Volumes

The Fillmore mess around

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s Fillmore District, Willie Brown once said, "had to be the closest thing to Harlem outside of New York." The Fillmore was in its golden era when the future mayor, then a teenager, arrived in 1951 from segregated Mineola, Texas. The 20 blocks that constitute the heart of the Fillmore then bustled with commerce and culture. It was a vibrant African American community, renowned for its nightlife.

People from throughout the Bay Area and around the world came to clubs such as Bop City (1690 Post), Jack’s Tavern (1931 Sutter), Elsie’s Breakfast Nook (1739 Fillmore), the Blue Mirror (935 Fillmore), and the Booker T. Washington Hotel’s cocktail lounge (1540 Fillmore) to see local attractions like Saunders King and Vernon Alley, as well as such national stars as Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Slim Gaillard, Art Tatum, T-Bone Walker, Roy Milton, and Ruth Brown. It was not uncommon for audience members to bump shoulders with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Robert Mitchum, Sammy Davis Jr., Dorothy Dandridge, and other visiting celebrities. Saxophonist John Handy remembers jamming with John Coltrane at Bop City, then going around the corner to Jackson’s Nook (1638 Buchanan) to share tea and conversation with the then-little-known musician, who was in town with Johnny Hodges’s band.

"Coltrane was quiet," onetime Bop City house pianist Frank Jackson recalls over a plate of short ribs at 1300 on Fillmore, a new upscale soul food restaurant two doors down from the new Yoshi’s San Francisco club. Willie Brown is dining a few tables away.

By the time Brown became mayor of San Francisco in 1996, the Fillmore was pretty much a ghost town and had been for some two and a half decades, the victim of a botched redevelopment plan. Small groups of aging African American men gathered on corners and in vacant lots that stretched for blocks, bringing folding chairs and tables to play dominos or poker.

In a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle about 20 years ago, an African American minister from the Fillmore who was opposing plans to revitalize the area’s nightlife claimed there had never been much of a jazz scene in the area. But those old men, as well as many musicians from the Fillmore’s heyday, knew better. Visual proof can be found in page after page of historic photographs collected by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts in Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Chronicle, 2006). Many also fill several walls in 1300 on Fillmore’s lounge. Some can be viewed in rotation on a screen above the bar and outside, on the Eddy Street side of the building, which also houses Yoshi’s, the Jazz Heritage Center, and 80 condominiums.

THE HOOD HEATS UP


"The Fillmore was hot," says trumpeter Allen Smith, who moved there from Stockton in the late ’40s. "You could hit two or three clubs in one block, each with a band. Racial prejudice was practically nonexistent. You gotta remember that blacks weren’t even welcome on the east side of Van Ness Avenue — but all the races could mix in the Fillmore. You could be out all hours of the night, partying with whomever you cared to, and you didn’t have to worry about anybody mugging you or bothering you. It was just very cool." The 82-year-old musician — who has played in the Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, and Gil Evans orchestras — will perform as a member of the Frank Jackson Quintet on Dec. 3 at the new Yoshi’s.

"There were a lot of after-hours clubs," says Jackson, also 82, a Texan who settled in the Fillmore with his family in 1942. "Bop City was about the most popular thing in this area. I was one of the house pianists. I would play different nights. We would all fill in for each other. If you got a better gig, you’d go and take it. There was always somebody that could take your place."

Bop City was owned by promoter Charles Sullivan, who in the 1950s and early ’60s was presenting such attractions as B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and Ike and Tina Turner at the Fillmore Auditorium before Bill Graham ever set eyes on the building. The after-hours club opened in 1949 and was originally called Vout City, with Slim Gaillard as host and attraction.

Famous for such songs as "Flat Foot Floogie," "Vout Oreenee," and "Popity Pop," Gaillard was a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and purveyor of jive talk. "He spoke several different languages and invented some of his own," says Jackson, who was a member of Gaillard’s band at Vout City. The eccentric Gaillard was as likely to bake a cake in the club’s kitchen and serve it to customers as he was to perform. After several months Sullivan let Gaillard go and hired Jimbo Edwards to run the room.

"Jimbo was a used-car salesman downtown or somewhere," Jackson says. "He knew absolutely nothing about jazz, but he got his jazz lessons right there with Bop City as his workshop. He got to know exactly what was going on and who was doing what and whether they were good at it."

Besides such then–resident musicians as Handy, Pony Poindexter, Dexter Gordon, and Teddy Edwards, Jackson remembers playing during his seven years at Bop City with many out-of-town talents, including Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, Frank Foster, Stuff Smith, Art Blakey, Chico Hamilton, and Philly Joe Jones. And he especially remembers the night his idol, pianist extraordinaire Art Tatum, came in to listen but not to play. "They gave him a seat right by the piano," Jackson says. "I did not wanna play. The place was packed. There were seven or eight piano players in the house, but nobody wanted to come up and play."

Edwards relocated the club to Fillmore Street in the mid-’60s, but it closed shortly thereafter. The action had shifted to Soulville at McAllister and Webster streets, where younger players like Dewey Redman and Pharoah Sanders jammed, and to the Half Note on Haight Street, where George Duke led a trio with vocalist Al Jarreau. And just down the street Handy’s explosive quintet with violinist Michael White appeared regularly at the Both/And, which also presented such touring artists as Betty Carter, Milt Jackson, Roland Kirk, and Archie Shepp.

"THEY TOOK AWAY THE MUSIC"


By the end of the ’60s, however, jazz was all but dead in the Western Addition. Only Jack’s, which had moved from Sutter Street to the corner of Fillmore and Geary in the building that is now the Boom Boom Room, survived into the ’70s. Some, like Handy, blame the decline of jazz on the popularity of rock, others on rising crime and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

"To me, they just destroyed the area," Jackson says of the city agency. "They took away the music. They took away homes from people. They were in a hurry to get people out of their homes."

Allen Smith’s son Peter Fitzsimmons has long been active in efforts to bring jazz back to the Fillmore and currently runs the Jazz Heritage Center, which includes an art gallery, a screening room, and a gift shop. "There were a lot of variables in place that kinda brought down the jazz scene," he says. "The music trends went away from jazz into the big stadium-rock concerts. There were some black families moving out of the Fillmore, so there wasn’t as much nightlife. And it got a little more dangerous. Like in major cities everywhere else, destitute people, drugs, and other things came into the sociological picture.

"In the ’50s and early ’60s, Jimbo was there," Fitzsimmons adds. "He marshaled his club. It wasn’t a dangerous place. People were coming from all over the world to go to Jimbo’s." Fitzsimmons and a lot of other people are confident that jazz in the Fillmore will again rise to such heights. *

FRANK JACKSON

Dec. 3, 8 and 10 p.m., $16–$20

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Can jazz save the Fillmore?

-
0

Yoshi’s unveils the live-music centerpiece in the once-hopping African American nightlife district that’s been devastated by redevelopment. Our critics talk to the venue about the challenges of opening a new jazz club in San Francisco and look at the jazz-era history of the Fillmore and the legacy of redevelopment.

>>Pick up the beat
Yoshi’s arrival in San Francisco raises questions about whether jazz can revive the Fillmore
By Marcus Crowder

>>The Fillmore mess around
Players recall the once sizzling, oft-forgotten Western Addition jazz era
By Lee Hildebrand

>>Redevelopment blues
Devastation, hope, and history in the Fillmore
By Kimberly Chun

>>Leona King’s Blue Mirror Club
Classic photos of Fillmore jazz’s golden era from 1953

Remain in light

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Bistro 9

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

It was déjà vu all over again when we stepped into Bistro 9 on a mild October evening.

"So when did you take over from Park Chow?" I asked our server. There was no doubt in my mind that Bistro 9 was the successor to that long-running Inner Sunset sanctum of casual comfort food. The heated sidewalk loge, the long bar, the warmth of brick and wood, the garden in the rear — it was all just as I remembered from my last visit to Park Chow. Bill Clinton was still president then, so this would have been sometime in the previous millennium, and memory does have its sell-by dates.

"Oh, Park Chow’s still there," she said brightly. "It’s just a few doors that way, toward Irving." She motioned, and I nodded, feeling the same confusion Captain Kirk must have felt in "The Mark of Gideon," when, unbeknownst to him, he was beamed onto a fake Enterprise. Later, after we’d paid and left, we strolled briefly along the block, just to make sure, and there indeed was Park Chow, with crowds milling outside and in. Heated loge set with tables at the sidewalk, warm yellow light pooling in the dim interior.

The sense of parallel universes is strong, then, if subtly skewed at points. The restaurants share a layout, look, and crowd — young, UCSF-ish, collegiate and postcollegiate — but they part company, congenially enough, in the matter of food. Park Chow tilts toward the Italian, whereas Bistro 9 (which opened late in the summer and is a sibling of the Citrus Club) finds its bliss farther east, in the methods and flavors of the Middle East. Here you will find kebab-style skewers to rival those at Asqew Grill — along with moussaka, couscous, and zataar flat bread. And if these fragrant whiffs of Turkey, Morocco, and Arabia don’t appeal, there are such standbys as pizza, burgers, rotisserie chicken or beef (from the splendid machine that stands at the heart of the exhibition kitchen), and even Provençal rack of lamb.

In this landscape of gastronomic peaks and valleys, there is a great deal of earthy satisfaction to be had in the folds of the second (although the rack of lamb is something of a deal at $19.50). Skewers are cookout food, party food — but Bistro 9 offers them in a wealth of possible combinations and sophisticated treatments. There are cubes of souvlaki-style lamb (wonderfully garlicky marinade, slightly tough meat), chicken breast perfumed with mint and cumin, shrimp and scallops with bell peppers, and spicy summer sausage. The last looked benign enough, with a pale color suggestive of veal and a smooth texture that reminded my companion of hot dogs. (I like hot dogs; he, being from Germany, regards them as overprocessed and aberrant.) But spicy meant spicy, as in "nearly incendiary." We both liked that.

