Pixel Vision

New film celebrates Burning Man

2008-07-17T01:02:18Z

Tis the season in San Francisco to get ready for Burning Man...and apparently for the release of films about the beloved and bemoaned event. Unlike another recent film that takes a critical look at the shortcomings of the event and its leadership, "Burning Man: Voyage to Utopia" is a celebratory tribute to the event and its central players, particularly founder Larry Harvey and temple builder David Best.
Filmmaker Laurent Le Gall, whose work premieres Friday at the Castro Theater (followed by afterparty at Cafe Flore), gives viewers an inside look at the 2003 event, starting pre-playa with the Temple crew and other attendees, through the arrival of the first dozen people on the playa, and continuing to the Temple burn that culminates the event and brings emotional closure to some of the film main characters, who came from France to attend the event.
Unlike in Oliver Bonin's "Dust & Illusions," where Harvey's disconcerting intransigence during his interviews reinforced accusations of a leadership vacuum, Le Gall shows Harvey at his creative best: engaged, inspiring, playful, cerebral and capable of dropping thought-provoking rhetorical bombs whose impact lingers long after the conversation ends. And Best comes through as the amazing artist and individual that he is.
This is a sweet film, maybe too sweet for many jaded old burners. But at a time when tens of thousands of Bay Area residents are busily preparing for their annual pilgrimage to the playa next month, it's a film sure to get many people's juices flowing.

Local Artist of the Week: Noah Beil

2008-07-16T23:32:19Z

LOCAL ARTIST Noah Beil
TITLE San Francisco, California, 2008
THE STORY Beil’s series “Berms and Drumlins” explores man’s alteration of the landscape. From Ohlone shell mounds to gold mining sediment changing the bay shoreline, the Bay Area has long been subjected to deliberate and unintentional modifications by its inhabitants. This photograph was taken on Treasure Island, a man-made environment built entirely on landfill.
BIO In his landscape photographs, Beil compares natural and man-made features and searches for subtle embellishments to the earth’s surface that may not be readily apparent. He questions whether the reshaping of the earth should be considered destructive or decorative. He lives in Oakland.
SHOW “Eighteen Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography.” Thurs/17 through September 19; Wed.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlet Place, SF. (415) 554-6080. Opening reception Thursday, July 17, 5:30 - 7:30pm. www.sfacgallery.org.
WEB www.noahbeil.com

The return of The Americans

2008-07-16T18:34:40Z

In the 1950s, while Robert Frank was shooting photos for The Americans (Steidl, 180 pages, $39.95 ), a Southern sheriff told him he had “an hour to leave town.” If Frank took even one photo before splitting, then few people have ever made better use of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The Americans turns 50 this year, and to celebrate its birthday — and perhaps to more perceptively rue the lack of change in this country — it has been republished in a new edition. This version corrects cropped images from past editions and presents deep tri-tone scans of vintage prints. Frank revised the book’s design. He selected its paper and its thread-stitching. He also conceived a new dust jacket that is closest in spirit to the book’s famed 1959 Grove Press and 1969 Aperture manifestations. As ever — maybe more than ever — The Americans is a scary beauty.

A Frank exhibition will be coming to SFMOMA. For now, here are some photos from Steidl's version of The Americans.

L'homme de evasion: Tell No One

2008-07-14T19:59:47Z

By Erik Morse

Winner of four 2007 César Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor, Tell No One -- aka Ne le dis à personne -- stars François Cluzet as Alexandre Beck, a successful Parisian doctor whose wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) is horribly murdered in the disturbing opening scene. Huit ans plus tard and we learn that Beck has been investigated, harrassed and scapegoated by the gendarmerie for the crime until several key pieces of evidence link Margot’s death to the work of a local serial killer. Taken to drink and solitudinous reveries of the past, Alexandre remains consumed by the events of that night. His obsession over Margot’s death is further inflamed when he receives an email containing a surveillance video of his wife still very much alive. Her instructions to him: “Tell no one.” Is it a hoax? His imagination? Or his wife returned from the dead?

Director Guillaume Canet’s sophomore effort resonates beautifully onscreen for its purposed inclusion within a rich lineage of French-on-American policiers. It combines the former’s predilection for hip pastiche with the latter’s laconic and laissez-faire glorification of gangsterism in all of its forms. From American expat Jules Dassin’s 1955 film noir Rififi to Michel Gast’s 1959 American expose I Spit on Your Grave (aka J’irai cracher dur vos tombes) to Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl (Le Cri du hibou) – a 1988 adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith mystery – these instances of Franco/American symbiosis have become central to the development of the arthouse crime picture.

