Interview

Legal aid funding for undocumented youth clears board committee

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Legal aid funding for undocumented youth clears board committee

Brian, who is 12, came to the United States from Guatemala with his younger brother, Edwin, who is seven. They arrived in a car driven by a coyote, an adult who ferried them across in an arrangement made with their family. But the brothers were quickly detained by Border Patrol agents.

When they were taken into custody, Brian explained through a translator, they heard sirens and went running into a field. The coyote ran in the other direction, leaving them alone. Brian said that when border agents shouted “stop!” he couldn’t understand what they were saying. But when Edwin tripped and fell, they both came to a halt, and were soon apprehended. They spent the next month in a Texas facility, where other Central American youth were also being held.

Brian and Edwin spoke to the Bay Guardian just before a Sept. 10 committee hearing of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, concerning a proposal to provide emergency legal aid for undocumented youth. Just before the interview, the brothers stood on the grand marble staircase in San Francisco City Hall, surveying the stately surroundings with wide eyes. But when asked what life was like in Guatemala, where they had stayed with their grandmother, Brian’s face got very serious. 

“It was bad,” he said. “We couldn’t live in peace. There were too many gang members. They often killed children and young teenage boys.”

 

Brian and Edwin. GUARDIAN PHOTO BY REBECCA BOWE

The brothers are relatively lucky – they have legal counsel provided by Dolores Street Community Services, and their parents are here with them in San Francisco – yet they are both in deportation proceedings, and could still end up being sent back to Guatemala.

During the hearing at today’s Budget & Finance Committee meeting, more youth shared stories of their own harrowing journeys to the United States and asked the supervisors to approve funding to provide legal counsel for undocumented kids facing deportation proceedings in San Francisco immigration court.

A girl named Natalie, who is 10, described being held in a detention facility she called the “freezer” because of the uncomfortable temperature. “It was unbearably cold. It was freezing,” she said during testimony. “We had to cover ourselves with aluminum foil.”

Others described horrific violence in their home countries in Central America, and spoke about their journeys to the United States on a dangerous freight train that’s earned the nickname The Beast.

Lawyers and advocates weighed in, too. One speaker read a prepared statement from Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, who wrote that due to violence and instability in Central America, “The cases we deal with are often in effect death penalty cases.”

As the Guardian previously reported, the supplemental funding request was proposed by Sup. David Campos, who noted during the hearing that he felt a personal connection with the kids because he himself was once an undocumented youth arriving to the United States from Central America.

Yet when Campos introduced the budget supplemental proposal at last week’s Board of Supervisor’s meeting, Board President David Chiu – Campos’ opponent in the race to represent District 17 in the California Assembly – noted that he had secured funding during the budget process for the expansion of a legal aid program to ensure immigrant youth would have access to pro bono legal counsel.

“Unless we actually fund nonprofits to provide that support, pro bono counsel cannot help in the way that we need them to,” Campos said during the Sept. 10 hearing.

Chiu suggested at last week’s full board meeting that a grant awarded to the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area, for $100,000, was intended to aid unaccompanied youth and could leverage pro bono legal representation valued at some $8 million. But Oren Sellstrom, legal director at the Lawyer’s Committee, said during the Sept. 10 hearing, “The grant we received is not focused either on unaccompanied youth or on the rocket docket,” referring to expedited immigration court proceedings. Sellstrom said he thought the additional funding proposed by Campos was needed.

In the end, the members of the Budget & Finance Committee – Sups. John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Mark Farrell – voted unanimously to recommend approval of $1.063 million per year for two years, slightly less than the $1.2 million per year Campos had originally sought.

After the hearing, Campos told the Bay Guardian he was “cautiously optimistic” that the full board, which votes on the supplemental on Tue/16, would approve the funding. His office is working with the Mayor’s Office on Housing and Community Development to expedite the process of securing contracts if it wins full approval.

Farrell, the more conservative member of the committee, said he’d had concerns walking into the hearing but was struck by youth’s accounts of their experiences. He said he had previously represented undocumented immigrants as an attorney and was sympathetic to their cases. “I had some concerns about the fact that during our own budget process, every year, we cannot fund enough services,” he told the Bay Guardian.

But at the end of the day, Farrell said, “This is a situation we cannot turn our back on in San Francisco.”

The Breeders barrel on

Steven T. Jones
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The Breeders barrel on

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL The first rule of interviewing former Pixies bassist Kim Deal is that you do not say the word “Pixies” while speaking to Kim Deal.

After it has been made clear to you, multiple times and in no uncertain terms, that you are forbidden from asking her about the iconic rock band she co-founded in 1986, quit, re-joined, and then quit again in 2013, it would be understandable if you were slightly apprehensive about said phone interview — worried, perhaps, that Deal might be cranky or unpleasant regardless of your following the rules, or else that you might suddenly develop a very specific and unfortunate case of Tourette’s that leads to you uncontrollably shouting Frank Black’s name or Pixies album titles into the phone as epithets.

All of this anxiety would be for naught. Kim Deal, 53, is in great spirits when she picks up the phone at home in her native Dayton, Ohio. She’s hilarious, actually. “Hellooo, how are you?” she drawls in an overly perky telemarketer accent of sorts. Then, laughing, before switching into her unmistakable real voice: “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m talking like that.”

If anything, she’s in a bit of a silly mood because she’s been cooped up in rehearsals. It’s about two weeks before she heads out on tour with The Breeders, the band she co-leads with her twin sister Kelley, whose nearly identical voice blends with Kim’s sultry, sharp-edged alto in a way that creates addictively salty-sweet harmonies — and a band whose chart-topping contributions to the Steve Albini era of early ’90s alt-rock are so significant that only co-founding a band like the Pixies, as Kim did, could relegate it to “secondary reason for fame” status.

Anyway: The Breeders have been rehearsing in Deal’s basement, like old times. Getting on each other’s nerves, like old times. Bassist Josephine Wiggs was convinced there was a weird sound coming out of her amp last night when they were practicing. “I swear I can’t hear what she’s hearing,” says Deal, like a stand-up comedian launching into a routine about his wife’s cooking. “It’s an 810 SVT bass amp, so it sounds like a big fucking bass amp. It’s distracting you? Scoot over and you won’t hear it anymore.”

“She’s British, though,” concludes Deal with a sigh.

And how about working with her twin sister day in, day out?

“I love her more than anything in the world, but she was bothering me so much at practice the other day that I took a lamp and put it between us so I didn’t have to look at her while we were playing,” Deal says cheerfully. “Once somebody starts doing something that annoys me I kind of get a red light around them. The lamp has moved around each day as we all [get annoyed at each other]. It’s subtle.”

They might piss each other off from time to time, but if there were any doubts about the place the Breeders still occupy in their fans’ hearts, last year’s wholly sold-out 60-date tour, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the band’s biggest commercial success, Last Splash, should have laid them to rest. (Two nights at The Fillmore last August saw the band playing the entirety of that album – which was recorded in San Francisco, then rode the same angsty wave to national fame Nirvana saw that year, propelled by its most catchy and most delightfully inane song, “Cannonball.” Then they left the stage for 10 minutes before coming back to play the entirety of Pod, the band’s 1990 Kurt Cobain-influencing debut, as an encore. Deal, who had just quit the power play of the Pixies for the second time, was noticeably exuberant as a frontwoman, and seemingly could not stop smiling.)

