It’s hard to know where to start with a film as rich as A Christmas Tale (trailer), which opens tonight, November 21^st at the Bridge Theater for an exclusive one-week run. It’s under consideration for one of France’s top film honors, the Louis Delluc prize, and no wonder: in two and a half hours that never drag or bore, director Arnaud Desplechin explores every aspect of a crazy dysfunctional family, and takes us on a journey that, for all its length, almost feels a bit too short.

The heart of the story is Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), whose three adult children have been locked for years into a state of passive-aggressive feuding. Overshadowing their lives is the fate of their oldest child Joseph, who died of leukemia forty years earlier at the age of seven. When Junon develops the same disease — and there is a chance that one of her children may be able to donate marrow to save her life — they all return to the family home to be tested, and for the holidays. Merry Christmas!

It sounds like a depressing film — as Desplechin himself said of it, everything “in the scenario should scare a producer half to death” — but in fact it’s often quite hilarious, and all the tragedy is treated with a light touch that somehow doesn’t trivialize it. But in the end that’s very true to life. Add in the wonderful cast — Mathieu Almaric, Emmanuelle Devos, Hippolyte Girardot, and Chiara Mastroianni (the only actress I can’t stop thinking about and Deneuve’s real-life daughter) — and it’s a film you just can’t miss.

Desplechin visited San Francisco back in October to attend a screening of the film at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now festival. We chatted in his hotel suite; his accommodations delighted him so much that he took us out onto the balcony to share the amazing view he had of downtown and the bay. We enjoyed a rich, wide-ranging discussion about this and his other films, about his process, his opinions about various films ranging from Fanny and Alexander to The Royal Tenenbaums to The Outsiders, his plans to make a film about the birth of hip-hop in France, and why he refuses to think about casting while working on a script — even if, as with the case of Catherine Deneuve in this film, there’s really nobody else who could do the role.

It’s a lengthy interview but well worth your time, if you’d like to get a glimpse into the mind of one of the finest directors working in France today. Full text after the jump.

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Just 24 hours after a troubled 3rd year law student at UC Hastings threatened a suicide leap off the school’s landmark tower, a high ranking diplomat from a “Rogue State”, made a brave appearance in the same potentially contentious academic environment. While not as visually dramatic as the hysterical student with her cellphone in hand being talked down by police negotiators from her 21st floor perch, the ground floor speech by the Syrian Ambassador (and fellow blogger) Imad Moustapha dealt with matters of a far more grave consequence than a student’s bizarrely botched love life.

Mustapha, made an eloquent spokesman for a nation that most Americans can’t fathom, find on a map, and perhaps hear only about when a Fox News correspondent mentions it’s candidacy for the Bush administration’s “Axis of Evil”. Just steps from the plaza named after the United Nations he spoke of some of the inner machinations of that body that left his countrymen a bit more than puzzled.

He spoke of a need for better relations between our two countries, and that the smaller Syria would prefer less bullying & bluster from the current administration. Unlike the reception that awaited Iran’s President Ahmadinejad at Columbia in New York, Imad Moustapaha found a far more colloquial reception at the state’s oldest law school.

He claimed he turned down speaking at the local Commonwealth Club in favor of appearing before law students, as a deference to his life before international diplomacy took him away from his job teaching computer science in Damascus.

Fluent in four languages, co-author of the UN-sponsored “Human Development Report in the Arab World”, Moustapha holds a Phd he earned in the UK, and was Dean of IT at the University of Damascus before accepting his Ambassadorship in 2004. Equally parts charming, witty and defensive of Syria’s political positions, the Ambassador relayed tales of his transistion from simple academic life driven by science to life on the diplomatic frontlines, and his small country’s larger perspective on world events and relationships. He brought to San Francisco his perspectives from 4000 year old Damascus, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, and he referred to Cairo and Baghdad as baby cities , since they are only some 1000 years old.

Moustapha, standing under a rotating slide show of his country’s treasures and sites, gave brief introductory statements, but spent most of his hour with the students engaged in Q&A. Unfortunately, not that many questions came down the pipe because some of these were “big” questions, not easily answered in short soundbites when involving complex and sometimes confrontational geo-political issues.

