Ryan Lattanzio

Two for the road

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Two for the road

arts@sfbg.com

FILM They met at a comedy club in Brooklyn. Carlen Altman, a nervous comedian who moonlights as a Jewish rosary maker, was doing stand-up when filmmaker and Tisch graduate Alex Ross Perry approached her about collaborating on a project.

"I came down from the experience of having my first movie out there in the world," said Perry, who directed the little-seen indie Impolex (2009) when he was only 24. "I started thinking about success, disappointment and the way that people grow apart from one another."

The idea for a brother-sister movie came to be. Altman and Perry, both 28, drafted the film in the summer of 2009 and shot it a year later. "You feel like you're stuck with someone and have been your whole life," Perry said of his time spent working with Altman on The Color Wheel, a droll and perverse take on vexed lives in transition, tinged with 16mm. Perry directed, produced, and edited the film while co-writing with Altman.

When the film begins, a dopey JR (Altman) shows up at the apartment of her misanthropic brother Colin (Perry). She is met with disdain by his girlfriend and by Colin, blue-balled by his stuffy long-term relationship. JR convinces him to help move her stuff out of her professor ex-boyfriend's place. Inevitably, their Northeastern road trip follows other tangents, taking the pair on a hilarious and sad journey that raises more questions than answers about their fraught relationship. They meet a lot of jerks, but no one more so than themselves.

"We were both really cranky filming," Altman recalled. "It [really] felt like we were brother and sister."

Both characters have had little personal and professional success, though JR, a would-be news anchor, even less than her brother.

Many of the characters' repellant mannerisms and frustrating habits are hewn from the real-life Perry and Altman — with exaggerations, of course.

"JR is more representative of what both of us actually feel and how we perceive ourselves in her creative ideas and lack of shame," Perry said. "My character represents the cautious side, what both of us feel like we should be doing."

Altman took the name of her character from a scrappy tomboy she once met at summer camp. "In terms of personality, my character is kind of my worst nightmare," Altman said of JR, who is really aggressive about success but has no specific passions of her own. "She's like 'Hey, look at me!' but, oh my god, there's nothing to look at. I feel shy about asking for favors, and I wanted to paint a picture of someone who is so not shy about asking."

Though the film is as talky, anxious, and self-revising as anything from the mumblecore school, Perry and Altman possess more maturity and even more cynicism than their profligate classmates. On the converse, their characters, filterless with no desire to grow up or shut up, are far behind everyone they encounter, from Colin's harpy high school crush to JR's haughty celebrity idol.

With all its zeitgeisty humor and lovably awful people, The Color Wheel takes some dark turns. What begins as a charming, dour comedy ends up viscerally queasy and pitiful, with its two leads as mixed-up as ever.

"The ending was my idea from the very beginning. It was easy to build it in a way that was natural and organic," Perry said of the film, which encourages, almost immediately, a repeat viewing.

Applauded by Cahiers du Cinéma and Mubi, among other cinephilic publications, The Color Wheel, a film that begins and ends in transit, no doubt has a long life ahead.

In the meantime, Altman wants to make a documentary about her Lionhead rabbit. And Perry, initially rejected by myriad producers and investors, hopes "there will be some traction after my two films," he said. "Maybe someone will help this guy."

Maybe someone will help these guys. *


THE COLOR WHEEL opens Fri/1 at the Roxie; also plays Sun/3 at the Smith Rafael Film Center.

Once upon a time in the Bronx

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Once upon a time in the Bronx

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Though the visibility of gays and lesbians in cinema remains (largely) confined to independent film, Rashaad Ernesto Green, in his debut feature Gun Hill Road, uses the creative freedom afforded by that closeting to explore issues of race and confused sexuality amid the Latino population of the Bronx.

Esai Morales is Enrique, a former drug dealer returning from prison to his wife Angela (Judy Reyes) and teenage son Michael (Harmony Santana). But everyone seems to have moved on with their lives. Angela is having an affair, and Michael has created a new persona, Vanessa. Green’s film focuses on the relationship between the damaged Enrique and Michael, whose cross-dressing and budding transsexuality puts the family members at odds.

Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an entry in this year’s Frameline Film Festival, Gun Hill Road is one in a recent spate of films that deals with coming out in an urban setting. Like Green’s film, Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009) offered a picture of homophobia in the Latino community. But Gun Hill Road, despite its bulging dramatic heft, shirks the after-school-special formula of La Mission by imagining complex characters rather than hewing them from instantly recognizable, sympathetic archetypes.

