Volume 44 [2009–10]

Splattergories

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Splattergories

FILM FESTIVAL Now in its seventh year, San Francisco’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival aims to draw fans of fantastical and shocking cinema into the Roxie and Viz theaters for its slate of 32 films. Spanning horror, science fiction, and fantasy, Hole Head features films from Singapore to Serbia, including 10 flicks from Japan.

Despite this cultural eclecticism, there is one theme that seems to crop up throughout the program: homage. A surprising number of these films are primarily interested in referencing or commenting on formative genre pictures that came before.

Of course, such an approach to genre filmmaking need not be retrograde. When it works, as in the hilarious kaiju pastiche Death Kappa, there’s no question about why someone would want to both mock and commemorate the storied run of man-in-suit monster movies. Kappa brings out the humor in an already existing template, mixing shades of H.P. Lovecraft and E.T. (1982) with Japanese folklore but ultimately ending up in the same place: city-smashing mayhem.

Among the Japanese selections is an assortment of gore films, weird fantasy-action movies entirely predicated on opportunities for spouting blood. These often feel like they’re in dialogue with themselves, lampooning older forms but also riffing on their own ridiculousness. RoboGeisha plays like a live-action cartoon, where laws of logic and good taste don’t apply and the best way to deal with a terrorist is two tempura shrimp to the eyes. Not gory but similarly frenetic is shock auteur Takashi Miike’s latest, an unexpectedly light adaptation of a children’s anime series called Yatterman, which is literally a live-action cartoon as well as a 1970s throwback.

Sometimes, though, the tribute-obsession can seem like wallowing. Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, blessed with an absurd title and the exotic appeal of being an Icelandic horror film, is basically a by-the-numbers slasher that retreads The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and others to the point that its shocks are predictable.

Many other subgenres are represented, from torture porn to luchador action, but one of the festival’s highlights dwells outside any such bracket. Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s metaphysical fantasy Symbol documents the travails of a man inexplicably trapped in a mysteriously interactive white room. It sometimes feels like a feature-length comedy sketch, governed by certain rules or patterns that drive its simple but ultimately cosmic plot. Constrained though it may be, it makes no concessions to genre and feels inspiringly new as a result.

Regardless of a few staid entries, such a forum for genre cinema is absolutely crucial, particularly on such an international scale. Even if we need another zombie reinterpretation like we need a hole in the head, Another Hole in the Head will hopefully be with us well into the future.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD FILM FESTIVAL

July 8–29, $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF

Viz Cinema, New People, 1746 Post, SF

www.sfindie.com

 

Ariel, part 2: Think Pink!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Ariel, part 2: Think Pink!

MUSIC Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real Ariel Pink.

The Los Angeles musician’s first few 2004-06 releases on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label were the stuff of indie water cooler infamy, but they also collected recordings (2002’s House Arrest and Lover Boy; 2003’s Worn Copy) that Pink had made years before. It wasn’t until early 2009 that the world had the chance to hear any new output from the notoriously mysterious musician.

Until then, the talk about Pink largely focused on how serious he was — or wasn’t. Built from lengthy experimentation and goofy gimmicks, such as drum noises made with his armpits, his lo-fi music wasn’t just a byproduct of bedroom recording, it was a reimagining of 1970s and ’80s radio jingles and easy listening sounds. Jingles are disposable by definition, yet anyone familiar with some from the ’70s has to admit they are designed to remain in your brain. They were touchstones for the young Pink, and through a love for them, he picked up a knack for great hooks and memorable choruses.

Catchy though they may be, the repetitive nature of Pink’s early songs nonetheless made some listeners wonder whether he was just monkeying about and marketing lo-fi weirdness to those with nostalgic impulses. A sweeping ballad that might mark a poignant moment in a Sunday night made-for-TV tearjerker, “For Kate I Wait” is one of the best songs from his 2004 debut The Doldrums (Paw Tracks). But the damn thing does not need to be over four minutes long, considering it consists of a single idea: sentences that rhyme with the title.

On Pink’s new album Before Today (4AD), he takes the leap to a larger label, drops a lot of the lo-fi scuzz and delivers smoothly succinct pop songs. The lo-fi isn’t gone completely, but it is refined. And while his vocals remain muddy and hidden behind other sounds, half the fun is guessing just what he’s going on about. You can’t take the weird out of a man, and Pink has spent too many years purposely being strange for Before Today to suddenly strip him of all idiosyncrasy. Keen-eared listeners will pick out stream-of-consciousness mutterings like “Make me maternal, fertile woman/Make me menstrual, menopause man/Rape me, castrate me, make me gay/Lady, I’m a lady from today” on “Menopause Man,” and while the tongue-in-cheek imagery conveys to listeners that Pink is still in on his own joke, the album really shines when he manages to play it straight.

The cover art for Before Today’s chief single “Round and Round” may sport a lovingly drawn image of a man french-kissing a dog, but the track itself is so masterfully clean and structured that it transcends homage, becoming one of the year’s best songs. The gifted flair for a sound and a hook that made Pink’s early works so catchy is still there, but he switches up tempo and groove so many times that the composition never outstays its welcome despite its five-minute length. Likewise, “Can’t Hear My Eyes” is easy-listening heaven, with echoed vocals and sharp piano flourishes that recall the Alan Parsons Project’s more radio-friendly fare, like “I Wouldn’t Wanna Be Like You.” These particular songs stand out for their devotion to time and place, but all of Before Today is a sprawling run through the dollar bin at Amoeba Music, and Pink makes it his own by picking apart the best bits and reimagining 2010 as it might have been if Fleetwood Mac and Cherry Coke still ran the radio.

Pink is often casually tossed in the freak-folk category of knowing eccentrics, alongside the likes of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. Both Banhart and Newsom have recently taken a more classic approach to their respective crafts — to great success — while remaining true to their unique personalities. It’s likely that the freak-folk tag’s death and in turn these artist’s survival resides in the realization that weirdness doesn’t have to define you as an artist. Mark down 2010 as the year Pink decided to take his turn at bat, cutting the shit and showing the world Ariel Pink cooks with fire.

Riot awakening

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Riot awakening

arts@sfbg.com

FILM On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms “our Rosa Parks moment.”

And what damning facts they are. Stonewall Uprising is most effective in its first half, when it vividly conveys the demonization and oppression queers regularly faced at a time when homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois. In one excerpted clip from a 1966 CBS investigative report that I’m sure Mike Wallace would just as soon have stricken from the record, the news anchor states matter-of-factly: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous.” In another clip, a Florida detective sternly warns a gym full of middle school students that should any of them act on their same-sex desires, “you will be caught.”

Davis and Heilbroner’s contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV, journalists for the Village Voice whose offices were nearby, remember fearing for their lives when they found themselves barricaded inside the bar with the police. But it is former police deputy Seymour Pine who emerges as the night’s unofficial antihero, having ordered his officers to hold their fire to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Pine’s interview — as much a mea culpa as a performance of self-assurance by an elderly man that he is on the right side of history — is Stonewall Uprising‘s true revelation. 

STONEWALL UPRISING opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

Sicily unbound

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Sicily unbound

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Francesco Rosi once remarked to an interviewer, “A film is always a testimony of the age in which it lives.” It’s one thing to recognize this as an incipient truth and quite another to enact it as a code of filmmaking. Rosi’s films from the 1960s and ’70s evince the common roots of aesthetic and ethic, exhibiting what can only be called an ardor for the analysis of social conditions — both their mechanisms and mentalities. Though still relatively unsung among the major Italian auteurs, of which he is certainly one, a career-spanning retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive makes the case for the writer-director’s staying power.

Rosi studied law at school and film with the Italian directors of the 1940s and ’50s. In his own early features, he placed additional demands upon the conventions of neorealism. Putting aside the tempting notion that the camera will discover a transcendent truth if only stripped of the artifices of professional actors and sets, Rosi’s films are concerned with inventing a public sphere for argument and questioning — this before the age of the Internet and 24-hour news.

Take Salvatore Giuliano (1961), his sophisticated dissembling of the tangled (and at that time recent) history of the eponymous gangster, a Robin Hood figure in the postwar Sicilian imagination who aided the area’s separatist movement. “He took from the rich and gave to the poor,” a local tells a bored reporter. When he finds out the newsman is from Rome, he adds, “What can you understand about Sicily?”

Rosi’s out-of-joint narration of events from before and after Giuliano’s death in 1950 takes at least a couple of viewings to puzzle together, and even then, much remains pointedly obscure. The film recalls Borges’ description of Citizen Kane (1941) as “a labyrinth without a center,” and, as such, contains an implicit disavowal of neorealist orthodoxy (if such a thing ever existed). If “reality” is transparent, why the confusing jumps in time? Why go to such lengths to keep Giuliano himself in the shadows? Why leave so much basic plot material unclear, from major events (the motivation behind Giuliano’s orchestration of a massacre of communists at Portella della Ginestro, for instance) to minor gestures (like when, at the end, one of Giuliano’s associates palms the bottle of medicine that has apparently just poisoned the bandit’s right-hand man)?

The answer has to do with Rosi’s desire to replace the “not knowing” of complacency with that of skepticism. The subject of the film is not Giuliano so much as the Sicilians who presume to know him. We begin with the bandit’s death, in Kane fashion, but even before the plot has insinuated a cover-up, Rosi visually undermines any easy sense of certitude. We watch the inspection of Giuliano’s prone corpse from several striking bird’s-eye-view shots, but soon discover these compositions are not as omniscient as we might first (complacently) assume. In fact, they represent the vantage point of the reporters hounding the carabinieri and citizens for a story quite separate from Rosi’s. Here the director insinuates how difficult it is to find your footing in the Sicilian situation. Taking aim at collusion, he formally imbricates us in its grip.

Rosi’s neorealism is one of provocation. He obsessively stages recent history in the actual locations in which it unfolded, employing eyewitnesses as themselves. Testimony is activated, not relegated to incidental afterthought. Even in later, more traditionally allegorical films like Three Brothers (1981), in which Rosi seems to move toward seeing political discourses as being channeled and contained by subjective experience, his visual and narrative designs mirror the macro controls at work in complex social systems. Watching Rosi’s work, we realize that the news lives inside us, whether we like it or not.

MODERNIST MASTER: THE CINEMA OF FRANCESCO ROSI

July 8-Aug 28, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

We are family

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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We are family

arts@sfbg.com

>>Read Louis Peitzman’s complete interview with director Lisa Chodolenko here

FILM In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn.

“I think we tried and I think we were somewhat successful in making it so that you don’t realize exactly what you’re watching, the subversiveness of what you’re seeing,” says writer-director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art). “I think we figured out a way for people to enter it, and that was really important for us.”

That blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes The Kids Are All Right such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema.

“I thought it was a very classic story,” Bening says, “other than that the women are gay.”

Cholodenko and Bening were both on hand in San Francisco to promote and speak about the film. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at The Kids Are All Right, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father (“the sperm donor”) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more problematic. Combine that with the film’s semiexplicit sexual content and a darkly comic, matter-of-fact script, and you’ve got a tougher sell.

“There were questions about the gay porn and about how much sexuality we were showing, but we felt like this is the fun of the film,” Cholodenko reflects. “It’s not going to be a multiplex film. But we hope it’s not going to be super-rarefied art house film.”

The fun Cholodenko mentions is the real strength of The Kids Are All Right, a movie that refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, the film is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor.

“To me, [the humor] is so important — and it’s harder,” Bening says. “That’s why more movies don’t have it. It’s because it’s harder. It’s much easier to write in an earnest way.”

That’s not to say that the film is insincere. Much of the humor is derived from the fact that it’s grounded in reality. The characters respond to their situation as real people do — and that’s far funnier than the broad, over-the-top reactions that often plague more mainstream comedies.

“We were really passionate about making it not politically correct and not sanctimonious,” Cholodenko explains. “As we went deeper into the drafts and moved along in the evolution of getting the film done, I really, really, really pushed for us to take whatever was potentially funny in there and just kick it up a notch.”

Besides — as Bening puts it — “I think if you’re trying to make an earnest movie about a lesbian couple with teenagers, whoa, what a nightmare that would be.” It’s not a message movie, but The Kids Are All Right may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed.

“It doesn’t ever have to go out and carry the banner, which is what great movies and great stories can do,” Bening notes. “You take an individual group of people, a specific little pod of people, and you try to tell their own personal stories as specifically as possible. Hopefully you get at something true and universal by doing that.”

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT opens Fri/9 in San Francisco.

Osteria Stellina

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Osteria Stellina

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If you think food Valhalla is the Ferry Building, you haven’t been to Point Reyes Station lately. The Ferry Building is just a building full of food — a nice building with interesting food, I concede — whereas Point Reyes Station is basically a village consecrated to food, Foodville USA. It’s full of produce markets, butchers, bakeries, creameries, and restaurants, seemingly to the exclusion of everything else. The village, which sits on Highway 1 near the foot of Tomales Bay in the far west of Marin County, is just a few blocks’ square, but those blocks are chockablock with people wandering on foot from one little food heaven to the next.

If Marin County doesn’t make my list of favorite places, it’s mainly because of the dense population corridor along U.S. 101 in the east. To the west, though, beyond the Mercedes-clogged tracts of Fairfax and San Anselmo, the land relaxes into open, rolling country plied by cyclists and dotted with stands of oak trees and boutique agricultural concerns, many carrying the “Marin Organic” label. And the capital of this peaceable (if kingless) kingdom is Point Reyes Station.

Given the bucolic setting, I was a little surprised to step into Osteria Stellina, one of the newer and most heralded restaurants, and find myself in a rather plain gunmetal-gray dining room. It was like being in the officers’ mess on a battleship. Gray is a nice color for flannel suits, but on the walls of a restaurant — a restaurant, moreover, serving a Cal-Ital menu that bursts with flavor — it struck me as overcautious.

Still, the nautical hint isn’t entirely misplaced. Point Reyes Station was once a port, and nearby Tomales Bay produces a wealth of farmed oysters. Naturally, Osteria Stellina offers these (from Hog Island) raw, and also (from Drake’s Bay Family Farms) atop a pizza ($18). This was as improbable a home for oysters as I’ve ever come across, but it did work. It helped that the rest of the pie was liberally spread with leeks braised in cream (from neighboring Straus Creamery), lemon thyme, and parsley — a tasty, green-yellow paste like a less manic gremolata. A small downside: the paste made the crust slightly soggy.

Damp bread isn’t always a disaster. We were smitten with Stellina’s version of panzanella ($18), the salad whose key ingredient is stale bread, moistened with vinegar and proof that thrift need not be dull nor otherwise feel like deprivation. This panzanella was the kind the king might be served, if west Marin had a king; it was made with heirloom tomatoes and (non-stale but perhaps toasted) Brickmaiden sourdough bread and further fortified with shreds of local chicken, Point Reyes mozzarella, greens, olives, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Panzanella is irresistibly flavorful, easy to make and share, and wonderfully redolent of both summer and elegant frugality, and I wonder why we don’t see it offered more often on menus.

Another Italian favorite that seems underrepresented in this country is the combination of cannellini beans and tuna. At Stellina this dish ($13) was made with conserved tuna (which I supposed to have been poached in olive oil), and it took an additional charge from celery and organic baby fennel, along with lemon quarters to squeeze over the top.

Even something as unassuming as a grilled-cheese sandwich ($14) can become special if it’s made with superior bread and interesting cheeses (fontina and, from Valley Ford, Estero Gold) and plumped up with braised veal shanks and caramelized onions. A kind of osso buco sandwich.

Stellina’s desserts have an artisanal intensity. The strawberry “pop tarts” ($10), a pair of shortbread-like pastry squares wrapped around a layer of fruit preserves, were enhanced by a scoop of lemon-buttermilk ice cream. This dessert was a whimsical reimagining of a Saturday-morning breakfast favorite from the 1960s. The fig crisp ($10), on the other hand, was direct and powerful — mostly fruit (including some blackberries) with just enough pastry and ground almonds to give context through texture.

The wine list is neither too long nor too short, and it offers local and Italian wines at moderate prices. Organic house wines (sauvignon blanc and zin) are available on tap, and all the wines except the sparkling are available in carafe or bottle. I was thrilled to find a greco di tufo, an obscure Italian varietal grown mainly on the far side of Mount Vesuvius. It goes well with oysters, and pizza too.

OSTERIA STELLINA

Dinner: nightly, 5–9 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

11285 Hwy. 1, Point Reyes Station

(415) 663-9988

www.osteriastellina.com

Wine and beer

DS/MC/V

Somewhat noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Dizzy dazzle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Dizzy dazzle

arts@sfbg.com

ART Let’s start with the obvious: the massive art collection of Gap Inc. founders Doris and the late Don Fisher is by far one of the largest and most significant windfalls SFMOMA has received in its 75-year history. More important, the collection — which had primarily been viewable throughout the Gap’s SF headquarters only by company employees and visiting tour groups — is finally being made accessible to the general public.

Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, has selected 160 works — a mere fraction of the 1,100 total — for “Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection,” a Fishers’ Greatest Hits that aims to provide an overview of the breadth of their holdings as well as highlight their in-depth focus on certain artists. During the exhibits media preview, Garrels mentioned that the Fishers acquired pieces without the help of advisers, jointly choosing works that “spoke to them.” Clearly, they had a taste for big game.

Primarily comprising paintings and sculpture, “Calder to Warhol” is, as its title indicates, a veritable who’s who of mid-to-late 20th century modern art that takes over the museum’s top two floors and spills out into the rooftop sculpture garden. I’m not being facetious when I say there’s something for everyone. Aside from extensive collections of Calder and Warhol, the show is chockablock with iconic pieces by Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close … and the list goes on.

The range of artists and quality of the pieces assembled is dizzying. Take the fourth floor, for instance. The shock of several hideous, large-scale mixed media on aluminum DayGlo monstrosities by Frank Stella from the late 1970s and ’80s is largely soothed by the blushing, meaty pinks and reds of The Street, a remarkable 1956 Philip Guston abstract canvas in an adjoining gallery (Guston gets an additional gallery all to himself), which then leads to the downy embrace of Lee Krasner’s equally stunning 1961 oil Polar Stampede — a palimpsest of brown and gold hatch-marked feathers — and from there a gallery of four decades of Twombly’s looped scribbles.

Then there’s the small collection of Agnes Martin paintings, which by itself would be worth the price of admission. Martin is an artist who particularly suffers in reproduction: the delicate lines and gentle washes of color in her paintings get lost, and all one sees are their grid-like skeletons. Being able to study up close the subtle pop effect of the squares in Night Sea (1963) — the way in which the gold leaf underneath the oil causes the canvas’ tiny bluish squares to flash teal — is a revelation.

Or, starting from the floor’s north end, one encounters a crash course in Pop Art and its kin. The Lichtensteins and the Claes Oldenburg apple core are all well and good, but the Warhols are where it’s at: standouts are early 1960s silkscreens such as Tunafish Disaster and two of the handsome criminals in the “Most Wanted Men” series, and lesser-famous portraits of Joseph Beuys and Robert Mapplethorpe alongside Dolly and Jackie’s familiar visages. These aren’t the usual Factory hits.

Around another corner, past a room crowded with Close portraits, is another must-see: two enormous Sigmar Polke canvases from his alchemical 1988 series, “The Spirits That Lend Strength to the Invisible,” on which the German artist applied unconventional materials such as tellurium, chemical resin, and ground-up meteors. Their wild, particulate sprays evoke both the Hubble Telescope’s images of space, as well as the crude plumes currently floating off the Gulf Coast.

And I haven’t even started in on the fifth floor, with its showcases of Important Works by Calder, Kelly, Serra, Kiefer, Richter, and some particularly wonderful Lewitt wall drawings.

Yes, “Calder to Warhol” is dizzying. It is also frequently dazzling. But I can’t help but feel a little squeamish in the face of such a grand and copious cache; one that until recently had been displayed as an act of corporate largesse to those in the service of the empire that funded its acquisition.

Art collecting is a form of investment, capital put down toward ensuring the collector’s future legacy as much as it is a reflection of aesthetic tastes. The Fishers rarely sold pieces, and the equal attention they paid to collecting both figurative and abstract works — as well as an earlier failed bid to construct a private museum in the Presidio — suggests that the collection was developed increasingly with an eye toward creating the very sort of jaw-dropping endowment of which SFMOMA now finds itself the very fortunate recipient.

Certainly for SFMOMA, the benefits of this gift are clear. The museum’s profile has undoubtedly risen, and will continue to rise once the planned expansion set to house the remaining 90 percent of the collection’s holdings is complete. What remains less apparent throughout “Calder to Warhol” is a sense of the Fishers’ personal investment in the pieces they so assiduously acquired. To simply say that the art — so much amazing work, now finally on view — speaks for itself is only half true. As with any major private collection, it also speaks to a long campaign waged over the peaks and valleys of the art market.

Still, the Fishers aren’t merely the sum of their deep pockets. I wish the wall panels revealed when each piece had been bought, and whether Don or Doris had singled it out first (Imagine their dinner conversations: “Honey, would you like to buy a Dan Flavin?”). That information would put a different, perhaps more humanizing, spin on the story “Calder to Warhol” currently tells: a testament to the Fishers’ wide-reaching, frequently well-informed, and relatively safe taste for blue chip names.

CALDER TO WARHOL: INTRODUCING THE FISHER COLLECTION

Through Sept. 19, $9–$15

(children under 12 free; first Tuesday of every month free)

SFMOMA

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Transit troubles

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Transit troubles

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Peggy da Silva is an avid cyclist, public transit advocate, and member of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union — a new organization made up of several hundred San Franciscans who want to see improvements to Muni.

Yet even she admits that when it comes to getting to work, it takes just 15 minutes by car or an hour if she opts to go by bus. “I am committed to transit and cycling” for environmental reasons, she said, but “it gets really frustrating” to wait for the bus or light rail cars to arrive.

Da Silva could be considered lucky in that she can opt to drive if she feels it’s necessary, while many lower-income San Franciscans cannot afford a car and have no choice but to rely on Muni to get to work, buy groceries, or make doctor appointments. It’s even worse late at night when the buses run less frequently and the streets are dark and empty.

Speaking at a June 29 transit rally, the Rev. Norman Fong of the Chinatown Community Development Center joked that Chinatown is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods — but “not by choice.” Most Chinatown residents just can’t afford to own a car, underscoring the point that Muni service cuts affect lower-income communities more significantly than those with more transportation options.

The perception that Muni is broken isn’t unique to transit advocates. Around City Hall, a number of proposals have been put forth to fix the ailing system, which has been mired in delays and overcrowding as fares have gone up and service was slashed. But determining what the root problems are, how they should be addressed, and what the best path forward may be has proved arduous.

Rather than a simple calculation or a study in efficiency, the debate surrounding Muni is spinning into an emotionally charged affair. For those aiming to protect low-income riders from service cuts or fare increases, it’s a discussion about social justice, calling into question why the city is asking more of bus riders than motorists in a city with a “transit-first” mandate in its charter.

The strong opposition to the cuts by supervisors and the public has led to a rollback. On June 30, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced that on Sept. 4, it would be able to restore half of the 10 percent systemwide service reduction that went into effect in May.

“Due to stronger than expected revenue streams, operational efficiencies, and new grant opportunities, staff is recommending the restoration of service on some routes and lines this fall,” according to an SFMTA press release. Buses that run all night would come more often, and the partial service restoration would help ease over-crowding.

While this was welcome news for anyone who takes transit, the expected improvement still leaves untouched many key issues plaguing the city’s public transit system. Two separate initiatives most likely destined for the November ballot seek to deal with systemic problems — but both have met with resistance.

On July 1, Sup. Sean Elsbernd announced that he had submitted some 75,000 signatures for a proposed charter amendment for the November ballot to change the way transit operator salaries are determined. Since they only needed 46,000 signatures, “presumably, we’ll qualify,” Elsbernd told us.

“It presses the reset button on all the [memorandums of understanding] and then puts the riders at the table,” he explained. “It also eliminates the side letters that allow the six leaders of the union to get full-time salaries and benefits without needing to drive.”

Elsbernd’s proposal would require operator wages and benefits to be set through collective bargaining, instead of the current guarantee that their wages be at least as high as the average wage rate for transit operators in the two highest paying comparable transit systems.

Yet his proposal is opposed by the city’s transit operators union, TWU Local 250-A, whose members feel they’ve been unfairly blamed for the MTA’s fiscal problems. Speaking at the June 29 rally, Ron Heintzman, the new international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, summed up the attitude of drivers who feel they are being asked to give up hard-fought gains in the face of an economic downturn.

“I’ve been told that here in San Francisco, the mayor for some reason clearly has his head up his ass,” Heintzman said. “It’s time to tell him to stop trying to balance the damn budget on the backs of the workers.”

Speakers at the rally voiced support for federal legislation that would bolster municipal transit budgets nationwide with a $2 billion emergency infusion. A second federal bill would allow local governments greater flexibility with federal transit funding that currently can only be spent on capital projects, not day-to-day operations.

“We’re asking them not to make us buy a bus when we can’t hire a bus operator to drive it,” explained Harry Lombardo, international president of the Transit Workers Union. “There’s no point in spending hundreds of thousands on a bus and letting it sit in mothballs. And believe me, it’s happening all over the country.”

Sup. David Campos, a cosponsor of a competing ballot measure that aims for more comprehensive Muni reform, joined the rally and criticized the notion that drivers should be blamed a dysfunctional, underfunded transit system.

“Those of you who live in San Francisco know that right now there is a climate at City Hall that is pointing the finger at drivers, blaming drivers and blaming the workers for the problems that this system has,” Campos said at the rally. “Muni is broken. But Muni is not broken because of labor. And we have to say no to that push to somehow create a division between riders and drivers…. We can’t ignore the fact that we have a system that is getting money that is not being used well.”

Campos has joined with Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and Board President David Chiu to propose a reform package that would remove the pay guarantee for Muni driver, but also create split appointments to the MTA Board of Directors, allocate a share of property tax revenue to the city’s Transportation Fund, and establish an Office of the MTA Inspector General to help reduce waste and ramp up efficiency. The proposal would be subject to voter approval in November.

The proposal to give the supervisors some appointments to an MTA board that is now solely accountable to the Mayor’s Office became an issue at the eleventh hour of budget negotiations between the supervisors and Newsom on June 30. The mayor strongly opposed that and two similar charter amendments that would establish split appointments for the Recreation and Park Commission and the San Francisco Rent Board, as well as a ballot measure that would require the police department to engage in foot beat patrols.

Many saw his stance as a quid pro quo that inappropriately tied mayoral support for the budget — which included funding restorations to community programs that progressive board members wanted to preserve — to these unrelated ballot proposals.

Dave Snyder, who directs the SF Transit Riders Union, viewed the move as an affront on Muni riders. “This particular mayor has managed to screw up Muni service through his complete control over the agency,” Snyder said. “And whatever it takes, Muni riders want to see that fixed.”

While he said he thought a split appointment for the MTA Board was important, “the most important thing is more money. That’s the key issue,” he added, noting the reform package would create more funding for Muni.

Members of the Budget and Finance Committee resisted the mayor’s demand and forwarded a budget to the full board that included their high-priority restorations. The proposed ballot measures will be considered by the board this month.

“If you ask me, I would say we should have commission reform across the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian. “The idea of having [equally balanced appointments] is a smart way for us to share the responsibility and the consequences.”

MTA’s fiscal problems aren’t unique to San Francisco. On July 1, Caltrain announced a menu of undesirable options to deal with big financial troubles facing the commuter railroad. Elimination of weekend service and certain weekday train stops, or a 25-cent increase to base fares or zone fares, will be the subject of public hearings this summer.

Noting that all the different sources that fund Caltrain have been slashed, spokesperson Christine Dunn told us, “It’s frustrating to not be able to provide the service you want to provide.”

Truce talks

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Truce talks

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All parties are hopeful for peace in the Guardian-labeled War on Fun after oppressive raids on SoMa clubs have stopped and the feuding sides — mainly the San Francisco Police Department and nightclub owners — are sitting down to truce talks brokered in part by the fledgling California Music and Culture Association (CMAC).

“I’m here to work with you,” Kitt Crenshaw, commander of SFPD’s new Entertainment Task Force, told the crowd at a Nightlife Safety Summit on June 30. “I’m not the enemy. I’m not the ‘War on Fun,’ as they call it. I’m not the Antichrist.” The summit was sponsored by the Mayor’s Office, Entertainment Commission, SFPD, Small Business Commission, and CMAC.

Club owners and the SFPD are attempting to find balance between stifling the entertainment industry with heavy-handed enforcement and doing something about the deadly gun violence plaguing neighborhoods around some San Francisco nightclubs. Owners and party promoters don’t want entertainment permitting power to go back to the SFPD, as Mayor Gavin Newsom has suggested. But recent shootings and the Entertainment Commission’s inability to immediately close problem clubs have city officials demanding change.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu introduced legislation in early June that would give the Entertainment Commission the authority to revoke the entertainment permits of noncompliant clubs that are consistently scenes of violence. Chiu’s legislation would further extend temporary suspension powers the board granted to the commission in 2009.

“There is strong consensus that the Entertainment Commission needs to do its job. And if this is what it takes to give it more tools, then so be it,” Chiu told the Guardian after the June 25 CMAC Insider Luncheon, where he participated in a forum with entertainment industry representatives. Chiu said he was feeling pressure from his constituents in North Beach to “come down like a hammer on the industry” following several shootings around the neighborhood’s nightclubs this year.

Terrance Alan, a longtime industry advocate and entertainment commissioner, told the Guardian he recently requested that the City Attorney’s Office help define when nightclub owners should be blamed for violence occurring near their business. “If we’re going to hold venues and security teams responsible, we have to tell them and make sure it’s legal,” he said. “The line of reasoning that blames the nearest business will force San Francisco to shut down. The first thing we have to do is stop blaming each other.”

Chiu, speaking to a crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, recounted a handful of incidents that pushed him to craft the new legislation. Since the last legislation was passed to strengthen the Entertainment Commission’s power to regulate nightclubs, eight people were shot outside the Regency night club Nov. 15, 2009; 44 rounds were fired outside club Suede, resulting in one death and four injuries Feb. 7; a shooting occurred on Broadway outside a strip club in mid-February; and a police officer was shot outside the Mission District’s El Rincon club on June 19. “And so on, and so on,” Chiu said.

Following the shooting at Club Suede, which had long been a site of violence prior to the gang-related carnage in February, officials were stunned to learn the commission did not have the power to revoke entertainment permits. The most it could do was suspend Suede’s permit to play music for 30 days.

“To hold the commission responsible for something it was never envisioned to do and never given the power to do is where the narrative has gone wrong recently,” Alan said of widespread criticism that the commission just didn’t simply “shut down” Club Suede.

Suede remains voluntarily closed as it bargains with the City Attorney’s Office, which filed a complaint against the club after the shootings. Alex Tse, the lead attorney for the city in the case, told the Guardian there was nothing he could legally do to prevent Suede from reopening before Aug. 10, when the court is scheduled to rule on a preliminary injunction (court mandated closing) the City Attorney’s Office filed. But he doesn’t expect them to reopen because Suede and the city are currently working toward settling the case.

If the incidents Chiu described represent a black eye for San Francisco’s entertainment industry, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and SFPD aren’t necessarily squeaky clean either. “I sat down with [ABC director] Steve Hardy and told him that where the state was focusing efforts in San Francisco was completely misguided,” Chiu said at the CMAC luncheon. “And I’ve spoken to [California Senator] Mark Leno to try to move them in the right direction.”

The break in the crackdowns of 2009, mostly attributed to severe tactics employed by SFPD Officer Larry Bertrand and ABC agent Michelle Ott, followed a widespread backlash to the sometimes brutal treatment legitimate business owners were receiving in the name of public safety. Back-to-back over stories in the Guardian (see “The new War on Fun,” March 23, 2010) and the SF Weekly, calls to the ABC from city officials, the formation of CMAC, and a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit filed against San Francisco and the rogue officers spurred officials to rein in Ott and Bertrand.

Hardy told the Guardian that Ott is no longer assigned to alcohol enforcement in San Francisco. Bertrand has traded in his plain-clothes for a uniform and hasn’t been seen busting into clubs, beating up the help, or confiscating DJ equipment for several months.

Mark Webb, plaintiff’s attorney in the RICO case, which was moved to the federal court by the City Attorney’s Office, said Bertrand is scheduled to give a deposition for the case July 26. Webb told the Guardian he plans to ask Bertrand questions relating to “a pattern of ongoing and repeated abuses” claimed in the complaint, which includes Newsom and ABC as defendants.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Chiu told the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, adding that if the new power for the Entertainment Commission does not reduce club violence, stronger measures would be taken, whether it’s Newsom’s suggestion to scrap the commission entirely and give permitting power back to the police department or Chiu’s idea to create another “less politicized” body to issue entertainment permits made up of representatives from city department that are affected when nightlife entertainment goes wrong.

“There has been significant dissatisfaction with the Entertainment Commission due to many actual and apparent conflicts of interests,” Chiu said. “Frankly, this is why we may need to move to a different model of who actually makes decisions on permits, because often the people who want to make those decisions are the ones who stand to get the most benefit out of them.”

But club owners and party promoters argue that the police issuing entertainment permits, as they did prior to the Entertainment Commission’s creation in 2002, has a chilling effect on an important part of San Francisco’s economy.

Alan said a civil grand jury found the police department had a conflict of interest in being both the granter and enforcer of nightclub permits, a finding that spurred the creation of the Entertainment Commission.

“I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember when it was in the Police Department’s hands,” said Guy Carson, owner of Café Du Nord and director of CMAC. “Since the advent of the Entertainment Commission, more permits have been issued, which has vitalized the industry.”

Club owners and party promoters don’t want to be blamed for street violence over which they have no control, and they have some political support for that stance. “Clubs don’t create youth gun violence, society creates youth gun violence,” Sup. Bevan Dufty proclaimed to the crowd at the Nightlife Safety Summit, drawing thunderous applause from the room.

“There is a street scene and a club scene, and they do intersect. But a lot of the violence occurs in the street scene,” Carson said. “A lot of shootings that happen relate to people never inside the clubs. That’s a conversation CMAC looks forward to having — to have a little more accurate discussion.”

While he asserts that some nightclubs attract violence to the city from out of town, Crenshaw said he was pleased and surprised at the level of collaboration emerging between entertainment representatives and SFPD. “I got so much positive feedback from it [the Nightlife Safety Summit]. It was a bit overwhelming,” he told us. “I think the industry itself is tired of being labeled as a pariah. They want to change their image.”

Brit Hahn, owner of City Nights and SFClubs, agreed that working with district captains was in the best interest of any club looking to remain profitable. “When something bad happens at a nightclub anywhere in San Francisco, he said at the Nightlife Safety Summit, “it’s bad for all of our businesses.”

Ungodly deeds

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Ungodly deeds

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The Catholic Church claims to value charity and justice, but recent local conflicts over cutting off child care for low-income families and refusing to pay millions of dollars in taxes to cash-strapped San Francisco city government — as well as the ongoing priest pedophilia cover-up cases — cast doubt over the church’s commitment to those in need.

The San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese has said it will close the Children’s Village Development Center in August, displacing 110 children enrolled in the program and leaving 100 families — a third of them low-income — scrambling for hard-to-find childcare providers.

The Archdiocese also sold other surrounding properties because it could not afford to retrofit its buildings for earthquakes, selling them to developers Chris Harney and Tom Murphy. Both the church and the developers rejected efforts by Children’s Village parents, who formed the nonprofit Supporting Early Experience and Development (SEED), to temporarily lease the building.

Dan Dillon, a representative for Harney and Murphy, told the Guardian that they decided to reject SEED’s leasing offer because they had already made a deal with a tenant who was willing to offer more money. Dillon wouldn’t identify the tenant, but he said the new tenant would use the building without major modifications, which might have triggered a need for city permits and a public hearing.

Catholic Charities CYO, an agency of the Archdiocese that oversees programs such as the Children’s Village program, closed the center because it wasn’t making money. The city gave about $1.5 million in grants and loans to support childcare for poor families at Children’s Village, with most of the money coming from the Low Income Investment Fund.

According to Catholic Charities’ official statement on the dispute, it tried to maintain the program by cutting slots for low income families in an effort to subsidize the program. There was still not enough money to fund the program. Catholic Charities representative Gabrielle Slanina told us that the tough economy and internal budget cuts hurt their ability to continue providing childcare at the site.

“The program hasn’t been financially sustainable over the years,” Slanina told us. “Sustainability just wasn’t turning around. But we tried to keep it going for as long as we could.”

Catholic Charities still plans to later build a new $1 million children development center three blocks away on the corner of 10th and Mission streets. But SEED members are left in the lurch for now, causing them to question the validity of Catholic Charities’ mission to “support, stabilize, and strengthen families.”

Dee Dee Workman, a consultant helping SEED, was disappointed with the Archdiocese’s bottom-line approach to helping local families. “They have not attempted to secure slots with these families,” Workman told us. “They don’t care about these kids. It’s just about the money, and it’s immoral.”

SEED member Sabrina Qutb, who has a three-year-old son enrolled in Children’s Village, said she sees the new center as a waste of money. “I do not believe the city should continue to fund Catholic Charities child care programs,” Qutb told us. “Who’s to say they won’t drop 10th and Mission in a few years and waste even more of the city’s money?”

Many child care programs have waiting lists up to two years in a city where there are more than twice as many children under 13 with working parents as there are licensed child care slots, according to a study prepared for the city by the California Child Care Resources and Referral Network. Child care slots for infants are among the fewest, making up only 6 percent of the 17,894 child care center slots in the city. Preschool children ages two to five years old occupy 63 percent of the child care slots.

SEED member Kathryn Shantz put her two-year-old daughter on a waiting list for another child care facility immediately after the announcement of Children’s Village closure. “I’m 104 on the waiting list for the Yerba Buena Child Development Center,” Shantz said. “I’ve been on the wait-list for a year, and they basically told me that there’s no way I’m getting in.”

Meanwhile, while the city supported the church’s child care program, the church is still stiffing the city on its tax bill. On April 16, the Archdiocese filed a suit in the San Francisco Superior Court against Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting. The suit challenges a Transfer Tax Review Board ruling last November which held that the Archdiocese owed the city $14.4 million after transferring 232 parcels of property among three Archdiocese corporations in 2008 without paying the required transfer taxes attached to those vacant lots, parking lots, apartments, commercial buildings, parishes, and schools. This is the second-largest transfer tax bill in San Francisco history.

Repeated calls to the Archdiocese of San Francisco were not returned. In a press release, the Archdiocese said that it “maintains that to impose transfer taxes, penalties, and interest on a religious organization in connection with an internal restructuring involving no exchange or receipt of money from which to pay any tax is inequitable and threatens to confiscate substantial church assets that are devoted to religious purposes.”

The next court date for this case is scheduled for Sept. 17. This recent lawsuit and the sale of Archdiocese properties come at a time when the church is facing the possibility of paying out big settlements in cases involving sexual abuse by priests.

Survivor Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) Northern California Regional Office representative Joey Piscitelli said that if victims weren’t so afraid to report their abuse, the Archdiocese would owe its victims even more money. “Ninety-eight percent of victims never report the abuse, and the average person reports the abuse 25 years after the incident,” Piscitelli said. “The church brags that the clergy didn’t do it because they were never convicted, yet they’re paying billions of dollars in lawsuits.”

With the Catholic Church now facing scrutiny on so many fronts, it seems that a day of reckoning could be in its future. On June 29, the Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal by the Vatican for immunity in a highly publicized pedophilia suit, clearing the way for the 2002 lawsuit to advance.

The plaintiff, under the name of John V. Doe, alleged that he was abused in 1965 by Father Andrew Ronan in Portland, Ore. Ronan died in 1992. The Vatican tried to kill the lawsuit by stating that it was protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, a federal law that prevents foreign states from lawsuits.

The appeals court determined that there was an exception to the law, stating that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican and he was working under Oregon law. No one has ever won a lawsuit against the Vatican for sexual abuse allegations made by the clergy. This Supreme Court decision opens the door for future lawsuits against the Holy See.

Naked fun in the sun!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Naked fun in the sun!

Entertainer Wavy Gravy and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg like Red Rock Beach; Marin Superior Court Commissioner Roy Chernus favors Bass Lake, and Marin County Sup. Steve Kinsey says he’s been naked at Red Rock, Bolinas, Hagmier Pond, and Mount Vision Pond.

“I’ve probably hit every nude beach in Marin,” says Kinsey, who has described his visits as “exhilarating and normal.” “My last dip was at Bass Lake last fall. It has beautiful, fresh water, and the swimming environment is wonderful. I look forward to the next opportunity.”

But on their next trips to the nude section of beautiful Muir Beach, visitors may notice something new: a warning sign is being erected by the county this summer to urge users to be “respectful” of each other and to notify authorities if there’s trouble.

The sign is the result of a compromise worked out by nudists, law enforcers, county officials, and local homeowners, some of whom wanted nudity stopped. Under the agreement, cops are making a few more visits than before. But through July 1, 2010, only four complaints about nudity and one citation for improper sexual conduct have occurred since January 1, 2009, and none since August 13, 2009, according to marin county sheriff’s office crime analyst Susan Medina. “We keep responding to complaints, but I can’t recall any recent citations,” says Lt. Cheryl Fisher, commander of the Marin County Sheriff’s Office’s West Marin Station. Fisher says the subjects are usually suited up by the time deputies arrive. “A deputy showed up on a very hot Sunday,” says regular visitor Michael Velkoff of Scotts Valley. “As soon as he left, everybody was naked again.”

“Of course, guys in spiked penis rings not parading themselves around also have helped,” says Sup. Kinsey, who, for now, has spiked his previous threat to fight back by starting an effort to make Muir and other beaches clothing-optional under a 1975 law giving Marin County the power to exempt areas from its anti-nudity provisions. “Sometimes the best thing we can do in government is to stay out of the way.”

Homeowners remain wary. One, who wants to remain anonymous, tells the Guardian: “We are optimistic” about being able to “coexist” with the naturists, “but we also remain very clear about what is legal and what will and won’t be tolerated.” And a former advocate of the ban told me that instead of not going to Muir Beach “a person wanting to use the beach nude might do it in a manner that doesn’t draw a lot of attention.”

As if the Marin mashup wasn’t enough, nervous naturists also got ready to do battle with state authorities, who they feared would eventually ban nudity at Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County and at Bonny Doon Beach near Santa Cruz, both of which are state beaches.

The jitters came in the wake of an October 2009 California high court ruling allowing a crackdown on nude sunbathing on state beaches, even in areas traditionally used for such activity. “All it takes now is an individual ranger with the desire to issue a citation,” warns R. Allen Baylis, a Huntington Beach attorney representing the Naturist Action Committee, the country’s biggest nudist lobbying group. “It could have a chilling effect [on nudity] on any state beach.”

“Our thin line of security has been overturned,” says Rich Pasco, head of the Bay Area Naturists, based in San Jose. “So let’s hope that in today’s economy, the thin level of state park staff has better things to do with their time than dealing with naturists.”

At press time, the NAC, along with BAN and 14 other nudist groups, were preparing, for the first time, to officially petition California to “designate clothing-optional areas” on one or more state beaches. Other efforts have, says Baylis, been “less formal.” “Do they really expect us to pack up and leave?” Baylis asks. “We’re going to fight back. This is our freedom they’re messing with!”

What’s the good news? Just like at Muir Beach, it doesn’t look like naturists have anything to worry about for now in Northern California. “In the short term, things at Bonny Doon are destined to continue the way they are,” says Kirk Lingenfelter, sector superintendent for Bonny Doon. He wants a better trail, stairs, and parking, but says the cash-starved state doesn’t have the budget to make even a preliminary plan or increase ranger visits. He said his staff have not issued any citations or warnings at the nude cove, which he calls one of the spots that “really give you the feeling of rugged, untouched majesty. It’s a very important feeling. Going to places like Bonny Doon helps you get recharged.”

And the Devil’s Slide police source, who wants to remain anonymous, told us: “Rangers aren’t going to be pursuing enforcement against nudity per se. Nothing’s changed.” Rangers will continue responding to complaints, he explained, but it usually means they arrive too late to do anything about them because cell phones don’t work on the beach. “We hear about it after the fact,” says another Devil’s Slide enforcer, Supervising State Park Ranger Michael Grant.

Want to contribute to the glad tidings? There’s still time for plenty of fun in the sun. You can donate your body to the record books, at least temporarily, by showing up Saturday, July 10 at the Sequoians Clothes Free Club (www.sequoians.com) in Castro Valley, when its annual attempt at setting a world skinny-dipping record, with 138 other nude locations, will be held. And if you’ve ever been dying to do a little light cleaning in the nude (no window-washing needed), here’s your chance: Your butt can be bare if you stop by Bonny Doon Sept. 18 to help fans pick up cigarette butts and other litter on the beach.

Speaking of good things, would you like to help improve our report? Please send brainstorms, your new beach “finds,” improved directions (especially road milepost numbers), and trip reports to garhan@aol.com or by snail mail to Gary Hanauer, c/o San Francisco Guardian, 135 Mississippi St., San Francisco CA 94107. Please include your phone number so we can verify that you’re not just another mirage in the nude beach sand.

>>BELOW ARE CAPSULE GUIDES TO POPULAR NUDE BEACHES. CLICK HERE FOR OUR COMPLETE GUIDE, INCLUDING MANY MORE

NORTH BAKER BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Things are really cooking at San Francisco’s long, narrow North Baker, which is in good shape this year, with plenty of sand and an influx of young people and more women than five years ago, even though the beach is still heavily male. “If you want to see naked chicks and guys, it’s the place to go,” says aficionado Paul Jung. Although beach regulars like himself welcome all the new nude volleyball players, “some of them seem to make up rules as they go along,” he laughs. Fun activities: Look for dolphins that occasionally surface in the water off shore. And in low tide only, walk around the big rocks at the north end of the beach to check out Baker’s “secret” tide pools.

Directions: Take the 29 Sunset bus or go north on 25th Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard. Turn right and take the second left onto Bowley Street. Follow Bowley to Gibson Road, turn right, and follow Gibson to the east parking lot. Head right on the beach to the nude area, which starts at the brown and yellow “Hazardous surf, undertow, swim at your own risk” sign. Some motorcycles in the lot have been vandalized, possibly by car owners angered by bikers parking in car spaces; to avoid trouble, motorcyclists should park in the motorcycle area near the cyclone fence.

 

LAND’S END BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Land’s End is just the beginning: it’s not just the ground that seems to “disappear” into the sunset at this little slice of paradise off Geary Boulevard. So do your clothes, if you want to be magically transported to another dimension, away from the cares of everyday constraints. Shorts, swimsuit, even work clothes during a quick lunch break — they all can be removed at this delightful cove, which features a mix of sand and rocks plus some of San Francisco’s best views. Better still, only a handful of people are usually present. Bring a windbreak for protection in case the weather changes.

Directions: Follow Geary Boulevard to the end, then park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. About 100 yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, then rises and falls, eventually becoming the width of a road. Don’t take the road to the right, which leads to a golf course. Just past another bench, as the trail turns right, go left toward a group of dead trees where you will see a stairway and a “Dogs must be leashed” sign. Descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Or, instead, take the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot 1/4 mile until you reach a bench, then follow the trail there.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

Don’t come to Golden Gate Bridge Beach, also called Nasty Boy Beach, if you want privacy: dozens to hundreds of visitors show up on the hottest days at the site that some have likened to a “gay meat market.” Along with the guys, a smattering of women, straight couples, children and fishermen are spread out on the three adjoining rocky coves that make up the beach, whose stunning views of the Bridge will make you feel like you’re the star of your own postcard. “It’s really nice to walk in the water,” says a woman. “In low tide, you can sometimes go out 150 feet.”

Directions: Directions: from the toll booth area of Highway 101/1, take Lincoln Boulevard west about a half mile to Langdon Court. Turn right (west) on Langdon and look for space in the parking lots, across Lincoln from Fort Winfield Scott. Park and then take the new, improved beach trail, starting just west of the end of Langdon, down its more than 200 steps to Golden Gate Bridge Beach, also known as Marshall’s Beach.

 

FORT FUNSTON BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

If you try to be naked here on weekends, you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. The main creatures who go nude at Fort Funston, south of Ocean Beach, are dogs, but that hasn’t stopped a small band of stark naked sunbathers from hiding away in some sand dunes when rangers aren’t in the area. Authorities usually issue several citations a year here. But if you don’t make a fuss and visit on a weekday, you probably won’t be busted. If anyone complains, put on your beach gear right away. Two more fun activities at “Fort Fun”: watching hang-gliders take off from the cliffs and checking out a seemingly endless passing parade of people and their pets.

Directions: From San Francisco, head west to Ocean Beach, then go south on the Great Highway. After Sloat Boulevard, the road goes uphill. From there, curve right onto Skyline Boulevard, go past one stoplight, and look for signs for Funston on the right. Turn into the public lot and find a space near the west side. At the southwest end, take the sandy steps to the beach, turn right, and walk to the dunes. Find a spot as far as possible from the parking lot. Do not go nude here on the weekends. And if you don’t like dogs, go elsewhere.

 

LAS TRAMPAS REGIONAL WILDERNESS, CASTRO VALLEY

Nudity’s banned in the East Bay Regional Park District, but if you tell that to the nude hikers who will be once again walking across park land July 23 and Aug. 22 — at night — they may moon you en masse. On America’s only naked “Full Moon Hikes,” participants leave the grounds of the Sequoians Naturist Club in Castro Valley fully clothed at dusk and walk through meadows and up hills until the moon rises, before heading back down the slopes with their clothes folded neatly into their backpacks. Says Dave Smith, of San Leandro: “It’s truly wonderful. Except for deer, we’re usually the only ones on the path.” Agrees James, of Fremont: “It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. You’re walking in this silvery light. The moonlight is flooding everything. You feel like you’re in the middle of a beautiful dream.”

Directions: Contact the Sequoians Naturist Club (www.sequoians.com) or the Bay Area Naturists (www.bayareanaturists.org) for details on how to join a walk. Participants usually meet at and return to the Sequoians Club. To get there, take Highway 580 east to the Crow Canyon Road exit. Or follow 580 west to the first Castro Valley off-ramp. Take Crow Canyon Road toward San Ramon 0.75 mile to Cull Canyon Road. Then follow Cull Canyon Road around 6.5 miles to the end of the paved road. Take the dirt road on the right until the “Y” in the road and keep left. Shortly after, you’ll see the Sequoians sign. Proceed ahead for about another 0.75 mile to the Sequoians front gate.

 

DEVIL’S SLIDE, MONTARA

Will they be having a devil of a time in paradise? For the first time, rangers say they’ll begin enforcing state anti-nudity regulations if offended beachgoers complain about the nudists who visit Gray Whale Cove, which is commonly called Devil’s Slide. The good news: It’s a nonissue because cell phones (used to summon rangers) don’t work on the beach, so by the time cops arrive, the offenders have long since suited up or left. And the beach’s top enforcer told us he won’t be telling rangers to bust nudists they see. Most visitors love the long sandy shore, where nudies, about 20 percent of visitors, hang out on the north end.

Directions: Driving from San Francisco, take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s restaurant in Linda Mar, turn left (inland or east) on an unmarked road, which takes you to the beach’s parking lot and to a 146-step staircase leads to the sand. “The steps are in good shape,” Ron says. Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the right (east), 1.2 miles north of the Chart House restaurant in Montara.

 

SAN GREGORIO NUDE BEACH, SAN GREGORIO

America’s oldest nude beach, near Half Moon Bay, offers two miles of soft sand and tide pools to explore, as well as a lagoon, lava tube, and, if you look closely enough on the cliffs, the remains of an old railroad line. Pets are allowed on weekdays. Up to 200 visitors may be present, but they’re usually so spread out, you may not even notice them. Gay men tend to hang out on the north side and in “sex condos” made of driftwood by visitors — a major annoyance to those who are easily offended. On the south end of the beach, there are sometimes dozens of straight couples and families, naked and clothed. For weather information, call (415) 765-7697.

Directions: Head south on Highway 1 past Half Moon Bay. Between mileposts 18 and 19, look on the right side of the road for telephone call box number SM 001 0195, at the intersection of Highway 1 and Stage Road and near an iron gate with trees on either side. From there, expect a drive of 1.1 miles to the entrance. At the Junction 84 highway sign, the beach’s driveway is just 0.1 mile away. Turn into a gravel driveway, passing through the iron gate mentioned above, which says 119429 on the gatepost. Drive past a grassy field to the parking lot, where you’ll be asked to pay an entrance fee. Take the long path from the lot to the sand; everything north of the trail’s end is clothing-optional.

 

BONNY DOON NUDE BEACH, BONNY DOON

Bonny Doon isn’t doomed. To the contrary, because the state has no plans to develop it or send rangers out to make anti-nudity patrols, it looks like it will remain Santa Cruz County’s prettiest nude beach, which should please the nudists who were on the edge of their towels wondering what would happen. Says Kirk Lingenfelter, sector superintendent for Bonny Doon and nearby state beaches: “Going to places like Bonny Doon helps you get recharged.” Naturists usually use the cove on the north end of the beach, which attracts more women and couples than most clothing-optional enclaves.

Directions: Head south on Highway 1 to the Bonny Doon parking lot at milepost 27.6 on the west side of the road, 2.4 miles north of Red, White, and Blue Beach, and some 11 miles north of Santa Cruz. From Santa Cruz, head north on Highway 1 until you see Bonny Doon Road, which veers sharply to the right just south of Davenport. The beach is right off the intersection. Park in the paved lot to the west of Highway 1; don’t park on Bonny Doon Road or the shoulder of Highway 1. If the lot is full, drive north on Highway 1, park at the next beach lot and walk back to the first lot. To get to the beach, climb the berm next to the railroad tracks adjacent to the Bonny Doon lot, cross the tracks, descend, and take the trail to the sand. Walk north past most of the beach to the cove on the north end.

 

2222, SANTA CRUZ

Size matters at 2222, which is the smallest nude beach in the U.S. — and probably smaller than your backyard. Not many people can fit into it and not many have heard about it, so not many are there, which is just fine with its mostly young crowd of local college students. Located across from 2222 West Cliff Drive, it’s a great place to sunbathe, read, relax, or even watch Neal the Juggler practice tossing balls, pins, and beanbags on the sand. But don’t attempt the very steep climb up and down the cliff unless you’re in good shape.

Directions: The beach is a few blocks west of Natural Bridges State Beach and about 2.5 miles north of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. From either north or south of Santa Cruz, take Highway 1 to Swift Street. Drive 0.8 miles to the sea, then turn right on West Cliff Drive. 2222 is five blocks away. Past Auburn Avenue, look for 2222 West Cliff on the inland side of the street. Park in the nine-car lot next to the cliff. If it’s full, continue straight and park along Chico Avenue. Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco suggests visitors use care and then follow the path on the side of the beach closest to downtown Santa Cruz and the Municipal Wharf.

 

PRIVATES BEACH, SANTA CRUZ

Privates Beach, at 4524 Opal Cliff Drive, north of the Capitola Pier, is so private that it has a locked gate, security guards, and, unless you’re too cheap to pay and want to try another option, a $100 per year fee (cash only). The two coves are exceptionally clean and you’re likely to see families, kids, and dogs on the shore.

Directions: 1) Some visitors walk north from Capitola Pier in low tide (not a good idea since at least four people have needed to be rescued after being trapped by rising water). 2) Others reach it in low tide via the stairs at the end of 41st Avenue, which lead to a surf spot called the Hook at the south end of a rocky shoreline known as Pleasure Point. 3) Surfers paddle on boards for a few minutes to Privates from Capitola or the Hook. 4) Most visitors buy a key to the beach gate at Freeline Design Surfboards (821 41st Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-476-2950) 1.5 blocks west of the beach. Others go with someone with a key or wait outside the gate until someone with a key goes in. “Most people will gladly hold the gate open for someone behind them whose hands are full,” says Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco. The nude area is to the left of the bottom of the stairs.

 

MUIR NUDE BEACH, MUIR BEACH

The mellowness of marvelous Muir Beach was marred last year when some homeowners verbally clashed with nudists over use of the sand. After a few meetings, it was decided that while bare buns on the beach wouldn’t be banned, a warning sign stressing “respect” for everyone and listing a phone number for complaints will be erected, most likely in July, near the border of the nude and clothed sections of the shore. The nude spot is pretty and curved and usually has excellent swimming conditions and access. Instead of a trail, you just walk along the water from the public beach and go around and over some easy-to-cross rocks.

Directions: From San Francisco, take Highway 1 north to Muir Beach, to milepost 5.7. Turn left on Pacific Way and park in the Muir lot (to avoid tickets, don’t park on Pacific). Or park on the long street off Highway 1 across from Pacific and about 100 yards north. From the Muir lot, follow a path and boardwalk to the sand, and then walk north to a pile of rocks between the cliffs and the sea. You’ll need good hiking or walking shoes to cross; in very low tide, try to cross closer to the water. The nude area starts north of it.

 

RED ROCK BEACH, STINSON BEACH

Bay Area fan favorite Red Rock is still rocking with an improved trail, more sand than last summer, Ultimate Frisbee games that last as long as three hours, a shower where you can cool down on a hot day, and up to 75 people a day. “More rock climbers than ever are coming to the beach,” says the Rock’s “ambassador,” Fred Jaggi. “You can get more privacy there.” Three nude women who were perched on a terrace overlooking the cove in June were recently anointed as the Cheerleaders by members of the fun, highly social crowd below.

Directions: The easiest way to find the beach is to go north on Highway 1 from Mill Valley, following the signs to Stinson Beach. At the long line of mailboxes next to the Muir Beach cutoff point, start checking your odometer. Look for a dirt lot full of cars to the left (west) of the highway exactly 5.6 miles north of Muir and a smaller one on the right (east) side of the road. The lots are at milepost 11.3, one mile south of Stinson Beach. Limited parking is also available 150 yards to the south on the west side of Highway 1. Take the path to the beach that starts near the Dumpster next to the main parking lot. The trail’s doable but moderately long, steep, and slippery, so don’t wear flip-flops.

 

BASS LAKE, BOLINAS

If you’re sleepless in San Anselmo, a cure might be to bare your bottom at Bass in Bolinas. “If you want to visit an enchanted lake, Bass is it,” says Ryan, of the East Bay. “Tree branches reach over the water, forming a magical canopy, and huge bunches of calla lilies bloom on the shore.” Even walking to Bass, 45-60 minutes from the lot over 2.8 relatively easy miles, can be an adventure like none other. You may see people with backpacks but no pants on the trail. Rangers once stopped and cited a clad man who had an unleashed dog but let the nudists continue. Says Dave Smith, of San Leandro, who unusually walks naked: “I came around a corner and there was a mountain lion sitting like Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza 50 yards down the path.” Bring a heavy towel or tarp for sitting on a somewhat prickly meadow near the water.

Directions: From Stinson Beach, go north on Highway 1. Just north of Bolinas Lagoon, turn left on the often-unmarked exit to Bolinas. Follow the road as it curves along the lagoon and eventually ends at Olema-Bolinas Road; continue along Olema-Bolinas Road to the stop sign at Mesa Road. Turn right on Mesa and drive four miles until it becomes a dirt road and ends at a parking lot. On hot days the lot fills quickly. A sign at the trailhead next to the lot will guide you down scenic Palomarin Trail to the lake.

 

RCA BEACH, BOLINAS

Couples love RCA Beach near Bolinas, and so do singles who long for a ruggedly isolated shoreline that doesn’t take long to reach. This summer, there’s even more to enjoy: the beach is reported to be about four to six feet wider than last year. But it has more gravel this season. “A downside is that it’s very exposed to the wind,” says regular visitor Michael Velkoff. “There’s so much driftwood on the sand that many people build windbreaks or even whole forts. The last time I went, somebody built a 30-foot-tall dragon.” The breathtakingly beautiful beach seems even bigger than its one mile length because, Velkoff says, “you might only see eight people spread out on the sand. Everybody’s like 100 feet apart. It’s great.”

Directions: From Stinson Beach, take Highway 1 (Shoreline Highway) north toward Calle Del Mar for 4.5 miles. Turn left onto Olema Bolinas Road and follow it 1.8 miles to Mesa Road in Bolinas. Turn right and stay on Mesa until you see cars parked past some old transmission towers. Park and walk a 0.25 to the end of the pavement. Go left through the gap in the fence. The trail leads to a gravel road. Follow it until you see a path on your right, leading through a gate. Take it along the cliff top until it veers down to the beach. Or continue along Mesa until you come to a grove of eucalyptus trees. Enter through the gate here, then hike a 0.5 mile through a cow pasture on a path that will also bring you through thick brush. The second route is slippery and eroding, but less steep.

 

LIMANTOUR BEACH, OLEMA

You can tour long, lovely Limantour in Point Reyes National Seashore while wearing only your smile and some suntan lotion. Few visitors realize the narrow spit of sand is clothing-optional. But unless there are complaints or if you beach your bare body too close to a parking lot or the main entrance, you shouldn’t be hassled. The site is so big — about 2.5 miles long — you can wander for hours, checking out ducks and other waterfowl, shorebirds such as endangered snowy plovers, gray whales in the spring, and playful harbor seals (offshore and on the north side). Dogs are allowed on six-foot leashes on the south end. Directions: Follow Highway 101 north to the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit, then follow Sir Francis through San Anselmo and Lagunitas to Olema. At the intersection with Highway 1, turn right onto the highway. Just north of Olema, go left on Bear Valley Road. A mile after the turnoff for the Bear Valley Visitor Center, turn left (at the Limantour Beach sign) on Limantour Road and follow it 11 miles to the parking lot at the end. Walk north a 0.5 mile until you see some dunes about 50 yards east of the shore. Nudists usually prefer the valleys between the dunes for sunbathing. “One Sunday we had 200 yards to ourselves,” says a nudist. But lately, the dunes have been more crowded.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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15
Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

I’m a pension-reform advocate. I think the current system is not only bad public policy, but that it’s not sustainable in the long run. But I’m not convinced that the plan proposed by Public Defender Jeff Adachi is good public policy, either — and I’m not convinced that it works in the long run.

Adachi wants to mandate that city employees pay between 9 percent and 10 percent of their salaries into the city pension fund. He also wants to make employees pay more for dependent health care. He points out that the changes would save the city around $170 million a year.

But what he’s proposing is an across-the-board pay cut for city employees — on top of the cuts they’ve already taken in the past several budget cycles — and that’s a dangerous thing to do in a recession.

Think about it. That $170 million is money that city workers won’t be spending buying food, clothes, movie tickets, restaurant meals, or any of the thousands of other things that can help get the economy going again. It won’t be a fair pay cut, either. The clerk who makes $40,000 a year will get a $4,000 cut, leaving him or her with just $36,000, while the senior manager who makes $150,000 a year will get hit with the same 10 percent cut, leaving him or her with $135,000 a year. In one case, it’s the difference between making rent and not; in the other, it’s cutting out some discretionary spending. Even the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t operate on that principle.

There’s a larger point here, too. I hear from Adachi, and from many others, that when the city is broke, when the pension system can’t meet its obligations, then everyone has to give back. Everyone has to take a haircut. Everyone has to share the pain.

But as Robert Cruickshank pointed out on the Calitics blog recently, public employees, and poor people, and middle-class private sector workers, and people who need public services, and kids who go to public schools, and college students … they’ve been giving back for years. The rich, the big corporations, the people and institutions that have fared so well under the Bush-era tax cuts … they haven’t given back a dime.

It’s true that there’s pension abuse, the vast majority of it in the management and public safety areas. There are cops who make too much money anyway, get pay bumps right before they retire, and walk away with 90 percent of their artificially inflated salaries — for life. I could see capping pensions for each pay grade, and I could see requiring people who make more than $100,000 a year to contribute more to their pension funds.

But I think it has to be done in combination with new revenue. It has to be done in combination with an acknowledgment that in this budget crisis, some parts of our city, some parts of our society, aren’t hurting at all, and are refusing to help out with anyone else’s pain. We simply are not sharing the burden equally. And until we can start to change that, I’m not so thrilled with blaming the middle-class city workers for the local budget problem.

Newsom and the board’s challenge

David Talbot
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1
Newsom and the board’s challenge

EDITORIAL The San Francisco supervisors took a huge step with the city budget this year: they essentially told the mayor that his approach was unacceptable, and that they were going to do it themselves.

The result — the document that the board’s Budget Committee approved and sent back to Mayor Gavin Newsom — isn’t perfect. But the members of that panel saved $40 million worth of programs from the mayor’s budget ax and got rid of two particularly bad plans: privatizing health care at the county jails and allowing more condominium conversions.

The board members are also looking seriously at putting as much as $100 million in new taxes — progressive taxes — on the November ballot. Current plans include a modest increase in the hotel tax, an increase in the real-estate transfer tax on high-end properties, and a tax on commercial rents of more than $200,000 a year, which would be paired with a reduction in the payroll tax for small businesses.

