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Volume 41 Number 27
April 4 – 11, 2007
Politics Blog: the new Josh Wolf scandal
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The Martin Luther King you don’t see on TV
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.” The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV. Why? It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years. In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow. Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power. “True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 –– a year to the day before he was murdered –– King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm) From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them. In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.” King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet. In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup. And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. ___________________________________________ Jeff Cohen is the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback.
The big town
From the air, Chicago in late winter looks like a giant crepe sprinkled with crushed peppercorns and minced scallions: a brown flatness textured with bits of black and white and wan hints of green. It’s a cold crepe, of course; you land and you can see your breath, though within a day or so the temperature will have risen into the malarial mid-70s, and the sky will be filled with purplish green, swelling clouds right out of The Wizard of Oz. Summerish heat in March suggests (apart from global warming) the imminence of tornadoes, to be followed by a blizzard, though not mosquitoes.
One evening we wandered west through River North to Scoozi, the Rich Melman–Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurant that turned 20 last year. The place was something of a pioneer when it opened; the neighborhood was still slightly sketchy, and the setting — a remade temple of heavy industry, with an enormous barrel ceiling supported by wooden cantilevers so as to leave the dining room clear of pillars — gave some sense of what imagination could do with grand old spaces that hadn’t been built with food and restaurants in mind. I thought Scoozi was spectacular when I first visited it, soon after it opened, and it seems to me none the worse for more than two decades of wear; in San Francisco, only LuLu begins to compare in the category of warm spaciousness. Even Scoozi’s big, red, and curiously flattened tomato still hovers, cigar volante–style, above the front door.
The metro-rustic food too was — or is — as good as I remembered it. We particularly liked the grilled artichoke hearts, which seemed not merely to have been marinated in lemon juice and garlic but to have been braised or parboiled in that combination before hitting the barbie. Clue: the potent pair was present throughout the vegetables, making the flesh tender, moist, and fragrant, rather than being just a surface phenomenon. And I am not particularly an apostle of artichokes.
Chicago is underrated as a food city, as in so many other ways. Its reputation is one of rust, Al Capone, Vienna beef sausages, and the clattering El — but that is the old city. The new one is, like our own, a forest of cranes and high-rise apartment buildings whose residents want something interesting for dinner. Excuse me, did someone say crepe?
Paul Reidinger
› paulr@sfbg.com
Sincerely again
Seven minutes into the Frames’ latest album, The Cost (Anti-), during a song titled "Falling Slowly," the Dublin, Ireland, veterans capture everything off-putting about their music in two stanzas splayed over a glassy-eyed piano: "Take this sinking boat / And point it home / We’ve still got time // Raise your hopeful voice / You have a choice / You’ve made it now."
If vocalist Glen Hansard’s tired poesy weren’t winceworthy enough, the fact that he’s pulled it out on wistful anthem number two of 10 would seem to cast The Cost as the kind of repetitive, inspiro-pop rubbish that should’ve gone out with the last couple Coldplay records.
But that’s exactly wrong. The Cost is a repetitive, inspiro–pop rock document too rich to write off, due largely to the lads’ penchant for grand arrangements and medium tempos. Recorded virtually all live in a studio over 10 days, the Frames’ seventh studio full-length embodies a thrilling live dynamic that has kept a devoted fan base snatching up tickets and T-shirts into the band’s second decade. So don’t get hung up on the excess of well-meaning sincerity. After so many years of playing together, they know their way around a plaintive power ballad.
"When we play live, we go from barely being able to hear us to melting your face off kind of thing," longtime bassist Joe Doyle explains from his Dublin home in a charming lilt. "It’s always been something people have said to us as well: ‘Yeah, I’ve listened to your records, but it just doesn’t do the same thing as you do live.’ And we’re kind of going ‘Shit, we don’t know how to do that.’ "
This time, Doyle says, the Frames figured it out. They rented a studio in France, hired a few extra musicians, worked out more of their songs in advance, and started playing in the same room again. "Everything on almost all the songs is live, including the vocals on some of the songs, and then we just added little bits over the top," Doyle says. "We’ve just come to the conclusion that when you record a song live and you just do everything in one take … there’s something in that that’s lost when you start editing a song and chopping it up and putting things in time."
It could be the magic in the cage-to-cathedral-sounding production. Or in the violin lightning of Colm Mac Con Iomaire. But something transforms the group’s balding rock structures into vast, bewildering voyages of disappointment and reassurance. Drunk on ribbons of reverby guitar, Hansard frees his words from contextual cliché, allowing them to settle comfortably inside the towering arrangements and become, well, meaningful. "Too many sad words make a sad, sad song," he realizes before a driving lap steel solo at The Cost‘s only country-tinged — and finest — moment. It’s a struggle the Frames evoke often: a vague but constant yearning and the price one pays for it.
After so many years, perhaps the Frames have yearned enough. But Doyle looks at the group’s anthemic tendencies the opposite way: they got ’em this far. "I guess the fact that we’ve never strived to be hip or fashionable probably means … probably means we never will be," he says, chuckling. "But maybe we won’t ever go out of fashion." (Ian S. Port)
FRAMES
Sat/7, 9 p.m., $20
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
(415) 346-6000
Their days are numbered
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
We’re all having a tough time these days in the Bay Area. It might be the worriment of the imminent tax day, our skyrocketing rent, or the recent dissolution of a rocky relationship. Or it could be as mundane as the feeling brought on by chasing down your morning commute through the pouring rain, only to realize that you forgot your bus fare once you finally catch up to it. Whatever the case is, we’re all in need of a curative soundtrack, and Cleveland’s Six Parts Seven are here to help out.