Yet Gun Hill Road takes many a detour into hokum-town. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming in that tiny Bronx apartment, which makes the proceedings occasionally claustrophobic and tiresome. The film has the subtlety of a slam poetry reading: it has emotional punch, but that punch often feels like its swinging in the dark. Yet the whole thing is handled with such chutzpah and bravery that you have to admire it.

The young Santana is fearless, portraying Michael-Vanessa with a naked-to-the-world earnestness that makes him the emotional center of the film. Enrique’s fist-wielding masculinity makes him a difficult character to like, but the film is well-cast and the performances are on-point. Though the script is flawed, it’s the execution that succeeds.

With a handheld camera in the tradition of gritty social realism, Green sheaths the Bronx cityscape in a muted lacquer of beige and blue, affording visual pleasures while treating Michael’s disoriented sexuality with sensitivity rather than camp. But the film probably could have used a sense of humor. Perhaps it’s because Michael isn’t yet comfortable in his own skin. In the end, Green gives us reason to believe that he’ll get there. 

 

GUN HILL ROAD opens Fri/19 at the Sundance Kabuki.

3348 with a bullet

Andrew Lam
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3
3348 with a bullet

arts@sfbg.com

A name like writer James Boice’s no doubt washes up waves of adulation. His partner-in-assonance is a certain modernist master whom Boice, at 29, surely knows something about. The Good and the Ghastly (Scribner, 288 pages, $25), a wicked new novel, is the kind of towering bildungsroman-cum-crime fiction carnival that is both entertaining and well-crafted — something we’ve come to expect from writers like Chuck Palahniuk, but don’t usually get these days.

For all its explosions, the book isn’t mere spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Often contemporary imaginations of literary violence sink into the page-filling, glittery sands of ersatz — but James Boice, quite the contrarian, has conjured a brutal, sharp diamond in the literary rough. The Good feels fresh and urgent while culling themes as old as the Bible and as zeitgeist-y as The Sopranos: the neo-noir crime epic. Boice has certainly eaten his cultural vegetables; at the same time, he isn’t afraid to spew them up to create a pulpy piece of work that is contemporary and allusive. It’s enough to satisfy readers in need of instant gratification as well as those less ravenous who prefer to sip and savor.

The Good and the Ghastly is a mad picaresque, the story of antihero Junior Alvarez’s rise and fall as criminal overlord. It is the 34th century. Seminal cultural artifacts were lost in some kind of nuclear devastation centuries before, so Sarah Palin and Oprah are among this world’s spiritual and intellectual pundits. Someone called Kevin Lithis is the new Jesus Christ. Everybody believes Stephen King wrote the works of Shakespeare. Ikea tables are considered antiques. But down in the underbelly, an implacable race to power wages between the Italians and the Irish as Josefina, a good mother turned hardened revenge-seeker, sets out to avenge the death of her son — one of Junior’s victims — by assassinating Junior and his unctuous underlings. And how far she goes I won’t say, but it does involve, in one scene, a bazooka, a baby, and a priest’s garb. Yeah.

A peak at the epigraphs inaugurating The Good and the Ghastly give a real sense of Boice’s literary antecedents. There are quotes from Faulkner, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and the OJ Simpson trial. With this mixed bag of chestnuts as synecdoche, Boice traverses the furrows of the high- and lowbrow in his novel. At once, The Good deserves the literary fiction crown and yet, it is also, in its own right, a piece of glorious trash. It is ugly and sensational, yet Boice is an evocative writer who knows what he’s up to.

With no degree to speak of, he has made himself something of a literary wunderkind. When Boice began writing, he “purposefully wanted no formal education,” he explained to me in an e-mail. “I did not want to be a proficient and well-executed writer. I wanted to be a writer who writes in blood. I wanted to live on the margins of decency and write things that were dangerous and true.” After dropping out of college, he moved to San Francisco and holed up in a room at the Halcyon Hotel on Jones Street, writing, drinking coffee, listening to Blood on the Tracks. Now, he lives in New York City and “life is good. I’m happy as a pig in shit.” And he should be. He already has two novels — MVP and NoVA — under his belt. This third entry is set in northern Virginia, where Boice is from. “I feel it is a microcosm of America, the quintessential American place,” he said. But here, NoVA is run by gangsters.

“Part of the impetus for the book was to sort of acknowledge our culture’s twisted relationship to gangsters,” Boice said. “We glorify them. We do. We love Scarface and Goodfellas and The Godfather. It’s fucked up that we do, because gangsters are evil motherfuckers.” Boice says the best writing is “the work of the subconscious.” Guy’s got a sick subconscious.

