Editors note: Award-winning reporter and former KTVU news anchor Leslie Griffith sent us this dispatch.

By Leslie Griffith

Tonight you can watch the mother lode of reality shows. It’s called “Bad Voodoo War,” and it airs on PBS’ Frontline. “Bad Voodoo War” is the story of a platoon of 30 soldiers in Iraq armed with both military might and camcorders. Cameras are attached to their humvees and carried in their hands as they take us on a mind-molesting mine-field of monotony that turns into an eruption of violence and leaves viewers sitting as anxious as nervous fingers on a loaded gun.

Director Deborah Scranton (“The War Tapes”) uses her brilliant subject as reporter theme to tell “Bad Voodoo’s War.” With very few “embeds,” (journalists reporting from Iraq,) Scranton jars us into the reality of war by forcing us to see through the eyes of the soldiers.

She chose a California based National Guard unit with seasoned soldiers. Almost all of them have seen prior active duty. They are not wide-eyed “want to be” warriors. They know the ropes, and they know a meaningful mission when they see one. Viewers get the impression there are many reasons to doubt this mission is worth the lives of the extraordinary men Scranton’s cameras introduce us to.

At 18 years old, when most of our sons are working to get into someone’s pants, Jason Shaw learned how to tie tourniquets around his pant legs to keep himself and his fellow soldiers from “bleeding out” during battle. While fighting for control of the Baghdad airport in 1993, the 18-year-old Shaw was awarded the Military’s third highest award for valor, The Silver Star.

He lost six of his best friends during that tour, returned to the states and moved to California to help care for the child of one of those buddies killed in action. Shaw, suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, lost his girlfriend and his religion and insisted on returning to die with his “brothers” if he had to. He did not want them in a fight he might be able to help them win. His fear of them dying on the battlefield without him was stronger than his fear of returning to Iraq. He is now 22 years old in “Bad Voodoo War.” I wonder if he understands the bravest people are always afraid.

By Ailene Sankur

A friend forwarded me this New York Times blog post on literary deal-breakers: the idea of the book on the shelf of the person you’re dating that would make you say, “You know what? I think we want different things in life.”

One great comment to the blog:

“I’m a huge book snob, but it’s a devotion to the overpraised middle ground, the NPR and Oprah-approved canon that would turn me off a person.

Give me a lover of James Patterson and Nora Roberts any day over someone who thinks Lethem and Safran Foer are geniuses. Who likes a striver?

The sight of a woman reading Javier Marias, Robert Musil, Frank O’Hara or just about any of the NYRB titles and I’m immediately smitten.”

This is my feeling about books. I read everything from Harlequin novels to (my favorite author of all time) Graham Greene. I’ve read Proust waxing poetic about Madeleins (eagerly) , and Joyce jabbering on about Leo Blum (reluctantly), but I’ve also read the entire Nora Roberts Key Trilogy (Key of Light, Key of Knowledge, Key of Valor). I enjoyed all of them in different ways, but equally.

Proust

But lately I’ve been feeling very nastily elitist, intellectually snobby towards those lovers of anything on the Oprah Book Club.

By Vanessa Carr

Independent music and DIY culture can come like flashes of hope through the dark days of teenage dorkdom. For me, it was Bikini Kill's first album on tape.

The revelation: something better is out there. And better yet, one can actually have a role in creating it.

Once a small-town kid growing up in Neenah, Wisconsin, graphic designer and poster artist Jason Munn tapped into a similar sense of inspired possibility. As a skateboarder with a crew of like-minded friends, he was influenced early on by skateboard graphics and the album art of bands like the Promise Ring and Boys Life.

Munn, 32, now lives in Oakland, where he has been running The Small Stakes design studio since 2003. He continues to draw stylistic and psychic inspiration from punk's handmade aesthetic and DIY ethos.

Munn's stunningly precise silkscreen show posters for artists, ranging from Battles and LCD Soundsystem to Sufjan Stevens and Modest Mouse, have made him a minor celebrity among design nerds and indie rockers alike. Not that you'd ever know it: in person he is soft-spoken and humble, certainly not the kind of guy who goes around telling people, for instance, that his work is part of the San Francisco MoMA's permanent collection, or that it's regularly featured in PRINT Magazine and Communication Arts.

This Friday night (4/4), Munn will be selling limited edition art prints and gig posters at Bloom Screen Printing in Oakland. Munn's prints will be on sale for $5-$25. Bloom Screen Printing posters will also be for sale.