Bracket for a moment the overarching influence of American gangster and noir films on every French director from Melville to Godard to Moullet. Canet’s contribution is fascinating for its attempt to transpose an “American” novel by Harlan Coben – set in American cities with American characters – into some kind of believable French analogue. Like Rififi, I Spit on Your Grave andCry of the Owl, Tell No One is as about translation as much as it is about crime. Can a New York murder yarn relocate to Paris with equal consequences? Do the regal but dour avenues of the Right Bank filmed by Canet equal the frantic pretensions of the Upper West Side as narrated by Coben? Similarly, when the action shifts to the underworld, does the largely gentrified community in Harlem seem at all analogous to the socio-political chaos currently engulfing the Parisian banlieue?

This question of translation is not simply an academic thesis on “cultural” exchange or heritage. It's also an examination of each country's film industry. Many critics were quick to point out, quite accurately, that much of Tell No One’s plot resembled – in its use of the man-on-the-run device and various byzantine conspiracies undergirding the action – the story of The Fugitive. Had Tell No One been produced by an American studio, it would have been stripped of its sentiment, suspense, and silences, becoming yet another television series remake. Imagine, for a moment, Harrison Ford’s Doctor Richard Kimball nursing his drunken ennui to Jeff Buckley’s “Lilac Wine,” or engaging in a naked frolic amid countryside rhododendron, as does Cluzet’s Doctor Beck. These moments of divigation, of excess, are rare in the American version of the crime film. They are stoppages or resistances to narrative momentum – the supposed central attribute of the genre. According to interviews with Tell No One author Coben, that is the reasont he rejected an ongoing American adaptation and, instead, elected to sign on with Canet and French producers.

Alternatively, some might question Canet’s use of "artistic" pretensions throughout Tell No One, finding them merely decorous and without substance. Several flashbacks of Alexandre and Margot as childhood sweathearts and a rather mawkish crosscutting between the couple’s wedding and Margot’s funeral do have an air of dramatic weightedness that rarely creeps into contemporary crime films. But they are hardly anamolous when compared to the brooding character studies of Jean-Pierre Melville, or to Godard’s early '60s images of the criminal-poet.

With all of these concerns at play, Tell No One proceeds to play with our expectations. Like Cluzet’s Doctor Beck, Canet evades a verdict by consistently running ahead of us and leaving false clues. His cinema becomes one of palimpsest, superimposing one language over another until both are indistinguishable. So while Tell No One is a beautiful homage to the French/American policier, it is precisely in the execution of the genre that Canet is able to establish his own translation.

Local Artist of the Week: Jen Merrill

2008-07-11T01:12:12Z

LOCAL ARTIST Jen Merrill
TITLE The Proportion of Perception
THE STORY Inspired by scientific anatomical studies and human interactions, Merrill uses paper, paint, and her scalpel to create a three-dimensional world of eerie, sometimes humorous figures. They are at once clinical and viscerally powerful, betraying a battle between emotional restraint and an unruly body and conscience.
BIO Jen Merrill first took scalpel to paper at San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her MFA in 2006. She continues to hone her paper-cutting skills in Oakland, where she lives and works.
SHOW "Demikhov's Hands of Glory." July 12 through August 10 (reception Sat/12, 7–9 p.m.). Wed., 4–7 p.m.; Sat., 1–4 p.m. Iceberger Gallery, 3150 18th St., # 109 (18th and Treat), SF. (415) 225-8932, www.icebergergallery.com
WEB SITE www.jenmerrill.com

Lit: Commie Girl rips OC, invades SF

2008-07-08T18:36:00Z

By Kat Renz

Commie Girl on the OC: “It took Senor Schwarzenegger’s propositions, overwhelmingly denied through the rest of the state and overwhelmingly approved here, to make me see just how willingly I’d blinded myself. It’s not the conservatism that bothers me: it’s the nastiness. The nattering classes I’d thought were fringey were in fact the decision makers.”

First off, what a great word: nattering. Second, really? I couldn’t believe Commie Girl -- a.k.a. Rebecca Schoenkopf, a.k.a. “the black widow/queen bee of alternative journalism”(Orange Country Register) -- claimed forced ignorance for nine years. “ ‘That’s a bad rap’,”she told me, describing her excuses over the phone from the porch of her new-as-of-eight-days home in LA. “ ‘We have a lot of Republicans, but we’re electing Democrats in central county and blah blah blah.’ But no, I was wrong. I was totally, totally wrong.”

It seems perfect timing: Schoenkopf’s inaugural book -- Commie Girl in the OC (Verso Press, 2008), a compilation of scathing tales of Orange County high and low culture written under her leftie-chick moniker – was published just as she’s moved out of the OC. When I spoke with Commie Girl, she’d just finished whirlwindedly unpacking her boxes among the blue-violet jacaranda trees and 1930’s Spanish bungalows of Los Angeles’s Wilshire ‘hood. Her relocation effectively wrapped up a 12-year tenure at the Orange County Weekly and ushered in a new one as editor of Los Angeles City Beat.

But rewind a decade, when Commie Girl was born after taking over an OC Weekly nightlife column. Schoenkopf insisted her commentary be told through her unique filters: a 25-yr-old socialist, Catholic-Jewish, educated, single mother. About five years later, a little partied-out, her column evolved into pure politics.

