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Love’s labours

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’m a fickle fucking farmer, I know that. So … sorry, Doc, I’ve got a new favorite person. Her name is Zidane de la Cooter, and even though she only weighs 6 pounds, 13 ounces, she just about broke Crawdad’s back trying to bonk her way into this sad and blurry world.

I got to be there for part of it. Not that I was invited exactly, but that’s where my press pass comes in handy. I was brushing aside doctors, nurses, midwives, midfielders, and middle linebackers, flashing my credentials and saying, "Excuse me, excuse me, sorry I’m late, damn the traffic. OK, push. I’m here," I said, looking at the wristwatch I don’t wear. "Let the baby begin."

Just kidding. Really, they said, way back at the front desk, "Press pass?"

And: "Chicken farmer?"

There were two of them. And as much fun as I generally have fielding goofy little questions like these, just this once I didn’t have time for philosophy. I went straight for my trump card: "Listen," I said, "those unmuffled screams and cries and curses … that’s my ex-wife we’re waltzing to out here. And if you don’t think she needs me in there right now, then clearly neither one of you has ever been divorced." I paused for effect, then added, "Which, frankly, strikes me as statistically unlikely."

Blink. Blink … Bingo! Tears, hugs, apologies, phone numbers, passionate three-way sex, earthquakes, floods, the sound of birdies tweeting, and — blink — I was in the room. There was my brother Phenomenon and Deevee and Trotwood. There was some woman I didn’t know. A guy with a camera … scooped again by the daily news, damn it.

And there was Crawguy de la Peter, proud father-to-be, at the place of honor, right in Crawdad’s ear, saying all the right things. I tapped him on the shoulder. "OK, Dad, great job," I said. "You can go to the bar now. I’m here."

Aaaaaaaaahhhh!!! How the hell did I write myself into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm — which I only saw once and didn’t even like? I’m trying to be funny here, and this is a serious Cheap Eats moment. This is huge! It’s Crawdad de la Cooter’s baby. This is no time to try to be funny. I must succeed. Now more than ever, my sanity depends on my being able to find the joke.

When in doubt, I always say … surrender. Immediately. Give up. Fall back on the truth, even if it ain’t funny. The truth is I’m not an idiot. I’m a chicken farmer, and this was one of the most joyous and difficult days of my life for a variety of reasons.

I was wanted, and I wanted to be there. There’s probably nobody in the world whose happiness I care about more than that of my ex-wife and beloved friend Crawdad. And there’s probably nobody in the world whose pain I feel more feelingly. The truth is that I am not strong or competent. After a couple hours of her pain and agony, I needed an epidural myself. So I went and got me one: a burrito.

Early evening. Walnut Creek, of all the unfamiliar planets in my solar system …

When I jittered out, all twisted and wrung and traumatized, the attending professionals were just starting to look at each other with question-marked eyeballs, and I was either hearing or imagining words such as suction, vacuum, surgery, toothpaste, and maybe corkscrew.

When I returned, rubbing my own pregnant belly and breathing more or less normally for the first time all day, Zidane "Z.Z." de la Cooter existed. Crawdad was all stapled up and very much on drugs. My assumption is that Phenomenon performed the operation, but I could be wrong.

The important thing was that everyone was OK now and that, through some miracle of lucky timing, I got to be in the recovery room when they brought Crawdad’s new little soccer star to her, all measured and crusty and shit, just squirming and kicking with wonder. Cutest thing you ever saw. And there ain’t a dry eye in my house every time I think of the look on Crawdad’s face when, finally, they set her baby against her skin.

The daily newsman was gone now so, appropriately, I got to hold Crawguy’s movie camera for what will likely remain the most profoundly beautiful sight I’ve ever seen: little Z.Z. finding out for her first time ever what was for dinner. I can’t speak for her. For me: carne asada. (Old friend!) Thanks to which, like a drunk on drink, my hand did not shake. *

TAQUERIA MEXICAN GRILL

Daily, 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

1359 Locust, Walnut Creek

(925) 932-8987

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

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Crime-free creativity

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› culture@sfbg.com

A couple dozen of San Francisco’s best young graffiti artists, many dressed in black hooded sweatshirts and baseball hats, huddle around long tables littered with markers, blank books, pens, and stickers. The artists crowded around the white paper–draped tables do a little talking and joking, but mainly they’re drawing and writing, some at a fever pitch. Bright colors and stylish lettering abound. There is a sense of concentrated creativity in this large studio space — something rare in classrooms these days. But this not your run-of-the-mill art class. This is Streetstyles, a free course that focuses on the misunderstood medium of graffiti and street art. Its aim is multifaceted, concentrating on the production and repercussions of urban art. The class attempts, as instructor Dave Warnke explains, "to separate the art from the act." He is interested in what motivates these artists: Why are they writing graffiti? What do they want people to see? What do they want people to feel?

Some kids, Warnke admits, "get into [graffiti] for the criminal mystique." But inclusion has been a key principle for Warnke and his art lessons. Although Streetstyles does not turn away any young artists, new students to the course are always pulled aside for a little one-on-one. "I ask them, ‘Do you do it for the crime? Or do you do it for the art?’ " he says. "If you don’t want to do art, then you might as well go piss on the sidewalk." The number one rule in Warnke’s class is respect. Respect for the art. Respect for one another. And respect for oneself.

"I try to give them the respect that I don’t think they get other places," he says. "I engage them, let them know that this is art. I’ve had some of these kids for years. I can help them by exposing them to different styles and by challenging them. I push them, and I’m not sure how many other people in their lives are doing that."

Originally from New Jersey, Warnke has two art degrees from Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland, but he says his early experiences in art education were a bit rough, as he bounced around art schools before finally settling in the Bay Area. "I had no skills except drawing silly faces," says Warnke, who’s been an active street artist for more than 10 years. "My art didn’t have a place. It’s kind of like propaganda."

He figured he’d become an art teacher, then quickly realized that schools in the area were firing — not hiring — art teachers. He finally applied for a position at James Lick Middle School in Noe Valley, carefully leaving his street art out of his portfolio, which was composed of mainstream art and design work.

"I wanted to get the job," Warnke admits. "I thought I was going to teach watercolors or something. You know, bowls of fruit and stuff." But faculty members had already heard about Warnke’s back-alley and rooftop endeavors, and they were not offended. As a matter of fact, they were impressed. They offered him an opportunity to teach a class on his kind of art, street art. Thus, the first Streetstyles program was born.

After a stint at City Arts and Tech High School, Warnke decided to take Streetstyles out on its own. Starting last October — thanks to financial backing from Youth Speaks and Mark Dwight, CEO of Timbuk2 — Warnke started teaching his independent class twice a week at Root Division, a 7,200 square foot building founded in 2002 where resident artists receive subsidized studio space in exchange for their service as art instructors.

"Root Division is a great place to do it," Warnke says. "They are very accommodating." In addition to hosting Streetstyles, Root Division provides San Francisco youth with free art classes and after-school programs, hosts events, and has adult programs designed to make art more accessible to the community at large.

Streetstyles was rounded out by the addition of San Francisco graffiti legend and Root Division resident artist Carlos Castillo. Castillo, under the alias Cast, is a first-generation West Coast graffiti artist who started writing on the streets of San Francisco around 1983. Now a professional artist, sculptor, California College of the Arts graduate, and occasional graffiti art teacher for his son, Castillo edifies students about old-school styles and the history of the movement. "We balance each other out," Warnke says.

The core curriculum doesn’t stray far from that of a conventional art class. Every session starts with a stealthy lesson plan in which Warnke and his staff attempt to sneak in a little formal education. There is study of color, composition, and form. The students study typography, entertain guest speakers, and examine street art from around the world. At Streetstyles purpose, placement, and permission replace reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Warnke is aware of the criminal aspect of his passion and understands how some, particularly opponents of street art at large, might think his work empowers vandalism. There are students in his class who have been arrested, suspended from school, and even jumped for their love of graffiti. Many are doing community service for vandalism, and some have prior records for crimes unrelated to street art. Warnke counters, "I’m not a cop, and no, I’m not going to snitch. I understand [these kids’] passion, and when you compare writing graffiti to what’s going on in the schools these days and in the streets with the violence and drugs, I just want to give them even more markers. Some of these kids don’t know about anything much past 23rd Street. I provide these kids with a place that’s safe. And yeah, I let them get up. For four hours a week, they are not getting in trouble, getting in fights, doing drugs, or whatever. While they are in my class, they will all be safe, creative, and respectful."

Many of the students’ parents are supportive of the class. Warnke boasts, "I got my first ever real fruit basket from a parent, and it was a damn nice one too." He adds, "I want these kids to do something they can be proud of. Something they can take home to mom."

"You can have street art hanging at the [Yerba Buena Center for the Arts], but if you go outside and start writing on a wall, you’ll be arrested," he says. It’s an interesting paradox in his class, just as it is in the larger world of street art.

As for Warnke’s own urban artwork, these days he focuses mainly on trading homemade stickers — his and his students’ — with other street artists from around the world. "What I like about it is that it’s a different form of getting up. Some people claim all-city — well, we’re trying to claim all-world," he says. "I’m up more in Brazil and Portugal than I am here in the States."

But is Warnke still writing on walls?

"I’m semiretired," he says, smiling shyly. "I used to be invisible. Now it’s too easy to find me." *

For information on Streetstyles, visit www.rootdivision.org. Check out Dave Warnke’s professional art and design work at www.davewarnke.com.

Don’t miss "New Growth: An Exhibition of Artwork from the Root Division," part of Root Division’s Second Saturday series, which will feature work by students from Buena Vista Elementary, Fairmont Elementary, and Hoover Middle School and youth from the Streetstyles class. The event will feature free interactive art projects and musical performances by Paul Green’s School of Rock (including tributes to the Grateful Dead, Southern rock, and Frank Zappa).

May 12, 4–8 p.m., $5 suggested donation. Root Division, Gallery 3175, 3175 17th St., SF. (415) 863-7668, www.rootdivision.org

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Learning from sexperts

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› culture@sfbg.com

I’d never considered a career in smut until I got fired from my day job as a waiter. As a freelance journalist, my first instinct was to find a stable writing gig. But after hours of meticulously scouring Craigslist, I was a beaten man. There just aren’t that many full-time writing positions available. And though the perks in freelancing are great (changing the world, getting free shit, etc.), the financial ceiling is pretty low. But thankfully, as I abandoned my job search that night, I found myself surfing the Web for free porn and thinking about my mother. Wait. Let me explain.

My mother is also a writer. And after getting a series of rejection letters, she sought career advice from an esteemed professor. He suggested sex writing as a fast, easy way to make money, likening it to the advertising work American actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Charlize Theron do abroad. Thanks to pseudonyms, writers can publish erotic fiction without tarnishing their reputations. After all, who would know A.N. Roquelaure, author of the Sleeping Beauty erotic series, is really Anne Rice — unless she’d wanted us to know?

My mother was financially stable enough to disregard the professor’s advice, but in that moment it seemed to be a perfect solution for a struggling journalist. I figured all I needed was some practice and a good pseudonym.

Sound easy? It’s not.

Sexy prose does not come naturally — at least, not to me. I had to find my e-zone, to push my inhibitions aside and turn up my id. I put in a heroic effort with my first story, but the pirate-themed fetish piece was dripping with the self-deprecating humor I inject into my usual culture stories — and not all that sexy. I needed some guidance.

