By Vanessa K. Carr

First Fridays aren't just for Oakland anymore: D-Structure now hosts art openings the first Friday of every month at their boutique in the Lower Haight.

After a successful show last month with painter Aaron Nagel, D-Structure is launching their latest exhibit, The Antique Roadshow, this Friday, 5/2. The launch party also celebrates the addition of San Francisco-based clothing line Correct Clothing to their stock.

According to Correct Clothing co-founder Thomas Lerou, "Correct Clothing is a lifestyle brand, which means we draw inspiration from the music and art that create the lifestyle. Our clothing will always be linked to music and art."

Coming Correct

The line keeps it simple – t-shirts and hats only – that they design to be more classic than trendy.

D-Structure's Antique Roadshow features more than 40 pieces of artwork by local artists Ian Hill, ZenTen, and TenFold, who together are known as the Swedish Milk Toast Collective. In his own way, each of these artists re-envisions the past from a futuristic perspective through the lens of urban and pop art.

Ian Hill's "Skeptic"

To make the event "a true antique bazaar and roadshow," says D-Structure's Cassidy Blackwell, the store will have "antique trinkets displayed all over the gallery space."

Tenfold takes it on the road

Music will be provided by local DJs Bogle, DJ Centipede, and Citizen Ten (a.k.a. artist TenZen).

The Antique Roadshow
Reception May 2, 8 p.m.
D-Structure
520 Haight, SF
415-252-8601

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I love the festival's crazy Late Show selections, but sometimes I miss them. Luckily, Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales screened for a third time on Wednesday afternoon. It's very reminiscent of John Cassavetes' 1974 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but not as focused. (Ferrara's style is even more rambling.)

Willem Dafoe plays Ray Ruby, a man living his dream by running a strip club. The trouble is that the club is failing, the girls haven't been paid and Ray loves to blow all his money on lotto tickets. A series of miniature dramas play out over the course of one night. Old friends stop in, new customers come and go, strippers dance and complain, and a man tries to sell organic hot dogs! A tanning booth explodes, nearly burning down the joint. The abrasive landlady (the great Sylvia Miles) shows up, threatening to let Bed, Bath and Beyond move in. A stripper called Monroe (Asia Argento) brings in her dog, which gets in the way. (She uses the dog in her act, and more or less makes out with him on stage.)

Bed, bath and beyond, baby!: The peerless Sylvia Miles with Go Go Tales director Abel Ferrara

By Justin Juul

Attention all aspiring American Apparel models! Stop eating this very moment and get yourself a one-way ticket to Downtown LA because your dreams are on the verge of crumbling. The rumors are true. As announced earlier this year, Polaroid, the world’s only instant film manufacturer, has officially announced that it will no longer be making instant film, which, of course, means that the low-fi, borderline racist, pseudo-amateur photographs American Apparel has built its legacy on will no longer be possible to produce and that the AA empire will soon crumble too. Yes, hipsters, the whole world is coming to an end.

But wait. Maybe I’m being too hasty. There is one niche market of highly influential people who, in all likelihood, will never let instant film die: art gallery curators. Their lives are about to become a whole lot easier. Soon, all they’ll need to do to guarantee a crowd is to find some random dude with a Polaroid collection and let him loose on their walls.

The End of Polaroid with Tod Brilliant is the first of what is surely to become a Bay Area tradition: The Polaroid Retrospective. Join Brilliant as he reminisces about instant film, talks about his photographs, and shares his vintage camera collection.

Artist’s Reception: May 9th from 6:00 – 9:00pm
Micro Gallery
602 Wilson St. Santa Rosa.
(707) 570-0128.

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Last night, Maria Bello accepted her Peter J. Owens award and hosted a screening of her new film Yellow Handkerchief. I haven't seen that film yet, but Bello will always have a place in my heart for her fearless performance in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005).

If you saw Buena Vista Social Club at the festival in 1999 and Calle 54 at the festival in 2001, then you may be familiar with the music of Israel 'Cachao' Lopez, the great Cuban songwriter and bassist who helped bring the mambo to popularity. The new Cachao: Uno Mas arrives just in time, given that Cachao passed away two months ago at the age of 89. It would be great to report that this 68-minute documentary was a worthy farewell, but it's far too brief and it breaks the cardinal rule of music films: it interrupts the songs with talking heads.