Now Newsom, who is busy running for lieutenant governor, needs to decide whether he’s serious when he says he wants to work with the supervisors on a budget everyone can accept.

On one level, the mayor doesn’t have a lot of choice — if he vetoes the proposal the board sent him, there’s a good chance the supervisors will override the veto. What he’s more likely to do is simply refuse to spend the additional money the board wants to allocate — allowing his cuts to take effect, allowing critical services to die and community-based nonprofits to close, while that money just sits in a reserve fund (or gets allocated to the mayor’s other priorities).

That would be a terrible statement for someone who claims he can be a positive force in Sacramento and who clearly wants to run for governor some day. The board has presented a budget that’s still fairly moderate — the tax hikes aren’t included in the spending plan, and most of what Newsom asked for is. It’s the kind of plan that a Democrat who wants to run California some day ought to be embracing. Unfortunately, Newsom insists on running on the Republican platform of cuts only, no new taxes. (Although he’s stuck a lot of hidden taxes, called fees, on small businesses.)

The mayor also has tried to use the budget process to kill some several ballot measures he doesn’t like. He wants the supervisors to get rid of proposals that would give the board shared appointments to the Rent Board and the Recreation and Park Commission along with a plan mandating community policing. In essence, he’s asked the supervisors to abandon other good-government reform policies in exchange for saving critical public services. That’s apparently not illegal (although offering to trade votes is). At the very least, however, it’s unseemly, and the board needs to make clear that it won’t accept this sort of hostage-taking.

It the mayor wants to have any kind of a productive year — and show that he can actually work with legislators — he needs to sign the budget the board sends to him and agree to spend the money the way it’s earmarked. Otherwise he’ll be acting like the governor of California — and that politician’s approval rating is about the lowest on record.

A new New Deal for San Francisco

David Talbot
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15
A new New Deal for San Francisco

OPINION On Thursday and Friday, July 8 and 9, San Franciscans concerned about the future of their city will have a unique opportunity to devise practical, locally actionable proposals to shape and direct future policy affecting the local economy and the provision of critical human services.

On July 8, starting at 3:30 p.m. at SF Lighthouse Church (1337 Sutter at Van Ness), a New Deal for the City economic development summit will be held to address set of issues ranging from municipal reform to community-based economic development proposals. A copy of the draft positions can be found at www.sfcommunitycongress.wordpress.com.

The next day, the San Francisco Human Services Network, a 110-member organization of human and health service nonprofits, will host its New Realities summit starting at 9 a.m. at the McClaren Center at the University of San Francisco. More details about topics at the summit can be found at www.sfhsn.org/index.

The results of these two summits, along with proposals on Muni reform and affordable housing, will form the basis for a citywide meeting of “The New, New Deal for San Francisco” Congress, scheduled for Aug. 14 and 15 at USF.

The summits and congress offer a chance to discuss, adopt, and plan the implementation of a comprehensive response to the assault on the provision of critical public services and the clear failure of the local economy to respond to the current and future needs of San Franciscans. Over the past decade, San Francisco has lost, and never replaced, more than 70,000 permanent jobs as first the dot-com bust and now the implosion of the financial sector have shredded the city’s “new” economy. In a total reversal of its historic role, San Francisco is no longer the employment center of the Bay Area, but simply the high-end bedroom of a commuting workforce based outside the city.

This historic shift has meant that the primary form of development in San Francisco has gone from commercial, employment-based enterprises to high-end residential development — development that, because of Proposition 13 limits on local property taxes, simply fails to pay for the city services needed to support the existing and new residential population.

San Franciscans built a system of local governance that was unique in the state, and not often matched in the nation, in providing a level of municipal services based on the premise that we share a special place and a common future. These services were provided by a robust mixture of traditional public sector departments and innovative, community-based nonprofits. That system was itself based on an economy that mainly employed San Francisco residents in a diverse mix of economic activities with opportunities open to a wide array of people.

That economic base has been reduced to a mere shell of its former diversity, with few opportunities for even fewer people. Our current mayor has no desire to address this historic shift; instead, he is content to endlessly campaign for other offices, issue press releases on mythical achievements, and pit one portion of San Francisco against another in hopes that all forget the decline of the city under his leadership.

Progressive forces cannot again allow needed changes to be held hostage to the election of a particular candidate. We must put on the table a comprehensive, integrated set of locally actionable policies that make sense in the realities we face in the second decade of the 21st century — no matter who wins. After all, it’s our city.

Karl Bietel is a worker advocate; Fernando Marti is a community planner; and Calvin Welch is a balanced growth and affordable housing advocate.

 

To barflys

David Talbot
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1
To barflys

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I went into the liquor store and bought a bottle of Extra Strength Excedrin, that was all.

“Bag?” the guy behind the counter said. Like the rest of the store, he was aflicker with fluorescence.

I was afraid to shake my head. “No thank you,” I said, very very softly.

He gave me a bag. I decided to look at it like this: I had a bag! I could fold it up and keep it in my purse, I could recycle it, write a poem on it, make a funny hand-puppet for the kids, pack a lunch … a small brown paper bag has many uses. I remembered my mother leaning forward in a soft chair in a darkened room, her eyes rimmed in red, breathing into just such a bag.

The rest of the family had found better things to do — playing outside, getting married — but I sat cross-legged on the living room carpet, a discreet distance away, watching my broken-down mother breathe into a paper bag, and learning loneliness.

Outside the fluorescent liquor store 30 years later was a bright, lovely day, and I knew I had to get out of it. I unhitched my bike, then rehitched it, walked five or six parking meters down the street, and ducked into a dark bar with two old guys and a bartender.

I sat between the two old guys. One was reading a newspaper, the other was just blinking.

“What can I get you, young lady?” the bartender asked, though my guess is I’m older than him.

“A Coke and a glass of water.” I smiled at the old man who wasn’t reading the newspaper, and he blinked. Maybe he was trying to focus. If so, we had that in common.

I opened my new bottle of pills, popped two, drank some water, drank half my Coke, and the bartender said, and I quote, “Headache?”

I nodded. I love bars. I wish I loved to drink, too. I would spend more time in bars, and then my life would be different. I met Crawdad de la Cooter in a bar, and a lot of great people in bars. People I didn’t meet in bars include: the German asshole, an Argentinean asshole, that Canadian one, and a whole lot of home-grown crap.

“I have a date for dinner,” I said, after we had discussed print media vs. electronics, children, the neighborhood, Proposition 8, and sports. I’m talking about me and the bartender. The newspaperman was only interested in his newspaper, and the man who blinked had left, his mood no doubt ruined by young women and Cokes and such.

“Oh yeah, where are you going?” the bartender said.

So then we got to talk about neighborhood restaurants. The neighborhood was Rockridge, but where we ended up eating was in Temescal, at the tapas place across the street from Pizzaiolo, which was closed.

And, no offense to the tapas, but I wish I had cancelled that date instead of curing my headache with a Coke and Excedrin beforehand. My mom, for example, doesn’t believe in Western medicine, not even aspirin. She thinks your body can take care of itself, and now I have to wonder if sometimes my headaches are trying to tell me something: “Stay in this bar, with these friendly and harmless people, and with at least 15 TVs to look at,” my headache was saying. “Eventually it will be tomorrow morning and soccer will come on.” Or: “Go home and go to sleep.”

Also, I remember now what I love about sports — fandom, I mean, in this case. It brings people together. In sports bars and stadiums and living rooms, where there are things to eat and drink.

At the Phoenix, where I managed to watch a lot of the soccer that I watched during this World Cup, I sometimes ran into people I knew, and sometimes sat and twitched or stood and cheered with people I didn’t. It was crowded in there, always. And people stood on the sidewalk on Valencia Street, looking in.

More important, bangers and mash: two big smoke-tinged sausages that were soft like butter inside, baked beans, smasheds, and a great Guinness gravy drenching everything. New favorite bar:

THE PHOENIX

Mon.–Fri. 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun. 10 a.m.–2 a.m.

811 Valencia, SF

(415) 695-1811

D/MC/V

Full bar

 

Ride the Iron Horse

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Ride the Iron Horse

There’s a mysterious paradox present in the fact the Golden Gate Bridge was essentially born in the pit of the Great Depression. On the one hand, this marvel of architecture and beauty stands for potential and optimism as made manifest in the dreamiest haven of California. On the other, the Golden Gate is like a metallic siren, known as a place where those who have lost contact with American life go to disappear.

In Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge (Bloomsbury Press, 224 pages, $23) the esteemed historian and state librarian emeritus Kevin Starr focuses on the positive side of the landmark, even if he notes tragedies such as the deaths of ten workers near the final days of the bridge’s construction. Starr isn’t seduced by the romantic or melancholic image of the fog-shrouded structure so much as committed to celebrate — with great acumen and an oft-oratorial voice that unites broad yet vital references in a turn of phrase — its greatness. His book is as well-ordered and constructed as its subject, with cleanly presented chapters outlining the bridge’s relationship to subjects such as politics, money, and design, saving the more ambiguous — yet also perhaps richest? — areas of suicide and art for last.

As such, Golden Gate is complimentary to Donald MacDonald and Ira Nadel’s more illustrative, text-based 2008 tome Golden Gate Bridge: History and Design of an Icon (Chronicle Books, 144 pages, $16.95), a well-designed hardcover with a cover that pays homage to the International Orange color of the bridge itself. Another recent book that pairs off and contrasts well with Scharff’s is Gary Snyder and Tom Killion’s Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History and Prints (Heyday Books, 160 pages, $50), in the sense that Starr, ever mindful of context, is keenly attuned to the bridge’s role in connecting nature and urbanity in Northern California. In the latter stretch of the book, he takes time to explore the contested role of BART in relation to the bridge.

In the “Art” chapter of Golden Gate, Starr makes cursory mention of the scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo in which Kim Novak hurls herself into the water at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Anyone who visits this cinematic landmark, whether alone or on a group tour, will discover that after Sept. 11, 2001, it has been fenced off. So, while safeguarding against real-life suicides has not (at least yet) resulted in overt changes to the look and structure of the bridge, the possibility of terrorist attack has led to some tiny degree of visual blight near it. It’s curious, and contradictory, and the type of detail — complete with the added twist that a hole ripped into the metal fence allows for good photography — that Starr might enjoy. He isn’t interested in singing the praises of the bridge’s famous creators, such as Joseph B. Strauss, as he is in demonstrating the meaning of their accomplishments. Trains and boats if not airplanes brought us the Golden Gate Bridge, and Scharff shows why its Art Deco subtle majesty — those paradoxes again — is here to stay.

KEVIN STARR: GOLDEN GATE

July 8, 6 p.m., $7–$12

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, SF

(415) 597-6700

www.commonwealth.org

July 13, 7 p.m., free

Bookshop West Portal

80 West Portal, SF

(415) 564-8080

www.bookshopwestportal.com

July 14, 7 p.m., free

Books Inc.

2251 Chestnut, SF

(415) 931-3633

www.booksinc.net

July 15, 6 p.m.

California Historical Society

678 Mission, SF

(415) 357-1848

www.californiahistoricalsociety.org

First-person shooter

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
First-person shooter

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

Tom Bissell

(Pantheon Books/Random House, 218 pages, $22.95)

In the fifth chapter of his essay collection Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, author Tom Bissell meets “Al,” a staffer at the 2009 DICE convention, an annual game industry event held in Las Vegas. “By 2020,” gushes Al, “there is a very good chance that the president will be someone who played Super Mario Bros. on the NES.”

There exists an entire generation who grew up alongside video games, and while it might well include a future president or two, it also contains a handful of talented writers eager to vivisect their childhood obsessions. Bissell is a model for this new breed of video game journo — schooled in the discourse of academic criticism, tempered in the crucible of high-stakes, highbrow publishing, and possessed of an unapologetic love for the medium — and Extra Lives is an important, relentlessly perceptive book.

Bissell began as a travel writer, and his background gives him a gift for evocative descriptions of video game vignettes that sketch the aesthetic and technical particulars in deft, efficient strokes. Each of the nine essays in the collection is roughly centered around a single game; the limited corpus, chosen with conviction and care, skews toward recent games like Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and Bioware’s Mass Effect.

This modern focus is a reaction to a game design sea change, one that privileges story and artistic ambition over technical achievement and mindless action. But games have a long way to go, and Bissell is determined to unpack their puerility, along with his unblinking acceptance of it: “If I were reading a book or watching a film that, every 10 minutes, had me gulping a gallon of aesthetic Pepto, I would stop reading or watching,” he opines. “Games, for some reason, do not have this problem. Or rather, their problem is not having this problem. I routinely tolerate in games crudities I would never tolerate in any other form of art or entertainment.”

Veering constantly from the personal to the theoretical, Bissell proves that it’s possible to ruminate on the past, present, and future of video games in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and consistently entertaining. The book’s only flaw is its relative brevity, especially considering that two essays (“The Grammar of Fun” and “Grand Thefts”) already have appeared in print in an abridged form. Nevertheless, games and gamers should count themselves lucky to have Extra Lives on their side.

Madam majesty

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Madam majesty

“Who do you think you are, the queen of fucking England?”

That’s Joe Pesci to Helen Mirren in Love Ranch, a film that takes Mirren about as far as possible from her titular role in 2006’s The Queen. She stars as Grace Botempo, co-owner of Nevada’s first legal brothel alongside her husband, Pesci’s Charlie. The fact that the regal British dame is entirely convincing as an American madam speaks to her impressive versatility.

In fact, Love Ranch is more of a showcase for Mirren than anything else. While the movie as a whole is engaging — insofar as it’s a 1970s period piece about legalized prostitution — the plot is mostly predictable. Grace finds herself drawn to the Argentinean prize fighter her husband forces her to manage. In Bruza (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), she gets the attention and appreciation Charlie can no longer offer. In Grace, Bruza gets a woman who looks damn good at 64.

The unlikely relationship between the two is actually Love Ranch‘s weakest element. It’s clear why they’re drawn to each other, despite the age and cultural gaps between them, but the affair plays out like an indie flick cliché. From the moment Grace and Bruza meet, you sense where things are going — and that takes away most of the excitement from the eventual consummation.

Still, there’s a lot to like about Love Ranch, which should be taken as more of a character piece anyway. Aside from Mirren, who carries most of the weight, Pesci returns to form as the violent and volatile Charlie. Then there are the prostitutes, a veritable who’s who of sexy, seedy actors: Bai Ling, Taryn Manning, and Gina Gershon, who turns in her finest work since 1995’s Showgirls.

Obviously Love Ranch is in a different class than Showgirls, but there is something charmingly trashy about it regardless. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is seeing Mirren in this context, watching her get ravaged by a much younger man, break up girl-on-girl fights, and say things like, “I’ve got 25 psychotic whores to manage. That’s a full dance card.” It’s doubtful the film would be worthwhile without Mirren’s efforts. We care about Grace because of her sympathetic portrayal, but also because she’s Helen effing Mirren. And though there’s something disingenuous, perhaps even gimmicky about that, it works despite itself. We’re drawn to Grace, even when Love Ranch‘s third act proves disappointing, and that’s enough to keep watching.

LOVE RANCH opens Wed/30 in San Francisco.

Free art school

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Free art school

Yes, it is summer. And yes, you look great in your tankini chewing ice cream and leathering your face. I am aware that school is out of session and out of fashion. And I know the institutional dinosaurs in tweed make you sneeze. But school is cool again — or at least it’s not as stale and stubborn as it once was.

I’m referring to experimental art schools, or “artist-initiated schools.” Their history lies in previous alternative art education models like the Bauhaus school or Black Mountain College, which served to explore other, more inventive ways of teaching and creating. Current models are everywhere. Coupled with the reach of today’s technologies they’ve grown into nebulous networks that spread like rhizomes in response to (or refusal of) what’s been called “a crisis in contemporary art education.”

Two recently published books address the height of this concern and the new shifts occurring within art education: Rethinking the Contemporary Art School (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 234 pages, $25) and Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (MIT Press, 268 pages, $30). To get a grasp of how this has affected the Bay Area, I met with independent curator Joseph del Pesco to discuss some of the history and impetuses of these schools locally, including one of his own.

Pointing to Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius as a precursor, and his edict-turned-trope “art cannot be taught,” del Pesco says artist-initiated schools begin with “the idea that artists need an informal education,” which includes “informal spaces” away from art world market pressures and “collectors who cop the studios of the best MFA programs.”

These informal spaces might take shape in a proper building or institution, but they’re also known to saunter in the streets, rub elbows in Chinatown bars, and wander nomadically from site to site. The loose, open structure of these spaces is meant to compliment and encourage the artist as autodidactic, self-orienting, and adaptive. This as opposed to the more conventional learning institutions that structure education through rigid class times, grades, diplomas, and linear teacher-to-student pedagogy.

Regarding local experimental school models, del Pesco cites the Independent School of Art as “the most important example in the Bay Area.” “ISA was run on a barter-based tuition system and you basically got a free education from Jon Rubin [ISA’s initiator], who was teaching at CCA and SFAI at the time.” Although the school only ran for two years (2004–06, at which point Rubin took a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University), del Pesco emphasizes ISA’s ability to function completely untethered as a nomadic network of artists who successfully organized projects and events. ISA’s endeavors included black market auctions where students made and sold forgeries of famous art works, then used the money to fund more ISA projects.

Del Pesco’s own “experimental school-without-walls,” Pickpocket Almanack, is slightly less ambitious in its approach. Instead, this “school” (del Pesco is highly reluctant to use this term and insists on its metaphorical value to dismiss any anxieties it might harbor) functions more as an “algorithmic calendar.”

“I think some of the most interesting things we have here in the Bay Area are the public programs. The lectures, the panel discussions, the screenings — those are our creative strengths,” del Pesco says. “And part of Pickpocket Almanack — part of its impetus — was to take advantage of that.”

Just as the name implies — “stolen calendar” (the “k” added as a nod to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack) — Pickpocket Almanack “steals” from the slew of free public programs offered by the Bay Area’s art institutions and organizes the best into individual courses via the prowess of an appointed team of “experts” or faculty. The faculty involved in Pickpocket’s spring 2010 season ran a wide gamut: Claudia Altman-Siegel, owner and director of Altman Siegel Gallery; Jim Fairchild, Modest Mouse guitarist; Amy Franceschini, artist and member of the Futurefarmers collective who organized Playshop, another Bay Area artist-initiated school; Renny Pritikin, curator and codirector during one of the best eras of the now defunct alternative space New Langton Arts; and Jerome Waag, artist and chef involved in the experimental restaurant collaborative OPENrestaraunt.

Partnered with SFMOMA, one might suspect Pickpocket Almanack’s “experimental” claim to be somewhat compromised. Although this relationship might carry with it a few bureaucratic implications, del Pesco assured me that Pickpocket’s faculty isn’t expected to include any of the museum’s events into its courses. If anything the pairing provides a consolation prize for Pickpocket’s participants (“students” is another term del Pesco avoids): an SFMOMA ID card that allows free access to any public program.

“It’s kind of like a gesture that makes the material real in some way,” del Pesco says. Since Pickpocket’s participants sign up through the website and discuss events primarily through e-mail, an initial launch event and final wrap-up meeting have also been incorporated to give some semblance of actual participation. But there’s no set structure. Some faculty have organized events outside of the course calendar, among them Fairchild, who facilitated a conversation with musician John Vanderslice.

While participating, as in any community setting, there’s always a fear of lame ducks. The misanthropic can technically remain anonymous throughout the course. “But there’s some incentive to actually meet each other to make it not a community but a kind of informal network of relationships,” del Pesco says. He likes to think of Pickpocket as “a special encounter with knowledge, where you don’t have the weight of school and education and a degree and grades and all that other shit. It’s self-guided; it’s social; it’s about the relationship between you, the people in the course, and the faculty — the informal production of knowledge and making visible certain events going on in the Bay Area.”

Pickpocket’s next season begins in September. So you have plenty of time to get dumb in the sun. 

www.pickpocketalmanack.org

Lips, Inc.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Lips, Inc.

SUPER EGO Pride was huge and mostly cute, although I was bummed out by all the trash. (The litter, I mean.) I say next year everyone who goes has to prove their queer credentials by designing dazzling outfits recycled from castoff compostable cups, clove butts, loose boa feathers, meat-on-a-stick sticks, leftover rainbow Smirnoff wristbands, and broken drag newbie heels.

Stand and wobble with me, sustainable sisters of the night!

Still, it was nice to see Pride acknowledge the tastes of its changing demographic with an expanded emphasis on Latin music, soul, and hip-hop at the dance stages. That replaced classic diva house and disco with an alternative musical history of Pride, and it was a lovely change. This year, it fell to the radical faeries of the Freedom Village to preserve that certain old-school strain of gay celebration with rare disco tunes, historical shrines (walking through the rest of the celebration, you’d have been hard-pressed to find any visual evidence that Pride was older than Rihanna’s hair), and, of course, a drag queen named Margaret Cholo drinking her own urine as she lip-synced to “Party in the USA.” Pride.

I’m on a homo-historical bent lately because word just came down that my spiritual pen mother, the ever-saucy nightlife gossip columnist Sweet Lips of the Bay Area Reporter, is retiring at age 87 after 39 years of covering a vibrant slice of the San Francisco gay scene. Child, she did not go easy — for the past few years she was homebound, but that didn’t stop her from sending her “spies” out into the bars and reporting all the scandal and drama. I was terrified of these spies. Sweet Lips knew all, and wasn’t afraid to say it.

In 39 years I’ll be 42, and I write about all kinds of scenes besides the gay one. But I stand on the padded and studded shoulders of Sweet Lips, Mr. Marcus (her leather-scene chronicling coworker who passed away earlier this year), and all the other dishy, insomniac, probably slightly alcoholic, definitely devoted nightlife columnists who came before me. Thank you, Ms. Lips: Long live the mouthy queens.

 

DAM FUNK

If you haven’t tuned in to this Angelino master of Princely funk — or at least tripped out once to the deconstructed ’80s wonder of his recent Toeachizown — then you crazy. Live, he’s even better, and will be joined by synth-loner Nite Jewel. (They’ll both join forces for a Nite Funk performance as well.) DJ Pickpocket presides.

Thu/1, 9 p.m., $15 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

SINGULAR SENSATION

Let’s get sweaty! Far-too-hip Los Angeles dance instructor Ryan Heffington is coming to town to Olivia Newton your John on the dance floor. Think Richard Simmons without the peek-a-boo shorts and closet. Fauxnique and Husband host, DJs Pee Play and Stanley Frank lube up the legwarmers.

Thu/1, 10 p.m., $7. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. www.paradisesf.com

 

MARQUES WYATT

With his weekly Deep parties, Marques has pretty much held down the L.A. fort for soulful house music, single-handed, for the past 13 years or so. His sets can get heady — he’s not afraid to take you into some fierce and spiritual headspace — but build so much organic rhythmic momentum that you won’t mind leaping into the void. With M3 and Jayvi Velasco.

Fri/2, 9 p.m., $10. Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF. www.triplecrownsf.com

 

JANAKA SELEKTA

Bay homeboy Janaka wickedly melds classical Indian sounds to deep dub and dread bass, and new album Pushing Air is full of sweeping melodies and haunting breakdowns. He’ll be supporting the rumbly nodding of our own Mighty Dub Killaz at one of SF’s raddest weekly parties, Dub Mission.

Sun/4, 9 p.m., $8–$11. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

INDEPENDANCE

An annual July Fourth weekend tradition, Stompy and Sunset’s 12-hour extravaganza on the patio of Cafe Cocomo brings together some of the best names in funky house and techno in town. This year, they’re adding legendary deep house pioneer Kerri “Kaoz” Chandler as headliner. Could it get any better? Hell yeah, there’s a BBQ before 9 p.m., too

Sun/4, 2 p.m., $10–$20. Cafe; Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF. www.pacificsound.net

Redneck dawn

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Redneck dawn

If it left here tomorrow, would you still remember redneck rock? In the 20-tweens, you might hear it rushing through the purple veins of Southern gothic TV: within Jace Everett’s growling poster-boy blues, “Bad Things,” which opens True Blood, and Gangstagrass’ hip-hop-drenched banjo-and-fiddle hillbilly vamp, “Long Hard Times to Come,” the theme to the trigger-happy Justified.

In 1974’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, author Jan Reid defined the genre as Texan through-and-through, based in irreverently reverent Austin and embodied by Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman, Janis Joplin, Doug Sahm, Townes Van Zandt, and Billy Joe Shaver. Reid sees the Dixie Chicks, Steve Earle, and Stevie Ray Vaughn as its unlikely descendants, but that’s only one blood line. The rusty dust of redneck rock can also be found rising from the sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man” and “Sweet Home Alabama” and the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” and “Blue Sky” on classic rock radio. Or whenever 38 Special’s soft-rock stab at Top 40 popularity, “Caught Up in You,” pops up, be it in a biker bar or a key girl-power moment from Drew Barrymore’s Whip It. Redneck rock lives wherever the Nuge wanders, crossbow in hand. Do the ghosts of redneck rock lurk wherever Buffalo Bill beards and American Gothic facial hair may roam?

Today, Nashville yields few answers: you’d be hard-pressed to hear anything beyond the “new rock” recent past in the OTT bounce of the Kings of Leon, apart from the sinewy guitar snaking beneath the pelvic thrust of, say, “Sex on Fire.” Though perhaps this year’s watery disaster — evoking the legendary 1927 Mississippi floods that inspired a generation of blues songwriters — will bring in a new wave of soul-searching.

You’re likelier to find remnants of redneck rock in the fiery ambitions of Louisville, Ky., combo My Morning Jacket. Or out west, in the Cali-rock dreams of Howlin Rain and the Portland folk-psych ruminations of Blitzen Trapper. These bands are also fans, unafraid to demonstrate their allegiance to those enlightened rogues the Allmans — shred-savants in the name of “Jessica” and the still-astonishing “Whipping Post” — or the Band, the group whose wide, deep catalog likely has the biggest impact on post-punk’s redneck rockers.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, with the recession continuing to bear down unsparingly on the music world, but neither My Morning Jacket, Kings of Leon, nor Howlin Rain has released a studio album since 2008. The exception is Blitzen Trapper. Enigmatic storyteller Eric Earley and company came to most critics’ attention with their third full-length, Wild Mountain Nation (Lidkercow Ltd., 2007). That recording dared to reclaim a kind of back-to-the-backwoods, Green Man-tapped mythos, complete with saintly tramps, critter call-outs, country caravans, and a genuine-dandelion-wine “Wild Mtn. Jam.” The new Destroyer of the Void (Sub Pop) yields further clues to the ensemble’s redneck of the woods.

