Volumes

“My Name is Albert Ayler”

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REVIEW My Name Is Albert Ayler offers a close reading of the titular musician, a saxophone colossus who pushed the emotional limits of free jazz, but it also tells a broader story about the strange currents of American avant-garde music. Interviews with Ayler’s churchgoing Ohio family, New York City compatriots, and Scandinavian admirers trace a particular, though by no means atypical, passage. The tenor saxophonist first achieved renown in Stockholm, Sweden, where he began to experiment with the wailing, explosive runs that would some years later turn even John Coltrane’s head. ‘Trane specifically asked for Ayler to play at his funeral, and the photographs and live sound from the memorial service included in the film are searing enough to make even the staunchest defender of melody reconsider. Rather than employing warts-and-all tactics, first-time Swedish director Kasper Collin keeps a respectful distance from Ayler’s mysteries, nowhere more hauntingly than in a few late sequences regarding the musician’s purported tendency to stare into the sun. There is so much we will never know about Ayler, Collin seems to tell us, but watching former collaborators listen to his music through cracked expressions of pain and amazement is revealing enough.

MY NAME IS ALBERT AYLER runs Sun/9–Tues/11 at the Red Vic Movie House. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

“Speaking Fierce”

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PREVIEW The first time I discovered feminism wasn’t just for white women who ate organic produce, I was eavesdropping on one of my mom’s phone calls. She was going off about some ex-boyfriend and a few "lazy-ass mothafuckas" before declaring that neither her mother, nor her mother’s mother, nor her mother’s mother’s mother had taken any bullshit and she didn’t plan to break the chain now. Put in those terms, my 10-year-old brain started to think that the word feminism might just apply to every woman I knew who had the nerve to survive in my Fillmore neighborhood. Years later, I picked up Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press, 2002), coedited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, and read about how other women my age were piecing together their own narratives of empowerment. Nowadays, Brooklyn-born Rehman is probably best known for writing on-the-road adventure stories about runaway Desi girls. She’s featured in this evening of art, spoken word, humor, and music in celebration of International Women’s Day. The night also includes performances by Bay Area soul diva Jennifer Johns and poetry collective Climbing PoeTree. Aside from celebrating stories of creative resistance, the event supports the Women of Color Resource Center, which works with war vets and teaches media production to low-income women of color in Oakland.

"SPEAKING FIERCE" Thurs/6, 7–9 p.m., $10–$25 (no one turned away for lack of funds). First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison, Oakl.; (510) 444-2700, ext. 305, www.coloredgirls.org

Seafood soup for the soul

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IT TAKES A VILLAGE Chuck chicken noodle soup. Forget pho. When I’m sick, I need the warmth and sinus-clearing spice of hot and sour soup, or in a pinch, Top Ramen with lots of Tapatio. But the last time I was sick, in an effort to explore my new Outer Sunset hood, I decided to take my chances on the offerings at the almost-year-old Tofu Village.

Now, I’m all about immediate gratification. So I was happy when, 30 seconds after I sat down, steaming tea arrived. Then, 30 seconds after I ordered, came little plates of banchan: seaweed salad, vinegar-soaked bean sprouts, stewed potatoes, kimchi, and fish cakes. And 30 seconds after that? A whole fried fish. (I know it’s a delicacy, but I usually hate when my meat looks like what it used to be — except for cow-shaped steaks, which are fun. In this case, though, the crispy skin and tender flaky fish made my hesitant bite worthwhile.)

Then came the seafood tofu soup, in a basketball-size, steaming ceramic bowl. I ordered mine spicy (out of four options, this was the third hottest), and it was almost too much even for my heat-inured taste buds. The concoction was full of silky tofu, clams, and oysters — leading to my next triumph over a squeamish moment with unshelled prawns (carapaces, antennae, and pleopods — oh my!). The rice was kept warm in a similar ceramic bowl — a traditional touch — although the server didn’t offer to mix it with green tea, as is custom. The bulgogi, served on a sizzling ceramic plate, was flavorfully marinated and tender against the fresh pop of green onion.

Like a mother — a brisk, efficient, multitasking, slightly hovering mother — Tofu Village left me happy, stuffed, and still sniffling but feeling better. The best part? Getting all that food for just under $20.

TOFU VILLAGE Mon.–Thu., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m. 1920 Irving, SF. (415) 661-8322

“Drama and Desire: Japanese Painting from the Floating World 1690-1850”

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REVIEW Drawn almost entirely drawn from the near-mint-condition holdings of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, "Drama and Desire: Japanese Painting from the Floating World 1690–1850" is an exhilarating survey of early modern Japan and the sumptuous — and often costly — pleasures that were available to the upper echelon of its newly solidified class system.

One can follow the contextual trail laid down by the show and take in the long view of history inscribed with brush and natural pigments: the relocation of Japan’s capital to Edo (now Tokyo); the establishment of Yoshiwara, the city’s licensed pleasure quarters; the development of Kabuki and sumo; and most important, the rise of an urban, largely male merchant class who kept this floating world afloat. It is a panorama laid out in the pair of large folding screens of Hishikawa Moronobu (1681–84), both studies in hierarchical contrast between the more lowly teahouses and higher-class brothels and their characters: a starring courtesan, enfolded in thickly brocaded kimonos as battle-ready as any armored samurai, surrounded by her retinue of clients, servants, and geisha, and male customers shamefully covering their faces with their fans so they’re not recognized by rivals. The real drama of these ukiyo-e is in their details, such as in the way Katsushika Hokusai dapples the collar of young woman’s inner kimono with mica to evoke a luminescent cherry-blossom pattern in Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror (1805). Seen from behind, her face framed by a small oval mirror, this gazing beauty is only partially regarding herself. She also seems to be taking stock of the viewer while taking pleasure in being looked at. But surely the pleasure is all ours. (Matt Sussman)

DRAMA AND DESIRE: JAPANESE PAINTINGS FROM THE FLOATING WORLD 1690–1850 Through May 4. Tues.–Sun., 10 a.m.–5 p.m. (Thurs. until 9 p.m.). $10 ($5 Thurs. after 5 p.m.), $7 students, $6 for 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin, SF. (415) 581-3500

Free birds

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George Sheehan, in his best-selling 1975 book of jogging-inspired philosophy, Running and Being: The Total Experience (Second Wind II), describes the endurance runner as being "twice born." The second life is the runner’s internal struggle — a gauntlet of pain, failure, and disappointment that ultimately becomes the necessary condition for hope. While not exactly an advertisement for sneakers, Sheehan’s maxim illustrates something important about the Black Swans: they aren’t the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down; they’re the medicine itself, a soulful salve pursuing internal aberrations because there’s something redemptive in their delivery, something undeniably good for you.

For his own part, songwriter Jerry DiCicca isn’t a runner. "I’m a relentless pacer," he confesses in an e-mail interview, "and a bad chess player," proving that the author of such doleful laments as "Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You" is not without humor after all. In fact, he’s far from a self-absorbed, journal-burning auteur. "I really care about the words, but I’m pretty sure if I moaned the menu of White Castle in a minor key backed by Noel [Sayre]’s violin, the effect wouldn’t be much different for most people."

It has been a bearish couple of years for the Black Swans. In late 2006 they released Sex Brain (Bwatue), an EP’s worth of variations on themes of a venal nature. After touring and getting "weirded out by some small labels that acted gross," they were able to remix a record originally made in 2005, and Change! (La Société Expéditionnaire) found its way into the light last November.

As we have learned, sustained struggle can be illuminating, so to call Change! a dark record is to deny its resolve, its reconciliation with psychic disfigurement. Melancholy airs are staked by arrangements that patiently wait on DiCicca’s mossy cant — "I sound like a narcoleptic caveman," he writes. On "Hope Island" he seems at peace with isolation so pure that it could have been the one true condition of his life. "Shake," a laconic waltz whose delicate piano figure trades with ocean-size guitar surges and Sayre’s tawny violin, exemplifies one of the band’s most enduring strengths: space — a slowly passing landscape that allows for breathing room and time to think. The Desire-era Dylan vibe comes courtesy of Sayre, who channels Scarlet Rivera better than anyone in or outside of Columbus, Ohio.

DiCicca is no Dylan dilettante. Last fall he lectured a 500-level class at Ohio State University on the bard’s career between Infidels (Columbia, 1983) and Time out of Mind (Columbia, 1997). He passed out pretzel rods to the class because, he writes, "I like to eat pretzels when I listen to Bob." Does he have further aspirations in the ivory tower? "I’m hardly a scholar," he observes, "just a semi-autistic windbag that convinced a professor otherwise."

Three records into their discography — Who Will Walk in the Darkness with You came out in 2004 on the Delmore Recording Society imprint — the Black Swans have proved their craftsmanship, one that does not feel overparented or overdetermined. Enter the artwork on the vinyl versions of Change!, each of which sports a custom sleeve painted by artists at ARC North, a Creativity Explored–like art studio for people with disabilities in Columbus. "I’ve purchased paintings by ARC artists because they seem freer, with less mimicry," writes DiCicca. "That’s what I aspire to — well, who wouldn’t?" On a recent visit to Aquarius Records, the bins offered a copy whose palate of serene colors — cornflower, aquamarine, a touch of navy — are swirled violently onto the paper, leaving gauzy, haphazard brushstrokes. A storm has come to a tranquil sea — or has just gone.

BLACK SWANS

With Oxbow and Pillars of Silence

Tues/11, 9 p.m., $8

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Say hello to my little Ferrari

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Every time I hear a Giorgio Moroder track, I am transported back to an exclusive Miami disco in the early ’80s. I’m Cuban drug lord Tony Montana, in my white polyester suit, disco dancing with the robotic, all-bangs, ultrablond Elvira Hancock. Her heavily stylized and mechanical moves are only bolstered by her last three nose-powdering bathroom trips.

Fast-forward to a recent Saturday night at sleek Italo-disco night Ferrari, a monthly fundraiser for volunteer-based, DIY station 93.7 FM West Add Radio at Deco Lounge. While drug cartel members, big-name celebrities, and models were noticeably absent, the club — still in its infancy and more baby powder than coca powder — is still very insider-y, attracting a notable crew of local DJs, promoters, and scene makers.

Hitting the dance floor, I was surrounded by a who’s who of San Francisco party throwers like Parker Day (Stiletto), Rchrd Oh?! (Hold Yr Horses, Lights down Low), and Juanita More (Trannyshack, Booty Call) among a mixed crowd of Mission kids, gay Tenderloin hipsters, and drag queens, all bumping on the dance floor to every conceivable disco subgenre — whether it was Italo, Euro, or Hi-NRG from assorted decades.

