Arts+Events: November 2009 Archives

Looking for a gift idea for the Simpsons fan in your life? Reporter John Ortved has written an unauthorized, uncensored history of the still popular, still witty, longest running prime time TV series in the country. SFist asked him a few questions about the book, and the contentious origins of the show.

by Rachel Brodsky

MUSIC: Enjoying watching solo acts perform? We sure do. (Hence our unshared love for cabaret acts.) Which is why you should check out "I Rock Alone! A Night of Weird Solo Acts" happening in the Tenderloin at the city's most deceptively named venue. Here's what's in store for you: The Slow Poisoner, a San Francisco-based "snake oil salesman that bangs a drum festooned with sleigh bells while singing jingles about the miracle tonic that he hawks from the stage"; Mosquito Bandito, a Wisconsin-based "renowned one man band" who performs "distorted blues singles"; and the 1 Man Banjo, a member of the Extra Action Marching Band and Hobo Gobbelins. Single people, unite! By spending some time with local solo acts.

       

Known as San Francisco's "other conservatory," the Sunnyside Conservatory underwent a dramatic renovation in 2009. And come Saturday, December 5, the newly refurbished conservatory will be open for business, complete with a kickoff party featuring conservatory tours, a ribbon cutting ceremonies, and... high tea! Best of all, it's just a few blocks away from the Glen Park BART station, and easily accessible if you take a ride on the Muni #23 Monterey.

DANCE: RAW (resident artist workshop) presents choreographer Aura Fischbeck Dance, who will be sharing a new improvisational work entitled “moment studies, too,” which incorporates the expression of the body in the present moment, in relationship to self, other, and the space. Also featuring guest choreographers Leigh Riley/The Riley Project, Christine Cali, Sam Stone, and DJ Owen Bondurant.

This week's concert preview is being brought to you by Kevin Meenan of Epicsauce, providing detailed concert listings for the Bay Area every week. Follow them on Twitter.

DANCE: It's the last night of the 11th Annual Hip Hop Dance Fest, which has was the first event of its kind and has played host to dance companies throughout the world. The festival offers professional Hip Hop dance companies a high level of production, exposure, and acknowledgment, nurtures emerging artists, and contributes to the evolution of both Hip Hop and dance.

FILM: CineKink: San Francisco, a touring version of NYC's "kinky film festival," has been at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend. Tonight's films include The Auteur at 7 p.m., a mélange of romantic comedy and raunchy satire that tells the story of renowned porn director Arturo Domingo, the creative genius behind classics like Five Easy Nieces and Requiem for a Wet Dream, and the Best of Cinekink / 2009 Shorts Sampler at 9 p.m., a special sampling of some of the hot shorts deemed by a jury to be the very best of CineKink.

FILM: The Oakland Underground Film Festival presents the San Francisco premiere of Black Dynamite, an action-packed comedy rooted in the traditions of American Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films, such as Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972), and The Mack (1974). According to Sundance Film Festival, the film "sustains the comedy while taking a nice big sucker punch at the underlying politics of our time." Director Scott Sanders and co-writer/star Michael Jai White will appear in person at the screening.

          

by Moses Namkung The last time Chris Brown performed in the Bay Area, he sold out Oracle Arena. A TMZ-obtained photo of Rihanna's battered visage, an awkward Larry King appearance, and a guilty plea to felony assault later, Chris Brown was back in town on a short run of shows geared towards rejuvenating his loyal fan base and healing his public image. The Fan Appreciation Tour, as it is called, is perhaps a test by various stakeholders to see how many fans Brown may have lost through the Rihanna ordeal.

After the 2008 departure of co-founding members Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, Australian hard rock group Wolfmother has reassembled itself and released a new album, Cosmic Egg. They're on tour and hitting the Fox in Oakland on Tuesday Monday (tickets still available here). Above, their new video for the single "New Moon Rising," which is not to be confused with the new Twilight movie, New Moon, or Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising."

Just in time for the holidays, Thread will be having a two-day shopping extravaganza this weekend at Fort Mason Center, featuring wares from the top 100 hand-picked independent fashion and art designers.

