› sarah@sfbg.com
If you’ve taken a women’s studies course in the past decade or if you’re a patron or follower of the sex industry, you’ve heard of San Francisco’s Lusty Lady. Depicted as a bastion of feminist values and workers’ rights, the 24-hour peep show floats amid the sea of macho-style strip clubs that dominate North Beach’s central strip.
Sure, the Lusty features live nude girls wiggling and jiggling while male customers masturbate in small enclosed booths, but dancers are protected from unwanted splashes of semen and sexual advances thanks to the panel of glass that separates them from the customers. Equally important, at least in the eyes of feminist voyeurs and dancers, is the theater’s reputation for having a broader vision of female beauty than prevailing cultural norms and for being a venue where discrimination simply isn’t tolerated. These credentials date back to the ’90s, when the club’s dancers traded boas for picket signs in what became a successful bid to organize the only unionized strip joint in the nation.
Back then, the drive to unionize was triggered by poor working conditions, including one-way mirrors that allowed customers, newly empowered with the affordable digital technology that emerged in the mid-’90s, to clandestinely film performers. Worried their images would end up as Internet porn or in bootleg videos or used against them in custody battles, the dancers and the male support staff joined forces and won representation with SEIU Local 790.
Less publicized is the fact that three years ago the club’s former management sold the business to the Lusty’s workforce. Since then, the theater has been run as an employee-owned cooperative, with an elected board of directors that signs the union’s collective bargaining agreement every year. Given the harsh fiscal climate that followed the dot-com bomb and the workers’ general lack of business experience prior to their involvement in the Looking Glass Collective (as the Lusty’s co-op is called), it’s no big surprise that the theater is currently facing some fiscal and management challenges.
But the next chapter in the Lusty Lady saga is the strangely twisted tale of how a small faction of male workers is trying to decertify the union against a backdrop of inflammatory e-mails, emotional outbursts, suspensions, and firings, along with competing allegations from dancers of sexual harassment and unfair labor practices.
It all started when one of the men began to argue that the place was losing money because the dancers were too fat.
Now some male co-op members (who work the front desk and the door and have the unpleasant job of cleaning the little rooms) say the union contract isn’t valid anymore because the co-op makes no distinction between management and labor. They are also spinning events to make it appear as if the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) agrees.
DANCERS OF SIZE
The tale goes back to July, when a support staffer named Davide Cerri sent the co-op board an e-mail complaining that the peep show’s revenues were falling off. Since everybody’s pay at the Lusty is based on monthly revenues, any decline in cash flow would hit every worker’s wallet.
Cerri claimed that the Lusty’s madams were hiring “unwatchable girls” — women who were too big and not quite sexy enough — and that as a result, the club lost money.
“People comes [sic] asking for refunds, because they do not want to see girls that they would not want to have sex with even if they were completely drunk,” Cerri wrote. “This is reality, not question of options. We sell fantasies, not nightmares.”
Cerri’s missive so outraged dancer Emma Peep that she posted a copy on a message board where all the dancers could read it.
As Peep explained to the Guardian, “Davide’s e-mail was against everything we stand for, and it’s against the law to hire and fire based on size discrimination.”
But by making the missive public, Peep set off a firestorm.
“Everyone flipped out, people were crying in the dressing room, and the male staffer got ostracized,” one Lusty board member, who asked not to be identified by name, told us. “It’s great what we at the Lusty think the standards of beauty are, but the reality is that we’re in the adult entertainment business.”
Peep claims Cerri’s missive “led to others calling for the termination of women based on their size” — and in the end, to her own July 30 termination. In a supreme twist of irony, given that she filed a grievance with the union and wanted Cerri fired for his e-mail, Peep instead found herself fired “for creating a disruptive, hostile work environment” — via an unsigned letter shoved under her door.
Documents filed with the NLRB show that shortly after Peep filed her grievance, Cerri filed one of his own: he charged SEIU Local 790 with failing to represent his grievances and with treating and representing male and female employees differently.
Last week the NLRB’s regional office dismissed Cerri’s charges — on the grounds that the Lusty is a completely member-owned and member-operated cooperative and that as a shareholding member with the ability to affect the formulation and determination of the Lusty’s policy, Cerri is a managerial employee.
“Accordingly, the Union’s duty of fair representation does not extend to you,” ruled NLRB acting regional director Tim Peck in a letter.
In the meantime, the union has continued to press Peep’s grievances. On Aug. 4, SEIU Local 790 staff manager Dale Butler wrote Lusty Lady board members Miles Thompson, Monique Painton, and Chelsea Eis, informing them that Peep’s termination was “without just cause” and “inappropriate.”
Butler told the board members that the Lusty Lady’s union contract provides for mediation and that the theater could be subject to $2,000 in arbitration fees plus attorneys’ fees plus Peep’s back wages (a triple whammy that could bankrupt the already fiscally struggling club). When the union threatened legal action, the board finally agreed to mediation.
WHO’S THE BOSS?
Meanwhile, there’s a dispute about whether the union actually has a valid contract. Union representatives say they sent a final version of this year’s agreement to the board, which never returned it. Butler told the Guardian that on Sept. 25, male support staffer Tony Graf called the union to say that the board had no objections to the contract — except for an antiharassment clause that shop steward Sandy Wong had proposed.
Male support staffers Cerri and Brian Falls still maintain that the union has no business at the Lusty.
“The union has been fraudulently in the Lusty Lady’s business, because we’re a co-op and everyone is a manager,” Falls said.
As for e-mail writer Cerri, he told the Guardian that “the union is automatically out and their contract is not valid, which is great news. We were mobilizing to deunionize by collecting signatures but now won’t have to go forward with that.” Falls also acknowledged being involved in a decertification drive.
“Before the formation of the co-op there was a common enemy, the management, who treated the dancers and the support staff badly. But once we became a co-op, there was no reason for the union to be there,” he explained.
Falls also claims that Cerri’s e-mail wasn’t triggered by larger dancers per se, but because there were four to five large women on the stage at the same time.
“We were losing customers and saw decreased revenues,” Falls said. “The business isn’t doing that great. We’re on a revenue-based pay scale, so it hits everybody’s paycheck. We never said, ‘Don’t hire big women, fat women.’ There are people who enjoy large women. But a block of the same kind of women — that was losing revenues.”
Financial records obtained by the Guardian, however, show that the Lusty Lady made an average of $28,000 a week in January, $27,000 in February, $28,000 in April, $26,000 in June, and $27,000 in July. That hardly looks like a dramatic collapse of income.
The last word goes to a female dancer who refused to use her stage name for fear of retaliation.
“The union can be polarizing, but it’s scary to leave because it protects our rights,” she said. “The problem is that people will vote against their best interests. It’s like working people voting for Bush. I think I can understand that phenomenon since working at the Lusty Lady.” SFBG
Events
An underground party primer
HYPERREAL.ORG
Monthly-ish e-mail calendar (a.k.a. Hyperreal Rave Interface) of upcoming SF underground events
BAYRAVES.COM AND NORCALNIGHTS.COM
Affiliated BBS sites that list upcoming parties
RAVELINKS.COM
Links to a calendar of SF events
SPRACI.COM
“Site for Party, Rave, and Club” Info with links to a calendar of SF parties
NITEWISE.COM
Weekly newsletter that includes major underground events
PACIFICSOUND.NET
The underground and overground crew that throws free parties in Golden Gate Park and on the Bay
Death by satire
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In honor of George W. Bush’s efforts to stop torture by setting up secret CIA prisons and promote freedom by expanding government surveillance powers, I think we should spend a few days contemputf8g another great thing this administration has done for the world: it has reinvigorated political satire.
What was The Daily Show before the USA PATRIOT Act? And where would international pranksters the Yes Men be today without this administration’s asshattish policies?
Thanks to the Internet, satire can be instant and lethal. Certainly it’s not always pretty, but it’s more effective as social criticism than it was in an era before jesters could respond within hours to current events and broadcast their pranks globally.
I’m still a big fan of the widely condemned fake execution video made by three San Francisco multimedia geeks in 2004. Benjamin Vanderford, who plays experimental music in several bands, decided to make the video in response to the media hysteria around the Nick Berg execution video. He’s said that the video wasn’t a partisan protest of the war itself, but instead a wake-up call to the media, which he criticized on his Web site (videohoax.ctyme.com) for doing “no fact-finding” and being so “centralized” that they’ll reprint anything from Reuters or the Associated Press without verifying it.
