Artists embrace paradox. They live outside society's norm, reflecting back not-always-visible truths. But not all paradox is good. Often, artists are reviled, ridiculed, or dismissed, celebrated only after they die or get "discovered" and make a fortune. Society at large is not wholly to blame. Highbrow sentiment does its part to perpetuate the idea that artists should be above mere business concerns. Many art schools and university departments don't devote enough time to answering the question, "What can I do with a fine arts degree?" Which leads to another truth: In a nation where commerce is king and almost no public support goes to the creative class, those who want to make even a modest living from their art but have no basic business sense are likely to fail outright or be exploited by profit-minded people. The folks at Kearny Street Workshop don't want to see this happen, so they offer Business Skills for Artists. The second of a three-part series is Tuesday night.
The curtain fell on the 20th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival yesterday, after 12 days of near-constant performance. Earlier this week, we covered The Madogs of Diego. Over the weekend we caught Submarine, created by Oakland's Kinetic Arts Center and highly recommended to us by the staff at Fringe, as well as Spitting in the Face of the Devil, winner of Best Show of the London Fringe, and Elite Waste, arguably the most viewed and least traditional performance of the festival.
Turandot, by Giacomo Puccini
@ War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness
Sept. 17, 2011
After the half-baked Heart of a Soldier, Saturday night's performance of Turandot at SF Opera felt as reassuring as waking up to the realization that not only are you not being pursued by angry gerbils, but it's also the weekend and someone is making pancakes. Turandot succeeds as resoundingly as Soldier fails, and it throws in a rare treat -- a star-making performance by young soprano Leah Crocetto.
It doesn't hurt that Crocetto's Liù is the most sympathetic of the three major roles -- Princess Turandot is a vengeful harridan with severe trust issues, and her suitor Calaf greatly benefits from modern audiences' Disney-induced tendency to root for lovesick, personality-deficient princes. What's worse, Liù sacrifices herself so that this undeserving pair can have their happily-ever-after. Crocetto, who's performed several smaller roles with the company during her training as an Adler Fellow, drew applause after her beautifully nuanced first aria and capitalized on every subsequent appearance. Though it would have been easy for this character to flirt with bathos, Crocetto conveyed Liù's vulnerability -- and strength -- without blatantly yanking the audience's heartstrings.
The name Tsui Hark is synonymous with Hong Kong action cinema -- he's a veteran director who has produced of some of Hong Kong's greatest cinematic hits, including the A Better Tomorrow and Once Upon a Time in China trilogies. It could easily be said that without Tsui's influence, there would have been no Tarantino and no Wachowski Brothers.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is Tsui's first film to receive an American theatrical release since 2000. The film stars Andy Lau as a Tang dynasty magistrate called to solve a series of mysterious murders in which the victims mysteriously turn into piles of smoking ashes. Featuring Tsui's unorthodox visual style and CGI-fused wire-fu, the movie was an instant box office sensation when it was released in Asia last year. Starting this Friday, Detective Dee will be playing at the San Francisco Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema, Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley, and Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto.
We had a chance to ask Tsui a few questions on his thoughts on martial arts films and the future of Hong Kong film industry.
Porn has changed a lot since the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1970s and '80s. For one thing, it's a much less public undertaking. Once upon a time, watching a dirty film involved sitting in a theater with an audience. It was almost the same process as going to see Bullit or The Graduate, except without the popcorn and with more trenchcoats. The VCR moved porn into the home, but you still had to look across the counter into the eyes of a teenage rental clerk as you paid for Lesbian Spank Inferno, Vol. 8.
Now we have the Internet, millions of miles of globe-spanning fiber optic cable solely devoted to bringing you hot and cold running smut, 24 hours a day. Thanks to technology, your choice of material is strictly between you and your browser history.
It's true that a lot of what comes out of the Internet is just the same old recycled crap; but it's also permanently queered the way we talk about sex and provided fertile ground for indie pornographers with their own visions. Shine Louise Houston's Pink and White Productions is one of the most acclaimed examples. Houston, who appears Wednesday as part of the Good Vibrations Indie Erotic Film Festival, entered the business intending to direct feature films. While she's done several, the most recent being a dyke boxing film called Champion, her most popular project has been The Crash Pad Series, an ongoing collection of free-form webisodes about a mysterious San Francisco apartment where random people show up to fuck. Pink and White embodies a style that's becoming more popular in porn: more gender fluidity, and bodies that look more like real people and less like Hollywood plastic surgery disasters. Queerness isn't a fetish or a freak show element for Houston or her contemporaries, but just a fact of life. Last year, Houston took things a step further when she launched Heavenly Spire, a site that explores masculine eroticism in biological as well as transgender men.
Houston shows excerpts from her own work and answers questions Wednesday at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center. We spoke with Houston recently.
