Nicole Gluckstern

The Performant 45: Oh Rapture, up yours!

Andrew Lam
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Gearing up for the end times with Hoodslam

Well another Armageddon scare has come and gone and we’re all still here, as is my dirty laundry which I was letting pile up on the off chance that I wouldn’t need it again. Not that clean clothes were necessary to attend the Judgment Day edition of Oakland-based, amateur-wrestling-and-sideshow-freak extravaganza, Hoodslam. 

Housed in the strategically ramshackle Victory Warehouse, a couple of scenic blocks from the Oakland Greyhound station, the Hoodslam ring loomed large in the confines of what could be euphemistically referred to as the foyer. Cheerfully inebriated fans crowded in on three sides, a colorful wall of graffiti framed the fourth, a makeshift door led to the “dressing room,” and a chainlink barrier shielded the house band, Einstye, in classic “Blues Brothers at Bob’s Country Bunker” style. “You can cut the tension in this room with a knife,” wry match commentator Kevin Gill remarked. You could have cut the great cloud of cigarette-booze-and-blunt fumes with same.

In the best tradition of punk rock wrestling shows like the sorely-missed Incredibly Strange Wrestling, Hoodslam mixes costumed characters, fabricated grudge matches, aggro posturing, loud music, and theatrical bodyslamming with a healthy dose of humor and a pinch of what-the-fuck. But where the flamboyant weirdness of ISW was definitely a product of San Francisco’s love of themed masquerade parties and the slickly produced Lucha Va Voom is 100 percent LA, the scrappy phenomenon that is Hoodslam retains a thoroughly Oakland vibe. 

The sensation of being a first-time Hoodslam attendee is something akin to having a crack pipe in one hand and a spliff in the other, with a Steel Reserve going five rounds with a half bottle of NyQuil in the fight cage of your alimentary canal. It’s disorienting. It’s vaguely unsettling. And it’s a hell of a crazy ride.

On Friday, in preparation for the end of the world, a good two dozen Hoodslam “legends” showed up to settle some scores and create new ones (just in case we’d all live to fight another day). Contestants included a bi-polar clown, a French mime, an invisible man, a stampeding rhinoceros, a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike armed with a garbage can, an unusually tall leprechaun, an Al Bundy clone, ISW remnant Otis the Gimp, the demonic Reverend Hellfyre and his passle of Zombie slaves, and a fanged Mexican werewolf—the dreaded chupacabra! 

There were even some wrestlers who could really fight: the acrobatic, bare-chested Juiced Lee for one, and native son, the masked El Lucha Magnifico, “the most evenly-matched men in Hoodslam.” 

The unbridled feistiness of the combatants was matched only by the rowdiness of the fans (“fuck the fans,” cheerfully reminded ring announcer Ike Emelio Burner on several occasions), whose profane chanting, frenzied pounding on the mat, and blow-by-blow heckling gave the event a post-apocalyptic edge, though the apocalypse wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the next day.

“Wrestling is a form of theatre designed to generate mass hysteria,” former ISW wrestler and book author Count Dante remarked in his Wired magazine interview. At the smackdown between the mass hysteria of Hoodslam vs. the mass hysteria of the pending Rapture, the former definitely took the win.

The Performant: Spank it!

Andrew Lam
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Austin invades SF with Christeene Vale, Wammo, and Guy Forsyth

There’s glamour. Then there’s Glamour. And then there’s Glamour’s myriad permutations, like Drag Glamour. And Drug Glamour. And Diva Glamour. Glamour makes respectable what might otherwise be considered merely ostentatious, excessive, or gauche. Elusive but instantly recognizable, there’s no doubt that glamour can enthrall. But frankly, sometimes it bores. 

There’s nothing boring about Christeene Vale. 

One part Iggy Pop, one part New York Dolls, and one part complete mess, Vale is pure punk rock without the guitars. Headlining Some Thing at the Stud, appropriately on Friday the 13th, Vale stumbled onto the stage dressed in decidedly unglamorous rags, a shredded t-shirt, and a flesh-colored thong, bruises decorating her hairy thighs, lipstick smeared half across her face like a terrorist clown. 

Accompanied by a burst of driving electronica, Vale began gyrating suggestively, not in a softcore “come hither” kind of way, but in a down and (really) dirty way, tugging at her g-string, spreading her literally filthy cheeks. 

Rapping over the rhythm at breakneck speed, the tweeker-twitchy tranny demanded that the crowd “Fix My Dick”. Clever and gross, lyrics such as “I’ll let you chew on my crab cake the hell with the first date just slide me the beefsteak” fell from her lips as easily as the gobs of spittle she spat at the front row. 

The rest of her set was just as confrontational—and just as hilarious: “Workin’ on Granma,” “Slowly/Easy,” “Tears from My Pussy” (a downbeat little R & B ballad with a Casio-tone hook). Creatively fearless, Vale managed to be both explicitly offensive and unexpectedly romantic. “There’s room at the table for all of us,” could well have been the anti-glamour message being propagated, though there’s an equal chance it was something a little less precious like “let’s get drunk and fuck tonight”.

Austin darlings the Asylum Street Spankers may be no more, but musicians still have to eat, y’all. Even the Sex Pistols had their Filthy Lucre tour, though that calculated stadium spectacle was a far cry from this convivial parlor act of former Spankers Wammo and Guy Forsyth, who teamed up at the Red Devil Lounge to play a few favorites. 

Blessed with a wicked slide guitar, Forsyth killed on Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Moves on the Water,” and on his own rocking, talking tune “Long Long Time” (“we used to dream about heroes/but now it’s just how to beat the system”). Wammo alternated between playing percussion on a plastic suitcase and adding “horns” to the mix with his harmonica, a kazoo, a spot of Tuvan-style throat-singing, and a jump onto lead vocals for humorous tunes such as “Beer,” and my personal favorite “Leafblower,” which sounded like a parody of a Kurt Cobain song, a sort of nasal whine ruminating on the evil of the 8 a.m. leafblower outside one’s window (“good thing I don’t have a gun”). 

They might not have an official band name yet, but as a duo, Wammo and Forsyth still managed to provide a spanking good show. 

 

 

The Performant: Vice squad

Andrew Lam
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The Thrillpeddlers take on Poe, plague, and poop

In Edgar Allan Poe’s grisly tale The Masque of the Red Death, a group of wealthy nobles hole up in a fortified abbey to avoid the ravages of a mysterious ailment sweeping the countryside, which causes its victims to sweat blood and keel over dead in the streets. 

Led by their host, Prince Prospero, they gather beneath his roof and weld the gates shut against the outside world, availing themselves of the comforts he provides: food, wine, and “all the appliances of pleasure”. Six months into their isolation the Prince arranges a masquerade ball, a gala affair that fills seven rooms, each decorated in a different color. In his zeal to describe at length how each room even boasted windowglass the color of the décor, and how the partiers were costumed with “much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm,” Poe neglects to describe much of the evening’s entertainment. 

Fortunately for the curious, the gender-bending, genre-blending ensemble The Cockettes decided to reimagine the spectacle in their final show, Vice Palace, now being revived by the Thrillpeddlers in their way-off-market digs, the Hypnodrome.

As grotesque and depraved as Poe must have imagined the desperate pastimes of the filthy rich to be, it’s my guess that he wouldn’t have come up with entertainments half as perverse as those showcased in Vice Palace. 

Wrangled into place by flamboyant, fabulously-coiffed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her crop-wielding, high-bosomed secretary Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz), the entertainers went right for the gusto early in the “yellow room” with a buxom burlesque dancer (Tina Sogliuzzo) and a ribald ditty about a camel’s hump(s) performed by dishy tattooed “boy toys” Steven Satyricon and Joshua Devore (the artist formally known as Tober Brandt). 

Next followed a lascivious ode to tantric sex, a bawdy, bloody ballad about Caligula, a Cockettes classic “A Crab on Uranus (Means You’re Loved),” and a sweetly-sung solo performed by Birdie-Bob Watt as Vagina Dentata about her life as a floating turd. Incidentally, this last song included a “scat break”. Of course it did! But even this paled in comparison to the titillating, wordless “Flesh Ballet” performed by an acrobatic (and totally nekkid) Ste Fishell.

The greatest thrill of the production is watching how easily the company weds their long-standing focus on the Grand Guignol with their more recent forays into Theatre of the Ridiculous territory in a single piece. Incorporating all of the gratuitous violence and bloodshed of the former, with the audacious camp of the latter, this show provides a quick and dirty primer on their longstanding love affairs with both. Blood, babes, beefy love slaves, boss wigs, striking black-and-white costumes (designed by Kara Emry), creepy blood effects (Rob Fletcher), and terrific tunes (Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn): this charming little anti-musical has something in it for everyone, with the possible exception of Poe. But he’s dead. 

 

Vice Palace: The Last Cockette Musical

Through July 31, $20-35

The Hypnodrome

575 10th St., SF

(415) 377-4202

www.thrillpeddlers.com

 

The Performant: Herrre’s Johnny!

