STREET SEEN First, I saw the socks. Half sheer, half solid, the pair’s blue rose design made me flash on stained glass cathedral. Like a sock-crazed zombie, I turned on my heels and entered the most unassuming, unmarked shop on Hayes Valley’s row of quirky boutiques and designer collections.
The pair was wildly expensive, and not being a swanky sock kind of lady, that threw me. But Japanese import shop Cotton Sheep is not for those unacquainted with the transformative power of superlative readywear. A few weeks later I was back for a tour, and to talk style philosophy with owner Eiko Critchfield’s son Rue, who credits his mother with awakening his own sense of personal flair.
“You can appreciate this story with your eyes closed,” Rue tells me, holding out an impossibly soft cotton scarf from his favorite of the shop’s handful of imported Japanese brands. The piece is by Kapital, a vaunted label that hails from Okayama, a town traditionally known for its indigo dye and denim. The true, deep blue of Kapital’s jeans, in particular, make them denim head cult items.
After Eiko impressed the company’s higher-ups with the fastidiousness with which she examined pieces in Kapital’s Japanese showroom, Cotton Sheep became the first American store to stock the brand, and the biggest US selection can still be found there — denim, hand-woven scarves, quirky button-down shirts, and of course, my wonder socks. The shop’s other brands include Merveille H, FITH, and Nuno. Each piece is handpicked for sale by Eiko.
“When you walk out the house with these pieces you know you are the only person in the country wearing them,” Rue says. He’s wearing Kapital khakis with an exposed, intricate button fly, and eye-catching strap along the backside waistband. Rue was a self-described jock before joining the family business (“sweatpants and white T-shirts,” he says ruefully), but got hooked on the line after Mom told him he needed a more fashionable dress code if wanted to work in the store.
Eiko certainly brought him up to appreciate a good outfit. She and husband Victor became pickers when they moved to San Francisco in the 1990s from Osaka, joining the hardy ranks of those who troll thrift stores for treasure, hustling to flip quality pieces to vintage stores for profit.
When they’d exhausted the Bay Area’s bins to their satisfaction, Eiko packed up the family into a Chevy Astro and took to the road, sending shipments of Americana (used Levi’s, Raggedy Ann dolls — Japan was nuts for anything that screamed “United States” at that time) to her boutique friends in Osaka whenever the van was too packed to fit more finds. “My parents relied on their sense of style to survive,” Rue says.
“I wanted to show people of San Francisco what I see in Japan that I know they would never find,” Eiko wrote me in an email when I asked her about her idea to open a shop across the street from the site from Victor’s now-defunct music store, BPM Records. “Our store is about an idea: to care for fabrics, to appreciate them, and to teach people that great fabrics will last you forever if you treat it with the care that I do.”
And please, do have care: Eiko’s a stickler for boutique etiquette, chiding those that enter with icecream cones from the Smitten kiosk down the block and cautioning careless types that don’t show the proper respect when handling her precious textiles. Check her Yelp reviews if you don’t believe me.
But the family’s about inspiring a different kind of relationship between us and our wardrobe, one with an emphasis on craftsmanship often lacking in the era of mega-brands and micro-trends. Who knows, maybe Rue will even talk me into those socks one day. “It might be a little scary to walk out of the store like that [with an expensive clothing item],” he laughs. “That’s my job, to help people be less scared.”
The Synthesis 2012 Festival, which marked the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, was supposed to be an opportunity to bring spiritually minded people together around the Kukulkan Pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico to help usher in a new age of cooperation and goodwill. That was the vision espoused by Executive Producer Michael DiMartino, a Californian who said he had been leading tours in the area for decades and setting up this event for years.
Instead, this anticipated moment of enlightenment became what can politely be called a clusterfuck, a descent into utter chaos for many volunteers and attendees. Hundreds of Bay Area people traveling to an uplifting holiday event found themselves stranded in an isolated location without the transportation, sustenance, or communications they’d been told would be available.
Now DiMartino is trying to settle a long list of refund demands, and there are threats of lawsuits on all sides.
When I first interviewed him about the festival, back in October, DiMartino was talking like a New Age prophet: “We, through our actions and intentions, create the world and take the path that we are creating,” he said.
So DiMartino is walking the rocky path of his own creation, facing recriminations for ignoring warnings about looming problems, and vilified both for his alleged managerial failures and for the sometimes appalling way he treated people.
About 150 people have joined the “Synthesis 2012 Scam Awareness” group on Facebook — which has barred Synthesis staff from joining the discussion — where they’re telling their stories of hardship and woe, sharing research into DiMartino’s history with other events, and organizing collective responses to the problem.
Micaela Teal Santos, who helped create and administer the Facebook group, told us her honeymoon trip turned into a nightmare of missing shuttles and meals and being forced to camp alone in the jungle after local authorities shut down the festival campground for several hours, missing the long-anticipated sacred ceremony at sunrise on Dec. 21.
It was one of many similar stories. People who were promised hotel rooms by DiMartino arrived to find those rooms had been given away to others and no vacancies were available — at a site far from any other accommodations. Shuttles that were supposed to bring revelers from other towns to the festival site never arrived, forcing people to spend hundreds of dollars on cabs or private shuttles, and volunteers who came early to create the festival often weren’t provided food or water at a site that turned out to be five miles from the nearest town.
Luckily for DiMartino, he has been surrounded by people who really do embody the positive, patient, and resourceful values that the festival was meant to highlight, from his co-producer Debra Giusti (founder of the Harmony Festival) to Tulku and the Bay Area crew that created the AscenDance stage to the many volunteers who stepped up to address the myriad problems and voids that manifested as the event unfolded.
“That’s the real story, it’s how people under extreme adversity came together to make this happen,” said Giusti, who has been working almost every day since the festival officially ended on Dec. 23 to deal with its fallout, from the attendees still stranded in Mexico without money to get back to the bus filled with festival supplies that still hasn’t returned, to the dozens of attendees who say they feel cheated by DiMartino.
Many of the DiMartino’s biggest critics have made efforts to remain positive and couch their criticisms in the New Age style of empowerment and acceptance but it’s clearly been a bitter disappointment to attendees who hoped the festival would be a launching pad into a new era of harmony and hope.
In an interview with the Guardian, DiMartino disputed many of the characterizations on the Facebook site, darkly warning that his lawyer is looking into “the bandwagon of people on a witch hunt.” But he repeatedly said that he takes full responsibility for problems at the event and accepts that he will probably lose a significant amount of money once the final accounting is done.
“There were logistical breakdowns, but that doesn’t constitute a scam,” DiMartino said, noting that he is issuing some partial refunds and “dealing with people on a one-by-one basis.”
But both in his public and private statements, DiMartino’s tendency to blame the festival’s problems on Mexico, or on volunteers, or on forces beyond his control — or, as he repeatedly told me, “systemic problems,” as if it was a system he didn’t create and run — has only added to people’s frustrations with the festival.
Giusti defends DiMartino as a “visionary” who has problems with organization and follow-through. “Michael would act like everything was handled and it obviously wasn’t. It was very frustrating.”
We heard many stories of DiMartino not responding well, an approach that seems to have helped create many of the problems at the event. Two of the more compelling and condemning narratives come from two longtime festival organizers, Xochi Raye and Corey Rosen, who say DiMartino responded vindictively when they raised concerns about looming problems.
Rosen didn’t actually attend the festival, saying he was forced out of his production manager role for raising questions about preparations, such as the ill-fated decision to save money on transporting materials to the festival by using a volunteer crew and bus, which was turned around at the border by officials with concerns for their safety.
“My biggest issue was transportation and safety. Within the festival community, there is an ongoing joke about ‘safety third,’ but that is just a joke,” Rosen told me. “For them to call these unforeseen circumstances is bullshit…There are a lot of unforeseen circumstances that happen in events. But if you plan for the foreseeable one, you can handle the unforeseeable ones.”
Rosen goes so far as to say he doesn’t believe DiMartino’s claims to have made advanced reservations for shuttles and other services that didn’t materialize. “People were trusting that Michael had things taken care of, and when I wanted to double-check, people said we didn’t need to do that,” Rosen said. “Michael told me my negative comments would not create a positive outlook.”
DiMartino said his computer and many documents were stolen from his car in Playa del Carmen before the event, complicating festival logistics and making it difficult to provide the proof that people are requesting.
To those who believed that the end of the Mayan calendar, coinciding with other New Age beliefs that Dec. 21, 2012, would be signal the beginning of an era of expanded human consciousness, Chichen Itza was considered a place of spiritual power and significance. That clearly made people more trusting of DiMartino’s intentions.
Raye took over some of Rosen’s duties — and much more in Mexico, as problems developed in the run-up to the event. She wrote out a long narrative for the Synthesis 2012 Scam site that tells a harrowing tale created largely by DiMartino’s undelivered promises and bad behavior when questioned.
“Michael said he had been focusing on getting basic needs such as toilets and water in place by the time we landed, and yet basic needs were not established until we had been there for several days, resulting in production time and volunteers lost, as well as many people becoming sick,” she wrote.
Dozens of people told us that things would have been even worse if people on the ground didn’t take the initiative, noting that DiMartino even refused to come to the campground for five hours while police blocked access to weary attendees until after 2am, an incident he minimized to us, calling it a miscommunication and insisting “I had a personal arrangement with the property owner.”
Giusti said she and other staffers are moving rapidly toward resolution of all the problems surrounding Synthesis, from refunds to attendees (many of whom paid $499 each for a “full experience pass”) to compensation for staff, both financial and spiritual.
“Michael does need to come forward and apologize to people,” Giusti told us, noting that she is planning a healing ritual to bring closure to this whole saga. “He will sit in the center of a circle and hear what everyone went through.”
In the Netherlands city of Eindhoven, the streetlights lining a central commercial strip will glow red if a storm is coming. It’s a subtle cue that harkens back to an old phrase about a red sky warning mariners that bad weather is on the way. The automated color change is possible because satellite weather data flows over a network to tiny processors installed inside the lampposts, which are linked by an integrated wireless system.
Lighting hues reflecting atmospheric changes are only the beginning of myriad functions these so-called “smart streetlights” can perform. Each light has something akin to a smartphone embedded inside of it, and the interconnected network of lights can be controlled by a central command center.
Since they have built-in flexibility for multiple adaptations, the systems can be programmed to serve a wide variety of purposes. Aside from merely illuminating public space, possible uses could include street surveillance with tiny cameras, monitoring pedestrian or vehicle traffic, or issuing emergency broadcasts via internal speaker systems.
The smart streetlights aren’t just streetlights — they’re data collection devices that have the potential to track anything from pedestrian movements to vehicle license plate numbers. And, through a curious process distinctly lacking in transparency, these spylights are on their way to San Francisco.
BIG PLANS
On Minna between Fourth and Sixth streets in downtown San Francisco, theSan Francisco Public Utilities Commission has installed a pilot project to test 14 streetlights that are connected by a wireless control system. The city agency plans to gauge how well this system can remotely read city-owned electric meters, wirelessly transmit data from tiny traffic cameras owned by the Municipal Transportation Agency, and transmit data from traffic signals.
The pilot grew out of San Francisco’s participation in an international program called the Living Labs Global Award, an annual contest that pairs technology vendors with officials representing 22 cities from around the world. At a May 2012 LLGA awards summit in Rio de Janeiro, far outside the scope of the city’s normal bidding processes, a Swiss company called Paradox Engineering won the right to start testing the high-tech lights in San Francisco. Within six months, Paradox Engineering and the SFPUC had the Minna streetlights test up and running.
Meanwhile, the city has issued a separate Request for Proposals for a similar pilot, which will test out “adaptive lighting” that can be dimmed or brightened in response to sensors that register pedestrian activity or traffic volume. The city is negotiating contracts with five firms that will test out this technology in three different locations, according to Mary Tienken, Project Manager for LED Streetlight Conversion Project for the SFPUC.
Under the program, five vendors will be chosen to demonstrate their wireless streetlights on 18 city-owned lights at three test sites: Washington Street between Lyon and Maple streets; Irving Street between 9th and 19th avenues; and Pine Street between Front and Stockton streets.
LED streetlights are energy-efficient and could yield big savings — but the lights do far more than shine. The RFP indicates that “future needs for the secure wireless transmission of data throughout the city” could include traffic monitoring, street surveillance, gunshot monitoring and street parking monitoring devices.
So far, the implications of using this technology for such wide-ranging objectives have barely been explored. “San Francisco thought they were upgrading their 18,000 lamps with LEDs and a wireless control system, when they realized that they were in fact laying the groundwork for the future intelligent public space,” LLGA cofounder Sascha Haselmeyer stated in an interview with Open Source Cities. “Eindhoven is pioneering this with … completely new, intelligent lighting concepts that adapt to the citizen not just as a utility, but a cultural and ambient experience. So many questions remain,” he added, and offered a key starting point: “Who owns all that data?”
LUMINARIES IN LIGHTING
Phillips Lighting, which was involved in installing the Eindhoven smart streetlights system, played a role in launching the San Francisco pilot. Paradox Engineering recently opened a local office. Oracle, a Silicon Valley tech giant, is also involved — even though it’s not a lighting company.
“Oracle, of course, manages data,” Haselmeyer explained to the Guardian when reached by phone in his Barcelona office. “They were the first to say, ‘We need to understand how data collected from lampposts will be controlled in the city.'”
According to a press release issued by Paradox Engineering, “Oracle will help managing and analyzing data coming from this ground-breaking system.” Oracle is also a corporate sponsor of the LLGA program. It has been tangentially involved in the pilot project “because of a longstanding relationship we had with the city of San Francisco,” Oracle spokesperson Scott Frendt told us.
Paradox was selected as the winner for San Francisco’s “sustainability challenge” through LLGA, which is now housed under CityMart.com, “a technology start-up offering a professional networking and market exchange platform,” according to the company website.
In May of 2012, the SFPUC sent one of its top-ranking officials, Assistant General Manager Barbara Hale, to Rio for the LLGA awards summit. There, technology vendors of all stripes showcased their products and mingled with local officials from Barcelona, Cape Town, Glasgow, Fukuoka and other international cities. San Francisco was the only US city in attendance. San Francisco will even host the next summit this coming May at Fort Mason.
In Rio, Paradox was lauded as the winning vendor for San Francisco’s LLGA streetlights “challenge.” It didn’t take long for the company to hit the ground running. “Soon after the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Cities, where we were announced winners for San Francisco, we started discussing with the SFPUC the objectives and features of the pilot project,” Paradox announced on the LLGA website. “Working closely with the SFPUC, we also had the opportunity to build solid partnerships with notable industry players such as Philips Lighting and Oracle.”
WINNERS’ CIRCLE
On Nov. 15, Paradox hosted an invite-only “networking gala” titled “Smart Cities: The Making Of.” The event brought together representatives from Oracle, the SFPUC, Phillips, LLGA, and the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, “to learn about the challenges of urban sustainability in the Internet of Things era,” according to an event announcement.
“The project we’re piloting with the SFPUC is highly innovative since it puts into practice the new paradigm of the ‘Internet of Things,’ where any object can be associated with an IP address and integrated into a wider network to transmit and receive relevant information,” Gianni Minetti, president and CEO at Paradox, stated in a press release.
