Religion

Guardian feminism panel calls for change, gang activity

Andrew Lam
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In the interest of behaving badly, let us first say that we won’t apologize for the “roving feminist gangs” comment, nor the laughter that ensued at our July 11 “Bay Area Feminism Today” panel. In the light of the sexual attacks that have terrorized Mission District residents this year, Celeste Chan’s joke (actually a reference to comments made by Fox News in reference to the New Jersey Seven) has to be read as a self defense tactic — and source of comfort and strength to the women living in the neighborhood. Not a threat to men. Unless they’re commiting sexual assault, of course — but then, women commiting sexual assault will probably have the gang’s wrath to face as well. 

Seven women from all walks of Bay Area activism — arts, nightlife, immigrant advocacy, domestic violence organizations, and more — came together at City College’s Mission branch to discuss what our SF progressive community needs to work on, recent feminist victories, whether they even believe in the term “feminism,” and everything in between. Our “Faces of feminism” cover story announcing the event attracted a decent-sized crowd of around 120 (mainly young women, with zero male elected officials in attendance.) We laughed, we nearly cried, we came away with a lot to think about. Here’s some of the general topics that were discussed. And here’s to this being a spark for continued talks, however a Fourth Wave Bay feminism may take shape.

>>FOR THE FULL BIOS OF OUR PANELISTS, CHECK OUT THE EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT 

Reproductive justice

Reproductive justice has long been a feminist goal, but with the recent spate of attacks on birth control and abortion access it’s come up again. Are we here in the Bay Area isolated from the War On Women?Some panelists thought we can affect the country’s situation positively.

“Part of what we do here in the Bay Area is we send strong women to Washington,” the Drug Policy Alliance‘s Laura Thomas said. “We are responsible for a significant amount of women in Congress.” But California’s reproductive justice situation is more complicated than it may seem. St. James Infirmary‘s Stephany Ashley noted that reproductive health here is under attack with “criminalization of HIV-positive people,”  and that California “just cut all funding for HIV prevention for women.”

>>CHECK OUT REBECCA BOWE’S RECORDED LIVESTREAM OF THE EVENT HERE

Chan, founder of Queer Rebels Productions, added that California is cutting domestic violence services through slashing CalWORKS funding. Mujeres Unidas‘ Juana Flores noted that the Bay’s Latino communities can find it difficult to support aspects of reproductive health because of religion and tradition. But she said that people need to work together and realize that “it’s a real war. It’s a real war on us.” She warned that “politicians are not going to fix things just because they want to improve our lives. We need to fight back.”

Transgender activist and member of SF’s Youth Commission Mia Tu Mutch said that part of the war on women has been a wave of anti-trans legislation across the country, as well as a wave of hate crimes, especially against trans women of color. Some legislation in Tennessee is making it more difficult for trans people to go the bathroom, she said. “Reproductive justice is important, but we also need just the simple right to pee.”

But what about the word itself?

Does feminism have power as its own concept now, or has its work been rightly subsumed into the queer movement, the civil rights movement, and other forms of activism? “A lot of us can agree that there isn’t something you can point to and say, this is the feminist movement in San Francisco,” Ashley said. “But there are many important feminist projects happening.”
Alix Rosenthal, who created a controversial women’s slate in her bid for re-election on the SF Democratic County Central Committee recalled how “30 to 40 years ago, we all had to join together because there weren’t enough of us. Now people have splintered off.” Chan brought up the bicycle scene in 1983’s feminist sci-fi film Born in Flames, and quoted Audre Lourde: “for so long, we’ve been on the edge of each other’s battles.”

Tu Mutch said that she “would rather identify as fighting for LGBT rights, progressive rights” than as feminist. But, she continued that it is “under the system of patriarchy that we’re all getting screwed over.” She said that women are treated as second-class citizens, and trans and gender non-conforming people are treated as third class citizens in our society.  Edaj, longtime Bay Area DJ and director of the Women’s Stage at Pride for a decade, agreed that the word feminism “sparks a lot of emotion in people” and can create obstacles in growing support. Said Flores: “it’s a big word. People call me a feminist when I claim my rights. When I see another women who is suffering or being abused it’s unbearable to me,” Flores said. “When someone calls me a feminist, I feel proud.”

The inward gaze: how does the San Francisco progressive community do on feminist issues?

In a word: okay. But there’s work to be done even here, in “progressive” San Francisco. Thomas led the charge, talking about the state’s current legal ability to shackle women prisoners during childbirth. Tu Mutch expressed a need to stop “pitting groups against each other,” and to get rid of a City Hall attitude that says “my budget is more important than yours.” Tu Mutch said “there’s still rampant transphobia and gender essentialism,” that affects not just women, but the “countless people born with intersex conditions and who identify outside the binary.”

Ashley pointed out that “even some of our favorite male progressive politicians, you don’t see them cultivating leadership among women, queer people, trans people.” She talked about how that’s a traditional feminist organizing principle, “mentorship and meaningful participation, not just tokenizing participation.”

As a (not) side note, there wasn’t a single male politician in the audience that day. As Ashley put it, “patriarchy is really the problem.” Ashley and panel moderator, SFBG culture editor Caitlin Donohue shared the fact that they’ve felt diminished by remarks made by and in the company of the city’s so-called “progressive politicians.”

Recent feminist victories

But enough depressing stuff. How about recent feminist victories, asked an audience member.

This question was met with a disconcerting silence. Until Chan jumped in: “I’m really inspired by the place queer arts are at right now.” She told of the “lineage of resistance” of art that deals with questions like “how do people survive the unimaginable? How do people survive the truly horrific?” Disturbing incidents like that of transgender prisoner Cece McDonald beg the question, “is the perfect victim a dead victim? If you fight back, you’ll be criminalized? Now more than ever we need a movement. We really need to come together,” concluded Chan.

Rosenthal saw hope in surprising places. “Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman,” she said. “These women are so incompetent. But they made it. They really made it.” She talked about how usually women have had to be five times better than the men they competed with, but “Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman are not five times better than anyone. But they made it.”
Laura Thomas was inspired by Julia Bluhm, the 14-year old ballet dancer from Maine whose online petition led Seventeen to promise to stop using Photoshop to alter women’s body types. Ashley acknowledged Tu Mutch’s advocacy work, and said she was recently inspired by a “take back the plaza” event Tu Mutch had organized. Edaj was inspired by being named a Pride Grand Marshall, and the feeling that the Pride organization was acknowledging the importance of the space created at the Women’s Stage. She was also inspired by Morningstar Vancil, a Filipino vet who is a two-spirit drag king, and Vancil’s commitment to disabled veterans issues.

Action items

In response to a question that asked what the 2012 action plan for Bay Area feminists should involve, Ashley said “principles of intersectionality, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism” had to be valued more than they have been in past feminist movements. They’re there in Third Wave feminism, Ashely said, only they are “wrapped up in theory and academia.” Those guiding principles should have “more on the ground” applicability. What needs to happen right now, speaking of on the ground? Back to 2012’s spate of sexual violence in the Mission, there’s a distinct necessity for “a perfect community response that doesn’t involve the police, so that we all of a sudden feel really comfortable taking a walk at 3 in the morning through our favorite neighborhood.”

Flores said that any new form of feminism would need to be about “mutual respect” and “against any form of injustice,” to which Thomas agreed, saying it needs to be “less theory, more practice.” It also, Thomas said “has to deal with gender in a different way. A new feminism needs to go beyond gender, or deal with gender differently” in the sense of respecting gender non-conforming identities. A tricky prospect, she admitted. “How you develop a gendered movement that doesn’t use gender as a defining construct, I don’t know.” More specifically, she underlined the importance of “progressive revenue measures,” and “an end to cuts to childcare and domestic violence programs.” “Our economy’s not coming back through more cuts. We need revenue, more taxes,” she said, to cheers from the crowd. Well this was a Guardian forum, after all. 

Edaj reiterated that “that word scares off a lot of people who might otherwise want to join.” Tu Mutch underlined that it would need to “take up the idea that men and women are opposites. That only serves to degrade women.” A new feminism, she said, would be about “turning away from that and realizing there’s lots of different genders.”

Tu Mutch said she would like to see success for her organization to fight for trans healthcare rights, FEATHER. “People have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to transition,” she said. “We need universal healthcare for all, including trans people.”

Chan pondered the question. In the end, she concluded, “roving feminist gangs,” inspiring at least one angry letter from a slighted middleaged white man in the crowd. Which wasn’t the only reason why we deemed the panel a success, but an important one.

Melody machers

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Melody machers

>>Read Cheryl Eddy’s take on this year’s SFJFF documentaries here.

SFJFF “All greatness comes from pain.” The simple statement comes from Raoul Felder, brother of legendary R&B songwriter Doc Pomus, in the beautiful, crushing mediation on his brother’s life, A.K.A. Doc Pomus, the closing-night film of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Doc wrote some of the greatest music of a generation: R&B and early rock’n’roll standards such as “This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Save the Last Dance For Me,” and “Viva Las Vegas” — songs made famous by the likes of Dion, the Drifters, and Elvis Presley. Jewish, debilitated by polio, and vastly overweight, Doc defied expectations while struggling with a lifetime of outsider status and physical pain.

It’s a subject that runs — albeit in far paler shades — throughout many of the fest’s music-filled documentaries. Defying limitations, strength through struggle, alienation, outsiders looking in; these all come up again and again. Tsuris to nachas, struggle to get to joy. All that plays out in the films, along with wildly varying (R&B, hip-hop, classical old world violin, 1990s-era Australian grunge pop) and vibrant music created by the subjects.

In Y-Love, about the gay, formerly Hasidic (still Orthodox) black Jewish rapper, these themes of isolation persist, almost painfully so. Having just come out during the year of filming, Y-Love seems to be smack dab in the midst of his struggle, and not yet capable of showing it all to the cameras following him through performances in Israel, his childhood neighborhood in Baltimore, and a New York recording studio. Most of these scenes are a bit long, focusing intently on Y-Love’s furrowed brow as he talks in great detail about the past without revealing much about how it’s affecting him now.

That’s not to say he hasn’t achieved something notable — we see that part. Y-Love does have followers, his records are starting to gain some traction, his YouTube videos have plenty of hits. He’s an anomaly in the communities he’s chosen (Judaism, the hip-hop scene), and owes his burgeoning artist status to this. He defied an agonizing childhood with an alcoholic, drug-addicted mother by turning to Judaism — a religion he first heard of in a TV commercial, a story he mentions in most interviews — and using word flow to study Torah.

On the other side of the world, and from an entirely different generation, there’s Jascha Heifetz, the gifted subject of God’s Fiddler. Growing up in rural Russia in the early part of the last century (he passed away in 1987), he was attached to the violin nearly since birth — a voice-over tells the story of Heifetz as a baby being soothed by the instrument’s sound — and a prodigy by age 5. Heifetz struggled with a demanding father and rising anti-Semitism, and had to fight to live in Saint Petersburg: the city had a quota for the amount of Jews allowed within its limits, not to mention the amount of Jews allowed to study at its prestigious music conservatory. But his eventual international attention and success led to a period of rebellion; negative reviews led the wunderkind to contemplate suicide. Emerging from the darkness, he re-focused on his instrument — but never again smiled while playing.

Though Ben Lee was born in Sydney, Australia some 77 years later, his musical journey — traced in fun, frenzied, colorful doc Ben Lee: Catch My Disease — mirrors Heifetz’s in certain ways. His first bout with fame also came at an early age, as a precocious tween in ’93 with his band Noise Addict. He went on to achieve higher levels of attention as a solo artist, steadily releasing poppier albums throughout the late ’90s and early ’00s, but never again reached as wide an audience outside of Oz (where he is a bona fide superstar).

Catch My Disease features interviews with ’90s mainstays and enduring entertainers like Thurston Moore (who discovered Lee as a child), Beastie Boy Mike D (who signed him to Grand Royal), actor Winona Ryder, and former girlfriend Claire Danes; Lee emerges as a well-rounded, exuberantly talented musician, always chasing a seemingly unattainable level of success.

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 19-August 6, most shows $12

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Opens Thu/28, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Fri/29 or July 6). Through Aug 18. A multi-character solo show about the characters of San Francisco.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $25. Opens Wed/27, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 8pm; Fri-Sat, 7 and 9:30pm; July 8, 5pm. Through July 8. Boxcar Theatre performs John Cameron Mitchell’s musical about a transgendered glam rocker.

Jip: His Story Marsh San Francisco, MainStage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Previews Fri/29, 7:30pm. Opens Sat/30, 5pm. Runs Sun/1, 4:30; Thu-Fri, 7:30pm; Sat, 2pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 15. Marsh Youth Theater remounts its 2005 musical production of Katherine Paterson’s historical novel.

Waiting… Larkspur Hotel Union Square, 525 Sutter, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $69-75. Opens Fri/29, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Aug 5. Comedy set behind the scenes at a San Francisco restaurant.

ONGOING

Aftermath Stagewerx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. Theatre, Period presents Jessica Blank and Erik Jenson’s docu-drama, based on interviews with Iraqi civilians forced to flee after the US military’s arrival in 2003.

A Behanding in Spokane SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-70. Wed/27-Thu/28, 7pm; Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm (also Sat/30, 3pm). If Garth Ennis had been asked to write a comic book about a one-handed sociopath with a dark obsession, he might well have written something similar to Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane. And admittedly, approached from that angle, a lot of the script’s dramatic flaws are more easily forgiven. There’s not a whole lot of subtle context or languid metaphor to be found in McDonagh’s criminal caper about the little-known “hand-dealing” trade, but as in Ennis’ best known work, Preacher, the pretty girl (Melissa Quine) is the smartest one in the room; the sociopath (Rod Gnapp) is interested in enacting as vicious a revenge on all humanity while spewing as many blatantly offensive invectives as possible; the boyfriend (Daveed Diggs) has some arrested development issues to work out; and the receptionist (Alex Hurt) takes the caricature of man-child to a whole new level. In fact, while all four actors deliver rock-solid performances of their mostly unsympathetic characters, it’s Hurt’s that impresses most. His spooky intensity and goofily tone-deaf determination plays like a combination of Adam Sandler and Arno Frisch, and if there’s a real sociopath in the room, the evidence suggests it’s probably him. Ultimately though the piece relies too heavily on hollow one-liners to remain interesting — a 20-minute farce stretched to 90 minutes — and quite unlike an Ennis comic, it does not leave one wanting more. (Gluckstern)

Bruja Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Extended run: Wed/27-Fri/29, 8pm; Sun/1, 2:30pm and 7pm. Although San Francisco’s Mission District is inexorably morphing into an empire of twee boutiques and haute cuisine, it’s still the first port of call for many Latin American migrants, and there are plenty of panaderias and botanicas tucked in between the sushi joints. In the Magic Theatre’s production of Bruja, playwright Luis Alfaro transplants the story of Medea to 24th Street by way of Michoacán, exploring the tension between retaining old-country values and staking out a future in a new world. Directed by artistic director Loretta Greco, the title role played by a stunning Sabina Zuniga Varela, this chamber version of the Greek tragedy hits hard, exposing each character’s darkest secrets to an unforgiving light. And every character, save the doomed brothers Acan and Acat (played the night I saw it by Daniel Castaneda and Gavilan Gordon-Chavez), has a secret to hide, even Medea, a curandera or healer by trade, whose powers run deeper and darker than her new world acquaintances, or even her old servant (Wilma Bonet) suspect. And when Jason (Sean San José) and his callous boss Creon (Carlos Aguirre), ruthlessly push Medea to her breaking point, her bloody vengeance proves, if little else, that she can play at ruthlessness better than anyone, whatever the consequences. (Gluckstern)

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 10pm). Through July 21. Tides Theatre performs Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood’s comedy about five women forced into a bomb shelter during a mid-breakfast nuke attack.

The Full Monty Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.roltheatre.com. $25-36. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm (also Sat/30, 2pm). In desperate times, how far would you go to turn a buck? The central premise of the 1997 movie and its namesake musical comedy The Full Monty, the answer to this question is right in the title, which limits the suspense, but amps up the expectations. Set not in Sheffield, England as in the movie, but the similarly economically challenged climate of Buffalo, New York circa the late nineties, the comical romp follows a group of unemployed steel workers who decide, rather optimistically, that spending one night as exotic dancers will solve their immediate financial woes. Banish all notions of a Hot Chocolate sing-along; the soundtrack of the stage musical has little in common with its cinematic predecessor, but there are a couple of toe-tappers, particularly the songs writ for the ladies: a belter’s anthem for their spry but elderly accompanist Jeanette (Cami Thompson), a snarky commentary on male beauty, “The Goods,” for the ensemble. On opening night, Ray of Light’s production ran about 15 minutes long after a late start, and the tempo seemed sluggish in parts, but once it hits its stride, The Full Monty should provide a welcome antidote to the ongoing, we’re-still-in-a-recession blues, red leather g-strings and all. (Gluckstern) Fwd: Life Gone Viral Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm (July 15, show at 7:30pm). Extended through July 22. The internet becomes comic fodder for creator-performers Charlie Varon and Jeri Lynn Cohen, and creator-director David Ford.

Lips Together, Teeth Apart New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed/27-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 2pm. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Terrence McNally’s play about two straight couples spending July 4 amid Fire Island’s gay community.

100 Saints You Should Know Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.therhino.org. $10-30. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 3pm. Homespun scenic design notwithstanding, Theatre Rhinoceros and artistic director John Fisher offer a fine, engrossing production of this 2007 play by Kate Fodor (Hannah and Martin, RX), a sturdy comedy-drama about two fractured families colliding awkwardly in a sort of spiritual vacuum. Matthew (an intriguingly restrained Wiley Herman) is a desolate but forbearing Catholic priest sent on a leave of absence after a venial transgression involving some artful nude male photographs. Returning home, he endures a pained relationship with his devout, passively domineering Irish mother (Tamar Cohn, channeling a nicely measured mixture of stony discipline and childlike vulnerability). Soon Matthew gets an unexpected visit from single mom Theresa (a bright but shrewdly self-possessed Ann Lawler), a former Deadhead who now cleans the rectory and finds herself overcome with an urge to ask the gentle priest about prayer — just at the moment his faith seems to have left him. Meanwhile, Theresa’s too-cool-for-school teenager, Abby (a deft and hilarious Kim Stephenson), waits outside and does some preying of her own on a slower-witted but game young man from the neighborhood (a charmingly quirky Michael Rosen), both of them roiling with confused yearnings. The appealing characters and unexpected storyline come supported by some excellent dialogue, developing a searching theme that ultimately has less to do with formal religion than the ordinary but ineffable need it promises (problematically) to meet. “I think I could be religious or whatever if it made any sense,” notes Abby, “but it doesn’t make any sense.” It’s easy to agree with the teenager on this one. 100 Saints is a genuinely funny and compassionate play discerning enough to avoid naming the depths it sounds. (Avila)

Proof NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.proofsf.com. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through July 14. $28. Expression Productions performs David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play about a mathematician and his daughter.

