Out There :: Night At the Wax Museum

Please note that by wax museum, we don't mean your favorite Castro District bar. We mean Madame Tussauds, the wax-figure tourist attraction deep in the tourist-a-go-go zone of Fisherman's Wharf, and apparently spelled without the apostrophe. It was the site of the afterparty for opening night of the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival, which began with a screening of documentarian Alex Gibney 's latest opus, "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" at the Castro Theatre. Out There was Johnny-on-the-spot for all of the fun, both in the moviehouse and at the house of wax.

We were happy to note LGBT figures among the waxy cast of characters at Tussauds: Harvey Milk, Billie Jean King, Neil Patrick Harris, and Quentin Crisp . (Also, Larry Kramer would have us believe, gay old George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.) OT & the ever-intrepid Pepi were also pleased to find that filmmaker Gibney, passing by us on his way to the VIP room, matched our diminutive stature. It was a great opening night for SFIFF. The film fits well into Gibney's oeuvre ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") by taking on the corruption and greed of digital-era capitalism. It shows Jobs to be multi-faceted: visionary, genius, spiritual, flawed. In a word, he was something that no Apple product will ever be, no matter how seductive: human.

First String

How do we love Owen Pallett? Let us count the ways. His classical violin training, his creativity, his mad skills with synthesizers and samplers, his angelic voice, his out gay public persona, his stunning good looks, his goofy patter between songs in performance, his athletic physique, his enlightened politics, his embrace of intellectual pursuits, his cute boyfriend, his impressive oeuvre. OP's simply got everything that OT needs in an O.

Now the Canadian boy wonder has released another video from his latest album, the excellent In Conflict (Domino). "The Sky Behind the Flag" (director: Eno Swinnen) joins the videos already released from that album, "Song for Five and Six," "On a Path," "Infernal Fantasy," the title tune and "The Riverbed," but unlike those vids, this one is completely animated. The lyrics remain the same. "Owen, why must you always be first to wake and first to fight? First to wound and first to fly?"

Pallett's compositional genius involves playing violin lines into a sequencer, capturing them in digital loops, then playing acoustic lines over the synthesized ones. He's taking techniques pioneered by Laurie Anderson in the 1970s and bringing his own lyricism and invention to them. He's a next-generation gay genius. In some ways, he's the anti-Morrissey. "You put on 'The Queen Is Dead,' " he sings. "I just want to talk instead." Where the Moz is self-aggrandizing, OP is self-effacing. Where M. is cutting, O. is kind. One day he'll make a great wax figure.