Cachao: Uno Mas talk at SFIFF

Jennique Mason weighs in on Du Haibin's Umbrella, also featured in Jeffrey M. Anderson's 'SFIFF, day ten' diary:

Director Du Haibin reveals the gap between labor and commodity in his modern-day documentary odyssey Umbrella. Beginning with the actual construction of mass-produced umbrellas in an urban factory, Du traces the product’s journey as it becomes increasingly divorced from its origins. He juxtaposes the tedium and repetition of factory work with the mindless chatter of umbrella merchants' wives who shamelessly lust after Audis and BMWs.

Can you stand under an umbrella?

Umbrella complicates these relationships with one beautiful shot after another. As factory workers, students and soldiers all attempt to shed their agricultural heritage, they find there are no guarantees in a consumer-based society. In creating a vast societal portrait through his focus on umbrellas, Du pulls off the rare feat of capturing the ephemeral. Umbrella takes modern life to its logical conclusion, succinctly stated by an auctioneer-type host at a job fair cattle call: “You go to school, so you can get a job, so you can make money, so you can buy a home, so you can start a family and send your children to school.”

Umbrella screens Thurs/8, 8:30 p.m. at the Kabuki

Jeffrey M. Anderson looks at the latest sinister magic act from veteran auteur Claude Chabrol:

Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two is about as good as any of his films, which is to say, it is highly skilled and hugely entertaining. Yet it will probably come and go fairly quickly. Chabrol made his fiftieth film a few years back, and when you make your fiftieth film, no one cares. If the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson live long enough to make fifty films, just see if anyone notices. If the quality of their films falls, people will complain, but if it stays the same, they'll be taken for granted, just like Chabrol. I guarantee it. Look at Ingmar Bergman. He cracked fifty films, and when his last, the great Saraband, opened in 2005, people could scarcely be bothered to even yawn.

Since Claude Chabrol has fewer unlicensed YouTube clips than feature films to his name, this still from A Girl Cut in Two will have to do

In any case, Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two tells the story of a love triangle. Beautiful, ambitious television weather girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) falls for the much older, but successful, married writer Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand). At the same time, a snotty, rich younger man, Paul (Benoît Magimel) is swept away by her and is even more intrigued by her utter indifference to him. The strong characters show at least two sides, slyly seducing one another while selfishly scheming. Chabrol moves the story ahead with a deceptively deft combination of humor and suspense. And of course, there's more. It just wouldn't be a Chabrol film if there weren't a murder or something equally sinister.

A Girl Cut in Two screens Tues/6, 9:30 p.m. at the Clay.

One female anchor is losing her job; another, her clothes

By Leslie Griffith

When Katie Couric was given the title of “America’s sweetheart it was a death knell. America relishes devouring its sweethearts.

If the news magazines and newspapers are correct, Katie Couric’s career at CBS, much like Dan Rather’s, is toast. The last chapters of this complex and revealing human drama are not written yet. But the plot, the sub-plots, the dialogue, the public’s perverse interest, and the motivations are nothing if not Shakespearean.

Two years ago, Couric was the first woman to anchor the evening news broadcast on one of the big three networks. On that day, I was called by local reporters for a quote. My own career in television began 26 years ago, about the same time as Couric’s. “It’s about time,” I told the newspaper reporters.

Couric and I have a few things in common. Bay Area viewers watched as I grew up before their eyes just as Katie Couric grew up in full view of the nation. Wives use to say in various ways, “You are the only other woman I will let my husband bring into the bedroom.” The intimacy of television is still very real, but the truth tellers of old are becoming history.

So -- at last! -- the platypus genome has been decoded, and it's apparently a doozie, much like the duck-billed, egg-laying, fur-covered, milk-producing wonder of nature itself.

Even more interesting for me this morning, however, was the discovery that a baby platypus is called a puggle. And that it looks like this:

Puggle-Aaaaw! Pic from NYtimes.com

May I be the first to cry out "Save the Nature!" at the sight of this adorable creature?