Like The Godfather, Boice creates a kind of ensemble piece, oscillating between a few different characters and third- and first-person while also generating a universe peppered with striking verisimilitude. Pop cultural references abound, and Boice’s prose contains an arsenal of neologisms — “smuck” is the new “fuck,” Visa rules the world, and Bar With Pool Table is Junior’s haunt. Boice’s invocation of particular brand names and coinages — reminiscent of Anthony Burgess, Bret Easton Ellis, or more recently, Junot Díaz — underscores the kind of fully imagined, multifaceted literary universe that would sate science fiction or fantasy nerds. And like those contemporaries, Boice is doing satire here, although it never feels heavy-handed because the mores of this literary world mirror ours. The year 3348 isn’t looking so glamorous after all.

The novel’s balls-to-the-walls violence, in scenes that glide as giddily as Scorsese’s camera, has a point: “Violence is not fun to think about, but it exists and has a way of interrupting your peace and penetrating your isolation out of the blue whether you want it to or not,” Boice said. “I believe in describing violence in a violent way. Otherwise you’re not telling the truth.”

Great works of art are always something of a mystery, and Boice leads us unflinchingly into the dark while cutting believable characters out of cardboard archetypes, right down to their flesh and bone (literally). Boice saves his most packed punches for last, where he rains down a reckoning upon Junior and Josefina. But all the while, Boice sidesteps easy moral punctuations in favor of ambiguity and open questions. In the end, it’s like a brick through a windshield.

Jamie Stewart on orange juice, armpits, bird calls, and ambient music

John Elberling
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0
Jamie Stewart on orange juice, armpits, bird calls, and ambient music

On Friday 8/13, Berkeley Art Museum is hosting a project that is threefold: the visual art of David Wilson, short films curated by Max Goldberg, and the music of Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). To find out more about this unusual collaboration, I spoke to Mr. Stewart on the phone about his contribution and how he anticipates the night will go down.

SFBG The BAM website says that you’re debuting a “new composition in field recording inspired by the night, animal calls, and quietness.” This is a little vague, so could you tell me more about what your performance is going to be?
Jamie Stewart I’ve always been really impressed with people who went to art school but I’ve never had any opportunity. Probably in the past six or seven years I’ve become a really avid birdwatcher and one of the things that I initially, having been so involved in music, enjoyed about birdwatching is that it was something completely visual for me. Most bird calls are completely bizarre so I had since become almost focused on listening to bird calls but almost in a way that’s detached from the birds itself. In the middle of this increased interest I find myself inexplicably in North Carolina and a big part of the recreational culture here is hunting. There’s a lot of hunting stores and being a vegan obviously, I’m not totally interested in hunting. In these stores there were rows and rows of different animal calls and a lot of these are really horrifying-sounding. If you blow into them, you hear some of the most harsh noise music ever imaginable. A lot of the hunting bird calls sound like the environment completely exploding. So I’ve racked up a pretty hardy collection of these.

SFBG How might you categorize this work into a genre?
JS It’s an ambient piece. I have a really extensive collection of gongs and animal calls and I will be using these together but with long periods of silence. It’s an attempt to incorporate ideas of 1950s minimalist composition insofar as focusing on the pauses in sound, animal sounds, and a certain amount of physicality.

SFBG How are you going to do it?
JS I think I’ll be running mostly. It will end up utilizing a fair amount of space. So far, there will be gongs placed on two different sides of the room and I have these two gongs I got in Korea recently, and various bird calls will be placed throughout the room. Part of the idea is to have [the piece] be in relative darkness and move as quickly as possible at predetermined intervals with each of the items that can make sound, to have a combination of intense rustling and physicality, and intense sounds, in addition to certain electronica. Short periods of super intense activity and miserable, intense sound, and then no source of sound.

SFBG How is this similar or different to Xiu Xiu?
JS It has absolutely nothing to do with Xiu Xiu at all. That has a specific aesthetic and philosophy, whereas this is more about being less defined, about subconscious experiences, and to be more experiential, whereas Xiu Xiu is an attempt to be about something that is very linear. I can feel what it is about but it is difficult to say what it is about. I think it will be emotionally clear but I think to put it into words will be more difficult, which is something I appreciate because usually I have to be as clear as possible.

SFBG Is this your first venture into museums and visual art?
JS When I was growing up, I used to do a lot of disruptive performance art –– we would shave our armpits into orange juice, the dumbest things possible. It wasnt a performance, I think we were just trying to irritate people. I’ve played the Gameboy occasionally. I’ve composed a fair amount of ambient music. I recorded a 13-disc series [available with a subscription]. I didn’t put it online, so I guess it was available to 50 people on Earth. This piece is probably more minimalist than some of that.

