Activism

Alerts: Sept 17-23, 2014

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Leather and Feathers: AIDS Emergency Fund’s Annual Gala

Temple Nightclub, 540 Howard, SF. 7pm, $125. For the second year, the San Francisco AIDS Emergency Fund is hosting its annual gala, Leather and Feathers, to raise money for clients. This year, the organization is proud to debut Fantasy Runway, where community members will strut their finest leather, fetish gear, and drag.

FRIDAY 19

 

League of Women Voters’ District 6 Candidate Forum

Golden Gate University, Room 2201, 536 Mission, SF. 6-8pm, free. Incumbent Jane Kim, and challengers Michael Nulty, David Carlos Salaverry, and Jamie Whitaker are invited to take questions from the San Francisco League of Women Voters and audience members regarding the race for the District 6 supervisor position. The forum is free and open to the public, with seating on a first-come, first-serve basis.

 

Dan Choi: Fight for City College

Barry’s Bootcamp, 236 King Street, SF. pro-choi.com. 9:00pm-midnight, $25 pre-sale, $50 at door. Dan Choi, a candidate for the City College Board and a key player in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” repeal movement, will host this event and fundraiser for Fight for City College. That organization is fighting to save the threatened LGBT studies program at City College of San Francisco. Enjoy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres by Skyy Cocktails, as well as musical entertainment, during the event.

SUNDAY 21

 

Transit History Bicycle Tour

Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF. noon-3pm, $15–$50 suggested donation. Chris Carlsson, of Shaping San Francisco, will lead this bicycle tour of San Francisco’s transit history. He’ll highlight locations linked to San Francisco transit history, such as the Freeway Revolt in Hayes Valley, the creation of The Wiggle, Critical Mass and bicycle activism in San Francisco, the United Railroads Strike, and nostalgic F-line cars. The tour will wrap up at Pier 36 with a look at San Francisco’s first Clipper ships. NorCal People’s Climate Rally Lake Merritt Amphitheater, Lake Merritt Blvd and 12th St., Oakl. peoplesclimatemarch.org. 2-5pm, free. Join activists and community members in a family-friendly settling for a rally in solidarity with the People’s Climate Rally in NYC, which will bring together environmental organizations, trade unions, and social justice groups nationwide for a gathering just before the Sept. 24th UN Climate Summit of world leaders. The Oakland demonstration, in support of the larger movement in NYC, will feature “Climate Fair” with a host of Bay Area environmental organizations that are focused on climate change.

Visual reaction

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arts@sfbg.com

FALL ARTS From retrospectives and installations tied to big names, to smaller but no less arresting gallery exhibitions, this fall’s visual art offerings will have a lot to say about political bodies, politicized bodies, and the body politic. It’s heartening that the “blockbuster” shows listed here by and large focus on artists whose work doesn’t shy away from politics or political activism. After a summer in which there was a palpable uptick in public conversations about the US’s role in humanitarian injustices — both home and abroad — I hope the following exhibitions encourage people to keep talking.

 

“Keith Haring: The Political Line”

de Young Museum, Nov. 8, 2014–Feb. 16, 2015

The posthumous ubiquity of Keith Haring’s art (on coffee mugs, T-shirts, postcards) has overshadowed the fact that he made work that was as committedly political as it was populist. His stances on antinuclear proliferation, apartheid, and the survival of sexual communities in the face of the AIDS epidemic were as clear as his trademark figures. This first major West Coast Haring show in over two decades is more importantly the first to explicitly focus on the political dimension of his work. https://deyoung.famsf.org

 

“@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz Island”

Sept. 27, 2014-April 26, 2015

The Chinese dissident artist’s installation on Alcatraz via the FOR-SITE Foundation has been greeted with equal parts hype and skepticism. Working remotely from his studio with a team that includes collaborators from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Ai has created new sculpture, sound, and mixed media works for four locations on the former federal penitentiary grounds (three of which are usually off-limits to the public). How these pieces will put the artist’s own experiences of detainment and censorship in conversation with the site’s history of discipline and insurrection remains to be seen. Here’s to hoping for as much heat as there is light. www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz

 

“American Wonder: Folk Art from the Collection”

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oct. 1-Dec. 21

John Zurier/MATRIX 255

Sept. 12-Dec. 21

On paper, “early American folk art” as the subject for an exhibition might sound dry as toast. But a lot happened between the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861, the period during which the portraits, landscapes, commemorative mourning pictures, weather vanes, and decorative sculptures assembled here (and all from the BAM/PFA collection) were made. These artifacts of national self-fashioning reflect that history but also the quotidian aspects of daily life which often get left out of its telling. Also on view will be local Zurier’s first solo show at the museum, which features luminous, abstract paintings and watercolors inspired by his time in Iceland. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

“Nicolas Lobo: D.O.W.”

Gallery Wendi Norris, Sept. 4-Nov. 1

Transforming chemical elements into contemplative sculptural pieces is the MO of interdisciplinary artist Lobo for his first San Francisco solo show. Previously working with sound in varying capacities, he has now turned to food science, isolating the chemical substrates of consumer goods such as doughnut frosting and cough syrup, and incorporating them into napalm and Play-Doh structures that resemble day-glo colored Song dynasty scholar stones. Toxicity never looked so enticing. www.gallerywendinorris.com

 

Kota Ezawa

Haines Gallery, Nov. 6-Dec. 20

Throughout his career, Kota Ezawa has rendered iconic images as disparate as Patty Hearst and the SLA robbing the Hibernia Bank and Nan Goldin photographs in a clean, simple style reminiscent of cartoons. The result is at once highly personal and aesthetically flattening, locating Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” outside of the event photographed and in the photograph’s broader circulation across time. This collection of new work should provide another chapter in his ever-evolving history of the medium. www.hainesgallery.com

“Songs and Sorrows: Días de los Muertos 20th Anniversary”  

Oakland Museum of California, Oct. 8, 2014-Jan. 4, 2015

While the popularity of the Mission’s annual Días de los Muertos celebration grows in tandem with the dislocation of the community that originated it, Oakland Museum of California’s 20th anniversary celebration grounds the holiday in some much-needed historical perspective, while showcasing Latino and Latina artists who continue to innovate on the traditions and aesthetics the celebration has inspired. www.museumca.org  

“Something Completely Different”  

City Limits, Aug. 30-Sept. 13

You have to act fast on this one. If you want to see something completely new, head to this group show at one of Oakland’s strongest exhibition spaces. For this salon-style collection, each of the 60 participating artists was asked to go outside his or her comfort zone to create a piece that was truly new. The opening reception Sept. 5 doubles as a gallery fundraiser, so now is you chance to pick up something by one of the Bay Area’s best and brightest. http://citylimitsgallery.com *

Federal complaint filed over death of Alex Nieto as supporters vow to keep fighting

Protests have sprung up throughout the week in San Francisco, Oakland, and nationwide in response to the police shooting of 18-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO.

This afternoon [Fri/22], at the San Francisco Federal Building, a similar rally took place – only this one was in memory of a different shooting victim, Alejandro (“Alex”) Nieto, who was gunned down by San Francisco police officers five months ago. Nieto, who died at the age of 28, had been pursuing a career as a juvenile probation officer and studying at City College of San Francisco. 

There’s much to say regarding recent developments in this case – Attorney John Burris, who is representing Nieto’s parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit today alleging wrongful death and violation of civil rights.

Shortly before Nieto was killed on March 21, a person had dialed 911 to report seeing a man in Bernal Heights Park with a gun. In reality Nieto, who worked part-time as a security guard, had a Taser in his holster, not a firearm. But the call sent police vehicles racing into the park in pursuit of a gunman.

What transpired next is in dispute: Police say Nieto pointed his Taser at officers, causing them to mistake it for a firearm and discharge their weapons. Yet Burris offered a very different account in the federal complaint, based on the account of an eyewitness, audio recordings, and other information gathered independently by attorneys and community supporters. “Based upon the witnesses’ accounts there, in fact, was no justification for this unwarranted use of deadly force as contrary to the Defendants’ claims, they did not hear Mr. Nieto threaten anyone or see him attempt to grab or point any object at the officers prior to being shot,” the compaint charges.

Investigations currently underway at the local level have been delayed by a Medical Examiner’s report, according to attorney Adante Pointer, who works with Burris. The Medical Examiner’s office did not return phone calls from the Bay Guardian, but Bill Barnes, a spokesperson for the City Administrator, said in an interview that the Medical Examiner’s office is waiting on the results of a toxicology report. Initial results were inconclusive, Barnes added, so another round of testing is underway.

Look for a more in-depth story in next week’s Bay Guardian.

But for now, give a listen to what activism around issues of police violence sounds like when it’s coming out of the Mission District of San Francisco.

Longtime organizer Roberto Hernandez, who worked alongside his father and Cesar Chavez decades ago in the United Farm Workers’ movement, delivered some comments outside the San Francisco Federal Building today when activists who had marched from Bernal Heights Park gathered for a rally in memory of Nieto. Hernandez was there with his son, Tito, who also led the crowd in some chants.

Film festival organizers call for safer San Francisco streets

Editor’s Note: Aug. 19 marks the Bay Area Global Health Film Festival, hosted by the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology. The theme of this year’s festival is “Road Traffic Safety Locally … and Globally,” and is geared toward raising awareness about the need for road traffic safety improvements. In this opinion piece, representatives from the University of California at San Francisco Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, at San Francisco General Hospital, describe how all-too-common accidents can permanently injure pedestrians and bicyclists. And they voice support for Proposition A, the San Francisco Transportation and Road Improvement Bond.

By Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas

San Francisco is a transit-first city. Everyone shares the need to get safely from point A to point B, preferably quickly. And the various options for doing so span the full spectrum from driving, biking, and walking, to public transit like MUNI and Bart, rideshare programs, taxis, and companies like Uber and Lyft.

As we go about our daily lives, transportation is one of the most important public infrastructure systems that San Francisco relies upon. It encompasses many controversial issues and is linked to other social equity campaigns including housing advocacy and urban gentrification.

Yet the issue of pedestrian and bike safety in San Francisco has made disheartening headlines as of late. 2013 was an especially deadly year, with 21 pedestrian and four bicyclist fatalities. San Francisco General Hospital alone cared for over 1,000 road traffic injuries, with an estimated $60 million annual cost. Organizations like the SF Bicycle Coalition and WalkSF have made biking and walking leading issues in debates over transportation policy and traffic safety. Mayor Ed Lee and our city government have responded by introducing a $500 million transportation bond measure for the Nov. 4th ballot. If it passes, a portion of the funding will be allocated for improving pedestrian and cyclist safety.

Less often discussed, however, is what happens to the pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit while going about their daily routines and permanently affected by all-too-common accidents. At the UCSF SFGH Orthopaedic Trauma Institute (OTI), these patients fill our wards, the operating room schedule and our hearts as we help to heal them from these injuries. We struggle with the balance between doing what we can and what should be done to curb the growing volume of patients we see annually due to preventable accidents.

What is alarming is the socio-economic impact these accidents have, not only on the person affected, but on the hospital and our city as a whole. Even in cases where the driver is at fault, it is rare for them to even be cited for a traffic violation in most cases. More importantly, personal injury insurance and health coverage barely cover the emergency services needed for these accidents, and most services offered at the hospital are subsidized by taxpayer dollars, which means we are paying for this on all sides. This is unacceptable.

There is currently a wave of momentum to address these complex issues and attempt to tease through how we as a city can rebuild, redefine and reinforce the safety in our city. This movement is supported by a global platform addressing road traffic safety as a public health campaign, through the World Health Organization’s Decade of Road Traffic Safety. This campaign tackles the myriad polices and resource investments needed to address the enormous impact road traffic accidents have on the world. 

Injuries, mainly those resulting from road traffic accidents, account for greater disability and death than HIV, TB and Malaria combined.  An average 5.8 million die annually, and for every death caused by these accidents, eight to 10 more are permanently injured.

To bring collective awareness around this issue and to change the landscape, the community needs to stand together not only in San Francisco but also around the world, to demand safer streets. The city is doing its part to outline a roadmap to curbing these alarming statistics, and a greater global campaign is underway to promote awareness and inspire activism.

We must stand up for the injured and for ourselves as local citizens to demand safer streets and protection from when accidents occur.  We may not be able to prevent every accident, but we can improve the choreography of their outcome if we work together.    

Amber Caldwell and Nick Arlas are Director of Development and Community Outreach Coordiator, respectively, at the Institute for Global Orthopaedics and Traumatology, UCSF Orthopaedic Trauma Institute, San Francisco General Hospital.

The Bay Area Global Health Film Festival begins Tue/19 at 6 p.m. at Public Works, 161 Erie, in San Francisco.

Boxing lessons

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arts@sfbg.com

While still a child in early-’80s San Francisco, Boots Riley witnessed something he didn’t quite understand but that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Walking into a theater performance at the venerable Mission District art space Project Artaud, Riley saw actors in body paint writhing around him in apparent agony on all sides. It was meant as a simulation of the AIDS epidemic, with the actors portraying the afflicted. But it didn’t enlighten him much as a kid.

“It just scared the hell out of me,” Riley recalls. “You walk into this place, and it’s like a whole city, with people all around you.”

Given how Riley’s own work with long-running hip-hop group The Coup likewise mixes political activism with overwhelming performance energy, it’s fitting he would look back on this experience as the inspiration for The Coup’s new multimedia project, Shadowbox. Featuring the work of street artist Jon-Paul Bail, videographer David Szlasa, and a host of other bands and performers, Shadowbox casts the Coup’s music in the context of an all-encompassing artwork that attacks the audience from all sides. He’s debuting the project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Aug. 16, but he hopes to eventually take it on the road to wherever an art establishment is willing to fund it.

Riley prefers to remain secretive about what the performance actually entails. He’s described it in the past as featuring puppets, drones and “Guantanamo Bay go-go dancers,” whatever those may be. To Riley, having the audience come in blind is key to maximizing the impact of the show.

“Some of the things that would make people probably want to come to the performance are things I don’t want to talk about before they happen,” Riley says.

What we do know is that it’ll feature multiple stages and a dizzying roster of collaborators, from socialist hip-hop militants Dead Prez to dream-pop duo Snow Angel, comedian W. Kamau Bell, chamber orchestra Classical Revolution, and the New Orleans-style second line unit Extra Action Marching Band. All of it will be encased by Bail’s black-and-white artwork, which will give the audience the impression of being in an actual “box of shadows.”

Bail, a Bay Area street artist perhaps best known as of late for his “Hella Occupy Oakland” poster, was one of Riley’s early heroes on the Bay Area art scene. The two met in the late ’80s amid a wave of neo-Nazi skinhead activity in the Bay Area, which the two of them helped fight to counter.

“When I was in high school I would hang out at Alameda Beach,” Riley recalls. “Back then Alameda was still a navy town and they didn’t like a lot of black folks coming around. Police rolled up to harass us, and the police insignia on the car was covered in a swastika. The first thing I thought was: ‘Who the fuck did that?'”

It turned out to be Bail, and the two artists quickly bonded, putting up anti-Nazi posters around the city. They’ve remained friends through the years, but they haven’t collaborated on a large-scale project until now.

“He was the first artist I ever met who was trying to do something more with art than just make art,” Riley says. “He had a collective at California College of the Arts at the time, which had the slogan — ‘no art for art’s sake.'”

The Yerba Buena Arts Center connected Riley and Bail with videographer (and Theater Artaud collaborator) David Szlasa, who helped design the video elements of the project. Together, they form Shadowbox’s core creative axis, responsible for the aesthetically overwhelming experience Riley hopes the project will be.

