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Urban Guide Listings to plan your week by Nakota blues rock band, Indigenous, at the Strong Medicine Concert. Strong Medicine: The Healing Voices of Native America "Music is music," quoth the Marley. If that's so, then there's no reason for the musical exchange in this country to be so American, so... unilateral. What does mainstream America know of Native Americana, music included, other than what we learned in elementary school or gathered through secondhand knowledge, most always wavering between aggrandizing and pitying the noble savage? But serving a community is a pretty straight route to learning about that community. This Friday, the Native American Health Center hosts the who's who of Native American music in the 30th Annual Strong Medicine Benefit Concert, proceeds from which will go towards the construction costs for a new Youth Community Development Center in Fruitvale. If that's not reason enough, than the line up is. Winner of near countless Nammy awards (the Native Grammy), vocal trio Walela features Rita Coolidge and headlines the benefit along with Indigenous, the Nakota blues rock group whose lead guitarist Mato Nanji is praised as the next Jimi Hendrix. Additional performers include Joanne Shenandoah, acclaimed Iroquois singer songwriter, 2002 Grammy Award winner Verdell Primeaux and Johnny Mike, and local Native jazz musician John-Carlos Perea, who seamlessly layers Celtic, jazzy, and native music to highlight the plight of urban Indians. Plus, Kurok ice queen Naomi Lang MCs the event. Past Strong Medicine concerts have been smash events, and this year's star line up and noble, but not abstracted, cause will make sure this Friday is no different. Fri/27, 8pm. Paramount Theatre. 2025 Broadway, Oakl. $18.50-$65.50 (a special $200 sponsorship ticket includes a pass to the artist's reception). 625.8497. (EP) Borderline: The TJ beyond whistles and watered-down tequila. 'Frontier Life' Tour 2002 Tijuana, Mexico. City of bright lights and big dreams. Where sex, drugs, and fast cars reign supreme ... For most of the 20th century - thanks to the Tijuana Fair of 1915, which ushered in the border city's taste for bullfights, horse racing, boxing, cockfighting and casino gam-bling, and the wide availability of alcohol during the 1920s - Tijuana has been a city with a reputation in the Western imagination as the place to let revolutionary "wild west" fantasies and frontier party spirits run amuck. But what of the city behind the gritty glamour of strip malls, nightclubs, and oversexed mayhem? The city set adrift from its brothers and sisters to the South and estranged from its neighbors to the North? San Diego-based filmmaker Hans Fjellestad offers a glimpse at the Tijuana beyond the Sin City heritage in his new documentary Frontier Life. Comprised around three stories, Frontier Life unveils a Tijuana fully grounded in an identity separate from its relationship to the U.S., the border, or other regions in Mexico; a unique and diverse region flourishing with dramatic population growth, where cultural and economic divisions constantly dance, merge, and collide. Featuring live concert/event footage, interviews with artists and producers, and visual imagery, a new narrative unfolds as Fjellestad documents the underground world of street racing clubs - Club Kallejeros and Club Euroworks - customizing and racing their cars (all while avoiding the police); the U.S./Mexico wastewater wars; and the rise of Nortec music, a 21st century fusion of regional Mexican folk music and U.S./Euro-electronica. Musical entertainment will be provided by audio-manipulator and visual artist Titicacaman. Sat/28, 9pm. 21 Grand, 449B 23rd Street, Oakl. $8. 44-GRAND. (CS) The MadCat Film Festival boosts the definition of women's cinema. MadCat Six years ago, after Ariella Ben-Dov wrapped up her first MadCat Women's Film Festival, she threw in the towel. The stresses of putting on a film festival proved to be too taxing. A cry went out - mostly from lady filmmakers hungry for a venue to show their work - to keep MadCat going. The cry still sounds, as MadCat dug in its heels and has continually expanded venues and screenings while retaining its original charter: "to push the technical and aesthetic boundaries of filmmakers and to expand the definition of women's cinema," i.e. experimental. The difficult and the sublime. It's alighting at the Pacific Film Archive this weekend after having hopped around a few S.F. venues, beginning this Thursday, 9/26, with their ace in the hole: the new Su Friedrich film Odds Of Recovery (a MadCat premiere!). One of the preeminent radical-feminist experimental filmmakers since the 1970's, NYC-based Friedrich will be in attendance to introduce the chronicle of her own medical history. Prone to health problems, she takes refuge from her tumultuous relationship with the Western health care industry in gardening and needlepoint, and worries how long her girlfriend will suffer the frequent hospital stays. MadCat brings more premieres of local talent to the PFA: Natalija Vekic's fairy tale Girl With The Pearl Suspended and Cade Bursell's found-footage montage Test Sites reconstructing education media. As long as they keep making 'em, MadCat will keep showing 'em. Thurs/26, Sat/28, Sun/29. Pacific Film Archive. 510. 6421412, www.somaglow.com/madcat. (PC) Picks by Peter Crimmins (PC), Erica Pedersen (EP), and Cicely J. Sweed (CS). [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]