Andrew Lam
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Entering The Room

Harley-Davidson. Twinkies. Michael Jackson. Some things are so uniquely American they practically ooze stars and stripes, no matter how far across the borders they stray.

Another all-American tradition – right up there with Miller-in-a-can and Wheel of Fortune – has got to be Bad Movie Night: the deliberate screening of movies so awful they make the viewer scream tears of laughter, or sit in horrified silence, too traumatized by dubious production values or script incoherence to muster the strength to tear their eyes away.

The compulsion to celebrate these cinematic misfits holds a singular place in our national consciousness. They even feed our civic pride: what may be California’s best-loved cult flick of the decade The Room is set right here in San Francisco, with plenty of slo-motion shots of the Golden Gate Bridge to prove it

“I’ve seen this movie 25 times now,” confessed Red Vic employee-owner Sam Sharkey during his introduction, a slightly desperate gleam in his eye. As the opening credits rolled over some stock-style footage of the sun sparkling on the bay, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the California Street cable car, the oddience immediately set phasers to “heckle”. When the credit for director of photography, Todd Barron, flashed on the screen they shouted as one “Fuck you, Todd!” When the door to a non-descript, upscale apartment swings open and “Johnny” (Tommy Wiseau) walked into his living room, the theater erupted into an ecstatic cheer.

“Hi babe,” he responded as if on cue, though of course he was really speaking to his co-star Juliette Danielle, cast in the unenviable role of Tommy’s whiny girlfriend, Lisa.

None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, which perversely is part of what makes the flick such a guilty pleasure. It’s simply impossible to feel bad for these jerks, even if they are trapped in a movie world they didn’t create. Besides Tommy, who appears perpetually zonked on airplane glue and speaks with an outrageous accent of indeterminable origin, and Lisa, who appears to be about 30 years younger and only living with him because, as her acerbic mother (Carolyn Minnott) points out, she can’t support herself, there’s his best friend Mark (Greg Sistero), a preternaturally handsome youth who allows Lisa to seduce him, Denny (Philip Haldiman), a socially-inept teenager who manages to almost get shot in a nefarious drug deal gone awry, and random friends who drop by to have sex on Tommy’s Ikea-issue living room sofa.

For aficionados of cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and events such as Midnight Mass with Peaches Christ, a screening of The Room will seem familiar. Scripted cat-calls, impromptu sound effects, the tossing of footballs and, more importantly, spoons don’t deviate overmuch from the generally accepted cult movie experience.

But for San Franciscans, The Room provides more than just an outlet for poking fun at a film, it’s a way for us to poke fun at ourselves. Though filmed mostly in LA, the random shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marina, and Alcatraz conspire to remind the viewer that the movie is partly a love letter, albeit sloppily written, to San Francisco. A city which embraces even its most incongruous misfits.

“If a lot of people loved each other,” Tommy as Johnny perseveres, despite all evidence to the contrary, “the world would be a better place to live.” We are all Tommy Wiseau now.

 

The Room screens monthly at The Red Vic Movie House

 

Bleak frames and guilt

Andrew Lam
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Bleak frames and guilt

arts@sfbg.com

LIT From the first page, an anonymous manifesto denouncing the pharmaceutical industry, to a bronze sculpture of a suppressed anti-Nazi headline from the Lippische Tages-Zeitung weighted down by a giant hammer and nails on the last, David Lester’s graphic novel The Listener (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 304 pages, $19.95) explores how words often fail their intended purpose, precipitating actions with unforeseen consequences.

The unintended consequence of the manifesto: an amateur activist falls to his death while hanging a banner from a radio tower. The unintended consequence of the unpublished article: the rise of the Third Reich and the fall of a nation’s conscience. In Lester’s book, both events become entangled within the scope of Louise Shearing, a Canadian sculptor wracked with guilt over the death of the activist, who took the phrase “action speaks louder than words” to heart.

Although The Listener eventually makes reference to the fallen activist, Vann, being influenced by Louise’s sculpture of French anarchist Louis Michel, it’s not immediately clear to the reader why Louise, as opposed to the scribes behind the manifesto, must bear the brunt of the guilt over his death. Like many young people in a state of flux, Louise winds up backpacking across Europe, hanging out in art museums and hooking up with cute but pedantic European men. In one of those almost-magical chance encounters so common to the open road, she has a conversation with an elderly couple in a café, which culminates in an unexpected history lesson.

Rudolph and Marie are from the former German state of Lippe (now part of North Rhine-Westphalia), site of the last free election in Germany before Hitler took the chancellorship. As journalists and members of a smaller right-wing party (the DVNP), which balks at towing the Nazi Party line, they nonetheless go along with the suppression of an article exposing corrupt Nazi campaign tactics. The headline pulled at the last minute is preserved for posterity on a secret plate that Rudolph smuggles home. “Our failure to defeat the Nazis in Lippe is a regret we live with every day,” Marie says.

It’s tempting to draw a parallel between Lester’s The Listener and Jason Lutes’ Berlin, but to compare the two does The Listener a disservice. Where Berlin is a meticulously-rendered serial drama characterized by painstakingly clear lines and weighted text, The Listener is a shadowy morality play cloaked in the mantle of German Expressionism. The black guilt that weighs heavily within Louise and the German couple seeps across each page like a Rorschach blot. Each bleak frame is a single painting, rendered in messily urgent layers of gray, interspersed with replications of newspaper headlines trumpeting the rise of the Third Reich. Also unlike Berlin, most of the book’s action actually takes place in the present day, where the reverberations of the dead can be, and are, remarked on by the living.

The Listener flags during Louise’s unstructured attempts to ascertain what art means to her by discussing it at length. She swoons over Cézanne and deconstructs Picasso, but is so rarely shown in the act of creation that it’s easy to forget that her art has served as a catalyst for action. It’s possible to imagine Lester — painter, musician, activist — having these very conversations with himself, but they don’t have the same impact as the sculpture Louise finally creates in the last frame, a picture truly worth a thousand words. 

 

Snap Sounds: PJ Harvey

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: PJ Harvey

PJ HARVEY
Let England Shake
(Vagrant)

It’s not really a subtle couplet, “Weighted down with silent dead/ I fear our blood won’t rise again,” but with it the title track for PJ Harvey’s newest offering Let England Shake sets the stage for the songs to come. A surprisingly melodic exploration of the still reverberating effects of World War I on England’s shores and English mores, Let England Shake is both a call to arms and a plea to lay them down again. And despite its deliberate focus on atrocities past, the album can’t help but to implicate all current and future wars within its narrow rifle scope.

At the core of every song in the collection lies a degraded yet determined Britannia, plowed with “tanks and feet,” shot down, blown apart, bitter, bloodied, and bowed. Yet despite the ignominy, it’s a land that inspires almost absurd loyalty -— in the singer as well as the soldier. “I live and die through England,” Harevey confesses on the song “England,” as if she can’t quite believe it herself, “to you…I cling.” It’s hard to imagine an American rock star pledging allegiance to any state on that soul-baring level, and it’s part of what makes Let England Shake a fascination for an American listener. Its uniquely British nationalism, built on a foundation of grief, defies direct translation.

The instrumentation is a melancholic mélange of spare, driving percussion with plenty of cymbals, reined-in, jangling guitar riffs, an autoharp, subtle layers of piano, occasionally awkward brass, and a cornucopia of extras: a xylophone here, a zither there. On the album’s third song, “The Glorious Land,” the clarion call of a war bugle insinuates itself into the otherwise stripped-down drum and guitar track while Harvey’s clear voice swoops through, a flock of startled birds surrounded by the muck of war.

Harvey stretches her register to its upper limit on track six, “On Battleship Hill,” leaving all traces of her trademark low gravel behind with a clarion call of her own. On songs such as “The Last Living Rose” and “In the Dark Places,” Harvey drapes herself not only in her flag but in soldier’s drag, evoking the hopeless trenches and “damned mountains” as if observing them first-hand. The album is not without flaws, a seemingly random sampling of Niney the Observer’s roots-reggae jam “Blood and Fire” on “Written on the Forehead” does the original no justice, and the sing-song quality of “England” jars somewhat after the considerably more powerful “On Battleship Hill,” but overall, Let England Shake stands out as a cohesive ode to a complicated love.

PJ Harvey, “Let England Shake” (from Let England Shake):

The Performant: Sing like everyone’s listening

Andrew Lam
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Electric Party Songs and The Darker Side of Broadway

However you feel (or don’t) about the Beat Generation, you have to give Allen Ginsberg credit for his ability to transcend the limitations of that motley crew, always pushing forward and outward in his beatific search for the sublime. Perhaps no other modern poet has better exemplified the endless fluctuations of the underground, and how to eternally roll along with them. Our own Holy Fool: queer Buddhist Jew, vagabond truth-seeker, and the King of May. In all the ways that count, Allen Ginsberg was, and will always be, America.

And America, like it or not, will always have an influence on the global arts arena, so it is perhaps not surprising that the small band of multinational artists who comprise the “open program” of the Italy-based Workcenter of Jerzy Growtowski and Thomas Richards have embraced America, and Ginsberg in particular, in their touring productions I am America and Electric Party Songs.

