Wholphin

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Artists’ Television Access celebrates independent and underground film with the 3rd ATA Film and Video Festival on October 2, 3 & 4, 2008.

On Thursday, October 2, the festival opens with Craig Baldwin’s latest feature, MOCK UP ON MU. Drug orgies, spaceships and monsters, oh my… Rising from the hippie-UFO scene, MU follows the intertwined lives of Jack Parson, inventor of rocket fuel, Marjorie Cameron, new age sex leader, and L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer turned Scientology founder, as the “insansational” ’60s feeds them with the occult, beatniks, and spaceships to the moon. Cultural historian and culture jammer Baldwin has made cult masterpieces like TRIBULATION 99 and SONIC OUTLAWS, and may know every conspiracy and urban legend invented from Alcatraz to Bermuda. His takes on the lurid history of the universe are crazed yet commonsensical. Mashing up real events with rumors and miles of found footage, he creates an elegiac fairy-tale so cohesive that you’ll feel like a manic scholar afterwards.

Don’t miss the intro act by MU-vie star, Stoney Burke as John McTaint (think McCain).

On Friday and Saturday, October 3 & 4, the festival will showcase 20 short films that run the cinematic gamut of art, comedy and lucid trip. Some of the highlights include Tony Gault’s CASE HISTORIES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY – a hilarious case study of 80s club life as interpreted by Unsolved Mysteries and then reinterpreted by Gault, the beautiful, flickering SPHINX ON THE SEINE by Paul Clipson – a luscious display of wires, lines, light and contrast, and VISIONS OF WASTED TIME – an apparently controversial but utterly unique home movie by Neil Ira Needleman. I didn’t get to see Kerry Laitala’s RETROSPECTROSCOPE but love all her work and the title is sure promising.

In addition to the screenings, the work of 11 experimental film and video artists will be displayed as installations throughout the gallery during the festival and in the ATA Window in October.

ATA is at 992 Valencia at 21st Street. Doors open at 7:30pm every night. Screenings start at 8pm. Tickets are $10. Limited amount available online.

For complete information, including interviews of the filmmakers visit http://festival.atasite.org/2008

FESTIVAL PROGRAM

Thursday, October 2 - Opening Night

Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin).

Friday, October 3:

Why Was I Born (Marlon Gonzalez); Vivid Dreams (Jim Granato); Ants (Ants Ants Ants) (Clare Samuel); Case Histories in Psychotherapy (Tony Gault); Kogel Vogel (Frederico Camapanale).

The Quite Storm (Jibz Cameron); Sunshine Bob (Christian Simmons); Martha’s Party (Marthaxiv) Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show (Lise Swenson/Richard Schimpf); Sphinx on the Seine (Paul Clipson)

Saturday, October 4:

Ghosts and Gravel Roads (Mike Rollo); Retrospectroscope (Kerry Laitala); Nocturnal Transmission (Carl Diehl); What for What (John Davis); Visions of Wasted Time (Neil Ira Needleman)

In Search of a Mystic Bartone (Mack McFarland); Baird’s Beaked Whale (Douglas Schultz); The Stalin that was Played by Me (Daya Cahen); Infection (Esther Maria Probst); and 3×1 (Telemach Wiesinger)

Gallery Installations - October 3 & 4

Ode to Kirlian (Sam Manera) and Television for Ghosts: The Big Storm (Shalo P.)

Window Installations – October 2-October 31 (7pm-midnight)August (Vanessa O’Neill); Ozuland 002 (Carlos Sansolo) Poderia Haver Algo No Fundo Do Espelno (Ericka Frankel);Steve Martin on the Loose (Rebecca Whipple); RGB Expose (Nick Briz); The Isthmus of Kansas (Christopher Cassidy); Baghdad Plan Is a Success (Sabine Gruffat); Close to Home (Jan Hakon Erichsen); and Sandwich: The Musical (Eric Arsnow)

With the Olympics and the DNC dominating the news these past couple weeks I almost missed the latest Bigfoot “discovery.” While hiking through the woods in northern Georgia this past June two men claim to have stumbled upon a dead 7′ 7″ Sasquatch, which they then brought home and put on ice while they made preparations for the proper unveiling. Crazy, right?

Three months ago I would have been rolling my eyes just like you, but that was before I saw David Thayer’s documentary, Bigfoot: A Beast on the Run. Now, I know all about Ray Wallace and his 16-inch wooden feet, I’ve seen the Patterson/Gimlin film at least a dozen times, and I could argue the “mid-tarsel break” theory like a pro. And you know what, it’s a damn convincing theory.