SFBG: When did you start making music-related posters?

Jason Munn: I started in [art] school. A lot of my projects were music-related even when they weren't supposed to be, because that was what I was interested in. I was working in another design studio at the time – after school – and at night a lot I was doing these kind of things just to do what I wanted to do and also to build up a portfolio of the kind of work that I really wanted to show people, which was not necessarily the stuff I was doing at my day job.

I moved out here in 2002, again with no plans at all. About a month after I moved out here, two people I met were booking shows in Berkeley at a place they called the Ramp. It was in the basement of this church in Berkeley, and they were doing one show a month – really great shows, a lot of local bands, and a lot of bands that will play the Fillmore when they come through now: Animal Collective, Deerhoof, Why? – a lot of local things, but also touring acts. But again, it was only one show a month, and it was only open for a year. It was essentially when I started doing posters. They asked me to do a poster for each show. I wanted to silkscreen, but I didn't know how. I had done a little bit of silkscreening in school, so I had a real basic knowledge of it. The first job I had out here I was actually temping at a silkscreen shop – I printed the t-shirts. So basically they would burn the screens for me and I would print from home. I made a huge mess and it was a huge learning process.

I probably did six or seven posters, and then I met a guy in Oakland who was printing another job for me that I did the design work for. His name is Nat and he runs a screenprinting shop in Oakland called Bloom Screen Printing. It's a small shop, and he basically taught me a ton about printing. I started printing my stuff there, and he was showing me lots of tricks, random things that I was having trouble with. He was looking at the stuff I was doing at home and was like, "This is what you're doing wrong." It was really cool. I still print there – he also prints larger jobs for me, although he is a pretty in-demand printer.

SFBG: How do you make it work financially?

First: what an amazingly over-the-top press kit housing season four's opening episode. The disk came tucked in the rear pocket of a framed, numbered print of the Battlestar Galactica cast in Last Supper mode. Quite a souvenir for the trophy room - the first episode of the series' fourth and final season airs Friday, April 4.

The April 4 season opener, "He That Believeth in Me," unfolds as pals/lovers Lee "Apollo" Adama and Kara "Starbuck" Thrace trade glances from their respective ships as they fly alongside each other. Starbuck assures him that she's been to Earth and he's "gonna love it." Oh, yeah? Vipers and Raiders battle, splattering organic toaster guts on Starbuck's windshield: splashy! The opening episode boasts notably more nuanced, beautifully realized special effects - the powers-that-be are clearly not holding anything back for the last season. The cinematography and effects here are lush, showy, and cinematic in their detail.

Surprise! Starbuck's hubby Sam is now a Viper pilot and he suits up and gets ready to take on his Cylon brethren for the first time - leading to an eerie mano-y-mano, eyeball-to-Cylon-iris-scan moment when a Raider turns and connects with him. The Cylons seem to have the humans on the run but suddenly they turn back. Has sleeper Cylon Sam been "activated"? The knowing looks exchanged by all the new humanoid Cylons reach some kind of climax as now-outed-Cylon/once-ace-Cylon-hater Colonel Saul Tigh fantasizes about shooting his best friend, Admiral William Adama, in a dream sequence reminiscent of Sharon "Boomer" Valerii's assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Dr. Gaius Balthar gets drawn into a sweet lil' female-dominated (sex) cult of sorts: is it a fantasy or nightmare come true? And has Balthar become a faith healer, he of little faith? The egotistical scientist's semi-comic scenes are always a welcome relief amid BSG's general gloom. The mystery surrounding Starbuck's seeming death and sudden reappearance deepens: she says she simply woke up at one point - after her ship apparently burst into flames - and found herself flying above Earth. She has photos and everything. Nevertheless, everyone thinks she's a Cylon.

Clearly a transitional episode, "He That Believeth in Me" sets up more questions than it answers. Newbies will wonder what the fuss is all about; enthralled BSGers will be satisfied that so many narrative threads are getting picked up and tugged.

