Charles Gatewood/Courtesy

Treasure Island Music Festival

The ever-growing Bay Area music festival returns this weekend with even bigger headliners, including Atoms for Peace and Animal Collective. With the San Francisco skyline as the most epic backdrop ever, the festival is a guaranteed good time. If you decide to splurge on the ticket, make sure you check out Disclosure’s set on Saturday — the duo’s funky beats will definitely get you in the dancing mood.

‘Porcile’ at the Pacific Film Archive

Regarded as one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most difficult and intriguing films, “Porcile” (Pigsty) is made up of two stories spliced together, somehow touching on everything from bestiality to psychoanalysis to the brutal effects of human isolation. If you leave the theater feeling like you want to curl up in a ball in an attempt to digest what you’ve just seen rather than meeting your friends at Cafe D, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Classical Revolution

A collection of classically trained musicians has decided to bring the symphony to the common people, meeting up every week in cafes, galleries and other small venues in the Bay Area to jam with other professional and amateur string musicians. Hit up Revolution Cafe on Monday to get in touch with your sophisticated side without having to shed your favorite cut-offs and Converse.

‘Charles Gatewood: 50 Years’

Launching his career with his black-and-white portrait of Bob Dylan smoking a cigarette, Gatewood entered the rock ’n’ roll world with force in the late ’60s. His work is on display this month at the Robert Tat Gallery, including his later shots of New York’s and San Francisco’s underground erotic cultures. If your mother is in town, it might be best to head to the de Young instead.

Contact Alec Smyth at asmyth@dailycal.org.

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An open letter to “Saturday Night Live”:

Diversify your cast. How freakin’ hard could it possibly be? This let’s-just-hire-white-male-actors schtick season after season is getting old. Diversify your cast because if you fail to do so, you fail to be relevant to America.

Hire a black woman. For your 39th season, when you hired six new players, five of whom are white males, even one of your castmates, Jay Pharoah, had to call you out on it. Do not hire a black woman for the sake of hiring a black woman. Hire her because Michelle Obama, Beyonce Knowles and Serena Williams are cultural forces to be reckoned with.

Do not diversify because Pharoah told you to. Diversify because America is diversifying, and if your aim is to offer cutting-edge satire of contemporary America, you cannot do so by focusing singularly on a white audience.

Do so because every now and then you have the power to change an election. Do so because when Tina Fey says, “Only in comedy is a white girl from the suburbs considered diversity,” it isn’t funny, it’s shameful. Do so because Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann cannot be your only sources of political variety. Don’t forget about the former mayor of Los Angeles, the governor of Louisiana or the point guard of the Houston Rockets. There is a whole cache of hilarious material that you don’t even have the option of tapping into because you don’t have the players to do it.

Don’t buy into the excuse that “SNL” defenders give — if people want alternative, counterculture comedy, they can look to BET or Comedy Central or “MADtv.” Don’t buy into the excuse that because your audience is largely white and because large swaths of America aren’t interested in your show, there isn’t a need to make an effort. And don’t make the excuse that since you mainly hire from major improv troupes like the Groundlings, the Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, all of which are predominantly white, your pool for minority employment is limited.

First, maybe the reason counterculture shows exist is that cornerstone shows like “SNL” have failed to integrate, forcing comedy television to segregate. Second, maybe the reason why large swaths of America aren’t interested in SNL is because you haven’t made the effort to branch out. Third, it’s hard to believe that there are zero funny minority players out there who are not involved in an improv comedy troupe whom you could potentially hire.

Your old formula clearly isn’t working and hasn’t been for years. The millennial generation tunes in and out of your show, and when we really need incisive political commentary, there’s Jon Stewart. For everything else, there’s the Internet. Every now and then, a celebrity graces your show that is of interest and does something moderately funny that goes viral.

The New York Times came out with a piece about a month ago detailing your hiring process. The publication noted that Lorne Michaels is involved in all hiring decisions. If all your new hires must be screened through Lorne, maybe your problem isn’t your staff. Maybe it’s Mr. Michaels himself. Maybe your 68-year-old executive is stuck in a New York City bubble, and it’s time for him to look around at America’s changing racial makeup.

Is “SNL” still relevant? Barely. With your persistently stagnant cast demographics, you becomes less and less so with every passing season.

If retaining relevance is a thing over at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then the solution to your problem is pretty simple. Don’t diversify for the PR. Definitely don’t diversify just because critics are telling you to.

