Volumes

For Christ’s sake

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The cultural divide between a supposed gay agenda and faith-based biases is well represented in several features within Frameline’s expansive 2007 program. Its representations run a wide gamut — just as the terms gay and Christian have come to encompass wildly disparate US communities.

On Frameline’s nonfiction side, Markie Hancock’s Born Again deftly mixes home movies, archival news footage, and more to chart the director’s long, often agonized journey away from being the perfect overachieving and overbelieving product of her Pennsylvanian parents’ staunch evangelical faith. At a Christian college and then in wide-open Berlin, Hancock began to question the conservative beliefs that had — along with her family’s approval — constituted her formative-years identity.

The devout Hancock clan members are models of tolerance compared to the subject of K. Ryan Jones’s Fall from Grace. That individual is none other than Rev. Fred Phelps, the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., a man long notorious for his congregation–cum–extended family’s outrageous displays of public homophobia. Most recently, Phelps and his followers found infamy by picketing the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq, a phenomenon they approve of — the notion being that these American military deaths are somehow God’s vengeance for the pipe bomb that student pranksters planted at Westboro Baptist a decade ago.

Yup, these people are cray-ay-ay-azy! Also scary. Two among Phelps’s several estranged children say he used the Bible to justify domestic violence. Unlike most hatemongers, Phelps’s small but fervent clan actually embrace the word hate. Their notion of Christianity is all hellfire and zero forgiveness or compassion. They are pseudo-Christian Antichrists.

A gentler treatment of Bible-based intolerance can be found in Rock Haven, the first directorial feature of San Francisco’s David Lewis. Its titular fictive Northern California burg (played by Bodega Bay) is where Bible college–bound Brady (Sean Hoagland) moves from Kansas with his widowed mother (Laura Jane Coles), who’s opening a Christian school. The moment Brady spies slightly older Clifford (Owen Alabado) striking Grecian postures on the beach, however, unclean thoughts — then nekkid actions — put him on a collision course with his mom’s values.

Deeper yet less serious in tone, writer-director-star Pete Jones’s delightful Outing Riley is a comedy in the Judd Apatow vein, often raucously funny without sacrificing warmth or character dimension. Jones plays Bobby, a 30-ish Chicagoan who loves his Cubs and his beer. And also his male lover — but that is a secret kept well hidden from his three Irish Catholic brothers (including one priest), with whom he’s still best buds. Their sister, Maggie (Julie Pearl), is one among several folks urging him to come the hell out, for Christ’s sake. But doing so doesn’t go down too well at first, not even with the designated bad-boy bro (the wonderful Nathan Fillion, of Waitress and Firefly). Ultimately, things turn around in an agreeable fashion that doesn’t cut corners for cheap uplift.

The result is one of those rare gay movies that should or could be shown to all the straight dudes in America who claim they "can’t really deal with that gay shit." Incredibly, Outing Riley doesn’t have a theatrical distributor yet. Catch it at Frameline, or may the Lord help ya. (Dennis Harvey)

BORN AGAIN (Markie Hancock, US, 2007). June 21, 7 p.m., Victoria

FALL FROM GRACE (K. Ryan Jones, US, 2007). Mon/18, 7 p.m., Roxie; June 20, noon, Castro

OUTING RILEY (Pete Jones, US, 2004). Fri/15, 9:30 p.m., Castro

ROCK HAVEN (David Lewis, US, 2007). June 21, 9:30 p.m., Castro

One-on-one-on-one

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Violent Femmes and wrestling boys. The same boys watching TV, huffing glue, jerking off, playing soccer, dodging water balloons, sharing headphones, and dancing, singing, and drumming at punk rock shows. Listed in this manner, the basic ingredients of Alexis Dos Santos’s Glue don’t sound that different from those of a dozen other teen films. But the way Dos Santos views such material is something else entirely. Glue is that rare kind of filmmaking so attuned to pleasure and spontaneity that it tickles your palate, opening up new possibilities about how to live. The film’s chief subject matter — bisexuality that takes exhilarating form before the constraints of adulthood can arrive — is ideally realized through Dos Santos’s sensual and whim-driven approach.

"If my parents made love before I was conceived, would it be me being born or another boy?" skinny, wild-haired, and sleepy-eyed Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) wonders to himself at the beginning of Glue, before his jock friend Nacho (Nahuel Viale) and their mutual crush, the gawky yet beautiful Andrea (Inés Efron), arrive on screen. When Andrea is eventually introduced, it’s via a poolside scene in which polite kisses through a steel fence provide one typically fleet example of Dos Santos’s ability to land on the right use of foreground, background, and happenstance scenic detail to convey a shot or scene’s emotional temperature.

This symbiosis between director and actors — and perhaps even more important, between actors — results in some extraordinary passages. Glue meanders near its end, when, in true teen spirit, it doesn’t want a good time to end. But in its best moments, Dos Santos’s debut feature is an important and exciting addition to Latin American cinema’s evolving views of masculinity. (Sergio de la Mora’s recent book Cinemachismo is an excellent source for historical background on the subject.) Glue‘s ménage à trois is more radical than the ones in both Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Fernando Eimbcke’s chaste Duck Season, though one suspects those more commercial movies helped pave the way for the spaces that Dos Santos and his actors discover. Like Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky, in which a trio of young lovers meet and kiss repeatedly in public, Dos Santos’s insular and gutsy film charts territory where people don’t repress their desires.

Thus it’s a shame that, unlike all of the Mexican features mentioned in the previous paragraph, Glue doesn’t have a distributor. Dos Santos’s movie is yet another example of how new Argentine cinema (thanks to talents as varied as Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, Verónica Chen, and Pablo Trapero) continues to stretch the time and space dimensions of the word new. Unfortunately, it’s far from the first film from Argentina in the past few years to be neglected by commercial forces. A French feature such as Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr’s One to Another treats the same elements found in Glue — teen life, bisexual trysts, rock music — in a manner that results in overheated garbage (yes, it stinks), yet it’s been given exactly the type of eminent, if small, US theatrical run that Dos Santos’s movie deserves. That means now is the time to see Glue. (Johnny Ray Huston) *

GLUE (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina, 2006) June 20, 9:15 p.m., Parkway; June 22, 7 p.m., Victoria

Reform the recall

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EDITORIAL The Board of Supervisors — and the very notion of representative democracy — is under attack in San Francisco.

As city editor Steven T. Jones reported in last week’s paper ("Hazy Recall") and on our Politics blog ("Connect the Recall Dots"), a recall campaign has targeted Sup. Jake McGoldrick, citing his advocacy of car-free spaces in Golden Gate Park and a bus rapid-transit initiative that recall advocates believe district residents oppose.

Behind its claims of being a grassroots effort with legitimate concerns about McGoldrick’s leadership are some troubling indicators that there’s a lot more to this than potential petition signers might realize. The campaign’s biggest financial contributions come from the Residential Builders Association (which has long battled McGoldrick over conditions and restrictions he’s tried to place on developers) and the conservative property rights group Small Property Owners of San Francisco.

The lion’s share of the $24,000 raised so far has gone to Johnny K. Wang’s JKW Political Consulting. Among JKW’s other clients are the reelection campaign of Mayor Gavin Newsom (who would get to appoint McGoldrick’s successor, and whom the supervisor publicly criticized over Newsom’s sex scandal), Google and Earthlink (which Newsom wants to build a wireless Internet system for the city, a deal McGoldrick has taken the lead in scrutinizing), and malevolent downtown player Citizens for Reform Leadership (an attack group created by Newsom treasurer Jim Sutton).

It’s no surprise that Newsom and his downtown allies would want to knock off McGoldrick or any of the progressive supervisors who have been effectively setting the city’s agenda for at least the past two years. In fact, critics of the board have now launched another recall campaign, against board president Aaron Peskin, as well as a lower-level effort against Sup. Chris Daly. And this follows an unsuccessful 2004 effort to recall Sup. Sophie Maxwell, which had some behind-the-scenes support from downtown attack dog Wade Randlett.

None of these four supervisors have committed the acts of corruption, incompetence, or gross malfeasance for which the tool of the recall was created. Instead, people are trying to recall McGoldrick, Peskin, and Daly simply for being effective legislators with whom some of their more conservative constituents disagree.

This is an outrageous and dishonest abuse of the recall. Newsom should immediately and publicly express his opposition to the recall campaigns, and citizens of the district should refuse to sign the petitions. But that’s not enough. It’s time for the Board of Supervisors to consider placing a charter amendment on the ballot that would reform the way recalls are handled in the city, which is far more lenient than under state law.

The San Francisco signature threshold of 10 percent of registered voters is ridiculously low, particularly for district-elected supervisors, for whom only about 3,500 signatures are needed. Statewide, the standard is 20 percent of registered voters, and that should be our standard as well.

Raising the signature threshold is particularly important given the advantage that downtown interests have in recalling supervisors. The City Charter treats recall campaigns like ballot measures, allowing for huge political contributions rather than the $500 limits applied to candidates. This is grossly unfair to truly grassroots groups and should also be changed to cap contributions at $500.

Finally, we should remove the temptation for allies of the mayor to use the recall as a way of undoing popular elections and giving more power to the mayor. Most recall elections in California entail the replacement of a successfully recalled official by a vote of the people (as we saw when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled), but in San Francisco, the mayor chooses the successor. That needs to change.

Too often these days, the recall is a weapon wielded recklessly by wealthy special interests to subvert the true will of the people. By setting reasonable financial contribution limits, creating a high but still attainable signature threshold, and making the recall more democratic, San Francisco can once again make the recall an honorable — and seldom used — tool of the people. *

From the ashes

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"They may label you, try to classify you, and even call you a crazy bitch — but don’t flinch, just let them," Honey of Radio Phoenix says to the women of New York City after her black feminist–run station gets bombed by government agents, after her comrade in arms is found dead in her jail cell, as the fireworks are about to go off in a certain tall tower in Lower Manhattan.

