Volume 44 [2009–10]

Stone age drop out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stone age drop out

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Dopesmoker (Tee Pee Records, 2003) begins with a move characteristic of Al Cisneros’ style. Striking a series of low to mid-range notes, Sleep’s bassist and incantatory vocalist draws forth a series of monster bass tones that warp and disassociate as they decay.

As the listener focuses on the subtle permutations in the drone-overture — sometimes Cisneros’ bass notes vibrating into ever-smaller tonal subdivisions, at other moments, they radiate volume ever-outward — the DNA sequence for an unfolding doom metal magnum opus begins to take shape. The double kick bass follows in a steady trek to the foreground of the mix, followed by the guitar, which sounds almost grafted onto the bass, like a membrane of barbed amplifier fuzz circumscribing Cisneros’ hypnotic line. The riff snakes Geezer Butler-like into crevices and apertures, then rises to a Tony Iommian trill before pausing against a rain of cymbals — Black Sabbath as ancient, unstable organism.

With its relentless, uninterrupted hour-plus length, Dopesmoker unfolds like one of those naturally occurring geographical wonders that embodies thousands of years of passing time. Granite sheets, city-sized coral reefs, and Sleep’s culminating musical statement: all sprawling patterns dependent on vast expansions and mutations. This is what the undiluted version of Sleep’s masterpiece has over the abridged Jerusalem, released unofficially five years after Dopesmoker was completed. Where Jerusalem is divided and fragmented, seeking to place this freakish growth in track-length components and excising some of the weird arabesques of feedback that emerge at the margins, Dopesmoker, like Sleep’s music itself, evolves into ever more bizarre shapes via its own unintelligible logic.

Sleep broke up in 1995, after the band’s then-label, London Records, famously didn’t “get” Dopesmoker. The label felt (probably correctly), that a 60 minutes-plus quasi-Wagnerian “fuck you” to brevity would be career suicide for a band making its first foray on a major. In a sense, it was. It’s almost poetic that the album — a time-bending epic about traveling through sonic time and space — was released posthumously and out of chronology.

In the interim, Sleep has become the quintessential band for people who like their metal baked and ponderous. Following two discrete reunion shows at London’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2009 with Jason Roeder of Neurosis replacing Chris Hakius on drums, the group is set to reunite for a series of U.S. dates. As if this long dreamed-of tour wasn’t enough to make metal heads across the country flip the fuck out, the band’s set is to be comprised of Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993) played cover-to-cover, as well as excerpts from the now semi-mythical Dopesmoker. The returning sonic titans are set to once again engulf the Bay in a haze, one which smells mysteriously like the backroom of a T-shirt shop. But even if the band is notorious for its heroic weed consumption and all-around stoney pedigree, Sleep’s body of work — as challenging as it is impenetrably heavy — demands a staggering attention span on the listener’s part.

None of the San Jose trio’s albums reveal themselves on first listen; nor is Sleep’s catalogue by any means “feel good music.” Sleep purveys dark, unsettling grooves; its music ruins your buzz. Consider “Holy Mountain,” where Cisneros’ chant-vocal — like a Gregorian monk after a particularly harsh bong rip — approximates the desolate textures of his “earth drenched in black,” while Pike’s insistent riff (here anticipating High on Fire, perhaps) circles back in on itself like it’s spiraling toward the menacing “ohm” that distends across the mix of the titular track. This is heavy metal warped and skewed; an exercise in bad vibes that pulverizes thought in the same way that ultrasonic waves are used to crush kidney stones.

I can’t recall the specifics of picking up my copy of Sleep’s Holy Mountain, but what I do remember is hearing Matt Pike’s opening lick on “Dragonaut,” and the ensuing maelstrom of psychedelic electricity — maze-like and abstract, like the interlocking web of shapes on the album cover, only suffused with dripping, inexpressible colors. This is perhaps why Sleep’s sound has always been infinitely more compelling to me than feel-good psychedelia. Of all the bands to engage in the doom tradition, Sleep makes the increasingly relevant (sub)genre entirely its own. Familiar Sabbathisms — pentatonic bass grooves, monolithic power chords, a savvy manipulation of the lexicon of the blues — become building blocks within a phantasmal landscape of drones and echoes.

I also can’t help but feel that, as natives, Sleep has created a sound that forever superimposes itself over the Bay Area, so that cityscape surroundings, such as an ivy-choked chain-link fence or the cavernous opening of a BART tunnel (which doesn’t extend to their San Jose home) take on a weird, fantastical dimension, oscillating between solid matter and buzzing amplifier fuzz like the weird nebulas that seem to obsess Cisneros.

The way I hear music has been informed by Sleep since I first heard Sleep’s Holy Mountain in high school. Seventeen years after the album’s initial release, it still manages to yield stretches of unexplored musical terrain, as if it has been reproducing via osmosis while we were away. Like the elite cadre of spacey predecessors to the Great Drone, Sleep uses metal as a kind of vehicle for processing experience through rhythms and patterns, abstract tones and intricate layers of sound synching up with surroundings (like that Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd thing you tried when you were 16, but in this case it actually works.)

The underlying genius of Sleep is the way the band manages to diffuse the atomic foundations of its monolithic riffs throughout entire albums and into a sprawling, seemingly endless landscape, a sonic cartography that — like a good Lovecraft yarn — perpetually expands past the next horizon point. The shape-shifting resonances of a decaying power-chord or bass fill flesh out the contours of an interminable sonic desert, a labyrinth of sound we find ourselves compelled to reexplore ad infinitum. “Drop out of life” are the first words we hear Cisneros chant on Dopesmoker. 

SLEEP

Sun/12–Mon/13, 8 p.m.; $23–$25

With Thrones (Sun/12) and Saviours (Mon/13)

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

Stimulating voltage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stimulating voltage

Don’t ask synthesizer inventor and electronic instrument designer Don Buchla (appearing Thu/9 as part of the 11th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival) for a CD of his music. He’s more interested in following his curious muse — in this case, through the oft-uncharted territory of performance — than documenting his many experiments.

“It’s hard to have a CD that hasn’t been done yet,” the soft-spoken, even-keeled Buchla quips, deep within his Berkeley Victorian. He’s tucked behind a desk in a beige-carpeted, orderly studio-basement dotted with instruments — a hulking vibraphone dominates the space — and a few rainbow-colored 1960s- and ’70s-era lights. “None of my music can be recorded,” he adds. “It’s all theatrical in nature and involves a lot of visual simulations — stimulations.”

Buchla’s last performances were with saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum in Europe. His next appearance, a rare Bay Area one, will be in collaboration with Nine Inch Nails player Alessandro Cortini, for whom he made one of his Buchla Series 200e analog synthesizers. Using the 200e, a Thunder tactile surface MIDI controller, and various pieces of percussion, the two are making electronic and acoustic music with a distinct “element of chaos.” Buchla says they are striving for “unpredictability — allowing things to happen that we didn’t anticipate.”

In the meantime, forget about procuring a document of any of the practice sessions. Still, the inventor — who came out with his first modular synthesizer just months after Robert Moog in 1963 and created the first analog sequencer, among many other instruments — has made live CDs in the past. Indeed, his audiences would sometimes get a CD of the first half of a concert once the performance was completed and receive the second half in the mail. “If you want a record of the music,” he says, “the record should be the music you heard.”

If the live-recording-as-you-wait approach reminds you of the tape heads who devoted their energies to the Grateful Dead, you’re not far off: the Dead were onetime Buchla clients. He built their sound system — as well as the system on Ken Kesey’s bus — around the time he was doing sound and light at the Avalon Ballroom and the first Fillmore auditorium, as part of the North American Ibis Alchemical Company. Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s soundman and the onetime LSD cook, enlisted Buchla to make a Series 100 system for the band. “He wanted it to be very unique, so I painted all the panels candy-apple red,” Buchla remembers with a chuckle. “It was quite dazzling. It’s in their museum now, a collector’s item.”

Buchla’s instruments have all become collector’s items, from his Series 500, the first digitally controlled analog synth, to his all-in-one-paintbox Music Easel. “I usually can’t afford to keep them myself,” he says, laughing. “If I had, I’d be wealthy now.”

The first synthesizer that Buchla built in 1963 for composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender at the San Francisco Tape Music Center was the fruit — the silver apple — of the UC Berkeley physics graduate drop-out and musique concrete composer’s roving curiosity. He’d learned that the Center had a three-track tape recorder, a marvel anywhere outside film studio contexts at the time. “I observed what they were using to compose electronic music,” Buchla remembers. “I proposed that instead of using the radar and gun sights and physics lab equipment and Hewlett-Packard oscillator, they build instruments intentionally geared toward electronic music. That was a revolutionary thought.”

In the 1984 book The Art of Electronic Music, Subotnick tells Jim Aikin that Buchla synthesizers are notable for “the way things are designed and laid out, so that a composer can impose his or her own personality on the mechanism. For example, Don always disassociated a voltage controlled amplifier from its control voltage source. That meant that the voltage source could be used for controlling anything. It wasn’t locked into a single use … That kind of sophistication has given him [a reputation] as the most interesting of all the people building this kind of equipment.”

The first Buchla Box, using touch-sensitive pads or ports rather than a standard keyboard, was funded with a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Today it’s permanently ensconced at Mills College. On a side note, Buchla estimates it would easily go for $30,000. Buchla still tackles new designs — he has a multichannel filter that can serve as a Vocoder coming out next month — and his instruments, it seems, “don’t depreciate at all, so they’re good investments.”

“But I prefer to build them for playing.” 

11TH SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

Wed/8–Sat/11, various times, $10–$40 (pass)

(Alessandro Corti and Don Buchla perform Thurs/9, 8 p.m., $10–$16)

Brava Theatre (except Fri/10 at de Young Museum)

2781 24th St, SF

(415) 861-3257

www.sfemf.org

Agony uncle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Agony uncle

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: “I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane.”

Director Vikram Jayanti coproduced the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings (1996), yet seems to be more interested in American celebrity Babylons of late, à la The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret (2003). You can see why he scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).”

Unavoidable, weirdly unblinking, and placed like a crazy diamond in front of John Lennon’s ivory “Imagine” grand piano is the wiggy wonder himself, rambling about such tidbits as his explosive courtroom ‘do (“It was a tribute to Albert Einstein and Beethoven. That day it got a little extreme”). In conversation, Jayanti dwells on the sunnier side of Spector’s checkered history: no mention is made of his alleged pistol-waving at the Ramones during the making of 1980’s End of the Century, or his reputed mistreatment of ex-wife and Ronettes star, Ronnie Spector — likely a condition of the interview. But the director manages to get in a scattershot series of thrusts and parries concerning the man and his guilt or innocence, pairing courtroom scenes — the image of a spent gun beside Clarkson’s twisted feet, a sphinx-like Spector in all his pop-Godfather pin-striped finery — with B&W TV clips of his now-classic, far-from-disposable songs.

The musical roll call is impressive, including the eerie, elegiac “To Know Him Is to Love Him” with Spector himself strumming guitar as part of the Teddy Bears and warbling to his dead father (who, eerily, committed suicide by “blowing his brains out,” as Spector puts it); the truly exquisite “Spanish Harlem”; and such rock ‘n’ roll Rosetta stones as “Then He Kissed Me” and “Be My Baby.” Subtitles by author Brown blow up the historical importance of the music, which could have easily stood on its own, and add to the po-mo swirl of information surrounding the man, the career, and the comedown. Yet we don’t hear from Spector’s crucial vocalists, who, like Darlene Love of the Crystals, struggled to find recognition beyond the producer’s Wall of Sound power, or the artists, who arguably tended to chafe against the producer’s overriding vision.

Still, to the Jayanti’s credit, Agony‘s strange parallels stay with you: Clarkson, in blackface, impersonates Little Richard (in a failed bid to resurrect her comedy career), around the time Lennon is heard on the soundtrack singing “Woman is the Nigger of the World”; Spector rattles on about how he wasn’t surprised when Lennon was shot (“People wanted to become famous by killing him, and if you were neurotic and crazy enough … “) before a prosecutor offers, “Lana Clarkson wasn’t an anonymous nobody who deserved a bullet to her head.” Over it all looms the so-called legend — a victim, yes, as he implies at the start, but one who has fallen prey to his own press, and to his own eternally flaming ego.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR opens Wed/10 at the Roxie.

Mellow noir

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Mellow noir

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Every nation’s cinema has its share of memorable contributions to the narrative category of amour fou. But since the French came up with that term in the first place, we might as well grant them a certain supremacy. They definitely tend to arrive at the madness of a self-destructive love with less high melodrama (let alone misogyny) than is the U.S. norm.

Consider such prior Gallic exercises as Duvivier’s 1937 Pépé le Moko, Malle’s 1958 The Lovers, Truffaut’s 1981 The Woman Next Door, or Resnais’ recent Wild Grass (2009) — all strong in incident yet restrained in execution and complex in psychology. Many of these movies might be classified as "noir," the label French critics applied to postwar American thrillers first.

But their country’s films seldom replicated the sharply-defined good vs. evil conflicts between character, circumstance, fate, and gorgeous black and white stylization in those Hollywood B movies that created an eventual transcontinental cult. Instead, they were essentially intimate dramas whose roiling domestic emotions hurtled toward fatalistic, often fatal yet low-key implosions.

Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is like that, a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s.

Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school.

There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards.

There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, amplified when she asks him to address her fourth-grade class (there’s been a cancellation) on career day. He unexpectedly enthralls them describing how a house or school gets built — then she hires him to repair a drafty apartment window. As payment he asks her to play the violin, something she hasn’t done for anyone else in so long she plays with her back to him. You can imagine where this sequence’s heady repressed emotions are heading.

Yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. Forty-something Jean has working-class-hero brawn but also a beer gut. His wife is a French Talia Shire circa Rocky (1976), and slightly younger Véronique resembles a more starved Agnès Jaoui.

As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. This isn’t the outsized universe of Hollywood noirs 60 years ago, where men were men and women were frequently duplicitous, bullet-bra’d Shivas of destruction. Nor does it echo the medium’s occasional role-reversals, in which intoxicated family man turns hapless stalker. Or even the stop-me-please-I’m-having-too-much-good-sex-to-maintain-sanity likes of Last Tango in Paris (1972) or Betty Blue (1986).

Instead, Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic.

Indeed, Brizé ultimately aligns over-much with the Brief Encounter (1945) school of thwarted-passion pathos. His refusal to artificially underline such emotions, however, is what elevates this from so many good movies nobody in their right mind would confuse with reality.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Azztronaughty

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Azztronaughty

It’s impossible for me to think of Big Freedia without exploding into happy feathers. As the fierce national face of New Orleans’ bounce music movement (along with her drag daughter, Sissy Nobby), Freedia’s been shoehorned into several media narratives that don’t necessarily do her justice — popular performer who bridges a supposed gap between flamboyant gayness and macho rap, evidence that original regional roots music is still being generated in our monocultural-seeming musical world, post-Katrina beat-healer of ravished communities, anthropological curiosity. But she’s all that and more: a canny, hard-working force of nature who can really turn you out.

Bounce, with its quick-step, butt-thundering beats and hypersexual call-and-response template, has done a lot to push New Orleans back to the forefront of the American dance music scene. That a shoulder-shrugging attitude toward its superstar’s transgender appearance and cartoonish sexuality accompanies the sound should only surprise those who somehow missed Little Richard and Prince, not to mention Cameo and Cam’ron. Still, Freedia’s matter-of-fact, out-and-proud “Queen Diva” stance is all too rare in hip-hop. First-time listeners, after taking in Freedia’s feminine peacocking, still get floored when her gravelly voice orders straight crowds to “bend ovah like I told ya!” in her hit “Azz Everywhere.” (And then they do.)

Outsiders have called Freedia’s style “sissy bounce” — a niche label she rejects, and one that’s pretty inaccurate. Freedia’s first appearance in the Bay, last year at a San Francisco drag party, left the sissy audience completely befuddled. This time around, she’ll be in Oakland at a mixed affair put on by the fab Le Heat and Hella Gay parties. And now that she’s been featured everywhere from Diplo’s blog to The New York Times Magazine, Bay crowds may be ready to “jump back, shoot it up now, bitches get down” the Big Easy way.

Big Freedia Wed/9, 9 p.m., $10. The New Parrish, 579 18th St., Oakl. www.thenewparish.com

 

PEPE BRADOCK

The jazz-educated Frenchman could have been beamed up after he gifted the world with orchestral house classic “Deep Burnt” in 1999 and still been lionized. But he’s consistently delivered deep-streaming tracks that drop at just the right moments. He’ll be headlining the Staple boys’ ear-ticking Darkroom monthly with Fil Latorre and Javaight.

Thu/9, 9 p.m., $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

DRUMCODE: ADAM BEYER AND IDA ENGBERG

Attack of the Swedish techno giants! Drumcode label head Adam Beyer and “Disco Volante” hitmaker Ida Engberg bring news from the detail-oriented Stockholm scene to the perfectly curated weekly Base party at Vessel. My longtime local bass-maven crush Nikola Baytala warms up.

Thurs/9, 10 p.m., $15. Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF. www.vesselsf.com

 

ARTIFICIAL

The debut of this dark wave, minimal synth, and rare post-punk party last month was fashionably bananas — don’t miss the follow up with DJ Justin of Nachtmusik, Banshee, Dreamweapon, Julian DeStrukt, and Nary Guman of Warm Leatherette.

Fri/10, 9:30 p.m., $7. Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF. www.sfcatclub.com

 

BACK TO SCHOOL

Aw, already? Meet and greet the new freshman class of clubgoers, probably wearing even more fantastically mismatched ensembles than previously imagined, at this electro blowout put on by the Blow Up kids. Tenderloins, Udachi, Sticky K, Lucky Date, Jeffrey Paradise, and more stoke your higher learning.

Sat/11, 9 p..m.–3 a.m., $15 for 18+, $10 for 21+. Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois Blvd., SF. www.blowupsf.com

 

BLOOD, SWEAT, AND QUEERS

Bmore funk and booty jams from DJs Davo and Bunnystyle for two floors of hot queers in a Chinatown dive. ‘Nuff said!

Sat/11, 10:30 p.m., $5. Li Po Lounge, 916 Grant, SF.

 

MIXMASTER MIKE WITH DEL THE FUNKY HOMOSAPIEN

It’ll be a classic hip-hop throwdown when the Beastie Boys DJ and mind-warping rapper join forces at this Electronic Arts shindig. There’s something about a ” sexy exotic cars” showcase, too, but why burn the fossil fuels when you can inflame the brain cells? With DJs Sake One, Ren the Vinyl Archeologist, and more.

Sat/11, 9 p.m., free with RSVP at Mighty website. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

Izakaya Sozei

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Izakaya Sozei

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE A specter is haunting America — the specter of deflation, according to the worthies at the Fed, who, having played no small role in conjuring said specter, are now kind enough to warn us of it. Let the excellent adventure begin, but first, a stop at Sozai (full name: Izakaya Sozai), a twice-reinvented Japanese restaurant in the mid-Sunset, where the crush of youth is so massive that even the most slithery of specters would have a tough time worming their way in.

One tends to associate youth-crushed restaurants with Valencia Street, those droves of 30-year-olds in jeans and black shoes with disposable incomes adequate to support restaurant-going as a form of entertainment. Irving Street would hardly seem to be a serious competitor to the Mission extravaganza, and Sozai looks demure from the sidewalk: Japanese-style screens over the large windows and modest signage. But once inside, it’s all energy. The space seats only a few dozen, and as we all remember from high-school physics, compression produces heating.

The clientele is substantially Asian, which makes for a complex comment on the food. Despite the name, Sozai is far from a traditional Japanese restaurant. Its nearest relation is Namu, which stitches together Korean, Japanese, and Californian influences into a new piece of small-plate cloth. At both places, overflow spills onto the sidewalk, where wait-listers can be observed in deep communion with their smart phones, fingers jabbing away.

Sozai’s menu does offer a base of recognizably Japanese dishes, including otsumami, sashimi, nimono, and yakitori. The kitsune udon ($7) — fat wheat noodles in broth — is wonderful, despite a difficult-to-eat block of tofu floating on top. But the more exciting action is posted on the chalkboard; there the dishes can slide away from categories, and in some cases from Asian influences altogether.

An octopus ceviche ($8) served in a martini glass, for instance, with a gap-toothed fence of tortilla chips ranged around the lip, was like something you’d find in tony Peruvian or pan-Latino restaurants. The marinade was splendidly tangy; the octopus itself tough. But where would you look to find chunks of boneless, slightly fatty duck meat ($6) grilled on skewers after a bath in blueberry port? The port was vanishingly unpresent, while the meat itself was gamy and chewy, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Equally oddball were skewers of brussels sprouts ($5) wrapped in bacon and grilled. I am a big believer in both grilling and combining bacon and cruciferous, but here the method — which left the vegetable in a semi-raw state while failing to crisp the bacon — did not impress.

Pulled-pork croquettes ($5) resembled a pair of whole-wheat English muffins but lacked any crust or crispness and, worse, were seriously underseasoned. If it hadn’t been for the side dish of ginger-charged hoisin sauce, we might not have finished them. The bed of daikon threads did offer a subtle heavenly quality and some texture, but no flavor.

The kitchen’s best dishes seem to be the simplest and the most Japanese, and maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. Mackerel, or aji, tataki sashimi ($10) was about as straightforward as it gets, a low heap of fish strips with skin still attached. It looked like a gathering of eels.

A salad of yuzu-dressed mozuku seaweed ($4) couldn’t have been improved upon while acquiring a sheen of elegance from the martini glass it was served in. And a plate of blanched baby yellow carrots ($4) needed only a shallow dish of lumpy miso paste on the side to offer a complete, and remarkably vivid, experience.

Taking chances does raise the risk of failure, and Sozai’s kitchen takes more chances than most, perhaps with the understanding that even serious culinary failures are almost sure to fall well short of inedible disaster. But one of the desserts, fig tempura ($5) arguably crossed the line. It consisted of halved figs, dipped in a light tempura batter and fried just enough to be crisp (why couldn’t the croquettes have been this crunchy?) and arranged around a helmet of vanilla ice cream.

The figs were neither sweet nor mealy inside, so call that a draw. The ice cream was fine. But why oh why drizzle everything with a too-tart balsamic reduction? It looked nice, like chocolate syrup, but knocked the dessert off balance. If not for the ice cream, the figs and balsamic could have been served as an hors d’oeuvre. As a dessert, it left us deflated.

IZAKAYA SOZAI

Dinner: Wed.-Mon., 5:30–11 p.m.

1500 Irving, SF

(415) 742-5122

www.izakayasozai.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

alt.sex.column: A good fit

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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alt.sex.column: A good fit

Dear Andrea:

I want to have anal sex with my boyfriend. I read that you can wear a butt plug beforehand to prepare. True?

Love,

Willing

Dear Will:

Good grief. What do you think people did before the advent of the novelty marital-aide industry? Sit on pinecones? You don’t need weeks of prep to achieve what may be in some senses an “unnatural act” (the rectum being far better at pushing things out than it is at taking things in) but is nevertheless performed regularly and pleasurably by normal people everywhere. I’d certainly suggest you try a smoothly manicured finger first to see if you even like this sort of thing. Use a bottle of lube. It may take time, but by time I mean minutes or hours, not weeks.

Honestly.

Love,

Andrea

 

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend and I are planning to start having sex. I feel kind of silly saying this, but I am really scared! I’m afraid he won’t fit! Should I try stretching first with something? Or is that just ridiculous?

Love,

Tightly

Dear Tight:

First off, please stop using words like “silly” and “ridiculous” to describe yourself and/or your perfectly reasonable concerns. And second, yes, it would be pretty ridiculous to resort to something like vaginal sounds or graduated dildos to do what your very own vagina so cleverly evolved to do for itself. That said, it is far more likely to be successful when you are hot and bothered and ready to go. It will not, however, take weeks of preparatory homework and a specially-fitted case full of precision instruments.

Love,

Andrea

 

Dear Andrea:

I am just starting to date a new woman. I find her very attractive but frankly, she is BIG. Do I have to figure out some new positions or angles?

Love,

Skinny

Dear Skin:

You might, but I’m guessing she may know something about this herself. You may want to consult her when and if it comes to that. I enjoyed this summation of how not a problem your problem is likely to be, from the “Fat Sex” page of Dimensions Magazine’s website: “Those authorities who have taken the trouble to investigate the matter report that obesity is rarely, if ever, a barrier to intercourse.” … Or, as Marvin Grosswirth put it in “Fat Pride”: “To put it bluntly and squarely, no woman is so fat that her vagina is inaccessible.”

Love,

Andrea

Got a question? Email Andrea at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Play at work, or more at play?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Play at work, or more at play?

rebeccab@sfbg.com

There’s a long-standing perception in San Francisco that certain development firms are treated more favorably than others thanks to insider politics. And while supporters of Mayor Gavin Newsom say he’s cleaned up the pay-to-play culture, a look at the list of contributors to Newsom’s run for lieutenant governor at the very least raises questions.

For example, according to campaign filings, Newsom received $6,500 from a business called 706 Mission Street Co. LLC, which was formed to construct a condo high-rise at Yerba Buena Center. The building would also be a new permanent home for the city’s Mexican Museum. The 706 Mission project, which has been in the works for several years, is a joint venture between developer Millennium Partners and JMA Ventures, a San Francisco-based real estate investment firm. JMA Ventures contributed $5,000 to Newsom, campaign finance records show, and the firm’s president and CEO, Todd Chapman, also made a generous donation of $1,000. Effectively, Newsom’s campaign received a total of $12,500 from individuals or firms associated with 706 Mission.

The project has been under the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency since 2008, when the Redevelopment Commission authorized an exclusive negotiations agreement with the developer for the mixed-use high-rise and museum, to be partially constructed on a parcel owned by Redevelopment and later included plans to integrate the landmark Mercantile Building. The project went dormant in the face of the economic downturn, but it’s now moving forward again, and the environmental review of the proposed 600-foot tower falls under the purview of the city’s Planning Department. On Sept. 1, Newsom mentioned 706 Mission, a “new, world-class facility,” in a press release announcing a new director for the Mexican Museum.

“The Redevelopment Agency and the city are fully committed to the public/private/nonprofit partnership that will eventually bring the Mexican Museum to a new home in the heart of Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco’s premier cultural district,” Redevelopment Agency executive director Fred Blackwell proclaimed.

Another contributor that demonstrated strong financial support for Newsom’s bid is a global technical firm that has a hand in several major infrastructure and development projects throughout San Francisco. AECOM contributed $13,000 to Newsom’s campaign, and a handful of people who work for AECOM chipped in smaller amounts totaling $3,600, according to campaign-finance records. In an April 15 news release for investors, AECOM noted that it had been awarded a $26 million contract for construction management of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Water Improvement Infrastructure Project. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in May, the firm was also awarded a five-year, $147 million contract with the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency for construction management on the Central Subway project. AECOM is also playing a role in a number of major developments currently under review in city planning. It is the prime environmental impact report consultant for the California Pacific Medical Center proposal for a giant new hospital on Van Ness Avenue. It’s also completing a traffic corridor analysis for 19th Avenue on behalf of the developers of Parkmerced, a renovation and in-fill project on track to be one of the largest new residential developments in the city.

 

A $2 MILLION BONUS

The Parkmerced developers have helped Newsom’s campaign along too. Craig Hartman, an internationally renowned architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who is a design partner for the project, dropped $1,000 into Newsom’s hat. Two executives associated with Parkmerced each pitched in another $1,000.

A smaller project that has been in the works for years also seems close to home for Newsom. Michael Yarne, of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, is a former director of development of the Martin Building Co., the lead developer on mixed-use residential project located in Central Waterfront at 2235 Third St. The project has commendable features such as a reuse of an existing industrial building, proximity to transit, and 39 below-market-rate units — and the project developer managed to secure an incredible deal with the city.

This past April, the Planning Commission approved an unprecedented in-kind agreement with Martin Building Co. that waived nearly $2 million in development fees, including about $1.2 million for 2235 Third St. and the rest for a second Martin Building Co. project on Townsend Street, in exchange for the developer’s commitment to construct a space for a day-care facility on the Third Street site and lease that portion of the property to a childcare provider for free for 55 years. The provider would have to operate the facility without profit and would be required to have low-income child-care slots, so this bargain would serve to create affordable day care.

Yarne’s close ties to the mayor and the developer — plus a $2,000 campaign contribution to Newsom from the head of the project’s general contractor, a building company called Nibbi Bros. — could raise a few eyebrows in light of this unprecedented deal, especially given the city’s gaping deficit and the question of how else that $2 million might have been put to use. The project was also awarded more than $1.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to excavate lead-contaminated soil from the property and transport it away for off-site disposal. The project, which has already been approved and moved to the Department of Building Inspection phase, also incorporates a City CarShare space. Yarne’s on the board of City CarShare, too.

It’s always possible that there is no connection between Newsom’s campaign contributions, his personal staff, and contributors’ connections to the myriad development projects in the hopper — but that doesn’t stop observers from asking questions. Developers who are anxious about the economic downturn may be motivated do everything in their power to speed a project along, and it’s possible that throwing money at a political campaign is just one tool among many.

Or maybe they just think Newsom would make a great lieutenant governor.

 

PLANNERS COMPLAIN

Nonetheless, the perception that certain developers get special treatment is shared by at least two former planners in the city’s Planning Department — one of whom is facing termination in the wake of a recent investigation surrounding porn email.

Following an internal shake-up at the planning department triggered by the discovery that some staffers shared pornographic e-mails, messages started flying about what was behind the crackdown. “Porn is not the real story,” Lois Scott, a retired planner and former president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.

After the porn scandal broke, the hammer came down. Five people were terminated effective this past May, and another 20 or more reportedly faced some form of disciplinary action.

Some have interpreted the move as a signal that Planning Director John Rahaim, a Newsom appointee, won’t stand for inappropriate conduct on his watch. At the same time, others have contacted the Guardian to voice concerns that the firings and internal shakeup were connected to something deeper than dirty emails.

Although speculative theories abound and there is a paucity of official comments on the firings due to privacy laws, one point is abundantly clear. In a city where powerful developers will go to great lengths to secure approval for lucrative projects, there’s a great deal of wariness surrounding city planning. San Francisco is host to leagues of developers, real estate investment groups, prestigious law firms specializing in land use, technical consultants, and politically powerful associations of residential builders, building owners, and building-trade unions — all with a huge financial stake in seeing projects make it past the approval finish line and onto groundbreaking.

When it comes to a major project that will transform a city block in San Francisco, the planning department (which relies on development fees to pay the bills) inevitably encounters pressure from two sides: well-connected development teams with economic interests on the one hand, and neighborhood groups or historic preservationists who aren’t shy about hurling criticism on the other.

So it’s no surprise than anything affecting the planning staff in a major way would not pass quietly.

One of the planners affected by the firings told the Guardian that the porn investigation went on for months. There were one-on-one interviews, and some 70 staff members were called in and questioned, some two or three times. Contents of computer hard drives and city e-mail accounts were analyzed. Later, huge posters went up, displaying questions like, “How Are You Going to Make a Better Planning Department?”

“It was bizarre,” the former planner said.

According to Leigh Kienker — a former planner who recently retired and was not implicated in the computer misuse investigation — the result of all this was to create a sort of chilling effect on the planning staff, especially since she said two of the five individuals who lost their jobs had been more likely to question management and speak up when they didn’t think a project was being handled properly. When it comes to ensuring that projects conform to the planning code, “We need to be able to speak up,” she said. “This is our expertise.”

Jim Miller, who had been with the department for more than 32 years and is regarded by his peers as very outspoken, discussed his own termination in an e-mail to a number of supporters. “I was given a loose-leaf binder indicating the reasons for the firing,” he wrote. “The information contained therein was decidedly very thin. This, plus the fact that others who had a greater role in the ‘wrongdoing’ received job suspension rather than termination, leads me to believe that there is some other reason for the action taken. This reason is heretofore unbeknownst to me.”

Cynthia Servetnick, shop steward for IFPTE Local 21 planner’s chapter and a historic preservation advocate, voiced concerns about how the department dealt with the porn problem in an e-mail to Rahaim. “Frankly, the firing of so many senior Planning Department staff members not only seems like a ‘witch hunt,’ but smacks of age discrimination against a class of union-represented employees for the purpose of shoring-up budget deficits and intimidating less senior employees,” she charged. In response, Rahaim dismissed her comments as baseless accusations.

 

BADINER GETS $82,500

At a Feb. 18 Planning Commission meeting, when the department’s proposed budget came under review, commissioners noted that Rahaim was in the unenviable position of having to lay off four to six staffers in order to balance the budget. Noting that a great deal of effort had gone into attracting fresh talent and hiring younger planners, several commissioners expressed hope that they wouldn’t be the first to go. Rahaim responded that, given the union’s seniority rules, his hands were tied to an extent. In light of that conversation, Servetnick suggested that the porn e-mails presented a convenient solution for a director faced with a thinly stretched budget. All of the five who were fired were 50 or older.

At the same time, others who closely follow city planning rejected the idea of any ulterior motive. Sue Hestor, a land-use attorney who seems to have her finger firmly on the pulse of San Francisco development, told the Guardian that she’d heard plenty of rumors, but wasn’t necessarily buying the hype. Charles Marsteller, a former director of Common Cause and a keen observer of the planning process, said he had little reason to suspect that what had happened was anything more than responding to inappropriate conduct.

Zoning Administrator Larry Badiner, a 28-year veteran of the department who critics say was friendly to high-end developers, was fired in the wake of the porn investigation along with three lower-level staffers — but he appeared to walk away with a better deal than his subordinates.

A Guardian sunshine request revealed that Badiner received a six-month severance package amounting to $82,500, plus benefits he was eligible for that could have amounted to more than $57,000 (but may be significantly less). In exchange, he agreed not to sue the city. None of the other planning staffers who were terminated appear to have received such a payout.

Meanwhile, Badiner may not have been the highest-ranking city employee to be snagged in the porn investigation. An e-mail address of dlmacris[at]aol.com was included on an e-mail provided to the Guardian that contained a rather tame pornographic image.

The planner who sent the e-mail was fired after the porn investigation, and so were three of the recipients. Former Planning Director Dean Macris, who more recently served as a special advisor to Newsom, stopped working for the city around the same time Badiner and the others were terminated. Mayoral spokesperson Tony Winnicker told the Guardian he could not discuss anything related to how or why Macris left city service.

Rahaim said he had no choice in the Badiner severance. “The issue with Larry Badiner was required as part of a MEA labor contract. It requires a payout in any situation where a person is terminated or laid off.” He added that the firings were “strictly because of inappropriate use of city resources and also because of the type of material” that was being viewed. There was “absolutely no other reason.”

And he insisted that no developers get favoritism: “I have no idea who’s contributing to whose campaign.”

At least one response to the rash of firings commended the planning director for taking action. “I applaud your efforts to address hostile working conditions related to gender and sexual preference, which have long existed in the Planning Department,” a retired senior planner wrote to Rahaim shortly after the firings. “There is, perhaps as you have realized, a deep undercurrent of unresolved and unpleasant practices which perhaps finally led to the present complaints.”

Does the planning department shake-up indicate a move away from the bad old days of quid pro quo dealings and hostile working conditions, thanks to a director who’s standing strong against inappropriate conduct — or is it a move to consolidate power in a department led by a mayoral appointee at a time when the development community is particularly hungry to move new projects forward? Given the knock-down, drag-out fights that have unfolded over planning in the city’s history, and the high sums of money that are gushing into project proposals and campaign coffers, it’s no wonder the question is being posed.

“The bottom line is, the public is not being served,” Servetnick said. “Developers shouldn’t be able to come in and say, ‘Just for me!’ If everybody who pays to play gets away with that, we’re going to end up with a really ugly city.”

Blocking the bridge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Blocking the bridge

sarah@sfbg.com

The Sierra Club and Golden Gate Audubon Society have sued to block the final environmental impact report on the Lennar Corp. redevelopment project, a move that could force reconsideration of a bridge over Yosemite Slough.

The suit against the city, Board of Supervisors, and Redevelopment Agency charges that the final EIR for Lennar’s Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard project was inadequate, in part because it didn’t consider all the impacts of the bridge or look properly at alternatives.

The move comes as no big surprise: these environmental groups vowed to file a suit within 30 days of the city’s August certification of the project EIR. But advocates hope it will lead to a change in the proposal.

Arthur Feinstein, a member of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Chapter, said the EIR didn’t comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.

The introduction to the Sierra Club suit notes that “the FEIR failed to identify or underestimated the significance of environmental impacts associated with the project; failed to address the alternative proposed by Arc Ecology, which provides for a bus rapid transit route around Yosemite Slough; and failed to provide adequate responses to comments on the draft EIR.”

Or as Feinstein puts it: “There’s a bridge, and it’s going through a nature area where they say the sound level from the buses will be the equivalent to standing 50 feet from a freeway.

“They say there is no impact and that you can’t have an undisturbed nature experience in an urban area, but you can,” Feinstein continued, pointing to the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, and Crissy Field as examples of places where you can have undisturbed experiences.

Feinstein noted that Candlestick Point State Recreation Area is the only large park on the city’s eastern shoreline, and the only park that people in the Bayview can access easily.

“The city boasts about how much it was improving the Bayview, but this park is the only major open space where you can get away from urban stress — and folks have a lot of stress in the Bayview,” Feinstein said. He added that building the bridge will involve sinking pilings in Yosemite Slough that will disturb wildlife and stir up PCBs and other known contaminants.

“Noise, light and glare all have impacts on wildlife, but the city’s EIR said these are insignificant because these critters are insignificant,” Feinstein said.

Feinstein noted that the city’s final environmental impact report did make a finding of overriding concern that the project will cause air pollution at levels that exceed Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) health standards.

“But [the city] decided that this was a regional problem, so they did not attempt any mitigations for the 25,000 new residents that this 700-acre redevelopment plan is supposed to bring into the Bayview — which already has the city’s highest asthma and cancer rate and the largest number of polluting sources,” Feinstein said. “But they could say that all buses going into the development need to be electrified, or they could limit the number of parking spaces the way they did at Octavia-Market and South of Market.”

Feinstein said the next step in this CEQA lawsuit in a pretrial negotiation session to see if a settlement can be reached. “We’re not looking for a long drawn out fight. We’re ready for one, but we’re also ready to negotiate because that’s how you achieve things.”

Feinstein also noted that the Sierra Club had to go to Los Angeles to hire a traffic consultant to work on its suit because Lennar has contracts with just about every shop in the Bay Area, thanks to its various projects at Hunters Point, Treasure Island, and Mare Island.

“The related problem is that the city is no longer looking at the project with a steely eye,” Feinstein said. “Instead, they have become the developer — except that they are working with Lennar and not reviewing Lennar’s plans with objectivity. By filing this lawsuit, we’re keeping the conversation about this project alive and reminding folks that you don’t have to take everything this mayor and his administration gives you.”

The Sierra Club/Audubon Society suit came four days after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the California State Parks Foundation entered into an agreement with Lennar to help prepare conceptual designs that reportedly will be used as the basis for the actual bridge over the Yosemite Slough.

Some critics interpreted the timing of CSPF’s announcement, which the Chronicle reported under a confusing “Environmentalists to help design span” headline, as an attempt by Lennar’s well-oiled PR machine to undermine the Sierra Club/Audubon Society suit.

They also questioned CSPF’s independence from Lennar, and from the Mayor’s Office, because Guillermo Rodriguez Jr. from the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development sits on CSPF’s board. So does Peter Weiner, a partner at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, which has contracts with Lennar. Representatives from Southern California Edison, Toyota, the Walt Disney Company, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and several other companies that either have contracts with Lennar or have given to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign for lieutenant governor campaign also sit on the park foundation board.

CPSF’s President Elizabeth Goldstein told us that “as park supporters and defenders, we consider ourselves environmentalists.” CSPF originally planned to fight approval of the project’s final EIR when it came before the board in July. But unlike the Sierra Club, CSPF pulled its appeal at the last minute.

Goldstein told the Guardian that the foundation reversed its decision because it had initiated what she characterized as “a fruitful discussion with Lennar.”

“We wanted to play that out,” Goldstein said. “And now we’re glad we did, because the design criteria look quite good and hopefully will be compatible with the project.”

“What we’ve agreed with Lennar about is a set of design criteria to be applied to the bridge, she continued. “These criteria are intended to make sure the bridge fits aesthetically into the park as much as is possible. Lennar asked us, and we agreed, to develop the first set of conceptual plans — obviously in cooperation with them — to make sure that they are, from their first iteration, as sympathetic as possible to the park.”

Goldstein said that some of these design criteria are “quite global.”

“Some are big arcs of things that are very important to us, such as impact from light, glare and noise,” she said, noting that they don’t want to see the proposed bridge lighted at night, à la the Golden Gate Bridge.

“We want the environment at dusk to be as unimpacted as possible,” she said.

Other CSPF concerns are more situation specific.

“We want safe, attractive, easy-to-use signage,” Goldstein said, referring to need to help users and neighbors find their way around and across the bridge. “We also talk about minimizing piers in the water at the slough, and if possible, eliminating them altogether since they impact vehicles and kayaks.”

Goldstein agreed that the foundation’s roots are not in political advocacy. “We were founded as a philanthropic land acquisition partner to the Department of State Parks.” But she noted that the group was involved in blocking a proposed toll road through Orange County and is a leading supporter of Proposition 21, which seeks to raise nearly $500 million a year for state parks by tacking on an $18 vehicle registration fee that would give all vehicles registered in California free access to the majority of state parks.

As Feinstein observed, “The CSPF does great work, but they are not usually advocates for conservation and biodiversity. That is what the club and Audubon Society does.”

Stuart Flashman, attorney for the Sierra Club and the Golden Gate Audubon Society, said that in the long run the lawsuit won’t stop the project from going forward. “But in the short term, if the court finds that the EIR wasn’t adequate and that there are significant impacts from the bridge that could have been avoided, then the city has to go back and redo that part of the EIR, a process that could take two to four months. And if they conclude, yeah, the impacts from the bridge are unavoidable, then they’d have to redo it to go around the slough.”

Flashman says he hasn’t seen the proposal CPSF and Lennar are working on. “But as part of this suit, we are required to sit down with the city and see if we can settle — and we are hopeful we can do that.”

No smart meters in SF

David Talbot
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No smart meters in SF

EDITORIAL Smart meters are a dumb idea. That’s what The Utility Reform Network says, noting that the high tech devices are expensive (California utilities, including Pacific Gas and Electric Co., will be charging consumers $5.4 billion to install the meters), don’t save energy or money, and can lead to privacy risks. PG&E bills have soared unexpectedly in places where the meters have been installed in the past year, forcing an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission, which concluded on Sept. 2 that the meters are okay, but PG&E’s customer service isn’t. Still, TURN and other experts say the report is inconclusive, and state Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) wants legislative hearings before any more meters are installed.

San Francisco hasn’t faced the smart meter problem yet since the utility hasn’t been installing them here — but that will start soon enough, now that the CPUC (never known as a harsh critic of PG&E) has given the green light. TURN is urging customers to boycott the meters, so the San Francisco supervisors should tell PG&E that the city doesn’t want this flawed technology.

Smart meters are supposed to make it easier to save energy. The idea is that the devices will not only track how much electricity a customer is using, but give that customer the ability to monitor usage at different points in the day and cut back during peak periods.

But to take advantage of the gadgets, a customer would have to buy a bunch of expensive gear on the side — communications devices, thermostats, computer chips for energy-intensive appliances, etc. PG&E isn’t going to pay for that stuff.

Meanwhile, the "smart" part of the meter sends information about your energy usage through a wireless signal. Privacy advocates worry about that (as do people concerned with having yet another device in the house emitting low-frequency radiation).

And while PG&E denies that there are any problems with the accuracy of the meters, huge numbers of people in areas where they’ve been installed have reported huge — and otherwise inexplicable — hikes in their monthly bills.

So for most residents and small businesses, smart meters are just going to be a pain in the ass — a questionably accurate, potentially dangerous, and otherwise worthless device that PG&E is making money from by installing.

TURN has advice on its website (turn.org) for people who want to boycott the meters: to tell PG&E to leave the existing meters in place. If you put a sign on your meter saying you don’t want it changed — and if you tell the person coming to replace it that you don’t want a smart meter — you may stave off the new product for a while.

But San Francisco is in the process of creating a community choice aggregation (CCA) system that will put the city for the first time in the business of delivering retail electric power. That ought to give the city some authority over how local meters are going to operate — and at the very least, the city should tell PG&E to back off until CCA is in place and the city can do its own independent study.

The supervisors should ask City Attorney Dennis Herrera to investigate what authority the city has to block PG&E from installing smart meters, and to look at how the new CCA might avoid including the cost of the devices in the rates local customers pay for power. At the very least, the board can endorse the boycott and urge the CPUC to keep smart meters out of the city. Candidates for local office should oppose the smart meters. And if PG&E wants to force the issue, city officials just need to remind the utility that its local monopoly is illegal, that San Francisco has a federal mandate for public power, and that just three months ago, 68 percent of the city’s voters said they wanted to preserve a public power option.

The case for SEIU at Kaiser

David Talbot
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The case for SEIU at Kaiser

Editors note: In last week’s issue, we ran an op-ed piece by two hospital workers who are members of Service Employees International Union and want to change their affiliation to the new National Union of Healthcare Workers. SEIU asked for the right to respond, so we’re presenting the arguments of an SEIU worker who opposes the change.

OPINION I’m a licensed vocational nurse (LVN) at Kaiser Permanente Oakland, where I’ve worked for 26 years. As an LVN and a union shop steward, I have two passions: patients and workers.

I do home health visits. My patients are sick and sometimes feel anxious and upset. Those feelings can be overwhelming. When I walk into a patient’s house, that person has my full attention. Little things like that make people feel better and heal more quickly. That’s what’s important.

I also know that healthcare givers can’t provide good care if we don’t have the basic things we need. I worked for another hospital before, but I came to Kaiser because the benefits, wages, and working conditions were better — and the union was better.

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), my union, is the largest at Kaiser and has represented workers here since the 1930s. It’s through our union that we’ve been able to make our jobs some of the best in California at one of the state’s largest employers. Kaiser workers are not just providing quality healthcare throughout the state, we’re also contributing to local our economies and getting our communities through these tough times.

I was one of 121 workers to be elected to the national bargaining team that negotiated our union contract, the largest committee ever in the history of our union. Members filled out surveys to set our priorities and we were able to win 9 percent raises over three years, no change in the cost of our fully-paid family healthcare, and some of the best job protection in the industry. I’m very proud that everyone’s voice was heard and that we had the largest ever rank-and-file member vote to approve our contract. But now all that could be lost.

On the heels of winning the contract, another union — the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) — filed a petition for an election to represent Kaiser workers. Now Kaiser workers will vote on which union they want: SEIU-UHW, the union we won this contact with, or NUHW, which hasn’t bargained a contract for anyone.

People want to know the truth, even if it’s a hard truth. Here’s the truth about NUHW: it was formed by former leaders of our union who were removed from office and have been found in federal court to have misused members’ money. NUHW was ordered by a federal judge to repay $1.57 million in damages to SEIU-UHW members. They then filed a motion to delay payment, saying it would potentially bankrupt the new union. But their motion was denied. Let’s face it — NUHW needs us more than we need them.

What’s going on right now with this union election is a shame. I see some of my coworkers getting afraid and angry — afraid that we could lose the wage increases and healthcare benefits we fought so hard for and angry that NUHW is coming after us like this and creating these distractions. I tell them what I tell my patients: just focus on healing and moving forward.

We have a long history at Kaiser of supporting each other as coworkers, which is why it’s so important that we resolve our differences and keep going. We’ve walked picket lines together, even when it’s to support workers in other hospitals, and have fought to improve the quality of care we deliver to patients. We’ve worked hard to create good jobs in this community while people around us are losing everything. All this has been possible because workers are united in our union SEIU-UHW. *

Earlene Person is a home health licensed vocational nurse at Kaiser Permanente Oakland and a member of the national bargaining committee for SEIU-UHW.

 

Appetite: Plum sneak preview dinner amps up anticipation

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: Plum sneak preview dinner amps up anticipation

Daniel Patterson is one of our city’s true visionary chefs, willing to push the envelope, gifted with technique, but, yes, able to make it taste damn good. I’m a big fan of Coi, delight in Il Cane Rosso and try not to resent Oakland for getting both Bracina and Plum, his upcoming ventures. 

Thankfully, Plum sneak preview dinners were held here in SF at Il Cane Rosso, every Monday during August. A simple, four-course menu was presented at $45 per person, representing what might be on offer once Plum rolls out. It’s a smart idea: try things out, get diner’s feedback, hone the menu… all before the restaurant opens. 

Of course, I am eagerly anticipating the bar menu from none other than Scott Beattie with bar manager Michael Lazar, co-author of Left Coast Libations. This is going to be a good one, folks. 

Patterson, Il Cane Rosso chef Lauren Kiino, and pastry chef Bill Corbett are behind the food. From the preview dinner perspective, I first noticed the menu’s straightforwardness: lamb stew, roasted beets, and the like. But the food belies a brazen spirit you won’t catch reading the menu, one married to understatement. Ask questions and you’ll find there’s much more to your dish than meets the eye. 

What is labeled “potato chips” are russet potato strips and skins prepared like chicharrones: crispy, dusted with cayenne and fennel pollen. These would make incredible bar snacks. Roasted beets display radiant hues of gold and red, accented with onions, sorrel and the crunch of pistachio. A pure, seemingly simple mushroom dashi/broth with yuba, tofu and greens, is contrasted by pickled radish. This dish is an excellent example of what I’ve seen from Patterson before: balanced flavors, impeccable technique but approachable, not playing any games. 

Lamb stew with sunchokes and wheatberries deserves applause. When I found out what was in the dish, it seemed a shame not to list it on the menu, but it’s smart on the Plum crew’s part to encourage the average diner to order something they are comfortable with (lamb, for example), while gently expanding their horizons. The stew is tender chunks of lamb neck, shoulder and head, while the accompanying grilled toast is covered in “brainnaise”, Patterson’s term for brain mayonnaise. Never fear, it tastes delicious with radicchio. You’d never know that mayo was creamy with lamb brain. 

Dessert is fresh huckleberries accented with airy goat cheese foam on a ‘liquid’ graham cracker, followed by a grapefruit and wild fennel pate de fruit: a bright, tart finish. 

The marriage is right: the food is straightforward and comforting, accessible to your general Bay Area diner, but simultaneously bold, unapologetic and lovingly prepared. This bodes well for Plum. 

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Good enough, fella?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Good enough, fella?

Here’s a game that piles on hot-rods, collectible Playboy centerfolds, piano joints with framed Bogie posters, and one instance of a full-fledged Sinatra sing-along. Mafia II (2K Czech/2K Games, Xbox 360/PS3/PC)is the sequel to 2004’s Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, a well-received PC game that put players in the shoes of a cab driver as he rose through the ranks of the 1930s mafia. Its sequel mines similar Coppola and Scorsese territory, set this time in the 1940s and ’50s, as you play a young war vet looking to settle his late father’s debts.

 

The American war-era backdrop is a fantastic sandbox to play in: there are old-school billboards, decorative storefronts, and lavish little details like Christmastime snow slowly blowing away from your car as you drive down the street. But in the case of Mafia II, the freedom of the open world becomes largely an irrelevant means to an end: a set of roads that direct you to your next mission. There are really no side-quests to perform apart from stealing a few cars or hunting for Playboys, and even the old pastime of shooting it up with the cops is pretty unsatisfying. I spent most of my travel time with the cops trailing helplessly behind me. You have to wonder why the developers spent so much time creating an open world city that exists only to shuffle you from shootout to exposition.

Jack Scalici, director of production for developer 2K Games, told me that, for him, the story is the game’s most important aspect and he hopes that Mafia II‘s cinematic style will be best appreciated by film critics rather than traditional game journalists. The game does lend itself more to plot deconstruction than gameplay analysis, but unfortunately Mafia II doesn’t quite nail the story either.

The game’s scope is vast — it spans years as you leave the dreary 1940s for the sunny ’50s — but Mafia II never manages a truly satisfying character arc, content instead to putter along in standalone vignettes. The gangster lifestyle ain’t always shits and giggles and there are some fantastic little moments — jail yard fights, lugging a day-old dead body around in the trunk — but tension quickly fizzles, leaving the story a wildly inconsistent experience of highs and lows.

Actually, “wildly inconsistent” describes Mafia II to a T. Bum checkpoints, spiking difficulty, funky camera tics: it seems for every pro there’s a con. But if the aesthetic appeals to you, there’s enough play here to make the game worth a spin. I had a good time; the most promising games always get the most flak.

Appetite: Studying drink

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Appetite: Studying drink

Left Coast Libations by Ted Munat with Michael Lazar — Left Coast Libations, released today (catch the launch party on 9/18 at Heaven’s Dog), is, as far as I’m concerned, a must for the library of any West Coast cocktailian, not to mention drink aficionados everywhere. Ted Munat clearly displays a fan’s love of drink and the bartenders behind them in his cheeky, delightful bartender bios, Jenn Farrington’s pristine photos give the book a sleek, pure look, and Michael Lazar painstakingly made every recipe to ensure workability for those of us trying these recipes at home. Naturally, San Francisco makes a strong showing with LA, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver bartenders sharing many of their greats, all highlighting the innovation happening in cocktails on the West Coast. You’ll find recipes for local favorites like Daniel Hyatt’s Southern Exposure or Joel Baker’s Pear Sonata. I’ve been making many of these at home and the book is rich with possibility. In the midst of intriguingly unique recipes calling for homemade syrups or tinctures, I am also grateful for simple beauties like Murray Stenson‘s Stephan’s Sour with Beefeater gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and Bitter Truth celery bitters. 

Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by Ted Haigh — After meeting him and attending his Hollywood Cocktails seminar at Tales of the Cocktail, I can say Ted Haigh is one crazy guy… and one of the best resources in the world for history behind drinks (just read his regular column in Imbibe magazine). With a well deserved win as Best New Cocktail/Bartending Book at Tales, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails feels like the kind of tome that would be a definitive resource in any era. Focused on the classics, it’s rich with historical notes, vintage artwork, and approachable, standard-setting recipes every bartender (or at-home novice) should know. Kudos for the spiral bound presentation, making it easy to use while mixing drinks. 

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent — Last Call is an almost textbook-detailed approach to the history, people and circumstances surrounding Prohibition and how it changed the face of America in issues as far-ranging as personal freedom to organized crime. Daniel Okrent is best known as the first public editor of the New York Times, but is also a Pulitzer nominee. His painstaking research reveals fascinating stories (Carry A. Nation, the temperance “saloon smasher” with a hatchet, for one), and debatable but thought-provoking conclusions. Just delve into the introduction with eye-opening stats on just how much America drank pre-Prohibition, and you’ll be hooked. 

 

Desperately seeking squash bees

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Desperately seeking squash bees

UPDATE! In the print version of this article, this reporter inadvertently described Anthidium maculosum as a territorial leafcutter bee. It is in fact a wool carder bee. My humble apologies to the bees and the experts who helped identify them.

Sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN This summer, I hunted squash bees. The hunt began on a sunny mid-July afternoon at the home of Celeste Ets-Hokin, an advocate for native bees who lives in Oakland and has just published a 2011 calendar on the importance of conserving bee habitats.

As Ets-Hokin explains in the forward of her calendar (available from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation), “Most of our fruit, vegetable, and seed crops depend on bees for pollination. For bees, success depends on habitat, habitat, habitat.”

Ets-Hokin has planted her own backyard, on a sunny ridge near Lake Merritt, with lavender, basil, and other bee-attracting plants. Although her yard was abuzz in midsummer with the sound of honey, bumble, carpenter, leafcutter, longhorn, and green metallic sweat bees, there was no sign of squash bees.

That’s because squash bees only visit the blossoms of squash plants and other members of the gourd family, which Ets-Hokin doesn’t grow in her yard.

So we decided to head for the trials garden next to Lake Merritt, which is funded by the University of California and the Alameda County master gardeners program.

Ets-Hokin spent the last 18 months creating a bee-attracting zone in this garden. And now she hoped to find squash bees in the garden’s vegetable patch, where squash and other vegetables are tested for suitability to the local environment.

Clad in just shorts and T-shirt, Ets-Hokin looked rather vulnerable, considering she was about to go bee hunting. But, as she explained, there was no imminent threat of stings: female bees only sting those who threaten their nest, and male bees have no stingers.

“Male squash bees live to drink (nectar) and have sex with female squash bees,” Ets-Hokin joked, as Rollin Coville, a lanky entomologist who has photographed insects for three decades, joined the squash bee hunt.

Dressed in a hat, slacks, and vest and hauling a state-of-the art camera, Coville was hoping to get shots of the elusive male squash bees, which emerge in late summer and can sometimes be found taking naps in the squash blossoms in the afternoon.

Last year Ets-Hokin produced a 2010 native bee calendar highlighting Coville’s kickass images and informative sidebars on how to attract these native pollinators to urban yards.

This year she focused on the importance of bee habitat on farms in face of proposed food safety regulations that could undermine existing federal bee conservation programs. And she hoped to use Coville’s squash bee photographs as her August 2011 pin-up shot.

But before we could escape Ets-Hokin’s yard, Coville quickly withdrew a clear vial from his vest pocket, popped it over a bee on a nearby flower, then corked the vial.

The bee began to buzz furiously.

“I think it’s a Anthidium maculosum,” Coville declared as he uncorked the vial and let what turned out to be a territorial wool carder bee go back to its business of guarding nectar in a nearby plant.

We eventually reached the trial gardens, where Coville showed me how to pry open the fleshy yellow squash flowers that lie half-hidden below the plant’s massive prickly leaves atop budding zucchini that threaten to grow as big as canoes if left unpicked.

The first dozen squash blossoms were vacant, save for a few ants and beetles, and Coville wondered aloud if late rains and a cold snap had decimated bee populations.

But then I found a squash bee sitting inside a flower like a king on a bright yellow throne. And at the next flower, six squash bees were gently napping inside.

As I tried to hold the fleshy flower petals open so Coville could photograph these sleepy males, one petal began to vibrate loudly. I let go and a male bee unwrapped itself from the petal and zoomed away into the undergrowth.

At the end of the afternoon when I thanked Ets-Hokin for inviting me on the bee hunt, she turned to Coville and laughed, “I told you she was easily entertained.”

For information about native bees, visit www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center.

 

From Alps to Arp

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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From Alps to Arp

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC Taking its name from the 1982 final edition in Brian Eno’s ambient series, the On Land Festival is in some ways a younger relative of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (as well as a prelude to it). Attuned to grain of sound as much as volume, unlike popular music fests, it isn’t as concerned with expansion or unlikely pairings as with the enhanced appreciation that can result when artists with a kinship are brought together. Grouper is back, and this year, Oneohtrix Point Never appears amid online raves and a recent collaboration with Antony Hegarty. On Land also sees the return of former SF resident Alexis Georgopolous, who’s had a hand in two excellent 2010 albums, The Alps’ spring release Le Voyage (Type) and Arp’s brand-new The Soft Wave (Smalltown Supersound). Alps are playing On Land while Arp isn’t, but because the Guardian covered Le Voyage earlier this year, the time seemed right to check in with Georgopolous about The Soft Wave.

SFBG There is a more pastoral quality to the music of both The Soft Wave and FRKWYS, Vol. 3, your recent collaboration with Anthony Moore. To me this is interesting because I just got off the phone with a musician and former New Yorker who talked about the lack of nature in New York City in relation to the Bay Area. Arp’s music has a strong elemental feel to it, one suggestive of oceans or the cosmos, but this more pastoral atmosphere is new in a way, so I’m wondering about its inspirational sources.

Alexis Georgopolous I like the idea of conjuring the natural world with analog synthesizers. It’s true that the current vogue is for ultra-artificial sound. It’s become trendy to exploit all the present synth sounds that were off limits, that were just too cheesy. Some good music has come of that opening up of the floodgates — Ariel Pink, Oneohtrix, James Ferraro. But I can’t say I know where this zeitgeist is leading. It might not be good.

But though there are some new age gems to be found, I’m not into just anything that purports to be “cosmic” or has a synth on it and happens to be obscure or ignored.

SFBG The Soft Wave was recorded onto two-inch tape. What is it about two-inch tape that attract or appeals to you in terms of the resulting sound?

AG Most of my favorite records were recorded to tape. There’s just something about it, the way that things can sound far away but also very present. Now everything is just butted right up against your ears. There’s no space between you and the sound. It’s just a wall. If you record 16 tracks or less on two-inch, the space on the tape itself creates a spaciousness, a wide angle. If digital gives you a blank space to inform, tape adds its own atmosphere.

SFBG Was it a major step to move vocals to the foreground as you do on Soft Wave‘s “From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea”? I realize you’ve sung or used your voice a little before in other projects, but your voice is central to the song, and its arrival occurs within what otherwise is an instrumental recording. It’s a bold gesture in that context.

AG It was simply a song that needed to be sung, not just played. It was written at a time when I’d realized the California chapter of my life, significant as it was to me, was over. It was, um, emotional. I’d seen so many friends leave and though I still have many dear, dear friends in San Francisco, it just felt that the time had come and I would be doing something wrong if I chose to ignore it. I had to leave. It sounds desperately corny, but I was literally choking back tears when I did the first take — which we ended up using.

I’d written and demoed a number of songs with words and vocals for The Soft Wave sessions. But after listening to what had been recorded, “From A Balcony” seemed appropriate while the others seemed destined for another album, the next album.

Initially, the idea of including just one song with vocals on an album seemed bizarre. But then, the unlikeliness of it all — the fact that I couldn’t think of an album that did that — began to appeal to me. The next album will be entirely vocal songs. “From A Balcony” is the bridge to the next record.

SFBG “High Life” also marks an overt step into melodicism. In some ways it’s so immediate or classic it sounds like a cover (forgive my ignorance if it is indeed one). Can you tell me a bit about the creation of that song?

AG Ha! That’s great. Well, it’s my own tune. But I’d be curious to know if you know of a song that sounds like it! That reminds me of the story about Paul McCartney waking up with the melody from “Yesterday” in his head. It was already so fully formed, so familiar in his dream, he was convinced it probably wasn’t his own tune. Some record executives looked into it, really looked high and low for a preexisting song that sounded like it. They didn’t find it. So McCartney recorded the song. I think it’s the most covered song of all time. Alas, I digress!

“High Life” is just a joyful little tune. Something to lighten things up after recording “From A Balcony.” It’s a bit cheeky, innit? I was sort of going for a Holger Czukay solo album feel, when he was into West African music and Fairlight synthesizers. I love Malcolm McLaren’s track “Obatala” (from 1983’s Duck Rock). It’s always struck me as sounding a lot like late-’70s Can. Like ethnological synth forgery. Fourth world.

ON LAND FESTIVAL: ARP DJ SET

With Oneohtrix Point Never, White Rainbow, Pete Swanson, Operative, Robert A.A. Lowe, Eli Kezsler and Ashley Paul, Golden Retriever

Fri/3, 7:30 p.m., $10 ($45 for four-night festival pass)

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

ON LAND FESTIVAL: THE ALPS

With Zelionople, Xela, Date Palms, Grasslung, Metal Rouge, Le Revelateur

Sat/4, 7:30 p.m. $10 ($45 for four-night festival pass)

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Portraits of Jason

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Portraits of Jason

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL “The black queen is not interested in sympathy,” intones the artist Tim Roseborough dryly in Portrait of Jason II: Rebirth of the B*tch , his “sequel” to Shirley Clarke’s 1967 film Portrait of Jason. It’s one of many verbal snaps issued by Roseborough’s piece, a séance with and tribute to its titular subject currently on view at the tiny Scenius Gallery.

The Jason is question is Jason Holliday, who, for close to 100 minutes, gives Clarke’s near-static 16mm camera the performance of a lifetime. In an uninterrupted stream of speech filmed mostly in medium close-up, Holliday holds forth on the life experiences, aspirations, and observations he’s picked up as an African American, a gay man, an ex hustler, and a showbiz dreamer.

As the culled remains of the 12-hour shoot roll on and Clarke loads in new reel after new reel, Holliday’s finger poppin’ sassy front gradually gives way to flashes of deep-rooted pain and vodka-fueled rage, culminating in a tear-streaked finale that qualifies as one of the most unsettling moments in American documentary film.

Dressed in Jason drag — Coke bottle glasses, a natty white shirt, and dark blazer — and speaking in Holliday’s jivey cadence, Roseborough resurrects Clarke’s subject as a ghost from the past commenting on current events (Obama is discussed) and a cultural climate worlds away from the pre-Stonewall moment of Portrait.

Things get more interesting when Roseborough uses his performance of Jason to dive into how race and gender are affectively coded in Clarke’s film. The above quote is spoken in the midst of a disquisition on representations of “the queeny black man” as either an object of (presumably white) pity — here he brings up Paris is Burning — or exotic fascination (RuPaul), who is invariably collapsed with the figure of the drag queen.

Although it bears the look of its source material, Roseborough’s piece fundamentally differs from Clarke’s film in its presentation. Shot on single-channel video, Roseborough’s movie is shown on DVD. At my viewing session, I was given a remote allowing me to skip around between chapters, effectively taking in as much or as little of his Jason as I would like. Of course, when watching the original Portrait, you can up and leave the theater at any time (many viewers have in the two screenings I’ve attended), but its grueling duration and unrelenting pace are also what gives Jason’s performance, and Clarke’s film, their urgency.

Roseborough’s Jason might be more effective if unleashed across YouTube instead of confined to the by-appointment-only limitations of Scenius’ white cube (although, even former reigning queen Kalup Linzy has moved on and up to episodes of General Hospital). I’m glad the bitch is back, but I’d like to have a clearer sense of the stakes behind Roseborough’s new portrait.

 

FREE TO FALL

There are scads more shows opening just around the corner that space limits me from including in last week’s fall arts preview. That said, here are a few more current and upcoming exhibits worth seeking out in the coming weeks:

Composed of hundreds of miniature landscapes inspired by Western landscape painting, Sean McFarland’s refracted view of California’s blues, browns, greens, and golds turns Adobe Books’ back room into an exploded postcard shop.

At the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the cleverly titled “Black Sabbath” examines how black artists used Jewish music as way to define African American identity, history, and politics. The Idelsohn Society of Musical Preservation, which curated CJM’s recent “Jews on Vinyl” exhibit, has uncovered all sorts of hidden-in-plain-sight encounters between black and Jewish musical cultures, from Cab Calloway doing Yiddish jive to Johnny Mathis singing the Aramaic prayer “Kol Nidre.”

Radiohead fans know Stanley Donwood as the go-to cover artist and frequent artistic collaborator for the British rock group’s albums from The Bends onward. “Over Normal,” Donwood’s first stateside solo exhibit, features many of the painter’s colorful “word map” canvases, whose wavy, grid-like structures (based on the street layouts of major world cities) are filled in with politically resonant and controversially juxtaposed words (see the cover for 2003’s Hail to the Thief). 

TIM ROSEBOROUGH: PORTRAIT OF JASON II: REBIRTH OF THE B*TCH

Through Sept. 10

Scenius

3150 18th St., Suite 104, SF

(415) 420-2509

www.scenius.com

SEAN MCFARLAND: UNTITLED LANDSCAPES (CALIFORNIA)

Through Sept. 19

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

3166 16th St, SF

(415) 864-3936

www.adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com

BLACK SABBATH: THE SECRET MUSICAL HISTORY OF BLACK-JEWISH RELATIONS

Through March 1, 2011

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org

STANLEY DONWOOD: OVER NORMAL

Fifty24SF

Thurs/2 through Oct. 27

218 Fillmore, SF

(415) 861-1960

www.fifty24sf.com

 

Notes on a scandal

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Notes on a scandal

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught.

Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the “friendly fire” circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House.

Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else, prizing honest intellectual adventure above such niceties as “clean” language. (Pat and his two younger brothers, as seen here, were/are cheerfully potty-mouthed.)

The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families rendered military ones by virtue of economic hardship and poor educational and career opportunities might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. It took two Congressional inquiries to prove their suspicions right.

Tillman was a golden boy of rare stripe: a natural athlete who overcame relatively small size (5-feet, 11 inches) to become a star tackle; a team player who turned down a $9 million St. Louis Rams contract out of loyalty to the Arizona Cardinals; a Noam Chomsky fan who abandoned pro sports to serve “freedom” abroad. He then refused to ditch his three-year Army term early (despite under-the-table negotiations between the government and the NFL) though he was already severely disillusioned by what he’d seen in Iraq.

When sent on a second tour of duty to Afghanistan, Tillman was only finishing what he considered a contract of honor. He was no longer at all sure about the righteousness of the cause. He was killed, it seems, senselessly — hardly an unusual casualty-of-war scenario. But his case was defiled by blatant official lies that manipulated this critical free-thinker into sacrificial poster boy for the “war on terror” in its most simplistic terms.

The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. It’s far from a worthy slog — Bar-Lev, who directed the brilliant prior doc My Kid Could Paint That (about a controversial, possibly rigged “child artist” success), retains a firm lock on narrative engagement in this less vérité context. It punches the emotions as hard as the originally intended title: I’m Pat Fucking Tillman, named after the subject’s recorded last words as he desperately tried to identify himself to testosterone over-amped “friendly” shooters who should have been watching his back.

THE TILLMAN STORY opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

Father knows best?

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Father knows best?

FILM A man, his wife, and their three children live in a country house with a swimming pool and a huge yard enclosed by a high fence. So far, so good. But the kids, who don’t have names, appear to be in their 20s. They’ve never left the property, and they won’t, Dad (Christos Stergioglou) says, until they lose a “dogtooth,” at which time they’ll be mature enough to deal with the terrors of the outside world. In the meantime, they’re trapped in the only world they’ve ever known, carefully constructed by their domineering father.

Dad’s laws shape just about everything, from language (to them, a “phone” is a salt shaker) to entertainment (lots of physical, competitive games); he tosses plastic airplanes into the garden and tells the kids they fell from the sky. He also provides his son (Christos Passalis) with a sex partner (the two daughters get zilch), a security guard (Anna Kalaitzidou) who woodenly services the lad and is paid for her time and her discretion.

Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who picked up the Prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes for this slice of disturbing domesticity, offers little explanation for Dad’s motives, or why Mom (Michelle Valley) goes along with his plan. They watch porn, so they’re not religious extremists. Dad isn’t fooling around with the daughters (though incest among the siblings is eventually, creepily encouraged). The only hint comes from one of few scenes set outside the family’s compound, in which Dad goes to check on the progress of the family’s soon-to-be new dog (the plan is, of course, to tell the kids that Mom has given birth to it). “Dogs are like clay, and our job here is to mold them,” the trainer explains. “Every dog is waiting for us to show it how to behave.” Indeed. It’s pretty clear Dad — master of his own private North Korea — is aware of that concept.

Though Dogtooth‘s main themes enfold cruelty and child abuse, it also deploys the kind of black humor and button-pushing that fans of shock-trader Harmony Korine would appreciate. There is casual violence, extreme animal cruelty, full-frontal nudity, several disturbing sex scenes, and maybe the most alarming dance routine ever captured on film. Its performer, the family’s eldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), has been pushed to the brink. Clandestine newness — a coveted sparkly headband, a crash course in cunnilingus, and especially the discovery of the wonderful world of Hollywood (including 1976’s Rocky) — has made her stir-crazy. Though it’s unclear how this half-formed human would fare in the outside world, it’s impossible not to root for a jailbreak.

DOGTOOTH opens Fri/3 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Northern lite

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Northern lite

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO My friends, there is another America. One where the teeth are clean, the streets nonthreatening, the nightlife tidy, the needle exchanges plentiful, and the gays legitimized. No, not Guam or Puerto Rico: I’m talking about Canada. OK, OK, one would be hard-pressed to identify any fierce contemporary regional dance music exported from the Great White North — there is no son Canuck — yet techno artists from Richie Hawtin (hard at work compiling a 25-year Plastikman retrospective) to Circlesquare (whose recent Robert Longo-ripping vid for “Dancers” caused several international heart palpitations) have at least kept Canada on the electronic music map. And there’s a thriving hip-hop scene as well, although rappable subjects of urban strife in this most civilized of countries are mostly restricted to stern public transit inspectors and spotty free wireless.

I just zipped back from four days in dazzling British Columbian hot spots Victoria and Vancouver, and while I came across no glorious cybernetic dance hybrid of Scottish strathsprey and Inupiat blanket toss, northern nutters like Calgary filter hip-house duo Smalltown DJs and deliciously deep divers Eames and Fatso of Victoria’s Soft Wear party caught my roving ears. Also discovered: Canada might be irony-free. At otherwise fantastic alterna-faggy party Queerbash, the boys and girls may have been torn from my hunky, uninhibited lumberjack fantasies and the stout drag queens unafraid to creatively camp up odd diva house classics like Sunkids’ “Rise Up” — but the tunes were pure Gaga-wave punctuated by 2k7 Britney, which I guess is retro now? And can every pop “club remix” stop sounding like someone scratching a new pair of nylons over the telephone? Elastic-synthetic, I get it. Still, the punky kids ate it up with nary a wink, and it would have been too impolite not to join in. But Canada, dear Canada: your homosexual party music drives me loony. Please fix.

 

POPSCENE VS. LOADED

Two of the biggest indie dance clubs team up again for rock debauchery, with DJs Omar and Aaron Axelsen and live gigs from localistas the Limousines and Lilofee.

Fri/3, 10 p.m., $13. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

 

GEMINI DISCO FAREWELL

The kids behind this incredibly popular and stylish retro-disco affair are ending on a high note — on this, their four-year anniversary, they’re packing up the mirrorball and move-move-moving on. Do the hustle, shed a tear with DJs Vin Sol, Nicky B., and Derrick Love, and hosts Le Dinosaur and Christopher McVick.

Sat/4, 10 p.m., $5. UndergroundSF, 424 Haight, SF. www.geminidisco.com

 

MOTOR CITY DRUM ENSEMBLE

He’s not from the Motor City and the only drums are your feet on the dance floor, but knob-nymph Danilo Plessow from Stuttgart sure knows his way around dance music history. He’s exemplary of a new wave of German techno-ists who aren’t afraid of that little thing called “funky.” Catch him opening for revered slow-and-low Frankfurt producer Roman Flugel (once described as “Patrick Cowley on ketamine”) at the monthly Kontrol party.

Sat/4, 10 p.m.–late, $20. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.kontrolsf.com

 

LE PERLE DEGLI SQUALLOR ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

For a dozen tight moons, DJ Bus Station John has carved out a monthly space at wondrously gritty mid-Market dive the Hotspot for cruise-y gentlemen with low goals and high minds. Revel in lusty disco rarities, luridly cheap drinks, upstairs pocket-pool, and several indecent exposures.

Sat/4, 10 p.m., $5. The Hotspot, 1414 Market, SF.

 

LABOR OF LOVE

It’s a three-day weekend with no Burners — let’s celebrate! Looong-running parties Stompy and Sunset once again team up to flood the Cocomo all day with funky house sounds and a distinct lack of fun fur and yarn braids. With DJs Galen, Solar, Tasho, Deron, and tons more.

Sun/5, 2 p.m.–2 a.m., $20. Café Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF. www.pacificsound.net

 

COCKTAILGATE: DROWNING LADY

Another play for the Playa-less — super-bendy drag lady Suppositori Spelling’s weekly gender clown hoot kicks out the jams (watch those heels) with a lineup of bedazzled performers actively protesting Burning Man’s “no glitter, no feathers” anti-drag policy. Guest hostess VivvyAnne Forevermore soaks you with love.

Sun/5, 9 p.m., $4. Truck, 1900 Folsom, SF. www.trucksf.com

Curry Boyzz

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Curry Boyzz

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE If no good deed goes unpunished, then it must follow, by some inexorable law, that no rule goes unbroken — not even my cherished guidance that oft-flipped restaurant spaces in this city tend to end up as Japanese places. Sometimes spaces go in another direction — like toward the Asian subcontinent. Early in the year, Curry Boyzz opened on a second-floor space, across 18th Street from DeLano’s Market, that for a number of years had been the home of Côte Sud, a credible French restaurant, and before that a Cuban spot.

The space is one of the more appealing in the area, in large part because of a glassed-in terrace that gives an expansive view over the street scene. Côte Sud made some tasty Parisian-style hay from this terrace while meaningfully contributing toward an elevation of culinary standards in the Castro.

But the times, they are a’ changin,’ and by the look of it, not for the better. People are more sensitive about bang-for-buck ratios than they were just three or four years ago, and hardly any culinary tradition gives you more bang for the buck than the south Asian (or, as the menu card puts it, “Indian-Pak”). In this important respect, Curry Boyzz (a sibling of Curry Stop in the Barbary Coast) doesn’t disappoint, although they might have spelled it “Bois” if they were interested in upping the twink, or at least the twink-involved, traffic.

You know you are in downmarket-land when you order at a counter and carry a number to your table. At Curry Boyzz you are further on your own scaring up utensils and napkins from bins near the entrance to the terrace. But — a thoughtful touch — there’s also a refrigerator filled with carafes of water, a flourish that puts this crucial matter right in your hands.

The menu includes many Indian staples, ably prepared, along with some unexpected items. Several involve karela, or bitter melon. It turned up cooked, with various meats, and also on its own ($5.99), rather pretty striped green strips in a stew with ginger, garlic, and onions. “Bitter” is a word that has no good connotation in America, where palatal pleasures tend to revolve around an infantile sweet tooth. But bitterness is one of the basic tastes, and is therefore essential. When moderated and modulated, as here, by strong counter-presences, it becomes something rich, deep, and satisfying.

Another dish I couldn’t recall having seen before was lamb cholay ($7.99), knuckles of meat cooked with chickpeas — but maybe that was just because my spice eye tends to be drawn toward lamb vindaloo. The cholay edition was well-behaved in the chili-heat department; its most obvious characteristic, in fact, was the presence of so many bones to be navigated around.

Tikka masala so often means chicken tikka masala, chunks of boneless meat simmered in a creamy curry sauce, but fish ($9.99) works just as well. We liked the big pieces, almost like whole filets instead of the more typical chicken chunks. And we loved the palak paneer ($5.99), the classic dish of spinach and chunks of white cheese, for its mysterious, transporting spice breath. Did I catch a whiff of some extra cardamom in there?

The ancillary items were also reliable. Pappadum (99 cents) were crisp and glistening with a sheen of oil. (Not all sheens of oil are undesirable.) Naan, on the other hand, weren’t glistening; they had the dry, slightly chapped faces of pita bread. Luckily, naan need not be moist and oily to succeed. Indeed, since naan chunks tend to get used to mop up sauce, a bit of dryness and absorbency is preferable, as with bath towels.

We were a little surprised to find the keema naan ($2.99), a flatbread disk stuffed with what the menu card called “ground meat” — shades of freshman-year mystery meat! but the faint gaminess suggested lamb — to be nearly as dry as its unstuffed sibling. No matter: it was good for sopping, and we had plenty to sop.

Considering that the terrace is glassed-in, we found the presence of bugs — tiny bugs, smaller than gnats — to be both ironic and irritating. But maybe even the bugs (or do I mean bugzz?) have found this cold and gloomy summer (the chilliest in nearly 40 years, say the TV weather boffins) to be tough going, and, like us, find themselves seeking shelter inside. 

CURRY BOYZZ

Sun.–Thurs., noon–11 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., noon–2 a.m.

4238 18th St., SF

(415) 255-6565

curryboyzz.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Modest noise

Not wheelchair accessible

 

alt.sex.column: My sibling’s keeper

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
alt.sex.column: My sibling’s keeper

Dear Andrea:

I’m having a problem with my brother. He wants to become a priest, and even though I want to be happy for him I cannot help but worry because in high school he told me that he thought he might be gay.

I’m worried that his secret desire will drive him to molest alter boys and I would rather he be a normal gay person than a priest who has relations with young men. How can I get him to talk to me? Should I tell him not to be a priest?

Love,

Concerned Sister

Dear Sis:

You do not have “a problem with your brother.” You may be troubled about him, but it is not your problem. You’re really not your brother’s keeper and it would likely improve relations between the two of you if you stopped appointing yourself such. As he probably told you at some point in your mutual childhood, “Mind your own beeswax.”

I doubt you can “get” him to talk about any of this with you. I do hope, for his sake, that he’s not jumping into anything, and that he truly feels called to the priesthood and is not seeking it out as a place to hide from his sexuality. That, very obviously and very famously, does not work. Please, please, do not make the mistake of confusing gay men, who are attracted to, well, men, with the evil fucks whose molestation of young boys in their care has come to light in recent years. Decent human beings do not become predators merely out of convenience or lack of access to more acceptable choices. Your brother may end up unhappy (celibacy and service not being everyone’s cup of tea), but he will not become an abuser merely by virtue of taking up the collar.

As for you, an honest mistake here and there, born out of naiveté, is one thing, but if you make the mistake of conflating gay men and child abusers, not only will your brother not want to talk to you, neither will I or most other nice people.  

Love, Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My sister is a lesbian, which I think is fine. For her birthday, I got her a card that said “bitch.” I thought it was funny, but she got mad and won’t talk to me. Do lesbians not like the word “bitch” or is she just overreacting? Do I have to say I’m sorry? Love, Oops, Wrong Card

Dear Card:

Of course you should apologize. Whether or not your sister is displaying a certain stick-up-her-buttness about the (probably) harmless card (she is), you did offend her. You’re not children any more and you are not going to get into a “she started it” loop at this point. You’re just not.

Apologize, and when you do, do not tell her that its “just fine” that she’s a lesbian. That is not your call and will just piss her off more. And don’t ask her why lesbians don’t like the word “bitch.” Whether or not you think it’s fair, the word is best left to dog fanciers and ironic self-describers.  

Love, Andrea

Got a question? Email Andrea at andrea@mail.alsexcolumn.com

 

 

Turf politics

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Turf politics

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Messy Marv, a.k.a. The Boy Boy Young Mess, is probably San Francisco’s most popular rapper. Within the city, fellow Fillmore District native San Quinn remains SF’s icon, but, as Will Bronson, head of SMC Recordings, says: “Once you cross that [Bay} Bridge, it’s Mess.” According to Saeed Crumpler, the rap buyer for Rasputin, the prolific Mess outsells everyone in the Bay save E-40 and The Jacka, often having three or four CDs among the store’s top 20 rap chart. SMC has thus tapped the raspy-voiced gangsta rapper to preside over the just-released compilation Thizz City, first of a Frisco-focused series paralleling the label’s Oakland-oriented imprint Town Thizzness.

“We’re trying to brand the city and showcase the talent and the up and coming talent,” Mess says of Thizz City, a partnership between SMC and Thizz Entertainment, hence the name. “People can get on my promotion as far as where I’m at in my career.”

True to this conception, Thizz City attempts to represent all of the city’s scattered hoods, with a lineup that ranges from enduring O.G.s like Lakeview’s Cellski to new acts like Roach Gigz, a white kid from the Fillmore. Yet behind this apparent display of unity lurks an inconvenient truth: SF rappers don’t get along. By comparison, Oakland is a rap utopia — not that there’s never beef so much as the prominent acts tend to find common cause in the endless quest to make it big.

“In Oakland, they come together,” says Killa Keise, also of Lakeview. Keise, who began recording with Cellski at 12 and later hooked up with Hunters Point’s Guce, is simultaneously a vet and a young act, one of several slated for a Thizz City album later this year. “We just did a video shoot in Oakland for Guce and all the Oakland rappers came out to support it,” Killa says. “But there really wasn’t that Frisco support.”

The lack of camaraderie in SF is evident, and neutrality is frequently not an option. I’ve confirmed stories, off the record, of people being threatened just for recording with another rapper’s rival, and never have I been forced to have so many off-the-record conversations to get a picture of what’s happening. In Oakland, threats are generally reserved for someone who owes someone money, not for guilt by association. But in SF, where the African American population has shrunk from 13 percent to 6.5 percent since 1970 (according to an Aug. 8, 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle), street politics tend to exert more pressure on its necessarily smaller rap scene.

 

MESSY SITUATIONS

Mess’s situation is instructive. Currently he’s prepping his first full-blown solo album in several years, Waken Dey Cook Game Up, due this month from his own company, Scalen LLC/Click Clack Records. Produced largely by Mess’s longtime collaborator Sean T, who also made Mac Dre’s classic “Fellin’ Myself,” Waken will be the Fillmore rapper’s first big release as The Boy Boy Young Mess. It’s also a serious bid for chart action, with singles featuring Keyshia Cole (whom Mess discovered in the late 1990s) and Houston rapper Chalie Boy, whose 2009 independent hit “I Look Good” snagged him a deal with Jive. Clearly Mess has similar major label ambitions, and Chalie Boy proves that despite rap’s youth bias, a 30-year-old underground legend like Mess himself can still fulfill them. (In the age of Jay-Z, 30 is the new 25.)

“If one of us makes it from Frisco, we all make it,” says Guce, articulating the regional rap logic that has turned once-fledgling scenes like Houston into national powerhouses. But the SF rap scene hasn’t rallied around Mess the way the entire Bay seemed to support Jacka for last year’s Billboard-charting Tear Gas (SMC). This is partly due to feuds that have divided the Fillmore itself. A vicious beef with San Quinn two years ago has left lingering tension. Their battle was shocking because Quinn and Mess literally grew up under the same roof — Mess lived with Quinn’s family for a time — and the two have recorded together since they were teens.

“It was an ugly fight because they knew too much about each other,” says Fillmore’s Big Rich, who is in the studio working on his new album, Built to Last, with his protégés, Evenodds. “When Rick Ross and 50-Cent beef, they don’t know each other like that. It’s very nonpersonal. But these two brothers, every line they said was real.”

Just as this beef was “officially” squashed, another exploded between Mess and his former associates the Taliban (Young Boo and Homewrecka), which the group airs on Thizz City. The reasons for the dispute are less clear than the duo’s mode of attack, which is to question Mess’ street cred due to his recent absence from the Bay. On probation after his second weapons conviction — one strike away from serious prison time — Mess relocated to Miami in 2008 to focus on his music and his new endeavors Scalen Clothing and Scalen Films.

“When you break away and do other things, you get negative shit: ‘He ain’t fuck with the hood no more. He ain’t got money no more,'<0x2009>” Mess says during our phone interview. “Ain’t nobody run me out of Fillmore. I go wherever the fuck I please. I got out of jail and moved myself because I don’t want to go through that situation no more.”

This is an eternal dilemma, not limited to SF. A gangsta rapper faces an unrealistic if not impossible demand: to maintain credibility, you’re supposed to simultaneously get rich and stay in the hood.

“A lot of my people are brainwashed to believe you’re supposed to be in the hood and stay there,” Mess says. “That’s not what it’s supposed to be. I want to break the cycle. I have a kid. I don’t want him to go through the shit I went through. So I’m doing what I need to do for what’s better for my kid.”

 

WESTERN SUBTRACTION

No rap scene is immune to street politics, but the degree to which they affect SF is more extreme than anywhere else in the Bay. To every rapper I spoke with, I put the same question: why? Big Rich links the widespread volatility to both the depressed economy and drug abuse.

“The turf war in SF hip-hop is because niggas ain’t eatin’ enough,” Rich says. “Only a few of us can live off rap. And a few aren’t livin’ the way they used to because of the economy. That’s problem No 2. Problem No. 1 is drugs. A lot of Frisco rappers do cocaine and ecstasy, and drugs alter your thought process and your actions. So you get the drugs mixed in with the street politics and the lack of money being circulated.”

Another answer comes from the Fillmore’s DaVinci, a rising star originally from Quinn’s Done Deal camp. In March, DaVinci released his debut, The Day the Turf Stood Still (SWTBRDS), one of the most powerful, thought-provoking recent Bay Area albums, using gangsta rap to explore the problems of urban life. (The album is available for purchase or for free at www.swtbrds.com/DaVinci) As on his album, DaVinci suggests that gentrification is the root of many problems that bleed into the SF’s rap scene.

“Not only did gentrification break up families, but families that stayed let personal problems get in the way of coming together,” DaVinci said. “Fillmore used to be a whole, and now it’s broken up into different sections. Families who were keeping it together moved or got bought out of they houses, and we’re left with sprinkles of people who don’t know each other well. Or the second generation from them isn’t able to connect the dots like, ‘Oh, my pops used to go to school with him; he’s cool.’ It wasn’t instantly beef, but it was more like, ‘I ain’t fuckin with them.'<0x2009>”

As the aforementioned Chronicle article notes, SF has the most rapidly dwindling black population in the country, and the Fillmore, prime real estate in the middle of one of the most expensive cities on earth, has particularly felt the squeeze.

“The neighborhood’s shrinking every year,” DaVinci says. “It’s like, first you had two blocks for your territory, now you only got half a block. You do whatever you can to protect your half-block, even if it means you just fuck with these two niggas on your block. People don’t trust each other. And that’s reflected in the music because the music always reflects what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

Everyone I spoke with agrees that the lack of unity in SF rap is a problem. It’s bad for business, even locally. Town Thizzness, for example, has been thriving since 2008 while Thizz City is just getting off the ground, though they were conceived at the same time. “It’s like there’s a dark cloud over the city,” DEO of Evenodds sighs.

Occasionally a ray of light breaks through. Berner, a Mexican Italian SF native whose duo projects with the likes of Jacka also made Billboard noise, recently brokered what seemed impossible: getting Mess and Quinn on the same track — twice! — for his new collaboration with Mess, Blow (Blocks and Boatdocks) from Bern One Entertainment.

“I’m a fan first,” Berner says. “To be able to bring them together after all the problems is the greatest feeling in the world.”

They may have recorded their parts on opposite coasts without personal interaction, but that Mess and Quinn agreed to appear together sends a powerful message. Yet the tension in SF rap runs far deeper than any one dispute and Rich, for one, is tired of it.

“People be like, ‘We need a meeting, all the rappers come out,'<0x2009>” he says. “Every meeting, niggas say ‘This is what we need to do, this is what we gonna do,’ then everyone puts their hand in the circle and we break out the huddle. And niggas go out that room like, ‘Fuck that nigga.’ So I gotta carve my own lane and stay in it.”

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