Highlights

Psychic TV

Sat., July 3

Last night I dreamt I kissed Genesis P-Orridge. Not in a sexual way, despite the fact that he's nearly a she, made possible as part of a perf-art experiment ("Breaking Sex") wherein he and partner Lady J. Breyer P-Orridge reunited and resolved their male/female partnership with matching breast-implant operations. No. I nearly kissed Genesis P-Orridge because he continues to be confrontational art's most radically flip and noisiest provocateur; the don of disinformation, a mensch of morass. Whether you consider his birthing of ire-filled industrial music via Throbbing Gristle the full-body heave of spoken word/visual projects like Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (where Genesis' teeth get replaced with solid gold), body/mind-modifying art, working as part of the hyper-theatrical Thee Majesty or collaborations with Leary, Burroughs or the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Orridge is about making trouble magick.

Nothing comes or goes easy for Orridge. Rather than turn his most brilliant project, Psychic TV, into an everyday arbiter of electronic currency, he's maintained the genuine evil acidity of acid house's soul-body transformational psychedelicism and continued to make PTV CDs in that scary tech-sampled image. Though issuing what seems like dozens of live venue CDs before Clear Channel got into the act, studio volumes compiled under the Origin of the Species rubric best execute what Orridge has titled "hyperdelic" electronic music: scabby, scared techno records that manage to stay haunting yet infectious. And Orridge doesn't take infection lying down. With Michael Gira and the Optic Nerve.

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111, 10, $20.

A.D. Amorosi

The Dave Van Ronk Street-Naming Memorial

Weds., June 30

Though not as dust-bowl-dry and socialistically political as Guthrie or as dastardly prosaic and prolific as Dylan, folk godfather Dave Van Ronk has a talent: his big mouth. It's big in that he could and would talk up the best minds of his generation in generous Ginsberg-like fashion as if he were a carnival barker for the folk movement. Yes, Van Ronk was a nimble, finger-plucking guitar fool with a gruff, happy folk vocal sensibility. Yes, he was a fine interpreter of both rural and urban blues.

Before succumbing to colon cancer in February 2002, Van Ronk proved that songs of fellow artists like Scrapper Blackwell, Jelly Roll Morton, Joni Mitchell and, yes, Bob Dylan are etched into his DNA. But if his greatness comes from singing someone else's songs, why doesn't Jerry Vale have a street named after him, like Van Ronk will have this week? Because Vale was never thought of as "The Mayor of MacDougal Street." Vale never founded and fueled generation after generation of literate critical artists from Tom Paxton and Judee Sill to Suzanne Vega. If he had, they'd have renamed Mott Street as Vale Street.

Instead Dave Van Ronk gets his own Greenwich Village block, a new posthumous live album and any number of accolades. Don't be jealous. Maybe one day you'll move mountains in the name of a worthy art form. Until then, slide those Jerry Vale records onto your turntable and mope.

Sheridan Square (Barrow St. & Washington Pl.), 310-451-0767, 6:30, free.

A.D. Amorosi

Jaga Jazzist

Tues., July 6

Like a cross between the Matthew Herbert Big Band's jungle-juggling Goodbye Swingtime, the post-prog slog of Tortoise on Millions Now Living Will Never Die and several latter-day Gil Evans albums, Lars Horntveth and Martin Horntveth make electronic swings sounds that shake, rattle, jump and jive. But for two guys (and their band of renown) whose Norwegian heritage sounds closer to chocolate-making than it does moist drum 'n' drill jazz, it ain't the ambition that's weird. It's the execution, as found on A Livingroom Hush and its successor, The Stix.

Across the point-and-counterpoints, the fugues-and-freakouts and the anti-harmonic harmolodics, there is a crepuscular sense of beautiful music, as if the Horntveths were preparing a bossa bachelor-pad's warm bath or a Tropicalista's swinging sex party. Tunes like "I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna" and "Kitty Wú" are otherworldly in the way Another Green World or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was upon first listening—quietly revolutionary and revolutionarily quiet.

With Sixtoo + P-Love and Matt Kelly.

Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 212-219-3006, 8:30, $20, $17 adv.

A.D. Amorosi

Jazzanova

Thurs., July 1

What Picasso is to blue-school Cubism, what Gamble and Huff are to smooth Philly cheese, what Donald Byrd is to the birth of the cool—Jazzanova is to Teutonic space soul. In fact, throughout their nine-year tenure, this team of players and spinners has made blankets of Syn-&-B as if they were Kraftwerk dressed in blue suede tuxedos. With sublime arranging skills, dub-deep bass lines and layers of subtle melody, Jazzanova's artist records and their DJ-blitzes take their time. Never rushed or angry, the deliberately dusky, fuzzy, fussy tech-funk of Philly's Jazzy Jeff, Bahamadia and Jill Scott get tossed like a soft salad onto a bed of satin. While Jazzanova DJ, Jürgen von Knoblauch, takes on an opening set of block-rubbing rhythm, Ayro brings his broke-beaten ElectronicLoveFunk to the stage. Though a bit smitten with the Stevie Wonder school of elastic soul, there's dirty melodies in them thar hills where programmer/songwriter Jeremy Ellis is concerned.