Reunion SF Playhouse, Stage Two, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20. Wed/27-Thu/28, 7pm; Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm. SF Playhouse presents a world premiere drama by local playwright Kenn Rabin.

“Risk Is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival” Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. Free ($20 donation for reserved seating; $50 donation for five-play reserved seating pass). Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through July 14. Cutting Ball’s annual fest of experimental plays features two new works and five new translations in staged readings.

The Scottsboro Boys American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Opens Wed/27, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (Tue/3 performance at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm; no matinee July 4); Sun/1 and July 8, 7pm. Through July 15. American Conservatory Theater presents the Kander and Ebb musical about nine African American men falsely accused of a crime they didn’t commit in the pre-civil rights movement South.

Slipping New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed/27-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 2pm. Midwestern high-school senior Eli (Evan Johnson), a recent transfer from San Francisco, is a rebellious gay teen with issues — what American teen doesn’t have issues? But then Eli’s, which include the loss of a beloved father and a Hamlet-like resentment for his recently widowed, sexually liberated academic of a mom (a subtle Stacy Thunes), have already driven him over the ledge. Eli’s “slip” into a state of deep grief is further accelerated by the complicated, violently closeted love he left back in San Francisco. In flashbacks, Eli relives this punishing, irresistible relationship with Chris (a coiled, forceful Fernando Navales) as meanwhile new best friend Jake (Benjamin T. Ismail) gradually expresses more than platonic interest and life with mother builds toward a showdown, in New Conservatory’s Bay Area premiere of Bay Area–born playwright Daniel Talbott’s thoughtfully drawn if dramatically underdeveloped play. In contrast to Ron Gasparinetti’s purposefully vague “anywhere” of a monochrome set (consisting of several low or sloped stone slabs), director Andrew Nance’s cast are engagingly precise in their clear-eyed take on adolescent anguish. Johnson proves gracefully multifaceted as Eli, at turns unbearable in his loose, simmering rage and disarming in his helplessness and heartbreak. And a charmingly awkward and earnest Ismail makes wholly convincing Jake’s innocent moth-to-flame attraction. Indeed, the play’s weaknesses — including a dizzying amount of hopping around the time-space continuum and, more critically, a dramatic arc that’s too neat and shallow to be really satisfying — do not completely detract from a worthwhile subject that often feels drawn from life. (Avila)

Vital Signs Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm. Through July 21. The Marsh San Francisco presents Alison Whittaker’s behind-the-scenes look at nursing in America.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through July 7. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.brownpapertickets.com. $18-25. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 2pm. Symmetry Theatre Company presents Bay Area playwright Lauren Gunderson’s romantic drama centering on the life of 18th-century French physicist and mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet (Danielle Levin) and her (here tempestuous) long-term romance with Voltaire (Robert Parsons). In a familiar conceit left accordingly vague, fate rematerializes Emilie from some hazy afterlife so that she may relive key moments in her life and account for herself. A Cartesian mind/body split rules the replay, with Emilie finding herself painfully attenuated from the world of the senses — her flashback self (played by an impressive Blythe Foster) alone able to enjoy sensual contact with her surroundings. Meanwhile, love and loyalty face the test as Emilie goes head-to-head with a male-dominated scientific establishment over a certain theorem she calls “force vivre” — a formula into which Gunderson cleverly folds theoretical physics and the irrational heart. There’s even a visual aid: a running tally is kept throughout on a screen at the back of the stage, where hash marks appear and disappear under the headings “philosophy” and “love” as the scenes wind their desultory way back toward the moment of her demise. Chloe Bronzan directs a cast of strong actors but their work is uneven. Foster alone is consistently commanding in a part that, while minor, suggests what a more muscular approach overall might have accomplished. The normally formidable Parsons seems uncommitted in the part of Voltaire, admittedly a character too simpering and watery as written to merit much credence. Instead of palpable relationships — whether with lovers or ideas — Emilie deploys self-conscious verbiage, strained repartee and heavy thematic underscoring to churn what amounts to thin drama. (Avila)

Emotional Creature Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no show July 13); Wed, 7pm (no show July 4); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 15. Berkeley Rep presents Eve Ensler’s world premiere, based on her best-seller I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through July 15. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri/29, 8pm; Sat/30, 5pm. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. Note: review from the show’s 2011 run at the Marsh San Francisco. (Avila)

The Odyssey Angel Island; (415) 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. $40-76 (some tickets include ferry passage). Sat/30-Sun/1, 10:30am-4pm (does not include travel time to island). We Players present Ava Roy’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem: an all-day adventure set throughout the nature and buildings of Angel Island State Park.

Salomania Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $30-55. Previews Wed/20, 8pm. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Throgh July 22. The libel trial of a politically opportunistic newspaper publisher (Mark Andrew Phillips) and the private life of a famous dancer of the London stage — San Franciscan Maud Allan (a striking Madeline H.D. Brown) — become the scandalous headline-grabber of the day, as World War I rages on in some forgotten external world. In Aurora’s impressive world premiere by playwright-director Mark Jackson, the real-life story of Allan, celebrated for her risqué interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, soon gets conflated with the infamous trial (20 years earlier) of Wilde himself (a shrewdly understated Kevin Clarke). But is this case just a media-stoked distraction, or is there a deeper connection between the disciplining of “sexual deviance” and the ordered disorder of the nation state? Jackson’s sharp if sprawling ensemble-driven exploration brings up plenty of tantalizing suggestions, while reveling in the complexly intermingling themes of sex, nationalism, militarism, women’s rights, and the webs spun by media and politics. A group of trench-bound soldiers (the admirable ensemble of Clarke, Alex Moggridge, Anthony Nemirovsky, Phillips, Marilee Talkington, and Liam Vincent) provide one comedy-lined avenue into a system whose own excesses are manifest in the insane carnage of war — yet an insanity only possible in a world policed by illusions, distractions and the fear of unsettled and unsettling “deviants” of all kinds. In its cracked-mirror portraiture of an era, the play echoes a social and political turmoil that has never really subsided. (Avila)

Wheelhouse TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Wed/27, 7:30pm; Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm (also Sat/30, 2); Sun/1, 2 and 7pm. TheatreWorks’ 60th world premiere is a musical created by and starring pop-rock trio GrooveLily.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Fri/29, 6pm; Sat/30, 11am. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Alicia Dattner Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. Thu/28-Sat/30, 8pm. $26. The comedian performs.

“DEEPER, Architectural Meditations at CounterPULSE” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri/29-Sun/1, 8pm. $25. Lizz Roman and Dancers perform a site-specific work.

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

“I Heart Hamas: And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You” Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm. $20. Jennifer Jajeh performs her solo show, soon to be presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“Jillarious Tuesdays” Tommy T’s Showroom, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.jillarious.com. Tue, 7:30. Ongoing. $20. Weekly comedy show with Jill Bourque, Kevin Camia, Justin Lucas, and special guests.

“Majestic Musical Review Featuring Her Rebel Highness” Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; www.herrebelhighness.com. Sun, 5pm. Through Aug 12. $25-65. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, performers in Baroque-chic gowns, music, and more.

“Mission in the Mix” Dance Mission Theatre, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 7pm. $17. SF Hip-Hop DanceFest producer Micaya presents new work by her SoulForce Dance Company, plus guest performances.

“Nerdgasm” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; wonderdave.wordpress.com. Thu/28, 8pm. $12. Poetry, storytelling, and more, for nerds and by nerds. Part of the National Queer Arts Festival.

“One Night Only Benefit Cabaret” Marines Memorial Theater, 609 Sutter, SF; www.richmondermet.org. Mon/2, 7:30pm. $25-65. Cast members from the American Idiot tour perform original music and comedy to raise money for the Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

“Picklewater Clown Cabaret: Robot’s Revenge!” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/2, 8pm. $15. Picklewater and guests perform physical comedy and other circus acts.

“Same Amor” Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St, SF; www.ftloose.org. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/1, 3pm. $10-20. Flamenco and contemporary dance, comedy, and live music, featuring Acuña Danza Teatro.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.worldartswest.org. Sat/30-Sun/1, 3pm (also Sat/30, 8pm). $18-58. This final weekend of programming includes dance from Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, the Philippines, Spain, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Sex and the City: Live!” Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Tue, 7 and 9pm. Through June 26. $25. Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger, Lady Bear, Trixxie Carr play the fab four in this drag-tastic homage to the HBO series.

“This Is What I Want Performance Festival” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF; thisiswhatiwant.eventbrite.com. Wed/27-Fri/29, 8pm. $20. Part of the National Queer Arts Festival, this event features different bills each night of new, multidisciplinary performances from San Francisco and Los Angeles-based artists.

“Walking Distance Dance Festival” ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. Fri/29-Sat/30, 6:30pm; Sun/1, 2pm. $20-75. LEVYdance, inkBoat, Kunst-Stoff, and more participate in this new festival, featuring dance artists performing throughout ODC’s two-building campus.

“When We Fall Apart” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Wed/27-Sat/30, 7pm (also Fri/29-Sat/30, 9pm). $25-35. Joe Goode Performance Group presents a world premiere, an exploration of “home” with a set designed by architect Cass Calder Smith.

The Feds are watching — badly

Andrew Lam
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9
The Feds are watching — badly

yael@sfbg.com

So, you’re a law enforcement officer in training for participation on a local Joint Terrorism Task Force. Or a student at the United States Military Academy at West Point, involved in the counterterrorism training program developed in partnership with the FBI. Or you’re an FBI agent training up to deal with terrorist threats.

Get ready for FBI training in dealing with Arab and Muslim populations.

Take note that “Western cultural values” include “rational, straight line thinking” and a tendency to “identify problems and solve them through logical decision-making process” — while “Arab cultural values” are “emotional based” and “facts are colored by emotion and subjectivity.”

Be advised that Arabs have “no concept of privacy” and “no concept of ‘constructive criticism'” and that in Arab culture it is “acceptable to interrupt conversations to convey information or make requests.”

“Westerners think, act, then feel,” an FBI powerpoint briefing notes, while “Arabs feel, act, then think.”

Those are some of the most dramatic examples of racial profiling and outright racist stereotyping revealed in thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Bay Guardian, the ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus.

The documents show a pattern of cultural insensitivity, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, not only tolerated by promoted as official instructions by the FBI. The records also show a broad pattern of surveillance of people who have engaged in no criminal activity and aren’t even suspected of crimes, but have been targeted because of their race or religion.

Pieces of this story have come out over the past year as the ACLU has charged the FBI with racial profiling and Attorney General Eric Holder has insisted it’s not happening. And some of the documents — which are not always properly dated — may be a few years old.

But none of it is ancient history: All of the material has been used by the FBI in the past few years, under the Obama administration.

This is the first complete report with the full details on a pattern of behavior that is, at the very least, disturbing — and in some parts, reminiscent of the notorious (and widely discredited) COINTELPRO program that sought to undermine and disrupt political groups in the 1960s.

The information suggests that the federal government is using methods that are not only imprecise and xenophobic but utterly ineffective in protecting the American public.

“This is the worst way to pursue security,” Hatem Bazian, professor of Near East Studies at UC Berkeley, told us.

CULTURAL STEREOTYPES

Dozens of documents attempt to describe “Arabs and Muslims” but other groups aren’t left out of the sweeping stereotyping and blatant racism and xenophobia that the FBI has used in its training guides. One training presentation is titled “The Chinese.” The materials give such tips as “informality is perceived as disrespectful.” The presentation warns “expect your gift (money) to be refused” but advises to give “a simple gift with significant meaning- tangerines or oranges (with stems/leaves.)” But “never give a clock as a gift! (death!)”

And if those in the training on “The Chinese” find themselves in “interactions with the opposite sex,” then “touching, too many compliments, may imply a romantic liaison is desired — be careful!”

The vast majority of the “cultural awareness” training materials imply that the authors believe that the law enforcement personnel receiving the training will never be female or interact with female members of the groups they describe. Some warn repeatedly to never ask Arabs how “females in their family” are doing in polite conversation.

A presentation on “Arab and Muslim culture” compares the western thought process with that of all Arabs. According to the FBI, westerners are “rational” thinkers; Arabs, on the other hand, are “emotion based.” A slideshow on cross-cultural interrogation techniques says, “It is characteristic of the Arabic mind to be swayed more by words than ideas and more by ideas than facts.”

Bazian said the FBI’s generalizations about the Arab intellect are “ideological constructs reflective of the orientalist discourse.”

“Many of these individuals have not done any primary sociological, psychological, or historical work in the Arab/Muslim world,” said Bazian, who works on UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project. “What they basically do is take a text from a particular historical period and pick these points and put it as reflective of contemporary Muslim society. Most of these statements have no basis in any critical analysis. They’re not rooted in any type of research.”

Included in the FBI’s recommended reading list for counterterrorism agents-in-training is the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,” in which “Islam expert Robert Spencer reveals Islam’s ongoing, unshakeable quest for global conquest and why the West today faces the same threat as the Crusaders did.”

It’s not exactly an academically sound piece of work, Bazian told us. Spencer and his cohorts are “political hacks,” the professor said. “They come from neo-con backgrounds. Even saying ‘extreme right wing’ is giving them credit; they’re way down below the cliff. They create this contrast between western society and the rest of the world based on a nostalgic idea of western society.”

Arab culture is often the target these days, but the rhetoric recalls that used during the Chinese Exclusionary Act era, and toward Latinos in the United States today, Bazian said.

“They pick on the weakest, most vulnerable people in western society at a particular time and lay blame on them,” he said.

The FBI’s xenophobic approach to interrogation training—which involves warning new agents that “If an Arab is scared, he will often lie to try to avoid trouble”—is not even productive, Bazian said.

“If you go to people with professional training in interrogation and investigation, they’ll say none of this gives them access to security. If anything, it creates a greater global misunderstanding.”

RACIAL MAPPING

And the creation of misunderstanding doesn’t stop there. The FBI is also involved in an intelligence-gathering method known as racial mapping. Racial mapping involves local FBI offices tracking groups in their “domains” based on race and ethnicity.

In blog post, the ACLU writes, “Empirical data show that terrorists and criminals do not fit neat racial, ethnic, nation-origin or religious stereotypes, and using such flawed profiles is a recipe for failure.” In the Counterterrorism Textbook read by all trainees the FBI seems to agree, warning multiple times that there is no such thing as a typical terrorist and that making assumptions based on stereotypes is dangerous and unproductive.

Yet the FBI files we’ve acquired reveal that the bureau consistently does just that. Though the Department of Justice prohibited race from being “used to any degree” in law enforcement investigations in 2003, a convenient and potentially unconstitutional exception allows racial profiling in national security matters.

When the FBI created its Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide in 2008, it used that loophole to permit the mapping of racial and ethnic demographic information and to keep tabs on “behavioral characteristics reasonably associated with a particular criminal or terrorist element of an ethnic community,” the ACLU reported.

Communities in San Francisco have been the victims of this prejudicial loophole more than once. In 2009, the ACLU reported that the FBI justified mapping and investigating the Chinese American population in the city because “within this community there has been organized crime for generations.” Likewise, the bureau collected demographic data on the Russian population because of the “Russian criminal enterprises” known to exist in San Francisco.

The loophole, however, may not even apply to these investigations in the first place.

According to Michael German, a 16-year veteran of the FBI and senior analyst with the ACLU, these investigations don’t fit the national security description. “In intelligence notes on Chinese and Russian organized crime, those are not national security issues,” German told us. “Those are all clearly criminal investigations.”

German has brought attention to another troubling use of racial mapping — documents revealing that the FBI’s Atlanta bureau tracks Georgia’s African American population.

The stated reason is a threat of black separatist groups; the documents name the New Black Panther Party and the Black Hebrew Israelites as the black separatist groups that pose a threat.

German wrote about this problematic practice in a May 29 article on the website Firedoglake.

“The problem with these documents,” German told us, “is that it’s not black separatists or alleged black separatists who are being tracked — it’s the entire black community in Georgia.”

“Those individuals and those communities are being targeted only for their race,” German said. “Were it not for their race they wouldn’t be part of that assessment. There is no reason to do that, accept to treat that community differently than the way it treats other communities. It’s problematic from a constitutional standpoint.”

The New Black Panther Party was founded in Dallas and has mostly East Coast chapters. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate United States hate groups, “The group portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like), but principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s— a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization — have rejected the new Panthers as a ‘black racist hate group’ and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.” The Black Hebrew Israelites is another fringe group, an apocalyptic group whose ideology holds that black Americans are God’s chosen people.

Both groups have written and spoken record of racist and violent rhetoric, but record of violent or criminal acts are hard to find.

“I’d say they’re a fairly small part of the radical right, and generally quite small. As far as we know, there is virtually no connection between these groups and criminal activity,” Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the SPLC, told the Guardian.

According to Potok, the center’s list of hate groups in operation in 2011 includes four organizations classified as black separatist, which, between them, have 140 chapters. Those chapters are counted as 140 of the list’s 1,018 groups.

“Most of the rest of the list are white supremacist groups,” Potok notes. “There are some exceptions — anti-gay groups and anti-Muslim groups.” After a quick count, Potok found 688 groups to be “straight-up white supremacist.”

The majority of these hate groups may be white supremacist — but the FBI is not involved in tracking white populations.

Last October, the FBI’s press office responded to the ACLU’s concerns with racial mapping. “These efforts are intended to address specific threats, not particular communities,” the agency’s statement reads.

“These domain management efforts seek to use existing, available government data to locate and better understand the communities that are potential victims of the threats. There must be an understanding of the communities we protect in order to focus our limited human and financial resources in the areas where those resources are most needed.”

With that defense, resources continue to pour into racial mapping efforts.

Black separatist organizations are not the only groups to be targeted for political beliefs. Groups such as “anarchist extremists” and “animal rights/environmental extremists” are also, according to the FBI, groups to watch out for.

A training presentation for the Bay Area’s Joint Terrorism Task Force includes a list of those groups: “animal rights/eco terrorism, anarchists, white separatists, black separatists, militia/sovereign citizens, and ‘lone offender’.”

How do you spot a potential “animal rights extremist”? According to the documents, “ideology and concepts” found among this group includes a “complete vegan lifestyle,” and activities include the promotion of “anti-capitalist literature.” In other words, your roommate is probably a terrorist.

