REVIEW Writer-director Matt Tauber has clearly taken his debut movie’s title to heart. Each streamlined scene has been carefully laid out to maximize character and plot development, seemingly creating the beginnings of a rich, thoughtful film. The strong cast — led by Anthony LaPaglia, Isabella Rossellini, and Viola Davis — provides ample reason to remain hopeful. Tauber, with playwright and coscreenwriter David Greig, gives us a movie full of multifaceted characters, but as the plot progresses, these characters seem increasingly stereotypical and each facet feels calculated. LaPaglia plays Leo, a successful architect unaware of the world crumbling around him: his wife (Rossellini) is bored and depressed; his son (Sebastian Stan) questions his cozy, straitlaced upbringing; and his blossoming teenage daughter (Hayden Panettiere) sure wants some male attention. Elsewhere, a low-income housing complex of Leo’s design deteriorates, and a resident (Davis) works to tear it down. Tauber has the makings of a talented designer, but The Architect needs a less hollow structure.
THE ARCHITECT Opens Fri/8. Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, SF. See movie clock at www.sfbg.com. www.landmarktheatres.com, www.magpictures.com
Bay Guardian Archives
The Architect
Unmoored
CHEAP EATS I should say a few words about Weird Fish. Not that I didn’t thoroughly exhaust the topic in last week’s restaurant review, but because it’s just so fun to say the name of the place. Weird Fish.
Weird Fish is a new nice little Mission-y restaurant at Mission and 18th Street. On the basis of its great name alone, it’s my new favorite restaurant. The food was good too, but if I tell you how small the plates were, my faithful fans will all write to me and say, like they did when I wrote about Café Gratitude, “Come on! Be true to your roots, man.”
I think roots are great, for trees and, you know, Christians and such. But what can I say? In addition to not having a spiritual bone in my body or bark or branches, I don’t eat like I used to. I just don’t. I don’t anything like I used to.
Now, I know not everyone reads these things as meticulously as I right them (yes, that’s a joke), but I would think by now it would be clear that I’ve come entirely unhinged. I don’t have no roots, man. I live and lie down entirely on top of my planet. And I just love Weird Fish. To eat at and to say.
I met a guy at a party who had just eaten dinner at Weird Fish, and our mutual friend, who was introducing us, said, “Dani just wrote a review of Weird Fish.”
And I said, being a brilliant conversationalist, “Mm-hmm, yes, that’s right, I did.” Or something to that effect. Then I suavely spilled a small sip of wine down my chest and asked, to secure the continuation of our acquaintance, “Wha’d-ya-get?”
“Fish and chips.”
I nodded thoughtfully, as if to say, “Ah, fish and chips,” but for some reason I didn’t say anything. I was trying to remember what I’d had at Weird Fish. Blackened trout? Mango salsa?
Oh, it was yummy, whatever it was, but a lot of good that did me now.
After an awkward silence, my new friend handed me a napkin and while I dabbed at my chest, he became involved in a passionate discussion with our introducer about teaching and I think maybe pedagogy (depending what that word means).
I turned to the woman on the other side of me and engaged her on the topic of poop.
Yes, the dates are rolling in! I have to have a calendar now to keep it all straight — which days I’m doing what with whom and eating where with what. Soon I might have to get a watch or a cell phone. Anything is possible, life remains interesting, love flows. And while you’re shuddering at the thought, let me remind you that I use the word date loosely and love even looselier and that in any case my new pattern is to fall for wonderful, fascinating folks who are ultimately unavailable to me, at least in any kind of horizontal fashion. Luckily, I love to kiss people standing up, preferable with my back pressed against a wall.
So, OK, so: what does this tell me about me, my initial relationship to my overwhelmed, unavailable mom, who passed me off to an aunt and uncle while she cranked out her fifth, sixth, seventh kids? Being now a self-aware, psychologically-minded, in-therapy type of person, I have to think about these things. But because I am also still very much a fool, I get to “persist in my folly” — hooray! — and continue to chase after rainbows and windmills in the meantime. I have permission. From Blake and Cervantes!
I’m not giving up just yet on the queer wimmins, cause I just love the bejesus out of them, whether they want to ever git me nekkid or not. My luck, on that front, may well change. To ensure it doesn’t, I think I’ll switch my focus back to straight men. Speaking of windmills. Yes, question?
Yes. Thank you. So why, when presented with the opportunity the other night to put your weird fishy body into a hot tub with a sweet straight stoned dude who people said was flirting with you … why did you wash dishes instead and then drive the dark, winding drive home? Hmm?
That’s a very good question, and in fact, I’m still bashing my head into the wall over it. If a fool persists in her folly, as the saying says, she shall become wise. Like all good philosophies, this raises more questions than it answers. Mainly: when?<\!s>
WEIRD FISH
Sun.–<\d>Thurs., 9 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat., 9 a.m.–<\d>midnight
2193 Mission, SF
(415) 863-4744
Takeout available
No alcohol
D/MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible
The salt point
As a partisan of salt, I could hardly help but love a restaurant called Salt House, and I did — and do — but … how funny that there apparently are no saltshakers at the bar. I was casting about for one, wanting to salt something up a little while waiting for someone to arrive, but I had to settle instead for pouring myself more water from the glass jugs the staff set out for your very own. Water is nice, of course, but sometimes only salt will do.
Salt House is the latest project from the brothers Rosenthal, Mitchell and Steven, who for the last decade or so have run the kitchen show (and I mean this quite literally) at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio, where the exhibition kitchen is of the capital-E sort. The first stage of the Rosenthals’ exit strategy involved opening their own restaurant, Town Hall, in an old SoMa building a few years ago. Salt House is their Chapter Two and coincides, more or less, with the end of their reign at Postrio.
