Review

THE GUEST opens today! Plus more new movies!

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FINALLY, clever, retro-styled thriller The Guest is here. Check out our interview with the filmmakers and star here, and then go see The Guest this weekend. You’re welcome. 

After you’ve TCB in that regard, you might also want to check out sleek new Patricia Highsmith adaptation The Two Faces of January (review here), family drama The Judge (interview with the director here), or journalism thriller Kill the Messenger. How to decide? Read on for reviews of these and even more films, plus trailers. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccai-E36BfI

Advanced Style Many successful blogs have been turned into books, but few make the leap to film. Street-style photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s online album of fashionable elders translates well to the big screen, as without exception all of the women featured in Lina Plioplyte’s doc are vivacious, quotable (“I’m an artist, and my art is dressing!” “Good style improves the view for everybody!”), and — obviously — wonderfully, uniquely put together. Although at least one subject, 80-year-old Joyce, is wealthy (witness her to-die-for vintage Chanel purse collection), the rest of the women eschew designer for the most part; one owns a vintage store (“Sometimes I’m building an outfit for seven years!”), one owns a boutique (“You either have it, or you don’t … but you can learn it!”), and others are artists, including a former Apollo theater dancer. All are close with Cohen, an access point that allows Advanced Style to dig beyond fabulous hats and into end-of-life issues, including health concerns among the women and their aging spouses. But mostly, this is an upbeat, inspiring look at women who are embracing their later years — and looking rather fab doing it. (1:12) (Cheryl Eddy)

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day In this Disney comedy based on the Judith Viorst children’s book, Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner star as parents to an 11-year-old struggling through, well, see title. (1:22)

Björk: Biophilia Live Those who saw one of Björk’s mind-boggling, futuristic spaceshows for her most recent full-length, Biophilia — performed at only a handful of intimate venues around the world — know the specialness of that experience. At the shows, Björk, everyone’s favorite chirping Icelandic wood-fairy, stood on relatively diminutive stages surrounded by a chilling blonde choir while a Tesla coil vibrated electric shocks of purple lightning. Now those who missed out on these very-special-Björk-moments have the luxury of viewing the full show with concert film Bjork: Biophilia Live. The album was heavily based around imaginative musical apps created for it, making the film an interactive experience as well (play along at home!) The film showcases the complete experience of Biophilia, which touches on nature, music, and technology, during Björk’s showing at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2013. While it would have been nice to see a few behind-the-scenes moments, Biophilia Live still brings up close rushes of electrifying sounds, glittering visuals, and a poufy red-orange cotton candy wig floating delicately above Bjork’s cherubic face. (1:37) Roxie. (Emily Savage)

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead Beginning moments after the events of the original 2009 Dead Snow, Tommy Wirkola’s sequel has that film’s sole survivor, Martin (Vegar Hoel), fleeing the resurrected Nazi invaders who laid waste to his seven fellow med school students on their holiday weekend. Crashing his car en route, he wakes up in the hospital, where there’s some good news — he’s alive — but also plenty of bad. For one thing, the infected arm he sawed off to escape zombie-bite infection has been replaced; that would be good, if he weren’t now the bearer of an arm belonging to none other than the nefarious Col. Herzog (Orjan Gamst); naturally, the limb has a malevolent mind of its own. Plus, the authorities laugh off his story of undead Nazi attackers, naturally assuming that he killed his friends himself. Worse still, Martin figures out that Herzog and company won’t stop killing (and “turning”) the living until they’ve conquered a sleepy town some miles away — thus completing their direct orders from Hitler 70 years ago. The first film took its time revealing the outrageous premise, poking along as a conventional slasher until turning into an increasingly berserk, hilarious black comedy midway. This follow-up makes an all-too-predictable mistake: It starts out at “over-the-top,” leaving the movie nowhere to go but further into slapstick gore and bad-taste jokes, all scaled bigger but just half as funny as before. (There’s also the really dismal addition of three zombie-obsessed American nerds, additional “comedy relief” presumably aimed at US audiences — but I’m not sure even a Norwegian could find these asinine cartoons amusing.) Dead Snow 2 has high energy and some laughs, but if you haven’t seen the original, that’s the place to start — and perhaps to end. (1:40) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him The combined version, Them, was released earlier this fall; now, the individual films exploring a marriage in shreds arrive in theaters. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy star. (3:19)

Dracula Untold Now it can be told: Dracula was super-duper into Game of Thrones! Between the tension-fraught banquet scenes, swordplay, intrigue, ornate costumes and armor, mop-topped children in peril, and dragon references — not to mention the casting of Big Daddy Lannister (Charles Dance) in a key role — the HBO show looms large over this lightweight but enjoyable vampire yarn, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Soulfully goth Luke Evans (the Hobbit series) stars as Count Dracula before, during, and after his transformation into the fang-bearer of legend; turns out he was a bloodthirsty dude even in human form (hence the nickname “Vlad the Impaler”), though the film lets him rationalize this battlefield behavior by pointing out it was an intimidation tactic designed to save lives by encouraging armies to surrender. Uh-huh. Some clever effects (bats galore!) and flashes of wry wit add to the fun of this mostly forgettable but seasonally-appropriate exercise. (1:32) (Cheryl Eddy) 

The Green Prince Nadav Schirman’s Sundance Film Festival audience award winner (and SF Jewish Film Festival opening night film) should make an impression well beyond the fest circuit; it’s edited and scored like a thriller, surging ahead with constant tension despite the fact that most of the movie consists of the same two talking heads. But what subjects: Palestinian Mosab Hassan Yousef, oldest son of a Hamas leader, and Shin Bet agent Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the man who recruited Mosab to spy on behalf of Israel. How this relationship came to be, the sensitive information it yielded, the incredible risks both men took, and how Mosab eventually ended up living in the United States and sharing his tale — for so long, a life-or-death secret — with the world, is an undeniably gripping tale of loyalty, trust, and a most unlikely friendship. (1:41) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Guest See “Go for Goth.” (1:39)

The Judge Crackling chemistry between Robert Downey, Jr. (as Hank, a hotshot Chicago lawyer who reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after the death of his mother) and Robert Duvall (as the stern title character, Hank’s long-estranged father, Joseph) elevates this otherwise heavy-handed look at a dysfunctional family forced to pull together when Joseph is arrested for murder. The rest of the cast in this more mature departure for director David Dobkin (2005’s The Wedding Crashers) ain’t bad, either; there’s Vincent D’Onofrio as Hank’s seething older brother; Vera Farmiga as Sam, the high school sweetheart Hank left behind; and Billy Bob Thornton as a gimlet-eyed prosecutor with an ax to grind. At two hours and 20 minutes, there’s a lot of opportunity for sentimentality, including a recurring narrative device of using home movies — a treasured hobby of Hank’s younger brother, Dale (Jeremy Strong), unfortunately scripted as a “childlike,” vaguely autistic type — to remind us The Way We Were When Things Were Good. And as if the drama of a murder trial wasn’t enough, there’s also Hank’s tentative reconciliation with Sam, relationship-building efforts with his own wee daughter (Emma Tremblay), a tornado, etc. etc. If The Judge tries to be too many genres at once (see also: Cameron Crowe’s lesser filmography), at least it has those marvelously acted Downey vs. Duvall tête-à-têtes — as well as one memorably hilarious jury-selection scene. For an interview with Dobkin, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (2:21) (Cheryl Eddy)

Kill the Messenger Based partly on former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb’s 1998 book, Dark Alliance, and partly on a posthumous 2004 biography of Webb written by SoCal reporter Nick Schou (from which the film takes its title), Kill the Messenger recounts a grim tale of single-minded muckraking, professional betrayal, and how the federal government’s dubious War on Drugs took an extra-grim turn during the Reagan administration. As the film opens, Webb (Jeremy Renner) is working for the Mercury News, having moved to the Bay Area with his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and three kids after some marital trouble back east. In the course of covering a drug dealer’s trial, he gets tipped to a story connecting the CIA, the US funding of the contras in Nicaragua, and the crack cocaine that began pouring into Los Angeles and other American cities in the mid-1980s. Michael Cuesta, who since his directorial debut with L.I.E. in 2001 has been mainly working in television (Homeland, Six Feet Under), attempts to combine an All the President’s Men-style journalistic crime procedural with a portrait of the man who broke the story and was in turn broken by it — or rather, by the CIA and the mainstream press, which turns on him with the vengeance, it’s implied, of a handful of prestigious papers of record that got majorly scooped. The portrait, with Renner giving a nuanced, painfully sympathetic performance, comes out better than the procedural, which feels blurry in places from the speed of the discoveries. (1:52) (Lynn Rapoport)

Kite Based on Yasuomi Umetsu’s cult anime, known for its fetishy sex and violence involving a young girl assassin with a penchant for traditional Japanese school uniforms, South Africa-set sci-fi action indie Kite begins with a bang — and a hail of bone fragments and gray matter splatter when an explosive bullet connects with a baddie’s skull. Set in the dystopic near future, after a global financial meltdown, Kite picks up in the middle of an all-too-familiar seedy scenario: an out-of-it teen hooker in a body-con mini and neon wig is getting dragged into the elevator by a trashy sleazebag. His unnecessary cruelty to an elderly lady sharing their lift forces the damsel to break cover and unleash those exploding bullets. It turn out Sawa (India Eisley) is far from your traditional hapless victim — rather she’s a brutal assassin out to avenge her parents’ murders and jumped up on a military drug designed to dull the pain and memories related to PTSD, administered oh so helpfully by her father’s old law-enforcement partner Aker (Samuel L. Jackson). The catch: a mystery man (Callan McAuliffe) who threatens to disrupt the smooth flow of bloody mayhem with his promise to dredge up Sawa’s past. Kite‘s acting talent — in particular Eisley and Jackson — and cinematographer Lance Gewer do what they can, painting the screen with lurid hues and just as over-the-top emotive moments, with pulpy material that’s high on the ultra violence (and salacious kicks for those into little girls with guns) but low on originality. (1:30) (Kimberly Chun)

One Chance Dramedy about the unlikely rise of Britain’s Got Talent breakout Paul Potts (played by James Corden, who just replaced Craig Ferguson as host of The Late Late Show). (1:43)

The Two Faces of January See “Con and On.” (1:38)

Remembering Gary Webb, the fallen messenger resurrected on film

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I always enjoy seeing fellow journalists and their work celebrated in a Hollywood blockbuster such as Kill the Messenger, which opens tomorrow. It’s even more exciting when that journalist is someone that one knows and admires, as I did the film’s protagonist, the late Gary Webb, author of the explosive “Dark Alliance” series connecting the CIA to cocaine trafficking in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

I was happy to run a story on Webb and the film in this week’s paper, a piece written by former Sacramento News & Review editor Melinda Welsh, who hired me back in 2000 to be the paper’s news editor. I had already moved on to the Bay Guardian, in 2003, before Webb came to work for SN&R, so never got the chance to work directly with him, as Welsh did before Webb took his own life (her story, including this longer version from SN&R, is well worth reading).

But I did introduce Webb to the SN&R editor that I worked under, Tom Walsh, who was the worst boss I’ve ever had, a petty tyrant who made most of his employees (at SN&R and later SF Weekly) miserable. I met Webb through some journalistic colleagues one night at a party thrown by Robert Salladay, then a reporter with San Francisco Chronicle and now with Center for Investigative Reporting.