The event was also meant to celebrate Paradox’s expansion into the North American urban lighting space, a feat that was greatly helped along by the LLGA endeavor. But how did a Swiss company manage to hook up with a San Francisco city agency in the first place — and win a deal without ever going through the normal procurement process?
San Francisco’s involvement in LLGA began with Chris Vein, who served as the city’s Chief Technology Officer under former Mayor Gavin Newsom. (Vein has since ascended to the federal government to serve as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation for President Barack Obama.)
To find the right fit for San Francisco’s wireless LED streetlights “challenge” under the LLGA program, a judging panel was convened to score more than 50 applicant submissions received through the program framework. Judges were selected “based upon knowledge and contacts of people in the SFPUC Power Enterprise,” Tienken explained. The scoring system, Haselmeyer said, measures sustainability under a rubric developed by the United Nations.
Jurists for San Francisco’s streetlight program were handpicked from the SFPUC, the San Francisco Department of Technology, Phillips, and several other organizations. An international jurist is designated by LLGA for each city’s panel of jurists, Haselmeyer said, “so as to avoid any kind of local stitch-up.”
He stressed that “the city is explicitly not committing to any procurement.” Instead, vendors agree to test out their technology in exchange for cities’ dedication of public space and other resources. Tienken, who manages the city’s LED Streetlight Conversion Project, noted that “Paradox Engineering is not supposed to make a profit” under the LLGA program guidelines. “We’ll pay them a $15,000 stipend,” she said, the same amount that will be awarded to the firms that are now in negotiation for pilot projects of their own.
“San Francisco is using this to learn about the solution,” Haselmeyer added. “This company will not have any advantage,” when it comes time to tap a vendor for the agency’s long-term goal of upgrading 18,500 of its existing streetlights with energy-saving LED lamps and installing a $2 million control system.
At the same time, the program clearly creates an inside track — and past LLGA participants have landed lucrative city contracts. Socrata, a Seattle-based company, was selected as a LLGA winner in 2011 and invited to run a pilot project before being tapped to power data.SFgov.org, the “next-generation, cloud-based San Francisco Open Data site” unveiled by Mayor Ed Lee’s office in March of 2012.
The mayor’s press release, which claimed that the system “underscores the Mayor’s commitment to providing state of the art access to information,” made no mention of LLGA.
PRIVACY AND PUBLIC SPACE
Throughout this process of attending an international summit in Rio, studying applications from more than 50 vendors, selecting Paradox as a winner, and later issuing an RFP, a very basic question has apparently gone unaddressed. Is a system of lighting fixtures that persistently collects data and beams it across invisible networks something San Franciscans really want to be installed in public space?
And, if these systems are ultimately used for street surveillance or traffic monitoring and constantly collecting data, who will have access to that information, and what will it be used for? Haselmeyer acknowledged that the implementation of such a system should move forward with transparency and a sensitivity to privacy implications.
“Many cities are deploying sensors that detect the Bluetooth signal of your mobile phone. So, they can basically track movements through the city,” Haselmeyer explained. “Like anything with technology, there’s a huge amount of opportunity and also a number of questions. … You have movement sensors, traffic sensors, or the color [of a light] might change” based on a behavior or condition. “There’s an issue about who can opt in, or opt out, of what.”
Tienken and Sheehan downplayed the RFP’s reference to “street surveillance” as a potential use of the wireless LED systems, and stressed that the pilot projects are only being used to study a narrow list of features. “The PUC’s interest is in creating an infrastructure that can be used by multiple agencies or entities … having a single system rather than have each department install its own system,” Tienken said. The SFPUC is getting the word out about the next batch of pilots by reaching out to police precinct captains and asking them to announce it in their newsletters, since “streetlighting is a public safety issue,” as Tienken put it.
Haselmeyer acknowledged that public input in such a program is important: “It’s very important to do these pilot projects, because it allows those community voices to be heard. In the end, the city has to say, look — is it really worth all of this, or do we just want to turn our lights on and off?”
LIGHTS, BUT NO SUNSHINE
One company that is particularly interested in San Francisco pilot is IntelliStreets, a Michigan firm that specializes in smart streetlights. IntelliStreets CEO Ron Harwood told the Guardian that his company was a contender for the pilot through LLGA; he even traveled to Rio and delivered a panel talk on urban lighting systems alongside Hale and a representative from Oracle.
A quick Google search for IntelliStreets shows that the company has attracted the attention of activists who are worried that these lighting products represent a kind of spy tool, and a spooky public monitoring system that would strip citizens of their right to privacy and bolster law enforcement activities.
“It’s not a listening device,” Harwood told the Guardian, when asked about speakers that would let operators communicate with pedestrians, and vice-versa. “So you can forget about the Fourth Amendment” issues.
Harwood seemed less concerned about the activists who’ve decried his product as a modern day manifestation of Big Brother, and more worried about why his company was not chosen to provide wireless LED streetlights in San Francisco. After being passed over in the LLGA process, Harwood said IntelliStreets responded to the RFP issued in the weeks following the Rio summit. Once again, Harwood’s firm didn’t make the cut.
Since his company provides very similar services to those described in the RFP, Harwood said he was “confused” by the outcome of the selection process. IntelliStreets’ Chief Administration Officer Michael Tardif was more direct. “Clearly we think this was an inside deal,” Tardif told the Guardian. Tienken, for her part, declined to discuss why San Francisco had rejected IntelliStreets’ application.
And when a public records request was submitted to the agency last August for details on San Francisco’s participation in LLGA, the response was opaque at best. “After a duly diligent search we find that there are no documents responsive to your request,” an SFPUC public records coordinator responded via email. “The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is not a participant, nor is involved with Living Labs Global Award. Please know that we take our obligations under the Sunshine Ordinance very seriously.” That was just an honest mistake, Sheehan tells the Guardian now by way of explanation. In the public records division, “Clearly, nobody had any familiarity with LLGA.”
MUSIC There will be no bad seats at the new SFJazz Center in Hayes Valley; or at least, that’s the goal.
The brand new jazz venue in the heart of town, a three-story, glass-encased structure with a circular concrete stadium bowl of an auditorium, educational components, rehearsal spaces, a cafe run by the Slanted Door’s Charles Phan, and multiple bars opens Mon/21. It’s a $63 million, 35,000-square-foot addition to Performing Arts Row, near Van Ness-adjacent locations such as the Davies Symphony Hall, and the War Memorial Opera House. It’s the birth of a nonprofit jazz institution.
In the auditorium, 700 seats encircle and hover above a central stage — chairs behind the stage, up in the balcony, and practically up in the artists’ faces on the ground level. Because the room so surrounds the stage, there’s a direct sight line for every instrument being played, every hand grasping a horn, tickling keys, or plucking strings. There are platforms that can accordion and retract, making that enviable space near the stage open up into a temporary dance floor.
And all the seats have cup-holders. We’re a long way from the smoke-filled, underground jazz clubs of the past.
EXCITING AS ALL HELL
And from those seats in the Robert N. Miner auditorium, patrons will see an impressive first season of SF Jazz at its new home. Fans already have high expectations, given SF Jazz’s 30 years of hosting concerts and festivals at other venues like the Paramount in Oakland, and smaller clubs like Amnesia. Now with its own multi-use facility, the nonprofit has taken eclectic routes with its programming and contributions.
“This first season, when you look at some of the things we’re doing here, it’s just exciting as all hell,” says founder and executive artistic director Randall Kline, barely able to contain that excitement, clad in a hardhat and reflective vest on the first level of the still-under-construction building. “[These events] fully take advantage of what we can do with the theater — something we couldn’t do when we didn’t have our own place.”
For starters, there’s a sold-out opening night celebration Jan. 23, hosted by Bill Cosby, along with a grand opening week of shows spotlighting McCoy Tyner, the SFJazz Collective, and more, followed by a week of big band with the Realistic Orchestra (Jan. 31), and swing with Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickets (Feb. 3).
In March, virtuoso Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain will perform four nights, and in April there will be a Weimar Germany themed weekend with Ute Lemper, Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, and a screening of the classic Metropolis (1927), with live music by the Clubfoot Orchestra.
But even more to Kline’s point: there will be five resident artistic directors for the 2013 through ’14 season (along with Kline’s overall vision). The five — Jason Moran, Regina Carter, Bill Frisell, John Santos, and Miguel Zenon — are musicians with distinctive backgrounds and viewpoints, programming four days of thematic events.
ENCOMPASSING GEOGRAPHIES
For his days, Santos hand-picked colleagues and artists working and performing in the Caribbean style. He chose De Akokan, a duo made up of Cuban singer-songwriter-composer Pavel Urkiza and Puerto Rican saxophonist-composer Ricardo Pons, because “they’re phenomenal artists…and they rarely come here.” He also invited cutting edge trombonist-composer Papo Vazquez, who lives in New York but is steeped in the Afro-Puerto Rican tradition.
During a phone call a few hours before my hard-hatted venue walk-through with Kline, architect Mark Cavagnero, and Marshall Lamm, who does public relations for the center, Santos discusses his anticipation and interest in the upcoming schedule.
The Bay Area bred percussionist will also be premiering his own Filosofia Caribena II, which refers to Caribbean philosophies and traditions — those that have informed his entire body of work. “[It] blends all the experiences of Black American music with Caribbean traditions, and it goes into the whole socio-political aspect of how the music really represents resistance and the identity of a whole group of people that identify culturally, even though we don’t live in Cuba or Puerto Rico, but we certainly grew up in and maintained those traditions.”
Adding, “Jazz was born in that environment, in New Orleans, in the Caribbean community. We’re making those connections between jazz and the Caribbean roots.”
Frisell’s batch of shows, beginning April 18, will include multimedia pieces with projections and orchestras, readings of Allen Ginsber’s Kaddish, and Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (the latter of which is rumored to be narrated by Tim Robbins).
Moran’s residency likely represents the scope of the auditorium’s versatility best: he’ll open with a solo acoustic piano night (May 2), followed by a “Fats Waller Dance Party” with Meshell Ndegeocello that utilizes the dance-floor, then break out the inspired, possibly nutty, concept of a skateboarding jazz piece. There will be an actual half-pipe on the lower level of the room — seats pushed back — with professional skateboarders riding back and forth in the curved structure to Moran’s musical accompaniment.
FOCAL POINT
It’ll be one of many configurations for that striking room. The specifics of the auditorium were big challenges for architect Cavagnero — the acoustics, the balance of sound (such as making sure solo piano and thundering skateboarding dips both fill the space equally), isolating street noise, creating those excellent sight lines from every angle.
“The idea of the building was to make the big concrete room the sacred space for music, the focus space,” says Cavagnero, walking up the stairs in the building’s glass-encased entryway. “That was going to be the closed, sacred space, [and] everything else would wrap around it and be as open and public as we could make it.”
To that end, the rest of the building has floor-to-ceiling glass, and the staircase has no columns supporting it, just thin titanium rods that double as the guardrail. The second floor has bars on either ends and terraces with glass doors that fully open, along with tiled murals representing the history of jazz in the city, with long-gone clubs painted throughout.
It’s clear that this building is meant to be more than a standard music venue, the goal is to be an institution.
“So, if the paradigm is: clubs are harder to run and have live music, well, if we could have the same kind of vibrant music in an institution that supported that kind of thing, to build up a community of people that cared about that kind of thing — which is the gamble I guess we’re making here in this building — we can build it for the jazz community,” says Kline. “[The goal is to have] a great place to hang out and hear live music, where new artists can grow and premiere, and be nurtured.”
And it is hard to run live jazz venues in the city. Nearing the end of 2012, the owners of Oakland’s Yoshi’s filed for involuntary bankruptcy to put its San Francisco location in Chapter 11 if it couldn’t meet an agreement with its partners, the Rrazz Room switched venues under a cloud of controversy stemming from an allegedly racist former manager of its then-location, and Savanna Jazz had to fight off foreclosure.
“We have not seen an increased interest for the art form [recently] primarily because the economy is down significantly and the arts are usually the first to suffer,” says Savanna Jazz co-owner Pascal Bokar.
Because of this, I ask Bokar if other jazz club owners in the city see the center as a contentious new rival. He categorically denies that assertion.
“Jazz is an art form and it has no competition, every club and club owner adds to the fabric of our community and SFJazz is the big brother. I know how hard it is to promote jazz and [Kline] has been working at it for several decades,” he says. “He deserves tremendous credit for bringing this to San Francisco. SFJazz is a very powerful organization and I think that there is an opportunity for [it] to partner with the smaller venues like Savanna Jazz. The smaller venues are the incubators of local talent and I think that they would benefit from a closer relationship, which in turn would solidify community commitment.”
It may be the older sibling to smaller clubs, but given the economy, and the tough climate for all music venues in San Francisco really, the SF Jazz Center does also feel like a gamble itself. But to extend and belabor the metaphor, Kline’s got a good hand.
Santos describes the center to me as a “bold experiment.”
“The amount of money that it has taken to build that place and keep the doors open is phenomenal, and in a lot of ways, it’s a step out into the darkness,” he says. “But I see the potential of it as just limitless. It can be such an incredible thing, if the community supports it. That’s what I’m hoping will happen.”
NATIONAL ART FORM
Santos points out that the jazz center is unique in its fans and patrons differing from the typical performing arts donor, and will have specific obstacles because of that.
“In a way, it’s abstract, when you think of it like, OK, there it is, next door to the symphony hall, to the ballet, to the opera, within one block of those institutions. It’s wonderful to have jazz there, and standing toe-to-toe with those institutions, and getting the respect it deserves. Getting public support from the city and the country and the state, as it should be, because jazz is our national art form. The symphony and the ballet and the opera are not.”
“The difficult part is that the opera and the symphony and the ballet have traditional well-heeled audiences of supporters. Jazz does not. Jazz is grassroots; it’s working class. The audience for jazz and the community from where jazz comes out of is not a deep-pocket kind of community. And that’s where the challenge lies.”
If anyone can face that, it’s Kline. It’s part of his whole bootstrapping essence, how he’s kept SFJazz up, running, and prominent for the better part of three decades. From its humble beginnings as the three-day Jazz in the City festival, promoted solely by Kline, to the Summerfest, the SFJazz High School All-Stars group, the monthly Hotplate series, and finally, the SFJazz Center.
Leaning against the guardrail on the second floor of the building, gazing out through the wall of glass to the greater Hayes Valley neighborhood, Kline smiles as he talks of the city’s history with jazz, his own life mirroring it for quite some time. “I’ve been here since 1976, and I’ve seen a lot of patterns in the scene; it ebbs and flows, the economy changes. This building is a reflection of the sociology; we’re trying to be relevant, so we’ve chosen a different model, we’ve chosen institution.”
It’s one of a few times that will come up in my conversations with those involved with the center.
“Could we apply that older model for culture to a younger, vibrant art form that’s relevant to the city?” he asks, rhetorically. “That’s the aim here, to try something that’s of our time.”
Jazz hands: Some SFJazz season highlights
MCCOY TYNER
A rare old school jazz legend in the center’s inaugural season — stunning and dapper pianist Tyner will “consecrate” the space by performing with the SFJazz house band.
Jan. 24, 7:30pm, $50–$150
MONTCLAIR WOMEN’S BIG BAND
Swing is still huge in SF, and this celebration of the classic big band sound pairs the 17-member Montclair Women with the 20-member Realistic Orchestra (who’ve big-banded Bjork) for a wall of swingin’ sound. The SFJazz High School All-Stars Orchestra opens.
Jan. 31, 7:30pm, $25
AFRO-CUBAN ALL STARS
Oh heck yes.
Feb. 22-24, 7:30pm, $25–$65
MARIZA
The gorgeous longing of Portuguese fado washes over the Bay in the form of the wonderfully voiced Mariza, a spellbinding star whose repertoire spotlights acoustic melancholy melodies from Brazil, Cape Verde, North Africa, and beyond.
Mar. 14-17, 7:30pm, $25–$65
“JOHN SANTOS: FILOSOFÍA CARIBEÑA II”
Beloved Bay Area bandleader and jazz evangelist digs deep in his knowledge of Cuban, Latin, and indigenous Caribbean styles to deliver a heady trip through ancient Iberian influences and contemporary island expressions.
Mar. 23, 7:30pm, $25–$65
METROPOLIS
San Francisco’s Club Foot Orchestra performs its renowned futuristic soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi masterpiece.
Apr. 14, 7:30pm, $20–$40
“ALLEN GINSBERG’S KADDISH” AND “HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S THE KENTUCKY DERBY“
Überhip guitarist Bill Frissell, an SFJazz resident artistic director, applies his downtown cool pedigree to two überhip literary iconoclasts. He’ll be conducting an ace team of musicians for multimedia presentations of Ginsberg’s epic poem of mourning and Thompson’s notorious, uproarious 1970 article about the grand horse race. With visual design by Ralph Steadman for both programs, classic counterculture will be out in force.
Ginsberg: Apr. 18, 7pm and 9:30pm, $35–$80
Thompson: Apr. 20, 7:30pm and Apr. 21, 4pm and 7pm, $35–$80
BANDWAGON AND LIVE SKATEBOARDING
“Jazz wild card” and MacArthur Genius pianist Jason Moran gets contemporary with new trio Bandwagon, performing a rolicking set as a who’s-who of SF skateboarders shows off the flexibility of the new center.
OPINION Given that Gov. Jerry Brown put out his proposed budget the same day that Oscar nominations came out, it’s tempting to make some comparisons.
Brown’s budget, like the nominated musical “Les Misérables,” has plenty of numbers, and will make some people cry.
But I take the new budget seriously, the same as every budget I’ve seen since I got to Sacramento. Unlike most of the recent budgets, this one doesn’t feature a big deficit. Give the Governor some credit for that, but let’s look at how he’s done it. Not all of it is pretty.
To start with, education gets a boost. That’s clearly what California’s voters wanted when they passed Proposition 30 in November. The budget will give more generous increases to the school districts that have more education challenges, and it boosts funding for higher education. We can cheer that.
It also funds the next steps for implementing federal health care reform. That bodes well for efforts to make sure all Americans and all Californians are insured. Under ideal circumstances, of course, we’d be talking about single payer.
There are other, less cheerful things in our future.
There’s an across-the board 20 percent cut to In-home Health Supportive Services beginning in November. This comes from an odd “optimistic” assumption from the governor that the courts that kept him from making those cuts earlier will let him do it now.
Child care funding is flat, which would be tolerable if it weren’t for past cuts. It’s hard to find a better investment in our state than child care. Kids in good child-care programs do better when they get to school. Child care allows more people to work and attend job training. Restoring child-care funding is critical for the state.
Keeping CalWORKS benefits at half of what they used to be is similarly shortsighted, as are cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, reductions in Medi-Cal provider rates and funding changes for students in higher education.
While preaching austerity, Brown keeps pouring money into a prison system that needs more reform. Sentencing and release programs could be altered to reduce the need for overstuffing prisons without risk to Californians. Overcrowding continues, with one women’s prison in the Central Valley at 180 percent of capacity. This is not stewardship that inspires confidence.
Prison programs to help people beat drug addictions and find jobs when they come out are gone. We are missing a chance for long-term reductions based on rehabilitation. Instead we continue to shuffle bodies around.
Spending choices are not the only problem. The governor skipped some ways of boosting revenue. What about the rules surrounding Proposition 13? Local jurisdictions would benefit from closing loopholes that allow corporations to avoid reassessment when property changes ownership.
I also want discussion of an oil severance tax. Here in the Bay Area — in Richmond and San Bruno — we’ve seen and lived with major downsides of the energy industry. I think it’s time that the oil producers who continue to make big profits pay a tax for the oil that’s taken out of California.
You can see that the Governor’s “director’s cut” budget doesn’t deserve a little gold statue — even if it is the best picture (fiscally) we’ve seen in a few years. We’ll look for silver linings when the Legislature starts working on our playbook.
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano represents the 13th District.
EDITOR’S NOTES The guy who runs the San Francisco Housing Authority is in pretty serious doo-doo: His agency has just been placed on the federal government’s “troubled” list, and he’s getting sued by his own lawyer, and he’s hiding from the press while tenants complain that they can’t get basic repairs.
Although Mayor Ed Lee has so far officially stuck by Henry Alvarez, he’s already backing off a bit, and it’s pretty likely Alvarez will be gone when his contract expires this summer. He may be gone even sooner than that; there’s a growing chorus of voices calling on the mayor to fire him.
So at some point we’ll get a new director, who will make a handsome salary (Alvarez gets $210,000 a year plus a car and seven weeks paid vacation) and live in a nice house and go into work every day to deal with problems that are pretty damn far from his or her life.
That’s always the case to some extent with the heads of agencies who deal with the poor, but it’s particularly dramatic when you talk about the Housing Authority. Public housing is never luxurious, but in San Francisco, it’s been riddled with problems for many years. And frankly, I’m much more concerned about the tenants than about Alvarez or his management style.
I get that the Housing Authority has financial problems. The federal government long ago abandoned any serious commitment to funding housing in American cities, and the authority only recently managed to pay off a multimillion-dollar judgment from a lawsuit filed by the families of a grandmother and five children killed in a fire on Housing Authority property.
Yet, tenant advocate continue to complain that it can be hard, even impossible to get a response from the agency. When critics complain, the agency goes after them: The Housing Rights Committee went after the Housing Authority over evictions, and wound up getting investigated by SFHA employees who wanted to gut their city funding. And while some say Alvarez is a hard-charging person who demands results (and thus pisses some people off), nobody has used the words open, accessible or compassionate to describe him.
I’ve got an idea for the next director (or for Alvarez, if he wants to stick around). Why not live in public housing?
Seriously: Why shouldn’t the person who controls the safety and welfare of tenants in more than 6,000 units spend a little time understanding what their lives are like? Why not spend, say, one night a week in one of those apartments?
In the old days, judges used to sentence slumlords to live in their own decrepit buildings, which seemed to work pretty well: Once the guy in charge has to deal with the rats and roaches and broken windows, he’s much more likely to expedite repairs.
But it wouldn’t have to be punitive — just a chance to get a first-hand look at how the agency policies are working on the ground. The city employee unions have had a lot of success asking members of the Board of Supervisors to do a union worker’s job for a day; the director of the San Francisco Housing Authority could certainly live like one of his tenants every now and then.
Think of it as a management tool: What better way to figure out whether his staff is doing the job than to look at the end product? Or figure it as a way to stop being an asshole and see what people who live on less than ten percent of his salary really think of his administration.
CAREERS AND ED If your New Year’s resolutions include finally finishing that post-apocalyptic S&M fantasy novel, or maybe just starting the memoir about your childhood as the illegitimate offspring of a ’70s soap opera star, you’re in the right place — and time. Here in the Bay Area, you can’t throw a copy of Robert McKee’s literary how-to “Story” without hitting a writing teacher — and January is when most writing classes ramp up. The trick is choosing the right one.
Best to begin with these 3 steps:
DECIDE EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF CLASS YOU WANT
Are you looking for a lot of lecture on writing craft, or would you rather spend more time workshopping your writing? Do you want to be assigned reading homework, or would you prefer writing exercises? All this information should be in the class description, and if it isn’t, email the teacher and ask. You’re allowed, you’re a grown-up now.
ASSESS YOUR MOTIVATION LEVEL
About mid-February it’ll be a cold, rainy night and that TiVoed episode of Downton Abbey and some takeout Indian food will seem more appealing than the experimental fiction course you signed up for. Decide now if you’re better committing to an afternoon class or a weekend workshop. Or if you should sign up with a friend so you’ll have somebody to shame you going.
VET THE INSTRUCTOR
Reading the teacher’s bio is as important as reading the course description. If you’re taking a class in novel-writing, you might want to know if your instructor has actually published (and not self-published) a novel — and if it was in the last couple of decades. This is useful information to have when you’re asking about real-world topics, such as getting an agent or dealing with publishers.
Of course, being published doesn’t necessarily make someone a good teacher. Writing is a profession that attracts people who like to lock themselves up in rooms with imaginary characters. Always check out the Yelp reviews for any place you’re thinking of taking a class. You’ll find plenty of individual teacher comments, pro and con.
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While there are other options, here is my personal list of the best places to take writing classes in the Bay Area:
THE WRITING SALON
Started in 1999 by a former newspaper editor, the Writing Salon (www.writingsalons.com)now has two locations, one in Potrero Hill and another in Berkeley. The Writing Salon offers intimate classes, four times a year in all genres (fiction, poetry, playwriting, even erotica) that are real crowd-pleasers. The Writing Salon won the SFBG Best of the Bay Readers’ Poll in Adult Education in 2011 and 2012.
THE SAN FRANCISCO WRITERS’ GROTTO
The Grotto began offering classes in 2008, and has seen their program grow to more than 15 classes per week. Begun in 1994 by Po Bronson, Ethan Canin, and Ethan Watters, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto (www.sfgrotto.org) is a collective of working writers who share office space South of Market, where classes are held. Grotto classes are taught by Grotto members, as well as visiting colleagues, such as their agents, editors, and author friends. Grotto classes have perhaps the most stringent criteria for their teachers. No instructor can teach a Grotto class in a genre he or she is not published in. The Grotto has recently partnered with Litquake to sponsor the Bay Area’s first juried writers conference, Lit Camp, to be held this April.
BOOK PASSAGE
Easily the best independent bookstore in the country, Book Passage (www.bookpassage.com) in Corte Madera is also an excellent place to take a writing class. Often authors on their way through town on book tour will teach here. Book Passage is justifiably famous for its three big conferences — Children’s Writers and Illustrators, Mystery Writers, and Travel Writers and Photographers — which take place in the spring and summer. Elaine Petrocelli, the brains behind Book Passage, packs these conferences with agents and editors, and then sends them out to mingle with the students. More than one local writer has had his or her career made at a Book Passage conference.
GOING ALL IN — GRADUATE SCHOOL
If attending these writing classes has you thinking about taking your skill set to the next level, you don’t have to leave town. San Francisco State has one of the best, and for California residents, one of the least expensive Creative Writing graduate programs. It’s not easy to get into, but the upside is that once you’re in, reading your fellow students’ work is a pleasure. SF State (creativewriting.sfsu.edu) offers an MA and an MFA program, and you can go part time.
Another good, although pricier, choice is California College of the Arts, which offers a two-year MFA program at its SF campus (www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/writing).
Licensed clinical social worker and former punk rock singer-guitarist Stephanie Pepitone leads this musical play group for kids of all ages. Stephanie “leads families in about an hour’s worth of singing, dancing, music-making, and fun/chaos” with original tunes and familiar favorites.
Fridays, 10:30-11:30am, $10 per family. La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. www.lapena.org
JAN 12
Haitian Folkloric Dance
Live drumming accompanies instructor Portsha Jefferson’s class for all levels, which promises that “you will experience the meditative Yanvalou, the fiery rhythms of Petwo, the playful and celebratory dances of Banda and Rara. Expect a high energy class in celebration of a rich, spiritual tradition. Bring a long, flowy skirt if you have one.”
Feeding Your Soul: Mindful Cooking and Eating in the New Year
Let the onslaught of New Year’s resolution-keeping commence. Kick off the year with an intro to mindful eating, and get away from psychologically compulsive, physically harming habits when it comes to nourishing yourself. Life coach Carley Hauck and chef Greg Lutes (known for his uni crème brulee!) team up deliver a lecture and cooking demo — aimed at helping you recognize wasteful food behaviors and reinvigorate your love for creating and enjoying healthful dishes.
A six-week course at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine that will introduce you to the basic life force concept of Qi, and then broaden your knowledge into acupuncture, Chinese herbs, tongue and pulse diagnostics, yin and yang, five elements, and the Chinese concept of internal organs.
Thursdays, 6pm-8pm, $120. Pioneer Square and Shuji Goto Library, 555 De Haro, SF. www.actcm.edu
JAN 19
New Year, New Poems: Celebrate Your Muse!
“In our day together we’ll read and talk about an array of accessible, provocative poems by fine writers including current poet laureates Kathleen Flenniken, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Natasha Trethewey, and we’ll do some whimsical, illuminating writing exercises to bypass our inner critics and experiment with themes and tones, phrases and rhythms. We’ll listen closely and encouragingly to each other’s voices. By the end of the day we’ll have shaped a handful of budding poems and sharpened our vision for future writing projects,” says Writing Salon teacher Kathleen McClung.
10am-4pm, $95 Writing Salon members, $110 others. Writing Salon, 720 York, SF. www.writingsalons.com
JAN 19
Kongolese Contemporary Dance
Extremely charismatic instructor Byb Chanel Bibene revisits his Congolese roots, in which contemporary and traditional movements intertwined to produce a unique, exhilarating style. No experience in dance is necessary for this warm, fun, and inviting workshop.
10am-noon, $12-15 sliding scale. Also Jan. 20. Counterpulse, 1310 Mission, SF. www.counterpulse.org
JAN 25
Exploring San Francisco District Six
Sometimes education begins with looking more closely at your community. Supervisor Jane Kim leads a tour of her district — including South of Market, Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods — highlighting some of the recent successes and challenges affecting its residents’ quality of life.
Hole yes! You’ll never need complain about the state of West Coast bagelry again when the good folks of Sour Flour workshops lead you through the basics. You’ll begin by mixing flour, starter, salt, and water and then learning to develop the glutens through various techniques. Finally you’ll find out about boiling and baking techniques. Bring a plate to roll your creation home.
The Coptic style of bookbinding allows a book to be laid open flat, making it ideal for sketchbooks and journals. Offered at Techshop, the epicenter of hands-on DIY yumminess, this seminar allows you to take home your own handmade journal! (To blog about?)
Revered Beat poet, former New College professor, and Guardian GOLDIE Lifetime Achievement Award-winner David Meltzer takes us on a uniquely persona tour of poetry and poetics, exploring “the roots of poetry, the invention and mythology of writing systems, divination, Kabbalah, and the page.” The four-week course (Tuesdays through February) will cover a lot of transcendent ground.
7:00-9:30pm, $200. Mythos, 930 Dwight Way #10, Berk. Contact julmind@mtashland.net for more info.
FEB 8
Career Toolbox with Suzanne Vega
The acclaimed neo-folk singer introduces us to her concept of the “career toolbox,” which “contains a unique mix of creative, strategic and marketing skills that helped her in the early stages of her career.” Honest self-reflection and an understanding of necessary skills to survive a competitive marketplace are key. Plus, hello, Suzanne Vega.
11am-2pm, $52 CIIS members, $65 others. California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, SF. www.ciis.edu
FEB 19
Wild Oakland: Nature Photography Basics at Lake Merritt
Amid its passel of no-cost classes, including weekly courses on Eskrima, the Filipino combat system and herbal medicine, the East Bay Free Skool offers great one-off tutorials. Nature group Wild Oakland hosts a few of these that entail happy tromps about Lake Merritt. Today’s is a wildlife photography class taught by Damon Tighe, whose freelance shots appear in Bay Nature and other publications.
Noon, free. Meet in front of Rotary Nature Center, 600 Bellevue, Oakl. eastbayfreeskool.wikia.com
MARCH 17
Introduction to Neon
Surely there are few among us who could not use a custom-made neon sign. Perhaps you would like it to be clear that you are open for business. Maybe your roommate could use a permanent reminder that please Buddha Christ our savior we don’t leave our coffee mugs on the dining room table (ahem.) At any rate, this is one of this West Oakland metal mecca’s entry-level courses — check its online course schedule for more offerings in blacksmithing, welding, jewelry, glass, and more.
Sundays through 10am-6pm, $400. The Crucible, 1260 Seventh St., Oakl. www.thecrucible.org
CAREERS AND ED When Ford Models announced that its newest menswear model was a woman — Olympic swimmer and New York artist Casey Legler — in the same month that Yves Saint Laurent chose Saskia de Brauw as the face of its spring-summer 2013 menswear collection, it became clear that men’s fashion was opening itself to the fact that not all people who wear suits and sport rugged looks are male-identified.
But not every butch looking for a fly three-piece has the gamine, broad-shouldered physique of Legler and de Brauw. What’s a dapper gent to do?
Enter the new wave of menswear (or, “masculine of center,” as we’ve seen the look defined on some style blogs) brands specifically tailored to the female-born or identified. Happily, downtown San Francisco’s Crocker Galleria will be the site of the first permanent menswear store to cater to the genderqueer.
“My mother started teaching me [to sew] when I was eight,” Tomboy Tailors’ 48-year-old, butch-identified owner Zel Anders writes me in an email interview. Anders has long been a fan of suits over dresses when it came to formal occasions, but was frustrated that she could never find a well-fitting outfit — even here in the Bay Area, where she’s lived since she was 17. She says the process of suit shopping grew painful, and found it necessary to steel herself before hitting the dressing rooms.
No such toughening up will be necessary at the new shop, which has already garnered a loyal Internet following despite the fact that it won’t open its doors until February 2nd. Tomboy Tailors’ staff will help customers find suits that fit right across the chest, hips, thighs, and seat, customizing them so that each garment fits its new owner.
The store will stock not only its in-house line (Anders especially touts its three-button, notch lapel suit for heavier clientele), but items from other brands selected for a pangender crowd — including a selection of men’s shoes in smaller sizes, like a Dalton wing-tip lace-up Oxford and saddle shoes from Carlos Santos and Walk-Over.
“I am having so much fun just watching people ponder and choose from the several hundred fabrics that they have as options,” Anders says about her Tomboy Tailors experience to date. ” Not only do they have to think about what color they want their suit to be, but they have to decide if they want a solid, herringbone, pinstripe, chalk stripe, plaid, or even a bird’s eye, nail’s head, or houndstooth check pattern to the fabric.” Finally, options.
Tomboy Tailors is hardly the only option for fly transpeople, dapper dames, and other genderqueers — transgressive men’s fashion site dapperQ (www.dapperq.com) recently published a list of fab online labels like Marimacho (www.marimachobk.com), The Original Tomboy (www.theoriginaltomboy.com), Saint Harridan (www.saintharridan.com), and Androgynous (www.androgynousfashion.com) that all have a mission to provide fashion for all points on the gender-fashion spectrum.
CAREERS AND ED Like most skills, acting can be honed and refined, and the number of disciplines and techniques an actor could familiarize themselves with are practically infinite. Fortunately for the professional and amateur actor alike, there’s a number of theater companies who offer the same actor trainings to the public that they utilize in the creation of their own work.
Ranging from techniques such as Suzuki Method or Viewpoints, skill sets such as improv or stage combat, or theatrical forms such as Bouffon or Kyogen, these classes help keep working actors in artistic shape, and offer a way for even rank beginners to acquire translatable performance skills. And since unlike acting schools or conservatories, there’s rarely an audition process or prerequisite for attendance, they’re accessible to a fairly broad demographic.
Ensemble theater-making is East Bay company Ragged Wing‘s focus, and therefore also the focus of the trainings it offers to the public. Utilizing techniques such as Viewpoints, mask performance, puppetry, music, and myth-based story creation, Ragged Wing introduces actors and theater-makers of all levels (including total newbies) to concepts such as devised theater, imagination play, and the psycho-physical exercises of Michael Chekhov. It even offers a workshop for teachers in applying ensemble theater techniques in the classroom. Visit its website for an overview of last year’s program, and this year’s upcoming dates, which will occur later this spring.
We like this next class so much we awarded it a Best of the Bay in 2011! Taught by Naked Empire Bouffon Company artistic director Nathaniel Justiniano, the Intro to Bouffon Workshop guides up to 20 participants on a journey to find their “personal bouffon” (or “inner psychopath,” as we termed it). Alternating between weekend intensives and four-week workshops of two-hour sessions (one of which just started on January 15), Intro to Bouffon includes instruction on creating within ecstatic play, movement-and-vocal-based improv, and blatantly violations of the usual boundaries drawn between audience and performer. In addition to teaching at the warehouse Main Street Theater, Justiniano has also recently joined the Circus Center faculty where he will teach a seven-week course on Bouffon beginning in April.
Another theater company offering training in the specialized theatrical format it also performs is Theatre of Yugen, which offers a series of art of performance workshops as well as an apprenticeship program on Kyogen and Noh techniques. This year’s public trainings begin on January 26 with a weekend intensive on “Physical Character” in the Kyogen style of performance. Private apprenticeships are granted by audition, and last for an entire calendar year during which apprentices train and eventually perform with the company, sometimes staying on as company members after their graduation.
$80–$100 (with discount for taking multiple classes.) Enrollment is limited. www.theatreofyugen.org
Sure you can act if someone hands you a script. But how about when there isn’t one? At its best, improvisational theater makes use of a whole range of techniques, and requires a huge amount of focus and cooperation between players in order for a scene to work. It’s also one of the most accessible theatrical art forms for beginners to get involved with, particularly in the Bay Area. One of the newer kids on the block, EndGames Improv is nonetheless one of the most pedigreed. Offering instruction in “long form improvisation” à la Upright Citizens Brigade and Second City, EndGames Improv holds classes in four levels and stages weekly performances at Stagewerx, including its infamous “F!#&ing Free Fridays.” Seven-week classes are capped at 16 participants. January is sold out, but keep an eye on the website for future dates.
They’re not a stand-alone theater company, but I can’t resist mentioning Dueling Arts San Francisco. Providing instruction to performing artists in a wide range of stage combat skills — including quarterstaff (what up Little John?), rapier, dagger, broadsword, and unarmed combat — the instructors of Dueling Arts are also accomplished fight directors and performers in their own right, for a diverse array of companies including IMPACT Theatre, Shotgun Players, Thrillpeddlers, ACT, Berkeley Rep, San Jose Rep, SF Playhouse, and California Shakespeare Theatre. Certification class sizes are generally between six to 12 students, and there are no prerequisites for the beginning levels.
Quarterstaff Level 1 Certification Class begins March 17, $200. www.duelingartssf.com
There’s no shortage of high-end housing in San Francisco. If you can afford to pay $6,000 a month for your rent or mortgage, you’re going to find a nice place to live. And there’s no study anywhere in any corner of the City Planning Department suggesting that current San Francisco residents really want new luxury condos downtown.
In fact, all evidence suggests the contrary — the market for high-end downtown housing is new residents, people who are moving here to take tech jobs, empty nesters moving from the suburbs, or world travelers looking for a pied-a-terre in one of the greatest cities on Earth.
But when the City Planning Department analyzes a project like 75 Howard, that’s not part of the discussion.
The Dec. 12 preliminary environmental study on the “market-rate” (read: $1 million and up for waterfront views) project never addresses the question of what value this type of housing would bring to the city. Instead, it talks about projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments, which says that San Francisco will grow by 52,000 households by 2030.
So a project that’s creating fewer than 200 housing units, and creating a net of 77 jobs, isn’t big enough to be a factor in the future of either jobs or housing.
But in the process, the study makes a remarkable statement, one that underlines everything wrong with city planning policy. Buried on page 48 of a 151-page preliminary study is the following: “In addition, the demand for housing by the net increase in number of employees would be more than offset by the dwelling units that would be constructed on site under the proposed project or its variants.”
That sounds like bureaucratise, and it is, so allow me to translate: The project will create 186 housing units and 77 jobs. More housing than jobs; what’s there to worry about?
Well: The 77 employees at 75 Howard will work in the restaurants and stores, or in the garage under the building, or in maintenance. Not one of them will make even remotely enough money to afford to buy one of the condo units in the building.
So the project — like so much of the development that happens in San Francisco — will create jobs for people who can’t afford to live here, and housing for people who don’t currently work here. That imbalance is utterly unsustainable, spells disaster for the future of the city — and is pretty much hard-wired into current planning and housing policy.
There’s a blocky, unattractive building near the corner of Howard and Steuart streets, right off the Embarcadero, that’s used for the unappealing activity of parking cars. Nobody’s paid much attention to it for years, although weekend shoppers at the Ferry Building Farmers Market appreciate the fact that they can park their cars for just $6 on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
But now a developer has big plans for the 75 Howard Street site — and it’s about to become a critical front in a huge battle over the future of San Francisco’s waterfront.
Paramount Partners, a New York-based real-estate firm that also owns One Market Plaza, wants to tear down the eight-story garage and replace it with a 350-foot highrise tower that will hold 186 high-end condominiums. The new building would have ground-floor retail and restaurant space and a public plaza.
It would also exceed the current height limit in the area by 150 feet and could be the second luxury housing project along the Embarcadero that defies the city’s longtime policy of strictly limiting the height of buildings on the waterfront.
It comes at a time when the Golden State Warriors are seeking permission to build a sports arena on Piers 30 and 32, just a few hundred feet from 75 Howard.
Between the proposed 8 Washington condo project, the arena, and 75 Howard, the skyline and use of the central waterfront could change dramatically in the next few years. Add to that a $100 million makeover for Pier 70, the new Exploratorium building on Pier 15, and a new cruise ship terminal at Pier 27 — and that’s more development along the Bay than San Francisco has seen in decades.
And much of it is happening without a coherent overall plan.
There’s no city planning document that calls for radically upzoning the waterfront for luxury housing. There’s nothing that talks about large-scale sports facilities. These projects are driven by developers, not city planners — and when you put them all together, the cumulative impacts could be profound, and in some cases, alarming.
“There hasn’t been a comprehensive vision for the future of the waterfront,” Sup. David Chiu told me. “”I think we need to take a step back and look at what we really want to do.”
Or as Tom Radulovich, director of the advocacy group Livable City, put it, “We need to stop planning the waterfront one project at a time.”
Some of the first big development wars in San Francisco history involved tall buildings on the waterfront. After the Fontana Towers were built in 1965, walling off the end of the Van Ness corridor in a nasty replica of a Miami Beach hotel complex, residents of the northern part of the city began to rebel. A plan to put a 550-foot US Steel headquarters building on the waterfront galvanized the first anti-highrise campaigns, with dressmaker Alvin Duskin buying newspaper ads that warned, “Don’t let them bury your skyline under a wall of tombstones.”
Ultimately, the highrise revolt forced the city to downzone the waterfront area, where most buildings can’t exceed 60 or 80 feet. But repeatedly, developers have eyed this valuable turf and tried to get around the rules.
“It’s a generational battle,” former Sup. Aaron Peskin noted. “Every time the developers think another generation of San Franciscans has forgotten the past, they try to raise the height limit along the Embarcadero.”
The 8 Washington project was the latest attempt. Developer Simon Snellgrove wants to build 134 of the most expensive condominiums in San Francisco history on a slice of land owned in part by the Port of San Francisco, not far from the Ferry Building. The tallest of the structures would rise 136 feet, far above the 84-foot zoning limit for the site. Opponents argued that the city has no pressing need for ultra-luxury housing and that the proposal would create a “wall on the waterfront.”
Although the supervisors approved it on a 8-3 vote, foes gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, so the development can’t go forward until the voters have a chance to weigh in this coming November.
Meanwhile, the Paramount Group has filed plans for a much taller project at 75 Howard. It’s on the edge of downtown, but also along the Embarcadero south of Market, where many of the buildings are only a few stories high.
The project already faces opposition. “The serious concerns I had with 8 Washington are very similar with 75 Howard,” Chiu said. But the issues are much larger now that the Warriors have proposed an arena just across the street and a few blocks south.
“Because of the increase in traffic and other issues around the arena, I think 75 Howard has a higher bar to jump,” Sup. Jane Kim, who represents South of Market, told me.
Kim said she’s not opposed to the Warriors’ proposal and is still open to considering the highrise condos. But she, too, is concerned that all of this development is taking place without a coherent plan.
“It’s a good question to be asking,” she said. “We want some development along the waterfront, but the question is how much.”
Alex Clemens, who runs Barbary Coast Consulting, is representing the developer at 75 Howard. He argues that the current parking garage is neither environmentally appropriate nor the best use of space downtown.
“Paramount Group purchased the garage as part of a larger portfolio in 2007,” he told me by email. “Like any other downtown garage, it is very profitable — but Paramount believes an eight-story cube of parking facing the Embarcadero is not the best use of this incredible location.”
He added: “We believe removing eight above-ground layers of parked cars from the site, reducing traffic congestion, enlivening street life, and improving the pedestrian corridor are all benefits to the community that fit well with the city’s overall goals. (Of course, these are in addition to the myriad fees and tax revenues associated with the project.)”
But that, of course, assumes that the city wants, and needs, more luxury condominiums (see sidebar).
Among the biggest problems of this rush of waterfront development is the lack of public transit. The 75 Howard project is fairly close to the Embarcadero BART station, but when you take into account the Exploratorium, the arena, and Pier 70 — where a popular renovation project is slated to create new office, retail, and restaurant space — the potential for transit overload is serious.
The waterfront at this point is served primary by Muni’s F line — which, Radulovich points out, “is crowded, expensive, low-capacity, and not [Americans with Disabilities Act]-compliant.”
The T line brings in passengers from the southeast but, Radulovich said, “if you think we can serve all this new development with the existing transit, it’s not going to happen.”
Then there are the cars. The Embarcadero is practically a highway, and all the auto traffic makes it unsafe for bicycles. The Warriors arena will have to involve some parking (if nothing else, it will need a few hundred spaces for players, staff, and executives — and it’s highly unlikely people who buy million-dollar luxury boxes are going to take transit to the arena, so there will have to be parking for them, too. That’s hundreds of spaces and new cars — assuming not a single fan drives.
The 75 Howard project will eliminate parking spaces, but not vehicle traffic — there will still be close to 200 parking spaces.
And all of this is happening at the foot of the Bay Bridge, the constantly clogged artery to the East Bay. “Oh, and there’s a new community of 20,000 people planned right in the center of the bridge, on Treasure Island,” Peskin pointed out.
Is it possible to handle all of the people coming and going to the waterfront (particularly on days where there’s also a Giants game a few hundred yards south) entirely with mass transit? Maybe — “that’s the kind of problem we’d like to have to solve,” Radulovich said. Of course, the developers would have to kick in major resources to fund transit — “and,” he said, “we don’t even know what the bill would be, and we don’t have the political will to stick it to the developers.”
But a transit-only option for the waterfront is not going to happen — at the very least, thousands of Warriors fans are going to drive.
The overall problem here is that nobody has asked the hard questions: What do we want to do with San Francisco’s waterfront? The Port, which owns much of the land, is in a terrible bind — the City Charter defines the Port as an enterprise department, which has to pay for itself with revenue from its operations, which made sense when it was a working seaport.
But now the only assets are real estate — and developing that land, for good or for ill, seems the only way to address hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance and operating costs on the waterfront’s crumbling piers. And the City Planning Department, which oversees the land on the other side of the Embarcadero, is utterly driven by the desires of developers, who routinely get exemptions from the existing zoning. “There is no rule of law in the planning environment we live in,” Radulovich said. So the result is a series of projects, each considered on its own, that together threaten to turn this priceless civic asset into a wall of concrete.
OPINION The so-called Fiscal Cliff has been averted. But the country actually has a much bigger issue — the debt ceiling.
For the uninitiated, the debt ceiling is exactly what it sounds like, an artificial limit imposed by Congress the keep the president from borrowing money. The ceiling was originally passed back in 1917 to prevent the government from excess spending during the First World War. Besides its constitutionality being questionable, it’s also useless and dangerous.
The far right goes bananas about the national debt, and points to the ceiling as a way to keep it from growing. But the debt growth in question is simply to pay back bills on products and services that Congress already used. So to impose a ceiling now is not to cut growth, but to default on US creditors.
The Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless they get huge cuts in social programs — and if current spending hits the ceiling, the United States would be unable to pay its bills.
But there’s a solution, a way President Obama could get around the GOP and its threats altogether. It’s a unorthodox — but legal. Call it debt hacking.
Obama could simply direct the Treasury to print a series of platinum coins in denominations of at least $1 trillion. It’s not perfect, and it’s not without potential cost — but compared to defaulting on debt or cutting Social Security and Medicare, it’s not a bad option.
The president is legally barred from asking the US Mint to print more money — gold coins or paper bills — without the permission of Congress. But under an obscure 1996 law, there’s an exception for platinum.
So upon realizing that the GOP leaders in Congress will push the republic into default, President Obama could direct the Mint to produce, say, three coins — each with the face value of $1 trillion. The coins would be deposited into the general treasury account at the Federal Reserve. This would then be converted into credit to buy back and retire enough debt to give Obama, and the country, some breathing space.
In fact, Obama could do something even bolder and create more coins, to go beyond breathing space and pay off almost all the national debt except for that held by Social Security. But that sort of action — the government just printing new money — can, many economists warn, create hyperinflation.
Still, the Federal Reserve magically produced about $30 trillion to help bail out banks not long ago, and there was little discernible inflation. The government wouldn’t actually be creating new money — it would simply be replacing debt that the country pays interest on with paper (or digital accounting) that it doesn’t. And right now, inflation is the least of our national worries; a little inflation might even help homeowners and those with heavy credit-card debt pay off what they owe with cheaper money in the future.
Of course, no government can do this on a regular basis. The US Dollar could lose its reserve status if investors start to fear the potential of future platinum coins appearing. But what are the alternatives? US dollars and US debt are, and will remain, trusted investments. China may not purchase as many bonds in the future, but the money we save on interest payments could be well worth it.
It’s a crazy idea, but these are crazy times — and if the GOP continues to threaten to destroy the economy, Obama might want to consider something bold.
Johnny Venom is an economist and commodities trader.
Political dynamics on the Board of Supervisors moved into uncertain new territory this week with the inauguration of two new members -– London Breed and Norman Yee –- who break the mold in representing districts that have long been predictable embodiments of opposite ideological poles.
Breed and Yee are both native San Franciscans with deep roots in their respective districts, which they tapped to win hotly contested races against challengers who seemed more closely aligned with the progressive politics of Dist. 5 and the fiscally conservative bent of Dist. 7. Both tell the Guardian that they represent a new approach to politics that is less about ideology and more about compromise and representing the varied concerns of their diverse constituencies.
“I don’t see everything as a compromise, but I want to be sure we find compromises where we can and don’t let personalities get in the way,” said Yee, whose background working in education and facilitating deals as a school board member belies District 7’s history of being represented by firebrand opponents of the progressive movement.
Some of the strongest champions of the pro-tenant, anti-corporate progressive agenda have come from the Haight and Dist. 5, a role that Breed has no intention of playing. “When you talk about the progressives of San Francisco, I don’t know that I fit in that category,” Breed told us. “I’m a consensus builder. I want to get along with people to get what I want.”
Yet what Breed says she wants are housing policies that protect renters and prevent the exodus of African-Americans, and development standards that preserve the traditional character of neighborhoods against corporate homogenization. “I don’t see the difference between my causes and progressive causes,” she said, claiming a strong independence from some of the monied interests that supported her campaign.
We spoke a few days before the Jan. 8 vote for board president (which was scheduled after Guardian press time, and which you can read about at the SFBG.com Politics blog). Neither Yee nor Breed would tip their hands about who they planned to support -– the first potential indication of their willingness to buck their districts’ ideological leanings.
Breed had raised some progressive eyebrows by telling the Guardian and others that she admired moderate Sup. Scott Wiener and would support him for president, but she had backtracked on that by the time we spoke on Jan. 5, telling us, “I’m going into this with an open mind.
“I’m waiting on my colleagues to decide who has the most votes,” Breed said, ing a candid take on valuing compromise over conflict. “I really would like to see us walk into this all together.”
Yee had similar comments. “They’re all competent people and can be leaders, it just depends on where they want to lead us,” he said. “I value people who can work with anyone and see themselves as facilitators more than as dictators.”
Both Breed and Yee come from humble roots that they say give them a good understanding of the needs of the city’s have-nots. Breed was raised in the public housing projects of the Western Addition, an experience that makes her want to solve the current dysfunction in the San Francisco Housing Authority.
“I can’t tell you what needs to be done, but I can tell you something is wrong,” Breed told us. “My goal is to get to the bottom of it and be extremely aggressive about it.”
Yee grew up in Chinatown, his father an immigrant who worked as a janitor, his mother a garment worker. They later lived in the Sunset and the Richmond, and Yee moved into his district’s Westwood Park neighborhood 26 years ago.
When Yee was eight years old, the family saved enough money to open a grocery store at 15th and Noe, and he said that he basically ran the store in his teen years while his father continued working another job.
That was where Yee developed his deep appreciation for the role that small, neighborhood-serving businesses play in San Francisco. In an era before credit cards, he would offer credit lines to local customers struggling to make ends meet; that experience showed him how stores like his family’s were essential parts of the city’s social and economic fabric.
“That’s why I value small businesses,” Yee said, calling that his top focus as a supervisor. “They’re going to have a bigger voice now.”
Yee draws a clear distinction between the interests of small business and that of the larger corporations that dominate the powerful San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Asked where he might have placed on the Chamber’s recent scorecard ranking supervisors’ votes — where Yee’s predecessor, Sean Elsbernd, got the highest marks — Yee said, “Probably not on their A list. They are just one entity in San Francisco and I’m not going to be judged just by them.”
At 63 years old, Yee is by far the oldest member of the youngest Board of Supervisors in recent memory, while Breed, at 38, is closer to the current average. Yee hopes his age and experience will help him forge compromises among all the supervisors.
“People draw their lines, but I try to listen to people and see where their lines are,” Yee said. “It’s a balancing act, but at the same time, there’s things I’ve been working on all my life, like education and safety net issues, and this district does care about those things. At the same time, they care about their homes. Are these issues in conflict? I don’t think they have to be.”
EDITOR’S NOTES Everybody’s talking about the new data on the price of housing in San Francisco, which is in part because everybody talks about the price of housing in San Francisco anyway and in part because the figures are just so alarming. The figures show that the median rent in San Francisco is $3,100 a month — and while it’s hard to know exactly what that means, since some three-bedroom and larger units are in the mix, most San Francisco rentals are smaller, and I’m hearing tell of people paying more than $2,000 for a studio.
Insane. This hurts everyone, particularly small businesses. The much-reviled payroll tax doesn’t really affect the bottom lines of most businesses, but the cost of housing absolutely does, since it drives up the cost of employing people. High rents are way worse for business than high taxes. I don’t get why all the downtown types refuse to see that.
At any rate, I was listening to KQED’s Forum this morning, and the guests, including an economist from Trulia, the real-estate analysis outfit, kept talking about the “healthy” housing market. Again: Insane. This housing market is about as unhealthy as any capitalist market anywhere in the country. It’s increasing the wealth gap, impoverishing thousands, forcing vast amounts of displacement and making the city less diverse. In what economic universe is that “healthy?”
When I write about this sort of stuff, my beloved trolls all say that’s just how markets work and that any form of regulation (say, rent controls on vacant apartments) just makes things worse. (Not true — see Berkeley in the 1980s.) But it all raises a fun question, and gives me a chance to make a very immodest proposal that is no more outrageous than the existing situation for people who want to live in San Francisco.
Maybe we should take housing in this city out of the private market entirely, regulate it like a public utility — and assign it by seniority.
Remember the college housing lottery? First year, you got stuck with a small dorm room, just like everyone else. You lived with it, and with the roommates they assigned you; rich student, poor student, we all lived in the same place under the same conditions.
Sophomores had a little more choice, and by senior year you could pick the best housing on campus. Nobody complained about unfairness; that’s just how the deal worked.
So imagine if everyone who first arrives in San Francisco (or graduates here and enters the job market) had to live in a small SRO or mini-studio. Twitter executive, nonprofit worker, unemployed person — all of us start out with the same housing conditions.
After you’ve stuck around a while, demonstrating a commitment to the community, you move up — say, after five years you get a one-bedroom apartment, after ten you get a flat, and after 20 years you get a house of your own. People who start families would get more space, but on the same type of schedule. Everyone pays the same monthly rent for the same size place, and eventually, after time, vests into home equity.
What should cities encourage? Stability, community involvement, respect for elders … all of those things fit into this plan. People who might otherwise never meet each other would be thrown into living in the same places; high-paid professionals would learn what life was like for working stiffs (and vice versa).
It’s an eminently fair way of allocating a scarce resource. Anyone have a better idea?
FILM With Django Unchained-related posts currently filling up your Facebook feed (and box-office receipts stuffing Quentin Tarantino’s pockets), now seems the perfect time to amble over to Berkeley for the Pacific Film Archive’s spaghetti western series.
Six-part “The Hills Run Red: Italian Westerns, Leone, and Beyond” highlights some of the genre’s most notable B-sides, with three examples of ‘ghetti subset “Zapata westerns,” plus a Monte Hellman oddity, a leather-clad display of youthful Burt Reynolds charisma, and a Lee Van Cleef classic. Expect multiple train heists and shootouts, dubbing that runs the gamut from questionable to surreal, class warfare, much macho chest-beating, and some stellar Ennio Morricone ear candy — including scores sampled by Tarantino over the years. Do not expect any political correctness whatsoever.
Plot incoherence and generous helpings of cheese are also on the menu in 1971’s Duck, You Sucker!, also known as A Fistful of Dynamite. Director Sergio Leone took the gig reluctantly; he’d wanted a break from westerns after 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but came aboard after Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Peckinpah, and Giancarlo Santi (Leone’s assistant on West and 1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) jumped ship for reasons both personal and producer-mandated. The casting of leads James Coburn (as an Irish explosives expert) and Rod Steiger (as, uh, a Mexican bandit) also came after a round-robin of choices were bandied about — including George Lazenby, fresh off his first and last James Bond portrayal, for Coburn’s part.
At any rate, Duck opens with a Mao quote that reminds us “The revolution is an act of violence.” We meet Juan (Steiger, whose accent foreshadows Scarface by 12 years) peeing on an anthill and weaseling his way onto a stagecoach populated by snobby gringos. After an uncomfortably extended sequence comprised of extreme close-ups of richie-rich lips and teeth — chomping food, hurling insults at the peasant in their midst — Juan reveals he’s actually a serial robber, helped along by his extended brood of scrappy sons. Sure, there’s a revolution going on, but he’s in it for personal gain. “My country is not my family,” he mutters later in the film; revolutions, he says, are planned by men who read too many books — and carried out by poor people, many of whom don’t live to see the end result.
This observation proves eye-opening for Mallory (Coburn), who gives his first name as John, though his true name is Sean — which, to my ears, is one of the recurrent motifs in Morricone’s score (“Shon! Shon!”) On the run from his IRA misdeeds — shared throughout the film in superfluous, soft-focus, slo-mo flashbacks — the dynamite addict joins Juan’s crew to help rob a bank, or so Juan thinks, until he realizes the Irishman has neglected to mention that the vault contains political prisoners, not gold. Having sprung hundreds of captives purely by accident, Juan becomes the world’s most reluctant revolutionary hero. Meanwhile John/Sean works through his own demons by applying generous amounts of TNT to bridges, trains, etc.
Shorter than Django by 20 minutes or so, Duck is still overlong, with a tone that careens from fist-raising earnestness to kitschy over-the-topness. The latter is only enhanced by the performances — Steiger’s, mostly, though Coburn isn’t immune, and neither is the hollow-cheeked actor who plays the duo’s army nemesis; who knew brushing one’s teeth could look so … evil? Duck may be an imperfect movie — particularly in the context of Leone’s slender yet masterly filmography — but it has the Zapata western format down pat, with its dual heroes (typically, one’s a simple Mexican capable of unexpected heroics; one’s a European or American whose refined dandiness belies his secret propensity for bad-assery), dusty period setting, and political themes. It’s predated by two structurally similar films included in “The Hills Run Red”: Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary (1968) and Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General (1966).
Corbucci’s Navajo Joe (1966) also plays the PFA series; it’s a more conventional tale of a rogue Native American who brings hope to a crook-plagued frontier town, distinguished mostly by hot-young-thang Reynolds and a screamy, tom-tom-y score by one “Leo Nichols” (a.k.a. Morricone). But The Mercenary is the film to see if you’ve gotta choose. You’ll still get your Morricone, whistle-heavy as ever, but you will also get Franco “the original Django” Nero playing gunslinger Sergei “the Polack” Kowalski, opposite Tony Musante (giallo fans will recognize him from Dario Argento’s 1970 debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) as loopy rabble-rouser Paco. Plus: Jack Palance as demented heavy “Curly,” a character that hardly resembles the Curly he’d win an Oscar for playing in 1991’s City Slickers.
