July 2011
1 post
10 tags
A minor place
June 2011
6 posts
11 tags
Fake-out
5 tags
Frameline at 35 Still Finds Youth a Focus
It’s hard to think of another point in time when LGBTIQQ youth have been so visible across media, for better and for worse. Thousands of young male and female fans watch Kurt Hummel, the openly gay teen on Glee played by Chris Colfer, even as elsewhere on the hit show’s network, conservative pundits try to downplay the problem of anti-queer bullying and rail against the evils of...
6 tags
The faith and the fury: A night with the one and...
Hell hath no fury like an enraged Klaus Kinski. The late German actor, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as the combusting supernova at the center of the Wernzer Herzog films Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987), was as famous for his coruscating off-camera temper as for his onscreen intensity. With Kinski, there is always the near-unanswerable question of to what extent...
6 tags
Crying in public
6 tags
The ballad of Peter and Raymond: A legendary local...
Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men who were old friends moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to take in all the big city had to offer. Like many 20-somethings, Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey didn’t have a lot of money and wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight with a bright pink exterior they...
5 tags
Art Fair City: Can artMRKT and ArtPadSF validate...
[This was my first cover story for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As always with these sort of longer pieces I had to leave out more voices than I would have liked to. -M]
The booths have been dismantled, countless plastic cups and empty liquor bottles are heading to recycling centers, and the exhibitors have returned to the quiet of their respective white cubes. San Francisco’s big,...
May 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Slick
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The long goodbye: YSL's legacy looms large in...
Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his...
4 tags
Lost Legends Haunt Roxie's Latest Noir Series
In his scathing review of Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film Phantom Lady, critic Bosley Crowther rattles off what is essentially a laundry list of stylistic hallmarks of the not-yet named genre that Siodmak would later be recognized as a master of: film noir. “[Phantom Lady] is full of the play of light and shadow, of macabre atmosphere, of sharply realistic faces and dramatic injections of...
9 tags
TV eye
April 2011
3 posts
5 tags
A bang and a whimper: A weird future awaits in End...
Science fiction’s open secret is that it has never really been about the future. As William Gibson explained to an interviewer in 2007, echoing earlier genre criticism by writers such as Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ, science fiction is, at its heart, “speculative fiction, but you don’t really have the future to work with, so you are always working with history and with...
6 tags
All that glitters
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The joy of life: Bill Cunningham New York captures...
To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And,...
March 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Exercises in style
8 tags
Touching from a distance
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By demons driven: San Francisco International...
A few years ago, much was being made of the “new wave” of Asian horror films. Western audiences were being introduced to the long-haired, vengeful spirits and women on the verge of murderous rampages that had been scaring moviegoers in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia for much of the late 1990s and early aughts. Companies such as Tartan and Lionsgate rushed to make the...
6 tags
The unseen enemy
February 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Not forgotten
5 tags
Every little star
January 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Crack-ups: Noir City 9 corrals characters on the...
Who wants to die for art? That question, immortally screamed by Divine at the climax of John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974), has most recently been taken up by Darren Aronofsky’s campy psychological thriller Black Swan (2010), in which Natalie Portman’s fragile ballerina discovers that giving her all as the good and evil leads in an edgy production of Swan Lake requires giving up...
5 tags
La Frontera
4 tags
Sawako's choice: Nobody's special in Yuya Ishii's...
Sawako Decides, the most recent feature by the talented 27 year-old Japanese director Yuya Ishii, might not be the best film of 2010 that you never saw, but it certainly ranks as one of last year’s funniest — and perhaps more debatably, most feminist.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Ishii double feature “Lost in Japan,” which pairs Sawako with Ishii’s previous...
December 2010
2 posts
4 tags
The Year in Art: A firestorm of controversy in the...
The year in art is ending on a note both sour and defiant. On Nov. 30, Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough, caving to criticism voiced by conservative politicians and religious groups, ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.”...
8 tags
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
It can be easy to get cynical about the business side of art, so it’s always refreshing when a local labor of love such as Romer Young — the small Dogpatch gallery formerly known as Ping Pong — demonstrates that growth doesn’t necessarily entail compromising one’s vision.
That vision has always been driven by husband and wife team Vanessa Blaikie and Joey Piziali’s...
November 2010
6 posts
6 tags
The face of Cher
(After Roland Barthes’ “The Face of Garbo”)
Cher’s face belongs to our current moment in cinema when the female visage represents a kind of absolute non-state of the flesh, which can be reached through a variety of (as-yet-not-entirely-confirmed) nips, tucks, filler injections, makeup and post-production airbrushing.