SPYING ON MUSLIMS

Racial mapping is not the only FBI practice that targets people just for being members of groups “associated with crimes.” The FBI routinely gathers information on Muslims through deceptive “community outreach” programs.

Memoranda we’ve obtained reveal that FBI agents, operating under the guise of community outreach, attended various events hosted by local Muslim organizations in order to gather intelligence between 2007 and 2009.

When agents attended Ramadan Iftar dinners in San Francisco, they wrote down participants’ contact information and documented their conversations and opinions. At an alleged outreach event at CSU Chico, they recorded a conversation with a student about the Saudi Student Association’s activities and even took the student’s picture. That information was sent to the FBI in Washington, DC, the ACLU reported.

Writing down information on individuals’ First Amendment activities—in this case without any evidence that they were notified or asked—violates the federal Privacy Act, the ACLU says. Using access to community events to gather personal information undermines the FBI’s stated effort to form relationships with Muslim leaders and community members.

And covert surveillance can also have an immediate and hazardous impact on the unwitting subjects.

“It’s becoming more of a public discourse that these FBI background checks are affecting immigration status, the ability to send money back home, and generally creating an environment of fear,” said Miriam Zouvounis, membership coordinator with San Francisco’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center.

The organization has helped clients who have been detained for months because their names were mistakenly placed on a no-fly list, and others whose immigration processes have taken up to ten years because they were erroneously perceived as threatening, Zouvounis said.

“The process of information collecting on covert and overt levels is accelerating, and definitely a present reality in San Francisco. People don’t want to be civically engaged if that material’s being used against them,” she said.

ONLINE SPYING

“Extremism online is the most serious international terrorist threat in the world.” Or so says FBI training materials in a presentation entitled “Extremism online,” meant for those training to be online covert employees. The documents teach OCEs to scan through comment threads and enter chat rooms, searching for people whose speech may be “operational.”

This surveillance has led to investigations.

Some of the documents are individual files and summaries of individual files, and many note that the person (often someone who was convicted, so the name isn’t redacted in the documents) was “detected via the Internet.” Some examples: “Mohamad Osman Mohamud, detected via the Internet, discussing Jihad plans” and “Hosam Smadi, detected via the Internet: online chats.” Both men were 19 when they were convicted of crimes.

These men — and the many more who have not been accused of any criminal activity but are likely under surveillance or investigation by OCEs — could have been “detected via the Internet” in a variety of ways, according to German.

“It could be that the chats were open source, or that an informant was in the chat room, or a person participating simply turned them over to the FBI, none of which would require any legal process,” German explained.

“It could also be monitored under FISA [ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] or traditional criminal wiretaps, which would require court warrants (secret ones under FISA). Finally, the stored chat logs retained on third party servers could have been obtained with Patriot Act Section 215 orders, or what’s called a “D” order under the Stored Communications Act (if held for over 180 days),” German detailed in an email.

So what kind of speech are OCEs looking out for to peg potential terrorist threats? The Extremism Online presentation has a list of “major themes and language used in online extremist writings,” which includes Islam-related terms such as “Caliphate, Al-Ansar, Al-Rafidah, Mushrik, and Munafiq” as well as the Arabic words “Akhi, Uhkti, Ameen, Du’aa, Shari’ah, and Iman” (brother, sister, amen, prayer, Islamic law, and faith.) Other words the agents are told to look out for: “crusaders, hypocrites, dogs and pigs,” and any discussion of “occupation of Muslim lands.”

The FBI can really get into your business if agents confiscate your possessions. Personal computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices, according to the documents, are routinely checked out at Regional Computer Forensics Labs.

The nearest one to San Francisco is in Menlo Park, where employees brag of having investigated thousands of pieces of data.

Law enforcement routinely confiscates property after arrests, and if local cops are involved with the FBI through the Joint Terrorism Task Forces or other partnerships, they may very well send the belongings of those arrested to be checked out at a local RCFL. But there are other ways the FBI can obtain your electronics.

“Certainly the FBI has the authority to obtain computers and other devices with search warrants, either traditional search warrants where the individual is given notice or expedited warrants where the person isn’t aware,” German told the Guardian, noting that the second type of warrant is the preferred method, for obvious reasons, when the Feds plan to search a confiscated computer.

“The FBI also works with immigrations and customs enforcement, so laptops and other devices seized at the border the FBI can gain access to. There are myriad ways they can get them.”

“DISRUPTION”

A 2009 FBI memorandum on investigating suspected terrorists reveals that the Bureau encourages its agents to implement a “disruption strategy” that German wrote is “eerily reminiscent” of the COINTELPRO tactics used to stop political organizers in the1960s. “If the risk to public safety is too great, or if all significant intelligence has been collected, and/or the threat is otherwise resolved, investigators may, with substantive desk coordination and concurrence, implement a disruption strategy,” one memo reads. Investigators can conduct interviews, make arrests, or use any number of other undefined “tools” to “effectively disrupt subject’s [sic] activities.” Such disruption strategies have been used in the past to investigate and shut down First Amendment-protected activity, German said. The reintroduction of such tactics could open the door for a major breach of the subjects’ constitutional rights.

A MATTER OF PRIORITIES 

“After September 11th, 2001, the FBI realigned its mission and purpose to reflect the global and domestic threats that face the US,” begins an orientation packet for members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces. “FBI director Robert M. Meuller III defined the following as the top ten priorities (in order of importance) that confront the Bureau today,” Number one on the list: Protect the United States from terrorist attack.

Indeed, after 9/11, the FBI prioritized terrorism investigations, a shift from the previous focus on criminal investigations. Classified as national security threats, these investigations are not subject to the same type of privacy and anti-racial discrimination protections that other criminal investigations might be.

Terrorist threats, apparently, are to be found in mosques, in online conversations that involve criticism of US foreign policy, in entire populations of African Americans or Chinese Americans in given areas. In recent years, simply speaking Arabic online or being black makes a person a suspect and potential target of surveillance.

Look out America, especially members of that celebrated “melting pot.” The feds are watching.

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

The Scottsboro Boys American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Previews Thu/21-Sat/23 and Tues/26, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2pm); Sun/24, 7pm. Opens June 27, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (July 3 performance at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm; no matinee July 4); July 1 and 8, 7pm. Through July 15. American Conservatory Theater presents the Kander and Ebb musical about nine African American men falsely accused of a crime they didn’t commit in the pre-civil rights movement South.

ONGOING

Aftermath Stagewerx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 30. Theatre, Period presents Jessica Blank and Erik Jenson’s docu-drama, based on interviews with Iraqi civilians forced to flee after the US military’s arrival in 2003.

A Behanding in Spokane SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-70. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through June 30. If Garth Ennis had been asked to write a comic book about a one-handed sociopath with a dark obsession, he might well have written something similar to Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane. And admittedly, approached from that angle, a lot of the script’s dramatic flaws are more easily forgiven. There’s not a whole lot of subtle context or languid metaphor to be found in McDonagh’s criminal caper about the little-known “hand-dealing” trade, but as in Ennis’ best known work, Preacher, the pretty girl (Melissa Quine) is the smartest one in the room; the sociopath (Rod Gnapp) is interested in enacting as vicious a revenge on all humanity while spewing as many blatantly offensive invectives as possible; the boyfriend (Daveed Diggs) has some arrested development issues to work out; and the receptionist (Alex Hurt) takes the caricature of man-child to a whole new level. In fact, while all four actors deliver rock-solid performances of their mostly unsympathetic characters, it’s Hurt’s that impresses most. His spooky intensity and goofily tone-deaf determination plays like a combination of Adam Sandler and Arno Frisch, and if there’s a real sociopath in the room, the evidence suggests it’s probably him. Ultimately though the piece relies too heavily on hollow one-liners to remain interesting — a 20-minute farce stretched to 90 minutes — and quite unlike an Ennis comic, it does not leave one wanting more. (Gluckstern)

Bruja Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Wed/20-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2:30pm); Sun/24, 2:30pm. Although San Francisco’s Mission District is inexorably morphing into an empire of twee boutiques and haute cuisine, it’s still the first port of call for many Latin American migrants, and there are plenty of panaderias and botanicas tucked in between the sushi joints. In the Magic Theatre’s production of Bruja, playwright Luis Alfaro transplants the story of Medea to 24th Street by way of Michoacán, exploring the tension between retaining old-country values and staking out a future in a new world. Directed by artistic director Loretta Greco, the title role played by a stunning Sabina Zuniga Varela, this chamber version of the Greek tragedy hits hard, exposing each character’s darkest secrets to an unforgiving light. And every character, save the doomed brothers Acan and Acat (played the night I saw it by Daniel Castaneda and Gavilan Gordon-Chavez), has a secret to hide, even Medea, a curandera or healer by trade, whose powers run deeper and darker than her new world acquaintances, or even her old servant (Wilma Bonet) suspect. And when Jason (Sean San José) and his callous boss Creon (Carlos Aguirre), ruthlessly push Medea to her breaking point, her bloody vengeance proves, if little else, that she can play at ruthlessness better than anyone, whatever the consequences. (Gluckstern)

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 10pm). Through July 21. Tides Theatre performs Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood’s comedy about five women forced into a bomb shelter during a mid-breakfast nuke attack.

The Full Monty Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.roltheatre.com. $25-36. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 30. In desperate times, how far would you go to turn a buck? The central premise of the 1997 movie and its namesake musical comedy The Full Monty, the answer to this question is right in the title, which limits the suspense, but amps up the expectations. Set not in Sheffield, England as in the movie, but the similarly economically challenged climate of Buffalo, New York circa the late nineties, the comical romp follows a group of unemployed steel workers who decide, rather optimistically, that spending one night as exotic dancers will solve their immediate financial woes. Banish all notions of a Hot Chocolate sing-along; the soundtrack of the stage musical has little in common with its cinematic predecessor, but there are a couple of toe-tappers, particularly the songs writ for the ladies: a belter’s anthem for their spry but elderly accompanist Jeanette (Cami Thompson), a snarky commentary on male beauty, “The Goods,” for the ensemble. On opening night, Ray of Light’s production ran about 15 minutes long after a late start, and the tempo seemed sluggish in parts, but once it hits its stride, The Full Monty should provide a welcome antidote to the ongoing, we’re-still-in-a-recession blues, red leather g-strings and all. (Gluckstern) Fwd: Life Gone Viral Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm (Sun/24, show at 2pm; July 15, show at 7:30pm). Extended through July 22. The internet becomes comic fodder for creator-performers Charlie Varon and Jeri Lynn Cohen, and creator-director David Ford.

Lips Together, Teeth Apart New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Terrence McNally’s play about two straight couples spending July 4 amid Fire Island’s gay community.

100 Saints You Should Know Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.therhino.org. $10-30. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through July 1. Homespun scenic design notwithstanding, Theatre Rhinoceros and artistic director John Fisher offer a fine, engrossing production of this 2007 play by Kate Fodor (Hannah and Martin, RX), a sturdy comedy-drama about two fractured families colliding awkwardly in a sort of spiritual vacuum. Matthew (an intriguingly restrained Wiley Herman) is a desolate but forbearing Catholic priest sent on a leave of absence after a venial transgression involving some artful nude male photographs. Returning home, he endures a pained relationship with his devout, passively domineering Irish mother (Tamar Cohn, channeling a nicely measured mixture of stony discipline and childlike vulnerability). Soon Matthew gets an unexpected visit from single mom Theresa (a bright but shrewdly self-possessed Ann Lawler), a former Deadhead who now cleans the rectory and finds herself overcome with an urge to ask the gentle priest about prayer — just at the moment his faith seems to have left him. Meanwhile, Theresa’s too-cool-for-school teenager, Abby (a deft and hilarious Kim Stephenson), waits outside and does some preying of her own on a slower-witted but game young man from the neighborhood (a charmingly quirky Michael Rosen), both of them roiling with confused yearnings. The appealing characters and unexpected storyline come supported by some excellent dialogue, developing a searching theme that ultimately has less to do with formal religion than the ordinary but ineffable need it promises (problematically) to meet. “I think I could be religious or whatever if it made any sense,” notes Abby, “but it doesn’t make any sense.” It’s easy to agree with the teenager on this one. 100 Saints is a genuinely funny and compassionate play discerning enough to avoid naming the depths it sounds. (Avila)

Reunion SF Playhouse, Stage Two, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through June 30. SF Playhouse presents a world premiere drama by local playwright Kenn Rabin.

“Risk Is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival” Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. Free ($20 donation for reserved seating; $50 donation for five-play reserved seating pass). Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through July 14. Cutting Ball’s annual fest of experimental plays features two new works and five new translations in staged readings.

Slipping New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Daniel Talbott’s drama about a gay teen who finds new hope after a traumatic breakup.

Tenderloin Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Extended run: Thu/21, 7:30pm; Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2pm); Sun/24, 5pm. Annie Elias and Cutting Ball Theater artists present a world premiere “documentary theater” piece looking at the people and places in the Cutting Ball Theater’s own ‘hood.

Vital Signs Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri/22, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through July 21. The Marsh San Francisco presents Alison Whittaker’s behind-the-scenes look at nursing in America.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through July 7. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Wed/20 and Sun/24, 7pm (also Sun/24, 7pm); Thu/21-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2pm). Berkeley Rep presents a world premiere from writer-performer Dael Orlandersmith (a Pulitzer finalist for 2002’s Yellowman).

Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.brownpapertickets.com. $18-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. Symmetry Theatre Company presents Bay Area playwright Lauren Gunderson’s romantic drama centering on the life of 18th-century French physicist and mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet (Danielle Levin) and her (here tempestuous) long-term romance with Voltaire (Robert Parsons). In a familiar conceit left accordingly vague, fate rematerializes Emilie from some hazy afterlife so that she may relive key moments in her life and account for herself. A Cartesian mind/body split rules the replay, with Emilie finding herself painfully attenuated from the world of the senses — her flashback self (played by an impressive Blythe Foster) alone able to enjoy sensual contact with her surroundings. Meanwhile, love and loyalty face the test as Emilie goes head-to-head with a male-dominated scientific establishment over a certain theorem she calls “force vivre” — a formula into which Gunderson cleverly folds theoretical physics and the irrational heart. There’s even a visual aid: a running tally is kept throughout on a screen at the back of the stage, where hash marks appear and disappear under the headings “philosophy” and “love” as the scenes wind their desultory way back toward the moment of her demise. Chloe Bronzan directs a cast of strong actors but their work is uneven. Foster alone is consistently commanding in a part that, while minor, suggests what a more muscular approach overall might have accomplished. The normally formidable Parsons seems uncommitted in the part of Voltaire, admittedly a character too simpering and watery as written to merit much credence. Instead of palpable relationships — whether with lovers or ideas — Emilie deploys self-conscious verbiage, strained repartee and heavy thematic underscoring to churn what amounts to thin drama. (Avila)

Emotional Creature Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Previews Wed/20-Thu/21, 8pm. Opens Fri/22, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no show July 13); Wed, 7pm (no show July 4); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 15. Berkeley Rep presents Eve Ensler’s world premiere, based on her best-seller I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.

The Great Divide Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Wed/20-Thu/21, 7pm; Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm; Sun/24, 5pm. Shotgun Players performs Adamn Chanzit’s drama about the hot topic of fracking, inspired by Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through July 15. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through June 30. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. Note: review from the show’s 2011 run at the Marsh San Francisco. (Avila)

The Odyssey Angel Island; (415) 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. $40-76 (some tickets include ferry passage). Sat-Sun, 10:30am-4pm (does not include travel time to island). Through July 1. We Players present Ava Roy’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem: an all-day adventure set throughout the nature and buildings of Angel Island State Park.

Salomania Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $30-55. Previews Wed/20, 8pm. Opens Thu/21, 8pm. Runs Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Throgh July 22. Aurora Theatre Company closes its 20th season with writer-director Mark Jackson’s world premiere, commissioned especially for the company, about a San Francisco-born dancer notorious for her take on the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

The Tempest Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda; (510) 809-3290, www.calshakes.org. $35-71. Wed/20-Thu/21, 7:30pm; Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm (also Sat/23, 2pm); Sun/24, 4pm. California Shakespeare Theater opens its season with this dance-filled interpretation of the Bard’s classic tale.

Wheelhouse TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 1. TheatreWorks’ 60th world premiere is a musical created by and starring pop-rock trio GrooveLily.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Fri, 6pm; Sun/24 and June 30, 11am. Through June 30. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bare Bones Butoh Presents: Showcase 24” Studio 210, 3435 Cesar Chavez, SF; deborahslater.org/studio210.php. Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm. $5-20. New material and works-in-progress by both local and national cutting-edge artists.

Alicia Dattner Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. Fri/22, 8pm. $26. The comedian performs.

“DEEPER, Architectural Meditations at CounterPULSE” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri-Sun, 8pm. Through July 1. $25. Lizz Roman and Dancers perform a site-specific work.

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

“hOPPomage” Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/22-Sat/23, 8pm. $10-15. An evening of “mental dance” inspired by artist Dennis Oppenheim with Driveway Dancers.

“Jillarious Tuesdays” Tommy T’s Showroom, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.jillarious.com. Tue, 7:30. Ongoing. $20. Weekly comedy show with Jill Bourque, Kevin Camia, Justin Lucas, and special guests.

“Majestic Musical Review Featuring Her Rebel Highness” Harlot, 46 Minna, SF

; www.herrebelhighness.com. Sun, 5pm. Through Aug 12. $25-65. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, performers in Baroque-chic gowns, music, and more.

“Mission in the Mix” Dance Mission Theatre, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 1. $17. SF Hip-Hop DanceFest producer Micaya presents new work by her SoulForce Dance Company, plus guest performances.

“Porch Light: California Dreaming” Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. Thu/21, 7pm. $15. Storytelling with Janet Varney, John Law, Dayvid Figler, and more.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.worldartswest.org. Sat/23-Sun/24, 3pm (also Sat/23, 3pm). $18-58. This weekend’s program includes dance Appalachia, Huntary, China, India, Mexico, the Middle East, Peru, Tahiti, and Zimbabwe.

Sex and the City: Live!” Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Tue, 7 and 9pm. Through June 26. $25. Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger, Lady Bear, Trixxie Carr play the fab four in this drag-tastic homage to the HBO series.

“Snob Theater” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; snobtheater.tumblr.com. Fri/22, 10pm. $10. With comedians Rick Overton, Drennon Davis, Chris Thayer, and Coree Spencer, and musicians Debbie Neigher, Laura Weinbach, and Anton Patzner.

