Real Life Rock (270 page)

3
Scott Ostler, “Bay Area Sports Scene Is Giants and Disasters”
(
San Francisco Chronicle,
April 1, 2010)
On the so-far futile attempt of the Oakland A's to move to San Jose, with disaster rating by tornado: “The A's (three tornadoes) are Running Bear, the American Indian in a 1960s novelty song
of the same name by Johnny Preston. Running Bear is in love with Little White Dove. In our local drama, Little White Dove is played by the city of San Jose.

“Bear and Dove can't get together because their respective tribes are at war. All they can do is gaze longingly at one another across a big river.

“That's the A's. Their very existence depends on finding a way to overcome politics and hook up with San Jose. Frankly, most of us wish the two would get a room.

“The song, by the way, ends with Running Bear and Little White Dove jumping into the river from opposite sides, and ‘the raging river pulled them down.' ”

4
Hanoi Janes,
Year of Panic
(Captured Tracks)
Almost-one-man band Oliver Scharf, from Saschen, Germany, near Dresden. Caspian Sea Surf Music, suggests the press release, which is close enough—song titles include “Beachkids,” “Surfin' KMC,” and (note the surfin' variation on the album title) “Summer of Panic”—but Scharf is closer to Jan and Dean than Brian Wilson, and a lot closer to Jonathan Richman than either of them. Except on “Good Bone,” when he's closer to Buddy Holly. Gloriously.

5–6
Hugh Brown,
Allegedly: The Hugh Brown Chainsaw Collection
(Grand Central Press) and Caitlin Williams Freeman, “Confections” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
What if Matisse, Duchamp, Man Ray, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Cornell, and more, more, had incorporated chainsaw motifs into their work—not to mention Arbus (she didn't?), Warhol, Ruscha, Kruger, Holzer, Prince, Hockney, and Mapplethorpe? It's not likely many of them would have come up with anything as coolly subtle as Brown's constructions, fruit of a project decades in the making. Least convincing: a phallic remake of Meret Oppenheim's
Object
. Blink and you'll miss it: a perfectly rendered version of Walker Evans's 1936 Farm Security Administration photograph of a New Orleans movie theater, which instead of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey's
The Nitwits
is now featuring
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2
. Brown's work is also a gallery show (at the Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles, July 24–August 21), which were it to be installed at SFMOMA you could walk through and then go up to the rooftop coffee bar and try to chose between Caitlin Williams Freeman's Jeff Koons White Hot Chocolate with cup and saucer slathered with gold leaf; Frida Kahlo Mexican Wedding Cookies; a blue, red, yellow, and white Mondrian Cake; and, most perversely, Build Your Own Richard Serra—where standing in for the iron walls are a Swedish gingersnap, a chocolate sable cookie, a graham cracker, and, as the bar to hold the mini-Stonehenge in place, a citrus tuille cookie. Plus a napkin complete with instructions to keep the thing from falling down while you set it up.

7
Surveillance,
directed and cowritten by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (2008, Magnolia DVD)
For nightmare performances by Pell James and Ryan Simpkins—with Simpkins, in her fearlessness and lack of affect after seeing her entire family massacred, presented, by way of her blond braid, as Patty McCormack in
The Bad Seed,
which means a sequel in which she will either kill Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond or join their gang. With David Lynch's crawl song “Speed Roadster” in his high, come-into-this-alley-with-me psycho rap over fuzzed blues.

8
Kiss Meets the Führer of the Reich
(YouTube)
In 1966 Woody Allen bought rights to a Japanese James Bond imitation called
Kagi no Kagi,
dubbed in his own dialogue, and released the thing as
What's Up, Tiger Lily?
As Allen's first and funniest movie, it made an increasingly unhinged kind of sense—and so do the slew of un-credited videos that with English subtitles play the same trick on a four-minute section of the 2004 German film
Der Untergang
. It's April 20, 1945, Hitler is in his bunker, surrounded by his staff, raging, despairing, then reflective, almost wistful—and then it's June 25, 2009, for
Hitler Finds Out Michael Jackson Has Died,
or three months later, for
Hitler Finds Out Kanye West Disses Taylor Swift
. But the killer is June 8, 2008. Poring over charts, plotting strategy
to the end, as head of the German division of the Kiss Army, Hitler is preparing for the band's big concert. He will stop at nothing to get Peter Criss and Ace Frehley to add their signatures to his buttocks—he's already got Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Then an officer steps forward, trembling, to deliver the bad news: Frehley and Criss are not touring with the band. There is a silence no one dares break. Another officer, grasping at straws, suggests that all may not be lost: the substitutes are said to be “competent musicians.” “What do Kiss fans care about competent musicians!” Hitler explodes. Again, silence. Again, the remaining officers looking desperately at each other, knowing the wrong word could mean their deaths. Hitler backs himself into a corner, shrinking into himself, cursing wildly, but then fury turns to acceptance. It's over: “I can't even rest my hopes on Mr. Ace Frehley's new solo album.” And it's all in the timing—the camp timing of the original transformed by the bizarrely human timing of the subtitles, catching nuances the real movie never dreamed of.

9
Assassination of a High School President,
directed by Brett Simon (2008, Sony DVD)
Scream
was a parody of the high-school slasher movie, and for most of its length this increasingly creepy exercise—with Reece Thompson as the school paper reporter Bobby Funke (“Funk!” he keeps correcting everyone) and Mischa Barton as the femme fatale—is a parody of
Scream
. But step by step, in emotion if not plot, it moves toward the believable. At the end, with the hero distraught and refusing to accept the whole truth, when his editor turns to him and says, “Forget it, Funke, it's high school,” the moment sticks harder, seems less of a screenwriter's gloss, than it did in
Chinatown
. Plus Cat Power's “Speak for Me” running over the credits, and capturing the chaos of high-school life as well as anything on the screen.

10
Penelope Houston at Library Laureates presents Urban Legends (San Francisco Public Library, April 16)
The great Avengers singer, a longtime SFPL staff member, came up: “I'm dressed as a
literary
urban legend,” she said. Perhaps 5′ 2″, moles pasted on each cheek, streaked blond hair over one eye, goggle-dark glasses—she
was
JT Leroy. Or as much as anyone impersonating someone who existed only as an impersonation could be.

Thanks to Jeff Gold