Using Ginsberg’s poetry as a catalyst, Electric Party Songs was developed with social gatherings in mind, mashed ecstatic texts with Southern spirituals, “Capitol Air” with call-and-response. 

Displaying a chummy familiarity despite the less-than-intimate setting of the SFMOMA lobby, the performers began by praising the creative energy of excess, first as a duet between Alejandro Rodriguez from Argentina, and Lloyd Bricken from Alabama, then quickly incorporating the eleven-person cast. Bursting with exuberance like Kerouac’s “fabulous yellow Roman candles,” they may have been dressed liked a runaway chorus line from a revival of Hair, but their intuitive chemistry was pure Digger. 

Eventually, in a manner that Ginsberg would undoubtedly have approved of, the gleeful club abandoned word-for-word renditions of his poetry, and moved into a set of African-American spirituals, a focal point of much of Workcenter’s current research. A moving rendition of “Adam in the Garden” found several performers mixed into the oddience, keeping time and murmuring response, while in the center of the polite circle, the song leader Alejandro romped and wriggled with Davide Curzio (Italy), giggling, entangled, pulsing outwards, pushing forward: all innocence. By the end of the set it was impossible to believe they haven’t been here with us all along, hovering genially at the edges of our consciousness, just like the spirituals and the venerable poet that gave their electric party its juice.

Belters, babes, and consummate showmen – and that’s just the production crew! If Boxcar Theatre’s tongue-in-cheek tour of The Darker Side of Broadway, a dizzying slew of doomed ditties sung by most of the cast and crew, was an indicator, their upcoming production of Little Shop of Horrors (which opens May 20) should be a rip-snorter.

Highlights included a heartfelt West Side Story duet between ensemble member Amy Lizardo and “Ronnette” Nikki Arias (“A Boy Like That”), a tense, downtempo “Pimp’s Tango” from Threepenny Opera, between John Lewis (who will play Seymour) and Bryn Laux (who will play Audrey), and a hilariously bawdy “Glitter and Gay” from Candide performed by assistant director Lauren Doucette. After a terrifically evil rendition of a Shockheaded Peter song from artistic director Nick Olivero, a smashing performance of “The Cell Block Tango” from Chicago brought down the house, leaving us with appetites whetted like Audrey II’s for fresh blood, with a side of campy cheese.

 

The Performant: I’m aware of the dark

Andrew Lam
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David Thomas and Joanna Haigood explore the shadows of the American Dream

“There’s no real trick to living life like a ghost,” David Thomas assures an excited contingent of experimental music enthusiasts from a makeshift stage set up in performer Erica Blue’s Oakland warehouse residence. Best known for his iconoclastic avant-rock combo Pere Ubu, Thomas’s stage persona may be less openly confrontational than in younger days, but he wears the mantle of curmudgeonly grand-père with a sense of historical imperative. 

Accompanied by multi-faceted musician (and jovial straight man) Ralph Carney on clarinet, Thomas’s additional instrumentation involved nothing more than a small button accordion punctuated by a few spare samples pulled up on a cigarette-ash-streaked iPad. His singing voice was weathered yet resonant, like the creaking of an old barn door, and he made good use of the melodic rumble of his speaking voice in the conversational manner of a clairvoyant storyteller, interspersing long, poetic passages from works such as “Mirror Man” with tragic-comic tunes such as “Sad.Txt.” admonishing that “time will catch up to you/like it caught me too.” Within each song shimmered an elusive portrait of the America of the dispossessed: roadside cafes and long lonesome stretches, broken hearts attached to broken people, living ghosts, and dark spaces. “I’m aware of the dark,” he crooned during his encore, while an empathetic shiver passed through the room. 

Opening act, The Wounded Stag, an inventively disturbing collaboration between performance artist Dan Carbone and musician Andrew Goldfarb, a.k.a. The Slow Poisoner (plus a cameo appearance by dancer Erica Blue) provided a worthy introduction to the darkside, with lyrics like “please don’t let me go to heaven with a swollen gun in my pocket,” and “aren’t we all already dead?” Crooning, warbling, screaming, even grunting like a monkey, singer-lyricist Carbone’s expressive use of props and masks underscored his theatrical background while Goldfarb, another amiable foil, provided the swamp-rock tinged musical ballast with his electric guitar and a single, expressive kickdrum. 

On the other side of the Bay Bridge, Joanna Haigood’s Zaccho Dance Theatre company was remounting their 2008 exploration of racism in America, The Monkey and the Devil at YBCA. Inventively set in an installation known as “a house divided” (designed by Charles Trapolin), two section of a single wooden edifice split in two and mounted on shaky, unbalanced foundations, Monkey featured two couples, one black, one white. Mocking each other’s mannerisms and posturing for dominance, the women started the piece off, culminating in a pitched battle royale in a boxing spotlight “ring”. Settling back into their separate quarters, they proceeded to hurl racially-charged epithets at each other in muted monotones until abruptly the tenor of the scene shifted to one of palpable threat as the men leapt to the top of each “house” and then through the windows, menacing the women with silence and measuring tapes which coiled and uncoiled like whips.

In the final tableau, each couple danced in desperate tandem, being spun violently around and around by a member of the other duo to a soundtrack of waves and traffic which crashed over their bodies slamming against the wooden walls of their unstable fortresses. After a pause the cycle resumed itself, this time with the men in the posturing position. Then once more with the women, an endlessly repeating loop, as fitting a metaphor for the persistence of racism in America as any written word.

 

 

Hear me howling!

Andrew Lam
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Hear me howling!

MUSIC Last November, with little fanfare, homegrown roots music empire Arhoolie Records turned 50, an almost unbelievable milestone for a niche music label dedicated to the lasting preservation of regional music in an increasingly disposable MP3 world.

It wasn’t until this February that Arhoolie even scheduled a celebration, the proceeds of which went to fund the Arhoolie Foundation, the 16-year-old nonprofit dedicated to making a digital archive of founder Chris Strachwitz’s vast miscellany of Mexican and Mexican American recordings — the Frontera Collection — widely considered to be the largest of its kind on both sides of the border. Conceived as a research resource and historical documentation of the recordings, the digitized files are stored and accessible at the Chicano Studies Research Center library at UCLA (www.chicano.ucla.edu). The physical collection of approximately 46,000 units, housed in a climate-controlled basement in El Cerrito, stands as a fragile yet monumental testament to the mostly under-recognized talents of literally thousands of music-makers.

Strachwitz himself, a seemingly boundless wellspring of enthusiasm at 79, slowed only by a recalcitrant hip (recently replaced), attributes the label’s longevity in part to his own stubborn “fanaticism” for music, a trait shared by his small yet dedicated staff. From Strachwitz’s well-documented obsession with tracking down Lightnin’ Hopkins to record him in 1959, to his increasingly far-flung forays into the backwoods and swamps of the musically-diverse South, his emphasis has been on excavating the genuine, the raw, and the regionally significant. The diversity of music that Arhoolie publishes and records ranges in style from dirty blues to folk ballads, Cajun zydeco to conjunto. The tie that binds them isn’t genre, but emotional content.

“They are all very down to earth, totally alive and vibrant, from people who have mostly had a rough life,” Strachwitz explains. Perhaps best known for their bang-for-your-buck compilations assembled by region or genre: 15 Early Tejano Classics, Angola Prisoner’s Blues, Masters of the Folk Violin, Arhoolie has also released a number of seminal single-artist albums. Bogalusa Boogie by recent Grammy Hall of Fame inductee Clifton Chenier, Flaco Jiménez’s 1986 Grammy-winning ranchera album Ay Te Dejo en San Antonio, and the Pine Leaf Boys’ 2007 Grammy-nominated Cajun dance album Blues de Musicien exemplify Arhoolie’s commitment to unadorned authenticity.

Though it’s been a few years since Arhoolie recorded any new material, there’s a stockpile of one-of-a-kind field recordings patiently awaiting release. A recent addition to the Arhoolie canon is 2010’s Hear Me Howling, a four-CD collection housed in the handsome confines of a hardcover scrapbook. This 72-track compilation of raw material, gleaned from a series of Bay Area recording sessions from 1954-71, captures the essence of the music as well as the musicians in the moment: a humorous reference about Strachwitz’s “new recording machine,” improvised by skiffle group The Skid Band; a soft-spoken call for requests by bluesman Mance Lipscomb; a brief but earnest sermon delivered by the Rev. Louis Overstreet before he launches into an anthem on his electric guitar.

On several of Hear Me Howling‘s tracks, you can hear Strachwitz’s distinctive laugh carrying above the responsive noises of the audience. The intimacy of these mostly home recordings brings the circumstances they were recorded in to life in a way that no studio polish can mimic. Each is an aural document of a precise place and time.

Aural documents are what head Frontera Collection archivist (and trombonist for radical ska-punk ensemble La Plebe) Antonio Cuellar specializes in. His Sisyphean task is to scan and digitize a copy of every album — he’s been working for nine years, focusing primarily on the 78s and 45s that make up the bulk of the collection. After listening to a recording, Cuellar compiles a list of keywords to append to the digital file. Recurring themes and keywords such as “patriotism” (four hits), “praise of beauty” (3,590 hits), “executions” (32), and “trabajo de emigrante” (277) are entered into the digital database, along with a high-quality scan of the physical vinyl, and notes on the artists (Hermanas Segovia, Narciso Martínez, Orquesta La Campaña) and style of music (conjunto, ranchera, bolero, vals bajito, and Latino rock and soul).