The Mercenary is nuts, in a good way. Within the first five minutes, there are rodeo clowns, the sight of Kowalski forcing a cheatin’ gambler to swallow his own weighted dice (in a glass of milk), and Paco cackling through the only-in-westerns punishment of being buried up to one’s neck in a spot frequented by thundering hooves. The unflappable gringo — prone to striking matches on whatever’s convenient: a hooker’s cleavage, a dead guy’s dangling feet — agrees to help train Paco’s ragtag rebels, though Paco doesn’t take direction well, and Kowalski is a bit of a douche. Meanwhile, Curly lurks, seeking revenge on both men, lending his BAMF skills to the Mexican army, and rocking a jaunty carnation in his lapel. (If this all sounds a bit similar to Corbucci’s 1970 Compañeros — well, it is. Except Palance doesn’t smoke weed or own a hand-pecking hawk in this one.)
Even more unhinged is A Bullet for the General, a.k.a. El chuncho, quién sabe?, (score by Luis Bacalov, supervised by Morricone), which gives away its endgame in the title and kicks off with a rapid-fire voiceover offering some historical context: “From 1910-1920 Mexico was torn by internal strife … scenes of this kind were commonplace.” (“Scenes of this kind” being an army firing squad mowing down common folk, natch.) Prim American Bill Tate (Lou Castel) is visiting Mexico in the service of a shadowy plan, which first involves helping a gang of gun-stealing rebels, led by El Chuncho (frequent Leone star Gian-Maria Volonté), rob the train he’s riding. Chuncho can’t figure him out, either, but he’s won over quickly, deducing “You are a smart young gringo!” and dubbing him “El Niño.”
The plot proceeds apace, with the duo pursing the ultimate prize, a machine gun (“more beautiful than any woman!”), but Bullet has one golden ticket that none of the other “Hills Run Red” films can boast of: wild-eyed Klaus Kinski, a frequent spaghetti-er who plays Chuncho’s half-brother. “That man is a lunatic!” a bystander observes. Yep. There are interpretations of Bullet that suggest the film addresses current events of the time (Vietnam; the CIA’s influence in Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and other parts of Latin America), but anytime Kinski is onscreen, forget about any subtext. Or subtlety.
The other films in the series don’t fit into the Zapata mold; Gianfranco Parolini’s Sabata (1969) most resembles Navajo Joe in its tale of a drifter whose appearance in dusty Daugherty City, Texas means trouble for the local criminal element, though he’s not exactly law-abiding himself. Star Lee Van Cleef — “the man with the gunsight eyes” — lives up to his nickname here, brandishing some creatively souped-up weapons as he takes on the fey local land baron, who dwells in a hilariously over-decorated manse complete with duelling chamber. Other town residents include an “Indian” whose acrobatic skills are as random as they are impressive (seriously, though, get that guy off the rooftop); a sloppy-drunk Civil War vet who Sabata takes pity on; and “Banjo,” whose instrument fires off both musical notes and bullets. All this, plus lines like, “When I stop laughing, you’re dead!” Essential viewing for Van Cleef fans — was there ever a cooler cat in all of the west?
The offbeat sixth film in the series is Monte Hellman’s 1978 China 9, Liberty 37, neither his first western nor his first film to star Peckinpah favorite Warren Oates. If 1971’s Two-Lane Backtop remains the best-known collaboration between the two, China 9 is worth a look just for its dreamy, melancholy mood. It’s kind of the least-garish, “and Beyond” part of the PFA program, mercifully light on the racist characterizations of Mexicans that make other spaghettis so problematic.
China 9 was an Italian-Spanish production, which accounts for the casting of Italian heartthrob Fabio Testi. He plays Drumm, a quick-draw king who’s granted a last-minute pardon when he agrees to off Sebanek (Oates), a stubborn old cuss who refuses to sell his farm to the railroad. (When the railroad’s on its way in, you know any romantic notion of a wild, wild west is on its way out.) But it gets complicated: Drumm actually likes Sebanek, and he really likes his much-younger wife, Catherine (Jenny Agutter, two years past Logan’s Run, introduced while bathing in a river). When Drumm and Catherine run off together, a left-for-dead Sebanek gives chase.
Because it’s the 1970s, there’s a circus scene (and an end-credits twanger by Ronee Blakley). Everyone’s angry, but everyone’s kinda sorry about it, too, and the movie rambles its way to an uneasy, downbeat conclusion. The hills, however, run red as ever.
THE HILLS RUN RED: ITALIAN WESTERNS, LEONE, AND BEYOND
APPETITE Although I’m not an island girl, I crave sorrel — that cinnamon-spiced, rosy-purple juice made from the petals of a sorrel plant — or multi-colored Scotch bonnet peppers, both common in the Caribbean and ideal together, the sorrel cooling off the pepper’s scorching heat. One of my closest friends is Jamaican and we’ve been exploring local Caribbean food for years, despite the lack of abundant local options.
We were saddened to lose Penny’s Caribbean Cafe, a tiny Berkeley dive with excellent Trinidadian home cooking, when Penny moved back to Trinidad a few years ago, I’ve trekked to San Leandro for festivals (Jamaican cornbread fritters) and curry goat at Sweet Fingers, savored the more Americanized food at Primo Patio Cafe tucked away in SF’s SoMa (the sunny patio is lovely), dined at the now-defunct popup Kingston 11 in Berkeley, and appreciated Sarah Kirnon’s inventive Caribbean fusion (Jerk Cornish hen!) from her days as chef at Oakland’s Hibiscus.
Caribbean foods can also be found at Oakland grocers like Minto Jamaican Market and Man Must Wak where you can stock up on authentic ginger beers and Ting (beloved Jamaican grapefruit soda). I’m curious about San Francisco-based caterer Lehi Cooks Jamaica.
But thanks to my dear friend and her family who get their Jamaican food fix at this tiny haven, I’ve found my favorite Caribbean outpost in the most surprising of locales: Menlo Park.
BACK A YARD
With squeaky front porch door and perpetual line out the door, the closet-sized Back A Yard is clearly a locals’ favorite in suburban Menlo Park. The term “back a yard” refers to the way things are done back home, appropriate to this humble, comforting spot. Chef Robert Simpson began his cooking career in Jamaica, gained European perspective in Belgium, then cooked at various Caribbean resorts before coming to the Bay Area.
Under fluorescent lighting, crammed into a handful of tables, I down a Ting which cools off the effects of the tender curry goat special ($12.75, Thursday-Saturday only). Generous platters come with sides of sweet plantains, green salad, and coconut-laced rice ‘n beans, different from New Orleans’ version but equally moist and cheering. Another fabulous side dish consists of warm, honey-sweet festivals, a doughnut-meets-cornbread fried pastry. Jerk chicken ($9.50) appropriately shines, although jerk tofu ($8.95) likewise exhibits meaty, grilled tones amidst silky texture. Friday’s special is escoveitch (the Carribean version of escabeche, or fish marinated in a hearty vinegar sauce): it was snapper on a Friday I visited. Choose a grilled fillet ($12.75) or whole fish (market price), head and eyeballs intact, not so much an immaculate fish dish as Caribbean comfort food, recalling days I’d polish off a whole grilled fish in the countryside of Vietnam.
Jamaica’s national dish, saltfish and ackee, is a must, served here only on Saturdays ($14.50). Salty cod is sautéed with Scotch bonnet peppers and subtly sweet, soft ackee, a fruit related to the lychee. This version shines compared to others I’ve had, confirmed by my friend as authentically reminiscent of the saltfish and ackee she grew up with in Jamaica. Dessert ($3.25) is the one letdown, whether a blandly cold sweet potato pudding or key lime pie lacking the tart oomph I crave in what is one of my favorites. Nonetheless, this hole-in-the-wall is a treasure bringing heartfelt Caribbean cooking to South Bay folk… and worth a trek for hardcore foodies.
1189 Willow Road, Menlo Park, 650-323-4244 (also 80 N. Market, San Jose, 408-294-8626), www.backayard.net
MISS OLLIE’S
Chef Sarah Kirnon (formerly of the aforementioned Hibiscus) launched Miss Ollie’s at the beginning of December, currently open only for Tuesday-Friday lunch in a corner location of Swan’s Market in Old Oakland. During the first week lines were already long and waits for food even longer (30 minutes), not ideal for a low-key, eat-in, or takeout lunch. Despite opening kinks, Oakland is clearly craving quality Caribbean, packing communal wooden tables in a spacious, spare dining room.
Named after, and in tribute to, Kirnon’s grandmother, the food is decidedly more casual than that of her Hibiscus days, modeled after the Caribbean one-stop shops she grew up with: affordable (under $10) daily changing dishes from curry goat to her popular fried chicken — grandma’s recipe. Initially, dishes were uneven, whether flavorless, cold Creole ham and sweet potato salad ($7.50), or a two-note (salty and HOT) saltfish and ackee ($8), begging for more plantains and ackee to contrast Scotch bonnet peppers and over-salty cod. But Miss Ollie’s sorrel is a superior, refreshing rendition, while lamb patties ($7) in a puff pastry evoke an Indian-Caribbean empanada, redolent of cardamom and allspice.
Daily specials, like fresh loaves of Jamaican hard dough bread or Chicory coffee sweetened by condensed milk with Creole doughnuts, are announced via Facebook. Miss Ollie’s fills a needed void and is certainly one to watch.
Happy Current Year from the not-too-distant past! We celebrated New Years Eve at the Manse de la Cooter with good luck sausages, kale, and (for some of us) perhaps a little too much vino.
Oddly, it wasn’t Chicken Farmer who over-indulged, though I expected her to drown her sorrows in the grape since earlier that day her knee doctor broke the news. Or rather, he tore the news: ACL.
"In the wind," as McNulty would say. Only permanently. Like, Chris escorted her left knee’s ACL into a "vacant," and Snoop followed behind with a bucket of quick lime and a powder-actuated nail gun, you feel me?
But, in spite of her bad case of S.A.D. (Sad ACL Discovery) the farmer stoicly sang and storied the Chunks de la Cooter to sleep, and soberly designated drivered me home, where we’ve been burying our heads ever since, recording Sister Exister music.
And so, in deference to my honey’s questionable sports future and entirely unsporty present, I’m going to focus my portion of the column on the thing I now know more about than I did last week: music in San Francisco.
What’s that? The BG already has music writers? So? They already have a food writer, too. My new twist is: Us! That’s right, it’s 2013 and Sister Exister (sisterexister.bandcamp.com) is primed for world domination. We are everywhere. We tweet, tumble, face the book, kick the songs, camp the band, and cloud the sounds with our patented brand of "What the hell was that? Are they serious?"
And it is thanks to my self-appointed role as the band’s link to all things digital that I’ve discovered — gasp — we are not the only band in San Francisco. This epiphany was mostly Soundcloud’s doing, since we never go outside, let alone to bars, let alone to bars playing loud, live, amplified music.
But maybe in 2013 we should because . . . The High Witness Co. (www.soundcloud.com/highwitness)? Digging the "Leonard Cohen and Calexico in a blender" vibe of "Borrowed Time." And the Street Eaters (www.soundcloud.com/streeteaters)? Fuck yeah! And not just because of their name, either.
Chick drummer, fella plucking the bass, and that’s it. And they sound like a full orchestra! OK not really but dang, only two people? Yowza. Check out their track "Blades" and forget what I said about there being only two people in the band. And then be amazed when I say again: all that energy is coming out of only two people!
This, and then all the bands we already know with all the people we already know in them, like the Verms, Yard Sale, the Low Rollers, 17 Reasons . . . In fact, everybody in the greater Bay Area is in a band! If this isn’t true, if you in fact are not in a band then guess what? You, like us, have got a lot of audiencing to catch up on!
CHEAP EATS continued
Yeah but now I can’t go out because I look like Rocky Balboa. I lasted just one round with the bathroom floor yesterday morning and now I have a broken nose, a black eye, and a swollen eyebrow full of dried blood, in addition to my depressing ACLessness. So I can’t even dance, let alone be seen.
For now.
Go on ahead without me, Hedgehog.
I’ll be here on the toilet, where I’ve spent most of 2013, when I wasn’t Hillary Clintoning off of it.
She found me, dear reader, in a puddle of blood. Not Hillary — Hedgehog. And that awesome moment was the highlight of my year this year so far.
Oh. This morning I ate a half of a bagel with jam on it, and I held it down!
Or up, as it were. Other than that it’s been white rice and dry toast on my menu. But you don’t want to hear about this! Go give a listen to happier times, courtesy of Hedgehog . . .
DANCE After a decade of dancing and choreographing in the Bay Area, Cid Pearlman departed for Los Angeles, spent a year in Estonia, and now lives in Santa Cruz.
At last May’s San Francisco International Arts Festival, she re-introduced herself with This is what we do in winter, choreographed in 2010 for both her own dancers and performers from Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. In that piece, dance as social activity beautifully co-existed with the art as rigorous practice. This is what made you wonder what else this choreographer might have percolating.
It turns out to be the premiere of the intriguingly named Your Body is Not a Shark, a collaboration between Pearlman, composer Joan Jeanrenaud, and poet Denise Leto. Maya Barsacq, music director of chamber orchestra Cadenza, instigated the project. The women came together with a common interest in exploring constraints — physical and otherwise — as a generative force in art making. “In dance,” Pearlman says, “the young athletic body is the norm. I want to explore physical differences because I am interested in complicated stories that show people at different stages in their lives.” Shark’s seven dancers range from 18 to 64.
As a no-longer-young dancer, the 49-year-old Pearlman knows about the fragility and vulnerability of the human body. But, as she pointed out in a New Year’s Day conversation from Santa Cruz, “there are different kinds of virtuosity. There is hugely physical, deeply embodied dancing in your 20s and 30s which relies on strength and sharpness technique. Older dancers bring maturity to their work. If they can’t jump so high, don’t ask them to. You ask a performer to do what they are good at.”
“Limitations can hit you any time,” she adds. “It’s part of the human condition.” Her collaborators know whereof she speaks. Poet Leto, who wrote the text for this production, likes to present her works orally. A few years ago, she developed dystonia, a neurological disorder that has affected her vocal chords. “Sometimes she can get the words out, sometimes she can’t,” Pearlman says. But like the dancer who finds new ways to use her body, Leto has developed new strategies for presenting her poetry. Among them is the presence of a co-reader, “so if her voice gives out, the other person picks up.” Jeanrenaud was a cellist with the Kronos Quartet who had to alter her musical career in 1999, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She too adapted to the changed circumstances by becoming a solo performer and composer with wide-ranging works in many media.
Each of these three artists has faced the restrictions on their expressiveness by expanding their reach. (And as Pearlman points out, sharks die if they stop moving.) At the core of Shark are Leto’s poems, each written within the constraints of separate, highly formal parameters: a sestina, an oulipo, and a tanka. She then turned the verses over to Jeanrenaud, who generated a sound collage and an instrumental score to be performed by herself, percussionist William Winant, and members of the Cadenza chamber players. Leto too will be on stage.
Shark’s most demanding task by going farther afield may well have been Pearlman’s. Having immersed herself in the verses’ technical demands — some of them sound like algorithms — she shaped her choreography along the same rules. Leto seems to be happy with how her partners have worked with the poems. “Taken off the page — by the movement of bodies and the movement of sound — they have become something altogether different,” she says in the introduction to the texts’ printed version.
But what about the rest of us? With its intricately interweaving of formal questions and demands, will Shark be readable to an audience? “It’s not a problem,” Pearlman laughs. “They don’t have to know how it works. It’s an experiment. It’s meant to be a puzzle.” *
CAREERS AND ED I bought my friends. For 2,500 of them, I paid $26 — and you can do it too.