By Justin Juul

Call me crazy, but I'm a beer man. Liquor's okay too, but wine? Wine has got to go. I absolutely cannot stand the stuff. In fact, there's only one thing I hate more than wine and that's wine snobs. Now, this may sound funny coming from a man who serves expensive wine every night at a fancy boutique in North Beach, but come on! Get over it rich dudes. Wine is rotten grape juice and that's it. There are no hints of currant or raspberry in there. There is no bouquet. Oh, sir, you want me to tell you what the Captain's Reserve 02 Pinot tastes like? It fucking tastes like wine! And it smells like wine. From Two-Buck Chuck to the fanciest merlot, wine is sour, bitter, and fucking stupid. It's certainly no match for a nice pint of Hoegarden or even a Beam&Coke, for that matter. But there's a new wine coming out this week that has me rethinking my stance on the matter. Are you ready for this?!

Crunk (or krunk, or qronk?) purveying rapper Lil Jon just went public with his own wine label. Hu-What?! Hu-What?!! Yeeeeeeaaaaahhhh!!!

I can't freakin' wait to describe "Little Jonathan Cabernet, '06" to a table of over-privileged yupsters. "Well, you see, sirs," I'll say. "This particular vintage features a very special blend of petit syrah, cab, and malbec grapes - which are originally from Argentina, but are now being grown in Napa as well. It's earthy, toasty, and a bit jammy for a California blend and if you just let it linger on your tongue long enough, you'll be able to taste THE SWEAT FROM MY BALLZ, BITCHES! SKEET SKEET SKEET!"

Or maybe I'll just describe the wine in Lil Jon's own words. Here's how he responded to a journalist who asked him about his wine:

"This is not no ghetto Boone's Farm; this is some real wine." To which he added, "I'm not like an expert, so don't ask me no questions."

Lil Jon, you are my hero.

By Erick Lyle

Chris Carlsson, one of the founders of Critical Mass, has long been one of San Francisco’s most notable utopian tinkerers. Through projects like his magazine Processed World and his radical archive Shaping San Francisco, he has devoted much unpaid labor to investigating lost people’s history and to imagine possibilities for a better world. In 2004, he turned his attention to the future with After the Deluge, a speculative fiction novel about a post-economic San Francisco of 2157 where compulsory work has nearly been abolished and the Financial District has been submerged in rising floodwaters caused by global warming.

Carlsson’s brand-new book, Nowtopia (AK Press, 288 pages, $18.95), looks, instead, for seeds of that money-free utopia in the present, with chapters focusing on subjects as diverse as vacant-lot gardeners, the growing bio-fuels movement, the rise of Bike Kitchens across the nation, and Burning Man. Carlsson shows that as our economy, civic institutions, and faith in the system continue to break down, there are people all over the world organizing autonomously to “build the new world in the shell of the old.”

SFBG: In Nowtopia, you highlight groups of people who are doing very diverse things. How do you perceive that, say, the open source software movement, the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, and people who farm empty lots in West Oakland are related?
CHRIS CARLSSON: I tried to reduce those things to the common thread that they are all forms of self-expressive behavior that people are doing outside of work and outside of what they consider to be political. People are coming together to try to add to their depth of experience, or to make their lives worth living. All of the activities in the book also represent people who have a creative engagement with technology.

By Justin Juul

Tax season is here, and math is hard. That's why you need to get on the Math Bus.

PS -- If you don't know what internet phenomenon this is spoofing, you really need to watch more porn.

By Ailene Sankur

Valyntina Grenier is no stranger to poetry. By her undergrad senior year at U.C. Berkeley, she had already put together two chapbooks and now she's in the second year of an M.F.A. in Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California.

She is also no stranger to bars: she works as a bartender at Lanesplitter () in Oakland. And it was her friendship with two other East Bay bartenders on which she built her Back Room Live (www.lifelongpress.blogspot.com) reading series. Most people go to bars to have mindless fun, relax, get wasted; Valyntina used them as a vehicle for “…a polyphony of voices, united by the desire to make art, enjoy language, and drink a pint or two.”

First, Sheila from the wonderful Hotsy Totsy Club in Albany let Valyntina read the poetry from her first chapbook. (Incidentally, the Hotsy Totsy Club, in a not particularly trendy East Bay neighborhood, wins the dive bar competition against San Francisco anyday.) The readings were well-received by the bar crowd. After those experiences, she toyed with the idea of doing another reading series at a bar. After befriending Tony, the bartender at McNally’s Irish Pub in Oakland, she asked if she could do a reading series there. He agreed, and after it proved successful Back Room Live became a monthly event—on the last Saturday of each month.