Considering I found her book TOTALLY FUCKING FUNNY, did the original readers similarly adore her in all her hammered-and-sickled glory? “Oh my god, I have had at least 20 letters over the years that have said, ‘Stalin killed 20 million people!’”Schoenkopf recalled. “And I’m like, Jesus fuck, I know, okay?”Again channeling the collective rage of OC’s PC police, she mimicked, “‘Why don’t I call myself Fascist Boy?’”

Now at City Beat -- a mere 3-months in, with a painfully scanty staff of three and amidst a successful relaunch -- Schoenkopf’s receiving reams of hate mail. “ ‘Who’s this inane, vulgar, rambling, trite girl who’s a terrible writer and has a potty mouth?’”she laughs. “And I was like, ‘You live in Los Angeles, are you really that sheltered?’”Even Commie Girl, who’s interviewed the record-holder for gang bangs (742, if you must know) and makes new friends at the Rush Limbaugh Fan Club meeting, is surprised.

Between sips of just-off-work wine, Schoenkopf lists three of her favorite columns, starting with “The Church of Phil,”a sweet paean chronicling the rise of Huntington Beach-cum-Vegas cover crooner Phil Shane. She particularly likes “Real Live Boys,”also one of my top picks (along with “Last Call”, a tear-jerking eulogy to an Anaheim punk club). As she writes, “For decades it’s been a truism that those on the right only love you till you’re born and then you’ve got a freaking bull’s eye on your head.”From here, she launches into the Right’s encouragement of the adoption of embryos in order to cash in on the consequent $10,000 federal tax credit originally intended for eager couples adopting post-utero (i.e. real, live, and born) orphans. It continues: “The most cuckoo among them even think the Pill is murder….If that means we have to start burying our Tampax in consecrated ground, so be it.”

Her hands-down favorite, “Capitol Punishment”(subhead, “How I stopped worrying and learned to love Arnold Schwarzenegger”), logs her multi-day, multi-mixed-drink attempt to interview the Governator. Characteristically hilarious, yes, but it’s also chock full of run-downs of political bills and the stats on both loved and hated Sacramento suits. “Everybody thinks I’m this bimbo who doesn’t know stuff,”Schoenkopf said when asked why this is her winning commentary. “Like, oh you’re just a party girl. Well, actually, I do know lots of stuff about things.”

Finally, we talked about men. I gushed over “Smell the Love,”which detailed her love/hate relationship with a teased hair cock-rockers The Moseleys. By the end (which can be revealed without really revealing anything: “You imagine you could be his Yoko. You imagine you could be his Vitamin U.”Ah, Vitamin Me?!), I knew Commie Girl was a genius unafraid to tell the truth, and we’d be forever bonded by our shared ability to become idiotic puddles in the presence of rock ‘n’ roll man-babies. We discussed her former engagement to the political director of the California Republican Party, a man so far Right while she was so far Left they often came full circle, for example in their dual disdain for Bill Clinton. “My only deal-breakers,”she noted of her romantic choices, “are if you think gay people are gross or dirty or going to hell,”she said. “That to me speaks of such a closed-mindedness. If you think other shit, well how ‘bout that? We disagree, are we going to go have some good sex or what?”

And Obama? As she wrote on her own site (www.commiegirlcollective.com) in regards to a photo of the handsome Democratic hopeful together with the handsome progressive she once supported, John Edwards: “I think I just got cured of my Luke & Owen Wilson daydreams.”

Considering she’s flown the OC coop north to la-la land, does the southern California native harbor visions of continuing on to our liberal Shangri-la here in the Bay? Nope. Actually, she hates San Francisco, a sentiment based largely upon some obnoxious radio DJ’s assertion that everyone from Southern California sucks just as she, at the impressionable age of 18, was about to arrive in the city. Not the friendliest welcome.

“I feel like I’d get a lot of the same response there as I’ve gotten being the editor of LA City Beat,”she said. “‘Oh, but you’re being flip about something that’s very important, we don’t laugh about that.’ That self-seriousness…”she trailed off. “I think there’s a lot of that in your city.”

Commie Girl in the OC is a definitive, well-versed argument against across-the-board SoCal suckage. Now it’s our turn, we uber-impenetrable NorCal lefties, to return the myth-busting favor and show the visiting author that we can indeed laugh our asses off.

Rebecca Schoenkopf reads from Commie Girl in the OC
Thu/10, 7 pm
City Lights
261 Columbus Ave.
(415) 362-8193
www.citylights.com

Semiconscious Consumerism: American Spirits light the way to the finish line

2008-07-03T19:30:33Z

Just in time for the Fourth of Independenciality, another installment of our Semiconscious Consumerism blog by confused-with-a-capitalism-C Justin Juul. To read about his previous Nike vs. American Apparel torment, click here.

Sweatpants and Spirits. Fannypackin' across the Bay to Breakers finish line.