Like Town Hall (which is just around the corner), Salt House has been installed on the ground floor of a venerable structure, a century-old building that used to be a printing plant. The restaurant’s street-front space is boxy, fairly narrow, and deep — like a garage bay for an 18-wheeler, if there are such bays. In keeping with SoMa’s postindustrial fashionability, there are exposed wood beams (including a kind of indoor arbor, sans greenery, near the host’s station) and exposed brick, along with a line of light fixtures that look like barrels beginning to explode above the dining room and neoquaint incandescent bulbs dangling over the zinc bar.
Mostly, though, I noticed the windows, huge multiglazed modern marvels that admit oceans of light while giving the entire redo a distinctly sleek, Mies van der Rohe cast. If you want to know if an old building has been rehabbed, look at the windows; if you see a certain waviness, like heat rising from pavement on a hot day, you are probably looking at original window glass and an unrehabbed building. If you see gleaming perfection, a sheen like the undisturbed surface of a pond, you are looking at renovation money, and perhaps at Salt House.
The food might be called California pub food, but it is pub food of a high order. As at Postrio, the Rosenthals have orchestrated a brass band of big flavors. Even the little bar snacks are vivid: the house-made “pot o’ pickles” ($5) — an array of vegetables including cauliflower, baby carrots, pearl onions, and wax beans — jumps with a vinegar charge in its fist-sized crock; and the mixed nuts ($5) — almonds, pistachios, a cast of thousands — are roasted with one of life’s great improbables, truffle honey, along with sea salt. (This was the dish I was trying to salt up at the bar, incidentally. The sea salt had settled at the bottom of the crock, a fact we discovered only when the crock was nearly empty.)
Nearly every dish has some flavor kazoo. In the poutine ($7 at dinner, $10 at lunch), basically a plate of potato chips dribbled with short-rib gravy, it’s the layer of gorgonzola, which not only gives a textural effect like that of nachos but adds a tremendous charge of pungency up the nose. In the shellfish stew ($19), mainly mussels and shrimp, it’s a broth infused with saffron aioli. In the pizzalike preserved tomato tart ($11), it’s the intensity of the preserved tomatoes — along with the squares of luxuriously buttery pastry crust they sit on. In the chili-roasted oysters ($13), it’s the fiery chili sauce, which, it must be said, makes the dish a little top-heavy.
The watchword for fish is crispy. This cannot be a bad thing. A mackerel filet ($9) wears a waistcoat of golden panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs), while pan-roasted skate wing ($24) gets a nice searing on both sides before being plated with roasted, quartered brussels sprouts, chunks of salsify, and dabs of a tarragon salsa. Skate wing, with its corrugated texture, is one of the most interesting fish to eat — getting the last of the flesh away from the bone is like cleaning stray hairs from a comb — and yet we should not be eating it. Too late I learned from Seafood Watch that skate are seriously endangered and should be avoided. Like sharks, they reproduce slowly, and they are taken through the highly destructive method of trawling. (Mackerel are in the “best” category, but that was just a lucky stab for us.)
I would be glad to learn that skate had been replaced on the menu by petrale sole or some other type of local, floundery fish that might not be as fascinatingly ribbed but isn’t teetering on the brink, either. The Rosenthals are eminences here; if they set a good and conspicuous example, others will follow. It would be a great help to ordinary diners if restaurants simply refused to buy and serve any seafood whose populations aren’t in sustainable shape (per Seafood Watch or some similar authority) and indicated as much on their menus — maybe with a smiling or dancing fish icon?
Sundries: desserts ($7) are mostly in the American grain, including a lewdly moist warm chocolate Bundt cake and some nostalgia-laced butter pecan ice cream, presented in two scoops. The house-blend wines, including a fruity-floral white, are available on tap (from steel barrels) and are presented in several sizes of nifty apothecary bottles, near relations of the water jugs and perhaps of the saltshakers, if they ever come to pass.<\!s>
SALT HOUSE
Mon.–<\d>Fri., 11:30–<\d>1 a.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.–<\d>1:30 a.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.–<\d>midnight
545 Mission, SF
(415) 543-8900
Full bar
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Yule be sorry!
There’s a reason Kate Winslet has four Oscar nominations. Even in a film as fake-snow fluffy as The Holiday, she’s able to imbue her character, lovesick Londoner Iris, with pathos and dignity. Since this is a contemporary romantic comedy (new turf for Winslet), she’s also able to cut loose with some air guitar — although The Holiday is so mass-market it assumes Iris would rock out to something as MOR as “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.” But even if she’d cranked “Ace of Spades,” The Holiday would still be a painful viewing experience, amplified to agonizing any time Winslet isn’t onscreen.
Yep, that’s a dis on Cameron Diaz. Why writer-director Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give) decided to cast actors as unevenly matched as Winslet and Diaz is perplexing. Diaz can play goofy-glam in the right context (There’s Something about Mary, Charlie’s Angels), but The Holiday also asks her to emote. Bad call. Diaz’s story line — she plays Amanda, a tightly wound LA gal who swaps homes with newfound IM buddy Iris for Christmas — is also weaker than Winslet’s, which only adds to the torture.
Why is this movie more than two hours long? Why is the eternally cool Eli Wallach trotted out for a subplot about Old Hollywood that’s not only entirely superfluous but also a reminder of all the romantic classics (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Casablanca) your eyeballs aren’t admiring? Am I swigging extra haterade for The Holiday because I’m so clearly part of its target demographic — female, early 30s, unmarried, and superficial enough to squeal over a humongo-screen TV?
Could also be I ain’t buying what The Holiday is selling because it’s a chick flick composed of nothing but false notes. Jude Law (corny) and Jack Black (dialed down) put in appearances as Amanda’s and Iris’s rebound men (both of whom turn out to be the One, by the way — oh, was that a spoiler? Tee-hee!), but The Holiday’s main message lies with the ladies and for the ladies. Turns out the prospect of being single is so terrifying it requires frequent flier miles to avoid.
THE HOLIDAY
Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
Songs of devotion
Accessible to anyone who might be interested in a deeper understanding of his or her own senses, Nathaniel Dorsky’s book, Devotional Cinema (Tuumba Press), explores the physical properties we share with the film medium. Within the book, Dorsky draws upon films by Roberto Rossellini, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujuro Ozu, and others to illustrate his insights on filmic language. But if another person were capable of writing Devotional Cinema, he or she could just as effectively draw upon Dorsky’s films, which connect intrinsic facets of cinema to intrinsic truths about human experience.
Capable of discovering at least half a dozen fields of vision (or planes of existence, or worlds) within a single shot, Dorsky’s films can fundamentally alter — and heighten — one’s own perception, and his editing skill, tapped by many local directors, is as fundamental to his work as his image making. Sam Mendes took American Beauty’s floating bag sequence from Dorsky’s Variations, which he read about during filming. (Dorsky has noted that the image isn’t a new one — and it isn’t necessarily the richest among his luminous, phantasmagoric visions.)
In conversation with filmmaker Michelle Silva of Canyon Cinema, Dorsky paraphrases the observation of his friend, anarchist writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey), that we’re trapped in a “light age” of meaningless information. “In the dark ages, there were little areas of light, where there might be alchemical investigations,” Dorsky says. “Now we have to find little areas of darkness.” This week brings an opportunity to explore those little areas, at a San Francisco Cinematheque program that will present Dorsky’s three most recent films, Song and Solitude, Threnody, and The Visitation, in alphabetical and reverse chronological order. (Intro by Johnny Ray Huston)
SFBG I remember running into you last year when you might have been shooting Threnody. You were in Chinatown perched right over a parking meter, and you had your camera hidden underneath you. You were so still I almost didn’t notice you — you were blending in with the background. I started thinking about the rules of quantum physics and that it’s impossible to not affect the object that you’re observing. Yet you seem to manage to do just that in your films — you don’t disturb the environment.
NATHANIEL DORSKY If you’ve ever gone into the woods and sat very still for half an hour, all the animals will come back and gather around you. You have to be part of the inanimate world, so the animate world can feel relaxed and come around. Also, you can find these little psychic backwaters on the street — there are places where the energy doesn’t quite flow, and you can kind of tuck yourself [within those places]. It has to do with the angle of the light and so forth.
SFBG My interpretation of your film Song and Solitude is that it is like a silent odyssey through shadow words and the introverted psyche. There are several masks and layers of reality that you’ve collapsed into one. There’s a depth of field in many shots, and the different layers aren’t aware of themselves, while you’re aware of all of them. Could you talk about your visual language in the new film and your state of mind while making it?
ND There are a number of things involved. One is that I’d made a film right before [Song and Solitude], called Threnody, which was an offering to Stan Brakhage after his death. In that film I was trying to shoot images while I had a sense of Stan looking over his shoulder one last time while leaving the world, having one last glance at the fleeting phenomena of life.
Song and Solitude I made along with a friend, Susan Vigil, who was in the last year of her life with ovarian cancer. [She’s] a person who was extremely important to the San Francisco avant-garde film community and helped support the San Francisco Cinematheque throughout the ’70s and ’80s. She was a wonderful, wonderful friend. She came and looked at camera rolls every Friday when I’d get them back from the camera store. There was that atmosphere going on of being with someone so close who was also involved in a terminal illness. But also you might say that with Threnody the camera was placed somewhere back around the ears looking out of your head. In Song and Solitude I actually placed the camera in a sense behind my own head — for a feeling like looking through your own head out [at the world].
Most of my films are more about seeing or about using seeing as a way to express being. [Song and Solitude] is more about being, where seeing is an aspect of the being. The world is seen through the whole fabric of your own psyche as a foreground. Through that foreground exists the visual world, almost as a background.
I also wanted to see if I could photograph things which you’d traditionally call nature and things you’d call human nature with the same primordial sense, to see the slight rub of what human nature is and what nature is, where they are similar and where they feel different. How is muscular movement different from wind? I wanted the film to rest in a very primordial place in its visual essence.
SFBG One time I was questioning you about why we torment ourselves making films, and you said, “It’s to attract a mate.” Could you elaborate on that?
ND I myself met my friend Jerome, who I still live with, on the night that I premiered my first film, when I was 20. So in a way it happened right away for me. But I’ve worked for many people in the film industry as an editor, especially in the area of documentary, and at least three or four times I’ve worked for someone who was looking for a mate.
Once, a friend, Richard Lerner, was producing and directing a film on Jack Kerouac called What Happened to Kerouac?, which I edited. It came time to write out an enormous check to make a 35mm print from the video material. He was really hesitant, and he was single at the time. I said, “Don’t worry. There is no way you won’t get a permanent relationship from this film.” He got irritated, because it was something like the third time I’d said that to him. But a woman approached him after the film premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and they’ve been married ever since.
That has happened with at least four other filmmakers. I worked with Kelly Duane, who made a wonderful film [Monumental] about David Brower, the guy who radicalized the Sierra Club. She was single. She met someone when she showed the film in LA at an environmental film festival, and now she’s married and has a child.
SFBG Is that why you’ve earned the reputation of being the editing doctor of San Francisco?
ND Yes. I work for a lot of single women.
But to answer your question in a more simple way: birds sing, and every February or March a mockingbird always appears in my backyard and sings all night. If it’s a bad singer, there can be trouble. One bird three years ago was not a good singer. It sang from February until the first week of July before another bird sang along with it — then it disappeared. But sometimes they sing for four nights, and it’s over. They’ve gotten someone, because they’re really good singers.
SFBG I’d never thought of filmmaking as a mating call, but you’re right.
ND Many people don’t understand that, and they try to win their mate by making horrible and aggressive conceptually based films. No one is drawn to them, and then they get even more conceptual and aggressive. It can be a downward spiral.
It’s difficult, because you’d think anyone who’d want to make a so-called handmade film would do so to have complete control of the situation. It’s also a chance to make a film that isn’t based on socialized needs. When you make your own individual film, it’s generally an opportunity to be completely who you are and share the intimacy with someone else. In my experience, the more purely individual a film is, the more universal it is. The less successful attempts at filmmaking occur when people are trying to make something which functions within the context of current belief systems. It’s like trying to get a good grade in society, even if it’s alternative society, rather than actually taking the risk of letting the audience feel your heart and your clarity and [to] touch them with that.
SFBG We might be in a dark age in architecture, design, fashion, and everything that involves representing ourselves visually. Aesthetics are ignored, intellect isn’t challenged, nor is spirituality. In contrast, all of those things are at the foundation of your work. Does it bother you that the audience is small?
ND I’m not sure. I’m 63 now, and in the last few years while showing my films in Europe and Canada and the US, I’ve noticed that people in their 20s are really loving them. There’s some kind of interesting face-off between my own generation and people who are in their 20s now.
Within the avant-garde there’s the virgin syndrome, which is that every showcase will only show a film that’s never been screened before. Everyone wants a virgin for their temple. A good avant-garde film is made to be seen 10, 15, 20 times. But because of the virgin syndrome, because they only sacrifice virgins at the temple altar at this point, audiences rarely get to experience a film a number of times.
SFBG Lastly, I want to ask about the roles of silence and sound in your films. Do you prefer silent films?
ND The first time I saw a silent Brakhage film, it seemed quite odd. If you’re used to having sugar with your coffee and someone gives you coffee without sugar, you might find it strange. But you can also get used to it, so that when someone puts sugar in your coffee it seems sort of obnoxious.
It’s an acquired taste, silence, definitely an acquired taste. But once acquired, it has many deep rewards. For one thing, a sound film is more like sharing a socialized event, where to me a silent film is more like sharing the purity of your aloneness with the purity of someone else’s aloneness. The audience has to work a little harder, of course, to participate — everything isn’t just spoon-fed to them. But if they do work a little bit harder, they’re more than rewarded for that effort.<\!s>
SILENT SONGS: THREE FILMS BY NATHANIEL DORSKY
Sun/10, 7:30 p.m. (sold out) and 9:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–<\d>$10
(415) 978-2787
www.sfcinematheque.org
For a longer version of this interview, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Editor’s Notes
The death of David Ayoob didn’t get a lot of headlines. He wasn’t famous in that way; he never ran for office or made speeches. But everyone on Cortland Avenue knew him, and when he died suddenly of a heart attack at 53, Bernal Heights — and the city — lost a great citizen.
Ayoob ran 4-Star Video, and he was the essence of a good small businessperson. He was active in the community and friendly to everyone and treated his employees well. (When he opened a second shop on Potrero Hill, he made two former employees partners in the business and let them run the new outlet.) His shop felt like the neighborhood — full of a diverse collection of people, with plenty of kids and dogs running around. Everyone was welcome.
As one post on a Bernal listserv put it, “With David it was never just about running a business. Bernal was his family. He was a larger-than-life character. The fabric of the neighborhood is weaker, a bit less comforting, and a lot less colorful without him.” Sup. Tom Ammiano added, “He had such a wonderful heart, so generous.” We’ll all miss him.
The memorial for Ayoob is Dec. 9, 2 p.m., at St. Kevin’s Catholic Church, 704 Cortland, SF.
I’m liking Frank Rich’s most recent analysis in the New York Times, which has President George W. Bush in effect talking to the walls, like Richard Nixon in the final days, and utterly losing touch with reality. It’s not clear that he even remembers why we got into this war in the first place: if he wanted control of Iraqi oil, he’s pretty clearly bungled any hope of that, and nothing in the current course is going to make the situation any better. If it was all about his ego, then that’s a lost cause.
My only problem with the Rich line (other than the fact that you can’t get it on the Times Web site without registering and subscribing, which is pretty damn stupid for the nation’s paper of record) is that it assumes Bush actually had a grip on reality in the first place.
I remember way back in the early days of the presidency of Ronald Reagan reading a piece by Carl Bernstein in the Washington Monthly that said something considered heresy in the nation’s capital: Reagan, he wrote, really wasn’t terribly intelligent and didn’t know what was going on half the time. Agree with his policies or disagree, it was a bit alarming to have someone in the White House who was really a pretty dim bulb (and thus was easily manipulated by the people around him — even before the Alzheimer’s hit).
Even today there’s this sense of respect and decorum in Washington that prevents people from just coming out and saying it: the president really doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Consider the other fascinating Bush item from the past week, his interaction with senator-elect Jim Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq. Bush (like an idiot) asked Webb, an outspoken war critic, “How’s your boy?” Webb responded appropriately: “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.” Bush’s lashback: “That’s not what I asked.”
Well, yes, it was what he asked. And the father of a kid who is risking his life for Bush’s insanity answered the same way a lot of fathers would: honestly. Somehow, in Washington, this is a big deal.
Hey: 2,900 US soldiers are dead. Time to get over the protocol.
No pass for Newsom
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom may tell the media that he’s not sure he wants his job anymore, but the reality is that he’s been running for reelection for months. His campaign team is in place, the fundraising is about to kick into high gear, and when 2007 dawns Newsom will start to line up endorsements, put money in the bank, and do everything possible to clear the field. That’s not just a campaign consultant’s fantasy: right now there’s no clear, obvious opponent for a mayor whose poll ratings are almost unimaginably high.
But Newsom can’t be allowed to run without any credible opponent. Somebody has to challenge Newsom — and it’s not as impossible as it might seem.
As Steven T. Jones reports (“Blood in the Water,” page 12), Newsom’s popularity is broad but not terribly deep. He’s got a lot of feel-good political capital that dates back to the same-sex marriage days, but there are a lot of really serious problems facing the city — and when you get right down to it, Newsom hasn’t done a hell of a lot to address any of them. For the past year San Francisco politics and public policy have been driven by the Board of Supervisors, with the mayor reacting. Other than cutting welfare payments for homeless people, it’s hard to think of a single major local initiative that the mayor has taken on. He certainly hasn’t ended homelessness. He hasn’t brought down the violent crime level. He hasn’t improved Muni. He hasn’t done much to create jobs and clearly hasn’t made the city a better place for small locally owned independent businesses.
He’s letting developers call the shots at the Planning Department, letting landlords drive housing policy, following the lead of some very bad actors downtown on education, and letting the city’s structural budget problems fester.
In 2003, Newsom was a strong front-runner from day one and beat back a dramatic challenge from Matt Gonzalez, in part because he had so much money. This time around, money may not be the deciding factor: with public financing in place, a candidate who can raise a respectable sum (a few hundred thousand, not a few million) will be able to mount a competitive effort. And with ranked-choice voting (RCV), several candidates challenging Newsom from different perspectives might leave the mayor unable to pull together a clear majority. (If RCV had been in place in 2003, it’s entirely possible, if not likely, that Gonzalez would have been elected mayor.)
The list of people who have either talked about running or are being pushed by one interest group or another is long, and some of the strongest potential challengers seem to be biding their time. It’s true that the filing deadline isn’t until August, and in both 1999 and 2003 late entrants in the progressive camp made the best showings.
Still, if Newsom has the field to himself all spring and summer and nobody challenges his statements, questions his record, or offers people an alternative, the incumbent will try to anoint himself as the inevitable winner.
So at the very least, progressives need to make sure the mayor isn’t allowed to coast this spring. The supervisors need to keep pushing issues like police reform. They need to make sure the budget hearings point up the mayor’s real priorities. And elected officials and civic activists should hold off on endorsing Newsom by default, unless and until he presents some evidence that he’s going to do a lot better in the next four years than he’s done in this term.
Wholly noise
Trying to fathom the arcane and somewhat frustrating demeanor that shrouds a Bay Area noisenik is like cross-examining Walt Disney on LSD. I’ve been at the mercy of Rubber O Cement’s Bonnie Banks for the past week, meticulously querying the mumbo jumbo he (or she, as Banks likes to be referred to) sends in response to interview questions while nagging him for answers to my more dogged inquiries. One e-mail reply might yield a pensive thought, only to be followed by a farrago of chaotic imagery — swarms of schizo babble about vocal chord mulch, mosquito broccoli, and rabid zombie snowmen. When asked what people can expect from the impending Brutal Sound Effects Festival, Banks answers that performers “will present the sound of a stuffed horse and cat calliope skidded via hydroplane base into a volcano of semi-liquid thorium pellets.” In another e-mail he writes that he hopes people will come to the event “adorning their larger-than-life scramble nightmare Bosch slip-and-slide mask.”
Though put off at first by Banks’s excursive, seemingly psychotomimetic rants, I soon realize this is his world. What I mistook as some puerile screwball who’s simply fucking with me — I’m still convinced he’s doing that to a degree — is actually the eccentric, visionary heart of the Bay Area noise scene.
Since the early 1980s, Banks has exhaustively chiseled San Francisco into the West Coast hub for underground noise by playing in prominent acts such as Caroliner, bringing up young bands (his musical influence has extended from Wolf Eyes to Deerhoof), and encouraging others to engage in the scene. In 1995 he established the Brutal Sound Effects Festival — a musical community of misfits who, according to Hans Grusel of Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, “didn’t fit in anywhere else.” Shortly afterward, Banks founded an online BSFX message board where people could discuss noise acts, events, and other bizarre topics.
Now in its 40th incarnation — Banks is said to organize four to five events a year — the forthcoming BSFX Festival includes some of the Bay Area’s renowned noise addicts: Xome provides power noise onslaughts, and Nautical Almanac’s James “Twig” Harper indulges in electronic cannibalism. Other notable acts include Anti Ear and Bran (…) pos of Beandip Troubadours, Skozey Fetisch, and Joseph Hammer of the Los Angeles Free Music Society in Psicologicos Trama, offering “a fun way to sample experimental sound,” says Joel Shepard, film curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is hosting the event for the first time. Each act will integrate improvised film and video clips into a short performance, creating what Shepard describes as “a real multimedia sensory overload event.” If something seems boring, he adds, there will be another performance in minutes.
“I’ve been really impressed with what he’s been doing,” Shepard says, referring to the industrious Banks. “I find what he’s doing to be a very important part of the art and cultural scene in San Francisco, and I want to show my support.”
The freaks and geeks of BSFX push performance art to its limits, playing under unpronounceable aliases and often incorporating elaborate costumes and scenery unlike anything you see at conventional concerts. Musicians execute a medley of odd sounds using home-wired equipment and analog gadgets at warehouses like the Clit Stop and Pubis Noir. Blistering resonance is one element at these shows. Relying heavily on feedback and distortion, artists such as Xome, Randy Yau, and Tralphaz create a getting-sucked-through-a-vacuum effect by hooking up 20 guitar pedals and feeding them into each other. But don’t be fooled — not all noise acts use volume as an instrument. The Spider Compass Good Crime Band, a duo that will play the upcoming BSFX show, is described by its members as “giant vultures who play instrumental music based around a keyboard.” Their YouTube video is just as outlandish: two costumed performers (one dressed as a giraffelike character, the other as a flamingo) dance and fiddle with samplers; the chamber-driven organs and rubber-sounding belches resemble industrial surf pop.
It’s easy to get sucked into the abstract, visual noise. Costumes range from the cuckoo-clock masks of Hans Grusel to the moss-covered floor crouching of Ecomorti. “Some performers will move an entire set of scenery into a show, which takes two to three hours to set up, and then play a 15-minute set,” Grusel says over the phone. “That shows the dedication people have to this sort of thing.”<\!s>
BRUTAL SOUND EFFECTS FESTIVAL
Fri/8, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–<\d>$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org
The Lowell lessons
EDITORIAL When someone — quite possibly a faculty member or administrator — poured pink paint on a gay teacher’s computer at Lowell High School and left a racist, homophobic note, the administration tried to keep it quiet. Teachers say they were told not to discuss the hate crime with students. Other than a tiny notice in the San Francisco Chronicle — and whatever rumors may have been swirling around campus — the students at the city’s premier public high school had no idea what was going on.