Cher’s is indeed a formidable face-object....
4 tags
Timbre! Love is a Stream and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma...
Local multi-instrumentalist and Root Strata label cofounder Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has titled his newest solo album, Love is a Stream (Type), but the watercourse this robust and unexpectedly sharp collection of dazzlers brings to mind is Niagara Falls.
Whether he’s playing a pastoral variant of psych rock with his more recent project The Alps or improvising a soundtrack to one of Paul ...
6 tags
Pwning the classics
Jennie Ottinger’s last solo painting show at Johansson Projects, “ibid,” presented an assortment of ghostly figures — ballerinas, nurses, schoolchildren, businessmen — lifted from found photographs. The less-is-more aesthetic of Ottinger’s small oil and gouache canvases underscored the fact that, save for the recovered images used as source material, the everyday...
4 tags
America's original sin: Jens Hoffmann finishes his...
Going into “Huckleberry Finn,” the final installment in the Wattis Institute’s trilogy of group shows organized around canonical American novels, it is perhaps best to heed the notice Mark Twain places at the outset of the text from which this exhibit takes its name and inspiration: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons...
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Goldies 2010: Amanda Curreri
Five minutes into talking with Amanda Curreri over a slice and coffee at Mission Pie, I’ve agreed to take part in a piece she’s working on as part of Shadowshop, the in-gallery artists’ marketplace Stephanie Syjuco is organizing for SFMOMA’s upcoming survey of work made in the past decade.
“It’s called Afghanistan Insert,” Curreri explains, speaking ...
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Goldies 2010: Jennifer Locke
In her pieces, Jennifer Locke has, variously, jumped rope for 30 minutes in a full-body latex suit (cutting out a hole in the bottom afterward to drain out her accumulated sweat and urine); wrestled with a partner at the Berkeley Art Museum smeared in stage blood; covered herself in Elmer’s glue, let it dry into a second skin, and then peeled it off; received a lap dance from a male...
October 2010
5 posts
11 tags
Seeing spots
Jancar Jones Gallery might be no larger than most gallery kitchens, but New York City-based artist Bill Jenkins has created the illusion of more space within it through very simple means. For his solo show “Lids and Dots,” he irregularly spray painted black polka dots across the gallery’s white walls, evoking Yayoi Kusama’s spot-covered installations from the 1960s...
7 tags
Dancing with the dark: YBCA remembers butoh...
Kazuo Ohno, who died this past June at 103, probably received the broadest exposure of his long career when Antony and the Johnsons chose Naoya Ikegami’s black and white Ohno portrait as the cover art for their 2009 album The Crying Light. Shot in profile, wearing a black dress with a cluster of white flowers pinned in his hair, the visibly aged Ohno — his head tilted back, mouth...
4 tags
SF Docfest Still Stranger than Fiction
“You’ve gotta have a gimmick,” goes the line from Gypsy, and a list of some of the subjects featured in the 9th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival reads like the first round of cuts from an America’s Got Talent audition. There is a sex shaman who testifies to the powers of his libidinal healing workshops (Sex Magic), a rapping cowboy from North Dakota (Roll Out,...
6 tags
Tick tock
In a characteristically poetic passage within 1980’s Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes early cameras, given their cabinet-like appearance and precise mechanical innards, as “clocks for seeing.” I couldn’t shake the phrase while taking in Will Rogan’s “Stay Home,” an ambiguous smile of a solo show composed of photographs and three-dimensional...
3 tags
'Enter the Void' at Your Own Risk
Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void is destined to join the ranks of Pink Floyd’s the Wall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Trainspotting as a go-to visual aid for casual substance users in dorm rooms across the globe. Perhaps it will prompt those same buzzed, perhaps straight and probably male viewers to muse on what happens to us after we die, or whether or not something akin to that great...
September 2010
3 posts
9 tags
Of human bondage
Two life-size sculptures of human skulls sit side by side at Meridian Gallery. The first is cast in glass, tiny air bubbles filling its dome like frozen stars. The one to the right, the wall card indicates, is actually human, but you wouldn’t know it since it’s covered in black leather. The seamless second skin is pulled tight around the bone, as if shrink-wrapped. The effect is...
6 tags
King of the beach: Glitch pioneer Fennesz surfs...
That old saw about how the Velvet Underground’s first record may not have sold well but everyone who heard it went on to form their own band could also be said of Austrian composer/producer Christian Fennesz’s 2001 release Endless Summer (Mego).