With the help of Laurie Kirchner and Robert Martin, Vanderford filmed himself tied up in a dingy room as if he’d been kidnapped in Iraq. He stated his real name and address and urged the United States to get out of Iraq. Islamic chants played in the background, and every few seconds a picture of a grisly execution appeared. “We need to leave this country alone or all of us will die like this,” Vanderford said before the video cut to a grainy image of somebody sawing his head off with a butcher knife.
He and his buddies made the video available on their hard drives to anyone using the P2P networks Kazaa and Soulseek. Because the Berg execution video was all over the news, thousands of people were scouring P2P networks for anything with the word “execution” in the title. The video soon turned up on an Islamic Web site, which is how the US media got wind of it. AP and several papers published stories about the video without ever bothering to look up Vanderford, verify his existence, or check the address he used in the video (which was his real home address).
Sure, the message was ugly and the video is actually quite disturbing to watch. But it was the very best kind of social satire — it proved Vanderford’s point that the media were so eager to lap up any news that could feed the terrorism frenzy that they weren’t bothering to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking. Of course, the news outlets whose shoddy practices had been unmasked by this prank were quick to condemn Vanderford and cover their asses. Fox ran a bogus segment featuring a “legal adviser” who said Vanderford had broken the law (he hadn’t), and AP deputy editor Tom Kent claimed that his organization did eventually check the veracity of the tape by “banging” on Vanderford’s door at 4 a.m. and filming him in his underwear answering questions about the hoax (you can see clips of this seminaked interview online).
Possibly the stupidest responses to the hoax came from people who claimed that it hurt people and therefore Vanderford and pals should be punished. Stanford professor of communications Ted Glasser told the San Jose Mercury News that releasing the video was “like bombing a building to see if security measures are in place.” Despite the foolishness of this comment, it reveals how strongly people are affected by well-aimed satire.
I’d rather watch a dozen fake execution videos if it would make the media more careful about buying into government and corporate propaganda. I live for the day when satire is like bombing a building — because nobody actually bombs anyone anymore.
See, that’s the beauty of satire — it hurts, but only in your conscience. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who can’t wait to watch videos of the Yes Men masquerading as HUD officials in New Orleans.
TUESDAY
Sept. 12
Visual Art
“Prophets of Deceit”
OK, what was I just saying about there not being so many Sept. 11 art events? I kinda like CCA Wattis Institute’s approach, which is opening a show that is openly critical of the delusions that have sprung forth in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. Actually, the dozen-artist “Prophets of Deceit” seems more ambitious than that description – together its varied film- and video-gifted crew of contributors should provide some bizarrely insightful views of messianic and apocalyptic cults and their fear-selling leaders. (Johnny Ray Huston)
7:30-9 p.m. reception; through Nov 11
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Artists
1111 Eighth St, SF
Free
(415) 551-9210
www.wattis.org
Fim/Discussion
The World According to Sesame Street
Watch the film The World According to Sesame Street and find out how the muppets have helped people in troubled areas such as Bangladesh, Kosovo, and South Africa. Human rights advocate Chivy Sok; executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation Milton Chen, PhD; and associate director of International Child Resource Institute Lisa Ruth Shulman, JD, give a presentation before the screening. (Deborah Giattina)
5:30 p.m.
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin, Koret Auditorium, SF
Free
(510) 452-7178
MONDAY
Sept. 11
Music
Spencer Day
Spencer Day is San Francisco’s own portal to the past: Old Blue Eyes has nothing on this kid. Hailing from a highly musical family in Utah, he commands a microphone and steers a piano into places seldom heard these days. Enchanting audiences, Day spins a room into flickering black and white, conjuring trench coats and pearls, finger weaves and cigar smoke. (K. Tighe)
With Same Shape and Joe Bagale
9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$15
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
www.spencerday.com
Visual Art
“Terror? An International Interdisciplinary Project”
Five years on, the lack of localized art events directly responding to Sept. 11 is a little surprising. Count on Intersection for the Arts to weigh in with an exhibition that steers clear of the jingoism currently crowding movie theaters and television screens. Composed of hundreds of works on paper from around the world, “Terror?” takes on the title subject from myriad personal and political angles. The exhibition is augmented by other events at the space later this month, such as a “War on Terror” discussion led by activists Tram Nguyen and Sandip Roy. (Johnny Ray Huston)
6-9 p.m. reception; through Nov. 11
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF
Free
(415) 626-3311
www.thintersection.org
SUNDAY
Sept. 10
Event
SF Zine Fest
You start with just a staple gun and a dream, but pretty soon you’ll want an audience. The San Francisco Zine Fest fills CELLspace to the brim with minicomics, literary journals, zines galore, and even arts and crafts booths for those who can’t go an afternoon without a glue stick fix. The peeps behind the fest are offering various workshops and plenty of film and animation screenings during this year’s free event. (K.Tighe)
CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF
Free
(415) 648-7562
www.sfzinefest.com
www.cellspace.org
Film
Three Dollars
There-but-for-the-grace-of-whomever is the overriding theme of this Australian drama from director Robert Connolly (The Bank), based on Elliot Pearlman’s novel. Life is pretty – just pretty – good for chemical engineer Eddie (David Wenham); his academic wife, Tanya (Frances O’Connor); and their daughter, Abby (Joanna Hunt-Prokhovnik). But it’s a life wobbling on any number of fragile foundations, primarily in the financial realm: when both parents lose their employment in rapid sequence, things suddenly look desperate. The film has some ambitious, even metaphorical aspects that seem incompletely developed, and most viewers will find that the last reel’s events drop Eddie too far, too fast to be believed. Nonetheless, for the most part Three Dollars handles suspense, humor, warmth, and near-tragedy in an affecting way – all the while facing off against some of life’s big questions. (Dennis Harvey)
Now in Bay Area theaters
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
There are people at the daily newspapers around here who bristle when I accuse them of ignoring important local stories, particularly ones involving powerful political, business, or social figures (and most particularly, involving the newspapers themselves). No representative of the Hearst Corp. stands in the newsroom door announcing that stories about management will be sent to New York for prior censorship. Nobody tells the Chronicle’s reporters that they can’t cover a pressing story.
And I believe all that. I really do. I know it doesn’t work that way.
Carl Jensen knows that too. When he started Project Censored back in 1976, he knew he’d get a lot of criticism. “Censored” is a pretty strong word; it evokes a mirthless military guy with a pair of scissors and a big black pen, preventing real news from emerging out of a pressroom bunker somewhere.
But what Jensen has been trying to say for years is that the stories cited by Project Censored represent choices made by editors and publishers about what’s important in today’s world. That’s what the front page of a newspaper is — a set of choices. Is the confession of the purported killer of JonBenet Ramsey more important than the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of millions of Americans? Is the latest news about Brad and Angelina more important than the latest news from Iraq? Is one man’s quest to take control of every daily newspaper in the Bay Area worth more than a first-day story and a few tiny news briefs?
Editors are paid to make those decisions — and the ones who want to keep their jobs know what the rules are. That’s why some stories get more coverage, more play, and more attention and some get deeply buried or published in one place and never picked up by anyone else.
Anyone who reads political blogs knows about stories like the ones on this year’s Project Censored list (see page 15). Nobody blacked out the news with a big rubber stamp; it just never got reported in the first place.
For a Sunday afternoon on a Labor Day weekend, it was truly impressive: I counted at least 300 people at the Delancey Street events room for the Sue Bierman memorial. Just about everyone on the local left seemed to be there, along with a few luminaries like John Burton, Gavin Newsom, and Willie Brown, who were Bierman’s friends even when they were wrong and she was right.
Newsom, who was often at odds with Bierman, looked out over the crowd and made the point succinctly: “This is what happens,” he said, “when you’re nice to people.”
There were many funny and moving stories. Burton, who showed up in his usual sartorial splendor (striped sweatpants and an untucked shirt, which makes me respect the guy as much as anything he’s ever done in politics) talked about how Bierman always, always enjoyed herself, even in the most boring political drudgery. It was wonderful to see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren there (and wonderful for them to see how many people were part of Bierman’s San Francisco community).