That was terrible judgment on the part of the interim principal, Amy Hansen. When this sort of thing happens on a school campus — particularly a school like Lowell in a city like San Francisco — the administration should immediately go public, make an announcement to faculty, students, parents, and the larger school community, arrange for discussions in smaller groups, and make it clear that intolerance won’t be tolerated.
Instead, the incident was allowed to fester — until the student paper, the Lowell, defied administration wishes and did a story.
The report was fair and accurate, and it gave everyone on campus some insight into what had happened.
The hate crime report was one of several scoops that got the students in hot water this year. Earlier, a Lowell reporter had learned the identity of a student who slashed a teacher’s tires and reported why the student did it — but refused to reveal the offender’s name to the administration. Reporters, the student journos said, are not agents of the police, and they have every legal and ethical right to protect confidential sources.
Hansen was unhappy about those stories (and several others) and required the Lowell’s staffers to meet with her while she expounded on ethics. Fortunately, neither the Lowell staff nor their faculty advisers backed down an inch.
There are two important lessons here. The first is that student journalists have the same rights as professionals and that school administrators ought to respect those rights and not try to intimidate the campus press.
The other is that student newspapers are an essential part of any high school community.
In the past few years, with money short all over, the San Francisco Unified School District has taken a lackadaisical attitude toward campus papers. Today only eight of the city’s 21 high schools have active papers. The hate crime incident at Lowell demonstrates exactly why that’s unacceptable.
Student papers are obviously a wonderful teaching tool. They get kids to think about writing in a different way; they open up opportunities and stimulate debate. But they also serve a community purpose: the students know (often better than anyone else) what’s really going on in a high school and with proper support and guidance can hold administrators and teachers accountable, prevent the spread of misinformation and rumor, and make the school a better place.
Student papers don’t have to be expensive items. Printing isn’t free, but with a bit of prodding, we suspect the dailies in town might be willing to do the work at a steep discount. And Web publishing is practically free. Giving one teacher the time to serve as an adviser isn’t going to break anyone’s budget.
The school board ought to establish a policy that every local high school have a functioning campus newspaper — and ought to tell the administrators to refrain from trying to censor the student press.
The smell is over
By Tim Redmond
Well, SF Gate reports tonight that the cookie ads on bus shelters have been scrapped. Amazing it even got this far.
More cookie madness
By Tim Redmond
The more I think about this cookie-odor thing, the worse it sounds. There’s some real agitiation out there from people who are allergic to or offended by chemical odors, and who rely on public transit. All the way out in Milwaukee, they have heard about this and think it’s a dumb idea.
What I really want to know, and can’t find out, is exactly what chemicals are in the odiferous strips that will be attached to the bus shelters.
I called Maggie Lynch, the spokesperson for Muni, and asked her; she said she was trying to find out. But as of today, all she could tell me was that the ingredients that will assault our nostrils are “an FDA-appreoved food product” and “a widely used flavoring in hundreds of food items.” That sound pretty innocent, but frankly, a lot of what the FDA says is okay for food is kind of nasty stuff.
The difference is that people can choose to buy organic food without FDA-approved chemicals. They can’t choose to ignore the cookie odor at the bus shelters. This is an infringement on public space in the worst kind of way: People rely on Muni. It’s not an optional experience.
As the very least, the supervisors need to demand a full list of the chemical compounds that this ad campaign will release into the shelter air. Better yet, let’s just ban the whole idea.
Got piss?
By G.W. Schulz
I can’t decide what’s creepier. The fact that an advertising firm has made a bus stop smell like cookies to promote milk, or the fact that said advertising campaign has itself become an ongoing news story. Yesterday, the Examiner made the geniuses behind the campaign into a news item. Ever wonder what all those douchebags who fill the Mission on the weekends do for a day job? This is it. Maybe tomorrow, Matier & Ross can analyze how the contrived smell of cookies mingles with the smell of a piss-soaked downtown alley. Nothing is sacred and nothing is off limits when you work in marketing and advertising.
Pelosi’s solid start
By Steven T. Jones
Now, the Guardian hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye with our congressional rep, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In fact, it’s fair to say the relationship has been downright chilly as she’s made compromises to attain her leadership post and we’ve wanted someone to take stronger stands against the unchecked rise of Bush-brand imperialism, corporatism, and theocracy.
But I’m happy to see her take a strong stand against letting the hawkish Jane Harman take over the House Intelligence Committee, making the solid choice of Rep. Silvestrie Reyes instead. And I’ve recently been convinced by Assemblyman Mark Leno that even her apparent gaffe of unsuccessfully backing John Murtha for the number two slot wasn’t the disastrous error in judgment that the mainstream media made it out to be.
Instead, Leno argues that it was a shrewd move that sent a strong message to her troops: if you support me, as Murtha has done on the war and other key issues, then I’ll support you (even in uphill fight where the media is waiting to mock me). Even if there’s only some truth to that view, it at least neutralizes the incident and offers some hope that the Democrats might to up to the challenges they face.
The next big test will be whether she allows John Conyers and other strong Bush critics to push for the release of records related to the Iraq War, which could turn up some truly damning data that would then test Pelosi’s pledge not to pursue impeachment. There’s still lots to do and pitfalls at every turn, but for now, I’m willing to hold my fire and offer my support. Go Nancy!
NOISE: Sonny Smith surfaces
That playwriting sonuvagun Sonny Smith is back in town. You can find him at 12 Galaxies Tuesday, Dec. 5, opening for Bob Frank and John Murray.
