With spring quickly approaching, festival season is fully underway in the Bay Area.  San Jose Cinequest wrapped up with an encore night of all the festival favorites of the year. This year’s fan favorites were comprised of a surprisingly large number of documentaries.

Already a winner for the Special-Jury Prize and a contender for this year’s Audience Award, “The Real Revolutionaries” explores a Silicon Valley encompassing large acres of farmland on the verge of complete transformation in the late ‘60s. Meant to be an inspirational piece, while also giving credit where it has largely been missing, the film centers on semiconductor pioneer Robert Noyce and the founding of Intel in Santa Clara, CA.

“The Real Revolutionaries” slightly suffers for its relatively short running time of only 89 minutes, causing some of the information to be thrown out too quickly.  The film tries to compensate by providing cutesy animation for some of the more technical details, which just feels somewhat patronizing.

However, the argument posed by the documentary is undeniably compelling: By placing images of Noyce and his new company with shots of ‘60s anti-war protests, the Civil Rights Movement and Woodstock, the film asserts that the greatest challenge to the ruling culture came from a bunch of nerds in lab coats working on microchips and semiconductors. Not necessarily pointing to the technological revolution that has come to define the Silicon Valley, the makers of the film analyze the challenge Intel posed to the traditional corporate culture of the time.

Also an audience favorite at this year’s festival, “Cleanflix” surveys the battle between Hollywood and a Mormon audience base that wants to be able to watch R-rated movies without all the violence, sexual content, and lewd language. The first half of the documentary provides a fascinating look at why Hollywood is unwilling to release edited versions of popular movies, even though this is already done for network television, while counter-balancing this with a look into the Mormon community and why they would want to watch movies like “Kill Bill” and “Fargo” in the first place.

The film eventually dwindles off by turn into more of a character study.  Halfway through its 85-minute running time, it starts to exclusively focus on one of the owners of the edited movie rental stores in Salt Lake City. His story becomes a metaphor for the entire Mormon community, but instead of coming off as insightful, it just falls into condescension.

Image source: www.siliconeer.com

The 12 short films, experimental pieces and documentaries showed a broad range of insight into the conceptions of the human body and its vulnerabilities. Curtis Tamm’s experimental piece, “hour) or a fis…” opened the night, with a disorienting use of video and audio editing in order to create what Tamm described in the Q&A afterward as working towards, “a new kind of pornography,” with “a transgendered gaze.” Tamm stated that his inspiration for the film came from “an interest in exploring within the vast landscape of experience something we all share: a body that can be pushed to the limits of maintaining its composure.” Tamm explains his method behind his disorienting editing as an approximation of audio and visual stimulus to the stimulus of touch, and thinking about the ways in which the audience is affected by the cinematic experience.

Another film that dealt in both disorienting editing and its physical affect on the body, was Benjamin Zaehringer’s film, “Tunnels.” Like many of the pieces shown, the film was originally conceived of and completed for the Film Department’s “FILM 28B: The Avant-Garde Film” class. In the Q&A, Zaehringer cited his inspiration for the text-based piece with a quote from the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, in November 1998:

“We don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Nobody has shown us a light at the end of the tunnel. There is a tunnel at the end of the tunnel.”

The words, “There is a tunnel after the tunnel” flashed one by one across the screen in increasing frequency, and the affect caused some members to turn away from the screen because of the intense physical affect it had on the viewer.

Another avant-garde film class final project called, “Their There,” explored the manifestations of the inner person on their outer flesh. fourth year Alayna Johnson used her own body as the film’s blank slate, writing in permanent marker and using duct tape to “show what a broken heart looks like,” as she explained it after the film. The cinematography also worked to disorient the audience’s ability to “read” the body on the screen, both in its movements and in the text written. Alayna gave all the credit for the dreamy cinematography of the film to the film’s director of photography, Christopher Deetz. The film was scored by the quiet and heartbroken-sounding Rachel Yamagata, and the combined affect of the text, the photography and the music gave the film an elusive quality.

Among the other films shown, the 16mm piece by Joe Garrity entitled, “Ferris Wheel on Fire” showcased the nostalgic beauty of the black and white medium. Sam Barnett’s stop-motion film, “The Flesh: Chapter 1, Angle of Trajectory” was aesthetically powerful, and his wire-animated character, the “Wireman,” accomplished a range of comic force and emotion with only three prongs for a head.