“Often the only information left about a recording is on the label,” explains Cuellar, who extracts what he can from each. But besides collecting discards from jukebox joints, radio stations, and major label back-stock, Strachwitz acquired several now-defunct labels lock, stock, and-barrel, including Falcón and Ideal. This has allowed him to expand on the information he archives, noting, for example, what a particular recording artist was paid ($10 and a six-pack) or who was in the backing band. It’s painstaking, “sometimes tedious” work, but Cuellar, who may be the only person besides Strachwitz to have listened to so much of the collection, has a clear sense of its historical importance.

“Probably 99.9 percent of these artists are unknown,” Cuellar points out. “If I do a search for them online, it directs me back to Arhoolie, to the information that we have here … [Whereas] I can go and search for information about the most obscure blues guy, and he’s going to have something written about him.”

“It was Guillermo Hernandez [the late former director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center] who made me aware that this music was really the literature of the campesinos,” Strachwitz muses. “When he discovered I had all these damn old records, he became totally intrigued. Because nobody at that time seemed to know they had such a long history.” “It definitely influences me,” notes Cuellar, who was born in Mexico. “It’s helped open my eyes to my own history.”

The Performant: Here be pirates

Andrew Lam
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Joining the saltwater chorus at the monthly Chantey Sing at Fisherman’s Wharf

Landlubbers arise. San Franciscans of the not long-distant past were a sea-faring folk, and you don’t have to scratch the surface very far to dig up old salt. Sailboats, houseboats, fishing boats, and ferries all still have their place in the bay, churning in the wake of container ships and visiting cruise lines, and the waterfront pubs are still prime locations to be regaled by gusty tall (ship) tales by grizzled old-school longshoremen and maritime amateurs alike.

One of the most unexpected legacies of our boating heritage is the monthly Chantey Sing aboard The Balclutha, a historic square rig docked at the end of the Hyde Street Pier. Six months shy of its 30-year anniversary, the Chantey Sing is one of those wonderfully hidden-in-plain-view pockets of locals-only camaraderie that you could spend years of urban assimilation hoping to stumble upon.

That singing in public is one of the top-rated social anxieties in America is a statistic that has blissfully passed the Balclutha by, and on the first Saturday of every month its shelter deck fills up with as mixed a group in terms of age, background, musical ability, and general sea-worthiness as any 120 year-old square-rigger could possibly hope to attract. Anchored at the end of Hyde Street pier and maintained by the National Park Service, the Balclutha sails no more, but when night falls and the tourist dives on Fisherman’s Wharf become flatlander-infested, the comfortable embrace of the historic ship welcomes Chantey novices and old hands alike.

Like any style of call-and-response work song, the typical sea chantey takes its rhythm from the work involved, in this case a slowly rolling pace punctuated by rollicking bursts of chorus, meant to be sung while heaving to or hoisting sails. Themes revolve predominantly around certain bodies of land or water, ladies left behind, dangerous capes, and rough seas, with songs of a salacious nature given a deserved airing after the 11 p.m. mark. Anyone is free to lead a song, and although some chanteys are certainly more immediately recognizable than others – the Pogues-immortalized “South Australia” for instance — the wealth of material ensures a comfortable four-hour singalong with no repeats. 

There’s a certain campfire chumminess about the event, right down to the marshmallows in the hot chocolate (bring your own mug!) but instead of wandering off to get lost  in the woods, the restless patron of the Chantey Sing can wander off to explore the ship itself: the captain’s close quarters, the vast cargo hold, the galley, the poop deck. And though the proceedings are considerably less rum-soaked and catastrophic than the typical night-out-at-sea in 1886 might have been, the experience does provide a bracing injection of salt-sea mystique to even the most landlocked veins. 

 

Chantey Sing

First Saturdays of the month 8 p.m., free

The Balclutha, Hyde Street Pier

2905 Hyde, SF

(415) 561-7171

www.nps.gov/safr/historyculture/chantey-sing.htm

 

Found in translation

Andrew Lam
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Found in translation

arts@sfbg.com

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

— Goethe

THEATER In Mark Jackson’s breakout theatrical hit, 2003’s The Death of Meyerhold, title character and playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold asserts that “the classics are always new. That is why they are called the classics.” That philosophy of theatre is one that Jackson’s other plays frequently embrace. From reimagined Shakespeare to adaptations of underproduced Russian dramas, Jackson’s work is invariably characterized by his respect for and understanding of the universal nature of human emotion, regardless of location or century, as well as an intensely verbal style of playwriting and often aggressively physical staging.

It’s a logical progression that a writer with such a facility for his own language might eventually turn to the translation of theatrical works in other languages — especially after spending a year abroad, steeped in the theater scene of another country (in Jackson’s case, Germany). To date, Jackson has translated two full-length works, Faust, Part 1 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mary Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller, presented in 2009 and 2010 by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage. Translating from a director’s perspective, Jackson’s primary focus is on the spirit of the original play, and the intentions of the playwright, not necessarily a word-for-word direct interpretation.

“Why do that,” he wonders when asked about his approach, “except out of academic interest?” In addition to preserving the overall intention of the pieces he translates, Jackson also focuses on what he calls the “music” of the German language.

“Fortunately, because English is a Germanic language, it’s easier to retain the melody of it,” he explains. “To streamline the text but keep the poetry.” From Jackson’s perspective and personal experience, it’s the music of a language that ultimately reveals the character of its people, and therefore the characters of the pieces he translates.

For Rob Melrose of the Cutting Ball Theater, an experimental Bay Area company with a dedicated bent for the classics and the avant-garde, translation is an opportunity to stretch his comprehension of the English language and language in general. A dabbler in five languages in addition to English, Melrose has translated a total of seven plays from French and German and appreciates the insight into different cultures learning languages has given him: how the spare simplicity of French reveals the elegance of the French; how the logical, tightly constructed phrases of German are engineered as flawlessly as one of their vaunted automobiles. But even more, he appreciates the ways that these other languages push him as a writer and an artist.

“Working in another language makes you think differently,” Melrose explains. “Learning how other languages work helps me appreciate our language better and helps me identify what is unique about it. It also helps me stretch English a bit by trying to make it do what French can do or what German can do.”

It’s fair to say that Bennett Fisher, a cofounder of San Francisco Theatre Pub and an English teacher, has an in-depth understanding of English, which may be why for fun he chooses to translate plays from ancient Greek and French. The convivial atmosphere created by San Francisco Theatre Pub doesn’t mask its emphasis on thinking theatre, including Fisher’s translations of Cyclops and Ubu Roi. For his Greek translations, Fisher relies on the translation website Perseus project (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper), first translating chunks of text verbatim, then struggling to fill in the blanks.

“What I end up with is a kind of “me Tarzan, you Jane” sentence,” he says. “Then it’s a kind of puzzle to figure out what it means and how to phrase it to make it sound conversational. Once I get a handle on that, I can do all the stuff I do with French in terms of getting at feeling, tone, intent, and all that. There’s a lot of trial and error. It’s kind of like being a director — you try interpreting the dialogue in different ways and eventually you find a choice that feels right.”

It’s not just the classics that inspire local theatre-makers to try their hand at translation. One of the most exciting productions of 2006 was foolsFURY’s take on Fabrice Melquiot’s The Devil on All Sides, translated by artistic director Ben Yalom. A harrowing blend of magical realism and atrocity, Melquiot’s play set in the former Yugoslavia was pronounced the theatrical discovery of the year in his native France in 2003. The production went on from San Francisco to New York City, and helped inspire foolsFURY’s ongoing Contemporary French Plays Project, with two more Melquiot translations in the works and more possibilities waiting in the wings.

Daniel Zilber, cofounder of the Thrillpeddlers, translates original Grand Guignol plays from early 20th-century Paris, retaining all the melodrama and humor of the originals. Both the foolsFURY’s emphasis on physical artifice and the extreme naturalism of the Thrillpeddlers stem from French theatrical traditions, an influence that even extends to the writing and staging of their English-language productions. Much the way the art of translation pushes theatre-makers like Jackson and Melrose to think differently about the language of playwriting, so does the language of French theatricality encourage foolsFURY to create seething tableaux of writhing bodies, as in 2008’s Monster in the Dark, and the Thrillpeddlers to push the playfully edgy Grand Guignol aesthetic in their English original shows.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that some of Bay Area theatre’s most compelling risk-takers are also drawn to the possibilities translation offers them — from the challenges of the process to the rewards of producing a fresh interpretation of a classic work for the modern stage. But the greatest impact of the translation process may well be the way it continues to influence these theatre-makers during the creation of their original works. Perhaps Melrose puts it best: “It’s only by knowing these other languages well and by translating classic works that I have the idea to push English in my own writing.”