"I hear you callin', baby, but you ain't gettin' me. Not today, anyhow."

This week's Guardian features a trio of railroad-related stories. On the Lower Frequencies author Erick Lyle writes about the train-hopping photos of the Polaroid Kidd and the words and images of William T. Vollmann. Cinema Scope chief and film programmer Mark Peranson talks with James Benning about his new movie RR. And Bill Daniel talks about the passions and motivations behind his new book Mostly True, which mixes a wealth of new and vintage print material with excerpts of his beautiful train-tagging movie Who is Bozo Texino?.

The epic account of the improbable discovery of the world's greatest boxcar artist.

The SF International Film Festival's Golden Gate Awards ceremony took place last night. Below, Jeffrey M. Anderson sounds off on two films that nabbed honors: Best Documentary Feature winner Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, and FIPRESCI winner Ballast, by Lance Hammer:

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The documentary Up the Yangtze is a perfect companion piece to Jia Zhangke's Still Life. Both deal in specific ways with China's humongous Three Gorges project, although neither film ever goes into detail as to what the project -- which will displace some 2 million people -- is supposed to accomplish.

A trailer for Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze.

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

That blond firecracker Ludivine Sagnier, 28, turned up at the festival to accompany her new film A Girl Cut in Two, directed by the French new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, and she was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat. Sagnier is happy to talk about her character Gabrielle Deneige (or "Gabrielle Snow" in the English subtitles), a television weather girl who becomes torn between two men, an older, married author and a younger, rich, spoiled brat. But she's tickled to tell stories about her legendary director.

Ludivine Savignier times two.

"It was amazing," she says. "I thought I would never work with him because I didn't have that high society profile. I wasn't bourgeoisie enough to work with him. I actually felt like I was suddenly printing my name in the history books. Chabrol is such a monument in France. Not even working with him, but only talking with him was amazing. He would talk to me about Alfred Hitchcock: 'Oh Alfred asked me if I wanted to shoot a sequence in this movie.' Suddenly he's speaking about something that's far away, that belongs to history, but it's next door. Those were privileged moments to be able to share all those stories with him."

By Justin Juul

Thursday nights usually suck, but they just got a whole lot better. That’s right ya’ll, Dolores Park Movie Night is back in action. Last night’s screening of Soylent Green marked the second show of 2008, but there are plenty more to come. So get your BBQ grills, your mini-kegs, and a blanket; and don’t forget to bring a few bucks for the pot-brownie dude. You might not be able to hear the sound and you probably won’t be able to see the screen much, but you can rest assured you’re going to see some fresh costumes and drink a lot of beer. Plus, popcorn!

Dolores Park Movie Night
Free from April to October
The Second Thursday of Every Month @ 7:00pm
doloresparkmovie.org

By Justin Juul

When boring people think about heaven they envision angels and wings and clouds and gold and stuff like that. Other people, cooler people you might say, imagine a world where everything is free, where alcohol flows like water, where cigarettes provide nourishment, and where orgasms last for hours. And then there are people like Paul Cesewski, a well-known Bay Area artist who’s been making bicycle-powered carnival rides, kinetic sculptures, and other weird machines for something like a decade and a half. His vision of paradise is a sprawling landfill of garbage, scrap metal, and castoff PVC tubing. What a weirdo.

Material!

The cool thing about Cesewski’s version of heaven is that, unlike the angel and harp deal, it actually exists. It’s called the SF Dump and after years of trying, Cesewski has finally scored the Dump’s coveted artist-in-residence gig. He’s been wallowing in scrap metal, garbage, and PVC piping for the past three months and he’s about to let loose with a show. It’s only going on for two days so don’t miss the boat.

Paul Cesweski, clownin'

Paul Cesweski
SF Dump
503 Tunnel Ave. SF.
Free
May 23 (5:00 – 9:00)
May 24 (1:00 – 5:00)

A little bit of Italy down south: La Puerta Negra. Photo courtesy of Zancudo Times.

