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Issue 304 |
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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
Feb 26-Mar 3, 2008
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Noise Pop is cranking the volume in San Francisco, whipped up by Marshall stacks and lots and lots of feedback. But if you listen closely, other sounds can be made out: Lost City Radio's talk-show dispatches, Sonic Boom's analog drones, and Slavic Soul Party's Balkan blue notes. The audio spectrum is wide this week, so keep your ear to the ground.
- Matt Sussman, Managing Editor
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SPECIAL FEATURE
Charity: Water
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Charity: Water is a nonprofit initiative that brings clean water and basic sanitation to impoverished communities around the world. Since its start in 2006, it has funded the construction of more than 268 wells to support 150,000 people. Last year, Flavorpill teamed up with Charity: Water and has already raised $17,000 — enough to build several wells in Ethiopia.
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Flavorpill Cover Gallery
All the designs, illustrations, and photography featured atop our online magazines.
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Flavorpill Mobile
Access Flavorpill listings, rate events, and find friends on the go, all via your handheld device.
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READING
Samantha Power: Chasing the Flame
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Tuesday Feb 26 (7:30pm)
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First Congregational Church of Berkeley (2345 Channing Way, 510.848.3696)
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| price: |
$10 suggested donation
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Samantha Power takes some time off from advising Obama to discuss her upcoming book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. Vieira de Mello was killed in a hotel bombing while serving as a United Nations special representative in Iraq. Before this untimely end, however, he had a long history of human-rights advocacy — an issue that is also at the heart of Power's own work. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and an esteemed professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Power is best known for her critical history A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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FILM: Documentary
Casting a Glance (2007)
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Tuesday Feb 26 (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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Minimalist filmmaker James Benning finds an ideal (and inanimate) muse in Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970). Built on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake during a drought, Smithson's sculpture re-emerged in 1999 after three decades underwater. Cue Benning, who made 16 pilgrimages to document the site for this slow, meditative film. Made up entirely of stationary short takes, Benning's work bears witness to the mutable beauty of Smithson's masterpiece as it reveals itself through the seasons and tides. It's an incredible spectacle that Casting a Glance treats with something like awe.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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READING
Daniel Alarcón: Lost City Radio
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Wednesday Feb 27 (7pm)
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A Great Good Place for Books (6120 LaSalle Ave, 510.339.8210)
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FREE
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For a 30-year-old, author Daniel Alarcón has assembled a nice collection of accolades. This former Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, whom Granta recently named one of America's top young writers, saw his debut novel, Lost City Radio, land on many year-end lists. Alarcón is currently serving as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Oakland's Mills College, and he's become a regular presence at local literary events. He visits Oakland's A Great Good Place for Books to read from his novel, which brings an unnamed South American country's history of civil war and disappearances to bear on a middle-aged talk-radio host.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Rock/Pop
Jay Farrar w/ Anders Parker
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Wednesday Feb 27 (8pm)
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Great American Music Hall (859 O'Farrell St, 415.885.0750)
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$20
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When Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy's fruitful songwriting partnership in Uncle Tupelo ended in a nasty 1994 breakup, Farrar couldn't help looking like the loser. Tweedy retained most of the original band's personnel for his new project, Wilco, which went on to win overwhelming acclaim for albums like Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Farrar was hardly left in the musical wilderness, but his several solid Son Volt albums paled next to his former bandmate's successes. No matter: Farrar's deep, twangy vocals still emanate a gravelly warmth, and his songwriting strikes a delicate balance between Neil Young and more traditional folk sources. Now performing solo, the artist is securing his own place as an alt-country icon.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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PERFORMING ARTS: Comedy
Noise Pop XVI: Human Giant
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Thursday Feb 28 (8pm)
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Mezzanine (444 Jessie St, 415.625.8880)
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$20 seated / $15 general admission
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Human Giant isn't all dude-humor and inappropriate behavior. OK, so it pretty much is — but Aziz Ansari, Rob Huebel, and Paul Scheer are three dudes who totally nail it, kicking the ass of most other sketch groups out there. Couched in indie-music criticism and pop-culture touchstones (Child actors! Celebrity crotches! Extreme sports!), the MTV show might be the last thing on the network worth watching. The new season kicks off Tuesday, March 11, and the gang's on tour to promote it. Tonight, expect some clips from the upcoming season, stand-up sets, and a guest or two from HG's long list of semi-famous admirers. Afterwards, stick around for indie-pop perfection from SF's own Magic Bullets.
- Leah Taylor
Note:
This show is part of both SF Sketchfest and Noise Pop. Previous dates in LA sold out quickly, so advance tix are recommended.