DJs Christopher Vick (Gemini, Paradise), Jordan (House Parties), Nicky B (Electric Boogie), and Connor and Primo (Night Beat), who mix more obscure ’80s dance artists Klein and MBO with innovator Donna Summer, describe their records simply as "robot rock."

As I passed a couple of girls dancing like automatons — with blond, heavy-on-the-bangs hair — I prepared to mourn the day this club is discovered by Bridgette and Tunnel. Maybe promoters can hire a machine gun–wielding security team to keep out the riffraff. But disco’s inherent inclusivity, bringing everyone together for an orgy of music and revelry, means biting the bullet and passing on the ammunition.

FERRARI

Second Saturdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Deco Lounge

510 Larkin, SF

(415) 346-2025, www.decosf.com

A band apart

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There’s never been any doubt pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba could play. The 44-year-old Cuban émigré has been a highly favored sideman to top-shelf jazz leaders since landing in the United States some 15 years ago. He’s also had a steady recording contract with Blue Note and leads his own trios, which he dominates with an imposing virtuosity, an exacting sense of Cuban musical history, and a tense, brooding personality.

Now Rubalcaba has an exciting new quintet with a striking potential for challenging even his outsize talent. Culled from New York City’s best young players, his combo could be one of those very special groups whose exceptional parts create an even greater whole. Together almost a year, they’ve just released their first record, Avatar (Blue Note) and are embarking on their first West Coast tour, playing at both Yoshi’s locations over the course of a week. Avatar includes three compositions by saxophonist Yosvany Terry, whom Rubalcaba knew from their youth in Havana, Cuba, and who brings a modern, angular urbanity to the jazz traditions they are both well acquainted with. Trumpeter Mike Rodriquez played with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and has become one of the most sought-after young players in jazz. Bassist Matt Brewer had been with saxophonist Greg Osby’s group and suggested the stunning drummer Marcus Gilmore. Brewer and Gilmore are still in their 20s and bring a vibrant, youthful energy to the group that complements Rubalcaba’s old-world, old-soul vibe. Avatar nods to Rubalcaba’s Latin-classical side, closing with his arrangement of Preludio Corto no. 2 for Piano by the Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla, but the disc also showcases Terry’s funky "Hip Side," Brewer’s meditative "Aspiring to Normalcy," and Horace Silver’s enduring ballad "Peace."

It’s a riveting recording — and the combo’s live performances promise to be equally compelling. Of late, few major jazz ensembles stay together long enough to create really unique sounds and sensibilities. This particular quintet could have that kind of staying power.

GONZALO RUBALCABA

Mon/10–March 12, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–$24

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

Also March 13–15, 8 and 10 p.m.; March 16, 7 and 9 p.m., $12–$22

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200, www.yoshis.com

World of echo

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It’s been 20 years since My Bloody Valentine released their breakthrough album, Isn’t Anything (Creation) — long enough for it to be wound up in a younger generation’s musical DNA. For how frequently the band is referenced by both musicians and critics, the rich double-sidedness of MBV’s peculiar attack often gets simplified as "swooning" and "ethereal." Erstwhile Deerhunter vocalist Bradford Cox is one of the few shoegaze suitors who seems clued in to the searing — and often distressing — tensions that distinguish My Bloody Valentine from followers like Slowdive and Ride. In Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (Kranky), his first official release as Atlas Sound, Cox has worked out an exquisite combination of shoegaze and laptop pop, a fucked-up beauty waiting to be adored.

A self-described "queer art punk," the young Atlantan first turned heads for his Internet indiscretions and outré performances with Deerhunter. The words Cox used to describe author Dennis Cooper in ANP Quarterly may as well be his own propulsive mantra: "The only thing he does to infuriate so many people is to write honestly, expressing things that most people would prefer to stay far under the surface."

While Cox’s transgressions have previously edged up to mawkishness, Let the Blind channels his confessional tendencies into a newly retrospective shape. Atlas Sound’s source material, aesthetic means, and subject are inextricable from one another in the same manner as Jonathan Caouette’s first-person film, Tarnation (2003). Much glitchier than Deerhunter’s Cryptograms (Kranky, 2007), the Atlas Sound home recordings are almost exclusively about the soul-baring, delicious isolation of being alone in your adolescence. Cox has described "Quarantined" as being about children with AIDS, though the main refrain, "I am waiting to be changed," resonates with Morrissey-like wistfulness.

The music on Let the Blind drifts uneasily between bliss and terror, the heavily doctored mélange of glockenspiels and guitars conjuring a narcoleptic glow. Drone pieces like "Small Horror" and "On Guard" concentrate on specific intense emotions, while fuller arrangements like "River Card" and "Bite Marks" entangle youthful romantic obsession in soft-hewn bass melodies and howling vocals. The shoegaze textures may be Cox’s equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s in the treated, divested vocal tracking that Let the Blind achieves its deepest immersions.

On "Winter Vacation," the chords seem to be pulling each other apart, reaching for different resolutions — so too with the rest of the album’s balancing act of sensuousness and numbness — though never so far apart as we think. Cox has written extensively about aiming for catharsis on his heavily trafficked blog, but Let the Blind comes off more as a prismatic refracting of past intensity and indolence. It’s teenage confusion done in Technicolor, and that ought to be enough to change more than a few kids’ lives.

ATLAS SOUND

With White Rainbow and Valet

Sat/8, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com, deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com

One ear to the ground

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REVIEW Ah, the morality police — you’ve gotta love ’em. At least artists who get free publicity from the overzealous watchdogs should. With freedom of speech still miraculously in decent shape in this country, one might be forgiven for forgetting the unique dilemma of the banned book: once branded immoral, it automatically becomes sought after.

Such is the case with Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Wolves of the Crescent Moon (Penguin, 192 pages, $14), which was banned in Saudi Arabia by theocratic thought-cops for casting too many spotlights on societal problems that the authorities insist don’t exist. Upon being labeled dangerous and sinful, the book gained a large audience throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It has since been translated into French, and now, into English by Anthony Calderbank. While hardly as inflammatory as Saudi authorities might lead one to believe, the novel paints a troubling portrait of a traditional society embracing and fighting modernity. Government claims notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia is not free from abuse, prejudice, racism, and religious hypocrisy, and the author minces no words in giving voice to the marginalized, the abandoned, and the otherwise ignored. While the titular animal does figure prominently in the story, the main wolves appear to be of the human variety.

Wolves of the Crescent Moon reveals itself in fevered rushes of storytelling that concern three characters: a one-eared bedouin, a eunuch, and a one-eyed orphan. Turad, the one-eared tribesman who has tolerated an endless run of degrading jobs since leaving the desert for the city, arrives at a Riyadh bus station without a plan. Paralyzed by indecision, he finds himself trapped in nightmarish reminiscence and speculation; thus, we are introduced to Tawfiq, Turad’s elderly eunuch coworker, whose life of misery is retold by the bedouin. While trying to decide which bus ticket to buy, Turad discovers a discarded government file involving an abandoned one-eyed baby; from there, the experimental narrative expands to include anecdotes about the orphan’s distressing childhood, as well as reveries imagined by Turad in an effort to fill in the gaps left by the impersonal official documents. His inability to inject even the briefest respite into the child’s conjectured history speaks volumes. For Turad, life is an endless chain of pain and suffering.

Told over the course of an evening, and engulfed by mental fatigue, Al-Mohaimeed’s novel presents a variant of the existential dread found in works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, albeit with more violence. The spellbinding narrative rarely feels anchored to its chief time and place, but instead hangs suspended within a hellish realm governed by fear, agony, and resentment.

In volleying between carefully recalled memories of his own suffering, detailed anecdotes about Tawfiq’s forced slavery and eventual castration, and embellishments about the abused orphan he never knew, Turad takes the role of a downtrodden Scheherazade. He’s capable of spinning 1,001 tales without the faintest hope of saving a single life. But his creator — at least until he was censored — speaks directly to those huddled in the margins of a secretive society. Wolves of the Crescent Moon might remain banned in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future; for now, Al-Mohaimeed will receive his well-deserved audience elsewhere in the world.

The young untold

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To say that Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers might sound like a provocation. But I have said it and will repeat it: Pedro Costa is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and there’s nothing willfully perverse in my statement. What follows are initial notes toward understanding why Costa matters. Final judgment is left up to the audience — to whom this director yields so much — and should only follow from seeing his films. Watching Costa’s work gives me the chills; it’s a most mysterious, unusual, and unclassifiable oeuvre, one littered with ghosts of the past and the present.

From the first frame of each Costa film, it’s apparent we’re in the company of that rare filmmaker who simply cares about people: about who his subjects are, about what they’re feeling and thinking, and just as crucially, what his viewers are thinking about them. Each work is riddled with enticing close-ups, and Costa’s pictorial attention (coming out of a sensibility equally at home with European fine art as, say, the dust bowl photography of Walker Evans) is a constant wonder. The subjects are for the most part the downtrodden inhabitants of a Lisbon, Portugal, slum called Fontaínhas, people literally overlooked by dominant cultures. He’s not trying to rub their misery in his viewers’ faces — calling him a "Straubian neorealist," to quote J. Hoberman, is misleading; if anything, his films, with their rejection of rational structures, are more neosurrealist. Rather, the progression in Costa’s cinema has been to give voice to his subjects and to treat them as worthy of existing as fictional characters (Bones, 1997); then, to delve further into their world, their personalities, and their ways of living (In Vanda’s Room, 2000); and most recently, with great success, to combine the two approaches (Colossal Youth, 2006).

Costa finds richness in small variations, and his evolution has led to a narrowing of both subject matter and spatial exploration. Costa has retreated from the wide-open, Monument Valley–esque volcanic surface of Cape Verde to interiors; the benefit of seeing 1994’s Down to Earth is in realizing how Costa’s characters must now feel, cramped in their disheveled surroundings. Combined with his movement toward a long-take style, this signals a shift from a cinema of space to a cinema of time. A parallel trend is an attempt to redefine beauty in cinematic terms — from the exquisite monochrome 35mm of The Blood (1989) to the grubby, purposeful digital video of In Vanda’s Room — and its staggeringly unique use (aided by Costa’s remarkable compositional eye) in Colossal Youth. Likewise, few contemporary filmmakers are as concerned with the juxtaposition of image and soundtrack, and each of Costa’s films reveals new ways of seeing and hearing: in Colossal Youth, the sound is a better narrative guide than the visuals — making long takes a necessity.