By Erik Morse

A-way down south past Baja, Calif., and the Rio Grande, through Mexico and the mountain ranges of Central America, which blossom into the fiery petals of Arenal volcano, there’s a tiny fishing village near the border of Costa Rica and Panama called Playa Zancudo. Along the town’s one gravel road that travels through the swamps and palm trees to the edge of the Osa Peninsula, passing shotgun shacks and mercados, sits one of the most delicious Italian restaurants this side of the Adriatic.

Christened La Puerta Negra according to the plywood sign near the dirt path entrance, this small trattoria is a simple concrete slab and garden just off the beach. But the chef and owner Alberto Ferrini has taken great care to make it his own: a colorful assortment of fresh flowers, white tablecloths, and twinkling lights sit beneath a quilted patio covering.

Photographs of forgotten guitar heroes from the American delta are pinned above the entrance to the open-air kitchen, and the constant rotation of jug bands and blues troubadours playing from the stereo portray an ardent musical soul. A small advertisement written in marker reads: Live Blues on Saturday Night. Later on I find out that Ferrini often brings his git box from the room above the restaurant to give his customers a lesson in old-fashioned gut bucket.

How meta.

Oakland Outlaws vs. San Francisco ShEvil Dead at the last match in Oakland in April. Photo by Boss Hogg.

You've been warned. Women's roller derby is back, big time, Saturday, May 17 when B.A.D. Girls, the Bay's only all-female flat-track league, present SF's ShEvil Dead battling Richmond's Wrecking Belles at Dry Ice in Oakland.

Promoters say, "The face-off is a rematch of the teams that fought it out last December for the Bay Area Derby Girls (B.A.D.) 2007 championship. In that bout, Richmond clinched the league title in front of hundreds of frenzied fans. But both ShEvil and the Belles lost their last bouts and are eager to draw fresh blood and recuperate the thrill of victory.

"San Francisco and Richmond have not met for a public bout at their home venue, Dry Ice, in more than a year. The Oakland location is neutral territory where more than 600 fans from the opposing cities can sit on the periphery of the track, or snag a couch on one of two vista platforms, for an eye-of-God view of the action.

OK, it may ruffle some feathers and it's not exactly global warming friendly, maybe, but I'm getting a little kick this Monday afternoon out of this. The Clio Awards, the Oscars of advertising, happened recently, and this ad spot from Thailand, a font of advertising genius lately, took home a Silver:

As I use spare change to pay off medical debts, they both seem further away than ever, but I swear that one day I'm going to roll directly from the Cannes Film Festival to the French Open. This spring, I may not be there in person (cue violins) while Rafa Nadal tries to make it four titles in a row at Roland Garros and the Dardenne brothers compete for another Palme d'Or, but that doesn't mean I won't enjoy some specific aspects of both events from afar.

When the films in Cannes' Official Competition were first announced, the best news for me wasn't that Jia Zhangke, Lucrecia Martel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan had new works competing against the Clint Eastwoods and Charlie Kaufmans of the world. It wasn't even that one of Philippe Garrel's rare films had also landed a coveted Official Competition slot. I was happiest about two things:

Still from El Cant dels Ocells

1: Albert Serra's new movie El Cant dels Ocells -- co-starring my colleague and pal (and sometime Guardian contributor) Mark Peranson as the Christ child's dad, Joseph -- was playing Director's Fortnight. Peranson first told me about his role in the movie last fall, after I'd expressed love for Serra's previous film Honor of the Knights, aka Quixotic. I'm as eager to see Cinema Scope editor Peranson in a biblical role as I am to see Serra's next move (and next bouts of stasis). What with this and Nadal's Roland Garros campaign, everything's coming up Catalan.

Stills from Serbis

2. Brillante Mendoza's new movie Serbis is part of the Official Competition at Cannes, making it the first Filipino film in 24 years up for the Palme d'Or. The Guardian has spotlit some film activity in the Philippines in recent years, and Mendoza is just one current of a creativity that ranges from independent narratives to the more experimental works of Raya Martin (also present as part of the Director's Fortnight, with his fourth film, Now Showing) and others. A few months ago I raved at length about the melodrama of Mendoza's Foster Child and the politicized action of Slingshot. It's great to see him reaching an even higher profile now via a film that sounds like it is confrontational and far from mainstream in content.