There’s no denying the evocative weight of that last image these days. But Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames — and in particular, advice like Honey’s — comes to mind every time I watch a film in which grrrls are running riot in the street or on the radio or in the clubs, a slowly but surely growing subgenre as the decades pass (at least in my home video collection).

In the thin line of plot running patchily through Borden’s vérité-style feature, surfacing at the Roxie Film Center on June 22, the War of Liberation has brought about a single-party system run by Socialist Democrats, the postrevolution economy is in the toilet, and working women are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs that have ensued. Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) is the leader of the Women’s Army, a loose circle of radical lesbian feminists — or vigilantes, as they’re called on the nightly news — who, among other pursuits, patrol the streets on bicycles with whistles at the ready in search of men behaving badly.

Norris begins to see their basically peaceful efforts to gain equality going nowhere and becomes convinced that armed struggle is the only way to get the government’s attention and force a change. When she dies in jail, the news sends a charge through the gathering underground, bringing together disconnected feminist forces that have long kept their distance. Borden’s aim, perhaps unrealistic and perhaps naive, is to present an expanding patchwork of radicalized women unified across lines of class and race in the face of overarching sexism.

You couldn’t call the women of Born in Flames riot grrrls with a straight face. The spiky commentators at Radio Regazza — trash-talking, white punk-rock counterparts to Radio Phoenix’s Honey — look familiar, but this is the second wave of feminism personified (evidenced, for one, by an unquestioning opposition to sex work). But if Borden’s point in setting Born in Flames in a future United States run by socialists, of all things, is that nothing much has changed for the second sex postrevolution, there’s a parallel in watching as a new clan of young women is born in flames onscreen every few years.

Such latter-day films — Kristine Peterson’s 1997 Slaves to the Underground, documenting the Portland DIY scene of the early ’90s; Barbara Teufel’s 2003 part-fiction, part-doc Gallant Girls, set amid the direct-action anarchopunks of late-’80s Berlin — regularly surface at the Frameline fest. And this year adds a couple more to the pack: closing night’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a tale of teen radicalization by But I’m a Cheerleader‘s Jamie Babbit (who cites Born in Flames as an inspiration), and the Spanish film El Calentito, by Chus Gutiérrez, set in 1981 on the eve of a coup d’état by Fascist vestiges of Francisco Franco’s gang. These, as well as Flames contemporaries Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), are filled with rude girls hijacking the radio waves or the stage, flinging out slogans and manifestos, and screaming bloody murder. Though only Borden’s future radicals are prepared to cause it. *

BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983). June 22, 10:30 p.m., Roxie

Hit it or quit it

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Black White and Gray (James Crump, US, 2007) If Andre Téchiné’s The Witnesses colors the early ’80s red, this documentary about Sam Wagstaff (and by extension Robert Mapplethorpe) opts for a relatively bloodless palette. Though its voice-over shows class chauvinism in asserting that Patti Smith brought validity to punk, Black White and Gray perceptively uses its enigmatic subject as a window onto the changing role of photography within the art world. (Mapplethorpe’s objectification of black men is left uncriticized.) Crump brings in some excellent sources, such as Hanuman publisher Raymond Foye. He also brings in at least one horrible blabbermouth: spewing bitter opinion, historian Eugenia Parry deserves every hearty hiss she’s going to get from a Frameline crowd. The film ends on a flat note by allowing Smith to recite one of her pedestrian recent lyrics, but otherwise she’s a trustworthy and likable source on the relationship between Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe. Maybe the DVD version will bring more of her reminiscences and less of Parry. (Johnny Ray Huston)

June 21, 7 p.m., Victoria

DarkBlueAlmostBlack (Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Spain, 2006). The term Almodóvarian is being thrown around these days with almost the same frequency as the term Hitchcockian (Almodóvar’s Bad Education was called Hitchcockian) and just as vaguely, but screenwriter-director Sánchez Arévalo’s DarkBlueAlmostBlack is Almodóvarian, resembling his postscrewball phase: it has melodrama without histrionics, likable characters doing absurdly unlikable things and vice versa, malleable (different from queer) sexuality, and near-incestuous family dynamics. The only thing missing is a hideously decorated apartment. In a world littered with the fruits of vacant and wild-eyed Almodóvarians (see — or don’t — Frameline 30’s unintentional disaster film The Favor), a disciple with some chops is cause for applause. Bitterly funny and narratively exciting — it toys with an amiable glibness that always comes back from the brink with devastating human emotion —Sánchez Arévalo’s dark but not quite jet-black comedy could be one of Almodóvar’s strongest films. (Jason Shamai)

June 20, 9:30 p.m., Victoria

Finn’s Girl (Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert, Canada, 2007). While other lesbians in the fest ponder whether to start a family, in Finn’s Girl conception is a fait accompli. How exactly it was accomplished is a bit of a mystery, but more pressing questions present themselves. One is whether Finn, a workaholic running a besieged Toronto abortion clinic and mourning the death of her wife, will get her head blown off by antichoice snipers — apparently, religious wingnuts live in Canada too. Another is whether she’s up for single-parenting the charming, precocious, enraged, and increasingly unmanageable Zelly, whose expressive 11-year-old eyes are particularly off-putting when narrowed above the smoke of a joint. Finn’s Girl covers a lot of terrain (grief, reproductive rights and technology, the travails of parenting, tween sexuality) with a fairly light tread, though Zelly’s scenes carry a particular charge of unpredictability. The result is a somewhat involving, sometimes sketchy picture of a family in transition. (Lynn Rapoport)

Sun/17, 12:30 p.m., Castro; Tues/19, 6:30 p.m., Parkway

Fun in Girls’ Shorts (various). Excluding Filled with Water, a smart, beautifully shot animation about a woman who falls for a TV-enclosed ballerina, and Succubus, a semicomedic film about a lesbian couple struggling to have a child, adolescent identity issues and anxieties constitute the major themes of this short-film compilation. With its attractively blurry cinematography, Pariah, about a 17-year-old black girl who keeps switching identities to please her parents and friends, is the most complete example of the suffocative effects that the suppression of one’s identity can have on a person, let alone a teen. (Maria Komodore)

Sat/16, 1:45 p.m., Castro; June 24, 11:30 a.m., Castro

Homos by the Bay (various). Though uneven, this program of shorts by local filmmakers does boast some standouts, including a stop-motion pair by Samara Halperin (who notably queerified Beverly Hills, 90210 in 2001’s Sorry, Brenda): the minute-long rhapsody on hot dogs, Plastic Fantastic #1, and Hard Hat Required, featuring two Lego men who do more than construction on the job. The Clap’s Gary Fembot uses his DJ skills for Mondo Bottomless‘s delightfully vintage pop soundtrack, a perfect match for its 16 minutes of cavorting men in bathing suits. And Nao Bustamante has a joyful punk-rock awakening in the black-and-white suburban fantasy The Perfect Ones. (Cheryl Eddy)

June 23, 1:15 p.m., Victoria

Jam (Marc Woollen, US, 2006). This is a fantastic, fascinating Roller Derby doc about Tim Patten, a local HIV-positive man who ferociously attempted to revive the sport after its virtual demise in the ’70s and, with it, the legendary Bay Area Bombers team. In San Francisco in the late ’90s, Bombers matches at Kezar Stadium were the hottest after-dark tickets in town, uniting swing revivalists, rockabilly fans, queer hipsters, and anyone into exquisitely goofy WWF-type antics but not into scary WWF crowds. Director Woollen takes us behind the scenes of those derby matches, delivering plenty of colorful history and personal drama (along with a few trade secrets) and uniting the disparate stories of the eccentrically flamboyant gang of wheel-heeled dreamers who signed on to Patten’s dream into a rollicking tale of subversive triumph. Now that’s a party. (Marke B.)

Mon/18, 7 p.m., Victoria

No Regret (Leesong Hee-il, South Korea, 2006). If you like movies about sexy orphans who become male prostitutes, you have at least two options at Frameline this year: Twilight Dancers and No Regret. Neither really addresses the issues it promises to (class politics, sex politics, et al.). But No Regret — essentially Pretty Woman for gay male depressives — is at least a better time at the movies. The South Korean film successfully tricks us into thinking its condom-thin melodrama is worthy of our tears, which is nothing to sneeze at. Just don’t expect to come out of the theater having unpacked the psyches of mopey Adonises for hire and their equally mopey rich lovers. (Shamai)

June 22, 10 p.m., Victoria

On the Downlow (Abigail Child, US, 2007) Some of the best pure moviemaking in this year’s festival can be found within this documentary by Abigail Child. Reflecting Child’s background as an experimental filmmaker, On the Downlow finds a lot of poetry and grit in urban Cleveland: a shot of a hooker moseying across the street and a sequence set at a barbecue are great examples of the poetry in motion that can happen when a talented woman with a camera looks at another woman. (Shot by men, these sequences would almost unfailingly be presented in a crude fashion or simply left ignored.) Of course, the main subjects here are men. Child also films them well, adding portraiture to talking-heads segments. On the Downlow‘s somewhat frustrating paradox is that it can’t really directly present its title subject — the guys talking here are either in love with DL guys who aren’t interviewed or they’re young gays- or bi’s-to-be taking awkward first public steps toward an out identity. (Huston)

