SFBG Blogs

SEIU Local 1021 backs motorist measure and a Republican. WTF?!?!

Sasha Cuttler
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SEIU Local 1021 backs motorist measure and a Republican. WTF?!?!

Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — which has long played an important role in San Francisco’s progressive movement, providing the money and member turnout to achieve some important victories for the left — finds itself at odds with many progressive activists in this election, particularly on the issue of transportation.

As we previously reported, the union has been aggressively campaigning for BART Board member James Fang’s reelection this year, even though Fang is the city’s only elected Republican and not particularly progressive on transit and other issues. But he was the only BART board member to walk the picket line with the workers during last year’s disastrous strikes, so it’s understandable why the union would stand with him now.

What’s less understandable is why Local 1021 has endorsed the Yes of Prop. L campaign, which seeks to undermine San Francisco’s transit-first policies and transfer money from Muni operations to subsidize more free public parking for automobiles, joining such unlikely allies as the San Francisco Republican Party, the SF Association of Realtors, and the SF Chamber of Commerce.

So we asked Local 1021 Political Chair Alysabeth Alexander about the endorsement, and she told us: “One of our member leaders is a proponent and the argument that driving is hell in San Francisco resonated with a portion of our membership that drives and for whom public transportation is not an option either because of service cuts and route changes, because their job requires car use, or because they work shifts that don’t work for public transportation or biking. Because of rising housing prices many working people have been pushed out of SF over the years, and many of our workers shifts end or start when BART or Muni isn’t working or isn’t practical. Our union is 100 percent supportive of public transportation and addressing the climate crisis head-on.  We are fighting for the expansion of public transportation and for adequate funding, and sufficient staffing so that it can be maintained.”

The “member leader” she referred to was apparently Claire Zvanski, a longtime past president of the District 11 Democratic Club. But even that club couldn’t bring itself to endorse this myopic primal scream of a ballot measure, taking no position and writing, “This is a policy statement to inform the MTA that cars and those who love them are not getting enough attention in the transit planning process. This measure received a No Recommendation as an alternative to an Oppose from the eboard, mostly out of respect for our venerable past-president Claire Zvanski. The members also voted No Recommendation.”

Most progressive and transportation-related groups are opposing Prop. L, which its opponents say will actually make things worse for motorists in the city by undermining current efforts to make Muni more attractive and encourage people to use alternatives to the automobile.

“If we don’t reduce the congestion on the streets, that makes it harder for the people who really do have to drive,” No on L campaign manager Peter Lauterborn told us, responding to Alexander’s argument that the measure somehow helps working people and noting that Local 1021 never allowed the No on L campaign to make its case before endorsing the measure [UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Alexander said the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition “did present a No on L position]. He also said the measure may have visceral appeal to frustrated drivers, but it doesn’t really make sense.

“Taking away money from the transportation system to build parking garages doesn’t help anyone,” Lauterborn said. “The Labor Council endorsed No on L and the reality is working class people use Muni at a far higher percentage than those citywide….Being pro-transit is inconsistent with supporting a ballot measure that would defund Muni.”

Meanwhile, in an allegedly unrelated matter, Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly — who was a local leader of the progressive movement while serving the Board of Supervisors 2000-2010 — on Friday resigned from the union, where the Guardian has long been aware that he was having internal power struggles over the last year.

Daly tells us that his departure wasn’t based on political or philosophical differences with SEIU, that he’s proud of the work that he and his colleagues have done on wage equity and beating back anti-worker threats, and that it just seemed like the right time to leave, although he’s not sure what he’ll do next.

“I’m sorry to go,” he told us, “but it was time to go.”

Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle fest sets high bar for mezcal lovers

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When it comes to tasting mezcal, the experts have some generally accepted rules. Chief among them is that “you should never taste more than four together,” cautioned Oaxaca’s Graciela Carreño of Mezcal Real Minero at the Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle event, held at Public Works, Sept. 14. It’s usually good advice: With the spirit’s alcohol content regularly topping 50 percent ABV, and its flavor components so nuanced yet so varied from one bottle to the next, it can be hard to distinguish mezcal’s finer points when your tastebuds are aflame with intense spice, smoke, and minerality.

But when you’re staring down nearly 20 of the world’s absolute best mezcal brands in one room, each of which has at least three or four different offerings on hand (if not plenty more), heeding that first caveat is a patent impossibility.

Events like Mexico In a Bottle are not everyday happenings in the US, so for mezcal aficionados and fans, this was something of a paradise. It wasn’t until the next day that I could even hazard a guess as to how many different mezcals I tasted over the course of those four hours, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 40. I, naturally, was not the only one on such a course.

At a table helmed by Arik Torren of Fidencio Mezcal and Esteban Morales, who was properly introducing La Venenosa Raicilla to the US for the first time that night, there were no fewer than 13 expressions to taste — from basic espadín to pechuga distilled with fruits and raw chicken breast to wild-grown madrecuixe to single-distilled Jaliscan raicilla that started off with an almost cheese-like scent before moving into sweeter flavors. All of them were sublime.

Another bit of advice? Mezcal should be “kissed,” rather than drank, but when one considers the blood, sweat, and centuries of callouses that mark these magical hand-made elixirs’ travels from Mexican hillsides to our mouths in a club off of Mission Street, spitting or pouring out your leftovers seems at least guilt-inducing, if not downright shameful. You can see where this is going: No matter how little you kiss, there’s a good chance you leave feeling pretty fucked up.

That wasn’t, of course, the first order of business. It was to simply explore the plentitude of offerings — the explosively tasty spirits from relative newcomers like Mezcal Tosba, La Niña Del Mezcal, and El Jolgorio to the more widely distributed Del Maguey and Mezcal Vago brands. Local restaurants such as Sabrosa, Tamarindo, Loló, and La Urbana also created special mezcal-based cocktails for the celebration, and paired them with small bites.

Upstairs, Max Garrone (who, along with his Mezcalistas.com co-author, Susan Coss, organized the event) hosted a panel discussion with Morales and Wahaka Mezcal’s Raza Zaidi on the history and culture of the spirit, and others like Carreño, Montelobos creator Iván Saldaña, and writer John McEvoy (aka the Mezcal PhD) walked guests through guided tastings. As the evening progressed, and more folks willfully discarded any recommendations of restraint, those informative tastings became less and less formal, to the point where the crowds’ attention was even a little hard to corral — which made for even livelier and more interactive samplings.

Of course, one of the most exciting elements of an event like this is getting your lips on super-unique bottlings heretofore unknown and unavailable in the US. Along with La Venenosa’s debut, Wahaka also premiered its soon-to-be-released line of vegan pechuga mezcals, which involves placing a bag of herbs (Espadín Botaniko) or heirloom apples (Espadín Manzanita) in the still during the spirit’s second distillation.

Mexico City’s Erick Rodriguez, who is known as the Indiana Jones of Mezcal, because of his extreme forays out into the mountains and pueblos in search of the rarest of the rare, also presented a few gems that he sourced for the Oaxaca-based brand/tasting room Mezcaloteca, along with some from his own Almamezcalera line. Due to their extremely small runs and primitive production methods — which can include wild-harvesting and hand-mashing the agave, and fermenting it in leather sacks or hollowed-out tree trunks — many of the mezcals he finds will forever remain in the collectors-only realm, but damn, they’ve got character.

While pondering the larger issues surrounding this oft-misunderstood and mistreated spirit was a big part of why people came to Mezcal: Mexico In a Bottle, it was also, of course, to celebrate its legacy, its cultural importance, and its vibrancy. Mezcal has inspired a cult-like following that only seems to be growing, and while it may be at a crossroads in terms of its sustainability, it’s clearly got a huge support network that has spread well beyond the borders of Oaxaca to points all around the world– one of the biggest of which is, without a doubt, San Francisco. As some of the brand reps echoed during one panel, with an increase in consumer awareness like we’re seeing, there is hope for mezcal despite its current socio-economic challenges. And events like this one can only help.

Live shots: Beck christens the new Masonic

Steven T. Jones
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It’s not often that you get to see a new venue on opening night — so yeah, even if Beck hadn’t been part of the deal, we would’ve been stoked to spend Friday evening at the newly refurbished and rebranded Masonic.

While it’s not technically a new venue, it might as well be: After months of construction (and literally years of fighting with Nob Hill neighbors) the historic Masonic temple reopened this weekend with a new sound system, completely revamped stage and seating areas, new bars and concessions, a shmancy new VIP section, you name it.

masonic

The renovations also upped the venue’s capacity to 3,300 — compare that to, say, the Warfield’s 2,300 — which makes it all the more impressive that the jam-packed amphitheater-shaped, with seats on the upper level and standing-room only on the floor — actually felt pretty intimate. Of course, several hundred strangers sweating on you will also do that.

“There’s no opener tonight, so we’re kind of gonna open for ourselves,” Beck told the crowd, to cheers of approval. “And we’ve been playing a lot of festivals. We thought we’d play some of the new album for you first, which we haven’t really gotten to do — this’ll be nice to stretch out a little.”

beck

Accordingly, the first 30 minutes or so were made up of harmony-heavy, melancholy numbers off February’s Morning Phase, which Beck has said was intended as a companion to 2002’s Sea Change, his other (truly masterful) collection of heartbreakingly beautiful songs to take along on a solo post-breakup road trip. “Blue Moon” was as triumphant and warm as it was, well, blue; accompanied by an image of a werewolf-howl-worthy moon on the giant video screen behind him, the song lulled the crowd into a reflective state. The always-welcome “Golden Age” sealed the mood, with our ringleader at the guitar and harmonica.

beck

And then, very abruptly, it was time to dance.

One almost forgets exactly how many hits Beck Hansen has written over the course of his 20-year career, until one sees them performed back-to-back. “Devil’s Haircut,” “Loser,” “Where It’s At” — if you were a young person in the 90s, there’s a good chance these lyrics are wedged permanently into some corner of your brain. A super-heavy “E-Pro” devolved into band members physically crashing into each other and falling down in a pile of guitar reverb, after which Beck, straight-faced, turned it into a crime scene, stretching a piece of yellow caution tape across the stage.

