Volume 43 [2008–09]

Green living resource guide

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Living green is not just about buying organic vegetables and riding a bike. It’s about making conscious choices about where you shop, what you buy, and how you interact with your environment. Here are some resources that can help you align your lifestyle with your values.

Down at Home: Greening your domestic life starts with revising your habits, but the next step is revising your actual surroundings. A consultation from the folks at Sustainable Spaces (1167 Mission, SF. 415-294-5380, www.sustainablespaces.com) will identify the areas where you can make the most substantial difference. You can pick up green building supplies, like bamboo flooring or zero-VOC paint, from the savvy staff at Berkeley’s Eco Home Improvement (2169 San Pablo, Berk. 510-644-3500, www.ecohomeimprovement.com). Also consider leasing a solar panel from Solar City (2245 Quesada, SF. 800-765-2489, www.solarcity.com), a company that will come out and install a solar panel on your house. (You don’t have to put any money down and the lease may be less then your monthly utility bill.)

In the Bag: Shopping is a fact of life. We all need to clothe and feed ourselves. Opt organic where you can. For green threads, from jeans and tees to sexy slipdresses, shop crisp Russian hill boutique EcoCitizen (1488 Vallejo, SF. 415-614-0100, www.ecocitizenonline.com). Fill the fridge with locally sourced and organic food from eco-thoughtful co-op Rainbow Grocery (1745 Folsom, SF. 415-863-0620, www.rainbowgrocery.org) or natural market Real Foods (2140 Polk, SF. 415-673-7420; 360 Fillmore, SF. 415-567-6900, www.realfoodco.com).

On the Street: We live in a bike-friendly city, and the folks at Valencia Cyclery (1077 Valencia, SF. 415-550-6600) are stoked to put you on spokes. If you still drive, drive green. Take your car to the friendly mechanics at clean, inviting Luscious Garage (429 Clementina, SF. 415-875-9030, www.lusciousgarage.com), where broken auto parts are recycled and all invoices are digitized to save paper. Fill the tank with locally produced biofuel at Dogpatch Biofuels (765 Pennsylvania, SF. 415-643-3435, www.dogpatchbiofuels.com).

Skin and Soul: Stock up on health and wellness info, vitamin supplements, and chemical-free skincare products at Clary Sage Organics (2241 Fillmore, SF. 415-673-7300, www.clarysageorganics.com). If facials are your beauty indulgence of choice, go for an organic option at Epi Center MedSpa (450 Sutter, Ste 800, SF. 415-362-4754, www.skinrejuv.com), which is housed in a lovely, LEED certified space. Find focus and balance—and at mat made of recycled materials—at The Yoga Loft (321 Divisadero, SF. 415-626-5638, www.theloftsf.com).

Out and About: You don’t have to eat at Café Gratitude to dine green. Check out Thimmakka (www.thimmakka.org), an organization which helps restaurants and bars — most of them small, independently owned, and ethnic — become more eco-friendly. Thimmakka maintains a list of places they’ve certified, including San Miguel’s (3263 Mission, SF. 415-641-5866) delicious Guatamalan cuisine and Elixir’s (3200 16th St., SF. 415-522-1633, www.elixirsf.com) organic cocktails. Then shake your booty on the dance floor at Temple (540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com), where the owner is so committed to being environmentally friendly that he’s working on a way to harness dancers’ energy to power the place. Catch a flick at Red Vic Movie House (1727 Haight, SF. 415-668-3914, www.redvicmoviehouse.com) a co-op that offers organic snacks.

Giving back: Support small businesses who are trying to be greener by using a Viv sticker (sign up at www.doyouviv.com). Every time you show it to a participating local shop or eatery, you’ll push the business to shift to greener cleaning products or energy efficient lights.

Shades of green

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sarah@sfbg.com

When President Barack Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in mid-February, folks across the country were hopeful that the $787 billion stimulus package would help preserve and create decent jobs in their communities.

And in mid-March, when the Obama administration announced that Bay Area social justice activist Van Jones was joining the White House Council on Environmental Quality, advocates for green jobs took it as a sign that Obama shares Jones’ belief that we can fix our nation’s two biggest problems — excessive greenhouse gas production and not enough good jobs for the working class — by creating a green-collar economy.

Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which opposes police abuse and promotes alternatives to incarceration, and founded Oakland’s Green for All, which aims to create green-collar jobs in low-income communities. He defines a green-collar job as "a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality."

"Think of them as the 2.0 version of old-fashioned blue-collar jobs, upgraded to respect the Earth and meet the environmental challenges of today," Jones wrote in his New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (HarperOne, 2008).

But is Jones’ definition codified into Obama’s Recovery Act? And in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom speaks incessantly about green jobs and regularly praises Jones, will the jobs we create be for the people who need them most? And how will that play out in a city where blacks, Latinos and Asians experience higher unemployment, poverty, and incarceration rates than whites, and building construction has stalled, pitting skilled union workers against training program graduates?

Last month, an alliance of community and worker organizations from San Francisco’s working class neighborhoods sent a letter to Newsom outlining concerns about the Recovery Act’s equity, job quality, and transparency requirements.

Antonio Diaz of PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Association, Steve Williams of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), and Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center asked Newsom to ensure that ARRA funds would be used to create "green jobs and opportunities primarily for low-income people and people of color" and "high quality jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and career ladders."

"We ask for your commitment to greater transparency and community input in shaping and monitoring the infusion of ARRA funds for San Francisco’s developing green collar economy," they wrote.

Two weeks later Newsom announced the launching of www.recoverysf.org, a Web site that seeks to track stimpack funds coming to San Francisco. Although the Web site shows that $150 million of the first quarter-billion of formula funding is headed toward infrastructure projects, it does not include estimates of the numbers of green jobs created.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor’s Office told the Guardian that the city is focused on ensuring that green jobs are created with these funds and that the City Attorney’s Office is figuring out what is "allowable" under Recovery Act’s guidelines.

On April 3, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a 172-page memo outlining the Recovery Act’s policy goals. The goals included ensuring compliance with equal opportunity laws and principles, promoting local hiring, providing maximum practicable opportunities for small business and equal opportunities for disadvantaged business, encouraging sound labor practices, and engaging with community-based organizations.

"But will all cities include achievable, measurable requirements?" Crowfoot said. "I don’t think so, without federal guidelines."

This lack of specifics, Crowfoot says, has the City Attorney figuring out if San Francisco can include "first source" hiring requirements, in which hiring halls agree to interview graduates from local training programs first. If so, Crowfoot says, the city will seek to leverage existing funding for energy efficiency programs and conduct hire-locally campaigns in low-income communities.

But as Crowfoot notes, although we know that $1.5 million in ARRA funding is coming to San Francisco for weatherizing homes — helping to decrease the energy costs of low-income residents, reduce the city’s energy demands, and increase the number of people hired from the local community to do energy audits and retrofits — we still don’t know how many jobs will be created per project, which is the basic goal of economic stimulation.

"If we spend the dollars, say, on boiler replacement, that’s more equipment and less labor," Crowfoot said. "But the more you hire locally, the more those folks get experience, the more they’ll be well positioned to get jobs in the non-subsidized sector once the stimulus funds are gone."

Acknowledging the tension between laid-off union workers and graduates of apprentice training programs, Crowfoot said, "We are trying to figure out a balance, whereby the community is not shut out, but the unions’ needs are addressed. We want to be careful about how many jobs we say are going to be created. We don’t want to build hope in populations who already have a lot of mistrust in the government."

Michael Theriault, secretary and treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, told us that 25 percent of the region’s 16,000 building trades workers are out of work, compared to nearly full employment last year.

In the past, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council provided CityBuild with instructors and took the lion’s share of the program graduates, Theriault explains. But under present conditions, the Council isn’t keen on another CityBuild cycle.

"I think they should work to sponsor another cycle, but the ball is also in the city’s court," Theriault said, noting that the ARRA-funded weatherization program could soon be offering prevailing union wages ($20 an hour for roofers, $40 to $50 for plumbers and electricians) that could help ease the tension. And then there’s the inconvenient truth that some union members view non-unionized solar panel installers as "scabs," creating another barrier to using green jobs to lift the underemployed.

Mayor Newsom has until June to secure and implement stimpack funding as part of upcoming local budget proposals, a timetable that has Green for All issuing a call for action to ensure that Recovery Act implementation creates green-collar jobs, ensures transparency and accountability, and supports pathways out of poverty.

"This may be the most important opportunity you’ll ever have to bring green-collar jobs to your community," Green For All wrote in a public statement. "But the planning process will be over in the blink of an eye, and your community could miss out. That’s why we’re calling on you to take action now."

Green for All field organizer Julian Mocine-McQueen is scheduled to sit down with Crowfoot this week in an effort to get Newsom to sign his group’s pledge. He said there’s been an expansion of the city’s lighting and refrigeration cooling retrofitting program, starting with small business owners who speak English as a second language. "It’s good," McQueen said. "But it’s not enough."

He believes green job success will depend, in part, on including hiring parameters. "A job in the city’s southeast sector may not pay $70,000 a year, but it would be a huge step toward creating a family-sustaining job," McQueen said, noting that the Obama administration has "to a certain extent" adopted Jones’ definition of green-collar jobs. "I’m not sure that they have codified it," McQueen said. "They have recommendations."

Asked to define green jobs during a recent media roundtable on projected budget deficits, Newsom talked about weatherization and sustainability and plans to expand the city’s training academies before handing the floor to the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Kyri McClellan, whom he described as his "green czarina."

McClellan, who describes herself as "the lead cat-herder" of Recovery Act funds, told reporters that San Francisco is expected to receive a quarter of a billion dollars in formula funds in the coming fiscal year, 95 percent of which have been allocated to "shovel-ready" projects that were already queued up under the city’s 10-year capital plan.

During a subsequent board committee hearing, McClellan shared job estimates — 30 jobs from the $11 million Department of Public Works street paving allocation and 250 jobs from the $18 million Housing Authority retrofitting allocation — that raised eyebrows.

McClellan said that OEWD is "moving as quickly as possible to take the dollars we’ve been allocated, get approval from the Board of Supervisors, and get programs up and running."

