Arizona

Dick Meister: We all need a higher minimum wage

5

By Dick Meister

Bay Guardian columnist Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED/TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

Election’s over, the good guy won, so what now for working people? Labor’s wish list for our re-elected president and the new Congress is long, but certainly the most basic item is raising the pay of our poorest workers by raising the minimum wage.

 About four million workers have been living in poverty or near-poverty at the current minimum of $7.25 an hour – $15,000 a year at most before taxes and other deductions. And that’s assuming the workers manage to find full time, year-round jobs.

There’s been no lack of congressional bills to raise the minimum since it was last raised in 2007, the latest introduced this year by two Democrats, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Rep. George Miller of California.  Their bill would increase the rate to $9.80 an hour by 2014, index the rate to rise automatically with any rise in the cost of living after that, and set the rate for tipped workers at 70 percent of the minimum.

 Raising the minimum would help us all. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) estimates that increased consumer spending generated by the proposed raise would create the equivalent of more than 100,000 full time jobs. Other estimates indicate that every dollar increase in wages for workers at the minimum would create more than $3,000 in new spending after a year.

It’s often argued by those opposing a raise that a raise would be mainly a burden on small businesses, but NELP found that more than two-thirds of minimum wage workers are employed by large companies.  There’s no doubt many of the larger employers could easily afford a raise, especially since, as NELP notes, most of them are fully recovered from the Great Recession and are back making strong profits.

It’s not surprising that the opposition to a raise is led by corporate employers, but how does the general public feel about raising the minimum? A poll conducted in February of this year showed that nearly three-fourths of likely voters nationwide would support raising the federal minimum to $10 an hour and indexing it to inflation.

States, counties and cities can set their own minimums, as long as they at least equal the federal rate, and voters in 18 states and several cities have by substantial margins approved minimums greater than the federal rate.

In 2004 and 2006, state wage rates above the federal minimum were approved by voters in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. As for a federal raise, President Obama pledged during his initial election campaign in 2008 that he’d seek an increase to $9.50 an hour. But he did not do that, and said nothing about a raise during his re-election campaign this year.

Meanwhile, however, voters have recently raised the minimum rates in three cities, Albuquerque, San Jose and Long Beach.  NELP’s executive director, Christine Owens, hails the raises as a “major victory for workers.”

The rate in Albuquerque jumped a whole dollar to $8.50 an hour and will automatically adjust to future increases in the cost of living. NELP calculates that will affect an estimated 40,000 workers, generate $18 million in new consumer spending and support creation of 160 new jobs as businesses expand to meet the increased demand.

The minimum wage in San Jose rose from $8 an hour, the current California rate, to $10. NELP says that should raise the pay of almost one-fifth of the citywide workforce, boost consumer spending by $190 million and support creation of 200 new full-time jobs.

The raise in Long Beach does not apply to all workers there, but does set a higher minimum for hotel workers, who are essential to the success of the city’s booming hospitality industry. Their minimum pay will rise to $13 an hour from an average of only $10.  They will also get five paid sick leave days per year.

City minimums in California and elsewhere in the country range up to San Francisco’s rate that will reach $10.55 an hour next year.

NELP’s Owens notes that “with growing numbers of working people relying on low-wage jobs to make ends meet, the voters recognize that raising the minimum wage fulfills our basic obligation to ensure that work provides a path out of poverty. Higher wages for the lowest-paid workers in our economy will promote upward economic mobility and help accelerate post-recession recovery.”

It’s time for the president and Congress to recognize that vital truth.

Bay Guardian columnist Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED/TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

Vote early and often

1

The most expensive, ugliest, longest and most money-dominated election in my memory is finally winding down, and unless something really weird happens, Obama’s going to win another term. It’s likely the Democrats will control the Senate and the GOP will retain a narrow edge in the house, meaning four more years of gridlock (and possibly the end of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s career).

But the real message will be the role of big money — not just ordinary big money, but billionaire money — in California and San Francisco elections.