Entwining reflective, subdued instrumentation with tame, wistful melodies on its fifth full-length, Casually Smashed to Pieces (Suicide Squeeze), the group concocts eight tunes that make you want to curl up on a floating cloud and leave your headaches at the runway strip. The core members — guitarist Allen Karpinski; his brother, drummer Jay; guitarist Tim Gerak; and bassist Mike Tolan — mingle meditative, winding guitars, low-end bass, and restrained drums with soothing elements such as brass, piano, and woodwinds. Focusing primarily on mood and space, the 6P7’s instrumentals seesaw between joy and dejection, remorse and hope.
Though the sextet has considered adding a vocalist in the past, Allen Karpinski disclosed they were more interested in "making a very gorgeous sound together instead of worrying about lyrics or a singer."
He attempted to define the band’s sound over the phone while on a tour stop in Tallahassee, Fla. "There’s nothing very deliberate about the way we make our music — we just play what we play," he revealed. "One of the things that makes us unique is that we are able to project our personalities into the music that we choose to play: the melodies, the actual aesthetic of the sound. We let the instruments sing instead of having a voice, and it always has sort of a melancholy undercurrent to it."
The group first emerged in 1995 as a bass and drum duo, which Karpinski describes as "basement project" for his brother and himself. After breaking up for a short time to pursue other projects, such as the brothers’ Old Hearts Club, the two reassembled 6P7 in 1997, this time with Gerak in tow, to record their debut, In Lines and Patterns (Donut Friends). The years following saw numerous lineup changes, and the ensemble began introducing violin, lap steel, and piano and vibraphone harmonies into songs on the Suicide Squeeze–released Things Shaped in Passing (2002) and Everywhere, and Right Here (2004). But 6P7’s basic, signature sound remained unchanged.
"We would be writing exactly the same album if we stuck with the same instrumentation," Karpinski said. "We change it up not only to have different textures but also to challenge ourselves."
Casually Smashed to Pieces is no different. Cornet and trumpet blend to give songs such as "Stolen Moments" and "Confusing Possibilities" the jazzy meltdowns they seemingly beg for, while strummed guitar and twangy banjo administer a dose of backwoods Americana on "Conversation Heart." In contrast to 6P7’s past efforts, the new, shorter album sounds much more polished.
"We tried to give the new songs a little bit more of a pop feel and more of a verse-chorus structure," Karpinski explained. "Most of our older songs are sort of based on a repetitive motif of notes or something cyclical. The kind of experimentation I like to do with the band is not to change too much, but someone who knows our records well would be able to tell the difference."
In the past couple years, the band hasn’t gone unnoticed either. In 2003, Suicide Squeeze released Lost Notes from Forgotten Songs, reinterpretations of 6P7 songs by such artists as Modest Mouse, Black Heart Procession, and Iron and Wine. National Public Radio uses their songs as segue music for All Things Considered, and their current tour finds them acting as Richard Buckner’s backing band. Karpinski claimed that although they will be playing two shows a night for most of the tour, they plan on keeping 6P7’s sets short and sweet.
"Our live sets are rarely over 30 minutes long, and I don’t think people have the attention span to stand in a room with all the distractions and listen to instrumental music for more than that," he noted and laughed. "You know, they start to get bored even if they love it." *
SIX PARTS SEVEN
With Richard Buckner
Thurs/5, 9 p.m., $15
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016
Seattle’s finest
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The Crime Watch column was far and away the most entertaining part of my hometown’s local paper. Police Beat, a week-in-the-life account of a Seattle-by-way-of-Senegal bike cop named Z (played by nonprofessional actor Pape S. Niang), is structured around these strangely revealing public records, culled from the real Seattle blotter by writer Charles Mudede. Reenacted and filtered through Z’s layered immigrant experience, the episodic busts and false alarms are woven with off-key comedy and vague apprehension: a formulation that makes the film the rare work to merit the overused "Kafkaesque" tag.
The various crime scenes Z happens on are only connected in their general weirdness. Director Robinson Devor (previously celebrated for his 2000 debut, The Woman Chaser) drops us into these digressions midstream, denying us context or even clarity of tone. A man ravages raw meat in a supermarket; a woman with a gash on her head has been hit by an errant tree branch; a pimp has two chubby prostitutes doing sit-ups at gunpoint: these scenes hover uneasily between humor and menace. Their oddness reverberates against Z’s unwieldy English; he mediates with the strange lyricism that comes from being lost in translation (shades of Jim Jarmusch), instructing the tree-battered woman, for example, that "your tree is dead, and if it’s not chopped down, it will continue to harm and disturb the living."