Calvin Welch, her Haight Asbury neighbor, friend, and longtime comrade in arms, reminded us all that Bierman “created the neighborhood movement in San Francisco” — and that she did it in her own style, always believing that “fun is important.”
A lot of people go to political funerals because they have to; most of us went to this one because we wanted to. Thanks, Sue. SFBG
The silent scandal
Editor’s note: This story has been altered to correct an error. The original version stated that an Examiner editor had admitted in court testimony to providing positive coverage to politicians in exchange for help with a business deal. The person who testified to that was not an editor, but Publisher Tim White, and he was talking about editorial, not news, coverage.
› gwschulz@sfbg.com
After William Randolph Hearst flunked out of Harvard in the 1880s, he pursued a new career path, asking his wealthy father for only one thing: the San Francisco Examiner.
Young William didn’t stop with the Examiner — over his lifetime, he accumulated dozens of newspapers nationwide. Eventually, one in five Americans regularly read a Hearst paper.
That seems like a lot of power and influence, and it was. But it’s nothing compared to what the heirs to Hearst’s media mogul mantle are doing today.
In fact, the Hearst Corp. is working with another acquisitive newspaper magnate, William Dean Singleton, to lock up the entire Bay Area daily newspaper market. If the project succeeds, one of the most sophisticated, politically active regions in the nation may have exactly one daily news voice.
That worries Clint Reilly.
The political consultant turned real estate investor has sued the Hearst Corp., owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, for the second time in a decade to stop a partnership he fears will eliminate the variety of voices among newspapers in the Bay Area.
It’s an amazing story, full of politics, big money, secretive arrangements, and juicy executive bonuses. What’s at stake? Control over one of the most lucrative businesses in Northern California.
But for the most part, you aren’t reading about it in the daily papers — which means you aren’t seeing it on TV or hearing about it on the radio.
In fact, the blackout of the inside details of the Singleton deal and Reilly’s effort to stop it is one of the greatest local censored stories of the year — and the way the press has failed to cover it demonstrates exactly what’s wrong with monopoly ownership of the major news media.
The story began in the spring when one of the nation’s more respected newspaper chains, Knight Ridder, was forced to put itself up for sale after Bruce Sherman, a prominent shareholder, decided that the company’s relatively healthy profit margins (and dozens of Pulitzers) were simply not enough.
It’s the nature of publicly traded companies to be vulnerable to shareholder insurrections, unless they have multiple classes of stock. Knight Ridder didn’t, and although its former chief executive, P. Anthony Ridder, later said he regretted the sale, Knight Ridder went on the block.
The Sacramento-based McClatchy chain bought the much bigger Knight Ridder but needed to sell some of the papers to make the deal work.
In the Bay Area, Knight Ridder’s two prime properties, the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, were bought by MediaNews Group, the Denver-based conglomerate run by Singleton. That was a problem from the start: Singleton already owned the Oakland Tribune, the Marin Independent Journal, the San Mateo County Times, and a series of smaller local papers on both sides of the bay. The two former Knight Ridder papers would give him a near-monopoly on daily newspaper ownership in the region; in fact, there was only one daily in the area that would be in a position to compete with Singleton. That was the San Francisco Chronicle.
But in one of the strangest deals in newspaper history, Hearst — the erstwhile competitor — joined in the action, buying two of the McClatchy papers (the Monterey Herald and the St. Paul Pioneer Dispatch) and then immediately turning them over to Singleton, in exchange for some stock in MediaNews operations outside of California.
When news of the transactions first broke, MediaNews publications and the Hearst’s Chron covered it extensively, more than once putting the billion-dollar partnership on the front pages. (The transactions also involve a company formed by MediaNews and two of its other competitors, the Stephens Group and Gannett Co., called the California Newspapers Partnership.)
Since then, however, coverage has been overshadowed by JonBenet Ramsey and local crime news. The real story of what happened between Hearst and Singleton and how it would devastate local media competition never made the papers.
If this had been a deal involving any other local big business that had a huge impact on the local economy and details as fishy as this, a competitive paper would have been all over it. And yet, even the Chron was largely silent.
In fact, when Attorney General Bill Lockyer decided not to take any action to block the deal, the Chron relegated the news to a five-paragraph Reuters wire story out of New York, buried in the briefs in the business section. The original Reuters story was cut; the news of Reilly’s suit and his allegations didn’t make it into the Chron version.
At times, the new Singleton papers have treated the story with upbeat glee: in early August, the Merc proclaimed in a headline that the area’s “New media king is having fun.”
The story noted: “MediaNews is privately held, a step removed from the Wall Street pressure that forced the Mercury News’ previous owner, Knight Ridder, to put itself up for sale…. Singleton is its leader, and by all accounts, a man who lives, breathes and loves newspapers.”
Longtime media critic and former UC Berkeley journalism school dean Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, told the Guardian that most of the coverage so far has focused on the business side of the transactions.
“The coverage I’ve seen has simply described the devices they used to divide the McClatchy chain and did not describe how cleverly it was designed to avoid an antitrust action,” Bagdikian said.
Here’s some of what the daily papers have ignored:
The Hearst deal was certainly good for MediaNews, because on the same day the agreement was signed, top executives at the company were awarded $1.88 million in bonuses. MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic earned the chief bonus of $1 million, while the president of MediaNews Group Interactive, Eric Grilly, received over $100,000 in bonuses on top of a $1.25 million severance package for retirement. The figures were disclosed in the company’s most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Hearst has insisted repeatedly that its investment in MediaNews involves only tracking stock, meaning its up-and-down value rests solely on the performance of MediaNews businesses outside of California. Such a structure may help the two companies comply with antitrust rules — for now.
But in a little-noticed footnote included in a July memo filed by Hearst in response to Reilly’s lawsuit, the company revealed that its tracking stock could still be converted to MediaNews common stock in the future — meaning it would then have a stake in the entire company, including its Bay Area holdings. “The tracking stock will be convertible into ordinary MNG common stock, but that will require a separate, future transaction and its own Hart-Scott-Rodino review,” the July 25 document states.
In other words, public records — information freely available to the 17-odd business reporters at the Chronicle — show that Hearst’s fundamental presentation of the deal is inaccurate. Hearst is not just a peripheral player in this deal; the company is a direct partner with Singleton and thus has no economic incentive whatsoever to compete with the Denver billionaire.
And that means there will be no real news competition either.Reilly has been in politics most of his adult life, and he knows what happens when one entity controls the news media: perspectives and candidates that aren’t in favor with the daily papers don’t get fair coverage.
Newspapers, he told us recently, are charged with checking the tyranny of government; without competition they will fail to check the tyranny of themselves.
“The combination intended to be formed by these defendants constitutes nothing less than the formation of a newspaper trust covering the Greater San Francisco Bay Area,” Reilly’s suit states, “implemented through anticompetitive acquisitions of competing newspapers, horizontal divisions of markets and customers, and agreements not to compete, whether expressed or implied.”
A federal judge recently tossed Reilly’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Hearst transaction. But Reilly’s overall lawsuit, designed to stop Hearst’s $300 million investment in MediaNews, will still wind its way through the courts, and Judge Susan Illston signaled in her last order that she would “seriously consider” forcing MediaNews to give up some of its assets if the court finds the company’s transactions to be anticompetitive.
There are clear grounds to do that. In fact, as Reilly’s attorney, Joe Alioto, points out in his legal filings, the monopolists have made the argument themselves. When Reilly sued to block the Examiner-Chronicle deal in 2000, Hearst, which wanted to buy the Chron and shutter the Examiner, argued that closing the Examiner would have no competitive impact — since all the other competing Bay Area papers provided the reader and advertiser with a choice. Now the lawyers are arguing just the opposite — that the Chron and the outlying papers never competed in the first place.
Hearst will more than likely argue in court that since its newspapers face unprecedented competition from online content, there’s technically no such thing as a one-newspaper town. The world is globally connected now, this thinking goes, and the Chron and MediaNews both face competition from popular blogs such as Daily Kos and Valleywag on the West Coast and Gawker and Wonkette on the East Coast.
But that ignores a media reality: for all the power and influence of bloggers and online outlets, daily newspapers still have the ability to set the news agenda for a region. Among other things, local TV news and radio stations regularly take their cues from the daily papers — meaning that a story the dailies ignore or mangle never gets a real chance.