Do it because it makes sense. Do it because diversity is fundamentally American. Do it because it’ll make you funnier.

Lynn Yu is the arts columnist. Contact her at lyu@dailycal.org.

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The Weinstein Company/Courtesy

‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’

A Grammy legend will be gracing the Bay Area this week, but only as a fictional portrayal. “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” starring Tony nominee Jessie Mueller in the titular role as well as Jake Epstein (Yes, from “Degrassi: The Next Generation”!), will open at SHN Curran Theatre in San Francisco on Tuesday. This will be the only pre-Broadway run before the musical moves to the Broadway stage in November.

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Virginia Woolf tells me not to be angry all the time because no one wants to listen to angry people. So this week, I’m taking a break from lamenting the sad state of television and its exclusivity and instead nerding out over Joss Whedon’s latest creation, the TV show “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Superhero films and shows have an uncanny ability to reflect the American public’s feelings about power or whatever the present paranoia happens to be.

I was an avid fan of “Heroes,” faithfully following through even after it thoroughly jumped the shark in its third season. The 2006 series, focusing on an international community of ordinary folks with superpowers, resonated with much of what was being preached to the millennial generation — who wants to be extra special when you can be “normal”? We’re all special because we all get trophies for simply existing in youth basketball!

That tired theme quickly petered out by the fourth season, and the show was canceled. Soon afterward, we were met with a deluge of superhero movies questioning whether power was inherently good or bad (see: “The Avengers,” “Iron Man 3”). And now, we have “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” a departure from the normative superhero narrative in that the show centers on the team hunting down the supers.

Another side note trend that deserves snaps: Lead female characters in superhero movies/TV shows have become progressively more badass. Katniss Everdeen of “The Hunger Games,” Black Widow of “The Avengers” and even Gwen Stacy of “The Amazing Spider-Man” made the summer of 2012 one of the best seasons for female roles in the superhero genre.

Given that “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is a Whedon show, the lead female characters are smart and kick-ass but nonetheless objectified. In the first episode, the protagonist resorts to flaunting her breasts to get an agent to open up to her, even though she has hacked into government systems multiple times and probably brilliant enough not to have to do so.

The show’s protagonist is a young hacker and conspiracy theorist named Skye, paranoid that the government is trying to “cover up” superheroes everywhere after what happened in New York City a la “Avengers.” Her rhetoric echoes the Occupy movement in some regards —  in the latest episode, she fantasizes how great it is that “so many people can unite over an idea … a few hundred people can come up with 1 percent of the solution.”

And in the pilot episode, she’s constantly worried that she’ll be captured by the “men in suits” for her work as a hacker running an antigovernment website. Sound paranoid enough to be familiar? If Captain America was for World War II and the X-Men’s struggle for equality from the same period as the Civil Rights Movement, is the defining movement of our time defined by Occupy and antigovernment paranoia? God, I hope not.

But as much as the show allows Skye to project the unease that American sentiment holds for government overreach, it ultimately seems to advocate the net positivity that this shadowy, shady government entity is dealing out in “covering up” supernatural presences.

Despite Skye’s efforts to cast doubt over S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intentions and actions, the secret government department nevertheless charms viewers.

Perhaps President Obama and Congress can take a cue as to how to win over the hearts and minds of the American public — have a few very attractive people run around and save the day from alien threats to humanity while making witty quips, and voila, our faith in the necessity of intelligence agencies is restored.

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Hotwire Unlimited, Warner Bros. Records/Courtesy

Gary Clark Jr. at the Fox Theater

The Texas-based rock ’n’ roll guitarist is back in the Bay on Oct. 2, guaranteeing audiences a wild, electrifying performance if his shows at Glastonbury and Outside Lands this summer were any indicator. The Hendrix-esque artist has been hailed as the future of Texas blues. If that doesn’t lure you to his show, then perhaps Entertainment Weekly’s affirmation that Clark is this generation’s “chosen one” will.

“Art of Bulgari” at the de Young

“Art of Bulgari: La Dolce Vita and Beyond, 1950-1990” opened this past week at San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. The exhibition consists of the Greek designer Sotirios Voulgaris’ luxury jewelry. These showstopper diamond, jewel and gold pieces were all post-World War II and cite Greco-Roman classicism and the Renaissance as inspiration. Be sure to check out the pieces that were once owned by Elizabeth Taylor.