SFBG Who are some ambient artists that have inspired you in the making of this work?
JS A couple (like Rhys Chatham) but it was really inspired by natural sounds and more of a coming to terms with different ways in how people regionally deal with ideas of nature. [Being from California] I have a hippie-ized idea of what nature is for. Rhys Chatham is so preposterously minimalist. Chestnut and I saw how long we could endure listening to it. It’s called “Two Gongs” but my piece plays differently. Two gongs for an hour, very limited changes in the tonal shading. A lot of ambient music that I find difficult to endure or that is unpleasant I find particularly fascinating. It ends up being less of a musical experience and more of a psychological and physical experience. Its a combination of being inspired by the sonic tools that people use to destroy nature. Hopefully it’s just interesting. I don’t think Rhys Chatham was trying to do anything unpleasant either.

Bay Area assemblage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Bay Area assemblage

arts@sfbg.com

FILM/MUSIC/VISUAL ART Since July 9, local artist David Wilson has programmed the Friday night L@TE shows at the Berkeley Art Museum, in conjunction with “Gatherings,” his installment in the site’s MATRIX series. On Friday the 13th, Wilson concludes his summer contributions to L@TE with presentations by Jamie Stewart, the veritable prince of darkness for Oakland-based indie band Xiu Xiu, and Bay Area film critic Max Goldberg. The program is not only about gatherings in nature but also the assemblage of disparate art forms. Wilson has traversed between media to suss out the kind of aesthetics you can see, and invisible aesthetics that can only be heard. Or as he puts it in an e-mail: “I have been organizing a seasonal series of performances that foster collaborations with different artists and performers and bring people together in unique circumstances.”

Adjacent to Thom Faulder’s BAMscape — a massive orange installation that doubles as sculpture and furniture, beckoning spectators to “sit on it” but also turning them off with its uncomfortable wood seating — Wilson has placed what he calls “a large cove structure of found wood.” It works like an indoor amphitheater. This summer it has become the playing space of musicians such as Grouper and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Wilson also has framed some works in conjunction with the interactive architecture installed in the gallery. “I’ve been making art about place and experience in place,” he writes. “Often this takes shape as a series of drawings made during explorations through the hills, or as a single drawing of a place.”

When he’s not brooding onstage or exploring childhood trauma in Xiu Xiu, Oakland native Stewart has cultivated a rather self-effacing hobby: bird-watching. “I find myself inexplicably in North Carolina,” he tells me in a phone interview. He’s been living there for about two years. “There are a lot of hunting stores … [with] rows and rows of different animal calls. A lot of these are really horrifying. The hunting bird calls sound like the environment completely exploding.”

I ask Stewart not to be totally forthcoming about his performance, as the element of mystery and the unexpected will be crucial to this event. “It’s an ambient piece,” he says. “I have a really extensive collection of gongs and animal calls and I will be using these together, but with long periods of silence. It’s an attempt to incorporate ideas of 1950s minimalist composition insofar as focusing on the pauses in sound, animal sounds, and a certain amount of physicality.”

In trying to realize the chasm between din and utter silence, Stewart cites composer Rhys Chatham’s Two Gongs (1971) as an inspiration. Of ambient music, Stewart explains, “It ends up being less of a musical experience and more of a psychological and physical experience.”

The aural and physical aspects of Stewart’s contribution — since he will be running from gong to gong — collide with the almost exclusive visual focus of Goldberg’s carefully curated selection of short films, all culled from Canyon Cinema. In the same way that the aural, physical, and visual get cozy and find a crossroads at BAM, the trio of Wilson, Stewart, and Goldberg will gather and treat BAM like a bazaar for the exchange of artistic interests.

Goldberg, a friend of Wilson’s and an admirer of Xiu Xiu (and Guardian contributer), says in an interview that the films he curated are “tuned into different ideas about recording nature. It’s not just observing. You’re in the midst and you encounter it.” For the exhibit, he sought “aesthetically amazing works” because he is “eager to capture the eyes of people who might not know about experimental cinema.”

The six shorts include films by Jeanne Liotta, Len Lye, and avant-garde household name (because there are so many of those!) Stan Brakhage. One of the most stunning works is Ben Russell’s 2007 Black and White Trypps Number Three, which turns a mosh pit into a fugue state with epileptic, chiaroscuro-heavy visuals. “They’re all films with no spoken language, and that was unintended,” Goldberg tells me. He’s curious about BAM-as-theater since it is “not a controlled environment for viewing films.” The projector will be placed right in the audience, in BAMscape’s center.

While Stewart’s performance and Goldberg’s handpicked film selection will not occur at the same time, they will operate in tandem, addressing the aesthetic concerns of place — and its, well, place in nature — while creating a multisensory experience: a disquieting yet provocative full-course feast for the open eyes, ears, and mind.