I started smoking when I was 14 years old and I’ve never been able to stop. The gum didn’t work. The patch didn’t work. The plastic cigarette holders that show tar buildup didn’t work. Shit, even adopting a rigorous jogging schedule (I’m up to 25 miles a week!) hasn’t done anything to curb my appetite for tobacco. I’m a smoker through and through. But at least I’m a healthy smoker, a highly functional smoker as we’re called. I run, I bike, I don’t eat meat, and I only smoke American Spirits, the healthiest cancer sticks on the market. Just kidding! I do smoke American Spirits, but I’m not dumb enough to buy into all that hippy marketing crap. I was at one time though.

I switched from Parliament Lights (In know, I know) to American Spirits about three years ago because I believed all the hype about American Spirits being, if not healthier, than at least less addictive than regular smokes. I figured if I could switch to a brand with no chemical additives it would make quitting that much easier. Not true. I smoke just as many cigarettes these days as I did when I smoked the evil stuff. But that’s not where the trickery stopped. I also smoke harsher cigarettes now because I mistakenly assumed that, in the American Spirit color-coding system, blue meant “Light.” But it doesn’t! Blue, the color of the sky and the ocean, actually means “Full-Flavor.” Yellow stands for “Light.” The American Spirit Company actually tricked me into ingesting more nicotine. But I’m not mad.

American Spirits may not have helped me quit smoking. But they’ve done a lot for my image. When people see me smoking American Spirits they think Now there’s a bright, socially conscious, young gentleman, a true non-conformist, a rugged individual. I can now look down on regular smokers for not being able to think for themselves, for not understanding that buying tobacco from a hippy commune in New Mexico (which is actually owned by the RJ Reynolds Corp!) is much more noble than buying stuff from a bloodthirsty corporation like Phillip Morris. Also, because American Spirits are endorsed by dipshits like Marc Johnson and Billy Bob Thornton, I can subtly vibe other smokers for being un-hip. Which is all that matters in the long run. Smoking cigarettes is cool, but smoking American Spirits is cooler. Plus, they taste better. End of story.

'Usually I like it when you play with yourself,' or Richard T. Walker at Iceberger

2008-07-03T16:16:06Z

By Ari Messer

Continuing to glide through artistic media, the Mission's new Iceberger gallery opened its fifth show, Richard T. Walker's video installation, "sometimes i like you more than othertimes," with a bang on June 14.

Walker, a British artist currently at the Headlands Center for the Arts and formerly at Berkeley's Kala Art Institute, is drawn to our often self-interested but always interesting interactions with the natural world. In this case, two videos playing simultaneously on color flat screens face each other in the small, pristine gallery space. They showcase Walker traipsing around the golden California hills with a microphone and small amplifier, delivering a speech in different locales while looking away from the viewer. At the same time, he literally plays with himself - on guitar, vocals and drums - also looking away from the viewer, as if talking to himself all the way around the world.

The most impressive thing at Iceberger's fifth opening wasn't the free beer - or free pizza - but the fact that most folks stayed to watch the entire video, often following along with the conversational, poetic text, which was available as program notes. Though spoken in address alternately to "all of the grass I have ever encountered" and to "a medium-sized mountain that will stay in my thoughts forever," the words sound like a Tarot reading from a good, if ruthlessly honest, friend, speaking directly to the viewer, such as this:

"On occasion you do fail to really engage in conversation, settling a little too well into the role of a listener."

Which gives rise to this:

"The singing that is accompanying the guitar chords and the drums is sung with you as inspiration. Please listen, but don't just listen, try to think of some questions to ask me about them when I see you next."

Richard T. Walker, from left; deputy director Ginelle Hustrulid; Erica Freyberger; and special operations/Web site guy Neil Alger (who also works at Small Press Distribution) outside the gallery.

Aside from openings, Iceberger is open by appointment only, but they tend to be around on the weekends, said owner-director Erica Freyberger. If things keep heating up around here, there might be real polar bears straying into the Mish for another monthly opening, looking for free beer or tasty art.

RICHARD T. WALKER: SOMETIMES I LIKE YOU MORE THAN OTHERTIMES
Through July 8
Open by appointment
Iceberger Gallery
3150 18th St., SF
(415) 225-8392

Local Artist of the Week: Praba Pilar

2008-07-02T19:51:14Z

LOCAL ARTIST Praba Pilar
TITLE Performance still from The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno
THE STORY Reverend Praba Pilar of the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno travels the world offering fantastical prophesies, outrageous sermons, incantations, neorituals, and a freshly minted techno-communion with emerging technology. Inverting phobic cries for a precautionary principle, the church proclaims a liturgy that drives these technologies: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience — forward into the neoteric millennium.
BIO A Bay Area/Colombian multidisciplinary artist, Praba Pilar explores the intersections of art, science, technology, and community through site installations, performances, street theater, and Web sites. Her wildly diverse work has been presented at museums, galleries, universities, and on streets around the world while winning multiple honors, including the Creative Capital award and the Creative Work Fund award.
SHOW “Bay Area Now 5,” opening July 19 (performance: Aug. 10, 2 p.m.). Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $3–$6, (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. “We Remember the Sun,” through Sept. 13 (performance Sept. 11, 7 p.m.). Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. Free, (415) 749-4563, www.sfai.edu
WEB SITE www.prabapilar.com

More Montreal Fringe Fest: Peg-Ass-Us, Zombie parties, faux kraut rock ...

