The national domestic workers’ movement is on the cusp of making history in California. Any day now, the state’s Domestic Bill of Rights (AB 899) – only the second such piece of legislation in the country – could be passed on the Senate floor, finally bringing respect and recognition to 200,000 workers who have been systematically excluded from labor laws for 74 years.
In what could be the final hours of this hard-fought, multi-year campaign, grassroots domestic worker leaders are counting on a rising tide of public support to finally bring victory. Earlier in the month, the New York Times endorsed the bill (sponsored by our own Assemblyman Tom Ammiano), and last week’s video of support from “Rec & Park” actress Amy Poehler has led to a new surge in national support. You can learn about the group’s work and weigh in here, today.
I’ve been inspired by the National Domestic Workers Alliance since its founding in 2007, and have been carefully watching its cutting-edge approach to women’s leadership, grassroots organizing, worker rights, and movement-building. But it was not until last week, when I talked at length with one of the movement’s grassroots leaders, that the politics of this struggle became personal.
On Aug. 21, I spoke to Emiliana Acopio, a caregiver with a gentle but strong voice, fiercely proud of the love and care she provides to elderly people and a determined leader of the CA Domestic Worker Bill of Rights campaign. She was on her way to Sacramento with hundreds of domestic workers and their supporters, for possibly the 12th time (she’s lost count), to educate legislators about domestic workers’ need for basic rights like a minimum wage, overtime, and the right to at least one day of rest each week. And in the process, she educated me.
I don’t think of myself as someone who depends on a domestic worker. But Acopio helped me to recognize that my 94 year-old grandfather’s mind, body, and spirit are all in such amazing shape in no small measure because of the devoted daily care of a remarkable woman named Sandra. I love my Grandpa Lee like a second father, but the home he treasures is in Delaware and my home is here, 3,000 away. He is famously sharp for 94, still able to tell hilarious and detailed coming-of-age stories from more than 70 years ago. He still sings in the church choir every Sunday. But the reality is that every day, he needs help.
Sandra arrives every morning at the same time. Grandpa is already sitting in his favorite chair, awaiting her arrival. She asks about Grandpa’s night, how he’s feeling today. She makes his coffee, with just the right amount of the same sugar and creamer he’s been using for decades. She puts ice in his cereal, just the way he likes it. At the kitchen counter, she carefully counts out his many medications and pounds them into a little paste. She pauses in front of all those bottles, making note of which refills are needed. She mixes her perfect little paste with applesauce and gently sets the bowl and spoon in front of him. His day begins.
Sandra is not a biological relative, but the care and compassion she shows to my Grandpa Lee far exceeds what some of my own kin are capable of. She tell us that she does it as a labor of love — but the reality is that she is a caregiver worker, and like Acopio and 2.5 million other domestic workers in the nation, she does not have the labor protections that most US workers take for granted. Her wages and working conditions are completely dependent on my family’s sense of fairness. Should we fail or forget to pay her wages, she has little recourse. Should we lose our minds and begin demanding much more work for no more pay, what could she do? She is not a wealthy woman, and her family needs the income just as much as my Grandfather needs her support.
Acopio knows about the fundamental vulnerability of domestic workers – working behind closed doors, under-valued and exploited in the privacy of other people’s homes:
They hired me to take care of their elderly parents but then expected me to cook, clean, and care for the entire family. And they were very disrespectful to me. I did all I could to make sure their needs were met, and it was important to me that their aging family members felt loved and respected. But it hurt me, especially as a Filipina taking care of a Filipino family, that I was not given that same basic respect. That’s what this is all about. Our work makes all other work possible; we need the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights because we deserve respect, recognition, and dignity.
Acopio shared with me the challenges of organizing domestic workers, the need to share personal stories and organizing victories to break through the immobilizing fear so many women – mostly immigrant women of color – face. We were talking on the phone with the help of a translator, and it wasn’t until the interview was over that her translator explained to me that Acopio – grassroots leader, fighter for worker rights, and a longtime caregiver for the elderly – was elderly herself. At 79, she continues to work to help provide for her family back home in the Philippines.
It’s been 74 years since federal labor law finally gave most US workers rights like the eight-hour day, overtime, and breaks. But farmworkers and domestic workers were intentionally excluded from that law. The legacy of white supremacy and slavery meant that at the time, fully 65 percent of all Black workers labored in one of those two occupations, and there was a white elite interested in keeping it that way. Black domestic workers and civil rights leaders lobbied against this clearly racist exclusion, but that legacy of racism remains with us to this day.
Despite the organized efforts of Black domestic workers and other women of color – like the groundbreaking campaigns of the National Domestic Workers Union founded by Black domestic worker Dorothy Bolden in 1968 – it wasn’t until the National Domestic Worker Alliance consolidated more than 30 domestic worker organizations and won the groundbreaking NY Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in 2010 that hundreds of thousands of women of color workers finally have basic labor protections.
While the historic role of Black women as domestic workers – as exploited workers, courageous organizers, and even as the critical foot soldiers of the victorious Mongtomery Bus Boycott — is unfortunately ignored or misrepresented in the media, history books, and even sometimes in multi-racial settings, it is never, ever too late to fight the legacy of racism in the United States. The modern-day domestic worker’s movement is largely led by Asian and Latina immigrant women, and their fierce, creative, multi-generational and holistic approach to building this movement has lessons for everyone who cares about justice.
Time Magazine named NDWA director Ai-Jen Poo as one of the world’s most influential people back in April of this year. It was incredible, and provided an entirely new level of national attention to campaigns like the CA Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. But media attention is not the victory that 2.5 million workers want – it’s protection under the law.
What my grandfather’s caregiver receives in wages could not ever properly compensate her for her labor of love. All domestic workers – caregivers, childcare providers and housekeepers– do their work with care and compassion. They also have the right to basic respect, recognition and rights in the workplace. The thousands of stories of wage theft, failure to provide time for rest for live-in workers, and never-ending vulnerability to other acts of exploitation are simply unacceptable.
Stand with me, thousands of organized domestic workers, hundreds of domestic worker employers, the AFL-CIO, the state NAACP and more than 14,000 petition-signers; support the CA Domestic Worker Bill of Rights today. Call your Senator or Governor Jerry Brown today at (916), 445-2841. Go here for more information and help make history.
We brought nautical-themed beer and outfits to Crissy Field for the America’s Cup preliminary races, and had a great view of one of the turning points of the really big boats before the winning sailors aggressively sprayed champagne on each other. I’m not sure how many of the race’s subtleties our fellow spectators were getting, but it was clear the Team Prada had a lot more fans than Team J.P. Morgan. Say what you like about the economic benefits of millionaire’s sporting events in our city, but they are great excuses to wear peacoats, anchor jewelery, and visible chest hair. Arrrr!
Activists from San Francisco and around the country are descending on Tampa this week to protest the Republican National Convention. I got a call this morning from Diamond Dave Whitaker, the poet who hung with the beats and the hippies in his 75 years, CCSF student senator and San Francisco legend. He’s has been serving food to protesters at election-season conventions for almost three decades. His first was 1984, the Democratic Convention here in San Francisco before he got hooked and headed to Dallas to protest the Republicans. Along with a few hundred others, Diamond Dave braved the rain, but missed the full effects of Hurricane Isaac on the tent city last night. The RNC starts officially starts today (though many of the day’s events have been called off due tot the hurricane warning.)
“I’m talking in the midst of Romneyville,” he said. “Folks came from far and wide to camp out together, cause a ruckus and be here.”
What’s Romneyville? “It’s a homeless camp, a poor peoples camp,” said Dave. He’s been there a week setting up the Food Not Bombs kitchen, and Romneyville grew up around him. It now has few hundred tents, he said. But most people arrived today, so as the convention gets started, it will probably grow. “Two buses from Zuccotti Square came today,” he said.
Romneyville is put together in part by the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign. Dave said Green Party vice presidential nominee Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother herself who works with the Poor Peoples campaign, is a fixture around the camp.
“Our demands are housing for all, food for all, healthcare for all, and living wages for all. We call for an end to foreclosures and homelessness, an end to the war on the poor, both here and abroad. An end to criminalization of poverty. Money for jobs and housing, not for war!” says a statement from the group.
More protesters are staying over at the Occupy Tampa encampment.
A permitted march left this morning, and Diamond Dave says there’s another, unpermitted, planned for 3pm est. Many citizen journalists and livestreamers are documenting the events, one can be found at mobilebroadcastnews.com.
But so far, his work has been handing out free meals with Food Not Bombs.
“We fed the masses this morning for sure,” he said.
Bad enough that Berg allowed Stephen Herman, who was directly involved in the scandal and pled guilty to two felonies, to hold a fundraiser for her. But his offenses were reduced to misdemeanors, he’s paid his fine — and Berg has every right to say that he’s learned his lesson and deserves a chance to continue in the political world.
That’s not what she’s saying, though:
Berg, first elected to the college’s board in 1996, saw nothing wrong with having Herman host the fundraiser, calling him, “completely honest and honorable.” Of the criminal charges, she said: “The whole thing was trumped up. Nobody benefited from that, and it ruined people’s careers.”
Trumped up? Seriously?