 

The Performant: Stupid is in the eye of the beholder

Andrew Lam
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St. Stupid and Karen Finely ride again

For anyone who could count that high, Friday’s St. Stupid’s Day parade marked its 33rd anniversary — a year that was also auspicious, it should be noted, for that famous first martyr, Jesus Christ Superstar. Will St. Stupid, revered patron of the First Church of the Last Laugh, succumb to a similar fate as JC? 

Methinks not. The Romans have yet to suss out the threat St. Stupid’s low-maintenance doctrine poses to their empire building, and the Stupids are not about to let them in on that little secret. After all, on the surface it seems pretty benign, a bit of only-in-San-Francisco color for the die-hards to cherish and the tourists to gawk at. But beneath the greasepaint, dirty balloon animals, and silly sloganeering (“Dum is Sexy,” “I Can’t Afford an Actual Sign,” “Serfs Up!”), there’s still a feverish drop of pure dada shivering in the mix.

Of course, before you can have chaos you must first have a veneer of order. There’s a certain ritual solemnity to this carnival of fools and surprisingly strict adherence to the “stations of stupid,” a chain of locations stretched throughout the Financial District. 

These include the statue of the bare butt mechanics, the sunken plaza of slack, the banker’s heart, this last a huge chunk of polished black marble squatting malignantly outside the Bank of America HQ. The route provides ample opportunity to poke fun at the suits sticking their puzzled heads out of high-rise windows and demystify the sacred symbols of commerce, particularly the old Pacific Stock Exchange (now a fitness gym) with an annual “sock” exchange in which the crowd pelts each other with holey/holy footwear. 

Within the cast of carousing hundreds there are even set roles, in particular that of the Bishop Joey, a.k.a., parade founder Ed Holmes, who leads the parade with as much pomp and circumstance as a man in court-jester dishabille can. Like any good parade there are noisemakers, chants (“No more chanting, no more chanting”), and even a float bearing three iconic Doggy Diner heads — plus Wavy Gravy — but they are all mere means to justify an end, and in the best tradition of participatory anarchy, what you take away from the experience is very much equal to what you put in.

What has performance artist Karen Finley taken away from a lifetime of participatory anarchy? Finley’s a woman who has been derided as obscene by racists, who uses confrontational nudity to inflame not loins but synapses – an act of protest that can be likened to that of the infamous Nigerian “curse of nakedness.” 

Reading excerpts from her new book The Reality Shows, Finley kept her clothes on, but still provoked a few good reactions imagining a love match between George W. and Martha Stewart, embodying the persona of a cranky New Yorker (“no, USA Today is not a real paper, no, I do not want to just ‘hang out’”), and portraying a woman who loves to fuck amputee veterans of the first Gulf War. In fact, her quiet confidence and leopard print outfit made her seem exactly like the kind of person who could roll with the St. Stupid’s Day festivities for the right reasons, if only because there are no wrong ones.

 

The Performant: The Empire has no clothes

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: The Empire has no clothes

Adventures in Naked Empire’s bouffonery

An evening spent in the presence of the Naked Empire Bouffon Company is always an unsettling experience. It can be difficult sometimes to assess who is actually performing for whom, as bouffons are wickedly adept at reading individuals and pulling them however briefly into the spotlight not as props, but as human beings with something to hide.

Unlike clowns, who often devise situations during which the oddience may laugh at them, bouffons laugh at the oddience from a position of almost comically aggressive power. It can be as simple as an offhand observation (“recently dyed,” one bouffon sniffed at a blonde streak) or a direct poke at a cultural or time-sensitive taboo (“surely it’s still too early to be referencing radiation in Japan”), but once they’ve got you in the crosshairs of their uniquely confrontational form of physical theatre, a bouffon shoots straight from the hip.

“As a citizen I am consistently impressed by how much of the “unsayable” the bouffon is allowed to say and by how well people hear it,” writes Naked Empire artistic director Nathaniel Justiniano. Justiniano first experienced the art form at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre and was immediately attracted to its audacious commitment to the truth.

“(It’s) a corkscrew type of energy…boring into the audience and sniffing out the muck we try to hide.” But despite the element of improv, Bouffon performance is also tightly scripted, allowing the performers a tightly structured framework to work within, and break out from when it becomes relevant to do so.

Performing as part of the Home Theatre festival in an artist’s warehouse dubbed the Main Street Theatre, Justiniano and company member Ross Travis performed two solo shows starring their Bouffon alter egos: Zooka Splat and Cousin Cruelty. 

Nathanial Justiniano’s Cousin Cruelty addresses his audience. Photo by Ross Travis 

Ross as Zooka burst into the room, screaming a war cry and dressed in tattered camouflage. He circled the crowd knowingly, leaping on the backs of the sofas they sat in, leering at their shock. Like a one-man Mad Max, he ably deconstructed the post-apocalypse genre of action films and doomsayer surrender in a series of vignettes that mapped out the bizarre terrains of alien abduction, zombie uprisings, nuclear holocaust, and macho bullshit. 

Justiniano’s Cousin Cruelty, a lewd giggling juggernaut of murderous impulse and fart jokes bounded out, shopping bag in hand, looking for trouble. Trouble came in the form of an orgy of mimed bloodshed — until from the shopping bag, a querulous puppet demanded to be released. 

Between the puppet’s script – a passionate, twelve-minute long speech denouncing the death penalty, delivered by Orson Welles in the 1959 film “Compulsion”— and Cousin Cruelty’s gleefully chaotic depictions of the origins and implications of violence, the oddience would have been pushed out of their “theatre-going” comfort zone even without the addition of the personal attentions bestowed on them by puppet and puppet-master alike. 

The laughter these twisted creatures provoked was genuine, but with an edge of unease, which is exactly the effect Justiniano is looking for.

“This laughter is uncomfortable….(It’s) the laughter that humans tend to find comforting when the silence or truth is too heavy.”

Intrigued by buffoonery? Check Naked Empire’s website for upcoming classes in this uncomfortable art

 

The Performant: Any way you want it

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Performant: Any way you want it

Bad hair days gone wild at Rock of Ages
 
That distance makes the heart grow fonder does go a long way in explaining the recent resurgence of hair metal. Somehow despite all better judgment, a spangled veil of wistful nostalgia has fluttered over that particular genre of music you probably loathed when you had to listen to it blaring non-stop from every corporate rock station in the nation [or while guys in eyeliner and leopard tights were beating you up in high school for being a flannel-wearing, Smiths-loving faggot -ED.].

But nowadays stone-washed denim is the new sepia-tone, and don’t think the canny producers of the touring, glam-rock “jukebox musical” Rock of Ages don’t know it. Any show where scantily-clad beauties hand out custom-made lighters at the door (ok, little flashlights) to hold up at the appropriate moments, that is to say every five minutes, is staged quite emphatically to push your most embarrassingly sentimental buttons. But it’s such an eagerly goofy emphasis that you can’t really resent the blatant manipulation. You’ll probably even wind up singing along.


 Full of ear-worms and eye-candy, Rock of Ages has a classic “busbo/ aspiring rock star” meets “cocktail-waitress-stripper-actress waiting for a break” storyline straight out of an MTV music video on heavy rotation. I almost expected Beavis and Butthead to show up during the finale and give it their classic “this rocks/this sucks” treatment before heading over to Burger World to set things on fire. What rocked: the hard-working live band conducted by keyboard player Brandon Ethridge and not so subtly dominated by lead guitarist Chris Cicchino, the gleefully tacky Sunset Strip aesthetic that permeated every designer’s work from crimped wigs to paraphernalia-covered stage wings, the endless stream of frighteningly familiar songs you can barely even find in karaoke joints anymore—“Sister Christian,” “We’re not Gonna Take it,” “Cum on Feel the Noize,” “Every Rose has its Thorn”.

What sucked is what sucked back in the 1980s, namely where’re all the ladies at? Out of 30 songs, only Joan Jett and Pat Benetar (plus a smidge of Lita Ford) represented the women-in-rock, and most of the female cast members didn’t even get so much as a character name or a few good laugh lines, but instead got to settle for lap-dancing like they meant it. Couldn’t they have snuck just one Wendy O. Williams riff in there? And though Constantine Maroulis as Drew played one of the most sweetly affable lead roles in any musical since Seymour of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and has a great set of rock pipes to boot, I was reminded of the quote about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did “backwards and in high heels” when Elicia MacKenzie as Sherrie took the stage and belts out a show-stopping “High Enough,” by Damn Yankees. A good girl gone bad never sounded better.
 
Still, you can’t necessarily blame the boys that there just weren’t very many girl bands playing unapologetic cock rock back in the day, and not every nostalgia trip has to pack along a roadmap to political correctness. Like the proverbial fountain of youth, Rock of Ages has the magical ability to turn its audience into a pack of fourteen year-olds on an ephedrine-and-Aqua Net binge, which sounds pretty heinous, but somehow manages to be totally awesome instead.
 
