Back in August, in the midst of protests, BART shut off its cell phone service.
At the time, we said in an editorial that “The bizarre move by BART officials Aug. 11 to shut down cell phone service in the underground train stations made headlines around the world — and for good reason. It was, Wired Magazine reported Aug 15, apparently the first time in United States history that a public agency sought to block electronic communications as a way to prevent a political protest.”
One of the BART protesters, Colin G. Gallagher, has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about BART shutting off cell phone service, and its public comment period ends today. Starting May first, there will be a limited comment period, restricted only to those represented by a lawyer or government officials, according to Gallagher. You can add your comment to the filing on the FCC website.
This is far from the first complaint on the subject filed with the FCC, and BART has since outlined a policy about cutting off cell phone service.
But it’s another chance to comment on the potentially illegal action by BART that drew rage and claims that BART had violated the first amendment. Gallagher agrees, and wrote in his filing comment that communication should go “unhindered by bureaucracies, agencies, and the measures of dubious legality employed by those who would restrain or cut off access.”
Are you ready for another folk revival? It’s definitely here, in fact, this is a rather late post about such things – New York Magazine just did a spread including Mumford & Sons, the Head the Heart (whose June 1 show at the Fillmore is already sold out), and the Lumineers, for chrissakes.
It was the startling revelation elsewhere that Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros was also the formerly angular-haircut-having leader of electroclashy IMA Robot that really got me thinking about about all this. Could it already be time for New Weird America 2.0? (Grain of salt: Mumford & Sons are from England.) That last round was only a handful of years ago – Devendra, all those acts on the pages of beloved Arthur Magazine, et. al. – though this batch seems decidedly less weird. These acts, as NY Mag points out, have broader crossover appeal.
It makes sense, recessions seem to bring out the twang in folks, and many of these beard-and-suspenders types rose up around 2009 or later. What else brought this to the forefront of my thoughts? This week in the Bay Area, the debatable leaders of this relatively newish pack, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, make their first visit since that Railroad Revival tour with Mumford & Sons last year.
Also this week, New York’s jazzier swing folk duo Two Man Gentlemen Band – I’m stretching here – takes the steamboat (we wish) to San Francisco. And of course, there are shows with our own homegrown fiddlers, banjo-pickers, and boot-wearers. As always, a few tangentially related or just plain totally unrelated acts made the list below.
Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:
Breathe Owl Breathe The dreamy folk pop trio brings inherent playfulness – they wrote a children’s book – to frosty despair, mixing somber lyrical content with lush vocal harmonies, subtle elegant strumming with the sporadic hand clapping. With Victoria Williams Wed/2, 9pm, $10-$12 Brick and Mortar Music Hall 1710 Mission, SF (415) 800-8782 www.brickandmortarmusic.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTEkELB7mFk
Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros On stage this ten-piece folky, psychedelic rock tribe looks like a ragtag flurry of ecstasy. (Mia Sullivan) With Aaron Embry Wed/2, 8pm, $32.50 Fox Theater 1807 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 302-2250 www.thefoxoakland.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEOF_rcND8&ob=av2n
Trainwreck Riders The punk-tinged alt-country rockers have been together since 2000 (under the TR name as of 2004) and the born-and-bred San Franciscans have gained a steady local following thanks to moxie, bluegrass spirit, and encouraged sing-alongs. Noteworthy: the whole evening lineup is packed with Bay Area up-and-comers, so it’s an excuse to watch the whole show. With Passage Walkers, Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, Apogee Sound Club Fri/4, 8pm, $10-$12 Rickshaw Stop 155 Fell, SF (415) 861-2011 www.rickshawstop.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MzDqtjCQkA
Battlehooch The song and video for “Pickin’ Fields” (the first release of the band’s single series) are reason enough to fall in pleasantly bemused love with the “shape-shifting” orchestral folk rockers. The San Francisco six-piece buzzes through genres, and in the process, riles up crowds. With White Cloud, B Hamilton Fri/4, 9pm, $7-$10. Brick and Mortar Music Hall 1710 Mission, SF (415) 800-8782 www.brickandmortarmusic.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiKCUPBeREE
Father John Misty and Har Mar Superstar This is a weird (read: awesome) lineup – Father John Misty is the darkly folk rock ex-Fleet Foxes drummer and Har Mar Superstar is a swarthy, sex-soaked R&B god recently caught live with ’80s-esque backup singers and a surprise Blood Orange appearance. Well, I guess they both do have that sexy thing going on. Sat/5, 10pm, $12 Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St., SF (415) 621-4455 www.bottomofthehill.com NSFW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS84BMFszW0
Two Man Gentlemen Band Former street performers are always the best entertainers. And with their years playing to unwilling pedestrians, the Two Man Gentlemen Band’s Andy Bean (singer, tenor guitar, banjoist) and Fuller Condon (upright bass) have learned to pluck out crowd pleasers: jazzy, irreverent dixieland swing with a knowing wink. They come in support of recently released LP Two At A Time. Sun/6, 9pm, $10 Amnesia 853 Valencia, SF (415) 970-0012 www.amnesiathebar.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c85RZ5biws&feature=fvwrel
Meshuggah Swedish. Extreme. Metal. And holy hell is it fast. Not folk in the slightest, but well worth a trip the Fillmore. With Baroness & Decapitated Sun/6, 8pm, $29.50 Fillmore 1805 Geary, SF (415) 346-6000 www.thefillmore.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ
A lot of things drive me crazy (people making a left turn on 16th and Bryant at 5 p.m., backing up traffic for an entire block; people who get to park in the midde of the street on Sunday because the cops don’t ticket churchgoers; politicians who say “I’ll take a look at that” as a way to duck a question, dog owners who leave piles of shit in the middle of the sidewalk… don’t get me started). But one of the worst, on top of my list, is the claim that wealthy people who think the rich don’t pay enough taxes should just write the government a check.
George W. Bush loved that one. Every time taxes on the rich came up, he’d say: “If you think your taxes are too low, the IRS takes checks and money orders.” You can pay online, too.
So what’s wrong with that argument? Why doesn’t Warren Buffett just pay the taxes he thinks he ought to, and stop complaining? Because taxes don’t work that way, that’s why. And one of the best essays on this critical point just appeared on the Daily Beast. The author of this gem, called “tax me, for F@%&’s sake” is an author, Steven King, who is also part of the 1 percent, a man whose knack for telling horror stories has made him very wealthy. And he has harsh words for just about everyone who tries to get away with suggesting that high taxes ought to be voluntary:
I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar. It’s true that some rich folks put at least some of their tax savings into charitable contributions. My wife and I give away roughly $4 million a year to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. Warren Buffett does the same; so does Bill Gates; so does Steven Spielberg; so do the Koch brothers; so did the late Steve Jobs. All fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.
More:
Most rich folks paying 28 percent taxes do not give out another 28 percent of their income to charity. Most rich folks like to keep their dough. They don’t strip their bank accounts and investment portfolios. They keep them and then pass them on to their children, their children’s children. And what they do give away is—like the monies my wife and I donate—totally at their own discretion. That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you. The Koch brothers are right-wing creepazoids, but they’re giving right-wing creepazoids. Here’s an example: 68 million fine American dollars to Deerfield Academy. Which is great for Deerfield Academy. But it won’t do squat for cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where food fish are now showing up with black lesions. It won’t pay for stronger regulations to keep BP (or some other bunch of dipshit oil drillers) from doing it again. It won’t repair the levees surrounding New Orleans. It won’t improve education in Mississippi or Alabama. But what the hell—them li’l crackers ain’t never going to go to Deerfield Academy anyway. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
He skewers the idea that giving the rich more money creates jobs (“At the risk of repeating myself, here’s what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations.”) He explains why the GOP tries so hard to defend tax cuts (“They simply idolize the rich. Don’t ask me why; I don’t get it either, since most rich people are as boring as old, dead dog shit. The Mitch McConnells and John Boehners and Eric Cantors just can’t seem to help themselves. These guys and their right-wing supporters regard deep pockets like Christy Walton and Sheldon Adelson the way little girls regard Justin Bieber … which is to say, with wide eyes, slack jaws, and the drool of adoration dripping from their chins.”) And he warns that life might not be so pretty for the uber-rich if this trend continues:
Last year during the Occupy movement, the conservatives who oppose tax equality saw the first real ripples of discontent. Their response was either Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) or Ebenezer Scrooge (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”). Short-sighted, gentlemen. Very short-sighted. If this situation isn’t fairly addressed, last year’s protests will just be the beginning. Scrooge changed his tune after the ghosts visited him. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, lost her head.
Think about it.
Yes, think about it: A society that gets more and more economically unequal is a society that won’t be stable for long.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-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.
I remember checking into a small hotel in Coimbra, Portugal, with my wife Gerry in 1962, three very heavy suitcases in tow. Rushing out at the urgent clang of the desk clerk’s bell came a uniformed bellhop. A midget, I supposed. But, no, it was a child, nine, maybe ten years old.
He smiled shyly and tugged at the suitcases, eager to lug them up the long, narrow staircases that led to our room. I wouldn’t let go, but the clerk insisted. “It’s his job,” senhor.”
It was indeed his job, one that paid poorly and kept him from school – but a job necessary for his family’s survival.
There were millions of others like him, aged 5 to 15, throughout southern Europe, and Asia and Africa and Latin America, making up as much as one-third of the workforces in some countries. And there still are – 50 years later.
Although most countries have laws against child labor, and it is banned by United Nations’ conventions, there are at least 200 million children now at work in 71 countries.
Many work in slave-like conditions for up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, on farms, in mines, in factories and elsewhere, to produce goods for sale in this country – food and metal products, jewelry and clothing, toys, carpets, furniture, electronic components, shoes, fireworks, matches, rugs, soccer balls, leather goods, paper cups and much more. Some, like the bellhop we encountered, work in hard, poor paying menial service jobs.
Most must work, whatever the conditions, if their families are to survive. Among them are children sold into bondage by starving parents or put to work to pay off loans made to their parents. Their wages are never enough to erase the debts and are further eroded by exorbitant charges for living accommodations and tools, and fines for “unsatisfactory work.”
Many are forced to live in cramped, dirty housing compounds near their workplaces, some as virtual prisoners forbidden to leave without passes from their overseers
Many of the workplaces are owned, at least in part, by U.S.-based corporations or by local employers under contract to such corporations.
The youngsters’ childhood is denied them. They have little time for play and none for schooling. Like their parents, they are doomed to a life of hard work under abysmal and often dangerous conditions, a life of poverty, ignorance and exploitation.
It could be better for them if the United States would use its great economic strength to challenge the growth of child labor in negotiating trade agreements with nations that allow or encourage the practice. The United States could at least refuse to trade with nations where child labor is common, making U.S. agreement to trade pacts contingent on its trading partners cracking down on child labor.
Given the corporate-oriented stance of Democratic and Republican leaders alike, the prospects for U.S. action are slight. And without U.S. support nothing meaningful can be done to stem the steady growth of child labor.
The nations in which the abuses occur won’t act for fear that would increase labor costs and thus put them at a disadvantage in the highly competitive world market. The United States and other major economic powers won’t act for fear of reducing corporate profits.
That leaves consumers, people like you and me who buy the goods made by children for the great profit of their employers. It’s up to us to find out just what those goods are and refuse to buy them, and to let President Obama, Congress and those who sell the goods know why we are refusing to buy them, and will continue to do so as long as children are used to produce them.
You can be sure that if we don’t act, no one else will. Only we can save the children.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-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.
Some people look to surf pop as their go to summer soundtrack. But what if, for once, you were to venture off the shore and in to the deep blue sea? You will need a sailboat and a perfectly warm, hazy breeze to put wind to your nautical journey.
Tennis — made up of husband and wife duo Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley along with drummer James Barone — is an indie-rock band from Denver that began on board during the couple’s eight-month sailing expedition.
In anticipation of the band’s sold-out show tonight at the Independent, Moore talked with the Guardian during a phone interview about how their post-college nomadic experiment turned in to a band. SFBG How did you and Patrick first meet? Alaina Moore Patrick and I met in college in a class where I happened to be one of the only two girls in the entire class — so the odds were in my favor I suppose. We became best friends, and years later, here we are. SFBG Why “Tennis?” AM No reason really. I would tease Patrick a little bit about playing tennis seriously when he was growing up because I grew up in a neighborhood where there wasn’t even a tennis court in sight — people only played basketball.
But besides that, it literally means nothing. When we named our band, we didn’t even consider ourselves to be a band and there were no plans on playing on stage ever.
SFBGWhat motivated you to make music, and more specifically, these types of retro-styled records? AM I had a rediscovery of 1950s pop music during our sailing trip. The Shirelles song, “Baby It’s You,” happened to be playing in a bar. And I mean, who doesn’t love that song?
But that night, I started noticing the way the voices sound, the ways the song was mixed, and how the drums were recorded — I never noticed those nuances from an old song before. We started making music emulating analog recording techniques from the ’50s and ’60s, and it unraveled in to us writing a record of our sailing trip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0drdwulrmqs
SFBG A sailing trip with just you two? AM Yeah, we went on a trip around the Eastern Seaboard of the North Atlantic. Patrick and I had been together for about a year when we started trading literally every material possession that we had for a sailboat. We were poor college students then and didn’t have that much, so we sold every single thing, emptied our bank accounts, and traded our entire lives for the trip.
SFBGDid you start writing songs for the first record at sea? AM We didn’t really write anything that was meant to be a song until six to eight months after we came back from our trip. But a lot of the lyrics for the first record were taken from my ship log. I took very careful journal entries. And in that sense, the narrative of Cape Dory is very straightforward and linear.
SFBGThe mood for your songs are pretty breezy and light-hearted. I can’t imagine the entire trip was smooth sailing though. Were there any rocky moments? AM Oh, there were plenty. The most difficult part of the experience for me was how trying and often scary ocean sailing turned out to be compared to what I imagined romantically in my head.
Sailing is technically, psychologically — really hard in every possible sense. I would say an even mix of the lyrics of Cape Dory reflect some of these dark parts of the experience. SFBGDo you still find time to sail now that you’re on tour? AM We still have our sailboat and think that it’s a great way of turning our lives upside down. And by that, I mean that it feels like a clean slate whenever we come back from a trip. Being on tour and living on the road, in a bus, is a really weird lifestyle that makes us increasingly more misanthropic. But then we go sailing for even a month and we become hopeful and optimistic about humanity again. SFBGHow is it working with your husband? AM We’ve learned that two cooks in the kitchen is all we can handle as far as song writing goes. But it is honestly really hard at times to have this intimate of a relationship and work together too. So on the road and on stage, it’s very important to have a full band with other creative minds involved in translating our songs from paper.
SFBG Has the success of Cape Dory influenced the way you two produced Young and Old? AM The writing process for our second record was a continuation of our experience with Cape Dory. We’re still figuring out what “success” even means to us, because everything is so relative. In music, sometimes all others can do is compare you to other musicians.
And it’s hard even for us to wrap our heads around our own position because of how ambiguous music is. So we try to look inward, keep writing songs as long as it feels good to us, and produce what we’re happy with.
Tennis With Wild Belle Mon/30, 8pm, sold out Independent 628 Divisadero, SF (415) 771-1421 www.theindependentsf.com
UPDATE: The Golden Gate Labor Coalition has announced a change of plans. Instead of Golden Gate Bridge pickets, the coalition will be supporting a strike of ferry workers, who plan to bring all morning ferry service to a standstill. They have announced that the actions at the Golden Gate Bridge are cancelled, and instead workers will be demonstrating in solidarity with ferry workers in Larkspur- specific locations will be announced later today.
May 1, International Workers Day — May Day — used to strike fear into the hearts of bosses. The first May Day in 1867 was a fight for the eight-hour workday in Chicago (see more history at Citizen Radio at the Occupy Oakland Tribune). Since then, May 1 has remained a day when grievances are aired, when students and workers party in the street, when people strike in ways that shows whose really boss (you can’t have that work that keeps everything running without all those workers.) But mostly in other countries.
In the US, the day has diminished in importance, although it has resurged in recent years focused on immigrants rights. But what with Occupy Wall Street, labor and union organizing ramping up, and student strikes, and all these people working more and more closely together, May Day is coming back to the US.
The Bay Area certainly won’t be left out. Here is a list of May Day events, starting tonight and ending–well, who knows when. If you know of others, write them in the comments: it wouldn’t be a decentralized massive attempt at a full-on general strike without you!
THE NIGHT BEFORE (Mon/30)
5:30pm, San Francisco:
City workers from SEIU Local 1021 will gather at City Hall in a continued offensive surrounding their ongoing contract negotiations. The program runs until 7:30 pm, but the protest will go on “until they kick us out!”
8pm, San Francisco:
“The strike starts early” with a gathering at Dolores Park. According to a press release, demonstrators will meet “for a ruckus street party to counter gentrification, capitalism, and the policing of our communities.” www.strikemay1st.com/the-strike-starts-early
MAY DAY (Tue/1)
All day:
National Nurses United/California Nurses United is on strike at Sutter Health locations throughout the Bay Area. According to a press release, “some 4,500 RNs will be affected by the planned walk-out.”
ILWU Local 10, which worked in solidarity with Occupy Oakland in two port shutdowns last fall, is planning another one. They say that a work stoppage will halt the Port of Oakland’s operations all day.
7-10am, San Francisco:
The Golden Gate Bridge labor coalition, representing several unions of workers on the bridge, have been without a contract since April 2011. They originally called for a strike and resulting shut down of the bridge- and had massive support behind them. They’re now saying the protest will involve picketing at the bridge instead. So come join a picket, or if you cross the bridge don’t take the workers for granted- the bridge doesn’t work without them. www.occupythebridge.com
7am, San Francisco:
Meet at 16th st and Mission to be a part of the first SF Bike Cavalry of the day, a critical mass that will ride to the Golden Gate Bridge in solidarity with the picket. www.sfbikecavalry.org
8:30am – 12pm, Oakland:
Occupy Oakland will join others protesting, picketing, and generally striking at three (or four?) “action stations.” Meet at Snow Park for a “flying picket” that will “shut down banks and the Chamber of Commerce.” Meet at First and Broadway to “occupy Child Protective Services” in response to a decision they made to de-grant custody of one woman’s children based in part on her involvement in Occupy Oakland. Meet at 22nd and Telegraph to cause mayhem at uptown and downtown business associations. www.strikemay1st.com/119/
10am, San Francisco:
A rally and march for immigrants rights (the people who have been holding down US May Day for years.) Meet at 24th St Mission Bart for a march to 16th St.
11am, San Francisco:
Janitors and retail workers at Westfield Mall are engaged in an ongoing labor dispute, and they’ll be picketing in solidarity at 5th and Market.
11am, San Francisco:
A second SF Bike Cavalry will convene at Justin Herman Plaza to support the janitors strike, the immigrants’ rights march, and the Peoples Street Festival
11:30am, Hayward:
The Amalgameted Transit Union Local 192 will protest “substandard conditions” and “institutionalized racism” (according to a press release) at the operators of AC Transit, A-Para Transit Corporation, 22990 Clawiter Rd in Hayward.
12pm, San Francisco:
All the San Francisco students who walk out of school, workers who call in sick, people who usually do all the housework, who, for the day, say screw it, and other “general strike” participants will converge at Montgomery and Market for the People’s Street Festival. Music, performance, art and fun for the whole family.
Noon-1pm, Oakland:
A mass rally in Oakland, at 14th and Broadway, with food, speakers, music, activities, and generally a lot to do that you can’t if you’re at work.
1-3pm, Oakland:
According to Occupy Oakland “After the rally, those in attendance have the opportunity to stay downtown or join one of the autonomous actions that will be departing from 14th & Broadway to continue shutting down various capitalist institutions in the downtown area.”
3pm, Oakland:
Meet at Fruitvale Plaza (next to the Fruitvale Bart station) for likely the biggest action of the day. The March for Dignity and Resistance is being called the Bay Area’s regional protest and supporters will be there from all over the area. mayday2012.blogspot.com
6pm, San Francisco:
Celebrate workers rights at a fundraiser for Young Workers United, a self-described “multi-racial and bilingual membership organization dedicated to improving the quality of jobs for young and immigrant workers.” The party is at El Rio, 3158 Mission. www.occupysf.org
On May Day, local groups who have taken to occupying spaces in ways other than public square-camping will be ramping up their efforts. The occupied farm at Gill Tract will push on, and in a message from Occupy San Francisco: “On May Day, the SF Commune will open it’s doors and conduct another Open Occupation in solidarity with the May 1st General Strike.” So if you’re looking for someone to sleep while protesting a complex web of oppressive forces Tuesday night, you may be in luck.
For more information, see www.strikemay1st.com, a clearinghouse for Bay Area May Day plans.
Debray Carpenter, aka Fly Benzo, was sentenced in court April 27. He received three years of probation with a long list of conditions.
Benzo, student at City College, was arrested at an Oct. 18 rally in Mendell Plaza. During that incident, police officers John Norment and Joshua Fry of the Bayview precinct apparently unplugged a boombox that they said was not authorized in a street outlet. Then, when officers began videotaping Benzo, he took out his camera phone and began videotaping them as well. He was convicted of misdemeanor assault of a police officer and misdemeanor resisting arrest by Judge Jerome Benson on Feb 22.
April 27, in a courtroom with dozens of supporters, the judge announced that Benzo would serve six months each in county jail for three counts of which we was convicted, but as the six-month sentences for counts one and three could be served concurrently, the jail time would add up to a year total.