Nobody has thus far disputed the basic evidence: Former Chancellor Phil Day and Herman diverted tens of thousands of dollars in public money into political campaigns. They never denied doing it. The documents showing what happened were completely clear. And just about everyone with any sense of law or ethics agrees it was a serious problem.
Nobody benefited? How about the taxpayers and the students, who have the right to honest oversight of their money?
Wow. I knew Berg was a bad trustee, but this is over the top.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.
Millions of American workers badly need jobs, and the owners of many thousands of commercial buildings badly need “green retrofitting” to improve their energy efficiency and thus cut operational costs while simultaneously helping clean up the environment.
The conclusion should be obvious: Let the retrofitting begin, for the benefit of everyone – those who need the work, the employers who want it done, and the rest of us , who would benefit greatly from it.
Details of what could and should be done – and why and by whom – are laid out in a new briefing paper from the well-regarded National Employment Law Project, otherwise known as NELP.
Perhaps what’s most important about green retrofitting is that it’s what NELP calls “a powerful job creation tool.”
It can indeed be that. As NELP reported, “Estimates show that a mix of tax credits, new building code requirements and loans for commercial energy efficiency upgrades would create upwards of 160,000 new jobs,” possibly hundreds of thousands more, over the next year. That certainly would significantly lower the high unemployment rate that has plagued the country for far too long, encourage investment and otherwise jolt the lagging economy.
Construction workers have been hit particularly hard by unemployment, and it is they who have the skills and knowledge “that could be put to work cutting greenhouse gas omissions and making our cities cleaner and more efficient places to live,” notes Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director.
She says many construction workers, as well as other workers, also are needed to improve existing commercial buildings “in a common-sense way while also meeting the challenges of climate change.” NELP says more than three-fourths of all the electricity produced in the United States is used to operate the buildings, “making improved energy efficiency an increasingly recognized part of reducing the nation’s greenhouse gases.”
Simply providing jobs would not be enough. NELP argues that government policy makers supporting green retrofitting and the jobs it creates should make certain they are “good jobs with strong workplace standards and fair pay and job security.” That’s an absolute necessity if jobs in the retrofit industry are to be truly sustainable. At a minimum, that would call for providing workers increased pay and better chances of being promoted to higher-paying jobs.
NELP cites three cities – Los Angeles, Seattle and Milwaukee – that have developed programs which have won the support of workers, environmentalists and commercial building owners, in large part by backing retrofitting projects that, while creating jobs, also help owners cut their costs and increase their income.
Los Angeles has adopted a city ordinance that calls for retrofits of city-owned buildings, a process for settling labor conflicts that arise during the work, and an effort to ensure that Los Angeles residents have access to training for retrofitting work.
In Seattle, the city has an agreement with retrofit contractors on setting pay and providing job training for their employees.
Milwaukee has a new energy-efficiency program that offers building owners the chance to qualify for financial aid in exchange for using contractors committed to hiring local workers and “adhering to quality workplace standards.”
It’s now time for other cities nationwide to take action. There’s no legitimate reason for inaction. We have a great need to modernize and expand our infrastructure, diminish environmental pollution and provide work for the jobless. We have shown it can be done. So let’s do it!
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.
State Assembly Member Fiona Ma, who wants to keep 15-year-olds in prison for life, has been trying for a while now to help the big garbage outfits, Recology and Waste Management Inc., avoid running into local laws that could block their use of landfills. So far, she hasn’t been able to get it through the normal commitee process.
But she’s not giving up: As the session winds down, she’s done the ol’ gut and amend and created AB 845, which looks pretty much like the bill she hasn’t been able to get through committee. And she got this reborn Dracula of a bill it through the state Senate, which means she just needs concurrence at the Assembly, and away she goes.
Ma says that garbage is a statewide concern — true, as far as it goes — but she’s also helping Recology avoid problems in Solano County, where local residents want a cap on the amount of outside garbage trucked in from other places (like San Francisco) and buried in Solano landfills.
By the way, she’s also been helping Recology fight those pesky recycling poachers who make a few extra bucks by getting the bottles and cans out of the bins before Recology can.
And the garbage giant hasn’t even been her biggest campaign contributor. Her non-campaign for state Senate got $1,500, her campaign for state Board of Equalization got $500, and she picked up $3,000 more in her Assembly races.
San Francisco’s countercultural community was built at least partly through free concerts and gatherings in Golden Gate Park, including the legendary Human Be-In and Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane concerts in the late-’60s. But these days, as corporations starve local government but seize public spaces, grassroots groups and populist performances are being forced out of the park.
Events without expensive tickets and corporate sponsorships (such as this month’s Outside Lands) or endowments from dead billionaires (Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, coming up in early October) just can’t afford the rising fees charged by the Recreation and Parks Department, a reality that is quietly ending an important San Francisco tradition and legacy.
A few weeks ago, organizers of the Power to the Peaceful Festival – a free concert featuring Michael Franti and Spearhead and other big acts, which drew tens of thousands of people to the meadow formerly known as Speedway annually for more than a decade – announced that it was canceling next month’s event because of onerous fees.
“The only way to have produced the festival this year would have been to turn it into a ticketed event,” organizers wrote in their July 31 announcement. RPD officials were going to charge the event $77,000 in permit fees this year, dealing it a death blow after also forcing the cancellation of last year’s event by instituting a strict 40,000 attendee cap, which was nearly impossible to enforce for a free event.
If we accept the neoliberal perspective that has taken hold of San Francisco – which sees government’s role as facilitating whatever corporations want to do and hoping they share some of their profits, or at least create some good jobs – it makes sense. After all, the cash-strapped RPD made $1.7 million in profit-sharing off Outside Lands this year, up from $1.4 million last year.
The same logic has caused RPD, under the mercenary leadership of Director Phil Ginsburg, to rent out its recreation centers to the highest bidders and fire the recreation directors that used to treat them as public resources, and to let the private City Fields Foundation cover many parks in artificial turf. Again, through a strictly economic lens, it makes a certain amount of sense.
“As the steward of our parks, the Department works with event organizers to host diverse events in our parks, it is our shared responsibility to make sure the City and the event organizers have plans and resources in place to care for our park land and ensure public safety. The Department is always ready to work with all event organizers to modify their event planning for safe and successful events,” RPD spokesperson Connie Chan told us.
Power to the Peaceful – ironically, an event celebrating the plight of ordinary people against powerful political and economic interests around the world – just didn’t have the resources to meet the standard, so out they go. Same thing with the venerable Anarchist Book Faire, which was also forced from the park by rising fees this year after 17 years in the park’s County Fair Building.
Again, there’s a note of irony to this exodus, with city officials suddenly deciding the anarchists could no longer police themselves and needed to pay for four Park Police officers to watch over a festival that has been without violent incident throughout its history, unless you count a speaker getting pied last year (which the self-sufficient anarchists easily dealt with on their own).
“We had put this thing on for 17 years and there were no problems until this new guy came,” Joey Cain of Bound Together Bookstore, which puts on a free event whose fees have steadily risen to almost $14,000. “We’ve had to increase our rates every year, and we were starting to lose some vendors.”
On top of that, city officials had also cracked down on free offerings that surrounded the free event, banning Food Not Bombs from serving free meals to visitors and people from setting up information tables outside the main event.
So now the event, coming up in March, will be held at the Armory. Cain admitted that rent on the building they used in Golden Gate Park was still fairly cheap compared to similar sized venues around town, “as it should be, being owned by the city.”
But when city departments like RPD become dependent on corporate contributions, public spaces become commodified, and we begin to lose access to the last places in town where our creator endowed us with the right to assemble freely and pursue our happiness: our public parks.
This week started off with Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s comments that seemed to suggest a belief that women who are raped are less likely to get pregnant. This was just one more drop in the bucket, if the bucket is reasons why men who don’t understand how reproduction works shouldn’t get to legislate policy that affects it. Remember when Michigan Rep. Lisa Brown was barred from participating in a House debate after daring to say the word vagina during an abortion debate? As Brown said at the time, “If I can’t say the word vagina, why are we legislating vaginas?”
People at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next week who find vaginas “lewd,” and yet work tirelessly to strip away reproductive rights, will surely be offended by some of what protesters are bringing to the convention. People with CODE PINK, for example, will be dressed in giant fluffy vagina costumes.
Women’s rights, of course, is broader than just reproductive rights. And a range of issues, including immigrants right, the pay gap, housing and welfare will be addressed at nationwide protests Sunday.
The Aug. 26 day of action is scheduled to coincide with both the RNC and Women’s Equality Day, which celebrated the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Women fought tooth and nail for rights before, since and after that day, and Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD), the group behind the day of action, sees itself as part of that tradition.
“We realized that we really needed to have a group that was ready to fight right now for women’s rights,” said Meghann Adams, an organizer with WORD.
For the march’s organizers, the Democratic National Convention happening in Charlotte right after the RNC is just as much reason to march. As they note on their website, “While President Obama is not a right-wing pro-lifer, we cannot count on him or any politician to defend our rights. In fact, in order to reach a budget compromise with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner in July 2011, President Obama said, “I’ll give you abortion in D.C.”
“If you can’t make it to protest in Tampa and Charlotte, join or organize a protest in your community,” their statement reads. “There is a long, proud tradition of women in the United States mobilizing and fighting to win equality and respect. Let’s continue this legacy this summer!”
The march will leave from 24th and Mission at noon on Sunday, Aug. 26.
Granted I’m not out in Berkeley a ton, but I found it strange that someone had tagged an entire concrete side of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive the very first week that thousands of impressionable minds were invading the UC Berkeley campus and waiting in half-block lines to enjoy a free grilled cheese sandwich in between classes.
But duh, everyone (everyone in the Bay who would tag a museum wall, at least) is big on Twist. The “SNITCH” tag, just like the massive red piece that obscured the museum’s glass front doors, was engineered by McGee and his some-dozen team of be-cardiganed, baseball cap flat-brimmed artistic cohorts, many of whom were still bustling about on Thursday trying to get the exhibition ready for the opening reception mere hours away.
He came up earning tagger cred for his masterful tags and cartoon anti-heroes all over the streets of SF, but the hyper-successful and hyper-problematic museum-street art confluence is a crossroad that Twist has stood firmly atop for decades now. Of course he’s the first to tag his own opening.
I’m not going to go into too much depth about the exhibit here, because that would make the paper piece I’m going to write about it in a few weeks totally pointless, but know that it is the most ambitious spread BAM/PFA has ever undertaken (how the hell did they get that van in there? Curator Larry Rinder had no answers for the passel of press assembled at the preview), in terms of mediums it is wildly diverse, and you will probably never see any thing like it because the days of astronomical funding for art are dead and many of the rarely-seen Twist projects — he hasn’t had a Bay Area solo show since 1994 — took stacks to produce.
If you’re looking for a good moment to check out the show, I suggest that you don’t do it during university passing time unless you dig flip-flops, and that you coordinate instead with one of the rad events that BAM/PFA has scheduled to run in accordance with the show. Here’s a couple:
L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Sept. 21,curator Larry Rinder in conversation with Jeffrey Deitch 6-7pm; Lawrence Rinder; Devendra Banhart, Justin Hoover, and Chris Treggiari 7:30-9pm, $7. McGee chats with the guy who funded his biggest splashes, Deitch, and exhibit curator Rinder. The artist’s SF Art Institute fellow alum Barnhardt brings his wacky brand of folk to the L@TE night event, with Hoover and Treggiari slinging their street-based cuisine.
Oct. 19,Jim Prigoff: “Graffiti: A History in Photographs” 6pm; T.I.T.S. and Erick Lyle (Scam)7:30-9pm, $7. Prigoff, along with peers Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, Jack Stewart, Henry Chalfant, traveled the world when graff was still in its young’n stages, snapping shots of a youth-based art form that had yet to run through the commercial grinder. Tonight, he runs through some of his archival images of Bay greats like DREAM, and of course, Twist. Zinester Lyle and grrrl mob quartet T.I.T.S. raise a rebel yell later that night at L@TE.
Nov. 16, Peggy Honeywell and Bill Daniel 7:30-9pm, $7. Visual artist Clare Rojas, a.k.a. folk singer Peggy Honeywell shares an affinity with partner McGee for aliases, and is sure to turn out a hot show (check out our 2011 interview for her woman-centric, quietly lovely artwork). Bill Daniels tracks indie film and hobos with his “dirt lot cinema.”
If Friday means Some Thing — the popular late night drag performance showcase at the Stud — then tonight means something More: opening night of “Work MORE! #5,” the hybrid performance installation headed up by Some Thing’s charismatic and catalytic hostess, Vivvyanne Forevermore, alt-persona of artist-curator Mica Sigourney.
Tonight has even a little more More than that: it’s also four years to the month since Vivvyanne Forevermore first stepped onto the San Francisco stage. It’s an auspicious moment, in other words, for one of Sigourney’s more ambitious Work MORE! undertakings to date (with the possible exception of next year’s planed tour of Work MORE! #4, but more on that below). Number five brings together (at CounterPULSE this weekend) a group of drag queens, visual artists, dancers and performance artists in an overlapping series of collaborative performance installations that do away with the usual proscenium setting in favor of a loosely compartmentalized stage that’s more like a haunted gallery.
“Logistically, I’ve never done anything like this at all,” says Sigourney, speaking at a SOMA café last week. “It’s going to be too hot, it’s going to be too loud, and it’s not going to be easy.” But then, he immediately adds, “that’s not any different from a drag bar.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhWyKkUgRI
The Work MORE! series has been chipping away at the wall between nightlife and theatrical performance through five iterations and counting, so maybe people will understand that without much prompting. “Hopefully people will realize how much agency they have.”
As Work MORE! continues to grow in scope, it’s also grown in popularity, enough that Sigourney is able to float a little money in the direction of the artists. Not a lot yet, he admits, “but you don’t have to worry about buying your wig — and you can keep it afterwards.” Beyond the ambitious tour next year, Sigourney hopes to make Work MORE! a sustaining enterprise.
“I’d like it to be, not an institution, but a program that happens yearly or twice yearly that can support itself and can support the artists,” he says, explaining that that means supporting unique collaborations unlikely to take place anywhere else. “I mean Dean [Disaster] and Philip [Huang] as a collaborative team? I would never have thought of that,” marvels Sigourney.
“Or like Jonathan Solo, who is a beautiful illustrator and artist, a favorite of mine, and the fact that he’s working with Diamanda Kallas, that’s a valuable creative collaboration. I want to be able to facilitate that kind of work,” says Sigourney. “That’s what I want to do.”
More of last week’s conversation with Mica Sigourney follows.
San Francisco Bay Guardian When did you start doing drag? You started in theater; those were separate things entirely?
Mica Sigourney Yeah, I did theater for a long time. I started doing theater when I was five, like outside of school, continued in college for two years and then stopped. I moved to San Francisco in 2004. I had a residency at Jon Simms Center. Then I stopped again doing any performance from 2004 to 2008. I was drawing at that point, doing screen-printing and fine art, soft sculpture.
Then I started doing parties and nightlife. I started doing this party, which was called Tiara Sensation and is now called Some Thing. We moved to the Stud two months after it started. And when we moved to the Stud, I knew they had a stage there, and if we had a stage I had to host, because I was the host of the party. I mean that was my job. So it happened organically. I really didn’t want to. Like the first two numbers I did were terrible. I had no idea how to make a thing. But part of it too.
By the time I met Fauxnique I was already doing drag, but meeting Fauxnique — she came from a technical background in dance — just seeing the way different people had navigated it and gone through it was really helpful. So I started doing it four years ago this month.
SFBG You never had any drag inclinations before?
MS No, that’s not true. When I was younger I used to dress up a lot. You could say I was a club kid. I collected women’s clothes and high heels but I never bothered to do drag with them. As a teenager going out in New York I idolized drag queens, but I just never thought that I’d be able to do it right. There was like one time in 2001, when I was in San Francisco, where I stepped out in drag, but never did it again. It wasn’t until I met the right people that I felt supported, that I felt like I could try it.
SFBG These people gave you the knowledge you needed?
MS Completely. One of the ideas behind Work MORE! is that drag is a folk art. There’s not really a technique, drag is more like the modality that you participate in, so your knowledge comes from either directly witnessing it from somebody else, and studying them, or by watching someone else and having them teach you like a parent or a mentor. So my mentors would be Glamamore, who’s my drag mother; Kevin, the DJ at my party who’s a drag queen and has had an influence on me; Hoku Mama Swamp; and Fauxnique are all probably my immediate inspirations and people who significantly helped me in different ways.
SFBG How did Work MORE! start?
MS It started the first year of Too Much!, the Keith Hennessy thing when it was at the Off Center. Julie [Phelps] just reached out and asked me if I wanted to do something. And my club had just moved to Friday nights from Monday nights, so I’d been curating a show for that for a while, and I wanted to try to curate something outside of my nightclub scene. I was just getting into the dance world more, the art world more, and so I wanted to try writing a real curatorial statement, and so I just did and they let me do it. And every time I’ve been super moved by the amount of effort and what people make for it.
I just kept doing it as a side project for myself so I could stay fresh. And we’re going to tour next spring so last year we made this really big piece—so it’s different every year, which also keeps me interested.
SFBG What’s the show you’re touring with?
MS It’s going to be the show we did last year. The premise for that was that we took 11 solo artists and allowed them to sub-organize and create pieces together. It was hugely collaborative. We made a master list of 20 numbers. Then I cut it down. So each person was set up as a director of each number, and then cast different performers for each number, so it was just this network of people working together on these different pieces. It was very like segmented but overlapping. I’m hoping to take a modified version of that show on tour, starting with colleges, in April of next year. My goal is to do West Coast, Midwest, and South, and see if it has legs and try to take it to the East Coast and abroad if we can.
I mean, I never booked a tour so I didn’t realize how expensive it is. Also how expensive it is to travel with drag queens, because they need two hours to get ready, so you can’t, like, roll into a venue. You need to get there three hours ahead. Somebody has to be doing tech. It’s not like a literary tour or a band where you roll up and unload. It’s not that.
SFBG It’s a complex show too, as you were just describing.
MS Yeah, though now that we have the framework I can look at the video and say this [part] was directed this way by someone who may or may not be in the cast but that’s how we’re going to do it. The way it was generated was more in line with the mission of Work MORE! than the output. The output is a beautiful drag show that has a lot of people in it, more than you usually see because drag queens are usually solo artists. And you get to see them changing, there’ s exposure of the artifice and all that.
SFBG Have you toured before?
MS I went to London with Fauxnique [in her show, Faux Real]. We did it at the Hot August Fringe Festival.
SFBG How was that?
MS It was really cool. I didn’t know people were going to get all the references, because it’s so American — well, not completely American, but being a teenager in America and listening to Morrissey is really specific. People loved it. I think they were really confused by a woman doing drag, though.
SFBG It’s more unusual there?
MS I guess so. Also, in London all the drag queens sing their songs, whether or not they should. It’s live singing. So Fauxnique lip-syncing was a little different.
It makes sense when you call drag a folk art, especially considering the way things are learned and traded, but you also bring up the way it can be really regionally specific.
MS Absolutely. In San Francisco you have the new strong tradition of gross out, like lots of blood, taking off your clothes, what Trannyshack was really good at [fostering], which is beautiful and genius but really specific to here. I think with RuPaul’s Drag Race and the advent of Facebook and all that, things are probably becoming less specific, which is kind of sad to me.
But actually in the first Work MORE!, the assignment wasn’t collaborative. It was after the second Work MORE! that it became focused specifically on collaboration. The first one was about just tradition. Let’s go back to the traditions of lip sync, glamor and femininity. That was the assignment. You had to use those three things in extreme ways. It was about finding roots. Where does drag come from for us now? What are the things being ignored or that can be enhanced more? But a dream for me is to do a Work MORE! where it’s a collaboration between artists not from the U.S. and some from here. Because the social aspect [of Work MORE!] is about the sharing of traditions, and the strengthening of queer community, crossing lineages or genealogies. So I think that would be really interesting.
[CORRECTED BELOW] The first step was taken in changing City College of San Francisco’s educational mission at last night’s Board of Trustees meeting, a decision that would drastically alter what programs the college funds and who it serves.
The college’s mission statement is an overarching funding guideline, according to Gohar Momjian, the college’s accreditation liaison officer. She presented the mission statement workgroup’s findings to the college’s board and a packed room of faculty and students last night.
Momjian oversees the 15 workgroups responsible for addressing the major areas the Accrediting Commission of Community and Junior Colleges told the school it has to rectify. A failure to do so by March 2013 could result in the revocation of the school’s accreditation, which is necessary for the college’s degrees to be recognized and for the school to receive federal funding.
Simply put, City College was tasked by the ACCJC to gets its mission in line with current fiscal realities. The workgroups, tasked with brainstorming ways to reshape the college and meet the criteria of the accreditation team’s findings, will use the new mission statement as a guide for what programs are viable, said Momjian.
So what was cut out of the new mission statement? Completion of adult high school diplomas, GED’s (which help students test out of high school), active engagement in the social fabric of the community, lifelong learning, life skills, and enrichment courses were all dropped from the revised mission statement. [[8/27 CORRECTION: Transitional Studies, which includes GEDs and basic adult education, ended up being in included in the primary mission]].
In their place was a statement making these things “conditional” on available resources. “In addition, the college offers other programs and services consistent with our primary mission, only as resources allow and whenever possible in collaboration with partnering agencies and community-based organizations,” reads the new draft statement of the college’s mission.
Essentially, the college promises to enrich the community only if the resources are available to do so. Students and faculty from classes geared towards older adults and also disabled students came out to oppose changes to the mission statement, and a loss of their funding.
“We have students that will wait 40 minutes in the rain in a wheelchair for a bus to get to class,” Disabled Students Programs and Services faculty Katherine Brown said to the board.
Shelly Glazer, faculty in the older adults program, left the board with a warning. “Here are the almost 2,000 letters written to the Student Success Task Force when they tried to cut our dollars,” Glazer said, dropping the huge stack of paper on the top of the podium. “They need your support, and you need theirs.”
Importantly, English as Second Language classes and basic skills classes were preserved in the primary mission guideline. “There are compromises made in the mission statement. There are things we can do under [better] conditions,” said Momjian in her report to the board. “That was our compromise.”
The board made a motion to approve the new draft mission statement, and voted unanimously in favor. The board will look at a second revised mission statement on Sept. 11, and take a final vote to amend the mission statement on Sept. 27. The draft mission statement can be read at the City College website here.
Forty-five problem areas were found in City College’s financial structures by a financial consulting group at the same college board meeting last night. The findings left the college board nearly speechless once the report was complete.
The Financial Crisis Management Team, known as FCMAT, was paid for by the state community college chancellor’s office and assigned to City College to help it review its finances. This was good timing with the recent accreditation troubles, but officially has no connection to the recent accreditation team visit or with any direction from the state chancellor’s office, FCMAT Chief Analyst Michelle Plumbtree told the college board.
Plumbtree and her associate Mike Hill made the presentation to the board on behalf of the four members of the “financial SWAT team,” as they’ve been dubbed by the board in the past. The report it gave to the board that night was only the tip of the iceberg.
“The report itself is going to be in the realm of 65 pages. There are about 45 specific recommendations,” said analyst Mike Hill. “But we do want to give you a sense of some of our observations first, and some of our recommendations grouped together.”
The hit list was read in a bullet point fashion, and as he rattled off each of the findings, the silence in the room deepened:
The district has made a cost structure over time that can’t be sustained in this economy.
The district opted for short term solutions.
Employee contracts have been made without long-term analysis.
Decision making has been made by power and political whim rather than logic and fairness.
The conduct of key leaders and the culture within the district have greatly diminished the role and the effectiveness of the management team.
The district lacks data to assess sites.
The district supports much more faculty than its closest peers.
There’s a history of maintaining a small fund balance, with 90-92 percent of the budget being committed to salary and benefits, the college needs to make adjustments.
The department chair structure is not cost effective nor administratively sound.
We’re recommending a reduction in full time faculty through attrition.
We’re recommending the district not subsidize categorical programs, and that current subsidies be reassessed (the state cut funding for some categorical programs, like the second chance program, and City College has been eating that cost to the tune of around $20 million a year, according to AFT 2121 president Alisa Messer).
Consider either elimination of department chairs or diminish them while empowering deans and giving them the ability to act.”
“There’s a lot there, it covers a lot of territory, and you need to see the context and data and analysis in order to have informed questions, or else you’ll be spinning our wheels,” Hill said to the stunned board.
Chief Analyst Michelle Plumbtree concluded by cautioning the board against inaction. “The circumstances the district found itself did not happen overnight, decisions made over many years brought you here,” she said. “You’re going to have to move quicker than you want to, but that’s what’s needed.”
“Some of these things are new to me, but some of these things have come up in work groups. Some of these things are things we’ve known for years,” board President John Rizzo said after the report concluded. Financial administrators at City College declined to comment before the release of the full report. The 65-page final report will be made public on Sept. 18, and given to the college board a few days before that, Plumbtree said.
The City College Board of Trustees motioned to delay one of their most controversial votes at last night’s board meeting.
The board hopes to bring in a “special trustee,” who would be provided by the state, to help guide them through their recent accreditation woes. A special trustee is not simply a guide. A special trustee has veto power over the college board, giving the trustee unilateral decision making powers, according to college officials that night.
Most of the board welcomed the notion of outside help. The board has asked for $1.5 million dollars in cuts that never got made, Rizzo said, arguing for the need for the special trustee.
“It’s an enormous wealth of expertise that we do not have…We need someone from the outside to tell us where that mistake was made,” Rizzo said.
Trustee Chris Jackson wasn’t sure that the board had full knowledge of what it was asking. “I support a special trustee, but I have questions…How long would a trustee be here? What’s the process of asking them to leave?” Jackson asked, to the applause of the audience.
It was student Trustee William Walker who clarified the students’ position. He had a meeting with students the previous day, and they strongly disagreed with bringing in a special trustee to help run the school.
Given the history of special trustees in college districts, it’s not surprising why. A report by the LA Sentinel shows the discord brought by one special trustee to the Compton community college district, also facing accreditation woes. To read a report of Compton College’s and how it mirrors City College, check out the Guardian report “Saving City College.”
Special trustee Dr. Genethis Hudley-Hayes, was removed from her position as special trustee by State Community College Chancellor Jack Scott last September, according to the Sentinel article. The article cites multitudes of complaints against her by the community, who wrote a six page letter to Gov. Jerry Brown and Scott asking for Hayes’ removal.
“Who do you serve and why are you here?” Associated Students President Shanell Williams said to the board during its public comment session. “It’s shameful… If you can’t make decisions without a special trustee, then we need a new board.”
Student Kitty Lui said that the board’s decision to bring in a special trustee would undercut the democratic will of the community. “If you don’t know how to move forward, I don’t know why you’re still here,” she said.
Despite students’ objections, if the board does not choose a special trustee, the likelihood is that one will be imposed on them, Jackson said. The board ultimately decided to shelve the decision until a special meeting on Sept. 11.
Interestingly, the “financial SWAT team,” FCMAT, thinks that a special trustee is a good idea. “To have an outside expert is always good,” FCMAT Chief Analyst Michelle Plumbtree told The Guardian. “Sometimes, you’re just too close.”
The push and pull of relationships is a great basis for a dance piece. Not only are relationships intimate, beautiful, and at times frustrating, but they also create magnetic moments, and sometimes pain. This weekend, two dance companies, Detour Dance and the Caitlin Elliott Dance Collective, have collaborated (see? Relationships) to present Along the Way, a production that includes all the basics: love, lust, plain old allure. I stopped by the final rehearsal to check out the romance and have come to the conclusion that it’s ready to seduce all comers.
Along the Way
Fri/24-Sun/26 8pm, $30-20 general admission, $15 artist or student admission
After releasing their self-titled debut LP to cultish acclaim in 2000, Bay Area hip-hop supergroup Deltron 3030 mysteriously dropped off the radar for over a decade, resulting in borderline Chinese Democracy levels of superfan speculation. Now, with their follow-up, Deltron Event II, finished and slated for release this fall, the trio is going all out on their first North American tour since the project’s revival.
This Sunday, rap icon Del the Funky Homosapien (or Del tha Funkee Homosapien), producer Dan the Automator, and turntablist Kid Koala, will descend upon Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater on their second Rock the Bells tour stop as Deltron 3030, for a homecoming spectacular determined to exceed their devoted fan-base’s already lofty expectations.
As demonstrated by the triumphant live premiere of Deltron Event II in Toronto this past June, and in the YouTube videos that circulated in its aftermath, the trio’s comeback tour is anything but a low-key affair. “We’re literally bringing a string section, a horn section, and a choir,” Dan the Automator told the Guardian over the phone from his SF studio. “I mean, rap doesn’t do that. We’re in our own lane. There’s no actual comparative group to deal with, except ourselves.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp5JK9YazVM
Dan’s assertion would recall Mike Tyson’s infamous post-prizefight gloating, if he weren’t totally right. Truth be told, Deltron 3030’s ambitious live approach presents a striking departure from hip-hop’s bare-bones, DIY origins.
“It’s an experience,” Del said from his home in Oakland. “It ain’t the same old walkin’ back and forth, two turntables, yelling in a microphone, not really doing nothing… This is an extravaganza.”
Having produced, recorded, and engineered a vast range of musical projects, from Kool Keith, to Gorillaz, to Primal Scream, Dan is no stranger to ambitious undertakings. However, the logistical planning of Deltron 3030’s current touring lineup stands tall as the mightiest accomplishment of his career thus far.
“I came up with the idea, and everybody else helped pull it off,” Dan explained. “Then, we had to do charts, score the music, get all the people, find how we can get that many people to a place. I don’t want to say it was a stupid idea, because it was a great idea. [Laughs] It was an incredibly naive undertaking, but it’s awesome that we got to do it.”
Del was similarly awestruck at the depth of Dan’s achievement. “It’s amazing, to me, how he had this vision, and really made it happen. Of course, it took some work, but he’s up there with the tuxedo on, with the baton in his hand, conducting. And I’m like, ‘Wow! OK, this is really happening.’ Plus, for some reason, I don’t know where his power comes from. I guess, because he’s the Automator.”
Whereas Dan functions as Deltron 3030’s chief organizer, and the primary force behind the project’s aesthetic foundation, Del is largely responsible for the underlying mythology. Set in an Orwellian dystopia, 1000 years in the future, and filtered through the observations of protagonist Deltron Zero, Deltron 3030 evoked the structure of rock operas such as Tommy, Ziggy Stardust, and The Wall, in its insistence upon narrative drive and the establishment of a distinctive universe all its own.
Partly in response to tumultuous changes in the real world since 2000 (9/11; the ensuing police state, and wars in the Middle East; Occupy Wall Street) Deltron Event II illustrates a society that has only grown bleaker and more demoralized.
“It’s a Mad Max type of world,” Del philosophized. “Everybody went too far, so to speak. Everything is just trashed; there’s no law; criminals just took over the streets, basically, so you just gotta get in where you can fit in, just make it happen however you gonna make it happen. It’s like anarchy, basically. It’s everybody for themselves.”
From his home in Montreal, Kid Koala discussed Deltron 3030’s futuristic approach, and its capacity to address the zeitgeist of 2012 more effectively than a narrative set in current times.
“Even though it’s set in the future,” he explained, “it’s not really about us being on some crazy laser quest… it’s actually talking about real issues. The economy, the class system… but, I guess, had we set it in the actual present day, it would just come off as more preachy, or something.”
Given the largely personal, apolitical nature of Del’s solo material, and his much celebrated work with Hieroglyphics, his resistance to heavy-handed politicking is understandable.
“Deltron is kind of separate from what I do with Del. With Del, I try to be more direct, to the ground, to the earth, try to talk directly to people. And it’s usually about real life situations. Just being able to deal and cope with personal types of problems or issues… and just striving. That’s what that’s about. With Deltron, I just tried to make a novel and put it in a musical format.”
Outlining his literary approach, Del cited Orwell’s 1984 as having a major effect on Deltron Event II’s conceptual framework, but the project’s key influence behind might come as a surprise.
“My main inspiration came from Megaman X,” Del explained. “It was the same game, basically, but the graphics were stepped up: more glossy, more futuristic, just looked real spiffy. It wasn’t as bubbly and cartoony as the first one. It looked modern. You had modern types of weapons and stuff. It really sent [me] a message, like, ‘Ok, that’s how you can do Del, too: put him in this future world, and he’ll be the same Del, but he’ll be able to do different little things that the regular Del can’t do.’”
High gloss, modern weapons, and a world gone down the tubes: that’s the state of affairs in the Deltron universe, circa 3040. But, despite the hopelessness of the world they’ve created, Dan, Del, and Koala are confident in Deltron Event II’s ability to justify a 12-year hiatus.
“I think it crushes the first one,” Kid Koala proclaimed. “The three of us, individually, are just better at our crafts now. We just tried to raise the bar on ourselves, really.”
A glance at the Rock the Bells lineup reveals a wealth of esteemed artists, and genuine game-changers in the world of hip-hop: Method Man and Redman, Ice Cube, Nas, Common. However, Deltron 3030’s almost absurdly ambitious live approach puts them in an entirely different league.
“As far as the artistic aspect, intrinsically, there’s nothing like this,” Dan insisted. “There never has been, and I doubt there ever will be.”
Deltron 3030 Sun/26, 6:45-7:45pm Paid Dues Stage; Rock the Bells $265 for two-day tickets Shoreline Amphitheatre 1 Amphitheatre, Mountain View www.rockthebells.net
Of the several films I looked at this week, two must be mentioned up top: The Master and The Expendables 2. These films are notable not just because I spent my own hard-earned dollahs for entry (usually I see stuff for free, being a critic and whatnot), but also because I loved them both, despite one being a bound-for-Oscars effort by one of America’s most exciting filmmakers, and the other being a silly showcase for America’s most beloved aging action heroes. Only one, however, contained a scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger riding in a teeny Smart Car. Your guess which.
Mark your calendar using my guide to fall film happenings in the Bay Area and beyond in this week’s Guardian; and don’t miss Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ interview with Compliance director Craig Zobel. Jesse’s Compliance review is below the jump, along with more short takes on other films opening (and rep events happening) this week. This week also heralds a pair of horror movies (and, well, Halloween candy has started making appearances in Walgreens aisles…): The Apparition (review below) and Sinister (not screened for critics).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj2lR6Yp-gY
Alps Yorgos Lanthimos is well on his way to a reputation for sick yet oddly charming high-concept spectacles. Here, a group calling themselves Alps offers substitution services for the recently bereaved — that’s right, they’ll play your dead loved one to fill that hole in your life. Pitch-black comic moments abound, and the sensibility that made 2009’s Dogtooth so thrilling is distinctly present here, if not quite as fresh. Beyond the absurd logline, the plot is rather more conventional: things get out of hand when Alps member Anna (Aggeliki Papoulia, the eldest daughter from Dogtooth) gets too invested in one of her assignments, and the power structure of Alps turns on her. If Alps is not exactly a revelation, it’s still a promising entry in a quickly blossoming auteur’s body of work. (1:33) Roxie. (Sam Stander)
The Apparition Does this horror flick stand a ghost of a chance against its predecessors? So many bodies, so many mysteriously slammed doors, so many girl ghouls — they all surface in this obviously low-budget cash-in on the coattails of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Look to the signs: the slow build of zero-CGI/bucks tension-building devices like flung-open doors that are supposed to be locked, scarily grainy, nausea-inducing handheld video footage and spastic editing, and screams in pitch blackness—with a dash of everything from 1979’s Phantasm to Fulci to J-Horror. Prefaced by the story of psychics’ attempts to rouse a spirit, then a flashback to a group of college students’ try at recreating the séance by magnifying their brainwaves, The Apparition opens on the cute, perfectly made-up, and way-too-glamorous-for-suburbia Kelly (Ashley Greene) and her boyfriend Ben (Sebastian Stan), who have just moved into a new faceless development in the middle of nowhere, into a house her family has bought as an investment. Turns out they aren’t the only ones playing house, as the building’s alarm is continually bypassed, mysterious mold appears, and the neighbor’s adorable pup whimpers at thin air and obligingly dies in their laundry room. Matters go from bad to worst, as some invisible force does in Kelly’s cactus, messes up her closet, and blows the lights — all of which also sounds like the antics of a lousy roommate. Add in choppy, continuity-destroying editing; throwaway dialogue; music that sounds like it came from Kelly’s favorite store, Costco; overt appropriations like a slithery, long-haired ghoul girl that slimes her way out of a cardboard box; and that important, indelibly spooky image that comes far too late to count — and you’ll find yourself rooting for the fiend to put these kids out of their misery. (1:22) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdONydDX44I
Compliance No film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival encountered as much controversy as Craig Zobel’s Compliance. At the first public screening, an all-out shouting match erupted, with an audience member yelling “Sundance can do better!” You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Every screening (public and press) that followed was jam-packed with people hoping to experience the most shocking film at Sundance, and the film does not disappoint. (Beware: every review I have happened upon has unnecessarily spoiled major plots in the film, which is based on true events.) What is so impressive about Zobel’s film is how it builds up a sense of ever-impending terror. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the film steps into Psycho (1960) terrain, specifically in the final act of the film. Compliance aims to confront a society filled with people who are trained to follow rules without questioning them. Magnolia Pictures, which previously collaborated with Zobel on his debut film Great World of Sound (which premiered at Sundance in 2007), picked up the film for theatrical release; if you dare to check it out, prepare to be traumatized. You’ll be screaming about one of the most audacious movies of 2012 — and that’s exactly why the film is so brilliant. (1:30) (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)
Cosmopolis With end times nigh and the 99 percent battering the gates of the establishment, it’s little wonder David Cronenberg’s rendition of the Don DeLillo novel might rotate, with the stately rhythm of a royal funeral and deliciously tongue-in-cheek humor, around one of the most famed vampire heartthrobs at the cineplex. Sadly, a recent paparazzi scandal threatens to eclipse this latest, enjoyably blighted installment in the NYC urban nightmare genre. Robert Pattinson’s billionaire asset manager Eric Packer takes meetings with his new wife Elise (Sarah Gadon) and staffers like his monetary theorist Vija (Samantha Morton) in his moving office: a white, leather-bound stretch limo that materializes like a sleek, imposing extension of his pale frame. Seriously disassociated from reality on multiple levels, Eric is a 28-year-old boy in a bubble, speaking of himself in third person and willing to spend all day making his way across town to get a haircut at his father’s old barbershop, even though his head of security (Kevin Durand) warns him that at least one “credible threat” has designs on his life. The passing of his favorite Sufi rapper (K’Naan), a possible Rothko for sale, a mad pie-thrower, and an asymmetrical prostate all threaten to capsize those, as it turns out, not-so-humble plans. Warning: the brainier members of Team Edward might plan on finding their minds blown by this thoughtful and mordantly humorous meditation on this country’s cult of money, while Cronenberg watchers will be gratified to pluck out his recurring themes, here dealt with a lighter hand than usual. At this date, rather than telegraphing how one might feel about a scene by way of, say, music, the director is increasingly comfortable with the ambiguity — and the uneasy, pleasing mix of sneaking repulsion and gimlet-eyed humor, of these scenes and their language. Thus the autoerotic-car fetishism of Crash (1996) and hallucinatory culture grazing of Naked Lunch (1991) — and that fascination with how a body intersects sexually or otherwise with a machine or “other” — seems completely natural here. Or perhaps it’s a measure of how much Cronenberg’s preoccupations and cinematic language have made themselves at home in the vernacular. (1:49) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwNMGdWyjcc
“Global Threats Film Series” The San Francisco Film Society’s “Global Threats” series continues with a double dose of stuff that’ll kill ya. Though separated by six decades, both features are remarkably similar for their matter-of-fact, location-shot, non-pulp treatment of a prime (if infrequently used) thriller topic: the desperate attempts by health officials to contain a deadly virus before it spreads to the whole population. While in some quarters it was criticized for being too docu-drama-esque and not “thriller” enough, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion last year was admirably cool-headed in its depiction of various global, national, and local authorities (played by an all-star cast) frantically coping with an outbreak of something that yuppie slut Gwyneth Paltrow brought home from a business trip. A year before A Streetcar Named Desire (which was, contrastingly, almost entirely shot on studio soundstages), Elia Kazan ventured to the real New Orleans for Panic in the Streets (1950), in which another traveler imports an actual plague to the Big Easy. US Public Health Service physician Richard Widmark is tasked with tracking down the rapidly growing number of the infected, which is complicated by the fact that several of them (including Jack Palance and Zero Mostel) are criminal-underground types naturally averse to cooperating with the cops or any other governmental representative. If Contagion irked some for being a little too nuts-and-bolts procedural, the brilliantly black-and-white-shot Panic excited audiences and critics at the time for its unusual realism. That extends to the warmly credible marital relationship between workaholic Widmark (very appealing in one of his few nice-guy leads) and neglected but understanding spouse Barbara Bel Geddes. SF Film Society Cinema. (Dennis Harvey)
HermanoAs a child, Julio (Eliu Armas) discovered foundling Daniel (Fernando Moreno) abandoned in a dumpster; taken in by the former’s mom (Marcela Giron), the two boys are raised as brothers. They’re close as can be, even if Julio is physically slight, shy, and straight-arrow, while strapping Daniel is a born leader and survivor quite willing to cross the legal line when it serves his purposes. One area in which they’re of the same mind is the soccer field, where both (especially Daniel) are talented players with hopes of going pro. But that seems a remote dream in their violence-ridden slum. Marcel Rasquin’s Venezuelan sports-crime drama is built on some hoary clichés — the “good” brother/”bad” brother dynamic, the tragedy that sparks revenge that sparks more tragedy, etc. — but is so unpretentious, energetic, sincere. and well-cast that skeptical resistance is futile. It’s a modest movie, but a true, satisfying pleasure. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZlXB5okeo Hit and RunAnnie (Kristen Bell) has a Stanford doctorate but is treading in the academic backwaters until the prospect is raised of an ideal department-heading position at UCLA. She’s thrilled, but also conflicted, because live-in beau Charlie (Dax Shepard) is in the Federal Witness Protection program, and can’t leave the nowhere burg he lives in incognito — particularly for Los Angeles — without risking serious personal harm. However, for love he decides he’ll risk everything so she can take the job. Unfortunately, this fast attracts the attention of various people very much interested in halting this exodus, for various reasons: notably Charlie’s inept U.S. Marshall “protector” (Tom Arnold), Annie’s psycho ex (Smallville‘s Michael Rosenbaum), and a guy with an even more serious grudge against Charlie (Bradley Cooper in a dreadlock wig). A whole lot of wacky chases and stunt driving ensues. The second feature Shepard’s co-directed (with David Palmer) and written, this aims for a cross between 1970s drive-in demolition derbies (1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, 1974’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, etc.) and envelope-pushing comedy thrillers like 1993’s True Romance. There’s a lot of comic talent here, including some notable cameos, yet Hit and Run is one of those cases where the material is almost there, but not quite. It moves breezily enough but some of the characters are more annoying than funny; the dialogue is an awkward mix of bad taste and PC debates about bad taste; and some ideas that aim to be hilarious and subversive (naked old people, a long discussion about jailhouse rape) just sit there, painfully. Which makes this only the second-best Dax Shepard movie with incarceration rape jokes, after 2006’s Let’s Go to Prison. (1:38) (Dennis Harvey)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn6ie1zCkZU
Premium Rush“Fixed gear. Steel frame. No brakes. Can’t stop … don’t want to.” Thus goes the gear breakdown and personal philosophy of New York City bike messenger Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an aggro rider who uses his law school-refined brain to make split-second decisions regarding which way to dart through Midtown traffic. Though bike messengers had a pop culture moment in the 1990s, Premium Rush is set in the present day, with one of Wilee’s numerous voice-overs explaining the job’s continued importance even in the digital era. One such example: a certain envelope he’s tasked with ferrying across the city, given to him by the troubled roommate (Jamie Chung) of the pretty fellow messenger (Dania Ramirez) he’s romantically pursuing. The contents of the envelope, and the teeth-gnashingly evil-cop-with-a-gambling-problem (Michael Shannon, adding some weird flair to what’s essentially a stock villain) who would dearly love to get his mitts on it, are less crucial to Premium Rush than the film’s many, many chase scenes featuring Wilee outwitting all comers with his two-wheeled Frogger moves. Silly fun from director David Koepp (2008’s Ghost Town), but not essential unless you’re a fixie fanatic or a JGL completist. (1:31) (Cheryl Eddy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiFqT5-6JQg
Robot and FrankImagine the all-too-placid deadpan of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) coming out of a home-healthcare worker, and you get just part of the appeal of this very likable comedy debut with a nonrobotic pulse directed by Jake Schreier. Sometime in the indeterminate near future, former jewel thief and second-story man Frank (Frank Langella) can be found quietly deteriorating in his isolated home, increasingly forgettable and unable to care for himself and assemble a decent bowl of Cap’n Crunch (though he can still steal fancy soaps from the village boutique). In an effort to cover his own busy rear, Frank’s distracted son (James Marsden) buys him a highly efficient robotic stand-in (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), much to his father’s grim resistance (“That thing is going to murder me in my sleep”) and the dismay of crunchy sibling Madison (Liv Tyler). The robot, however, is smarter than it looks, as it bargains with Frank to eat better, get healthier, and generally reanimate: it’s willing to learn to pick locks, participate in a robbery, and even plan a jewel heist, provided, say, Frank agrees to a low-sodium diet. Frank flourishes, like the garden the robot nurtures in a vain attempt to interest his human charge, and even goes on a date with his librarian crush (Susan Sarandon), though can the self-indulgent idyll last forever? A tale about aging as much as it is about rediscovery, Robot tells an old story, but one that’s wise beyond its years and willing to dress itself up in some of the smooth, sleek surfaces of an iGeneration. (1:30) (Kimberly Chun)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3CaXSIgi4o
$upercapitalistGreed is good … fodder for cinematic drama these days as all assembled struggle to get out from under the Great Recession and look to immerse themselves in the boardroom battlefields of films like 2011’s Margin Call. Spinning off his time working for CNN in Hong Kong in the halcyon mid-’00s, lead actor, writer, and producer Derek Ting stars as a bright, eager-to-please hedge fund trader from New York, transplanted in the wild, wild East, and forced to learn a lesson about unchecked, profit-driven gamesmanship. In Hong Kong, Conner (Ting) only looks as Chinese as the rest — otherwise he’s American through and through. Unlike, say, the old-fashioned family-run corporation he’s assigned to take down, Conner is estranged from his family and has few loyalties, apart from Quentin (Darren E. Scott), the fellow trader who shows him the ropes and gets him hooked on hand-tailored suits, flash cars, and attractive arm candy, and Natalie (Kathy Uyen), a publicist who’s as brainy as she is beautiful. Unfortunately the game Conner’s playing has real costs for the people around him — and he finds himself questioning his loyalties. Ting and director Simon Yin have the makings of a compelling thriller — nothing is more tempting than a peep behind the curtain of a closed world like Chinese big business — and though the overall narrative pulls you in, they get tripped up on the details, namely easy clichés like $upercapitalist’s pampered, playboy son of a business dynasty, or the rote devices like the middle-class family rigged to reveal that Conner does indeed have a soul. Much like their hero, Ting and company take a bit for granted, from the viewer’s patience with tired Hollywood conventions to the very system — capitalist, supercapitalist, or socialist market economy — that supports them. (1:36) (Kimberly Chun)
“It’s almost a cliché to say that families come in all shapes and sizes, but they really do”
I’ve always found the expression “the birds and the bees” queer. As a child I somehow knew the expression had sexual connotations, but I could never understand why the birds and bees were having sex together. They seem like such an odd pairing.
Airial Clark, or as she’s known on her blog, the Sex-Positive Parent, could have explained to a prepubescent me that the expression was merely a metaphor about having a talk about sex with kids. More importantly, I’m hoping Clark will teach me how to explain to my future child how it is that one of their daddies used to be a little girl.
Clark has a master’s degree in human sexuality from San Francisco State University, and is the proud parent of two beautiful children. She hosts a Youtube channel on which she provides sex-positive schooling. If you’re in town this weekend, you should check out her series of four workshops on sex-positive parenting at the Center for Sex and Culture. I caught up with her via email for a sneak peek at what she’ll be sharing.
SFBG: What have you told your children about sex and your own sexuality?
Arial Clark: When talking about sexuality with kids, the focus has to be on them. Where are they at in their development? What do they need to know? What are they comfortable hearing? What have they been observing? It shouldn’t be about me as the adult.
SFBG: In interviews you often discuss the wide range of familial matrixes, or ways that families are configured. How do we go about cultivating acceptance among kids about the diversity of the family matrix?
AC: This is a great question- especially in the Bay Area where respecting cultural diversity is a goal we are all striving for. It’s almost a cliché to say that families come in all shapes and sizes, but they really do. Families also change shape over time. The first step in cultivating acceptance and respect is to let kids know that not all families look like their own and that is just how the world works. This message works for kids in more traditional family structures as well as for kids in under-represented family structures too.
SFBG:You also talk a lot about diversity among parents — gay parents, kinky parents, poly parents. What kind of parent would you describe yourself to be?
AC: Like all parents, I have to maintain healthy boundaries with my kids and focus on what they need for their healthy development. I also have to respect their privacy. The important thing for parents to remember is that labels are secondary to your role in their life. Your child sees you a parent first and everything else second. When I refer to a certain type of parent, that is more about self-identification for seeking support. All parents need role models. Finding other parents who share your same concerns is vital so we have this system of identification around sexuality in order to combat stigma and prejudice of all kinds.
SFBG: How can parents begin to identify some of the sex-negative and hetero-normative scripts they may be passing along to their children?
AC: This is the first suggestion I make to parents who want to create a more sex-positive dialogue in their family: what are your beliefs about sexuality and gender? It takes some self-reflection and bravery to differentiate yourself from how you may have been raised. How do you talk about relationships in front of your kids? What language do you use about feeling desirable, or feeling protected, or feeling uncomfortable? Most parents choose silence as opposed to directly voicing their dissent with more traditional cultural norms, so kids depend on subtext. My suggestion is to start bringing it out into the open.
SFBG: You discuss at length what a sex-positive parent should be. How would you describe a sex-positive child?
AC: A sex-positive child is safe, protected, and knows about consent and boundaries. They have access to accurate and age-appropriate information about reproductive biology as well as the emotional and social realities of sexuality. A sex-positive child is not a sexualized child.
SFBG: What are some practical tools parents can start using to cultivate healthy conversations around sexual diversity with their children?
AC: I always recommend asking questions first. Ask your kids what they think about characters on a TV show, or their friend’s parents. Begin by asking and then listen. Let them know that what they think matters. Ask them why they think people dress in a certain or way, or what they think the lyrics to a song means. Using media to distance the conversation can make both parent and child more comfortable.
Also, sharing stories from when you were their age is a great way to know what to say and to relate to where they are now. Share anxieties you had, or weird situations you were in. You don’t have to tell them everything, you’re the adult so you’re in control of the narrative, but start with something true and go from there. As they get older the depth of the topic will increase. Remember these are life long conversations; it’s a gradual process in parallel to their maturation.
SFBG: Is there an ideal time for parents to start having conversations about sex with their kids?
AC: Before they become sexually active! Parents need to set the foundation way in advance. That is why age-appropriateness is so important. At every stage of development, there are conversations relating to sexuality to be had.
SFBG: How does one create a sex-positive environment in such a sex saturated culture (with television, social-media, books, and conversations you may have with other adults)?
AC: I remember being so overwhelmed by how much sexualized imagery and content was being directed at my kids when they were pre-school-aged. Everything around them had to do with gender and reenacting sexualized behavior. I felt inundated. All you have to do is take a step back to see how much sexuality is used in marketing to kids and in children’s programming. Placing that constant stream of sexualized information into a container, detaching it from the child, is something parents can do to cultivate sex-positivity. We can talk to our kids about what is being directed at them by problematizing the messages about sexuality.
SFBG: You are hosting a sex-positive workshop this weekend. What can attendees expect?
AC: Saturday’s classes are tailored to parents with alternative sexualities- parents who often don’t see themselves in parenting books or online forums. In the morning we’re going to talk about stigma and finding support as both parents and members of sexual minority groups. In the afternoon we’ll work on coming-out strategies specific to non-traditional families. I’m going to teach parents how to both educate and advocate from a sex-positive perspective.
Sunday’s workshops are designed for a broad audience. The morning workshop is about what to say and when to say it. The afternoon class is about how to communicate your sex education values with other adults in your child’s life. Maybe you and Grandma need to talk about how you plan to teach your kids about sexuality because it is going to look a lot different then how she taught you. Having those conversations are tough as well.
SFBG:What is your favorite thing about being a parent?
AC: Watching my children grow into the people they are is pretty amazing. I am so proud of them, and I am consistently impressed with the things they come up with. Being a parent is the ultimate form of geekery for me.
Sex Positive Parenting
Four sessions: Sat/25 and Sun/26, 10:30am and 1pm, $25/each, $75/four sessions
It is one of the great ironies of American journalism that Edward Kennedy, once vilified by colleagues, ejected from Europe by the U.S. Army and sacked by the AP for his exclusive report of Germany’s World War II surrender in defiance of political censorship, is now the subject of two efforts to rectify a journalistic injustice by awarding him a Pulitzer Prize posthumously.
One effort is a grassroots campaign launched from, of all places, Cedarville, CA in rural Modoc County by Ray A. March, editor of the Modoc Independent News monthly newspaper, to win a posthumous Pulitzer for hard news international reporting. March worked for Kennedy as a cub reporter at the Monterey Peninsula Herald half a century ago,
“After reading and reviewing ‘Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship & The Associated Press,’ it was obvious to me that Kennedy had been denied a Pulitzer and it was time to correct an injustice,” March said, emphasizing that campaign supporters are professional reporters, editors, and photographers, and the campaign is catching fire.