Through April 9
Curran Theatre
445 Geary, SF
$30-$99
(888) 746-1799
www.shnsf.com

The Performant: Life is a BOA

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bay One Acts festival turns 10

“Life is like a Boa,” the random stranger at the bus station (Nicole Hammersla) announces to the sweetly bemused young man (Ray Hobbs) she has marked as her test subject. Cleverly referencing both the reptile and the Bay One Acts festival — through March 26 at Boxcar Theater — in which she is performing, Hammersla goes on to demonstrate the action of being constricted by a giant snake, first on herself, and then on Hobbs. It’s a reference that perhaps doesn’t stand up to close examination, but for a moment at least you go with it. Life is like a snake sometimes, and sometimes a play. Sometimes coiled around you, smothering, dangerous, and sometimes unfolding swiftly before you, like a message pulled from an unexpected bottle washed to shore. 

At the Bay One Acts festival, now in its tenth year, there’s plenty of the unexpected tucked inside the eleven shorts plays by local playwrights, running in repertory through March 26. Sunday I saw a lineup of six (“Program two”) as wildly divergent in tone and intention as a group of strangers in the bus station thrown together by chance—the shared goal is to survive the ride. In Daniel Heath’s  “Twice as Bright,” Nicole Hammersla’s bus station character, Jen, announces to Hobb her intention to have a fifteen-minute love affair with him before her bus comes. “All I want from life is an abundance of wonderful things,” she explains as she slinks around him with calculated insouciance, trying to avoid the afterburn of a relationship gone wrong by fanning the brief, bright flame of a new one.

Far removed from the slightly sordid staging ground of the bus station, Megan Cohen’s “A Three Little Dumplings Adventure” is set in the claustrophobic confines of a home in the ‘burbs, where three manic little dumplings dressed identically in baby pink and powder blue, blaze a trail of wreckage in search of the hidden world they know only as their mommy’s room. Unlike a lot of “updated” fairy tales that seek to show how it would be really literally possible to live in a shoe or a pumpkin, and suck the blood out of the scary bits, “Three little Dumplings” replaces blood with gleeful venom and madrigals with choreographed electropop numbers. Murderous, foul-mouthed, impossibly cute, whatever truth the dumplings are poised to reveal is sublimated by the hurricane force of their spontaneous safari, their inability to grow up the not-so-stealthy weapon of their appeal.

Yet another completely different chord is struck by the 11th Hour Ensemble’s newest movement-based work, “Cloud Flower”. Eerily apropos for this particular moment, much of the piece is set in and inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima, and includes a tableau of corpses, fires, a rescue, a song perched on the edge of a dream. Streaks of ash-black paint trickling down the faces and hands of ensemble members, recalling the effects of devastation. Especially in light of the looming possibility of a present-day nuclear crisis in Japan, the heart of the piece is almost too tender, too overwrought to bear, but in terms of life and art imitating each other, there may be no better time to see it than right now.

Through March 26
Boxcar Playhouse
505 Natoma, SF
$20-$32
www.bayoneacts.org

The Performant: Lady in Red

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Cirque Noveau and Carletta Sue Kay blaze and seduce 

Even though nothing I saw over the weekend had anything remotely to do with Mardi Gras (Sunday’s Motown Parade in the Fillmore, was on the radar, but I melt in the rain), subtle little visuals kept it very much on my mind. In fact, as I type this, it nags me that I’m missing out on another Rosenmontag, Rose Monday, which is being celebrated all across Germany, a blowout which rivals the best Carnival celebrations from around the world, packed with parades, costumed revelry, and oceans of bier. I’m trying to compensate with a Rammstein CD and a 21st Amendment IPA, but really, it isn’t the same. Let “next year in Cologne” be the rallying cry! There are so many ways to dream.

Despite there not being any roses in my Montag, rose red colored my weekend. First found swirling in the startling tsunami of stage blood spilled by Impact Theatre in their Russian-mafia-meets-Romeo-and-Juliet adaptation, it also glowed wickedly, stretched across the muscled torsos of the performers of Cirque Noveau, in a production that closed last weekend entitled Devil Fish. 

Somewhat hampered by a plot line as thin as a contortionist’s body-stocking, the Circus improved immensely whenever they dropped the narrative and amped up the acrobatics. The sultry “Devil’s Advocate” Haley Vilora, in glittering red tiger stripes, contorted her body across the stage and through the air, a mesmerizing, gelatinous ooze. Peruvian performer (and show director) Angelo Rodriguez strutted across the stage as the Devil, and also took to the air with his signature cube. And Calvin Kai Ku entertained as a lovelorn clownfish with the hots for aerialist Morgaine Rosenthal, who floated on a set of straps with partner Ryan Webb, her red dress fluttering in the spotlight, a victory banner. 

Something tells me that recondite crooner Carletta Sue Kay knows a little about victory. I first encountered the beau-dazzling alter ego of Randy Walker in a whorehouse off the Carquinez Straits, singing longingly as if to an empty room of heartbreak, male beauty, and candy canes. Part torch singer, part small-town librarian with a knack for Karaoke show-stoppers, Carletta Sue’s enviable pipes turn often hilarious lyrics into rough gems of wisdom such as “is there a lot of dog shit in Paris?/I don’t know why I never noticed it before/Until you said goodbye to me in Paris/it’s just not the same to me anymore.” 

At Sunday’s show at the Makeout room (with the Suicide Dragons and the Sandwitches), the stage was lit red as always, which took the frump out of an embroidered sweater and peasant skirt combo and infused CSK with outlaw glamour, especially when she wailed into the mic like a soul train diva. The crowning moment of the show was definitely the stirring rendition of “If I Was Your Woman,” a song that Carletta promised would fuck her up. I don’t know how she sounds today, rasping through Rosenmontag like some film noir private eye, but on Sunday, her voice was a banner, bathed in red. 

 

The Performant: Pop up the jam

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appear and disappear at Noise Pop with Nobunny and Battlehooch

There’s a pop-up explosion going on out there, and it’s insidiously cornering the market on all our fun. It’s become well nigh impossible to stumble down the street without coming across a pop-up “gallery boutique ramen restaurant poodle salon performance space” and even more impossible to not want to avail oneself immediately of its fleeting charms. It’s the precarious ephemerality of pop-up ventures that makes them so enticing—the knowledge that at any moment the ability to tap into this particular experience will be gone forever. Granted, if you examine any particular moment in time closely, you’ll come to a similar conclusion, but sometimes it’s best to just go with the spontaneous flow, even if it’s a little bit manufactured.


How appropriately ingenious it was for Noise Pop to insert some pop-up action on the side of purveying the other kind of pop, as in music, as in the full-on winter blues-buster the festival has become, joining Indiefest as the other best reason to bundle up and brave the frosty February chill. There was the month long operation of the “Noise Pop Pop-up Shop” (say that five times fast) with Upper Playground as well as the weekend pop-up-culture extravaganza that was the “Culture Club” at Public Works. A genial mish-mash of all the popular arts—to gawk at, to buy, to make, and to listen to—Noise Pop’s pop-up experiments definitely ratcheted up their cool quotient and added a new dimension to their overall poppiness.

Of course it wouldn’t be Noise Pop without the noise, plenty of which was to be had at the venerable Bottom of the Hill, a festival mainstay. A double-header bill of Nobunny and Battlehooch (with the Exrays and The Downer Party) brought the werewolf-masked, face-painted bunny-hoppers out in force, freak flags flying proudly. And while it always inspires a certain awe to watch a man in furry dishabille pogo wildly and exhort the crowd to “Do the Fuck” themselves, the boys of Battlehooch closed the show with a satisfying bang. Less swashbuckling and more math rock than their moniker might suggest, Battlehooch’s sound bounces gleefully between influences, part Mother’s of Invention, part Devo: a solid guitar foundation swooping into psychedelic dissonance (AJ McKinley), a completely non-ironic synth (Ben Judovalkis), vocal modulations set on a channel somewhere between “Peter Murphy” and “Ivan Doroschuk “ (Pat Smith), a kickass one-man woodwind section (Thomas Hurlbut), and lyrics featuring baby sharks. Plus facepaint and a video montage of urban decay. Honesty, at this point, any band that gets hipsters to mosh like it’s 1989 gets my vote, and on that score alone, Battlehooch delivers the goods, and brings the noise. Pop.

The Performant: Neat stuff

Charles Russo
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TechShop San Francisco gets busy, Writers With Drinks gets drunk

Just when it felt like San Francisco could not possibly Do It Itself more than it already has, Jim Newton’s TechShop moved to town. Now it will be almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation of learning welding, soldering, molding, screen-printing, and quilting — not to mention CAD (computer aided design), CAM (computer aided machining), 3D modeling, laser-cutting and etching, and so much more. Whee!


At Saturday’s grand opening, after a short introductory speech by Mythbuster Adam Savage, a squadron of “dream coaches” gave walking tours of the 3-story, 17,000 square foot premises. Dream coaches are TechShop staffers who person the machinery and help patrons with their on-the-spot needs: answering questions, providing support. As Melquiades Olivares, a recent graduate of the Stanford School of Mechanical Engineering, took us around the giant, state-of-the-art workshop, it became quickly apparent that the scrappy, low-budget definition of DIY does not apply to TechShop. This is not a place where you’re likely to spin your empty toilet paper tubes into golden birdhouses.