Bikes to Books

USA Today wrote that, on average, San Franciscans spend twice the nation’s average on books and booze. If you’re not old enough to take San Francisco’s Walking Pub Tour, then you should at least look into Bikes to Books, a free bicycle tour of the Literary City. From Jack London Street to Kerouac Alley, the tour follows a map co-designed by the famous City Lights Bookstore.

Blitzen Trapper’s VII

Portland-based, homespun folk band Blitzen Trapper releases their seventh album (aptly titled VII) Tuesday. Fans of the Americana quintet can look forward to more country-creased sounds that this time around are tinged with a darker R&B vibe. Listen to VII in preparation for the band’s San Francisco show in November.

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Aug. 25 was an iconic day in contemporary American history, apparently. Miley Cyrus twerked, and we cared. The single act sparked one of the most notable outcries from the general public in the history of live performance, and if you haven’t been living under a pile of discarded Random Access Memories records, you’ll need no refresher about the myriad of ways people felt Miley had impinged upon their moral standards by dropping her thun thun thun in front of millions of Americans. And I get it. It was scandalous, it was raunchy, it was daring, and somebody needed to say something. But what the performance did not warrant was its labeling by critics as a flagship for the deterioration of music and the overexposition of sexuality in contemporary media and culture.

Yes, of course, popular music frankly doesn’t compare to that which was popular when these repulsed critics were growing up. I think it would be difficult to find someone who has any sense of music at all who disagrees. And yes, instead of listening to Michael Jackson belt out the ABCs of how to fall in love when middle schoolers are having their first dances, the speakers in the gymnasium are blaring Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’ “Get Low” (my favorite lyrics going something like, “To the window / To the wall / To the sweat drop down my balls”).

Clearly, a shift has occurred, and we should take note of it. But the allusion critics make to censoring popular music for their children or forcing them to hear the “real” songs written in their childhoods instead of the philistine junk played on the radio is like placing a band-aid over a festering wound. The “problem” isn’t the music. The problem is us.

 First of all, different stuff is sexy now than it was when they were growing up. An article from popular culture blog Hypstercrite shows how Robin Thicke’s manipulation of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Got to Give It Up” reveals the kind of perversion for which contemporary popular music is agreeably responsible. The author cites Gaye’s lyric, “You can love me when you want to, babe / This is such a groovy party, baby,” claiming that this kind of sexy talk is inherently better, cleaner and more appropriate than Thicke’s replacement, “You the hottest bitch in the place.”

But here’s the real talk: Kids are living and growing up in a world where romantic ideals of love and sex have been shattered. When we think of sex, we also think of disease, death and danger due in part to the medicalization of sexuality and the popularization of HIV and STD awareness campaigns. While “let’s get it on” might be a more polite and sensual form of getting someone into bed with you, it also is indicative of a time when sex still stood for something pure. The first thing kids think about when they hear sex in the 21st century is more likely porn and strip clubs than rose petals and red lipstick.

Some of the mystery of sexuality has been lost, and while, of course, I love Marvin, Al, J Brown and the rest of them, I think there’s value in new artists trying to define and imagine a new definition of sexuality that might more accurately apply to a 15 year-old kid in 2013, growing up in a world much different from the one these critics grew up in — different not only because we’ve swapped out the LP for the iPod but because we’ve completely reconceptualized sex, love and relationships in general.

 What many critics have suggested is that older generations remove technology from their children and instead take them on field trips to the record store in hopes that they establish a kind of music taste that more closely aligns with their own, so that, I think, so too will their concepts of sex, love, identity, selfhood, etc. begin to regress to those more “pure” ideals of the ’60s and ’70s. But the thing is, we’ve already changed, and the music just follows. While Sam Cooke wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, his lyrics reflecting the passion of the people who believed in a different future for blacks in this country, artists today are worried about different issues and are communicating them in different ways because, well, times are just different. Whether it’s Thom Yorke’s environmentalism, Macklemore’s gay marriage, Beyonce Knowles’ women’s rights or Kendrick Lamar’s race/class struggle, things are still being said through music, messages are still being delivered, and most important of all, people are still dancing.

And yeah, who cares if Miley’s a slut? If popular music is giving some 11-year-old girl a little relief from the fucking hectic, acid-bleached pain of growing up as she locks herself in her room to just dance, or move, or listen and escape, I don’t think we can complain. Music is still moving people; it’s still making people smile. It’s still making people cry. And until it stops doing all that, I’ll keep listening.