It bore reflection one day last month: Why does New York journalist-party disaster Cat Marnell have 20,000 more Twitter followers than me? Her quote about quitting her xoJane editorship to do angel dust was gold, but still.
In a world where relevancy is determined by your profile stats, I’m not alone in this, surely. No matter how much time some of us spend hashtagging, cross-linking, shouting-out, one never has as much social networking impact as one would like. Twitter baffles me sometime.
Thankfully, we live in a world where these perceived inadequacies can be dispersed with the click of a mouse.
Welcome to the business of paying for Internet followers. Spend five seconds on a quick Google search (try “buy Twitter followers,” for example) and like Jezebel posts on insensitive media trends, they will appear: firms that contract with overseas programmers who spend their days creating fake online profiles, or bots, that can be summoned to announce their proclivities for anyone willing to brave this ethical gray space. Fake Internet celebrity, if that’s not too redundant a term.
These fakeries are the cheapest thing you can buy in this world. My mouse hovered over the button on a site called Intertwitter: really 2,500 for $26? Hell yes — wisdom of handing over one’s credit card information to a person who creates fake Internet profiles be damned.
It would take three to five business days, said the site, for my newfound flocks to assemble. Biding time until relevance, I reached out to several of the fake follower companies, hoping that they’d share a little with me about the business of fake friends. Somewhat to my surprise, most were polite and forthcoming about their mission.
The vice president of my benevolent friend-finder Intertwitter, Armani Prescott, assured me that the business of fake friends attracts all kinds of Internet entities, “from oil sheiks in Dubai to small mom-and-pop operations in West Virginia,” he wrote me in an email. “Celebrities, politicians, professional athletes, start up companies, and just average, ordinary people” use his services. It has to do with search engine optimization, he said, but also just with creating confidence in whomever’s browsing your profile.
And, real talk: “People use our services for all kinds of reasons including brand impact,” Prescott told me. “But also just because they want to have more [followers] than their friends.”
ROMNEY’S FOLLOWERS
Over the course of 24 hours on July 21 of last year, perpetually robot-faced presidential candidate Mitt Romney picked up almost 117,000 Twitter followers. The campaign’s sole tweet from that day was a link to a contest whose winner would join Mittens for a day on the road to the White House — hardly a revolutionary breakout for a social media campaign whose last follower increase of that size had taken roughly a month to accrue.
Of course, the uptick was fake. Romney’s campaign denied buying the fake followers, but if people really gauge worth by perceived Internet influence, the incident could be a sign of the darker side of buying Internet popularity. President Obama’s rockstar Twitter account (which at 25.5 million adherents is one of the top most followed accounts on the site, as compared to the now-defunct Romney account’s paltry 1.6 million) could have an even higher percentage of bot followers than his 2012 campaign opponent, some researchers have found.
When digital marketers Advocate Media ran a check on our national elected representatives, it found that members of US Congress had an average of 38 percent fake followers. Senators had an average of 42 percent fake and inactive accounts following them. When social media analysts PeekYou examined the honorable Newt Gingrich’s Twitter account during his not-yet-failed presidential campaign, it uncovered that no less than 92 percent of his followers were figment.
Although as Zach Moffat, the Romney campaign’s digital director, pointed out while denying claims he had bought bots, if Twitter followers were everything, we’d have been looking at a President Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber presidential win in 2012. To be fair, Gaga and Beebs never asked us to vote for them, so his logic is slightly off.
WHY BOT?
The major fallacy in all this, of course, is that these followers are not real people. Regardless of how witty my live tweeting of family members’ peccadillos over the holidays would turn out, the bots would never retweet me. Romney’s and Obama’s bots did not turn out for their rallies or cast ballots. Sure, they make your profile page look nice, but do fake followers really lead to more real-life influence?
“I can say that from my experience, that is 100 percent correct,” wrote the CEO of FanMeNow.com, who identified themself as A. Delgado. FanMeNow, Delgado told me, is Brooklyn-based and employs three full-time workers and five independent IT contractors. “I have seen first hand, and also received testimonials from clients, that right after their boost, they began receiving many real followers. The only correlation I can make is their new social presence being the cause for this drastic change.”
“I do know that when I’m looking for a song on YouTube and there are several videos with the song title in it, I pick the one with the most views,” wrote Prescott in response to the same question. “I’m assuming the majority of people out there do the same — or maybe I’m just an odd ball?”
Not everyone agrees. Jeremy Scott created video marketing firm Viral Orchard, which employs all sorts of techniques to grow the popularity of online brands among meat puppet Internet users. Scott advises clients away from buying fake views and followers.
“The savvy brands know there’s long-term value in more than just a simple view,” he explained. “The engaged viewer shares the content, discusses it, and comes back for more. Bought views don’t translate into comments, likes, or shares the way real views do. And at the end of the day, if all you can really say about your video is that it had a lot of views and not much else, then I don’t see a lot of value in that.”
Scott insists that the fake followers are only good for the initial boost that your profile gets. But to his way of thinking, you’re better off just buying a sponsored ad slot on social networking sites, which can target your content towards viewers who are picking up what you’re putting down, as it were.
Plus, there’s the potential for discovery when you buy fake followers. Run a Twitter handle through StatusPeople’s search engine (fakers.statuspeople.com) and you’ll see in seconds that around 85 percent of my flock hails from bot land.
Awareness about faking it on the ‘Net is growing. At the end of last month, YouTube removed more than 2 billion views from major label recording artists. Will.i.am, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Chris Brown, Avril Lavigne, and Michael Jackson’s page were all docked, YouTube claiming that the views had been arriving at through artficial means. Websites like Business Insider have published lists of the top business fakers that include Google (47 percent fake), YouTube (33 percent), Twitter (47 percent), and Twitter Español (61 percent.)
Of course, not all bots are bought bots. Ever received a freaky link from one of your followers on Twitter? Some bots are meant for virus transmission, and latch onto popular accounts to increase their perceived legitimacy. Perhaps being followed by more accounts makes you more suspectible.
ARE MY BOTS RACIST?
The bots came sooner than I anticipated. Though Intertwitter had predicted I would see my 2,500 new friends join the party within three to five days, most came overnight. In fact, I saw even more than the promised amount drop in.
Because every writer needs to know her audience, I investigated my bots. @CandraObrien, with her profile photo featuring a shock of bleached blond and deep blue hair, looked like someone who might follow me in real life. I clicked to her feed and the first tweet to greet my eyes was awfully, unnecessarily racist. A nursery rhyme with slurs plugged in. The n-word? Candra, why?
It was a moment of panic. Would I be judged by my racist bots? Why the hell would the overseas programmers that my fake follower hawkers had described write racist tweets for my shadow minions?
But generally, bot feeds were comprised of sweet, generic affirmations (“Move on past your divorce & plan for the future, as that’s where u are going to spend the rest of your life & it is so bright it glimmers.”), crude outbursts (“I Wanna Fuck Those Huge Melons !!!!!!”), and marked by a mix of languages unlikely to occur in any one person’s nomenclature (@BenitaSheppard3 supplied us with all these gems — her feed also includes tweets in Portuguese and multiple Asian languages.)
Some day, I will write slam poetry created from the tweets of my bots. My fake follower experts told me these profiles would stick by my side for a year. I hope they stay for ever. Besides the racist one. (Candra, get help.)
Though I knew it was the utmost in superficiality, suddenly having 3,000 Twitter followers felt like an Internet boob job. I was getting more real-life followers than usual, too: an aspiring NASCAR driver, activist group ACT UP, a Philadelphia journalist I’d looked up to for years, porn professionals, weed smoker networks, an organic restaurant in Seattle, an apocalypse-inspired visual artist, an SF vogue dancer, and a Ukrainian foodie.
I realized that my entirely questionable social networking had paid off while bonding with a colleague over drinks. “I just wanted to tell you that your writing has been going so well!” she enthused into our third beers and mutual writerly appreciation. “I was just reading over your most recent articles, they’re amazing. And you’re doing so well on Twitter — 3,000 followers!”
She dissolved in embarrassment when I confessed my scheme, insisting that the number hadn’t overly influenced her compliment. In fact, after a round of direct messages to some of my new real followers, not a one would admit that my pixelated new breasts had been what had impressed them sufficiently to hit that “follow” button, per se. “Did you follow me because I tricked you with spam bots?” is a weird question to answer to in the affirmative.
Although: “&yes — it’s assumed if you have lots of followers you have an entertaining/funny/ culturally relative twitter and I should prob follow you,” Desiree Hersey, an SF club promoter/X-rated crafter extraordinaire told me.
“In general I am more likely to follow someone on Twitter who I don’t know if they have a lot of followers. But it’s not just the number of followers, but the spread between the number of ‘follows’ and ‘followers,'” explained Philly’s investigative journalist Daniel Denvir.
BUT IS IT RIGHT?
Did Romney’s bot army get him closer to the White House? Was my Intertwitter boob job a breach of Internet morality? I put the question of ethics to the fake follower professionals.
“Is it ethical to recall all of the gold and silver in the world’s currency and hand out worthless paper in its place?” wrote Prescott in a somewhat distractionary paragraph that left me with rather more questions than less. “Is it ethical to allow collateral damage in war, in the form of woman and children? Is it ethical to take the citizens’ guns and leave them defenseless against a tyrannical government? Bottom line, ethical’ness’ is different for everyone in regards to their perspective on the matter.”
Delgado stuck closer to the point, inasmuch as celebrities are always the point.
“I believe it is ethical only because Celebrities [all capitalization Delgado’s own] have been doing this for years. Way before companies like ours started offering these services, it was exclusively only offered to Top Notch Celebs. It isn’t hard to see that it would be very difficult for someone to compete in an industry where only the Elite were allowed to use these services. I am helping to close the barrier.”
I liked Delgado’s egalitarian thinking. Hell, if I was willing to spend another $1,500 on bot love, I could be the next Mitt Romney.
SUPER EGO So, there is a hipster church called Reality SF. (Not to be confused with the pretty great, all-singing, some-dancing hipster synagogue, the Kitchen — www.thekitchensf.com. “Slow down, Jew up.”) I’m not sure what all goes on there because Jesus is kind of mainstream. But I do know that every Sunday morning when I’m crawling home from whosever’s house, there’s this amazingly fly and fashion-forwardy crowd of young people on the sidewalk outside Swedish American Music Hall. The hot hair alone had me praising the Holy Spirit. I needed to know more.
Turns out the Reality church dealie — www.realitysf.com, founded in 2010 — comes with indie-flavored music (plus set lists and free downloads), slick videos and podcasts, roving locations, and a charismatic leader named Dave. And, for the month of January, the glamorous congregation is meeting at Everett High School for “slow church” Sundays, including food trucks and a climactic re-baptism using a giant kiddie pool. Paging Portlandia: our SF reality is basically writing your next season. In any case: yes, it’s gay-friendly, but it’s still a bit conservative, so you probably won’t get laid there. However, you may get some great tips for your 2k13 look.
Faith, now with food trucks. Can a super-twee mobile artisan church-truck, possibly called Holy Rollin’, be far behind? I’m still waiting for my mobile leather bar/sex club truck, Glory Holellujah.
ALLAND BYALLO VS. DAVE AJU
The effervescent Housepitality weekly pairs two of SF’s international techno heavyweights, the now-Berlin-based Byallo and the globe-hopping Aju, for some juicy tag-team table collab. It’ll be a little bit wiggy, a lot dancey. With Craig Kuna, Joel Conway, and JP Soul.
Classic Cali house DJs Hipp-e and Halo, aka H-Foundation, are flying in fresh from Mexico’s heated BPM Festival with some major comeback tailwind. They’re appearing with premium Glaswegian techno duo Slam, bringing some great ’90s energy.
Fri/11, 9:30-3:30am, $15–$20. Public Works, 161 erie, SF. www.publicsf.com
STEVE BUG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxyO7nUbsE
Is minimal techno retro yet? Of course, the scintillatingly clean sound (once dubbed “Windex music” by our own Greg Bird of the Kontrol crew) never really went away. But essential minimal label Poker Flat was launched in 1999 (the same year Richie Hawtin dropped seminal Decks, EFX, & 909) — next in line, after a forthcoming drum and bass revival, on our retro creep up the ’90s. Poker Flat founder Steve Bug’s appearance should be a treat for those who want to revisit the sound — and see what tech-house-y things Bug’s been doing with it.
One of my musical high points of 2010 was seeing dreamy glitch-hop pioneer Prefuse 73 at Slim’s, engaging in a ear-blowing impromptu jam session with a live guitarist and gonzo future bass guru Gas Lamp Killer on drums. As the live opener for beloved Philly trippy-hopper RJD2 (also live), I’m sure more sparks will fly high.
Fri/11, 10pm-3am, $20–$25. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com
THREE SOME THING
The party list this week is so full of dudes. We need some drag queens up in here, for sers. Happy third birthday to the weekly Some Thing party, put on by my favorite trio of theatrical gender clowns — Glamamore, VivvyAnne ForeverMore, and DJ Down-E — who really know how to put on shoooow. One of the best things in the city is Haute Gloo’s genius interactive craft table. I made a swan out of porn mags and pancake batter! DJs Stanley Frank and Robin Simmons play delightful tunes from all over.
Two diabolical bass-bounce kids, bringing it down at the youthful, Angelfiery, green-screen-dream Y3K party. With Nanosaur, Joaquin Bartra, candy, bubbles, and lasers.
Fri/11, 10pm, $10 advance. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com
BRUTAL SOUNDS EFFECTS FESTIVAL #72
Really looking forward to some earhole mindfuckery from various experimental electronic crews at the bleeding edge Lab space. With Antimatter, Pulsating Cyst, Ebony Cubbyhole, Beast Nest, Moo Kao, Ribspace, and more. I made none of the above names up.
FILM Robert Carlyle is the kind of actor who usually elicits a slow-dawning response in realm of “Oh, right … that guy. What was he in again?” Well, a lot, but if you’re not British (let alone Scottish), his visibility has probably been erratic and infrequent — plus he does that exasperating English thing of taking TV assignments like they’re perfectly OK, as opposed to the US approach of doing series work only when your big-screen career is in the toilet.
His persona, to simplify a bit, is usually that of the aging boy-man sad sack whose self-deprecation and pleading eyes are attractive until you realize he’s as likely to slide out of any commitment with a muttered excuse as easily as he’ll slide off that bar stool. In other words, a long-odds but redeemable loser. In that vein his quintessential role was as the main guy trying not to disappointment everyone yet again in The Full Monty (1997), an unusually bleak and satisfying “feel good” movie that spawned umpteen softer ones. He’s played variants on that part enough times that you might forget just one year earlier he was the terrifyingly vivid psychotic Begbie in Trainspotting.
Indeed, he’s played a Bond villain (albeit in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough), a cannibal (in 1999’s Ravenous), an evil wizard (2006’s Eragon), even Hitler (in a little-seen 2003 TV film), and if you get BBC America you might well think he’s the most versatile actor on the planet. But the projects in which he most frequently surfaces here — discounting American broadcast money gigs like SGU Stargate Universe — are little UK art house dramas. Often directed by people such as Ken Loach or Shane McMeadows, they customarily find him as protagonists who’d have been Angry Young Men a generation or two earlier. But now they’re not even angry; defeat has been bred in since the cradle, and there’s likely to be a good deal of pathos in any attempts to buck the odds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSiiqp5J30w
Bruised losers going down — albeit not without one last noble act or effort — can be a beautiful line for an actor to make his own, from Jean Gabin to Liam Neeson (before he abruptly turned geriatric action hero). If the shabby shoe fits, might as well wear it. So Carlyle is a producer on California Solo, the kind of movie that often prompts critics to evoke ones from an earlier era (1972’s Fat City, 1981’s Cutter’s Way, 1975’s Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, etc.) No one went to those, either. But they were good, small, “personal” films with a genuine fondness for gritty characters and milieus.