I was star-struck upon meeting Webb, remembering what a big impact his 1996 “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News had on me and other young newspaper journalists at the time. It exposed how the CIA turned a blind eye to the cocaine trafficking into the US that was being done by the Contra rebels that the Reagan Administration was supporting in Nicaragua. Perhaps even more significantly, it was the first big newspaper investigation of the Internet age, showing how online journalism could go viral and reach millions of people.

It was inspiring, but it was followed by dispiriting attacks by fellow journalists who tried to debunk its findings and the conclusions made by many of its readers, who went further than Webb in accusing the CIA of intentionally fueling the crack epidemic as a way of undermining African American communites in big cities.  

Those attacks helped deny Webb the Pulitizer Prize that he probably deserved (the CIA’s inspector general later confirmed Webb’s main findings) and led his own newspaper editors to sell him out, fueling his battle with depression and leading him to the job he had when I met him. He worked as an investigator for the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, an investigatory arm of the California Legislature staffed almost entirely by former journalists (he later got laid off during the state’s lean budget years).

We didn’t know each other very well — we had lunch or drinks a few times and he was a helpful source of mine in the Capitol on a few occasions — but we did talk about how he felt betrayed by his profession and yet still longed to get back into the work that he loved doing.

Journalism plays a critically important yet undervalued role in the US, where the profession has been losing journalists in droves to the public relations industry and corporate communications jobs, positions often designed to fool the public instead of inform it.

Welsh calls Webb’s story “a cautionary tale,” and it was indeed, both for journalism and the broader public interest. I’m looking forward to seeing the film, and hoping that it helps humanize Webb and his fellow messengers before we’re forced even further into the margins of civil society.  

ACCJC dismissal rebuffed, City College goes to trial for its life in 18 days

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The courtroom saga between City College of San Francisco and its accreditors reached a new milestone yesterday, as Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow rejected the accreditors’ motion to dimiss the City Attorney’s Office’s case against the decision to close the college, yet again. 

Like Charlie Brown’s decades-long effort to kick the football from Lucy’s hands, the accreditors keep trying to get the case dismissed and they keep failing.

“This is the fourth time they’ve tried to say they’re immune (from a lawsuit),” Sara Eisenberg, lead prosecutor from the City Attorney’s Office told us. “It’s a running theme.”

The City Attorney’s Office is representing the People of the State of California (not the college directly), suing the ACCJC for what they say was an unfair accreditation evaluation. Accreditation is vital for degrees from colleges to be worth the paper they’re printed on, a process many schools go through. When the ACCJC evaluated City College and decided to rescind its accreditation, the City Attorney’s Office alleges, the ACCJC was “embroiled in a political dispute with the college,” and the team that evaluated the school were “individuals affiliated with districts and organizations” that shared the ACCJC’s political leanings.

In plain English, the accreditors stacked the deck with evaluators inclined to disagree with many of the funding choices, teaching choices, and other decisions City College administrators and trustees had made. There are other complaints related to the way the ACCJC conducted its evaluation, but suffice to say the case is multi-layered. 

In seeking to have the case dismissed, the ACCJC’s attorneys alleged communicating with the government was “petitioning activity,” that the only court legally able to discuss the case was at the federal level, and that the true liability for their decision to close the college lay with the state. Those were some mixed messages, and Judge Karnow rejected all of those motions yesterday.

We walked side-by-side with Dr. Barbara Beno, the head of the ACCJC, as she left the hearing. All she had for us was a terse, “no comment.” 

The ACCJC may not have had much luck in court on Tuesday, but Karnow issued a warning to the City Attorney’s Office as well. The City Attorney’s Office must prove there was true harm against City College of San Francisco, Karnow told Eisenberg, and the court.

“In this case,” he said, sternly, “you’re going to have to prove some harm. It cannot just be a technical violation.”

Eisenberg and her team at the City Attorney’s Office have a challenge. They must not only prove that the ACCJC violated its own rules and federal law, but that the People of the State of California suffered a specific and identifiable harm through the process of an unfair evaluation.

We asked Eisenberg how she would prove this. “I’m a little loathe to get into our strategy in advance of the trial,” she told the Guardian. “But when you don’t get a fair review of an institution, particularly a public community college, that in itself is a harm. These flaws in the process led to a potentially different outcome than they would have received (otherwise).”

“We don’t know for sure what the outcome would be if a fair process was followed,” she said. “We have a right to know that.”

Come Oct. 27, we’ll see exactly what her strategy is. And, in another treat, the once private documents governing the ACCJC’s secret processes and secret decisions around City College will be revealed as the City Attorney’s office demands discovery. 

We can’t wait.

There are even more inappropriate PG&E emails

Even more internal Pacific Gas & Electric Co. emails – this time flagged by activists focused on safety concerns at a nuclear power plant – raise new questions about the company’s tactics of manipulating the state regulatory process.

PG&E – which is facing federal charges in connection with a 2010 fatal gas line explosion in San Bruno – has come under scrutiny in recent months due to a series of questionable email exchanges revealing a cozy relationship between company executives and members of the California Public Utilities Commission, the state regulatory body that monitors utility spending and rate setting.

Much has been made of emails spotlighted by San Bruno officials, revealing a relationship so cozy that one PG&E executive signed off on an email with a CPUC representative by writing, “love you.” 

Those exchanges were the subject of an Oct. 7 hearing at the CPUC, and could result in financial penalties if an administrative law judge cracks down on PG&E for negotiating with state officials in what’s been dubbed a “judge-shopping” scandal. On Oct. 6, PG&E self-reported even more questionable “ex parte” communications with CPUC officials, correspondence it revealed is being scrutinized by federal prosecutors.

Meanwhile, when it came to an earthquake risk assessment at Diablo Canyon, according to a legal brief filed at the CPUC by the nuclear watchdog group Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, PG&E “brazenly ignored the commission’s requirements” for working with a state-appointed independent review panel.

The panel of independent experts was appointed because the CPUC lacked staff with the expertise needed to review seismic safety studies concerning the nuclear facility, which is located in proximity to several earthquake fault lines. 

Internal PG&E emails obtained by the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which used discovery to obtain documentation through its status as an intervener in the CPUC rulemaking process, revealed that PG&E was concerned about how to field inquiries from the independent panel.

In one email, a utility executive suggested submitting “processed” data, rather than raw data, to demonstrate how it had arrived at certain conclusions.

Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility spokesperson David Weisman discussed why that matters with an analogy: “Why don’t they want anyone else to look at the raw numbers? It’s like saying, here’s the cake. You might find that it tastes a little funny, but we aren’t going to tell you what went into it.”

In another internal PG&E email, a government affairs representative went so far as to ask his coworker: “Do you believe we could get the [independent panel] ‘decommissioned?’”

Several weeks ago, PG&E announced that it had found no safety hazard at Diablo Canyon, essentially telegraphing that there’s nothing to worry about. But that determination was made before the independent review panel had a chance to review the company’s analysis, or weigh in on whether it agreed with the science supporting this finding.

“If you release a report without the panel’s review, that’s not science,” Weisman charged. “That’s propaganda.”

PG&E did not respond to a request for comment.

As the Bay Guardian previously reported, the discovery of previously undetected fault lines around Diablo Canyon six years ago set in motion a new risk assessment to determine whether a major earthquake near San Luis Obispo, where Diablo Canyon is located, would result in power plant equipment failure. State legislators passed a law mandating that these risks be analyzed – long before Japan’s Fukushima nuclear meltdown underscored the importance of taking such hazards seriously.

Now, the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility is arguing that PG&E should not be allowed to recoup $64 million in ratepayer dollars that the CPUC agreed to set aside to fund the seismic study. “The CPUC granted PG&E ratepayer funding to carry out those seismic studies,” Weisman explained. “Our concern is that that the study itself is inadequate and poorly vetted.”

The Bay Guardian submitted several requests to speak with a knowledgeable CPUC staff member about the matter, but the agency did not grant an interview. Instead, public information officer Constance Gordon emailed a prepared statement that stated simply: “The Independent Peer Review Panel will review the seismic report and will hold a public meeting shortly to discuss it and receive public feedback.”

Interestingly, PG&E’s determination that Diablo Canyon is risk-free was issued on the very same day that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission publicly dismissed the concerns of Michael Peck, the former on-site safety inspector at the nuclear facility.

The senior NRC staff member made headlines for formally suggesting that the plant should be temporarily shut down until the science could prove that it would safely withstand a major earthquake. News of Peck’s “differing professional opinion” caused California nuclear activists to immediately file petitions calling for Diablo Canyon to be shut down. 

In a lengthy op-ed published in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, Peck said he stood by his conclusion.

“I have exhausted the NRC processes for raising nuclear safety concerns,” he wrote. “At every turn, the agency reinforced that their original conclusions and actions had been correct. From my perspective, I applied the same NRC inspection standards and agency rules to the Diablo Canyon seismic issues that I’ve used to disposition many other design bases issues during my 20-plus years as an inspector. Because the [differing professional opinion] was reviewed by the highest levels of agency management, I was left with the impression that the NRC may have applied a special standard to Diablo Canyon.”

Return of the messenger

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By Melinda Welsh

news@sfbg.com

This one has all the ingredients of a dreamed-up Hollywood blockbuster: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers a big story involving drugs, the CIA, and a guerrilla army. Despite threats and intimidation, he writes an explosive exposé and catches national attention. But the fates shift. Our reporter’s story is torn apart by the country’s leading media; he is betrayed by his own newspaper. Though the big story turns out to be true, the writer commits suicide and becomes a cautionary tale.

Hold on, though. The above is not fiction.

Kill the Messenger, an actual film coming soon to a theater near you, is the true story of Sacramento-based investigative reporter Gary Webb, who earned both acclaim and notoriety for his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series that revealed the CIA had turned a blind eye to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras trafficking crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere in urban America in the 1980s. One of the first-ever newspaper investigations to be published on the Internet, Webb’s story gained a massive readership and stirred up a firestorm of controversy and repudiation.

After being deemed a pariah by media giants like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and being disowned by his own paper, Webb eventually came to work in August 2004 at Sacramento News & Review. Four months later, he committed suicide at age 49. He left behind a grieving family — and some trenchant questions:

Why did the media giants attack him so aggressively, thereby protecting the government secrets he revealed? Why did he decide to end his own life? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Gary Webb?

Like others working at our newsweekly in the brief time he was here, I knew Webb as a colleague and was terribly saddened by his death. Those of us who attended his unhappy memorial service at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento a week after he died thought that day surely marked a conclusion to the tragic tale of Gary Webb.

But no.

Because here comes Kill the Messenger, a Hollywood film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb; Rosemarie DeWitt as Webb’s then wife, Sue Bell (now Stokes); Oliver Platt as Webb’s top editor, Jerry Ceppos; and a litany of other distinguished actors, including Michael K. Williams, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia, and Robert Patrick. Directed by Michael Cuesta (executive producer of the TV series Homeland), the film opens in a “soft launch” across the country and in Bay Area theaters on Oct. 10.

Members of Webb’s immediate family—including his son Eric, who lives near Sacramento State and plans a career in journalism—expect to feel a measure of solace upon the release of Kill the Messenger.

“The movie is going to vindicate my dad,” he said.

For Renner — who grew up in Modesto and is best known for his roles in The Bourne Legacy, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, The Avengers and The Hurt Locker — the film was a chance to explore a part unlike any he’d played before. During a break in filming Mission Impossible 5, he spoke to us about his choice to star in and co-produce Kill the Messenger.

“The story is important,” said Renner. “It resonated with me. It has a David and Goliath aspect.

“He was brave, he was flawed. … I fell in love with Gary Webb.”