Yet the more these movies seem to be within one’s grasp, the more they slip away from comprehension. Costa seems to be saying the same thing about life today: he portrays the outside world as a labyrinth and the domestic arena as a much-needed shelter. He’s surely something of a Brechtian modernist (with Jean-Luc Godard as perhaps an even greater influence than Jean-Marie Straub), yet it’s tempting to assign the modifier post in order to understand Costa’s work. His persistent interrogation of the ways in which people live is certainly post–Yasujiro Ozu. And as Jeff Wall has noted, Costa can also be considered post-Bressonian in that he improves on what some find problematic about the master’s later works — namely, Robert Bresson’s tendency to turn his models into intense abstractions. Costa corrects this by allowing disorder, the uncleanliness of the real world. (Bones is that rare transitional film able to stand on its own as a masterpiece, though at the same time, it doesn’t go far enough — as Vanda and Colossal Youth show). The category that Costa might most willingly fit is that of a postpunk director; that the English moniker Colossal Youth — distinct from the film’s Portuguese title Juventude em marcha, literally "Youth on the March" — is also the only album from the stripped-down Welsh band Young Marble Giants (Rough Trade, 1980) is a surrealist coincidence.

Costa’s films are complex objects in which the present and the past intermingle, both literally (in the posthuman Portuguese slums where Costa’s last three features unfold) and within the history of film. The lipstick traces of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and many other auteurs reappear in Costa’s films. Just as Down to Earth takes off from I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Bones remakes The Searchers (1956). (It might be perverse to say Colossal Youth is Rio Lobo [1970] to Vanda‘s Rio Bravo [1959], but … there, I just said it.) Les inrockuptibles‘s Serge Kaganski has said that Fontaínhas’s poor are like Indians in classical westerns, and that seems about right. In the same way that he recognizes Bresson’s genius, Costa nods to Hollywood even as he tries, in his unorthodox mode of production — he’s created a studio system in which the crew is minimal, and in the case of Colossal Youth, technical support is provided by the actors off camera — to rip it up and start again.

One final, crucial note: As Costa describes, the themes in the films are highly personal. A search for family and for home threads through them, articuutf8g desire for a community that merges the personal and the political (his community is about as far from the European Commission as one can get). And in his subjects, he’s found that missing family, which is but one of many reasons why Colossal Youth is so touching. He’s also developed an alternative, collaborative model of filmmaking that is radical yet replicable, and one that will generate disciples — provided a director is willing to devote the time needed to nurture similar relationships with actors. Even if Costa "only" continues to make films about downtrodden Portuguese — exploring what one festival guide has called a "desperate utopian dream of a human existence" — it’s a new form of cinema that will continue to reverberate, echo, and grow richer with each variation. The avenues of inquiry are innumerable. After all, John Ford only made westerns.

STILL LIVES: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA

Through April 12

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

SFIAAFF: Multiculti cock-meat sandwich

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› superego@sfbg.com

When we last left crazy-ass Kumar (Kal Penn) and his more straitlaced college pal Harold (John Cho), at the end of the 2005 stoner epic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, they’d just victoriously satiated their munchies with enough sliders to block a rhino’s colon. That movie was a classic bong-wielding buddy road-trip flick — Question: How long does it take two potheads to get to a drive-through? Answer: Neil Patrick Harris on ecstasy — that was improbably hailed by serious critics as a multicultural breakthrough. Kumar is Indian American and Harold Asian American, a combination of lead ethnicities that was new to the American mainstream. And even though lineage figures little in the characters’ daily realities, Harold’s and Kumar’s difference from the cartoonish honky inbreds and skinheads (and candid others of color) that exist beyond their postmillennial collegiate bubble — and who often mistake them for Arabs — fuels the plot. Dude, where’s my kufi?

White Castle screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg giddily foreground the first movie’s subtext in their follow-up (which they also directed), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, a special presentation at this year’s San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. Mistaken for terrorists when they’re caught with a "smokeless bong" on a flight to Amsterdam, weed capital of the world, our hapless heroes ("North Korea and al-Qaeda working together," gloats their bumbling FBI nemesis) are imprisoned in Gitmo. After being presented with a jailer’s massive "cock-meat sandwich" — "I’ve never sucked dick before," quips Kumar. "I bet it sucks dick!" — and submitted to various tortures, they eventually escape, crashing a "bottomless" hot tub party, impersonating Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice, and lighting up with George W. Bush himself. No shit.

I caught up with Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and actor Cho — a surprisingly intellectual type who studied English at UC Berkeley — as they prepared to promote the new movie at wacky comics convention WonderCon.

SFBG For Arab Americans like me, this movie is like a nightmare come true. People gasp whenever I stand up on an airplane, and 9 times out of 10 I’m the one who’s pulled over for "random" searches. I know that Indian Americans often experience similar treatment. But Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay seems revolutionary in that it expands that situation to include the feelings of Asian Americans, and it’s playing at the [SF International] Asian American Film Fest. Do you think Asian Americans relate?

JOHN CHO I would assume that every immigrant group has their own bag of individual problems. I don’t know if Asian Americans get hassled at the airport — maybe they do. Traveling with Kal on the publicity tour for the first film, I got to see firsthand how he was treated — and that’s real; he was patted down all the time. We were traveling together, and he’s the one that got pulled aside. I’m really happy that the film’s playing at the festival. I feared that Asian Americans wouldn’t accept this movie — the subject matter isn’t discussed much in the community — but it seems that the programmers feel they will.

SFBG Not to state the obvious here, but Jon and Hayden, you’re a couple of white guys. I’m wondering if these scripts come from your own experiences, or if you do a lot of research?

JON HURWITZ We’re white guys, but we’re Jews. So we’re already a minority subset, but I don’t really know if that plays into it. We’ve always had a large group of multicultural friends and been able to observe and have conversations with people with different points of view. As a writer and director you’re just hoping to put something out there that’s new. Something with Asian American and Indian American leads was something that hadn’t been done in the way that we were doing it. We felt that we had enough perspective as huge fans of comedy to pull it off.

HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG We didn’t set out to make this big statement, although I have to say when we looked at the first one when it was done, we said, "Wow, this is so much better than we thought." It went way beyond the fart jokes, weed humor, and nudity that we love to put up on-screen. But it’s really just a classic comedy trope. Two guys, a baggie, a voyage. . . . It was the right time to have someone finally throw ethnicity into the mix. The script took off from there. The only question now is, where else can we take this? Harold and Kumar Fly the Space Shuttle?

JC And the focus is always on being funny first. The characters’ races are almost secondary. I find that so refreshing because a lot of Asian American cinema is just about being Asian American, how hard it is. Not to denigrate anyone’s work, but those movies get really repetitive, and fewer people want to see them.

SFBG Speaking of space — John, you’re about to be mobbed at WonderCon because you’ve accepted the role of Mr. Sulu in the upcoming Star Trek film. Following in actor George Takei’s footsteps must feel huge.

JC I’m delighted. As a kid it meant so much to me to see an Asian American on television and say, "Whoa! He’s not wearing a cone-shaped hat or teaching kung fu!" It was very important, a legacy that I desperately wanted to be a part of, and something I feel my work on the Harold and Kumar movies pays tribute to. Now Asian Americans can be stoners too.

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sat/15, 9:15 p.m.

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

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SFIAAFF: Are you lonesome tonight?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Brad Renfro wasn’t the only cinematic figure neglected in the recent Academy Awards’ "In Memoriam" montage: the academy fumbled even harder in its omission of Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, who died last June of colon cancer in Los Angeles at 59. The self-taught father of Taiwan’s cinematic new wave and a runaway Seattle software engineer who abandoned the tech field that made his classmates wealthy for his true love of filmmaking, Yang only created only eight films during his short, multi-career life, but during that brief span the Shanghai-born, Taipei-raised auteur managed to lend an influential, helping hand in the difficult birth of serious Taiwanese movie making.

Yang’s so-called old drinking buddies, screenwriter Wu Nien-chen and fellow director Hou Hsiao-hsien, were more than just sodden shoulders to cry on; they grappled with manifold frustrations of working independently in the Taiwanese film industry (described by Yang as "fragmented and run-down," with only a limited pool of experienced actors). This gang of three supported each other financially and artistically: according to Jeff Yang’s account in Once upon a Time in China (Atria, 2003), Wu spearheaded the anthology In Our Time (1982), which showcased Yang’s first theatrical film, and Hou mortgaged his house to underwrite Yang’s second feature, Taipei Story (1985), which Hou also starred in — and ended up losing his shirt for after it lasted all of four days in theaters.

Twin brothers by different mothers and both born in 1947, Hou and Yang created their breakthrough films in 1986: the former’s Dust in the Wind was also — surprise! — written by Wu, while the latter’s The Terrorizers is a handsome, cerebral urban psychological drama that flaunts new wave roots like a glittering pop offspring of Jean-Luc Godard. Inspiring critic Fredric Jameson to praise its "archaically modern" textures, The Terrorizers broke down, as writer David Leiwei Li writes in Chinese Films in Focus (BFI, 2003), the hidebound binaries of East and West as "tradition versus modernity, enabling readings that recognize both the border-transcending flow of global commerce and the reflexive capacity of residual local cultures."

It’s easy to read Hou’s and Yang’s early works as responses to one another, a relic of their barroom-pal give-and-take back in the day, and some might view Yang’s masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day (1991), as simply a rejoinder to Hou’s critically acclaimed, box office record-breaker City of Sadness (1989), though it was made amid far more hazardous conditions — 1989 was the year the bottom fell out of the Taiwanese market for locally produced films, and audiences turned to Hong Kong–made entertainments. A few critics might even tag Yi Yi: A One and a Two as Yang’s greatest feature — for its warm, humanist blend of The Terrorizer‘s postmodern urban landscape, Yang’s evocative roundelay of reflective surfaces, and the gentle gaze he levels on its quietly deteriorating family, headed by a software company manager pater familias, played by Yang’s old friend Wu, and a mother in the throes of spiritual crisis (Day‘s Elaine Jin).

For its unseen but subtly telegraphed depths, referential richness, and the sheer breadth and long-shot scope of its four-hour running time, Day nonetheless deserves the praise lavished on it. Much like City, writes Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis in Taiwanese Film Directors: A Treasure Island (Columbia University Press, 2005), Day‘s "local history turns the lock on long-suppressed ideas," convincingly plunging the personal into an epic sphere. Rarely screened and unavailable on DVD (much like The Terrorizer), Day has been described as a Taiwanese Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — a true descriptor if one discounts the very specific mise-en-scène of early ’60s Taipei and the film’s dense connective web of cultural, political, and familial allusions, obligations, and affiliations, one that’s as many-tendrilled and enmeshing as that of your average multigenerational Chinese family.