2008-06-30T21:59:20Z

Nicole Gluckstern reports from the Montreal Fringe Festival. You can read part one here.

It's Monday morning, three am. In the last week I've eaten my way through a pound of chocolate-covered espresso beans, a bottle of Excedrin, and countless bowls of $2 chow mein, and now find myself uttering the unlikeliest phrase of all: "I'll almost be glad when the party is over."

The plays, the pleasure, the poster. Photo by Barry Smith

Not that the party is ever truly over in Montreal in June. Montreal in June, like Madrid eleven months a year, is like an endurance marathon of frenetic activity. Sure -- the Fringe Festival has come to an end, but tomorrow is Saint-Jean Baptiste -- Quebec's largest and proudest festival day of all, the one day a year that even the dépanneurs (beer stores) don't stay open. Also happening as I type: the Suoni per il Popolo Music Festival, the First Peoples' Festival, the Free Jazz Festival, a Baroque Music fest, and the Infringement. And it ain't free--but I've still somehow managed to score myself a ticket to Leonard Cohen's sold out concert on Wednesday. No, there's no end to the party around here, but the Fringe, at least, c'est fini. Since last night was the official awards ceremony, I feel obliged to offer my own shortlist of totally subjective, unofficial awards, in no particular order, to celebrate my personal top ten favourite moments of the Montreal Fringe, 2008.

1) Best passionate dissertation in musicology: Led Zeppelin was a Cover Band, by Stéfan Cédilot. Not a play so much as an exploration of the musical path leading from old beloved blues tunes to 70's rock-and-roll, Cédilot's love for his subject is evident in every anecdote and every rarity spun. His air guitar skills could use some polishing, but his enthusiasm couldn't be better.

2) Best off-venue set design and use of space: The Beekeepers. Built into a tiny corner of a tiny cafe, The Beekeepers set is claustrophobic, spare, and entirely apt. Boarded up doors, a solitary bee box, wood floors, and a single suspended picture frame to serve as a window somehow conjure up the vision of an old wreckage of a farmhouse, barricaded against the rioting starving on the outside. We, the captive audience, are not even granted the cover of darkness, and the effect is as if we are watching an uncomfortable fight between a couple struck with cabin fever while sitting in their living room.

Fucking Zombie Party! Photo by Barry Smith

3) Best reason to stay up until 4 a.m. on a Monday (and a Tuesday, and a Wednesday....): The 13'th Hour. This Montreal Fringe variety show, which starts at one am.m every night of the Fringe, is a cornucopia of spontaneous hilarity and a showcase of the best (and worst) performers on the circuit. Suavely hosted by members of local improv troupe, Uncalled For, the hour often lasts two, punctuated by spins of the "money wheel" which leads to prizes the whole room can enjoy. Plus they threw a Zombie-themed party this year which somehow managed to surpass even last year's Mass Wedding party in terms of sheers debaucherous entertainment.

4) Best compressed, booty-shaking, body-slamming, adrenaline-fueled dance party ever: Eleven Second Dance Party. This signature prize on the money wheel cues the opening eleven seconds of Le Tigre's "Decepticon" which brings the entire room to its feet to dance with the sort of wild abandon normally reserved for coked-up club kids at some warehouse party in the boonies. Every eleven second dance party ever is worth every penny of airfare I spent to get here, and in the course of ten days, there've been an awful lot of eleven second dance parties to be had.

5) Best reason to not go see a Fringe show in a Theatre: Fringe Pop in the Parc. This outdoor showcase of homegrown Montreal bands ranges from overly earnest college kid "projects" to seasoned favourite sons. Though there are a few misses and a last minute cancellation of the Handsome Furs (a Wolf Parade side project), Fringe Pop redeems itself on Saturday with a slamming double bill of the Zeroes and Wintersleep, plus a great early evening set on Sunday from Francophone psychedelic pop rockers, Delaplage.

Les Néos's Spectacle pour Emporter. Photo by Cindy Lopez

6) Best local Neo-surrealistic theatre troupe: Les Néos. Oh yes, I know what you're thinking, you mean ther're more than ONE neo-surrealistic theatre company in Montreal, how cool! Well, Les Néos might be the only ones, but lack of competition doesn't make them lazy. Their high-energy show Spectacle pour Emporter, set (conveniently) in a cafe, offered menus of a repertoire of 33 two-minute plays, performed to order. As I suspected, a deep knowledge of French was not required to enjoy this madcap production which shifted in tone from serious to silly to surreal second by timed second.

7) Most useful show flyer: Peg-Ass-Us, by Pack of Others. The first rule of Fringing might well be, "don't refuse anyone's flyer." But still, emptying one's pockets of the detritus day after day can get wearying. All that useless beauty! But Pack of Others have very kindly provided their show info on pocket-sized packets of personal lubricant, which seems eminently appropriate for a heart-warming, coming-of-age story on the joys of pegging. They'll be performing off-venue in the SF Fringe this fall, so get ready to get lubed.

Barry Smith plays the blues. Photo by Cindy Lopez.

8) Best alternative to psychedelic drugs that is not Will Franken: The Cody Rivers Show. If you took Will Franken, and split him into two people, and taught him how to dance, he might well resemble the Cody Rivers Show, and they him. What they all share a highly attuned sense of the absurd and a sense of story that transcends mere linear constructs yet never falls apart. The symbiotic energy that crackles between performers Mike Mathieu and Andrew Connor and their total commitment to their hilarious craft elevates them way above the sketch comedy pack in ways I can't even begin to describe. But hey, here's their website to do it for me: http://www.codyrivers.com.

9) Best use of the word "chartreuse": Barry Smith's parody rhyming dictionary blues. "A whole lot of words rhyme with blues," he sings from the 13'th Hour stage, as he strums his steel-string guitar, "so you might want to sit back and get comfortable."

Die Roten Punkte rocking out. Photo by Cindy Lopez

10) Best totally rocking refrain of the Fringe: this bound-to-be-a-classic tune from faux-kraut rock stars Die Roten Punkte: "Drink, drink, drink while you can, leave all your troubles behind. Don't be pains in the asses, just fill up your glasses, you'll be dead for a very long time." A close runner up, is a totally shameless, yet utterly infectious fringe anthem penned by improv troupe Without Annette: "Oh the Fringe in Montreal, is the best Fringe of them all, and the best Fringe of them all, is the Fringe in Montreal." The best? That's a pretty subjective category of course--but at moments like these, it can be hard not to agree. Vive la Fringe! Let's do this again sometime....

Burning Man film revives key conflict

2008-06-27T20:55:31Z

A new film about Burning Man – Dust & Illusions, which has its first public screening tomorrow night at CELLspace in a benefit for the fire arts collective Flaming Lotus Girls – revives questions about whether the rapidly growing event has missed an opportunity to transform itself from the best party on the planet into an important and enduring sociopolitical movement.

San Francisco filmmaker Olivier Bonin has been shooting footage for the film (which is still in rough form and awaiting final editing and a soundtrack) for more than four years. Much of his time has been spent with the Flaming Lotus Girls, who we were each embedded with when I did a nine-month immersion journalism project with the group in 2005.

Bonin has collected some amazing archival footage from the event’s early years and he scored insightful interviews with significant originators such as John Law and Jerry James, offering viewers a sense of what a collaborative effort the creation of the modern event was. Founder Larry Harvey comes off as sort of the last man standing and the often uncomfortable interview footage with Harvey certainly doesn’t help dispel the accusations that there’s a leadership vacuum at the heart of an event that has come to consume so much financial, emotional, and creative capital in San Francisco.

I saw Dust & Illusions two weeks ago during a screening at the Mission-based film project Rough Cuts, in which an invited panel of guests gave Bonin feedback in a structured forum. The group included some of the film’s stars, including Chicken John and Jim Mason, who led the Borg2 revolt that serves as the main conflict in the film.

Everybody liked the film, and everyone agreed that Harvey didn’t do himself or the organization any favors, chain-smoking through his interviews and sometimes coming off as petulant, obtuse, or impervious. But the film is far from a hit piece, celebrating the beloved and bemoaned event while musing about its potential for more.

“To me, Burning Man is still a unique and important thing, but isn’t it going to dry out if they don’t keep reinventing themselves from a leadership standpoint?” Bonin told me this week.

As the guy who wrote the series of articles that first exposed Bonin to the central conflict in his film, I have some insights into the subject matter. And I know that Harvey has been slowly nudging the event toward great sociopolitical relevance, mindful that any overt declarations of its meaning and direction could cause many of its participants to flee.

Ultimately, I think this is best film about Burning Man that’s ever been made, and the questions it raises are even more relevant today than they were when I and others first started raising them almost four years ago. Check it out.

Dust and Illusions, 8 p.m. at CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, $10-$20 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit the Flaming Lotus Girls.

LIT: Beautiful photography exposes crude reality

2008-06-27T00:08:15Z

photo by Lou Dematteis

Crude Reflections opens with pastoral scenes of a rainforest lagoon and the looming roots of a giant ceiba tree. Indigenous Ecuadorians are dancing in an open-air hall and traveling by canoe down tributaries of the Amazon River. A placid stretch of water seems threatened by nothing more than a puffy white thunderhead.

Turn the page. The viewer is blasted by roiling flames: the liquid surface of a waste oil pit on fire, the foreground charred to coal, the forest horizon blurred by a shaky haze of heat.