But if you’ve been looking for the equipment to build your backyard lunar lander, TechShop’s got you covered. Equipment that made my internal geek organs go pitter-pat included: the Saw Stop, a basic table saw fitted with an electric monitor that can sense almost instantaneously the moment a finger (or carrot, or hot dog) comes in contact with the blade, shutting it down immediately; the Flow Waterjet cutter, capable of slicing through six inches of steel; and a 3D printer busily “printing” a smiling bust in microthin layers of UV-curable acrylic. Memberships, which are $125/month for individuals, are on the pricey side for a cheapskate like me, but certainly cheaper than buying a Waterjet cutter of one’s own.
 
“Tonight we’ll be giving each other Spiritual Wedgies,” promised MC Charlie Jane Anders last Saturday evening, at another monthly installment of San Francisco’s favorite reading series “Writers With Drinks.” A genial mashup of fiction and non, erotica and sci-fi, comedy and drama, WWD has been packing ‘em in for almost 10 years now (April 9 is the anniversary show, mark your calendar).

But it’s more than just the ecstatic crapshoot of the lineup that gets oddience crowding through the door at the Makeout Room. The event’s real secret weapon is Charlie Jane, whose introductory patter is legendary. After discussing our spiritual wedgies, and leading the crowd in a rousing affirmation “I am a sunflower and my underwear is a beautiful bumblebee” — Charlie Jane introduced poet Jason Morris as a man who is most famous “in the giant-cockroach reality,” Comedian Alex Koll as a shoe-fetishist who’d briefly been hired as the replacement Mr. Rogers, erotica author Hanne Blank as “the go-to person for dealing with hive minds that want to be dance instructors.” Event Wrangler isn’t exactly the most glamorous title in show business, but as a person who’s sat through more uninspired introductions that I can bear to recollect, getting to watch a true pro work a room will always keep me coming back for more. And judging from the usual attendance numbers, I’m not the only one.
 
*In the spirit of full disclosure it should be mentioned that the author of this piece read at Writers With Drinks on April 14, 2007.

The Performant: Enter the Platypus

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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French “Art” and Fringe wins at the EXIT Theatre

Of all the theatre companies in the Bay Area currently operating, the most specifically focused may well be our premiere (or rather only) amateur Francophone company Le Theatre Platypus. Though the Goethe-Institut sometimes hosts touring productions, such as Bridge Marklund’s “Faust in the Box” which will play in the Institut auditorium March 3 and The Mission Cultural Center hosts occasional Spanish-language plays such as Dolores Prida’s “Coser y Cantar” (playing March 17-19), dedicated multi-lingual local troupes are unfortunately scarce. This makes going to see a Platypus play more than just a night out, but a bona-fide cultural immersion experience.

Thursday night at The EXIT Theatre Mainstage is not usually where you’d expect to find a sold-out house, but Platypus pulled it off with their French language presentation of Yasmina Reza’s “Art” a satirical look at the world of art commerce as well as an exploration of the relationship between three friends whose differing feelings about an art piece underscores the divide in their characters.

There are many things about watching the play in French that are just the same as watching it in English—or any other translation. The appearance-driven shallowness of Serge (Michel Tassetto) is no less shallow in French than in English, and the zealous arguments against “the modern” of his acerbic buddy Marc (Arnaud Merceron) are no less self-righteous. The insecure hypochondriac Yvan (Thomas Marigne), who wobbles between trying to placate the feelings of both and obsessing over his pending marriage, is no less a schlub en Francais, and the piece of art in question—a $40,000 canvas painted all in white—is no less an eyesore.

The difference definitely lay in the crowd, half of whom appeared to be bona-fide expats, half of whom appeared to be French American International School scholars out for extra credit, and all of whom most certainly appeared to be having a great time. It surprises me that there aren’t more dedicated non-English Language theatre companies in the Bay Area, considering our diverse population, and while the Bay Area is a breeding ground for new translations, it’s interesting to consider what sort of impact these same companies might have mounting a non-translated work.

Because it’s never too early to start obsessing over the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which will be celebrating it’s 20th year in September, a hard-core crew gathered at the EXIT café on Saturday to witness the annual lottery — the process by which all entrants are chosen. This year 25 out-of-town companies, 10 of whom were alternates, and 35 locals, ditto, were drawn out of the “hat” by Christian “Nothing-up-my-sleeves” Cagigal and Michelle Talgarow. The San Francisco Fringe, as well as all Fringe Festivals part of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals are 100% non-curated, which means literally anything goes. Working titles of this year’s chosen productions include “Hamlet vs. Zombies,” by The Skinny Improv, “Hitler’s L’il Abomination,” by Annette Roman, and “I Love You, We’re F*#ked,” by Kevin J. Thornton, worthy Fringe titles all. The only question now—how do I wait six more months to see them?

Send in the clowns

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Send in the clowns

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE/PUPPETRY It’s been more than 10 years since Brooklyn-based Kevin Augustine brought his life-sized puppets and existential worldview to the Bay Area, and during that time he’s not been idle. Augustine’s last full-length show, 2008’s Bride, a charged exploration of theism, garnered much critical acclaim as well as an UNIMA-USA Citation of Excellence in Puppetry — the profession’s highest honor.

Just one month after Bride‘s successful New York City run, Augustine was already nurturing the delicate sprouts of the show that has become Hobo Grunt Cycle. After briefly considering a Civil War theme, Augustine expanded his vision to encompass the broader topics of modern warfare: weapons technology, the psychological effects of war, the physical effects of violence. He began to direct his creative energies toward answering a question he felt central to the topic: What progress have we made?

“The whole idea of warfare, of training ourselves to kill other human beings, seems so archaic,” he explains over the phone.

Part of Augustine’s brainstorming process includes sketching possible characters. One of his images, a soldier in fatigues with the face of a world-weary clown, helped spark his conviction that the hierarchies between the world of the soldiers and the world of the clowns were very similar. “There are always the clowns who get hit in the face with the pie,” he points out. Drawing from the comparison between low-caste clowns getting knocked around by their “superiors” and low-ranking Dogfaces getting shafted on the battlefield by theirs, Augustine started to craft Hobo Grunt Cycle‘s narrative around a hobo clown (played by himself), while adding a parallel narrative that involves war veterans (played by puppets).

The use of tramps and clowns as protagonists is not exactly new territory for Augustine — his previous productions Big Top Machine and Once Vaudeville feature one or the other. Both can be likened to the classic archetype of the fool or trickster, which makes them perfect for illustrating uncomfortable human truths via puppetry. What’s different for Augustine as a playwright is that most of Hobo Grunt Cycle is performed in silence, a nod to the tradition of pantomiming tramp-clowns such as Emmett “Weary Willie” Kelly, as well as a symbolic comment on the blanket secrecy that shrouds many veterans of conflict during and after their tours of duty. When one soldier character is finally allowed some exposition, Augustine is representing vets such as the “Winter Soldiers,” who have been able to break this silence and speak out about their experiences.

More than just the rich, dark nuances of Augustine’s playwriting set Lone Wolf Tribe apart. The puppets themselves are incredibly distinctive. Trained in theatre and — briefly — sculpture, Augustine had no formal puppetry experience when he began working on his first puppet show in 1995.

“I started as a solo performer,” he jokes. “But it got lonely, so I added the puppets.”

Starting from scratch, without preconceived expectations of puppetry’s limits, Augustine began creating life-size puppets to his own singular specs: warped, clumsy, vulnerable bodies with grotesque features and complex emotions. The foam-rubber he carves his puppet heads from allows for an unsettling realism in terms of facial textures — sleepy half-lids, arched brows, curled lips, rutted terrains of wrinkles and lines. Most of his puppets are manipulated by whole teams of hired-gun puppeteers, who must perform heroic acrobatics as they make the puppets dance, shamble, and limp across the stage.

So does Hobo Grunt Cycle answer its central question? Augustine remains unconvinced that progress has been made.

“I believe we haven’t progressed in terms of violent conflict because we’re stuck in our adolescent stage of development,” he says ruefully. “We see things only from our point of view, and always in terms of right and wrong, mine and yours, us and them — which prevents us from seeing that all human beings [and all puppets?] have the same needs.” *

HOBO GRUNT CYCLE

Thurs./17 through March 5; $15-$25

Exit Theatre

156 Eddy, SF

(415) 673-3847

www.theexit.org

The Performant: Of eggs and robots

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Thomas John’s “The Lady on the Wall,” and the Slave Robots of Carl Pisaturo

A few years ago, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I saw Dov Weinstein’s imitable Tiny Ninja Theatre enact “Macbeth” on a dollhouse-sized stage, which one viewed through cheap plastic binoculars from a distance of about ten feet. It will always remain one of my favorite versions of that particular play. Weinstein’s ability to perform as a literal cast of hundreds and run his own tech without fumbling his lines nor cues put many much larger (and taller!) companies to shame, and though the intention was quite obviously to amuse, Weinstein and his tiny plastic ninja cast still managed to convey the nuances of a more  serious artistry. Thomas John’s puppet noir “The Lady on the Wall,” which played at the Garage last weekend, displayed the same perfect balance of dorky and deliberate, featuring an unlikely cast of, not ninjas, but eggs.