Trailer for Slingshot

I walked past the 200 white roses (no exaggeration) outside of my Mission shack's front window this morning. A lot more fallen petals on the bricks. Don't go, spring. My path was to a morning screening of Christophe Honore's most recent film Love Songs. What can I say -- for much of the first half of Honore's tribute to and update of the one and only Jacques Demy, I was skeptical. Thirty or even forty minutes in I was ready to chalk it up as a failure. But somehow by the end I was just about totally seduced. I'll write more about the film when it's released.

Trailer for Love Songs

If you're at all tempted to see Love Songs, take a listen to "Bien Avant," the opening track of Benjamin Biolay's most recent album Trash Yeye. This static fan vid hasn't garnered the 20,000+ views that some of Biolay's performances and promotional videos have, but it pairs my favorite song on the album with some images from the album's Bruce Weber sleeve art. There's about one degree of separation between Biolay's chansons and Honore's chansons d'amour. Her name is Chiara Mastroianni, and when she finally sings in Love Songs, the movie really blooms.

The latest massive to drop onto Shopping Spy's radar is this announcement from Green Apple Books - who are not - repeat - not going out of business:

"We only have a few weeks left to sell off the last 30,000 used books at our Warehouse Clearance Sale, so they're all priced to move: Gold is $13,859.36/pound; filet mignon is $20.00/pound (at Guerra's on Taraval); the current issue of The New Yorker is $14.40/pound; jujubes are $9.44/pound; Uncle Ben's brown rice is $3.36/pound; and all used books at our Warehouse Clearance Sale are $0.99/pound.

"If you agree that books are more valuable than Jujubes, please come browse the grand finale of our sale store at 248 Clement at Fourth Avenue. The store is better organized than it has ever been, and a quick check this morning showed many good reads still on the shelves.

"P.S. Please help staunch any rumors you may hear about Green Apple Books going out of business; only our temporary Warehouse Clearance Sale at 248 Clement is closing.

"Check back for even further reductions as this final fortnight or so turns into the final days."

A work from Tauba Auerbach's book, How to Spell the Alphabet.

By Glen Helfand

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith began her review of the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh with a pulse-taking statement: “Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people 'love to hate,' or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference.” That statement may resonate a bit more in biennial-intensive towns like Manhattan or Venice, Italy. In San Francisco, where the arts are less widely celebrated, the biennial concerns seem to coalesce around issues of regionalism or the perpetually problematized thing we call “Bay Area art.”

So it seemed fitting that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made back-to-back announcements yesterday, May 22, as to the inclusions in, respectively, "Bay Area Now 5" and the "2008 SECA Award" - both the most high-profile exhibitions of artists living and working here. The Yerba Buena folks threw a press lunch, at the fittingly titled new wine bar, the Press Club, and an evening member’s soiree in their theater to celebrate their forthcoming show, actually a triennial, which opens on July 19 and runs through Nov. 16.

In the late period of international biennials, it seems that institutions are upping the ante a bit with higher concepts and more elastic geographical borders. In recent years YBCA has been working with tiers of themes and structures - a standard gallery show plus four guest-curated shows at various venues - that tend to muddle the excitement with structural complications. BAN is no exception. A glance at the press release doesn’t suffice: you’ve gotta look deeper to figure out the scope. "Bay Area Now 5," which was curated by Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu, has the attached subtitle "Inside/Outside," referring to the not-so-provocative premise that “artists are influenced by their experiences both inside and outside the Bay Area.”

An upcoming article will feature Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman (City Lights, 138 pages, $12.95), the latest -- and 59th -- volume in City Lights' Pocket Poets Series, edited by poet, hip-hop devotee and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples. For now, I'd like to get the word out, if it ain't too late, about a reading and book party this Sunday. Caples hosts the event, which justifiably celebrates the publication of the lost second book by the influential surrealist Lamantia, who in turn was devoted to the writing of the comparatively obscure Hoffman, who died at the age of 25. Here's the info, and after the jump, a choice Hoffman poem from the book.

