Bay Guardian Archives

City College will appeal

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9

OPINION City College will appeal last week’s decision by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) to revoke City College’s accreditation.

The reason for the appeal is simple: Most of what ACCJC asked for has been accomplished, and the rest is well on its way towards completion within a year.

First, the San Francisco City College district is financially secure. This is not a district that is close to fiscal collapse. This year’s audit was “clean,” and the budget is balanced, thanks to multiple cost-saving reorganizations, large spending cuts, reforms in practices, and the passage of Propositions A and 30. City College also has a healthy reserve fund well above that of state requirements. City College is even squirreling away money for a special “Ninth year” fund in the event that voters don’t reapprove Prop A when it expires 8 years from now.

The City College budget also increases spending in areas that ACCJC wanted: there is nearly $3 million per year for new technology and building maintenance, both long deferred through the years of radical state funding cuts. City College is also paying money towards the unpaid liability in retiree health benefits. The City of San Francisco also has this kind of liability — to the tune of $4.4 billion — but has so far not come up with a plan to deal with it. City College, on the other hand, has a plan and the funds to enact it.

City College has also cut costs by millions of dollars. There have been layoffs and furloughs, and salary cuts. For instance, faculty members are earning 5 percent less than they did in 2007. Department chairs are earning less, and the Board of Trustees just cut administrators salaries. Streamlined operations have resulted in other savings.

Governance is another area where City College has made major changes. There have been five major management overhauls to streamline bureaucracy, increase efficiency and speed the carrying out of decisions. And many administrators have been replaced. Any one of these overhauls could ordinarily have taken a year each to implement. There were all done in a matter of months.

For instance, the job description of every dean’s position was completely rewritten; some posts disappeared, and new ones were created. Every dean had to reapply for a job, and many did not return. The same is true for other management positions.

City College also replaced a decades-old department chair structure with a system that costs less and has simpler lines of authority. And last fall, the Board of Trustees acted to completely restructure the Participatory Governance system. This is a state-mandated system of getting input from faculty and staff into management decisions. Over 40 committees were dissolved and replaced with a more streamlined system.

The faculty and staff also worked hard in fixing problems identified by ACCJC, particularly in the areas of planning. One of the most important of these is in the collection of Student Learning Outcome data -– a measure of how well students do. Faculty filed thousands of reports in order to fulfill this requirement, a truly enormous amount of work. The collected data will then be used to improve courses next year. This cycle of planning, data collection, and improvement are the basis of ongoing reform effort that takes a year at minimum to prove that it’s working. There is a lot more work to be done in this area. It will take another year to complete — if City College is given the time.

Not everyone at the college agrees with all of the changes that were made. People have the right to express their views, and indeed, we want the internal experts to speak up and give their best advice. And given the speed and monumental scope of the changes, it is very likely that these changes have flaws and that improvements can be made.

But regardless of what people think of the changes that have occurred, these are changes that ACCJC asked for. City College neither ignored nor fought ACCJC’s recommendations, as many people wish we had. City College’s response was to work to enact ACCJC’s will as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the decision to revoke accreditation will harm City College’s otherwise good financial position by causing a large drop in student enrollment for fall — and the loss of millions of dollars in state funding. Ironically, this will make it more difficult to finish what ACCJC wants done.

The best course for students is to let City College retain accreditation while it finishes the job that ACCJC wants done.

John Rizzo is President of the City College Board of Trustees

 

More ill winds

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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EDITORIAL After years of hype, the 34th America’s Cup finally got underway on the San Francisco Bay this past week — with a single boat formally winning in a match against itself, a fitting metaphor for this whole disappointing affair.

Emirates Team New Zealand sailed solo while its Italian would-be competitor, Luna Rossa, stayed ashore to protest a rule change on rudder design that had been unilaterally decided by regatta director Iain Murray. The third competitor with Larry Ellison’s Oracle Racing team that is defending the cup and hosting the event, Swedish team Artemis, was still trying to rebuild its vessel after a tragic accident resulted in the death of a renowned sailor in May.

It was a lame kickoff. The anticipated hordes of race-goers have yet to materialize, with the once-regal America’s Cup reduced to just another Fisherman’s Wharf tourist trap. In a display that might as well have been used to entice tourists to the Wax Museum, a barker outside the event’s sprawling Pier 27 spectator area fruitlessly tried to lure passersby: “See the fastest boats in the world!”

In an interview with ABC7 news, Oracle Racing CEO Russell Coutts declared the Italians to be “acting like a bunch of spoiled babies,” adding that if they didn’t want to race, they should just leave. You could practically hear the event’s corporate sponsors burying their faces in the palms of their hands.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 2010, when software tycoon Larry Ellison of the Oracle Racing Team hinted to city officials that he might want to stage the next Cup on the Bay, if not Italy or some other exotic destination, economists with the Bay Area Council trumpeted the economic gain that stood to be reaped if Ellison’s plan was realized.

Since a dozen teams competed during the last America’s Cup, the authors of the study reasoned, at least as many could be expected to join this time around. Those initial projections — $1.4 billion in economic activity (like three Super Bowls!, the analysts enthused), thousands of new jobs, a tourism windfall — sounded so rosy in part because 15 syndicates were expected to compete.

But in time, this optimism faded and the city is arguably on the hook for millions in race-related costs. Fortunately, then-District 6 Sup. Chris Daly scuttled an initial plan to cede vast swaths of city-owned waterfront property to Ellison in exchange for the expected economic gain, thus averting an even greater loss.

Meanwhile, Oracle is weathering accusations that it cheated by slipping a design change into a list of safety recommendations, conveniently granting itself a competitive edge. An international jury’s decision on whether to honor the rule change was still up in the air at press time. While we at the Guardian find ourselves rooting for the Kiwis, we remind Ellison that it isn’t too late to right this ship — and cutting a check to the city to cover its losses would be a great place to start.

Who killed City College?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Who killed City College?

news@sfbg.com

The day City College of San Francisco heard it would close was the same day, July 3, that 19-year-old Dennis Garcia signed up for his fall classes.

With a manila folder tucked under his arm, he turned the corner away from the registration counter and strode by a wall festooned with black and white sketches of every City College chancellor since 1935, including a portrait of bespectacled founder Archibald Cloud. In a meeting room on the other side of that wall, the college’s current administrators were receiving the verdict from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

It was their worst fears of the past year realized: City College’s accreditation was being revoked. Accreditation is necessary for the college to receive state funding, for students to get federal loans, and for the degree to be worth more than the paper it’s printed on.

Unbeknownst to Garcia, he walked out of the building just as the college received its death sentence, which is scheduled to be carried out next July unless appeals now underway offer a reprieve. In the interim, CCSF will essentially be a ward of the state, stripped of the local control it has enjoyed since Cloud’s days.

Just a few blocks down Ocean Avenue is the nerve center of City College’s teachers union. Housed in a flat above a Laundromat, the scent of freshly washed clothes wafted up the staircase to an office that instantly became a flurry of ringing phones and rushed voices.

Only an hour later, 10 or so union volunteers were calling their members, contacting nearly 1,600 City College faculty whose responses ranged from sad to furious. The volunteers read them bulleted factoids about accreditation and a call to join an upcoming protest march.

But the woes of City College reach deeper than a three line script could ever cover, and can be traced back to the oval office itself, leading to a really odd question: Did President Obama kill City College?

 

 

PRESSURE FROM THE TOP

When the president trumpeted education in his 2012 State of the Union speech, he sounded an understandable sentiment. “States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets,” Obama told the nation. “And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down.”

But the specifics of how to cut costs were outlined by years of policymaking and a State of the Union supplement sheet given to the press.

The president’s statement said that they will determine which colleges receive aid, “either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system; or by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.”

The emphasis is ours, but the translation is very simple: College accreditation agencies can either enforce the administration’s numbers-based plan or be replaced. The president’s college reform is widely known and hotly debated in education circles. Commonly known as the “completion agenda,” with an emphasis on measurable outcomes in job placement, it had its start under President George W. Bush, but Obama carried the torch.

The idea is that colleges divest from community-based programs not directly related to job creation or university degrees, and use a data measurement approach to ensure two-year schools transfer and graduate students in greater numbers. “Community colleges” would quickly become “junior colleges,” accelerating a slow transition that began many years ago.

But its critics say completion numbers are screwy: They discount students who are at affordable community colleges just to learn a single skill and students who switch schools, administrator Sanford Shugart of Valencia College in Florida wrote in an essay titled “Moving the Needle on College Completion Thoughtfully.”

Funding decisions made from completion numbers affect millions of students nationwide — and CCSF has now become the biggest laboratory rat in this experiment in finding new ways to feed the modern economy.

“I think there was a general consensus that the country is in a position that, coming out of the recession, we have diminished resources,” Paul Feist, spokesperson for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, told us. “Completion is important to the nation — if you talk to economic forecasters, there’s a huge demand for educated workers. Completion is not a bad thing.”

Like dominoes, the federal agenda and Obama’s controversial Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tipped the Department of Education, followed by the ACCJC, and now City College — an activist school in an activist city and an institution that openly defied the new austerity regime.

 

WINNING THE BATTLE

In the ACCJC’s Summer 2006 newsletter, Brice Harris — then an accreditation commissioner, now chancellor of the state community college system — described the conflict that arose when colleges rallied against completion measurements established by the federal government.

“In the current climate of increased accountability, our regional accrediting associations find that tight spot to be more like a vice,” Harris wrote.

Many of the 14 demands the ACCJC made of City College trace back to the early days of Obama’s administration, when local trustees resisted slashing the curriculum during the Great Recession.

“There’s a logic to saying ‘We don’t want to put students on the street in the middle of a recession,'” said Karen Saginor, former City College academic senate president. “If you throw out the students, you can’t put them in the closet for two years and bring them back when you have the money.”

And they have a lot of students — more than 85,000. Like all community colleges in California, the price of entry is cheap, at $46 a unit and all welcome to attend. But since 2008, the system was hammered with budget cuts of more than $809 million, or 12 percent of its budget.

So programs were cut, including those for seniors, ex-inmates re-entering society, or young people enrolling to learn Photoshop or some other skill without committing to a four-year degree.

“As the recession hit, the Legislature instructed the community college system [to] prioritize basic skills, career technical, and transfer,” Feist said. “That’s to a large extent what we did. That was the reshaping of the mission of that whole system.”

It’s easy to cast the completion agenda as a shadowy villain in a grand dilemma, but as Feist or anyone on the federal level would note, people were already being pushed out of the system, to the tune of more than 500,000 students since the 2008-09 academic year due to the budget crisis. Course offerings have been slashed by 24 percent, according to the state chancellor’s office.

But City College would only go so far. Then-Chancellor Don Q. Griffin raised the battle cry against austerity and the completion agenda at an October 2011 board meeting, his baritone voice sounding one of his fullest furies.

“It was obvious to me when I heard Bush … and then Obama talking about the value of community colleges … they’re going to push out poor people, people of color, people who cannot afford to go anywhere else except the community college,” he said.

But when it came to paying for that pushback, things got tricky.

“No more of this bullshit, that we turn the other way and say it’s fine. We’re going to concentrate the money on the students,” Griffin said at a December 2011 board meeting. “You guys are talking about cutting classes, we don’t believe in that. Cut the other stuff first, cut it until it hurts, and then talk about cutting classes.”

So he slashed his own salary and lost staff through attrition and other means. The college had more than 70 administrators before 2008, and it now has fewer than 40.

“Since the recession in 2009, we’ve been seen as the rebels,” said Jeffrey Fang, a former student trustee on City College’s board. “When most of the colleges went and made cuts in light of the recession, we decided to find ways to keep everything open while doing what we could to eliminate spending.”

But those successes in saving classes put City College on a collision course with its accreditor.

 

LOSING THE WAR

Seven years ago, the ACCJC found six deficiencies that it asked City College to fix, finding it had too many campuses serving too many students, fiscal troubles, and hadn’t enforced measurement standards. Last year, it faulted City College for resisting those changes and tacked on eight additional demands, threatening to revoke its accreditation.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an official who worked closely with ACCJC as a member of one of the visiting accreditation teams told us there was pressure to crack down on all the Western colleges.

“The message they’re hearing from (ACCJC President) Barbara Beno is that Washington is demanding, ‘Why are you not being more strict with institutions with deficiencies that have lasted more than two years [and taking action] to revoke their accreditation?'” the source said.

This official said this may soon ripple to other accreditation agencies. “What’s anomalous about California is we’re getting to where everyone will be in a few years.”

The ACCJC’s next evaluation is this December, where it will be reviewed by the Department of Education. It wants to be ready, says Paul Fain, a reporter for Inside Higher Ed, a national trade publication.

“Washington writ large … is pushing very hard on accreditors to drive a harder line,” Fain told us. “There’s a criticism out there that accreditation is weak and toothless.”

The U.S. Department of Education declined to comment on the issue, saying only that it will formally respond to all officially filed complaints about ACCJC.

But the numbers speak volumes. As an ACCJC newsletter first described federal pressure back in 2006, seven community colleges in California were on probation or warning by the ACCJC. By 2012 that number leapt to 28.

But the California Federation of Teachers is fighting back, and recently filed a 280-page complaint about the ACCJC with the Department of Education.

The allegations were many: Business conflict of interest from a commission member, failure to adhere to its own policies and bylaws, and even the commission President Beno’s husband having served on City College’s visiting team, which the unions said is a clear conflict of interest.

Some people think it’s a waste of time, that City College has already lost.

“That process of fighting accreditation won’t succeed, it just forestalls the problem,” said Bill McGinnis, a trustee on Butte College’s board for over 20 years. He’s also served on many ACCJC visiting teams.

But the unions are making some headway. The Department of Education wrote a letter to the ACCJC telling them to respond in full to the complaints by July 8, as this article goes to press. The accreditor will soon be the one evaluated.

 

WHAT’S NEXT?

In the meantime, City College has exactly one year to reverse its fortunes: The loss of accreditation doesn’t actually kick in until July, 2014. A special trustee appointed by the state will be granted all the powers of the locally elected City College Board of Trustees to get with the federal program. Without voting power, the elected body is effectively castrated.

No one knows what that will mean for the college board, not even Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement supporting the state takeover and criticizing local trustees for not cutting enough. “The ACCJC is fundamentally hostile to elected boards and they’ve made that clear,” City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman told us. “The Board of Trustees should and may look at all possible legal options around this.”

Although officials say classes will proceed as normal for the next year, some aren’t waiting around to see if City College will survive.

At its last board meeting, the CCSF Board of Trustees grappled with how to address dwindling enrollment. As news of its accreditation troubles spread, City College has been under-enrolled by thousands of students, exacerbating its problems. Since the state funds colleges based on numbers of students, City College’s funding is plummeting by the millions.

A frightening statistic: When Compton College lost its accreditation in 2005 and was subsequently absorbed by a neighboring district, it lost half its student population, according to state records.

Even the faculty is having a hard time hanging on, said Alisa Messer, the college’s faculty union president.

“People are looking for jobs elsewhere already. Despite everyone’s dedication to see the college through, it has tried everyone and stretched them to the limit,” she told us.

The college has two hopes — that the CFT wins its lawsuit and can reverse the ACCJC decision, or that the new special trustee can somehow turn the college around by next July. But either way, something will be lost. “City College is definitely changing,” Saginor said. “What it will change into, and if those changes will be permanent, that I don’t know.”

Last train

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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17
Last train

steve@sfbg.com

Last week’s four-day strike by Bay Area Rapid Transit workers dominated the news and made headlines around the country, marking the latest battleground in a national war between public employee unions and the austerity agenda pushed by conservatives and neoliberals.

Of course, that wasn’t how the conflict was framed by BART, most journalists, or even the two BART unions involved, all of whom dutifully reported the details of each sides’ offers and counter-offers, the competing “safety” narratives (new security procedures demands by unions versus spending more on capital improvements than raises), and the strike’s impact on commuters and the local economy.

But once this long-simmering labor standoff seized the attention of a public heavily reliant on BART, fueling the popular anger and resentment increasingly directed at public employee unions in recent years, familiar basic storylines emerged.

At that point, the Bay Area could have been placed in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois — the most recent high-profile labor union battlegrounds, with their narratives of greedy public employees clinging to their fully funded pensions and higher than average salaries while the rest of us suffer through this stubbornly lingering hangover from the Great Recession.

Around water coolers and online message boards, there were common refrains: How dare those unions demand the raises that the rest of us are being denied! Pensions? Who has fully funded pensions anymore? Why can’t they just be more realistic?

When Bay Area residents were finally forced to find other ways of getting around, within a transportation system that is already at the breaking point during peak hours thanks to years of austerity budgets and under-investment in basic infrastructure, those seething resentments exploded into outright anger.

And those political dynamics could only get worse in a month. The BART strike could resume full strength on a non-holiday workweek if the two sides aren’t able to come to an agreement before the recently extended contract expires.

This is the Bay Area’s most visible and impactful labor standoff, and it could prove to be a pivotal one for the modern American labor movement.

 

BART AS BELLWETHER

Chris Daly was a clarion voice for progressive values while serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2000-2010. Now, as political director of Service Employee International Union Local 1021, one of the BART unions, he says this standoff is about more than just the issues being discussed at the bargaining table.

“The terms and conditions of workers in the public sector is a buoy for other workers,” Daly told us, explaining how everyone’s wages and benefits tend to follow the gains and setbacks negotiated by unions. “The right understands this, which is why the right has been mercilessly attacking public sector workers.”

Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, confirmed that union contracts affect the overall labor market. “When unions improve wages and benefits, it does have a ripple effect,” Jacobs said. He agreed that the outcome at BART could be a bellwether for the question, “As the economy comes back, how much will workers share in that prosperity?”

Demonizing public sector workers as greedy or lazy also serves to undercut the entire labor movement, Daly said, considering that public employees make up a far higher percentage of union members than their private sector counterparts. And during election time, it is union money and ground troops that typically contest wealthy individuals and corporations’ efforts to maintain or expand power.

“Labor is one of the main checks on unbridled corporate power, and public sector unions are the backbone of labor,” Daly told us.

So in that context, BART’s battle is about more than just the wages and benefits of train drivers and station agents, with their average base salary of $62,000, just barely above the area median income, and their demand for raises after accepting wage freezes in recent years.

Daly sees this as part of a much broader political standoff, and he said there are indications that BART management also sees it that way, starting with the $399,000 the transit agency is paying its lead negotiator Thomas Hock, a veteran of union-busting standoffs around the country.

“He has a history of bargaining toward strikes, with the goal of breaking unions,” Daly said, noting that Hock’s opening offer would have taken money from BART employees, with new pension and healthcare contributions outweighing raises. “It was a takeaway proposal when you add it up, while they have a $100 million surplus in their budget and the cost of living in the Bay Area is shooting up.”

But BART spokesperson Rick Rice told us that Hock is simply trying to get the best deal possible for this taxpayer-funded agency, and he denied there is any intention to break the union or connection to some larger anti-worker agenda.

“There is definitely a need to start funding the capital needs of the district,” Rice told us. “I don’t see that we’re pushing an austerity agenda as much as a realistic agenda.”

 

AUSTERITY AND EXPANSION

But Daly said the very idea that austerity measures are “realistic” excuses the banks and other powerful players whose reckless pursuit of profits caused the financial meltdown of 2008. The underlying expectation is that workers should continue to pay for that debacle, rather than bouncing back with the rebounding economy.

“They get in this austerity mindset, and we see it in every contract we’re negotiating,” Daly said, noting that capital needs and benefits have always needed funding, despite their elevation now as immediate imperatives. “You have good people with good intentions like [BART Board President] Tom Radulovich pushing this austerity mindset.”

Radulovich, a longtime progressive activist, told us he agrees with some of how Daly is framing the standoff, but not all of it. He said that BART is being squeezed into its position by unique factors.

Radulovich said that healthcare and pension costs really are rising faster then ever, creating a challenge in maintaining those benefit levels. And he said that Hock isn’t simply carrying out some larger anti-union agenda. “He’s negotiating what the district wants him to negotiate,” he said.

Radulovich said that while BART’s workers may deserve raises, most of BART’s revenues come from fares. “So it’s taking from workers to give to other workers,” Radulovich said. “It’s a little more complicated because it is a public agency and Chris is aware of that.”

Yet Radulovich acknowledged that BART has opted to pursue an aggressive expansion policy that is diverting both capital and operating expenditures into new lines — such as the East Contra Costa, Oakland Airport, and Warm Springs extensions now underway — rather than setting some of that money aside for workers.

“And for a lot of those, we were being cheered on by the [San Francisco] Labor Council, one of many ironies,” said Radulovich, who favors infill projects over new extensions. “These are some of the conversations I’ve had with labor leaders in the last few weeks, how we think strategically about these things.”

But if BART wanted to defeat the union, it may have miscalculated the level of worker discontent with austerity measures.

“What they didn’t plan on is some high-level Bay Area political pressure,” Daly said, referring to the local uproar over the strike that led Gov. Jerry Brown to send in the state’s two top mediators, who made progress and created a one month cooling off period before the strike can resume.

 

RETIREMENT SECURITY

One of the hardest issues to overcome in the court of public opinion may be the fully funded pensions of BART employees. “Times are changing, costs are escalating rapidly, and we’re asking for a modest contribution,” Rice said of BART’s demand that employees help fund their pensions.

Daly acknowledges the resentments about the pension issue, even though it was essentially a trap set for public employee unions back in the 1980s, when BART and other public agencies were the ones offering to pay for employee pensions in lieu of raises.

But rather than resenting public employees for having pensions, he said the public should be asking why most workers don’t have retirement security and how to fix that problem.

“At what point do we organize and demand retirement security for all workers?” Daly said, noting that SEIU is now leading that fight on behalf of all workers, not just its members. “What we ought to be talking about is how we restore the social contract.”

Jacobs confirmed that SEIU has indeed been pushing the retirement security issue at the state and federal levels. And it’s a crucial issue, he said, noting that just 45 percent of workers have pensions and that the average retirement savings is just $12,000.

“The retirement problem we have is not the pension crisis, it is the lack of pensions crisis,” Jacobs said.

That’s one reason that he said this standoff has implications that extend far beyond the Bay Area.

“The fight goes beyond these particular workers,” Jacobs said. “It’s an important set of negotiations and an important strike in terms of looking at what happens in this country as the economy improves.”

Daly agrees there’s a lot at stake, for more than just his members.

“Losing on this means we’d be hard pressed to win elsewhere, anytime,” Daly said. “It is important symbolically, and it is important to the strength and morale of the movement.”

 

Psychic Dream Astrology: July 10-16, 2013

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July 10-16, 2013

Mercury is Retrograde, so hold off on solidifying major plans and making big purchases, folks.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Save yourself from yourself! Say “yes” to life and to your self this week. It would be all too easy to fall into stressful feelings that make things more dire than they need to be. Support yourself by taking a solid step back and appraising your situation so you can joyfully participate when you feel ready.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Step away from the narratives that are you’re obsessing on, Taurus. You may feel that you’re figuring everything out, but you’ve got a blind spot that that you’re not accounting for. When you see the world through a veil of insecurity you cannot see it clearly. Don’t look for answers, only truth.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Practice gratitude, Gemini. Every morning for the next seven days, name six things that you’re grateful for before you get out of bed. In order to expand your life, you need to start at the beginning. Believing in your potential works best when you are able to appreciate the present and build from there.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Don’t let your fears inform your actions, because that will give them the power to shape your reality. No matter how anxious you get, this is not the week to roll over and give in to your demons. Keep clear in your mind a vision of happiness and make sure that your actions reflect that picture.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

You have nothing to worry about, Leo. If you act in integrity with your values you may suffer through some anxiety this week, but it’s likely to be no big deal. Things will get tricky for you if you violate your own code of ethics, though. This is not the week to take shortcuts or act like Robin Hood.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Don’t repress your ego drives or to let them run roughshod over your life. Turn your ego into your best friend, or at least let it into your inner circle! Give yourself permission to take up space, to have ambition and to attain your goals. A healthy and integrated ego is an important part of a healthy and integrated Virgo.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

If you get too big for your britches someone’s gonna want to knock you down a peg, Libra. Embody power as honestly as you can without getting passive aggressive this week. What you may think is an effort to be nice can come across as condescending. Be authentic to avoid power struggles.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Change is in the air, and with Saturn in your neck of the woods you should keep your participation creative and regenerative. Be willing to be changed by your situation and to be true to yourself, even if that takes you down a winding path, pal. You have a lot to learn, and this week can help you learn it.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Stop what you’re doing! No matter how capable you are, you need to slow down and take stock of what’s happening so you can make sure that you’re living up to your commitments. This is not the time to let things slip through the cracks. Finish what you’ve started before you do anything else, Sag.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

The only way for you to thrive and grow is through change. You don’t always get to choose what the shifts in your life will look like, but you needn’t assume it’s bad when change is hoisted upon you. Choose to be a part of things getting better this week. Don’t let fear hold you still in a world in motion.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Should you find yourself running away you should catch yourself before you get too far. If your primary motives are fear-based this week you’ll end up making things worse. Create space enough to reflect on what you’re going through so that you can consciously move towards someplace better.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

If you persist in looking outside of yourself for answers you will only feel worse. There’s a ton going on right now and only you can know what pace you need to adopt. Protect your emotions from a major crisis of confidence by slowing down and focusing on what you can handle in a healthy way, Pisces.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 18 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com to contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading.

Independence movement

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Independence movement

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER/DANCE The crowd outside the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland was hopping. Fidgeting, really — imperceptibly at first, but soon enough bodies were bouncing and flailing, until the scrum of dancers packed shoulder-to-front-to-back on the sidewalk morphed their collective way through the front door.

June 22 marked one year’s worth of PPP, the monthly performance series instigated by Oakland-based dance collective SALTA. As much a scene as a performance platform, PPP has been building an ethic of serious, unbridled experimentation in a low-key setting where failure is as valid as success, and no one ever encounters a price tag, a door charge, or a gate keeper.

In terms of curation, PPP is equally promiscuous and shrewd, emphasizing a cross-generational perspective. “We try to reach out to people who have paved pathways for us,” says one SALTA member. “And we’ve been a little brazen about cold-emailing, cold-calling people who are in town, like Jeremy Wade.” Meanwhile, PPP has been building a unique audience for contemporary dance-performance and inspiring dialogue about the ethics of art-making in the Bay Area.

As an attribute of its headlong dive into experimentation and openness, PPP never sits still but moves restlessly and freely from one donated space to another. With each space come new networks as well as many PPP diehards. As its members explain, the anniversary installment marked the beginning of a summer hiatus for PPP, so that the collective can better focus on advancing other projects — all geared to creating space, in the widest sense, for dance in Oakland.

SALTA is very much the restive and searching reflection of its monthly series. What began as necessity — a space for dance — has been embraced as ethic. Not that the two were entirely strangers to begin with. As suggested by the conversation below with the members of SALTA (currently seven young women who preferred to speak as members of the collective rather than use their individual names), the realities of dance today imply, more than ever, a confrontation with the values of the dominant culture.

SFBG Which came first, PPP or SALTA, and what’s the relationship?

SALTA It’s funny, we were just talking about this earlier — it’s so confusing!

SALTA I guess we, as a collective, came first.

SALTA And we named that SALTA.

SALTA But the name SALTA didn’t come until after we had the name PPP.

SALTA We all came together in the idea of making space for dance. We were talking a lot about having an actual space and, in the meantime, [we said] let’s do a performance series. So that came second, and then it eclipsed a lot of what we’d been doing. We’re actually going to take a break over the summer and focus on some other stuff.

SALTA We want to have classes, [and start] a dance publication. We want to work on networking. We’ve had some out of town people, but just because the West Coast can be very isolating.

SFBG How did it all start?

SALTA We’re all based in Oakland, and we wanted to have a space for dance to happen here — there are not a lot of venues that are really open for experimental work. That was the big thing: we’re sick of going to San Francisco all the time, and we want to figure out what the community is in Oakland and see what we can build. Something that’s been really cool from the beginning is that a lot of non-dancers come to PPP, a lot of Oakland people who hear about it from different arenas.

SALTA As well as there not being institutions interested in the kind of work we were doing, we were also not interested in institutionalizing art, in the way that it’s done. Also, financially, making it a free event was really important to us as artists and the way we want to make art. Not having to play this whole [“who do you know”] game. It was modeled, or got a lot of guidance from Jmy [Leary] in LA, who started [dance organizers/activists] AUNTS in New York. That’s been a model that we’ve been in dialogue with.

SALTA She’s a mentor of ours, and a benefactor actually, through the Yellow House fund. We originally wanted to create a space here in Oakland similar to Pieter Pasd in LA, but the realities of being who we are as artists and where we are in our lives, as transient people, we thought we’d keep the space moving. We figured out that that worked over the past year.

SFBG I like this ethic of moving around, of asking for a free space each time. It seems a good social ethic to encourage, and it really pushes back against the spirit of the times.

SALTA It’s interesting who said no to the proposal, and who has been really willing to donate space and time — and their art.

SALTA I feel as we continue to exist and assert ourselves into spaces, it opens up more. We have to find a space, ask for a free space, because as dancers we don’t have the resources to be renting all the time. So where there’s this huge scene of First Friday or whatever — “art’s happening all the time in Oakland” — we’re not a part of that. It would be interesting at some point. Well, we WILL be a part of that. [Laughter.] But what does that mean? And how much more legit, in a certain sense, do we have to become? *

For a longer version of this interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision; for more information on SALTA, visit www.saltadance.info.

Independence/Movement: extended interview with Oakland’s SALTA dance collective

Sue Vaughan
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1

Note: this is an extended version of an article in this week’s Guardian.

The crowd outside the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland was hopping. Fidgeting, really. Almost imperceptibly at first, while above it a bulging moon hung in the temperate June sky, just itching to go super as it would the following night. But soon enough bodies were bouncing and flailing, until finally the scrum of dancers packed shoulder-to-front-to-back on the sidewalk morphed their collective way through the front door.

We followed the dancers (choreographed by Abby Crain) inside, swept along by their momentum, and were deposited around the perimeter of the main reading room like dust mice by a strong breeze. On that same floor, a few hours later, choreographer Ronja Ver would be sending her supine audience into dreamland with a couple of Finnish lullabies. Before that, a bowl of liquid nitrogen would send a delicate fog creeping over its wooden surface as the spectators (temporarily wrapped in reflective emergency blankets) braced themselves for a performance by Daniel Stadulis that was part science experiment, part detailed meditation on the fragility of the body.

Much else went on during the event’s roughly four hours, which ended with a dance party. No one stayed put the whole time. Some wandered off to the back rooms to the free bar, or to partake in the desultory clothing swap at the free boutique (both the bar and boutique are voluntarily stocked by the guests). Upstairs, meanwhile, the ebb and flow offered other attractions — a mother and daughter did a duet; a young writer read her first novel aloud for the first time, offering each completed page to anyone who paused to listen…

June 22 marked one year’s worth of PPP, the monthly performance series instigated by Oakland-based dance collective SALTA. As much a scene as a performance platform, PPP has been building a platform for serious, unbridled experimentation in a low-key setting where failure is as valid as success, and no one ever encounters a price tag, a door charge, or a gate keeper.

As an attribute of its headlong dive into experimentation and openness, PPP never sits still but moves restlessly and freely from one donated space to another. Among these have been the Foundry, The Vulcan, The Public School, Subterranean Arthouse, Sri Louise’s Underground Yoga Parlour, private homes, Ellen Webb’s studio, and Zach Houston’s poemstore gallery (site of the inaugural PPP in June 2012). With each space come new networks as well as a growing number of PPP diehards.

Providing room for experimentation and cross-fertilization among artists — from the well known to the unknown, and as disparate as Tere O’Connor (interviewed by Monique Jenkinson), Jmy James Kidd, Peter Max Lawrence, Miriam Wolodorski, Keith Hennessy, Ethan Cowan, Laura Arrington, and Philip Huang, among many others — PPP has also been building a unique audience for contemporary dance/performance, while inspiring dialogue about the nature of art-making in the Bay Area.

The anniversary installment of PPP marked the beginning of a summer hiatus for the series, so that the collective can focus on advancing other projects — all geared to creating space, in the widest sense, for dance in Oakland.

SALTA is very much the restive and searching reflection of its monthly series. What began as necessity — a space for dance — has been embraced as ethic. Not that the two were entirely strangers to begin with. As suggested by the conversation below with the seven women who currently make up SALTA, the realities of dance today imply, more than ever, a confrontation with the values of the dominant culture.

Note: the dancers preferred to speak as members of the collective rather than use their individual names.

SF Bay Guardian Did PPP come first, or SALTA, and what’s the relationship?

SALTA It’s funny, we were just talking about this earlier — it’s so confusing!

SALTA I guess we, as a collective, came first.

SALTA And we named that SALTA.

SALTA But the name SALTA didn’t come until after we had the name PPP.

SALTA We all came together in the idea of making space for dance. We were talking a lot about having an actual space and, in the meantime, [we said] let’s do a performance series. So that came second, and then it eclipsed a lot of what we’d been doing. We’re actually going to take a break over the summer and focus on some other stuff.

SALTA We want to have classes. We would really like a dance publication. We want to work on networking. We’ve had some out of town people, but just because the West Coast can be very isolating. So that’s one of our goals, we’d really like to figure out some way to connect.

SFBG What’s the most urgent or exciting project you’re discussing now?

SALTA I think building a floor.

SALTA And also exploring what it might look like to do a pop-up for one or two months. That would then allow us to do classes and hold performance.

SALTA Yeah, I think classes and workshops and stuff. Not only us — we have a lot of things we’re interested in exploring in teaching — but also, again, people we might invite in from out of town who could come do a workshop and perform. So that kind of thing.

SALTA In that vein of dialogue, it’s important to mention that a lot of our work is multi-generational in curation. We try to reach out to people who have paved pathways for us. And we’ve been a little brazen about cold-emailing, cold-calling people who are in town, like Jeremy Wade.

SFBG I saw his performance at CounterPULSE at that time; really great. What did he do at PPP?

SALTA He tried something new!

SALTA Yeah, he took advantage.

SALTA He did a kind of magic act. He had a crazy magician’s outfit on. Yeah, it was pretty awesome.

SALTA But even he, who is touring at that time with specific ideas, still adhered to this idea of coming and experimenting with us.

SALTA That’s something we’re trying to work more. Inviting people, colleagues, or people whose work we’re interested in that we don’t actually know, from other places but also from the Bay Area. I think last month was a pretty harmonious example of that because we had Ellen Webb. She runs a space for so long and had a company in the ’80s. We didn’t really know her work. We use her space all the time — we’ve actually used it for PPP as well. So we had her come and just share. She showed some video of an amazing piece she did with a hundred dancers on Mandela Parkway, right after the [1989] earthquake. She was there, and then Keith [Hennessy] was there — who’s kind of the next [generation] — and then Jmy [Leary, a.k.a. James Kidd] from LA, who is just a little bit older than us.

SFBG How did you start working together?

SALTA We’re all based in Oakland, and we wanted to have a space for dance to happen here — there are not a lot of venues that are really open for experimental work. That was the big thing: we’re sick of going to San Francisco all the time, and we want to figure out what the community is in Oakland and see what we can build. Something that’s been really cool from the beginning is that a lot of non-dancers come to PPP, a lot of Oakland people who hear about it from different arenas.

SALTA We were also not interested in institutionalizing art, in the way that it’s done. Also, financially, making it a free event — no one is paid, free boutique, free bar  —that was really important to us as artists and the way we want to make art. Not having to play this whole [who do you know] game. It was modeled, or got a lot of guidance from Jmy in LA, who started [dance organizers/activists] AUNTS in New York. That’s been a model that we’ve been in dialogue with.

SALTA She’s a mentor of ours, and a benefactor actually, through the Yellow House fund. So we’ve been working with her. We originally wanted to create a space here in Oakland similar to Pieter Pasd in LA, but the realities of being who we are as artists and where we are in our lives, as transient people, we thought we’d keep the space moving. We figured out that that worked over the past year. We actually made a list before you got here of all the [12] spaces we’ve been in, here in Oakland.

SFBG I like this ethic of moving around, of asking for a free space each time. It seems a good thing to encourage, and it really pushes back against the spirit of the times.

SALTA It’s interesting who has said no, at the proposal, and who has been really willing to donate space and time and their art.

SALTA I feel as we continue to exist and assert ourselves into spaces, it opens up more. We have to find a space, and ask for a free space, because as dancers we don’t have the resources to be renting all the time. So where there’s this huge scene of First Friday or whatever — “art’s happening all the time in Oakland” — we’re not a part of that. It would be interesting at some point. Well, we WILL be a part of that. [Laughter.] But what does that mean? And how much more legit, in a certain sense, do we have to become?

SFBG How did your thinking about a physical space evolve into this broader idea of creating space for dance?

SALTA I live between here and LA. And when I’m in LA I spent a lot of time at Pieter, and I kept asking Jmy questions about how she runs it and how the funding worked. About a year and half ago she asked me to have coffee with her and said, ‘It seems like you really just want to run a space.’ So that planted the seed. I’d danced with some of the people here, so I just brought up the conversation, “Should we start something?” And Ethan [a founding member not currently with SALTA] used to live in New York and we would go to AUNTS events. I think Ethan had an idea to start an event series. So we thought, let’s start an events series and hopefully that will snowball into something bigger.

SALTA Into an actual space.

SALTA Before we even talked about having a performance series, it was very much, “We want a space in Oakland that is about dance/experimental performance.” But, soon we found out: that’s hard!

SALTA I think, too, we like going to different spaces, and we like how that pulls in different people. [We realized] we want to actually make space, however that can happen. One of our ideas — there have been these pop-up spaces; different people have gotten subsidies from the city and empty buildings. We want to see if we can do that kind of thing. Build a moveable floor. So, yeah, it’s just kind of expanded.

SALTA I think too there’s something about the impermanence about it that’s special and that we like. So instead of focusing on the brick-and-mortar — “We’re going to have a space. That’s our jam” — opening it up and being a bit more flexible has allowed us to think a bit more creatively about, “What does it mean to really promote dance and make space for dance in Oakland?”

SALTA All of us are dancers. But something that feels important to us in creating this event is that it’s really not about us, or our agenda as dancers. All of us at some point have performed at a PPP. There’ve been 12, so we’ve all at some point done something. We’ve talked about doing a group dance — there’s this event called Oakland Nights Live that happens once a month. They invited SALTA to perform at it, even though we’ve never made a dance together before. We thought, OK, we’ll go do something there. So there is that fluidity and it definitely feeds into the work that we do, and we’re doing other projects too. But PPP is really about creating space for dance and really trying to open it up to the community.

SFBG It sounds like you’re really creating an audience too. Do you have a lot of return people?

SALTA Yeah! We have diehards.

SALTA We have a following! It’s crazy.

SALTA Our first PPP: Zach Houston had a space in downtown Oakland. It was a poetry space, specifically; he’s a poet…

SALTA That was our first one. And I think because of that we’ve had this nice relationship with the poetry community. And so we’ve had a lot of people from that community that come and watch. So people who are around the arts, or friends of friends — I mean one of the great thing about inviting all these performers is that they bring their people. And their people maybe bring someone else. And they go to the next one. Someone last night was like, “I feel like the more I come to these I get it more, I know how to watch it better.” I thought, wow, that’s a really cool thing.

SALTA It’s very unassuming. We don’t demand a lot. People can come and leave.

SALTA There’s literally an open door policy. Like at Niebyl-Proctor last night, the front door is open and people from the street walk in. That’s happened at a lot of the events we do. And that’s really nice, to have people that are called to it.

SALTA People come to it from so many different places too, which is exciting.

SALTA I think it’s important to us all as dancers, that it is a richer audience with various interests. Because we as dancers are like that, as people, we have varied interests outside of dance that informs our dancing.

SFBG Is performing in this kind of event is more satisfying in some ways? What are the advantages to you and others, as performers, with this kind of format?

SALTA We’ve had performers who are performing on the same night together who maybe have never met each other. There have been connections that have been made there between their work and their interests that might not have happened otherwise.

SALTA It’s a space for experimentation. I think that’s one thing we’re trying to be really intentional about it, how to create a space where people will take experimentation seriously. Not just come do whatever and don’t give a shit. That’s why we were really excited about what Keith [Hennessy] did [at the May PPP at Berkeley’s Subterranean Arthouse]. He was actually late to the pre-performer meeting, saying, “I’m sorry I was late. I was rehearsing!” People come with that mindset often. Not necessarily that they’re creating their masterwork — how can they? We’re not funding them. We don’t have any money. But it’s just a chance to try things out and be able to fail or do something absolutely spectacular, and everything in between. Really, most months, there is something that’s like oh god and also something that’s so inspiring …

SALTA I like that: take experimentation seriously.

SALTA And also it’s not like a critique. We didn’t want that. It’s just a time to try something out, and then you can have conversations about it afterward if you want.

SALTA That said, whenever I’ve performed at PPP there’s always someone who comes up to me who has a really interesting, deep perspective because it’s not your typical dance, performance audience member.

SALTA And I think too that there’s something freeing in that there’s not a whole lot at stake. Oh, you finally got a show at CounterPULSE and you have to make it good if you want to show anywhere else. I think there’s a lot of freedom in knowing that everyone’s there to do the same kind of experiment.

SFBG What’s the financial model that makes possible bringing artists in from out of town, and the other projects you’re looking at?

SALTA I think, at this point, we’re trying to go for the free and grant-supported. That might not be something we continue with.

SFBG So you’ve been getting grants.

SALTA Well, we got one. [Laughter.]

SALTA That’s how it started. It was from Jmy…

SALTA But that’s what we’ve talked about — more than trying to make it a viable business.

SALTA I think it’s really important for it to stay free and non-commodified. [SALTA] has lots of thoughts about the realm of recreation, and dance as recreation rather than something you make money off of.

SALTA One more thing about the name. We had a deadline to submit a fiscal sponsorship application. So there was one meeting where we had to come up with a name. I had the idea of wanting it to be a name, like Pieter, so it could be like a sister or brother [to Pieter Pasd]. But then no one else really liked that idea. So PPP was this compromise where it would be like initials but it wouldn’t refer to a name. But then I was reading a book by Marx and I came across the term, Hic Rhodus, hic salta, which is from an Aesop fable. But Marx translates it as, “Here is the rose, dance here.” Salta is a Latin term that means both to leap and to dance. The way Marx uses it, [the phrase means], “You want to do something? OK, do it. Show the dance. Do the leap.”

So for me it was this nice metaphor for what we were doing. And it’s also something about the dance world, and the disintegration of what it means to be a professional dancer; the eclipse of a company model, where you train and then suddenly there’s this company that will employ you to dance. So it’s also part of this question: What does it mean to dance in this post-Fordist moment when it’s not financially viable to dance? (And also everyone else seemed to like the name SALTA.)

SALTA She even put that on our website: “Hic Oakland, hic salta!”

SFBG In this one year since starting, has the collective or vision changed in ways you didn’t foresee?

SALTA I feel the main change is we’ve let go of trying to have an actual, permanent space. Because a year ago we were looking at Craigslist, and biking around to different buildings, and trying to figure out square footage — and that’s — just the logistics of everyone’s lives …

SALTA And the reality of the rental market right now, it’s insane.

SALTA We were like, “How can we do that with our grant?” The grant is generous but it’s not enough to last over a year of rent.

SALTA And a lot of us do travel a lot, or live in various cities, and we all have different creative projects…

SALTA Originally we had a little flyer saying SALTA is looking for a space. We said that a lot: “PPP is this, a project of SALTA. We are looking for a space. Please contact us.” And we’ve decided we’re just always looking for a space. That’s going to be our new flyer.

In tech-dominated Mid-Market, arts center beats the odds

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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5
In tech-dominated Mid-Market, arts center beats the odds

Is there a place for community theaters and nonprofit arts and education programs in pricey San Francisco? The 950 Center for Art and Education, a project that will be housed on the corner of Market and Turk streets in San Francisco, has gained a foothold against the odds.

Two years in the making, the center will provide permanently affordable performance facilities for the Lorraine Hansberry and Magic theaters, and create affordable space for art education organizations including Youth Speaks, the American Conservatory Theater and All Stars Project. Other groups, such as Lines Ballet, the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club and others previously unsure whether they could continue to rent in the Tenderloin/SoMa area will get the chance to expand their performance and programming capabilities at the center.

Because the neighborhood is in such high demand in the wake of recent tax breaks and incentives designed to bring tech businesses to SF, it took the Tenderloin Economic Development Project, a part of the North of Market Neighborhood Improvement Corporation, at least two years to secure the property for the arts and education complex. Until very recently, the project’s fate was hanging in the balance, with many groups uncertain whether they would be able to remain in the city.

Three-quarters of the project space that TEDP had long set its sites on is located at 970 Market, and was initially owned by Lone Star, a Texas-based hedge fund. The remaining project space, at 950 Market, was under the ownership of the Thatcher family, known for philanthropy.

Initially, TEDP “had a deal with the hedge fund,” says TEDP director Elvin Padilla, but after property values rose, “they basically walked away from the negotiating table. The crisis moment was, who’s going to control the land – and will they collaborate with us?”

Padilla credits Gladys Thatcher, founder of the San Francisco Education Fund, as “the reason we decided to make the attempt [to acquire these spaces for the 950 Center] in the first place.” 

When TEDP first pitched the idea to her several years ago, “she gave us her blessing we decided to make a go of it,” he explained.

Thatcher is trustee and former board member of the San Francisco Foundation, which worked alongside TEDP and the Rainin Foundation to secure the lion’s share of the land needed for the 950 Center, by facilitating a purchase of the 970 Market Parcel from Lone Star.

On June 7, the property was transferred from Lone Star to Group I, a San Francisco-based real estate development firm that Thatcher is friendly with. Now that the sale has gone through, the space will be devoted to the arts and education programming that TEDP had long envisioned. The San Francisco Foundation plans to facilitate development of the center through the creation of a new sponsoring organization that will be housed at Community Initiatives, a nonprofit. 

While he is grateful for the community support, Padilla likened their quest to gain 970 Market to a climb up Mt. Everest.

A 2011 payroll tax exclusion zone introduced by Mayor Ed Lee vastly increased the property value in the mid-Market area. Although Lee had a soft spot for the 950 Arts and Education Center and even organized events to support bringing that use to mid-Market, his new policy left the project facing an uncertain future in a suddenly pricey strip along Market Street. “He doesn’t have any real authority over private sector transactions,” Padilla says, so all the Mayor could do was stipulate the city’s interest in using this land for “arts and education.”

The city doesn’t offer public funding for projects like 950 Center for Arts and Education. To “subsidize on the front end,” as Padilla puts it, the center will have to rely on the backing of individual investors, philanthropic groups and new market tax credits to reduce and eliminate the debt entirely, so the organizations that will be housed at the center don’t have to carry a mortgage.

In the end, it was only through the efforts of wealthy and connected individuals that plans for the center were nailed down rather than extinguished. “Mid-Market is going through a very rapid transformation,” says Dr. Sandra R. Hernández, Chief Executive Officer of the San Francisco Foundation. “We’re just lucky that Group I, the developer, shares this vision with us for an arts center.”

Looking back on the years of effort it took to piece the plan together, Padilla noted, “When we started this, it was before the tech boom. Now, the pressure on the real estate is many times what it was when we conceptualized the 950 project.” 

That uncertainty finally came to an end for Padilla’s organization when Group I closed the deal with Lone Star on June 7. “That really [did] start the project officially,” Hernández says. “We’re now working with a number of the organizations that have expressed interest in having permanent space or accessible space for their programming or rehearsals for their theater production.”

The Performant: The Real Patriot Act

Sue Vaughan
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0

Celebrating Freedom of Expression with Tourettes Without Regrets

I’m as susceptible as the next ‘Murican to the social imperative of observing certain time-honored holiday traditions, particularly the ones that involve drinking and blowing shit up, but still I appreciate the opportunity to mix things up in that milieu. Which is why this Fourth of July, heading over to the Oakland Metro for Tourettes Without Regrets was the perfect way to celebrate my inalienable right to get freaky.

Probably the least predictable and therefore most electric variety show in the Bay Area, TWR has been throwing down the gauntlet of weird since 1999, a mad mashup of foul-mouthed comedians and spoken word performers, battle rappers, burlesque beauties, and sheer, unbridled chaos. Can YOU guess what’s in host Jamie DeWolf’s pants? Would you fuck a pie onstage? Compete for the prized “golden dildo”? Participate in a bout of pants-off musical chairs? Be forewarned,
there are no true bystanders at TWR and nobody is innocent.

“Everyone is a part of this fucking event,” warns DeWolf at the top of the show, and although his smile is deceptively genial, the cold steel glint in his watchful eyes tells you he means it.

Freedom of speech is so important to our national identity that it was the first right to be codified in the Bill of Rights, way back in 1791. Of course efforts to chip away at that right have been in play from both sides of the political spectrum ever since, and speech considered to be hateful, obscene, seditious, or libelous has been under almost continual attack for centuries. And though much of Tourettes Without Regrets keeps its tongue firmly planted in cheek (any cheek), a paranoid visitor from planet normal could get nervous about the broadness of the show’s interpretation of protected expression.

Dirty Haiku and a sexy pie-eating contest (won handily by a lesbian couple) could easily be viewed in the heartland as obscene, rude Battle Rap as slander, a downright lascivious fantasy about hate-humping Sarah Palin and a joyous spot of burlesque flag-burning as borderline seditious. No stranger to the controversial, the charismatic DeWolf provides as much distraction as direction, deploying an arsenal of colorful tangents and unflinching observations, gleefully pushing the buttons of anyone within earshot, and at some point almost everyone in the freewheeling oddience has at least one chance to squirm uncomfortably beneath the onslaught of freedom we are fortunate enough to take for granted.

Special July 4th additions to the evening’s festivities include a spontaneous shower of sparklers, burlesque dancers in camouflage and red-white-and-blue toting guns and six-packs of cheap beer, and a guest appearance by the Bay Area’s finest amateur wrestling and performance troupe, Hoodslam, who provided their signature wrestling ring to be the event stage, as well as a couple of whirlwind melees involving some of their most iconic players including Johnny Drinko Butabi (sporting stars-and-bars tights with wild fringe), the preternaturally handsome Anthony Butabi, the user-friendly Stoner Brothers, the perpetual user Drugz Bunny, the menacingly masked Scorpion, and the formidable Ultragirl.

And because nothing spells M-U-R-I-C-A so much as conspicuous consumption and wanton destruction, a bout of toilet paper dodgeball involving the entire crowd “wrapped up” the evening in one delightfully riotous exemplar of our constitutional right to make asses of ourselves in public. Now that’s independence!

First Thursdays
8:30pm, $10
Oakland Metro
630 Third Street, Oakl.
www.touretteswithoutregrets.com

Opponents of City College takeover to march through SF

Sasha Cuttler
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15

Opponents of last week’s decision to revoke the accreditation of City College of San Francisco and place the district under state control until that death sentence becomes official in July 2014 plan to rally and march through San Francisco today [Tues/9] at 4pm.

The procession will begin at the CCSF’s downtown campus at 88 Fourth Street and end outside the U.S. Department of Education — whose policy of coercing colleges to focus on job training and university prep led to the crackdown on CCSF, as we report in tomorrow’s Guardian — at 50 Beale Street.

Among the local officials who will join the march are Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, San Francisco Central Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson, and Alisa Messer, president of the American Federation of Teachers Local 2121, who this morning issued statements condemning the decision by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

“This decision is nothing less than an attack on the people of San Francisco,” Ammiano said. “All of us benefit from having this great 78-year-old institution, whether we take courses or not. San Francisco voters recognized that at the polls just last fall when they passed Proposition A to support the college financially. In addition, the appointment of a state official to manage the school takes away the local voice of CCSF’s duly elected trustees.”

“The quality of education at City College is not in question,” said Messer, who is also an English teacher at the college. “For the last year this institution has turned itself upside down to address the recommendations of the Commission, with employees putting in thousands of hours of effort and making huge sacrifices. To be told at the end of this process that the effort has had no impact is simply outrageous.”

“City College is vital and has made major progress in turning around many of the shortcomings identified by the Commission,” said Paulson. “The actions of the ACCJC – an organization accountable to no one — have unnecessarily put at risk the livelihoods of the nearly 2,500 hard-working men and women at the college. What’s more, their move to deny CCSF accreditation has imperiled the future of San Francisco’s working people, who rely heavily on a CCSF education for workforce training, language learning, and a pathway to better futures for themselves and their communities.”

“The Accrediting Commission’s handiwork has not improved educational quality at CCSF,” said Messer. “We want a stronger, better college, but in many instances direction from the ACCJC has moved us in the wrong direction. The Accrediting Commission should be accountable for the impact of its actions.”

 “The accrediting agency has only worked half-heartedly to support City College, and instead seems bent on tearing it down,” Ammiano said. “The decision needs to be reversed so we can all go to work building on the successes and fixing the few problems, instead of spending our time starting over from scratch because the school was destroyed by naysayers.”

Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles
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This week I learned that if I should ever be presented with the chance to interview Selena Gomez, I should decline. The Toronto Star published this biting commentary on the current state of press interviews with pop stars, and had more information leading up to the interview than the actual chat. Recommended reading: “Meeting Selena Gomez rule No. 1: Do not mention Justin Bieber.”

Often, the story behind the stage is even more compelling. And there are some storied acts playing live in SF this week: local emcee DaVinci busts out with a freebie, the long-running Flamin’ Groovies are back, as are LA’s Happy Hollows, after a lineup shift and with a new album; we also welcome Weedeater, Japonize Elephants, and Acid Pauli. Plus the return of reliably great outdoor fest Phono Del Sol (Thee Oh Sees and YACHT headline this time).

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:

DaVinci
Fillmore District-raised emcee DaVinci plays this free show alongside fellow burgeoning local rap duo Main Attrakionz, Young Gully, Shady Blaze, Ammbush, and Sayknowledge. DaVinci has been releasing tracks for a few years, in late 2012 dropping full-length The MOEna Lisa with an ode to SF in track “In My City” with the telling lyric, “Trying to push us out of the city/but we ain’t leaving,” in a hoarse whisper, but also referencing favorite spots like the waffle house at Fillmore and Eddy (Gussies).
Wed/10, 9pm, free
Brick and Mortar Music Hall
1710 Mission, SF
www.brickandmortarmusic.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PMgStbVNYk

The Flamin’ Groovies
Influential 1960s rockers the Flamin’ Groovies — who delivered wailing cult classics like “Slow Death,” “You Tore Me Down,” and “Shake Some Action” (you know this last one from its resurrection in the film Clueless) — have gone through some serious band changes over the past four decades, with more than 15 members rotating through the legendary group and some legendary rifts in the mix as well. Roy Loney has moved on to Roy Loney and the Phantom Movers. This current lineup is a circle back to Cyril Jordan, Chris Wilson, and George Alexander, who all overlapped in the group from 1971 through ’80. That powerpop lineup played a hastily arranged show in SF earlier this year, its first time together since ’81, but now it’s given you more advance notice. The current crew is rounded out by drummer Victor Penalosa. Don’t miss it again.
With Deniz Tek (Radio Birdman), Chuckleberries, DJ Sid Presley
Wed/10, 9pm, $25
Chapel
777 Valencia, SF
www.thechapelsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI7-ol-TG2o

Happy Hollows
Happy Hollows, the LA group now made up of Sarah Negahdari, Charlie Mahoney, and Matthew Fry, will release its sophomore album Amethyst on July 30. Produced by Fools Gold guitarist Lewis Pesacov, the record has that shimmering indie thing down, especially on single, “Endless.” With “Endless,” you can squeeze your eyes shut and practically see the stars bouncing through the sky along with the beat, or perhaps the neon pink signs flickering down Sunset Boulevard. And then there’s bubbly electro “Galaxies,” (sensing a theme here?), used in the album trailer. They both present a compelling, synth-looped step away from 2010’s Spells.
With Nightmare Air, Broadheds
Wed/10, 9pm, $12
Café Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
www.cafedunord.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ5ZYMe2bIY

Japonize Elephants
The elegant yet spooky old-world-carnival act Japonize Elephants — noted for drawing sounds from eclectic styles like gypsy jazz, bluegrass, and klezmer — will celebrate the vinyl release party for newest album Mélodie fantastique, this week at Amnesia. Go, and witness all the instrumentation you can handle (fiddle, banjo, glockenspiel, vibraphone, accordion, percussion, surf guitar), along with four-part vocal harmonies. A group of waltzing ghosts, like the ones you find on the Haunted Mansion ride, wouldn’t seem out of place here.
Thu/11, 9:30pm, $7–$10
Amnesia
853 Valencia, SF
www.amnesiathebar.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axWdjXBZqIo

Weedeater
After last year’s triumphantly heavy opening slot before LA doom metal group Saint Vitus at the Indy, North Carolina sludge metal act Weedeater returns to the Bay to play a far more appropriate venue, the dank, dark cave of the Oakland Metro. And this time, local metal duo Black Cobra and fellow NC stoner act ASG will pummel the crowd first, setting up the perfect spotlight for the grimy Weedeater. Here’s hoping there’s another Southern Lord release on the horizon for Weedeater (the band’s most recent LPs, 2007’s God Luck and Good Speed and 2011’s Jason…The Dragon, were both put out by the well-curated metal label).
With ASG, Black Cobra
Fri/12, 9pm, $13
Oakland Metro
630 Third St., Oakl.
www.oaklandmetro.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZSN-d0e_bg

Acid Pauli
“Punk bands, Bjork productions, hip-hop projects, an ambient album on Nicolas Jaar’s label, mixes for Crosstown Rebels: Martin Gretschmann has many musical roles and aliases. In DJ mode as Acid Pauli, the guy sends me Googling every time, re-energizing my excitement for new sounds. Half the time it’s something I’ve never heard like the wonky jazz romp of Der Dritte Raum’s “Swing Bop,” or tectonically teutonic deep house of Gunther Lause’s “Mountain.” (Where the school children astral pop on Jan Turkenburg’s “In My Spaceship” came from I. Just. Don’t. Know.) Even when it’s as familiar as Nancy Sinatra or Johnny Cash, Gretschmann reworkings are something else entirely. At this debut three+ hour set, I expect to see at least few cell phones on the dance floor, Shazam-ing to keep up.” — Ryan Prendiville
With Eduardo Castillo (Crosstown Rebels/Voodoo),
Fri/12, 9pm-3:30am, $12 presale
Public Works
161 Erie St., SF
(415) 932-0955
www.publicsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvwCggxOaKc

Phono Del Sol
In these past three years, Phono Del Sol has built itself up into a tastemaker midsummer’s indie music fest — and it’s one to watch. It makes sense: the one-day fest is curated by on-the-pulse local blog, the Bay Bridged. And beyond the interesting (and mostly local) band choices — the first year featured Aesop Rock and Mirah, last year the Fresh and Onlys and Mwahaha, and this year Thee Oh Sees, YACHT, Bleached, and K. Flay will headline — there’s something about the approach and atmosphere that calms the nerves. One of the newest bands on this year’s bill fits this feeling as well, the young garage pop four-piece Cool Ghouls will be bringing a horn section to Phono Del Sol this year.
Sat/13, 11:30am-7pm, $20
Potrero Del Sol Park
25th Street at Utah, SF
www.phonodelsol.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuCx9kgtr38
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeD3-sdGf1c

Is Larry Ellison cheating?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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If you’re wondering why the hell there was only one boat was out there “racing” in the first match of the America’s Cup on Sunday, here’s the rundown on “Ruddergate,” yet another contentious chapter in the 162-year history of the America’s Cup.

At issue is the size and shape of the rudders on the twin hulls of the AC72s. Original design parameters were established back in 2010 when, in the interest of fairness, details of the boats were agreed upon by all teams — so exactly this kind of conflict wouldn’t occur. A “box rule” was applied, which means the boats won’t be identical, but they will be similar (Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa actually have near-identical boats as the Italians came late to the party and bought New Zealand’s design to save time.)

Then, after Andrew Simpson was killed when Artemis’s boat capsized on May 9, regatta director Iain Murray made 37 new safety recommendations, which the Coast Guard made into requirements when they permitted the race.

“Basically, for marine events, marine event sponsors are responsible for the safety of the events,” U.S. Coast Guard chief Mike Lutz explained, noting that the 37 rule changes originated with Murray and were approved by the Coast Guard as a package.

Some of those changes are straightforward and simple, like no guests aboard during races, more body armor, buoyancy and other personal safety gear, and no racing in winds over 23 knots (That one is actually a hindrance for ETNZ and Luna Rossa, who deliberately built for prevailing San Francisco Bay conditions, i.e. as much as 35 knots of wind.) 

But that’s not what the two teams are protesting. They don’t like new size and shape rules for the rudder elevators, which are designed to stabilize the boat when it’s foiling. Oracle has a pretty good description of how they work here.

The new rule lays out minimum and maximum area, depth, and span and says they should be symmetrical. None of the 36 other safety recommendations touch on design elements. The fishy part is that Oracle has been practicing with a bigger, symmetrical rudder elevator since they launched their second boat on April 24. Before Simpson died, before Murray’s new safety rules, Oracle was using what would be considered an illegal rudder. And now, voila, it’s legal.

The Kiwis immediately filed a protest to the rule, on June 28, and four days later Luna Rossa joined them.

“I’m not saying all the changes have been made for them, but it’s nothing related to safety. What really upsets me is that there is one boat sailing since they launched on April 24 who has been sailing out of the class rule,” Luna Rossa’s Max Sirena told the media on July 2. “Why design a boat that doesn’t comply with the class rule? And then one week before the Louis Vuitton Cup, you ask the other teams to change the position of the rudders and the elevators…”

In the meantime, rather than delay the first race or move up the date of the protest hearing, Murray said it was okay for the Kiwis and Italians to race without the “safer” rudder elevators, to which ETNZ’s Grant Dalton said, “The point is that under the recommendations you can run both. The question is why?  Because, if you can run both, then why do you need the ones that aren’t rule compliant?”

Dalton also thinks this design change could make the boats more dangerous because the rudder elevators would extend wider than the maximum beam of the boat and could slice a sailor in half if he slips over the side of the hull.

He hasn’t said something dirty’s going down. He told the media, “If the question is, has that rule been put in there deliberately to help Oracle, then no I don’t think it has – I don’t think for a second Iain Murray has done that. Is it helping them as a kind of byproduct of it, then yes it is.”

Luna Rossa’s Max Sirena has been more critical. “It is not safety related at all … It is the first time in the history of the America’s Cup that they can change the class rule just like that, just because they want to change it and with no reason. To change a class rule you need unanimity. Why when Oracle capsized last October did they not come up with this change then?”

Luna Rossa boycotted until the jury made a decision, stating that it would seem like silent affirmation if they raced. A last minute deal to get them on Sunday’s course fell through and for the time being, the Italians are sticking to their principles – they were out practicing yesterday, showing their boat is more than capable of performing with the smaller, asymmetrical, noncompliant rudders.

“The teams don’t believe it’s proper to change the class rule without a vote of the teams,” said America’s Cup spokesperson Sean McNeill. “They believe [Murray] didn’t have the authority to make such a change.”

If the jury rules in favor of Luna Rossa and ETNZ, Murray would have to go back to the Coast Guard with a new safety plan in order to obtain a new racing permit. “If there’s any change, they would have to submit an updated safety plan,” Lutz noted, saying he was confident that it could be reviewed in a short time and a second permit could be issued without too much of a delay.

The jury convened yesterday to hear the protests and a decision is due Wednesday, but this debacle raises a couple of questions. Why didn’t they hear the protests prior to the first race? That race day was established a long time ago, and hasn’t changed. The jury had at least five days to review the protests – ample time if the race organizers were really concerned with keeping the event from totally losing face.

Instead, two of the three boats were out of the race before it had even begun, creating animosity among the handful of sponsors still involved. Louis Vuitton’s Bruno Trouble – who initially anticipated 15 contenders, then 8, and certainly no less than 5 – is pissed that not even two could show up and the event has been very far from the big splash it was billed to be. Meanwhile, international media aren’t holding back the ridicule. Fairfax NZ’s Duncan Johnstone called it “a hugely embarrassing situation for regatta organisers, a major dent for the on-shore festivities and massive sponsorships that envelop this ridiculously expensive event.”

And, if the larger rudder elevators really are safer, why didn’t Oracle say something back in April before Simpson died? Or in October when their boat capsized? Instead, they’ve been very mum on the subject. Control is going to be as important as speed in this Cup and with the Kiwis and Italians burnt by the lowered wind limits, it looks like Ellison is hoping to top them in the control category. Larger rudders create more drag and less speed, but may get Oracle foiling for longer periods with enhanced stability – which they desperately need.

ETNZ and Luna Rossa have indicated it would be impossible for them to adapt their rudders now that racing has begun. Meanwhile, Oracle gets to hang back until the finals in September, practicing their moves while Ellison carries on with acting too rich too fail.

Rebecca Bowe contributed to this report.

In the moment: At City Hall for the Supreme Court’s same-sex wedding decisions

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Still beaming from the Supreme Court’s DOMA and Prop 8 decisions? If you’ve come down with the Monday blues, here are some great photos from Amanda Rhoades of that historic moment in City Hall on June 26.

Mime Troupe debuts its usual political satire in stripped down fashion

Sasha Cuttler
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The San Francisco Mime Troupe overcame its recent financial troubles and debuted the SFMT’s latest season of free, socially-relevant theater in Dolores Park yesterday (Thu/4), a rollicking send-up on the political culture and Chevron’s greedy plunder of Ecuador, delivered by a smaller than usual cast.

“We all felt really great just to have the opportunity to do the show because of the financial issues,” Pat Moran, one of the SFMT’s head writers, told the Guardian.

“It came very close to not happening this year,” Moran said. “There was a period of about a month or a month and a half when the show wasn’t going to happen, but we had to keep writing as if there were going to be one.”

After a “successful grassroots fundraising effort,” according to the SFMT website, the Troupe knew for sure there would be a show, and was able to resume rehearsal in April. But it was a show marked by austerity measures that slashed the number of actors and musicians involved in the performance. There were just four actors who hurried through various costume changes to fill all the parts.

Moran helped write the SFMT’s two-part “Oil and Water” that debuted Thursday. The first part “Deal with the Devil” begins in the White House Oval Office, set in the future, where a secret service agent finds the President dead on the day of an important speech on environmental issues. The second part “Crude Intentions” focuses on Chevron, whose headquarters is now in San Ramon, CA, but was previously in San Francisco.

The performance “continues in a noir style with some slapstick comedy,” according to Moran. And as it has done since its beginning in 1959, the SFMT hits strongly on the political in “Oil and Water,” focusing on Chevron’s mounting counter-suits and millions of dollars spent in order to fend off the settlement requirements that an Ecuadorian judge awarded to its people for damages Chevron committed.

“We focus on Chevron as a specific and local entity, but also as a way to focus on the larger issue of how oil companies use tactics to control their image in public, from National Public Radio donations and advertisements,” Moran said.

These SFMT shows rely on foundational grants and on-the-spot cash donations from audiences. And earlier this year, the SFMT’s financial situation worsened due to the loss of foundation money, including its long-held National Endowment for the Arts grant and others. In addition, cash donations have gone down since, as Moran observed, “people carry less money around now” when they come to SFMT shows in the park.

“But at this point, we are optimistic. We have a show up, and that’s our focus,” Moran added. Although up and running now until its last show September 2nd, come the end of the season the SFMT may have to rethink doing its performances in public space for free, Moran said.
“In September we might have to re-imagine the show. We may not be able to make shows happen in park, or at least free with donations; it may not work out. We might have to figure out something new, rather than strip away the elements of the current show so we can afford it.”

When things get weird: X-Day, Weird Al, and more

Tony Robles
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Today is weird. It’s in that black hole gap between a nationally recognized holiday (er, Fourth of July) and the actual weekend, which begins for many traditional workers around 5pm on Fridays. So with this weirdness, we celebrate both X-Day, a parody of cult holidays, and the more literal, Weird Al — he shines down on the Alameda County Fair tonight with a beam of frizzy light.

Let’s get to Al, straightaway. While he used to be big-time MTV stock, parodying Michael Jackson and Madonna types, Weird Al has done something interesting in the past few years, and gone cult. It may have started with his cartoon-genius take on R. Kelly’s masterpiece, “Trapped in the Closet” (by the way, the Castro is having a “Trapped in the Closet” sing-along later this month). Weird Al made it better with strangely appealing “Trapped in the Drive-Thru.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHnTocdD7sk

But before that, there were bona fide hits, this strange musical landscape, including “I Lost on Jeopardy,”  “Fat,” and Coolio’s worst nightmare, “Amish Paradise.” More recently, there was meh Gaga takedown “Perform This Way.”

And now he’s on the county fair circuit (full disclosure: I saw him on said same county fair circuit more than a decade ago, and loved every obnoxious moment, especially the costume changes).

Here’s the info on the fair and concerts. Show starts at 7pm tonight (July 5), and all concerts are free with paid admission to the fair.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

And then there’s X-Day. It’s a faux-holiday celebrated every July 5 as part of the Church of the SubGenius — “a religion formed as a parody of cults and extreme religious groups.”

For X-Day, the church prophesized that an army of weirdo alien invaders would land their spaceship on earth and destroy all the normals, those without sin.

While celebrated worldwide, in Orange County, Calif. for many years and through the late ‘90s there was a nonprofit all-ages venue called Koo’s, which celebrated X-Day with a punky band called the Four Letter words — and a paper mache spaceship. The Four Letter words returned recently for a few reunion shows, and one can only hope that was in part in allegiance with X-Day, the Church of the Subgenius, and the Church’s leader, Bob Dobbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj127gtcqdk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APSP0fjHqGQ

Or you could keep the weirdness more local tonight, and see Bart Davenport live in Oakland at the Uptown. The now LA-based leader of the avant-electro group Honeycut did the most surprising thing when he went solo a decade or so back, and put out tender, soulful pop songs, all about gooey love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g-DOc9gVhM

He plays a free First Fridays show tonight with Extra Classic, Legs, and She Owl.
Fri/5, 6pm, free. Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. www.uptownnightclub.com.

Depp stinks but Death rules: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Depp stinks but Death rules: new movies!

By now you’ve heard how much The Lone Ranger sucks (for more on that, my review here), so what else should you be spending your weekly movie-theater budget on? Well, the Roxie just opened a doc about Detroit band Death (Dennis Harvey breaks it down here), plus there’s a new Pedro Almodóvar joint, a coming-of-age summer flick starring Sam Rockwell and Steve Carell as cool and not-so-cool father figures, and (since one Carell movie ain’t enough) Despicable Me 2  — just the thing for the kidz who’ve already seen Monsters University.

Read on for our takes on these films, and more!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irSSZumpYS4

Augustine When a 19-year-old Parisian kitchen maid (single-named French musician Soko) has a dramatic seizure during dinner service, she makes for Salpêtrière Hospital, where she becomes the superstar patient of Dr. Charcot (Vincent Lindon) — a real-life 19th century professor and neurologist who later mentored Sigmund Freud. There’s no “talking cure” at work here, though; Augustine’s medical treatment consists mostly of naked poking and prodding, as well as hypnosis-induced episodes of her increasingly sexualized “ovarian hysteria.” The tension builds as Charcot struggles against popular disdain for his methods (read aloud to him from newspapers by his coolly elegant wife), as well as his forbidden attraction to Augustine. Occupying the same moody, sensual milieu as David Cronenberg’s too-talky A Dangerous Method (2011), first-time feature writer-director Alice Winocour approaches her tale of misunderstood madness from a point of view that’s more emotionally-driven, with some subtle feminist undercurrents. Points deducted, though, for some obvious symbolism — like costuming Augustine in a brand-new red dress right after she starts her period for the first time. (1:42) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtVEj86Vmzo

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay David Mamet fans will recognize Ricky Jay from multiple appearances in the director’s work; he’s also been in films like Boogie Nights and Tomorrow Never Dies (both 1997). But Jay’s true passion is stage magic, specifically card and other sleight-of-hand tricks, performed with a skill so dazzling that it’s tempting to believe he really does have supernatural powers. He’s also a witty, self-deprecating, and sometimes “irascible” (to quote a word used in Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein’s doc) character — and has a vast, ever-expanding interest in magic history. Using first-hand interviews, TV and stage-show clips, and some wonderful vintage footage, Deceptive Practice traces Jay’s career (he was a child prodigy in the 1950s, thanks to his supportive grandfather), pausing along the way to pay tribute to the men who influenced him and, in many cases, taught him their top-secret techniques. Throughout, Jay is seen demonstrating his own mind-bending tricks — as “simple” as changing a card’s suit, as elaborate as making it sail across the room and plunge like a knife into a watermelon rind — although never, of course, revealing how he does it. (1:28) (Cheryl Eddy)

Despicable Me 2 The laughs come quick and sweet now that Gru (Steve Carell) has abandoned his super-villainy to become a dad and “legitimate businessman” — though he still applies world-class gravitas to everyday events. (His daughter’s overproduced birthday party is a riot of medieval festoonage.) But like all the best reformed baddies, the Feds, or in this case the Anti-Villain League, recruit him to uncover the next international arch-nemesis. Now a spy, he gets a goofy but highly competent partner (Kristen Wiig) and a cupcake shop at the mall to facilitate sniffing out the criminal. This sequel surpasses the original in charm, cleverness, and general lovability, and it’s not just because they upped the number of minion-related gags, or because Wiig joined the cast; she ultimately gets the short end of the stick as the latecomer love-interest (her spy gadgets are also just so-so). However, Carell kills it as Gru 2 — his faux-Russian accent and awkward timing are more lived-in. Maybe the jokes are about more familiar stuff (like the niggling disappointments of family life) but they’re also sharper and more surprising. And though the minions seemed like one-trick ponies in the first film, those gibberish-talking jellybeans outdo themselves in the sequel’s climax. (1:38) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

I’m So Excited I’m So Excited may be to Pedro Almodóvar what Hairspray (1988) was for director John Waters: a kind of low-intensity, high-fluff gateway drug for a filmmaker who’s otherwise an “acquired taste.” (Note: unlike Hairspray, this is not a family movie.) Almodóvar’s previous pictures were far more explicit about their obsessive thinking: mothers suffered (1999’s All About My Mother); sex was deadly (1990’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and men were dishonorable (all of them). But in this drug and booze-addled flame-fest, Almodóvar takes one of his lesser themes (the joy of confinement) and transforms a flight from Madrid to Mexico into the funniest soap opera to ever feature cabaret and S&M talk. Early in the flight we learn the landing gear is shot; this means the flight’s dueling pilots have to find a place to host an emergency landing while Europe is on holiday. They anesthetize all of coach (um…metaphor, anyone?), leaving the rich to bellyache over their lost children, lost happiness, and stubborn virginity. Business class is full of drama queens so the flamboyantly gay attendants spike a cocktail with ecstasy (to make everyone get along) and an orgy ensues, complete with a seemingly victimless rape and multiple change-overs from hetero to homo. Almodóvar does have a knack for make-believe, but his biggest gift for fantasy happens in his stress-free transitions; oh, that coming out could be so liberating — but living in a Catholic country lousy with sexual disorientations, maybe the only place that can happen is at 30,000 feet. (1:35) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX9gUw3Kwb4

Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain The comedian (2012’s Think Like a Man) performs in this concert film, shot at Madison Square Garden during his 2012 stand-up tour. (1:15)

Maniac And it came to pass that William Lustig’s trashy classic Maniac (1980) was remade, with Elijah Wood assuming the role of twisted killer Frank, a role closely associated with its originator, the late, great cult actor Joe Spinell. Lustig is credited with a producing credit on this otherwise largely French effort, directed by Franck Khalfoun and co-written by Alejandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur — who also worked together on the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Though it’s set in contemporary Los Angeles (complete with dating websites and cell phones), Maniac is shot to mimic the original film’s late-1970s New York (cabs, deserted subways, grimy streetscapes), with a synth-heavy score enhancing the retro vibe. Frank is still obsessed with mannequins, scalps, and his dead mother, with shades of both Psycho (1960) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) filtering through. When Frank meets Anna (Nora Arnezeder), a beautiful French photographer whose preferred subject is mannequins, he grows ever more confused — and more violent. The entire movie is shot from Frank’s POV (we see Wood’s face only in mirrors and photographs), an off-putting gimmick that fails to add much in the way of suspense or scares. As for the gore, there’s nothing amid the CG enhancements that matches the work of special effects genius Tom Savini, whose memorable exploding-head scene plays just as repulsively effective in 2013 as it did in 1980. If you really wanna be freaked out by a movie maniac, skip this so-so do-over and spend some quality time with Spinell instead. (1:29) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK7AS_cITKI

The Way, Way Back Duncan (Liam James) is 14, and if you remember being that age you remember the awkwardness, the ambivalence, and the confusion that went along with it. Duncan’s mother (Toni Collette) takes him along for an “important summer” with her jerky boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell) — and despite being the least important guy at the summer cottage, Duncan’s only marginally sympathetic. Most every actor surrounding him plays against type (Rob Corddry is an unfunny, whipped husband; Allison Janney is a drunk, desperate divorcee), and since the cast is a cattle call for anyone with indie cred, you’ll wonder why they’re grouped for such a dull movie. Writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash previously wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for 2011’s The Descendants, but The Way, Way Back doesn’t match that film’s caliber of intelligent, dry wit. Cast members take turns resuscitating the movie, but only Sam Rockwell saves the day, at least during the scenes he’s in. Playing another lovable loser, Rockwell’s Owen dropped out of life and into a pattern of house painting and water-park management in the fashion of a conscientious objector. Owen is antithetical to Trent’s crappy example of manhood, and raises his water wing to let Duncan in. The short stint Duncan has working at Water Wizz is a blossoming that leads to a minor romance (with AnnaSophia Robb) and a major confrontation with Trent, some of which is affecting, but none of which will help you remember the movie after credits roll. (1:42) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

Hi-yo, stinker

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Hi-yo, stinker

FILM Pop-culture historians who study 2005’s top movies will remember Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the so-so action flick that birthed Brangelina; Batman Begins, which ushered in a moodier flavor of superhero; and Tim Burton’s shrill Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

That last title is of particular interest lately. Not only did Charlie provide grim confirmation that a post-Planet of the Apes (2001) Tim Burton had squandered whatever goodwill he’d built up a decade prior with films like Ed Wood (1994) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), it also telegraphed to the world that Johnny Depp — previously a highly intriguing actor, someone whose cool cred was never in question — was capable of sucking. Hard.

In the years since 2005, Depp hasn’t done much to stamp out those initial flickers of doubt. If anything, he’s fanned ’em into a bonfire. His involvement in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (which is plodding toward a fifth installment) has taken up most of his schedule, though he’s always willing to don a wacky wig whenever Burton needs him (2007’s Sweeney Todd; 2010’s Alice in Wonderland; 2012’s Dark Shadows). The rest of his post-2005 credits are a mixed bag, mostly best forgotten (ahem, 2010’s The Tourist), though one does stand out for positive reasons: 2011’s animated Rango, a cleverly-scripted tale that reunited Depp with Gore Verbinski, who helmed the first three Pirates movies.

The pair returns to Rango‘s Wild West milieu for The Lone Ranger; certainly there’ll be no Oscars handed out this time, though Razzies seem inevitable. The biggest strike against The Lone Ranger is one you’ll read about in every review: it’s just a teeny bit racist. The casting of the once and future Cap’n Sparrow — who apparently has a blank check at Disney to do any zany thing he wants — as a Native American given to “hey-ya” chants and dead-bird hats is very suspect. Some (white) people might be willing to give this a pass, because it’s always been part of Depp’s celebrity mythology that he’s part Indian. I mean, he totally has a Cherokee warrior inked on his bicep, just below “Wino Forever”!

Mmm-hmm. Let’s go to the source, shall we? Speaking of his heritage in a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Depp mustered the following: “I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line. My great grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek.”

Sounds kinda sketchy, JD. The actor who played Tonto on TV may have been born Harold J. Smith (“Jay Silverheels” was his nom de screen), but he was also raised on Canada’s Six Nations reserve and was the son of a Mohawk tribal chief. So The Lone Ranger TV series, which ran from 1949 to 1957 — and had its share of racial-insensitivity and stereotype-perpetuating issues — was able to cast an actual indigenous person to play Tonto, but 2013’s The Lone Ranger, which elevates Tonto from sidekick to narrator and de facto main character, was not.

In fact, it’s not too far-fetched to assume that the casting of Depp (also credited as an executive producer) is the only reason this Lone Ranger exists. Clearly, he really wanted to play Tonto, and Depp has a way of making his performance the most important thing about whatever film he’s in. Were audiences really screaming out for The Lone Ranger, a rather literal big-screen take on a 1950s TV show with some heavily CG’d train chases added in? Could not $250 million, the film’s reported budget, have been better spent doing something … anything … else?

Obviously “redface” is nothing new in Hollywood. It was frequently deployed in the pre-PC era, as when a white actor played a heroic Native American figure — think Chuck Connors in 1962’s Geronimo. But shouldn’t we have transcended that by now? You’d never see blackface in a film unless it was being used to make a character look ridiculous (2008’s Tropic Thunder), or to make a satirical point, as with 2000’s Bamboozled. Somewhere, Kevin Costner is clutching his Oscars for 1990 post-Western Dances With Wolves — more or less cinema’s biggest mea culpa for all those “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” yarns of the John Wayne era — and weeping.

Tonto isn’t the only Native American character in The Lone Ranger. But the others (none of whom are given names, unless someone was called “set dressing” or “background actor” and I missed it) have a slightly sharper aura of authenticity than Depp, who spends the whole movie caked in either old-age make-up or campy face paint. They are mere plot devices, there to give contemporary audiences a reason to feel outraged when an evil railroad baron lays his tracks through their land and raids their silver mine. “Our time has passed,” an elderly Indian character tells the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer, whose role literally consists of riding a horse and reacting to Depp’s scenery-chewing buffoonery). “We are already ghosts.”