“When We Fall Apart” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Wed/20-Thu/21 and June 27-28, 7pm; Fri/22-Sat/23 and June 29-30, 7 and 9pm. $25-35. Joe Goode Performance Group presents a world premiere, an exploration of “home” with a set designed by architect Cass Calder Smith. *

 

Make it better now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Make it better now

yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Opens Fri/15, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 10pm). Through July 21. Tides Theatre performs Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood’s comedy about five women forced into a bomb shelter during a mid-breakfast nuke attack.

BAY AREA

Emotional Creature Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Previews Thu/14-Sat/16 and June 19-21, 8pm; Sun/17, 7pm. Opens June 22, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no show July 13); Wed, 7pm (no show July 4); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 15. Berkeley Rep presents Eve Ensler’s world premiere, based on her best-seller I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.

Salomania Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $30-55. Previews Fri/15-Sat/16 and June 20, 8pm; Sun/17, 2pm; June 19, 7pm. Opens June 21, 8pm. Runs Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Throgh July 22. Aurora Theatre Company closes its 20th season with writer-director Mark Jackson’s world premiere, commissioned especially for the company, about a San Francisco-born dancer notorious for her take on the "Dance of the Seven Veils."

ONGOING

Aftermath Stagewerx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 30. Theatre, Period presents Jessica Blank and Erik Jenson’s docu-drama, based on interviews with Iraqi civilians forced to flee after the US military’s arrival in 2003.

A Behanding in Spokane SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-70. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through June 30. If Garth Ennis had been asked to write a comic book about a one-handed sociopath with a dark obsession, he might well have written something similar to Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane. And admittedly, approached from that angle, a lot of the script’s dramatic flaws are more easily forgiven. There’s not a whole lot of subtle context or languid metaphor to be found in McDonagh’s criminal caper about the little-known "hand-dealing" trade, but as in Ennis’ best known work, Preacher, the pretty girl (Melissa Quine) is the smartest one in the room; the sociopath (Rod Gnapp) is interested in enacting as vicious a revenge on all humanity while spewing as many blatantly offensive invectives as possible; the boyfriend (Daveed Diggs) has some arrested development issues to work out; and the receptionist (Alex Hurt) takes the caricature of man-child to a whole new level. In fact, while all four actors deliver rock-solid performances of their mostly unsympathetic characters, it’s Hurt’s that impresses most. His spooky intensity and goofily tone-deaf determination plays like a combination of Adam Sandler and Arno Frisch, and if there’s a real sociopath in the room, the evidence suggests it’s probably him. Ultimately though the piece relies too heavily on hollow one-liners to remain interesting — a 20-minute farce stretched to 90 minutes — and quite unlike an Ennis comic, it does not leave one wanting more. (Gluckstern)

The Full Monty Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.roltheatre.com. $25-36. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 30. In desperate times, how far would you go to turn a buck? The central premise of the 1997 movie and its namesake musical comedy The Full Monty, the answer to this question is right in the title, which limits the suspense, but amps up the expectations. Set not in Sheffield, England as in the movie, but the similarly economically challenged climate of Buffalo, New York circa the late nineties, the comical romp follows a group of unemployed steel workers who decide, rather optimistically, that spending one night as exotic dancers will solve their immediate financial woes. Banish all notions of a Hot Chocolate sing-along; the soundtrack of the stage musical has little in common with its cinematic predecessor, but there are a couple of toe-tappers, particularly the songs writ for the ladies: a belter’s anthem for their spry but elderly accompanist Jeanette (Cami Thompson), a snarky commentary on male beauty, "The Goods," for the ensemble. On opening night, Ray of Light’s production ran about 15 minutes long after a late start, and the tempo seemed sluggish in parts, but once it hits its stride, The Full Monty should provide a welcome antidote to the ongoing, we’re-still-in-a-recession blues, red leather g-strings and all. (Gluckstern)
Fwd: Life Gone Viral Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm (June 24, show at 2pm; July 15, show at 7:30pm). Extended through July 22. The internet becomes comic fodder for creator-performers Charlie Varon and Jeri Lynn Cohen, and creator-director David Ford.

Lips Together, Teeth Apart New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Terrence McNally’s play about two straight couples spending July 4 amid Fire Island’s gay community.

100 Saints You Should Know Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.therhino.org. $10-30. Wed-Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm; starting June 22, runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through July 1. Homespun scenic design notwithstanding, Theatre Rhinoceros and artistic director John Fisher offer a fine, engrossing production of this 2007 play by Kate Fodor (Hannah and Martin, RX), a sturdy comedy-drama about two fractured families colliding awkwardly in a sort of spiritual vacuum. Matthew (an intriguingly restrained Wiley Herman) is a desolate but forbearing Catholic priest sent on a leave of absence after a venial transgression involving some artful nude male photographs. Returning home, he endures a pained relationship with his devout, passively domineering Irish mother (Tamar Cohn, channeling a nicely measured mixture of stony discipline and childlike vulnerability). Soon Matthew gets an unexpected visit from single mom Theresa (a bright but shrewdly self-possessed Ann Lawler), a former Deadhead who now cleans the rectory and finds herself overcome with an urge to ask the gentle priest about prayer — just at the moment his faith seems to have left him. Meanwhile, Theresa’s too-cool-for-school teenager, Abby (a deft and hilarious Kim Stephenson), waits outside and does some preying of her own on a slower-witted but game young man from the neighborhood (a charmingly quirky Michael Rosen), both of them roiling with confused yearnings. The appealing characters and unexpected storyline come supported by some excellent dialogue, developing a searching theme that ultimately has less to do with formal religion than the ordinary but ineffable need it promises (problematically) to meet. "I think I could be religious or whatever if it made any sense," notes Abby, "but it doesn’t make any sense." It’s easy to agree with the teenager on this one. 100 Saints is a genuinely funny and compassionate play discerning enough to avoid naming the depths it sounds. (Avila)

Reunion SF Playhouse, Stage Two, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through June 30. SF Playhouse presents a world premiere drama by local playwright Kenn Rabin.

"Risk Is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival" Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. Free ($20 donation for reserved seating; $50 donation for five-play reserved seating pass). Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through July 14. Cutting Ball’s annual fest of experimental plays features two new works and five new translations in staged readings.

Slipping New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Daniel Talbott’s drama about a gay teen who finds new hope after a traumatic breakup.

Tenderloin Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 525-1205, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Extended run: Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Extended through June 24. Annie Elias and Cutting Ball Theater artists present a world premiere "documentary theater" piece looking at the people and places in the Cutting Ball Theater’s own ‘hood.

Vital Signs Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Previews Fri/15, 8pm. Opens Sat/16, 8:30pm. Runs Sat, 8:30pm; June 22, 8pm. Through July 21. The Marsh San Francisco presents Alison Whittaker’s behind-the-scenes look at nursing in America.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through July 7. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar "doood" dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 7pm). Through June 24. Berkeley Rep presents a world premiere from writer-performer Dael Orlandersmith (a Pulitzer finalist for 2002’s Yellowman).

Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.brownpapertickets.com. $18-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 1. Symmetry Theatre Company presents Bay Area playwright Lauren Gunderson’s romantic drama centering on the life of 18th-century French physicist and mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet (Danielle Levin) and her (here tempestuous) long-term romance with Voltaire (Robert Parsons). In a familiar conceit left accordingly vague, fate rematerializes Emilie from some hazy afterlife so that she may relive key moments in her life and account for herself. A Cartesian mind/body split rules the replay, with Emilie finding herself painfully attenuated from the world of the senses — her flashback self (played by an impressive Blythe Foster) alone able to enjoy sensual contact with her surroundings. Meanwhile, love and loyalty face the test as Emilie goes head-to-head with a male-dominated scientific establishment over a certain theorem she calls "force vivre" — a formula into which Gunderson cleverly folds theoretical physics and the irrational heart. There’s even a visual aid: a running tally is kept throughout on a screen at the back of the stage, where hash marks appear and disappear under the headings "philosophy" and "love" as the scenes wind their desultory way back toward the moment of her demise. Chloe Bronzan directs a cast of strong actors but their work is uneven. Foster alone is consistently commanding in a part that, while minor, suggests what a more muscular approach overall might have accomplished. The normally formidable Parsons seems uncommitted in the part of Voltaire, admittedly a character too simpering and watery as written to merit much credence. Instead of palpable relationships — whether with lovers or ideas — Emilie deploys self-conscious verbiage, strained repartee and heavy thematic underscoring to churn what amounts to thin drama. (Avila)

God of Carnage Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $34-55. Wed/13, 7:30pm; Thu/14-Sat/16, 8pm (also Sat/16, 2pm); Sun/17, 2 and 7pm. Marin Theatre Company performs Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning comedy about two sets of parents who meet after their children get into a schoolyard fight.

The Great Divide Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through June 24. Shotgun Players performs Adamn Chanzit’s drama about the hot topic of fracking, inspired by Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s New venue: Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through July 15. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through June 30. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. Note: review from the show’s 2011 run at the Marsh San Francisco. (Avila)

The Odyssey Angel Island; (415) 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. $40-76 (some tickets include ferry passage). Sat-Sun, 10:30am-4pm (does not include travel time to island). Through July 1. We Players present Ava Roy’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem: an all-day adventure set throughout the nature and buildings of Angel Island State Park.

The Tempest Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda; (510) 809-3290, www.calshakes.org. $35-71. Tue-Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also June 23, 2pm); Sun, 4pm. Through June 25. California Shakespeare Theater opens its season with this dance-filled interpretation of the Bard’s classic tale.

Wheelhouse TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-69. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 1. TheatreWorks’ 60th world premiere is a musical created by and starring pop-rock trio GrooveLily.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Fri, 6pm; Sat/16, June 24, and 30, 11am. Through June 30. Louis "The Amazing Bubble Man" Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

"The Amen Corner" Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; www.lhtsf.org. Mon/18, 7pm. $25. Project1Voice presents this benefit staged reading of James Baldwin’s play, part of a simultaneous staged-reading event with 25 other African American theaters across the country.

"Branded Funny" Purple Onion, 140 Columbus, SF; www.eventbrite.com. Thu/14, 8pm. $15. Stand-up with Melanie Bega, Seth Hardiman, and Justin Lucas.

"The BY Series" ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Thu/14-Sat/16, 8pm; Sun/17, 2pm. $25. Robert Moses’ Kin Dance Company presents work by guest choreographers Molissa Fenley, Ramon Ramos Alayo, and Sidra Bell, plus the world premiere of Moses’ Scrubbing the Dog.

Alicia Dattner Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. Fri/15-Sat/16, 8pm. $26. The comedian performs.

"DEEPER, Architectural Meditations at CounterPULSE" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. $25. Fri-Sun, 8pm. Through July 1. Lizz Roman and Dancers perform a site-specific work.

"Elect to Laugh" Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Ongoing through Nov 6. $15-50. Will Durst and friends perform in this weekly political humor show that focuses on the upcoming presidential election.

"Fresh Meat Festival" Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.freshmeatproductions.org. $15-20. Fri/15-Sat/16, 8pm; Sun/17, 7pm. $15-25. The transgender and queer performance festival celebrates its 11th year with members of Vogue Evolution (America’s Best Dance Crew), Emily Vasquez (American Idol), drag star Miss Barbie-Q, same-sex ballroom champs William DeVries and Kumi Keali’I, and Sean Dorsey Dance.

"hOPPomage" Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun/17, 3pm. Through June 23. $10-15. An evening of "mental dance" inspired by artist Dennis Oppenheim with Driveway Dancers.

"Jillarious Tuesdays" Tommy T’s Showroom, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.jillarious.com. Tue, 7:30. Ongoing. $20. Weekly comedy show with Jill Bourque, Kevin Camia, Justin Lucas, and special guests.

"Kunst-Stoff Arts/Fest 2012" Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; kunststoffartsfest2012.eventbrite.com. Thu/14-Sat/16, 8:30pm. $15. Bruno Augusto and Meisha Bosma perform.

"Porch Light: I Do: The Wedding Show" Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/18, 8pm. $15. Wedding-themed storytelling with Eugene Ashton-Gonzalez, Barbara Berman, Clint Catalyst, and more.

"Previously Secret Information" Stage Werx Theater, 446 Valencia, SF; www.eventbrite.com. Sun/17, 7pm. $15. Comic storytelling with C.W. Nevius, Jack Boulware, and more.

"Qcomedy Showcase" Stage Werx Theater, 446 Valencia, SF; www.qcomedy.com. Mon/18, 8pm. $8-20. Special Pride edition with stand-up comedians Julia Jackson, Scott Backman, Enzo Lombard, Justin Simpson, Karen Ripley, and drag performers House of Glitter.

"Queeriosity" San Francisco LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF; www.youthspeaks.org. Fri/15, 7pm. Free. Youth Speaks hosts this literary arts and performance showcase for LGBTQ youth.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.worldartswest.org. Sat/16-Sun/17, 3pm (also Sat/16, 3pm). $18-58. This weekend’s program includes dance from China, Cuba, Hawaii, Hungary, India, and more.

Sex and the City: Live!" Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Tue, 7 and 9pm. Through June 26. $25. Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger, Lady Bear, Trixxie Carr play the fab four in this drag-tastic homage to the HBO series.

"Two by 24: Love on Loop" UN Plaza, Market between Hyde and Seventh St, SF; www.rawdance.org. Tue/19, 11am-7pm. Free. RAWdance performs an eight-hour contemporary dance installation.

"Voca People" Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. Wed/13-Fri/15, 8pm; Sat/16, 6:30 and 9:30pm; Sun/17, 3 and 6pm. $49-75. A capella from outer space.

"When We Fall Apart" Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Thu/14-Sat/16, June 20-21, and 27-28, 7pm; June 22-23 and 29-30, 7 and 9pm. $20-35. Joe Goode Performance Group presents a world premiere, an exploration of "home" with a set designed by architect Cass Calder Smith.

"Wonderland" Circus Center, 755 Frederick, SF; wonderlandatcircuscenter.eventbrite.com. Fri/15-Sat/16, 7pm; Sun/17, 2pm. Free (advance registration recommended). Family-friendly show of aerialists, acrobats, and other circus-style performers. *

State of debate

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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11
State of debate

yael@sfbg.com

On May 24, a panel of three Jewish activists and authors from the Bay Area will discuss the historical figures and ancestors that inspire their work today. The event was originally scheduled to take place at the Jewish Community Library, operated by the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE), which is largely supported by the Jewish Community Federation (JCF, or “the Federation”).

Leaders at the BJE canceled the event in January after discussions about its content with organizers of the panel, who then found another venue: Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. That seemed like a harmless turn of events that has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not directly.

But with the current state of discourse in the Bay Area’s Jewish community, just beneath the surface are complex dynamics that raise issues of censorship, bonds forged by religion, whether certain criticisms of Israel should be off-limits, and a battle for the hearts of minds of Jews in the diaspora.

Anti-war activist Rae Abileah has found herself at the middle of this battle. She is on the panel to discuss her great uncle Joseph Abileah, an Israeli pacifist who was charged and tried in 1949 after he refused to join the army as part of Israel’s mandatory military service.

Abileah is a member of Code Pink who is outspoken about her opposition to the Israeli occupation in Palestine. The panel is meant to discuss decades-old work, not the current state of affairs domestically or in Israel, but Abileah’s inclusion made it too political for some.

In March, the panelists — which also include Julie Gilgoff and Elaine Elinson — and event organizer Diana Scott wrote an open letter to the Jewish Community Library saying, “We find it particularly troubling that an act of censorship has occurred at the Library — an institution that it supposed to be a symbol of open thought in learning in the Jewish Community.”

David Waksberg, the director of the BJE who was instrumental in the decision-making process, said it was nothing of the sort. “We had very honest, productive, and respectful discussions about why the program wasn’t for us,” he told me.

The letter concludes: “We seek to make clear that Federation policies, designed to foster the appearance of Jewish solidarity by shutting down the vital exchange of ideas in the Jewish community, are divisive and intolerable. They are also ultimately ineffective in suppressing dissent, and, paradoxically, undermine the values and mission of some of our most cherished Jewish institutions.”

“The Jewish Community Federation didn’t tell us whether or not to do this program,” Waksberg insists. “They didn’t pressure us one way or another.”

The open letter also discusses funding guidelines, adopted in 2010 by the Federation. The guidelines restrict funding for events that “endorse the BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) movement or positions that undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

 

DELEGITIMIZING ISRAEL?

The guidelines have meaning beyond these specific circumstances. They represent a conflict in what counts as diversity of opinion, what counts as dissent, and the incredibly loaded concept of “delegitimizing Israel.”

The guidelines were a response to a controversial 2009 screening of Rachel, a documentary on the life of Rachel Corrie, a 24-year-old who was killed when she stood in front of a bulldozer on its way to level a Palestinian home. The film was screened at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival followed by speaker Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother. The film-going crowd yelled and booed, and the Federation threatened to quit funding the festival.

The next year was declared by some Jewish leaders to be the Year of Civil Discourse. The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), the self-described “central public affairs arm of the organized Bay Area Jewish Community,” organized a year of programming and discussion, with an aim to “elevate the level of discourse in the Jewish community when discussing Israel.” The J Weekly, the magazine of the Jewish Bay Area, reported that “[organizers] agree that the Year of Civil Discourse was a success,” though these organizers acknowledged their work was far from over.

Indeed, the controversies rage on. Two months before the Year of Civil Discourse officially ended Dec. 13, the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland canceled an exhibit, “A Child’s View from Gaza”, that would have showcased drawings by Palestinian children, after pressure from Jewish organizations.

The director of the JCRC, Doug Kahn, became a spokesperson against the exhibit, butting up against groups like the Middle East Children’s Alliance and Bend the Arc (formerly Progressive Jewish Alliance). In March, an event that would have featured author and journalist Peter Beinart lost support after the JCC of the East Bay learned that one of the event’s moderators was on the board of Bend the Arc. Add this panel to the mix, and the six months since the Year of Civil Discourse ended have proven how taboo topics like BDS and Israeli violence in Palestine remain volatile.

BDS in particular has emerged as an untouchable issue. The campaign is a result of a 2005 Palestinian call for boycott and divestment from Israeli companies, and economic sanctions on Israel. BDSmovement.net, which provides news and background information regarding BDS efforts, lists three goals to the protest: “Ending [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

The campaign has seen effects worldwide. Abileah has organized to promote BDS, in particular working to get Bay Area stores to stop carrying Ahava, skin-care products made in what she calls an illegal Israeli settlement in Palestine.

The BDS campaign is “a tried and true nonviolent tactic to get the Israeli government to uphold international law,” Abileah told me. “We decided to be in solidarity.”

But some Jewish leaders feel BDS goes too far.