The state ballot has become a billionaire playground, with four of the ten initiatives created, written, put on the ballot and funded by stinking rich individuals who have their own personal and political agendas. In San Francisco, billionaires Ron Conway and Thomas Coates are trying to buy the District 5 election. An Arizona group linked to the Koch brothers is trying to shut down Prop. 30 (and leave the state in fiscal disaster).

And I’ve never seen as much real-estate money go into one supervisorial district.

We know both presidential campaigns are billion-dollar operations, and a lot of the same bad money is going into each of them. But on the local level, it’s a very different situation. There’s a concerted campaign here to drive progressives out of local office and install people more friendly to landlords and developers — at a time when the city’s going to be facing the greatest displacement pressure since the first dot-com boom. You don’t see the Association of Realtors putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into local races very often; there’s an opportunity here and they see it and they want to weaken tenant protections so they can make more money.

One of the best arguments in favor of district elections is that money doesn’t necessarily buy electoral success. In a district with roughly 30,000 voters, it’s possible to practice old-fashioned grassroots retail politics, to win by knocking on doors and going to house parties and meeting people. It’s not all about TV ads. And if that holds up with this election, Sup. Eric Mar — with a far superior field operation — will survive the blistering assault he’s under in District 1. If David Lee — who has taken the Mitt Romney approach and refused to speak to reporters (they might ask him a question or two about his inaccurate campaign dirt) — wins, it will be the greatest blow to democracy in San Francisco that we’ve seen in years.

On the other hand, if the D1 voters reject all that money and sleaze and Mar wins — and if the District 5 voters reject the billionaire money and someone other than London Breed wins — San Francisco will be sending a profound message: We don’t want your dirty money here, and our votes are not for sale.

Polls are open until 8. Vote early and often.

Who’s really behind the No on Prop. 30 ads?

7

The Fair Political Practices Commission released a bit of information about who just dumped $11 million into the No and 30 and Yes on 32 campaigns, and on the surface, the disclosure doesn’t tell much except that secretive PAC money moves around in tight circles. The head of the FPPC, Ann Ravel, called it “money laundering,” which sounds like a fairly accurate description. But all the FPPC records really show is that one nonprofit called Americans for Job Security and another called The Center to Protect Patient Rights moved the cash into the Arizona-based Americans for Responsible Leadership, which sent the money to California.

Who the hell are any of these groups? Technically, nobody knows, since they don’t disclose their donors. The SacBee notes that:

Although it could not be confirmed, the Center to Protect Patient Rights has been connected to Kansas-based Koch Industries, whose owners, David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch, are conservative advocates.

“Conservative advocates” is a kind way of putting it.

When the Bee called Koch HQ, a flak there said her guys weren’t involved:

Asked about reported ties to the Center to Protect Patient Rights, Koch Companies Public Sector spokeswoman Melissa Cohlmia said in an email, “Contrary to some media reports, Koch Industries, Charles Koch, and David Koch have not provided any financial support in favor of Proposition 32 and are not involved in this issue.”

Ah, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The LA Times has actually done some investigative work on this, and it’s pretty clear that the Center to Protect Patient Rights IS the Koch brothers, and that any money that comes through there is part of the brothers right-wing network.

I’m surprised Jerry Brown hasn’t jumped all over this. A big ol’ press conference event with the guv denouncing the (actual) vast right-wing conspiracy to shut down unions and drive California off the fiscal cliff might be the boost Prop. 30 needs in the final day.

 

 

True facts: there are at least 15 movies opening this week

0

Pack up the leftover Halloween candy and head to the movies this weekend — what better way to escape election-related craziness and/or rest your liver after all that LET’S GO GIANTS damage you just did?

Your options are pretty spectacular, as well: intriguing Israeli doc The Flat, in which a Jewish filmmaker learns his grandparents counted a Nazi couple among their social circle (my interview with director Arnon Goldfinger here); bonkers 1987 rock ‘n’ roll taekwondo spectacular Miami Connection (Dennis Harvey’s take on this newly discovered instant cult classic here)

Plus, RZA’s The Man With The Iron Fists, an homage to chopsocky classics (with, I’m assuming, a much better soundtrack); Denzel Washington playing an airline pilot whose secret drinking problem comes to light only after he prevents a plane from crash landing in Flight; and Deep Dark Canyon, a NorCal-set thriller by former locals Silver Tree and Abe Levy starring Ted Levine.

