for Godard, and correspondingly, the film isn’t a narrative but rather a study. The Summer of Love notwithstanding, Two or Three Things isn’t concerned with Juliette’s sexuality (any sensuousness is incidental to Raoul Coutard’s color-mad cinematography) or psychology (something that Godard never has much use for, especially when it comes to his female characters); a poster for Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu is the only evidence of female suffering here. For Godard, prostitution is simply an apt metaphor for the dreary life of the new, amorphous Paris to which the "her" of the title refers: the Paris of the outer rings, then being settled by a disassociated middle class and recently set ablaze by more indignant communities.

So then, will the real belle du jour please stand up? It’s Juliette who tends to occupy the frame, sleepwalking through boutiques and barren apartment spaces (like Woody Allen’s, Godard’s film style often seems a matter of real estate), but Two or Three Things‘ most intimate presence isn’t visualized at all. Throughout the film Godard himself interrupts with a whispered, reflective voice-over: an existential director’s commentary track 30 years before DVD technology made this kind of authorial expressivity standard-issue.

No one Godard film is any more "Godard" than another, though Two or Three Things does feel unusually direct in its peripatetic meditations. Conversations, when they occur, are still tête-à-tête volleys (talk never flows with Godard), but more often than not it seems the characters are simply verbalizing their own reveries on life in the pseudocity. The maestro reserves the most powerfully searching musings for his own voice: in particular, the famous "clouds in my coffee" sequence, in which he parses the irresolvable tension between "crushing" objectivity and "isoutf8g" subjectivity amid extreme, lyrical close-ups of a coffee’s swirl, bubbles bursting and shades swallowed by the closeness of his voice.

As with most things Godard, there are multiple meanings to this series of shots, which simultaneously emphasize existential dread and a remarkable capacity for abstraction. It’s direct contact with an imagination on fire, reveling in the difference between thought and expression. Of course, a film built entirely on asides — in addition to Godard’s and Juliette’s reflections, we get many landscapes surveying Paris under construction and the usual café dialogues — is as likely to be a soporific as a revelation; reverie and sleepiness are frequent bedfellows in the movie theater and never more so than here. Certainly, Two or Three Things lacks the pop frisson of Masculine-Feminine or Weekend, but it’s also, in many ways, a more palatable work — not least of all for a toning down of the toxic sexism that mars Godard’s best, angriest work.

Two or Three Things will always be thought of as a stepping stone, though the film’s beauty lies in its singularity. In another, less famous but no less profound voice-over sequence, Godard contemplates the nature of his representations of reality ("Should I have talked about Juliette or the leaves?") while Juliette has her car washed. As the car (lollipop red, of course) shuttles from station to station, so too does Godard’s mind lurch from idea to idea before settling on an underlying truth: the necessity for an indefatigable "passion for expression." The world can be anything he wishes to make it. It’s a beautiful, surprisingly hopeful idea, and for a moment all that followed Two or Three Things slips away, leaving us only this unwieldy, pregnant now. *

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

March 30–April 5

Mon.–Wed. and Fri.–Sun., 7 and 9 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat.–Sun., 1, 3, and 5 p.m.), $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

>

Raising the BARR

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I haven’t lived anywhere since April for more than 12 days." Brendan Fowler tells me this on the phone from New York, where he’s dug in to prepare for a national tour — his first with a live band — supporting BARR’s new album, Summary (5 Rue Christine). He’s a little out of breath from racing up apartment stairs while hyping the band ("I think it’s going to be bananas. I totally started crying the other day when we were playing songs for the first time. It sounds nuts"), but our interview remains hectic as he runs through his different projects and enthusiasms. It’s been a busy couple years for Fowler, even by the industrious standards of the DIY community, from which he draws inspiration — several BARR tours, including opening slots for Xiu Xiu and Animal Collective; a profile in Artforum; performances at prestigious venues such as New York’s the Kitchen and Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery; the publication and proliferation of art and culture magazine ANP Quarterly; and now the new record, a rousing confessional several bounds ahead of 2005’s Beyond Reinforced Jewel Case (5RC).

As BARR, Fowler doesn’t really sing lyrics so much as spit them out — pages and pages of them — and this often seems to trip up reviewers. The music doesn’t quite have the measured flow of rap or the hard-bitten enunciation of spoken word. The twin spirits of hardcore and hip-hop loom large, but Fowler’s channeling is defiantly personal. There’s performance-art bravura akin to that of BARR’s first tourmates, Tracy and the Plastics, and Fowler’s unflinching intimacy reminds me some of the DIY, self-documenting impulse in Jonathan Caouette’s 2004 film, Tarnation.

Summary tightens the screws of Fowler’s sonic palette: his choppy drumbeats find balance with top-heavy piano chords and brainy bass lines. "The Song Is the Single" is a splashy party jam in the LCD Soundsystem mold, though elsewhere Fowler continues to tow his own line, whether on introspective confessionals such as "Complete Consumption of Us Both" or political rave-ups such as "Half of Two Times Two." Though Fowler studied free jazz drumming in college, the directness of his approach naturally blooms in performance, when he can, quite literally, reach out and touch someone. He performed at the Mama Buzz Café last spring and totally ruled the space, careening up and down, thinking aloud.