“The term delegitimizing Israel refers to the intent to eliminate the Jewish and democratic State of Israel by portraying it as an illegitimate nation,” Kahn wrote in an email. “The boycott/divestment/sanctions movement’s leadership has made clear that this is their ultimate agenda and one of the movement’s explicit objectives would achieve that aim resulting in a dire threat to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population that lives in Israel.”

BDS is mentioned several times in the Federation funding guidelines, and stands out as the only specific example of what it means to “undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel.”

 

ISOLATE THE EXTREMISTS

But organizations like the Federation and the JCRC aren’t the only ones interested in the path that Israel-Palestine discourse among Bay Area Jews takes. The Reut Institute, a think tank based in Tel Aviv, “has been committed to responding to the assault on Israel’s legitimacy since 2008,” according to the introduction to its 2011 report: “San Francisco as a Delegitimization Hub.”

The report ranks San Francisco and London among the “few global hubs of delegitimization.” It also warns of the dangers of San Francisco in particular as top-delegitimizing city, noting “the role of the San Francisco Bay Area as a generator and driver of broader trends, or as a hub of social experiments…What won’t pass in San Francisco won’t pass anywhere else, and what happens in San Francisco doesn’t stay in San Francisco.'”

San Francisco gets this attention from Reut because of dissent within its Jewish community, which the institute calls globally unparalleled. “While in London delegitimization is being promoted primarily by groups that are not part of the Jewish community…an increasing number of Jews in the San Francisco Bay Area have become ‘agnostic’ towards Israel, and are fueling the delegitimization campaign.”

The report’s authors, Reut’s “national security team,” do not spend much time explaining what “delegitimizing Israel” means. When it does, BDS again stands out as one of the only concrete examples. According to the report, in the Bay Area “the number of individuals who are willing to stand up for Israel is declining while others have been fueling the delegitimization campaign, many times unintentionally, by engaging in acts of delegitimization — namely, actions or campaigns framed by their initiators as a reaction to a specific Israeli policy, which in practice aim to undermine Israel’s political and moral foundations. Examples include support for the BDS movement and the 2010 Gaza Flotilla,” a protest in which ships full of supporters and cargo tried to make it to Palestinian land in violation of an Israeli embargo.

The report labels those looking to delegitimize Israel “extremists.” It warns, however, that those questioning Israel’s policies, when rebuked by its “tradition defenders,” may be swayed into trusting the extremists. It therefore advocates a “broad tent approach,” advising that Jews in the Bay Area initiate a “community-wide deliberation” with an “aim to…drive a wedge between the extremists and those who principally support the legitimacy of Israel’s existence regardless of policy agreements.”

It’s important, according to the report, to make sure that supporters of BDS are seen as “extremists.” The “broad tent” is supposed to contain all Jews, with a diversity of opinions — except those supporting BDS and other acts of “delegitimization.” In light of this goal, the report praises the Federation’s funding guidelines and the Year of Civil Discourse.

“Through the funding guidelines drafted by a JCRC-JCF Working Group…the San Francisco Bay Area has set the standard nationally as the first American Jewish community to develop guidelines delineating red lines that go hand-in-hand with the broad tent approach,” Reut reports. “Additionally, we regard the Year of Civil Discourse…led by the JCRC, as important best practices that could be emulated in other places.”

 

ORTHODOXY

The Bay Area’s left-leaning Jewish organizations may be influential, but under such a hot spotlight, they tread carefully. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav is one such organization. Last year, the synagogue surveyed its members to test opinions on Israel.

“In general, the survey shows that we have a liberal left-leaning congregation,” said Terry Fletcher, a member of Sha’ar Zahav who now heads a committee created to follow up on the survey results. “People tend to blame, shall we say, both sides of the conflict, both Israelis and Palestinians, somewhat equally.”

Fletcher’s committee has organized events and discussions in the wake of the survey since January. “One idea was that we would start with something non-controversial,” Fletcher told me. “But we couldn’t think of anything that everyone on the committee considers non-controversial.”

The programming has featured discussions on evolving relationships with Israel and questioned their nuances. But Fletcher says they haven’t been able to venture into BDS territory.

“I would love it if we could get to a place where we could actually address that,” Fletcher reflected. “And we would want to do it from a balanced perspective. But it’s such an emotional issue.”

There are practical concerns as well. According to Fletcher, the Federation gives a small amount of funding for scholarships for Sha’ar Zahav’s religious school. The money that funded Fletcher’s committee’s programming came from Sha’ar Zahav’s general fund, when there was enough of it. She says that the committee is now operating without a budget due to tight finances. Even so, if the committee’s programming were to breech the Federation’s funding guidelines, it might put the program in jeopardy.

“To me, that’s what’s so problematic about these guidelines,” Fletcher said. “The guidelines are saying, if you want money from us, we have restrictions on what your organization can do. Even though our programming is not funded by the Federation, because it funds something completely unrelated, it could get cut.”

Fletcher also questions that paradigm of “delegitimizing Israel.”

“I think this is a term that people who defend Israel use to label people who criticize Israel in a certain way,” she said. “Many of us would answer that it’s Israel’s own policies that are delegitimizing Israel in the eyes of the world. I don’t find it a useful term.”

Sha’ar Zahav will be hosting the Reclaiming Jewish Activism panel. Davey Shlasko, a member of the congregation who helped facilitate the new arrangement, thinks the concern about Abileah’s associations were misplaced.

“I think it is unfortunate that the predicted objection to Rae’s other work was enough of a concern to cancel an event that is actually about drawing inspiration from our ancestors,” Shlasko told me via email.

But it’s in looking back at history that the panel acquires so much meaning. “It is safe to say that living in the United States, Jews have never been more empowered, safe, and connected to the community they live in,” mused one source, who wished to remain anonymous. “It is inevitable that with such success, the need to band together changed. The group identity changes. Sometimes it’s that fight, that need to rally together, that keeps the group intact.”

For Abileah, “the event will be Jewish activists talking about our ancestors.” She’s upset about the event’s cancellation, but not surprised.

“For a lot of Jewish people it can be challenging to speak out against this issue because you don’t know where your friends stand on this, or your synagogue or even your family,” she said. “There are a lot of people who we say are PEP: progressive except Palestine. My family and community have been supportive, but I’ve gotten hate mail and threats of violence.”

“It sounds like these Jewish institutions that are censoring have so much power, like they’re the mainstream Jewish voice. But I think the majority of Jewish Americans want a resolution to the conflict and are opposed to the occupation,” she said.

And how does she think Joseph Abileah would react to this situation? “I’d like to think that he would be shocked and hurt by it,” she said. “It’s sad to see so much fracture in the Jewish community over this issue.”

Meister: Another presidential step against anti-gay bias

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

President Obama’s bold endorsement of same-sex marriage should be only the first of his key acts in behalf of gay Americans. It’s now past time for him to redeem a 2008 campaign promise to issue an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against gay workers.

Such discrimination is already banned in Washington, D.C., and 21 states, including California. A presidential order would cover the millions of federal contractor employees in the other states. Building roads, bridges and dams are among the many essential tasks they perform throughout the country.

Previous executive orders, first issued seven decades ago, have made it illegal for contractors to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Recent investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the gay publication Metro Weekly noted that Obama made his promise to add a ban on anti-gay discrimination during a meeting with a gay rights group in Houston four years ago.

The Chronicle quoted Heather Cronk, director of the gay rights group Get Equal, as noting that a non-discrimination order “would give concrete, real-life workplace protections to people who work for federal contractors like ExxonMobil that refuse, year after year, to add those protections on their own.”

Cronk recalled that former Bay Area activist Cleve Jones recently presented Obama with a binder containing more than 40 accounts of workplace discrimination in hopes of making a decisive case for a presidential order. The president accepted the binder, Cronk said, without saying a word. But later, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett said the president had no immediate plans to ban contractor discrimination on his own.

That was confirmed a day later by Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary. Carney claimed the president nevertheless “is committed to securing equal rights” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. He cited Obama’s long-time support for the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would give federal protection to LGBT workers in government as well as private employment.

Instead of issuing an executive order, Carney added, the president’s plans are to take “a comprehensive approach” by pushing for passage of the non-discrimination act.

But, as the Chronicle noted, “the legislation has no chance of passing in the current Congress,” whereas congressional approval is not needed for an executive order to go into effect. In any case, there seems to be only a slight chance that Obama would suffer serious political harm for issuing an order, since polls show strong public support for him doing so.

The president has in fact been losing support because of his refusal to act. The Chronicle, for instance, noted the anger of Log Cabin Republicans, the gay rights group that led the legal fight against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that had excluded gays and lesbians from military service. The GOP group complained that Obama has “turned his back on 1.8 million LGBT workers” and failed to deliver on a policy that has broad, bipartisan support among the American peopl

Harsh criticism came, too, from a former congressional staffer, Tico Almeida, who helped draft the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now heads a group called Freedom to Work. He called Obama’s refusal to act “a political calculation that cannot stand” as he announced that his organization was launching a campaign to increase pressure on Obama to issue an order.

One prominent – and wealthy – activist who’s pledged to contribute $100,000 to the drive to get Obama to change his mind called his refusal to sign an order “craven election-year politics.”

Pretty strong language, but Obama’s inaction on such a vital issue rightly opens him to such harsh judgment. His endorsement of same-sex marriage took genuine political courage. It proved he has the strength, the will and the ability to take the country another step closer to granting true equality to all Americans. Now the president needs to take that next essential step.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: Union rights are civil rights

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The right of U.S. workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers unhindered by employer or government interference has been a legal right since the 1930s. Yet there are workers who are unaware of that, and employers who aim to keep them unaware, meanwhile doing their utmost to keep them from exercising what is a basic civil right.

Many employers often claim working people are in any case not much interested in unionization, noting that less than 15 percent of workers currently belong to unions.

But as anyone who has looked beneath the employer claims has discovered, it’s the illegal opposition of employers and the failure of government regulatory agencies to curtail the opposition that’s the basic cause of the low rate of unionization.

If most workers do indeed oppose unionization, then what of the recent polls decisively showing otherwise? And why do so many employers go to the considerable trouble and expense of waging major campaigns against unionization ? Why do they take such illegal actions as firing or otherwise penalizing union supporters?

Could it be that union campaigners might be able to persuade workers to vote for unionization, despite what their employers might have to say? Or despite employer threats to punish them for voting union?

Some employers have now taken the outrageous step of trying to keep employees from even knowing of their legal right to unionization.

Under a National Labor Relations Board ruling last August, employers were to be required as of this April to post notices at their workplaces telling employees of their union rights.

The ruling stemmed from the labor board’s finding that young workers, recent immigrants and workers in non-union workplaces were generally unaware of the labor laws’ guarantees and protections – including, of course, the basic right of workers to unionize.

As the New York Times observed, “the backlash was furious.” The notoriously anti-union National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed suits in two federal courts, claiming the law does not expressly permit the NLRB to require employers to post such notices. An appeals court has postponed the effective date of the rule pending further appeals.

The Times noted that the case involves more than “the legality of having to hang a poster in the coffee room. It’s about industry’s attempt to delay rules whenever it cannot derail them outright. It is about preventing workers from gaining knowledge and support to help them press their concerns.”

So unless and until a court rules otherwise, workers will have the right to protections from the labor laws, but not the right to be informed of that through workplace notices and otherwise. Bizarre, certainly, is the word for that.

What workers need above all, even above the right to know their legal rights, is a firm strengthening of those rights. Why not add the right of unionization specifically to the Civil Rights Act? It is, after all, on a par with other basic civil rights such as the right to an education free of discrimination.

The Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal to discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion or national origin, should be expanded to include a specific prohibition of discrimination against pro-union workers.

No less a civil rights champion than Martin Luther King Jr. would agree to that. He knew that the right to unionization is one of the most important civil rights. Virtually his last act was in support of that. For he was slain by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 as he was preparing to lead yet another of the many demonstrations he had led in behalf of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis who were demanding union recognition.

That was but one of many examples of King’s support for workers seeking union recognition as their civil right – a right guaranteed not only by the 77-year-old National Labor Relations Act but also by the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom of association.

King declared that the needs of all Americans “are identical with labor’s needs: Decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community.”

There could be no civil right greater than the right of working people to try to meet such paramount needs, as well as to be clearly informed of their right to

do so through unionization.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Calvin Trillin: Ron Paul, still standing

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Ron Paul, Stll Standing

 Mitt’s opposite number is still in the race.

Paul has his supporters; he has his own base.

He has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.

Religion? He’s got one. His prophet’s Ayn Rand.

By Rand’s wacko theories he’s fervently gripped,

So he  won’t do the flip-flops. He long ago flipped.

Calvin Trillin, The Naton (5/14/2012


This is your brain on Zulawski

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This is your brain on Zulawski

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To the extent he’s known at all, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski is known in the U.S. for the only movie of his that’s gotten any real exposure here: Possession, a scandalous 1981 Cannes prize-winner considered to have some commercial potential due to its “horror” elements, including a creature designed by FX master Carlo Rambaldi. Its American distributor cut the film from 127 to 80 minutes, radical surgery turning an already logic-defying narrative into a complete madhouse abstraction with its own considerable charms — though don’t tell that to Zulawski, who hated the truncated results.

Thrown into 1983 grindhouse bills, this version flummoxed mainstream horror fans (too arty) and critics (too distasteful), but earned a cult following eventually surprised to learn there was a very different, longer, at-least somewhat-coherent Possession also in existence. One making it clear that for all its bloody, fantastical, even mystical flights, this movie was what Zulawski claimed all along: a portrait of a marriage in painful dissolution, with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill standing in for the director and his first wife (Polish actress Malgorzata Braunek). Even if dramatizing that relationship’s collapse somehow required such metaphorical leaps as Adjani keeping dismembered body parts in her refrigerator and being fucked (happily!) by a tentacled slime monster.

Repaying endless viewings (bonus: after a few you can actually decipher Adjani’s impenetrably accented English), brilliantly acted, and oddly touching despite its myriad outrages, Possession is like nothing else — except, that is, the director’s other films. Five will be shown in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series “From A Whisper to a Scream: Discovering Andrzej Zulawski” this week and next. Watching more than one in close proximity may be hazardous to your mental health, but what the hell.

Now apparently retired at 71, Zulawski was born in Lvov, educated all over Europe thanks to his intellectual family’s diplomatic ties, and assisted Andrzej Wajda on several 1960s films. His first feature, The Third Part of the Night (1971), set the precedent: it was as fevered as its hero, already fragile when the senseless murder of his wife (Braunek) and child by Nazi occupiers turns him into a dervish of frantic motion and impulse. Is he mad? Hallucinating? Already dead? “You behave like the wind,” a friend tells him, a judgment applicable to almost any Zulawski feature or character. This debut won acclaim, but was warily viewed by the Polish government. His next, 1972’s The Devil, an even more berserk Pilgrim’s Progress through war-torn 18th century Poland, was banned outright.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_YOfyMcIwM

Zulawski responded by moving to France, where 1975’s The Most Important Thing: Love, a heated cry against (and of) present-day orgiastic perversity — “Force yourself to look at what revolts you the most,” as one participant puts it — was a success. As a result, Polish authorities invited him back to adapt a great-uncle’s literary sci-fi epic. An allegorical tale of Earth’s civilization grotesquely recreated on another planet, On the Silver Globe was two years into production and 80 percent shot in 1977 when the same authorities shut it down, destroying sets and costumes for good measure. A decade later, Zulawski turned the striking extant footage into both a semi-realized spectacular and a chronicle of its own undoing — 166 minutes’ auto archaeology.

These films are screening at YBCA, though unfortunately the director’s eight French ventures (apart from French-German co-production Possession, showing in an uncut, new 35mm print) were unavailable for inclusion. Most starring subsequent on and off-screen partner Sophie Marceau, they range from 1985’s astonishing Parisian-gangster Dostoyevsky update L’amour Braque to the overblown soap operatics of 2000’s Fidelity, his last work to date.

A sole later Polish endeavor completes YBCA’s quintet. Szamanka‘s sheer extremity — of cinematic and performance frenzy, of often literal wrestling with sex, violence, religion, philosophy, and politics — crystallizes the best, worst, and most purely Zulawskienne (an actual French coinage meaning “over the top”) of this singular career. An older anthropology prof (Bouguslaw Linda) and gorgeous, unlikely engineering student (Iwona Petry) fuck, fuck, fuck around Warsaw, as compulsively and destructively as the duo in 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses, with an endpoint anticipating Hannibal’s cannibal-licious last supper.

Reviled in Poland, barely glimpsed elsewhere, the 1996 film was notorious before it was finished, with Zulawski accused of wildly mistreating 20-year-old “discovery” Petry. She refused to comment, but immediately abandoned acting and reportedly sought spiritual succor in India. Even the sturdier Adjani said it took her years to get over making Possession. What to say about a director who drives actors over the brink? Only that the emotions — as is sometimes said of the millions spent on lavish productions — are all right up there on screen.

“FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM: DISCOVERING ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI”

May 3-13, $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2878

www.ybca.org

Dick Meister: The temples of baseball

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist and former semi-professional baseball player. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

Baseball season again. Time to re-enter the temples of baseball. Temples? Yes, temples.

To most people, baseball is merely a game. But to some others, it’s virtually a religion, a game played in temples – the temples of baseball, be they Major League stadiums or any other baseball park at any level from the Major Leagues to the little parks at much lower levels where I played in hopes of making it big as a professional. But that’s another story.

Of course baseball is a game. But it is indeed a game that is played in temples. Baseball parks are places of myth, superstition and legend, no less than the temples where the great myths, superstitions and legends of religion hold sway. Even the most casual fan is likely to know the myths and legends that make up baseball’s storied history – Babe Ruth’s called-shot home run in the 1932 World Series, for example. His whole career, in fact.

Temples are places of tradition and veneration, and ritual and order, of wisdom being passed from generation to generation, in baseball’s temples from older players and managers to younger players.

Temples are also places in which to pay reverence to beauty. And what’s more beautiful than the graceful motion and timing of baseball, its unique rhythm, the exquisite ebb and flow of action and anticipation, action and thought.

A ballpark also is very much like a temple in that it’s a place to demonstrate faith – faith that your team can win, that there’s always a chance of winning, whatever the odds. No Major League team, anyway, has ever lost all of the games it has played. Nor have many teams at baseball’s lower levels, though I’ve played on some teams that came close.

So, those entering the temples of baseball know there’s always a chance for their team to win. They can legitimately believe t it could happen. Fans know that the games are not over until the very last out of the very last inning, that the innings and the game can go on for as long as the players perform well.