And that’s not even the end of it! Read on for video game characters run amok, two found-footage horror flicks, a musically-inclined Pacific Film Archive program, tributes to Tony Bennett (speaking of the Giants) and Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, and, I kid you not … even more.

Amber Alert An audition tape for The Amazing Race quickly turns into an epic chase in this low-budget “found footage” drama. Arizona BFFs Nate (Chris Hill) and Sam (Summer Bellessa, wife of director Kerry Bellessa) — and Sam’s teenage brother, shaky-cam operator Caleb (Caleb Thompson) — notice they’re driving behind the very Honda that’s being sought by an Amber Alert. “Following at a safe distance,” as advised when they call the cops, leads to high-decibel arguments about how to handle the situation — and for the next hour-plus, the viewer is trapped in a car with two people communicating only in nails-on-chalkboard tones. Amber Alert‘s nonstop bickerfest is so tiresome that it’s actually a relief when the child molester character starts taking an active role in the story. Not a good sign. (1:20) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctkkn1qSYKw

The Bay Top-quality (i.e., realistically repulsive) special effects highlight this otherwise unremarkable disaster movie that’s yet another “found footage” concoction, albeit maybe the first one from an Oscar-winning director. But it’s been a long time since 1988’s Rain Man, and the Baltimore-adjacent setting is the only Barry Levinson signature you’ll find here. Instead, parasites-gnaw-apart-a-coastal-town drama The Bay — positioned as a collection of suppressed material coming to light on “Govleaks.org” — is a relentlessly familiar affair, further hampered by a narrator (Kether Donohue) with a supremely grating voice. Rising star Christopher Denham (Argo) has a small part as an oceanographer whose warnings about the impending waterborne catastrophe are brushed aside by a mayor who is (spoiler alert!) more concerned with tourist dollars than safety. (1:25) (Cheryl Eddy)

“Don’t Shoot the Player Piano: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow” The late Texarkana-born composer’s birth centenary is celebrated in this two-part (Fri/2 and Sun/4) program of films examining his unique contribution to 20th century music. Frustrated early on by the inability of standard musicians to play his incredibly complicated scores, he turned to composing for player pianos, with their greatly heightened capacity for producing density of notes and rhythms. A member of the American Communist Party, he returned from fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War to discover the U.S. government had revoked the passports of many citizens with similar political convictions. As a result, in 1940 he moved to Mexico, where he remained until his death 57 years later — his reputation remaining an underground musicologists’ secret until the early 1980s, in large part due to his disinterest in fame and dislike of crowds (he’d always avoided any gathering of over five people). But in his last years he became much more widely known, thanks in large part to fans like fellow composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who in one documentary here calls him “the most important composer of our time,” comparing him to Beethoven and saying “his work is completely, totally different from [his contemporaries].” Among the movies screening are Uli Aumuller and Hanne Kaisik’s 1993 German Music for 1,000 Fingers, in which the reclusive, elderly subject allows us into his studio to explain his (still somewhat inexplicable) methodologies. The brand-new, hour-long Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano offers a posthumous appreciation of his life, music and influence. It’s a first film from James Greeson, a professor of music at the University of Arkansas who knew the man himself. Also featured are several international shorts that provide interpretive visual complements to Nancarrow pieces. His widow and daughter, as well as kinetic sculptor Trimpin and composer-former KPFA music director Charles Amirkhanian will appear at both PFA programs. Pacific Film Archive. (Dennis Harvey)

