Picks for Sunday, February 12

Sunday

Jeff Tweedy at the Henry Fonda Theater

With Wilco on a brief hiatus, Jeff Tweedy must be feeling restless again. This year he’s revisiting the myriad side projects that often confound fans of his critically slobbered band: another record with his Albert Ayler–meets–Poco trio Loose Fur, another whimsical collaboration with Scott McCaughey’s Minus 5, and another back-porch jam session with alt-rock supergroup Golden Smog. Tweedy’s ever-changing set lists on this brief solo tour have thus far unveiled new tunes like “Is That the Thanks I Get?” and “The Ruling Class” as well as Smog faves, underplayed Wilcoia, Uncle Tupelo chestnuts and a cover of Mott the Hoople’s “Henry and the H Bombs,” a song he’s been doing since Wilco’s first tour in 1995. Tweedy’s band mates open both shows: drummer Glenn Kotche on Sunday night and prodigal-son guitarist Nels Cline on Monday. 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd. (213) 480-3232. (Matthew Duersten)

Eleni Mandell at Tangier

Eleni Mandell comes in many guises. There’s the noirish underground romantic from such early albums as Thrill and Snakebite, her languorous phrasing accented by her softly decisive acoustic-guitar strokes. Then there’s the warmly inviting down-home cowgirl of Country for True Lovers, contrasted by the late-night jazzbo captured on 2004’s smoke-filled Maybe, Yes EP. The local singer-songwriter reveled in her breezy pop side on Sex, Fashion and Money, the 2005 debut CD by the Grabs, a side project with Blondie’s Nigel Harrison and W.A.C.O.’s Steve Gregoropoulous. Miss Eleni even rocks out on occasion, as with her seductively glammed-up version of Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris,” from Paris Hilton’s notorious burger-chain TV ad. At heart, though, Mandell is an unrepentantly dreamy balladeer with a gift for cinnamon-streaked, horchata-sweet melodies. Expect to meet all of these personas during this monthlong Tangier residency, where she’s backed by a full band. (Falling James)

Museum Pick: GAJIN FUJITA AND PABLO VARGAS LUGO

Genre-hoppers Gajin Fujita and Pablo Vargas Lugo are clearly in the forefront of a pan-Pacific sensibility, marrying Mexico to the Far East. Fujita, an east-Los native, weds his heredity to his environment with outsize renditions of Japanese visual pop, from ukiyo-e to anime, overlaid with bold graffiti tags. The cultures smash but don’t clash, roiling together in noisy concert, the eye-candy equivalent of koto sampling hip-hop. Mexico City–based Vargas Lugo takes a subtler approach to bridging the pond, slyly infusing an already abstracted Latin urban sensibility with a delicacy of line and image he attributes to the models of Pacific-Asian art. For all his soft-spoken deftness, though, Vargas Lugo produces works — out of concrete, music paper, outsize light boxes — as big and crisp and in-your-face as Fujita’s billboard-size paintings. There’s more here than meets the yo. At LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Mon.-Tues. and Thurs., noon-8 p.m., Fri., noon-9 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; thru Feb. 12. (323) 857-6000. (Peter Frank) FILM:

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY

Purporting to be the autobiography of a man more inclined toward discussing the difficulty of writing an autobiography than actually writing one, and who tends to reminisce about events that occurred before he was even born, Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman departs from the narrative straight and narrow early on, never to return. Momentary asides lead to parenthetical digressions that blossom into full-blown anecdotes that eventually loop back over themselves, by which time we’ve ended up somewhere entirely other than where we thought we were going. As Sterne, writing as Shandy, said of his own penchant for straying off course: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading, — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.” But I digress. For the matter at hand is not Tristram Shandy the book, but rather the remarkably fecund film that has been made from it — in spite of the conventional wisdom that even to attempt such an endeavor would surely prove a fool’s errand. Foolhardy British director Michael Winterbottom and his frequent screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (here collaborating under the pseudonym Martin Hardy) have responded to Sterne’s daunting fragmentation by fragmenting it all the further. What begins as a note-perfect Shandy adaptation (starring the game-faced Steve Coogan as both the title character and his father, Walter) soon gives way to a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the making of said film, complete with its own Winterbottomesque auteur (Jeremy Northam), an insecure star (Coogan again) trying to distance himself from his sitcom past, and an eager co-star (the delightful Rob Brydon) yearning for his moment in the sun. (Plus, lest I forget, a last-minute cameo — both in the movie and in the movie-within-the-movie — by Gillian Anderson.) The layering of the real and the reel is as intricate as in Adaptation or The Stunt Man, but underneath the movie’s tricky hall-of-mirrors surface lies a warm, delicate and, yes, distinctly Shandy-esque portrait of the struggle of creation, the general folly of human endeavor and the infrequency with which our lives turn out as we would have scripted them. By not even attempting to follow Sterne to the letter, Winterbottom and Boyce have triumphantly captured his impish creative spirit. (ArcLight; Monica 4-Plex)