If the audience is peculiarly disassociated from the nominal action in Police Beat, it’s only to match Z’s dreamy remove. We get his strange little koans in English, but the voice-over, in which he ponders his immigrant status (Police Beat articulates the notion of being a stranger in a strange land to an extreme degree) and worries over his spectral girlfriend’s faithfulness, is rendered in his native Wolof. Z’s musings aren’t readily locatable in either time or space, and while thoughts and action frequently seem to overlap, the echoes between the two only thicken the obscure narration.
And yet, if Police Beat ‘s montage is something of a hazy daydream, it’s hardly a formless one. The glue holding the picture together is Devor’s responsive mise-en-scène. Seattle — with its forested city streets, overgrown industrial sites, and ubiquitous water passageways (and bridges) — is a landscape of in-betweens, everywhere suggestive of Z’s placeless condition. In framing too, Devor frequently denies us a fully contextualized picture, casting Z against abstracted dark blues and greens. When Z rides his bicycle, the director allows the background to blur out of focus, creating an effect reminiscent of those deliriously dreamlike rear-projection shots once preferred in Hollywood productions.
Police Beat is marked by indirection on all levels, a risky modus operandi rarely found in mainstream or independent cinema. The prioritization of situation over characterization recalls Robert Bresson’s classics (as do the detached voice-over and the use of a quotidian occupation to frame the "action" of a film), and while Police Beat isn’t Pickpocket, sometimes a film’s ambition seems validating in its own right, regardless of whether it ties together as a neat package (Police Beat doesn’t).
Or maybe I’m just more willing than usual to forgive loose ends because of my sense that Devor and Mudede had fun making this movie — in compiling the crime reports and scouting Seattle, yes, but also in playing with the police procedural. They pay heed to the genre’s standard emphasis on temporality (a title occasionally breaks in, specifying the day of the week; every night ends with Z composing his police report), but instead of orienting these narrative ploys toward some guiding goal or payoff, Devor and Mudede allow them to overripen and underscore Z’s elusive existence: their film is more Eternal Sunshine of the Punch-Drunk Mind than Zodiac. This shift in emphasis makes Z the rare cop character I can actually relate to. His profile may seem unusual — I did, after all, have to look up the spelling of "Wolof" — but his experience is intensely familiar to those of us who regularly lose ourselves in the city. "I was in my own world," we say, though Z would surely have a more interesting way of putting it. *
POLICE BEAT
Opens Fri/6
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
Brothers in arms
› cheryl@sfbg.com
In a vulnerable country occupied by a foreign power, civilian frustration leads to anger, which soon explodes into a violent, uncontainable insurgent movement. It could be ripped from today’s headlines — but The Wind That Shakes the Barley is set in 1920s Ireland, where the oppressors are the British and the rebels are members of the nascent Irish Republican Army.
Directed by Ken Loach (Bread and Roses) in his trademark naturalistic style (few close-ups, overlapping dialogue) and with immaculate attention to period detail, Wind makes the guerrillas sympathetic — to a point. But it’s also a film that avoids drawing strict boundaries; it exactly captures the uncertainty that arises when conflict and emotion become hopelessly tangled. At the beginning, brothers Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy, the only cast member with a Hollywood hand stamp) know precisely where they stand. Tensions between British soldiers and Irish villagers are already sky-high when the young men are accosted by the Black and Tans for daring to hold a forbidden public meeting (really a harmless sporting match). Amid the shouting and gun pointing, an Irish teen refuses to speak his name in English, with fatal consequences.
With that first act of brutality, Wind ‘s tone is set. It’s war, and a dirty one at that. Damien abandons his med-school plans to join the fiery Teddy in his quest to drive out the Brits. As hostility escalates — humiliation, torture, and cold-blooded execution are the daily norm — Damien becomes more warrior than intellectual, a changeover that crystallizes once he’s asked to perform a terrible deed in the name of the cause. "I hope this Ireland we’re fighting for is worth it," he mutters.
But is it, at least for Damien? The affairs of state play out as you’d expect; for our benefit, events are explained via a newsreel the townsfolk watch in the local movie theater. The headline "Peace Treaty Signed by British and Irish Leaders!" is greeted first with cheers, then chagrin when it’s revealed the country will still be a dominion of the British empire and Northern Ireland will still be part of the United Kingdom. Clearly, there’s no way the bloody mess in the countryside will be tidily ended by a piece of paper signed by far-off dignitaries.
For Teddy and Damien, the ruling forces an impenetrable wedge between them. Teddy accepts the compromise, figuring he’ll work within the system to change it — for him, "this Ireland" is worth it. Damien’s actions during the war have pushed him to the point of no return; he has no choice but to keep fighting. When the brothers have their climactic clash, even their deep love for each other can’t overcome their political beliefs.