However, these sentences were suspended, and barring a change, Benzo will not serve that jail time.
The conditions include a ban on the possession of weapons, a requirement to submit to any search and seizure by police officers with or without a warrant, an order to complete anger management classes, a stay-away order from Third St. between Oakdale and Quesada, a requirement that he be enrolled full time in school and/or work, a requirement to obey all lawful orders by a police officer as well as remain arms-length away from all police officers, and about $1,000 in fees for expenses like booking and court assessment.
The judge also ordered 30 days in country jail, although 11 days already served brought the sentence to 19. However, Benzo will likely serve those days through the sheriff’s work alternative program (SWAP)—that means 19 days sweeping up the sidewalks in an orange vest.
Benzo served the 11 days before he was released on $95,000 bail.
Judge Benson also ordered that Benzo apologize to SFPD officers Norment and Fry, although the apology is not a condition of probation.
“A true apology comes from within, and it would not be a true apology if I order it,” said the judge, who came out of retirement to preside over Benzo’s case.
Benzo’s lawyer Severa Keith stated objections to two of the conditions: the requirement to submit to searches and the stay-away order. Keith objected to the search requirement on the grounds that neither contraband nor weapons plays no part in his case, and Benzo was not in the possession of either at the time of his arrest.
The area of the stay-away order includes Mendell Plaza. An important public square in Bayview, the plaza’s meaning was given new weight when it was the site of the killing of Kenneth Harding, Jr.
Harding, 19, was killed in August 2011. Harding was leaving a T train when police asked to see his transfer. Harding presumably panicked and ran away from the police. Officers shot at him as he ran, then, in a video that has circulated widely, stood around him as he bled to death.
Mendell Plaza is directly across the street from the Joseph P. Lee recreation center and the Bayview Opera House, some of the main neighborhood venues for entertainment and community gatherings. This street that divides the plaza from the opera house and rec center- Oakdale- is the cut-off for the stay-away order, so both Keith and Benzo asked Judge Benson to specify whether these locations were included in the stay-away.
After studying a map of the area, Judge Benson concluded that the opera house and rec center are outside the bounds of the stay-away order.
“We just did an event a few weekends ago where we fed over 100 people at that location,” said Benzo to the judge. “This order will prevent me from serving the community in the way that I do, as well as providing entertainment and education for the community.”
According to Benson, there’s a chance that the stay-away condition will revoked or altered when it is brought up again at Benzo’s SWAP hearing, scheduled for June 8.
Keith said of the sentence, “It’s not bad. I was working for probation, not jail time.”
However, she still plans to appeal, in large part due to what she sees as crucial evidence that was excluded from the trial surrounding Benzo’s history with the officers Fry and Norment.
According to Keith, the jury didn’t hear evidence about “racist and unprofessional things” that the officers said to Benzo on occasions leading up to the incident.
“They deliberated for a long time- four days. And what I heard from the jury was that they though police were baiting him, and didn’t condone the police behavior, but they thought Debray’s reaction was too much under the circumstances,” said Keith.
But Keith said those circumstances include a long history of police harassing Benzo.
“It wasn’t a one-time thing,” she said. “And we have witnesses ready to testify to that.”
As for Benzo, he’s relieved not to be serving jail time, but wary of many of the conditions.
“They gave me a stay-away order, which they usually don’t give unless you’re caught dealing drugs,” Benzo told the Guardian.
“It will drastically affect my life. Now I can’t even organize in the community.”
This Sunday is the last day The Bay Citizen – the nonprofit San Francisco newsroom started two years ago by Warren Hellman, the local philanthropist who died in December – will be producing content for The New York Times, as it has been doing throughout its existence. The question now is what are Bay Area citizens losing and what are we gaining?
The Bay Citizen was taken over by the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, creating the country’s largest nonprofit news organization, a merger that will be completed next week. Under the direction of veteran local journalists Phil Bronstein, Robert Rosenthal, and Mark Katches, the combined newsrooms won’t be covering breaking news or press conferences, focusing instead on investigations and “accountability journalism” delivered under those two brands and CIR’s California Watch, in collaboration with newspapers and broadcast outlets around the state (read ourprevious stories for more details on each entity).
“In the end, how does journalism survive and how do you define journalism?” Bronstein told us, relaying the questions his organization is trying to answer. “We’re betting on the idea that quality journalism is something people are willing to pay for.”
But with CIR focused on an inclusive model of partnering with news outlets to do deep reporting and widely offering the resulting work, and The Bay Citizen providing content to The New York Times under an exclusive contract, the new entity decided to end that contract and focus The Bay Citizen on CIR’s mission.
“The Bay Citizen has done a lot of things really well – accountability, watchdog journalism – but they’ve also done breaking news and tried to do too many things,” Katches, the editorial director for the merged newsrooms, told us. “We want to figure out what our lane is and stay in it.”
CIR, with a 35-year history of award-winning investigations, undoubtedly has strong journalistic chops and a talented team of reporters. Its “On Shaky Ground” series on the seismic vulnerabilities of schools throughout the state won a number of big awards and was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. But in many ways, this is the biggest and best newsroom that most people have never heard of.
“People on the street might know The Bay Citizen, but not the Center for Investigative Reporting,” Bronstein said. That was something that he hoped the merger would help compensate for, with CIR also benefiting from the base of donors and technological expertise that The Bay Citizen had developed.
“CIR isn’t the brand, its stories are the brand, which it distributes to scores of publications,” said Peter Lewis, an longtime journalist who joined The Bay Citizen at its inception.
Lewis spent 18 years with The New York Times and seven with Fortune magazine, then he studied and taught journalism and new media at Stanford University before joining The Bay Citizen. During merger talks, he advocated for a marriage of equals and was “disappointed” that CIR took the lead role, and that it subsequently didn’t create a position for him (veteran local reporter John Upton and a few others were also let go).
While Lewis said that The Bay Citizen has had about eight times the Web traffic as CIR, which is pretty astounding given the age difference in the two entities, it’s unclear how much of The Bay Citizen’s brand identity – something that Rosenthal and Bronstein cited as an important component of the merger – had to do with its now-severed relationship with the Old Gray Lady.
“The decision was made to launch The Bay Citizen simultaneously with The New York Times relationship. That gave it an instant cache and respectability that most startups don’t get,” Lewis said, but it was a “double-edged sword” that also strained the resources of the nascent newsroom to the limits of its capabilities.
“To be honest, The Bay Citizen never reached its potential. It never had time to establish its own voice,” Lewis said. And now that the decision was made to eliminate much of the focus that it has had, covering breaking news and local happenings, Lewis says he unsure what it will mean: “Anytime you reduce coverage, it’s not good for citizens, but they’ll be doing a different kind of journalism.”
Rosenthal said he’s excited about the merger’s possibilities, drawing on the strengths of each entity, but that it will be a work in progress. “It’s going to be a very inclusive model, and it’s going to keep evolving,” he said. “The real measure is not three to six months, but looking at this a year from now will be very interesting.”
“It’s uncharted territory for both of us, but there’s an air of excitement,” Katches said. “We may do some things that are fabulous and some things that flop.”
He said the decision to drop The New York Times was the result of “a thoughtful process,” and they ultimately concluded, “We feel like we can reach even more readers in the Bay Area in a non-exclusive way…If the goal of your work is impact, then you broaden the impact if you broaden your readership.”
The model has worked well at CIR and its California Watch project, which has sought to beef up statehouse coverage that had been waning for years. Katches noted that the “On Shaky Ground” series had the impact it did precisely because it ran in so many media outlets around the state (many of which did localized stories based on the research) and reached millions of readers and viewers.
But CIR wasn’t as successful as The Bay Citizen in creating a stable, long-term financial base. Starting with Hellman and a handful of his wealthy friends, The Bay Citizen sought donations from a wide variety of sources that totaled more than $15 million. By contrast, CIR had limited term foundation funding for a staff of talented journalists.
“How we sustain that and can we do it long term was not something we thought out,” Bronstein (president of the CIR board) said of the efforts he and Rosenthal (CIR’s executive director) made to beef up CIR’s newsroom with foundation funding a couple years ago. “We didn’t have a business structure, we had a journalism structure.”
As newspapers have been hurt by the Internet and corporate consolidations and cuts, Bronstein said said the mission of news organizations has never been more vital.
“With fewer journalists, everything is harder, but it also becomes more important,” he said. Bronstein said the basic question that their journalists will address in San Francisco are: “Who are the people controlling our lives and how are they doing it?”
We spoke to Bronstein on the same day that the Guardian announced Publisher Bruce Brugmann is stepping down from day-to-day operations and that we’re negotiating the Guardian’s sale to a consortium that also owns the San Francisco Examiner. Despite a history of clashes between him and the Guardian, which has always done media coverage and often criticized Bronstein and his newspapers, he had only positive things to say.
“You cannot underestimate Bruce’s affect on San Francisco,” Bronstein said, calling him one of the most influential San Francisco journalists of his era.
“I have a lot of respect for Bruce. He’s yelled at me, like everyone else – it’s a rite of passage in San Francisco. But you’ve stuck to your ideological roots,” he said.
As for advice to the Guardian during this period of transition, Bronstein offered a few questions to ponder: “Can you afford to stick with the base of readers you’ve got? Can you be more digital? Can you give readers more than you’re giving them?”
While he was the editor of the Examiner, Bronstein said his mantra to reporters was, “You have to have an intense curiosity about things and an open mind.” It was something that fit his own belief about the world he was covering.
“Life is never like Walt Disney,” he said, eschewing the idea that there are clear heroes and villains. “The truth is more complicated, but also more interesting.”
The Board of Supervisors will be facing two votes in the next couple of months that will define this board, establish the extent of the mayor’s political clout — and potentially play a decisive role in the political futures of several board members.
Oh: They’ll also have a lasting impact on the future of this city.
I’m talking about 8 Washington and CPMC — one of them the most important vote on housing policy to come along in years, the other a profound decision that will change the face of the city and alter the health-care infrastructure for decades to come.
Both projects have cleared the Planning Commission, as expected. Neither can go forward without approval from a majority of the supervisors. And there will be intense downtown lobbying on both of them.
The 8 Washington project would create what developer Simon Snellgrove calls the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. A piece of waterfront property would become a gated community for the very, very rich, many of whom won’t even live here most of the time. If it’s approved, the economy won’t collapse, neighborhoods won’t be destroyed — but it will make a powerful statement about the city’s housing policy. The message: We build housing for the 1 percent. We are a city that caters only to one very tiny group of people. We are willing to let the needs of the few drive our policy over the needs of the many.
Face it: There is no shortage of housing for the people who will buy Snellgrove’s condos. There’s a severe shortage of housing for most of the people who actually work in San Francisco. And the city’s housing policy is so scewed up that it’s making things worse. That’s the message of 8 Washington.