More after the jump…

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It sounds like I’m about to write about a bad porn flick, but Amber is actually one of the most dee-lish things I’ve had to drink in a long time: Amber is Macallan scotch with a hint of pecan, so yummy. I tried a sample at the Litquake opening night party, but declined to have their mixed version and opted for over ice, same way I prefer my Scotch. It was musky and smooth, and the pecan came across like peaty hazelnut — and thankfully, not too sweet (but it totally smelled like waffles). Here’s a review on The Scotch Blog.

Amber is a locally-focused phenom; Citizen Cake is making pastries with it, Absinthe is re-inventing cocktails around it (”Absolute Sacrilege” is muddled blood orange, Amber, bitters, tequilia and ice), Miette has made butterscotch with it, Last Supper Club is making Hot Toddys with it, and the list goes on and on. It’s either good marketing, or the stuff is just drop-dead delicious (it is). You can get it at BevMo, but Amber doesn’t seem to have a website, doh.

At any rate, I just had to rave for a minute — and give a heads-up on an Amber tasting this Monday October 22nd at Citizen Cake, from 4-6pm (390 Grove @ Gough). Pastries and cocktails on a Monday sounds do-able to me…

(Photo from SF Station.com)
After living in the city, its easy to take certain things for granted; the benefits of public transportation, the myriad of diverse restaurants, the vibrant local art scene and…french hip hop? You read that correctly, although French and hip hop are words that typically do not share a sentence. Imagine my surprise after hearing that Voda Lounge, located in Belden Alley, offered such a musical concoction. There was a special event last week to support a local non profit and that was my first glimpse of Voda. It had a casual vibe and became crowded in a short time but the music was an absolute delight and there was even a mini dance floor. Parlez-vous hip hop?

Wander around the Rincon Hill area of SoMa, and you’ll see many buildings sporting vertical barcode strips, labeled “Nullpunkt”. I’d seen them for months, and had always theorized that they were sighting aids for surveyors. What puzzled me, though, was that the Null-line (nullpunkt is ‘absolute zero’, or a fixed baseline) didn’t seem to coincide with street elevations; around a single construction site, the null seemed to be placed arbitrarily relative to the actual grade level. So very puzzling!

So I started asking around - to surveyors I knew, structural engineers I was working with, the Google-gods.

Turns out, these barcode strips are part of an automated construction management system, becoming more common for grand-scale, complex projects. Known as mobile construction supply chain management, the system enables workers to improve efficiencies at the site; for example, to identify where pre-coded materials are to be delivered to the jobsite - key for when your materials are being shifted around by massive cranes. These processes are common to the shipbuilding and aerospace industry, but relatively new to architectural building.

The system can be infinately scaled - rumor has it that when building the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a similar barcode scanner system was used to code each structural component, thereby enabling workers constructing the steel frames to verify that the correct pieces were being joined together.

Similarly, I imagine that the twisting, splaying form of SF’s own new de Young Museum’s tower structure must have needed a heck of a lot of barcodes!

Somethings just go together. Go together like, salt ‘n pepper, scotch ‘n soda, bread ‘n butter, and one of my favorites, art ‘n jazz.

The cover artwork on my copy of Al Green, “The Absolute Best” is by artist BRUNI Sablan. It is just one in her Jazz Masters Series collection. The Bruni portrait of Duke Ellington, “The Smithsonian Duke” is a permanent fixture at the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of American History.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this wonderfully gifted artist is a local. The BRUNI Gallery located in downtown Campbell, at 394 E. Campbell Ave., is a joy for any art and  jazz connoisseur.

As my eyes moved from Miles to Bessie, I was not only seeing Bruni’s passionate brush strokes, I was hearing the music.
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Being half asian and from Hawai’i, people often ask me if I moved to the Japantown neighborhood because it reminds me of home. The short answer is No. However, this weekend was the Nihonmachi Street Fair, and the billowing aroma of teriyaki BBQ and the strains of slack-key guitar coming from the plaza did flash me back to strolling down the streets of Honolulu. Only with less aloha attire.

The two-day festival hosted musicians and dance troupes representing cultures all around the Pacific Rim. The food vendors set up on Post Street offered tempting tempura and fresh poke, but it was the art stands that I went to see. Vibrant posters done in the traditional woodblock style and raku glazed pottery at one end of the Japan Center plaza, hand beaded evening purses and authentic Samurai swords at the other. I picked up a ginko leaf styled ceramic dish made by seniors at the Kimochi Center for only five dollars, and came this close to getting one of those purses.