Ensnared by filial duty as well as street gang politics and placed in the sweepingly de-centered core of Day is its proto–James Dean, Xiao Si’r, portrayed by the baby-faced Chang Chen (the nomadic hottie in Yang’s Taiwanese cohort Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000]). The director opens Day with Si’r’s Shanghainese intellectual father arguing with teachers about his son’s grades, and then widens his aperture imperceptibly, ingeniously onto the arboreal byways, flat-lit classrooms, vertigo-inducing corridors, and shadowy hideouts of Si’r’s world. It’s a realm in which the children of the Kuomintang live an uneasy existence much like their elders: residing in Japanese houses less than 20 years after their parents fought the Imperial army on the mainland, these Taiwanese teens listen to American doo-wop and early rock and form street gangs that parallel the battling political factions of the People’s Republic. Tanks rumble by as brownouts underline the sense of rupture.

Resembling in its panorama and chapterlike parts such historical epics as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Day unfurls like a scroll, peppered by the shouts and orders of parents, peddlers, and teachers, and peopled with pungent characters like the Tolstoy-reading, romantically heroic hood Honey and his guilelessly calcuutf8g survivor of a sweetheart Ming — as well as Si’r’s bookish father, who’s torn from his self-absorption when taken into custody by the secret police. All bear the marks of severance from one’s past, papers, homeland, and other familiar signposts of identity. The quiet, troubled, and piercing irony that Yang applies to the scene of Si’r’s father’s arrest, one in which his children repeatedly play Presley’s "Are You Lonesome Tonight" in order to translate the lyric "Does your memory stray to a brighter summer day" to sing at some future sock hop haunted by the specter of Honey’s death — shades of the Jesus and Mary Chain — makes this teeming opus worth turning over again and again in your own memory. It’s like a battle hymn to a faltering family, or a love song to the death of innocence.

TRIBUTE TO EDWARD YANG

The Terrorizer

March 14, 9 p.m.

Yi Yi: A One and a Two

March 20, 7 p.m.

Pacific Film Archive

A Brighter Summer Day

March 19, 7 p.m.

Clay Theater

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SFIAAFF: Take one

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>Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran, 2007) Buddha marks the feature debut of Hana Makhmalbaf, one of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s daughters (she made her first short, The Day My Aunt Was Ill (1997), when she was only 9 years old). It has already won eight awards at different international film festivals, a fact that becomes more impressive when one considers the filmmaker’s age: she’s 19. Reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema, her first feature is shot in a neorealist style in Bamian, Afghanistan, and features a 5-year-old girl named Baktay (the extraordinary Nikbakht Noruz) as its main character. In following the youngster during her struggles to attend school, the film becomes a stunning exploration of how Afghanistan’s violent political history affects its youth. (Maria Komodore) March 15, 12:45 p.m., Castro; Tues/18, 8:45 p.m., Pacific Film Archive.

>Happiness (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2007) One of the most adept melodramatists working in South Korea, Hur casts an affectionate, gently comic glance on the see-sawing declines and resurrections of the hard-partying, handsomely weather-beaten Young-su (the talented Hwang Jung-min), an aging club kid with a raging case of cirrhosis. Luckily, the man is able to rub a few brain cells together and get himself to a rural health retreat that specializes in detoxifying worst-case-scenarios with clean living, herb gathering, fresh air, and outrageously light exercise. Young-su is also lucky enough to win over the clinic’s sweet, fragile princess, Eun-hee (Lim Soo-jung), who suffers from lung disease and just might keel over if forced to break into anything more strenuous than a stroll. But can you keep the playboy down on the farm once his liver is back in business? (Kimberly Chun) March 15, 6 p.m., Castro; March 16, 5 p.m., PFA; March 22, 7 p.m., Camera.

Never Forever (Gina Kim, South Korea/USA, 2007) At first, it’s purely business: as a last-resort response to her Korean American husband’s infertility, Sophie (The Departed‘s Vera Farmiga, sporting an ice-blond ‘do) lurks after a Korean immigrant (Jung-woo Ha) she spots at a fertility clinic. She pays him big bucks to have sex with her and possibly make a baby — therefore saving her husband (David L. McInnis) from depression and getting his intensely Christian family off their backs. Of course, things get complicated mighty fast. Farmiga is riveting in this deliberately quiet (save its melodramatic violin-heavy score) drama, a delicate exploration of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons — and grappling with the sudden realization that wrong and right are often not so easy to define. (Cheryl Eddy) March 15, 9:15 p.m., Clay; March 16, 7:50 p.m., PFA.

>Ping Pong Playa (Jessica Yu, USA, 2007) Energetic direction by Jessica Yu — best-known for docs like the Henry Darger portrait In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and the Oscar-winning short Breathing Lessons (1996) — perfectly complements a star-making turn by Jimmy Tsai as Christopher "C-Dub" Wang, a slacker who discovers he’s got talent as a ping-pong teacher and, eventually, competitor. Yu and Tsai cowrote the hip-hop flavored script, filled with rapid-fire dialogue and culturally targeted zingers (as when C-Dub assures an opponent, "I hope you’re hungry, because I’m about to serve you some Chinese take-out!"). Winning from start to finish, Ping Pong Playa achieves the near-impossible: it makes infectious hilarity seem entirely effortless. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 6:45 p.m., Clay; March 17, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 22, 2:15 p.m., Camera.

Santa Mesa (Ron Morales, USA/Philippines, 2008) Ron Morales’s first feature focuses on 12-year-old Hector (Jacob Kiron Shalov) and his efforts to fit in when he’s forced to leave the United States (where he was born and raised) to be with his grandmother Lita (celebrated Filipino actor Angie Ferro) in Manila, Philippines, after his mother’s death. Despite Shalov’s awkward performance and some uneasy sentimental scenes, Mesa‘s yellow-hued cinematography attractively portrays the colorful, throbbing city, and the young boy’s eagerness to internalize his surroundings without knowing how to speak Tagalog is brave and touching. (Komodore) March 15, 7 p.m., Clay; March 22, 4:30 p.m., Camera.

>3 Days to Forever (Riri Raza, Indonesia, 2007) After a night of partying makes Ambar (Adinia Wirasti) miss a flight to her sister’s wedding, she hitches along with cousin Yusuf (Nicholas Saputra), who’s in charge of driving a set of delicate dishes to the event. Drugs, detours planned and accidental, and frank talk about what it’s like to be a rebellious teen in Indonesia (Ambar’s sister is getting married because her parents caught her having sex) — and an uncertain teen, period — color this road movie. 3 Days to Forever echoes 2001’s Y tu mamá también‘s racy tone and the-journey-is-the-life-lesson message, and boasts similarly photogenic young leads. Bonus for armchair travelers: it also makes Indonesia look like the most magical place on earth. (Cheryl Eddy) March 14, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; March 18, 9:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2:15 p.m., Castro.

Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara (Koji Sakebe, Japan, 2007) Punk’s not dead! And neither are the wide-eyed little girls, drowsy dogs, and the other indelibly etched creatures that populate Yoshitomo Nara’s oeuvre: they’re alive and evolving in Nara’s studio. Koji Sakabe and his crew tail the artist as he travels to public appearances at museums and radio stations where he’s treated like a rock star; as he creates a massive village installation in his hometown of Hirosaki, Japan; and then follow Nara back to his studio, where he conjures his avatars of cuteness all by his lonesome. That’s where things get interesting: watching the bashful yet driven enigma study his own paintings, one hand on his camouflage-encased hip, and then home in with a brush on a fillip in a wide-eyed tot’s ‘do. (Kimberly Chun) March 16, 12:30 p.m., Clay; March 23, 2 p.m., Camera.

The Unseeable (Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand, 2006) For those whose eyes are still adjusting from the ultraviolet palette of Wisit Sasanatieng’s stunning debut, the genre-bending 1999 western Tears of the Black Tiger, the clammy greens and dusky grays that hang over The Unseeable feel like so much dust on the lens that can’t be wiped off. Unfortunately, you can still see everything coming from a mile away in this ghost tale of a country mouse trapped in (where else?) a decaying mansion. At least the magical touches of 2005’s Citizen Dog seem like genuine quirks in the fabric of reality. Here, the supernatural is an excuse to trot out tired new Asian horror staples like the crazy old lady or spooky child, and the multiple twists of the Shining-aping finale only work to make an already shaky premise all the more hamstrung. (Matt Sussman) March 16, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; March 21, 9:15 p.m., PFA; March 23, 4:45 p.m., Camera.

>> Complete Asian American Film Fest coverage

SFIAAFF: Manila: the drama

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Over roughly the past year, Brillante Mendoza has brought a pair of films to festivals that pack a particular one-two punch when they are programmed to play at the same event. Foster Child first bears witness to the final day that caretaker Thelma Maglangqui (superb veteran actress Cherry Pie Picache) mothers three-or-four-year-old mestizo John-John (Kier Segundo), and as sunlight gives way to night, it follows her from a Manila slum into the ostentatious hotel where she passes him over to wealthy white foster parents from San Francisco. Slingshot also uses a real-time conceit, but in an entirely different manner — locked within the mazelike alleys and shanties of Manila’s Mandaluyong City, it foregoes long takes and methodical passages to careen as if the camera were a baton passed from one preoccupied, panicky person to another. Or perhaps more aptly, as if the point of view was a valuable that one character fleeces from another’s pocket.

As a melodrama, Foster Child fits into the dominant genre of Filipino feature films that screen at international festivals — a genre that certain North American critics might enjoy more than writers such as Richard Bolisay and Alexis Tioseco, whose critical conversations are as vital to thriving "CineManila" activity as any current filmmaker. In a piece on one of Tioseco’s excellent Web sites, Criticine, Noel Vera recalls a Rotterdam screening where fellow film scholar and Chicago-based critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared Mike De Leon’s Kisapmata (1981) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha (1974). Perhaps in that spirit, Rosenbaum’s contemporary, the critic and influential programmer Tony Rayns, has likened Foster Child to Fassbinder as well.

I’d add another comparison that, however Eurocentric, is meant as a great compliment: Foster Child shares a number of similarities with Douglas Sirk’s mother of all melodramas, Imitation of Life (1959), such as a harshly ironic perspective on maternal bonds in a racist, capitalist world. When Mendoza’s film reaches its final wrenching moments — and Thelma seems stripped, at least temporarily, of life (even the future repetition of her foster maternal duties is harrowing) — a lesser director would have simply milked the pathos. Instead, Mendoza allows no mercy to invade his sympathy, presenting a sequence that calls to mind a scenario depicting Lana Turner’s selfish protests by the bedside of her dying maid Annie (Juanita Moore) in 1959’s Imitation of Life, a sight that is extra bitter because Annie’s lost daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) can be seen smiling in a nearby framed picture within the shot. Foster Child‘s climactic heartbreak is set against a backdrop of vulgar department store displays that privilege white glamour and which celebrate a false vision of familiar perfection. "The house that love built," proclaims one callow ad, depicting a mother and child. The cruel gods of capitalist marketing provide perfectly horrible set design.

Those last glances, leading to a weary climb up a concrete public transit stairwell, also ricochet off Foster Child‘s sustained (and indeed Fassbinder-like) first shot: a silent, postcard-perfect view of Manila’s high-rise cityscape that gives way to a noisier look at the ramshackle slums at the feet of those skyscrapers. A more subtle echo occurs between two scenes that take place nearer to the narrative’s center: an idyllic, sunlit view of Thelma bathing John-John outside her home, and a later moment when she has to wash him in a hotel’s many-mirrored, intimidating bathroom.

Engaged Web sites such as Bolisay’s Lilok Pelikula (Sculpting Cinema) have greeted this neorealist symbolism, and Foster Child‘s standing ovation at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, with some wariness. Indeed, it is frustrating if international audiences take Mendoza’s movies for the whole of Filipino independent film today, when thanks to the punk-fueled Khavn de la Cruz, the monumental Lav Diaz, the prodigiously visionary Raya Martin, and the autobiographical John Torres, CineManila is frankly more inspired than almost all of the indie film — and much of the experimental work — currently coming from the United States. Mendoza’s talent equals or bests anyone who has passed through the Sundance factory in the past decade, but he and his more formally radical contemporaries have to vie for the same too-few spaces allocated to feature films from the Philippines at most festivals.

By working within relatively linear narrative structures and feature-length frameworks, Mendoza veers toward the mainstream currents of vital Filipino independent cinema. But he’s demonstrating great versatility. Slingshot‘s burnt-brown palette, verging on black-and-white in nighttime scenes, contrasts greatly with the more colorful, sun-dappled view of slum life in Foster Child, which is so pleasant that soap bubbles blown by children float through one shot. But it would be a mistake to see Foster Child‘s view of cramped city blocks as purely idealized, simply because a fresh array of mothers with newborn babies can be found on every corner — a scene in which foster system overseer Bianca (comedienne Eugene Domingo) greets these women and knowingly checks in on their offspring has a sinister underpinning.

Its title translated from a term (tirador) denoting a street hustler, Slingshot is harder and faster — money or valuables are frequently handed from one character to another on the sly as people move in an out of a shot that is itself moving forward. A viewer had best be on the top of his or her game while watching, because everyone in the film is on the make. But the gay Mendoza brings a subversive eye to the masculine genre of action: he knows that harder and faster might seem tougher, but it doesn’t necessarily mean one is savvier. Interestingly, while Slingshot‘s critical reception in CineManila realms seems warmer than that given to Foster Child, the film has had its share of semiblind assessments in English-language publications. More than one critic has complained that the film wears a viewer out with its frantic pace before it abruptly ends. The reviews fail to note that Mendoza frames his many-stranded story line and slum-stranded characters amid a broader view of societal and political corruption. He kicks the story off with cops raiding blocks of Mandaluyong City to round up and arrest people who are then bailed out by politicians in exchange for votes. He fades out with a glimpse of a pickpocket at work during a quasireligious campaign rally dominated by empty, clichéd speeches.

Between those crowd scenes, Slingshot joins a wide variety of characters for intimate treks through semi-anonymous acts, only to abandon them — just as fate might and a politician’s promises are certain to. Tess (Angela Ruiz) steals video equipment to pay for a pair of dentures. Her illicit lover Rex (Kristofer King) neglects fatherhood in favor of druggy reverie. In an example of tail-biting irony, the impulsive Caloy (Coco Martin, whose open-faced melancholy carries over from Mendoza’s debut feature The Masseur [2005]) needs to scrape together cash to keep the pedicab that he’s using to earn money. Meanwhile, Leo (Nathan Ruiz, the gamine title character of Aureaus Solito’s 2005 The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, now adolescent and pimply) begins what will eventually become one of the worst days of his life by accidentally getting his dick caught in his pants zipper. The two-dimensional faces of political candidates — including actor Richard Gomez, then running in real life for a Senate position — look on from the campaign billboards and posters that dominate public spaces.

In the eyes of the official system, Lopez’s Leo is the thief character of Slingshot‘s Tagalog title, but in the real world he’s just one of many everyday bandits, who are doing whatever they can to survive while a faceless upper class profits from their votes. There’s a potent undercurrent to Lopez’s performance perhaps being the titular one, though, since it’s much harsher than the similar turn he delivered as Maximo in Solito’s comparatively romantic film festival favorite. The differences in pace and look between Foster Child and Slingshot demonstrate that Mendoza is capable of sculpting widely contrasting true visions of Manila’s streets, which in turn shows that the exact same setting can take on widely varying characteristics based on one’s perspective at any given moment.

Part of Mendoza’s versatility might be grounded in his background as a production designer under the name Dante Mendoza. It also might reflect a developing, nuanced queer sensibility, one that has forsaken forebear Mel Chiongo’s eye for international markets to also produce a feature, 2007’s Pantasya, that possibly plays off of Slingshot‘s view of corrupt police forces and probably adds a critical dimension to the age-old "I love a man in an uniform" motif of gay porn. After half a dozen features as a director, Mendoza has ranged from melodrama to action, from a pentet of gay sex fantasies to a story about education amid the Aeta tribe (2006’s Manoro). His next step will probably be hard to predict, and it’ll definitely be worth watching.

FOSTER CHILD

March 14, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

March 16, noon, Kabuki

SLINGSHOT

March 15, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive

March 18, 7 p.m., Kabuki

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Conduit

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› paulr@sfbg.com

First impressions are often false impressions, but some first impressions are so overwhelming as to transcend such mundane terms as false and favorable. When I first crossed the threshold of Conduit, I had the impression of having stepped inside a pipe organ. The restaurant (which opened late last year on a once-desolate stretch of Valencia near 14th Street) is a labyrinth of copper and steel tubing, so dense in its gleaming geometry as to become a kind of metallic fabric. The tightly arranged pipes make up part of the ceiling and help divide the dining room into sections, and if you think all that metal must feel cold, you’re not factoring in the burnished glow of the copper — so reminiscent, for foodheads, of the copper pans that once hung in Julia Child’s Cambridge, Mass., kitchen — or the gas fireplace that sits just inside the front door, as if in a warming hut at a high-end skating rink.

Also, you haven’t seen the bathrooms: a set of private cells behind a wall of translucent blue doors, as if in a giant honeycomb. A guided tour of this part of the restaurant would not be completely absurd but probably won’t be necessary, since paying crowds have already descended on Conduit for other, and excellent, reasons. The restaurant, even in its fledgling days, already must be considered one of the premier spots on Valencia’s still-burgeoning restaurant row; its peer group consists of Range, Limón, and perhaps Bar Tartine, and if only because of the extraordinary atmospherics of the interior design (the architect was Stanley Saitowitz), its sheen is brighter than theirs.

But let’s not forget the appeal of chef Justin Deering’s food either. The man and his staff work in an exhibition kitchen that stretches like a stage across the back of the restaurant, and the menu they’re turning out is a seasonal California one, yes, like so many others, but with an emphasis on butter and cream that reminded me of Traci Des Jardins’s early menus at Jardinière and of Nancy Oakes’s at Boulevard. Butter and cream discreetly bespeak luxury, not only because they’re expensive but also because they bring a velvety weight to foods that probably don’t, in most cases, need it. But part of the appeal of luxury is its very superfluousness. In other words: Conduit is a downtown restaurant that happens not to be downtown and charges (down!) accordingly. It isn’t cheap, but it costs about a third less than its city-center siblings and occupies a neighborhood setting that presents fewer logistical challenges.

Deering’s gnocchi ($12) are finished in bubbling butter — also topped with crab meat and chopped arugula — and as we might expect, they’re très rich, but the butter finish is standard procedure for gnocchi. A more improbable jolt of creaminess can be found in, or on, a salad of little gems ($9), the heads of baby romaine lettuce that so often get used in some variation on Caesar salad. The creamy dressing here is buttermilk based (like ranch) and is slathered on the halved heads with abandon. Even so, it doesn’t entirely mask the pleasant bite of spicy macadamia nuts and radish shavings, fine and delicate as tiny facial tissues, which are scattered over the lettuces and across the oblong plate.

Duck confit ($11) gets the deconstruction treatment instead of the usual meat-on-bone presentation. The deconstruction is visually striking, with a salad of frisée and pear slices at one end, and at the other a smear of duck-liver mousse (creamy!) and the actual confit, a pat of shredded confit meat that might more accurately be described as rillettes. Still, there’s nothing wrong with rillettes, and what’s been deconstructed can be reconstructed, often entertainingly.

Deering isn’t a complete butterfat crackhead. His bigger plates, in particular, rely less on dairy richness than their small-fry relations; a steak of grilled walu ($19), for example, was plated atop a mound of cannellini beans enhanced by crisped flaps of guanciale (a baconlike form of cured pork) and halved green olives fried tempura-style. (Walu is one of those wonderful fish with meaty white flesh taken from the waters of the Hawaiian Islands.)

Kitchen voyeurs (of whom I am one) will appreciate the dinner bar — a half dozen or so seats at the very cusp of the kitchen, with an unobstructed and intimate view of chefly goings-on. (This bar is not to be confused with the bar bar, an impressive affair nearer the front of the dining room, stacked with a full complement of booze.) The dinner bar, interestingly, is another echo of Boulevard, which offers similar seating. A further advantage of the dinner bar at Conduit: it’s near the restrooms, so you can make a brief visit and perusal while the pastry chefs (who are working right in front of you) put together your dessert.

A sundae ($8) sounds like an 80 mph fastball right down the middle of the plate — in other words, banal and sluggable — but a major wrinkle at Conduit is that the pastry chefs make their own ice creams, such as one with cherries and chocolate chunks, a kind of boutique Cherry Garcia, creamy and rich as gelato or frozen custard. Hot chocolate sauce spooned over? A nice touch, as is the pair of triangular chocolate wafers stuck into the ice cream. The clear plastic cup in which the sundae is served, meanwhile, seems like a good joke whose punch line is "Downmarket." But really, you could serve ice cream this good practically any way and send people into transports. Bi-Rite Creamery? What’s that?