June 23, 6 p.m., Victoria

Tan Lines (Ed Aldridge, Australia, 2006). The Aussie surfside ensemble drama has deep roots, stretching at least from preasshole Mel Gibson’s 1977 feature debut, Summer City, to last year’s superb, as-yet-unreleased (at least here) crime docudrama Out of the Blue. Landing somewhere between Gus van Sant and shark-bait territory, director Aldridge’s first feature focuses on the few days when 16-year-old surfer Midget (Jack Baxter) falls in first love — or at least first lust — with his best mate’s briefly returned, gay-disgraced brother, Cass (Daniel O’Leary). With its cannily used nonprofessional actors and streaks of absurdist humor, Tan Lines is an offbeat delight for half its length. The charm fades a bit thereafter, but this is still worth a look. (Dennis Harvey)

June 23, 3:30 p.m., Castro

Tick Tock Lullaby (Lisa Gornick, UK, 2006). Flirting with the idea of having a child and confronted with the difficult question of how to go about having it, Sasha (Gornick) and Maya (Raquel Cassidy), a lesbian couple living in London, set out on a sperm escapade. Inspired by the thought process that Sasha goes through as the couple’s hunt progresses, three additional stories emerge and intermingle, representing variations on the potential of becoming a parent. Shot with a beautifully fluid camera, Tick Tock Lullaby is an intimate, complex, and elaborate exploration of sexuality, relationships, and most important, parenthood. (Komodore)

Sat/16, 9:30 p.m., Castro

For more short takes on Frameline 31, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Don’t let PG&E kill CCA

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EDITORIAL For decades, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has been a deceptive and corrupting influence in San Francisco politics, time and again subverting efforts to create a public power system that would save city ratepayers tens of millions of dollars annually, comply with the federal Raker Act public power mandate, and create a greener power portfolio.

PG&E is prohibited by state law from interfering with community choice aggregation, an eminently worthy project that will allow San Francisco to develop sustainable energy projects and to buy and distribute power on behalf of residents. So, to circumvent the law, PG&E works quietly and aggressively through the Chamber of Commerce, the mainstream media, and community groups. It also spreads a blizzard of greenwashing ads around the cityscape.

The Guardian obtained a memo that PG&E secretly distributed to various community groups around town a few weeks ago, calling the CCA plan flawed and the city unfit to enter the power business. As Amanda Witherell reported on our Politics blog, Committee on Jobs director Nathan Nayman then plagiarized whole chunks of the PG&E missive for a May 23 guest editorial that he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner (a PG&E ad nestled close to his op-ed on the Examiner‘s Web site).

Then the Chamber of Commerce got into the act, purporting to conduct a poll of 111 business executives, most of whom said — surprise, surprise — that they would rather just keep doing business with PG&E. We got a copy of the poll, and it showed that only l,500 of the city’s 50,000 or so businesses were canvassed, and less than 10 per cent bothered to respond. The company that conducted the poll, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, lists PG&E as a client on its Web page but does not list the chamber.

Despite the obvious bias of this survey and the chamber’s clear intention to do PG&E’s bidding, both the Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle dutifully reported the results but didn’t include any comment from public power people. How close was the coordination between PG&E and the chamber? When the Chronicle called PG&E for comment, the reporter wrote, a chamber spokesperson called back on PG&E’s behalf. Neat. And the chamber’s James Lazarus testified on the poll results at the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee CCA hearing June 6.

To its credit, the committee saw through the charade and voted unanimously to move CCA forward. The full board was scheduled to consider approving CCA on June 12 after our press time, and approval appeared likely. CCA is an important first step toward public power, consumer choice, and an energy policy that is sustainable and independent. Let’s put CCA on the fast track and keep exposing PG&E’s sneaky maneuvers and the people and businesses that promote them. *

Editor’s Notes

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› steve@sfbg.com

I’ve been obsessed with high-speed rail for a couple of months now. It started in March when I was in France and had my first experience on the TGV trains that zip between Paris and Lyon in less than two hours, about a third of the time it takes by car. The ease with which I stepped onto the train made my airport experiences seem like torturous tests of my capacity to endure long lines, inexplicable delays, nosy cops, bureaucratic madness, and fellow travelers made cranky by it all.

As the French countryside flew past me at 200 mph, I wondered why California has been unable to build a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities quite similar to Paris and Lyon in terms of distance and cultural importance. So I researched the issue and learned that the single biggest obstacle is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as I reported recently in "The Silver Bullet Train" (4/18/07), a story that the San Diego CityBeat then ran as its cover article in its last issue.

So I was intrigued to hear what Schwarzenegger had to say on the subject last week when he came to speak in a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. auditorium for an event sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. When asked about it, the governor said, "I’m a big believer in mass transit. I’m a big believer in high-speed rail. I think this high-speed rail is a great possibility, but I want us working on the public participation — private partnerships — then we can commit to the $10 billion to put in from the public sector."

Which, of course, is complete bullshit. The governor’s budget made big cuts in mass-transit spending, including chopping $28 million from BART and $36 million from Muni. And it proposed gutting the California High Speed Rail Authority, which has long planned for the need for private-sector funding support that Schwarzenegger claims will preclude next year’s $10 billion high-speed rail bond measure. Those who know the issue know how ridiculous the governor sounds.

"Based upon your encouragement, we have prepared the financing plan. If your support for an appropriate level of funding in 2007–<\d>08 is contingent upon securing specific commitments of funding from various public and private entities, you are the logical leader who can bring together California Congressional leaders and private financiers," CHSRA chair Quentin Kopp wrote to Schwarzenegger on May 25.

And still Schwarzenegger does nothing to support the project, which the downtown think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) makes the focus of its June newsletter under the headline "High Speed Rail Essential to Keep California on Track: Trains Offer Best Bet for Fast, Clean Transport as State Grows."

It’s time for Schwarzenegger’s deeds to start matching his words, particularly on this crucial project.*

Club Six survives

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› news@sfbg.com

A two-year battle over noise may have finally come to a relatively peaceful close June 5 when both sides made concessions about the presence of Club Six on historically blighted Sixth Street.

In one corner were a few discontented residents of the Lawrence Hotel atop the club and their champion, Paul Hogarth of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and managing editor of www.BeyondChron.org, who say the noisy club disrupts their lives. On the other side of the ring was Angel Cruz, Club Six’s owner and operator, and dozens of supporters who assert that Cruz and his club have revitalized Sixth Street and enriched their lives.

The two sides faced off in front of the Entertainment Commission, which was charged with mediating the dispute and was considering a 30-day suspension of the club’s entertainment and after-hours permits. The commission decided to forgo the suspension for now and place the club on a 120-day probationary period, during which any sound violations could trigger an expedited return to the commission and possible shutdown.

Cruz pledged to use the time to finish soundproofing Club Six. He has already poured about a quarter-million dollars into buffering the club’s noise, and he just hired an esteemed acoustic consultant to finish the process.

The movement to shut down Club Six was spearheaded by Jim Ayers, a long-term, low-income tenant of the hotel who claims that the noise generated by the club keeps him up all night and that the vibrations are strong enough to knock items off shelves (see "Fury over Sound," 5/23/07).

"The funny thing about this whole process is the better [the soundproofing] gets, the more complaints we get," Cruz told the Guardian. "As long as we are open, Jim Ayers is going to complain."

But not all residents of the Lawrence Hotel are against Club Six. Julius Countryman, another long-term resident, told the commission — to rounds of applause from supporters — "Club Six keeps me rockin’. It keeps me movin’."

In fact, only a few of the 41 residents of the Lawrence showed up at the hearing to voice displeasure. One tenant claimed "intimidation" kept them away.

Club Six supporters turned out in such large numbers that the hearing had to be moved to a bigger room. Dozens filed before the commission to give impassioned, one-minute pleas as to why the club needs to stay. A few even said Club Six saved their lives. One man who was beaten unconscious down the street from the club said he may not have been alive if Club Six security hadn’t stepped in. Another recovering drug addict thanked Cruz for giving him a job when no one else would hire him.

So for now, there’s a break in what had been an animated and polarizing conflict pitting low-income residents against those with concerns about growing threats to nightlife and urban culture. (The Guardian‘s last story on the conflict generated more readers comments than any recent story on our Web site, most of them critical of our perspective.)

Yet the overwhelming response at the hearing brought a perspective to the issue different from what Hogarth and his clients have pushed. And that is, if Club Six closed, more than 50 people employed by the club would face financial hardship, and a unique venue supportive of music, art, and cultural diversity would be sorely missed.

But it remains to be seen whether Cruz can mollify his neighbors and the city officials who are now watching — and listening to — Club Six.

Exclusive to SFBG.com

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The ongoing layoffs at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are a human drama as well as a financial one, particularly given the relationship between the parent companies of those two publications: the Chron’s Hearst Corp. and Merc owner MediaNews Group.

An anticipated 160 journalists and their editors are being cut from the Chron and the Merc, which means, of course, less news for you. The names of which editors were slashed by the Chron surfaced first on the local blog Ghost Word while the rest made it to the Web in an internal Bronstein memo leaked to industry watchers, a painful irony considering what news execs say is killing journalism jobs.

Those who have been let go paint an interesting picture of what happened and what’s to come. “When Frank Vega, the new publisher, got here a couple of years ago, he said only three things can happen: We can fix it. We can sell it. Or we can shut it down. They haven’t fixed it yet, so those other two things are what they have to be considering,” John Curley, a deputy managing editor let go from the Chronicle recently after more than two decades with the paper, told the Guardian.