MediaNews argues in its most recent memo to Judge Illston that “any potential anticompetitive effect of the transactions against which the Complaint is directed is greatly offset and outweighed by the efficiencies that will result from those transactions.”
“Efficiencies” isn’t actually defined, but if the past is any indication, jobs could be the first place MediaNews looks to “efficiently” save money for its investors — at the cost of performing the traditional role of a newspaper to monitor government.
Reporting — real reporting — is expensive. It requires experienced journalists, and a good paper should give them the time and resources not only to watch day-to-day events but also to dig deep, below the headlines.
That’s not the monopoly media style.
Speaking in general terms, Jon Marshall, who runs the blog Newsgems and teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, wrote us in an e-mail that newspapers have to be willing to invest in innovation now, while there’s still time.
“If newspapers really want to win back readers, they’ll need to start offering more outstanding feature stories that really dig deep and have a big impact on their communities,” Marshall wrote. “Readers need a reason to turn to newspapers rather than all the other content that’s now available through the Web. Newspapers will have a hard time creating these outstanding stories on a consistent basis if they keep paying their current skimpy entry-level salaries.”
The pattern Singleton is known to follow isn’t unique. A recent survey conducted by journalism students at Arizona State University revealed that the nation’s largest newspapers are giving reduced resources to investigative and enterprise reporting as media companies trim budgets to maintain or increase profits. More than 60 percent of the papers surveyed, the report stated, don’t have investigative or projects teams.
Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, told us that while teams of reporters dedicated exclusively to investigations may be disappearing, many papers are willing to pull staffers away from their regularly assigned beats to make sure that big stories are thoroughly covered. But, he said, Wall Street’s haste to make money could backfire if readers head elsewhere in search of more exclusive content.
“I think everything is in flux right now,” Houston said. “Everyone’s trying to figure out what the next newsroom looks like.”
Luther Jackson, an executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents staffers at the Merc, said it’s too early to determine the impact of MediaNews on the paper. The union just recently began new contract negotiations with the company, while the previous agreement, which expired in June, remains in place. Jackson said he didn’t believe the Merc’s Silicon Valley readers would tolerate any dramatic dip in quality coverage.
“We have a problem with the idea that you can cut your way to excellence,” Jackson said.
Just six years ago, after Reilly sued Hearst the first time to stop its purchase of the Chronicle and subsequent attempt to shut down the Examiner, trial testimony revealed that the Examiner had, in fact, abused its editorial power to advance its business interests. Examiner Publisher Tim White admitted in open court that he had traded favorable editorial coverage to then-mayor Willie Brown in exchange for his support of the Chronicle purchase.
Reilly lost that one — but for now this case is moving forward. The suit could be the last legal stand for people who still think it’s wrong for one person to dominate the news that an entire region of the country depends on — and at the very least will force the story of what really happened out into the open. SFBG
PS At press time, Judge Illston ordered the trial be put on the fast track and set a trial date for Feb. 26, 2007. See the Bruce blog at www.sfbg.com for more info.
Big Idi, little Idi
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Most of 2006’s blockbusters (wannabe and otherwise) have already blown by in a sugary cloud of Sour Patch Kids dust. Poseidon’s already on DVD; The Da Vinci Code was totally boring; X-Men: The Last Stand killed off Professor X (or did it?); Superman Returns was stomped on by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; and Snakes on a Plane did only so-so business despite widespread prerelease hyperventilation. Frankly, my teeth hurt and I’m ready for some meatier cinematic fare — especially the 10 picks that follow. As always, release dates are subject to change.
The Black Dahlia Serial homage artist Brian DePalma has been in a rut lately. His recent efforts include the underwhelming Femme Fatale, Mission to Mars, and Snake Eyes. But lest we forget, he’s also the guy who brought us Scarface and The Untouchables — and Phantom of the Paradise, though that may be my own personal bias speaking. His latest noir draws from a James Ellroy novel, itself based on Hollywood’s most famously unsolved murder case (pre-O.J., that is). The Black Dahlia stars Josh Hartnett, Hilary Swank, and Elizabeth Short look-alike Mia Kirshner as the starry-eyed dame headed for sliced-in-half doom. (Sept. 15)
Mutual Appreciation Just because a movie isn’t opening at the Metreon doesn’t mean you can’t count down the minutes until it arrives. Writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha was the most honest film about postcollege malaise in aeons; his latest, Mutual Appreciation, about a musician adrift in New York City, has earned excellent festival reviews and looks to extend this talented young filmmaker’s winning streak. (Sept. 29, Red Vic)
The Last King of Scotland In a stroke of genius casting, Forest Whitaker stars as the bloodthirsty yet oddly charming Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. James McAvoy (Mr. Tumnus from The Chronicles of Narnia) plays his personal physician. This based-on-true-events drama can’t possibly surpass Barbet Schroeder’s creepy 1974 doc Idi Amin Dada — but it’ll probably best 1977’s made-for-TV Raid on Entebbe (with Yaphet Kotto as Amin). In any case, a new Amin movie is reason enough to fire up the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Regiment Band. (Sept. 27)
Jesus Camp Yep, it’s all about a summer camp for right-wing, conservative, evolution-hating, antiabortion, born-again Christian kids. I doubt there will be many Meatballs moments. However, this doc from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (The Boys of Baraka) has earned praise for its unbiased filmmaking — this kind of subject matter speaks for itself, as demonstrated by 2001’s Hell House. (Oct. 6)
The Departed Martin Scorsese shifts Infernal Affairs’ cops ’n’ crooks action from Hong Kong to Boston, with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as deep-cover operatives working opposite sides of the law. It’s a killer premise based on a proven hit, with a stellar team behind it — plus, Jack Nicholson plays gangster number one. How can The Departed miss? (Oct. 6)
American Hardcore Black Flag, Minor Threat, and other 1980s hardcore punkers have their say in this doc by Paul Rachman (a onetime music video director), based on Steven Blush’s exceedingly detailed 2001 book American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Rachman and Blush conducted 100-plus interviews over five years and strove to keep the filmmaking process as appropriately DIY as they could. Also, the trailer fucking rocks. (Oct. 13)
Marie Antoinette Speaking of rocking trailers, by now we’ve all patted our dainty, Marc Jacobs–clad feet to New Order every time the clip for Sofia Coppola’s latest unspools during the coming attractions. If not, perhaps you’ve hefted the 25-pound Vogue featuring Kirsten Dunst and her period-appropriate Bride of Frankenstein ’do on the cover. No? OK, well, it’s the director’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, and even if the French pooh-poohed Marie Antoinette at Cannes, a new Coppola movie is an indisputable must-see for fans and haters alike. (Oct. 20)
Fast Food Nation You can’t accuse Richard Linklater of being in a filmmaking rut. His last three releases? The wildly diverse Before Sunset, Bad News Bears, and A Scanner Darkly. Following Scanner, his second film of 2006 offers a narrative take on Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction best-seller about the dark side of the fast food industry. Helping you never look at Happy Meals the same way again (if Super Size Me didn’t already do the trick) is an ensemble cast that includes Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Bruce Willis. (Nov. 17)
For Your Consideration A new Christopher Guest mock doc (this one’s about Hollywood awards shows and features all the usual suspects) is one more reason to give thanks to the movie gods — especially since it’s getting a Thanksgiving week release. Tofurky leftovers fit so nicely in a Remains of the Day lunch box. (Nov. 22)
The Fountain Six years is too long to wait for a new Darren Aronofsky film (after his 1998 breakthrough, Pi, and 2000’s unforgettable Requiem for a Dream). But wait we have, and The Fountain — starring Hugh Jackman and Aronofsky ladylove Rachel Weisz as trippy, time-spanning sweethearts — has finally arrived. His upcoming slate includes an adaptation of Lone Wolf and Cub due in 2008. Promise? (Nov. 22) SFBG
Yay Area five-oh
› johnny@sfbg.com
“Before Vanishing: Syrian Short Cinema” A series devoted to films from Syria kicks off with a shorts program that includes work by Oussama Mohammed. (Sept. 7, PFA; see below)
The Mechanical Man The PFA’s vast and expansive series devoted to “The Mechanical Age” includes André Deed’s 1921 science fiction vision of a female crime leader and a robot run amok. The screening features live piano by Juliet Rosenberg. (Sept. 7, PFA)
“Cinemayaat, the Arab Film Festival” This year’s festival opens with the Lebanon-Sweden coproduction Zozo and also includes the US-Palestine documentary Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority, which looks at events before and after Israel’s 1948 occupation of Palestine.