Though Shadowbox contains elements of both a gallery exhibition and a theatrical performance, Riley ultimately hopes that Shadowbox will feel more like a show than anything else, in line with the Coup’s high-octane concerts.

“A lot of the time when you’re doing something theatrical people just want to stand around,” Riley says. “But our shows have always been known to be a dance party, and we’re keeping the audience with us and not just watching us.”

The performers and artworks are intended to surround an audience, which will be able to move around and examine the exhibit at first. But as the room fills, Riley hopes the crowd will solidify and focus on the music. The musical element of Shadowbox will mostly consist of Coup songs, but each of the additional musical performers will play one of their own songs in addition to collaborating with the band.

The Coup didn’t write songs specifically for the performance, rather choosing to perform works culled from the band’s six-album, 20-plus-year catalog — including a few unreleased tracks and songs they don’t generally perform live. Though calling Shadowbox an augmented Coup concert would surely sell the event and its collaborators short, it seems as if all the key elements of a Coup show will be there: the songs, the audience-bludgeoning power, and especially the politics.

Though the title Shadowbox primarily refers to the effect Bail’s artwork creates on the performance space, Riley sees multiple meanings to the title. Shadowboxing is the practice in boxing of “fighting” an imaginary opponent to prepare for a match, and Riley sees parallels between this practice and the way in which the Coup “prepares” its listeners to fight real-life injustices. He’s aware political art can’t always change the world on its own, but it can inspire listeners to take action.

This gives rise to a third, even more poignant meaning to the title: that the social issues depicted in the work are only shadows of what’s really happening in the world, contained within the clearly defined “box” of the performance space.

“There are a lot of terrible things happening in the world that we’re talking about in the performance,” Riley said. “But the artwork is just a shadow of what’s really going on.”

THE COUP’S SHADOWBOX

Saturday, Aug. 16, 5 and 9pm, $25-$30

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415)978-2700

www.ybca.org

King of the commons

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steve@sfbg.com

When Susan King attends the Aug. 24 Sunday Streets in the Mission District — the 50th incarnation of this car-free community gathering, coming the week before her 50th birthday — it will be her last as director of an event she started in 2008.

That successful run was made possible by King’s history as a progressive community organizer who also knew how to do fundraising, a rare combination that has made Sunday Streets more than just a bicycle event, a street faire, or a closure of streets to cars that the city imposes on its neighborhoods on a rotating basis.

Instead, King took the ciclovia concept that started in Bogota, Colombia in the late ’70s — the idea was creating temporary open space on streets usually dominated by cars (See “Towards Carfree Cities: Everybody into the streets,” SFBG Politics blog, 6/23/08) — and used it as a tool for building community and letting neighborhoods decide what they wanted from the event.

“I regard the organizing as community organizing work rather than event organizing, and that’s significant,” King told the Guardian. “We’re creating the canvas that community organizations can use.”

San Francisco was the third US city to borrow the ciclovia concept to create open streets events — Portland, Ore, was the first in June 2008, followed quickly by New York City — but the first to do one that didn’t include food trucks and commercial vending, which Sunday Streets doesn’t allow.

“It’s not a street fair, it’s about meeting your neighbors and trying new things,” King said, referring to free activities that include dance, yoga, and youth cycling classes and performances. “It’s a really different way of seeing your city. A street without cars looks and feels different.”

Now, after seeing how Sunday Streets can activate neighborhoods and build community, and watching the concept she helped pioneer be adopted in dozens of other cities, King says she’s ready for the next level.

“I want to apply what I know on a larger scale, ideally statewide,” King said of her future plans. “This really opened my eyes up to the possibilities.”

 

WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES

After a lifetime of progressive activism — from grassroots political campaigns to city advisory committees to working with the Green Party — King knew the value of listening to various community stakeholders and earning their trust.

“We try to be culturally competent and work with each neighborhood,” King said. “We want to work with the neighborhood instead of dropping something on the neighborhood.”

That distinction has been an important one, particularly in neighborhoods such as Bayview and the Western Addition, where there is a long history of City Hall officials and political do-gooders trying to impose plans on neighborhoods without their input and consent.

“We worked really closely together and she gave me a lot of leeway to do Sunday Streets in a way that it worked for the community,” said Rebecca Gallegos, who managed public relations for the Bayview Opera House 2010-2013. “I can’t say enough great words about Susan. She was a truly a mentor to me. They’re losing someone really great.”

The first Sunday Streets on Aug. 31, 2008, extended from the Embarcadero into Bayview, opening up that neighborhood to many new visitors. King cited a survey conducted at the event showing 54 percent of respondents had never been to Bayview before.

“Susan wore a lot of hats. Not only did she create community in all the neighborhoods in San Francisco, but she knew how to go after the money,” Gallegos told us. “She walks the walk and doesn’t just talk the talk.”

Meaghan Mitchell, who worked with the Fillmore Community Benefits District, also said King’s skills and perspective helped overcome the neighborhood’s skepticism about City Hall initiatives.

“Susan came in and was very warm and open to our concerns. She was a joy to work with,” said Mitchell, who went on to work with King on creating Play Streets 2013, an offshoot of Sunday Streets focused on children.

The neighborhood was still reeling from a massive redevelopment effort by the city that forced out much of its traditional African American population and left a trail of broken promises and mistrust. Mitchell said King had to spend a lot of time in community meetings and working with stakeholders to convince them Sunday Streets could be good for the neighborhood — efforts that paid off as the community embraced and helped shape the event.

“It was nice to know the Fillmore corridor could be included in something like this because we were used to not being included,” Mitchell told us. “Community organizing is not an easy job at all because you’re dealing with lots different personalities, but Susan is a pro.”

 

ROUGH START

It wasn’t community organizing that got King the job as much as her history with fundraising and business development for campaigns and organizations, ranging from the San Francisco Symphony to the San Francisco Women’s Building.

At the time, when city officials and nonprofit activists with the Mode Shift Working Group were talking about doing a ciclovia, King was worried that it would get caught up in the “bike-lash” against cyclists at a time when a lawsuit halted work on all bike projects in the city.

“I thought that would never fly,” King said. “We started Sunday Streets at the height of the anti-bike hysteria.”

But her contract with WalkSF to work on Masonic Avenue pedestrian improvements was coming to an end, she needed a job, and Sunday Streets needed a leader who could raise money to launch the event without city funds.

“I know how to raise money because I had a background in development,” said King, who raised the seed money for the first event with donations from the big health care organizations: Kaiser, Sutter Health/CPMC, and Catholic Healthcare West. And as a fiscal sponsor, she chose a nonprofit organization she loved, Livable City, for which Sunday Streets is now a $400,000 annual program.

King had a vision for Sunday Streets as an exercise in community-building that opens new avenues for people to work and play together.

Immediately, even before the first event, King and Sunday Streets ran into political opposition from the Fisherman’s Wharf Merchants Association, which was concerned that closing streets to cars would hurt business, and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors who were looking to tweak then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose office helped start the event.

City agencies ranging from the Police Department to Municipal Transportation Agency required Sunday Streets to pay the full costs for city services, something that even aggressive fundraising couldn’t overcome.

“We were in debt to every city department at the end of the second year. It was the elephant in the room going into that third year,” King said.

But the Mayor’s Office and SFMTA then-Director Nat Ford decided to make Sunday Streets an official city event, covering the city costs. “It was the key to success,” King said. “There’s no way to cover all the costs. The city really has to meet you halfway.”

King said that between the intensive community organizing work and dealing with the multitude of personalities and interests at City Hall, this was the toughest job she’s had.

“If I would have known what it would be like,” King said, “I would never have taken the job.”

 

SUNDAY STREETS SOARS

But King had just the right combination of skills and tenacity to make it work, elevating Sunday Streets into a successful and sustainable event that has served as a model for similar events around the country (including at least eight others also named Sunday Streets).

“The Mission one just blew up. It was instantly popular,” said King, who eventually dropped 24th Street from the route because it got just too congested. “But it’s the least supportive of our physical activity goals because it’s so crowded. It was really threatening to be more of a block party.”

That was antithetical to the ethos established by King, who has cracked down on drinking alcohol and unpermitted musical acts at Sunday Streets in order to keep the focus on being a family-friendly event based on fitness and community interaction.

Even the live performances that Sunday Streets hosts are required to have an interactive component. That encouragement of participation by attendees in a noncommercial setting drew from her history attending Burning Man, as well as fighting political battles against the commercialization of Golden Gate Park and other public spaces.

“It was my idea of what a community space should look like, although I didn’t invent it…We really want to support sustainability,” King said. “We’re not commodifying the public space. Everything at Sunday Streets is free, including bike rentals and repairs.”

As a bike event, the cycling community has lent strong support to Sunday Streets, with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition strongly promoting it along the way.

“The success of Sunday Streets has been a game changer in showcasing how street space can be used so gloriously for purposes other than just moving and storing automobiles. At every Sunday Streets happening we are reminded that streets are for people too,” SFBC Director Leah Shahum told us. “Susan’s leadership has been such an important part of this success.”

Guardian Intelligence: July 2 – 8, 2014

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GUARDIAN ON THE MOVE

There were a couple of big changes for the Bay Guardian this week. We and our sister newspapers within San Francisco Media Company — San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly — moved into the Westfield Mall. Yes, the mall, but in the fifth floor business offices formerly occupied by the San Francisco State University School of Business extension program. The company, owned by Black Press in Canada and Oahu Publications in Hawaii, also named Glenn Zuehls as the new publisher and Cliff Chandler, who worked for the Examiner for years, as the senior vice president of advertising. Zuehls, who comes from Oahu Publications, replaces Todd Vogt as the head of SFMC. Zuehls and Chandler told the staff of all three papers that their primary goal is to grow the company’s revenues.

QUEER SPIRIT ROILS PRIDE

Even as an awareness of the ever-growing commercialization of SF Pride dawned on younger participants, a spirit of activism also took flight. Community grand marshal Tommi Avicolli Mecca led a fiery parade contingent (above) of housing activists in Sunday’s parade, protesting skyrocketing evictions in San Francisco. The anti-eviction brigade staged a die-in in front of the official parade observation area. Friday’s Trans March was the biggest so far, and Saturday’s Dyke March featured a huge contingent marching under the banner “Dykes Against Landlords.” Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors targeted a Kink.com prison-themed party, saying it glorified a prison-industrial complex, which “destroys the lives of millions of people.” Seven of the protestors were arrested, and charges of police brutality are being investigated.

LESBIANS BASHED AT PRIDE

While there were some disturbing anecdotal reports of homophobic slurs and queer bashing at Pride this year (including one of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and her husband being attacked at Pink Saturday), San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Albie Esparza said police are only investigating one incident so far as an actual hate crime. It occurred on June 28 around 5:30pm near the intersection of Mission and Ninth streets when two young lesbians were subjected to homophobic taunts and then severely beaten by five young male suspects, all of whom remain at large. They’re described at 16 to 20 years old, two black, three Hispanic. Esparza said hate crimes are defined as attacks based solely on being a protected classes, so that doesn’t include robbery or assaults in which racism or homophobic slurs are used, if that doesn’t seem to be the motivation for the attacks.

LIFE’S A STAGE

Hark! It must be summer, because all the companies dedicated to outdoor theater are opening new productions in parks across the Bay Area. Aside from the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ripple Effect (see feature in this issue; www.sfmt.org), Marin Shakespeare is presenting As You Like It in San Rafael (pictured), with Romeo and Juliet opening later in July (www.marinshakespeare.org); Free Shakespeare in the Park brings The Taming of the Shrew to Pleasanton and beyond (www.sfshakes.org); and Actors Ensemble of Berkeley goes stone-cold Austen with Pride and Prejudice in John Hinkel Park (www.aeofberkeley). AS YOU LIKE IT PHOTO BY STEVEN UNDERWOOD

TEN YEAR GRIND

Kids and pro skaters from One Love boards tore up “the island” — between the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero — with flips, kick tricks and plants June 29, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the much loved skate spot. Local Hunters Point pro skater Larry Redmon sat watching the new generation of skaters and offering pointers. Sure downtown has more grind blockers then it did a decade ago, but as Redmon says, “We out here.” PHOTO BY PAUL INGRAM

THE WILLIE CONNECTION

Muni’s workers and the SFMTA reached a final labor deal over the final weekend of June, but Mayor Ed Lee is telling news outlets the real dealmaker was former mayor Willie Brown. “He’s someone who understands the city, understands labor, the underlying interests,” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin told various news outlets. Reports say Brown went unpaid by the city for the deed. That’s hard to believe: Anyone who knows Slick Willie knows he seldom does anything for free.

WAXING NOSTALGIC

The new Madame Tussauds wax museum attraction opened June 26 at Fisherman’s wharf — and includes SF-specific figure replicas like Mark Zuckerberg, Harvey Milk, and, of course, our real mayor, Nicolas Cage (pictured). See the Pixel Vision blog at SFBG.com for more creepy-ish pics and a review.

SHARON SELLS OUT (THE INDEPENDENT)

Despite her catalog full of confessional songs about nasty breakups and other dark subject matter, Sharon Van Etten was all smiles during two sold-out shows at the Independent June 29 and June 30. Leaning heavily on songs from her new album, Are We There, Van Etten and her four-piece band even led the adoring crowd in a cheerful sing-along at one point. On her next pass through town, we expect to be seeing her on a much bigger stage.

UNION PROUD

If BBQ and black-market fireworks aren’t your idea of showing civic pride, make your way over to the Mission’s Redstone Building (2940 16th St. at Capp) for a street fair Sat/5 with local musicians, poets, visual artists, and more, to mark the 100th anniversary of the SF Labor Temple and call attention to current labor issues like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Built by the city’s Labor Council in 1914, the building formerly housed SF’s biggest labor unions and was the planning center for the famous 1934 General Strike. This celebration is part of Labor Fest, now in its 20th year, which runs throughout July around the Bay Area — for more: www.laborfest.net

 

Boom asks “What’s the matter with San Francisco?” and offers insightful answers

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“What’s the matter with San Francisco?” asks the Summer 2014 issue of the Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine produced by the University of California Press, tapping an amazing array of writers to explore the struggle for the soul of San Francisco that has captured such widespread media attention in the last year.

The question on its cover, which all of the articles in this beautifully produced 114-page magazine explore from varying perspectives, is a nod to Thomas Frank’s insightful 2004 book, What’s the matter with Kansas? And the answer in both cases, argue writers Eve Bachrach and Jon Christensen in their cover story article, is the people.

“Specifically, the people who act time and again against their own interests, people who adhere to a narrow political line, whether it’s antipopulist in the nineteenth century or antiprogressive in the twentieth. By focusing on one set of values, this analysis asserts, the people don’t notice what they’re really losing until it’s too late — and San Francisco is no different,” they write.

At this important moment in time, San Francisco is fighting to retain the last significant remnants of the cultural and economic diversity that have made this such a world-class city, with today’s hyper-gentrification building off of previous waves of displacement to change the city in fundamental ways.

Sure, this struggle between capital and community has been part of San Francisco since its founding, a dynamic that animates our civic life and feeds important political movements that trickle out across the country. And local writer/historian Chris Carlsson has a great article documenting those movements, from the Freeway Revolt of the 1960s to the pro-tenant and anti-displacement activism around the last dot.com boom.

“Read one way, this short history demonstrates the relentless power of money in defining who is a San Franciscan and who can stay and who must go. But read another way, this history shows that there is historic precedent for optimism that the worst consequences of today’s creative destruction of the city can be averted if we know and use our history,” Carlsson wrote.  