A final huzzah for noise management. It is expert. Conduit isn’t quiet — and how could it be, with throngs of 1999-vintage tech androids swarming the place? — but the floors are laid with some sort of charcoal rugs of hemp or sisal, and they soak up sound like sponges. Impressive!

CONDUIT

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

280 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-5200

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Flowers

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I see flowers very differently. Not because I’m a woman now, or a softy, or insane, or even a chicken farmer. It’s a kid thing. I learned it from little Clara de la Cooter, who bonked into the world a year ago and very quickly became my new favorite person in it.

Probably not a lot of people get to babysit their ex’s kids. So I’m lucky in that sense, and so is Clara. She’s a passionate eater — I daresay a budding foodie. Her favorite food so far is eggs. I’m just saying …

It’s not hard to imagine who her favorite auntie will be, I’m saying.

Today I saw an ad on the side of a truck that said, "Just the freshest eggs you will ever eat." I forget the brand, but if its slogan is true, then I highly recommend it. Its eggs will be sold not by the carton but by the chicken. Yo, I’ve held warm ones in my hands on cold days between the nest and the skillet. I’ve had to postpone lunch until almost dinnertime because somebody was all stopped up.

And the boys who I’ve dated have not tended to bring flowers. But that’s OK, because most of them never knew they were dating me. I like to think of Clara de la Cooter’s first date. Some awkward, googly kid hands her a flower and she laughs.

"What?" they say, offended.

But if they knew her now, they would know better. The girl just cracks up at the sight of flowers. That’s all. For some reason they are the funniest thing in the world to her. They’re hilarious. She points and giggles, and she laughs her head off. And I think that’s beautiful. More beautiful than I used to think flowers were.

I’m inspired. I want to laugh at flowers too, and I think there’s a chance I might learn to. Yesterday we took two walks together. It’s spring. It’s Berkeley. I held her in bushes and she kicked her legs and squealed with pleasure, rattling the leaves and branches. I pushed her stroller right up into pink ones, purple ones, white ones, yellow ones, and she pointed and laughed and touched and tugged. That she also tried to eat them goes without saying, don’t you think?

Under a lemon tree I wheelied the stroller back so she could look straight up into it. The tree was loaded, and she lost it. She busted a gut. All that yellow, it was early Woody Allen to her. If she hadn’t been so strapped in, she’d have been rolling on the sidewalk.

I want this. I want one. And that alternative-weekly groan you’re hearing is all my old friends, because they know how I used to be. And people tend to expect you to stay the same. Especially those who love you most.

Which reminds me that one day Clara will not be so tickled by flowers, or not in the same way. Maybe she’ll have allergies. I had a fantasy, under the lemon tree with her, that I would live to be 84, and that she would ask me, hopefully over dinner, what she was like when she was one.

Like I started asking my own parents, and at least one of my aunts, a couple years ago. They didn’t seem to know much, maybe because I was 1 of 11. Or they forgot. Which … I don’t have the world’s best memory myself. Already. What I will have is an excessively creased and yellow newspaper clipping in my apron pocket, where I’ve been keeping it for 40 years, just in case. "You found flowers very funny," it will say. And: "We laughed till we cried."

Making limeade out of lemons is my motto in life. This was someone else’s tree, of course, but I picked a small, hard one and put it in Clara’s little hand, unwashed, let her gum and suck it. And a couple of sidewalk squares later I saw, and picked, one tiny wild strawberry, the size of a pea. This I put in her other hand, knowing she’d eat it. And that it might have been sprayed, or peed on by a dog.
——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is one of my old favorite restaurants, but I never told you. It’s the 55-year-old Cinderella Russian Bakery in the Richmond, where I refueled with my soccer buds recently and dripped sweat and blood (from my nose) onto stuffed cabbages, garlicky potatoes, homemade bread, and dill in general. Wow! I think my mates were looking for more like, you know, breakfast, but for my money this is just the thing.

CINDERELLA RUSSIAN BAKERY

435 Balboa, SF

(415) 751-9690

Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

AE/DC/V

And also, herpes

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

You guessed right — those letters about women who can’t have orgasms were both mine. Maybe I was so frustrated that I lied about my age so you wouldn’t think they were from the same person. Anyway, I’m in a stupidly worse situation now: I contracted herpes, despite having had sex with only one other human being. My boyfriend engaged in some ill-advised polyamorous experimentation about two years ago: I agreed to it even though I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. And he proposed it even though he was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea, either.

It’s just HSV-1, but I can’t get over how unfair it is. I don’t even like oral sex! I have this irrational feeling of being punished. I hear that HSV-1 isn’t nearly as bad as HSV-2, and that I might never even have another outbreak (though it doesn’t feel that way). Plus, my boyfriend keeps saying that around 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes, which sucks because that means 80 fucking percent don’t.

While I love my partner, I never thought he’d be the only person I’d ever sleep with. However, I’m shy: having to have the pre-sex "I have an STD" talk means that I’ll just avoid sex. Since I wasn’t enjoying it anyway, this shouldn’t bother me. But now, I feel disgusting too. My boyfriend admitted that he had to leave school on STD Day because he was so completely grossed out that he felt faint. At least he’s unlikely to get it, since HSV-1 doesn’t like to jump from genitals to genitals.

Add to all this the fact that I don’t really want to be touched sexually, and you get the result that my boyfriend is unhappy too. Of course, now that I regret having just one relationship so far, I’m screwing that one up. It’s like some kind of terrible paradox.

I know that I’m overreacting, but I’m just so mad and unhappy. I know that outbreaks can be treated, blah, blah, blah, but then I’m just a less-ulcerated, less-contagious plague carrier. I know that I have to talk to some kind of therapist before I become even more messed up, but I thought that someone whose area of expertise is sex would be a good first person to ask.

Love,

Angry and Contagious

PS: Thank you for your previous advice, but I don’t think Betty Dodson will be advising me until everything involved doesn’t hurt.

Dear Contagious:

Sorry, nope. You totally have to talk to a therapist as well as a gynecologist, but mostly to a therapist — and possibly a psychiatrist too. Don’t you think you’re depressed and anxious enough to benefit from at least contemputf8g medication? I do!. And maybe you should speak to a yoga master about learning deep-breathing techniques. Or get a paper bag and breathe into it until you pass out or don’t pass out — however that trick is supposed to work.

First off, do we know how you got the genitally located oral herpes? We do not. Do we know that the introduction of the GLOH to your ménage was due to one of the women your boyfriend kissed during that brief foray into ill-advised polyamory? We don’t know that, either. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, it’s possible that the boyfriend either picked it up somewhere far less ooky (it’s only oral herpes, after all) or already had it but it hadn’t made an appearance yet. Furthermore, do we believe that you had to agree to doing something that even your guy thought was a bad idea? Nuh-uh. I know you were young and silly, but so was he. I’d chalk that one up to "our bad" and move on.

You’re going to have to disentangle your anger with your boyfriend from your beef with fate and, for that matter, yourself. What happened happened, and hey, it could be worse. By the way, about 20 percent of Americans have genital herpes but somewhere between 50 and 80 percent have the oral version, so you’ve a ton of company — and some of it is quite nice.

If you drag your angry self to a clinic or to your regular gyno you can get on an antiviral, which will not only suppress your symptoms but make it far less likely that you could spread this thing to a putative future boyfriend that you don’t even want, especially since you still like the one you have. Then you won’t hurt as much and can get back to where you were before: frustrated, angry, and bitter because sex isn’t any fun for you. And then you can go see a therapist. And then, after that, maybe Betty Dodson and I can help you.

And before you think me unsympathetic, I’m really and truly not. I just think you need a swat on the behind to stop dithering in fury and start fixing stuff. I swat because I love.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Health care paradoxes

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OPINION What does homicide in the Western Addition have to do with the closure of the worker’s compensation clinic at San Francisco General Hospital? How does a mobile methadone-treatment van affect the broader public health of San Francisco?

These are just two of the questions that University of San Francisco nursing students are asking while San Francisco residents face a public health and safety crisis.

Public health and safety are both affected by economic conditions. Nonetheless, we must all question a need-blind cutback in services to public health.

It’s the task of San Francisco nursing professors to address the following confounding paradoxes:

Homelessness Nursing students, Department of Public Health staff, and a host of individuals and organizations work together at the commendable, but intermittent, Project Homeless Connect, while midyear budget cuts will shutter Buster’s Place, the only 24-hour drop-in center that serves homeless persons every day of the year.

Mental health Last semester USF students learned that increasingly scarce hospital beds for mentally ill and impoverished San Francisco residents were going to be cut back even further. Now budget cuts are planned that will decrease services for individuals on an outpatient basis.

Violence Nursing students learn about the effectiveness of education and physical exercise in ameliorating the deplorable conditions of the city’s housing projects and streets. The Western Addition has recently suffered from a spate of shootings; it seems an odd time to close a healthy and safe alternative to the violent streets such as tennis courts.

Occupational health The Occupational Health Clinic at SF General will soon be closed. USF students want to know why they should choose to work for a public health system that puts them at high risk for hepatitis B, HIV, back injury, and exposure to violent patients.

Substance use Methadone treatment for opiate addiction is an imperfect clinical intervention, but it’s certainly better than users overdosing on the street or spreading HIV and antibiotic-resistant skin infections by sharing needles. However, methadone treatment is expensive, and an innovative program to bring it to addicts will be delayed for budget reasons.

Access to care While the city’s health plan, Healthy San Francisco, is a laudable attempt to provide optional health care coverage to more residents, the budgets of public health clinics and hospitals that provide the care are being cut back.

Public health nursing San Francisco has pioneered effective programs tackling the disproportionate infant-mortality, asthma, diabetes, and hypertension rates among African American and Latino San Francisco residents. Now the cadre of public health nurses who do this work will be reduced, and Laguna Honda Hospital is being rebuilt with fewer patient beds. Who will monitor and support the disabled and seniors in the community if not the public health nurses?

As public health nurses, we implore our elected officials to protect the most vulnerable while making difficult decisions.

Sasha J. Cuttler

Sasha Cuttler is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing

Chemicals and quarantines

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) pushes ahead with plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with pheromones to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has signed onto state senator Carole Migden’s efforts to ask CDFA to put a moratorium on the spraying.