Sept. 8–17. Various venues. (415) 863-1087, www.aff.org
“Global Lens” The traveling fest includes some highly lauded films, such as Stolen Life by Li Shaohong, one of the female directors within China’s Fifth Generation.
Sept. 8–Oct. 4. Various venues. (415) 221-8184, www.globalfilm.org
“MadCat Women’s International Film Festival” MadCat turns 10 this year, and its programming and venues are even more varied. Not to mention deep — literally. 3-D filmmaking by Zoe Beloff and Viewmaster magic courtesy of Greta Snider are just some of the treats in store.
Sept. 12–27. Various venues. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org
The Pirate The many forms and facets of piracy comprise another PFA fall series; this entry brings a swashbuckling Gene Kelly and Judy Garland as Manuela, directed by then-husband Vincente Minnelli. (Sept. 13, PFA)
“A Conversation with Ali Kazimi” and Shooting Indians Documentarian Kazimi discusses his work before a screening of his critical look at Edward S. Curtis’s photography. (Sept. 14, PFA)
“The Word and the Image: The Films of Peter Whitehead” The swinging ’60s hit the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as curator Joel Shepard presents the first-ever US retrospective dedicated to the director of Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London. Includes proto–music videos made for Nico, Jimi Hendrix, and others. Smashing! (Sept. 14–28, YBCA; see below)
Edmond Stuart Gordon of Re-Aminator infamy makes a jump from horror into drama — not so surprising, since he’s a friend of David Mamet. Willam H. Macy adds another sad sack to his résumé. (Sept. 15–21, Roxie; see below)
Anxious Animation Other Cinema hosts a celebration for the release of a DVD devoted to local animators Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and others. Expect some work inspired by hellfire prognosticator Jack Chick!
Sept. 16. Other Cinema, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.othercinema.com
Kingdom of the Spiders Eight-legged freaks versus two-legged freak William Shatner. I will say no more.
Sept. 17. Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF. (415) 401-7987, www.darkroomsf.com
Landscape Suicide No other living director looks at the American landscape with the direct intent of James Benning; here, he examines two murder cases. (Sept. 19, PFA)
La Promesse and Je Pense à Vous Tracking the brutal coming-of-age of scooter-riding Jérémie Renier, 1997’s La Promesse made the name of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, but Je Pense is a rarely screened earlier work. (Sept. 22, PFA)
Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied Billed as the first authoritative doc about the man who invented electric blues, this plays with Always for Pleasure, a look at New Orleans by the one and only Les Blank. (Sept. 22–26, Roxie)
Rosetta and Falsch The Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta made a splash at Cannes in 1999; Falsch is their surprisingly experimental and nonnaturalistic 1987 debut feature. (Sept. 23, PFA)
loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies A reunion tour movie. (Sept. 29–Oct. 5, Roxie)
American Blackout Ian Inaba’s doc about voter fraud made waves and gathered praise at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival; it gets screened at various houses, followed by a Tosca after-party, in this SF360 citywide event.
Sept. 30. Tosca Café, 242 Columbus, SF. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org
Them! “Film in the Fog” turns five, as the SF Film Society unleashes giant mutant ants in the Presidio.
Sept. 30. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org
“Zombie-Rama” Before Bob Clark made Black Christmas, Porky’s, and A Christmas Story, he made Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. The ending is as scary as the title is funny.
Oct. 5. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net
“Swinging Scandinavia: How Nordic Sex Cinema Conquered the World” Jack Stevenson presents a “Totally Uncensored” clip show about the scandalous impact of Scandinavian cinema on uptight US mores and also screens some rare cousins of I Am Curious (Yellow). (Oct. 5 and 7, YBCA)
“Mill Valley Film Festival” Why go to Toronto when many of the fall’s biggest Hollywood and international releases come to Mill Valley? The festival turns 29 this year.
Oct. 5–15, 2006. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org
“Fighting the Walking Dead” Jesse Ficks brings They Live to the Castro Theatre. Thank you, Jesse. (Oct. 6, Castro; see below)
Phantom of the Paradise Forget the buildup for director Brian de Palma’s Black Dahlia and get ready for a Paul Williams weekend. This is screening while Williams is performing at the Plush Room.
Oct. 6. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
Calvaire Belgium makes horror movies too. This one is billed as a cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance — a crossbreeding combo that’s popular these days. (Oct. 6–12, Roxie)
Black Girl Tragic and so sharp-eyed that its images can cut you, Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film is the masterpiece the white caps of the French new wave never thought to make. It kicks off a series devoted to the director. (Oct. 7, PFA)
“Animal Charm’s Golden Digest and Brian Boyce” Boyce is the genius behind America’s Biggest Dick, starring Dick Cheney as Scarface. Animal Charm have made some of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
Oct. 7. Other Cinema, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.othercinema.com
Madame X, an Absolute Ruler Feminist director Ulrike Ottinger envisions a Madame X much different from Lana Turner’s — hers is a pirate. (Oct. 11, PFA)
“The Horrifying 1980s … in 3-D” Molly Ringwald (in Spacehunter), a killer shark (in Jaws 3-D), and Jason (in Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D) vie for dominance in this “Midnites for Maniacs” three-dimensional triple bill. (Oct. 13, Castro)
“Dual System 3-D Series” This program leans toward creature features, from Creature from the Black Lagoon to the ape astronaut of Robot Monster to Cat-Women on the Moon. (Oct. 14–19, Castro)
“Early Baillie and the Canyon CinemaNews Years” This program calls attention to great looks at this city by Baillie (whom Apichatpong Weerasethakul cites as a major influence) and also highlights the importance of Canyon Cinema. (Oct. 15, YBCA)
“War and Video Games” NY-based film critic Ed Halter presents a lecture based on From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, his new book. (Oct. 17, PFA)
Santo Domingo Blues The Red Vic premieres a doc about bachata and the form’s “supreme king of bitterness,” Luis Vargas.
Oct. 18–19. Red Vic, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com
“Monster-Rama” The Devil-ettes, live and in person, and Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women, on the screen, thanks to Will “the Thrill” Viharo.
Oct. 19. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net
“Spinning Up, Slowing Down”: Industry Celebrates the Machine” Local film archivist Rick Prelinger presents six short films that epitomize the United States’ machine mania, including one in which mechanical puppets demonstrate free enterprise. (Oct. 19, PFA)
The Last Movie Hmmm, part two: OK, let’s see here, Dennis Hopper’s 1971 film gets a screening after he personally strikes a new print … (Oct. 20–21, YBCA)
What Is It? and “The Very First Crispin Glover Film Festival in the World” … and on the same weekend, Hopper’s River’s Edge costar Glover gets a freak hero’s welcome at the Castro. Sounds like they might cross paths. (Oct. 20–22, Castro)
I Like Killing Flies And I completely fucking love Matt Mahurin’s documentary about the Greenwich Village restaurant Shopsin’s, possibly the most characterful, funny, and poignant documentary I’ve seen in the last few years. (Oct. 20–26, Roxie)
“Miranda July Live” Want to be part of the process that will produce Miranda July’s next film? If so, you can collaborate with her in this multimedia presentation about love, obsession, and heartbreak.
Oct. 23–24. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org)
The Case of the Grinning Cat This 2004 film by Chris Marker receives a Bay Area premiere, screening with Junkopia, his 1981 look at a public art project in Emeryville. (Oct. 27, PFA)
The Monster Squad The folks (including Peaches Christ) behind the Late Night Picture Show say that this 1987 flick is the most underrated monster movie ever.
Oct. 27–28. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
Neighborhood Watch Résumés don’t get any better than Graeme Whifler’s — after all, he helped write the screenplay to Dr. Giggles. His rancid directorial debut brings the grindhouse gag factor to the Pacific Film Archive. (Oct. 29, PFA)
“Grindhouse Double Feature” See The Beyond with an audience of Lucio Fulci maniacs. (Oct. 30, Castro)
“Hara Kazuo” Joel Shepard programs a series devoted to Kazuo, including his 1969 film tracing the protest efforts of Okuzaki Kenzó, who slung marbles at Emperor Hirohito. (November, YBCA)
“International Latino Film Festival” This growing fest reaches a decade and counting — expect some celebrations.