William Bolcom composed two third of the pieces in the program presented by the New Century Chamber Orchestra, in a run which opens tomorrow in Berkeley (and repeats Friday in Palo Alto, Saturday in San Francisco and Sunday in San Rafael). He is also penning a world premiere for another NCCO concert series next May.

COCKTAIL PARTY: Wow, we're intrigued. Bold Italic presents 1939. Tog to the Bricks!, a decadent cocktail party from the 1930s, celebrating the opening of the World's Fair. The organizers promise "a raucous good time while the gin and absinthe flow, photographers roam, the piano keys are plunked." Cocktails and food by St. George Spirits, Distillery No. 209, Aidells, Cheese Plus and Pacific Puffs are all included in the cover charge. Attire is 1930s inspired, of course, and the best dressed will get gift certificates to Decades of Fashion and tickets to Long Now's Rick Prelinger Lost Landscapes screening.

Artists: Do you find it hard to get your pieces done? Then let San Francisco Art Institute MFA student and Immediate Future exhibiting artist, Daniel Yovino guide you through a crash course on productivity methods in his lecture A Year of Getting Things Done. Yovino will also speculate on the possibility of increasingly productive artists and reflect on his foray into art without a final product.

Oh, what joy. Brittney Gilbert at Eye On Blogs brings our attention to this: Green Apple Books, located at 506 Clement, will donate proceeds of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's new book Going Rogue: An American Life to the betterment of animals up in Alaska. Check it:

LIT: One of the first performance artists and a New York Underground cultural icon, Penny Arcade (Susan Ventura), will make a rare appearance tonight in celebration of her new book, Bad Reputation: Performances, Essays, Interviews, the first book by and about the legend herself. The book consists of three autobiographical plays, as well as a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus and a collection of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade's performances.

Five long years after she burst onto the indie music scene with Anniemal, a debut universally embraced by indie music critics, Annie is finally releasing her much-delayed sophomore effort, Don't Stop. A lot has changed in the industry and in Annie's music-making process since Pitchfork named "Heartbeat" the best song of 2004, so we sat down with Annie in the lobby of her hotel and chatted about those changes, the process of creating Don't Stop, where her music fits into the spectrum of pop and her substantial magnet collection. SFist: How do you feel about Don't Stop versus when Anniemal came out? Do you feel as good or do you feel more excited for this? It's been a long time coming.

Some collaborations between Hollywood people and non-Hollywood artists yield magical results -- take Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' work on Where the Wild Things Are, for example -- but in the case of Erased James Franco, the hour-long art film made by the artist known as Carter with Hollywood actor James Franco occupying the central role, the results are confused, mundane, and borderline pretentious. Billed as a riff on Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (which is owned by the SFMOMA), the film is meant to be an "erased performance" in which Franco appears in a non-descript setting reading random lines from all of his previous work, including the Spiderman films and the TV show Freaks and Geeks (at the time of shooting, in June 2008, Milk had not yet been released). There are a few inspired moments in the piece, but they mostly involve performances not originally given by Franco, where he performs monologues from other films like Todd Haynes' Safe or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, which starred Rock Hudson -- we especially enjoyed a brief telephone conversation Franco has with Julianne Moore, with her words clipped from lines from Safe. But the majority of the film features long, labored shots of Franco writing on loose-leaf paper, waving his hands, drinking water, answering phones, moving a chair around, and walking in and out of a room.

FILM: Director Barry Jenkins joins SF Film Society Director Graham Leggat for a screening of Medicine for Melancholy and a conversation afterwards. M4M, which was shot in a mere three weeks and made its West Coast Premiere at the 2008 SF International Film Festival, is a "love story of bikes and one-night stands told through two African-American twenty-somethings dealing with issues of class, identity and the evolving conundrum of being a minority in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco - the city with the smallest proportional black population of any major American city."

This week's concert preview is being brought to you by Kevin Meenan of Epicsauce, providing detailed concert listings for the Bay Area every week. Follow them on Twitter.