 

EARLY VIRAL JOURNALISM

There’s a scene in Kill the Messenger that will make every investigative journalist in America break into an insider’s grin. It’s the one where — after a year of tough investigative slogging that had taken him from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to a moldering jail in Central America to the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles — Renner as Webb begins to write the big story. In an absorbing film montage, Renner is at the keyboard as it all comes together — the facts, the settings, the sources. The truth. The Clash provides the soundtrack, with Joe Strummer howling: Know your rights / these are your rights … You have the right to free speech / as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.

It took the real Gary Webb a long time to get to this point in his career.

His father, a U.S. Marine, moved Webb around a lot in his youth, from California to Indiana to Kentucky to Ohio. He wound up marrying his high school sweetheart, Sue Bell, with whom he had three children. Inspired by the reporting that uncovered Watergate and in need of income, he left college three units shy of a degree and went to work at The Kentucky Post, then The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where he rose quickly through the ranks of grunt reporters. Dogged in his pursuit of stories, Webb landed a job at the Mercury News in 1988 and became part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for reporting on the Loma Prieta earthquake.

It was the summer of 1996 when the lone-wolf journalist handed his editors a draft of what would become the three-part, 20,000-word exposé “Dark Alliance.” The series was exhaustive and complex. But its nugget put human faces on how CIA operatives had been aware that the Contras (who had been recruited and trained by the CIA to topple the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua) had smuggled cocaine into the United States and, through drug dealers, fueled an inner-city crack-cocaine epidemic.

When “Dark Alliance” was published on Aug. 18 of that year, it was as if a bomb had exploded at the Mercury News. That’s because it was one of the first stories to go globally viral online on the paper’s then state-of-the-art website. It was 1996; the series attracted an unprecedented 1.3 million hits per day. Webb and his editors were flooded with letters and emails. Requests for appearances piled in from national TV news shows.

“Gary’s story was the first Internet-age big journalism exposé,” said Nick Schou, who wrote the book Kill the Messenger, on which the movie is partially based, along with Webb’s own book version of the series, Dark Alliance. “If the series had happened a year earlier it, ‘Dark Alliance’ just would have come and gone,” said Schou.

As word of the story spread, black communities across America — especially in South Central Los Angeles — grew outraged and demanded answers. At the time, crack cocaine was swallowing up neighborhoods whole, fueling an epidemic of addiction and crime. Rocked by the revelations, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, congresswoman for Los Angeles’s urban core to this day, used her bully pulpit to call for official investigations.

But after a six-week honeymoon for Webb and his editors, the winds shifted. The attacks began.

On Oct. 4, The Washington Post stunned the Mercury News by publishing five articles assaulting the veracity of Webb’s story, leading the package from page one. A few weeks later, The New York Times joined with similar intent.

The ultimate injury came when the L.A. Times unleashed a veritable army of 17 journalists (known internally as the “Get Gary Webb Team”) on the case, writing a three-part series demolishing “Dark Alliance.” The L.A. paper — which appeared to onlookers to have missed a giant story in its own backyard — was exhaustive in its deconstruction, claiming the series “was vague” and overreached. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” summed Post media columnist Howard Kurtz.

Now, even some of Webb’s supporters admitted that his series could have benefited from more judicious editing. But why were the “big three” so intent on tearing down Webb’s work rather than attempting to further the story, as competing papers had done back in the day when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal?

Some say it was the long arm of former President Ronald Reagan and his team’s ability to manipulate the gatekeepers of old media to its purposes. (Reagan had, after all, publicly compared the Contras to “our Founding Fathers” and supported the CIA-led attempt to topple the Sandinista government.)

Others say that editors at the “big three” were simply affronted to have a midsize paper like the Mercury News beat them on such a big story. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review claimed some L.A. Times reporters bragged in the office about denying Webb a Pulitzer.

One of their big criticisms was that the story didn’t include a comment from the CIA. When reporters at the big three asked the agency if Webb’s story was true, they were told no. The denial was printed in the mainstream media as if it were golden truth.

Other issues fueled controversy around Webb’s story. For example: It was falsely reported in some media outlets — and proclaimed by many activists in the black community — that Webb had proven the CIA was directly involved in drug trafficking that targeted blacks. He simply did not make this claim.

In some ways, Webb became the first reporter ever to benefit from, and then become the victim of, a story that went viral online.

After triumphing in the early success of the series, Webb’s editors at the Mercury News became unnerved and eventually backed down under the pressure. Jerry Ceppos, the paper’s executive editor, published an unprecedented column on May 11, 1997, that was widely considered an apology for the series, saying it “fell short” in editing and execution.

When contacted by us, Ceppos, now dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, said he was only barely aware of the film coming out and wasn’t familiar with the acting career of Oliver Platt, who plays him in the movie. “I’m the wrong person to ask about popular culture,” he said.

Asked if he would do anything differently today regarding Gary Webb’s series, Ceppos, whose apologia did partially defend the series, responded with an unambiguous “no.”

“It seems to me, 18 years later, that everything still holds up. … Everything is not black and white. If you portrayed it that way, then you need to set the record straight. I’m very proud that we were willing to do that.”

Some find irony in the fact that Ceppos, in the wake of the controversy, was given the 1997 Ethics in Journalism Award by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Webb, once heralded as a groundbreaking investigative reporter, was soon banished to the paper’s Cupertino bureau, a spot he considered “the newspaper’s version of Siberia.” In 1997, after additional run-ins with his editors, including their refusal to run his follow-up reporting on the “Dark Alliance” series, he quit the paper altogether.

But a year later, he was redeemed when CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, released his 1998 report admitting that the CIA had known all along that the Contras had been trafficking cocaine. Reporter Robert Parry, who covered the Iran-Contra scandal for The Associated Press, called the report “an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA.” But the revelation fell on deaf ears. It went basically unnoticed by the newspapers that had attacked Webb’s series. A later internal investigation by the Justice Department echoed the CIA report.

But no apology was forthcoming to Webb, despite the fact that the central finding of his series had been proven correct after all.

 

‘STAND UP AND RISK IT ALL’

It was eight days after Webb’s death when a few hundred of us gathered in Sacramento Doubletree Hotel’s downstairs conference room for an afternoon memorial service. Photo collages of Webb were posted on tables as mourners filed into the room. There he was featured in an Esquire magazine article recounting his saga. Family members and friends, longtime colleagues, and SN&R staffers packed into the room.

My own distress at Webb’s passing wasn’t fully realized until my eyes lit on his Pulitzer Prize propped on a table just inside the entryway. It was the first one I’d ever seen. I wondered how many more exceptional stories he could have produced if things had gone differently.

“He wanted to write for one of the big three,” said Webb’s brother Kurt. “Unfortunately, the big three turned [on him].”

Praise for the absent journalist — his smarts, guts, and tenacity — flowed from friends, colleagues and VIPs at the event. A statement from now U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, then a senator, had been emailed to SN&R: “Because of [Webb]’s work, the CIA launched an Inspector General’s investigation that found dozens of troubling connections to drug-runners. That wouldn’t have happened if Gary Webb hadn’t been willing to stand up and risk it all.”

Renner was hesitant to say if those who watch Kill the Messenger will leave with any particular take-home lesson. “I want the audience to walk away and debate and argue about it all,” he said of his David and Goliath tale. And then, “I do believe [the film] might help create some awareness and accountability in government and newspapers.” And what would the real live protagonist of Kill the Messenger have thought of it all? It’s at least certain he’d have been unrepentant. In the goodbye letter his ex-wife received on the day of his suicide, Gary Webb told her: “Tell them I never regretted anything I wrote.”

Now that Willie Brown is a lobbyist, will the SF Chronicle finally cut him loose?

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Years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle handed Willie Brown a megaphone, but now that he’s officially recognized as a paid lobbyist, isn’t it time to yank it back?

Weekly Chronicle columnist and former Mayor Brown’s newest Ethics Commission filings show he’s been paid $125,000 to lobby the city on behalf of Boston Properties, negotiating for the developers who are threatening to sue the city over a tax deal worth up to $1.4 billion to San Francisco. Boston Properties were told going into the deal they’d pay taxes based on property values in the South of Market district, where the high-rise Salesforce Tower (formerly the Transbay Tower) and other developments will soon be built.

The loss of funding in the special tax zone known as a Mello-Roos District (which, in a twist of another sort, was created when Brown presided over the California Assembly) could jeopardize the high-speed rail extension from the Caltrain station at 4th and King streets to the new Transbay Terminal, possibly downgrading it into a very expensive bus station. We left an interview request with Brown’s assistant for this piece, but received no reply.

Brown has long sold his influence to the highest bidders, although he claimed to be their lawyer and not their lobbyist, but now Brown is legally out in the open as an advocate against the city’s interests. He’s now officially a registered lobbyist (finally).

But the Chronicle still publishes Brown’s column, Willie’s World, giving “Da Mayor” a weekly space in its prominent Sunday edition to charmingly joke away his misdeeds (which raised the eyebrows of the Columbia Journalism Review for its maddeningly obvious ethical concerns). In his newest column, Brown kiddingly brags about taking bribes:

“John Madden got off a great line the other night when we were sitting in the St. Regis lobby.

I was reading off my itinerary for the evening when he stopped me, turned to another guy and said, pointing my way, ‘He’s the kind of politician who goes everywhere. As a matter of fact, he’ll show up for the opening [sic] an envelope.’

It all depends on what’s in it.”

In his column the week before, he trumpeted a potential political ally while taking pot-shots at high speed rail, the very same project that Boston Properties seeks to defund by depriving the city of tax dollars for the Salesforce Tower project:

“There is a very impressive star on the horizon. Her name is Ashley Swearengin. She is the mayor of Fresno, and she’s running for controller against Democrat Betty Yee.

She is also a Republican who is being pilloried by other Republicans for her support of Gov. Jerry Brown’s high-speed rail project. Unlike some politicians, Swearengin has a concrete reason for backing what some are calling the ‘train to nowhere.’ It means a ton of construction jobs for Fresno.

Supporting high-speed rail, however, has cost her in the fundraising department because many potential Republican donors hate the project.”

And maybe because he’s digitally disinclined to use Twitter, in July he used the Chronicle as his own personal communications service to contact federally indicted and alleged-gun-running Sen. Leland Yee:

“Where’s Leland Yee? I’ve got everybody in town looking for our indicted and suspended state senator, and no one can find him. Leland, if you read this, call me.”

We reached out to Chronicle Managing Editor Audrey Cooper to ask her if San Francisco’s paper of record would consider retiring Brown’s column now that he’s a registered lobbyist, but didn’t hear back from her before we published. But you know, they could always go the other way: Why stop with Willie? Just give up guys, and give editorial space to BMWL (who are pushing against the Soda Tax), to Sam Singer (the high-powered public relations flak), or Grover Norquist (he could write about the virtues of libertarianism and Burning Man at once!).

But Brown is a special case all on his own. He’s no ordinary lobbyist: He has the ear of the mayor (and helped elect the mayor), and his influence cuts a swath through the city’s biggest power players, from PG&E to Lennar Corporation. He helped many current city politicians and staffers get their jobs in the first place.

The average reader not steeped in wonky political backdoor deals may not understand why giving him a column is such a bad idea. Journalist Matt Smith has long-written on Brown’s SF Chronicle conflict of interest, first for the SF Weekly and then for the now-defunct Bay Citizen. In 2011, an anonymous Chronicle staffer told this to Smith:

“‘Should the newspaper be in the business of helping an influence peddler peddle?’ the journalist asked.

