By Kai Wada Roath
Ambassador of Confusion Hill and host of the Super Shangri-La Show

"Human beings do not survive on bread alone, you poor, soulless creature, but on the nourishments of liberty. For what indeed is a man without freedom, naught but a mechanism, trapped in the cogwheels of eternity."
~ Harcourt “Harry” Fenton Mudd

Just as Manchego cheese is paired with Pinot Noir, five beers should be paired with watching the 1973 Turkish cult-classic Omer the Tourist in Star Trek (known simply to most as Turkish Star Trek), where the Enterprise picks up a goofy Turkish hobo and then must deal with a salt-sucking vampire. Despite being filmed six years before the official Star Trek motion picture, this mind-boggling movie is not shown at many sci-fi or foreign film festivals, but it has been known to teleport to Amoeba’s used movie section from time to time, or, as Cyndi Lauper would say, time after time.

Five beers also go very nicely with listening to Star Trek themed bands in the garage with your friends. Bands such as Thee Shatners (with an amazing B side on the LP), The Encounters, Warp 11, Stovokor, No Kill I, and The Vulcaneers (with their hit record Beat Me Off Scotty) are guaranteed to entertain guests for hours and non-Trek loving friends for at least a half an hour.

By doubleay

Vocalist Allan Kingdom’s stunning debut album, Lines, should not get overlooked. The Canadian-born, Minnesota-raised artist dropped the project in early April and it’s surely one of the most exciting releases of 2017 thus far. Kingdom’s uniquely iconic vocals and rap prowess command attention. He was raised on traditional African music and mainstream American R&B played by his Tanzanian mother, and he eventually took to hip-hop acts like Pharrell and Outkast. All his influences were prolific and candidly original, pushing him to develop a distinctly unmistakable sound all his own that only continues to blossom on Lines.

Kingdom’s early one-off singles like “Evergreens” and the powerful “Wavey” featuring Spooky Black garnered him esteem in the digital realm of Soundcloud, while his incredibly inventive 2014 solo project, Future Memoirs, and self-titled collaborative album with the group Thestand4rd (Kingdom, Corbin fka Spooky Black, Bobby Raps & Psymun) solidified him as serious talent looking to break through to higher planes.

Join Amoeba Music in celebrating the 22nd year of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF)! This year's fest runs June 1-4 at the Castro Theatre and presents many restorations, including three titles SFSFF had a hand in restoring: Silence (with Cinémathèque Française), The Three Musketeers (with MoMA), and a fragment of the lost Wallace Beery/Louise Brooks film Now We’re in the Air (with the Czech National Archive).

All films at SFSFF are accompanied with live music by extraordinary musicians. Favorites Alloy Orchestra, Berklee Silent Film Orchestra, Frank Bockius, Guenter Buchwald, Stephen Horne, Sascha Jacobsen, Matti Bye Ensemble, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Donald Sosin are returning, and DJ Spooky will be making his SFSFF premiere!

All in all, this year's line-up contains 18 programs, 36 musicians, 9 countries, three new SFSFF restorations, two women directors, plus Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Lon Chaney, Sergei Eisenstein, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Ernst Lubitsch, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, Victor Sjöström, and much, much more!

By Brett Stillo

Get on your bikes and ride! That devilish blackguard Tom Latham and his gang of shaggy-haired, cycle-crazy delinquents, the Death Wheelers, have come back from the grave—AGAIN—in a deluxe Blu-ray/DVD release of the 1973 horror favorite, PSYCHOMANIA!

Psychomania is an Aleister Crowley-on-Wheels, black-magic-meets-black-leather tale of witchcraft, reincarnation, myth, and motorcycles. The aforementioned Tom ('70’s favorite Nicky Henson, displaying brutish charm and swagger) and his motorcycle gang, The Living Dead, tear up the English countryside while his spiritualist mother (Beryl Reid) and her sinister butler (the elegantly satanic George Saunders in his final screen appearance) conduct weird séances at the family manor. What more could a saucy lad like Tom ask for, except maybe immortality by way of a suicide pact with the Dark One in the guise of a frog?

From there, Psychomania opens the throttle as Tom convinces his gang of baby-faced Bikers (who look like members of Badfinger) to kill themselves so they too can return to this world as indestructible, undead hooligans. The horror shifts to action as Tom and his gang roar down country roads and ancient, fog-shrouded cemeteries on their classic British racing bikes, terrorizing the local villagers.

Presented by the California Film Institute, the inaugural DocLands Documentary Film Festival will run in Marin County May 10–14. DocLands is a non-competitive and inclusive festival that will showcase documentary film in a variety of genres and with a diversity of content, highlighting films that transcend the traditional definition of the documentary.

Amoeba Music is proud to be part of the first-ever DocLands, sponsoring these two unique films:

Nari
Wednesday, May 10, 7pm at Smith Rafael Film Center
DocLands Documentary Film Festival kicks off with the California premiere of Nari, a stunning short documentary blending film, archival footage, and animation accompanied by live narration and an original score featuring vocals, Indian percussion, and Gingger Shankar's unique double violin, with Carlo Ribaux on drums and Vivek Maddala on guitar and keyboard. Nari tells the life stories of the two extraordinary artists who helped bring Indian music to the West in the 1970s through their close collaboration with Ravi Shankar and The Beatles' George Harrison. Tickets.