Volume 46 Number 42
Volume 46 Number 42 Flip-through Edition
Spark that joint, Barry
caitlin@sfbg.com
HERBWISE First things first, because I just saw the new Oliver Stone weed movie and I’m dying to tell you which of the grisly marijuana murders was my favorite. But there are bigger things afoot, namely the President’s journey to the East Bay on Mon/23.
PROTEST
Is there anyone in the Bay who has more to protest, in regards to medical marijuana, than the staff and students — not to mention the patients who depend on their harvest — of Oaksterdam University? Earlier this year the place was ransacked by the feds, who left nothing “short of the tables and chairs and teachers,” new school president Dale Sky Jones told me in an interview in June (Herbwise “After the raid” 6/20/12).
And so, the school may be hosting a welcome wagon for the President’s fundraising foray to Oakland on Monday. Details weren’t quite hammered out by the time we went to press, so stay on top of developments if you’d like to add your voice to those that are calling for President Obama to reign in/call off/fire the overzealous lawmakers who are trampling state law by persecuting our cannabis businesses.
Oaksterdam Obama protest Tentative meet-up: Oaksterdam University student union, 1915 Broadway, SF. 3:30pm, free. For definitive information and last-minute logistic changes, see facebook.com/safeaccessnow
KUDOS
… to the city of San Francisco for doing what it can to support cannabis, says David Goldman of Americans for Safe Access. Goldman got me on the horn last week to talk about ways you can support the dispensaries that are still with us — not to mention the new ones that have recently opened their doors. Here’s a few ways to engage in cannabis culture in the city.
Home Grown Author Night Oaksterdam University, 1600 Broadway, Oakl. 6-8pm, free. www.oaksterdamuniversity.com. Journalist David Downs of the East Bay Express hosts this panel of weed intellectuals — Ed Rosenthal, author of The Marijuana Grower’s Handbook and OU professor; a senior researcher from the Drug Policy Center; and the author of a book on Mexican marijuana cartels will speak.
Americans for Safe Access San Francisco chapter meeting 847 Howard, SF. First and third Tuesdays, 7:30pm, free. www.safeaccessnow.org. Past chapter meetings have included trainings on what to do if you get caught in a dispensary raid as a patient — but ASA meetings are also a good chance to meet other cannabis activists, find out about upcoming events, and drink free coffee.
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DANK
HopeNet (223 Ninth, SF. (415) 863-4399, www.hopenetcompassion.org) joins Vapor Room in closing after a final day of operation on July 31. Another threatening letter from US Attorney Melinda Haag was the culprit, leaving us with one less way to fill cannabis physician’s recommendations.
HOLLYWOOD CHIMES IN
How apt a description of the marijuana industry is Oliver Stone’s new movie Savages? For all the buzz surrounding the release — and Stone’s corresponding mugshot, interview, and incendiary jabs at the prison-industrial complex featured on the cover of High Times — the frenetic, hyper-violent film still seemed to me as though someone took a cocaine movie and slapped a bunch of glamour shots of nug jars on top of it. Perhaps Stone learned from the lackluster numbers of his recent releases that explored Wall Street, South American democracy, and George W. Bush, that you need a few good head explosions and cannabis-fueled three-way to ring up Hollywood-level revenue.
There is some subtle cannabis messaging buried in there, like joint-smoking shots that cut to John Travolta’s federal agent dragging on his cigarette. And yes, the futility of the War on Drugs is a theme, again subtly. But the way in which the economics of the drug trade is dealt with is pretty standard, as are the way faceless drug peons are shot down in the name of saving Blake Lively’s kidnapped hippie goddess. (Who is addicted to marijuana!)
Ah yes, the hippie goddess. Since I’ve been on somewhat of a feminist tear recently, I’ll close with a word on the female characters in Savages. There are three, maybe three and a half, all plucked straight from the Hollywood firmament. Two (Lively and Sandra Echeverría as a Mexican cartel princess) are young, impossibly lovely women who are kidnapped and forced into bondage for most of their screen time. Another is an impossibly lovely Latina cartel matriarch (Salma Hayek), who rips off her wig when said daughter is taken and wears lace-and-spandex numbers while conducting business in her home office. The last female character, who barely counts as such, is a sultry, mysterious drug peon whose most momentous role is helping Benicio Del Toro rape Lively.
Shout-out to all the women who can make the protest on Monday!
Double visions
virginia@sfbg.com
APPETITE A strong concentration of cutting-edge American chefs are right here in the Bay Area. Widely acknowledged in food publications and among global diners, Bay Area creativity has been ascendant in recent years. Collaborative dinners between local chefs and with chefs from countries beyond our borders uniquely showcase the forward-thinking cooking coming out of our region. I’ve been privileged to attend recent one-of-a-kind dinners (like the one this week between culinary “it” town Copenhagen chef Christian Puglisi of Michelin-starred Relae and Bar Tartine’s visionary chef Nick Balla).
During a weekend in May, one of Australia’s star chefs, Ben Shewry of Attica in Melbourne (www.attica.com.au), joined the incredible David Kinch at Michelin-starred Manresa in Los Gatos (www.manresarestaurant.com). Both chefs are known foragers, utilizing local bounty in their restaurants in bursts of pure inspiration — Manresa sources its produce from nearby Love Apple Farms (loveapplefarm.typepad.com), which holds classes on urban goat-raising, cidermaking, edible perennials, and more. The hours-long dinner was not just a visual feast of color combinations, it was a dream of freshness in unexpected forms, heartwarming in taste.
Shewry started with walnuts in their shells, unadorned and tender, while Kinch offered carrots, clams, and savory, textural granola dotting vegetable marrow bouillon. Shewry’s fresh crab and artichoke leaves arrived softly layered, dotted with citrus cream. Unlike any crab dish I’ve had before, it nearly dissolved on the tongue, a striking as the sea yet elegantly subtle. A stunner. As was his beauty of diced sweet potato, purslane, and egg doused in a creamy pool of Cabot clothbound Vermont cheddar. Kinch’s gorgeous dessert was a silken, custard-like mound of white chocolate surrounded by crispy quinoa, goat’s milk ice cream, and a strip of rhubarb resembling an elevated fruit roll-up.
Manresa is a destination any time, with garden-fresh cocktails, impeccable service, and excellent wine list. The partnership this particular weekend showcased two world class chefs side-by-side, melding their visions.
As part of SF Chefs’ (www.sfchefsfoodwine.com) current Dinner Party Project, which teams up local chefs in themed dinners leading up to the big food and drink classic swiftly approaching August 2-5, inventive chefs Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn (www.ateliercrenn.com) and Jason Fox of Commonwealth (www.commonwealthsf.com) partnered at Dominique’s restaurant, for a special dinner on July 8. Both chefs connect over a similar ethos apparent in their delicate yet bold, often playful, cooking styles. Alternating courses, they produced bright, summer-spirited dishes.
An amuse bouche certainly did amuse: little white chocolate shells dubbed “Campari explosions” actually exploded with vivid, joyously bitter Campari reduction, paired alongside a Campari and blood orange cocktail aperitif. Both chefs rocked the tomato in unexpected ways. Fox played with green tomato in the form of a jelly disc gracefully dotted with silky uni, shiso mint leaves, and refreshing cucumber granita. Crenn saluted the glories of red and yellow tomatoes in varying forms and textures — peeled, sorbet, etc. — in a vibrant bowl accented by goat cheese, edible flowers from her home garden, and a strip of lardo, that beauty of pig fat salume, for rich contrast.
Unpredictable touches jumped out, like Fox’s frozen “white snow” over corn pudding topped with grilled sweetbreads and tempura-fried okra (paired beautifully with a 2006 Pierre Morey Bourgogne Chardonnay), or another Fox hit: bone marrow puree animating hearts of palm, skinned red potato and poached ruby fish, happily paired with a cup of duck consommé tea. The meaty tea seamlessly interacted with the vegetables and bone marrow, highlighting a masculine mischievousness in Fox’s stylish cooking. Besides her truly imaginative take on tomatoes, my other favorite Crenn dish arrived dramatically on a scooped stone slab graced with a chocolate branch and an edible, glistening silk nest filled with dehydrated vanilla pods over sweet corn and porcini mushrooms. Like a treasure found in an enchanted forest, the dish explored both savory and sweet whimsically, a feminine wildness tempered by refinement.
We’ll see more from both skilled chefs — and many others — during SF Chefs days’ long extravaganza, which I look forward to every year in tented Union Square. It’s a pleasure to witness our region’s best collaborate with each other and the finest globally, a reminder as to how the Bay Area is in the midst of yet another culinary renaissance, one of many the past few decades.
Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com
Gated communities of hate
OPINION “I have been arrested for 3 times in one day for sitting on the street in San Francisco” PoorNewsNetwork panhandler reporter and my fellow “poverty skolar” Papa Bear reported in our monthly community newsroom meeting last week.
As Papa Bear reported on yet another example of being arrested for the sole act of being poor, black and houseless in America, I received a text message from Berkeley that after a second round of seven hours of testimony against the proposal to put a sit-lie measure on the November ballot, it was approved anyway.
From Santa Monica to Santa Cruz, from Atlanta to San Francisco, cities across the US have been sliding towards fascism and the casual criminalization of poor people with the 21st century pauper law known as the sit-lie law.
As I have asked before — and I will ask again with the hope that readers will truly think this through: How did we all buy into the notion, without even realizing it, that emptiness equates with cleanliness, that public space should be empty to be clean and that public really doesn’t mean public anymore, if its filled with the “wrong” people?
When me and my poor Black/Indian mama dealt with houselessness and racist and classist profiling throughout my childhood, we were arrested multiple times for the sole act of sleeping in our car in certain neighborhoods, and eventually I was incarcerated for those poverty crimes — and no matter how many times I was arrested, cited, and incarcerated, my or my mama’s poverty didn’t go away. As a matter of fact, it got worse.
Berkeley, more than these other cities, is pretty ridiculous, because so many activists live there and work on issues of Palestine and immigration and anti-war and economic justice. It just shows the true colors of separatist, grant-guideline-fueled organizing that does not connect and conflate all of these struggles together.
As a poor indigenous mother who struggles on welfare and has been incarcerated and houseless for years for the sole act of being poor, my criminalization is completely connected to my migrant brothers and sisters fighting borders and to my sisters and brothers who struggle with colonization and globalization in the global south and beyond.
I cannot work against the false borders and occupation in Palestine and not work equally on the false borders and occupation by police and ICE in Mexico, Oakland, or Berkeley. I cannot work against the war in Iraq and not also work against the war on the poor.
But corporations and wanna-be corporations — not people — are in control of politricksters in these cities. So the racist and classist lies and mythologies about those dirty, crazy, and dangerous houseless people or young people of color flood the dialogue surrounding the issues of sit-lie, and gang injunctions, and increased police terrorism against poor folks of color. And the real issue — who defines what is public space and who can be considered the public? — is ignored.
I ask readers as this issue comes up on the ballot in Berkeley, as it did in San Francisco, to really think about the kind of world we are becoming, the ease with which we are thinking and incarcerating certain people and the borders and gates and locks we are putting in place that will eventually change our supposedly public and free society into smaller and smaller, gated, racist, communities of hate.
Tiny, aka Lisa Gray Garcia, runs POOR Magazine and is a poverty scholar and activist.
Shutting down Sunshine
EDITORIAL The unwillingness of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to follow the City Charter’s rules on open government has reached a new level of absurdity: The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force voted July 11 to stop meeting, because the supervisors wouldn’t appoint the legally mandated members.
Technically, the fuss is over a provision in the law creating the Task Force that mandates one member must be a physically disabled person with a demonstrated interest in open-government issues. That was written into the law in part because access to meetings for people with disabilities is an ongoing area of concern.
But the supervisors refused to reappoint Bruce Wolfe, a longtime task force member who met that criterion — and who had the respect of independent and progressive leaders all over town. And none of the six people the board did appoint qualify as physically disabled.
So the City Attorney’s Office advised the task force that it would be violating the charter if it met and took any action — and although the chance that the courts would invalidate task force decisions might be slim, the members could face fines. So the panel did the prudent thing and quit meeting.
Now, for all practical purposes, there is no Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, and it will be in legal and political limbo until the supervisors appoint a disabled member.
That follows on the heels of the board refusing — for the first time since the creation of the task force in 1999 — to seat the nominees of the Society of Professional Journalists, New American Media, and the League of Women Voters. Those organizations were given the right to submit names for three seats as a way to ensure that some of the task force members were from outside City Hall and represented media and good-government groups.
So the agency that it supposed to protect the public’s right to access records and meetings has been stacked with City Hall-friendly appointees and now is unable even to hear complaints.
There’s no question that some supervisors are annoyed with the task force, in part because it’s issued some rulings that board members disagreed with. But the task force is supposed to come down on the side of public access whenever possible, and if the agency is doing its job, it’s going to piss off politicians. The response shouldn’t be to seek retribution by denying its ability to function.
The supervisors are demanding that SPJ, NAM and the League submit new lists of nominees, with multiple names, which is unprecedented and difficult: These grassroots groups are supposed to line up a group of volunteers for a difficult, time-consuming, unpaid job — then tell them that all but one of them will be rejected by the supervisors? Who’s going to want to be in that position?
The three organizations should hold their ground, resubmit their nominees and ask the supervisors to follow the City Charter. And the City Attorney’s Office needs to offer some clarity here: Can the supervisors, in a fit of pique, shut down a Charter mandated watchdog agency? Really?
Batter up
le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com
CHEAP EATS Hedgehog and me are on the road again. Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, and the Mission lie ahead — by mere days! — and shrinking in the rearview mirror are both our families, several old priced-out-of-SF pals, 10 big states, four or five completely different kinds of barbecue, and many, many baseball games. Including big league ones, a minor league one, a semi-pro one, and a little league all-star game.
The American pastime, you will be happy to know, is alive and well on the other side of the bay. At PNC Park in Pittsburgh, for example, there are Polish Hill dogs, which are hot dogs with pierogi on them.
Earlier today, in a desperate attempt to be healthy, we both ordered grilled tilapia at a little family restaurant in Chenoa, Illinois. Make note, in case you are ever out Chenoa-way: “grilled,” in Chenoese, means breaded and fried.
You know me: I love these kinds of curveballs. But Hedgehog, who is still smoldering from the ears over a grilled pork chop disguised as a fried ham steak that occurred to her in Georgia three years ago, was less amused.
She has antiquated notions about the things she eats. She wants them to be what they are. That’s why I was surprised a couple nights ago in Youngstown, Ohio, my hometown, when she wanted to go to C. Staples barbecue.
The last time we were in Youngstown, a year ago or so, I took Hedgehog to C. Staples so she could experience the barbecue I lost my barbecue virginity to, which (and I warned her) isn’t barbecue so much as fried chicken slathered in a tangy, gritty sauce and served on white bread.
As I recall, she wasn’t amused.
So why did she insist on a do-over this year, on our way to the ballpark (Connecticut Tigers 5, Mahoning Valley Scrappers 4)? And why was C. Staples’ unbarbecued barbecue so freaking delicious this go-round?
I don’t have an answer.
And Youngstown was not the biggest barbecued revelation of our last thousand miles. That would be Pittsburgh, where, before the game, Moonpie and her man took us to Union Pig and Chicken. There, the truly smoked chickens and ribs and ohmigod the pork shoulder rocked my little world harder than it’s been rocked in a long time — by barbecue anyway. The brisket was only so-so, but that’s OK, cow being merely a special guest at Pig and Chicken.
San Francisco Giants 6, Pittsburgh Pirates 5.
We tend to root root root for the home team, so that game was kind of confusing for us. Not so Cleveland, where the Indians spanked the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 7-3. We met Kiz and her man beforehand at Hodge’s — a place fancy enough to bring out amuse bouches and unfancy enough for the amuse bouches to be tater tots. Crème fraiche for dipping.
There were lobster corn dogs with banana ketchup too, but that’s neither here nor there. Well, it’s there.
Here, we have the wonderfully fluorescent and blue collar Vientiane Cafe, on Allendale in East Oakland — which may as well be Des Moines to most City dwellers, I realize. But that’s OK. Go stand in line at San Tung.
We first discovered Vientiane last fall during our desperate search for a replacement for San Tung’s dry fried chicken wings. Angel wings, Vientiane calls them, and they come crispy and piled up on the plate, all second joints — which, as it happens, is both of our favorite joints, mini-drumstick be damned. Speaking for myself, I just like sticking my tongue between those two little bones, and getting the goods.
That joint reminds me of eating crawfish and crabs, and some other things. Vientiane’s dark, sticky sauce, according to Hedgehog, tasted like it belonged on Cracker Jacks.
Berwick 8, Danville 7.
Besides these angelic cracker jack wings, I love the papaya salad, which is almost too spicy and fish saucy, even for me. The menu has probably a hundred Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese dishes, and I hope to eventually try all of them. New favorite restaurant!
VIENTIANE CAFE
Daily 11am-9pm
3801 Allendale Ave., Oakl.
(510) 535-2218
AE,D,MC,V
No alcohol
City College fights back
news@sfbg.com
When your options are bad, terrible, and unthinkable, how do you choose which way to go? And should that decision be graded on a curve that takes into account the dire fiscal circumstances facing most public colleges in California these days?
City College of San Francisco (CCSF), which serves more than 90,000 students a year, last year did what some consider unthinkable: laying off administrators and leaving a reserve fund at dangerously low levels in order to save classes and stave off faculty layoffs. The current $187 million operating budget has a reserve of only $2.2 million, or just over 1 percent compared to the state-recommended 5 percent.
Such decisions may cost the college its accreditation and threaten its very existence, but they also represent legitimate differences over what role educational institutions should play in their communities.
In June, the college came under fire for administrative and financial mismanagement by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a private organization that evaluates K-12 schools and higher education institutions every six years.
Although the commission applauded the school for its commitment to students, it placed the school under its most severe sanction before accreditation is terminated: “show cause.”
It identified eight problem areas that the college has failed to address since 2006, which include measuring student learning outcomes, attaining financial solvency, and revising the college’s mission statement to reflect current fiscal realities.
“The team finds that the current, ongoing funding for San Francisco City College appears insufficient to fully fund the mission of the college as it is currently conceived,” the commission wrote in its June report. “The team advises the college to assure the mission of the college is obtainable based on accurate short-term and long-term funding assumptions.”
Essentially, the commission is recommending a refocusing of the school’s mission to prioritize college transfer classes. The report went on to say that too many people making decisions through a highly decentralized governance system slowed down or halted altogether the college’s ability to make cuts where it needed to — or where the state and commission thought cuts should be made.
These competing visions of how community colleges should continue to exist have driven a wedge between local college officials and state-level decision makers — a clash made clear through City College’s accreditation woes.
“It’s not that City College isn’t doing a good job, it’s that these are emerging trends we have,” former Student Trustee Jeffrey Fang said. “In the long run, it might actually improve City College. The bad part is that it came at a time when we are so strapped and mired neck deep in political games.”
Those games have starved funding for public education statewide, in the process redefining the role of community colleges.
“City College has a very ambitious mission. Part of that mission is that it’s a true community college,” CCSF spokesperson Larry Kamer said. “Now, decisions are being made de facto by the budget and we need to re-evaluate that mission.”
PUTTING THE “COMMUNITY” IN COLLEGE
Adult education used to be integrated into K-12 districts. But over the years, two-year “junior” colleges took over that responsibility, transforming them into today’s “community” colleges.
The newly minted community colleges began serving thousands of immigrants learning English, job seekers needing new skills, and elderly citizens looking to continue their education. But when California’s budget crisis hit a critical point, that all began to change.
Three years ago, the California Legislature said when the community colleges cut courses, they shouldn’t cut courses involving transfer, career technical education, and basic skills, State Community College Chancellor Jack Scott said in a phone interview.
Scott is responsible for overseeing all 112 community colleges in California, a quarter of all community colleges in the country. He’s on the cusp of retirement, and the end of his tenure has been marked with the changing mission of the colleges he oversees.
“I want it clearly understood that I personally want to see the community colleges offer all the classes it wants to,” he said. “But with scarcity, you have to prioritize. If you offer the same classes you did before, you’ll go bankrupt. Something has to give.”
The state agreed and asked community colleges to prioritize enrollment, with a focus on recent high school graduates who plan to transfer to a university in two years and anyone else seeking a degree or certificate.
If community colleges can’t afford to offer classes sought by their broader communities, and K-12 schools are ill-equipped to plug back into that task, does the notion of continuing adult education just fade away?
David Plank, executive director of policy analysis for California Education, a Stanford University-based research center, says it just may: “I don’t think that responsibility will be reimposed on K-12 districts because it was always seen as a sort of add-on supplementary responsibility.”
BUDGET WOES TRICKLE DOWN
California’s Master Plan for Higher Education — which mandates that community colleges provide classes for everyone — only worked as long as there was money to fund it. But Plank says that money has been steadily shrinking since 1978 when voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property tax increases and raised the voting threshold for the Legislature to increase other taxes.
As funding from Sacramento has been slashed by more than $500 million in the past year alone, California’s 112 community colleges have turned away more than 300,000 students trying to enter the system. If Governor Jerry Brown’s tax proposal wins in November, community college funding will stay at about the same level, but if it fails, the system will see further cuts of more than $340 million.
“The system now is breaking down,” Plank said. “We’ve finally reached a point where the state’s share is too small to hold things together. We see tuition going up at very rapid rates and a substantial deterioration both in access and affordability.”
In flush times, community colleges could serve everyone — rich and poor, those seeking new skills and others working toward a new degree. Now, the community college system faces two choices if it’s unable to find new sources of revenue: continue on the path of deep cuts, or change its priorities altogether.
City College Board member Steve Ngo cites new statistics that show enrollment in English as Second Language (ESL) classes are trending down, a sign that those classes should be cut first. “The community should lead. If the demand is down, you’re not serving your community,” he said.
Yet others say community colleges should strive to serve everyone who needs them.
“Some [classes] are really valued by our Pacific Islander population, but their enrollment may not be as high. Should those classes go away? I don’t think so. It’s something I feel like the whole college community needs to come to grips with” CCSF math instructor Hal Hunstman said.
City College ESL instructor Susan Lopez said her classes have been cut about 29 percent over a decade, which she considers drastic.
“Despite that large and somewhat intentional reduction, we still serve 20,000 annually throughout the city. By comparison with our very large ESL Department, the English Department serves only 7,000,” Lopez said. “How could we abandon those who are most educationally needy and often desperately poor in favor of those who are less needy?
“We need to step up adult education across the board,” she said. “The problem is all the pressure to do less and to fund less of this type of education.”
SMOTHERED ON ALL SIDES
The accreditation commission is an independent body, but it’s been pressured too.
“In the current climate of increased accountability, our regional accrediting associations find that tight spot to be more like a vice,” a commission newsletter said in 2006. “On one side are forces at the national level ready to throw out regional accreditation in favor of a federal approach; while at the local level, they are faced with institutions resistant to rapid change and increased scrutiny.”
In the past year, private entities ponied up thousands of dollars to help usher in a new numbers-based approach to education. In 2011, a 20-member body comprised of public and private representatives was charged with evaluating the community college system.
Called the California Community College Student Success Task Force, its creation was mandated by the state, but to many people it reeked of privatization.
Several private organizations funded the task force’s work, including the Lumina Foundation, an educational research and grant-making institution with ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a controversial lobbying group for private interests that authored the Stand Your Ground gun law.
By fall 2011, students, faculty, and administrators across the state began to question the task force’s methods and recommendations, which initially included proposals to cut many non-credit and enrichment courses, restrict financial aid, prioritize transfer students, and cap the number of units one person could take.
Under the veil of increasing so-called “student success,” the task force was asking schools to prioritize limited funds and change their missions to once again become “junior” colleges — a fate that City College has refused to accept.
City College’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution in November 2011 opposing the task force, nearly unanimously, with Ngo the sole dissenting vote. Then-Chancellor Don Griffin warned that the task force’s agenda was a transparent attack on open access that would disproportionately affect poor people and people of color, imploring the board to reject its recommendations.
“They’re talking about taking over the vehicle of community colleges and turning it into something else,” Griffin said. “We have to take a hard stand because everybody around the state is watching City College of San Francisco.”
Students and faculty at City College joined the fight. They spoke out at Board of Governors meetings in Sacramento. They wrote letters, emails, and scathing editorials. The school’s student-run school newspaper, The Guardsman, led a statewide campaign opposing the task force.
Despite the public’s concerns, the California Community Colleges Board of Governors adopted the task force’s final report in January.
“As wonderful as open admissions is, if it’s a false promise to an objective, it fails,” Peter MacDougall, Board of Governors member and task force chair, said at the January meeting.
“Our objective is to have that promise realized, that’s what the recommendations are intended to achieve.”
Ultimately, the initiative succeeded, shifting priority enrollment to students who are freshly in the college system. The Task Force report is now Senate Bill 1456, sponsored by Sen. Alan Lowenthal and commonly known as the Student Success Act of 2012.
AHEAD OF THE PACK
As everyone waits with crossed fingers hoping for a favorable outcome at the ballot in November, City College officials are fighting keep the school open.
“Do we alter our mission slightly, or fundamentally? It’s not clear yet what we’re going to do,” Ngo said.
The trustees have until October to present the commission with a plan and then until March to prove they can achieve it. In the meantime, the commission requires that preparations be made for potential closure, which Interim Chancellor Pamila Fisher and other CCSF officials say won’t happen.
Only two other community colleges received a “show cause” order this year: College of the Redwoods and Cuesta College. Yet as of January, 25 percent of California’s community colleges are under sanctions, according to the accreditation commission documents.
Federal funding hinges on the certification and other educational institutions, such as the University of California and the California State University systems, only accept transfer credits from other accredited institutions.
Everyone seems to agree that City College is too big to fail — with more than 90,000 students, it’s the largest community college in the nation — but how it will look and operate in the future remains unknown.
City College already cut dozens of classes this year — including many with students already enrolled after the spring semester began. But City College isn’t alone in its plight.
Santa Monica Community College caused an uproar earlier this year when it proposed charging more for popular classes. As of July 1, classes cost $46 per unit but under Santa Monica’s proposal students would pay $180 per unit for courses in high demand.
When students protested this two-tiered payment system in April, police pepper-sprayed them, just five months after UC Davis students received the same brutal treatment for holding a non-violent Occupy-style action against their own tuition hikes.
“What we see is a move towards privatization, in the sense that we are now expecting students to pay a larger share of the cost,” Plank said. “Over certainly the last 40 years, California has been steadily disinvesting in post secondary education.” Whether tuition increases at the CSUs and UCs in the near future depends on whether voters approve Brown’s tax proposal this November. City College’s financial future hinges not only on the governor’s tax proposal, but a local parcel tax initiative as well. City College needs both to pass in November just to break even. “A lot of San Francisco’s workforce is educated at City College,” City College board member Chris Jackson said, adding that for poor and working class people, it’s the only affordable option. In addition, as veterans return from foreign conflicts, ex-offenders are released from prison and enrollment capped at the state universities, Jackson said, “We need local investment in City College.”
By the horns
marke@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO So much glitterbong unihorny tres magnifiqué this week — let’s get into it:
CHUCK HAMPTON
Fabulous old-school Detroit houser (also known as Gay Marvine) hits up the Housepitality weekly, dropping some glamour on the kids with fellows P-Play and Synthetigers.
Wed/18, 9pm, $5–$10. Icon, 1192 Folsom, SF. www.housepitalitysf.com
SIMON BAKER
Love the impeccably chosen tech-house sounds of this handsome longtime UK favorite. 2011 LP Traces showed he could really pull out the sexy. With Tyrel Williams at the Sound weekly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zorhicY438c
Thu/19, 10pm-3am, $5–$10. Harlot, 46 Minna, SF. www.facebook.com/soundselections
BLAKTONIKS
Gearheads and stardancers, rejoice. Really lovely monthly showcase of live electronic music, Realtime at 222 Hyde, hosts this classic local neo-electrosoul duo who’ll take you on a supranatural audial journey to within. With C. Faith.
Fri/20, 9pm, $5–$10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com
BRENDAN MOELLER
The As You Like It crew host this South African dub-techno hero, who reaches for timelessness but doesn’t forget to take the dance floor with him. With Sassmouth vs. Mossmoss, Jason Kendig, and more. (Don’t miss obligatory insane afterparty at 6am at 222 Hyde.)
Fri 20, 9pm-4am, $10–$20. Beatbox, 314 11th St., SF. www.ayli-sf.com
LOVEBIRDS
Gorgeously melodic cosmic disco(ish) cutie Basti Doering from Hamburg, aka Lovebirds, widens the vibe of Marques Wyatt’s fantastic Deep monthly, currently hosting an “innovators” series that pairs classic vibes with cutting-edge styles for a super-diverse crowd.
Fri/20, 10pm-4am, $10–$20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com
BALKAN EXTRAVAGANZA
Local trumpet prodigy Will Magid’s World Wide Dance Parties parties are a global blast, and this Romani romp featuring legendary musician Rumen “Sali” Shopov and the Balkan Brass Band will be pure foot-stomping, body-whirling bliss.
Sat/21, 9pm, $15. Cafe Du Nord, 2174 Market, SF. www.tktwb.tw/balkantime
BLOW UP REUNITED
Three months can feel like forever when you’re young and beautiful and partying hard — so yeah, it feels like forever since the wonderfully sophisticated-electro party Blow Up tickled our tailfeathers. Raise your glass, gorgeous, it’s back! With DJ Wool of The Glass, Jeffrey Paradise, Ava Berlin, more.
Sat/21, 10pm-late, $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 fell, SF. www.blowupsf.com
NITIN
Dreamy Torontonian No.19 label founder will come packed with a slew of sophisticated new tech tracks to light your brain on fire at the huge Forward party. With Adnan Sharif, Galen, Star Kommand, more.
Sat/21, 9pm-4am, $10–$20. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.forwardsf.com
VOICES FROM THE LAKE
So incredibly excited to peep intense duo Donato Dozzy and Neel, aka Voices from the Lake, who are everything on the discerning techno connoisseur circuit right now, with a buzzy ambient edge that slices dimensions. This collab between NYC’s excellent Bunker club and our own Gray Area Foundation for the Arts will slay in a heady way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooxO0VaZt9M
Sat/21, 9pm, $10–$25. Monarch, 101 Sixth St., SF. www.monarchsf.com
Personal detectives
cheryl@sfbg.com
SFJFF This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival includes a trio of documentaries inspired by ephemera: hand-scrawled memoirs and journals, decades-old letters, fading photographs, and yellowing newspapers, long-forgotten and crumpled into attics and storage closets.
Dust be damned, for all three filmmakers — Arnon Goldfinger (The Flat), David Fisher (Six Million and One), and Daniel Edelstyn (How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire) — become obsessed with these scraps from the past, and with piecing together their family histories, all of which were studded with tragedy and rarely discussed with younger generations. The task requires the kind of determination that can only be mined from a deeply personal place — and it results in some deeply personal films.
The docs are similar, especially when viewed in the short span of a festival, but Goldfinger’s The Flat is the standout. It begins as the filmmaker’s family descends upon the Tel Aviv apartment of his recently-deceased grandmother, “a bit of a hoarder” who lived to 95 and seemingly never got rid of anything. This includes, as Goldfinger discovers, copies of the Joseph Goebbels-founded newspaper Der Angriff, containing articles about “the Nazi who visited Palestine.” The Nazi was Leopold von Mildenstein, an SS officer with an interest in Zionism. Turns out he made the journey in 1933 with his wife and a Jewish couple named Kurt and Gerda Tuchler — Goldfinger’s grandparents.
Understandably intrigued and more than a little baffled, Goldfinger investigates, finding letters and diary entries that reveal the unlikely traveling companions were close friends, even after World War II. His mother, the Tuchler’s daughter, prefers to “keep the past out,” but curiosity (and the pursuit of a good documentary) presses Goldfinger forward; he visits von Mildenstein’s elderly daughter in Germany, digs through German archives, and unearths even more surprises about his family tree. Broader themes about guilt and denial emerge — post-traumatic coping mechanisms that echo through generations.
Family is a favorite subject for fellow Israeli David Fisher (2000’s Love Inventory). For Six Million and One, he rounds up his brothers and sister for a visit to the Austrian concentration camp where their late father was held as a teen. The elder Fisher recorded his thoughts in a memoir that only David can bear to read. As the siblings engage in the odd pursuit of being tourists in a place of brutality — the film illustrates the town’s changing landscape through eerie, before-and-after photos — their playful arguments escalate into legit psychodrama as the camera rolls and four raw nerves react to their intense emotions.
Interspersed with this journey is David Fisher’s visit with some American veterans who saw unimaginable horrors when they arrived to liberate the camps. It becomes clear that post-traumatic stress doesn’t just affect Jewish families grappling with the after effects of the Holocaust. When Fisher wistfully remarks that his father never spoke about his experiences, an elderly solder tells him, “Maybe you’re better off not having heard the stories.”
Lighter in tone, but with an equally serious back story, is Daniel Edelstyn’s How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, which follows the British filmmaker’s quest to import the vodka made at the Ukrainian factory once owned by his great-grandfather. The disheveled Edelstyn, who admits he has no business experience, pinballs between charming and exasperating as he fumbles through meetings with distributors and dodges hostile locals in his grandmother’s hometown. Despite the film’s title, Edelstyn’s adventures in booze are less compelling than the tale of that grandmother, whose remarkable life is re-enacted with sepia-toned silent film-style clips (starring Edelstyn’s wife, Hilary Powell, who’s also the film’s cinematographer), and miniature animations.
THE MORE YOU KNOW
There’s more for fans of non-narrative cinema, as SFJFF unspools several biopics that also delve into troubled pasts — with significant triumphs along the way. No one embodies this more than Roman Polanski, subject of Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, directed by Laurent Bouzereau and structured as a sit-down conversation with longtime Polanski pal and producer Andrew Braunsberg. If you’re hoping for hardball questions or new information on Polanski’s colorful life, prepare for disappointment; the familiar pillars of the Polanski legend (traumatic childhood growing up as a Polish Jew during World War II; filmmaking success with films like 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1974’s Chinatown; wife Sharon Tate’s gruesome death at the hands of Charles Manson’s followers; and that oh-so-inconvenient sexual assault charge, which came back to haunt him 30 years after the fact) are all covered.
If you’ve read Roman By Polanski, the director’s autobiography, or seen the 2008 doc about his struggle with scandal, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, this is familiar turf. But to hear the celebrated director share his memories in his own voice, encouraged by an interviewer he trusts, is a unique experience.
You won’t hear the spoken voice of passionate, patriotic Yoni Netanyahu, the Israeli commando who died leading the 1976 hostage-rescue mission at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, in Ari Daniel Pinchot and Jonathan Gruber’s Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story. But Netanyahu — adored older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister — was prolific letter-writer, and his words (read by actor Marton Csokas) are an invaluable component of this affectionate portrait. But it’s not all heroic platitudes: Netanyahu, who also fought in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, put the military above everything else, including his marriage.
“I don’t ever remember walking as a young person,” jokes sportscasting great Marty Glickman at the start of James Freedman’s upbeat Glickman. “I always ran. It was just my nature to run.” Though he’s referring to his extraordinary sprinting ability, which got him all the way to the 1936 Olympics (where he was denied the chance for certain glory for Hitler-related reasons), it’s also kind of how he lived his life, attacking bigotry and adversity with sunny side-up resilience. Glickman died in 2001, but his life was well-documented — when he wasn’t making sports history, he was doing the play-by-play for it. As an influential broadcaster (basketball fans: he was the first one to say “Swish!”), there’s no shortage of famous fans willing to weigh in: Bob Costas, Bill Bradley, Jerry Stiller, Jim Brown, and Larry King, who has supremely high praise for Glickman’s skills: “It was like his voice was attached to the ball.”
SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
July 19-August 6, most shows $12
Various Bay Area venues
Melody machers
>>Read Cheryl Eddy’s take on this year’s SFJFF documentaries here.
SFJFF “All greatness comes from pain.” The simple statement comes from Raoul Felder, brother of legendary R&B songwriter Doc Pomus, in the beautiful, crushing mediation on his brother’s life, A.K.A. Doc Pomus, the closing-night film of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Doc wrote some of the greatest music of a generation: R&B and early rock’n’roll standards such as “This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Save the Last Dance For Me,” and “Viva Las Vegas” — songs made famous by the likes of Dion, the Drifters, and Elvis Presley. Jewish, debilitated by polio, and vastly overweight, Doc defied expectations while struggling with a lifetime of outsider status and physical pain.
It’s a subject that runs — albeit in far paler shades — throughout many of the fest’s music-filled documentaries. Defying limitations, strength through struggle, alienation, outsiders looking in; these all come up again and again. Tsuris to nachas, struggle to get to joy. All that plays out in the films, along with wildly varying (R&B, hip-hop, classical old world violin, 1990s-era Australian grunge pop) and vibrant music created by the subjects.
In Y-Love, about the gay, formerly Hasidic (still Orthodox) black Jewish rapper, these themes of isolation persist, almost painfully so. Having just come out during the year of filming, Y-Love seems to be smack dab in the midst of his struggle, and not yet capable of showing it all to the cameras following him through performances in Israel, his childhood neighborhood in Baltimore, and a New York recording studio. Most of these scenes are a bit long, focusing intently on Y-Love’s furrowed brow as he talks in great detail about the past without revealing much about how it’s affecting him now.
That’s not to say he hasn’t achieved something notable — we see that part. Y-Love does have followers, his records are starting to gain some traction, his YouTube videos have plenty of hits. He’s an anomaly in the communities he’s chosen (Judaism, the hip-hop scene), and owes his burgeoning artist status to this. He defied an agonizing childhood with an alcoholic, drug-addicted mother by turning to Judaism — a religion he first heard of in a TV commercial, a story he mentions in most interviews — and using word flow to study Torah.
On the other side of the world, and from an entirely different generation, there’s Jascha Heifetz, the gifted subject of God’s Fiddler. Growing up in rural Russia in the early part of the last century (he passed away in 1987), he was attached to the violin nearly since birth — a voice-over tells the story of Heifetz as a baby being soothed by the instrument’s sound — and a prodigy by age 5. Heifetz struggled with a demanding father and rising anti-Semitism, and had to fight to live in Saint Petersburg: the city had a quota for the amount of Jews allowed within its limits, not to mention the amount of Jews allowed to study at its prestigious music conservatory. But his eventual international attention and success led to a period of rebellion; negative reviews led the wunderkind to contemplate suicide. Emerging from the darkness, he re-focused on his instrument — but never again smiled while playing.
Though Ben Lee was born in Sydney, Australia some 77 years later, his musical journey — traced in fun, frenzied, colorful doc Ben Lee: Catch My Disease — mirrors Heifetz’s in certain ways. His first bout with fame also came at an early age, as a precocious tween in ’93 with his band Noise Addict. He went on to achieve higher levels of attention as a solo artist, steadily releasing poppier albums throughout the late ’90s and early ’00s, but never again reached as wide an audience outside of Oz (where he is a bona fide superstar).
Catch My Disease features interviews with ’90s mainstays and enduring entertainers like Thurston Moore (who discovered Lee as a child), Beastie Boy Mike D (who signed him to Grand Royal), actor Winona Ryder, and former girlfriend Claire Danes; Lee emerges as a well-rounded, exuberantly talented musician, always chasing a seemingly unattainable level of success.
SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
July 19-August 6, most shows $12
Various Bay Area venues
They want to believe
emilysavage@sfbg.com
MUSIC Grass Widow nicknamed the city it calls home “Planet San Francisco.” As in, the city is removed from elsewhere, it has its own humming, insular ecosystem. An inhabitable planet all its own that happens to be attached to the rest of the state and country.
The post-punk trio — bassist Hannah Lew, guitarist Raven Mahon, and drummer Lillian Maring — with lush harmonies and no frontperson used both this foggy city of ours and the unknown planets in the sky above as fodder for the electrifying new full-length, Internal Logic.
The album, which gets a proper release party this week at the Rickshaw Stop, was written and recorded in brief spurts over the course of a year, while Lew worked at Lost Weekend video store in the Mission, woodworker Mahon built things in Mendocino County, and Maring served up lattes in an Oakland cafe while writing about fairies for local blog FairyRoom.
Internal Logic is a title derived from the band’s own internal musical logic along with a phrase written by Tobi Vail after Grass Widow’s 2010 record, the bleak and beautiful Past Time, which was released on Kill Rock Stars. In the review, Vail writes, “Grass Widow are like The Raincoats or The Minutemen or even The Melvins in method, meaning they create their own formalistic, aesthetic universe with its own internal logic.” It stuck.
And this time, the trio is did it without a label — releasing Internal Logic on their own newly formed HLR Records. “It’s really just an extension of what we’ve been doing, we’ve always been really hands-on with all our business,” says Lew during her lunch break. “Also, we were just really proud of the record, almost proud enough that we were like, ‘we can’t share this glory with anybody.'” She laughs, recognizing this as a bold statement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJazD46uvA
However audacious, it makes sense. The record is complex, angular, melodic, supernatural; both based in pop and roaring with the underpinned ethos of punk. It rears its head from moody rocker “Disappearing Industries” to tranquil, wordless shepherd “A Light in the Static.”
Those delicious harmonies swell on SF-meets-outer space track “Spock on Muni,” and again on single “Goldliocks Zone.” Like many of the songs on Internal Logic, “Goldilocks Zone” is about the possibility of life on other planets, along with hopeful personal mythologies and sci-fi parables. Lew discovered the zone that became the inspiration for the song through basic keystrokes.
“Sometimes when I’m feeling down I’ll go online and check what NASA’s doing. I follow them on Twitter. It just, for some reason, makes me feel hopeful when there are things out there that people are doing that make me feel like an ant.”
She learned that afternoon about the Goldilocks Zone, essentially, a habitable zone. Like the fairytale, the environment in said zone is just right to host life.
She says the words to that track have been the most jumbled by the press. “We’re saying ‘just right,’ but people think we’re saying ‘just drive!’ or something really aggressive. There are so few words, it’s just: stood/looking at the sky/I wanted to find your whole life/I don’t know you/just right,” she says. “It’s just about that moment of wonderment — looking up at the sky and not knowing what’s out there, but knowing there’s a huge possibility that there is something, there’s a zone that is inhabitable for life.”
While the hopeful cosmic pining is most prominent on the record, one track is about something else entirely, something I even hesitate to bring up, though it’s indeed a part of the puzzle. “Advice” is both about the weird dynamics of the industry, and the absolutely unwarranted advice so often thrust upon women by male sound guys, guitar techs, Guitar Center employees. “On a night when a douchey sound guy is starting to ruin our mood for a show, we have that song and we just sing it, and it’s like a nod to each other.”
Which brings us to another unfortunate side effect — the bullshit, rape-referencing frat boy review of the new album that focused solely on gender. “It was shocking that they published that, but then again, it wasn’t, because in a lot of ways I think [that publication] is an icon for the apathetic years we’re in right now, shock value, this post-PC kind of thing where they’re playing on the idea that people are going to read what they write and be self-conscious about giving a shit about anything.”
Grass Widow, however, does give a shit about something — about making something memorable, about the band as a family, about creating an alternate universe with music.
The mostly celebratory — and celebrated — Internal Logic was released the same day the band began a summer tour in early June. “It was pretty affirming,” Lew says of the tour. “We even had a couple groups of girls be like, ‘we started a band because of you.’ I’m dying to hear those bands.” *
GRASS WIDOW
With American Splits, Wax Idols, the Worlds Longest Guitar Solo with Breaks
Fri/20, 9pm, $10–$12
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
(415) 861-2011
Lunch hour
arts@sfbg.com
MUSIC What’s your idea of a productive lunch break? Mine involves returning a failed online shopping purchase to FedEx with just enough time to grab a sandwich to shove into my face back at my desk.
DJ Matt Haze, of the Slayers Club collective, hates this. “A lot of my friends work in the tech industry or in finance,” he explains. “Even though they’re eating a nice gourmet lunch, they’re eating it at their desks. They’re not taking a moment to breathe or take their eyes off the monitor… I want to provide an outlet for people during the day.”
That outlet is RECESS, a new monthly (for now) midday party Haze is organizing with Sunset Promotions. The goal: to get as many young, San Francisco office workers to take full advantage of that magical allotted free hour during their day by getting sweaty with like-minded PYTs on the dance floor.
The daytime lunch party idea isn’t entirely new. The Swedes have been doing it with wild success since 2010, under the name Lunch Beat, but Matt is quick to point out that his idea for RECESS came independently. He first shared the idea of a lunchtime party with friend and Scoutmob Community Manager Lauryn McCarthy.
She was the one who told him about the Lunch Beat phenomenon, which he credits for motivating him to make RECESS a reality. “I was spurred into action,” he says, “knowing that someone else had a similar idea and was making it work in Europe. I thought if any city in the US should have a lunchtime dance party, surely it’s San Francisco.”
Surely indeed. Last week, my coworker and I headed to the RECESS launch party (NOTE: future installments will be dubbed bEATs for Lunch out of respect to an already-existing Oakland Recess party that was just brought to the organizers’ attention).
That kickoff event was held at Monarch, a club at the lively intersection of Sixth and Mission Streets.
We passed a small crowd standing on the side of the Monarch building, eating sandwiches in the sunshine (RECESS provided free, vegetarian sandwiches from Ike’s to the crowd, but we were too late to snag a bite — alas, they looked pretty good).
With our IDs checked, we headed into the small bar and lounge area. Less than 10 people were scattered around the bar and a few couches, chatting and eating. House music bumped from the basement. I wondered if the dance floor was experiencing the same sparse attendance.
We ventured toward the music, passing two sweaty girls who were laughing and fanning their faces on their way up. I was shocked when we hit the basement.
Here was the party. Not the daytime awkward-fest I’d been imaging. It was a party-party with club lighting and projectors splashing trippy footage of abstract art and bare boobs and squiggly lines across the walls. Haze was dancing behind his turntables, spinning an electrifying set of house music mixed with the likes of Depeche Mode and eclectic world music.
And because everyone was coming from work, they were dressed casually. No guys in shiny button-down shirts or girls with torture-devices strapped to their feet.
The vibe was fun, inclusive, and warm. Maybe because we were all doing something a bit out of the norm, everyone was smiling and jumping, laughing and making real eye contact with each other. It was a genuinely positive atmosphere without dreaded pretension.
My coworker and I stayed for 45 minutes. We pounded a drink at the bar — this is another way the SF event differs from the strictly non-alcohol-offering Lunch Beat — and danced with abandon. People began trickling out around 1:45pm.
Back at the office, I was noticeably less tense and in a fantastic mood. It’s hard to pinpoint why RECESS feels so exciting and illicit. Yes, you’re sneaking off to a club in the middle of the workday, but it’s your lunch break. No broken rules there. Still, there’s a rush that comes with using that time to do something just for you.
The next bEATs for Lunch (formerly RECESS) will take place Aug. 8 at Monarch.
Retro future
arts@sfbg.com
MUSIC The sad truth of dance music is that the party necessarily ends. Tailor a song too much for the floor tonight and it’s lifeless on the street or in the car tomorrow. Factor in the conflation between EDM and electronic music, and the latter can be all too often stuck in the shadow of the club. With his latest solo album, Salton Sea, Danish music producer Tomas Barfod steps out into new territory.
Barfod — a.k.a. Tomboy, also the drummer for electro-rock act WhoMadeWho — has worked on more projects than I could count: producing, running a label, booking Copenhagen’s Distortion festival, and lots of DJing. But tired of nonstop club performances, he recently decided to refocus and moved to LA “It was about getting away from doing gigs and focusing on studio work, that was the main goal of going away,” Barfod said. “But also to start from zero in a totally different — and awesome — environment.”
This environment allowed Barfod to work with Leeor Brown’s burgeoning label Friends of Friends, home of talented producers including Shlohmo, Salva, and Groundislava. “I’ve always had a vision about where I wanted my career to go, and almost always ended there, but never on the path that I expected,” Barfod says. Working with FoF has been an unexpected path. “It started when MySpace was almost dead. I hardly ever checked my messages, but I got one from Leeor. It took us a couple of years to really figure out how to work together, but when I moved to LA there was no question that we should do an album.”
The result is Salton Sea, named after the California lake area that’s now largely an abandoned wasteland. (Imagine the post-apocalyptic setting for a Fallout video game or Mad Max movie.) In the early 1900s, an engineering accident flooded the area and created a lake that was for a few decades rebranded as a utopian resort town.