The commandments in baseball’s rule book promise that. There are no clocks measuring off quarters and halves, no point during a game when there is not enough time left to win, no rule saying how long it should take to make three outs and complete an inning, or how long it should take to win or lose a game.

Certainly life outside the temples of baseball may not offer quite so much hope. But if it did, who’d need religion? Who’d need baseball?

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist and former semi-professional baseball player. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

 

The FBI spies on mosques

Zelda Bronstein
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The FBI spies on mosques

The FBI has been sending agents to mosques in California and filing intelligence reports without any suspicion of criminal activity, records obtained by the ACLU, the Asian Law Caucus and the Bay Guardian show.

The records, obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, show agents engaged in what the FBI calls its “mosque outreach” program gathering intelligence on the content of sermons, mosque finances and such mundane things as the sale of date fruit.

The agents apparently weren’t working undercover — in fact, in one instance, an FBI agent met with worshippers after a service and “handed out FBI pens.”

But the information collected — none of which has anything to do with any criminal activity or threat of criminal activity — was filed as “positive intelligence,” meaning the data would be maintained in the FBI’s intel files. Some of it was marked “secret” and distributed outside the agency.

Among other things, the records show that federal agents collected the names of congregants, the names of religious leaders, and the level of financial support individuals were giving to various mosques.

In one instance, FBI agents used a worshipper’s cell phone to run electronic checks on him.

As the ACLU notes:

Categorizing information about religious beliefs, practices, and otherwise innocent activities as “positive intelligence” could have very serious negative consequences for Muslim groups and their congregants. FBI agents accessing this information in intelligence files would assume it was relevant to the FBI’s investigative and intelligence mission, casting a cloud of suspicion over the group or individual mentioned and potentially leading to more intensive scrutiny or investigation. The dissemination of this “positive intelligence” outside the FBI would only increase the likelihood that other law enforcement or intelligence agencies would investigate innocent groups or individuals based solely on their religion.

You can download the ACLU report and the records here (pdf), and an earlier report on “mosque outreach” here. I’ll be updating this information as I go through the individual files.

It’s not what you get, it’s what you keep

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It’s not what you get, it’s what you keep

caitlin@sfbg.com

LIT In Redefining Black Power (City Lights Books, 206pp, $16.95), Joanne Griffith’s assemblage of her interviews with black thought leaders, Obama is not the focus, but his presidency is the frame. Journalists, activists, an economist, a theologist who wrote speeches for Martin Luther King, Jr. — each chapter of the book is a dialogue faithfully transcribed from Griffith’s well-informed questionings, reminding readers that the fight for expanded democracy in the United States didn’t end when the brand-new First Family took the stage that night in Chicago’s Grant Park.

Because when it comes to the fight for equal rights in this country — as economist Julienne Malveaux quotes from Lauryn Hill in her Redefining Black Power interview — “it’s not what you get, it’s what you keep.”

Griffith wants to make sure that the words of black leaders are kept in history’s permanent ledger. The Redefining Black Power project was born after she visited KPFK in Los Angeles, where the Pacifica Radio Archives are kept. The archives, a repository for interviews with African American leaders going back for decades, inspired her role as a modern day chronologist. With the help of Brian DeShazor, director of the Archives, Griffith has been airing one historical interview a week on her BBC Radio 5 Sunday evening show.

She also started conducting interviews herself. This edition of Redefining Black Power (she hopes there will be more) is structured as a look at the state of black America since President Obama ascended to the Oval Office, public fist bumps, and dolorous battles over health care.

The book is important, more readable than you’d think interview transcripts would be, and includes seldom-heard perspectives like those of an activist who refuses to vote and calls President Obama “crack” for African Americans, and a Ghana-born New York journalist who asserts we must never forget what it meant when Malia Obama wears her hair in twists.

Griffith acts as the conduit of information, rarely the pontificator herself. That’s why we tapped her for a Guardian interview via email last month, eager to hear what she’s learned about black power today.

SFBG: Explain where the interviews in the book came from. How did you become acquainted with the Pacifica Radio Archives and why are they important?

JG: The idea for the Redefining Black Power Project, of which the book is part, was born out of the historic audio held in the Pacifica Radio Archives, a national treasure trove of material charting America’s history from a progressive perspective dating back to 1949. But it was one recording of Fannie Lou Hamer addressing the 1964 Democratic national convention that sparked the idea for Redefining Black Power. Brian DeShazor heard the tape and wanted to find a permanent way to preserve and share the voices held in the Archives with a wider audience, and what better way than through the written word? Brian approached City Lights Books with the idea, and this book is the result, drawing on the voices of history to link us to the election of Barack Obama, one of the most significant moments in the social and political history of the United States. Through this project, we hope to preserve the voices, opinions and perspectives of African-Americans in this so called ‘Age of Obama’ for historians to digest and explore in years to come.

How did I get involved? As a complete audio nut, I always make a point of visiting local radio stations wherever I travel in the world. Back in 2007, I was in Los Angeles, called KPFK to arrange a visit and was introduced to the Pacifica Radio Archives. Because of this work and the extensive list of people I have interviewed over the years, Brian invited me to do the interviews for the Redefining Black Power project. Through this book, we delve into the role of the activist from different perspectives; the legal system, the media, religion, the economy, green politics and emotional justice.

SFBG: Was there an interview from the book in which your subject’s answers deeply surprised you? 

Joanne Griffith: It was Dr Vincent Harding, the man behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech that surprised me the most. A true veteran of the civil rights movement, he made the point that the election of President Obama was never the goal of the movement; instead he prefers to call the work “the movement for the expansion and deepening of democracy in America.” Put this way, it made me realize more than ever, that the work we do today is not in isolation, but part of a wider movement, stretching back all the way to slavery. And the work isn’t over.

SFBG: Who should read this book? How should it be used? 

JG: Use it as a conversation starter to discuss issues in your own community. Parents, use it as a way to engage your children in history. Students, use it as a resource for papers on race and the Obama presidency. Most importantly, everyone, share your thoughts at www.redefiningblackpower.com. This book is not the end of the project; we’re only getting started.

 

The legacy of racism

Andrew Lam
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The legacy of racism

steve@sfbg.com

The legacy of brutal racism in this country, particularly against African Americans, shapes the events of today. That’s a notion that much of white America resists accepting, particularly conservatives. But actions create reactions, hatred begets hatred, and those cycles can roll forward endlessly and manifest in unpredictable ways.

That’s one of the most compelling lessons in local journalist Thomas Peele’s gripping and insightful new book, Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist (2012, Crown), which grew out of covering the aftermath of the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Bailey was killed to prevent him from writing a story in the Oakland Post about the violence and financial crimes perpetrated by followers of the late Yusuf Bey and his sons, including Yusuf Bey IV (aka Fourth). Peele and other local journalists and media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to build on the work Bailey began and investigate his murder, which Fourth was convicted last year of ordering.

“The free press on which the public depends to keep it informed had been attacked,” Peele wrote. While such murders are rare in the U.S. — the last was a Mafia hit on a reporter from Arizona in 1976 — Peele and his brethren considered it important to send the message that, “A story could not be killed by killing a journalist.”

But the story that emerges from Peele’s years-long investigation goes well beyond Bailey’s murder, its flawed investigation by the Oakland Police Department, the violence and hypocrisy of the Your Black Muslim Bakery “cult,” or its long and complex relationship with Oakland’s political and community leaders.

Peele delves deeply into the 80-plus-year history of the Nation of Islam and Black Muslim ideology, dissecting its turbulent evolution and belief system that white people are “devils,” created by a mad scientist named Big-Headed Yakub, who use “tricknology” to hide the truth that African Americans are superior beings who will be spared during a coming Armageddon inflicted by a spaceship that has long circled the earth — a belief system that Malcolm X rejected after taking a hajj to Mecca and shortly before his assassination.

Peele dismisses the entire religion — which has very little in common with true Islam — as a deceptive scam from its inception, devised by the “con man” W.D. Fard and promoted by Elijah Muhammad simply to enrich its leaders by manipulating poor African Americans. Similarly, Yusuf Bey spoke the language of black empowerment in founding his own breakaway Black Muslim sect in North Oakland then used it as cover for criminal enterprises and raping the women under his control over a period of decades.

But to understand the appeal of Black Muslims preaching hatred of white devils, you have to look at the African American experience and horrible racism and violence that black people have endured in this country, as Peele does. He starts in Depression-era Detroit, where Fard and Muhammad met amid the virulent racism against Southern blacks who migrated north to work in Henry Ford’s automobile factories.

“This is the question of the psychology of race,” legendary attorney Clarence Darrow said during the Detroit murder trial of blacks defending their home against an attacking white mob, which Peele uses to great effect. “Of how everything known to a race affects its actions. What we learn as children we remember — it gets fastened to the mind. I would not claim that the people outside the Sweet house were bad. But they would do to Negroes something they would not do to whites. It’s their race psychology.”

We see Joseph Stephens (who would later become Yusuf Bey) growing up with tales of brutal lynchings in his hometown of Greenville, Texas, and later as a Santa Barbara hairdresser who discovered the Nation of Islam in 1962 after the Los Angeles Police Department had shot up its mosque and Stephens found his calling in the resolute words of Malcolm X and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

African American history made Bailey want to become a journalist focused on covering and empowering his community. And this same legacy — mixed with hopelessness, poverty, and broken homes during an upbringing in San Francisco and Richmond — animated Devaughndre Broussard, who fired three shotgun blasts into Bailey on a sunny morning in downtown Oakland.

“His life was no accident. Neither was his faith,” Peele wrote of Fourth in the last chapter. “The society that now worked through its flawed laws and imperfect courts to put him in prison for life had only itself to blame for the terror that Fourth and his fellow believers had inflicted upon it. The backlash against centuries of enslavement of Africans and the subhuman treatment of their descendants had seen to that. The stick figure hanging from a loose that Elijah Muhammad had ordered displayed in all the Nation of Islam mosques, the symbol of the boyhood lynching of his friend Albert Hamilton, showed that some could never forget, or forgive. Neither could Yusef Bey forget the stories of cotton fields his parents brought west from East Texas along with the story of a Negro burned to death as white people gathered in the square of a horrible place called Greenville and cheered. Some wounds are too deep to heal.”

But Americans have short memories for even our recent history, coupled with a growing sense that society’s have-nots somehow deserve to be that way and a lack of understanding of the many ways that racism and its legacy still affects this country.

“I don’t think white America understands it at all. White America has this attitude of: get over it,” Peele told me when I asked about that “racism’s backlash” theme. “How long can you oppress people and treat them like utter garbage before there is a rebellion?”

Gauged by poverty or incarceration rates, or by the poor quality of many of its schools, much of black America still faces tough struggles. It wrestles with a lack of opportunities and an understandable sense of hopelessness that can easily breed resentment or even violence. One example that Peele includes were the Death Angels (aka the “Zebra murders”), in which a small group of militant black ex-convicts randomly shot dozens of white people in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 1970s.

Peele closes the book with a chilling suggestion that Broussard, who is serving a fixed 25-year prison sentence because of his cooperation in the prosecution of Fourth and co-defendant Antoine Mackey, is studying to become a spiritual leader and may follow familiar patterns. “Look at where he came from? Have things changed that much?” Peele said of the lack of opportunities that Broussard faced growing up, and will face again when he gets out of prison in his mid-40s.

Peele has long been an award-winning investigative reporter rooted in deep research, which he combines with a colorful and dramatic narrative style. Yet he sometimes oversimplifies and harshly judges events and people, even Bailey, who Peele deems a lazy journalist and bad writer.

“The truth speaks for itself,” Peele told me. But the truth is often a matter of perspective, and Peele can’t escape the fact that he’s a white guy who has worked out of Contra Costa and Alameda counties since 2000. Perhaps that’s why he’s so quick to label poor urban areas with substantial African American populations as “ghettos.” Or, sometimes even more dramatically, as a “sagging, blood-splattered ghetto,” a phrase that a Los Angeles Times reviewer singled out as an example of how “Peele’s prose occasionally overreaches.”

I was repeatedly struck by the same thought, almost physically cringing when Peele labeled San Francisco’s Western Addition, my old neighborhood, as a violent ghetto. Or when he wrote, “Richmond is one of the most hopeless and violent cities in America, an oil-refinery town of 103,000 people, littered with shanties where shipyard workers lived during World War II ,” as if it were a cross between an Appalachian coal town and Third World hovel rather than a clean, modern Bay Area city well-served by public transit and a Green Party mayor.

Peele got defensive when I asked him about the labels, telling me, ” I stand by characterizations,” although he admitted that maybe Western Addition isn’t really a ghetto. “I think you’re nitpicking,” he told me.

Perhaps, and I do think that Peele’s flair for the dramatic is one of the things that makes Killing the Messenger such a page-turner, in the tradition of great true-crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But in a book that bravely takes on the complexities of racism and its backlash, I think this is more than a trivial “nit.”

It’s tempting for white America to dismiss such details, treat racism is a thing of the past, and malign racial sensitivity as political correctness. But as Peele and his book remind us, the wounds of not-so-distant indignities can run deep. And the collapsing opportunities for social and economic advancement in this country will create a backlash if we try to ignore it.

Our Weekly Picks: March 14-20

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 14

“History of the Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe”

Those hurting from lurid leprechaun depictions could do worse than attend San Francisco’s Crossroads Irish American Festival (going on now through April 7) for legitimate, culturally relevant Éire-inspired happenings. Lectures, live music, dance — and don’t worry, this is no stodgy teetotaler lineup, either. Visitors to the California Historical Society today can check out the group’s collection of artifacts of (and a presentation regarding) that very San Francisco of beverages, the Irish coffee. Ephemera from the drink’s progenitors at Buena Vista Cafe in Fisherman’s Wharf, correspondence with the Irish Consul, drink propaganda going back decades. A trip to your favorite cozy bar to sample a cup is required post-exhibit. (Caitlin Donohue)

5:30-7:30 p.m., free with RSVP (rsvp@calhist.org or 415-357-1848, ext. 229)

California Historical Society

678 Mission, SF

www.irishamericancrossroads.org

 

The Knux

Hailing from “the real New Orleans” where “every day was hell,” the Knux isn’t fucking around. Brothers Kentrell “Krispy” Lindsey and Alvin “Joey” Lindsey wear skinny jeans and Converse, but if you call them hipster rappers, they will crush you. The Knux released its second full-length album, Eraser, last September and seem to play shows as frequently as humanly possible. Their heady brand of hip hop integrates elements of punk and garage rock, and most of their songs are at least a little bit (if not entirely) about sex; drugs figure in prominently, too. Joey has called their performances “a musical orgasm on stage.” Tempting. (Mia Sullivan)

With Vibrant Sound, the Cuss

9:30 p.m., $12

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com


THURSDAY 15

Willie Nelson

“Outlaw” is a term that tends to be thrown around a little bit too liberally these days, particularly when it comes to discussing musicians — but one man that undoubtedly deserves that title is Willie Nelson, whose five-decade and counting career as a singer, songwriter, poet, author, and social activist has been forged entirely on his own terms. Known for his own recording hits, his partnerships with people such as Johnny Cash, his slew of songwriting successes (notably the classic tune “Crazy,” as made famous by Patsy Cline), the 78-year-old icon continues to prove that he is a musical and social force to be reckoned with. (Sean McCourt)

With Pegi Young and the Survivors

8 p.m., $55

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.thefoxoakland.com

 

San Francisco Dance Film Festival

Now San Francisco really has reason to brag about its Dance Film Festival. The first two editions of the fest packed ’em in, not because of big names but because the selections, mostly shorts, were so varied and, for the most part, mesmerizing. This year the festival boasts three different programs in three different locations, with 23 films (including four feature-length documentaries) from ten countries. A particularly fine doc is Joffrey: Mavericks on American Dance, which has an additional post-fest screening at the Balboa Theater on Mon/19 (www.balboamovies.com). As the film demonstrates, Robert Joffrey was one of America’s most adventurous artistic directors, both in terms of commissioning new work and restaging historical ones. (Rita Felciano)

Through Sun/18, $10–$100

Various locations, SF

www.sfdancefilmfest.org

 

“Life and Death in Black and White: AIDS Direct Action in San Francisco, 1985-1990”

Last month’s splendid display of well-selected AIDS quilt panels in the Castro (which commemorated dozens of passed community members), excellent local HIV oral history doc We Were Here (which should have won the Oscar), and recent fetishization of early 1990s gay party music in the clubs (which … don’t ask) have opened a fascinating wormhole into the recent — and recently unspeakable — past. The invaluable unearthing of contemporary gay history continues: we’ve moved from the Milkeolithic into the HIVoscene. The GLBT History Museum’s new exhibition “Life and Death in Black and White” will help dig even deeper, bringing important and inspiring ACT-UP and other protest photographs by Jane Philomen Cleland, Patrick Clifton, Marc Geller, Rick Gerharter, and Daniel Nicoletta to light. (Marke B.)

