Volume 47 [2012–13]

Gimme Moors

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Gimme Moors

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has inspired multiple films, as varied in quality as the 1939 Best Picture nominee starring Sir Laurence Olivier — and the 2003 made-for-MTV adaptation, in which “Heath” is a pouty, motorcycle-riding himbo. The source material may seem an odd choice for acclaimed British director Andrea Arnold, best-known for 2006’s Red Road and 2009’s Fish Tank, both gritty films about working-class people, unfussily shot using hand-held cameras.

Resisting the urge to contemporize a classic, or shoot it as a traditional costume drama, Arnold takes her version in a near-experimental direction; her Heights makes Cary Fukunaga’s edgy 2011 interpretation of Jane Eyre (starring Fish Tank‘s Michael Fassbender) look tame by comparison. I spoke with Arnold about her daring spin on the Gothic classic.

San Francisco Bay Guardian You’re known as such a contemporary director, in both subject and shooting style. What made you want to take on Wuthering Heights?

Andrea Arnold It’s an interesting question, because I don’t really know. I knew at the time that it was a sort of stupid idea, but I couldn’t help it. I just had to do it. I don’t know why I became so possessed, and I still don’t really know why. It was a book that I had a fascination with — I think a lot of people do. It’s a very troubling book, a very unsettling book, a book that I don’t think is easily understood.

But I seem to like trouble. I sort of realized this about myself, that I’m always pushing myself in ways, like, I’ve got no idea how it’s going to work out, but I’m going to learn. I do think I’m not afraid of going on a journey that I don’t know where it’s going to go. With this film and this whole project, that definitely was a very unnerving and strange decision.

SFBG How did you approach adapting a classic literary work that’s been made into so many films before?

AA I didn’t think like that, or worry about that. I mean, I knew that it had been remade an awful lot of times. I think I didn’t realize how many times. But I just thought about when I went to film school we were all given the same scripts, and 20 people all made something completely different. With such rich material, you can find your own way. And I think when you get attached to something and you have to do it, you’re not sensible anyway.

I’ve always said that once I’ve got an image and an idea about making something, that it chooses you. You don’t choose it. And this was exactly the same. I just got obsessed with the idea of doing it. It wasn’t like I thought very sensibly about what had gone before. I didn’t think about it being a career move in any way.

SFBG Watching the film, it was clear that you — like Emily Brontë — had been inspired by the setting. The landscape is practically a character in the film, and the imagery includes lots of close-ups of insects and plants.

AA I think the difficulty of the location really [influenced] the film, in terms of the way everyone was feeling — it was hard to get around, and [we were] genuinely cold and fed up with the mud. First of all, I tried to find somewhere near where Emily had written it, which was the moors near Haworth, where she lived. The moors near Haworth are a bit like being in the middle of the ocean. They’ve got this undulating, endless feel to them. It’s really beautiful in that way: you feel the moors are everything and there’s nothing else in the world when you’re in the middle of it.

But it’s not so isolated around that particular area anymore. We couldn’t find anywhere that you couldn’t see things on the horizon. So we had to go further. We went to the North York Moors. And there were very few buildings, real places — I always wanted a real location — that were truly isolated. It wasn’t like I had lots of choice.

But I really like that place [where we filmed]. It was a very difficult place to work, though, no doubt. Everyone who worked on it said it’s one of the hardest things they’ve ever done, just physically. We couldn’t get vehicles there so we had to carry all of the cameras up the hills.

SFBG The film has gotten some attention for your casting choices — black actors play Heathcliff at various ages, and race is a recurring theme in the film. What motivated those decisions?

AA When I looked at the book, and all the descriptions of Heathcliff, I really felt that he wasn’t white. I was really surprised, after looking closely at how he was described, why nobody has actually done that before. I think if you’re being really faithful and truthful to the descriptions, that he’s more Asian than he is African. The fact that he’s called a gypsy, the Romany gypsies of that time would have originally come from Asia, and they’re very dark-skinned.

But after sort of investigating a bit more, I thought what really matters is that he’s different. I began to realize that Heathcliff is really Emily Brontë, and that she felt different for being female. There’s something about the book that makes me think that’s a large part of what it’s about.

SFBG The material may be a change for you, but the film is still shot like your other films, using a hand-held camera. Why do you prefer this method?

AA I didn’t think about making it in any different way than I normally do. I like hand-held cameras because if I’m working with non-actors, and there were lots of non-actors in this one, I don’t like them to feel restricted. If you put cameras on tripods then it sort of harnesses things. You have to start telling people where to stand, and hit marks. That’s something that I don’t enjoy.

Also, I didn’t see any reason why a period film shouldn’t have hand-held camera. I thought, just because we’ve seen lots of period films where they’re all very respectful, that doesn’t mean that’s how I have to be. I didn’t feel that I had to follow any sort of traditions. I just felt like I was trying to see it in my own way, and I didn’t let myself be inhibited by what had gone before. *

 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Close encounters

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Close encounters

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The six dancers of Kunst-Stoff’s the moment you stood still…#7 moNOs (Oct. 13-14 at the Old Mint Museum) managed to do something that had previously seemed impossible: they created a playground out of the building’s crumbling courtyard, surely the city’s most oppressive, garrison-like structure. At 50 minutes this romp of stealing, sharing, and varying movement phrases ranged from athletic to balletic, virtuosic to pedestrian. It would have worn out its ability to snare you into its universe, had it not ended with artistic director Yannis Adoniou’s free-spirited and loose-limbed solo, sweetly underscored by Bruno Augusto on keyboard. It’s easy to forget that this entrepreneurial artist is also a fine dancer.

Kunst-Stoff is not so much a company as a place where artists come together to explore affinities and differences. moment, one of a series of such encounters, is the result of this sextet having bounced back and forth ideas of the most disparate nature. Together they came up with scenes which varied between silly and somber, camp and charming. There was as much room for a passing-a-ball game — including, of course, the ubiquitous audience volunteers — as crawls and rolls on the floor and leaps across space. Letting down your hair, as Katie Gaydos did in her initial diagonal, seemed to be the order of the afternoon.

Initially unrelated ideas began to coalesce into something like a patchwork of movement, with rather surprising resilience. A dancer morphed from lying down with beating legs into somersaults and yoga poses. Later, frisky pile-ups did not really look so harmless.

For all the frantic activity in which dancers did not only pick up and vary phrases from each other, but also exchanged clothes, moment did not lack the stillness alluded to by its title. Lindsey Renee Derry, who can scream with the best of them, stood in a relevé in which her toes surely were glued to the floor. Gaydos looked abandoned on top of a “monument” while Calvin Hilpert, holding a weight aloft as if it was about to drop on his head, was hilarious with a screechy Frank Sinatra imitation. moment‘s recurring refrain had the dancers sitting on a bench. We looked at them; sometimes they looked back at us.

Elsewhere on stage this past weekend: British choreographer Russell Maliphant introduced himself at Cal Performances with the theatrically spectacular Eonnagata in 2010. Now, courtesy of San Francisco Performances, he returned with AfterLight (Oct. 13-14, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), inspired by Russian dancer and Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. A great dancer and even greater choreographer, Nijinsky was also schizophrenic and spent the second half of his life in mental institutions. His best-known surviving work Afternoon of a Faun thoroughly shocked audiences at its premiere in 1912.

On the basis of his concept Maliphant intermittently draws you into a murky atmosphere of, perhaps, madness. But as a dance you only want to watch AfterLight once; further exposure is unlikely to reveal hidden treasures.

In Michael Hull’s lighting design, AfterLight is literally dark; at times you can hardly make out the dancers in a couple of shifting spotlights or through a thick carpet of inchoate shapes. As a single-minded expression of a restless mind this worked; in terms of a time-based art, it lacked sustaining power.

AfterLight opened with a solo for Thomasin Gülgeç, spinning as if on a turntable while his arms reached into the darkness around him. At the end we returned to that solitary figure that, instead of opening his body to an enlarging consciousness, shuts down into solitary whirls. In part two, the white-clad Silvina Cortés and Gemma Nixon’s gentle liquidity could have come from Isadora Duncan dancers.

Maliphant’s choreography has no hard edges; its performers spiraled, curled, and spun from one evanescent moment to the next. Sometimes this felt like watching smoke, except that these dancers were anchored in a deep-grounded muscularity that allowed them to connect into an endless stream of rounded shapes. In the first pas de deux, Gülgeç and Nixon’s weighty folding over each other wonderfully recalled Leon Bakst’s illustrations of Scheherazade. Though conceptually intriguing, AfterLight turned out to be a one-shot deal; whether there is more meat to this choreographer remains to be seen.

San Francisco Stories: The literary life

Andrew Lam
-
9
San Francisco Stories: The literary life

tredmond@sfbg.com

A few months before I graduated from college, a group of Distinguished Literary Figures came to my Fancy Eastern University and gave a special seminar on careers in literature. At least 150 of my classmates showed up in their $80 Frye boots and their shirts with the alligators on them and the attitudes they’d carefully honed during a life in which things pretty much went their way.

After an erudite discussion of the lofty (the philosophy of writing) and the mundane (write every day and don’t send bad photocopies of your manuscript to your publisher), one of the DLF’s asked for a show of hands: How many of you are planning a career as a writer?

Every hand in the room shot up. And I looked around and said to myself:

No you aren’t.

No, most of you people will never be writers. Because you’re too fucking happy. Because you’re all well-adjusted young men and women with real futures, who will want jobs that pay and apartments with heat and decent food and cars that start and clothes that look cool, and cappuccino that someone else makes for you, and vacations in nice places where the sun always shines.

You’ll never be writers. You don’t know enough about life.

*****

A year or so later, I was sitting in the makeshift loft of my $175-a-month illegal storefront apartment, and my fingers were so cold that I couldn’t work the cheap and nasty typewriter very well, and there wasn’t any heat and the only way to get rid of the chill was to turn on the oven, which was a very bad idea because a banged-up British motorcycle shared the concrete floor of my room with me and the gas tank leaked, not enough to spill but enough that after five or six hours the collected aromatic hydrocarbons in the air were probably enough to ignite and consume me and half the neighborhood in a cataclysmic fireball. So: we sat in the cold.

My girlfriend had left me; her cat was gone but the place was full of fleas, and I’d picked one out of my mustache that morning when I tried to shave. I was finishing a story about antinuclear protests for a magazine that would soon fold, but maybe not before I got my $200 check, and all I could think about was:

I still have a couple cold beers, and Brian Eno on the box, the toilet hadn’t overflowed yet this week — and fuck: This is about as good as it gets.

This is how young writers live.

We don’t ask for much, writers. We don’t need better iPhones or wifi at Union Square or tax breaks. What we need, and have always needed, is chaos, misery, and grit. We need places where money doesn’t rule and where everything isn’t comfortable. We need, more than anything, a kind of cheap that isn’t cool.

You go to the Salvation Army or Goodwill these days and you don’t see many writers who have day jobs as temps in the Zone buying the crummiest suits and ties they can get away with; it’s all, like, hipster fashion.

Writers need real cheap. They need $2 beers and $4 burritos and crappy places to live that cost less than you can make selling a story or two a month. They need to exist, for real, not just for fun, in a world outside the bubble — and they need a city that makes room for that to happen.

I love where I live, but it’s failing me. And I sometimes think that nobody in charge really cares.

*****

The Bay Guardian turns 46 this week. I’ve been part of it for more than half its life, since I sold my first story to the paper in 1982, a shocking expose about police harassing homeless people for sitting on the sidewalk. I got paid $50. It was a huge deal. I ran right out and bought a bottle of whiskey.

The Guardian was always more of a reporter’s paper than a writer’s paper — we wanted news, facts, information more than we wanted flair. And that’s as it should be in a newspaper. But we’ve also always appreciated the local literary scene, and have always been a place where young (and old) writers could find their voices and tell stories.

Now the paper’s under new ownership, and for our birthday, we contacted some of the best writers we could find in town and asked them to tell us their San Francisco story. What is the city’s literary narrative? What, to use a horrible cliché, do we talk about when we talk about San Francisco?

I’m not surprised that some of what we got was about rent — about the fact that nobody like us can live here anymore without rent control, that the housing crisis brought on by the latest tech boom has made it a terribly unfriendly city for writers.

But they also talked about beauty and passion and the reasons that, despite it all, we remain.

*****

One day after I’d been in San Francisco a few years, my brother called me from Boulder, Colorado, where he’d enrolled as a University of Colorado student. “I can’t stand it here,” he said. “There aren’t any fucking problems.”

Yep — everyone he saw in Boulder was rich and white and clean and educated and healthy. He dropped out pretty quickly, and went back to his America, where it’s nasty and you fight for every scrap and life sucks and then you die — but along the way, you meet the greatest people in the world and you live and love and get in some awesome kicks.

Me, I stayed in my city, a place worth fighting for.

I spent my childhood and college years in New York and Connecticut; I grew up in San Francisco. This is my place in the world, and, as the late great John D. MacDonald said of Florida, “It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.”

And for better and for worse, San Francisco is a great story, a world of love and hope and fear and greed and all these people who wake up every morning and try to make it and the world a better place, often against the greatest possible odds.

Herb Caen said it once: “Love makes this town go ’round. Love and hate, pot and booze, despair and buckets of coffee, most of it stale.” We are strange, and we are proud, and we are freaks, and while our local politicians try to tamp us down and make us normal, the rest of the world treats us as special because of who and what we are.

We are immigrants, most of us, and we all love the city we once knew, and those of us who have been here a while are the worst kind of radicals, the ones who hate change … but inside us, inside the ones who know and care and believe, there’s a heartbeat that says: We have something special here, and part of it comes from tradition, and part of it comes from the shabby underclass side of life, from the fight against greed and landlords and smart-eyed speculators who want to charge for what San Francisco once gave away free.

And that’s a kind of style and class that doesn’t fit into anyone’s portfolio of stock options.

I can talk about policy options all night. It’s a disease you get when writing becomes journalism and the fight goes out of the pen in your hand and into the pen where the decisions that change your life get made. I could tell you a thousand ways that San Francisco can stop becoming a city of the rich and too fucking cool for words and could give a little, tiny bit of its soul to the population that made it great.

I could say that the dot.com booms that ruined so much of this city’s crazy madness would never have happened without the Beats and the Summer of Love, and that we ought to honor our ancestors — even if it means the newcomers have to do what everyone else did, and live a little lower for a while.

I could make the case that housing in San Francisco ought to be treated like a public utility, dispensed by seniority, so the folks who worked for 30 years trying to build community without making a lot of cash get priority over the ones who arrived yesterday, with gobs of money and no concept of what the people who came before them did to make this city great.

But mostly I want to say this:

It’s not pretty, being a writer. The ones who succeed are few, and the ones who fail are many, and the city’s poorer for every one who is force to give up because the city would rather have rich people than people who live on the edge.

But in my San Francisco, some people still make it. I love them all. It gives me hope.

SF Stories: Zahir Janmohamed

Andrew Lam
-
2
SF Stories: Zahir Janmohamed

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Of the many things I adore about San Francisco, one of them is that the word “Palestine” is not treated like Voldermort’s name, the one that dare not be uttered. You can say you are Palestinian here and no one will freak out. San Franciscans, most of them at least, will not tell you — as Newt Gringrich did — that your culture is invented, or that your identity (or your struggle) is not a valued part of the tapestry of this city.

I am not used to this. I spent the past nine years living in Washington DC, where I became accustomed to meeting Arab shop owners who dodged questions about their country of origin. Some feared a backlash from customers. Others worried about government harassment and eavesdropping. One Yemeni shopkeeper near the Pentagon even went as far as creating to-go boxes with Americans flags imprinted on them, the words “we are proud of you” under each flag. Unfortunately, it’s like this now in many cities in the US, where to be Arab, Iranian or South Asian is to abdicate your ethnic identity, to pretend it’s just not there.

That’s not exactly true in San Francisco. This city isn’t perfect and it has its own ugly past and current struggles with racial integration — but San Francisco at least tries to inculcate its motto on all who are lucky enough to live here: just be who you are. You can fly a Palestinian flag outside your business and chances are you may even attract more customers because of it. And if you show up to work wearing a red, white and blue covered hijab or turban in the city, people may very well laugh at you.

Last week I walked through the Mission district interviewing Palestinian American business owners. On Mission Street, I saw my friend Ashraf sitting on a bar stool at the café he opened two years ago. The San Francisco born Palestinian-American, whose parents were born outside of Jerusalem, wore an SF Giants baseball cap and adjusted it often during our meeting, revealing a full head of hair already graying at the age of 34.

Ashraf remembers car trips with his parents to the Samiramis Grocery just down Mission Street. Samir Khoury, a Palestinian Christian from Ramallah who came to San Francisco in 1953, opened the iconic grocery store in 1972. For the longest time it was the only place where Ashraf’s family could buy zaatar or rent Egyptian movies. It always had everything we had back home, Ashraf says.

Ashraf points out that within a small radius of his cafe, there are a now number of Palestinian owned businesses, including Philz Coffee and Bi-Rite Creamery.

“But no one really knows these are Palestinian owned businesses,” Ashraf says. “And even if they found out, no one would really care.”

I tell Ashraf about a sandwich shop I used to visit in Washington DC where the owner insisted on telling everyone that he was Jordanian. One day the owner pulled me aside and confessed he was really Palestinian from Bethlehem but told people he was Jordanian because he thought it “sounded better.”

When Ashraf hears this he laughs. “It’s not like that here,” he says. “In San Francisco you don’t have to play that act.”

Zahir Janmohamed is a San Francisco writer and former Congressional aide.

SF Stories: Michelle Tea

Andrew Lam
-
0
SF Stories: Michelle Tea

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL When I was about 21, living with my parents outside Boston, I started making zines. I sent my first one, Bitch Queen, to Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, and it wound up getting reviewed in MRR‘s Queer Zine Explosion issue. I hadn’t even known there was a queer zine explosion happening, but my little P.O. box was soon stuffed with zines from zinesters wanting to trade issues, and with enough dollar bills that I could cross the street to the mall and get lunch. It was the first experience I had of being given something for my writing, and, more importantly, finding community with other writers.

Later that year my relationship fizzled and I found myself unexpectedly moving to San Francisco. It felt like I had stepped right into the zines I’d been devouring — not only because the punk-queer scene really embodied the content and aesthetics I’d become obsessed with — torn, cut ‘n’ paste, glue-sticked and Sharpied, riffing on radical feminism, dirty queer sex, anti-racist, anti-sizest and more — but because the people from the actual zines were slamming up against me at the queer clubs I was dancing at!

There was Lynn Breedlove, whose daredevil fucking-shit-up bike messenger adventure story I’d read in Chainsaw. There was Youme, the sweetly, long-haired girl who inked the pervy, graphic novel-zine Get What You Want. There’s Larry Bob from Holy Titclamps, and Matt Wobensmith from Outpunk! I think that woman with the spiral-shaved head in the front row of the poetry reading at the Bearded Lady is Kathy Acker, from the Angry Woman book. Yeah — it is. And I swear I saw those heavily tattooed, psychotically pierced girls over there in a DIY photo spread in some grainy, Xeroxed number.

An obsessive fan my whole life, it took me an awe-filled moment to understand that I had become obsessed with a scene I could actually participate in. Showing up to dance at Junk at The Stud and getting taken home by the girl on the cover of the latest modern-primitive zine was just something that happened when you were living in the center of everything interesting, San Francisco in the 1990s. No more longing for Warhol’s Factory, the heyday of the Mud Club, front row at CBGBs, a room at the Chelsea, London in the 70s, the East Village in the 80s or whatever cultural moment I was upset at time itself for causing me to miss. I had the tremendous feeling of being part of something larger than myself, righteous with activism and wild with sex and art.

I pierced one nipple at Fakir Musafar (wait, the guy from the ReSearch Book???)’s piercing school, where you only had to pay for the jewelry, the piercing, done by a student, was free. Even so, I could only afford a single ring, so I only pierced one nipple, and the ring fell out anyway, while having sex with someone I don’t remember anymore. The San Francisco queer-punk scene in the 90s was adamant in its invitation that anyone could participate. It didn’t matter what you looked like, you were invited to fuck yourself up a little and whammo, you are getting massively laid. Broke? Write about it, steal copies from Kinko’s –look, you’re a publishing magnate! Got a bad attitude? Awesome, you are now mayor of dyketown, go punch someone. Every bit of antisocial behavior punished elsewhere was here politicized and celebrated in the ongoing experiment of how far could everything be pushed. And at it’s heart, the culture was a literary one, with zines its many bibles, its textbooks, its canon.

Michelle Tea is the author of many books, including the 90s classic Valencia and the forthcoming A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (McSweeney’s). She is the editor of Sister Spit Books, an imprint of City Lights, and the Executive Director of RADAR Productions, which hosts a Polka Dot Cocktail Party with queer studies scholar and curator Jonathan Katz, at a private home, on October 28th. The link: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/282115

 

SF Stories: Annalee Newitz

Andrew Lam
-
0
SF Stories: Annalee Newitz

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Right now, at UC Berkeley, somebody is inventing a new organism. Across the Bay, at the San Francisco hacker space Noisebridge, somebody is programming a giant array of LEDs they bought from a cheerfully piratical Chinese website that sells the lights on long ribbons rolled tightly into bundles. On Mount Tam, long after the park closes on Saturday night, a group of amateur astronomers has set up telescopes and is surveying Messier objects. In Golden Gate Park, historians are leading walking tours; in the Presidio, the Park Service has just painstakingly recreated a dune ecosystem that had been destroyed by development decades ago. And over at Tech Shop, in SoMa, somebody is inventing a high-tech prosthetic that will turn disabilities into superpowers.

The San Francisco Bay Area is globally famous for its subversive subcultures, from the hippies and punks to the hipsters and steampunks. But what we usually forget is that scientists and engineers are part of the city’s phylogeny of subversives too. The Bay Area was home to the nation’s first conservationist movement in the early twentieth century, as well as the first urban “sidewalk astronomy” club in the 1960s. The Homebrew Computer Club, whose members included a bunch of weirdos who invented the first home PCs, started in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. The people who participated in these groups, like John Muir and Steve Wozniak, were activists. Their goal was to teach everyone about science, so that we could use science to transform our cities and the world.

We did it, too. In the 1960s, conservationists prevented developers from choking the Bay with landfill so they could build more condos. In the 1980s, computer scientists at Stanford and Berkeley organized to educate the public about the incredible dangers of Reagan’s “Star Wars” project, a computerized missile defense system. And today, Bay Area scientists are still trying to save the world. Earthquake engineers at an enormous lab in Richmond are figuring out ways to construct buildings that won’t collapse when the Big One hits. Biologists at Walnut Creek’s Joint Genome Institute are using a fleet of genome sequencers save the environment by figuring out which plants make the best biofuels — and which microorganisms are the best carbon sinks.

It’s no accident that San Francisco is home to two of the country’s most radical experiments in politicized science: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which fights legal battles to protect people’s privacy and free speech in the realms of technology; and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which makes scientific journal articles freely available online under open copyright licenses. Both organizations challenge the conventional wisdom that technology and science should be controlled by an elite few.

Here in the Bay Area, we use education to disturb the peace. We do science in the streets. When it comes to rational inquiry, we do not fuck around. And that is why San Francisco will always be a city with one glowing tentacle wrapped tightly around the future. Of course, our version of tomorrow isn’t ruled by brain-eating zombie authoritarians and mind-controlled mutants. Instead, it’s full of green energy, freely-shared information, robotic exoskeletons for people who are paralyzed, carefully maintained ecosystems, and Utopian experiments with Internet democracy. I know you’ve seen that future, too. It lurks in labs and libraries. Of course there are always reasons to be pessimistic. But sometimes, when you climb a hill and look out at the open Bay, you cannot suppress the feeling that we are inventing a better tomorrow.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is editor and time distortion field operator for i09.com.

 

Pre-lloween

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Pre-lloween

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “We wanted to put together something that truly reflects San Francisco on its most popular holiday,” DJ Syd Gris of Opulent temple tells me over the phone. “A titillating, intoxicating kaleidoscope of San Francisco flavor with soulful, sexy music. And zombie strippers.”

He’s talking about the massive Masquerotica (Sat/20, 8:30pm-3am $55–$125, creative costume expected. San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th St., SF. www.maquerotica.com ), a perfect kick-off to the insane Halloween season, which pretty much does include frisky input from most of the more risquee club scenes SF’s got going — Kink.com, Anon Salon, Mission Control, Vau de Vire, Hubba Hubba Revue, Bondage-A-Go-Go, Asian Diva Girls, Club Exotica … and then for kicks, Trannyshack. Hey, different strokes! Please have sex with Trannyshack if you want.

There also promises to be some intriguing tunes, from electro-house headliners Stanton Warriors and 15-piece funk band Action Jackson right on through to the early R&B Hard French DJs and hard-driving Mr. Gris himself. (We’ll also probably be hearing from a lot from gay rapper Cazwell’s alabaster abs as well. Squee squee!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyO9D3t0jVM

“The demise of the Exotic Erotic Ball here a few years ago provided an opportunity to put the focus back on local talent while still keeping the sexy vibe. We’d like to think that we’re sanding off some of the rougher edges of what the Erotic Exotic and the Castro became, so that people feel more comfortable being themselves. Or getting out of themselves. Whatever the case may be.”

Although there’s no hardcore sex allowed at Masquerotica (no fear, there’ll be plenty of makeout areas), why do San Franciscans weave so much hanky-panky into our pagan revels? Or did I just answer my own question?

“Halloween is partly about being able to express yourself in ways that don’t involve judgement, and so a lot of subcultural communities found acceptance during the holiday,” Gris said. “We want to honor that. We’re a big tent, and we want to fill it with all the people and things that turn us on in the Bay Area.”

 

MOVE D

I have a scary-powerful crush on this wizard of wide-ranging techno, whose epic sets with live bells and whistles are painterly in their soundscape effects and irresistible in their atmospheres. You can dance to them, too. With DJs Conor, Jonah Sharp, and Mike B.

Thu/18, 9pm-3am, $12–$15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

REAGENZ

Oh hey, did I mention that the amazing Move D was in town from Berlin? Why not take advantage of that, and his fruitful collaboration with local hero Jonah Sharp, and present them both in their ambitious ambient live-entity form, Reagenz. Tech heads like me are already wetting their drawers for this installment of the Realtime live techno party, also featuring Moniker, Polk & Hyde, and Its Own Infinite Flower.

Fri/19, 9pm, $12–$15. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

ODYSSEY

One of the city’s most beloved underground parties emerges to celebrate its anniversary, with SF legend DJ Neon Leon at the helm. Expect tons of warm house tunes and love up the wazoo (plus some nifty projections, too!) With DJs Steve Fabus, Robin Simmons, Jason Kendig, Robert Jeffrey, and Viv Baron.

Fri/19, 10pm-4am, $10. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.public.com

 

HALLOWEEN! THE BALLAD OF MICHELE MYERS

What do you get when you mashup all your favorite teenage slasher flicks with The Facts of Life? Grindr! Kidding. You get this horrifically hilarious musical brought to us by one of SF’s most twisted drag queens, Raya Light. As glamour-ghoul Michele Myers, she’s gonna tear you apart to a disco beat. And you’ll be singing right along.

Fri/19-Wed/31, 8pm and 10pm, $20. CounterPulse, 1310 Mission, SF. michelemyers2012.eventbrite.com

 

DEATH BECOMES HER

You know you live for that campfest movie — wherein Goldie Hawn eats Meryl Streep while Bruce Willis drives away with Freeway the Dog? Something like that, but also the Fountain of Youth and Isabella Rossellini in something really strappy. Anyway, Peaches Christ is giving the 1992 flick, which introduced many of us toddlers to the wonders of CGI, the inimitable uproarious Castro Theatre treatment. Heklina of Trannyshack joins her for a wild live pre-show, with Lady Bear, L. Ron Hubby, and the city’s drag-erati.

Sat/20, 8pm, $20–$25. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF. www.peacheschrist.com

SF Stories: Jessica C.Kraft

Andrew Lam
-
0
SF Stories: Jessica C.Kraft

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Everyone sees the neon signs on street posts over the weekend, but only a few types of people actually stop at estate sales. Early on Friday come the re-sellers—professionals intent on securing cheap, high quality goods that can be resold at pricey consignment shops and on eBay. On Saturdays come the casual shoppers, drawn by the novelty of IKEA prices on antique store treasures. And on Sundays, the hard-core hagglers and bargain hunters arrive, ready to seize upon whatever’s left for a few small bills.

My husband and I have gone “estate saling” all over the city for the past five years. While we’ve found plenty of cheap treasures, our real attraction to these final close-outs is their view into a hidden and historic San Francisco.

Walking into these properties, we marvel at the lush backyard gardens never visible from the street, and the secret views never seen from hilltop public parks. As in any scenic city, San Francisco builders smartly sited properties to maximize views, adding up to tens of thousands of private vistas that each offer a unique glimpse of the lambent sunsets, the columns of fog, or the itinerant Telegraph Hill parrots on parade.

We note how interior design styles have changed through the decades, and wonder how the elderly residents of these homes were able to put up with railroad hallways, stairways both too steep and too narrow, and the classic Doelger home’s miniature bathrooms.

There are always hordes of tchotchkes, outdated kitchenware, and piles of VHS tapes. But curious, bizarre objects also abound, mostly in mildewed basements where World War II veterans kept elaborate workbenches and harbored unconventional passions. An orthopedist in Forest Hill spent his free time jerry-rigging prosthetic devices in his basement, which, by the time of his sale, resembled a museum for medical patents. One dusty workbench was covered with scale models of world-famous buildings; the architect-collector had traveled to each of the sites and brought home a replica. Now his Hagia Sophia and Taj Mahal perch above our bathroom sink. My favorite find from one of these sub-floor collections was a drink stirrer with a pink, cheeky plastic butt affixed to the top. “Bottom’s Up!” the caption read.

Frequenting these sales allows visitors to paint a cultural map of the city that’s more nuanced than what you might learn on a City Guides walking tour. Headed out to the Sunset? You’ll likely find lacquered furniture, multiple tea sets and jade buddhas — but these might be surrounded by Guatemalan embroidery, Irish beer towels or French literature.

Who knew that Cow Hollow’s Union Street used to be a bohemian enclave? Amidst the posh wine bars and jewelry stores, we visited the apartment of a Life photographer and his oil painter wife who collected esoteric religious books, set their table with African textiles and, we imagined, spent evenings seated on the floor listening to sitar ragas. (We now use their Japanese gong to call our family to dinner.)

Stopping in at a sale in Noe Valley with other baby-clad parents, we’re delighted to discover a closet full of Carmen Miranda costumes, sequined carnival masks, fishnet tights and feather boas. A gay couple had lived there together since the ’50s, each year outdoing one another at Halloween. Thanks to them, our New Year’s party last year was extra sparkly.

At a sale just down the street from our house, at the foot of Grandview Heights in the inner Sunset, we inquired about an upright piano. We learned that its owner — a surgeon and well-known jazz photographer — had shot Duke Ellington and other jazz greats playing that very instrument. We never would have imagined that in our quiet hood of dog walkers and weekend gardeners, music history was made.

When we see these homes and prized collections being dismantled and dispersed, we become the last witnesses to episodes in San Francisco history. We get an intimate glimpse of the personalities that used to fill pockets of San Francisco real estate, before many of these neighborhoods became too costly for more than one privileged demographic.

Ultimately, though, we reckon with loss. Someone has died. Their family heirlooms are deracinated; a resale company makes some dough. A family grieves, and is compensated. The perpetual question that these sales seem to ask is: can we, should we, know a life by the objects left behind? When we bring an item home, we feel enriched, as if some facet of our inner world has been represented in solid substance. Yet we can’t help seeing these objects as memento mori. As my husband wistfully observed: when we’re gone, and after our kids have rifled through our dusty, obsolete books and tchotchkes, we’ll likely have one hell of an estate sale ourselves.

Jessica C. Kraft is a San Francisco writer.

SF Stories: Kevin Killian

Andrew Lam
-
0
SF Stories: Kevin Killian

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Today it’s mostly about the rents. People come to my tiny apartment, a shoebox I share with three cats and a genius, and they wonder two things at the same time—what the mad Romantic poet Holderlin called the condition of “pallaksch,” an occurrence that presses your yes and no buttons simultaneously. I can see my visitors wondering, you’re only an avant-garde writer at the bottom of the heap, how can you afford to live in San Francisco? And another part of them is answering their own questions by guessing, it must be rent control.

We moved into our place in 1990. Minna Street was then the foulest street I’d ever lived on, but because of the recent earthquake of 1989 the rents were dirt cheap and you just couldn’t say no. From what I understand, the building shook so much during the quake that if you didn’t live on the ground floor, you got the hell out. And the bottom feeders, like ourselves, moved in. I said, “Lightning’s not gonna strike twice,” and so far the building hasn’t crumbled. We came to love our little alley, the neighbors, the quiet, even the drug dealers. It was the bohemian quandary: if a neighborhood improves, does gentrification automatically follow?

I write this in the mourning attendant to the September 29th death, in New York, of radical geographer Neil Smith, the Scots-born teacher and theorist whose work on uneven development has helped us identify these patterns more clearly. Walking down the streets of a big city, or even passing through my shoebox (for he taught us that the same patterns that shape a city are shaping our interiors too), it’s impossible not to think of the man. “Capital,” he wrote, “is continually invested in the built environment in order to produce surplus value and expand the basis of capital itself. But equally, capital is continually withdrawn from the built environment so that it can move elsewhere and take advantage of higher profit rates.” That’s the uneven part of the theory of uneven development. We always wondered why there was so much crack and prostitution on Minna Street, a stones throw from City Hall, from the Opera House, from the other landmarks of capital. But Smith knew. How does rent control even survive in a totalizing city like San Francisco? It has to for capital to flourish, to breed, to flex its muscles.

The legends of the uneven are rampant. When I interviewed the poets and artists who flocked to San Francisco after WWII for my book on the life of Jack Spicer, men and women 85 today if still they live, they would invariably mention moving into a room in North Beach that was 19 dollars a month, a four-bedroom flat in the Fillmore for sixty a month. When the evidence of inflation is pressed up to one’s face like a rag dowsed in chloroform, we younger people inhale sharply. And we’re the same way, we who moved here later on, in the 60s, 70s, even the 80s, when rents were 200, 300, 500 dollars. It wasn’t like we could afford our apartments even then. But at least there would be another worse one we could repair to when “times got tough.” And now, instead, there are fields further away, from which capital has been temporarily withdrawn. Oakland we hear. Last month we counted and realized that only three poets under the age of forty remain in San Francisco. And in each case it’s an exception—a quirk in the system—perhaps the wrinkle that determines the system’s face? The face that says yes to us and no to us with the same grinning wet mouth.

Kevin Killian’s new novel is called Spreadeagle (from Publication Studio). His next book is Tagged, a collection of his intimate color photos of poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians naked, or the next thing to it, edited by Darin Klein. (A show of this work opens at White Columns in New York on October 27th). On November 8, SFMOMA and San Francisco Poets Theater present a revival of Killian’s 1995 play WET PAINT, in conjunction with the Jay DeFeo retrospective (Nov 3 — February 3, 2013) organized jointly by SFMOMA and New York’s Whitney Museum.

 

SF Stories: Laura Fraser

Andrew Lam
-
3
SF Stories: Laura Fraser

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

People marvel that I manage to live in San Francisco on what I make as a freelance writer. They wonder if I have a trust fund, secretly write speeches for CEOs, or run a phone-sex business on the side. They figure I must somehow make over six figures to live in a three-bedroom flat in the Haight with high ceilings, hardwood floors, a big kitchen, and a garden as big as a park.

No: I’m able to be a writer in San Francisco because of rent control.

If it weren’t for rent control, I would not live in the city I love, which has been my home since 1984, when I scored an apartment on Waller Street with one woman I’d met in a magazine collective called Processed World and another who’d just gotten off the Green Tortoise bus.

At first I wasn’t sure I wanted the apartment. It was filthy; the living room had been subdivided into four sections with hanging sheets, and only cockroaches dared to enter the kitchen. It was $750 a month, which seemed astronomical to us at the time. But it was so rundown that no one had ever bothered to rip away the original wainscoting, Victorian cabinets, hardwood floors, or clawfoot tub, so it had a lot of charm under its grime. The landlord — an entrepreneurial hippie who bought about ten buildings when the Haight was at its most depressed — insisted we do community service as part of our rent. We pooled our money, took the place, and began scrubbing and painting.

Over the years, by sheer luck, I never moved. Instead, people moved in with me. I lived with a constant parade of roommates, most of them artists or people who worked for nonprofits. There was a drummer, a guitarist, and a composer. Maria was a young journalist from Mexico City who came here to write about migrant farm workers. Stevious was a political refugee from South Africa who worked at Mother Jones. Gail was a chef who left to join the circus. Natalie taught English to new immigrants. Julia was an avant-garde theatre director. Danielle was a filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary about Ghana, where she’d lived in the Peace Corps. Vince worked for the alternative press. All these people had moved to San Francisco because they wanted to do something creative or humanitarian, and to Waller Street, because our rent made that possible.

During the dot-com boom, my flat became a refuge. Two friends, a photographer and a musician, had been effectively evicted by a landlord who made life so hellish they’d leave, so he could raise the rent at a time when Mission rents went up 40 percent in a year. They had nowhere to go, so they moved in with me. It was a very San Francisco story: the guy was my great-grand-ex, who used to live in the flat above me when we dated, and now he was living in my house with his girlfriend. We cooked and played music and got along fine, until they moved into a flat they could afford — in Oakland.

Until the dot-com years, thanks to rent control, you could make a living as an artist or activist and manage to live in San Francisco, even if it meant eating a lot of burritos. Today, that’s not possible, unless you’re as old as I am and somehow had the luck to hang on to the second apartment you moved into after college. I may envy people who had the foresight to buy real estate in the 1980s or 1990s, but the fact is, I didn’t have the money then, either, for what now seems like a laughably low down payment. Rent control is my equity. The neighbors who live in the mirror-image apartment in my building are not artists or activists; they are tech people, whose rent is double mine, and who do make six figures.

Recently, a talented young novelist visited my flat and was amazed at how spacious it is. He’s struggling to keep on living in San Francisco, and I don’t know how he and his wife manage writing and running an international creative nonprofit while paying our city’s rents, especially with a child. I do know that unless San Francisco makes room for people like him, as it made room for me, with rent control, we will lose the distinctive character of our city—or what remains of it. Rent control made it possible for me to be a writer, but 25 years later, it’s a lot harder for him.

Rent control is essential to keeping San Francisco’s creative character. But it isn’t sufficient if the city wants to help young people who are trying to embark on creative careers outside of the tech sector in San Francisco today. We need affordable housing; we need rent controls to extend to vacant apartments; mainly, we need to want to keep San Francisco weird.

Laura Fraser is the author of the New York Times bestseller An Italian Affair, among other books.

SF Stories: Veronica Christina

Andrew Lam
-
3
SF Stories: Veronica Christina

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Living in San Francisco means accepting the constant love/hate battle between beauty and the beast, privilege and poverty, art/music/literature and, “Ew, what the hell did I just step in?” It’s balancing the sweeping bayside views against the looming threat that at any minute we could crumble into the sea. Living here means accepting a certain level of hypocrisy, from ourselves, our government, and each other. It’s understanding that you can’t please everyone all of the time so you’d better figure out how to please yourself.

We’re a city that believes the good things in life should cost money, but heaven forbid we raise property taxes or are asked to pay cover at a club when we think we’re “on the list.” We’re sex-positive, frequently hedonistic, and culinarily spoiled. We float easily between roommate potlucks, Napa Valley wine tastings and pop-up restaurants (where bringing your own 6-pack is not only encouraged but another urban validation of just how in-the-know we actually are).

We dedicate our weekends in drunken tribute to America’s Cup/Folsom Street Fair/Bay to Breakers, then shock our livers back to life on Monday with an all-juice cleanse, delivered right to our shared workspaces. We’ll wax poetic about the exhibits at the MOMA and the DeYoung when secretly the Academy of Sciences is the only museum most of us like.

We vehemently fight for the rights of all our residents to know the joy, solace and comfort of family life, but hate waiting behind the poor lady struggling with her stroller on the bus (eyeroll) and why doesn’t she just get a Baby Bjorn already? We hate drivers while we’re bicycling, hate bicyclists while we’re driving, and collectively despise anyone on a motorcycle.

We’re a city that is constantly forgetting which days street sweeping are on and remain almost adorably hopeful that maaaaybe this time our bumper can hang six inches into the red without being noticed by DPT (it can’t). We’re a city that spends too much precious time getting our cars towed/ ticketed/ broken into.

But then there’s the love. We are a city who falls in love all the time; with ourselves, with our chosen urban families, with that girl on the BART, the view from the bridge, Dolores Park movie nights, hikes in the Presidio, with yoga, politics, new ideas, farmer’s markets, the Giants. We’re a city of, “hey, let’s give it a shot,” a destination for people of alternative mindsets to finally belong.

We love this city with a passion akin to a lover you just can’t leave. San Francisco is in our veins and we keep coming back for more. Sure, we flirt with the notion of trading up to some sexy Oakland loft (free parking!) or a peaceful, tree-canopied Marin cottage (we could get a dog!) but the allure never quite goes away. We may fight like crazy, but no matter how mean we get, she always welcomes us home.

Veronica Christina is the editor of Sex + Design magazine, www.sexanddesign.com

 

Darker than dark

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Darker than dark

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It is one of those hard truths one must learn to live with: Quentin Tarantino will always have seen more obscure exploitation movies than you. His new Django Unchained will arrive just in time for Christmas like a gift wrapped severed limb, leaving dedicated fanboy/fangirl types just weeks yet to immerse themselves in the world of spaghetti westerns to which it pays homage.

That makes two features in a row he’s made inspired by 1960s and 70s Euro trash cinema, following 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, which tipped hat to the era’s myriad international-coproduction war flicks. If you saw the obscure 1978 Italian film that was based on (and named after), you also probably already know who and what a Django is, how to pronounce him, and maybe even the factoid that countless (seriously, no one knows how many) ersatz Django “sequels” were made to cash in on the 1966 original’s success.

If not, join the more innocent multitudes at the multiplex come December, many of whom will no doubt be asking for one ticket to “Duh-jango,” please. There’s no shame in knowing nothing about such cultural marginalia. But what even faintly hipster-identifying person would admit to not knowing everything there is to know — even being bored with that knowledge — behind Reservoir Dogs (1992), the now 20-year-old Citizen Kane of indie meta guy flicks? How many people can not only quote its every line, but quote the every line of at least a few amongst its own umpteen mostly lousy imitations (yep, that includes you, 1999’s Boondock Saints)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvoKT481EmU

In the gradual groundswell of attention that greeted Dogs back then, viewers confidently cited Tarantino’s inspirations (as did he himself), noting the imprint of everything from classic noir titles to Kurosawa. Yet one movie that had a very direct influence was almost completely absent from those discussions, failing to rise from its prior two decades of complete obscurity even in the two decades post-Dogs.

Together at last in one canine-throwdown double bill is Day of the Wolves, that forgotten 1971 thriller — thanks of course to the Roxie Cinema and Elliot Lavine, themselves reunited for the latest installment in “Not Necessarily Noir,” that catch-all occasional series encompassing all things cool and (mostly) celluloid which don’t fit the loose strictures of their long-running actual noir retrospectives. Wolves and Dogs tussle to kick off the two-week schedule this weekend.

Day of the Wolves‘ low profile is somewhat explicable: it was never released theatrically in the US, and for years withheld from legal exhibition due to copyright issues. Still, one marvels how such a flamboyant relic of pure Seventies-ness could have remained under the radar for so long. TV and Vegas comedian Jan Murray is improbably cast as the mastermind who orchestrates the assembly of six career criminals in a secret desert location. All strangers, they’re instructed to call one another only by assigned number, wear identical outfits, and sport full facial hair (some obviously glued-on). Their mission is to “hit a whole town and peel it like an orange” — sealing off a “model community” in the Southwest, emptying every till, then scramming via private plane.

It’s an ingenious plan that counts on the complacent vulnerability of such burgs. In fact, Wellerton’s city council has just demonstrated ideal small-mindedness by firing its police chief (late, SF-born Richard Egan, a second tier 1950s star gone to flab) for the crime of actually enforcing laws on some of its more irresponsible A-list citizens. Thus the population of 7,000 or so is woefully under prepared when they find the power cut off, exit routes blocked, and seven armed desperados in charge.

The early going bears closest resemblance to Reservoir Dogs, and is the most inspired. (Later when the film gets to its prolonged actual climax, it devolves into a more ordinary Western-style shoot-’em-up between the raiders and Egan’s cop-turned vigilante, though there’s a doozy of a final twist.) Writer-director Ferde Grofe Jr., whose career in features sprawled sparsely from the early 60s to the late 80s, demonstrates a real flair for memorable idiosyncrasy, if less so for action. In style and content, Wolves is a perfect time capsule: groovy rock score (with “acid” guitar, bongos, and flute), very wide lapels, and a dune buggy chase. This near-classic B movie will be shown in one mightily color-faded, “pinked-out” 35mm print, an ostensible flaw that plays more like a finishing touch.

“Not Necessarily Noir III” mixes more such rediscoveries with fairly well known cult faves of the last decades, from neo-noirs to Hong Kong action to 70s New Hollywood questing (exceptional 1978 drama Who’ll Stop the Rain with Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld; the seldom-seen ’71 Cisco Pike with Kris Kristofferson, Gene Hackman, and Warhol superstar Viva). Among its more rarefied titles are two Me Decade Franco-noirs with Jean-Paul Belmondo (who performs some amazing stunts himself in 1971’s The Burglars); 1968’s very disturbing crime thriller Night of the Following Day (wherein white-blond Marlon Brando is the good guy), and a supernatural blaxploitation double bill of very odd, arty 1973 vampire tale Ganja and Hess and the next year’s wacky, tacky voodoo revenge saga Sugar Hill.

Particularly worth checking out is Darker Than Amber, an attempt to launch a James Bond-style series featuring John D. MacDonald’s best-selling Florida sleuth Travis McGee. Unfortunately this 1970 maiden effort flopped, and the film has seldom been seen — especially without cuts — since. Admittedly it has pedestrian TV-style direction from Robert Clouse (who’d hit his sole career peak later with Bruce Lee’s 1973 Enter the Dragon), and the production values are just B-plus. But it’s an ideal vehicle for Rod Taylor, the brawny, wry, relaxed Aussie who should have been a huge star in the 60s and 70s, but despite a couple memorable films (1963’s The Birds, 1960’s The Time Machine) never got the right break. He’s surrounded by a memorable gallery of MacDonald characters, with two body-builder villains (William Smith, Robert Philips) in addition to the frequently shirtless star making this an notably homoerotic entry for the era in a macho action genre.

“NOT NECESSARILY NOIR III”

Oct. 19-31, $6.50-$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

 

SF Stories: Benjamin Bac Sierra

Andrew Lam
-
5
SF Stories: Benjamin Bac Sierra

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL 

Puro San Fran: These words have inspired me to somewhere beyond my city and to someone beyond myself. Puro San Fran, I have howled into our smashed streets, into the lush jungles of Okinawa, death deserts of Saudi Arabia, the overly intellectual classrooms at U.C. Berkeley — into barrios worldwide.

Puro San Fran can be literally translated into Pure San Francisco, but what exactly is so pure about this Golden Gated city is the subject for this musing.

As an adolescent homeboy from our Mission district, I shouted Puro San Fran with anger, as a demand to combat. In different evolutions, though, St. Francis blessed me with different powers that forced me to confront profound paradoxes, within myself and my home.

Puro San Fran is more than a battle-cry; it is a meditation, a mantra that has soothed me and granted me an identity that has fueled my consciousness. I like to pride myself as a Missionero and Cortlandero before gentrification of those gritty hoods, but it is idealistic impurity to tell the tale that the Mission district is all I knew. I liked to claim those territories as if I, we, owned those streets, but those streets were only half my story.

A veteran Muni bus rider by age 11, I would graffiti tag my name and the name of our break dance crew all over every neighborhood — the Haight, Noe Valley, Soma (back when all that existed there were dull warehouses), the Sunset, Excelsior, etc. At 14 years old, we, brown skinned, would blow white angel-dust smoke halos into San Francisco’s spitting seashore at Ocean Beach. During the crack-era 1980s, we would drink and fight at rat-infested Union Square, a home for black-bearded bums who we would share our Mad-Dog 20/20 wine with. Parading our poverty on 30th street after our many 49ers Superbowl victories, we proclaimed the streets as ours, not knowing or understanding that the actual tar and cement would be “rehabilitated” (gentrified) before we would be, so that now almost all of my former San Franeros have vanished outside its borders.

Except for very brief stints in backyard cities, I did not truly explore outside of San Francisco until I was seventeen and joined the Marine Corps. Before then, I had never even heard of other major Bay Area cities called Santa Rosa, Richmond, Berkeley, or Menlo Park. My world, my life was Puro San Fran, but it was that spirit that also charged me forward, so that now I have trumpeted our unique city everywhere I have traveled. With San Fran spirit, I thrust myself into becoming a student, a writer, a professor, a father, a sinner, and a fuller human being.

San Francisco is changing, as it has always been changing, but we are at our roots Native American hippie Missionary 49er Giant locos. Thanks to our counterculture tradition, we believe in peace and diversity as an essence, yet we contradict ourselves by also being hedonistic kings and queens who wear the golden crown of capitalism on the West Coast. What goes on in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what goes on here in San Fran becomes a permanent tattoo on our souls, and we like to believe we have them, that stuff of souls. We live in the moment trusting it is forever. Go to AT&T Park during the Giants playoffs; you will feel the forever, and you will fall in love with it. Puro San Fran, therefore, is a hopeless romantic nostalgia for something that never really existed but that always is possible. With that purity, that hopeless possibility, that profound paradox, I write and represent us all. Con Safos.

Benjamin Bac Siera is a San Francisco City College English composition and literature professor and author of Barrio Bushido, an ode to Mission District vato locos.

SF Stories: John Ross

Andrew Lam
-
0
SF Stories: John Ross

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Coming out of the underground

On the BART escalator,

The Mission sky

Is washed by Autumn,

The old men and their garbage bags

Are clustered in the battered plaza

We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.

Behind me down below

In the throat of the Earth

A rough bracero sings

Of his comings and goings

In a voice as ronco y dulce

As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco

For the white zombies

Careening downtown

To the dot coms.

They are trying to kick us

Out of here

Again

They are trying to drain

This neighborhood of color

Of color

Again.

This time we are not moving on.

We are going to stick to this barrio

Like the posters so fiercely pasted

To the walls of La Mision With iron glue

That they will have to take them down

Brick by brick

To make us go away

And even then our ghosts

Will come home

And turn those bricks

Into weapons

And take back our streets

Brick by brick

And song by song

Ronco y dulce

As Jalisco and Michaocan

Managua, Manila, Ramallah Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.

As my compa QR say

We’re here now motherfuckers

Tell the Klan and the Nazis

And the Real Estate vampires

To catch the next BART out of here

For Hell.

John Ross (1938-2011) was a street poet, shit disturber, author, and for some 20 years, the Bay Guardian’s Mexico City correspondent

SF Stories: Tiny

Andrew Lam
-
3
SF Stories: Tiny

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL I have a Vision..(Too!)

of poor people-led revolutions and clan mothers wit solutions including the many colored, many spirited, humble people who still remain in San Francisco even though we are systematically incarcerated, profiled, shot or just hated Used by akkkademic institutions, Nonprofiteering, complex over-funded government collusions — From gang ijunctions to sit-lie laws —

Arresting poor folks of color for no just cause

From Ambassador security guards to Stop ‘ n’ Frisk-

using code words like”cleaning up streets”

so frisko is only for the white ‘ n’ Rich The Afrikan population Out-migration caused by Negro Removal, Redlining, Re-Devil-opment and Lennar displacement La Raza en la mission replaced, displaced by condominiums and Eastern Neighborhood Plans, making room for wheatgrass juice and gourmet coffe stands-

And then let’s go back to the Original removal — !st Peoples of the Ohlone Nation — rarely remembered, considered, spoken about or even named..

Caring for Pachamama, mother Earth in a good way, by the teachings of our ancestors every day

So where does this leave us folx who refuse to be cleaned out, incarcerated, profiled or Wheat-grasserated…

We still here, aqui estamos y no nos vamos —

You can’t Frisk, me, Injunct me or incarcerate me cuz let me be clear.

I am staying in my hood, on my corner

and gonna stay seated in my newly gentrifuked park

.. and to Google buses, condominium, devil-opers and un-conscous new-comers,

we will be a thorn in your side for life and up-end your corporate, money-driven hustle

with our feet, our love, our actions …and our ancestors at our side…

“Where we supposed to go, us po’ folks born here, raised here?” said Vietnam vet, disabled, poverty skola and panhandler reporter at POOR magazine, Papa Bear, arrested three times in one day under Sit-lie. “Going to Hell,” thats my vision (of the city) — when they killed the black community — the soul of this city was gone,” said Tony Robles, PNN co-editor, poet, author and organizer and revolutionary son of San Francisco natives of Manilatown. “I don’t care if I’m the last Mexican in the Mission,” said Sandra Sez, indigenous warrior mama and organizer born and raised in the Mission District.

I was born in the back seat of a car, dealt with houselessness and criminalization since I was 11. Ended up in the Bay Area when I was 14. Can’t say San Francisco is my town. But I have had the blessing of meeting and being in family with some of the most powerful revolutionaries from both sides of this beautiful bay. From the I-Hotel resistance to Mission Anti-displacement Coalition to HOMIES to PODER, from The Bay View Newspaper, Idriss Stelley Foundation to the Coalition on Homelessness. Me and my houseless mama along with other landless revolutionaries launched revolutionary projects, POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE, PeopleSkool, the Po Poets/Poetas POBRE’s , the welfareQUEENs and Theatre of the POOR, to name a few.

I have also been houseless, incarcerated, evicted, profiled, poverty-pimped, gentriFUKed and welfare deformed in the Bay. I have seen beauty and felt resistance in this place in ways I don’t believe would have been possible anywhere else. And yet now it seems like the struggle is just to remain.

Should one fight to stay in a party that no longer includes most of your friends? Neighborhoods filled with people you don’t know and don’t want to know. Schools stripped of their color and cultures. Corporate streets filled with shiney white buses for people who can’t put their deliecate feet on a public bus. Bike lanes filled with $3,000 bicycles and coffee shops that only sell $4 cups of coffee and $3 vegan donuts.

My humble vision for SF includes reparations for black peoples in the Bay View, giving back stolen vacant land to Original Peoples, makng the more than 30,000 empty units in San Francisco available for poor, houseless, and foreclosed on peoples to live in. For landlords to rent at least one apartment per building to families in poverty at reduced or no rent, for doctors and dentists to see at least three patients per practice for a sliding scale starting at $0 — and for people to not question “where their money is going” when they give 50 cents to a panhandler/street newspaper vendor while never questioning where their tax dollars go to politricksters and CEOs of corporations. For the SFPD to arrest, profile, and harass drunken white people who spill out of Bay to Breakers and Golden Gate Park concerts with the same voracity that they do poor youth of color — cause then maybe it would actually have to stop.

And finally for all racist, classist laws that target us poor folks, like sit-lie, gang injunctions and stop and frisk be repealed for their flagrant and disgusting unconstitutionality so that public space will remain truly public and people might truly be free.

Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, is a founder of POOR Magazine.

The return of the ugly laws

Andrew Lam
-
0

OPINION In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, municipalities across the country passed what have become known as “ugly laws,” often modeling their ordinances word for word on San Francisco’s. According to The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik’s comprehensive study of these laws, they were intended to target those who “exposed disease, maiming, deformity, or mutilation for the purpose of begging.” In city after city a pattern emerged of “enactment, reenactment, crackdown, malaise.” As Schweik writes, “what most aligned” the cities “were not the law’s successes, but its failures, the impossibility of removing the unsightly in the form of persons.”

Fast-forward 150 years and “sit lie,” replaces “ugly,” as the name for a category of laws whose intention is to remove the unsightly from our public spaces. Different in form, but nearly identical in intent and justification, these laws are now sweeping through the country, disfiguring the municipal codes of one city after another. San Francisco is not patient zero of this epidemic. But it now threatens to pass that contagion on directly to Berkeley.

Berkeley’s Measure S would prohibit sitting on any commercial sidewalk or on any object placed on the sidewalk without express permission of the city between 7 am and 10 pm. (Since 1998 Berkeley has had an ordinance prohibiting lying on the sidewalk.)

As with the “ugly laws,” the fact that sit lie-laws have been ineffective, has proven no impediment to their spread. Months before the Berkeley City Council voted to place Measure S on the ballot, an independent analysis of San Francisco’s sit-lie ordinance conducted one year after its implementation concluded that it had “on the whole, been unsuccessful at meeting its multi-faceted intentions to improve merchant corridors, serve as a useful tool for SFPD, connect services to those who violate the law, and positively contribute to public safety for the residents and tourists of San Francisco.” Undeterred by the failures of sit-lie in San Francisco, proponents of Measure S, most prominently business improvement districts representing commercial landlords, promise it will rid the city of what they describe as unsightly “encampments” of nomadic street youth.

The fact that Measure S is targeted at homeless youth is an open secret. Ugly laws are a thing of the past. It is not constitutionally permissible to pass laws that target people for who they are as opposed to what they do. The Supreme Court has declared laws against loitering and vagrancy unconstitutionally void for vagueness. The workaround these constitutional obstacles is to pass laws against specific behaviors associated with people whom we don’t want in our public space. Like laws prohibiting sitting on the sidewalk.

Over a hundred years ago, Anatole France famously praised “the majestic equality of the law that forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” He would no doubt smile at a law that forbids everybody from sitting on the sidewalk. Measure S is supported by people who hide behind its “majestic equality,” but count on a “majestic inequality,” in its enforcement. They believe, without reservation, that it will always be enforced against others.

I don’t like using disease metaphors in politics. Susan Schweik describes the spread of ugly laws as a “contagion,” and it’s hard to resist a similar metaphor for the spread of sit-lie laws. But what is really at stake here is an ugly tendency in national politics, spread not by an anonymous bug, but by people in positions of power and influence, to shift the blame for our sour economy from those who run the system to those who are run over by it: labor unions, public employees, teachers, immigrants, and now, in Berkeley and too many other cities, people who are homeless. If Berkeley passes Measure S, sit-lie laws could be greenlighted across the nation, for who could object that such laws are unfair and mean spirited if oh-so-radical Berkeley passed one. On the other hand, if we defeat measure S Berkeley has a chance to model how a community can come together to find real solutions to real problems in hard economic times.

Osha Neumann is an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center, and Chair of Berkeley Standing Up for the Right to Sit Down/No on Measure S. For more on the measure, visit www.noonsberkeley.com.

Davis should drop out

Andrew Lam
-
49

EDITORIAL Kay Vasilyeva, a member of the San Francisco Women’s Political Caucus, has come forward with the allegation that District Five candidate Julian Davis grabbed her and put his hand down her pants at a political bar crawl in 2006. That was six years ago, but it’s still important — and more than the incident itself, the response we’ve seen from Davis is highly disturbing. He’s utterly denying that it ever happened, and retained a lawyer to send Vasilyeva a letter threatening her with legal action if she continues to talk.

While we endorsed Davis for supervisor, we take these charges very, very seriously — particularly coming at a time when relations between men and women in the progressive movement are badly strained.

Since the SF Weekly, which broke the story, suggested that we knew something about Davis’s behavior, we need to state, for the record: When we endorsed Davis, we had heard nothing even remotely close to this type of allegation. Yes, we knew that in his 20s he was a bit of an arrogant ass. We knew that at one point, he actually got into a tugging match with another person over the ridiculous question of who got to hold a campaign sign. We’d heard that, in the past, at somewhat debauched parties, he’d made advances toward women who weren’t interested in his affections.

Those could be the acts of an immature man who has since grown up. And since, on a level of policy, knowledge, and positions, he was by far the best and strongest progressive in the race in District 5, we — along with much of the local progressive leadership — thought he was demonstrating enough maturity that he was worthy of our support.

But this new information, and his response to it, is alarming.

We don’t take last-minute allegations about a front-running candidate lightly; people have been known to dump all sorts of charges into heated races. When we learned about Vasilyeva’s allegations on Oct. 13, we did our own research. We spent two hours with Davis and his supporter and advisor, former D5 Supervisor Matt Gonzalez. We realized that allegations without corroboration are just charges, so we tracked down everyone we could find who might know anything about this incident — and, as we discovered, other similar events. And we have to say: Vasilyeva’s account rings true. Davis’s categorical denial does not.

More than that, we were offended that he in effect threatened with a lawsuit a woman who, at some peril to herself, came forward to tell the public information about someone who is running for elected office. What was the point of that, if not to intimidate her? It’s highly unlikely he’s going to sue (and drag this whole mess into court). He says he was just trying to send a message that he has a legal right to respond to defamation, but this is a political campaign; if he didn’t want to deal publicly with what he must have known were these sorts of potential allegations, he shouldn’t have run for office.

This is a bad time for progressives in San Francisco. The Mirkarimi case has brought to the fore some deep and painful rifts; a lot of women feel that (mostly male) progressive leaders have pushed their issues to the side. For the future of the movement and the city, the left has to come together and try to heal. This situation isn’t helping a bit.

Davis needs to face facts: Supervisors John Avalos and David Campos have withdrawn their endorsements. Assembly member Tom Ammiano is almost certain to do the same. With his inability to handle the very credible charge that he not only groped a woman but lied about it, Davis no longer has a viable campaign in the most progressive district in the city, and we can’t continue to support him.

We have said it many times before: People on the left need to be able to put their own ambitions aside sometimes and do what’s right for the cause. Davis can’t win. He’s embarrassing his former allies. He needs to focus on coming to terms with his past and rebuilding his life. And for the good of the progressive movement, he needs to announce that he’s ending his campaign, withdrawing from the race, and urging his supporters to vote for another candidate.

Happy hunting

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Happy hunting

cheryl@sfbg.com

TV Stainless steel appliances. Hardwood floors. Walk-in closets. The House Hunters drinking game, which lovingly mocks the HGTV program’s predictability, will have even a seasoned lush drunk before the first commercial break. “But there’s nowhere for my man cave!” DRINK.

Brian Balthazar, who is HGTV’s Director of Programming, has a sense of humor about the drinking game (“If I ever played it, I’d be hammered, because I watch a lot of House Hunters!”), and also about some recent online muckraking that revealed that what you see on House Hunters isn’t one hundred percent real. “We’re making a television show, so we manage certain production and time constraints, while honoring the home-buying process,” he explained in a statement to Entertainment Weekly this summer. “To maximize production time, we seek out families who are pretty far along in the process. Often everything moves much more quickly than we can anticipate, so we go back and revisit some of the homes that the family has already seen and we capture their authentic reactions.”

Wait, so reality TV isn’t actually real? Shut the custom-painted front door! “Mostly I was happy that people cared that much about House Hunters,” Balthazar says of the controversy. He’s currently promoting the latest House Hunters spin-off, House Hunters Renovation, which follows buyers as they pursue remodeling projects in their just-purchased homes. The next new episode airs Oct. 21 at 11pm; it follows a couple whose “dream house” (DRINK) contains a pink-and-gold nightmare of a bathroom.

“On this show, we see them buying the homes, and then making all these changes to them. So it’s exciting to be able to show that,” Balthazar says. “But I’m always excited that people are talking about House Hunters and that it has had such longevity. It’s nearing its 1,000th episode this year. That’s more than Law and Order!”

And like Law and Order, every episode of House Hunters is basically the same. “The concept is very clear. You know what’s going to happen on the show,” Balthazar says. “They’re going to see three homes, and we’ll see which one they choose. But what is always different are the homeowners and the homes. That voyeuristic, play-along quality of the show changes every time, which I love. We have some really interesting characters that come along, and everyone has a different reaction to different aspects of a home. I think that’s what makes it such a guilty pleasure among people who love to spy on the real estate process.”

House Hunters International follows the same basic formula, with an obvious difference: instead of a new construction in Indianapolis with a three-car garage (DRINK), the buyer (or renter) is seeking an apartment in a slightly more exotic locale. Like, say, Cambodia. Or Serbia. Or the Arctic Circle.

“I’m amazed at some of the stories the production company we work with on International finds. They’ve developed relationships with real estate agencies all over the world,” Balthazar says. “For a long time we didn’t go to some countries simply because it was too complicated. In some countries, you can’t actually buy a home if you’re not a resident. In others, you have to pay cash completely up front, in full. That was really a daunting thing for us to tackle. And now that the show’s been around for so long a lot of people write in to be on the show. It’s like this grassroots effort in some regards.”

Of course, being so popular has a slight downside. “Everyone that I run into, whether I’m on an airplane or at a party, if I say I work on House Hunters or House Hunters International, inevitably there will be someone saying they want to be on,” Balthazar says. “I actually love that! Though I will admit that occasionally when someone asks me what I do, I just say I’m a writer. [Laughs.] But I’m ultimately so grateful that people want to be on the show.”

Balthazar’s main distraction from an endless parade of buyers seeking open-concept floor plans (DRINK) is his pop-culture website, popgoestheweek.com. He’ll be melding his two interests on a special he’s hosting on HGTV in December.

“It’s called I Bought a Famous House. I go around to homes in Hollywood that were once owned by celebrities,” he says. “It’s interesting see what [the non-famous new owners have] done with them since. In one case, someone kept the house exactly the same as it was when the celebrity owned it. And in another case, with Madonna’s former house in the Hollywood Hills, a guy came in and literally changed almost everything, with the exception of the kitchen. But I think when you buy a seven million dollar house, you probably aren’t as concerned about the kitchen as the rest of the house, because you aren’t doing your own cooking when you have that kind of money!”

Of course, Madonna’s kitchen probably already had granite countertops. DRINK!

www.hgtv.com

 

Serendipity, with saba

-
1

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The number of severed duck heads in my compost bucket currently stands at eight, but I am open to more. Did anyone else accidentally go to Louisiana and shoot some ducks, bring them back, put them in the fridge, and then not have time to deal with them?

If so, I’m here for you. If you want, I’ll even share the resultant gumbo. Just ask the de la Cooters.

A lot of people don’t like to eat ducks. Especially wild ‘uns, which, in comparison to their domesticational counterparts, tend toward tough and gamey. That’s why you have to gumbo them.

Gumbo, by virtue of being gumbo, is good. Even health-food gumbo, like mine. I used okra and file instead of a roux, Hedgehog being essentially gluten free. I even used chicken-instead-of-pork andouille. From Trader Joe’s! And it was super spicy and delicious, so kudos to them.

Meanwhile, as much as I hate to dis the little guy: boo-hiss to RoliRoti for selling me an inedible half of a chicken yesterday at the Mission Market. What the? Everyone raves about this place, but I’ve had better chickens for half the price at the Safeway Deli. This poor li’l big bird was so dry, even the dark meat, we had to take it home and shred it into our now-giant gumbo.

 

CHEAP SPORTS

by Hedgehog

Months ago we bought $2 tickets for the A’s final regular season game, guessing it would be an important one. It turned out to be the importantest: not only was it a three-game sweep of the Rangers and a dramatic come-from-behinder, it also left the A’s in sole possession of first place in the AL West for the first and only time all season. Fortunately, it was the only day that first-place matters.

My orthopedist had declared my wrist re-unbroken mere days before that game, which was excellent timing on her part because I can’t even count how many high fives I gave to strangers on our way out of the Coliseum. And this may surprise you but some of the fans had impaired aim, so that the high fives were more like flunges and parries, but with wrists instead of foils. So a big Cheap Sports shout-out to my left radius, for getting its shit together in time for the big game.

Which doesn’t remind me: We made a five-minute movie last weekend. It was a lot of fun! So much so that another one or more will be in the can by the time you read this. We have a club! For making movies! A movie-making club! We are flush with writers and directors but if anyone wants to act, direct the photography, light, picture edit, or fund our endeavors, hit up the Farmer’s email addy above.

To see why we need you, “Finding Dee Dee” is now showing on a YouTube or Vimeo near you.

CHEAP EATS continued

Yeah, well, if Academy Awards were given for catering, I reckon I’d be working on my acceptance speech now. Instead of this.

But I do have a new favorite restaurant. It’s Tokyo Teriyaki, in Daly City, and we wound up there by accident with my Secret Agent Lady, who picked us up from the airport after last week’s column.

At rush hour! So 101 was bad, so we took 280, which was bad, but we were hungry anyway so we aimed ourselves toward Tani’s Kitchen. Which had a line with a 40-minute wait, it’s so cute in there. So we aimed ourselves toward Tokyo Teriyaki.

Which doesn’t sound as good as Tani’s Kitchen, and was only luke-warmly recommended by one of our fellow line-standers, but two-thirds of us were starving on East Coast time, so away we whisked.

Wow. If they’re waiting 40 minutes to eat at Tani’s, and the half-empty joint around the corner is this good … Wow. Daly City is my new favorite city.

Oshitashi made with napa cabbage instead of spinach: fantastic.

Seafood sunomono, which is a cucumber salad with raw shrimp, crab, and octopus: fantastic.

Tokyo Teriyaki is not expensive, precious, or popular; just friendly, great Japanese food, including sushi.

Best. Saba. Ever. I had to order it again, it was so dang good.

TOKYO TERIYAKI

Mon-Sat 11am-2pm; Mon-Thu 4:30-9:30pm; Fri 4:30-10pm; Sat 4-10pm; Sun 4-9pm

25 Southgate Ave., Daly City

(650) 755-3478

AE,D,MC,V

Beer and wine

 

Overkill

-
0
Overkill

Resident Evil 6

(Capcom)

Xbox 360, PS3, PC

GAMER Capcom really wants you to like Resident Evil 6. The Japanese developer has been turning out entries since 1996 in the survival horror franchise that has spawned countless films, games, books, and theme park attractions, and with each success came an increase in fans. Resident Evil 6 suggests Capcom has listened to each and every one of its fans, and instead of using fan feedback to make an informed decision about what type of game players want, they simply shrugged and stuffed four games into one.

Resident Evil 6 offers four separate story campaigns, each designed to appeal to a different kind of player. For fans of the original games, fan favorite Leon Kennedy gets top billing in a campaign with a tense atmosphere and sense of exploration. Resident Evil 5‘s Chris Redfield heads a combat-heavy campaign focusing on action and gunplay. New character Jake Muller takes on a story that plays like a mixture of the first two, and the unlockable final campaign stars a bizarrely deracialized Ada Wong as she solves puzzles.

Booting up the Leon campaign reveals mechanics and pacing that are baffling. Levels are designed to be played with a partner, but there are moments when one player performs a task while the other stands around with nothing to do. Quicktime events exist solely to make players jam on the sticks and buttons at inopportune times and lead mostly to cheap deaths. Melee combat is so overpowered it makes more sense to kick zombies to death rather than waste ammunition lining up a shot from a pistol. And the game is relentless with explosions and breakneck action sequences.

The schizophrenic design decisions start to fall into place when you begin Chris’ war-shooter themed campaign. The focus on guns, overpowered melee moves, and arena levels are specifically designed to enhance an action experience but have been applied across the board to campaigns that don’t support the play style. Understandably, it’s impossible to change the fundamental design of each campaign without ballooning the developers’ budget, but my response to that would be not to make four different campaigns. Longtime fans of the series were never going to accept Resident Evil 6. It makes the controversially action-packed fifth entry look like Citizen Kane and it’s a far cry from the slow, solitary experiences that made the franchise a hit. But even separating the game from its baggage, the game stumbles in simple mechanics, pacing, and level design. When a single failed release can sink a development company it may seem justifiable to want to focus-group your game, but in dividing their resources Capcom really just made four different bad games. 

Rich Table

-
3
Rich Table

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE Not since State Bird Provisions and AQ opened towards the end of 2011 have I been as excited about an opening. Evan and Sarah Rich’s new Rich Table is, kinks and all, even in the first month, well-rounded and satisfying. With efficient, informed service, reasonably priced wine list, few but well-crafted cocktails, a comfortable dining room with rustic-urban decor, and most importantly, a number of exquisite dishes, Rich Table is primed for greatness.

The Riches, a husband-and-wife chef duo, both worked at Bouley in New York and Coi here in San Francisco. Evan was also at Quince, Sarah at Michael Mina — and the couple hosted memorable pop-up dinners at Radius last fall. This fine dining pedigree infuses their mid-range menu. At other restaurants, dishes don’t often surprise beyond a menu reading. But here numerous dishes are more fascinating than their descriptions suggest. At AQ, dishes are works of art unfolding in layers of unexpected flavor. At Rich Table, there’s an approachable comfort elevated with refined nuances.