Valyntina, now in her M.F.A. program, decided to bring together others from the creative writing masters program -- both students and faculty -- as well as other Bay Area poets and authors.

Literary readings have long been thought of as the property of dim bookstores, mousy clerks shakily whispering introductions to authors, bad wine, and an intellectual elitist. With the Back Room Live series,Valyntina wanted to get away from that. She says, “My initial impetus was the sense that if you’re not in academia, and even sometimes if you are, you can feel left out of literary events. So I thought by bringing it to the bar, people would be engaged in it. Really just to broaden the community, get different genres of writers together and people together who wouldn’t necessarily go to hear writers…”

The reading series became so popular Valyntina decided to publish a Back Room Live Reading Series magazine, sold online and at Diesel Books, Book Zoo, and Pegasus (all in Oakland). The magazine is published through Valyntina’s other venture: Life Long Press Publishing.

According to intern Ailene Sankur, sometimes a girl just needs a subpar, average meal at a crappy chain restaurant.

I have a confession to make: sometimes, I need to go to a chain restaurant. I know, I know, I live in a gourmand’s paradise. And yes, I love to support family-owned small Indian, Turkish, and Mexican joints. I hate corporations, hate cheesiness, hate tchotchkes and flair. But sometimes, I just need to go into my happy suburban place. The place that takes me back to the Target, Ross, and TJ Maxx stores of my youth, with their big, wide, unmonitored parking lots where I could probably leave my car for weeks unnoticed.
Yes, the food is subpar, but it’s consistent in its average-ness. And sometimes, you want to step away from all the culinary razzle-dazzle and just eat something blah in a place where the “kooky, original” décor is the same as it is in your fave chain back home for a Twilight-zone eerie, but strangely soothing effect. Talk about Walter Benjamin’s theories of “art in the age of mechanical production” in a ginormous booth—another wonderful thing about chains…no more tiny wood tables crammed next to a loud kitchen—decorated in southwestern tiles and a big sign that says “Chili cook-off.”

So, if you’re like me and sometimes you just want to eat an homage to your Stepford childhood, here’s a list of chain restaurants close to the city:

Passover's around the corner (starts Saturday, as a matter of fact), so what better way to celebrate than with a bit of Jewtube humor?

And don't forget to buy your last minute seder supplies at popjudaica.com. Where else will you find a "Let My People Go" toilet seat?

By Justin Juul

Snazzy!

My birthday’s coming up in May, so for all of my fans out there, here’s what you should get me: A Brew Holster. And don’t just get one for me. Get one for yourself too. Just imagine all the BBQ’s you’ll be attending this spring and summer. Don’t you want to be the freshest dude/chick in the park? Yes you do. But what exactly is a Brew Holster you ask. It’s a gun sling for beer, but the awesomeness doesn’t stop there. Brew Holsters are made by two members of SF’s very own all-girl AC/DC tribute band, AC/DShe, so they’re extra-extra cool.

Nici and Sara, the guitarist and bassist from Ac/DShe, came up with the idea when they realized that double-fisting cheap beer, while simultaneously jammin’ out with their clams out, was not as great as it sounded. Following a few close calls with drenched t-shirts and wet amps, the girls hit their backyard chop shop and The Brew Holster Cult was born. All you need to do to join the cult is to buy one of the things, so go visit their website and prepare yourself for the biggest balls of them all: backyard BBQ’s, outdoor concerts, and Bay to Breakers. Springtime in SF just got a whole lot cooler.

Get 'em here, suds-slingers: www.brewholstercult.com

At the Femina Potens gallery, oil painter Alicia DeBrincat, photographer Rocksusto, and paper cut artist Lex McQuilkin take a fresh look at gender, sexuality, societal expectations and ethics in Neu Wave Feminism, a group show that opened April 5.

DeBrincat's "Cultural Corset" series examines how women's identities and societal expectations play out on the terrain of the body. She is interested in how American culture is simultaneously obsessed with the female body and repulsed by its natural form.

Her huge oil paintings portray female nudes with a stunning realism – breasts small and large, thighs puckered with cellulite, rounded bellies.

"The paint is applied with an attention to anatomical detail that both celebrates women's bodies and references the leering voyeurism and minutely critical gaze that the female body encounters," she writes in her artist statement.

Photographer Rocksuto has also taken a thematic approach to her work. In 2007, she embarked on A Photo a Day project, which explored a range of themes, such as population, foreclosures, sexual ethics, trust fund nihilism, and chickens.