Dressed in a nice suit just a little too big (like an adolescent boy clad in his father’s clothes for the talent show), Thomas narrated the piece with the deadpan delivery of a professional street performer (which he is), making every bad egg-related pun in the book, as bacon, and eventually eggs, sizzled on a hotplate grill beside him. Maneuvering his fragile characters from the countryside to “Carton City” and back again, Thomas also incorporated small moments of juggling, shadow-puppetry, and DIY lighting effects into his 45-minute thriller. The somewhat scrambled plot (ha!) involved the mysterious death of a lovely lady egg named Maud, aka “Humpty Dumpty,” done wrong by a cad named Frank, and perhaps the victim of a mysterious marauder: “The Poacher”.

Other members of the cast spanned the gamut of noir archetypes, including a gruff, “hard-boiled” private eye (Bob), an ingénue (Molly Meringue), a suspect aristocrat (Sir Benedict), and a whole carton-full of doomed ovum -— the final body count of the show ultimately rivaling “Hamlet”. As for-adults puppetry in the Bay Area has been experiencing a bit of a slump of late, with the majority of produced shows coming in from out-of-town (here’s looking’ at you, Avenue Q), it was great to see such a unique spin on the medium by such a dexterous, likable, and local performer.

Speaking of unique spins, it would be hard to think of a more unique spin on classical dance than the Slave Robots of Carl Pisaturo, on display during MAPP in his studio workshop-cum-gallery, Area 2881. With a meticulously-arranged workspace in the back, and a front room full of spinning, whirling, brightly-lit, kinetic sculptures made of  mostly mechanical components, Area 2881 is a low-key, yet entirely reverent, church of geek. Pisaturo’s centerpiece creations, a pair of skeletal humanoid figures with an astounding degree of hand and arm motion, and nightmarish Frank Garvey-designed body “panels,” are known merely as “Slave Zero” and “Slave One”.

As stirring instrumental music and projections of building demolition looped behind the backlit slaves, they “danced” along, using an expressive range of gesture to surprisingly emotional effect. More proof, if proof were needed, that robots — in addition to eggs and tiny plastic ninjas — can be artists too.

The Performant: Homing instinct

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Performance thrives on the Living Room Circuit

What are the barest fundamentals of theatre once you remove it from “the” theatre? This is one of the questions site-specific performances are always confronted with, and the answer is not immediately clear. Does “theatre” require a script? (Then what is improv?) Does it require actors? (Then what is Spalding Gray?) Does it require a moral? (Then what is Ubu Roi?) Perhaps, like obscenity, it is immediately known when seen, but otherwise elusively indefinable. What does seem to be certain, particularly in light of the latest wave of productions set in non-traditional venues, is that performing in an actual theatre space is definitely not a requirement for creating an actual theatre piece.

Probably the best example of space self-sufficiency is the current upswing in salon-style performances. From participatory readings to full-blown plays performed for invited attendees, the trend has become so pervasive that Berkeley-based performance artist Philip Huang even coined a name for it: Home Theater, naturally. In May 2010, Huang launched the “Home Theater Festival”, with events on both sides of the bridge. This year, beginning March 3, the festival will include performances from all around the world, staged in the homes of the artists performing in it.

One participant in last year’s festival, performance-poet Baruch Porras-Hernandez, had such a positive experience he’s signed up for another slot this year on March 18, even though he doesn’t think he’ll be able to use the space he currently lives in on the grounds that it is too small. “It is one of the things I am most proud of, out of all my 2010 projects,” he tells me via email, “[I] have not seen so much joy in an audience.”

 Other pioneers of the living-room performance circuit include No Nude Men, who have been hosting theatre salons since 2009, though their interpretation of salon is more traditionally-slanted towards play-reading and subsequent discourse. In 2008, Boxcar Theatre staged Edward Albee’s “The American Dream” in four different living rooms across the Bay Area, and EmSpace Dance premiered their “Keyhole Dances” in a Victorian flat. And every couple of months in the upper Haight, The Living Room Reading Series brings together a diverse crowd of writers and readers together for an evening of wordsmithery on display.

Seduced by the potential of living rooms used for living art, two weekends ago I also hosted a performance salon in my home. And though I feel I must refrain from gushing about the specifics in this column (fabulous as they were!) I can say I highly recommend the experience on either side of the “stage.” Not only was a palpable intimacy created by just being packed in a smaller space, but more importantly by being in a *living* space, which quite literally made the event seem more alive. Though the atmosphere was casual, it was charged with an excitement I rarely, if ever, feel seated in the tidy rows of a conventional “theatre.”

Best of all, from my perspective, at least four attendees left vowing to host salons of their own, and one had attended a similar event in the Berkeley Hills the night before. This makes me hopeful to think that we’re standing at the brink of a bona-fide movement, not just a momentary fad.

The Performant: Stalking the voice of young America

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Listening in at SF Sketchfest and Live Evil

Is it just me, or do you also catch yourself wondering on occasion, “I wonder what the sound of young America is today?” Where is it lurking, and how will I recognize it when I find it? Well one pretty obvious solution is to just Google “the sound of young America” — the first hit will be Bay Area native Jesse Thorn’s podcast/radio show webpage on Maximum Fun. Delightful, irreverent, not unintelligible, and better yet, not unintelligent, “The Sound of Young America” is both talk show and time capsule. I mean, podcasts? How 2007!

But with comedy, it still works. A good joke is timeless, and a good comedian, whose primary tool is language, can generally carry off being funny, with or without additional visuals. And at the special SF Sketchfest edition of TSOYA, recorded at the Eureka Theatre  to a small but spirited afternoon crowd, funny people were in plentiful supply. LA stand-up comic Baron Vaughn, SF’s finest absurdist sketch troupe Kasper Hauser, creator of animated series “The Life and Times of Tim” Steve Dildarian. But as for the sound of “young” America, it was actually the comfortingly middle-aged “Bobcat” Goldthwait, no longer the mercurial situationist he was in his twenties, who stole the show with his affable demeanor and his relatively grounded philosophy of artistic fulfillment over monetary reward or “the usual trappings”.

Walking into Noh Space Saturday night was a little like walking into a high school Drama Club party, or Heavy Metal Karaoke in the Lower East Side, with everyone dressed up in their very best rock concert t-shirts, mullet wigs, and fingerless gloves: and that was just the oddience!

Onstage was Laurent Martini in a nerdy cardigan and his “younger self—‘Little Evil’” (Max Hartman), eagerly reenacting every past embarrassment of Laurent’s coming-of-age as an upper middle class fat kid from the Marina, with a desperate yearning to get laid, write rock songs, and be Nikki Sixx. These scenes were interspersed with “Don’t make me look too psychotic” vignettes from Martini’s now-defunct married life with desperate housewife Missy (Sara Faith Alterman) who spent a good portion of the show either bitching about Laurent’s uncool passion for hair metal, or getting frisky with “extra-curricular” construction workers, surfer dudes, and drug dealers.

Humiliation is central to the plot of “Live Evil”: it debuted appropriately enough as a share-and-tell at the Mortified story-telling series before it was written down in play form, and five years later still feels, in many ways, like a perpetually adolescent work. But actually, that’s the over-arching secret to its success. Because back when the sound of young America was “Pour Some Sugar on Me” every day was awkward embarrassment, and every desire over-wrought. And we’ve all been there—maybe not penning lyrics like “I’m gonna fuck my way across this great big land” — but certainly harboring impossible dreams of our own. And watching even a small slice of an impossible dream come true for a fellow romanticist, whether still the voice of “young” America or not-so-much, totally rocks.

Snap Sounds: Munly and the Lupercalians

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: Munly and the Lupercalians

MUNLY AND THE LUPERCALIANS
Petr and the Wulf
(Alternative Tentacles)

Munly J. Munly has long been one of the most enigmatic yet prolific figures of the Denver Music scene. And with his latest lineup, concept band The Lupercalians, he’s tapped into a treasure trove of possibility. Ostensibly the first of a series of albums focusing on the imaginary world of the “Kinnery of Lupercalia,” Petr and the Wulf is a dark retelling of the Prokofiev children’s symphony, whose characters are trapped by circumstance and each other in a deadlocked circle of vengeance and fear.

Reminiscent of, yet literal worlds apart from, the down-home fire and brimstone twang of Munly’s other projects (particularly Slim Cessna’s Auto Club), the musical arrangements of Petr and the Wulf are far closer in nature to the original symphony than to a hootenanny: strings, flute, organ, and even a tuba are represented in the mix along with multiple percussionists, a solitary banjo, and intense vocal layers. The last track, an eight-minute spoken-word soliloquy against a wailing wall of percussion-driven sound, exalts in the Wulf’s unrepentant ways: “If I am to be your reprobate,” he intones, “I shall at least enjoy the malefaction,” a phrase that seems just as easily applied to Munly himself.

Munly and the Lupercalians, “Grandfater”

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