Bay Guardian Archives

The Fourth of July: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940s to 1950s

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of 1972, when the Bay Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, Elmer Menage, and the rest of the neighborhood gang would race out of  their houses to catch the action. Some had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for.)

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story for my coming Halloween blog.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shene” Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Lyon County  Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene.  My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “Where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902″) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms beer  at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway? I can beat the hell out of any of you.”   And the crowd  would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of local  variety shows. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna,” as Caen would say.  Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even good enough  to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer had a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch cafe, John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on their lawns. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s farm.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular on the evening of the Fourth of July.

From any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and the  Mission Rock restaurant.

The action is informal but fiery, fast, and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and gingerly patrol the perimeter but don’t bother anybody. I go every year. I think it’s the best show in town. B3.

City College loses accreditation, throwing its future into doubt

Sasha Cuttler
-
79

City College of San Francisco will lose its accreditation, it was announced today, and the venerable local college may not survive. With its impending death, the future of thousands of San Franciscans seeking education and a better life are in limbo.

The loss of accreditation becomes effective in one year, and the decision is being appealed, during which time local control is being transferred to a state trustee. The California Community College Chancellor’s Office has not yet named the trustee that it will appoint, and officials say the trustee will be given full authority to make decisions in the place of the current Board of Trustees.

“I think state intervention is going to be necessary,” said Mayor Ed Lee told reporters this afternoon.

“It’s imperative City College stay open for business and education the 85,000 students it serves” Lee said in a conference call with reporters. “I’m concerned about the devastating impact City College’s termination would have on our great city.”

The long-awaited decision was expected sometime around this long holiday weekend, and officials knew losing the accreditation was a possibility, but most said privately that they didn’t think the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges would actually pull the trigger. So right now, everyone is still reeling from the news.

“It’s too soon to say who that special trustee will be at that point,” State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris said. 

Locally elected Trustee Rafael Mandelman said that the locally elected board will continue operating until July of 2014, when the termination of the accreditation becomes effective, but it’s unclear what authority it will now have. 

“It’s disappointing, it’s outrageous, I don’t think it’s called for. I don’t think it’s the right outcome. I don’t think the state is going to do a better job running the school than a local board could,” he told us.

“We believe that the best way to bring the college from certain closure is to put the college under trusteeship of certain powers,” Harris said, adding that the search for a new chancellor for CCSF will now be accelerated. The current chancellor is an interim chancellor, the second one in a year after chancellor Don Griffin left the school due to an illness.

“We are disappointed in the Commission’s decision. We will be filing a request for review and will do everything in our power to have this decision reversed,” Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman said in a prepared statement. “What is of utmost importance at this time is that City College remains open, and instruction and services will continue. We want to assure our students and their families that we will serve them and continue to provide the high quality education that they expect from City College. We will continue to register new and returning students for the Fall semester and look forward to their arrival on campus in August.”

City College was put on sanction by the commission back in July of 2012 after allegedly failing to fix issues identified by the commission six years prior. Since then, the college has been in panic mode. 

The threat of closure brought drastic changes at whip lash speed over the past few months: two campuses shuttered, over 40 counselors and support staff were laid off, faculty took a 7 percent pay cut and student enrollment has plummeted.

Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance Peter Goldstein put the college’s finances this way, “This has been a nightmare of a fiscal year.”

But there were positive improvements as well, said Alisa Messer, an English teacher and faculty union president of City College’s local AFT 2121. 

“Faculty have banded together and worked hard to address the requirements around student learning outcomes,” Messer said. SLOs, as they’re commonly known, measure student learning over the course of a class and in a student’s college career. 

“The accrediting commission felt it wasn’t integrated throughout the college, but they would be hard pressed to say it isn’t now,” she said.

Despite City College’s improvements the California Federation of Teachers is set on fighting the accreditation commission’s decision. They filed a massive 280-plus page complaint to the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the accreditation commission violated many of its own rules in evaluating CCSF.

 

The commission responded by locking out over 30 faculty and concerned citizens from its most recent public meeting, even barring a reporter from the SF Chronicle from entering.  

Now the commission has asked visiting accreditation teams, who evaluate colleges on site, to shred their documentation to make such complaints harder to research, which was originally reported on by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The work you do here is a position of trust, the documents you receive are given to you in that light.” said a faculty member who had served on prior accreditation teams, but did not wish to be named because they are not approved to speak on behalf of the accreditation commission. “When you’re done fulfilling your responsibility its good policy to dispose of them, and its the commission’s expectation.”

Some of the documents are proprietary information at for-profit colleges, such as Heald. It makes sense to protect that private information. The visiting team has “a look behind the curtain,” the faculty member said. 

But Messer isn’t buying it. “We’ve asked they be more transparent, they’ve done the opposite of that,” Messer said.

On the college’s Ocean campus, just outside the Chancellor’s office in a retro brown speckled hallway, Dennis Garcia walked by with his City College registration info in hand.

He’s ready for his next semester, and unlike the thousands of students that didn’t enroll in City College this year, he forged ahead.  

“I decided to come because I’m not scared or nervous about the school going down,” he said.

Garcia is an 18-year-old criminal justice major and SF native who dreams of transferring to San Francisco or San Jose State Universities. He wants to be a star soccer player while in school.

But why did he stay when so many others fled? 

“Why City College? It’s home,” he said. “People say, coming here is not successful, but I mean, sometimes you don’t have money and you’re not an A or B student, but you get your math and English done and you go from there. College is college.”

Now, whether City College remains a college this time next year is still an open question.

 

“Eviction Free Summer” activists show up outside a landlord’s office to protest an eviction

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
19

On July 2, activists from “Eviction Free Summer,” formed to defend tenants facing eviction, gathered outside landlord Rick Holman’s South Park office building in San Francisco to protest an eviction he’d initiated against a Mission-based activist collective.

Organizer Fred Sherburn-Zimmer said it was one of many peaceful protests the housing activists plan to stage against property owners this summer. “We’re taking it to the landlord’s homes and offices,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “They can’t pretend they’re not ruining people’s lives by displacing them.”

This past April, collective members from In The Works, an organization that rents space in what is often called the “17 Reasons” building, at 17th and Mission streets, received an eviction notice from Holman alleging illegal subletting.

Holman is a managing partner at Asher Investment Group, and from the perspective of Sherburn-Zimmer and other protesters, his move to evict the collective is helping to propel a trend of gentrification in the Mission. “We need this space, and if the whole neighborhood is high-end realty, then it’s not really helping the community,” Sherburn-Zimmer said.

The In The Works Collective bills itself as an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist arts and events collective, which regularly hosts skill-sharing workshops and other activism-oriented events. A collective member who introduced herself as Madeline said Holman has not been the most hospitable landlord.

“When he first came to talk to us, he said we had bad posture and body language,” she recounted. “The day after we got the three-day notice, the locks were changed.” 

When the Guardian reached Holman this past May seeking comment for a longer article about widespread evictions, he declined to comment on the matter but emphasized that he planned to keep the building as commercial office space rather than convert it into high-end condos, and said his other tenants had expressed no complaints.

Like many folks facing eviction from San Francisco rental properties, In The Works may be forced to find another space. Currently, Madeline says the collective is paying 72 cents a square foot for the 5,200 square foot place — and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll find a place in the Mission for a similar price. That’s why they welcomed support from the activists at Eviction-Free Summer.

“I totally respect them helping us out,” Madeline said. “It’s important that we stick together. Our place has always been big on solidarity and community building.” 

Eviction Free Summer hasn’t revealed what other landlords they might target, yet they plan to continue staging protests outside landlords’ homes and offices in coming months. “This is just the beginning of this direct action group,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “We will do anything to prevent people from losing their homes and spaces.”

Political Alerts

-
0

Thursday 4

San Francisco Mime Troupe: Oil and Water Dolores Park, 18thand Dolores, SF. www.sfmt.org. 2pm, free. This free performance by San Francisco’s beloved Mime Troupe actually incorporates two shorter plays, Crude Intentions and Deal with the Devil. Dealing with issues such as climate change, pollution, water scarcity and fossil fuel dependence, the plays involve a poisoned rainforest river, a senator mysteriously murdered in his office and, true to life, an oil refinery ablaze in the Bay Area.

 

Saturday 6

Laborfest bike tour of historic SF 518 Valencia, SF. (415) 608-9035, www.laborfest.net. noon-4pm, donation suggested. Led by local author and activist Chris Carlsson, this bike tour will delve into San Francisco’s working-class history, featuring stops at landmarks and tales of dozens of epic battles between owners and workers, culminating in the 1934 General Strike and its aftermath. Join this event for a different look at San Francisco labor history and a new perspective on San Francisco.

 

Sunday 7

Innocent! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal 518 Valencia, SF. www.laborfest.net. 2-6pm, free. You may or may not know the story behind the campaign to free America’s most famous political prisoner, former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal. But whatever your level of knowledge, here’s your chance to hear from experts including Rachel Wolkenstein, investigative attorney for Mumia; family spokesperson Bob Wells; Oakland Teachers for Mumia and ILWU organizer Jack Heyman of the San Francisco longshore union on the West Coast port shutdown organized in defense of Mumia.

Walking tour: Empires, Kings, and Labor Cable-car turnaround, Powell and Market, SF. commonwealth1234@yahoo.com, laborfest.net. 11am, free. Join this hour and fifteen minute tour of Union Square and surrounding blocks, where one can learn the history of labor struggles that unfolded in San Francisco. Tour is led by David Giesen.

 

Monday 8

Chinatown walk Portsmouth Square, Washington near Kearny, SF. www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Join SF City Guide Mae Schoening in a walk through Chinatown to learn about Chinese labor history in California, where discrimination by governments and unions, sweatshops, housing issues and other problems have shaped experiences throughout the decades. Learn how immigrant labor struggled for fair treatment while mining gold, building railroads, and working in the garment and building trades. Meet inside Portsmouth Square Park in front of Parking Garage Elevators adjacent corner of Walter P. Lum Place and Washington.

So now what?

-
0

EDITORIAL The scene at City Hall on Friday, June 28 could have been a video rewind of 2004’s Winter of Love: a surprise announcement granting same-sex marriage licenses; a breathless rush of couples to the civic altar, led by two brave, symbolic women (lesbian groundbreakers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in 2004 and anti-Prop 8 plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier in 2013), a city erupting with good will and cheer, dazed by the speed of luck and history. Earlier, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, teeth and hair and all, was making grand pronouncements, strutting about like he was mayor of the place again.

Back in 2004, the city was scarred and drained from the first great Internet bust, and still reeling from the losses of AIDS. San Francisco was a mess, but it was starting to recover. People who had been forced to move out by the city’s skyrocketing rents and evictions in the early 2000s were beginning to trickle back in, and many of those beached by the boom’s collapse were turning into the very freaks, artists, and innovators they had helped displace. When Newsom launched SF’s same-sex marriage rebellion, it was an act of great civic uplift, burnishing SF’s progressive image in the eyes of the world, while boosting the city’s self-confidence. (Not to mention its economy, which benefited greatly from the wedding explosion.)

The act also burnished Newsom’s own reputation. Previously reviled for his “Care Not Cash” policies that demonized the poor and homeless, a significant percentage of LGBTQ people among them, he was suddenly a posterboy for civil rights. Now of course, San Francisco is supposedly on the arc of an economic boom, skyrocketing evictions included, and not in the dregs of a bust. So it was with a regretful shudder that we noticed some more ominous similarities between 2004 and 2013.

A week before this year’s Pride, and right before the wave of marriage elation overtook the festivities, the city’s homeless census was released. Out of the total count of 6,436 homeless people, a figure emerged that stunned many: 29 percent of 1000 people specifically asked identified themselves as LGBTQ, and it’s assumed that the actual percentage of queer homeless people is in fact higher, due to factors like closeting and mental health. A large portion of LGBTQ homeless are youth, still drawn here by San Francisco’s promise of inclusion and shelter from abusive and rejective backgrounds.

While the city celebrates the achievement of grand ideals of equality, we are failing the very people for whom those ideals may be most valuable. Currently, Dolores Street Services, along with help from Sup. David Campos and the city’s “homeless czar” Bevan Dufty, is working towards the building of a 24-bed shelter specific aimed to service LGBTQ homeless people. But that’s just a drop in the bucket. We need much more.

Now that DOMA has been overturned and Prop. 8 kicked to the curb, there’s a lot of discussion about what the powerful, energized “gay lobby” should take on next. Righting the horrible Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act and achieving marriage equality in 37 more states are valiant, necessary goals. But turning toward the actual problems in our own backyard is another imperative.

As the Pride celebration in the Civic Center was winding down on the evening of Sunday, June 30, a group of young women emerged seemingly out of nowhere among the trash-strewn streets and beeping trucks being loaded with the party’s massive detritus. The women quietly dispersed among the leftover crowd, hauling sacks of bread on their shoulders. They made their way toward those lying on the street or huddled in doorways, distributing loaves in a matter-of-fact manner to people in need. It was a perfect reminder of the real spirit of Pride — an inclusivity that benefits all, empowered by actions on a one-to-one, human scale.

Parents, behind bars

-
3

By Ross Mirkarimi

OPINION Nearly 50 percent of the 2.7 million people incarcerated in US prisons and jails are mothers and fathers. In San Francisco, about 40 percent of the prisoners are parents. For their children, the punishment does not fit the crime.

Federal and state recidivism registers at 78 percent; locally the rate is 65 percent and dropping. If we’re serious about breaking the cycle of incarceration, we must get serious about restoring the family ties of the incarcerated.

Studies support what common sense suggests — strengthening the parent-child bond reduces recidivism. It also reduces the prospect that children of the incarcerated are more likely to violate the law. While maintaining appropriate safety and legal protocols, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department is reexamining policies that invariably damage or strain relationships between an inmate parent and child, starting with birth. In honor of Mother’s Day, on May 9, the Community Works Jail Arts Program, with our department, converted the lobby of the SF women’s jail into a temporary gallery of art created by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers.

That provided a warm environment to announce a policy first in California: The Birth Justice Project, designed to affirm the reproductive rights of all incarcerated women and provide prenatal and postpartum care during the transformative experience of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. With the stewardship of Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB/GYN from UCSF, along with the Department of Public Health, Zellerbach Foundation, and our volunteer doulas (professional birth assistants), we’re radically distancing ourselves from the barbaric attitude of 33 states that still shackle women during labor. Rather, we seek to nurture the inimitable bond between mother and child.

While most jails and prisons shun a lactation policy, we’ve unveiled our pro-lactation program. Breast pumps, refrigeration, and delivery are provided around the clock, facilitated by our jail health professionals. While the arcane national practice is to separate baby and mother after the third day of birth, we’re working to maintain the connection. If we can’t do it through diversion (alternatives to incarceration), then we’ll continue to assess our facility in allowing mother and baby to stay together. I look forward to promoting breast feeding in San Francisco’s jails.

For children of incarcerated parents, the absence of a mother is the loss of a primary caregiver. Ninety percent of incarcerated fathers in the US report that while away, their children live with the child’s mother. In contrast, only 28 percent of incarcerated mothers report that their children live with their father. Routinely, her children are cared for by a grandparent or relative — and about 11 percent are placed in foster care. Many children are bounced from caregiver to caregiver during their parent’s incarceration.

These disruptions to a child’s life negatively affect their social and mental development. Acknowledging the sense of disconnection experienced by children whose parents are incarcerated also means we must grapple with the emotional poverty that increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. In San Francisco, we’re taking steps to bridge this disconnection by reforming visitation policies to facilitating regular contact between children and incarcerated parents.

The people in our jails will eventually be released and will return to communities that historically have been underserved. We’re trying to intensify resources toward exit planning for newly incarcerated parents and guardians. Depending on individuals cases, that could include a regiment of parenting classes, substance abuse and mental health treatment, domestic violence counseling, reunification counseling for parent and child, reading and writing comprehension, high school completion, life skills such as financial literacy, and vocational training.

Many people don’t know what the Sheriff’s Department does or the difference between us and the SFPD; we’ve launched a monthly e-newsletter to keep the public informed. To sign up or contact us at: Ross.Mirkarimi@SFgov.org

Ross Mirkarimi is sheriff of San Francisco

Wedding bells and Pride protests

-
0

rebecca@sfbg.com ; steve@sfbg.com

The city of San Francisco was a complete whirlwind from June 26 to June 30. First came the historic Supreme Court ruling that ended the ban on same-sex marriage in California and struck down the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. The historic decision, handed down just before the city’s Pride festivities got underway and as a rare heat wave gripped the city, unleashed widespread celebration June 26, culminating with a rally and dance party in the streets of the Castro.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition of same-sex marriage, “is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.” According to the majority opinion, “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case, was dismissed on standing due to the fact that the State of California refused to defend it in court. That meant the previous ruling invalidating Prop 8, by Judge Vaughan Walker and upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court, was upheld.

City Hall was totally packed at 7am when the Court convened, with hordes of journalists, gay and lesbian couples, and sign-wielding activists in the crowd. Cheers erupted when the decision was announced striking down DOMA. When the Prop 8 statement came down, the room went nuts.

“It feels good to have love triumph over ignorance,” said Mayor Ed Lee, who joined Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in escorting a fragile Phyllis Lyon down the stairway. When Lyon married the late Del Martin, they became the first same-sex couple to get legally married in California in 2004.

“San Francisco is not a city of dreamers, but a city of doers,” Newsom said. “Here we don’t just tolerate diversity, we celebrate our diversity.” He thanked City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others who’d contributed to the fight to for marriage equality. “It’s people with a true commitment to equality that brought us here.”

When Herrera took the podium, he turned to Newsom, and said, “Now you can say, ‘Whether you like it or not!'” — a joking reference to Newsom’s same-sex marriage rallying cry, which some blamed for boosting the anti-same-sex marriage cause. “We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Gavin Newsom’s leadership,” Herrera continued. “I remember in 2004 when people were saying it was too fast, too soon, too much.” Herrera also pledged to continue the fight that began here in City Hall more than nine years ago: “We will not rest until we have marriage equality throughout this country.”

Later that afternoon, clergy from a variety of faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and the Church of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill for a buoyant press conference to celebrate the court’s rulings.

“For 20 years I’ve been marrying gay and lesbian couples, because in the eyes of God, that love and commitment was real, even when it wasn’t in the eyes of the state,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue. “We as religious people have to apologize to the gay community,” he added, for religious texts that gave opponents of gay marriage ammunition to advance an agenda of discrimination.

He added that the take-home message of the long fight for marriage equality is, “don’t be ‘realistic.’ Thank God the gay community vigorously fought for the right to be married — because they were not ‘realistic,’ the reality changed. Do not limit your vision to what the politicians and the media tell you is possible.”

Mitch Mayne introduced himself as “an openly gay, active Mormon,” which is significant since the Mormon Church was a major funder of Prop 8. He called it “one of the most un-Christlike things we have ever done as a religion,” but noted that the sordid affair had brought on “a mighty change in heart from inside the Mormon community, with greater tolerance than ever before,” with many Mormons going out and marching in solidary with gay and lesbian couples, he said.

Then on June 28, earlier than expected, the County Clerk started issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, plaintiffs in the case against Prop. 8, became the first of dozens of happy couples to be married at City Hall that evening, and the marriages continued in the days that followed.

And as if that weren’t enough excitement, it all happened before the weekend, when Pride festivities got underway. This year featured not only the official Pride parade and myriad performances, but also an “Alternative to Pride Parade,” signifying that a radical Pride-questioning movement has been reawakened in San Francisco.

“Have you had enough with the poor political choices of some community leaders that claim to represent you? Are you over the over-corporatizing of SF Pride? Or just tired of the same old events that don’t reflect who you are, and how you want to celebrate your queer pride?” organizers wrote in a statement announcing the event.

The parade itself, meanwhile, also featured some dissenters. The third annual Bradley Manning Support Network contingent swelled in ranks this year, due to the political maelstrom touched off when the Pride Board rescinded Manning’s appointment as Grand Marshal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network contingent attracted more than 2,000 supporters who marched to show solidarity with the openly gay whistleblower, comprising the largest non-corporate contingent in the Parade. Former military strategist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked secret government documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, donned a pink boa and rode alongside his wife, Patricia, in a pick-up truck labeled “Bradley Manning Grand Marshal.” Patricia told the Bay Guardian, “There is something about the energy and triumph of this beautiful event … Just as the gays have made a tremendous difference with marriage, we have to do the same with wars and aggression” in U.S. foreign policy.

Pride’s legal counsel, Brooke Oliver — who resigned over the Pride Board’s handling of the Manning debacle — marched along with the Bradley Manning contingent. Bevan Dufty, former SF Supervisor and now the mayor’s point person on homelessness, stepped down as a Grand Marshal, also because of the Pride Board’s actions, but didn’t march with the contingent.

Nor were the Bradley Manning supporters the only protest contingent to take part in the parade. A group seized the opportunity to make a political statement by marching with a faux Google bus, an action meant to call attention to gentrification and evictions in San Francisco. They rented a white coach and covered it with signs printed up in a similar font to Google’s corporate logo, proclaiming: “Gentrification & Eviction Technologies (GET) OUT: Integrated Displacement and Cultural Erasure.”

Some trailed the faux Google bus with an 8-foot banner depicting a blown-up version of an Ellis Act evictions map. Others donned red droplets stamped with “evicted” to signify Google map markers, while a few toted suitcases to represent tenants who’d been sent packing. However, their ranks were thin in comparison with the parade contingents surrounding them, which included crowds of workers representing eBay, DropBox, and, of course, Google — the largest corporate contingent in the parade.

“The organizers of this anti-gentrification and displacement contingent are not ‘proud’ that folks are being kicked out of this city that was once their refuge,” organizers of the faux Google bus contingent wrote in a press statement. “The 2013 SF Homeless Count and Survey shows that 29 percent of the city’s homeless population is ‘LGB and other.’ The Castro is experiencing the highest number of evictions in the city. Meanwhile, the SF Pride Parade is becoming as gentrified as SF. This group is calling on Pride to remember its roots.”

 

Hungry for reform

-
16
Hungry for reform

news@sfbg.com

Sitawa Jamaa is among the thousands of California inmates who, two years ago this summer, took part in the largest prison hunger strike in US history to protest harsh conditions and their invisibility to those outside prison walls.

Now, Jamaa and other prisoners are about to launch another hunger strike to highlight the system’s unfulfilled promises and the persistence of inhumane conditions.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) counted 6,000 prisoners throughout the state who refused food over several weeks in July 2011. During a follow-up strike that September, the number of prisoners missing meals swelled to 12,000, according to the federal receiver who was appointed by the courts to oversee reforms in the system. At least one inmate starved to death.

As one of four inmates who call themselves the Short Corridor Collective, Jamaa was a key organizer of the hunger strike. The group of inmates drafted a list of core demands calling for the strike when they weren’t met.

That was no easy task for Jamaa, who has spent most of the last 28 years alone in a windowless, 8-by-10 foot concrete cell in Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax facility not far from the Oregon border, where some 1,200 men are held in similar conditions.

Inmates held in solitary confinement (in government lingo: “Segregated Housing Units”, or “SHU” for short) aren’t supposed to communicate with each other, verbally or through the mail. But they were able to organize with the help of their lawyers, who they are allowed to communicate with, and prison reform advocates outside.

Jamaa and other inmates are planning to launch a second hunger strike on July 8. The Short Corridor Collective has drafted a list of 45 demands, reflecting concerns ranging from inadequate health care to extreme solitary confinement—conditions that prison advocates characterize as cruel and unusual punishment.

The list is an extension of the five initial demands that Pelican Bay inmates presented in 2011 before initiating a hunger strike. Most of those demands were never met, or they were met only with lip service, leading prisoners back to where they started.

 

 

CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

High on the list are concerns about conditions in the SHU, the amount of time prisoners can be made to spend in isolation, and the public’s inability to monitor the situation.

“I feel dead. It’s been 13 years since I have shaken someone’s hand and I fear I’ll forget the feel of human contact,” Pelican Bay prisoner Luis Esquivel told attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights in an interview.

Along with Jamaa and others, Esquivel is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of California that would effectively cap the time someone can spend in solitary confinement to 10 years.

“The hunger strike is an extreme act,” says Terry Kupers, a Piedmont-based psychology professor and clinical psychiatrist who has testified before the California State Assembly on long-term solitary confinement. “It’s very dangerous, and you can die. So when a group of prisoners go on hunger strike, it means they’ve exhausted all ways of expressing themselves and having their demands considered. And that’s very much the case here—some of these guys have been in SHU for 30 or 40 years.”

Kupers believes solitary confinement in California prisons violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, a view echoed by activists who’ve launched a statewide effort called the Stop the Torture Campaign.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez, an expert on torture, has called for a ban on solitary confinement where inmates are kept in isolation for 22 hours a day or more, saying the practice should only be used in very exceptional circumstances and for short time periods.

The CDCR has made some concessions and reforms since the 2011 hunger strikes, but critical issues have gone unaddressed. In Pelican Bay’s SHU, the men are now allowed beanie caps for when it gets cold. They can now have wall calendars to track time and bring a human touch to their surroundings.

Some prisoners have received exercise equipment, such as a handball or pull-up bar. Each year, they now have permission to have one photograph of themselves taken to send to family members, and prison administrators have signaled that they are looking into extending Pelican Bay’s visitation hours.

But more pressing issues have yet to be resolved, so the prisoners who drafted the 45 demands are resorting to starvation once again, despite official statements that it will do little to improve their conditions.

“Negotiation is something the department does not do,” says Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for CDCR. But the department has met periodically with a mediation team, consisting of lawyers and prison activists, who have communicated the inmates’ concerns and gone over their demands with prison authorities.

 

 

RESISTING REFORM

In 2002, the state of California was sued, and lost, in an 8th Amendment class-action lawsuit: Plata v. Davis. The federal judge overseeing the case called the medical treatment in California prisons “horrifying,” sinking “below gross negligence to outright cruelty,” ordering improved treatment and reductions in severe prison overcrowding.

A court-appointed doctor found that out of 193 deaths over the course of one year, 34 were “probably preventable,” but medical staff gave “well below even minimal standards of care.” Eleven years later, the state is still under federal receivership, until it can show that conditions have actually improved.

Court-appointed consultant Dr. Raymond Patterson wrote his 14th annual assessment report last April, blaming high suicide rates behind bars on a lack of “adequate assessment, treatment or intervention.” After it was released, he quit the post in frustration, writing: “It has become apparent that continued repetition of these recommendations would be a further waste of time and effort.”

So inmates are taking in upon themselves to accomplish what the courts and consultants have failed to do: reform conditions in the prisons.

As happened in 2011, in spite of what is planned to be a peaceful protest, prisons housing strikers will be, according to Thornton, on “modified program” (or “lockdown,” as prisoners call it). Generally, that means inmates aren’t allowed to leave their cells, even to shower.

New regulations created after the 2011 strikes call for no visits for striking prisoners, and for their canteen food to be confiscated. In addition, “inmate(s) identified as strike leaders, instrumental in organizing, planning, and perpetuating a hunger strike, shall be isolated from non-participating inmates.”

Since March of this year, the Guantanamo Bay prisoner hunger strike has made news around the world for highlighting alleged violations of international law. There, when a striker goes below 85 percent Ideal Body Weight, regulations dictate that he or she be shackled to a chair, fitted with a mask, and have tubes inserted through their nostrils into their stomachs for up to two hours at a time.

That didn’t happen in California back during the 2011 strikes, but the Division of Correctional Health Care Services devotes five pages of its policy handbook to outlining specific instructions for dealing with hunger strikers, including transfers to prison medical facilities where they could potentially be force-fed, another practice the UN regards as torture.

Prisoners and activists believe the policy was instituted as preemptive attack on the upcoming hunger strike. “We are concerned that, under the pretext of ‘welfare’ checks, prisoners are being harassed, targeted, and deprived of sleep as the date of planned hunger strikes and work stoppages approaches,” said Isaac Ontiveros of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group. “Whatever the case, new CDCR Secretary Jeffery Beard has an opportunity to avoid the strike and begin to undo the indescribable harm that the California prison system has caused.”

 

 

DANGEROUS ASSOCIATIONS

Problems associated with solitary confinement are closely connected to CDCR’s most commonly used tool for sending prisoners like Jamaa into the SHU: the controversial “gang validation” process.

Once an inmate is listed in prison records as a gang member, he or she loses multiple rights on the assumption that they’re a threat to the order of the prison. With no disciplinary write-ups since 1995, Jamaa would have been eligible for parole in 2004, except for the gang validation that led to his indefinite SHU sentence.

Getting pegged as a member of a gang can happen easily. Guards can write prisoners up for anything from the possession of artwork deemed to be gang-related, to information obtained from confidential informants whose claims prisoners often aren’t allowed to refute and whose identities remain unknown to the targeted prisoners.

Last year, in the wake of hunger strikes, CDCR announced a “complex retooling” of the gang validation practices. The so-called Step Down process, created in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, is meant to transition inmates out of gangs over the course of four years, with privileges gained over that time.

It might be the most significant of the reforms that followed the last hunger strike, but prisoners and their advocates criticize it as too lengthy of a process, subject to the arbitrary whims of the correctional officers overseeing a given prisoner. In fact, they say it may widen the definition of who counts as a gang member.

Manuel Sanchez, who is participating in the Step Down program at Corcoran State Prison, wrote in a letter that he is “seriously considering returning to SHU, where I’d be less harassed and I’d get more yard access more consistently.”

Compounding the problems in the prisons is a lack of transparency and public accountability.

“It’s like mentioning July 8 is anathema,” says San Francisco Bay View Editor Mary Ratcliff, whose African American-focused newspaper has been a CDCR censorship target.

From January to April of this year, Ratcliff said papers were being returned from Pelican Bay undelivered because they included articles about the hunger strikes, representing “material inciting participation in a mass disturbance,” and “a serious threat to the safety and security” of the prison, according to CDCR Administrator R.K. Swift.

“I think it’s remarkable that hunger strikes are considered a ‘disturbance,'” says Ratcliff. “A disturbance is supposed to mean a fight—something that threatens people. A hunger strike is a threat to no one except the people who are participating in it.”

Just as inmates can’t get news from the outside, they are also walled off from journalists who might cover them and the conditions they live in.

Since 1996, the CDCR has limited reporters to only interviewing prisoners they’ve selected. Last September, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have opened up media access to the prisons. “Giving criminals celebrity status through repeated appearances on television will glorify their crimes and hurt victims and their families,” he wrote, citing the media spectacle around Charles Manson.

But activists say the nearly $2 million Brown received from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) during his successful bid for governor in 2010 had more to do with it than infamous serial killers.

Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who authored the most recent bill, stressed that “Press access isn’t just to sell newspapers. It’s a way for the public to know that the prisons it pays for are well-run. I invite the governor to visit the SHU to see for himself why media access is so important.”

 

 

DRASTIC MEASURES

Last time around, Jamaa lost 19 pounds. Deprived of sunlight, the Oakland-born man has developed melanin and vitamin D deficiencies that have lightened his normally dark brown skin. He suffers stomach problems and swollen thyroid glands that he didn’t have before prison. Starvation is a possibly lethal proposition. “Make no mistake, none of us wants to die. But we are prepared to, if that’s what it takes to force a real reform,” he and other strike leaders wrote in a statement last December. Jamaa’s sister, Marie Levin, who has organized monthly vigils for the strikers at Oakland’s monthly First Fridays/Art Murmur event, is worried about how her brother’s body will cope this time around. “It’s something that we as family members don’t want them to have to experience again,” she notes with anxiety. Yet both the prisoners and their advocates on the outside say they can’t simply let dehumanizing conditions in California’s prison system continue indefinitely. “I think things have changed, but not substantially in terms of actual conditions,” Kupers argues. “What is changed is the CDCR had to recognize the strikers, and conceded some of the things. And subsequently, the various prisoner groups have come together and made a commitment not to have violence between groups inside the prisons. This is huge advancement.” But unless all 45 demands are met, they say the strike will commence July 8. For now, Jamaa and others are readying their bodies for hunger, for a cause they believe goes far beyond prison walls. “Know this,” he wrote from SHU, words that needed to be smuggled out through unconventional means to get around an official wall of silence. “I am a … Prisoner of War, and I serve the interest of all people.”

Diversity in motion

-
37
Diversity in motion

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Last weekend, World Arts West’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival closed out four almost completely sold-out weekends of performances. It is tempting to take this 35-year-old celebration for granted. Yet despite universal accolades, excellent audiences, a steadily improving roster of artists, an increase in live music, and ever-better production values, EDF still does not receive the support it deserves.

Consider this: according to its own numbers, EDF’s budget this year was two-thirds of what it was five years ago. Foundation and corporate support is down, between 30 and 50 percent. This time around, even Grants for the Arts — a stalwart champion of the festival since the beginning — had to cut its contribution by close to 20 percent.

Add to these challenges the fact that in 2011, due to the complications of the Doyle Drive construction, EDF lost its home at the Palace of Fine Arts. The much smaller Lam Research Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts cannot make up the lost ticket sales.

Of course, in these mean and lean times, all the arts suffer. But other institutions of similar size, track record, and scope have endowments that help tie them over. Not EDF. It’s paycheck to paycheck. One reason for EDF’s survival, however, is that the biggest supporters of the arts have always been the artists themselves. Most of this year’s 500 dancers and musicians performed for free. (Their companies get a small stipend.)

So perhaps it’s appropriate to give a small bouquet to these eminent artists who may have come from places most of us will never visit — 19 countries on five continents — but are bringing to both fellow dancers and audiences their perspectives on what dance can tell us about being human.

While the Palace’s loss deprived EDF of its preferred stage, spreading the dance to different venues was a successful experiment. On June 7, a free, mid-day gala opening rocked the rotunda at San Francisco City Hall; the following day, Charya Burt’s reimagining of sculptor Auguste Rodin’s 1906 encounter with classical Cambodian dance brought East and West together at the Legion of Honor Museum’s jewel box theater. Later in the festival, one could walk across the lawn at Yerba Buena Gardens, where Patrick Makuakane was teaching light-hearted contemporary hula — and then, at YBCA, watch Halau o Keikiali’i present dignified re-interpretations of sacred Hawaiian rituals, offering an inkling of the complexities of culturally-specific dance.

EDF presents cultural traditions that range from high classicism (Chinese Performing Arts of America) to folkloric community celebrations (Lowiczanie Polish Folk Ensemble). But the fest also embraces change within continuity. It gives newcomers a chance, and welcomes re-interpretations of the past.

Nine of this year’s 33 participants made their EDF debuts. Among them were Colectivo Anqari, which charmed with an urban reinterpretation of popular dance from the Andes in which the men both danced and played the pan pipes. The women’s contribution almost looked like an afterthought. Ceremonially stepping dancers, drummers, and a flute player from Ensohza Minyoushu performed Sansador from Northern Japan, its high degree of formality leavened by a leaping masked “spirit.” Antoine Hunter’s short Risk showed a fascinating mix of jazz and sign language by this deaf dancer. High fives, however, must go to the two dozen youngsters of Mona Khan Company Emerging Performers. Their rousing, Bollywood-inspired Jalsa showed them to be disciplined, tough, and exuberant.

A relatively recent phenomenon is dancers and companies who rethink their heritage and reframe it into the kind of individual expression that Western art encourages. Charya Burt is one of them. Another is La Tania Baile Flamenco, whose Tierra translated the quintessential male farruca into a women’s dance. The trio became a striking expression of female power — rigorous and utterly convincing. Solo artist Oreet incorporated modern and ballet vocabulary into her spunky belly dancing, making it a decidedly contemporary expression of womanhood.

I do find it problematic, however, that dance from Mexico — there are over two dozen folklórico groups in the Bay Area — inevitably is represented by suites that are happy, fast, and loud. Surely there are more varied ways to showcase that culture’s rich variety of traditions.

The Palace of Fine Arts is scheduled to re-open in 2015. The people at World Arts West would like the complex to become a center for art and culture from around the globe. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Live to tell

-
1
Live to tell

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The most popular feel-good documentary last year was Searching for Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul’s film about the somewhat mysterious Rodriguez — a talented singer-songwriter who recorded two major-label albums in the early 1970s, attracted no notice whatsoever, then disappeared from any public view. Unbeknownst to him (or to his bank account, since the royalties seem to have vanished more completely than he did), the records were a big hit in South Africa, where fans eventually tracked him down and informed him that he was, well, a star. So, decades after falling into obscurity, he was playing before large audiences he’d never known he had, and (via the film) getting new ones.

Sugar Man made you wonder how many other such stories might be waiting to be excavated. We’ve probably all seen or heard acts that deserved some commercial success, but never got close to it. More than ever, the musical mainstream seems more about marketing a package than promoting genuine, idiosyncratic talent. And examples of the latter slip through the cracks all the time, hopefully getting re-discovered later — for instance Nick Drake, sainted godhead of sensitive singer-songwriters, was barely a blip on the public-awareness horizon during his life. It was only after he’d died that the cult, and record sales, began to swell.

A Band Called Death is a similar story of recognition delayed so long that the principal vindicated character was no longer alive to enjoy it. Sons of a Detroit Baptist minister, David, Dannis, and Bobby Hackney were enamored with rock music from the time the family sat down to watch the Beatles play The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. By 1971 they were calling themselves Rock Fire Funk Express — but exposure to live hard-rock acts like the Who and Alice Cooper convinced them to ditch the funk part completely. Their father’s tragic death (he was killed by a drunk driver while taking an injured coworker to the hospital) hit all of them hard, but especially guitarist David, who had a spiritual awakening of sorts and insisted their band be named after what he now considered “the ultimate trip:” Death.

It seemed a career-killing moniker if ever there was one. (Though by 1983 Orlando’s death metal pioneers would have no trouble using the same name.) Nor did the trio’s loud, fast, heavy sound — their rehearsals drove the neighbors nuts — make sense for an African American outfit in a city where Motown ruled. Though their parents had always encouraged them, nearly everyone else took a “Why are you playing that white boy music?” stance. Nonetheless, they found a supporter at local studio-music publisher Groovesville Records, recorded some tracks, and shopped them around to every imaginable label here and abroad. After innumerable rejections, they seemingly hit the jackpot with Columbia Records prez Clive Davis, who was eager to sign them … if they’d just change that name. As the band’s “visionary,” however, David Hackney was unwilling to budge on his total “concept.” The offer was withdrawn.

Defeated and exasperated, the brothers accepted a relative’s invite to stay with him in Burlington, Vt., and wound up relocating there — but when they put up Death posters around town, the unamused local cops assumed this was some sort of gang-activity threat. That was the last straw; Dave reluctantly agreed on a name change, to the 4th Movement. In that form they played some gigs and recorded a couple albums — but their new, more overtly spiritual emphasis didn’t play well with rock audiences who really didn’t want to flick their Bics to lyrics about Jesus Christ.

A man with a plan — but no backup plan — Dave eventually slunk back to Detroit, and was dismayed when his brothers moved on musically, experiencing some success with a reggae band called Lambsbread. Death wasn’t just forgotten; it had never really been noticed. Its only material issue was a self-distributed 1974 single of “Politicians in My Eyes” b/w “Keep on Knockin'” that had scored just token local radio play. But three decades later some of its 500 pressings started surfacing on underground DJ’s turntables, rare-record collectors’ wish lists, and on eBay (at $800 a pop). What could be a more fascinating enigma and find than an unknown African American group making music that was precociously protopunk (with some psych influences) well before even the Ramones’ first album in ’76?

Eventually the surviving members saw their ancient masters released at last, and toured clubs as a reformed Death with Lambsbread’s guitarist taking cancer-felled Dave’s place. It was all made sweeter by the fact that three of Bobby’s sons now had their own band, named Rough Francis after their late uncle’s last recording pseudonym.

A bit overlong, the documentary nonetheless ingratiates with its surprising wealth of home-movie footage, commentary from the very genial Hackney clan, and testimony from latter-day fans like Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, Kid Rock, and Questlove.

 

A BAND CALLED DEATH opens Fri/5 at the Roxie Theater.

On the Cheap

-
0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 3

“Fuck the Fourth Sale” AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St, Oakl; www.akpress.org. 4-8pm, free. Need a little inspiration to face tomorrow’s flag-waving masses? The publisher of anarchist and radical books opens up its warehouse for it annual summer sale: 25 percent off everything, plus a sale table of tomes going for $1-5.

“Salsa in the Square” Union Square between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.ybgf.org. 2-4pm, free. Cuban-born, Bay Area-based Fito Reinoso brings the party to Union Square in conjunction with the Yerba Buena Gardens festival and Union Square Live.

THURSDAY 4

Fourth of July at the Berkeley Marina 201 University, Berk; www.anotherbullwinkelshow.com. Noon-10pm, free. Doesn’t get more American than pony rides for kids, but Berkeley throws down the gauntlet with even more fun stuff: performances by the Blue Yonders, the John Brothers Piano Company, juggling and magic acts, and more, plus arts and crafts, dragon boats, and (obviously) fireworks.

Fourth of July at Pier 39 SF; www.pier39.com. Noon, free. If you dare to surf the crowds of tourists, turn up early in the day for kid rockers WJM (noon-2pm) and 1980s cover band Tainted Love (4-7pm). The reason for the season starts booming in the sky around 9:30pm, so get yourself situated at your favorite viewing spot and pray to the weather gods that fog doesn’t hide the whole show.

FRIDAY 5

“Oakland Art Murmur First Friday Gallery Walk” Various venues, Oakl; www.oaklandartmurmur.org. 6-9pm, free. Galleries and mixed-use art spaces in Oakland’s downtown, uptown, and Jack London Square areas open for evening hours; visit the event website for a map of venues.

SATURDAY 6

“Beast Crawl” Various uptown venues, Oakl; beastcrawl.weebly.com. 5-9pm, free. This second annual literary festival boasts the participation of over 140 writers at 26 venues (bars, galleries, cafés, etc.) Plan your crawl (and don’t miss any must-see readings) by picking up a map on “leg one” of the event (5-6pm).

SUNDAY 7

Poetry Unbound Art House Gallery and Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 472-3170. 5pm (sign-up; reading begins at 5:15pm), $5-10 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds). Wordsmiths John Curl, Clara Hsu, and Eanlai Cronin read, followed by a brief open mic.

TUESDAY 9

“Carol Tarlen Tribute” City Lights Books, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. Laborfest 2013 hosts this celebration of the release of Every Day Is an Act of Resistance: Selected Poems by Carol Tarlen, with Aggie Falk, Jack Hirschman, David Joseph, and others reading work by the late activist, a longtime North Beach resident.

Nina Schuyler Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The NorCal author reads from her latest, The Translator, about a woman who forgets her native language after a head injury and can understand only Japanese.

Get trashed

-
3
Get trashed

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC During high school one day in a sleepy Marin County enclave, Tina “Boom Boom” Lucchesi went to a local record shop where Erik Meade of Jackson Saints and the Pukes worked, and he put on a Redd Kross album. “Total obsession,” Lucchesi says now, a few decades later, from her punky, vintage-filled Peewee’s Playhouse home in Oakland. “He was playing the Teen Babes from Monsanto record, and I was like, I’m going to buy that — and I did.”

This week, Lucchesi’s early 1990s-born wild surf-punk group the Trashwomen will play alongside Redd Kross for the first time ever, during the two-day slackfest Burger Boogaloo (Sat/6-Sun/7, noon-9pm, $25/day. Mosswood Park, 3612 Webster, Oakl., www.burgerboogaloo.com). The Boogaloo, a yearly collaboration between Orange County, Calif. label and shop Burger Records, and East Bay promoters Total Trash Booking, is known for bringing an eclectic, sometimes manic mix of surf, punk, garage, doo-wop, and retro rock’n’roll acts commonly associated with both organizers.

This year, for the first time, it’s all outdoors, and the headliners are impressive: Redd Kross, Jonathan Richman, the Zeroes, the Oblivions, Fuzz, the Trashwomen. The rest of the lineup is too, including Audacity, Mean Jeans, Shannon and the Clams, Mikal Cronin, Guantanamo Baywatch, and more.

The Trashwomen immediately stuck out in the stellar lineup, mostly because the other groups are all active bands. The Trashwomen haven’t played together in four years (during a brief reunion for Budget Rock in ’08), and before that, they’d been broken up since ’97. So why now?

For Total Trash’s Marc Ribak, the choice was obvious. “In the Total Trash babe bible, Trashwomen rank number one!”

But for said babes, it was all about Redd Kross. “Redd Kross is playing! We’re all big fans, so we were like,’we’ve got to do it!'” says drummer Lucchesi, sitting on a teal patterned couch in her home next to bassist Danielle “Lead Pedal” Pimm, and guitarist Elka “Kitten Kaboodle” Zolot.

Though they also mention getting stoked to see Mexican punk legends the Zeros, and Portland, Ore. sloppy surf-rock group Guantanamo Baywatch.

“We’ve gotten a lot of offers, but we all have busy lives. There was a time when we were doing it but then you know, it kind of fizzled out,” she adds. “In the early ’90s, when the garage thing was so great in San Francisco, we played with the Mummies, the Phantom Surfers, Supercharger, we all played together. And then it just kind of died out, and we did get sick of it, and each other. But it’s fun, I like getting together and playing with these guys once in awhile.”

While their initial run ended in ’97, the group left a lasting impression on future generations of San Francisco garage groups, particularly girl groups, which has surprised Zolot. “I have my Instagram, and a lot of young bands that are still in high school [post on there] like ‘oh I look up to you,’ ‘you inspire me to write music and be a girl on guitar,’ and I’m like, how did you even hear about us? It’s cool, but sometimes it shocks me that young people know who we are.”

It’s a combination of sound, style, and era that carries on the Trashwomen torch. Likely the Internet accessibility of music had a hand in it too. The music itself, on albums like debut ’93 record Spend the Night with the Trashwomen (Estrus), is a raucous jumble of raunchy original garage anthems (“Cum on Baby,” “I’m Trash”), syrupy rock’n’roll numbers (“Daddy Love”), and surf-punk covers of rare ’60s gems like the Fender Four’s “Mar Guya” and Starfire’s “Space Needle.”

The aesthetic was based in high camp and cheap glamour — also seen on the cover of Spend the Night with the Trashwomen, the trio lounging in bed together, dolled up and looking tough in leopard print bras, red lace crop tops, and black babydoll dresses.

“It came from a lot of pin-up stuff and ’60s go-go girls. We wanted to have a weird persona, I think, like Russ Meyer bad girls,” Lucchesi says.

The group was known to play live in matching outfits, often trashy lingerie. “I don’t know if you’ll see us wearing lingerie on stage again though,” Zolot says.

Though Lucchesi and Pimm do mysteriously mention possible planned outfits for Burger Boogaloo, noting that they’re working on a little something.

“There may be just a little flair,” Pimm says with a laugh.

“No bikinis though!” Zolot again reminds everyone.

The three have an easy rapport, which Pimm says took only about 22 years to master. Each time they get back together in Lucchesi’s garage, it’s like starting over fresh, but the songs eventually come rumbling back to them, she says. They’ve been practicing for about two months this time around, going back through the classic tracks, with no intention of writing new ones. “I get disappointed when I see an older band and they don’t play much of their stuff that we all grow up with,” Zolot says. Everyone nods in agreement.

The group originally came together fresh out of high school. Lucchesi and Pimm had gone to school together in Corte Madera and both moved to San Francisco at age 18, where they met Elka. She’d grown up in Los Angeles, and moved to SF, forming the psychobilly group Eightball Scratch.

The Trashwomen were supposed to be a one-off Trashmen cover band for a New Year’s party at a long-gone venue called the Chameleon, kicking off 1992 in surf garage style. The idea was masterminded by Mike Lucas from the Phantom Surfers, then a popular local surf band.

For NYE, they learned a handful of Trashmen songs, got drunk, and played the set twice.

“After that, people kept calling, so we realized, we better write a bunch of songs,” Zolot says.

Since she’d been in Eightball Scratch, she’d already been playing punk and rockabilly guitar parts, so she continued to do so in the Trashwomen, adding even more surfy reverb.

She’s been playing music since before she can remember, and as a teenager was influenced by the Go-Go’s. “I’d listen to the Go-Go’s and pretend I was on stage.”

“I think every girl did that when that album came out,” says Lucchesi, who since the Trashwomen has gone on to front a dozen bands, including the Bobbyteens. “The Ramones definitely got me more into guitar. Every day after work I would just come home and play to the tape.”

Their personal influences all seem to overlap with those creepy-sexy goth punks, the Cramps. “All the great punk stuff, and new wave, all that stuff was happening. We were lucky we got to see it,” Lucchesi says. Putting on a mock cranky-old-lady accent she adds, “Kids today, they don’t kno-ow.”

In the early days of the Trashwomen, the threesome often played the Chameleon (in the space formerly known as Chatterbox and which is now Amnesia), and also the Purple Onion, frequently popping up at lesbian nights at clubs, warehouse parties, or underground house shows. They once wore bras scrawled with the word “Feminist” to the Faster Pussycat lesbian night at FireHouse 7 in Oakland. Often, fights would break out at their shows at the Purple Onion, just the high drama of the scene.

They also once played Bimbo’s, opening up for Nina Hagen, and they flew to New York to play CBGBs, which was monumental for all three. The day after the show, they went to Coney Island, ate hot dogs, and rode the Cyclone — on which Zolot severely injured her back; she has yet to go on a rollercoaster since. They were also heckled along the boardwalk, Pimm says. “Some of the girls at Coney Island, they were like, ‘excuse me, B-52s!'”

The band also toured Europe and Japan briefly, playing alongside its Japanese equivalent, the 5.6.7.8’s.

“The Germany shows were weird,” Pimm says. “We played somewhere in East Berlin, and all these metalheads walked in and we were like, ‘this is our audience? They’re going to hate us!’ The crowd ended up not letting the Trashwomen leave the stage, standing up front with folded arms, begging them to play more.

From all the stories, it seems like an aggressive, wildly exciting time for the band, but it’s easy to see why it eventually fizzled. Lucchesi has gone on to form acts like the aforementioned Bobbyteens, and is also currently in two-person garage-punk band Cyclops with her boyfriend Jonny Cat, and Midnite Snaxxx, with former Bay Guardian staffer Dulcinea Gonzalez. She also runs Down at Lulu’s a little vintage shop and hair salon in Oakland she opened seven years back with Seth Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx, and now runs solo.

Pimm too opened a salon, Marquee, last year in Oakland, near 1-2-3-4 Go! Records.

Zolot works in catering at wineries in the Napa area, dressing like a pin-up girl and shucking oysters with a mobile oyster bar, and also does photography. She’s not currently in another band, but says she has some secret music projects in the works.

“We didn’t even know that!” Lucchesi says when Zolot reveals this.

“It’s not the same style as people would expect, so I don’t talk about it much,” Zolot says.

“I want to know — is it hip-hop?” Lucchesi jokes.

“No! That’s for Tasha, she’s got that covered,” Zolot says, speaking of her daughter, Natassia Zolot, a.k.a rapper Kreayshawn. (Kreay can be heard at age five screaming the lead on the Trashwomen single “Boys Are Toys.”)

“That’s for the younger generation,” Pimm says.

Stage Listings

-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Chance: A Musical Play About Love, Risk, and Getting it Right Alcove Theater, 415 Mason, Fifth Flr, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $40-60. Previews Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm. Opens Sun/7, 5pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); Sun, 5pm. Through July 28. New Musical Theater of San Francisco presents Richard Isen’s world premiere work inspired by the writings of Oscar Wilde.

Oil and Water This week: Dolores Park, 18th St and Dolores, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Thu/4, 2pm. Also Peacock Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Sat/6, 2pm. Also Washington Square Park, Columbus at Union, SF; www.sfmt.org. Free. Sun/7, 2pm. Also Mitchell Park, South Field, 600 E. Meadow, Palo Alto; www.sfmt.org. Tue/9, 7pm. Free. At various NorCal venues through Sept. 2. The San Francisco Mime Troupe presents its 54th annual summer season; this year’s performance is comprised of two one-act musicals about corporations and the environment: Crude Intentions and Deal With the Devil.

ONGOING

Abigail’s Party San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Wed/3-Thu/4, 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 3pm). Although it’s tempting to compare Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party to Edward Albee’s rancorous Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Abigail‘s escalating nastiness skews emphatically British, giving it as much in common with televised exports such as Fawlty Towers and the Ricky Gervais version of The Office. As with these, the humor in Abigail’s Party is of the bleakest and cruelest kind, and there are moments when the five Americans onstage don’t quite convey the wit that lurks beneath the ire, but when they do the results are hysterical and uncomfortable in equal measure. Though the party we witness is not Abigail’s (she’s having a teenage house party next door, the music of which keeps throbbing through the walls of Bill English’s attractively-appointed set) the adults-only cocktail party is just as awkward as any high school mixer. Hosted by the fiercely self-absorbed Beverly (Susi Damilano) and her obnoxiously classist husband Laurence (Remi Sandri), the guest list includes the mousy Angela (Allison Jean White), her monosyllabic husband Tony (Patrick Kelley Jones), and Abigail’s ill-at-ease mum, Susan (Julia Brothers), who’s agreed to keep out of the house during her daughter’s wild soiree. The acting — as well as Brendan Aanes’ sound design, Jacqueline Scott’s props, and Tatjana Genser’s costuming — is pitch perfect, but unless you haven’t already been to enough bad parties, you might find it difficult to sit through this one. If you do, don’t be surprised if you find yourself secretly envying Laurence by the end of the play — at least he finds a way out. (Gluckstern)

Betrayal Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, Sixth Flr, SF; www.offbroadwaywest.org. $40. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through July 20. Off Broadway West Theatre Company performs Harold Pinter’s out-of-sequence drama about an unfaithful married couple.

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Aug 25. Solo performer Don Reed returns with a prequel to his autobiographical coming-of-age hits, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel.

Dark Play, or Stories for Boys Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.theexit.org. $5-20. Fri-Sat, 9pm. Through July 13. Do It Live! Productions offers a steadily engrossing production of this slippery play from Chicago playwright Carlos Murillo, wherein a less-then-trusty teenage narrator, Nick (a clever, tightly wound, darkly charming Will Hand), addicted to “making shit up,” recounts his fateful internet-baiting of a fellow teen upon whom he had become fixated. As the unwitting object of Nick’s desire, sweet guy Adam (Adam Magil) gets pulled into an online love affair with Rachel (Amy Nowak), his first love, and — as fate and Nick would have it — Nick’s sister. But Rachel exists only online. And her equally fantastical evil stepdad (Nathan Tucker) soon intercedes, throwing Nick and Adam closer together. All of this disembodied desire floating around the ether leads to a physical climax even Freud might find a bit much, but the way there proves increasingly tense and interesting — if also a little frustrating itself at times in some strained plot points and, especially, its overwrought psychopathologizing of homoerotic desire. (Erik LaDue’s awkward set design also takes a little getting over.) But despite various flaws, the story intrigues, thanks to the solid performances from director Logan Ellis’s sure cast. Tucker and Kelly Rauch are dependable throughout in a varied range of sharp and often hilarious supporting roles. Nowak’s take on the vital (albeit imaginary) teen heroine is refreshingly straightforward. And Hand, while slightly slower to catch fire, ends up a persuasively complex figure at the center of it all. (Avila)

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

God of Carnage Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.com. $26-38. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 7. Shelton Theater peforms Yasmina Reza’s award-winning play about class and parenting.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast.

In A Daughter’s Eyes Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $15. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 14. Brava! For Women in the Arts and Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience presents the West Coast premiere of A. Zell Williams’ tale of two women: the daughter of a man on death row, and the daughter of the man he’s been convicted of killing.

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. Update: new episodes began May 15. (Avila)

So You Can Hear Me Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through July 20. A 23-year-old with no experience, just high spirits and big ideals, gets a job in the South Bronx teaching special ed classes and quickly finds herself in over her head. Safiya Martinez, herself a bright young woman from the projects, delivers this inspired accounting of her time not long ago in perhaps the most neglected sector of the public school system — a 60-minute solo play that makes up for its relatively slim plot with a set of deft, powerful, lovingly crafted characterizations. These complex portraits, alternately hysterical and startling, offer their own moving ruminations on a violent but also vibrant stratum of American society, deeply fractured by pervasive poverty and injustice and yet full of restive young personalities too easily dismissed, ignored, or crudely caricatured elsewhere. An effervescent, big-hearted, and very talented performer, Martinez’s own bounding personality and contagious passion for her former students (as complicated as that relationship was), makes this deeply felt tribute all the more memorable. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through August 24. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through July 27. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

Dear Elizabeth Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $24-77. Wed/3 and Sun/7, 2 and 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 2pm). Berkeley Rep performs Sarah Ruhl’s play written in the form of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

George Gershwin Alone Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Wed/3 and Sun/7, 2 and 7pm; Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm (also Sat/6, 2pm). Hershey Felder stars in his celebration of the music and life of composer George Gershwin.

Sea of Reeds Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Previews Wed/3-Thu/4, 8pm. Opens Fri/5, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Aug 18. Josh Kornbluth’s brand new comedy — it involves atheism, oboes, and the Book of Exodus — opens at Shotgun Players “before it goes on Torah.”

Superior Donuts Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-30. Wed/3 and Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Thu/4); Sun, 2pm. Through July 14. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Tracy Letts’ comedy about the redemptive power of friendship.

This Is How It Goes Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Extended through July 28. An awkward love triangle between former high school classmates gets the caustic Neil LaBute treatment in Aurora Theatre Company’s production of This is How it Goes. Not content to merely skewer the familiar battles between the sexes, LaBute further prods his captive audience with the big stick of race relations, and the often unacknowledged prejudices that lurk in the hearts of men. And women. There are no innocents in this play, though each character certainly has moments where they play upon audience sympathies, only to betray them a few inflammatory lines later. As the marriage between the successful yet self-conscious African American alpha male Cody (Aldo Billingslea) and his neurotically placating Caucasian wife Belinda (Carrie Paff) erodes, the mostly affable (and former fat kid) “Man” (Gabriel Marin) insinuates himself in the middle of their troubled relationship, obviously still carrying the torch for Belinda he did 15 years ago — as well as the same wary animosity an unpopular kid carries for the star of the track team, in this case, Cody. All three actors do a very good job of shape-shifting between their middle-class Jekyll and Hyde selves, assisted in part by Marin’s amiable asides, which don’t so much lull the audience as tease them with the idea that things are about to get better, when they can only get worse. (Gluckstern)

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. July 13, 21, and 27, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/8, 8pm. $7-20. With Eve Meyer, Johan Miranda, Kate Willett, Sammy Obeid, and Lisa Geduldig.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Performance Making Showcase” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Sat/6, 7:30pm. Free. Work created by participants in the University of Chichester (UK)’s Performance Making Institute.

“Queer Rebels of the Harlem Renaissance” Performances: African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.queerrebels.com. Fri/5-Sat/6, 8pm. $15-20. Films: New Parkway, 474 24th St, Oakl; www.queerrebels.com. Sun/7, noon. $7-10. The National Queer Arts Festival presents this showcase of queer black performers, plus films by and about the same.

“Randy Roberts: Live!” Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. July 9, 16, and 23, 9pm. $30. The famed female impersonator takes on Cher, Better Midler, and other stars.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Accordion Daze,” Sat, noon-3. *

 

Psychic Dream Astrology: July 3-9, 2013

-
0

July 3-9, 2013

Be patient with miscommunications and crossed wires ’cause Mercury is retrograde till the 20th, y’all.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

You need to change, Aries. Don’t change because there’s anything wrong with you — you’re perfect! Change because you want to, because it’s time that you let go of some old, outworn ways of being. You are on the verge of something greater than you are able to understand right now. Be a part of it.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Kindness will best pave roads in all directions before you, Taurus. No matter how nervous or upset you get, this is not the time to lash out at folks. Be tolerant and generous with yourself and others this week. If you assume the worst you’re investing your precious energy in unwanted negative outcomes.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Patience and perseverance alone will guide you through the anxieties that this Mercury retrograde may bring. Things are not as they appear, Twin Star, so making plans based on what you see or assuming you understand what you’re being shown is not well starred. Stay centered and simplify your life this week.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Life is like ice cream; no matter how delicious it is, eating it too quickly or enjoying too much of it will make you sick. Jupiter just entered your sign and that means you are capable of great growth and expansion. If you try to do too much you’ll end up messing things up, though, Moonchild.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

You don’t need to know what’s coming, or to even understand everything that is at hand, but you do need to cope to the best of your ability. This week you are not meant to be perfect, Leo, only to try and embody all the strength and candor your sign is known for. Don’t rush the unknowable.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Making peace with crappy things is not meant to depress you. It is meant to liberate you from the belief that there is “good” or “bad” experience; there’s not. It’s all just experience, if you allow it. Don’t get so fixated on your narratives that you make this story worse than it needs to be. Be interested in how your life is developing.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Trust your instincts, Libra. This is an important time to be self–reliant because you need to assert yourself dramatically forward, and if you cant trust yourself, who can you trust? Keep your feet on the ground and your head screwed on tight as you challenge yourself beyond your comfort zone.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

You simply don’t have enough knowledge to make an informed decision, Scorpio. No matter how impatient you’re feeling you should strive to have more data to work with before you make a call. Whether that requires introspection, research, or dialogue, you should never take shortcuts in a Mercury Retrograde week.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Did you know that it was a Sagittarius that invented the fine art of putting ones’ foot in ones’ own mouth? Its true. It’s also true that you need to avoid perfecting that craft this week, no matter how motivated you feel, or how passionately you believe that you’re right. Don’t push others; let them come when they’re ready.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

In order to win the game you have to be prepared to play, Cappy. There’s no possibility to succeed in your relationships if you don’t put yourself out there and take risks. If you never let people in, you’ll never know what could’ve been. This week is all about being present and willing, in spite of your fears.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

No matter how much drama is around you, this is the time to stay true to yourself. It’s also time to be willing to change. The key is to transform in ways that feel creative and lead you to somewhere better instead of just running away from pain. Don’t escape hardship; carve a new path, Aquarius.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

There’s no need to make any sweeping judgments this week, Pisces. You are being shown different sides of people than you’ve seen before, but that doesn’t mean that what you knew yesterday is no longer true. Integrate all you are being shown and revise your opinions as needed.

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.

Rep Clock

-
0

Schedules are for Wed/2-Tue/9 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-10. Directing Dissent (Hamacher, 2013), Sat, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-13. •Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), Wed, 2:15, 7, and Rocky (Avildsen, 1976), Wed, 4:35, 9:25. •Josie and the Pussycats (Elfont and Kaplan, 2001), Fri, 7:30; Velvet Goldmine (Haynes, 1998), Fri, 9:30; Wild in the Streets (Shear, 1968), Fri, 11:59. “Scary Cow Independent Film Festival,” Sat, 3. This event, $10-25; visit www.scarycow.com for more details. “50th Anniversary Restoration:” Cleopatra (Mankiewicz, 1963), Sun, 2, 7.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.75-$10.25. Fill the Void (Burshtein, 2012), call for dates and times. Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012), call for dates and times. Rebels With a Cause (Kelly, 2012), call for dates and times. 20 Feet From Stardom (Neville, 2013), call for dates and times. Augustine (Winocour, 2012), July 5-11, call for times.

CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $10. “Midnight Movies:” Mr. Hush (Madison, 2011), Fri, midnight. Hosted by Miss Misery.

“FILM NIGHT IN THE PARK” This week: Creek Park, 400 Sir Francis Drake, San Anselmo; www.filmnight.org. Free (donations appreciated). Super 8 (Abrams, 2011), Fri, 8; Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983), Sat, 8.

NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. Free. “First Friday Shorts,” featuring short films made by local youth, Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “A Call to Action: The Films of Raoul Walsh:” Sailor’s Luck (1933), Fri, 7; Me and My Gal (1932), Fri, 8:40. “A Theater Near You:” Port of Shadows (Carné, 1938), Sat, 6:30; Kuroneko (Shindo, 1968), Sat, 8:30. “Castles in the Sky: Masterful Anime from Studio Ghibli:” Pom Poko (Takahata, 1994), Sun, 4:30.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. Hey Bartender! (Tirola, 2013), Wed-Thu, 7, 9:15. Ain’t In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (Hatley, 2013), Wed, 7:15, 9:15. A Band Called Death (Covino and Howlett, 2013), July 5-11, 7, 9. Maniac (Khalfoun, 2012), July 5-11, 7:15, 9:15.

VICTORIA 2961 16th St, SF; teatrofrida.eventbrite.com/#. $12-35. “Fiestas Fridas:” •Frida: Naturaleza Viva (1984), and The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo as told to David and Karen Crommie (1966), Sat, 5. Followed by “Somos Frida,” a performance showcase. *

 

Our Weekly Picks

-
0

WEDNESDAY 3

PANTyRAiD

Seven years after meeting in Costa Rica, Martin Folb and Josh Mayer are still doing their thing as seductive bass collaboration PANTyRAiD, even while each has achieved solo success as the Glitch Mob’s Ooah and MartyParty respectively. New album PillowTalk has the right touch of move and groove while keeping an arm’s length from booming, bro-centric dubstep or ear-shattering electro. PANTyRAids like to jump from genre to genre, dropping some trap here and some glitch there, keeping listeners on their toes. Standout track “Just For You” showcases the duo’s slick handling of hip-hop drums, brooding basslines, and melodic synths. Call it mood music for the bass-minded. (Kevin Lee)

10pm, $20-25

1015 Folsom

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

Fruition

Upright bass, acoustic guitars, and mandolin (quickly strummed and finger-picked) fill out Fruition’s sound, but don’t clutter its performance. And this show will feature Bridget Law of Elephant Revival, an addition that only upgrades the night. Bluegrass itself requires a lot of emotion and passion to sound right, but Fruition harbors a certain old-back-road, last drop of sunlight through the trees kind of passion. “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery,” sings the group in gorgeous country harmonies, in its cover of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” (Hillary Smith)

7pm, free

Brick and Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 371-1631

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

THURSDAY 4

Oil and Water

It just wouldn’t be summer in the Bay Area without the San Francisco Mime Troupe — so thank goodness the veteran company was able to raise enough funds (in part through crowdsourcing, a testament to its loyal supporters) for its 54th season. Though the 2013 musical will still be performed mostly for free, and comes complete with a political theme (corporations vs. environmental activists), the format is different this year. The show is broken into two musical one-acts: Crude Intentions and Deal With the Devil, both written by Pat Moran And Adolfo Mejia. Per tradition, the show opens July 4 in Dolores Park before spreading its jolly satire ’round NorCal parks through Labor Day; check website for additional shows this week in Golden Gate Park and beyond. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sept. 2

Thu/4, 2pm, free

Dolores Park

18th St. and Dolores, SF

www.sfmt.org

 

Giraffage

San Francisco-based futuristic dream R&B producer Charlie Yin has made some big leaps in 2013, with a performance at SXSW along with upcoming gigs at Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle festival and SF’s Treasure Island Music Festival. His new album Needs on Los Angeles label Alpha Pup Records is a thesis in music manipulation, a comprehensive counterargument to straightforward 4/4. Vocal samples are up-shifted in tempo to lend a playful mood. Tracks are sometimes dipped in sonic mud halfway through, decelerating to a crawl before jumping back to normal time. But Needs never feels jerky, which owes to Yin’s tight transitions and harmonious melodies throughout. The sensual, infectious, shifty third track “Money” sounds like it will be played in lounges in 2050. (Lee)

With Mister Lies, Bobby Browser

9:30pm, $13–$15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

FRIDAY 5

“Fiestas Fridas”

There’s a reason this three-day event is subtitled “celebrating the 103rd and 106th birthday of Frida Kahlo:” the iconic Mexican painter was actually born in 1907, but she liked to say she was born in 1910 — the year the Mexican revolution began. The fest kicks off with a gala dinner featuring Kahlo’s own recipes (cooked by Puerto Alegre, Gracias Madre, Mijita, and other restaurants), with proceeds going to Cine + Mas; Saturday brings film screenings and Kahlo-inspired performances. The fest wraps up Sunday with an afternoon and evening of live art, dance, DJs, and more family-friendly fun, like a costume contest with a variety of categories: Best Frida and Diego, Best “Little Frida,” and Best “FriDRAG.” (Eddy)

Opening dinner tonight, 6-11pm, $50

Mission Cultural Center

2868 Mission, SF

Film screening and performance, Sat/6, 5-11pm, $35

Victoria Theater

2961 16th St, SF

Community event, Sun/7, 2-9pm, $10 suggested donation

Women’s Building

3543 18th St, SF

www.fiestasfridassf.com

 

 

Johnny Mathis with San Francisco Symphony

Legendary crooner Johnny Mathis’ family moved to San Francisco when he was very young, and it was here in the city that he developed his love for music; while studying at San Francisco State University, he began performing at the Black Hawk nightclub and eventually garnered the attention of some high-profile promoters. In early 1956, Mathis recorded his first album, and he continues to this day. Singing hit songs such as “Chances Are,” “Wonderful! Wonderful!,” “A Certain Smile,” and many more, Mathis has been going strong for nearly 70 years now — don’t miss you chance to see a true icon this weekend, performing with the San Francisco Symphony (Sean McCourt)

Also Sat/6, 8pm, $20–$125

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

 

Accidental Bear Queer Summer Tour

What, you thought just because DOMA got overturned and same-sex couples might be getting married again this summer that our work was over? And also that we’re too hungover from Pride to start partying again? Queer mental health issues and suicide risk are still a huge concern in the community, and hyperenergetic SF gay blogger Mike Enders, a.k.a Accidental Bear, is trying to break the stigma and bring awareness — by throwing a big, fun, charitable concert and party, of course. Colorful gay novelty rappers Rica Shay and Big Dipper (let the double entendre zingers fly!), dazzlingly alien outfit Conquistador, local electro heartthrobs Darling Gunsel, and soulful tunesmith Logan Lynn fill the bill, with proceeds going to the Stonewall Project, the Ali Forney Center, and more. (Marke B.)

8pm, $15

Beatbox

314 11th St., SF.

www.accidentalbear.com

 

 

SATURDAY 6

Beast Crawl

Now in its second year, Beast Crawl is a free literary festival featuring more than 140 writers in one night. It’s probably pretty hard to go wrong with that many options. Spread out over 26 local galleries, restaurants, bars, and cafes, the annual event offers a place and performance for everyone. Beast Crawl has four legs — the first one beginning at 5pm, and the last one (the after-party) starts at 9pm. Visit the Uptown, have a drink at Telegraph Beer Garden, open your eyes at Awaken Café, all while taking in some of the best Bay Area authors, poets, and even stand-ups. You know how you always hear people say “I went to this rad little poetry reading the other night,” and then wonder where the hell they always are? Well, here’s your chance to finally check out one, or 20. (Smith)

5pm, free

Uptown, Oakland

(415) 706-9128

beastcrawl.weebly.com

 

Audiobus Mission Creek

Properly executed, music should take you on a mental voyage, a mini musical vacation, if you will. It’s not to remove all thought, but to direct your attention elsewhere momentarily, in the direction the sound dictates. The AudioBus, a mobile venue, will delete the figurative from that jaunt, and take you on a literal trip down a specific San Francisco route. For AudioBus Mission Creek — a Soundwave SonicLAB event — sound artists Jeffy Ray and Jorge Bachmann will sonically guide passengers through the old and new Mission District, narrated by Adobe Books’ Andrew Mckinley. Together, they’ll explore “profound themes of the past, from nostalgia to displacement, and the future ideas of technology and possibility.” The sound-tour will leave the temporary station twice tonight, once for a sunset tour and then again on a starry night ride. A reminder: the bus waits for no one, so don’t miss your stop. (Emily Savage)

8 and 9pm, $16

Bus station: Adobe Books

3130 24th St., SF

www.projectsoundwave.com

 

Fillmore Jazz Festival

Live jazz music, crafts, and gourmet food, all in one place (and most of it is free to check out). The Fillmore Jazz Festival is the largest of its kind on the West Coast, reportedly luring in a mind-blowing 100,000 visitors over the two-day event. Considering the history and popularity of the neighborhood — and the sheer amount of bands and musicians playing the fest — that number starts to make sense. Sultry local vocalist Kim Nalley will bring her jazzy blues blend to the stage, as will instrumentalist-composer Peter Apfelbaum, Mara Hruby, John Santos Sextet, Beth Custer Ensemble, Crystal Money Hall, Bayonics, and Afrolicious, among many others. Stroll through the 12 blocks, and you’re bound to find some acts that give you a reason to pause. (Smith)

Also Sun/7, 10am-6pm, free

Fillmore Street between Jackson and Eddy, SF (800) 310-6563

www.fillmorejazzfestival.com

 

Woolfy

I miss Kevin Meenan’s show listings at epicsauce.com. At one time it was a go-to for highlights of small shows going on in the city, filler free, and super reliable for finding a new act to see live. Meenan has since dropped the showlist (perhaps made redundant with the availability of social apps), but is still active with his regular event Push The Feeling. This edition features a DJ set by English born, LA musician, Simon “Woolfy” James, whose eclectic and spacey post-punk dance sensibility first got my attention with the caressingly Balearic “Looking Glass” and the recent James Murphy-esque snappy cut on Permanent Release, “Junior’s Throwin’ Craze.” (Ryan Prendiville)

With Bruse (Live), YR SKULL, and epicsauce DJs

9pm-2am, $6, free before 10 w/ RSVP

Underground SF

424 Haight, SF

www.undergroundsf.com

 

SUNDAY 7

Cleopatra

The backstory that looms over 1963’s Cleopatra is very nearly as glorious as the film itself, which ain’t no small feat; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s epic take on the legendary Queen of Egypt ran famously over-budget, but damn if all those dollars aren’t one hundred percent visible, with lavish sets, costumes, and blingy whatnots filling every frame. But really, who cares about overapplied eye make-up and historical inaccuracies when you have the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton romance playing out before your very eyes? There’s no better way to relive the drama — oh, the drama — than in this 50th anniversary restored DCP screening, a one-day-only affair at the Castro. (Eddy)

2 and 7pm, $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

 

TUESDAY 9

Chef Hubert Keller

Hubert Keller is a culinary celebrity as a multiple James Beard Award winner and the owner and executive chef of trendy restaurants across the country, including the highly-praised San Francisco-based Fleur de Lys. But the classically trained French chef is not all expensive, showy cuisine — during the first season of Top Chef Masters, he earned the respect of broke college kids and amateur foodies everywhere when he resourcefully used a dorm room shower to cool a pot of pasta. Last year, he collaborated with co-author Penolope Wisner to publish Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs: Stories and Recipes from My Life, a memoir-cookbook featuring instructions on 120 dishes. (Lee)

In conversation with Narsai David

6pm, $25 (students, $7)

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, SF

(415) 597-6700 www.commonwealthclub.org

New Zealand’s Cup

-
7
New Zealand’s Cup

news@sfbg.com

A few weeks ago I was walking down the dock in the marina where I live, in Wellington, New Zealand, when I passed a woman and a young boy. I’d never seen them before, which is uncommon here in this municipal marina — about 100 boats — in a small suburb of the country’s capital.

The boy was walking from berth to berth pointing out certain rig and hull features and expounding on them as only a future aficionado can. “Lots of different boats, huh?” I asked as I passed.

“Different than America,” he confirmed in an accent the same as mine.

The kid is sharp, I thought, or maybe it’s just obvious, even to an eight-year-old from Chicago. The New Zealand sailing scene is vastly different than its American counterpart, which is not to say there’s no comparing — they’re not exactly navigating carved logs with gunnysack sails down here.

But the boats in my marina are, in fact, mostly homebuilt from steel, cement, aluminum, and wood. They appear a motley crew compared to the cookie-cutter production fiberglass Beneteaus, Catalinas, and Hunters, with their identical pacific blue sail covers lined up in San Francisco’s South Beach Marina.

In New Zealand, a boat is rarely a status symbol — it’s part of the middle-class way of life, the home base for holidays and weekend fishing trips and lots and lots of competitive racing. If I’ve noticed one thing since I arrived in this country (aboard a sailboat, after leaving San Francisco and my job as a Bay Guardian staff writer), it’s that every little harbor town has a yacht club and an awful lot of Kiwis own boats — and they sail the shit out of them.

Which is part of the reason why the New Zealand government is willing to invest NZ$36 million (US$27 million) to compete in the 34th America’s Cup against some of the richest men in the world in a race that has become so elite there’s barely any competition.

Small as the field is, Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) is quickly shaping up to be the team to beat if you’re on a high-speed, air-catching AC72 catamaran. If they succeed, it will show that developing an America’s Cup team doesn’t have to come from having deep pockets in your Nantucket Red pants — it comes from having the sport ingrained in your culture, filtered through affordable local boat clubs, city-run facilities, volunteer programs, publicly accessible shorefronts, and an innovative marine industry.

In fact, without New Zealand’s maritime way of life, Larry Ellison wouldn’t have much of a team: of the 27 sailors and management crew aboard Oracle, a third are Kiwis. Another third are Australians. If you count Ellison, there are only three Americans aboard. Just one of them — tactician and grinder John Kostecki — grew up sailing on San Francisco Bay.

Ellison’s boat is mostly a Kiwi production, too — the fixed-wing sails and structural components for Oracle’s two AC72s were made in New Zealand, as were the boats, sails, and rigs for ETNZ and Luna Rossa. The only other syndicate competing, Sweden’s Artemis, in the wind since the death of crewmember Andrew Simpson, is the outlier, but they still have eight New Zealanders on board.

America’s Cup is looking more and more like it owes a lot to New Zealand. Is the Cup doing as much for San Francisco as it is for this little island nation, with a population just a tenth of California’s?

“If it wasn’t called Team New Zealand, we wouldn’t get a lot out of it,” says Sven Pannell, a competitive dinghy racer and employee of the economic development agency Grow Wellington. “The numbers of boat builders, carbon fabricators, sail makers, yacht designers coming out of New Zealand are the reason we’re still at the top of the global game. If we can bring the Cup home that means a lot for our country.”

It may also save America’s Cup from becoming even more out of touch with reality.

 

IT’S THE CULTURE, STUPID

It’s June 8, summer in San Francisco but winter in Wellington. The first race of the 2013 Winter Series at Evans Bay Boat Club hits hypothermic seas beneath steely overcast skies and 20-30 knots of wind — “perfect conditions,” one sailor enthuses. Tame, actually, for Wellington. A week ago, wind blew out the fifth story windows of a building downtown.

Sven Pannell has just finished racing a 12-foot skiff, a super lightweight, often homebuilt boat that probably originated in Australia and is almost exclusively raced in the Southern Hemisphere, though an 18-foot version will be showcased in San Francisco this September alongside the America’s Cup finals. Weighing about 100 pounds, with no class restrictions on sail area, they rooster-tail around Wellington harbor, bow high, barely in the water. They seem to require a similar caliber of nerve as the AC72s.

Which Pannell, who won today, evidently has. He grew up sailing as a kid, as did his crew, Craig Anderson. Neither of them can think of anyone who didn’t get into sailing as a child.

“A lot of people around the world think yachting is a well-heeled sport, but not in New Zealand,” he says. “There’s a reason that half those [America’s Cup] boats are full of Kiwis and Aussies. Go out and see the number of eight-year-olds in Optis in all kinds of weather here. A high number of people sailing at that age creates a deep pool of sailors in demand.”

“America’s Cup is about stretching the limits, but it starts here, when you’re eight years old,” he adds.

Eager to get out of the icy Antarctic wind, I enter the boat club where about 35 people are gathered at the bar, buzzing from adrenalin, barefoot and wet from spray or capsizes, gripping ginger beers and green bottles of Steinlager, the Budweiser of New Zealand. It’s a humble looking crowd — no flash gear or cashmere.

I’m introduced to Mike Rhodes, 26, wearing a blue sweatshirt and camo pants. He’d love to race an America’s Cup boat, but he also satisfies himself with a 12-foot skiff, which he stripped and rebuilt, fashioning the stainless steel fittings himself — he’s a sheet metal worker.

“New Zealand sailing is all about learning and moving forward,” he says. “The boats we’re sailing are always changing. We have set rules for weight, width, and length. After that it’s wide open. You can put up as much rig as you can handle. We went out in 50 knots last weekend. It was insane. We probably had boat speeds of 30 knots.”

The speed and innovations are what appeal to Rhodes and also connect to the America’s Cup, which has been an historic proving ground for leaps forward in boat design. “Who thought New Zealand could make the boat fly first?” he says of ETNZ’s proficiency at foiling the AC72 — going so fast the hull actually lifts off the water.

We’re soon joined by Laura Hutton, a 30-year-old from Cape Cod. She’s raced dinghies, coached and taught sailing for years. Now a speech therapist, she moved to New Zealand three months ago and immediately hooked into the local yachting scene. It’s palpably different than what she’s used to in the States. Here, she says, “It’s a lot more laid back. It’s more inclusive than exclusive. I used to go to events at New York Yacht Club in Newport and I felt so uncomfortable there. It’s the most elite, snobby place.”

“You can’t get coaching in the US unless you’re part of a yacht club or go to a school with a racing team,” she adds, and there’s often a huge cost to enter the sport. “Here, I can join the local yacht club for $35 a month,” she deadpans.

I spend more money riding the bus, I tell her, but I wouldn’t in San Francisco, where it’s cheap to catch a bus but where most people rarely board boats.

The American yacht club tradition has a certain “if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it” attitude. Ellison is one of 300 members of Golden Gate Yacht Club, official host for the Cup. Its neighbor, St. Francis Yacht Club, 2,300 strong, also has a role in the festivities. Both are exclusive, members-only clubs and neither would tell me what their members pay for the club’s privileges.

However, they’re officially nonprofit organizations and filings with the IRS show St. Francis made nearly $13 million in 2011. Golden Gate Yacht Club took home $660,000 the same year. Ironically, both clubs are on public lands, leased from San Francisco’s Recreation and Parks Department for $231,125 and $64,000 annually respectively.

Both clubs run learn-to-sail programs for kids — $350 for St. Francis and $200 for GGYC — which seem affordable, but what’s the next step? Joining the club, but apparently it’s too rude to query the price.

By contrast, Wellington’s Evans Bay Boat Club charges NZ$281 (US$210) to join and Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club, which is a sister club to St. Francis, costs NZ$160 (US $120). The Bay Area is lucky — Berkeley and Treasure Island both have affordable clubs, however one could argue that if St. Francis and GGYC are on public lands, they should be paying more in dues to the city.

If there’s a posh club in Auckland, it’s ETNZ’s home — the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. “But it’s a Kiwi version of posh, nothing like some of the yacht clubs I have been to in places like England, where women aren’t allowed to order drinks at the bar,” says Ben Gladwell, a journalist for Boating New Zealand who will be racing an 18 foot skiff in San Francisco in a regatta concurrent with the Cup finals. “At the Squaddy, there are obviously rules, like no cell phones, and dress codes and such like, but the fees are still only a few hundred dollars per year and it is much more inclusive than other yacht clubs around the world.”

Gladwell explored the health of New Zealand’s sailing culture in a story called “State of the Racing Nation” for Boating New Zealand. He found that although there is a drop-off in interest during university years, many yacht clubs have created partnerships to keep kids in the sport, there are mobile learn-to-sail units roaming the country, and lots of accessible city-run programs for kids. Couple that with low lifetime fees to stay in the sport and you see healthy clubs like Evans Bay, where people of all ages are out racing every weekend, all year round.

“Having so many people involved in sailing is a major reason we are successful,” he says. “Children are introduced to it at such a young age…by the time they come to competing at youth international regattas, they are hugely experienced and winning becomes a habit.”

 

“AMERICA’S CUP IS NOW NEW ZEALAND’S CUP”

In 1995, when Black Magic smoked Dennis Connor’s Stars and Stripes in a five-race shut-out, commentator Peter Montgomery famously quipped “America’s Cup is now New Zealand’s cup,” a line that’s gone down in Kiwi history like the “I have a dream” speech.

For the first time, the Auld Mug would be defended in New Zealand. Back then, Auckland’s Viaduct Harbor probably looked a lot like parts of San Francisco’s waterfront does today — dilapidated piers and old industrial buildings crumbling on their pilings. It would cost of NZ$58 million (US$29 million at the time) to dredge the harbor and spruce up the waterfront for the Cup.

The city made its money back. Hosting for two years, in 2000 and 2003, brought NZ$1 billion (US$500 million, at the time) in economic benefits to the country, about 85 percent of that going to Auckland’s local businesses, mostly from visiting megayachts and the services required for the nine syndicates that competed — twice as many as are in San Francisco today.

And Auckland made a lot less than the US$900 million predicted for San Francisco, already trimmed from the US$1.4 billion initially estimated. What the city actually gains from the $22.5 million investment they’ve been forced to make remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Auckland continues to benefit from the race.

It’s been estimated that the four Cup contenders have collectively spent half a billion on their campaigns and a decent chunk of that has been in Auckland, particularly during the AC72 design, build, and testing phases. Already, taxes paid by ETNZ employees amount to NZ$22.4 million (US$16.5 million). That doesn’t include the employee payroll taxes of all the businesses doing Cup-related activity, like the boat builders, riggers, and sailmakers.

ETNZ CEO Grant Dalton has netted sponsorships from more than 100 companies and argues that the Cup efforts have kept many marine businesses afloat that would have otherwise shuttered. Kiwis have not been immune to the world financial situation: the high New Zealand dollar hurting exports and the NZ$30 billion (US$22.5 billion) price tag for the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake have stressed the country’s coffers.

Because of that, funding ETNZ has been as contentious here as hosting Ellison’s party has been to San Franciscans. The agreement was signed in 2007 by a Labour Party-led government and when National Party’s John Key won the Prime Minister’s seat in 2008, he looked into breaking the contract, a move supported by other parties. “Funding the America’s Cup is surely a ‘nice to have’, rather than essential spending, in the current economic climate,” said Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei at the time.

The government was advised they’d still be legally on the hook for the money if they broke the contract, so ETNZ proceeded, but proof of economic return was a contingency and Dalton has taken pains to keep the public good in the conversation, a sharp contrast to Ellison’s attitude toward San Francisco. Dalton has said if New Zealand wins, the world should expect a sharp scaling back of costs. “We stand for nationality rule and we stand for real budget numbers that real people can raise,” he has said.

There’s definitely a sense that this could be New Zealand’s last chance to bring the Auld Mug home. If they don’t, the America’s Cup also loses. Who else will save it from American-style exclusiveness?

City budget boosts homelessness spending, but not enough to meet demand

Sasha Cuttler
-
6

The city budget that is now awaiting approval by the Board of Supervisors includes new funding for individuals and families facing homelessness, but community advocates say it doesn’t devote enough of the city’s rebounding revenues to addressing this growing problem.

Last Thursday, the Board of Supervisor’s Budget and Finance Committee approved $2.4 million in “add-backs” to homeless services, on top of the $2.3 million that Mayor Ed Lee pledged to supplement the city’s initiatives to curb the burgeoning number of San Francisco’s individuals and families becoming homeless.

The committee’s proposed budget will go before the full Board of Supervisors’ for a vote this month, devoting at least $2 million for this fiscal year and $1 million the next in to continue the successful Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing (HPRP) program that provides eviction defense and rent and utility vouchers to residents at-risk of homelessness.

Other homelessness initiatives in the proposed budget include extending the Lower Haight First Friendship shelter for homeless families to a year-round schedule, permanent housing units at 5th and Harrison streets for transitional age youth, 33 Local Operating Subsidy Program (or LOSP) subsidies for low-income homeless individuals and families, and funding to construct 24 shelter beds for the City’s first LGBTQ-focused homeless shelter at Dolores Street Community Center.

But for many residents and families, these initiatives may not be enough to stay in their homes, or re-house themselves after becoming homeless. And as the rent prices continue to drastically rise in San Francisco as the city’s economy heats up, the search for affordable housing or shelter beds has become more and more desperate.

January’s point-in-time homeless count identified 6,436 homeless persons on the streets and in the shelters in the city, a majority of which became homeless as San Franciscans. The current number on the city’s wait list is 220 families with an expected wait of seven to eight months, according to the Human Services Agency, which runs the city’s homeless shelter system. This is slightly down from 268 families earlier this year, then the largest in city history.

As the Guardian reported recently, the number of eviction notices in San Francisco hit a 12-year high this year, indicating an increase in displacement that may compound the number of families on the emergency shelter waiting list.

Bevan Dufty, the mayor’s point person on homelessness, told the Guardian that “the city definitely is not seeking to expand the shelter system,” despite the near-record waiting list.

 “Yes, we have lost shelter beds in recent years, and the 24 we are adding at Dolores Street Community Services is a minimal number,” Dufty added. “But you have to have a toolbox to respond in different ways.” And Dufty claims that re-housing families through programs like HPRP services in the budget has been shown to be the best way to prevent homelessness.

In response, Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness told the Guardian that, although the $1 million of HPRP services did prevent 1,300 San Francisco households from becoming homeless last year, it only covered 15 percent of the city’s overall need based on the number of people seeking services through San Francisco’s Eviction Defense Collaborative.

When asked to respond to the Coalition’s estimate, Dufty replied that he could not comment on its accuracy, but he conceded that the HPRP funding is “certainly not going to satisfy all the need.”

Dufty stressed that the city has been able to reduce the number of homeless veterans and has responded to a noticeable outcry in the need for more transitional housing, especially from LGBTQ community activists. Although the version of the budget making it to the Board of Supervisor’s vote this month would not expand the homeless shelter system beyond the Dolores Street Community Services project, it would improve the city’s oft-criticized shelter reservation system for single adults.

Along with Dufty and the Mayor Lee’s support, Friedenbach advocated in the homeless community to change the current line-based system to a lotterized system run through the city’s 311 system.

“The current shelter waitlist system is really archaic,” Friedenbach told the Guardian. “People spend 17 hours a day trying to get a bed at night.” Mayor Lee proposed this change in his budget, especially so the indigent and elderly no longer have to stand for hours waiting in line for a bed.

Though Friedenbach acknowledges the positive in the budget initiatives, she pointed out that there is still only one shelter spot for every six homeless persons in San Francisco, and that she “doesn’t know what standard you can go by to say that is too much.”

The new revenue from November’s business tax reform measure, won through a ballot initiative pushed by on-the-ground community groups like the Coalition on Homelessness, should “go back to low-end communities who are hurt from years of reduced services in mental and public health,” Friedenbach said.

Last month, the Coalition on Homelessness and other advocates pushed the Budget and Finance Committee to double Mayor Lee’s proposed $1 million for HPRP for 2013-2014 and an additional 75 LOSP rental subsidies on top of the 25 the Mayor had already pledged. At its last meeting before the new fiscal year, the Budget and Finance Committee pledged an addition $1 million for HPRP, but only added eight new LOSP subsidies.

Friedenbach attributed the lower number to the city’s logistical problems of trying to find additional service providers for subsidies. The “add-backs” marked “a lot of progress for poor folks,” Friedenbach said, although the city will still have “a situation where a lot of money is coming in, but not trickling down.”

“San Francisco is at a critical juncture,” Friedenbach prefaced her public comment at a Budget and Finance hearing last month. “The influx of wealth is pushing the heart of the city—the working class and poor—out.”

The budget approved by the Budget and Finance Committee last Thursday will likely go to the full Board of Supervisors starting next week, July 9.

Possibly the coolest queer mental health concert tour ever

-
1
Possibly the coolest queer mental health concert tour ever

Accidental Bear Queer Music Summer Tour Benefit for LGBTQ Mental Health Services and Suicide Prevention. Now, that’s a mouthful.

“It’s the longest, most ridiculous title ever,” Accidental Bear blog owner and founder Mike Enders said in a Guardian interview.

It’s basically a really queer, really cool music concert series travelling to five cities with performances by Logan Lynn, Big Dipper, Conquistador, Darling Gunsel, and Rica Shay, who all put a different spin on the concept of “queer music.”

But it’s also a two-fer. It’s giving exposure to the bands playing while raising money to donate to LGBT foundations in support of mental health including the San Francisco-based Stonewall Project, the LAGay and Lesbian Center, Ali Forney Center, Pride Foundation, and Q Center.

“All of these people [performing] are up-and-coming and some people have been around longer than others,” Enders said. “I wanted to have people who are going to draw a crowd and each one of these bands has their own group or pull.”

There are some big characters and personalities performing, and it’s going to be a high energy show. It’s also something you don’t want to bring your grandma to.

“Parts of the show are going to be X-rated,” Enders said. “Not like, nude, but Big Dipper, he has a lot of songs about his private parts. His version of the twerking that’s going on, is a song he has out called ‘Dick Bounce.’”

The Accidental Bear Tour is going to be a fun, queer time that also aims to eliminate the stigma that surrounds mental health and bring awareness to the alarming rates of suicide in the LGBTQ community.
Enders has a personal connection to the cause as well.

“In 2007, I started having these out-of-the-blue horrible panic attacks. And, being someone who didn’t have a lot of money, that was uninsured, I couldn’t find a resource, couldn’t find anybody to help,” Enders said.

He went to LGBT-specific services that couldn’t help due to him being uninsured, or being put on the end of a waiting list.

“I ended up in the emergency room,” Enders said. “If you’re unaware of what’s actually happening with a panic attack, a lot of times people think they’re having a heart attack. It was just kind of an eye opener. Luckily, I had good support around me, but I just realized there’s a real lack in services.

“The fact is, everyone in their life has dealt with a mental health issue. It’s kind of embarrassing admitting it now. It’s weird with the stigma to it.”

Tickets start at $15, and are on sale now. The tour kicks off here in San Francisco on July 5 at Beatbox, and will travel to LA, Portland, Seattle, and finish in New York City on the 19th.

“This is something that the queer world is missing right now,” Enders said. “Everything right now’s like DJs and dance music.”

The Accidental Bear Tour features dance, rap, hip hop, and electro music – a little something for everyone.

It’s going to be a great, big, gay time, with awesome performances while simultaneously fighting for a good cause.

AB SUMMER TOUR

8pm, $15
Beatbox
314 11th St., SF.
www.accidentalbear.com

Heads Up: 6 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles
-
0

Not to give this family any more attention, but here I go. Are you aware of the fact that the Balloon Boy is now a long-hair tween, in a darker Hanson trio with his brothers, singing operatic heavy metal bits? It’s all here, in a Gawker long-read post. The article notes that the group (Heene Boyz) considers itself the “World’s Youngest Metal Band.” — don’t we have that already here in the Bay with our own Haunted by Heroes? Take that, Balloon Boy. (Whatever, technically they’re billed as “The World’s Youngest Rock Band.”)

But my real point is this: America, home of the free, free to whore oneself and one’s family out on reality TV, to sneak kids into homemade balloon UFOs, to shoot for fame from birth. Happy Fourth of July week, everyone. Celebrate it with the bedlam of Bob Log III, the annual Big Time Freedom Fest at El Rio or Fillmore Jazz Festival, dreamy R&B producer Giraffage, or, the snacktastic Burger Boogaloo fest with headliners Redd Kross, the Oblivians, the Trashwomen, and more! Paint your face red, white, and blue, stick a sparkler behind your ear, and rage out into the night, it’s what the founding fathers would have wanted.

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

Bob Log III
What’s more US of A than a lone multi-instrumentalist on stage in a glittery bodysuit and microphone-affixed motorcycle helmet, looking like a futuristic Bowie-esque alien, and sounding like a punky blues madman, or a scrappier Bo Diddley meets the Coachwhips, on slide guitar. As the Kansas City Star puts it, “If he hired a drummer, ditched his helmet, and requested a standard swizzle stick to stir his scotch, Bob Log III would still draw an audience. His music is that entertaining.”
With The Okmoniks, Los Vincent Black Shadows (Mexico City).
Wed/3, 8:30pm, $15
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
www.hemlocktavern.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQmX4LzaDDU

Big Time Freedom Fest
It’s back, El Rio’s annual Fourth of July patio party Big Time Freedom Fest is here again, and this time brings out the worthy local Black Sabbath tribute act that is Bobb Saggeth, fronted by wailing female powerhouse Meryl Press. The band isn’t nearly as active as I’d prefer, but always plays parties on Halloween and Fourth of July, usually at places like Thee Parkside, Hemlock Tavern, and yes, El Rio. Plus, newish local heavy-psych band Golden Void headlines the show, and Wild Eyes, Couches, and Upside Drown open. And it’s all on the back patio, so you can officially say you spent the holiday outdoors, (with your favorite local rock‘n’rollers).
Thu/4, 3:30pm, $8
El Rio
3158 Mission, SF
www.elriosf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebe9BtnD6wQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmXB7-plWrY

Giraffage
“San Francisco-based futuristic dream R&B producer Charlie Yin has made some big leaps in 2013, with a performance at SXSW along with upcoming gigs at Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle festival and SF’s Treasure Island Music Festival. His new album Needs on Los Angeles label Alpha Pup Records is a thesis in music manipulation, a comprehensive counterargument to straightforward 4/4. Vocal samples are up-shifted in tempo to lend a playful mood. Tracks are sometimes dipped in sonic mud halfway through, decelerating to a crawl before jumping back to normal time. But Needs never feels jerky, which owes to Yin’s tight transitions and harmonious melodies throughout. The sensual, infectious, shifty third track “Money” sounds like it will be played in lounges in 2050.” — Kevin Lee
With Mister Lies, Bobby Browser
Thu/4, 9:30pm, $13–$15
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PVWP1Zrh4Q

Fillmore Jazz Festival
“Live jazz music, crafts, and gourmet food, all in one place (and most of it is free to check out). The Fillmore Jazz Festival is the largest of its kind on the West Coast, reportedly luring in a mind-blowing 100,000 visitors over the two-day event. Sultry local vocalist Kim Nalley will again bring her jazzy blues blend to the stage, as will instrumentalist-composer Peter Apfelbaum, Mara Hruby, John Santos Sextet, Beth Custer Ensemble, Crystal Money Hall, Bayonics, and Afrolicious, among many others.” — Hillary Smith
Sat/6-Sun/7, 10am-6pm, free
Fillmore Street between Jackson and Eddy, SF (800) 310-6563
www.fillmorejazzfestival.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XRE8FSkxQg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hall_F7pTbg

Woolfy
“I miss Kevin Meenan’s show listings at epicsauce.com. At one time it was a go-to for highlights of small shows going on in the city, filler free, and super reliable for finding a new act to see live. Meenan has since dropped the showlist (perhaps made redundant with the availability of social apps), but is still active with his regular event Push The Feeling. This edition features a DJ set by English born, LA musician, Simon ‘Woolfy’ James, whose eclectic and spacey post-punk dance sensibility first got my attention with the caressingly Balearic “Looking Glass” and the recent James Murphy-esque snappy cut on Permanent Release, ‘Junior’s Throwin’ Craze.’” — Ryan Prendiville
With Bruse (Live), YR SKULL, and epicsauce DJs
Sat/6, 9pm-2am, $6, free before 10 w/ RSVP
Underground SF
424 Haight, SF
www.undergroundsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9WMPPiBimc

Burger Boogaloo
We blurbed this early: everyone is talking about the disparate headliners early LA punk band Redd Kross and Modern Lover/singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman — and rightfully so, they are incredible — but can we also take a minute to thank satan for the Trashwomen addition to the lineup? For those somehow unaware, the Trashwomen are Bay Area noisy surf-punk royalty, born of the ‘90s, and featuring Tina Lucchesi (of every band, ever), Danielle Pimm, and Elka Zolot (Kreayshawn’s hot mama). Check the paper this week for an interview with the Trashwomen. And check Mosswood Park for a sloppy soul dance party.
With the Zeroes, Oblivians, Fuzz, Mikal Cronin, Audacity, Guantanamo Baywatch, Mean Jeans, Pangea
Sat/6-Sun/7, noon-9pm, $25
Mosswood Park
3612 Webster, Oakl.
www.burgerboogaloo.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP4hxwyWxHY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJx5c_cFq5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI3XM-X72eQ

1...118119120...1,098Page 119 of 1,098

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org