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Score one for fun

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› steve@sfbg.com

City officials and race organizers have dropped plans for a crackdown on partying at the annual Bay to Breakers race in the face of a massive grassroots organizing effort that quickly generated more than 20,000 members opposed to the proposed bans on alcohol, floats, and nudity.

"We’re pleased with the outcome. I think it’s a victory," Ed Sharpless of the group Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers told the Guardian. "When you have over 20,000 people join your group in two weeks, it means something."

It means that people are tired of the string of crackdowns by Mayor Gavin Newsom (and his special events coordinator, Martha Cohen) that the Guardian has labeled the "Death of fun" (see "Death of fun, the sequel," 4/25/07), which have included canceling Halloween in the Castro District and placing restrictions on the Haight Ashbury Street Fair, How Weird Street Faire, North Beach Festival, North Beach Jazz Festival, and other events.

And the public outcry demonstrates that big events like Bay to Breakers don’t belong to the organizers and sponsors; they’ve become the property of the entire city.

Sharpless was part of a Feb. 27 meeting convened by the Mayor’s Office that included opponents of the crackdown, race organizers, neighborhood groups, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who has been trying to balance complaints about public urination, drunkenness, and trash with his concerns about killing yet another party.

Afterward, the Mayor’s Office issued a statement indicating that floats would be allowed as long as they aren’t used to transport alcohol, urging Bay to Breakers participants to register for the race, and stating that alcohol consumption "will be subject to the laws of California. Race organizers will coordinate with the San Francisco Police Department to proactively remove kegs and glass bottles of alcohol from the race course."

While that alcohol policy was left deliberately vague, those involved with the negotiations and the May 17 event say drinking will be allowed as long as attendees don’t get out of control. As with alcohol, nudity isn’t specifically allowed, but it’s no longer explicitly banned.

"The issue was it had gotten out of hand last year," Sam Singer, a crisis communications specialist brought in by race organizers, told the Guardian. He said the race organizers wanted to put a stop to the mayhem and proposed the restrictions, but eventually agreed to work with the partyers this year.

"There was a request by the pro-float, pro-alcohol group to continue what had been a San Francisco tradition. Now it’s incumbent on them to register for the race so organizers can pay for it," he said. "This debate has created a positive social pressure to be a cool person and to be respectful of one’s self and one’s neighbors."

Opponents of the crackdown agree and say they will work to keep things under control. Or as Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers wrote in a public statement, "The problems with public drunkenness … we get it and agree. People, you need to act more responsibly. Pace yourself. It’s a long day. Don’t get out of hand and don’t ruin it for the majority of folks who are acting responsibly. Most importantly, take care of your friends and each other."

But there are still outstanding questions about whether race organizers (including for-profit corporations AEG and ING) are providing enough portable toilets and trash receptacles to avoid last year’s problems, concerns that were raised but not resolved on Feb. 26 during a permitting hearing before the city’s Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation.

Organizers told ISCOTT they would provide 650 portable toilet this year, compared to 550 last year, and that they would be more concentrated around problem areas such as Alamo Square and the Panhandle. But Sharpless told the committee that still wasn’t adequate, describing last year’s problems as "mostly a logistical issue" and saying the proposed crackdown and hiring of Singer, who often charges $400 per hour, were counterproductive.

"Why is it they bring in such a heavyweight to deal with this when they could have applied their resources to these logistical issues?" Sharpless told ISCOTT. "They want to take away the fun in San Francisco to make a buck."

Longtime runner Tony Rossman, who supports the crackdown, didn’t agree and told ISCOTT, "There is a one-word problem here and that is alcohol. And that requires public enforcement."

But Conor Johnstone, a runner who opposes the crackdown, told ISCOTT that banning alcohol was an attack on the character of the 97-year-old event, rather than dealing with the main stated problems. "I think an increase of 100 Porta-Potties is anemic at best," he said.

Jeremy Pollock, who was representing Sup. Mirkarimi, offered ISCOTT and race organizers a long list of suggestions to mitigate the problems, including using large capacity urinals, creating an end point with entertainment and Dumpsters for those with floats, and setting a cheaper registration tier for those who aren’t serious runners. "Nobody wants to see this race end," he said.

Opponents of the crackdown say they will continue working to resolve the outstanding issues.

"We’re not done, folks. There is still work to be done. Issues to be resolved. Details to be hammered out," Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2 Breakers wrote in a public statement. "What wasn’t discussed at the meeting and tabled for later discussion are the logistical deficiencies we still believe exist with race organizers’ plan for the event. Recent research by our group revealed that the New York Marathon sources 2,250 toilets for 39,000 participants in their race, while AEG race organizers source only 500 toilets for 65,000 participants in Bay to Breakers. Could it be that there are such massive issues with public urination because there simply aren’t enough toilets?"

Mirkarimi was happy with the agreement, but said it didn’t address the logistical concerns he’s been raising. "It’s a good step in the right direction. However, this is predicated on the trust that may not be felt until the day of the race. We were looking for specifics to improve this race."

Climate change

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

I’ve heard about a fortuneteller with a tarot deck and a dead fish. I can smell the fish, but I’m daunted by the line in front of the curtain, so I wander into another room and stand before a terrycloth sculpture of some tropical beach getaway. It looks a little like a desert nomad’s tent in Technicolor, and comes fronted by an immobile bare-shouldered woman in vertical repose, cast like a caryatid and basking in cat-eye shades under some imagined equatorial sun for, I’m told, hours on end.

I try not to stare at her beach towel, which not only conforms to her shape but also a life-size photorealistic representation of what you imagine to be the body underneath. Somebody finally offers her a color-appropriate drink through a straw as my eyes dart over to a bedroom scene of vaguely subconscious associations: an inanimate, incongruous couple pokes out from under a duvet, the whole scene partially obscured by a murky plastic curtain on which a playfully frenetic lightshow dances. Titled Sea of Dreams and fashioned by Joegh Bullock — landlord and Anon Gallery proprietor, in addition to being one of more than 20 artists with work on display here tonight — it stands just to the left of a DJ booth, and attracts a group of costumed art lovers who also break into dance.

Taking in Unseen/Unsaid, as this one-off evening of curated art and performance is called, is a lot like trying to take in the history of the Climate Theater itself, full of blurring boundaries and strange echoes. In some ways it’s as labyrinthine as the floor plan of the former bordering house at Ninth and Folsom streets whose second floor contains the theater, its offices, and Anon Gallery. Branching out in several directions at once, it also stitches together the fringe arts, tech, and underground party scenes of the mid-1980s to those of the present.

Next year the Climate turns 25, an impressive run for any theater, and probably a better occasion than just now to trace this one’s full baroque lineage. Suffice it to say that the Climate Gallery, as it was originally known, was an accidental theater started by artists who, by their own admission, had no background or even interest in theater per se. But in opening its doors in 1985 to Nina Wise, who had recently lost a performance space, it quickly became a vital scene and vibrant avenue for some of the most dynamic and promising crossover and experimental work around.

In the last year and a half, as a result of a spurt of new energy via new management — as well as a larger recrudescence, if you will, of some of the old SoMa arts scene of the ’80s — the Climate has been looking pretty spry for a decades-old theater. Granted, this is happening at a time of supreme social and economic uncertainty. But what’s particularly striking about this fresh whirl of eclectic programming, as well as some wider neighborhood networking, is how naturally it harks back to the early history of the quirky black box, founded by artists and famed trend-setting party impresarios Bullock and Marcia Crosby — also founders, with Mark Petrakis, of the famed Glashaus parties of the ’90s and the still-influential Anon Salons. The current vibrant and dedicated bustle on this little corner of the city frankly inclines one to wax wise: do not the biggest downpours also give rise to the most unexpected blooms?

NOW PLAYING: THE GREAT DEPRESSION II?


Then again, a few months ago Great Depression II: the Reckoning was just the big coming unattraction. By now it has officially hit theaters, and already set more than one teetering. Most dramatic cases so far: the Magic Theater — whose recent close shave with the bill collectors put in jeopardy the rest of the current season before a massive donor campaign was launched — and Shakespeare Santa Cruz, which underwent a similar, narrowly averted disaster. If this can happen to established, midsize institutions, what of the little guy? And with funding for the arts promising to be an even shakier proposition than usual — $50 mil in the stimulus bill notwithstanding — it’s small wonder that GDII is the inevitable topic of conversation in theater circles.

Climate Theater artistic director Jessica Heidt, however, is talking to me about sloths. We’re parked at a table outside Brainwash, a couple blocks east of Climate, and it’s becoming clear she admires them. "There’s this theory," she says, "that the reason sloths are so sedentary and stay in one tree is that they then fertilize their tree."

I wait for the relevance of this remark to wash over me. I had thought we were discussing the Climate.

"I’m really interested in being rooted in the neighborhood that you’re living in," she continues. "So you can fertilize what’s around you and have a more symbiotic relationship."

Heidt took over Climate in September 2007, shortly after leaving her associate artistic director position at the Magic. Since then, and true to her words on symbiosis, she has been strengthening the theater’s area ties. Recently she banded together with colleagues from other small neighborhood theaters and dance venues under the banner of the newly formed SOMA Culture Coalition, organizing the first theater crawl between the Garage, Boxcar Theater, and Climate.

Meanwhile, Heidt has been coordinating some theater and dinner packages with Climate’s downstairs neighbor, the Medici Lounge. Then there are the collaborations she’s facilitating between Climate artists and neighborhood organizations. She describes one involving women in the penal system based out of the women’s re-entry program on Bryant Street. "That’s been key with the resident artist program," she says, "figuring out partnerships for my eight resident artists to go work with social service organizations, specifically in this neighborhood, where they can give back a little bit — the sloth theory."

THE BIGGEST LITTLE THEATER IN SAN FRANCISCO


So much sprang from the Climate’s operation in the 1980s and ’90s that the outfit was soon labeled "the biggest little theater in San Francisco." And no wonder, since the space managed to be at the precise center of some mighty major trends. Tapped into the local vanguard geek scene of the burgeoning tech industry, for instance, Climate opened the country’s first Internet-wired restaurant-bar downstairs, the Icon Byte Bar and Grill. Meanwhile, the same confluence of art-types and venturesome techies spurred on new social networking strategies, including the earliest version of ex-Climate board member Craig Newmark’s ever-expanding online message board.

In the performance world, Climate helped spawn the storied Solo Mio Festival in 1990, a jaw-dropping who’s who of the form — which enjoyed a real vogue as the most promising segue out of a performance art shtick everyone was getting pretty bored with. Solo Mio’s principal curator was also, as it happens, its second performer, after Wise, to grace the Climate’s new stage in 1985: former SF denizen Bill Talen, a.k.a. Reverend Billy, followed by a runaway hit that solidified Climate’s new status as a serious alternative venue, "avant-vaudevillian" Helen Shumaker’s turn as Mona Rogers in Person, which ended up ensconced off-Broadway. One could go on. There was the international avant-puppetry performance showcase Festival Fantochio …

Climate worked with the hand they were dealt: once, Winston Tong, one "performance art crossover guy" who sparked Fantochio, was stabbed onstage. "Suddenly there was this big blood-spurting thing that we knew wasn’t special effects," remembers Crosby with a cringe. Soon afterward she discovered, while putting up flyers for the show, that the accident had helped them in the all-mighty word-of-mouth department. "’Is that the show where somebody got stabbed?’ they asked. I said, ‘Yeah, you should see it.’ They went, ‘Yeaaah!’<0x2009>"

Bullock — while still a practicing artist and one of the biggest events presenters around, associated with everything from the Sea of Dreams NYE parties to the SF Burning Man events, Decompression, and Flambé Lounge — notes wryly that these days he’s not always recognized when he strays from Anon to the other side of the building. In truth, his and Crosby’s involvement with the theater side of Climate is limited. "I’m still a board member, and I’m still sub-landlord of this space," he says. "But I don’t have much to say about the programming."

The theater itself is the Climate’s second incarnation — after a progressively overtaxed Bullock and Crosby finally decided to hang up their theater hats and vacate the storefront space at 252 Ninth St. in the late ’90s — and it’s the handiwork of magician, actor, showman, and impresario Paul Nathan of Dark Kabaret — a lavishly popular event that has served in part, like Bullock and Crosby’s famous Glashaus parties, as a fundraiser for the theater.

Nathan happened to be driving by, contemputf8g a sojourn in Europe in the wake of the dot-com bust, when he saw the for-rent sign at Ninth and Folsom. He knew the space well from Glashaus party days and the old Billboard Café, which derived its name from the sheets with painted messages that regularly hung from the roof. "I thought, you know, small theater is a dumb idea," he says. "But with a billboard there, we might be able to make a go of it." He got a good deal on the rent from Bullock, built a stage in the empty space, and took on the Climate name again with Bullock’s hearty approval.

"We started with Devil in the Deck and Titillation Theater," Nathan recalls. The evolving smart and sexy sketches of Titillation Theater (favorite program title: Let’s Pretend I’m Not Your Mother) produced another long-running success for the Climate. "We got huge crowds, but we were also advertising in the Chronicle, so our advertising budget was just insane," he adds. "We were breaking even, or making a little bit of money each week. But we really didn’t know what we were doing. There was no grant money." Eventually, Nathan says, they couldn’t afford to continue: "You do the numbers — it just can’t happen."

A NEW CLIMATE


Journey across the gulf of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, during which the theater briefly disappeared along with many other art spaces and artists, to the moment when Heidt joined the Climate in 2007. In step with the intrepid optimism she detects in her SoMa environs, she has cheerfully and tirelessly overseen a remarkable resurgence of activity at the 49-seat black-box theater. With its all-volunteer staff, the venue hit a high point in February, presenting in that one month 16 downright disparate shows, including the current West Coast premiere of Skin, a smart, bold, adults-only rumination on lust and fidelity by the sharp and whimsical young Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey, a coproduction with Encore Theater, which coproduced Yockey’s Octopus at the Magic last year.

As offbeat as any play by Yockey promises to be, it remains one of the more straight-ahead components in an unusually varied theatrical lineup. The Climate’s programming stretches beyond the average small theater fare and its audience, to encompass a range of performance and visual art styles and solid Bay Area microscenes — like those around clowning or belly dance — as well as a laidback, brew-in-hand atmosphere of cultured fun, or just funny culture, amenable to a more general bar-hopping crowd.

The first show Heidt produced, You Tubed, a performance series codirected by the artistic director and Richard Ciccarone, was a crowd-pleasing blend of quotidian Internet technology and live reenactments. At the same time, Climate is also making forays into exploratory works in other media: one of Heidt’s first initiatives was establishing both a music and (now defunct) film series. She also repeatedly brought in acclaimed clown and Cirque de Soleil vet John Gilkey’s rollicking band of bad-boy "anticlowns," Your New Best Friends.

"The great thing about this space is that we get to try stuff out and to be much more experimental," Gilkey explains, taking a break from rehearsing a new show he’s developing for the Climate stage. Gilkey’s association with the Climate runs back at least 15 years, but it’s not nostalgia that brings him back.

"The history of San Francisco is that of producing amazing clowns," he says, citing Geoff Hoyle, Bill Irwin, and Larry Pisoni. "I think we have to push a lot harder to be more subversive, more daring, and bolder in the kind of clown we’re creating. This is the place that has open doors for the forward stuff, and that’s what excites me."

Climate’s forward programming last month included installments of the Wednesday night Music Box concerts; another Improv Soapbox open jam session hosted by resident champs Crisis Hopkins; the Monday night Clown Cabaret directed by Paoli Lacy and showcasing students and grads from the Clown Conservatory, as well as faculty and seasoned clowns of the likes of Gilkey, Joel Salom, and James Donlon; another boisterous staging of the matchmaking show and runaway hit, The Dating Game; and Unseen/Unsaid, one in a series of irregular, curated, multi-artist, multidisciplinary, and multi-roomed art parties.

Looking back at its history, the Climate’s success then, and now, has resided in its talent for bridging not just disciplines and genres, but audiences and whole scenes in what was once — and increasingly is again — a flourishing hub of arts and nightlife in SoMa. While it remains to be seen if this gradual crawl back to life can weather the full brunt of the coming economic storm, Heidt’s sloth theory dovetails comfortably with her vision of a diverse but tight-knit artistic community.

Her extensive theater background has held her in good stead: Heidt knows how to produce, direct, and write grants — although ticket sales are still the main source of operation revenue. At the same time, she’s been inspired by what she was not familiar with. "For me that’s been one of the most exciting things about being here — going to Burning Man, knowing it’s a city of crazy artists, incredibly talented people, and it’s all sort of below the surface of what you’re seeing in the mainstream," she says. "To be able to tap into that world a little has been really fun."

As for Bullock and Crosby, who both have remained deeply involved in the culture and organizing of Burning Man and its year-round Bay Area events, they are clearly gratified with a direction they see as consonant with the theater’s long, remarkably fruitful tradition of cultivating crossover communities and promoting the edgy, fun, experimental, and unexpected. "She’s doing the kind of programming that we used to do," says Bullock, "which is eclectic."

I’m hearing echoes again. "South of Market is starting to come back," he continues. "I think there’s a resurrection of the arts right now. I think this corner and this block are key to it, with New Langton Arts and Eighth Street. I mean, this is becoming what it used to be 20 years ago." Bullock laughs. "It’s like, what the hell?"

SKIN

Through March 21

Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 7:30 and 10 p.m.; $15–$20

Climate Theater

285 Ninth St., SF

(415) 263-0830

For info on this and other events, go to www.climatetheater.com

Lupino Noir

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REVIEW A Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained Londoner born to Brit vaudeville parents, Ida Lupino improbably wound up one of hardboiled studio Warner Bros.’ favorite tough all-American dames in the 1940s. Albeit not quite favored enough: WB already had Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, and then acquired Joan Crawford, so Lupino didn’t get the pick of parts despite some stellar work. When they let her go in 1947, she continued to act but proved her mettle by becoming something extremely rare: a director, writer, and occasional producer. She was, in fact, the only woman occupying a Hollywood director’s chair at the time. Lupino directed features just between 1949 and 1953 (then innumerable TV episodes for another 15 years), but they’re all admirably taut little black-and-white "B’s" with a penchant for taking on sensational themes in a no-nonsense manner.

This Film on Film Foundation double bill revives two. The Bigamist (1953) stars Edmond O’Brien as a businessman explaining to a shocked adoption agency investigator (Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street‘s Santa) how he came — with the best intentions, really — to be married to both elegant San Franciscan Joan Fontaine and working-class Los Angeleno Lupino. The latter character is striking for being the kind of unapologetically self-reliant single woman portrait Hollywood generally wouldn’t get around to until much later in films like 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

The real find here, however, is 1950’s Outrage, a surprisingly frank (even if the word "rape" is never uttered) study of a young woman’s psychological deterioration as a consequence of sexual assault. Attacked after a long, Expressionistically atmospheric stalking through a late-night warehouse district, young Ann (Mala Powers) has to endure the subsequent whispers and stares of neighbors and coworkers. (Her name was printed in the newspaper crime report — something not uncommon then.) Unable to cope, she flees town, ending up incognito as an orange-farm worker. But her lingering trauma can’t simply be run away from. Outrage has its flaws. Yet there’s still considerable force in the way Lupino stylistically conveys Ann’s panic attacks, and the screenplay’s unusual, sympathetic focus on aftereffects rather than the crime itself.

"LUPINO NOIR" double feature, Sun/8, 7:30 p.m., $7. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. www.filmonfilm.org

Vanishing points

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY/REVIEW There is a wry but hilarious scene near the very end of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 912 pages; $30), in which a French literary critic finds a German writer, Archimboldi, lodging at what the critic calls "a home for vanished writers." After checking into a room at the large estate, the elderly vanished writer wanders the grounds, meeting with the other vanished authors, residents whom Archimboldi finds friendly but increasingly eccentric. Gradually it dawns on Archimboldi that all is not as it seems. Walking back to the entrance gate, he sees, without surprise, a sign announcing that the estate is the "Mercier Clinic and Rest Home — Neurological Center." The home for vanished writers is an insane asylum.

As we enter the Obama era, with all its promise of "change," I’ve found it impossible to read 2666 without being haunted by the memory of those who vanished into the lunatic asylum of the long George W. Bush years — not just the nameless and unlucky left to rot in the Bush administration’s secret torture cells throughout the world, but also those who disappeared right here at home. For instance, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago. One day he was training me on the job, and a week or so later he was in a federal prison, labeled a "terrorist" — which in his case meant that he edited a Web site called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

There were other ghosts, those who vanished after refusing to speak to grand juries. They were rumored to have gone over the border, or back to the land, or who knows where, their very names now superstitiously verboten to speak out loud, lest we bring the heat down on ourselves. Now that Obama is here and everybody is eager for "change," who will remember the once-bright hopes and dreams of the generation that beat the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the dawn of this decade — the hopes that would later be chased down and gassed and beaten by riot police under cover of media blackout in the streets of Miami, St. Paul, or countless other cities? Of course, there were the suicides and overdoses, and other kinds of disappearances, different but related, too: the abandoned novels, or the guitars taken to the pawnshop. Three people in my community jumped off bridges. Only one survived. The human toll of the Bush years in my life has been enormous.

Watching the celebrations in the streets of the Mission District on election night in November, I could tell all of this was soon to be trivia. I saw a virtually all-white crowd of completely wasted people take over the intersection at 19th and Valencia, shouting "Obama!" and dancing in the street. In one way, this scene was touching: the spontaneous gathering was a product of the true feelings of human hope that people have for a better world. Yet the moment already had the scripted feel of something self-conscious or mediated, like the Pepsi ad campaign it would soon become. I had a sinking realization: those of us who have spent eight years battling the post-9/11 mantra of Everything Is Different Now were now going to soon be up against a new era of, well, Everything Is Different Now.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our country are important. Just when a Truth and Reconciliation Committee is most needed to write a detailed narrative of the Bush era’s torture, spying, illegal war, and swindling, I could already see the opportunity for that kind of change slipping away into the blackout amnesia aftermaths of the street parties taking place all across the nation. The election of a president of the United States from among the ranks of the nation’s most oppressed minorities has offered the country a new triumphant storyline. We have symbolically redeemed our sins against civilian casualties and third world workers, without too much painful self-examination. I could see that Obama’s brand of change was really so seductive because it offered a chance to change the subject.

Like Ronald Reagan, elected while the U.S. was mired in recession and post-Vietnam soul-searching, Barack Obama developed campaign narratives that made the U.S. feel good about itself again. Obama guessed correctly that national morale is low partially because we don’t want to deal with the nameless guilt we feel from the atrocities Bush and company committed in our names. Accordingly, he stated during his campaign that he would not pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nor has Obama questioned the preposterous idea that we can win either a War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan. If you think about it, "Yes We Can" — his campaign’s appeal to good old American can-do spirit — isn’t far off in substance from Bush’s faith-based convictions about U.S. power. Both Bush’s crusade to make democracy flower in the desert of Iraq and Obama’s notion that the auto industry could save itself — and the planet! — with electric cars are fantasies that appeal to our sense of pride about being the richest and most powerful.

When a country that is owned by China and is getting its ass kicked simultaneously by ragged guerilla armies in two of the most impoverished and backward parts of the world keeps finding new ways to tell itself that it’s the richest and most powerful country, it is in deep trouble.

When political leaders and journalists seek to generate false narratives for our consumption and comfort, the difficult task of remembering the truth falls to literature.

Roberto Bolaño completed 2666 in 2003, shortly before he died, too poor to receive a liver transplant, at the age of 50. Born in Chile, Bolaño counted himself a member of "the generation who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell," and was himself something of a vanished writer. Briefly jailed during the 1973 coup in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, Bolaño wandered in exile from Mexico City to Spain, working variously as a janitor and a dishwasher, entering obscure literary competitions advertised on the backs of magazines, while his generation was consumed by Pinochet’s secret prisons and torture cells.

Fittingly, disappearance is perhaps the main action of characters in Bolaño’s works, from the vanished fascist poet and skywriter in 1996’s Distant Star (published in English by New Directions in 2004) to the entire romantic generation of doomed Mexican poets and radicals followed across the span of decades and continents to its vanishing point in a desert of crushed hopes in 1998’s The Savage Detectives (published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007). In 2666, the terminally ill Bolaño wrote as if in an urgent race against the moment of his own departure, unwilling to leave anything out, as if he wanted to save an entire lost underworld from banishment. Taking on every genre from detective noir to the war novel to romantic comedy in an exhilarating, nearly 1,000-page race to the finish, the book is Bolaño’s epic of the disappeared.

The periphery of 2666 teems with Bolaño’s archetypal lost and doomed, a host of minor characters including a former Black Panther leader turned barbecue cook, various Russian writers purged by Stalin during World War II, a Spanish poet living out his days in an asylum, and an acclaimed British painter who cuts off his own hand. There are the usual obscure literary critics and lost novelists, and we even briefly meet an elderly African American man who calls himself "the last Communist in Brooklyn." This last communist could speak for all of Bolaño’s lost and departed when he explains why he presses on: "Someone has to keep the cell alive."

The book’s action, however, centers upon the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa during the late 1990s, events based on real-life unsolved killings in Juarez, Mexico. The majority of the women murdered in Juarez were workers at the new factories along the border with the United States, the unregulated maquiladoras that have sprung up in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the book’s longest section, "The Part about the Crimes," we learn the names, one by one, of 111 of these murdered women. In terse, police-blotter language, Bolaño describes the crime scenes — the girls’ clothing, their disappearances, and the police investigators’ attempts to construct the last hours of their lives. Their bodies are discovered slashed, stabbed, bound, gagged, and always raped, in ditches, landfills, alleys, or along the side of the highway. Seen from these vantage points, Bolaño’s Santa Teresa is a disjointed place, seemingly patched together from snatches of barely remembered nightmares. Shantytowns and illegal toxic dumps spring up everywhere in "the shadow of the horizon of the maquiladoras." It is a city that is "endless," "growing by the second," a new type of urban zone in a Latin America that has become a laboratory for free trade policy experiments. It is a city made unmappable by globalization.

Bolaño clearly intends the reader to see the disappearances as the inevitable byproduct of the cheapness of life in the maquiladora economy, yet the killings also eerily evoke the disappearances in fascist 1970s Chile and Argentina. These murders are an open secret, virtually ignored by the media. Residents almost superstitiously refer to them only as "the crimes." The Santa Teresa police respond to the killings with a staggering indifference and ineptitude that might suggest complicity. The maquiladoras are ominous, hulking windowless buildings often in the center of town, not unlike the torture cells once hidden in plain sight in Buenos Aires (Bolaño even names one of them EMSA, an obvious play on Argentina’s most notorious concentration camp, ESMA), and many of the women’s bodies are discovered in an illegal garbage dump called El Chile. 2666 suggests that the unrestrained capitalism of the free-trade era is the ideological descendent of the 1970s South America state repression from which Bolaño fled, and that the killings in Santa Teresa are in part a recreation of the Pinochet-era disappearances.

While the scenes Bolaño describes are grisly, his language is clinical, the cold camera eye of the lone detective gathering evidence. The collective impact of story after story starts to accrue into its own profoundly moral force. By giving name and face to hundreds of disappeared women, Bolaño suggests that literature is a political response, a way to make wrongs right by bearing witness. While it would certainly be a mistake to read 2666 strictly as a political tract, Bolaño explicitly ties writing to justice in a rambling digression about the African slave trade. A Mexican investigator of the killings points out that it was not recorded into history if a slave ship’s human cargo perished on the way to Virginia, but that it would be huge news in colonial America if there was even a single killing in white society: "What happened to (the whites) was legible, you could say. It could be written." For Bolaño, the search for justice is partially about who can be seen in print.

At a literary conference in Seville six months before his death, Bolaño joked that his literary stock might rise posthumously. Sure enough, Bolaño the man has, ironically, vanished after his untimely death, lost in the fog of fame in the English-speaking world. Mainstream critics call his work "labyrinthine" — perhaps English-language critics’ stock adjective for Latin American writers — in a rush to "discover" a new Borges. Bolaño was a high-school dropout who bragged of discovering literature by shoplifting books. He claimed to be a former heroin addict who hung out with the FMLN in El Salvador. His genius deserves comparison to the great Borges, but it’s safe to say that, unlike Borges, a literary lapdog of Argentina’s generals, Bolaño would never have addressed the military leaders of the fascist Argentine coup as "gentlemen." Bolaño wrote without a net, over the abyss of atrocity into which his generation vanished. He did so in an effort to make a literature that recorded for all time where the bodies were buried. As a female reporter in 2666 says, "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."

The dangers of believing false narratives should be evident by now. In the wake of our current financial collapse, it is now widely understood that the U.S.’s sense of itself as the richest and most powerful nation in the world has been kept artificially afloat in the recent past by the import of cheap goods and credit from China. These cheap goods are manufactured under labor and environmental conditions much like those of Bolaño’s maquiladoras — conditions we tell ourselves we would never allow here at home, yet which are vital to our economic survival. Dealings with China have, instead, spread repressive tactics in reverse back to corporations from the United States, such as when Google memorably agreed to remove all reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Google China site.

There is a crucial difference between hope and self-delusion. In its dogged search for uncomfortable truth, 2666 creates a hard-won hope that is different from the way in which that word manifests on the campaign trail. It respects the hope that truth matters, that staring it down can provide the shock of self-awareness that makes real change possible.

In the meantime, there is the hope of literature itself. In 2666, Bolaño devotes a scene to one of his disappeared characters, a Spanish poet who lives out his days in an insane asylum in the countryside. The poet’s doctor — who in a classically deadpan Bolaño twist tells us he is also the poet’s biographer — reflects on the asylum the poet has vanished into. "Someday we will all finally leave (the asylum) and this noble institution will stand abandoned," he says. "But in the meantime, it is my duty to collect information, dates, names. To confirm stories." *

Erick Lyle is the author of On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City, out now on Soft Skull Press.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

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PREVIEW If success breeds success, why has Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater not had any imitators? The company celebrated its 50th anniversary in December, and Revelations will be half a century old next year. Yet Ailey and Revelations continue to be as unique as they were on Jan. 31, 1960, when the company thought the work had failed because the audience greeted it with a stunned silence. Then, of course, the roof came down, and Revelations continues to move audiences around the globe. So would the Ailey company be such a hit wherever they go without Revelations? It’s on every single program of this year’s Berkeley run, and my suspicion is that it wouldn’t.

Still, the company has more going for itself than one masterpiece. For one thing, there are the dancers. They all are virtuosic, generous, and committed to each other. A sense of inclusivity was also key to Ailey and continues to be vital for artistic director Judith Jamison. Ailey never wanted this to be an Ailey-only, American-only ensemble. Today the company still takes chances — with younger choreographers such as Hope Boykin, whose 2008 work Go in Grace will be on Program A. Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen’s 1997 Solo, also seen at San Francisco Ballet, will be on Program D, as will Festa Barocca, a 2008 commission from the Italian Mauro Bigonzetti. One definite highlight should be the West Coast premiere of Ailey’s 1969 piece Masekela Language on Program C. It makes you wonder, what took them so long?

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Wed/4–Fri/6, 8 p.m.; Sat/7, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun/8, 3 p.m.; $36–$62. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Radio Africa and Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Radio Africa and Kitchen is described by its Web site as a "nomadic" restaurant, but if it has anything like a home, it’s Coffee Bar, the Multimedia Gulch spot kitty-corner from Circolo. This juxtaposition isn’t as unlikely as it seems. Although the first thing you smell when you step into Radio Africa is Coffee Bar’s coffee, the smell reminds you that coffee is native to the highlands of east Africa — and Radio Africa’s food is east African in influence.

The maestro of the project is Eskender Aseged. In the autumn of 2004, having cooked professionally in Bay Area restaurants for two decades, he began Radio Africa on a small scale in his own home, serving dinners that reflected the cuisine of his native Ethiopia to groups of 15 or 20 people. Today, more than four years later, the heart of the drill remains much the same: inventive and elegant cooking that emphasizes healthfulness and carefully chosen ingredients in an atmosphere of (sometimes raucous) festivity.

Despite the arresting name, Radio Africa and Kitchen is several steps removed from Africa. It doesn’t even much resemble the Ethiopian restaurants you find along Divisadero Street in the Western Addition. Coffee Bar, as a locale, is a redoubt of pure Mission District monied hipsterdom: a vault of brick, concrete, and stainless steel, with industrial-style lighting, a gigantic, heavy door, and a large mezzanine.

On that mezzanine you will find the flickering light of votive candles, for a monastery effect. There are also big tables for big parties, along with a dining counter overlooking the bar. The Wi-Fi connection must be especially good at the counter, because it seems to attract diners with laptops, who sit there with plates of food while gazing into glowing screens like hardworking controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, gobbling some takeout while maintaining radio contact during a space walk.

I do wonder about the etiquette of peering at a laptop, or into a handheld, while having dinner, especially when the food is as good as Radio Africa’s. Much as I love the traditional way of presenting the highly spiced dishes of Ethiopia and Eritrea — family-style, on mats of injera — I was delighted to find some of the flavors of east Africa handled in a different way. They’ve been passed through a California filter, in a sense. Also I was pleased to find meat de-emphasized, though I like meat. If you’ve been to one of the old-line places, you’ve probably noticed the prominence of beef. Radio Africa favors seafood and chicken instead, and many of the best dishes have no flesh at all.

We were particularly impressed by a green-bean salad ($6) — really an arugula salad with green beans, slivered almonds, dabs of notably creamy goat cheese, and long fingers of white, faintly blushing radish bound together with a simple vinaigrette. A salad like this one reminds us that there is an art to salad-making, particularly in winter, when not only is matériel in short supply but the human response to greens and uncooked vegetables is at its most reluctant and in need of coaxing.

Edamame hummus ($6) was very much like the usual chickpea kind, except with a faint sheen of green. The hummus was dressed with argan oil, which is derived from the pits of a fruit tree native to Morocco and is thought to have many health benefits similar to those of olive oil. For dipping, the kitchen offered rounds of Tartine sourdough baguette instead of the usual pita bread or lavash.

Were the mushroom crostini ($6) mounted on rounds of toasted Tartine bread? The menu did not give the bread’s provenance, and Tartine would be a reasonable guess, but the question was mostly mooted by the tastiness of the topping: a coarse purée of brown mushrooms seasoned with berbere (an Ethiopian form of chili powder) and swabbed onto the toasts along with bits of basil and shreds of manchego cheese, for a hint of tang.

Seared Maine sea scallops ($6) came embedded in a granular purée of cauliflower (about the consistency of riced potatoes) that had been stewed alicha-style. Scatterings of minced chive helped this plate avert a complete white-out, as did the nice crusting on the scallops themselves, which can be overpoweringly rich and sweet but weren’t here.

Usually a special vegetarian plate makes me suspicious, but Radio Africa’s fantasy ($16) was a small ensemble masterpiece. The dramatis personae included lentils in two guises (green were mashed into something like dal; beluga remained whole), an expertly seasoned eggplant caviar, a wintry tagine of fennel and chard spooned over a foundation of couscous, and (also charmingly wintry) a chestnut salsa to bind the players into a whole of still-discernible parts.

The fantasy was so good that the menu’s premier item, a chunk of true Alaskan cod ($20), crusted with flaps of artichoke heart and seated on a low hill of couscous in saffron broth, slightly paled by comparison. We devoured it nonetheless, while noisy birthday parties unfolded at spacious tables on either side of us.

As befits the abbreviated menu, dessert is typically limited to a single possibility, such as vanilla ice cream ($6) — organic, in two scoops — with a couple of fabulously intense lemon cookies, a few blueberries, and a puddling of chocolate sauce, the last two items combining in a strange harmony as well as providing a wealth of antioxidants and going well with coffee, which — not surprising given the circumstances — is available. Wine and beer too.

RADIO AFRICA AND KITCHEN AT COFFEE BAR

Dinner: Thurs.–Fri., 6:30–10 p.m.

1890 Bryant, SF

(415) 420-2486

www.radioafricakitchen.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Anthony B

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PREVIEW Keith Anthony Blair, also known as the fiery Rasta reggae sing-jay Anthony B, is becoming a multigenerational artist. The 33-year-old began recording in his late teens and over 15 years has helped usher in a cultural revival via a dozen albums, thousands of singles, and relentless touring. Still, he was surprised while on his last trip through Europe when promoters asked him start his shows early to accommodate his many preteen fans. "The shows were full of kids," Blair says, speaking by phone from Jamaica. "We had 10-, 12-, and 14 year-olds come out — that’s a fanbase for the next 10 years." Apparently the youth are drawn by Blair’s lively shows and enthusiastic recordings. "But they’ll go home and ask their parents what my lyrics were talking about. So a conversation can build in the home between the parents and the different generations over music."

Blair arrived on the reggae scene in the early-1990s among a Jamaican cultural contingent that included Luciano, Sizzla, and others. Blair and his camp stood out with their turban-wrapped locks and Bobo Ashanti Rastafarian faith — a sect that imposes restrictions on diet, conduct, and appearance — as well as songs that promoted a positive identity, equal rights, and gave a voice to the poor in Jamaica. After recording for Star Trail, Xterminator, and Fat Eyes, he formed his own Born Fire imprint and issued three self-produced full-lengths, including 2008’s brilliant Life Over Death. His music has always contained conscious content, dating back to 1995’s daring political indictment "Fire Pon Rome," a track recorded at considerable risk. "I’ve had to sidestep police," he explains.

Blair’s latest album, Rise Up (Greensleeves), continues that social justice thread: the title track is an acoustic number that echoes Bob Marley ("emancipate from mental slavery") and urges listeners to be mindful of global issues. With its innovative roots-meets-hip-hop production ("Stop Fight Reggae") and great combination tracks with Chezidek, Lukie D, and Horace Andy, Rise Up is an exemplary recording by a reggae artist that has no problem setting an example. "We have to go out into the world," Blair says, "and come back and show people what can achieved by doing good."

ANTHONY B With Native Elements. Tues/16, 9 p.m., $25. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422, www.theindependentsf.com

Akron/Family

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PREVIEW Dear Akron/Family: When I first got my hands on your self-titled 2005 release (Young God), I wasn’t immediately grabbed by your music. Its spare ethereal quality had to stew. But it wasn’t long before the album had brewed, and I was pressing repeat. "Before and Again" and "Running, Returning" led me through the looking glass into a timeless fairy-tale land of fleeting fright and fancy flight. I fell the hardest for "I’ll be on the water." This is kinda embarrassing to admit, but eventually the track even found its way onto a summer mix for my boyfriend at the time, because I loved the line, "Thinking of you / there’s lightning bolts in my chest," the subtle field recordings of ocean waves and children voices, and everything else I thought it said about us.

After that I continued to eat up all of your releases. Meek Warrior (Young God, 2006) and your split album with Angels of Light (Young God, 2005) were both delicious. I found myself liking them even better than your first record — or just as much, but for different reasons. They still have that folksy warmth, but they feel more fractured. "Blessing force" begins with bursting beats, blossoms into intricate polyrhythmic interplay, turns to free-form chaos, and ends with a spiritual climax. Then Meek Warrior follows with the melodic, acoustic mantra "Gone Beyond."

In your music I hear everything from the Beatles’ "A Day in the Life" to "Blackbird," Zeppelin to Zappa, and in the repetitious gospel moments, I hear Spiritualized. But mostly I find a chaotic, incoherent experience — which in your case is a good thing. Your sound is far too eclectic to fit into any Allmusic genre I’m familiar with and instead sounds and feels more like a spiritual awakening. I’m really looking forward to your three-day residency at the Hemlock, and I can’t wait to hear the new material from your upcoming album, Set ‘Em Free, Set ‘Em Wild (Dead Oceans). P.S., I heard y’all made up your own religion called "AK." Is that true? (Michelle Broder Van Dyke)

AKRON/FAMILY With Avocet (Fri/6), Citay (Sat/7), and Howlin’ Rain (Sun/8). Fri/6–Sun/8, 9:30 p.m., $15. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

“Yan Pei-Ming: YES!”

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REVIEW James Elkin starts off his wonderful book What Painting Is (Routledge, 1998) with the simple statement that "painting is alchemy," an elegant encapsulation of the process by which combining oils and pigments, applying that mixture onto a canvas, and generally getting one’s hands dirty results in something as ethereal as one of Monet’s Water Lilies. Elkin’s words came to mind while looking at Franco-Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming’s massive watercolor and oil paintings. Yan’s paintings are alchemical double exposures: we are asked to view them simultaneously as palimpsest-like records of their material creation and as indexes of their subjects. Their visceral emotional impact comes from the tension between these two ways of seeing, a tension that is present in every brush stroke and paint globule.

Take Yan’s portrait of our new president, painted last year. Obama regards us cautiously. His sober visage and weary gaze — the products of roughly brushed, smeared and daubed blacks, whites and grays — seem to anticipate the disappointment that will invariably accompany the enormous, near-impossible task before him. The spattering mist of paint droplets that streak his face and suit make the canvas look as if it has been left for the birds, so to speak. This is not the face of the Great Progressive Hope enshrined in street art hagiography. This is not a presidential portrait. This is a portrait of a man — a rightfully exhausted and undoubtedly doubt-filled man — who happens to be the president. The aggregated crudeness of Yan’s technique is not in the service of caricature or grotesquerie. Rather — much like Yan’s earlier portraits of Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, anonymous prostitutes, and himself — Obama displays the battle scars of a forceful struggle with portraiture itself.

The political resonances of that representational struggle echo resoundingly throughout this solo exhibition, and the struggle is often one of life and death. On the wall adjacent to Obama, there are four equally large black and white oil portraits depicting unnamed U.S. soldiers and veterans. Each is ambiguously titled Life Souvenir, followed by a different date. Do the numbers mark when these people returned home, or the hour of their death, or both? A morbid terminus is suggested, metonymically, by Returning Home (2008) which depicts the flag-draped coffins of the recent war dead; an image that the Bush administration so pointedly tried to remove from the public domain. A similar ambiguity suffuses the more recent "New Born, New Life" series: I couldn’t help but think of the gore porn photos used by anti-abortion extremists when looking at Yan’s watercolors of newborn infants emerging from murky pools of placental red. Even Obama faces a presidential memento mori in the massive watercolors of U.S. currency on the gallery’s upper level, each mottled denomination bearing the portrait (in this context, rendered worthless as legal tender, while being worth quite a lot, since Yan tends to receive blue chip bids at auction) of a "great man" who has come and gone.

YAN PEI-MING: YES! Through May 23. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 749-4563, www.waltermcbean.com

It’s a depression. Let’s get cracking

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By Calvin Welch


OPINION It’s time we called it what it is: this is a depression. And we need to figure out the politics of the new age we are entering, especially in cities, which will be the ground zero for economic hardship.

While President Obama and the media continue to use euphemisms (the "subprime mortgage collapse," "the recession," "the credit crunch") for fear of causing a panic. But the recent tsunami of lost jobs and frozen credit, coupled with the long-standing structural problems of nearly 30 years of Republican magic-of-the-marketplace economic policies — shrinking real incomes for 90 percent of Americans, an obscenely expensive healthcare system that neither businesses nor workers can afford, and an outmoded and deadly carbon-based energy system — have created a new global depression, one the experts said could never happen again.

The current global depression differs in three important ways from your grandparents’ (or great-grandparents’) depression.

First and foremost, this depression was worldwide from the start. Although made in America, the global financial capital system infected the world economy one trading day after it affected ours. Second, the Great Depression was agricultural- and industrial-based, hitting small towns and the countryside the hardest. The current depression is financial service-sector based, and will hit cities and suburbs the hardest, especially the housing, real estate ,and retail sectors. Since the nation is far more urban than it was in the 1930s, our depression will put far greater strains on our urban politics and life-supporting social services to low income people, than anything that occurred during the Great Depression. Finally and saddest, this depression comes at a time when organized labor is weak, divided, and confused.

San Francisco leaders seem unequal to the challenges confronting us. Recently Mayor Gavin Newsom has come up with the usual policies that transform a bad recession into an even greater depression: cut urban health and human services, lay off city employees, and massively accelerate speculation in condo conversions in the midst of cratering real estate values and zero mortgage lending while providing an anemic stimulus proposal for a handful of small businesses that pay their workers very little and are no longer capable of providing health care.

But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is king. What is the progressive answer to these mindless proposals? The usual default answers: no cuts, no layoffs — and silence on all the other issues confronting us. This simply won’t do this time. Its not about the budget, folks, it’s about the economy.

We need to start talking with each other — now — about how we rebuild a sustainable urban economy that runs on renewable energy, provides health care for our people, and houses us all. Lets get cracking. *

Calvin Welch is a community organizer and resident of San Francisco.

Fisher’s Folly threatens the Presidio

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EDITORIAL The latest proposal for developing the Main Post at the Presidio national park shows exactly what’s wrong with the privatized, developer-driven planning that has plagued the 1,400-acre site since Rep. Nancy Pelosi took control of it away from the National Park System.

The centerpiece of the new plan, released last week, is the same old monument to the greed and ego of Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher. The octogenarian billionaire still gets his art museum, a three-building, 200,000-square-foot development that has no place at the Presidio. Oh, it’s not quite as ugly and intrusive the original design: most of the main gallery will be underground, and the roof will be green. How lovely.

The essential problem with the museum remains, and will continue to plague this development plan. The park is making room for a museum, which was never part of anyone’s vision for the new national park when the Army abandoned the post, purely and simply because a billionaire with powerful political connections wants a place to show off his personal art collection. Fisher’s desires are driving the shape of what ought to be a crown jewel of an urban park. The folks who once upon a time thought the Presidio could be a center for sustainable ecology never had a chance.

And a museum of contemporary art is a total mismatch for the Presidio’s main post. A museum is, by its nature, designed to attract large number of visitors — and since there’s only limited transit capacity in the Presidio, most of them will come by car. The center of the park will be overwhelmed with traffic — and so will the surrounding neighborhoods and the streets that serve as the chokepoints for the Presidio’s limited number of entrances and exits. Those cars will compete for space with the growing number of hikers and bicyclists trying to carve out a space in what is, by definition, a park.

The Main Post proposal also includes a large hotel (described as a "lodge," to conjure up images of rustic accommodations) that will feature a high-end restaurant and bar.

This commercialization of the Presidio stands as the legacy of the speaker of the house, who back in 1994 bowed to Republican demands and decided to take the new park away from the people who run every other national park in America and turn it over to a developer-run Presidio Trust. The trust was saddled with a mandate something no other park has ever faced — it has to develop enough real estate to become self-sufficient. And with Fisher as one of the early trust members, the Presidio has become part office park (with a big George Lucas complex that won the moviemaker a $60 million tax break), part shopping center — and now part museum and hotel complex.

This plan — and the overall dreadful direction the park is taking — can still be changed. The seven-member trust board is appointed by the president, and the Obama administration will soon have a chance to fill three of the slots. By tradition the local Congress member (Pelosi) would have a major say in those appointments — but Pelosi is close to Fisher and has set the Presidio on the wrong course. Obama ought to appoint credible environmentalists and preservationists who are wiling to question and oppose Fisher’s grand scheme.

Some well-meaning local museum foes think the best answer is to encourage Fisher to build his personal edifice somewhere else — say, in downtown San Francisco, where other museums are and where there’s adequate transit infrastructure. The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 to encourage Fisher to follow that path.

We wish he was willing to donate his contemporary art to SFMOMA which is perfectly suited to handle and display it. But Fisher wants total control, and no professional curator would ever accept that. So we’re willing to consider a new Fisher museum downtown. But the city shouldn’t roll out the red carpet for it. If the Republican who made a fortune selling clothes sewn by children in third world sweat shops wants to buy some land and apply for a building permit, the city should treat him like any other developer. But Don Fisher, who has done almost nothing but damage to this city, deserves no special favors.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

When the news broke last week that Hearst Corporation was threatening to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, the pundits across the country raised the obvious question: will San Francisco become the first American city without a major daily newspaper?

I think it’s a little early to say that Chron is actually going to vanish; part of what’s going on is clearly a shot across the bow of the paper’s unions, a warning on the part of tough-guy publisher Frank Vega that he’s deadly serious about cutting costs. That will mean widespread layoffs, outsourcing of union jobs, etc. Hearst is a big corporation run by bean counters, one that has major financial problems at many of its media properties. It’s not going to keep sustaining $50 million a year losses in San Francisco.

But Hearst is also a major political player in the United States, California, and San Francisco, and a big-city newspaper carries with it a lot of influence. Shutting down the Chron would be a huge step, one that the Hearst board members, who include William Randolph Hearst 3rd, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, are going to do only as an absolute last resort.

What happens if we lose the Chron? Well, in the short term, we’re stuck with the Examiner, which recently lauded Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s CEO as an icon of alternative energy. I need say no more. In the longer term, something will arise to replace the Chron, probably several Web-only daily newspapers, but they’ll never achieve the clout an old-fashioned morning paper had on the political, cultural, and civic dialogue. Those days are numbered anyway; the urban news media of the future will be smaller, less concentrated, and less individually influential.

I’m not a huge fan of Hearst’s San Francisco flagship, but it’s always a shame to see a newspaper die. And I’m convinced that the creaky old Chron could still survive. But it will need major surgery — not just on the finances, but on the content. Because these days, nobody I know under 30 bothers to read it.

So for Mr. Vega and his editor, Ward Bushee, allow me to offer some hints at reviving the moribund publication:

1. Become a San Francisco paper. Nobody reads the Chron for national news any more. You can get The New York Times delivered or read it on the Web and get far better coverage than anything the Chron offers. So give it up. Go local. And by local I don’t mean Walnut Creek and Orinda; forget the suburban readers and try to convince people in your central circulation area that you have something worth reading every day.

2. Trade C.W. Nevius to the Examiner for a draft choice and a writer to be named later and hire seven young, progressive columnists who can talk about issues that people in one of America’s most liberal cities actually relate to. Run a front-page opinion column every day, by a different one of them — make every powerful interest in the city nervous.

3. Redirect the energy and money from the national news to local investigative reporting. A team of five reporters can break a dozen major stories a year. We do it here on much less.

4. Since David Lazarus left for the L.A. Times, there’s not much muckraking on the business desk. Forget the wire stories and the puff — kick some corporate asses.

5. Hire a liberal editorial page editor.

6. Ray Ratto. Go team.

Lunch-drunk love

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AVANT TO BE PUNK If any artist ever self-classified as trash, it was (is?) Lydia Lunch, original ’70s New York City No Wave princess (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), ’80s underground film star (for Richard Kern, Scott and Beth B., Nick Zedd, etc.), and subsequent spoken-word performer and print autobiographer. In each medium her voice bottled the societally incriminating sarcasm of self-defined detritus, costume-partied as yesteryear’s bullet-bra’d sex object. By 1990, who beyond first-generation punk nostalgists gave a fuck? Europeans, that’s who.

That same year Lunch wrote and codirected (with Babeth Mondini) Kiss Napoleon Goodbye. The featurette — photographed by Mike Kuchar, no less — screened only in Dutch avant-garde and Berlin Film Festival–related events shortly after completion, then perhaps nowhere else until its recent release on the aptly named U.S. DVD label, Cult Epics.

It stars Lunch as Hedda, slinky spouse to Neal (Don Bajema). They’ve retreated to a lovely country château to reboot their relationship. This goes OK before Hedda hears from pal Jackson (Henry Rollins), who’s passing through on an author’s tour and wants to visit for the weekend. His arrival triggers an explosion of both Neal’s paranoiac imaginings and the filmmakers’ poetic ones.

Poet-novelist-playwright Bajema, at the time based in San Francisco and so sinewy he makes pumped costar Rollins look like an empty fitness showboat, was no trained actor. But his conviction as a man tortured by jealousy (and possibly madness) largely puts Napoleon across.

The film is a very odd duck, with aristocratic European locations juxtaposed against a primitive triangle drama, stilted lesbian scenes, bewildering historic flashbacks, Neal’s rather abstract meltdown, and the spectacle of macho lit-punk heroes muscle-tussling on a château lawn. There’s also experimental artist Z’ev as a guy aiming a trepanning drill into his own skull. Posting this under the Guardian‘s Trash umbrella is honest only in vague, associative terms: Napoleon‘s makers were clearly aiming for art beneath the coatings of irony, pop, and punk sarcasm.

An oppressive bounty of DVD extras reveal Lunch’s latter-day sub–Karen Finley spoken-word rants as heckle-worthy, and much-heckled. (Still, her core messages about institutionalized misogyny are hard to argue against.) It all makes one nostalgic for the ironic hatefuck retro sex-kittenry of 1980’s Queen of Siam, the best album Lunch ever made, with or without a band. "Pleasure is always made sweeter at the expense of others," her character says in a Napoleon voiceover. That’s not necessarily the voice of wisdom. Just the voice of Lunch.

www.lydia-lunch.org

Loving the enemy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Nation, ethnicity, family, friends, gender, lover — where do our true loyalties lie? More to the point, when our multiple loyalties slip out of concentric orbit and collide, how much say do we really have in the matter? These questions arise provocatively from two very different plays making their Bay Area premieres.

In the first, Golden Thread’s generally sturdy West Coast premiere of Joyce Van Dyke’s A Girl’s War: An Armenian-Azeri Love Story, an aging Armenian American fashion model, Anna (Ana Bayat), returns to the war-torn village of her youth determined not to be affected by the ongoing ethnic strife that has just taken the life of her brother (Adrian Cervantes Mejia) and racked the Azerbaijani region of Karabakh since the late 1980s — converting her stolid yet hot-tempered mother (Bella Warda) into a machine gun–toting foot soldier for the Armenian cause. Almost flaunting her own aloofness and disapproval, Anna even resists calling herself Armenian and soon falls in love with a returning member of her family’s onetime Azeri neighbors, now antagonists: a passionate young deserter (Zarif Kabeir Sadiqi) who arrives stealthily one day at her mother’s house, which he and his family briefly occupied years before.

Van Dyke’s 2001 play opens on a world seemingly apart, however, as Brit fashion photographer Stephen (Simon Vance) snaps photos of the still-striking Anna, his old flame and muse, glowering at him in some haute-couture idea of battle garb. The contrast is key and works its way into the second setting in Karabakh, when Stephen and his cheerful but recently shaken assistant Tito (Mejia) arrive after escaping anti-U.S. feelings during a harrowing trip to Turkey. Here in her mother’s house, Anna’s two worlds collide even as she insists she needs no land, passport, or language to define her. Her stoic but long-suffering mother, however, shows little patience for her daughter’s flighty Western cosmopolitanism, and we are left with our own sympathies unsettled, fraternizing with all sides.

Along the way, the play neatly works a certain doubling conceit. The same actor playing the Italian American Tito, for instance, also plays Anna’s recently deceased brother, a spectral presence in the form of the far more severe but equally sensitive Seryozha. The implications are subtle rather than crude, suggesting the dramatic shaping done by circumstance across a universal segment of young manhood. And the climax, in yet another doubling, underscores the point resonantly, as another two seemingly very different characters lie side by side, brought together in death — the most democratic of states — and made mirror images of each other. It’s an effect that might have been overplayed, but under artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian’s confident direction it happily comes off with matter-of-fact simplicity. The play as a whole succeeds in similar fashion, overshadowing, if not altogether escaping, its more maudlin and moralizing tendencies with fitting dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and thematic delicacy.

TO HELL AND BACK Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, meanwhile, offers an admirably complex take on love and loyalty in the context of the proverbial war of the sexes, in director Buddy Butler’s graceful Northern California premiere of William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell. An African American couple (a towering Alex Morris and a slyly understated Pjay Phillips) find their relationship hitting the skids after 20 years of marriage, dividing along lines of gender solidarity the four friends who’ve shown up to celebrate their anniversary. If the title — playing on the Terry McMillan novel — isn’t that funny, Parker’s naturalistic dialogue offers consistent laughs and truths, pivoting expertly on the comic and tragic dimensions of male-female rivalry in the context of African American experience. There is one seeming misstep late in the plot — a slightly hard-to-believe change of heart evoked at gunpoint — but this is a surprisingly powerful and well-rounded comedy about love; the entwined politics of race, class, and gender; and the long haul every family faces.

A GIRL’S WAR

Through March 8

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; $15–$25

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

www.thickhouse.org

WAITIN’ 2 END HELL

Through March 1

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $24–$36

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre

77 Beale, SF

www.lhtsf.org

Maus trapped

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER San Francisco street rats, go play some other day. House heads, scamper beneath some disco ball far away. And, kraut rock kidz, don’t you dare mistake Maus Haus for just another tinned Can tribute band — German spelling or nein — though the Bay Area ensemble has been known to rock the occasional Faust track behind closed doors.

Instead Joseph Genden, Tom Hurlbut, Jason Kick, Sean Mabry, Josh Rampage, and Aaron Weiss — all real birth names, folks — make some of the most original music to scuttle along the edges of aural indefinability, right here in the Bay. Just don those giant Mickey ears and take in the boom-bleat orchestral art-rock bounce, chugging motor-iffic rhythms, and squealing theremin-like shrieks of "Rigid Breakfast," the opening track of Maus Haus’ latest, Lark Marvels (Pretty Blue Presents, 2008). Fractured psych patients, bent-but-not-broken folk-funksters, soft-acid bluesmen, Silver Apples acolytes, and Captain Beefheart praise-sayers — all these descriptors touch on, yet don’t quite capture, the inviting, inventive sonic nest Maus Haus has built.

"It’s a project that started out as a guideline of concepts that we wanted to fulfill but we had no actual idea of what the music would sound like," explains drummer-keyboardist-multi-instrumentalist Mabry by speaker phone alongside Kick.

"We definitely like a lot of late ’60s psychedelia — that’s something we all agree on," vocalist-keyboardist Kick adds. "But we didn’t intend to do anything with a retro sheen necessarily." Rather, Maus Haus chose to simply identify with the pioneering spirit of early psych. "Our heart is kind of in the same place," he says.

Hard to believe this gang of friends — some assembled via Craigslist, a clutch relocated from the Midwest (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana), two hailing from Sacramento and Half Moon Bay, and all involved in bands as varied as Social Studies, Battlehooch, and Pope of Yes — started working on music together just two years ago, and at the encouragement of friends, they played live together for the first time a year ago. "It felt like there needed to be a band to represent the songs," Kick says, "instead of it just being an esoteric recording project.

Enter the crazy quilt of onstage instrumentation, in full pack-rat effect when Maus Haus played Bottom of the Hill not long ago. "We have so much stuff onstage it’s kind of ridiculous," says Kick. He counts off a Rhodes keyboard, Omnichord, drum set, assorted floor toms, an electronic drum pad, two MicroKorgs, the theremin-emuutf8g Chaos Pad, trombone, sax, trumpets, bass guitar, MIDI controller, and laptop, though he says, "We might stop using the laptop because computers shut down at the worst times." Sounds like the song "We Used Technology (But Technology Let Us Down)" was written from experience.

So what are these brain baths that Maus Haus recommends as one of several "special things to do" on their MySpace site? That suggestion, along with the rest of the list, emerged from a series of surrealist word games undertaken to generate lyrics. "Nerdy but true," says Kick. Still, one imagines a good saline solution dousing — accompanied by Maus Haus’ bubbling score — might set the imagination reeling. "You can do it clothed," Kick offers, "or naked."

MAUS HAUS

Fri/27, 5 p.m., free

Benders

806 So. Van Ness, SF

www.bendersbar.com

Also March 4, 8 p.m., $8

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

SIDEBAR ONE

MUSHROOM MUSHES … TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Who’s brave enough to tackle a 1971 rock opus its very creator could never conjure live? Bay Area rock brainiacs Mushroom — that’s who. And here they go again — reprising their Feb. 21 Make-Out Room reprise of Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse, which was scuttled by the Who and ended up in pieces on Who’s Next (MCA, 1971). "The main thing," e-mails Mushroom maven Pat Thomas, "is that there have been a lot of ‘tribute’ shows and even ‘tributes’ to specific albums, but in this case, Mushroom is performing a ‘rock opera’ that the band themselves (the Who) never got around to performing." This time around, Naked Barbies’ Patty Spiglanin will fill in as Roger Daltry, Citay’s Josh Pollock will shoulder Pete Townshend duties, Brightblack Morning Light’s Matt Cunitz will be Nicky Hopkins, and Thomas will ape Keith Moon. Townshend was never able to talk the rest of the Who into realizing his Matrix-ish, Web-prophesying sci-fi followup to Tommy, but, according to Thomas, "It’s PT’s intensity and conviction that led me to explore the possibility of performing Lifehouse, music that I’ve been obsessed with for 34 years." Mike Therieau will open with a tribute to Ronnie Lane and the Faces.

March 6, 10 p.m., $10. Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. www.starryploughpub.com

SIDEBAR 2

SHELLING IN THE PEANUT GALLERY

TWO SHEDS AND AN HORSE


Soulful indie emanates from the former SF/Sacto twosome; skirt-swirling pop from the latter Brisbane, Australia pair. With Matt Costa and Robert Francis. Wed/25, 8 p.m., $25. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

ONE HUNDRED SUNS


Stately black metal growl from the SF/Brooklyn combo, which celebrates its new self-released CD, Beneath the Hooves of Time. With Grayceon, Nero Order, and Wanteds. Sun/1, 8 p.m., $8. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com

RAPHAEL SAADIQ


Oakland’s own takes out his classic throwback R&B once again, after a series of dates opening for Columbia labelmate John Legend. Tues/3, 8 p.m., $32.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.livenation.com

Two’s the charm

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You could dig up what you need to know about Baltimore, Md.’s Thank You on the Internet pretty easily: names, dates, discography, samples, and pics. Friends of mine released a real labor-of-love album recently, and a preliminary Lycos search turned up a review that was 90 percent press release. This is the kind of disappointment that makes me think rock criticism à la Richard Meltzer — the kind that trades in imaginative, frequently lazy yet still illuminating misinformation — is due for a comeback.

Judging by the name, I thought Thank You was the sort of band to be "in" on these sorts of pranks at rock’s expense. But search "thank+you+band" and blam, there it is. Thank You has a bona fide album on a serious indie, Terrible Two (Thrill Jockey, 2008), and, depending on your perspective, it can count as a long EP or short LP.

The opening track, "Empty Legs," is an oceanic expanse of faux-metal churn. The whistle toots toward the beginning reach out to fellow Thrill Jocks OOIOO’s ecstatic, kinda impenetrable Taiga (2006), but once the musicians settle in, the flashbacks are of the Don Caballero/Storm and Stress variety. It’s perverse post-rock all the way, but you probably knew that anyway, based on song titles like "Embryo Imbroglio."

Terrible Two‘s best quality is precisely that we don’t know what to make of it. That’s the point of the album and what makes the band a close fit with post-rock’s steez. Many standard-issue indie descriptors apply to Thank You’s music — it’s rhythmic and sports chanty vocals and so-called tribal percussion — but there’s a lingering question over what we’re supposed to do with it. Zone/make/freak out? The music doesn’t hang together in an album-as-statement way: it just drifts in and out of cymbal-showered cosmic grooves.

Thrill Jockey describes Thank You’s sound as a resource for "beat-diggers and electronic artists," raw material for repurposing, but don’t be discouraged by the ambiguity. The toxic assets spilling out of indie’s boom and bust aren’t crispy organs and tuned tom-toms — instead they’re everything embodied by Beirut and Jeremy Jay. Those dudes took it too far, while Thank You, like tourmates Mi Ami, take it further out. For examps, the only reason to tune out of the chugging, hypnotic middle section of the slothy title track would be to peep the mind-melting percussive discourses of N’Diaye Rose Sabar Group’s video clips — though you’d still end up coming back to finish "Terrible Two" off.

Chris Coady, who’s worked with fellow Charm City residents Celebration, mixed Terrible Two and gives it the saturated, subtly warped tone that sounds like a really classy 4-track, a sound Beach House also go in for. The production enhances the already-glassy quality of the songs. I imagine Thank You’s process for composing as something I christen "deep jamming": discarding the first dozen ideas that you stumble upon as a group, then reducing the 13th riff by half and looping indefinitely. In this sense, Thank You could have existed in the mid-’90s without arousing suspicions of time travel: it sounds like the ensemble mainly uses the computer to check out A Minor Forest’s brainwashed.com page and play Minesweeper.

As far as Bmore bands go, this threesome out-Apollonian Animal Collective. Or out-Dionysian. We can leave that to the unspecified future lady/dude with the sampler to figure out.

THANK YOU

With Mi Ami and JAWS

Fri/27, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Ridin’ the synergy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Listening to Keelay & Zaire’s debut, Ridin’ High (MYX Music Label), is like being transported back to Bay Area hip-hop in the early ’90s. Remember those glory days? Hobo Junction and Hieroglyphics battled for supremacy; the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and Bomb Records sparked the turntablism movement; and Celly Cel, Spice-1, Richie Rich, and the Click created mob music.

Production team Tim "Zaire" Lewis and Kyle "Keelay" Pierce evoke that era with balletic numbers such as "I’m on Swerv," with its Zapp-style — not T-Pain style — Auto-Tunin’, and laid-back gangsta soul like "Alright with Me" and "Nurf to the Turf." The cast itself isn’t Bay-specific. Its geographical makeup — a product of connections made through MySpace pages and online community forums — ranges from Raleigh, N.C. (Phonte Coleman and Darien Brockington) to Bloomberg, N.J. (rising producer Illmind’s group Fortilive). It’s a result of Internet hustling, and the chorus line raps, sings, swaggers, and jostles for attention. But the smooth, breezy, Dayton-tires-rolling-on-concrete tone remains.

"We really just wanted to make something that would give the listener the feeling of riding around in a car," says Keelay by phone. A Salt Lake City transplant, he enrolled at San Francisco State seven years ago. "After college, I just didn’t want to leave," he remembers. "I loved it in the Bay Area. It quickly became my home."

Keelay met Zaire on the UndergroundHipHop.com — once ughh.com — message boards. Both work 9-to-5 gigs: Keelay is a computer technician for Wells Fargo. Zaire, who lives in Newport News, Va., is a government contractor who mysteriously performs "intelligence work." ("I don’t know what he does!" answers Keelay when pressed for details.) Without a label deal, they painstakingly cobbled together Ridin’ High over two years, paying for the guest appearances themselves, though, Keelay adds, "a lot of people were really generous," and did it for free. "Me and Zaire had to send beats and sessions back and forth" via e-mail, he says. "We did it all through the Internet."

Now MYX Music Label (MML), who signed Keelay & Zaire to a deal last fall, has chosen Ridin’ High as its first major release. MML is a subsidiary of ABS-CBN Global, a Philippines media company that launched a U.S. version of MYX TV in 2007. According to Karim Panni, who manages the imprint, the "music lifestyle channel" can only be seen on DIRECTV in the Bay Area. But it is working on various deals that will widen its reach. Meanwhile, Comcast carries MYX’s most popular show, Built from Scratch, through its On Demand channel.

"There’s a lot of work that goes into getting added onto Comcast. But we’re working on it," says Panni, also known as Nightclubber Lang, one-third of the Seattle group Boom Bap Project. "I was on tour with Brother Ali, and the owner [of MYX] asked me if I wanted to run his record label."

It seems odd that a multimedia company with international ambitions would choose an indie rapper to launch a record label. And judging from MML’s release slate — including 20 C Energizers, described in press materials as a "hip-hop CD produced solely by Asian MCs, producers, DJs and singers," and MYX TV-affiliated DVDs such as Slanted Comedy, which showcases Asian American comedians — MYX appears to target Asian youth culture. But when asked about MYX’s Asian identity, Panni bristles. "I’m not trying to be typecast as an Asian label," he says. "We’re not trying to market to a niche audience. We’re reaching out to everybody."

"These days, with the Internet, the lines between major and underground are really fine. So instead of looking for this type or that type of rapper, I just look for the people who are making really good music that I would like," Panni adds. His expectations for Keelay & Zaire are modest: "Really, to establish themselves in the Bay Area, in the California market, and then become one of the elite production duos in the game. This is a good jump-off to show what they can do."

KEELAY & ZAIRE

With Blue Scholars, Grynch, and DJ Vin Roc

Sun/1, 9 p.m., $12–<\d>$15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 522-0333

www.slims-sf.com

Speed Reading

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THE FACE IN THE LENS: ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHS

By Robert Flynn Johnson

University of California Press

208 pages

$45

A shop in the Tenderloin sells anonymous photos. The pictures are messily packed in boxes and labeled according to whether the subject, sometimes but not always graphic (there are plenty of head shots of failed actors, for example), is heterosexual or homosexual. As digital images fly and float through the Internet, I’ve thought about those boxes of snapshots, their mix of allure, mystery, and depressing banality. With The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs, a sequel to his acclaimed monograph Anonymous (Thames and Hudson, 2005), Robert Flynn Johnson both expands and refines the type of gathering and organization I discovered in that store.

Alexander McCall Smith’s brief intro, which imagines stories around some of the book’s images, isn’t as effective as Johnson’s essay, which connects obvious critical sources such as Susan Sontag with aphorisms on sight and photography from W.H. Auden and Jean Cocteau. Johnson is out to find the many spaces between the sentimentality of humanistic projects such as the 1955 book and exhibition, The Family of Man, and the morbid focus of monographs such as 1973’s Wisconsin Death Trip. He does so with 1880s daguerreotypes and late-1980s color snapshots. We see Robert F. Kennedy on the day of his death, mass hangings in the Soviet Union, flying leaps from flaming buildings, storm troopers in suburban backyards, kids smoking, infants in dresses holding rifles, men in drag or kissing by Christmas trees, and naked women soldering. Few images are obvious or dull. Some are worthy of a Ralph Eugene Meatyard or Weegee. The power of others resides in the relationship between clueless photographer and defiant or sad subject. (Johnny Ray Huston)

BLANK SPOTS ON THE MAP: THE DARK GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENTAGON’S SECRET WORLD

By Trevor Paglen

Dutton

324 pages

$25.95

In 2006’s Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Melville House), Trevor Paglen worked with former Guardian writer A.C. Thompson to reveal the subculture of "planespotting" and the realities behind terms such as "rendition" as practiced by clandestine U.S. forces. The book also provided an interesting entryway into, or extension from, Paglen’s work as a visual artist, with Thompson’s journalistic voice seemingly braided in and out of Paglen’s more academic tone.

Blank Spots on the Map is a more mainstream book, as evidenced by its publisher. This aspect has its assets and drawbacks. One asset is that Paglen’s writerly voice has improved greatly, growing more versatile and characterful as it shifts to first-person. A look at the rendition programs of the CIA is just one element of his overall effort here, which involves revealing hidden spots used by the U.S. for covert activities throughout the globe — and in the skies above it. Early on, he cites facts showing that the number of federal government employees working on classified projects far outnumbers those working aboveground. At times, Paglen relates discoveries in a manner that suggests that he alone has made them. But for the most part, Black Spots is a bracing, real-life through-the-looking-glass antidote to Tom Clancy–style escapism. (Huston)

Rights way

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Ask any filmmaker: facts and figures may horrify, but images are what leave the most lasting impression. With raw and shocking footage of worldwide atrocities, the movies featured in this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival speak multitudes — even when their narrators are silent. Rather than attempt to encapsulate the entirety of the injustices committed, these films focus on the human side of things. And so we get glimpses: a mother weeping over the daughter taken from her, a student cradling her bloody head as she leads a protest.

Two particularly effective films restrict their focus to the women involved in these struggles—as perpetrators and as victims. Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling (2007) avoids such labels and focuses on female Israeli soldiers as individuals. Some might criticize the film for its apolitical tone. While many of the women lament war crimes, they have little to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. But the story that emerges from these interviews is a unique one, and a valuable addition to the ongoing debates. To See If I’m Smiling doesn’t seek to justify the actions of the Israeli Army, but rather to give its subjects space to reflect — both on their rights and on the rights they served to protect.

The scope of Julie Bridgham’s The Sari Soldiers (2008) is considerably wider. Her female subjects are the civilians of Nepal, the Maoist rebels, the Royal Nepal Army soldiers. Some are loyal to the king, while others march in protest. Bridgham wisely avoids coming down on one side or the other, allowing us to see that these women are united not by ideologies, but by their shared belief in a better Nepal.

One film can’t sum up a human rights quandary — and it surely can’t solve it either. At the very least, though, this festival gives a voice to people in dire need of speaking, whether through pictures or words.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/27–Fri/27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

March 5–26, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

www.hrw.org/iff

Beautiful nightmare

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If the U.S. really is entering a new period of transparency and team-playing, that might take a while to swallow for some nations that have known us best as an unreliable fair-weather ally. One of the Vietnam War’s lesser-heralded tragedies was what happened to neighboring Laos. Early in Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, we see JFK in 1961 saying of Laos, "All we want is peace, not war. A truly neutral government, not a Cold War pawn." Whatever earnestness that statement possessed, it was raped under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, despite all official denials.

The CIA drafted and trained Laotian military personnel as secret guerilla units gunning for North Vietnamese fighters along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. U.S. aircraft began dropping bombs on Laos — 3 million tons’ worth over nine years, more than in both World Wars combined. Vietcong were targeted, but civilians suffered plenty from the bombings as well as from a Yank-supported South Vietnamese invasion.

Nixon’s disgraced resignation drove one last nail in the coffin of this "unpopular" war. The 1975 "fall of Saigon" withdrawal was accompanied by abrupt pullouts of American interests and muscle in Laos. Though not quite as ghastly as what ensued in collaborating Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the fast overthrow of Laos’ "neutral" U.S.-backed monarchial government by Communist forces had similar consequences. Pathet Lao’s oppressive new regime closed itself to the world, arresting, executing, or otherwise persecuting anyone suspected of ties to the prior epoch.

The Betrayal fascinates like other rare, intimate documentaries shot over long periods — Michael Apted’s Seven Up series being the most famous example. This one began a quarter-century ago, when Kuras contacted 19-year-old Thavisouk Phrasavath (credited as co-director and co-writer, and the film’s sole editor) for lessons in speaking Lao for an unrelated project. His personal story — past, present, evolving — took up any time not occupied by Kuras’ cinematography career, which has encompassed features and docs by Spike Lee, Rebecca Miller, Harold Ramis, Jonathan Demme, Mary Harron, Jim Jarmusch, Michel Gondry, and Sam Mendes.

Phrasavath’s father was a Royal Army officer seduced by better pay and the promise that his own country’s best interests were being served — even when he plotted its bombing targets. After long service, the Americans’ abrupt pullout got him arrested, sent to re-education camp, and assumed executed by loved ones. Considered traitorous along with her 10 children, his wife Orady desperately bribed smugglers for their safe expatriation. When that happened, it was so sudden she had to leave two briefly absent daughters behind. She chose the United States as an asylum destination, believing that a government grateful for her husband’s sacrifices would "take care of us when we get to America." The clan got dumped in a decrepit mid-1980s Brooklyn apartment shared with other Southeast Asian refugees, next to a crack house and surrounded by gang violence.

Kuras was there then, and later on when some startling changes occurred in the Phrasavath family saga. But The Betrayal is as soft on narrative detailing as its color palette, which finds rainforest green and Buddhist monk-robe saffron echoed even in the harshest New Yawk/Joisey landscapes. Her visual impressionism is a gift, especially in the abstract illustration of teenage Phrasavath’s solo escape across the Mekong. But such poetical shorthand also frustrates — we’d like to know far more than Kuras and Phrasavath allow about what happened to immediate blood beyond himself and his mom.

But that stuff could be forgivably relegated to DVD extras. A rare new documentary that really belongs on the big screen, The Betrayal‘s flowing lyricism gracefully connects a poignant family history to larger socio-political and extra-large spiritual themes. It’s an almost sinfully beautiful movie about ugly global realities.


THE BETRAYAL opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Entropy

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I’ve been eating a lot of spaghetti and meatballs lately because it’s Boink’s favorite thing to make. Meatballs. Makes sense, right? Making meatballs has everything that kids love: pouring milk somewhere that milk doesn’t belong (on bread), smushing with a fork, cracking eggs, beating, tearing parsley leaves off of stems, sticking your hands into meat and other slimy things, rolling it into balls …

And then the key to cooking with kids, I learned the hard way, is to get the unfinished product, in this case a tray of meatballs, out from under them before they give you a lesson in entropy. To Boink, who is almost four, there is as much fun or more in the act of catastrophic dismantling as there is in the act of ordered creativity. One time a carefully assembled counterful of ravioli turned into a mountain of sludge while I was using the bathroom, for example.

I’m old enough to know about entropy in a firsthand, personal, and bodily way. I don’t need these demonstrations. I mean, conceptually at least, three- and four-year-olds have got nothing on me when it comes to an understanding of thermodynamic principles. I love entropy; it’s just that I prefer ravioli. Especially for dinner.

So I have learned to hover, watch like a hawk, hold my bladder, and time my dive perfectly. From the counter to the stove, virtually no time at all passes — so that from Boink’s point of view, the meatballs were there, then they were gone.

It’s sad in a way to have to scramble such a pure, scientific mind with a sense of magic. But dinner has to happen. It’s in my job description.

Speaking of which, since I’m still trying to review you a restaurant now and again, and since I have a whole new neighborhood of restaurants to explore …

What’s that smell?

Oh yeah, I almost didn’t recognize it, it’s been so long, but here comes a three-part series. What I love about Rockridge is that for all the hoity-toit and hullabaloo, it turns out there are plenty of down-homey, down-to-earth, and downright reasonable restaurants to duck into, if you’re me.

And I don’t mean Pasta Pomodoro or Barney’s, although both those places have their place.

Soi 4, the great date destination, is not that much more expensive than other Thai restaurants, as I recall. And Zachary’s, for all its lines and overknownness, is manageable during off hours, and you can always order half-baked to take home. I’ve been back to the Crepevine a couple times, and still love it.

But what I didn’t know about Rockridge was the Rockridge Café (which rocks), Christopher’s burger joint (which is up there with Barney’s but has a much more jointlike feel), Sabuy Sabuy (cheap cheap Thai food), and a pretty gritty looking burrito place, the name of which escapes me.

I should rein it in before my little three-part series turns into a five-part three-part series. On the other hand, reining it in is not exactly my style.

So, to add a fifth to the mix, I was standing outside of Currylicious with the Maze, debating between going on in or crossing the street for an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet we’d passed on the way.

This rarely happens: the owner of Currylicious walked up from the other direction, handed us take-out menus, discussed the small matters of rice and tea with us, and we were sold. Well, the Maze was sold. I was already planning on Currylicious because my new landlordladypersonpeople had recommended it.

I think it’s the newest place on that part of College Avenue, but what do I know? I’m even newer!

Great food, good free tea, labyrinthine layout…. What a dumb name, though. They sound like they were named by Yahoo, or some dating site, because their first five choices were already taken.

I’m not going to hold it against them. Lamb cholay, which is garbanzo beans and three big lumps of lamb in a nice, spicy curry ($6.99), naan ($1.49), and the Maze got vegetable biriyani ($6.99), and that was good too.

New favorite restaurant! Across the street from my new favorite bar, McNally’s, which has a fireplace and a pool table. Exactly on the way to my new favorite post office … and, by the way, I mean it. I’m not a post office reviewer, but this one looks like it is run by three-year-olds. It’s a mess! I can’t wait to go back.

CURRYLICIOUS

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5299 College, Oakl.

(510) 450-0644

No alcohol

MC/V

Appetite: Steak, pork, Victoria Lamb and an El Carajo cocktail or two

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Welcome to Appetite, a new column on food and drink. A long-time San Francisco resident and writer, Virginia Miller is passionate about this incomparable city, obsessed with finding and exploring its best spots, deals, events and news. She started with her own service and monthly food/drink/travel newsletter, The Perfect Spot , and plans to pass along up-to-the minute news to us. View her last installment here.

New openings

FiDi’s A5 Steak Lounge for the urban-chic carnivore

Frisson was one of the coolest restaurant spaces I’ve seen: a modern-day-chic meets the ’60’s vibe with orange couches, a round room and striking dotted-lighting ceiling. Though closed awhile, the space is now reincarnated. The same round, dome ceiling remains, though this time the room is redone in softer, sleeker hues with faux-alligator chairs and cream-colored booths. Steve Chen and Albert Chen (not related), are the new owners, creating a current-day steakhouse for the urban carnivore, A5 Steak Lounge. A5 refers to the highest grade of Japanese Wagyu beef, which, yes, will be served along with some choice US Prime beef. Chef Marc Vogel helms the menu, which refreshingly offers a range of sizes and prices in steak cuts – even those who just want a taste can order, let’s say a 4 oz. rib-eye (around $12), an 8 oz. slab (low $20’s), on upwards. You can have your steak and eat it (all), too.

A5 is in the middle of a soft opening until the official launch date of March 10. Be the first to try it out (with reduced prices) during the limited, four-nights reservations, with the caveat that you provide feedback as the staff hones the menu and service prior to opening.

244 Jackson Street
415-989-2539
Email for reservations: rsvp@a5steakhouse.com

Tipsy Pig gastrotavern debuts in the Marina on Feb. 24

The Marina restaurant take-over of Nate Valentine, Sam Josi and Stryker Scales (behind Mamacita, Umami and Blue Barn Gourmet) continues with The Tipsy Pig, opening today in the former Bistro Yoffi space. The Tipsy Pig will start out only with dinner, but will eventually serve brunch and lunch as well, and the bar will be open till 2 a.m. I hear it’s a rustic, wood space separated comfortably into a Living Room (with bar, leather booths, wood tables), the Library, and an inviting back patio pleasantly aromatic with citrus trees, seating up to 50 people at communal picnic tables. Produce will, by-and-large, be sourced from Sonoma’s Oak Hill Farm for a locavore nod, while over 50 artisanal beers are available on tap or by the bottle along with — what else? — classic american cocktails. Menu items include a Spinach Salad with kabocha squash, plenty of pig dishes and a Brussel Sprout/Apple Hash. Whether or not we need another gastropub, the Marina doesn’t have one and I think all things combined (patio, beers, yummy-sounding menu, open all day…), it sounds well worth checking out.

2231 Chestnut Street
415-292-2300
www.thetipsypigsf.com

Special events

Tuesday, 2/24: South Fundraiser for Australia’s bushfire victims

Dine for a cause tonight at our local Australian/New Zealand gem, South. Aussie chef Luke Mangan wanted to help his homeland and is doing so with a special, four-course dinner benefiting victims of the Victorian bushfires. For $125, there’s dinner, wine pairings (from South sommelier Gerard O’Bryan) and a live auction with proceeds donated to the Australian Red Cross Bushfire Relief Fund. The menu is listed on the website with Down Under-influenced dishes like Victorian Lamb with rhubarb, nettles and parsley puree, or for dessert, Creme Fraiche Panna Cotta with kumquats and caraway. Seating is limited, so RSVP — and note a credit card is needed to hold your place.

7pm

330 Townsend Street, Suite 101
415-974-5599
RSVP to: info@southfwb.com

Dungeness Crab Week runs through March 1st

So it’s been a lackluster crab season, but what’s there is sweet and succulent as ever… and 44 SF chefs from 54 restaurants (do the math?) are featuring signature crab dishes on their menus this week. Visa is a sponsor, so if you pay with a Visa Signature card, you’ll get a complimentary cookbook featuring a slew of crab recipes from some of the chefs and restaurants involved. Some of my faves are participating (like Incanto, 1300 on Fillmore, Bix, Jardiniere, Pesce, Shanghai 1930, etc… and there’s no meat I’m more crazy about than crab, particularly our West Coast Dungeness.

For added fun, there’s the annual Crab Cracking Contest in Union Square on Saturday, 2/28, from noon-3pm. It’s free, though you’ll need to purchase tickets for food, beer and wine tastings. There’ll be Union Square chefs (like Jen Biesty of Scala’s and Adam Carpenter of Ponzu) and San Francisco 49ers (yeah, you heard right) crackin’ crabs together, with live music from Diego’s Umbrella, who myspace lists as Experimental-Flamenco-Rock, booths for kids, and plenty to drink.

Details and list of participating restaurants here.

Make reservations here.

Bar news

Get sultry with Brazilian Wednesday Nights at Pisco Latin Lounge

In these rainy days, one of the best ways to warm things up is a well-crafted drink and lively music. Pisco Latin Lounge offers you both in weekly Brazilian-themed Wednesdays. I recently enjoyed an ideal end to a long day here, sipping the El Carajo cocktail ($12, made of Veev Acai Liquor, St. Germain and Aji amarillo pepper), while watching spicy Brazilian music videos on the flat screens. DJ Anjo Avesso spins while you sip a specially-priced $7 Caramelized Caiparinha and chow down on Latin small plates. This Wednesday, 2/25, bring your business card or email address to possibly win a magnum (double-sized) bottle of Cachaca. Lindo maravilhoso!

Wednesdays, 7-11:45pm
1817 Market Street
415-874-9551
www.piscosf.com

Deals

Foreign Cinema’s three-course prix-fixe honors 10th anniversary

Foreign Cinema may not be the latest hotspot anymore, but it still packs ’em in with the mystique of being located on a dodgy Mission block, down a candlelit hallway, into an oasis of foreign film, a roaring fireplace and quite tasty food (I’ve long been partial to the pot de cremes for dessert). In honor of the restaurant’s 10th anniversary, a special prix-fixe menu is available every night of 2009 (!) for $36 per person ($55 with wine pairings, including a dessert wine pour), though menu items and wine flights change daily (I hear so far the Pot de Creme has been seen on the prix fixe menu, along with dishes like Fried Oysters with spinach, smoked bacon and preserved lemon).

2534 Mission Street
415-648-7600
www.foreigncinema.com

Mission Beach Cafe ushers in Pot Pie Sundays and Let Them Eat Cake!

One of my favorite cafes for its eclectic decor, friendly service, and, best of all, Blue Bottle coffee and amazing house-made pastries, Mission Beach Cafe further sweetens the ‘hood with two new specials. Pastry chef Alan Carter is already known at MBC for his flakey pot pies – that’s what baking and living in Paris did for him. Lucky us, he’s sharing his pot pie magic skills every Sunday night creating pies filled with rabbit, beef, duck or veggies. Sounds like a perfect winter dinner to me. On Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, you can further rack up the calories (happily so) with a Let Them Eat Cake offer from 5:30–6:30 pm: a free slice of cake with each entrée ordered. Knowing how decadent the pastries and pies are, I’ve no doubt the cakes will give you sweet dreams, too.

198 Guerrero Street
415-861-0198

It’s a rainy day – today

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OPINION As San Francisco’s health and human services face unprecedented loss of funding under Mayor Gavin Newsom’s glaringly disproportionate budget cuts, forcing layoffs of city and nonprofit health care workers who work on the frontlines of a strained system, now is the time when the moral implications of budget decisions mean the most.

The midyear cuts alone have eliminated HIV/AIDS services for an estimated 2,660 San Franciscans. Many core health service programs are wrestling with the reality of closing their doors entirely when the next round of cuts arrives in June. As the city scrambles to come up with any and all possible solutions, Supervisor Chris Daly has introduced an amendment to the Rainy Day Fund that would offer up a much-needed safety net for San Francisco’s vital services.

Currently, San Francisco’s Rainy Day Fund contains a provisional trigger focused on protecting the San Francisco Unified School District during tough times. When the Controller’s Office identifies the need and pulls the trigger, Rainy Day Funds can be appropriated at the discretion of the mayor and the Board of Supervisors to offset the costs of maintaining education during the upcoming budget year.

Daly’s clause, which would take effect in years when the city’s deficit exceeds $250 million, would provide a similar safeguard to public health and human services, services that are no less critical than education but tend to bear the brunt of budget cuts during challenging economic times.

Some have argued that we should save this money for the (perpetual) "next year," with the timeless hypothetical that it could get worse. Yet for those who may lose their lives this year because of colossal cuts to vital services, this argument offers little consolation, and in fact begs the question of how we define a rainy day to begin with. While city workers are being asked to cut salaries and business leaders are being asked to support new revenue, now is the time to reach into our reserves to protect the programs that protect lives.

San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS services have become, in many ways, models for the rest of the country, yet the years of battling for and finessing of these services seem to be taken for granted as we brace ourselves for the possibility of losing them overnight. Strained as our safety net may be, it still provides much of the best care available for those at risk of or living with HIV/AIDS, and in these complex budget discussions, we have yet to hear a consideration of what it would cost to reconstruct such a landscape of services.

Finding solutions to this year’s budget crisis will not be easy. It will require a complex solution, and even with givebacks by city workers and even with new revenue, there will be significant cuts to programs. We need to think about all of the possibilities and understand that it will take extraordinary measures to protect a model health care system. Now is the time when San Franciscans need access to their safety net. Today is a rainy day, and baby, it’s cold outside.

Stephany Joy Ashley is on the steering committee for the Coalition to Save Public Health, an executive board member of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and the harm reduction coordinator of the St. James Infirmary.

Losing the tax argument

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EDITORIAL The lead topic on the local cable TV show City Desk News Hour Feb. 21 was the state budget, and a panel of local reporters were talking about the mix of tax increases and service cuts the Legislature finally passed. After a bit of back and forth, Scott Shafer, host of KQED’s California Report, piped up. "Everyone knows it’s a bad idea to raise taxes in a recession," he said.

Shafer, who was a press secretary to former Mayor Art Agnos, is hardly a conservative commentator. In fact, at the risk of damaging his credentials as an unbiased reporter, we might even call him a liberal. And to judge from the response of most of the panel, nothing he said was particularly controversial. Sure, raising taxes in a recession is bad; so is cancer, and violent crime. Next question.

But that’s not just a limited viewpoint — it’s factually inaccurate. Raising taxes during a recession can be an excellent economic idea, if it’s done right. Because the one thing almost every credible economist outside of the far-right intellectual swampland agrees on these days is that cutting government spending during a recession is a terrible idea — and if the only way to keep the public sector jobs, the social services, and the welfare payments going is to raise taxes, then raising taxes on those who can afford to pay is not only good politics, it’s good policy.

And it’s infuriating that this point seems to have dropped out of the mainstream of debate. That’s a major failure of the Democratic leadership, in California and nationwide.

Historians can argue forever about the direct impact the New Deal had on ending the Great Depression. But it’s pretty clear that what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls the great jobs program of World War II turned the American economy around. And during World War II, tax rates, particularly on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, were exceptionally high. The top marginal income tax rate exceeded 80 percent. Corporations that made more than a modest return paid a high excess-profits tax. The high income tax rates on the richest Americans remained through the postwar boom era, a time when inequality declined and overall wealth grew.

That money went into the public sector, not just for the war but for retooling and rebuilding U.S. industry. High taxes on the rich paid for the interstate highway system, the University of California system, the California Water Project, the birth of the Internet. It took almost half a century for the Republicans and no-taxers to wreck the economic gains of that high-tax era.

And yet, despite all the consistent, clear evidence, we still hear the news media, the commentators, and even liberal Democrats saying that tax cuts are good for the economy and tax hikes are bad.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

One of the most important goals of the next year or two, under the Obama administration, is to change the national debate over public and private priorities. That won’t be easy. President Obama has started off in the right direction, although the Republicans forced him to include several hundred billion in wasteful tax cuts in his stimulus bill. The tax hikes in the state budget plan are almost entirely regressive (sales taxes and a flat increase in the income tax.)

Here in California, and here in San Francisco, elected officials who claim to represent the Democratic Party’s future need to stop mouthing the old Republican line. None of the Democratic candidates for governor, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, have been our front about the need for more government spending, even if it means higher taxes on the wealthy (say, a business tax that hits harder on the biggest and less so on the small). In fact, Newsom has taken the opposite line, writing in a Feb. 13 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece that "we have to reduce spending." The San Francisco supervisors are at least talking about new revenue sources, but polls show that will be a hard sell.

Why do the polls show that? Because people like Newsom — and to some extent, the supervisors — aren’t using their bully pulpits to change the tone of the discussion, to make the case for economic sanity, to challenge the demented wisdom that’s brought us to this nightmare.

That has to change, now, or there will be no way out. *

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