Nov. 3–19. Various venues. (415) 454-4039, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org
Vegas in Space Midnight Mass makes a rare fall appearance as Peaches Christ brings back Philip Ford’s 1991 local drag science fiction gem.
Nov. 11. Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-1124, www.thelatenightpictureshow.com
“As the Great Earth Rolls On: A Frank O’Hara Birthday Tribute” The birthday of the man who wrote “The Day Lady Died” is celebrated. Includes The Last Clean Shirt, O’Hara’s great collaboration with Alfred Leslie.
Nov. 17. California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org
Sites and Silences A shout-out to A.C. Thompson for his work with Trevor Paglen on the well-titled Torture Taxi, which helped generate this multimedia presentation by Paglen. (Nov. 19, YBCA)
“Kihachiro Kawamoto” One of cinema’s ultimate puppet masters receives a retrospective. (December, YBCA)
“Silent Songs: Three Films by Nathaniel Dorsky” The SF-based poet of silent film (and essayist behind the excellent book Devotional Cinema) screens a trio of new works. (Dec. 10, YBCA)
CASTRO THEATRE
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
www.castrotheatre.com
PFA THEATER
2575 Bancroft, Berk.
(510) 642-5249
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
ROXIE FILM CENTER
3317 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
www.roxie.com
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS (YBCA)
Screening room, 701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org\ SFBG
Fallin’ out
› superego@sfbg.com
Club me. Club me hard. And party me even harder, Miss Autumn — you with the burgundy hair, the tiger-striped jumpsuit, and the White Russian teeth. This is a great time to fall out in the Bay: the weather gets warmer, the nights get longer, and there’s a new crop of fresh-faced, low-tolerance Berkeley students and their future careers to fiddle with. How naughty. Do let’s dive into some fall party highlights, shall we?
Big club news first. Crusty favorite 1015 Folsom (www.1015.com) just underwent a massive remodel and is looking to rebrand itself as a more welcoming, less tired niche spot. So far the calendar looks full of the usual Paul Oakenfold–wacky techno stuff of yesteryear, but there’s an outreach going on to draw in more, er, post-1998-type fare, and the remo looks fabu, so here’s hoping.
1015 is spacious, but the brand-new Temple (www.templesf.com) in the old DNA space is holy fucking cosmic. With five dance areas, underground “catacombs,” and various VIP rooms (including one you get to through a secret door in the women’s john), there’s gonna be a lot of sublebrity scandal reeking from this joint when it opens in September. I’m still all about small, but I’m mysteriously drawn to this place already. Something spiritual? Nah, I just wanna egg all the Hummers.
Also on its way is Slide (www.slidesf.com), an upscale underground speakeasy-style lounge soon to be launched by some of clubland’s wealthiest players. It really is underground — you get to it by going down a slide. Lord knows how you get out. But it’ll be fun watching people try. Look out for beaver cams, skirt wearers.
If you’re gay or a fan of the gay or a pervert nun — and who isn’t on a Thursday — you’ll squeal like a stuck pig that one of San Francisco’s literally balls-out faves, Revival Bingo (www.revivalbingo.com), the raucous fundraiser hosted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, will rise from the dead on Sept. 7 and will continue to rise on the first Friday of every month at 7 p.m. at Ellard Hall in the Castro.
But Sept. 7? You may be just too hungover from the SF Symphony Opening Gala (www.sfsymphony.org) Sept. 6 to wet your bingo tip. OK, OK, I admit this isn’t exactly a clubby event, and maybe I’m pumping it because I want free press tickets. (Oh yes, I’ll be blogging it on www.sfbg.com.) But I’m tired of standing behind the velvet ropes year after year watching San Francisco’s impeccably accoutred master class promenade down the red carpet to enjoy the Michael Tilson Thomas–led aural fireworks inside. I’m a faggot, dammit. I wanna be in the sparkly parade!
Which brings us to the biggest party weekend of the year: Sept. 23 and 24. That’s when, for the third year in a row, the technolicious LoveFest (formerly the Love Parade; www.sflovefest.org) and the leatherific Folsom Street Fair (www.folsomstreetfair.com) share a weekend of mayhem — LoveFest all day Saturday and Folsom all day Sunday. These are both ginormous institutions that draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each. And oh lord, you should see the outfits. LoveFest boasts hundreds of top-notch live acts, including Massive Attack, Grandmaster Flash, and DJ Shadow, plus a really rickety parade of hilariously homemade floats up Market. Folsom boasts hundreds of top-notch bare buttocks and several hundred lower-notch other parts as well, plus this year it’s woken up to the whole alternaqueer thing, programming a ton of trash-drag live acts and even SF’s favorite musical curmudgeon, DJ Bus Station John, to get your chaps sweaty. Throw on a beer-stained bunny suit and hit up both events.
Finally: “Mass Culture has forced the majority’s subconscious into accepting a monotonous mindset pervaded by ignorance and inaction,” quoth the press release for Be the Riottt (www.riottt.com), the eclectic Vice-meets-Misshapes electro-fash throwdown Nov. 11 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Riott’s answer? Have an enormous concert featuring some of the biggest international draws in postironic attitudinizing. The Rapture, Metric, Clipse, Diplo, and about 20 other acts (plus, I suppose, thousands of neon Vans and white-framed sunglasses) will stoke the frozen grins of the sans blague generation. I’ll be there with a Cher tambourine. Go team! SFBG
Fashion Week for the fierce, pt I: Yao-za!
Fab intern K. Tighe went to Thursday’s Fashion Week emerging designers extravaganza, here’s the take:
What to wear? The big question. When I decided to attend the 3rd Annual San Francisco Fashion Week, I didn’t really think it through. You see, I’m not what one might call a “fashionable” person. Oh, I’ve got style for miles and miles — but trendy I am not. I’ve been wearing a uniform of jeans, cowboy boots and free band swag t-shirts for years — and the thought of dressing up for such an event frankly turns my stomach a little. So I did what any self-respecting journalist does in dicey situations such as these — I put on a sweater. I figure at the very least I can start a trend — the “dude ranch rocker on the slopes” look is gonna be all over the Milan runways next year, you watch.
Makeup!!!
I head to the Galleria — roughly 15th & Kansas, that highly fashionable district located just between the Mission and Potrero Hill — hoping the walk will open my mind a little. SF’s Fashion Week is not modeled after the stuff of New York and Paris events — tonight will focus on emerging local designers, and that is a cause I can get behind. I hope.
Pedro’s progress
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Poor Generalissimo Franco, not yet dead a decade before the Spanish film industry he’d so carefully censored gained its new leading tastemaker: a plump, girly homo fond of gender blur, anticlericalism, and nuclear-family meltdowns. Twenty-two years have passed since What Have I Done to Deserve This? made Pedro Almodóvar “enfant terrible of Spanish cinema” — a title that still sticks in his late 50s — as well as a dominating cultural force.
New movies “by Almodóvar” (like Picasso or Cher, he became an institution early on) are international events as those by Fellini or Bergman used to be in the ’60s. There remain good Spanish movies by directors working in entirely different styles. Yet in terms of what gets seen abroad, you might reasonably judge the whole industry to have gone Almodovaresque — a term applicable to select hit films by established talents like Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) and Álex de la Iglesia (Ferpect Crime), not to mention rising talents like Ramón Salazar (20 Centimeters) and Manuel Gómez Pereira (Queens). There may well be too many shrill, candy-colored Spanish comedies in which women act like hysterical drag queens and men like horndogs — but the master himself is no longer making them.
His ongoing evolution is partially charted in “Viva Pedro,” an upcoming four-week retrospective at the Castro and Shattuck theaters. The eight films in this series are what Sony Classics could get its hands on. “Viva” has to skip over his first five features (including What Have I Done?), leaving little of the John Waters–style anarchy that dominated his early work. (Like Waters, Almodóvar started out making campily offensive 8mm silents with nonsynch soundtracks, up through Fuck Fuck Fuck Me Tim!, his 1978 feature debut.) Particularly missed is Labyrinth of Passion, the quintessential all-purpose Almodóvar title and one of his funniest films. Also left out are early-’90s titles Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down; High Heels; and Kika.