Still, not counting last year’s 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash (LSXX), it’s been five years since the Breeders put out new material (though it’s been a much less dramatic break than the seven-year hiatus between Last Splash and Title TK, during which time the band famously imploded in part due to Kelley Deal’s heroin use).

In lieu of new Breeders records, however — and in lieu of, er, bringing up her most recent few years with the Pixies, which, it could be noted, some of us were excited about mostly because of the chance to hear “Gigantic,” which she wrote, which is arguably the best song in the entire decades-spanning Pixies catalog — Deal has quietly issued eight 7-inch singles of solo material since January 2013. It’s something she began doing when she “couldn’t find anybody who could be in a band” with her, she says, especially living in Ohio.

“The industry dropped out of the music,” she says simply. “Musicians need jobs now. There used to be enough money in music that people who played in bands could actually make their rent. Maybe they’d sling weed on the side or do some pizza delivery, but they could hit their rent. Now that’s just not possible. Even bands that people know pretty well, they need real jobs — they design websites, then they go home to their band. Unless you’re [at the star status] where you’re, like, making perfume.”

So she started making music by herself. Though she’s brought in old friends and bandmates to play along (Slint drummer Britt Walford, whom Deal ran into at Steve Albini’s 50th birthday party, makes an appearance), the songs are unmistakably hers. Their moods shift from volatile bass-driven fuzz (“Walking With a Killer”) to cooing sing-song with an almost creepy Velvet Underground edge (“Are You Mine?”).

In an age when we’re used to artists simply throwing up a SoundCloud link and announcing “I have a new single,” she’s done something increasingly rare, as well: She released each song as an old-school single with an A and a B side, a physical product, each with its own album art. Long known for her perfectionism and attention to detail when it comes to gear and a studio’s technical specs, 2013 and 2014 were the years when Deal became entranced by the physical process of distributing music.

“It makes it more real to me,” she explains. “If I just put it out as a download, I feel like I just emailed my sister the song. Nothing even happens, it doesn’t make sense to me — I’m like, ‘Where do I put the title, the song name?'” Plus, since she self-issued Fate to Fatal in 2009, she realized she enjoyed the process of calling around to research manufacturers, assigning ISRC codes (kind of like serial numbers for songs), getting physical mail back when she sent something out.

She has no current plans to compile the tracks into an album, however — for one, each has “really different levels of production.” She feels a little like she’d be ripping people off, since the songs are all out already. And somehow she doesn’t expect “normal people” to be interested in buying these tracks, anyway, though a large portion of the Internet (and the majority of music critics) might disagree with that.

At the moment, though, Deal is in full-band mode. This current Breeders tour came about when Neutral Milk Hotel asked them to join a bill at the Hollywood Bowl; the Breeders structured the rest of the three-week tour around the gig. (In San Francisco, the band will play The Fillmore this Saturday, Sept. 13.) The tour will be a chance to try out new material, though Deal seems a little nervous about that.

“We have about four new songs right now that we can really play, and I’m working on the words for this other song Josephine wrote,” she explains. “She seems so smart, and she’s English, so I can’t just go, like, ‘ooga chooga,'” you know? I want to really say something with it.” Deal’s been reading The Power of Myth, the anthology of conversations between scholar Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, and thinking a lot on the hero’s journey. Specifically, what would happen if the hero completely ignored the advice of the gatekeeper/mentor character at the beginning of the arc.

“We’ve been working on this stuff all year, so when [Neutral Milk Hotel] asked us, even though it’s way out there, we thought ‘Hey, let’s give it a shot. And hope to hell nobody records on cell phones,'” she says.

And then there’s the act of traveling together at this stage in the game, with bandmates she’s known for 20-plus years. (After a decade or so of other members, the current lineup is the original Last Splash crew: Wiggs on bass, Jim McPherson on drums, and the inimitable sisters Deal in the center ring on vocals and guitars.)

People can get snippy on tour, says Kim — especially in Florida, “things get weird…but we get along for the most part, no one’s an asshole, that’s important. There’s just really not a rude person in this bunch.”

In the van, especially, you can always put on headphones. And if all else fails, “You get lamped,” she says. “There’s always the lamp.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PghwbxtcJo8

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THE BREEDERS

With Kelley Stoltz
9pm, $28.50
The Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
(415) 346-3000
www.thefillmore.com

Urban decay

Michael Redmond
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Urban decay

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It increasingly seems like the ultimate plan for the poor must be simply to drive them into the sea. What else is going to be done with them if we realize the Koch brothers’ dream of no minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, or Social Security? (One alternative already in practice: Build more prisons, of course.) Hostility toward the have-nots, believing that somehow they got there by being lazy or criminal or genetically inferior, is of course as old as civilization itself. But legislating to create poverty rather than to solve it is a significant reversal over the general trend of American history over the last century or so.

This kind of “Sorry, you’re screwed” mentality may seem alarming here, but it’s a basic part of the social structure wherever economic resources have always been scarcer and a drastic wealth-power divide taken for granted. Part of the impact of Ira Sachs’ excellent Love is Strange, now playing, comes from our horror that this doesn’t happen to these people, since educated, middle-class white Americans aren’t supposed to become more or less homeless. The protagonists in UK-Philippines co-production Metro Manila, however, stir our sympathy but little surprise when they become completely homeless. (Unlike the Strange characters, they have no safety net of friends and relatives who can take them in.)

Oscar (Jake Macapagal) and Mai Ramirez (Althea Vega) are rice farmers who live in the Ifugao province, tending their crop on 2,000-year-old terraces cut into the mountains. It’s grueling work in which nine-year-old daughter, Angel (Erin Panlilio), is already enlisted; another child is still a babe in arms. This stunning verdant landscape, shot by former fashion photographer Sean Ellis (also the director and co-scenarist), might be paradise on Earth with less toil and a lot more pay. But as the Ramirez family discovers, the crop that paid 10 cents a pound last year now only pays two. The family can’t survive on that return — it’s not even enough to buy seeds for next year’s harvest.

There’s nothing they can think to do but to follow the path of so many impoverished rural folk before them and head to the big city. Upon arriving in Manila, they’re stunned by the noise, crowds, and the aggressive police presence; one day they’re horrified witnesses as an attractive woman walking alone is pulled screaming into a passing car and spirited away, though no one else seems to blink. What seems a lucky break with a Good Samaritan turns out to be a scam that robs them of their paltry cash store and the shelter they thought they’d bought with it. Hustling frantically, Oscar gets himself a day’s physical labor, only to be paid with a sandwich.