Although I can’t speak to Endless Summer’s sales numbers — surely the deluxe reissue treatment it received in 2007 must have...
5 tags
Totally wired
The secret lives of teenagers aren’t so secret. They’re just password protected and might only be on view to a close circle of Facebook friends. Alternately, they might be lived via text message or on YouTube. Typically only the most sensational and tragic episodes involving wired teens seem to make the news — pregnancy pacts, cyber bullying, suicides — even if teenagers were...
August 2010
6 posts
7 tags
Portraits of Jason
“The black queen is not interested in sympathy,” intones the artist Tim Roseborough dryly in Portrait of Jason II: Rebirth of the B*tch , his “sequel” to Shirley Clarke’s 1967 film Portrait of Jason. It’s one of many verbal snaps issued by Roseborough’s piece, a séance with and tribute to its titular subject currently on view at the tiny Scenius...
3 tags
Lights out! Not Necessarily Noir is a thrilling...
Like many of its hardboiled antiheros, film noir is a career criminal on the lam. Constantly eluding the clutches of the historically particular and categorically retentive, it’s especially skilled at flying under the radar only to stealthily reappear years down the line. Just look at the number of times it has been sighted (as well as cited) since its initial appearance in postwar...
4 tags
In the dumps
From Kurt Schwitters’ dwelling-consuming accretion The Merzbau to Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s silhouette-casting garbage heaps, making art from the discard pile is by no means a new gesture. It can still be a potent one, though, as evinced by “Art at the Dump,” a 20-year survey of the fruits of Recology’s artist in residence program at Intersection for the...
4 tags
Back with a 'Vengeance'
With a near 50-feature filmography filled with its share of double-crossed gunslingers, wronged toughs, and shattered loyalties, director Johnnie To knows a thing or two about vengeance. To’s latest bullet-riddled ballet follows a familiar trajectory for the Hong Kong filmmaker and his frequent collaborator Wai Ka Fai (who wrote the screenplay; Vengeance, which played the San Francisco...
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"The kids aren't alright: Todd Solondz provokes...
The Kids Are Alright isn’t the only film this summer that subtly skewers the suburban upper-middle class by following a seemingly well-adjusted family as they’re thrown into crisis when a shadowy father figure attempts to enter their orbit. Only in the case of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, instead of a sperm donor, Dad is a convicted child molester.
A quasi-sequel to...
7 tags
"The Yellow Wallpaper"
New York City construction workers at the World Trade Center site recently unearthed an 18th-century ship hull. More interesting is that scientists believe that the structure was part of the massive landfill that extended lower Manhattan further into the Hudson River. You don’t have to read too deep to hit on the symbolism of this story, even if the occurrence at its center...
July 2010
6 posts
6 tags
"According to Matthew"
It is an understatement to say that the work of Matthew Barney elicits strong reactions. Critics have alternately hailed him as “the most important American artist of his generation” (that’s the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman) and complained of his art’s Wagnerian grandiosity, needless inscrutability, pretentiousness, and icy perfection...
8 tags
"Group think"
“Calder to Warhol,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s giant introductory survey of the Fisher collection, isn’t the only big summer show happening right now. With its wanted poster-style flyer design and a menacing title that could have come from a hardboiled paperback, “They Knew What They Wanted” is an exquisite corpse of a group show, pieced ...
3 tags
Mr. Resnais' Wild ride
Alain Resnais’ feisty new film, Wild Grass, is a bit of a head-scratcher. I was as charmed as I was confused. But I’m glad I didn’t leave the screening room feeling as if I had all the pieces. As my bf pointed out, it’s a little strange how the film’s US promotional campaign loudly trumps Resnais’ now-canonical past achievements (“from the director of Last...
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"7th Heaven: Another Hole in the Head"
In Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, the President of the United States, in a final bid to save the human race, implores the space invaders before him with the exhortation: “Little people, can’t we all just get along?” Needless to say, he doesn’t live. A cursory scan of the battle-poised titles at this year’s Another Hole in the Film Festival similarly answers “Hell nah” to any notions of smiling on your...
5 tags
"Dizzy dazzle: The enormous and impressive Fisher...
Let’s start with the obvious: the massive art collection of Gap Inc. founders Doris and the late Don Fisher is by far one of the largest and most significant windfalls SFMOMA has received in its 75-year history. More important, the collection — which had primarily been viewable throughout the Gap’s SF headquarters only by company employees and visiting tour groups — is finally...