Observing that the city also has parallel funding for training programs such as CityBuild and a Green Academy, McClellan added that "no one is working harder than Rhonda Simmons." Reached by phone, OEWD’s Simmons said she has been working with San Francisco State University professor Raquel Pinderhughes to identify five job sectors that have "the capacity to grow the greatest number of green jobs."

These include solar installation, energy efficiency, landscaping/public greening, recycling, and green building. "In an economy like this, you have to be competitive," Simmons said. "And almost all the programs that come out of my shop are geared toward low-income to moderate-income folks."

Observing that OEWD is using a $238,000 federal earmark to seed a Green Academy and that will expand the GoSolarSF workforce incentive, compete for a $500,000 EPA brownfield cleanup training grant, and coordinate with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to develop "workforce incentive language" for biodiesel reuse program and energy efficiency projects, Simmons notes that it was the unions that helped create CityBuild in the first place, and the city is working to ease current concerns.

"It is our intent as OEWD designs the academy that any training programs must demonstrate that they train individuals for occupations with opportunity for upward mobility," Simmons said, after emerging from a meeting cochaired by Crowfoot and Pinderhughes to help community-based organizations understand green jobs and figure out how to link with the Green Jobs Corps that Pinderhughes set up in Oakland.

Eric Smith runs the Bayview-based Green Depot, a nonprofit that promotes biodiesel use in neighborhoods facing environmental justice issues and ran a $9,000-per intern pilot program with Global Exchange. He worries that administrative costs will chew up much of the stimulus money, citing SFPUC figures that the cost ratio for trainers to interns is about 3:1.

"There is a lot of concern in the Bayview that the money will end up going to consultants and administrators when we have people who are hungry and desperate to work," Smith said.

After two green jobs hearings, Sup. Eric Mar says that he and Sups. Sophie Maxwell and David Chiu have concluded "that unless the board takes action and gives clear guidelines and expectations, green collar job creation will be miniscule."
Noting that Oakland’s Green Job Corps and Richmond’s solar program seem years ahead of San Francisco’s efforts, Mar said his next step will be to talk with labor, environmental groups, businesses, and nonprofits to get a sense of an appropriate structure to prioritize the low-income communities as the main beneficiaries of green-collar job creation. "It’s pretty clear that the [Newsom] administration’s commitment to the numbers of jobs created is pretty small," Mar said. "The community is going to have to push for more."

Energy deficiency

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More in this issue:

>>Fed money for green jobs?

>>Green living resource guide

rebeccab@sfbg.com

As the window of opportunity for averting the worst-case global warming scenarios narrows, wise use of energy seems increasingly urgent. So millions of dollars in state and federal funding and significant contributions from utility customers are devoted each year to improving energy efficiency in California.

It’s a crucial program designed to reduce consumption and planet-damaging emissions and eliminate the need for new fossil-fuel burning power plants. Yet the state’s energy-efficiency programs are often run by investor-owned utility companies, such as Pacific Gas & Electric, that have been missing efficiency targets yet demanding ever more public money anyway.

Critics say the programs would yield more energy savings on the dollar if local governments or nonprofits were in charge. The utilities have not only fought to maintain control of these programs, they’re now seeking even more taxpayer money by trying to claim federal economic stimulus funds.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is engaged in a long, slow process of rolling out an ambitious community choice aggregation (CCA) program, Clean Power SF, which would utilize 50 percent renewable energy and promote green technologies in the city.

While state law guarantees that energy-efficiency funding generated by San Franciscans could be funneled into Clean Power SF, it isn’t likely to happen without a fight from the state’s most powerful utility.

AN ‘A’ FOR EFFORT


Although PG&E and other utilities are entrusted with millions in ratepayers’ money to promote energy efficiency, independent analysis demonstrates that they’ve had limited success. But last December, they garnered rich rewards anyway, at ratepayers’ expense.

In 2007, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a system to encourage utilities to strive for high energy efficiency standards. Utilities could receive hearty payouts for achieving a certain threshold of energy savings, the commission decided. Conversely, if the companies failed miserably, they’d be slapped with penalty fees. Rather than take the utilities’ word for it, the CPUC directed its Energy Division to inspect the companies’ energy efficiency program performance and report on it each year.

About a third of the funding for these programs is amassed with a mandatory fee on every ratepayer’s monthly energy bill, called the Public Goods Charge. This is combined with a second pot of ratepayer money and collected by utilities to fund initiatives such as rebates, light-bulb discounts, energy retrofits, and consumer-education drives. The program budget for all the utilities from 2006 through 2008 was around $2 billion. For the 2009 to 2011 program, the utilities are collectively seeking closer to $4 billion.

Last December, based on the utilities’ own claims that they’d hit the targets for the 2006 — 2007 program, the CPUC handed over nearly $82 million in incentive payments — with some $41 million going to PG&E. The commission accepted the utilities’ claims because the Energy Division’s verification report was behind schedule, and the utilities argued that this delay would postpone their payments and thus undermine the whole incentive.

At the same time, the commission noted, "We have profound concerns that accepting the [utilities’] proposal … would subject ratepayers to significant risk of overpayment." In an attempt to strike a balance, the CPUC voted to award $82 million rather than the $152.7 million that the utilities claimed they were owed.

But the independent report, which was finally released two months later, concluded that PG&E and two other utilities shouldn’t have been entitled to any incentive payments at all. Based on this analysis, they’d missed the targets.

The move drew criticism from groups like The Utilities Reform Network (TURN), Women’s Energy Matters, and the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which charged that investor-owned utilities are more concerned about the payouts they receive for running these programs than maximizing energy savings.

"They didn’t seem troubled by the fact that they hadn’t met the goals. They were only troubled by the fact that they weren’t going to get the financial reward," said Mindy Spatt, communications director for the Utility Reform Network (TURN). "I suppose there’s a message in there about just how seriously they take energy efficiency."

Loretta Lynch, a former CPUC commissioner, told the Guardian that she’d been watching the proceedings closely. "They had already promised Wall Street they were going to get this money, and so they had to meet Wall Street’s expectations regardless of whether or not they met the technical requirements of the program," Lynch said.

The CPUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates opposed the decision to award the incentive money. "[The utilities] are being rewarded for something they say they’ve done, but that independent analysis shows they just didn’t do," DRA Regulatory Analyst Thomas Roberts told the Guardian. "It’s like rewarding a student for getting a D."

Part of the problem is that PG&E’s program relied heavily on giving away compact-fluorescent light bulbs, and then the utility inflated estimates for how much energy savings they would provide and how long they would last. In other words, CFLs are a good first step to energy conservation, but not enough to make the greatest strides in reducing demand.

Roberts also said PG&E often delivered the bulbs to what he called "free riders," or people who would’ve made the switch on their own. TURN once discovered a box of light bulbs posted on eBay by some crafty entrepreneurs who had purchased them at a discount, courtesy of PG&E. At that point, the bulbs could have wound up anywhere in the country, Spatt points out, instead of reducing electricity demand in California.

"There is no clear connection that we are not building new power plants due to energy efficiency programs," said Cheryl Cox, senior policy analyst and project manager for energy efficiency at the CPUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. "And we do not appear to be on track to achieve long-term, persistent energy savings. Given the dependence of energy efficiency portfolios on short-term savings like lighting, it appears that the utilities would have to spend additional dollars to play catch-up — yet they persist on proposing the same old, non-progressive, CFL programs."

WHO’S IN CHARGE OF YOUR SURCHARGE?


For some, the incentive payouts provided new fuel for a longstanding argument that utilities shouldn’t be in charge of administering state-mandated energy efficiency programs in the first place. Barbara George, executive director of Women’s Energy Matters, points out that states with financially disinterested third parties managing energy efficiency measures tend to be more careful with the money they’re granted, resulting in more energy savings per dollar.

She points to a report completed by analyst Richard Estevez, which ranked 37 statewide energy efficiency programs by cost-effectiveness. "Non-utility implemented programs make up 18 out of the top 20 rankings; utility-implemented programs make up 15 out of the 17 poorest rankings," that report concludes.

Under the current system, "PG&E makes a profit on every dollar," says Lynch. "In addition, all of PG&E’s costs are covered. Then, of course, all the subcontractors’ costs are covered too, so it gets down to only 50 or 60 cents of every dollar that is actually going into programs. The rest of the money is going into PG&E’s profit, PG&E’s overhead, and the subcontractors’ overhead. Not surprisingly, if you’re a nonprofit or a government, you’re doing that service directly at no profit and lower administrative costs."

Paul Fenn, a consultant to Clean Power SF, sounds a similar note. In his view, PG&E "doesn’t want to reduce energy consumption. Why? Because every year, they go to their shareholders and they predict next year’s load growth. That’s their business. They burn gas, and they sell power. They’re a gas and electric company. The idea that a gas and electric company could be adequately incented to reduce their sales is naïve."

Fenn is the founder of Local Power, Inc. and the author of Assembly Bill 117 — a state bill passed in 2002 under the sponsorship of then-Assembly Member Carole Migden that allows municipalities to set up community choice aggregation programs. Local Power has been a key player in San Francisco’s own embryonic CCA.

AB 117 also gave cities the option to gain control of Public Goods Charge funds generated by their own ratepayers. In SF, that would mean funneling roughly $18 million annually into Clean Power SF’s energy efficiency budget.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs a committee overseeing the CCA implementation, told the Guardian he supports the idea. But he warned that the city probably wouldn’t be able to wrest the funding away from PG&E without a fight. "It’s completely appropriate for city government to be in charge of those funds," he says. "PG&E shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat with all that money anyway."

San Francisco is already hailed as a green city, but Clean Power SF, which has renewable energy as its centerpiece, would set a new standard for what cities can do to address climate change. The plan calls for 50 percent renewable energy, compared with PG&E’s energy mix of 11 to 12 percent renewable power. The SFPUC is slated to present CCA program plans to the state next year.

SFPUC’s Michael Campbell, the CCA program director, rejects the idea of going after Public Goods Charge funds just yet. "It’s premature to do that now," Campbell says. "About one-third of the energy efficiency dollars that PG&E collects … come from Public Goods Charge, and the other two-thirds are charges associated with procurement portions of customers’ bills. If a CCA were formed … to have an equal amount of dollars, we would need to have additional charges to CCA customers that would be associated with the energy portion of their bill."