Through July 1

Reception tonight, 7-9 p.m., $3-5

GLBT History Museum

4127 18th St., SF

(415) 621-1107

www.glbthistory.org


FRIDAY 16

Lindstrøm (cancelled)

We should all hold off final judgment at least until Mungolian Jet Set makes its way over here, but otherwise, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is currently Norway’s funkiest export — if for no other reason than that the electronic musician has been anointed by having prog-rock legend Todd Rundgren remix his latest single, “Quiet Place to Live.” It’s an inspired move, particularly since the album it comes from — Six Cups of Rebel — has the same anything-goes eclecticism that marked Rundgren’s work. The result, which feature Lindstrøm’s vocals for the first time, plays like a post-disco version of cuts from Rundgren’s 1973 prog classic A Wizard, a True Star. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Magic Touch, Conar, Solar, and more

9 p.m., $18

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

 

Hot Buttered Rum

This friendly San Francisco-based quintet delivers twangy bluegrass bliss with its signature woodwind accents. Heavily influenced by jam giants like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and Béla Fleck, Hot Buttered Rum’s music is light, fun, and compositionally lush. Although HBR has developed a jammy, improvisational style and reputation over the years, the group focused more on songwriting while making its latest album, Limbs Akimbo. Band member Erik Yates (banjos, guitars, woodwinds, and vocals) has described the album as “deeper” and more reflective of struggle than its previous work, which explored utopian themes like backpacking, first love, and materialism. Did I mention most of these men were reared in Northern California? (Sullivan)

With Cornmeal

9 p.m., $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com


Layo & Bushwacka

Matthew Benjamin and Layo Puskin first joined forces in the 1990s during the hustle and bustle of London’s acid house scene. Since then, the affectionately dubbed DJ-producer duo Layo & Bushwacka continue to pump out tracks that straddle the fence between pounding techno and groovy house music on their own Olmeto Records. “Love Story,” from their 2002 release Night Works, remains the seminal example of their classic, no-frills tech house, with vintage-sounding vocals and catchy melodies layered over driving beats. (Kevin Lee)

With !K7, Ripperton, Eduardo Castillo, VOODOO, and Brandt Brauer Frick

9:30 p.m., $20

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com


SATURDAY 17

Sonoma Marin Cheese Trail

Wine country tours are all well and good — until it’s your turn to be the designated driver. Enter the cheesemaker tour, brought to you courtesy of the California Artisan Cheese Guild. The association’s nifty new map has directions to 27 producers of blue, washed rind, semi-soft, and surface-ripened wonders in Sonoma and Marin Counties, from Tomales’ Ramini mozzarella (made from the milk of water buffalos) to the Italian-style snacks of Sebastopol’s Bohemian Creamery. Samples and tours are available at many of the cheeseries, consult your handy (available online) map for which ones are which. Two different 50-mile driving routes await you, as does — perhaps less explicitly — a picnic in the high grasses, or perhaps sunny sand dunes with a wheel or three. (Donohue)

Ongoing

Various cheesemakers, Sonoma and Marin Counties

www.cheesetrail.org

 

Robert Glasper Experiment

Following his singular and hilarious performance with Reggie Watts at Yoshi’s last month, pianist Robert Glasper returns, this time with his full band. The Robert Glasper Experiment has just released Black Radio, in which Glasper seems to be taking a shot at infusing some life back into jazz as well as raising the bar back up on popular music. Prominently blending jazz, R&B, and hip-hop, the album feature collaborations with Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey), and many others, as well as an unexpected cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The assuredly tight band will features guest vocalist Bilal at these dates. (Prendiville)

Tonight, 8 p.m., $20–$25

New Parish

579 18th St., Oakl.

www.thenewparish.com

Also Sun/18, 9 p.m., $20-25

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

Kafana Balkan

A few short years ago, it seemed like wild Balkan dance parties were everywhere. Not so left-field a concept! (And not just because we have a sizeable population of hard-partying Eastern European immigrants.) The whirling Romany, a.k.a. gypsy, tunes and wanderlust ethos served as perfect redux for post-playa burners, California dreamers, nomadic spirits, and techno-fatigued clubgoers. The music’s woozy brass oompahs, astonishing accordion flights, and multiple time-signatures tapped into familiar, ecstatic Norteño, Irish jig, and polka veins while appealing to musicological intellects and enthusiastic dancers. Some great gypsy parties remain, especially at Amnesia Bar in the Mission. But hoist your glass of rakija for the return of one of the largest and best: Kafana Balkan swings back into action with fantastic DJ Zeljko and a live blast from the Brass Menazeri ensemble. It’ll be rather good-insane. (Marke B.)

9 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com


SUNDAY 18

Barbary Coast Burlesque

Consider the bunny. Scotty the Blue Bunny that is, a azure spandex-clad gent whose providence could only be, and sure enough is, San Francisco. Scotty stalks the stage in transparent plastic stripper heels and towering blue wabbit ears, a walking, talking, anthropomorphic vaudeville game. Would you believe he’s not the main attraction in his own troupe? No, no, that honor must be bestowed upon the betasseled lovelies of the Barbary Coast Burlesque, formed in 2006 by the elegantly-monikered Bunny Pistol. This, friends, is retro-sex — sleek and classy Burly Q in a city that does it very well. Check out this month’s Barbary Coast showcase at the equally impressive Yoshi’s, and resist the urge to hop-hop-hop onstage to join in the fun. (Donohue)

8 p.m., $20

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com


TUESDAY 20

Deicide

Led by singer-bassist Glen Benton, Deicide has been storming stages and terrorizing the music world for nearly 25 years with their Florida-bred brand of death metal, stirring up controversy with their anti-religion lyrics, offstage antics, and (of course) their extreme sound. Returning to San Francisco on the “March of Death 2012” tour in support of their latest album, last year’s To Hell With God, fans can expect nothing less than a night of brutal blast beats, demonic vocals, and thrashing guitars. (McCourt)

With Jungle Rot, Abigail Williams, and Lecherous Nocturne

8 p.m., $25–$28

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com 


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Our Weekly Picks: February 29-March 6

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 29

Jacques Lu Cont

Stuart Price is a mixmaster of mystery. The British producer-DJ goes by many aliases, including Paper Faces, Thin White Duke, Jacques Lu Cont, and Les Rythmes Digitales. How could a Brit use French pseudonyms? Well, after you’ve won three Grammy Awards and worked with an entire spectrum of musicians ranging from Madonna to Miike Snow, from the Killers to Kylie Minogue, from Seal to the Scissor Sisters, then you’re off the hook for that faux pas. Price, the son of two classically trained pianists, developed his version of French electro house after hearing the sounds of the Human League. Expect Price and his trusty synthesizers to give guilty-pleasure makeovers to familiar songs and vocals (Kevin Lee).

With Robb Green

10 p.m., $5

Vessel

85 Campton, SF

(415) 433-8585

www.vesselsf.com

 

Nellie McKay in “I Want To Live!”

From the get-go, Nellie McKay has bucked against the typical musical confines: releasing her first album in 2004 as a double CD when it might have fit in one, calling it Get Away From Me in a jab at Norah Jones and to avoid being lumped in as just another female jazz singer. One listen to her actual music then and since, a maddening blend of pop, calypso, hip-hop, rock, reggae and (yes) vocal jazz, with maddening humor and reassuring warmth, assured that one label would simply never work. “I Want To Live!” showcases all McKay’s uncaged skill as performer as she reinvents the story of San Quentin death row inmate Barbara Graham as noir cabaret. (Ryan Prendiville)

8 p.m., $30

Rrazz Room

222 Mason, SF

(415) 394-1189

www.therrazzroom.com


THURSDAY 1

It Came From Hangar 18 book party

Two men, one brand-new sci-fi epic: It Came From Hangar 18 touches down from Planet Pulp this week at the Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge, which is actually one of the book’s settings, and serves a mighty tasty array of exotic cocktails to boot. Written by noted B-movie film programmer and author Will Viharo (A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge) and software-engineer-with-a-dark-side Scott Fulks, Hangar 18 is self-described as “the most action-packed, erotic science fiction epic since the Bible — but with even more sex and violence!” Also: vampires, mobsters, and (I’m guessing) umbrella drinks galore. The release party features live surf music by retro-futurists Tomorrowmen. Whatever you do, keep watching the skies! (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., free

Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge

1304 Lincoln, Alameda

(510) 749-0332

www.forbiddenislandalameda.com

 

RED BULL Thre3STYLE DJ COMPETITION

Every year, Red Bull pops in to provide a swell showcase of our current nightlife scene, inviting a variety of local disc jocks to compete for the chance to advance to national and international levels — and possibly win an enormous golden calf that squirts endless supplies of energy drink from its nipples. KIDDING. I’m sure they win something, but the real reward is ours, watching fine hometown talent display some flexibility on the decks. (The “Thre3style” part means competitors must include three different genres of music in their 15-minute sets.) This year’s amped qualifiers are KingMost, Zita, Theory, Just, Miles Medina, and John Beaver, as well as Seattle winner Four Color Zack and Portland winner Playtime. If last year’s wonderfully diverse crowd and hyper energy are anything to go by, this will be the party.

9 p.m. (show at 9:30 p.m.), $12, 18+

Ruby Skye

420 Mason, SF.

(415) 693-0777

www.redbullusa.com/thre3style

 

Zola Jesus

Russian-American Nika Roza Danilova grew up in Wisconsin, which is pretty much as close to Russia, climate-wise, as you’re going to get in the continental U.S. In the bitter cold of the Midwest, young Danilova sang opera before transitioning into rock, nabbing a keyboard here and a drum machine there. A few EPs, studio albums, and a critically acclaimed LP later, Danilova’s Zola Jesus is preaching to the masses, belting and wailing while electronic glitch samples and piano chords crash against each other. Most recent release Conatus (Sacred Bones Records) is something akin to industrial sprinkled with a pinch of classical, culled together by Danilova’s haunting, resonant voice. (Lee)

With Wymond Miles of the Fresh & Onlys, Talk Normal

9 p.m., $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com


FRIDAY 2

O’ Brother

A brutally captivating four-piece out of Atlanta, O’ Brother combines industrial, screaming metal, and the hard edge of Southern rock. A barrage of guitars —grounded by drummer Michael Martens, with shifting vocals by Tanner Merritt —results in a sound that’s syrupy and sludgy one moment, airy the next. Released in late 2011, O’ Brother’s first full length album, Garden Window, recalls the drive of Queens of the Stone Age, the atmosphere of Sigur Ros, and the march of Tool, without being too heavily indebted to any one part. (Prendiville)

With Junius, Happy Body Slow Brain

9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

Prizehog

Don’t let the lack of a bassist fool you — Prizehog gets heavy. The San Francisco trio deploys a keyboard alongside large-gauge drums and down-tuned guitar to create music that veers effortlessly between tectonic post-rock, thundering doom blues, and Hawkwind-style, spaceship-launch psychedelia. Patience and an open mind are two necessary virtues; they’ll prepare you for the band’s shuddering builds, non-traditional arrangements, and sudden stylistic shifts. Concertgoers looking for a potent dose of local, experimental volume should look to get high on the ‘Hog. (Ben Richardson)

With Bobb Saggeth, Hell Ship

9 p.m., $8

Thee Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415)-252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

 

Ty Segall

Ty Segall has managed to produce ecstatic, psychedelic lo-fi garage punk rock that retains the catchiest elements of rock’n’roll — seductive drumbeats, wailing guitars, and arresting lyrics — really quickly. Last year he released full-length album Goodbye Bread, along with three EPs. This spring he’s touring with Tim Presley of White Fence to promote their collaborative LP, Hair, out April 28. Hair features Segall’s brand of bright and fuzzy electric doo-wop and Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds-inspired melodic distortion. Segall rocked the Great American Music Hall last year with his curly blonde head-banging antics and returns this week to shake it out some more. (Mia Sullivan)

With White Fence, Mikal Cronin, the Feeling of Love

8:30 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com


SATURDAY 3

Bad Weather California

Let’s start a new religion. Let’s start a cult. Let’s go to bed. Let’s get high. Let’s get fucked up. Let’s start a band. Let’s get a van. Let’s make some music. Whatever its problems may be, Denver-based freaked out rocker band Bad Weather California offers a lot of simple solutions, without falling into the typical pratfalls of musical contrivance. It’s a rebellious rock streak without being punk, hippy utopian idealism without being a jam band, spiritual fervor without preachy religiosity. The Akron/Family label-mates have a sunny optimism in the face of bad shit and a sound that might have you going along. Maybe even that cult part. (Ryan Prendiville)

With He’s My Brother She’s My Sister

9 p.m., $8–$11

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com


SUNDAY 4

“Balboa Birthday Bash”

Hey, jazz baby: between 2011 hits The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris, the 1920s are the cinematic decade du jour. What better way to re-live the flapper era than at a movie theater that’s been around since 1926? Cheer the Balboa’s 86th birthday — yep, it’s older than the Oscars — at a fiesta co-presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. On tap are a screening of Harold Lloyd classic Safety Last! (1923) on 35mm with piano accompaniment by Frederick Hodges; a screening of shorts by Georges Méliès (a.k.a. Ben Kingsley’s character in Hugo); a live vaudeville show; an illustrated lecture by author and Safety Last! expert John Bengtson; birthday cake; and more. As they said in the ’20s (or at least, they always say in movies set in the ’20s), it’ll be the cat’s pajamas. (Eddy)

7 p.m., $7.50–$10

Balboa Theatre

3630 Balboa, SF

(415) 221-8184

www.balboamovies.com


MONDAY 5

The Driftwood Singers

Listening to the Driftwood Singers makes you feel like you’re ambling down a dusty country road toward something that might not exist anymore. This lo-fi folk duo of Pearl Charles and Kris Hutson writes foreboding, bluesy love ballads laden with longing nostalgia. Charles’ warm, milky vocals blend seamlessly with Hutson’s slightly twangy voice as Charles picks her autoharp and Hutson strums his guitar (or mandolin/banjo, depending on the number). This pair hails from LA (no, really) and recorded their debut EP, Look!, with a Sony Walkman. Their upcoming seven-inch, out March 27, was recorded a bit more expertly, but channels the same raw honesty. (Sullivan)

With Birdhouse, Lauren Shera, and Infantree

8:30 p.m., $12

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com


TUESDAY 6

Mia Doi Todd

Los Angeles singer-songwriter Mia Doi Todd’s latest offering, Cosmic Ocean Ship (City Zen Records), was inspired by journeys into Cuba, Brazil, France, Mexico, and India. Her lilting, reflective vocals relay tones of nostalgia, affection, and optimism. Opening track “Paraty” refers to a Brazilian coastal town and brings in some lighthearted samba, while “Under the Sun” sees Todd turn tropical island chanteuse; her romantic crooning bringing to mind a couple taking a post-luau stroll on the beach. The take-away message might best be encapsulated by Cosmic‘s last track, a touching cover of Chilean Folk artist Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la vida.” (Lee)

With Bells

8 p.m., $16–$26

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

 

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is the only 20th century ballet that can give a run to the 19th century biggies Nutcracker and Swan Lake. No matter who choreographs, it will find an audience. Fortunately, you have to be really good to keep control of the subject matter’s complexity, not to speak of an audience’s expectation about a beloved story and, of course, the music. Helgi Tómasson has the chops. His 1994 version is gorgeous, sumptuously choreographed and designed. The depth of the company is such that it has any number of first-rate dancers to fill the roles, not just the major ones of the lovers, but minor characters — the villain and the best friend, the gypsy girls and the rejected suitor. (Rita Felciano)

Through March 11, 8 p.m., $36–$285

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 865-2000

www.sfballet.org

 

 

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Our Weekly Picks: February 22-27

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WEDNESDAY 22

Way Behind the Music

Famous rockers may have a way with riffs, but their grammar and syntax can often prove cringe-worthy. And yet, their inflated egos and turmoil-filled musings within literary efforts provide insight into worlds otherwise unknown. This, my friends, is the perfect set-up for an evening of music obsessed over-sharing. At the return of Litquake and Noise Pop’s collaborative event, Way Behind the Music, a collection of esteemed local musicians and writers will read from the autobiographies of Ozzy Osbourne, Sammy Hagar, Jewel, Slash, Ted Nugent, Marianne Faithfull, Angela Bowie, Jim Hutton (boyfriend of Freddie Mercury), and Christopher Ciccone (brother of Madonna). The group on stage — which includes Penelope Houston, Carletta Sue Kay, Jennifer Maerz, and more — will extract tales of Olympic-level drug use, epic bands fights, and rock star trials and tribulations, giving the audience just a taste of that wild ride to infamy. (Emily Savage)

7 p.m., $15

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2888

www.makeoutroom.com

 

THURSDAY 23

Big Black Delta

Big Black Delta is the solo project of Los Angeles maestro Jonathan Bates, lead singer of lo-fi rock band Mellowdrone. Legend has it Bates launched BBD after buying a used laptop off frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator Alessandro Cortini and using it to create electronic soundscapes. Good thing too, because BBDLP1 is a crafty compilation made up of equal parts power and panache. “Huggin & Kissin” sounds so aggressive, it’s as if Depeche Mode’s synths decided to take steroids and beat up little kids. On the flip side, “Dreary Moon” with Morgan Kibby (the Romanovs, M83) has all the ethereal, vocal playfulness of an Air track. Bates brings in dueling drummers Mahsa Zargaran and Amy Wood for the live show. (Kevin Lee)

With New Diplomat, Aaron Axelsen & Nako 9 p.m., $10–<\d>$12 Rickshaw Stop 155 Fell, SF (415) 861-2011 www.rickshawstop.com

 

FRIDAY 24

“More Light”

If you’re up for a dose of reifying pessimism, check out “More Light” —a joint exhibition featuring new works by Francesco Deiana and Lafe Harley Eaves. In an effort to explore how society diverts humans from primordial joys, Deiana creates ballpoint pen drawings and images on photographic paper that juxtapose society’s adulterating tendencies with natural beauty (e.g. a drawing of an impenetrable brick wall flushed with a photograph of the ocean). Eaves, who’s said he views the world as “one dark joke after another,” makes line and pattern narratives that delve into the occult, religion, and the psychedelic. He also focuses on illustrating human duality and the uncertainty of relationships. (Mia Sullivan)

7 p.m. opening reception, free

Park Life

220 Clement, SF

(415) 386-7275

www.parklifestore.com

 

Image Comic Expo

With San Francisco’s WonderCon moving to Anaheim while Moscone Center South undergoes renovation, Image Comic Expo in Oakland is the primary destination for Bay Area comic book nerdery this season. Instead of focusing on Marvel and DC — the comics industry’s “Big Two” — the Expo bills itself as a “celebration of creator-owned comics.” Exhibitors include a number of independent publishers besides Berkeley-based Image Comics. Guests include Image luminaries Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), plus fan favorites Jonathan Hickman (FF, Pax Romana), Joe Casey (Gødland), Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, ABC’s Lost) and Blair Butler. (Sam Stander)

Fri/24, 3-8 p.m.; Sat/25, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun/26, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $20–$150

Oakland Convention Center 550 10th St., Oakl.

www.imagecomicexpo.com

 

Dave Holland Overtone Quartet

English bassist Dave Holland came to the United States at the request of the legendary Miles Davis and became part of music lore as part of the quartet that birthed jazz fusion and its opus, Bitches Brew (Columbia). Holland has since worked with a number of jazz masters including Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk and Chick Corea. When Holland was coming into his own as a musician in the 1970s, the rest of the Overtone Quartet were just entering into the world. But saxophonist Chris Potter (a frequent Holland collaborator), drummer Eric Harland (a SFJazz Collective performer) and pianist Jason Moran (a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius”) have established themselves as potent forces in their own right. (Lee)

8 p.m., $25–$65

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 567-6642

www.sfjazz.org

 

“Oracle and Enigma”

For a while, thanks to a series of festivals organized by producer Brechin Flournoy, San Francisco was the place in the country to see Butoh. The excitement and puzzlement surrounding the art has died down as it has simply become another form of international dance. So it should be good to again see one of its original practitioners, the Kyoto-born Katsura Kan who in 1997 moved to Thailand and has since become one of those peripatetic choreographer-dancers who takes inspiration from wherever he alights. As part of his winter residency at CounterPULSE, Kan and Shoshana Green will present “Oracle and Enigma” which they describe as “a journey towards the celestial horizon”. Sounds like Butoh . (Rita Felciano)

Fri/24-Sat/25, 8 p.m., $18–<\d>$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(800) 350-8850

www.counterpulse.org

 

SATURDAY 25

Monster Jam

A stampede of horsepower comes thundering into the Bay Area today with the Monster Jam series of monster truck races and events, featuring 16 ground-shaking custom creations such as the long-running fan favorite “Grave Digger,” which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Fans can get up close and personal with the burly behemoths during the afternoon “Party In The Pits” before the night’s main events, where the 10,000 pound muscle machines will fly through the air at distances up to 130 feet, reach heights up to 35 feet in the air, and of course, gloriously smash a series a puny regular cars. (Sean McCourt)

3-6 p.m. pit party, 7 p.m. main event; $12.50–<\d>$32, $125 for total access pass

O.co Coliseum

7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl.