Turn another page and the river has given way to a viscous stream of oil seeping out of a “remediated” pit. A family is walking down a road, sprayed with waste oil to keep down the dust. They are barefoot. They are the Aguindas from Rumipamba, lead plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against Chevron,

Photographers Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak have put together an unparalleled pictorial account of life in the northern Amazon region of Ecuador, where certain elements of life are cruel and crude. For over 30 years, the land, water, and people have been tossed asunder in favor of a more marketable natural resource: oil.

From 1964 to 1992, Texaco drilled for oil in the Oriente region, but chose not to employ best practices for the industry, instead dumping the waste and byproducts into 627 open, unlined pits, polluting a region three times the size of Manhattan.

Color shots by Dematteis and black and white images from Szymczak are interspersed with profiles, written in English and Spanish, of families and children who have fallen ill from decades of drilling.

“After bathing, our skin was covered with crude,” says Maria Garofalo, whose husband and daughter both suffer from different forms of cancer. “I went to the oil companies, and they said this wouldn’t affect me; that the reason I had cancer was because I didn’t have good personal hygiene.”

photo by Lou Dematteis

More than 30,000 people have been affected, some tribes decimated to the point of extinction. Chevron purchased Texaco in 2000, and three years later a group of citizens from Lago Agrio filed suit against the company. Pablo Fajardo, a native Lago Agrian, put himself through law school to take the lead on the case – his first ever litigated. In April, an Ecuadorian judge ruled damages could go as high as $16 billion should Chevron ultimately be found at fault.

Setting aside, for a mere moment, who exactly is to blame, the 128-page book strikes a successful balance of art, documentary, and activism – and shows, indisputably, that far too much harm has been done. Without focusing too overtly on one aspect, the book is a full portrait of the situation – from the protesting indigenous tribes to the courtroom lawyers, the affected landscape and injured, dying, and disappearing people.

Dematteis, a former Reuters staff photographer, first traveled to Ecuador in 1992. “During my trip, I spoke with a doctor at Ecuador’s Ministry of Health,” Dematteis writes in the introduction. “He said it would take 10 years or so for the cancers and other health problems to fully manifest themselves, but when they did, the result would be an epidemic of serious and fatal health conditions. When I returned to the northern Amazon again in 2003 to cover the opening of the trail against Chevron (formerly Texaco), I found that the time bomb had exploded. Everywhere I turned, I encountered people with cancer, birth defects, respiratory ailments, and other severe health problems.”

Though Chevron’s drilling occurred in the Northern Amazon region, the largest stretch of primary tropical rainforest still sits, untouched, atop the country’s greatest oil reserves. Photographs from the Yasuni National Forest are accompanied with testaments from tribes urging continued protection of that land, and an explanation of President Rafael Correa’s proposal to the international community to pay Ecuador to preserve the land, rather than drill it.

The book opens with a prologue by Rainforest Foundation founders Trudie Styler and Sting, and closes with an eloquent reminder, written by Amazon Watch’s Atossa Soltani, of the greatest virtues of the rainforest, the medicinally rich flora, the inimitable fauna, natural air filter of the forest. “Simply put, the Amazon rainforest is a vital part of the life-support system of our planet,” Soltani writes. “Unfortunately, the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed at the alarming rate of seven football fields per minute.”

Every Chevron shareholder deserves a copy of this book, to be shown exactly what their $18.7 billion company is responsible for.

photo by Lou Dematteis

Dematteis and Szymczak will be talking and signing books at the El Tecolote Literary Series on Sunday, June 29. 2-5 p.m., 2958 24th Street, San Francisco.

And they’ll be in the East Bay on July 1, hosted by the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center. The event, “Amazon Oil: Crude Stories and Crude Images: The Biggest Oil Spill on Earth,” starts at 7 p.m., at the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church, 55 Eckley Lane, Walnut Creek.

Crude Reflections: Oil, ruin and resistance in the Amazon Rainforest
Cruda Realidad: Petroleo, devastacion y resistencia en la Amazonia
By Lou Dematteis and Kayaana Szymczak
Foreward by Trudie Styler and Sting
City Lights Books, San Francisco
128 pages
$24.95 paper, $40 cloth

Frameline: Project Runway's Jay and the perils of PR

2008-06-25T23:53:22Z

By Jason Shamai

Part of what makes Project Runway so good is that it loves its clever queers. By no means is the show light on standard-issue drama, but one thing its producers and editors don't abide is bullshit fabulousness comedy routines. They love their bitchy overcompensators (Christian) and their angelic peacekeepers (Danny V.) and their hyperbaric chambermaids (Austin Scarlett, and Malan Breton from Taiwan) and their everything-but-the-sodomy queens (Vincent Libretti), but they would not put up with a Carson Kressley. Or at least they wouldn't give him much face time.