This year, she's embarked on A Photo a Month project, where she's limited her thematic exploration to gender roles, sexual ethics, and religion.

Lex McQuilkin's swirling, delicate paper cuts explore gender and masculinity from queer perspective. Her latest series, Good Old Boys, explores the precariousness of masculinity and its portrayal.

Gender and sexuality -- not tired!

Neu Wave Feminism
April 5 - 27, 2008
Gallery hours: Thurs-Sun, 12-6 p.m.
Femina Potens Gallery
2199 Market, SF
415-864-1558

By Justin Juul

Perhaps inevitably, long-awaited doc Ghostride The Whip: The Story of The Hyphy Movement screens this Thursday, April 24th at UC Berkeley. (It'll be available on DVD this July after it makes some rounds. )

At first glance, it’s a movie about riding around on top of and outside your car while listening to goofy music, dropping e, and acting tough (duh). I was all set to write about how tired the film sounds and how played out the ghostriding phenomenon is, but I decided to do some research before opening my big mouth.

And now, well, what can I say? After spending an hour on Ghostride The Whip director DJ Vlad’s MySpace, I have become a full-blown fan. I still think ghostriding is ridiculous, and I can’t say I like hyphy music (or wasting gas), but holy shit, have you seen all the video tributes this Bay Area ghetto pastime has spawned? Maybe this is a perfect time to immortalize this movement onscreen. Here are a few of my favorites:

Ghostride the Granny

Extreme Ghostride!!!

By Vanessa Carr

Aaron Koblin's Ten Thousand Cents

It's hard to believe that San Francisco, the very birthplace of Web 2.0, has lacked a gallery space dedicated to new interactive media arts – until now.

Tomorrow, Gray Area Gallery, whose space closed last year, celebrates the launch of what is, in effect, its 2.0 rebirth – Gray Area Beacon (GAB) – which claims to be the first San Francisco gallery space to focus exclusively on the intersection of art and technology.

"This is the moment in time for the Bay Area to celebrate and appreciate technology-based art," said GAB co-founder Josette Melchor. "[GAB] is trying to provide a home for exhibits, ideas, and interaction."

GAB's launch party on Tuesday, 4/22, coincides with the first day of the Web 2.0 Expo and features four pieces by local artist Aaron Koblin in his first ever San Francisco show.

Aaron Kiblin's New York Talk Exchange

Recently featured in Wired Magazine and the New York MoMA, Koblin's work creates visualizations of large datasets and human systems that explore some very Web 2.0 themes:digital labor marketplaces, online collaborations, and global communications.

"I thought [Koblin] was perfect because of [his] Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents pieces," Melchor told the Guardian. "He's used online means to get people to collaborate to create a large scale installation."

Koblin's Sheep Market features 10,000 sheep drawn by online "workers" from around world, each of whom were paid two cents to draw "a sheep facing left" using the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace.

Similarly, Ten Thousand Cents, Koblin's collaboration with artist Takashi Kawashima, is a digital representation of a one-hundred dollar bill made up of one thousand tiny squares reproduced by anonymous online laborers who worked without knowledge of the overall picture. Each worker was paid one penny for his or her work, which amounted to $100 in total.

THURS/24

The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007) Catherine Breillat steps back from one of her bluntest provocations -- 2006’s Anatomy of Hell -- to deliver this barbed, intelligent adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1851 novel. Asia Argento is heroic as the titular courtesan, a seething, powerful woman working outside bourgeoisie bounds. On the eve of his marriage to a suitably chaste maiden, the entitled, Mick Jagger-lipped Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) narrates his decade-long affair with the magnetic mistress to his fiancées grandmother (she’s rapt). Locked into place by an attraction at once destructive and indestructible, they’re not star-crossed lovers so much as fatal accomplices. An intriguing cocktail of classical framing and modern malaise, The Last Mistress is Breillat’s best work in years -- not least of all because of her clear affection for the material. (Max Goldberg)
7 p.m. Castro
FRI/25