If you missed the bargains from the fair vendors, there’s still plenty of reason to do some in-depth browsing through the mall and it’s surrounding shops: My friend Andy frequents the tiny restaurant On The Bridge for flashbacks to his days as a graduate student in Tokyo, Soko Hardware’s basement level is a neighborhood secret for finding unique kitchen tools at an absolute steal, and the Kinokuniya bookstore offers more Manga than you can shake a rolled-up comic book at - and yes, some of it IS in English.

The Metroblogging network has grown once again, this time to Sacramento! We are excited to welcome such a close neighbor to our San Francisco community. Check out what is happening in the capital of our lovely state at:

http://sacramento.metblogs.com

And for those of you keeping score at home, Sacramento brings the total Metroblogging cities in California up for four! And for those of you really keeping score, we now have two cities up here in Northern California to keep up with the two in Southern Cali (Orange County and the flagship LA).

Oh! Any Christiana fans out there? Wonder where she’s been the past month? She’s in Sacramento now and blogging it up, so be sure to check out her posts over there!

To complement Violet’s photos, here’s a photoset view from above. On a rooftop at 18th & Guerrero. Inaugurating my absolute fav moment of the Pink Weekend, those sanctity-of-marriage destroyin’ Dykes on Bikes throttled their decible-tickling, tricked-out wheels down the streets of The Mission. Paving the way for a full hour of Lesbian Runway Action. This Saturday’s Dyke March was especially exhilarating for me. Banner overhead, I was continually blown away with the unguarded looks of sheer joy from the girls below. It was much of an ego boost for me as it was for them, let me tell ya. Women of every age range and demographic looked up with such disarming and grateful exhuberance. Surveying the upturned smiles, it appeared as if many were not local - and thus slightly giddy that an entire city would devote such unbridled enthusiasm for who they really are. I was humbled. And heartened. It’s easy to be jaded and therefore unplugged about Gay Pride here in SF. (Since, as my brother loves to sarcastically bellow: “Every week is frickin’ Gay Pride Week in San Francisco!”) True enough. But seeing your everday life mirrored through the eyes of people from around the world who view this place as a safe harbor - and have travelled all this way to exhale - that’s something that instantly removes my posturing armor and makes me see my hometown affectionately afresh. I had a blast.

No, not that kind.

The kind everyone else watches.

The Chron has a story about what strikes me as the very American practice of rooting for teams other than - or at least along with - our own - growing up with an Italian grandmother and a Croatian best friend, Italy and Croatia games were never missed.

There’s also a list of bars where you can catch live World Cup action:

Absolute Addiction, 1581 Webster St., June 12, June 17-18 and June 22, at the Kinokuniya building of the Japantown Mall in San Francisco. Live public screenings, international booths and cultural performances. Supported by the Consulate General of Japan and the Japantown Merchants Association. For more information, go to www.geocities.jp/absoluteaddiction2006.

The Chieftain Irish Pub, 198 Fifth St, San Francisco, (415) 615-0916. Will show all games live.

Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush St., San Francisco, (415) 263-8760. Will open doors at 8:45 a.m. for 9 a.m. games. Big screen.

Kezar Pub, 770 Stanyan St., San Francisco, (415) 386-9292. Will show all games live and repeat them at 5 p.m.

Mad Dog in the Fog, 530 Haight St., San Francisco, (415) 626-7279. Will show all games live and repeat them at 5 p.m.

Made in Brazil Plus, 4820 Bissell Ave., Richmond, June 17. Brazilian dancing, live music, and rebroadcast soccer matches at 8 p.m. Contact the Bay Area Brazilian Club, (415) 334-0106.

The Rose & the Crown English Food, 547 Emerson St, Palo Alto. Will show all games live. (650) 327-7673.

Santo Cristo Hall, 41 Oak Ave., South San Francisco, June 13, 18 and 22. Brazilian food, music and 9 a.m. World Cup screenings. Contact the Bay Area Brazilian Club, (415) 334-0106.

South Beach Cafe, 800 Embarcadero, San Francisco, (415) 974-1115. Will open at 5:30 a.m. on early game days. Popular with Brazilians.

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