Print sections as they appeared in the early 2010s

To find articles by keyword or author, you may want to use our Search function.

Print Sections

The faith and the fury

Andrew Lam
-
0
The faith and the fury

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Hell hath no fury like an enraged Klaus Kinski. The late German actor, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as the combusting supernova at the center of the Wernzer Herzog films Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987), was as famous for his coruscating off-camera temper as for his onscreen intensity. With Kinski, there is always the near-unanswerable question of to what extent is his performance acting and to what extent is he just being himself. Are we watching someone who has totally, obsessively (unhealthily?) committed to his craft, or a petulant diva whose overinflated ego perhaps bruises too easily?

Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savoir, a recently rediscovered concert film of a 1971 solo performance, makes a riveting case for all of the above. Filmed a year before he headed to the South American jungle with Herzog, Jesus Christ finds Kinski alone on a spot-lit stage before a packed house delivering a monologue that frames Christ as a persecuted outlaw. “Wanted: Jesus Christ,” he purrs, “charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.”

Not five minutes in the catcalls begin, no doubt encouraged by Kinski’s sudden switch to the first person, making overt the already implicit and problematic association of himself with his subject. “I want my 10 marks back!” cries one audience member. “Shut up!” Kinski volleys back. When one particularly bold heckler climbs on stage to chasten Kinski for his un-Christ-like language, the actor has his security guards forcibly remove the young man and storms off stage to the audience’s cries of “fascist.”

Things only get uglier as the evening progresses. Kinksi returns a second time to proselytize for the continued relevance of scripture by drawing comparisons to then-current issues such as Vietnam and the growing counterculture. The audience, both fascinated and repelled by this wealthy actor whose truculent delivery and hostility toward his flock undercuts his message of nonviolence and justified outrage at the world’s horrors, continues to have its say. Many times, in fact. Kinski walks away from the mic twice more in disgust at the “riffraff.” It is only after the film’s credits that the visibly drained thespian finally delivers his sermon in full to the remaining faithful.

What’s surprising is the palpable sincerity beneath Kinski’s vitriol: He seems genuinely exasperated by the unreceptive crowd, even as each successive disciplinary outburst further alienates them. Of course, such naiveté is another symptom of privilege, but rarely are the privileged as hypnotic or as loose a cannon as Kinski. God bless him.

KLAUS KINSKI: JESUS CHRIST THE SAVIOR

Thurs/16, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/19, 2 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org *

 

The ballad of Peter and Raymond

Andrew Lam
-
0
The ballad of Peter and Raymond

arts@sfbg.com

Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men who were old friends moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to take in all the big city had to offer. Like many 20-somethings, Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey didn’t have a lot of money and wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight with a bright pink exterior they dubbed “the Pepto Bismol Palace.” The paint was peeling and the walls were thin but the rent was cheap.

What Eddie and Mitch didn’t count on was having Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman as their neighbors. “You blind cocksucker. You wanna fuck with me? You try to touch me, and I will kill you in a fucking minute.” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, little man!”

The insults, tantrum-throwing, and threats of violence (which sometimes crossed over into actual fisticuffs) coming from next door were constant. When they weren’t drinking like fishes, Peter — acid-tongued, gay — and Ray — the more hotheaded of the two and an unrepentant homophobe — seemingly devoted their every waking hour to mercilessly tearing each other apart.

Weeks went by. Eddie and Mitch started to lose sleep. And after one failed attempt at complaining to Raymond’s face (he threatened death), they started tape-recording Peter and Ray’s endless geyser of vitriol — first, as possible future evidence — but also out of a growing voyeuristic fascination with these two seniors who had to be the world’s oddest and angriest odd couple.

The rest is history. Mitch and Eddie started including snippets of Peter and Ray’s bickering on mixtapes for friends. Somehow, the editor of the now-defunct SF noise music zine Bananafish heard a snippet and approached Mitch and Eddie about distributing compilations of the recordings to a large network of found sound fans. Gradually “Peter and Raymond” became known and much-beloved characters. Their warped repartee — frequently referred to using Raymond’s favorite rejoinder, “Shut up, little man!,” as shorthand — inspired several theatrical adaptations, short animated films, pages of comic book panels by artists such as Daniel Clowes, and even a one-off single from Devo side project the Wipeouters. SF Weekly did a cover story and there were reams of additional press. Hollywood types called wanting to know who owned the rights to Peter and Raymond. Things had gotten big.

“Shut Up Little Man has been an enchanted, messy cultural accident,” reflects Sausage (he’s kept the moniker) over a Skype conference call. “It was a personal obsession and a private joke that in a very curious way became an underground cultural phenomena.” Sausage, a visual artist and musician who supports himself as a rare-book seller, remains, in his words, “the official custodian” of Shut Up Little Man’s (SULM) legacy, which is copiously detailed on its website.

Deprey — who now works as an insurance agent in Wisconsin where he lives with his wife and teenage children — is also on the line. Although Sausage is doing most of the talking, he interjects from time to time to provide clarification. We are discussing Matthew Bate’s documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure — perhaps the squarest peg in Frameline 35’s lineup. As much an attempt to comprehensively recount the above long, strange trip from start to finish, the film is also the newest chapter in the now 20-year saga of Peter, Raymond, Mitch, and Eddie.

Bate is a clever filmmaker who is able to translate a story that has primarily been told through sound into something visually compelling. Goofy animated interludes are woven between interviews with Clowes, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, and the many other SULM fans who have created art inspired by Peter and Raymond. Sausage and Deprey also get plenty of screen time, and Bate goes so far as to have them play their 20-something selves in dramatized reenactments of their early days of interacting with and recording Peter and Raymond, who are played by actors. (Huffman died in 1992 of a heart attack brought on by colon cancer, pancreatitis, and alcoholism; Haskett died four years later of liver problems also due to alcoholism.)

Bate’s film is less successful in presenting a clear account of Sausage and Deprey’s 1994 controversial decision to copyright their recordings — which up to that point had been accompanied only by a note encouraging creative liberties and humbly asking for credit — going so far as to imply that this was an ideological about-face. As Sausage and Deprey tell it, they were simply doing the responsible, professional thing in the face of mounting disputes over who could or couldn’t sell the rights (the current disclaimer on the SULM website notes that “permission and licensing is usually granted, but please ask first”).

“Because this stuff was so viral and so innocuous, it wasn’t clear who owned any of this, ” explains Deprey, “We just didn’t want people wrongfully charging other people to use it. And the truth is, we’ve never gotten a penny from any of the artists [featured in the film].”

Still, Deprey and Sausage have now become the semiofficial executors of Peter and Raymond’s estate, even if it’s a legacy composed of hours and hours of blue streaks captured on tape. No surviving relatives of either Huffman or Haskett have come forward in the time that their infamy has grown, underscoring the fact that these two men — despite the venom they constantly spewed at back and forth — really only had each other.

“In a very real way, I think it’s a nontraditional love story,” says Sausage. “There’s a lot of passion and a lot of intimacy there. I mean, arguing is one of the most intimate things we can do as human beings.”

Indeed, Peter and Raymond’s highly dysfunctional Boston marriage might be the queerest onscreen relationship in the whole festival.

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! AN AUDIO MISADVENTURE

June 22, 9:30 p.m., $11

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

www.frameline.org

P.S. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure was recently picked up by a distributor and will be released theatrically Aug. 26.

 

Sing out

Andrew Lam
-
0
Sing out

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE It may be summer break for America’s favorite Slushee-barraged show choir, but judging by the array of song-and-dance numbers in this year’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, Glee fever continues to spike. Half of the fest’s showcase films celebrate the power of the performing arts, including Mangus!, about a young man’s against-all-odds dream of playing the lead in his high school’s production of Jesus Christ Spectacular. Leading Ladies features a mother-daughter-daughter trio immersed in the world of competitive ballroom dancing. And the shorts roster offers no less than three musicals — the Australian films Slut: The Musical and Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical hail, naturally, from the program “Zombies, Aussies, Musicals, Oh My!,” while Who’s the Top? explores a relationship’s diminished sexual undercurrents through musical comedy. Directed by Jennie Livingston, Who’s the Top? is paired with Paris Is Burning (1990), Livingston’s acclaimed full-length documentary on the late-1980s ball scene in New York City.

The on-and-off-stage drama continues with Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together, a tale of thespians, best friends, and housemate tension rooted more in unvoiced amour than in chore wheels and whose turn it is to buy toilet paper. As the title’s Chicago-dwelling characters negotiate Jamie’s imminent departure for the Big Apple and (she hopes) Broadway, a few wistful tunes are crooned, accompanied by the occasional step-ball-change, but the songs feel somewhat opportunistically tacked on, and the film’s strength lies more in its exploration of that foggy, foggy gray area between the romance of intimate friendship and the romance of ripping the clothes off of someone you really care about.

The tweens of Spork show slightly more promise, at least when it comes to working the dance floor at a nightclub unaverse to letting in 13-year-olds. Spork — so nicknamed by her burnout but well-meaning brother due to her intersex status — is shy, awkward, and isolated at school — when not being tortured by a clique of tiny, racist mean girls led by a Britney Spears wannabe named Betsy Byotch. The answer, clearly, is to best the Byotch in a high-stakes middle-school dance-off — for if we’ve learned one thing from Glee and every high school musical and dance-ical pumped out by Hollywood in the past few decades, it’s that community can be found through soaring vocal harmonies, choreographed ass-shaking, and following one’s dreams.

This lesson is perhaps best exemplified by Leave It on the Floor, which updates (and fictionalizes) the drag and tranny ball scene of Paris Is Burning, transports it to the warehouses of South Central L.A., and adds some infectious music and lyrics (the song “Justin’s Gonna Call” is particularly likely to stay trapped in your brain for days). Leave It‘s kicked-to-the-curb protagonist, Brad, is equally in need of community and a place to crash, and he finds both (after a fashion) in the House of Eminence, the reigning underdog of the ball scene, proudly populated by outcasts and freaks — as well as a hot dueting partner, queer family, and a closing-number set of runway moves that nearly set a warehouse ballroom on fire and probably won’t be coming to a show choir competition near you anytime soon.

FRAMELINE 35: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 16–26, most films $9–$15

Various venues

www.frameline.org

 

Camp rocks

Andrew Lam
-
0
Camp rocks

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE The eponymous character in Ash Christian’s Mangus! has a simple ambition: to be Jesus. That is, to play Jesus in the local production of Jesus Christ Spectacular. Mangus does get the part, but his dreams are crushed when a freak limo accident lands him in a wheelchair and his neighbors decide he’s no longer cut out to play their Lord and Savior.

“When you’re in a small town and you want to be an actor and you don’t get the lead, it’s the most devastating thing in the whole world,” says Christian (2006’s Fat Girls), who was inspired by his own history in community theater.

Mangus! is an interesting but wise choice for Frameline: while it features queer characters (including Mangus’ sister Jessica Simpson, played by Heather Matarazzo), the film as a whole is subtler than other festival picks. It has what Christian calls a “queer sensibility,” but much of that is subtextual.

“I don’t look at it as a queer film,” offers Matarazzo. “I just look at it as a really great dark comedy.”

Christian’s cast is full of actors who might be considered queer icons — among them Matarazzo, Jennifer Coolidge, and Leslie Jordan. But Matarazzo, who is openly gay, doesn’t want to restrict herself.

“When I’m playing to a specific audience because I want this to be a gay and lesbian film, that’s fine for any filmmaker who desires to do that,” she reflects. “But for me, film is really about unifying on all fronts.”

And Christian has his own ambitions. Mangus! is a dark comedy in the tradition of Christian’s cinematic idols John Waters and Todd Solondz. (It’s worth noting that Waters has a cameo in the film, and Matarazzo made her breakthrough in Solondz’s 1995 Welcome to the Dollhouse.) With this work, Christian tackles the topic of discrimination apart from sexuality.

“I’d never really seen a movie with a young disabled kid who had a dream,” he says. “It deals with discrimination in a small town, which I’ve definitely been a part of — not with a disability, but because of the gay thing.”

Mangus! is both hilarious and poignant because its filmmaker is unafraid to hold anything back. It somehow manages to walk the line between over-the-top and honest, presenting a portrayal of disability and sexuality that will only shock those not in on the joke.

“Ash is the perfect master of getting to bring absolute balance in terms of letting an audience pity a character, but then also cheer for him and go along with the ride,” Matarazzo notes. “There was never any kind of mentality of trying to manipulate the audience.”

For a while, Christian did worry about audiences taking his films the wrong way, but he admits that it’s no longer a concern. Indeed, he takes pleasure in making movies edgy enough to unnerve people.

“It’s just something that’s going to keep happening because I don’t want to tell boring stories for Lifetime,” he says. “It’s not really what I want to do. So it kind of turns me on now to have people actually have a problem with what I’m trying to say.”

Those who take Christian’s film in the intended tone will appreciate that it’s not meant to be mean-spirited. In the tradition of the great queer films that came before it, Mangus! lives outside the box: it’s unconventional, subversive, and yes, not even a little bit PC.

“In my heart, I’m not trying to say anything offensive at all,” Christian explains. “They’re just taking it that way.”

MANGUS!

Wed/15, 8:30 p.m., $11

Castro

429 Castro, SF

www.frameline.org

 

Heroes and hoedowns

Andrew Lam
-
0
Heroes and hoedowns

arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE This year’s Bay Area-centric Frameline features run a thematic and identification gamut appropriate to the festival’s ever-inclusive programming. Several are celebrations of local LGBT heroines and heroines, some recently deceased and some still-with-us.

Scott Gracheff’s With You commemorates the life and legacy of late local resident Mark Bingham, who famously died on United Airlines Flight 93 and is strongly suspected of being among the passengers who stormed the cockpit and prevented that hijacked Newark-to-SFO flight from reaching its presumed governmental target in Washington, D.C., on 9/11.

As his activist mother Alice Hoagland and everyone else here says, it’s the sort of thing he would do — Bingham was, among other things, an avid rugby player, metalhead, daredevil, UC Berkeley frat president, world-class partier, several-time arrestee (for reckless hijinks rather than criminal menace), bear chaser, global traveler, dot-com-wave surfer, and “human labrador retriever” (as a long-term boyfriend calls him). He lived a very full life and doubtlessly would have continued living it to the limit if this encounter with terrorism hadn’t cut his time short at 31.

A life that remained eventful for nearly three times that length was that of Del Martin, who along with surviving partner Phyllis Lyon founded SF’s Daughters of Bilitis — the nation’s first lesbian political and social organization — in the highly conservative climate of 1955. They remained highly active in feminist, gay, senior, and other progressive causes over the decades. Martin’s death in 2008 at age 87 occasioned a tribute in the City Hall rotunda that is captured by veteran local filmmaker Debra Chasnoff’s Celebrating the Life of Del Martin. This hour-long document demonstrates the breadth of Martin’s influence as prominent politicians, musicians, authors, progressive and religious leaders, et al. pay homage.

How exactly to honor our dead is the question at the heart of Andy Abrahams Wilson’s very polished The Grove, which charts the creation of the National AIDS Memorial Grove — an idea brought to fruition by the surviving partner of local landscape gardener Stephen Marcus — as well as some struggles over its visibility (even most visitors to Golden Gate Park don’t seem to know it’s there) and purpose.

When a recent contest was held for an installation to be added to the site, two women designers won with a striking sculptural concept intended to make a potent statement à la D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial about the disease’s devastation. But the grove’s current board shot it down, preferring to maintain the space’s leafy, meditative feel — even if that might also maintain its relative public invisibility. Should the memorial comfort those who directly suffered loss, or metaphorically convey that loss in vivid terms for future generations?

Very much living with HIV — emphasis on the living part — is the subject of Dain Percifield’s Running in Heels: The Glendon “Anna Conda” Hyde Story. Glendon Hyde a.k.a. Anna Conda fled a horrific Bible Belt background to become one of SF’s premier drag personalities, running the Cinch’s popular Friday night Charlie Horse revue for five years until a new condo’s complaining tenants shut that down. Enraged by the city’s “war on fun,” hostility toward the homeless, and other issues to boot, he joined 13 other candidates running for District 6 (Tenderloin) supervisor last year. He didn’t win, but this doc will make you hope he tries again.

Last but far from least is this year’s sole Bay Area narrative feature, shot largely in Fruitvale even if it is set in Texas. A big leap from writer director David Lewis’ prior features, Longhorns is a delightful romantic comedy about several 1982 Lone Star state frat boys dealing with sexual impulses and related emotions that might — oh lawd no — mean they’s quar, not just “messing around.” With some soundtracked songs by H.P. Mendoza (2006’s Colma: The Musical), this total charmer is (as one character puts it) “hotter’n a billy goat in a pepper patch.”

FRAMELINE 35: SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL

June 16–26, most films $9–$15

Various venues

www.frameline.org

Wild is the wind

Andrew Lam
-
0
Wild is the wind

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “I remember the last time I saw Nina Simone, it was just after the Bush-Gore election fiasco. She was maaad,” graciously loquacious jazz chanteuse Kim Nalley told me over the phone when I asked her about the High Priestess of Soul’s relevance today. “Here was this woman who had been there through so many stages of the civil rights struggle, fought for voting rights in Mississippi, been there through all of that — and then to hear about black communities, Jewish communities, where the votes just disappeared …

“Well, she wasn’t having any of that. She told us we had to always keep up the fight, keep the fire going, and never let go. What was gained in one generation could be completely wiped out in the next. And all the while she was playing the most spellbinding music. I think that’s her angle on now”

Golden-voiced and full of fierceness, Ms. Nalley, a longtime (but not too long) Bay Area phenom and former owner of Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach, intends to keep that message alive for five straight weeks at the Rrazz Room — and sing the sugar out of a Nina Simone set list that runs to 44 songs, augmented with tales of the activist diva’s life and accomplishments. If just thinking about doing all that makes you draw a breath, add in that Nalley is finishing up her Ph.D. in history at UC Berkeley, teaching jazz to grade school kids, and preparing to embark on a string of international tours and recording projects. Plus she’s catching up on all four seasons of Mad Men. Did I mention she’s gorgeous and actually exists?

She’s also well aware of the hold almighty Nina still exerts on the dancefloor imagination — from the famous, or infamous, Verve Remixed series of the early ’00s, to more recent sample-based efforts like those of Massive Attack, Gui Boratto, Ark, and this spring’s rather unfortunate minimal-tech hit “Sinnerman 2011” by Sean Miller and Daniel Dubb, which apparently took two people to make. (Civilization has so far escaped an Auto-Tuned strip-rap version of “See-Line Woman” or Deadmau5’s “Young Gifted and Black” but I could easily see Nicki Minaj as all “Four Women” at once.)

“You hear these newer versions of her, but some can sound so dated so quickly,” Kim said. “The originals never stop being fresh, alive. There’s nothing wrong with introducing her to new audiences in different ways. But Nina has always been with us, right there, so go out and hear her actual music, already.” *

SHE PUT A SPELL ON ME: THE MUSIC OF NINA SIMONE

Through July 17, Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.,

Sundays, 7 p.m., $30–$37.50

Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko

222 Mason, SF

www.therrazzroom.com

 

TRANNYSHACK: HEKLINA’S BIRTHDAY

The highest hog in dragland turns 103, and this night of greatest hits command performances will be an over-the-top trashtacular. Plus: Justin V. Bond from New York City, and probably some light rimming.

Fri/17, 9:30 p.m.–-3 a.m., $12–>$15. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.trannyshack.com

 

PRECOMPRESSION

It’s that time, again — time for the Burning Man gear-up and things that sound like this: “We invite you to live out this year’s theme in ways that manifest your personal journey.” I’m gonna be a pizza! Put it on the pizza! Put it on the pizza! It’s all good. With a holy helluva lot of DJs, theme installations, and fun-fur coughs.

Sat/18, 8 p.m.–4 a.m., $15 in “Playa finery,” $20 without. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

FLYING SAUCER BEACH PARTY

What do you get when you mix big-headed invaders, a slew of hot bodies, a ton of zombie-Martian makeup, and the “Hand Jive”? No, not Weinergate II: Night of the Living Tweets. Culturally invaluable burlesque crew Hubba Hubba Revue and a slew of groovy ghoulies play beach blanket bingo — but with laser guns! — at this ginchy all-day dress-up-and-rock-out bash.

Sun/16, 2 p.m.-8 p.m., $10 before 3 p.m., $12 after. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.hubbahubbarevue.com

Alexander’s Steakhouse

Andrew Lam
-
0
Alexander’s Steakhouse

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE “This doesn’t really look like a steakhouse,” a friend said recently while scanning the ambience of Alexander’s Steakhouse, which opened last fall in the fabulous Bacar space. Since Alexander’s isn’t an ordinary steakhouse, it’s probably okay that it doesn’t look like one. It’s probably additionally okay that it still looks more or less like Bacar: old brick, gleaming copper and chrome, a vault-like spaciousness, the wall of translucent glass cells in which bottles of wine are stored as if by giant oenophile bees. Even the lounge below decks is still there; it’s is a peaceful haven from the tumult upstairs, with its noticeable Hooters atmospherics.

The central novelty of Alexander’s (the original is in San Jose) is the sensibility of the chef, Jeffrey Stout, whose culinary poles are Japan and France. In this respect the kitchen’s nearest relation in town is probably 5A5, the splendid Asian-inflected steakhouse in the Barbary Coast. Stout’s wrinkle is to swirl some Gallic seasoning into the pot. And while most of the food’s cues seem to be taken from east Asia, the kitchen does turn out such sly treats as truffled french fries ($12 for a good-sized stack). As someone who’s not wild about truffles, despite or because of their expensive exclusivity, I was surprised to find this was an effective idea, with the earthy taste and scent of the truffles neatly nested in the crunchy, all-American bonhomie of the potatoes. Americanness isn’t a neglected theme here, either, incidentally, from Maine lobster to a credible salad of iceberg lettuce ($10), with Point Reyes blue cheese, a fine dice of smoked bacon, and a tangy buttermilk dressing I thought to describe as “ranch.”

“Please don’t call it ranch,” a voice across the table implored. Well, okay, but that’s what it was. Next to the lettuce wedge sat cubes of candied applewood smoked bacon ($5), like a stack of miniature bricks. In their meatiness they could easily have passed for Canadian bacon.

For a steakhouse, there’s a surprising amount of seafood, including Kusshi oysters ($4 each) and hamachi shots ($4 each), cubes of fish served like ceviche in martini glasses with an electric ensemble of chile coins, ginger, and truffled ponzu sauce. There was also, one evening, a main dish of halibut ($34), a perfectly nice filet that had a length of chicken skin roasted onto it. This wasn’t quite a bad idea, but it wasn’t a good one, either. Chicken skin would in theory provide some chicken fat, which is full of flavor and moistness, important considerations when dealing with fish. But halibut is a hardy fish that stands up well to chefly handling, and the chicken skin turned ornery in the roasting, like gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. Worst of all, the fish seemed to have dried out a bit during its time in the kitchen — not fatally, but still.

Well, you’re thinking, what fool orders fish at a steakhouse? The point of such a place must be the beef, and what grander beef is there than prime rib? Alexander’s offers it in two sizes: 14 ounces ($38) or 20 ounces ($42), the 20-ouncer seeming almost big enough to have been pulled from its own Cryovac pack. The meat, we were told, had been slow-roasted for hours and were presented with jus and a trio of horseradish creams.

(The service, incidentally, must be the among the wordiest in the city. Each item is described at length, with the particulars flying at you like buckshot. Complicating matters is the noisiness of the place, which is like being in the pit of the New York Stock Exchange when full and can make some of the servers hard to understand. I saw lips moving, I heard sounds, but I could not piece together a narrative. Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, I nodded, smiled, and hoped for the best.)

The beef looked splendid — rather on the purplish, rare side, but that was fine. It was also tough. This was a new prime-rib experience for me; in the past it’s always been tender, if not quite butter-like. Alexander’s meat had a good, rich flavor, but it was hard to separate flavor from texture when texture was calling attention to itself. I’ve often roasted my own prime rib at the holidays, but I’ve never had it show this kind of obstinacy.

Pastry chef Dan Huynh’s dessert menu is littered with French terms (financier, crème brûlée), along with something called “dark dimensions” ($12) that sounded like an episode of The Twilight Zone but turned out to be a miniature playground of chocolate, including logs of malted chocolate ice cream and a small bowl of popcorn. All was tender.

ALEXANDER’S STEAKHOUSE

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.;

Sun., 5:30–9 p.m.

448 Brannan, SF

(415) 495-1111

www.alexanderssteakhouse.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Cheese bits

Andrew Lam
-
1
Cheese bits

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS K. Chunk’s favorite restaurant is Caffe Venezia so that’s where we went for her third birthday. She was having a fruitful, productive, and all-around happy day until — just before dinner — she fell off the slide and cut her mouth. Now some things were going to be hard to eat, like crusty bread. Poor little carb loader.

I tried to distract her from her discomfort in the usual way: by talking about mine.

I’m kidding! We talked about love, of course. I had just come back from Nola for the umpteenth time, and was, well, in it. But I’m not going back for the rest of the year, because Hedgehog won’t be there. And Li’l Edible’s fambly already up and moved to Los Angeles, damn em, so I wouldn’t have any kind of babies to squeeze at all. Ergo: what’s the point?

Hedgehog is driving up to Pennsylvania as we speak, stopping to watch Minor League Baseball games along the way. She has work in New York, and then back to Nola, and then back to New York, and then we’re going to go camping a little out here before I leave the country for a couple months, to write.

She keeps score. She sent me a snapshot of the scorecard from last night’s single-A game in Hagerstown, Md., and in a blank square where she’d missed an at-bat she’d written: “BBQ pork.”

So you see?

“I see,” K. Chunk said. “Did she meet your mommy?”

K. Chunk’s ma and pa looked at me like, Yeah, what about that? Are you going to introduce her to your mom?

“Sure, if she wants to meet her,” I said. “I want everyone in the world to meet my mom. Then they’ll finally cut me some slack for being like I am.”

But it’s my dad who’s really going to hit it off with this pokey, spiny, pointy critter of mine when they cross paths at my nephew’s wedding in the fall. I wish I could say he’ll like her ’cause she obviously makes me happy and proud and inspires me to make songs and other things, and treats me with more care and respect than any of my other recent loves. But really it will be because she keeps score at baseball games.

Our food came.

Wagon wheels with butter sauce and lots of cheese for the birthday girl. Her older sister, whose birthday it wasn’t, had ordered wagon wheels too, but seemed to prefer eating all the little seafoods out of my linguine de mare. Her favorite — get this — was calamari. She might just have been trying to impress me, though, like when she sat with me on the couch in the dark, when she was three, and ate raw onions.

I was impressed with Venezia’s fare. I didn’t expect to like it that much, because it seemed at first glance like a place place, where the point was going to be the village square setting, complete with a fountain, muraled store fronts, fake pigeons, and line-hung laundry.

Cheese city, in other words. I loved it!

Mind you, it’s not cheap eats, but it’s good uns. The pasta was great, the tomato cream sauce was perfect, and the calamari, shrimp, clams, and mussels were not only fresh and delicious, but plentiful.

I got to taste some carbonara too. Next time I’m getting that. And I might not even wait for K. Chunk to turn four.

Venezia is a great place for a big group, and, of course, the childerns. They bring out little plates of carrot sticks, celery and olives for them right away, and they get jars of crayons to color on the paper tablecloths.

In this case, the kids were tired, bleeding from the mouth, and whatnot, so perhaps not surprisingly nobody finished their wagon wheels. Still, pennies were tossed into fountains, pigeons were spotted on rooftops, nourishment was achieved, and all-in-all somebody fantastically special to me turned three. So happy birthday to her.

And happy Father’s Day to her dad, and mine. And yours, I guess. Why not?

CAFFE VENEZIA

Mon.–Thu. 5:30–9 p.m.; Fri. 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Sat. 5–9:30 p.m.; Sun. 5–9 p.m.

1799 University, Berk.

(510) 849-4681

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

 

3348 with a bullet

Andrew Lam
-
3
3348 with a bullet

arts@sfbg.com

A name like writer James Boice’s no doubt washes up waves of adulation. His partner-in-assonance is a certain modernist master whom Boice, at 29, surely knows something about. The Good and the Ghastly (Scribner, 288 pages, $25), a wicked new novel, is the kind of towering bildungsroman-cum-crime fiction carnival that is both entertaining and well-crafted — something we’ve come to expect from writers like Chuck Palahniuk, but don’t usually get these days.

For all its explosions, the book isn’t mere spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Often contemporary imaginations of literary violence sink into the page-filling, glittery sands of ersatz — but James Boice, quite the contrarian, has conjured a brutal, sharp diamond in the literary rough. The Good feels fresh and urgent while culling themes as old as the Bible and as zeitgeist-y as The Sopranos: the neo-noir crime epic. Boice has certainly eaten his cultural vegetables; at the same time, he isn’t afraid to spew them up to create a pulpy piece of work that is contemporary and allusive. It’s enough to satisfy readers in need of instant gratification as well as those less ravenous who prefer to sip and savor.

The Good and the Ghastly is a mad picaresque, the story of antihero Junior Alvarez’s rise and fall as criminal overlord. It is the 34th century. Seminal cultural artifacts were lost in some kind of nuclear devastation centuries before, so Sarah Palin and Oprah are among this world’s spiritual and intellectual pundits. Someone called Kevin Lithis is the new Jesus Christ. Everybody believes Stephen King wrote the works of Shakespeare. Ikea tables are considered antiques. But down in the underbelly, an implacable race to power wages between the Italians and the Irish as Josefina, a good mother turned hardened revenge-seeker, sets out to avenge the death of her son — one of Junior’s victims — by assassinating Junior and his unctuous underlings. And how far she goes I won’t say, but it does involve, in one scene, a bazooka, a baby, and a priest’s garb. Yeah.

A peak at the epigraphs inaugurating The Good and the Ghastly give a real sense of Boice’s literary antecedents. There are quotes from Faulkner, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and the OJ Simpson trial. With this mixed bag of chestnuts as synecdoche, Boice traverses the furrows of the high- and lowbrow in his novel. At once, The Good deserves the literary fiction crown and yet, it is also, in its own right, a piece of glorious trash. It is ugly and sensational, yet Boice is an evocative writer who knows what he’s up to.

With no degree to speak of, he has made himself something of a literary wunderkind. When Boice began writing, he “purposefully wanted no formal education,” he explained to me in an e-mail. “I did not want to be a proficient and well-executed writer. I wanted to be a writer who writes in blood. I wanted to live on the margins of decency and write things that were dangerous and true.” After dropping out of college, he moved to San Francisco and holed up in a room at the Halcyon Hotel on Jones Street, writing, drinking coffee, listening to Blood on the Tracks. Now, he lives in New York City and “life is good. I’m happy as a pig in shit.” And he should be. He already has two novels — MVP and NoVA — under his belt. This third entry is set in northern Virginia, where Boice is from. “I feel it is a microcosm of America, the quintessential American place,” he said. But here, NoVA is run by gangsters.

“Part of the impetus for the book was to sort of acknowledge our culture’s twisted relationship to gangsters,” Boice said. “We glorify them. We do. We love Scarface and Goodfellas and The Godfather. It’s fucked up that we do, because gangsters are evil motherfuckers.” Boice says the best writing is “the work of the subconscious.” Guy’s got a sick subconscious.

Like The Godfather, Boice creates a kind of ensemble piece, oscillating between a few different characters and third- and first-person while also generating a universe peppered with striking verisimilitude. Pop cultural references abound, and Boice’s prose contains an arsenal of neologisms — “smuck” is the new “fuck,” Visa rules the world, and Bar With Pool Table is Junior’s haunt. Boice’s invocation of particular brand names and coinages — reminiscent of Anthony Burgess, Bret Easton Ellis, or more recently, Junot Díaz — underscores the kind of fully imagined, multifaceted literary universe that would sate science fiction or fantasy nerds. And like those contemporaries, Boice is doing satire here, although it never feels heavy-handed because the mores of this literary world mirror ours. The year 3348 isn’t looking so glamorous after all.

The novel’s balls-to-the-walls violence, in scenes that glide as giddily as Scorsese’s camera, has a point: “Violence is not fun to think about, but it exists and has a way of interrupting your peace and penetrating your isolation out of the blue whether you want it to or not,” Boice said. “I believe in describing violence in a violent way. Otherwise you’re not telling the truth.”

Great works of art are always something of a mystery, and Boice leads us unflinchingly into the dark while cutting believable characters out of cardboard archetypes, right down to their flesh and bone (literally). Boice saves his most packed punches for last, where he rains down a reckoning upon Junior and Josefina. But all the while, Boice sidesteps easy moral punctuations in favor of ambiguity and open questions. In the end, it’s like a brick through a windshield.

Groupon’s secret

Andrew Lam
-
0
Groupon’s secret

sarah@sfbg.com

A San Francisco-based bus tour operator who relies on the Internet to drum up business has filed a class action suit against Groupon, alleging that the deal-of-the-day website uses false advertising, or bait-and-switch tactics, to get customers to its site.

San Francisco Comprehensive Tours, LLC, which does business as San Francisco Shuttle Tours and Wine Country Tour Shuttle, originally filed suit March 17 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California “to stop false and misleading business and advertising acts and practices employed on Google.com by Groupon, Inc.”

In essence, the tour company claims that Groupon is dominating Google searches with offerings for discounted local tours — of, say, Alcatraz — that don’t actually exist.

On April 19, SFCT amended its complaint into a class action suit. The amended suit includes “all persons and entities in the United States who purchased Internet ads with Google for the purpose of advertising local tour company business information and whose tour businesses, including the cost of advertising on Google, have been affected by the false advertisements of Groupon which claim to provide discounted offers for tours but actually provide no such offers.”

Attorneys for Groupon have asked for an extension until June 13 to respond to SFCT’s complaint. Representatives for Groupon told the Guardian they can’t comment on the case.

SFCT’s attorneys claim that Groupon is arguing that this shouldn’t be a class action suit because everyone’s complaint is different.

“They’re spamming the Internet with false advertising that affects everyone’s ability to do business, so this is tailor-made for a class action suit,” said SFCT’s attorney Steve Williams of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy in Burlingame. “It’s not easy to take on Groupon now that it has gotten so big and can afford top-notch lawyers.” In other words, it could take a group to take on Groupon.

The suit comes as Groupon, which launched in Chicago in 2008 and now claims to have 70 million subscribers as well as annual revenues of $700 million and an estimated worth of $12.7 billion, prepares to go public. Investors are trying to figure out if Groupon has a sustainable business model.

Last December Groupon fueled speculation that it would offer an initial public offering (IPO) when it rejected Google’s jaw-dropping $5 billion-plus takeover bid. Spurned, Google responded by launching Google Deals, a Groupon clone, in Portland, Ore., this June and announcing plans to expand into San Francisco and other U.S. cities later this year.

But as Forbes magazine noted last August, Groupon founder Andrew Mason has “managed to build the fastest-growing company in Web history.” Groupon’s meteoric rise has been attributed to Mason’s decision to combine a familiar concept with a novel idea: customers only get Groupon’s deeply discounted deals if enough customers pay up in advance for the deal that day.

 

A BAIT AND SWITCH?

SFCT is accusing Groupon of manipulating ad space that it buys from Google to funnel visitors to its site and collect data about these visitors — while SFCT and other tour companies lose customers and have to spend more money on online advertising.

This isn’t the first time Groupon has been sued since it was launched. But the bulk of those cases revolved around claims that Groupon’s “Daily Deal” gift certificates have illegal expiration dates. By contrast, SFCT’s suit is about Groupon hurting other businesses through manipulating Google’s AdWords program, which is Google’s main advertising program and main source of revenue.

“It’s the means that Groupon uses that is harming legitimate businesses. But they argue that it’s the Internet, it’s all new, and therefore the rules don’t apply,” Williams claimed.

Even though Google has not been sued in this instance, Eric Goldman, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the school’s High Tech Law Institute, said that much of SCTF’s complaint is as much an indictment of Google’s platform as it is of Groupon’s practices. “Even though Google hasn’t been sued, I wonder if Google has or will make changes to its ad platform in response to the allegations in this complaint,” Goldman said.

Google spokesperson Diana Adair told the Guardian: “Unfortunately, we’re not able to comment.”

Williams claims that Groupon is gaming the algorithm that underpins Google’s AdWords program, which uses a combination of the number of click-throughs to a website, the closeness of an ad’s wording to an Internet user’s search terms, and the amount of money businesses are willing to bid on specific keywords to rank search results on Google.

“Groupon can’t say it’s just an AdWords problem,” Williams said. “It’s a manipulation.”

In its suit, SCTF claims it successfully bid on keywords such as “San Francisco tours,” “Alcatraz tours” and “Napa wine tours” for years. Then, in September 2010, Groupon started bidding on these terms as well — and though it rarely offered any discounted Alcatraz tours, it began to rank high in search results, driving up SFCT’s ad costs.

The suit notes that one time, in response to the keyword “Alcatraz tickets,” Groupon’s ad copy read “Alcatraz tickets — one ridiculously huge coupon a day: Do Alcatraz CA at 50 to 90 percent off.” Groupon’s actual ad that day was for discounted acting lessons.

“But they don’t care because they are trying to direct as many people as they can to their website,” Williams claimed.

Williams said he believes he can show that from the moment Groupon started placing ads for tours it didn’t sell, SFCT has suffered financially. “For someone like the plaintiff who is not about to put out an IPO, the frustration is that Groupon is funneling people into their direct mail campaign to develop huge databases and monitor what people like to buy so Groupon can target those people in future,” he said.

Williams told us he thinks he knows how Groupon will try to defend its strategy. “They’ll probably say that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing because if a business want to attract people to its product, it can talk to them about other products,” he said.

But he doubted they would try to blame it on Google. “Google would say that Groupon is taking advantage of AdWords,” Williams explained.

He sees Groupon’s strategy as a “bait and switch” tactic that’s illegal under the federal Lanham Act and California’s unfair competition and false advertising laws. “If I did this in a newspaper’s classified advertising section, it would be wrong. But the way Groupon looks at it, the normal rules don’t apply because it’s doing this online,” Williams said.

 

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Williams also noted that Groupon hasn’t disclosed all the other lawsuits it’s facing. “They view this as a pesky little thing. But most companies, unless the suits are patently without merit, will err on the side of caution, believing it’s better to disclose than fail to disclose,” he said. “Or maybe they are thinking, ‘Soon we’re going to be making $30 billion, so who cares?'<0x2009>”

Goldman notes that SFCT’s class action adds extra complexity for its lawyers. “Groupon will likely try to prevent the class from forming in addition to attacking the substance of the arguments. This is not a quick-and-easy win for the plaintiffs. In many cases, companies like Groupon decide to settle rather than fight because it’s a costly defense, even if they ultimately win.”

“The starting point of this suit is simple enough, namely that businesses need to tell the truth in advertising,” he said. “The complaint alleges that Groupon wasn’t telling the truth because it says X in its ad but when you get there it says Y, which has nothing to do with X.”

Goldman also predicted that, to the extent that SFCT’s suit is truly about an algorithm problem, it won’t be helpful to Groupon. “But that doesn’t mean the plaintiff will win,” he added, noting that establishing false advertising is tricky.

The plaintiffs will have to establish that their parties are competitive and that their businesses were harmed, Goldman said. He also observed that this particular class action suit points to a broader range of questions about the legitimacy of Groupon’s business practices and problems with Google’s AdWords platform.

Goldman pointed to a lawsuit filed June 7 against Amazon suggesting that Amazon had an algorithmic tool for buying ads and that perhaps the tool had gone awry. In that case, Maxfield, a New York City company that markets and distributes the magnetic desk toys called Buckyballs, alleges that beginning May 5 when people searched online for “Buckyballs,” an ad popped up for Buckyballs at Amazon. But when customers clicked on this ad, they wound up on a website that purports to be a listing for Buckyballs but is actually an ad for Maxfield’s competitors’ products.

Goldman also said there is a growing trend of plaintiff law firms feasting on Internet companies, especially in Silicon Valley. “They are watching for these companies to make a mistake and are pouncing on them. It’s possible that suits are mushrooming into class action suits because someone is looking to get more money,” he said.

But in SFCT’s case, Goldman noted, “the plaintiff’s story makes sense.”

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
-
7
Editor’s notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

I heard Phil Ginsburg, the head of the San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks, on KQED’s Forum June 13, talking about the state of the public parks, and he got the usual angry calls. One person wanted to know why it costs so much to play on the city’s ball fields. Another wanted to know why the city is working with a private foundation to put artificial turf and big lights out at the end of Golden Gate Park. (I still don’t understand why the baseball field at Holly Park is always — always — locked and nobody seems to be allowed to play on it at all. Except the people who jump the fence. Not that my kids and I would know anything about that.)

Ginsburg did his best to duck and weave and answer — and portray this as a tough situation with a lack of public resources. But what he didn’t say is that the overall mission of the department has changed over the past few years. Dramatically. And it follows an alarming national trend that, ironically, started right here in San Francisco, with the Presidio National Park.

When the Sixth Army moved out of the Presidio and the land reverted to the National Park Service, Republicans in Congress threatened to sell it off. The NPS was short of money to develop and maintain the place, so Rep. Nancy Pelosi came up with a plan. She turned the park into a semiprivate enclave run by a board of real-estate developers with a mandate to become economically self-sufficient. Step one: give that notable Marin County pauper George Lucas a $50 million tax break to build a commercial office building in the middle of a national park.

It was a terrible precedent. Public parks aren’t supposed to be money-making enterprises. But it took hold — and now Ginsburg is following the same model.

Rec and Parks these days is all about commercialization. The recreation centers are leased to private operations. More and more park space is going to private food vendors. The Stowe Lake concession is set to become an upscale café (run by an out-of-town outfit). The City Fields Foundation, run by the sons of Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher, is taking over soccer fields. It costs money for tourists to visit the arboretum.

I know: there’s no cash, the city’s broke, and Ginsburg says this is the only way to keep the department running. But it’s really dangerous — because once you treat the public commons as a commodity, you’ve crossed a line. And it’s hard to go back.

CPMC’s stunning arrogance

Andrew Lam
-
0
CPMC’s stunning arrogance

The San Francisco City Planning Commission hearing June 9 on California Pacific Medical Center’s expansion plans was remarkable — both in the comments that the commissioners had and in the mind-boggling arrogance of the giant hospital chain.

CPMC wants to build a massive new hospital and medical office building on Van Ness Avenue and rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission. The plans aren’t even close to complying with city planning codes — the Sutter Health affiliate will need city approval to exceed height limits on Van Ness (by more than 100 feet); a modification of the housing construction requirement for new offices; permission to demolish existing housing units; permission to take over a part of San Jose Avenue — and a lot more. In other words, CPMC is asking a lot from the city.

And since this nonprofit controls four major hospitals in the city, its future development decisions need to be considered in the context of San Francisco’s overall health care needs.

It’s entirely reasonable that the city ask CPMC for a development agreement that provides benefits to city residents. Mayor Ed Lee has made it clear that the approval of this project will depend on whether CPMC can address affordable housing, healthcare access for low-income people, a secure future for St. Luke’s, workforce development, and transportation impacts. Lee’s proposals are more than reasonable: he’s asking that CPMC pay the standard fee for affordable housing required of any major commercial developer; increase its level of charity care (now an abysmal 0.99 percent) to the average of other regional hospitals (2.3 percent); increase its Medical acceptance rate; and maintain St. Luke’s as an acute care facility with an emergency room. Union nurses are asking that Sutter deal with them in good faith.

But Dr. Warren Browner, CEO of CPMC, showed little interest in working with the city. The demands are way too high, he told the commissioners, insisting that it was unreasonable to ask the hospital to contribute that much to affordable housing. He acted as if CMPC was somehow entitled to move forward — at its own proposed schedule — and that all of these city demands were nonsense.

That’s not going to work.

A clear majority of the commissioners got the point. As Ron Miguel pointed out, Sutter is a nonprofit — and its tax-exempt status mandates a certain level of social responsibility. Every big commercial developer has to pay for housing and transit impacts. Gwyneth Borden and Bill Sugaya noted that hospital officials knew full well what the planning rules were when they bought the Van Ness site.

This is a $2.5 billion project. Community benefits need to be a significant part of the final plan. If anything, Lee’s proposals are too limited (Sutter should agree to protect St. Luke’s for 50 years, not 20). The planning commissioners should stick to their positions — this project is out of control, and if Browner wants to see it built, he needs to come back with a new set of numbers, and a new attitude.

Stage Listings

Maria Poblet
-
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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. 

THEATER

OPENING

Assisted Living: The Musical Imperial Palace, 818 Washington, SF; 1-888-88-LAUGH, www.assistedlivingthemusical.com. $79.59-99.50 (includes dim sum). Opens Sat/18. Runs Sat-Sun, noon (also Sun, 5pm). Through July 31. Rick Compton and Betsy Bennett’s comedy takes on “the pleasures and perils of later life.”

Indulgences in the Louisville Harem Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $20-40. Opens Thurs/17, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through July 30. Two spinster sisters find unlikely beaux in Off Broadway West Theatre’s production of John Orlock’s play.

ONGOING

All Atheists Are Muslim Stage Werx, 533 Sutter, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Runs Sun, 7pm. Through July 10. Zahra Noorbakhsh returns with her timely comedy.

Assassins Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.roltheatre.com. $20-36. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 25. Whether the world truly needed a Sondheim musical about the joys of political assassination or not is debatable, but as long as there is one it might as well go for the gusto. Brought to you by Ray of Light Theatre, the folks behind last year’s production of Jerry Springer the Opera, Assassins imbues society’s greatest misfits with quirky relatability. From Joel Roster’s hangdog portrayal of Leon Czolgosz (McKinley’s assassin) to Lisa-Marie Newton’s frazzled Sara Jane Moore (attempted to off Ford), Danny Cozart’s foul-mouthed, Santa Claus-suited, Samuel Byck (out for Nixon) to Gregory Sottolano’s loopy Charles Guiteau (bagged Garfield), the solid cast examines the assassination impulse in a breezy, borderline goofy manner. The production takes a more somber tone when Lee Harvey Oswald (Michael Scott Wells) takes the stage, encouraged by John Wilkes Booth (Derrick Silva) to turn a presumptive suicide attempt into one of assassination, while the other assassins beg him to legitimize their dark impulse through his action. The pacing works best when at its most frenetic, though Silva’s Booth, a pokerfaced elder statesman, lends an air of balancing gravitas. But the true stars of the show might well be the ultra-tight, eight-person house band playing a wide variety of American musical styles from the last 150 years, confidently directed by David Möschler.(Nicole Gluckstern) *Blue Man Group Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor, SF; www.tickets.shnsf.com. $50-200. Wed/15-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. Jaw-slackening feats of circus skill combine with elaborate otherworldly percussion, subtle fresh-off-the-spaceship clowning, and of course lots of blue body paint in the updated version of the long-running now internationally strewn multi-group Blue Man Group. Mutatis mutandis, it’s a two decades–old formula. But its driving, eyeball-popping musical spectacle and wry, deft way with mass culture send-ups and (albeit rather pushy) audience participation can’t help but entertain. (Avila)

Fighting Mac! Thick House Theatre, 1695 18th St, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.therhino.org. $15-30. Wed/15-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 3pm. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s play about real-life queer British general Hector MacDonald.

“Fury Factory 2011” Various venues and prices; www.brownpapertickets.com. Through July 12. Over 30 Bay Area and national companies participate in this bi-annual theater festival.

*Little Shop of Horrors Boxcar Theatre Playhouse. 505 Natoma; www.boxcartheatre.org. $20-50. Tues-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 26. From the moment the irritable Mr. Mushnik (Alex Shafer) chases his temp clerk (Amy Lizardo) out the lobby door and onto the street for the opening number, it’s clear that Boxcar Theatre’s production of Little Shop of Horrors is going to be unique. Boasting an energetic cast, an ingenious set, a few updated lyrics, and a marvelously menacing man-eating plant, Little Shop is engaging enough to distract from the somewhat awkwardly-mixed wireless mikes, and the fact that the doo-wop trio (Nikki Arias, Lauren Spencer, and Kelly Sanchez), though each individually blessed with awesome pipes, don’t always vocally blend well together. But they play their streetwise characters to a tough and tender T, while the awkwardly schlubby Seymour Kleborn (John R. Lewis) and his battered muse Audrey (Bryn Laux) tend Seymour’s mysterious botanical discovery and their burgeoning love affair with real sweetness. Everyone’s favorite badass dentist is played to sadistic perfection by Kevin Clarke, who rolls up Natoma Street on an actual motorcycle, while the able chorus morphs from skid row bums to cynical ad execs without missing a musical beat. As usual, Boxcar Theatre’s design team is a strong one, particularly in the case of puppet designers Greg Frisbee and Thomas John, whose trio of Audrey Jrs. are superbly executed. (Gluckstern)

Much Ado About Lebowski Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; www.sfindie.com. $25. Fri-Sun, 8pm. Through June 28. SF IndieFest and the Primitive Screwheads perform a Shakespeare-inflected take on the Coen Brothers’ classic film.

The Pride New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 10. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the West Coast premiere of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s love-triangle time warp drama.

Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival EXIT on Taylor, 227 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. Free. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through June 25. Cutting Ball Theater closes its 11th season with a festival of experimental plays, including works by Eugenie Chan, Rob Melrose, and Annie Elias.

The Stops New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 25. New Conservatory Theater Center presents a musical comedy set in San Francisco.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 25. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennessee Williams tale.

*Vice Palace: The Last Cockettes Musical Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 31. Hot on the high heels of a 22-month run of Pearls Over Shanghai, the Thrillpeddlers are continuing their Theatre of the Ridiculous revival with a tits-up, balls-out production of the Cockettes’ last musical, Vice Palace. Loosely based on the terrifyingly grim “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, part of the thrill of Palace is the way that it weds the campy drag-glamour of Pearls Over Shanghai with the Thrillpeddlers’ signature Grand Guignol aesthetic. From an opening number set on a plague-stricken street (“There’s Blood on Your Face”) to a charming little cabaret about Caligula, staged with live assassinations, an undercurrent of darkness runs like blood beneath the shameless slapstick of the thinly-plotted revue. As plague-obsessed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her right-hand “gal” Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz) try to distract a group of stir-crazy socialites from the dangers outside the villa walls, the entertainments range from silly to salacious: a suggestively-sung song about camel’s humps, the wistful ballad “Just a Lonely Little Turd,” a truly unexpected Rite of Spring-style dance number entitled “Flesh Ballet.” Sumptuously costumed by Kara Emry, cleverly lit by Nicholas Torre, accompanied by songwriter/lyricist (and original Cockette) Scrumbly Koldewyn, and anchored by a core of Thrillpeddler regulars, Palace is one nice vice. (Gluckstern)

Wish We Were Here New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $20-32. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 25. Slacker meets genie in this Michael Phillis comedy.

BAY AREA

Care of Trees Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-26. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through June 26. E. Hunter Spreen’s Care of Trees, which is receiving an inventively bold world premiere production in Shotgun’s capable hands is at once ambitious yet unsatisfying. The basic plot — “girl meets boy then turns into a tree &ldots; sort of” — is a quirky premise full of untapped potential. With so many possible interpretations of Georgia’s (Liz Sklar) unique predicament, the one that seems most predominant is an unwitting critique of the banality of the self-realization movement. “If I don’t do &ldots; what I see as right, then I’ll be lost to myself,” she tells her understandably frustrated husband Travis (Patrick Russell), as she abruptly shuts off her empathy-meter and bids him to do the same. During isolated pockets of dramatic tension, Georgia is stabbed in an altercation with a tree-hugger, suffers a series of violent seizures, is shuttled off to a battery of clueless doctors, and granted an audience with a Peruvian shaman, yet the underlying significance of actually turning into a tree, is barely explored, certainly never understood. Sklar and Russell turn in standout performances as the forest-crossed lovers, and the canopy of Nina Ball’s inventive set soars, but overall this Tree could stand to develop some stronger roots. (Gluckstern)

Distracted 529 South Second St, San Jose; (408) 295-4200, www.cltc.org. $15-35. Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 2pm. City Lights Theater Company of San Jose presents a drama written by Lisa Loomer and directed by Lisa Mallette.

East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Aug. 7. Don Reed’s hit solo comedy receives one last extension before Reed debuts his new show (a sequel to East 14th) in the fall.

Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; (415) 388-5208, www.marintheatre.org. $32-53. Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs/16, 1pm; June 25, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7:30pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through June 26. Marin Theatre Company performs Albee’s most divisive play, an erotic thriller-cum-comic allegory.

Let Me Down Easy Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $17-73. Tues and Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed, 7pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 26. Anna Deavere Smith performs her latest solo show.

Metamorphosis Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Previews Wed/15, 8pm. Opens Thurs/16, 8pm. Runs Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 17. Aurora Theatre Company performs a terrifying yet comic adaptation of Kafka’s classic by David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson.

[title of show] TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $24-42. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through June 26. TheatreWorks performs a new musical about musicals by Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen.

*Welcome Home, Julie Sutter Marion E. Greene Black Box Theater, 531 19th St, Oakl; www.theatrefirst.com. $10-30. Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 2pm. On her first day back from Iraq, African American Marine, mother, and amputee Jenny Sutter (a pensive, quietly affecting Omoze Idehenre) sits in Beckett-like stasis at a bus depot operated by a wound-up cockroach-crazed attendant (Joe Estlack), until a chatty middle-aged woman named Louise (Nancy Carlin), recovering from addiction to everything, convinces her to come to Slab City. The off-the-grid settlement of semi-permanent campers and kooks on the desert edge of Los Angeles turns out to have once been a Marine base, much to the dismay of traumatized and anguished Jenny, who can’t work up the courage to answer the cell phone calls from her mother and children, let alone return to them. A physically handicapped internet-certified preacher (Brett David Williams) meanwhile takes it upon himself to help Jenny, with assistance from sometime girlfriend and recidivist Louise and a local soi-disant shrink (Karol Strempke). They throw a public coming-home ceremony for the cast-off vet. It’s Slab City’s socially awkward and pugnacious jewelry maker Donald (a sharp Jon Tracy) who challenges the militarism and religious pabulum in this enterprise, even as he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the deeply wounded Jenny. Nevertheless, playwright Julie Marie Myatt’s involving story (smoothly and engagingly directed for TheatreFIRST by Domenique Lozano) carries a real if not quite heavy-handed spiritual dimension, peppered with traditional gospel tunes (heard in Johnny cash recordings during scene transitions but echoed by cast members at other times) and undergirded by doubting Jenny’s unconscious quest for signs of a seemingly absent Christian god. What she finds is a community of equally messed up but compassionate souls, and that’s enough. (Avila)

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; (415) 863-9834, www.odctheatre.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. $15-20. The company performs its 2011 home season, with Heelomali, Alonesome/Twosome, and Solo Lo Que Fue.

“Fauxgirls!” Kimo’s, 1351 Polk, SF; (415) 885-4535. Sat, 10pm. Free. The drag revue celebrates its 10th anniversary with Victoria Secret, Chanel, Davida Ashton, and more.

“Fresh Meat Festival” Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF; www.freshmeatproductions.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. $15-20. Transgender and queer performers take the stage at this 10th annual festival.

“Garage All-Stars II” Garage, 975 Howard, SF; www.975howard.com. Sat-Sun, 8pm, $10-20. Part of the National Queer Arts Festival, this performance includes new choreography by Sara Yassky and Tim Rubel Human Shakes.

“Here: An Evening of Work by Katherine Kawthorne” Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St, SF; (415) 298-2000, www.ftloose.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm, $10-15. Multimedia dance works including Living Line, Sferic, and Lumen.

kDub Dance CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.counterpulse.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm. $16-20. The Los Angeles company makes its SF debut with the evening-length dance work Fruit.

“Radar Spectacle” Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri, 7pm. $10-100. Support the 2011 Radar LAB Writers’ Retreat by checking out this event, with performances by Cintra Wilson, Fauxnique, Keith Hennessy, Lovewarz, Lil Miss Hot Mess, and more.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. Sat, noon; Sun, 1pm. Free-$24. The third weekend of the 33rd annual festival includes events celebrating the Rumson Ohlone tribe plus dance set to the words of transcendent poets.

“Trouble In Mind” Zeum Theatre, 221 Fourth St., SF; (415) 474-8800. Mon, 8pm, $30. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre benefits from this staged reading of Alice Childress’ play, with Peter Coyote, Geoff Hoyle, Margo Hall, and others. 

Rep Clock

Maria Poblet
-
0

Schedules are for Wed/15–Tues/21 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

BALBOA 3620 Balboa, SF; www.balboamovies.com. $20. “Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema:” Coppelia, performed by Bolshoi Ballet, Wed, 7:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. •Repulsion (Polanski, 1965), Wed, 2:50, 7, and Bunny Lake Is Missing (Preminger, 1965), Wed, 4:50, 9. “Frameline 35: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival,” June 16-26. Visit www.frameline.org for complete schedule and ticket information.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $10.25. These Amazing Shadows (Mariano and Norton, 2011), Sun, 7. With filmmakers and special guest Peter Coyote in person. The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011), June 17-23, call for times. The Trip (Winterbottom, 2010), June 17-23, call for times. The Cove (Psihoyos, 2010), Tues, 7. This event, featuring a live performance by Bob Weir, $40; proceeds benefit Earth Island Institute and SaveJapanDolphins.org.

“FILM NIGHT IN THE PARK” This week: Old Mill Park, 300 block of Throckmorton, Mill Valley; (415) 272-2756, www.filmnight.org. Donations accepted. How to Train Your Dragon (DeBlois and Sanders, 2010), Fri, 8. Dolores Park, Dolores and 19th St, SF. Caddyshack (Ramis, 1980), Sat, 8.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $10. “Asian Movie Madness” •Lovers in Turbulent Days (1980), and Rorita Couple, Thurs, call for times. For mature audiences only.

MARSH ARTS CENTER 2120 Allston, Berk; www.culturedisabilitytalent.org. $5-20. “Superfest 2011 International Disability Film Festival,” Fri, 11am-4pm; Sat, 10:30am-2:30pm; Sun, 11am-4pm. Films that portray the disability experience.

OPERA PLAZA 601 Van Ness, SF; www.anightmaretoremember.com. $12. “A Nightmare to Remember Film Festival,” horror films, Sat, 7-10.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “The Cult of the Kuchars:” “Beyond Melodrama: Short Films By George and Mike Kuchar,” Wed, 7; “Artist Friends: Videos by George and Mike Kuchar,” Sun, 4:30; “Mike Kuchar Selects:” Empty Canvas (Damiani, 1963), Sun, 6:50. “Arthur Penn: A Liberal Helping:” The Chase (1966), Thurs, 7; Alice’s Restaurant (Penn, 1969), Sat, 6; Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sat, 8:40. “Japanese Divas:” Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953), Fri, 7; Odd Obsession (Ichikawa, 1959), Fri, 9.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. The Cockettes (Weber and Weissman, 2002), Wed, 2, 7:15, 9:30. Insidious (Wan, 2011), Thurs-Sat, 7:15, 9:25. Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1988), Sun-Mon, 7:30 (also Sun, 2, 4:45). “Midnites for Maniacs:” •Broadway Danny Rose (Allen, 1984), June 21-22, 7:15; The Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen, 1985), June 21-22, 9:15 (also June 22, 2). Single film, $7; double feature, $10.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “Another Hole in the Head Film Festival,” Wed-Thurs. Horror, sci-fi, and fantasy films; visit www.sfindie.com for complete schedule. Meek’s Cutoff (Reichardt, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Pooley, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 9. Making the Boys (Robey, 2010), June 17-23, call for times. “Frameline 35: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival,” June 17-23. Visit www.frameline.org for complete schedule and ticket information. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior (Geyer, 1971/2008), Thurs, 7:30; Sun, 2.

Film Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

FRAMELINE

The 35th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 16-26 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF. For tickets (most films $9-$15) and complete schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

The Art of Getting By The Art of Getting By is all about those confusing, mixed-up and apparently sexually frustrating months before high school graduation. George (Freddie Highmore) is a trench coat-wearing misanthrope — an old soul, as they say — whose parents and teachers are always trying to put him inside a box and tell him how to think. He finds a kindred sprit in Sally (Emma Roberts) who smokes and watches Louis Malle films. Hot. Heavily scored by the now-ancient songs of early ’00s blog bands, it may all sound like indie bullshit but this one has charm and wit despite its post-trend package. Like a sad little crayon, Highmore is a competent Michael Cera surrogate du jour. Writer-director Gavin Wiesen embraces hell of clichés, but he suitably sums up a generational angst along the way. The film may not always feel real, but it does have real feeling. Look out for great performances from Blair Underwood and Alicia Silverstone. (1:24) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

*Beautiful Boy Save the children, but pity the parents. Director-cowriter Shawn Ku’s Beautiful Boy is one of two recent films concerning parents of kids who go on school killing sprees, and it’ll get potentially shortchanged due to the forthcoming We Need to Talk About Kevin‘s head-turning cast and its Hitchcockian literary source material. Still, Beautiful Boy shines in its own humble way, by dint of its quiet sense of integrity and refusal to pander. The bone-deep unhappiness suffusing the family concerned was present long before 18-year-old college student Sammy (Kyle Gallner) picked up a gun, killed more than a dozen people, then took his own life. Surviving parents Kate (Maria Bello) and Bill (Michael Sheen) already kept separate bedrooms under the same roof and led separate lives, with Bill pasting an unsettling grin on for work and Maria relentlessly pushing to make everything all right, neither noticing the barely perceptible warning signs that their only son was succumbing to despair. Belying its title, Beautiful Boy is less focused on the desperate youngster than on the adults attempting to cope with the horror he’s wrought — not necessarily cleaning up after him or picking up the pieces, but somehow finding their way through their own explosive responses. Bolstered by fine performances by Bello and Sheen, it’s yet another installment in the post-9/11 cinema of trauma — this time, attempting to imagine the unimaginable and to comprehend a kind of healing. (1:40) SF Center. (Chun)

Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds stars as the green-suited hero. (1:45) Four Star, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki.

Just Like Us You want to like Just Like Us, Egyptian American director-comedian Ahmed Ahmed’s documentary charting his tour of the Middle East. The comic gets credit for touching on potentially thought-provoking material while fishing for laughs amid a potential minefield of religious and cultural taboos and pushing audience boundaries in countries where national borders are hard-fought and loaded with controversy. Journeying from Dubai to Beirut to Ahmed’s ancestral homeland, the friendly band of merrymakers, including female comic Whitney Cummings, deals with self-censorship, sight-sees, and learns what kind of jokes fly with an audience unaccustomed to the conventions of standup comedy. Unfortunately the doc feels self-interested and suffers from the fact we hear so little from the ordinary people in the cheap seats. The hope is that Ahmed and his crew would break it all down and crack it open, but just as its title and its comedians’ jokes go, Just Like Us prefers to play it safe, underlining a good-natured message of inclusion and unity, never quite hitting the smart, sharp commentary that the best comedy aspires to. (1:12) Lumiere. (Chun)

*Last Mountain Appalachia remains a gorgeous natural refuge — at least those parts not razored by coal-mining corporations who dynamite the tops off hills in order to access mineral deposits. Flooding, deforestation, chemical contamination, and human ailments including brain tumors are among the significant accusations levied against greedy privatizations by Bill Haney’s documentary. On the other hand, a huge amount of the nation’s electricity hies from the region’s coal. Gorgeously photographed, Last Mountain is a stark portrait of political corruption rolling back all environmental regulation. Who’s the major reactionary villain here? Duh: W. At times the movie seems overmuch a promotion for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a croak-voiced environmental activist who objects to the spoilage of his privileged childhood vacation playground. But he’s right — at least ideologically. (To his credit, he calls out corporations as the dominating players in “our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery.”) For locals who’ve both profited and suffered from strip-mining (the area’s cancer rate is sky-high, sometimes-fatal workplace violations ditto), as well as imported civil disobedience protestors, the reality is much harsher. (1:35) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Making the Boys In 1968 The Boys in the Band revolutionized Broadway and opened a lot of minds by being a hit play (and film) about NYC homosexuals. Yet on the cusp of “Gay Liberation” and for many years thereafter, much of the actual gay community hugely objected to author Mart Crowley’s fictive portrait of its ‘mos as insular, shallow, classist, bitchy, and guilt-ridden. It was (as interviewee Edward Albee notes here) a picture ideally suited to straight Broadway audiences who lined up to see queers rendered pitiful if still identifiably human. Crayton Robey’s absorbing documentary chronicles the bumpy road of Boys and its creators — Crowley never had another hit, floundering until he moved into TV series scripting. The cast of the 1970 movie version, directed by William Friedkin (one year before The French Connection, followed by The Exorcist), saw their big break turn into a virtual industry blacklisting. Exceptions were unimpeachably heterosexual thespians Laurence Luckinbill and Cliff Gorman, who only “played” gay. This engrossing document recalls a work that trailblazed, was rejected as politically correct, then re embraced as an important touchstone in gay visibility and self-empowerment. (1:33) Roxie. (Harvey)

Mr. Popper’s Penguins Jim Carrey plays a New Yorker who suddenly finds himself taking care of six penguins. Wackiness ensues. (1:35) Presidio.

*The Trip See “In Spite of Himself.” (1:52) Clay, Smith Rafael.

*Trollhunter Yes, The Troll Hunter riffs off The Blair Witch Project (1999) with both whimsy and, um, rabidity. Yes, you may gawk at its humongoid, anatomically correct, three-headed trolls, never to be mistaken for grotesquely cute rubber dolls, Orcs, or garden gnomes again. Yes, you may not believe, but you will find this lampoon of reality TV-style journalism, and an affectionate jab at Norway’s favorite mythical creature, very entertaining. Told that a series of strange attacks could be chalked up to marauding bears, three college students (Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, and Johanna Morck) strap on their gumshoes and choose instead to pursue a mysterious poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen) who repeatedly rebuffs their interview attempts. Little did the young folk realize that their late-night excursions following the hunter into the woods would lead at least one of them to rue his or her christening day. Ornamenting his yarn with beauty shots of majestic mountains, fjords, and waterfalls, Norwegian director-writer André Ovredal takes the viewer beyond horror-fantasy — handheld camera at the ready — and into a semi-goofy wilderness of dark comedy, populated by rock-eating, fart-blowing trolls and overshadowed by a Scandinavian government cover-up sorta-worthy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). (1:30) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Chun)

ONGOING

*L’Amour Fou Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later. Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton. Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) but also forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed, but this is clearly Bergé’s show. (1:43) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) Balboa, Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

Bride Flight Who doesn’t love a sweeping Dutch period piece? Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is pure melodrama soup, enough to give even the most devout arthouse-goer the bloats. Emigrating from post-World War II Holland to New Zealand with two gal pals, the sweetly staid Ada (Karina Smulders) falls for smarm-ball Frank (Waldemar Torenstra, the Dutchman’s James Franco) and kind of joins the mile high club to the behest of her conscience. The women arrive with emotional baggage and carry-ons of the uterine kind. As the harem adjusts to the country mores of the Highlands, Frank tries a poke at all of them in a series of sex scenes more moldy than smoldery. This Flight, set to a plodding score and stuffy mise-en-scene, never quite leaves the runway. Not to mention the whole picture, pale as a corpse, resembles one of those old-timey photographs of your great grandma’s wedding. These kinds of pastoral romances ought to be put out to, well, pasture. (2:10) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) Balboa, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*The Double Hour Slovenian hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) and security guard Guido (Filippo Timi) are two lonely people in the Italian city of Turin. They find one another (via a speed-dating service) and things are seriously looking up for the fledgling couple when calamity strikes. This first feature by music video director Giuseppe Capotondi takes a spare, somber approach to a screenplay (by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo) that strikingly keeps raising, then resisting genre categorization. Suffice it to say their story goes from lonely-hearts romance to violent thriller, ghost story, criminal intrigue, and yet more. It doesn’t all work seamlessly, but such narrative unpredictability is so rare at the movies these days that The Double Hour is worth seeing simply for the satisfying feeling of never being sure where it’s headed. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Everything Must Go Just skirting the edge of sentimentality and banality, Everything Must Go aims to do justice by its source material: Raymond Carver’s rueful, characteristically spare short story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” from the 1988 collection Where I’m Calling From. And it mostly succeeds with some restraint from its director-writer Dan Rush, who mainly helmed commercials in the past. Everything Must Go gropes toward a cinematic search for meaning for the Willy Lomans on both sides of the camera — it’s been a while since Will Ferrell attempted to stretch beyond selling a joke, albeit often extended ones about masculinity, and go further as an actor than 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. The focus here turns to the despairing, voyeuristic whiskey drinker of Carver’s highly-charged short story, fills in the blanks that the writer always carefully threaded into his work, and essentially pushes him down a crevasse into the worst day of his life: Ferrell’s Nick has been fired and his wife has left him, changing the locks, putting a hold on all his bank accounts, and depositing his worldly possessions on the lawn of their house. Nick’s car has been reclaimed, his neighbors are miffed that he’s sleeping on his lawn, the cops are doing drive-bys, and he’s fallen off the wagon. His only reprieve, says his sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), is to pretend to hold a yard sale; his only help, a neighborhood boy Kenny who’s searching for a father figure (Christopher Jordan Wallace, who played his dad Notorious B.I.G. as a child in 2009’s Notorious) and the new neighbor across the street (Rebecca Hall). Though Rush expands the characters way beyond the narrow, brilliant scope of Carver’s original narrative, the urge to stay with those fallible people — as well as the details of their life and the way suburban detritus defines them, even as those possessions are forcibly stripped away — remains. It makes for an interesting animal of a dramedy, though in Everything Must Go‘s search for bright spots and moments of hope, it’s nowhere near as raw, uncompromising, and tautly loaded as Carver’s work can be. (1:36) SF Center. (Chun)

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Incendies When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. (2:10) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer Try not trying so hard, Judy Moody. The tween paperback fave gets an OTT makeover for the cineplex, as director John Schultz and company throw as many bells, whistles, silly new slang, kooky gruesome colors, CGI twinkles, sing-along subtitles, and zany hijinks into the mix as possible, in vain hope of keeping kiddie eyeballs from drifting. Bright-eyed redhead Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) — think Pippi Longstocking, only way more annoying — is stuck at home for the season, sans most of her pals and parentals, scuttling her plans for a Not Bummer Summer filled with weirdly competitive thrill points (her very own invention) and pointless faux adventures (ditto). Her cute, arty, wack-eee Aunt Opal (Heather Graham) offers some diverting solace, but the summer seems to find its groove only after Judy slimily co-opts younger bro Stink’s (Parris Mosteller) obsession with Bigfoot. Lovers of visceral kid stuff will appreciate Judy and mob’s affection for pee and puke references — too bad the entire enterprise just reeks of very bummer desperation. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Kung Fu Panda 2 The affable affirmations of 2008’s Kung Fu Panda take a back seat to relentlessly elaborate, gag-filled action sequences in this DreamWorks Animation sequel, which ought to satisfy kids but not entertain their parents as much as its predecessor. Po (voiced by Jack Black), the overeating panda and ordained Dragon Warrior of the title, joins forces with a cavalcade of other sparring wildlife to battle Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), a petulant peacock whose arsenal of cannons threatens to overwhelm kung fu. But Shen is also part of Po’s hazy past, so the panda’s quest to save China is also a quest for self-fulfillment and “inner peace.” There’s less character development in this installment, though the growing friendship between Po and the “hardcore” Tigress (Angelina Jolie) is occasionally touching. The 3-D visuals are rarely more than a gimmick, save for a series of eye-catching flashbacks in the style of cel-shaded animation. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Sam Stander)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Balboa, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides The last time we saw rascally Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), he was fighting his most formidable enemy yet: the potentially franchise-ending Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). The first Pirates movie (2003) was a surprise critical success, earning Depp his first-ever Oscar nomination; subsequent entries, though no less moneymaking, suffered from a detectable case of sequel-itis. Overseeing this reboot of sorts is director Rob Marshall (2002’s Chicago), who keeps the World’s End notion of sending Jack to find the Fountain of Youth, but adds in a raft of new faces, including Deadwood‘s Ian McShane (as Blackbeard) and lady pirate Penélope Cruz. The story is predictably over-the-top, with the expected supernatural elements mingling with sparring both sword-driven and verbal — as well as an underlying theme about faith that’s nowhere near as fun as the film’s lesser motifs (revenge, for one). It’s basically a big swirl of silly swashbuckling, nothing more or less. And speaking of Depp, the fact that the oft-ridiculous Sparrow is still an amusing character can only be chalked up to the actor’s own brand of untouchable cool. If it was anyone else, Sparrow’d be in Austin Powers territory by now. (2:05) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Le Quattro Volte There are “documentaries” that use staged or fictive elements to fib, and others toward some greater truth. Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte is of the second type. You might well question just how much of this “docu-essay” simply occurred on camera, or occurred when/how it did for the camera. But that really doesn’t matter, because the results have their own enigmatic, lyrical truth, one that might not have been arrived at by pure observation. In some ways, this is a better movie about life, existence, and the possibility of God than The Tree of Life. At the very least, it’s shorter. It might help to know — though the film itself won’t tell you — that Frammartino drew inspiration from the purported theories of ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, and mystic Pythagoras. (Purported because his sect was highly secretive and no writings survive.) He believed in transmigration of the soul, a.k.a. metempsychosis — souls reincarnating from human to animal to various elements, endlessly replenishing nature. There, now you have some CliffsNotes on a movie that itself chooses to wash over the viewer almost as neutrally as the stationary landscape studies of James Benning. Void of recorded music and nearly all speech (the few overheard bits go untranslated), Frammartino’s film — shot in and around the medieval Calabrian village of Serra San Bruno — is part neorealist nod and part metaphysical rapture. It is gorgeous, and occasionally goofy, just like the deity one might pick to be Up There. (1:28) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Submarine (1:37) SF Center.

*Super 8 The latest from J.J. Abrams is very conspicuously produced by Steven Spielberg; it evokes 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as well as 1985’s The Goonies and 1982’s Poltergeist (so Spielbergian in nature you’d be forgiven for assuming he directed, rather than simply produced, the pair). But having Grandpa Stevie blessing your flick is surely a good thing, especially when you’re already as capable as Abrams. Super 8 is set in 1979, high time for its titular medium, used by a group of horror movie-loving kids to film their backyard zombie epic; later in the film, old-school celluloid reveals the mystery behind exactly what escaped following a spectacular train wreck on the edge of their small Ohio town. The PG-13 Super 8 aims to frighten, albeit gently; there’s a lot of nostalgia afoot, and things do veer into sappiness at the end (that, plus the band of kids at its center, evoke the trademarks of another Grandpa Stevie: Stephen King). But the kid actors (especially the much-vaunted Elle Fanning) are great, and there’s palpable imagination and atmosphere afoot, rare qualities in blockbusters today. Super 8 tries, and mostly succeeds, in progressing the fears and themes addressed by E.T. (divorce, loneliness, growing up) into century 21, making the unknowns darker and the consequences more dire. (1:52) California, Empire, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Eddy)

*13 Assassins 13 Assassins is clearly destined to be prolific director Takashi Miike’s greatest success outside Japan yet. It’s another departure for the multi-genre-conquering Miike, doubtless one of the most conventional movies he’s made in theme and execution. That’s key to its appeal — rigorously traditional, taking its sweet time getting to samurai action that is pointedly not heightened by wire work or CGI, it arrives at the kind of slam-dunk prolonged battle climax that only a measured buildup can let you properly appreciate. In the 1840s, samurai are in decline but feudalism is still hale. It’s a time of peace, though not for the unfortunates who live under regional tyrant Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), a li’l Nippon Caligula who taxes and oppresses his people to the point of starvation. Alas, the current Shogun is his sibling, and plans to make little bro his chief adviser — so a concerned Shogun official secretly hires veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to assassinate the Lord. Fully an hour is spent on our hero doing “assembling the team” stuff, recruiting other unemployed, retired, or wannabe samurai. When the protagonists finally commence their mission, their target is already aware he’s being pursued, and he’s surrounded by some 200 soldiers by the time Miike arrives at the film’s sustained, spectacular climax: a small village which Shinzaemon and co. have turned into a giant boobytrap so that 13 men can divide and destroy an ogre-guarding army. A major reason why mainstream Hollywood fantasy and straight action movies have gotten so depressingly interchangeable is that digital FX and stunt work can (and does) visualize any stupid idea — heroes who get thrown 200 feet into walls by monsters then getting up to fight some more, etc. 13 Assassins is thrilling because its action, while sporting against-the-odds ingeniousness and sheer luck by our heroes as in any trad genre film, is still vividly, bloodily, credibly physical. (2:06) Bridge, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. (1:24) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) California, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*X-Men: First Class Cynics might see this prequel as pandering to a more tweeny demographic, and certainly there are so many ways it could have gone terribly wrong, in an infantile, way-too-cute X-Babies kinda way. But despite some overly choppy edits that shortchange brief moments of narrative clarity, X-Men: First Class gets high marks for its fairly first-class, compelling acting — specifically from Michael Fassbender as the enraged, angst-ridden Magneto and James McAvoy as the idealistic, humanist Charles Xavier. Of course, the celebrated X-Men tale itself plays a major part: the origin story of Magneto, a.k.a. Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor, is given added heft with a few tweaks: here, in an echo of Fassbender’s turn in Inglourious Basterds (2009), his master of metal draws on his bottomless rage to ruthlessly destroy the Nazis who used him as a lab rat in experiments to build a master race. The last on his list is the energy-wrangling Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who’s set up a sweet Bond-like scenario, protected by super-serious bikini-vixen Emma Frost (January Jones). The complications are that Erik doesn’t ultimately differ from his Frankensteins — he pushes mutant power to the detriment of those puny, bigoted humans — and his unexpected collaborator and friend is Xavier, the privileged, highly psychic scion who hopes to broker an understanding between mutants and human and use mutant talent to peaceful ends. Together, they can move mountains—or at least satellite dishes and submarines. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast fill out the cast, voicing those eternal X-Men dualities — preserving difference vs. conformity, intoxicating power vs. reasoned discipline. All core superhero concerns, as well as teen identity issues — given a fresh charge. (2:20) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

 

Psychic Dearm Astrology: June15-21

Maria Poblet
-
0

You’re ready to revitalize your life and create a new beginning. Protect your tender heart along the way so you can finish what you start.

 

ARIES

March 21-April 19

This week requires a delicate balance between assertively proactive and gestating your options with care. Don’t allow your ego to direct your actions, even as it informs them. Take risks that feel right for you.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

The only way to win is to play the game, Taurus. With care and attention, you can learn from past mistakes before you repeat them. Put yourself out there creatively this week, and take some risks for best results.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

The truth will set you free, Gemini. Instead of pouring over details, get a gander of the big picture this week. The more directly you stare truthiness in the eye, the quicker you’ll move on from the doubts that plague you.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

The most effective way for you to execute your plans is slow and steady, Cancer. You’re ready to revitalize your life and create a new beginning. Protect your tender heart along the way so you can finish what you start.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Invest energy into your friendships, Leo. Ask the people who know you best to check you before you go off in some wacky and ill advised direction. Your ego needs some down time, and your pals can help you get it.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

People pleasing “yes-man”-ishness will bring you down paths you’ve already traveled, Virgo. Be bold enough to stand up for what you want, even if you stand alone. Say yes to your desires, instead of no to your fears.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Beginnings are a time for passion and inspiration. Enjoy this phase of development without needing to figure out how things are gonna work out in the end. Set solid foundations today and don’t overthink things.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Keeping yourself separate from others may protect you from dealing with your insecurities, but it will also magnify your anxieties. Don’t alienate yourself this week. Connect with people who care about you.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

There are no grand gestures that will change the disquiet you’re feeling, Sag. Instead of looking for a magic potion to turn lemons into apples, why not go with simplicity? Make lemonade and work with what you’ve got.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Things need to get shaken up in your life, so don’t resist big changes as they present themselves — even if you aren’t sure of their value at first. Be open to growing pains as your world expands this week, Cappy mon Capitan.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Pay close attention to the things in your life that are throwing you off balance, Aquarius. You need to get cozy with yourself and get out of your reactive haze. Clarify what you feel and things will improve from there.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

As you move through some unfamiliar emotional terrain this week, don’t let yourself focus on the parts that bum you out exclusively. You are overcoming your past, so stay focused on your goals for the future. 

 

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 16 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com.

Alerts

Maria Poblet
-
0

ALERTS

By Jackie Andrews

 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15

Golden Wheel Awards

Join the SF Bike Coalition to celebrate and congratulate the movers and shakers who realize the potential for connectedness and comfortable biking in San Francisco. Award recipients include the SFMTA for the safer green bike lanes installed along Market Street, which have attracted new commuter cyclists to the Financial District. Also hear from Leah Shahum about the Bike Coalition’s bold vision of cross-town bikeways.

6–9 p.m.,

$75 individual, group packages available

War Memorial Building

401 Van Ness, SF

www.sfbike.org

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 16

The Castro and LGBTQ history

Attend this panel discussion called “No Equality Without Economic Equality: The Struggle Against Gentrification and Displacement in the Castro in the Late 1990s” and learn about the tumultuous period of dot-com boom and doom in San Francisco’s Castro District — a time when rents soared, long-term tenants were displaced (many living with HIV and AIDS), and queer youth ended up on the street. But there was a silver lining. Out of the gentrification grew a strong community of activists and much- needed social services, as well as historical milestones like the Tom Ammiano write-in mayoral campaign of 1999 and the progressive takeover of the Board of Supervisors the following year. Speakers include Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Jim Mitulski and Gabriel Haaland, and Paola Bacchetta.

7–9 p.m., $5

GLBT Historical Museum

4127 18th St., SF

www.glbthistorymuseum.org

 

TUESDAY, JUNE 21

Guardian forum: Budget, Healthcare, and Social Services

This is the second forum in a five-part series that examine local issues that are expected to have a major impact in the upcoming mayoral race. Representatives from labor groups and local nonprofits will be on hand, as will budget experts, to discuss the city budget, access to healthcare for San Franciscans, and other useful and threatened social services. This is sure to be a lively discussion and a unique opportunity to get involved in local politics. Be there.

6–8 p.m., free

Local 2 Hall

309 Golden Gate, SF

www.sfbg.com

Media access here and now

Weigh in on the issue of media access in San Francisco and the controversy around the accessibility of media passes for journalists while out on assignment. Panelists at this conversation with the Society of Professional Journalists will include SFPD’s Lt. Troy Dangerfield, attorney David Greene with the First Amendment Project, interim City Administrator Amy Brown, and a local journalist who has experience going through the process of trying to obtain a press pass.

5:30 p.m., free

SF Public Library

Latino Community Room

100 Larkin, SF

www.spj.com 

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Not the face!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Not the face!

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Henny, I don’t even know where to start. I leave the country for a lousy two months and I come back to this? No more Eagle Tavern to blow my mind on Thursday nights and blow my other parts on Sunday afternoon? No more Ti Couz for a hot bowl of pear cider when it’s pissing down rain? Straight people from Richmond puking all over the Castro on the regular? (Actually not too sad about this. I love my Richmond girls — and their unattended purses and boyfriends.)

Perhaps worst of all — um, Kreayshawn? Wow. At least we’re balancing out that catastrophe with a healthy, sleazy obsession with the Weeknd.

OK, I’m gonna move it all along, not dig my claws into bygones. I just flew in and my arms are too short to box with blah. It’s actually great to be back in blackout among my SF dance floor family. So let’s toast the future by getting toasted, because there’s a Jeroboam-load of parties sparkling in the fridge. Hiya!

 

BAWDY STORYTELLING: “LIBERTINE!”

“Carnal chronicler” Dixe De Tour’s over-the-top scandalous, sexy Bawdy Storytelling reading series is so successful it just expanded to Los Angeles. But home is where its, er, heart remains as Oakland’s infamous Ouchy the Clown joins a bevy of ear-burners for a no-holes-barred night of free speech.

Wed/8, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. storytime, $10. Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF. www.bawdystorytelling.com

 

WIG OUT: KIM KONG BENEFIT

Beloved DJ and promoter Kim Kong of Non-Fat and Bitches with Stitches was just diagnosed with lymphoma, and the SF scene is stepping up to lend support at this bonkers fundraiser. The Housepitality, dirtybird, and Non-fat crews are bringing heavy hitters Mr. C and Claude VonStroke to the decks — you throw on your favorite wig and dance around.

Wed/8, 8 p.m., donation requested. Icon, 1192 Folsom, SF. www.wigoutwednesday.com

 

BLOW UP SIX-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

You mean our seminal electro banger glamourpuss joint is already six years old? That’s almost the age most of the kids who went there were during its insane early Rickshaw Stop days, what? Blow Up power couple Ava Berlin and Jeffrey Paradise join the Tenderlions, Nisus, Trevor Simpson, Holy Mountain, and more for the hands-up blur.

Fri/10, 10 p.m., $16 under 21, $12.50 over. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.blowupsf.com

 

DAVE NADA

The godfather of Moombahton — pitching Dutch house down to its deliciously tropical (and far less annoying/wannabe gangsta) roots — hits the raucous Lights Down Low party, not previously known for its reggaeton or Netherlandish leanings. But dude, when it gets darker anything goes. U.K. funky beatsplitter Canblaster and IHEARTCOMIX’s Franki Chan open up, local locos Deevice, Sleazemore, and Eli Glad preside.

Fri/10, 9:30 p.m.-3 a.m., $10. SOM, 2925 16th St., SF. www.lightsdownlow.net

 

EVOLVE ANNIVERSARY

Monthly party Evolve has grabbed the crown for deep yet spirit-raising soulful house in the Bay. (Was there ever any doubt Oakland would reign supreme?) And while the emphasis is on the “sacred element of music,” DJs David Harness and Soul Luciani don’t stint on the more earthly pleasures of a friendly, packed dance floor.

Fri/10, 9 p.m., $10. Era Art Bar, 19 Grand, Oakl. www.oaklandera.com

 

LEE DOUGLAS

Sophisticated nu-disco and deeper house funkiness from this Brooklynite, who has garnered a star-studded following by unashamedly embracing the lo-fi analog techniques of yore. (No fear of the wah-wah here!) He’ll be at the monthly No Way Back party with DJs Conor and Navid.

Fri/10, 9:30 p.m., $5–$7. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

LOOSE JOINTS THREE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

One of the funkiest parties in the city — a real topper combining secret sampled classics with up-to-the minute edits into a heady yet hip-swinging brew — hits the triple. Guest star: live beatboxer, producer, and instrumentalist James “Ayro” Ellison of Ubiquity Records, with residents Tom Thump, Damon Bell, and Centipede.

Fri/10, 10 p.m., $5. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. www.makeoutroom.com

 

MALL MADNESS

The totally not ironic, awesomely gnarly, giddily drag-ridden tribute to 1990s boy bands, ’80s Spandex pop, and ’70s unicorns on roller skates (bonus Bieber nods!) is folding up its Sunglass Hut and moving on with its life. Hostess Oxana Olsen serves up Glamour Shots and Hot Topics for the final installment.

Sat/11, 10 p.m., $7. UndergroundSF, 424 Haight, SF.

 

FADE TO MIND

Those wacky Tormenta Tropical kids are at it again, expanding the signature electro-cumbia sound of their monthly gig with some warped global bass action. This Fade to Mind showcase flies in the L.A. label’s biggest draws: rave ‘n’ b king Kingdom, bouncy duo Nguzunguzu, and kooky pixellator Total Freedom.

Sat/11, 10 p.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

 

THIRD ANNUAL SUNSET MUSIC AND ARTS PICNIC

It doesn’t exactly feel like summer as I write this — most likely because one of the Bay’s most adored free summer-launching events hasn’t occurred yet, right? The Sunset crew is once again taking over Treasure Island for a daytime dance and chill extravaganza, featuring a live set by the actually legendary house and jungle pioneer A Guy Called Gerald of “Voodoo Ray” and “Black Secret Technology” fame. DJs Solar, Galen, J-Bird, and (yay!) Primo Preems support.

Sun/12, noon–8:30 p.m., free. Treasure Island. www.pacificsound.net 2

 

Sing out, sister

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
Sing out, sister

culture@sfbg.com

BAR CRAWLER Until last week, I’d never set foot in a karaoke lounge. It wasn’t exactly on purpose; it was just something — like using dryer sheets and eating those little lathed carrots prepackaged with swimming pools of ranch dressing — that never occurred to me.

This is not a story where, by the end, I uncover a newfound talent and become an instant rock star. Turns out, karaoke is hard — and commands a hardcore following of seriously legit singers. But after one whirlwind karaoke tour of the city, I found that it can be tons of fun for the rest of us too.

 

ENCORE KARAOKE LOUNGE

A friend enlisted for guidance and moral support assured me the first stop on our Friday night list would be mellow. So mellow, in fact, that when we entered from the still-light evening, about six people were watching a surprisingly spot-on rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miz. Next, a potbellied beer-in-hander stepped up for some Led Zeppelin. The patrons were singles and couples, none of the giggly groups of girls I expected. The lights, however, were just what I expected: over-the-top and outdated all at once. The tables were sticky and the drinks were predictably terrible (but cheap). The overall experience seemed like a cozily trashy movie-scene karaoke pastiche.

1150 California, SF. (415) 775-0442. www.encorekaraokesf.com

 

(Click here for larger Google map.)

THE MINT

Though this be-spangled Mid-Market spot reprised Encore’s small, watery drinks, there was nothing cozy about it. The Mint is on the tip of everyone’s karaoke tongue, so it was packed almost beyond maneuverability with fratty types and hipsters galore, who were too busy huddling in little beanie-topped clusters to pay attention to the stage: no fun for veteran singers of big booming anthems, but potentially good for first-timers.

I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to sing, but my friend joked that if nothing else, I could do “Bicycle Built for Two.” Well, no shit: 40,000 songs to pick from, and someone with mismatched thigh-highs and a fuzzy panda hat beat me to it. Galvanized, I submitted a slip for “American Pie,” which I figured might arouse the passion — or, at least, compassion — of even the most blasé in attendance. When I wasn’t called in 30 minutes, I took it as a signal to duck out with my dignity intact.

1942 Market, SF. (415) 626-4726. www.themint.net

 

FESTA WINE AND KARAOKE LOUNGE

Next, we headed to Japantown for a more authentic experience. Festa fit that bill, according to our one companion with bona fide Tokyo chops. It’s a surprise to walk into Festa — with its twinkling LED stars, cityscape wall motif, and lustrous dark décor — from the deserted second floor of Japantown’s mall-like Japan Center. With five bartenders for an intimate 30 seats, Festa definitely has an upscale vibe. Most of the women wore heels and cocktail dresses, and the cocktails were likewise elevated, both in price and quality. It took a Bellini, lychee martini, and sake-tini to precondition my vocal chords.

The song list was extensive but lacked my planned-on Don McLean classic — which seemed out-of-place anyway amid such a demure crowd. Billy Joel’s “Entertainer” popped into my head because it’s light and mercifully fast. With hardly a wait, I was twanging, left leg trembling, a good half-octave below where my voice stops sounding like a woman’s and starts sounding like the Marlboro Man’s. I got a rush of mercy applause and swept my friends out the door.

1825A Post, SF. (415) 567-5866. www.festalounge.com

 

500 CLUB

More than a week passed, and I was ready to go it alone. For a low-key bar with a neighborhood vibe, 500 Club is perfect. Karaoke Sundays start when the afternoon light is still streaming through large windows and a Tecate on the crowded benches feels just right. Audience participation — including some friendly heckling — is big here, and the singers heckle right back. Be warned: the front row, which is nearly every seat in the joint, is something akin to Sea World’s splash zone. You may be personally serenaded, implored to sing backup, or even humped a bit — all in good fun.

500 Guerrero, SF. (415) 861-2500. www.500clubsf.com

 

PANDORA

Pandora begs a reference to the overstuffed box, and it’s appropriate: this bar has it all — in a good way. Bins brim with cymbals, tambourines, silly hats, and other props. Candy Land and Jenga top a stack of board games. Flat-screen TVs flash the night’s basketball scores. A disco ball sprinkles light over sleek silver couches, low coffee tables, and a posh lit-up bar.

Make a splash

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Make a splash

virginia@sfbg.com

BAR CRAWLER Overrun with partiers from the burbs on weekends, North Beach remains far more than its hordes of visitors would suggest. Italian history, comforting foods, historical churches, and Beat mystique keep tourists roaming the streets. But savvy locals know North Beach’s under-the-radar gems. In some ways, it’s our most European neighborhood, where you’re most likely to find elderly Continental gentlemen gesticulating over coffee and cigarettes at sidewalk tables outside Cafe Greco or Caffe Trieste. Beneath the tourist trappings and meat markets, beats a vibrant and cultured heart.

This is equally true of its nightlife. Look beyond seedy strip joints and bars packed with suburbanites to find a long list of spots rich with history and colorful characters. If you haven’t hung out in NB in awhile, it’s time to fall in love with this late-night neighborhood’s impressive diversity again via a nice north-to-south bar crawl.

 

BIMBO’S

There’s no cooler live music venue in San Francisco than Bimbo’s. A Rat Pack-style supperclub where Rita Hayworth danced as a chorus girl in the early 1930s and gin was served in coffee cups, the spacious club is rife with character. Wood-paneled walls, red curtains, and stools create a space Dean Martin’s Matt Helm character would have felt at home in. Start your night with a show of acts as divergent as Flaming Lips and Adele.

1025 Columbus, (415) 474-0365, www.bimbos365club.com

 

TONY NIK’S

Divey and lived-in, Tony Nik’s still shines under its original neon sign. A Prohibition-era bar opened in 1933 by namesake Tony Nicco, it’s a funky, worn respite from the bustle of North Beach. It’s like stepping back in time … with rock ‘n’ roll attitude. It’s just the place to pop in for conversation and a stiff martini.

1534 Stockton, (415) 693-0990, www.tonyniks.com

 

CHURCH KEY

This underrated beer haven keeps a rotating selection of craft beers from around the world on tap. Victoriana wallpaper melds with a mellow vibe, offering a welcome respite from weekend craziness. Sip an Allagash Witbier in the upstairs alcove with wild game sausages while a DJ plays classic soul records that won’t drown you out.

1402 Grant, (415) 963-1713


(Click here for larger Google map.)

THE SALOON

It’s time for more music at one of the country’s oldest bars. The Saloon hit the Barbary Coast in 1861 as Wagner’s Beer Hall. Beat-up and worn down (in look and regulars), this bar feels like New Orleans, where music sings out into the night from seasoned musicians who play as hard as they live. Offering live music seven nights and three afternoons a week, the Saloon’s key focus is blues, although rock ‘n’ roll and soul influences abound. Dancing erupts in tight confines — like one ongoing party where music legends relive glory days.

1232 Grant, (415) 989-7666

 

15 ROMOLO

No North Beach night would be complete without killer cocktails, and they don’t get better than at 15 Romolo. A turn-of-the-century bar vibe is balanced by killer jukebox. Karaoke Gong Show nights are legendary and, although frequently packed, it’s often a place to get an artisanal drink in a relaxed setting. Spawning some of our city’s best bartenders, the talent behind the bar remains impressive. You’ll be hard-pressed not to count their inventive (yet far from fussy) creations among the best in the city.

15 Romolo Place, (415) 398-1359, www.15romolo.com

 

BAMBOO HUT

It’s a grungy sort of tiki vibe at Bamboo Hut. Live surfer bands, kitschy tiki paraphernalia, and tropical drinks (warning: this ain’t no Smuggler’s Cove) make it a fun, distinctive stop on your crawl for a fruity island escape. And, yes, there are volcano bowls.

479 Broadway, (415) 989-8555, www.maximumproductions.com

 

MONROE

If you must do a club, this newest North Beach addition is unlike the rest. With decidedly Hollywood flair, mirrors and artwork of models draped in pearls (alas, no Marilyn) line brick walls over leather and velvet couches in this unexpected den of hip classiness.

473 Broadway, (415) 772-9002, www.monroesf.com

 

SPECS

Journeying south down Columbus Avenue, you’ll hit a few of the city’s great classics. Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe is the dive to trump all dives. Singing around the piano with a Guinness or a shot of whiskey is a favorite pastime, as is soaking in the glowing, musty atmosphere and listening to stories from crusty locals your mother would be nervous around. A maritime SF mainstay since 1968, Specs is more than a bar, it’s an institution.

12 William Saroyan Place, (415) 421-4112

 

TOSCA CAFÉ

In the realm of classic bars, Tosca stands alone. Surviving Prohibition with “house cappuccinos” (hot chocolate with brandy), still its No. 1 seller, Tosca has been a North Beach hotspot for decades, its famed back room a haven for rock and movie stars alike. With a lovingly faded yet romantic interior, red booths and chairs hark back to its early days. The famed jukebox spins out a line of tunes crucial to Italians, from legendary opera singer Enrico Caruso to Dino and Frank.

242 Columbus, (415) 986-9651, toscacafesf.com

 

VESUVIO

Vesuvio is not so much about drink. Libations are an afterthought in a legendary 1950s space like no other. This is the kind of bar where intellectual discussion and reading books are the norm, where inspiration seeps out of the walls. Eclectic, hodgepodge decor is quirky and artsy, just like the clientele. The spirit of the Beat poets who frequented its corners lives on … with beer.

255 Columbus, (415) 362-3370, www.vesuvio.com

 

COMSTOCK SALOON

End your long night with a mellow, classy stop recalling Barbary Coast days. Comstock Saloon captures that spirit in a restored turn-of-the-century space replete with antique mahogany bar, Victorian furniture, 1916 rotating ceiling fans, and wood-burning stove. Cocktails are impeccable, classic and expertly-made … and top-notch jazz musicians play from the upstairs balcony.

155 Columbus, (415) 617-0071, www.comstocksaloon.com

Alameda all at once

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Alameda all at once

caitlin@sfbg.com

BAR CRAWLER Rumored to have given birth to the snow cone, the Popsicle, and the Kewpie doll back in its amusement park days, Alameda still gives off a summery island vibe. (With Playland at the Beach, Oakland’s Idora Park, and Alameda’s Neptune Beach, the primary mode of transportation in the Bay used to be a Big Dipper. Picture rush hour.) The golden sun, rad flea market, and laid-back neighborhoods — well, the place screams “stay a while.” So you may as well get drunk. FYI, the flatlands crawl works best on a bike, but if you soldier up and walk it, you don’t risk getting tipsy and bloody — to each her own. (Caitlin Donohue)

 

ALAMEDA FERRY

No, you’re not driving out there. Hop the ferry, ’cause guess what? It’s the first stop on the crawl. Take advantage of the bracing winds to order a beer, or better yet, a bay-ready cocktail. Affable bartenders will recommend a bloody or one of the Campari concoctions that sometimes make the specials board. Take your sweet-ass time and ascend to the top deck with your glass — you have 30 to 45 minutes to kill coming from San Francisco. Once you disembark, you’ll be flush with the possibility of a new island lifestyle. Steady on captain, much boozing lies ahead.

Departs from SF Ferry Building, Pier 41, and Jack London Square. www.eastbayferry.com

 

ST. GEORGE SPIRITS

Surprise! Not only is Alameda a great bar town, it’s also home to a burgeoning alcohol-making district. The island’s northwestern blocks — once the Naval Air Station and still fetchingly speckled at the edges with behemoth military boats — went through an era of tumbleweed rule but are now being reinvigorated by pioneer businesses that enjoy the commercial, wide-open spaces that only airplane hangers can provide. St. George Spirits moved here in 2004 and now produces pleasant, not-too-cloying Hangar One-flavored vodkas (mandarin blossom and chipotle versions are amazing), absinthe, superlative Firelit coffee liqueur, and more. Check out the $15 tasting menu in the jovial tasting room and toast to Alameda with every tiny, long-stemmed glass the good saint presents you with.

2601 Monarch, Alameda. (510) 769-1601, www.stgeorgespirits.com

(Click here for larger Google map.)

ROCK WALL WINES

Don’t worry if your St. George tasting ended with a disorienting absinthe-root beer closer — you don’t have far to bike to the next stop on the crawl. A few hangars over, step into the sleek tasting room of Rock Wall Wines, where you can order flights of swishes from Rock Wall’s father-daughter team plus nine other small wineries that share production space next door in the massive urban vintner hangar-hangout. Feel good about supporting the little guys along with another chance to sample an array of finely-crafted local booze.

2301 Monarch, Suite No. 300, Alameda. (510) 522-5700, www.rockwallwineco.com

 

BLADIUM BAR AND GRILL

So you’re a few drinks deep — time to check out the actual Alameda haunts. Bar! Well, a gym bar. Once you arrive at the Bladium (you’ll pedal past an impressive lineup of battleships on the way), smile sousedly at the front desk of the Bladium athletic center and weave your way through in-line hockey and indoor lacrosse arenas to the comfortable second-floor sports bar, where you can knock a pint back and take in some of the heated amateur action going on among the athletic types below. Don’t let all the secondhand endorphins make you feel lazy — the kind of drinking you’re doing takes endurance.

800 West Tower, Building 40, Alameda. (510) 814-4999, www.bladium.com

 

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE

Enough crawling with the generalists — let’s get dark ‘n’ sugary the way only a quality tiki bar can encourage. Find the flavor at the low-lit Forbidden Island, where there will be a luau in progress, if you play your cards right, and sufficient vats of rum and juice even if you didn’t schedule your crawl around roast pig. Hoist a Neptune’s Garden (it’s blue and has fruit garnishes!) to discovering more about the Forbidden Island’s watering holes and continue on your way.

1304 Lincoln, Alameda. (510) 749-0332, www.forbiddenislandalameda.com

 

LOST WEEKEND LOUNGE

See how we planned this out? We started with sober sea legs on the ferry, pinky-up tastings while you can still bullshit about noses and mouthfeels, then the limber tiki limbo — enter now the dives. Lost Weekend is a good one, and it’s smack in the center of Alameda’s fun downtown, which is worth a saunter about if you’re feeling a little shaky after Forbidden Island. Otherwise, belly up the bar, gaze at the TVs and myriad ephemera on the walls from hazy sports meccas — Philly? Texas? — and discover that here in the Island City, the jock and black-clad hipster crowds can oftentimes merge into one.

2320 Santa Clara, Alameda. (510) 523-4700, www.lostweekendlounge.com

 

LUCKY 13

Turn the corner onto Park Street and you, my friend, have come to the end of your bar crawl — lucky for SF residents, it’s on familiar turf. The Lucky 13’s East Bay branch is just as good a rockabilly dive into a heavy, microbrew-tinged blackout as its Castro counterpart. Same wooden tables to back-slap and talk trash over without blazing TVs to distract your train of thought, same walled patio for fresh air and lighting of the cancer stick (yeah, alright, you’re wasted). Two big points for the Alameda Lucky: you can bring in take-out stromboli and french fries from Scolari’s next door — and the Fruitvale BART Station is only a happy downhill ride away when you’re ready for the mainland. Lean your bike against the wall and find a comfy seat for yourself, brave crawler — you’ve earned it.

1301 Park, Alameda. (510) 523-2118, www.lucky13alameda.com 

Tipping point

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
3
Tipping point

sarah@sfbg.com

On June 14, members of the Board of Supervisors will vote to appoint a new member of the Police Commission — in the wake of a messy string of alleged police misconduct scandals that, progressives argue, underscore why having strong civilian oversight is critical to ensuring a transparent, accountable police department the public can trust.

The appointment comes less than two months after San Francisco native Greg Suhr was sworn in as chief in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to appoint former Chief George Gascón as the next district attorney — a move that has served to muddy the D.A. Office’s efforts to investigate the alleged police misconduct.

Further complicating the board’s choice is the heated battle that erupted over the appointment, led in part by members of two Democratic clubs that represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.

The Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club has officially endorsed Julius Turman, a gay attorney and community activist who was a former assistant U.S. attorney and the first African American president of the Alice club. Turman currently works for Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he represents companies in actions for wrongful termination, employment discrimination, and unfair competition. He is also state Sen. Mark Leno’s (D-SF) proxy to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee and serves on the Human Rights Commission.

On the other side, members of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the voice of the city’s queer left, are supporting David Waggoner, an attorney and community activist who is a former Milk Club president. Waggoner has worked on police use-of-force policy and as a pro bono attorney for the National Lawyers Guild at the Oakland Citizen’s Police Review Board, and been a passionate advocate for the LGBT community, immigrants’ rights, people with disabilities, and the homeless.

The other two applicants for the post are Vanessa Jackson, a staffer at a women’s shelter with experience in counseling ex-offenders; and Phillip Hogan, a former police officer who serves on the board of the Nob Hill Association and has been trying to get on a commission for years.

Although both Jackson and Hogan have diverse experience with law enforcement — Jackson as an African American woman who claims the police have “no respect for people of color” and Hogan as a former police officer of Lebanese-Irish descent who manages real estate — neither has the support of the LGBT community. The position occupied by Deputy District Attorney James Hammer for the last two years, and Human Rights Commission director Theresa Sparks occupied before that, is widely considered to be an LGBT seat.

 

WHO’S THE REFORMER?

So now the fight is about whether Turman or Waggoner would be the strongest reformer.

In a recent open letter, former Board Presidents Harry Britt, Aaron Peskin. and Matt Gonzalez expressed support for Waggoner. “While most hardworking police officers perform their jobs admirably, insufficient oversight and poor management systems have led to significant problems,” their letter stated. “Despite these widely reported problems, the Police Commission has failed to adequately address these issues. San Francisco needs real reform, not more of the same. We believe David Waggoner will be that voice at this critical time.”

At the June 2 Rules Committee hearing, Waggoner proposed taking away master keys to single-resident occupancy (SRO) hotels from the police. “Significant abuse of that resulted in seriously tarnishing the department,” he said.

Turman made an equally impassioned — if less stridently reformist-sounding — speech. “Why would we allow an officer to enter a home, regardless of the master key rule, which I’m not a fan of?” Turman asked. He also said Tasers are dangerous weapons with unintended consequences. “I fear communities of color will suffer more from Taser use.”

Waggoner’s supporters noted that their candidate has more than 15 years of police accountability experience. Turman’s supporters vouched for his integrity, maturity, ability to build consensus, and “belief in strategically serving his community.”

In the end, Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell voted for Turman, while Rules Committee Chair Sup. Jane Kim voted for Waggoner.

That means Turman’s name has been forwarded to the full board with a recommendation. But because the Rules Committee interviewed all the candidates, the board can still appoint any of them.

At the Rules Committee, Sup. Scott Wiener voiced support for Turman. And Board President David Chiu recently told the Guardian that he has known Turman for years, has worked with him professionally, and will vote for him. “I found him to be fair, thoughtful, and compassionate,” Chiu said, noting that he believes the role of the commission is “to provide oversight and set policy.”

Sup. David Campos, one of the solid progressive votes on the board and a longtime Milk Club member, believes Waggoner would make an excellent commissioner but is a friend of Turman, and believes he’ll be a strong voice for reform. “Sean [Elsbernd] and Mark [Farrell] could be in for a big surprise if Julius gets appointed,” Campos mused shortly after Elsbernd and Farrell voted for Turman.

Campos recalled how he and Turman started working at the same firm years ago. “So I got to know him well,” he said, adding he is “like a family member.

“By virtue of his involvement with Alice, some folks think Julius will be a certain way,” Campos added. “But I believe he’ll take a progressive point of view on the issues. He has both the knowledge and the experience with the police, he understand the important role that police oversight and the Police Commission play in making the SFPD accountable.”

Kim told us that she primarily voted for Waggoner because she knows him the best, and not out of concern that Turman wouldn’t do a good job. “I’m more familiar with David and that’s what tipped the scale,” Kim said. “It’s great to have two strong LGBT attorneys who have a clear understanding of public safety issues, the law, and are advocates for the community.”

But Debra Walker, who ran against Kim last November, steadfastly supports Waggoner. “Julius has been active in the Alice B. Toklas club for a while, he’s a prosecutor, while David is more of a citizen’s defense attorney,” she said.

Turman continues to be dogged by reports of domestic violence, thanks to a lawsuit that Turman’s former domestic partner Philip Horne filed in March 2006 alleging that Turman came into his house when he was sleeping on New Year’s Day 2006 and tried to strangle him.

Horne claimed he “was terrified that the lack of air supply would cause him to pass out and potentially die at the hands of such a jealous and unmerciful former lover.” He alleged he was able to calm Turman down only to see him get enraged again and punch Horne in the face seven to 10 times. When Horne decided he needed to go to the emergency room, the complaint states, Turman grabbed his phone and keys saying, “If you leave, you’ll never see the cats (alive) again,” and “I will report you to the state bar.”

Horne claimed he ran outside screaming for help and that when SFPD arrived, they arrested Turman for domestic violence and called an ambulance for Horne.

Turman responded in July 2006 to what he described as Horne’s “unverified complaint,” arguing he acted in “self-defense” and that the conduct Horne complained of “constituted mutual combat.” He added that “damages, if any, suffered by Horne were caused in whole or in part by entities or persons other than Turman.”

In the end, no criminal charges were ever filed against Turman and the case was settled out of court. Turman now says “I’ve done nothing wrong and these allegations are false.”

Campos warns people not to jump to conclusions. “We need to remember that there is a presumption of innocence,” Campos said. “Yes, there was a court case, but there was never a conviction. Yes, there was a settlement, but people do that for a lot of reasons.”

Turman told the Rules Committee that the incident was from “an extremely difficult time that is now being used against me as a political sideshow.”

Meanwhile, Campos notes that without a reform-minded mayor, there will be only so much any board-appointed police commissioners can do. “What we really need to implement police reform is a mayor who is willing to do that,” he said. “Otherwise it’s going to be very difficult because the mayor still gets to appoint four commissioners and mayor still gets to control who is in charge of the police department.”

 

WHAT DIRECTION?

Civil liberties advocates praised as a “first step in the right direction” Suhr’s May 18 decision to issue an order clarifying that SFPD officers assigned to the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce should adhere to SFPD policies and procedures set by the Police Commission, not FBI guidelines.

But in the coming months, the commission will have to decide whether to push a Portland-style resolution around SFPD involvement with the FBI. The commission also will be dealing with fallout from the other scandals, including the crime lab, the use of force against mentally ill suspects, and videos that allegedly show police conducting warrantless search and seizure raids in single residential occupancy hotels.

These scandals have progressives arguing that it’s critical that the board’s three seats on the commission are occupied by applicants with proven track records of reform.

Waggoner notes that in 2003, voters approved Prop. H., which changed the composition of the commission from five to seven members. Four are appointed by the mayor; three by the board.

Last year, he said, the commission made significant progress in the right direction when it adopted new rules after the Jan. 2 shooting of a man in a wheelchair in SoMa. “That was not the first time an unarmed person with a disability was killed,” he said. “After Prop. H and a crisis, the commission finally took steps. It remains to be seen if Chief Suhr will implement that.”

Waggonner said the current arrangement “creates tension between people who are more willing to defer to the chief on policy issues and being in an advisory capacity, as opposed to people who want to be in the forefront of setting policy.”

That tension played out when Commissioners James Hammer, Angela Chan, and Petra DeJesus tried to find consensus on the Taser controversy last year. “Overall they worked well together. But there’s been no progress yet on Tasers,” he said, noting that the commission eventually decided on a pilot project.

Waggoner said he would be in favor of the commission having a more active role and exerting its authority under the city charter to set policy, but in collaboration with the chief.

The Police Commission’s May 18 joint hearing with the Human Rights Commission about FBI spying concerns was a symbol of the broader issue at the Police Commission. The majority of the commission didn’t see any major problems — but the progressives were highly critical. “Is the commission there to set policy and take leadership, or is it there in an advisory capacity?” Waggoner asked.

With Hammer’s departure, Chan and DeJesus, both board-appointed women of color, are the most progressive members of the commission. Chan hopes Hammer’s replacement believes in strong civilian oversight. “We should never be a rubber stamp for the police department,” he said. “We need to take community concerns very seriously. When the police department is doing great things, we should support them — but if we see something wrong, we should not be afraid to speak out.”

Turman told the Guardian that “being the voice for reform and advising are not mutually exclusive roles — and an effective police commissioner needs to be both.

“I would advocate for series of meetings with representatives from the Arab community, the SFPD, and the FBI to increase communication and understanding of each side’s perspective on exactly what we need to implement in San Francisco,” Turman said.

Asked more about Tasers, Turman said that “one of the things I would be interested in pursuing is a recognition by some that female officers are less likely to incapacitate during an arrest, which could lead to learning for the larger police force.”

But does this means Turman will turn out to be a swing vote for Tasers? Only time — and the board’s June 14 vote — will tell.

1...182183184...493Page 183 of 493

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