But in a Q&A interview with author Rebecca Solnit, both celebrates that dynamic and explains why things are different this time: “You can image San Francisco as full of dynamic struggle that’s been pretty evenly matched between the opposing sides since the Gold Rush. There have always been idealists and populists and people who believe in mutual aid in the City of San Francisco. And there have also been ruthless businessmen and greedy people: the ‘come in and get everything and be accountable to nobody and hoard your pile of glittering stuff’ mentality has been here since the city was founded. But it has not been so powerful that it has rubbed out the other side.

“Now, however, it feel like Silicon Valley is turning San Francisco into its bedroom community. There’s so much money and so much power and so little ability to resist that it is pushing out huge numbers of people directly, but it is also re-creating San Francisco as a place that is so damn expensive that nobody but people who make huge amounts of money will be able to live here.”

After building off of previous gains, the capitalists of today, those who refuse to even acknowledge the political landscape and dynamics that have been developed over generations, seem to be moving in for the kill, armed with more powerful weapons of accumulation and displacement than their predecessors had or were willing to deploy.

“So what’s the matter with San Francisco? It’s becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, while Silicon Valley becomes a global power center for information control run by a bunch of crazy libertarian megalomaniacs. And a lot of what’s made San Francisco really generative for the environmental movement and a lot of other movements gets squeezed out. And it feels like the place is being killed in some way,” Solnit said.

Yet the issue pointedly avoids falling into us-vs.-them traps or trite demonization of techies, ultimately seeking to provide a more nuanced look at the city’s current cultural and economic clashes than the various East Coast publications have brought to the task. And the best of it is “The Death of the City? Reports of San Francisco’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Written by Rachel Brahinsky, a former Bay Guardian staff writer who is now a professor at the University of San Francisco, the article echoes other concerns about the threats and challenges facing San Francisco, but she finds a potential “seed of the solution” in the city’s current zeitgeist.

For one thing, she challenges the convenient blaming of “techies” for the problems facing San Francisco, noting that some of the city’s best progressive organizing has been done by those with skills and/or jobs in the technology sector, often by people who despise the corporate managers and investors who run the industry as much as outsiders do.

“The problem isn’t tech, but corporate tech,” she writes.

Brahinsky also urges readers to broaden their lenses to consider San Francisco as part of the broader Bay Area, which now much confront the growing challenges of rising economic inequality and gentrification as a region, using the clashes here as a catalyst to finally pursue what she calls “ethical urbanism.”

“What is to be done? There is no lone policy shift that will salve these corporate tech wounds. There are many good solutions under debate now; with continued pressure they may become law in the same way that rent control moved from impossible to mainstream in 1978,” she writes.

The prescription she then offers includes fostering greater community engagement, developing regional policies that promote “community development without displacement,” not blaming techies for the sins of landlords, finding ways to increase the density of development without displacing or sapping vital public services, using open source tech tools to increase awareness and broaden the progressive movement, and “you need to fight like hell for the kind of city you want.”

Finally, in closing, she writes, “The San Francisco region’s most potent dreams are made of the kinds of struggles that refuse the sweeping change brought by the economistic forces of urbanism. What we witnessed in the winter of 2014 was a reawakening of this side of ‘San Francisco,’ a part of the city as mythic and real as the Gold Rush. The ongoing cacophony of protests, corporate tech-activist happy hours, housing lectures and forums, and the ballast of anti-eviction committees brought together by two months of tenants conventions are all signs of this legacy regathering steam. What happens next?” 

A heart in San Francisco

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arts@sfbg.com

THEATER This week, at New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco’s Evan Johnson remounts his popular 2013 solo play, Pansy. It’s the story of a disaffected twentysomething gay man who discovers a cache of videocassettes in the basement of his SF apartment building — made by someone who could be considered his doppelganger, a club kid long since felled by AIDS. The play functions in part as a communion between a younger generation of queer San Franciscans and the early era of the AIDS crisis.

Of course, there are those who, in their lives as well as work, continue to bridge the two eras, maintaining a vital link to this fraught but fecund period in SF’s queer/queered history. One of them is the inimitable Justin Vivian Bond. Mx. Bond has long since been based in New York, and yet v (to apply the preferred prefix and pronoun to someone who has gracefully sidestepped the dominant gender binary) grew into an artist here, and has returned to SF many times over the years, including for packed performances produced by Marc Huestis at the Castro Theatre.

Although maybe still most often identified with the cabaret sensation Kiki and Herb — a Tony-nominated, long-running duet with Kenny Mellman, in which Bond excelled as the perennially sloshed Kiki Durane — Bond’s career has hardly slowed since K&H were put to rest more than five years ago. In fact, the output for this internationally acclaimed artist, actor, performer, and singer-songwriter has been impressive: In addition to innumerable musical performances, there are two fine albums, a spunky and poignant memoir about growing up as a trans kid in suburban 1970s Maryland, and a recent turn as the Widow Begbick (singing original songs by Duncan Sheik) in a New York production of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man.

A powerfully soulful and charismatic performer, Bond brings Love Is Crazy!, an evening of songs about love in all its aspects, to Feinstein’s at the Nikko this weekend.

SF Bay Guardian In the late 1980s and early ’90s, AIDS made SF a dark place, but it was also a time of exceptional artistic, intellectual, and political ferment. How did that affect the development of your career?

Justin Vivian Bond I majored in theater in college, but I couldn’t really see a place for myself in mainstream theater. At my freshman evaluation they told me I had to butch up; I had to be able to pass as a straight man in order to make a living in the theater. Fortunately, I’ve been able to prove them wrong! But that was sort of a frustrating and unappealing way to live my life.

So I moved to San Francisco. I was going to probably go back to college and get a degree in art history and teach. But instead, I found Theatre Rhinoceros and queer performance and Queer Nation. It was a time when there was a tremendous amount of activism around HIV and AIDS. I worked at A Different Light bookstore, so I was exposed to the greatest queer minds of the day, brilliant writers and artists that would come in there. It was also, looking back now, the golden age of queer publishing. It was when Mike Warner published Fear of a Queer Planet. It was an intellectual and creative surge for queer people. Rick Jacobsen was still alive, and he did the Kiki Gallery [1993–1995]. I worked with him on a show that was written by Christian Huygen called Waiting for Godet, which appropriated Waiting for Godot and made it about two drag queens. It was so much fun, and really exciting. And I was in Hidden: A Gender with Kate Bornstein at Theater Rhinoceros. We toured that around the country — that was my New York stage debut.

I was at the Alice B. Theatre in Seattle when the NEA Four were defunded. Three of the four were at that festival. That was when I decided that I was going to devote my life to queer performance and to having the voices of queer people heard in as many places as possible. That propelled me to stay in the role of Kiki longer than I might have liked to, because it eventually brought me to Carnegie Hall and a Tony nomination on Broadway. [After that] I thought, OK, now I can really start honoring my own creativity, aside from making political statements. Fortunately for me, once I gave up that character and started performing as myself, I feel like things have been going pretty well. And it all started for me in San Francisco, which is why I love it so much.

SFBG Was there always a political dimension to your work?

JVB Having my art spring from a political place — exposed to the queer politics, really the life-or-death politics, that were happening back then — really justified my impulse to be an artist. I’m not saying that everything I’ve ever done has been politically astute or important, but there is a political perspective behind everything I do. That helps me justify asking a bunch of people to pay attention to me. If I didn’t feel like I was actually saying something, I’d probably be embarrassed to be on the stage, really.

SFBG What are the origins of Love Is Crazy!? You took it first to Paris. Was it a show you made specifically for that city?

JVB It kind of evolved. When I was last in San Francisco, actually, I was getting ready to host a benefit for the Lambda Legal Defense [and Education] Fund. Sometimes I’ll just pick a word and put it on my iPod, then let all the songs with that word in them play. That particular day, I had recently become single, so I hit “love,” and this list of songs played. I thought, “I should just write down this list and that could be my next show.” And that’s what I did for a show here in New York called “Mx. Bond’s Summer Camp.” I liked that show but over time I sort of finessed it. Now, not all the songs have the word love in them. Some are songs from both of my records. I was going to Paris, and I decided I wanted to do this Valentine’s Day show in front of the Eiffel Tower. I had a really wonderful time with it, so I decided to tour that show this year. So that’s what it is, craaazy love. And it’s got some good anecdotes in it.

SFBG I’m curious about the origins of your distinctive singing voice.

JVB For Kiki, I sang with a character voice. I started performing Kiki when I was like 28 or 29. I was just coming into my own voice at that time, and I kind of sang in that voice for 15 years. In San Francisco, during the last run of Kiki and Herb, I met this person who I fell in love with, and went on the road with, from San Francisco up to Canada. I kind of got back in touch with my queer roots, and I started writing my own songs, because I needed to find my own voice. It really helped me to get myself into the mindset of what I wanted to say, as opposed to what I wanted to say as this character.

I wrote several songs that were on my record Dendrophile. And I started singing songs that really resonated with me, including “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” which is a song by Bambi Lake and Jonathan Basil, who lives in the Bay Area. It’s about San Francisco and Polk Street. It’s an elemental song for me. And that’s how I started to rediscover my own voice. I had also just been in London; I went to Central Saint Martins College for my MA in scenography, which is like performance installation. One of my teachers was talking about Nina Simone, and how when you hear her sing you hear the life that she’s lived. I set out to try and make my voice reflective of my experience, so that when people hear my singing voice, they’ll sort of know what my life has been like and the world that I inhabit through it. That was my goal. And it really is a very satisfying thing, I have to say.

SFBG To be concentrating on your voice?

JVB And my life, and what my voice can say. 

JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

Sat/21-Sun/22, $35-$50

Feinstein’s at the Nikko

222 Mason, SF

www.feinsteinssf.com

 

Stage Listings: June 11-17, 2014

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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

“The Bakla Show 3” Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; http://baklashow3.bpt.me. $10-20. Opens Thu/12, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 28. Three short works focusing on the struggles of Pinoy LGBT youth.

Body of Water Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-35. Opens Fri/13, 7:30pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2:30pm. Through June 28. A Theatre Near U presents an original indie-rock teen musical, with songs by Jim Walker.

The Weir Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. $38. Opens Thu/12, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through July 12. Shelton Theater performs Conor McPherson’s acclaimed tale about a spooky night in an Irish pub.

BAY AREA

American Buffalo Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Previews Fri/13-Sat14 and June 18, 8pm; Sun/15, 2pm; Tue/17, 7pm. Opens June 19, 8pm. Runs Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. through July 13. Aurora Theatre closes its 22nd season with David Mamet’s powerful drama.

ONGOING

Brahmin/I: A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.crowdedfire.org. $15-35. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 28. Crowded Fire Theater presents Aditi Brennan Kapil’s “outrageous play masquerading as a stand-up comedy routine.”

The Crucible Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $10-35. Thu/12-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 7pm. Custom Made Theatre Co. performs Arthur Miller’s drama.

Devil Boys From Beyond New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 28. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Buddy Thomas and Kenneth Elliot’s campy sci-fi saga.

Each and Every Thing Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Previews Thu/12-Fri/13, 8pm. Opens Sat/14, 8:30pm. Runs Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through July 12. Dan Hoyle presents his latest solo show, about the search for real-world connections in a tech-crazed world.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat-Sun, 5pm. Extended through July 13. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

God Fights the Plague Marsh San Francisco Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-100. Previews Sat/14, 8:30pm; Sun/15, 7pm. Opens June 21, 8:30pm. Runs Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Aug 10. The Marsh presents a solo show written by and starring 18-year-old theater phenom Dezi Gallegos.

Homo File CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. $20-35. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 7pm. Writer-designer-director Seth Eisen’s homage to queer rebel Samuel Stewart (1909–1993), whose polymorphous career spanned the better part of the 20th century, was last seen at CounterPULSE in a trim and appealing 40-minute version that capped his artistic residence there in 2012. Since then the work has ballooned across two acts and, unfortunately, lost its focus. What was a compact but meaningful exploration of a polymath and sexual rebel, boldly negotiating the social hierarchies of a deeply repressive and homophobic culture, has become a vague, sometimes difficult to follow story with little more to recommend it than a hedonistic joie de vivre (though even the raunch feels listless and somewhat perfunctory). The expanded production still sports the playful puppetry (shadow and otherwise), overhead and video projections, and aerial choreography of the original — and these do produce some interesting or enjoyable moments — but the show’s polyphonic elements get drastically watered down in a sprawling, lumbering, and unevenly performed dramatic narrative. This is marked by a lot of leaden dialogue and underwhelming songs in scenes that feel either unnecessary or under-explored. The subject (played dutifully but without much illumination by Brian Livingston), along with a seven-actor ensemble of supporting characters, traverses the mutually exclusive worlds of academia and the literary avant-garde (where Michael Soldier as both sexologist Alfred Kinsey and Gertrude Stein is a notable treat); the working-class homosexual underworld of sailors and tattoo parlors; and even the conventionality of a part-time heterosexual romance (where a nicely understated Katharine Otis as Emmy Curtis begins to cast an intriguing angle on Stewart’s complex makeup). But the import of Stewart’s unique vantage and influence on it all as well as his peculiar aloofness in the midst of everything are fuzzily evoked at best. For all the media employed to depict him and his world, we come away with little sense of either. (Avila)

The Homosexuals New Conservatory Theatre Center, Decker Theatre, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 28. This mildly intriguing and fitfully engaging drama from rising Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins (whose Failure: A Love Story is currently having its Bay Area debut at Marin Theater Company) explores the tensions — sexual, generational, and otherwise — among a small circle of mostly gay friends via a central figure, Evan (a sharp Robert Rushin), who ends up in relationships with almost everyone. Beginning in 2010, as 29-year-old Evan breaks up with older histrionic theater director Peter (a drolly world-weary Matt Weimer), each successive scene jumps back two years and one relationship, until the final scene unites the entire circle as they welcome naïve Iowa teen Evan out of the closest and to the big city. It’s also a new millennium, of course, some distance now from Stonewall and the first wave of the AIDS crisis, and one of the more interesting aspects of the drama (which benefits from an overall strong cast under the direction of Arturo Catricala) is the generational divide between Evan and his circle. This divide feels downright political in the aggressive showdown between Evan and the apathetic art teacher and predatory libertine Mark (a persuasive Keith Marshall), but there’s a political edge at the outset, in Evan’s pointed refusal to join Peter in referring to himself as a “homosexual,” insisting instead on the word “gay” tout court. Despite this underlying issue and some witty dialogue, however, there’s little of interest in most of the dynamics between Evan and his circle. The play’s structure accordingly becomes a slightly tedious countdown, at least until the final scene, which cashes in on the power of hindsight to produce a limited, wistful tremor of reflection. (Avila)

In the Tree of Smoke Great Star Theater, 636 Jackson, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 28. Circus Automatic performs an new evening of immersive, experimental circus.