Time and again, they find those who offer help are predators who recognize easy marks when they see them. Mai is tipped to a barmaid job that even has babysitting. But it’s the kind that starts with the interviewer saying “Show me your tits.” “Daycare” consists of letting the kids crawl around the women’s changing room, and keeping customers “happy” is scarcely distinguishable from straight-up prostitution. Then Oscar’s military-service tattoo gets him embraced as a fellow veteran by older Ong (local film and TV veteran John Arcilla). The latter seems a savior, setting up the family in a fairly nice apartment, taking on Oscar as his new partner in an armed security-guard service where the main duty seems to be running questionably legal amounts of money around.

All this happens in Metro Manila‘s first half, after which it becomes less a tally of everyday exploitations and slum indignities than a crime drama in the mode of Training Day (2001), or Brillante Mendoza’s notorious 2009 Kinatay, which won a controversial Cannes Best Director Prize in 2009 and subsequently played Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (YBCA’s New Filipino Cinema festival provided Metro‘s area premiere earlier this summer — the Roxie’s single showing this Thursday evening will doubtless be as close to a regular theatrical release as it gets hereabouts.) Ellis’ film isn’t as slickly hyperbolic as Day or as challengingly grungy as Kinatay, inhabiting a useful middle ground between thriller and case-pleading exposé. Itself an audience award winner at Sundance, Metro feels creditably engulfed in its cultural setting — if this were a movie by an old-school Filipino director, there might have been a heavier emphasis on the Ramirezes’ Christianity, which is presented simply and respectfully here but not used to milk viewer emotions.

Ellis funded this feature (his third) himself, the story inspired by a violent fight he witnessed between security guards during a prior trip to the Philippines. He doesn’t speak Tagalog, making Metro one of the better films in recent history by a director shooting in a language he doesn’t understand, something that happens more often than you might think. (Interestingly, Metro has already been remade as the Hindi movie CityLights.) The script he’s co-written with Frank E. Flowers is economical, such that when there’s a rare moment of what otherwise might pass for preachiness, the truth stings instead. When a suddenly less grateful than fearful Oscar tells his boss, “I don’t believe in hurting people,” Ong snaps, “Don’t speak. You have no voice in this world.”

Indeed. Money talks. The rest of you, STFU. *

METRO MANILA

Thu/11, 7pm, $10 (followed by Skype interview with Sean Ellis)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

 

Jock joints

Michael Redmond
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Jock joints

culture@sfbg.com

CULTURE Jim McAlpine wants the world to know that not all marijuana users are lazy, permanently couch-locked, junk-food addicted stoners. That’s why McAlpine is organizing the 420 Games, a series of athletic competitions in which weed enthusiasts will run, walk, and bike their way to larger societal acceptance.

The Games’ inaugural event, a five kilometer fun run in Golden Gate Park Sat/13 that McAlpine hopes will attract 500 participants, will be followed by a road cycling competition in Marin County, a “Marijuana Olympics Challenge” in Sacramento, and foot races across the state. “What better way to prove that you’re not a stoner just because you use marijuana, than [by] going out and being motivated and athletic?” McAlpine points out in an e-mail interview with the Guardian.

The visual of hundreds of healthy weed users jogging en masse through Golden Gate Park’s winding green thoroughfares seems like an apt PSA for responsible pot use. The 420 Games also just sound like a good time. At the inaugural event, attendees have the option to skip the athletics completely and come for the afterparty, which features an artisanal beer garden sponsored by Lagunitas and a set by Zepparella, an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band.

Those expecting the baseball bat-sized joints and puking, littering high schoolers present each year at the 4/20 celebrations on Hippie Hill in the park, be warned: There will be no sanctioned on-site cannabis use at the 420 Games, and attendees are encouraged to drag only on legal weed before and after the event. The Games are not a free-for-all smoke out, radical demonstration, or a call to legalize weed now; rather, McAlpine has packaged his sporting events in a way that will encourage even cannabis skeptics to examine their views about marijuana in 2014.

In his previous life, McAlpine was an entrepreneur who ran a discount ski pass company. But drought and years of dismal snowfall have driven McAlpine to find additional ways to spend his time. He was inspired by the potential of the cannabis industry, and seeks to use many of the proceeds from the 420 Games to fund a 501c3 nonprofit, the PRIME Foundation, which he’s establishing. Though PRIME has yet to begin educational programming and McAlpine has few details on when it will begin operating, he told the Guardian that he wants the organization to be a source of education for youth and adults about marijuana addiction, and about the very real benefits of weed and hemp. “I hope we can begin to raise some money to create campaigns to really educate the public on topics like this,” he says, referring to the 420 Games kickoff.

Of course, the 420 Games are not the only proof that weed-smoking athletes exist. One need only look at the countless Olympians and NFL, NBA, and NFL players who have been caught with pot to know that the sporting life is not one that is necessarily devoid of THC. The highest-profile case was that of swimmer Michael Phelps, the Olympic phenom who has won more medals than anyone in the history of the Games (22 total, 18 of them gold). In 2009, three months after dominating the lanes in Beijing, a leaked photo appeared to show Phelps smoking a bong. Since the photo’s depicted infraction took place during the off-season, Phelps escaped Olympic sanctions, but he did receive a competition suspension and lost a few endorsement deals.

In 1998, Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati was nearly stripped of his Olympic gold medal after a post-competition positive drug test, but ducked punishment when it was proven that marijuana wasn’t officially on the banned list of the Olympics’ governing board. It was added three months later, which meant American judo star Nicholas Delpopolo was expelled from the 2012 London Olympics when his results came back positive for pot (he maintains he unwittingly ate weed-infused food, but no exception was extended for ignorance of intoxication).

Josh Gordon of the Cleveland Browns was the NFL’s leading receiver during the 2013 season when he failed a drug test for pot. The league recently announced he will be suspended for the entire 2014 season. Pittsburgh Steelers running backs Le’Veon Bell and LeGarrette Blount were pulled over with weed in their car last month, but have yet to be suspended from play. And of course, who could forget SF Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum’s 2009 off-season misdemeanor charge, when a pipe and weed were found in his car’s center console during a traffic stop? The list of athletes who have been discovered with weed is rather lengthy, all things considered.

The NHL has removed marijuana — and all drugs not deemed to be performance-enhancing — from its list of banned substances, choosing instead to offer optional addiction counseling to athletes who repeatedly test positive. But NFL spokespeople have repeatedly asserted that no change will be forthcoming in the league’s weed policy. This is especially distressing given that football players likely stand to benefit much more than most people, particularly athletes, from marijuana’s pain management effects. A lawsuit filed earlier this year by 750 ex-NFL players takes on the league for alleged distribution of opioid painkillers that have been shown to have detrimental long-term effects on players’ health.

Cannabis’ natural painkillers are a different story. In an interview with the Fusion network, former Chicago Bears defensive tackle Tank Johnson estimated that 70 to 80 percent of NFL players “gravitate toward the green,” and not just for recreational use. “Managing and tolerating your pain is how you make your money in this game,” Johnson said.

Berkeley doctor Frank Lucido knows full well why sports enthusiasts would turn to marijuana. “Some athletes might benefit from using cannabis after sports for the acute pain and inflammation from that recent activity or trauma,” Lucido writes in an e-mail interview with the Guardian. “Depending on the sport, a player may use cannabis before to ease chronic pain or muscle spasm, so they can function better.”