"We haven’t seen this level of concern and debate since the medfly days of then governor Jerry Brown," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "At this point, spraying sounds premature and reckless, even though I understand this is a nasty invasive pest."

Meanwhile, four members of the California State Assembly, including San Francisco’s Mark Leno, are working collaboratively on a group of LBAM-related measures to address health, scientific, and efficacy issues that remain unresolved since the agency’s multimillion-dollar eradication campaign began last year.

Leno’s part in this collaboration with fellow assembly members John Laird, Loni Hancock, and Jared Huffman involves demanding that CDFA complete an environmental impact report (EIR) before being able to apply pesticide in an urban area for LBAM eradication, which can be a lengthy process.

"By making this an urgency measure, it would take immediate effect," Leno told the Guardian. "We recognize that urban areas are concerned about health and safety, that LBAM is a real threat to the agricultural industry, and that the other side must be considered."

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CDFA both gave LBAM emergency status after the tiny, leaf-rolling Australian native was found in a Berkeley backyard, the first time it was confirmed in the continental United States.

As the USDA’s Larry Hawkins told the Guardian, the federal declaration of emergency allowed his department to access the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federally owned and operated entity within the USDA that supports and protects farm income and prices.

So far, the USDA has allocated $90 million to cover the costs of what Hawkins called "an expensive regulatory program," along with those of developing suitable pesticides and a nationwide survey to see if the moth has spread beyond California.

Hawkins claims the state separately declared an LBAM emergency — a move that allowed CDFA to go ahead and abate the pest — and that impacted the state’s normal EIR process.

"Emergency status doesn’t relieve [CDFA] of EIR requirements, but it allows them to do it simultaneously," Hawkins explained.

Since then some citizen activists have challenged the moth’s emergency status, claiming that there is no evidence that LBAM has severely damaged or infested local crops. But Hawkins says this purported lack of evidence proves that the government’s eradication program is working.

"We know the insect exists, that it destroys crops in other countries, and now you find the same insect here," said Hawkins, whose department has predicted that LBAM could inhabit 80 percent of the United States and nibble on 2,000 plant species.

"So, we can logically conclude it will cause damage here. The reason you haven’t seen major damage here is because we’ve found it early enough to deal with it before it becomes substantial. And the reason you won’t find reports of major LBAM damage in New Zealand or Australia is because they are constantly using pesticides," Hawkins said.

Asked if the USDA will fully disclose the ingredients of any product the state plans to use aerially, Hawkins said, "We cannot force a private company to reveal all their ingredients. But we have told all those companies that hope to provide products that they should expect to reveal them all."

Critics of the state’s pheromone spraying program observe that Suterra LLC, which manufactured the spray used over Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, refused to release the full ingredients until it was sued — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded immediate full disclosure.

These same critics also note that Schwarzenegger, who continues to support CDFA’s LBAM-eradication program, received $144,600 in campaign contributions from Los Angeles–based Roll International owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who control Suterra, Fiji Water, Paramount Agribusiness, and the Franklin Mint.

Records show the Resnicks donate broadly, mostly to Democrats — including the gubernatorial campaigns of Steve Westly and Phil Angelides, and US Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — with a lesser-size donation to Republican presidential front-runner John McCain, proving they play both sides of the fence.

With researchers testing a variety of LBAM-related products in New Zealand, Hawkins hopes to have a product formulated for California by June 1, which is when spraying is scheduled to resume in Santa Cruz and Monterey; spraying in the Bay Area is set for Aug. 1.

"We would like to give communities maximum notice, but we’re also working towards a beginning-of-June date, and as much as we’d like to insert artificial time frames, the insect couldn’t care less. It’s on a biological time table and is multiplying every day," Hawkins said.

David Dilworth of the Monterey nonprofit group Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment, which advocates the use of targeted pheromone-baited sticky traps, conceded that even if CDFA was forced to stop the aerial spraying, the USDA could spray anyway.

"But it would take them several months to organize, and we don’t believe they have the constitutional power," claimed Dilworth, whose organization is preparing a 60-day notice of intent to sue the USDA and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, organic farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable limbo that continues to shift. Take the Santa Cruz–based California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). Last fall, CCOF supported the aerial pheromone spray after the National Organics Program approved it, meaning sprayed farmers didn’t lose organic certification

But March 4, CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley told the Guardian that the group is about to release a revised position on the spraying, and could not comment further "because CCOF’s government affairs committee has not yet approved this revised position."

"We lobbied for an organically approved product and supported it last fall when lots of our members were suffering because they were in quarantine and couldn’t sell beyond county lines," was all Shipley would say.

Meanwhile, organic farmers who spoke on condition of anonymity largely supported aerial spraying for economic and environmental reasons.

"If the moth isn’t dealt with now, it’ll become a bigger problem, from both an environmental and toxic perspective," one farmer told us, citing the already high costs of controlling such bugs as coddling moths and medflies.

"This is somebody else’s pest at the moment, a nonnative pest," he said. "If farmers have to start dealing with LBAM as well, they’ll be ruined."

He also cited his belief that there aren’t 40 million pheromone-soaked twist ties on the market, which is what the CDFA claims is needed to blanket infested counties from the ground up with female pheromones to confuse the males.

Nigel Walker, an organic farmer in Dixon, recalled the devastating costs of quarantine thanks to a medfly-infested mango that someone brought back from Hawaii.

"Their vacation cost me $60,000 because of lost sales," Walker said. "So, for God’s sake, don’t bring, mail, or FedEx fruit and vegetables into California, because border inspectors are looking for bombs and terrorists, not produce and moths.

"We live in a global economy, and we have trade agreements that say if one person gets a pest, you have to do something about it," Walker added. "Nobody wants to be sprayed. Even when I spray organic seaweed on my fruit trees, I wear a mask. So I understand the gut reaction. But by refusing to be sprayed, you’re punishing the wrong person — the farmer — who already has to deal with the vagaries of the weather, the marketplace, and pests like the medfly."

Chris Mittelstaedt, who lives in San Francisco with his family and runs Fruitguys, a small business that delivers organic fruit to offices, said he’s personally against the spraying. "But as a company, we are going to wait a few weeks before letting people know what we officially think or endorse as a plan of action," Mittelstaedt told us.

Other city dwellers are less ambivalent. Frank Eggers, a former Fairfax mayor who is organizing a group called Stop the Spray, said, "[World Trade Organization] stuff is driving this so-called moth emergency.

"We’re allowing other countries to quarantine our produce. And with the global economy, climate change, and travel, we’re going be facing this issue continuously. But we can’t keep putting poison on our land, or say we’ll put you in quarantine if you don’t accept our aerial bombardment," he said.

Paul Schramski, state director of Pesticide Watch, worries that the state and federal agencies are still not listening to the people of California.

"If this is not being driven by trade agreements, then I’m not sure what is the driver. We don’t have all the facts. But it’s not being driven by actual crop damage," Schramski said. "We agree that this invasive moth should be controlled, but it’s a false premise to believe that the choice is between aerial spraying or nothing. The state has known since August that the public was opposed to spraying, so why aren’t we producing more twist ties?"

CDFA, which used $500,000 in USDA funds to hire PR agency Porter Novelli last November at the height of public outcry, is currently researching pheromone products that last up to 90 days and is also planning to use pheromone-loaded twist ties, sticky traps, and stingerless parasitic wasps in its LBAM program.

"We believe this to be a biological emergency," CDFA public affairs supervisor Steve Lyle told us. "If we waited a year or two, so we could first do an EIR, we would lose the battle and become generally infested."

Ironically, California’s best hope for not being sprayed ad infinitum may lie in the discovery that the moth has spread to other states.

"It would make a significant impact if we were to find the insect established in other places," the USDA’s Hawkins told us. "It doesn’t mean we would throw up our hands and walk away, but it would remove some of the argument that the rest of America is at risk from California if other states already have it."

But until that time, Hawkins warned that if state legislators demand a moratorium, forced spraying won’t be the federal government’s only option: "Maybe California would have to be quarantined. And now we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars."

Questioning Matt

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Matt Gonzalez consulted few of his colleagues in San Francisco’s progressive political community before announcing Feb. 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that he’ll be Ralph Nader’s running mate on another quixotic run for president.

That’s fairly typical for Gonzalez, who has tended to keep mostly his own counsel for all of his big political decisions: switching from Democrat to Green in 2000; successfully running for president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2002; jumping into the mayor’s race at the last minute the next year; abruptly deciding not to run for reelection to his supervisorial seat in 2004; and — last year — deciding against another run for mayor while being coy about his intentions until the very end.

But if he had polled those closest to him politically, Gonzalez would have learned what a difficult and divisive task he’s undertaken (something he probably knew already given what a polarizing figure Nader has become). Not one significant political official or media outlet in San Francisco has voiced support for his candidacy, and some have criticized its potential to pull support away from the Democratic Party nominee and give Republican John McCain a shot at the White House.

In fact, most of his ideological allies are enthusiastically backing the candidacy of Barack Obama, who Gonzalez targeted with an acerbic editorial titled “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out” on the local BeyondChron Web site on the eve of his announcement (while not telling BeyondChron staffers of his impending announcement, to their mild irritation).

It’s telling that all of the top Green Party leaders in San Francisco — including Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, school board president and supervisorial candidate Mark Sanchez, and Jane Kim, who got the most votes in the last school board election after Gonzalez encouraged her to run — have endorsed Barack Obama.

Mirkarimi, who ran Nader’s Northern California presidential effort in 2000 and ran Gonzalez’s 2003 mayoral campaign, has had nothing but polite words for Gonzalez in public, but he reaffirmed in a conversation with the Guardian that his support for Obama didn’t waver with news of the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.

Mirkarimi has a significant African American constituency in the Western Addition and has worked hard to build ties to those voters. He’s also got a good head for political reality — and it’s hard to blame him if he thinks that the Nader-Gonzalez effort is going nowhere and will simply cause further tensions between Greens and progressive Democrats.

Sup. Chris Daly is strongly supporting Obama and said the decision of his former colleague to run didn’t even present him with a dilemma: “It’s unfortunately not a hard one — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.”

Daly doesn’t think the Nader-Gonzalez will have much impact on the presidential race or the issues it’s pushing. “The movement for Obama is so significant that it eclipses everything else,” Daly told us. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change how politics happens in this country.”

While few San Francisco progressives argue that Obama’s policy positions are perfect, Daly doesn’t agree with Gonzalez’s critique of Obama’s bad votes and statements. “I don’t understand the argument that you should only back a candidate that you agree with all the time,” Daly said. “If that was the case, I would only ever vote for myself.”