Rare, 416 W. 14th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-675-2220, 10, $10.

A.D. Amorosi

Cine Mexico!

Fri.-Thurs., July 2-22

In Mexican film, one overriding concern always seems to seep to the surface: Revolucion. Beginning with El Compadre Mendoza (Fernando de Fuentes, 1933) and continuing through Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1976), much of the best of Mexican filmmaking depicts the struggle between the forces of change and reaction. This tension is on display for the next three weeks in a comprehensive, illuminating series at Film Forum.

In Mendoza, a crafty merchant of that name bankrolls Zapata's revolutionary army, which the government army is then sent to fight, replacing Zapata's picture on the wall with that of the dictator Huerta. Pacifying officers on both sides with his extensive supply of liquor, Mendoza receives the tacit approval from all parties to continue on despite the obvious conflicts of interest. Only his son, not yet schooled in the ways of capitalism, is foolish enough to believe in the revolution.

A Woman in Love (Emilio Fernandez, 1946) has been compared to Gone with the Wind for its strange combination of swooning romanticism and slapstick comedy, but its most intriguing aspect is the showdown between the revolutionary and the priest, old friends meeting again under changed circumstances. Borrowing its conceit from James Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces, the film contrasts two leaders: the outlaw and the priest, one determined to uphold tradition and the other equally determined to overthrow it. A Woman in Love is admirably agnostic about any cause, political or spiritual; when the revolutionary demands that the church turn over its valuables in the name of the revolution, the priest wryly responds, "They have been used for other causes." Since turnabout is fair play, Fernandez also provides a long, loving track along the splendiferous ceiling of the church, a beauty that fades rapidly upon contrast with the grinding poverty of its congregants.

Luis Buñuel, brilliant bomb-thrower that he was, was never opposed to a good slap at the Church. Four of his films are being screened in this series, including the anti-Catholic screed Nazarin (1958). Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953) is a relative trifle in the master's career, but its depiction of two drunken transit workers commandeering their favorite trolley line and offering free rides to all is a sort of homespun revolution. Even Cantinflas' persona as the Chaplinesque outsider obsessed with bodily comfort bears a mark of class warfare. That's the Point (1940) is for the most part painfully unfunny, but the lazy Cantinflas gets in a few good cracks at the expense of his social betters: "If work was so good, the rich would have hoarded it, and only they would work."

Canoa alternates mock-documentary interviews (borrowing from British master provocateur Peter Watkins) with a careful retelling of five lynchings in a small Mexican university town. The dramatic reenactments drag a bit, but Cazals' outrage at the Church's ability to rile up its followers to violence, whether in the name of God or in opposition to some phantom communism, is palpable. Aventurera (Alberto Gout, 1950) is an hysterical melodrama, following young Elena's path from middle-class comfort to prostitution and back. Taking place in a world of grasping, criminal men and street-tough women, Aventurera is truly epic trash that revels in its own absurdity.

Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110, call for times, $10.

Saul Austerlitz

Paradise (Lost): Los Angeles on Film

Fri.-Sun., July 2-August 15

Timed to coincide with the upcoming release of the phenomenal documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (opening at Film Forum July 28), the American Museum of the Moving Image has programmed a series of films in and about the city of Angels.

Thom Andersen's brilliant, incisive look at the history of Los Angeles' relationship to the silver screen is too free-wheeling and brilliant to adequately summarize here. Suffice it to say that Andersen is one of the foremost critical thinkers on cinema anywhere. Utilizing clips from sources ranging from Mildred Pierce to Die Hard to gay porn classic L.A. Plays Itself (from which the film gets its title), Los Angeles Plays Itself is such a hearty meal, with so many impeccably served, lip-smackingly good courses, that to pay tribute to any one of them seems insulting to the others.

Moving Image's series makes use of Andersen's film as an inspiration, with a 38-film series, of which many are drawn from the examples used in Los Angeles Plays Itself. Much like Andersen, "Paradise (Lost)" includes two radically different sets of films, only nominally related: movies explicitly about Los Angeles, and movies that happen to feature Los Angeles as a backdrop. In that sense, watching Los Angeles Plays Itself is something of a prerequisite for viewing this series; it serves as a key, explaining the provenance and relevance of the great majority of the films on display here.