Yet Fenn said applying to administer those funds is long overdue. Not knowing whether that $18 million is in place every year could derail the CCA bidding process, Fenn argues, since it would be difficult for prospective power suppliers to draft a plan if they lack clarity on the program budget.

The other problem, Fenn said, is that without the energy-efficiency funds, it would be harder for the city’s CCA to get its rates down low enough to compete with PG&E. Given the CCA is required to beat PG&E rates, it could make or break the success of the project.

"Energy efficiency is the cheapest resource," Fenn said. "It helps the economic feasibility of the portfolio by creating surplus revenue. If you’re just doing green supply, and not green load reduction, it’s going to be really hard not to pay more than PG&E."

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PG&E


While Clean Power SF lags, energy efficiency programs are percoutf8g throughout the city — usually touted by Mayor Gavin Newsom and funded through public-private partnerships with PG&E.

In a recent post on TriplePundit.com, Newsom announced the creation of an Existing Buildings Efficiency Task Force — composed of landlords, developers, PG&E, and other downtown interests — tasked with greening buildings and creating green jobs.

"The Task Force builds upon a great deal of work we’re doing already — taking full advantage of the $7 [million] to $11 million provided in energy efficiency block grants by the federal stimulus, leveraging our ongoing … partnership with PG&E, and working with private partners to create a San Francisco Clean Energy Fund," Newsom wrote.

A recent initiative to install energy efficient streetlights in the Tenderloin is the result of another PG&E partnership. While there’s no doubt that these programs will have positive results, they also serve to further entrench PG&E into citywide green initiatives, which render it more difficult for Clean Power SF to gain footing further down the road.

With federal stimulus money flowing into state coffers, the utilities are back at the table, recommending to the CPUC that some of the federal funding go into their existing energy-efficiency programs. "We believe that the Recovery Act or ARRA funds should work in conjunction with [investor-owned utility] programs to minimize potential customer confusion and leverage the success we have had with the programs," Marc Gaines, a representative for the state’s four investor-owned utilities, said during a recent All-Party CPUC meeting to discuss the stimulus funds. "Rather than competing with the programs, we would like to use ARRA funding to supplement existing energy efficiency [and other] programs."

Not so fast, countered George, who stood up to speak during the meeting. "We have to worry about if these funds are commingled with current programs, are the utilities going to rake off profits?" she wondered. "These funds need to be used for authorized purposes, and not for fraud, waste, error, and abuse. The energy efficiency programs have been used to fight public power and community choice efforts. The competition is brutal when it comes to the utilities."

Carolina blues

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cheryl@sfbg.com

Ramin Bahrani is a young filmmaker who’s beloved by critics and whatever arthouse-type audiences have been lucky enough to catch his work, thus far 2005’s Man Push Cart and 2007’s Chop Shop. Born in America to Iranian parents, Bahrani was educated at Columbia University and set both of those films — minimalist marvels that racked up kudos galore at global fests — in New York City. His latest, Goodbye Solo, shifts from gritty NY to depressed Winston-Salem, N.C., where Bahrani was raised. Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forest University, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company; it’s also where Bahrani met the real-life characters who inspired Solo‘s tale of an elderly Southerner, William (Red West) who reluctantly befriends the Senegalese cab driver, Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), who regularly shuttles him around town.

In the film’s first scene — which really begins mid-scene, as if the camera just happened to be turned on at an unspecified moment — Solo has laughingly just agreed to take William to the mountain hamlet of Blowing Rock in two weeks’ time. As becomes increasingly clear, it’s a two-hour trip from which William does not plan to return. Solo, who dreams of being a flight attendant despite the disapproval of his hugely pregnant wife (mother to his feisty nine-year-old stepdaughter), reaches out to the lonely William for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. For his part, William would prefer to be left alone as he quietly ties up his affairs, though he does begrudgingly allow Solo to bunk down in his motel room when Solo’s career aspirations cause a marital rift.

West, a high school pal of Elvis Presley and a member of Presley’s Memphis Mafia (until Elvis: What Happened?, a 1977 tell-all co-written with other posse members), was a stunt player during the King’s Hollywood years. (As a big-screen presence, West is perhaps most recognizable as one of Patrick Swayze’s small-town allies in 1989’s immortal Road House.) His William is gruffly taciturn, with a mournful aura that suggests a past full of transgressions and a present choked with regrets.

By contrast, Solo is an ebullient force, working hard and hustling harder to get ahead. He takes to William immediately, dubbing the older man "Big Dog" and convincing him to ride around with him and even kick back with a beer at the local pool joint. It’s only when he interferes with William’s Blowing Rock plans that he understand the difficult choice he’ll have to make, should he want to become the friend William truly needs.

Hollywood films about aging are generally sappy, preachy, and stuffed with cringe-inducing scenes of distinguished actors skydiving (see: 2007’s The Bucket List). Not only does Goodbye Solo approach the subject with dignity, it balances out the grimmer William plot with Solo’s optimistic embrace of everything in his life. Realism, with naturalistic acting and locations, is Bahrani’s technical gift. Along with co-scriptwriter Baharez Azimi, he’s also able to hew giant, honest emotions from tiny moments and seemingly ordinary situations.


GOODBYE SOLO opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Wiggletronics

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superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “Many people confuse us with Spain,” MC Kalaf of worldwide dance sensations Buraka Som Sistema says — a back-end hint of fado-like melancholy mixing into his unfailingly chipper voice — when we talk over the phone about how the fab foursome has finally put their homeland, Portugal, on the club-must map. Buraka, two of whose members hail originally from Angola and two from that sunny strip along the Atlantic, represents a double bubbling up of the repressed: the crew has exploded onto the nightlife radar by melding the underground sounds of Luanda’s bumping kuduro dance movement with Lisbon’s buzzy, overlooked electronic music scene.

Last year Buraka’s sophomore release Black Diamond (Enchufada/Sony BMG) quickly shot up the hit lists of beats connoisseurs by jumping the current trend of streaming developing-world rhythms through the latest sonic technology. “We took the sound of the Lisbon suburbs where many Angolan immigrants live — our suburbs are not like your ‘Desperate Housewife’ suburbs — and used our years of dance music on it, and the crowds loved it,” says Kalaf.

Kuduro is often translated as “stiff bottom,” heh, or “hard ass,” referencing the form of lowdown, hips-wiggling motion that sometimes accompanies the deliciously uptempo sound, a hybrid of sensuous zouk, raucous soca, and free-flow hip-hop that shares an affinity for analog atmospherics with early dub. (Or rather, that dance is mostly reserved for women — men tend to go pop and lock crazy, as you can see in the video below.) Along with Kalaf, Buraka members Li’l John, DJ Riot, and Conductor apply their extensive hip-hop, house, and breakbeat production experience to blow the lid off kuduro’s possibilities. 

The superkinetic results reference everything from Ed Banger hardcore and hyperdub freakouts to Orb-esque kaleidoscopics and the late ’80s Sheffield bleep scene. Scoring MIA to guest on “Sound of Kuduro” helped kick that track up the club charts, and basing the excellent “Kalemba (Wegue-Wegue)” on a misheard lyric from the classic Afro Acid house remix of More Kante’s “Yeke Yeke” gave fanboys a theoretical boner. Live, Buraka’s a tornado, with toasting MCs, fierce singers, and, as Kalaf points out, “anything that makes you scream.” Last time the crew was here, a topless female fan stormed the stage. Kalaf half-joked that an upcoming tour of Japan is brief because “if they throw us out of the country, at least we won’t lose a lot of money.”

Some things get lost in the laptop filtration, however. Kuduro isn’t just a groove; like rap, it’s built on extended narratives of hood life. Buraka jettisons those for catchy calls to the dance floor and global unity “I’m from Angola,” Kalaf admitted, “and even I can’t follow most of what they say.” And, for all the talk on its records of the primacy of Africa, the group has yet to tour the continent. “We’re going in 2010,” Kalaf said, “and to be honest, I’m a little afraid. It may be mental.” But Buraka has helped bring the Angolan guests on its tracks an international audience, while waking up the Western world to yet another vital cultural expression on its edges. Let’s get suburban, y’all.

BURAKA SOM SISTEMA

Tue/21, 8 p.m., $14. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com For more on Buraka’s kuduro connections, click here.

Grand Pu Bah

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You might think, with today’s endless parade of television cooking shows, that the dining public’s appetite for a theatrical restaurant experience might be whetted. But mostly this does not seem to be the case. Oh, we have plenty of display kitchens, and soufflés finished tableside, and occasionally you might happen upon on a cheese cart, or a foie gras or champagne cart. Yet the typical restaurant experience is notably slim on any actual culinary drama, unless something goes dreadfully wrong: a steak burned, a chicken paillard undercooked, a tray of dirty dishes dropped.

Then there might be a scene, with some lively dialogue. But this doesn’t happen often. The usual course of events is that food is ordered and, later, brought, ready to eat. If your restaurant has a display kitchen, you might have caught a glimpse of line cooks doing something or other, but the likelihood is that you wouldn’t be able to figure out what they were up to, and almost certainly you would have no way of knowing whose plate they were working on.

Imagine my delight, then, when the chicken volcano ($19) at Grand Pu Bah, an 18-month-old Thai restaurant near the Concourse Exhibition Center at Eighth and Brannan streets, turned out to be almost as exciting as a high school science experiment. The roasted bird arrived, still mounted on its upright roaster. The server, after muttering a few cautionary words (or perhaps a prayer), emptied a small tumbler of some kind of liquor over the chicken (actually a game hen) — I thought I heard “151” and “tequila” — lit a match, and set my dinner gloriously ablaze. He did not say Opa!, as the Greeks do when lighting saganaki cheese on fire, but the omission did not matter, because the hen burned a beautiful, steady, Bunsen-burner blue for seconds that might have stretched into a minute.

When the flame finally died out, the bird had a crisp-crinkly golden skin as impressive as that of any roast chicken in town. Even if the dish had been bad, I would have said nothing, having enjoyed the show (and discreetly warmed my hands). But the meat was tender and moist, the accompanying roasted cauliflower florets and potato quarters tasty (despite not being torched), and the ramekins of mysterious dipping sauces (one red, the other neatly divided between red and green by a bisecting diagonal, like a flag) welcome. Even good chicken benefits from a bit of extra help. My only complaint: the hen was awkward to eat. The server, having kindled his blue blaze and departed, did not return to lift the finished item from its perch. Since I couldn’t see a graceful way to do it, I just hacked away as discreetly as possible while thinking there must be a more elegant way.

