SAMUEL BECKETT + BUSTER KEATON’s FILM + LIPMAN’s NOTFILM
After many years in post-production, the Bay Area finally gets to see the kino-essay that our LA archivist-ally Ross Lipman has fashioned and about, Beckett’s only motion picture, Film (1965). OC screened the 20-min. anomaly many years ago, though it dropped out of sight with the closure of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press. But Lipman was on the trail, finding out-takes, tracking down production crew members, interviewing family and friends of the principals, and consulting historians and critics like Kevin Brownlow and Leonard Maltin. The result is a fascinating feature-length think-piece that rightfully situates avant-garde literature, theater, and cinema within their 20C socio-historical contexts, and humanizes risky 60s projects like this and others out of Rossett’s provocative publishing house. Lipman‘s magnum opus is screened in two iterations, with the original Film (and an intermission) between them.
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Other Cinema: ARCHIVE FEVER1
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Other Cinema: ALT.TRANSPORT
BRECKE/McABEE’s I_BUTTERFLY + RAIL PUNKS
Adventurous and free-thinking refusals of the petroleum dead-end give rise to thriving sub-cultures, and tonight, two of these are celebrated in their respective halves of a program filled to bursting with radical ideas and experiences. Bernal Heights hero Mark Brecke takes the handlebars of the I_Butterfly project, Cory (Stingray Sam) McAbee‘s inspired campaign to save the Monarch Butterflies through the seeding of their migratory pathways with the milkweed plants that are essential to survival..and which can sprout right out of our lovingly composted corpses! Mark‘s 20-min. live-narrated slideshow details the fascinating episodes of McAbee‘s junket to launch the national consciousness-raising, a bike journey through 2000 miles and 15 states, from Maine to Florida, stopping at theaters—and “green” graveyards—along the way to spread the word! Cory‘s own 25-min. Cultured Cells Culture performance-video was often screened, and will be tonight. Our second half sports a spate of reports of travel by even Other means—hopping those freights! Showcased is David Murphy’s Free Ride, supported by a pair of shorts from the InDecline Collective. ALSO: Ivy McClelland in-person with clips of herself in the European hit-doc, This Train I Ride, AND on our gallery walls, a sneak-preview of Bill Daniel’s upcoming Mostly True rail zine, plus a choice clip of his Bozo Texino, of course! $12-120 benefit for I_Butterfly -
Other Cinema: SF PYSCHO-GEO2:80s
YORK’s WHO CARES ANYWAY + CRAIG & PAUL MIDGET + STAR PANELISTS +
An outrageous oral history of the Bay Area‘s wild post-punk underground! Writer Will York spent two decades conducting interviews and whittling it all down to a mere (?) 560 pages’ worth of existetial drama, dark humor, spectacular failures, and improbable successes—including in-depth coverage of acts ranging from Flipper to Factrix, Minimal Man to Mr. Bungle, Inflatable Boy Claims to Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. Now Will is flying across the country to launch it in thee City that gave it birth, here moderating a panel that includes Bill Gould of Faith No More, photographer Joan Osato, Longshoreman Dog Swan, Peter Urban (aka “The Pope of Punk”), punk fiction pioneer Deise Dee, peace punk-turned-experimental artist CYRNAI, and RE/Search Pubs guru V. Vale. Members of Toiling Midgets and (the long-defunct) Arkansaw Man play separate sets; Liz Keim‘s In the Red and Richard Gaikowski‘s Deaf Punk set our screen aflame.