Skewer plates ($7.50 for one skewer, $10.50 for two, and so on) include, besides a bed of wonderfully plumped rice grains, a choice of side dishes. These were superior, except for tabbouleh, a cracked wheat salad that was fine but not memorable. Greek salad, on the other hand — a jumble of tomato quarters, cucumber wedges, olives, onions, and feta cheese crumblings in a lemony vinaigrette — carried an enchantment of fresh mint, while grilled artichokes had a lovely lemon breath and were surprisingly tender, if not quite in season. Grilled corn, late in what has been a fine season, was still summertime sweet and dripping with melted butter. And the macaroni and cheese (you can get it separately, for $5.50) was just stupendously good, best in show in a field that’s grown quite impressive in the past few years. The kitchen uses cheddar, jack, and Gruyère, hardly an unknown combination in today’s world of mac-and-cheese connoisseurship, but the result is a creaminess and intense depth of flavor that leaves one longing for more, even though the serving crock is not small.

The Bistro 9 burger ($8, plus another buck for cheese) is made from Niman Ranch beef, which manages to remain tasty and juicy even when slightly overcooked. I’d ordered mine medium rare, which maybe is such a common expression that it no longer registers in the awareness of busy servers. Medium well isn’t ruinous for a burger, just faintly disappointing. A nice pillowy bun helped soften the letdown, as did a stack of fresh french fries, some with bits of skin still attached.

A word on the soups: try them. (All right, two words.) The signature soup is a hearty lentil ($4.50 for a cup), semipureed and sweetened by a raft of caramelized onions. A sometime offering is red bean with vegetable (also $4.50 for a cup), a full puree the color of tomato soup, decorated with pipings of crème fraîche and summoning the spirits of both minestrone and chili. It’s like a blind date for soup that works out.

For dessert, how about a shameless wallow in the brownie sundae ($6.50), several scoops of ice cream plopped over warm, chocolate chip–studded brownies, with a heavy lacquering of hot fudge sauce? It’s plenty for two and then some. The only issue is likely to be in agreeing on what kind of ice cream you want, since you get a choice. I demurred in the selection and heard, from across the table, chocolate being chosen. Chocolate ice cream with chocolate chocolate-chip brownies and chocolate sauce? And how about a tube of Clearasil on the side?

Still, we left happy. We even waved at the Park Chow people before slipping off into the night. *

BISTRO 9

Daily, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

1224 Ninth Ave., SF

(415) 753-3919

www.bistro9sf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Praise the lard

-
0

By L.E. Leone


› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The problem is, I don’t like applesauce. The solution is to start liking applesauce. There is no other way, given the ridiculous bounty of Sonoma County’s apple harvest this year, plus the clanking, cavernous, empty chill I feel every time I open my checkbook.

I have two apple trees in my chicken yard. Since I wandered and roamed all summer and most of the fall, missing blackberries, missing peaches, missing the pears I poach from a tree down the street and the grapes I borrow from all of the vineyards around here, I am especially determined to use my millions and millions of apples — even the ones that have already fallen and have worms swizzle-sticking out of them since there ain’t no chickens yet to see to this.

I don’t like apple cider. I don’t like apple juice. Apple pie is not my favorite kind of pie. I mean, I eat applesauce, but it’s not a thing to get all excited about, like beet greens or getting to ride up front.

What I do like is apples — crunchy, juicy, crisp, ripe apples. In my hand, while I’m sitting in the tree, under it, or on a ladder. So I eat what I can, and I hand apples to people, like on the train. Or at Sockywonk’s art opening, when I went around the room and handed everyone an apple from my tree.

There’s something sexy about handing someone an apple.

I’m not religious, but sometimes a crazy-ass Bible story can point to something worth something in real life too, like how Jesus turned water into wine, and the next thing you know the French are making French toast out of stale bread. I myself have turned cream into butter, and my brother hammered spigots into trees and turned goo into maple syrup.

Voilà: breakfast!

To hand someone an apple is to say, Take a walk on the wild side!

Whereas there’s nothing at all sexy about applesauce. It’s baby food. It’s windfall, it’s "drop," it’s old. It’s easy to make. Just cut ’em up and cook ’em. Last year I made and canned a load of applesauce, and, so I wouldn’t have to eat it, I gave it all away. And no one made love to me. Well, that’s not true, but it was meat related. It had nothing to do with applesauce.

The year before that it was apple chutney, which didn’t go over so well with the Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve made and canned apple barbecue sauce too. It’s okay.

This year I am determined to learn to like applesauce.

Now, the number one tried-and-true all-time best way to start liking a thing that you didn’t like before, everybody knows, is to put bacon in it. I looked online, but none of the applesauce recipes had bacon in them. Cinnamon. Sugar. One said honey, but the closest any of them came to bacon was butter. I didn’t look real close. Anyway, the lesson of Jesus is to not use recipes. I shut down my computer and galloped into town to buy me some bacon.

My mother wonders if the serpent that spoke to Eve in the Bible story was perhaps actually honey, oozing out of a hive and slithering down the tree of life. Never mind that honey is even less likely to learn a language than snakes are — my mother has been wondering this now, she admitted to me recently, for at least 30 years.

I think she’s brilliant. And persistent. Yet flexible. Thirty years ago, for example, she was keeping bees and eating honey instead of sugar. Honey was good for you. Now it’s the root of all evil.

I never liked honey, and I found out recently that neither does Ruth Reichl, and neither did M.F.K. Fisher. So that’s my literary mom and grandma (they shudder and turn over, respectively, at the thought) and now my mom-mom too. My grandma-grandma couldn’t care less, being dead, but I come from a tradition of honey hating, apparently, and not even bacon is going to change that.

As for applesauce …

If there is in fact a root of all evil, I would like to find out what exactly it is and learn to cultivate and cook with it, like carrots, potatoes, beets.

If there is a root of all good, it’s bacon fat. I cooked the apples in it, slow and long, over the wood stove. Sprinkle of water. Speck of cinnamon. When finally I had what seemed like applesauce, I crumbled the bacon back into it, and now, praise the lard, guess who just loves applesauce?

Ape-man

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I just read your question in the Slate article (www.slate.com/id/2174411) that asks sex columnists what puzzles them. For you, it was, in short, "Why homophobia?"

I’m convinced that boys learn it from their peers. Once a person is labeled gay, that person is marked for ostracism. A boy who comes to the defense of a gay boy pretty much guarantees that he’ll be lumped in with the gay boy, so a powerful taboo is set up. If he joins in the ostracism, he’ll be rewarded with membership in the brotherhood of dudes.

I’m sure I’m just touching on the situation here, and it’s sort of a chicken-and-egg solution, because who taught the meanies homophobia in the first place? And finally, I’m from Hawaii, where folks are a tad more tolerant of gays. It’s not a Shangri-la of acceptance, but Hawaiian culture is more inclusive than mainland American culture. So I guess I can end with another question: why are some cultures more homophobia prone than others?

Love,

Island Reader

Dear Island:

Yes, I was asked come up with something that I just don’t get, and I picked homophobia, or rather, the kind of semidispassionate, delayed-gratification, frighteningly organized sort of homophobia that results in anti–gay marriage legislation, not the kind that results in broken heads. The latter I can understand, sort of. The people who break heads — with their inarticulate, reflexive need to Hulk Smash! whenever they feel their shoddily constructed senses of self crumbling at the margins — are not the people who coolly invent laws to ruin other people’s lives from a distance. Those are the ones whose motivations fail to connect with me, so every time I try explaining them to myself (they sincerely believe their gay neighbors are breaking God’s laws and must be punished; they feel very strongly that only heterosexual marriage can protect Western society from the barbarians at the gates; they want to save Ellen and Portia from sin; etc.), the brief, bright light of understanding flickers out, and I find myself wondering why those people will not go away and leave the rest of us alone.

It’s not that I’m entirely at sea as to where homophobia comes from or why people feel it. I believe quite strongly that we are wired to be exquisitely sensitive to sameness and difference and that once upon a time recognizing one’s own was a vital survival strategy on the Serengeti, as anything strange was far more likely to be foe than friend. I also believe that humans evolved with an extraordinary gift for pattern recognition and an accompanying discomfort around things, especially people, that fail to categorize neatly. Just ask any transgender person or any parent who has been subjected to the surprisingly aggressive grilling that old biddies on the street feel entitled to initiate: "Are you sure she’s a girl?" "Yes, quite." "Then why is she wearing a blue hat?" People are extremely invested in knowing who’s a what and who isn’t. This maintains order, and we are order-loving animals. Obviously how order loving varies: compare, if you will, the behavior of Israelis attempting to board a bus with that of the Swiss — those kinds of small variations probably account for the slightly less homophobic milieu of your island home, if in fact you’re not imagining it.

We know these things about our primitive behaviors, and we know that, like violent sexual jealousy and rape as a reproductive strategy — among many other unattractive behaviors from our prehistory — they’re no longer adaptive. We are now forced to live crammed into the same cage with others of all sorts, with the cheering side benefits of cultural liveliness and hybridity, but our inner ape-man will take a while longer to be bred away, if he ever goes at all. I sincerely hope that we are not someday living in off-Earth colonies, all evolved and beige and Starfleety, and still occasionally passing laws against the one group (besides fat people) it’s still OK to subject to state-sponsored discrimination.

Now check this out: back at Slate, where I went to catch up on the Human Nature column, there was this very appetizing column fodder: "Genetic brain manipulation can change sexual orientation in worms." Seriously! Of course, they were worms, and our concept of "sexual interest" can be applied to them tenuously at best, but it does seem to imply that, at least for worms, the capability to "think" like a male worm is present from the beginning, awaiting only the kiss of a genetic engineer to awaken it. Not conclusive, certainly, but hella intriguing. The story is here: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/uou-sas101707.php.

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.

Why I voted for Josh Wolf

-
0

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Last week’s mayoral election in my hometown of San Francisco was one of those weird moments that make you think you’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel, looking at hundreds of alternate futures peeling away from the present like little slivers of psychosis. It was a dismal election, in which the incumbent, conservative–for–San Francisco Gavin Newsom, was the only candidate who had any hope of winning. He was practically unopposed, but there was, technically, a cornucopia of candidates, spanning the gamut from qualified but unpopular to completely unqualified and silly, who were on the ballot running against him.