L@TE: JAMIE STEWART AND FILM PROGRAM BY MAX GOLDBERG

7:30 p.m., $5

Berkeley Art Museum

2625 Durant, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

The top 10 films of 2010’s first half — one take

John Elberling
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0
The top 10 films of 2010’s first half — one take

By now we’re past the halfway point of 2010, the inaugural year of another decade in movies. So far, the selection of great films has been scant –– though, as usual, the coming of winter and the iron hand of film’s favorite fascist Harvey Weinstein signal Oscar-worthy films in our future. These are the best films of 2010, so far, in alphabetical order. And yes, I have seen Inception, but I did miss The Ghost Writer. Cold Weather (Aaron Katz)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEggB8DvXP4
Aaron Katz acts as the much-needed liaison between mumblecore and non-mumblecore (what would that be? Everything Else? Screamcore?), forgoing an already tired genre (though Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha remains great) for a totally weird existential detective story. Cold Weather stirs up the naturalism of mumblecore with the more exciting draw of, say, an independent thriller.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTlm6dU2xHk
The exit of this Gift Shop could’ve led us down an enigmatic path forged by Banksy for his own self-gratification. Yet, for the most part, he turns the camera completely away from himself –– despite a few shadowy moments –– and onto Thierry Guetta, also known as Mr. Brainwash, also known as the biggest art hack of the 21st century.

Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjV2GXxrEMI
Speaking of mumblecore, Noah Baumbach’s (The Squid and the Whale) latest bittersweet-slice-of-life stars mumblecore muse Greta Gerwig as the bemused and socially uncomfortable Florence as Ben Stiller’s love interest (or, more accurately, emotional plaything/fuck buddy). Baumbach’s screenplay is spare, mostly plotless, yet full of the scars of real life that are mostly healed but always leave a mark.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fnojZw54ls
One of the best documentaries about show business ever, A Piece of Work is just that and more. It is the root canal of a starlet going sour, a woman trying to elevate herself above flotsam-status. Joan Rivers has never been so heartbreaking before, nor has she been this saucy.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgwjTy_cohg
This is the best tragicomedy about family in America that I’ve seen in awhile. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore note-perfectly elicit all the nuances of a very long marriage. Cholodenko works in a language that can be universally understood and in some way, I can’t help but think she’s made a great case for gay marriage.

Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi9WlsYCr-k
In Nicole Holofcener’s (Lovely and Amazing) sometimes icky dramadey, Catherine Keener is brilliant as a polarizing character who tries to have a heart of gold –– but all her liberal trappings are weighing her down. Rebecca Hall plays a woman who is sort of the opposite: a genuinely good person for whom things just don’t work out. These are some of the year’s best performances.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYVrHkYoY80
A totally misunderstood, underrated genre romp, Shutter Island is Scorsese’s Shining: occasionally terrifying, oozing with hallucinatory visuals and an ending that could be potentially be seen as a cop-out. Leonardo DiCaprio, in all his tortured, splashing-water-on-his-face-in-front-of-the-mirror madness, has utterly convinced me he’s one of today’s great actors.

Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6o_Vl2f07Q
Splice is probably the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year. It’s fucking scary, it reeks of Freud, and Adrien Brody looks brutally hot –– again. But seriously, guys, if you consider yourself a horror or sci-fi buff at all, you’ll most likely take great pleasure and comfort in this film, and the fact that Vincenzo Natali restored my faith in horror. The most remarkable splicing is the one with thrills and laughs. This movie is mostly horrifying for its 104-minute running time, and hilarious for at least 80 of those minutes.

White Material (Claire Denis)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2noQowyoKQ
I don’t really know what the hell happened in this movie –– most of the senior citizens seeing it at the PFA didn’t know, either –– but all I need are lots of grainy handheld close-ups of Isabelle Huppert’s face to know White Material is good.

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ8kqytI_oA
Granik wow’d me with 2004’s Down to the Bone, and she’s thrown us yet another bone with Winter’s Bone, a bloody and downright biblical tale of the Ozarks. Granik is so skilled because she deals in rich, beautiful symbolism that’s never too obvious, nor is it cockeyed. She might very well be the Dardenne Brothers of the West.

HONORABLE MENTION: I almost forgot Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King). It transcends this list. It is the list-defier of all list-defiers. It’s just that good. So good, in fact, that I just can’t parse it with words.

Addicts unanimous

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Addicts unanimous

arts@sfbg.com

LIT What is it about addiction memoirs? Like Pringles — something food junkie Frank Bruni might know something about — you just can’t have one. They’re easy to devour and easy to digest, as compulsively consumable as the impulsions they’re filled with.