Wind was the Palme d’Or winner at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, a surprise victory for a movie that seems, at least on paper, to be about a pretty specific moment in Irish history. The tale of two brothers is admittedly an obvious storytelling device — check your Civil War cinema for other me-versus-him tales, or foreign epics such as the 2004 Korean drama Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War. Wind ‘s leg up is its echoing of current events; you can’t help but watch the film through the framing of the nightly news. It could be in rural Ireland, it could be in rural Iraq, but fighting for freedom can take many forms, with all involved believing victory for their side will produce the only acceptable result. But what happens when the clear-cut realms of a battlefield mutate into the murky waters of courts, laws, and governments? To paraphrase Damien, it’s easy to know what you’re against — but another thing entirely to figure out what you’re for. *
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY
Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
Open city
› paulr@sfbg.com
There could hardly be a more welcoming name for a restaurant than aperto — "open" in Italian, and Aperto is an Italian restaurant — except, possibly, Welcome. The north face of Potrero Hill is home to lots of restaurants, but Welcome isn’t one of them, at least not yet. While we wait, we can wait at Aperto, which offers a handsome wooden bench outside the front door for the convenience of those whose tables aren’t yet available and are too weary to stand. Aperto is small, and it is busy, and everyone seems to know about it. This is fitting, because it’s been there since 1992 and over its 15 years of life has become the jewellike Italian restaurant every urban neighborhood should have at least one of.
For some or no reason, Aperto is a place I’d never been to until recently. Regular reports, most of them favorable, did reach me from friends who seemed to go all the time, and these debriefings perhaps soothed my curiosity. I had noticed that the restaurant, after reaching a crest of sorts in the mid-1990s as one of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s top 100 restaurants, seemed to have receded in later years from public awareness. This could be due to fatigue, but it is certainly not due to the focaccia, which flows from the open kitchen to the dining room in a steady stream and is just exemplary: soft (though with a hint of crust), warm, and gently scented with olive oil. It’s the bread equivalent of the perfect hotel pillow and is at least as good as the focaccia at Blue Plate. And that means it’s awesome.
When you are dishing out complementary focaccia of this quality and keeping water glasses full and prices modest for well-executed, lovable Italian dishes, you are likely to be a successful restaurant. Aperto isn’t up to anything radical; its look and food are classical and timeless, and the restaurant, as an experience, presents itself unobtrusively. It’s like a favorite coat, well made and warming, you might wrap around yourself on a chilly night.
Few cuisines can match the Italian for inventive frugality. Despite a public image of flamboyance, Italians tend not to waste food. Stale bread finds a home in panzanella or ribollita, while grape pomace (the mush left over from the wine crush) is fermented and distilled into grappa. (Then exported and resold to us at a tidy profit.) Because Aperto’s menu is pasta-rich and pasta is among the most flexible of starches, the restaurant’s recycling program uses it to impressive effect. One (chilly!) evening I found myself staring into a broad white bowl of papardelle ($13.50) sauced with a sugo of osso buco. Osso buco, also known as braised veal shank, is a tine-intensive production, not ordinarily to be undertaken just to come up with a pasta sauce. But, should there be surplus from the night before, the leftover meat makes a lovely pairing with pasta, rich and just hinting of the beefiness that makes veal so attractive. Throw in some spinach for color, add some grana shavings on top, and you have a dish of elegant simplicity.
Glancing slightly upmarket, we find striped sea bass ($17.75), coated with arugula pesto, roasted, then plopped into a beanbag chair of lemon mashed potatoes, with an encirclement of ratatouille and a hairpiece of microgreens. This was a handsomely composed, colorful plate of food whose lemon mashed potatoes actually carried a distinct whiff of the advertised ingredient and whose seafood star (as I learned ex post facto from Seafood Watch) is in the "best" category. I give Aperto a big gold star for this alone. If a smallish neighborhood restaurant can keep itself within the boundaries of sustainability without making a huge fuss or overcharging, then everybody can.
The restaurant doesn’t give short shrift to seasonality either. On one late-winter menu we found crab cakes ($9.75 for a crottin-shaped pair), presented on a bed of shaved fennel and radicchio, with pomegranate seeds scattered around the plate like rubies and squirts of spicy aioli atop the cakes themselves. The same menu yielded strands of fat spaghetti ($11.50) tossed with shelled fava beans, leeks, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese — a distinctively NorCal when-seasons-collide moment.
Given the limitless focaccia, which produces a filling effect similar to that of chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants, the first courses are in some danger of superfluousness. Among the best of the lot is the platter of oven-roasted mussels ($9.50), swimming in a buttery shellfish broth perfumed with fennel and garlic. The broth is nicely soppable with the accompanying spears of well-grilled levain (topped with the customary rouille), and when that was gone, we picked up the slack with focaccia.
Only the soups seemed flat: good, but a little slow out of bed in the morning. Lentil ($4.50) did feature shreds of crispy pancetta, but the floating chunks of celery seemed slightly clumsy, like flotsam after some sort of accident. And cream of roasted tomato ($5) was creamy — and cheesy! — but might have been made more interesting, visually, at least, by an addition as simple as minced parsley.
If the overhead chalkboard listing the day’s specials includes the mascarpone brownie ($6), you won’t be sorry if you ignore your diet and have it. Brownies sound juvenile, but this one isn’t; it’s marbled, moist, and just sweet enough, like homemade cake. Whipped cream? Yes, but not too much; same with the hot fudge sauce piped around the edges of the plate. The brownie might not be authentically Italian, but I suspect even a lot of authentic Italians would be open to its charms. *
APERTO
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.
1434 18th St., SF
(415) 252-1625
www.apertosf.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Wing clippings
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS My new favorite person is this guy Doc who I play baseball with. He’s not a medical doctor. He knows about chicken wings. We weren’t even on the same team, and he said between innings, "Have you ever been to San Tung?"