Things being what they are, the silly candidates got the most attention (albeit not most of the votes). Some guy named Chicken, known mostly for his participation in the art festival Burning Man, ran on a campaign pushing people to vote for him as their second choice, since San Francisco has ranked-choice voting. He definitely had great posters, given his connection to the arts community, but not much of a platform. Then there was the sex club owner Michael Powers, who ran on a platform I never quite understood. Powers does have one of the nicest sex clubs I’ve ever seen, called (appropriately enough) the Power Exchange, and I wondered briefly if that might qualify him to run the city. But in the end, he got the fewest votes. And Chicken did not come in anywhere near second.

As I said, there were a few candidates, like Quintin Mecke, with relevant experience, but none had big enough constituencies to pull off a win. So when it came time to fill in my ballot, I voted for a guy who isn’t a joke and has the kinds of political experience that might get him elected in 2035: Josh Wolf.

Media geeks may remember Wolf as the blogger who was sent to prison for refusing to identify for the police some protesters in video he posted of a political demonstration that turned violent. After he got out of prison he went on the Colbert Report, where he came across as well intentioned and with a burning passion for free speech. In the mayoral race, he ran on a platform that emphasized open democratic processes and a good wi-fi plan for the city. Nobody in his campaign thought he would win, and indeed he only garnered about 1,500 votes. But that’s saying something in an election with only 17 percent turnout.

So why didn’t I vote for somebody like Mecke, who had a good position on dealing with homelessness and had already done some work in city politics? Because, as I said, I felt like I was in this Dick novel looking into a zillion possible futures right there in the polling place. There were the sure-to-fail futures represented by good candidates with no hope of winning, and then there was the dark future of creepy joke candidates like Chicken, whose mockery of the voting process was probably part of why so few people turned out for the election. Why vote when running for mayor had been turned into a joke?

So I voted for the best possible future I could find, the future in which, eventually, smart young people who care about freedom of expression online become mature politicians who understand new technologies and the socioeconomic conditions associated with them. Maybe Wolf won’t grow into that politician, but somebody like him will. And that person will probably understand things like how to organize Internet access for low-income city residents and why entertainment companies shouldn’t be allowed to sue people for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they’ve been file-sharing. That person will also understand how easy it is to violate people’s privacy online and will push for regulations that prevent companies and governments from dipping into private digital data supplies.

Of course, the future in which we have politicians like Wolf may never happen. We can’t predict what will become of him, and we can’t know if digital natives will mature into progressives who care about access and privacy reforms. There’s always room for wired neocons and digital Puritans, whose intimate history with the Internet will make them particularly good at legisutf8g censorship purges and invasive data mining. That’s not the future I voted for, but I am always having to remind myself that’s the future I may get. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is living in an alternate future right now.

Good-bye to my city

-
0

EDITORIAL My marriage to the city is ending. Yes, the one on a peninsula tipped with astounding beauty, filled with rich cultural communities and the fullness and complexities of the growing inequities in American life.

It is the city that has witnessed the nurturing scenes of my adulthood on the West Coast of North America since 1966. I was here as the beat generation turned over my new city bride to newcomers during the Summer of Love. They called us hippies. Later I witnessed the tear gas flows at Haight and Ashbury the year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. I watched television with Students for Eugene McCarthy on Haight Street on the warm June night when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

Although my city bride is scarred and worn down, like any bride would be with too many lovers fighting over each blink of her aging eyes under a wrinkled brow, how can anybody leave after a 41-year love affair?

Sadly, the deepening citywide housing crisis, well documented by the Guardian, has now reached our rental home near our beloved Unitarian Church and Center.

I have been in the "good fight" for most of those 41 years in San Francisco, where I have been arrested in solidarity with homeless people, witnessed for peace and justice, and engaged the body politic at City Hall on behalf of sound environmental and planning policies. I have worked continually for better public TV and radio services, including 10 years of elected service on KQED’s Board of Directors.

Now what is a responsible lover of a city bride to do? Jump ship? Leave on the next voyage of the SS Bilge Rat?

As an aging groom, however, my choices are few.

Along with my human bride, Jean, I could live in the cramped, crowded, and often dangerous gray ghetto for folks of limited income. Perhaps we’d win the California Lottery so we could "afford" the city’s lottery for a so-called affordable-housing condo.

We could continue to mount the barricades, trying keep our bride from being dressed up for dates with the limousine-and-caviar set and the arrivistes of wealth and power who want to steal her remaining treasures.

Instead, we are now heading toward building a new community in Boulder, Colo., where my life in the West began nearly 50 years ago as a college student. We will be members one of America’s first cohousing villages designed by elders who are now building an intentional community of self-managed affordable and market-rate units in a city where there are successful policies geared to meet the housing needs of all income groups.

In many marriages facing uncertain challenges, at times ties are dissolved unwillingly. I will miss my haughty, imperial, and strangely vulnerable city bride called the city of St. Francis — in Spanish, San Francisco.

To you, the remaining citizens of San Francisco: I have had a wonderful relationship with my city bride, with many gifts from insightful people. It was a time of great love, affection, expectations met and unmet, with disappointments and frustrations and — of course — laughs and tears. I have had them all with you.

Henry Kroll

Henry Kroll moved to San Francisco in 1966.

Trattoria Pinocchio

-
0

REVIEW My mission was to find a restaurant in North Beach that doesn’t serve Italian food. This was more out of curiosity than resolve; Italian food happens to be my favorite, but I wanted to find an oasis of originality amid the monotony of Columbus Street. After two hours of slowly eliminating the Afghan, Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican restaurants I had found online because they had closed permanently, only opened for dinner, or had moved across town, I was coming to the conclusion that there is a very active Italian consortium in North Beach driving away all challengers. Plus, my curiosity was eroding under the steadily lapping waves of hunger. I finally cracked and decided to patronize the next cozy little restaurant I came to, provided it wouldn’t break my bank account.

This happened to be Trattoria Pinocchio, a nice-looking establishment with a hostess who spoke fluent Italian as she boasted that the restaurant’s pastas and breads were made fresh every day. With a claim like that and with prices comparable to those of all of the other places I had been passing ($12.95 for a salad and pasta), it deserved a shot at pleasing my exceedingly discriminatory pasta palate. I even made it easy by ordering one of my all-time favorites, linguini al pesto.

Unfortunately, my salad was so oily, it dripped onto my shirt and left stains on the way from the plate to my mouth. The dressing was not quite orthodox and mildly unpleasant, but tasty enough once I added black pepper, so I continued with the greens — with little help from my waiter, who was suspiciously absent most of the time. On my first bite of the linguini — when it finally came — I realized that I had been rudely cheated. While the pasta was cooked well enough, it certainly didn’t taste like it was made fresh that day, and the pesto sauce was more cream and (you guessed it) oil than basil. As I left, I half-expected the hostess’s nose to look longer, but no dice.

TRATTORIA PINOCCHIO Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–midnight. 401 Columbus, SF. (415) 392-1472, www.trattoriapinocchio.com

Green City: Solar solutions

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When Berkeley mayor Tom Bates recently announced a creative city plan to financially assist homeowners who want to dress their roofs in solar panels, people across the Bay wondered if San Francisco could come up with something similar.

It’s happening. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working with the City Attorney’s Office on legislation to make solar panels more affordable for property owners. "The idea with my proposal is the city would use its very high credit rating to borrow money at almost zero cost," the District 11 supervisor said. That money would be turned over to citizens as low-interest loans to be paid back through a monthly assessment, similar to a property tax, with a very low interest rate. "It’s going to be a lot cheaper than what homeowners can do on their own."

A photovoltaic array for a typical home can cost the owner as much as $40,000, though state and federal incentives can reduce the cost by about $10,000. Systems are typically guaranteed by the manufacturers for 20 to 25 years, and the cost is recouped over time in reduced energy bills.

But the initial investment is high enough to discourage many would-be solar users. "The main challenge for many homeowners is the substantial upfront cost. It could easily cost you up to $50,000 to upgrade your home," Sandoval said of the bill for items like insulation, solar panels, and wind generators that can help modify a building to use less energy more efficiently.

Under this new financial program, the entire city would be declared a tax assessment district — similar to a Mello-Roos, or community benefit, district — with a resident opting in by deciding to buy solar panels. Both Berkeley and San Francisco are charter cities, which gives them the ability to tweak state laws, like the one that permits the creation of Mello-Roos districts, to meet local needs.

The plan to help private property owners has a number of public benefits. By generating most of their power on their roofs, homeowners will draw less juice from the grid, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels (and is ultimately inefficient, as much energy is lost through transmission from distant power plants).

San Francisco is fast closing in on its 2012 deadline to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, and a July Civil Grand Jury report found the city would have to triple its current reduction rate to meet that goal. Sandoval’s plan would help. According to a federal study, one kilowatt of solar electricity offsets about 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Additionally, the city is aiming to provide 31 megawatts of solar power capacity through Community Choice Aggregation, which Sandoval sees as part of his plan.

"Both programs are about organizing our city to get off the grid and get off fossil fuels," he said, adding that he hopes this financing model will expand to all renewable-energy and efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses.

The plan is still in its nascent stages, and a few administrative and legal questions remain.

It’s unclear which city department would administer the program, although San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Tony Winnicker said, "We already have a framework to administer something like this," citing the management infrastructure of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Department of the Environment has also been suggested. Sandoval said, "There are a lot of different city agencies who see benefits of administering the program." He was clear that it should remain in the public sector, with the possible assistance of community-based nonprofits that understand the local needs of their neighborhoods.

Sandoval also sees his proposed program as a way to foster the right kind of industry in San Francisco. The volume of solar business could bring more manufacturing companies, and City College of San Francisco and other educational programs could partner with manufacturers to train consultants and installers.

Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, a Los Gatos PV installer, expressed enthusiasm and support for the plan. "It’s really commendable that cities like San Francisco and Berkeley are trying to find ways to do this."

Sandoval hopes to see the program up and running within a year, and said, "If no one accuses me of conflict of interest, I’ll be among the first to sign up."

Supervisors approve campaign finance reforms

-
0

On Nov. 6, while voters were casting their ballots, Sup. Chris Daly and a veto-proof supermajority of the Board of Supervisors approved four ordinances that seek to tighten loopholes in campaign finance law and increase the public financing that will be available to candidates running for at least six openings on the board in 2008.

"The impact of these changes is going to have significant reverberations," Daly told the Guardian. "If these changes had been in place during the 2006 election race, I would have had $200,000 more in public money available during my reelection race. And that’s always helpful. You can always influence an election with that kind of money."

As of 2008, circulators of initiative, recall, and referendum petitions will be required to display a badge stating whether they are volunteers or paid and to disclose on request the names of the proponents of the petition.

Also beginning in 2008, independent expenditure committees that pay for mass mailings to support or oppose candidates for city elective office will be required to file campaign disclosure reports with the Ethics Commission, as will those conducting or paying for push polls, which deceptively try to influence voters under the guise of gathering information. Push poll workers will also have to disclose their sponsor to those they call.

Equally significant for the 2008 election is the fact that the expenditure ceiling for supervisorial candidates receiving partial public financing will be raised to $140,000. Daly argued the current bar of $86,000 is on the "low side of the political spending cycle."

The new limits will allow serious candidates to have a budget of about $200,000, which, Daly said, "more accurately reflects the cost of running a significant campaign…. As we’ve just seen from the mayor’s race, it’s not just any candidate that can get partial public financing."

With the progressive balance of power on the board at stake in next year’s supervisorial races, it wasn’t surprising that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top field marshal on the board, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, argued against raising the cap, claiming it would be "inappropriate" and "unethical" to do so given that three current supervisors could potentially benefit next year. Elsbernd suggested delaying such a raise until 2010.

Board president Aaron Peskin countered that "if this is good public policy, it should be passed on its own merits. At any time, members can be up for reelection, but actually the vast majority [of supervisors] are termed out."

In November 2008, Sups. Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, Tom Ammiano, and Geraldo Sandoval will be termed out, while Elsbernd and Ross Mirkarimi will be up for reelection. The election to replace suspended Sup. Ed Jew will also likely be held next year, depending on when and if he is permanently removed for his various ethical problems.

"It’s fair to say that partial public financing has severe limitations," Daly added, citing his 2006 reelection race, in which independent expenditure committees with ties to his challenger, Newsom ally Rob Black, spent "gobs of money" but didn’t declare them until the last minute, thus tricking Daly into limiting his expenditures to $86,000.

Daly said it doesn’t make sense "to subject dozens to a program that doesn’t work and has flaws because we fear three individuals may gain." But, he said, it is good for "three individuals to run with public financing on why they disagree with the incumbent, Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s, record. This is not necessarily good for incumbents, but I do think it’s good for democracy."

Ethics under attack

-
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

A group of political campaign treasurers who regularly handle the financial nuances of reporting election cash have signed a letter disparaging the operations of San Francisco’s Ethics Commission.

"Fewer and fewer of our members are willing to accept San Francisco local candidates and committees as clients because of the hostile environment that now exists," reads a July 23 missive addressed to the five Ethics commissioners and posted by the Los Angeles–based California Political Treasurers Association.

The letter includes a laundry list of gripes, including that Ethics staff treat treasurers like criminals; the audit, fines, and penalty processes are too slow; forfeitures of campaign donations for minor reporting errors are unfair; penalties for some infractions are unjust; there’s been no guidance on a new law banning donations from corporations; and that when screwups occur the paid, professional treasurers are treated more harshly than volunteers.

Twenty-one CPTA members signed the letter, and several echoed its contents at a Nov. 8 meeting with Ethics staff.

"Honestly, our firm will probably never touch a San Francisco ballot measure again," said Stacy Owens of Oakland’s Henry C. Levy and Co.

However, Ethics staff refuted some of those complaints.

For example, the treasurers universally decried the requirement that a donor have a street address as well as a post office box. "It’s stupid," said Kevin Henegen of the Sutton Law Firm, who did not sign the letter but did attend the Nov. 8 meeting.

But it’s a law throughout California, not just in San Francisco. "The state considers this very serious," said Oliver Luby, the fines collection officer of the Ethics Commission and the most outspoken staffer at the meeting. He pointed out that a street address can be used to verify the physical existence of a donor, while a PO box can easily shield a false identity.

Some of the treasurers said the quick pace of campaigning can turn the search for a simple street address into a battle, and the threat of a fine or forfeiture from the Ethics Commission causes them to consider not reporting the donation at all until after the election, when the address can be less hurriedly determined.

That’s a problem, according to Charles Marsteller, a good-government watchdog instrumental in the drafting of many of San Francisco’s campaign rules. He told us he’d like to see legislation that addresses the treasurers’ concerns while ensuring timely disclosure: "We don’t want to see a situation where two days before the election a large donation is not reported because the donor fails to disclose an address or occupation. This might give a handy excuse to justify not reporting things like large 11th-hour media buys."

The treasurers further complained that their being on the hook for a fine, fee, or forfeiture when a client screws up isn’t fair and that the past errors of a group shouldn’t affect how it’s treated in the future.

If a committee breaks the law and owes money, the treasurer is legally responsible, but these paid professionals could act as filers instead and leave the name of treasurer and any monetary penalties to one of the committee members, as Luby told us.

While the treasurers complained that forfeitures of donations for reporting errors are a penalty that no other California jurisdiction imposes, Luby said that San Francisco hasn’t enforced them since 2002.

He also penned a detailed 17-page memo responding to the CPTA’s complaints, which includes a matrix showing that most of the signers of the letter don’t do business in San Francisco and only 4 of the 21 have had to pay fines here since 2002.

While he argues that those four are disgruntled professionals who have tangled with Ethics in the past, he does not entirely dismiss the CPTA’s observations of serious management inconsistencies at Ethics. In particular, he cites the perception of unfairness when routine late fees and fines, which he handles, are wrapped up in campaign investigations — which are conducted, in secret, by another sector of Ethics and can result in different monetary penalties. Over the years the standards for fines have dissolved as secret deals have been cut to settle investigations.

"Since my arrival in 2002, my mantra for penalties has been consistency, consistency, consistency," Luby writes. "By routinely being a stickler for standards over the years, I have detected the Commission management prefers greater flexibility when regarding when to grant a waiver. In particular, waiver standards have been applied inconsistently when late fees and forfeitures are incorporated with investigative penalties."

The CPTA asked for a task force to fully vet solutions to some of Ethics’ problems, which Commissioner Emi Gusukuma said she’d be willing to join. "This is a great first step," she said of the Nov. 8 meeting, which she and Commissioner Jamienne Studley attended. "But it’s still a big, meaty issue."

John St. Croix, executive director of Ethics, said the agency will be taking these issues seriously. "There’s a lot of frustration because people don’t know what our processes are," he said. "If we are being unfair, we can normalize our processes."

CPTA’s letter to Ethics
Oliver Luby’s Response to CPTA
Luby’s supporting documentation

Fisher fails

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

The crowd at El Rio, the Mission Street dive bar, was reaching capacity election night when Sup. Aaron Peskin climbed onto an unstable bar stool to announce a political victory that had been very much in doubt just a few weeks earlier.

“They said it could not be done. We drove a Hummer over Don Fisher!” Peskin said, referring to the Republican billionaire and downtown power broker who funded the fight against progressives in this election, as he has done repeatedly over the years.

Indeed, the big story of this election was the improbable triumph of environmentalists over car culture and grassroots activism over downtown’s money. The battleground was Muni reform measure Proposition A, which won handily, and the pro-parking Proposition H, which went down to resounding defeat.

It was, in some ways, exactly the sort of broad-based coalition building and community organizing that the progressives will need to help set the city’s agenda going into a year when control of the Board of Supervisors is up for grabs.

“I just felt it at El Rio — wow, people were jazzed,” said campaign consultant Jim Stearns, who directed the Yes on A–No on H campaign. “We brought in new energy and new people who will be the foot soldiers and field managers for the progressive supervisorial candidates in 2008.”

Maintaining the momentum won’t be simple: many of the people in El Rio that night will be on opposite sides next June, when Assemblymember Mark Leno challenges incumbent state senator Carole Migden, and they’ll have to put aside their differences just a few months later.

Downtown, while soundly defeated this time around, isn’t going to give up. And some parts of the winning coalition — Sup. Sean Elsbernd, for example, who helped with west-side voters, and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which helped bring more moderate voters into the fold — probably aren’t going to be on the progressive side in Nov. 2008.

But there’s no doubt the Yes on A–No on H campaign was a watershed moment. “I’ve never seen this kind of coalition between labor and environmentalists in the city,” Robert Haaland, a union activist who ran the field campaign, told us. “New relationships were built.”

During his victory speech, Peskin singled out the labor movement for high praise: “This would not have happened if it were not for our incredible brothers and sisters in the house of labor.” He also thanked the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and environmental groups — and agreed that the labor-environmental alliance was significant and unique. “This is the first time in the seven years that I’ve been on the Board of Supervisors where I have seen a true coalition between labor and the environmentalists,” he said.

It’s not clear what we can expect in 2008 from Mayor Gavin Newsom, whom the latest results show finishing with more than 70 percent of the vote, better than some of his own consultants predicted. Newsom endorsed Yes on A–No on H, but he did nothing to support those stands, instead focusing on defeating Question Time proposition E, which narrowly failed.

Will Newsom continue to pay fealty to the biggest losers of this election, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Fisher, who funded No on A–Yes on H and became this year’s antienvironmentalism poster child?

Or will Newsom — who has said little of substance about his plans for 2008 — step to the front of the transit-first parade and try to drive a wedge in the labor-environmentalist-progressive coalition that achieved this election’s biggest come-from-behind victory?