FILM: Multimedia artist Carter riffs off of Robert Rauschenberg's iconic drawing Erased Willem de Kooning in Erased James Franco, in which contemporary actor, James Franco, is stripped of the sureties of his craft and transformed into an almost sculptural object. Franco covers banal scenes from his own films, as well as segments of Julianne Moore's character in Safe and Rock Hudson's in Seconds. Franco, Carter, and SFMOMA Associate Curator of Public Programs Frank Smigiel will take the stage for a post-screening conversation about film, celebrity, identity, and art. The Castro will also be screening Safe, Seconds, and Franco's favorite episodes of Freaks and Geeks during the day as a double feature matinee to get the audience ready for the main feature.

VARIETY: The Devil-Ettes and The Mini Skirt Mob pay tribute to the great 60’s variety shows like Laugh-In, Shindig, and Hullabaloo in the action-packed Go Go Spectacular. Special guests The Barbary Coasters and Deke Dickerson’s All Star Frat Band will also perform.

Mezzo-soprano diva Joyce DiDonato last seduced us here as Octavian in Strauss's Rosenkavalier and is returning on Monday night for her first ever San Francisco Performances recital, with pianist John Churchwell. Joyce made headlines over the summer when she fell during a performance of the Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, broke her leg and kept on singing. She set such a courageous example that soprano Sondra Radvanovsky got hurt during an attempted purse snatching at the Van Ness Walgreen's so she too could sing with a leg cast. Joyce is out of the cast by now, and well, others have asked her about it, so we know how she was able to finish that performance after the wipe out: "Midwestern work ethic". Good thing she is from Kansas, and not from somewhere with depraved values.

It wouldn't be a weekend in San Francisco without at least two film festivals going on. (What a great town we live in!) The 11th Annual Black Film Festival honors festival founder and executive director Ave Montague, who passed away earlier this year. The event will kick off at 3:30 p.m. with a memorial gala and reception, which will feature a memorial video montage, film screenings, and filmmaker dialogs.

The band in question is called B & Not B, a self-described "nerdy supergroup" from SF with a name inspired by Derrida, or something. Watch as they show up at various Mission locales and entertain the natives. They'll be performing a show at the Makeout Room on December 2nd. Hat tip: Mission Mission.

ART: Artist Paul Madonna will debut his annual publication, Album, along with an exhibit of his corresponding large-scale, pen-and-ink drawings of '70s and '80s era toys, which serve as a catalog to the book. In the smaller Electric Works gallery, artist Ian Huebert will exhibit his images from an "(imagined?) Plain States landscape." The exhibit runs through January 9, 2010.

This year’s San Francisco International Animation Festival, running through Sunday, explores the decidedly un-Hollywood side of the art form. From demonstrating Los Angeles traffic scenarios, to an anime documentary about samurai, cartoons are not just for singing princesses.

Artist Toban Nichols -- a former San Francisco resident who recently exchanged his Bay Area lifestyle for LA's expansive and creative community -- has three shows that will take over the Bay Area over the next two months. His work, as he describes it, "favors bright color, along with databending and media manipulation, with an eye focused on both current and nostalgic popular culture moments and icons."

       

by Moses Namkung

GALA: AIGA San Francisco presents Hung up, its annual fall gala. This year, AIGA celebrates the art of skateboarding and has invited its members to contribute custom skate decks, which will be auctioned off at the end of the night. The event also features a live art component and a raffle with prizes including posters, restaurant vouchers, magazine subscriptions, and a copy of Adobe CS4.

Now that autumn is in the air, the Mission is too clammy and cold, the Avenues are too foggy, and the Marina is too the Marina. So, why not spend your Thursday night in the lovely, twinkly, high-rise building-y downtown area. It simply crackles at night. And it's chic. And it has a good mix of San Francisco ilk. And there's no better venue than 111 Minna, who will be hosting some of the city's best gastronomic sweet treats.

Gautier Capuçon makes his SF Symphony debut tomorrow. The French cellist will dazzle in Schumann's cello concerto, under the direction of famed Russian conductor Semyon Bychkov (the program also includes a curtain opener by Dutilleux, and Sibelius 5th symphony). It's his third time in San Francisco, but his first time with the SFS orchestra, or without his brother and chamber music partner, the violinist Renaud Capuçon.

Guys and gals, clear out your closets and throw your discarded duds into the giant pile at CellSpace (2050 Bryant St) tomorrow night, as part of the Massive Men's And Women's "Cool Cat" Clothes Swap For Fashionably Conscious Cultural Creatives. (We're sure glad they didn't use the term "frugalistas.") You never know what gems you might find in exchange! (Or in yours truly's experience, we just end up with more crap that gets donated later on.) Enjoy some food and dancing while you swap.

Although it's still rather warm outside, the Holiday Ice Rink at Union Square officially opened this morning. SF Appeal/Bay City News informed us that a snow machine will drop snow on the rink throughout the day, and members of the national figure skating team will be performing at 5 p.m. today. Apparently they also performed at Noon as well. Did anyone see the show?

FILM: Soul legend Bill Withers (of "Ain't No Sunshine," "Lean on Me," and "Just the Two of Us" fame) is profiled in the new documentary Still Bill, which will be screening in San Francisco for one night only at Sundance Kabuki. The screening will be followed by an after-party at the Boom Boom Room, which is free with the purchase of a movie ticket. Curtis Bumpy, a Curtis Mayfield and Bill Withers tribute band will perform.

The expanding War on Fun has taken another life, ladies and germs. Marke B. over at the SFBG reports that punk-politico drag queen Anna Conda has decided to call it quits on her weekly Friday party Charlie Horse at the Cinch after complaining Polk Street neighbors brought the bar before the Entertainment Commission. Rather than "take a break" and try to tone down the often raucous drag night (where it was likely the noisy smoking porch out back and the spillover out front that brought the complaints) Anna has decided to put a bullet in the head of this five-year-old party and pursue other ventures.

If you feel like celebrating the fallen heroes of gruesome wars on this Veteran's day, we'll point you to the music budgets under assault in Gov. Schwarzenegger's war on education. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a vital institution in this city, is hosting a fund raiser tonight, from 7pm to 11pm. Billed as "an evening of eclectic performances," it is faithful to the mission of the institution which teaches everything to everyone, from kids and adults and from baroque to avant-garde.

Veteran San Francisco photographer Gerald Ratto will exhibit his rarely seen collection of photographs, Children of the Fillmore, 1952, which he captured with his Rolleiflex camera while a student at California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute). The photography program was founded by Ansel Adams in 1945.

HISTORY: As part of the SF Museum and Historical Society's 2009 "Neighborhoods of San Francisco" program, author and historian Woody LaBounty will reintroduce the community to Beachside Bohemia: Carville-by-the-Sea and the Birth of the Outer Sunset District, which he researched extensively for his new book, Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb. Carville-by-the-Sea, which was in its heyday in the 1890s, is one of the quirkiest and least-remembered communities in San Francisco’s history. There will also be a companion walk to this event with Woody LaBounty on Saturday from 2 to 4. Meet at the corner of La Playa and Lincoln Way.

The production currently playing on the thrust stage at Berkeley Rep -- while American Idiot finishes out its raucous pre-Broadway run in the Roda Theater -- is Tiny Kushner, a collection of one-act plays written by Angels in America scribe and Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner. The plays were all written in the 90's and 00's and originally produced in this grouping by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Though they all bear some familiar Kushner-esque markings -- psychotherapy, fictionalized portrayals of real people, fantastical premises involving the afterlife, politicized critiques of the government -- they are relatively unconnected pieces and deserve to be discussed separately. So here goes, in brief:

COMEDY: Attention adventurous singles with some extra cash -- Improv Dating Scene might be for you. The event begins with a comedy show with Big City Improv performing sketches based on audience suggestions. Then, dating coaches will lead participants through a series of fun and easy improv games. The evening concludes with a mixer with snacks and drinks, giving singles an opportunity to better get to know the people they connect with the most.

This week's concert preview is being brought to you by Kevin Meenan of Epicsauce, providing detailed concert listings for the Bay Area every week. Follow them on Twitter.

FILM: Filmmaker Nara Denning will be celebrating the release of her new DVD Neurotique with a premiere screening. Neurotique is a collection of six silent and tragic love stories set to live musical performances by Mister Odom & the Odom Poles, Charith Premawardhana, and Momo and Friends -Cheeskos Junction.