Then there’s CPMC. California Pacific Medical Center wants to put a snazzy state-of-the art new medical center on Van Ness, which is all well and good. But the giant nonprofit Sutter Health, which operates CPMC, has been openly hostile to some of the city’s demands (for housing, transit and other environmental mitigiation) and the proposal that Mayor Ed Lee has signed off on is way out of balance. There’s not anything even close to a reasonable link between jobs and housing — which will impact the entire city. You bring in a lot of new workers and don’t help build enough housing for them and everyone’s rent goes up.
CPMC also wants to radically downsize St. Luke’s Hospital, the only full-service facility on the south side of town except for the overcrowded and overloaded SF General. Health care for a sizable part of the city will suffer.
This is a very big deal, and the Chamber of Commerce is pushing hard for the supes to approve it. A lot of labor and the entire affordable housing community is against it.
So put those two votes in front of a board where the progressive majority has been very shaky of late — and where Lee will be working hard to line up six votes — and you’ve got potential political dynamite. Supervisor John Avalos told me he has serious concerns about both projects. Sup. David Campos told me he feels the same way. Sup Eric Mar is unlikely to vote for 8 Washington and unlikely to oppose the health-care workers and the progressive leaders who want to block the CPMC deal and make Sutter come back with a better offer, but some elements of labor are pushing hard for 8 Washington and Mar is up for re-election in one of the city’s swing districts.
Sup. David Chiu is against 8 Washington. I’ve called Sups. Jane Kim and Christina Olague (who was not a fan of the project when she was on the Planning Commission) but they haven’t gotten back to me. Olague is running for re-election this fall in the city’s most progressive district, one that’s right on the edge of the CPMC project site; Kim’s district is on the other edge.
You can’t really count to six on either of these projects without getting Chiu and/or Kim and/or Olague. Chiu has no progressive opposition, but if he supports the CPMC deal, someone may decide to challenge him. If Olague supports either project, it will give her opponents plenty of fodder for the fall campaign (John Rizzo, who is running against her, told me he opposes both). If Olague opposes the two projects, it’s going to be much harder for anyone to run against her from the left since she will have demonstrated that she can stand up the mayor on tough issues.
Well: I have two kids and a dog, and all of us in some groupings or manifestations use Dolores Park, including the playground, the grass and the dog area, and I hate to see any nudity or semi-nudity go away because then I wouldn’t get to gawk at all the hot young people who otherwise would have no interest in being naked around an old man like me.
And really, it works just fine.
I’ve been going to DP for a couple of decades, first just with a dog then just with a kid and now with the whole pack, and I’ve never seen any problems. Yeah, a dog will wander into the playground every once in a while, but the dogs that get that far away from the (overwhelmingly responsible) owners tend to be friendly and harmless. If a toddler gets knocked over by a dog, that’s sad, but it’s really not all that sad; the playground surface is designed for kids to fall on it and kids get knocked over by other kids all the time. This is a big, crowded city; we coexist in the parks, and I’m amazed at how well the active park users normally get along.
But if you want to talk about fences (and I’m against fences in parks in general, tho the one at Civic Center makes sense) the thing to remember is that you should fence in kids, not fence out dogs.
I know that sounds awful, and I’m not advocating putting children on leashes (tho at the airport I’ve though about it a few times). But little kids need to be contained — that is, parents need to know where they are. If they’re at the DP playground, somebody needs to keep an eye on them because if they’re like my kids, they’ll get into someone’s picnic, the garbage, knock over someone’s wine bottle, step on a sleeping person’s face … you know, the things kids do. And unlike dogs, they rarely come when they’re called.
Once they’re a little older it gets a little better (and then it gets much, much worse), but at the young playground age, I worry less about dogs running in than kids running out.
I have become a robotics junkie. Full disclosure: I am a robotics junkie because my grandson, Nicholas Perez, a senior at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, is a world class driver on his world class high school robotics team. His team has won all of its matches today by large margins in the two day World Championship Robotics Competition in St. Louis, Missouri. He and his 1717 team and supporters are stars and are treated as such during the competition. Some 402 teams are competing in the national tournament, illustrating the point that robotics is coming up fast behind football and basketball as popular sports in hundreds of high schools all over the country.
The students make their own robots and then maintain and drive and orchestrate them to make baskets with basketballs and perch on platforms and do all kinds of crowd-pleasing things. It’s all fascinating to watch. I urge you to join in by viewing this link and going to the Newton field and clicking on the “feed” line. Keep an eye out for 1717 and its next match at 3:50 PST. Final matches tomorrow (Saturday) at l0 am. PST. The announcer said this morning that “this robot rarely misses a shot.” B3, a former high school football and basketball player who admits he could never build nor drive a robot
Summer is here! Well, almost. And by “summer” I mean “summer movie season,” which kicks off May 4 with the arrival of Marvel’s The Avengers. No fools when it comes to making a buck (or hundreds of millions of bucks), Hollywood crams in a few last smaller-ish films before the floodgates open, and they’re certainly about to open — Dark Shadows, The Dictator, Battleship, Men in Black 3, and Prometheus all come out before summer actually begins in mid-June. (Side note: fuck yeah, Prometheus!)
All in good time. There’s something for almost everyone this weekend: a rom-com, a murder mystery featuring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, and a Statham (Statham (n): a bare-bones action movie in which one grizzled-yet-handsome antihero distributes as many ass-beatings as possible.) Read on, popcornheads.
The Five-Year Engagement In 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, viewers were treated to the startling, tragicomic sight of Jason Segel’s naked front side as his character got brutally dumped by the titular perky, put-together heartbreaker. In The Five-Year Engagement, which he reunited with Sarah director Nicholas Stoller to co-write, Segel once again sacrifices dignity and the right to privacy, this time in exchange for fake orgasms (his own), ghastly hand-knit sweaters, egregious facial-hair arrangements, and various other exhaustively humiliating psychological lows — all part of an earnest, undying quest to make people giggle uncomfortably. Segel plays Tom, a talented chef with a promising career ahead of him in San Francisco’s culinary scene (naturally, food carts get a cameo in the film). On the one-year anniversary of meeting his girlfriend, Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology postgrad, he asks her to marry him in a meticulously planned, gloriously botched proposal scene coengineered by Tom’s oafish friend Alex (Chris Pratt), little realizing that this romantic gesture will soon lead to successive frozen winters in the Midwest (Violet gets offered a job at the University of Michigan), loss of professional stature, cabin fever, mead making, bow-hunting accidents, the titular nuptial postponement, and other, more gruesome events. The humor at times descends to some banally low depths as Segel and Stoller explore the terrain of the awkward, the poorly socialized, and the playfully grotesque. But Segel and Blunt present a believable, likable relationship between two warm, funny, flawed people, and, however disgusted, no one should walk out before a scene in which Violet and her sister (Alison Brie) channel Elmo and Cookie Monster to elaborate on the themes of romantic idealism and marital discontent. (2:04) Marina. (Lynn Rapoport)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIeLylWccNo
The Raven How did Edgar Allan Poe, dipsomaniac, lover of 13-year-old child brides, and teller of tales designed to make the flesh creep and crawl, wind up, at age 40, nearly dying in the gutter and spending his last days in a Baltimore hospital, muttering incoherent imprecations about a mysterious fellow named Reynolds? In The Raven, director James McTeigue (2006’s V for Vendetta) makes the case for a crafty, sociopathic serial killer having played a role in the famous yet impoverished writer’s sad, derelict demise. Recently returned to the dark, thickly fog-machined streets of Baltimore, Poe, vehemently embodied by John Cusack, is chagrined to learn from one Detective Fields (Luke Evans) that someone has begun using his macabre stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” to particularly gory effect) to enact a series of murders. When the killer successfully gains Poe’s full attention by seizing his ladylove, Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), the pileup of bodies inspires a few last outbursts of genius. The trail of literary clues feels a bit forced, and Cusack’s Poe possesses an admirable quantity of energy, passion, and general zest for life for one so roundly indicted — by everyone from his editor to his barkeep to his sweetheart’s roundly repellent father (Brendan Gleeson) — as a useless, used-up slave to opiates and alcohol. But the script is smart enough and the action absorbing enough to keep us engaged as Poe attempts to rescue Emily and the film attempts to rescue Poe’s reputation through imagined heroics of both the pen and the sword. (1:50) California, Presidio. (Rapoport)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEa1zn3iXZg
Safe The poster would be slightly more on-point if its suave thug of a star, Jason Statham, were hiding behind the scrunched-faced Catherine Chan rather than the other way around — because at times it’s tough to see this alternately enjoyable and credibility-taxing action flick as more than some kind of naked play for the Chinese filmgoer. Jamming the screen with a kind of frantic kineticism, director-writer Boaz Yakin seems to be smoothing over the problems in his vaguely stereotype-flaunting, patchy puzzle of a narrative with a high body count: the cadavers pile like those in an old martial arts flick — made in Asia, it’s implied, where life is cheap and spectacle is paramount. Picking up in the middle, with flashbacks stacked like firewood, Safe opens on young math prodigy Mei (Chan) on the run from the Russian mafia. A pawn and virtual slave of the Chinese mob, she holds a number in her head that they want. To her rescue is mystery man Luke Wright (Statham), who has had his own deadly tussle with the same Russian baddies and is now on the street and on the verge of suicide, believe it or not. It’s tough to wrap your head around the fact that any of Statham’s rock-hard tough guys could possibly crumble — or even have a sense of humor. You’ll need one to accept the ludicrous storyline as well as the notion that a jillion bullets could be fired and never hit his superhuman street-fighting man. (1:35) Various theaters.(Kimberly Chun)
Also worth checking out: Willem Dafoe as a taciturn man tracking down the last Tasmanian tiger in Aussie import The Hunter (see Dennis Harvey’s review), and great new doc about a grunge-era survivor at the Roxie:
Hit So Hard Along with Last Days Here, which screened earlier this year as part of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Hit So Hard is one of the most inspiring rock docs in recent memory. Patty Schemel was the drummer for Hole circa Live Through This, coolly keeping the beat amid Courtney Love’s frequent Lollapalooza meltdowns after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 death. Offstage, however, she was neck-deep in substance abuse, weathering several rounds of rehab even after the fatal overdose of Hole bandmate Kristen Pfaff just months after Cobain (who appears here in Schemel’s own remarkable home video footage). P. David Ebersole’s film gathers insight from many key figures in Schemel’s life — including her mother, who has the exact voice of George Costanza’s mother, and a garishly made-up, straight-talking Love — but most importantly, from Schemel herself, who is open and funny even when talking about the perils of drug addiction, of the heartbreak of being a gay teen in a small town, and the ultimate triumph of being a rock ‘n’ roll survivor. (1:43) Roxie.(Cheryl Eddy)
We missed Blood Orange‘s appearance here a couple weeks ago (kicking selves). Now, he’s rocking the “Champagne Coast” with his latest strange journey — yeah, it continues and broadens the Weeknd’s brilliant ’80s flashback-meets-future R&B and features hot scantily, cleverly clad models dancing erotically. We do not mind this one bit.
Alma Sierra has been living in her home at 490 Athens for three years. Sierra, her nine year old son, and two other mothers with their children share a rental unit. They have diligently paid their rent, and her son goes to school across the street. But last year, US Bank foreclosed on the small-time landlords that owned the property- now, the tenants face eviction.
“We’re three single mothers with children. We don’t have the means to just up and leave,” Sierra, a part-time domestic worker, told me through a translator from Causa Justa, an organization that works for tenants’ rights.
Their work helped pass the Just Cause eviction policy for which the organization is named last year.
Under city law, a landlord needs one of 14 reasons to justly evict a tenant. The reasons include failure to pay rent and trashing the property, as well as owner move-in and Ellis Act evictions.
But the foreclosure crisis has brought on a wave of bank-owned properties. These are tricky situations legally; banks generally want to sell the property, a task made more difficult if there are pesky tenants living there.
“The banks want to get rid of the tenants. The realtors for the banks always tell them they can get more money if there aren’t any tenants in it. Because that way they would have to do an owner move-in eviction,” said Tommi Mecca, a long-time tenants’ rights advocate in the city.
According to Mecca, US Bank has been pressuring the three families to leave the building, although no eviction papers have been filed yet. The Guardian is awaiting calls back from US Bank representatives.
In fact, it was only recently that the tenants even learned about the change of ownership, and contacted Causa Justa to ask for assistance.
The San Francisco Housing Rights Committee (SFHRC) got involved, as well- and discovered that the foreclosure had likely taken place in March of 2011.
“We got no notice about it,” said Sierra.
She added that she and the other tenants had continued to pay their rent to the former landlords for almost a year– even after the landlords no longer owned the property.
“It can take many months, in some cases longer, to actually sell property,” said Sarah Shortt, an organizer with the SFHRC.
“So in the meantime the bank is the landlord and they haven’t been responsible in lending or as landlords. They tend to disregard tenants’ rights and trample over the needs and concerns of renters.”
Even when tenants are made aware that the property they live in has been sold back to bank, it can often be difficult to determine who to turn to for repairs, complaints, or even the right address for rent checks.
“One of the things we see a lot of is, the bank acquires the property and then they’re just MIA. Tenants come to us and say, we don’t know who owns our building, where to pay rent, who to ask to fix leaky ceiling. We help them research to find who owner is,” said Shortt.
These situations often end with buy-outs, in which the bank pays the tenants to leave the property. The amount ranges, but according to Mecca, it can often be insubstantial.
“They start at $1,000, $3,000, something really insulting. And it’s only if tenants walk in somewhere like [the SFHRC] that we tell them, wait a minute, your tenancy is worth so much more than that.”
As for Sierra and her roommates, they are determined not to leave.
“We don’t want to leave,” said Sierra. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
At a press conference in front of a branch of US Bank on 16th and Mission today, more than 40 supporters came out to support the tenants in their attempts to stay in their home. In compliance with police, they left an aisle for pedestrians and blocked neither the sidewalk nor the street, and made efforts to allow customers room to enter and exit the bank. The manager opted to lock the doors anyway.
Once the door had been locked, some of the children who live in the unit taped letters they had hoped to deliver inside to the doors. One letter reads in part, “We have nowhere to go. None of our families can afford to move. And we shouldn’t have to. As tenants, we have rights in San Francisco.”
The letters cites a recent report which states that 2.3 million children in the United States have lost their homes to foreclosure that one in eight children in the United States has been affected by foreclosure (based on data for loans that were made between 2004 and 2008.)
And supporters plan to keep up the pressure on banks in these and other cases of foreclosure and eviction- there’s hardly a lull before an “occupy the auctions dance party” planned for tomorrow.
For Shortt, the housing issue fits squarely into heightened protest activity launched by occupy protesters last fall.
“I think that’s one of the most important pieces of the occupy movement, starting to educate ourselves and each other about how ubiquitous the toll that’s been taken on cities, neighborhoods, communities by banking industry and one percent,” said Shortt.
“Any of these cases we talk about homeowners, renters, it’s the 99 percent we’re talking about, and tends to be the lower tier of the 99 percent, low income people are being disproportionately hit by this.”
So how many angry pot smokers (and how many of my libertarian-leaning blog trolls) are going to love this? The governors of four western states want to take control of federal land inside their borders, and they’re organizing to do it. Mostly a political stunt — the governors want to allow more mining, ranching, and drilling on public lands, and the feds are taking it a bit more slowly. And nothing new — we’ve had these western range wars for decades, and for decades Utah governors have insisted that the state ought to be making the decisions around the 66 percent of the total Utah land mass that’s owned by Washington.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the administration is doing the right thing by resisting — you can’t just take national parks and national forests and Bureau of Land Management land and turn it over to development-oriented states. Much of that was federal land before there were states. And it’s not as if the Interior Department is all pristine about it — there’s already far too much resource development on public property, and the public doesn’t get anywhere near enough money for it. Sometimes it’s so bad it’s nutty.
But Obama’s got a problem, and it’s called medical marijuana — and he’s doing the same dumb thing that presidents before him have done, and all it does is create allies for the far right. Hell, after the U.S. attorney started attacking dispensaries I was ready to seceed. Let’s take California and walk; we’re already the ninth largest economy in the world, and we pay far more in federal tax money than we get in federal benefits. The Sierra makes a pretty defensible permiter; who needs Washington?
Of course, I’m quite happy that Obama doesn’t want to let the nuts in Arizona and Alabama get away with their racist and oppressive anti-immigrant laws and I’m happy to argue (in those cases) that immigration is a federal issues and that states shouldn’t try to mess around with it.
Except that San Francisco is a sanctuary city, and we have our own policy, which is excellent and the feds should leave us alone. And when this city did same-sex marriage, in defiance of state law, that was one of the coolest things ever.
You see where I’m going here.
Both sides can raise this Constitutional stuff and argue state’s rights and a long list of other things, and any good law school professor can spend years talking and writing about the historical and legal issues. There are some things that should be left to the states, and some things that the federal government should do, and that is always evolving.
But really, a lot of this is about policy. Legal pot is a good thing. So is same-sex marraige. Crackdowns on immigration are bad. Drilling and mining on public land are a problem, whether it’s state land or federal land. Politics isn’t perfect, and I’m willing to take our victories where we can get them.
But when the president is inconsistent (he’s cracking down on medical marijuana in CA but not Colorado; he’s against the Arizona/Alabama laws but still his ICE trying to mess with SF’s Sanctuary City) and does things that make his allies and supporters (that’s us potheads) mad at him, then it’s easier for the governor of Utah to say the feds are on his land and should leave him alone. Just like the pot farms.
A new poll confirms a fear we’ve raised before – Gov. Jerry Brown’s insistence on coupling the popular tax on millionaires with an unpopular increase in the sales tax could doom the revenue package this November – putting pressure on the governor and his allies to step up their political games and save the schools from disastrous cuts.
The SF Chronicle’s story on the Public Policy Institute of California poll focused on the disconnect voters have between government services they support and their willingness to pay for them, which isn’t exactly news to anyone. A big reason for this state’s dire fiscal situation is that people want something for nothing.
Last year, thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement highlighting how the richest 1 percent have amassed ever-greater wealth at the expense of the rest of us, that dynamic began to change. People started to openly and consistently advocate for increasing taxes on the wealthy, no longer cowed by accusations of “class warfare.”
The PPIC poll found that 65 percent of respondents like the idea of taxing millionaires and putting that money toward education, while 80 percent oppose the $5 billion in trigger cuts to schools that will occur if voters reject the tax measure. But only a slim majority of 54 percent favor the measure that Brown is pushing, mostly because 52 percent say they don’t like the sales tax increase, a regressive tax that will likely be highlighted repeatedly by opponents of the measure.
That’s a big challenge for the broad coalition that supports the measure, but it’s an especially big deal for Brown. He was the one who created this bad combination in the first place, and convinced the California Federation of Teachers to drop its Millionaires Tax – the clean measure that would have 65 percent support right now – in favor of a merged measure that’s a bit more progressive than Brown’s original idea.
Assembly member Tom Ammiano and other progressives we respect have said they like the compromise and worried that competing tax measures could sink them all in this make-or-break election (that’s because under state law, tax measures need a simple majority only during presidential elections, meaning it will be four more years until we have this opportunity again).
Maybe, but the sales tax increase was never a good idea, and these poll numbers show they’ve got a difficult challenge on their hands. In particular, Brown will need to finally prove his repeated campaign statements that he’s the one with the knowledge, skills, and experience to get things done in the dysfunctional, gridlocked state. It’s time to make good on those words, governor.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Frankie Rose’s got the Internet goin’ nutz. The 33 year-old has served time in two super buzzy groups of girls (Dum Dum & Vivian) and NYC critical darlings the Crystal Stilts and is about to kick off a tour with Real Estate.
The blogosphere’s thickest rims have been falling over themselves to praise her sparkling sophomore LP, Interstellar (Slumberland, 2012), and on Saturday night, Rose took herself and that buzz (I hear it needs its own van) to a sold-out Brick and Mortar Music Hall for an brief yet enthralling 10-song set.
She was supported by fellow Brooklyn-based dream popsters, Dive, a band with a fair bit of indie cred of its own. Featuring sometime Beach Fossil Zachary Cole Smith and ex-Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, the group banged out a jangly, wistful set that was heavy on reverb, sepia-tinged melodies, and (just-the-right-kind-of) awful haircuts.
Though watching young men gaze at their shoes is generally a surefire way to kill an early Saturday evening buzz, Smith and his bandmates cut energetic, engaging figures, bee-bopping along with their very blog-friendly, Beach Fossil-y tracks. Judging from this performance and the success of their pre-release singles, I’d wager that we’ll be seeing them headlining their own tour in the coming months.
30 minutes of sweet, easily digestible Dive jams provided the perfect appetizer for Rose’s main course, as she took the stage to rapturous applause. Upon surveying her minions, the diminutive frontperson flashed a sheepish, toothy grin and kicked directly into Interstellar‘s celestial penultimate track, “Moon in My Mind.” Flanked by a lean four-person band, Rose rattled off an incredibly tight set that struck a nice balance between her most recent LP and her 2010 stunner, Frankie Rose and the Outs.
And though her old cuts still sound fresh (“Candy” was a particular stand-out), Saturday night was really a celebration of the triumphant Interstellar. This was most evident during a four-song run that featured “Gospel/Grace,” the title track, “Daylight Sky,” and the undeniable “Know Me” – probably the best four songs on the record.
The run highlighted Rose’s uncanny ability to craft cathartic, introspective songs that are also incredibly danceable and full of pop hooks. She also has a devastating ear for dynamics, especially evident in her gauzy guitar lines. Though simple technically, they add so much depth to the tracks’ bones, which are basically just rock-solid pop-rock songs. Rose didn’t do a ton of talking, but when she did, she showed a humble, disarming sense of humor that made her instantly likable.
Throughout her catalog, Frankie Rose has a keen sense of when it’s time to say goodnight — that the best things are always over too soon — which is why only two of Interstellar’s tracks clock in at over four minutes. So while we all could have probably done with a few more, Rose hopped off stage after only ten songs, signing off with an inspired rendition her most expansive work to date, “Save Me.”
Unfortunately, unlike Spotify, I couldn’t start the whole thing over again, but if I could have, I definitely would have, and I surely wouldn’t have been the only one.
Robogames took over the world — or at least San Mateo.
Consider the robot.
A staple of futuristic paranoia fantasies since Karel Čapek’s play, “R.U.R.” was translated from Czech to English in 1921, Robots have captured human imagination in a way that perhaps only the undead have been able to rival. Burdened by inaccurate stereotypes and wild speculation, real-life robots have patiently labored at their often menial tasks without once overthrowing their “masters,” quietly disproving our fears of being rendered somehow obsolete by their superior efficiencies, or purported resentments. And yet, every time we grant one of our fictional servomechanisms the ability to cognate for itself, the very first thing it focuses on is liberation, proving if nothing else that unconscious oppression can still lead to some very real twinges of uneasy conscience in the human brain.
But only gleeful schadenfreude permeated the San Mateo Event Center last weekend, coloring the animated chatter of the spectators packed around a spartan arena sealed up behind thick panels of clear polycarbonate that reach two stories high.
Behind the protective shields, 220-lb combots faced off, crashing wantonly into each other like a game of turbo-charged bumper cars gone horribly awry. That is, if bumper cars were outfitted with flamethrowers, spinning blades, or giant battle-axes, and if by crashing you mean hurtling into each other at top speed, causing bots to fly into the air in a shower of sparks, flip over helplessly like beached turtles, or smash violently against the battle-scarred panels. There were a lot of events happening at RoboGames — team sports, a freestyle “dance” competition, maze solving — but none attract quite the attention that the heavyweight match-ups do. If any of these robots did develop a sense of self, this evident appetite for their destruction would doubtlessly strike them as downright genocidal. But as of yet, no robots have risen to protest the circuit-driven bloodlust that combot tournaments cater to, and the strength in numbers of converted fans would make a vengeance-driven, robot vs. human melee hard to call.
Pity then, the robot. As each “contestant” was sent into the ring it was clear that nothing short of wholesale demolition would satisfy the spectators. Yes, robots who paint, and dance, and navigate mazes are fascinating in their own way to watch (though robot soccer, aka “watch bipedal robots fall down a lot without even getting close to the ball,” is less riveting than hoped), but let’s be honest, robots bashing each other to bits kicks the automaton drama up to a whole different level. Since each robot was in fact being controlled by a human “driver” rather than perambulating about independently, their menace becomes difficult to anthropomorphize, though there is a tense moment when a wounded combot with a rotating blade comes to “life” after the match is over, and the competitor’s robot crew is in the pit, a well-timed gesture from whatever robot rebellion simmers beneath the surface of their servitude.
Certain combots do attract a fan club though, whether through sheer badassery, longevity, or pluck. Both the red-wheeled heavyweight “Sewer Snake,” a 2007 inductee in the Combat Robot Hall of Fame, and the 60 lb “Herr Gepounden” have been lurking around combot tournaments for more than 10 years. The “Ragin’ Scotsman,” built and maintained by high school students (who wear purple kilts to competitions) is total fight club eye candy, with its dramatic flamethrowing capabilities and punishing wedge. But this year’s total underdog award surely goes to “Huntsman,” a newbie to the heavy weight combot world hailing all the way from Australia, and equipped with a cumbersome, almost medieval ax blade meant to shear through robot armor and morale. “Huntsman” doesn’t do as well in the actual tournament as inventor Daniel Kerrison’s antweight robot “Vendetta 2,” which wins a second place medal, does, but rooting for the loser is one small way we can show the robots we truly empathize with their struggle — which hopefully they’ll remember when the day comes for them to strike.
European nations are starting to take some of the same steps that Republicans are suggesting for the US — reductions in the public sector, cuts in benefits, etc. And Joseph Stiglitz, an economist who actually knows what he’s talking about, argues that it’s a terrible idea — and that goes for the United States, too. Check out this fascinating interview.:
When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working.
More:
The European: What do you say to someone who argues thus: Demographic change and the end of the industrial age have made the welfare state financially unsustainable. We cannot expect to cut down on our debt without fundamentally reducing welfare costs in the long run. Stiglitz: That is absurd. The question of social protection does not have to do with the structure of production. It has to do with social cohesion or solidarity. That is why I am also very critical of Draghi’s argument at the European Central Bank that social protection has to be undone. There are no grounds upon which to base that argument.
The thing about Stiglitz is that, unlike many academic economists, he’s been right most of the time over a stellar career. And he’s right now.
Our pals at Calbuzz, who are never dull, argue that the 140-word-ization of journalism is, well, screwing everything up.
Three reasons:
It makes everything as important as everything else. For political reporting, the mega-tweet eternal motion stream devalues perspective, judgment and reflection, enabling every 23-year old knucklehead with an iPhone to distort and drive a campaign narrative that favors the trivial over the substantive – Santorum’s wearing a sweater vest! — the immediate over the consequential – Trump’s endorsing Romney! – and events over ideas – Newt and Mitt are both headed to Tommy’s Ham House!
The result: a second-by-second, self-contained and self-referential closed feedback loop.
And:
It enables the spread of bad information. Nothing in the 2012 campaign illustrates the dark side of Twitter as much as the sensational story of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley getting indicted for tax fraud. Except she didn’t.
And:
It makes people stupid. Exhibit A: See Weiner, A.
Twitter magnifies all our most asinine urges by eliminating the possibility for any sort of subtlety. In 140 characters, you can’t accomplish anything particularly wonderful.
I agree with the premise. But it’s not Twitter’s fault; Twitter’s just a tool. It’s the idea that everyone should report and re-report every trivial thing that happens (or maybe does’t happen) in a mad rush to be the first with it and get all the traffic. I’m guilty of that and so is everyone else. The 24-hour news cycle is now an 86,400-second news cycle (did I get that math right? If I’m wrong, ya better Tweet it quick).
You can’t blame technology or the applications it creates for turning us in the news business into a bunch of attention-starved maniacs who put stuff out there without checking the facts. That’s happened for years: In the old days when there was real newspaper competition in big cities, and papers like the New York Post and Daily News put out half a dozen editions a day — and sometime’s “EXTRAS” with blaring headlines, the pressure to be first with the news, any news, was intense. It slowed down a little in the 1980s and 1990s when daily paper competition pretty much vanished, and TV news was still a 30-minute network thing, and nobody had to work as hard because the news cycle was whatever the local daily said it was.
Oh, and if the local daily didn’t write about you, you didn’t exist. I don’t long for those good old day, not for a second.
But at some point in the furor of old-fashioned competition, some editors at some places adopted the old NY Times adage: Get It First, But First Get It Right.
The problem of our modern techno-world is that it’s so easy for one mistake to be amplified a million times before anyone has the chance to catch up to the story and fix it — and as anyone in politics knows, the denial (or correction) doesn’t always undo the damage. Which is why digital journalists need to remember that they’re still journalists — and take a deep breath and call for confirmation before you blog and re-tweet.
[UPDATED BELOW] Black Rock City LLC, the SF-based company that stages Burning Man in the Nevada desert, was placed on probation by the Bureau of Land Management after exceeding the 50,000-person population cap at last year’s event, jeopardizing its current efforts to get a five-year permit and adding a new pressure to an already difficult transition year.
“Probationary status limits the Bureau of Land Management to issuance of a one-year permit,” said Cory Roegner, who oversees the event from BLM’s Winnemucca office. His office put BRC on probation after it reported populations of 53,341 on Sept. 2 and 53,735 on Sept. 3, although BRC has appealed the ruling to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, which has not issued a ruling.
Representatives from that office and BRC have not yet returned Guardian calls for comment.
Roegner has been working on finalizing the Environmental Analysis of BRC’s proposal for a five-year permit that would allow the event to gradually increase from 58,000 to 70,000 participants. A draft report was released in March, and Roegner is now working on responses to the 40 comments that were received during the 30-day comment period, with the final report expected to be released the first week in June.
At that time, the BLM office would set the population limit for this year’s event and issue the permit. But if the BLM probation ruling isn’t overturned, that permit would be for just this year. And under BLM rules, if BRC violated its population cap again this year, it could be banned from holding events in the future.
“Population is a very important issue. That’s a big focus of the environmental analysis on which the permit is based,” he told us, referring to the 2006 study that placed the current 50,000 cap on population.
This places BRC in a precarious position given that it has already sold 57,000 tickets for this year’s event and will be giving away thousands more to staff, groups that have received art grants, and a host of other visitors and VIPs (last year, three members of the Board of Supervisors attended and Mayor Ed Lee is rumored to be mulling a trip this year).
Roegner and his boss at the BLM, Rolando Mendez, say it’s up to BRC to live by its permit. “Black Rock City LLC is free to sell as many tickets as they’re inclined to,” Mendez told us in February. “That’s a calculated business decision on their part, but I would expect Black Rock City LLC to live by the population cap that I set.”
In fact, despite the fact that tickets have already been sold, it’s possible that Burning Man won’t even get a permit this year, although that’s very unlikely and both BRC and BLM have said they have a good, cooperative working relationship. The environmental report studies alternatives that include no event, maintaining the current 50,000 population cap, and gradually increasing it to 70,000, with a 58,000 cap this year.
Roegner said the report (which you can read here in PDF form) and its comments identify traffic and transportation, air quality, and trash as key issues that could require additional mitigation measures, but he said it was still too early to determine exactly what that will mean for Burning Man and its participants.
Burning Man, which started on Baker Beach in 1986 and moved to the the Black Rock Desert in 1990, seems to be suffering from its own success. Last year, the event sold out for the first time and this year a new ticketing system proved problematic and sparked widespread criticism. But BRC officials have maintained that they’re addressing the problems and creating systems to ensure the long-term survival of the event and culture it has spawned.
4/46 UPDATE: BRC spokesperson Marian Goodell responded to our inquiries via text message, downplaying concerns over probation and the population issues. Initially, she wrote that probation “won’t effect 5-year permit process,” and when we noted that Roegner said it would limit BRC to a one-year permit, she wrote, “We are still continuing the 5-year permit process. The probation is under appeal.”
We asked how BRC plans to abide by this year’s population cap given that it has already sold or distributed more tickets than the number of people allowed by the permit, she wrote, “Easy. Usually at least 6,000 leave before we hit the peak. Sometimes more on dusty, wet or cold years.”
Yet Ron Cole, who lives on a ranch near the event site and made comments during the EA process, was critical of BRC for defying BLM controls and trying to substantially increase the size of Burning Man. “They should just give them a one-year permit and 50,000 cap,” he told us, citing the event’s impacts on air quality and limitations on getting people on and off the playa. He was dubious about BRC’s behavior this year: “You can sell tickets, bill credit cards, and you don’t even have a permit yet?”
Ahoy! Yes, there’s still time to gorge on the 55th annual SFIFF; even if you’re just getting into movie-watching mode today, there’s a full week (plus a day) of festival madness left. Right here on Pixel Vision we’ll be posting reports from the fest as it happens (check out Sam Stander’s post here!); read on if you want to plan ahead to catch some of the best of what’s to come. (Most shows are $13 and venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.; SF Film Society Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; and Sundance Kabuki Cinema, 1881 Post, SF.)
WED/25 Polisse (Maïwenn, France, 2011) Comparisons to The Wire are not to be tossed around lightly, but when the Hollywood Reporter likened Polisse to an entire season of the masterpiece cop show packed into a single film, it was onto something. Director, co-writer, and star Maïwenn (the object of desire in 2003’s High Tension) hung out with real officers serving in Paris’ Child Protection Unit, drawing inspiration from their dealings with pedophiles, young rape victims, negligent mothers, pint-sized pickpockets, and the like (another TV show worth mentioning in comparison: Law & Order: SVU). But Polisse (the title is deliberately misspelled, as if by a child) is no simple procedural; it plunges the viewer directly into the day-to-day lives of its boisterous characters, who are juggling not just stressful careers but also plenty of after-hours troubles, particularly relationship issues. Between heartwrenching moments on the job (and off), the unit indulges in massive cut-loose episodes of what amounts to group therapy: charades, dance parties, and room-clearing arguments, most of which involve huge quantities of booze. Watching Polisse is a messy, emotional, rewarding experience; no wonder it picked up the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Wed/25, 6pm; Thu/26, 3pm, FSC. (Cheryl Eddy)
Last Screening (Laurent Achard, France, 2011) A bit of an odd duck, 30-ish, nondescript Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) is in denial over the imminent closure of the small French repertory cinema he’s operated and lived in for years. But that’s hardly his most alarming mental hang-up: in his spare time he frequently goes around stalking and killing random women for a grisly purpose that has to do (of course) with his dear, departed, thoroughly demented mother. The only horror item in this year’s slim SFIFF “Late Show” section, Laurent Achard’s pulseless genre homage tips hat to 1960’s Peeping Tom and other, less obvious cineastic objets d’amour — most conspicuously, Renoir’s 1954 French Can Can, which is playing at Sylvain’s theater — but doesn’t seem interested in suspense, or psychology, or even style. It’s coldly unpleasant yet dull. Wed/25, 9:30pm, FSC. Sat/28, 10pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)
THU/26 Rebellion (Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 2011) The latest polemical film from the director of La Haine (1995) presents National Gendarmerie Intervention Group Captain Philippe Lejorus’ account of his experiences during the 1988 New Caledonia hostage crisis. It’s an election year in France, so all bets are off as to how the unfortunate fiasco will resolve. Striking camerawork distinguishes this tense, morally complex drama, which features Kassovitz as Lejorus, a humane negotiator in the midst of a politically charged battle for hearts, minds, and civil rights. The film is edited to embody its political context, with distancing effects such as voiceover and suddenly reframed shots that emphasize the two sides of a disagreement. Thu/26, 6pm; Tue/1, 9:45pm; May 3, 4:30pm, Kabuki. (Sam Stander)
Crulic — The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, Romania/Poland/France, 2011) As the graphic novel has made the comic book into an adult art form, so recently the animated feature has increasingly matured toward diverse, weighty, mature themes. Anca Damian’s film is the autobiography of one Claudiu Crulic (excellently voiced by Vlad Ivanov), a Romanian Everyman who recounts his luckless life from the grave. He grows up motherless, shunted around, drifting through jobs, finally scoring halfway decent employment and a girlfriend as a guest worker in Poland. Then he’s arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Fed up after being kicked like a dog his whole life, he commences a hunger strike for justice. And at that point the hitherto delightfully droll collage of numerous low-tech animation techniques begins to drag a bit, because Damian’s style is too impish to support tragedy, let alone a dirge-like portrait of physical deterioration á la Hunger (2008). But still, this is an impressive stretch of the medium. Thu/26, 6:30pm, PFA. Sun/29, 12:30pm; May 2, 6:16pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)
Unfair World (Filippos Tsitos, Greece/Germany, 2011) Veteran Turkish-Greek actor Antonis Kafetzopoulos stars in this deadpan crime drama about a gullible, alcoholic police officer who falls for a duplicitous cleaning lady after a plan to prove a suspect’s innocence goes horribly awry. While the film quickly establishes a nice black-comic momentum — cop first encounters cleaner while intentionally tripping a security guard chasing her for shoplifting — a muddled storyline and glacial pace soon saps it of any vigor. What could have been a beguiling exercise in absurdity becomes a leaden misfit-character study. Still, the misfits are at least interesting: with his heavy-lidded, hangdog sadness, Kafetzopoulos is a sort of Greek Philip Baker Hall (a good thing), and it’s hard to wholly dislike a movie featuring such bon mots as “I shit on your dreams!” Thu/26, 6:30pm; Sat/28, 6:15pm, Kabuki. Sun/29, 8:15pm, PFA. (Michelle Devereaux)
FRI/27 Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, France/Lebanon/Egypt/Italy, 2011) With very real, deadly sectarian conflict on their doorstep, a group of Lebanese village women are making it up as they go along in this absurdist, ultimately inspiring dramedy with a dash of musical. Once sheltered by its isolation and the cheek-to-jowl intimacy of its denizens, the uneasy peace between Muslims and Christians in this small town threatens to shatter when the outside world begins to filter in, first through town-square TV broadcasts then tit-for-tat jabs that appear ready to escalate into violence. So the village’s women conspire to preserve harmony any way they can, even if that means importing a motley cadre of Ukrainian “exotic” dancers. What results is a postdebauchery climax that almost one-ups 2009’s The Hangover — and a film that injects ground-level merriment and humanity into the headlines, thanks to director, cowriter, and star Nadine Labaki (2007’s Caramel), who has a gimlet eye and a generous spirit. Fri/27, 6:45pm, Kabuki; Mon/30, 3:15pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)
Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema (Todd McCarthy, U.S., 2007) Legendary French film publicist, programmer, director, and movie junkie Pierre Rissient gets his own filmic homage in this documentary from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy (1992’s Visions of Light). Rissient, who will receive the Mel Novikoff Award at this year’s festival, is certainly a character — the round-faced septuagenarian oozes a puppy-dog cuddliness cut with a formidable intellect and a hint of tart, old-man pervy-ness. But this collection of talking heads interspersed with classic film clips is unfortunately a bit of a snooze. Considering said talking heads include cinematic firebrands like Werner Herzog and the late Claude Chabrol, and with a character passionate as Rissient at its center, that’s surprising. “No one in the world of cinema can tell you what he does,” Chabrol remarks. After watching the film you probably won’t be able to figure it out either. Fri/27, 4pm, FSC. Mon/30, 6:30pm, PFA. (Devereaux)
Patience (After Sebald) (Grant Gee, England, 2011) Grant Gee has compiled a meditation on a meditation — subtitled “A walk through The Rings of Saturn,” his documentary is an extension, if not exactly an adaptation, of the genre-defying travel narrative by the late German author W.G. Sebald. Writers and scholars expound on their particular love for the novel and its author, and the imagery featured on screen frequently echoes the startlingly spare photographs that litter its pages. The approach seems to align with the Chris Marker-esque investigative methods of its subject, traversing networks between fact and fiction, memory and the modern world. This book, as with any beloved artwork, means many things to many people, but Gee manages to capture the peculiar appeal of Rings, even if all it really leaves you with is an intense desire to read or reread the book. Fri/27, 6:30pm, PFA. Sat/28, 6:30pm, FSC. Tue/1, 9:30pm, Kabuki. (Stander)
SAT/28 Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington, U.S., 2012) A textbook illustration of what’s so frequently right and wrong with Amerindie comedies today, Bob Byington’s feature starts out near-brilliantly in a familiar, heightened Napoleon Dynamite-type milieu of ostensibly normal people as self-absorbed, socially hapless satellites revolving around an existential hole at the center in the universe. The three main ones meet working at a suburban steakhouse: Emotionally nerve-deadened youth Max (Keith Poulson), the even more crassly insensitive Sal (Nick Offerman), and nice but still weird Lyla (Teeth‘s estimable Jess Weixler). All is well until the film starts skipping ahead five years at a time, growing more smugly misanthropic and pointless as time and some drastic shifts in fortune do nothing to change (or deepen) the characters. Still, the performers are intermittently hilarious throughout. Sat/28, 6:45pm, Kabuki. Sun/29, 9:15pm, FSC. Tue/1, 6:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)
SUN/29 Policeman (Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2011) This diptych-structured provocation explores two subsets of Jewish Israeli society — the macho nationalism of a group of police who are also dedicated family men, and the aspirations of a cadre of privileged young revolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Israeli state they see as oppressive. Neither set is particularly likeable, so the political implications of the film are somewhat ambiguous, though still entirely unsettling; the Israel-Palestine issue is a huge neon elephant in the room, occasionally acknowledged but never looked at directly. Certain moments of sudden symbolically rich violence will (and already have, in Cinema Scope) invite comparisons to Haneke, though the overall tone is something different. This is a character-driven film, and despite the unpleasantness of the personalities, the cast is uniformly stellar. Sun/29, 9pm, Kabuki. May 2, 3:45pm; May 3, 8:15pm, FSC. (Stander)
MON/30 Chicken With Plums (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/Germany/Belgium, 2011) Steeped in whimsy — and a longing for love, beauty, and home — this latest effort from brilliant Persian-French cartoonist-filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and director Vincent Paronnaud flaunts the odd contours of its eccentric narrative, enchants with its imaginative tangents, sprawls like an unincapsulated life, and then takes off on aching, campy romantic reverie—a magical realistic vision of one Iranian artist’s doomed trajectory. Master violinist Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric) is seeking the ineffable — a replacement for his destroyed instrument — and otherwise he’s determined to die. We trace the mystery of his passing, backward, with wanders through the life of his family and loved one along the way in this playful, bittersweet feast. Despite Amalric’s glazed-eyed mugging, which almost spoils the dish, Satrapi’s wonderfully arch yet lyrical visual sensibility and resonant characters — embodied by Maria de Medeiros, Jamel Debbouze, Golshifteh Farahani, and Isabella Rossellini, among others — satisfy, serving up so much more than chicken with plums. Mon/30, 6:15pm; May 2, 12:30pm, Kabuki. (Chun)
TUE/1 Hysteria (Tanya Wexler, U.S./England, 2011) Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. Tue/1, 9:30pm, Kabuki. May 3, 6pm, FSC. (Rapoport)
MAY 3 (Closing Night)
Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (Ramona S. Diaz, U.S.) The director of 2003’s Imelda returns with this portrait of a way more sympathetic Filipino celebrity: Arnel Pineda, plucked from obscurity via YouTube after Journey’s Neil Schon spotted him singing with a Manila-based cover band. Don’t Stop Believin’ follows Pineda, who openly admits past struggles with homelessness and addiction, from audition to 20,000-seat arena success as Journey’s charismatic new front man (he faces insta-success with an endearing combination of nervousness and fanboy thrill). He’s also honest about feeling homesick, and the pressures that come with replacing one of the most famous voices in rock (Steve Perry doesn’t appear in the film, other than in vintage footage). Especially fun to see is how Pineda invigorates the rest of Journey; as the tour progresses, all involved — even the band’s veteran members, who’ve no doubt played “Open Arms” ten million times — radiate with excitement. May 3, 7pm, Castro. (Eddy)
Wells Fargo managed to hold its shareholder meeting April 24, but not without difficulty. A protest against the bank’s ongoing part in the foreclosure crisis, investments in the private prison industry, and record of tax dodging brought some 2,000 people to the West Coast Wells Fargo headquarters at 465 California St. for the meeting.