One track on the album recalls this, consisting of a single repeated lyric: “everybody came to party.” An ecstatic house track? A hedonistic rager anthem? Barfod affects another mood entirely. The voice is robotic, with zero emotion, over a brooding four to the floor bass beat. The lyric is a statement that begs a question: and then what happened?
Saline levels rose. Water became polluted. Fish became infected with botulism and washed up on the beach. In the case of the Salton Sea, the past returned, the party was over, the people left.
Barfod describes himself as a “retro-romantic” for “places where nothing has been touched for ages. It doesn’t need to be pretty, as long as it tells a story about the past.” He was working on music and collecting pictures of abandoned places and things — ships being cut up in India at Alang Beach; empty offices in Detroit — so when Leeor told him about the Salton Sea it was a natural fit. “It’s a really special place,” Barfod says, “the lake is kind of timeless.”
Similarly timeless is Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic set against an environmental dystopia. Not wanting to be too influenced by new music, Barfod cites the film, particularly Vangelis’s soundtrack, as something he listened to a lot while making Salton Sea. Its stamp is there, beginning with the racing arpeggio and slow synth chord progressions that open the album on “D.S.O.Y.”
But the influence is beyond references. A video posted by Barfod shows visual designer Syd Mead discussing minute details like parking meters as he creates the futuristic world of Blade Runner. Key to the aesthetic is building on existing layers so that buildings use ceiling fans in an era of flying cars, and a geneticist can create artificial humans but wears coke bottle glasses. It’s a regressive sort of futurism, but ages surprisingly well.
Listening to Barfod there’s a sense of wanting to make something that sounds good now, but will last. “I think it’s very hard to make something timeless. However my way of trying is that I tend to use analog sounds in my drums and synths, and acoustic instruments so it sounds somewhat retro, but on the other hand I use a lot of computer generated effects that are new and almost futuristic. I don’t know if it makes my music timeless but I like it like that.”
The lesson of the Salton Sea is that the future can’t escape the past. The lesson of Blade Runner is that the future can’t escape the past. Tomas Barfod is in a new home, with new collaborators, and a new label, but at the same time it’s not a complete break. (Among the new voices on Salton Sea is his WhoMadeWho bandmate, Jeppe Kjellberg. When we exchanged emails Barfod was back in Europe for gigs.) While he’s moving into the future, Barfod has his eyes and ears on the past.
FORWARD WITH NITIN, TOMAS BARFOD, ADNAN SHARIF, AND MORE
Sat/21, 9pm, $15–$20
Public Works
161 Erie, SF (415) 932-0955
Asylum seekers
arts@sfbg.com
THEATER From Broadway blockbuster Les Misérables (at the Orpheum) to offbeat courtly lounge act Her Rebel Highness (at Harlot), 18th-century radical postures are enjoying an unexpected vogue at the moment — as anachronistic and bracing as a pinch of snuff. But let the truly adventurous eat Marat/Sade. In what may be the year’s most felicitous blend of company, producer, and material, Thrillpeddlers and Marc Huestis offer an exuberant, exquisitely trashy, and note-perfect revival of Peter Weiss’s radical 1963 play, permeating the enormous Brava Theatre with an infectious delirium perfectly in sync with restive times.
Helmed with operatic flourishes and insouciant humor by artistic director Russell Blackwood, Marat/Sade unfolds meticulously and vibrantly across an imposing pasteboard set (by James Blackwood) that aptly looks something like a sprawling lavatory with enormous glory holes, covered over in political graffiti (from “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” to “Ayn Rand fucks you”). Whatever debt it owes to the original legendary production (staged by Peter Brook for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and made into a film in 1967), this Marat/Sade is fully inhabited by the raucous libertine spirit and Grand Guignol aesthetic of Blackwood’s adventurous company and its artistic confreres — including former Cockettes Scrumbly Koldewyn (the show’s astute musical director and pianist) and Rumi Missabu (who excels as the straightjacketed and wild-eyed Jacques Roux, radical upstart priest of the French Revolution).
The play’s full title — The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade — pretty much says it all, plot-wise. The date is July 13, 1808, 15 years to the day after Girondist partisan Charlotte Corday stabbed Jacobin leader Marat to death as he soaked in his bath. The French Revolution, having since lost many more lives in a tidal wave of bloodshed, has succumbed to Napoleon and the return of the old guard, wrapping themselves in the mantle of 1789. A skeptical, revolution-weary but ever defiant Sade (rivetingly personified by a darkly charming Jeff Garrett) has been granted permission to perform his play in the institution’s bathhouse. There the asylum’s director, quintessential bourgeois twit Coulmier (a comically wound yet nicely restrained Brian Trybom), watches the performance with wife (Lisa Appleyard) and daughter (Carina Lastimosa Salazar), intervening now and then to protest feebly Sade’s reinsertion of some previously censored lines.
Sade (once a real-life inmate at Charenton) meanwhile leads his variously deranged cast in a reenactment of the death of the Jacobin leader. The “actors” (or “patients” to Director Coulmier and his regime of mental hygiene) are made up of political dissenters, social deviants, the desperately poor, the disempowered, the mentally ill — the lines blur pointedly here.
This play-within-the-play unfolds like a comically unhinged historical pageant, with bursts of anarchic energy, high political debate, and low provocation — all amid excellent renderings of composer Richard Peaslee’s wonderfully serrated songs (backed by Koldewyn, Victoria Fraser, Eden Neuendorf, and Birdie-Bob Watt on a mix of keyboard, percussion, brass and wind instruments). Marat (played with a biting intensity by a fine Aaron Malberg) argues with Sade while soaking continually in a bath to assuage the fever and itching from a debilitating skin disease, his wounds attended to by spouse Simonne Evrard (a sure Kära Emry).
Before he dies, Marat suffers three separate visits by Corday (played by a delicately incandescent Bonni Suval, as a narcoleptic and melancholic beauty with volcanic depths). But the real purpose of this thin plotline is the airing of competing viewpoints on the nature of revolution, freedom, power, individuality, social solidarity, authority, and (more implicitly) art’s role as a site of radical alternatives.
To this end, the large and able cast has its say in song and other outbursts, variously hysterical, macabre, louche, and chilling. But the preeminent voices are Sade, Marat, Corday, and Roux — all of whom attack, from competing angles, the problem of resistance in the modern age, where bureaucratic class-rule comes in the name of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, and other terms appropriated by the modern state.
Effortlessly recalling recent popular uprisings across a shuddering planet, these archetypal voices of dissent sound as alive as ever in Weiss’s eloquent dialogue — an iridescent mix of the philosophical, poetical, and scatological. As the cast belts out for a final time the show’s blunt refrain, “We want our revolution now!”, the actors spill over the stage and the inmates take over the asylum, enveloping the audience in a coup d’état that is simultaneously a coup de theatre, and a thoroughly carnivalesque upending of norms. It’s enough to make you lose your head.
MARAT/SADE
Through July 29
Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (also Sun/22, 1:30pm), $20-$38
Brava Theatre
2781 24th St, SF
(415) 863-0611