But back up, kemo sabe. Racism may be The Lone Ranger‘s worst problem, but it’s not the film’s only problem. There’s also its bloated length (nearly three hours); its score, which dares to introduce an Ennio Morricone homage into a film Sergio Leone wouldn’t line his gatto‘s litter box with; its waste of some great character actors (Barry Pepper, William Fichtner); its assumption that having random characters ask the Lone Ranger “What’s with the mask?” over and over is the funniest joke ever; and its failure to follow through on its few inventive elements — that herd of Monty Python-inspired rabbits, for example.

And another thing: if the moral of The Lone Ranger — spelled out with all the delicate subtlety of a fiery train crash — is “greed is bad,” why did El Deppo sign onto this piece of crap in the first place? *

 

THE LONE RANGER opens Wed/3 in Bay Area theaters.

Dick Meister: Celebrating July Fourth with the enemy

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By Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a veteran Guardian columnist and freelance writer.

The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George
Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British.
That sort of thing.

But have you ever wondered what it’s like on the other side? Have you ever
celebrated the Fourth across the border in Canada, in that territory settled
by pro-British “Loyalists” who fled the United States after the
Revolutionary War? It is a most peculiar experience for one accustomed to
the American way of viewing the events of 1776.

My wife Gerry and I observed the Fourth on the other side a few years back
— in Fredericton, the beautiful little capital of New Brunswick, named in
honor of King George’s second son, Frederic. Going into Fredericton meant
going into the camp of a former enemy — a friend now, but a former enemy
who openly hails the “Loyalists” who fought for them against us. I mean
people who opposed our revolution and never even said they were sorry.

Our first stop was the hallowed Loyalist Cemetery near the banks of the
Saint John River at the far end of Waterloo Row, burial ground of
Fredericton’s revered founders — anti-American tories, the lot of them. We
trudged down a muddy path to a ring of trees around a swampy grass clearing
in which the tory heroes lay, prepared to utter a revolutionary sentiment or
two over them in honor of the holiday.

We managed to get a quick look at a couple of thin, well-worn, tottering
slate headstones — but that was all. Before we could even open our mouths,
they struck — angry swarms of dread North woods mosquitoes. Backwards we
dashed. Quickly. Very quickly. We slapped at each other as we squished
awkwardly over the wet ground, batting mosquitoes off hair, face, neck,
arms, clothes. Much buzzing. Much stinging. They were everywhere. The
tories’ revenge. For days afterward, we bore the swollen red marks of the
Loyalists.

More insults were to come, in the Legislative Assembly chambers downtown.
The chambers are elegant: ornately carved desks, elaborately patterned silk
wall covering, thick crimson carpeting. But look up on the walls, in the
places of honor on either side of the Speaker’s chair. To the left there’s a
portrait of George III, the very monarch we made a revolution against, to
the right a portrait of his queen, Charlotte — and both painted by no less
a master than Joshua Reynolds.

George is in fact treated much better in New Brunswick than he generally is
in Great Britain. Historians there ridicule him for being a bit of a loon
and for such loony acts as overtaxing the American colonists and
overreacting to their protests by then waging war against them. In
Fredericton, they think George did the right thing.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate the end of colonialism. But in
Fredericton they seem to yearn for its return. Union Jacks fly from staffs
all over town and portraits of Queen Elizabeth and her consort hang in
government and private buildings everywhere. Ceremonial guards outside City
Hall wear the white pith helmets, long crimson jackets and black uniform
trousers of the British colonial soldier.

Just behind City Hall stand the restored quarters of the British garrison
that was stationed in the city for more than a century, one of the buildings
now housing a museum full of anti-revolutionary twaddle. Captions below
portraits of leading Loyalists praise them for “faith, courage, sacrifices”
against Yankees, who are for the most part described as violent, crude, rude
and vulgar. Here, too, a portrait of George III hangs in a place of honor.
Among the Loyalists singled out is that other fine fellow, Benedict Arnold,
who lived in New Brunswick before slinking off to Mother England in 1791. At
least the museum keepers have the decency to own up to Arnold’s “reputation
for crookedness.”

Loyalists also are favorites in New Brunswick’s neighboring province of Nova
Scotia, particularly in the capital of Halifax. There, the American
revolutionaries are portrayed as bad guys who would have made Nova Scotia a
U.S. colony if the British hadn’t beefed up their garrison on Citadel Hill,
a massive fortress that towers high above the city, guarding every access,
be it by land or by sea.

The champion Loyalist stronghold is the New Brunswick city of Saint John.
“Loyalist City,” it’s called. It has a Loyalist Burial Ground, naturally,
but also a Loyalist Trail, Loyalist Apartments, Loyalist Coin & Collectibles
shop, Loyalist Pub and, among many other things loyalistic, Loyalist Days,
an annual week-long festival honoring Saint John’s founders. At a high point
in the festival 100 or so appropriately costumed Loyalists — “His Majesty’s
Loyal Troops” — fend off a brigade of actors portraying American rebels
attempting to “capture” Saint John.

The latter-day Loyalists claimed to like us nevertheless. In Fredericton,
for instance, a half-dozen U.S. flags fluttered smartly outside the Lord
Beaverbrook Hotel, the city’s finest, and the marquee proclaimed, “We Salute
our American Friends. Happy 4th of July.”

Sure thing. But watch out for the mosquitoes.

Dick Meister is a veteran Guardian columnist and freelance writer.

(Bruce B. Brugmann, or B3 as he signs his emails and blogs, is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at the Bruce blog at sfbg.com.)

    

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Celebrating independence, embracing wage slavery

Sasha Cuttler
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Celebrating independence, embracing wage slavery

On the eve of Independence Day, too many San Franciscans seem eager to give up on the very idea of independence, instead willingly buying into the divide and conquer strategies of those who seek to control and exploit us. Just consider the big news of the day.

On Day Three of the BART strike, mainstream and social media are once again awash with angry anti-union diatribes by people who are resentful of the fact that some workers in this society still manage to earn the pensions and decent salaries that most of us wage slaves are being denied.

Pensions are the one thing that allows the working class some degree of independence during its twilight years. And the average BART salary of $72,000 annually shouldn’t be considered excessive in an expensive city that will chew up at least a third of that in housing costs.

But they are each more than most of us are getting, so it’s easy to turn many people against their fellow workers, even though the real targets of our ire should be the bosses and economic system that are denying us our independence and the means to pursue our happiness.

It’s a similar story with the breaking news of the day: City College of San Francisco losing its accreditation and being turned over to state control. While there are some reasons to criticize how this important institution has been managed over the years, it was still being managed by locally elected trustees who made the best decisions they could under bad circumstances.

They made decisions to maintain a broad-based curriculum that this community wanted and needed, and to avoid exploiting the faculty like so many other educational institutions are doing, in the process taking a gamble with lower reserves than may be needed. And the voters of San Francisco stepped up to support CCSF with a parcel tax that was helping to ease it away from the brink, acting as a proud and independent community does during troubled times.

But a commission of unelected bureaucrats on a ideological mission to transform educational institutions into something less than the broad-based community resources that CCSF has strived to be decided to make an example of San Francisco. And they did so with the full support of Mayor Ed Lee, who issued a statement today criticizing local officials for not embracing even harsher austerity measures than they did, and saying “I fully support” the state takeover.

Lee’s hand-picked panel recommending reforms of the Housing Authority is also proposing to sacrifice the independence of poor San Franciscans in favor of ever-more subsidies to real estate developers, according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the “reforms” is a proposal to divert federal money from the Section 8 program that offers rent-subsidies to the poor, as Chron reporter John Cote described like this: “A terribly run program that provides low-income residents with vouchers for private housing would be administered by the city, rather than the federally funded public housing agency. The vouchers would be prioritized for certain affordable housing projects, creating dedicated revenue to help secure loans to build them.”

So the vouchers that allow low-income people some independence — rather than living in squalid, chronically mismanaged public housing projects in San Francisco — will instead subsidize development projects. Yes, we do need to subsidize affordable housing development, which this city is underfunding, but we shouldn’t be taking the meager resources of society’s least fortunate families to do so.  

I have no doubts that Lee will jump at this suggestion (although its unlikely to be so eagerly embraced by federal regulators at HUD) given his penchant for shady real estate schemes that line the pockets of the powerful, like the one that the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered this week.

CIR reported that the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Center — a for-profit company connected to Willie Brown that is arranging immigration visas for Chinese nationals who invest in Lennar’s Hunters Point housing development — is getting key help from Lee and members of his staff.

This project was already looking like a bait-and-switch scam, as we also reported this week, with Lennar being guaranteed profits without even putting up its own money, thanks to Lee’s willingness to use the power of his office to solicit funds on behalf of the country’s biggest residential developer.

If Lennar wasn’t going to build the affordable housing we need on the front end, or put up the money itself, why didn’t the city just administer this project and give the work to local contractors? What exactly is this Florida-based corporation doing in exchange for being handed some of the most valuable real estate in the city, except for helping its powerful local friends who pulled strings on its behalf?

What’s motivating Lee these days? Well, considering that Brown and other power brokers placed him in the Mayor’s Office after a career at City Hall doing their bidding — a role he seems to be still playing today in his powerful new role — I’d say it was a lack of independence.

It’s all pretty depressing, but at least we have a holiday tomorrow to celebrate our independence. Happy Fourth of July, comrades.  

8 Washington opponents try to torpedo counter-initiative

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Opponents of 8 Washington, a hotly contested development project that would erect 134 new condos priced at $5 million apiece and up along the San Francisco waterfront, are seeking to thwart a counter-initiative developers have launched to solicit voter approval for the project on the November ballot.

In a July 1 letter from The Sutton Law Firm to Hanson Bridgett LLP, a firm representing the project proponents, political lawyer and fixer Jim Sutton highlights “fatal legal flaws” he claims would invalidate each and every signature collected in support of the 8 Washington initiative. It’s likely a precursor to a lawsuit. Apparently, Sutton got involved through his connection with former City Attorney Louise Renne, who opposes the 8 Washington plan.

Organized under No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront, opponents circulated petitions of their own earlier this year to challenge San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ approval of 8 Washington, asking voters to weigh in on the Board’s waiver of building height limit restrictions. Polling has indicated they’ll succeed (a win in their case is a majority of “no” votes), effectively sinking the project. That prompted 8 Washington proponents to generate their own counter-initiative.

Sutton’s letter demands that 8 Washington proponents not submit the initiative to the Department of Elections for signature verification, unless they first re-circulate the petitions. Of course, that would torpedo the whole endeavor, since there’s no way proponents could gather enough signatures in time for the imminent filing deadline.

The aforementioned “fatal legal flaws,” meanwhile, seem to illustrate why high-powered attorneys like Sutton rake in the big bucks. Apparently, the initiative proponents neglected to attach a few maps detailing the height limit increases, in violation of a requirement that proponents present the “full text” of a proposal to voters. And then there’s this:

Whether it’s a photocopying error or an attempt at obfuscation, the map on the left (circulated by the pro-development camp) makes it impossible to read the height limit increase. (The map on the right was circulated by opponents.) This seemingly minute detail matters, according to No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront spokesperson Jon Golinger, because “the whole point of this is the height increase.”

David Beltran, a spokesperson for the pro- 8 Washington folks, responded to a Guardian request for comment by saying, “Our opponents are offering up yet another baseless claim.” He called it a distraction “from having to justify why they are asking our City to give up new parks, jobs, and housing and millions of dollars in city benefits that includes $11 million for new affordable housing—to protect an asphalt parking lot and private club,” referencing a recreational center that’s served a predominantly middle class clientele for years that would be razed to make way for 8 Washington.

Beltran also attached a complaint Hanson Bridgett had filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, charging that No Wall on the Northeast Waterfront had failed to meet campaign filing deadlines, and urging city officials to “immediately investigate the delay” and impose fines of $5,000 per violation.

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