Graduate student, Vianna Davila at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism was not in attendance that evening, but her short-form documentary on a father and son working as “stringers,” night photographers selling their crime and emergency focused footage to news stations, was emotionally powerful. Beautifully edited and poignantly produced, Davila conveyed the hearts and life histories of Henry Valadez Jr. and Henry Valadez III living in San Antonio, TX. within the film’s short running time.

“Fleshed Out” carried the thread of human bodies and physical experiences effectively throughout its 80 minutes total running time, and the students in attendance who spoke afterward conveyed their inspirations and intentions in enlightening and generous ways. The films seen in the context of one another spoke to the self-conscious experience of an individual living in society, and often questioned through experimentation and disorientation what we as the audience project onto the screen versus what is actually there.

For more information on current and upcoming PFA film events, you can check out their calendar for the months of March and April.

Image Source: The Daily Californian, Travis Wyche/Courtesy

So last week I was strolling Telegraph for First Friday, a monthly drink-on-the-street-look-at-art-cause-a-raucous event that I encourage everyone to go to. There on Telegraph among the vegan street food and homeless drunkards was a little SF band called the Ferocious Few.

Just two dudes, one drum set, one guitar, one amp. They seriously blew my mind. They sounded better than most live shows I’ve been to. Apparently they’ve done this before, since when I looked them up on YouTube there were various street performances all equally as awesome. So do your self a favor and check these guys out. (The video is long but just listen to the first song they play).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsPXMgKfTRs

Their next shows are at Space Gallery in SF on April 1st. And at the Uptown in Oakland on the 2nd.

Image source: myspace

Electronic music has come a long way from an incessant “oom-tss oom-tss” beat and cheesy keyboard loops.  It’s one of the fastest evolving and most popular forms of music around the world.  DJs and producers are constantly pushing the rules and boundaries, creating new sub-genres  every year, and electronic festivals draw huge crowds all over the place.  Last year, Los Angeles’s Electric Daisy Carnival brought over 140,000 attendees, more than doubling the attendance of the more musically diverse Coachella music festival.  Plus, the influence of the genre is beginning to surface in much of the mainstream music being produced today.

But despite its popularity and cultural significance, why do so many major music media outlets almost completely ignore it?  The artists that are mentioned tend to be the more experimental and show a lot of creativity, but aren’t typically the ones that draw thousands of people to dance floors.  So why haven’t I seen a review for the latest Deadmau5 album?  Or a write-up for Valentine Day’s ETD. Love in San Francisco?  I don’t claim to have the answers, but I have a few hypotheses:

1) Electronic music and rave culture is still a pretty underground scene, and one that has been stigmatized and associated with drug use and hedonism for years.  I’ll admit, raves can be a pretty freaky environment, so I can see why critics and music journalists might be a little hesitant to write about them.  It would be a little redundant to have to write “Well, a guy behind some turntables and a laptop played dance music while people took drugs, danced, and played with neon things” for every show.  But you don’t have to take a ton of ecstasy to enjoy electronic music or a rave (though it may help).  A friend of mine DJs house and trance music and started going to raves when he was in high school.  To this day, he has never consumed a single mind-altering substance (with the exception of alcohol), and almost exclusively listens to electronic music.  There’s definitely an appeal to the music outside of the drug community, and there has been plenty of mainstream music glorifying drug use throughout the years, so this shouldn’t be a reason to ignore it.

2)  Much of electronic music is undeniably similar: similar measures, similar tempos, and similar musical elements.  Not that this is a bad thing.  Much of the appeal of electronic music is that it provides a steady beat to dance to, and has relatively predictable builds and releases set at opportune times to throw in a bit of variety and get listeners excited.  But a lot of artists’ unique appeal comes not from their ability to think too far outside the box, but the ability to use the restraints of the box to create something new and exciting. A lot of this comes down to something as subtle as unique tone they modify for their bass lines or snare drums.  This makes it pretty difficult to talk about, let alone write reviews.  Still, there are artists that certainly have a uniquely recognizable characteristic to their music, and some that have more of an appeal for others, which definitely opens up the possibility for someone to evaluate it.