MUSIC: Alternative Tentacles have been celebrating their 30th Anniversary with an Incest-A-Thon this weekend. Tonight's line-up is Alice Donut, Victims Family, and Burning Image.

While today's young San Francisco gay gent prefers to (pretend to) skateboard, spend the night frolicking at Bender's, and eschew the art of proper hygiene, there was a day when the effete dandy reigned supreme among the homo sect. (No, Rufus Wainwright doesn't count. Ever.) And those dandies, if only the days of yore had allowed it, would have put on their Sunday best and busted it up on the ballroom floor. Lots of swirling, lots of twirling: the way God programmed gay men.

With the new album, The Farm, J Mascis and the gang return to mid-nineties form in sound and song writing. They're performing at The Fillmore tonight and we believe there are still some tickets available. The video above embarrasses us a little, if only because they're all a little old to be on skateboards and BMXs, but we suppose that's the point.

Leanne is off for the day, taking care of the proverbial bun in her proverbial oven. So, please, bear with us as we throw a list of stuff at you. And remember: just because it's rainy outside doesn't mean you should go crazy and not have fun tonight. How else are you going to show off that new scarf and umbrella?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Evolution of a Painter at George Krevsky Gallery, Exploration and Celebration Finale at Sandra Gallery, C3, Akira, KMNDZ at Shooting Gallery, plus many more.

Still in its embryonic stage, please join SF Appeal's Eve Batey and your SFist editor at 4 p.m. today for SF Views, live from the stained heart of SOMA! It's an interwebs show about -- you guessed it -- San Francisco. And other stuff.

Grammy-award winning mezzo-soprano Susan Graham just headlined a concert series six weeks ago with the San Francisco Symphony, which will be released on a CD as part of the SFS Mahler project. Obviously, we can't get enough of her: she returns this week to star in a concert version of Purcell's opera Dido and Aenas, with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. She chats about her upcoming Dido and looks back at her Mahler performance here.

VIDEO: Check out the West Coast premiere of Target Video's SF Punk, as part of the SF Main Library's Punk Passages exhibit. The film features Bay Area early punk legends The Avengers, Dead Kennedys, DILS, Crime, Nuns, Flipper, Factrix, Noh Mercy, Minimal Man, Chrome, Offs, Z, UXA, Sick Pleasure, KGB, Negative Trend, The Mutants, and the Sleepers. A Q&A with videographer Joe Rees and photographer Ruby Ray will follow.

Sad news, Golden Girls fans. Rue McClanahan (AKA Blanche Devereaux) canceled her November 14 tribute at the Castro Theatre. The actress, it seems, is laid up in the hospital over an ailing heart.

THEATER: Comedian and playwright Rick Reynolds presents his hilarious and gut-wrenching personal confessions and childhood remembrances in Love, God, Sex (and and other stuff I don’t have), which is directed by Jason Alexander.

         

A few images from last night's Day of the Dead procession in the Mission.

Yes, it's that time of year again when aspiring and/or hobbyist writers -- as well as those creative souls who feel their lives slipping away year by year with nothing to show for it but debt and some nice pics on Flickr -- join together with others across the world for National Novel Writing Month. November is but a 30-day month, and if you haven't started on your new novel draft, then, well, you have a little catching up to do. The idea isn't to come up with something polished and perfect, but just to write every day, about whatever, and hopefully link some stuff together into something resembling a 50,000-word cohesive story. (Watch the video above for some tips for getting started.)

VARIETY SHOW: Tonight is the premiere of PianoFight's Monday Night ForePlays, a female-driven variety show that will run every Monday through November 23. Consisting of comedy sketches, original dance numbers, a rotating line-up of musical acts, and special additions ranging from burlesque acts to comedians, the shows will feature "a titillating collection of comedic sketches touching on performance anxiety, bodily functions, relationships, robots, office politics, writers block and sex."

This week's concert preview is being brought to you by Kevin Meenan of Epicsauce, providing detailed concert listings for the Bay Area every week. Follow them on Twitter.