An annotated photo of Curley’s desk at the Chron appeared on Flickr.com last week and elicited two successive waves of heartfelt e-mails and calls after the popular industry blog Romenesko linked it.
Early in his career, Curley worked in New Jersey under David Burgin, who was famously fired and rehired several times by MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton at a number of the company’s papers before briefly working at the San Francisco Examiner, once owned by Hearst before it took over the Chronicle. Curley also worked for Jim Bellows, an influential editor in American journalism, at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
“Even though this is officially termed a ‘reduction in force,’ I am surprised and dismayed that the organization thinks it can have a future without me,” Curley wrote below the photo on his Flickr profile. “To be honest, I thought I’d get the chance to help lead the paper where it needed to go to compete successfully in the digital age. But instead, off I go.”

Insiders told us managers at the Chronicle reiterate over and over that the paper will never be the New York Times. To be fair, Bronstein likes to change up his low expectations from time to time. Last year, he told media hound Michael Stoll in a piece for the SF Weekly that the daily can’t be another Los Angeles Times either.

Sunday editor Wendy Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron before being let go just recently, told us, “There’s no answer to that except, ‘Of course we can’t be the New York Times. But we could be the very best regional paper we could be and as good at doing in-depth regional stories as the national papers are at doing what they do. There’s not a lot of imagination in Chronicle management. They’re not a very flexible group.”

Chron executive editor Phil Bronstein told Editor & Publisher that the paper will focus more on local news, but he said it will also have to do fewer stories now. And staffers told us he’s admitted during recent meetings that he’s not quite sure what to do in order to save the paper.

The Chron has lately continued its strong coverage of police misconduct in San Francisco but chose to relegate a superb story about one problem officer to the back of the June 7 edition in the local section. The riveting tale of a scandalous trust-fund lawyer by long-time crime reporter Jaxon Van Durbeken was placed far from the June 10 Sunday edition’s front page as well.

Miller told us she was displeased with what the daily was choosing to promote on its Sunday front-page and wished it would more often showcase thorough local reporting done by beat reporters.

The Chron’s financial desperation is well-known by now, confirmed months ago by Hearst attorneys in federal court when local businessman Clint Reilly was suing the company along with MediaNews to stop – or at least limit – a $300 million investment scheme the two would-be competitors planned that has since enabled MediaNews to dominate most of the Bay Area’s newspapers outside of the Chron.

Hearst lost approximately $1 million a week last year, and all told, they’ve more or less dumped $1 billion into the paper, including its purchase price, since buying it in 2000. Sources say the losses are now closer to $2 million a week.

The company first announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its 400 total. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted June 8 with more expected soon afterward, but no one’s entirely sure who’s accepted buyouts so far and much uglier terminations could take place soon. At the same time, nine editors were sent packing.

The Chron’s managing editor Robert Rosenthal announced he was leaving before the axe fell on the newsroom proclaiming that he couldn’t stomach the bloodshed.

The coincidence couldn’t be more profound. He spent much of his career at the respected Philadelphia Inquire before joining the Chron after growing dissatisfied with the Inquirer’s decision in 2001 to downsize more than 100 people under former owner Knight-Ridder, which also once owned the Merc.

“What I believe is that the real innovators are the journalists,” Rosenthal told us. “In the industry, the people who are not the innovators are on the business side. They’ve looked at this as a very traditional challenge and now they’re getting caught up in a whirlpool of change.”

At the Merc, expected cuts for the paper were first disclosed by John Bowman, who quit recently as editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews Group. Bowman had grown angry over what the cuts had done to his own paper, and opened up like a geyser to GradetheNews.org telling them that shortcuts on copy editors were causing egregious errors even in headlines.

State workplace safety cops are investigating the San Mateo paper’s offices where Bowman contends the building is without air and rats are a concern. Spokesperson Dean Fryer of the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health wouldn’t discuss the case while it remains open. But federal records show MediaNews was fined $800 last fall for an asbestos-related complaint at the company’s nearby Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

The Merc and the Times are run by a consortium of companies called the California Newspapers Partnership with MediaNews at the helm and include the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune. Online ad revenue actually went up last quarter for MediaNews along with its general profit margin while the cost of newsprint is going down, all good signs for Singleton’s wallet.

But print ad income and circulation, which continue to butter the company’s bread, remain on a downward march, according to earnings statements, and Singleton still must service the hundreds of millions in debt he accrued in recent years storming the nation in a frenzied haste to buy up both daily and weekly papers big and small.

In fact, the business press in recent stories about the company’s performance failed to point out that the Denver-based company is doing yet more big deals with Hearst in other cities. The two joined efforts last quarter to purchase the News-Times in Danbury, Conn. for $80 million in an arrangement very similar to what the companies created here, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. A few newsroom job cuts were announced recently at the News-Times.

MediaNews already owned the Connecticut Post, located about 20 miles away, and the deal included another nearby paper in New Milford. Combined, the three make a cluster, just as Singleton likes them, which enable him to thin and share staff and other resources between the publications as he’s been doing in the Bay Area.
Thin, of course, equals cutting more journalists.

Paper trail

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Up to 160 journalists and editors being cut from the payrolls of the Bay Area’s biggest two daily newspapers will flood a shrinking media job market, forcing many from their homes and making it difficult to pay their rents or mortgages.

But it also means something else: less news, and therefore less accountability and diminished democratic debate.

That was the sad conclusion of many observers and media professionals after the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News both revealed recently that they’d be laying off about a quarter of their respective newsroom staffs.

"Something has to give," Chron editor Phil Bronstein told Editor and Publisher recently. "If you have 15 priorities, sometimes the bottom three or four don’t get done. You may have to do fewer stories, and you can do that."

The disturbing pronouncements by their parent companies, the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, even led some veterans who weren’t immediately facing pink slips to leave on their own accord, unable to stomach the sorry state of their profession. Yet even as the bloodletting began in earnest at the Chron last week, Bronstein hadn’t presented much of a game plan for how Hearst actually expects to continue operating a major metropolitan newspaper.

"There’s no question that with the Bay Area — like other big metro markets — the diminishing number of journalists will definitely impact the public," just-departed managing editor Robert Rosenthal, who announced he was leaving two weeks ago as the cuts were about to begin, told the Guardian.

The paper even started a blog for fallen staffers to exchange leads on new opportunities. Among the first posts was a public relations gig in San Francisco, which to many earnest reporters is like crossing over to the dark side.

Despite its lagging finances, the Chronicle has still been the city’s main paper of record — based mostly on its extensive resources and large newsroom — no matter how many blogs, online journals, and alt weeklies claw at its heels, or whether people consider it a poor paper.

But Sunday editor Wendy Miller, who was squeezed out last week, told us that the paper has been promoting sensationalism while failing to put some of its best stories from beat reporters high on the Sunday front page. As an example, she pointed to Carrie Sturrock’s regular education coverage, like recent stories on far-flung alternative-energy research at Stanford University and the punishing collection tactics of student-loan agencies.

"That front page too often is driven by crime and tabloid and goofy local stories," said Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron. "I think this is too sophisticated of a market for a front page like that. While I do think there’s a lot of good work that we do, we don’t play it well…. We don’t put our very best work on the cover often."

Now the situation could grow worse, as changes are certain at the paper along with the layoffs. It’s not clear, for instance, that its Sunday edition will contain an Insight section anymore, laid-off editor Jim Finefrock, who spent more than 30 years at the paper, told us last week just after he cleaned out his desk.

Washington bureau chief Marc Sandalow was let go after more than 20 years at the Chronicle, 13 of them inside the Beltway, and the paper has also made an effort to cut the job of fellow longtime DC reporter Edward Epstein. The moves would halve the bureau’s staff and cast doubt on how the Chron would continue its knowledgeable stories on some of the most powerful members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who are only now attaining major leadership positions.

"I always knew it would mean extremely unpleasant belt-tightening," Sandalow told the Guardian, referring to the paper’s hundreds of millions of dollars in losses since Hearst took it over in 2000. "I just didn’t think it would be suffocation."

Bronstein apparently is unsure of how the Chron can even begin to change the course of its unique money-losing trajectory. Despite the industry being wounded by fleeing subscribers and competitive Web outlets, most newspapers are still making big profits, with the Chron being a fairly rare exception. Sources add that the job cuts might save just $8 million or so per year, not nearly enough to make up for the paper’s staggering losses, for which no one had any reasonably good explanations.

"Something’s not right with our structure," John Curley, a deputy managing editor who’d been at the paper for more than 20 years, told the Guardian. "There isn’t another metropolitan daily that has a dominant position the way the Chronicle does that loses money."

Indeed, SFGate.com is among the most regularly visited newspaper sites in the country, and the model has greatly expanded the paper’s readership. But Curley explained that local advertisers "don’t necessarily want to reach someone in Zurich who might be interested in reading our political analysis." For most papers, online ads still generate remarkably little revenue.

The company initially announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its total of 400. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted last Friday, with more on the way, but no one’s entirely sure who has accepted buyouts so far, and much uglier terminations could take place soon. "People are terrified," one source said. "Their phone rings, and they don’t want to answer."

At the same time, nine members of the top brass, including two deputy managing editors, Curley and Leslie Guevarra, were sent packing. Bronstein worked hard to appear assured of the paper’s future in Editor and Publisher, telling the journal recently that the Chron would be focusing more on local news as part of its strategy, with less of a "buffet-style," but he offered few specifics. He nonetheless told staffers during recent meetings that he doesn’t really know what to do and invited them to offer their own solutions.

The mood’s been decidedly glum at a modest SoMa dive known as the Tempest, where Chron staffers are known to commonly lurk and where some of the recent sendoffs for departing staffers have been held.

"Business has been very good for me this week," a bartender there said late at night on June 8. "But I know 25 percent of these people won’t be coming back. This won’t be good for business in the long run."

As for the Merc, www.GradetheNews.org fueled the rank and file’s worst fears by first reporting that 60 newsroom positions at that paper would get the ax, in addition to the 35 union employees who were shoved out last December.