3.) The listening experience for electronic music is much different than most forms of pop music.  There aren’t usually lyrics to think about, and even when there are, they aren’t usually meant to be thought too hard about.  You don’t typically think too hard about what it is you like about a particular song—it either makes you feel good and want to dance, or it doesn’t.  Maybe electronic music doesn’t need to be evaluated. Rock critics have been trying to pin down and describe the importance and significance of rock and roll since the ’60s, but electronic music doesn’t really have any over-arching political or social statements behind it.  It’s meant to make you dance, and reading a review probably isn’t going to change whether or not it does so for you.

There are tons of possible reasons why it’s not talked about in the mainstream.  But maybe techno does deserve more of our attention.  What do you think?

You can have your chance at the Folio release party is this Friday at the Alphonse Berber Gallery (@ 2546 Bancroft) at 6pm. Apparently it’s two bucks to get in and from there it’s all the food and booze you can get your hands on, though you’ll have to compete with the writers themselves, who will be there.

Unfortunately Sebastian Shepard, author of a piece on some seriously salacious elements of this dirty story called the bible—heard of it?—will not be in attendance. His quick wit and uproarious, Virginia Woolf-esque anecdotes will be missed by all.

Seriously though, there are a lot of good writers on this campus and the Folio is one of the too few places to check them out. By providing a forum for creative academic writing, the Folio is putting together something new and interesting for intellectually minded Cal students. There are a few of you out there, aren’t there?

There are a lot of highly anticipated albums hitting stores today, from Ted Leo, Gorillaz, Liars and Titus Andronicus, among others. So, this week, I’m going to feature three releases I’m very excited about.

First up, Stridulum, the new EP from Zola Jesus, a Madison, WI, lo-fi-goth-noise-rock-what-have-you project masterminded by Nika Roza Danilova, is out tomorrow on Sacred Bones Records. Zola Jesus’s full-length record from last year, The Spoils, was absolutely bone-shaking, and Stridulum puts her massive voice front and center. These six doomy songs are going to be on heavy rotation for some time.

Next, on Warp Records, Gonjasufi’s tremendous and strange A Sufi And A Killer–wherein Gonjasufi’s eerie vocals are complemented by Eastern-inflected beats and backing from the likes of Flying Lotus and the Gaslamp Killer. Must be heard to be believed.

Last but not least, a local offering: Oakland-based rockers the Splinters release their debut record, Kick, today. Look for my profile of the band in Thursday’s Daily Californian.

Shows to Look Out For:

In the aftermath of Noise Pop, which has now been over for a week (check our coverage here if you haven’t seen it yet!), there’s still no shortage of cool shows.

First up, catch meteorologically obsessed folk singer Laura Veirs & Hall of Flames at Cafe Du Nord on Wednesday, with the Old Believers and Cataldo. (21+)

Also Wednesday, you can get your big noise fix from dream-poppers the Big Pink at Great American Music Hall. They’re backed by A Place to Bury Strangers, an excellent quasi-nu-gaze band who are reputedly deafening in concert, as well as IO Echo.

If you feel like making it a fuzzed-out twofer, you should hit up San Francisco’s Hemlock Tavern on Thursday for A Sunny Day in Glasgow, with the Gold Medalists and Apopka Darkroom. (21+)

Furthermore:

Sorry for the preponderance of 21+ listings–it’s just what looked good this week! By way of apology, here’s a think piece from The Bay Bridged about recent developments involving the Alcoholic Beverage Committee and all-ages venues that serve alcohol. There’s cause for consternation here, especially if you’re below the 21 mark.

