2012

Takei wisdom at San Francisco’s ‘Star Trek’ convention

Sue Vaughan
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Bay Area Trekkers (don’t call them “Trekkies”!) set their coordinates for the city this past weekend as the official 2012 San Francisco Star Trek Convention took over the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, filling the hotel and the surrounding area with a galaxy’s worth of creative costumes, collectibles vendors, parties, and an impressive slate of stars from the franchise’s 46 year and counting history.

Several of the most esteemed names in the Trek universe made appearances over the course of the three day fete, including George Takei and Walter Koenig (Sulu and Chekov from the original series), along with Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, and Martina Sirtis (Data, Geordi, Worf, and Counselor Troi from The Next Generation).

Fans enthusiastically listened to behind the scenes stories and heard the actors share their thoughts on being part of the Star Trek universe, and also asked about some of their other projects and outside work.

Burton got the crowd going on Sunday morning, charging up the cheering throngs with stories about playing the blind engineer Geordi La Forge, along with reminiscing on the 35th anniversary of the TV mini-series Roots, which was his first starring role. He even elicited a spontaneous group sing-along when he asked if there were any Reading Rainbow fans in the audience, and started singing the theme song to the 1980s literacy-encouraging PBS program that he hosted in the 1980s.

Throughout the weekend’s talks, cast members of The Next Generation — who were celebrating that show’s 25th anniversary, and clearly are all still friends—would sneak up and tease one another during each other’s programs, with Spiner suddenly popping up at an audience microphone during Burton’s Q&A session and asking about the new “Reading Rainbow” iPad app and whether or not it featured a variety of made up of book titles in a nerdy voice.

Burton returned the favor when Spiner took the stage later in the afternoon, as did Sirtis, who proceeded to show off her still-limber body by doing the splits in front of man who played an emotionless robot on the show, but was visibly impressed by her heat, and was hilarious when answering questions from fans.

The keynote speaker for the convention however, was George Takei, who has become a figurehead in Hollywood for LGBT rights over the past several years, after coming out and marrying his long time partner in 2007. After receiving a standing ovation upon his introduction, the 75 year actor charmed the crowd with his signature smooth voice, and went on the emphasize the importance of the Star Trek fan community as a continuing inspiration for him in his current personal and professional endeavors.

“This longevity was created by you fans, of all generations, and I personally am so indebted to you, because my career has been a great blessing,” he said.

Echoing the original sentiments of creator Gene Roddenberry, who wove many of the pressing social issues of the 1960s into the fabric of the Star Trek ethos, Takei urged fans to take the spirit of unity and collaboration that forged the fictional “Federation of Planets” and put it into action in their own lives.

“I am very confident that Star Trek is going to continue to be strong base for making America a better nation, and building a better future for the world, working together.”

Hot sexy events: Queer calendars, hot bikes, and Dita

Andrew Lam
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Orientalism to-do aside (who does she think she is, Gwen Stefani?), making eye contact with Dita Von Teese for an extended period of time is an experience I highly recommend.

Von Teese, after all, is “the siren of our times,” as host Lady Rizo told the crowd last night at Big Daddy’s Antiques, where Cointreau is hosting a few nights of cocktails and burlesque amid the whimsical, weird towers of Big Daddy’s old things-for-sale. Last night, a performance by the Cointreauversial Von Teese headlined the event preview, which also featured a vast swath of cocktails shaken up the brand’s “master mixologist” Kyle Ford. You can check out the show, minus Dita, for free with RSVP today Wed/14 and tomorrow Thu/15.

“Ask her if her shit stinks,” whispered my escort for the evening. 

I didn’t. But the soft-spoken Von Teese and I managed to cover a few other topics during our brief chat next to a wall of glowing Cointreau bottles. For example, what the most over-the-top feminine woman today considers to be the most masculine thing about herself (“my ability to paralell park. No, my collection of vintage autos. I drive a 1953 Cadillac on a daily basis.”), how she survived the vitriolic election season (“I have a girlfriend who keeps me informed. I fill out my ballot with her. Everything turned out fine in the end…”), and the sexiest thing she’s seen in 2012 — a question for which the seasoned star, surprisingly, had no pat answer for (“you mean, that I can tell you about?”)

But eventually, she hit upon it. “I’ve seen a lot of sexy moments within my show [her revue, “Strip, Strip Hooray!” which features curvy burlesquer Dirty Martini and Perle Noir]. We have a lot of diverse body shapes.”

Does she ever get blowback from fans for featuring fat girls in her shows? (We are talking about fat girls, amiright?) Not, Von Teese told me, from people who have actually watched “Strip, Strip Hooray!”

“But I have had them go, wow, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

… Which was exactly what I was thinking from my front row spot watch Von Teese do her jaw-dropping thing, first in a sequined South Pacific-style two-piece, then a feathered fan, then nothing much of anything — a string of sparkles, pasties, and a coy smile. 

La Maison Cointreau Big Daddy’s Antiques 1550 17th St., SF. www.lamaisoncointreau.com. Wed/14-Thu/15 6-9:30pm, free. RSVP for time slot

Bawdy Storytelling: Gender Bender

GenderFork founder Sarah Dopp created an online place to celebrate transgender, genderqueer, and androgynous folks, which is pretty much the perfect resume for a reader at tonight’s Bawdy. The XXX storytelling series explores the nooks and crannies of gender variance. Dopp will be joined by sex educator Reid Mihalko, performer Lily Black, and more at this last Oakland Bawdy for the forseeable future. 

Wed/14 7-10:30pm, 

The Uptown

1928 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.bawdystorytelling.com

“Everyday Pervertibles: DIY Kink”

When Sister Eden Asp asks you to find pervy uses for a quotidian object, you do it. Porn stars Leo Forte and Element Eclipse may be particularly suited for the task, which means that tonight’s event, at which they’ll share their sexual imaginations, will be a must-attend for anyone who is looking to learn about kink play that’s safe, sane, sexy. 

Wed/14 7-9pm

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org

Q-Were calendar release parties

Chicagoan photographer Patience Meeks has pulled together this gorgeous 12-monther of queer women just in time for your early holiday shopping (you’re doing that, right?) To celebrate, her team has organized parties on either side of the Bay at sexy hot spots, where they’ll be selling the calendar and mingling with its fans. 

Oakland: Thu/15 6pm, free

Feelmore510 

1703 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.feelmore510.com

San Francisco: Fri/16 8:45pm, free

Lexington Club

3464 16th St., SF

www.lexingtonclub.com

Progressive International Motorcycle Show

Leather aficionados will vroom vroom for this weekend expo of the burliest, sexiest two- and three-wheeled numbers in the industry. Among the vehicles that will be available for you to cast your voyeuristic eyes all over will be: first person from this country to win the Grand Prix motorcycle racing world championship Kenny Roger’s bikes and Honda’s 2013 bikes, appearing for the first time in public.

Fri/16 3pm-8pm; Sat/17 9:30am-8pm; Sun/18 9:30am-5pm, $15 day pass

San Mateo County Event Center

2495 South Delaware, San Mateo

www.motorcycleshows.com

The Godless Perverts Story Hour

How many times has Jesus poked his meddling beard into your bedroom? We all know that God and his son have no place in your sexual doings. This fact will be celebrated at tonight’s reading, featuring confirmed blasphemers Maggie Mayhem, Greta Christina, David Fitzgerald, Chris Hall, Dana Fredsti, Anthony O’Con, Simon Sheppard, and M.Christian. Earthly lechers, rejoice. 

Sat/17 7pm, $10-20

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org

Get wine delivered straight to your doorstep with Rewinery

Maria Poblet
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Rewinery was launched in February of 2012, and provides an easy way for consumers to enjoy a variety of wines delivered straight to their doorstep in under an hour. The brainchild of entrepreneurs Paulo Lerner and Joana Koiller, the inspiration behind the business was to transform the often overwhelming task of wine selection into a seamless and fun process. Rewinery has relationships with high quality purveyors that allow them to offer great wines at a great price.

Through Rewinery’s iPhone app or website, customers can easily choose from a daily selection of red, white, or premium wines, and with a few clicks of the mouse or taps on the phone, get two bottles delivered within the hour. It’s a good deal too: the price point for 2 bottles including delivery is $30.

In addition, Rewinery has recently launched an events feature in order to help customers navigate the process of selecting the right amount of wine for their event, and Rewinery will deliver both the wine and the glasses. It’s that easy!

To find out more and to place your first order, follow this link.

Localized Appreesh: Brand New Trash

Tony Robles
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Localized Appreesh is our thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Brand New Trash is a new “trash pop” (more on that in a second) band from Buxter Hoot’n’s SF-via-Indiana brothers Vince and Jimmy Dewald. The group, rounded out by two drummers – Kevin Alan Walters and Ebony Towner, who also doubles on keyboard – is about to release its debut self-titled LP.

It’s a record rooted in raw rock’n’roll Americana, with dreamy roadtrip sing-along melodies, hence the “trash” and the “pop” that make up the band’s sound. The album is mostly original tunes, but one of the more surprising turns would be the group’s solid, harmonica-peppered cover of Tupac’s classic “Brenda’s Got A Baby” – definitely worth a listen; and it’s certainly not done in a kitschy-krappy Karmin way. Instead, it’s a Tom Petty-reminiscent mouthful of a tribute, showcasing the boldness of the original lyrics, wrapped in a noisy roots rock package.

Brand New Trash’s last local live appearance of 2012 – at Bottom of the Hill this week – also happens to be its release party for that brand new album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ12emzwy-I&feature=youtu.be

Year and location of origin: 2011, San Francisco, but the band’s roots go back to the late ’90s in northern Indiana where three of us grew up and played in a band together.
 
Band name origin: Our sound just kind of spawned the name. We are also big Crazy Horse fans and Neil Young saying “Here’s some more trash for ya,” on a live album has always stuck in my mind.
 
Band motto: “Tell the story and keep it trashy.” A lot of the songs on our debut are first takes. This is a big part of “trash pop,” being ready for the moment and delivering something raw and uncensored. There are no put ons with this band, allow for the unexpected and let the music tell a story.
 
Description of sound in 10 words or less: Trash Pop – raw rock with stick-in-your-brain melodies.

Instrumentation: We do a lot of switching instruments and we all sing because we all write songs. Mainly, brothers Vince and Jimmy Dewald share the bass and guitar duties. Kevin Walters and Ebony Towner share the drums and Ebony also plays keys.

Most recent release: Debut album, Brand New Trash out November 20, 2012.

Best part about life as a Bay Area band: The general freedom in the Bay. We did a lot of touring with our first band, Buxter Hoot’n, and you just don’t find that everywhere.

Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Getting to the rest of the country for tours is a big undertaking

First album ever purchased: Run-D.M.C, Run-D.M.C. “It’s Tricky” still pops up in my head, probably the first song I ever memorized.

Most recent album purchased/downloaded: Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring For My Halo.

Favorite local eatery and dish: Underdog-“The Organic Sausage Joint”, half of the band gets “Let’s Be Frank” half goes for the Vegan Dog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFgNZqdm5Gs

Brand New Trash
With Jonny Cat and the Coo Coo Birds, Sufis
Thu/15, 9pm, $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

GOLDIES 2012

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES With Obama’s re-election dominating the news, and the 24th annual Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery Awards — or Goldies — dominating this week’s issue, I’m reminded of the 2004 Goldies celebration, a muted affair held just days after George W. Bush was re-elected. Way to wreck our shindig, George. Fortunately, the mood is decidedly happier in 2012. In this issue, we honor local musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and theater and visual artists — all of whom are currently making creative, inspiring contributions to the Bay Area’s arts scene. We aim to award Goldies to those whose careers are still on the rise, having not yet achieved the widespread recognition we suspect they’ll soon be enjoying.

This year, we also bestow an award for Lifetime Achievement on Berkeley’s Shawl-Anderson Dance Studio, a remarkable “heaven for dance” for 54 years (and counting). Thinking back again to Goldies past, the Guardian has had an incredible track record in picking those who’re destined for greatness: Craig Baldwin (film, 1991); Beth Custer (music, 1992); Barry McGee (visual arts, 1994); Charlie Hunter Trio (music, 1994); Charlie Varon (performance, 1995); Dan “The Automator” Nakamura (music, 1997); Krissy Keefer (dance, 1997); Paula Frazer (music, 1997); The Coup (music, 1998); Neurosis (music, 1999) — all big names, and this list ain’t even reached the current millennium yet. In other words, keep this issue around, and you can say you knew ’em when.

The 2012 Goldie winners were selected by a group of Guardian editors and contributors, including Emily Savage, Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, Nicole Gluckstern, and Marke B. Please share the golden moment with us and this year’s winners by hitting up the 2012 Goldies party — details below. Stay gold! (Cheryl Eddy)

GOLDIES PARTY
With Mad Noise, Kat Marie Yoas, Dr. Zebrovski, and DJ Bus Station John
Nov. 28, 9pm, free
111 Minna Gallery, SF.

GOLDIES 2012 (click below to read about our winners):

MUSIC: THE MALLARD

DANCE: JOE LANDINI AND THE GARAGE

FILM: JAMIE MELTZER

PERFORMANCE: MICA SIGOURNEY

VISUAL ART: BRETT AMORY

THEATER: ANNA ISHIDA

MUSIC: 5KINANDBONE5

THEATER: PIANOFIGHT

MUSIC: WATERS

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT:  FRANK SHAWL AND VICTOR ANDERSON, SHAWL-ANDERSON DANCE STUDIO

 

GOLDIES 2012 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

GOLDIES John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and Fayard and Harold Nicholas are among the dance world’s most famous couples. In the Bay Area, nobody comes close to the relationship between Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson, of Berkeley’s Shawl-Anderson Dance Center.

Over the years the two men have a created a heaven for dance unlike anything that exists here, and probably could not be replicated anywhere else. Shawl and Anderson are the local dance community’s patriarchs.

They started modestly in 1958, above a liquor store on the corner of Alcatraz and College. After dance careers that spanned both coasts, they moved West from New York because they wanted to teach. Anderson had family roots in Berkeley, and the duo figured they might have a better chance at making a living in the Bay Area than in NYC’s competitive jungle.

Having performed and studied with May O’Donnell, a Martha Graham Dance Company member, they wanted to teach modern dance — at the time, a discipline that was not easily available to local dancers. They called their studio “Shawl-Anderson Modern Dance Center,” still its official name. In the beginning, Shawl remembers, “We did not even make enough money to pay its one-hundred dollar rent.”

From those early beginnings has grown the Bay Area’s oldest and — if you listen to dancers — most-beloved teaching institution, with over 100 classes per week. In addition to a full pre-professional curriculum for children, they teach modern dance; that style’s focus on individuality and personal expression has created an atmosphere that also welcomes ballet, hip-hop, jazz, and Horton, plus physical practices like Feldenkrais, pilates, and yoga.

Most remarkable is the breadth and longevity of its teaching staff, all of whom are on salary. Marina Eglevsky, whose artistic roots go back to the legendary André Eglevsky, considered the greatest ballet dancer of his generation, still teaches ballet twice a week. “Her classes are packed — people come from all over,” Shawl says. Wendy Diamond has taught modern since 1988; Joanna Harris’ decade-long Sunday morning class, “Lifelong Movement,” addresses the needs of older adults.

Younger teachers who are still actively choreographing — like Randee Paufve, Nina Haft, Antoine Hunter, and Nol Simonse — bring their own creative perspectives to the classes. The combination of life-long experiences and fresh approaches is invaluable to student dancers.

To get teachers — some start as substitutes — Shawl relies on his instincts and his experience. “I talk with them, and I can usually tell whether they would be a good fit,” he explains. “Very rarely have we had to let somebody go.”

He remembers Reginald Ray-Savage just walking in a few years ago. “I listened to what he had to say, and I just could tell that he was the real thing.” Today, Shawl-Anderson has the Savage Jazz Dance Company in residence.

But back to the earlier days: when the center was facing eviction from the liquor store (apparently, all that dancing made too much noise), student Sylvia McGraw suggested the two men look at a building across the street. “It was a home,” Shawl remembers. “I walked in and all I saw was a bunch of tiny little rooms.” McGraw pointed out that the house was zoned residential-commercial and, furthermore, that her husband was an architect.

With the budget spent on the essentials, in 1968 the school moved into the reconfigured space, with two small studios on the entry level and two huge ones — beautiful dance floors, lots of light, and high ceilings — one floor up. Shawl’s office is still the size of a closet, and the women’s dressing room still looks like it might originally have been a kitchen.

Most remarkably, the building still feels like a home. Walking up the small pathway from the street and the few steps that invite stoop-sitting, it uncannily feels like the rest of the Arts and Crafts residences that stretch toward the Berkeley hills. The wooden floors in the entry are well-worn, and the bench on the side looks like it has been there forever.

No doubt its funky charm and good usable studios have helped make what Shawl-Anderson has become. But it’s these two remarkable men who have given the place its soul. The minute you walk in, you pick up its sense of generosity of spirit, a commitment to craft and creativity, and a welcoming embrace of diversity in all its manifestations.

It’s what Paufve, whose company now is in residence, experienced when she first stepped through the door in 1986. “I don’t remember not ever having felt at home here,” she says. After moving from New York, she heard about the place the first week she was here. She also found teachers with whom she wanted to work. Over the years, she says, “People here have been incredibly generous. I honestly don’t know if I would still have Paufve Dance if it was not for Shawl-Anderson.”

Fog Beast, one of San Francisco’s newest dance companies (formed by Joe Goode dancers Melecio Estrella and Andrew Ward), recently paid tribute to “the decades of dance art cultivation at Shawl-Anderson.” Move Here, created when the duo was in residence, was a site-specific work using the building’s architectural space. It allowed the choreographers “to step into the role of host, exploring the aesthetics of hospitality, the art of friendliness and warmth.” Shawl enjoyed the performance. “They had pictures of the two of us on the walls — it was so nice,” he smiles.

Both men are now in their 80s. Anderson is semi-retired, but Shawl still takes class every day and substitute teaches when needed. Looking back over more than 50 years, is there something that they would have changed? “It is the way it was [meant] to be,” Shawl says. “I believe in the right path. We didn’t do it for the ego, we did it for love.”

GOLDIES 2012: PianoFight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: PianoFight

GOLDIES A PianoFight show can be almost as striking for its audience as for what the company puts onstage, even if few audiences will upstage a machine that blows ducks out of people’s butts, per Duck Lake. PianoFight crowds are conspicuously not your typical theatergoers — they’re closer to the boisterous women in office attire I noticed at the now-defunct Off-Market Theater, PianoFight’s old haunt, who had smuggled in a bottle of Chardonnay and were picnicking in a back row like it was Baker Beach. Such eager insouciance is one sign of this young company’s burgeoning success.

“We’re aiming for those people,” says Rob Ready. “We’re aiming our stuff at Giants fans. That’s who we want in the door. Our generation didn’t grow up with theatergoing as a habit.”

“On the contrary,” says Ready’s colleague, Dan Williams. “You grew up with theater as a joke, as a byline for something boring and stuffy. There’s no reason it has to be that.”

Let it be known that PianoFight is doing its part to insure it isn’t. A PianoFight show takes many forms — sketch comedy, original drama, new play festivals, oyster-fuelled theater al fresco, a rotten vegetable barrage, or the fowl comedy-horror-ballet-musical mash-up of 2012’s aforementioned Duck Lake — but it always includes a rambunctious spirit of collusion with an audience who, very often, take some part in the proceedings.

Ready and Williams, two guys whose laid-back nature belies their seriousness and savvy as theatrical entrepreneurs, first met doing theater in their Santa Barbara high school. After Ready got his arts degree at NYU, he moved out to San Francisco specifically to start a theater company with Williams, who was then working a day job downtown. In Ready’s hands was his own script for a play based on NYU’s string of student suicides called Roommate Wanted. With the help of friends and family, they produced a successful two-weekend run in 2007.

From this humble beginning, PianoFight has mushroomed into a multi-faceted, multi-armed organization that includes sketch comedy troupe Mission Control and its female-driven counterpart, Monday Night ForePlays. It regularly sells out shows, boasts a semi-official “flexible” roster of 46 company members (with many more in unofficial orbit around the company), and is building its own bar-theater complex on the site of the old Original Joe’s on Taylor Street.

Along the way, it’s toured the West Coast (twice), scattered a set of new playlets across an oyster bed in Tomales Bay (two years in a row), opened productions simultaneously in SF and LA, taken four company retreats, and generally developed ambitious programs that balk at the usual small-cast, three-weekend production model, while adding fuel to the fire of local playwrights like Tim Bauer, William Bivins (Pulp Scripture, The Position), Jon Brooks, Megan Cohen, Bennett Fisher, Daniel Heath (FORKING!, A Merry FORKING! Christmas), and Lauren Yee, among others.

Ready and Williams credit Matthew Quinn with taking a chance on their inexperienced but fervent selves when the producing artistic director of Combined Art Form Entertainment, who had co-founded Off-Market Theater in 2004, handed them the keys in 2007. PianoFight eventually left Off-Market when the rent rose, but by then it was on a roll, having proved resourceful and inspired in its own venue. When tenants Point Break Live! moved onto a bigger venue, for instance, Ready and Williams filled the gap by inventing “the nation’s largest audience-judged playwriting competition,” the (now long-lived) ShortLived series.

“So glad Point Break Live! dropped out,” muses Williams, “because ShortLived turned out to be an amazing community builder. It really was one of the biggest drivers of our company initially, since we had to get a bunch of actors, a bunch of directors, and a bunch of writers.”

“The R&D wing of the theater business is [made up of] small, scrappy companies,” says Ready. “If it was just us I’d be, ‘All right, we’re just that more awesome,’ but it’s not. There are a lot of people saying theater can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people.”

As for the name PianoFight, apparently there’s no short answer to that question. I was invited to come back some time with a bottle of whiskey and ask again. “Have at least 24 hours,” cautions Williams. “You’ve got to set aside some time, some whiskey … and bring a credit card, too.”

GOLDIES 2012: Jamie Meltzer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: Jamie Meltzer

GOLDIES He may be a filmmaker, but the inspiration for Jamie Meltzer’s first feature-length documentary came while he was flipping through the bins at a record store.

“I found this song-poem compilation,” Meltzer remembers. At the time, he was a San Francisco State University MFA student. “It was such an amazing, undiscovered-to-me subculture that I started making the film that day. It took me two years to go around and meet all of these song poets and musicians, but it really started in the record store.”

The end result morphed from thesis film into 2003’s Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story, which aired on PBS and earned a cult following. It also opened professional doors for Meltzer; after thanking one of his undergrad professors in the film’s credits, he learned that his alma matter, Vassar College, was hiring in its film department. In 2007, he transitioned to his current teaching gig, at Stanford’s prestigious MFA program in Documentary Film and Video.

“I was happy to come back to San Francisco, of course, but I was also really happy to step into the documentary-centric environment at Stanford,” Meltzer says. “It’s almost like a documentary lab — between the students and other professors, we’re all thinking about documentary films, talking about them, studying them, making them.”

His follow-up to Off the Charts, 2007’s Welcome to Nollywood, takes on another “Who knew?” subject: Nigeria’s vibrant film industry.

“Nollywood is the third-largest film industry in the world, and they have this independent film model that makes a lot more sense than even what we have in the US. That just kind of blew my mind,” Meltzer says.

“But beyond just being a portrait of an industry, the film ended up being a complex story. There’s all sorts of questions of, are these quote-unquote good films, or is the value that they’re being made and consumed as kind of a self-representation? To me, Nollywood and Off the Charts were similar in that way: different people passionately making art, but not sure how well it will be received. The character of the dreamer against all odds, that outsized ambition — I think that’s a big parallel with independent filmmaking in general. You always believe in what you’re doing, but you’re not really expecting other people to believe in what you’re doing.”

Meltzer’s current film, Informant, premiered at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, and has since been on a nonstop festival tour. The doc explores the strange life of Brandon Darby, a lefty activist turned FBI informant who helped send two 2008 Republican National Convention protestors to jail. He’s a polarizing guy, but the film, which is anchored by an extensive interview with Darby, invites the audience to draw their own conclusions. Complexity is once again an important theme.

“The main thing was to try to respect the complexity of Brandon, as a subject, as a person, because he has all these different facets,” Meltzer says. “His story’s very intense, and he was very sincere and conflicted in ways that I found really compelling. It brought up a lot of interesting moral territory and all these moral issues. Then you’d go and talk to Brandon’s activist nemesis, and he had a totally different take, and you’d find yourself agreeing with his story. So, to have that kind of character who can be seen from such different perspectives — that’s totally astounding. I really wanted to get that across in the film.”

Informant, which avoids making any tidy conclusions, reflects Meltzer’s own philosophy on documentary making.

“Some audiences have this idea that documentaries have to make very clear and usually politically-based arguments. And that’s the thing that I set out not to do. I think it’s great that the film creates a dialogue over, ‘What is documentary?’ People question my point of view, they question the point of view of Brandon and the other characters,” he says. “Hopefully they will start questioning other documentaries, too, and the notion of objectivity. Documentary filmmakers know that documentaries aren’t objective in the least. But I think audiences still aren’t entirely clear on that.”

Meltzer credits both the Bay Area filmmaking community (particularly Frazer Bradshaw, Informant‘s director of photography) and his Stanford colleagues (including numerous former students) for helping him make the film. “San Francisco has a lot of people who are committed to working on things that they believe in for little or no money, out of passion. That can’t be overstated,” he says.

So what’s next? Making Informant was so difficult, Meltzer confesses, that he thought it would be his last film. But then he heard about a group of exonerated men in Texas who’ve formed a detective agency to help other innocent people behind bars. “You can’t pass up those kind of ideas,” the filmmaker says. “You have to grab them when they come.”

No doubt it won’t end up being a simple story — but Meltzer will weave all of its threads into a captivating tale.

GOLDIES 2012: Joe Landini and the Garage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: Joe Landini and the Garage

GOLDIES Choreographer, impresario, and arts advocate Joe Landini likes to say yes. “It’s my philosophy to start that way,” the founder and artistic director of the Garage — San Francisco’s most hoppin’ performance venue — explains. “If you say no to something, the conversation is closed. There is nowhere to go.”

Landini is a curious mixture between visionary idealist and pragmatist who has a solid grasp of what it takes to get a job done. As a young jazz dancer, he was told to take ballet to improve his alignment. So he did, until his knees gave out and he switched to modern dance at UC Irvine, where he majored in choreography.

While Landini was in college, master choreographer Donald McKayle suggested that he had talents as an administrator. Landini accepted the observation though he saw himself primarily as a choreographer. He moved back to San Francisco — he grew up in Concord — and waited tables while interning for Mary Alice Fry’s Footloose Dance Company and Shotwell Studios. “I learned to write grants,” he remembers over coffee, near the Garage’s digs at 715 Bryant. “And I got free rehearsal space for my own choreography.” He also learned that per capita, San Francisco funds its dancers reasonably well. “In New York, you might have 200 applicants for one grant. Here, there may be 50 to 60.”

Opening the Garage in 2007 (its original location was on Howard Street) allowed him to offer what he thought artists, particularly young ones, need: an environment where experimentation, learning, and risk-taking are welcome. Artistic failure doesn’t bother Landini; it’s part of the learning process, he says. During the first five years, he estimated that annually around 10,000 people walked through that iconic red door on Howard.

Landini’s major initiative, RAW (Resident Artists’ Workshop), is modeled after AIRspace (AIR standing for “artists in residence”) — which had been set up for queer performers at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts. Landini ran it for a year. When the Sims Center closed, he bought the seats and tech equipment, putting them in storage until needed.

The Garage is run like a time-share in which 30 groups evenly divide up the time slots. While primarily a haven for dancers, theater folks and performance artists are equally welcome. Anybody can apply. True to form, Landini doesn’t tell them no, though “they just may have to wait until a space opens up.”

Wayne Hazzard, executive director of Dancers’ Group, the Bay Area’s dance service organization, considers the Garage a “powerful space where community-building can start. Joe, with his practically 24-hour open-door policy and constant presence, is almost like a neighborhood mom-and-pop store. For first-time young artists, this is particularly valuable.”

All Garage artists get three months of four-hours-a-week rehearsal time that ends with a public performance. Artists can come back — and many do. As for his own choreography, Landini is just getting back into it. During a two-year stint in London for an MA in choreography from the Laban Centre, he immersed himself in the European dance theater tradition. “I learned so much, and I have never been able to use it,” he says — until now: on November 27, he will present his new physical theater piece, Bitter Queen.

As if running the Garage seven days a week was not enough, Landini also started a Summer Performance Festival this year, curated in conjunction with ODC Theater. Again, he couldn’t say no — this time to offering a select group of Garage choreographers a venue more professional than his own modest theater can provide. The event will return in August 2013.

And, of course, Landini couldn’t say no when he heard that the city was interested in keeping another summer event, the 22-year-old West Wave Dance Festival, alive. “Every city needs a yearly independent dance festival, right?” he asks. One guess who will be running it in 2013.

GOLDIES 2012: Mica Sigourney

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: Mica Sigourney

GOLDIES Regular appearances are not Mica Sigourney’s thing. True, most Friday nights you’ll find alt-persona VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! at the Stud hosting Some Thing, the boisterously resourceful drag cavalcade (formerly Tiara Sensation) started two years ago with drag mother Glamamore and dj down-E. Even there, though, you couldn’t call VivvyAnne’s appearance regular: one night it’s ersatz Dior, another it’s lipstick, hobo beard, and a jock strap.

Beyond that, you never know where or how you’ll see either VivvyAnne or Sigourney. This is an artist drawn not only to the spotlight (what drag queen isn’t?) but to the genuinely experimental and demanding, whose work runs the gamut from go-go to performance art to contemporary dance (the latter most notably as an all-out ensemble member of Laura Arrington’s Wag in 2011) and in the process bridges the nightlife and performance scenes with untiring ingenuity.

This crossover élan was on display at the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival with the unveiling of Martha Martha Martha, a drag piece co-created with Eli Magid (a.k.a. Elijah Minnelli) in which some maniacally looped dialogue from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gets refracted through a stage-full of renegade Liz Taylors. A year later, at the debut of Keith Hennessy and Julie Phelps’ “Too Much!” marathon of queer performance, VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! led an impressive roster of SF drag superstars into the proceedings (including Glamamore and Fauxnique, a.k.a. past Goldie winner Monique Jenkinson, another major influence).

That showcase brought the nightlife scene squarely into the realm of contemporary queer performance, and evolved into the sporadic Work MORE! series, based on crossover collaboration between highly distinct artists. Sigourney, who just produced its fourth installment in August, plans to tour it next year. Meanwhile, a 2012 CounterPULSE residency produced the winking hubris of MASTERWORK, marshaling a cast of po-mo drag queens under Sigourney’s control to question the egotism of the artist and the role of the audience. And in a highlight of 2012’s This Is What I Want festival, Sigourney re-purposed his performance fee to negotiate his sexual currency in real-time with his audience, while a chorus beside him voiced the testimonials of ex-lovers.

The brio and subtle play in these and other works keep Sigourney a vital presence on multiple stages, as well as an important catalyst for new work. But the more makeshift outings, without any stage at all, can be just as memorable: Sigourney in a crowded men’s room at SOMArts, for instance, seated at a table in a wife-beater beside a stack of his own poems, some pages from David Wojnarowicz, a fifth of bourbon, and a lot of shot glasses.

“It was the first time I’d brought my writing into a performance,” says Sigourney of the inebriated presentation in the john (mounted as part of SOMArts’ monthly new queer performance showcase, “The News”). “It was my writing and Wojnarowicz’s from two of his books, and the audience picked what I read.” Sigourney offered bourbon to anyone who wanted a shot with their request, and he committed himself to always drinking one with them. “I was trying to layer people on top of people. It was good for that,” recalls the artist, a little hazily. “Someone actually used the bathroom.”

Another sighting: a makeshift biergarten in Portland last September, during one of the nightly after-parties for that city’s Time-Based Art festival. Out of a small huddle by the fence rises VivvyAnne like a gibbous moon, flashlight held firmly to her face and balancing her leggy fishnets on a combination of high heels and patio furniture. After instructing the crowd in a few dance steps, she leads an impromptu off-program all her own, lip-syncing to a boom box that blasted Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.”

Surprisingly, the Long Island native, a longtime theater (and later, club) kid who moved to San Francisco in 2004 and birthed VivvyAnne ForeverMORE! in 2008, says drag was something he grew up admiring but never thought he could do. Maybe that’s why he can do so much with it.

“I’ll never be a ‘lady lady’ drag queen,” he says. “It just won’t happen for me. So I started out saying fuck the illusion, what illusion? I’d wear things where my chest was exposed or a see-through dress or just underwear. There’s no illusion here to ruin in the first place. Once we agree that it is an illusion [we’re after], then we can make it together.”

GOLDIES 2012: WATERS

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
GOLDIES 2012: WATERS

GOLDIES “It’s been a great year for me,” says Van Pierszalowski, slightly out of breath after pushing his bicycle up a seriously steep hill. “It’s been the first year that I’ve lived anywhere in a long time.”

Pierszalowski has been part of the San Francisco indie rock scene for years, first with Port O’Brien and now with WATERS, but he hasn’t actually lived in the Bay Area since his days at UC Berkeley. He’s been mostly out on the road, couch-hopping at friends’ houses upon return, spending summers fishing in Alaska with his father — or in Oslo with his European girlfriend, Marte Solbakken, who also plays in WATERS.

But in 2012, following positive reviews for 2011’s Out In The Light (TBD Records), his debut album as WATERS, he’s finally on dry ground. He’s got a somewhat permanent structure — an apartment he shares with Solbakken — on the top of Potrero Hill, and a part-time job at the bottom of those hills, at Four Barrel.

“I haven’t had a job, other than music and fishing, since college,” he says with a laugh. “Finally I’m not touring for a little while, and I’m just concentrating on writing songs, and I wanted my days to have a little more structure. So I sought out a job — I love coffee and I love Four Barrel.”

Java-brewing skills aside, Pierszlawski’s been garnering notice from music fans for other reasons: his earnest, salty sea-referencing lyrics; matured and more aggressive vocals; grungy, fuzzed out guitar-work; and seriously tripped-out music videos. As far as imagery goes, there’s a lot to take in with the video for “For the One” — flaming dream catchers, creepy convenience store clerks, acid-laced dreams, purplish starry nightscapes that look like screensavers for Windows 95, extras fleeing through smoke machine fog, and Pierszalowski riding his bicycle through a tunnel full of trash and glitter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIOJkUFTiwY

It’s kind of what WATERS is all about, the light and the dark, the weird and the weirdly confident, the grungier moments of the ’90s, soulful voyages through choppy seas, the hooks (pop and otherwise), a fisherman in a flannel.

Then there’s the more straightforward tour video for sparkly, garage-punk standout track “Back to You,” and two for moodier, yearning acoustic single “Mickey Mantle” — one clip that’s of Pierszalowski with a guitar on a rooftop, and the other a zoomed-in snapshot of his day — created for the 48-hour Music Video Race this spring. Live, the song’s a crowd-pleaser in which he pleads, “forever, forever” and gets the audience chanting the word back to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izgmACVXVBA

Pierszalowski also toured a whole lot with WATERS this year, opening for Delta Spirit across the US and Nada Surf throughout Europe. But WATERS’ biggest moment came this summer, when the band topped a bill at Brick and Mortar Music Hall.

“It was the first WATERS headlining show and I was super nervous and anxious about it. I thought no one was going to come. I could feel that my mood for the next while was dependent on how it would go,” he says. “To my great surprise, it was an amazing turnout. It was packed, and people knew the songs and were singing along and dancing. It just really felt like almost a solid year of promoting the album had paid off. And I know that’s not a huge deal, but it kind of is to me. It felt like the start of something new.”

With a boyish gleam of hope in his eyes, he adds, “Getting to play for people in San Francisco, on our own, felt infinitely more powerful than any of those [previous] experiences.”

Plus, now that he’s got his own apartment in SF, it probably didn’t take him too long to find his way home after the show.

GOLDIES 2012: Anna Ishida

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: Anna Ishida

GOLDIES One of the very first things you’ll notice about Anna Ishida, onstage and off, is an aura of self-possession that simultaneously grounds her and yet sets her ever-so-subtly apart in a crowd. But she also has a chameleon-like quality, a way of blending seamlessly into her surroundings, whether it’s a 49-seat black box theater on Natoma Street, or the hip buzz of Farley’s East in Oakland, where we meet over coffee and sandwiches.

It’s this very quality that helps make her such a compelling actor to watch onstage. No matter what the role, Ishida appears born to it, whether appearing as an allegorical peasant in an imaginary land (in The Forest War at Shotgun Players), a horny Russian aristocrat with a mic (in Beardo, also at Shotgun), or a frustrated former drag queen forced to languish in the glitter-dusted shadow of her employer-lover (in Boxcar Theatre’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch).

Professionally, Ishida appeared first in The Color of Justice at Oakland’s TheatreFIRST in 2002, following up with roles with a miscellany of companies such as Woman’s Will and the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, plus a long association with Shotgun Players. But this year, after a powerful performance as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in Impact Theatre’s Titus Andronicus, Ishida’s been working to make herself even better-known as a triple threat: vocalist, actor, and independent film star. Her turn as Yitzhak in Boxcar’s summer production of Hedwig framed her trademark spiky hairdo in black leather and heartbreak, and matched her versatile vocals and formidable stage presence to the dozen glam-rock divas cast in the title role.

Her current show, Christopher Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project with Crowded Fire Theater, casts her as an actor exploring the sprawling epic of China’s Cultural Revolution via the creative process. Earlier this year, she spent a week basically locked up in a room for 16 hours a day for her cinematic debut in HP Mendoza’s unsettling art house ode to the horror film genre, I Am a Ghost. The film — about a literal lost soul trapped in an unending routine — premiered at the 2012 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and has been getting raves elsewhere on the festival circuit.

Ishida was born in Tokyo; her family moved to the East Bay when she was four, where she first attended a mostly all-black kindergarten followed by an almost all-white Catholic school, which naturally meant she fit into neither. Gravitating towards music at a young age, she narrowly escaped becoming a business major in college and instead attended the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Southern California, where she connected on a deeper level to acting, and has mostly stuck with it ever since.

“The grass is always greener,” she confesses with a smile. “If I’m acting, I want to be singing; if I sing, I want to do Shakespeare; if I do Shakespeare, I want to dance. I’m fortunate I can do all three.”

Onstage, no matter what the role, Ishida never lets her focus flag, and her signature watchfulness gives her characters a feral, almost predatory depth. Perhaps most interestingly, in a climate of casting controversies particularly affecting Asian actors (such as a recent production of The Nightingale at La Jolla Playhouse, where a Caucasian actor played the Emperor of China), Ishida has successfully avoided being categorized by her racial makeup. With the exceptions of The Forest War and The Hundred Flowers Project, she’s been seen in roles she has successfully rendered colorblind.

“I’ve demanded that people see me as an actor, rather than as ‘Asian’ — and if I didn’t work, then so be it, but I was not going to be pigeonholed,” she emphasizes.

Then she laughs, considering some of her recent roles: a Russian tsaritsa, Poseidon (in Shotgun’s The Salt Plays, Part Two: Of the Earth), and Tamora. “I may have escaped being typecast as Asian,” she allows, “but now I’m typecast as the angry queen. The angry god-queen!”

GOLDIES 2012: The Mallard

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2012: The Mallard

GOLDIES You always hear of those artists that simply must keep creating, regardless of location, monetary resources, health, or free time. It’s the urge, the craving, something deep in the pit of their being. Idle hands and all that. I get the feeling this is just how it is for Greer McGettrick, the Mallard’s lead vocalist-guitarist. There’s a fire in her belly, and it burns from a sonic tinder.

Let’s take just this year as a case example. The Mallard released its psych-garage influenced debut full-length, Yes on Blood, in March on John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records to increasingly rave reviews. The band opened for Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Shonen Knife, Hot Snakes, and countless others, at shows at places like the Verdi Club, Slim’s, and Bottom of the Hill. It toured with the Fresh and Onlys’ Wymond Miles. It put out a split seven-inch with Thee Oh Sees. It’ll have a plexi seven-inch out later this month. It contributed a stirring cover of the classicaly morose track “There She Goes Again” to Castle Face Records’ Velvet Underground and Nico tribute album. Oh, and McGettrick has had a few art shows around the city, showcasing her intricate woodcuts.

In addition to all that, the fuzzy San Francisco four-piece is now working on its follow-up to Blood. “I’m still writing a lot, but I feel like it’s more of a record for me,” says McGettrick, sitting outside the coffee shop-video store where she works. “I feel like Yes on Blood was more of a record for San Francisco, an homage, where it was like, ‘These are the bands that I love and I’m drawing from them’ — there’s the Thee Oh Sees song, the Ty Segall song, the Intelligence song.”

Or, as she’s been know to describe it, the band makes “inside-out-echo-laser-garage-psych-rock.”

“This is more of an album for me in that it’s a lot weirder, a lot darker, more personal,” she says. “I’m learning how to use my voice versus yelping.”

Live, that yelping comes across as more of a gritty punk plea, an emotional core tumbling out, backed by McGettrick’s noisy guitar work; “boy” Dylan Tidyman-Jones on guitar, keys, and backing vocals; “girl” Dylan Edrich on bass; and Miles Luttrell on drums.

This current formation of the Mallard is here after a few false starts. When McGettrick first moved to SF three years back, she gathered friends to start a new band, but it quickly fizzled. So she started again. “I just needed to keep playing songs, keep playing shows,” McGettrick says.

She’d already been in bands for years before her move to the Bay Area. The Studio City, Calif. native was part of the Fresno music scene for five years after college. “I kind of got stuck there, but it was good for me. There are some great people there, some really talented musicians, there’s just not a lot to do. A lot of people move away once they realize there’s something else out there.”

Once in SF, she clicked with the booming garage rock scene, and fortuitously met Dwyer. She played him some of her raw home recordings and he told her to go record more, and he’d put them out on Castle Face.

“It’s a really great scene,” McGettrick says. “Living in Fresno for five years — where it was just such a struggle to get other bands to play from out of town, and it was hard to get any momentum there. People moved away, bands broke up — it got me to work a lot harder. I moved to San Francisco and it kind of seemed easy. There’s all these bands, all these shows, people go to shows. It feels nourishing. We’re really lucky to live in this city.”

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

History: The Musical Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Opens Thu/15, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Nov 22). Through Dec 22. The Un-Scripted Theater Company performs "an unscripted romp through Western history."

ONGOING

Carmelina Eureka Theatre, 215 Geary, SF; www.42ndstmoon.org. $25-75. Wed/14, 7pm; Thu/15-Fri/16, 8pm; Sat/17, 6pm; Sun/18, 3pm. 42nd Street Moon performs the "forgotten musical" that inspired the Broadway hit Mamma Mia!

Elektra Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-110. Wed/14-Sat/17, 8pm (also Sat/17, 2pm); Sun/18, 2pm. Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis stars in Sophocles’ Greek tragedy.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm (no show Sat/17). Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

The Foreigner Mission Dolores Academy Auditorium, 3371 16th St, SF; (650) 952-3021. Free (donations requested). Fri/16, 7:30pm; Sat/17-Sun/18, 3pm. 16th Street Players perform Larry Shue’s comedy about an Englishman in the American South.

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $30-100. Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 7pm. Geoff Hoyle’s popular solo show about aging returns.

The Hundred Flowers Project Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.crowdedfire.org. $10-35. Wed/14-Sat/17, 8pm. Reinvention is as American as apple pie — allowing every individual to shed the limitations of the past and move constantly forward. Of course it’s not an exclusively American concept, a point Christopher Chen makes early on in his latest play, The Hundred Flowers Project. A group of Asian American actors gather to collaborate on a play about the Maoist Cultural Revolution, focusing first on the idea of China as a "country of only beginnings … built on the idea of no past," while wrestling with the implications of creating and recreating history as you go along, including, eventually, their own. Ultimately the ideal overtakes their earnest intentions and hijacks the play to serve its own dictatorial end, each actor reduced to an insubstantial shadow of their former "selves," from the over-eager Sam (Ogie Zulueta) to the penitent philanderer Mike (Wiley Naman Strasser) to his somewhat wary ex, Lily (Anna Ishida). Their identities gobbled up by the restless juggernaut the play has morphed into after a triumphal five-year world-tour they hover constantly just on the edges of a dangerous discovery, their once lively sense of purpose replaced by an almost willful inability to question their roles or their fate. Chen’s sprawling, Orwellian tour de force is further bolstered by an army of adroit designers and the competent hand of director Desdemona Chiang, who one hopes is a slightly more benign force than the director of the play-within-the-play, Mel (Charisse Loriaux). (Gluckstern)

Lost Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, Ste 217, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $28. Wed/14-Sat/17, 8pm. Modern love and modern life: it’s all a wash in this very funny and smart play from playwright-director Peter Papadopoulos about two pairs of lost souls thrown together in the shoals of a soggy apocalypse. Mitzy (a sure Elena Spittler) is a stunned bride whose just lost her wedding party and everyone she knew — except the valet, Tito (a perfectly deadpan Carlos Flores, Jr.), a loose canon if ultimately goodhearted, who finds himself clinging to the same rock after some unmentioned catastrophe. Meanwhile, Jan (a brilliantly, manically articulate Kimberly Lester) has gone from just sexy crazy to all-out nuts for her girlfriend Barb (a sharp, sympathetic Jessica Risco), whose recent infidelity has apparently triggered Jan’s meltdown, key symptoms of which include an obsession with a certain downbeat French existentialist on the Discovery Channel (a spritely Roy Eikleberry in an outrageous French accent so mal it’s bon), and shedding all material possessions in their mutually decorated apartment. What happens when they all end up together? The possibilities, if not endless, spell end times for the old world. The welcome inaugural production by newcomers Mojo Theatre turns out to have preempted Hurricane Sandy with its own storm of the century, proving rather timely as well as dramatically very worthwhile. Director Papadopoulos makes excellent use of modest resources in staging the action with dynamic contrasts and choice detailing, across a set of finely tuned ensemble performances, as the eccentricities and common sense at war within and between his characters begin slowly and surely to unravel a life out of balance, merrily and mercifully making way for who knows what. (Avila)

Phaedra’s Love Bindlestiff Studios, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.doitliveproductions.com. $15. Wed/14-Sat/17, 8pm. Although she didn’t make it into the 21st century herself, British playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) left behind a small group of plays that continue to test the complacency of an age lulled into thinking itself ultimately rational and civilized. In Kane’s cutting, brutally funny reworking of Seneca’s play (itself an adaptation of Euripides’ Hippolytus), the titular lovelorn queen (an amiably tormented Whitney Thomas) throws herself shamelessly at her stepson, royal slob Hippolytus (a sharp yet low-key Michael Zavala, channeling mumblecore nihilism) despite, or because of, his pungent contempt for everyone around him. The play’s main action, however, takes place after Phaedra has killed herself, leaving a note accusing Hippolytus of rape and setting in motion a downfall that is his own perverse salvation. Despite occasionally flagging momentum, director Ben Landmesser and newcomers Do It Live! (in their second outing since last season’s debut, an agile staging of Sam Shepard’s Suicide in B Flat) deliver a worthy production of this clever gem. While a sporadic, low-murmuring sound design (by Hannah Birch Carl) infuses the atmosphere with a muffled libidinal menace, the thrust stage brings us close to the action, rubbing our noses in the fetid whisperings and fumblings of royal parasites and their dialectical kin, the infantilized, desensitized masses. Kane’s Hippolytus, meanwhile, turns from a sort of repellent Hamlet without motive to a Genet-like criminal-saint whose martyrdom is a solitary ecstasy of stark perception. (Avila)

The Rainmaker Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. $38. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 22. Shelton Theatre preforms N. Richard Nash’s classic drama.

"ReOrient 2012 Festival and Forum" Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.goldenthread.org. $20. Series A runs Thu/15-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 7pm. Series B runs Sat/17-Sun/18, 8pm. After a three-year hiatus, Golden Thread Productions’ ReOrient Festival of short plays from and about the Middle East is back (coupled with an impressive two-day forum of talks, panels, workshops, and performance around art and politics in the wake of the Arab Spring and other momentous developments across the region). The first of two series of plays, Series A, includes War & Peace, a short symbolical comedy by 20th-century Egyptian literary giant Tawfiq Al-Hakim (handily translated by May Jayyusi and David Wright) that distills imposing social forces into a three-way ménage between a smart, free-spirited woman (a vibrant Lena Hart), her secret suitor in a showman’s coattails and cane (a comically fervent Jesse Horne), and her jealous husband, a violent-tempered military officer (a suave yet stentorian Garth Petal). Sharply directed by Hafiz Karmali, it’s an effervescent little farce that in its power dynamics, and the elusive happiness of the characters, neatly limns bigger themes never timelier in Egypt (or here). It’s followed by Farzam Farrokhi’s 2012, directed by Sara Razavi, a low-key second-coming cum coffee klatch among three laid-back, cell phone-obsessed messiahs (Cory Censoprano, Horne, Roneet Aliza Rahamim) from the three Abrahamic religions that sets an unexpected tone but never really amounts to much. Far more dramatic is Birds Flew In by Yussef El Guindi (of Golden Thread hit Language Rooms, among others), a monologue by a single Arab American mother mourning her deceased soldier-son and wondering where she might have gone wrong. Delivered with unsentimental grit by Nora El Samahy, it’s a strongly voiced if familiar story that registers ambivalence with facile patriotism and violent nationalism, yet unconvincingly retreats at the last moment into a familiar red-white-and-blue corner. Silva Semericiyan’s Stalemate, directed by Desdemona Chiang, is a triptych of scenes between changing pairs of men (played by Censoprano and Horne) that aims at a transnational snapshot of ingrained patterns of male aggression (from Fleet Street to Red Light Amsterdam to war-torn Baghdad) but comes across too weakly and a little confusingly. Durected by Christine Young, Jen Silverman’s In the Days That Follow — set in Boston amid clichés of American openness, innocence and possibility (albeit charmingly personified by Censoprano) — is the longest piece and the most dramatically interesting, if also somewhat strained, positing a 22-year-old Jewish Israeli translator and IDF veteran (Rahamim) as the instigator of peaceful dialogue and mutual affection with an older and politically hardened Palestinian Lebanese poet (El Samahy). Finally, in Mona Mansour and Tala Manassah’s sweet but drifting meta-theatrical, The Letter, directed by Razavi, a Palestinian American physicist (Petal) and his philosopher daughter (Hart) mount an amateur theater piece to respond to the 2011 controversy over CUNY’s blocking of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner based on an attack by a CUNY board member on Kushner’s opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. (Avila)

Roseanne: Live! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Wed/14, 7 and 9pm. Lady Bear, Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger, and more star in this tribute to the long-running sitcom.

Shocktoberfest 13: The Bride of Death Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Thu/15-Sat/17, 8pm. Thrillpeddlers’ seasonal assortment of yeasty Grand Guignol playlets is a mixed bag of treats, but it all goes so nicely with the autumnal slink into early nights and dark cravings. Fredrick Whitney’s Coals of Fire is lightly amusing, if far from smoking, as a two-hander about a blind older matron (Leigh Crow) who discovers her young companion (Zelda Koznofski, alternating nights with Nancy French) has been secretly schtupping her husband. I’m a Mummy is a short, not very effective musical interlude by Douglas Byng, featuring the bright pair of Jim Jeske and Annie Larson as Mr. and Mrs., respectively. The titular feature, The Bride of Death, written by Michael Phillis and directed by Russell Blackwood, proves a worthy centerpiece, unfolding an intriguing, well-acted tale about a reporter (Phillis) and his photographer (Flynn DeMarco) arriving at a stormy castle to interview a strangely youthful Grand Guignol stage star (Bonni Suval) making her film debut. After another, this time more rousing musical number, Those Beautiful Ghouls (with music and lyrics by Scrumbly Koldewyn; directed and choreographed by D’Arcy Drollinger), comes the evening’s real high point, The Twisted Pair by Rob Keefe, acted to the bloody hilt by leads Blackwood and DeMarco as the titular duo of scientists driven mad by an experimental batch of ‘crazy’ glue. All of it comes capped, of course, by the company’s signature lights-out spook show. (Avila)

Speed-the-Plow Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Extended through Dec 21. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs the David Mamet drama.

"Strindberg Cycle: The Chamber Plays in Rep" Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50 (festival pass, $75). Thu/15, 7:30pm; Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm (also Sat/17, 2pm); Sun/18, 5pm. The first pair in the Cutting Ball Theater’s cycle of five newly-translated August Strindberg chamber plays, Storm and Burned House share much in common. Written in 1907, five years before Strindberg’s death, they are the most straightforward, least supernaturally-charged of the five, whose characters are haunted by memories rather than actual ghosts, and whose cloak and dagger domestic intrigues foreshadow Alfred Hitchcock as much as they do Harold Pinter. Both star a commanding pair of veteran Bay Area actors James Carpenter and Robert Parsons as elderly brothers, whose ability to move forward in the present is impeded by memories of past mistakes. In Storm, Carpenter plays the role of an elderly cuckold, whose wife left him five years previous and who, in the words of Parsons, "murdered" his reputation. In Burned House, Carpenter returns to his childhood home from America, a long-lost prodigal son, only to find it has burned to the ground, and with it, any hope of reconciling an unpleasant past. In both, an atmosphere of muted mendacity and stifling unease crowds the stage like an unnamed character whose presence is little acknowledged but felt acutely by all the principles. Gloomy and hostile, bereft of even the slightest glimmer of hopefulness, Storm and Burned House will appeal most to Strindberg completists, post-naturalists, and admirers of new translations (of which Paul Walsh has done a stellar job). (Gluckstern)

The Submission New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm (no shows Nov 21-22); Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 16. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jeff Talbott’s drama about a playwright who falsifies his identity when he enters his latest work into a prestigious theater festival.

Superior Donuts Gough Street Playhouse, 1622 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $25-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 2. Custom Made Theatre performs Tracy Letts’ poignant, Chicago-set comedy.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, Sixth Flr., SF; www.ninjazofdrama.com. $10. Thu/15-Sat/17, 8pm (also Sat/17, 3pm). Ninjaz of Drama perform the Shakespeare classic.

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through Dec 8. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar "doood" dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 24. Lynne Kaufman’s new play stars Warren David Keith as the noted spiritual figure.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 16. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Richard the First: Part One, Part Two, Part Three Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $14-25. Thu/15-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, three-part marathon, 2, 5, 8pm. This Central Works Method Trilogy presents a rotating schedule of three plays by Gary Graves about the king known as "the Lionheart."

Richard III Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley performs the Shakespeare classic.

Sex, Slugs and Accordion Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $10. Wed/14, 8pm. Jetty Swart, a.k.a. Jet Black Pearl, stars in this "wild and exotic evening of song."

The Sound of Music Julia Morgan Theatre, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $15-35. Thu-Sat, 7pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, noon and 5pm. Through Dec 2. Berkeley Playhouse opens its fifth season with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

Toil and Trouble La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Nov 22). Through Dec 8. Impact Theatre presents Lauren Gunderson’s world premiere comedy inspired by Macbeth.

The White Snake Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Opens Wed/14, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Nov 29, Dec 13, and Sat, 2pm; no matinee Dec 1; no show Nov 22); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 23. Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses) returns to Berkeley Rep with this classic romance adapted from a Chinese legend.

Wilder Times Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 9. Aurora Theatre performs a collection of one-acts by Thornton Wilder.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am; Nov 23-25, 11am. Through Nov 25. Louis "The Amazing Bubble Man" Pearl brings his lighter-than-air show back to the Marsh.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. $20. "Theatresports," Fri, 8pm, through Dec 21. "Family Drama," Sat, 8pm, through Nov 24.

"The Buddy Club Children’s Shows" Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Wy, SF; www.thebuddyclub.com. Sun/18, 11am. $8. Magician Timothy James performs.

"Clone Zone" Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; clonezone.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm; Sun/18, 7pm. $20. Anna and the Annadroids perform a multi-media dance theater piece inspired by video games and Carl Jung.

"Comedy Bodega" Esta Noche Nightclub, 3079 16th St, SF; www.comedybodega.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. No cover (one drink minumum). This week: Caitlin Gill, Wonder Dave, and friends.

"The Comikaze Lounge: A Showcase of Smart Comedy" Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; www.comikazelounge.com. Wed/14, 8pm. Free. Comedy with Brendan Lynch, Griffin Daley, Drew Harmon, and more.

"Fauxgirls!" Infusion Lounge, 124 Ellis, SF; www.fauxgirls.com. Thu/15, 8pm. Free. Drag revue with Victoria Secret, Alexandria, Chanel, Maria Garza, and more.

"Illuminique Under the Dome" Westfield SF Centre, 865 Market, SF; westfield.com/sanfrancisco. Thu/15, 4:30pm. Free. Dancers from the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker perform a demonstration for children at this launch event for the shopping center’s new 3D holiday light display.

International Taiko Festival Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm (also Sat/17, 2pm). $32-38. With Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka and San Francisco Taiko Dojo, and more.

"Life with Laughter" Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/16, 8:30pm. $10-20. Variety show featuring comedy, storytelling, spoken word, and music.

"New Frequencies Fest 2012" Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm. $20-25. Fri/16: "Women, Strings, and Song" with women songwriters and composers performing live; Sat/17: Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio and a lively celebration of the African Diaspora.

"Our Daily Bread" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/15-Sun/18, 8pm. $20-30. Amara Tabor-Smith’s Deep Waters Dance Theater performs a work inspired by food traditions.

"Round One Cabaret" Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; roundonecabaret.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm. $30. Not Quite Opera presents this showcase of new songs by Bay Area composers.

San Francisco International Hip Hop Festival Palace of Fine Arts Theater, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.cityboxoffice.com. Program A: Fri/16, 8pm and Sun/18, 2pm. Program B: Sat/17, 8pm and Sun/18, 7pm. $39.99 (combo tickets, $75). Sixteen hip-hop dance companies from the Bay Area, the East Coast, Europe, and more perform at this 14th annual event.

"San Francisco Magic Parlor" Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

"The Way Tomorrow Was: A Retro-Future Burlesque and Bellydance Revue" 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.lightreclaimed.com. Sat/17, 10pm. $12-20. Retro space-age performances.

BAY AREA

Mills Repertory Dance Company Lisser Theatre, Mills College, 5000 Macarthur, Oakl; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/16-Sat/17, 8pm (also Fri/16, 1pm). Also Sun/18, 3pm at Dance Mission Theatre, 336 24th St., SF. $12-15. Fall concert with works by Sonya Delwaide, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Katie Faulkner, and others.

"Yes, Bay Area: The Selected Tweets of Lyrics Born: A Reading with Beats" Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-1320. Sun/18, 7:30pm. Free. The musican shares his first book at this "musically enhanced literary reading" presented by First Person Singular’s On Book series.

Shit happened

Andrew Lam
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0

CASH FOR TRASH

Recology, the city’s garbage monopoly, has a problem: It charges residential customers only for the black cans full of unrecyclable material headed for the landfill — but thanks to city policy and environmental consciousness, there’s less and less traditional trash out there. Ultimately, the company wants to get rid of the big black cans altogether.

So a business model based on offering free recycling and compost doesn’t work any more — and everyone has known for some time that it had to change.

But there was no discussion of rate changes earlier this year; in fact, Recology folks said there were no plans for an immediate rate hike in the works. That’s because the June ballot included a measure that would have created competitive bidding for the city’s garbage contract — and the last thing Recology wanted was the threat of a rate hike to drive voters toward amending the 1932 City Charter provision that gives just one company complete control over the lucrative waste franchise.

Ah, but the June election is long over, and Recology beat back that effort — so the rate hike we all expected is now on the table.

On Sept. 11, Recology informed the city that it intends to apply for a new rate structure — and while the process is long and convoluted, we’ll see the details in a few weeks, and you can expect to start paying more for your service by next summer.

There’s no formal proposal yet — that will come in December. The director of the Department of Public Works has to approve it, and so does a Rate Board made up of the city administration, the controller and the head of the Public Utilities Commission. But both Recology and the city say there will be some significant changes in the way San Franciscans pay to have their refuse removed.

“We can’t focus our financial operations on a black can if we’re trying to get rid of it,” Recology spokesperson Eric Potashner told us.

Douglas Legg, the finance director at the Department of Public Works agrees. “As we’ve been pushing diversion, the blue and green cans have been pretty heavily subsidized.”

But shouldn’t good habits, like recycling, be subsidized? Should people who recycle and compost more be penalized? “That’s the challenge,” Potashner said.

And in the end, it’s going to be more than a shift in which bins cost how much. There’s no doubt that your bills will be rising, perhaps by a significant amount. “I assume it will go up,” Legg said. “There hasn’t been a cost-of-living increase since 2010.”

Which, of course, brings back the competitive bidding point. If others had a chance to make a play for the city contract, might rates be lower? Or might the city get more out of the deal?

Retired Judge Quentin Kopp, who helped spearhead the campaign for competitive bidding, thinks so. “If we had competitive bidding,” he told us, “these rate hikes would be more moderate.”

OPENING THE LAST CLOSET DOOR

While most everyone’s attention was focused on electoral politics in late October, Supervisors David Campos and Christina Olague were talking about a different level of political issue, one that’s still a huge taboo: Gay men in professional sports. At an Oct. 30 press conference, the two LGBT supes joined with representatives of The Last Closet, an SF-based campaign that’s trying to get gay professional athletes to come out.

It’s remarkable (or maybe, sadly, it isn’t) that in 2012, not one openly gay man has played in any of the Big Five pro sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball and soccer). There are, everyone knows, plenty of gay athletes, and the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and various soccer associations all have gay players. Some of them have come out after they’ve retired. But on the field (or on the floor, or on the ice)? No way.

Why does anyone care? Because youth sports are still, even in this town, full of homophobic language and homophobic attitudes, and it’s hard to imagine what young LGBT football or basketball players have to endure. Even one gay player could make a world of difference.

“What I saw with the San Francisco Giants, all of the Latino players, was such a source of pride to Latino boys and girls,” Campos told us. “We can’t feel that in the LGBT community. We know there are gay baseball players, but the LGBT youth don’t have those role models to look up to.”

The Last Closet campaign emerged out of a documentary film project that sought to look at homophobia in pro sports. “It became clear that some members of the sports hierarchy were not going to make themselves available to speak about this taboo subject,” the group’s website notes.

In fact, Fawn Yacker, one of the project directors, told us that nobody in a senior position in any sports organization was willing to talk — and that’s turned the movie into a political campaign. “We want the fans to push the sports leaders to address this,” she said.

In fact, all The Last Closeters want right now is for the commissioners of the major sports leagues to make a statement that homophobia is unacceptable and that the leagues will do everything possible to make sure that out gay players are accepted. Seems like a pretty simply no-brainer — but so far, not one sports official has gone along.

It’s pretty crazy, considering that it’s almost inevitable that a few major sports athletes will come out in the next few years — and the leagues are going to look foolish if they pretend it’s not going to happen. Any bets on which sport is going to be the first? “I don’t know,” Yackey said. “I think it might be hockey.” 

Critics urge caution on fast-moving Warriors arena deal

Sasha Cuttler
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Critics urge caution on fast-moving Warriors arena deal

UPDATED The proposal to let the Golden State Warriors build a new sports arena complex at Piers 30-32 is moving forward quickly, with the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee considering approving its fiscal feasibility tomorrow (Wed/14), the Land Use Committee hearing its design and transportation aspects on Monday, and the full board scheduled to move it forward on Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. After that, it will undergo an environmental study and work on myriad fiscal and administrative details, coming back to the board for final approval, probably in the fall, with the goal of opening by the 2017 basketball season.

[UPDATE 11/14: The Finance Committee today voted 3-0 to approve findings of fiscal feasibility for the project after Sup. Jane Kim made amendments delaying the EIR scoping session until January and ensuring the Citizens Advisory Committee will be given more time to review the project and its term sheet. City officials and the Warriors also signed a deal this morning requiring that at least 25 percent of its construction jobs and half of its apprenticeship positions go to local residents or military veterans. We’ll have more details and analysis of what happened in the coming days.]

Critics of the project say it is being rammed through too quickly, with too little public notice or attention to blocking off views of the bay, and on terms that are too costly to city taxpayers. To some, Lee’s quest for a “legacy project” is reminiscent of the groupthink boosterism that characterized the initial America’s Cup proposal, before it was revealed to really be a lucrative waterfront real estate scheme that was great for developers but costly to the public, and later abandoned.

And just like last time, when the Guardian, then-Sup. Chris Daly, Budget Analyst Harvey Rose, and others forced a major scaling back of the developers’ ambitions, there are some prominent voices of caution now being raised about the Warriors arena deal and its potential to fleece city taxpayers, including concerns raised by someone with decades of experience shepherding some of San Francisco’s biggest public works projects.

Rudy Nothenberg, who served as city administrator and other level fiscal advisory roles to six SF mayors and currently serves as president of the city’s Bond Oversight Committee, yesterday wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors urging it to reject the deal.

Among other things, he criticized the 13 percent interest that city taxpayers would pay on the $120 million in pier restoration work that the Warriors will do. “Quite simply, I would have been ashamed of such a recommendation,” Nothenberg wrote. “In today’s markets it is incomprehensible to have such a stunning recommendation brought to your honorable Board in such haste.”

Project spokesperson PJ Johnston and its main advocate City Hall, Office of Economic and Workforce Development head Jennifer Matz, each disputed Nothenberg’s characterization, citing a report by the project consultants, the Berkeley-based Economic and Planning Systems Inc. (EPS), that 13 percent is a “reasonable and appropriate market based return.”

Matz told us the rate was based on the risky nature of rebuilding the piers, for which the Warriors are responsible for any cost overruns. And she compared the project to the massive redevelopment projects now underway on Treasure Island and Hunters Point, from which the city is guaranteeing powerful developer Lennar returns on investment of 18.5 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Johnston, who was press secretary to former Mayor Willie Brown and worked with Nothenberg on building AT&T Park and other projects, told us “ I have great respect for Rudy.” But then he went on to criticize him for taking a self-interested stand to defend the views from the condo he owns nearby: “They don’t want anything built in their neighborhood. They would rather leave it a dilapidated parking lot.”

But Nothenberg told us his stand is consistent with the work he did throughout his public service career in trying to keep the waterfront open and accessible to the public, rather than blocking those views with a 14-story stadium and surrounding commercial and hotel complex.

“I have a self-interest as a San Franciscan, and after 20 years of doing the right thing, I don’t want to see this rushed through in an arrogant way that would have been unthinkable even a year ago,” Nothenberg told us. “I spent 20 years of my life trying to deal with waterfront issues.”

Among those also sounding the alarm about how quickly this project is moving is land use attorney Sue Hestor and former Mayor Art Agnos, who told us the supervisors should heed the input of Nothenberg and make sure this is a good deal for the city.

Agnos said, “Rudy Nothenberg stands apart from every other department head and CAO in the modern history of San Francisco for his financial and managerial expertise in bringing major projects with complex finances to completion that worked for our City. That is why the past six mayors…whether conservative or liberal…trusted him to advise them and administer the biggest projects in this city from Moscone Convention Center to the new main library to the Giants baseball park and Mission Bay. “

Legislative Analyst Harvey Rose released his initial analysis of the project on Friday. The $120 million plus interest that the city is paying to the Warriors would be partially offset by the $30 million the team would pay for Seawall Lot 330, a one-time payment of $53.8 million (mostly in development impact fees), annual rent of nearly $2 million on its 66-year lease of Piers 30-32, and annual tax and mitigation payments to the city of between $9.8 million and $19 million.

But the report also notes that many city departments and agencies – including the Department of Public Works, Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Police Department – have yet to estimate their costs. Both Johnston and Matz emphasized Rose’s conclusion that the project is “fiscally feasible” – the determination that supervisors will have to agree with to move the project forward – but the report also noted “the finding of ‘fiscal feasibility’ means only that the project merits further evaluation of environmental review.”

The full text of Nothenberg’s letter follows:

Dear Supervisors:

My experience as a high level financial advisor and city administrator for Mayors Moscone, Feinstein, Agnos, Jordan, Brown, and Newsom, and current President of the City’s Bond Oversight Committee cause me to write in the hope that you will reject the outrageous 13% interest rate that the developers of the waterfront arena are proposing to charge the City for their cost of replacing Piers 30/32. 

In my years as General Manager of Public Utilities, the Municipal Railway System, Water and Hetch Hetchy, and later as the Chief Administrative Officer for the City and County of San Francisco, I took probably more that a billion dollars worth of various debt instruments to the Board. 

Never…even in the worst days of highest modern era interest rates of the 1970’s hovering at 20% …never did I ever bring a 13% City borrowing to the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors for approval.  Quite simply, I would have been ashamed of such a recommendation.

In today’s markets it is incomprehensible to have such a stunning recommendation brought to your honorable Board in such haste. 

Even more remarkable is the fact that just weeks ago, Allentown, Pennsylvania has just procured a 4.78 % interest rate for $224.4 million of taxable bonds to help build with private contributions a hockey arena for 8500 seats. 

Yet, you are being told the best our city can do is 13% for $120 million.

No Board of Supervisors I ever appeared before would tolerate such dramatic discrepancy.

It is with this in mind, I would most respectfully urge you to send this proposed deal back to the developers, instructing the City’s negotiators not to bring it back without a far more favorable interest rate for City tax payers not to exceed a maximum of 7.5%.

And that would still be almost twice what the City would need to pay for City issued debt and more than amply compensate the developers for any risk premium that they allege that they are taking. 

Any such instruction from you to the City negotiators should also make it clear that they are not to make any new concessions to the developers in exchange for achieving a still high, but eminently more reasonable interest rate.

Thank you for your attention.

Rudy Nothenberg

Chief Administrative Officer (Ret.)

Documentation:

1.     The Warriors Arena negotiates 13% interest on $120 million from San Francisco when the City of Allentown in Pennsylvania just issued $224.4 million of taxable bonds for an arena at an average interest rate of 4.78%. 

13% for SF versus 4.78%  for Allentown

 http://www.allentownpa.gov/Home/AllentownCityNews/tabid/142/xmmid/636/xmid/2000/xmview/2/Default.aspx

City of Allentown – PA – Official Site

www.allentownpa.gov

The official website for the City of Allentown, PA. Learn about all the exciting events going on in the city of Allentown, from music, arts, theater, and sports. Allentown is the largest city in the 

2.     Allentown hockey arena bonds cost $4.2 million to issue …

www.lehighvalleylive.com/allentown/…/allentown_hockey_ar…

Oct 10, 2012 – About $224.4 million in municipal bonds were sold last week to help finance arena construction. City officials say the issuance costs are about …

 

 

Out of the last closet

Zelda Bronstein
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Out of the last closet

It got pretty well buried in the last-minute election madness, but Sups. David Campos and Christina Olague did a very cool thing Oct. 31 — they helped create some press, and some possible national buzz, for a small San Francisco organization that’s taking on a very big issue.

The Last Closet is trying to get someone — anyone — in the senior hierarchy of male professional sports to talk about homophobia and the fact that there are no out gay men in any of the five major pro sports (football, basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer). When Olague and Campos held a press conference to introduce a resolution endorsing the group’s aims, it got at least passing mention on sfgate. And that’s a start.

Everyone knows there are gay men in the NFL, and in the NBA, and in MLB, and on the ice playing professional hockey. Yet even in 2012, when retired tough-guy athletes can talk about homophobia and the need for equality, not one active player has come out of the closet.

Who cares? Well, if you’re a young LGBT person involved in sports, you care — and you care a lot. Middle-school and high-school locker rooms (male locker rooms, particularly) are still pretty homophobic places and can be scary for gay kids. And there’s nobody for them to see as a role model.

As Campos told me, “What I was with the San Francisco Giants, all the Latino players, was such a source of pride to Latino boys and girls. We can’t feel that in the LGBT community. We know there are gay baseball players, but the LGBT youth don’t have those rold models to look up to.”

Not that sports figures are great role models, but still: One badass NFL player — I envision a linebacker — comes out, and a generation of LGBT youth can say: He’s gay. He’s tougher than any of you assholes who are teasing me.

And it would change lives.

All the Last Closeters want right now is for the commissioners of the five major sports to speak out, to make a statement, to say that out gay players would be welcomed and protected in their leagues and that homophobia would not be tolerated. Doesn’t seem like much to ask.

And yet: Not one will do it.

Maybe Larry Baer can bring it up at the next owner’s meeting.

 

Ladies and gentleman, hip-hop 2012: Kitty Pryde, Main Attrakionz, Hottub

Andrew Lam
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0

Concurrent downlow Rusty Lazer set across the bridge at Ruby Room notwithstanding, Y3K at DNA Lounge was the place to be for hip-hop in the Bay Area on Friday night. This is a disputable claim, given the hordes of Youtube haters that run amok over headliner Kitty Pryde’s channel. But a Hottub–Main Attrakionz-Pryde 1-2-3 punch will tell you more about where hip-hop is today than any number of shows by more universally-accepted rappers.

I got to the show after DJ sets by FRIENDZONE, Matrixxman, and Marco de la Vega opened it. Hottub, an Oakland group fronted by a triad of heartstoppingly perfect female emcees was the first live act of the night.

This group is one of those things I should have paid more attention to way, way earlier. Hottub is fire. Its music is high-energy stompfest, and I have never seen women fondle their boobs more self-assuredly on a stage. Hottub’s attitude has a lot to do with punk and funk, but there’s no denying that emcees Coco Machete, Ambr33zy, and Lolipop have mad hip-hop swagger and flow and the kind of self-confidence that says if you don’t like it they don’t really care anyway. 

At one point towards the end, Hottub called half of the audience up to party with them, and all of a sudden the stage was filled with a bunch of really hot females, a tall skater guy who assumed centerstage and began to make a “x” with his hands over his crotch. To the beat. Eventually he was tackled by one of the members of Hottub, because apparently he was a friend of theirs. Another guy hopped up there who was probably someone’s dad who really likes Wu Tang. He had a T-shirt with the names of the clan members on it.

Main Attrakionz played it a little more close to the traditional contours of the rap game, albeit with that hazy, promethazine-inflected lean of the cloud rap genre they helped kick off. Emcee MondreM.A.N. has made it clear that the duo’s beats aren’t club-party music, but someone forgot to tell the crowd at DNA, who remassed their cumulus around MondreM.A.N. and Squadda B everytime they swapped the DNA stage for a go-go platform and back again.

In case you were wondering, you can get girls on lean — the two turned a performance of “Take U There” off 2012’s Bossalinis and Foolyiones into a lover’s moment (“Thugs get lonely baby, that’s why I called ya.”) This was also the first concert in which I’ve seen someone drop and break their cellphone, an occurence that was not noticed by the performers until a song or two later. 

I feeling slightly jumbled by the time Kitty Pryde inched on stage after hanging around the edges of it during the Main Attrakionz set.

Pryde’s San Francisco debut was maybe the buzziest portion of the night. If you took a break from the Internet last week/summer, you may have missed that she’s a Daytona Beach teenager currently assuming the “ruining hip-hop” mantle with her geekiness, doodles, weird voices. But unlike say, Ke$ha, Kitty Pryde can rap and like a rapper, she combats haters with considerable grace and counter-aggresiveness.

She spent the first handful of songs breathily self-deprecating, comparing herself unfavorably with the opening acts and squeaking. Her EP is called haha i’m sorry, as befitting a rap parody of a teenage white girl.

At some point, Main Attrakionz came back out onstage, their motivations for doing so unclear. Did they feel the need to save her from a crowd unsure of what to do with all the performance art? Were they feeling the set and wanted to lend their energy? Kitty asked MondreM.A.N. if he could please get everybody bouncing because they weren’t listening to her. Hot Sugar, Kitty’s DJ and Internet boyfriend, looked on heavy-lidded from the back of the stage. 

But then Kitty hit her stride and started performing, and it turns out she can grind (on MondreM.A.N.’s back, in this case) in a way that is not white girl-embarassing. It turns out she’s actually a rapper, even if she wears bigass fake sunflowers in her hair, and flower print leggings with her oversize black tee. She wouldn’t sing her Justin Beiber song even though Hot Sugar started the beat because, she said, she was made at Beiber for getting an Ellen Degeneres haircut. Note to Kitty: all of his haircuts are Ellen Degeneres haircuts. (Kids!)

A lot going on in a single show. Even the flyer was a trippy, four-eyed kitten. It was like some kind of Internet collage where you can post videos, photos, rambling monologues, and hit on people obliquely. Someone should make a web platform like that. 

The Performant: Paris is learning

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Adventures in ‘pataphysics

Well, pschitt! Although Alfred Jarry — schoolboy playwright, raconteur, and progenitor of ‘pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions” — died 105 years ago of decidedly prosaic malady tuberculosis, his outré influence lives on. Adopted and championed by generations of outsider artists, avant-garde writers, and revolutionary thinkers, the self-styled “Pere Ubu” gave artistic anarchy a nexus during his lifetime, an iconic figurehead after.

Last weekend, the four-day Carnivàle Pataphysique, part commemoration and part investigation, gave amateur pataphysicians, situationists, and conceptual artists a free zone to mingle, to expound, and to congeal, over lectures, concerts, puppet shows, and other unique performative opportunities in and around the practically imaginary stronghold of “North Beach,” a land where strip clubs and surrealists collide.

On Saturday, beneath an almost oppressive sun, a small group of eager urban explorers embarked from City Lights Bookstore on a situationist-inspired dérive — a psychogeographical walking tour of North Beach using maps of Paris (ala Jarry’s creation Dr Faustroll) to orient ourselves. Our intrepid guide, City Lights events coordinator Peter Maravelis hurried us along the less familiar side streets of Chinatown, stopping to exclaim over abstract, easily overlooked details. In a psychogeographical foray, murals become prophecies, placid streets become daunting Rubicons, oddball ephemera becomes omen. 

At St Mary’s Square aka “The Amorphous Isle,” beneath the stainless steel monolith of Beniamino Bufano’s sculpture of Sun Yat-sen, Frederick Young and Linus Lancaster demonstrated their latest attempt to make contact with the USS Macon, a military zeppelin which crashed in the ocean at Point Sur in 1935. Involving a slowly inflating weather balloon, soil from France, a stack of Heidegger texts, and a curious mechanical component best filed under “moves in mysterious ways,” (or, rather, doesn’t) Young and Lancaster’s absurdist experiment was conducted with all appropriate gravity until we were hurried off again to another park (“The Great Church of Snout Figs”) to watch actors Leonard Pitt and Kurt Bodden orate from a hodge-podge of cut-up texts beneath a gracious gazebo.

Marching onward, we found ourselves faced with a seemingly insurmountable mountain — the Vallejo Steps — leading straight into the sun. After our climb, more readings followed, courtesy of Mark Gorney and Josh Mohr, and a chance sighting of the Uniqlo blimp, shades of the USS Macon, and a jeering band of North Beach’s famous feral parrots, added local color to our border-blending dérive.

On such a journey, the most mundane minutiae becomes unaccountably fascinating. An abandoned pair of pants on the sidewalk raises the real question, who abandons their pants in the middle of a sidewalk? A cluster of television sets and sandwiches begs for an archeological explanation. Sloppy graffiti reads like a coded message. Empty streets twist unexpectedly, like lines of a labyrinth. 

“I think we’re lost,” Maravelis announced at one point.

“At last!” exclaimed a committed voyager.

Our final destination, Jack Early Park, renamed for our purposes as “The Land of Lace” involved one more sunward climb, and a rare treat worth the exercise—a command performance by dark folk duo Hazy Loper, whose sorrowful San Francisco ballad “The Graywood Hotel” should be required listening for all poet philosophers and vagabond flâneurs no matter which streets they wind up wandering, and for whatever purpose.

(Interested in more things ‘pataphysical? Festival co-curator Andrew Hugill’s ‘Pataphysics, a Useless Guide (MIT Press, 2012) is available at City Lights, as is Jarry’s seminal work, Ubu Roi.)

 

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