 

MONEY AND PEOPLE

The Yes on A–No on H campaign was a striking combination of good ground work by volunteers committed to alternative transportation and solid fundraising that allowed for many mailers and a sophisticated voter identification, outreach, and turnout effort.

“We worked the Muni a lot in the last days, particularly in areas where we thought there were a lot of young people,” Stearns said.

Polls commissioned by the Yes on A–No on H campaign showed that Prop. H, which would have deregulated parking and attracted more cars downtown, was winning by 54–39 percent as of Aug. 30. By Oct. 25 that lead had narrowed to 40–41 percent, a trend that gave the campaign hope that a big final push would produce a solid margin of victory, particularly given that more detailed polling questions showed support dropped fast once voters were educated on the real potential impacts of the measure.

Prop. A was much closer throughout the race, particularly given that both daily newspapers and left-leaning Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Jake McGoldrick opposed it and even the Green Party couldn’t reach consensus on an endorsement.

“This could have meant a lot of arrows from a lot of directions,” Stearns said.

Campaign leaders Peskin, Haaland, and Stearns were so worried about Prop. A being defeated — and about not having the money for a big final telephone canvas in the final days — that they decided to make last-minute appeals for money.

“I’ve been a nervous wreck about this,” Haaland said of the campaign on election night.

On the evening of Nov. 3, he placed an anxious call to Peskin, suggesting that the latter make an appeal for money to Clint Reilly, a real estate investor who has often helped fund progressive efforts.

Peskin agreed and asked Stearns to help him make the pitch — and the two men drove to Reilly’s Seacliff home at 10 p.m. on Nov. 3.

“Prop. A just struck me as a nice, decent, positive message,” Reilly told the Guardian at the election night party, which he attended with his wife, Janet Reilly, a former State Assembly candidate.

Sharing Peskin and the campaign’s concerns that Prop. A was in trouble, Reilly cut a check for $15,000, which was enough to keep the phone banks going and help give the measure a narrow margin of victory.

But the money alone wasn’t enough for this mostly volunteer-run campaign.

“The push we made on the last five days of this campaign was just incredible,” campaign manager Natasha Marsh told us. “We had close to 500 volunteers on that last four days.”

 

A DIFFERENT CITY

The campaign also developed an extensive list of potentially supportive absentee voters — fully half of them Chinese speaking — who were then contacted with targeted messages.

Rosa Vong-Chie, who coordinated the voter outreach effort, said the messages about climate change, clean air, and Fisher’s involvement worked well with English-language voters. Chinese speakers didn’t care as much about Fisher, so campaign workers talked to them about improving Muni service.

The absentee-voter drive (and the push among Chinese-language voters) was unusual for a progressive campaign — and the fact that Prop. A did so well among typically conservative absentee voters was a testament to the effort’s effectiveness.

Elsbernd, one of the most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors, crossed many of his political allies to support the Yes on A–No on H campaign, and his involvement helped win over west-side voters and demonstrated that environmentalism and support for transit shouldn’t be just progressive positions.

“It’s great for public transit riders. It reinforces that this is a transit-first city…. Public transit is not an east-side issue,” Elsbernd told us, adding that the election was also a victory for political honesty. “It shows that people saw through the campaign rhetoric.”

The Fisher-funded rhetoric relied on simplistic appeals to drivers’ desire for more parking and used deceptive antigovernment appeals, trying to capitalize on what he clearly thought was widespread disdain for the Board of Supervisors.

“The attacks against the board didn’t work,” Peskin said, noting that in election after election the supervisors have shown that they “have much longer coattails than the chief executive of San Francisco.”

“I think it’s a pretty thorough rejection of Don Fisher’s agenda. He was not able to fool the voters,” said Tom Radulovich, director of Livable City and a BART director, who was active in the campaign. “This was about transit and what’s best for downtown. We should be very proud as a city.”

 

NOW WHAT?

The day after the El Rio party, at the monthly Car Free Happy Hour — a gathering of alternative-transportation activists and planners — there was excited talk of the previous night’s electoral triumph, but it quickly turned to the question of what’s next.

After all, progressives proved they could win in a low-turnout election against a poll-tested, attractive-sounding, and well-funded campaign. And given that the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative for the ballot is a percentage of the voters in the last mayor’s race, it suddenly seems easy to meet that standard.

Some of the ideas floated by the group include banning cars on a portion of Market Street, having voters endorse bus rapid-transit plans and other mechanisms for moving transit quicker, levying taxes on parking and other auto-related activities to better fund Muni, and exempting bike, transit, and pedestrian projects from detailed and costly environmental studies (known as level of service, or LOS, reform to transportation planners).

“There’s a lot of potential to move this forward,” Haaland said later. “We can talk about creating a real transit-justice coalition.”

There’s also a downside to the low turnout: downtown can more easily place measures on the ballot or launch recall drives against sitting supervisors, which would force progressives to spend time and money playing defense.

But overall, for an election that could have been a total train wreck for progressives, the high-profile victory and the new coalitions suggest that the movement is alive and well, despite Newsom’s reelection.

This oil spill — and the next

-
0

EDITORIAL The first headline the San Francisco Chronicle ran after the Cosco Busan crashed into a Bay Bridge protective fender Nov. 7 implied that nothing terrible had happened. It read, almost comically, "CRUNCH!" Initial reports suggested that only a few hundred gallons of fuel oil had spilled from the gash in the 810-foot freighter’s hull. Caltrans assured the public that the system had worked: the fender had absorbed the blow, the bridge had suffered no damage, and motorists had no cause for concern.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that the public learned just how big an ecological disaster was unfolding in the bay. And the most disturbing evidence is only now becoming clear: this was an accident waiting to happen. The regulations and processes in place to prevent a catastrophic oil spill in the bay — where thousands of ships with tanks carrying foul and toxic fuel oil sail through a fragile ecosystem every year — were, and are, tragically inadequate.

Just look at the record so far:

•The Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service on Yerba Buena Island, which has extensive radar and electronic tracking devices, was clearly aware that the container ship was heading for a collision — but was unable to stop it.

The fog was thick, and the ship, which had just made a wide S turn out of the Port of Oakland, was far from the center of the 1,200-foot-wide channel under the bridge. The Coast Guard could hardly have missed what was going on.

In fact, according to news reports, a VTS staffer radioed the bar pilot at the helm of the ship minutes before the crash and warned him that he was on an errant course. "Your [compass] heading is 235. What are your intentions?" the VTS staffer asked (essentially saying, in nautical-radio speak, "What the hell are you doing?"). The pilot, John Cota, insisted he was heading right for the center of the span and not to worry, his lawyer told reporters.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if air traffic controllers at San Francisco International Airport saw a commercial jet flying off course in zero-visibility fog and heading for the top of San Bruno Mountain. The controllers wouldn’t ask the captain what his intentions were; they would announce an imminent crash and order him to immediately increase altitude, change course … whatever was necessary. The captain wouldn’t argue that his or her instruments said everything was fine; the airliner would change course at once and sort out the question of instrument accuracy after it was out of harm’s way.

But traffic regulators on the bay operate under different rules. Even a minor course change would have prevented the accident — but according to VTS rules posted on the Web, the Coast Guard has no authority (other than in times of national-security alerts) to directly order preventative action. Under centuries-old rules of the sea, the captain of a ship is in total control and can’t be told what to do, even if a disaster is looming — and modern safety regulations haven’t caught up to that tradition.

•The ship was sailing under terrible conditions, with almost zero visibility, and even some bay captains say running a 70,000-ton vessel in an area like this in fog that thick is a bad idea. But the shipping companies have so much money on the line that nobody wants to slow down the schedules.

•It’s no secret where the fuel tanks are in a ship like this. The moment the ship took a gash that size in the hull, the authorities should have assumed that a sizable and extremely dangerous spill was in the works and begun immediate emergency containment procedures. But somehow just about everyone seemed to believe the initial reports that the crew of the ship had transferred the fuel away from the hole and only a trivial amount had escaped.

Remember, we’re talking about a rip of 100 feet, one-eighth the length of the ship, right in the part of the hull where half a million gallons of nasty bunker fuel were stored. Emergency responders should have known a spill was inevitable and gone into action right away.

Yet hours passed. No public warning was issued. Bay swimmers continued to take their morning natations — and some came back covered with oil. Nobody knew what was going on.

•The day after the spill, when it was clear an ecological disaster was happening in the bay, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom split town and went on vacation.

•So far, the taxpayers are picking up the tab for the cleanup — and in the end, it may prove difficult to get the owner of the ship to pay, even if faulty navigation equipment on the Cosco Busan was at least partly the cause of the spill. The companies that own these big ships use layers of dummy corporations, legal tricks, and secretive contracts to protect them from liability. In this case, the Chronicle has reported, the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It’s going to take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for this mess.

Meanwhile, the crab-fishing industry is out of business, and the economic impact will be dramatic.

There are obvious lessons here — and the first is that the public and all of the regulatory and response agencies at every level of government have to stop taking a nonchalant, hands-off attitude toward the ships that represent an ecological time bomb in the bay.

Shipping is part of the lifeblood of the local economy, and everyone who lives in the Bay Area has to live with the fact that giant steel vessels loaded with toxic fluids are going to be passing through a diverse and easily damaged ecosystem every day of every year for the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot that can be done to make it safer.

For starters, the VTS ought to have the mandate and the authority to regulate shipping traffic in the same way that air traffic controllers regulate planes. Among other things, the service should keep ships in port when the fog is that thick and conditions aren’t safe. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is mad about the spill response, and that’s fine — but she and her Bay Area congressional colleagues ought to push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

There’s a desperate need for a bay spill early-warning system, something that could go into effect the moment there’s a possibility of oil fouling the water — and get containment crews on hand quickly and let the public know the hazards. That’s something the State Legislature should move on immediately.

Perhaps Congress should mandate that ships passing through US coastal waters post an accident bond to ensure they don’t escape liability for disasters. But for now, the federal government needs to seize the Cosco Busan, impound its cargo, and make it clear that nothing is going anywhere until the bill for this catastrophe is settled.