"Never heard of it," I said.
"Best chicken wings," he said.
"Where?"
"Irving," he said. "Between 11th and 12th."
We were in the Golden Gate Park, Big Rec. That put chicken wings pretty much almost exactly on my way home to Sonoma County, give or take a block.
It was a good game, my favorite kind, a pitcher’s duel, nothin’-nothin’ (nothin’-nothin’-nothin’-nothin’) … but I’m not a nihilist or a sports writer. Wait a minute, am I a nihilist? I can’t keep things straight anymore, damn it. Hold on. [Sounds of papers rustling, drawers opening and closing, coffee spilling.] Where’s my identity?
Chicken farmer!!! People have been writing to me and saying, Chicken Farmer, what about Houdini? Houdini being my famously wayward escape-artist chicken, and "what about" being that I was going to eat her, I said, if I couldn’t figure out how she was doing it — "it" being finding her way into the neighbors’ flower bed and being generally disrespectful to the colors, smells, and natural beauty of it.
"It" being said flower bed.
Damn, I really do need to learn to write. No I don’t. I need to learn to chicken farm because, no, I never did discover her escape route. This, in spite of 24-hour surveillance cameras, stakeouts, and the clandestine cooperation of two "plants" on the inside.
Houdini’s a genius. Nevertheless, I didn’t eat her, not yet. Thanks for asking. She was saved by my chicken farmerly surrealism. I’m not a genius, but I do know how to deflect criticism by not making any sense whatsoever. I bought the neighbors an amelioratory bag of wild bird seed, some oranges, and a package of pretty stickers, and informed them in a letter that I was transsexual and should thenceforth be referred to as Ms. Chicken Farmer, if they please.
Essentially, this was a stalling tactic, designed to buy me and Houdini another week, at least, while my neighbors wobbled and just generally lost sleep.
Not long into that week, when Houdini was next found by me to be luxuriating among the forbidden flowers, I held her down and clipped her wing. It was a desperate measure but not necessarily cruel. Chickens are flightless birds to begin with. What do they need wings for?
Well, balance. It’s more like a haircut than surgery, see? You’re only clipping the feathers, and only on one wing, so that afterward they feel all asymmetrical and artsy and don’t crave flowers anymore. Theoretically.
It’s working, but it’s also only a matter of time, I know. Feathers molt and grow. And smart animals, with the possible exception of me, only get smarter.
So I’m packing up the pickup truck, all dolled up for a gig, when my neighbor comes strolling over with his hands in his pockets … thanks for the seeds, you shouldn’t have, and congratulations.
"I don’t know," he said, checking himself. "What do you say to a trans person? Is that what you say?"
"Congratulations is nice," I said, loading up my steel drum and stand. I like my neighbor Dave. We get along, chickens in flower beds notwithstanding.
"So what do your groupies think about this?" he said. He knows I’m in a band but not what kind, apparently.
I smiled. "Dave," I said, "my groupies are 80-year-old shut-ins with bad eyes and Alzheimer’s. Not that they could ever quite tell if I was a boy or girl, but …"
"Well, congratulations," he said. "You’ve got the hair for it, anyway."
And he went back to his flower bed, and I went to my gig, and Houdini gazed into the chicken coop mirror and felt progressive.
Every time I have to clip a chicken’s wing, I can’t help fantasizing that some day, if there is a god, we will have genetically modified chickens that regenerate missing parts. So that chicken farmers can clip off more than just the feathers. We will harvest chicken wings like asparagus and eat like kings or college students.
But there’s not a god, of course, and that’s where San Tung comes in handy. Doc was right. *
SAN TUNG
Mon.–Tues. and Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.
1031 Irving, SF
(415) 242-0828
Takeout available
Beer
MC/V
Bustling
Wheelchair accessible
The Blender
(1) Shakin’ Jesse, Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe, Emeryville
(2) Homemade Greek spinach pie
(3) Braised lamb shank and Sharffenberger chocolate pudding, Adagia Restaurant, Berk.
(4) Chicken hearts, Espetus
(5) Apple tarts, Farley’s
Oh dad, poor dad
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I have a bit of a problem. It’s not a huge one, but I’d like to get past it. A long time ago (maybe 15 years ago or more), I had a dream that my dad was molesting me. Now, I love my dad, and I have nothing but respect for him. I know he would never do anything like that to me. But right after the dream I started to feel uncomfortable around him. If I sat next to him on the couch, I’d sit at the other end and keep a pillow between us. If he went to hug me, I’d want to pull away. I would especially hate it when he’d kiss my cheek. On my wedding day (I’m divorced now — that’s another story), he kissed me on my mouth so as not to mess my makeup, he said. I pulled away and tried to make the kiss land on my cheek. I know he didn’t mean anything by it, but it bothered me. The situation has gotten a little better over the years, but I’m still bothered if he sits too close to me or tries to hug me.
It’s a problem because my dad is a very affectionate person by nature. All my life I’ve always been a daddy’s girl (my mom died when I was young). Now that I’m an adult, he and I are like good friends. I want it to stay that way, but I need to get over this dislike of being touched. What can I do?