Lucido said he has prescribed various ex-NFL players medical marijuana, has worked with patients on seeking cannabis treatment since the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, and holds the opinion that performance in some noncompetitive sports can benefit from cannabis use beforehand. He’s not alone. Others have commented anecdotally that weed can improve sporting ability, especially in pursuits involving high levels of finesse like golf and bowling.

McAlpine says thus far no pro athletes have announced their support of the 420 Games. In our interview, he alludes to plans to approach Phelps’ management, but he might have better luck shooting for Rebagliati. After his close shave with Olympic disgrace, the snowboarder is now the CEO of Ross’ Gold, a Canadian company that sells 14 strains of premium branded medical cannabis. Philadelphia Flyers veteran Riley Cote is another ex-pro in the world of marijuana — he recently started a foundation to teach people about the role hemp can play in a sustainable lifestyle.

But perhaps the 420 Games will manage to sway public opinion not with the appearance of gold medal winners, but rather everyday people who use weed in their everyday lives — something that weed expos, with their green bikini babes and emphasis on innovative new ways of getting blasted, have failed to do.

“I believe very strongly that there is a huge problem with public perception of marijuana users,” says McAlpine. “Even as it becomes legal. I knew it would be a big step to take on this new venture, but it is 100 percent for a cause I believe in, so that makes it all a lot easier to get up and put the hours in.”

There’s no question that it will take many muscles to change much of professional sports’ opinion on marijuana. But maybe we can start here. Call it a joint effort. *

420 GAMES 5K FUN RUN/WALK

Sat/13, 7am check-in; 8am race; 9am-noon afterparty, $60 (afterparty pass, $42)

Bandshell, Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF

www.420games.org

Gearing up for war

Michael Redmond
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Gearing up for war

joe@sfbg.com

A tear gas canister explodes as citizens flee from the gun-toting warriors, safely guarded behind their armored vehicles. Dressed in patterned camo and body armor, they form a skirmish line as they fire projectiles into the crowd. Flash bang explosions echo down the city’s streets.

Such clashes between police and protesters have been common in Ferguson, Mo., in the past few weeks since the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer. But it’s also a scene familiar to anyone from Occupy Oakland, where Iraq veteran Scott Olsen suffered permanent brain damage after police shot a less-than-lethal weapon into his head, or similar standoffs in other cities.

police embed 1As the country watched Ferguson police mobilize against its citizens while donning military fatigues and body armor and driving in armored vehicles, many began drawing comparisons to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan — indeed, viral photos featuring side-by-side comparisons made it difficult to distinguish peace officers from wartime soldiers.

So how did law enforcement officers in police departments across the country come to resemble the military? And what impact is that escalation of armaments having on otherwise peaceful demonstrations? Some experts say the militarization of police actually encourages violence.

Since the ’90s, the federal Department of Defense has served as a gun-running Santa Claus for the country’s local police departments. Military surplus left over from wars in the Middle East are now hand-me-downs for local police across the country, including here in the Bay Area.

A grenade launcher, armored command vehicles, camera-mounted SWAT robots, mounted helicopter weapons, and military grade body armor — these are just some of the weapons and equipment obtained by San Francisco law enforcement agencies since the ’90s. They come from two main sources: the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, also known as the 1033 loan program, and a multitude of federal grants used to purchase military equipment and vehicles.

A recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, “The War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” slammed the practice of arming local police with military gear. ACLU spokesperson Will Matthews told us the problem is stark in the Bay Area.

“There was no more profound example of this than [the response to] Occupy,” he told the Guardian. He said that military gear “serves usually only to escalate tensions, where the real goal of police is to de-escalate tension.”

The ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and others are calling for less provocative weaponry in response to peaceful demonstrations, as well as more data to track the activities of SWAT teams that regularly use weaponry from the military.

The call for change comes as a growing body of research shows the cycle of police violence often begins not with a raised baton, but with the military-style armor and vehicles that police confront their communities with.

 

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

What motivation does the federal government have to arm local police? Ex-Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Stephen Downing told the Guardian, “I put this at the feet of the drug war.”

The initial round of funding in the ’90s was spurred by the federal government’s so-called War on Drugs, he said, and the argument that police needed weaponry to match well-armed gangs trafficking in narcotics. That justification was referenced in the ACLU’s report.

After 9/11, the desire to protect against unknown terrorist threats also spurred the militarization of police, providing a rationale for the change, whether or not it was ever justified. But a problem arises when local police start to use the tactics and gear the military uses, Downing told us.

When the LAPD officials first formed military-like SWAT teams, he said, “they always kept uppermost in their mind the police mission versus the military mission. The military has an enemy. A police officer, who is a peace officer, has no enemies.”

“The military aims to kill,” he said, “and the police officer aims to preserve life.”

And when police departments have lots of cool new toys, there is a tendency to want to use them.

When we contacted the SFPD for this story, spokesperson Albie Esparza told us, “Chief [Greg Suhr] will be the only one to speak in regards to this. He is not available for the next week or two. You may try afterwards.”

 

“CRAIGSLIST OF MILITARY EQUIPMENT”

Local law enforcement agencies looking to gear up have two ways to do it: One is free and the other is low-cost. The first of those methods has been heavily covered by national news outlets following the Ferguson protests: the Department of Defense’s 1033 loan program.

The program permanently loans gear from the federal government, with strings attached. For instance, local police can’t resell any weapons they’re given.

To get the gear, first an agency must apply for it through the national Defense Logistics Agency in Fort Belvoir, Va. In California, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is the go-between when local police file grant applications to the DLA.

The bar to apply is low. A New Hampshire law enforcement agency applied for an armored vehicle by citing that community’s Pumpkin Festival as a possible terrorism target, according to the ACLU’s report. But the report shows such gear is more likely to be used against protestors or drug dealers than festival-targeting terrorists.

“It’s like the Craigslist of military equipment, only the people getting this stuff are law enforcement agencies,” Kelly Huston, a spokesperson of OEMS, told the Guardian. “They don’t have to pay for this equipment, they just have to come get it.”

Troublingly, where and why the gear goes to local law enforcement is not tracked in a database at the state level. The Guardian made a public records requests of the SFPD and the OEMS, which have yet to be fulfilled. Huston told us the OEMS is slammed with records requests for this information.

“The majority of the documents we have are paper in boxes,” Huston told us, describing the agency’s problem with a rapid response. “This is not an automated system.”

The Guardian obtained federal grant data through 2011 from the OEMS, but with a caveat: Some of the grants only describe San Francisco County, and not the specific agency that requested equipment.

Some data of police gear requested under the 1033 loan program up to 2011 is available thanks to records requests from California Watch. The New York Times obtained more recent 1033 loan requests for the entire country, but it does not delineate specific agencies, only states.

Available data shows equipment requested by local law enforcement, which gravitates from the benign to the frightening.

 

TOYS FOR COPS

An Armament Subsystem is one of the first weapons listed in the 1033 data, ordered by the SFPD in 1996. This can describe mounted machine guns for helicopters (though the SFPD informed us it has since disbanded its aero-unit). From 1995 to 1997, the SFPD ordered over 100 sets of fragmentation body armor valued at $45,000, all obtained for free. In 1996, the SFPD also ordered one grenade launcher, valued at $2,007.