The producers and editors, of course, are the master tailors behind all the sartorial pageantry. Their jobs seem pretty similar to the trials imposed upon the designers:

Production team, your challenge was to take the painfully young, dumb, and talented Christian Siriano and craft his insecurities into a compelling dramatic arc. You perhaps overplayed your hand in the beginning by setting him up as Machiavelli's pet rat, but the disarming late-arrival accents of warmth and anxiety brought the whole together boldly if not seamlessly.

And so on.

You sense they are really sweating the final product, resenting the challenges that are comparable to designing ice-skating outfits or fitting teenagers for prom dresses and reveling in the opportunity to make top-notch originals with quality materials.

If the judges aren't voting solely on craft (and if you think they are, I have a Saturn Astra to sell you at bluefly.com), they don't just handicap for drama queens—the dry editorialists are always given high consideration. When Chris March and Steven Rosengard were on the chopping block last season, my loins voted for Steven to stay but the rest of me knew Chris was the wiser choice. The show needed his class more than it needed Steven's lips. It knew he was that season's color bearer of wry, thoughtful faggotry. And in Season Two, Santino's Tim Gunn impersonations were an inspired collaboration with the editors. His Red Lobster bit, generously featured as it was, instantly made the world a better place.

Jay McCarroll and hot air balloons in Eleven Minutes

Jay McCarroll was just such an object of appreciation on Season One, and possibly the most worthy of the series. More power to him, then, that he's got himself a proper documentary, which is showing this Wednesday as part of Frameline. Eleven Minutes, directed by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, follows McCarroll as he prepares to show at New York's Fashion Week—his first not under the auspices of Project Runway. In the film, McCarroll worries that any success he might have as a designer will always be thanks to an alloy of aptitude and personality. He's well aware that the cameras continue to roll because he entertained us way back when on Bravo and he's ambivalent about it at best.

I am similarly ambivalent about the stuff Project Runway flings from its orbit into the greater entertainment universe, though I'm sure my reasons have more to do with concern about the integrity of the show than McCarroll's do. As much as I love Tim Gunn, the key to his appeal is very narrowly that he's a good educator, so to watch him try to lather up generic star quality in his side projects gives off that weird disconnected feeling of spotting your elementary school teacher at the grocery store.

But whenever Jay McCarroll hitches more freight to the "PR" engine—no matter how ambivalently, that's what he's doing—the threat of devaluation doesn't loom so large. Whatever it might be this time, I have more faith in its prospective quality and the justifiability of its existence than he himself seems to.

Eleven Minutes vindicates that faith. The documentary—which should be seen as an unofficial sequel to Bravo's follow-up report, Project Jay, where we left McCarroll with neither a new collection nor a congealed next step in his career—finds him somewhat farther along but still scrambling. Selditch and Tate have constructed a brisk and coherent fashion-industry procedural that expertly switches out the cultivated tension of Project Runway for its real-world counterpart. The film is an equally adept portrait of a designer who gracefully channels his fear of squandered momentum into the dry charm the filmmakers were probably banking on.

Jay McCarroll and a model in Eleven Minutes

It's valid for McCarroll to worry about the composition of his budding success, but he shouldn't overdo it. If he were a shitty designer, that would be a different story. If he were a shitty entertainer—a panderer—that would also be a different story. But he's neither. In any case, the outcome of the film—which was either a qualified victory or a qualified defeat, I couldn't tell—should certainly reassure him that his persona will only take him so far. There are lots of us out there who would like McCarroll to do well for the right reasons, but that shouldn't stop us from wanting to watch while it happens.

ELEVEN MINUTES
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
Wed/25, 10 p.m.
www.frameline.org

Local Artists of the Week: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and James Luna

2008-06-25T21:49:58Z

LOCAL ARTISTS Guillermo Gómez-Peña and James Luna
TITLE Photos of El Mexican’t and The Shame-man
THE STORY Chicano performance artist Gómez-Peña’s and Native American conceptual artist Luna’s ongoing project The Shame-man meets El Mexican’t challenges stereotypes, assumptions, and lazy thinking about race and culture. Their latest collaboration within the series, La Nostalgia, reveals how that term can be used as a mechanism of cultural defense, as a stylistic device, and as a way of revising the artist’s careers. In a pair of performances last year, the artists staged their ritual deaths inside coffins and then engaged in a poetic dialogue while Luna cooked Indian stew and Gómez-Peña played roulette.
SHOWS: La Nostalgia Re-mix (Best hits and outtakes for an imaginary bar). Thurs/26, 8 p.m.; $10–$20. The LAB, 2948 16th St., SF. (415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org. (Also, on July 11, Gómez-Peña’s group La Pocha Nostra will present four performance/installation pieces at the de Young Museum.)
WEB SITES www.pochanostra.com, www.jameslunaprojects.com

George Carlin: Gee, he was here a minute ago

2008-06-23T21:46:18Z

L.A. writer (and my former instructor) David Hochman reflects on an interview with George Carlin about death, dying, and CNN.