Elegance, interestingly, otherwise pervades Grand Pu Bah. Despite the silly name, the restaurant is surely among the most stylish Thai places in the city and is, really, stylish by any standard. The space, which spreads away from the entrance like a baseball diamond folding out from home plate, includes a handsomely backlit bar, walls textured with what appear to be wood cuttings and offset bricks, and paper lamps that hang from the ceiling like giant porcini stems being air-cured for some kind of mushroom prosciutto. The overall flavor of the design suggests a contemporary California restaurant, and indeed executive chef Teerapong Khantawisut’s menu emphasizes “local and seasonal ingredients.” At some point will this be required by law?

The menu offers “Thai beach cuisine” in the “family style” — sharing is encouraged — and includes a raw bar (with oysters and sashimi), a conventional array of appetizers, soups, salads, and main courses, and a large collection of shareable plates grouped under the rubric “street food.” Why the chicken volcano should have been slotted in here isn’t obvious; it’s hardly street food and not all that shareable.

Some of the other offerings here spread themselves around the table much more easily: sizzling spicy beef pad cha ($18), for instance, strips of flank steak tossed with slivers of bell pepper and fresh chile and cubes of Thai eggplant and electrified by kaffir lime leaf and wild ginger. For a slightly sweeter tack, there’s roasted duck in a broad-shouldered but well-behaved coconut-red curry sauce fructified by pineapple chunks, lychee nuts, grapes, and tomato quarters. (Tomato is a fruit, don’t forget!)

And, of course, appetizers and salads are shareable, even if they’re not marked that way. Sizzling spicy prawns ($10) were indeed sizzling — they arrived, like fajitas, on a hot cast-iron platter — and were souped up with chiles, cilantro, lemongrass, and lime. I liked the chunked taro root added as ballast to fresh rolls ($8), otherwise filled with a traditional jumble of tofu, basil, cilantro, and cucumber; the root meat was both creamy and weighty. A similarly moderating influence would have benefited the seafood salad ($14), which was a kind of southeast Asian caesar salad — romaine hearts tossed with prawns, scallops, and calamari — but finished with a spicy lime vinaigrette that was the spiciest vinaigrette I’ve ever had, including my own, and George likes spicy chicken. It isn’t every day you come across a salad that’s almost too hot to eat. This one had me panting like a dog on a blazing August afternoon.

We laughed, we shared, we panted, we thought the dessert menu was a little perfunctory and was the one dimension in which Grand Pu Bah is more Thai than California. Fried bananas ($8) come with beer ice cream — weird, slightly sharp but acceptable. And yet: never again. The beer is Singha, which is always good and is at its best when icy cold, not as actual ice.

GRAND PU BAH
Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.,
Sat.-Sun., 5-10 p.m
88 Division, SF
(415) 255-8188/9
www.grandpubahrestaurant.com
Full bar
AE/DS/MC/V
Loud
Wheelchair accessible

Astral peaks

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

If not for High on Fire, Mastodon might never have existed. The flame-bonging Oakland trio swung through Atlanta in 1999, playing what was presumably an eardrum-destroying gig in the basement of local musician Brent Hinds. At the show, Hinds and his friend, bassist Troy Sanders, met drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher, who had both recently arrived from Rochester, N.Y. The four were knit together by a love of the Melvins and Bay Area metal experimentalists Neurosis, and a decade later, they are a metal band of towering stature.

Mastodon’s Crack the Skye (Warner Bros./Reprise, 2009) is an appropriately mammoth undertaking, the final chapter in a four-album arc that ties each disc to an Aristotelian element. With fire (Remission, Relapse, 2002), water (Leviathan, Relapse, 2004), and earth (Blood Mountain, Warner Bros./Reprise, 2006) accounted for, Crack the Skye centers around ether, which (in the band’s typical fashion) serves as a jumping-off point for the story of a quadriplegic astral traveler who zooms through space and time only to arrive in tsarist Russia in time to warn Rasputin of his impending assassination.

Spanning only seven tracks but clocking in at roughly 50 minutes, the album is Mastodon’s most cohesive to date, its songs flowing into each other like the movements of a heavily distorted prog-rock symphony. With this in mind, the band will play the album in its entirety during its April 19 date at the Great American Music Hall, augmenting the performance with visual spectacle courtesy of an LED screen and Neurosis member Josh Graham.

Mastodon, “Iron Tusk”

Crack the Skye‘s title has a deeper meaning for drummer Dailor, whose contributions to the record are a tribute to his sister, Skye, who committed suicide at age 14. This multivalent phrase is an illuminating example of the band’s densely layered art, which combines the diverse songwriting of its members with a wealth of thematic and musical allusion.

It was Dailor who showed up in London after an exhausting plane trip clutching a copy of Moby Dick. Though the group had toyed with high- and pop-cultural references in the past, the drummer’s suggestion that their next album be centered around Herman Melville’s 1851 classic took a while to sink in. When I interviewed Kelliher recently by phone, he explained how it caught on: "We kind of saw ourselves in the same boat, literally, leaving our families and friends behind and jumping into this quest … going out in the world trying to make it, searching for our own white whale."

The album that resulted, Leviathan, was Mastodon’s defining work, mixing easy-to-grasp themes of harpooning and high-seas adventure with oceans of metaphorical extrapolation. The band has mined other allusive veins, modeling riffs from Blood Mountain’s "Crystal Skull" off tribal drum patterns in Peter Jackson’s 2005 take on King Kong and shooting a video for the Crack the Skye single "Divinations" that’s an uproarious tribute to John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing.

Between the nods to other works, the narrative lyrical themes, and the complex, progressive songwriting, Mastodon’s music can be overwhelming. Kelliher cops to some early writing conflicts with guitarist Hinds that involved a refrain of "No, man, it doesn’t go like that, it goes like this" in response to his opposite number’s deconstructive playing style. Soon, though, they learned to fuse their disparate riffs.

After four albums, it is possible to point to this relentlessly inclusive artistic tendency as the key to the band’s success. Mastodon has a rare kind of talent that suggests a pseudo-aphorism: more is more. Saddling their listeners with the full weight of their wide-ranging inspiration, the band’s albums are cohesive against the odds, rewarding careful, long-form listening sessions and a lot of revisiting. Beneath each layer of discovery lies another, and this feeling of excitement and expectation is crucial to the enjoyment of their music. Who knows what abstruse surprises they will conjure up in the future? We can only wait and hear. *

MASTODON

April 19

With Kylesa, Intronaut

7:30pm, $25 (sold out)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

Appetite: Free pancakes, Lower Haight French, Little Skillet, twice the Woodhouse, and more

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Farmerbrown’s leaps from the frying pan into Little Skillet

As long-time San Francisco resident and writer, I’m passionate about this city and obsessed with exploring its best food-and-drink spots, events and news, in every neighborhood and cuisine type. I have my own personalized itinerary service and monthly food/drink/travel newsletter, The Perfect Spot, and am thrilled to share up-to-the minute news with you from the endless goings-on in our fair city.

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NEW RESTAURANT OPENINGS

Little Skillet: Chicken & Waffles from a walk-up alley window in SoMa
Farmerbrown’s is about to open Little Skillet in a SoMa alley at 330 Ritch. It’s a walk-up window offering morning pleasures like biscuit sandwiches loaded with cheese, egg, housemade sausage or bacon, plus Oyster Po’Boys, and one of my favorites in comfort food: Chicken and waffles (from Petaluma Poultry chickens) for breakfast and lunch. Lucky, those who work nearby! Cento, neighboring alley Blue Bottle coffee-source, also sells box lunches of Little Skillet’s food. Initial hours are supposed to be Monday–Friday, 8am–3pm, open later as baseball season progresses. No strikes here!
330 Ritch
415-777-2777
www.littleskilletsf.com

Woodhouse Fish Co… Part Deux
When I want a Crab Salad (aka mountain of fresh crabmeat) with fresh lemons, Anchor Steam-battered Fish & Chips or a buttery Lobster Roll without waiting in line at the great Swan Oyster or paying Waterbar prices, Woodhouse Fish Co. fits the bill perfectly. Old seafaring movies on the wall, like 1935’s “Mutiny on the Bounty”, pair nicely with hanging squids and tackle. Up till now, it’s been the Castro locale but with a brand new, larger space on Fillmore, there’s more than one way to assuage New England seafood hankerings.
1914 Fillmore Street
415-437-2722
www.woodhousefish.com

Bistro Saint Germain delivers French flair to Lower Haight
Le P’tit Laurent owner, Laurent Legendre, with chef Eliseo Soto Dimos, debuted Parisian bistro fare to Lower Haight this weekend with Bistro Saint Germain. If you want a change of pace from Lower Haight’s curry houses and sandwich shops, here you can dine on French classics like bistro-style mussels, salads, escargots and boeuf bourguignon. Legendre makes quick friends in the ‘hood by offering Le P’tit’s popular steal of a prix-fixe: 3-courses for $19.95, Sunday through Thursday.
518 Haight Street
415-626-6262

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WINE COUNTRY OPENINGS

Napa’s new green winery from Plumpjack: Cade Winery
Think what you will of our Mayor and his Plumpjack enterprise, it doesn’t hurt that Plumpjack, Gavin and Gordon Getty (helps to have friends with connections), opened an out-of-the-way winery for your next day trip to Napa. Impress friends with an intriguing drive up Howell Mountain to new Cade Winery, a solar powered, green winery with cave tours and lush, hillside views. After a tour, sip a glass of wine by roaring fireplaces (if it’s chilly) or rushing waterfalls overlooking the Valley on brilliant Wine Country days. It’s appointment-only for a tour or tasting (prices vary) which means you have to plan ahead, but it’ll keep out the tour bus riff-raff.
360 Howell Mountain Road South
Angwin CA, 94508
707-965-2746
www.cadewinery.com