While they certainly won’t have the final say in the matter, two recent addiction memoirs, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown, and Company; 240 pages, $23.99) by Bill Clegg and Born Round (Penguin, 368 pages, $16) by Frank Bruni, fit the genre’s high-stakes bill.

“I can’t leave and there isn’t enough,” declares the first line of Portrait, as Clegg stares at the crumbs in a bag of crack and the crumbs of his successful career as a literary agent. This is only the beginning of what quickly becomes a journey into an all too lucid nightmare.

The articles in the title suggest that Clegg’s story — while not anonymous the way Go Ask Alice was in the ’70s when readers were convinced of its authenticity — isn’t remarkable because addiction is, well, wholly unremarkable. Clegg makes this clear in his episodic telling of day after day, night after night of crack binges and self-inflicted explosions and implosions.

Clegg’s prose is like beautiful quicksand — calm in its capture, deadly in its swallow. In some of the book’s ugliest moments, he abstracts himself from the mire through third-person, conjuring an out-of-body experience and pressing himself against the glass case of his own madness. ” … He feels the high at first as a flutter, then a roar … It is the warmest, most tender caress he has ever felt and then, as it recedes, the coldest hand.” The book’s brazen unsentimentality is its best and most addictive ingredient.

Yet whatever goes down comes up. There’s always the flipside to addiction and consumption: expulsion. While Clegg, with the crack toke count rising, arrives at a sickly ectomorphic physique — perfectly captured in the perhaps unfelicitously cartoonish book cover — Frank Bruni, in his college years, aims for a similar build with the help of amphetamines and bulimia. In Born Round, he “regurgitates” — his words, not mine — his insatiable struggle with appetite as he moves up the food chain from addict to critic. It’s something he believes he was “congenitally rigged” for, he tells me in a phone interview.

Born hungry into a large Italian family of enablers, Bruni pokes fun at his gut — and his gastronomical gusto — with flippant prose that puts everything out on the proverbial five-course table. Food is Bruni’s own version of crack, and Born Round shows how his diet stood in the way of promotions, led to body dysmorphia, and found him getting cozy with the fridge on date night. (“It was Haagen-Dazs or love. I couldn’t have both.”)

In working with a genre that’s been tried-and-sometimes-true (think James Frey’s 2003 A Million Little Pieces), these books beg the question: Do we really need another addiction memoir?

“I didn’t think of keeping it fresh or whether or not the world needed another one,” Clegg tells me when I broach the question. “The landscape of other addiction memoirs didn’t occur to me. The writing of [Portrait] preceded any idea of it being published. When I first started, it was just a transcription of memories while I was in rehab.”

Bruni, former food critic for the New York Times and still a writer there, performs a similar rewinding of the memory-tape. He even goes back to a time when, as a toddler, he wept for a third hamburger. “I couldn’t just sit down and … reproduce chapters of my life,” he says during our conversation. “I had to do an in-my-head interview with myself like I would with a profile subject.”

Bruni is among a minority of men in dialogue about eating disorders today. “Almost all the discussion about eating disorders is focused on women,” he says. “Society … tells men to be stoic and that talking about ooey-gooey vulnerabilities is not masculine.”

Both memoirs get at the heart of addiction’s tedium. In each tawdry vignette of Clegg’s cracked-out narrative, he moves like a sleepwalker with no hope of waking, prodding the underbelly of New York in the mean search for a fix. It’s a broken record: cab ride, hotel room, cab ride, hotel room, and the paranoia in-between. These urban encounters are the stuff of Hubert Selby Jr.

Bruni moves at a like rhythm, throwing up meals as if it were breathing or blinking: a habit he just can’t kick. Something, as he writes, “encoded in [his] genes.”

Perhaps the act of buying into a memoir is like paying admission for a nasty, self-indulgent carnival (for example, Eat Pray Love). Or perhaps it’s just fuel for postmodern narcissism. Ex-denizens of addiction’s terrain will marvel at how both Bruni and Clegg balk at blaming others. Though if I were Bruni, I might blame his mom and her bacon-wrapped hot dogs.

There are moments in Portrait where Clegg peers beneath the detritus to blame some bad parenting, but in the end, he really blames no one. “The process of repair will be going on for the rest of my life,” Clegg tells me. “My primary work is with other alcoholics and addicts. It’s through that work I stay sober and rebuild my relationships.”