Macbeth Fort Point (beneath the Golden Gate Bridge), SF; www.weplayers.org. $30-75. Thu-Sun, 7pm. Through June 29. We Players’ latest site-specific undertaking is nothing less than the Scottish play at San Francisco’s historic Civil War-era Fort Point, under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge. And a better location for Shakespeare’s brooding, bloody, and spooky civil war drama is hard to imagine. The grandeur of the multi-story red-brick edifice with its mammoth steel doors, magnificent inner courtyard, graceful arches, spiral stairwells, mysterious passageways, canon casemates looking onto the Pacific — as well as old canons and cannonballs — add up to a deeply atmospheric setting. Moreover, directors Ava Roy and John Hadden and their production team make good use of it, moving the audience around the grounds for the better part of three hours amid picturesque staging of scenes, a wonderfully powerful quartet of musicians (made up of percussionist Brent Elberg, trumpeter Aaron Priskorn, saxophonist Charlie Gurke, and trombonist Mara Fox alternating with Rick Brown), and reverberant cries from the weyard sisters (Julie Douglas, Maria Leigh, Caroline Parsons), the enraged MacDuff (Dixon Phillips), or usurper Macbeth’s hapless victims. As the titular hero-villain, John Hadden is generally imposing if not always convincing, while Ava Roy’s forceful Lady M cuts an elegant, at times ethereal figure in her magnificent black gown (the admirable costumes throughout are by Julia Rose Meeks and Master Seamstress Dana Taylor). In general, the acting proves the weakest link, but the overall spectacle makes this a unique and rather compelling outing. (Avila)

The Orphan of Zhao ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-120. Opens Wed/11, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat and June 24, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Tue/17, 7pm. Through June 29. Tony winner BD Wong stars in James Fenton’s acclaimed Chinese-legend adaptation at American Conservatory Theater.

Pearls Over Shanghai Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through June 28. Five years ago, Thrillpeddlers breathed new life into a glitter-dusted piece of Sixties flotsam, beautifully reimagining the Cockettes’ raunchy mock-operetta Pearls Over Shanghai (in collaboration with several surviving members of San Francisco’s storied acid-drag troupe) and running it for a whopping 22 months. Written by Cockette Link Martin as a carefree interpretation of a 1926 Broadway play, the baldly stereotyped Shanghai Gesture, it was the perfectly lurid vehicle for irreverence in all directions. It’s back in this revival, once again helmed by artistic director Russell Blackwood with musical direction by Cockette and local favorite Scrumbly Koldewyn. But despite the frisson of featuring some original-original cast members — including “Sweet Pam” Tent (who with Koldewyn also contributes some new dialogue) and Rumi Missabu (regally reprising the role of Madam Gin Sling) — there’s less fire the second time around as the production straddles the line between carefully slick and appropriately sloppy. Nevertheless, there are some fine musical numbers and moments throughout. Among these, Zelda Koznofsky, Birdie-Bob Watt, and Jesse Cortez consistently hit high notes as the singing Andrews Sisters-like trio of Americans thrown into white slavery; Bonni Suval’s Lottie Wu is a fierce vixen; and Noah Haydon (as the sultry Petrushka) is a class act. Koldewyn’s musical direction and piano accompaniment, meanwhile, provide strong and sure momentum as well as exquisite atmosphere. (Avila)

Seminar San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-100. Wed/11-Thu/12, 7pm; Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm (also Sat/14, 3pm). San Francisco Playhouse performs Theresa Rebeck’s biting comedy.

“Sheherezade 14” Exit Theater, 156 Eddy, SF; www.playwrightscentersf.org. $25. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 21. The Playwrights’ Center of SF and Wily West Productions host this annual festival of fully-produced short plays.

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blond innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: The energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $65-100 (gambling chips, $7-10 extra; after-hours admission, $10). Wed-Sat, 7:30, 7:40, 7:50, 8pm, and 9pm admittance times. Extended through June 21. Boxcar Theater’s most ambitious project to date is also one of the more involved and impressively orchestrated theatrical experiences on any Bay Area stage just now. An immersive time-tripping environmental work, The Speakeasy takes place in an “undisclosed location” (in fact, a wonderfully redesigned version of the company’s Hyde Street theater complex) amid a period-specific cocktail lounge, cabaret, and gambling den inhabited by dozens of Prohibition-era characters and scenarios that unfold around an audience ultimately invited to wander around at will. At one level, this is an invitation to pure dress-up social entertainment. But there are artistic aims here too. Intentionally designed (by co-director and creator Nick A. Olivero with co-director Peter Ruocco) as a fractured super-narrative — in which audiences perceive snatches of overheard stories rather than complete arcs, and can follow those of their own choosing — there’s a way the piece becomes specifically and ever more subtly about time itself. This is most pointedly demonstrated in the opening vignettes in the cocktail lounge, where even the ticking of Joe’s Clock Shop (the “cover” storefront for the illicit 1920s den inside) can be heard underscoring conversations (deeply ironic in historical hindsight) about war, loss, and regained hope for the future. For a San Francisco currently gripped by a kind of historical double-recurrence of the roaring Twenties and dire Thirties at once, The Speakeasy is not a bad place to sit and ponder the simulacra of our elusive moment. (Avila)

36 Stories by Sam Shepard Z Below, 470 Florida, SF; www.36stories.org. $35-55. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through June 22. Word for Word has been at the business of putting literature on the stage, verbatim, for some time, and far from slowing down, this new production shows the company operating at the height of its powers. Among the best manifestations of the company’s particular concerns and talents, 36 Stories by Sam Shepard not only shows off the considerable virtues of Shepard’s short-story writing (usually overshadowed by his justly acclaimed plays) but unfolds as a stellar piece of theater in its own right. Shrewdly adapted and directed by company charter member Amy Kossow, the production repeatedly finds opportunities in the writing for dramatic transmission and exchange among the performers — a kick-ass ensemble composed of Patrick Alparone, Carl Lumbly, Delia MacDougall, JoAnne Winter, and Rod Gnapp as “The Writer” — the latter a sleepless wanderer crisscrossing the country by car, from whose head and manual typewriter the low characters, tall tales, and electrical encounters issue forth with sharp, sometimes zany humor; smoldering sexual heat; and a shapeless foreboding. Word for Word’s loyal fans need little encouragement, but all interested in a gratifying night in the theater will want to catch this one before it goes. (Avila)

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.sfneofuturists.com. $11-16. Fri-Sat, 9pm. Ongoing. The Neo-Futurists perform Greg Allen’s spontaneous, ever-changing show that crams 30 plays into 60 minutes.

Triassic Parq Eureka Theater, 215 Jackson, SF; www.rayoflighttheatre.com. $25-36. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also June 21 and 28, 2pm). Through June 28. Ray of Light Theatre presents the Bay Area premiere of Marshall Pailet’s musical involving “dinosaurs, show tunes, and sex changes.”

Walk Like A Man Costume Shop, 1117 Market, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-35. Wed/11-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 3pm. Falling in love with your boss, surviving child abuse, losing a loved one in war, dealing with your straight daughter’s shame around her mom’s butch wardrobe — these are only a few of the circumstances encountered in a raucous and affecting evening of celebrating desire and being true to yourself, as Theatre Rhinoceros presents 10 stories of love and sex among a diverse set of African American women. Culled from the titular collection of erotic fiction by Atlanta-based author Laurinda D. Brown, the evening unfolds with a pert and playful finesse thanks to director John Fisher and a strong, charismatic five-women ensemble (made up of Alexaendrai Bond, Kelli Crump, Nkechi Emeruwa, Daile Mitchum, and Desiree Rogers). Sexy and brazen, raunchy and wrenching, this series of vignettes, spread out over two acts, comes with nary a dull moment and plenty of climaxes. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Candida Town Hall Theatre, 3535 School, Lafayette; www.townhalltheatre.com. $20-32. Thu/12-Sat/14, 8pm. Town Hall Theatre performs the Shaw classic.

The Crazed Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through June 23. Central Works performs Sally Dawidoff’s play, based on Ha Jin’s novel about coming of age in Communist China.

Daylighting: The Berkeley Stories Project Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (June 22, show at 2pm). Through June 22. Shotgun Players present Dan Wolf’s new play inspired by real-life tales from Berkeley residents past and present.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond; www.masquers.org. $22. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 28. Masquers Playhouse performs Sarah Ruhl’s imaginative comedy.

Failure: A Love Story Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $37-58. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/14 and June 28, 2pm; June 19, 1pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through June 29. Marin Theatre Company performs Philip Dawkins’ play about love and loss, with puppets and live music.

Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-87. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through June 22. Juno-winning actor and musician Hershey Felder (George Gershwin Alone) performs his latest solo show.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-89. Tue, Thu-Sat, 7:30pm (also Sat and June 26, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through June 29. Berkeley Rep’s Tony Taccone, a comrade of Tony Kushner’s from way back in the Angels in America days, directs this revised version of the playwright’s 2009 play, whose long title is a riff on an earlier one by George Bernard Shaw. It concerns the fractured Italian American family of a diehard Communist longshoreman named Gus (Mark Margolis in an impressive, anchoring performance), now retired, who has announced his intention to kill himself and leave his Brooklyn brownstone to the grown children to sell and divide among themselves. In today’s inflated real estate market, that’s not chump change either. His announcement plunges the family into chaos, though truth be told they were all kind of a mess already. Son Pill (Lou Liberatore) is a married gay high school history teacher having a torrid affair with a young hustler (Jordan Geiger), which has already cost him $30,000 of his sister’s hard-earned money. His sister, Empty (Deidre Lovejoy), meanwhile couldn’t care less about the baby to whom her partner (Liz Wisan) is about to give birth, courtesy of the donated sperm from her kid brother Vito (Joseph J. Parks) — who comes across as the contrarian of the family: he’s neither gay nor a Communist. Other significant others are on hand, as well as Gus’s sister Clio (an effective, comically deadpan Randy Danson), a onetime nun who later became a Maoist in Peru and now seems some sloshy mix of the two. And for that reason she, along with Gus, symbolizes more than most the real dilemma here: a lack of something to believe in, of a structure for explaining and shaping experience and modeling action toward a better (post-capitalist) world. At nearly four hours, the play is Kushner’s version of the great American three-act family drama — those personal yet prophetic portraits by your O’Neills, your Millers, your Shepards. Tracy Letts made a similar bid with 2007’s August: Osage County. I don’t think either play really makes it into the pantheon, but while Letts’ play was ultimately slicker, more entertaining, Kushner’s has more in it, more to talk about of real relevance. Not that the production isn’t also entertaining — stage business with pregnant lesbians and mysterious briefcases buried in the wall are deployed to elating effect. But the play’s various subplots and characters are not equally interesting and the machinations of the plot and the sometimes-overlapping dialogue can be overwrought. But despite the tedium this produces, the political questions opened up here are liable to continue rattling around the brain after the curtain comes down, leaving one with a small but worthwhile buzz. (Avila)

Marry Me A Little Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.theatreworks.org. $19-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 8pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through June 29. TheatreWorks performs Stephen Sondheim’s intimate musical.

Nantucket Marsh Berkeley MainStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-100 (all tickets include a picnic dinner). Thu and Sat, 7pm. Extended through July 19. Nantucket Island, a wisp of shifting sand 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is the evocative setting for this autobiographical story from writer-performer Mark Kenward — less the tourists’ Nantucket of summer holidays, mind you, than the inhabitants’ gray and isolated winter. And just as its bleak weather stood for the tempestuous mood of Herman Melville’s Ishmael before he sets sail again in Moby Dick, so the environment for Kenward’s coming-of-age darkly foreshadows a terrible downward spiral. The only son and oldest child of two in a nuclear family from Normal, Ill., that really seemed to fit the bill — complete with a dad who, “in his entire life, only missed four days of shaving” — Mark becomes the odd-boy out upon the Kenwards’ relocation to the remote island. An affable, poised, physically demonstrative performer with a residual Midwestern charm, Kenward describes an upbringing in a household overshadowed by a high-strung, controlling, deeply unhappy mother who, as luck would have it, also becomes his high school English teacher. This relationship is the ground for much of the play’s humor, but also a trauma that blows in like a winter squall. Directed keenly, if perhaps a little too stiffly, by Rebecca Fisher, and accompanied at points by a watery island backdrop (courtesy of video designer Alfonso Alvarez), Nantucket discharges some of its messy human themes a bit too neatly but maintains an inescapable pull. (Avila)

Other Desert Cities Barn Theatre, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.rossvalleyplayers.com. $10-26. Thu/12, 7:30pm; Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 2pm. Ross Valley Players perform Jon Robin Baitz’s Pultizer-nominated drama about a tense family holiday.

South Pacific Cushing Memorial Amphitheater, 801 Panoramic Hwy, Mill Valley; www.mountainplay.org. $20-60. Sun/15, 2pm (arrive one hour prior to show time). Mountain Play Association performs the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.centerrep.org. $37-65. Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Saturdays in June, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm. Through June 21. Center REP performs the Tony-winning musical by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bitch and Tell: A Real Funny Variety Show” Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. $8-10. Footloose presents this variety show with Bob McIntyre, Nick Stargu, Carolina “CoiCoi” Duncan, and others.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. June 22, 29, July 12, 19, and 27, 6:30pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Dash: Improv in a Flash” Un-Scripted Theater Company, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. Sat, 10pm. $15. Ongoing through Aug 30. A late-night, free-form improv show with Un-Scripted Theater Company.

“Dream Queens Revue” Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF; www.dreamqueensrevue.com. Wed/11, 9:30pm. Free. Drag with Collette LeGrande, Ruby Slippers, Sophilya Leggz, Bobby Ashton, and more.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: “Judy Kaye Sings Bernstein and Sondheim,” Thu/12-Fri/13, 8pm, $35-50; Christine Ebersole in “Strings Attached,” Sat/14-Sun/15, 7pm, $60-85.

“Global Dance Passport Showcase” ODC Dance Commons Studio B, 351 Shotwell, SF; www.odctheater.org. Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 4 and 7pm. $10. ODC presents a sampler of world dance.

“Hubba Hubba Revue’s Burlesque Nation” DNA Lounge, 375 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. Fri/13, 9:30pm. $15-30. Burlesque performers from NY, Miami, LA, Germany, Australia, and more.

“Imaginary Activism: The Role of the Artist Beyond the Art World” Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, SF; (415) 282-9246. Sat/14, 8pm. Free. A new monologue by acclaimed performance artist Guillermo Gomez Peña.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.carlitzdance.org. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. $15-18. Performing Momentum, dance works exploring the magic of mathematics.

“Out of Line Improv” Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; outoflineimprov.brownpapertickets.com. Sat, 10:30pm. $12. Ongoing. A new, completely improvised show every week.

“Rites and Passages” Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes, SF; www.cityboxoffice.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $18-36. The San Francisco Girls Chorus closes its season with a concert of music by Eastern European composers (Bartók, Stravinsky), plus performances by the Joe Goode Performance Group and pianists Kanoko Nishi and Sarah Cahill.

“San Francisco Comedy College” Purple Onion at Kells, 530 Jackson, SF; www.purpleonionatkells.com. $5-10. “New Talent Show,” Wed-Thu, 7. Ongoing. “The Cellar Dwellers,” stand-up comedy, Wed-Thu, 8:15pm and Fri-Sat, 7:30pm. Ongoing.

“Sojourners” Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market, SF; www.magictheatre.org. Mon/16, 6pm. Free. Staged reading of Nigerian storyteller Mfoniso Udofia’s new work. Presented as part of the Magic Theatre’s Martha Heasly Cox Virgin Play Series.

“This Lingering Life” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.theatreofyugen.org. Previews Thu/5, 7pm. Opens Fri/6, 8pm. Wed/11-Thu/12, 7pm; Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. $15-50. Theatre of Yugen performs the world premiere of Chiori Miyagawa’s drama, inspired by nine Japanese Noh plays from the 14th century.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, 760 Howard, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Free. Through Oct 26. This week: Destani Wolf, Thu/12, 12:30-1pm; Venezuelan Music Project, Fri/13, 11-11:30am; “The Art of the Descarga” with the John Santos Sextet, Sat/14, 1-2:30pm; Native Contemporary Arts Festival, Sun/15, noon-3pm; “Poetic Tuesday,” Tue/17, 12:30-1:30pm.