‘If you believe him even 50 percent of the way, Willie Brown has a big say in San Francisco politics, which he reminds us of every week. He has a certain self-deprecating style that makes him even more charming, which kind of hides the fact that what he is really doing is bragging about all the people he knows, and all the influence he peddles. What that does is it has a multiplier effect.'”

That multiplier effect works in a few ways. First, it works almost as information-laundering: When Brown “jokes” about taking bribes, it makes any accusations of impropriety seem quaint. After all, it’s just Willie Brown, we already know he’s a wheeler-and-dealer, right? What harm could he do?

Second, it amplifies his already formidable position as a kingmaker in San Francisco politics, possibly allowing him to charge even more cash to special interests for his influence. Since he registered as a lobbyist, Brown has met five times with Mayor Ed Lee over the Salesforce Tower tax issue. And until the Chronicle’s surprising and incredibly rare editorial stance against Mayor Ed Lee’s deal, Brown almost succeeded in negotiating hundreds of millions of dollars out of city coffers and into the pockets of Boston Properties.

The Chronicle wrote scathingly in their editorial:

“The deal is baffling — and infuriating. The group of developers had already gotten special favors from City Hall.”

Swap the words “the group of developers” with “Willie Brown,” and you could say the exact same thing about Brown’s Chronicle column.

Brown even used his San Francisco Chronicle headshot in his lobbyist registration with the Ethics Commission. If that’s not a “fuck you” to the Chronicle’s sense of journalistic ethics, I don’t know what would be. The Chronicle’s photo editor told us in an email that Brown did not have permission to use the photo.

I don’t think he cares.

BROWN1

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Tough decisions ahead: The Bay Area Record Fair, the Oakland Music Festival, and more

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Ever get so overwhelmed by all the awesome events in the Bay Area on a given weekend that you give up on trying to decide between any of them and find yourself just hanging with whomever you can get to come to your house to drink with you and your cats? Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, venturing 50 yards down the street to watch baseball at the closest bar with a TV?

Haha, me neither! Just kidding; that person sounds like a loser who is definitely not me. ANYWAY, this is one of those weekends where you’re going to have to make some tough calls. It’s called being a grownup. Here we go.

FRI/26

San Franciscans may think they have the market cornered on psychedelia, but things sound a little different in the desert — dusty, moody, lonely, and super atmospheric. All of these are apt words for decker., a Sedona-based “desert folk” act led by singer-songwriter Brandon Decker that won hearts with its soulful live act at SXSW, among other stages. This show at Bottom of the Hill (1233 17th St, SF), which serves as a record release party for the band’s fifth album, Patsy, will actually be a double-helping of soul: Oakland favorites Whiskerman, with multi-instrumentalist Graham Patzner’s vocal chops at the helm, will help open the evening.

Bob Mould, Castro resident and extremely well-spoken guy in addition to being an exceedingly talented guitarist and legendary all-around frontman, is coming home — and his welcome party’s at the Fillmore (1805 Geary, SF) tonight with Cymbals Eat Guitars. Mould’s new record, Beauty and Ruin, has been on repeat in certain headphones; check our interview with him in this week’s paper for more.

 

SAT/27

The Bay Area Record Fair, aka the best new acronym to come out of the local music scene since possibly ever, is throwing the second edition of its schmooze-fest/record sale/party this Saturday at Thee Parkside (1600 17th St, SF) and the surrounding blocks. This free shindig, thrown by local label Father/Daughter Records alongside promoters Professional Fans, will feature live sets from Happy Diving (whose excellent debut LP is out next month), Hot Flash Heat Wave, Wild Moth, and Flim Flam and The Jet Stars of Three O’Clock Rock. All of that while you swing by tables from more than 30 Bay Area record labels, who’ll be hawking CDs, LPs, t-shirts, stickers, that one weird rare flexi-disk you’ve been looking for forever, etc. The party goes down from noon to 5pm, but $5 gets you early entry (first access to the crates, you fiends) at 11am. RSVP here. Oh, and here’s our review of the last one.

Over on the other side of the Bay, the second annual Oakland Music Festival highlights the best in local-ish hip-hop, funk, R&B, dance and electronic music, with a few folky singer-songwriters in there for good measure. The daylong fest has four stages throughout downtown (21st, 22nd, and Grand Streets between Broadway and Webster) with headliners like rapper Dom Kennedy, beatmaker Esta, soulful singer SZA as headliners, while the legendary Chuy Gomez and hometown heroes Trackademicks and 1-O.A.K hold down the DJ stage. Plus, you know, food, beer, a beautiful day in the East Bay sunshine. Tickets (for $28 or $35, unless you go VIP) right here.

 

SUN/28

How do you get away with throwing a bonkers dance party on public Ocean Beach in broad daylight? Pipe the music directly into the crowd’s headphones, that’s how. The Silent Frisco crew has found the ultimate underground vibe, above ground, with HushFest. Here’s how it works: Gather at the party spot (imbibe your libations beforehand, please, no drugs or alcohol on the beach), pay $20 for special wireless headphones, and dance in the sand with a huge gaggle of other wildly, silently gesticulating aficianados — all for $20, kicking off at 11am. DJs at this annual event around include genius duo Psychmagik, who rejigger deepest funk-rock memories of the 1970s, Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation, and Fort Knox Five. Yes, you can still yell “woo!” (Marke B.)

The Aislers Set, Cold Beat, and the Mantles at The Chapel (777 Valencia, SF). This here’s an SF triple-threat, with the Brit-influenced, late ’90s/early aughts indie-pop veterans The Aislers Set making their much-awaited return tonight. Hannah Lew’s (ex-Grass Widow) Cold Beat will lend a harder edge to the evening, sandwiched alongside the Mantles’ 60s-tinged dream-pop. Also for $20, we can think of worse ways to stave off the Sunday night blues.

 

 

Extended review: British prison drama ‘Starred Up’

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By Haley Brucato

Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie’s prison drama Starred Up is a brutally raw indie film starring rising actor Jack O’Connell as Eric, a 19-year-old offender who has just been “starred up,” or transferred to an adult prison due to his uncontrollable and dangerous behavior. Though he’s passive when we get our first look at him, he won’t be for long: One of the first things Eric does upon entering his new cell is expertly rig a shank out of a toothbrush and a shaving razor, which he then hides in an overhead light fixture. Clearly, he’s done this before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE4ziBfu0JA

This weapon takes awhile to be deployed, but he’s not so patient with his fists, nor is anyone here; inmates regularly resolve their differences by beating each other to a pulp. Screenwriter Jonathan Asser provides powerful insight with his own history as a psychotherapist in a London jail, an experience that inspired the character of therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend). Oliver has hope for the violent Eric — he’s maybe the only one who does — knowing that this furious creature is likely destined to slip through the cracks like so many before him.

The well-meaning doc attemps to challenge prison authorities who prefer slapping troublemakers into solitary confinement by offering anger-management treatment to the worst offenders. This includes, however briefly, an inmate who happens to be Eric’s surly, long-absent father (Ben Mendelsohn). But there are no quick fixes for any of these characters, especially with shifty allegiances between different factions both in front of and behind bars. 

Although American viewers will likely struggle to understand the thick accents (not to mention the free-flying jailhouse slang), this doesn’t exactly matter in a film that propels itself via physical confrontations rather than dialogue. As for star O’Connell, he’ll soon be seen as a very different kind of prisoner in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken

STARRED UP opens Fri/26 at the Roxie.

Guardian Intelligence: Sept. 24 – 30, 2014

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MASONIC MOONWALK

Beck brought his endlessly funky band to the new Masonic Sept. 19 for opening night, where they ran through melancholy new tunes from this year’s Moon Phase before switching gears toward his more upbeat hits for a serious dance party (there was caution tape involved). See a full review and more photos on our Noise blog at SFBG.com PHOTO BY ERIN CONGER

TIFF TAKES

Bay Guardian film festival correspondent Jesse Hawthorne Ficks returned from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, having deployed his usual tactic of seeing as many films as possible — and then writing about them at length on the Pixel Vision blog at SFBG.com. Visit the Pixel Vision blog for his series of posts, including takes on the trend toward ultra-long films (FYI, he’s a huge Lav Diaz fan…), Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (pictured), Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, and other buzzed-about titles. PHOTO COURTESY OF TIFF

DEATH TO CAPITALISM!

The Bay Area’s edition on the Sept. 21 Global Climate Convergence was held on the edge of Lake Merritt in Oakland, where some of the best speakers went full-on commie in connecting capitalism to the climate crisis, calling for revolutionary change. Socialist Action’s Jeff Mackler brought the old-school Trotskyite class analysis while up-and-coming Socialist Alternative (the party of Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant) had a strong presence. The Coup’s Boots Riley opened with an a cappella “Love for the Underdog,” followed by some fiery oratory and a couple more strong songs, including the militant anthem “Ghetto Blaster.” Power to the people!

EXPORTING CYCLETRACKS

San Francisco pushed the envelope in building cycletracks, bike lanes physically separated from cars, before state law allowed them. But on Sept. 20, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 1193, a bill by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-SF) that inserted cycletrack standards into state transportation codes, they suddenly became a legal, easy option for cities around the state to start building, just like they already do in Europe. So as cyclist safety improves in California, they can have San Francisco to thanks. You’re welcome.

GLOVER INSPIRES

Major kudos to actor and local hero Danny Glover for his recent visit to the San Francisco County Jail Reentry Pod. “With that great smile and laid-back style, Danny connected with inmates about preparing to get out and staying out,” said Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who spent some time with Glover and inmates preparing for release. “Be the example.” The reentry pod stems from a collaboration between the Sheriff’s Department and Adult Probation, to prepare AB109 prisoners from state realignment for their release. PHOTO COURTESY SF SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

EVICTION PROTECTION

Now you can don condoms against evictions! At Folsom Street Fair, activists handed out condoms adorned by the face of Ellis Act evictor (and leather lover) Jack Halprin. Why are the protesters equating him with an ejaculate receptacle? Halprin purchased a San Francisco property on Guerrero two years ago and filed to evict the tenants under the Ellis Act, one of whom is a San Francisco elementary school teacher with a 2-year-old son. From the condom wrapper: “Jack be simple, Jack’s a dick! Jack’s evictions make us sick!”

TRI-VALLEY POUR-A-THON

This issue of the Guardian is all about delicious travel — here’s something close to home that will have beer lovers gripping their steins. The new Tri-Valley Beer Trail lights up Pleasanton, Livermore, San Ramon, Dublin and Danville with foamy craft goodness — reinstating that area as one of the original homes of California beer (the region formerly contained one of the largest hops farms in the world). Fifteen stops, innumerable beers to try, and warm weather all the way. See www.visittrivalley.com for more details.

OPEN SEASON

Art Explosion Studios, the Mission’s largest artist collective, prides itself on supplying affordable studio space to local painters, sculptors, photographers, jewelers, fashion designers, and other creative types. An affordable situation for artists? In the Mission? What is this, 1994? Support this organization and meet the artists (over 100 in total) right where they do their makin’ at the annual Art Explosion Fall Open Studios. Hit up the opening gala Fri/26, 7-11pm, or stop by Sat/27-Sun/28 from noon-5pm. 2425 17th St, SF; 744 Alabama, SF; www.artexplosionstudios.com.

