REVIEW Full disclosure would take up the full piece, so I'll just say that in spite of knowing both David Wilson and Frank Lyon well as friends, I'm hardly alone in counting them as two of the Bay Area's most celebratory and engaging young creators. They've largely steered their efforts away from the typical venues that comprise San Francisco's music-art coordinates thus far, especially in their periodic outdoor music gatherings. Read more »

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There's a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in '64 and '79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player's solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist's pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. Read more »

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Where to begin with Jandek? First, a definition: Jandek is a phenomenon, as plainly uncanny as a lightning storm. Then on to the facts of the case: initially emerging in 1978 with the Ready for the House album (Corwood), Jandek has since released a steady stream of haunting LPs: 51 at last count, each talismanic of a cumulative mystery. The records originate from Corwood Industries, PO Box 15375, in Houston, a company that seems to exist solely to disseminate Jandek music. Read more »

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The Bay Area boasts some of the most forward-thinking film programmers in the country, but even here there's often no getting around the circuitous, arbitrary workings of foreign film distribution. No matter how big a hit in its festival travels, the foreign film must dutifully wait untold months until it is dressed up by Sony Pictures Classics or released to no fanfare by a small distributor like Film Movement. Read more »

The only thing that prevented Entrance's resplendent Prayer of Death (Tee Pee) from being one of my top picks for 2007 was that it came out in 2006. Lately, when I want music to overwhelm me I reach for Prayer of Death. Alas, it wasn't always so with Entrance, the nom de plume of Baltimore-born Guy Blakeslee. I first saw him perform in a dingy college basement sometime after the release of his 2003 debut, The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken by Storm (Tiger Style). Read more »

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Is defining I'm Not There the same thing as defending it? Todd Haynes's kaleidoscopic antibiography of, to quote the tagline, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan" has inspired all sorts of platitudes since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so many that it's hard not to feel late for the party only a few months after. Read more »

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An archival recording can assume many forms, contexts, meanings. This year saw the reissue of an album unappreciated in its time (Jim Ford's The Sounds of Our Time [Bear Family]), the compilation of genre-bound obscurities (Numero Group's Eccentric Soul series), the live performance (Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. Read more »

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"I don't like things that are about what they are."

The title character of Hannah Takes the Stairs says this to a coworker. The quip, though, constitutes something of a wink from the film's director, Joe Swanberg, a leading light of a group of loose-knit DIY filmmakers regrettably known by the mumblecore moniker. Read more »

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The folkish side of indie rock has been blessed with several female songwriters who have unique, affecting voices — Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom, Becky Stark — but White Magic's Mira Billotte is in a different league altogether. Her vocal tracks thunder and shiver all over the register, fearlessly chasing down radical intonations and bold tonal colors. Where the others can all sound a little fey and princessy, Billotte's full-spectrum blasts hark back to the possessed passion of '60s stunners like Grace Slick, Karen Dalton, and — why not? Read more »

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"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian's firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Read more »