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Rock/Pop
Noise Pop XVI: Blitzen Trapper w/ Fleet Foxes, Here Here, and Sholi
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Thursday Feb 28 (7:30pm)
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Bottom of the Hill (1233 17th St, 415.621.4455)
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$12
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Portland's Blitzen Trapper take the stage at Bottom of the Hill tonight with countrified indie rock. The sextet's third release, last year's Wild Mountain Nation, is a collection of lo-fi ditties that convincingly walk the line between Appalachian twang and the playful style-experiments of Pavement's Wowee Zowee, with a few classic-rock riffs thrown in for good measure. Riding a wave of positive reviews and well-deserved Internet hype (including Pitchfork's all-important Best New Music nod), the band signed with Sub Pop last summer. Bouncy indie-pop group Here Here and atmospheric folk-rockers Fleet Foxes open.
- Joe Blankholm
[Info Source]
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FILM: Documentary
Noise Pop XVI: Wesley Willis' Joy Rides
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Friday Feb 29 (7pm)
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Artists' Television Access (992 Valencia St, 415.824.3890)
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$8
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Before his untimely death at the age of 40, Wesley Willis amassed a cult following for his music, art, and Batman-hating, McDonald's-loving personality. Schizophrenic and unceasingly creative, Willis became an underground-rock icon (many of his records were produced by Beck-buddies the Dust Brothers), and a figurehead of sorts for the contemporary "outsider music" scene. Filmmakers Chris Bagley and Kim Shively use footage of Willis, interviews with his family and friends, and animations of his artwork to paint a portrait of a man whose creative energy was in perpetual battle with the voices in his head.
- Annie Lo
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Hip-Hop
Noise Pop XVI: Electropop feat. Wale w/ Trackademicks and Nick Catchdubs
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Friday Feb 29 (9pm)
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Mighty (119 Utah St, 415.762.0151)
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$20 / $15 advance
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Twenty-three-year-old Wale (pronounced "wah-lay") is being touted as hip-hop's next golden boy by The Fader, bloggers, and his DJ/producer and collaborator Mark Ronson. But all the fuss isn't for nothing: Wale's steely rhymes are delivered over the propulsive rhythms of his native DC's long-underground go-go scene. Rich Harrison may have sampled go-go for Amerie's "1 Thing," but Wale takes it a step further, employing a live band to deliver the punchy horn stabs and rolling drum fills that are the genre's hallmarks. To borrow a phrase from go-go legends Trouble Funk, tonight's show is sure to "drop" the proverbial "bomb."
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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MUSIC: Rock/Pop
Spectrum feat. Sonic Boom w/ Careen Ajar
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Saturday Mar 1 (9:30pm)
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The Compound (1070 Van Dyke, 650.255.8947)
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| price: |
$10 donation
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After recording a series of thrillingly trippy albums, drone-rock legends Spacemen 3 went their separate ways. Jason Pierce and co. got Spiritualized, while Sonic Boom (aka Pete Kember) kept busy with projects like Spectrum and the more experimental E.A.R., collaborating with Kevin Shields and BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Delia Derbyshire. Boom is wont to indulge his fascination with vintage EMS synths and long-form drone compositions, so expect a heavy, arpeggiated head trip tonight, à la Terry Riley's all-night organ concerts. Careen Ajar, a collaborative project between Recombinant Media Labs curator Naut Humon, new-media artist Li Alin, and longtime noisemaker Scott Arford, start things spinning.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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FILM
Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa
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Saturday Mar 1
More times»
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| where: |
Pacific Film Archive Theater (2575 Bancroft Way, 510.642.0808)
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| price: |
$9.50
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Few filmmakers have elicited as strong and divided a response from critics and cinephiles as Portuguese director Pedro Costa. He isn't so much an aesthete (an unwieldy word, given his sparse palette of natural light and near-interminable shots) as an ascetic, fashioning purposefully vague mixtures of documentary and fiction out of the threadbare lives of Lisbon's working poor. As this career retrospective shows, though, Costa's formalistic presentation doesn't belie his empathy toward junkies, day laborers, and the dispossessed. He knows his film history, too — yes, Ozu and Bresson are obvious antecedents, but Down to Earth (1994) also reimagines Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
- Matt Sussman
Note:
Costa appears in person at many screenings, and delivers the Regent's Lecture on Sun Mar 9 (3pm); admission to the lecture is free and open to the public.