Sun./25, 5 p.m., free
City Lights Books
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193

Eyeing Blindsight. Photos by Byian Winters and design by Paige Sorvillo.

By Dina Maccabee

It feels a little overblown to say that Thirty Seven Isolated Events, conceived by choreographer Paige Sorvillo with her company Blindsight and presented at CounterPulse with the San Francisco International Arts Festival, is a triumph of independent experimental performance. It's a relatively lean production, well-scaled to maximize CounterPulse's somewhat Spartan interior. Still, for this audience member, there were so many successful aspects in what might have been a risky venture that triumph is the word I'll use.

Though promotion for Thirty Seven Events uses spiffy words like "intermedia," dance fans wary of fancy gadgets edging out real-life rippling muscles needn't be scared off. In fact, displacement of human intimacy and desensitization to violence enabled by ubiquitous modern media are the kernels of Sorvillo's exploration, and they provide a rich source of imagery and metaphor. The Blindsight company members slithered, twitched, and struggled with determination, fluidity, and tight control, sculpting their own flesh into an unforgettable reminder that real human contact, whether caressing or brusque, is utterly irreplaceable.

Sorvillo's training in contemporary Japanese butoh clearly played into both the conception of Thirty Seven Events as a platform for dealing with fairly abstract emotional material, and in the style and mood of the movement itself. In the opening passage, Sorvillo writhed in a single column of yellow light, seeming to test the power of her joints and limbs against the pull of gravity in an alternately lyrical and frenzied monologue. But as she pointed out in an after-show panel discussion, the ghostly white body paint and gruesome facial contortions are parts of the butoh vocabulary she's deliberately left out.

By Phil Eil

I was walking down Mission Street the other night, just South of Cesar Chavez, when I saw something that made my heart skip. No, it wasn’t another ex-girlfriend lookalike (they’re everywhere, I swear), it was a 1991 white Toyota Previa -- a doppelganger of my first car -- parked in front of The Knockout.

The Previa, if you don’t know, was a Toyota minivan produced from 1991 to 1997 (their popularity followed roughly the same arc as Soundgarden’s). With a name derived from the Italian word “to preview” or “to look ahead,” Previa enthusiasts, past and present, agree -- the Previa was a visionary feat of engineering.

This week's Lit features a review of Erick Lyle's new book On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City (Soft Skull Press, 272 pages, $14.95). Liam O'Donoghue recently talked with Lyle, who will be appearing at Get Lost Travel Books on June 4th and AK Press Warehouse in Oakland on June 5th:

By Liam O'Donoghue

SFBG: The phase “secret history” is in the subtitle of your book and the term “urban archeology” is used to describe it. Did it feel like an archaeological project -- like you were digging up this buried history of the city -- when you were compiling the book?
Erick Lyle: When I moved to San Francisco I was lucky enough to be around a lot of older folks who told me their stories about the city and I fell in love with this place instantly. I feel like I’ve got all those stories filed away in my mind, so that when I’m out, riding my bike around the city, if I’m at a certain intersection, for example, I’ll think, “Oh, this is where that punk club was in 1988, but it’s also where so-and-so broke up with her boyfriend in 1995 and there was that one time when a guy tried to hit me with a 2x4.” But I can see all these layers simultaneously in my mind, and for me, part of the enjoyment of living here for awhile is seeing how these layers fit together over time. It gives an added dimension to, for example, a protest event you might be doing, to understand how that event fits into the longer history of the area.

Erick Lyle, in his secret mansion enjoying the high life

As far as thinking about it as archeology at the time, I wouldn’t say that we were so self-conscious that we would do generator shows in the street so we could say, “This is history." But if we don’t write this shit down, no one is, it’s not making it in the Chronicle or anywhere else. The things that happen in the doorsteps of the Mission or on the dance floor at the punk club or are spray-painted on the walls: these are the things that make up our lives. That’s the fabric of life in the city.

Part One of a multi-part series on ill-conceived Public Service Announcements by intern Marianne Moore

On a Richmond-bound train the other day I noticed a sign at the end of the car, reading: “Los líquidos calientes queman como el fuego,” which means, “Hot liquids burn like fire.” I confess that I laughed — really, really loudly.

Heave ho at Matthew's Barney's REN. Photo courtesy of www.lipsticktracez.com/reggie/.

By Glen Helfand

How any artist follows up a large scale, career-making project is accompanied by the same critical pressure that greets the sophomore album of a hot new band. Matthew Barney made it through his post-Cremaster days with Drawing Restraint 9, which took over a whole floor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a couple of summers ago, though many would agree that while it stayed the course, it was a film and exhibition that didn’t quite rival the five part film/sculpture extravaganza that preceded it.

In an interview before that show, Barney said his next works would be in the realm of live performance, and true to his word, he’s been mining that vein. He staged a typically perverse work at the 2007 Manchester International Festival, an adults-only performance that involved a bull, a self-fisting female contortionist and Barney wearing a live dog on his head. (The reviews were mixed.) Another performance, staged in New York, was shown as a video as part of an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects last year.

I can’t say I wasn’t thrilled to get an invitation to a recent Barney performance, titled REN, that took place on May 18 in not so beautiful Norwalk, a south-of-LA suburban flatland populated by convenience stores and auto dealerships. Here’s some of what the invite promised: “'Ren' represents the first stage of the soul in its journey through the afterlife in which its 'Secret Name' is revealed, and subsequently lost. REN will reference the Cremaster Cycle, linking Barney and [music collaborator Jonathan] Bepler's earlier project to the iconography and mythology of ancient Egypt. REN will feature the return of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial and Aimee Mullins from Cremaster 3, a Southern California drum and bugle corps, ranchera singer Lila Downs, and British performance artist Mouse. Performance is approximately one and a half to two hours in duration.”

Just so you know. It's not "Oo-way." This is the first thing I learned while gearing up to interview Uwe Boll last August, on the occasion of the uncut version of his film Postal's world premiere at the 2007 Dead Channels Film Festival. The film played to a small but enthusiastic Castro Theater crowd, many of whom were surely lured more by the Boll's presence than by the film itself. Boll, who has embraced video games as cinematic source material the way other directors have embraced, say, Shakespeare, is so fond of controversy it's difficult to read a news story about him that doesn't include something ridiculous, like a Boll vs. critics boxing match or an anti-Boll petition. The first picture of him furnished by a Google search features a grinning Boll flipping off whoever's behind the camera.

Postal, as a whole, is kind of an exercise in fuck-you cinema: in addition to making light of 9/11, it pokes fun at everything from new-agers to trailer trash to coffee snobs to midgets to Nazis ... and more. (Read my shockingly positive review here.) The long-delayed film is finally getting a theatrical release; it rocks the Roxie starting tomorrow. Such an event affords me the chance to dust off my interview with Boll and cast members Zack Ward (who plays "Postal Dude," and also appeared in 2007's Transformers) and Larry Thomas, Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" -- who plays Osama Bin Laden. Read on for part one, if you dare.

By Marianne Moore

My friend’s rich older boyfriend—well, rich relative to my friend, who makes her living pretending to be a fairy at birthday parties (Her fairy name is Ginger-Snap. We know it’s a stripper name. We’re over it.)—is taking her to the Black and White Ball on Saturday, and I’ve been drafted into shopping. We’re now faced with a pretty awkward question: what do normal people wear to the fancy-pantsiest occasion on the San Francisco calendar?

Other people must have faced this problem before. After all, tickets to the party are $200, not cheap by any means but still well within the reach of many modest-living San Franciscans. Maybe some are kept away by the event’s reputation; personally, even if I had $200 to throw around, I would be way too scared to go. Whatever the case, there’s no information out there about how to dress for the B & W if you’re not immensely rich. One thing we know for sure: the boyfriend, while he may be shelling out $400 for tickets, isn’t about to spring for a $10,000 gown. That leaves us to dress on a fairy’s budget.

I figure we have three options:
(1) try and find a cute discounted dress a la TJ Maxx,
(2) go completely casual, or
(3) go vintage.