Writer-director Marshall Lewy’s drama revolves around Lachlan MacAldonich, a lanky fortysomething Scotsman who’s somehow found himself managing an organic farm for its cranky but loyal owner (A Martinez) in that deep SoCal nowhere rendered agricultural only by the contortions of water-rights trafficking politicians.
He lives alone, he drinks alone; whatever past he’s got is one he’s cut himself off from. He does have an interesting “hobby” that might provide a clue: boozily hosting a weekly podcast from his kitchen table called Flameouts, “the show where we discuss the tragic and sometimes spectacular deaths of the world’s greatest musicians.” If anybody actually listens, we aren’t told, and he probably doesn’t care.
But Lachlan’s genial not caring much about anything, it seems, when he’s stopped careening home down the highway after bar-time. The resulting DUI charge, even its four-month drivers’ license suspension, wouldn’t be such a big deal if it didn’t turn out that a long-prior pot conviction makes him eligible for deportation despite his green card. And Lachlan really, really does not want to go back to the UK He’s buried himself here precisely to avoid the massive fuckup that no one there would be likely to have forgotten — that he was once the guitarist in “Britain’s biggest band” (at least for one NME minute), and that the major casualty of his stupid rock-star antics was the “British Kurt Cobain,” his brother Jed. When he crawls to the Beverly Hills manse of erstwhile music biz associate Wendell (Michael Des Barres, disturbingly well cast as an oily industry survivor) to beg for immigration lawyer money, the latter snaps “I was never your manager. I was never your friend. Jed was the band.”
Cue further self-destructive impulses, not at all eased by the pleading cow eyes Lachlan makes at sympathetic Beau (Alexia Rasmussen), a much younger customer he chats up at the farmer’s market each Sunday. (It’s even more embarrassing when Danny Masterson as her age-appropriate DJ boyfriend realizes “who he is,” and pours on the hero worship.) Even more painful are Lachlan’s attempts to re-establish some relationship with the bitter mother (Kathleen Wilhoite) of his now-teenaged daughter (Savannah Lathern) so he can claim his deportation would be a hardship to them.
Those last sequences are truly squirm-inducing, because the gap between Lachlan’s desire to do something right for a change and his haplessness at actually doing it is so palpable — we know it’s unfair he’s looking like a “reet eedyut,” but we also know he’s entirely brought it on himself. This is where an actor like Caryle knows how to go for the throat without seeming to reach for effect at all. He makes the depth of Lachlan’s self-loathing so palpable you want to hug him. After you’ve slapped him … but still.
Lewy also wrote and directed the very astute indie drama Blue State (2007), and if he didn’t craft Solo specifically for its Carlyle’s floppy-haired, ever-apologetic charm — well, didn’t he? This is the kind of very good movie that surprises when it actually turns up in theaters, however few. No matter that whoever actually sees the undeniably depressing-sounding California Solo will likely find it — and its star — endearing, poignant, ultimately upbeat. It’s even sort of a perfect early-date movie, softening up the emotions with male fragility redeemable by female generosity and forgiveness.
CALIFORNIA SOLO opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.
TOFU AND WHISKEY Ah, the tormented love song. Chelsea Wolfe does it well. Vocally, she transfixes, sometimes sounding like she’s calmly wringing every ounce of blood from a relationship totem, at other points whispering cries of help from a enveloping darkness, the vibrations of the plucked-hard guitar strings reverberating in the distance. This rush of gloom and pain, in a genre she’s past described as “doom folk,” came forth in a fierce package in 2011’s electric Apokalypsis, and steadily zigzags beautifully through 2012’s meandering Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs.
This weekend, the LA-via-Sacramento singer-guitarist comes to SF with a fellow dark folk spirit, King Dude (Fri/11, 9pm, $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.slimspresents.com). The two once recorded a split seven-inch together, and have played a few shows here and there, but this will be their first full tour together, which surprises King Dude, as tells me via phone from his homebase in Seattle, because they’re longtime pals who “got on like a house on fire” when they first met.
They’re both on the spectrum of a bubbling rebirth of neofolk and gothic Americana roots, inspired by acts like Death in June, and seen elsewhere in musicians like Emily Jane White and Father John Misty, but really driven recently by Wolfe and Dude, in unique ways.
Though King Dude — a.k.a Seattle’s T.J. Cowgill of black metal bands Teen Cthulhu and Book of Black Earth, and clothing label Actual Pain — also has some experience with tortured love songs. His baritone vocals often sound as if there’s a gravelly demon inside, clawing to get out. The lyrics of his 2012 release, Burning Daylight, tend to reflect inner, unearthly struggles, the occult, fears of death, and tragic old world tales. Or as he told another publication, he’s inspired by “death, religion, love, Lucifer, nature, primal feelings.” Most of the tracks have fully imagined narratives.
There’s the song “Barbara Anne” in which he growls, “I’ll shoot that man in the head if he hurts you, Barbara Anne” and “I’ll run away with you if you’ll have me, Barbara Anne.” It’s the tale of small-town love, set in 1940s, around two characters — a boy and the girl he wants, who’s been wronged by the town. “I think it’s probably the best love song I’ve ever written,” Cowgill says. “The kid is like: ‘I’ll kill everybody in the town for you, if that’s alright with you.’ That’s the most loving thing I think anybody can say for somebody else.”
In his reality, his allegiances lie with his musician wife, Emily, and their seven-year-old black lab, Pagan, the latter of which is currently at the vet getting checked before King Dude heads out on tour with Wolfe, just to make sure everything is OK.
There have been countless articles dissecting every shot of Quentin Tarantino’s newest revenge fantasy, Django Unchained. From “the Django moment” (when white people laugh) to Kerry Washington’s costume designer’s secrets to “Why Django Had to Be a Spaghetti Western,” bloggers and squawkers have been raising important, sometimes frivolous theories about the controversial, often brutal film, set in an alternate version of the antebellum era of the Deep South. But what stood out to me, was the Django Unchained soundtrack; no big shocker, given the director.
The music takes over and transports immediately, with “Django (Main Theme)” by Luis Bacalov and Rocky Roberts, a powerful, full-throated song that was also the title track to the 1966 Spaghetti Western, Django. The opening credits are startling enough, setting a vividly emotional tone, but the song adds the outlining whomp, the exclamation mark. The dusty plucking and Elvis-like vibrato of “Jane-gooo” just stick in your brain. While on “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” show on Sirius Radio, Tarantino discussed his reasoning behind the music in the film. Of the theme he said, “When I came up with the idea to do Django Unchained, I knew it was imperative to open it with this song.”
The soundtrack weaves through ominous and plucky original Spaghetti Western themes, Brother Dege’s twangy stomper “Too Old To Die Young,” John Legend’s funky blacksploitation-style anthem “Who Did That To You” (which ended up on the soundtrack after Legend recorded it on cassette and mailed it to Tarantino), and pummeling hip-hop bangers, “Unchained (the Payback/Untouchable)” — a mashup of James Brown’s “The Payback” and 2Pac’s unreleased “Untouchable” — and “100 Black Coffins” by Rick Ross and Jamie Foxx.
Tarantino said on the radio show that this was the first time he’d included new music in one of his films, and it was thanks to the star and title character, Jaime Foxx, who ran into rapper Rick Ross at the BET Awards and invited him back to the set to work on a song together. The song is clearly influenced by the surroundings, with a Western whistle underneath a molasses beat and lyrics like “revenge is the sweetest.” and “I need 100 black coffins for 100 bad men/…I need 100 black bibles while we send ’em all to hell.”
There’s also the deceivingly calmer moments thanks to songs like Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name,” as Django is given his freedom, which left another lump in my throat. That track also has the needle drop and minimal fuzz of the record collector nerd Tarantino is. He’ll often use his own vinyl on the soundtracks. It’s a “whole record experience,” as he describes it. “Pops and crackles be damned.”
NEVER SLOWING DOWN?
It’s true, prolific garage rocker Ty Segall has yet another new band. This one’s called Fuzz, and it includes Segall on drums and vocals (just like in his pre-Ty Segall Band band, Traditional Fools!) and longtime collaborator-pal Charlie Moothart on guitar. The dudes just released new single “This Time I Got a Reason,” played Vacation last weekend, and will be a part of Noise Pop 2013: Feb. 28 at the Knockout ($8).
CANNIBAL OX
After a period of moody silence, underground Harlem rap duo Cannibal Ox has returned — to the stage, at least. Vast Aire and Vordul Mega announced a one-off reunion show in NY late last year, and that must have gone well, ’cause now they’re heading our way on a full tour. Also noteworthy: Aire and Mega only put out one album as Cannibal Ox, 2001 indie hit The Cold Vein, produced by El-P. Now they’re working on a 2013 followup on Iron Galaxy Records.
With Keith Masters, Double AB, Kenyattah Black, I Realz
Yeah, the presidential election happened months ago. But the most intense campaign season is just beginning, as multiple ceremonies ramp up to Hollywood’s ultimate night of self-congratulation (and occasionally questionable fashion): the Academy Awards. The nominations will be announced Jan. 10; the ceremony, hosted by first-timer Seth MacFarlane — of Family Guy and talking teddy bear fame — is Feb. 24. Predictions are based on Golden Globe nominations, Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, Independent Spirit Award nominations, random news and gossip reports, and my own loudmouthed opinion.
Best Actor This one’s already in the bag, or more accurately, tucked under the stovepipe hat: Daniel Day-Lewis is the closest thing 2013 has to a lock, for Lincoln. The only strike against the two-time winner is that his last trophy came pretty recently, for 2007’s There Will Be Blood. Though it’s unlikely any of the other nominees have a chance, best guesses for also-rans are Hugh Jackman for Les Misérables (he sings!); John Hawkes for The Sessions (he’s paralyzed!); and Denzel Washington for Flight (he drinks!) The fifth slot could go to Silver Linings Playbook‘s Bradley Cooper, The Master‘s Joaquin Phoenix (my pick), or dark horse Jack Black, for Bernie.
Best Actress Two women enter, one woman leaves … with a little gold man in tow. Best Actress looks to be a battle between Zero Dark Thirty‘s Jessica Chastain and Silver Linings Playbook‘s Jennifer Lawrence. Both have been nominated before, though Chastain might have an edge here: Zero is a serious action-drama that’s been hyped more than Playbook, and Chastain — last year’s “Where did she come from and why is she in every movie?” surprise — has settled down from overexposed newcomer to reliable talent. Lawrence, also the lead in the mega-popular Hunger Games series, is just 22 years old, and though her sophisticated work in Playbook belies her relative youth, she may be passed over with the understanding that she’ll soon be nominated again.
Other names that will likely appear on the ballot: Marion Cotillard, a past winner, for playing a woman who loses her legs in Rust and Bone; and Naomi Watts, a past nominee who should probably have gotten a statuette by now, for playing the matriarch of a tsunami-ravaged family in The Impossible. The last slot could go to Academy fave Helen Mirren (for the so-so Hitchcock); another past winner, Rachel Weisz, for her raw turn in The Deep Blue Sea; Emmanuelle Riva, winner of the San Francisco Film Critic Circle’s Best Actress award for her work as a dying woman in Amour; or grade-school discovery Quevenzhané Wallis, for her tough-sprite turn in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Best Supporting Actor After I saw Argo, I was certain that Alan Arkin (who won in this category for 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine) would repeat. Then I saw Lincoln, and decided Tommy Lee Jones was the clear favorite. Then I saw Django Unchained, and Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz lurched forth. I suspect all of Django‘s supporting cast won’t actually be nominated (my favorite of the trio: Jackson), and The Master’s Philip Seymour Hoffman and Silver Linings Playbook‘s Robert De Niro are likely contenders. Matthew McConaughey could also slither in, for the crowd-pleasing Magic Mike. But right now, I’m leaning toward the hilariously world-weary Jones for the win. “It opens!”
Best Supporting Actress It’s going to be Sally Field, the nutty-yet-sympathetic Mary Todd in Lincoln, versus Anne Hathaway, the weepy, shorn Fantine in Les Misérables. I am not a Hathaway fan, but if the Academy — who are not immune to being emotionally manipulated by director Tom Hooper (2010’s Best Picture The King’s Speech) — wants to award someone from Les Mis, she’s more likely to squeak in than Jackman. Plus, she hosted the Oscars a few years ago. That’s got to count for something, right?
Other nominees: I’m hoping both Amy Adams (spooky in The Master) and Nicole Kidman (daffy in the Paperboy) get nods, but any slots left over will probably be filled by The Sessions’ Helen Hunt or Maggie “Dowager Countess 4-Lyfe” Smith, for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Best Screenplay (Original and Adapted) The Golden Globes, the Oscars’ boozier little bro, doesn’t differentiate between original or adapted, but its lumped-together nominees contain the likely winners in each category: Mark Boal for Zero Dark Thirty (original), and Tony Kushner for Lincoln (adapted). Other original nominees could include Django Unchained, The Master, Amour, and Looper; other adapted nominees will be sure-things Argo and Silver Linings Playbook, with The Sessions and Beasts of the Southern Wild possibly filling out the category.
Best Documentary The 15-film short list was released in early December, so there’s a bit of navigational help with this one. I have seen most (but not all) of the films on the list; with that disclaimer, my predictions for the final five are: The House I Live In, The Imposter, Searching for Sugar Man, This Is Not a Film, and the SFFCC’s top doc, locally-made hospital drama The Waiting Room. I’m still awaiting the chance to check out Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, a highly-praised look at clerical sex abuse from oft-nominated (and once-rewarded, for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side) director Alex Gibney.
Best Foreign Language Film Since only one film per country can be submitted, and The Intouchables snagged France’s spot, my favorite movie of the year (Holy Motors) isn’t even eligible. But that doesn’t matter, really — Intouchables will likely get a nod, but this race is for the critically-beloved Amour (from Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose The White Ribbon was nominated in 2010) to lose. Other short listers (there are a total of nine) include Canada’s War Witch, Chile’s No, Denmark’s A Royal Affair, Romania’s Beyond the Hills, and Switzerland’s Sister.
Best Director/Best Picture As Steven Spielberg surely recalls, just because you win Best Director (for 1998’s Saving Private Ryan) doesn’t mean Shakespeare in Love won’t swoop in and steal your Best Picture prize. Oscar can tap between five and ten nominees for Best Picture, so the categories won’t necessarily line up — but this year, they just might. Look for the top contenders to be Kathryn Bigelow-Zero Dark Thirty (see my review elsewhere in this issue; it’s also my pick to win), and Spielberg-Lincoln. Other likely nominees: Paul Thomas Anderson-The Master; Ben Affleck-Argo; Tom Hooper-Les Misérables; David O. Russell-Silver Linings Playbook; and Michael Haneke-Amour.