(800) 745-3000

www.monsterjam.com

 

“Cum and Glitter: A Live Sex Show”

Perhaps you’re one of those people — that yes, do exist — left nonplussed by your standard strip club experience. Let’s face it, fried chicken buffets and atrocious choreography amplified by glitter platform heels don’t do it for us all. For you, then, queer pornographer Maxine Holloway’s new monthly sex show. Holloway, a vintage-loving local coquette, has bolstered her sex industry chops heading Madison Young’s women’s only POV website and used her connections to line up a crack cast for Cum and Glitter’s opening night: Kitty Stryker, Courtney Trouble, and Annika Amour among other superlative sex workers. Live cello music. Specialty cocktails named after the performers. Class. (Caitlin Donohue)

9 p.m., $30–$55 individuals, $50 couples

RSVP for location

www.cumandglitter.com

 

SUNDAY 26

“Up the Oscars!”

For a particular breed of movie fiend, the Academy Awards are more like a sporting event than a glamorous celebration of Hollywood. You know the type: catcalling the screen like they’re giving a blind ref the business (2006 flashback: “Crash? Are you fucking kidding me? Brokeback Mountain forever!”) This year’s ceremony will no doubt evoke its own array of passionate responses to awkward presenters and awkward gowns, omissions from the Tribute to the Dead, faux-surprised winners who unfurl pre-scripted lists of people to thank (“My agent! My masseuse!”), etc. The Roxie’s annual “Up the Oscars!” bash is aimed squarely at those who enjoy cheering and jeering the gold man in equal measure. D.I.Y. drinking games optional. (Cheryl Eddy)

3:45 p.m., $15

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

 

Stardust Sunday

Cover band? Try cover cult. The First Church of the Sacred Silversexual takes all the Christ allusions David Bowie made with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and The Man Who Fell to Earth, exorcising one little bit — Jesus. The resulting mass is a blasphemous celebration of the 65-year-young rock God’s music. With as many members as Bowie has personas, all fully embracing their deity’s love of costume, the Church’s service has the campy theatricality of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and all the sparkle of a Ken Russell movie. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Space Cowboys DJs Mancub and 8Ball

8 p.m., $5

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

 

The Dodos

Listening to the Dodos kind of makes you feel like you’re part of a drum march that’s heading down a sunny country road via Brooklyn. Logan Kroeber, who’s been known to play a drum kit sans bass and to tape a tambourine to his foot, creates catchy rhythms that compel you to dance frenetically (really, it’s unavoidable), while lead vocalist Meric Long finger-picks an acoustic guitar and traverses the octaves with deep, introspective lyrics you can’t help Googling. This San Francisco-based indie folk duo most recently released fourth album, No Color (Frenchkiss) last year, and is closing out Noise Pop this year with what will likely be a memorable performance. (Sullivan)

With Au, Cannons and Clouds, Here Here

7 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

MONDAY 27

Leslie and the LY’s

Long known for her 1980s-esque minimal dance-pop numbers encased in stretchy gold lame (referred to in “Gold Pants”), and even longer for her extensive bejeweled sweater collection (ahem, “Gem Sweater”), Leslie of Leslie and the LY’s boasts a newish additional talent to add to the mix: wedding officiant. The Ames, IA-based confetti-puke performance artist began officiating weddings when Iowa voted yes on gay marriage in 2009. The weddings she oversees are said to twinkle with her typical megawatt star quality — there’s even a documentary about one affair called Married in Spandex — and Mother Gem performs a personalized dance number for each lucky couple. While she may not be hosting any impromptu weddings during her appearance at Rickshaw this week, the world just feels more glamorous knowing that she could (for this, we listen to “Power Cuddle”). (Savage)

With Pennyhawk, Ramona & the Swimsuits

8 p.m., $13

Rickshaw Stop

(415) 861-2011

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

 

TUESDAY 28

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

Following 2010’s high profile Pavement reunion tour — which gave fans of the ’90s alternative rockers a chance to see the group live for the first or last time (as well as reportedly giving some of the members funds to pay off some financial debts) — leader Stephen Malkmus returned to the studio with his band the Jicks to record an album with Beck on board as producer. The result, Mirror Traffic, carries over the tour’s energy, and is the closest thing to a Terror Twilight follow-up to date. And as showcased by the Jicks’s all-too-short performance at the last Treasure Island Music Festival, Malkmus remains the slacker king of the nonchalant guitar solo. (Prendiville)

With Nurses

8 p.m., $20

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com 

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Down Dog break down

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culture@sfbg.com

YOGA For a sizeable sector of our population, yoga is as much a part of the culture as burritos and biking to work. With more than 50 studios in San Francisco’s 49 square miles alone — and even a brand-new yoga room in SFO, which claims to be an airport first — the Bay Area isn’t short on options for a Saturday morning sweat sesh or Sunday night candlelight.

But which teacher is best for you? For three exhaustive weeks I pretzeled it up from Berkeley to Bernal, sampling classes with some of our most famous and intriguing yogis. Below are my experiences with each, along with a one-to-five “sweat factor” intensity rating . Hopefully, this will help you choose the right teacher to help you lighten up, ground down, or just plain bliss out. (Perhaps you might be inspired to follow one of our dozens of other local yogis’ paths.)

Me? I’ll be soaking in a hot bath. Can you hand me that ice pack?

 

PETE GUINOSSO: GOOFY AND LOOSE

If you’re the kind of person who thinks the Black Eyed Peas and Beyoncé — let alone House of Pain — don’t belong in the yoga studio, then Pete’s Friday night Happy Hour Yoga at Yoga Tree on Valencia (www.yogatreesf.com) isn’t for you.

Guinosso breaks it down, both musically and with frequent stops to explain a new inversion or variation on an arm balance. With plenty of “play time” to work at your own pace, plus friendly gossip and occasionally flirty energy in the female-heavy room, the class can sometimes feel more like a very sweaty cocktail party. But it’s a great way to stay loose, learn new tricks, and cultivate what Pete calls the “inner teacher.” The smiley, Forrest-trained yogi also guides more traditional vinyasa and candlelight flow classes — no Top 40 here — but his liberating sense of humor remains.

Sweat Factor: 3 

The Takeaway: Fun and funky, but probably not best if verses from “Afternoon Delight” aren’t among your favored mantras.

www.petegyoga.com

 

LES LEVENTHAL: FRESH AND AFFIRMING

Imagine taking a rubber band ball and chucking it down some hard wooden stairs: that’s what Les was like, bouncing around during Saturday morning vinyasa while his students were still waking up.

But that’s all right. As my neighbor one mat over put it, Les is “really good at letting you know that where you are is fine, while at the same time pushing you to move forward.”

Leventhal’s quirky style, coupled with live beats by Sac-town sacred sound messenger Nate Spross (Les has also brought the likes of Buddha Bar’s Daniel Masson from Paris to spin), kept class sparkling; even when he got down among the mats to demonstrate a Foot-Behind-Head pose which morphed into a series of arm balances that had students’ eyes bulging, his sense of humor soothed the spirits of those of us who were in pain just watching — let alone trying to replicate the seamless flow.

“Why do we let our heads tell us what’s good enough?” he asked, putting a hand at neck level to show a separation between head and body. “Even if you’re in the simplest expression of this pose, it feels good from here down!”

Sweat Factor: 4 

The Takeaway: Down-to-earth, despite chanting in a reverberating baritone that brings me shuddering back to the rabbis of my Sunday school days.

www.yogawithles.com

 

JANET STONE: FAST AND UNFETTERED

With barely two inches between mats on a Saturday morning, it’s easy to see that Janet is a Bay Area favorite. She’s no slave to typical maneuvers like the Sun Salutation, though, and while her fast flows kept class interesting, all the unfamiliar iterations seemed a bit frantic — and made the class more about momentum (and not getting lost) than about muscle and alignment.

But of course, that’s the yoga. And though her students may love her because they come to learn her style, she might say the real work is in getting better at not knowing what’s next. Or, in Janet’s wording: “In this practice we pause and disarm our myriad of defenses, and experience the pure luminous light that is there.”

Sweat Factor: 3

The Takeaway: Good if you like spontaneous Hare Krishna-themed dance fevers and Lulu-clad students eager to show off their handstands — even when that means toppling onto others’ mats.

www.janetstoneyoga.com

 

RUSTY WELLS: DEVOTED AND UNDONE

Only a few years after beginning his journey as a yogi in early 1990s Atlanta, Rusty started to sense something missing.

“A teacher of mine told me after class one day, ‘it looks like you’re praying when you practice,'” Rusty says, “and my reply was, ‘What, am I not supposed to be?'”

Now he knows that something is bhakti, Sanskrit for “devotion to the wonder of life,” and it’s for sale (well, actually, for donation) at Rusty’s vinyasa-inspired studio near the Mission, Urban Flow (www.urbanflowyoga.com).

Taking class with Rusty is a bit like having your own personal cheerleader, albeit an extremely calm one, urging you to “undo a lifetime of doing.” His classes reflect the intention to be a beginner each time you return to the mat. But despite a slightly slower pace and emphasis on fundamentals, Bhakti Flow is by no means a soft option. In fact, everyone I saw there (including a smattering of other Bay Area teachers) was pretty much a hardbody.

Not that I should have noticed, my teacher told me.

“When I first started practicing,” Rusty said, “I used to look around and admire the people who were really strong, really stretchy.”

“After a while, I learned to look around and admire the people who were finding great joy in their practice. And a while after that,” the yogi concluded “I learned to just stop looking.”

Sweat Factor: 3

The Takeaway: Like Chicken Soup for the Ass(ana). Part workout, part therapy.

www.rustywells.com

 

STEPH SNYDER: COMFY AND UNASSUMING

I was a little intimidated, walking into the crowd assembled for Steph’s class on Super Bowl Sunday — my first with her, and her first upon returning to teaching after having a healthy baby boy. Excitement was as thick as the steam wafting through the air, streaking the windows with condensation. Friends squealed and greeted each other, mats moved over and over again to make more space, and shouts that had nothing to do with pigskin could be heard all around.

But once we started, it was like slipping into a favorite pair of old jeans. Her flows have great rhythm and plenty of variety. Plus something intuitive, as though my body knew what to do even before her cue. She’s humble, and you can tell that she honestly loves what she’s doing.

Part of her appeal is her belief in the practice, one she says has gotten her through dark times, and her commitment to making the same hold true for others.

“Whatever you need, the practice is there for you. If you need to be saved, it will literally save you,” she promises. Add to that a great workout, beautiful chanting, and some awesome harmonium playing (Steph says she accompanies herself every day) and you can’t go wrong.

Sweat Factor: 4

The Takeaway: Delicious in every way.

www.stephaniesnyder.com

 

PRADEEP TEOTI: SONGFUL AND BOLD

Born in a small village outside of New Delhi, Pradeep brings with him an international yoga certification in the Sivananda tradition, a deep personal practice that stretches way beyond asana, and an amazing unique voice that pitches and rolls all throughout class with nary an audible breath, making him sound something like a spiritual auctioneer trying to sell peace of mind and six-pack abs; the only pause in singsong accompaniment raising warrior ones to warrior twos is his distinctive intonation of exhaaayle, inhaaayle.

Pradeep’s classes, including this one at Oakland’s Flying Yoga Shala (www.flyingyogashala.com) are fast and packed with plenty of push-ups and core work, definitely best when you’re feeling bold. But his compassion is also undeniable.

“Yoga is not saying you put your leg behind your head,” he told me when I was feeling sick in class. “Yoga is just putting yourself in the moment, paying attention to right now. Maybe someone wants to come to my class and just do child pose for one whole hour. Then my job is to create that space for them.”

Sweat Factor: 5

The Takeaway:Though he said I taught him yoga that day, it’s better to leave the instruction up to Pradeep: he’s one of the best.

www.pradeepyoga.com

 

DARREN MAIN: SPIRITUAL AND SINCERE

Though he’s definitely made a student or two sweat, Darren truly shines when teaching restorative sessions — especially his donation-based Tuesday night practices in the cavernous Grace Cathedral, coupled with live music like Sam Jackson’s exquisite chorus of a dozen Tibetan singing bowls.

The temptation may be not to take Darren seriously: sometimes he slips into that same ethereal quality of voice he uses to introduce his “Inquire Within” podcasts, and the flowing blond hair and bright blue eyes staring out from the back of his most popular book, Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic, are a bit Cherub-cum-movie-star, come to that.

But his teachings — in the studio and as an author, essayist, and international speaker on spirituality — come from a sincere place: a struggle with issues of sexuality, religion, and identity. Who couldn’t use a teacher with that kind of experience on their quest for personal growth? Plus, his hair’s short now.

Sweat Factor: 1 

The Takeaway: Unique restorative classes with a dose of mysticism — and sometimes hot stones.

www.darrenmain.com

 

MARK MORFORD: CALM AND FOCUSED

Straight up: I have to respect a guy who starts class, no apologies, with core work. Mark is that guy. His classes are serious and to-the-point, but without the rush and ego I sometimes associate with other hardcore workout-focused yogis. Of course, he does teach, rather noticeably, with his shirt off. But we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk that up to inspiration. Perhaps because his classes don’t tend toward the super-crowded, they feel both peaceful and purposeful.

And — unlike his columns for the Chronicle, which are all over the place and over-the-top funny — his yoga, both the asana and the anecdotes, have a simple, quiet intensity and calm focus that make them rewarding and accessible for all levels.

Sweat Factor: 4 stars

The Takeaway: Strong, steady yoga with the occasional conversational foray.

www.markmorford.com

 

JANE AUSTIN: CANDID AND EARTHY

In classes filled with as much laughter and candid advice as yoga, Jane prepares new moms and moms-to-be for the best and worst of mothering. And she does it as much through understanding and open conversation as through asana (poses to strengthen the arms for holding a newborn, to rotate wee ones while they’re still inside, and to stretch, err, whatever might need stretching in preparation for delivery).

A midwife, doula, and mother of two, Jane is funny and warm, and able to come up with plenty for pregnant or healing women to do other than “go sit against the wall and squat.”

Plus, for ladies looking to speed things up, her classes have a history of hastening delivery — as in, right then and there. Pssst, the “water breaking spot” is just one mat to the right of the door at Yoga Tree on Valencia.

Sweat Factor: 2 

The Takeaway: Be prepared to discuss everything from the nipples on down. And imagine your cervix melting like butter.

www.janeaustinyoga.com

Catholic hospitals and birth control

Zelda Bronstein
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Catholic hospitals and birth control

I’m glad Sen. Barbara Boxer, along with Sens. Patty Murray and Jeanne Shaheen, are supporting the Obama administration’s decision to mandate contraceptive coverage at Catholic hospitals. I read the Wall Street Journal editorial denouncing it as an assault on religious freedom, and I think there’s something that is too easily overlooked here.

Religious institutions like the Catholic Church are not just churches these days; they’re major employers and the operators of major health-care facilities that are intertwined with insurance companies. And for a lot of employees and patients, there isn’t any choice.

People who work for the hundreds of nonprofit social-service agencies run by the Catholic Church aren’t necessarily Catholics, or even religious. They might be receptionists, or janitors, or computer systems operators, or counselors who needed a job and happened to get hired by an agency that needed their (secular) skills. Jobs are hard to come by these days; a person who works in an administrative job at a Catholic nonprofit and is trying to pay the rent and support a family may not have the option of simply leaving because she doesn’t agreed with the Church’s position on birth control. She’s got a health plan paid for by her employer, just like most of the rest of us, and if that plan doesn’t cover contraception, she’s SOL. It’s not fair.

My health-insurance plan recently decided not to do business any more with Brown and Toland medical group and instead contract with Hill Physicians. I had nothing to do with that decision, which was based on some financial negotiations around reimbursement rates that were entirely out of my control, part of an ongoing fight between major hospital groups, physician groups and insurance companies that leave patients entirely out of the loop.

So I had to leave the doctor I’d been seeing for many years (who was a member of Brown and Toland and affiliated with the Sutter-owned California Pacific Medical Center) and I was reassigned to a new doctor, who is a member of Hill — and because of economic issues that have nothing to do with religion, my Hill doc is affiliated with Catholic Healthcare West. So now any major medical treatment I need is at St. Mary’s, or St. Francis, or Seton — all excellent hospitals, and I have no complaints. My new doctor is great, and frankly, the medical staff who are part of what happens to be a Catholic Church affiliated hospital chain aren’t a whole lot different from the medical staff at the secular CPMC — skillful, devoted, caring, and so far as I can tell, entirely free of any type of evangelism. I have no idea what, if any, religious affiliation the doctor who patched my broken hand back together last year had; it wasn’t an issue. Who cares?

But still: It’s a Catholic hospital chain. With all the issues that creates. And it’s part of the city’s public-health infrastructure. A lot of us didn’t choose a religious-based medical center; our insurance company did that for us.

Catholic Healthcare West just changed its name to Dignity Health, apparently for marketing reasons (interesting that they chose the name of a longtime group of gay Catholics) but according to the group’s website:

All of our Catholic hospitals, as well as those that may join the system at a later date, will continue to be Catholic and follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs).

Among the rules that guide those ERDs:

First, Catholic health care ministry is rooted in a commitment to promote and defend human dignity; this is the foundation of its concern to respect the sacredness of every human life from the moment of conception until death. … Catholic health care does not offend the rights of individual conscience by refusing to provide or permit medical procedures that are judged morally wrong by the teaching authority of the Church.

I’m all for religious freedom. But under our current healthcare system, a lot of people have no choice as to their employer or their health-care system. And as long as that’s the case, I don’t see why the Church (which has to pay payroll tax on its employees and abide by the state’s employment laws) shouldn’t fall under the same health-insurance rules as everyone else.

 

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