Smith describes Frank as “a gifted Memphis singer-songwriter who landed a one-album deal with Vanguard Records” back in the ’70s. Frank’s subsequent eponymous album “earned critical comparisons to Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson”; the songwriter is apparently back after hooking up with his old Memphis pal Jim Dickinson.
Smith also sends the above photo from his tour travels. It’s a sign posted outside a ruined church in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans.
NOISE: Saturday, it’s a free-for-all of other worlds, Crumar, and Pens…
Free stuff on a Saturday — we are so there, after blowing our wads of nonexistent cash on holiday gifties.
Don’t stare – it’s Phil Crumar. Courtesy of asphodel.com.
First off: Phil Crumar, SF beat maker and Asphodel artist, will be ho-ho-ho-ing for the man, the Virgin man, that is — when he performs Saturday, Dec. 2, 3 p.m., at the Megastore at Stockton and Market. Word has it Organer and the Court and Spark’s Mike Taylor will be playing earlier at 2 p.m. Sounds like quality, quality local rock and hop — on a chilly, sparkly weekend afternoon. Wanna meet next to the mint chocolate Citizen Cupcake cupcakes?
Later that evening — if you’re not going to see Jana Hunter in SF — head over to the free opening of “Other World,” curated by Bay Area artist Christine Shields, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama at 25th Street, SF. It runs 7-10 p.m. The show offers “visions into the realm of spirits, shadows, forests, night creatures and those who have passed on. Worlds parallel to ours but less physical in nature sometimes seep into this world leaving curious images, sensations, or sounds. “Other World brings the work of 13 artists into one space creating a place in between this world and the Other.” Or so the press release/email blast sayeth.
Artists in the show include Lara Allen, Adam J Ansell, Julianna Bright, Alice Cohen, Georganne Deen, Veronica De Jesus, Colter Jacobsen, Jason Mecier, Donal Mosher, Kyle Ranson, Amy Rathbone, Jovi Schnell, and Shields herself. There will be a performance by Mosher and music by SteepleChase.
While you’re in the Mission on Dec. 2, stop into Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St., SF, for the reception for “The Dispossessed,” which showcases new work by Monica Canilao. The opening runs 6-9 p.m., and Ghost Family provide the haunting sounds.
Boo! I mean, yeh! Free art!
NOISE: Burn, babies, burn
It’s a whole lotta noise in a teeny tiny package: Deluxe Incinerator, C.I.P.’s three 3-inch CD collection of disc by Bay noise nabobs SIXES and Xome and Texas playmate Goat.
Xome in action. Courtesy of Lars Knudson.
I just opened this small package of bristling static, fuzz, and feedback, and I gotta say it’s just the thing to stuff in your favorite noise fan’s stocking.
Take a gander at C.I.P.’s Blake Edwards’ evocative description of the project: “First I feel harsh noise is best delivered as a short, explosive, focused punch: a 60 or 70 minute CD of noise more often than not just loses impact after a while. Second, a traditional ‘compilation’ usually gives you six minutes maximum by any artist, which really isn’t enough time for them to really stand out from the dozen or so other artists on the compilation. Similarly I want there to be more ‘down time’ between the tracks — time to pop the CD out (or shuffle to the next one) so there was more dead time between the track so that each stood on its own. Last, I didn’t want to create any sense of ‘hierarchy’ or listening order by placing the tracks all on one CD.” SIXES, he writes, “delivers three tracks of blistering motor oil splashed across your eyes; deep ugly wrought tones scrape flesh right off the balls of your feet and serve it up to you in blood sauce.” Yummo.
The limited edition release of 1,000 is available at cipsite.net; just the follow-through after you track down that 10-LP boxset California, which SIXES and Xome also popped up on.
P.S. Xome also appears Dec. 8, 7:30 p.m., as part of the Brutal Sound Effects Festival, a music and film event, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. Check www.ybca.org or call (415) 978-2787 (ARTS).
Questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times? Why won’t the Times and its Santa Rosa Press Democrat cover Project Censored?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored, Peter Phillips, the current director, and I have been waiting anxiously for weeks now to see if the New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat would answer our questions about why they once again censored and mangled the annual story of Project Censored, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year at Sonoma State University? (See previous blogs.) We heard nothing.
So I am posing the following questions to Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times, who answers questions about Times coverage and policies in his twice monthly column in the Op ed section of the Week in Review in the Sunday Times.
l. Why in 30 years has the New York Times never covered nor written about Project Censored, a nationally recognized media criticism project locating the 25 most important stories that were overlooked, under-covered, or censored?
2. Why in 30 years has the local New York Times/Santa Rosa Press Democrat either censored or mangled Project Censored, a local journalism/media criticism project done at a local university by local professors and local students?
3. Why did the Press Democrat this year, on the 30th anniversary of the Project, continue its censorious policy by sending a reporter to the celebration, not to do a real story on the project, its stories, and its history, but to do what amounted to a hatchet job on the project via one story, Censored Story No. l8, “Physicist challenges official 9/ll story?”
4. Why won’t the Press Democrat/New York Times answer the questions and complaints from Jensen and Phillips (and the Guardian, as the publisher of the project each year) as to why it censors and/or mangles this major story every year? What is going on here?
5. After the problems with the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller et al, how do you recommend targets of Press Democrat/New York Times news policy complain effectively and get some fair and balanced news coverage of a major local story?
In my accompanying email note to Calame, I wrote, “The Guardian has been doing this story for years, front page, with our local version of censored stories, and sending it out to the alternative press across the country. It is one of our most widely read and highly respected stories of the year and people look forward to it as a major journalistic and academic gem of distinction. I hope you see this as the terribly important and relevant issue it is, since much of the mainstream press helped Bush march us into a war without end at the very time that Project Censored, and its censored stories, were providing an alternative and more realistic point of view.”
Note the supporting material below, this year’s Guardian story on Project Censored, and the archives of some 750 or so issues or stories over a 30 year period of time. B3
San Francisco Bay Guardian : Home Page
… BY AMANDA WITHERELL Rob Strange Project Censored
Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times “censors” the annual Project Censored story.