The paper got the tip from John Bowman, now former executive editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews, who disclosed the layoffs to the public after deciding he was "fed up" with MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton’s slash-and-burn business strategy.

Amid the chaos, the Merc‘s brand-new top editor, Carole Leigh Hutton, sent a memo to staffers begging them to remain calm and "focus some of that energy on doing the journalism we do so well" instead of indulging in rumors at the watercooler about what was planned.

Furious over cuts at his paper, Bowman decided to quit the same day that he talked to GradetheNews about an April meeting he attended with other MediaNews editors at which the layoffs were discussed.

Singleton, the industry’s undisputed king of consolidation, months ago cut some copyediting jobs and moved others to a single hub in Pleasanton where its Tri-Valley Herald was formerly located. Bowman told GradetheNews the move had caused "an incredible number of errors," including glaring geographical mistakes even in headlines.

"You want copy editors who know your city, who know your beat, who can ask great questions and help make your story better," Luther Jackson, executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, told us. "That’s just a general rule, I would say. Copy editors are really underappreciated in general."

Jackson added that Bowman’s figure of 60 isn’t set in stone, and while the paper has admitted it plans to initiate more layoffs soon, it still hasn’t decided how many. GradetheNews also interviewed reporters at "several of the chain’s papers" who echoed Bowman’s complaints and wrote that some of the papers are dreadfully short of reporters, including beat writers who specialize in specific local subjects.

We never heard back from Bronstein, Singleton, California Newspaper Publishers Association executives George Riggs and Kevin Keane, or former Merc executive editor Susan Goldberg, who high-tailed it out of San Jose recently for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

But Merc business reporter Elise Ackerman, who’s worked at the Peninsula daily for seven years, told us the paper’s union plans to provide execs with suggestions on how to improve the paper and boost income, though she didn’t give details.

"I do think that this is really just a rough transition, and I was really impressed with Carol Leigh Hutton," Ackerman said carefully. "She’s communicating very clearly…. I don’t think that she’s going to preside over the bloodletting that we saw at the Chron." *

For more on this evolving story, visit www.sfbg.com.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/11/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/11/07): Three U.S. soldiers killed. Twelve Iraqi soldiers killed.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

Three U.S. soldiers killed today in bridge bombing in Baghdad, according to BBC news.

3,757: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

At least 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed today by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,116 – 71,328: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Journalists:

Journalists abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/11/07): So far, $433 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Politics Blog

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics@@

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/05/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/05/07): 90 Iraqi civilians killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 90 Iraqi civilians were killed or found dead today, including 61 bullet-riddled bodies believed to be the result of a sectarian death squad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

64,776 – 70,934: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,740: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

Journalist abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/


The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/05/07): So far, $431 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The man whose head exploded

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FILM Recently, my eyeballs were among the first to be skewered by the finished print of Hostel 2. As torture and black humor unspooled on the big screen, director Eli Roth — last seen working on Grindhouse, both as an actor and behind the camera for the Thanksgiving trailer — prowled about, gauging audience reactions to his third feature film. The next day I met Roth to discuss all things horror. He talks fast. Here are some excerpts.

On the Metreon audience’s response to Hostel 2: When you’re making a film, you’re literally going on instinct. I know my gore stuff is gonna work, but it’s the other stuff, those moments where you’re, like, "No, don’t, don’t, don’t!" — in editing, you’re just hoping the audience will feel that way. And I thought that every moment hit the way I wanted it to. Even in a fan-based audience, sometimes they’re, like, "All right, impress me, Roth. Let’s see what you got." I wanted people to be cheering and screaming and going wild the way they were at the end of the first one, and I really felt we got that.

On emuutf8g the grand old Italian B-movie tradition of killing kids: I wanted to take risks in the movie. I wanted things where people would go, "Oh, you can’t do that." Not just to offend, but I wanted to live in that danger zone. After I made it, I saw this film directed by [Narciso Ibáñez] Serrador called Who Can Kill a Child?, which I think is genuinely one of the single greatest horror films. I love those early 1970s Italian movies like Torso, Night Train Murders, and To Be Twenty, by Fernando di Leo. Have you seen To Be Twenty? At the end of this movie, my jaw was on the ground. It was so horrific that they pulled every single print from the theaters. But in all three of those films, it’s a group of college-age girls that are all going on a trip somewhere. The girls all make intelligent decisions; there’s nothing that they do that’s like a dumb movie moment. And there’s a real, palpable sense of dread in those movies. I really wanted to build that sense of dread for everybody [in Hostel 2].

On getting Ruggero Deodato, director of 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, to cameo: I went to Italy to do press for Hostel, and this journalist was producing behind-the-scenes interviews for No Shame DVDs. We drove an hour outside of Rome to the set of a TV show that Deodato was shooting. I brought my Cannibal Holocaust poster for him to sign. And he was so funny and so cool, and I was, like, "I got a cameo for you that I think the American fans would love." And Deodato is just a huge slice of ham. This guy loves being on camera. He’s so funny. And when he showed up on set, I got to ask him questions like, how do you direct people that live in trees, like in Last Cannibal World? It was great to hear his answers.

On his rivalry with the Saw filmmakers: I’m friends with all those guys, and we always call each other when we get a kill scene done. It’s almost like this bleeding contest we have. The Splat Pack — we all love each other’s movies. But there’s always that side of you that wants to have the rep of having the nastiest kill. We joke all the time: "We’re running out of body parts!"

On his inspiration for torture scenes: All you have to do is go to the Museum of Torture in Prague. The stuff you see is so shocking you couldn’t even film it. [In my films] it’s a combination of looking at history and what’s actually already been done and sort of walking around Home Depot and looking at tools. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what I think of — what makes the scene horrifying is whoever’s in the chair. It’s the actor. That’s what makes it really scary.

His response to people who think his films glorify violence: I say, don’t see them. I’m not making movies to appeal to everybody. I’m making movies for fans of this type of movie, and I want to stay true to that.

HOSTEL 2

Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Wikipedia activism

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION When I edit Wikipedia, I am fighting for the future. There are certain things and people whose memories I want preserved for generations to come so that curious searchers a century from now will know the full story. Via Wikipedia, they will get more than stories of great politicians and giant corporations from glossy histories. I want this user-edited, online encyclopedia to tell tales of the brave and the marginal as well as the notorious and the powerful. That’s why I’ve become a Wikipedia activist.

For years I was a passive reader of Wikipedia, particularly entries on obscure technology and pop culture. I think of Wikipedia as the first place to go when I’m researching something off the beaten track, like early episodes of Doctor Who or technical specs for the outputs on DVR players.

Last week, however, I finally shed my Wikipedia passivity and started editing entries myself. I hit a personal tipping point.

I was writing a profile about a novelist for an online magazine and discovered that this author’s Wikipedia biography page had been summarily deleted the week before on the grounds that it wasn’t notable enough. I had previously visited his entry early in my research because it contained a fairly complete list of everything he’d written. To make matters worse, when I read the history of the deletion, it turned out to have been done by a guy who knew absolutely nothing about this novelist’s areas of expertise. The deleter was a big contributor to Wikipedia, it’s true — but only on the topic of religion, particularly Lutheranism. How could that background possibly grant him the authority to determine whether a postmodern novelist and video game designer was notable or not?

So I signed up for a Wikipedia account and re-created this novelist’s entry from the Google cache and sources I’d gathered while writing the profile. I also wrote an explanation to the deleter, requesting that he not do it again.

And then, while I was at it, I re-created another entry recently deleted for not being notable enough — that of Sonia Greene, a pulp fiction writer and publisher of the 1920s who was briefly married to H.P. Lovecraft. Of all the insulting things to have happen, her entry had been erased, and people searching for her were redirected to an entry on Lovecraft. How’s that for you, future scholars? Looking for information about a minor pulp fiction writer? Too bad she’s not notable — but we can redirect you to an entry on a guy she was married to for two years. (A guy, I might add, who pissed her off so much that she burned all his letters when they divorced.) Yuck.

My experiences have made me strongly question the idea of "notableness" on Wikipedia. I am genuinely offended by the notion that obscure authors, technologies, ideas, and events should be deleted from what’s supposed to be a vast compendium of knowledge. It’s not as if Wikipedia is running out of disk space and needs to delete stuff to keep going. And it’s not as if an entry on an obscure writer will somehow undermine somebody’s ability to search for less obscure ones.

Besides, who is to say what is notable or not? Lutheran ministers? Bisexual Marxists? Hopefully both. For me, the utopianism of Wikipedia comes from its status as a truly democratic people’s encyclopedia — nothing is too minor to be in it. Everything should be noteworthy, as long as it is true and primary sources are listed. If we take this position, we avoid the mistakes of 19th-century chroniclers, who kept little information about women and people of color in archives because of course those groups were hardly notable. Yet now historians and curious people bang their heads against walls because so much history was lost to those deletions.

If the goal is to preserve knowledge, we shouldn’t be wasting our time determining what’s notable enough to stay in Wikipedia. Instead, we should be preserving in a searchable form everything we can that’s truthful, so the culture and history of the minor and the obscure can be remembered just as easily as those of the famous and the mighty. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is going to re-create Danah Boyd’s entry if you delete it, you bastards.

Tongues and tales

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The unconscious, the underworld, the undead — what is it that under-the-mattress anxiety points to, exactly? And what might it have to do with a pack of powdered French fops in Louis Seize costumes? Given the blissful nonchalance with which Dark Porch Theater’s Under the Bed tackles that thing called plot, it’s probably best not to mull it over too much. Suffice it to say that all of the above and a live band serve as lower bunkmates to Leonard Pinklestein (Chris Carlone), a World War II soldier crashed out on a fluffy brass bed, the limbo life raft for a lost soul that slipped its earthly mooring on the beaches of Normandy.