Thayer traveled around the United States meeting with Bigfoot researchers, hunters and enthusiasts, including University professors, cryptozoology experts and Bay Area native, Tom Biscardi, who was the one and only person called in to consult on this recent Bigfoot discovery in Georgia. Biscardi has been called many things, but passionless is certainly not one of them.

So while we all eagerly await the results of the DNA tests to reveal whether this Georgia Bigfoot is human, opossum or other, I highly recommend you whet your appetite with Thayer’s documentary, excerpted on this month’s Wholphin No 6. Camping will never be the same again.

at Cinefamily, the venerable institution at the Silent Movie Theatre

Sunday, 8/24 @ 7:30 & 9:30pm
Frank Zappa’s The Amazing Mr. Bickford

The title is not an exaggeration. Bruce Bickford’s art–a hallucinatory stop-motion amalgamation of Peter Pan, Ray Harryhausen, and The Wild Bunch–is nothing short of amazing. Frank Zappa first used the incredible talents of self-taught claymation wizard Bickford as visual companions to his music in the film Baby Snakes, and continued this collaboration in The Amazing Mr. Bickford. On the film’s original VHS cover, Zappa exclaimed, “Bruce Bickford is a genius!…Few other home video products can compare with the years of effort and attention to detail contained in less than an hour of The Amazing Mr. Bickford. It is a show that will be watched again and again, freeze-framed, and gasped at for years to come.” Bruce Bickford will be in attendance for a Q&A after this incredibly rare screening.

Dirs. Bruce Bickford & Frank Zappa, 1987, digital presentation, 60 min.
Tickets - $14/ $10 for members

Tuesday, 8/26 @ 8pm
Cas’l and Other Unreleased Bruce Bickford Films

While the greater mass of animator Bruce Bickford’s work seen by the public consists of the films he made while working for Frank Zappa, he never stopped working, either before or after his employ. We will screen some of Bruce’s early Super-8 experiments as a teenager, as well as his unfinished 45-minute opus Cas’l, the inspired result of years of solitary work, featuring a live score by The Gaslamp Killer. Also, Bickford will perform on of his “blues raps”, with musical accompaniment by Gerry Fialka.

Tickets - $14/ $10 for members

Japanese noise geniuses the Boredoms have always been the exact opposite of their name. Main mastermind Yamantaka Eye first did pure noise as a one-man band Hanatarash. I’ve heard that stands for “snot nosed,” as Eye often had allergy problems - which, plus medicine, would make him space out a lot. So I heard. Hanatarash is puuurrrre noise, in the realm of Merzbow and the Incapacitants, using pedals to blow out deafening feedback with strange underlying rhythms. Live he would let the sound max out as he smashed things. I’ve seen footage of him throwing big oil drums into the audience and smashing anything in site. Stories include him driving a back hoe into a club and knocking down a wall, and jumping around with a chainsaw until it hit his leg.

The Boredoms were the next step for Eye, a more traditional setup of a band but the team made unusual songs, with Eye not really singing in any language as much as the entire band making up their own musical and vocal sounds. They went from (less harsh) noise with song structures, eventually to more drifting ambience in longer songs, to various setups like tribal drum influences. Always completely fresh with each album, like you were being taught what sound could be.

So when the Boredoms organized 77 drummers to play on 7-7-07 last year - made perfect sense. Last week they upped it to 88 drummers, playing 88 minutes, on 8-8-08, with a group in Brooklyn and a group at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, which i went to.

Audibly, it was, of course, amazing. It sounds simple in a lot of ways, but you’ve just never heard that much drumming at one time. (Sorry USC, this even blew away your “Tusk” cover.) The waves of sound and beats were different depending on where you were in the crowd, and the echoes kept going. Beats seemed thought out, led by the Boredoms, and often you thought the drummers were directly in sync when different layers appeared coming from different areas of the circle.

Visually it was even better. The waves of drummers moving seemed more complex than you would have expected. Started slow, got going, then explosions of fury. The giant circle of drummers around the Boredoms on the center stage became a nice zoetrope of movement, sometimes in perfect unison, sometimes a wobbly set of dominos. It was blurry at times, and you were lulled into expecting what was next. But then all the sticks moving and the beats hitting you just stayed….pleasurable.

You Tube has many many cool videos, from the close up of a few drummers, also fascinating, to a wide shot of the circle. But its all small moments. Pro cameramen were running around, hopefully for a DVD release. No matter where you watched the performance from, you couldn’t have the same experience as others, side to side, front to back, always seeing half of the circle, and different parts of the Boredoms. All while Eye led as conductor, while hitting a homemade(?) eight-neck guitar with his stick. Noise is pretty structured after all.

Wholphin’s own Brent Hoff spoke with MarBelle of Directors Notes about Wholphin’s past, present, and future. Listen to the podcast here.