Bruce B3: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: still no answers on why…
A snapshot of what is going on these days in the world of the Galloping Conglomerati
Rumors just in:
This illustrative note came to me a few minutes ago from Chain Links, the online publication of the Newspaper Guild, which is fighting fires on all fronts in these days of the Galloping Conglomerati.
The email note:
“I wanted to let you know that two reporters from The (Santa Cruz) Sentinel called me today, wanting to know if I’d heard any rumors that CNHI, the Birmingham, Ala.-based company that just bought the Sentinel, is talking with Media News (Singleton) about a possible swap involving the Monterey Herald. Apparently–and this is what a source told one of the reporters–MediaNews would get a CNHI paper in Pennsylvania (the Sharon Herald in Sharon, Pa.) in exchange for the Herald. An announcement, according to the source, is supposed to come sometime this week and there is a meeting going on today between CNHI and Media News.”
So? Or not so? We shall see. We made some calls to check, but got nowhere. In any event, whether this rumor is true, it illuminates some sad truths about the current state of daily newspapers hereabouts: (a) that the chains are flipping papers about as if they are no more than playing cards in a game at the local pool hall and (b) that
these are the kinds of unsettling rumors flying about the newsrooms and boardrooms of the Galloping Conglomerati, the phrase I use for the chains at play. (See my previous blogs). Where it all will end knows only God. Alas. Alas. B3
Good bye Klein’s Deli
By Tim Redmond
I’ve been buying turkey sandwiches at Klein’s Deli on Potrero Hill for more than 20 years. Back in the early 1980s, when the Guardian was in an old building on 19th and York, and the old Best Foods factory was still spewing fumes or mayonnaise wind over the neighborhood and there weren’t many places around to get food, we used to pile into somebody’s car and drive to 20th and Connecticut, where a former Guardian distribution manager named Deborah Klein was making great sandwiches. Then our part of the Mission started booming, and you didn’t need to drive to get lunch, and my Klein’s habit faded.
By the time the Guardian moved to Potrero Hill, Deborah had sold out to one of her employees, Avery McGinn, but the place was just the same, and at least two or three times a week, I make the trek to the top of the hill. It’s one of those places that’s been around so long you just sort of assume it will always be there.
But it won’t. Next week is the last week for Klein’s Deli. The landlord, Timberly Hughes, wanted to double the rent, from $3,100 to $6,255 a month, and McGinn told me she just can’t pay that, not without raising her prices so much that none of us would be going there anymore. “She has the right to do that,” McGinn, who has been remarkably diplomatic about all of this, told me. “I twisted and turned, but it just was too much for my deli to pay.” She hasn’t been able to find another spot on the hill, so for now, it’s over.
Damn.
I called Hughes, who seems like a pleasant enough person, and she told me that the higher rent was what she needed to get, and since Klein’s won’t be there any more, she’s going to open an “organic wine bar and deli” that will be called Jay’s, after her son. She has lived on the hill for nine years – she actually occupied the apartment above the deli – and she promised to try to keep the spot as a neighborhood gathering area.
Maybe she will, and maybe the wine bar will be lovely, but it won’t be Klein’s Deli. And while McGinn is taking the high road, not everybody is being so nice. Some of the folks on the Potrero Hill Message Board are calling for a boycott of the new place. “Bad, bad, bad to destroy a neighborhood institution so you can have your vanity business,” one post says.
I dunno. Commercial landlords can raise the rent as much as they can get away with, and the California Leglislature has barred cities from enacting commercial rent controls (which, of course, would have saved Klein’s). And Hughes is not in the business of charity. But she made a choice to raise the rent to a level that a locally owned business couldn’t afford, and she’s going to have to live with that.
Klein’s is having a party Dec. 16th, from noon to 4 pm. There will be a photo booth in the place Dec. 2, from 10 am – 3 pm so locals and regulars can get their pictures taken before the doors close.
Meanwhile, you’ve got another week to go get a sandwich at a great San Francisco establishment. Enjoy it while you can.
New York mayor shows up Newsom
By Tim Redmond
When New York City cops fired 50 shots outside a Queens nightclub, killing an unarmed 23-year-old African American man, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, quickly met with black leaders and publicly announced that the shooting was excessive and “unacceptable”. That’s a stunning move for any mayor; most civic leaders want to give the cops the benefit of the doubt, and they duck these situations by claiming they need to wait for the results of some long investigation.
But Bloomberg didn’t mess around: He told the truth, that “I can tell you that it is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.”
Not surprisingly, the mayor is getting a pretty positive response.
Contrast that with how Mayor Gavin Newsom has dealt with past police shootings, including the Asa Sullivan killing, and you get a sense that the Democratic mayor of San Francisco doesn’t have any where near the guts of the Republican mayor of New York.
Gay guys get gavels
By Steven T. Jones
I have a prediction for the new session of the California Legislature, which begins on Monday: there won’t be as much anti-gay rhetoric as we sometimes hear from the social conservatives in Sacramento. Why? Because the Assembly’s two remaining gay men — John Laird from Santa Cruz and our own Mark Leno — have risen to the chairs of two of the most powerful committee. Leno will chair the Appropriations Committee, through which most bills must pass, and Laird will chair the Budget Committee. Or as one insider told me, the word have gone out: you gotta deal with the gay guys. And that might not be easy to do if some loudmouth legislator is out there railing against the “homosexual agenda” because he thinks such nastiness plays well with his conservative constituents.
Compounding that reality will be Leno’s latest bill legalizing gay marriage, which he said he will introduce on the first day of the session. Last time, the Legislature passed it only to have it vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said the issue was a matter for the courts. Then, a month later, the Court of Appeals ruled against San Francisco’s effort to legalize gay marriage by saying it was a matter for the legislature. Stay tuned, folks, this could get interesting.