It’s a testament to the grace in some brands of lunacy that this swift, enjoyably madcap dance musical — a self-styled fairy tale set in purgatory, created and directed by Margery Fairchild and copresented with SafeHouse at a new Howard Street venue known pretty aptly as the Garage — can seem so endlessly expansive on an otherwise cramped (if nicely atmospheric) stage. Under the Bed not only draws a dozen or more bodies from beneath its title furniture; it also sets them exuberantly in motion.

But back to that willful plot: run aground on a patch of purgatory under the management of a sort of manic night nurse named Harriette D. (a comically adept Fairchild), Leonard finds himself the pawn in a battle royal between his gleaming but slightly sinister hostess and the Greek goddess and maiden huntress Artemis (a vigorous Alexis Blade Perry). The latter storms Hades, or whatever, with the intention of reuniting Leonard and his lost love, the cheerful would-be revolutionary Rosemary Short (Hilde Susan Jaegtnes), who arrives soon after him as another Lethe-headed amnesiac, though with raised fist ever at the ready.

Harriette, who for assistance is wont to call on a member of the band, the somewhat reluctant Mr. M. (a laid-back Patrick Simms), also conjures the French courtiers previously mentioned. When not mincing, they act as willing executioners and wield the same device that left such prominent scar lines on their own effete necks.

A fairy tale naturally allows for all manner of incongruities, and Under the Bed‘s just sweeten the pot. No doubt the unusually collaborative nature of the production has something to do with them, as do a winsome score (composed of more than a dozen droll and dreamy songs), eclectic choreography (by Fairchild and Perry), and some nicely offbeat dialogue. Add to that the production’s generally sharp and always game performances, beginning with a fine, versatile turn by Carlone as the slumbering soldier, and the unlikely spell cast by Under the Bed is complete.

ANYTHING BUT STILL LIFE


Art in Artemisia is a dynamic, multifaceted force, skillfully and thoughtfully realized in just about every aspect of the Dell’Arte Company’s thought-provoking dramatic study exploring the life and work of the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Barbara Geary). In director Giulio Cesare Perrone’s well-acted and visually striking production, which closed its run at the Magic Theatre last weekend, the rape of the artist by Agostino Tassi and the sensational trial that followed in 1612 — as well as the biblical story of Judith, whose beheading of Holofernes served as a heroic subject for Gentileschi at a time when female painters were rare and deemed unable to handle such material — become the ever-present, intervening background to a physically choreographed dialogue set in 1635 between Artemisia and her model Giulia (Keight Gleason).

If the script (cowritten by Perrone and Geary) veers at points into an awkward mesh of heightened speech and contemporary frankness, the production design carries the theme of art’s transformative power in several directions. From the cleverly abstract yet functional use of painting materials and everyday objects in Perrone’s scenic design to Greta Welsh’s dynamic chiaroscuro lighting, composer Youn Joo Sim’s transporting score, and choreographer Yong Zoo Lee’s incorporation of the histrionic postures of the painter’s canvases, Artemisia‘s mise-en-scène elaborates a vision of symbolic and psychic redress that echoes down the centuries. *

UNDER THE BED — A FAIRYTALE SET IN PURGATORY

Thurs/7–Sat/9, 8 p.m.; Sun/10, 7 p.m., $12–$20

The Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 793-8030

darkporchtheater@gmail.com

Only human

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Great art has a moral force that ennobles anyone it touches. Not that Joe Goode’s new Humansville, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is that great. But the work nudges at so many raw spots in a lovingly healing way that you end up believing there may yet be hope for human nature, at least until you leave the theater. Still, Goode’s latest essay on acceptance and the embracing of frailty left me with conflicting emotions.

To longtime Goode watchers — and the night I attended, the YBCA’s Forum seemed packed with them — Humansville‘s inhabitants may have looked vaguely familiar: the wistful, lonely guy (Melecio Estrella) stretched out poolside; the poodle-skirted, Doris Day–ish country inhabitant (Jessica Swanson); the preternaturally mismatched couple (Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello); and the two tough-luck buddies (Estrella and Alexander Zendzian). We know them; we have met them before. But Goode never seems to tire of making us look at them again. Yet because he does it with such clear-sighted wit and compassion, we will probably continue to cherish them and recognize ourselves in these hapless strugglers for sanity.

Humansville is divided into two parts. At first the audience walks around dioramas devised by designer Erik Flatmo and video artist Austin Forbord. One rains words, another is all furry softness, a third is composed of chintz and flowers. In each, dancers present episodes of disconnectedness. As you return to them, the sections begin to blend. You shudder as you hear Patricia West bitching about a missed dinner reservation while Zendzian and Estrella crash their bodies against their cell walls. Swanson’s relationship hysterics bleed into Brook-Kothlow’s and Barrueto-Cabello’s stony silences. This roundabout of foolishness, pain, and absurdity works well despite being a vaguely voyeuristic experience. Swanson’s TV news–inspired echo of a mourning mother on the video screen below her is particularly chilling.

The more conventionally choreographed second half elaborates on what went before. Estrella laments the death of his fellow prisoner; Brook-Kothlow endlessly nuzzles up to a tormented Barrueto-Cabello; Swanson wails about a nest being a launching pad. But the choreography falls short — it is bland and stiff. The lifts, reaches, and stretches of shifting connections look too unmotivated to suggest the fragile community proposed by Brook-Kothlow’s hymn about an empathy that enables you to step out of yourself. Not even Joan Jeanrenaud’s delicate cello, weaving in and out of the hour-long show, made me buy it.

HUMANSVILLE

Thurs/7–Sat/9, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., $19–$25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Gunning for Boots

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Where have all the outlaws gone? Now that Paris Hilton seems like the highest-profile sorta-one-hit wonder to run afoul of the law, it’s easy to believe that pop’s rep for rebellion is seriously in question. (And with Warner Bros. jettisoning the overexposed jet-setter, who knows if she should even make the tally?) Yet just how disturbing or subversive is it to glom on to corporate punks like Good Charlotte or hitch your fortunes to soaking-in-it onetime gangstas like Snoop "Soul Gravy Train" Dogg? How revolutionary is it to play music your parents might approve of, à la white-bread soul poppers Maroon 5?

But those petty pop-crit worries wane on hearing about the Coup mastermind Boots (né Raymond) Riley’s Memorial Day misfortune. In the early-morning hours, long before most locals were firing up the grill and chugging microbrews, Riley was looking down the wrong end of a San Francisco Police Department gun barrel while innocently attending a get-together at a friend’s warehouse in SF’s Dogpatch-Waterfront zone. Why? Likely for nothing more than driving while black.

Riley had just parked his car near the warehouse when he was blinded by flashlights, and he realized that he was surrounded by cops. "They were saying, ‘Don’t fucking move, don’t fucking move,’ and came straight at me," Riley told me from his Oakland home, where he had just fed his kids their Sunday breakfast. "They put my hands above my head, searched me, and searched my car, even though they were looking for someone who was stealing tires. You know, if they had a description of a light-skinned black man with a big Afro and sideburns, maybe they should have taken me in. But they were yelling, ‘Are you on probation? Do you have a warrant?’ And every time I said no, they said, ‘Don’t lie to us. Don’t fucking lie to us.’"

Neighbor Hoss Ward had been walking his dog by the warehouse when he spied officers with flashlights lurking between parked cars amid the trash on the street. "I thought that was weird. They didn’t question me, but I’m a white man," he said later, verifying that Boots parked, got thrown against his car, and had guns pulled on him. "It’s not unusual for someone to pull up in a beater car," Ward said. Yet this incident smelled like racial profiling: "That’s what the vibe felt like."

"I walked over there and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’" recounted Riley’s friend Marci Bravo, who lives at the warehouse. Eventually Riley was released, but, Bravo continued, "It was really messed up. We fire off fireworks, burn things in the street, and there’s been no problems with cops. They’ve actually come and hung out before.

"It’s just a nasty case of police profiling."

In the end, Riley said, the officers didn’t even check his ID. At press time, police representatives had not responded to inquiries about the incident, and Riley was planning on filing a grievance with the city watchdog agency the Office of Citizens Complaints, a process that the longtime activist is, unfortunately, familiar with. After a 1995 Riverside performance with Method Man, Riley and kindred local hip-hoppers Raz Caz, E-Roc, and Saafir were pulled over and pepper-sprayed in their car seats following a yelling argument at a club. Then there was the incident during the Coup’s 2006 tour around, ironically, their Epitaph album Pick a Bigger Weapon. Shortly after the tour manager urinated next to a semi at a Vermont rest stop, the tour vehicles were stopped by plainclothes officers who claimed to be surveilling a cocaine deal in the truck. "Half the band woke up with guns in their faces," the Coup leader recalled.

Riley’s experiences in and out of our enlightened — for some — city bring home the ugly, everyday reality behind the entertaining anecdote with which the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler regaled the Greek Theatre crowd June 2: he was almost arrested for the first time that day when Berkeley police dragged him out of a rec facility for arguing over the use of a public basketball court. "They called for backup and everything," Butler marveled onstage.

"There are stories all the time," Riley offered matter-of-factly. "Everyone knows you used to get fucked with in San Francisco and Berkeley."