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Neely welcomes you to Napa

Bollywood and Indian flavors come to Napa
Neela Paniz, cookbook author and Indian chef, spices up downtown Napa with something it doesn’t have: an Indian restaurant. From Chota Haazari (starters) to Haazari (mains) and Mitha (desserts), Neela’s certainly has a California fresh, local touch (who doesn’t these days?) to home-style recipes like mini dosas with mango chutney, curries, tandoor Cornish hen and Lasoon Jhinga (shrimp with garlic, green chiles and mustard seeds). The plan is to have Bollywood music videos liven up the bar as you down a Kingfisher beer or glass of wine (it is, after all, Napa).
975 Clinton Avenue
Napa, CA 94559
707-226-9988
www.neelasnapa.com

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DEALS

A week full of deals at Cassis Restaurant
Cassis Restaurant, a couple blocks off Fillmore Street, does right by French bistro classics like Pissaladiere (Nicoise Carmelized Onion Tart), with service that’s charming, attentive, and oh, so French. Their weekly deals are many… and hard to resist. First, the bar’s happy hour (5:30–6:30pm) has two-for-one beers plus discounted wines and cocktails. Bring-A-Friend-Tuesdays means 15% off your total food and drink bill with a table of four or more (assuming those are friends you brought, right?) Wine Wednesdays offers no corkage (a two bottle max) or if you decide to buy a bottle off the menu, it’s 25% off. Sweet Thursdays is for the sweet-tooth: order two entrees, get two-for-one desserts. Only caveat? You can’t combine with the $25 Early Dinner Special (Sun-Thu, 5:30-7pm, 3-course prix-fixe).
2101 Sutter Street
415-440-4500
www.restaurantcassis.com

Free pancake Saturdays once a month at El Rio
El Rio is one generous bar to serve free pancakes from the griddle every third Saturday of the month. Further cool points won by calling it “Rock Softly and Carry a Big Spatula“. Curing all that ails after Friday night, breakfast is kindly served at 1pm, so after you’ve rolled out of bed and wandered over, ease into wakefulness with soft rock and hot flapjacks. Wear the “funkiest kitchen couture” and you could win their Golden Apron honors. With a free meal, it’s easy to feed the tradition with generous tips.
Free
3rd Saturdays, 1-3pm
3158 Mission Street
415-282-3325
www.elriosf.com

“Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations”

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REVIEW One of my most uninteresting college professors used to insist that negatives only exist in language, but couldn’t explain what this meant. That’s funny, I thought, because I can physically feel a complete lack of interest in your class. In fact, I think you can feel it too; it’s contagious. Nonetheless, I was never bored as a child, and I’m still never bored. The boring and the uninteresting are different concepts. Julie Blackmon’s lucid, staged photographs of childhood fantasy worlds in the twilight of America are stunning for a ton of reasons, but first and foremost they get their signature bite and sting by recognizing that everyone in each scene is interested in different things. There is no sincere panorama. From the modern intrusions into Blackmon’s protoclassical, Dutch-inspired scenes — a miniature FedEx truck, Netflix mail — to trippy little things such as the almost lurid dog eyes and discarded gloves in Snow Day (2008), every person, place, and thing appears distracted by an otherworldly mission.

Adding to this sense of confused biography, Blackmon, the oldest of nine kids and now a mother of three, uses people and things from her life in her work like a novelist trussing out character relations pictorially. She reminds me of some essays by Orhan Pamuk about his daughter, Rüya. It’s not the stories themselves that are so thrilling, but the palpable feeling of love in their narrative arcs, plus the vectors they send out into Pamuk’s novels, where characters seem to have little aspects or shimmers of Rüya (even if she wasn’t born when the story was written): her young mind, her toys and delusions, the way she gazes out the window and finds it startlingly new every day.

JULIE BLACKMON: DOMESTIC VACATIONS Through May 23. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020. www.sfcamerawork.org

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange: “Small Dances About Big Ideas”

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PREVIEW Liz Lerman is one gutsy woman. Early in her career she decided that there is more to dance than working with highly trained performers for an audience that wants to be entertained. "There was a time when people danced and the crops grew," she told a conference of arts presenters 15 years ago. "They danced, and that’s how they healed their children." For Lerman, the primary function of dance is to heal and create communities. Not only has she taken her Dance Exchange company to parks, schools, and nursing homes, she has included so-called non-dancers in her performances. Today such efforts have become fairly commonplace, except they are usually considered ancillary outreach activities. For Lerman, making "dance of, by, and for the people" — as it has been called — is the foundation of her work. She often weaves spontaneous audience suggestions into her pieces. Older dancers (i.e., over 60) and dancers with disabilities are part of her company. And she doesn’t shrink away from big topics. In 2006 she brought Ferocious Beauty: Genome to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. A hugely ambitious collaboration between artists, scholars, and scientists, this multimedia work explored the forces that had been unleashed with the mapping of the human genome. This weekend she is returning with an equally far-reaching project. Small Dances About Big Ideas was commissioned by Harvard Law School for the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. It looks at atrocities, the law’s ability to address genocide, and our capacity to be either "bystanders" or "up-standers."

LIZ LERMAN DANCE EXCHANGE Sat/18-Sun/19, 8 p.m., $28-$36. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org/arts

In a Dream

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REVIEW Jeremiah Zagar’s feature has a subject that’s not just close to home, it’s in his home: father Isaiah is an eccentric artist who’s created extraordinary mosaics covering myriad walls, rooms, and several entire buildings in Philadelphia. Julia, his wife of 43 years, views herself as the necessary "reality base" to his "crazy, self-absorbed but amiable … rare flower." Isaiah is a bit of an exhibitionist, his art a "journal of my life" that might easily embarrass family members less accustomed to his idiosyncracies. His past encompasses childhood molestation and institutionalization, while the present is imperiled by "delusions of grandeur." During the several years Jeremiah shot this documentary — at first intended as a simple tribute to a very creative parent — Isaiah upset the family’s long-term yet still very delicate balance by springing a major crisis. On top of that, the filmmaker’s brother moves back in, his marriage collapsed and substance-abuse problems evident to all. The Zagars aren’t anybody’s idea of a standard-issue nuclear unit, but this quietly engaging portrait transcends train-wreck fascination because for all their quirks, they are functional — close, loving, and supportive. Also, because Isaiah’s epic mosaics of tile, paint, and embedded detritus are so remarkable, you’ll want to book the next flight to Philly to see them first-hand.

IN A DREAM opens Fri/17 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

Late of the Pier

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PREVIEW Late of the Pier is catchy while still retaining an essential core of flighty, fidgety weirdness. With its askew harmonics, squelchy synths, and wildly off-key vocals, Fantasy Black Channel (Parlophone, 2008) marks the big label debut of a band bent on peddling an oddball sound to the masses, to say nothing of a kitschy aesthetic. The album’s cover presents a haphazard assortment of drums, kits, cords, and keyboards scattered atop outcroppings of granite — an apt visual for the band’s chaotic approach. Some tracks suggest a recorder switched to on-mode at the site of a train wreck, while others rescue some order from the mayhem. Discerning musical adherents will peg the group as contemporaries of outfits like Metronomy, Hot Chip, and Klaxons. This quartet is inventive and almost extreme in how far they’re willing to take their sprawling multipart sagas, instrumental transitions and elaborate glam guitar breakdowns. Plain-jane indie rock outfits have nothing on them.

Late of the Pier hail from Castle Donington, London, where they formed in 2004. Frequent nightclub fixtures and the toast of a large teenage fanbase, the group was picked up by a few small record labels before landing a slot on one of French dance it-label Kitsune Maison’s annual compilations. Fantasy Black Channel is produced by electro DJ Erol Alkan, who brings his pedigree as a remixer (Mylo, Chemical Brothers, and Digitalism) to the recording’s sound. Now that its spunky electro-rock numbers have been rapturously received by the oft-smitten British music press, the band is setting its sights on the U.S. We should like what we hear: Late of the Pier’s fingerpainted audio tableaus add some slapdash vitality to the musical orthodoxies of today.

LATE OF THE PIER at Popscene. Thurs/16, 9 p.m.-2 a.m, $13 (advance). 330 Ritch, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 541-9574, www.popscene-sf.com

Dan Deacon

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PREVIEW I first saw Dan Deacon perform at Oberlin College’s venue the ‘Sco, a den of nascent creativity that eventually brought me to a city sometimes referred to by the same three-letter abbreviation. Deacon was there, balding and bearded, his glasses taped to his head, his muffin-top iced by a bright pink T. He set up his mad scientist’s table of electronics in the audience’s usual domain. Different colored cords sprang out in every direction and there were multiple mics for his one-man show. Lit by a neon green skull, Deacon began stretching, then implored the audience to stretch. They did.

Not only did we all stretch with Deacon, we danced with Deacon. For a generation that has been taught that to move is to be judged — or whatever excuse keeps scenesters so static — such an act is similar to the miracle of the Virgin Mary getting pregos. Deacon’s inhibition-less philosophy was infectious: not only were the undergrads dancing, they were willing to participate in a high-five conga line and compete in a dance-off.

Although the complexities of Deacon’s music become clearer when heard on an iPod, the experience verges on seizure-inducing. Live, the same music becomes hypnotic. Like his earlier work, Deacon’s newest album Bromst (Carpark) is as much a singular composition as a collection of tracks, which should make it exhilarating to encounter. In concert, he has arranged for it to be played by a 15-piece ensemble. Now that he’s decidedly bigger — in band, popularity, and girth — it’s hard to predict how the intimacy and audience participation aspects of his performance will be affected. But it is sure to be a blast. And a bromst. (Deacon said he made up the word for his album title because it doesn’t have a meaning and he likes the way it sounds.)

DAN DEACON With Future Islands and Teeth Mountain. Thurs/23, 9 p.m., $13. Great American Music Hall. 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

Editor’s Notes

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

In 1984, journalists Milton Moskowitz and Robert Levering published a landmark book called The 100 Best Places to Work for in America. I didn’t want to work for any of them. The list is updated every year through the San Francisco-based Great Places to Work Institute, and it runs in Fortune.

The institute looks at things like pay, benefits, and perks, as well as at trust and culture: Does management accept input freely? Are workers in involved in key decisions? Do people feel part of a team? All of these are important factors in a workplace.

But the selection process doesn’t look at what the company actually does.