Why would the SFPD need a grenade launcher in an urban setting? Chief Suhr wouldn’t answer that question, but Downing told us it was troubling.

“It’s a pretty serious piece of military hardware,” he said. “I’ll tell you a tiny, quick story. One of the first big deployments of SWAT (in Los Angeles) was the Black Panthers in the ’60s. They were holed up in a building, well armed and we knew they had a lot of weapons in there,” he said. “They barricaded the place with sandbags. Several people were wounded in the shooting, as I recall. The officers with military experience said the only way we’ll breach those sandbags and doors is with a grenade launcher.”

In those days, they didn’t have a grenade launcher at the ready, and had to go through a maze of official channels to get one.

“They had to go through the Governor’s Office to the Pentagon, and then to Camp Pendleton to get the grenade launcher,” Downing told us. “[The acting LAPD chief] said at the time, ‘Let’s go ahead and ask for it.’ It was a tough decision, because it was using military equipment against our citizens.”

But the chief never had to use the grenade launcher, Downing said. “They resolved the situation before needing it, and we said ‘thank god.'”

The grenade launcher was the most extreme of the equipment procured by local law enforcement, but there were also helicopter parts, gun sights, and multitudes of armored vehicles, like those seen in Ferguson.

By contrast, the grants programs are harder to track specifically to the SFPD, but instead encompass funds given to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Sheriff’s Department, and even some schools. That’s because the grants cover not only allow the purchase of military surplus vehicles and riot gear, but also chemical protective suits and disaster-related supplies.

But much of the requested gear and training has more to do with active police work than emergency response.

San Francisco County agencies used federal loans to purchase $113,000 “command vehicles” (which are often armored). In 2010, the SFPD purchased a $5,000 SWAT robot (which often comes equipped with cameras and a remote control), as well as $15,000 in Battle Dress Uniforms, and $48,000 for a Mobile Communications Command Vehicle.

In 2008, the SFPD ordered a Bearcat Military Counterattack Vehicle for $306,000.

The Lenco website, which manufactures Bearcats, says it “may also be equipped with our optional Mechanical Rotating Turret with Cupola (Tub) and Weapon Ready Mounting System, suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.”

Its essentially an armored Humvee that can be mounted with rotating gun turrets.

police embed 2

Department of Homeland Security grants were used to purchase Type 2 Mobile Field Training, which Department of Homeland Security documentation describes as involving eight grenadiers, two counter-snipers, two prisoner transportation vans, and 14 patrol vehicles.

All told, the Bay Area’s many agencies were awarded more than $386 million in federal grants between 2008 and 2011, with San Francisco netting $48 million of those rewards. Through the 1033 loan program, San Francisco obtained over $1.4 million in federal surplus gear from 1995 to 2011.

But much of that was received under the radar, and with little oversight.

“Anytime they’re going to file for this equipment, we think the police should hold a public hearing,” Matthews, the ACLU spokesperson, told us.

In San Francisco, there is a public hearing for the procurement of military weapons, at the Police Commission. But a Guardian analysis of agenda documents from the commission shows these hearings are often held after the equipment has already been ordered.

Squeezed between a “status report” and “routine administrative business,” a March 2010 agenda from the commission shows a request to “retroactively accept and expend a grant in the amount of $1,000,000.00 from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

This is not a new trend. In 2007, the Police Commission retroactively approved three separate grants totaling over $2 million in funding from the federal government through the OEMS, which was then called the Emergency Management Agency.

Police Commission President Anthony Mazzucco did not respond to the Guardian’s emails requesting an interview before our press time, but one thing is clear: The SFPD requests federal grants for military surplus, then sometimes asks the Police Commission to approve the funding after the fact.

Many are already critiquing this call to arms, saying violent gear begets violent behavior.

 

PROVOCATIVE GEAR

A UC Berkeley sociologist, with his small but driven team and an army of automatic computer programs, are now combing more than 8,000 news articles on the Occupy movement in search of a pattern: What causes police violence against protesters, and protester violence against police?

Nicholas Adams and his team, Deciding Force, already have a number of findings.

“The police have an incredible ability to set the tone for reactions,” Adams told us. “Showing up in riot gear drastically increases the chances of violence from protesters. The use of skirmish lines also increases chances of violence.”

Adams’s research uses what he calls a “buffet of information” provided by the Occupy movement, allowing him to study over 200 cities’ police responses to protesters. Often, as in Ferguson, protesters were met by police donned in equipment and gear resembling wartime soldiers.

Rachel Lederman is a warrior in her own right. An attorney in San Francisco litigating against police for over 20 years, and now the president of the National Lawyers Guild Bay Area chapter, she’s long waged legal war against police violence.

Lederman is quick to note that the SFPD in recent years has been much less aggressive than the Oakland Police Department, which injured her client, Scott Olsen, in an Occupy protest three years ago.

“If you compare OPD with the San Francisco Police on the other side of the bay,” she told us, “the SFPD do have some impact munitions they bring at demonstrations, but they’ve never used them.”

Much of this is due to the SFPD’s vast experience in ensuring free speech, an SFPD spokesperson told us. San Francisco is a town that knows protests, so the SFPD understands how to peacefully negotiate with different parties beforehand to ensure a minimum of hassle, hence the more peaceful reaction to Occupy San Francisco.

Conversely, in Oakland, the Occupy movement was met by a hellfire of tear gas and flash bang grenades. Protesters vomited into the sidewalk from the fumes as others bled from rubber bullet wounds.

But some protesters the Guardian talked to noted that the night SFPD officers marched on Occupy San Francisco, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors and other prominent allies stood between Occupiers and police, calling for peace. We may never know what tactics the SFPD would have used to oust the protesters without that intervention.

As Lederman pointed out, the SFPD has used reactive tactics in other protests since.

“We’ve had some problems with SFPD recently, so I’m reluctant to totally praise them,” she said, recalling a recent incident where SFPD and City College police pepper-sprayed one student protester, and allegedly broke the wrists and concussed another. Photos of this student, Otto Pippenger, show a black eye and many bruises.

In San Francisco, a city where protesting is as common as the pigeons, that is especially distressing.

“It’s an essential part of democracy for people to be able to demonstrate in the street,” Lederman said. “If police have access to tanks, and tear gas and dogs, it threatens the essential fabric of democracy.”

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

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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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.

Little Dragon roosts at The Fox

Steven T. Jones
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By Rob Goszkowski

Janet Jackson was in heavy rotation when Little Dragon went to work on Nabuma Rubberband, the album they released in May. That’s the Janet-era Janet — the sexy, sultry version of the R&B superstar — so it’s no coincidence that there are a few slow jams on the fourth record by the electro, soul, and synthpop quartet.

“I think we fit in right now at the moment. But we do love the ’80s and the sounds of that era have been a big part of our childhood soundtrack,” explains drummer Erik Bodin.