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2007) Alexandra’s seventy-something title figure (Galina Vishnevskaya) takes the laborious journey to Chechnya, where the grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) she hasn’t seen in seven years is stationed at a large army base. This latest by Russian master Sokurov isn’t exactly narrative-driven -- Alexandra wanders about the vast compound and war-torn nearby town, trying to re-instill a little humanity between weary, wary occupiers and occupied -- but it’s one of his least abstract, most emotionally direct works. In her first film role (and a non-singing one), veteran opera singer Vishnevskaya etches a character whose long-suffering indomitableness is Mother Courage as Mother Russia. (Dennis Harvey)
7 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, noon, Kabuki; May 4, 4:15 p.m., PFA

Black Belt (Shunichi Nagasaki, Japan, 2007) Hai karate! Ably armed with authentic martial arts aces in lead roles and a stripped and ripped discipline that allows for only one or two evil cackles from warlord villains, auteur Nagasaki transforms his masterful piece of genre filmmaking into a brink-of-WWII parable about the uses of power and the wisdom of passive resistance. The year is 1932 and an imperialist Japan has just invaded Manchuria. The next takeover: a peaceful Kyushu karate dojo where the students -- arrogant and aggressive Taikan (Tatsuya Naka), dutiful and gentle Giryu (Akihito Yagi), and peacemaker Choei (Yuji Suzuki) -- are not quite ready to go quietly into the armed forces. Black Belt trounces typical CG kung fu: the fact that the actors are karate masters gives the film a texture of authenticity unseen since the days of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan, lending weight to thoughts and deeds. (Kimberly Chun)
8:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/27, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/29, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, England, 2007) Adapted from Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane -- which takes it’s name from a London street on which many immigrants reside -- is a clichéd, romantic, finding-one’s-home story. After her mother commits suicide, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is forced to leave Bangladesh in order to marry Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who lives in London, England. There, she submits herself to the unexciting life of pre-arranged marriage until she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), who sweeps her off her feet. One of the most aggravating things about the film is that Nazneen finds the power to take charge of her life through her affair with Karim. Apparently her daughter’s constant plea for Nazneen to start verbalizing her will was of secondary importance. (Maria Komodore)
7:15 p.m., Kabuki

"The Golem with Black Francis" (Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, Germany, 1920) An original score composed and played live by the Pixies’ leader is a mighty enticement, but even without it, this classic 1920 German silent would be worth seeing in a promised beautiful archival print. Drawn from medieval Jewish folklore, it tells of a rabbi’s creation of a clay man to protect the ethnic ghetto from a Christian emperor’s heavy hand. Co-directed by Wegener, one of the masters of cinematic German expressionism (who also plays the Golem), it’s an impressive, strikingly designed mix of horror, history and political commentary. (Harvey)
9:30 p.m., Castro

Tonight seems to be the time to check out that storefront marked Fecal Face Dot Gallery - you know, right where Go-Ugh tears into Market, near the delish Brazilian meats playzone, Espetus Churrascaria. Tonight, "Kottie Paloma and the Daily Strangers," the space's first solo show, opens from 6 to 9 p.m. The Guardian rhapsodized former Low Gallery honcho and Fecal Face impessario John Trippe way back when (and we dug the art-opening photos he'd contribute to the paper), so get out and support his latest project. He e-mails:

"Featuring over 250 5-by-7-foot graphite portraits that San Francisco artist Kottie Paloma produced over the last 2 years (each titled A Daily Stranger), the work forms a survey of the strangers in Kottie's life.

"The Daily Strangers series is based on the idea of seeing the same person on a daily basis without ever getting to know that person. They are just a face in one's life. An interesting individual kept at a safe distance. To get to know these particular strangers could possibly ruin whatever fantasy one has made up in their head about these people.

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This year, it's Asia Argento's festival, and we're all just invited. I've heard through the grapevine that Asia will not be in attendance at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, but her diva-ness will exude throughout. She's in no less than three festival films this year, a feat I can't remember ever having been duplicated (if you were quick enough, a fourth one, Boarding Gate, recently opened and closed in San Francisco).

Asia Argento picnics in The Last Mistress

Asia has always struck me as an unholy fusion of Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz, but far more daring and alluring. In her father Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, she looks unbearably sexy striding through the streets of Rome in a black raincoat. A raincoat! She's not so much an actress as she is a force of nature; she explodes rather than performs. None of her films can be categorized as trifling, bland or boring, and she sets the bar for guts at this year's festival. Among the rest of this year's films one can find elements of psychotronic cinema: dangerous marginal ideas like time-travel, ghosts, murder, martial arts, gore and sex. This is no shoe-gazing, hand-wringing fest. We've got some of the strangest films since Harmony Korine's Gummo turned up in 1998.

