Volumes

PG&E’s candidates

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EDITORIAL We’ve seen plenty of allies of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. We’ve seen a few PG&E bagmen, PG&E shills, and PG&E fronts. But there’s never been anyone elected to the board in our 40 years who was actually a paid attorney for PG&E.
This year there’s at least one and possibly two candidates who have worked as PG&E lawyers — and that alone should disqualify them ever from holding public office in San Francisco. The most obvious and direct conflict involves Doug Chan, the former police commissioner who is seeking a seat from District 4. Documents on file with the California Public Utilities Commission show that Chan’s law firm, Chan, Doi, and Leal, has received more than $200,000 in fees from PG&E in just the past two years.
Chan won’t come to the phone to discuss what he did for the utility, won’t respond to questions posed through his campaign manager and press secretary, won’t return calls to his law firm, and thus won’t give the public any idea what sorts of conflicts of interest he’d have if he took office.
This is nothing new for Chan: back in 2002 he put his name on PG&E campaign material opposing public power and earned a spot in the Guardian’s Hall of Shame.
Then there’s Rob Black, who worked as an attorney for Nielsen Merksamer, the law firm that handled all of the dirty dealings for the anti-public-power campaign in 2002. Black worked with Jim Sutton, his former law professor and PG&E’s main legal operative, during that period but insists he did no work on anything related to PG&E or the campaign. That’s tough to believe.
All of this comes at a time when PG&E is going out of its way, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to buff up its image — and to fight the city’s modest but significant plans for public power.
As Steven T. Jones reports on page 16, the notorious utility is well aware that its future in San Francisco is shaky. The city is bidding to provide public electric power to the Hunters Point shipyard redevelopment project and preparing to provide public power to Treasure Island. There is a study in the works to look at developing tidal power. The supervisors are moving forward on Community Choice Aggregation, which will put the city directly in the business of selling retail electricity to customers (albeit through PG&E’s grid). And there’s talk brewing of a public power ballot initiative for next November.
PG&E president Thomas King met with Mayor Gavin Newsom this summer and sent him a nice, friendly letter afterward discussing all the ways the city and PG&E could work together.
But in fact, the utility is already opposing even the baby steps coming out of City Hall: PG&E has bid against San Francisco for rights to sell power to the shipyard, and that’s forced the city to cut prices and reduce the revenue it could have gained from Lennar Corp., the master developer. PG&E is trying to stop the city from selling power on Treasure Island and has financial ties to a private company that has rights to Golden Gate tidal power development until 2008. Meanwhile, the utility just hired the former secretary to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission — a woman who sat in on every closed-session strategy meeting the panel held, including sessions dealing with litigation against PG&E.
In other words, PG&E is gearing up for all-out political warfare — and the mayor and supervisors need to start preparing too. From now on, people should see whatever PG&E does as hostile — and on every front the city needs to adopt an aggressive strategy to move forward toward eliminating the company’s private power monopoly.
For starters, it’s ridiculous that the city should have to fight PG&E for the right to sell power at the Hunters Point shipyard. The Redevelopment Agency should have made public power a part of the program from the start, and the supervisors should examine that plan immediately to see if it can be amended to require Lennar to buy power from San Francisco. Newsom needs to take to the bully pulpit and say that if PG&E gets this contract, nobody on the Redevelopment Agency Commission will ever be reappointed.
Meanwhile, when Chan and Black appear anywhere in public this election season, they need to be asked to fully disclose their ties with PG&E and outline their positions on public power.
And it’s time for the public power coalition to start meeting again, with the aim of crafting a ballot measure that will create a full-scale municipal system, perhaps as soon as November 2007. SFBG
PS PG&E already has one staunch ally on the board, Sean Elsbernd, a Newsom appointee who also worked in the late 1990s for the Nielsen firm. That’s three too many.
PPS If Newsom is really for public power, as he claims, then why is he pushing so hard for two PG&E call-up votes for the board? And why is he not publicly denouncing PG&E’s attempt to scuttle public power and lending his political capital to a new municipalization effort?
PPPS The SF Weekly’s Matt Smith last week all but endorsed Doug Chan — but made no mention of Chan’s PG&E ties. Did that somehow slip through Smith’s investigative reporting net?

Save Daly — and the city

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EDITORIAL The sleaze in District 6 is utterly out of control. So far, five different organizations, all claiming to be independent of any candidate, have sent out expensive mailers blasting away at incumbent Chris Daly (and urging voters, either directly or indirectly, to support his main opponent, Rob Black).
The law says that these groups can spend all the money they want, without abiding by campaign contribution limits, as long as they aren’t coordinating with Black’s staff, but let’s not be naive here: this is a carefully planned and orchestrated campaign by a handful of wealthy, powerful interests that will spend whatever it takes to get rid of one of the board’s most reliable progressive leaders.
Daly’s a hard worker, has a solid record, and is popular in his district — but after a while, this much negative campaigning starts to take a toll. And for the sake of the progressive movement in San Francisco, Black and the downtown forces simply can’t be allowed to defeat Daly.
Daly is more than a good supervisor (although he certainly meets that qualification). He’s part of the class of 2000, one of a crew of activists who swept into power in the first district elections as a rebellion against the developer-driven politics of then-mayor Willie Brown. He has become one of the city’s most promising young leaders, someone who, with a bit more seasoning (and diplomacy), could and should have a bright future in local politics.
He’s also very much a district supervisor and a symbol of how district elections allowed the neighborhoods to take back the city. The attack on him is an attack on the entire progressive movement and all that’s been accomplished in this city in the past six years.
Daly needs help. He needs volunteers to walk precincts, distribute literature, and get out the vote. This has to be a top priority for independent neighborhood and progressive activists in San Francisco. There’s a campaign rally Oct. 28 at 10 a.m. at the northeast corner of 16th Street and Mission. Daly’s campaign headquarters are at 2973 16th St. The phone is (415) 431-3259. Show up, volunteer, give money … this one really, really matters. SFBG

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
The San Francisco Examiner reported last week that enrollment in the local public schools is down by another 1,000 students this year, which means, some school board members say, that more sites will have to be closed.
I understand the economic issues — the state pays for education based on average daily attendance, and if fewer kids show up, the school district gets fewer dollars. And I’ll admit I have a dog in this fight: my son goes to McKinley Elementary, a wonderful school that represents everything that’s right about public education in San Francisco — and McKinley was on the hit list last year. It’s a small school; that makes it vulnerable.
I also understand that there are some things the school board can’t control. Families are leaving San Francisco in droves. That’s largely because of the high cost of housing, which is an issue for the mayor and the supervisors (and one that’s going to take a lot more work and resolve to address). So we’re going to lose some students that way.
But we’re also losing a lot of kids to private schools; I know that because I have good friends who’ve chosen that route, mostly because they don’t think the public schools can offer what they want for their kids. This is a perception problem, and it’s something the school board doesn’t have to sit back and accept.
That, I guess, is what really frustrates me — so many people simply saying that as a matter of strategic planning, we need to assume 1,000 fewer students a year will go to the public schools. The district spent around a quarter of a million dollars last year on a public relations office, and almost all the office seemed to do was hide information from the press and promote the career of then-superintendent Arlene Ackerman. Now Ackerman’s gone, and so is her officious flak, Lorna Ho. It’s time to take district PR seriously.
How hard would it be to have one PR staffer dedicated to creating a major citywide ad campaign promoting the public schools? I suspect it would be relatively easy to find a top-flight local ad firm that would work pro bono and not at all impossible to raise money for media (billboards, bus sides, direct mail, print ads, TV, whatever). Lots of prominent people would do testimonials. Set a goal: no enrollment drop-off next year. Before we close any more schools, it’s worth a try.
Now this: Clear Channel, which owns 10 radio stations in San Francisco and does almost no local public affairs programming at all, recently dropped its only decent San Francisco show, Keepin’ It Real with Will and Willie on KQKE, and replaced it with a syndicated feed out of Los Angeles. To listen to most of Clear Channel radio, you’d never actually know that you’re in San Francisco; the giant Texas chain doesn’t care anything about this community.
If you’re sick of this kind of behavior by an increasingly consolidated monopoly broadcast industry (using, by the way, the public airwaves), you’re not alone: Media Alliance, the Youth Media Council, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will host a hearing on media consolidation in Oakland on Oct. 27, and two Federal Communications Commission members, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, will be there to take public comments.
The hearing’s at the Oakland Marriott Civic Center, 1001 Broadway. For more information, go to www.media-alliance.org. SFBG

Allison inspires youth

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OPINION I first saw Aimee Allison, District 2 candidate for the Oakland City Council, when she addressed a large, enthusiastic crowd of high school students, mostly students of color, from Oakland Tech, McClymonds, and Skyline. She spoke about the ruin and costs of war, the need for decent jobs, and practical ways and means for overcoming poverty in Oakland.
What impressed me about the young, vivacious candidate from the Grand Lake–Chinatown district was not just her Ron Dellums–like vision of Oakland, where “a better world begins.” It was her special ability to break through youthful feelings of despondency, the Generation X cynicism that continues to impede social progress. Allison has a special asset that her adversary, incumbent Pat Kernighan, lacks: an ability to inspire hope and activism among youth, including the struggling students in the least affluent sections of our city.
On Sept. 17, Constitution Day at Laney College, students hosted a debate between Kernighan and Allison. After the debate I talked with Reginald James, a 24-year-old Laney College student. He told me other students agreed that Kernighan was unprepared. “She was unable to relate to youth, to find common ground.”
James said Kernighan tended to blame the federal government for Oakland’s problems, deflecting responsibility from the City Council on which she serves. In contrast, Allison said incumbents should accept accountability for their failures, and she challenged the students to become active in their own cause.
During the debate Kernighan was almost fatalistic. “When there are not enough resources, we have to make hard decisions,” she argued. After the debate, Oakland teacher Jonah Zern summarized Kernighan’s presentation: “Pat continuously stated that she was powerless to change the problems of Oakland, that it was the state and federal government that need to make changes. It made me wonder. Why was she running for City Council?”
It was not her political positions as such or even her record that irked the youthful audience. One student asked Kernighan why the streets in the flatlands are not as clean as those above the freeway. She replied, “They don’t sweep the streets up there because the people do not tend to throw their trash out in the street.” The insinuation that people in the hills are superior to less-fortunate folk upset some students. Allison’s remarks, in contrast, were well received. Allison said, “In rich neighborhoods, parents can raise money for their kids’ sports teams. In others, schools don’t have teams. In rich neighborhoods, they can send their kids to music lessons, while in poor neighborhoods, music and art programs are being cut. Every child deserves an opportunity.”
Kernighan works hard. She knows the ins and outs of city government. But she has no vision, no plan to address the structural defects of Oakland’s social life. As a successful businessperson, Allison responds well to the needs and feelings of the middle class. But unlike most politicians, she maintains close relations and ties with the young and poor of Oakland. She has a valuable talent for enlisting youth in the fight against crime, for uniting our diverse cultures.
Understanding the needs and longings of young Oaklanders, tapping their potential to become agents of change, is a precondition of effective leadership on the City Council. If the Laney debate is an example, Kernighan is out of touch. SFBG
Paul Rockwell
Paul Rockwell is a writer living in Oakland.

PG&E’s extreme makeover

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› steve@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom called a meeting with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. president Thomas King in July to let the utility chief know that the city intended to pursue public power projects on Treasure Island and Hunters Point.
“It was just to tell him that we’re going to do it,” Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone said of the meeting. “The mayor thought it was a gentlemanly thing to do.”
King used the occasion to start an aggressive new offensive — and to preview PG&E’s latest political strategy.
In an Aug. 10 letter to Newsom, King promised not to fight the city’s plans in court and pledged to develop a better relationship with the city.
“We know that it was in this spirit of cooperation that you approached us last month, and we want to foster this spirit and forge an even stronger partnership in efforts to protect our environment in the years ahead. That’s why I wanted to respond to your questions and suggestions — and to share with you some ideas of my own,” King wrote, listing one of those ideas as helping the city develop energy from tidal power at the mouth of the bay, which Newsom had recently announced a desire to pursue.
The day after PG&E wrote the letter, Newsom and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) head Susan Leal announced the city’s intention to supply public power, mostly from clean solar and hydroelectric sources, to the redevelopment project on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the politically connected Lennar Corp. (which is also part of the team with the rights to build on Treasure Island) has the contract to build 1,600 new homes.
“What we want to provide is a green community at a rate that meets or beats PG&E,” Leal told the Guardian, noting the history of environmental injustices that have been heaped on the southeast part of town. “We’re very excited about what’s going on at Hunters Point. . . . It’s important that the city do the right thing for that community.”
And just as PG&E was pledging cooperation, it aggressively set out to undermine the city’s plans with competing bids and continued its fiercely adversarial posture in another half-dozen realms in which it must work with the city, battles that have cost San Franciscans millions of dollars.
“This is a competitive world and this is fair game, don’t you think?” PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu — who used to be Newsom’s deputy press secretary — told us of company efforts to subvert the public power projects.
Last month PG&E also hired away SFPUC commission secretary Mary Jung, who had been privy to closed-session discussions about various city strategies for dealing with PG&E. Jung, who did not return a call for comment, was required to sign a confidentiality agreement and threatened with criminal charges if she spills city secrets, although city officials acknowledge that would be difficult to prove.
PG&E has also launched a high-profile public relations offensive designed to repackage the utility as a clean and green crusader against global warming and a supporter of community programs such as the mayor’s pet project, SF Connect, to which it contributed $25,000 last month.
“The company has a long and continuing history of fighting against the city rather than working with the city on issues involving municipal power, improved reliability, connecting city facilities, and protecting ratepayers,” Matt Dorsey, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told us. “If PG&E wants to demonstrate its good corporate citizenship, it can start by changing the nature of its relationship with the city.”
BIG BUCKS
If anyone from the Bay Area needs a reminder about the big money, bare-knuckle approach PG&E uses when its interests are threatened, they need only look up the road to what’s happening in Sacramento and Yolo counties.
PG&E has so far spent more than $10 million fighting Propositions H and I in Yolo County and Measure L in Sacramento County, which together would allow the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) to annex more than 70,000 customers in Davis and surrounding communities.
The PG&E effort has saturated mailboxes and the airwaves with messages that inflate the cost of taking over its transmission lines, imply threats of a drawn-out legal battle, and make bold claims of its being an environmentally friendly utility (for example, including nuclear power in its calculations of how “green” PG&E is).
“They’re trying to spread fear and confusion,” Davis-based public power advocate Dan Berman told us. “A new thing comes out every day. But we keep citing the message of lower rates and better service.”
In fact, SMUD has rates that are about 30 percent lower than PG&E’s and a power portfolio that includes significantly more energy from renewable sources than PG&E uses. Even King’s claim that PG&E is “the leading solar utility in the county, having hooked up more than 12,000 solar-generating customers” is misleading. The number is large because PG&E has the largest customer base in the country, but the solar rebates were state mandated and SMUD inspired and come from ratepayer surcharges.
Still, PG&E justifies its aggressive campaign in Yolo County in terms of warding off a hostile takeover of its customers. For residents there and new customers in San Francisco that the SFPUC wants to serve, PG&E’s Chiu repeats the mantra that “we have an obligation to provide services.”
Yet critics of the company say the campaign is about more than just holding on to those customers. Right now more than a dozen California communities are pushing for public power, most involving community choice aggregation (CCA) — which allows cities to buy power on behalf of citizens, potentially bypassing PG&E.
“That’s one of the reasons they’re pulling out all the stops in Davis, because if this goes through, it will embolden other communities,” Barbara George of Women’s Energy Matters told us.
San Francisco was an early city to pursue CCA, but plans to implement it have moved slowly, and now other communities — including Marin County and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley — are even further along.
“San Francisco is way behind in community choice,” George said. “The mayor is giving PG&E a lot of time to put out its claims to be green in order to fight this.”
Part of that push involves a slick 16-page mailer sent out in August by “The New PG&E” outlining “a proposal for an unprecedented and far-reaching partnership with the city of San Francisco to create the cleanest and greenest city in the nation.”
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — a longtime public power advocate — is skeptical. “I welcome it, but I don’t buy it,” he said. “Their desire to work with us is typically predicated on the receding of our efforts to pursue public power.”
In fact, King seemed to say as much in his letter to Newsom when he wrote, “We see the investment of time, money and political capital in the public power fight as a distraction from the real need — providing clean, reliable and safe power to San Francisco.”
Chiu denied that there is a quid pro quo here, saying, “It is our intent to help San Francisco become clean and green, whether or not it comes with the city’s blessing.”
Yet Leal said the company seems more interested in stopping public power than going green. Rather than trying to undermine the city’s plans for the area, she questioned, “Why don’t they have the rest of Hunters Point, which are already their customers, be a green community?”
COMPETING WITH PG&E
Lennar is expected to announce in the next week or two whether it will go with public power or PG&E at Hunters Point. “No final decision has been made at this point,” Lennar spokesperson Jason Barnett told us.
Yet it didn’t have to be this way. Lennar’s redevelopment project is being subsidized with public funds that could have been conditioned on public power. Even as late as Oct. 17, when the San Francisco Redevelopment Board agreed to change Lennar’s contract to let the company out of building rental units, public power could have been part of the trade-off. Agency chief Marcia Rosen did not return Guardian calls asking why the public agency didn’t take advantage of this leverage.
For her part, Leal said, “I’m not afraid of competition.” It was a point echoed by Ragone, who said Newsom believes the city shouldn’t be afraid to compete with PG&E on Hunters Point or Treasure Island or to stop a PG&E bid to help develop clean tidal power.
But Mirkarimi doesn’t necessary agree. “Why do they have that right?” he asked, arguing the city shouldn’t let PG&E take control of new energy resources or customers who should be served by public power. “The tentacles of PG&E haven’t receded any less at City Hall and we should always be on our guard.”
Leal and Ragone each acknowledged that competing with PG&E isn’t always a fair fight. After all, in addition to having the resources of nearly 10 million customers paying some of the highest rates in the country, PG&E is also alleged in a lawsuit by the city to have absconded with $4.6 billion in ratepayer money during its 2002 bankruptcy, in what Herrera called “an elaborate corporate shell game.” On Oct. 2, the US Supreme Court denied review of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruling favoring the city, sending the case back to the trial court to determine just how much PG&E owes ratepayers.
That is just one of several ongoing legal actions between the city and PG&E, including conflicts over the city’s right to power municipal buildings, PG&E’s hindrance of city efforts to create more solar sites, and battles over the interconnection agreement that sets various charges that the city must pay to use PG&E lines.
MONEY IN ACTION
A good example of PG&E tactics occurred during the July 26 meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is overseeing work on the Bay Bridge. As part of that work, a power cable going to Treasure Island needed to be moved, but the Treasure Island Development Authority didn’t have the $3.4 million to do it.
So PG&E executive Kevin Dasso showed up at the MTC meeting with a check made out for that amount, offering to pay for the new cable and thus control the power line through which the SFPUC intends to provide public power to the 10,000 residents who will ultimately live on the island.
“This deal with Treasure Island was really egregious. They came in like a game show host and held up a check to try to stop this baby step toward public power on Treasure Island,” said Sup. Tom Ammiano, who also sits on the MTC board. “It shows PG&E is not asleep at the wheel by any means, and anybody who’s elected is going to need to stay vigilant.”
Ammiano was able to persuade the MTC to loan TIDA the money and preserve the city’s public power option. PG&E officials are blunt about their intentions. Chiu said, “We both want to provide power to Treasure Island.” So officials note the importance of being vigilant when it comes to PG&E.
“There will be other meetings where PG&E will wave around $3.4 million checks,” Leal said. “And at some of those meetings, we won’t be there to stop them.”
So public power advocates are concerned that public officials are letting PG&E rehabilitate its public image. Newsom has recently shared the stage with PG&E executives at a green building conference in San Francisco and the Treasure Island ceremony where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark global warming measure that PG&E long opposed before ultimately supporting. Ragone said neither these events nor PG&E’s contribution to SF Connect nor his direct dealings with King indicate any softening of Newsom’s support for public power.
“We’re going to do what’s in the best interests of the city of San Francisco,” Ragone said. “This is the first mayor to support public power, and that hasn’t changed at all.” SFBG
To see the letter from King to Newsom and other documents related to this story, go to www.sfbg.com.

SPECIAL: Candy apples and razor blades

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Colorado Springs, Colo., is likely the most Christian city in America, a Vatican for the Evangelicals, if you will. It’s home base for some of the most potent forces in Christian conservative politics, and perhaps no place in the country celebrates Christmas with as much conviction. The central Colorado city of 350,000 even sports a 25-acre Christmas-themed amusement park known as Santa’s Workshop that stays open from spring until the end of the year, complete with rides and a shop selling miniature nativity sets and Precious Moments figurines. Christmas, more than any other event, defines the reputation of this sort of conservative religious town.
San Francisco, on the other hand, could be the most secular city in America — and as far as national holidays go, Halloween best represents our taste for light sin and playful fascination with the demonic.
And for better or worse, much of it happens in the Castro, in a giant frenzy of partying that attracts not only local revelers but spectators from around the Bay Area. Therein lies what over the years has become something of a problem.
With literally days remaining before more than 100,000 people are expected in the neighborhood, the city still hasn’t made clear exactly how it’s going to respond, what the rules will be — or whether partyers will really be greeted at 11 p.m. with water hoses.
In fact, some fear that the confusion and disorganization, combined with rumors that the city wants to make the event as unpleasant as possible to discourage huge crowds, could lead to a nasty backlash.
The last couple of years haven’t actually been all that bad, according to post-Halloween Chronicle headlines. “A Not-Too-Scary Halloween,” began last year’s headline. “Police call Castro event one of the most peaceful lately.” A 2004 story declared the event that year for the most part a success too, the Chron’s perpetually nerdy headlines notwithstanding. “Spooky but Safe Fright Night: Tens of thousands converge on the Castro for a far-out, but peaceful, celebration.” Even 2003 wasn’t necessarily that terrible, despite one guy getting shot in the leg. The cops aggressively worked to keep out booze, and a lane through the crowds was widened for emergency vehicles.
But Castro residents haven’t forgotten when things did get out of control. A record 300,000 people turned out in 2002, and police said at the time that well before midnight, the crowd’s mood had turned dark. Four people were stabbed or slashed, bottles were lobbed at the cops, and 30 people were arrested. In 2001, 50 people were arrested, and one woman told police that she was drugged, abducted, and taken to a dirt road in South San Francisco, where she was raped by three men.
And community concerns about violence are on the rise these days in the Castro, where three assaults have taken place since July.
Frustration over what Halloween in the Castro had become — it began three decades ago as a block party and turned into a regional event for wall-to-wall crowds, which police in 2002 estimated were 60 percent visitors to the city — led to this year’s event becoming a campaign issue for District 8 incumbent Bevan Dufty and challenger Alix Rosenthal.
In a larger sense, the debate raises a question that has the late-night crowd up in arms: is San Francisco becoming too staid and cautious to hold a big, wild party?
Complaints about Halloween have been growing for some time. Castro residents and merchants who have grown tired of having to mop up foreign substances from the sidewalks and repair broken windows each year on Nov. 1 have approached Dufty, who earlier this year proposed ending all city support for the event in the hope of keeping the big, rowdy crowds away.
Problem is, you can’t really scrap Halloween in the Castro. Critics of Dufty’s proposal feared (and likely hoped) revelers would show up anyway.
Since then, Dufty and other city officials have been looking for a compromise — but few specifics have emerged. Dufty, who has been involved in negotiations with neighborhood residents and city officials, promised weeks ago that an outline for security measures and an entertainment itinerary would be available at www.halloweeninthecastro.com. But at press time the Web site was still empty.
“It’s totally appalling that the first planning meeting was in July,” Rosenthal said in an interview. “It should have been organized a year in advance…. I haven’t seen any public service announcements. If you’re going to fundamentally change an event like Halloween, you need to tell people what you’re going to do.”
Suggestions from Dufty, confirmed for us by the Mission District police station, include having just one music stage (there were three last year), keeping the Castro Muni open as opposed to previous years, and beefing up the public-safety presence at Market and Noe streets. Then, at 11 o’clock, water trucks would appear to clean the streets.
Over the last few months Rosenthal has suggested that the event be turned into a parade to keep the anxious crowds occupied, similar to what takes place in New York’s Greenwich Village each year. Access would be limited to one entry gate where sliding scale donations would be taken to help cover costs, and costumed attendees, whom Rosenthal said would perhaps be less likely to cause major disturbances, would receive a discount. Other access points would be for exits only.
She said police commanders from the Mission station have taken the position that Halloween should be as unpleasant as possible to discourage large crowds in the future, but the result could be angry resistance from partygoers. Sgt. Mark Solomon from the Mission station said he wouldn’t describe it as “unpleasant” but said there are certain types of visitors who can cause a variety of problems for the neighborhood.
“The outsiders who are coming in and urinating and defecating on the sidewalks and having sex and leaving the condoms behind, we’re going to address those kinds of problems and make them not want to come back,” Solomon said.
Rosenthal remains skeptical that Halloween in the Castro is sufficiently organized this year and properly balances honoring a long-running tradition and meeting the needs of fed-up Castro residents.
“There are a lot of people who just want to get rid of Halloween in the Castro entirely,” she said. “We can make this a fun party. Making this unpleasant will only make it more violent. I fear retribution.”
The Mayor’s Office now appears to have taken over responsibility for the event, but Martha Cohen, whom Dufty told us is in charge of the event, wasn’t available for comment.
Ted Strosser of the fun-advocacy group SF Party Party, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary on Halloween, said the outfit is concerned that allowing too many restrictions for the event would stifle the city’s traditional reverence for street parties. SF Party Party plans this year to canvass the city again with 100 costumed and party-crawling Abe Lincolns. He said trying to end Halloween in the Castro altogether would cause the same problems for Gavin Newsom that Willie Brown experienced when he attempted to rub out Critical Mass in the ’90s — record-breaking participants turned out as a show of force.
“San Francisco says it can safely host the Olympics, but it can’t host Halloween and deal with some San Jose teens,” Strosser said. “If SF can’t keep us safe and clean up trash, then that’s a problem.”
Dufty, for his part, told the Guardian again that maps should be up at www.halloweeninthecastro.com outlining the finalized plan shortly after we go to press. He said one of the biggest changes this year was keeping open the Castro Muni stop and admitted that the goal was to tone down Halloween. Some Castro residents still want entirely to get rid of Halloween, he said.
“I have spent so much time on Halloween,” he added. “I think it’s not fair I’m getting the smackdown for not wanting to have fun…. I feel responsible to make sure that everyone feels safe.” SFBG
Editor’s note: Alix Rosenthal is the domestic partner of Guardian city editor Steven T. Jones. Jones did not participate in the assigning, writing, or editing of this story.

SPECIAL: Ghosts of Homoween

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› marke@sfbg.com

When I was a little gurl growing up in Detroit, my ma used to spin an enchanting yarn about her downtown All Hallow’s Eves as a child in the ’50s. “We’d go out trick-or-treating in the early evening, me and your aunts, in our gypsy dresses pieced together from faded handkerchiefs,” she’d intone every year about this time.

“But we’d have to be home by the stroke of dark. That was when the men dressed as women would come out. There would be men dancing with men, women wearing cotton pants and button-down shirts. There would be a lot of screaming and carrying on. We used to watch them through the lacy window coverings in our bedroom, scared into laughing.”

You can imagine what such a tale of gaily marching ghouls and goblins did to an impressionable homosexual like myself. My mind swam with visions of drag queen sugar plums and wild-dyke Roy Rogerses, bell-bottomed sailor suits and sequins dripping from well-groomed mustaches. “Would there be men dressed as the Supremes?” I’d excitedly beg Ma to tell. “Would they do the mashed potato?” Oh, how I would have loved to slip the latch on those lace-veiled portals and join in their spirited parade!

For many a gay back in the day, Halloween was Pride before Pride existed, the one time they had implicit permission to show out in all their invert finery and let loose. Under the code of mid-20th-century gay oppression, the holiday was a fine time for gays to publicly congregate and whoop it up, embodying civilization’s nightmare and driving the children inside. It worked both ways: the gays at least had one high holy day for themselves, which happened to belong to the devil. And the hushed tales of it served to arouse the soon-to-be-overly-curious like me.

OUT IN THE STREETS

Halloween in the Castro began unofficially in the ’80s, when crowds attracted by the exotic window displays at Cliff’s Variety hardware store grew large enough to warrant a street closing. Grandpa Ernie DeBaca, the legendary owner of Cliff’s, drove a flatbed truck and started an annual Halloween kids’ party in the newly emerging gay neighborhood.

Soon, in a symbolic reenactment of Stonewall or the Harvey Milk riots, the gays “took the street” on an annual basis, forcing the cops to give up trying to regulate the party, and the event mushroomed into the wild, potentially dangerous — and gay-diluted — bacchanal of today.

But before the Castro exploded, back in the ’70s, the gays of San Francisco would throw on their best Barbara Stanwyck and hit up Polk Street to let it all hang out, gayngsta-style. Those were the glory days of the bathhouse generation, and whenever I want to project myself back into them, I visit amateur historian Uncle Donald’s Web site, www.thecastro.net. Therein lies an archive of Uncle Donald’s photos of the 1976 Polk Halloween scene, as well as a spotty but fascinating diary of gay Halloween celebrations from the disco era to 2003. It’s a treasure trove of artifacts and impressions — and perhaps an elegy to the seemingly endangered high holy day.

“Back then there were two outfits: drag queen and drag queen’s escort. You either wore a ball gown or black tie,” the husky-voiced 65-year-old says over the phone. “It was such a magical time. I don’t think of Halloween as a gay-only tradition, but there was a glorious, creative spirit, a feeling of freedom and community. It was something special.”

GIVING UP THE GHOST?

Does that spirit still exist? For years Halloween was the one night us gays didn’t have to be afraid. And now the gays of the Castro want to do away with Halloween because it scares them. Weird. “It’s become a zoo, but it’s great to see the young people still partying,” says Donald when I ask him about Halloween in the Castro today.

But none of my young gay friends like to party in the Castro, and not just because they fear getting bashed by out-of-towners. “There’s no inspiration to be found there. Everyone just wants to dress up as celebrities and stand around. Or else it’s for more uptight gay men to do drag and feel ‘wild,’” says fashion designer Allán Herrera, 23. “Private parties are more fun, but everyone just ends up in the Castro because the alternatives cost $50.”

Hunter Hargraves, 23, a drag performer, agrees. “You can dress up anytime you want in San Francisco, so I think the feeling of Halloween as a gay freedom day no longer applies,” he explains. “I have a lot of respect for what it was, but now it’s just one day among many.” Another friend, Brion, 17, says, “Halloween is for getting fucked up and checking out other high schools.”

So maybe the venerated spirit of Homoween has moved on from the Castro, just like it took flight from Polk Street two decades ago. The question, of course, is “to where”? In an age of gay mainstreaming, when the notion of community has been rapidly decentralized, diffused across a spectrum of tastes and miniagendas, maybe the purpose of a gay high holy day has evaporated into the ethosphere, like real-time cruising or leather bars.

Or maybe it’s just been mischievously internalized. As my 25-year-old roommate said the other day, trying on plaid hot pants and naughty-schoolboy accessories, “For Halloween, I just want to dress like a slut and get laid.”

That sounds plenty gay to me.

SPECIAL: Scary monsters and supercreeps

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Halloween is the season for self-expression in all of its many glorious forms: costumes, music, dance, art, theater, and maybe even a few forms that can’t be classified. Whether you’re a trash-culture junkie or a splatter-movie freak, a pagan ritual follower or a brazen exhibitionist, you’ll definitely find something chilling, somewhere in the Bay Area. Here’s a sampling; for more Halloween and Día de los Muertos events, go to www.sfbg.com.
PARTIES AND BENEFITS
FRIDAY 27
The Enchanted Forest Cellar, 685 Sutter, SF; 441-5678. 10pm-2am. $5-10. Silly Cil presents the seventh annual Enchanted Forest costume ball; woodland nymphs and mythical creatures are welcome. DJs McD and Scotty Fox rock the forest with hip-hop and ’80s sounds.
Hyatt Regency/98.1 KISS FM Halloween Bash Hyatt Regency, 5 Embarcadero Center, SF; 788-1234. 8 pm. $28.50 advance ($30 door). KISS Radio’s Morris Knight MCs an evening of costumed revelry. DJ Michael Erickson brings the dance mix.
Rock ’n’ Roll Horror Show Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; 820-3907. 7:30pm. $5-10 donation. Rock out and scream loud for a good cause: proceeds go to the ninth SF Independent Film Festival. A screening of 1987 B-movie Street Trash is followed by the sounds of Sik Luv, Wire Graffiti, Charm School Drop Outs, and Madelia.
SambaDa: Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Exotic Halloween Extravaganza Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF; 552-7788. 10pm. $8-10. Don’t feel like ghosts and goblins and blood and guts? How about samba and bossa nova grooves to keep your feet busy?
BAY AREA
Halloween Madness Speisekammer, 2424 Lincoln, Alameda; (510) 522-1300. 9pm. Free. Skip Henderson and the Starboard Watch offer hard-drinking sailor songs. Come in costume and get a free rum drink, matey.
SATURDAY 28
Exotic Erotic Ball Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva, SF; 567-2255, www.exoticeroticball.com. 8pm-2am. $69. P-Funker George Clinton, ’80s icon Thomas Dolby, and rapper Too Short are among the musical guests at this no-holds-barred celebration. Put on your sexiest, slinkiest number and admire the antics of trapeze artists, fetish performers, and burlesque show-stoppers, as well as those of the attendees.
SUNDAY 29
Fresh/Halloween T-Dance Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF; www.freshsf.com. 6pm-midnight. $20. Sassy, slinky, and sexy costumes abound at this Halloween dance party. DJ Manny Lehman spins.
MONDAY 30
Dead Rock Star Karaoke Cellar, 685 Sutter, SF; 441-5678. 8pm-2am. Free. Elvises, Jim Morrisons, and Kurt Cobains deliver heartrending renditions of favorite songs.
TUESDAY 31
A Nightmare on Fulton Street Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton, SF; www.polenglounge.com. 8pm-2am. $5-10. The third annual Holla-ween showcases a rich harvest of fat beats, thanks to the DJ skills of Boozou Bajou.
Scary Halloween Bash 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF; 970-9777. 8pm. $10. All dressed up but not feeling like heading to the Castro? Want to hear a marching band? No, wait, come back. It’s the Extra Action Marching Band, which specialize in baccanalian freak-shows. Sour Mash Jug Band and livehuman leave you grinning beneath that rubber mask.
FILM/MUSIC/THEATER/ART
WEDNESDAY 25
Art Hell ARTwork SF Gallery, 49 Geary, suite 215, SF; 673-3080. noon-5:30pm. Free. Bay Area artists render darkness, death, and all things devilishly creepy. Sale proceeds go to the San Francisco Artist Resource Center. Also open Thu/26-Sat/28, same hours.
THURSDAY 26
Babble on Halloween Dog Eared Books, 900 Valencia, SF; 282-1901. 8pm. Free. There’s nothing like shivers up the spine to go with cupcakes and wine! Bucky Sinister, Tony Vaguely, and Shawna Virago creep you out with spooky stories and bizarre performances.
A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco’s Lost Cemeteries California Historical Society Library, 678 Mission, SF; 357-1848. 6pm. Free. Trina Lopez’s documentary tells the story of how San Francisco relocated burial grounds in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire — ironically sending some of the city’s settlers on a last journey after death.
Shocktoberfest!! 2006: Laboratory of Hallucinations Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; 377-4202. 8pm. $20. The Thrillpeddlers are back with a gross-out lover’s delight: public execution, surgery, and taxidermy in three tales of unspeakable horror. Also Fri/27-Sat/28, 8pm.
FRIDAY 27
BATS Improv/True Fiction Magazine’s Annual Halloween Show Bayfront Theater, 8350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. 8pm. $18 ($15 advance). Madcap improvisational comics of True Fiction Magazine transform audience suggestions into hilariously bizarre pulp fiction–inspired skits. In the spirit of the season, TFM is sure to throw ghoulish horror into the mix. Also Sat/28.
Hallowe’en at Tina’s Café Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; 581-1600. 9pm. Free. What’s Halloween in San Francisco without any drag? Before you consider the sad possibilities, let Tina’s Café banish those thoughts with a deliciously campy drag queen cabaret show. Mrs. Trauma Flintstone MCs.
Rural Rampage Double Feature Alliance Française de San Francisco, 1345 Bush, SF; www.ham-o-rama.com. 7:30pm. Free. Those midnight movie aficionados at Incredibly Strange Picture Show unreel a shriekingly tasty lineup from the “scary redneck” genre: Two Thousand Maniacs and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
SATURDAY 28
11th Annual Soapbox Pre-Race Party/Halloween Show El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325. 9pm. $7. What better way is there to get revved up for the Oct. 29 Soapbox Derby in Bernal Heights? With a full evening of good ’n’ greasy garage rock and rockabilly, thanks to the All Time Highs, Teenage Harlets, and the Phenomenauts, this party gets you in touch with your inner speed demon.
Pirate Cat Radio Halloween Bash Li Po Cocktail Lounge, 916 Grant, SF; www.piratecatradio.com. 8pm. $5. The community radio station presents an evening of crazy rock mayhem with Desperation Squad, the band now famous for getting shot down on TV’s America’s Got Talent! Wealthy Whore Entertainment, the Skoalkans, and Pillows also perform.
Shadow Circus Vaudeville Theatre Kimo’s, 1351 Polk, SF; p2.hostingprod.com/@shadowcircus.com. 9pm. $5. Shadow Circus Creature Theatre hosts a variety show of ukulele riffs, comedy, burlesque, and filthy-mouthed puppets.
Spiral Dance Kezar Pavilion, Golden Gate Park, 755 Stanyan, SF; www.reclaiming.org. 6pm. Free. Reclaiming, an international group observing pagan traditions, celebrates its 27th annual Spiral Dance with a magical ritual incorporating installations, drama, and a choral performance.
BAY AREA
Flamenco Halloween La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 849-2568, ext. 20. 8:30pm. $15. Flametal brings the evil to flamenco with mastermind Benjamin Woods’s fusion of metal and the saddest music in the world.
Murder Ballads Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 841-0188. 9pm. $8. Murder, misfortune, and love gone really, really wrong — all sung by an impressive array of garage rockers, accordionists, and female folk-metal songstresses. There’s even a duo who specializes in suicide songs! Dress up so no one can recognize you weeping into your beer.
SUNDAY 29
The Elm Street Murders Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF; www.myspace.com/theelmstmurders. 7:30pm. $20. Loosely based on A Nightmare on Elm Street, this multimedia interactive stage show promises heaping helpings of splatter.
MONDAY 30
The Creature Magic Theatre, building D, Fort Mason Center, SF; 731-4922. 8pm. Free. Reservations required. Black Box Theatre Company gives a single performance before a studio audience of their new podcast adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankensten. This version tells the story from the monster’s point of view.
Independent Exposure 2006: Halloweird Edition 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF; 447-9750. 8pm. $6. Microcinema International assembles a festively creepy collection of short films from around the world, focusing on the spooky, unsettling, and just plain gross.
TUESDAY 31
Bat Boy: The Musical School of the Arts Theater, 555 Portola, SF; 651-4521. 7pm. $20. It’s back: a Halloween preview performance of the trials and tribulations of everyone’s favorite National Enquirer icon, Bat Boy. Camp doesn’t get any better than this.
Cramps Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF; 346-6000. 8pm. $30. Don’t get caught in the goo-goo muck. The Demolition Doll Rods and the Groovie Ghoulies also whip you up into a rock ’n’ roll frenzy.
One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut, SF; 771-7020. 7:30pm. Free. Before the Rolling Stones became some of the richest people on earth, Mick, Keith, and the boys dabbled on the dark side. At a rare screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, you get a chance to see them at the height of their flirtation with evil, performing the still-mesmerizing “Sympathy for the Devil.”
EVENTS/FESTIVALS/KID STUFF
FRIDAY 27
Haunted Haight Walking Tour Begins at Coffee to the People, 1206 Masonic, SF; 863-1416. 7pm. $20. How else can you explain all of those supernatural presences drifting between the smoke shops and shoe stores? Here’s a chance to find out about the more lurid chapters in the neighborhood’s history. Also Sat/28-Tues/31, 7pm.
SATURDAY 28
Boo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo, 1 Zoo, SF; 753-7071. 10am-3pm. Free with zoo admission. Costumed kiddies can check out the Haunted Nature Trail and the Creepy Crawly Critters exhibit. Live music, interactive booths, games, and prizes keep little ghosts and goblins delighted.
Children’s Halloween Hootenanny Stanyan and Waller, SF; www.haightstreetfair.org. 11:30am-5pm. Free. The Haight Ashbury Street Fair folks provide children ages 2 to 10 with games, activities, theater, and food. Costumes are encouraged.
Family Halloween Day Randall Museum, 199 Museum, SF; 554-9600. 10am-2pm. Free. Trick-or-treaters play games, carve pumpkins, create creepy crafts, and take part in the costume parade. Jackie Jones amazes with a musical saw and dancing cat; Brian Scott, a magic show.
Hallo-green Party Crissy Field Center, 603 Mason, SF; 561-7752. 10am-2pm. $8. It’s never too early to teach your children about environmentalism. The party includes a costume contest and a chance to bob for organic apples.
House of Toxic Horrors Crissy Field Center, 603 Mason, SF; 561-7752. 10am-2pm and 4-8pm, $8. Ages 9 and older. No, it’s not a Superfund site, but it should be equally educational: the center’s first haunted house addresses the scary world of environmental horror. Sludge and smog lurk behind every corner.
BAY AREA
Boo at the Zoo Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links, Oakl; (510) 632-9525. 10am-3pm. Free with zoo admission. Dress up the kids and bring them over to the zoo for scavenger hunts, crafts, rides on the Boo Choo Choo Train, puppet shows, and musical performances. Also Sun/29, 10am-3pm.
SUNDAY 29
Halloween’s True Meaning Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St., SF; 289-2000. 1-3pm, $5-15 sliding scale. Kids are encouraged to come in costume for this afternoon of interactive theater led by Christina Lewis of the Clown School. Enjoy Halloween history, storytelling, role-playing, and face-painting.
Pet Pride Day Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; 554-9427. 11am-3pm. Free. Dress up your pet in something ridiculous and head down to Golden Gate Park to laugh at all of the other displeased pups! The pet costume contest is always a blast, as is the dog-trick competition.
BAY AREA
Haunted Harbor Festival and Parade Jack London Square, Oakl; 1-866-295-9853. 4-8pm. Free. Families can check out live entertainment, games, crafts, activities, and prizes. The extravagantly decked-out boats in the parade are not to be missed.
Rock Paper Scissors’ Annual Street Scare Block Party 23rd Ave. and Telegraph, Oakl; www.rpscollective.com. Noon-5pm. Free. Who doesn’t love block parties? The kid-friendly blowout has something for everyone: fortune-telling, craft-making, pumpkin-carving, and all sorts of wacky games and prizes. And barbecue — witches love a good barbecue.
MONDAY 30
Halloween Heroes Benefit Exploratorium, Palace of Fine Arts, 3601 Lyon, SF; (650) 321-4142, www.wenderweis.org. 6:30pm. $185 for a parent and child. A benefit for the Exploratorium Children’s Educational Outreach Program and the Junior Giants Baseball Program, this lavish costume party for kids promises to be equally fun for the parents. Many of the exhibits are turned into craft-making and trick-or-treat stations.
TUESDAY 31
Halloween in the Castro Market and Castro, www.halloweeninthecastro.com. 7pm-midnight. $5 suggested donation. You and 250,000 of your new best friends — reveling in the streets and getting down to thumping beats. Don’t even think of driving to get there, and don’t forget: no drinking in the streets.
Vampire Tour of San Francisco Begins at California and Taylor, SF; (650) 279-1840, www.sfvampiretour.com. 8pm. $20. This isn’t Transylvania, but San Francisco has had its share of vampires. Just ask Mina Harker, your fearless leader, if you dare take this tour.
DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS
ONGOING
BAY AREA
‘Laughing Bones/ Weeping Hearts’ Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm. $8. Guest curator Carol Marie Garcia has assembled a vibrant collection of installations produced by local artists, schools, and community groups, all celebrating the dead while acknowledging the sorrow of those left behind. Through Dec. 3.
THURSDAY NOV. 2
Death and Rebirth Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, 2981 24th St, SF; 334-4091. 7-10pm. Free. Precita Eyes Muralists will be celebrating the work of founder Luis Cervantes with a breathtaking mural exhibit and celebration.
Día De Los Muertos Procession and Outdoor Altar Exhibit 24th St and Bryant, SF; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 7pm. Free. Thousands of families, artists, and activists form a procession to honor the dead and celebrate life, ending at the Festival of Altars in Garfield Park, at 26th Street and Harrison. Local artists have created large community altars at the park; the public is invited to bring candles, flowers, and offerings.
Fiesta De Los Huesos’ Gala Opening Reception Mission Cultural Center for the Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; 643-5001. 6-11pm. $5. Curator Patricia Rodriguez has put together a family-oriented party, with musical performances, mask carving, sugar skull–making, videos, and other tempting creations among the exhibits, altars, and installations. The exhibition opens Oct. 27.
BAY AREA
Día De Los Muertos Benefit Concert 2232 MLK, 2232 Martin Luther King Jr., Oakl; www.2232mlk.com. 7pm. $8-20 sliding scale. Hosted by the Chiapas Support Committee, this benefit concert features Fuga, los Nadies, la Plebe, and DJ Rico. Early arrivals get free pan dulce and hot chocolate.
SUNDAY NOV. 5
Dia De Los Muertos Family Festival Randall Museum, 199 Museum, SF; 554-9681. 1-5pm. $100 and up for family of five. The family event benefits the museum’s Toddler Treehouse and other toddler programs. Arts and crafts, food, and entertainment make this a rewarding educational experience for kids. Attendees learn how to make masks and sugar skulls and to decorate an altar. Los Boleros provide festive entertainment.
BAY AREA
Día De Los Muertos Fruitvale Festival International Blvd., between Fruitvale Ave and 41st Ave, Oakl; (510) 535-6940. 10am-5pm. Free. With the theme “love, family, memories,” the Unity Council in Oakland has put together a full day of family celebration. Five stages showcase music and dance performances by local and world-renowned artists. More than 150 exhibitors and nonprofits highlight wares and services. Art and altars are on view, and the Children’s Pavilion promises to be a rewarding educational experience for kids of all ages.
THURSDAY NOV. 9
Mole to Die For Mission Cultural Center For Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; 643-5001. 7-10pm. $5. Try it all at this mole feeding-frenzy and vote for your favorite.

SPECIAL: Great bad ideas for Halloween costumes

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Strapped for a costume on the most unhallowed of unholy days? Envious of those oh-so-topical and on-point costumes of yesteryear — remember that post-9/11 walking bag of anthrax and those Royal Tenenbaums? — but eager to put the Governator drag to bed? Here are some quick, easy, bad-taste costumes that will make you the hit of the Halloween street parade — or have ghosts and goblins racing away from you in utter fear. (Cheryl Eddy and Kimberly Chun)
#1
Crikey! It doesn’t get much tackier than this Steve Irwin ’n’ stingray combo. Kids and grown-ups alike will stare you down with white-hot horror when you strut around in your khaki ensemble with a pissed-off sea creature piercing your chest. Too soon? Hell, no. If Irwin’s eight-year-old can get her own Discovery Kids television show, you can certainly make sport of her nature-loving pop’s freaky demise. Group costume idea: bring along Roy Horn and Montecore, and Timothy Treadwell and the Big Red Machine, and you’ve got your very own When Animals Attack all-star team!

#2
Frankly, we think those Vanity Fair photos were as faked as the moon landing. With Americans still unsure about whether Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are an actual couple (despite Us Weekly’s breathless anticipation of the most E-metered wedding ceremony since John Travolta and Kelly Preston got hitched), the whole baby Suri thing just feels a bit suspect. Kick the formerly untouchable box office champ while he’s down by donning Cruise garb (maybe you have a leather jacket and Wayfarers left over from last year’s couch-vaulting costume?) and bringing li’l Suri out for her first trick-or-treating experience. It’s clear that it’ll be out of this world!

#3
Nothing says “I want candy!” like a Kim Jong Il costume, especially if you’re packing a nuke for added encouragement. So little is known about North Korea’s boss that you can insert your own cult of personality into Kim’s mystique (suggested background research: Team America: World Police). Pass the Hennessy and make sure you insist everyone refer to you as “Dear Leader,” and by all means get that pompadour as high as gravity will allow. Nobody knows how to party like the Axis of Evil, after all.

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PG&E’s Letter to Newsom – Page 1 of 3

PG&E’s Letter to Newsom – Page 2 of 3

PG&E’s Letter to Newsom – Page 3 of 3

TUESDAY

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Oct. 17

Discussion

Prop. 89 debate

Hear expert panelists discuss the pros and cons of Proposition 89, the campaign reform ballot measure that would allot 0.2 percent of corporate tax funds to state campaigns and also lower contribution limits. (Deborah Giattina)

Noon
Commonwealth Club of California
595 Market, second floor, SF
Free
(415) 597-6700

Film

Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs’s autobiographical tome gets a surefooted film adaptation from Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy. As a child little Augusten thinks nothing of being woken in the middle of the night for a command living room poetry performance by his mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), or being a less-willing witness to the fights between her and the “oppressor” husband (Alec Baldwin). By age 13, Augusten (Joseph Cross) is sorta-kinda orphaned. Dad has bolted, and Mom in her infinitely selfish, manic-depressive wisdom has deposited Augusten whole in the “care” of her shrink. Swinging tonally from comic highs to scarifying (but still comic) lows in tune with its characters, Murphy’s first directorial feature is a tad uneven in its quality. But overall it does a pretty fine job with tricky material, especially within the all-important area of casting. (Dennis Harvey)

In Bay Area theaters

MONDAY

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Oct. 23

Music

Be Good Tanyas

Some of the finest purveyors of sepia-toned old-timey sounds, Vancouver’s Be Good Tanyas whisk together the scatterings of John Steinbeck’s dust bowl with the slow drawl of southern gothic to create songs that conjure images of moonshiners on the lam and hobos hopping trains bound for nowhere. Every now and then, they toss in a sly anachronism to remind you this isn’t your grandma’s bluegrass. This evocatively soulful troupe of dusty-trail wanderers will seduce you with their subtle coupling of bygone-era themes with a 21st-century sensibility. (Todd Lavoie)

With Ana Egge
8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$20
(415) 771-1421
www.theindependentsf.com
www.begoodtanyas.com

Music

Cursive

Three years after The Ugly Organ, Cursive find themselves in an unenviable position: how do they follow up a monolith? With Happy Hollow (Saddle Creek), the band builds a mythical Midwestern town that is happy on the surface, but upon a peek through the windows, this happiness is revealed to be hollow. Vocalist-lyricist Tim Kasher sets out his thesis on “Opening the Hymnal/Babies”: “The beautiful truth of it is, this is all we are/ We simply exist/ You’re not the chosen one/ I’m not the chosen one.” Musically, Happy Hollow moves between guitar screeches and nickelodeon keyboard riffs, but it’s the horns that never seem to stop punctuating the fact that if God isn’t dead, he’s certainly on vacation. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

8 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$18
(415) 346-6000

SUNDAY

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Oct. 22

Visual art

“Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle”

It’s been almost 50 years since Wallace Berman withdrew his art from public spaces after facing obscenity charges for a show he put together in Los Angeles. The traveling exhibition “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle” brings the late Berman’s creativity and that of his many associates – including Jack Smith – into a museum space. Every one of the dozens of varied contributors to Berman’s journal Semina opens up a fascinating universe. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Opens Wed/18, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. (through Dec. 10)
Berkeley Art Museum
2625 Durant, Berk.
$5-$8 (free for children and UC Berkeley students)
(510) 642-1295
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Dance

Imagenes Flamencas

When it comes to flamenco, Yaelisa more than knows how to bring the drama and the beauty – she’s been dancing onstage since she was four, and for the past decade she’s been bringing the best of her chosen form to the Bay Area through classes and performances. Fresh from a recent collaboration with Savion Glover, she’s reuniting with a number of artists from Spain for Imagenes Flamencas, the latest show by her company, Caminos Flamencos. The show draws inspiration from the flamenco pictorials of painter Roberto Zamora. (Johnny Ray Huston)

3 p.m.
Cowell Theater
Fort Mason Center
Marina at Buchanan, SF
(415) 345-7575
www.caminosflamencos.com

SATURDAY

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Oct. 21

Dance

Daughters of Haumea

The latest show by Nā Lei Hulu i Ka Wēkiu doesn’t just promise to be another terrific piece of choreography by 2002 Goldie winner Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakāne – it’s also a work of scholarship. In Daughters of Haumea, Makuakāne draws from a recent book that rescues two lost centuries of indigenous Hawaiian women’s history. Using both hula kahiko and Makakuāne’s modern hula mua, Nā Lei Hulu move beyond the typical focus on Pele to bring oracles, fisherwomen, and dragon totems to the fore. (Johnny Ray Huston)

8 p.m. (also Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. Through Oct. 29)
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
3301 Lyon, SF
$30-$35
(415) 392-4400
www.naleihulu.org

Performance

Going Through Kathy Acker’s Stuff and October Country

Given to willfully crude rewrites of works like Great Expectations, the late Kathy Acker knew a thing or 300 about going through other people’s stuff. If anyone in the Bay Area is qualified to go through Acker’s stuff, it’s Dodie Bellamy, whose novel The Letters of Mina Harker takes Acker-like cannibalistic writing practices and runs with them in new directions. Bellamy rummages through some of Acker’s belongings in a new performance-lecture; she’s joined by Donal Mosher, whose October Country is a photographic exploration of his family’s haunted fall traditions. (Johnny Ray Huston)

7 p.m.
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, second floor, SF
$2-$5
(415) 512-2020
www.sfcamerawork.org

FRIDAY

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Oct. 20

Music

Slim Cessna’s Auto Club

Colorado’s harsh geographic and metaphoric isolation have given rise to a whole subgenre of hellfire-and-brimstone-tinged balladeering perhaps best exemplified by Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. Part old Appalachia, part new country, part salvation, and part eternal damnation, the Auto Club epitomize “the Denver Sound,” and their manic live presence, dueling vocalists, and frenetic fingerpicking will have you breaking out your best bling-bling belt buckles and spurs. (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Rykarda Parasol
and Ill Gotten Gainz
9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
$10
(415) 970-9777
www.12galaxies.com
www.slimcessnasautoclub.com

Music

Lyrics Born and Cut Chemist

The pairing of Lyrics Born and Cut Chemist seems like a match made in heaven. The former is a rapper for people who don’t like rappers, and the latter is a DJ for people who hate DJs. Lyrics Born’s melodic vocal style is singing as much as it is rapping, and Cut Chemist’s groovy, organic spinning is light-years away from the cut-and-paste mush-ups of everyday hip-hop DJs and the sterile pulse of the techno raveheads. (Aaron Sankin)

Also Sat/21
With Pigeon John
9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$25
(415) 771-1421
www.theindependentsf.com
www.lyricsborn.com
www.cutchemist.com

THURSDAY

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Oct. 19

Event

“Inside Storytime: Bad Girls”

“What exactly is a bad girl?” you might ask. According to Cameron Tuttle, author of the popular Bad Girl’s guides, this headstrong vixen can be defined as a woman who “knows when to work a room, when to work the angles, and when to work her curves – or all of the above.” Tuttle will participate in the all-girl reading “Inside Storytime: Bad Girls.” The fierce female lineup includes Jennifer Solow, author of “Booster,” and Kathi Kamen Goldmark of the Rock Bottom Remainders. The MC for the night is comedian Mary Van Note, whose stage antics would make even the most jaded devilette blush. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

7 p.m.
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$3-$10, sliding scale
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com
www.insidestorytime.com

Theater

Passing Strange

There’s nothing that critics love more than jumping on bandwagons (except maybe jumping off them a few months later). So it’s best to take an artist with a boatload of great reviews with a grain of salt. However, sometimes an artist’s reviews are so hyperbolically positive because there’s some fire under all that smoke. Take Stew, for example, who has created a piece of musical theater titled Passing Strange that paints an alternately uproarious and heartbreaking picture of the black experience from suburbia to bohemia. The New York Times said it may be the best thing anyone’s done all year, and Entertainment Weekly gave Stew its Artist of the Year award – twice! Now if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your butt to Berkeley, plant it in a seat, and be wowed by one of this generation’s greatest talents. (Aaron Sankin)

8 p.m. (Through Dec. 3; see Web site for dates and times)
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
2025 Addison, Berk.
$33 ($16.50 for 29 and under)
(510) 647-2949
www.berkeleyrep.org

Online Exclusive: Method Man at the crossroads

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a&eletters@sfbg.com
When a bumped phone interview with hip-hop legend and putf8um artist Method Man mushroomed into a proposed
backstage post-show encounter, I naturally jumped at the chance.

Being a devotee of the ultimately more funk-based grooves of Bay Area hip-hop, I tend not to pay
attention to the doings of NYC, and I can’t claim to have ever followed the Wu-Tang Clan in general or Meth
in particular, though I have always admired both from afar. Yet one needn’t follow the Big Apple’s scene in
great detail to appreciate its impact, and with Meth’s successful film and TV career, most recently as a recurring character in this season of HBO’s cop drama The Wire, one needn’t even listen to hip-hop anymore
to appreciate his.

This situation is exactly what’s troubling Method Man. His very success in the cultural mainstream, he
feels, has been held against him by the hip hop-industry, a curious situation considering
mainstream success is the perceived goal and direct subject matter of most raps these days. Unlike the
recent fashion among rappers like Andre3000 to pooh-pooh their interest in music in favor of their
“acting career,” Meth wants to be known primarily as an MC. But Hollywood success has proved to be a
slippery slope, paved by Ice-T and Ice Cube — each in his turn the most terrifying, authentic street rapper
imaginable — to the end of your hit-making potential in hip-hop.

Couple this perception with Meth’s vocal challenges of the effect of corporate media consolidation, and it’s
not difficult to imagine why Def Jam released his fourth solo album, 4:21: The Day After, without a peep
at the end of August, as if the label had written him off despite his track record of one gold and two
putf8um plaques.

Still, no one who’s heard the angry, defiantly shitkicking 4:21 (executive produced by the RZA, Erick
Sermon, and Meth himself) or saw the show Meth put on that evening (leaping from the stage to the bar and
running across it by way of introduction, later executing a backwards handspring from the stage into the crowd by way of ending) could possibly doubt his vitality as an MC. He put on a long, exhausting show,
heavy with new material, that utterly rocked the packed house.

Shortly after the show ended, I was brought backstage by Meth’s road manager, 7, to a tiny corridor of a
dressing room crammed with various hangers on. A man in a warm-up suit with a towel over his head was
sitting alone on a short flight of steps in the center of the room.

“That’s him,” 7 said, before disappearing to take care of other business.

It was like being sent to introduce yourself to a boxer who’d just finished a successful but punishing
brawl. The face that looked up at my inquiry was that of a man who’d retreated somewhere far away into
himself, requiring a momentary effort to swim to the surface. Quite suddenly I found myself face to face
with Method Man, whose presence immediately turned all heads in the room our way as he invited me to sit down
for a brief discussion of his new album and his dissatisfaction with his treatment by the music
industry.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: I read the statement on your Web site [www.method-man.com] in which you
discuss your problems with the industry. Could you describe the problems you’ve been having?

METHOD MAN: My big problem with the industry is the way they treat hip-hop artists as opposed to artists
in other genres. Hip-hop music, they treat it like it’s fast food. You get about two weeks of promotion
before your album. Then you get the week of your album, then you get the week after, then they just
leave you to the dogs.

Whereas back in the day, you had artists in development, a month ahead of time before you even
started your campaign, to make sure that you got off on the right foot.

Nowadays it’s like there’s nobody in your corner anymore. Everybody’s trying to go into their own
little club, for lack of a better word. Everybody has their own little cliques now. Ain’t no money being
generated so the labels are taking on a lot of artists because of this at once that they don’t even have
enough staff members to take care of every artist, as an individual. Their attention is elsewhere, or only
with certain people.

SFBG: Your new single [“Say,” featuring Lauryn Hill] suggests you’ve had problems with the way critics have
received your recent work and even with the radio playing your records. How can someone of your status
be having trouble getting spins?

MM: You know what it is, man? A lot of people have come around acting like I’m the worst thing that ever
happened to hip-hop, as good as I am.

Hating is hating. I’ve been hated on, but just by the industry, not in the streets. They never liked my crew
[the Wu-Tang Clan] anyway. They think we ain’t together anymore and they try to pick at each and
every individual. Some motherfuckers they pick up. Other people they just shit on. I guess I’m just the
shittee right now, you know what I mean?

SFBG: Do you think it has to do with the age bias in hip-hop? The idea an MC is supposed to be 18 or 20?

MM: You know what I think it is? As our contracts go on, we have stipulations where, if we sell a certain
amount of albums, [the labels] have to raise our stock. A lot of times dudes just want to get out their
contracts so they can go independent and make more money by themselves. There’s a lot of factors that
play into it.

SFBG: Are you not getting enough label support?

MM: A label only does so much anyway. It’s your team inside your team that makes sure that you got a video.
Or that you got that single out there, or that your tour dates are put together correctly. The labels,
they basically just do product placement. They make sure that all your stuff is in the proper place where
it’s supposed to be at. They’re gonna make sure your posters are up. They’re going to make sure that
they’re giving out samples of other artists that are coming out also. [But i]t’s really up to us [the
artists] to make sure our music is going where it’s supposed to.

Right now there’s so many artists people can pick and choose from, don’t nobody like shit no more.

SFBG: Do you think you’re getting squeezed out of radio play as a result of corporate media
conslidation?

MM: Absolutely; this shit ain’t nothing new. It isn’t just happening to me. It’s been going on since dudes
have been doing this hip-hop music. They bleed you dry and then they push you the fuck out.

That’s why I always stress to the fans to take your power back. I always hear people talking about things
like, “Damn, what happened to these dudes? What happened to these guys? I always liked their shit.”
But the fans, not just the industry, tend to turn their backs on dudes. They get fed so much bullshit,
they be like, “Fuck it; I’m not dealing with that shit. I’m going to listen to this.”

SFBG: So what about your acting career? Do you feel like you’ve been overexposed as an actor or that
you’ve been spread too thin and are readjusting your focus?

MM: Fuck Hollywood, B.

SFBG: But I heard you say on the radio today you wanted to play a crackhead and get an Oscar….

MM: I do want to play a crackhead in a movie. I’m going to be a crackhead who dies of an overdose at the
end of the movie, and people cry, and I’m going to get me an Oscar. But fuck Hollywood; tell ‘em to come see
me. Tell ‘em to come to my door.

SFBG: Obviously, from what you said during the show and the lyrics on 4:21: The Day After you haven’t
renounced smoking marijuana, so could you discuss the concept behind “4:21”? Is it about the difficulties
of living the hard-partying lifestyle of the rap artist?

MM: It was just symbolic of a moment of clarity for me. I made a symbol for myself of a moment of
clarity. You know I’ve always been an avid 4:20 person. I like to get out there and smoke with the
best of them. But I picked “4:21” as like, the day after. I got tired of people running up on me and
being like, “You was funny in that movie,” because I was an MC first and foremost. It used to be like, “Yo,
that fuckin’ verse you did on that song, that was hot.” Now it’s like, “My kids love you; they love that
movie, How High.”

It gets to the point when even when I’m having a serious moment, or a serious conversation, people
laugh at the shit like it’s funny. But they laugh cause they thinking of the movie; they thinking of
some sitcom shit.

SFBG: Besides yourself and RZA, Erick Sermon executive produced the album. Can you talka bout your
connection with him?

MM: I’ve been fuckin’ with E ever since I’ve been fuckin’ with Redman. E knows what I like, you know
what I’m saying? The same way he knows what Redman likes. And RZA, that’s a given right there. I’ve been
down with RZA’s shit A1 since day one.

SFBG: 4:21 also features a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When did you guys record this track?

MM: “Dirty Meth” — that’s a posthumous joint with O.D.B. It was after he was gone already. I tell everyone
that so they know.

SFBG: But he seems to permeate the new album.

MM: He does. Good word, too. He permeates it.

WEDNESDAY

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Oct. 18

Music

“Freaky Folkie Magic”

With the immense popularity of Bay Area artists such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, who have revitalized stuffy notions of folk, it is no surprise that the Rickshaw Stop decided to host “Freaky Folkie Magic,” an evening of mysticism and musical whimsy. Tonight’s main act is LA’s Entrance, whose haunting, spectral sounds conjure up early permutations of the blues and Syd Barrett-esque madcap psychedelia. San Francisco’s White White Quilt, known for their soothing homespun melodies, get the support slot, with Nevada City’s Mariee Sioux and perennial vagabond Joseph Childress opening up. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

8 p.m.
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$8
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com

Music

Hippie Grenade

According to UrbanDictionary .com, a “hippie grenade” is a bit of hot ash that you accidentally suck down your throat while smoking marijuana. The wonderful sound made by the band Hippie Grenade, on the other hand, is something you won’t mind going down your windpipe. Hippie Grenade are local heroes who effortlessly blend musical styles ranging from Parliament Funkadelic to Phish and come out sounding a little like early Incubus. Their live shows are so epic that if you’re smoking at the time, you might make a hippie grenade if you’re not careful. (Aaron Sankin)

9:30 p.m.
Boom Boom Room
1601 Fillmore, SF
$5
(415) 673-8000
www.boomboomblues.com
www.myspace.com/hippiegrenade

Economy class

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› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO “Please pass the grilled Moroccan spice-rubbed lamb loin,” I dewily asked the cute investment banker from Philadelphia on my left.
Me and Hunky Beau were seated under the Saturday stars at Escondida, a “hidden kitchen” — a.k.a. renegade restaurant in someone’s home or backyard — deep in the Outer Mission, at a table that also included four hip lady lawyers and a postgrad neurobiologist from UCSF who makes headphones for birds. (Don’t ask. Well, OK — first you implant screws in the skulls of small finches, and then you jury-rig a sort of “fly-pod” out of two Q-tips and an old transistor in order to test their hearing skills. Someday, I swear, those poor, deaf birds will have revenge on us all.)
Hidden kitchens are big these days, especially since the permit processes for restaurants and clubs seem to be getting more complex by the minute, and most of the time the underground menus are cheaper than the real thing: you get multicourse gourmet eats plus drinks in a lively underground setting for the price of appetizers at Andalu. And there’s a naughty inspectors-be-damned thrill to boot. (It’s all very hush-hush, but you can usually find hints about upcoming covert cucina events on chowhound.com or Craigslist — just don’t sue me if you get botulism. I got nothin’ for ya.)
The food and company were delish. But me? I was more interested in shoving as much entrée as I could into my faux-leopard baguette handbag — the Hunkster and I were due on a plane to Honolulu in a few hours to attend the biggest gay wedding of the year in Waikiki. And a girl can’t survive a five-hour ride on $4 minicans of Pringles alone. It was bad enough I had to pack my in-flight Stoli in three-ounce saline solution bottles just to get past the damn check-in.
Waikiki? Why not, I say. But first, a real drink to get the whole aloha ball rolling. So we hit up Jet, the new Greg Bronstein joint in the Castro where the Detour used to be, and ordered us up some primo alco-Dramamine. Although I partially miss the hurricane-fence decor and tragic queen atmosphere of the Detour, Jet’s awfully cute, with black padded leather walls, Broadway marquee lighting, and a fuzzy pink double bed in an alcove in the back. There’s also a small dance floor, rare these days in the Castro without a giant video screen playing Kylie Minogue. The club, in all its luxuriant gay sleaziness, is either a pint-size Studio 54 or Liza Minnelli’s future mausoleum. Probably both. Right now, the music is all hip-hop lite — pretensions to be the next Pendulum? — and there’s a velvet rope on weekends — as if! — but something could definitely be done with the place.
Lemme tell you though, Honolulu in October is fabu. The mangoes are huge, the agua is aqua, the gay scene is horrid — new club coming in November: Circuit Hawaii! — and the 14-year-old tranny hookers in six-inch clear plastic heels are gorgeous. Plus there’s, like, five military bases nearby, for those into raping drunk Marines. And who isn’t? Me and Hunky were hopping around like we had humuhumunukunukuapuaas in our Volcoms.
My dearest amigos from the old EndUp days, ChrisP and Armando, got betrothed right on the water in a tear-jerking all-hula celebration bursting with orchids and sunlight. There weren’t any conch shell blasts or caged white doves (or earthquakes), but the grooms were rowed into the friends-and-family ceremony on an outrigger by four hot muscle dykes in sports bras — an ancient tradition, I’m told. It was the second amazing gay wedding I’d been to this year, and although I used to rail against such things politically — why be normal? — I cried like Tonya Harding at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Love is real. And so was the open bar, which me and my sadly, gloriously bare ring finger quickly sidled up to for a post–gay marriage mai tai, studiously avoiding the moony-eyed intimations Hunky Beau was sending my way. I’m not quite done playing hard to get yet. Or am I? Aloha! SFBG
JET
2348 Market, SF
8 p.m.–2 a.m.
www.jetsf.com

What Is Crispin?

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CULT ICON Over a decade ago a pair of first-time filmmakers approached Crispin Glover to ask if he would act in their movie.
Glover signed on — but to direct, with the condition that most of the roles be filled by actors with Down syndrome. Best known for eccentric fringe roles in films such as River’s Edge, Bartleby, Back to the Future, and Rubin and Ed, Glover had written other screenplays involving people with the condition and had kept it in his mind’s eye for some time. “Looking into the face of someone who has Down syndrome,” he says during a recent SF interview, “I see the history of someone who has lived outside of the culture.”
Glover maintains that the resulting film, What Is It?, is not about Down syndrome. But he raises a valid point about the benefits of casting underutilized actors. “There is not necessarily a learned social masking [in their performances],” he says.
Though Glover’s casting decisions were backed by then–executive producer David Lynch, they soured Hollywood’s corporate entities and led to a plan to shoot a short film proving the viability of a disabled cast. That short flowered into the realization that a feature-length movie could be made without kowtowing to studio execs and for less than $200,000. After almost 10 years Glover emerged with What Is It?, a 72-minute film he describes as “being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home. As tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche.” However tenuous a tagline that may seem, it hits the mark dead-on.
Glover has taken strenuous liberties with narrative structure, resulting in split sanctums. The outer realm — an atmospheric ringer for a Diane Arbus print — concerns itself with the travels of the Young Man (Michael Blevin), who is slighted by his friends and finds solace in snails (one of them voiced by Fairuza Balk) before several violent if childlike murders take place in a graveyard. The second, inner sanctum is the young man’s psyche, a kingdom presided over by one Demi-God Auteur (Glover), populated by concubines, and disrupted by a minstrel in blackface (Apocalypse Culture author Adam Parfrey) who aims to become an invertebrate by injecting himself with snail juice.
Overflowing with incendiary imagery, What Is It? juxtaposes Shirley Temple with swastikas, features buxom monkey-ladies crushing watermelons, and documents a praying mantis claiming the lives of a snail and a child. “Some of those things start out as emotional, and then you intellectualize them,” Glover says.
After What Is It?’s Sundance premiere, many critics liberally employed words like exploitative, weird, and inflammatory. The latter two I’ll concede. But whatever What Is It? is, a deeper plot than what’s suggested by those words is afoot. “There are things in this film that would not necessarily be taboo in 1910,” Glover says. “In certain silent films, racism, sexuality, violence are handled in a more frank way than they are right now. Why should these things not be put in front of the public? They exist. They’ve got to be able to be talked about and processed in the culture.”
Glover is traveling with What Is It?, preceding each screening with a slide-show presentation from eight of his books. Most were created in the ’80s using cut-up techniques akin to those of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The large-screen format and dramatic readings by Glover breathe new life into the books, which were published in small, beautiful editions by his own press, Volcanic Eruptions. After the movie there is a Q&A in which the filmmaker takes the time to speak with every viewer, be they friend, member of the press, or regular part of the audience.
It seems that we are approaching the disclaimer part of the text — the part wherein the responsible reviewer urges the reader to shed all preconceptions and bring an open mind to the Castro Theatre this weekend. The caveat is that each viewer’s point of view is vital to the film’s life. Glover chops art down to its most basic method of consumption: from the mind of the creator to the eye of the viewer and out into whatever cultural context is born from that interaction. In this regard, he is a purist. Note that the title of the film isn’t Why Did He Do That? or What Does He Mean By This? but What Is It? That interpretation is yours alone. (K. Tighe)
WHAT IS IT? AND THE VERY FIRST CRISPIN GLOVER FILM FESTIVAL IN THE WHOLE WORLD
Fri/20–Sun/23, call or see Web site for times
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$5–$18
(415) 621-6120
www.castrotheatre.com
www.crispinglover.com

Head of Hopper

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CULT MOVIE Movie history is full of figures who could do no wrong one minute, then blew it — never trusted to do right again — the next. This year alone something like this happened to the richly deserving M. Night Shyamalan, and it might soon be happening to Darren Aronofsky, whose sci-fi soap opera The Fountain is arguably the most daft hijacking of major-studio cash in 35 years — since Dennis Hopper morphed from princeling to pariah via something called (with masochistic foreboding) The Last Movie.
An eccentric journeyman actor onscreen since 1955, Hopper was way past 30 when he codirected Easy Rider with Peter Fonda. Any studio would have supplied him any sum to get the follow-up. Universal gave him half a mil for The Last Movie, and he stayed on schedule and on budget throughout shooting in a far-flung Peruvian Andes village.
Then the aging boy wonder returned home to edit — for 18 druggy, hazy months, as executives freaked and anticipation rose to a tottering peak. A documentary chronicling that period, The American Dreamer, shows Hopper in extremis — doffing clothes (“symbolically,” he says) to run around suburban Los Alamos; cohabiting with a harem of hippie goddess freeloaders; comparing himself to Orson Welles, then exhaling, “I’d like to go about a month with three chicks in a hot tub.”
Upon release, The Last Movie — which screens in a new, Hopper-funded 35mm print this weekend — looked like the nail in the coffin of acid casualty cinema. The film was a mess, a freak show, an indulgence par excellence — with an incoherent quasinarrative that had Hopper as a stuntman on a western who stays on during postproduction to reenact the mythic pulp action with villagers who can’t or won’t separate the phony spectacle they’ve hosted from more spiritual yet violent reality.
“I only hope that after this game is over, morality can begin again,” prays (in vain) the local priest, played by spaghetti western icon Tomas Milian. But morality has left the building. The Last Movie isn’t the balm for stoner egos that Easy Rider offered. It incriminates everybody — colonialists, swingers, industry suits, the greedy (like our hero’s covetous Indio girlfriend), and filmmaking itself. Periodic “scene missing” titles help make this a deconstructive metamovie well ahead of its time. It’s an antiaudience picture, now more breathtaking than ever in sheer gall.
Who could make such a movie now? Might stars align again to permit such major-studio strangeness? Hard to imagine: The Fountain is nutty and navel-gazing but sentimental in a way Hopper’s auto-excoriating wack-off abhors. All those lysergically and vaginally oversatiated months spent editing The Last Movie make it a stand as memorably bold — if ruinous — as Custer’s.
Hopper is 71 now, but The Last Movie will always be a boy-man’s definitive up-yours against pricks in suit and tie. It’s a lyrical abstract as yet unchallenged for discombobulation by any film made under a major studio’s umbrella. It remains a startling finger driven straight up the Universal. (Dennis Harvey)
THE LAST MOVIE
Fri/20–Sat/21, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, screening room, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org

Surfing new turf

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Listening to the warm analogs, e-bowed guitar, and post-jazz swing that manifest on “Medium Blue” off Surf Boundaries (Ghostly International) — one of two new albums by Christopher Willits — you might assume that the instrumentation was performed by an ensemble of helping hands rather than simply the Bay Area electronic musician. And you’d be half right. The 28-year-old Kansas City, Mo., native executes many of the album’s compelling melodies and fizzling, ambient textures on guitar, laptop, and synths — aided at times by compañeros including Adam Theis, Brad Laner, and notably, R&B-pop vocalist Latrice Barnett on the calming orchestrations of stringed instruments and horns.
“My name’s on the record, but tons of collective energy came into making it happen,” explains Willits at a Mission District bar. “I outsourced some things to the brilliant friends around me.”
Their impact is evident: the CD shifts dynamically from the usual guitar-run-through-a-laptop drone and fuzz of Willits’s live sets. He says that he hopes to someday put together a band to perform a release like Surf Boundaries on tour. That plan isn’t a surprise, considering Willits’s determination to always have a full plate.
The Mills College graduate’s musical career has quickly taken flight since his move to the Bay in 2000. It’s amazing that Willits even has time for solo endeavors between playing with Flössin — his side project with Hella’s Zach Hill featuring guest noisemaking from Kid606, the Advantage’s Carson McWhirter, and Matmos — and ongoing collaborations with avant-garde musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, and former Tool bassist Paul d’Amour. When not on tour, Willits spends his time at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, where he began teaching digital audio workshops five years ago. With John Phillips, he also founded Overlap.org, an online community that aims to give exposure to electronic and experimental artists through blog feeds, podcasts, and live music events.
Much of Willits’s work as a solo artist and a collaborator is documented on labels such as Taylor Deupree’s 12K and Sub Rosa, but his recent alliance with the Midwestern electronic imprint Ghostly International may prove the most promising. “I really like Ghostly, because they’re more into artist development rather than boxing in artists’ sounds and constraining them from branching off,” Willits says.
Likewise, his latest offerings are all over the sonic map. The art alone for Surf Boundaries illustrates its ethereal mood: soft hues delicately wash images of animals scattered around a portrait of Willits. The music within strikes a wonderful symphonic balance between electronic composition and live instrumentation as Willits and his collaborators frolic with a blend of jubilant French pop, glitchy guitar, and shimmering psychedelia.
Along with Surf Boundaries’ cozy, sleepy appeal comes Willits’s shrill wake-up call with guitarist Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company) — the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. The space pop–oriented unit gives the Creation Records class of ’91 competition with white-noise guitar treatments and alt-rock rhythms.
The duo met through mutual friend Kid606, and for Willits the collaboration was a dream come true.
“Laner is one of my guitar heroes,” he says, adding that when he first listened to his old Medicine cassette in high school, he mistook Laner’s nails-on-chalkboard approach to guitar playing for a stereo malfunction.
“I realized that the way he’s making that sound is that he’s running all his guitar effects into a shitty four-track and then cranking the preamps up on it, so it’s getting this full …” — Willits makes a fast, circular motion with his arms — “whish!”
Released in August as Ghostly’s first full-length available exclusively via download, NVSO’s The Right Kind of Nothing highlights Laner’s signature guitar bluster and Willits’s ability to dabble subtly in an aggregation of soundscapes. What results is a continuous squall of beaming shoegaze discord that feels like sunshine bursting into a dark room — only to be broken by heavy kraut rock tempos and Swervedriver guitars.
Though Surf Boundaries and The Right Kind of Nothing radically differ in sound and structure, both discs showcase Willits’s ambition to crack the electronic mold and move toward a contemporary vein of experimental rock.
“All I’m trying to do is feel out my own energy and relationship to my creative process,” Willits explains. “I could have never envisioned the albums sounding the way they do. I love being surprised by my own creativity.” SFBG
CHRISTOPHER WILLITS
With Daedelus, Caural, and Thavius Beck
Fri/20, 9 p.m.
Bar of Contemporary Art
414 Jessie, SF
$10
(415) 777-4278
www.sfboca.com
www.overlap.org

Hailing a Japanoise guitar maestro

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FULL CIRCLE For more than three decades Masayuki Takayanagi (1932–1991) has served as a cult figure to a small but rabid coterie of listeners searching for the roots of extremity in improvised music and free jazz. The Japanese guitarist has received kudos from renowned experimentalists like John Zorn and Otomo Yoshihide yet has remained obscure because his recorded output has been generally unavailable. During the last decade a slew of his reissued recordings have been available only as hard-to-find, pricey imports, while the original vinyl pressings have changed hands for ridiculous amounts of money.
So what’s the big deal? Beginning in the late ’60s, Takayanagi blazed kamikaze musical assaults of a previously unheard violence and abstraction in the jazz idiom. Long before the pure Japanoise of artists like Merzbow, Masayuki Takayanagi threw down a gauntlet. “I always feel that beauty of form and tone are lies. Playing music that’s muddy and violently splattered is an essential way of getting at the truth,” he once wrote. This approach manifested itself in a concept he called “mass projection” — a gushing, sweaty arc of maximum density and energy that was savagely defiant of melody, interplay, and structure.
Unfortunately, a good portion of Takayanagi’s early free-music output is marred by lousy recording quality: early ’70s performances on the DIW and PSF labels suffice as archival documents but barely hint at the true strength and articulation of the music. The newly issued CD versions of the mythically scarce 1975 diptych Axis: Another Revolvable Thing Volume 1 and 2 (Doubt Music, Japan) should rectify this situation, presenting almost 100 focused minutes of Takayanagi and his classic New Directions Unit in full fury.
Recorded live in Tokyo on Sept. 5, 1975, the quartet revealed their manifesto in six movements, roughly building from agitated, spacious quietude to climactic, sustained catharsis. Although the volumes mix up the sequence, the release’s freshly translated liner notes suggest that the music can also be pondered in the order it was executed. The first part — a display of Takayanagi’s more minimal “gradual projection” style — evokes the low-volume scuttling of English guitar pioneer Derek Bailey’s early Company groups. Spotlighting acoustic guitar, flute, slide whistle, rubbery acoustic bass, and skittering percussion, the music is pervaded with a deceptively delicate sense of restraint. A second gradual projection concerns isolated, dynamic sounds that burst through silence in their own mysterious tempos. After a few minutes, Kenji Mori’s lumpy bass clarinet croaks while Takayanagi surprisingly sneaks in a few brief melodic shards that allude to his straight-ahead roots. Part three — a dull drum solo — fills space before the final half of the concert: three mass projections. The first builds very slowly, with sustained cymbal wash and sinister tremolo bass bowing before revealing the perverted grunts from Takayanagi’s now-electrified strings. The second pushes the intensity up but still feels like a tease, threatening to explode before receding into sustained tones penetrated by pricking soprano saxophone curlicues and tumbling percussion.
In the final segment the floodgates open, and we are assaulted by a lengthy tirade that appears to start at maximum intensity but manages to blow straight through the roof, ascending into unknown levels of forceful cruelty. Hiroshi Yamazaki’s superhumanly dense drum attack violently propels the onslaught. Bassist Nobuyoshi Ino ditches his main ax, creating an acidic wall of fierce noise on cello while Takayanagi goads his guitar into shrieks of feedback and crusty slabs of distorted density, bashing it with a metal slide. Intermittently cutting through the din on his alto saxophone, the unflappable Mori is eerily eloquent. Throughout this hypnotic overload of information, one might concentrate on the detail of parts, the texture of the whole, or nothing at all. After 16 minutes the saxophone lapses into outright screaming. Takayanagi’s guitar coasts arrogantly over the damage in thick sheets of atonality before rising into dog-whistle range, calling an end to a harrowing 22 minutes of sustained devastation. If only the first and last sequences of this concert were paired alone on one release, Axis might have been Takayanagi’s single finest recording. With these discs, at least, the secret is out, and the tortured innovations of an obscure musical pioneer are finally revealed to a wider audience seeking buckets of blood in their music. SFBG

Straight outta Mill Valley

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Some time has passed since people routinely looked in 924 Gilman Street’s direction to familiarize themselves with what’s new and interesting in Bay Area rock. However, this doesn’t mean that nothing worthwhile passes through its doors. Topping the bill of the annual Punk Prom earlier this year were the Abi Yoyos, whose cavalier, recklessly hooky normal-dude brand of punk is totally outlook brightening.
Over beer and burritos at a San Francisco taquería, guitarist-vocalist-songwriter Matt Bleyle and lead vocalist Shawn Mehrens, both 21, recently strolled down a nearly five-year-long footpath of memories, including problematic tour vans and onstage pleas for Albuterol inhalers. Unlike a lot of local groups, the Abi Yoyos openly rep the North Bay: namely, Mill Valley. Its members’ paths crossed when Bleyle, Mehrens, and bassist Jeff Mitchell attended Tamalpais High.
“The band was sort of an offshoot of the conversations that Matt and I would have while taking all-night walks in Mill Valley,” Mehrens said. “Nothing is open past 10 p.m., and nobody really presents any options as to how to change things aside from maybe starting a band.” Originally, they played straight hardcore; since then, they’ve adopted a more complex, melodic approach. They cite Charles Darwin — or as Mehrens calls him, “Chuck D” — and Phil Ochs as inspiration for their evolution, along with bands like los Rabbis and the Fleshies.
“Originally we were called Gutter Snatch, as we tried to just come up with the most offensive name possible,” Bleyle said. The moniker Abi Yoyos came to pass courtesy of a Pete Seeger song and an African tale that prophesied “if we turn our back on music and religion, Abi Yoyo [a bogeyman who symbolizes Western civilization] will come and get us.”
The musicianship of the band — which includes drummer Blaine Patrick and saxophonist Kyle Chu — is remarkably solid. “Blaine has won ‘Outstanding Soloist’ awards at Stanford Jazz Camp,” Bleyle explained. “Jeff was in a band called Turbulence that sounded like a cross between Weezer and Hendrix.” Chu joined the band after the Abi Yoyos’ first 7-inch, “The World Is Not My Home” (Riisk), and the lineup solidified to what it appears as on their new debut, Mill Valley (Big Raccoon).
To put out that record, Mehrens worked 80-hour weeks between three jobs, including one at ellusionist.com, a magicians’ supply Web site. “We’re really hard to pigeonhole,” said Mehrens, who now runs Big Raccoon. His friend Corbett Redford, who ran S.P.A.M. Records, along with other industry-seasoned pals, gave the Abi Yoyos the guidance needed to release Mill Valley, an altogether inspired, infectious set of songs.
“I think we can all agree on our hometown heroes,” Bleyle said with a smirk. Sammy Hagar was one of the first names to be mentioned, along with “the guy who invented the toilet-seat guitar,” Huey Lewis, Clover, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Cruisin’ and boozin’, my ass!” exclaimed Mehrens to much laughter. “I hate Sammy Hagar.”
Instead the band takes after punkier forefathers. John from the Fleshies introduced the Abi Yoyos to the Punk Prom audience as what Flipper would sound like “if Flipper were good.” After a few minutes of searching for the drummer, that description gained credibility as the band, donning dresses and sparkly makeup, ripped into their cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.”
They routinely jam “Helter Skelter” in their practice space — a large metal storage box with electrical outlets by San Quentin State Prison — skirting lunacy in their proximity to inmates and in their unusual reverence for both the sticky melodies of ’60s pop and the fast, snotty punk that emerged from LA in the ’80s. In a scene where, in Mehrens’s words, “image means a lot,” the Abi Yoyos tend to defy punker conventions, adopting an unusually eclectic aesthetic. “Quagmire” moves from medium-paced hardcore to a full-blown anthem about halfway through — a nod to Bleyle’s recent “openness to prog” and odd song structures — and they pop hooks in a forcefully shameless manner; Mehrens was, after all, “raised on R&B and Motown.”
“We have friends in a lot of different scenes,” Mehrens said. “Bands that play hardcore, dancy punk, crusty punk, and some that don’t do anything at all. At every show, there are different types of kids rockin’ out.”
Their first nationwide tour began in late July and has included such transcendent experiences as Dumpster diving, playing a farm in Las Cruces, and shooting Roman candles out the passenger-side window of their van on the Williamsburg Bridge. “We’re a little too weird for the South,” said Mehrens by phone from Ohio. “And one show flyer described us as ‘strange punk,’ which we all think is pretty awesome.”
With any luck, their sharp wit and taut songwriting will take them much further than would the gas tank of Sammy Hagar’s convertible. SFBG
ABI YOYOS
With This Is My Fist, Onion Flavored Rings, Giant Haystacks, and Robocop 3
Sat/21, 7 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$5
(415) 255-7227

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