BAY AREA

“Immigrant Stories: Personal Stories Honoring the Immigrant Experience” La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; www.livingartsplayback.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $18-20. Playback Theater presents an evening dedicated to honoring the experiences of immigrants, with audience input guiding the performance.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

“The Next Big Thing” Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon, Oakl; www.bigmoves.org. Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 2pm. $18. Big Moves presents its all-new dance and music spectacular, featuring residence dance company emFATic DANCE.

“Precious Drop: Our Relationship to Water” Malonga Casquelourd Theater, 1428 Alice, Oakl; www.afriquesogue.com. Sat/14, 7pm; Sun/15, 2pm. $10-15. Live music, dance, and multimedia elements contribute to this contemplation of water and culture, inspired by African folklore.

“Virago Theatre Company New Play Reading Series” Flight Deck, 1540 Broadway, Oakl; www.theflightdeck.org. Wed/11, 5:30pm; June 18, 25, and July 2, 7pm. Wed/11, $10-25; other dates free. This week: Danii Kharms: A Life in One Act and Several Dozen Eggs by Nancy Cooper Frank. *

 

Good green: Lessons from the 4th annual SF Green Film Festival

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I can count on my two hands the days it’s rained in San Francisco this year. You’d have to be living in a cave to not know that our city is having its worst drought in decades.

For that reason, the theme of the fourth annual San Francisco Green Film Festival is “Water in the West.” The festival, which began on Thu/29, is pushing us to reevaluate our relationship with water. As our state is faced with its worst drought since 1977, it is imminent that we answer the question on everyone’s minds: What is the future of water in California?

With over 60 films coming from 21 countries, the SFGFF is tackling our complicated relationship with water. Like a river flowing through the week-long festival, six feature films address this issue in varying ways: DamNation, Watermark, Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek, The Great Flood, Lost Rivers, and Chinatown.

Yesterday’s centerpiece film at the Roxie Theater, Watermark, explores humans’ relationship with water, traveling to countries far beyond what most of us have experienced. The film, directed by Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky, superimposes breathtaking aerial perspectives of water scenes from around the world. Watermark travels to the National Ice Laboratory in Greenland, the disturbing and daunting Xiluodu Dam in China, a heavily-polluted leather tannery in Bangladesh, a pilgrimage of 30 million people bathing in the Ganges river, and a parched, cracked desert in Mexico where the Colorado River used to run wild, among many other beautiful sites.

The film exposes the manifold layers of our water consumption and offers awe-inspiring cinematography but leaves something to be desired. With no narrator and minimal context, the documentary shows rather than tells. It excels visually, but flounders thematically. We see how the world consumes water for farming, for energy, for spiritual and recreational purposes and most importantly for survival but what does it all mean?

The Green Film Festival finds answers with a handful of other films. On Saturday night, Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek was awarded the Green Tenacity Award for capturing the inspiring community fight for environmental justice in Mississippi. Over the weekend, the festival hosted two shorts showcases, several workshops, various panel discussions and nightly feature films, including a special 40th anniversary screening of Chinatown.

The event’s opening ceremony last Thursday night was fittingly held at the Aquarium of the Bay. It’s difficult to process the imminence of climate change with the majestical bay at fingertips length. But the opening night’s feature film DamNation drove the point home. The award winning documentary weaves together the ecological, political, economical and psychological implications of river dams. Focusing on the Pacific Northwest, the 87-minute film tracks the “era of dam removal.”

With nature-drenched cinematography and a candid narrator — co-director Ben Knight who admits in the first five minutes to his embarrassingly minimal knowledge on rivers dams when he signed onto the film — DamNation offers an excellent introduction to how the removal of river dams restore watershed ecosystems, revive fish migrations, improve water quality and the lives of adjacent communities and cultures. “The great beauty about wild fish is we don’t have to do a damned thing for them except leave them the hell alone,” says one of the activists in the film. At the end of the night, DamNation took home a 3-D printed award for Best Feature Film. The festival came full circle with Sunday night’s showing of The Great Flood, a film-music collaboration about the Mississippi River Flood of 1927, a catastrophe that prompted the “era of dams.”

The first leg of the Green Film Festival offered a wide array of perspectives about the green movement. Water is the world’s most precious resource and it affects all environmental issues from food security, healthy kids, and livable cities. The festival continues on with daily panel discussions and films promoting social change. Wednesday night’s Lost Rivers is the final installation of the six-part “Water in the West” theme. “Do you know what is hiding beneath our cities?” the film asks. Lost Rivers retraces history in search for disappeared rivers around the world. The film not only offers insight on how and why most rivers in major cities have disappeared today but also answers the question of whether we will see these rivers again.

Activism is rooted in community. For the fourth year, the Green Film Festival is engaging with the community through discussion and film. The community support in San Francisco is heartening. From the filled theaters to the community organizations who’ve partnered with this event: Earthjustice, American Rivers, Save the Bay, Restore the Delta and many others.

Water is invaluable to our daily lives but we treat water as an inexhaustible resource. The films showcased this week prove that this is not the case. Climate change is imminent and we are at the root of it. We can make a difference through education, engagement, activism, and our vote. And if you’re too lazy to do any of that, why not watch a film?

MONDAY JUNE 2

Seeds of Time + panel discussion with Sandy McLeod, director; Cary Fowler, agriculturalist; Greg Dalton, Climate One 

6pm, Roxie Theater


A Will for the Woods

8:30pm, Roxie Theater

 

TUESDAY JUNE 3

Free Screening: Thin Ice: The Inside Story of Climate Science

12pm, SF Public Library

 

Angel Azul  + panel discussion with Marcy Cravat, director

6pm, Roxie Theater


Uranium Drive-In

8:15pm, Roxie Theater


WEDNESDAY JUNE 4

Lost Rivers

6pm, Roxie Theater

 

Wrenched: The Legacy of the Monkey Wrench Gang + discussion with Ariana Garfinkel, archivist; David J. Cross, Earth First! photographer; Karen Pickett, activist; and other guest activists from the film.

8pm, Roxie Theater

 

Closing Night Wrap Party

10pm, Slate Bar

Event Listings: May 28-June 3, 2014

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Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 28

Cassandra Dallett Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck, Berk; www.pegasusbookstore.com. 7:30pm, free. The author celebrates her poetic memoir, Wet Reckless.

Madison Young Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The author and sex-positive activist reads from her memoir, Daddy.

THURSDAY 29

“BiConic Flashpoints: Four Decades of Bay Area Bisexual Politics” GBLT History Museum, 4127 18th St, SF; www.glbthistorymuseum.org. Opening reception 7-9pm, $3-5. A new multimedia exhibit explores the history of bisexual activism in the Bay Area since the 1970s.

“Chemical Reactions NightLife” California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.calacademy.org. 6-10pm, $12. “Think before you drink” with author Adam Rogers (Proof:: The Science of Booze), get a close-up (like, microscopic) look at beer brewing, dance to disco with DJ BANG!, and more.

SATURDAY 31

“Babylon Salon” Cantina SF, 580 Sutter, SF; www.babylonsalon.com. 6:30pm, free. With readings by Kathryn Ma, Dave “Davey D” Cook, Porter Shreve, and Kirstin Chen, plus a musical performance by singer-songwriter Ying-sun Ho.

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival Shattuck between Rose and Vine, Berk. www.anotherbullwinkelshow.com/chocolate-chalk-art. 10am-5pm, free. Chalk artists compete for prizes while turning the sidewalks into eye candy — and speaking of candy, sweet tooth-ers can pick up ticket packs ($20 for 20) to sample chocolate items galore, including exotic treats like picante habañero chocolate gelato.

“Ecology Center Farmers’ Markets Family Fun Festival” Civic Center Park, MLK at Center, Berk; www.ecologycenter.org. 10am-3pm, free. Petting zoos (baby goats!), bouncy houses, an obstacle course, puppet-making using recycled materials, a zine-making station, and more green fun.

Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days Pet Food Express, 3868 Piedmont, Oakl; www.mainecoonadoptions.com (check web site for additional locations). 9am-3pm, free. Also Sun/1, 10am-3pm. Nonprofit cat-rescue organization Maine Coon Adoptions offers free adoptions of cats and kittens in honor of Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days, the largest free pet adoption event in the country.

SUNDAY 1

“Poetry Unbound #13” Art House Gallery, 2905 Shattuck, Berk; berkeleyarthouse.wordpress.com. 5pm, $5. Reading with COPUS, Charles Curtis Blackwell, and Kayla Sussell, with a brief open mic hosted by Clive Matson and Richard Loranger.

MONDAY 2

“Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy” David Brower Center, Goldman Theater, 2150 Allston, Berk; www.browercenter.org. 7pm, free. The Brower Center and Voice of Witness partner for this book launch (Invisible Hands) and panel discussion on the state of labor the global economy.

“13 Crime Stories from Latin America: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #46” Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. Editor Daniel Gumbiner and translators Katherine Silver and Joel Streiker discuss this new collection of work by contemporary writers from 10 different countries.

“Todd Trexler: A Solo Exhibition of His Legendary Portraits” Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; www.magnetsf.org. Gallery hours: Mon-Tue and Sat, 11am-6pm; Wed-Fri, 11am-9pm. Opening reception June 6, 7-10pm. Free. Legendary poster artist Todd Trexler (the Cockettes, Sylvester, Divine) shows his work in the first exhibit of its kind in over 40 years.

TUESDAY 3

“Creating Children’s Books: An Immigrant’s Story” San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. 6pm, free. Author Yuyi Morales (Niño Wrestles the World) delivers the SFPL’s 18th annual Effie Lee Morris Lecture, discussing the need for diversity in children’s literature.

James Fearnley Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The music biographer discusses Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues. *

 

Bay Guardian Community Forum! Bikes, buses, and budgets: How to create the transportation system San Franciscans need

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Join the San Francisco Bay Guardian as we explore the current swirl of challenges and initiatives that will determine how people get around San Francisco. We’ll discuss transportation funding measures recently placed on the fall ballots this year and in 2016, big ideas such as tearing down I-280 and taking a Bay Bridge deck for bikes and buses, and the gap between political rhetoric and realities on the street along with a panel of key experts and activists. This is a free community event, and attendees will be entered into a raffle for an A2B electric bicycle, with a winner selected at the end of the event.

Panelists:

Supervisor Scott Wiener — Wiener represents San Francisco’s Supervisorial District 8 (Castro, Upper Market) and he has taken the lead role on the Board of Supervisors and Metropolitan Transportation Commission in advocating for dedicated funding sources for transportation project and challenging his colleagues to get serious about the challenges we face.

Professor Jason Henderson — As a geography professor at San Francisco State University, Henderson has focused his research and teaching on urban transportation issues. He’s also the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco and he writes the Guardian’s popular and controversial monthly Street Fight column.

Chema Hernández Gil — Hernández Gil is a community organizer with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, San Francisco largest member-based grassroots advocacy organization, which has recently been highlighting funding shortfalls in creating the bicycling infrastructure needed to accommodate a growing number of cyclists. 

Susan King — King coordinates the popular Sunday Streets program, which creates temporary car-free spaces in San Francisco, the latest endeavor in a long history of transportation activism ranging from working for Livable City to helping found WalkSF to serving on the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee to working on transit justice campaigns.

 

Moderators: Guardian Editor-in-Chief Steven T. Jones and News Editor Rebecca Bowe

 

Agenda:

6-7pm: Panel discussion — Prompted by questions from the moderators, panelists will share their insights into what kind of the transportation system San Francisco needs to address a growing population amid global warming and other environmental challenges, how to overcome the multi-billion-dollar funding shortfalls that have been identified, the political/ideological context of this debate, and other issues.

7-7:15pm: Break and networking — Stretch your legs, meet fellow concerned citizens, enjoy snacks provided by the Guardian, sign up for the A2B bike raffle, and prepare your remarks

7:15-8pm: Comments and questions: What do you think San Francisco needs from its transportation system and how do we get it? This is your chance to offer your ideas and/or ask questions of our panelists (note: Wiener has a prior engagement and will only be there for first hour, sorry). This is also a time for panelists to raise big, thought-provoking ideas and get audience feedback.

8pm-?: Haven’t had enough? Join the diehards over at Zeitgeist to continue the discussion over pitchers of beer and burgers. 

 


Neighborhood papers tell the story of SF

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By Jessica Lipsky

news@sfbg.com

Before many San Francisco residents traded their newspaper subscriptions for Internet media, a dozen monthly papers covered the beat of the city’s distinct neighborhoods. Nine of these papers, whose heyday came with radical changes in the ’70s and ’80s, are being digitally archived by local historical organization Found SF.

“The papers all have their own personalities,” said Found SF organizer LisaRuth Elliott. “You get a sense of even how those change over time too, whether it’s a hard hitting article or it’s talking about the evolution of how the street businesses changed in Noe Valley. Archiving these papers opens up the gates for all the stuff we don’t know, and that you want to find out about, in San Francisco.”

Over the course of six months, Found SF volunteers will archive two decades’ worth of content from papers published throughout the city — the Noe Valley Voice, Tenderloin Times, Visitation Valley Grapevine, Richmond ReView, Potrero View, the New Fillmore, El Tecolote, North Mission News, and the Glen Park Perspective — in partnership with the Internet Archive and San Francisco Public Library. Since beginning the project in January, Found SF has scanned over 200 issues and tagged each with searchable keywords.

 

BILINGUAL VOICES

While several of the papers have come and gone, the publication that inspired the project is still going strong. Born from 1968 riots at San Francisco State for relevant ethnic education, the Mission’s El Tecolote was founded in 1970 as a bilingual paper dedicated to social activism. The paper made great inroads in the mid-’70s fighting for equitable health services, such as a bilingual emergency phone system, while covering Latino arts and civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

“We started El Tecolote to fill the gap of the mainstream media, which wasn’t covering this neighborhood with any real consistency; if it did it was often times negative news,” founder Juan Gonzales said. “The mission was to really be a voice for the neighborhood and hopefully move the spirit of organizing ahead to make some social change.”

In addition to taking a hard line on local politics and immigrant issues, the archives document the evolution of San Francisco from various perspectives. Residents of lower-income neighborhoods were displaced, and many districts leveled, during urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s, while a 1973-75 recession caused further damages. The resulting plight set the stage for journalism driven by demand for hyper-local coverage of LGBT and feminist rights, gentrification, and third-world issues.

“In the mid-’70s there was consciousness around neighborhoods as social centers and places where community organizing was happening,” Elliott said. “People are facing eviction, they’re protesting, there are these vigils happening, and people talking about gaining rights for long-term things. We’re still working with the legacy of some of the housing decisions [San Francisco] made around that time due to the activism,” she added, citing the Tenderloin Times’ advocacy for SROs in the face of hotel development west of Union Square.

 

RESILIENCE IN HARD TIMES

The New Fillmore — established in 1986 as the city became inflicted with crack and AIDS epidemics, just as Reaganism swept in — was at the heart of socioeconomic changes that transformed parts of San Francisco from what felt like a blue-collar town to an increasingly white-collar city. Approximately 30 blocks in the Fillmore and Western Addition were leveled and left vacant until the ’80s, and the monthly paper played an important role in chronicling the return of businesses to the once thriving neighborhood.

“We ended up with the worst of both worlds in the Fillmore,” said Thomas Reynolds, who took over publishing the New Fillmore in 2006. Redevelopment efforts initially provoked no organized public protest, he said, but later “generated a lot of activism. The New Fillmore managed to capture a lot of the change that was coming to the neighborhood, and a lot of the flavor and history of the neighborhood that was being lost.” The paper encouraged civic engagement through a regular architecture column that featured local homes and helped owners register their historic buildings.