Bruni says the heavy lifting is in “constantly reminding yourself where you’ve been, where you don’t want to go, and how you got to those places that make you unhappy.” His temptations to binge remain at large. “Just last night after … a really good meal in a restaurant,” he explains, “I came close to buying a pint of ice cream. I took a deep breath and said, okay, are you really hungry? Are you thinking about the potential subtle difference you’ll feel in your pants tomorrow if you eat this?” Bruni’s a funny guy, and I want to laugh, but I don’t. “It’s … an ongoing struggle that I don’t think will ever end.”

Though there’s no end in sight for Clegg and Bruni, at least they’re not tacking on a happy ending and pulling any punches, because, ultimately, that would be relapsing.

FRANK BRUNI: BORN ROUND

Sun/25, 4 p.m. free

Omnivore Books

3885 Cesar Chavez, SF

www.omnivorebooks.com

Mon/26, 7 p.m., free

Books Inc.

1760 Fourth St., Berk.

www.booksinc.net

Snap Sounds: Björk and Dirty Projectors

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: Björk and Dirty Projectors

BJÖRK AND DIRTY PROJECTORS
Mount Wittenberg Orca

Mount Wittenberg Orca is neither the first nor last time Björk sings about oceans, mothers, and plant life (re: “Oceania”). But now, she has the genius of the Dirty Projectors ­– in particular, producer and Dirty frontman David Longstreth – looking at Mother Nature, too.

On Orca – and I don’t mean Bitte Orca, the Dirty Projectors’ 2009 indie instant-classic  – the Icelandic songstress and Longstreth have teamed up to produce an album for charity. This is a 20-minute, seven track release – short, but oh how sweet ­– whose proceeds all go to the National Geographic Society. It’s the first time we’ve been able to hear studio recordings of these tracks since Dirty/Björk played a benefit concert last year at Housing Works in New York.

Perhaps the titular mountain is our very own, in Marin. Either that or, judging by the album art, it’s some Middle Earthian alternate world. The eponymous orca – a killer whale – holds especially pertinent ground for Björk since, back in the Aughts, she developed some kind of maritime obsession on Medulla and the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack. It’s also interesting to note that, back in 2005, Björk’s hubby Matthew Barney gave ambergris, aka whale shit ­– one of his many fetishized materials – a starring role in Drawing Restraint 9. If you want to connect the dots even more, Barney was born in San Francisco.

Reminisicent of Medulla, Orca is like an epic chamber piece: harmony-heavy, flippantly sliding up and down scales, often ending up in a round of disparate melodies. Both Björk and the Dirty Projectors foreground imaginative vocal arrangements, and thus, the vocals here are strong and full of nuance.

The opening track, aptly titled “Ocean,” features some frightening feedback and disquieting vocals that wouldn’t be out of place in Krzysztof Penderecki’s scariest nightmares. Later, the bouncy “Sharing Orb” showcases the Dirty girls’ piquant “eh eh eh”s to match Björk’s Yoko-like, banshee-wailing “waaaaw.” “How do you say ‘love’?” she asks. Well, I know how I say it, Björk, and it’s definitely not the same way you do (“laaaaaave”). But as on the rest of her canon, her Neanderthalic cadence is totally successful in the context of the album’s conceit: A return to nature and the elements, a vision of an a priori universe of sound, to create modern, tightly woven aural textures.

“No Embrace” sounds like typical Dirty Projectors fare: spooky, yet wistful. Longstreth and his leading ladies – Angel Deradoorian, Hayley Dekle, and Amber Coffman – never clash with Björk’s typically dominant voice. The two work well in concert (both in the literal and figurative sense if you’ve seen the performances) yet you can still tell who’s singing and when.

The best song is “All We Are,” the final track and also the Björkiest. It almost sounds like a b-side from Medulla or the separated Siamese twin of “Sonnets/Unrealities XI.” The choir-like incantations, offering plenty in the way of falsetto, wax ethereal beneath Longstreth’s romantic lyricism. But like the best of Bjork’s Icelandic-to-English words, beauty is met by danger, and emotions are met with undermining qualifications (“I looked out for you/But looking never meant less”).

Mount Wittenberg is a pleasant, lovely climb, both brisk and a breath of fresh air. It’s enough to satisfy fans of either Bjork or Dirty Projectors, and you’ll most likely freak out if you’re a follower of both like myself. Yet at 20 minutes, it still leaves you wanting more. You can purchase the mp3s at mountwittenbergorca.com for pretty cheap, or you can stream the album on YouTube.