For example, Texas Instruments is on the list. It’s also a defense contractor that makes precision-guided weapons systems. You know, bombs. Starbucks — the voracious chain that drives out small local coffee shops — is on the list. So is Whole Foods and Microsoft and Goldman Sachs.

I’m not saying that Levering, who runs the institute, isn’t doing good work. But when you talk about great places to work these days, I think you also should be talking about places that have a positive impact on the environment.

The world is facing two cataclysmic crises these days. The planet is melting down. So is the economy. The only way we’re going to fix both is to look at economic development that is also environmental development. And a lot of it is going to happen in cities.

Real sustainable development includes green jobs (Bay Area activist Van Jones is bringing that agenda to the White House) — and a commitment to preserving locally-owned, independent businesses and a diverse community.

Those aren’t conflicting goals, they’re complimentary. But looking only at one piece of the puzzle — how many jobs we create, or how nice they are — isn’t going to get us where we need to go. *

Gavin Newsom’s Earth Day

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EDITORIAL Here’s a snapshot of the state of green San Francisco, as we approach Earth Day 2009:

• San Francisco ought to be getting $18 million a year for energy-efficiency programs, but the money instead goes to Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which is wasting half of it.

•Mayor Gavin Newsom went to Washington, D.C. to participate in a Newsweek panel on the environment and called for a transformation of the American automotive industry just a few days after the city’s transportation agency decided to cut $56 million out of Muni, increase transit fares by $30 million — and hike fees for car parking by just $11 million.

•The city stands to get millions in federal stimulus money for green jobs — but nobody knows how many jobs the money will create, where they will come from, or who will get them.

This doesn’t seem the best way for one of the most liberal cities in America to respond to the environmental and economic crisis.

As Rebecca Bowe reports on page 10, PG&E is managing part of a multibillion dollar program aimed at cutting electricity demand. It’s a laudable goal — in fact, the cheapest way to reduce the use of fossil fuels and dirty power is to use less in the first place.

But the private utilities are a bad fit for any program that seeks to cut demand. Every year PG&E tells Wall Street how it expects to grow — and since the company’s product is electricity and natural gas, that means PG&E has no incentive at all to shrink its market. Not surprisingly, the giant utility has done a crappy job of running the program, failing to meet even its modest goals.

But state law allows cities to apply to run the local programs themselves — and data from across California show that public sector, non-utility programs do a far better job of lowering electricity use. So why isn’t San Francisco applying for that money? Because the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission thinks it’s "premature."

That’s crazy — the money could create local green jobs, reduce energy demand, and cut PG&E waste. It’s an obvious choice, and the supervisors should pass a resolution directing the PUC to take on this program.

The supervisors no longer have control over Muni fare hikes, but when they examine the city budget, they should take a hard look at what Newsom’s transit planners are doing. Cutting bus service during a recession, when low-cost transportation is needed more than ever, is generally a bad idea. So is raising Muni fares. Why are the car drivers, who are generally richer (and many of whom are commuters from wealthier suburbs) getting off so cheap?

The supervisors also need to be monitoring closely the federal stimulus money and the creation of green jobs. The single most important thing San Francisco can be doing right now is creating jobs in the green economy. In fact, there ought to be a city loan fund just for local green-collar startups. Instead, while Newsom is prancing around the country running for governor, his staff seems flummoxed by the whole process. The city needs a goal — say, 5,000 new green-collar jobs for unemployed San Franciscans in the next five years — a plan to create them, and a program to use the available federal money.

Newsom seems to have plenty of ideas for Detroit. We’d love to see him start to focus on San Francisco. *

No balance in two-year budget

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OPINION There’s no more important decision made by the Board of Supervisors than that of the city’s annual budget. Every year the board sets the city’s priorities by appropriating more than $6 billion. In good economic times, the board uses the budget process to set new policy directions for San Francisco. In bad times, the annual budget is the board’s only real chance to save vital services by making targeted appropriations while strategically reducing other parts of the budget.

That’s why a charter amendment to have only biannual budgeting is a bad idea.

The fact that a two-year budget is being pushed by the Newsom administration and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce should give progressives pause. Unfortunately, downtown forces have successfully used the worst budget year ever to woo some progressive budget stakeholders.

Their argument sounds good on its face. A multiyear budget would help smooth out the highs and lows, requiring City Hall to deal with pending fiscal emergencies sooner. It would also mean every other year off from having to spend all that energy turning people out to endless budget meetings and lobbying to save the programs we care about.

But the way a two-year budget would actually play out would mean that progressive budget stakeholders would have only half the opportunities for budget input through the generally more responsive Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, the Mayor’s Office would be able to centralize more power without having to get annual approvals from the board. In other words, a two-year budget would make the Office of Mayor even more insulated from the public and members of the board on the decisions that affect us the most.

Additionally, two-year budgets would be unwieldy and inaccurate. Over the past nine years of out-year projections by the Controller’s Office, the average difference between the projected and actual surplus or deficit was nearly $250 million. For example, last year the controller estimated our 2009-10 budget deficit would be about $46 million. This year it’s pegged at $438 million. Of course, as our real revenue data comes in, this number will surely change again. Unfortunately, we won’t know how much revenue we received for this upcoming budget year until we are a month or two into the following fiscal year.

There are serious flaws with our annual budget process. In difficult years, the mayor has too much unchecked power to make mid-year budget changes. Earlier this year, Mayor Gavin Newsom enacted a $118 million budget package that included tens of millions in health and human service cuts and more than 400 layoffs without approval of the Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, when a majority of board members voted to cut pork from the mayor’s budget, he was able to avert that cut with his veto pen.

Leaving the decision about millions of dollars’ worth of service cuts in the middle of the year turns the democratic budget process — with checks and balances between the mayor and board — on its head. Correcting this problem with the current budget process would surely be a worthwhile effort.

Meanwhile, we must stay focused on this year’s budget process to preserve as many of the vital services as we can. *

Sup. Chris Daly represents District 6. Ed Kinchley is a labor activist.

 

SF Weekly’s deadbeat dad

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The company that owns SF Weekly is positioning itself to become the greatest deadbeat in the history of the alternative press.

Village Voice Media, the 16-paper chain, owes the Bay Guardian close to $20 million as the result of a year-old jury verdict in a predatory-pricing lawsuit.

After a six-week trial in the spring of 2008, the jury found that the Weekly had intentionally sold ads below cost over a period of years, losing millions in the process, in an effort to put the locally owned competitor out of business.

But while the case is on appeal, VVM hasn’t posted an appeal bond — that is, a guarantee that the defendant will pay up after the appeals are over. That’s highly unusual for a business that isn’t claiming insolvency – and since there’s no bond, the Guardian is free to start collecting the money.

However, the Guardian lawyers have gotten a clear message from VVM’s legal team in a variety of communications over the past months. In a July 18, 2008 legal filings and subsequent disclosures, VVM claims that it owes a consortium of banks, led by the Bank of Montreal, $92 million — and that those banks have a prior claim on all of the company’s assets.

That suggests that the entire chain is worth less than $92 million — something that stretches credibility even in these difficult economic times. In 2007, the company listed assets of $191 million, documents presented during the trial showed.

If the current claim is true, then VVM has lost more than half its value in just two years and is technically underwater, much like the homeowners whose mortgages exceed the value of their property.

The VVM lawyers are also claiming that the company’s assets are set up in such a way that the Guardian will never be able to reach the money.

That leaves the largest alternative newspaper publisher in America in the remarkable position of saying that it’s prepared to duck a legitimate debt, to defy a jury and court order and hide its assets — like a media version of Bernard Madoff.

Asset-protection is a booming area of law, and in some cases, it’s considered entirely appropriate and ethical. Plenty of businesses — and increasingly, surgeons, dentists and others subject to a high risk of lawsuits — set up subsidiary companies, limited liability companies and other corporate structures to protect them from potential creditors.

But creating such a scheme to avoid paying a valid debt, particularly a court judgment, is frowned on both by legal experts and courts.

“It is never ethical to devise or implement a scheme to deprive a legitimate creditor of access to your assets,” Marjorie Jobe, an El Paso, Texas business litigation attorney and an expert on asset protection, told us by email. “It is never ethical not to pay or satisfy a legitimate debt.”

Adds Jay Adkisson, a Newport Beach lawyer and the author of a leading book on asset-protection: “Typically, it is considered unethical to transfer assets to harm a legitimate creditor.”

There are, experts point out, asset-protection programs that are both legal and ethical — and while Jacob Stein, a Los Angeles attorney who lectures regularly on the topic, told us there’s no “bright line,” it typically depends on the timing.

“If a business has a legitimate reason for setting up an asset-protection plan, that’s entirely proper,” Stein told us. “But if it’s done after a judgment is in place, it’s not a good idea.”

Added Jobe: “the asset protection plan needs to be deliberate and not aimed at only one creditor.”

At this point, only VVM executives and their lawyers and bankers know for sure when the asset-protection scheme was devised. The Guardian‘s legal action began in 2002; if the program had been in place prior to that, it would be easier to defend. But if money is moved out of a company to frustrate a creditor, that can run afoul of laws that govern improper transfers.

“If you do something to stiff your creditors, the fraudulent transfer laws come into play,” Adkisson said.

When companies have debt that exceeds their ability to pay, a typical option is bankruptcy – that’s what more than 70 asbestos companies have done in the United States. Bankruptcy isn’t perfect for creditors, and there’s a lot of controversy over the practice, but at least it allows a court to supervise a plan to pay some of the debt. And in a bankruptcy, the shareholders of a corporation are wiped out.

In this case, VVM is placing itself in a strange and potentially perilous situation. The company is saying that it’s protected from any judgments, and thus from any creditors — meaning that any vendors, suppliers, contractors or other creditors that VVM decides to stiff would have no easy legal recourse.

But there’s no bankruptcy and as far as we know, the company is paying its other debts. So VVM is apparently seeking to stiff a single creditor – which in itself is a legal issue — and is doing so while the shareholders, including those who participated in an illegal predatory pricing scheme, pay no penalty at all.

The ultimate problem with these schemes is that, in the long run, they don’t always work. “There are very few ways to do this that are bulletproof,” Stein, who creates asset-protection programs for a living, explained. Instead, the experts tend to agree, asset-protection is mostly about delaying justice — it’s a way to make it expensive and time-consuming for a creditor to get to the money. It’s a legal game, a tactic to frustrate a less-well-funded individual or company by dragging the legal issues out even further.

