Volume 46 [2011–12]

After the raid

Andrew Lam
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1
After the raid

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE It is exceedingly difficult to get Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee to talk about himself. I have him — the person who drove the Proposition 19 legalization campaign, whose house and cannabis trade school were raided by federal agents in April, who through his businesses’ success has helped revitalize and make safe a previously gloomy stretch of downtown Oakland — on the phone to talk about the lifetime achievement award he will be receiving from High Times at this week’s Cannabis Cup (Sat/23-Sun/24).

I want him to share his emotional journey since government agents poured into his home, what’s it’s like to be the public face of the flashpoint between California and national government over marijuana. High Times editorial director Malcolm MacKinnon calls Lee a “fearless trailblazer,” perhaps he’d like to make grand predictions about the future of pot? At least describe exactly what’s happening with Oaksterdam, post-raid. But Lee prefers to stress the latest poll numbers on legalization.

“All the national polls and the Colorado polls are going our way,” he says. “If you could get the word out about that, that’d be great.” FYI, on June 6 Rasmussen Reports found that 61 percent of Coloradoans support regulating cannabis like alcohol and cigarettes.

Lee has retired from university administration — he’s referred to as a professor emeritus, although he is still teaching classes in cannabis policy, history, and advocacy. In his “big Converse All-Stars” (as she calls them) now stands Dale Sky Jones. She once developed Oaksterdam’s curriculum and now joins a short list of female leaders in the marijuana industry as the university’s president.

“When the federal government came in, they took the curriculum, the computers — everything else that was the blood and breathe, heart and soul of the school short of the tables and chairs and teachers,” Jones says in a phone interview. Under her watch, the finances of “top-heavy” Oaksterdam’s gift shop, dispensary, and university have split and are now under separate ownership. Staff is attempting to rebuild curriculum from email records. 45 employees have lost their job because of the disruption in business affairs. “This was a violation on so many levels for the staff of Oaksterdam,” Jones says, sadly.

But life goes on. Lee says his “students are great, they have lots of energy and enthusiasm.” And the cultural contributions that the school and its founder have hardly been negated by federal intervention. “[Lee] brought the debate about marijuana policy reform to the kitchen table,” says Jones. “Before Prop. 19, the only time parents and kids had conversations around marijuana it was ‘where the hell did you find it? who are your jackass friends?’ It was always a negative discussion. This was the first time that families were able to discuss marijuana as a policy issue.”

This weekend’s Cannabis Cup will bring the pot world’s focus back here, as some of NorCal’s [author’s note: and hence, the world’s] best strains compete for the title of best indica, sativa, edibles, etc. Lee’s lifetime achievement award (presented at 7pm on Sun/24) will just confirm what we all already knew: even when it comes to activists, we grow things better out here.

HIGH TIMES CANNABIS CUP

Sat/23 noon-10pm, Sun/24 noon-9:30pm; one-day pass $40, two-day pass $65 advance, $80 at door

Craneway Pavilion

1414 Harbour Way, Richmond

www.medcancup.com

Apocalypse meh

Andrew Lam
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0
Apocalypse meh

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Being a movie star is a precarious business. It seemed very good news when The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) made Steve Carell one after years of very good work as a sketch comedian and supporting player (and with years of The Office to come). He was smart, funny, personable, and versatile. But Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and the animated Despicable Me (2010) aside, movies have been trying to pound his round peg into a square hole ever since. Evan Almighty (2007), Dan in Real Life (2007), Get Smart (2008), Date Night (2010), Dinner for Schmucks (2010), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) — there are worse lists (see: Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler), but each failed him and its audience in some way. At this point he seems just a few more flops away from re-entering the network sitcom world.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World won’t help. A first directorial feature for Lorene Scafaria, who’d previously written Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008) — another movie dubiously convinced that sharing its Desert Island Discs equals soulfulness — it’s an earnest stab at something different that isn’t different enough.

Specifically, it’s a little too similar in premise to the 1998 Canadian Last Night (which wasn’t all that hot, either). But the problem is more that Scafaria’s film isn’t anything enough — funny, pointed, insightful, surprising, whatever. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), for all its faults, ended the world with a bang. This is the whimper version.

An asteroid is heading smack toward Earth; we are fucked. News of this certainty prompts the wife of insurance company rep Dodge Peterson (Carell) to walk out — suggesting that with just days left in our collective existence, she would rather spend that time with somebody, anybody, else. A born self-defeatist, he accepts this rejection as proof of total failure in life. So while the multitudes go nuts with apocalyptic fervor — partying, fucking, weeping, etc. — he anticipates quietly crawling toward the hereafter on a business-as-usual schedule.

Public hysteria turns from giddy to violent, however, and rioting vandals force Dodge to flee his apartment building. By now, however, he has acquired two strays: A mutt he names Sorry (after the terse note its owner left in surrendering custody) and professedly “flaky, irresponsible” neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley), who’s just broken up with her useless boyfriend (Adam Brody) and missed the last available planes to England, where her family lives. She decides she must reunite Dodge with the long-ago love of his life — an event that could have happened months ago, had the mail carrier not delivered that woman’s flame-rekindling letter by mistake to Penny’s mailbox, and if she hadn’t simply forgotten to slip it under his door.

Thus ensues a tepid road-trip dramedy of episodic encounters with interesting actors — William Petersen, Martin Sheen — primed to shine in better material than they get. (One fresh if hardly slam-dunk sequence has comedian T.J. Miller as the host at Friendly’s, a chain restaurant where “everyone’s your friend,” perhaps because its orgiastically inclined staff seems to be “rolling pretty hard” on Ecstasy.) Needless to say, however, Carell and Knightley’s odd couple connects en route.

Except they don’t, in the chemistry terms that this halfway adventurous, halfway flatlined film ultimately, completely depends upon. Carell’s usual nuanced underplaying has no context to play within — Dodge is a loser because he’s … what? Too nice? Too passive? Has obnoxious friends (played early on by, in ascending order of humiliation, Rob Corddry, Patton Oswalt, Connie Britton, and Melanie Lynskey)?

His character’s angst attributable to almost nothing, Carell has little to play here but the same put-upon nice guy he’s already done and done again. So he surrenders the movie to Knightley, who exercises rote “quirky girl” mannerisms to an obsessive-compulsive degree, her eyes alone overacting so hard it’s like they’re doing hot yoga on amphetamines. It’s the kind of role, conceived to be dithering-helpless-eccentric-charming, that too often plays instead as annoying. Knightley makes it really annoying. She’s certainly been capable before — and might yet be in Joe Wright’s forthcoming Anna Karenina, scripted by Tom Stoppard. Here she’s so forcedly over-agitated she sucks life from scenes in which she never seems to be acting with fellow cast-members, but rather with line-feeders or a video monitor. It’s an empty, showy performance whose neurotically artificial character one can only imagine a naturally reserved man like Dodge would flee from.

That we’re supposed to believe otherwise stunts Scafaria’s parting exhale of pure girly romanticism — admirable for its wish-fulfillment sweetness, lamentable for the extent that good actors in two-dimensional roles can’t turn passionate language into emotion we believe in.

 

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

Homebodies

Andrew Lam
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0
Homebodies

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Anyone who watches dance — and perhaps any of the other arts — over a period of time will experience the excitement of discovery for one of two primary reasons. Proven choreographers may come up with fresh perspectives on who they are and what drives them. The voice may be familiar, but the intonation is new. Or you can have a first encounter with an artist who pushes you right to the edge of your seat — the work’s ingredients are good, but it’s the way they interlock or bounce off each other that makes you look forward to what else this person will come up with in the future.

Such was the case with Nicole Klaymoon, who founded her Embodiment Project company in 2009. For her latest project, House of Matter (performed at Dance Mission Theater June 8-10), she collaborated with jazz singer Valerie Troutt and her vocal ensemble, also founded in 2009. The result was one of the most rocking, joyous dance theater pieces that have hit the town in a long time.

Jamie Tracey’s multi-level panels, perhaps inspired by calligraphy, however, were not up to par; the set design was a weak link. Klaymoon is a writer, social activist, poet, performer, and dancer who grounds her choreography in modern and “urban” (read: hip-hop) styles. Troutt, who created House‘s musical universe, calls what she does house music, though to my ears it sounded more jazz and soul-influenced. Dance-y, however, it is.

“The body as our home” is one of those post-structuralist tropes that academia has bequeathed on us. In her opening spoken and danced monologue about “wanting to let you in” but not daring to do so, Klaymoon didn’t push it. The image of the house did set the tone — not for a series of narratives, but stories nonetheless. Jennifer “JenAy” Anolin and Rama Mahesh Hall longingly yanked and confronted each and yet separated. Ndubuisi Madu, rooted in place, popped so violently it seemed his limbs might fall off. When during Solas B. Lalgee’s ecstatic vocal solo he embraced Assad Conley, the moment was both grand and intimate. I can’t pretend to have followed the details of Troutt’s song cycle, which started with “Make Me Ovah” and ended with “Peace Lives Here,” but House‘s trajectory from tension to reconciliation flowed seamlessly.

The finale looked a bit too protracted and flirted with sentimentality. But there was something so grand and operatic about this house that became a home that I couldn’t help but feeling pulled in.

 

GOODE BUT NOT GREAT

Joe Goode has used the image of the body as a home — the only one we have — in many of his dances. In his latest, the house literally collapses on top of him. It’s a rickety, unstable lattice structure that is the visual focal point of the hour-long When We Fall Apart. Putting a libretto together from inquiries among acquaintances, Goode paints a multi-hued portrait of the dashed hopes and failed expectations that come with living. Looking around the audience, with just about every seat having a nametag on it, I couldn’t help but think but how many patrons could identify with those voices.

Goode’s ability to shed skins with but a few props kept me gasping and laughing at the same time. His splendily versatile dancers, with choreography in which they reached and stretched towards each other and some invisible goals on the ground and above, amplified the sense of life as inherently unstable. At one point they surrounded Goode as characters from his dreams. The scene looked like a merry-go-round. These days, performers Melecio Estrella and Damara Vita Ganley also shine vocally.

Still, with all its charm, wit and theatrical skill, Fall struck me as ultimately facile; its plaintive tune didn’t ring as true as others I have heard from Goode. *

‘WHEN WE FALL APART’

Through June 30

Wed.-Sat., 7pm (also Fri.-Sat., 9pm), $25-$35

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

www.joegoode.org

 

Are we real?

Andrew Lam
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1

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I took a cab from the airport to the football game and changed in the back seat without (I don’t think) leaving anything behind, not even the big bag of smaller bags of airline pretzels. Which came in handy because it was a 6:30 kickoff — an awkward time, whether you’re coming from work, like my teammates, or across the country.

How I came to come by said bag of bags of airline pretzels for entirely free is a restaurant review unto itself, starring a five-year-old girl named Shaya. She got on the plane in Los Angeles with a big bald doll named Jacob, a small Dora the Explorer backpack, and a clipped-on ticket.