Snap Sounds: Wavves

John Elberling
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Snap Sounds: Wavves

WAVVES
King of the Beach
(Fat Possum)

With King of the Beach, Nathan Williams, Billy Hayes, and Stephen Pope have finally stopped adding “v”s to their name. After Wavves (2008) and Wavvves (2009) of unpolished lo-fi, these San Diego-based upstarts have elevated to a dreamier, more whimsical sound (re: “When Will You Come”). Yet Wavves also hearkens back to Blink-182, Sum 41, and the bygone days of summer in the ’90s. The new album’s delightful pastiche is thanks, in part, to Dennis Herring, who’s produced the likes of Counting Crows, Elvis Costello, Modest Mouse, and the Hives. Goodbye dissonant noise; hello pop punk!
Williams has been Pitchforked to on- or maybe even above-the-radar status, and the media frenzy brought to cold, hard light his alleged substance abuse issues. Druggy themes are present within the music (or at least the song titles), especially “Post Acid,” whose nasally croon and carbonated licks quite literally scream DeLonge, Hoppus, and Barker. “Green Eyes” displays a similar harum-scarum musical attitude, where Williams doesn’t care how derivative he sounds. The freewheeling “Convertible Balloon,” with its effervescent chorus and prickly percussive textures that just stick to you – as any fizzy-lifting-thing does – is pure PG-rated fun.

A reference to a Nintendo game in “Linus Spacehead” makes the heart grow even fonder for the ’90s. There’s an esoteric boyishness at large that makes King of the Beach, strangely, more precious than the band’s previous releases. The tinges of melancholy and nostalgia in a song like “Mickey Mouse,” along with some chilling vocal reverbs, reflect a band that’s still young, still having fun, and yet starting to grow up. Even if at the end of the beach, Wavves crash on an overproduced note (“Baby Say Goodbye”), Williams is among the least pretentious of a current breed of rockers who can be found on the corner of Indie and Internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjdfEvzBPz0

Gore … and bores: more Another Hole in the Head reviews

Sue Vaughan
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Gore … and bores: more Another Hole in the Head reviews

More bloodthirsty coverage of the San Francisco IndieFest’s horror-fest offshoot, Another Hole in the Head, in this week’s Guardian.

Grotesque (Koji Shiraishi, Japan, 2009) When did gorno stop being sick and start becoming sad? In Koji Shiraishi’s Gurotesuku, or Grotesque – banned in the UK – a chainsaw is brought to chests, arms, legs, and fingers when really it should be brought down on this celluloid garbage. Shiraishi presents a film that is sloppy, badly written, badly acted, and is above all things, deeply unentertaining. The plot is as thin and drawn-out as one of the protagonist’s intestines: While on a date, two dumbfucks get picked up by a craaaaaazy doctor (at least I think he’s a doctor – and I think he’s lost his board certification) who proceeds to do sick but unoriginal things to them (sawing off a girl’s fingers and stringing them on a necklace for her BF? C’MON!). There are some brief moments of respite, albeit painfully acted and ridiculous respite, but the torture tries not to let up its chokehold on the audience. Unfortunately, it just ends up being a chokehold on our time. Fri/16, 5 p.m. and Sun/18, 7 p.m., Roxie.

Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives (Israel Luna, USA, 2010) Trannies should get ticked-off more often. In a mock-exploitation fest like this one – which has the candid crudeness of a John Waters film – the tranny is the ultimate hero because she embodies the street smarts and agility of a woman, and the muscles and thirst for vengeance of a man. After an aggressive brush-up with some nasty bros (and what’s worse than a weapon-wielding homophobe?) the titular trannies in Ticked-Off set out to put the ol’ Hammurabi’s Code to the test – and with results both hilarious and flat-out gross. The cheeseball aesthetics and maudlin acting are surprisingly funny and self-conscious rather than self-effacing – yet in dealing with something like a hate crime, how else can you approach the material? July 22, 5 p.m., Roxie and July 23, 9 p.m., Viz.

Doctor S Battles the Sex Crazed Reefer Zombies (Bryan Ortiz, USA, 2008) Apparently, Reefer Madness (1936) and the public health warnings like it were right: weed does turn you into a monster. But in this underachieving student film, the message arrives a little too late. Doctor S has a promising start: some hilarious faux-film reel ads, and many a nod to cult horror films. In stark black-and-white, it’s as if Candace Hilligoss were running from stoners in Carnival of Souls (1962). But once the PhD of the title teams up with a cheerleader, saved from her post-puff zombified boyfriend at Make Out Hill, the film quickly devolves into amateurism. The thrills are cheap – too cheap – and the laughs are forced. Not to mention the title is way cooler than the movie itself. July 23, 7 p.m and July 26, 9 p.m., Viz.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL
July 8–29, $11
Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF
Viz Cinema, New People, 1746 Post, SF
www.sfindie.com

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