Love,
In Dreams
Dear Dreams:
Wow. I don’t get to say this often, but I don’t believe I’ve heard this one before. There’s a similar phenomenon — the friend or coworker sex dream, usually starring someone completely inappropriate or out-of-the-question — that does come up pretty often. Unlike your supercreepy version, of course, the coworker sex dream is at least kind of funny, although it can have oddly lingering effects: you find yourself glancing speculatively at the dream object, against all common sense, or blushing furiously when said coworker brushes your shoulder in the corridor on the way to the break room.
Yours, though, is more like a dream I had when I was five or so, in which my grandmother (in real life, batty and irritating but harmless) was trying to poison me. I gave her a wide berth for weeks, and I distinctly remember refusing food she offered (not a bad idea in general, come to think of it, with that particular grandma). But lady, 15 years of feeling weird about your poor old dad? That’s plenty, already. Good god, let it go.
I know, I know, you want to. If giving yourself a stern talking-to before a visit with dad — reminding yourself that nothing bad ever happened between you and therefore nothing bad will happen if you let him hug you — doesn’t work and neither does deep breathing or stiff drinking, it’s time to call in the pros. I’m pretty sure a short course of cognitive-behavioral therapy would be of use to you. CBT (this abbreviation always startles me, since I doubt very much you’d be interested in cock and ball torture) is based on the belief that the way we think determines the way we feel: change the thoughts and you change the feelings. You seem like a good candidate, given that what’s going on with you is 100 percent internal and that nothing your father has done or could do could affect things in the slightest. You really do need to change the way you think, don’t you think?
If CBT sounds too, I dunno, therapy-y to you, you might consider hypnotherapy, guided relaxation-meditation, or even EMDR, which I spent half a column making fun of just a few weeks back (3/7/07). It doesn’t matter, really. They all work OK. Just do something. This is a really stupid way to be broken, so get it fixed.
There is one word of caution I don’t feel like including here but suppose I must: be very sure of whom you’re talking to before you tell a therapist that you feel creeped out at the slightest physical contact with your father. Recovered memory may no longer be the "it" diagnosis (serious memory research having put the kibosh on that hogwash), but a therapist would not have to be an ’80s-style witch-hunting hysteric to wonder if there might be anything going on here besides a 15-year-old dream with no more basis in reality than the one I had about my grammy in the basement with a sandwich. I believe you that nothing bad happened, but when you add in the early widowerhood and all, you’ve got to admit that there are people who would hear this story and look at you funny. Just don’t be shocked if they do.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.
No hidin’ SECA
P>› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW Each SECA Art Award exhibition, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s biennial and only official nod to Bay Area artists, is cause to revisit the curious, contested idea of place in contemporary art. In his introduction to the 2006 SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Award catalog, SFMOMA director Neal Benezra describes the exhibition as a "lens focusing on the best that the San Francisco Bay Area has to offer." That’s a tough order that the curators, Janet Bishop and Tara McDowell, with input from the SECA group, bestowed on five artists, Sarah Cain, Kota Ezawa, Amy Franceschini, Mitzi Pederson, and Leslie Shows. Do they — should they — illuminate a sense of regionality, what critic Lucy Lippard dubs "a state of mind rather than a place on the map"?
Any way you enter the third floor of SFMOMA, you’re faced with SECA artists. From the stairs you’ll see large collage paintings by Shows, landscapes that appear chemically ravaged. Via the elevator, you immediately encounter Pederson’s 2005 sculpture of gray cinder-block fragments stacked like a low-slung house of cards. On the floor at the entry to the gallery proper, there’s Cain’s small pile of leaves painted black and subdued rainbow shades. These three artists share a similar practice of transforming humble materials into something almost magical and begin to articulate an aesthetic — or state of mind — that, to various degrees, is emphatically handmade and poetic. The inclusion of the more widely exhibited Ezawa, who makes computer-rendered, cartoonlike still and video images, and Franceschini, known for digital graphics and ecoconscious public projects, however, subverts the idea of a thematic thread.
The 2004 SECA exhibition focused on artists who worked primarily in drawing in very different ways, a strategy that gave the show a sense of structure and created a dialogue between works. The current group feels more fractured; the whole seems less than the sum of its parts.
Shows and Pederson complement each other most effectively. With extensive use of meticulously collaged printed matter and paint, Shows creates sweeping, epic images of landscapes that seem to have gone through geologic shifts and been layered with kaleidoscopic chemicals. The show also includes a new series of smaller, text-based works in which she’s carefully shredded texts, unlikely selections such as Edwin Abbott’s mathematical fantasy Flatland, and ripped pieces of canvas bookbinding, fusing them into ambiguous wholes.
Her muted, earthy color schemes merge well with Pederson’s cinder blocks, which are dusted with slate-colored glitter and resemble glam-rock geodes. Her other pieces, positioned near Cain’s, employ featherweight materials, such as wood veneer and fluttering strips of tinted cellophane, to explore physical tension and tentative presence — the work is emphatically fragile and deceptively offhand.
There’s an improvisatory feel to Cain’s work that doesn’t quite flower in this setting. She scores with a wonderful site-specific installation: a tree branch dynamically merges with the wall and architecture, using the floor, shadow, and abstract spray-paint squiggles. Titled We Push Ourselves into the Mountain Until We Explode into the Sky, the piece embraces its earthy-spiritual vibes but seems anything but hokey. Her framed paintings on paper, which also contain natural elements and metallic sequins and threads, are less consistently assured and sometimes overwrought. Next to the tree, these seem trapped under glass.