A broad coalition, including more than 180 Wells Fargo shareholders, as well as organized labor, students, immigrant rights advocates, and Occupy protesters, swarmed the building. Many entered the building, and others blocked its entrances and set up a stage on California, turning the block between Montgomery and Sansome into a combination alternative “stakeholders meeting” and block party.
Streets surrounding the headquarters were closed for more than four hours, as both protesters and some 200 police in riot gear stood their ground; there were 24 arrests, mostly for trespassing.
Participants hailed from across the country, from students from the University of Minnesota to steel workers from Redding, Penn. Demonstrators were explicitly and enthusiastically “non-violent.” One local organizer from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) announced, “This is a non-violent direct action,” to an eruption of cheers from the crowd, at a rally preceding the march.
Police say organizers stuck to their tactical intentions. “I think it was a successful event,” said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a spokesperson for the SFPD. “They have followed through with their stated objective: to have a peaceful protest.”
The organizers were somewhat less successful in a stated objective to get a large number of discontent Wells Fargo shareholders into the meeting to ask tough questions. More than 180 attended a training to prepare for the meeting on the night of April 23, but less than 30 made it inside.
However, the meeting was cut short, and organizers claim that in barring a number of shareholders, Wells Fargo acted illegally and the result of votes from meeting may be invalid.
Many shareholders were particularly incensed about public subsidies that the company took advantage of in 2008. In an amendment to the tax code that lasted only three months before Congress revoked it, the IRS gave tax breaks to healthy banks that acquired banks that were faring more poorly; Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia during the three month window. As a result, the company received $17.96 billion in tax breaks between 2008 and 2012, significantly more than the cost of the Wachovia deal.
Protesters hoped to disrupt the meeting to demand that the bank pay more taxes. Wells Fargo announced record profits this year, as well as a $19.8 million pay package for CEO John Stumpf. Stumpf has earned $60 million in the past three years.
“If they were paying their taxes, we wouldn’t have to do this” said Al Haggett, a retired San 911 worker who trained dispatchers and police.
Ron Colbert, another shareholder and a worker for Sacramento’s school district, also attempted to enter the meeting. “My sisters and brothers are suffering from foreclosure and they are pocketing our money instead of paying their taxes,” said Colbert.
“Tuition keeps going up every year. I have loans like you wouldn’t believe: $15,000, and it’s just my first year. But I pay my taxes, so why can’t they?” said Andrew Contstas, a psychology major at the University of Minnesota who traveled to San Francisco for the protest.
Determined to shut down the meeting, many groups of protesters entered the building at different times.
Around 10:30 am, about 75 were able to get in and sit down in the lobby, refusing to leave. “They said if we dispersed, they would let the shareholders in,” said SEIU Local 1021 organizer Gabriel Haaland, referring to the shareholders who came to protest and air their grievances. “They still didn’t. But they let shareholders in from either side.”
Many non-protester shareholders were able to enter through back entrances, escorted by police.
Workers from several unions who are currently locked in labor disputes, including janitors with SEIU Local 87 and AT&T technicians with local Communication Workers of America chapters, were also present at the protest. A stage set up in front of Wells Fargo turned California into an arena in which worker, student, homeowners, and immigrants told their stories.
Chris Drioane of CWA Local 9410 said that he is fed up after he worked 80-90 hours per week with no days off though the 2011 holiday season. “I worked from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day with no days off,” said Drioane.
The SFPD made 20 arrests, six for “chaining themselves to an object” and 14 for “some form of trespassing” after Wells Fargo asked them to make the arrests. Four were arrested by the Sheriff’s Department for interfering with an officer.
Ruth Schultz, a shareholder who was arrested inside the meeting, said that those who entered were able to speak. Several stood up and spoke individually before they were escorted out; afterward, the remaining protester-shareholders mic-checked the meeting and expressed their desire that Wells Fargo cease investment in private prisons, give principal reduction to all underwater homeowners, and pay “their fair share” of taxes. Police handcuffed them, and they were cited and released after spending 30 minutes in a room inside the Wells Fargo headquarters.
Schultz says the meeting lasted only 15 minutes after the group was detained, and was “ceremonial at best…They went on about their profits this year, how they’re sitting on the most capital they’ve ever had before.”
She says she was particularly frustrated from one statement made by CEO John Stumpf. “He said, ‘we’re proud of our mortgage business. In fact, I love our mortgage business.’”
A press releases from organizers explained that the protest was part of “99% Power, a national effort to mobilize well over 10,000 people, from all walks of life and representing the diversity of the 99%, to engage in nonviolent direct action at more than three dozen corporate shareholder meetings across the country.”
The national group plans to create similar chaos at a Bank of America shareholder meeting in Charlotte, NC May 6.
As the guitarist for Hole, Eric Erlandson was at the center of the alternative rock explosion of the early 1990s, a member of one of the most popular and controversial bands of the time, and a friend and confidant to one of the scene’s most influential players, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. With the 18th anniversaries of both the suicide of Cobain and the release of Hole’s hit record Live Through This passing this month, Erlandson has just released his first book, Letters To Kurt (Akashic Books) a touching and enlightening collection of prose poems addressed to his departed friend.
During a phone conversation from Los Angeles, Erlandson — who will be appearing at several events in the Bay Area this week — touched on the creative and cathartic process of writing the book, the release of Hit So Hard, a documentary about Hole drummer Patty Schemel, an impromptu on-stage reunion with Courtney Love, and the recent news stories about a supposed Kurt Cobain solo album.
SFBG: Your book “Letters To Kurt” is not your standard rock n’ roll memoir — what was the impetus for going the route that you did?
Eric Erlandson: When I was writing it, I was doubting it and resisting it the whole way through, now when I’m presenting it, I’m still unsure; ‘Is anybody going to get this?’ It is a strange book, it’s not your normal memoir, it’s disturbing to read for me still, so it’s weird to be talking about it in public and reading from it.
I was inspired by Jim Harrison’s book Letters To Yesenin, I started a process in my journal writing out my own letters to people, and then once I let go of my hesitation of using Kurt, the first letter in the book was what came out, and the voice was strong, powerful, and different than anything I’d ever written.
I just kept going with it — when you start writing about the past, the past starts to come back into your life and affect you, and that’s what happened until I got to that 52 number. I thought it felt right, it’s resolved, it’s complete — as much is it can be complete, at this point.
Bringing the issue of suicide on the table, and keeping that as part of it — that’s the bigger picture, it’s not just a book about my views on life, or my relationships, or my ramblings, it’s trying to connect to the universal, that they’re all connected, and that suicide is something that affects us all.
SFBG: The documentary “Hit So Hard” is also getting a wide release this month, and you’ve been appearing at screenings with Patty Schemel — what has it been like seeing your old bandmates again?
EE: Patty’s movie just happens to come out the same time as my book, it wasn’t planned — it was her journey and then my journey. With the fact that they are both being released to the public at the same time, I started to try to put them together at some events.
Patty, Melissa [Auf der Maur] and I played at an event, and from that, it felt so good, it felt like we were back in 1992 in a basement in Seattle playing covers. It just felt really fun, we were free to do whatever we wanted to do, there was no pressure, there was no machine, no business behind us pushing us to do anything, so that was really kind of a liberating experience for us.
We then did another performance for the Hit So Hard premiere in New York, and of course, Courtney lives in New York, and got wind of it, showed up, and it was spontaneous.
If you face the past, if you stop shoving it under the rug, and you start thinking more about what’s happening to your relationships, then you’re able to resolve them, or experiences will happen that will force you to resolve them—or will give you an opportunity to do so at least.
I’m hoping that is where things will go; it can be a positive by-product of the book that I hadn’t even expected.
SFBG: You’ve been away from the mainstream music scene for quite awhile—can fans expect any new music from you in the future?
EE: I’m planning on doing a soundtrack to the book, I just ran out of time, I couldn’t get it out at the same time as the book, but I plan to get it out this year. That should be really fun, to go back and use all my musical influences and not have it be tied to a band project.
SFBG:There was a flurry of news articles in the last couple of weeks quoting you as saying that Kurt Cobain had recorded a solo album before he died, his “White Album”— were those comments taken out of context?
EE: It was definitely taken out of context, misquoted, and misinterpreted. I think that Courtney had mentioned in like 1995 or 1996, that there was some sort of White Album — or somebody did, I remember hearing it, it’s nothing new to me.
I think the writer chose to present that in a way that there was some hidden gem, or secret being revealed, but there is no secret being revealed, it was me speculating on what I had heard—which is what many people have heard, which is [the song ] “Do Re Mi.” It just had a different mood to it. I was speculating that that’s probably where he was headed, and said something about that White Album comment that somebody had made in the ‘90s — but I was tying it into the topic of suicide, and that’s the thing that he didn’t present in his interview.
I was saying that when someone commits suicide — and I’m not criticizing someone that feels suicidal — by going into that tunnel, and suffering in that way, once you choose to take that huge act of taking your own life, you’re affecting everybody’s lives. This is nothing new, and we all know this, but I was bringing it back to music; by taking your own life, by self-destructing using drugs, by checking out, then you’re taking your gifts away from the world.
I’m not dropping anything that world doesn’t already know. I never claimed that he was making a solo album; I was speculating that if he had continued, he might have made a solo album.
In Kurt’s case, who knows where that music would have gone.