And the state and federal governments need to compensate the crab fishers — and then collect the money from the ship’s owners to cover those costs.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I called labor activist Robert Haaland a few days after the election to chat about what the victory of Proposition A meant, and I wound up interrupting his vacation in Maui. I shouldn’t feel so bad — anyone who takes his cell phone on vacation and returns calls from political reporters has nobody to blame but himself … but still, I wanted to get off the phone quickly and let him get back to his sun and sand and Bikram yoga.

It wasn’t happening. Even from Hawaii, even with all of us in a celebratory mood over the way the progressives stomped Don Fisher, Haaland had a somber note to share.

"Queer progressives were missing in action on Props. A and H," he told me. "I think they were spending all their time fighting over Mark and Carole."

What he meant, of course, was that people active in the LGBT community spent their energy these past two months in organizing (and bickering over) the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club’s endorsement for the June 2008 State Senate race. The two candidates, Assemblymember Mark Leno and incumbent Carole Migden, are both, generally speaking, progressive politicians. They both have active, loyal groups of LGBT supporters, and they have both poured considerable effort into getting the Milk club endorsement, which puts a stamp of progressive legitimacy on the winner.

But if you’ve followed the whole mess on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, you know it’s been nasty and bitter. The meeting at which the club decided (or maybe didn’t decide) when to schedule its formal endorsement vote was a mess of procedural questions, shouting, alleged violations of Robert’s Rules of Order, utter confusion at the end, and recriminations afterward. A lot of people who used to like one another are still steaming about it, using epithets we typically save for the Republicans in Washington DC.

I’ve said this before, and I’m going to do it again, as loud as I can:

Knock it off. All of you.

Look: Leno is running against Migden. You can think that’s a bad and divisive political idea or you can think that he has every right to seek office in a democracy and hold an incumbent accountable. It doesn’t matter; the race is on. Next June we’ll all be voting for one or the other.

And five months later control of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be in the balance, and we will desperately need a united progressive front to make sure that Gavin Newsom’s allies don’t win. We can’t afford to be mad at one another. We can’t afford an ugly progressive split. We can’t afford to let the Leno-Migden race devolve into personal attacks. We can’t be demonizing one another.

Don’t start with your he-did-it-first-she-did-it-first stuff either. Nobody’s completely innocent here; both sides have said and done things that have inflamed the situation.

I’m an idealist and an optimist; that’s how I survive. I actually believe that this city, and this movement, is mature enough politically to have a race like Migden vs. Leno without leaving lasting scars that will hurt all of our causes for years to come.

But when I mentioned to a downtown operative the other day that I was worried that people like Debra Walker and Howard Wallace will wind up hating each other, he told me gleefully that "Don Fisher would happily pay money to see that."

Think about it.

“Android”

-
0

REVIEW In the grand scheme of things, the mission of Hamburger Eyes is an admirable one: to perpetuate the life of film-based photography, its processing, and its printing. By offering both color and black-and-white labs at their newish Photo Epicenter, they have created an outpost that caters to specific photographic practices while maintaining a distance from the rising popularity of digital technologies.

In "Android," the current exhibit in the Epicenter’s intimate entryway gallery, the photographs of Hamburger Eyes magazine editor Ray Potes pay direct homage to the history of his medium and the beauty of the high-contrast black-and-white image. Regardless of subject, his prints are consistently striking in their formal qualities. The subjects, however, compete with the technical elements of the photographs.

Potes’s photos are less about capturing and producing an image with a pleasing combination of blacks and whites than about capturing a lifestyle — or at least a snippet of one. The 100 11-by-14-inch photographs on display, all framed but hung so close together that they take on a muralistic quality, present an extensively documented world but maintain a highly edited point of view. Although the imagery hints at a photojournalistic eye, documenting the decay and inhumanity of city life, the main focus is on a youth or street culture à la Vice magazine.

In this sense, photographs of so-called crackheads and human excrement on sidewalks appear to arise from a pubescent interest in the extreme for its own sake. The arrangement of human destitution in such close proximity to images of pretty girls and topless women illustrates the artist’s range, yet the simultaneity of optimism and pessimism, created by juxtaposing such polar aspects of urban life, also seems to accentuate the growing divide in classes and a sense that the poor and drug addicted have become mere curiosities for the affluent. The photographs would have benefited from a more thoughtful installation that resolved, or simply addressed, the social issues they perhaps inadvertently conjure.

ANDROID Through Dec. 7. Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter, 26 Lilac, SF. (415) 550-0701, www.hamburgereyes.com

Goldie winner — Dance: Shinichi Iova-Koga

-
0

Shinichi Iova-Koga’s work is grotesque, beautiful, and funny. As a dancer he is never less than mesmerizing — ephemeral like smoke, limpid like a vernal pool. And yet he is an accidental dancer. The son of two painters, he was initially drawn to photography; at age 12 his bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Then, at San Francisco State University, he became a film major. "All the while," he says, "I was involved in theater, but I thought my main line was behind the camera."

The Oakland-born Iova-Koga also trained in Tadashi Suzuki’s method for actors, through which he was introduced to Butoh. Another influence was the investigative method of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater. His most formative teacher, however, was Butoh dancer Hiroko Tamano: "While we were making rice balls one day, [Tamano] asked me if I wanted to join Harupin-Ha [Butoh Dance Theater]." After a while, like many of Tamano’s pupils, Iova-Koga needed to strike out on his own. He traveled to Japan and Germany to study and work with other Butoh masters and, not incidentally, learn to adapt the genre to his expressive needs.

Thanks to these shifts in focus, he has developed a personal form of mixed-media dance theater that integrates contradictory impulses — the ancient and the technological, the chaotic and the formal, nature and nurture. He might be called a dancer at the edge. To Iova-Koga, this may well be a compliment; he has said that "only a dance at the edge reveals the honest life." His process blurs the distinctions between categories of thinking, being, disciplines, and performing. He likes to dig into both humorous and horrible subjects. The resulting works have taken him around the world.

One of his early works, 1996’s Desert Body, showed dramatic flair but not much personal voice. Ironically, he says, "I first started with Butoh so that I could be a better director. Now by chance I am a dancer." He is very precise about what this means to him. Dancing, he has said, means "focusing on the body being danced. To mentally construct a choreography that ignores this is to create a false dance."

Iova-Koga is an avid solo performer as well as a collaborator; he is often inspired by the people around him. His harrowing Tasting an Ocean — influenced by his father’s having lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at the age of five — kept a 2003 audience at the tiny Noh Space on the edge of their seats. His most recent, highly acclaimed solo, Milk Traces, which he has performed in Europe and Japan, was prompted by the birth of his daughter. He calls her his main teacher now: "I follow her without questions."

In ensemble pieces such as Heaven’s Radio, an adaptation of a Samuel Beckett radio drama, and this summer’s Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird’s Spine (cocreated with Nanos Operetta), Iova-Koga has worked with other Bay Area theater artists (Nils Frykdahl, Ken Rudstrom, and Allen Willner) and Butoh dancers Tanya Calamoneri and Leigh Evans. The duet Ame to Ame, featuring Yuko Kaseki, another Germany-based frequent collaborator, finds the two playing out a riotous male-female relationship in terms of both meanings of the word ame, Japanese for "candy" and "rain." The absurdist Cockroach casts Kaseki as the ghostly wife to Iova-Koga’s husband; she dances through his tea-slurping last moments. His newest enterprise is C(h)ord, which he’s collaborating on with Seattle’s Degenerate Ensemble. It premieres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on April 24, 2008.

www.inkboat.com

Goldies 2007

-
0

The Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards — the Goldies — have gone through many phases since 1989, the year they first honored a group of Bay Area artists. They’ve sparked some anarchic celebrations and hosted some quiet and even tasteful affairs. They’ve honored close to two dozen people in one year and paid tribute to less than two handfuls the next. But whatever form they have taken, the Goldies have never been about courting or capturing target markets. They’ve always been a chance for the Guardian, which writes about what’s happening every week, to flip the script and do some curating of its own — to set its own date to celebrate actors, artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and people who do things that can’t be categorized.

"FREE FREE THIS WAY TO HEAVEN FREE." So reads a bit of text captured by the camera of the great photographer William Klein. In recent years the Goldies party has been a free affair. It makes sense: the Guardian is still a free newspaper, built on the ideals of a free press, so the Goldies party should be free to everyone. Though this issue is on the stands for a week, months of effort go into it, and the best and final reward is to see the winners meet one another and discover their fellows’ work, then invite their friends and everyone — that means you — to a celebration.

This year’s Goldie winners were selected by the Guardian‘s Johnny Ray Huston, Kimberly Chun, and Cheryl Eddy after discussions with our writers and critics, including Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Glen Helfand, as well as a wide range of people who make, show, and see art in the Bay Area. Look through the pages that follow and you’ll find a muse of cinema, food as weaponry, and even a different definition of sex toys (in this case, toys that have sex with each other). You’ll also find 13 reasons why the Bay Area is awesome.

Click below to find out more about this year’s Goldies winners

DANCE


SHINICHI IOVA-KOGA

DANCE/PERFORMANCE


KEITH HENNESSY

FILM


SAMARA HALPERIN

KERRY LAITALA

MUSIC


KIRBY DOMINANT

THE FINCHES

NON-STOP BHANGRA

WOODEN SHJIPS

THEATER


FOOLSFURY

VISUAL ART


MICHAEL ARCEGA

COLTER JACOBSEN

JENIFER K. WOFFORD

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT


CREATIVE GROWTH

PORTRAITS BY SAUL BROMBERGER AND SANDRA HOOVER PHOTOGRAPHY

Goldie winner — Music: Wooden Shjips

-
0

Wooden Shjips released their "Dance, California/Clouds over Earthquake" 7-inch single (Sick Thirst) last year in much the same way as they had their instigating, self-released Shrinking Moon for You 10-inch: packaged in an unassuming, clear plastic sleeve with hardly any information besides song titles. Beyond sending bloggers and journalists into a tizzy over their sexy, squalling grooves, this set confirmed Wooden Shjips as essential California. While Devendra Banhart and Vetiver reel in mellow ’70s album rock and Comets on Fire carry the torch of scraping psychedelia in the key of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Wooden Shjips recover the dark star lurking behind flower power in groups like Blue Cheer and yes, the Doors. The A-side is all feverish face melt, but it’s on "Clouds over Earthquake" that the band really sets the agenda. A shapely guitar lead dissolves into the heat waves of a droning pulse, eventually giving way to band leader Ripley Johnson’s echo-chamber vocal: "Fire / The sun is rising / Cut through the black clouds / Over earthquake."

Their early records sold out their limited pressings long ago, a fact the band took into consideration when packaging the first 2,000 copies of its eponymous first album (Holy Mountain) with a bonus CD compiling all of the singles’ tracks. Besides being a warm gesture to new fans, the comprehensive packaging has the effect of consecrating Wooden Shjips’ reputation. It seems certain that this band is now at the helm of San Francisco’s ever-burgeoning psych-rock scene. There is also evidence of serious if subtle musical progress being made, from the cryptic garage rock of tracks like "Death’s Not Your Friend" to the artfully expansive arrangements of Wooden Shjips‘ culminating diptych, "Blue Sky Bends" and "Shine like Suns."

In keeping with their scattershot release history, Wooden Shjips have released a new 7-inch on yet another label, Sub Pop. Although many musicians are tailoring their work to iTunes, Johnson’s moved in the opposite direction, recognizing that the material nature of his band’s releases seals their music’s aura, which, redolent of ’60s and ’70s minimalist garage rock, occupies a very specific, romantic spot in many record collectors’ hearts. "It was inspired in part by private-press and limited-press records, like George Brigman’s Jungle Rot [self-released, 1975]," Johnson writes from New York, where Wooden Shjips recently played a round of CMJ festival shows. "More in the sense that if you make a record and put a lot of care into it, someone might discover it someday and dig it."

Long cognizant of the fetish for mystery objects, the singer-guitarist even went so far as to give away the first several hundred copies of Shrinking Moon for You. The gamble paid off nicely, judging by the piqued curiosity inspired by early raves the 10-inch drew from tastemakers like the Wire‘s Byron Coley and Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke. These reviews ignited the dash among critics to tease out the elements of the Shjips’ suggestive sound as so many influences; the Velvet Underground, the Doors, Terry Riley, and Spacemen 3 are most frequently named, though I’d also refer listeners to the burned-rubber daydream of Monte Hellman’s classic 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.

It would be silly to contend that the Shjips don’t work from the fierce template pioneered on the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (Verve, 1967), but their cobalt blue jams hardly tell of an anxiety of influence. What matters with Wooden Shjips is the evident relish they take in reconfiguring the shards of a particular music history and the sense of utter bliss in their fire-and-brimstone sonic landscape.

www.woodenshjips.com

www.myspace.com/woodenshjips

Goldie winner — Visual art: Jenifer K. Wofford

-
0

Hey framer, don’t try to frame Jenifer K. Wofford. She’ll turn that frame into a threshold. Her creative identity ricochets from teacher to student to painter to performer to director to curator with a self-determining force that exposes the mutability of such labels.

In May, Point of Departure, Wofford’s evolving series of postcard-size portraits of Filipina nurses, was a highlight (along with understated contributions by Bill Jenkins and Alicia McCarthy) of the UC Berkeley MFA show at the Berkeley Art Museum. In late July and early August, Wofford and 8 of 14 other participating Bay Area artists — including 2007 Goldie winner Michael Arcega — journeyed to Manila, the Philippines, for the first of three installments of the traveling exhibition "Galleon Trade," which she conceived and organized. (The show’s next stop will be at San Francisco’s Luggage Store, and from there it will venture to Mexico City.)

It usually takes a large institution with major funding to assemble a project of "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s scope, but Wofford can not only skewer a museum’s lust for colonialist decoration (as one third of the performance mob known as Mail Order Brides and in solo pieces such as 2005’s Chicksilog) but also do the cultural exchange work that these establishments somehow fail to achieve with all of their resources. "The word that came up for all of us was serendipity," she says, discussing "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s Manila manifestation, which required last-minute scrambling between the city’s thriving visual art and experimental film and video venues. "The entire time we were there, there was just one intersection after another where things fell into place."

The community goals of Wofford’s "Galleon Trade" are counterpointed by her solo art endeavors, which repeatedly tap into transitional spaces and isolated states of being. Hospitals (in Point of Departure and 2006’s drawing-video project Nurse) and motels (in 2005’s installation Motel Cucaracha) are just two liminal zones that Wofford is drawn to as if they were magnetic fields. She explores both in a manner that pinches people’s assumptions about privilege and servitude and what makes an insider or an outsider. "I’m fascinated by borders, or places where people don’t belong," she says. In fact, for her next solo show (at Southern Exposure) Wofford plans to spotlight and perhaps parodically re-create metal detectors in order to tap into their tragicomic potential. This idea takes on another facet when Wofford mentions that her "bullshit detector" goes off anytime that she reenters the art world just after teaching in high school.

"I just can’t not be inappropriate," Wofford jokes, the triple negative demonstrating her affinity for the truth that often resides in awkwardness. "Comedians of color like Dave Chappelle know that you get heard by being funny — the court jester gets to stay in the court. Also, humor can be disarming for a lot of people." This quality, partly forged through her work with fellow MOB artists Eliza Barrios and Reanne Estrada, is present whether she’s displaying the absurdist properties of the Flip-Flop on a Stick (in a hilarious video homage to a hand-fashioned bug-killing contraption she found at a market in Manila’s Quiapo District) or proving Yma Sumac will have her revenge on Hollywood. "Most of my projects have been born from some infantile Beavis and Butthead moment," Wofford goes on to confess, the pop-cult reference pinging off the gray-hoodie poses she and her sister Camille adopted for the 2006 performance-painting Woffords, Paint. "After I stop laughing, I start thinking about why I was snickering."

Where do we come from, and where the hell are we going? Wofford has a keen sense of just how impossible it is to answer those questions, which means she’s as good a person as any to follow into the future.

www.wofflehouse.com

Goldie winner — Film: Kerry Laitala

-
0

A casual observer might simply call Kerry Laitala a filmmaker and leave it at that. But anyone who’s seen her spooky, intricate, delightfully creative works, including 2003’s Out of the Ether, 2005’s Torchlight Tango, and 2006’s Muse of Cinema, would certainly disagree. A self-described "media artist-archaeologist" whose art hinges not just on subject matter but on the physical manipulation of film stock, Laitala makes movies for viewers who’re willing to leave their preconceived notions about cinema at the screening-room door.

"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the world don’t know what [experimental film] is," she said from the living room of her San Francisco apartment. The eclectic decor includes an array of Halloween decorations that Laitala displays year-round, stacks and stacks of books, and curiosities seemingly plucked from a cabinet of dusty Victorian delights. "A lot of people don’t like [experimental film] because it doesn’t fulfill their expectations of what cinema should be. They’re not interested in engaging with something that they’re not familiar with. That’s just human nature."

Having a limited audience doesn’t bother Laitala, who’s been making films since high school. She was first inspired after seeing a 16mm archival print of the Hindenburg explosion. "I was blown away by the paradox of how beautiful it was and how tragic it was too. How horrific and simultaneously incredible it was."

In college at the Massachusetts College of Art and grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute, Laitala pursued experimental filmmaking. At MassArt, "I saw Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart when I was 18 or 19 years old. That was where I became interested in experimental film and working with a medium in a way that’s more personal."

Since the late 1980s, Laitala has completed an impressive array of short films, installations, and projector performance works (including 2007’s Hocus Pocus, ABRACADABRA, recently staged at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley winery). Her art has screened all over the United States, Europe, and Asia, and she’s about to head down under for her Australian debut. The reason for her international popularity is clear: even if only point-one percent of the population embraces experimental film, Laitala’s works are exceptional — and anyone with a pair of eyeballs, even a befuddled popcorn-movie fan, can see it. Muse of Cinema, a 20-minute re-creation of the experience of going to the movies when movies were still being born, makes use of a serendipitous flea market find: antique magic lantern slides. The result is inspired, multilayered, and visually astonishing.

Five years in the making, Muse of Cinema also highlights Laitala’s technical skills. I asked her to explain hand processing, the technique she uses to create her vivid images. She told me, "After you’ve exposed your film in the camera, you have an image on the film, but you can’t see it. It’s a latent image. In order to bring the image out to the viewer’s eyes when you project it, you have to process it. You can either have a lab do that or you can do it yourself. When you process it yourself, you can manipulate the material. You’d have the pay a lab a lot more money to do that, but also [when you do it yourself] you have a lot more control. Oftentimes it has a handmade look to it because there might be certain kinds of idiosyncrasies with the way that you do the hand processing that’s different than how a lab would do it, where everything’s in a very standardized, sterile setting. With hand processing you can get a lot of interesting effects that are very hard to replicate digitally."

Muse of Cinema‘s soundtrack, created in collaboration with Robert Fox, is similarly complex, an evocative mix of sound effects and music snippets. Because they require her to gather plenty of material for her images and her soundtrack — and endlessly manipulate both to achieve the effects she desires — Laitala’s films are labor-intensive, which is part of the reason she enjoys making them. "I get a lot of ideas during the process of working with the material," she said. "You discover things that you would never set out to achieve if you had everything mapped out from beginning to end. I think a lot of artists work that way. People keep saying, ‘You gotta stop using the phrase experimental film, because experimental film makes it sound like you don’t know what you’re doing.’ It’s a really tricky thing. A lot of people call themselves film artists. You’re working with a medium in the same way that a painter would work with paint. You’re working directly with the stuff itself."