The Moving Image series is terrific in its own right, running the gamut from Chinatown (which Andersen repeatedly uses in his film) to Meshes of the Afternoon to Mulholland Drive. Almost everything here is a must, but if you haven't seen it, check out Peter Bogdanovich's debut feature Targets (1968). Intermingling the stories of an aging horror star (Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself) and a whitebread sniper (Tim O'Kelly), Bogdanovich paints Los Angeles as a fractured, disjointed metropolis. Bogdanovich's sense of Los Angeles is sharp, and the contrasts made between the worlds of movie stars and middle-class Valley dwellers go a long way toward revealing Los Angeles' alienated sprawl. In the superb closing set piece, the sniper pokes a hole in the drive-in movie screen where the movie star's latest film is being premiered, then begins to pick off the spectators. The horror film's promises of danger become reality here, and the movie star (and Karloff by extension) is given a grand send-off by facing down genuine, featureless evil.

American Museum of the Moving Image, 35 Ave. (36 St.), Astoria, 718-784-4520, call for times, $10, $7.50 st./s.c.

Saul Austerlitz

Bembeya Jazz

Weds., June 30

One of the most celebrated groups from the country of Guinea and the so-called "Afropop" scene in general, Bembeya Jazz returns to the U.S. following their 2002 reunion album Bembeya and, more recently, Guitar Fo, the just-released solo album of one of their primary members, guitarist Sekou Diabate. Bordering Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Côte D'Ivoire, Guinea lies along the northern part of Africa's West Coast. Though it is a well-known fact that the music of the region is forever linked through the slave trade to the various musical forms that subsequently sprang up in the Americas, the 20th century saw the influence begin to travel in two directions. Afro-Cuban and jazz in particular have repollinated the work of many artists on the African continent.

The Bembeya Jazz ensemble sprang up in 1961, following Guinea's abrupt transition to independence from French rule in 1958. Guinea's alliance with Cuba paved the way for Bembeya to tour Cuba in the 60s. Reportedly, Cuban singer Abelardo Barroso was moved to tears by one of their performances. By the late 60s, the group, which at one time numbered 12 members, including a horn section with overt Latin influences, had achieved international acclaim, and they soldiered on even after vocalist and leader Aboubacar Dembar Camara was killed in 1973 in an automobile accident on the way to a concert in Dakar, Senegal.

Functioning in Guinea's impoverished economy proved too difficult, and in 1988 the members were forced to find work outside the country. Interestingly, during the band's formative years, Diabate, a member of the "griot" artist class of the Mandingo ethnic group, didn't want to join the band at first but was forced to do so by his uncle, who threatened to turn him in to the authorities. (A more precise label for Bembeya's music is "modern Manding." Manding is a region that straddles Guinea and Mali.) Nicknamed "Diamond Fingers," Diabate ended up becoming a primary contributor to the band's trademark four-guitar sound.

Despite their native country's intense poverty, Bembeya's music is buoyant and light on its feet, forgoing the density preferred by American jazz groups of all sizes. Blending jazz, Hawaiian slide and other styles, the guitar work of Diabate sparkles and drifts like a fine mist through the light layers of sound laid down by the rest of the ensemble. An animated performer on stage, Diabate employs the services of Bembeya's rhythm section—drummer Conde Mory Mangalan, bassist Aziz Dielygui Diabate, percussionist Papa Kouyate and vocalist M'Bemba Camara—and revisits some well-known Bembeya numbers on his solo album, so it makes sense that Bembeya appears in full at this show. Dancing, it is said, is irresistible at a Bembeya concert. At a recent Central Park Summerstage appearance, even heavy rainfall couldn't deter people from moving their feet.

S.O.B.'s, 204 Varick St. (Houston St.), 212-243-4940, 9 & 10, $25, $22 adv.

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Lyle Lovett & Calexico

Sun., July 4

No other artist knows how to deliver stinging, bruised lyrics while making you laugh quite like Lyle Lovett does. Remarkably, the painful situations he and lyrical collaborator Michael H. Goldsen describe in their narratives, such as calling an estranged lover's grandmother from a payphone only to find that she's been married for years, don't strike the heart with any less impact just because they're funny, at times even ridiculous.

Which makes Lovett an understated master. It's precisely his playfully wry, quirky delivery that enables listeners to feel like they're soaring through—and ultimately above—the deep melancholy his albums explore. He is also among the distinct few who manage to create moods that go beyond the monochromatic emotional approach typical of country music. In addition, the sophistication of his records, both in terms of arrangement and production, is virtually untouchable. Truly, he epitomizes the term "progressive country."

Tuscon's Calexico, a band built around the creative partnership of drummer John Convertino and guitarist/vocalist Joey Burns, opens tonight's show. Among the slew of so-called "alt-country" acts who, with indie cred in tow, straddle the appeal of both the rock and country camps, Calexico's fascination with Tex-Mex culture can get a little grating. Nonetheless, their subdued, folky approach makes them a fitting foil for Lovett's more elaborate sense of restraint. A winning and unusual double-bill.

Lawn of Battery Park (State & South Sts.), 212-835-2789, 4, free.

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni