Volume 45 [2010–11] Archives — Page 25 of 45 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

The fight for KUSF

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

By Irwin Swirnoff

OPINION For almost 34 years, KUSF (90.3 FM), has provided unique and varied local programming that truly is the audio representation of the qualities that make San Francisco such a special place. A place where diversity is honored and given a voice. A place where art, culture, and music are given a platform to tell stories, evoke emotions, and unite a wide range of people.

With shows in more than a dozen languages and every imaginable musical genre, era, and region represented on its airwaves, KUSF stood as one of the most respected college and noncommercial radio stations in the country.

Beyond its wide scope of music programming, KUSF provided crucial cultural and public service programming that served so many communities and cultures in our city that are all too often marginalized. Chinese Star Radio was the only radio program in Cantonese for the large and vibrant Chinese community in San Francisco. Disability and Senior News Report provided in-depth reporting on pressing issues facing these often overlooked and neglected parts of our community.

On Jan. 18, at 10 a.m., all those voices, all those communities, and all those services were silenced and squashed. In a secret deal behind the back of the community, the University of San Francisco sold KUSF’s transmitter to the University of Southern California in a deal that also involves the large media conglomerate Entercom.

It went down like a hostile corporate takeover. The DJ on air wasn’t allowed to sign off. Armed security entered the station as every lock in the studio was being changed. As stewards of a scarce public resource, USF has an obligation to the community. It’s time for the university to take a step back from this deal and allow for a mutually beneficial solution that will keep community radio alive in San Francisco.

It’s become clear that USF had no idea what an irreplaceable public resource it was killing when it entered this sneaky deal that would afford USC with its sixth territorial radio station as it aims to create a monopoly on the left side of the dial and extend its fundraising capacities deep into the Bay Area.

It’s obvious that this is a bad deal for the city of San Francisco. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Democratic Party, and the USF Faculty Association have passed resolutions condemning the deal. Outspoken support has come from a wide range of city and state leaders, including state Sen. Leland Yee.

No one is arguing USF’s right to liquidate an asset. All we are asking is that the community be involved in this decision and be given the first opportunity to purchase the transmitter.

This is not a done deal. Our petition to deny the transfer has been filed at the Federal Communications Commission. Serious questions about the legality of this deal are being addressed, and the next several weeks and months will allow us time for negotiations to help save community radio in San Francisco.

This is not about a format change. It’s about a community being robbed of its voice. We are committed to this fight and need everyone in San Francisco to join us in saving this crucial community asset. Now is the time to speak truth to power.

Guardian contributor Irwin Swirnoff has been the musical director at KUSF.

For safety’s sake

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

6

rebeccab@sfbg.com

A federal investigative hearing on the deadly Sept. 9, 2010 San Bruno explosion triggered by the rupture of a high-pressure Pacific Gas & Electric Co. pipeline was all about getting answers — but it has also sparked new questions.

For instance, why didn’t the San Bruno Fire Department have maps of the 30-inch gas line running beneath the neighborhood where the blast destroyed 37 homes and killed eight people? Why did PG&E’s records list that section of pipe as seamless when the federal investigation revealed that it actually consisted of shorter pieces of pipe, called pups, welded together? Why has PG&E been unable to produce records of close to 30 percent of its pipeline infrastructure, proving that the lines are in decent shape? And does the paperwork it has produced contain reliable information?

These shortcomings speak to a broader issue gaining attention as more fatal pipeline ruptures grab headlines. On a national scale, at least 59 percent of onshore gas transmission pipelines were installed before 1970, according to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety, making most of the infrastructure a minimum of four decades old.

Pipelines everywhere are getting older, and in some cases, weaker. Yet there tends to be a lack of awareness about the risks associated with the subsurface transport of hazardous materials, and as the San Bruno disaster demonstrated, there is often a lack of communication between utilities, local governments, and property owners about minimizing the risks.

These gaps are especially apparent in the process of approving new development projects. Tried-and-true systems are in place for indicating to contractors where they should and shouldn’t dig to avoid making direct contact with underground infrastructure, but that information seldom takes into account what condition a pipeline is in. The general assumption is that the pipeline operator (in this case, PG&E) is keeping up with maintenance, and that it’s safe to dig. Yet with the gaping questions surrounding PG&E’s infrastructure in the wake of the San Bruno blast, there’s a new level of uncertainty.

Pipeline safety isn’t just a problem for utilities and pipeline regulators to worry about, according to a report issued by Pipelines and Informed Planning Alliance (PIPA), an initiative led by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which brought together more than 100 experts in the field. It should also be on local governments’ radar when they’re making decisions about land use. Yet in San Francisco, this level of awareness seems to be absent.

According to PIPA, “Changes in land use and new developments near transmission pipelines can create risks to communities and to the pipelines.” The hefty report contains an exhaustive set of best practices for planning near pipelines, many specifically targeting local governments. Priority No. 1 for local planning departments should be to “obtain mapping data for all transmission pipelines within their areas of jurisdiction … and show these pipelines on maps used for development planning.” The report also suggests taking special precautions in areas spanning 660 feet on either side of a gas-transmission pipeline; creating systems of communication so information can be readily shared between local governments, utilities, and landowners; and identifying emergency contacts who can halt dangerous excavation activities in case something goes wrong.

The Guardian sent e-mail queries to the Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection (DBI) to find out if the city was adhering to any of the practices recommended by PIPA as the best ways to ensure safe planning near pipelines. Reached by phone, a spokesperson from Planning told the Guardian, “DBI is where you need to call.”

But DBI spokesperson Bill Strawn said, “Those questions you were asking really don’t fall into the Department of Building Inspection’s jurisdiction.”

Strawn added that the issue of underground infrastructure is not really taken into account when building permits are issued. “We don’t go to the [Public Utilities Commission] or [Department of Public Works] or PG&E” for that kind of information, Strawn said. “That would be the responsibility of the property owner, and the plans they submit to us don’t include that kind of utility information.”

PG&E is scrambling to meet a March 15 deadline imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission to turn over records proving its lines are intact. Until it can prove the integrity of its system either on paper or through costly, high-pressure water testing, the condition of some lines is unknown. PG&E did not return calls for comment.

In San Francisco, a densely populated urban hub on an earthquake-prone peninsula where major development projects are being permitted all the time, these issues are particularly pressing. Charley Marsteller, former chair of San Francisco Common Cause, certainly thinks so.

Last December, Marsteller penned a letter to a well-respected geotechnical engineer, raising a question about pipeline safety in light of California Pacific Medical Center’s plans to construct a massive hospital at its Cathedral Hill site on Franklin Street. According to a map of underground gas lines published by the Guardian (See “PG&E’s Secret Pipeline Map,” 9/21/10) using several sources of data, a PG&E gas main appears to run beneath Franklin.

Marsteller was worried about whether excavation for CPMC — or other projects requiring excavation, or even simple contractor digging — could cause vibrations that could affect that pipe.

“As CPMC digs its 100-foot hole, and due to the massive construction vibrations, is there not a risk that the PG&E gas pipeline is at risk of rupture?” he wanted to know.

The engineer, who preferred not to have his name published, responded in an informal letter that “it is indeed possible that soil movement generated by excavation and/or foundation construction could rupture a deteriorated gas main.” He added that while he wasn’t familiar with the details of CPMC’s or other excavation projects on Franklin Street, he did know that the area in question “consists of relatively weak soil” underlain at depth by a geologic feature called the Franciscan Formation, made of sandstone and fine-grained, sedimentary rock.

Yet no one seems to be giving this question any kind of professional attention or study. Eerily, Marsteller seems to be the only person in San Francisco who’s asking what happens if a major excavation project is permitted nearby a corroded pipeline — and he says he hasn’t received much of a response from the “rather blistering memos” he’s fired off to planning commissioners and members of the Board of Supervisors to ask about it. “I’m very concerned that we’re not suspending contractor digging proximate to a pipeline,” Marsteller said, until PG&E can offer proof that the lines nearby excavation projects are in good shape. Whether these issues will ever be considered as part of the local planning process, Marsteller predicted: “The answer is, no one ever thinks about this.”

Excavation damage accounts for nearly one-quarter of pipeline “incidents” nationwide, according to the federal Office of Pipeline Safety report. Yet safeguards are in place to prevent these things from happening.

When the Guardian initially phoned the Planning Department to ask about digging near pipelines, the phone call was returned by the Department of Public Works. Anytime a street excavation project is planned, DPW’s Gloria Chan explained, a notice of intent is issued 120 days beforehand to PG&E, AT&T, the Public Utilities Commission, and any other stakeholders that might have something running underground. Projects are then designed to integrate existing lines. “Sometimes the information we get may be 40 years old,” Chan said. Through a mandated process called USA Service Alert, people go out to physically mark where the underground infrastructure begins and ends on the project site before a contractor starts breaking ground.

That same process occurs with private development projects, explained Alan Kropp, a geotechnical engineer with the firm Alan Kropp & Associates. Kropp said it’s left up to a private contractor to work out the technical details for digging, which are governed by a set of regulations. “If you’re one foot away or three feet away, most pipes don’t care,” Kropp said, but he acknowledged that if a pipe is deteriorated, there could be instances where digging a normally safe distance away could still pose a problem.

“Almost all the time, the system works well,” Kropp said. As for the condition of the pipe, Kropp said, that information generally doesn’t guide project decisions. “It’s really up to the owner of the pipeline,” he said. “They would be the ones in control of that information.”

Mighty real

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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marke@sfbg.com

CULTURE It’s kind of insane that San Francisco hasn’t had a queer history museum until now. My goddess, we’ve even had a Barbra Streisand museum called Hello Gorgeous!! — not to mention museums dedicated to ophthalmology, old video games, Bigfoot, Walt Disney, and antique vibrators. So basically in the recent past, you could more easily explore the pedigree of a masturbating Yeti singing Yentl with a monocle than revisit the days of Harvey Milk and the Daughters of Bilitis.

Yet here was Amy Sueyoshi, co-curator of the brand new GLBT History Museum’s tremendous first show, “Our Vast Queer Past,” standing before an antique vibrator — and a huge box of dildos — in a display case marked “Sex Toys: Implementing Erotic Expression,” telling a group of attendees that high schools are booking tours at a brisk rate. “The kids don’t have any problem with the sex stuff. They want to know more about what the whole thing was about,” she said. “The only backlash we’ve had is in the comments section of SFGate.”

Sure enough, at a subsequent visit on a rainy weekend afternoon, there was an exuberant scattering of younger people inside the sleek, tiny, white-and-turquoise Castro storefront, checking out a wide and challenging array of queer historical inquiries. For despite the rather stodgy “GLBT” in the museum’s name — better, I guess than just Schwules Museum, or “gay museum,” the name of the only other institution of this kind, in Berlin — “Our Queer Past” is queer through and through, from its non-hierarchical “cluster model” curation, to its breathtaking range of diversity, to its unabashed approach to sex. There’s even stuff about straight people! Granted, it’s about the Rev. Lou Sheldon, but still.

Despite the ambitious scope of the exhibit, though, it’s anything but preachy or dry. On entering the museum, you’ll encounter instantly accessible items like the iconic Easter Egg pantsuits that Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin wore when they married in 2008 — already it seems so long ago — and Harvey Milk’s kitchen table. These items are part of the ongoing “Great Collections From the GLBT Historical Society Archives” display, which also includes oral interviews with local activists and personalities and rare video footage (scenes from the 1989 Miss Leather Contest played while I was there). A screen projecting archival photos from personal collections, many in black and white, casts its own spell: without any commentary or context, the pictures invite you to examine every detail for clues to the subject’s sexual identity.

ACT-UP protest chants and the sounds of White Night Riots scuffles lead you into “Our Vast Queer Past,” which is broken up into 23 small displays, each taking a different approach to aspects of the queer experience. “Vast” doesn’t just refer to the centuries of buried and unmeasured queer history, but also to the collection of the GLBT Historical Society, which forms the basis of the museum’s resources. Started in 1985 by a collective group of queer history enthusiasts headed by Willie Walker, a nurse driven by the growing AIDS crisis to preserve the gay present and past, the society’s archives are currently housed downtown, but the dream of an actual museum was never far off. Two years ago, perhaps encouraged by the Milk mania that gripped the gay community, the society set up a temporary exhibit at Castro and 18th streets. When the museum’s current space, a former flower shop, became available, the plan was set.

But that also meant, in preparation, sorting through the society’s 75,000 images and acres of papers, objects, and video and audiotape to form an engaging and cohesive narrative. Sueyoshi, associate professor of race and resistance studies and sexuality studies at San Francisco State, and her co-curators Don Romesburg, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State, and Gerard Koskovich, an independent scholar, have done a fantastic job. At a recent public talk about how they faced such a daunting task, Koskovich explained the cluster concept of the individual displays. “We each picked out single objects that we thought represented a larger slice of the queer experience, and then built the displays around that to fill out the story in interesting ways. We let the object guide us, in a sense. We didn’t want to impose a huge timeline and struggle to fit everything in.”

The approach leads to an absorbing experience, with grouped-together objects pinging their implications off one another. The more you look, the richer the relationships become. Koskovich pointed out two objects in an display marked “Consuming Queers: The GLBT Marketplace.” One was a pink Xeroxed hand-drawn flyer from 1989 announcing “Let It All Hang Out Day,” inviting large, bare-breasted women of all backgrounds to “hang out” in the male-dominated Castro. The other was a slick brochure advertising Lazy Bear Weekend 2003 with a big Miller Lite logo on the cover. “You can see the contrast,” Koskovich said, “how larger size had been completely commercialized, if only for a certain ‘desirable’ population.”

Beyond body politics — and there are fascinating displays concerning that important subject, including “Lesbian Sex Wars,” which illustrates a contentious period in the 1970s when women faced off about pornography, S–M, and penetration — some of the displays evince a poetic quality. I was particularly drawn to the story of Jiro Onuma, a compulsive self-documenter whose records, letters, and photographs tell an eloquent story of what life was like for a Japanese gay man in America in the 20th century. From his 1919 Japanese passport to a striking picture of him with two male friends in the Topaz internment camp during World War II (“showing that even in these places of restriction, there can be room for pleasure,” as Romesburg described it), his tale is somehow a gentle rebuke to the stereotypical narrative of doomed and anguished closeted gay men in the middle of the last century.

Other things that stayed with me: the giant butterfly nets that were used by the Butterfly Brigade to catch gay bashers in the Castro in 1976; the artwork of Adrienne Fuzee, which emphasized queer women of color; a look at Lou Sullivan, trans man pioneer and one of the Historical Society’s founders, who died of AIDS at 39 in 1991; and the “On the Margin: Queers and Poverty” display that maps out queer life in the Tenderloin in the 1960s.

And of course I was drawn to “Bar Life: Going Out,” with its crazy quilt of matchbooks, dozens of them, culled from the extensive network of gay bars that used to make up North Beach and the Polk, among other neighborhoods. The Fickle Fox, Mind Shaft, Kokpit, Carriage Trade, Febe’s, The Plantation, The Baj — the names all call up images of hot pickled ghosts, still cavorting through whatever those places became. But the matchbooks also raised a question about the scope of the Historical Society’s holdings. At the public talk, I asked whether tokens like those matchbooks, which used to function as souvenirs of gay travel, had now been replaced in this smoke-free, online world with Facebook invites. And was the society collecting those?

“You know, I used to feel stressed out because we’re only now capturing just a tiny fraction of what’s going on the Internet,” Romesburg replied. “But not everything is virtual. Even without the Web, there’s just so much.”

That may be debatable. But I do know that “Our Vast Queer Past” and the GLBT History Museum are giving queers a sense that we live history in our daily lives, and presents us with a fascinating IRL Wikipedia of our once subversive activities.

“OUR VAST QUEER PAST” through December. Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–7 p.m., Sun, noon–5 p.m., $5. GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF. www.glbthistory.org

SPKR OUT

As the stars and St. Sylvester would have it, this is a perfect moment to open this museum — interest in the queer past, especially among smart nightlife denizens and young image makers, is still at a peak. In that spirit, and with the intention of creating a sense of living history beyond the museum’s walls, local DJ collective Honey Soundsystem is hosting a fundraising party for the museum called “SPKR: Evolution of the Queer Dance Floor” at Pubic Works on Saturday, March 12. The event will weave together sounds and photographs of five quintessential venues from San Francisco’s gay nightlife timeline: I Beam, End Up, Trocadero Transfer, Townsend, and The Box. Old school legends DJ Bobby Viteritti, DJ Steve Fabus, and lights and sound man Randall Schiller will make the past come alive and you all sleazy-sweaty.

SPKR: EVOLUTION OF THE QUEER DANCE FLOOR Sat/12, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $20 advance. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com, Facebook: SPKR

The line, the line

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

ART “Philip Guston: A Life Lived and Discussed” is an event for anybody who appreciates provocative talkers.

The subject of Michael Blackwood’s Philip Guston: A Life Lived is quotable throughout the 1981 bio-doc. Shot at various points during the last decade of Guston’s life, the film opens with a retrospective being hung at SFMOMA in 1980. The painter, who will pass away within the year, is seen walking through the show, chatting with the curator and, somewhat later, his wife Musa. He frequently touches the paintings, taking advantage of the fact that, as he puts it, “This is the one show where nobody will tell me not to touch the work.”

Next, there’s a news conference where Guston parries questions and charms his audience, who are busy scribbling notes. Blackwood’s movie then flashes back to the early 1970s, when Guston enters his last highly prolific period. He’s seen at home in Woodstock, N.Y., hanging out in his studio. Surrounded by recent paintings, he frequently moves them around, in order to display examples of what he’s discussing. At one point, he paints over a new work because it’s “too much of a painting.” He also breezily discusses his creative life, recalling his teenage years in Los Angeles with Jackson Pollock, his rising prominence as an Abstract Expressionist in New York City during the 1950s and ’60s, and his artistic concerns at the present moment.

Guston stresses his displeasure with the mistaken, seemingly necessary yet all-too-easy categorizing that plagues the art world. As he says, referencing the readily rehashed modernist values found in his early painting Mother and Child (1930): “You have to come from somewhere.”

An enthusiasm for painting that is in “the midst of happening” drives Guston’s work. He doesn’t seek to achieve an image in which there’s a recognized “this with that, and that and that.” Rather, he desires that a painting be a thing realized for the first time to (or by) the world. He wants it to be unfamiliar, to leave questions, and to settle nothing.

Frequently making declarations like “I really enjoyed myself painting this,” Guston also reflects on his darker moods. His outlook on existence? He doesn’t “think of it as pessimistic,” but nonetheless feels “doomed.”

As Guston gestures about, endlessly smoking cigarettes, it’s easy to see how autobiographical his later paintings are, with large heads, eyeballs, and cigarettes crowding the large canvases. He paints his world; and in doing so, seeks to offer something new to ours.

At slightly less than an hour, Blackwood’s film leaves you wanting more — and luckily, the University of California Press just published Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (344 pages, $29.95). The book is edited by Clark Coolidge, who makes a short appearance in the film discussing old brick buildings and how paintings are “dumb creatures.” After a screening of Blackwood’s portrait, Coolidge will be on hand for a public conversation, along with Bill Berkson, a fellow poet and friend of Guston.

Patrick James Dunagan is the author of There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A GUSTONBOOK (Post-Apollo Press, 96 pages, $15).

PHILIP GUSTON: A LIFE LIVED AND DISCUSSED

With Bill Berkson and Clark Coolidge in conversation after the film

Mon./14, 7 p.m.; $10

Balboa Theatre

3630 Balboa, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

Beadeviled

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

1

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

As it turns out, the whole purpose of Mardi Gras is to catch beads. There are also little plastic cups and stuff, but what I want is a football. I want to make a leaping spinning catch, like a halftime Frisbee dog, bring it on home, lay it at Coach’s feet, and pant.

Do you think she will pat me on the head?

Do you think she will let me play in the season opener (this weekend!) even though I’ve missed every single practice since training camp?

I don’t know.

She texted me yesterday to ask how my lesbianism was coming along. I said, We’re at a parade, recording the crowd and the sounds of feet, and taking pictures of the childerns. I said I was trying real hard to catch a football for her, but so far … beads.

She expressed her disbelief (which I share) that I was ever even thinking of France over Mardi Gras. Then she texted again and said, for clarification, "Boobies!!!!!"

I paraphrase. There might have only been four exclamation marks. The point is, Earl, that when people think of Mardi Gras, they think of tits. Well, I am here to tell you — you, Earl, of all people, because I know you are more interested in subtlety and nuance than most of my two lesbian friends — that this is about so much more than that.

For example: ass.

I’m kidding. I’ve been to four parades already and I’ve seen about as much skin as I would have seen if I went to church. Admittedly, I haven’t been hanging out in the French Canadian Quarter, let alone on Bourbon Street, which is what everyone associates with Mardi Gras, not to mention New Orleans. But that’s like thinking of San Francisco as Fisherman’s Wharf.

Which would be what? Ridiculous. Yes. So my own personal, privately-held, and highly journalistic insider’s impression of Mardi Gras so far is that it’s a family affair, featuring marching bands of pimply teenagers and cute-ass kids punctuated by horses, trucks, and tractor-pulled floats from which ridiculously attired adults shower the citizenry and streets of New Orleans with insanely cheap and even more insanely coveted toys and trinkets. You can imagine my joy!

Boobs be damned, Earl, I am catching Coach a football or my name ain’t whatever my name is.

Dear Li’l Sister,

That is great. Me and Diane went to Katana-Ya in downtown San Francisco after seeing the greatest western movie of all time. Diane called my tongue unsavory, which you would think would put me in a funk, but, I don’t know, I just blew it off somehow.

Which is kind of what happens in this western we seen. This guy kind of gets his tongue blew off. It’s an odd way to start an afternoon when you are going to write about food. But it is not too odd.

We both got ramen. Big bowls of delicious noodle soup with prizes, like pot stickers. Hers was vegetable with soba noodles ($11) and mine was the katanaya, which had fried chicken and pork and pot stickers (get to the pot stickers early or they get a little chewy) and corn and fried potatoes and seaweed and scallion and barbecued pork and boiled egg. That is a lot of prizes ($12.90).

We talked of how we were both going to find us mates. Her plan was, I forget. And my plan was to get a garage space in my building and then get a car and a motorcycle. I believe it is the parking inconvenience that has hindered me all these years.

We also had edamame.

And Diane had a lollipop, seeing that there was a bowl of them on the counter and they were free. That is supposed to be a good sign.

Yers,

Earl

Katana-Ya

Daily: 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

430 Geary, SF

(415)771-1280

MC/V

Beer and wine

March to the rainbow

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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culture@sfbg.com

IRISH Whether you live in Dallas or settle in SoMa, March is the month when Americans throw out their stale V-Day candy hearts and bring out the greens. Not the ones you smoke, silly, we’re talking St. Patrick’s Day here. Along with the rest of the country, San Franciscans will bite into green bagels, take a swig of something Irish, and head down to the St. Patrick’s Day parade (ours is early this year, Saturday, March 12) to join in the Celtic revelry. But — typical — there’s something about our Irish celebrations that set SF apart — our St. Patrick’s Day parade is one of few in the country to welcome the LGBT community to the party.

While it’s easy to forget over here at the end of the rainbow, most St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the U.S.A. have a strict no-gays policy when it comes to who is allowed to march — which is sad and ironic considering that Irish Americans once faced the same discrimination that their parade associations now seem to be condoning when it comes to gay Americans.

Three cities in the country allow gay groups to participate in their St. Paddy’s parades: Queens, N.Y., SF, and Key West, Fla. (editor’s note: not exactly true, as it turns out — check out our correction for the other bergs around the country to welcome the queer community into the St. Paddy’s fold) The Queens parade was created as an all-inclusive alternative to the New York City parade, which still does not allow LGBT groups to participate despite years of protests — after Irish pride, these demonstrations may be NYC’s second highest profile St. Paddy’s Day tradition. This year the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has refused to participate in the Big Apple’s march on account of the parade’s regrettable policy. She’s not the only one: Boston’s mayor has refused to march in his city’s parade for the past few years.

But here in the country’s queer mecca, we can shake our heads in smug, gay disapproval at the St. Patty’s wars of the rest of the country. SF has a history of hoisting our rainbow shamrock high: this city’s parade is all-inclusive, which the president of SF’s Irish Societies (the organization behind the parade and concurrent Civic Center Plaza festival), Dermot Philpot is glad about.

“We include everybody, and we look for them to be in the parade,” Philpot told us in a recent phone interview. “When we include LGBT groups and individuals in our parade, it shows that [the SF Irish community] is part of a larger community.” Although there are no nominally gay groups marching in the parade, unlike in years past, Philpot says he hopes “[the LGBT community] feels included and that they will be there.”

The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band is one LGBT group that has high-stepped for Irish pride, making its most recent St. Patrick’s Day parade appearance in 2000. Doug Litwin, who is the secretary for the band’s board of directors, says the band had been participating in the parade even before he and his clarinet joined the group in 1985. Although marching on St. Paddy’s Day is a subject of contention for queer groups in other parts of the country, for the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band the parade is about as run-of-the-mill as any. “The bottom line is in San Francisco it’s just not that big of a deal to be openly gay anymore,” says Litwin. “Our band was declared the official band of San Francisco by two different mayors. Some of these parade organizers practically beg us to march.”

Openly gay senator Mark Leno is another familiar face on parade day. Leno is unable to attend the event this year because of an out-of-town speaking engagement, but says he’s been included in the parade as far back as 1998, when he was first elected to office. “I’ve always been proud of the fact that San Francisco’s parade is inclusive. And as long as I have been in office, I’ve always felt welcome in the parade.” Only once has he ever gotten negative reactions from the parade crowds. As Leno recalls, that year he had opted to ride through the parade in a Jaguar. “I heard booing and hissing right as I got up to Second Street.” At issue: red-blooded parade watchers were upset that Leno hadn’t chosen an American car for his cruise through the crowds.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE

Sat/12, 11:30 a.m., free

Begins at Market and Second streets, SF

(415) 203-1027

www.uissf.org

Erin go barhopping

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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caitlin@sfbg.com

IRISH Public service announcement: you do not need to get drunk on St. Patrick’s Day. This year there are a gamut of cultural activities that will teach you more about paddie heritage than finding the bottom of yet another Irish car bomb. But drink yourself green if you must — in this country, an argument could be made that the day has become a celebration of alcoholic pride more than anything. Just please, for the love of corned beef and cabbage — try to limit your use of novelty T-shirts.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE AND FESTIVAL

The big potato kicks off St. Paddy’s season this year and will honor upstanding Irish folks from around the city.

Sat/12. Parade: 11:30 a.m., free. Starts at Market and Second; Festival: 10 a.m.–5 p.m., free. Civic Center Plaza, SF. 1-800-310-6563, www.sresproductions.com

ST. PATRICK’S DAY FITNESS CRAWL

Stage a preemptive strike against all the Guinness you’ll be drinking at this affordable fitness boot camp.

Sat/12 9:30 a.m.–3 p.m., $10. Third Street Boxing Gym, 2576 Third St., SF. (415) 550-8269, www.thirdstreetgym.com

“IRISH CALIFORNIA: AN EVENING WITH THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION”

Snack on Irish bites and booze while perusing the Historical Society’s stockpile of Irish American ephemera — photos, pamphlets, and more from the Golden State’s green past.

Wed/16 5:30–7:30 p.m., $4 suggested donation, free to members. RSVP recommended. The California Historical Society, 678 Mission, SF. (415) 357-1848, www.californiahistoricalsociety.com

ST. PADDY’S PUNK BASH XI

The leprechaun rager returns for its 11th year in action, featuring the Undead Boys, Street Justice, Crosstops, Ruleta Rusa, and Face the Rail.

Weds/16 8 p.m., $8. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788, www.elbo.com

FARLEY’S 22ND BIRTHDAY

The Guardian staff’s fave cafe around the corner celebrates multiple decades of well-roasted independent business awesomeness with live bagpipers in the daytime and a concert in the evening.

Thurs/17 bagpipes 9 a.m.–1 p.m.; concert 8 p.m., free. Farley’s, 1315 18th St., SF. (415) 648-1545, www.farleyscoffee.com

O’REILLY’S ST. PATTY’S BLOCK PARTY

Between this and the Royal Exchange block party (see below) you’ll be well — if not over — served on “Kiss Me I’m Irish” tees, green face paint, and Bailey’swhiskeycarbombGuinness blackout glory. Pad your stomach before you get too deep in the drinkin’ with O’Reilly’s classic Irish brunch foods.

Thurs/17 Serving brunch 9 a.m.–1:30 p.m.; black party 3 p.m., free. O’Reilly’s, 622 Green, SF. (415) 989-6222, www.sforeillys.com

HABITOT MUSEUM’S SHAMROCK DAY

Make potato prints, drink green punch, and decorate your own pair of shamrock glasses with your little leprechaun at the family learning museum.

Thurs/17 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., $9 museum admission. Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk. (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org

PARKSIDE TAVERN IRISH LUNCH

Traditional fixin’s abound on this Sunset pub’s special Irish menu — corned beef and a little Irish stew to go with your Jameson?

Serving from 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Parkside Tavern, 1940 Taravel, SF. (415) 731-8900, www.parksidetavernsf.com

FINANCIAL DISTRICT ST. PADDY’S STREET PARTY

Wonderbread 5 provides rockin’ live tunes during happy hour, and pub Royal Exchange keeps the suds a flowin’ at this al fresco rager in FiDi.

Thurs/17 3 p.m.–2 a.m., free. Front between Sacramento and California, SF. www.royalexchange.com

ST. PATRICK’S NIGHTLIFE

DJ Nako puts the spin on St. Patrick’s, and the swanky science museum plies you with green-themed activities at the shamrock edition of its bangin’ night at the museum’s weekly event.

Thurs/17 8–10 p.m., $12. California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF. 1-888-670-4433, www.calacademy.org

DELHI TO DUBLIN

Can you hold your finger cymbals and Guinness stein in the same hand? Try. This multicultural Celtic bhangra group always brings the jams — its St. Paddy’s Day gig in clubland is sure to be the most high energy dance party this side of Riverdance.

Thurs/17 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880, www.mezzaninesf.com

CULANN’S HOUNDS

Didn’t get enough of the folk rock Hounds at the March 12 Civic Center Plaza festival? Check out the SF group’s headlining gig ensconced in the wooden glory of the Great American Music Hall. Renée de la Prada’s dulcet voice soars over the accordions and violins of her band.

Thurs/17 7:30 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

BISS ME I’M IRISH ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARTY

Celebrate the Irish infiltration into every corner of the globe with the hip-hop-cumbia-reggaetón punch of La Gente, which headlines this diverse lineup, otherwise composed of female singer-songwriters bringing it in the keys of punk, rock, and pop.

Thurs/17 9 p.m., $10. Cafe Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

Bay Area dance’s bragging rights

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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DANCE When the 25th Annual Isadora Duncan Dance Awards take place March 14, the local dance scene will have much to celebrate. In advance of the event, I recently asked several local members of the community what makes Bay Area dance special.

Wayne Hazzard, executive director of Dancers’ Group, pinpoints the relationship between contemporary and traditional artists. “I’ve seen it [the dance community] really grow and continue to do what it’s been doing and attract new companies and artists to the area.”

According to Hazzard, the dance scene’s steady development is linked to the Bay Area’s “livability” and “the maverick nature of the West Coast, this region where you can find yourself. Even if you are coming from a tradition, you can deepen that and go in your own direction, which seems to be a truism of artists here whether [we’re discussing] the San Francisco Ballet or Brenda Way or Chitresh Das. They’re all traditionalists, yet they’re imbuing their formal structural ideas around theater and dance with current issues. Joe Goode as well.”

Jessica Robinson Love, artistic and executive director of CounterPulse, focuses on a different aspect of community. “We can’t talk about dance in the Bay Area without discussing the Ethnic Dance Festival and the huge amount of culturally-specific dance that’s practiced here,” she says. Love also believes the Bay Area’s proximity to Silicon Valley makes for greater interest in and use of technology: “Being on the Left Coast gives us a freedom to experiment. There’s less of a fear of risk-taking and failure, so there’s a lot more diversity in terms of the choices choreographers make about their work.”

“I also see a real emphasis on queer and gender-bending performance,” she adds. “There’s an emerging, blossoming conversation between the drag performance community and the dance community in San Francisco right now.”

Joe Landini, artistic director of The Garage, agrees that queer dance-makers are among the strongest voices to surface. Specializing in emerging choreographers, he produces an exceptional amount of new work. “What I’m finding is that a lot of choreographers coming out of the university system are choosing to relocate to San Francisco because the resources are less competitive than New York. San Francisco probably has more opportunities for emerging choreographers than any other place in the United States, so we have a huge pool of trained choreographers.”

Site-specific work also makes its mark on the scene. Hazzard points in particular to Anna Halprin’s long history of investigations, noting that, at 90, she’s still creating new work, including an upcoming trilogy honoring her late husband titled Remembering Lawrence. “Joanna Haigood particularly deals with space and ideas,” he adds, “so when you look at aerial artists that work here, whether its Haigood or Jo Kreiter or Project Bandaloop, no one anywhere else is doing what they’re doing. It’s uniquely about our region and space and relationship to dance and performance.”

THE 25TH ANNUAL ISADORA DUNCAN DANCE AWARDS

Mon/14, 7 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The end?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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DANCE Looking at the magnificent and elegant Merce Cunningham dancers perform Pond Way (1998), Antic Meet (1958) and Sounddance (1975) in the by no means sold-out Zellerbach Hall on March 3 made me sad. Each of these works showed such skill, beauty, and intelligence. Yet they left me pessimistic about the future of a precious repertoire.

So this was it. This was end of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which has appeared at UC Berkeley since 1962. Some people there this past weekend have been watching them since year one. I am not one of them. It took me a quite while to realize the difference between “connection” and “coexistence” of movement, music, and design. But I finally understood that connections happened between these elements — not as a result of planning, but simply by together at a particular moment. And once I apprehended Cunningham’s multifocused — rather than front- and center-oriented — stage picture, a wondrous world opened up.

Now it’s finished. Shortly before his death, the choreographer decided the company would go on a two-year “Legacy Tour” around the world and then disband. Following the Balanchine model, Cunningham set up a foundation that can license the pieces to companies that want to perform them. That’s the rub.

Who can do them? The company’s early quintets or septets are one thing, but his big, companywide choreographies, which still don’t make for easy viewing, are another. We don’t have a tradition of repertory modern dance companies; they are driven by their founder-choreographers. So who can do justice to Cunningham?

Ballet companies would seem the logical choice, since Cunningham’s technique — though exceedingly specific — relies heavily on ballet-trained dancers. But would these ensembles invest the amount of rehearsal that a Cunningham piece would require, especially at a time when choreographers are given as little as two weeks to create a new piece on a company? And what about their conservative base of support?

The serenely lyrical Pond Way has been described as one of Cunningham’s nature pieces. To be sure, Brian Eno’s sound score includes some howling monkeys and barking dogs, and if you want, you can see loping gazelles and hoping frogs in the choreography. But the work, with the ensemble dressed by Suzanne Gallo in tunic-like tops and wide pants, suggests a crowded Elysian fields — assuming one knows what that looks like — where the inhabitants are engaged in some kind of praise dancing.

Maybe Roy Lichtenstein’s barely perceivable ship on the backdrop had brought them there. Brandon Collwes, his hair bleached the whitest of blonds, magisterially streaked through the unisons, only to join them. An upstage quintet for women seemed inspired by Greek vase paintings. And then there was Marcie Munnerly, who for the longest period stood frozen in a running position, oblivious to the guys who tried to get her attention. She finally whipped herself into a solo that pulled her into the wings.

The recently-reconstructed Antic Meet, with Robert Rauschenberg’s design, is a rarity. A mashup of vaudeville and silent movie pratfalls, it’s a full-blown comedy. It takes on the oh-so-serious attempts of (old school) modern dancers to squeeze meaning out of every gesture. The dancers strained, pushed, pulled, then hopelessly collapsed into a muddle. Four of them, dressed in fluttering parachutes, flopped and hopped and surrounded their “heroine.” They looked as much like Edward Gorey characters as Martha Graham acolytes. Curiously, John Cage’s score sounded very much of its time, but the wittily-danced choreography looked as fresh as ever.

In this context, the sweet Sounddance felt like a farewell. Robert Swinston, the ensemble’s rehearsal director and a company member since 1980, stepped into the Cunningham role. As heavy baroque curtains seemed to spit out the dancers one by one, he tried to keep an eye on the multiple actions — four men manipulating Andrea Weber; evanescent couples and line dancing; Rashaun Mitchell enclosing everyone in a magic circle. In the end, the dancers and Swinston/Cunningham disappeared back into the curtains. It seemed very final.

Limon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

3

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE In our epoch of wood-fired chic, gas-fired sounds, well, ordinary. If you have a barbecue at home, it’s more than likely gas-fired. Gas is cleaner, cheaper, and lights instantly, at the push of a button, without fuss. It’s the barbecue equivalent of an automatic transmission. Charcoal, on the other hand — to say nothing of actual wood — is a balky and oversensitive stick shift: tricky to start and unpredictable once started. If you lay too hot a fire, you’re stuck; you can’t just turn a dial (or downshift) to tame the inferno. Yet, just as a manual tranny is more absorbing and fun to drive than an automatic, charcoal and wood do impart character to food that gas doesn’t. They’re worth the trouble, provided it’s someone else’s trouble.

In this sense, it isn’t a huge surprise that restaurants have been touting their wood- or charcoal-burning bona fides, their grills and pizza ovens. They’re in a much stronger position to stoke the necessary apparatus, and there is presumably strong and steady demand from a public that has largely abandoned charcoal for gas in their home barbies. What does come as a bit of a surprise is that a fairly high-profile restaurant — one bearing the magic name of Limon, as in, Limon Rotisserie — makes a conspicuous display of its brasa, the gas-fired rotisserie on which dozens of chickens are, at any given moment, being roasted in the Peruvian style. It looks like a modern version of one of Mark Twain’s riverboat steamers, with jumping blue flames and the birds turning as if on a paddlewheel.

The evolution of the Limon franchise has been among the more stirring in recent memory. Martin Castillo opened the original Limon in 2002 in a modest 17th Street space now occupied by Maverick. A few years later it moved to grander digs in the heart of the Valencia corridor, with prices and tone rising accordingly. Limon Rotisserie isn’t exactly a throwback, but it does restore roast chicken to pride of place.

And the chicken is really splendid — a reminder of how good this most modest of birds can be if seasoned and cooked with care. A half-bird costs just $9.95 (including two sides) and arrived with crisp skin and cooked-through flesh that was still juicy. The juiciness surely had to do in part with the marinade, whose undisclosed ingredients had to include lemon and garlic, along with (I’m guessing now) cumin and paprika. Nothing about the bird seemed complex or exotic yet the result was sublime. Roast chicken is underrated; if done right, it’s simple, elegant, and memorable.

If the sides don’t make quite the same splash, they do offer variety, including fries in several forms (potato, yucca, sweet potato), tacu-tacu (wonderful rice-and-beans croquettes), and vegetales salteados (basically a quick sauté of green and yellow-wax beans).

Outside of the rotisserie, there is a wealth of ceviches, including a version with red snapper (pescado, $9.75), another with whitefish, calamari, and tiger shrimp (mixto, $9.75), and a soupy cocktail of seafood dice ($4.75) served in a heavy highball glass. All the ceviches are made with what the menu calls leche de tigre, a citrus-based marinade; yet despite this implication of acid, I found them all too salty. And if I find it too salty, it must really be salty. A little sugar (maybe from orange juice) might have helped pull the marinade into better trim and more complexity.

The restaurant’s menu scheme stresses shareability, so the kitchen turns out a wealth of small plates. Notable was the seco de costillas ($8.95), boneless flaps of braised (beef) short rib in a sauce dotted with carrots and peas, like beef Burgundy, but with huacatay (a pungent Peruvian herb) and cilantro. Then there was jalea ($9.75), a kind of relative of fritto misto, with batter-fried calamari rings and shrimp with salsa criolla and huacatay tartar sauce.

Despite a certain perfunctory quality, the dessert menu does offer a stellar possibility: the chocolate bandido ($7.25), a warm chocolate cake with brandy sauce and crème anglaise. The simplicity is deceptive and wise, because the chocolate is an engulfing experience, texturally somewhere between cake and fudge and of a singular intensity, like dark sexual heat. When you have chocolate like this, you really don’t care if the pastry chef has scattered some berries on the plate or made artful doodles with mint cream. No: you’re a fastball pitcher, you bring the heat. Let the batter worry about getting some wood on it.

LIMON ROTISSERIE

Daily: noon–10:30 p.m.

1001 S. Van Ness, SF

(415) 821-2134

www.limonrotisserie.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Youth in revolt

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

0

arts@sfbg.com

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL What’s the matter with kids today? Young people wrestle with issues that many adults would find beyond their ken at this year’s SFIAAFF. Coming of age is a hazard in a Vietnam where street gangs grapple with injustice, under highly emotional — and entertaining — circumstances; in Iran, where oppressive fundamentalism colors even the most carefree youth; and in Hawaii, where the endless party of skate-rat slackitude hits the skids of very adult responsibilities.

The young folks of Le Tranh Son’s Clash (2009) are desperate — and alas, all too used to it. The doe-like, fiery-eyed, and formidable fighter Trinh (actress-vocalist Ngo Thanh Van), a.k.a. Phoenix, has plenty to scowl about. Kidnapped at a tender age to serve as a prostitute, she was plucked from the brothel by crime king pin Black Dragon (Hoang Phuc) — an opera-loving, white-suited baddie that John Woo would love — to be groomed as one of his highly skilled soldiers. Now on a mission to steal a briefcase of codes for Vietnam’s first satellite, Trinh assembles a crew that Son films like the suavest thugs in the slum, set to a chest-thumping arena-rock and hip-hop soundtrack. The most handy-in-a-corner hottie of the bunch is Quan (Johnny Tri Nguyen), a.k.a. White Tiger.

Contrary to initial impressions, “we’re not in some cheesy Hong Kong action movie,” as one character declares when Trinh attempts to wield an iron fist of intimidation over her charges — although Nguyen and Ngo’s stunningly rapid-fire martial arts skills (and chemistry: the two are a real-life couple) make this flick a must-see for fight fans. Clash was the highest-grossing movie in 2009 in its homeland; though the film strives to please with its visceral, full-throttle fight scenes, it seems haunted by a colonial past as well as recent terrors. Life is a constant struggle for Clash‘s young people. They’re fully capable of working their conflicts out with bare knuckles, but what really breaks through their defenses are the injustices that befall family dear to them.

The ties that bind the handful of 20-something Iranians are tested in Hossein Keshavarz’s Dog Sweat (2010) — though not in ways one would immediately expect. The lo-fi, handheld camerawork can be distractingly shaky, especially since Dog Sweat was shot without the proper permissions and permits. But the director’s eye for telling detail is sure, at times humorous, and other moments poetically penetrating. Bedroom rock is the only way to go: behind closed doors, a trio of men booze it up on so-called Dog Sweat moonshine while dancing and flipping on and off the light switch for a homemade strobe effect — they’re dreaming of Western-style intoxicants and freedoms and wondering why America doesn’t come and “save us from this nightmare.”

In another bedroom, girls gossip (“There were some hot guys at the demonstration!”) while shimmying with themselves in the mirror. Keshavarz captures the propaganda-embellished concrete and the parks for men searching for other lonely men, and the double standards that apply to the music-loving woman who yearns to sing but must hide from the recording studio owner, and the rebellious girl who acts out by donning a scarlet hijab and romancing her cousin’s husband. A rough snapshot of a generation that crosses class lines, conceived during Ahmadinejad’s crackdown on artists and dissidents, Keshavarz succeeds in conveying the palpable hopes, humor, anxieties, and fears of young people in resistance, primed to explode.

“Da kine,” that fuzzy, vagued-out arbiter of “whatever,” reigns supreme in the Hawaii of writer-director-skater Chuck Mitsui’s One Kine Day (2010). Welcome to the other side of the isle, far away from touristy Waikiki, where skater Ralsto (Ryan Greer) is dealing with his morning-sick 15-year-old girlfriend Alea. His boss at the skate shop isn’t buying his diffuse excuses for lateness; Alea doesn’t want to go through another abortion; mom is putting pressure on him to get a stable job at the post office; and loutish friend Nalu believes he can score the money for “da kine” abortion at an underground cock fight. Of course, it will all come crashing down at the big house party — but will the perpetually tragic-faced Ralsto go postal? Mitsui shines a light on the less-than-savory aspects of the islands — the pregnant teens in the malls, the ‘shroom-popping adults who turn on and phase out, the fact that you have to drive everywhere — and dares you to tear your eyes away from the sun-streaked, well-baked screen.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

March 10–20, most shows $12

Various venues

www.caamedia.org

By demons driven

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

0

arts@sfbg.com

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL A few years ago, much was being made of the “new wave” of Asian horror films. Western audiences were being introduced to the long-haired, vengeful spirits and women on the verge of murderous rampages that had been scaring moviegoers in Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia for much of the late 1990s and early aughts. Companies such as Tartan and Lionsgate rushed to make the latest bloodbaths from directors such as Takashi Miike and Kim Ji-woon available on DVD, and Hollywood began to voraciously buy up story rights and churn out English-language remakes. Then Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) came along.

But while the new wave of Asian horror may have crested as a Western phenomena, SFIAAFF’s retrospective “After Death: Horror Cinema from South East Asia” proves that using regional ghost stories as a springboard for Romero-worthy blood feasts is still a winning formula for many Southeast Asian directors. Nang Nak (1999), the oldest of the three films in the series, reenvisions the Thai folktale of a wife whose love for her family chains her to the earthly realm long after death. Histeria (2008) loosely bases its six-girls-tormented-by-an-evil-spirit variation on the classic slasher narrative on actual cases of mass hysteria among Malaysian schoolgirls. And 2008’s Affliction (the only film unavailable for preview) pits a father against his daughter as he fights to prevent her transformation into an Aswang, a blood-sucking monster of Filipino legend.

To be honest, there might be a reason these titles have received less attention abroad than the output of the Pang brothers (2002’s The Eye), for example. For all its flashy cinematography and folkloric source material, Nang Nak drags for most of its 100 minutes (when we already know long before the protagonist does that his dutiful dearest is not all she appears to be, waiting for him to finally catch on feels like an eternity). Histeria has more fun at least with its set-up, sketching out the hierarchy at work in its clique of schoolgirls sentenced to a long weekend of janitorial labor at their rural boarding school before dispatching them in unsavory ways one by one. The film even features what’s touted to be Malaysian cinema’s first same-sex onscreen kiss; although a “half-peck” might be more accurate. Still, the film’s special effects are imaginative — especially its creature design — and its scares are genuine even if the twist ending doesn’t pack much surprise. Indeed, the films in “After Death” are perhaps SFIAAFF’s most familiar offerings, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable for, say, date night.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

March 10–20, most shows $12

Various venues

www.caamedia.org

Not for sale: An insider’s look at the battle to save KUSF

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

0

Not for sale: An insider’s look at the battle to save KUSF

MUSIC/CULTURE Normally, Irwin Swirnoff’s demeanor is upbeat, and I’d consider him to be one of the friendliest people I know. But from the expression on his face, I thought someone had died. Even before walking into the room, I felt there was a weird vibe. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We just got sold and were taken off the air,” he replied.

Immediately and instinctively, without even really processing his words, I fired back, “Well, what are we gonna do about it?” Within minutes we worked ourselves into a frenzy, sending e-mails, texts, tweets, and phone calls to let everyone know that the nonprofit station where we volunteered, KUSF, had unfairly been ripped from us without any fair warning.

That morning, Jan. 18, was a blur of bad news. My parents were staying with me, and I had the day off. I needed a brief escape and turned to my volunteer work. It doesn’t really feel like work. I consider it more of a hobby, but calling it that would be selling it short. It’s like you can’t even have a hobby anymore without someone taking it away, selling it for $3.75 million and making it corporate. That’s exactly what the University of San Francisco did by attempting to sell out KUSF and the community in a veiled deal involving Entercom, America’s fifth-largest radio conglomerate; the University of Southern California; and Classical Public Radio Network (CPRN). We now know some of the details and overall shady manner in which these events transpired.

When I step back to think about our battle to save KUSF, one thing I find interesting is the current micro- and macro- momentum of power-to-the-people movements and how they can become contagious. It’s been said that tragedy brings communities together in astounding ways. Maybe the attempt to dismantle KUSF was the wake-up call some of us needed to pay attention to the behind-the-scenes politics of how, in radio, conglomerates are swallowing the little guys. This isn’t the first time this has happened — and it won’t be the last. But so many people were moved, inspired, and outraged enough to incite action, myself included. Maybe this is what we needed to get organized.

There was something really satisfying, in an old-school way, about a large group of people coming together to chant, clap, and scream “Shame!” in unison and really mean it. That’s how it went down Jan. 19 during the ill-conceived Q&A-style meeting staged by USF and its president, Father Stephen A. Privett. There was real energy in the air that night; it was sad, inspiring, and exciting all at once. It felt like I was going to a rumble, and I even dressed for the occasion, donning my leather biker jacket. When I got to the scene of the rally, I wasn’t disappointed by what I saw: sheer numbers, picket signs, “Save KUSF” hats and T-shirts, all materializing within hours. Most important, we had supporters willing to get vocal, with the passion to stand up and fight those who had wronged us.

At the end of February, the very community that USF and Privett sold out had raised more than $15,000, which is partly going to legal fees for what could be a precedent-setting denial of the station’s sale by the FCC. I think a lot of us were high on adrenaline in those first days after the station’s sale, especially because of the way it happened. Our cause has since garnered support from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. The majority of our supervisors seem to understand what the station meant to the community. You can’t just sell 33 years of independent radio, culture, and rock ‘n’ roll history. It never should have been for sale.

Radio radio!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

5

arts@sfbg.com

Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio, as the Ramones once quizzed us, ever so long ago? If not that “Video Killed the Radio Star”-era iteration, a leather-clad punky nostalgia for Murray the K and Alan Freed, then do you remember college rock when it became the name of a musical genre in the early 1990s?

I’m trying to make out its faint strains now: a sound nominally dubbed rock, but as wildly eclectic and widely roaming as the winds blowing me over the Bay Bridge on this blustery, rain-streaked afternoon. I’m not imagining it. New, shaken-and-stirred PJ Harvey nudging family-band throwback the Cowsills. Nawlins jazzbos Kid Ory and Jimmy Noone rubbing sonic elbows with winsome Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. Brit electropoppers Fenech-Soler bursting beside Chilean melody-makers Lhasa. The ancient Popul Vuh tangling with the bright-eyed art-rock I Was a King. It’s an average playlist for KALX 90.7 FM, the last-standing free-form sound in San Francisco proper — though it hails from across the bay in Berkeley.

But what about SF’s own, KUSF? A former college radio DJ and assistant music director at the University of Hawaii’s KTUH and the University of Iowa’s KRUI, I’m one of those souls who’s searching for it far too late, even though I benefited from my time in college radio, garnering a major-league musical education simply flipping through the dog-eared LPs and listening to other jocks’ shows. Like so many music fans, I got lost — searching for the signal and repelled by commercial radio’s predictable computerized playlists, cheesy commercials, and blowhard DJs — and found NPR.

Today, I’m testing the signals within — the health of music on SF terra firma radio — by driving around the city, cruising City Hall, bumping through SoMa, and dodging bikes in the Mission. KALX’s signal is strong on the noncommercial side of the dial, alongside the lover’s rock streaming from long-standing KPOO 89.5 and the Strokes-y bounce bounding from San Jose modern rock upstart KSJO 92.3, whose tagline promises, “This is the alternative.” But KSJO’s distinct lack of a DJ voice and seamless emphasis on monochromatic Killers-and-Kings-of-Chemical-Romance tracks quickly bores, slotting it below its rival, Live 105.

Dang. I wind my way up Market to Twin Peaks. Waves of white noise begin to invade a Tim Hardin track. KALX’s signal fades as the billowing, smoky-looking fog rolls majestically down upscale Forest Hill to the middle-class Sunset. But I can hear it — with occasional static — on 19th Avenue, and later, in the Presidio and Richmond.

Throughout, KUSF’s old frequency, 90.3, comes through loud and clear — though now with the sound of KDFC’s light-classical and its penchant for swelling, feel-good woodwinds. The music is so innocuous that to rag on it feels as petty and mean as kicking a docile pup. But I get my share of instrumental wallpaper while fuming on corporate phone trees. It’s infuriating to realize that it supplanted KUSF, the last bastion of free-form radio in SF proper. Where is the free-form rock radio? This is the city that successfully birthed the format in the 1970s, with the freewheeling, bohemia-bred KSAN, and continued the upstart tradition with pirate stations such as SF Liberation Radio. Doesn’t San Francisco deserve its own WFMU or KCRW?

FEWER INDEPENDENTS, MORE CONSOLIDATION

Online radio — including forces like Emeryville’s Pandora and San Diego’s Slacker Radio — provides one alternative. This is true for listeners who use the TiVo-like Radio Shark tuner-recorder to rig their car (still the primo place to tune in) to listen to online stations all over the country. The just-launched cloud-based DVR Dar.fm also widens the online option.

Nevertheless, online access isn’t a substitute for free radio air waves. “We get the wrong impression that everyone is wired, and everyone’s online, and no one listens to terrestrial radio,” says radio activist and KFJC DJ Jennifer Waits. “Why then are these companies buying stations for millions of dollars?”

Waits and KALX general manager Sandra Wasson both point to the consolidation that’s overtaken commercial radio since deregulation with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — a trend that has now crept onto the noncommercial end of the dial.

As competition for limited bandwidth accelerates (in San Francisco, this situation is compounded by a hilly topography with limited low-power station coverage) and classical radio stations like KDFC are pushed off the commercial frequencies, universities are being approached by radio brokers. One such entity, Public Radio Capital, was part of the secretive $3.75 million deal to sell KUSF’s transmitter and frequency. Similar moves are occurring throughout the U.S., according to Waits. She cites the case of KTXT, the college radio station at Texas Tech, as akin to KUSF’s situation, while noting Rice and Vanderbilt universities are also exploring station sales.

“The noncommercial band is following in the footsteps of the commercial band in the way of consolidation,” Wasson says, from her paper-crammed but spartan office at KALX, after a tour of the station’s 90,000-strong record library. Wire, Ringo Death Starr, and Mountain emanate from the on-air DJ booth, as students prep the day’s newscast and a volunteer readies a public-affairs show. “Buying and selling noncommercial radio seems to me very much like what used to happen and still does in commercial radio: one company owns a lot stations in a lot of different markets and does different kinds of programming in different markets. Deregulation changed it so that 10-watt stations weren’t protected anymore. There were impacts on commercial and noncommercial sides.”

Lack of foresight leads cash-strapped schools to leap for the quick payout. “Once a school sells a station, it’s unlikely it will be able to buy one back,” says Waits. “Licenses don’t come up for sale and there are limited frequencies. They have an amazing resource and they’re making a decision that isn’t thought-through.”

DREAMING IN STEREO

There are still people willing to put imagination — and money — behind their radio dreams. But free-form has come to sound risky after the rise of KSAN and FM radio and the subsequent streamlining and mainstreaming of the format.

Author and journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who once oversaw a KUSF show devoted to KSAN jocks, cites the LGBT-friendly, dance-music-focused KNGY 92.7 as a recent example of investors willing to try out a “restricted” format. “They were a good solid city station that sounded quite loose,” he explains. “But even there they weren’t able to sell much advertising because they were limited to the demographic in San Francisco and they couldn’t make enough to pay their debts.”

Nonetheless, Fong-Torres continues to be approached by radio lovers eager to start a great music station. “I’ve told them what I’m telling you,” he says. “It’s really difficult to acquire a stick in these parts, to grab whatever best signals there are.” This is especially true with USC/KDFC rumored to be on a quest for frequencies south of SF.

“There are some dreamers out there who think about it,” muses Fong-Torres. “A single person who’s willing to bankroll a station just out of the goodness of his or her heart and let people spread good music — someone like Paul Allen, who did KEXP in Seattle.”

THE FIGHT TO SAVE KUSF

The University of San Francisco has touted the sale of KUSF’s frequency and the station’s proposed shift to online radio as a teaching opportunity. But the real lesson may be a reminder of the value of the city’s assets — and how easily they can be taken away. “We’re learning how unbelievably sacred bandwidth is on the FM dial,” says Irwin Swirnoff, who was a musical director at the station.

Swirnoff and the Save KUSF campaign hope USF will give the community an opportunity to buy the university’s transmitter, much as Southern Vermont College’s WBTN 1370 AM was purchased by a local nonprofit.

For Swirnoff and many others, listener-generated playlists can’t substitute for the human touch. “DJs get to tell a story through music,” he explains. “They’re able to reach a range of emotions and [speak to] the factors that are in the city at that moment, its nature and politics. Through music, they can create a moving dialogue and story.”

Swirnoff also points to the DJ’s personally selective role during a time of corporate media saturation and tremendous musical production. “In the digital age, the amount of music out in the world can be totally overwhelming,” he says. “A good station can take in all those releases and give you the best garage rock, the best Persian dance music, everything. One DJ can be a curator of 100 years of music and can find a way to bring the listener to a unique place.”

Local music and voices aren’t getting heard on computer-programmed, voice-tracked commercial stations despite inroads of satellite radio into local news. In a world where marketing seems to reign supreme, is there a stronger SF radio brand than the almost 50-year-old KUSF when it comes to sponsoring shows and breaking new bands for the discriminating SF music fan? “People in the San Francisco music community who are in bands and are club owners know college radio is still a vital piece in promoting bands and clubs,” says Waits. “There are small shows that are only getting promotion over college radio.”

“It was a great year for San Francisco music, and we [KUSF] got to blast it the most,” Swirnoff continued. “It’s really sad that right now you can’t turn on terrestrial radio and hear Grass Widow, Sic Alps, or Thee Oh Sees, when it’s some of the best music being made in the city right now.”

PIRATE CAT-ASTROPHE — AND THE DRIVE TO KEEP RADIO ALIVE

Aside from KUSF, the only place where you could hear, for instance, minimal Scandinavian electronics and sweater funk regularly on the radio was Pirate Cat. The pirate station was the latest in a long, unruly queue, from Radio Libre to KPBJ, that — as rhapsodized about in Sue Carpenter’s 2004 memoir, 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio — have taken to the air with low-power FM transmitters.

After being shut down by the FCC and fined $10,000 in 2009, Pirate Cat is in limbo, further adrift thanks to a dispute about who owns the station. Daniel “Monkey” Roberts’ sale of Pirate Cat Café in the Mission left loyal volunteers wondering who should even receive their $30-a-month contributions. Roberts shut down the Pirate Cat site and stream on Feb. 20. Since then, some Pirate Cat volunteers have been attempting to launch their own online stream under the moniker PCR Collective Radio.

“We would definitely start our own station,” says Aaron Lazenby, Pirate Cat’s skweee DJ and a Radio Free Santa Cruz vet. “The question now is how to resolve the use of Pirate Cat so we don’t lose momentum and lose our community. We all love it too much to let it fizzle out like that.”

Some people are even willing to take the ride into DIY low-power terrestrial radio. I stumbled over the Bay Area’s latest on a wet, windy Oakland evening at Clarke Commons’ craftsman-y abode. The door was flung open and a colorful, quilt-covered fort/listening station greeted me in the living room. In the dining space, a “magical handcrafted closet studio station” provided ground zero for the micro-micro K-Okay Radio — essentially a computer sporting cute kitchen-style curtains and playing digitized sounds.

A brown, blue, and russet petal-shingled installation looked down on K-Okay’s guests as they took their turn at the mic. And if you were in a several-block radius of the neat-as-a-pin house-under-construction and tuned your boombox to 88.1 FM, you could have caught some indescribably strange sounds and yarns concerning home and migration. I drove away warmed by the friendly mumble of sound art.

Who would have imagined radio as an art installation? Yet it’s just another positive use for a medium that has functioned in myriad helpful ways, whether as a life link for Haitians after the 2010 earthquake or (as on a recent Radio Valencia show) a rock gossip line concerning the Bruise Cruise Fest. As Waits puts it, radio is “about allowing yourself to be taken on a musical journey rather than doing the driving yourself online.” Today it sounds like we need the drive to keep that spirit alive.

Mother courage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 8, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

STAGE As outrage mounts at the vicious repression of civilians in Libya, Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined reminds us of the ongoing crimes against humanity — in particular the strategic use of sexual violence against women — carried out routinely for years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The devastating civil war that began there in 1998 continues today as one of the most destructive on the planet, having taken well more than 5 million lives.

Despite its title, Ruined is as much a tribute to the persistence of life amid the most unspeakable atrocities. The play gets a strong, well-acted Bay Area premiere in a coproduction between the Berkeley Rep, Huntington Theatre Company, and La Jolla Playhouse. Directed with sharp timing and a keen eye by Liesl Tommy, it uses a small circle of characters to draw attention to the horrendous ordeal, as well as the enduring fortitude and resilience, of hundreds of thousands of Congolese women whose bodies, as one character puts it, have been used as battlegrounds in a ruthless and terrifying conflict.

Mama Nadi (an expansive and canny Tonye Patano) runs a modest little bar and brothel in a mining town somewhere in the lush and lawless countryside of eastern Congo. Her clientele are exclusively men: a dangerous mixture of miners, soldiers, rebel militiamen, and shady merchants. Not unlike the title character in Brecht’s Mother Courage (which was indeed the inspiration for Nottage’s protagonist and a starting point for her play as a whole), Mama does her best to keep the conflict outside in the name of doing business, insisting that her customers unload their weapons before entering and smoothly managing any potential unrest with a swift flow of alcohol or some proffered female companionship.

But in truth, the best Mama can hope for is an uneasy negotiation with the usually heavily-intoxicated and power-drunk marauders who inevitably bring the evils of war with them as they come looking for respite. And Mama is not all business either. She’s reluctantly kind-hearted, a trait that creates (or recapitulates) conflict where she would prefer there was none.

Four years sober but soon pushed off the wagon, Mama’s friend Christian (a compelling Oberon K.A. Adjepong) brings over two young war refugees as new labor for her business. She finally accepts both, even though the shy, limping Sophie (a moving Carla Duren) is “ruined” by the sexual assaults she’s suffered, and thus of limited use to the proprietress. The other woman, Salima (Pascale Armand), is a former wife and mother cast off by her husband and community in the wake of her abduction and rape by a group of soldiers. (Her soldier husband, played by Wendell B. Franklin, eventually comes looking for her, having reconsidered, but he doesn’t realize she’s pregnant.)

The Brooklyn-born Nottage — whose earlier play Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine is also running in the Bay Area this month in a production by the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre — traveled to Africa to hear firsthand from Congolese women who had suffered the various forms of violence, exploitation, and exclusion depicted here. There is a strong sense of authenticity in the stories that Ruined elaborates, despite the conventions of the dramatic form she has chosen. It’s an emotive and sturdily constructed drama, if also a traditional and familiar-feeling one.

The tension arises less from the storyline — which is dispersed across several overlapping plot points — than the palpable threat of violence and fearful gloom permeating the stage, an open-air barroom enshrouded by vaunting jungle in scenic designer Clint Ramos’ impressive rendering.

It’s a venomous atmosphere dispelled strategically, here and there, in merciful moments of humor, tentative affection, and bursts of lovely, joyful song delivered by Sophie (backed by an understated but terrific pair of musicians acting as Mama’s house band: Adesoji Odukogbe and Alvin Terry). This dynamic — the contrast between the memory and promise of happiness contained in the music, and the toxic physical and mental forces bearing down on the characters — might be Ruined‘s most tangible illustration of the perversion of life by war.

RUINED

Through April 10

Berkeley Rep, Roda Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Appetite: Betelnut’s secret Malaysian menu, March 8 until May 8

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 6, 2011

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Appetite: Betelnut’s secret Malaysian menu, March 8 until May 8

Foodies, take note. If you like offal, Malaysian food, or adventurous eating, there’s a “secret” offal menu through Blackboard Eats. Sign up for the Betelnut special on March 8th only. You’ll get a passcode to give to your waiter at the restaurant during any dinner until May 8th.

It has been awhile since I visited Betelnut, though I used to frequent it in my early years of living in SF. Chef Alex Ong has been there about that long (10 years), serving Betelnut’s ever-popular mix of Asian cuisines. He gets to bring a bit of his Malaysian roots to this secret menu, combining street food from his home country in family-style dishes for four or more people.

Sampling these generous dishes is both approachable and comforting. Don’t be afraid of animal parts you may not have eaten before. There’s adventure here but in a presentation reminiscent of heartwarming Asian bar food.

Start with crispy chicken livers in black pepper sauce ($9.88). A street food snack, Chef Ong says he’d get these on skewers in a plastic bag they’d eat at the movies in Malaysia. Served here in a bowl, lightly fried livers are tender and slightly crisp, lush with oyster sauce and roasted onions.

In a delicate, sashimi/tartare-like presentation, cured lamb tongue ($11.88) is thinly-sliced, bright with lime juice and chilies, topped with freshly grated galangal root and crispy taro. It’s Malaysia by way of Thailand.

Salt & pepper veal sweetbreads ($12.88) combine Chef Ong’s French-training and French classic, sweetbreads, with Cantonese-style salt and pepper sauce, scallions, ginger, garlic.

My favorite may be the 3-lb. fish head in tamarind curry ($15.88). Served in a giant pot, the fish head holds fall-off-the-bone, flaky fish meat (beware the eyeballs! Eat up the tender cheek meat!) It rests in a bold, coconut milk, shrimp paste, spice-heavy curry that is creamy, textured. Okra dots the dish, as do Fresno chilies. Pickled in vinegar & sugar, these chilies were so good, adding a needed contrast to the rich sauce, that I asked for a side of more. With South Indian roots, this dish is an example of Nonya cuisine (a mix of Malaysian, Indian, Chinese foods), and is served at celebratory meals in Malaysia.

P.S. For more fun, Betelnut roasts whole pigs on Tuesday nights… get there early as they will stop serving this off-menu special once pigs run out.

— Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

Appetite: Three reasons to visit Gitane

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 5, 2011

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Sexy, sultry Gitane had me at “hello” when it opened over two years ago. There is no other place in SF with quite its seductive charm. (In the neighboring alley to Gitane’s Claude Lane, Irish Bank is a festive, beer-soaked hang-out.) Gitane lures you into its tiny space with sherry cocktails and Spanish-Moroccan food.

With a chef (Bridget Batson) and bar manager (Alex Smith) change months back, Gitane blossoms into further radiance. Still evoking romance with a bold, modern spirit, its charged with new tastes that should draw you back if you’re already a fan, or bring you in if you have never been. Do yourself a favor and make a reservation or pull up to the bar for dinner soon…

P.S. Reservations often need to be made weeks ahead for prime hours as tables are few, and don’t forget to check out what is one of the more fascinating bathrooms around.

1. Alex Smith’s Cocktails

If you subscribe to my Perfect Spot newsletter, you’ve been hearing me rave about Smith’s sophisticated cocktails over the past month. Sip the increasingly meaty, much-lauded La Convivencia ($12), made of Four Roses bourbon, East India sherry, sweet vermouth, Nocino, and Smith’s house-made chorizo bitters (vegetarian version also available). Or try the light, luscious La Tardor ($13): No. 209 gin, ruby port, cherry heering and lime, soft with honey and egg white, with sweet, earthy nuance from vanilla bean and white peppercorn. Ask for the off-menu Autumn Flip ($11), creamy with whole egg, Laird’s bonded apple brandy, bitter cinnamon cordial and salted maple syrup. You won’t even need dessert. Cocktail aficionados will marvel at the complex layers of Martyr of Cordoba ($14): Copper Fox‘ white rye, Dry Sack sherry, Dimmi, absinthe, apricot liqueur, sweet vermouth, Peychaud’s bitters. There’s just a hint of each element. When you think you are about to call out the ingredients, they slip away, elusive and intriguing.

Lamb Tatare at Gitane. Photo by Virginia Miller

2. Lamb Tartare

Order this dish. Do not fear the raw lamb. Do not expect gaminess. Rather, prepare for fresh, succulent meat to rival the better beef tartares you’ve had. Chef Batson’s lamb tartare ($18) is an unexpected surprise of silky meat, bright with flavor. The added bonus is three dollops of worthy spreads, from an eggplant compote to a mix of pomegranate, walnut, red pepper. There’s currently no other dish like it in town.

3. Grilled (and stuffed) Calamari

After two recent visits to Gitane, I violate my usual policy of always ordering something different to re-order grilled calamari ($16) stuffed with bacon and onion in a cast-iron skillet. Swimming in an addictive, buttery garlic and herb broth, dotted with Manzanilla olives, cherry tomatoes and heirloom potatoes, I sop up the broth with grilled toasts, my breath happily redolent of garlic. It’s a hefty portion and works as dinner on it’s own.

–Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

Soul with a “Q”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 4, 2011

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MUSIC How do you know spring is coming in San Francisco? Trusty Mission venue El Rio starts throbbing once a month to the sweet soul sounds of yesteryear, and a hot, youthful crowd of queer dancers (and friends) floods the spacious patio to capacity. Although there are many parties in the city that cater specifically to gay men, Hard French is one of a handful that has built a successful formula on welcoming everyone — lusty femmes, trans jocks, DIY freaks, fairy stoners, vinyl junkies — while staying true to its spirit of retro-tune vitality and lean toward old-school R&B.

The packed party, which takes place every first Saturday, is a (hopefully) warm weather affair — its season opener Sat/5 will also mark its one-year anniversary. We e-mailed the six-member Hard French team, composed of Devon Devine, Tina Faggotina, Jorge P., Amos G., DJ Carnita, and DJ Brown Amy, to talk about their success and plans for future Frenching. True to the party’s collective spirit, and like a funky hot-pink Borg, they preferred to answer as one entity.

SFBG Hard French has quickly established itself as a major Bay Area queer destination. Obviously you wanted to be successful, but was the reaction a surprise?

Hard French We came together to throw a party where twinks and chubsters and queens and plushies and punks — basically all our friends — could come together to French hard and dance it out every month. As we move into our second year, our intentions haven’t changed a bit (although we want more leather daddies). We saw room in our communities for a different kind of dance party a place to dance in the sunlight with a bunch of weirdos. It just caught on real fast. People saw Hard French as a special thing. Since our community inspires us, being able to enrich it in the way that Hard French has is awesome.

We’ve ended a number of our parties with “Everyday People” by Sly and The Family Stone. It’s kind of our unofficial anthem because it seems to capture the essence of what we do and what we believe in. Hard French is for everyone; we are all everyday people who just want to ensure that our everyday brothers and sisters have a great time. It’s really our crowd that creates the right vibe and aesthetic — it of course helps that they are crazy sexy babes who make us want to dance ourselves into a frenzy and make out all day long. Luckily, our Jiggalicious Hard French Dance Club photo booth captures the ones we missed so we can seek them out later.

SFBG Let’s talk about soul — it seems like such a natural match, queers and soul, yet Hard French is unique in bringing the two together. It also seems like soul and San Francisco in general make a great pair …

HF Unbeknownst to many, the Bay was a hub of soul music during the 1960s and ’70s. It was home to better-known artists like Sly and The Family Stone, as well as some of our more personal favorites like Sugar Pie De Santo and Darondo. The soul resurgence today is largely due to the San Francisco’s wealth of amazing soul DJs who have been digging through records and throwing great parties here for a while now. We’ve been honored to have some of these DJs, like Lucky of Soul Party and Primo of Oldies Night, be our guests at past Hard Frenches. We’ve heard from these DJs and others that the difference between our party and other soul parties in the city is that we reach out to everyone. We don’t just attract “soul people” — we attract everyone, which makes us unique.

SFBG This question seems kind of mean, since there’s so few left, but what’s your favorite record store for soul scores?

HF Rookie Ricardo’s Records (www.rookyricardosrecords.com) in the Lower Haight. The owner, Dick Vivian, has been dancing to these 45s since they were originally pressed — and he now shares them with all the DJs who take an interest. Also, Dick is our total record daddy dream babe. The aforementioned soul scene in San Francisco would not exist without Rookie’s.

SFBG Any new record scores the DJs are stoked to debut on Saturday?

HF “Since the Days of Pigtails” by Chairmen of the Board, “Do the 45” by the Sharpees, Ruby Lee’s “Gonna Put a Watch On You,” and “Soulful Dress” by Sugar Pie DeSanto. Plus a bunch more — we’ve basically spent the last three months digging through acres of vinyl.

SFBG What’s been the most memorable Hard French moment so far?

HF Our most mind-altering moment had to have been the Hard French Winter Ball we threw in January at the haunted Brookdale Lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains. More than 400 people — from Santa Cruz locals to folks as far as New York, Toronto, and New Orleans — dressed in their finest formal fashions and completely took over the lodge. Seriously, every room was booked, the hotel bar was overrun, there were drag queens putting on face in the bathrooms, queers frenching in every nook and cranny, and even double dutch happening in the famous Brook Room, a beautiful room with a river that runs right through it! The event was hosted by the one and only Lil Miss Hot Mess, who curated a show that featured jaw-dropping performances by Glamamore, Alotta Boute, and others. There was also a dance contest, a highly competitive coronation … Oh, and we made it snow — inside the hotel. No big deal.

SFBG Any plans to take the party abroad? Will you ever be able to say Hard French is big in Japan?

HF Though it’s easy to forget, Canada is abroad, and Hard French has had mind-blowing parties in Toronto (as well as New York). But yes, we do have a few other international buns in the oven. As a note, if anyone out there wants to pay for six round trip tickets, a few hotel suites, a couple pitchers of margaritas, and some regional cuisine, Hard French will roll into your town and throw the best damn dance party that Iceland, Croatia, Zanzibar, or wherever has ever seen.

SFBG Describe Hard French in a haiku.

HF: Make out with hot babes/ Inside soul shaken sunlight/ Daytime adventure.

HARD FRENCH

Sat/5 and every first Sat., 3 p.m.– 8 p.m.

$7 (free BBQ from 3–5 p.m.)

El Rio

3158 Mission, SF.

www.hardfrench.com

What can’t be said

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 3, 2011

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DANCE Rehearsing The Unsayable at the Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, the performers of Hope Mohr’s newest work march together. The row of marchers is composed of her company members (Cameron Growden, Derek Harris, Risa Larsen, Rogelio Lopez Garcia, and Tegan Schwab), and artistic partners who are war veterans (Carol Roye, Katharine Conley, Paul Ramirez, and David Fish). They stand erect with puffed chests, and settle only slightly when a voice calls, “At ease.” Taking turns, the performers speak, shift formation, and splinter into dance, bravely sharing personal anecdotes, including the ugly, the tender, and the uncomfortable.

Mohr’s deeply human collaboration springs from work with VA medical centers in San Francisco and Palo Alto, and Swords to Plowshares. “We’re a country at war, and it’s easy to forget about that. The project is in part my response to feeling isolated from that,” she explains, in interview. “I wanted to do something to engage dancers and the general public in the emotional reality that we are a country at war.”

Mohr conducted seven months of outreach, culminating in workshops with a small group of veterans. Influenced by Daria Halprin and the Tamalpa Institute, the workshop process involved first creating a safe space for the highly-charged work. Ground rules made clear that workshop participants could select what would be included for the performance. Each veteran maintained ownership of his or her story.

Improvisations pairing dancers with veterans incorporated drawing, text, and movement to explore themes like home, the flag, and the body. In drawing the dancing, and dancing the drawing, Mohr aimed to “try to triangulate that relationship, so the stories go beyond the head space and it becomes a more body-based, physical storytelling process.”

Workshops for The Unsayable adapted the methodology Mohr developed in 2008 when working with cancer patients for her piece Under the Skin. While her goal is not to heal anybody, the collaboration provides an opportunity for creative expression and community engagement while commenting on the role of art in time of war. “This project reflects my interest in making work that is not only socially engaged but also aesthetically sophisticated,” she says. “It’s been a huge challenge to balance the integrity of a group emotional process and also to make choreography that is very well-crafted.”

Using transcriptions from the workshops, novelist Bart Schneider compiled the script and voice-overs for the performance. “My role coming in was to help facilitate conversations between the veterans and the dancers,” says Schneider, when asked about this process. “Even from the first session, it was really intense stuff. And it’s an interesting process when you don’t happen to be a therapist, because stuff comes up and you can really tap into some deep material that can go any which way. I think as a group we did a really good job of building a sense of trust.” In the studio, eye contact and careful listening helped build compassionate relationships between the dancers and veterans.

“I think it was a transformative experience for everyone.,” says Schneider, who has also worked on VA oral histories. “[The veterans felt] ‘Wow, I’m not alone, these people are really listening, and I get to experience the complex qualities of my experience in more ways than just verbally.’ I think sometimes when material like this is involved, the art is a bonus. The experience itself is what really matters.”

Regarding the transition from workshops to stage, Mohr says, “The performance piece is an important part for the veterans. I’m trying to support them in performing with their senses open, so that it’s a continuation of a process that’s about self-awareness and bodily awareness. I really believe in the dancing body. As dancers, we are trained in the somatic sense, having a self-sense of where we are in space and time — being really present in the moment and in our bodies; being really connected to what’s going on internally. I think all of those skills are relevant for healing from trauma.”

THE UNSAYABLE

Thurs/3–Sat/5, 8 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m.; $10–$18

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

www.zspace.org

Beady beady

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 3, 2011

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SUPER EGO Mardi Gras is one of those time-honored party traditions I always forget. Usually, I’ll pass by some unfortunate gay man covered in plastic Miller Lite beads passed out on a Castro curb, a bedazzled mime mask slipping from his gradually unclenching fist. Then I’m all like, “Oh, it’s Fat Tuesday,” and I totally know what I’m giving up for Lent. I love my Castro gays! They’re like a tragic calendar of fetes.

But this year, my inbox has seriously exploded with feather-headdressed alerts. Even though our own official version of the Mardi Gras festivities, Carnaval San Francisco, doesn’t happen until the end of May, we of course have ancestral party ties to both New Orleans, with its jazz, raunch, and tolerance, and Rio and the Caribbean, with their, er, glittery body stockings. So bring on the slurricanes, Mardi, I’m ready.

Krewe de Kinque Bal Masque VIII Sat/5, 7 p.m.–10 p.m., $20–$25. Trigger, 2344 Market, SF. www.sfkinque.com. The Bay’s gay Mardi Gras guardians throw a dazzling AIDS benefit, with live tableaux, a disco theme, and tons of kiki.

New Orleans Mardi Gras Costume Party Sat/5, 9 p.m., $20. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com. Zigaboo Modaliste, the “king of the funky drums,” leads the party into Creole mayhem.

SF Mardi Gras 2011 Sat/5, 9 p.m., $10 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com. Local electro-funky DJ duo Whitenoize join the fab Pam the Funkstress for stylish festivities.

Fat Tuesday Carnaval at Yoshi’s Tue/8, 8 p.m., $10. Yoshi’s San Francisco, 1330 Fillmore, SF. www.yoshis.com/sf. Fantastic drum troupe Loco Bloco and the ever-sassy Bayonics perform.

Fat Tuesday Carnaval at Elbo Room Tue/8, 9 p.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com. Brazilian Wax presents SF Carnaval Champions Fogo Na Roupa with DJs Carioca and P-Shot.

Mardi Gras Ball Tue/8, 9 p.m., $10 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com. Extra Action Marching Band, Brass Mafia, and Boca Do Rio all on one night? Yes, please.

Mardi Gras in the Fillmore Tue/8 7 p.m.–11 p.m., $45–$55. West Bay Conference Center, 1290 Fillmore, SF. www.mardigrassanfrancisco.com. Dancing to Lloyd Gregory and Band, dinner, drinks, and a $300 costume contest.

FIRST ANNUAL MISS TOOLBOX PAGEANT

The wonderfully kooky free weekly queer variety show throws its first pageant, and it will be messy good. Hostess Alexis Von Fierce presides as underground stars grapple for the crown.

Thu/3, 11 p.m., free. Club 93, 93 Ninth St., SF. Facebook: Miss Toolbox

LE CASTLE VANIA

Hardcore electro may be completely streamlined into the inevitable at this point — but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be a blast. Since 2006, I’ve retained a soft spot in my black heart for glamour-gothish Atlanta banger Le Castle Vania (and opener Fukkk Offf is cute, too).

Fri/4, 9 p.m.–late, $10 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

NEW WAVE CITY

The long-running, resilient, and goofy-brilliant straight-up retro night is goin’ back to roamin’, as it leaves its home at DNA. But first, DJs Skip and Shindog host a gonzo “soundtrack night” party — dress up like your fave ’80s movie characters, Ducky, and light 16 candles to the future of the past.

Sat/5, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $7 before 10 p.m., $12 after. DNA LOUNGE, 375 11th St., SF. www.newwavecity.com

The unseen enemy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 2, 2011

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Trevor Paglen’s photography has always been about making the unseen visible. His luminous chromogenic prints unsettlingly reveal that the machinery of war and surveillance controlled by the military-industrial complex is more often than not hiding from plain sight; one need only have the right high-powered lens to gaze back.

One of the ironies of Paglen’s work, owing largely to the great distances from which he must photograph his purposefully obscured subjects, is how minuscule and non-particular they appear within the photographs themselves (this is also why Paglen’s work, in particular, suffers in reproduction). Test sites are twinkling oases amid vast surrounds of rock and sand, orbiting satellites are often no more than streaks of light, and unmanned planes are but black flecks against large expanses of sky. The human element is absent or left implied.

“Unhuman,” the title of Paglen’s second solo show at Altman Siegel, is thus quite appropriate, calling to mind the unmanned and auto-piloted craft that he repeatedly shoots while also drawing attention to the reality that much of this technology will continue to exist and perhaps, one might speculate, even continue to operate long after we have vanished. The recent work in “Unhuman” zeros in on both concerns.

Take the black and white photograph, Dead Military Satellite (DMSP 5D-F11) Near the Disk of the Moon, in which the titular forgotten object, lighted only by a half-veiled moon, is barely visible amid the surrounding darkness of space. The shot could easily be mistaken for a matte painting from Alien, and its seeming impossible vantage point makes Paglen’s dogged tracking of the dead satellite somehow all the more poignant.

Other photographs are less subtle. In the diptych Artifacts, a black and white photograph of the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Park hangs next to one that captures the glowing traces of spacecraft perpetually orbiting thousands of kilometers above the equator. Although the score-marked cliff face in the first photo forms a nice formal counterpoint to the hatch-markings of time-lapsed stars in the second, the pairing (perhaps a nod to Kubrick’s bone-satellite?) offers too heavy-handed and easy a comparison.

But Paglen doesn’t need to spell things out so directly. The show’s most stunning pieces are a series of lush skyscapes in which reaper and predator drones hover mote-like amid large, gaseous swathes of color seemingly lifted straight from a Rothko or Turner. The abstract beauty of these images is held in tension by the near-unseen menace that their titles call attention to. It’s a tension exacerbated by the limits of Paglen’s own machine-enhanced vision, such as when he photographs a similar type of dronecraft in a blurry, enlarged “close-up” two miles from the Indian Springs, Nev., site where it sits parked.

TENDERLOIN SATORI

For her debut at Silverman, local Deva Graf looks to both midcentury Minimalist sculpture as well as her ongoing studies at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California’s ski country. The pairing isn’t so unlikely, and the two installations Graf has created on either side of the small space evoke both the simple shapes and natural materials of de Maria and Smithson sculptures as well as those of objects used in Zen practice.

To the right is Mother’s Vigil, an arrangement of three small stone sculptures of Buddhist deities surrounded by lighted candles (around 40 are used for the piece each day) set into earthenware bowls filled with sand. In Bindu, on the opposite side, a lighted pyramid-shaped candle on stone pedestal sits below an eye-level framed piece of paper with a black India ink square at its center. An arc, also done in India ink, is traced on the wall above both painting and candle.

The features and iconography of each installation overtly solicit the viewer’s contemplation and concentration. Alas, that’s a tall order when floor-to-ceiling windows are the only thing between you and heavily-trafficked Sutter Street.

TREVOR PAGLEN: UNHUMAN

Through April 2

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, Fourth Floor, SF

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

DEVA GRAF: GOOD MORNING

Through March 12

Silverman Gallery

804 Sutter, SF

(415) 255-9508

www.silverman-gallery.com

Chiu’s challenge

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 1, 2011

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steve@sfbg.com

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu launched his mayoral campaign Feb. 28 with a pledge to bring San Franciscans of all political stripes together around a common agenda. It’s a message that has also been sounded by other mayoral candidates, but one in which Chiu is in a unique position to try to deliver on this year.

“This campaign, at its heart, is going to be how we come together,” Chiu told a crowd of hundreds gathered at City Hall for the announcement. Later he told the crowd, “This campaign needs to be a beacon to the rest of the world about who we are as San Franciscans.”

Chiu appeared to be reaching out to progressives more than the other mayoral candidates have so far, emphasizing how he doesn’t own a car and wants make big improvements to Muni and the bicycle network, valuing “diversity and social justice,” calling for “community-based budgeting,” and saying that “we have to have a conversation about how we can creatively fund affordable housing.”

“We are at our best when we come together for our shared progressive values,” Chiu said.

But then he quickly noted that over the past decade, “City Hall has been a bit dysfunctional.” That was a time when progressives controlled the Board of Supervisors and there was a downtown-backed mayor, and Chiu decried how the two sides didn’t work well together. Yet now, with Chiu as board president and Ed Lee as interim mayor — an appointment Chiu helped engineer — “the tone at City Hall has changed.”

Perhaps that’s true, but the thorny issues that divide the city and defy simple solutions remain in play: bridging a $380 million budget deficit after years of deep cuts, creating jobs without worsening the city budget picture, controlling employee pension costs, reforming Muni and addressing traffic congestion, bringing cleaner energy sources online, and increasing the affordable housing stock.

These are all issues that President Chiu and Mayor Lee will have to deal with this year if Candidate Chiu is going to be able to credibly claim that the new tone at City Hall can actually translate into policies that work and bring people together.

And there won’t be consensus in the community on all of those issues; at some point, Chiu will have to take a side.

RHETORIC AND REALITY

All the mayoral candidates argue for coming together around common-sense solutions, a trope that clearly polls well with voters.

Leland Yee welcomed Chiu into the race while emphasizing his own kumbaya message: “My commitment is to run a different kind of campaign for mayor — to work with other candidates to present real choices and options for voters.”

Dennis Herrera, whose mayoral campaign announced its endorsement by Sup. Scott Wiener during Chiu’s kickoff event, said, “I look forward to working with him toward my goal of making San Francisco a city that works and one that lives up to its great promise”

And Ting told a gathering of his Reset SF group over the weekend, “It’s time for San Francisco city government to be as creative and innovative as the rest of San Francisco. And it’s going to take all of us to make that a reality.”

Even political consultant David Latterman, who usually works with downtown-backed candidates but is working on Chiu’s campaign, told us, “I’m just so tired of that left-right divide. I don’t think this city is served well by those wars any more.”

But Chiu is uniquely positioned to turn that rhetoric into a reality at City Hall — if it’s possible. Over the past two years, he took the lead on challenging bad budget proposals from the Mayor’s Office and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, only to back down in the end and make compromises that many of his progressive colleagues opposed. Similarly, he spent months working on a business tax reform measure that would have raised city revenue without costing private sector jobs, only to abandon it in the face of big business opposition.

This year, some progressives are banking on Chiu to deliver on their issues and have offered his mayoral campaign their early support.

“He’s willing to take bold moves to make Muni continue to improve,” MTA Commissioner and cycling activist Cheryl Brinkman told the gathering.

“There is no one running for mayor who has David’s zeal for social and environmental justice,” Fei Tsen, chair of Chinatown Community Development Corporation — a core Chiu constituency — told the gathering.

“I think he’s the right choice for low-income communities of color,” Planning Commission Christina Olague said at the event.

Sup. Eric Mar, the only elected official at Chiu’s kickoff, told the crowd that “David Chiu has shown he has the ability to bring communities together,”

But the rest the progressive community, from elected officials like Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sup. David Campos to the leading advocates for renters, environmentalists, and the social and environmental justice movements, are still waiting to see what happens this year. Many are disappointed that Chiu is pushing tax breaks for Twitter and other corporations rather than progressive budget solutions, as well as putting moderate supervisors in control of some key board committees.

In an era of fiscal desperation, it may not be possible to bring progressives and downtown together around a common agenda. But if Chiu wants to try, voters are likely to learn whether that approach works even before they head to the polls in November.

The mayor’s race: beyond compromise

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 1, 2011

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EDITORIAL The race for mayor is now fully underway, with eight candidates declared — and at least four are fighting for the progressive vote. It’s a remarkably open field — and the fact that there’s no clear frontrunner, no candidate whose money is dominating the election, no Willie Brown or Gavin Newsom, is the result of two critical progressive reforms: public financing and ranked-choice voting.

In fact, those two measures — promoted by the progressive, district-elected supervisors — have transformed the electoral process in San Francisco and undermined, if only somewhat, downtown’s control.

As Steven T. Jones points out in this week’s issue, the leading candidates are all sounding similar, vague themes. They all say the city can work better when we all work together. That’s a nice platitude, but it reminds us too much of President Obama’s promise to seek bipartisan consensus, and it’s likely to lead to the same result.

On the big issues, the Republicans don’t want to work with the president, and big downtown businesses, developers, and landlords don’t want to work with the progressives. In the end, on some key issues, there’s going to be a battle, and candidates for mayor need to let us know, soon, which side they’re going to be on.

Sup. David Chiu, who entered the race Feb. 28, may have the hardest job: he actually has to help balance the city budget. As board president, he’ll be involved in the negotiations with the Mayor’s Office and the final product will almost certainly carry his imprimatur. It’s unlikely the progressives on the board will agree with the mayor on cuts; it’s much more likely that some will seek revenue enhancements as an alternative. Whatever Chiu does, he’ll be on the record with a visible statement of his budget priorities.

We’d like to hear those priorities now, instead of waiting until June. But either way, the remaining candidates, particularly those who want progressive and neighborhood support, need to start taking positions, now. What in the city budget should be cut? What new revenue should be part of the solution? What, specifically, do you support in terms of pension reform? How would you, as mayor, deal with the budget crisis?

Every major candidate in the race has enough familiarity with city finance to answer those questions. None should be allowed to duck or resort to empty rhetoric about everyone working together.

The same goes for community choice aggregation and public power. There is no consensus here, and will never be. Either you’re for public power and against Pacific Gas and Electric Co., or you’re opposed, weak, or ducking — all of which put you in PG&E’s camp.

There are many more issues (condo conversions, tax breaks for big corporations, housing development, help for small business, etc.) on which there has never been, and likely never will be, agreement. The people who make money building new condos will never accept a law mandating that 50 percent of all new housing be affordable (although the city’s own Master Plan sets that as a goal). The landlords will never accept more limits on evictions and condo conversions.

We’re all for working together and seeking shared solutions, but the next mayor needs to be able to go beyond that. When the powerful interests refuse to bend, are you ready to fight them?

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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March 1, 2011

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tredmond@sfbg.com

I’ve been trying to think of a good metaphor for the public-employee pension story, a way to explain what’s going on without making it so complicated that it becomes a battle of political slogans. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Imagine you and your friends all work at a resort hotel, and you’ve been there a while, and you approach the boss and say it’s expensive to live in the area and you want a raise. But your boss isn’t handing out any more cash — he wants to hire his girlfriend for a cush job, and he wants a promotion in the resort chain, so he has to keep the bottom line tight.

But he can’t afford to lose the group of you, so he offers a deal: no raise, but you and your coworkers can eat lunch free at the resort restaurant. It’s a painless offer for him; the restaurant is booming, so much cash coming in that nobody will notice a few free meals. Still, it’s a benefit you didn’t have, so you accept.

Then a year passes, and resort traffic drops off, and the price of lunch food goes way up, and the guy who handles the books at the restaurant has been skimming and pocketing a big chunk of the proceeds — and suddenly, the free meals aren’t so free for your boss. So he starts pointing fingers at you, telling all the other diners that it’s unfair you get to eat free. The cry goes out: “No free lunch!” He starts to demand that you pay “your fair share.”

Now: you realize like everyone else that the resort is in financial trouble, and you’ve already accepted unpaid overtime and fewer work days. You also realize that a couple of your greedier friends have been taking extra sandwiches home in their pockets and they need to knock it off.

But the huge chain that owns the resort is still doing fine; the percentage profits off the top never change. No cuts there. And your free lunch isn’t “free”; it’s part of your pay. And you suspect that at some point, the economy will pick up and the restaurant will be flush again — and if you give up your benefit now, you’ll wind up with no raise and no lunch either.

But somehow, it’s all your fault. You are the ones bleeding the resort dry.

Look at it that way, and the picture is a little different.