They include San Francisco Chronicle editor Ward Bushee, Pulitzer Prize winning photographers Kim Komenich and Sal Veder, San Francisco Bay Guardian editor at large Bruce B. Brugmann, former AP legal reporter Bob Egelko and Frank McCulloch, former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and chief Southeast Asia correspondent for Time, Inc.
“Formal acknowledgment by the Pulitzer people of Ed Kennedy’s courageous and enterprising news reporting is 67 years overdue,” said campaign co-chair Eric Brazil, retired Los Angeles bureau chief for USA Today and a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The other effort is a move by Louisiana State University and retiring AP president and CEO Tom Curley to enter “Ed Kennedy’s War,’’ recently published by LSU Press, in the Pulitzer competition based on its literary qualities.
The memoir has reposed, unpublished, in a filing cabinet since Kennedy’s death at age 58 in November, 1963, when he was struck by a car while a pedestrian in Monterey, where he was editor and associate publisher of the Monterey Peninsula Herald.
In a formal apology last May, Curley said that its repudiation of Kennedy “was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way… Kennedy did everything right.’’
In a subsequent interview, he elaborated: “Once the war is over, you can’t hold back information like that. The world needed to know.’’ Curley has co-written the introduction to Kennedy’s memoir.
Kennedy was among 17 reporters from major western news outlets allowed to witness Germany’s formal surrender on May 7, 1945, on condition that they agreed not to break the news for 36 hours. Unbeknownst to the reporters at the time, that suppression was the result of an agreement between U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to allow Russian Premier Joseph Stalin to hold a second surrender ceremony in Berlin.
The embargo was broken shortly after Kennedy learned that news of the German surrender was being broadcast to Germany from a radio station in Flensburg, Germany. He contacted military censors and said that since the cat was out of the bag and the security of Allied troops was no longer an issue, he intended to defy censorship and report the news, which he proceeded to do – using a military phone line — thereby registering the biggest news scoop of the entire war.
Julia Kennedy Cochran, Ed Kennedy’s daughter, saved his unpublished memoir and pressed for its publication. She was the first to join March and Brazil in the campaign to see her father awarded a Pulitzer.
When asked how she felt about a network of journalists supporting her father for a posthumous Pulitzer, she said she was surprised and honored.
“It is astonishing that my father’s story still elicits so much interest among journalists. I am thrilled and honored that so many of them are signing on to the campaign for a posthumous Pulitzer for him,” she said in a recent interview.
Anyone interested in joining the “Ed Kennedy Project,” can do so by contacting March at ramarch@frontiernet.net.
Eric Brazil and Ray A. March
Carl Nolte’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Pulitzer-campaign-for-Edward-Kennedy-3802586.php
1. Hop on over to Marin County’s highly-recommendedRCA Beach, where Hanauer affirms driftwood dragons can sometimes be spotted. “Want to recharge your life? … a single stopover at the beautiful beach will probably inspire you to keep coming back.”
2. No, not that spot by the GG bridge. Humboldt County’s Baker’s Beachhas a differently-placed apostrophe, as well as a carpeting of sesame seed-sized pebbles just perfect for your naked footsies. “Baker’s features a quarter moon-shaped shoreline lined with tide pools and agates that make it one of the best beaches in Humboldt County,” says Hanauer. Sold!
3. Although nude-levels rarely approach those of its heyday, when hundreds of unclothed sunbathers could be seen dotting its sand, Devil’s Slide (Gray Whale Cove)in Santa Cruz County is boxed in by orange-colored sandstone heights. Says Hanauer: “Devil’s Slide is a great place to read, tan, jog, play Frisbee, or watch (true to its state beach name) gray whales, pelicans, and surfers.”
4. In the mood to earn your naked? Check out the listing for Sykes Hot Spring in Monterrey County, six warm pools stationed a 10-mile hike in from a Big Sur ranger station. Afterwards, a couple of campsites await you so that tomorrow you can wake, soak, and luxuriate in your natural state.
5. Of course, not all nudies have autos. And in light of that, let us highlight an easy-to-get-to, A-rated gem in the guide: North Baker Beach. Tucked up by the Golden Gate Bridge, Hanuaer’s source on the spot Santosh affirms you have nothing to worry when it comes to leering voyeurs — “Jedi mind tricks” are employed by the naked community to get creeps to shove off. And what community! Quoth the guide: “‘I sometimes invite people into my duney [sheet-covered driftwood structure] to get out of the sun'” says Santosh, who lives about 20 blocks from the beach. ‘We even have a driftwood bar. It’s like a day at Club Med.'”
While the Performant is off hugging trees in Oregon, please enjoy this series of interviews with the curators of three innovative performance spaces
There’s nothing about the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in North Berkeley that particularly speaks of abstract performance, but that element of the unexpected is possibly what makes it the perfect venue for Karen Penley’s fledgling performance series, Retard. Inhabited by out-of-the-box, outré performers such as Dan Carbone, Edna Barron, Herb Heinz, and Catherine Debon, Retard is a low-key, all-inclusive, no-judgment sort of event where the weird get a chance to shine, and everybody gets to eat cake. After an evening spent nibbling clafoutis and ducking clowns, I caught up with Karen via the magic of the Interwebs to pick her brain about her brave new experimental showcase.
SFBG: What was the original impetus for this showcase? What sets it apart?
Karen Penley: I have an interest in brave unconventional work and I wanted to be able to have room to let that happen instead of having to fit into the structure of poetry and music open mics…. I think the thing that sets Retard apart is a feeling of support for adventurous, innocent work. I really love raw art, as well as the feeling of people being so immersed in…their artistic work and caring about it so much. It’s this feeling of creating different worlds as well. You can do anything, theater, movement, improvisation, music, or some hybrid of such. Also, it’s kind of homey, easy, non pretentious. I really wanted that. There are special Retards, the evenings called “Crack,” where I curate more carefully and then the other retards are more a jambalaya and are open to people I don’t know their work as well so they can just come and perform and I can get a sense of them.
SFBG: What is your ultimate vision for these evenings?
KP: Well, ultimately, I would love to have them be ‘Crack’ every Friday, with lots of people coming, and I’d love to rent the church another day a week and have it be ‘Pretard’ which I tried to do for five months, but there wasn’t enough participation and I couldn’t afford it. ‘Pretard’ was a place to work on and develop material just for a warm audience, not a workshop, just a place to try out stuff, and then I wanted to take that work and curate it into cool evenings. But I’d love to connect with people that I admire, all different kinds of performers, and curate great evenings so that it really is a network of daring work.
SFBG:Do you bake your own cake? What do the cake and tea signify for you?
KP: I love cake and I can’t eat a whole one so this gives me an opportunity to bake all those great cakes on the internet that I couldn’t bake just for myself. I always like food to be involved in performing and watching performance. It feels more cozy and fun and more warm-y to have cake and tea for people.
SFBG: “Retard” sounds intentionally provocative, though you do offer a rather nonconfrontational definition for it on the webpage. What prompted you to use that name, and has anyone had an uncomfortable reaction to it?
KP: I HAVE had some uncomfortable reactions to the name. One girl was labeled in her high school and I really liked her and wanted her to perform, but we had a long email back and forth about it and she just couldn’t condone the use of the word. My feeling is that using it for my show changes the derogatory feeling associated with that word. I feel like a retard myself, always have. I want to be more retarded; i.e. slow down. In my mind, to be retarded is a good thing. Plus it’s just funny (the name).
Retard
Fridays 7-9pm, $10 sliding scale
1823 Ninth Ave., Berk. (side building next to The Good Shepherd Church)
Jenny was visiting from Portland and Sam Love and I decided to take her on a field trip to the Alemany Farm. Portland is well known for their community and sidewalk veggie gardens, so we were excited to show her what SF had to offer in the realm of urban farming. [Ed. note: while they still can! Check out this week’s story in the print edition about the impending death of many of the city’s agriculture spaces.]
But first we got kind of lost and ended up making a rather huge loop through the neighborhood. Then we saw it, four-and-a-half acres of soil covered in vibrant veggies, trees dripping with stone fruit, and gigantic, golden sunflowers. There was a group of high school students helping with weeding, a volunteer tending to some baby greens and even a windmill. And it just keeps going and going. You start walking up the hill and end up finding loquat trees, huge chard bunches, artichokes. It’s all growing next to each other — a zucchini vine here, an apple tree here — a random quilt of edibles.
The only downside is the proximity to the freeway, which adds a background humm to the farm. (Just pretend like it’s bees.) The garden is volunteer-run and has work days on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It hosts a u-pick program on Wednesday evenings for folks in the neighborhood. Get down there and get your paws dirty!
Fabulous food-and-junk-drawer-oriented collage artist (and legendary SF club denizen) Jason Mecier is back in our virtual orbit lately. His meme explosion beef jerky portraits of Obama and Romney seemtobeeverywhere. And his wonderful makeup-y likeness of Phyllis Diller, RIP, is giving us sad LOLs. But wait, the “meatraits” of Obameat and Meat Romney are sponsored! And there’s a video! Let’s go to the jerky tape:
