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Issue 299 |
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Your cultural event guide
Here's a snapshot of our favorite things to do in San Francisco this week. |
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San Francisco
Jan 22-28, 2008
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The conservative panic attack over last week's announcements that a virulent strain of Staph infection is now appearing in the Castro was eerily synchronous with director Gus Van Sant's makeover of the neighborhood for Milk, an in-production film about slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk. It seems if there's a lesson in film noir — which appears in festival form at the freshly painted Castro Theatre this week — it's that while you can't go back in time, history often repeats itself.
- Matt Sussman, Managing Editor
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SPECIAL FEATURE
Office dA
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Multidisciplinary firm Office dA synthesizes green consciousness, respect for craft, and a love of iterating forms. The Boston firm's most outlandish combination of eco-friendly and algorithmic methods is Helios House, a LEED-certified BP gas station in LA. The silvery form is a notable departure from the firm's characteristic, understated elegance.
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Musicophilia
Neurologist Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia entertainingly illustrates the power music has over the human body.
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The Flavorpill Blog
The Flavorpill Blog highlights our hard-working crew and the company we keep.
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READING: Poetry
Robert Hass: Time and Materials
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Tuesday Jan 22 (7pm)
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Booksmith (1644 Haight St, 415.863.8688)
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FREE
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Fresh off his victory at the National Book Awards, San Francisco-born poet Robert Hass reads from his latest collection, Time and Materials. Ever since his first collection, Field Guide (1973), Hass has been a sterling rebuke to those who claim California poetry ended with the passing of the Beat Generation. A tireless advocate for the value of poetry during his 1995-1997 tenure as Poet Laureate, and an accomplished translator of the Polish poet (and former UC Berkeley professor) Czeslaw Milosz, Hass writes pieces that are deeply in tune with both nature and lived experience.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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FILM: Documentary
Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink
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Tuesday Jan 22 (7:30pm)
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Pacific Film Archive Theater (2575 Bancroft Way, 510.642.0808)
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$9.50
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The Pacific Film Archive's intriguing Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries series gets a bovine boost from Milk in the Land, an investigation that leaves no cow unturned. The inventively historicized documentary unearths the sundry political, moral, and scientific platforms that got milk to its current post as beleaguered alpha beverage. Directors Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum also present several opposing views as to whether it "does a body good," cleverly exploiting the symbolic value of a fluid that's as essentially American as the oil flowing through There Will Be Blood's veins.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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ART
Jens Haaning
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Wednesday Jan 23 (11am–6pm)
More times»
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San Francisco Art Institute - Walter and McBean Galleries (800 Chestnut St, 415.749.4563)
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FREE
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Jens Haaning's new exhibit at SFAI is a reminder as to why the Copenhagen native's work has earned critical paeans. His daring conceptual works toy with capitalism's rules of commodification, grapple with xenophobia, and cunningly send the stolid institution of the art gallery into paroxysms. Haaning's previous projects have seen him broadcast jokes in Turkish through loudspeakers blaring on the streets of Oslo and turning a gallery into a workshop for the production of weapons, a discount travel agency, and a shop for reduced-tariff imported foods (respectively). His clever conceptualism continues to push against the status quo with this new show.
- Isaac Amala
Note:
There is an opening reception Wed Jan 23 (5:30-7:30pm).
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Rock/Pop
KIT w/ High Places, Breezy Days Band, and Bay/Oslo Double Trio
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Wednesday Jan 23 (8pm)
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Artists' Television Access (992 Valencia St, 415.824.3890)
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$6
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It's hard to be hardcore with a straight face these days, so KIT opt for cheeky smiles. Singer Kristy might start off a song with a playful recorder line, which in turn signals an abrupt plow-through of eight bars of distorted guitar and no-frills drumming worthy of Youth Brigade, only to wind up back at the original whistling filigree. Their most recent album, Broken Voyage, invites easy Deerhoof comparisons for its skittish flirtations with pop, but this Oakland foursome clearly prefers the slash-and-burn tempo of punk (minus the war paint and spikes).
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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PERFORMING ARTS: Dance
Harvesting Beauty in the Dark: Butoh Dance Performance
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Thursday Jan 24 (7pm)
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Asian Art Museum (200 Larkin St, 415.581.3500)
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$5
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Butoh emerged in '60s Japan as a new mode of physical expression, twisting traditional and Western dance techniques into a choreographed response to post-A-bomb existence. With exaggerated yet incredibly precise movements and often daubed with ghostly white paint, butoh dancers invoke narratives and pinpoint emotions with visually arresting physicality. For this performance, renowned dancer and instructor Katsura Kan collaborates with dancers from several companies to perform a series of dance vignettes in a style they're calling "post-butoh," adding to and revising the art form's language.
- Tanya Feldman
[Info Source]
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FILM
State of the World
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Thursday Jan 24
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Novellus Theater (701 Mission St, 415.978.2787)
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$8
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Portuguese director Pedro Costa once said, "The primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn't right," and in fact, many of Costa's films — like 2007's Colossal Youth, a bare-bones portrait of a Lisbon slum on the edge of erasure — certainly succeed by that account. In State of the World, this same drive innervates a series of shorts by Costa, as well as those by newer talents (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and older firebrands (Chantal Akerman). It's a cinematic Model UN of sorts, compiling snapshots of those most affected by the world's ills.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Electronic
Gui Boratto
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Friday Jan 25 (10pm)
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Fat City (314 11th St, 415.861.2890)
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$15 / $12 advance
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Frequent flirtations with pop, glam, ambient, and trance have always made Kompakt hard to pigeonhole. But recently, the techno super-label's arsenal of producers has swelled even faster than its ever-expanding aesthetic. Last year, the boys from Cologne once again reached beyond the Reine, signing São Paulo-based beatsmith Gui Boratto. This newbie didn't disappoint, releasing "Arquipélago", a minimal mind-blower that spun in clubs worldwide and that laid the groundwork for Supermayer's reworking of "Like You." But these singles only proved an appetizer to his debut full-length, Chromophobia — a record chock-full of brawny dance-floor workouts, shimmering comedowns, and last year's first essential techno anthem, "Beautiful Life."
- James Jung
[Info Source]
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FILM
Noir City Film Festival
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Friday Jan 25
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The Castro Theatre (429 Castro St, 415.621.6120)
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Various prices
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Eddie Muller and the rest of the Film Noir Foundation keep the night alive with another Noir City Film Festival. As with earlier incarnations, ten double features rally special guests (actress Joan Leslie), honorees (blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, forgotten man Richard Widmark), enduring exemplars (Gun Crazy, Border Incident, Moonrise, Night and the City), and risky rarities (about half of the fest's titles aren't on DVD). If all that doesn't have you crying Christmas in January, then a final word to the wise: never underestimate the power of a packed house at the Castro.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Electronic
Lady Miss Kier w/ Melissa Logan and Safety Scissors
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Saturday Jan 26 (9pm)
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Mezzanine (444 Jessie St, 415.625.8880)
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$15 advance
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While the retro-fabulous trio Deee-Lite disbanded more than a decade ago, its distinctively flamboyant frontwoman, Lady Miss Kier, has gone on to establish a solo career of her own as a DJ, musician, and even as an art and design scholar. She's never strayed far from her club roots, however, dishing out a tantalizingly erratic repertoire of original tracks that reference the band's funky house beats, throaty soul, and late '90s drum 'n bass. Tonight, she spins tracks alongside solo electro art rock from Chicks on Speed's Melissa Logan and local laptop troubadour Safety Scissors.
- Connie Hwong
[Info Source]
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ART
An-My Lê: Small Wars
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Saturday Jan 26 (11am–5:45pm)
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SFMOMA (151 3rd St, 415.357.4000)
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$12.50
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An-My Lê's stunning Small Wars and 29 Palms series find the photographer capturing Vietnam War enthusiasts who recreate scenes of battle and treading through the dry brush of the Mojave Desert on the heels of training soldiers. As Lê follows the actors and soldiers through their respective stagings, tracking their advances and retreats, her images become both aesthetic compositions and a chilling documentation of our culture's fascination with playing war. Without taking any didactic potshots at her subjects, Lê boldly wades into the vast gray expanse that confounds photojournalistic objectivity and our faith in the camera's ability to tell the truth.