Events kick off tonight with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress -- starring Asia -- and the big opening night party. I'll talk more about the film tomorrow. After that, I'll do my best to prowl around the festival front lines, and report back on what I see. I'll be here every day, unless I somehow fry my retinal nerves in the meantime...

Five random early picks: Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Peter Chan's The Warlords, Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra and Craig Baldwin's Mock Up on Mu.

By Justin Juul

Broke Ass Stuart is a travel writer, an SF cult hero, and one of the luckiest sunzabitches you will ever meet. Not only does he get paid to travel the world and write, but he also gets to do it as himself. Most travel writers have to water their stories down for those crappy airplane magazines or they just write thousands of fact-of-the-matter-reviews designed for hurried tourists. But not Stuart. He doesn’t have to do any of that shit.

His first book, Broke Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco, which he originally published himself as a zine, helped him carve a niche as a new voice in an industry overpopulated by impersonal clones. Since releasing his first book, Stuart has gone on to write a second SF edition and he recently spent ten months in New York doing research for his newest book, Broke Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York City. Sounds like a dream come true doesn’t it? Well, apparently travel writing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After four years of writing Broke Ass Stuart books and doing odd jobs for Lonely Planet, Stuart’s life is in shambles. He’s homeless, disoriented, and still broke-as-fuck.

The Guardian caught up with Stuart recently to remind him that his job is awesome and that other financially challenged writers (ahem) would kill to be in his position.

SFBG: So what’s up with your New York book? Did you make tons of money off it?
Stuart: No dude. Let me tell you, writing books is not the way to wealth and fame. I blew through my New York advance pretty quick and wound up waiting tables the whole time I was there. The book’s not coming out till November so I won’t be getting any royalties for a long time. I can’t even think about that money, really. I mean, I’ve been waiting tables for nine years.

SFBG: Shit. Yeah. So have I actually.
Stuart: It’s like a fuckin’ bad habit. It’s such a weird subculture, you know? Like people in the restaurant fucking each other, tons of drugs. And then you get out at night and you’re all revved up from dealing with assholes all night…

SFBG: So you take all your tips and go blow it another bar.
Stuart: Exactly. It’s definitely, uh, special.

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Tonight, I'm off to see Roy Andersson's You, the Living and then Frank Black's live accompaniment to 1920’s The Golem. Three years ago at SFIFF, I saw Frank Borzage's 1927 Street Angel with a live score by the American Music Club, and it was one of the great movie nights of my life. I hope this one comes close.

Word has it that Roy Andersson's You, the Living blows -- in the best possible sense

The Golem will soon be hit with a wave of Frank Black's sonic mutilation

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I found it vaguely irresponsible, and perhaps even cruel, that the festival programmed its two most high-profile horror pictures on the same night at around the same time. Dario Argento's Mother of Tears and Paul Wegener's 1920 film The Golem both played Friday night between 9 and 11 p.m. I managed to see the Argento film in advance: Mother of Tears is the third in a trilogy that Argento began with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), but unlike those two this one is laughably awful. Written and performed in stilted English, it's filled with continuity gaps, logic holes and otherwise unmotivated behavior. But its use of gratuitous nudity, gratuitous gore (much of it actually done with latex rather than CGI!) and gratuitous random acts of cruelty make it a hilarious, MST3K-style cult classic keeper. Not to mention that Asia Argento, though not exactly deserving of an Oscar, manages to inject enough sheer animal presence into the movie to make it worth sticking around.

Mother of Tears is supposed to get a theatrical release in June, while SFIFF's particular version of The Golem was a one-time deal. The screening boasted a live score by none other than Black Francis (once again going by his Pixies-era moniker, rather than Frank Black or Charles Thompson). The good news is that it was a great Black Francis show, but the bad news is that I'm not sure the songs actually synced up with or enhanced the movie in any way. For the most part they actually rubbed up against the movie, competed with it for our attention. In 2005, American Music Club's score for Frank Borzage's Street Angel (1927), was pure genius, absolutely mesmerizing. Francis' The Golem played a bit more like syncing up Pink Floyd to The Wizard of Oz (1939); sometimes something magical happened, melding music and film, but other times, you were trapped in some netherworld between the two forms.