Several papers served neighborhoods with large refugee and immigrant populations, many of whom didn’t speak or read English. The Tenderloin Times promoted social services and encouraged activism through coverage of Southeast Asian and local politics, while publishing simultaneously in English, Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese over its two-decade run. Others chronicled changes in demographics, including an influx of Chinese residents into Visitation Valley and a population shift in the Mission from predominately Chicano to more Central Americans.

The Noe Valley Voice also took an international turn when escaped Irish prisoner Liam Carl toured the U.S. to expose harsh conditions in British jails. Carl entered the country illegally and was housed in a Noe Valley home in the fall of 1980, telling the Voice, “If [prisoners] thought that perhaps there was a chance that they could be heard through less drastic measures … and maybe bring about some change without so many people having to die, perhaps I can save lives.”

While the newspapers often differed in their coverage, each featured complementary stories chronicling the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Common features included how to check for damage, profiles on restaurants that fed the neighborhood or, as one Noe Valley Voice headline described the experience of meeting neighbors during a power outage: “We Could See the Stars.” Ahead of the 25th anniversary in October, Found SF has examples of quake coverage online.

“It makes me think that the city is comprised of all these little villages and it’s a little hard to say San Francisco has one direction, one value system,” Elliott said. “The papers show the wide variety of people who live in the city … but it’s all very much at a very personal level. They know each other. They’re telling stories about each other.”

For more information on the neighborhood newspaper archiving project, or to volunteer, visit foundsf.org.

 

Happy May Day, San Francisco

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Happy May Day, comrades, and what a fine May day it is even if the urgent mayday spirit on this International Workers Day doesn’t seem as strong as some recent years past in the Bay Area.

While Russia seems to be rediscovering its previous practice of massive May Day marches marked by anti-Western propaganda, spurred on by renewed nationalism from the standoff in Ukraine, May Day has never been very big in the US.

The holiday celebrated throughout the world with workers showing their strength and demanding their fair share of our collective wealth marks the anniversary of a labor demonstration that turned violent and triggered a harsh crackdown in Chicago in 1886. While the socialists of the Second International adopted the May Day holiday in 1889, the American holiday of Labor Day was adopted as a bland alternative meant to take the radical edge off of workers movements.

But many leftists in the US retained an affinity for May Day, and it was infused with a renewed spirit and radical energy by supporters of immigration reform and an end to deportations that divide up families, with massive marches in major US cities in 2006 catching the media and political establishment off-guard.

 Then, two years ago, fresh off of the Occupy Wall Street (and Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Oakland, etc.), some young anarchists rampaged through the Mission District, breaking windows, spray painting luxury cars, attacking a police station, and generally targeting what they saw as the forces of wealth and gentrification, albeit in a misguided and widely condemned way.

Today’s big May Day march in San Francisco starts at the 24th Street BART Plaza, again strongly emphasizing the need for immigration reform, but also marrying that cause with the anti-displacement and anti-eviction activism that are roiling San Francisco these days. [The poster for the event even features a photo of a recent Google bus blockade CORRECTION: The photo is actually of immigration activists blocking a deportation bus.]

Meanwhile, in the East Bay, the main May Day march begins at 3:30pm at the Fruitvale BART Street, also with a focus on social justice and immigration reform. So get on out there, comrades, you have nothing to lose but your chains.  

Left out

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steve@sfbg.com

It’s never been easy for progressives to mount a serious campaign for the California governor’s office. The high water mark was in 1934 when famous author/activist Upton Sinclair ran on his End Poverty In California platform and got nearly 38 percent of the vote despite being shut out by the major newspapers at the time.

That campaign was cited by both of this year’s leading leftist challengers to Gov. Jerry Brown — Green Party candidate Luis Rodriguez and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Cindy Sheehan — who say the goal of ending poverty is more important than ever, but who are also having a hard time getting media coverage for that message.

The latest Field Poll from April 9 shows Brown with a 40-point lead on his closest challenger, conservative Republican Tim Donnelly (57 to 17 percent, with 20 percent undecided). Republicans Andrew Blount and Neel Kashkari were at 3 and 2 percent, respectively, while Rodriguez and Sheehan are among the 11 also-rans who shared the support of 1 percent of the California electorate.

Perhaps that’s to be expected given that Brown is a Democrat who pulled the state back from the edge of the fiscal abyss largely by backing the Prop. 30 tax package in 2012, with most of the new revenue coming from increased income taxes on the rich. But to hear Rodriguez and Sheehan tell it, Brown is just another agent of the status quo at a time when the growing gap between rich and poor is the state’s most pressing problem.

“We have to put all our resources into ending poverty,” Rodriguez told us.

The campaigns that Rodriguez and Sheehan are running seem indicative of the state of progressive politics in California these days, with good work being done on individual issues by an array of groups, but little coordination among them or serious work on the kind of organizing and coalition-building needed to win statewide office.

There is still hope, particularly given California’s open primary system, where all Rodriguez or Sheehan need to do is beat the top Republican challenger in June in order to face Brown in a two-person race in November — an outcome that would definitely elevate their progressive message.

“One of our sayings is ‘second place wins the race,'” Sheehan told the Guardian.

But at this point, that seems unlikely, a longshot that points to the need for progressive-minded Californians to rebuild the movement and win over new generations of voters, particularly the young people disconnected from electoral politics and largely behind by the economic system.

 

REACHING VOTERS

When we asked Sheehan how her campaign was going, she replied, “It’s going.” When we pushed for a bit more, she told us, “It’s very, very grassroots and we’ve been trying to get the word out.”

And by “very, very grassroots,” Sheehan seems to mean that it’s not going very well, in terms of fundraising, volunteer support, media exposure, or any of the things a campaign needs to be successful. It’s been a disappointment for a woman who started her public political life as a media darling.

The year after Sheehan’s son Casey died fighting the Iraq War in 2004, she set up an encampment outside then-President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, instantly becoming a high-profile anti-war activist just as public opinion was turning strongly against the war.

Sheehan parlayed that fame into international activism for peace and other progressive causes, writing a pair of autobiographical/political books, and mounting a primary challenge against then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2008, finishing in second place with about 16 percent of the vote. Sheehan was also the running mate of presidential candidate Roseanne Barr in 2012, although their Peace and Freedom Party ticket didn’t appear on the ballot in most states.

But these days, Sheehan has found it tougher to recapture the media spotlight she once enjoyed, causing her to sometimes bristle with frustration and a sense of entitlement, as she did with us at the Guardian for failing to help her amplify her message before now.

“Who came in 2nd against Pelosi? Who received well into ‘double digits?’ The campaign can’t get steam if ‘lefties’ put the same criteria as the [San Francisco] Chronicle for example for coverage. If I were truly in this for my ‘ego’ I would have quit a long time ago. You write, I campaign all over the world for the things I care about,” Sheehan wrote in a testy April 3 email exchange with me after a supporter seeking our coverage sent her a message in which I questioned the prospects of her campaign.

But getting progressive support in a race against Pelosi in San Francisco clearly isn’t the same thing as having a progressive campaign gain traction with a statewide audience, particularly because Sheehan doesn’t have many prominent endorsers or organizational allies.

By contrast, Rodriguez seems to be outhustling Sheehan, racing up and the down the state to promote his candidacy and work on rebuilding the progressive movement, with an emphasis on reaching communities of color who feel estranged from politics.

“People like me and others on the left need to step up if we’re not going to just accept the control of the two-party system. We have to fight for that democratic reality, we have to make it real,” Rodriguez told us. “You can’t just say vote, vote, vote. You have to give them something to vote for.”

 

ON THE ISSUES

Rodriguez is the author of 15 books, including poetry, journalism, novels, and a controversial memoir on gang life, Always Running, winning major writing awards for his work. He lives in the Los Angeles area, where he’s been active in community-building in both the arts and political realms.

Rodriguez is running on a platform that brings together environmental, social justice, and anti-poverty issues, areas addressed separately by progressive groups who have made only halting progress on each, “which is why we need to make them inseparable.”

While he said Brown has improved the “terrible situation he inherited from Schwarzenegger,” Rodriguez said that the fortunes of the average Californian haven’t turned around.

“People are hurting in the state of California. I think Brown has to answer for that,” Rodriguez said, noting that people are frustrated with the economic system and looking for solutions. “I don’t think Gov. Brown has a plan for it. In fact, I think he’s making it worse.”

Sheehan is critical of Brown for his opposition to full marijuana legalization, his resistance to prison reform, for allowing fracking, and for doing little to challenge the consolidation of wealth.

“My main issue is always, of course, peace and justice. But a corollary of that is for the resources of this state to be more fairly distributed to help people’s lives,” Sheehan said, calling that economic justice stand an outgrowth of her anti-war activism. “Since my son was killed, I’ve been starting to connect the dots about the empire we live under.”

When she studied California history at UCLA, Sheehan said, “I was inspired by Upton Sinclair and his End Poverty In California campaign in the ’30s.” She reminisces about the California of her childhood, when college education was free and the social safety net was intact, keeping people from economic desperation.

“It’s been done before and we can do it again,” Sheehan said. “I love this state, I love its potential, and I miss the way it was when I was growing up.”

 

OBSTACLES TO OVERCOME

Money is a challenge for statewide candidates given the size of California, which has at least a half-dozen major media markets that all need to be tapped repeatedly to reach voters throughout the state.

“I won’t take any corporate dollars and only people with money get heard,” Rodriguez told us.

But he says California has a large and growing number of voters who don’t identify with either major party, as well as a huge number of Latino voters who have yet to really make their voices heard at election time.

“I’m really banking on the people that nobody is counting,” Rodriguez said. “This is the time when people need to come together. We have to unite on these central things.”

That’s always a tough task for third-party candidates. Sheehan has a paltry list of endorsers, owing partly to the left-leaning organizations like labor unions staying with Brown, even though Sheehan claims many of their members support her.

“The rank and file is supportive of our message, but the leadership is still tied in with the Democratic Party,” Sheehan told us. “This state is deeply controlled by the Democratic Party, even more than it was a few years ago.”

But Sheehan considers herself a strong and seasoned candidate. “I’ve run for Congress, I’ve run for vice president, and I think that politics should be local,” Sheehan told us, saying her main strength would be, “I would work with people to create a better state, not against people.”

It was a theme she returned to a few times in our conversation, her main selling point. “It’s about inspiring a movement,” Sheehan said. “My biggest gift is getting out there and talking to people.” But if her strengths are indeed inspiring a movement, working with allies, and building coalitions, then why isn’t her campaign doing those things? Sheehan admits that it’s been difficult, telling us, “I found it easier in San Francisco to get the word out.”

Events: April 16 – 22, 2014

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Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 16

“Globular Clusters of the Milky Way” Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, SF; www.randallmuseum.org. 7:30pm, free. Calling all Cosmos fans: UC Santa Cruz Professor of Astronomy Graeme Smith delivers this talk as part of the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers’ 2014 lecture series.

Myra McPherson Green Arcade, 1680 Market, SF; www.thegreenarcade.com. 7pm, free. The author discusses The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age.

Elizabeth Scarboro and Louise Aronson Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The authors read from My Foreign Cities and A History of the Present Illness, respectively.

“Smack Dab” Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; www.magnetsf.org. 8pm, free. Open mic for writers and musicians, with featured performer Blair Hansen.

Kevin Young City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. The poet reads from his new collection, Book of Hours.

THURSDAY 17

Kaya Press 20th Anniversary City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. With Sesshu Foster, Gene Oishi, Amamath Rawa, and Shailja Patel.

“The Natural and Cultural History of Yerba Buena Island” Randall Museum, 199 Museum Wy, SF; www.randallmuseum.org. 7:30pm, free. The 2014 SF Natural History Lecture Series continues with this talk about Yerba Buena Island’s ecological secrets by Ruth Gravanis.

FRIDAY 18

“Birding the Hill” Corona Heights Park, behind Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, SF; www.randallmuseum.org. 8am, free. Beginning birders are welcome to this 2.5 hour walk scouting the park’s avian inhabitants.

SATURDAY 19

Emil DeAndreis Green Apple Books, 506 Clement, SF; www.greenapplebooks.com. 6pm, free. The author reads from Beyond Folly.

Earth Day Bay Area Discovery Museum, Fort Baker, 447 McReynolds, Sausalito; www.baykidsmuseum.org. 9am-5pm, $11. Live music, hands-on craft projects using recycled materials, storytelling, and more for kids and their families.

Earth Day SF UN Plaza, Civic Center, SF; www.earthdaysf.org. 10am-6pm, free. This year’s theme is “A Call to Action,” so look for speakers and booths addressing climate change, green activism, and other social-justice topics. Of course, there will also be plenty of music (by headliners New Monsoon and the Earth Day All Star Band, among others), dance performances, an eco fashion show, a sustainable chef showcase, and more.

“Earth Day on the Bay” Marine Science Institute, 500 Discovery Pkwy, Redwood City; www.sfbaymsi.org. 10am-5pm, free. The Institute opens to the public just once a year, and today’s the day. Families are invited for hands-on science fun (touch a shark!).

“Eggstravaganza 2014” Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.sfrecpark.org. 11am-3pm, $8. Egg hunts, carnival rides, games, live entertainment, and a barbecue competition between city agencies highlight this family-friendly Easter event.

“Great Egg Hunt” Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate, 2960 Peralta Oaks Court, Oakl; www.dunsmuir-hellman.com. Noon-3pm, $3-5. Oakland’s largest egg hunt (also on tap: a petting zoo, face painting, crafts, and more) covers the grounds of the 1899 mansion.

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival Japantown, SF; www.sfcherryblossom.org. Times and prices vary. Through Sun/20. Celebrate Japanese culture and the Japanese American community at this 47th annual street fair, boasting food booths, live music, martial arts demonstrations, and more.

“Party for the Planet” Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd, Oakl; www.oaklandzoo.org. 10am-3pm, $11.75-15.75. 50 local environmental organizations participate in this zoo bash, which will feature over 50 “interactive Earth Stations” throughout the facility. Plus: live animal presentations, live music, and more.

“SuperAwesome: Art and Giant Robot” and “Vinyl: The Sound and Culture of Records” Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl; www.museumca.org. 11am-5pm, $6-20. Through July 27. Two new exhibits open today at OMCA: the first highlighting 15 artists associated with Asian and Asian American pop culture-focused magazine Giant Robot, and the second exploring “the social and cultural phenomenon of listening to, collecting, and sharing records.”

SUNDAY 20

“Easter in Golden Gate Park” Hellman Hollow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.thesisters.org. Children’s Easter, 10am; main event, noon. Free. Hunky Jesus has risen! And this year, he’s got Foxy Mary with him! It’s the 35th year for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s flamboyant Easter festivities. Crucial info: the theme is “The Emerald Jubilee, A ‘Trip” to Oz;” and since Dolores Park is temporarily closed, it all goes down in Golden Gate Park.

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics 40th Anniversary Party City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 5pm, free. Andrea Rexillus hosts readings by Robert Gluck, Juliana Spahr, Cedar Sigo, Eric Baus, Michelle Naka Pierce, and Chris Pusateri.

“The Szyk HaggadahContemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. 1-2pm, free with museum admission ($10-12). Also April 27, 3-4pm. The Arthur Szyk scholar discusses the artist’s masterwork in this gallery talk.

Union Street Easter Parade and Spring Celebration Union between Gough and Fillmore, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 10am-5pm, free. A parade, an Easter bonnet contest, live entertainment, and lots of kid-friendly fun highlight this 23rd annual event.