“It’s my perspective that if a debtor has money, there’s a way to get to it,” Richard Goldstein, a lawyer and expert in collections, told us. And, of course, the Guardian is mounting an aggressive collection effort.

It’s quite a length to go to in an effort to avoid paying a competitor who was harmed by illegal pricing and predatory competition. “In the end,” Goldstein said, “there are only two ways to avoid a judgment. You can have no assets at all, or you can undermine your own business and your own company to make it hard for someone to collect a debt.”

Calls to the Bank of Bank of Montreal, were not returned by press time. However, VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey posted a long response to our written questions on SF Weeky’s blog.

In between insults, he responded — sort of — to a few points we raised.

He said, for example:

“The case is on appeal. You are not entitled to a penny.”

That’s wrong. By law, if VVM had posted an appeal bond, The Guardian would be unable to collect until the appeals had run their course. Of course, a bond would guarantee that the Guardian ultimately would get the money if the verdict were upheld.

With no bond posted, the Guardian has every legal right to begin collecting the judgment.

Lacey states that “I’m not going to discuss our banking relationship with a miscreant who makes up slander. Perhaps your lawyers can enlighten you. (But if your lawyers have led you into a blind alley, do you really trust their insight?)”

Interesting comment, considering that our lawyers — Ralph Alldredge, Richard Hill and E. Craig Moody — not only won the case, in front of a jury, but won a California Lawyers of the Year award from California Lawyer magazine for the case, which the magazine called one of the most important lawsuits of the year.

Most of the rest of his statement is a rehash of the claims VVM threw out in court — all of which were proven false. The final word on those claims came from a jury of 12 San Franciscans, who agreed unanimously that Lacey’s company had engaged in illegal predatory pricing and awarded the Guardian damages.

PS: The other banks in the consortium led by Bank of Montreal are BNP Paribus, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Rabobank, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and Westlb AG. If we hear from any of them we’ll let you know.

Trip at the ‘Brain’

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CULT HORROR "I am a genre terrorist," legendary Italian "B" filmmaker Lucio Fulci professes in an interview on the freshly released two-disc edition of his 1990 film Cat in the Brain (Grindhouse). "I perform my commercial deflagration, then I get bored and move on." Likely aware of his more successful compatriot Dario Argento’s moniker, the "Italian Hitchcock," perhaps the late Fulci fancied himself as a sort of Italian Howard Hawks with mild frontal lobe damage: whimsically genre-tripping (comedies in the ’50s, westerns in the ’60s, thrillers in the ’70s) while mastering and exploding conventions. But this would be something of a fanciful delusion. Fulci’s mid-career adoption of giallo, the "spaghetti horror" he helped pioneer and perfect, trapped him in an almost literal genre hell of his own making. With the success of the breakout Zombie (1979), blood-and-gore-thirsty fanboys cried out for more, and Fulci, eager for the commercial success that mostly had eluded him to that point, demurred.

It’s fitting then, that the hallucinatory Cat in the Brain would star Fulci as himself, a director tortured to the point of madness by brutal, graphic visions of his past and current productions: limbs hacked off with chainsaws, numerous decapitations, heads cooking in microwave ovens, and generally just a lot of gorings, stabbings, slicings, slittings, flayings, and disembowelings. When a psychiatrist suggests he is suffering from an identity crisis due to work stress, Fulci objects, "If I made films about love no one would buy a ticket."

But don’t assume Cat in the Brain is Fulci’s attempt to drive the final nail in giallo‘s coffin, much as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007) tried (and failed) to do to its 21st-century offspring, torture porn. It’s certainly bad enough to do so: Fulci’s acting is painfully garish, the edit (featuring footage cobbled from his past films) is out to lunch, and the atypically pedestrian score is worthy of the worst MacGyver episode. But much of Cat‘s perverse charm, like much of giallo, comes from its chainsaw-rough edges. Fulci’s meta conceit may be more Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (a 1994 release he derided as a rip-off) than 8 1/2 (1963), but it’s still satisfying. In the end he has perpetrated a cinematic rope-a-dope, a "statement of innocence in the form of a joke," as his journalist daughter writes in the DVD’s liner notes. The maestro of splatter held an abiding affection for the genre after all, despite his alter ego’s haunted visions. Fulci’s messy violence and gore might not have always been in the best of taste, but for the man himself, they set the stage for an awful lot of good, clean fun.

El Paso passages

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

At the poetic heart of acclaimed playwright Octavio Solis’s aching, wild, and poignant new drama, Lydia — receiving a beautifully cast and memorable West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company under the direction of MTC’s Jasson Minadakis — is a mysterious connection between two very differently challenged and empowered young women: the severely brain-damaged Ceci Flores (Gloria Garayua) and her family’s new undocumented Mexican maid, Lydia (Adriana Gaviria). The house they live in, along with Ceci’s sharp and sensitive younger brother Misha (David Pintado) and her upbeat but overworked mother Rosa (Wilma Bonet), also comes stalked by some serious, restlessly conflicted, and grieving machismo — aloof yet violent patriarch Claudio (Luis Saguar); renegade big brother and guilt-ridden shit-kicker Rene (Lakin Valdez); and hunky first cousin Alvaro (Elias Escobedo), a newly discharged Vietnam vet turned border patrol agent. But leave it to Solis to put the real muscle in the most compromised of female bodies.

Ceci, played with a deft physical dynamism by Garayua, is the play’s vivacious narrator. When not addressing us in physically fluid gestures and urgently poetical language from some residual place inside her own battered head, she lies at the front of the stage in the center of her family’s living room, her quaking body a kind of Richter scale of emotional energy registering every molecule of feeling in the tumult around her. She was transformed into this state two years earlier, on the eve of a happier transformation, her quinceañera, after a mysterious car accident that still eats away at her family, especially her father, and older brother Rene, who was at the wheel.

The other motive force, Lydia, arrives with her own near-death experience behind her, something left purposely vague but giving her presence a sense of destiny, especially when it becomes clear that she alone can understand and speak for the seemingly vegetative Ceci. Lydia is also an unexpected balm to the suffering Claudio and a seminal inspiration to the burgeoning poet in Misha. Meanwhile the threat of deportation hangs over her in the person of the zealously authoritarian Alvaro. Before the end, Lydia will become the catalyst for still one more startling transformation, amid joyful memories and torturous longing associated with childhood play and flowering sexuality among the siblings and their cousin.

San Francisco’s Solis is one of the theater’s great poets of the border, in senses both banally specific and relentlessly far-reaching. Like many of his plays (including Bethlehem, Santos y Santos, and El Otro), Lydia is set just this side of the geopolitical divide between Mexico and the United States, where no lines physical, social, or otherwise actually divide people very neatly — but rather messily and haphazardly. The doubling and blurring of identities among his characters is one of Solis’s tried-and-true dramatic avenues into this reality, this border condition, a world forever straddling and negotiating two others to which it can never wholly belong. It’s the great paradoxical beauty of his work that in its concrete social and cultural details, hilariously accessible yet indigenous humor, and the sheer lyricism it inspires, this uniquely unsettled world gathers universal force and significance.

LYDIA

Through Sun/12, see stage listings for schedule, $20–$51

Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley

(415) 388-5208

www.marintheater.org

Dance cocktail

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If you asked a member of the dozens of ethnic dance groups that make their home in the Bay Area (103 of them auditioned in January for the yearly San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival) why they are willing to rehearse many hours and perform for little or no money, they’ll tell you that they like the dances. But of almost equal importance is the sense of community these ensembles create. No doubt nostalgia for a better and simpler world may be factors as well. Even so, it’s the sense of being with people who share similar values that creates powerful bonds.

As in any other tight-knit community, however, in order to thrive you need to fit in. In ethnic, or as they are called these days, world dances, there is often not much room for individual expression. What little there is sprouts from within prescribed parameters. Yet some dancers reach beyond these boundaries. Perhaps, as does Wan-Chao Chang, they love Indonesian and modern dance. Ramon Ramos Alayo is the Bay Area’s best Afro-Cuban dancer, but he takes his choreography well beyond the traditional modes. What if you want to combine flamenco and tango? "There is no place for us — we don’t fit into established categories," says Holly Shaw, who is trained in flamenco as well as Middle Eastern, Romani, Balinese, and a slew of other styles. "So we perform in coffee houses and private homes."

To give space to these "homeless" artists, Shaw two years ago started "Eve’s Elixir," which highlights contemporary choreographers of world dance. They performed at the open-minded CounterPULSE in the Mission District. For its second incarnation, a grant from the Fort Mason Foundation’s In Performance series enables the young enterprise to move into the dance-friendly Cowell Theater.

"EVE’S ELIXIR: EYES OF EVE"

Fri/10-Sat/11, 7 p.m., $25

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 345-7575, www.eveselixir.net

Victory lap

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

When Special One of the Conscious Daughters raps, "And I know all my folks been patient for this shit" on the Oakland female duo’s new track "A Moment In Rhyme," she ain’t kidding. It’s been 13 long years since she and partner-in-rhyme CMG released their last album, 1996’s Gamers (Priority). So long gone were the previously high profile pair that in 2007 Nas invited the Daughters, along with other forgotten Left Coast vets such as Kam, King Tee, and Threat, to appear on his homage track "Where Are They Now (West Coast Remix)."

The Nutcracker Suite, released in February on longtime associate Paris’ Guerrilla Funk label, is Conscious Daughters’ third album in 16 years. It’s a refreshing return to form for the female duo, who burst onto the national rap scene with 1993’s Ear To The Street (Priority), led by the Paris-produced, funk-fueled riding anthem "Somethin’ to Ride To (Fonky Expedition)." Striking a perfect balance between political hip-hop and street mobbin’ music, Special One and CMG have always won over discriminating rap fans.

"You can call it what you want — we just back," laughs an unfazed Special One, when asked if the new album and upcoming performances should be called a comeback. "It’s a comeback to everybody else, but we never went anywhere," adds CMG. "We been recording and making music the whole time."