Still, there’s plenty of good stuff in a package encompassing his two most outré forays into homoeroticism (1986’s Matador and the following year’s Law of Desire, both with Banderas), his most successful farce (1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), and the strange, still-in-progress trip toward profundity commenced in 1995 with The Flower of My Secret.
Almodóvar reportedly often shoots scenes in alternate funny and serious modes. The eccentric Flower is said to have found its largely serious tenor in the editing room. This high-wire balance between baroque ideas and earnest emotions was less wobbly in 1997’s wonderfully lurid Live Flesh. Two years later, Almodóvar surprised critics by delivering All About My Mother, a waterfall of Douglas Sirk–ian suffering female tears universally hailed for its newfound maturity. I (resistant) imagined Susan Hayward hammering her coffin lid, yelling, “Manny, you son of a bitch agent, that shoulda been my script!”
Almodóvar came out (in all senses) of the Madrid-centered Movida arts movement, whose late ’70s–early ’80s explosion of punk, camp, and transgression personified the most radical forces behind Spain’s rapid transformation from Franco-era repression to today’s extremely liberal culture. Traditional Spanish obsessions with death, sex, and religion plus post-Franco giddiness toward finger-diddling every hitherto taboo subject needn’t be “read into” Almodóvar movies — they’re spelled out on every flamboyant, melodramatic surface.
But not until his most recent two films did all these themes blend together in sardonic yet sympathetic wide-screen perfection. These are 2002’s Talk to Her — in which the main female characters are comatose, leaving the men to do the emotional weight lifting — and 2004’s Bad Education, a Catholic black comedy cum sexual-horror film oddly, elegantly redolent of Vertigo. In November we’ll get Volver, with Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura returning to the fold. Whether or not it matches his recent achievements, Almodóvar has already earned the right to seem larger than life. SFBG
“VIVA PEDRO”
Begins Sept. 1
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
www.clubcultura.com
www.sonyclassics.com/vivapedro
A sister fears Halloween in the Castro
OPINION Any attempt to organize an official Halloween in the Castro is a terrible idea, maybe even a deadly one. But before I rant, let me give a little history. In the wake of the Oct. 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake, a BBC story reported that “a massive rescue effort is now underway in what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States.”
More than 3,500 people were injured and 100,000 buildings damaged. For this reason, a few members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a spontaneous decision to stand in the Castro among the drag queens and costumed folk that Halloween to put on street theater and collect donations for the mayor’s relief fund for the victims of the earthquake. A brilliant move. We collected thousands.
This put a bee in our bonnets … er … wimples to use Halloween as a fun fundraiser the next year. A tremendous success. Each year the caliber of entertainment drew more people and brought in more donations, enabling us to entertain the otherwise unruly crowds while collecting donations for AIDS charities. The events were a hit, until we saw attendees getting hit — with bottles, bats, and other deadly weapons — by drunken gay-bashers out to get their kicks. The next year we saw that police checking for weapons had collected garbage cans full of baseball bats, hammers, knives, axes (none of these were the rubber kind), and many blunt instruments that could harm people. I saw someone with a mask running a gas-powered chain saw. But when police told us that among other weapons they had confiscated an AK-47 assault rifle, that was the year the Sisters were through with Halloween in the Castro, frightened that an event we had sponsored might bring about death.
So we tried something different. Luring people away from the Castro and into a private club, we turned the Pleasuredome in SoMa into a Halloween-themed party space with ornate All Hallows Eve–oriented backdrops and props. We had stellar entertainment, and the door charge went to AIDS and cancer charities. There was only one rule: you had to be in costume. The event was called HallowQueen, with the slogan “Evolve with the Sisters as Halloween moves to the next level.” It was successful in getting people out of the Castro and into a safe space, but we couldn’t afford to do it again on our meager budget.
The attempt to move the party to the Civic Center did not work because of poor planning and insufficient advance public relations. And since the Castro was still gated off, the queer-bashers thought that was the better locale in which to be violent. There were several stabbings that year.
There should be no official gathering in the Castro. No gates set up to make it look like an event. Police should infiltrate the area to keep peace but not harass the costumed folk. And something must be scheduled by the city outside the Castro and managed well to draw the crowd away to safety. Then perhaps the Sisters will get involved again. Then maybe the Sisters will MC and run a stage. But as it is now, the cordoned-off section of the “official” Halloween will end at Market and Castro. That is potentially deadly — inviting bashers and spoilers to assemble right at the very entrance of the Castro. Boo! SFBG
Sister Dana Van Iquity
Sister Dana Van Iquity is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Is Josh Wolf in jail because of federal laziness?
By Sarah Phelan
An amicus brief filed this week in support of jailed freelance reporter Josh Wolf argues that federal common law already recognizes a reporter’s privilege, that it should be applied to Wolf’s grand jury case, and that before a journalist be compelled to divulge unpublished material in response to a subpoena, the requesting party must demonstrate “a sufficiently compelling need for the journalist’s materials to overcome the privilege.”
‘At a minimum, that requires a showing that the information sought is not obstainbable form another source,” argues the brief, which points out that , “it appears that the US Attorney has not even attempted to make a showing that alternative sources have even been consulted, let alone exhausted, or that Mr. Wolf’s videotape is unique. As the district court repeatedly pointed out, the events Mr. Wolf filmed took place on a public street and the published portions of his video show numerous participants and onlookers, (some with cameras) and dozens of police officers.”
Observing that, ” the record reveals a veritable treasure trove of alternative sources, including possible eye witnesses from law enforcement,” the brief concludes that, “The government seems to want Mr. Wolf’s video not because it is the only source of information about what happened to the police car, but because it speculates that it might be the best and most convenient source of information.”
The full text of the amicus brief which was filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the national Society for Professional Journalists, the WIW Freedom to Write Fund, and the California First Amendment Coalition can be viewed at http://www.cfac.org
P.S.! A fund-raiser for Josh Wolf happens this Saturday, Aug. 19, 7 to 9:30 p.m., at Dance Mission, 3316 24th st., San Francisco. Free Admission, donations appreciated. Entertainers include Diamond Dave Whitaker of Enemy
Combatant Radio and musician John Staedler. Chuck Gonzalez is the DJ.
Speakers include Josh’s mother, Elizabeth Wolf-Spada; Wolf’s uncle Harland Harrison, Libertarian candidate for Congress from San Mateo County;Krissy Keefer, Green Party candidate for Congress from San Francisco’s east side, and Rick Knee of the National Writers Union. Or consider donating online at http://joshwolf.net/grandjury/donate.html
NOISE: Skating along the Bleeding Edge
You ran into the most intriguing pairings – and people – at the Bleeding Edge Festival Sunday, Aug. 13: what other event would find SF duo Matmos and a handful of other familiar SF rock folk down amid the leafy, upper-crusty environs of Saratoga (inspiring the question: just how many McMansions and outright mansions can one small town include?). I can’t help but compare the event to last year’s ArthurFest in LA – it was a similar wide-ranging if somewhat smaller gathering of intriguing artists in an unlikely, grassy, very non-clubby space. And as with Yoko Ono at that 2005 event, you could catch one-time events like this collabo between Matmos and Zeena Parkins below.
Zeena Parkins beats long-stemmed red roses and Matmos takes a stab at the duo’s recent “Roses and Teeth Ludwig Wittgenstein.” All images by Kimberly Chun.
But unlike ArthurFest, the selections seemed a wee bit random: I still don’t quite get the connection between the fine but not quite as experimental Yo La Tengo and, say, sound artist William Basinski, who impressed many in the Carriage House theater and also installed a site-specific tape loop piece, in collaboration with James Elaine, in the Main Hall.
Considering the long haul from other parts of the Bay Area to the site (the location makes it superconvenient for San Jose fans and Zero One attendees but necessitated carpools for Oaklanders), I’d say that if the organizers wanted to make draw listeners to this event they should have charged $10 or $15 for the fest rather than $50. The prohibitive ticket price didn’t help the shockingly sparse audience in the Garden amphitheater for lesser-known bands like Flying.
Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan hunkers down with a cozy, lengthy jam on “Autumn Sweater.”
Also admirable, with mixed results, was the juried competition winner showcase. Pardon my igornace but when did this competition occur? Who was invited to compete? Questions, questions – the mind is a-whirl. In any case, the best of the bunch was Canned Corpus Callosum, here shown below, cranking out the rickety-rock Tom-Waits-and-Dresden Dolls-like sounds.