SHADY TRANSIT DEAL

A wonky tale of woe just got a happy ending. Developers looking to make big bucks from the construction of the new Transbay Terminal tower, now the SalesForce tower, were looking to skim money off San Francisco by reneging on their required taxes, possibly costing the city $1.4 billion dollars. After the developers hired slick ex-Mayor, lobbyist, and SF Chronicle columnist Willie Brown to smooth the deal, they almost got away with saving hundreds of millions of dollars that would go to Muni, pedestrian safety, and infrastructure. At the last minute, the city changed its tune, and now the SoMa area will get the funding it was promised. The people win, and the fat cats lose.

 

Questions of the week: Who is the walrus? And who is Liam Neeson gonna take down next? New movies!

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If Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ ongoing Pixel Vision posts about the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival have you longing for your own festival experience, check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s one-day “Silent Autumn” series at the Castro Theatre, as well as Cine+Mas’ San Francisco Latino Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Brava Theater and runs through Sept. 27 at various venues.

First-run picks o’ the week include Liam Neeson’s latest lone-wolf action movie, an ensemble movie starring Tina Fey and Jason Bateman, and Kevin Smith’s new joint, in which Justin Long turns into a walrus. Yep, you read that right. Read on for reviews and trailers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ng4MD66WyU

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby Writer-director Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby began as separate films about a failed marriage, told from the points of view of the husband (James McAvoy), and then the wife (Jessica Chastain). Because Americans will happily binge-watch entire TV seasons but still get the shakes when confronted with a two-part film, the segments (titled Him and Her) are getting wide release in the edited-together Them. (Diehards will have a chance to seek out the complete work eventually, but for now, this review concerns only Them.) As the film begins, Chastain’s Eleanor (yep, named after the Beatles song) flings herself off an NYC bridge. She survives physically, but her mental state is still supremely fragile, so she checks out of her Manhattan life and her marriage to Connor (McAvoy), and digs in at the chic suburban saltbox occupied by her parents (Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt) and sister (Jess Weixler), a single mother with a young son. Meanwhile, Connor mopes around his failing restaurant with his chef BFF (the suddenly ubiquitous Bill Hader), and pays occasional visits to his own moping father (Ciarán Hinds). The estranged couple circles each other, in flashbacks and occasional run-ins, and the audience is slowly made privy to the tragedy that drove them apart and has them both reeling from grief months later. Even in mash-up form, this is a delicate film, enhanced by Benson’s confidence in his audience’s intelligence; what could have been a manipulative tear-jerker instead feels authentically raw, with characters whose emotional confusion leads them to behave in realistically frustrating ways. The casting is note-perfect, with a special nod to Viola Davis as Eleanor’s world-weary college professor. I’ll be seeking out Her just to catch more of that performance. (2:03) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Iceman A palace guard accused of murder (martial arts star Donnie Yen) and three vengeful brothers are all frozen mid-battle — only to defrost 400 years later and pick up where they left off. (1:46) Four Star.

Los Angeles Plays Itself Remastered and newly cleared for fair use, Thom Andersen’s incisive 2003 film essay on narrative cinema’s many representations and misrepresentations of Los Angeles plays a single night at the Castro. Andersen’s impressively choreographed montage zigzags through a vast litany of film history, submitting erotic thrillers, middlebrow Oscar bait, and avant-garde outliers to the same materialist protocol. Observing Hollywood’s tendency to falsify geography and transform landmarks of modernist geography into villainous hideouts, Andersen’s treatment of mainstream ideology is acidly funny but never condescending. To the contrary: Los Angeles Plays Itself is driven by an unshakeable faith that another kind of film — and with it another kind of world — is possible. In methodically deconstructing countless car chases and phony denouements, the native Angeleno lays groundwork for the fresh appreciation of the diverse neorealisms found in the work of directors like Kent Mackenzie (1961’s The Exiles), Nicholas Ray (1955’s Rebel Without a Cause), Fred Halsted (1972’s LA Plays Itself), Charles Burnett (1979’s Killer of Sheep), and Billy Woodberry (1984’s Bless Their Little Hearts). A true work of termite art and an impassioned argument for “a city of walkers, a cinema of walking,” Los Angeles Plays Itself is the closest thing to a cineaste’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. (2:49) Castro. (Max Goldberg)

The Maze Runner In a post-apocalyptic world, a youth (Dylan O’Brien) finds himself among a group of boys trapped at the center of a mysterious maze. Based on the YA novel by James Dashner. (1:53) 

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! See “Joyous Blues.” (1:32) Elmwood, Roxie, Smith Rafael.

This Is Where I Leave You Jason Bateman plays Judd Altman, the hollow center of a clan of snarky, squabbling siblings — Wendy (Tina Fey), fractiously married with kids and pining for her high school sweetheart (Timothy Olyphant); Paul (Corey Stoll), who runs the family sporting goods store; and Phillip (Adam Driver), a philandering über-fuckup currently dating his former therapist (Connie Britton) — reunited somewhere in eastern seaboard suburbia by the death of their father. This vaguely sketched individual’s last wish, they are informed by their mother (Jane Fonda), a therapist turned author who mined their adolescence for pop psych bestseller gold, was that, his atheism notwithstanding, they conform to Judaic tradition and sit shivah for him. A seven-day respite of quiet reminiscing and clarifying reflection, broken up by periodic babka-and-whitefish-salad binges, could be good for Judd, whose recent misfortunes also include coming home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) between the sheets with his shock jock boss (Dax Shepard), resulting in a divorce-unemployment double whammy. But there is no peace to be found at the Altman homestead, where fuses blow, siblings brawl, in-laws conduct high-volume international business transactions and reproductive rites, and Wendy’s latchkey toddler wanders the property with his portable potty. Director Shawn Levy (2013’s The Internship, 2010’s Date Night) and writer Jonathan Tropper, who adapted the script from his novel, don’t want any of the siblings, or satellite characters, to feel left out, and the story line is divvied up accordingly. But the results are uneven — lumps of comedy and genuine pathos dropped amid the oppressive exposition, pat resolutions, and swings in pacing from slack to frenetic. (1:43) (Lynn Rapoport)

Tusk Michael Parks has a gift for looking like he’s in a different movie than everyone else, and it’s possible that ineffable skill of his has found its best use to date in Kevin Smith’s new fuck-you horror-comedy Tusk. When jerky podcaster Wally (Justin Long) finds a video that begins like “Star Wars Boy” but ends with dismemberment, Wally flies to Canada to interview the “Kill Bill Boy” (so named for the sword wielding and spurting stump). Wallace reaches his destination and is importuned by the funeral. This is one of a handful of scenes that exists to make us happy when Wally meets magical storyteller Howard Howe, an ex-sailor full of sea tales and an dark plan to turn Wally into a Franken-walrus. The story is based on something Smith hashed out in his sModcasts (excerpted during the credits) and when you look for author surrogate (not that you should) Wally’s impossible to distinguish from Smith. Asshole podcaster? Fights for permission to work freely? Body issues? All Wally needs is a dachshund and a jersey. Tusk isn’t up to the level of Smith’s early output, but it’s right in line with the decline in quality he’s been facing since critics broke his spirit, studios turned cold shoulders, and cynicism naturally set in. I hope whatever soul coughing Tusk represents will provide Smith momentum and license to leave any transformative hardships behind him — there are always beacons of hope (an uncredited Johnny Depp provides a good one here). Despite fundamental frustrations, Tusk has some deep and inky moments. When Howe takes Wally’s leg from him (leveling him to a “Kill Bill Kid”-styled punch line) Wally wails impotently, and Howe laughs — at what, it’s not certain (perhaps it’s really Parks, guffawing at Long’s performance?), but whatever that gloriously complicated motivation was, in the mingling of cries emerges an eerie but profoundly communal squall. (1:42) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ttj9tXzCA

A Walk Among the Tombstones The latest in Liam Neeson’s string of films in which he plays a tough guy uncannily adept at hissing orders (or threats) through a telephone is as pitch-black as its eerie title suggests. Set conspicuously in 1999, when Y2K and far more sinister threats loomed (see: a poignant shot of the World Trade Center), Tombstones is the grim tale of Matt Scudder, a loner with both an NYPD career and a prodigious drinking habit wedged 10 years in the past. He maintains his bare-bones lifestyle by doing off-the-books PI work, but none of his dirty-deeds experience can prepare him for his next case, a nightmarish pile-up of missing women sliced to pieces by a van-driving maniacs. Working from Lawrence Block’s novel, writer-director Scott Frank (2007’s The Lookout) emerges with surprisingly layered characters that extend beyond the archetypes they initially seem to be at first; besides Neeson’s Scudder, there’s a street-smart youth who becomes his sorta-helpful sidekick (Brian “Astro” Bradley), and a vengeful drug dealer (Dan Stevens) with a junkie brother (Boyd Holbrook). Even the murderers behave in unexpected ways. And if its story hews a bit too closely to Urban Noir 101, it’s bleak as hell, and has the guts to make relentlessness one of its primary objectives. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

Wetlands It begins, like many a classic coming-of-age tale, with an unbridled case of hemorrhoids, followed by a barefoot meander through possible sewage to the vilest public restroom captured on film since 1996’s Trainspotting. None of this seems to faze Wetlands’ outspoken heroine and narrator, 18-year-old Helen (Carla Juri), a skateboarding, sexually adventurous young maniac who admits to having a markedly lax attitude toward personal hygiene. Viewers of director-cowriter David Wnendt’s film, however, may want to refrain from visiting the concession stand just this once — chewing on Milk Duds is likely to become negatively evocative as Helen embarks on a round of tactile explorations involving a tasting menu of bodily excretions. The biotic high jinks continue when she winds up in the hospital in the wake of a viscerally enacted shaving incident, from which vantage point, occasionally under general anesthesia, she revisits scenes from both her fraught childhood and her teenage exploits, wandering between the homes of her divorced parents: an anxious, uptight germophobe mother (Meret Becker) and a checked-out, self-indulgent father (Axel Milberg), whose inadvisable rapprochement she hopes to engineer from her hospital bed. Impressively, amid the advancing waves of gross-out, a poignant story line emerges, and, like Helen’s handsome, bemused nurse Robin (Christoph Letkowski), the object of her wildly inappropriate advances, we find ourselves rolling with the shock and revulsion, increasingly solicitous and bizarrely charmed. (1:49) (Lynn Rapoport)

The Zero Theorem See “Waltz Work.” (1:46) 

Reform BART’s approach to labor

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By Christina Olague

OPINION If BART is part of your daily commute, you know how critical a reliable system is to Bay Area working people. If you don’t ride BART, all you have to do it think about all the cars that the system keeps off the road every day.

That’s why everyone — most of all the BART unions and their supporters — found last year’s strike so upsetting. And now, a new report commissioned in part by BART Board member James Fang shows how unnecessary it was for management to drive workers to walk off the job.

In fact, the report says, hiring a union-busting outside negotiator was a serious mistake. Allowing that hired gun to pursue an extremist bargaining strategy was a major cause of the labor unrest.

The report, conducted by an outside consultant, involved interviews with dozens of workers, managers, and negotiators. The document is riddled with references to war: Bomb-throwing, Vietnam, a labor “massacre.” It shows how badly the executive management at BART allowed the climate for negotiations to deteriorate — and how hard it will be to repair the damage.

Here’s how one manager put it: “This strike was not productive. We never did a course correction and then there was another strike. Two people got killed. We spent millions to end up getting creamed, and engendering hate.”

The report notes how BART executive management and their notorious chief negotiator refused to take seriously the concerns workers expressed about safety.

“Key points made about safety in bargaining sessions fell on deaf ears…because management thought the unions were just posturing and the unions thought the management was refusing to engage,” it states.