The Conscious Daughters pick up right where they left off with The Nutcracker Suite, which includes production by Paris, Rick Ross, One Drop Scott, Fred White, and newcomer Steven King. The album opens with the head-nodding hard funk of "Not Bad But Good," an updated riding track about "the Town" (Oakland). But a few tracks later it veers into thought-provoking territory, with songs that tackle topics head-on from a female perspective. Domestic abuse and California’s spiraling incarceration rates are on the lyrical agenda. "And Arnold keeps building these correctional facilities for youth, women, and crooks and thieves with disabilities," Special One raps in the song "Issues."

Having spent a short stint behind bars herself ("for pot") Special One speaks from first-hand experience. "There’s women, their grandmothers, their aunties, mothers, nieces, and sisters in the penitentiary, just like there are men in the male penitentiary," she says.

One of the new album’s more poignant songs is "Dirty Little Secret," in which the duo urge domestic violence victims to "Get the hell up out that situation before you get killed."

"We have friends who have gone through this for many years, best friends who won’t even tell you [about their abuse]," CMG says when discussing the emotionally-charged song, told in the first-person voice of an angry victim who fights back. "Even though our song is pretty deep about getting this guy back, we are saying what a lot of women want to actually do, and helping them get their frustrations out by listening to our song."

In practice, as well as in their lyrics, Conscious Daughters demonstrate solidarity for their sisters: Nutcracker Suite features cameos from several Bay Area female hip-hop talents, including Mystic, Marvaless, and Goldee the Murderist, whose death last summer from a blood disease was sudden and tragic. Special One says that it’s important for females in hip-hop to look out for one another, since they already have the chips stacked against them. "It’s always harder for women," she notes, "Most female rappers have to balance a career and their family."

Another longtime fellow East Bay female hip-hop talent, DJ Pam the Funkstress of the Coup, is joining Conscious Daughters when they embark on a national tour later this year. (Official details — likely involving Paris, Talib Kweli, Pete Rock, and others — will be announced at guerrillafunk.com).

After so many years away, CMG and Special One heartily embrace the work ahead. "We love challenges, and we’re going to have to get out there and do everything all over again now," says CMG.

"It’s a blessing, and we’re confident in our talents," adds Special One.

www.myspace.com/consciousdaughters

www.guerrillafunk.com

The passion of Agnes

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Director commentaries are de rigueur in the DVD age, but few filmmakers possess the élan to warrant a feature length auto-exegesis. Agnès Varda is one, and her most recent memory piece — she claims it’s her last — cheerfully dissolves the boundaries between memoir, retrospective, and installation. The film caps the Pacific Film Archive’s month-long series, "Agnès Varda: Cinécriture," and faithful attendees will be rewarded by its recollections of earlier works from La Pointe Courte (1954) to The Gleaners and I (2000). The Beaches of Agnès begins with the 80-year old Varda spryly instructing her devoted assistants. These are people willing to enter a reverie on the placement of various mirrors. "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes," she explains of her motivation for filmmaking, before setting off on an unclassifiable daisy chain of reenactment and reminiscence. The film moves at the leisurely pace of the flaneur’s walk, the better to relish Varda’s joie de vivre and sweet bawdiness. Where to begin? With her color-bending bowl cut or Chris Marker’s grinning cat cameos? With the ephemera of Varda’s innumerable home movies or her defense of the so-called "Manifesto of the 343 Bitches"? With the many things she adores — blurry foregrounds, ancient frescoes, heart-shaped potatoes, neighbors — or her W.G. Sebald-like resuscitation of photographs? "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, referring to her great love, Jacques Demy. Their life together loops Beaches with enough beautiful images to warrant several viewings. A must.

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS

Fri/10, 8:40 p.m.; Sat/11, 6 p.m., $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Diamond in the rough

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Co-writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made their feature debut in 2006 with Half Nelson, a movie with an iffy concept — an at-risk Brooklyn middle school student discovers her teacher is a part-time crackhead but they become best buds anyway — somehow rendered utterly plausible. That same keen sense of atmospheric and character detail, as well as resistance to sensationalism or cliché, is on display again in their new film, Sugar. The film has taken its time getting to theaters since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival more than a year ago, but it’s likely to be one of the best films of 2009, as it certainly would have been of 2008.

Sugar is also possibly the best narrative film ever about the world of pro baseball, and that’s an opinion lifted from people who care a lot more about America’s pastime than me. It may not have the sentimental or fantasy appeal of 1988’s Bull Durham, 1989’s Field of Dreams, 1984’s The Natural, etc., but as with Half Nelson, Boden and Fleck create something that’s at last deeply satisfying, though their happy ending isn’t at all one you (or the protagonist) might’ve planned two hours earlier.

Here we have baseball, football, and basketball as rivals, but in the Dominican Republic there’s just baseball, a national obsession as well as major export. There are more Dominicans in Major League Baseball than any other offshore population. For everyone who reaches that status, there are umpteen contenders, their aspirations often fueled by a desire to raise themselves and family members above the poverty line. That’s the case for Miguel (Algenis Perez Soto), a coolly self-possessed 19-year-old whose big eyes are always watchful and guarded, suggesting a mind sharply focused on advancement despite his low-key demeanor. He’s called Sugar because, he brags, "I’m sweet with the ladies" — but more seriously, "I’ve got the sweetest knuckle curve you’ve ever seen." His hopes of breaking into the majors are everybody’s, from his girlfriend and mother to the hometown friends who’ll live vicariously through his success.

His pitching skills get him plucked from Boca Chica baseball academy to a cattle-call camp in Phoenix where a lot of other Dominicans await their big chance — or discover it will never come. Sugar, however, gets hand-picked for the minor league Kansas City Knights where, after a fumbling start, he looks like star material.

But as the dream grows nearer, so does Sugar’s evolving sense of insecurity and isolation. He’s absorbed almost no English, so coaching instructions, teammate camaraderie, and even restaurant ordering remain blank mysteries. He’s housed with a well-meaning farm family whose Presbyterian pieties are equally foreign (despite his own crucifix-kissing before each game). When their corn-fed granddaughter sends mixed signals his way — seemingly more interested in spreading salvation than locking lips — our sexually experienced protagonist can only read her behavior as duplicitous. Having left school at 16, he’s intimidated by teammates like Brad (Andre Holland), a million-dollar draftee who’s always got his Stanford degree to fall back on.

Boden and Fleck did their research and then some. To their further credit, it’s all so fully integrated Sugar feels more verité than instructive. Like the performance of Soto (who’d never acted before, and might not again), the film doesn’t outline its agenda or emotions — indeed, some might find it a little too internalized and averse to melodrama. Yet it does exert a spell, building almost unnoticeably until the cumulative effect quietly exhilarates. Among so many recent movies about immigrants pursuing the elusive American Dream, Sugar is a rare upbeat one, partly because it allows that the dream might best be realized when one settles for less than it first promised.

SUGAR opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Morality

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le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

Morality

CHEAP EATS Intoxicated by how pretty flowers are in the dark and wowed by the sheer size of the lit TVs in all my neighbors’ windows, I accidentally hit my head on a tree. Hard. The rest of my life is going to be a dream.

Here’s the part where Earl Butter sends a messenger pigeon saying he’s sick, but not sick, and will be sitting home and crying unless anyone comes over and drinks and eats vegetables with him.

Well, I have no particular plans for the evening. I was planning to stay home and cry, myself, so I tell Earl Butter’s bird to tell Earl Butter I’ll be right over. If I don’t hit my head too hard on too many trees, walking to BART.

Which I didn’t. One tree. Hard, but not hard enough to make my life much more than dreamy. What I failed to account for was all the distractions that would bonk and bewitch me on the other side of the pond, walking from BART to Earl Butter’s. Namely, and in no particular order: Pizzeria, the Mission’s first (that I know of) stone oven pizza, good ol’ Good Vibrations, and of course New Yorker’s buffalo wings because I needed some lube.

Butter and hot sauce, babe. That’s what I’m made of.

Buffalo wings remind me of Earl Butter, who got made in upstate New York and introduced me to buffalo wings and bowling as a way of life.

But a friend of a friend of mine died yesterday of either cancer or knife wounds. She had cancer and then got mugged and stabbed, see, and then died in her sleep after she got out of the hospital, hard to say why. So my friend wrote to me, even though I never knew her friend, and it was like an obituary.

"She loved camp comedians, naughty jokes, show tunes, Ireland, bubble baths, and take-out curry," my friend said of her friend. She said she wished she had a blog because she finds herself wanting to talk and write about her deceased pal. A lot.

And a light went on over my head. It’s rare that you get to do something concrete for a friend in need. But the thing is that I kind of do have a blog, or something very much like one. So why don’t I make myself useful for a change and write about my friend’s friend for her, a lot, in this restaurant review?

Her name was Mandy. She died at home, at night, in bed with her long-distance girlfriend Kristen, who had come that day from Kansas City to be with her, to help her get well.

Mandy was a psych nurse and sometimes kept baby hedgehogs under a heat lamp in her guest room, according to her friend (my friend), "rising during the night to bottle feed them." She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, yet had eight godchildren. Think about it. So whoever stabbed her stabbed someone who didn’t have any brothers or sisters, yet had eight godchildren and nursed both baby hedgehogs and human head cases.

Plus there’s the take-out curry factor. Nothing pokes the unfunny bone like an extinguished hankering for curry. Or the smell of paint. I could go on and on, on my friend’s behalf.

But I know a lot of my readers are muggers, so I’ll be succinct: If you take anything at all from this important restaurant review, take this: stop stabbing people, you fucking morons. We’re all dying anyway, of breast cancer and heart disease, and we don’t need knife wounds on top of it all, so fuck the fuck off. If you lack the skill or finesse to eke a living or pick a pocket cleanly, turn the knife inward and cut your gutless bowels out.

For those of you who aren’t muggers, your moral is quite different. When your friend sends a messenger pigeon, and sometimes even if they don’t, go to them. Bring lube, and/or vodka. Bring buffalo wings. Bring pizza.

Yes, Pizzeria has a dumb name, and a posh (and therefore empty) interior. But its pizza has that nice, thin, stone oven crispness. Which I so so so so love.

My friend’s friend Mandy did not like pizza.

PIZZERIA

Tue.–Thu., 3 p.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., noon–11:30 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m.

659 Valencia, SF

(415) 701-7492

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

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