At the moment of this correspondence, he and the band, including vocalist Yukimi Nagano, bassist Fredrik Källgren Wallin, and keyboardist Håkan Wirenstrand, are “in Japan, trying out all the extra technical features everything has. Like automatic toilet cover lifts and such. We are also doing some shows at the Summersonic festival.” The lack of high-tech privies not withstanding, the band is excited about its return to the U.S. (They hit the Fox Theater for a sold-out show tomorrow, Fri/22.)

“We always felt love from California, and especially the Bay Area,” says Bodin. “People really seem to have an easy time getting down to our music.”

Indeed, much of Nabuma Rubberband is easy to dance to. It’s also restrained and mature in many respects, amid the bounce and clap of its soundscapes. It is — and feels like — an album recorded during winter months in Sweden. The beats can be sparse, the lyrics world-weary, yet they’re still fun. That dichotomy is well-represented in the album cover artwork by Chinese photographer Li Wei. It features a photo by of a little girl in a white dress in mid-air with her arms outstretched, the background a flat field of dormant, brown grass and traces of a smoggy/foggy city on the horizon.

And then there’s “Paris,” one of the album’s three singles, with its wonderful depth: a rollicking hi-hat and a danceable beat, but with somber chords and singer Yukimi clearly expressing that pulling away from the relationship in question.

It’s a workable songwriting strategy and they return to it over the course of the record. While there’s a solid groove in every track, the band may pair it with sober warnings about the greed (“blinded by the rubberbands”) or the risk in the pursuit of fame (“You’re aiming the royal scene/Fast luck /TV dreams/ Pretty girl, don’t get struck”) “It’s all up to each and everyone to interpret the lyrics … but of course we put a lot of consciousness into our lyrics and music,” Bodin says. “It’s nice to mix it up and pair dance music next to deeper, more-serious lyrics.” (Nagano breaks down the meaning of the title track here.)

The band has deliberately not abandoned what made them creatively compelling when they first formed the group as high school students in Gothenburg, Sweden. Youth provides energy and unpredictability, which is great for creativity, but it can also lead to bad decisions that can hurt the group and its career. The band’s name is reference to Yukimi’s feisty personality — she’s the youngest in the group. While the resulting tension has settled, Bodin contends that they haven’t changed that much since they started playing together in 1996.

“Fred is still the tallest. Yukimi still the smallest. Håkan is still the smartest (he thinks). Erik is still the smartest (actual fact). It feels like the circumstances have become different, though. We don’t have as much time as we used to just playing, fighting, painting and such. It’s both a good and sad thing. We feel it’s important to protect the childishness and playfulness.”

Their spurts of levity aren’t hard to find. In their music video for “Paris,” the band halts its road trip through the countryside in an orange VW bus at a small roadside deli. Håkan, repleat with a magnificent red beard, loses badly in an arm-wrestling match to a petite, straight-faced girl. Why is unclear. “That is a question we all wonder about,” Bodin says, maintaining the band’s dry humor. “He is not so strong after all, it turned out.”

Or they’ll apply a few less-serious words with a serious message. A trifling man playing games with his lover is called “smooth cat rider.” A pretty girl hung up on “the free fantasy” of easy fame?  That’s “Riding a unicorn through your Dali.” Bodin will neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of these interpretations during his interview with the Bay Guardian, only acknowledging that, “Fred wants to ride a cat, but the rest of us prefer the more reliable unicorns.”

Despite the diversion in opinion about which animal is more worthy of a saddle, the band is committed to being a single unit with the inevitable rise and fall of internal disagreement that accompanies it. “You get a buzz out of seeing all different wills and wishes clash and turn into a beautiful ‘trasmatta,’” Bodin says cryptically. “There is a hidden translation quest calling upon the reader in this answer.”

LITTLE DRAGON

Friday, Aug, 22, 8pm, $29.50

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.thefoxoakland.com

 

Eyewitness claims victim of officer-involved shooting did not brandish Taser

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Eyewitness claims victim of officer-involved shooting did not brandish Taser

A person claiming to be an eyewitness to the fatal shooting of Alejandro Nieto has come forward to say he did not see Nieto point a Taser at police officers before they opened fire, according to attorney Adante Pointer, who is representing Nieto’s family.

The eyewitness, whose identity Pointer would not disclose, told the attorney that he “did not see Alex point a Taser at anybody” and “did not see or hear any back-and-forth exchange that police said took place,” Pointer said in a phone interview with the Bay Guardian.

At a March 26 town hall meeting convened shortly after the officer-involved shooting, which occurred on March 21 in Bernal Heights Park, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told attendees that Nieto, a 28-year-old City College student, had “tracked” officers with his Taser in the moments before police discharged their weapons.

“When the officers asked him to show his hands, he drew the Taser from the holster. And these particular Tasers, as soon as they’re drawn, they emit a dot. A red dot,” the police chief said, adding that Nieto had verbally challenged officers when they asked him to drop his weapon. “When the officers saw the laser sight on them, tracking, they believed it to be a firearm, and they fired at Mr. Nieto,” Suhr said at the time.

Pointer said the person who claims to be an eyewitness did not know Nieto, and had no connection to the incident aside from having been in the park on the night that the shooting occurred.

He said that because the San Francisco Police Department was not forthcoming with information in the months following the shooting, “we launched our own investigation to get to the bottom of this.” The eyewitness came forward after his office initiated a concerted effort to gather information, he added.

Pointer, who works with the Law Offices of John Burris, plans to file a federal civil complaint against the city tomorrow [Fri/22].

Today [Thu/21] marks five months since Nieto’s death. Supporters plan to gather in Bernal Heights Park for a 7pm sunset vigil. They’ll return at 5am the following day for a sunrise vigil, featuring Buddhist chanting and a reading of the names of those killed by the SFPD in past decades, according to an event announcement.

Later that day, also at Bernal Heights Park, friends and supporters of Nieto plan to gather at noon for a non-violent “March for Civil Rights Against Police Killings!” The march will progress from Bernal Heights Park to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue, where Pointer will file the complaint.

American landscapes: a review of SF native Sean Wilsey’s essay collection, ‘More Curious’

Sue Vaughan
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American landscapes: a review of SF native Sean Wilsey’s essay collection, ‘More Curious’

Midway through the introduction to More Curious (McSweeney’s Books, 342 pp., $22), his recently-published collection of essays from the last 15 years, Sean Wilsey (who appears at the Booksmith Thu/21) reveals his quest to combine the styles of Thomas Pynchon and New Yorker legend Joseph Mitchell — paranoia and precision, respectively.

The introduction itself is a joyfully meta attempt at this very task. The 20-odd pages of often non-sequitorial rumination about the aforementioned authors, the triviality of the 1990s, and the first Obama election can be mistaken as “formless while still astonishingly informative” or “so intricately constructed and fact-filled that the form is too complex to be instantly identified.” The happy reality of all of Wilsey’s essays is somewhere between these two perceptions.

The author, a San Francisco native who now lives in Texas, never entirely abandons the expository air of classic feature writing, but he injects his work with enough personal and manic energy to identify it as decidedly 21st century. While Wilsey recognizes (very humorously) the bombast of comparing oneself to two of the greatest writers of the modern era, his writing does occupy the rarefied territory between Mitchell’s organization and Pynchon’s stream-of-consciousness and is the perfect tone for the frenetic and absurd subjects that make up his collection. 