BARR is obviously Fowler’s personal outlet, though one could easily argue his larger contribution lies in his talent as a facilitator. Indeed, his generous, motivating artist’s spirit makes him something of a latter-day Wallace Berman. Berman cohered an eclectic circle of like-minded artist-explorers in his handsome homemade magazine, Semina, the subject of a recent, effusive show at the Berkeley Art Museum. A similar sensibility is cast in ANP Quarterly, the ad-free and free glossy Fowler coedits with Ed Templeton and Aaron Rose for LA skate-art-clothes magnate RVCA. Each ANP casts a wide net of coverage, profiling skateboarders, activists, and idiosyncratic entrepreneurs as well as outsider artists looking in and insider artists looking out. Perhaps most refreshing is the way ANP cuts such a wide swath across the country, with an eye for what’s happening in Phoenix and Iowa City as well as NYC and LA. Check out all these people doing their own thing, ANP tells us. It’s a spirited vision of America, one that Fowler rhapsodizes in "Half of Two Times Two" as being made of those "rebelling from the systems, and the norms that are saying ‘be bummed’ and ‘be bored,’ and they’re taking matters into their own hands, and that’s what matters."

Fowler articulates this free-thinking position more. "I do think about the outside world and bigger things but with an intimate, fine lens…. But I would hope that, on some level, the stuff that’s more intimate and fine would speak to the larger picture."

He laughs at his own seriousness and closes, "Fingers crossed." *

BARR

With Marnie Stern

Mon/5, call for time and price

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.theknockoutsf.com

>

Brutal fucking movie

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a corpse, of course. Unless, of course, that corpse is brought to you by the famous Mr. David Lynch. In this case the corpse gets up and shuffles away, walking the earth like something out of a Samuel Beckett play directed by George Romero.

My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life.

"Are you looking for an opening?" Look over here, if you dare, and make your entrée through a tableau of rabbit-headed domesticity complete with sitcom-style applause and a laugh track inserted at decidedly odd moments. Entrances and exits are everything in Inland Empire, which takes place in a universe so slippery your front door may no longer open into your living room but rather into a dark alleyway — and your identity might change if you step through.

So in July 1973 I went to the TM Center in Los Angeles and met an instructor, and I liked her. She looked like Doris Day.

"You have a new role to play?" Yes, you do, at the place where evil was born; your creepy new neighbor is more than happy to warn you of your imminent danger even as you stride around the ornate mansion that you and your violently jealous husband occupy. No matter, though. That new role is your big break, and your star turn in On High in Blue Tomorrows could mean you’ve finally stepped over the threshold into that magical land "where stars and dreams come true." Not coincidentally, it’s also where evil was born — and where hammy Southern accents go to die.

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks.

Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 fantasy is Lynch’s almost three-hour New Nightmare, both a film and a studio lot overrun with elliptical numerical references: stages 4, 5, 6, 32, and 35; page 57. Where are we? Hollywood or Poland? And what time is it exactly? Is it 9:45 or just after midnight? Is it real time or remembered time, those two warring temporal spaces at the core of so many film noirs? Douglas Sirk–ian blue tomorrows are always just out of reach, but this is a rare instance in which the answer It’s only a movie isn’t very comforting — both viewers and characters seem trapped in a hellish real or imagined world that Lynch himself can’t or won’t explain. One thing is for certain: if you’re running along the Walk of Fame, it’s safe to say you’re in danger.

It’s so magical — I don’t know why — to go into a theater and have the lights go down. It’s very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they’re red. And you go into a world…. It’s best on a big screen. That’s the way to go into a world.

Oh yes, Inland Empire was shot entirely on digital video. And it’s not that fancy-shmancy digital either. No, it’s crap digital. But it’s glorious crap — at once making the horror more potently ugly and profane and lending it the quality of gauzy impressionism. By the 4,000th squashed close-up of Laura Dern’s twisted face, you’re thinking there’s nothing so grotesque as a degraded image — see YouTube, tweaked-out coverage of the Iraq War. Then Lynch’s digital expressionism rallies, the incandescent flares of pixilated light at the twilight’s last gleaming. Everything is illuminated unless it’s not. A cut is not a cut but rather a buzzing lightbulb; a long shot is not a long shot but instead a menacing corridor.

I love Los Angeles.

Delivering her lines like a long-lost relative of Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man and lensed and styled to look like a cross between Jane Wyman and an evil squirrel, Grace Zabriskie plays the ultimate nosy neighbor — one who inaugurates this pleasure and boredom zone by opening a window into the leading lady’s future. Her director has a digital-video eye for combinations of lemon and gray as well as cheap Pepto-Bismol pinks and barf tones — he can make a palatial mansion look as grim as Eraserhead‘s dead living room. This is a movie about the horror of set design, the terror of lamps. Lynch can’t help but look for and stare down the rabbit hole, that spot where it’s hard to disappear, that place just down the way, the space that’s tucked back, difficult to see from the road — the lost highway that connects to the dark hallway and the innumerable nooks and crannies of negative space. As always, he fixates on the sinister brutality in pop’s lexicon; this time, instead of candy-colored clowns tiptoeing into bedrooms, it’s hearts wrapped up in clover.