"Usually it’s not anything with me specifically being a rapper," he continued. "I might have even more protection because of that. Like at this get-together, somebody came up and said, ‘Don’t you know who this is? This is Boots Riley.’ They might not have known who I am, but they realize this isn’t the regular case where they can do whatever they want." *

ALIGN YOUR CHAKRAS, CAMPERS

Talk to underground trance DJs, and they’ll point to the Harmony Festival as the hot spot forest ravers will be orbiting. Indeed, one of the main organizers, Howard "Bo" Sapper — who, along with Sean Ahearn, Scott McKeown, and Jeff Kaus, is putting on the 29th music and camping fest — agrees that a healthy, fire-breathing portion of the expected 40,000 at the three-day event will be die-hard burners drawn to the seven-year-old techno tribal night. Sapper also points proudly to the diversity of the musical lineup, including Brian Wilson, Erykah Badu, Rickie Lee Jones, the Roots, Common, moe., and Umphrey’s McGee. "I’m not sure if we’re going mainstream or the mainstream is coming to us," Sapper said, listing the green exhibits and this year’s theme, Promoting Global Cooling. "It’s part of the paradigm shift going on in America."

OVERNIGHT MUST-HAVES


•Earplugs

•Air mattress

•Plenty of water

•Patience

HARMONY FESTIVAL

Fri/8–Sun/10, $20–$500

Sonoma County Fairgrounds

1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa

www.harmonyfestival.com

A stitch in time

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› paulr@sfbg.com


Today’s lesson — do as I say, not as I do — pertains to knives. What I say is what all sensible people say: keep your knives sharp; keep the tips of your fingers bent under the knuckles when chopping, mincing, dicing, and so forth; and, most important, do not rush. I rushed, and I paid, by slashing my ring finger with the 10-inch chef’s knife I had perhaps neglected ever so slightly. The result was a scene of carnage and gore the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the long-ago TV footage of Rockingham and Bundy, plus four stitches. All this, as Sir Thomas More might sadly have said to me — if A Man for All Seasons had concerned cutlery and Indian food — for vindaloo. And the vindaloo was too vinegary, I was advised from across the table. Must tweak the recipe.

It is one of life’s glum facts that collateral damage occurs in kitchens. Virtually every everyday cook I know has a scarred finger or two or (in one case) is even missing a fingertip. Then there are the lesser insults: the spattered shoes and shirts, the spattered cookbooks. I have a large wardrobe of aprons, and I always try to keep open cookbooks away from spatter zones — not to mention open flame — but cooking, like war, is organized chaos, and one’s best intentions can easily go awry when the pot comes to a boil or the minced garlic gently sizzling in the pan starts to smell acrid and you must act in haste.

The injured finger was the bird-flipping one, and while this procedure wasn’t compromised by either wound or stitches (not that I had any public occasion to try, and not, of course, that I would have if I’d had), I did feel curiously diminished. I had trouble signing my name and putting in my contact lenses — even sleeping, that first night, since the installation of the stitches was followed by an extravagant wrapping with gauze and a metal pinch cap that made me feel as if I had been given the finger equivalent of a club foot, an unwieldy mass I could find no comfortable place for and that only stopped throbbing once I’d popped a Tylenol or two. Tylenol doesn’t cure vinegar breath, alas.

I just wanna testify

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In high school I was a band geek. OK, not quite: I was never cool enough to make it into the inner circle of the Blackbirds Marching Band, and so — odd duck that I was — I’d be left flapping around on the outer margins of the football stadium bleachers while all the hilarity and revelry that a pack of gangly teenagers in polyester and feathery headgear can muster would carry on without notice of me and my forlorn little trumpet. I ain’t saying you need to shed a tear or anything, but I did drop band hot potato–style mid–sophomore year and switched to a cappella choir, became a theater fag, and found my badge to wear in the relentlessly status-conscious gauntlet that is the American high school. I never picked up that trumpet again.

Which I suppose means I might still be working through those high school slights every time I throw myself full force into the ecstatic horn frenzy of the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, but what the hell. Add these East Bay bacchanalians to the serious brass lovefest being led by the likes of DeVotchKa, Beirut, and a Hawk and a Hacksaw, and I think I’ve hit just the therapy I need. Look around: suddenly trumpets, trombones, and tubas are the new guitar. Welcome back to band camp, I tell myself, only this time it’s cool.

Let the healing begin!

And what better way to introduce our six romping, stomping Gomorrans than with a call for rejuvenation? The band name itself is a gospel to them, a platform from which to preach their party-as-catharsis convictions while shaking out some of the most deliriously crooked New Orleans ragtime you’ve ever heard. It’s more than just a name — it’s a way of life.

"The funny thing is, the name existed for probably six months before we were technically even a band," chief songwriter and banjo-playing vocalist Beebe says, chuckling, at a Mission coffeehouse. (At the risk of provoking flashbacks of high school football coaches, members prefer to be called by their last names.) "My brother Adam created the concept, artwork, Web site, everything … even had us all listed in the lineup before we’d even played a note!"

"Yeah, we each ended up finding out when we’d bump into a friend who’d say, ‘Oh, I heard you’re in a new band,’" tuba player Kirley says. "Eventually, we all discovered we were in a band together, so we figured, let’s do it!"

In addition to Beebe and Kirley, four others learned of their band membership: Davis (trumpet, vocals), Lehnartz (clarinet, vocals), Knippelmeir (trombone, vocals), and Westbrook (trash drums). But before we leap to any Maurice Starr–mastermind comparisons, a few facts: all six were already good friends who lived together, as they still do, in a house in Oakland. All were musicians who shared a passion for old-time sounds, particularly those blaring out of New Orleans. All of them have called the Crescent City home at some point. Putting together a band was a natural next step … unless, of course, you’re of a more spiritual bent and wish to call it destiny.

A kind of spirituality does figure prominently in the Gomorran ethic, albeit one that preaches the virtue of whiskey and encourages audiences to bear witness as well. Once a tent-revival level of rapture has been reached, Beebe invites members of the congregation onstage for faith healings, which feed the cycle of sin and salvation. "If I take in some sin, it’s gonna get disbursed," he jokes, bandmates nodding to show they’re willing to share the burden.

Judging from their recent self-released eponymous debut, bearing such a heavy load is not a problem. Recorded in an abandoned hotel and featuring a drum kit culled from junkyard roamings — "I’d much rather put it together myself than have some fancy kit," Westbrook says — the album wobbles with rickety charms while exuding the moxie of a midnight bender in the making. From the clattering pot-and-pan rhythms of "The Westbrook Two-Step," inspired by the train tracks outside the drummer’s workplace, to the humidity dripping from each frantic note of the klezmer-Dixieland fusion workout "Klanzmeirtong" to the boozy testimonial "Whiskey Paycheck," the Gomorrans celebrate wild abandon with, well, wild abandon. They might be playing ragtime, but they’re by no means a ragtime band: "We’re definitely rock ‘n’ rollers playing jazz, not the other way round," Lehnartz explains.

And with this comes the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I assume? Beebe gives some illuminating confirmation when I ask what inspires their songwriting: "Sleep deprivation, definitely."

Hmm, all that sin disbursing will do that, won’t it? *

"MISHAP SCIENCE FAIR"

With the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Top Ramen, James Call and the Missing Teens, and Brian Kenny Fresno

Fri/8, 8 p.m., $8 or free with erupting papier-mâché volcano, robot, or perpetual motion machine

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(510) 595-7188

www.12galaxies.com

Living in the moment

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Anat Cohen, an Israeli-born New Yorker often found working in Latin bands, seems intent on leaving no jazz style unexplored. Whether on tenor saxophone — essaying the opening melody of Cuban drummer Francisco Mela’s straight-ahead "John Ramsay" from his 2006 album Melao (Ayva) — or soloing on clarinet with the Brazilian Choro Ensemble, Cohen seems to intuitively absorb the musical language she’s engaged in. With a burgeoning reputation preceding her and two new albums in tow, she comes to Yoshi’s this week, performing alongside guitarist Vic Juris and drummer Daniel Freedman. Special guest pianist Jason Lindner, Cohen’s longtime colleague and mentor, will sit in on June 6.

Earlier this year Cohen released Poetica, a sensuous, clarinet-based album augmented with a string quartet, simultaneously with Noir, a film score–ready big-band full-length on which she played mostly saxophone. She produced both records and released them on her up-and-coming independent label, Anzic.

Cohen spoke by phone from Tel Aviv, where she was preparing for a concert with her two brothers, saxophonist Yuval and trumpet player Avishai. The latter sat in with the SFJAZZ Collective this spring when Dave Douglas was unavailable.

She laughed about releasing two albums at once, saying it has raised eyebrows even though that wasn’t her intent. "They’re very different, but it just makes sense to put them out together because they show different musical adventures for me," she said. "Different musical personalities on the instruments and different approaches to the music."

She began Noir almost a year before Poetica, but the big-band recording was more complex to put together. Cohen and coproducer Oded Lev-Ari, who wrote the arrangements, had gathered some musicians to try the music out. The results sounded good, and they wanted to record it, but they needed more music to complete the album.

"It’s a longer process, obviously, because it’s a 15-piece band, and it just takes longer to write everything," Cohen said. The tunes are a travelogue of cultures reflecting Cohen’s journeys that opens with Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona’s "La Comparsa," touches on Sun Ra and Hobart Dotson’s "You Never Told Me That You Care," and closes with music by a couple of Brazilian icons: Hermeto Pascual’s "Bebe!" and Pixinguinha’s "Ingênuo." There are also American pop songs such as "Cry Me a River" and "No Moon at All."

During the making of Noir, Cohen decided she’d like to make a clarinet album and enlisted friend and bassist Omer Avitale to write string arrangements. Poetica includes the old Israeli songs "Hofim" and "Eyn Gedi," the Jacques Brel song "La Chanson des Vieux Amants," and a lush arrangement of John Coltrane’s "Lonnie’s Lament."