TUESDAY 22

Doug Fine Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. Celebrate Earth Day with this reading by the author of Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution.

Sixteen Rivers Press reading City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm. With poetry readings by Beverly Burch and Murray Silverstein. *

 

Save the world, work less

56

steve@sfbg.com

Save the world, work less. That dual proposition should have universal appeal in any sane society. And those two ideas are inextricably linked by the realities of global climate change because there is a direct connection between economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions.

Simply put, every hour of work we do cooks the planet and its sensitive ecosystems a little bit more, and going home to relax and enjoy some leisure time is like taking this boiling pot of water off the burner.

Most of us burn energy getting to and from work, stocking and powering our offices, and performing the myriad tasks that translate into digits on our paychecks. The challenge of working less is a societal one, not an individual mandate: How can we allow people to work less and still meet their basic needs?

This goal of slowing down and spending less time at work — as radical as it may sound — was at the center of mainstream American political discourse for much of our history, considered by thinkers of all ideological stripes to be the natural endpoint of technological development. It was mostly forgotten here in the 1940s, strangely so, even as worker productivity increased dramatically.

But it’s worth remembering now that we understand the environmental consequences of our growth-based economic system. Our current approach isn’t good for the health of the planet and its creatures, and it’s not good for the happiness and productivity of overworked Americans, so perhaps it’s time to revisit this once-popular idea.

Last year, there was a brief burst of national media coverage around this “save the world, work less” idea, triggered by a report by the Washington DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled “Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change.”

“As productivity grows in high-income, as well as developing countries, social choices will be made as to how much of the productivity gains will be taken in the form of higher consumption levels versus fewer work hours,” author David Rosnick wrote in the introduction.

He notes that per capita work hours were reduced by 50 percent in recent decades in Europe compared to US workers who spend as much time as ever on the job, despite being a world leader in developing technologies that make us more productive. Working more means consuming more, on and off the job.

“This choice between fewer work hours versus increased consumption has significant implications for the rate of climate change,” the report said before going on to study various climate change and economic growth models.

It isn’t just global warming that working less will help address, but a whole range of related environmental problems: loss of biodiversity and natural habitat; rapid depletion of important natural resources, from fossil fuel to fresh water; and the pollution of our environment with harmful chemicals and obsolete gadgets.

Every day that the global workforce is on the job, those problems all get worse, mitigated only slightly by the handful of occupations devoted to cleaning up those messes. The Rosnick report contemplates only a slight reduction in working hours, gradually shaving a few hours off the week and offering a little more vacation time.

“The paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent. It finds that such a change in work hours would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in (i.e. warming that would be caused by 1990 levels of greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere),” the report concludes.

What I’m talking about is something more radical, a change that meets the daunting and unaddressed challenge that climate change is presenting. Let’s start the discussion in the range of a full day off to cutting our work hours in half — and eliminating half of the wasteful, exploitive, demeaning, make-work jobs that this economy-on-steroids is creating for us, and forcing us to take if we want to meet our basic needs.

Taking even a day back for ourselves and our environment will seem like crazy-talk to many readers, even though our bosses would still command more days each week than we would. But the idea that our machines and other innovations would lead us to work far less than we do now — and that this would be a natural and widely accepted and expected part of economic evolution — has a long and esteemed philosophical history.

Perhaps this forgotten goal is one worth remembering at this critical moment in our economic and environmental development.

 

HISTORY LESSON

Author and historian Chris Carlsson has been beating the “work less” drum in San Francisco since Jimmy Carter was president, when he and his fellow anti-capitalist activists decried the dawning of an age of aggressive business deregulation that continues to this day.

They responded with creative political theater and protests on the streets of the Financial District, and with the founding of a magazine called Processed World, highlighting how new information technologies were making corporations more powerful than ever without improving the lives of workers.

“What do we actually do all day and why? That’s the most basic question that you’d think we’d be talking about all the time,” Carlsson told us. “We live in an incredibly powerful and overarching propaganda society that tells you to get your joy from work.”

But Carlsson isn’t buying it, noting that huge swaths of the economy are based on exploiting people or the planet, or just creating unproductive economic churn that wastes energy for its own sake. After all, the Gross Domestic Product measures everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

“The logic of growth that underlies this society is fundamentally flawed,” Carlsson said. “It’s the logic of the cancer cell — it makes no sense.”

What makes more sense is to be smart about how we’re using our energy, to create an economy that economizes instead of just consuming everything in its path. He said that we should ask, “What work do we need to do and to what end?”

We used to ask such questions in this country. There was a time when working less was the goal of our technological development.

“Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the reduction of worktime was one of the nation’s most pressing issues,” professor Juliet B. Schor wrote in her seminal 1991 book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. “Through the Depression, hours remained a major social preoccupation. Today these debates and conflicts are long forgotten.”

Work hours were steadily reduced as these debates raged, and it was widely assumed that even greater reductions in work hours was all but inevitable. “By today, it was estimated that we could have either a 22-hour week, a six-month workyear, or a standard retirement age of 38,” Schor wrote, citing a 1958 study and testimony to Congress in 1967.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, declining work hours leveled off in the late 1940s even as worker productivity grew rapidly, increasing an average of 3 percent per year 1948-1968. Then, in the 1970s, workers in the US began to work steadily more hours each week while their European counterparts moved in the opposite direction.

“People tend to think the way things are is the way it’s always been,” Carlsson said. “Once upon a time, they thought technology would produce more leisure time, but that didn’t happen.”

Writer David Spencer took on the topic in a widely shared essay published in The Guardian UK in February entitled “Why work more? We should be working less for a better quality of life: Our society tolerates long working hours for some and zero hours for others. This doesn’t make sense.”

He cites practical benefits of working less, from reducing unemployment to increasing the productivity and happiness of workers, and cites a long and varied philosophical history supporting this forgotten goal, including opposing economists John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx.

Keynes called less work the “ultimate solution” to unemployment and he “also saw merit in using productivity gains to reduce work time and famously looked forward to a time (around 2030) when people would be required to work 15 hours a week. Working less was part of Keynes’s vision of a ‘good society,'” Spencer wrote.

“Marx importantly thought that under communism work in the ‘realm of necessity’ could be fulfilling as it would elicit and harness the creativity of workers. Whatever irksome work remained in realm of necessity could be lessened by the harnessing of technology,” Spencer wrote.

He also cited Bertrand Russell’s acclaimed 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” in which the famed mathematician reasoned that working a four-hour day would cure many societal ills. “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached,” Russell wrote.

Spencer concluded his article by writing, “Ultimately, the reduction in working time is about creating more opportunities for people to realize their potential in all manner of activities including within the work sphere. Working less, in short, is about allowing us to live more.”

 

JOBS VS. WORK

Schor’s research has shown how long working hours — and the uneven distribution of those hours among workers — has hampered our economy, hurt our environment, and undermined human happiness.

“We have an increasingly poorly functioning economy and a catastrophic environmental situation,” Schor told us in a phone interview from her office at Boston College, explaining how the increasingly dire climate change scenarios add urgency to talking about how we’re working.

Schor has studied the problem with other researchers, with some of her work forming the basis for Rosnick’s work, including the 2012 paper Schor authored with University of Alabama Professor Kyle Knight entitled “Could working less reduce pressures on the environment?” The short answer is yes.

“As humanity’s overshoot of environmental limits become increasingly manifest and its consequences become clearer, more attention is being paid to the idea of supplanting the pervasive growth paradigm of contemporary societies,” the report says.

The United States seems to be a case study for what’s wrong.

“There’s quite a bit of evidence that countries with high annual work hours have much higher carbon emissions and carbon footprints,” Schor told us, noting that the latter category also takes into account the impacts of the products and services we use. And it isn’t just the energy we expend at work, but how we live our stressed-out personal lives.

“If households have less time due to hours of work, they do things in a more carbon-intensive way,” Schor said, with her research finding those who work long hours often tend to drive cars by themselves more often (after all, carpooling or public transportation take time and planning) and eat more processed foods.

Other countries have found ways of breaking this vicious cycle. A generation ago, Schor said, the Netherlands began a policy of converting many government jobs to 80 percent hours, giving employees an extra day off each week, and encouraging many private sector employers to do the same. The result was happier employees and a stronger economy.

“The Netherlands had tremendous success with their program and they’ve ended up with the highest labor productivity in Europe, and one of the happiest populations,” Schor told us. “Working hours is a triple dividend policy change.”

By that she means that reducing per capita work hours simultaneously lowers the unemployment rate by making more jobs available, helps address global warming and other environmental challenges, and allows people to lead happier lives, with more time for family, leisure, and activities of their choosing.

Ironically, a big reason why it’s been so difficult for the climate change movement to gain traction is that we’re all spending too much time and energy on making a living to have the bandwidth needed to sustain a serious and sustained political uprising.

When I presented this article’s thesis to Bill McKibben, the author and activist whose 350.org movement is desperately trying to prevent carbon concentrations in the atmosphere from passing critical levels, he said, “If people figure out ways to work less at their jobs, I hope they’ll spend some of their time on our too-often neglected work as citizens. In particular, we need a hell of a lot of people willing to devote some time to breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry.”

world

That’s the vicious circle we now find ourselves in. There is so much work to do in addressing huge challenges such as global warming and transitioning to more sustainable economic and energy systems, but we’re working harder than ever just to meet our basic needs — usually in ways that exacerbate these challenges.

“I don’t have time for a job, I have too much work to do,” is the dilemma facing Carlsson and others who seek to devote themselves to making the world a better place for all living things.

To get our heads around the problem, we need to overcome the mistaken belief that all jobs and economic activity are good, a core tenet of Mayor Ed Lee’s economic development policies and his relentless “jobs agenda” boosterism and business tax cuts. Not only has the approach triggered the gentrification and displacement that have roiled the city’s political landscape in the last year, but it relies on a faulty and overly simplistic assumption: All jobs are good for society, regardless of their pay or impact on people and the planet.

Lee’s mantra is just the latest riff on the fabled Protestant work ethic, which US conservatives and neoliberals since the Reagan Era have used to dismantle the US welfare system, pushing the idea that it’s better for a single mother to flip our hamburgers or scrub our floors than to get the assistance she needs to stay home and take care of her own home and children.

“There is a belief that work is the best form of welfare and that those who are able to work ought to work. This particular focus on work has come at the expense of another, far more radical policy goal, that of creating ‘less work,'” Spencer wrote in his Guardian essay. “Yet…the pursuit of less work could provide a better standard of life, including a better quality of work life.”

And it may also help save us from environmental catastrophe.

 

GLOBAL TIPPING POINT

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top research body on the issue recognized by the United Nations, recently released its fifth report summarizing and analyzing the science and policies around climate change, striking a more urgent tone than in previous reports.

On April 13 at a climate conference in Berlin, the panel released a new report noting that greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than ever and urgent action is needed in the next decade to avert a serious crisis.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report, told The New York Times. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

After the panel released an earlier section of the report on March 31, it wrote in a public statement: “The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce surprises.”

The known impacts will be displaced populations in poor countries inundated by rising seas, significant changes to life-supporting ecosystems (such as less precipitation in California and other regions, creating possible fresh water shortages), food shortages from loss of agricultural land, and more extreme weather events.

What we don’t yet know, these “surprises,” could be even scarier because this is such uncharted territory. Never before have human activities had such an impact on the natural world and its delicate balances, such as in how energy circulates through the world’s oceans and what it means to disrupt half of the planet’s surface area.

Researchers have warned that we could be approaching a “global tipping point,” in which the impact of climate change affects other systems in the natural world and threatens to spiral out of control toward another mass extinction. And a new report funded partially by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Goodard Space Center combines the environmental data with growing inequities in the distribution of wealth to warn that modern society as we know it could collapse.

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” the report warned.

It cites two critical features that have triggered most major societal collapses in past, both of which are increasingly pervasive problems today: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or ‘Commoners’),” which makes it more difficult to deal with problems that arise.

Both of these problems would be addressed by doing less overall work, and distributing the work and the rewards for that work more evenly.

 

SYSTEMIC PROBLEM

Carol Zabin — research director for the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, who has studied the relation between jobs and climate change — has some doubts about the strategy of addressing global warming by reducing economic output and working less.

“Economic activity which uses energy is not immediately correlated with work hours,” she told us, noting that some labor-saving industrial processes use more energy than human-powered alternatives. And she also said that, “some leisure activities could be consumptive activities that are just as bad or worse than work.”

She does concede that there is a direct connection between energy use and climate change, and that most economic activity uses energy. Zabin also said there was a clear and measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions during the Great Recession that began with the 2008 economic crash, when economic growth stalled and unemployment was high.

“When we’re in recessions and output and consumption slow, we see a reduction in impact on the climate,” Zabin said, although she added, “They’re correlated, but they’re not causal.”

Other studies have made direct connections between work and energy use, at least when averaged out across the population, studies that Rosnick cited in his study. “Recent work estimated that a 1 percent increase in annual hours per employee is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in carbon footprint,” it said, citing the 2012 Knight study.

Zabin’s main stumbling block was a political one, rooted in the assumption that American-style capitalism, based on conspicuous consumption, would continue more or less as is. “Politically, reducing economic growth is really, really unviable,” she told us, noting how that would hurt the working class.

But again, doesn’t that just assume that the pain of an economic slowdown couldn’t be more broadly shared, with the rich absorbing more of the impact than they have so far? Can’t we move to an economic system that is more sustainable and more equitable?

“It seems a little utopian when we have a problem we need to address by reducing energy use,” Zabin said before finally taking that next logical step: “If we had socialism and central planning, we could shut the whole thing down a notch.”

Instead, we have capitalism, and she said, “we have a climate problem that is probably not going to be solved anyway.”

So we have capitalism and unchecked global warming, or we can have a more sustainable system and socialism. Hmm, which one should we pick? European leaders have already started opting for the latter option, slowing down their economic output, reducing work hours, and substantially lowering the continent’s carbon footprint.

That brings us back to the basic question set forth in the Rosnick study: As productivity increases, should those gains go to increase the wages of workers or to reduce their hours? From the perspective of global warming, the answer is clearly the latter. But that question is complicated in US these days by the bosses, investors, and corporations keeping the productivity gains for themselves.

“It is worth noting that the pursuit of reduced work hours as a policy alternative would be much more difficult in an economy where inequality is high and/or growing. In the United States, for example, just under two-thirds of all income gains from 1973-2007 went to the top 1 percent of households. In that type of economy, the majority of workers would have to take an absolute reduction in their living standards in order to work less. The analysis of this paper assumes that the gains from productivity growth will be more broadly shared in the future, as they have been in the past,” the study concludes.

So it appears we have some work to do, and that starts with making a connection between Earth Day and May Day.

 

EARTH DAY TO MAY DAY

The Global Climate Convergence (www.globalclimateconvergence.org) grew out of a Jan. 18 conference in Chicago that brought together a variety of progressive, environmental, and social justice groups to work together on combating climate change. They’re planning “10 days to change course,” a burst of political organizing and activism between Earth Day and May Day, highlighting the connection between empowering workers and saving the planet.

“It provides coordinated action and collaboration across fronts of struggle and national borders to harness the transformative power we already possess as a thousand separate movements. These grassroots justice movements are sweeping the globe, rising up against the global assault on our shared economy, ecology, peace and democracy. The accelerating climate disaster, which threatens to unravel civilization as soon as 2050, intensifies all of these struggles and creates new urgency for collaboration and unified action. Earth Day to May Day 2014 (April 22 — May 1) will be the first in a series of expanding annual actions,” the group announced.