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The first Saturday of the SF International Film Festival is usually loaded. This year, the broad array of movies included some disappointments: the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts showed that Phil's a genius with wide-ranging talents and interesting friends, but it lacked drama; Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails was a letdown from the director of the masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978).

The Castro had the day's best films, starting with Carlos Saura's magical Fados, so far one of my favorites in the festival. Fado has recently come back in a big way and Saura does little more than stage several music videos back-to-back with no commentary. But each segment overflows with its own narrative and emotional power, aided by Saura's expert staging and cinematography (the screen fills with huge squares of bold colors).

Carlos Saura's Fados completes a trilogy by the director

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The SF International Film Festival has always been open to Iranian films. Festival-goers have been able to see Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1996 A Moment of Innocence and 1998 The Silence, Jafar Panahi's 2000 The Circle, Jazireh Ahani's 2005 Iron Island, and a whole batch of Abbas Kiarostami films (he was given the festival's "achievement in directing" award in 2000). But lately the output of Iranian films has slowed. The unfriendly Bush-era climate could be responsible for fewer Iranian films being imported to the U.S. Or it could be that the burst of new cinema from the 1990s has run its course.

This year's SFIFF only has only one Iranian film and it's a decidedly minor work, though still difficult to pinpoint. Mania Akbari was a painter when Kiarostami cast her as the driver for his experimental digital feature Ten (2002). The filmmaking bug bit her and she embarked on her own directorial debut, 20 Fingers (2004), a solid, if sentimental look at different facets of men/women relationships. Now, with Kiarostami's blessing, she's returned with the official sequel to Ten, entitled 10 + 4.

10+4, good buddy

Akbari was diagnosed with cancer and decided to make 10+4 about her disease (and about her chemotherapy and resulting baldness). I don't like disease-of-the-week pictures anyway, but when the disease is real, forming a critical analysis is doubly hard. And when the filmmaker is prone to overreaching (Akbari is), it's triply difficult. Perhaps making 10+4 helped Akbari come to terms with her illness, and perhaps it will do the same for someone else who watches it. At the very least, some of the film's segments have a power of their own, hinting that the Iranian New Wave hasn't entirely dissipated.

I needed a hero to get through this morning after, and you came from the ceiling to save me.

And thank YOU, gay mafia (Brock at SFist, via DListed, obviously via somewhere in Georgia or Alabama) for passing the above to me. Hope that tuck's insured!

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Well, I wasn't able to catch up with Errol Morris this time around, and I'm bummed, but I secured an interview with screenwriter extraordinaire Robert Towne, which I will share with you later in the week.

I did catch up with Touching Home, the feature debut by local twins Logan and Noah Miller, and after watching it I suspect that their future may lie more in the realm of producing than directing or acting; their meetings may be more interesting than their movies.

Touching Home touches upon Christmas

Apparently the Millers accosted Ed Harris outside the Castro Theater in 2006, when the actor received the festival's Peter J. Owens award. They pitched him their project and even showed him a trailer. The movie itself shows similar marketing smarts. It's the story of twin brothers, both baseball players, who dream of making the big time. One loses his scholarship and the other is fired from his bush league position, so they slink home, get jobs in the local quarry and hope for a chance in the spring in Arizona. Meanwhile, one brother reconnects with their alcoholic, gambling-addicted father (Harris) and finds a cute new girlfriend, leading to fights between the brothers.

By Justin Juul

I once lived with a girl whose bedroom looked and smelled exactly like a landfill. Stained panties, pieces of trash, and soup-bowls-turned-ashtrays were strewn from one corner of her private hellhole to the next. The strange thing was that if you had never seen this girl’s room you would have thought she was normal and nice. She dressed well, spoke eloquently, and never did anything too crazy. But I knew the truth. She may have looked nice on the outside, but I knew that somewhere deep down inside there lurked a slovenly beast with no regard for order or cleanliness, a heathen with dirty underpants. That’s the thing about bedrooms. The way we decorate them can reveal something about who we really are.

Bay Area photographer Andrew McClintock certainly understands this truth. He recently spent about five years documenting the living habits of young San Franciscans. So if you’ve ever wondered what all those waiters, starving artists, and late-night-computer nerds are really like, you should check out his show at the Bluesix Acoustic room. Prepare to be shocked.

Opening reception for Andrew McClintock’s Bedrooms Series
Friday, May 2nd. 7:30 PM.
Bluesix Acoustic Room
3043 24th. SF.