Image sources: ZolaJesus.com, Warp, Double Negative Records

Speaking of diamonds in the rough, of the four moderately obscure bands that played at the venue as part of Noise Pop on Friday, it was the one that absolutely no one in the audience seemed to have heard of that really ended up blowing the the roof off the place. Scissors for Lefty and Judgement Day were the headliners, and thus the main crowd magnets, while Glaciers seemed to have brought with them a tiny, fierce circle of uber-focused followers. Ask nearly anyone in the crowd about ghost and the city, however, and the response was usually “Oh, they seem cool. I hear they’ve got a trombone player and a string section.” Nobody knew quite what to expect.
As it turned out, ghost simply rocked the pants off the other three bands (or at least the two that I managed to catch). Glaciers is one of the kind of band that is only good in theory—their musicianship is clearly impeccable, but their songs just aren’t that much fun to listen to. It’s probably good music for studying, or for motivating employees in an illegal gin distillery. Scissors for Lefty were charming enough, but their schtick is pretty predictable. They’re standard-issue Britpop/cheek-rock lads. Think the Strokes minus the ennui, or the Artic Monkeys minus the booze. Actually, just think Los Campesinos! and you’re pretty much there.
I’m not going to a spend lot of space here talking about why Ghost were so cool—I’ll save that for the print edition. I will say, though, that they were rootsy in a believable way, and scary as fuck to boot. This is why I love music festivals—they’re among the few places where you can be blown away by a relatively unknown band without having to look all that hard.

Image source: www.morguefile.com

Choose Your Own Adventure books aren’t just for kids anymore!

Both a Berkeley alumni and a hip Bay Area cartoonist, Jason Shiga has a new book, a kind of postmodernist comic book, and the launch party will be at Books Inc. on Sunday, February 28th at 6 pm. It’s called “Meanwhile,” and it’s the story of Jimmy who really needs to go to the bathroom and is suddenly plunged into a crazy world. And so you get to choose from 3,856 possible endings!

I don’t pretend to know anything about comics except that I read “Watchmen” before the movie came out. I’m certainly intrigued not only about the heft of this book but also how Shiga will make such an opus accessible and engaging without leaving us scratching our heads.

In other news, the third part of Haruki Murakami’s new book “1Q84″ will be released in April. This brings us just a little bit closer to the English translation and publication slated for fall 2011. We’re all pretty much in the dark as to what it’s about, but Murakami claims it’s his most ambitious yet. He’s kept it hermetically sealed in secrecy for English reading audiences, but we’re going to be waiting with bated breath for another year and a half. Maybe someone will leak a sloppy translation of it onto the internet before 2011?

Not to keep plugging Dave Eggers on my blog, but he’ll be at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on March 11th at 8 p.m. as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. But this time the Zeitoun family will be with him. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, whose survival story of Hurricane Katrina was the inspiration for Eggers’ latest book, will be speaking alongside the author himself.

Also, look out for my review of Ian McEwan’s new novel “Solar” in March. The book is schedule for release at the end of March.

Image sources: Laughingsquid.com, Kienforcefidele.wordpress.com

This week in Bay Area music is really all about the Noise Pop Festival, so fellow writer Rajesh Srinivasan and I have put together a podcast previewing a handful of local acts who will be playing as part of the festival. It’s the first installment of a monthly podcast on local talent, Transbay Tracks, so keep your iTunes podcast subscriptions up to date! (You’ll get this if you’ve subscribed to Daily Cal Podcasts, and you should also be able to find it on our Web site.) Take a listen below:

[audio:http://blog.dailycal.org/arts/files/2010/02/Transbay-Tracks-Noise-Pop-Preview.mp3]

Release of the Week:

This week brings us one of the most hotly anticipated albums of the year, Joanna Newsom’s only-recently-unveiled triple album Have One On Me. The harpist and singer/songwriter has already released two beloved albums of virtuosic modern folk, and early preview tracks “‘81″ and “Good Intentions Paving Company” point to this as a mature step forward for Ms. Newsom. It’s over two hours in duration, so it will take even diehards a little while to sink into it, but it’s absolutely thrilling to see someone who started out as a weird little indie sensation moving forward with her ambitious music.

Runner-up Exciting Release of the Week: Dear God I Hate Myself by Xiu Xiu.

Image source: The Silver Tongue

The locally made, Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” which I reviewed here, opens this weekend in Berkeley at the Shattuck Cinemas. This is an exciting moment for the East Bay film scene: Berkeley filmmakers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith staged a number of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, who himself lives in the East Bay community of Kensington. Pair the local premier of “The Most Dangerous Man” with Bill Clinton’s visit to Zellerbach Hall next Wednesday, and you begin to realize that there is a thin line between politics and entertainment. And perhaps this is how it should be: With the right venue, modern-day political issues can feel surprisingly accessible and relevant.

Image source: AP PHOTOS/COURTESY