The primary symptom of Wilsey’s ability to be both informative and emotionally kinetic is how seamlessly he intertwines personal narrative with reference. Never in the collection did I feel jolted when Wilsey inserted a block quote of an email correspondence with a NASA engineer or a quote from Beowulf. To the contrary, Wilsey’s deft research and allusion bolsters his personality — his rabid search for answers would feel anti-climactic without the primary source of his findings.

In this layered memoir about a surreal, Travels With Charley-inspired road trip across the US, WIlsey invokes the social science of George Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context” to discuss America’s obsession with celebrity culture. This graceful quote (which includes the biting “Television is dangerous because it operates according to an attention span that is childish but cold”) is the proverbial Mitchell, a disciplined and timely revelation of a concept that makes a point about the collective. But after Wilsey realizes that the backups he causes in his impossibly slow 1960 Chevy Apache pickup have halted the transport of military and retail goods, he brings the Trow allusion into the paranoid — he is the free spirit holding back the movement of inanimate celebrity, the Pynchonian radical wrench in the machine.

In the majority of Wilsey’s 15 essays he creates a similar dichotomy between colorful reporting and intense feeling. In “Some of Them Can Read,” Wilsey throws together dozens of facts about New York’s rat population (with the titular affirmation only half as disturbing as the most grotesque truisms about the beasts) while waxing philosophical about the special place of paranoia that rats inhabit for new fathers. In his ode to skateboarding, “Using So Little,” Wilsey gives a detailed cultural history of the art (or sport, though he rejects this branding) while discussing the personal escape it allowed for him in the topsy-turvy world of the 1980s San Francisco urban haute bourgeoisie. And in “The Objects of My Obsession,” he breaks down Craigslist culture while revealing his increasingly pagan and obsessive relationship with the site and the epic journeys its resultant acquisitions afford. 

It’s often difficult to tell how Wilsey avoids a simple deductive pattern of conceptual to personal — this tendency plagues an overwhelming majority of confessional and “new” (if we’re in 1968) journalists, though is perfectly reasonable given the desire to adequately prove to the reader that the article has educational value before the author unleashes his idiosyncrasies onto the page. The constant back-and-forth between personal experience and cultural analysis keeps the writing from becoming predictable or repetitive. I got to know Wilsey, assuredly, but he was always capable of surprising me.

Near the end of “The World I Want to Live In,” a dialectic on the quirkiness of World Cup soccer that, unlike almost anything else in the book, feels vaguely dated (it was originally published in 2006) after the recent explosion in domestic popularity of the event, Wilsey digresses into a several-page breakdown of the most memorable aspects of the 1970 World Cup. The shift is so within the narrative but also just so damn trivial — that Wilsey includes it in full (and it is one surprisingly complete digression of many, I assure you) helps him carve out a space beyond Mitchell and Pynchon, where the voracious Wikipedians among us are sated without even having to ask. 

Wilsey’s tendency to elevate his Mitchell-influenced addenda to levels of specificity only possible in the Internet age allows his work, when taken in full, to feel generation-defining. Wilsey, now almost 45, has grown through the advent of the second millennium from being identified as the son of controversial socialites to an ubiquitous magazine contributor to a recognized literary voice. The paranoias that have seemingly driven his modern humanist journey are just as intense as those of any other time — fatherhood, vocation, separation from parents, guilt are pretty timeless fuels.

In fact, in the post-9/11 world they may even be elevated — Wilsey lived near the World Trade Center and constantly invokes his personal fear of the attacks throughout the collection, even including an essay about his attempts to help grieving relatives in the immediate aftermath. Access to anecdotes, minutiae, and statistics, however, is an emotional comfort and storytelling tactic that is far more complete now than it was in the heydays of Wilsey’s literary idols. It is this timeliness of style, alongside self-awareness and acknowledgement of the past, that makes Wilsey’s collection feel unified and a welcome chronicle of our age.  

Check back for an interview with author Sean Wilsey, coming soon!

Sean Wilsey

Thu/21, 7:30pm, free

Booksmith

1644 Haight, SF

www.booksmith.com

Vigil at 3:33pm tomorrow for Feather, faerie found beaten near Duboce Park

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Vigil at 3:33pm tomorrow for Feather, faerie found beaten near Duboce Park

The life of Bryan Higgins, 31, know among his radical faerie community as Feather, will be celebrated tomorrow at 3:33pm with a vigil at Duboce Park — the exact moment his family wishes to remove him from life support at SF General Hospital.

Feather is the John Doe whom police were attempting to identify this weekend in a viral campaign, whose unconscious, critically injured body was found near Duboce and Church streets at 7:30am on Sunday morning, and who has been sustained through life support at SF General while friends, family, and fellow faeries have streamed through to wish their goodbyes. Until now, Feather has not been identified in the press. In a personal interview today with his husband, Brian Hagerty, I learned more about how this central figure in the faerie community will be ushered into the next life. 

Feather’s family has not been talking to the police or the press — Feather’s husband spoke to me in an effort to get the word out about the vigil tomorrow. Police are now considering Feather’s death an attempted homicide via assault with a deadly weapon; according to sources, they are looking for a white male in a dark-colored hoodie, who was captured on Muni and surrounding businesses’ security footage around the time of the assault. (Anyone with relevant info please contact 415-575-4444 or text TIP411 with “SFPD” at the start of the message.)

 “We haven’t been in contact with anyone other than those immediately involved in Feather’s passing,” Hagerty told me today as we walked near New Rosenberg’s Deli, where Feather worked, and where mourners were gathered wearing “I Believe: Feather 1983-2014” t-shirts sporting Feather’s image.    

Hagerty, visibly shaken but acknowledging tremendous support of family and the faerie community, said he didn’t have any other information about the circumstances of Feather’s horrendous beating. “Right now, we are just concerned with his spirit, and making sure everyone has a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “Too many factors came together in this situation. But the truth is he has left us.”

Hagerty declined to reveal any more medical information, and no more information was available from the police at the time of this writing. The Guardian will be following the case as it develops.

Feather’s case has drawn attention from the media as violent crime in San Francisco seems to be taking an upswing, especially in the gay-friendly Castro District. Supervisors and gay community members are weighing the possibility of radical changes to June’s Pink Saturday celebration, and the area around Church and Duboce has become especially fraught with crime lately, as the surrounding neighborhoods undergo profound changes.

But mostly the shock of such a stalwart of the faerie community — one dedicated to gentleness, peace, and spiritualism — being beaten, possibly to death, is what’s drawing attention and disbelief.

A friend who was in the hospital room as Feather’s husband said goodbye described the scene in a series of texts:

“There are young gay men going in and out of the room holding and kissing his hands; whispering in his ear; family walking in and crying and massaging his feet; relatives encouraging their crying children to say goodbye to him. People meeting each other and hugging, watching TV in the waiting room, handing each other Kleenex in the hospital room. It is so fucking beautiful and sad.