You could ascribe a similar feeling to the presentation of Franceschini’s off-site project to resurrect San Francisco’s official Victory Garden program of the 1940s. The piece makes real sense in food activist Northern California during wartime. The project also exemplifies a strain of socially based art that’s thriving in SF galleries and art schools. This sort of practice, however, unfolds in streets, gardens, and ephemeral interactions and consistently engenders the challenge to create effective gallery presentations. At SFMOMA, Franceschini presents historical civic documents, spiffy new charts, prototype gardening and seed bank gear, and a video of a planting party. While these communicate the gist of this vital idea, the display feels stranded here: it may have been better served with a component that unfolded more directly in the gallery or in an exhibition with contextualizing, like-minded projects.
Bringing an animated Colorforms effect to the notorious Pamela Anderson–Tommy Lee bootleg sex tape, Ezawa wisely expands his artistic purview. In earlier pieces, including the History of Photography Remix series, examples of which are seen here, iconic images and media events become broad, deadpan cartoons. Instant recognition of the material has been key. In his new double-screen piece, Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One, a well-known but less widely seen piece of media — the aforementioned home video — pushes Ezawa’s work into more ambiguous territory, that strange zone in which celebrities, albeit naked ones with supersize body parts, seem as banal as the rest of us. Doubled to two screens and tinted in divergent hues, the scenario enters the subconscious with the kind of off-color lens that just might be in the Bay Area atmosphere — or perhaps just in this artist’s eye. *
SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION
Through April 22
Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third St., SF
(415) 357-4000
Smoking Yahoo!’s pipes
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’ve been playing around with Yahoo!’s latest technological experiment on the Web. It’s called Pipes, and it’s a system designed to help Web-savvy people write simple programs without ever having to read a book about Java. If you visit pipes.yahoo.com, you can take a peek. Visitors to the site are presented with a sheet of virtual graph paper and a list of modules that you can drag onto the paper and connect with pipes. In this early stage, the modules mostly allow users to build a really customized news feed or online research tool.
You can tell a source module to pull information from, say, a Google search for "Windows Vista" or the RSS feed of your favorite newspaper. Then you pipe that information to an operator module, which allows you to filter it, list it by date, translate it into another language, and more. Other modules let you do more complicated things, such as annotating each piece of data with geographical information or merging the RSS feeds from several sites so that you get one big daily news feed instead of 20 from various progressive blogs. Just think: you could mix the latest wankery from porno news site Fleshbot with the latest wonkery from Talking Points Memo! That’s the beauty of a customized news feed.
Pipes isn’t for everyone — it’s too complicated for casual Web surfers, who may not be familiar with the inner workings of RSS feeds and search queries. But a quick Google search reveals some excellent tutorials that will aid even the most RSS-clueless person in creating a pipe. Plus, you can clone other people’s pipes — so if you want a customized news feed, you can just use one that already exists, fill in your own news sources of choice, and save it to your own account. There are hundreds of cool pipes available on the site, and they’re all cloneable.
Now I sound like a cheerleader for Pipes, which I’m not. In fact, I recently spent an evening making fun of Pipes with one of the creators of the RSS standard (no, it wasn’t Dave Winer). Our mockery was inspired by two things: one, Pipes could be an overhyped proof of concept that nobody will ever use; and two, it could actually limit people’s control over data.
How could a tool designed to help you manipulate all kinds of information actually limit your control? To answer this, we need to delve briefly into the origin of the pipes idea. The name comes from a powerful command in UNIX, one of the first operating systems, which converts the output of one function into the input for another. It’s hard to convey how utterly awesome and time-saving this command was when it was invented. It meant that data could be crunched, sorted, alphabetized, merged, and recombined more easily than ever before.
Yahoo! Pipes aims to do the same thing, only the data you use is what’s publicly available on the Web. So if you want to use Pipes to organize or sort your personal data, you’ll have to publish it online. This is obviously quite different from the UNIX pipe, which is so powerful in part because you can use it on private stuff such as passwords and financial documents. Yahoo! Pipes treats the Web as if it were the hard drive of your UNIX box — you can pipe data from Google into a sorting program or pipe the New York Times RSS feed into a filter that will remove all stories that refer to Yahoo! Pipes. It’s marvelously cool, but I worry that it will inspire people to put sensitive data online just because it’s more convenient to crunch via Pipes.
At this point, my fears are probably unjustified. Pipes is in beta, and it may not catch on with the general public. More likely, a user-friendly version of Pipes will come along and get widely adopted in a couple years. It will become just one more way we’re being seduced into dumping all our personal stuff online. I like the idea of turning all the data on the Web into my raw material, to do with what I please. That’s the beautiful part of Pipes. Still, the more data we deposit in the hive-mind of the Web, the less power we have over it. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who still hears the voice of her UNIX teacher in her head saying, "Now pipe it to MORE."
