Are We Having Fun Yet? Bill Griffith's enigmatic, epigrammatic Zippy the Pinhead makes perfect sense after viewing John O'Hagan's documentary Wonderland, which played this year's S.F. International Film Festival. Wonderland is about Levittown, N.Y., America's first postwar suburb and Griffith's hometown. "It was like we were all acting in a TV sitcom," Griffith says in the film, describing the subversive weirdness that pervaded the "planned community," and that's what Zippy is like, too, with its off-kilter use of vivid color, cheerful sloganeering, and frequent commercial and pop-culture references. More than 100 of Griffith's pen-and-ink and color drawings will hang at "Zippy and Beyond: A Pinhead's Progress -- The Bill Griffith Retrospective," which includes work from Young Lust, National Lampoon, High Times, and The New Yorker, alongside stories and cover art and a sneak preview of character studies for an animated Zippy TV series now in development. The exhibit opens at 11 a.m. (and is up through Feb. 22, 1998) at the Cartoon Art Museum, 814 Mission (at Fourth Street), S.F. Admission is free-$4; call CAR-TOON.
thursday
october 16
Love Hurts As the Back Stabbing Machine makes clear at the interactive robot spectacle Violent Machines Perform Acts of Love, you never know when romance will sneak up on you. Art-tech collective Seemen will unveil this scary little number as well as the Kissing/Headbutting Couple, the Fucking Farmhands, and the Buttfucking Couple, plus contraptions geared more toward singles, like the Suicide Chair, the Beer Bottle Thrower, and the Robotic Pit Bulls. Seemen founder Kal Spelletich will be guiding viewers from machine to machine, giving people the chance to explore each one and reflect on their own love lives, and likewise giving each machine the chance to damage viewers, psychologically and otherwise. The show starts at 10 p.m. (and continues through Oct. 25) at the Lab, 2948 16th St. (at Capp), S.F. Admission is $7-10; call 864-8855.
friday
october 17
Child's Play There's an old knock-knock joke that pertains to Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game, and it goes like this: Knock, knock/ Who's there?/ Knock, knock/ Who's there?/ Knock, knock/ Who's there?/ Knock, knock/ Who's there?/ Knock, knock/ Who's there?/ Knock, knock/ Who's there? Philip Glass. Said composer, whose distinctive and challenging work includes the epic opera Einstein on the Beach and the scores for Powaqqatsi and Koyaanisqatsi, has collaborated with choreographer Susan Marshall on a dance-opera version of French poet Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles, an ever-so-surreal tale of teen-age siblings whose imaginary world eclipses their perception of the real one. The two live and one late collaborators are accustomed to innovative interdisciplinary work; dancegoers will recall Marshall's theatrical, acrobatic piece The Kiss, wherein she suspended a pair of lovers in harnesses hung from the ceiling, while this is Cocteau's second fling with the dance world; the first was his story for the 1917 ballet Parade. The show begins at 8 p.m. (also Saturday), preceded by a discussion with Glass at 7 p.m. (tonight only), at Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft & Telegraph, UC Berkeley campus. Admission is $22-40; call (510) 642-9988.
Mug Shot Brace yourself for photos like the one of Ruth Snyder being electrocuted in 1928 (in a dress, no less), in "Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence," a group show that is as gruesome as it is fascinating. In documentary style similar to that of past SFMOMA exhibits "Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West 1849 to the Present" and "Dorothea Lange: American Photographs," this exhibit attempts to place in historical context the use of photography and art in criminal cases, with shots by several well-known photographers like Jacob Riis and Weegee, along with work by law enforcement officers and unidentified artists. There are mug shots and wanted posters, crime scene and surveillance camera photography, drawn from state and federal archives, prison records, libraries, and private collections. Amid the colorful array of petty criminals, gangsters, and corpses, there are some startling bits of information, such as the 19th-century theory that a person's facial features reveal his character. "Police Pictures" opens at 11 a.m. at SFMOMA, 151 Third St. (at Mission), S.F. Admission is free-$7.50; call 357-4000.
saturday
october 18
Keeping You Abreast You'll have to hunt for the 4-foot-wide, helium-filled latex breasts amid the throng of photographers at the National Breast Cancer Bra Tapestry event, but they'll be there, hovering above the crowd, draped with a tapestry of bras that spectators will have donated and tied onto the tapestry themselves in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Conceptual artist Nicolino launches his Bras Across the Grand Canyon project with this event, which is intended to draw attention to the thousands of American women who die from breast cancer every year. The day, which will also feature breast self-examination information and a demonstration on how to take off a bra without disrobing, begins at 10 a.m. (at 3 p.m. the launching of the breasts will occur) in Justin Herman Plaza, Market & Embarcadero, S.F. Admission is free; call (510) 237-3939. And while you're at the waterfront, check out I'm San Francisco's Main Squeeze, an accordion contest featuring 10 bands and beginning at 11 a.m. (also Sunday) at the Anchorage, Fisherman's Wharf, S.F. Admission is free; call 775-6000.
Get Thee to the Frippery Chain mail and helmets are expected to sell well at this year's California Shakespeare Festival Garage Sale, a kind of bargain bin for Halloween costume hunters and a fund-raiser for the festival. Prices start at a dollar for costumes, props, and set pieces from past seasons' productions. This year's sale will also feature lots of hats and shoes adorned with all manner of plumage, buckles, and baubles. Throw in tights and kitchen knives and you and your friends can create Shakespearean scenes at parties. The sale begins at 10 a.m. at the California Shakespeare Festival Office, 701 Heinz (at Seventh Street), Berkeley. Admission is free; call (510) 548-3422.
Xenaphernalia Xena doesn't have superpowers like flying through the air or walking on water, so maybe the fan clubs that have sprung up around the action-adventure TV series Xena: Warrior Princess admire the main character for her above-average strengths as a broad-shouldered, bed-hopping, badass babe (the show's writers seem able to melt down history and circumvent logic pretty well, but those aren't exactly superpowers either). An actual convention celebrating Xena and her beefcake-y counterpart, Hercules from the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, will feature behind-the-scenes footage from both shows, a licensed merchandise emporium, and presentations by Renee O'Conner, who plays Gabrielle on Xena, Michael Hurst, who plays Iolaus on Hercules, and Robert Field, who "plays" an editor for Xena. The stars of the show will not attend, although chances are good that fans will be dressed to resemble them. The event begins at 1 p.m. at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, 1111 California (at Taylor), S.F. Admission is free-$20; call (818) 409-0960.
sunday
october 19
To Life! The Jewish Museum's "L'Chaim! A Kiddush Cup Invitational" celebrates Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and the museum's own bar/bat mitzvah with a group show of kiddush cups, the ceremonial wine goblets over which blessings are recited at Jewish holidays. American and Israeli artists have used tractor parts and marzipan along with traditional materials to create modern versions of the cup for the exhibit, which also includes historical cups like the 18-carat gold Voorsanger Goblet, which survived the 1906 earthquake. The exhibit opens at 11 a.m. (and is up through Feb. 8, 1998) at the Jewish Museum, 121 Steuart (at Mission), S.F. Admission is free-$5; call 543-8880. The celebration continues over at the Jewish Food Festival, where Middle Eastern and klezmer music will be played, kosher beer and wine will flow, and Jewish cuisine from every continent will be available for tasting, from the blini and kugel of the "Heart of Europe" booth to the Bombay fish dishes at "Oriental Express." The tasting begins at 11 a.m. at the Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut (at Rose), Berkeley. Admission is free-$10; call (510) 848-0237.
Hey Doe John Doe-the-solo-artist continues down his lonely road, appearing in movies like Georgia and the new Boogie Nights and making music that isn't exactly the searing punk rock of X, the seminal L.A. band he founded with then-girlfriend Exene Cervenka, or the road-weary roots rock of early solo work like Meet John Doe and Kissingsohard. His new music, to be released late this year on Kill Rock Stars, is somewhere in between the two, alternating between blasts of feedback and quiet, twangy odes to love gone completely wrong, sung by a man whose voice will feel as comfortable to longtime fans as a worn and well-loved pair of cowboy boots. The Wallflowers' Mike Ward backs Doe up at this show; Lava opens at 8 p.m., followed by Arizona rock cowboys Grievous Angels, at the Kilowatt, 3160 16th St. (at Albion), S.F. Admission is $8; call 861-2595.
monday
october 20
Regular Rock Guy Bob Pollard loves Budweiser. When he and his band Guided by Voices played a recent local show, Pollard chilled bottles of it in an ice-filled wastebasket that he kept within arm's length onstage; in last month's inaugural issue of Jane magazine, Pollard wrote a short piece about his long relationship with Bud; and, indeed, the members themselves call their band Guided by Beers. GBV, which has gone through something like 51 different lineups in its 14-year career and featured Cleveland glam-band Cobra Verde on its latest release, Mag Earwhig!, reflects a lot of Pollard's personality, a grade-school teacher and father of two from Dayton, Ohio, who, despite the beer thing, is otherwise fairly un-rock-star-ish. He's a prolific guy with hundreds of songs to his credit, and the music, for which the term "lo-fi" was practically invented, is smart and sweet and slightly addled, melodic and mean and funny all at once, chugging along with echoes of the best of British pop and psychedelia. Creeper Lagoon are just the right band to open the show, which begins at 8 p.m. (and no longer includes Sportsguitar) at Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus (at Chestnut), S.F. Admission is $12-13; call 474-0365.
tuesday
october 21
Screen Scene If you stay home and rent a movie, you can wear pajamas and skip the parking trauma, but if you go out to a movie, you might see something other than video store dregs, and socialize with people who are at least smarter than your cats. A balance has been struck between art and comfort at "Outdoor Cinema," a monthly film series that organizers describe as an unpretentious place to see good local and international stuff out under the stars, margarita in hand. The series, which plans to have themed nights like a Day of the Dead show Nov. 4 complete with altars and related films, begins with a program of experimental shorts by local filmmakers, including David Munro's Bullethead, the story of an East German luge racer with a surgically streamlined head; Jay Capela's Breathe, a romantic comedy about love, sex, and power; and Jim Mendiola's Pretty Vacant, about a mischievous Latina punk. The screening begins at 8 p.m. at El Rio, 3158 Mission (at Precita), S.F. Admission is a $5 donation; call 282-3325.
