Volume 44 [2009–10]

Regime genie

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Regime genie

arts@sfbg.com

FILM While his unauthorized appearance in Team America: World Police (2004) was surely disillusioning, Kim Jong-il is known to be a foreign film fanatic as well as someone with a keen interest in his own country’s popular media. Popular meaning propagandic, and vice versa — distinctions being useless in North Korea’s case. Inappropriate TV and radio signals are jammed; Internet access is scant; lively arts expressions are strictly “official.” Worldwide, only Eritrea rates lower for freedom of the press.

But why complain when a government-supervised communications realm allows the flourishing of such refined entertainment as Let’s Trim Our Hair In Accordance With the Socialist Lifestyle? Thanks to which broadcast series we know that shorter hair is not only more stylish, patriotic, and hygienic, but improves intelligence — because long locks drain the brain of needed nutrients. (Thus explaining the intellectual reputations of hippies and metalheads.)

The “Dear Leader” has also overseen numerous big-screen productions with alluring titles like A Faithful Servant, A Single Mind, Brigade’s Political Commissar and Let’s Go to Mt. Kumgang. In a 50-page pamphlet titled “Great Man and Cinema: Anecdotes,” he spills all about this fabulous showbiz sideline. Well, perhaps not all: one doubts, for instance, that he comes clean about the 1978 kidnapping of leading South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, who after an attitude-improving prison stint was compelled to make 1985’s nationalistic Godzilla-slash-Golem monster saga Pulgasari.

Other Cinema’s “Mayday Parade(e)” program offers a full dose of propagandic kitsch from the Democratic People’s Republic and beyond. Its centerpiece is The Juche Idea, an hour-long exploration of today’s united-front wonderland. There are excerpts from colossal choreographed Pyongyang patriotic displays, lugubrious dramas, poems (“O bureaucratic capitalism!/ Wet slug to be suffocated in eggshells and beer”) and other materials illustrating the regime’s titular essential ideology. Offering outside perspective is the lengthy interview with a South Korean film student who’s expatriated to an artists’ agricultural collective here after unimpressed stopovers in the U.S. and Japan.

You can stop dialing that local Tea Party hotline right now. The Juche Idea is not quite what it appears to be — though so nearly so it’s ingenious. The final section in an ultra deadpan mockumentary trilogy by plain old American Jim Finn, it mixes actual archival and faked footage to satirize revolutionary snowblindness so subtly you might well be fooled. Following his prior efforts’ send-ups of Peruvian Shining Path militants and a nonexistent East German space program, he again shoots and scores.

The most hilariously ersatz segments are those providing lessons in English as both a Socialist and Capitalist language. Speaking their dialogue with genius stiltedness is Oleg Mavromatti as a Russian visitor no doubt impressed to learn that as far as agricultural and other advancements are concerned, “The manure we’re spreading is just the beginning.”

Moving farther eastward, the ATA program offers fun from another People’s Republic. Great Advancement of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (1966), better known hereabouts as Mao’s Little Red Video, is a half-hour newsreel/pep rally focusing mostly on China’s first atomic and nuclear bomb tests. These are triumphant, natch; but more important is the fact that the people themselves are “a spiritual atomic bomb” who will inevitably blow decadent capitalist aggressors to smithereens by their sheer purity of rhetoric.

Early arrivals will be greeted by the turntablings of DJ Onanism and partial screening of Situationist prankster René Viénet’s 1977 Peking Duck Soup, or One More Effort, Chinamen, If You Want to Be Revolutionaries! This cheeky collage uses official imagery in service of an illustrated lecture enumerating all the lies, backstabbings, and massacres throughout Mao’s “visionary” rule. Any regime without humor is bound to generate a lot of the unintentional kind, but Viénet can’t help adding his own particular brand of aesthetic snark. Particularly felicitous are the uses of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je t’aime … moi non plus” and the Singing Dogs’ “Jingle Bells.”

OTHER CINEMA

Sat/1, 8:30 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.othercinema.com

Oyaji

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Oyaji

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Life does serve up the occasional delicious paradox, such as getting one’s first glimpse of the new iPad while sitting at a sushi bar in the outer Richmond. The iPad is elegant, yes, a jewel of a device whose colorful icons zip across the screen at the swipe of a finger, like images glimpsed through the windows of an accelerating train. But it is also the latest in a series of increasingly powerful devices that mediate our relations with the rest of the world. You do touch the iPad, true, to make it work, but mostly you stare at it, as if it’s a television.

The sushi bar, by contrast, is an unmediated encounter between customer and chef. No machines get in the way, not even servers, unless you order a beer or sake. There is no swiping unless and until you pay by credit card. The sushi bar in this sense resembles a New York deli: people at a counter full of food, looking and pointing at the food, the chef nodding and preparing the food and handing it back, maybe even watching in approval as it gets eaten. Directness.

This revelation — if that’s what it is — came to me recently at five-year-old Oyaji, a Zagat-rated Japanese restaurant at the edge of Lincoln Park. (The name means, more or less, “daddy,” in the Sean Connery sense.) The iPad was enthralling and magical, but I was more enthralled by the sight of our young sushi chef at his labors, expertly forming his rolls and hand rolls, wielding his sharp ceramic knives and handing us the results. Gleaming gizmo wizardry at one elbow, and spicy tuna at the other. Give me … well, it would be greedy to say both, especially since I don’t want an iPad.

Oyaji is good-looking in an unassuming way. Its most striking design features are the L-shaped bar, fashioned from blond wood and glass, at the rear of the storefront dining room and, overhead, a grid of beams laid out to form large squares, like upside-down seed beds. The lighting is low and moody, the crowds tending toward young and lively. I did notice one evening that most of the people sitting at the tables toward the front appeared to be occidental, while those at the bar were all Asian — at least until the iPad hipsters showed up.

The food is pretty conventional, mostly excellent, with a few blips. We thought very highly of goma-ae ($4), a boiled (but served cold) spinach, which had a faint sweetness and a bit of crunch from a gratin-like topping of crushed white sesame seeds. We thought nearly as highly of the wakame ($4), or seaweed salad. Less impressive were the sliced tomatoes with mayo ($3.50) — but then it was probably stupid on our part to order tomatoes in early spring — and the avocado roll ($3.50), which was dry.

Also a bit dry was the so-called Christy roll ($6), chunks of grilled albacore in a rice casing. I love albacore and prefer it to the more exalted sorts of tuna, perhaps because it’s more likely to be taken locally. But it does seem to be less fatty, and that reduces the margin of error when cooking it. The dryness issue recurred in the Hawaii roll ($5.50), though it was muted, if not mooted, by the presence of spicy mayonnaise. The spicy hamachi roll ($6.50), virtually the same dish, except with yellowtail instead of tuna and no clever name, was better.

Yellowtail also evidently helped lift the Crunchy Wedding ($7), one of those near-blockbuster assemblages that here included (in addition to the fish) avocado slices and tempura batter, again for a quasi-gratin effect. Similarly loaded was the Stirling ($7), with crab, avocado, fish roe, and crunchy protrusions of tempura shrimp. And for sheer elegance, it would be tough to top the spicy scallop hand roll ($7), a papery, dark-green cone filled with rice and scallops turned in spicy mayo, for a nice contrast between sweet brininess and creamy bite.

You’d have a hard time eating a handroll while dealing with your new iPad. The iPadders to my left seemed to have come to that conclusion; they had little discourse with our handsome young sushi chef and seemed to prefer the small plates of cooked food that were prepared somewhere out of sight in the rear (behind a battlement of beer boxes) and rushed out by acrobatic servers carrying one atop each upturned hand, as in the movies. A plate of meatballs flew past; I was tempted to swipe one but didn’t.

OYAJI

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5:30 — 10:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–midnight; Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

3123 Clement, SF

(415) 379-3604

www.oyajirestaurant.com

Beer and sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Glum and glummer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Glum and glummer

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Standing in my funny little yellow kitchen, 10 at night, pressing a package of frozen peas to my swollen jaw and looking glumly at a plate on the table, leftover from dinner three hours earlier. It was a half-ravished pork steak, long gone cold and congealy. Which is one of my two favorite ways to eat pork — the other being warm and nice. The frozen peas?

The frozen peas had to do with a friendly, casual pickup soccer game from which I had just returned and during which — in a friendly, casual way — I had been elbowed in the jaw so hard that my ears clogged and my head hurt. There was a loose lump of something in my chin, which was, in spite of the ice-pack peas, witching ever outward and rapidly turning as purple as a purple Popsicle.

Worst of all though, as I was just finding out the hard way, it hurt like hell to chew. This is like when piano players get their fingers mangled in a mining disaster. Everyone goes: Oh, how tragic! Except some people go: What were piano players doing in the mine?

See? So, similarly, while I have your sympathy (I feel certain) I have also raised the question: What was I doing leaving half a pork steak on my plate in the first place? It’s not like me, I know, I know, to not finish my dinner. Me!

Not to mention: pork!

Well, but I was running late for the stupid soccer game, you see, and so I thought, innocently enough, that I would leave this warm, nice meat on my table and come back in three hours to take care of it, cold and congealy.

Oh, the tragedy! Am I right?

Yes, but I wasn’t alone, either. Misery does love company, and my co-miserable comrade, the Maze, was looking even glummer than me, albeit less clobbered. He showed up at Garfield Park toward the end of the game just to walk me home. Plus he gave me his last two ibuprofens. How romantic, huh?

You wish! He doesn’t like me like that, which wouldn’t normally stop me from going after someone, true, except that he doesn’t like pork, either. And that is the deal breaker.

The Maze’s misery was less physical than my own. Poor cat, he doesn’t play competitive team sports, and so his wounds tend to be less responsive to ibuprofen, or peas. Like a lot of people, he just vaguely sort of hurts. Feels unfulfilled artistically, lonely in general, and doesn’t know what to do. What he needed was someone to talk to, whereas what I needed was a bath. A bath, a good night’s sleep, and some heavy duty makeup or I was going to have to cancel dates.

“Maze,” I said, mustering up all my compassion, empathy, and social skills. “Get the fuck out of here. Go home.” And I held the door open.

Well, but all kidding aside, I doubt he went home feeling any less lonely. While my bath was running, I tried to chew pork again, and couldn’t. And the next morning my jaw felt better but looked even worse.

I had pork and oatmeal for breakfast.

For brunch I went to Chilango, with Sockywonk and her badass hockey playing cross-dresser boyfriend. Me and her talked about heartache and hair, and me and him talked about sports and hair, and heels, and everyone was happy. Plus the duck flautas were fantastic, so …

Duck flautas? This is going to cost a fortune, isn’t it? Nah. It ain’t no taqueria, true, but even though you can get $12 filet mignon tacos at the Castro District’s new(ish) fancy pants Mex joint, you can also get huevos rancheros for $6. Which is right in line with Chavas and other cheapo joints.

The duck flautas were $9.

Tortilla soup, excellent. Guacamole, good. The chips were warm and homemade and the salsas were delicious. But best of all, at 11 a.m. on a weekend morning, there was nobody there but us. Of course, they don’t open until 11 a.m. 

CHILANGO

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

235 Church, SF

(415) 552-5700

MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Sweet Georgia Beyonce

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Sweet Georgia Beyonce

Caitlin@sfbg.com

SPORTS You’d be hard-pressed not to like Handles Franklin. The spunky Harlem Globetrotter and I stood in a basement hallway of UC Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion on April 24, shortly before his team took on the Washington Generals. (The Globetrotters beat them handily, just like they’ve beaten almost every other team they’ve gone up against since 1926.)

“This is what I want to do in life. Everything prior to this was working my way to the Globetrotters,” said Franklin, holding his head up like the noble star of an action film. “When I was a kid I saw the Globetrotters on Scooby-Doo, and I knew I either wanted to solve mysteries or play basketball,” he told me, smiling. This is how the Globetrotters enter many of our lives, a fond childhood memory of red, white, blue, and orange blurs.

Jewish B-ball enthusiast Abe Saperstein created the team in Chicago more than 80 years ago. He chose the Harlem moniker to invoke the epicenter of African American culture, and for the Globetrotters to appear worldly. The all-black Globetrotters adopted a more dynamic style of play than acceptable in the NBA, which was gripped by Jim Crow segregation at the time. The team played exhibition games all over the country, often scheduled in double- headers with NBA teams to give the professional league’s ticket sales a boost. In 1948 and ’49, the all-black Trotters defeated the all-white Minneapolis Lakers, commonly assumed to be the best basketball team in the world. Two years later, the first black players were drafted into the NBA. Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, a two-year Globetrotter alum, was one. Although continuing, unofficial racial quotas in the league meant that some players still Globetrotted while waiting to be called up (Wilt Chamberlin among them) the gradual dissolution of the color line led to the exodus of many of “Harlem’s” stars.

Which, in a way, freed the Globetrooters to do their thing. To date, they’ve played more than 20,000 games in more than 120 countries. “We’ve been able to cross generations using the international language of basketball, in regard to race, nationality, everything,” Handles said. “It’s important that we travel the globe spreading smiles.”

Off-court, community service is a big deal for the Trotters. Despite playing roughly 269 games a year, the players regularly carve out time for hospital visits and other charitable forays. During this last Bay appearance, the team dribbled across the Golden Gate Bridge, and Moo Moo Evans handed out free game passes to Earth Day volunteers in the Presidio. “It’s hectic,” Handles told me. “But there’s nothing like doing something you love. You sticking around for the game?”

Who misses the Globetrotters? Only suckers, I decided, watching the pregame show in which Globie, “the world’s most famous mascot,” slapped giant stunna shades onto his Earth-shaped head for a musical turn as Kanye, then donned a blonde wig to become Taylor Swift, and finally ripped off his Trotter uniform to reveal a black dress that left little of his blue-limbed body to the imagination. Globie had become Beyonce! The crowd goes wild for “Single Ladies.”

Then came the “magic circle,” the team’s traditional spinning and passing ritual done to the whistling strains of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” It soon became clear that it is Handles who will be running things tonight. As the Globetrotter showman, he was miked throughout the game, wandering off court to heckle late arrivals, sit in the laps of men’s wives, and jokingly steal purses — to the absolute delight of all those selected for harassment.

On the court, playfulness and showmanship were in ever-revolving focus. Most of the Globetrotters have competed in the upper echelons of the game. Current team member Hi Lite Bruton, before he started making appearances in ball-handling contests against trained sea lions, played for the Chicago Bulls. And through the clowning, they still ran plays that thrill, even in their occasional predictability. Dunks abound, as do no-look passes and — a Globetrotter specialty — a braided passing play in which the hapless Generals were forced to run behind the Globetrotters as they exchanged the ball in an endless figure eight.

Around me, children’s eyes lit up. “How many laughs do you have in your belly?” one tow-headed tyke squeezed out to his dad between chuckles. Handles is in the thick of it all, living his dream. He busts out a Fonz-like thumbs-up and hip waggle to punctuate his jibes and baskets. Sure, there wasn’t any doubt about the outcome. But forget tension, forget winning, it’s all about reliving that fuzzy, fleet-footed feeling.

Burning the Man

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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14
Burning the Man

steve@sfbg.com

Paul Addis is like the Man he burned: a symbol onto which people project their views of Burning Man, the San Francisco-born event that has become the most enduring countercultural phenomenon of this era. This summer, with the building of Black Rock City in the Nevada desert, marks the 25th annual event.

When Addis illegally torched Burning Man’s eponymous central icon during the Monday night lunar eclipse in 2007, he was either injecting much-needed chaos back into the calcified event; indulging in a dangerous, destructive, and delusional ego trip; or he was simply crazy, depending on the perspective of current and former burners who are still quite animated in their opinions about Addis and his act in online forums.

But Addis is also just a man, one who paid a heavy price to make his statement. After pleading guilty to a destruction of property charge in Nevada court, which became a felony after Burning Man leaders testified to more than $30,000 in damages from having to rebuild the icon, Addis served nearly two years in prison.

Addis was released late last year and recently returned to San Francisco, where this performance artist will debut his new solo show, “Dystopian Veneer,” at The Dark Room on April 30 (a second show is set for May 7). While Addis insists he didn’t seek the notoriety that came from getting caught, it’s clear he relishes this outlaw role, which follows naturally from his last stage incarnation as gun-loving journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

In a nearly three-hour interview with the Guardian, Addis described that fateful night and its implications, as well as why he turned on an event he once loved.

 

BURNING MAN GROWS UP

Addis first attended Burning Man in 1996, the last year in which anarchy and danger truly reigned, when a tragic death and serious injuries caused Burning Man organizers to impose a civic structure and rules, such as bans on firearms and high-speed driving, on future events.

Addis said he immediately became “a true believer,” seeing Burning Man as both a revolutionary experiment in free expression and political empowerment, and as a “wild, risk-taking thing for pure visceral power.” He came from what he called the “San Francisco arts underground” and had a libertarian’s love for guns, drugs, and explosives, but a progressive’s opposition to war and consumer culture.

“When you go to Burning Man, everyone has that feeling at a certain point in time. It is the most incredible thing you’ve been at. You do see the possibilities laid out in front of you,” Addis told me.

Addis poured himself into the event, but became frustrated with the rules and restrictions after three years and stopped going to Burning Man, although he remained in its orbit and closely followed it.

“There are some people who go to Burning Man who have extraordinary ideas and they are extraordinary people. They embody the type of concern and substantial action that I found so wonderfully possible in those early years. And to those people, thank you for what you do. But they are a minority,” Addis said.

Addis shared the anarchist mindset of John Law, who led Burning Man to the Black Rock Desert then left the event in frustration with its growing scale and popularity and never returned after 1996.

“Paul Addis’ early burning of the corporate logo of the Burning Man event last year was the single most pure act of ‘radical self expression’ to occur at this massive hipster tail-gate party in over a decade,” Law wrote on a Laughing Squid blog post after Addis’ sentencing hearing in 2008, one of 185 spirited comments on both sides of the debate.

Among this growing group of Burning Man haters and malcontents, which included self-imposed exiles like Law and provocateur attendees like Chicken John (see “State of the Art,” 12/20/04), there was always talk about burning the Man early as the ultimate strike against how ordered the event had become.

“Everyone knew it needed to be done for lots of reasons,” Addis said of his arson attack. So he returned to Burning Man in 2007 with the sole purpose of torching the Man in order to “bring back that level of unpredictable excitement, that verve, that ‘what’s going to happen next?’ feeling, because it had gotten orchestrated and scripted.”

 

TORCHING THE ICON

Addis can be very grandiose and self-important, prone to presenting himself in heroic terms or as the innocent victim of other people’s conspiracies, such as the police in Seattle and San Francisco who arrested him for possession of weapons and fireworks in separate instances within weeks of his arrest at Burning Man. But when it came to burning the Man, Addis was purposeful.

“Obviously a gesture like burning down Burning Man is very dangerous and very provocative. From my perspective, the No. 1 concern was safety. No one could get hurt unless it was me,” Addis said. Critics of the arson attack often note how dangerous it was, pointing out that there were a dozen or so people under the Man when it caught fire. But Addis said that he was on site for at least 30 minutes beforehand, encouraging people to move back with mixed results, shirtless and wearing the red, black, and white face paint that would later make for such an iconic mug shot.

As a full lunar eclipse overhead darkened the playa and set the stage for his act, Addis waited for his cue: someone, whom Addis won’t identify, was going to cut the lights that illuminated the Burning Man and give him at least 15 minutes to do his deed in darkness.

“I didn’t do this alone,” Addis said. “The lights were cut by someone else… The lights were cut to camouflage my ascent.”

Unfortunately for Addis, the operation didn’t go as smoothly as he hoped. He miscalcuated the tension in a guide-wire he planned to climb and the difficulty in using the zip-ties that attached a tent flap to it as steps, slowly pulling himself up the wire “hand over hand.”

Once he reached the platform at the bottom of one leg, “I reached for this bottle of homemade napalm that I made for an igniter and it’s gone,” dropped during his ascent. And his backup plan of using burlap and lighter fluid took a long time when he couldn’t get his Bic lighter to work under the 15 mph wind.

Then the lights came back on. “And now I know I’m exposed. Because the whole thing was not to get famous for doing this. It was to get away and have it be a mystery. That was the goal,” Addis said.

But then Addis got the fire going and it quickly spread up the Man’s leg, and Addis used nylon safety cables to slide down the guide-wire like a zip-line. “I landed perfectly right in front of two Black Rock Rangers who watched me come down,” Addis said. “And I turned to them and said, ‘Your man is on fire.'<0x2009>”

Addis said he was “furious” to see about nine people still under the burning structure, blaming the rangers and yelling at the people to clear the area before declaring, “This is radical free speech at Burning Man” and taking off running. Addis said he stopped at the Steam Punk Treehouse art exhibit, hoping to get lost in the crowd, but headlights converged on his location. He ran again, with a ranger close behind, and was finally caught, arrested, and taken to Pershing County Jail.

 

AFTERMATH

The arson attack made international news, and there were enough Addis’ supporters out there to convey the message that this was a political statement against the leadership of event founder Larry Harvey and Black Rock City LLC.

But those who run the event didn’t buy into Addis’ narrative. Instead, they ordered new materials to have the Man rebuilt and burned on schedule. And when it came time to testify at his sentencing hearing a year later, they sent LLC board member Will Roger and a tally for replacement costs that greatly exceeded the $5,000 level that bumped the charges up to a felony.

“They didn’t have to do this,” Addis said. “Instead, they decided to deliberately take action they knew would send me to prison.”

Burning Man spokesperson Marian Goodell wouldn’t discuss the charge. “It doesn’t do us or him any good to open that wound again.”

But an internal memo written by Executive Project Manager Ray Allen shortly after the hearing argued that they were required to respond honestly to requests for information from prosecutors and to do otherwise would have required perjury on behalf of an adversary.

“Part of putting on the Burning Man event means maintaining good relations with Pershing County so that we can continue to have the Burning Man event on BLM land within that county. Good relations means cooperating with criminal prosecutions,” Allen wrote to Burning Man employees.

Many of those employees remain profoundly offended by Addis and his act, mostly for the extra work it caused and the principle of such a selfish gesture. “The basic ethos out there is build your own stuff, burn your own stuff,” said Andy Moore, a.k.a. Bruiser, an employee since 2001 who helps build the city. “How would you have felt if he went to your house and burned it down because he didn’t like you?”

Yet as viscerally angry as Moore can still get when speaking of Addis, he also agreed that two years is a long prison term for this. “It seems a bit over the top. After all, it was a structure made of wood that was meant to burn.”

But Addis said that he has let go of the bitterness he felt toward Burning Man and is looking forward to being back on stage, something that he said was his main focus in prison. “It’s a brand new life, and I’ve got all this potential,” Addis said. “And I want to make the most out of it.”

Housing relief – for tenants

David Talbot
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1
Housing relief – for tenants

OPINION Since the burst of the housing bubble, we’ve seen a lot of attention paid to the plight of homeowners hit hard by the recession and facing foreclosure. Indeed, President Obama recently enacted a protection for homeowners that requires banks to let unemployed homeowners delay their mortgage payments. But until now there has been little talk and even less action on how we can help tenants who are also in danger of losing their homes.

Tenants need economic relief too. Renters have been particularly hard hit by the housing bubble and the ensuing recession. During the bubble, real estate speculation caused San Francisco rents to increase by an average of 50 percent. When the bubble burst, tenants saw their jobs disappear and incomes drop — but rents remained at record high levels. Evictions for nonpayment of rent shot up as renter after renter found it impossible to keep up with San Francisco’s housing costs.

The June 8 election will give voters a chance to change that. Proposition F will give tenants the right to postpone rent increases when they’ve lost their jobs or seen their wages or hours cut.

Many tenants struggle to pay San Francisco’s sky-high rents in the best of times and, when hit with a layoff or reduction in pay, it becomes even more difficult. Any further rent increases would be devastating and put their housing at risk. Prop. F will provide needed relief to those tenants trying to pay high rents with vastly reduced incomes. Unemployed tenants or those who have seen their wages cut by 20 percent or more will be able to get any rent increase delayed simply by filing a petition with the San Francisco Rent Board and documenting that they are unemployed or have had wages cut.

With the difficulties renters face in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets, Prop. F is a mild and measured response to a very real crisis. Prop. F essentially does what any decent landlord would do anyway: give a break to tenants who’ve just lost their jobs and hold off on rent increases until back on their feet.

San Francisco voters should also give a break to tenants on the verge of losing their homes. Vote Yes on Prop. F.

Ted Gullicksen runs the San Francisco Tenants Union.

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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0
Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that there are now almost 10,000 employees with paychecks that totaled more than $100,000 last year. I can already hear the screaming: that’s close to a billion dollars! City workers are all overpaid, fat, and lazy! That’s why we have a budget crisis!

And yeah, I think it would be a lot more fair if the highest earners took the bulk of the pay cuts (5 percent for everyone in that $100K club would be $50 million a year). But Mayor Newsom wants to be sure the lowest-paid folks get their share of the hurt, so the biggest impact of his budget reductions will fall on those least able to handle it.

But I also think it’s worth looking at who these high earners really are.

Now, some of the ones at the top of the scale are political appointees. Do we really need to pay $354,000 to get someone qualified to run Muni? Is the head of the city’s Public Utilities Commission really worth $291,000? Some are getting market rate for their skills — three of the top 20 earners are doctors who work as pathologists in the Medical Examiner’s office.

But the most telling fact is that 11 of the top 20 are either cops or firefighters — and they’re collecting huge amounts of overtime. Four cops alone, all with the rank of captain or deputy chief, accounted for overtime pay totaling $588,000.

I know city employees who work at the senior management level — just like those cops — but they don’t get overtime. Neither do senior managers in most private-sector jobs. And it’s not as if these top cops are working for minimum wage; they all make around $200,000 or more as base salary. Plus they get excellent benefits and get to retire on sweet pensions.

Think of all the money and services you could save with one minor contract change: once you get to the level of captain in the SFPD, you aren’t eligible for overtime anymore.

No more stalling on CCA

David Talbot
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1
No more stalling on CCA

EDITORIAL There’s nothing wrong with city officials taking tough stands in negotiations with private contractors. Hundreds, thousands of times in the past few years, San Francisco department heads have rolled over and given away the store in sweetheart deals that put the city on the hook for all the money, make the public take all the risk, and give a private outfit all the profit. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (remember the Tulock-Modesto sellout contract?), Lennar Corp., Recurrent Energy, and countless other developers, builders, suppliers, and service providers have easily taken the public to the cleaners with contracts that never seemed to get stuck in the due diligence process.

But when there’s a looming deadline, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the city’s energy future and environmental footprint at stake, why is the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission moving so incredibly slowly to hammer out a deal for the city’s community choice aggregation (CCA) program? And why is PUC general manager Ed Harrington doing everything in his power to make sure that nothing happens that might put the city in the power business until after PG&E’s initiative, Prop. 16 — which would block public power efforts — passes at the polls?

It’s infuriating — and the supervisors need to tell the PUC that they won’t approve anything the agency does or wants to do until this contract is completed.

Harrington’s shop has known for more than a year that it needed to work out a business deal with a supplier that could replace PG&E and manage a program to buy greener, cheaper power in bulk and resell it to San Francisco residents. Marin County is setting up a similar program and is far ahead of San Francisco. The city has chosen a vendor, Powerchoice Inc., run by people completely qualified to handle the business.

And now there’s a absolute, drop-deal mandate: the city has to complete negotiations and get the program underway before the June 8 election. That’s because PG&E is spending $35 million to try to pass an initiative that would mandate a two-thirds vote of the public before any new CCA can begin selling power to customers. If San Francisco wants to present a solid legal case that its CCA is already in business, the contract with Powerchoice needs to be completed and signed, now.

But Harrington has, to put it kindly, been dragging his feet. The negotiations are hung up on a few points, although none are deal-breakers; Powerchoice already has agreed to assume some of the financial risk, which was the biggest obstacle to a deal. Now it’s just a matter of hammering out the details — but the PUC staff isn’t acting as if there is any time pressure at all.

In fact, last week Harrington circulated a draft press release all but announcing that he was tossing the whole deal under the bus and postponing negotiations until after the June election. He wanted to say that the "uncertainly" surrounding Prop. 16 made a deal impossible.

But Powerchoice isn’t walking away or complaining about the initiative. The company’s CEO, Sam Enoka, made it clear to us in an interview April 26 that he is eager to move forward. If Harrington — an experienced negotiator with a large staff at his disposal — and his boss, Mayor Gavin Newsom, wanted a deal, it could be finished well ahead of the deadline.

Instead, Harrington showed up at the Local Agency Formation Commission meeting April 23 with charts and a PowerPoint presentation purporting to show that renewable energy is too expensive to sell at rates comparable to what PG&E charges local customers. That misses the point — PG&E’s rates are going up every year and renewables are coming down, and the greatest risk to the city, the ratepayers, and the planet is sticking with the unreliable private utility that relies on fossil fuels and nuclear power for much of its electricity portfolio.

If the city has legitimate issues with Powerchoice, fine: Sit down and begin working them out. Now. But the only thing we can see at this point is the administration of a mayor who wants to be lieutenant governor intentionally delaying the process and giving PG&E exactly what it wants. (We called the PUC April 26, our print deadline, to ask why there were no talks scheduled that day, but Harrington wasn’t available; he was taking the day off.)

Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos suggest that the board simply refuse to sign off on any contracts, appropriations, or other approvals for anything the SFPUC does until this contract is completed. That’s a fine idea; they should start today.

Appetite: Anchovies three ways

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Anchovies three ways

One (of many) of my great pleasures traveling in Italy is eating fresh sardines and anchovies along the coast, whether baked, brined or any other way. Thankfully, anchovies are plentiful — and often out of local waters — in the Bay Area. The anchovy, in particular, gets a bum rap as a too-salty pizza topping. That’s too bad, because it’s fantastically flavorful in the right preparation. Here are three places doing anchovies proud, with their own unique takes on one of the most healthy of fishes.

Moussy’s Basque Anchovies
Moussy’s (named after owner, Jean-luc Kayigire’s, father’s hometown in the Champagne region of France) is a welcoming basement bistro in Alliance Francaise, where you can drop in after French films or language classes (or just go straight there). With new chef, Nathan Ivry, the already charming space becomes a destination for comforting dinner bistro fare: burgers and frites, grilled prawns and salads (more details at The Perfect Spot). Ivry cooks a fine dish of Basque white anchovies ($8), flaky and bright, over avocado yogurt.
1345 Bush Street
(415) 441-1802
www.moussys.com

 

Lafitte’s Anchovy Onion Tart
Open less than a month, Lafitte, with its picturesque Embarcadero waterside perch, is already getting a lot of buzz (see my Perfect Spot early review). Dissident Chef Russell Jackson, whose underground dinners have amassed a loyal following over the years, helms the free-form kitchen that only loosely adheres to a menu, which changes daily based not merely on freshness but inspiration. If you go with an open mind and give Jackson free reign, all kinds of goodness can happen, like an anchovy onion tart that pairs the sweetness of caramelized onions with the anchovy’s salty assets.
Pier 5, The Embarcadero
(415) 839-2134
www.lafittesf.com

Ooh la la, Lafitte!

 

White Anchovies at La Salette in Sonoma
Next time you’re in Sonoma, consider La Salette, just off Sonoma’s idyllic town square, for a Portuguese feast (brunch, lunch or dinner). I’ve not found a restaurant quite like this elsewhere in the area. Paired with Spanish or Portuguese wines, order a platter laden with cheeses, Spanish hams, marinated octopus, blood sausage and the like (your choice of 3 items for $15, 5 for $24, 7 for $33). Don’t miss briny, impeccable white anchovies that taste as fresh as the sea. They also bake a mean plate of sardinhas assadas, flaky and drizzled with olive oil.
452 1st Street E, Suite H, Sonoma
(707) 938-1927
www.lasalette-restaurant.com

 

Visit Virginia’s culinary itinerary site, www.theperfectspotsf.com.

FEAST: 10 kick-ass brunches

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 10 kick-ass brunches

We here at the Guardian don’t survive on green buds and printer ink alone. We eat real food. Sometimes! But we do get up late and hungover. While we often forgo fancy brunch — unless we save our pennies for the amazing eggs-meet-legs “Sunday’s a Drag” buffet at Harry Denton’s (www.harrydenton.com) or dim sum nirvana at Yank Sing (www.yanksing.com) or Ton Kiang (www.tonkiang.net) — we’ll sure as shootin’ shell out for thrifty chilaquiles and bloody marys, especially the way the Bay makes ’em. Here are some of our dearest bleary-eyed, late-morning tummy fillers. (Marke B.)

 

BASHFUL BULL TOO

There are days when you wake up with a bladder full of Jameson’s and a fervent wish to sink into a salty, unglamorous world of egg and cheese. These are the mornings when bottomless mimosas and goat cheese frittatas sound like fightin’ words. Easy tiger, I got you — just slump into a booth at Bashful Bull Too, the most standard of Outer Sunset diners. There’s no live jazz band, no “scene” at all — just you and your greasy calories. Get down on their cheap plates of hash browns and bacon, or better yet, a burger. Slabs of ground beef are acceptable fare when, after all, you’re having breakfast at 2 p.m. (Caitlin Donohue)

3600 Taraval, SF. (415) 759-8112

 

BEAN BAG CAFÉ

In you’re from the Midwest, good brunch spots are distinguished by waitresses who call you “hon” and have your coffee waiting for you before you sit down. Become a regular at Bean Bag Café in the Western Addition, and they’ll do all that and more. Bean Bag’s extensive breakfast and lunch menu and progressive cooking staff means never having to decide if it’s too late for Goldilocks oatmeal (yep, it’s just right) or too early for pancakes and beer. Speaking of pancakes, the Bean Bag buttermilk, customized with bananas and caramelized walnuts on top, is a must-have. Pair it with scrambled eggs drenched in Tabasco, and you’re set until 3 p.m., when Bean Bag kicks off its happy hour with beer for $1.75. Other highlights: sunshine and a petting zoo of scruffy but wuvable dogs outside. (Diane Sussman)

601 Divisadero, SF. (415)-563-3634

 

CAFE DU SOLEIL

Lower Haight — known for its nicoise? C’est vrai! The salad nicoise at Cafe Du Soleil is a stunner, bursting with tender tuna, piquant greens, and enough fresh fixings to ensure some inner sunshine. But don’t stop there — or at the pastry case in front, with delectable goodies like croques madames and hazelnut chocolate croissants. Soleil’s salmon tortilla, a sort of deconstructed-quiche pyramid topped with lovely lox and drizzled with smoky romesco, is this laidback Parisian hang’s brunchtime piece de resistance. Bonus: hunky scruffsters and tattooed ladies. (Marke B.)

200 Fillmore, SF. (415) 934-8637. www.soleilsf.com

 

CHLOE’S

Let’s face it, one aspect of brunch — at least on a Sunday — is the wait. Chloe’s is no exception. The restaurant’s rep and tiny size mean that while weekdays are fine, on the weekend you will be waiting in a (loose) line. The upside is that Chloe’s is on a quiet corner of Church Street, so on a sunlit day, you’ll get fresh air and nothing noisier or more imposing than the people-watching pleasure of the J-Church sliding by. Once inside, indulge your sweet tooth: two highlights of the low-key menu are french toast made with croissants (served with strawberries and powdered sugar) and banana walnut pancakes, a Chloe’s specialty. Chloe’s offers some pleasant, simple variations on scrambled eggs, and the fresh fruit and white rosemary toast to compliment them. This may be Noe Valley, but the coffee is Twin Peaks good. (Johnny Ray Huston)

1399 Church, SF. (415) 648-4116

 

CHOW

The agony of brunch, since it allows for judgment-free consumption of lunch dishes or breakfast dishes, means having to choose between savory or sweet, sandwich or omelet, salad or hash browns. Ten minutes alone can be devoted to the age-old question of pancake or eggs benedict? Coffee or cocktail? Pancake or … This is where Chow ends the cycle of neurosis. At Chow, you can order one egg benedict and one pancake, accompanied by one cup of coffee and one wine mojito. Plus, Chow has two pancakes without peer: the blueberry with warm blueberry sauce and mascarpone cheese, and Marion’s ricotta pancake with lemon. Get one of each! Of course, if you want the chilaquiles or a cheesy scramble, Chow will happily oblige. Watch them start to emit a soft, warm glow when paired with a blushing bellini. (Diane Sussman)

212 Church and 1245 Ninth Ave. 415-552-2469; 415-665-9912, www.chowfoodbar.com

 

HOMEMADE CAFÉ

It’s Saturday morning-slipping-toward-noon, and there are few reasons to expend the effort to pick your fuzzball head up off the pillow it dropped onto in the after-party wee hours. Curled in your cocoon, there is but one comforting thought: breakfast! Few places can revive the soul and satisfy the belly as proficiently as Homemade Café. You’d be wise to choose the spinach, mushroom, and feta omelet. Sweet or spicy is a tough choice, though, since there are spectacularly fluffy blueberry pancakes to be had as well. It’s crucial that you remember this magical phrase: “Upgrade to Home-Fry Heaven.” They’ll arrive smothered in cheese, salsa, sour cream, and a choice of guacamole or pesto. You will feel alive again — at least until naptime. (Rebecca Bowe)

2454 Sacramento, Berk. (510) 845-1940

 

LIME

I love Lime. Not just because it offers a pretty good assortment of belly-filling foodstuffs on Sunday mornings or the hip and lively atmosphere — but because of the bottomless mimosas and bloody marys. Now, I could try to compare Lime’s eggs benedict to others I’ve eaten, but why bother? There are bottomless fucking mimosas and bloody marys, people! Who cares about the food when I can get stupid drunk with my friends at 11 a.m.? In fact, I can’t recall a time when we weren’t asked to leave, albeit very nicely by the wait staff. Just be careful, those drinks will knock you on your ass and give you a hangover by 4 p.m. Guaranteed. (Ben Hopfer)

2247 Market St., SF. 415.621.5256, www.lime-sf.com

 

LYNN & LU’S ESCAPADE CAFE

Lynn and Lu, I heart you. Snag a quaint table under an umbrella on Grand Avenue or find a spot on the back patio for a beautiful sunny brunch. The morning portions are fat, happy, and classic. Three-egg omelets come bursting with your filler of choice and arrive sitting next to a pile of yummy roasted potatoes. Those with stomachs bigger than their eyes will be relieved to see that the Escapade frittatas look more like a crowd-pleasing tower of peppers, veggies, and eggs than a paltry single serving — everyone will waddle away with a smile. The service is fabulous, the price is just right, and the food comes quick enough to whisk away any dream-soaked cobwebs. (Amber Schadewald)

3353 Grand Ave, Oakland, 510-835-5705

 

MAMA’S ROYAL CAFÉ

Imagine a John Waters time warp with rickety counter chairs, a napkin art gallery, and a suggestive painting of female softball players with a giant bat, and you’ve just about captured the quirkiness of Mama’s Royal Café. The home fries, hollandaise dishes, and rib-sticking omelets are consistently satisfying, but weekly specials also offer seasonal and delicious treats like lemon-ricotta pancakes with blood orange curd. The wait staff often serves on hipster time, which, quite frankly, works out perfectly since Mama’s is best enjoyed with friends on a lazy Sunday as you discuss, or help each other remember, last night’s misadventures. (Robyn Johnson)

4012 Broadway, Oakland. (510) 547-7600. www.mamasroyalcafeoakland.com

 

STACKS

After a recent multihour hike around the Presidio, I found myself ravenous. You know the feeling — fully prepared to combine breakfast, lunch, dinner, a multitude of snacks, and dessert into a single meal. Where better to do that than at Stacks, the San Francisco location of a mini-chain (others are in Menlo Park and Burlingame) that looks like a Denny’s that got an upscale makeover, with some of the biggest floral arrangements you’ll ever see. Speaking of gigantic, Stacks’ portions are robust, and their menu is a monster: over a dozen omelet choices; copious varieties of pancakes, crepes, and waffles; sandwiches and burgers; daily specials; and at least seven different smoothies. (Cheryl Eddy)

501 Hayes, SF. (415) 241-9011. www.stacksrestaurant.com

 

TAQUERIA LOS COYOTES

Being on a tight budget has forced me to get creative, and this underdog taqueria located on a block full of distracting alternatives has become my favorite spot for a weekend breakfast burrito. There are never any lines, the food is as cheap as it comes, and the egg and chorizo burrito with beans, cheese, and rice is guaranteed to soak up a whole weekend of leftover mischief hanging. It’s even big enough to share with any co-conspirators still hanging out as well. (Paula Connelly)

3036 16th St., SF. (415) 861-3708. www.taquerialoscoyotes.com

 

ZAZIE

Yes, there’ll be a wait — but it’s more than worth it at Zazie, a French bistro that is San Francisco’s best patio brunch spot. The heart of the menu resides in the poached egg dishes (my favorite is La Mer, with real Dungeness crab, avocado, and green onion), seven to choose from, each with a choice of one, two, or three perfectly poached eggs, wonderfully tangy hollandaise sauce, and a side of potatoes fried up with, get this, roasted garlic cloves. Yum! Everything on the brunch menu is awesome, from challah french toast to scrambled eggs Fontainebleau to the full-on trout du sud. C’est magnifique! (Steven T. Jones)

941 Cole Street, SF. (415) 564-5332, www.zaziesf.com

Appetite: 3 upcoming events covering sips ’round the world

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: 3 upcoming events covering sips ’round the world

From Dry Creek Valley barrel-tasting  to the snowy peaks of Austria, here are a trio of flavorful events that encompass a full range of delectable vino.

4/22 Wine Enthusiast’s Toast of the Town

One of the big wine events each year, this swank soiree in the War Memorial Opera House hits major cities (like NY and Chicago), often selling out. Tasting runs the gamut of the US (from Cali to South Carolina), through Tuscany, France, Chile, New Zealand, and so on. Food is almost an equal highlight here from Wine Country favorites such as the girl & the fig and Mustards, or Urban Tavern, Farallon, Chez Papa, even Oakland’s Home of Chicken & Waffles.

5-7pm VIP; 7-10pm general public grand tasting
$89 general; $169 VIP
War Memorial House
401 Van Ness, SF.
www.wineenthusiast.com/toast

4/24-25 Passport to Dry Creek Valley

A Wine Country locals’ favorite event annually, this weekend focuses on Dry Creek Valley and starts off with a classy shindig at Dry Creek Kitchen on Friday night. Then it uncorks the weekend with two days of barrel tasting (yes, you can purchase futures) and newly-released wines at over 60 wineries, Mingle with winemakers and growers as bands play (from blues to rock) or belly dancers dance. There’s food at each winery, everything from oysters to BBQ, even games of bocce ball and early morning vineyard tours.

11am-4:30pm
$120 for 2-day passport; $70 Sunday only
At participating wineries around Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County
www.wdcv.com

 

5/3 Austria Uncorked

How familiar are you with Austrian wines? Well, it’s time you became acquainted. Bottlenotes is selling tickets to this unique event (only held here and New York City) on a mellow Monday in Fort Mason. There’s more than 80 Austrian wines represented with Austrian cheeses and snacks to boot. The entire evening becomes one pleasurable education on top sips from this gorgeous country.

6-9pm, $60
The Officers Club, 1 Fort Mason
www.austriauncorked.com
facebook.com/austrianwine
twitter.com/AustrianWine

FEAST: Free crystal glass!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: Free crystal glass!

culture@sfbg.com

Should ceaseless hangovers and clumsy, inebriated behavior ever sour you on the drinking scene, you could do worse than while away an evening in one of SF’s many pan-Asian dessert cafes. Cheap prices, pleasant late-night crowds, cultural cachet … the sole caveat being that, for the neophyte dabbler in casual Asian cuisine, menus can approach this side of incomprehensible. This thought came to me midway through ordering at Tapioca Express (1522 Fillmore, (415) 346-6600. www.tapiocaexpress.com). A whim had struck me for bubble tea, but in my naiveté, I had come unprepared for what lay ahead. A universe of flavors, forms, and toppings were at my fingertips — it’s not unusual for a café to feature more than 80 bubble tea options; variations on form, flavoring, and toppings (“free crystal glass,” which to me sounds like a great deal on street drugs). Even ignoring the savories, I was at a loss. But I squashed the disorientation and walked away with an avocado snow, a tapioca-beaded milkshake whose creamy taste will dispel any hesitation you have toward desserts made from nacho ingredients. Sitting with my prize and savoring the peaceful, nonalcoholic hum around me, I knew: I was hooked. I needed more dessert cafe. And thus it began, the adventures of a white girl in the land of taro, grass jelly, and tadpoles.

As if the culinary adventures at Creations Dessert House (5217 Geary, (415) 668-8812, www.creationsdessert.com) weren’t enough food for thought, the ambience, as in other specimens of its genre, strikes an odd balance between coffeehouse and sit-down restaurant. Rather than highlighting its bubble teas, the ginormous menu focuses on hearty snacks, from fast food-like “value boxes” to potato polenta-esque radish cakes topped with fish sauce, and elaborately plated desserts (bowls of cubed fruits and ice cream nestled neatly alongside each other, rather than the helter-skelter mix-up found on most Western plates). The waitress will bring you complimentary hot tea while you ponder your options.

An after-school crowd and a more fast food vibe prevails at Quickly (2116 Irving and various SF locations, (415) 665-3090, www.quicklyusa.com), a global megachain that provides a gateway to bubble tea from New Zealand to Singapore. I learned about Quickly’s ubiquity from the café’s helpfully excessive signage, which also alerted me to its “new healthy fashion food” with “fiber green milk tea, black rice, and colis milk.” Eschewing the fried mini octopi and hot grass jelly, a plant-based pudding treat, I opted for a saccharine sweet rose bubble tea. And, in a bit of providence, I tried the Hong Kong egg puff, which turned out to be a crispy, waffle-bubble wrap marriage. It’s folded into a paper envelope, which fit nicely into my heart. New favorite thing!

Imagine, then, my elation at discovering that this mysterious egg puff was not a solely corporate creation — that, in fact, a sojourn into the Outer Sunset (SF’s epicenter of Asian dessert pleasures) will reveal Eggettes (3136 Noriega, (415) 681-8818, www.eggettessf.com), whose specialty is the puff. Eggettes has the distinction of three flavors; original, chocolate, and honeydew, whose golden-brown crust cedes to a chewy green dough within. Eggettes features the usual phalanx of bubble teas, and for the packs of adolescents usually present, not just free wireless but free computers! Imagine! Should you go, try the rice rolls, flat noodles rolled into delicious chewy nuggets, accompanied by peanut and hoisin sauce.

The challenge of dessert cafes may be what relentlessly pulls us to them — the variety of their wares. After all, the menu at 37 Degrees Dessert Café (1155 Taraval, (415) 566-3887) is a solid 10 pages long, filled with evocative photos to guide your deliberations. Dare you try the Deep Sea, whose striated layers of sweet liquid and “coral jellies” resemble nothing more than the dentist office’s saltwater aquarium tank poured into a tall ice cream sundae glass? Will you opt for the crystal rolls at 100% Sweet Café (2512 Clement, (415) 221-1628), small rice paper sachets of sugary goo, fresh strawberries, and mangos that constitute the most difficult and slippery food item to eat ever?

All told, the dessert cafes made a distinct impression on me. Situated at a small table, plied with free hot tea, megalith menu in hand detailing lobster balls, black pearl barley, and cold tofu flakes curdled in a wooden bucket — it’s easy to lose a few hours contemplating the fact that one will never, ever know all there is to be eaten under the sun.

But a girl can try. Osmanthus jelly with a side of explosive eggs, please?

Throwing down with the Tablehopper

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Throwing down with the Tablehopper

The incredibly everywhere Marcia Gagliardi, a.k.a. the Tablehopper (www.tablehopper.com), has somehow canvassed, in-depth, every eatery, drinkery, and food-cartery in our fair city — while still maintaining her voracious appetite, sassy aplomb, and appealing figure. Her new book, The Tablehopper’s Guide to Dining and Drinking in San Francisco (Ten Speed Press) is one of those must-have recommendation books that truly opens your eyes and mouth to culinary nooks and crannies. Divided into a multitude of sections like “Shituations” (places for dumping someone), “Morning After Breakfasts,” “Picky Eaters,” “Dude Food,” and “Ethnic Group Dinners,” it’s a fantastic thing to have on hand for every occasion, real or imagined. Marcia took a minute to answer some of our more “Guardian” questions about Bay dining and drinking. (Marke B.)

SFBG I’m pansexual and bursting with spring fever. What bars or restaurants can I go to where the boys and girls and everything-in-between are hot and open to everything?

MARCIA GAGLIARDI I’ve always thought the Lush Lounge (1221 Polk, SF. 415-771-2022, www.lushloungesf.com) has a good mixed vibe, and it seems Blackbird (2124 Market, SF. 415-503-0630, www.blackbirdbar.com) draws a mixed crowd as well. Orbit Room (1900 Market, SF. 415-252-9525) too. Or just go to Beretta (1199 Valencia, SF. 415- 695-1199, www.berettasf.com) late at night, sprinkle some Ecstasy on everyone’s crispy thin-crust pizza, and see what happens.

SFBG I have $5 for dinner. Where should I go?

MG I’d go to Balompie Café (3349 18th St., SF. 415-648-9199) or El Zocalo (3230 Mission, SF. 415-282-2572) and get a couple of extremely filling pupusas, which come with chips and salsa. Yep, you can get some hot pupusa action for less than $5. Hott!

SFBG Oh dear, I’ve doublebooked on date night. But then I get to thinking — why not take ’em both on at once? They might get into each other as well, and three’s certainly company! What’s a good place to have them both meet me and, once the initial confusion subsides, gently introduce the idea of a potentially delicious ménage à trois?

MG Well, hello, Ms. Popular. This is the kind of night that calls for some sexy atmosphere, and whaddya know, booze. The cozy downstairs booths at Oola (860 Folsom, SF. 415-995-2061, www.oola-sf.com) might fit the bill, and you can take turns licking the sauce from the yummy, sticky, baby back ribs off each other’s fingers.

SFBG My parents are on their way to take me out to dinner, but I just got really stoned. Where will my goofy demeanor blend right in?

MG Florio (1915 Fillmore, SF. 415-775-4300, www.floriosf.com) would work because its dandy-yet-friendly atmosphere is parental-unit approved, the lights are dim, the hearty food will jive with your munchies, and there’s usually enough going on in there that your parents won’t be watching your every move. There’s also a little alley around the corner where you can spark up if you need another puff before dessert.

SFBG Best place to announce my impending gender reassignment surgery to someone close to me who may be surprised?

MG Absinthe (398 Hayes, SF. 415-551-1590, www.absinthe.com). You can request a quieter table so not everyone hears your answers to all of your friend’s burning questions, and the spirited cocktails — a coquettishly tangy Ginger Rogers or bourbon-spiked Scarlett O’Hara, perhaps? — will help them digest the good news.

SFBG Someone took me out on a date to a really expensive restaurant and insisted on paying. Now it’s my turn to take them out, but I’m like, down to my last $20. Where can I take them so they feel I’ve treated them to something classier than my budget suggests?

MG Ah yes, the old smoke and mirrors. I’d go to Great Eastern in Chinatown (649 Jackson, SF. 415-986-2500), which has some bountiful deals on set menus, and the room is spiffy. Or you could take them to dim sum at one of my favorite places, S&T Hong Kong Seafood (2578 Noriega, SF. 415-665-8338) in the Outer Susnset, and you will feast fo’ cheap.

SFBG What wine bars have the best pours? I mean top-of-the-glass for $6. I’m a-thirsty, girl!

MG Well, the folks working the bar at Castro’s 2223 (2223 Market, SF. 415-431-0692, www.2223restaurant.com) know their clientele well and do pretty big pours. Same with Laszlo (2526 Mission, SF. 415-401-0810, www.laszlobar.com). I also noted a fuller glass the last time I was at the Hidden Vine (620 Post, SF. 415-674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com). And based on the number of loaded folks at the Wine Jar (1870 Fillmore, SF. 415-931-2924, www.winejar-sf.com), I’d say the generous pours are to blame.

SFBG What would you say are the most “interesting” things you’ve ever eaten in the city?

MG Some of the dishes at Spices! (294 Eighth Ave., SF. 415-752-8884) have definitely pushed the envelope for me. (Stinky tofu, intestine stew — and I don’t care to have either dish ever again). The tendon pho at Pho Tan Hoa (431 Jones, SF. 415-673-3163) definitely rates on the funky meter — and I’m talking big hunks of tendon.

Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Pioneers! O Urban Pioneers!

By Robyn Johnson

culture@sfbg.com

People are returning to land like it’s the 1970s all over again, but they’re not packing up for Vermont, letting their hair go au naturel, and unplugging from the grid to do it. Urban agriculture is sprouting up like, well, sprouts. And while we all feel strongly about sustainability and pay a lot of lip service to higher ideals, the majority of us probably aren’t willing to adopt the radical homemaker lifestyle and sacrifice cell phone coverage, The Colbert Report, or regular social interactions. The following cursory guide highlights a few urban farms in SF and immediate environs where you can volunteer or access food, as well as resources for cultivating your space in the concrete tangle (even if you live in a third-story apartment) and options for the time-honored tradition of gleaning.

 

MANY FARMHANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

Community farms offer support not always available for the individual plots of community gardens (which typically have astronomically long wait-lists anyway), or even your own cramped Bay Area backyard. And for 60-hour-work-weekers, it might be taxing to grow more than a bit of basil or mold on that cheese in the back of the fridge. If you don’t have the time, energy, space, or inclination to follow famed urban farmer Novella Carpenter’s fantastic example (ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com), consider volunteering at the following places to satisfy your green thumb’s bidding.

As Chris Burley, the director of Hayes Valley Farm (www.hayesvalleyfarm.com) told me, “People are looking for a tangible way to get their hands dirty and address the impacts of our ecologically destructive, industrialized food system while doing something meaningful and connecting with their community.” And that’s exactly the goal that the farm, located off Laguna and Fell steets, has been aiming to fulfill since its inception as a way to revitalize an unused lot, once a freeway onramp, into a shared space.

Although the farm is still taking root, so to speak, the plan is to eventually grow enough fresh and organic food to feed the neediest nearby members plus the volunteers working to cultivate the space. Education also plays a major part in the function of the project, with Thursday and Sunday “work parties” where people can get that hand-dirtying experience, as well as regular classes on urban gardening and permaculture.

Altho Quesada Gardens Initiative (www.quesadagardens.org) primarily operates as a community-directed organization that seeks to strengthen the social systems of Bayview-Hunters Point, local food production has become one of the top concerns of the neighborhood. The resident-led nonprofit connects and maintain backyard farms and free food-producing community gardens throughout the area. In one of the neater facets of its food justice work, the group also helps maintain the kitchen garden of roving supper club Old Skool Café (www.oldskoolcafe.org), which employs at-risk or previously incarcerated youth. With such kick-ass people, it’s no wonder that urban farm hero Will Allen adopted one of the satellite gardens on his visit to the Bayview. Community volunteer meetings and gardening days tend to be informal, so e-mail for specific opportunities.

Sometimes the best things in life really are free. Located at Gough and Eddy on land kindly lent by the Lutheran Church, The Free Farm (www.thefreefarm.org) intends to give away 100 percent of its produce. Still in its initial development stages, the fledgling project welcomes volunteers every Saturday and Wednesday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. to help with the launch. Working in tandem with its sister organization, The Free Farm Stand in the Mission also offers fresh fruits and vegetables donated by other local urban farmers. Although places like Little City Gardens (www.littlecitygardens.com) and folks who glean from public land contribute, the bulk of the produce comes from the 18th Street and Rhode Island (www.18thandrhodeisland.org) farm maintained by the SF Permaculture Guild, which offers volunteer opportunities as well. With a goal to sextuple the farm’s output within the next five years, it could probably use a little bit more help. Work days are on Friday.

For West Oakland residents, two nonprofits have been power-housing to combat the food desert that plagues the area. City Slickers Farms (www.cityslickerfarms.org) operates several all volunteer-run farms throughout the neighborhood that could always use a few extra work hands. Collectively these six lots cultivate ducks and chickens, bee hives, veggies, fruit trees, and medicinal herbs, the produce of which are distributed through the Saturday Farm Stand on a sliding scale or work-trade basis — no one’s turned away. And if you still have a mighty urge for some composting, weeding, planting, and mulching, People’s Grocery (www.peoplesgrocery.org) runs three farms that constantly need tending. The 55st Street location tends fruit trees, culinary herbs, and vegetables; 59th Street is a slightly less cultivated space in collaboration with Berkeley’s Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project (www.spiralgardens.org), which runs its own food garden off Oregon and Sacramento streets for you West Berkeleyites. People’s Grocery’s newest land acquisition, the plot behind the California Hotel off of 35th and Chestnut streets, hosts a greenhouse and a biointensive microfarm that replaced its 3.5 acre Sunol site last January.

 

HOME SWEET URBAN HOMESTEAD

If you have access to private land to cultivate, or even if you don’t, the following resources will set you on the path to food freedom. These classes, demonstration sites, and professional landscaping services will help you turn backyards, rooftops, and even windows into humming generators of small-scale urban agriculture.

Before you even think to take a shovel to your virgin backyard or start a worm bin, visit Garden for the Environment (www.gardenfortheenvironment.org). A one-acre demonstration garden in the heart of Golden Gate Heights that also teaches organic food production and sustainable landscaping with weekly workshops, you can see how it’s done before trial-and-erroring on that graywater irrigation system or chicken coop. The resource directory on its Web site also serves as an invaluable aid for at-home troubleshooting. Hotlines for gardening and composting issues, where to find recycled lumber, how to test your soil, manure suppliers, wasp removal companies — it’s all there.

DIY food production classes abound everywhere in the Bay Area but the one-stop shopper won’t find a better resource than the Institute of Urban Homesteading (www.iuhoakland.com) in Oakland. It offers a comprehensive curriculum ranging from beekeeping, butchery, goat farming, brewcraft, herbal medicine, bread making, fermentation, berry patches, and other topics of the same ilk. It’s a real crash course in manifesting your inner Laura Ingalls Wilder. With no central location, classes are taught in the teachers’ homes, which presents a neat opportunity to see real-time urban homesteading and the different ways people create sustainable places in an urban setting. Also consider Urban Kitchen SF (www.urbankitchensf.com) and BioFuel Oasis (www.biofueloasis.com) in Berkeley for supplementary courses.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and green behind the ears, several services will landscape your yard into a cornucopia of organic delectables and even continue the maintenance if you just can’t do anything with that black thumb of death. Star Apple Edible Gardens (www.starappleediblegardens.com) provides a range of services throughout the Bay Area, the simplest being consultations and composting tutorials. You also can order ready-made kitchen gardens or go whole kit and caboodle and have customized “garden design and installation, pathway and hardscape installation, irrigation design and installation, planting, plant feeding and cultivation, regular harvesting of your garden crops, and design, installation, and maintenance of composting systems.” Other similar businesses include All Edibles (www.alledibles.com), which specifically works with East Bay dwellers, and Chris Sein of Wildheart Gardens (www.wildheartgardens.com), who also consults on backyard chickens and mushrooms.

For a lot of us in the Bay Area, the dream of having a backyard is about as likely as Glenn Beck admitting that Obama is not a herald of an impending Orwellian dictatorship. So what can the more dispossessed among us do to return to the soil? Popular in Europe and becoming more so here, rooftop gardens are a great solution to space issues. Graze the Roof (www.grazetheroof.blogspot.com), the community vegetable patch on top of Glide Memorial Church, hosts rooftop gardening workshops. You can also gain experience by volunteering on work days every Thursday or first Saturdays. For those feeling less than philanthropic or sociable, pop over to your local bookstore to pick up the Use Your Roof Guidebook by Bay Area Localize (www.baylocalize.org). Seven bucks and four easy chapters gets you on your way to a more edible roof.

For balcony-less apartment dwellers, and maybe those with vaulted ceilings, window farms have become the new rooftop gardens. An open-source project that’s evolved over the past year, Windowfarms (www.windowfarms.org) gives how-tos for its innovatively cheap and space-conscious hydroponics system — jerry-rigged from repurposed plastic water bottles, tubing, and fish tank pumps that hangs in vertical columns in the window — as free PDFs on its Web site. It also hosts community boards where members share improvements to the system, which is constantly being updated. Alas, window farms can only really successfully raise leafy greens, but having a homegrown salad in a studio apartment is still pretty darn amazing.

If you already have your urban farm bustling along — or even just a prolific citrus tree — then yard-sharing is a great way to spread the fruit of your labor throughout the community. Neighborhood Fruit (www.neighborhoodfruit.com), SF Glean (www.sfglean.org), and Produce to the People (www.producetothepeople.org) will gladly help you to unload the excess bounty and distribute it to the hungry.

FEAST: 5 farm-fresh cocktails

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 5 farm-fresh cocktails

We’re used to well-crafted, artisanal cocktails year-round in our city, and some bartenders showcase the bounty of the seasons in their cocktails, using local fruits, herbs, vegetables. It’s easy to take the abundance of the region for granted, but let’s not and remember to enjoy what can happen when fresh produce and spirits get into the right hands. Here are a few places and drinks we recommend as winter turns to spring. (Virginia Miller)

BEET COCKTAILS AT THE ALEMBIC


The Alembic offers quite a selection of spirits and beer, plus some of our city’s best cocktails, including New Orleans’ classics done right. (Thankfully, the bar doesn’t let the small space get too crowded, it regulates crowds at the door during peak hours. Even so, I prefer "off" times during the afternoon or early weeknights). The staff knows its stuff, so go ahead and ask them to make you something off menu with your favorite spirit as a base. In recent weeks, I’ve seen wonders worked with fresh produce on hand, whether it beets, ginger, or even galangal. A couple versions of a beet cocktail wowed me each time, the latest being a Rittenhouse Rye base with dry vermouth, red wine vinegar, orange zest muddled with sugar, and plenty of beets for a glowing red hue. Topped with a celery leaf and splash of sparkling wine, it’s a tart, earthy, slightly effervescent delight. If no beets are in house, you can’t go wrong with menu staple, Southern Exposure ($10), a Junipero Gin cocktail brightened with mint leaves, lime, a touch of sugar and a shot of fresh celery juice.

1725 Haight, SF. (415) 666-0822, www.alembicbar.com

KUMQUAT CAIPIRINHA AT NOPA


If you want to be ahead of the curve tasting a new small batch spirit no one has heard of or cocktails unlike anyone else’s, Nopa is your spot. Bar manager Neyah White, who’s always ahead of trends and has a pioneer’s taste for the untried, has introducing me to spirits I’ll later hear everyone talking about. Neyah and the Nopa bar staff create luscious cocktails — try one of their sherry or white whiskey renditions for a proper use of the spirits. If you’re lucky, the kumquats they’ve been procuring for weeks will still be on the menu for a kumquat caiprinha ($9). I’ve had kumquats in a number of cocktails — the juicy tart is a lifelong favorite taste. Not only are Nopa’s kumquats the best I’ve had in recent memory, but the use of Boca Loca Cachaca and fresh lime with the plump, tart citrus makes for a bracing drink: pleasantly sweet, floral, tangy. I ate every kumquat out of the glass.

560 Divisadero, SF. (415) 864-8643, www.nopasf.com

KENTUCKY BUCK AT RICKHOUSE


Rickhouse has one of those dream menus for cocktailians: pages and pages of flips, fizzes, and punches. The atmosphere holds the magic mustiness of a dim old bourbon house — without the must. (You just have to brave — or avoid — the Financial District happy hour mobs). From Rickhouse’s beverage director, Erick Castro, comes a drink created last spring that has thankfully stuck around: the Kentucky Buck. A refreshing bourbon and ginger beer cocktail ($8), it is one of the best-balanced bucks I’ve tasted. ("Buck" is the historic name for drinks involving a base spirit, citrus, and ginger beer or ale). Bourbon is served with organic Monterey Bay Farms’ strawberries, lemon, Angostura bitters, then topped with ginger beer. Refreshing and spring-like, it’s nuanced, showcasing all the strawberry’s best assets without overstepping into sweet territory.

246 Kearney, SF. (415) 398-2827, www.rickhousebar.com

EVERGREEN AT RANGE


Range sets the standard for experimental but refined cocktails. This is one of the great neighborhood restaurants, but it’s also a worthy bar destination. You can expect fresh and inventive here every time — with classic cocktail sensibilities. The Evergreen welcomes spring with gusto in the form of citrus and herbs. Plymouth Gin and St. Germain accompany fresh kumquat juice, sage, and lemon. Smooth and bright, not one flavor overpowers the other, but all meld nicely. If tequila is more your speed, try the Malia with Pueblo Viejo blanco tequila, lime, egg white, cinnamon bitters, and a winning duo of quince and apple.

842 Valencia, SF. (415) 282-8283, www.rangesf.com

TRACK 42 AT 15 ROMOLO


Thankfully, this cocktail has been on the menu a while, a glass of layered delights from one of our city’s best all-around bars, 15 Romolo. Track 42 ($12) is an exhilarating fresh garden of a drink made with 42 Below Manuka Honey Vodka, basil, unfiltered apple juice, lemon, and egg white. You won’t go wrong with most anything on (or off) the menu, but this treat involves more complexity and nuanced flavor than the "vodka cocktail" label would suggest, and is a favorite among many, many delectable drinks. Other highlights: I love the Prohibition-era elegance, laid back staff, and legendary Chartreuse Gong Shows — American Idol-like karaoke shows with judges, a giant gong if you suck, and, yes, shots of chartreuse for everyone. 15 Romolo is the bar I wish was in my neighborhood.

15 Romolo Place, SF. (415) 398-1359, www.15romolo.com

FEAST: 6 voluptuous buns

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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FEAST: 6 voluptuous buns

Pools of ink and its electronic equivalent have been expended helping SF’s legions of night-crawlers find the best drinks, beats, and eats. Not so for our less numerous early-risers. But there are plenty of reasons to get up early: seagulls materializing out of the fog, the sun rising over the bay, first pressings at Ritual, parking spaces, and, perhaps most important, morning buns. Specifically, warm morning buns.

Unlike the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana‘s rules on pizza (dough no higher than 1/8 inch thick, hand-kneaded only), the French-inspired morning bun has some latitude. Buns can be made with brioche dough or croissant dough; flavored with cinnamon, or orange, or both. Puff pastry does not raise cries of quelle horreur! But whatever the yeast-risen dough base, the ideal MB should be a “turned” pastry, layered with butter and spices, then dusted with sugar and baked to caramelized crispness. Nuts, raisins, or frosting mean you have strayed — egad — into snail or danish territory.

Like bagels, MBs also are the perfect food ephemera. By 9:30 a.m. the chances of finding a still-warm one have passed. By 11 a.m., they have aged out completely. So set your alarm and get in line. (Diane Sussman)

 

SANDBOX BAKERY

This small Bernal Heights newcomer is already making a name for itself for its superlative sandwiches, kashi pans, and pastries (I’m talking to you, Valrhona pain au chocolat), and its MB is no exception. Starting with a brioche dough, Sandbox MB has a crisp, flaky top that gives way to fragrant, generous layers of cinnamon, sugar, and orange doughy bliss. Even better, this is one bun source where you can still get a warm one even if you sleep in (sort of). Although the bakery opens at 7 a.m., one staffer revealed that its MBs don’t usually come out of the oven until 7:30.

833 Cortland, SF. (415) 642-8580. www.sandboxbakerysf.com

 

TARTINE BAKERY

Scoring an MB at Tartine requires a strategy. Well before it opens (times vary), Tartine has lines out the door. Granted, not everyone is there for an MB, but that doesn’t alleviate fears among MB heads that the person ahead of you line won’t order five dozen. In addition, Tartine Mbers have subgenres of preferences, preferring “light on the bottom.” But not to worry. All colors of Tartine’s MBs (which start with croissant dough) have crisp, sweet, flaky, muffin-like tops with soft, yeasty, buttery centers sprinkled with orange, cinnamon, and sugar. In addition to competition, Tartine’s MBs are also more expensive ($3.75 compared to $2–$2.50 elsewhere).

600 Guerrero, SF. (415) 487-2600. www.tartinebakery.com

 

 

DELESSIO MARKET AND BAKERY

Delessio is the MB slug-a-bed’s dream joint. The combination deli-bakery doesn’t open until 8 a.m., and even then the bakers often run 10 to 15 minutes late. (Value add: sometimes the friendly staff will let you pluck your own MB from the cooling rack — use paper!). Delessio’s offering is moist, flaky (it uses a brioche dough), not too sweet, and generous with cinnamon. Delessio does have one tragic flaw, though: it doesn’t bake those buns every day. Call first or learn a vital lesson in flexibility with the breakfast brioche.

1695 Market and 302 Broderick, SF. (415) 552-5559 and (415) 552-8077. www.delessiomarket.com

 

LA BOULANGE

Stare into one of the pastry cases at Boulange and you’ll see the signs for “morning buns.” But Boulange’s morning bun isn’t really a morning bun, as one staff member readily acknowledged. “We call them cinnamon-orange buns,” she said. “They are our own version of morning buns.” Starting with a croissant dough, Boulange MBs are flatter and rounder than a traditional morning bun, don’t have the crispy, caramelized sugar muffin top, and have a bit more orange than others. While purists may shriek, “Wrong!” iconoclasts are likely to counter with “Nice!” (Whole Foods also carries Boulange’s buns in its bakery cases.)

Various locations, www.laboulange.com

 

MATCHING HALF CAFE

The small neighborhood café at the corner of Fulton and Baker streets in the Panhandle doesn’t bake its own MBs, but it does get a daily stash from Bakers of Paris. Shunning tradition, Bakers of Paris uses puff pastry and rolls its version with orange zest, making for a light, refreshingly acidic, not too sweet treat. Although you can’t get one fresh out of the oven (Bakers of Paris’ bakery is in Brisbane), Matching Half staff will heat it up for you. (Bakers of Paris also sells its buns at the Sunday farmers markets on Grove in the Divis Corridor and Irving in the Inner Sunset.)

1799 McAllister, SF. (415) 674-8699. www.matchinghalfcafe.com

 

SEMIFREDDI’S

Sorry, you can’t go to the source, and you won’t get a warm one. But if you have access to a warming device — and you can wait — you can opt for one of Semifreddi’s goodies. The bakery, which has its baking operations in the East Bay and no retail outlet, trucks its wonderfully carmelized, brioche-based MBs to numerous grocery stores, including Mollie Stone’s, Berkeley Bowl, and Faletti Market. Perfect for when you really slept late. www.semifreddis.com

The good, the bad, and the fence-sitters

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The good, the bad, and the fence-sitters

news@sfbg.com

The Guardian has been periodically producing the Board of Supervisors’ Good Vote Guide for many years, tracking where our elected representatives come down on important issues. And unlike a similar poll recently put out by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which chose 10 votes designed to promote deregulating and subsidizing big businesses, we chose items important to the broad public interest.

The 20 votes we selected this time reflect our concerns for protecting tenants, funding vital public services, safeguarding civil liberties, promoting small businesses and nonprofits, appointing qualified people to commissions, and valuing the environment more than “green” press releases and corporate profits.

To view our guide (PDF), please click here

Taking the Waters

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Taking the Waters

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF Jessica Rabbit was just drawn that way, Foster Brooks just happened to stumble on his “lovable lush” act, and likewise, actor-writer-producer Derek Waters — he of Drunk History fame — just sounds like he started poking around in the liquor cabinet earlier in the day. In the same way, we all happened to just look up from our many open browser screens and realize our attention spans have drastically shrunk — one of the many reasons Waters believes the histories have been so popular, leading to offers from HBO to produce a Drunk History sketch show and spinning off a host of homemade copycat videos on YouTube.

“Attention spans are way too small to watch whole movies,” says the 30-year-old Waters, speaking from Los Angeles. “I think if these came out in the ’70s, I don’t know how popular they would be.” And who can blame the pretenders, justly inspired by the shorts — and the sight of soused comedians relating their favorite great moments in history (while occasionally losing their lunch or lying down to get more comfy) while actors like Michael Cera, Jack Black, and Will Ferrell reenact out all the blurry details, down to Ben Franklin’s improbable “Holy shit … there’s a fucking lightning storm happening right now outside!”

The fact that creator Waters could get actors like Crispin Glover and John C. Reilly to play, for instance, the battling Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla is yet another plus. “Edison was publicly electrocuting animals to prove his point,” Waters says. “And to see Crispin Glover doing that was a dream come true.”

No fear that Drunk History will swallow up cable — or traditional academic — programming, though Waters says his old teachers have e-mailed to tell him they’ve shown the films to their students. “I think Drunk History is funny for five minutes,” he says. “I don’t think you can ask too much of a drunk person.” The actor is doing a HBO series called Derek Waters Presents LOL instead (“I like to say it stands for ‘Lots of Losers.’ I guess you write what you know”), remaining committed to the short, funny form, as well as the dream of turning his 13th Grade short, set at a community college, into a full-fledged series.

All that makes Waters a primo candidate for a drunken evening at the theater with Wholphin DVD magazine editor Brent Hoff. He’ll be showing relevant shorts such as Bob Odenkirk’s gut-busting The Pity Card — part of Waters’ and The Big Bang Theory‘s Simon Helberg’s online short series Derek and Simon — and talking about that film, as well as, no doubt, the work he’ll contribute to Wholphin‘s next edition.

Incidentally, Wholphin‘s latest issue, its 11th, is a doozy: “It’s the most edible-looking yet,” quips Hoff in San Francisco. “All bubblegum-y colors.” It includes Ramin Bahrani’s Plastic Bag short with poignant hilarious voice-of-the-bag narration by Werner Herzog, in addition to an excerpt from Bitch Academy, a doc about Russian women taking a class on how to snag millionaires — a grim, scary variant of the cheese-cloaked Millionaire Matchmaker — which Hoff describes as “the most terrifying thing we’ve ever put out.”

More terrifying that listening to writer Eric Falconer lose his eight vodka cranberries and then get back up to talk American history? For some, it might be a draw. “There’s something fascinating,” Waters observes, “about someone so passionate about something but not moving forward at all.”

A DRUNKEN EVENING WITH DEREK WATERS AND WHOLPHIN

Mon/26, 9:30 p.m.

Sundance Kabuki

1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

 

Live on screen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Live on screen

johnny@sfbg.com

SFIFF All those with curious minds, step right up, we have live cinema waiting for you in this dark room. The idea of “live” or performance-generated movies has taken on a new vitality recently via the light-projecting likes of Bruce McClure, whose ear-splitting and eye-blasting appearances in San Francisco usually sell out. On a smaller local level, Konrad Steiner’s neo-benshi programs have united local writers and a wide variety of filmic subject matter in creative and sometimes entertaining ways. At the San Francisco Film Festival, live music by bands for silent works has become a reliable main attraction. But Sam Green’s and Dave Cerf’s new meta-documentary Utopia in Four Movements adds a new facet to the phenomenon: instead of utilizing an over-familiar voice-over, it unites live narration by Green with a musical performance overseen by Cerf, allowing for degrees of spontaneity and change.

Utopian, isn’t it? At the Mission bar the Phone Booth on an early Monday evening, Green can’t help but tease out his thoughts on the very word. “To me, utopia is almost a metaphor for hope, or hope in the imagination,” he says, shortly after we’ve been flirted with (and flashed) by one fierce female patron. “It’s about trying to be hopeful these days, which is hard. Utopia is almost a way to make up hope. In some ways it’s so preposterous. The word even has negative connotations these days — people are told not to be utopian.” Half an hour later, he returns for another analogy or two: “Utopia is a thing that never really exists. It’s like a flower — it always wilts. Even if there’s a moment of great utopian energy, it can’t last.”

Utopia may not exist in fully realized forms, but the quartet of mutations in Utopia in Four Movements (five if you count the movie) fascinate as real-life fables. The first segment explores Esperanto, which was invented in the late 19th century with the aim of its becoming a universal, international language. As Green puts it, Esperanto is “a wonderful idea that can’t be,” an idea that he illustrates with short direct portraits of contemporary Esperanto speakers that, uncannily, takes on a colors-of-Benneton feel.

Esperanto has also yielded some memorable black-and-white cinema, namely a 1965 Esperanto horror film shot in Big Sur by Conrad Hall, which stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. San Francisco movie maniacs may recognize Incubus through the efforts of Will The Thrill and Other Cinema’s Craig Baldwin. “William Shatner wrote a memoir in which he talks about it,” Green says, before adding some information that reflects Utopia‘s ever-changing nature –and utopia’s pitfalls. “I’m trying to do an interview with him because he’s practically the most famous person to have spoken Esperanto. But the world’s most famous Esperanto person is probably [financier] George Soros.”

The idea of utopia isn’t new to Green, whose best-known feature The Weather Underground (2002) digs deep into the multi-faceted realm of ’60s radicalism, riding out its actions and repercussions. The second part of Utopia, set in Cuba, adds a new chapter to Green’s explorations of thorny political contradiction. Like Assata Shakur, the segment’s subject lives in Cuba as a fugitive. In the present, she’s engaged with Cuban hip-hop, but she remains tied to her past as a radical in America. “It’s about the last embers of revolution,” says Green.

One of Utopia‘s movements examines the potential of forensice science in a manner quite different from pro-law enforcement US true crime television, showing how the smallest reinforcement can be regained from sites of mass tragedy. But the movie’s sojourn in China is in some ways its most vivid. There, Green takes an extended trip to the world’s largest shopping mall, in China. The subject matter is akin to dramas such as Jem Cohen’s Chain and Jia Zhangke’s The World (both from 2004), but this is a case of reality trumping fiction. “Almost every article I read about China and capitalism talked about how the world’s largest mall was there now,” says Green. “But nobody described it as a total failure. We were at the mall for ten days, and it was soul-killing. There’s something about a gigantic failed mall that is profoundly depressing.” Luckily, an encounter with a Teletubby who eventually removed its mask added some life to the experience.

The world’s largest shopping mall — at least for now: Green says it is slated to be bulldozed — may be grim, but it’s also richly symbolic when history is integrated to the picture. “Victor Gruen who essentially invented the [shopping] mall in the US in the 1950s was a socialist who came to America,” Green says, as “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” gives way to “I Feel Love” on the Phone Booth jukebox. “In turn the mall has gone to China, and the grounds of cultural revolution became the site of a government-funded bust of a mall. In a way, it’s the trajectory of the 20th century.“

Today, we tiptoe into the 21st century, with a new president and old-new ways of seeing and making movies. “A year ago, when I was looking at [Utopia], people were saying ‘Aren’t you going to change everything because of Obama?’,” Green remarks. “It felt like cotton candy hope. When [U.S. presidents] are the limits of your possibility, it’s pretty lame.” Truth: Green may have used utopia in his title, but perhaps it’s time to come up with some fresh formulations of hope as well. *

UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS

Sun/25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

Red, blonde, and blue

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Red, blonde, and blue

johnny@sfbg.com

SFIFF The evening breeze caresses the trees tenderly early on in João Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die Like a Man. This shift from the furious winds of Rodrigues’ Odete (a.k.a. Two Drifters, 2005) is a signal that the director, ever aware of the lexicon he’s blooming, is adopting a languid pace. Rodrigues’ third feature film isn’t immune to irony, a main one being that slow death allows his cinema to breathe most deeply.

At the onset, To Die Like a Man does not seem like the story of a drag queen perishing from poisonous silicone implants. Rodrigues begins in a nighttime jungle of young male longing, in a nod to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), though his vision is much less chaste. Greasepaint is applied to a beautiful young soldier’s face, and upon wearing that militaristic form of drag, he’s soon fucked by the masculine makeup artist. Moments later, the two enlistees happen upon a lone mansion and peer through a window. The pair of ladies within are … not quite ladies. We are in a world where a lush garden is gradually revealed to be a terrarium, and that terrarium is soon visually rhymed with an aquarium. Nothing is what it seems, except that which flowers and dies.

It isn’t until after a gunshot and Rodrigues’ trademark blood-red letter credits that we are introduced to Tonia (Fernando Santos), a buxom blonde who bears a familial relation to one of the soldiers. Not quite weary enough to dispense with her wry wit, Tonia makes her living performing drag numbers at a club, where a beautiful and quite opposite heir apparent (Jenni La Rue) looks down at her from the other side of a mirror. At home, she cares for her drug-addled, dress designer boyfriend Rosario (Alexander David). Her chief confidante, her little white dog Augustina, appears to be slightly more obedient.

Santos’ presence at the heart of To Die Like a Man opens up Rodrigues’ distinctive world view, giving this musical without (much) music a true voice besides that of the director — quite literally in one bravura sequence, where Tonia half-whispers, half-sings a song long after Rosario angrily snuffs it from the car radio, as the world passing by is reflected in a car window adorned with raindrops. The hot-as-hell garbageman of Rodrigues’ O Fantasma (2000) and the leggy lunatic of his schematic Odete are as mute as they are ravishing, but Tonia has something to say, in tones that are smoky and relaxed and resigned to fate. Within English-language films, Divine’s siren song in Hairspray (1988) and Dorian Corey’s backstage aria of wit in Paris is Burning (1990) are the best touchstones for Tonia — ones that reveal the heft of Santos’ performance.

In life, Tonia has not fully crossed over to the other side. To illustrate her ladylike sensitivity, she complains to her transsexual friend and hairdresser, Irene (Cindy Scrash), about a doctor’s blunt, origami-like demonstration of how a penis is transformed into a vagina through surgery. But the man beneath Tonia isn’t immune to a cruise through the dark for a grope in the park.

A true auteur who hasn’t fallen prey to the excessive worship that has hindered influences such as Tsai Ming-liang, Rodrigues is cultivating his craft. He’s aware that he’s still developing, yet comfortable enough about his formidable command that he can casually deploy the motifs of great filmmakers as pivot points. If Odete‘s peculiar double-vision was constructed from the eyes of Hitchcock and Warhol, To Die Like a Man is his In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), or 1999’s All About My Mother changed to All About My Father. (A Marnie poster hints which wing of the Hitchcock library Rodrigues currently resides in, exploring patriarchal and matriarchal ties.) Fassbinder and the larger specter of "’60s and ’70s European art film is hilariously invoked through the character of Maria Bakker (the superb Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida), a sweet beacon of death prone to epigrams and fits of vamping. In the film’s key moment of ominous reverie, she and Tonia and their sidekicks sit down in the woods and are softly serenaded by Baby Dee’s song "Cavalry."

Rodrigues has a way with sound and image, and the queeniness of the characters here allows him and longtime partner and art director João Rui Guerra da Marta to indulge their own flouncier yet symbolically rich impulses. Tonia wraps a car gift for Rosario in silver foil, and her cell phone holder is a porcelain leather pump — with a puff ball at the heel. Her backstage mirror is decorated with photo mementos of Brad Renfro and Cristiano Ronaldo, and one of her chief stage outfits is like Dorothy’s red slipper turned into an entire dress. In a single shot, a bath towel, bath mat, and dog offer variations of furry whiteness. Twice, the aesthetically heightened naturalism of Rui Poças’s cinematography gives way entirely to fluorescent pastel hues.

Tonia’s story is about uncovering what is buried before one’s body is laid to rest. Her journey crosses through some of the Lisbon landmarks of Rodrigues’ previous films — the fatal intersection and cemetery walls of Odete, for example — while finding rare blooms on the edges of urbanity. A farewell tour as long as Cher’s, To Die Like a Man never tests one’s patience. Forget-me-not is one of the ever-referential Rodrigues’ secret mottoes as a director. Even if life and drag — and the drag of life — persist beyond the end of Tonia, he’s created a film to remember.

TO DIE LIKE A MAN

May 1, 9 p.m., Clay

May 3, 12:15 p.m., Kabuki

May 4, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

Love, guts, and glory

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Love, guts, and glory

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF Though there were far starrier, more expensive films debuting in the Midnight Madness section of last year’s Toronto Film Festival, the category’s prize and foot-stomping audience favor was stolen by a low-budget Australian film that arrived with no fanfare, no name actors, and a writer-director who’d made no prior features.

Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones focuses on small-town teenager Brent (Xavier Samuel), who’s severely depressed from a recent tragedy but rouses himself to attend the school prom — or would have, if he wasn’t hijacked instead for one of the most harrowing first dates in film history.

Pegged by some as "Misery meets Pretty in Pink," this instant horror mini-classic is by turns poignant, funny, grotesque, alarming, and finally very, very satisfying. It’s sure to be a hit again in the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Late Show section. Between festival travels, Byrne was back home in Melbourne when he answered my e-mail queries.

SFBG The movie really throws you for a loop by spending the first stretch on serious psychological drama, then springing something entirely different.

Sean Byrne Well, I needed [to establish] a hero who was uniquely qualified to survive hell. Someone who is conditioned to pain, who feels like they deserve to suffer. He’s a cutter or self-mutilator, someone who tries to block out emotional pain with physical pain. He’s a kid with a death wish who’s forced to endure a literal hell, and in the process realizes he’s got everything to live for.

SFBG Your central female character is more interesting than the usual horror movie villains in that she’s so spoiled she thinks she’s a victim, which then excuses her behaving monstrously. Where did that come from?

SB I was thinking about what could make a signature, iconic, highly marketable villain and I noticed how my five-year-old niece, along with almost every little girl, is obsessed with wearing pink. It’s part of the magic and fantasy stage of childhood, where they actually believe the Disney line "someday [my] prince will come." So then I started thinking, well, what if our villain is a teenager with raging hormones but still somehow stuck in this spoiled, childish, preoperational stage of development. I imagined "Princess" as a teenage version of that irritating kid in the supermarket who demands lollies and won’t stop screaming until she gets them.

SFBG I like that her favorite song is self-pity anthem "Not Pretty Enough." Has Kasey Chambers had any reaction to the film?

SB I tried to stay within the horror genre but at the same time subvert the conventions. And having our troubled hero listen to heavy metal (the "devil’s music") and our villain listen to a top-of-the-pops ballad like "Not Pretty Enough" was a way of doing that. As far as I know, Kasey hasn’t seen the film. I’m dying to know how she’ll react.

SFBG A difference between this movie and those associated with "torture porn" is that here both the victims and the perps are pretty complicated characters.

SB I hope so. I did my research and tried to get inside the heads of these characters before I started writing. Characters in horror movies are often one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. But really great ones like The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) delve into the psychology of the moment. They answer the question: how do ordinary people react to extraordinary situations honestly? They explore our base instincts with emotional authenticity.

SFBG The film really does dish out some horrifying abuse, though — did you ever pull back on how graphic it would be?

SB No. Never. I’m not a fan of PG-13 horror. The middle ground is pretty boring — that’s why it’s called the middle ground.

THE LOVED ONES

May 2, 10:30 p.m., Castro

May 6, 3 p.m., Sundance Kabuki


MORE ON SFBG.COM For an extended version of Dennis Harvey’s interview with Sean Byrne, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision

Not fade away

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Not fade away

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF Returns are dangerous. The story of Lot’s wife tells us that looking back is enough to be compromised. In cinema, the figure of return can stretch the basic spatiotemporal properties like so much silly putty. Take the two San Francisco International Film Festival speculative nonfictions that allow archival footage to overflow its conventional containers: 14-18: The Noise and the Fury, an epic reexamination of World War I narrated by a fictional French soldier, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, Serge Bromberg’s dogged excavation of the eponymous French director’s famously unrealized film. Then there’s Claire Denis’ return to Africa (White Material), a Chinese documentary portrait of a family’s fraught journey home (Last Train Home), and American filmmaker Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, a double return (the story of a Black Panther’s homecoming to his troubled neighborhood and a reconstruction of 1970s Philadelphia).

The cliché that “you can never go home again” is made freshly acute in Kamal Aljafari’s Port of Memory, a melancholic study of the Palestinian community of Jaffa where Aljafari is from. The film reminds me of The Exiles (1961) in its urban-fragmentary scenario, well-portioned running time, and lovingly quotidian portrait of a marginalized group. Port of Memory doesn’t announce that the fretful middle-aged woman who goes through the motions of housekeeping and caretaking is Aljafari’s mother and the man who wanders Jaffa’s crumbling streets his uncle — we’re left to piece together these intimate views on our own. As a narrator, Aljafari is discreet but hardly complacent: he intercuts establishing shots of his uncle’s promenades with footage from old Israeli and American films (for example, the 1986 Chuck Norris vehicle, Delta Force) that use the same streets for dubious spectacles of violence and nationalism. Doubling back on these inadvertent documents of occupation, Port of Memory‘s thin line of fiction has the now off-screen Israelis acting as a gentrifying force.

Like Aljafari’s film, Pedro González-Rubio’s gorgeous Alamar (“to the sea”) is set between landscapes (land and sea) and ways of telling (fiction and documentary). The bare frame of a plot places a young boy with his father and grandfather, Mayan fishermen working the Mexican Caribbean. The sweetness of this idyll is tempered by its provisional bounds: the boy will return to his mother in Rome at the end of his compressed experience of a father’s love. Every shot is earned: there are several in which the camera bucks with the boat, physically linked to the actors’ experience. The child is at an age of discovery, and González-Rubio channels this openness by fixing on the details of the fisher’s elegant way of life and the environmental contingencies of their home at sea.

The same well of patrimony and nature has been poisoned in Vimukthi Jayasundara’s surreal fable of destruction, Between Two Worlds. In this mythopoetic work, Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war ravages on in screaming city streets and darkened forest visions. We first see the film’s central figure — a nameless wanderer resembling many other “chosen ones” — in a death pose, splayed on the beach with crabs crawling over him. Two fishermen trade variations of the story of a prince destined to survive great bloodshed to kill his powerful uncles, and several forest dwellers seem to think our protagonist is the man. The slipperiness of Between Two Worlds‘ reality, in which visions are liable to be doubled or outright contradicted, evokes both the shifting ground of trauma and different rules of oral storytelling. In its best moments, the film put me in the mood of Jeff Wall and Raúl Ruiz; in its least, a slow-motion Lost. But Between Two Worlds amply demonstrates that returning is not always a matter of volition: such is fate and endless war.

Top pic picks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Top pic picks

The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2009) This latest by the recently jailed Iranian director of Iron Island (2005) is a stark, visually striking allegory whose natural settings (the salt formations of Lake Urmia) could hardly be more surreal. Aging Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) rows his little boat from one tiny island community to another, collecting tears from variably aggrieved locals so they can be absolved of their sins — just how, neither they or we know. During his latest travels he gains a teenaged stowaway, then a blind-struck painter as passengers; witnesses a couple of village rituals that prove fatal for their main participants; and experiences other curious events that scarcely prompt a raised eyebrow from him. As with so much modern Iranian cinema, Mohammad Rasoulof’s film carefully renders its political symbolism so abstract you can dig endlessly for hidden meanings, or simply lose yourself in the hypnotic black-and-white-in-color imagery of black-clad people on bleached landscapes. Fri/23, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/25, 8 p.m., PFA. (Dennis Harvey)

Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand, 2009) Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl cheats on boy with boss. Boy falls in love with tree. So are the broad strokes of Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s jungle-horror, Nymph, a city-to-country romance that deftly weaves strands of urban anomie, sexual dysfunction, and rural mythos into a dreamy, arboreal fantasia. One might be tempted to reference Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) and fellow Thai helmer Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2004 breakout, Tropical Malady, as obvious points of reference, but that would derogate the potency and intensity of Ratanaruang’s singular, artistic design. The director of Last Life in the Universe (2003) and Ploy (2007) creates a tropical mise-en-scène that is less cinematic than immersive, developed largely by his use of tight, suspenseful close-ups, fluid camera work (including a 10-minute opening sequence that is practically gymnastic), and a transfixing ambient score. But unlike Tropical Malady, which leveraged much of its second-half’s novelty from overwrought, homoerotic tropes and a condescending nativism, Nymph‘s descent into the jungle is only the beginning of this powerful love story. Fri/23, 9 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 4:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Erik Morse)

Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy, 2009) Around a Small Mountain (or 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup) is New Wave doyen Jacques Rivette’s return to the whimsy of 1984’s Love on the Ground, another exploration of theater staring eternal demoiselle Jane Birkin. In Mountain, Birkin plays Kate, a prodigal daughter who has returned to her deceased father’s circus after an unspecified trauma forced her into a 15 year absence. En route she encounters Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a peripatetic who instantly discovers in Kate a fellow improviser for his acrobatic feats of conversation. In hopes of learning her secret past, Vittorio follows Kate and her shabby troupe from performance to performance through the tiny towns of the Cevennes. Along the way, Rivette treats his audience to a mish-mash of sideshow sketches, enchanting dialogues and haunting soliloquies, all beneath the magical totem of the big top. The film is spellbinding ode to the theatre of everyday life and the actors who prance in and out of its cirque. Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 6:30 p.m., PFA. (Morse)

Way of Nature (Nina Hedenius, Sweden, 2008) Save for when Werner Herzog is doing the talking, documentaries about the natural world often benefit from a lack of voiceover narration. Nature’s seasons, cycles, and rhythms provide their own narrative structure, and simply, silently observing what happens can make for fascinating viewing. Nina Hedenius understands this. Her engrossing year-in-the-life portrait of Lisselbäcka Farm in northern Sweden is cut around creatures great and small — horses, cows, goats, chickens, dogs — and their routines. Although humans are part of the bucolic scene Hedenius so meticulously orchestrates (the sound editing is such that the film would be no less immersive if you watched it blindfolded), they are merely supporting actors. After watching, for the fourth time, another gangly offspring leap to its feet, minutes after being born, you start to realize the ways in which our species is quite helpless. If their keepers suddenly passed away, the animals of Lisselbäcka — domesticated though they may be — would probably manage to carry on. The way of nature is instinct, not mastery. Sat/24, 2 p.m., PFA; Sun/25, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Matt Sussman)

Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara, Sri Lanka, 2009) Part vision quest, part historical allegory, Vimukthi Jayasundara’s lush and beguiling head-scratcher unfolds like the mutable folktale told between two fishermen in one of the film’s asides. A synopsis would go something like this: an unnamed South Asian man falls from the sky into an unspecified South Asian country (although the Sinhala the actors speak places us in Sri Lanka) under siege by revolutionaries intent on destroying all means of communication and killing any remaining young men. Fleeing a riot-ravaged city he winds up in the countryside where he reconnects with his sister-in-law, and undergoes several mysterious and mystical experiences at a nearby lake. “It’s possible that one can see today what has happened in the past,” cautions an old man to our protagonist, and Jayasundara — with an eye for arresting mise-en-scene, gorgeously photographed by Channa Deshapriya — attempts to offer a way to re-see the traumas of the civil war that ravaged Sri Lanka for over three decades. Like a freshly remembered dream, Between Two Worlds is as stubbornly oblique as it is hard to shake. Sat/24, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/25, 9 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/26, 9:15, Kabuki. (Sussman)

Transcending Lynch (Marcos Andrade, Brazil, 2010) Picture it: everyone’s favorite psycho-thriller filmmaker and coffee retailer waxing beatific about peace, love, and “infinite bliss,” his American Spirit–stained teeth frozen in a perma-grin as he extols the virtues of the “unified field” of consciousness. At certain moments in Transcending Lynch, an exploration of infamous auteur David Lynch and his 35-year devotion to transcendental meditation, the director comes across as flakier than the celebrated piecrust at Twin Peaks‘ Double R diner. (At one point he even utters the phrase “Holy jumping George!”) For the irony-soaked, all the TM talk may be a little TMI, but for Lynch the practice is nothing short of the very source of his creative wellspring. Marcos Andrade’s documentary, which follows Lynch on a 2008 Brazilian book tour, won’t offer the mad-genius Eagle Scout’s more rabid followers much new insight. While the movie strives to be meditative, it’s more of an amalgam of trippy travelogue and pitch meeting. Even more frustrating, we get only teasing glimpses of how TM has directly informed and impacted the artist’s work. Lynch may be on the path to universal enlightenment, but when it comes to the man himself, the rest of us ignoramuses are still mostly in the dark. Sat/24, 6:30pm, Kabuki; Mon/26, 9pm, Kabuki; Tues/27, 12:30pm, Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

14-18: The Noise and the Fury (Jean-Françoise Delassus, France/Belgium, 2009) Made for French TV, Jean-Françoise Delassus’ unclassifiable film would be arresting simply for cobbling together seldom-seen archival footage reflecting all aspects of the First World War, from its leaders to its trenches. But he and co-scenarist Isabelle Rabineau have shaped that footage into a narrative driven by the writings of a (fictional) French everyman soldier who somehow manages to survive and serve in most of its major conflicts. The result melds exquisite color tinting, first-person narration, clips from commercial films about the war (by D.W. Griffith and Chaplin as well as European directors), and ambient sound to create a brilliant kind of living history lesson that makes the events of nearly a century ago seem as immediate as yesterday’s. Mon/26, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 1, 2 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 9 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Peddler (Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano, and Adriana Yurkovich, Argentina, 2009) Daniel Burmeister is a traveling filmmaker. He drives his infirm jalopy from one small Argentine town to the next, hoping to set up camp for a month and make a movie with the locals. He’ll need food, a place to stay, and a camera. Whatever camera they can find. Usually the mayors are easy to convince, because Burmeister is essentially a regional attraction, a one-man circus they know about from the neighboring towns. It’s this strange repurposing of the filmmaking experience that makes the documentary so distinctive and special. And just watching the old man hustle from shot to shot with his bashful actors, working efficiently from one of the handful of scripts he’s been cycling through for years, is an absolute pleasure. Directors Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano, and Adriana Yurcovich capture the jury-rigged process with unobtrusive admiration and an absence of condescension. As I watched it I kept thinking it was like the soul that was missing from Michel Gondry’s 2008 warmed-over DIY manifesto Be Kind Rewind. Mon/26, 6:30 p.m., PFA; May 1, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

Russian Lessons (Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov, Russia/Norway/Georgia, 2010) I remember watching the news two summers ago and feeling confused by the details of the Russia-Georgia War, the culmination of a dispute over the territory of South Ossetia. There seemed to be a haziness about who started what. Russian Lessons offers Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov’s version of what happened that summer and indicts Russian and mainstream international news organizations for exactly that failure to present a satisfactory chronology. Konskaya, a theater director and documentary producer, filmed events as they unfolded on the Northern end of the conflict while Nekrasov, a veteran documentarian, filmed in the South. The result is a collection of interviews with residents of recently bombed Georgian towns, confrontations with Russian soldiers, and investigations of still-smoldering battle sites. The filmmakers spend an equal amount of time scrutinizing source footage from the war and its antecedents, exposing how it was used to mislead the international community. It’s a disturbing and persuasive rebuttal to the Putin administration’s official side of the story. April 28, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 29, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Shamai)

Restrepo (Tim Hetherington and Sabastian Junger, USA, 2010) Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a “narrative arc” — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of “progress” in Afghanistan. April 30, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 4:15 p.m., PFA; May 4, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Animal Heart (Séverine Cornamusaz, France/Switzerland, 2009) This first feature by Séverine Cornamusaz has a story that would have fit just as well into the cinema of 1920 — or the literature of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot 50 years earlier. Paul (Olivier Rabourdin) is the gruff owner of family lands in the Swiss Alps, raising livestock whom he treats better than wife Rosine (Camille Japy). When he’s forced to hire a seasonal hired hand in the form of Eusebio (Antonio Bull), the easygoing Spaniard’s concern for ailing Rosine incites not Paul’s compassion but his brute jealousy. This elemental triangle set amid the severe elements of its spectacularly shot setting has a suitably blunt (but not crude) power; it leads not where you might expect but to a hard-won fadeout of audacious intimacy. April 30, 4 p.m., Clay; May 2, 9:15 p.m., Clay; May 3, 6 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France, 2009) A painstaking craftsman who left nothing to chance, French suspense master Clouzot (1955’s Diabolique, 1953’s The Wages of Fear) decided to push his own envelope a little in 1964. He cast Serge Reggiani as a resort innkeeper who becomes pathologically, paranoically possessive of his gorgeous wife (Romy Schneider). Convincing himself she’s having an affair, he gradually snaps tether — and the film itself would reflect that downward spiral by increasingly illustrating his mental stage in distortive image and sound. Unfortunately, the project also drove Clouzot mad in a way, as his grapplings at a new filmic language ran counter to the kind of creative discipline that normally storyboarded everything within an inch of its life. Shooting endless footage, spending endless money, he finally admitted defeat and abandoned ship. Never completed, the film’s surviving pieces were restored for this absorbing unmaking-of documentary — even if the original clips, daring then but now looking like psychedelic kitsch, suggest Inferno would likely have been no masterpiece but a fascinating, instantly-dated failure. May 2, 1:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Presumed Guilty (Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, Mexico, 2009) A fan of true crime TV programming, I all but take for granted that little coda at the end of each episode reminding viewers that the suspects shown are innocent until proven guilty. I sometimes forget that such rights are not the case in all countries, such as in Mexico where the criminal justice system employs a reverse practice requiring the accused to prove themselves innocent. In Presumed Guilty, filmmakers, lawyers, and UC Berkeley students Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete use rarely-seen, up-close footage of the Mexican trial process in their effort to exonerate a young Mexico City street vendor who is falsely accused of murder in 2005. The proceedings, which require the defendant to stand for hours on end and are performed sans jury, is riveting stuff for fans of those A&E true crime shows and is sure to ruffle the feathers of a few sympathetic humanitarians. May 2, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 6:30 p.m., PFA; May 6, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Peter Galvin)

Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, Israel, 2009) “Das Boot in a tank” has been the thumbnail summary of writer-director Samuel Maoz’s film in its festival travels to date, during which it’s picked up various prizes including a Venice Golden Lion. On the first day of Israel’s 1982 invasion (which Maoz fought in), an Israeli army tank with a crew of three fairly green 20-somethings — soon joined by a fourth with even less battle experience — crosses the border, enters a city already halfway reduced to rubble, and promptly gets its inhabitants in the worst possible fix, stranded without backup. Highly visceral and, needless to say, claustrophobic (there are almost no exterior shots), Lebanon may for some echo The Hurt Locker (2009) in its intense focus on physical peril. It also echoes that film’s lack of equally gripping character development. But taken on its own willfully narrow terms, this is a potent exercise in squirmy combat you-are-thereness. May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Day God Walked Away (Philippe van Leeuw, France/Belgium, 2009) Director Philippe Van Leeuw states in the press materials that he made The Day God Walked Away in an attempt to understand how the assassins of the 1994 Rwandan genocide could do what they did and how others could stand by and watch. I walked away from Day with a better understanding of what might draw a person to choose defeatism over an unlikely survival. The film opens as a Tutsi housekeeper (Ruth Nirere) finds herself trapped in her Belgian employers’ house, fearing for her children and surrounded by gun-toting murderers. Light on scripted dialogue and featuring local actors, van Leeuw’s nonintrusive filming lends the film an authentic atmosphere that can be slow but is never boring. In lensing the film’s horrific scenes in a simple and matter-of-fact fashion, he eerily replicates the emotional separation that survivors of the massacre were forced to adopt in order to live. May 3, 6:45 p.m., Clay; May 4, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Galvin)

The Practice of the Wild (John J. Healey, USA, 2009) “The way I want to use ‘nature’ is to refer to the whole of the physical universe,” explains the poet Gary Snyder in John J. Healy’s succinct but penetrating documentary on the octogenarian poet, essayist, and environmental activist. Snyder’s expansive definition conjoins the two areas to which he has devoted his life and creative practice to better being at peace with: the terrestrial and the existential. Healey provides the back story — covering Snyder’s farmstead childhood, his discovery of his love for the outdoors, his association with the Beats and later immersion in Zen Buddhism, and his two marriages — told in part through the obligatory scan-and-pan photography and contextual talking heads. The film’s highpoints, however, are the many lively conversations Snyder engages in with his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison, whose grizzled countenance and chirpy demeanor make him a character in his own right. May 3, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman)

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, USA, 2010) Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a “trailblazer” when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. May 6, 7 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

THE 53RD SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 22–May 6 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF; Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; and the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50) are available by calling (925) 866-9559 or by visiting www.sffs.org>.

 

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