San Mateo resident Ragina Johnson, who is coordinating events in the Bay Area, told us May Day, the international workers’ rights holiday, grew out of the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the United States, so it’s appropriate to use the occasion to call for society to slow down and balance the demands of capital with the needs of the people and the planet.

“What we’re seeing now is an enormous opportunity to link up these movements,” she told us. “It has really put us on the forefront of building a new progressive left in this country that takes on these issues.”

In San Francisco, she said the tech industry is a ripe target for activism.

“Technology has many employees working 60 hours a week, and what is the technology going to? It’s going to bottom line profits instead of reducing people’s work hours,” she said.

That’s something the researchers have found as well.

“Right now, the problem is workers aren’t getting any of those productivity gains, it’s all going to capital,” Schor told us. “People don’t see the connection between the maldistribution of hours and high unemployment.”

She said the solution should involve “policies that make it easier to work shorter hours and still meet people’s basic needs, and health insurance reform is one of those.”

Yet even the suggestion that reducing work hours might be a worthy societal goal makes the head of conservatives explode. When the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about how “working a bit less” could help many people qualify for healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (“Lower 2014 income can net huge health care subsidy,” 10/12/13), the right-wing blogosphere went nuts decrying what one site called the “toxic essence of the welfare state.”

Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders parroted the criticism in her Feb. 7 column. “The CBO had determined that ‘workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.’ To many Democrats, apparently, that’s all good,” she wrote of Congressional Budget Office predictions that Obamacare could help reduce hours worked.

Not too many Democratic politicians have embraced the idea of working less, but maybe they should if we’re really going to attack climate change and other environmental challenges. Capitalism has given us great abundance, more than we need and more than we can safely sustain, so let’s talk about slowing things down.

“There’s a huge amount of work going on in society that nobody wants to do and nobody should do,” Carlsson said, imagining a world where economic desperation didn’t dictate the work we do. “Most of us would be free to do what we want to do, and most of us would do useful things.”

And what about those who would choose idleness and sloth? So what? At this point, Mother Earth would happily trade her legions of crazed workaholics for a healthy population of slackers, those content to work and consume less.

Maybe someday we’ll even look back and wonder why we ever considered greed and overwork to be virtues, rather than valuing a more healthy balance between our jobs and our personal lives, our bosses and our families, ourselves and the natural world that sustains us.

Earth reads

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WEST OF EDEN: COMMUNES AND UTOPIA IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA (PM PRESS, 2012, $24.95)

Edited by Iain Boal, Janfrie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow, this fresh history of radical communitarians and their cultural impact includes essays that encompass the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Alcatraz occupation, and the Black Panthers, as well as famed (and doomed) communes like the Albion Nation along the Mendocino coast and Morning Star in Sonoma. There’s an emphasis on storytelling, roots activism, and personal relation to the earth here, as well as a bracing re-evaluation of what it meant to “get away from it all” and live free in the ’60s and ’70s.

 

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT (HENRY HOLT, 2014, $28)

Environmental staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the essential Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert turns an epochal eye toward our environmental fate. Proposing that, after the five major extinctions that have occurred in the history of life, the sixth one is us, her book guides us through the devastating effect we’re having on most of the planet’s species — and provides startling examples of animals almost gone, like the Panamanian golden frog and the great auk. After reading this, you will never snort ground-up black rhino horn as a party drug again.

 

THE BAY AREA FORAGER BY MIA ANDLER AND KEVIN FEINSTEIN (FORAGING SOCIETY PRESS, 2011, $24.95)

Miner’s Lettuce! Prickly Pear! Sour Clover! Blue Dicks! Where to find them, how to find them, when to use them, and how to eat them — all is revealed (along with some kick-ass recipes) in this wonderfully illustrated tome.

 

IN THE SIERRA: MOUNTAIN WRITINGS BY KENNETH REXROTH, EDITED BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON (NEW DIRECTIONS, 2012 EDITION, $16.95)

Beloved San Francisco poet Rexroth (1905-1982) brought his cosmic playfulness and sly, erotic wit to his encounters with nature. Snow-freckled granite, wrinkled tableland, peaks like refrigerated teeth, “the ventriloquial belling of an owl” mingling with nighttime waterfalls: Rexroth maps out a familiarly strange mountainscape with an ethereal astrolabe. Selected prose writings, including those from his columns in the Bay Guardian and the Examiner, take on winter camping, the history of the Sierra Club, and proper furniture for horses.

 

CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT IT MEANS FOR US, OUR CHILDREN, AND OUR GRANDCHILDREN (MIT PRESS, 2014, $22.95)

The folksy title of this MIT Press title may belie the eagerness of top scientists to reach everyday people before it’s too late. Edited by law professor and writer Joseph F.C. DiMento and energy specialist Pamela Doughman, the essays in Climate Change lays out up-to-the-minute information on the impending and present impact of our activities in practical terms of housing prices, taxes, and other relatable measurements in non-technical language.

 

A CALIFORNIA BESTIARY (HEYDAY, 2010, $12.95)

The pairing of writer Rebecca Solnit and muralist Mona Caron would cause major excitement even if it involved a book on differential equations. Here, however, is a gem-like compendium of iconic Golden State natives like the Chinook salmon, California condor, desert tortoise, and Mission butterfly. All seen through two of most important artists’ eyes. (Marke B.)

All titles available at Green Arcade Books (1680 Market, SF. www.thegreenarcade.com).

 

Alerts: April 9 – 15, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 9

 

Town Hall Meeting for Pedestrian Safety

Muslim Community Center, 4760 Mission, SF. gmackellen@eagsf.org. 6-8pm, free. Responding to the recent trend of pedestrian collisions in San Francisco, a coalition of neighborhood leaders has called for a Pedestrian Safety Town Hall. Supervisors Campos, Avalos, and Chiu will be in attendance, along with leaders from SFMTA and the SFPD, to discuss and propose ways to protect pedestrians against automobile accidents in San Francisco.

 

THURSDAY 10

 

Community Forum: Activism Against Displacement

LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF. www.urbanidea.org. 5:30-7:30pm, free registration online. Responding to the ’80s office high-rise boom, Proposition M has defined development and infrastructure in the City’s downtown to this day. Now, in the midst of another boom of development and evictions, Central City activists are proposing a Housing Balance Act, to link the rate of market development to a balanced affordable and middle-income housing. Join in the discussion to be part of the effort and find out more.

 

Panel Discussion: What the frack?!

1011 Market, 2nd Floor, SF. www.sfcamerawork.org. 6-8pm, free. Featured photographer Sarah Christianson will be present along with participants from Earthjustice and The Sierra Club to discuss fracking, a harmful oil and and natural gas extraction technique. The talk will examine how the scars from previous oil booms are healing, what new wounds are being inflicted, and who is on the forefront of the movement to safeguard California against environmentally harmful oil development.

 

SATURDAY 12

 

 

Cesar Chavez Holiday Parade and Festival

Dolores Park, Guerrero and 19th, SF. www.cesarchavezday.org. 10am-5pm, free. Celebrate the life of labor activist and civil rights leader, Cesar Chavez. The parade will begin assembling at 10am at Dolores Park, and there will be a street fair featuring food, music, entertainment, and arts and crafts booths from noon until 5pm on 24th St. between Treat and Bryant.

 

An evening with Matt Taibbi

First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing, Berk. www.kpfa.org. 7:30pm, $12 in advance, $15 at door. From the award-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author of The Great Derangement and Griftopia comes THE DIVIDE: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. Matt Taibbi, one of the most widely read journalists in America who is best known for his work at Rolling Stone, will speak about his new book, which offers a galvanizing exploration of how our growing wealth gap isn’t just warping our economy, but transforming the meaning of rights, justice, and basic citizenship. Taibbi will be joined by Donald Goldmacher, Producer and Director of Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?

Unanswered question on SF housing

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Nobody has a good answer to San Francisco’s most basic housing problem: How do we build the housing that existing city residents need? It was a question the Guardian has been posing for many years, and one that I again asked a panel of journalists and housing advocates on March 14, again getting no good answers.

The question is an important one given Mayor Ed Lee’s so-called "affordability agenda" and pledge to build 30,000 new housing units, a third of them somehow affordable, by 2020. And it’s a question that led to the founding 30 years ago of Bridge Housing, the builder of affordable and supportive housing that assembled this media roundtable.

"There really isn’t one thing, there needs to be a lot of changes in a lot of areas to make it happen," was the closest that Bridge CEO Cynthia Parker came to answering the question.

One of those things is a general obligation bond measure this fall to fund affordable housing and transportation projects around the Bay Area, which Bridge and a large coalition of other partners are pushing. That would help channel some of the booming Bay Area’s wealth into its severely underfunded affordable housing and transit needs.

When I brought up other ideas from our March 12 Guardian editorial ("Lee must pay for his promises") for capturing more of the city’s wealth — such as new taxes on tech companies, a congestion pricing charge, and downtown transit assessment districts — Parker replied, "We’d be in favor of a lot of that."

Yet it’s going to take far more proactive, aggressive, and creative actions to really bridge the gap between the San Francisco Housing Element’s analysis that 60 percent of new housing should be below-market-rate and affordable to those earning 120 percent or less of the area median income, and the less than 20 percent that San Francisco is actually building and promoting through its policies. (Steven T. Jones)


No charges in CCSF protest

The two formerly jailed City College student protesters can now breathe a sigh of relief, as they learned March 19 that the District Attorney’s Office won’t be filing criminal charges against them.

Otto Pippenger, 20, and Dimitrios Philliou, 21, were detained by SFPD following a violent clash during a City College protest on March 13. Their ideological and physical fight for democracy at their school is also the subject of one of our print articles in this week’s Guardian ("Democracy for none," March 18). Philliou’s attorney confirmed to the Guardian that charges were not pursued by the District Attorney’s Office.

"The charges have been dropped for now, in terms of the criminal case," said Rachel Lederman, president of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which is representing Philliou.

But, she noted, they’re not out of the fire yet.

"The fight is not over for them," she said, "as it’s possible they’ll face school discipline."

Heidi Alletzhauser, Pippenger’s mother, told the Guardian that Vice Chancellor Faye Naples indicated the two would face some sort of disciplinary hearing, though Naples told Alletzhauser that Pippenger would not be expelled. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)


Activists cross the border

Last November, the Guardian profiled Alex Aldana, a queer immigration activist who was born in Mexico but came to Pomona, California with his mother and sister on a visa at the age of 16 ("Undocumented and unafraid," 11/12/14).

On March 18, Aldana joined a group of undocumented immigrants in a protest at the US border crossing at Otay Mesa in San Diego. Chanting together as a group, they marched over the border and presented themselves to U.S. Immigration and Customs and Border protection agents, whom they asked for asylum.

Among the immigrants who surrendered to immigration agents were women, children, and teens. Some are separated from their husbands, children, and families in the US and, like my own mother (see "They deported my mom," March 11), wish to be reunited.

The youth protesters were brought to the US earlier in childhood, but deported to Mexico after being taken into custody and detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some would have qualified to remain under the Dream Act, but were forced to leave the country before it was signed into law.

The protesters marched toward the turnstiles that separate Mexico and the US, chanting "Yes we can," and "No human is illegal."

A few feet from the gates, the group paused to listen to a final pep talk from Aldana.

The action was captured and recorded in real time on U-Stream. About 16 minutes into the video, he can be seen addressing the crowd, fist raised. "We have nothing to lose but our chains," Aldana told the group. Then, in Spanish, he said, "Without papers," to which his fellow protesters responded, "without fear."

They made their way to the turnstiles and one by one they walked through, straight into custody of US border guards. As they crossed the border, they told a cameraperson where they hoped to go. They named cities, such as Phoenix and Tucson, and states, such as Alabama, Oregon, and North Carolina. But each one said, in English or Spanish, "we’re going home."

It was part of a series of organized border crossings by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, to highlight the experiences of young people who lived for years in the United States but were deported due to their immigration status. In Aldana’s case, he traveled to Mexico voluntarily, due to a family emergency. (Francisco Alvarado)


Oakland settles with injured Occupier

Iraq War veteran and injured Occupy Oakland protester Scott Olsen, 26, won a settlement of $4.5 million from the city of Oakland in a federal lawsuit, his attorneys announced March 21.

At the tail end of a thousands-strong 2011 Occupy Oakland protest, an Oakland Police Department officer fired a beanbag directly into Olsen’s head, causing serious and lasting brain injury. His attorney, Rachel Lederman, said that was why the payout was so high.

"His bones were shattered, part of his brain was destroyed," she told the Guardian. "He’d been working as a computer system network administrator. He’s not going back to that kind of work, and it compensates him for his wage loss for his lifetime."

But in the end, she said, "No amount of money can put his head back together." (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)


Guardian seeks columnists

The Bay Guardian is looking for a pair of new freelance writers to do separate monthly columns covering the technology industry and economic/social justice issues. The two new columns would go into a rotation we’re tentatively calling Soul of the City, along with Jason Henderson’s Street Fight column and a new environmental column by News Editor Rebecca Bowe that we’ll debut in our Earth Day issue.

For the technology column, we want someone with a deep understanding of this industry, its economic and personality drivers, and the role it could and should play in the civic life of San Francisco and nearby communities. We aren’t looking for gadget reviews or TechCrunch-style evangelizing or fetishizing of the tech sector, but someone with an illuminating, populist perspective that appeals to a broad base of Guardian readers.

The other column, on economic and social justice issues, would cover everything from housing rights to labor to police accountability issues, with an eye toward how San Francisco can maintain its diversity and cultural vibrancy. We want someone steeped in Bay Area political activism and advocacy, but with an independent streak and fearless desire to speak truth to power.

We strongly encourage candidates of color, young people, and those representing communities that need a stronger voice in the local political discourse to apply.

If you’re interested, please sent your qualifications and concepts, along with one sample column and ideas for future columns, to Editor-in-Chief Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com. Help us escalate this fight for the soul of the city by adding your voice to the Guardian’s mix.

Seeking technology and economic/social justice columnists

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The Bay Guardian is looking for a pair of new freelance writers to do separate monthly columns covering the technology industry and economic/social justice issues. The two new columns would go into a rotation we’re tentatively calling Soul of the City, along with Jason Henderson’s Street Fight column and a new environmental column by News Editor Rebecca Bowe that we’ll debut in our Earth Day issue.

For the technology column, we want someone with a deep understanding of this industry, its economic and personality drivers, and the role it could and should play in the civic life of San Francisco and nearby communities. We aren’t looking for gadget reviews or TechCrunch-style evangelizing or fetishizing of the tech sector, but someone with an illuminating, populist perspective that appeals to a broad base of Guardian readers. 

The other column, on economic and social justice issues, would cover everything from housing rights to labor to police accountability issues, with an eye toward how San Francisco can maintain its diversity and cultural vibrancy. We want someone steeped in Bay Area political activism and advocacy, but with an independent streak and fearless desire to speak truth to power.

We envision the columns running on a monthly rotation at around 1,100-1,400 words each, with the potential to sometimes run longer and to even be featured on our cover when circumstances warrant. Columns can focus on a single issue or multiple items. Pay is 10-15-cents per word depending on the depth of reporting required. We strongly encourage candidates of color, young people, and those representing communities that need a stronger voice in the local political discourse to apply.

If you’re interested, please sent your qualifications and concepts, along with one sample column and ideas for future columns, to Editor-in-Chief Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com. Help us escalate this fight for the soul of the city by adding your voice to the Guardian’s mix.