On the light bites side, everyone (and I mean everyone) has been buzzing about paper-thin potato chips ($7) with sardines interwoven through the center, dipped in horseradish cream. I’m a big sardine fan : these are not overrated, worth ordering every time. I brushed past Castelvetrano olives ($5) as common — thankfully a dining companion ordered them on one visit. Brightened by celery leaves and preserved lemon, the olives pop.

On an early visit, popcorn soup ($10) tasted like buttery, pureed popcorn in a bowl. Yuzu kosho (a fermented paste of chili peppers and yuzu rind) perks up the creamy bowl. Outstanding squid dishes ($14) morph with seasonal ingredients. The first incarnation wowed, the plump squid lively with watermelon yet simultaneously savory in black olive vinaigrette, dotted with crispy onions. This sweet-tangy, fresh-grilled dish was such a joy, I couldn’t help but be a little let down by its successor: squid with figs, crisp onions and lardon draped across the top. The breezy luminosity brought by the melon felt a bit weighted down with figs, though still a winning dish. Crushed peas ($14) with California yellowtail and saltine crackers to scoop up is vivaciously fresh, but comes in a slight (i.e. miniscule) serving.

The menu is not easily categorized nor a copycat of anyone, but is packed with pleasures peeking out in unforseen places. Case in point? The pasta. I could come here for pasta alone (one dinner I ordered all four pasta dishes on the ever-changing menu). None shines more than a divine duck lasagna ($19). A smile crosses my face just thinking of delicate, melting sheets of pasta, layered with braised duck, light béchamel, and tart Santa Rosa plums. It’s a glorious pasta dish with no equal in this town… or in any other. Other pasta dishes may not reach these heights but each is worthwhile, even excellent, whether rigatoni bolognese ($18) elevated by bone marrow and crispy kale or beets, or spaghetti ($18) tossed with Jimmy Nardello peppers and clams.

On the entree front, lichen-poached rabbit ($25) is heartwarming as it is gourmet, mingling with cippolini onions, radicchio leaves and broccoli raabe. Pork belly panzanella ($24) is the classic Italian bread salad of tomato, basil, cucumber and toasted bread cubes tossed with fatty pork belly, though I took to a hearty tomato-braised oxtail on toast ($25) even more. While accompanying grilled octopus and collard greens seemed disparate, the meaty toast alone makes it worthwhile, as satisfying as Southern BBQ.

Sarah Rich’s desserts (all $8) maintain the comfort-meets-craft spirit of the restaurant from a bright melange of chilled melon to caramelized olive oil cake in strawberries, a heightened strawberry shortcake. Panna cotta lovers shouldn’t miss Sarah’s silky rendition with changing seasonal accents.

Wines are priced by glass, carafe or bottle, conveniently grouped in three white and three red price categories, with strong options like 2010 Christian Moreau Chardonnay from Burgundy, or a 2011 COS Frappato from Sicily. The cocktail list ($10 each) is short — no more than four or five at a time — and I’ve sampled six different ones. While some fare better than others (the Barn Wood, with Buffalo Trace bourbon and bitters, was a bit too musky-sweet from stone fruits), most offer understated elegance, actually different than other cocktail menus in simple purity.

The star is the lush, green Big Night, which looks like a healthy, green veggie drink, but is subtly smoky Del Maguey Vida mezcal mixed with nasturtium and ginger, topped with an edible flower. It’s clean, strong, memorable. As is Land’s End, the Riches’ answer to a martini, using the incomparable St. George Terroir Gin, dry vermouth and foraged Monterey cypress. On the light, soft side, Let’s Go is a refreshing sipper of Encanto pisco, coconut water and lime.

Sarah, Evan, and the engaged staff serve a warm vibe at their table in Hayes Valley — and an ever unexpected menu that focuses simultaneously on flavorful comfort and elegant simplicity.

RICH TABLE

199 Gough, SF.

(415) 355-9085

www.richtablesf.com

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

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and timewarp

-
0
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and timewarp

marke@sfbg.com

CULTURE For any of you (guilty!) who have a kneejerk gag-reflex reaction upon hearing the words “Renaissance Faire,” but can’t quite pinpoint the source of your disdain, author Rachel Lee Rubin breaks it down for you three ways: fear of men in tights, fear of voluptuous women squeezed into revealing outfits, and fear of being engulfed by nerd culture. That third category of Renaiphobia includes my own personal terror, being approached by a merry fool and loudly addressed in “castle talk,” that peculiar grammatical melange which embodieth the thithermost in Faire-y frippery. (I would also add another fear: that of hepatitis A, which my husband’s high school friend contracted from a woefully undercooked giant turkey leg.)

“Part of Renaissance Faire culture is inextricably intertwined with this adjacent culture of Renaissance Faire haters,” Rubin told me over the phone from her office in Cambridge, Mass. “I spent so much time among the trolls on Internet message boards, it really hurt my feelings!”

The fascinating, forthcoming Well-Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (NYU Press, release date November 19), a study of the phenomenon and its political and cultural echoes by Rubin — a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston — just might temper any Renaissance indigestion. Its deep and compelling tale of the Faire’s reach, much of it emanating from a specifically Californian aesthetic of soft-golden attitudes and ecstatic liberal expression, certainly had me revisiting some of my own preconceptions, even yearning to be part of the revelry. Somebody polish me a codpiece!

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the Faire. (This year’s monthlong Northern California Renaissance Faire in Hollister winds down Sat/13-Sun/14). Amazingly, Well-Met is the first comprehensive historical and anthropological study of the festival, although an official 50th jubilee commemorative album is set to be published next year (www.rpf50book.com).

The Faire’s tale begins with a young Laurel Canyon teacher’s quest to teach her charges at the local community center the history of theater, including the Italian Renaissance form of commedia dell’arte, the rowdy, harlequin-speckled, lute-sountracked populist traveling-theater tradition, a mixed-up version of which the Faire would soon become most identified with. But Phyllis Patterson’s idea of putting on a community festival, dubbed the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, soon became a flashpoint for several cultural and political currents of the time, not least the blacklisting of Hollywood professionals by the House Un-American Activities Committee (with all that out-of-work talent, the first Ren Faire served as both a showbiz bonanza and a backlash to Communist witch hunts); a turning away from mass-produced goods and the harmful effects of global commercialism (with an emphasis on handmade crafts and local community); and the incubation stage of the hippie, including the Faire’s soft-focus, wild-and-free English pastoral style of clothing, soon found donned by top pop minstrels, from the Byrds and the Monkees to the Beatles and the Isley Brothers.

“Even now, the spectre of the long-haired hippie looms in many older conservative minds. And he — it is always a he — belongs to the aesthetic of the Renaissance Faire, guitar in one hand, flower in the other,” Rubin told me.

Also involved in the Faire’s history was the reinvention of theater — the New Vaudeville, including such bigtimers as Firesign Theater, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, Pickle Family Circus, and Bill Irwin — plus the explosion of public community radio (LA’s KPFK and our own KPFA owe much of their golden years to the Faire), and a revisionist historical movement in education. Rubin traces the New Left political movement’s break with the Old Left to the Faire’s liberating effect. But mostly the Faire operated as America’s freak magnet, the most visible manifestation of the counterculture emerging from the conformist 1950s — and a safe space for outsiders of all types.

“Again and again, people told me how the Faire made them feel safe,” Rubin said. “Vietnam veterans told me it was only at Faire that they felt welcome back in the country. There was a huge gay and lesbian presence from the beginning, and the bawdiness encouraged there attracted different sexual expressions. Class difference, too, could be left behind. The costuming echoed that of the masquerade, where a certain amount of anonymity — a shedding of the self at the gates, which is a very important ritual at the Faire — opened up new possibilities.

“The central paradox of the Faire is that it allows you to be more yourself while being someone else.”

Another paradox is the overwhelming anachronism of the Faire — starting with those emblematic turkey legs and continuing through the revealing custom-made chain mail “wench wear” that’s lately become all the rage among female Faire regulars (“playtrons” in castle talk). Somehow, reimagining the historical past makes the Faire more authentic.

“The inspiration to write this book actually came when I took an English friend to one of the fairs,” Rubin said with a laugh. “He was horrified: ‘what have you done to my country’s history?’ And yes, it’s called the Renaissance Faire, but it’s really the idealization of probably 10 years of the whole historical period, in England, and only very select parts of that. But the central notion of the festival is play — even a play on the meaning of ‘renaissance’ itself. It’s almost like steampunk’s relationship with the Victorian era. Except that steampunk starts with one historical period and imagines the future, whereas the Renaissance Faire imagines the past.”

And of course the one constant of every historical endeavor is change. The Faire is now a national institution with a broader appeal than ever. After functioning as an artistic haven in the 1960s and a working class escape in the late ’70s and ’80s (the titillating “freakfest” alternative to Six Flags’ “redneck Disneyland”), it’s lately settled into the role of suburban theme party and gamer-nerd paradise. But that’s changing as well.

“The video game role-players are still there, but the faire doesn’t seem to resonate as much with the current tech crowd, which may be more attracted to material gain than fantasy escapism,” Rubin said. And many regular playtrons are dismayed at what they see as the Disneyfication of the Faire. “Even as a suburban and working class phenomenon, the Faire always functioned as an alternative narrative to everyday life. But now we’re seeing more ‘handmade crafts’ manufactured in China and attempts to corporatize the Faire on larger levels. There has always been an argument about authenticity among playtrons, but now there are more contemporary forces affecting the Faire.”

Yet the original spirit of transformation and togetherness persists. For Well-Met, Rubin visited dozens of Faires across the country, not only documenting several intriguing regional differences but also talking to dedicated playtrons about their personal experiences at the Faire. What emerges is a candid family portrait, full of self-aware whimsy, goofy charm, and awkward situations. (Rubin speaks with playtrons of color about the faire’s often ethnically challenged demographics and writes about the widening of the Faire’s aesthetics to include Islamic World elements, in acknowledgment of the actual Renaissance’s roots.)

Also persistent: the wilder, bawdy side, especially on the last day of many Faires, when parents are warned and much of the self-censorship vanishes, like mead from a sterling goblet gripped by hairy Hobbit knuckles. Profane insults and hilariously vulgarish displays fill the fairgrounds. Will that be the case on Sun/14 at the NorCal Ren Faire? Squeeze yourself into corset and tights and come findeth out.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA RENAISSANCE FAIRE

Sat/13- Sun/14, $25–$35 (Kids under 12 free), 10am-6pm

Casa de Fruita

10031 Pacheco Pass Hwy, Hollister

www.norcalrenfaire.com

1...33343536Page 34 of 36

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org