“Are you my babysitter?” she said to the stewardessperson, who, as it happens, was standing right next to me while I waited to use the bathroom.

Seatwise, I’d just leapfrogged to an aisle seat in the front of the plane, which you can do on Southwest when it stops to re-passenger.

While I was in the bathroom, the stewardessperson ushered little Shaya to the window seat of my row. When I came out, she apologized. As if!!! “I hope you weren’t planning on having a quiet flight,” she said.

What she couldn’t have known: that I had just said goodbye to two of the many little loves of my life, age 4 and 5, and wasn’t going to see them for one more month, if ever, because — as you know — I have a horrible fear of flying. Every time I step in an airplane I have to assume I am climbing into my tomb.

What neurotic nutcases like me need most in life is a sense of purpose, and here was mine, the moment I’d been waiting for, my “is there a babysitter on board” moment.

“No worries,” I said to the stewardessperson. “I’m a pro.” And I moved my stuff from the aisle seat to the middle one, right next to the girl and her doll so that no one could possibly come between us.

“Is this his first time flying?” I asked, indicating the doll.

“This is my little brother. His name is Jacob. I didn’t have him last time, but mama got him for me. His eyes close when he lays down,” she said. “See?”

I did, and said so.

She leaned toward me conspiratorially and whispered over his head: “He’s not real.”

I whispered back: “Are we?”

She laughed and we introduced ourselves. She was on her way to her dad’s for the summer. Her dad had a new house. She was going to go swimming. I showed her pictures of the Chunks de la Cooter and told her how old they were, and she told me how old she was: Five, like I said. Almost six.

We were hitting it off. Then she got very thoughtful. “I feel awkward,” she said.

“Why?”

“I like you, but my mom told me not to talk to strangers.”

I got a little thoughtful myself. I thought: uh-oh. Was I encouraging unhealthy behavior in a five-going-on-six-year-old?

“Your mom is right,” I said. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers. But the person sitting next to you on an airplane, for as long as you are on that plane, is not a stranger. She is your airplane-only friend.”

This seemed to set Shaya’s mind at ease. In any case, she offered me a Chicken McNugget.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m still full from last night.” (Comal, the trendy new downtown Berkeley joint with the fancy noise-reduction sound system and way overpriced, way underimpressive food, immediately after which I needed a snack at Phil’s next door: a completely awesome bacon cheeseburger slider with homemade tater tots and my favorite cookie ever, which was essentially a homemade Oreo. Ohmigod, new favorite restaurant ever!)

“What did you eat?” my airplane-only friend Shaya asked.

“Long story,” I said.

After we landed she looked up at me and said, out of the blue: “I was brave.”

“Me too,” I said. “Thank you.”

And the stewardessperson gave me pretzels.

PHIL’S SLIDERS

Sun-Wed 11am-9pm; Thu-Sat 11am-midnight

2024 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-5060

www.philssliders.com

AE,D,MC,V

Beer and wine

That’s amore

Andrew Lam
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1
That’s amore

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE After moving from Southern California to New Jersey at age 14, I learned what a true city was when I discovered New York City. Whenever in that New York state of mind, I miss its boundless energy, frank people, eclectic neighborhoods, and, yes, East Coast-style Italian. I reminisce about family dinners filling up on mountains of cheese, doughy pasta, and impeccable red sauce — which, to achieve perfection, should exhibit both sweet and savory notes. In both NYC and NJ, it was often perfect. (I miss you, Cafe L’Amore).

It can be challenging getting my red sauce Italian fix here. I crave old school, heartwarming places, whether drinking a Manhattan in the brilliant time capsule of Joe’s of Westlake, dining on Gaspare’s “real deal” lasagna, Mozzeria’s oozing, baked mozzarella, or a plate of my beloved guanciale (pig jowl bacon) and garlic-heavy spaghetti alla matriciana at Ristorante Marcello. Enter Original Joe’s, a reborn San Francisco classic appealing to a blessedly broad demographic, satisfying East Coast cravings.

You couldn’t be blamed for initially assuming the sizable Original Joe’s off North Beach’s idyllic Washington Square Park is a tourist destination or primarily for older clientele. There is a more mature set dining here, a factor I welcome and at times seek out intentionally. But families, couples, residents, and tourists alike mingle in this new home for a restaurant founded here in 1937, yet closed since a 2007 fire at its Tenderloin location. Though impossible to replicate the original locale’s dive-y 1970s charm, the new space feels more old school NYC than modern-day tourist trap. Roomy red leather booths and a tuxedoed waitstaff immediately comfort.

The food surprises with an amped-up dose of quality compared to the old days on Taylor. A market price crab cocktail is expensive at $25 but the crab is clean and plentiful. A daily special of fresh burrata and Spring pea salad could have come from any current SF restaurant. Joe’s Italian chopped salad ($15.95) ends up being one of the quickest transports East. Ordering it to share, it arrives split, a half portion plenty for one. Chopped romaine is doused in Italian dressing, with garbanzo beans, olives, cherry tomatoes, silvers of salami, provolone, fennel, and the necessary pepperoncini. It’s brighter — and almost as satisfying — than heavier, loaded versions I used to fill up on back in Jersey.

As in the old Joe’s, there’s plenty of tender, juicy beef, from flat iron steak ($24) to a porterhouse (25 oz. at $44) and prime rib on Saturdays. But when in such an setting, I crave red sauce. It doesn’t get much comfier than spaghetti with meat sauce ($13.95) or meatballs ($16.95). Even if Joe’s is not the superlative version, it hits the spot, as does classic ravioli ($16.95), although I tend to prefer Jackson Fillmore’s housemade ravioli over the years. Another way to my East Coast Italian heart is parmigiana, whether chicken, veal, or eggplant. Here I’m drawn to the eggplant ($16.95), not too smoky, layered in cheese, breading, and, of course, red sauce.

I was tickled to find that $6 cocktails, including simple but revered favorites like a whiskey sour or negroni, are actually well-made — completely unexpected and at this price, one of the best drink values in town for solid classics.

Another unexpected pleasure is impeccable spumoni for dessert ($5 for a few generous scoops). Often in spumoni, unnatural cherry, chocolate and pistachio ice cream flavors are cluttered with nuts and candied fruits in what feels like a dated flavor that should be relegated to the past. Joe’s version delivers authentic, rich flavor with smattering of crumbled pistachios on top, demanding me to rethink, and once again enjoy, this classic ice cream rumored to have Neapolitan roots.

Joe’s isn’t revolutionary gourmet or cutting edge cuisine, but what it does, it does well. Its clientele reminds me of the history and sense of place San Francisco possesses that makes it one of the truly great cities in the world, now ideally situated in a neighborhood that fiercely maintains reverence for and ties to that history. Amid SF’s influx of tech-attracted newbies, Joe’s attracts that breed we often forget is here: the San Francisco native. Feeling like a family/group restaurant first and foremost, it’s a place I’d bring visiting family and Sicilian relatives with hefty portions and friendly service. But I’ve also had a cozy date night with my husband here, transported to decades past… but with fresher ingredients.

ORIGINAL JOE’S

601 Union, SF.

415-775-4877

www.originaljoessf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

 

Female trouble

Andrew Lam
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0
Female trouble

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER We’ve come a long way, baby, but why does it feel like women’s equality is a legal concept that still troubles the status quo? This past year has proven that the erosion of women’s rights remains a powerful political agenda across the country, with state bans on certain forms of abortion, the redefinition of rape, and the blocking of the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Two very different shows opening this week in Berkeley (previews began last week for both) are poised to provide timely additions to the ever-evolving discourse on female power and its reverberations on society at large. Mark Jackson’s Salomania, at the Aurora Theatre, and Eve Ensler’s Emotional Creature, at the Berkeley Rep, take on themes of gender parity and its embattled vanguard with a historical drama set in the early 1900s based on the life of one notorious woman, and an ensemble work exploring the challenges of girlhood in the present day.

Salomania, commissioned by Aurora, has been percolating on Jackson’s burner since 2006, when he directed Oscar Wilde’s Salome, also at the Aurora. While researching the production history of the play, he discovered a mostly forgotten scandal involving Maud Allan, a San Francisco dancer who achieved stardom with a provocative interpretation of “The Dance of the Seven Veils.” But it wasn’t her dancing that cemented her notoriety, but rather a high-profile media controversy in which she sued British M.P. Noel Pemberton Billing for libel after he accused her of being a lesbian (she was), a sadist (she wasn’t), and a German sympathizer (she wasn’t that either) after starring in a private performance of Wilde’s then-banned play.

Like all the best media scandals, her 1918 trial had all the necessary elements for a juicy celebrity circus — the personal vs. the political, beauty vs. bigotry, a titillating flush of sexual impropriety — and temporarily displaced the more austere wartime headlines of the era.

There are several themes at work in Jackson’s biographical drama, gleaned in part from courtroom transcripts and letters from Allan to her family, but the one that seems to best tie Allan together with her biblical muse is the emergence of the “independent” woman in popular culture, and the fearfulness they’ve inspired in their detractors throughout history. And just as New Testament figure Salome has been almost unanimously vilified by both church and secular society for her coerced display of her physical sensuality (almost more so than for her adolescent act of brutal vengeance), so was Allan maligned for her empathic recreation of same.

Both Jackson and Allan’s attitudes towards Salome accentuate the positive lurking within her oft-maligned reputation. Jackson posits that she’s “the only honest person in the room,” the one with the greatest potential for breaking free of the venal, decadent atmosphere of Herod’s palace. Allan found in her a kindred beauty-seeker, whose attraction to John the Baptist was formed partially from a sense of wonder at his purity and capacity for selflessness.

“She was not an uncouth child,” she protested at her libel trial. “She was a woman who valued beauty.” Their mutual reverence for beauty aside, another tie that binds Salome and Allan is a shared reputation for willfulness.

“She was kind of a force of nature in her personality,” Jackson says of Allan. “[And] without apology said, ‘This is what I do, and this is who I am’.” This unyielding attitude contributed to Allan’s reputation as “difficult,” even “arrogant,” a complexity of character that attracted Jackson’s interest as a playwright as much as it repelled her critics.

“Any woman with a forward personality who has pushed her boundaries is going to be characterized that way by her culture,” he muses, a sentiment that could be applied equally to Salome as well as to Allan, as well as to almost any controversial female celebrity today: our Madonnas and our Hillary Clintons.

 

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

 

“Part of why I wanted to write this is to say there’s this amazing resilience here, and power, and resistance, and energy and vitality in girls that we haven’t even begun to unleash,” says Eve Ensler, who has also been compared to a force of nature (by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone). Best-known for The Vagina Monologues, Ensler’s latest play, Emotional Creature, is having its world premiere at Berkeley Rep.

Global girlhood is its focus. Based on her book I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, the subject matter includes stories from Congolese rape victims, Eastern European sex workers, young factory workers, and Western anorexics, all struggling to move forward from their circumstances. Despite the often violent circumstances Ensler’s protagonists find themselves in, it’s their vitality that she hopes will come across, onstage and off.

Quick to emphasize that Creature is fictional, Ensler’s encounters with young women around the world — Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Sarajevo, Haiti, Afghanistan — have nonetheless heavily informed the characters of her piece. And of course, she has her own experiences in girlhood to draw from. “When I was younger, I was constantly told I was being too alive or too intense or too dramatic, and I chose to learn how to mute myself,” she says. An outspoken and prolific anti-violence advocate, Ensler does seem to have overcome that mute button in adulthood, but she’s quick to point out that its existence can make girlhood a bewildering, disempowering time in life.

The creation of the piece began in Johannesburg, with a staged workshop at the Market Theatre in July 2011, and another in Paris in September. Director Jo Bonney likens the shape of the play to that of an event being put on by the girls themselves: a variety show of monologues, ensemble pieces, even song and dance numbers, with music written by South African composer Charl-Johan Lingenfelder. Navigating the stormy seas of modern-day adolescence and young adulthood, Ensler’s “girls” may still be facing a whole spectrum of obstacles while tapping into their personal power. But thanks to precedents set by strong women such as Maud Allan, and even Salome, the fact that they should want to at all no longer seems unusual or unfortunate — no matter how often American right-wingers might have us otherwise believe. *

 

EMOTIONAL CREATURE

Through July 15, $14.50-$73

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk.

www.berkeleyrep.org

SALOMANIA

Through July 22, $30-$55

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk. www.auroratheatre.org

Prancing at the revolution

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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19
Prancing at the revolution

marke@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE “Right now it seems we have more in common with the Christian Right than the gay liberation movement. We’ve become so focused on marriage as the end-all and be-all of gay rights that it’s completely within the realm of possibility that the next leader of Focus on the Family could be a gay man. We all have to get married now for tax breaks, health care, or to stay in this country? Are you kidding me?” Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein spilled some truth into my hot pink Princess phone.

“I don’t know how we got to this position where we’re either agitating for more tax breaks for the rich via marriage, or we’re treating people like disposable objects on hookup sites because they don’t conform to certain standards. It’s really sickening. How does any of this further any agenda at all besides becoming what we’re supposed to be fighting against? I don’t get it.”

Sycamore Bernstein, who often writes for the Guardian, was speaking about the impetus behind her latest book, Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press), an invigorating collection of essays from a vast variety of queer people that “challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle.” (Let’s just say that President Obama’s limp “evolution” on same-sex marriage was not going to be a topic of conversation.) From envisioning a more faggoty Internet and reclaiming perversity as a proud, queer norm to honestly exploring the complex cultural confusions that Western-originating political expressions of gayness can wreak on immigrant and native homos, Faggots goes there with inspiring directness.

“I wanted to put out something that captured the spectrum of radical queer thinking that’s been going on while it seems everyone else was in line to get married. There are so many topics that affect our lives that have just been completely bulldozed by the ‘gay rights’ corporate lobbying groups’ crazed marriagemania.

“For example, Chris Bartlett, in his contribution ‘Gravity and Levity’ talks about how the idea of ‘risk’ in the gay community has been so associated with AIDS that it may have pushed any aspiration towards risk — emotionally, politically, socially — right out of gay consciousness. Yet being gay used to be all about taking risks. It’s what got us so far in the first place!

“I think exploring how the medicalization of AIDS terminology may have numbed us from each other — or how race still defines us in the ‘community,’ or how every dollar sucked into the corporate marriage machine means less for those in need of actual life or death help, or how hate crimes legislation ridiculously puts more power and resources into the hands of the very system oppressing us — is something we desperately need right now. We’re raising an entire generation to think that marriage is the only fight. Meanwhile, we’re discriminating against ourselves in so many other ways.”

Faggots is no mere spitting into the wind, either. Although Sycamore Bernstein has been sounding the assimilationist alarm for years, the prolific author and activist, now living in Seattle, has been surprised by the tome’s positive reception. (“It’s quite shocking!” she says with a lilting laugh.) Edmund White, Samuel R. Delaney, and Mx Justin Vivian Bond offered blurbs, and younger readers and the press have been grabbing onto Faggots’ incendiary yet sophisticated tone. Could the recent wave of AIDS activist nostalgia and a Occupy-like disillusionment with big money Pride sponsorships (embodied locally, especially, by a Wells Fargo advertisement covering the entire front page of Bay Area Reporter’s Pride Issue and a Stoli-sponsored GLAAD Pride float) be buoying the book’s popularity?

“I think the re-emergence of interest in things like ACT UP is very interesting. When I came to San Francisco I was part of ACT UP, and — with everybody dying from drugs, suicide, and AIDS — there was a real drive to come together to confront this massive structural neglect and recognize how brutalities align themselves to bring about our annihilation. But nostalgia can be dangerous without recognizing the reality. There was a very real, very dangerous moment in the 1990s when activism suddenly became about discrimination in the military, of all things.

“It turned from trying to guarantee health care for all to being about whether or not we could go die faster in wars. Whose decision was that?”

Marke B. is the author of Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Gude for Youth (Zest)

 

OccuPride remembers

Andrew Lam
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6
OccuPride remembers

yael@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE “First of all, the parade wouldn’t have barricades, because that immediately creates an us versus them divide, and then you see the parade as just the groups and companies that can afford the fee, which is like $450. Anyone who wanted to march could march, regardless of what the sheriff or Fire Department says. There would be tents for connections to services that people desperately need. I’m not opposed to having companies there, but they shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of Pride. And there should be more about the history, because people don’t know it. In the Holocaust, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 gays were worked to death in Dachau and other work camps. That’s where the pink triangle comes from. But people think Harvey Milk pulled it out of his ass or something.”

That’s what Scott Rossi, one of the organizers of San Francisco’s OccuPride march, told me when I asked him what his ideal SF Pride Parade would look like. The protest’s rallying cry is Community Not Commodity, and the group hopes to bring some rebellious spirit to the parade, which they say has become too watered down with corporate sponsors and assimiliation-lovin’ politics.

Some of the action’s organizers are from Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland, but the majority are a coalition of radical queer groups like HAVOQ, Pride at Work, Act Up, and QUIT (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism).

Honestly, it would be weird if there wasn’t a group with an anti-capitalist critique of the parade disrupting Pride this year. It’s been a tradition since 1992 when Act Up members joined the parade and staged intermittent Die-Ins, collapsing every seven minutes, the frequency that people were dying from AIDS that year.

Act Up and related groups staged similar demonstrations practically every year. A decade later, two Gay Shame protesters were arrested when they attempted to enter the parade. That year’s parade was sponsored by Budweiser, and Gay Shame had created a seven-foot-tall cardboard Budweiser can that read “Vomit Out Budweiser Pride and the Selling of Queer Identities,” and other props to confront “the consumerism, blind patriotism and assimilationist agenda of the Pride Parade.”

And radical queers show no sign of stopping. Veteran gay rights warrior Tommi Mecca was at basically all of these disruptions, and he won’t be missing out on this year’s events. Mecca was 21 when he helped organize the first Pride March in Philadelphia in 1972.

“Pride used to be a protest,” Mecca recalls. “It was very free. There were no barricades on the street, there were very few rules. We didn’t have contingents, people just gathered, and at some point there were speeches, usually by activists…I don’t know when it started getting corporate sponsors.”

But the glitz! The glamour! The music enhanced by electricity! Today, Pride is a giant, televised affair — this year, sponsored by Wells Fargo.

“Don’t people in Pride realize how much we’re being used by Wells Fargo?” Mecca said. “It just reeks.”

So if you go to the parade, smell the sweet smell of protesters promoting “pride not profit, a movement not a market, and community not commodity.” After all, if it wasn’t for queer radicals in the ’70s, there wouldn’t be a Pride at all.

A poly push?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A poly push?

culture@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE Is San Francisco’s polyamorous community experiencing a renaissance? Pepper Mint, organizer of the recent sex education conference Open SF (www.open-sf.org), suspects the non-monogamous in the Bay Area have finally reached a critical mass. His proof? Over the weekend of June 8, OpenSF was attended by over 500 of the poly-curious and practicing.

It might be, however, that they’ve finally found something to relate to. Sonya Brewer, a somatic psychotherapist, OpenSF lecture facilitator, and queer woman of color, has been a practicing polyamorist for 15 years. Brewer pegged the high attendance numbers on Mint’s efforts to diversify the conference and include sexual minorities and other oppressed groups on its planning committee.

Those values were reflected in the conference’s keynote address, delivered by trans-identified sex educator Ignacio Rivera and transgender health educator and social justice activist Yoseñio V. Lewis. The two hosted a lecture entitled “Kink, Race, and Class,” which sought to inspire dialogue about how social forces play into the world of kink. It was one of the many unique talks over the weekend that both celebrated and critiqued the diversity and spread of the polyamorous community.

Looking over the list of lectures for the weekend — “Sex Work and Non-Monogamy,” “Fat Sluts, Hungry Virgins,” and “Trans Queering Your Sex,” to name a few — it was hard to decide which talks to attend.

I settled on two: Kathy Labriola’s “Unmasking the Green-Eyed Monster: Managing Jealousy in Open Relationships” and the Maggie Mayhem-led “Second Generation Poly.” Labriola’s hour-long talk examined jealousy from an anthropological perspective, highlighting it as a universal experience that manifests itself depending on one’s cultural upbringing. The bad news? Jealousy is unavoidable. The good news? It’s a learned behavior, and you can learn to manage it. Labriola provided us with a handy checklist to use in determining whether insecurities are based in fact or freak-out.

“Identify a situation that makes you jealous and ask the questions,” Labriola advised. “One, [do] I have a resource I value very much and I’m fearful of losing? Two, [does] another person wants that resource.? Three, [do] you believe you are in direct competition for something you want? Four, [do] you believe if push comes to shove you will lose out?” Unless you answered yes to all four, she counseled, your jealousy can be worked through.

Mayhem, dressed in a fluorescent orange space suit (a representation of her “out-of-this-world” situation, she said) sat on a panel with her partner in life and in porn Ned (www.meetthemayhems.com) and his polyamorous family: his father, and his father’s second partner — a non-hierarchical term, Maggie was quick to clarify. Maggie and her family discussed negotiating boundaries at sex parties, raising children with more than two parents, and the stigma parents of sex-positive offspring can encounter.

Given the general focus of Open SF, Maggie’s key advice had resonance: “Be the author to your own happily ever after,” she told us.

They call it gunpowder

Andrew Lam
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13
They call it gunpowder

news@sfbg.com

At needle exchange sites around San Francisco, fliers are handed out to intravenous drug users warning them about a new and very potent form of heroin thought to be responsible for a dramatic increase in recent overdoses.

“Gunpowder heroin,” as it’s often called on the street, began infiltrating the city’s illegal drug market back around February, according to widespread reports from various needle exchange participants. Yet public officials appear to be in the dark about the epidemic, partly because budget cuts have created long backlogs for toxicology tests and partly due to indifference about the safety of drug users.

The reports were gathered by the Drug Overdose Prevention and Education Project from their network of needle exchange programs and analyzed by Project Manager Eliza Wheeler. She noticed the trend in April, and a flood of reports followed through May. It soon became clear that she was witnessing a potentially deadly spike in heroin-related overdoses.

“The whole city is reporting strong stuff,” Wheeler told us. “People are overdosing left and right.”

From January through May, 99 heroin-related overdoses were reported. The largest number of overdoses occurred in May with a staggering 40 reports. Wheeler says that an average month has 12 overdoses.

While those directly involved with San Francisco’s drug-using population seem to know all about the increase in overdoses, city and hospital officials seem to know nothing about it.

After checking with local police precincts in drug zones such as the Mission and Tenderloin, SFPD spokesman Sgt. Michael Andraychak told us officers haven’t come in contact with a strong batch of heroin and they are unfamiliar with the term “gunpowder heroin.”

According to Tenderloin Police Captain John Garrity, undercover and street officers only test controlled substances for positive or negative results. They do not test the drugs’ potency or chemical make-up. Garrity told us that the cops haven’t dealt much with opiate-related overdoses since the widespread availability of naxolone, an opiate overdose antidote commonly known by its brand name Narcan.

“We don’t see the overdoses anymore,” Garrity told us, “not for the last 20 years, not since Narcan came out.”

SF General, St. Mary’s, and St. Francis hospitals all say their emergency rooms haven’t seen an increase in heroin overdoses either and are also unfamiliar with the term “gunpowder heroin.”

It seems the city is content with letting nonprofit needle exchanges and programs like the DOPE Project deal with its opiate-using population. Although the DPH does fund and collaborate with many service providers, it rests the bulk of the responsibility on the drug users themselves.

While needle exchange programs combat blood borne diseases like hepatitis C and HIV, which can be contracted through sharing needles and other paraphernalia, DOPE attempts to educate users and prevent fatal opiate overdoses. The DOPE Project, funded through DPH, works with needle exchange programs to provide opiate users with a take home prescription of naloxone, which can be administered from a nasal spray or injected from a vial. At the exchange, if a returning drug user is re-supplying naxolone, he or she is asked “Did you lose it or use it?” If it was used, a report is made.

All the reports gathered by the DOPE Project are of overdose reversals, none of the reports are fatal, thanks to widespread availability of naxolone and the drug using population who use it. That doesn’t mean people haven’t died. In fact, a rash of fatal overdoses is rumored to have occurred. The suspected culprit: gunpowder heroin.

“There’s a new batch of heroin in town—people are dying,” says Johnny Lorenz, community activist and member of San Francisco Drug Users Union, a members-based organization advocating drug-friendly policies and giving a voice to drug users, who say they are often marginalized and seen as not caring about their community.

Lorenz, a former heroin addict, says a friend recently died from heroin-related causes. Whether it was gunpowder heroin that actually caused his death is unknown.

Wheeler and Lorenz say many people have died from the extra-strength heroin, yet no official records have turned up. The Medical Examiner’s Office hasn’t noticed an increase in heroin-related deaths, but Administrator Bill Ahern admits it was 90 days backlogged on toxicology reports.

The police and medical examiner’s lack of knowledge doesn’t surprise Mary Howe, executive director at Homeless Youth Alliance. She says heroin-related overdoses are indeed a real problem, and she personally knows heroin users who have recently died from overdose, but “unless you actually care about helping drug users you wouldn’t know.” And to receive a toxicology report from the medical examiner’s office takes a couple months, adds Howe.

Wheeler and others are currently waiting on toxicology reports to find out what exactly is in the heroin making it so strong. Without a toxicology report there is no way to be certain about the cause of death or the makeup of the drug.

According to SF Medical Examiner’s 2009-2010 annual report, nine out of the 141 people that died from narcotic analgesics related deaths were found with traces of heroin, down from previous years. However, finding out if heroin is the cause of death can be tricky. According to the report, the unique metabolite that identifies heroin, 6-monoacetamorphine, is very short lived and can metabolize in the body while the person is dying—leaving only traces of morphine or codeine.

Worse, a drug user buying heroin off the street will never know what exactly he or she is shooting.

“No one ever knows what’s in the heroin,” says Lorenz, adding that the label “gunpowder” has become a loose term for a stronger heroin. Lorenz, who spent the majority of his 20s doing heroin, remembers that gunpowder heroin at one time used to be a specific reference to a higher grade heroin from Columbia, off-white or grayish in color and crystal-like—resembling gunpowder.

Others say gunpowder heroin is black tar heroin mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate that can be up to 100 times stronger than morphine. Some disagree entirely and say the overdoses aren’t specific to any one type of heroin.

“Whatever people are calling it—it is strong,” says Wheeler adding that people rarely overdose from of a bad batch of heroin; they overdose from a good, strong batch. “In a world where the drug supplies are unregulated, this is what happens.”

If it is black tar heroin mixed with fentanyl, that could explain why hospitals aren’t reporting an increase in overdoses, says Jan Gurely, doctor at a local homeless clinic. She suggests that the people aren’t making it to the ER’s—they are only making it to the morgues.

“‘Gunpowder is very dangerous,” says Dr. Gurely. “It takes a phenomenal amount of antidote vials to reverse the overdose.”

Naxolone unbinds every molecule of heroin from receptors in the brain, reversing an overdose. The problem with naxolone is when too much is administered the overdose victim goes into withdrawal and comes to sick and vomiting. With a normal heroin overdose only half a vial is needed, but multiple vials are needed when dealing with gunpowder, she adds.

“A person could die on you with a vial in your hand,” Dr. Gurely said. “Most people don’t walk around with six or seven vials of Narcan.”

Pauli Gray believes the type of heroin causing a rash of overdoses and deaths is indeed heroin mixed with fentanyl. However, he doesn’t think it is a pure form of the prescription narcotic, but a homebrewed batch. Gray works for the Syringe Access Services program at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and also works directly with Eliza Wheeler and the DOPE Program.

“It’s called gunpowder and it’s all over the place,” Gray said, adding that heroin users are now actively seeking the extra-strength street drug. “When they hear dealers yelling ‘gunpowder’ they run and buy it,” he said. The street value has skyrocketed. Normally, a gram of heroin sells for $30, gunpowder is selling for $80 a bag, says Gray, and the bag can weigh as little as a quarter of a gram.

Gray says users have learned to shoot up very small amounts of the drug, although rumors of fatal overdoses are rampant. The other day he saw the drug for the first time. It smelled like vitamins and when cooked up it has small black flecks floating around, he says.

“People are selling it everywhere,” Gray said. “It’s really scary. We’re in overdrive.”

Fixing SF’s sunshine problems

Andrew Lam
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8

EDITORIAL Open-government advocates are circulating a series of amendments to the city’s landmark Sunshine Ordinance, and a lot of them make perfect sense. In general, the changes bring the law up to date — and deal with the ongoing and increasing frustration over the lack of enforcement that has rendered toothless one of the most progressive open-government laws in the nation.

The advocates are trying to find four supervisors to place the measure on the November ballot. It won’t be easy: Already, the City Attorney’s Office has circulated a memo arguing that some of the amendments conflict with state law or the City Charter.

And in the background, Sup. Scott Wiener is looking to take another approach to open-government, asking city departments to examine the costs of complying with the existing law — which could easily become an argument for loosening the rules.

The new disclosure rules are relatively modest. A policy body would have to release all documents relevant to a decision 48 hours in advance of a meeting. Documents that include metadata — tracked changes and other digital information — would have to be released in full. Regulations on closed meetings around pending legal issues would be tightened.

But the bulk of the changes have to do with enforcing the law — and that’s where the battle lines are going to be drawn. The measure would create a powerful supervisor of public records, appointed by the city attorney, who would be directed to review all denials of public records — and who, by law, would be ordered to “not consider as authority any position taken by the city attorney.” That seeks to address a key shortfall in existing law — the City Attorney’s Office, which (like most law firms) is often driven by privacy and confidentiality, advises city agencies on what records can be withheld, and city officials who refuse to release documents simply say they were following the advice of their attorney.

The proposal would turn the Sunshine Task Force into an independent commission, some of whose appointments wouldn’t be subject to any official review. The commission would have extensive new authority to levy fines on city employees who it finds in violation of the sunshine law and to force the Ethics Commission — which routinely ignores sunshine violations — to take action against offenders.

The idea, of course, is to mandate consequences for violating the Sunshine Ordinance, which is flouted on a regular basis by public officials who pay no penalty and thus have no real reason to comply. But increasing the scope and certainty of punishment is one side of the coin — and if there were better ways to ensure compliance, none of that would be necessary.

In Connecticut, a state Freedom of Information Commission has the statutory authority to require any government agency to release a document or open a meeting. The panel doesn’t punish people; it obviates that whole process. And it would be much, much easier to get beyond the penalties and simply create a legal process that allowed the Sunshine Commission full authority to order public agencies to comply with its rulings. The commission rules that a meeting was illegally closed? Tapes of that meeting must be released, at once. Documents improperly withheld? Cough them up, now. The only appeal city officials would have: go to court and seek a secrecy order. If the supervisors and other city officials think the proposed rules go too far, they can refuse to put this measure on the ballot, but that be ducking the clear and obvious problems. And there’s an easy solution: Give the Sunshine Commission the same power as the FOI panel in Connecticut, which has operated just fine for more than 30 years.

Make it better now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Make it better now

yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”

Acquerello

Andrew Lam
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0
Acquerello

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE There are but few whispers about Acquerello in dining circles these days. This is an oversight. Not readily visible from the street, the Nob Hill restaurant’s lobby opens onto a glowing dining room that at first glance appears to be an elegant oasis for an older clientele — a classic that has been loyal to the city since 1989. After a recent return to Acquerello, I’ll venture that it is this, but much more as well. For me, this is San Francisco’s great underrated fine dining destination, despite the fac that it has won a coveted Michelin star for six years and counting.

Even with the promise of Acquerello’s forward-thinking food and heartwarming classics in the air, it’s the service that initially stands out. Upon arrival, one is ushered to a table thoughtfully spaced apart from its neighbors, intimate yet still engaged with the Italian decor. In soft peach and beige, the dining room is subtly dated in a way that speaks of the old country, inviting and quiet enough under striking wood rafters but not so hushed as to be museum-like.

A team of waiters, three sommeliers and co-owner Giancarlo Paterlini, alternately attend to each table, the head waiter having been at the restaurant since the 1980s, along with Paterlini’s son, Gianpaolo, who is also the wine director, and chef and co-owner Suzette Gresham-Tognetti. The latter came out to greet those of us that lingered into the evening, clearly still passionate about what she does. Gresham-Tognetti works closely with young chef de cuisine Mark Pensa on all menus. (The classic tasting menu runs for $95 plus $75 for wine pairing; the seasonal tasting menu is $135 plus $95 for wine pairing; you can also choose three courses a la carte for $70, four for $82, five for $95.)

I recommend trying both the classic and seasonal menus, even if the a la carte menu gives you a chance to pick and choose among favorites. Ideally, a dining couple could order both for a glimpse of Acquerello’s entire timeline, past and present.

Maybe the dishes on the classic menu have been around for awhile, but they are far from stale. In fact, the “greatest hits” lineup still offers some of the restaurant’s best dishes. It will be a gourmand’s loss when one of Acquerello’s most popular plates, the ridged pasta in foie gras and Marsala wine sauce scented with black truffles, goes away in a few weeks. The most ecstasy-inducing dish on any menu is this dreamy take on foie gras, served as a sauce over al dente pasta. Another classic is juicy chicken breast decadently stuffed with black truffles over a leek custard and an artful mini-potato gratin, topped with shaved cremini mushrooms.

In contrast, the “chef’s surprises” menu is filled with delicate hints of things to come, like a warm arancini of asparagus and parmesan cream and some profiteroles filled with lush herbed cream. The regular menu holds treasures like pear and foie gras “ravioli” — the chefs slice dry-farmed, organic comice pears into a thin, pasta-like skin, filling it with truffled foie torchon. Saikou, a New Zealand farm-raised salmon, is bright and clean from high, cold elevations. It is poached for a few seconds in a layer of horseradish, and crusted it with chevril, pine nuts, and parsley; an herb pesto of sorts. Each dish explodes with flavor yet corners refinement, maintaining a Cal-Italian ethos that won’t play safe.

On the seasonal menu, the chefs work together closely on inventive takes that rival the better fine dining meals I’ve had. An amuse of raw yellowtail is alive with seabeans and arugula blossoms, while red abalone pairs with cabbage “seaweed” in porcini broth. Snake River Kobe beef is tender and pink, cooked sous vide under shaved hazelnuts. The cheese course is a warm, oozing round of gorgonzola D.O.P. (denominazione di origine protella, or protected designation of origin) beautifully co-mingled with potato, onion, mustard seeds, and nasturtium. Probably the most delightful, unique dish is “baked potato” gnocchi, a playful take on a baked potato made with a base of doughy gnocchi topped with chive crème fraiche, pancetta, and paper thin, fried slivers of potato skin.

Palate cleansers include a shot of carrot-apple-ginger juice with vanilla foam and a refreshing starter of orange juice, vermouth, and bitters. On the seasonal menu, a vivid dessert from pastry chef Theron Marrs marries cucumber sorbet with tart lime curd, sweet strawberry consommé, and herbaceous mint granita. As at Gary Danko, the cheese cart is one of Acquerello’s shining glories. The cart traverses the restaurant covered to contain the smell of its stinkiest offerings. Diners have their work cut out of them to select from among its unusual, largely Italian cheeses. An impression was made with earthy Blu di Valchiusella from Piemonte wrapped in walnut leaves and an impeccable Beppino Occelli in Barolo wine leaves.

Boasting input from no less than three sommeliers, Acquerello’s extensive wine list is novel-thick, dense with Italian wines. There’s an impressive range of varietals and vintages stored in its wine cellars. Suggested pairings meld seamlessly with each dish, whether it be a classic, lovely Nebbiolo d’Alba (2008 La Val Dei Preti), an unusual Langhe Rosso Burgundian-style Italian Pinot, or D’antiche Terre Taurasi Riserva, which transforms when sipped with fabulously rich veal and truffled mortadella tortellini Bolognesi.

For a special occasion, I’d place Acquerello among the best fine dining experiences in San Francisco — even up against hot newcomers and pricey minimalist restaurants. This is a place with a sense of history and a vision for the future.

ACQUERELLO

1722 Sacramento, SF

(415) 567-5432

www.acquerello.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

 

Distant craving

Andrew Lam
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0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS After two days of eating nothing but barbecue, fried chickens, and cupcakes, we started actually craving health food. I speak for the whole de la Cooter household, of which I am a small but important satellite. When I’m there, the kids come and jump on my bed in the morning, and mom and dad get to sleep a little longer.

That’s my importance.

Oh, and I am the one who cleans the cellar — mostly so I can put things in it. But still.

It’s nice to feel like you are part of a family, maybe you’ve noticed. And I have had no shortage of family in my life, but the blood ones are mostly very far away, so I can’t very well bathe their kids and sing them to sleep, let alone play with them.

It was nice when I was a nanny and got paid for all of the above, but I think I like being “like family” even better.

For one thing, I can argue for fried chicken and barbecue, and win! That was how it went my first day back: Barbecue for lunch, fried chicken for dinner.

And the next day was K. Chunk’s birthday, so we made pancakes with almost everything in the world in them for breakfast, by request, and then had pretty much cupcakes for lunch.

Now, Crawdad de la Cooter’s mister, Mr. Crawdad de la Cooter, makes THE best cake I have ever had. That’s why I will always, no matter where in the world I am, come chugging home for his kids’s birthdays. That’s one reason.

And it’s not anything fancy, either. Chocolate cake with white frosting. But you wouldn’t believe how moist. You wouldn’t believe how perfectly iced. Your teeth crunch then cream through the sugary, buttery quarter-inch of heaven, which blends so beautifully with the cakey softness below . . . you want to cry. But you’re too busy licking your lips and angling for your next bite.

I don’t even like cake! I’m a pie girl, all the way.

But now I like cake, thanks to Mr. Crawdad.

Anyway, after the birthday party, when the dust and wrapping paper had cleared and the Chunks de la Cooter were playing with their toys and it was time to start thinking about dinner, Mr. Crawdad says what he almost always says, at such times: Nature’s Express.

And whereas normally I would counter with, “Barbecue,” or “Fried,” I was like, “Damn straight.” And he and me grabbed our jackets and headed down to Solano to pick up.

Nature’s Express is exactly like it sounds, only moreso. It’s not just health food fast food; it’s vegan. The last time I craved vegan food was in 1997. And to give you some idea how long ago that was, it was 15 years ago.

As I recall, I hated it, but that was out of sheer curmudgeonliness. Though I am not likely to crave specifically vegan fare for another 15 years, I loved Nature’s Express. Loved it.

As in: new favorite restaurant. For real, Chunks.

I mean, sure, at first when I saw the bookshelf of vegan propaganda and the coolers full of kombucha, I almost ran screaming from the bright, friendly little joint.

But I’m glad I didn’t. The avocado and quinoa wrap was delicious, especially when I got down to the pickled ginger and jalapenos. There was also hummus, lettuce, and cabbage slaw in there, and the nice thing about vegan is you don’t have to worry about mayonnaise!

I also got the 5-A-Day smoothie, with kale, cucumber, beets, and celery, plus fruit. In fact, I take back what I said about 15 years. I’m craving another one of these earthy, refreshing juices right now.

The Chunks de la Cooter split a Brazilian Super Model smoothie, which is apple, açai, mango, and flax seeds, and I tried this and liked it, but not as much as mine.

Loved the quinoa salad, the cumin-lime dressing, with corn, cilantro, peppers, and onion.

Crawdad got the “essential lentil” — lentils over greens with an avocado dressing, hot sauce, and more slaw — which I tried, and liked.

Her mister got the spicy chik-un taco, about which he was very excited, so I tried this too. It was fine. Fake meat, though.

That’s where I draw the line.

NATURE’S EXPRESS

Daily 11:30am-8pm

1823 Solano, Berk.

(510) 527-5331

D, MC, V

No alcohol

Out for more

Andrew Lam
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0
Out for more

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE It was Blue (1993) and Swoon (1992) and Frisk (1995), or My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Hours and Times (1991). Paris Is Burning (1990). The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995).

It probably depended a little on who you were and what you’d seen lately that made you feel grateful to be coinciding with this point on the timeline of queer cinema. For me, it was Lilies (1996) and Go Fish (1997), and All Over Me (1997) and Beautiful Thing (1996), and every other gay teen romance, and any totally f***ed up thing Gregg Araki chose to put onscreen (including 1995’s Doom Generation, billed as “a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki,” which made straight look like a fairly provisional state of being). It was kind of like irony or porn — I couldn’t exactly define it, but I was pretty sure I knew it when I saw it while bingeing, mid–gay adolescence, on whatever the 1990s had to offer in the way of LGBT experience on film. “It” being this thing called New Queer Cinema, a term that film critic and scholar (and past Guardian contributor) B. Ruby Rich had coined in a 1992 essay in the British film journal Sight & Sound.

Rich, these days teaching in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Department, offered up the idea of New Queer Cinema as a way to frame a ragged-edged genre that she saw emerging. Populating it were films that told unfamiliar, upsetting, outrageous, and sometimes deeply lyrical stories of queer experience, forcing a more complicated picture onto the screen. As many of them gained a cultural foothold (seldom reaching deep into the mainstream, but drawing respectable numbers of art-house-goers), they made a space around themselves for more such films to follow their unsettling examples.

Over the next decade and beyond, the genre, and the larger, disparate queer culture, welcomed a world of untold stories; films like My Own Private Idaho and later Velvet Goldmine (1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) entered the popular culture by way of some combination of star and story power; and one morning we woke up to the sight of significant swaths of the country heading to the multiplex to watch a swoony, gloomy tale of two cowboys in love.

Now, somehow, Brokeback Mountain (2005) is starting to seem like a long time ago, and you could say that New Queer Cinema has both evolved and devolved, a fact reflected in the rom-com-packed LGBT section of your friendly neighborhood video store as well as in each passing year’s Frameline festival catalog. This year, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival offers the opportunity to compare and contrast, casting its eyes back on the genre 20 years after Rich pronounced its existence and sketched its parameters.

In addition to presenting Rich with its annual Frameline Award, the fest has programmed a retrospective of four films that offer a sense of New Queer Cinema’s expansive scope and permeable borders: Alex Sichel’s dark-and-light, riot grrrl music–infused All Over Me (costarring a baby-faced Leisha Hailey from The L Word); Ana Kokkinos’s Head On (1998), about a reckless but closeted young man living in a tight-knit Greek Australian community; Gregg Araki’s violent, trashily romantic, HIV-inflected road movie The Living End (1992); and Cheryl Dunye’s experimental mix of documentary and dyke drama The Watermelon Woman (1996). (In 2012’s Mommy Is Coming, also screening, Dunye adds to the mix Berlin sex clubs, explicit taxicab-backseat role play, and a parent-child dynamic likely to leave you flinching in horror.)

Elsewhere in the fest, French writer-director Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie has a mosh pit soundtrack and follows, clumsily, Araki’s frenetic and unrestrained example. Béatrice Dalle (1986’s Betty Blue) and Emmanuelle Béart (2002’s 8 Women) play former teenage punk rock sweethearts who met in a mental institution and reunite after a long estrangement to reenact the past and rip open old wounds. A high point, though not for their relationship, occurs when Dalle’s slightly unhinged character tells a woman at a highbrow cocktail party, populated by Paris’s public-intellectual set, that her dress is sectarian, before physically assaulting another guest. Cloying and soap operatic, offering the gauzy fantasy fulfillment of a Harlequin Romance, Nicole Conn’s A Perfect Ending nevertheless earns points for its premise of an uptight housewife who employs the services of a call girl — and for casting Morgan Fairchild as a madam who uses her Barbie collection as a staffing organizational tool.

Other queer stories are more successfully delineated. Aurora Guerrero’s coming-of-age tale Mosquita y Mari, which screened at the SF International Film Fest in April, soulfully and subtly captures the ambiguous friendship that develops between two Latina high schoolers struggling with unspoken feelings as well as pressures both familial and financial. In Joshua Sanchez’s Four, adapted from a play by Christopher Shinn, Fourth of July fireworks and a mood of lonely isolation serve as a backdrop to four disparate individuals’ uncomfortable attempts to find physical and emotional connection. Stephen Cone’s The Wise Kids is set in and around a Southern Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina, and tracks a trio of teenagers as they sort out the facts of their religious and sexual identities.

There’s a startlingly small quantity of queer baby-making going on in this year’s fest compared with recent years, and the family proposed in writer-director Jonathan Lisecki’s romantic comedy Gayby (as well as Ash Christian’s Petunia) is not necessarily nuclear or easy to encapsulate in kindergarten on “Let’s draw our family tree!” day, marrying the concept of queer family to the Heather-has-two-mommies narrative. The film’s gay-boy Matt and straight-girl BFF Jenn decide that it’s time to settle down and start a family together, but reject the idea of turkey basting or consulting a fertility specialist in favor of comically awkward, highly unerotic, goal-oriented sexual intercourse.

Come to think of it, their method could resonate with the procreation-only, can’t-wait-to-be-raptured crowd, who might be less enthusiastic when the pair switch to good old-fashioned DIY insemination and Matt’s friend Nelson (a scene-stealing Lisecki) brings over a container of holy cat cremains to sanctify the proceedings. Either way, with queer spawning sometimes serving as the rope in a tug-of-war argument about heteronormativity, queer identity, transgression, and basic rights, an unruly rom-com about queer family planning is a fitting entry in a genre and a festival that have both grown into panoramic representations of the queer world.

FRAMELINE36

June 14-24, most shows $9-$11

Various venues

www.frameline.org

You @ the festival

Andrew Lam
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0
You @ the festival

cheryl@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE What happens when a human being becomes a meme? This is the question at the heart of Me @ The Zoo, about YouTube celebrity Chris Crocker — destined to be forever known for his sobbing rant imploring the universe to “Leave Britney alone!”

What could have been a one-joke documentary is, to filmmakers Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch’s credit, a layered look at insta-fame in the internet age, the perils of cultivating an oversized persona (particularly while living in a small, closed-minded town), and the hard lesson that life in the spotlight also equals life under a microscope.

Far from being reducible to a single screen grab, Chris Crocker is a deeply complicated person. As the film begins, he knows exactly who he would like to be — her name rhymes with “Britney Spears” — but is a little less certain about who he actually is. Growing up in Bristol, Tenn. (“A good place to live,” an oft-filmed town sign reassures us), Crocker was bullied for being gay; in high school, home-schooling became necessary. With few friends and little supervision (his troubled mother is a peripheral presence; he lives with his grandparents — the parents of his completely absent father), the bright, charismatic, attention-starved teen turned to the burgeoning world of internet video.

Despite homophobic haters all too happy to shower him with ugly, threatening comments, he became a MySpace sensation with his manic, lip-glossed, gender-bending videos. He cultivated a bratty catch phrase: “Bitch, please!” When YouTube appeared in 2005 (the doc’s title comes from the site’s very first upload), Crocker was one of its early addicts, and his fame grew along with his subscriber count. He danced, he provoked his tough-as-nails grandma, he modeled wigs, and he vlogged, often with exaggerated emotion. When his idol took a dive into paparazzi-documented insanity in 2007 (Feb.: head shave; Sept.: disastrous “comeback” performance on MTV), of course he made a video about it. He could not have known that the clip, which currently has over 43 million views, would go viral, and that suddenly everybody would know about Chris Crocker.

Yay! It’s what he wanted! But was it? “I love acting like I don’t want it,” he gleefully announces, faux-shunning photographers trailing behind him on a visit to Los Angeles. But the Crocker zeitgeist ends nearly as soon as it starts. His reality show (to be called Chris Crocker: Behind the Curtains) fails to find a network, and he soon becomes yesterday’s novelty-news hook. Back in Tennessee, he’s surprisingly sanguine about his short-shrift stab at stardom and eventual slide into notoriety: “I’m one of the first people who’s famous for not being famous,” he says. And later: “I can’t stop being myself.”

As the kids say, haters gonna hate. But when being yourself brings you such joy, who cares? Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe’s effervescent Ballroom Rules follows a team of Australian same-sex ballroom dancers as they train for the Gay Games. The action revolves around Melbourne’s only LGBT-centric ballroom studio, Dance Cats, and its crew of dedicated learners. Comparisons to 1992’s Strictly Ballroom (frustrating practice sessions; copious sequins; stuffy jerks who oversee the mainstream ballroom scene) can be made, except same-sex dancers must be what the movie calls “ambi-dance-trous” — able to switch leader-follower roles mid-routine. That the Dance Cats crew is such a warm, often hilarious group who’ve overcome much (homophobia is the least of it) to get where they are makes Ballroom Rules that much more inspiring.

Also inspiring: the Lance Bass-produced Mississippi: I Am, Harriet Hirshorn and Katherine Linton’s short doc about what it’s like to be a gay teen in the deep South. Hint: it sucks year-round, but prom season is especially dicey. Julie Wyman’s STRONG!, about Olympic weightlifter Cheryl Haworth, follows the 290-pound athlete as she hefts mind-blowing amounts in the gym and speaks honestly about her issues with confidence and body image. Haworth is a delight (her nickname is “Fun”), and while STRONG!‘s more serious themes are important, the off-the-cuff scenes with its subject (her car, a hilariously retro 1979 Lincoln Continental, is dubbed “Mary Todd”) are just as memorable.

Two more docs worth mentioning, about a pair of men whose fascinating lives are ideally suited for cinematic exploration: the PBS-ish Revealing Mr. Maugham, about hugely successful playwright and author W. Somerset Maugham, whose works are still being made into films today; and Times of Harvey Milk-ish Vito, about groundbreaking activist and Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo — a spot-on opening-night choice for Frameline. 

www.frameline.org

Gimme more

Andrew Lam
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0
Gimme more

For more on this year’s Frameline Film Festival, including times and prices, go to www.frameline.org

Mixed Kebab (Guy Lee Thys, Belgium/Turkey, 2012) A My Beautiful Launderette-type mix of culture clashes ethnic, religious, sexual, and otherwise, Guy Lee Thys’ Belgian-Turkish feature risks over-contrivance, but comes out a tasty blend of narrative and thematic ingredients. Ibrahim, a.k.a. Bram (Cem Akkanat), is the apple of his émigré Antwerp family’s eye, but then he’s kept his hunky-gay-man-at-large double life entirely off their conservative Muslim radar. Even as his best-friendship with Kevin (Simon Van Buyten) looks set to turn into something much more, he goes along with plans for an arranged marriage to Elif (Gamze Tazim), an educated cousin desperate to escape the gender restrictions of Turkey and her father’s home. Several factors will erode those best-laid plans, however, not least the prying eyes of Bram’s black-sheep brother Furkan (Lukas De Wolf), who goes from rebellious juvenile delinquency to obnoxious moral fundamentalism under a far-right local imam’s influence. Thu/14, 10pm, Castro. (Dennis Harvey)

North Sea Texas (Bavo Defurne, Belgium, 2011) Growing up is never easy — especially when you know who you are and who you love from a tender young age, and live in a sleepy Belgium coastal hamlet in the early ’70s. Sexual freedom begins at home, as filmmaker Bavo Defurne’s debut feature opens on our beautiful little protagonist, Pim — a melancholy, shy, diligent soul who has a talent for drawing, a responsible nature, and a yen for ritual dress-up in lipstick and lace. He has an over-the-top role model: an accordion-playing, zaftig mother who has a rep as the village floozy. Left alone far too often as his mom parties at a bar named Texas, Pim takes refuge with kindly single-mom neighbor Marcella, her earnest daughter, and her sexy, motorcycle-loving son, Gino, who turns out to be just Pim’s speed. But this childhood idyll is under threat: Gino’s new girlfriend and a handsome new boarder at Pim’s house promise to change everything. Displaying a gentle, empathetic touch for his cast of mildly quirky characters and a genuine knack for conjuring those long, sensual days of youth, Defurne manages to shine a fresh, romantic light on a somewhat familiar bildungsroman, leaving a lingering taste of sea salt and sweat along with the feeling of walking in one young boy’s very specific shoes. Fri/15, 9:30pm, Castro. (Kimberly Chun)

I Want Your Love (Travis Mathews, US, 2011) Local director Travis Mathews’ first full-length feature — produced by porn impresario Jack Shamama and the good, pervy folks at Naked Sword — is so beautifully shot, edited, paced, and true to life for a certain young, scruffy, artsy fag demographic (not to mention brimming with explicit sex scenes) that you probably won’t notice that hardly anything happens plotwise. A cute performance artist named Jesse, played by one of our top performance artists also named Jesse, is getting ready to move back to Ohio due to those all-too-familiar San Franciscan money woes, but maybe also to forge some deeper connection to life. That’s about it. The true joy here is seeing most of the Bay Area’s gay underground arts scene nailing peripheral roles: Brontez Purnell hilariously steals the movie, cute naked gay boys abound, and the whole thing really does come off as a lovely West Coast boho version of last year’s UK indie hit Weekend, with more fog and condoms. Sun/17, 9:30pm, Castro. (Marke B.)