In a follow-up e-mail after our meeting, Laitala further explained herself: "My process is organic, utilizing elliptical forms, allowing my projects to evolve and become entities unto themselves. I am more interested in ideas that arise in a nonlinear fashion where my images can carry myriad meanings, for literal connotations are limiting." And there’s no limit to what this talented artist can achieve.

www.othercinema.com/klaitala

Goldie winner — Dance/Performance: Keith Hennessy

-
0

"Citizens. Wake Up. A new day is dawning in San Francisco and all over the world."

Keith Hennessy, "A Speech to the Poor Artists," San Francisco City Hall, Oct. 4, 2000

Keith Hennessy has made work in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, yet he has stayed at the margins all this time. Yes, his audiences are good, and they show up time after time to watch his latest work, but he hasn’t gotten the grants that would allow him to do big tours or reach a more mainstream audience. Maybe he prefers it that way. Maybe big audiences wouldn’t be comfortable with hearing what he has to say. But Hennessy is that rare artist who succeeds in transutf8g fierce social concerns into artistically satisfying creations that enlighten and entertain.

"Why are you wasting your time researching the grace, beauty, and strength of the human body in motion?"

Hennessy started out as a competitive social dancer in his native Canada and worked his way to San Francisco by clowning, juggling, and doing political street theater. In the Bay Area he studied with Lucas Hoving; in 1985 he became a founding member of Contraband, the most radical dance-theater group of the period. He has had a roller coaster existence ever since, pushing himself to develop new theatrical expressions that allow him to explode the conventions of form in order to speak to and about the marginalized: the poor, the victims, the ostracized, and the homeless. Against all odds he believes in art’s power to reassume its ritualistic and healing function.

"Stop trying to hack your way alone through hostile jungles in the dead of night. Take the FreeWay. It’s paved and easy, and a 24-hour SafeWay is always available."

One of Hennessy’s most daring and controversial pieces was his 1989 solo Saliva, for which he collected spit from willing audience members, mixed it with pigment, and painted his naked body with it. It was an extraordinary act of defiance, courage, and solidarity — as well as spectacular theater.

Spectacle, Hennessy has discovered, is a way to draw in audiences, not to expose them to mindless entertainment but to amuse and challenge them. This can be an intoxicating mix. During his four years with the French circus Cahin-Caha, he became an experienced aerialist and refined his skill of using circus, cabaret, and other popular art forms to create works that foster a sense of community and a set of shared values that are difficult to resist. Hennessy believes in the power of the imagination and in art as a spiritual practice. He also allows his collaborators the full range of their own imaginations.

Last year’s double bill "How to Die" was raw, violent, and difficult to watch. Both pieces examined the erotics of death. SDF USA (Sans domicile fixe, i.e., homeless) paid tribute to the many homeless people, primarily male, who kill themselves every year. American Tweaker honored disco diva Sylvester and an era of unprecedented sexual abandon and sense of liberation within the gay community.

This year’s Sol Niger is probably Hennessy’s best work yet. Looking at the devastation humankind has brought on itself — up to the present day — through a series of tightly structured vignettes, the work celebrates and laments the glory and the frailty of being alive. This is activist art that works — as art and as a call to action. Sol Niger returns to Project Artaud Theater from January 16 to 26, 2008.

"Citizens of San Francisco. Citizens of the second millennium. Wake up. The global city is yours. Blessed be."

www.circozero.com

Goldie winner — Film: Samara Halperin

-
0

It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re watching the films of Samara Halperin. Take, for example, the minute-long Plastic Fantastic #1 (2006). Jaunty bleeps keep the beat as a pair of ketchup-and-mustard-bedecked hot dogs are shredded into meaty octopuses. Freed from their buns, they frolic across a checkered tablecloth and embrace atop layers of sauerkraut and relish.

All of Halperin’s works — especially the ones that use her trademark technique, stop-motion with plastic toys — convey the filmmaker’s ability to find gleeful joy in unexpected places, be it a construction site (as in 2006’s Hard Hat Required), the Wild West (1999’s Tumbleweed Town), or the homoerotic subtext of Beverly Hills, 90210 (2001’s Sorry, Brenda). Her films also reflect her love of bright colors and, especially, pop culture.

"I grew up a few blocks from where they would shoot Sesame Street," the New York City–born, now Oakland-based Halperin explains. "I’ve always had this disconnect where I didn’t really understand that television wasn’t real. I saw Snuffleupagus on the street! So from a very early age, I was deep into [pop culture]."

As a child, Halperin dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and later worked in ceramics. After she entered the Rhode Island School of Design, she realized filmmaking was her calling.

"I’ve always made shorts, and [in 1989] I started making films that I wanted to see that I didn’t see, like queer youth represented or really queer people represented at all," she says. "I got a lot of shit for [my queer subject matter] in the beginning. It just wasn’t fashionable yet."

Now, of course, there’s an entire TV network devoted to queer programming. Logo screened Tumbleweed Town — Halperin’s eight-minute graduate thesis project for California College of the Arts — when programming in response to the Brokeback Mountain renaissance. A marvel of mise-en-scène in miniature, with expressive plastic characters and a score by Corner Tour that perfectly complements the action (another characteristic of Halperin’s films: pitch-perfect musical choices), Tumbleweed Town had a genesis that was equal parts imagination and inspiration.

"I had never done animation before," Halperin recalls. "I’m not really an animation person, but I am a toy person. [The cowboy toy looked] so gay, I thought I’d find a boyfriend for him and build a world where they could be gay together. I’d just moved from Texas, where there were real, handlebar-mustachioed gay cowboys shining boots in the bars. I’m a New York Jew, and I’d never seen anything like this."

Tumbleweed Town is Halperin’s best-known work besides Sorry, Brenda, a black-and-white marvel of suggestive reediting that’s a must-see for anyone who was ever addicted to "BH Niner."

"I really loved the show," she says, inching up her pant leg to reveal a 90210 tattoo on her calf. "I always thought, ‘[Brandon and Dylan] are so gay’ — I just wanted to bring out their relationship and show people what I saw." The piece made its way into the hands of Conan O’Brien, who discussed it on the air with the Brandon Walsh.

"Jason Priestly loved it," Halperin says. "He stole the tape to show to Luke Perry, so that was the crowning glory for a fanatic such as myself."

When she’s not tuning in to new pop-culture craziness — like MTV’s "revolutionary" celebration of bisexuality, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila — Halperin teaches at Mills College and works on an array of new films: a sequel to Tumbleweed Town set in early 1980s New York City; a live-action, nonnarrative homage to her beloved Coney Island, Astroland; and a video project that pays tribute to Richard Simmons and "loving yourself, no matter what you are."

On that note, Halperin’s final thought is especially fitting: "I encourage people to make movies. It’s my personal view that the world can be changed through art."

www.steakhaus.com/samara

Goldie winner — Theater: foolsFURY

-
0

One of the first things to strike you about a foolsFURY production is its sheer kinetic energy and rigorous physical vocabulary. Hovering somewhere between modern dance and mime, or maybe the fashion runway and the circus, the movement of the actors onstage suggests tightly coiled regimentation and an unpredictable, acrobatic freedom. Bodies rewrite the most seemingly inconsequential gestures as larger than life or in an altogether different register, so that you might suddenly see and wonder at them.

But the next thing to strike you will surely be the words. From its first outing nearly a decade ago to recent San Francisco and New York runs of artistic director Ben Yalom’s translation and staging of The Devil on All Sides (French playwright Fabrice Melquiot’s magic-realist rumination on Yugoslavia’s civil war) and the remounting in September of its exquisite version of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw (directed by company member Rod Hipskind), foolsFURY remains wedded to deep, often darkly comical, and alluring texts steeped in the mysterious potency of words.

The physical athleticism and stylization onstage — grounded in a unique, evolving synthesis of techniques from Tadashi Suzuki and Viewpoints to commedia dell’arte and Jerzy Grotowski — are, of course, inseparable from the company’s approach to such texts, whether they’re Martin Crimp’s silky and sinister ellipses (Attempts on Her Life), Don DeLillo’s gloomy, incantatory wisecracking (Valparaiso), Kirk Wood Bromley’s neo-Shakespearean, post-American rag (Midnight Brainwash Revival), or even Shakespeare himself (in one inimitable take on Twelfth Night that went solely by its telling subtitle, What You Will). This pairing of soaring physicality and textual depth has been a driving force behind the success of the small but restlessly active, ambitious company (which has also become a vital teaching center in the theater community) since its noteworthy debut in 1998.

Together with other choice elements — including the sensitive use of music, sound, and scenic design — foolsFURY’s heightened theatrical language is, at its best, a surprise and a challenge to audiences, inspiring and even requiring them to develop new ways of receiving a performance. Yalom concedes that it has taken some time to achieve all of this, including a stable group of like-minded, technically practiced actors. He claims he wasn’t thinking beyond a single play when he almost inadvertently founded the company. "I had no idea what it meant to be a professional theater director or artistic director," he recalls. "I was working with a couple of companies, trying to get them to hire me to direct a play — specifically The Possibilities, the Howard Barker play. After a while I started to get to know the scene, and it became pretty evident that that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided I was going to produce it myself."

Novice though he was, he had long been thinking about what makes theater different and vital, a train of thought the company members have since taken up together. "After spending a lot of time experimenting, we started to find certain aesthetic forms that were interesting. But to me it really comes down to the larger question ‘What should be the role of this art form in our contemporary culture?’ Because, frankly, if it doesn’t have a specific value and something that is unique about it, then, much as I love doing it, it would be irrelevant. I don’t think that’s the case [with foolsFURY], though it’s taken me a long time to figure out how and why."

And the name? "I made it up," says Yalom. "It really fit the Barker piece, and I think to a certain extent it fits [the company]. What underlies a lot of our sensibility is a collision of things that are uncomfortable and things that are funny because they’re uncomfortable. We’ve done a couple of shows that would be categorized as comedies. The far greater amount of work has been things that have been funny but funny because they are challenging and thought provoking and, certainly sometimes, very upsetting. The Barker was a perfect example of that: the ‘fool’ and the ‘fury’ just sort of crammed together."

1...327328329...431Page 328 of 431

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