The four-eyed Minotaur on the cover of Destroyer replaces the spectral Bigfoot skulking through Wild Mountain Nation‘s underbrush and the changeling wolf-boy in the title track of Furr (Sub Pop, 2008). In the opening title track, this Destroyer stalks a spaghetti southwestern dreamscape awash with rolling stones, wayward sons, and other rock ‘n’ roll archetypes, pieced out with harmonies more akin to “Bohemian Rhapsody” than “Good Vibrations.” Is this a rustic-rock mini-opera variant on the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away”? Instead, Blitzen Trapper appears intent on chasing away yawning distractions, the enemy of imagination — bounding over Rockpile hill and dale on “Laughing Lover,” fluttering after acoustic-guitar-glittered butterflies in “Below the Hurricane,” then finally settling down for a tale about “The Man Who Would Speak True,” a protagonist who destroys all who listen with his terrible honesty.

Does this fear point to why Blitzen Trapper prefers to take refuge in a lush, obfuscating thicket of folk tales, rock ‘n’ roll tropes, and unexpected sonic switchbacks? Truth is feared, and healing sanctuary can found in the natural order. No wonder Blitzen Trapper treats its windy musical changes — the roaring fuzz-guitar-and-B-3 overture of “Love and Hate,” the dying trees and elegiac piano and strings of “Heaven and Earth,” and the minor-chord yet blissfully sweet “Dragon’s Song” — as mysterious, unchanging, and impossible to tame.

“Sadie, I can never change,” wails Earley, in a feather-light tip of a cap to “Free Bird”‘s “This bird you cannot change/Lord knows I can’t change.” It’s a slight, very specific turnaround from the proud, loaded declaration of independence hammered out with such lyricism by Skynyrd: Blitzen Trapper stands its ground in fertile soil, part Mississippi Delta and “The Weight,” part A Night at the Opera and Village Green Preservation Society, its melodies — and heart — ever unresolved, its notions semi-nonsensical and wild-eyed.

BLITZEN TRAPPER

With the Moondoggies

Wed/30, 9 p.m., $20

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

Appetite: Bar buzz

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Bar buzz

Shuffling action around SF’s best bars has been steady in recent weeks: Neyah White leaves Nopa to become Yamazaki’s brand ambassador, Brooke Arthur exits Range to head up the bar at brand new Prospect, Reza Esmali departs Smuggler’s Cove to revamp Long Bar on Fillmore, Steven Liles journeys from Fifth Floor over to Smuggler’s Cove… Thankfully, there are others holding steady offering new seasonal menus or launching a new pop-up bar:

RICKHOUSE — It’s been a rewarding summer thus far for Rickhouse and its talented bar manager, Erick Castro, already. First, Castro won one of two mixologist of the year awards at StarChefs Rising Stars, then Rickhouse was nominated for three awards (more than any other SF bars) in the international nominees list for Tales of the Cocktail this year: Best American Cocktail Bar, World’s Best Cocktail Menu, World’s Best New Cocktail Bar. So it seems as a good a time as any to re-visit Rickhouse to try their brand new Seasonal Summer Cocktail menu — with eight original drinks plus one new punch — especially when they’re as good as Ginger’s Trois ($8).This was tops of the few I tried last week, effervescent with sparkling wine, smooth with Plymouth Gin, fresh lime and mint, balanced with bitters, lightly spicy with ginger. I hope this is a permanent menu fixture. A Cherry Blossom Cobbler ($8) is a sno-cone tower of ice, topped with a cherry, rich with Yamazaki 12-year whisky, organic cherry blossom jam and lemon juice. On the spirituous side is a Paper Plane ($9), refreshingly strong with bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon juice.
246 Kearny, SF
415-398-2827
www.rickhousebar.com

 

CLOCK BAR — Clock Bar’s fairly new GM, Phillip Barcio (formerly of Ramblas), launches his first seasonal menu, one of three throughout the year (“seasons” being grouped by produce): a May-September/berry season menu ($12-14 per cocktail). At a preview night last week, it was a joy to witness farmers and producers congregated at Clock Bar who provided much of the produce or ingredients for the menu’s cocktails.

Clock Bar’s inviting decor

The menu is ambitious, playful and farm fresh, with every drink featuring a different spirit and seasonal produce or local and house-made sodas and syrups. An Oregon 609 is complex but bright with Bols Genever, olallieberry marmalade, Cynar, Benedictine and lemon, though maybe my least favorite of the three I tried. Carl is a lighter take on absinthe (featuring Swiss Kubler absinthe) with apricot reduction and a zippy house root beer. Nutty, creamy dessert comes in the form of a Mission Flip with Pampero Aniversario Rum, house cane syurp, Mission fig reduction and a whole fresh egg. It seems a locally-embracing new season has dawned at Clock Bar.
335 Powell, in Westin St Francis Hotel, SF
(415) 397-9222
www.michaelmina.net

 

PICKLED at ABSINTHE — Yes, it’s a pop-up bar called Pickled, happening on the last Monday of every month in Absinthe’s private dining room, with ever-changing drinks created by bar manager Carlos Yturria.

Carlos Yturria behind the bar at Pickled at Absinthe

I stopped in inaugural night, June 28. A wide range of spirits are represented, from armagnac to mezcal ($10-12 a cocktail), and there’s also a revolving offering of bar bites to go with. Pisco showed itself beautiful in Carlos’ crushed ice presentation with figs, sage, lemon and a candied fig chip on top. Kudos for using my new local favorite pisco, Encanto. Close the night with a little finish of Carlos’ candied strip of rhubarb.
Last Monday of every month, 5:30-10pm
388 Hayes, SF.
(415) 551-1590
www.absinthe.com

The people’s court

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The people’s court

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL Amanda Curreri wants you. Like the open-ended phrasing of its title, "Occupy the Empty," Curreri’s second solo show at Ping Pong Gallery is both a basic statement of what an artist does within an exhibition space and a call to action soliciting the viewer to step in, step up, and take a stand. Or perhaps the phrase should be "take the stand," since, as the artist explained to me during a recent gallery visit, the arrangement of the installation’s components roughly mirrors the layout of a courtroom.

A heavy wooden bench sits to the right of the gallery entrance, evoking where the witnesses, lawyers, and spectators sit; leaning against the wall to the right is the "jury box," two long panels silk-screened with six life-size images of chairs apiece; a sculpture in the gallery’s center, which looks like a segment of the kind of pearl necklace both Jackie O and a porn actress would wear, becomes the balustrade that typically separates the actors from the observers in legal proceedings.

On the wall opposite the bench hangs a canvas covered in carefully painted grayscale rectangles — an abstract approximation of TV static — that’s next to a TV set elevated on a stool off of which hangs a compilation of last words of various famous figures (it’s hard to top Karl Marx’s final trump card: "Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough"). This is what Curreri refers to as the "power spot" in the room, "either where the judge would go or where the witness stand would be."

Our conversation is occurring after I’ve just "stepped down" from being videotaped by Curreri, and her telling collapse of the judge’s bench and the jury box sums up my experience: I wasn’t really under oath, but I wanted to be true to myself, since my act of testifying and its record are now part of "Occupy the Empty." She’s been asking people who come by the show to sign up and share their thoughts on the subject of last words. On July 9th, just before the exhibit closes, these conversations will be played back on the TV set, which until then has remained off.

Curreri started formulating "Occupy the Empty" last year after participating in a court hearing in Massachusetts concerning her late father. It turns out this was the same courthouse in which Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in the early 20th century. Curreri, also of Italian-American descent, started thinking about the judicial system as a kind of democratic theater in which one’s mandatory performance carries incredibly high stakes — including, as with Sacco and Vanzetti and thousands of other tragic cases, death.

"I wanted to bring some gravity into what we do as artists," Curreri explains, reflecting on the stakes of participation in her art. "I really value the way people put their lives together and present themselves. So I wanted a work that would necessitate some commitment on the viewers’ part."

When Curreri starts remembering the conversation she had with her father on his deathbed, I think of the collage hanging on the wall opposite the silk-screened jury box, in which Curreri has surrounded a copy of the moving letter Sacco wrote to his son on the eve of his execution with childhood photos of her and her dad. This fusion of the personal with the historic is simultaneously touching and troubling (Sacco’s words are not those of Curreri’s father, even though the two men are aligned graphically), but it is rooted in the common impulse to ground our present by finding solace in the past. Last words are comforting in this regard. They are epigrammatic reminders that we will have our say.

At its core, "Occupy the Empty" is about just that: having a say. Or as Curreri phrases it: "I’m asking people to stand in a moment of silence and occupy it and project."

MORE FAMILY MATTERS


"3+3," a group show of local marquee names at Haines Gallery, contains a lot of eye candy. Shaun O’Dell’s delicate ink-on-paper exercises in moiré pattern interference and Leslie Shows’ graphic reconfiguration of a brush-painted Chinese landscape scroll via cut-out comics and Benday dot sprays are particularly lovely stations in this curatorial relay: Haines selected O’Dell along with Kota Ezawa and Darren WatersTon, who in turn chose Emily Prince, Taha Belal, and Shows, respectively.

Prince’s contribution stands out because the beauty of its craft comments on the nature and history of its craft. In two identical wooden square frames hang what appear to be identical lace doilies, although the one of the right seems more brittle and aged. Closer inspection reveals that the second doily is in fact a to-scale, scanned, and intricately cut-out paper replica of the one on the left, which the wall card indicates was crocheted by the artist’s grandmother. Prince’s handiwork is no less delicate — or "auratic" for that matter — than that of her grandmother’s, and this tribute to "women’s work" is no less genuine for containing a facsimile.

If you want to have a conversation about the place of craft within fine art, you’re first going to have to navigate through these two skeins.

OCCUPY THE EMPTY

Through July 10, free

"Last Words" viewing party July 9 , 7–9 p.m.

Ping Pong Gallery

1240 22nd St, SF

(415) 550-7483

www.pingponggallery.com

3+3

Through July 10, free

Haines Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 397-8114

Nobody but you

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Nobody but you

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The couple on holiday is one of modern cinema’s quintessential sites of anxiety: Voyage to Italy (1954), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Weekend (1967), and L’avventura (1960) all chart its precipitous course. The merely inexorable ennui of the vacationing lovers is the existential flipside of the couple bound by oblivion, like so many Bonnie and Clydes. That may be heady company with which to introduce Maren Ade’s pairing in Everyone Else, her second feature, but in so laying bare the behavioral excesses of characters struggling for authentic expression, she’s made a distinctly modernist romantic comedy — one without air.

Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) are failing miserably at basic communication. This happens on vacation. Without the steadying rails of vocation, moods and unintended remarks are pursued further than they would be otherwise. Everyone Else figures holiday as a stage, in which the principles grasp for their roles in relationship to the other. Acting is brought up early and often. After a dangerous conversation about Chris’s masculinity, Gitti laughs at his "bad acting" when he casually throws his arm around her. "I didn’t know I was acting," he mutters.

They are a young, bourgeoisie German couple staying at his parents’ villa in Sardinia. He is a disappointed architect, she a music publicist. Already, though, this capsule betrays the film’s methodical mode of exposition, whereby facts like "his parents’ villa" and "in Sardinia" are realized in conversation, later than we expect. Before then, we’re privy to inner jokes, private nonsense, and gestural rapport. Rather than using such minutiae to ingratiate us into Chris and Gitti’s quirks, Ade is embedding us in the relationship’s interior.

We realize how deeply during the course of two dinners with an architect acquaintance and his wife, the first at the new couple’s house and the second at the villa. The other pair stands in for the "everybody else" of the title, and, in their outsized performance as a couple, acts as a convenient cipher for Chris and Gitti’s bottomless insecurities. As an afternoon champagne toast for the other’s couple’s pregnancy (one of many reminders in the film that Chris and Gitti are not expecting — a baby or anything else) gives way to sour bickering, Chris and Gitti’s conventional appearance cracks under the stress of false pretenses; just sitting on the same side of the table seems like a lie.

Both characters trail inconstant emotions without having resolved their meaning beforehand, but there’s a far greater dynamic range in their body language. Ade’s staging of Minichmayr and Eidinger’s bodies forms a vividly choreographed counterpoint to the many doublings in her script. Twice, Chris roughly embraces Gitti after she’s told him that she loves him: a false show of decisiveness masking indifference. Gitti wraps herself around Chris’ body when she’s most insecure of his love: hardly subtle, and, tragically, with an effect precisely contrary to her desire for comfort.

In screwball comedies, a couple’s disliking each other is a sure sign of their chemistry — it looks like fun, especially when the plot throws obstacles in the way of the inevitable consummation. Chris and Gitti are not cold fish — their passion is intense, if swollen by doubt — but the fact that their relationship’s obstacles are self-imposed leads to a certain captive mentality, in which staying together means being marooned from the outside world.

EVERYONE ELSE opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

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