Cohen called Coltrane her "constant inspiration." "I’ve tried along my musical path to really be open," she explained. "I have, of course, a passion for the traditionals of the American songbook and the American art form called jazz. But I also fell in love along the way with a lot of world music."

She’s the only non-Brazilian member of the Choro Ensemble but has toured the country several times, taking the opportunity to learn its language, culture, and music.

She’s also immersed herself in the rich musical heritages of Venezuela and Colombia. "I got stuck in Colombia during 9/11, and I couldn’t come back to New York," Cohen recalled. "I stayed there for three weeks, and I learned so much about Colombian music. It was a great adventure, really living the moment."

ANAT COHEN

Wed/6–Thurs/7, 8 and 10 p.m., $10

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West

Jack London Square, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

Nerves of Chrome

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whatever happened to all the cyberpunks? Once upon a Blade Runner, it looked like neo-noirists and novelists from the early 1980s were finally getting turned on to George Orwell’s vision, predicting a dystopian, nightmarish future in which humans were subject to conditioning and control. Even musicians were getting it: perhaps inspired by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (Buddah, 1975), such artists as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Pere Ubu were dabbling in a postapocalyptic music world by the close of the ’70s. But if there was one band that dared to define the genre back then, Chrome was it.

Lauded by critics and fans as one of the pioneers of industrial rock, the San Francisco outfit coupled psych-punk and electrodub with lyrical themes of alienation, paranoia, and ’50s sci-fi cinema, though its sound mirrored bands like the Sonics and Wipers when drummer Damon Edge and bassist Gary Spain came together in 1976. Following the release of its debut, The Visitation (Siren), later that year, the group folded once its members realized the album was a sales flop. Everything changed, however, once Spain and Edge hooked up with Helios Creed, a guitarist whom Spain had jammed with during the early ’70s. As Creed explained over the phone, "Chrome was the only band that was doing something I was interested in … space rock, punk rock, and the sci-fi kind of thing."

"It was really psychedelic, and it wasn’t in to be psychedelic back then. It was just punk and Budweiser," he continued. "Psychedelia would remind punks of the hippies, so they wouldn’t want anything to do with that. And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, ’cause acid punk doesn’t exist.’"

Creed also revealed that a falling-out during the recording sessions for Chrome’s sophomore effort, Alien Soundtracks (Siren, 1978), resulted in Spain’s exit in 1977 and subsequently ushered in a radical shift away from the band’s protopunk beginnings.

"Damon started playing some tapes that they had made a year or two before that were outtakes from The Visitation, and I said, ‘God! This stuff is fucking great!’" Creed said, laughing. "I liked it better than The Visitation, and I suggested that we make stuff like that and integrate it into our punk set."

Alien Soundtracks‘ 1979 follow-up, Half Machine Lip Moves (Siren), adhered to this formula as well. Joining scratchy, three-chord guitars and trash can–like drums with Creed’s growled vocals and an excess of waterlogged-sounding effects, the result mirrored some otherworldly murky realm. By the time Creed and Edge’s final collaboration, 3rd from the Sun (Siren), was released in 1982, the combo was heading in a more gothic direction, similar to that of contemporaries Killing Joke and Swans.

Chrome remained a duo until its ’83 demise, though the bandmates adopted a taped drum machine nicknamed Johnny L. Cyborg as their third member and briefly enlisted John and Hilary Stench from Pearl Harbour and the Explosions. During this period the group was primarily a recording project and only played live twice, to sold-out crowds in San Francisco and at a Bologna, Italy, festival. Edge moved to Europe to start another version of Chrome, while Creed remained stateside to work on his solo career, angry that he was left behind.

After Edge died in 1995, Creed carried on with the band because he felt he was just as entitled as his ex-bandmate to put out Chrome records. Since 1996, Creed has recorded a handful of full-lengths under the Chrome moniker but tends to focus more on his solo material. His current West Coast tour will include Chrome and Helios Creed songs, and he revealed he hasn’t ruled out a future full-on Chrome tour. Creed also wanted to set the record straight about his strained partnership with Edge.

"Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Damon. We just went through some shit," he clarified. "I forgive and love everybody." *

CHROME

With Battleship

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $12

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

There’s no business …

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

One of the most entertaining books ever written about the commercial theater is Ken Mandlebaum’s Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops (St. Martin’s, 1992). There’s something inherently fascinating about the backstories and eventual fates of big stage musicals. The egos involved and the radical revisions that take place during tryouts and previews (a process far more public than movie retweaking) make for high drama, even before you add the Russian roulette economic factor.

While Mandlebaum wrote from a dedicated fan’s orchestra-seat perspective, the absorbing new documentary ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway goes way backstage — director Dori Berinstein is a Tony-winning stage producer (her latest hit is Legally Blonde) and has privileged access. Her team reportedly shot more than 250 hours of footage, encompassing virtually every Broadway show of the 2003 to 2004 season, then narrowed the focus to the development and destinies of four high-profile musicals.

The quartet spotlighted here spans artistic ranges and commercial fates. The $14 million spectacular Wicked, a schlock-sentimental version of Gregory Maguire’s revisionist Oz fantasy, got no critical love during its closely observed San Francisco tryout — erstwhile Godspell composer Stephen Schwartz admits to making significant changes between that run and the Broadway opening. But while Wicked proved neither a reviewers’ nor a Tony favorite, it’s a rare case in which those factors don’t matter. It’s a massive million-dollar-a-week hit whose geek-empowerment message particularly resonates with younger girls. Those whose parents can afford Broadway prices, that is.

On a whole other plane, the Tony Kushner–Jeanine Tesori project Caroline, or Change was an emotionally complex, stirring, major high-culture event. Its producers, as New Yorker critic John Lahr puts it, "agreed to lose a little money so this very good thing which doesn’t fit the commercial formula [could] be seen." If only for a few months: with its more bitter than sweet emphasis on racial inequity and family dysfunction, no amount of acclaim could turn it into a tourist attraction.

While practically a Broadway bargain at merely $3.5 million in production costs, Avenue Q was considered the season’s longest shot — a Sesame Street parody whose relatively youthful target audience isn’t big on theatergoing. Wags anticipated an off-Broadway show that belonged off Broadway. Its triumphant critical reception and eventual clutch of Tony Awards turned such expectations upside down. Cocreators Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez are the giddiest protagonists here, their can’t-believe-our-luck exuberance offering a contrast to the sober insights delivered by such experienced hands as Schwartz and Caroline‘s director, George C. Wolfe.

Finally, there’s Taboo, a $10 million total loss for producer Rosie O’Donnell, who shepherded it to Broadway after loving a smaller-scale London staging of the gender-bending, Boy George–scored musical. Was it just too gay for Broadway? (No, that’s not an oxymoron.) Was it simply not very good? (A devoted cadre of mostly punk-goth fans would vehemently disagree.) Did negative press attention to O’Donnell and an apparently turbulent production process unfairly brand it a flop before the opening? We may never know — Taboo sure ain’t coming to a theater near you anytime soon. One of ShowBusiness‘s most poignant threads focuses on young unknown Euan Morton, who wins raves in a star part in the huge show. After its closure, his US work visa is revoked; he’ll have to restart his career back in England from square one.

ShowBusiness covers everything from playwriting to rehearsals to street buzz to critics, but one wishes it had more depth. Berinstein’s insiderdom gets her access but perhaps also limits her willingness to bare all. Clocking in at 102 minutes, her documentary is almost a dirt-free zone. It’s refreshing when Marx and book writer Jeff Whitty admit they could barely stand each other while collaborating on Avenue Q — though success certainly improves their rapport. And ultimately, their multiple Tony Award wins provide a dramatic highlight. At the ceremony, Carol Channing and LL Cool J copresent an award. It’s a showy moment whose mix of the sublime and the surreal encapsulates how unpredictable the business Berinstein examines can be. *

SHOWBUSINESS: THE ROAD
TO BROADWAY

Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.showbusiness-themovie.com“>www.showbusiness-themovie.com”>www.sfbg.com

Call the docs

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Now in its ninth year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival continues to expand its scope, with two long weekends of narrative films and documentaries plus several shorts programs. If you didn’t catch The Last Days of Left Eye during one of its recent VH-1 airings, it’s well worth a look on the big screen. After struggling through years of alcoholism and an abusive relationship (you know, the one where she burned the dude’s house down), hip-hop icon Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes found herself, kinda, through rehab and multiple trips to a faith healer in Honduras — the site of her fatal 2002 car accident. Composed mostly of footage shot for a documentary that was in progress when Lopes died, Last Days — directed by Lauren Lazin, an Oscar nominee for 2003’s Tupac: Resurrection — offers an unguarded look at the fragile megastar.

Another doc worth checking out is The Clinton 12, a PBS-esque look at the events leading up to the 1958 bombing of the first court-ordered integrated high school in the South. After segregation was outlawed, low-key Clinton, Tenn., saw an uptick in hate (cue the Ku Klux Klan) and played host to a media frenzy as the first day of school approached; a "home guard" was formed by veterans and other concerned Clinton citizens to help keep peace in the city, though the National Guard soon stepped in as well. Even if you don’t factor in James Earl Jones’s narration (and a dramatic score), Keith Henry McDaniel’s film has plenty of gravitas.

Octavio Warnock-Graham’s Silences also looks at racial tensions, but on a much smaller scale: within one family, all white except for the filmmaker, the mixed-race product of his mother’s short-lived relationship with an African American dancer. In his 25-minute film, Warnock-Graham travels from Ohio to the Bay Area in search of his long-lost father and draws his mother’s family into a discussion of what’s clearly been an elephant in the room since his birth.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/7–Sun/10 and June 14–17, most films $10

See film listings for showtimes and venue info

www.sfbff.org

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