I figured Good Vibrations, with its wall of books with titles such as I Once Had a Master and Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z, would be a good place to start. So I went to the Mission location, bought some anthologies, and signed up for the next night’s erotic writing circle. I thought if I met people who were working out the kinks in their writing, maybe I could work some into mine.

The next night I smoked nervously in my car outside the Center for Sex and Culture. No doubt the room would be full of semiprofessional sex writers, I figured, dressed for action in lingerie or rubber suits. They would be so comfortable talking about pussies and cocks and masturbation and fucking that I, with my red face and sweaty palms, would look like a fidgety prude.

Of course, I was wrong. I was first greeted by the center’s cofounder, sexologist Carol Queen, whose sensible sweater and black-rimmed spectacles made her look more like a hip college professor than the porn star I expected. There were about seven other people, none of them dressed for sex either. Among them: a high school teacher, a social worker, and a life coach. They all looked as nervous as me, notebooks clutched in their laps.

Queen’s cofacilitator, Jennifer Cross, began with a work in progress about a woman haunted by the memory of a rape. Her protagonist had no need for therapy, choosing instead to cultivate sanity in the arms of a lover with a taste for violent role play. Cross’s lusty voice rose and fell with her characters’ sexual peaks and valleys. It was fucking hot. And nothing like my story.

The high school teacher was next. Her story about a teenage girl’s trip to the Holy Land differed drastically from Cross’s. It seemed more funny than sexy, so I was surprised to see people squirming. The same thing happened when the life coach read. His story, told from the perspective of a young boy witnessing his first sex act, was also humorous. But it too had the desired effect on some. The grand finale was Queen’s story about a star-crossed relationship she’d had with a lesbian in denial. Her piece was funny and realistic yet undeniably erotic.

I left the reading circle confused. Although most of the stories were good, few had made my naughty bits tingle. If they could be considered erotic, wouldn’t my pirate story also qualify?

I decided to turn to the experts to help answer the tough questions.

I asked Cross about the role of humor in erotica. It seemed to work for Queen and some of the others, but wouldn’t everyone laugh at some poor dude with a pirate fetish? Cross told me not to worry. "Some folks might think a story is stupid or not sexy or boring," she said. "But there will be those who breathe a sigh of relief because someone finally wrote about their fantasy."

She also reminded me that erotic fiction — like all writing — isn’t easy. I turned to another expert, Violet Blue — sex blogger, author-editor of several erotic fiction anthologies, and well-known erotic podcaster — for more advice.

"The key is authenticity. Strive to create real, complex characters — flawed, not perfect — in realistic relationships with an honest, rip-each-other’s-clothes-off need to fuck burning beneath the surface at all times," said Blue (yes, that’s her real name), whose Web site, www.tinynibbles.com, features samples of the genre’s best writers; links to Web publishers, online communities, and safe porn sites; and photo albums of erotic art.

"And please," Blue added, "don’t go overboard with genital-sexual euphemisms."

For publishing options, Blue guided me to www.erotica-readers.com, which has an extensive list of soliciting publishers. It took a while to comb through the endless calls for submissions, and although I didn’t find any for pirate stories, I did locate Black Lace Anthologies, which offers $800 for stories with werewolves, vampires, and other oddities, and Penthouse Variations, which pays $400 for stories about anything sexual. Cross also assured me editors are open to new writers as well as experimental stories.

It seems all I need now is a pseudonym. *

CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

2215R Market, SF

(415) 255-1155

www.sexandculture.org

To read Justin Juul’s pirate story, visit www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

A law school of their own

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› culture@sfbg.com

In today’s "I’m gonna sue you" world, in which lawyers are called sharks (and often rightly so), getting a law degree from a school that offers the class "Education for a Just, Sacred and Sustainable World" might seem a little backward. However, since the ’70s a number of schools have been encouraging students to study law as a tool for practicing social advocacy — not just for lining corporate pockets (or their own).

One of the Bay Area’s banner examples is the New College of California, which — founded in 1975 out of the civil rights movement — has the oldest public interest law program in the country. But there are other stops for those with lawyerly aspirations. Golden Gate University not only offers certification in public interest law but also gives a number of incentives for students interested in helping local communities. UC Hastings College of the Law has the in-house Civil Justice Clinic, which gives students a chance to add an activist bent to their education. And most other nearby schools — from UC Berkeley’s School of Law to the University of San Francisco — now offer some kind of public interest law specialty.

So what are these programs like? Is this law lite?

Certainly not, Civil Justice Clinic director Mark Aaronson says. For example, clinic courses — which deal with employment law, housing law, and disability benefits among other areas of social interest — are very serious. In fact, students handle real cases and are advised by professional lawyers. As part of the course work in Aaronson’s Community Economic Development Clinic, students may survey community needs or translate court documents for neighborhood residents. The school is even more rigorous thanks to the fact that the yearlong program is limited to just eight students, giving them plenty of firsthand experience handling real-life legal situations. "Lawyers have to learn to lawyer in context, dealing with real problems as they occur — not just hypotheticals in a classroom," Aaronson says.

And UC Hastings’s dedication to this program goes beyond classes and course work. A number of student-led organizations offer a chance for community involvement: one group volunteers at outreach centers in SoMa along with UCSF medical students to provide medical care and legal advice to the underserved.

So where do graduates of these social justice law programs go? Some join private law firms, of course, or find government jobs serving communities in need. But others, such as Paul Hogarth, use their education to do something else entirely.

Hogarth is now the managing editor for BeyondChron.com, a daily news site produced by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that tries to raise awareness about the Ellis Act and tenant housing rights. But first he attended Golden Gate University with help from its Public Interest Law Scholars Program, a scholarship fund that gives up to $15,000 in tuition aid and a $5,000 internship stipend to five students a year. He says the skills he gained at Golden Gate are integral to his job now.

"Sometimes I’ll write a story about a court case, and I’ll do a legal analysis of it," Hogarth says. "I also cover City Hall, and I can read legislation that’s going through and then say, ‘Well, this is what the law will do.’ "

Had Hogarth chosen to work for a nonprofit or as a public defender or prosecutor, he would’ve been eligible for a generous tuition repayment assistance grant from Golden Gate University.

It seems one of the greatest benefits of joining these programs, though, is being surrounded by like-minded people passionate about social change. For example, Antonia Jushasz, a teacher in the Activism and Social Change masters program at New College, spoke at a protest rally against the Iraqi Oil Law at Chevron Corp. headquarters March 19 with four of her students looking on — making up an impromptu class.

It’s not exactly what most of us think of when we imagine a law education. And graduates from these programs don’t exactly fit the stereotype of one of the world’s most hated professions. But it just proves as there’s more than one way to be a lawyer, there’s also more than one way to become one. So if you imagine your lawyer self as more of a dolphin (or an otter or maybe a sea lion) than a shark, don’t worry. There’s a place for you too. *

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA

School of Law

50 Fell, SF

(415) 241-1300

www.newcollege.edu

GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY

536 Mission, SF

1-800-GGU-4YOU

www.ggu.edu

UC HASTINGS COLLEGE OF THE LAW

Civil Justice Clinic

100 McAllister, suite 300, SF

(415) 557-7887

www.uchasting.edu

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL OF LAW

2130 Fulton, SF

(415) 422-6307

www.usfca.edu/law

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW

Center for Social Justice

785 Simon Hall

Piedmont and Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-4474

www.law.berkeley.edu/cenpro/csj

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3-2-1 Impact

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› culture@sfbg.com

I can kick your ass. Not euphemistically, not theoretically, but literally. If you were to attack me in a dark alley — or anywhere else — I could break free, knock you to the ground, and kick you into unconsciousness. I’m five-foot-five, 135 lbs., and not particularly athletic, and I’ve been in exactly one fistfight in my life, which I won mostly by default (I was eight). But as a graduate of Impact Bay Area self-defense training, I am confident in my ability to fight for my life — and win.

I’d heard about Impact for years — how students are taught to set and assert boundaries, identify unsafe situations before they escalate, and defend themselves against an attacker — but I only recently decided to try the program myself. I knew advanced courses were offered in defense against attackers with weapons and multiple assailants, but since the majority of assaults are perpetrated unarmed (according to the National Crime Victimization Survey), I decided to start with a basics class — 20 intensive hours of physical training and emotional strengthening in preparation for handling a single unarmed attacker.

TRAINING DAY


Impact training addresses a woman’s weaknesses and her strengths: how to minimize the former and capitalize on the latter in the event of an attack. Although developed in the 1980s at Stanford by martial artists, Impact training doesn’t much resemble the controlled sparring and structured techniques you’ll find at your local dojo. Instead, women are taught to fight primarily using their leg strength and lower center of gravity, often by dropping to the ground (or remaining there if they’ve been tackled or pinned). Since men are more accustomed to fighting on their feet, any advantage their upper-body strength might afford them decreases exponentially when they’re forced into ground fights.

Encouraged to fight by any means possible, women are also trained in the finer points of eye gouging, choke-hold breaking, foot stomping, testicle smashing, and weenie whomping, all while vocalizing vociferously. The intent is to be as uncooperative and squirmy as possible. The point is few attackers expect women to fight back — let alone know how.

But on our first day, my 15 classmates and I started off slowly, our moves painstakingly choreographed by our tag-team instructors: coach Naomi (last name withheld according to the Impact anonymity policy) and the padded assailant I’ll call Theo. With the practiced, upbeat demeanor of a summer camp counselor, Naomi first demonstrated the moves we’d use in each fight, then walked each participant through the scenario step by awkward step. She was both guardian and ringleader, facilitating the sometimes emotional minisessions with which we started each class and goading us in every fight. It was encouraging to note that Naomi is no superathlete. She is short and soft bodied, but her moves were executed with a precision and speed she promised we’d all achieve by graduation. The back of her T-shirt read, "Caution: I kick like a girl."

The unenviable role of attacker was played by Theo, whose average-to-large frame was made to resemble the impossible physique of a cartoon weight lifter by the custom-made body armor he wears. Encased in supersize denim overalls, Theo wore padding constructed of three separate layers of foam and hard plastic, which turned his shoulders and torso into those of an NFL linebacker and extended over his thighs and genitalia. It was the helmet, though, that turned soft-spoken Theo into the unrecognizable alien we referred to as Random Creepy Guy: an enormous dome of foam and duct tape wrapped around a hard hat, with mesh "eyes" larger than the palms of our hands. This outfit ensured the physical safety of the man we were going to learn to kick, bite, gouge, jab, stomp, and generally beat the shit out of with full permission — and full force. By our third day, a second mugger was brought in to split the work, our strikes having become too powerful for one person to withstand for six hours straight.

It’s probably time for the obligatory disclaimer: I’m no advocate of violence. And Impact is not a crash course in aggression. We each signed an agreement that includes this emphatic phrase: "I will only use the techniques for self-defense and will not ever intentionally escalate a situation that could lead to an otherwise unavoidable physical confrontation." To this end, we practiced what Naomi called the protective stance: hands up, palms out, elbows at our sides, we placed one foot behind us and one in front, knees slightly bent, ready to strike — but only if necessary. With clear, modulated voices, we then practiced setting boundaries.

"Move away," we firmly told Random Creepy Guy as he hovered nearby. "Back off." Sometimes he moved away. Sometimes he moved closer, too close, reaching out to grab, and that’s when the real action began.