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When I get older, I have a feeling I will turn into Robert De Niro in “Silver Linings Playbook,” when Sunday becomes the greatest day of the week solely because of bacon, beer and Sunday football. Sports television is a large part of what Americans consume on TV — Sunday Night Football is the second-most-watched program on television right now — but to whose benefit?

According to The Economist, 40 percent of American athletic participants are female, and yet they receive only 1.62 percent of sports airtime on major sports networks.

I emailed ESPN, the network whose commentators have been talking with their dicks since 1979 (see: commentary of the 2013 BCS championship game), expecting no response. Surprisingly, a representative got back to me with a PC statement and some bullet points, one of which included: “No other outlet provides the breadth and depth of coverage.”

That’s funny, because from 2004 to 2009, only 3.6 percent of the covers of ESPN The Magazine featured female athletes. Although, to be fair, I was asking about television. I emailed back, requesting a breakdown of live TV events, and she pointed me toward ESPN3, which had featured women in 40 percent of its televised events.

She told me the network had 1,400 hours of women’s sports programming planned for the year. I asked: out of how many total hours? Unfortunately, she said, she did not have that information.

While the rest of the country grapples to catch up with the times, the Pac-12 Networks, the collegiate conference’s independently owned television broadcasting network, is already one step ahead of the game.

“We did 550 events last year, and it was actually an even split between men’s and women’s events,” said Kirk Reynolds, vice president of communications. “This year, we’re doing 750 events, and 383 are women’s sports. … We’re televising women’s volleyball with 90 events, women’s basketball with 100 events, which are unprecedented numbers. Prior to Pac-12 Networks, it used to be like five women’s basketball events televised the whole year.”

I sat down with Sandy Barbour, director of Cal Athletics, and she agreed with Reynolds’ sentiment. “The Pac-12 is head-and-shoulders above anyone else in televising women’s sports,” she said. When asked why she thought there was such a disparity between men and women’s coverage, she said, “It’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you see more women’s sports on TV, do you value it more? Or do you value women’s sports more, and then TV will value it more?”

Out of all the sports television networks in America, only one has a female executive running the show. Guess who? Lydia Murphy-Stephans, president of Pac-12 TV Networks. When I told her about the 1.6 percent statistic, she chuckled.

“This reminds me of 25 years ago — when I was at ABC Sports, I did a similar report,” she said. “I think the numbers back then were 99.8 percent for men’s sports and 0.02 percent for women’s. While this growth may not be aggressive or impressive, it’s going in the right direction.”

Murphy-Stephans told me a story of how in 1999, the executives at ABC Sports wanted to play the men’s PGA Golf Tour over the FIFA Women’s World Cup final. The women’s event won out, and it turned out to be the most attended women’s sports event in history.

Yes, our country has a “Friday Night Lights”-esque obsession with football — the fact that a show called “The League,” a comedy centering on a fantasy football league, exists is proof enough. But the times are changing. Larry Scott, the commissioner of the Pac-12, noted in an op-ed to San Jose Mercury News that the most watched event of the 2012 London Olympics was the U.S. women’s soccer gold medal match, which also happened to be the most watched event in the history of NBC Sports. In the social media universe, Gabby Douglas became the most “clicked” athlete.

“As women’s events become more interesting, TV coverage will come,” Murphy-Stephans said. “The growth will be exponential.”

Now, how long will it take for that growth to spread east?

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Zackery Michael/Courtesy

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Lowland”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri will release her second novel Tuesday. Taking place in India and the United States, the story focuses on two brothers from Calcutta and their separate paths. One joins a radical Naxal movement, and the other becomes a scientist in the United States. Lahiri’s lyrical prose will both haunt and dazzle readers with its poignancy and complex characters.

Robert Reich’s “Inequality for All”

Our very own Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and a renowned political economist, stars in one of the most important films of the year. “Inequality for All,” which won a Sundance award, deals with one of America’s most pressing issues: income disparity. It presents an informative and nonpartisan look at the nation’s economy and the importance of the middle class.

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival

The 18th annual poetry festival will feature readings by Pulitzer Prize winners Gary Snyder and Robert Hass as well as many other poets. With an environmentally conscious theme and jazz music from the Barry Finnerty Trio, this event is a perfect way to spend a warm Saturday afternoon. The festival will take place Saturday at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, and admission is free.

Arctic Monkeys at the Fox Theater

These British rock stars will make their way to the East Bay for their worldwide tour to promote their newest and most eclectic album, AM. The band’s performances, with an infectious energy stemming from their irreverent humor and dynamic melodies, will be highly entertaining to watch. They will be playing at the Fox Theater on Friday.

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“When it takes a white woman going to prison to raise the issue of women in prison #solidarityisforwhitewomen.” One of my favorite Twitter trends this summer, #solidarityisforwhitewomen, called out the feminist movement for frequently excluding women of color from its discourse. The aforementioned tweet refers to “Orange is the New Black,” Netflix’s hit original series based on an autobiography of Piper Kerman’s time in federal prison, a show that most likely would not have been produced without a white protagonist.

That is the state of affairs in Hollywood. While critics swarming the Internet have harped on that point, the fact that a show features so many women of color, queer folks of color and a realistic transgender character is, white protagonist or not, highly commendable.

The series is centered on Piper Chapman, a yuppie woman in her 30s who is sent to federal prison on an old drug crime charge for transporting money for her ex-girlfriend.

According to the Women’s Prison Association, the female prison population has soared by 835 percent over the last 30 years, while the male prison population rose by 416 percent. Like Piper, more than two-thirds of women in prison are convicted of nonviolent offences, such as drug-related crimes.

I tried calling around, but the people working on this social issue either don’t watch television or are too busy working on their cause because apparently no office wants to answer its phones. Carole Seligman, office manager of Prison Radio, a production studio aiming to challenge unjust incarceration practices, was kind enough to speak to me.

“This country is notorious for not granting compassionate release to prisoners with terminal illnesses who are elderly and are dying and denied to die at home,” Seligman said, referring specifically to the case of Lynne Stewart, a 74-year-old political prisoner dying of cancer in federal prison.

“Orange is the New Black” features elderly characters, such as the no-nonsense, badass Miss Claudette, but they serve as background characters to their more attractive, younger counterparts.

“The incarceration of men is the central narrative of prisons in the United States,” said Doug Taylor, a UC Berkeley re-entry student in his senior year.

He grew up watching “dozens of (his) friends get locked away … Women in prison face challenges that are different than those of men in prison, but the institution of incarceration tends to treat the sentence inflexibly. A sentence is a sentence, whether or not there are children waiting for the mother outside.”

Taylor is correct in that nearly two-thirds of women in prison are mothers. The Sentencing Project reports that women can be shackled during childbirth and labor in all but 13 states. This is the aspect of women in prison that the show does the worst job of portraying — two characters have to contemplate childbirth while in prison, but none of the women really mention parental obligations on the other side.

But can we really expect “Orange Is the New Black” to cover all the issues surrounding women in prison within the confines of 13 hour-long episodes? Is it the responsibility of the showrunners to accurately portray every detail, whether it means giving more screen time to the elderly characters or highlighting the repercussions on external family members for more characters?

I would say yes. All details matter, and what makes for the most realistic representations is art steeped in minutiae (and I would hardly call elderly women or mothers minutiae).

Not enough time or not enough money is hardly an excuse. Not enough knowledge? There are more than 200,000 women in prison today. That’s plenty.

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Rockstar Games/Courtesy

Grand Theft Auto V

Probably the only game you will play for the next two months, “Grand Theft Auto V” is coming out Tuesday. Featuring multiple characters; a new setting in Los Santos, a fictionalized version of LA; and more activities, such as skydiving and bank heists, there should be plenty to do in this open-world game. And expect a well-crafted story about the corrupt American Dream that Rockstar is known for.

Prisoners

While the trailers seems to give away the whole plot of the movie in two minutes (seriously, don’t watch it), lots of positive buzz seems to be surrounding “Prisoners,” starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. And if the hype is to be believed, there are many more twists and turns in this thriller than what the trailer would have you believe. Especially during what is something of a dry spell of decent big-budgeted films, “Prisoners” seems like a solid choice for a weekend viewing.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD

The classic Gamecube tile returns in a high-definition remake for the Nintendo Wii U. Don’t expect this release on store shelves, however: The game will be available only through download from Nintendo’s online shop or with the purchase of a special Wii U console bundle. But expect sharper graphics, two-screen functionality and gameplay improvements in this classic game. If you have a Wii U, be sure to check out this rerelease Friday.

Francis Wong at BAM

If you enjoy a mixing of jazz, dance, personal storytelling, spoken-word poetry and visual media, Francis Wong’s performance for L@TE: Friday Nights at the Berkeley Art Museum is a perfect way to spend a Friday night. As with much performance art, expect Francis Wong to be a bit esoteric. But for a performance free for Cal students, it’s worth checking out.

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