The highlight, though? Devotees of Beck’s live show will know to expect “Debra” — quite likely the best tongue-in-cheek sexytime jam ever written, and certainly the best one about wanting to romance both an intended paramour and her sister — but it doesn’t matter how much you’re anticipating it, or, say, if you saw him do it last year at Treasure Island Music Festival. When he catapults his voice into that falsetto, then busts out the regional specifics (“I’m gonna head to the East Bay, maybe to Emeryville, to the shopping center where you work at the fashion outlet…”), and actually looks like he’s still having fun with it, no matter how long he’s been doing this — well, that shit’s contagious. 

beck

If we have any complaints, it’s that the show was encore-less. But when you open for yourself and play a solid, nearly two-hour set that spans 13 studio albums, with roughly half of the songs involving running around the stage like a madman in a little sport jacket and Amish-looking hat, and don’t seem to have broken a sweat by the end of all of it — we’ll forgive you. Billboard recently called Beck “the coolest weirdo in the room,” which, seeing as this room was in San Francisco, at the start of Folsom Street Fair weekend, that might have been a stretch.

On the other hand, we’ve had this stuck in our heads for the past three days. Keep doing what you do, sir. We’ll probably be in the crowd next time, too.

 

 

Ron Conway’s attack on Campos fails to persuade actual feminists

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Ron Conway’s attack on Campos fails to persuade actual feminists

Remember when deep-pocketed tech investor Ron Conway poured hefty cash into an independent expenditure committee to finance campaign mailers designed to smear Assembly candidate Sup. David Campos, by equating his vote to reinstate Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi with support for murderous domestic abusers?

Well, those ads carried little sway with the National Organization for Women, California’s largest feminist organization. The statewide group’s political action committee sent out a press release Mon/22 to announce its endorsement of Campos for California Assembly District 17. In addition to listing some positive things Campos has done for women, such as creating a 25-foot buffer zone at the Planned Parenthood Clinic near St. Luke’s Hospital to protect women from harassment by anti-abortion activists, NOW’s press release specifically berated his opponents for these “misleading attacks.”

Reached by phone, California NOW President Patricia Bellasalma said the attack mailers qualify as “really outrageous.”

And furthermore, she added, where was this financier when actual protections against domestic violence were being gutted in Sacramento?

“This individual that spent all of this money,” Bellasalma said, referring to Conway, “I didn’t see him in Sacramento when the governor completely got rid of the domestic violence mandate,” a state law mandating law enforcement response to domestic abuse calls, recording of those calls to emergency personnel, maintenance records of protection orders, and incident reports.

“If we want to have a discussion about what the city and county of SF should be doing in the area of violence … it doesn’t belong in this race,” Bellasalma added, “and it has nothing to do with either of them,” referring to Campos and his opponent, Board President David Chiu.

Across California, “The vast majority [of] the progressive women’s organizations are with David Campos,” Bellasalma added. “If you’re a Sheryl Sandberg ‘Lean In’ sort of gal, then David Chiu is more your thing.”

Golden Gate unions to strike this week, stall commutes

Erica Hanna
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Golden Gate unions to strike this week, stall commutes

The Golden Gate Bridge Labor coalition announced it will strike this week, impacting commutes via bridge or ferries, and perhaps both.

Thirteen unions in the Golden Gate Highway and Transportation District are members of the coalition, whose talks with the district stalled today, representatives told us.

It is still unclear which unions in the coalition will strike, but commutes will definitely be affected, Alex Tonisson, co-chair of the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition said.

“There’ll be an announcement in a day or two,” he told us. As to which unions specifically would strike, “I can’t say exactly who it will be right now, to be honest.”

“None of us wants to be on strike,” said Michelle Shalagin, currently a member of LiUNA!, Local 261 (Laborers) working on landscaping, in a press statement. “But what choice do we have? The District has not moved, and the raises they are offering are completely wiped out by the high cost of the healthcare premiums they are proposing.”

The district and the coalition are deadlocked over healthcare proposals. As we reported last week, the unions maintain that the cost of living in the Bay Area has skyrocketed. Housing prices are up, gas prices are up, everything is up. Though the district’s offer includes a 3 percent wage increase next year, and further increases in subsequent years, the new health care plan would cost 2 percent of workers’ wages, largely nullifying any increases.

The district posted a full response to arguments against their healthcare offer at its blog. The district argues the workers are paid higher than their counterparts in other districts. The unions say the other districts don’t have to contend with local cost of living burdens, warnings which representatives said are largely falling on deaf ears. 

“The last strike was purposefully giving [the district] a warning another strike would happen,” Tonisson said. He was referring to last week’s iron workers strike, which garnered a bit of media attention, but for the most part did not move the needle on their contract negotiations. The two parties are still stalled on healthcare talks, despite the first “warning shot” picket line.

“This was their reaction,” Tonisson said. “The sense I had is they want us to strike.”

The impact of a strike depends on which of the 13 unions participate. Toll taking is now automated on the Golden Gate, but the unions still have options to affect commuters and garner attention. Workers changing the lanes on the bridge could snarl traffic during commutes, Golden Gate Transit drivers could strand bus-goers, and ferry workers could strand folks by the water.

“Imagine the backup on Lombard or Van Ness,” Tonisson said, referring to lane changers on strike. “It wouldn’t shut the bridge down entirely but it would make a mess of things.”

The real mess, though, is the state of the workers’ health care. But who’s willing to bet the public cares more about the snarled traffic than a thriving a middle class?

Below we’ve embedded a flyer from the union coalition, demonstrating its argument about cost of living and health care.



TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part two (Asia and beyond)

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part two (Asia and beyond)

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990) was an unofficial remake of the American film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) — and it was also a showcase for the 25-year-old Gong Li. I’ve grown up with each of his films over the past decades, including classics To Live (1994) and The Road Home (1999). His latest, Coming Home (China), is his most gut-wrenching film yet. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsKijZmtlM

Zhang began his studies at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, after the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. He quickly blossomed into the leader of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, and has gone through his fair share of controversy with the Chinese government and later with audiences who felt his films had lost their contrarian political stances. His latest heartbreaker is set during the Cultural Revolution, as it follows a university professor who is sent to labor camps, leaving his own wife and daughter to fend for themselves along with the negative status of being an “intellectual.” 

Zhang was in attendance for the Coming Home screening, and spoke at length about how China’s youth have never heard any of this history and how this film is not just one family’s struggle, but represents stories of millions of people that are being forgotten. Gong’s remarkable turn as a traumatized peasant ranks as one the year’s best performances and shame on the Oscars (in advance) for not recognizing her (yet again). As an aside: this is Zhang’s 18th feature and eighth time working with Gong; someone really needs to be putting together a complete retrospective. Qigang Chen’s Coming Home soundtrack is still haunting me weeks after the screening. This film is more proof that sentimentality should not be considered a dirty word in cinema. In fact, those that fight nostalgic tendencies are often the ones that have the most to hide.

Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom (South Korea) is yet another mini-masterpiece from the filmmaker, and another hilarious take on awkward, drunken relationships between 40-somethings. Hong upends linear storytelling, as usual, and showcases the legendary Korean actress Moon So-ri. (Her most recent Hong film was 2012’s In Another Country, with Isabelle Huppert.) With a running time at only 66 minutes, Hill of Freedom makes for the perfect appetizer on any film festival night.

In Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (Ukraine), an all deaf-mute cast leads the way to one of the most explosive films of the year, and it does so without a single line of dialogue or subtitling. This otherworldly experience forces audiences to pay attention to every action that these excluded teenagers make. While it ruthlessly emphasizes the violent, transgressive, and explicitly sexual nature of the teens, there is an intense structuralist method being utilized here that multiple viewings will be necessary to further pinpoint. 

Belarusian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s feature debut was the remarkable narrative My Joy (2010), which consisted of (according to the filmmaker) “140 cuts in the whole film.” With his third film, Maidan (Ukraine), he has created a jaw-dropping observational documentary of the Ukrainian people’s uprising in Kiev from December 2013 to February 2014. It is comprised of a series of fixed long shots that will be burned into your skull for the rest of your life, though your patience may be tested during the film’s 133 relentless minutes. 

Each sequence slowly gathers hundreds of faces, historically patriotic songs, and ultimately a unified people before, during, and after the government’s terrifying late night attacks. The film is not just a testament to the present-day political moment, but is a study in uncompromising cinema. This film has to be seen on a large screen. And if any local film festival to you is brave enough to program it, attend it all costs. Warning: A few audience members I spoke to were furious with the film for not “getting to know” any of the film’s inhabitants up close and personal.

Eugène Green is an American-born, naturalized French filmmaker that I had never heard of until his showstopper La Sapienza (France/Italy) screened on my final day at TIFF. With a plot that must be an homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), this eloquent exploration of a lifeless marriage caught me by surprise with its direct approach to the couple’s interactions. It follows Robert Bresson’s philosophy of removing cinema’s “masks,” and I found myself incredibly moved as a middle-aged man shared his genuine love for 17th century architect Francesco Borromini. Kino Lorber has acquired the film for a US release later this year — and with it, hopefully a larger audience for Green.

 

This was the first year that TIFF put together an international shorts program (“Short Cuts”), and art-house favorite Claire Denis led the pack with Voilà l’enchantement (France), a 30-minute tale involving an interracial couple and no sets. The mesmerizing actor Alex Descas shines in this wonderfully dramatic exercise. Tsai Ming-liang also continued his short film output with Journey to the West (Taiwan/France) — part of his “Walker” series. This time, Tsai brings his hidden camera to France and places both his regular actor Lee Kang-shang and the iconic Denis Lavant in unison on the streets of Marseille. The film runs close to 60 minutes, and there is truly nothing more enjoyable than watching these two performers hypnotizing the unaware locals (as well as the moviegoers around you). Tsai’s previous announcement of retirement will hopefully be soon forgotten.

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: His 1932 speech to the Commonwealth Club previewed the New Deal

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (with the full text of FDR’s address) 

Ken Burns’ documentary on the Roosevelts, broadcast last week by KQED,  was a stunning achievement and the best work Burns has done. It previewed key elements of the New Deal and provided historic context and relevance for the progressive politics of San Francisco and California. But it didn’t mention a key local angle, FDR’s famous speech to the Commonwealth Club on Sept. 21, 1932, in the heat of his winning campaign for president. 

I got on to the speech when Joseph J. Ellis, the noted historian, spoke to the club last year on his new book, “Revolutionary Summer, The birth of American independence.” In his introduction, Ellis said that “in my view the most important political speech in the 20th century was delivered here by Franklin Roosevelt.”

 The speech was written by Adolph Berle, a member of Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” and drew heavily on earlier progressive ideas, particularly  those of John Dewey, a leading progressive scholar who taught mainly  at Columbia University in New York. His speech is in the Commonwealth Club collection “Each a Mighty Voice,” a beautiful hardcover book published by Heyday.  Here is his speech. b3

https://online.hillsdale.edu/document.doc?id=282

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He was the editor and with his wife Jean Dibble the co-founder and co-publsher of the Guardian, 1966-2012.)

Double Duchess is back, and this time they’ve brought Kelly Osbourne

Steven T. Jones
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Is the drab Friday weather outside getting you down as you gear up for a weekend full of leather- and whip-filled debauchery?

Never fear! You just need a dose of Double Duchess, the Bay’s favorite queer electro duo, who invited Kelly Osbourne to do a Jem and the Holograms-style bit in this video for “Good Girl Freak Out,” which also features LA’s Future People.

Check it out below, and catch the fabulousness that is DD — made up of emcee-producer davO and charismatic vocalist Krylon Superstar — when the duo performs live at the Elbo Room Oct. 3.

 

 

TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part one

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Foreign favorites, part one

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

** Working steadily for over 40 years, achieving more than 20 features, Mike Leigh has stayed true to his “kitchen sink realism” aesthetic. Contemporary audiences could all too easily take him for granted. His latest, Mr. Turner (UK), is a rigorous and immensely rewarding journey that explores the life of British artist J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). 

Spall won the award for Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, not just for emulating Turner’s cartoonish and almost frightening physique, but also inhabiting and truly expressing the ghastly terror one struggles with after the death of a loved one. Recalling Jane Campion’s dazzling An Angel at My Table (1990), Leigh’s film places emphasis on the immense difficulties that an artists put themselves — and the others around them — through, and cinematographer Dick Pope (who has shot ten of Leigh’s films since 1990, and won a special jury award at Cannes for his work on Mr. Turner) gives every frame an almost spiritual look. 

** Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (France/USA) feels like a remake of his Maggie Cheung showpiece Irma Vep (1996), with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart playing out the filmmaker’s latest enchantments. Stewart, who plays the personal assistant to Binoche’s famous-actress character, is an absolute revelation, holding her own during the most fascinating and even erotic scenes of the film.

Clouds is deliciously layered with self-referential mirrorings of its stars’ real-life careers; it also contains ambiguity that left me talking to others about the film for days. The film was shot in 35mm, which is remarkably utilized during the many depth-of-field sequences in its Swiss-mountains setting.

** The Dardenne Brothers have added yet another stunning film to their collective résumé with Two Days, One Night (Belgium/France). The drama follows a woman (Marion Cotillard, in a stunning, panic-driven performance) as she desperately tracks down each of her fellow factory workers in hopes of saving her job, giving the audience an eye-opening look at the state of middle-class Belgian neighborhoods. 

** Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D (France) offers a purposefully playful take on 3D, forcing viewers to constantly readjust their focal points toward not just the images but the subtitles as well. This fast and furious farewell to our language of the past (and present?) is overflowing with so much energy, it should be screened twice in a row. 

** Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (Sweden/Norway/Denmark/France) lived up to its title when took this year’s Cannes Film Festival by storm, winning the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. This often surprisingly hilarious look at a Swedish bourgeoisie family slowly spills into much darker terrain, creating a minefield of gut-wrenching gender-politics. Similar to Julia Loktev’s gripping The Loneliest Planet (2011), director Östlund does an astounding job weaving through relationship expectations. With this being the Swedish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, hopefully someone local will program the filmmaker’s previous three films  — The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), and Play (2011) — which look just as mesmerizing.

** Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (France), an ode to the 1990s Electronic Dance Music scene, received countless write-ups due to the fact that the film includes the members of Daft Punk in the film. This humorously parallels the movie’s story, as it follows a French DJ who created the “French Touch” but whose legacy — like many in every youth movement — fell short of success. This was definitely one of the hottest cinephile tickets of the festival, and those who were patient with this two-part, 131-minute odyssey were rewarded with quite a poignant punch. 

The director made a splash with her hypnotic The Father of My Children (2009), which won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, and followed it up with the coming-of-age Goodbye First Love (2011). Eden has a built-in audience of EDM fans who will be educated on quite a number of unsung heroes from 1990s; added to that is the melancholic role played by Greta Gerwig, which should intrigue many non-EDM fans.

Lawsuit alleges Lee campaign accepted illegal donations from undercover agent

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Lawsuit alleges Lee campaign accepted illegal donations from undercover agent

By Max Cherney

Mayor Ed Lee has been named in a civil lawsuit that alleges he conspired to accept bribes in the form of illegal campaign contributions from an undercover FBI agent involved in the far-reaching federal corruption and racketeering probe into State Sen. Leland Yee, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, and 26 other defendants. The lawsuit is being leveled by an attorney working on Shrimp Boy’s behalf.

Filed yesterday [Thu/18] in San Francisco Superior Court, the lawsuit ties a $500 donation toward Lee’s 2011 successful bid for mayor to a man named Michael Anthony King, who the lawsuit claims was the same undercover federal agent referred to as UCE 4773 in the complaint against Yee.

King’s $500 donation was a part of more than $20,000 that the federal agent illegally contributed to the mayor’s campaign, according to the lawsuit. Individual contributions over $500 to the same candidate are against the law in San Francisco.

“From what we can tell, undercover agents have illegally been putting money into politicians’ pockets,” attorney Cory Briggs, who filed the lawsuit on Chow’s behalf, told us. In June, Briggs filed a public records request with the city of San Francisco, seeking documents associated with the campaign donations and additional cash allegedly contributed through individuals “involved in government” who were working for Lee’s campaign.

“What we want to know, is that when I asked on Raymond’s behalf about this, which we defined to include the transfer and payment of money to campaigns, why did the mayor not produce records of King’s donation? The public is entitled to an answer.” Cory Briggs is the brother of Curtis Briggs, who, along with Gregory Bentley, and famed civil rights attorney J. Tony Serra, represent Shrimp Boy in the criminal case.

Since individual donations totaling more than $500 are prohibited in San Francisco, the remaining $19,500 to an unnamed San Francisco elected official’s political campaign was allegedly spread out among dozens of straw donors, by two campaign staffers and political consultant Keith Jackson — also indicted by the feds — in an illegal attempt to mask the source of the funds, according to court documents in the Yee case.

According to the feds, the undercover agent was encouraged “by Individuals A and B to make donations to the elected official in excess of the lawful limit,” a motion filed by the feds in Sept. reads. “Each spoke plainly about the fact that they would have to break up UCE-4773’s donations among straw donors. UCE-4773 initially made a $10,000 donation in the form of a check made payable to Individual B and a $500 donation in the form of a check made payable to the elected official’s campaign.”

Despite rumors swirling that the $20,000 went to Ed Lee, the feds haven’t publicly stated which politician the funds went to. Nor have the feds released the alias that Undercover Employee (UCE-4773) used to make the contributions, or the names of the campaign staffers allegedly involved in the conspiracy — who were “involved in government” at the time, according to the feds’ motion.

Mayor Lee’s campaign is aware of King’s $500 donation, according to Kevin Heneghan, who served as campaign treasurer. The campaign sent a letter to the US Attorney’s Office seeking to verify whether or not the donation indeed came from a federal agent, Heneghan noted, but hasn’t yet received a response. The campaign hired a law firm to vet the campaign donations after the US Attorney’s Office announced the sprawling indictment that now includes racketeering charges.

Both the FBI and US Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the lawsuit, or the alleged connection between Michael King and the campaign donations to Mayor Lee’s campaign. Several emails to King were also not returned.

Many details contained in the far-reaching federal corruption probe match what the Bay Guardian has learned about King. US Attorney William Frentzen’s court filings in the Yee corruption trial stated that after being introduced to two campaign staffers, UCE 4773 contributed $500 to the campaign with a personal check.

Michael A. King of Buford, Georgia donated $500 to Leland Yee’s mayoral campaign on Sept. 22, 2011, San Francisco campaign contribution records show. King contributed another $500 to Ed Lee for Mayor on Mar. 15, 2012, months after Lee had been elected. At the time, Lee had approximately $300,000 in campaign debt, according to filings with the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in August, an unnamed source told the newspaper that a man with the surname “King” appeared in the Bay Area in the fall of 2011 looking to invest in Bay Area real estate projects.

To secure Bay Area real estate investments and other business contracts, UCE 4773 posed as an Atlanta, Georgia-based real estate developer seeking political favors from Yee, and an unnamed San Francisco elected official, according to court documents. Another undercover agent in the case, known as UCE 4599 — posing as a member of the La Cosa Nostra crime syndicate — introduced UCE 4773 to political consultant Keith Jackson after Jackson allegedly repeatedly asked UCE 4599 to donate to Sen. Yee’s campaign.

According to court documents, UCE 4773 met with the unnamed San Francisco official after he contributed the cash. Prior to the meeting, the campaign staffers, identified by the feds as “Individuals A and B” told UCE 4773 not to mention the donation scheme to the elected official.

The King Funding Group, which is controlled by M.A. King and Associates — the company listed on Michael King’s $500 donation to Mayor Lee’s campaign — also donated $500 to Leland Yee’s bid for Mayor, according to donation records. With Jackson’s help UCE 4773 also donated tens of thousands of dollars to Sen. Yee’s campaign, including a personal check for $500 to the campaign written in Yee’s presence.

According to court filings the government has made in the far-reaching corruption and racketeering investigation, the unnamed San Francisco elected official wasn’t the target of the investigation. Instead, the government focused on Keith Jackson and various members of the Chee Kung Tong organization, which Chow, aka “Shrimp Boy,” was allegedly leader of.

However, the feds did look into other politicians in San Francisco. Sups. London Breed and Malia Cohen both met with an undercover FBI agent using the name William Joseph on several occasions, according to records obtained by the Bay Guardian. The meetings didn’t amount to anything, and Breed dismissed Joseph as a hustler, according to a Chronicle report.

Questions of the week: Who is the walrus? And who is Liam Neeson gonna take down next? New movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Questions of the week: Who is the walrus? And who is Liam Neeson gonna take down next? New movies!

If Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ ongoing Pixel Vision posts about the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival have you longing for your own festival experience, check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s one-day “Silent Autumn” series at the Castro Theatre, as well as Cine+Mas’ San Francisco Latino Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Brava Theater and runs through Sept. 27 at various venues.

First-run picks o’ the week include Liam Neeson’s latest lone-wolf action movie, an ensemble movie starring Tina Fey and Jason Bateman, and Kevin Smith’s new joint, in which Justin Long turns into a walrus. Yep, you read that right. Read on for reviews and trailers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ng4MD66WyU

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby Writer-director Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby began as separate films about a failed marriage, told from the points of view of the husband (James McAvoy), and then the wife (Jessica Chastain). Because Americans will happily binge-watch entire TV seasons but still get the shakes when confronted with a two-part film, the segments (titled Him and Her) are getting wide release in the edited-together Them. (Diehards will have a chance to seek out the complete work eventually, but for now, this review concerns only Them.) As the film begins, Chastain’s Eleanor (yep, named after the Beatles song) flings herself off an NYC bridge. She survives physically, but her mental state is still supremely fragile, so she checks out of her Manhattan life and her marriage to Connor (McAvoy), and digs in at the chic suburban saltbox occupied by her parents (Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt) and sister (Jess Weixler), a single mother with a young son. Meanwhile, Connor mopes around his failing restaurant with his chef BFF (the suddenly ubiquitous Bill Hader), and pays occasional visits to his own moping father (Ciarán Hinds). The estranged couple circles each other, in flashbacks and occasional run-ins, and the audience is slowly made privy to the tragedy that drove them apart and has them both reeling from grief months later. Even in mash-up form, this is a delicate film, enhanced by Benson’s confidence in his audience’s intelligence; what could have been a manipulative tear-jerker instead feels authentically raw, with characters whose emotional confusion leads them to behave in realistically frustrating ways. The casting is note-perfect, with a special nod to Viola Davis as Eleanor’s world-weary college professor. I’ll be seeking out Her just to catch more of that performance. (2:03) (Cheryl Eddy)

The Iceman A palace guard accused of murder (martial arts star Donnie Yen) and three vengeful brothers are all frozen mid-battle — only to defrost 400 years later and pick up where they left off. (1:46) Four Star.

Los Angeles Plays Itself Remastered and newly cleared for fair use, Thom Andersen’s incisive 2003 film essay on narrative cinema’s many representations and misrepresentations of Los Angeles plays a single night at the Castro. Andersen’s impressively choreographed montage zigzags through a vast litany of film history, submitting erotic thrillers, middlebrow Oscar bait, and avant-garde outliers to the same materialist protocol. Observing Hollywood’s tendency to falsify geography and transform landmarks of modernist geography into villainous hideouts, Andersen’s treatment of mainstream ideology is acidly funny but never condescending. To the contrary: Los Angeles Plays Itself is driven by an unshakeable faith that another kind of film — and with it another kind of world — is possible. In methodically deconstructing countless car chases and phony denouements, the native Angeleno lays groundwork for the fresh appreciation of the diverse neorealisms found in the work of directors like Kent Mackenzie (1961’s The Exiles), Nicholas Ray (1955’s Rebel Without a Cause), Fred Halsted (1972’s LA Plays Itself), Charles Burnett (1979’s Killer of Sheep), and Billy Woodberry (1984’s Bless Their Little Hearts). A true work of termite art and an impassioned argument for “a city of walkers, a cinema of walking,” Los Angeles Plays Itself is the closest thing to a cineaste’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. (2:49) Castro. (Max Goldberg)

The Maze Runner In a post-apocalyptic world, a youth (Dylan O’Brien) finds himself among a group of boys trapped at the center of a mysterious maze. Based on the YA novel by James Dashner. (1:53) 

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! See “Joyous Blues.” (1:32) Elmwood, Roxie, Smith Rafael.

This Is Where I Leave You Jason Bateman plays Judd Altman, the hollow center of a clan of snarky, squabbling siblings — Wendy (Tina Fey), fractiously married with kids and pining for her high school sweetheart (Timothy Olyphant); Paul (Corey Stoll), who runs the family sporting goods store; and Phillip (Adam Driver), a philandering über-fuckup currently dating his former therapist (Connie Britton) — reunited somewhere in eastern seaboard suburbia by the death of their father. This vaguely sketched individual’s last wish, they are informed by their mother (Jane Fonda), a therapist turned author who mined their adolescence for pop psych bestseller gold, was that, his atheism notwithstanding, they conform to Judaic tradition and sit shivah for him. A seven-day respite of quiet reminiscing and clarifying reflection, broken up by periodic babka-and-whitefish-salad binges, could be good for Judd, whose recent misfortunes also include coming home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) between the sheets with his shock jock boss (Dax Shepard), resulting in a divorce-unemployment double whammy. But there is no peace to be found at the Altman homestead, where fuses blow, siblings brawl, in-laws conduct high-volume international business transactions and reproductive rites, and Wendy’s latchkey toddler wanders the property with his portable potty. Director Shawn Levy (2013’s The Internship, 2010’s Date Night) and writer Jonathan Tropper, who adapted the script from his novel, don’t want any of the siblings, or satellite characters, to feel left out, and the story line is divvied up accordingly. But the results are uneven — lumps of comedy and genuine pathos dropped amid the oppressive exposition, pat resolutions, and swings in pacing from slack to frenetic. (1:43) (Lynn Rapoport)

Tusk Michael Parks has a gift for looking like he’s in a different movie than everyone else, and it’s possible that ineffable skill of his has found its best use to date in Kevin Smith’s new fuck-you horror-comedy Tusk. When jerky podcaster Wally (Justin Long) finds a video that begins like “Star Wars Boy” but ends with dismemberment, Wally flies to Canada to interview the “Kill Bill Boy” (so named for the sword wielding and spurting stump). Wallace reaches his destination and is importuned by the funeral. This is one of a handful of scenes that exists to make us happy when Wally meets magical storyteller Howard Howe, an ex-sailor full of sea tales and an dark plan to turn Wally into a Franken-walrus. The story is based on something Smith hashed out in his sModcasts (excerpted during the credits) and when you look for author surrogate (not that you should) Wally’s impossible to distinguish from Smith. Asshole podcaster? Fights for permission to work freely? Body issues? All Wally needs is a dachshund and a jersey. Tusk isn’t up to the level of Smith’s early output, but it’s right in line with the decline in quality he’s been facing since critics broke his spirit, studios turned cold shoulders, and cynicism naturally set in. I hope whatever soul coughing Tusk represents will provide Smith momentum and license to leave any transformative hardships behind him — there are always beacons of hope (an uncredited Johnny Depp provides a good one here). Despite fundamental frustrations, Tusk has some deep and inky moments. When Howe takes Wally’s leg from him (leveling him to a “Kill Bill Kid”-styled punch line) Wally wails impotently, and Howe laughs — at what, it’s not certain (perhaps it’s really Parks, guffawing at Long’s performance?), but whatever that gloriously complicated motivation was, in the mingling of cries emerges an eerie but profoundly communal squall. (1:42) (Sara Maria Vizcarrondo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ttj9tXzCA

A Walk Among the Tombstones The latest in Liam Neeson’s string of films in which he plays a tough guy uncannily adept at hissing orders (or threats) through a telephone is as pitch-black as its eerie title suggests. Set conspicuously in 1999, when Y2K and far more sinister threats loomed (see: a poignant shot of the World Trade Center), Tombstones is the grim tale of Matt Scudder, a loner with both an NYPD career and a prodigious drinking habit wedged 10 years in the past. He maintains his bare-bones lifestyle by doing off-the-books PI work, but none of his dirty-deeds experience can prepare him for his next case, a nightmarish pile-up of missing women sliced to pieces by a van-driving maniacs. Working from Lawrence Block’s novel, writer-director Scott Frank (2007’s The Lookout) emerges with surprisingly layered characters that extend beyond the archetypes they initially seem to be at first; besides Neeson’s Scudder, there’s a street-smart youth who becomes his sorta-helpful sidekick (Brian “Astro” Bradley), and a vengeful drug dealer (Dan Stevens) with a junkie brother (Boyd Holbrook). Even the murderers behave in unexpected ways. And if its story hews a bit too closely to Urban Noir 101, it’s bleak as hell, and has the guts to make relentlessness one of its primary objectives. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

Wetlands It begins, like many a classic coming-of-age tale, with an unbridled case of hemorrhoids, followed by a barefoot meander through possible sewage to the vilest public restroom captured on film since 1996’s Trainspotting. None of this seems to faze Wetlands’ outspoken heroine and narrator, 18-year-old Helen (Carla Juri), a skateboarding, sexually adventurous young maniac who admits to having a markedly lax attitude toward personal hygiene. Viewers of director-cowriter David Wnendt’s film, however, may want to refrain from visiting the concession stand just this once — chewing on Milk Duds is likely to become negatively evocative as Helen embarks on a round of tactile explorations involving a tasting menu of bodily excretions. The biotic high jinks continue when she winds up in the hospital in the wake of a viscerally enacted shaving incident, from which vantage point, occasionally under general anesthesia, she revisits scenes from both her fraught childhood and her teenage exploits, wandering between the homes of her divorced parents: an anxious, uptight germophobe mother (Meret Becker) and a checked-out, self-indulgent father (Axel Milberg), whose inadvisable rapprochement she hopes to engineer from her hospital bed. Impressively, amid the advancing waves of gross-out, a poignant story line emerges, and, like Helen’s handsome, bemused nurse Robin (Christoph Letkowski), the object of her wildly inappropriate advances, we find ourselves rolling with the shock and revulsion, increasingly solicitous and bizarrely charmed. (1:49) (Lynn Rapoport)

The Zero Theorem See “Waltz Work.” (1:46) 

Dave Chappelle kept me up until 5am this morning and I’m still trying to process what just happened

Steven T. Jones
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The first time I saw Dave Chappelle perform live was 10 years and three months ago, in a large, echo-y gymnasium at UC San Diego. It was my 20th birthday and I was so excited. 

This was June of 2004, and the comedian was at the absolute peak of his Chappelle’s Show fame, which meant he suddenly found himself performing for sports arenas full of college kids who had neither the patience nor the decorum (nor the sobriety) to actually sit and listen to a standup comic performing material, choosing instead to holler “I’M RICK JAMES, BITCH!” or “WHAT!” and “YEAH!” in Lil Jon voices at random — in reference, of course, to their favorite Chappelle’s Show impressions. They did this without provocation or logic. They interrupted him constantly. They did not care. He was pissed. Every audience member who wasn’t doing it was super pissed.

Two weeks later, encountering a similar audience in Sacramento, he left the stage for two minutes, then came back and said: “This show is ruining my life. This is the most important thing I do, and because I’m on TV, you make it hard for me to do it. People can’t distinguish between what’s real and fake. This ain’t a TV show. You’re not watching Comedy Central…You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you’re not smart enough to get what I’m doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.”

Less than a year later, mid-production, he took off for South Africa and the show came to an abrupt end.

I have always felt a strangely personal guilt about this. I’m sorry about the idiots at UCSD, Dave, I have wanted to tell him. To this day, I can’t think of another instance in which such an intelligent brand of comedy has amassed such an astoundingly high percentage of morons as its fan base.

This being the case, I went into Dave Chappelle’s midnight performance at the Punch Line in SF last night (the fourth of four gigs in two nights announced Tuesday morning; he’ll do another one tonight at 10:30pm) with, well — I don’t want to say great expectations. But it’s a small club; I’ve heard great things about his smaller shows in SF over the past year or so, and I was ready for something like a redemptive Dave Chappelle experience.

“All of those 20-year-old idiots have grown up,” some part of my brain believed. “These shows sold out so quickly. These are super-fans. This will be great.”

You know what happens to drunk 20-year-old idiot college kids who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians? They do grow up. They get jobs. They move to SF. They buy expensive collared shirts. And they become drunk 30-year-old idiot startup bros who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians.

“DAVE who’s the hottest celebrity you’ve slept with!” (“That question assumes I’ve slept with a celebrity.”)

“DAVE you lift, bra? You lift!” (“No, this is actually just a really small shirt.”)

“Hey Dave! HEY DAVE! Are you gonna get the iPhone 6?” (Blank stare of disbelief. “Uh, probably.”)

Have you ever cringed so hard in a public place that it takes all your strength not to actually pull your shirt up over your head and crawl under your chair? Imagine a club full of people sharing this feeling. Now sit with it. For four hours. Now add a two-drink minimum and stressed-out waiters serving mandatory drinks that mandatorily must be downed within the next 10 minutes because it’s 1:45 in the morning.

To be fair: Chappelle was asking for it, quite literally. He opened with some SF-centric bits — a story about how he got mugged for the first time ever in San Francisco, and it was by a gay man. There was a quick, sweet anecdote about hanging out with the “startlingly funny” Robin Williams at the Punch Line, followed by a thought about Joan Rivers (“Joan Rivers was a great comedian, the problem is, she died a couple days after Robin Williams. Great comedian, but that’s bad timing.”) And then the evening became a neverending Q&A session, with very loose interpretations of both Qs and As.

“What do you guys wanna talk about?” he repeated at least a half-dozen times, leaning forward on his barstool in a short-sleeve black button-up shirt (looking, yes, noticeably buff), chainsmoking an entire pack of yellow American Spirits that he stubbed out in succession on his sneaker, drinking tequila and Coronas, and, at one point, ordering shots for a couple in the front row.

Fresh from appearances the past couple months at the traveling Oddball Comedy Festival, Chappelle — who, most of the year, lives in a farmhouse in Ohio with his wife and three kids — acknowledged that he was using this handful of last-minute SF performances as “practice” before heading to Chicago this weekend, where he’ll host Common’s Aahh! Fest, with Lupe Fiasco, De La Soul, MC Lyte (!), and others. And either he was plain sick of repeating material he’d performed three times in the last 48 hours, or he doesn’t have any new material, because most of what he did last night — sorry, what he did this morning, from 12:30am until just shy of 5am — is not what most people would refer to as “material.” This is also likely one reason the most sober he appeared all night was in the couple instances he caught people holding their cell phones, which were strictly and clearly prohibited from the moment he walked on stage. (“YouTube ruins comedy.”)

Also to be fair, Dave Chappelle is one of the few comedians alive who could get away with straight-up, absolutely non-planned riffing for that long — on current events, on domestic abuse and football, on race relations, on Ferguson, on run-ins with OJ, on sex, on marriage, on fame and its perils — and actually, for the most part, hold an audience’s attention.

For all his sloppiness (the last half-hour or so was largely Chappelle realizing and vocalizing how badly he needed to pee), the man possesses a spark of something undeniably genius, and it’s most visible in his social commentary, when he lets himself get dark — like the running gag of him being a “quinoa-eating” black person, the kind that makes white people feel safe. Or like when he unleashed a lucid torrent of facts about the shooting of unarmed young black men in the US over the past three years, including the grossly under-publicized killing of 22-year-old John Crawford III by white cops in a Walmart in Chappelle’s home state of Ohio last week. Crawford had picked up a BB gun inside the store — a gun that was for sale, naturally, at Walmart.

“The store never closed! They haven’t even shown the tapes!” Chappelle said incredulously. “And the worst part is that you’re allowed to carry a gun in Ohio. I’ve gone to Denny’s packing a gun! (Pause.) I’ve had a lot of cash on me at certain points in my life.”

At times you could almost see the sharpest version of him shining through the beer and weed haze, gauging the audience’s temperature, seeing how much more serious and guilt-inducing shit a mostly white audience would tolerate, before bringing everybody back in with his (still excellent) white suburban neighbor voice or a dick joke punchline. 

Around 4am, after maybe half the audience had left (“What if I just wait all of you out? I’m going to be the last one standing”) and Chappelle became less and less articulate, the pauses in his riffing got longer, as he (and we) sat listening to the sound of cars driving through freshly rain-washed streets outside. Everybody had gotten their dumb questions out, or else had gotten too drunk and indiscriminately yelled for a while and then had their embarrassed friends drag them home. It was awkward the way any straggler-at-the-party-at-4am interaction is awkward. A little bit like a hostage situation, but with an incredibly funny and intelligent albeit unfocused kidnapper.

“It will take you years to understand what happened here tonight,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, as someone asked about his show tomorrow (tonight). “Oh yeah, it’ll be great,” he said. “You should come. Based on how it went tonight, you won’t hear this shit again.”

—

Q: “Bring back the show!”

A: “Problem with that is, when you quit a show the way I did, networks don’t exactly trust you ever again. You realize I didn’t tell anyone I wasn’t coming in, I just left. So it’s like ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll see you Monday…'”

Q: “What’s the funniest insult you’ve ever heard?”

A: “My 5-year-old kid told me that I had a vagina on my back, with a butt for a mouth, with a hot dog in it. Five years old! I was like, the force is strong with this one. My wife got mad at me for laughing, but come on…I wasn’t even gonna laugh until the hot dog bit. He got me with the hot dog.”

Head First: On “dysfunction,” freaking out, and my huge, THC-fueled orgasms

Sasha Cuttler
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Head First: On “dysfunction,” freaking out, and my huge, THC-fueled orgasms

I have very little experience with marijuana — mostly because I’m from a small, East Coast town where such a substance is referred to as “the Devil’s lettuce.”  So when Mathew Gerson, founder and inventor of the THC lube, Foria, offered me the opportunity to test out his new product, I was intrigued. 

Foria is supposed to enhance female sexual pleasure. I’ve personally never had issues with orgasms (I can hump a chair and come), but I was interested to see how some oil could make them feel even better. So I decided to try it.

Foria is THC and coconut oil mixed together. The THC functions as an aphrodisiac that relaxes you, and the coconut oil smells nice and helps to keep the PH balanced in your vagina. On Foria’s website, the product is advertised as an “all-natural plant-based medicinal.” When I asked Gerson about what inspired him to create Foria, he said that 49 percent of women in American culture report some kind of sexual disorder, and he wanted to lend a hand (or two fingers, if you will).

There aren’t sufficient facts to prove that female sexual displeasure is a physical malady, even though medical companies have been trying to sell women bullshit medication for decades (see the documentary Orgasm Inc. for the details on that heinous scheme). I think that if women have problems with arousal, the dysfunction lies in the failings of society (i.e. “pussy pounding” in mainstream porn, religious slut-shaming, etc.) and not in their physical bodies.

When I questioned Gerson on the terminology, he said: “I’m not a scientist or a physician. I use [dysfunction] hesitantly. It’s more about dissatisfaction,” said Gerson. “[The word] ‘dissatisfaction’ feels better because it’s more addressable directly, without medical intervention. If you’re dissatisfied, you feel more empowered to do something about it, but if you’ve got a dysfunction, then you feel like you have to go see an expert.”

So the language is sticky. It’s a new company. He’s a nice enough guy. I decided to let it slide… into my crotch.

The first time I tried Foria, I followed the directions to a T. I spread eagled on my bed, applied the smallest suggested dose (four sprays), massaged the Foria into my crotch, and waited 30 minutes for the THC to soak in. Then, I masturbated for 20 whole minutes and… nothing happened. Well, nothing different than usual, anyway.

The second time I tried it, I used six sprays, then masturbated for 20 minutes and… nothing happened. I even squirted four spritzes into my mouth to see if it would take the edge off. I didn’t feel any different and didn’t orgasm any harder. 

I sent Gerson a text to tell him that the Foria bottle was faulty, to which he replied: “Expectations create residual stress in the body that actually inhibit plant medicine from doing its thing.” 

So if I was thinking or worrying too much about orgasm, then Foria would have no effect? Isn’t this product for women who are worried about or can’t have orgasms? 

I was convinced the bottle was shoddy. So in my confident bout of ignorance, I sprayed the highest dose of Foria (8 sprays) into my mouth, convinced it would have no effect.

Let me take a moment to offer you some advice: If you’re a small town chick with little to no experience with drugs of any kind, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES  spray 16 mg of THC into your mouth when you’re alone in your house on a Tuesday afternoon. 

Why? 

Because you will panic and call your ex-girlfriend who you haven’t spoken to in years and she won’t be in the mood to walk you through a bad high. You will open all of the drawers and cabinets in your house and trip over them in your daze. You will try to eat fruit salad, but because you’re so high, the watermelon will taste like rubbing alcohol. You will freak out and let your brain trick you into thinking you’re having a heart attack (you’re not). And you will keep telling yourself that no one has ever died from pot until you stick your finger down your throat and puke for 10 minutes.

So, yeah, the bottle wasn’t faulty. Hindsight’s a dick, isn’t it? I decided to give the Foria one more go. 

The next night, I sprayed on the oil, waited a whole hour, and then my boyfriend and I had sex. Really, really good sex. And finally… something happened. 

I had a super long orgasm. It lasted around 45 seconds, when usually my orgasms last about 10-15. My boyfriend’s wrist and tongue started cramping. When I finally stopped coming, my abs hurt and I was so out of breath that I told my boyfriend to wait a couple minutes before continuing. So we took a break, and then we did it again. And again. And again. And then I was so tired from having orgasms that I thought I would pass out.

The third try was a charm. 

I believe that all women can have fully functioning orgasmic vaginas with nothing but patience, a loving partner, and a map of the clitoris. But since Foria actually worked for me (eventually) to produce longer orgasms, then I can only imagine how it would help to enhance the sexual experience of someone who can’t come at all. I don’t think that women should permanently rely on a substance to get them off, but I see no reason why Foria can’t be used as a tool to help women begin to connect with their bodies.

Plus, giving people the opportunity to get high off pussy encourages the act of cunnilingus — and Lord knows society needs more practice with that.

The intern behind an epic blunder: Docs illuminate Asiana fake pilots’ names debacle

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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The intern behind an epic blunder: Docs illuminate Asiana fake pilots’ names debacle

Remember when a July 2013 KTVU-TV news broadcast went viral and caused jaws to drop because the anchorwoman read out fake, offensive pilots’ names in the wake of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash?

KTVU producers were fired in the wake of the blunder. The National Transportation Safety Board – the federal agency KTVU said it had checked the names with – issued a public apology, saying a summer intern had “acted out of scope” in confirming the names, which sounded like the punch line of a racist joke.

Someone submitted a public records request to the NTSB, shaking loose nearly 900 pages of documents, and we at the Bay Guardian received a copy. Names were redacted, but an internal statement written by a NTSB staff member provides the detailed backstory behind this extraordinary snafu.

According to that account, a KTVU producer first called the NTSB and read out the list of (fake) crewmembers’ names, asking if NTSB could confirm them. According to various news reports, KTVU had received the names in an email from a source it considered reputable.

The public affairs intern who answered KTVU’s call later told his supervisor that he “wanted to be helpful so he went online to search for the crew names but said that he made it clear to the KTVU producer that he was getting the information from an Internet search. … He said that the names he’d been given sounded like the ones that he had seen referenced on the Internet so he told me that he told the producer that he ‘believed’ that those were the names.” 

When the KTVU producer called back half an hour later, to double-check that the names were accurate, the intern put the producer on hold and then asked his supervisor if NTSB confirms crewmembers’ names. The supervisor, who apparently had no idea who had called, responded that it’s not the NTSB’s policy to confirm names, but that the caller could easily find the crewmembers’ names online from reputable news sources, since Asiana had in fact already released them.

Evidently, the intern ignored his supervisor’s instructions. As the supervisor later recounted, after hearing about the call from KTVU: “[The station manager] said that his producer told him that [the intern] said that he could confirm the names through the NTSB, but not to use [unknown] name in the report.”

Was that last redaction the intern’s own name? Did the intern realize that he was in a position to allow a callous prank to go forward, and try to take steps to avoid being publically associated with it?

“I asked [the intern] if he had used the word ‘confirm’ with the producer,” the supervisor’s account explains. “He said that he may have used that word. I asked him if he disagreed with the producer’s recounting of their interaction with [the intern] saying that KTVU could confirm the names through the NTSB but not to use [unknown] name in the report. [The intern] said he did not disagree with that account.”

In the end, the intern got fired, the KTVU producers got fired, and the NTSB weathered an onslaught of bad press. The federal agency went into damage control mode and tried to smooth things over with KTVU, Asiana, and outraged members of the Korean community, the documents show.

Here’s another tidbit from the trove of internal NTSB documents that shed light on the internal climate. (Click here to download the full PDF.)

“I am, unfortunately, not surprised this happened,” a different NTSB staff member wrote in an email. “Last week, I repeatedly told one of the interns that he needed to get the caller’s contact information and refer the questions to the appropriate Public Affairs Officer, rather than trying to answer the questions himself. I also heard [a different NTSB staff member] give him similar instruction. In fact, during the hearing last week, [a different NTSB staff member] (for all intents and purposes) told me to beat the kid to the phone. The intern pouted and kept his hand on the phone for the rest of the day. I’m not surprised that the kid overstepped.

“The big question, though, is who made up those names. The kid is overzealous and tries too hard, but he took the job much too seriously than to make up fake names. I think that it was probably a prank gone wrong from the station. We just got caught in the crossfire.”

TIFF 2014: Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’

Sue Vaughan
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TIFF 2014: Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Look of Silence’

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from the recent 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Previous installment here!

News broke earlier this week that Joshua Oppenheimer — the Texas-born, Copenhagen-based filmmaker who scored an Oscar nomination for 2012’s harrowing The Act of Killing — received a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Not a bad follow-up to the Toronto screening of his latest Indonesia-set doc, The Look of Silence (Denmark/Indonesia/Norway/Finland/UK), which is both a direct sequel to Killing and a complete stand-alone work. Either way, it’s one of the most powerful documentaries I have ever experienced. (It’s due in theaters in summer 2015.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqLLhoIrp8E

In this film, Oppenheimer teams up with Adi — an optometrist whose older brother died in the mid-1960s Indonesian genocide — and tracks down former officials to confront them about their horrific actions. Each interview pits Adi against his darkest demon and it only goes deeper from there. The theater echoed with sobbing throughout the entire 98 minutes and reports say that all three screenings concluded in standing ovations (though everyone on my row needed time to recover emotionally before they could even move). 

As in Killing, Oppenheimer’s co-director and countless crewmembers are credited as “Anonymous,” due to the risks they take by still living in Indonesia. Hailed (and executive produced) by Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, Silence is poised to earn Oppenheimer another Oscar nomination — and probably a win this time, too. But more importantly, it has the power to give a therapeutic experience to the many victims around the world of irresolvable atrocities.

Folsom Special: Guerrilla Queer Bar returns as leather “Pop-Up”

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Folsom Special: Guerrilla Queer Bar returns as leather “Pop-Up”

Picture it: the Marina, 2000, a club called Trap Door playing goofy throwback hip-hop, shirty dudes and “woo” girls playing the heter-mating game with hetero-abando.

In strut a gaggle of rough and ready queers, me included, part of Guerrilla Queer Bar, to shake things up and sprinkle a little unicorn rainbow dust (and wig hair) on the proceedings. Web 1.0 was in full effect, queers were losing their spaces, and so we wanted to “take it back” by invading “straight” neighborhoods and wreaking a little lavender havoc — you know, to even things out and have fun. It was kind of the original flashmob, spread only by the limited social media of the time (i.e. email listservs). 

And that’s when the shiny-cuffed bro pulled out a $20 and told me to make out with his male roommate so he and his friends could watch. “We’ve never seen two guys make out in real life!” he said. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted, but damn right I took his money stright up, and cultural experiences were shared all ’round.

Now, just in time for Folsom frolicking (most of it restricted to Soma), GQB is back, but in a much more global-reaching form called “Pop-Up Gay Bar,” still intending to challenge assumptions gay and straight in unexpected neighborhoods, while downing some yummy cocktails and making new friends. The next one will take place tomorrow, Fri/21 — sign up at the link above to get the details! Let’s take some queer leather and love to the normals.

I talked to Brian McConnell, Pop-Up Gay Bar organizer (along with Sister Selma Soul and a few others).

SFBG What prompted you to reactivate GQB  — and in this new form?

Brian Mcconnell A couple things prompted me.

One was going to eastern Tennessee a couple of months ago for my grandfather’s 95 birthday. This is in serious Appalachia (Smokey Mountains etc). Before I left, I stopped at a sports bar near the regional airport, and overheard the bartender talking with customers about his BF, etc. Twenty years ago you’d get beaten to a pulp, and then the cops would laugh at you for being a faggot. So obviously things have changed a lot, even in redneck country. It’s not the Castro, of course, but clearly things have improved, at least to the point people feel comfortable being more open now.

The other thing motivating me is I feel like the trend of everyone moving to the city is about played out. Yes, we’d all like to live in a cute house in a cute neighborhood, etc, but there’s only so much space, and the people who are already entrenched don’t want to move. So I think there are going to be a lot of people bypassing places like SF for other places. I moved here in 1994, partly because being gay and spending a lot of time in the South I was tired of that climate, and partly because I grew up around computers. At the time, it was really the only option professionally and personally. If it were today, I don’t know that I’d feel the same way about SF. It’s still a great place, but I don’t think the pull is as obvious now. What was a no-brain decision is less so now. (For context, I thought $800/month for a crappy 1 BR in the Tenderknob was expensive).

SFBG Who is all involved in the reboot, and have you launched in other cities yet?

BM In SF, it’s primarily me and Sister Selma Soul, who ran Pink Saturday for several years.

We’ve heard from people who are interested in organizing events in Marin/Sonoma, a guerrilla transgender event in East Bay, Baltimore and Harlem. The Pop Up Gay Bar system is set up so organizers can send email to people in their vicinity. It’s a location aware email listserv that I built. We’re letting it develop organically outside SF, since we noticed that GQB was different in each city it spread to.

SFBG What are some of your favorite GQB memories?

BM “Priscilla Queen of Walnut Creek” (Green Tortoise bus caravan to the East Bay). I remember Peaches Christ driving around a Safeway in one of the granny carts announcing “I need a price check for a rump roast.”

Saint Patricia’s Day. These two Irish tourists emailed us in advance of their trip to ask if we could organize something for them. At first we thought this a bit presumptuous, then realized they’d be here in March. So we organized a Saint Patrick’s Day parade two weeks early in Chinatown and made them the grand marshals.

“I’m Dreaming of a White Necklace.” We rented out (porn theater) The Campus Theatre for a Christmas party. Pro tip: if you are going to organize a completely illegal party across the street from a police precinct, rent searchlights and put out a red carpet (they’ll assume it’s legit).

SFBG Have you finalized this year’s location — and are you encouraging people to wear leather?

BM People can sign up at the site to get the information sent to them. On the record, we’re headed to Union Square, think of SantaCon with chaps. And yes, we are encouraging leather, or clowns, or whatever freak flag people want to fly.

SFBG What do you think the biggest challenges for queers are right now, both in the Bay Area and the country at large?

BM I think in general there has been a loss of LGBT space. Even in SF, gay bars have been disappearing (most recently Esta Noche), and there’s hardly anything here for lesbians. Outside SF, you’re lucky if there’s a place within an hour’s drive. So we’re hoping PUGB will spread, and that even the smallest towns will use it or something like it to create local space.

SFBG Should we bring our own girly drink to the pop up? Because what if there’s only beer.

BM You should always bring a flask.

While we definitely plan to have fun around SF, this time around its much more about getting this rolling everywhere, even places like Morristown, TN. That would be a good SF export in my opinion, and it is the kind of thing SF is good at starting.

Hockey! Drums! Pianos! And TRASHY MOVIES! Passions ruled TIFF 2014

Sue Vaughan
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Hockey! Drums! Pianos! And TRASHY MOVIES! Passions ruled TIFF 2014

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks reports from an epic Toronto International Film Festival. Read his first installment here.

Despite notable entries like George Roy Hill’s defining Slap Shot (1977) and Michael Dowse’s remarkable Goon (2011), hockey films have always been a little more overlooked in the US than they should be. Gabe Polsky’s blood-pumping Red Army (US/Russia) is begging to be adapted into a rip-roaring narrative, à la Catherine Hardwick’s Lords of Dogtown (2005) take on Stacy Peralta’s skateboarding doc Dogtown & Z-Boys (2001).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZxiPwGjqAE

Red Army takes a look at the Soviet Union’s famous Red Army Team of the 1970s and ’80s; it’s a powerful account of the personal and political plights endured by the team’s five stars. Outrageous human-interest story interlaced with gripping flashback sports footage, and all compacted into 85 minutes? Puck yeah!

When Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (US) won both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, critics began the inevitable debate: Is it really that good? (Catch it at the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival, or wait until Oct. 17, when it gets its Bay Area theatrical release.) But for anyone who has questioned their own education methods, whether they be student or mentor, child or parent, artist or technician, writer-director Chazelle’s deeply personal story will hit close to home. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvOksqh1Td0

Star Miles Teller has steadily built a cult following with memorable performances in John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole (2010), Craig Brewer’s underrated remake of Footloose (2011), and a slew of Hangover knockoffs (including this year’s That Awkward Moment.) But it was his role in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now (2013) — speaking of Sundance accolades, that film won a Special Jury Award for Acting for Teller and costar Shailene Woodley — that cemented his status as a next-generation one to watch. His turn as a young drummer in Whiplash should continue the trend, alongside another memorable performance by J.K. Simmons as his explosive music teacher.

Whiplash wanders into darker terrain than even film festival audiences were prepared for. Like free jazz, the structure of the film may feel faulty at times, but perhaps that is exactly what this audacious little number was aiming for.

More for music fans: Ethan Hawke’s Seymour: An Introduction (US) is a wonderful documentary celebrating Seymour Bernstein, who is not just an unsung pianist who withdrew from performing publicly, but also an artist who devoted his life to teaching and mentoring generations of students. Beautifully shot, this fascinating and strongly inspirational film is a perfect dose of medicine for middle-aged moodiness. 

 And Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (Australia/US/Israel/UK) is the third film that director Mark Hartley has made about off-the-beaten-path genre films. His Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010) fleshed out an overwhelming onslaught of low-budget gems made in Australia and the Philippines. This latest is aimed squarely at fans of low-budget 1980s legends Cannon Films, which produced countless action films starring Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris. 

Cannon’s overseers — Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — often boldly knocked off whatever genre was hot at the box office, as quickly and cheaply as possible. While Electric Boogaloo is packed with tons of wonderful clips from many of the studio’s best films (Andrey Konchalovskiy’s 1985 Runaway Train, anyone?!), the real punch line of the documentary is something that doesn’t even happen in the film: when Golan (who passed away last month) and Globus were told about about Hartley’s film, they refused to be in his movie and immediately started making their own. The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films (2014) premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, three months before Electric Boogaloo. Because there’s no such thing as too much Cannon love — and since Go-Go Boys supposedly contains a monumental interview with Jean Claude Van Damme — here’s to one last Golan-Globus masterpiece!

Airbnb says it will collect and pay local taxes in SF. Really.

Sasha Cuttler
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Airbnb says it will collect and pay local taxes in SF. Really.

In the wake of this week’s contentious hearing on legislation to legalize and regulate short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where Airbnb was chastised for snubbing the city on collecting and paying local taxes, the company today sent an email to its hosts announcing that it would begin doing so Oct. 1.

The message tells hosts that it will be collecting and remitting the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax on their behalf and that “hosts will not have to do anything extra.” But as Tax Collector Jose Cisneros told us for our article this week, that isn’t totally true. He said that hosts are still businesses and therefore need a business license, although companies like Airbnb can assume responsibility for the other two tasks involve: obtaining a “certificate of authority” that allows a business to collect taxes and filing monthly tax statements.

“All hosts would have to do is file annual business registrations,” Cisneros told us.

But hey, following local laws and correctly informing their customers about the legality of these transactions has never been Airbnb’s strong suit, so I suppose this is progress. The company’s email follows in its entirety:

 

Earlier this year, we announced that we would begin collecting occupancy taxes on behalf of hosts and guests in San Francisco. We’ve been working with the City to make the process streamlined and easy to follow, and today we are pleased to share that we are planning to launch this program on October 1. We know our community contributes substantial, positive economic impacts in neighborhoods across San Francisco, and this initiative will continue to make the city even stronger.

We’ve posted more information about this announcement on our Public Policy blog and we hope you’ll check it out. We also wanted to share more details about what this update specifically means for hosts and guests in San Francisco:

For reservations in San Francisco booked on or after October 1, guests will see a new line item on their Airbnb receipt for the city-imposed Transient Occupancy Tax. The tax will be added to the total amount paid by guests on stays of fewer than 30 days – hosts will not have to do anything extra. If you’ve already been collecting the San Francisco Transient Occupancy Tax for Airbnb guests, you should not do so after October 1.

Collection of these taxes won’t affect the payout amounts you receive as a host. Just like before, you’ll continue to receive your accommodation fee minus the Airbnb host service fee. Before paying and on the itemized receipt, your guests will see a separate amount for taxes in the total amount they pay for a reservation. If you’d like to learn more about occupancy taxes and Airbnb, please visit our Help Center.

Additionally, tomorrow our Regional Head of Public Policy David Owen will be hosting a webinar to discuss this important topic, and to give you the opportunity to ask questions. You can sign up to participate here.

San Francisco is our home and we look forward to continuing to work with everyone here to make it an even better place to live, work and visit.

Thanks,
The Airbnb Team

 

 

 

Indian Joe suffers a tragic injury, keeps his sense of humor

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Indian Joe suffers a tragic injury, keeps his sense of humor

We spotted Indian Joe, an iconic San Francisco character who’s famous for emulating the look of rock legend Alice Cooper, on the sidewalk outside the Bay Guardian office Monday morning. Donning his signature top hat, he beamed and said hello. But something was wrong.

Joe was sitting in a wheelchair, and the lower half of his right leg was gone.

He filled us in on how it happened: Less than a month ago, a concrete block fell onto his leg at a recycling facility operated by Recology, instantly crushing his ankle and foot. He’d gone to the recycling center, located at Pier 96 on Amadour Street in San Francisco, on Aug. 18, to help a friend unload recycled cardboard.

They’d gone numerous times before. He said they used the same practice for unloading his friend’s pickup truck that they and other recyclers always use, which involves tying one end of a rope securing the bundle of cardboard to a concrete block with an eyelet sticking out of it, and driving forward a few feet to pull the cardboard off the truck bed. But on this day, the concrete somehow came loose and crushed Indian Joe’s leg, causing him to lose a limb.

The day after we encountered Joe on the street, we stopped in to see him at the Hotel Alder, a Sixth Street SRO where he’s lived for four years. He shares his room with a sweet gray cat named Thin Lizzy, named after the rock band. Jack Ottaway, a photographer who’s acted as Joe’s caretaker since the accident, was with him, preparing to take him to a doctor’s appointment later that morning.

Joe said that after the concrete block fell onto his leg, a number of Recology employees came running over but didn’t immediately free him from the enormous weight he was trapped under, even though he could see a forklift nearby. Finally the concrete was moved aside, and he was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. “I heard them in the ambulance as they were talking to [San Francisco General Hospital],” he recalled, “and they were saying, ‘we’re going to have to amputate his leg.’”

Joe is still experiencing serious pain and he said he’s been having nightmares about the accident. He got emotional when he explained what had happened, but he’s maintained his sense of humor throughout the ordeal. “I may be down, but I’m not out. The first bionic Indian!” he laughed.

“I’m getting ready to go swimming,” he jokingly told a neighbor later on, top hat in place, as his caretaker wheeled him toward the elevator on their way to the doctor. “I’m gonna do the high dive!”

A few days after the operation, Joe celebrated his 52nd birthday in the hospital. He received a giant get well soon / happy birthday card signed by students from Crocker Middle School. They’d taped a picture of Alice Cooper on the front and covered the card in hand-written messages.

Earlier on the day of the accident, Joe had gone to De Marillac Academy, a school that educates low-income, underserved youth from the Tenderloin, to deliver a “motivational talk.” It’s one of several schools, including Crocker, where he regularly speaks to youth, telling his personal story. “We talk about hunger, homelessness, and what it’s like being Native American,” he explained. “They all love me to death.”

Joe was homeless on the streets of San Francisco for many years before moving into the SRO. “Over the years, the city’s been good to me,” he said. He’s made appearances in two documentary films. One of them, the Emmy-winning “A Brush With the Tenderloin” by filmmaker Paige Bierma, focuses on a Tenderloin mural painted by local artist Mona Caron. Indian Joe is painted into the mural.

“People recognize me,” Joe said. “I got to wearing my top hat, and that became my trademark over the years.” Then came the Alice Cooper makeup, which a friend did for him the first time. Walking down the street, “I felt so self-conscious, and people were looking at me,” he said. “And then I thought: There’s a lot weirder people than me in San Francisco!”

Joe said he grew up in British Columbia, and his family is a part of the Shuswap Tribe. While living on the streets, he said, he became a victim of violence more than once: “I was stabbed eight times,” he noted, lifting his shirt to show the scars. “I was shot in the back with a 9 millimeter.” He also said he kicked a decade-long heroin addiction. “I just told the devil, here’s the needle, I quit,” he said. The withdrawal “was five years of hell,” he said, but since then, a few people have approached him to say that he inspired them to give it up, too.

When Joe sits on the sidewalk outside of his SRO in his wheelchair, practically every other passerby stops to greet him, shake his hand, and ask him how he’s getting along. But he’ll be making many more visits to the doctor in the near future, and meeting with his lawyer.

Attorney Tanya Gomerman, who is representing him, told the Bay Guardian that she and her team are “currently investigating the facts of the injury,” and believe that “Recology was negligent in maintaining their premises in a reasonably safe condition.”

Reached by phone, Recology spokesperson Adam Alberti said the concrete block, called a push wall, wasn’t supposed to be used for the purpose of helping to unload recycled cardboard from the back of a truck. But Alberti said he didn’t have enough information to explain why attendants wouldn’t have intervened to prevent an unsafe practice. “Recology is saddened by this accident and is evaluating all aspects of its operations,” Alberti said. “Our sympathies go out to the customer.”

Supervisor Mar calls for more bike access on Muni

Erica Hanna
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Supervisor Mar calls for more bike access on Muni

With racks that can hold only two bikes on the front of most Muni buses, and no bike access on Muni’s light rail fleet, Sup. Eric Mar is calling on Muni to look at improving its bike-access. At today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, he called for a hearing to explore what can be done to address the problem.

“We’re looking at expanding the capacity of Muni for those that ride their bikes,” Mar told the board.

Currently Muni vehicles can carry two bikes at the front of each vehicle on its racks, which Mar called inadequate. Notably, only folding bikes are allowed on any Muni vehicle, which means light-rail riding bicyclists are left in the dust, bike grips in hand. 

A hearing on increased bus-bike capacity is especially timely, as Gov. Jerry Brown just signed AB 2707 into law last Tuesday, allowing transit agencies to increase the bike rack capacity on some buses to three bikes, instead of two. Also, San Francisco is anticipating a new fleet of buses, Mar noted, which may be a ripe opportunity to increase bike access. 

We contacted the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency for comment on the cost and feasibility of any such bike improvements, and spokesperson Paul Rose said the agency is in the process of gathering that data.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum said this was a good step for the city to take, but one that’s taken years to come to fruition.

“We’re really thrilled to see Supervisor Mar on the forefront of bike access, but this is also not a new idea,” Shahum said. “This was laid out in our bike plan years ago. We’ve seen advances in this regionally with BART lifting its ban on bikes.” 

Caltrain has also grown its bike access in recent years. “It’s exciting to see San Francisco able to do the same,” Shahum said.

The bike plan really highlights the opportunity for bikes on light rail vehicles, she added. But she wants to encourage the SFMTA to consider less busy times, like weekends or off-peak hours to bend those rules.

“Consider a family going to the Beach Chalet or someone who wants to enjoy Sunday Streets on the weekend,” she said. “Weekends could be an ideal time, (for bikes on light rail), especially for families.”

“We need to start with what San Francisco State University Professor and Bay Guardian columnist Jason Henderson calls automobility, the feeling where everyone feels they need to drive in the city,” Mar said. “We need to encourage people to walk bike or take transit.”

Mar’s office told the Guardian they’re anticipating the hearing would take place in November, after the frenzy of the upcoming election. 

Locals only: Split Screens

Steven T. Jones
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There’s something overwhelmingly dreamlike about Jessie Cafiero’s songwriting, to the point that it makes a listener feel like they’re sleepwalking: The ebbs and flows of cinematic, orchestral pop conjure a surreal sense of nearly floating around one’s city. It’s not surprising, then, to hear that the singer-guitarist often draws inspiration from walking around these foggy hills of ours.

Though Cafiero released a debut EP as Split Screens two years ago, Before The Storm, out Sept. 9, showcases a fuller band, a more confident, brighter sound, and a more lush dreamscape in which Cafiero’s words create an airtight, contemplative mood; this is the perfect sonic accompaniment for a Sunday afternoon, cruising around the city in the early fall air, seeing where the day takes you.

Cafiero released an accordingly pretty, otherworldly video for the LP’s first horn-punctuated single, “Stand Alone.” Check it below, and catch the band’s record release show at Bottom of the Hill Sat/20.

San Francisco Bay Guardian How and when did the band form? I understand it was mostly a solo project to begin with — how is this new record different, and what made you decide to bring in more members of the live band?

Jesse Cafiero The band formed a little over two years ago. I had already written and recorded my self-titled EP under the name Split Screens, but when I got my first show it was time to move the studio solo project into a live setting. With the new record, Before The Storm, I had already started playing a few shows in the area so I could bring members of the band into the studio, which was great!

SFBG What’s your songwriting process like?

JC It depends, I play guitar and piano so I like to write on both to have a little more variety. Since I started writing Split Screens material I’ve always had my phone around to record ideas on the fly, that’s definitely helped. I also love writing in the studio, usually I’ll have the main form of the song together by that point but writing particular parts in that setting is an amazing feeling.

SFBG You’re from the East Coast originally, yeah? How did you wind up in the Bay Area? How do you think it shapes/affects your music?

JC Yeah, I’m from a small town in upstate NY called Pine Plains and I moved to the Bay Area five years ago. It was just a good time to move, I was just out of a long term relationship at that point and had fell in love with California the year before when I visited for the first time. If anything, the natural beauty of the city is inspiring and I’ve found myself coming up with some of my best lyrical ideas just taking walks up in the hills around Sutro Tower.

SFBG I love the “Stand Alone” video. What made you decide to go with stop-motion for this song?

JC I’ve always been a huge fan of animation and for “Stand Alone” the song has this lifting quality that seemed to be a great fit with the kind of movement stop-motion creates. Also the idea that I could create a piece of visual art on my own time on an incredibly small budget was really appealing to me. This was my first time attempting stop-motion so there was a freshness of creativity that I haven’t felt in a while!

SFBG Other Bay Area bands/artists you love?

JC Waterstrider, St. Tropez, Black Cobra Vipers, Doncat, Debbie Neigher, Guy Fox, Bells Atlas, Quinn Deveaux, Lee Gallagher & The Hallelujah…I know I’m leaving some people out. The list goes on.

SFBG Plans for the coming year after the record is released?

JC I’m gonna take a well-needed breather and start writing some new material. After that I’d love to do another little West Coast tour in 2015 and begin working on another music video!

SFBG Where in the Bay do you live? What’s the Bay Area food/meal you think you couldn’t live without?

JC I recently moved to the Castro. I had never had a Vietnamese sandwich until I moved to the West Coast, and the first one I ever had on Clement Street kind of changed my life. Thankfully I live around the corner from Dinosaurs so I’m pretty set on that front!

Split Screens LP Release
With Yassou Benedict and New Spell
Sat/20, 9:30pm, $12
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St, SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

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