Safety concerns were a central part of the negotiations from the workers’ perspective, and by dismissing those concerns as a tactic, BART’s consultant not only made an agreement more difficult but gambled with the safety of workers and riders in order get concessions from workers.

Fang, head of the BART Board’s Labor Negotiation Review Committee, is asking that the board adopt the report’s recommendations to prevent this from happening again. These recommendations include more transparency around the agency’s finances, a much earlier start to negotiations — and if needed, bringing in mediators, not outside anti-union consultants.

Once the rest of our elected BART Board of Directors became more involved, management found a reasonable solution that both sides could live with. Why didn’t that happen at the beginning of negotiations?

That’s what the BART Board needs to be asking itself. A fair post-mortem puts much of the blame on management — a general manager who had little experience in labor negotiations and a board that failed to show leadership and independence.

Fang, who is the one board member who joined workers on the picket lines, says it’s time for management to change its approach. He’s calling for a strike-prevention plan that starts with honest, fair labor relations.

We’ve heard from some politicians looking to score easy points from frustrated riders that BART strikes ought to be banned. And it’s easy to imagine frustrated commuters, stuck far from work when the trains weren’t running, feeling sympathetic.

But if workers don’t have the right to strike, they are powerless to speak out against dangerous working conditions to a recalcitrant and, in this case, misdirected management. That leads to a more dangerous system for all of us.

Recognizing this, BART Board President Joel Keller just withdrew his suggestion that strikes be banned.

The much better approach for riders like me is to follow Fang’s prevention plan: Hold management accountable for its failures and to make sure that both sides can work together better in the future.

BART is a phenomenally successful system. Ridership has doubled in recent years, to 440,000 trips a day. With trained and experienced BART workers, the system’s on-time performance has risen to 95 percent. That’s not the result of some high-paid labor negotiator — it’s the work of a dedicated and hard-working staff.

If you ride BART every day, you deserve to know that the trains will be running, that you can count on the system to get you to work on time. Between now and 2017, when the next contract will be negotiated, the BART Board needs to learn from its past mistakes and find a different, more collaborative approach. Christina Olague is a community activist and former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Activists form human barricade to protest crude-by-rail facility

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This morning [Thu/4], at 7am in Richmond, Calif., four environmental activists used U-locks to fasten themselves by the neck to the fence of an oil shipping facility operated by Kinder Morgan. 

They were interlocked with another four activists, who had their arms secured with handmade lock-boxes. “I’m locked to a lock box connected to my partner, Ann, who is locked with a U-lock to the fence,” Andre Soto, of Richmond-based Communities for a Better Environment, explained by phone a little after 8am.

At that time, Soto said several Richmond police officers had been dispatched to the scene and were calmly surveying the human barricade. He wondered out loud if they would be arrested.

The environmentalists risked arrest to prevent trucks from leaving the Kinder Morgan facility for area refineries with offloaded oil shipped in by train. 

Crude-by-rail transport at Kinder Morgan’s bulk rail terminal, located in the Burlington Northern / Santa Fe railyard in Richmond, is the subject of a lawsuit filed in March by Earthjustice on behalf of the Sierra Club, Communities for a Better Environment, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

The suit, targeting Kinder Morgan as well as the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), charges that Kinder Morgan was illegally awarded a permit for crude-by-rail operations without going through a formal environmental review process, which would have necessitated public hearings and community feedback. The case asks for operations to be halted while the project undergoes review under the California Environmental Quality Act. A hearing will be held in San Francisco Superior Court at 1:30pm tomorrow.

Ethan Buckner of Forest Ethics, who was also locked to the fence, said activists were especially concerned that the crude oil being shipped into Richmond, much of which originates in North Dakota, was volatile, presenting safety concerns.

“The oil trains are … very old tank cars that are subject to puncture, and have been known to fail over and over again while carrying oil,” Buckner said. Much of the oil shipped into the Richmond transfer point by rail originates from the Bakken shale region, which has been dramatically transformed by the controversial extraction method known as fracking.

“Nobody was notified that these oil trains were going to be rolling in,” Buckner said. That morning’s protest, he added, was meant to “send a clear message to Kinder Morgan and the Air District that if we can’t count on our public agencies to protect our communities, we’re going to do it ourselves.”

In the end, none of the activists were arrested. They voluntarily unlocked themselves from the fence and left the railyard around 10am. “After three hours we decided thsat we had made our point,” Eddie Scher of Forest Ethics said afterward, speaking by phone.

Along with a group of around ten others participating in the civil disobedience action, the activists who locked themselves to the fence were affiliated with Bay Area environmental organizations including 350 Bay Area, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Sunflower Alliance, the Martinez Environmental Group, and Crocket Rodeo United to Defend the Environment.

Reached by phone, Ralph Borrmann, a spokesperson for BAAQMD, said, “We have no comment on the current litigation, or any actions relating to it.” He added that more information would come out during the Sept. 5 hearing.

When the Bay Guardian asked Kinder Morgan for a comment on the matter, spokesperson Richard Wheatley responded, “You’re not going to get one. We’re not going to comment on it.” Asked for a comment on the lawsuit, Wheatley said, “We’re not going to comment ahead of that hearing. And we’re not going to comment on the protesters.”

Alerts: September 3 – 9, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 3

 

Panel: Agriculture and Journalism

SF Commonwealth Club, 595 Market, SF. tinyurl.com/agriculturebeat. 6pm, $20 nonmembers, $8 members, $7 students. Cutbacks in reporting staff have decreased the amount of agriculture related journalism, yet in today’s foodie world, there is a growing demand for new information about where consumer’s food is coming from. Join Tara Duggan of the SF Chronicle, Naomi Starkman of Civil Eats, Andy Wright of Modern Farmer, and Sasha Khokha of KQED to discuss journalism’s changed and changing relationship with agriculture. Bi-Rite Catering will provide food for the event.

THURSDAY 4

 

Public Forum: Police Tasers in Berkeley

1939 Addison, Berk. coalitionfortaserfreeberkeley.org. 7-10pm, free. Is the militarization of the police force unnecessary? The Berkeley police force is asking for Tasers, but the City Council is hesitant. Discuss the issue with panelists such as Aram James, activist and former Palo Alto Public Defender; Barbara Ann White, Berkeley NAACP vice president and community mental health professional; James Chanin, founding member of the Police Review Commission and civil rights lawyer; and Jeremy Miller, program director of the Idriss Stelley Foundation and co-organizer of the successful campaign to stop San Francisco from getting Tasers. The Coalition for a Taser Free Berkeley is sponsoring the forum.

SATURDAY 6

 

Police Violence Teach-In

Starry Plough Pub, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. 510-465-9414. 2-4:30pm, free. In light of the recent Ferguson and St. Louis events, join speakers Anita Wills, Chris Kinder, and Carol Denney to learn about police violence and political protest in America, and how Ferguson relates to the Bay Area. The event is put on by the Alameda Peace and Freedom Party.

 

Film & Fundraiser: Connected By Coffee

2868 Mission, SF. tinyurl.com/connectedbycoffee. 4pm, $10 suggested donation. Coffee is important to a large percentage of the SF population. However, many coffee farms are threatened by leaf rust fungus. All donations will go to Cooperative Las Marias 93 in El Salvador — a cooperative farm that lost 80 percent of its crop to the fungus, and has been unable to export coffee since. There will be a Q&A with local coffee roasters from the Ubuntu Coffee Cooperative, and coffee samples at intermission. The documentary — Connected By Coffee — looks into the multibillion dollar industry of coffee.

Guardian Intelligence: September 3 – 9, 2014

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CASTRO CURTAIN CALL

If your favorite thing about seeing movies at the historic Castro Theatre is hearing the score for that Charlie Chaplin short played on the instrument that would’ve been used when the film actually came out — well, get thee to the movies, and fast. The Castro Theatre’s famous Wurlitzer organ is being sold by its current owner, and will be replaced early next year with an elaborate, one-of-a-kind digital console, with seven keyboards and more than 800 stops, designed by acclaimed organ creator Allen Harrah — pro bono. One trade-off: We’re guessing this will be better for scoring alien movies than its analog counterpart?

THEFT TIMES TWO

It’s a drag to have your car stolen. But if the vehicle is recovered, the high fees you may fork over to get it back only add insult to injury. In San Francisco, police give the owner of a recovered stolen vehicle 20 minutes to retrieve it before sending the car to impound. That’s where the costs add up. Worst-case scenario? The fees rise above the value of the car, and it gets auctioned off. Sup. Scott Wiener has called for a hearing to review the city’s towing policies with respect to stolen cars. The company that operates the city’s impound lot, AutoReturn, is due for contract renewal next year.

TAG, YOU’RE IT!

The neighborhood some call “upper Safeway” has gotten some negative attention lately, but the Friends of Duboce Park Tag Sale — back for its 17th year — is perfectly timed to recharge the area’s community spirit. Last year’s event was hit with an unexpected deluge, so hope for sunny skies Sat/6 and head to the ‘hood’s collective backyard from 9am-2pm for shopping (bargains galore on household items, clothes, sports equipment, books, and more!) and hob-nobbing, with all proceeds going toward improvements to Duboce Park, including its playground. www.friendsofdubocepark.org

SWEET TRIBUTE

Former SF clubkid (now renowned LA artist) Jason Mecier is famed for his celebrity portraits done with junk food and trash — and his tribute to Robin Williams is gaining attention. “It’s Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire, with a Patch Adams nose and a Flubber green background,” Mecier says. “This portrait took over 30 hours to make and is comprised of thousands of candy pieces including Red Vines, Black Licorice, gum balls, Jelly Bellies, Jelly Beans, Tic-Tacs,Gum Drops, Gummy Bears, Sixlets, Mike and Ike’s, Hot Tamales and others. I’ve always wanted to do a portrait of him combining all of his most popular roles. Unfortunately, now was the time to do it.” www.jasonmecier.com

CYCLE UP

San Francisco-style cycletracks — bike lanes physically separated from automobile traffic — could proliferate in cities throughout California under a bill approved today [Fri/29] by the Legislature, provided Gov. Jerry Brown decides to sign it. Assembly Bill 1193, the Protected Bikeways Act, by San Francisco Democrat Phil Ting, was approved today by the Assembly on a 53-15 vote after clearing the Senate on Monday, 29-5. The bill incorporates cycletrack design standards into state transportation regulations, which had previously stated that such designs weren’t allowed. In other bike news, the SF Bicycle Coalition announced that a plan was approved to bring a raised bikeway to Valencia between Cesar Chaves and Duncan Streets next year, creating a buffer between drivers and cyclists.

VOTERS IN THE DARK

Proposed legislation to shed light on who’s bankrolling political campaign ads has been stalled for now. The DISCLOSE Act — which stands for “Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections” — needed a two-thirds vote to pass both houses of the California Legislature, but lacked support. It would have required funders of TV, print, and radio ads, and robocalls, to be clearly identified by closing a loophole that allows them to be disguised by ambiguous committee names. Sen. Mark Leno and other cosponsors vowed to continue the fight next year.

ZOOBORN

On Aug. 26, the SF Zoo welcomed rare newborn twin male giraffes — unfortunately one was too weak to survive, but the other little fellow is doing fine at 100 pounds and 5’6″ tall. The calf’s mother is 11-year-old Bititi, who was born at the Oakland Zoo and made the journey across the bay to live at the San Francisco Zoo in 2005. The father is 12-year-old Floyd, who was born in Albuquerque at the Rio Grande Zoo. We’re looking forward to the naming contest. www.sfzoo.org

PARK ARIAS

One of our favorite picnic singalongs (and “try-to-singalongs”) is coming, as SF Opera’s Opera in the Park hits Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park, Sun/7 at 1:30pm. On the menu? Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” from Turandot, and Leoncavallo “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci. (You may not know the titles but you’ll recognize the tunes.) Pack a flask of wine and pray for sunshine. www.sfopera.org.