“His husband put a black, white, and tan African dye-print scarf around Feather’s neck, and stretched it out over his shoulders and arms and body with his beautiful face above it…. like he is a bird/spirit preparing to fly.”     

Update 8/14: Photos and coverage of Feather’s memorial can be found here.

Happy Hour: The week in music

Steven T. Jones
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Happy Friday, friends, and welcome to August. We’re only about a month away from summer weather!

As happy hour draws closer, here’s a look back at the best music and music news we heard and saw this past week:

— Sharon Van Etten shone in a free, intimate (though packed-to-the-gills), Pandora-presented evening at The Chapel on Tuesday night [July 29]. “I wrote this song while living in my parents’ basement…I was 26,” she said with a laugh in her voice. “How many of you have ever tried to move back in with your parents’ when you were in your twenties?” [Loud whooping from most of the room.]

“I think that just usually means you’re trying to figure out who you are, that you’re still finding your path, you know?” she continued. “I mean, if you really knew who you were by the time you were 20, fuck you. No, sorry, that’s great. Anyway, this song is about trying to get your shit together.” Millennial anthem for the ages?

— New for this year at Outside Lands: an entire stage devoted to food events, called “GastroMagic.” Some of said events are paired somewhat hilariously with accompanying musical acts, like the “Beignets & Bounce Brunch with Big Freedia and Brenda’s French Soul Food,” in which audience members who answer the Queen of Bounce’s call to twerk will be “awarded with beignets.” No word on the distribution method, exactly, but we pictured t-shirt cannons?

freedia

— This NPR piece on why band photos look the way they do is relevant to our interests. Specifically, if any banjo-laden alt-country/Americana band ever sends us an EPK that includes a photo shoot in an alley full of burning crash cans, we will run it.

— Speaking of Americana: This is a fun piece from the Bay Bridged about the boys of Goodnight, Texas, who make it work despite being in what amounts to a four-way long-distance relationship. Are there Cosmo tips for that yet? Get with it, lady mags. Anyway, GN,TX’s new album Uncle John Farquhar drops Aug. 5, and it’s rather good.

— Here’s a smart essay at Ebony about the shitstorm that ensued this week from Nicki Minaj’s new album, um, art for Anaconda.

— Like much of the music-related Internet, we too got obsessed with a little-known Canadian singer-songwriter named Tobias Jesso Jr., who by all appearances is a young reincarnation of Harry Nilsson mixed with shades of Joe Jackson and who hasn’t even put out an album yet, but damn does he need to hurry up (quick, while Stereogum, Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, your local PTA president, etc., are addicted to this song):

— Hardly Strictly Bluegrass keeps dropping hints about this year’s lineup. Listen here and tell us your guesses.

— Andrew Bird is a self-deprecating sweetheart in addition to being very good at songwriting and whistling, as you can see in this SFist interview, and he’s playing Stern Grove for free this Sunday at 2pm.

— Mastodong.

Eviction imminent for San Francisco Community Recycler’s Center

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Eviction imminent for San Francisco Community Recycler’s Center

This morning (Wed/16), outside the San Francisco Community Recycler’s Center in the parking lot of the Safeway at Church and Market streets, a group of protesters stood in a cluster, chanting: “Cans not condos!”

As the Guardian previously reported, Safeway is in the process of evicting the recycling center, which continued to operate up until yesterday. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which carries out evictions on Wednesdays, had signaled to the center’s operators that they could be forced out anytime after July 16.

That led supporters and volunteers with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness to show up at 5:30am in a bid to beat the sheriff there. They stood on the sidewalk outside the recycling center’s locked gate, waving signs.

“We’ll be holding space as long as we can,” Lisa-Marie Altorre, of the Coalition on Homelessness, told the Guardian a little after 7am. Calls to the Sheriff’s Department were not returned, but Altorre said around 12:15 that supporters had received “official word” that the eviction would be going forward, “likely later in the day.”

[UPDATE: Sheriff’s Department deputies showed up at 7am the next morning to enforce the eviction, and the center is now closed.]

Sup. Scott Wiener told the Guardian in an earlier interview that his District 8 constituents had complained about the recycling center’s presence, saying the facility draws too many unruly patrons, who are often homeless. A new condominium development looms over the recycling center from one direction, while a mixed-use condo development with a Whole Foods on the ground floor lies just across the street.

But recycling center operators argue that the eviction will be harmful to patrons, who need the extra money to get by, and that it will erode the city’s environmental goals. There’s also an issue of impacts on surrounding small businesses, which could be required under state law to accept recycling in-store, a burdensome task for smaller retailers, or to pay fees.

“Eliminating community-based recycling has grave impacts on San Francisco, from public safety to huge environmental fails, including moving us away from goals of being Zero Waste in 2020,” said Ed Dunn of the San Francisco Community Recyclers Center. Dunn was previously affiliated with the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center, which was evicted from a parking lot in Golden Gate Park. “It is sad to think any elected leader would support a move like this,” Dunn said, “and a corporation like Safeway would get away with turning their back on their corporate civic responsibility to something as vital as recycling.”

Start your engines

Steven T. Jones
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esilvers@sfbg.com

Everyone knows that true artists do their best work right before deadline. [Ed note: I may or may not be writing this an hour or so before mine.]

Now in its third year, the Music Video Race is an annual San Francisco tradition that takes this dictum to heart, pairing 16 different musical acts with 16 filmmakers for a challenge that makes that “find a flag in the middle of this big fake nose filled with green goop” thing on Double Dare seem like a cakewalk: Conceive, film, and edit an entire music video in 48 hours.

After accepting applications from both filmmakers and musicians for roughly two months, MVR organizers matched up pairs by random drawing at 7:30pm on Friday, July 11, turning the teams loose around the Bay Area, with a final deadline of 8pm on Sunday, July 13. This year’s bands include SF’s Rin Tin Tiger (which will cap their participation with a headlining spot at the video release party, held at The Independent Sun/20), Oakland’s Bill Baird (fresh from rocking Phono del Sol), Rich Girls, Lemme Adams, and bed. [Another ed note: Yours truly will be helping to judge said videos, and I’m rather excited about it.]

“We try to pick a diverse group of bands — we don’t want 20 garage bands or folk acts, etc. There’s so much variety in the Bay, and we really ant to respect that,” says Tim Lillis, an MVR founder, of how they select the participants. “But beyond that, we’re mostly just looking for flexibility, a willingness to roll with the punches, a sense of adventure.”

New this year: We Bay Area-dwellers aren’t so special anymore. The MVR is expanding to Austin and LA, over the weekends of Sept. 5-7 and Nov. 7-9, respectively.

“We’ve had a few really expansive years here, and I think this will help people understand that this isn’t just a San Francisco thing — we’re stoked to help local scenes build themselves,” says Lillis.

For an extended version of this interview, check out the Noise blog this week (www.sfbg.com/noise) and for more info or tickets to the premiere party, visit www.musicvideorace.com.

 

MUSIC VIDEO RACE PREMIERE PARTY W/ RIN TIN TIGER, BED.

July 20, 7pm, $14-$16

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

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