Our classmates cheered and shouted out the moves. "Eyes!" they’d say as we went for the assailant’s eye sockets with fingers pressed in triangular "bird beaks." "Groin!" they’d say, and knees flew up accordingly, hands still raised to protect our space.

Down went the padded assailant. The whistle squealed. "Halt!" And from the sidelines: wild, heartfelt applause. I was elated. I’ve never struck out at anyone or anything with full force, kneed a denim-clad Martian in the groin, or been applauded by a roomful of women for any reason — let alone for either of the above. I couldn’t help but get the warm fuzzies — which was, of course, the point.

I mentally added this experience to my rapidly increasing list of personal firsts and moved on to the second scenario: being grabbed from behind and wrestled to the ground. As instructed, I employed a rapid-fire sequence of biting, elbow strikes, eye jabs, and a powerful sideways thrust kick, a move we would come to use frequently. We practiced the kick in a circle on the mats.

"Strike with the heel," Theo reminded me patiently. Eventually, I discovered that if I point my toe slightly while positioning my legs before the kick, the heel naturally extends forward on its own. "How does that feel?" he asked.

"Weird," I admitted. I imagined having to ask a real-life attacker for do-overs, grinned, and kept practicing rotating my hip.

At the end of the first six-hour day, woozy from adrenaline, one of my classmates broke down crying before her final match. Her fear of being grabbed from behind had only intensified. Naomi soothed her but had her fight anyway. We cheered her on like Romans at the Colosseum as she was tackled, and we whooped as she battled her attacker, through her tears, to a knockout blow.

It was the most important lesson we learned all day: We can fight when we’re crying. We can fight when we’re exhausted. We can fight when we’re afraid. We can fight.

THE METHOD TO THE MADNESS


It’s this attention to emotions that sets Impact apart from other full-force defense techniques such as Krav Maga (an Israeli-developed school of hand-to-hand combat). More Impact instructors hail from therapeutic or healing than fitness or martial arts backgrounds, and the emphasis on training the body and mind together helps create a supportive, refreshingly noncompetitive atmosphere in the classroom. Beyond support, though, increased awareness of our mental state helps to minimize the tendency to freeze when abruptly forced into a high-adrenaline situation. By paying attention to our impulses, we are able to snap out of inaction more quickly than sheer instinct might allow, while through repetition and the uninhibited use of our full strength, we are building fight reflexes into our body memory.

I was told that instructors go through an estimated 150 to 200 hours of training in order to be able to tailor the curriculum to each student’s needs and capabilities. Students of Impact, at least in the Bay Area, are also given the opportunity to participate in a custom fight — battling the personification of an abstract fear or a real-life trauma. In this way a single classroom can simultaneously empower a victim of past abuse (such as Naomi) to take back space, encourage a nice girl to assert her boundaries firmly, and inspire a perennial klutz like me to drop to the floor of her living room to practice thrust kicks — leading with the heel — over and over until it no longer feels weird at all but just right.

For our public celebration, or graduation, we invited friends and family members to witness our final fights. We took turns being tackled, grabbed, held down, and verbally provoked while we battled back with all the promised speed and finesse that seemed so impossible our first day. Not every move was executed with picture-perfect aplomb, but the audible thwap thwap of our connecting strikes was evidence enough of our newfound abilities. If we took nothing else away from our experience, we could be sure of this: each Impact graduate (and there are more than 8,000 in the Bay Area alone) — older or younger, fit or not — has learned to kick like a girl, with strength, with speed, with heart. *

IMPACT BAY AREA

Adults $465, young adults $395, teens $195

146 E. 12th St., Oakl.

(510) 208-0474

www.impactbayarea.org

Join Impact Bay Area for its annual SHINE fundraiser at the Women’s Building on April 29. After a demonstration of Impact techniques, the public can watch graduates of each training level fight a padded assailant on the mat. Admission is free; children under 12 are not permitted. All proceeds go to Impact’s scholarship fund, which enables low- and no-income women to take the course. (More than $17,000 in scholarships were distributed in 2006.)

April 29, 1 p.m., free. Women’s Bldg., 3543 18th St., SF. (415) 431-1180

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Help them help you

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› culture@sfbg.com

Following the tornado of cutbacks and downsizing that ripped through the Bay Area, the job market has finally regained its footing, which is great news for all kinds of people, from recent grads to employees unsatisfied with their current jobs. But you don’t have to go it alone.

We’ve asked some of the Bay Area’s experts on job searching — recruiters — to guide those seeking gainful employment. Since these are the people who sell job seekers to potential employers on a daily basis, we figure who better to provide valuable insight about landing that dream job (or dream income)?

Our panel of experts: Linda Carlton, president and CEO of FinanceStaff, a recruiting resource for accounting and finance professionals in Northern California; Daniel Morris, director of staffing at Trulia, a real estate search engine poised to double in size within the next year; and Madison Badertscher, an independent recruiter currently placing engineers and computer programmers in Silicon Valley.

And just in case you’re worried about how the recruiting industry affects local job seekers, keep in mind that the demand for skilled employees is so high — especially in fields such as engineering, finance, and graphic design — that recruiters are forced to look outside the Bay Area in order to find them. This means recruiters typically aren’t threatening local job seekers (though Morris points out there are certainly people who would disagree). Furthermore, recruiters say, the global perspective that international candidates tend to bring to Bay Area–based positions is often a weighty plus.

The general consensus is that the Bay Area job market is enjoying a renewed vigor. The jobs are out there and the conduits to them are many and varied. There is simply nothing to lose by taking advantage of the myriad recruiting resources available to you, whether you are just entering the workforce or still searching for the perfect job. So use this advice, and then go get ’em:

GO ONLINE


As you might’ve guessed, the Internet is a great place to start your search — and from the looks of top job boards such as Monster.com, HotJobs.com, and Craigslist.org, all kinds of companies are hiring. But don’t hesitate to post your résumé online as well — contrary to the popular belief that you’ll just get lost in the shuffle, recruiters say this is the first place they look when trying to fill a position.

Carlton says she starts here because it’s where the most eager candidates tend to post their résumés. Morris agrees, pointing out that it’s the best place to cast a wide net.

WRITE A RESUMESSAY


Keep in mind, though, that your résumé is the only way you’re representing yourself on these job boards. So make sure you’ve put your best foot forward. Carlton recommends thinking of your résumé as an essay. Employers will make inferences from what they see, she says. Anything that could potentially look bad, such as a series of short-term jobs, should be given due explanation. Morris says previous successes should be quantified in a strong résumé. Sales accomplishments, for example, should be listed in quantifiable terms.

If you don’t have tons of experience, though, don’t fret. You might get just as far emphasizing how passionate you are about the potential job. Morris, for example, looks to staff Trulia with employees who have a history of doing more than is expected of them. And though Badertscher says education and relevant experience are important, she points out that credentials can be secondary to a strong willingness to learn.

BEFRIEND A RECRUITER


Job applicants who know exactly where they want to work and what they want to do are often best off aligning themselves with in-house recruiters, who frequently develop close relationships with the hiring staff at their companies. These recruiters know the company culture, including what makes the hiring manager tick.

Applicants who have a range of ideas about what they would like to be doing or where they want to work should look for agency-based recruiters or independent recruiters, as both can help narrow the search.

Agency-based recruiters, such as Carlton, often work with companies that want to be presented with lots of candidates. They also help fill temporary jobs, which can be a great way for a job seeker to test a particular position, company, or industry before making a commitment.

But agency-based and independent recruiters have a bevy of tools to help job seekers identify what they want. For example, Carlton uses a range of personality profiling methods in order to aid applicants, including tests such as Myers-Briggs, Omni Profile, and Kathy Kolbe’s method of measuring how people like to apply themselves.

CONSIDER RECRUITING


With so many companies looking to hire, recruiting itself has become a viable — but somewhat nebulous — career choice. There’s a particularly high demand for recruiters in the Bay Area, thanks to lower unemployment rates. But how does someone become a recruiter?

It’s certainly not an obvious path. Carlton says the best way is to get hired by one of the big national firms, receive some structured training from them, then go out on your own or join a smaller firm when the process becomes intuitive. "The great thing about being a recruiter is that you can do it anywhere," she says.

A wide range of backgrounds can lead to a lucrative career in recruiting. The important thing is getting the skills you need for the job. For example, Morris learned about generating leads and closing deals while working in sales at an Atlanta tech firm. Badertscher learned to be detail-oriented from her previous career in event planning. And Carlton first expressed her interest in talking to people about their careers as a high school guidance counselor — an interest she later supplemented with an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

"Recruiting is really a social science — the field can be lucrative, but it’s tough to succeed if money is your main motivation," Carlton says. "I love it when I can help someone find their dream job and help a client find the perfect person. That’s what it’s all about." *

FINANCESTAFF

300 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, suite 210, Oakl.

(510) 465-6070

www.financestaff.com

TRULIA

500 Treat, suite 200, SF

1-866-7-TRULIA

www.trulia.com

KOLBE A INDEX TEST

www.kolbe.com

>

Dear Diary …

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I was on antidepressants for a year and just came off them recently. It was a situational depression — my close sister had died. I have no other psych history. Now, since I’ve been off the medication, I’ve experienced an intense surge of sexual desire and have developed an online relationship with someone where I am his sex slave–toy. I’ve always fantasized about being submissive but never seriously acted on it until now. I find it so erotic!

I feel I’m about to go out of control, though. Out of control is bad, but is being a sex slave bad? My friends and family have no idea. I need to find a safe place to act out my fantasies or go to counseling. How do women who want to be submissive slaves become so safely? What the hell is wrong with me?

Love,

Bewildered

Dear Bea:

Nothing that isn’t wrong with a few million of your fellow perverts, so I wouldn’t get too exercised about it if I were you. Furthermore, I’m sorry to hear about your sister and not particularly alarmed to hear about your long-distance slavery thing. Good for you for finding him, actually. Perv World abounds with would-be submissive sex toys, while tops are always in short supply. (Topping is labor-intensive and requires skill, while bottoming can be done in one’s sleep. Then again, I suppose it is so much easier to type, "I flog you. I flog you some more. I am still flogging you …," than it is to actually flog someone.) Anyway, have fun, but do me a favor: don’t forget that you actually don’t know this guy, no matter how intimate your online connection feels, and also don’t forget that you never really know where an embarrassing picture might turn up once you’ve hit "send."

Don’t fret that your newly awakened libido is going to grow to monster proportions, break free, and stomp all over town like Godzilla, swallowing subway trains and getting all tangled up in the overhead power lines. It’s normal for a sex-drive suppressed by sadness and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to come roaring back to life when exposed to air again. Moreover, S-M, well, it does that. Early in one’s career as a self-professed kink, one tends to go a little overboard, thinking about it constantly, reading everything, joining everything, buying everything, posting unwisely to the Internet, and insisting on oversharing with anyone foolish enough to have briefly expressed even polite interest in your new hobby. You, by contrast, are remaining admirably discreet (it’s not that I think there’s anything to be ashamed of, just that there’s no reason to tell your dentist and your grandmother’s bridge club about it). You are taking it fairly slowly, keeping yourself to yourself, and having the safest supposedly dangerous sex imaginable, the kind that isn’t even really happening. Either you’re not out of control in the slightest or you aren’t telling me the whole story. I’ll have to go with the former.

Of course, there are safe ways to be somebody’s submissive sex toy, just as there are safe ways to go deep-sea diving or take up the flying trapeze — good equipment is key, but finding a good instructor comes first. It doesn’t sound like the online guy is going to become your off-line guy anytime soon, nor need he. You’re in the joining things phase (this usually passes, so you might as well take advantage now), so join something. Not so easy, I know, if you live in a small town or no town, but seriously, the exurbs are no place to be a sex slave (S-M porn abounds with isolated castles full of depraved aristocrats and isolated farms full of sick, sadistic rednecks with barns full of cowed sex slaves, but real life does not). You need to join one of the social-educational clubs you’ll find in most big cities now. They have meetings and get-togethers and swap meets. Hell, some have brunch, which always makes me laugh because I just can’t think of anything less edgy than brunch, but what could it hurt to have some coffee and a muffin and meet some nice people who like to do nasty things? This is how your modern freakazoid finds a tribe.

There may be nobody there you’d ever consider submitting to, body and soul (there almost certainly won’t be), but somebody will know somebody you will want. And even better, they’ll know if he’s safe, and even if he’s fun.

Besides urging you out into the daylight, I also support you in staying home and lurking about the more louche corners of the Internet. Acting out your fantasies online is actually a great way to find out what interests you, and there are no hard feelings if you just don’t feel like finishing a certain session because you don’t like his manner. Or his grammar.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Who blinked?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf has been free for more than a week, but the debate over why the federal government released him after 226 days in jail is only getting murkier.

First a US Attorney’s Office press release April 3 claimed that Wolf "complied with the grand jury subpoena." Next a San Francisco Chronicle headline April 4 declared, "Blogger Freed after Giving Up Video." Then a Chronicle op-ed April 9 by the California First Amendment Coalition’s executive director, Peter Scheer, claimed Wolf’s case never should have become a constitutional cause célèbre "because he never had evidence."

"In retrospect," Scheer wrote, "Wolf’s jailing looks like a huge misunderstanding, in which prosecutors assumed, incorrectly, that Wolf possessed relevant evidence, while Wolf believed, erroneously, that he had a responsibility to go to jail even if he had no relevant evidence."

Wolf disagrees with all the above, beginning with the prosecutor’s claim that he complied with the subpoena.

"If I complied, then journalists will be happy to know that the meaning of ‘complied’ has changed," Wolf said, noting that he never capitulated to the feds’ demands that he testify under oath before a grand jury about a July 2005 Mission District protest that turned violent, parts of which he captured on video and excerpts of which were aired shortly thereafter on national television.

Wolf was more forgiving of the Chron‘s misleading headline because, as he put it, "headline writers don’t write the story, and the story itself was accurate." That said, the truth, according to Wolf, is that only after the feds gave up their demand that he testify did he agree to post his unedited video.

It’s a subtle distinction that was missing from some coverage of his release from federal prison, but it’s a significant omission that makes Wolf’s decision look like a coerced surrender. Wolf emphasized, "The subpoena demanded I give up my video and testify before a grand jury."

As for Scheer’s argument that Wolf shouldn’t have gone to prison for nothing, Wolfe said it misses the crucial point: complying with a federal subpoena hurts a journalist’s standing with sources.

"You can’t decide to only protect material if it’s of evidentiary value. And Scheer sidestepped the issue of testimony and the fact that the government agreed to not make me testify before a grand jury," Wolf told us.

The problem with grand juries, at least from a journalistic perspective, is that their inquisitional power is unlimited and their proceedings are secret. In other words, journalists can be suspected of snitching yet can’t prove they haven’t, all of which adds up to the kiss of death for reporters who cultivate the trust of confidential sources.

Wolf said he offered to give up his tape but did not offer to testify about it, as early as November 2006, but the feds rejected the latter part of his demand. Once they did agree in April that he wouldn’t have to testify about the tape’s contents, Wolf said there was no longer any point in refusing to release the tape itself.

Releasing the tape, Wolf said, helped put to rest the "suspicion that I had any relevant evidence."

"Sure, Josh had developed sources in the anarchist community, but that’s not what this was about," Wolf attorney James Wheaton told us. "It was about refusing to appear before the grand jury and testify or name names."

With a parallel debate raging about whether bloggers are journalists, Wolf said he hopes people will give him the benefit of the doubt and say he should have been protected.

"I believe my action served to be the strongest case for the need for a federal shield law," Wolf said. Local officials agree.

"What happened to Mr. Wolf is stark evidence that we need a federal shield law to make sure this does not happen again," District Attorney Kamala Harris said April 3.

Harris’s support for Wolf also highlights questions about the role San Francisco police officials played in this mess.

As part of the settlement that secured his release, Wolf answered no to two questions: did he see anybody throw anything at the squad car that was part of an alleged arson, and did he see whom SFPD officer Peter Shields was chasing before his skull got fractured?

"Answering questions about which you know nothing is not a violation of journalistic ethics," Wheaton told the Guardian. "But those same questions prove that law enforcement misused the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was set up to investigate terrorism but which they used to get around California’s shield laws."

Public records show that the SFPD requested the help of the JTTF and the FBI to investigate the assault on Shields. That assault should be under the jurisdiction of the DA’s Office. But by framing the case as an alleged arson to a car, for which the department received some funds courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement was able to federalize the investigation.

With Wolf’s unedited video showing one police officer wildly pointing his gun at protesters in apparent violation of the SFPD’s general orders, questions remain as to who will hold law enforcement accountable for what’s on this long-disputed tape. *

Another digital divide

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion about free wireless Internet access in San Francisco. The audience and panelists included people who work on tech projects for the city, activists from impoverished neighborhoods, and civil liberties wonks. We were there to talk about what to do now that EarthLink has submitted a contract to San Francisco, offering to blanket the region with free wi-fi under certain conditions.

One of those conditions is that anyone who wants high-speed access will have to pay roughly $25 per month for it. So the only free wi-fi will be slow and spotty. Another condition is that Google will provide the software side of this free wi-fi network, potentially serving up location-based ads and keeping track of where people are when they log on the network.

A few minutes after panelists started discussing the EarthLink deal, a debate emerged over whether San Francisco should accept the contract with EarthLink as is or try to change some of the terms. Nicole Ozer from the American Civil Liberties Union was lobbying for more privacy-friendly provisions such as the ones EarthLink included in its contract with Portland; technical experts Tim Pozar and Bruce Wolfe wanted terms that promised better technical infrastructure. While their requests seemed reasonable to the geeks in the room, local teacher George Lee and African American community activist Reverend Arnold Townsend disagreed.

"What you don’t seem to understand," Lee said, "is that there are people in this city right now who don’t have any access to computers at all. They don’t know how to use Google or where to buy a USB drive. They can’t do their homework or apply for jobs because they don’t have Internet access. These people don’t care about being ‘pure.’ They just need to get online." Townsend echoed Lee’s sentiments, arguing that changing EarthLink’s contract would only delay much-needed high-tech resources for people in low-income areas in San Francisco — areas that are also heavily populated by blacks and other people of color.

Townsend said the concerns of civil liberties activists sounded to him like ideological quibbling. He added that Pozar’s and Wolfe’s suggestions for different technological approaches would just take longer and keep members of his community offline. Addressing the techies on the panel, Lee’s former student Chris Green said, "It’s like somebody is bleeding to death, but instead of giving him a tourniquet you’re saying that you’ll drive him to the hospital where you have really great facilities."

Ozer and others pointed out that asking EarthLink for better contractual terms isn’t likely to slow the wi-fi rollout in the city. The Board of Supervisors still needs to deliberate on the contract, and it could be more than a year before the supervisors accept the contract even if they don’t ask for changes. Plus, EarthLink’s technology may not serve the low-income communities. Wi-fi signals have a hard time traveling through walls and may not reach above the second floor on most buildings. It’s possible that EarthLink is courting low-income groups with promises of free wi-fi that the company can’t actually deliver.

Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that EarthLink does manage to deliver wi-fi to low-income communities and that members of those communities can afford to get wi-fi-ready computers. Given that there are so few privacy protections in the EarthLink contract, I worry that we may close one digital divide only to open another.

Already, it’s easy for a company like Google to track what users do online and sell that information to the highest bidder. What happens when companies link that capability with the ability to know where users are physically when they log onto the wi-fi network? We might see a new era in racial profiling, where Google or companies like it sell information to police about what people in black neighborhoods are searching for online. If anybody does a suspicious search for "drugs" or "the Nation of Islam," that person could easily become the object of a fishing expedition by police.

There are many software tools that people use to protect their privacy online, but will impoverished people on the free wi-fi network know about them or be able to use them over slow connections? The new digital divide won’t be between people who can get online and those who can’t; instead, it will be between people who can afford to create privacy for themselves on the Web and those who don’t have the resources to do it. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants everybody to have equal access to both the Internet and digital privacy.

A hammer, a pizza guy, and $60

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

When Darius Simms walked into Department 25 at the Hall of Justice late last year, dressed in the orange cottons inmates wear at the county’s downtown jail, he received some good news. He was being released.

The bad news was that he was still going to be punished for something a judge said she was pretty sure he didn’t do.

Simms had been on probation when he was arrested for allegedly bashing in the head of a pizza delivery driver for $60. But the District Attorney’s Office couldn’t make a criminal case against him, and the charges of assault, attempted murder, and robbery were dropped.

Still, on the advice of his lawyer, Simms accepted a deal that extended his probation until 2009 just to escape the hoosegow — essentially on the grounds that the normal rules of the criminal justice system don’t count for those on probation, innocent or not.

The way California’s probation system works, it doesn’t matter if law enforcement proves an ex-con committed a crime. Just getting arrested can mean trouble.

It is, one defense lawyer told us, a "dirty little secret" of criminal prosecutions in the state.

The prosecutors may not have a case to take to a jury, in which a defendant is innocent until proved guilty and the evidence has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But they can send people on probation, such as Simms, to jail anyway, and that requires only a hearing before a judge.

"It’s not 12 people agreeing. It’s one," Robert Dunlap, the defense attorney for Simms, told the Guardian. "And it’s not beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s by a preponderance of the evidence. It’s a lower standard of proof."

Deputy district attorney Jim Thompson insisted that Simms was guilty even though he lacked proof, and he wanted to railroad the 26-year-old Western Addition native into more jail time.

Sitting behind the prosecutor that day in the gallery of Department 25 was a man named Tony Portillo. If Simms’s defense attorney hadn’t negotiated an extended probation for his client, Portillo would likely have testified that Simms pounded the pizza driver with what Portillo says was a wood-handled, iron-head hammer — the same testimony Portillo gave during a preliminary hearing for Simms in September 2006.

Portillo was the people’s main witness, an auto mechanic who the DA’s Office had originally believed would help keep Simms behind bars for what Thompson described as a "heinous" crime.

But case number 194817 reveals just how quickly the roles can alternate in Superior Court and how the probation status of a defendant can make a mess of the legal system.

FOR THE PEOPLE


For several months Portillo had been restoring a 1973 Dodge Challenger for his pal Apollo Pacheco’s girlfriend. The car was kept in the garage of Pacheco’s home, on 47th Avenue in the Sunset.

The 28-year-old Portillo has an unassuming stature at two inches shy of six feet and boasts an "SF" tattoo on his right arm. On April 4, 2006, he was in Pacheco’s garage working on the Challenger’s floorboards, wheelhouse, and one of the quarter panels. Portillo says he had seen Simms around the neighborhood, and the day before, Simms stopped by to ask if Portillo was willing to sell his car, which was sitting in Pacheco’s driveway. "He seemed like a fine individual," Portillo would later testify.

Simms is heavyset at six-foot-one and at the time had a short moustache and beard. He’s no stranger to the Hall of Justice. In fact, the very law enforcement office that would later try to pin him for attempted murder had sent him to the Sunset in the first place. He was supposed to be living quietly with his mother by the beach in a witness protection program, poised to testify against a man who’d allegedly shot him five times.

When the Guardian reached Portillo in person, he declined to speak on the record, but he did tell police inspectors that Simms lied at the time of their meeting by telling him he was 22. Simms, who is now 27, was also on probation for a handful of robbery and battery cases stemming from 2001.

The sale of Portillo’s junker never happened, but Simms returned the next day, and Portillo asked for help removing the Challenger’s rear window. "He was there basically for company," Portillo told the court. Throughout that second day the two talked over cans of Olde English, at which point the story began to turn.

According to court records, at some time during the afternoon, Portillo slunk into the house and stole from the fridge a rum drink prepared by Pacheco’s roommate, Ted Langlais. Langlais discovered the theft later, and the two would clash over it.

After sharing the rum, Portillo realized he needed to run to the Kragen Auto Parts store on Taraval and buy a new piece for his welder. On his way out, he asked Langlais for money, who testified that he said no.

Two young women who were visiting stayed behind at Pacheco’s house, where Langlais was painting their nails. (One of the two girls is a witness in the case, but we are concealing her name because she’s a minor. Portillo testified he believed she was Simms’s girlfriend.)

Simms, Portillo, and the girl congregated back at the garage around 7 or 8 p.m. Simms and the girl wanted to order pizza. Portillo promised to pitch in five dollars. After a period during which Portillo stated he was gathering his tools and cleaning up, the pizza arrived.

"I was washing my hands to get ready to eat," Portillo later testified. "I heard a knock on the garage. The garage was slightly open. I looked up. I saw [Simms]. I heard a thump. I looked over. I saw him striking the pizza delivery person with the blunt object."

The pizza guy, Marco Maluf, was screaming, and Simms was telling him to shut up, Portillo told inspectors the night it happened. Maluf had $60 cash on him, which he would later testify was taken.

Simms and his friend left on foot down 47th Avenue. Portillo was in shock and didn’t know what to do. He reported that he collected his tools and threw them into his car.

"Ted came down, and he said, ‘Dude, why is this guy bleeding all over my floor?’ " Portillo told the inspectors. "And I go, ‘I don’t know, Ted. Ask, ask them,’ " pointing toward the couple walking away. He didn’t call 911 but drove back toward his home in the Portola District. He called a childhood friend, a firefighter at Station 42 on San Bruno Avenue named Michael Guajardo, to ask for help. Guajardo encouraged him to go to the Taraval police station, where inspectors recorded Portillo’s version of the story.

He told the inspectors Simms called him afterward to tell him about the $60. "Dude, don’t call me again, dude," Portillo said he told Simms. "We’re done. Don’t ever — we’re done. You fucked up."

Five days later Simms was arrested for the attack. He told police interrogators that he wasn’t in the garage when the pizza arrived. Portillo, he said then, had given him and the remaining girl a ride to his house up the street. But Simms eventually admitted to police he’d returned to the garage with the girl. The girl ultimately admitted the same thing during her interview with the inspectors.

This story is far from complete, however. While Simms waited in jail, defense attorney Robert Dunlap pursued a different narrative for what happened on April 4.

FOR THE DEFENSE


Simms says he never knew Portillo as much by his birth name as he did by a nickname Portillo had given himself: Capone. He says Portillo introduced him to Langlais as a "friend from high school."

"He called me his window man," Simms told the Guardian. Simms had never taken a window out in his life, he admitted, nor had he known Portillo extensively, but he played along. "I said, ‘Cool, it’s a place to hang and drink and everything.’ "

Portillo denied in court that he ever went by the name Capone. But his close friend, Guajardo, testified during a September 2006 preliminary hearing that in recent months Portillo had, in fact, been calling himself by that name. Simms was calling Portillo by that name to police interrogators five days after Maluf was beaten. So was the girl who remained at the home that night.

Simms never testified in court, because the primary charges against him were dropped. But if Simms had testified before a jury, he likely would have told them he and Portillo had dropped by the home of Portillo’s grandfather to get some money for crack during their trip to the Kragen Auto Parts store. That’s how Simms says he knew Portillo’s grandfather had a breathing problem.

Guajardo also told the court that Portillo’s grandfather relied on a breathing apparatus for oxygen. He noted that his fire station had made medical calls to the man’s Portola home to assist him. But when defense attorney Dunlap asked Portillo about it, he denied to the court that his grandfather had any breathing problem.

Portillo also couldn’t clearly recall for the court if he’d ever been convicted of a felony. But in 2000, records show, police did arrest Portillo for cocaine and marijuana possession, and at the time, he had a suspended driver’s license. The day before Maluf was attacked, Portillo had also received a ticket for running a stop sign while taking Simms for a spin in his car along the Sunset’s Great Highway. At that time, he had a 30-day restricted license, the result of a DUI case.

After returning from the trip to Kragen and drinking a couple more beers, Portillo took Simms and the girl to Simms’s house for a change of clothes, and Portillo left alone, Simms told us.

Langlais was livid by then, having realized Portillo took his rum from the fridge. On Portillo’s way back to the house, he and Langlais argued over the phone. When he arrived, Langlais was armed with a baseball bat, according to Portillo’s court statements.

"I called Tony," Langlais testified last September, "and basically was just yelling at him on the phone for a little while…. He apologized profusely, broke down, and started crying, and I just didn’t expect that."

"I go, ‘Hey, look,’ " Portillo told the court. "’I’m not here to fight with you over this rum.’ … And he was pretty mad, so I got a little emotional."

Much of April 4 seemed charged with anxiety. Portillo by then sounded drunk, according to the testimony of Pacheco, who also argued on the phone with Portillo about the stolen rum.

The rum fiasco was resolved delicately. Simms and the girl returned to the garage with more beers. They ordered pizza. Portillo promised to pitch in. Simms says that he stepped outside for fresh air, his head spinning from the drink. The pizza man arrived.

"As soon as I step outside, I hear, ‘Uh! Uh!’ He just cavin’ this guy’s head in," Simms says. "Kickin’ him. Hittin’ him with the hammer. Just blowin’ him out of the water with it. This guy is cryin’, sayin’ some shit in some other language [Portuguese]. And [Portillo’s] yellin’, kickin’ him, sayin’, ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up now!’ Ted comes down. He looks. ‘What the fuck is goin’ on?’ [Portillo’s], like, ‘We gotta get up outta here. I’m goin’ to Mexico.’ "

Simms says it was the start of the month and he had just cashed a Supplemental Security Income check. He didn’t need to rob the pizza man. He says police arrested him because of his background and because he lied to them about being in the garage — "I just panicked. I know how it is. I got priors."

He didn’t bother with a coat of sugar.

"The guy was small. I’m a big boy. I don’t need no fuckin’ hammer to get him. I’m just sayin’. I’m 300 pounds. If I would have used that hammer on that man, he would have been dead."

The pizza driver survived after being transferred to San Francisco General Hospital but suffered a skull fracture and lacerations that took 30 staples in his head to repair. He still gets headaches and can’t remember anything about that night.

STANDARDS OF PROOF


Nearly two decades ago the California Supreme Court declared that a lower standard of proof was sufficient to put suspects behind bars for vioutf8g the terms of their probation.

A judge convicted Juan Carlos Rodriguez of vioutf8g his probation in 1988 after a convenience store employee in King City testified that Rodriguez had shoplifted several pairs of utility gloves. The judge relied on a diluted standard of proof known as "a preponderance of the evidence" to revoke his probation rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required from juries at full-blown criminal trials.

Rodriguez appealed and won. But prosecutors took the case to the state’s highest court, and in 1990 the justices decided that state case law already permitted a lower standard of proof known as "clear and convincing evidence." In effect, the court ruled, the state could send a person on probation back to jail on as little proof as it wanted. Besides, the justices argued, a higher standard amounted to retrying a criminal who’d already been granted the court’s grace and would unnecessarily burden the system.

Coincidentally, former San Francisco DA Arlo Smith filed a friend of the court brief in People v. Rodriguez supporting the state’s position.

But at least one concurring judge worried ominously that with a lower threshold for alleged probation violations, "an unfortunate incentive might arise to use the revocation hearing as a substitute for a criminal prosecution."

Former supervisor Matt Gonzalez, who worked as a public defender prior to his time at City Hall, says that’s exactly what’s happened. He recalls a case that surfaced years after Rodriguez involving a woman named Mary Elizabeth Alcoser. Although she had a long history of trouble ranging from severe narcotics abuse to prostitution dating back to the 1970s, according to criminal records, after police charged her with assault in a 1997 case, she was fully acquitted by a jury, citing self-defense.

"Even though she was acquitted," Gonzalez said, "the judge sent her to prison on a probation violation, because he determined that by a lower standard of proof, she was guilty…. The real question is, who benefits when you don’t have the higher standard of proof employed?"

In another case, Gonzalez represented a Hispanic man facing robbery charges following an incident at a Mission bar. A witness described the assailant during testimony as African American. But the judge sent Gonzalez’s client to prison on a probation violation anyway, claiming that a piece of jewelry snatched during the encounter and later found on the suspect implicated him, even though he’d never even been charged with receiving stolen property.

Gonzalez calls it the "innuendo of a case unproven."

Speaking in general terms, longtime local defense attorney Don Bergerson said it’s far from uncommon for the DA’s Office to use an alleged probation violation as leverage for getting tough jail sentences when a case otherwise looks lifeless.

"To hide behind the fact that the standard of proof required to revoke probation is ostensibly less seems to me to be morally and practically dishonest," Bergerson said, "even if one can justify it semantically."

When we reached deputy district attorney Thompson, he refused to talk about the Simms case. But spokesperson Debbie Mesloh said outright that the DA’s Office was seeking to take advantage of the lower standard of proof and added that there was at least enough evidence to hold Simms for trial.

"The charges in this case were dismissed because we await crucial DNA evidence that was not available at the time that the defendant was scheduled to go to trial," Mesloh wrote in a January e-mail. "We currently await the findings of this evidence."

Her office confirmed in a follow-up e-mail, however, that the DNA analysis has so far gone nowhere. To this day, no reasonably good physical evidence from the case has been identified.

FOR THE RECORD


Somebody almost killed Maluf, and the two most likely suspects are Portillo and Simms. Neither is a Boy Scout, and both have an obvious incentive to finger the other.

That’s exactly why courts require strong evidence — enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt — before sending someone to prison. Using shortcuts such as probation revocations leads to slipshod prosecutions and wrongful convictions.

Strong evidence standards are particularly important for a case as muddled as this one.

Portillo told the court he doesn’t do drugs, let alone smoke crack.

While he’s "got no love for Tony" over the stolen rum, Langlais told us he’s certain he heard Simms yelling at Maluf, and he saw Simms standing over him when he entered the garage from upstairs. He’s "enraged" that San Francisco’s "revolving-door" criminal justice system put Simms back on the street.

But defense attorney Dunlap said Portillo’s testimony, which the lawyer described as "inconsistent," wasn’t nearly enough to prove the assault, robbery, and attempted murder charges.

"When Jim Thompson got the case assigned to him upstairs," Dunlap said, "I think he took an honest look at it and realized he was going to have a hard time convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that [Simms] was guilty of the crime. Because [Simms] was on probation, [Thompson] opted to dismiss the trial and proceed on a motion to revoke instead…. It was more or less a practical way to try and salvage something from a sinking ship."

After reluctantly accepting the extended probation deal for Simms at the hearing Dec. 13, 2006, Thompson still complained that Simms deserved more jail time.

"Your honor, this disposition is over the people’s strenuous objection," he indignantly informed Judge Charlotte Woolard. "The defendant has a lengthy criminal history…. And I do believe there is sufficient evidence that the defendant was the culprit in this matter."

But Woolard had a different opinion, based on a reading of Portillo’s testimony from the preliminary hearing, a telling example of how difficult it will always be to turn a real-world criminal prosecution into a fictionalized television drama and why the resolution of this case might actually be the worst possible outcome.

"The people’s main witness," she said, "in this court’s opinion is quite likely the person that committed this offense." *

Web site of the week

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While we wait for an actual candidate to run against Mayor Gavin Newsom, bloggers have filled the void with aggressive Web sites. Gavin Watch has been redesigned with a crisp and compelling new look, while former Newsom backer Dave Barbella enters the fray with his Gavin Newsom Sucks site.

Property wrongs

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› news@sfbg.com

For decades the narrow strip of land at the corner of Fulton and Stanyan streets in the Inner Richmond sat abandoned, accumuutf8g weeds and trash. At some point in the distant past, neighbors say, it had been a nice lawn, but no one remembers exactly when that was.

"I walk past it every morning," 75-year-old Kathleen Russell, who has lived in an apartment overlooking the lot for 34 years, told the Guardian. "I kept hoping somebody would put a lawn in or something, something that was pretty. But it was just left vacant and unattended."

Last year the Department of Public Works posted a sign declaring the vacant land blighted after receiving repeated complaints. Then in January a small group of neighbors began transforming the lot into a community garden. They cleaned up the garbage, cut down the weeds, and planted vegetables. Soon after, the DPW sign disappeared and was replaced by fava beans, garlic, and lettuce.

Justin Valone, who lives down the street from the piece of land, helped initiate the garden. "The response from the community has been amazing," he told us enthusiastically. "We’ve had nothing but support from neighbors. It’s been a real catalyst for getting to know everyone in the neighborhood."

Only one person seems to take issue with the project: the landowner. While visiting San Francisco from her out-of-town home, Aileen O’Driscoll discovered the guerrilla garden on her property and was less than thrilled. She also found neighbors using a hose from her building to water the plot without permission. O’Driscoll told Citywide Property Management, which takes care of the lot and the adjacent apartment building, that she wanted them off her land. She refused to speak to the gardeners directly and did not respond to our inquiries.

Carol Cosgrove, co-owner of Citywide, has been responsible for returning the lot to its unkempt state. "I think beautification of the city is important. I agree with it completely, but I think that personal property and private property is still important," she told us. "Instead of taking something aggressively and taking the water and not even bothering to seek out who the owner is and ask permission or to give a proposal to, this could have been done more responsibly."

Citywide got in touch with Valone and told him to stop using its water (which he did) and to remove the plants (which he didn’t). In response, gardeners began trying to generate broader support for the garden. They went door-to-door with a petition. Some neighbors asked Citywide to leave the plants alone.

Still O’Driscoll refused to talk. The San Francisco Parks Trust contacted the property managers to show there is organizational support for the garden. District Supervisor Jake McGoldrick’s office called too, offering to help mediate a deal between the two groups. The gardeners even agreed to lease the unused land. Citywide says it has presented the case to the owner many times, but O’Driscoll won’t budge and won’t offer an explanation.

"I can’t really speak for her, but she doesn’t want the garden there right now," Cosgrove said.

Gardeners are frustrated by her unwillingness to talk to them. "We could address her specific concerns, but without knowing what they are, we can’t do anything," says Becky Sutton, another garden organizer.

When they felt negotiations were going nowhere, garden supporters began holding a constant vigil at the lot, hoping for the chance to speak to the landowner directly. Groups of friends and neighbors stayed by the garden for days, talking to passersby and getting more signatures on the petition. Currently they have more than 300.

The benefits of the garden would extend beyond the 1,300-square-foot plot, advocates assert. "Green space in San Francisco is very valuable to all residents," said Jude Koski, director of the San Francisco Garden Resource Organization (SFGRO), a local community gardening organization that is willing to help broker a deal over the land. "It is a wonderful way to engage the community. It’s an opportunity for people to come together who wouldn’t otherwise be coming together." According to a 2004 survey by the Recreation and Park Department, 47 percent of San Franciscans would like to see more community gardens in the city.

The two sides have reached something of an impasse: O’Driscoll wants the garden gone, Citywide says it has no choice but to follow her orders, and the gardeners don’t want the lot to go back to dirt and weeds.

But even if they lose this lot, the gardeners see the fight as ongoing. "We want to see this garden not just be bound by the concrete that is all around it but be something that will inspire people and help them know they can utilize vacant land in their neighborhoods," Valone said. "People can take responsibility for beautifying and creating important and useful resources for themselves and their neighbors in the space around them. Whether you’re a renter, whether you own land or not, you can still take responsibility for land and utilize it." *

The real Josh Wolf story

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EDITORIAL The level of misunderstanding and utter inaccuracy in the reporting on the release of videographer and blogger Josh Wolf has been astonishing. Since Wolf was released from federal custody April 3, it seems as if everyone is taking a swipe at the 24-year-old, who set a record as the longest imprisoned journalist in American history.

The way much of the press covered the story, it would seem that Wolf gave up, abandoned his principles, and handed the government what it wanted; or he wasn’t really a journalist; or what he had wasn’t worth protecting.

But as Sarah Phelan reports ("Who Blinked?," page 15), those critics are all completely missing the point.

The facts: Wolf filmed an anarchist demonstration during which a San Francisco police car was slightly damaged and a cop was hit over the head. The San Francisco Police Department contacted the feds, who decided that since the city gets federal funding for police equipment, the damage to a taillight worth maybe $20 was enough to make this a federal case.

Wolf posted some clips from his footage on his Web site. Then a federal grand jury subpoenaed Wolf and demanded that he turn over all of the video — and that he come and testify about it under oath.

Wolf said from the start the video showed nothing that would be useful to the assault and vandalism investigations. He begged federal Judge William Alsup to look at the outtakes himself so that he could see the material was irrelevant. Alsup refused.

But the video was never the central issue. Wolf was in jail because he wouldn’t appear in a secret proceding before a grand jury without a lawyer and answer any questions under oath that the prosecution might have about the demonstration. He might have been asked to identify participants, to talk about any private information they had given him — in effect, to become a government agent in the investigation.

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a brief supporting Wolf, the FBI has been investigating activists all over the country. Once the grand jury started asking Wolf questions, he could have been forced to aid those investigations.

After almost eight months, a mediator was able to come up with a compromise. Wolf posted the rest of the video on the Web and gave it to the feds; as he had said all along, it showed nothing relevant. More important, though, he was able to avoid becoming a witness for the prosecution. All he had to do was say under oath that he didn’t know who hit the cop or damaged the car. Which he has been saying all along.

So this was in no way a capitulation to the authorities — and was by no means a moot issue. Wolf was standing firmly behind the journalistic principle that no reporter should become an agent of law enforcement. None of this was Wolf’s fault — it was the fault of the local cops, the federal prosecutors, and the judge. Wolf’s release after seven and a half months was a victory for free press and the First Amendment — and his incarceration ought to be strong grounds for Congress to pass a federal shield law. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I get just as crabby and cynical as any other political reporter, but the truth is, on the index of basic competence and lack of corruption, San Francisco city government is doing way better than it was a decade ago.

We’re far from perfect: the Raker Act scandal still sours everything at City Hall, and the mayor hasn’t done much of anything in the past three years. I could go on.

But the reformers have made some tremendous inroads. I don’t know of anyone running a critical department at City Hall who is too drunk to make it back from lunch on a regular basis. Most of the senior staff actually shows up to work instead of spending the day at Nordstrom. The school district has gotten back to educating students, and the public schools improve each year. The supervisors are overall a remarkably smart, progressive bunch. I haven’t seen the FBI raid a local government office in a couple years.

And then there’s the community college district.

The board and the administration that run City College are, I think, one of the last bastions of the kind of inbred, secretive, corrupt rotten boroughs that used to dominate our dear city. Take Lance Williams’s fascinating City College story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 6.

Williams showed how a college official, assistant vice chancellor James Blomquist, allegedly steered $10,000 in rent money owed to the school into a campaign fund for a 2005 community college bond act. If that’s true — and nobody’s denying it — the deal was not only inappropriate but blatantly illegal. There should have been outrage all around — but so far only the three dissident members of the community college board have said a word. "Nobody else has said anything," said board member John Rizzo, who with Julio Ramos and Milton Marks III has called for a special meeting on this.

Perhaps that’s because what Blomquist allegedly did isn’t all that unusual at City College, where bond money is moved around and treated like personal scrip by the administration and some of the board members. Remember, these are the folks who promised the voters that they’d build a performing arts center, then turned around and spent the money on a gym — and later agreed to rent out the new pool to a private school across the street (see "Field of Schemes," 9/22/04).

This is the crew that has resisted sunshine, that has run roughshod over neighborhoods and pissed off thousands of people — for absolutely no good reason.

The district attorney needs to investigate this latest scam and ask, among other things, which board members knew about it — because I suspect this wasn’t just a junior official operating unilaterally.

This shit has got to end, folks. The chancellor, Philip Day, needs to go. The board members who have been involved in these past shenanigans (Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Lawrence Wong) all need to go. The progressives have to make this a priority; City College is a civic gem and a crucial part of the city’s future. It’s infuriating to see it run by political hacks.

And as long as this crew is still in charge, I hope they know better than to come around with their hands out, asking for more of the taxpayers’ money. *

Stop the McGoldrick recall

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EDITORIAL Jake McGoldrick isn’t perfect, but he’s been a pretty good supervisor most of the time, and the recall effort launched against him by a Geary Boulevard merchant is baseless and inappropriate.

The recall is a potent weapon, part of the Progressive Era reforms that gave California the initiative and the referendum. But it can also be easily abused to threaten an incumbent who has done nothing wrong except show political courage on tough issues.

And that’s exactly what’s happening here: McGoldrick, who represents a relatively moderate district, is taking the lead on two key attempts to challenge the city’s car-driven transportation culture. He’s the author of a measure that would close Golden Gate Park to cars on Saturdays, at least for a six-month trial — something the trustees of the de Young Museum have been fighting bitterly. And he’s the chief backer of a plan to add bus-only lanes to Geary Boulevard, which would create a relatively cheap, efficient rapid transit system along one of the city’s main commute arteries.

Those positions have angered a small group of people, led by David Heller, who owns a beauty supply store on Geary and is adamantly opposed to anything that would reduce car traffic or parking on the street. Heller — who ran unsuccessfully against McGoldrick in 2004 — now wants to recall the supervisor, who has less than two years left in office anyway. Heller insists that McGoldrick is defying the will of the voters, because a majority of District 1 voted against Saturday road closures in 2000 and because McGoldrick hasn’t adequately addressed the concerns of some merchants who fear the loss of parking spaces under the transit plan.

Let’s get a couple things straight: the 2000 ballot had a pair of competing road-closure measures that left a lot of voters confused — and the museum people ran a misleading campaign that helped muddy the waters even more. The vote that year was hardly an accurate reflection of how San Franciscans or people in the Richmond view weekend road closures.

In fact, the car-free Sunday in the park is one of the city’s most popular regular events — and a study commissioned by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is not a fan of road closures, showed that the traffic and parking impacts on the neighborhoods are almost nonexistent. McGoldrick has been willing to stand up to the mayor and the powerful museum board on this, and that’s a good thing.

The Geary transit corridor is tough: any solution that improves transit on the road — and that’s a priority for the city — will leave less room for cars. But that’s the direction the city has to go in. Public transit will only be effective in this city if it can operate quickly and reliably on routes such as Geary — and that can’t happen without some disruption to car travel. The proposal McGoldrick supports would close one lane to cars (possibly by eliminating street parking) and dedicate it to buses only; the buses would have the ability to control traffic lights and would thus in theory be able to operate almost like underground or elevated trains, avoiding the delays caused by car traffic. Digging a subway below Geary would cost several billion dollars and take years; giving buses one exclusive lane in each direction is cheaper and can be done fairly quickly.

No, it won’t be painless, and it’s not perfect — ideally, there probably ought to be a light-rail line on Geary — but in an era of global warming, with all the costs associated with the use of private cars, it’s imperative that San Francisco move aggressively toward improving transit. McGoldrick is absolutely right to be looking for ways to encourage people to get out of their cars — and punishing him for it by forcing a recall campaign is a serious mistake.

Heller needs about 3,000 signatures to move forward. Don’t sign the petition. *

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/6/07): 20 Iraqis killed today.

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/6/07): 20 Iraqis killed today.

To hear how the war in Iraq has effected some Midwest families of soldiers, click here.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 20 people were killed when a chlorine bomb was detonated in Ramadi today, according to the New York Times.
Source:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

60,835 – 66,757: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 1 April 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/38/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,499: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

Source: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21339

155: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source:

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source:
1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (4/6/07): So far, $414 billion for the U.S., $52 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Bush asks congress to pass an emergency war-spending bill, according to the New York Times.

Source:

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/5/07): 7 U.S. soldiers killed.

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/5/07): 7 U.S. soldiers killed.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

7 U.S. soldiers were killed in the Baghdad area over the past two days, according to the Associated Press.

Source.

3,498: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

60,480 – 66,383: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 1 April 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/38/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

Source: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21339

155: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/


The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (4/5/07): So far, $414 billion for the U.S., $52 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Bush asks congress to pass an emergency war-spending bill, according to the New York Times.

Source.

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.

Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Martin Luther King you don’t see on TV

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It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.” The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV. Why? It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years. In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow. Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power. “True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 –– a year to the day before he was murdered –– King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm) From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them. In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.” King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet. In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup. And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. ___________________________________________ Jeff Cohen is the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback.

The big town

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From the air, Chicago in late winter looks like a giant crepe sprinkled with crushed peppercorns and minced scallions: a brown flatness textured with bits of black and white and wan hints of green. It’s a cold crepe, of course; you land and you can see your breath, though within a day or so the temperature will have risen into the malarial mid-70s, and the sky will be filled with purplish green, swelling clouds right out of The Wizard of Oz. Summerish heat in March suggests (apart from global warming) the imminence of tornadoes, to be followed by a blizzard, though not mosquitoes.

One evening we wandered west through River North to Scoozi, the Rich Melman–Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurant that turned 20 last year. The place was something of a pioneer when it opened; the neighborhood was still slightly sketchy, and the setting — a remade temple of heavy industry, with an enormous barrel ceiling supported by wooden cantilevers so as to leave the dining room clear of pillars — gave some sense of what imagination could do with grand old spaces that hadn’t been built with food and restaurants in mind. I thought Scoozi was spectacular when I first visited it, soon after it opened, and it seems to me none the worse for more than two decades of wear; in San Francisco, only LuLu begins to compare in the category of warm spaciousness. Even Scoozi’s big, red, and curiously flattened tomato still hovers, cigar volante–style, above the front door.

The metro-rustic food too was — or is — as good as I remembered it. We particularly liked the grilled artichoke hearts, which seemed not merely to have been marinated in lemon juice and garlic but to have been braised or parboiled in that combination before hitting the barbie. Clue: the potent pair was present throughout the vegetables, making the flesh tender, moist, and fragrant, rather than being just a surface phenomenon. And I am not particularly an apostle of artichokes.

Chicago is underrated as a food city, as in so many other ways. Its reputation is one of rust, Al Capone, Vienna beef sausages, and the clattering El — but that is the old city. The new one is, like our own, a forest of cranes and high-rise apartment buildings whose residents want something interesting for dinner. Excuse me, did someone say crepe?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Sincerely again

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Seven minutes into the Frames’ latest album, The Cost (Anti-), during a song titled "Falling Slowly," the Dublin, Ireland, veterans capture everything off-putting about their music in two stanzas splayed over a glassy-eyed piano: "Take this sinking boat / And point it home / We’ve still got time // Raise your hopeful voice / You have a choice / You’ve made it now."

If vocalist Glen Hansard’s tired poesy weren’t winceworthy enough, the fact that he’s pulled it out on wistful anthem number two of 10 would seem to cast The Cost as the kind of repetitive, inspiro-pop rubbish that should’ve gone out with the last couple Coldplay records.

But that’s exactly wrong. The Cost is a repetitive, inspiro–pop rock document too rich to write off, due largely to the lads’ penchant for grand arrangements and medium tempos. Recorded virtually all live in a studio over 10 days, the Frames’ seventh studio full-length embodies a thrilling live dynamic that has kept a devoted fan base snatching up tickets and T-shirts into the band’s second decade. So don’t get hung up on the excess of well-meaning sincerity. After so many years of playing together, they know their way around a plaintive power ballad.

"When we play live, we go from barely being able to hear us to melting your face off kind of thing," longtime bassist Joe Doyle explains from his Dublin home in a charming lilt. "It’s always been something people have said to us as well: ‘Yeah, I’ve listened to your records, but it just doesn’t do the same thing as you do live.’ And we’re kind of going ‘Shit, we don’t know how to do that.’ "

This time, Doyle says, the Frames figured it out. They rented a studio in France, hired a few extra musicians, worked out more of their songs in advance, and started playing in the same room again. "Everything on almost all the songs is live, including the vocals on some of the songs, and then we just added little bits over the top," Doyle says. "We’ve just come to the conclusion that when you record a song live and you just do everything in one take … there’s something in that that’s lost when you start editing a song and chopping it up and putting things in time."

It could be the magic in the cage-to-cathedral-sounding production. Or in the violin lightning of Colm Mac Con Iomaire. But something transforms the group’s balding rock structures into vast, bewildering voyages of disappointment and reassurance. Drunk on ribbons of reverby guitar, Hansard frees his words from contextual cliché, allowing them to settle comfortably inside the towering arrangements and become, well, meaningful. "Too many sad words make a sad, sad song," he realizes before a driving lap steel solo at The Cost‘s only country-tinged — and finest — moment. It’s a struggle the Frames evoke often: a vague but constant yearning and the price one pays for it.

After so many years, perhaps the Frames have yearned enough. But Doyle looks at the group’s anthemic tendencies the opposite way: they got ’em this far. "I guess the fact that we’ve never strived to be hip or fashionable probably means … probably means we never will be," he says, chuckling. "But maybe we won’t ever go out of fashion." (Ian S. Port)

FRAMES

Sat/7, 9 p.m., $20

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

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Their days are numbered

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

We’re all having a tough time these days in the Bay Area. It might be the worriment of the imminent tax day, our skyrocketing rent, or the recent dissolution of a rocky relationship. Or it could be as mundane as the feeling brought on by chasing down your morning commute through the pouring rain, only to realize that you forgot your bus fare once you finally catch up to it. Whatever the case is, we’re all in need of a curative soundtrack, and Cleveland’s Six Parts Seven are here to help out.

Entwining reflective, subdued instrumentation with tame, wistful melodies on its fifth full-length, Casually Smashed to Pieces (Suicide Squeeze), the group concocts eight tunes that make you want to curl up on a floating cloud and leave your headaches at the runway strip. The core members — guitarist Allen Karpinski; his brother, drummer Jay; guitarist Tim Gerak; and bassist Mike Tolan — mingle meditative, winding guitars, low-end bass, and restrained drums with soothing elements such as brass, piano, and woodwinds. Focusing primarily on mood and space, the 6P7’s instrumentals seesaw between joy and dejection, remorse and hope.

Though the sextet has considered adding a vocalist in the past, Allen Karpinski disclosed they were more interested in "making a very gorgeous sound together instead of worrying about lyrics or a singer."

He attempted to define the band’s sound over the phone while on a tour stop in Tallahassee, Fla. "There’s nothing very deliberate about the way we make our music — we just play what we play," he revealed. "One of the things that makes us unique is that we are able to project our personalities into the music that we choose to play: the melodies, the actual aesthetic of the sound. We let the instruments sing instead of having a voice, and it always has sort of a melancholy undercurrent to it."

The group first emerged in 1995 as a bass and drum duo, which Karpinski describes as "basement project" for his brother and himself. After breaking up for a short time to pursue other projects, such as the brothers’ Old Hearts Club, the two reassembled 6P7 in 1997, this time with Gerak in tow, to record their debut, In Lines and Patterns (Donut Friends). The years following saw numerous lineup changes, and the ensemble began introducing violin, lap steel, and piano and vibraphone harmonies into songs on the Suicide Squeeze–released Things Shaped in Passing (2002) and Everywhere, and Right Here (2004). But 6P7’s basic, signature sound remained unchanged.

"We would be writing exactly the same album if we stuck with the same instrumentation," Karpinski said. "We change it up not only to have different textures but also to challenge ourselves."

Casually Smashed to Pieces is no different. Cornet and trumpet blend to give songs such as "Stolen Moments" and "Confusing Possibilities" the jazzy meltdowns they seemingly beg for, while strummed guitar and twangy banjo administer a dose of backwoods Americana on "Conversation Heart." In contrast to 6P7’s past efforts, the new, shorter album sounds much more polished.

"We tried to give the new songs a little bit more of a pop feel and more of a verse-chorus structure," Karpinski explained. "Most of our older songs are sort of based on a repetitive motif of notes or something cyclical. The kind of experimentation I like to do with the band is not to change too much, but someone who knows our records well would be able to tell the difference."

In the past couple years, the band hasn’t gone unnoticed either. In 2003, Suicide Squeeze released Lost Notes from Forgotten Songs, reinterpretations of 6P7 songs by such artists as Modest Mouse, Black Heart Procession, and Iron and Wine. National Public Radio uses their songs as segue music for All Things Considered, and their current tour finds them acting as Richard Buckner’s backing band. Karpinski claimed that although they will be playing two shows a night for most of the tour, they plan on keeping 6P7’s sets short and sweet.

"Our live sets are rarely over 30 minutes long, and I don’t think people have the attention span to stand in a room with all the distractions and listen to instrumental music for more than that," he noted and laughed. "You know, they start to get bored even if they love it." *

SIX PARTS SEVEN

With Richard Buckner

Thurs/5, 9 p.m., $15

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

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Going mobile

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

On a recent sunny afternoon in Berkeley, the head-nodding rhythms of Barrington Levy’s ’80s dancehall hit "Here I Come" could be heard wafting down Telegraph Avenue. As the outdoor reggae mix continued, the music’s mysterious source soon became evident. Right off the ave on the corner of Haste were two chunky 10-inch JBL speakers, booming. They were attached to the back of what resembled a Mexican ice cream bike painted in bright Rasta colors, which was in fact a unique mobile record store, complete with turntables and a mixer and boasting a selection of CDs, 7-inch records, DVDs, and even T-shirts dangling from hangers hooked on a nearby metal fence.

Propped against the three-wheeler’s saddle and mixing reggae 45s behind the wheels — the turntables, that is — was the pedal store’s owner: longtime Bay Area DJ and former independent music store owner Riddm. Since his retail shop, once a few short blocks away on Bowditch, went out of business after five years, he has taken his vinyl to the streets, where he has successfully eliminated overhead and increased profits. "I definitely make more money on the street than I used to in the store," Riddm said with a smile between cuing up a single of Freddie McGregor’s "Roots Man Skankin" and taking $8 for a local DJ’s mix CD from one of this afternoon’s many customers. "And it makes me feel much better … to be out here … not having the confinement of walls," he said before quickly adding, "Of course, I couldn’t but feel a sense of defeat when I had to close the store."

A well-established Bay Area record collector, Riddm, whose gigs include Tuesdays at Farmer Brown and whose current popular mix CDs are Living in Love and Can’t Get Me Down, is known for such things as compiling the Bay Area Funk collection of local rare grooves for Luv N’ Haight and, of course, for his defunct shop.

On Sept. 1, 2000, Riddm did what most music fanatics only dream of: he opened his own record store, Funky Riddm Records, which was stocked with reggae, funk, and hip-hop and located a few blocks from the UC campus. And there he stayed until December 2005, followed by an immediate additional six months in a cheaper, more out-of-the-way space on Ashby. Running a retail business is always hard, but starting a music store in the first half of this decade had to be one of the hardest challenges anyone could take on. "A year into my business, 9/11 happened, and that really affected the whole mood of retail," Riddm said.

Then came the flood of reissues and bootlegs, which directly cut into Riddm’s collectors’ niche. "I wanted to be the East Bay Groove Merchant to some extent, as far as rare hip-hop was concerned. And I really did have the hookup on original hip-hop," he said. Digital file sharing and free MP3s didn’t help. "It would get a bit frustrating when kids would come in and say, ‘Hey! What’s the name of what you’re playing?’ and then write it down and leave," he explained.

By last summer Riddm had fully accepted that the traditional retail music store model was economically defunct and decided to take it to the streets, or rather first to the Berkeley Flea Market at the Ashby BART station. But he figured he needed something unique. "I wanted to have some kind of sound station where I could play records and CDs. So I hit the drawing board … and went from a wheelbarrow to all kinds of things," he said. One lucky day he "heard the guys from Critical Mass roll by with this big sound system towed on a bike." Riddm was impressed. "So I went to their headquarters or where they used to have meetings at PedEx, or Pedal Express, a green-powered delivery service out of Berkeley, and they were really supportive."

After he saw his inspiration’s old-fashioned three-wheel bike with two wheels in the front, he decided that would be the basis for his new shop’s design: "My main idea was to have the turntables right in front of the steering so that the second you stop steering you can start spinning. You are right in position. You don’t have to go around the back." Over a couple months he designed it and with help from his friend Steve from clothing company Rasta Boom Box successfully built the 250-pound mobile system, 300 with inventory. The mix CDs are the most popular, and Riddm sells CDs and DVDs for $10 or less, 45s for $3, and the T-shirts he designs himself for $15. You can find him at the Ashby flea market on weekends and on Telegraph during the week — sunshine prevailing, he noted.

And what about the future? "I want to get a better van to take it out on the road to more reggae festivals," Riddm said. He was very successful last year when he hit Reggae on the River, among other fests. "What I really love about this now is that I can set my own hours. People always ask me, ‘When will I be out again?’ " he said with a smile. "And I say, ‘When the sun shines!’ … You don’t feel the Jamaican vibe when it’s gray or raining!" *

RIDDIM

Tuesdays, 6–11 p.m., call for price

Farmer Brown

25 Mason, SF

(415) 409-FARM

www.myspace.com/funkyriddms

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Seattle’s finest

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Crime Watch column was far and away the most entertaining part of my hometown’s local paper. Police Beat, a week-in-the-life account of a Seattle-by-way-of-Senegal bike cop named Z (played by nonprofessional actor Pape S. Niang), is structured around these strangely revealing public records, culled from the real Seattle blotter by writer Charles Mudede. Reenacted and filtered through Z’s layered immigrant experience, the episodic busts and false alarms are woven with off-key comedy and vague apprehension: a formulation that makes the film the rare work to merit the overused "Kafkaesque" tag.

The various crime scenes Z happens on are only connected in their general weirdness. Director Robinson Devor (previously celebrated for his 2000 debut, The Woman Chaser) drops us into these digressions midstream, denying us context or even clarity of tone. A man ravages raw meat in a supermarket; a woman with a gash on her head has been hit by an errant tree branch; a pimp has two chubby prostitutes doing sit-ups at gunpoint: these scenes hover uneasily between humor and menace. Their oddness reverberates against Z’s unwieldy English; he mediates with the strange lyricism that comes from being lost in translation (shades of Jim Jarmusch), instructing the tree-battered woman, for example, that "your tree is dead, and if it’s not chopped down, it will continue to harm and disturb the living."

If the audience is peculiarly disassociated from the nominal action in Police Beat, it’s only to match Z’s dreamy remove. We get his strange little koans in English, but the voice-over, in which he ponders his immigrant status (Police Beat articulates the notion of being a stranger in a strange land to an extreme degree) and worries over his spectral girlfriend’s faithfulness, is rendered in his native Wolof. Z’s musings aren’t readily locatable in either time or space, and while thoughts and action frequently seem to overlap, the echoes between the two only thicken the obscure narration.

And yet, if Police Beat ‘s montage is something of a hazy daydream, it’s hardly a formless one. The glue holding the picture together is Devor’s responsive mise-en-scène. Seattle — with its forested city streets, overgrown industrial sites, and ubiquitous water passageways (and bridges) — is a landscape of in-betweens, everywhere suggestive of Z’s placeless condition. In framing too, Devor frequently denies us a fully contextualized picture, casting Z against abstracted dark blues and greens. When Z rides his bicycle, the director allows the background to blur out of focus, creating an effect reminiscent of those deliriously dreamlike rear-projection shots once preferred in Hollywood productions.

Police Beat is marked by indirection on all levels, a risky modus operandi rarely found in mainstream or independent cinema. The prioritization of situation over characterization recalls Robert Bresson’s classics (as do the detached voice-over and the use of a quotidian occupation to frame the "action" of a film), and while Police Beat isn’t Pickpocket, sometimes a film’s ambition seems validating in its own right, regardless of whether it ties together as a neat package (Police Beat doesn’t).

Or maybe I’m just more willing than usual to forgive loose ends because of my sense that Devor and Mudede had fun making this movie — in compiling the crime reports and scouting Seattle, yes, but also in playing with the police procedural. They pay heed to the genre’s standard emphasis on temporality (a title occasionally breaks in, specifying the day of the week; every night ends with Z composing his police report), but instead of orienting these narrative ploys toward some guiding goal or payoff, Devor and Mudede allow them to overripen and underscore Z’s elusive existence: their film is more Eternal Sunshine of the Punch-Drunk Mind than Zodiac. This shift in emphasis makes Z the rare cop character I can actually relate to. His profile may seem unusual — I did, after all, have to look up the spelling of "Wolof" — but his experience is intensely familiar to those of us who regularly lose ourselves in the city. "I was in my own world," we say, though Z would surely have a more interesting way of putting it. *

POLICE BEAT

Opens Fri/6

Roxie Cinema

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

www.policebeatmovie.com

Brothers in arms

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

In a vulnerable country occupied by a foreign power, civilian frustration leads to anger, which soon explodes into a violent, uncontainable insurgent movement. It could be ripped from today’s headlines — but The Wind That Shakes the Barley is set in 1920s Ireland, where the oppressors are the British and the rebels are members of the nascent Irish Republican Army.

Directed by Ken Loach (Bread and Roses) in his trademark naturalistic style (few close-ups, overlapping dialogue) and with immaculate attention to period detail, Wind makes the guerrillas sympathetic — to a point. But it’s also a film that avoids drawing strict boundaries; it exactly captures the uncertainty that arises when conflict and emotion become hopelessly tangled. At the beginning, brothers Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy, the only cast member with a Hollywood hand stamp) know precisely where they stand. Tensions between British soldiers and Irish villagers are already sky-high when the young men are accosted by the Black and Tans for daring to hold a forbidden public meeting (really a harmless sporting match). Amid the shouting and gun pointing, an Irish teen refuses to speak his name in English, with fatal consequences.

With that first act of brutality, Wind ‘s tone is set. It’s war, and a dirty one at that. Damien abandons his med-school plans to join the fiery Teddy in his quest to drive out the Brits. As hostility escalates — humiliation, torture, and cold-blooded execution are the daily norm — Damien becomes more warrior than intellectual, a changeover that crystallizes once he’s asked to perform a terrible deed in the name of the cause. "I hope this Ireland we’re fighting for is worth it," he mutters.

But is it, at least for Damien? The affairs of state play out as you’d expect; for our benefit, events are explained via a newsreel the townsfolk watch in the local movie theater. The headline "Peace Treaty Signed by British and Irish Leaders!" is greeted first with cheers, then chagrin when it’s revealed the country will still be a dominion of the British empire and Northern Ireland will still be part of the United Kingdom. Clearly, there’s no way the bloody mess in the countryside will be tidily ended by a piece of paper signed by far-off dignitaries.

For Teddy and Damien, the ruling forces an impenetrable wedge between them. Teddy accepts the compromise, figuring he’ll work within the system to change it — for him, "this Ireland" is worth it. Damien’s actions during the war have pushed him to the point of no return; he has no choice but to keep fighting. When the brothers have their climactic clash, even their deep love for each other can’t overcome their political beliefs.

Wind was the Palme d’Or winner at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, a surprise victory for a movie that seems, at least on paper, to be about a pretty specific moment in Irish history. The tale of two brothers is admittedly an obvious storytelling device — check your Civil War cinema for other me-versus-him tales, or foreign epics such as the 2004 Korean drama Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War. Wind ‘s leg up is its echoing of current events; you can’t help but watch the film through the framing of the nightly news. It could be in rural Ireland, it could be in rural Iraq, but fighting for freedom can take many forms, with all involved believing victory for their side will produce the only acceptable result. But what happens when the clear-cut realms of a battlefield mutate into the murky waters of courts, laws, and governments? To paraphrase Damien, it’s easy to know what you’re against — but another thing entirely to figure out what you’re for. *

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY

Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

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