GORGE YOURSELF

The Asian Arts Museum’s “Gorgeous” show (through Sept. 14) is a sugar rush of centuries’ worth of crowd-pleasing art hits, including everything from Jeff Koons’ infamous porcelain portrait of Michael Jackson and pet monkey Bubbles to breathtaking ancient Chinese paintings. The show, produced in partnership with SFMOMA, provides a great introduction to art history for our ADD age; more experienced types will appreciate the chance to linger before Mark Rothko’s “No. 14, 1960” alongside works from artisans of other eras. www.asianart.org

 

Nuclear shakeup

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It was more than six years ago that Jeanne Hardebeck, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey’s Menlo Park Earthquake Science Center, started to zero in on a pattern. “I was looking at small earthquakes,” she explained. “I noticed them lining up.”

 

She and other earthquake scientists also detected an anomaly in the alignment of the earth’s magnetic field off the California coastline, near San Luis Obispo. It all added up to the discovery of an offshore fault line.

What made Hardebeck’s discovery truly startling was that the sea floor fracture, now known as the Shoreline Fault, lies just about 300 meters from Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, California’s last operational nuclear power plant. In the general vicinity of the facility, which is owned and operated by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., there are also three other fault lines.

These discoveries have raised safety concerns and fed arguments by activists who want the Diablo Canyon reactors shut down, at least until the danger can be properly assessed.

When the final construction permits for Diablo Canyon were issued more than 45 years ago, engineers assumed a lower seismic risk. PG&E’s federal operating license to run Diablo Canyon is based on those assumptions. But the new information suggests that the ground is capable of shaking a great deal more in the event of a major earthquake than previously understood — leaving open the possibility that a temblor could spark sudden and disastrous equipment failure at Diablo Canyon.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency charged with overseeing the safety of nuclear facilities, has determined that the plant’s continued operation is safe. But Michael Peck, a senior NRC staff member, recommended that the reactors be shut down until a safety analysis could prove that the plant would successfully withstand a major earthquake. In the time since Peck began to sound the alarm about the potential seismic hazard, he’s been transferred from Diablo Canyon to a NRC training facility in Chattanooga, Tenn.

As The Associated Press reported on Aug. 25, Peck, who served as a resident on-site safety inspector at Diablo Canyon for half a decade as part of his 33-year career with the NRC, called for the plant to be temporarily shut down in a Differing Professional Opinion (DPO) filed in June 2013. Such a filing signifies a formal challenge to an agency position, and the NRC standard is to rule on these findings within 120 days.

More than a year later, however, Peck’s findings still haven’t been addressed. Since the DPO is technically classified — someone leaked it, and Peck says he wasn’t the source —the NRC hasn’t even publicly acknowledged its existence. The NRC did not return calls seeking comment.

Meanwhile, the Bay Guardian has learned that the NRC’s actions go beyond just foot-dragging on addressing Peck’s findings. Following a series of exchanges in the years since the discovery of the Shoreline Fault, PG&E filed a request to the NRC for its license to be amended so that it could continue operating Diablo Canyon in spite of the outmoded design specifications. As part of its request, the company performed its own studies concluding that the continued operation of the plant was safe in light of the new seismic information.

Yet the NRC technical staff rejected PG&E’s proposed methodology for analyzing the earthquake safety risk. Rather than amend the license, the NRC asked PG&E to withdraw its request. Despite this formal response, in a letter dated Oct. 12, 2012, an NRC project manager quietly gave PG&E the green light to update its own safety analysis report to incorporate the new seismic information, effectively allowing for the amendment without jumping through the hoops of the formal license amendment process.

“It appears that the licensing manager basically worked around the process,” Peck told us. Asked why he thought something like that might happen, he said, “I think there’s a prevailing viewpoint that … the plant is robust, and that even though it doesn’t meet its license requirements, it’s safe.” Nevertheless, “when our technical reviewers did a detailed review of the actual methodology, they said, we can’t approve it. It’s beyond what we can approve. I think that surprised a lot of people.”

Peck explained that the safety evaluations assess whether power plant equipment can be expected to remain “operable” in the event of an earthquake, in accordance with the agency’s technical standards. “In my opinion, their evaluation didn’t meet the standard,” he said.

That’s what prompted him to file two objections to the NRC’s decision to continue operating the facility despite the looming safety concerns. Peck stressed that he could not discuss the DPO, since it’s not a public document, but did speak about the concerns he raised in his first objection, which is publically available.

Peck emphasized that while he wasn’t saying outright that Diablo Canyon is unsafe, having the safety concerns out there as an unresolved question is unacceptable.

“How much will the plant shake? There’s not a clear consensus,” he told us.

When he performed his own analysis, concluding that PG&E’s evaluation wasn’t adequate, he based his assumptions on PG&E’s seismic calculations. Even by those numbers, which aren’t universally accepted, the peak ground acceleration in the event of an earthquake is “almost double” what PG&E’s operability standard is based on. PG&E did not return calls seeking comment.

Hardebeck, the seismologist, said that while the engineering questions are a point of contention, there’s little dispute about the earthquake science. “An earthquake on any one of these faults is very rare,” Hardebeck noted. The Shoreline Fault, for example, has an expected probability of rupturing in a major earthquake — of magnitude 6.5 or 6.7 — once every 10,000 years.

However, the existence of numerous fault lines in proximity means that if one ruptured, more earthquakes could be triggered along the other fault lines.

“It was only in the 1970s that some geologist found the Hosgri Fault — which turns out to be the biggest fault in the region,” Hardebeck said. “The Shoreline is sort of a little strand of the Hosgri Fault,” she added.

Seismologists predict that the Hosgri Fault could trigger a large earthquake, up to magnitude 7.5, once every 1,000 years. Also near Diablo Canyon are the Los Osos and San LuisBay faults, which Hardebeck said aren’t as well-understood by seismologists but could potentially rupture and cause earthquakes of a 6.5 magnitude.

Dave Lochbaum, who worked at the NRC prior to his current position at the Union of Concerned Scientists, provided some perspective by pointing out that nobody had expected the natural disaster that triggered the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan in March 2011.

“For context, the odds of a tsunami wave exceeding the protecting sea wall was one in 3,480 years,” he noted. “You’re in the same ballpark.”

Lochbaum said the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed with Peck’s analysis on Diablo Canyon. “He believes in nuclear power,” Lochbaum pointed out. “He’s not trying to say this plant can never split another atom. This plant is outside those rules and it needs to be fixed. … Technically, the plant has no legal basis for operating.”

The day after the AP article was published, the environmental nonprofit organization Friends of the Earth filed a 92-page petition with the NRC, calling for the Diablo Canyon to be shut down.

“Since Diablo is not operating within its licensing basis, as Peck asserted, the plant must suspend operations while the NRC considers a license amendment,” its petition states.

Yet by subverting the formal license amendment, as NRC public records show, the regulatory agency effectively skipped over a public process with an adjudicatory hearing that would have allowed concerned citizens to weigh in.

In the days following the AP report, US Sen. Barbara Boxer said she would submit a hearing request at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to ask the NRC about the matter. But aside from the checks and balances provided by the Senate and congressional oversight committees, the NRC is “the only game in town” when it comes to determining whether Diablo Canyon should continue operating or be shut down, said Lochbaum, who worked as a nuclear engineer for 17 years.

In a blog posted on the Union of Concerned Scientists website, Lochbaum said he had researched the history of how the NRC had treated similar situations.

“In all prior cases, I found that the NRC did not allow nuclear facilities to operate with similar unresolved earthquake protection issues,” he wrote. “For example, in March 1979 —two weeks prior to the Three Mile Island accident — the NRC ordered a handful of nuclear power reactors to shut down and remain shut down until earthquake analysis and protection concerns were corrected. Thus, Dr. Peck’s findings are irrefutable and his conclusion consistent with nearly four decades of precedents. What is not clear is why DiabloCanyon continues to operate with inadequately evaluated protection against known earthquake hazards.”

 

 

A master of observation: chatting with author Sean Wilsey

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“We used to call this Café High,” author Sean Wilsey says of Café International, our meeting spot, before letting out a hearty chortle. By “we” he means his late-80s classmates at the Urban School, the private prep school 10 blocks or so from the Haight and Fillmore coffee shop. By “high” I assume he’s alluding to marijuana in some form or another, but I’m too intrigued by Wilsey’s instant openness and nostalgia to probe. Despite four other high schools (he never graduated), myriad other cities (he doesn’t come back to San Francisco very often anymore), and 25 or so intervening years (he’s pushing 45), Wilsey still grasps the vibe of his native hood with the exactitude of a lifelong resident. 

“A lot of places used to look like this …Café High only stands out now because it’s a relic.” The joint, which plays reggae tunes, has scuffed floors, and whose waiters delivered a gorgeous mango smoothie to Wilsey, is no longer the stereotypical SF hangout spot. Instead, the boutique and artisanal bars and coffee houses of the tech boom are the preferred haunts for most interviews and meetings of the literati. As he discussed his own evolution on gentrification, his wide and incisive eyes, usually full of exuberant twinkle, squinted in judgment. “When it first started happening, I said, ‘Shit, yeah!’” But then it loses its edge of interestingness,” Wilsey says. “The Haight used to feel totally wild and nuts. Now I wouldn’t think twice about bringing my grandmother here at any hour of the day.”

Wilsey’s ability to instantly contextualize San Francisco’s commercial shifts despite his absence is testament to the depth of his analytical mind. The writer has managed to become a magazine mainstay, wildly successful memoirist, and, most recently, author of the McSweeney’s essay collection More Curious, because of this uncanny observational ability. He’s had a prolific and varied career and is only picking up steam. Yet, like the stories of many artists, Wilsey’s journey is one built more on compulsion than pure bliss, calling than serendipity. 

Given his background as the son of San Francisco socialites Al Wilsey and Pat Montandan, Wilsey is astonishingly self-made. “I have endured a certain amount of ridiculous preconception, especially in this town, out of the fact that I have a family that casts a shadow here,” he explains. “But I don’t feel like I have anything to do with it.” Despite his feelings of distance from his family’s legacy, Wilsey appears anything but bitter — he talks of his parents with a smile. Instead, he simply seems to have fought to find his own road.

After his tumultuous and often delinquent high school journey, he began honing his writing and eventually moved to New York City with the express desire to get a job at the New Yorker. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving until it happens.’ There was a lot of determination,” he says. Wilsey sent his portfolio to the New School, got in, and happened to find a professor who worked at the New Yorker. Wilsey had been at Newsweek organizing responses to letters, but eventually, after a year of calling the head of the messenger room, finagled a job as an in-house deliveryman at his dream publication.

“It had to be one of the favorite jobs that I ever had, because they would literally be like, ‘run this down to Norman Mailer’.” Despite the high-profile deliveries, Wilsey’s life was scrappily exhilarating as opposed to glamorous. He lived on a ferryboat that had docked at Pier 25, did restoration work in exchange for habitation, and got by on the $18,000 messenger salary.

I couldn’t help but think that the author’s early years in the industry were ripe for some sort of further artistic exploration, so it wasn’t surprising when Wilsey revealed that he is working on a new memoir that will incorporate his New York years. Our conversation began to transition from the biographical to the philosophical as we discussed his initial trepidation at the endeavor. “Until recently I’ve felt kind of intimidated about writing about New York, most notably because my editor — I love her, but she’s a badass — said, ‘Oh, you think you can write about New York?’”