On the national level, Gonzalez told us that he was running to challenge the two-party hold on power and to help focus Nader’s campaign on issues like ballot access for independent candidates. “If I’m his running mate, then we’ll be talking about electoral reform,” he said.

On a local level, the Gonzalez move will have a complicated impact. It will, in some ways, damage his ability to play a significant role in San Francisco politics in the future. That’s in part because Gonzalez has taken himself out of the position of a leader in the local progressive movement.

San Francisco progressives don’t like lone actors: the thousands of activists in many different camps don’t always agree, but they like their representatives to be, well, representative. That means when housing activists — one of Daly’s key constituencies — need someone to carry a major piece of legislation for them, they expect Daly to be there.

Sup. Tom Ammiano hasn’t come up with his landmark bills on health care, public power, and other issues all by himself; he’s been part of a coalition that has worked at the grassroots level to support the work he’s doing in City Hall.

Daly sought to find a mayoral candidate last year through a progressive convention. That seemed a bit unorthodox to the big-time political consultants who like to see their candidates self-selected and anointed by powerful donors, but it was very much a San Francisco thing. This is a city of neighborhoods, coalitions, and interest groups that try to hold their elected officials accountable.

Obama’s politics are far from perfect, and Nader and Gonzalez have very legitimate criticisms of the Democratic candidates and important proposals for electoral reform. But right now the grassroots action in San Francisco and elsewhere in the country — the movement-building excitement — is with Barack Obama. The activists who made the Gonzalez mayoral effort possible are now working on the Obama campaign.

In fact, Daly has repeatedly voiced hope that an Obama victory could help empower the progressive movement in San Francisco and give it more leverage against moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom who support Hillary Clinton (see “Who Wants Change?” 1/30/08).

Daly said the Gonzalez decision complicates that narrative a little. “I don’t think it’s undercut,” Daly said, “but I think it’s confused a bit.”

Wrapping it up

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The Guardian went to press this week without a jury verdict in our lawsuit against the SF Weekly.

As of the morning of March 4, the jury had been deliberating more than two days and was still behind closed doors in Superior Court. Any updates will be posted to www.sfbg.com.

The jurors have to answer a series of questions to reach a decision in the case, which alleges a violation of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. First they have to decide if the Weekly sold ads below cost. Then they have to determine whether that was done to injure a competitor (us) and whether the below-cost sales were a substantial factor in actually causing the Guardian harm. Only at that point would the jurors begin discussing damages.

The fact that the panel is still talking after more than 10 hours means it’s likely they answered yes to the first question and possibly the second or third — if those answers had been no, the case would have been over.

But trial lawyers all agree that it’s always a mistake to try to predict the outcome of jury deliberations. The trial has been going on for more than four weeks, with detailed and sharply conflicting testimony on the behavior, intent, and financial status of the city’s two alternative weekly newspapers.

The Guardian argued that the Weekly, owned by the Phoenix-based chain Village Voice Media (VVM; formerly known as New Times), has since at least 2001 engaged in a practice of selling ads for far less than the cost of producing them in an attempt to damage the local, independent competitor. Testimony showed consistently that the chain-owned paper was indeed selling below cost. In fact, the Weekly has lost money for the past 12 years, and the chain has shipped $13 million to San Francisco to prop up the paper and allow it to continue below-cost selling, testimony showed.

Three witnesses testified that they had heard Mike Lacey, one of the two principals of VVM, announce when the chain bought the Weekly in 1995 that he intended to put the Guardian out of business.

But the Weekly‘s lawyers argued that Lacey was just engaging in hyperbole, and that there was never a predatory intent. In fact, they argued, any financial0 losses the Guardian had seen were the result of a weak economy and competition from the Internet.

The Guardian‘s expert accounting witness, Clifford Kupperberg, conducted a study showing that the local paper had lost money to the Weekly‘s price-cutting. In 90 percent of the sample accounts he studied, the Weekly had sold ads below cost — and two-thirds of those were associated with the Guardian either losing a customer or having to cut its rates.

The Weekly brought out $1,075-per-hour Harvard economist Joseph Kalt to argue that it would be economically irrational for the Weekly to try to put the Guardian out of business. But the Guardian‘s business expert, Bill Johnson, publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly, said that VVM was behaving just the way many big chains do: it was cutting rates to seize as much market share as possible with the aim of undermining a competitor.

Kupperberg put the damages at between $5 million and $11 million. The Weekly‘s expert, Everett Harry, tried to belittle those claims, but in the process he gave the jury some misleading charts that completely misinterpreted Kupperberg’s work.

Even if the jury awards only modest damages, the Guardian can ask Judge Marla Miller to issue an injunction barring the Weekly from continuing to sell ads below cost.

Muni’s makeover

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s streets are some of the most congested in the nation, our gasoline prices are reaching record highs, and parking is both scarce and expensive (particularly given the rising cost of parking tickets). But most drivers still haven’t been willing to switch to public transit, something that Muni officials hope to change with the help of a highly anticipated study that’s just been released.

The Transit Effectiveness Program (TEP) is a systemic proposal to make Muni faster and more attractive, mostly by focusing resources on the busiest routes. The study kicks off what could be a transformative year for the Municipal Transportation Agency, which got another $26 million annually through the passage of Proposition A in November 2007 and has been struggling for years to meet its on-time performance goals and win back lost riders.

It has been over two decades since Muni had its last major overhaul. The TEP boasts "hundreds of changes" in the works, from larger buses to route additions. The current draft of the proposal reflects 18 months of data collection on rider trends and community input. Officials found residents citywide were most concerned with reliability in the system.

"We have some schedules that are up to 10 minutes short of how long the line actually takes," said Julie Kirschbaum, program manager of the TEP. "We also need to reduce the number of breakdowns. We need more mechanics."

Data also showed 75 percent of Muni passengers board in the system’s 15 busiest corridors, which include the 49 Mission/Van Ness, 38 Geary, and 30 Stockton routes. TEP calls for increasing service on these corridors by 14 percent and cutting wait times to five minutes or less.

The study also proposed new routes to better reflect changing growth patterns and travel needs. For the first time, a bus would directly connect Potrero Hill with downtown. A new "downtown circulator" would loop Market Street on Columbus, Polk, and Folsom streets, replacing the 19 Polk and 12 Folsom. Some proposals would increase service between neighborhoods in the western and southern parts of the city as well as create better connections to BART and Caltrain for those who commute to or from the city.

University students and employees could also benefit from the TEP, as increased service to destinations such as San Francisco State University and University of San Francisco were high priorities for the project team. In order to maximize resources, some routes could be scaled back or removed, potentially making the walk to the bus stop a few blocks longer for some city residents. For example, in the Mission District, there is a proposal to fold the existing routes on Folsom and Bryant into a faster, higher-capacity route on Harrison. A proposal to end the 56 Rutland route would leave Visitation Valley even more isolated.

Once the TEP’s environmental impact report is complete sometime next year, there will be public hearings before the MTA board decides which recommendations to adopt. The Board of Supervisors could ultimately vote to overrule controversial route changes.

The TEP is one of many high profile green initiatives Mayor Gavin Newsom has rolled out, from a solar panel initiative he introduced with Assessor Phil Ting to the controversial appointment of Wade Crowfoot as the director of climate protection initiatives, whose salary is paid with MTA funds.

"The best thing we can do is get people out of single occupancy vehicles…. This mode shift is my primary goal," Crowfoot said at a Feb. 27 public information workshop, one of many planned throughout the coming months to educate and receive feedback from residents on the TEP.

Yet like many of Newsom’s splashier initiatives, the plan lacks clear funding sources and commitments. "There’s a whole capital piece to the TEP that’s been missing the whole time," Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a member of the TEP’s policy advisory board, told us. "Without this capital element, TEP won’t happen."

Many of the proposals could be covered by reallocating operational costs, yet some expensive projects remain without a clear source of financing. Despite the price tag, Radulovich said ambitious investments now could more than pay for themselves in the long run: "If you’re smart about how you spend money, you can use capital money to save money in operating costs down the line."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

When Jerry Brown was governor of California, he was almost done in by the Mediterranean fruit fly. So he knows a thing or two about bug infestations and aerial spraying.

It was 1981, and Brown, approaching the end of his second and final term, was running for a spot in the United States Senate. He was the odds-on favorite to win the seat being vacated by the Republican S.I. Hayakawa; his chief Republican rival was a mild-mannered and hardly charismatic San Diego mayor named Pete Wilson.

But that summer, the fruit flies, known as medflies, started showing up in residential areas, mostly in gardens and fruit trees outside of San Francisco. Farmers worried that the pest could spread to the central valley and points south — and experts warned that the state stood to lose $1 billion per year if the agricultural industry got hit.

The flies breed rapidly and turn fresh fruit to mush. That would have been bad for growers. Even worse, the rest of the country was so worried about the tiny creatures that any sign of a commercial crop infestation might have led to a nationwide boycott of California produce.

Brown, still the staunch environmentalist, ordered the California Conservation Corps to strip the fruit off trees in the affected areas, and he ordered the release of millions of sterile flies to interrupt the mating cycles. As it turns out, the shipment of supposedly sterile flies from a Peruvian lab included at least some that were fertile; Brown argued that the error prevented the ecologically sound alternative from working.

But for whatever reason, the flies continued to spread — so the chorus from agribusiness got louder and louder. They wanted aerial saturation spraying of the pesticide malathion.

But Brown resisted. "All I could think about," he told me 10 years later, "was poison raining down from the sky."

That’s all a lot of environmentalists could think about too. The governor was knocked around like a ping-pong ball, to the delight of a mainstream media that never much liked or respected Jerry Brown. And in the end, he caved: helicopters, flying five abreast in military-style formation, began carpet bombing hundreds of square miles of mostly residential areas, dumping a chemical that a lot of critics argued could have untold long-term health effects.

The indecision pissed off the conservatives. The final outcome pissed off the environmentalists. Brown lost the Senate race.

When I talked to him about the decision, it was 1991 and I was writing a book — and Brown was mounting a surprisingly strong run for president. In retrospect, Brown thought the spraying was wrong. He thought he had to do it, but he felt horrible about it. Back then, he was a progressive populist.

And now he’s California’s attorney general, and he’s defending the state’s plans to bombard San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay with an artificial pheromone wrapped in tiny plastic bubbles to eradicate the light brown apple moth (see page 10). I know all the arguments, but please: I have two little kids now. It’s a nasty chemical, raining down on us from the sky.

The medflies came back. So will the moths. Brown wants to come back to his old job too. You wonder if he’s learned anything.

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