Home run
HOME RUN: AFTER THE WAR LUCIDLY STRIKES HOME
Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War, enjoying an exceptional world premiere at the American Conservatory Theater, is set during 1948 in a Fillmore boardinghouse run by a laid-back jazz musician and second-generation Japanese American named Chester "Chet" Monkawa (Vancouver’s Hiro Kanagawa in an impressive US debut). The bustling Fillmore District of ’48 was a highly diverse neighborhood that in particular mixed an African American business-owning and working class (whose members had recently arrived in the Bay Area from points south to fill jobs in the burgeoning defense industry) with "Japanese Town" residents returned from the horror and shame of forced evacuation and mass incarceration by the US government during the war.
Chet’s laissez-faire boardinghouse (and Donald Eastman’s brilliant two-story revolving set) puts a cross section of the neighborhood under one roof. This tangle of lives grows affectingly more snarled as the story unfolds. The fragility of the characters’ bonds, fraught with divisions between and within various communities, is soon apparent. At the center is Chet, whose background as a no-no boy (one of the interned men who refused to sign a pledge to the US government or volunteer to fight for it) puts him at odds with the tightly coiled local moneylender, Mr. Goto (longtime Gotanda associate Sab Shimono, in a deft performance of supple humor and menace). The latter’s disapproval reflects the bitter divisions among Japanese Americans struggling to regain dignity and a social foothold in the aftermath of traumatic isolation and victimization by their own, racially combustible country.
Given Gotanda’s recent and successful foray into more experimental work with Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts, After the War marks a return of sorts to the finely crafted realistic dramas — centered on Asian American scenes, yet of delicate existential and social import — that have made him an internationally celebrated playwright. This beautifully conceived and executed period piece, commissioned by the ACT and helmed by artistic director Carey Perloff, places that work on an unprecedented scale. It reminds one that few American playwrights are as capable as Gotanda of carrying on the kind of dialogue on race, identity, and history that the late August Wilson turned into a broad theatrical canvas embracing the evolving American experience. (Robert Avila)
AFTER THE WAR
Through April 22
See stage listings for showtimes
American Conservatory Theater
415 Geary, SF
(415) 749-2228
Taylor made
a&eletters@sfbg.com
It’s been easy getting used to having the Paul Taylor Company around. For each of the past five years, the group has presented three different programs of new and repertory works, courtesy of San Francisco Performances. Even taking into account the occasional repeat, this amounts to close to 50 pieces of choreography, an extraordinary overview of the artistic output of one of modern dance’s giants.
But San Francisco Performances can no longer afford to host the company on such a regular basis. Word has it a hoped-for increase in subscriptions — the lifeblood of every nonprofit arts organization — has not materialized. One reason may be that Taylor, who is unique in having performed with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and had a solo choreographed for him by George Balanchine, is such a well-known entity. Audiences may feel the 76-year-old choreographer has nothing new to offer them. Yet there is such pleasure in discovering the new in the familiar and the familiar in the new.
The first of this season’s programs beautifully illustrated what Taylor choreographs so brilliantly: humorous pieces, some with bite; wistful celebrations of idealized communities; and fierce, almost apocalyptic rages. These dark pieces provide no relief — Taylor doesn’t seem to believe in catharsis.
The new Lines of Loss is among his darkest. Its distillation of grief weighs heavily. In the past few years Taylor has homed in on the communal impact of violence. Here he focused on the individual. The walking patterns for the ensemble were austere and stripped-down: ceremonial like a procession, casual like a friendly stroll, and enfolding in a hand-holding chain. Turbulent solos and duets fatally imploded this sense of order: Lisa Viola descended into ground-brushing back bends as if something horrendous were descending on her; later, Annmaria Mazzini appeared crushed by the same force. Looking up, a frantic Robert Kleinendorf acted as if he’d been hit in the chest, after which his writhing body was dragged away. An innocent shove made claw-bearing enemies of Richard Chen See and James Samson. A weighted-down Michael Trusnovec crumbled from full manhood into a doddering old man. The closest thing to comfort was a feeble kiss blown across the stage after Viola and Trusnovec vainly tried to bridge the distance between their intertwining bodies.
Taylor’s 1962 Piece Period, only recently revived, represented a young choreographer’s effort at spoofing the establishment. Fun to watch, it was very much of its time. Taylor took on not only theatrical dance’s formal conventions — both Graham’s and Balanchine’s — but also the period’s fascination with the bobbing beats of baroque music. Even though Taylor never joined the Judson Group’s embrace of the ordinary, lurking in the background of this work is a similar desire to sweep away the constraints of artifice. Viola, the company’s supreme comedian, bounced about in a minitutu, sternly watched from behind fans by mantilla-clad matrons. A bewigged Kleinendorf pranced as Papa Haydn. Julie Tice’s movements with empty pots were little digs at Taylor’s Judson colleagues. Chen See, as the court jester of this motley troupe, performed his leaps as if pressed from a stencil.
Later, of course, Taylor embraced baroque music with a passion, creating works to strains of William Boyce (Arden Court), Johann Sebastian Bach (Esplanade), and George Frideric Handel (Aureole, Airs). The 1972 Airs looked as infectiously joyous as ever. Newcomer Laura Halzack’s poignant vulnerability and the lushly luminous Parisa Khobdeh contributed their shine to this shimmering jewel. As for the Paul Taylor Company, it will return to San Francisco Performances in 2009, in a format yet to be determined. *