While Wilsey delivered the quote with a hilariously sassy tone, he was clearly serious about the pressures of self-criticality and perfectionism in the writing world. He told me a bit about the plight of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, whom he got to meet while at the magazine and talked extensively about in the introduction to More Curious. At the height of his powers in 1964, Mitchell stopped writing and, until his death in 1996, still came to the New Yorker almost every day without ever publishing anything significant.

Relative mystery still exists about what exactly happened in Mitchell’s mind that led to his silence. Wilsey, however, has gleaned ideas from the memoirs of one of the writer’s secretaries. “They had these flirtatious lunch dates — she was a very good-looking woman — and eventually Mitchell would tell her about what he was working on and how hard it was.” The empathy that Wilsey felt for Mitchell was palpable in his voice as he recounted his literary idol’s struggles. “He tried to bring every piece he wrote to the next level and it became harder and harder for him to do it …a bit of it has come out and its not as amazing … there’s a kind of mania in it.”   

Wilsey’s candor is so without pretense that I found it difficult to maintain a critical eye while we discussed. As he told the Mitchell story, I remembered to take in his appearance — a blue messenger cap (which appeared so poetic given his “in” at the New Yorker), a button-down, jeans. His dress and light, baritone voice both evoked a lasting youth — while he spoke with authority and maturity, his vigor and presence quelled all supposes that he is approaching some sort of Mitchell moment. 

Wilsey battles the pitfalls of self-doubt through several writing strategies. While he was immensely appreciative of my review of More Curious, he called me out for suggesting that his immaculate fact checking was “of the Wikipedia age.” “I over-research to an incredible degree, but I actually try to avoid web research altogether.” The personalized investigative process, much of which he chronicles within his pieces, seemingly keeps Wilsey focused. The compressed timing of magazine writing also appears to help the writer keep energized in his detective work and retain perspective about the inevitable imperfection of his articles. “When you have an editor and a deadline it’s harder to get caught up in the potential craziness of working in a vacuum,” he says.

Wilsey also generates genuine interest in all of the subjects that he takes on and manages to imbue them with a philosophical depth that usually isn’t instantly obvious. While we discussed “Some of Them Can Read,” his frightening treatise on New York’s rat population, Wilsey recounted a surreal piece of information that, while not making it into the essay, buoyed its thesis. “Some explorers in South America entered a crater that no one had ever entered before. They found these huge dog-like rats, but they were like, pure love, extremely friendly, and vegetarian.” Using the rats as the uncorrupted variable against their more vicious and conniving New York equivalents, Wilsey came to a startlingly deep conclusion about the beasts. “Rats are reflections of us. They are our alter egos.”

While Wilsey can’t help but uncover facts and endlessly theorize about rats, NASA, World Cup soccer, and the other facets of contemporary society that he explores, he doesn’t necessarily want to. “You have to be called to do this thing. This is what I do. Otherwise it’s very lonely and frustrating to have a literary view of the world and not be able to set it down and stop analyzing.” The moxy that Wilsey showed in climbing the literary ladder and the attention he pays his focuses is not as much a desire so much as a necessity.

After discussing his powerful impulse to write for several minutes, Wilsey grabbed the copy of More Curious that I’d brought with me and flipped to its centerpiece, “Travels With Death.”

“I never wanted to write [this as] the main essay, but this dude we met went on this insane monologue.” The dude in question, an eccentric San Antonian interested in the architectural work of Wilsey’s traveling companion, the architect Michael Meredith, presented the duo with a multi-hour tirade about Texas history. Wilsey read his response to the surreal scene out loud: “It put me on alert. I started expecting I’d have to write about all of this, and there’s no surer impediment to a good time than knowing you have to write about it.”

Marfa, Texas, an artist enclave of around 2,000 people where Wilsey lives much of the time, offers the writer shelter from the emotional burden of his constant analysis. “Marfa, though overwhelming in its natural grandeur, allows me to step outside of my mind and just chill, and that’s almost a subversive act for me.” While Wilsey’s first and last essays in his collection focus on Marfa, he doesn’t feel the same internal expectation to chronicle its happenings.

That hasn’t stopped him from receiving a fair amount of derision in the local press. He explains a particularly damning piece: “It basically said, ‘Why does he get to write the book that is going to in some way define or advance the conversation about what this place gets to be?’” Thus, even when Wilsey manages to turn off his internal self-judgment in Marfa, his neighbors sometimes manage to pick up the slack. Despite the stress, however, Wilsey is still in love with the locale. “That’s not the Marfa that I know. Marfa can be edgy, but usually very kind.”

As we left Café High and walked up Haight Street to his reading at the Booksmith, I couldn’t help but think that Wilsey is like his home — full of sharp and often biting insight, but immensely generous and restrained, lacking almost entirely in cruelty. As he regaled me with stories of ’80s quasi-brothels on Haight that were frequented by Urban students and sighed at the sight of another steel-tinged bar with stylist mixologists, I could tell that the mania of Wilsey’s life and mind were all worth it — he’s doing what he has to do.  

Check out David Kurlander’s review of Sean Wilsey’s More Curious here.

Waiting for answers

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rebecca@sfbg.com

As word spread to San Francisco that police in Ferguson, Mo., were taking reporters into custody and firing tear gas at demonstrators outraged by the death of Mike Brown, a small group of writers and organizers with ties to the Mission District was gearing up to hold street demonstrations of its own.

On Aug. 21 and 22, they staged vigils and a march and rally in memory of a different shooting victim: Alejandro (“Alex”) Nieto, who died suddenly in Bernal Heights Park on March 21 after being struck by a volley of police bullets.

Despite palpable anger expressed during the events held to mark five months since Nieto’s death, it was a far cry from the angry demonstrations unleashed on the streets of Ferguson, where it was like something stretched too far and snapped.

People who knew Nieto gathered for a sunset vigil in Bernal Heights Park at the place where he was killed. They returned the following morning for a sunrise vigil, incorporating a spiritual element with Buddhist chanting. Hours later, in a march preceded by dancers who spun in the streets, donning long feathered headdresses and ankle rattles made out of hollowed tree nuts, they progressed from Bernal Hill to the San Francisco Federal Building.

Despite a visible police mobilization, the protests remained peaceful, with little interaction between officers and demonstrators. Instead, the focus remained on the contents of a civil rights complaint filed Aug. 22 by attorney John Burris, famous for his track record of representing victims of police violence.

Burris, who is representing Nieto’s parents, said he rejected the SFPD’s explanation of why officers were justified in discharging their weapons and killing Nieto. “What we will seek to do is to vindicate his interests, his good name, and to show through the evidence that the narrative put forth by the police was just flat-out wrong,” Burris said at the rally.

Nieto’s encounter with police arose because a 911 caller erroneously reported that he had a black handgun, leading police to enter the park in search of a gunman. In reality, Nieto possessed a Taser, not a firearm. On the night he was killed, he’d gone to the park to eat a burrito just before starting his shift as a part-time security guard at a nightclub, where all the guards carry Tasers. In addition to working at that job, Nieto, who was 28, had been studying administration of justice at City College of San Francisco in hopes of becoming a youth probation officer.

Days after the shooting, police said Nieto had pointed his Taser at officers when they approached. At a March 26 town hall meeting convened shortly after the incident, Police Chief Greg Suhr told attendees that Nieto had “tracked” officers with his Taser, emitting a red laser.

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

Yet attorney Adante Pointer, of Burris’s law office, told the Bay Guardian that a person claiming to be an eyewitness to the shooting has come forward with a different account. The witness, whose identity Pointer did not disclose, said he never saw Nieto draw his Taser and did not hear any verbal exchange prior to bullets being fired.

“To suggest that he’d engaged in the most ridiculous outrageous conduct, of pointing a … Taser at the police when they had guns drawn, is insulting,” Burris said at the rally.

The version of events included in the complaint, which Pointer said was based in part on witness accounts, differs greatly from the SFPD account.

“An SFPD patrol car entered the park and drove up a fire trail before stopping approximately 75 to 100 feet away from Mr. Nieto who at that time was casually walking down the jogging trail to the park’s entrance,” Burris’ complaint states. “Two officers emerged from the patrol car and immediately took cover using their car for protection. Several other officers had also gathered on the jogging path, appeared to be carrying rifle-type guns and were positioned behind Mr. Nieto. One of the officers behind the patrol car called out and ordered Mr. Nieto to ‘stop.’ Within seconds a quick volley of bullets were fired at Mr. Nieto. No additional orders or any other verbal communication was heard between the first officer yelling ‘stop’ and the initial volley of gunfire that rang out.”

SFPD spokesperson Albie Esparza told us the department was unable comment on the matter because “anytime there’s a lawsuit, we cease to speak to anybody about that.”

Adriana Camarena, an author and Mission District resident who helped organize the rally, decried the lack of transparency surrounding the Nieto case in comments delivered outside the Federal Building.

“For five months, city officials have kept sealed all records that could explain what happened on March 21 2014,” Camarena charged. “For five months, SFPD, the Police Commission, the District Attorney’s Office, the Medical Examiner’s Office, and the mayor have maintained in secrecy the names of the four officers who killed Alex Nieto, the original 911 calls, eyewitness reports, the number of bullets fired, and the autopsy report. For five months, the Nieto family has been kept in the dark about the facts that could ease some of their trauma about what happened the day that police killed their son.”

Mike Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson on Aug. 9. On Aug. 11, following angry demonstrations, police said they would release the name of the officer who shot Brown — but declined to do so Aug. 12, citing fears over the officer’s safety and threats communicated via social media. Yet on Aug. 15, Officer Darren Wilson was identified by officials as the person who shot Brown.

In San Francisco, the names of the four officers who shot Nieto have not been released. Esparza told the Guardian that this was because “there’s specified credible threats against the officers’ lives,” citing a Supreme Court ruling determining that law enforcement agencies can withhold this information under such circumstances.

In addition to the federal civil complaint, friends and supporters of Nieto delivered a petition with almost 1,000 signatures to the U.S. Department of Justice, calling for a federal investigation into the shooting.

Multiple investigations are underway at the local level, but have been stalled due to one missing piece: an autopsy report to be issued by the San Francisco Medical Examiner. Despite the delay in releasing the formal autopsy results, “We did see the body and we did take photographs of it,” Burris noted, referring to his office’s review of the body after it was released to Nieto’s family for burial. Based on that review, Burris said attorneys determined that Nieto had been shot by police more than 10 times.

We placed multiple phone calls to the offices of the Medical Examiner and the District Attorney seeking details about the status of the investigation and to ask about the delay, but received no response.

However Bill Barnes, a spokesperson for the City Administrator’s Office, which the Medical Examiner’s Office reports to, told us the timing of the report is consistent with that of other complex homicide investigations. Barnes added that the Medical Examiner’s Office is waiting on the results of a second toxicology report. The initial results were inconclusive, he said, so another round of testing was initiated.

But that explanation does little to quell the anger of activists who say the SFPD is merely seeking to cover up an unjustified shooting. Pointer said he could see no reason for information being withheld for five months.

“There’s no reason as to why the information that this family deserves as to how their son — our brother, our friend, our leader, our organizer — met his death,” he said at the rally. “There’s just no reason why that story hasn’t been told. If you, the police department, had been justified, why not be transparent? Why not open up your files and let us inspect it so that we can see that what you’re saying is the truth?”