- Isaac Amala
[Info Source]
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READING
Writers Remembered: A Bay Area Literary Tribute
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Sunday Jan 27 (1pm)
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Koret Auditorium (100 Larkin St, 415.557.4590)
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FREE
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Norman Mailer, Grace Paley, David Halberstam, Tillie Olsen, Kurt Vonnegut: these are just a few of the authors and cultural icons who will be commemorated at the San Francisco Library's annual Writers Remembered event. Each author received a lengthy obituary at the time of their death (especially Papa Mailer), but this ceremony promises a broader context of appreciation, with contributions and readings from several local authors and critics. Historian and Kerouac biographer Gerry Nicosia hosts the tribute, a last call for the literary lions who left us in 2007.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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FILM: Documentary
Que Viva La Lucha and DNN: Dead News Network
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Sunday Jan 27 (2pm)
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Brava Theater Center (2781 24th St, 415.641.7657)
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$10 - 15 sliding scale
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Que Viva La Lucha, the most recent documentary by San Francisco video artist and director Gustavo Vazquez, is screened tonight to benefit Galería de la Raza, an interdisciplinary art space for exploration of Latino culture. The film explores the tradition of lucha libre, a dramatic form of masked wrestling, and its particular draw both for athletes and spectators in Tijuana. DNN: Dead News Network, an animated capsule parodying epic news reporting, is also screened. Both films are preceded by a live performance by Carne Cruda, a five-piece Latin surf-cumbia-rock band who describe themselves as the "plastic flamingo on the neatly kempt lawn of Salsa music."
- Tanya Feldman
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FILM
Blonde Venus (1932)
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Monday Jan 28 (7:30pm)
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Artists' Television Access (992 Valencia St, 415.824.3890)
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| price: |
$5 - 20 sliding scale
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There are many reasons why Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus is well worth checking out. Beyond the compelling performance by a young Cary Grant, however the baldly racist and patently ridiculous sight of Marlene Deitrich emerging from a gorilla suit in front of a chorus line of scantily-clad "noble savages" to sing-talk her way through "Hot Voodoo" is perhaps the most memorable. Deitrich plays the titular blonde Venus, a cabaret-singer-turned-housewife who must retake the stage — in turn, becoming the mistress of a suave millionaire (Grant) — to save her poisoned husband. The plot's as WTF as Deitrich's bleached afro — but oh, those cheekbones.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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ART
An Equal Playing Field: New Work by Peter Stegall
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Thursday Jan 24 (noon–5pm)
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Triple Base (3041 24th St, 415.643.3943)
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FREE
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Of his recent paintings, Peter Stegall has exclaimed, "Color has me on the end of a string!" It's a strange statement to reconcile with his broad, linear segments of gloss enamel in muted shades, which recall both Sol LeWitt and Peter Saville's geometric cover designs for Factory Records. Whatever tizzy Stegall's palette has him in, the end results are coolly meditative. Sure, the bright-yellow and blue segments of Chroma Charged suggest a cropped lightning bolt, but it's the barely-there spectrum in Grays that's really exciting, morphing from a Malevich-like monochrome to a cascade of stone and moss-colored arcs right before your eyes.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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ART
Small Things End, Great Things Endure
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Tuesday Jan 22 (noon–6pm)
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New Langton Arts (1246 Folsom St, 415.626.5416)
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FREE
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Following the Brooklyn Art Museum's retrospective Global Feminisms show and the Geffen Contemporary's historically focused Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, this show demonstrates that feminism isn't just a museum piece. Small Things End, Great Things Endure sees contemporary artists seeking new ways to respond to our culture's limited view of gender and sexuality. Artists like Emily Roysdon, who revisits pieces by gay artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, map feminism's many splits and alliances while forging new routes of their own.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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About Us |
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Cultural Partner
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Editors
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Flavorpill San Francisco
All events featured on Flavorpill SF are pure editorial — we never accept paid promotions or advertisements. If you know about an upcoming event that you think should be covered in Flavorpill SF, email us a press release at sf_events at least two weeks prior to the event and we'll consider it.
To learn more about our staff and policies, see the credits and about us pages. If you'd like to respond to our editors about a listing published here, or have a general inquiry, please email sf_feedback.
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