Beauty (Oliver Hermanus, South Africa/France, 2011) The destructive toll of repression, psychological and otherwise, is vividly illustrated in Oliver Hermanus’ stark minimalist drama. Francois (Deon Lotz) is a middle-aged Afrikaaner husband and father living an entirely concealed double life: the hidden part acted out in secret orgies with other men as successful, privileged, and closeted as he. (When one member of this very exclusive “club” brings a black lover along, the reaction makes clear how sharp South Africa’s race/class divisions remain.) Francois’ control of that schizophrenic existence is masterful — until he spies Christian (Charlie Keegan), a model-handsome new corporate colleague, a close friend’s son, and eventually his younger daughter’s boyfriend. Despite all those red flags, his obsession builds toward a shocking, uncontrollable explosion. A deliberately chilly and unpleasant work of art à la Michael Haneke, Beauty weighs the consequences of living a lie, and finds them aptly repellent. Mon/18, 9:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

 My Best Day (Erin Greenwell, US, 2012) Sans name stars or a catchy plot hook, Erin Greenwell’s indie comedy attracted little attention at Sundance, and it’s kinda buried in the Frameline program — a pity, since its uncontrived, even-handed balance of gay male, lesbian, and straight protagonists would have been perfect for a higher-profile slot. Not to mention that it’s totally goofy, funny, surprising, and sweet. Over the course of one Fourth of July in Bangor, Penn., a motley assortment of hapless but endearing characters circle one another warily, desiring everything from family reunion to crush-realization to acknowledgement of a closeted relationship. They’re all delightful, although there’s no getting around the wholesale scene stealing of Ashlie Atkinson, whose motorcycle- and slutty local-girl-covetous refrigerator-repair dyke dials down her “Muffler” in Another Gay Movie (2006) to create a character of nuanced comic beauty. My Best Day is unpretentious but so low-key skillful and open-hearted that in the end it feels ever-so-slightly profound. Tue/19, 7pm, Elmwood; June 20, 9:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)

Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs, US, 2012) At times almost too intimately painful to watch, Ira Sachs’ autobiographical drama charts the long-term disintegration of a relationship between a filmmaker and a bright, adored but addicted and duplicitous soulmate. When expat Danish documentarian Eric (the exceptional Thure Lindhardt) first hooks up with publishing-biz newbie Paul (Zachary Booth), they have sexual chemistry and more. But the Manhattan life they build together is increasingly hole-riddled by Paul’s mood variances, unexplained absences, and other signs of serious drug usage. Sachs lets the narrative be controlled by the empty spaces such a habit leaves for concerned loved ones — time and circumstances often leap forward without full explanation, placing us in Eric’s frustrated position as a man in love with a man whose returned love is both genuine and entirely untrustworthy. Keep the Lights On is unabashedly difficult viewing. But it’s also the best (as well as the first gay-focused) feature Sachs has made since his equally unsettling 1997 debut The Delta. June 20, 6:30pm, Castro. (Harvey)  

Most likely to succeed

Andrew Lam
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0
Most likely to succeed

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Actors writing and directing movies in order to get work as actors can be a dicey business. It worked for the likes of Ed Burns and Vin Diesel, at least in terms of their becoming (however precariously) Hollywood stars. But anyone who’s seen a sizable share of independent features at B-list film festivals knows that more often than not, actor-originated projects can lead to excessive displays of vanity, indulgence, and shameless if frequently unconscious imitation of other movies. (Cassavetes, Scorsese, and Tarantino being the most deathlessly recycled models.)

It’s not that actors aren’t smart; it’s that as in so many things, a collectivist venture like moviemaking benefits from the checks and balances of each collaborator’s clear-eyed perspective on one another’s input. Mark Duplass is now getting roles in mainstream movies and TV — he’s in Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming Navy SEALs movie, for one — but you can’t say that that was necessarily the plan, or point. You certainly can’t say the so-called “mumblecore” genre he helped invent with sibling Jay (his co-writer and director on five features to date starting with 2005’s The Puffy Chair) is about actorly indulgence, either, much as its specimens might sometimes meander short of structure or meaning. They’ve been outward-looking — out to communities beyond acting school or potential William Morris representation, at least.

And Mark Duplass has been good in them, sometimes almost invisibly so. He stole the show in Lawrence Kasdan’s recent misfire Darling Companion by simply acting sanely amidst a starrier ensemble hell-bent on quirky hysteria. His slightly-shlumpy yet subtler (than Seth Rogen/Jason Segal/Jack Black) appeal is more prominent in two movies that happen to be opening this week, neither written or directed by a Duplass. He’s very good in both of them, albeit in unshowy, average-yoink ways no awards body might ever recognize.

Your Sister’s Sister is the new movie from Lynn Shelton, who sort of came late to the mumblecore table — her first feature, We Go Way Back (2006), was nothing like it — and who directed Duplass in her shaggily amusing, throwaway Humpday (2009). This latest opens more somberly, at a Seattle wake where his Jack makes his deceased brother’s friends uncomfortable by pointing out that the do-gooder guy they’d loved just the last couple years was a bully and jerk for many years before his reformation. This outburst prompts an offer from friend-slash-mutual-crush Iris (Emily Blunt) that he get his head together for a few days at her family’s empty vacation house on a nearby island.

Arriving via ferry and bike, he is disconcerted to find someone already in residence — Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who’s grieving a loss of her own (she’s split with her girlfriend). Several tequila shots later, two Kinsey-scale opposites meet, which creates complications when Iris turns up the next day. A bit slight in immediate retrospect and contrived in its wrap-up, Shelton’s film is nonetheless insinuating, likable, and a little touching while you’re watching it. That’s largely thanks to the actors’ appeal — especially Duplass, who fills in a blunderingly lucky (and unlucky) character’s many blanks with lived-in understatement.

San Francisco-born director Colin Trevorrow’s narrative debut feature Safety Not Guaranteed, written by Derek Connolly, is more striking both overall and in performance. It’s got an improbable setup: not that rural loner Kenneth (Duplass) would place a personal ad for a time travel partner (“Must bring own weapons”), but that a Seattle alt-weekly magazine would pay expenses for a vainglorious staff reporter (Jake Johnson, hilarious) and two interns (Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) to stalk him for a fluff feature over the course of several days. The publishing budget allowing that today is true science-fiction.

But never mind. Inserting herself “undercover” when a direct approach fails, Plaza’s slightly goth college grad finds she actually likes obsessive, paranoid weirdo Kenneth, and is intrigued by his seemingly insane but dead serious mission. For most of its length Safety falls safely into the category of off-center indie comedics, delivering various loopy and crass behavior with a practiced deadpan, providing just enough character depth to achieve eventual poignancy. Then it takes a major leap — one it would be criminal to spoil, but which turns an admirable little movie into something conceptually surprising, reckless, and rather exhilarating.

 

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER and SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED open Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

Same time next year

Andrew Lam
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0
Same time next year

GAMER There was a moment when it seemed this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) would be the most exciting since way back in 2006, the year Wii and PlayStation 3 premiered. This January, rumors swirled around Sony and Microsoft, that they were developing next generation consoles, and perhaps looking to premiere them alongside Nintendo’s big Wii U reveal.

But Microsoft’s decision instead was to coast on their current success as market leader, and Sony chose to concentrate on setting themselves apart in an increasingly multi-platform marketplace by focusing on peripherals and exclusives. So, at least one more year for this generation of gaming, making E3 2012 pretty interchangeable with 2011.

Nintendo’s presentation played it safe with first-party games that were either already known (Pikmin 3) or practically indistinguishable from past installments (New Super Mario Bros. 2), and left innovation for new Wii U software to third party developers. Playing nice with outside development teams will go a long way towards winning back the “hardcore” crowd Nintendo desperately craves but the dearth of exciting games evoked too-fresh memories of last year’s disastrous 3DS launch.

Speaking on the Wii U at an investor presentation prior to E3, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated “There is always a limit to our internal resources … if I said that an overwhelmingly rich software lineup would be prepared from day one, it would be too much of a promise to make.” Attendees at Nintendo’s conference would have been wise to heed that warning, as an initially excited crowd grew more restless with each announcement that wasn’t a hi-definition Zelda or Metroid game.

On the other side of the coin, Microsoft opened with a guaranteed bread-winner for the Xbox and their only exclusive blockbuster releasing this year, Halo 4. Coupled with the annual release of Call of Duty, the Xbox is in a safe spot, and Microsoft was smart to concentrate the rest of their show on apps and an application they’re calling SmartGlass, even if doing so created some disappointment in the crowd. An experiment in tablet crosstalk, SmartGlass is just one example of the “second-screen” gameplay all three publishers appear keen on for 2013.

Last of the “big three” publishers, Sony attempted to entice consumers into supporting the low-selling PlayStation Move and the new PSVita handheld, but their exclusive titles remained the most compelling reason to own a PlayStation. A new project from Quantic Dream, Beyond: Two Souls improves on Heavy Rain‘s cinematic storytelling, and Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic survival piece The Last of Us wowed audiences with gruesome one-on-one combat. Sony also featured the Expo’s biggest failure: way too much time devoted to a buggy and simplistic augmented reality book, Wonderbook, based on the Harry Potter franchise.

Concentrating on games over peripherals, Ubisoft had arguably this year’s best showing. New action/stealth IP WATCH_DOGS, about a hacker who can control the power of a city’s technology, had many declaring it E3’s biggest surprise, and Ubisoft also delivered strong demos for Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Assassin’s Creed III, Far Cry 3, and Rayman Legends, the last of which harnessed the possibilities of the Wii U in ways even Nintendo couldn’t match.

On the E3 show floor, the Tomb Raider series’ reboot is emotionally engrossing and includes a more robust upgrade system than the game it most closely resembles, Uncharted. Where Uncharted is known for strong story and characters, Tomb Raider competes with a terrifying sense of helplessness and mature storytelling. Making its debut at E3, Star Wars 1313 also made a lot of promises about being first to set a “mature” game in the Star Wars universe. It’ll be interesting to see if LucasArts uses that freedom as a tableau to create a truly interesting story, or if it becomes a bar to hit in terms of language and violence. Either way, 1313 features some of the most realistic motion capture I’ve ever seen, and lighting and animation that rivals entries in the film series. If there was a constant among the big E3 games, it was the year 2013. Publishers are tired of getting beat up each fall by Call of Duty‘s annual release and have relocated to next spring. Most titles demoed at E3 have been slotted for 2013’s first quarter, which currently looks as stuffed with games as November usually does. It’ll be interesting to see who stands their ground and who makes one last push to the barren summer months. If 2013 looks to be an exciting time to be a gamer, in 2012 it remains business as usual. 

Possessions and concessions

Andrew Lam
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Possessions and concessions

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A general store in a factory town is the deceptively concrete setting for playwright Christina Anderson’s purposefully nebulous drama, which conflates a range of 20th century African American experiences in a supernatural tale of characters and a town variously “possessed.”

Crowded Fire (which produced the world premiere of Anderson’s DRIP in 2009) takes the premise and runs with it, artistic director Marissa Wolf helming the production with a sure grasp of Anderson’s fluid structure, where time (“between 1961 and 1994”), place (“the side pocket of America”), and position (social, sexual or otherwise) are all on the move and yet passingly specific, as in some Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of history and identity.

As the story opens, Good Goods proprietor Stacey Good (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has recently retuned to town to take over from his father — the original Good — who we learn fled under vague circumstances seemingly connected to a recent “invasion” that has left this exclusively African American community in some sense (again purposely vague) occupied.

Meanwhile, the store itself is contested terrain. Longtime employee Truth (David E. Moore) holds a grudge against Stacey, who was supposed to be born a girl — promised to Truth by Good-the-father along with the keys to the store. But as a male heir, Stacey is instead Truth’s boss (although, as we learn in some of the clunky exposition at the top of the play, he’s obligated to keep Truth on the payroll no matter how ill tempered he may get).