[Info Source]
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READING
Dan Kennedy: Rock On
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Sunday Mar 2 (3pm)
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Diesel, A Bookstore (5433 College Ave, 510.653.9965)
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| price: |
FREE
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As the music industry contends with youthful downloaders, shuttered retailers, and lagging concert sales, it has become a sinking ship — and Dan Kennedy was there to see it take on water. In his keenly observed and often hilarious roman à clef Rock On, the frequent McSweeney's contributor recounts how he was forced to abandon the idealism of his fan-boy youth when joining the middle-management team of a major record label. As he witnesses the company's inability to keep up with technology and deals with surreal scenarios like a gangsta rapper's promo shoot gone awry, Kennedy quickly sours on the job; lucky for us, he's not too bitter to write all about it.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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FILM
Close at Hand
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Sunday Mar 2 (7:30pm)
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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission St, 415.978.2787)
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| price: |
$10
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The short films in this program, curated by Chris Kennedy and Vanessa O'Neil, bring to mind the tagline "look closer" — which American Beauty (1999) used to exhort viewers to peer behind the veneer of suburban America. But tonight's offerings put a less seamy spin on the phrase, by cutting out the voyeurism and paying more attention to natural detail. Their subjects are largely elemental — flowing water, shifting shorelines, weathered stone — with humankind's impact on the scenery framed as almost comically insignificant. Witness, for example, John Price's futile and aimless shooting in gun/play, as compared to the industriousness of insects in Charlotte Pryce's Concerning Flight.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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MORE FLAVOR: Lecture
Jan Egeland: A Billion Lives
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Monday Mar 3 (6pm)
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World Affairs Center (312 Sutter St, 415.293.4600)
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| price: |
$15
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Jan Egeland, the former UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, knows something about altruism. Since he helped to initiate the 1992 talks that led to the Oslo Accord, Egeland has embedded himself in the world's fiercest conflicts. At the UN, he had to contend with 2004's Indian Ocean tsunami, a disaster that required unprecedented relief coordination and left him leveling unsparing criticisms at the West's moral failings. It's this tenacity in the face of strife and apathy that caused TIME magazine to describe Egeland as "the world's conscience." At the World Affairs Council, he reads from his new book, and speaks about the challenges threatening peace processes and humanitarian aid.
- Max Goldberg
[Info Source]
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FILM
Taxi to the Dark Side
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Monday Mar 3
More times»
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| where: |
Landmark Opera Plaza (601 Van Ness Ave, 415.267.4893)
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| price: |
Various prices
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It's not as if Taxi to the Dark Side tells us anything new about the growing use of torture in US foreign policy; in fact, the Academy Award-winning film plainly credits the New York Times as its primary source. But this is where moving pictures really come in handy — though director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) never sacrifices any details in his reports of torture cases from Guantánamo to Afghanistan, he takes the space and time to connect individual events so that it's nearly impossible to dismiss them as the work of isolated maniacs. Be forewarned: a neutral documentary this is not.
- Lisa Rosman
[Info Source]
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ART
Leonora Carrington: The Talismanic Lens
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Tuesday Feb 26 (11am–7pm)
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Frey Norris Gallery (456 Geary St, 415.346.7812)
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| price: |
FREE
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Leonora Carrington's paintings are populated by mystics, crones, demons, and damsels with wan, Byzantine faces. There is magic in the air, but also menace, and the fairy tales they suggest are more Grimm than Mother Goose. As a young woman, Carrington had a passionate affair with surrealist artist Max Ernst; after WWII separated them, she suffered a nervous breakdown, and the British expat eventually moved to Mexico. While one can see traces of Ernst's strange landscapes in Carrington's frequent recombinations of flora, fauna, human, and beast, her small, delicately detailed paintings also evoke the ex-votos of her adopted homeland — the work of a singular artist shaped by trauma but sustained by grace.
- Matt Sussman
[Info Source]
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PERFORMING ARTS: Theatre
Endgame
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Tuesday Feb 26
More times»
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Traveling Jewish Theater (470 Florida St, 415.522.0786)
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| price: |
Various prices
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When Samuel Beckett wrote Endgame in 1957, audiences were more accustomed to stark, conceptual writing and avant-garde theatrics than today. The utterly bizarre one-act play lent itself nicely to the period, both impressing and confounding with strange social and political allegory. The story is simple enough (er, maybe not): a wheelchair-bound man lives with his parents, who are themselves ensconced in a pair of trash cans, and they all heap abuse on their servant. The heart of the work is its dark humor, stylized dialogue, and expressive physicality, and the Cutting Ball Theater company does the challenging modern classic justice.
- Shana Nys Dambrot
[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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Flavorpill also publishes eight other email magazines, covering ART, BOOKS, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in four other cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, LONDON, and CHICAGO. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now.
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