Canned Corpus Callosum peel open their roots-industrial-noise-classical songbook.
In the end however despite power problems for Black Dice, who played for three seconds then blew out for about an hour (heard they were incredible, if reminiscent of their last Great American Music Hall show), the event was a pleasure – set in startlingly beautiful environs. You could take a nature walk and check out Jeff Cain’s Dead Air sound installation along a hill trail that had recently boasted mountain lion sightings. Toothy! Essentially for your average experimental music-noise connoisseur who wanted to spend a Sunday with mom amid pink lilies and sound art – this was the place to be.
EDITOR’S NOTES
› lynn@sfbg.com
There was no better place than the Castro Theatre to watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which kicked off the 70mm Series on Aug. 11. (Future delights in store: South Pacific and Tron!) The timing wasn’t bad either: among the film’s many viscerally unsettling images (see: bludgeoned animals; HAL’s omnipresent glowing red eye; an astronaut jerkily struggling for oxygen, then floating off into deep space), one in particular for me managed to mainline a vein of depression and fear concerning where world events — and US foreign policy — are taking us, ceasefire notwithstanding. That would be the moment (melodramatic, yes, but provoking dead silence in the theater) when ape-man moves beyond territorial posturing and realizes that he has the technology to bring home dinner and brutally slaughter his neighbors.
On a less dismal note, go check out our blogs — www.sfbg.com has spawned a whopping five of them in the wake of our Web site redesign, and we’re quite enjoying our adventures in 21st-century-style online media. We’re a little creeped out to find ourselves in the company of late bloomer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, we learned at press time, just posted his first entry on his own blog (a punishing 2,000-plus words in English). But we feel good about the fact that we got the jump on the Iranian president by at least a month or so.
Ahmadinejad’s first post is packed with autobiographical tidbits and railings against, yes, US foreign policy — much like our own content! But we’ve also got Kimberly Chun’s report and pics from the Bleeding Edge Festival on our music blog, Noise. In Pixel Vision you’ll find Cheryl Eddy’s musings on the fact that, per court order, Ted Kaczynski’s copy of The Elements of Style will soon be on the auction block — plus the extended mix of Eddy’s interview with Snakes on a Plane snake handler Jules Sylvester. And in the Bruce Blog, you’ll learn what happens when a national glossy business mag has the unmitigated temerity to refer to Guardian headquarters as “grungy” in the lead paragraph of its cover story. Read all about it in “Why People Get Mad at the Media,” parts one through six. SFBG
Spiff your licks
› culture@sfbg.com
Painting, welding, playing the xylophone … these all seemed like mildly entertaining pursuits to me, but they didn’t quite inspire the level of intense passion needed to get me off my ass and into a classroom. If I was going to invest my valuable time in any course of instruction, it had to involve something I truly wanted to learn. Drinking, smoking, shoplifting … I was way too good at that stuff already. No, what I needed by way of education was something I could really get a hard-on about. That was it — I could definitely stand to learn more about the activity that gives me the biggest hard-on of all: going down on my girlfriend. Couldn’t we all? Join me, then, as I gently ease back the hood of our city’s sexual instruction resources in search of my very own cunnilingus guru.
Embarking on this quest had me feeling a little like Frodo: small, hairy footed, and bristling with trepidation at the thought of meeting a true cunnilingus master. Don’t get me wrong (I say in typical straight-guy fashion), I’m OK at what I do. But how would I ever convince the woman or man who was to teach me that I’d be a worthy pupil? Yet I knew I had to continue. Perhaps my libido was in charge. Perhaps somewhere in my heart, I knew my girlfriend deserved better than what I had been giving her. Whatever the case, I was determined to fix my licks for better kicks.
Finding my ideal tongue tutor wasn’t as easy as I thought. Most sex educators don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages, nor are they easily googled. And I’m a little leery of gaining sexual insights from the Learning Annex — I might walk away with my entire life savings invested in yoga retreats and Trump towers. To find someone to teach me how to orally astound, the first thing I needed to do was head to a respectable sex shop. In San Francisco that means go to Good Vibrations on Valencia Street.
There at the service counter, on an events calendar dotted with workshops on spanking, sex after 60, toe sucking, lap dancing, and whatever other sex acts you can imagine, I found the course that shot a twinge of excitement through my loins: Tracy Bartlett’s “Oral Majority” workshop. Alas, I’d missed it by a month — but didn’t despair: Tracy was due to come around again soon, I was assured by the counterperson. In the meantime, it was recommended that I read Bartlett’s bible, The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus (Cleis Press, www.tinynibbles.com) by Violet Blue.
If The Ultimate Guide works for a professional like Bartlett, I knew it would help me, so I purchased a copy and headed home. There in the cozy corner of my bedroom, I sat for the next three hours reading erotic fiction, techniques for mind-blowing orgasms, and helpful advice on proper pussy-eating etiquette. From the proper utilization of butt plugs to the pleasures of doggy-style licking, Blue’s book offers the sound advice of one who has braved the bush many times. Not only did it hone my cunnilingus skills, but it also provided me with a possible reason why my search for a teacher was proving difficult. “Most sex instructors,” Blue reveals, “are heterosexual females. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — unless you want to know what it’s really like to lick a pussy. Heterosexual women don’t know, so they tend to gloss over or skip cunnilingus in their classes.”
A bell went off in my head. I knew exactly whom I needed to find: a woman who teaches cunnilingus classes and actually licks pussies.
After reading Blue’s book, I could find the clitoris in two seconds flat. I could also judge the correct moment to introduce a well-lubed finger into a hesitant anus and could expertly perform a down-tempo version of “the ice-cream lick.” I was ready to meet my swami. But where was I to find her? After some more, perhaps embarrassingly persistent queries at Good Vibes, I struck gold. Bartlett had passed the local licks-pertise torch down to her top pupil, Koko West of www.sexysexed.com.
For the past two years, Koko has been making home visits and hosting parties for up to 40 people at a time. She’s queer identified and female, and teaches both fellatio and cunnilingus classes (one and a half hours for $250) and sex classes for couples (two hours for $300). Perfect! I set up a demonstration meeting with her and held my breath (while compulsively brushing my teeth). The next morning I headed to a local park where my pussy guru was patiently waiting on a checkered picnic blanket.
There on the knoll she sat, barefoot and draped in a polka-dot dress, her glistening tray of cucumbers and a silky pillow by her side. Without saying a word, I walked up, dropped to my knees, and prepared to imbibe the lessons of a true master. With tears streaming down my face, I begged her to teach me all she could. Her hands came down from the heavens to push the hair from my sweaty brow. “Shhh,” she said, “Koko’s gonna make it all better. Tell me what you want to know.”
My first question was obvious and the answer surprising; “What is the best way to perform cunnilingus?” I blurted. “First of all,” she said, “I find the word cunnilingus a bit unsexy. I like to say ‘going down’ or ‘licking pussy.’ And honestly, there’s no tried-and-true way to go down on a woman. She may love something one day and yearn for something completely different the next. The key is talking.”
“What do you mean,” I asked naively, “like, talk into her vagina or something?” Koko looked at me disapprovingly, took a breath, and said, “Uh … no. Communication between lovers is the key. Usually when people get over the initial discomfort of talking about sex, they find conversation extremely beneficial and hot.”
Yes, I thought. That’s what my girlfriend needs. A man who can talk and perform “the crooked tongue whip” at the same time. Shit, I had some serious work to do.
We sat for hours talking about the best way to ease a lover, how to use toys, and so on, but it wasn’t until evening approached that we got to the good stuff: cold hard sex tips. Koko flipped over the odd-shaped pillow she had been leaning on. On the other side were lips, a clitoris shrouded in a satin hood, and many, many folds. “This,” she said, “is the ‘Wondrous Vulva Puppet,’ from the House o’ Chicks [www.houseochicks.com], and you’re going to lick it with your hand.”
My arm became a mock tongue as Koko guided me through her repertoire of swirly techniques, flicking motions, penetration, and more. I could have played with Koko’s pussy puppet for days, but she eventually grew weary of my puppyish enthusiasm, packed up, and left. Still, she was only an e-mail away, and I knew that although I may not have earned my master’s in munching, I was no longer just whistling in the dark. SFBG
GOOD VIBRATIONS
603 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-5460
www.goodvibes.com