The allegorical air of this premise grows apace with the arrival of Patrick, nicknamed Wire (Armando McClain), and Patricia (an assured and persuasive Mollena Williams), his twin sister with a stalled career as a nightclub comedian. Patricia has just returned this day — Wire’s birthday but not yet hers, since she was born after midnight — with a runaway bride named Sunny (a fittingly bright and captivating Lauren Spencer), who she met on the bus ride to town. Sunny’s innocent, childlike radiance captures Truth’s ardor but it’s soon clear she’s already smitten with Patricia.

As it further becomes obvious there’s some lingering romantic history between Patricia and Stacey, as well as between Stacey and childhood best friend Wire, a horrible accident at the local factory intrudes. The outcome of this tragedy is the supernatural arrival of another member of the community, whose family has earned some resentment for having gone AWOL during the recent invasion. As a local medicine man named Waymon (Anthony Rollins-Mullens), channeling the spirit of the Hunter Priestess, arrives to sort the matter out, history and solidarity, ownership and desire, masculinity and femininity, tyrannical convention, and casual nonconformity are all mixed ever more thoroughly together.

Without giving away too many details of the plot’s central twist, it’s fair to say that who gets to possess whom and under what circumstances (that is, with or without the consent of the other party) is a question that rises and sinks amid the play’s convoluted action like a stone skipping across a roiling pond. If Anderson sacrifices some dramatic coherence along the way, there are productive questions thrown up merely by flouting a more realistic time/place continuum, since not making an issue of the characters’ fluid sexuality, for example, is already to draw attention to the usual regime while toppling its violent logic.

Crowded Fire’s production at Boxcar Playhouse is somewhat erratically paced and has sightline challenges, but it offers scope for some nicely tailored performances (with the most consistent work coming from Williams and Spencer, who anchor the proceedings with fine, vital turns). Emily Greene’s half-open half-realistic scenic design, buttressed by Rebecca Longworth’s mix of still and video backdrops, meanwhile strives with limited success to capture the play’s particular mix of naturalism and supernaturalism.

That mixture is ultimately both a weakness and strength. The action can feel too mysterious, contradictory and diffuse to be as hard-hitting as it wants to be. But the boldness of Anderson’s formal strategy and its deliberately spongy sense of history also invite an invigorating play between necessity and possibility. 

GOOD GOODS

Through June 23

Wed.-Sat., 8pm, $15-$35

Boxcar Playhouse

505 Natoma, SF

www.crowdedfire.org

 

The prestige

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The prestige

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Everybody’s in an uproar. Panties: twisted! Wig: askew! Weave: berated! Kanga: roo’d! The upper lefthand quadrant of the Internet is aflame.

Respected undergroundish house DJs are being kicked out of upscale club booths at an alarming rate. In February, Dennis Ferrer was tossed from the tables at Miami’s Mansion for not playing “commercial enough.” Last week, our own beloved Mark Farina got bumped from the Marquee poolside in Las Vegas because the management was “getting complaints from the table service crowd” about too much house. (And, most inexplicably, adorable ambient sage Mixmaster Morris was unplugged at a prestigious Berlin event late last year, for not wanting to spontaneously tag team with the tipsy promoter.)

Beyond screaming, “Why the hell would you play these idiotfests to begin with!” (each has their own credible individual explanation), I tend to think this rash of boots is simply symptomatic of dance music’s current bout of mainstreamification. A similar thing happened when oonce-oonce techno took over mainstream-y dance floors in the mid-1990s. Suddenly it seemed every DJ disappeared except Paul van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Armin van Buuren, and Sasha and Digweed. Creepy. This time around, house lovers, there’s plenty of venues and crowds for everyone, without having to cry about our time slot in the Electric Daisy Cannibal of life. All is full of PLUR. Just don’t fuss with our Farina again, Vegas, or we’ll Mushroom Jazz your ass.

 

DMITRI FROM PARIS

And now I will spin you a shaggy tale of reverse-douchebagginess. The year? 2000. The place? Winter Music Conference in Miami. The party? Playboy Mansion. All the fixings of a bottle service fake boobs popped collar disaster-fantasy! Of course I went. But then. Someone handed me one of those little shaker eggs that make maraca noises. And then. DJ Dmitri from Paris launched into a 12-minute version of “Love is Always on Your Mind” by Gladys Knight and the Pips. The floor went wild and I went straight (forward) to heaven. It was totally like that moment in the gay bar in 1978 when someone hands Sandra Bernhard a tambourine. Free at last! Ever since then I’ve adored this kicky disco Greek Frenchman, and now that he’s launched several re-edit projects, he’s back in the pulsating limelight. Will he drop the epic opera version of Pet Shop Boys’ “Left to My Own Devices”? As a guest at Marques Wyatt’s monthly Deep party, one of the best and most diverse in SF, anything goes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi50cNBjSMw

Fri/15, 10pm-3am, $15 advance, $20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

 

THE MAGICIAN

Have we at least reached the late Steve Miller Band stage of electro-disco? Abracadabra, out pops this mysterious prestidigitator, pulling blissful, keyboard-chiming, fog-enshrouded tricks from his fuzzy-wuzzy dream hat. I am assuming ze Magician is French, because he pulls off that excellent French touch trick of pulling your feverishly beating heart out of your chest right when the strobes hit. But in a more contemporary, happy house way. (UPDATE: The Magician is possibly Belgian. Magic!)

Fri/15, 9pm, $17 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

MAYER HAWTHORNE

Don’t call him a “throwback” — the young soul-funk revivalist prefers to count J. Dilla among his influences, even while he’s nicking inspiration from Holland-Dozier-Holland. The Stones Throw label favorite’s DJ set should span a spectrum of mood-bending, rootsy sounds.

Sat/16, 9pm-late, $10–$15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

SON’Y RAYS

Kind of freaking out about this one. Some of the deepest, most intellectually soulful —– and danceable! —– tech-house future beats are being made in Oakland right now (and for the past few years) by the Deepblak crew. This showcase will bring together most of the major players at SF’s SOM: Diaba$e and Nasrockswell, Blaktroniks, Aybee and Afrikan Sciences, and Damon Bell. Do not miss this night of exquisite hometown, hand-crafted live machine vibes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASEDs4n6HOk

Sat/16, 10pm, $10. SOM, 2925 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com

Suspended state

Andrew Lam
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0
Suspended state

news@sfbg.com

In May, a rip appeared in the social safety net that catches many of the people whose careers have been derailed by the continuing economic crisis when Californians lost eligibility for federal relief money under the Fed-Ed portion of the federal unemployment insurance extension program.

The news of the funding loss came to program recipients in a letter from the California Employment Development Department (EDD). According to data obtained from the EDD by the Bay Guardian, 1,994 San Franciscans were among the more than 92,000 people statewide who were cut from the unemployment roles earlier then expected, as the maximum length of benefits was reduced suddenly from 99 weeks to 79 weeks.

A nuance in the legislation that regulates state-by-state eligibly for Fed-Ed caused California’s early exit from the program, while individuals in other states with lower unemployment rates and stronger employment prospects remain eligible for longer coverage. New York state, with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, 2.4 points lower then California’s rate, continues to receive Fed-Ed funding.

Ironically, that’s because the recession has lingered longer here than elsewhere, and unemployed Californians are now being punished for being stuck for so long in such a slow economy.

“In order for a state to qualify for the Fed-Ed extension program you have to have a high unemployment rate and certainty California does have a high unemployment rate,” EDD Deputy Director Loree Levy told us. “It is just not 10 percent higher than what it has been over the last three years, and that is a requirement of the program. So the good news is that California’s economy is improving. It is unfortunate news for a lot of the long-term unemployed individuals who will now be doing without these extension benefits.”

In San Francisco, the economy is definitely improving. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that the San Francisco metropolitan area, which includes San Francisco and San Mateo counties, saw the second highest 12-month rise in employment nationally, creating more than 25,000 jobs, a 2.7 percent leap in employment. This big jump, the second highest nationally, reduced the city’s unemployment rate to 7 percent in April, leaving San Francisco a rare rose in a sea of briars.

But that’s little consolation to people in industries that have yet to recover, from construction to education to other government jobs.

While the city’s economy has been buoyed by tourism, technology, and a segment of pre-existing affluence that has weathered the economic crisis, the statewide the picture is much different. The state’s “improving economy” left more than two million Californians unemployed in May, 10.9 percent the state’s workforce.

When statewide unemployment ticked up slightly in April, the state’s three-month average registered as 8 percent higher than the three-year average, missing by a statistical sliver the federal program’s threshold 10 percent increase. This triggered the BLC, which tracks unemployment across the nation, to notify the California EDD that funding of the Fed-Ed program would cease.

The trouble with this metric as a benchmark for benefits dispersion is when discouraged workers self identify as having stopped looking for a job, they are no longer included in the unemployment figures used by the BLS to determine Fed-Ed eligibility. If a fraction of these workers had identified themselves as seeking work, the Fed-Ed relief would have continued to flow into California.

If the state edges back across that threshold in the coming months, Fed-Ed money will flow into the state again, but those recently cut from the unemployment roles who did not exhaust their Fed-Ed eligibility time will not qualify to be re-added to the program.

The program’s loss could have a significant impact on the state’s economy going forward.

“In the three years since Fed-Ed was passed, more than 912,00 people in California have relied on the benefits,” Levy says. “That has brought $5 billion of federal funds into the ailing state economy. It has had a tremendous impact on the economy and when you add in a multiplying effect from money spent out there from these benefits on local businesses, it can be almost a $10 billion effect on the economy.”

As the economic crisis drags on, federal stimulus and relief programs that were planned with a short downturn in mind dry up, a political climate of austerity in government spending has taken its place. Individuals caught in the fallout of the economic crisis increasingly find themselves with nowhere to turn.

Only one out of three unemployed workers statewide currently receive any unemployment benefits, and before the end of Fed-Ed, a staggering 700,000 people who had been receiving benefits during the economic crisis exhausted the previous maximum 99 weeks without finding work.

“What happens when we require people to go out and get jobs when there are no jobs? That’s a nightmare. People are being cut off with no place to turn,” Princeton professor of economics Paul Krugman said at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco last month. “Benefits that are emergency benefits should not depend on some arbitrary timeline for the individual but for the duration of the emergency. If we have a flood, you don’t say ‘We are only going to help flood victims for three days.’ We help them until the flood recedes.”

Of those Californians who still do receive an unemployment check, over half have been out of work for more than six months, the period at which normal state funding ends and federally emergency extension programs take over. The remaining federal unemployment extension program enacted during the economic crisis — the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program — is set to phase out on Dec. 23 of this year. That is bad news for Californians locked out of the labor market who have exhausted the normal six months of state funded benefits.

Responding to the release of May’s week jobs report, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) said the report, “Makes clear that we have more work to do to restore security and opportunity for the middle class. The time is now for Republicans to join us in moving forward on behalf of the middle class.”

Without the renewal by Congress of federal unemployment extension deep in the presidential election cycle, another larger surge in people booted from the unemployment roles will be locked in competition for the state’s paltry offering of new job creation — a punishing musical chairs game with real life stakes.

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