It was the light that brought everybody to LA to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.

Is Inland Empire really The Passion of Laura Dern? Yes, this is Dern’s movie, her face being cut up in nearly every scene ("brutal fucking murder," as one character puts it), and Laura, what do you make of it? Are you in there? A spotlight trained on you, long and lean, running horizontally through the night in silent slow-motion, then toward the camera, then fast, then screaming like Rita Hayworth in the mirrors at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, but for three hours. Come back, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney and Mary Pickford, Judy Garland and Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine and Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe: Lynch wants to make you stars again! A coast-to-coast search will soon be under way for the shot-for-shot remake of Inland Empire.

And sometimes things happen on the set that make you start dreaming.

No doubt, as the fate-strapped actress Nikki Grace, Dern makes an exquisite corpse. Oh, wait — she’s actually Susan Blue, Nikki’s alter ego and the character she plays in her latest film, a Southern potboiler that also stars Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) as Billy Side. Susan wanders through her fever dream screaming desperately for Billy, who always seems to be around the next darkly lit corner but rarely materializes. As the giant talking bunnies say, it all has "something to do with the telling of time." Of course, Nikki and Susan might have just fused into some kind of Lynchian-Freudian beast. The infamous Lynch psychofugue. It’s an assumption borne out by a third Dern personality, a ball-busting broad with a mysterious bruise on her lower lip who permanently totes a rusty screwdriver.

What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh.

Dern’s performance is like a disco ball in a hall of mirrors; it’s rarely clear which character she’s playing, but she’s never less than entirely committed. One minute she’s a kittenish starlet, long legs stretched out across a sun-drenched gazebo. The next she’s a haggard has-been with a busted lip, climbing a set of dingy steps into a dark office, where she tells the man seated there — who is he exactly? And who’s he talking to on the phone? — about how she once thwarted a rapist by plucking out one of his eyeballs.

I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal?

"Hey — look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before." This line repeats throughout Inland Empire, and yeah — there’s definitely David Lynch déjà vu at work here: Mulholland Drive‘s twisted Tinseltown, Twin Peaks‘ slutty-girl world, Blue Velvet‘s dark suburbia, Wild at Heart‘s seedy glamour and endless Dern worship. Plus the inevitably singular moments: Where, before or since, has a splattered bottle of ketchup foreshadowed a murder? Committed on the exact square foot of cement that encases Dorothy Lamour’s Hollywood Boulevard star?

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

Just as it’s tempting to view Mulholland Drive‘s semiuseless dude passages as a simple opportunity for Lynch to spank Quentin Tarantino, this time around his humane take on Eastern Europe might be a genial yet hostile retort to Eli Roth. The director himself won’t say anything about his movies or their influences — he’ll never fess up that Mulholland Drive is essentially Carnival of Souls moved from Salt Lake City to showbiz central, even if one of Inland Empire‘s most terrifying moments echoes the zombies-running-at-the-camera shock tactics of Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult classic. (The scariest Dern close-up adds more voltage to the peak jolt of Takeshi Shimizu’s video version of Ju-on, which goes to show, what comes around goes around.) Inland Empire‘s new capitalist whores might be talking with or back to the ones in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever and Ilya Khrjanovsky’s 4, a recent movie with an amazing sound design overrun by Lynchian subsonic rumbles.

Fellini had me sit down. He was in a little wheelchair between two beds, and he took my hand, and we sat and talked for half an hour…. That was Friday night, and Sunday he went into a coma and never came out.

Inland Empire is more than long enough to have some dodgy or cringeworthy moments, which include a fair amount of bad acting by models, the jarring soundtrack misfire — rare for Lynch — of Beck’s "Black Tambourine," and a final lip sync of Nina Simone’s "Sinnerman." No one can double for the late Dr. Simone! But Dern, her dirty strands of hair looking like facial wrinkles and bruises, can double over endlessly. By the time she’s on Hollywood Boulevard, caught between a young female junkie and a homeless untouchable calmly discussing how to get the bus to Pomona, she’s suffered a shattering fall from the confines of her lavish, hermetically sealed estate in the recesses of the Inland Empire (both the one in her zip code and the one in her mind).

I went to a psychiatrist once.

"You gotta swing your hips, now. Come on, baby. Jump up. Jump back. Well, now, I think you’ve got the knack. Now that you can do it, let’s make a chain, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) A chug-a chug-a motion like a railroad train, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) Do it nice and easy, now, don’t lose control: a little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul. So come on, come on, do the Loco-motion with me."

So I say: Peace to all of you. *

All the sentences in italics are from Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, by David Lynch (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006).

INLAND EMPIRE

Opens Fri/9

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.inlandempirecinema.com

>

1...567Page 6 of 7

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org