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

A Late Quartet Philip Seymour Hoffman is fed up playing second fiddle — literally. He stars in this grown-up soap opera about the internal dramas of a world-class string quartet. While the group is preparing for its 25th season, the eldest member (Christopher Walken) is diagnosed with early stage Parkinson’s. As he’s the base note in the quartet, his retirement challenges the group’s future, not just his own. Hoffman’s second violinist sees the transition as an opportunity to challenge the first violin (Mark Ivanir) for an occasional Alpha role. When his wife, the quartet’s viola player (Catherine Keener), disagrees, it’s a slight (“You think I’m not good enough?”) and a betrayal because prior to their marriage, viola and first violin would ”duet” if you get my meaning. This becomes a grody aside when Hoffman and Keener’s violin prodigy daughter (Imogen Poots) falls for her mother’s old beau and Hoffman challenges their marriage with a flamenco dancer. These quiet people finds ways to use some loud instruments (a flamenco dancer, really?) and the music as well as the views of Manhattan create a deeply settled feeling of comfort in the cold —insulation can be a dangerous thing. When we see (real world) cellist Nina Lee play, and her full body interacts with a drama as big as vaudeville, we see what tension was left out of the playing and forced into the incestuous “family” conflicts. In A Late Quartet, pleasures are great and atmosphere, heavy. You couldn’t find a better advertisement for this symphonic season; I wanted to buy tickets immediately. And also vowed to stay away from musicians. (1:45) (Sara Vizcarrondo)

A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman Blessed with recordings made by Monty Python member Graham Chapman (King Arthur in 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Brian in 1979’s Life of Brian) before his death in 1989 from cancer, filmmakers Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, and Ben Timlett recruited 14 different animation studios to piece together Chapman’s darkly humorous (and often just plain dark) life story. He was gay, he was an alcoholic, he co-wrote (with John Cleese) the legendary “Dead Parrot Sketch.” A Liar’s Autobiography starts slowly — even with fellow Monty Python members Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin lending their voices, much of the bone-dry humor falls disappointingly flat. “This is not a Monty Python film,” the filmmakers insist, and viewers hoping for such will be disappointed. Stick with it, though, and the film eventually finds its footing as an offbeat biopic, with the pick-a-mix animation gimmick at its most effective when illustrating Chapman’s booze-fueled hallucinations. In addition to opening theatrically, the film also debuts Fri/2 on premium cable channel Epix. (1:22) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIIMFHcC1Fc

The Loneliest Planet Travel broadens, they say — and has a way of foregrounding anxiety and desire. So the little tells take on a larger, much more loaded significance in The Loneliest Planet when contextualized by the devastatingly beautiful Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. In this film by Russian American director and video artist Julia Loktev, adventuring, engaged Westerners Nica (an ethereal Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) hire a local guide and war veteran (Bidzina Gujabidze) to lead them on a camping trip through the wilderness. They’re globe-trotting blithe spirits, throwing themselves into new languages and new experiences, though the harsh, hazardous, and glorious Georgian peaks and crevasses have a way of making them seem even smaller while magnifying their weaknesses and naiveté. One small, critical stumble on their journey is all it takes for the pair to question their relationship, their roles, and the solid ground of their love. Working with minimal dialogue (and no handlebar subtitles) from a Tom Bissell short story, Loktev shows a deliberate hand and thoughtful eye in her use of the space, as well as her way of allowing the silences to speak louder than dialogue: she turns the outdoor expanses into a quietly awe-inspiring, albeit frightening mirror for the distances between, and emptiness within, her wanderers, uncertain about how to quite find their way home. (1:53) (Kimberly Chun)

The Other Son The plot of ABC Family’s Switched at Birth gets a politically-minded makeover in Lorraine Lévy’s The Other Son, in which the mixed-up teens represent both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. When mop-topped wannabe rocker Joseph (Jules Sitruk) dutifully signs up for Israeli military duty, the required blood test reveals he’s not the biological son of his parents. Understandably freaked out, his French-Israeli mother (Emmanuelle Devos) finds out that a hospital error during a Gulf War-era evacuation meant she and husband Alon (Pascal Elbé) went home with the wrong infant — and their child, aspiring doctor Yacine (Medhi Dehbi), was raised instead by a Palestinian couple (Areen Omari, Khalifia Natour). It’s a highly-charged situation on many levels (“Am I still Jewish?”, a tearful Joseph asks; “Have fun with the occupying forces?”, Yacine’s bitter brother inquires after his family visits Joseph in Tel Aviv), and potential for melodrama is sky-high. Fortunately, director and co-writer Levy handles the subject with admirable sensitivity, and the film is further buoyed by strong performances. (1:53) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCD00LLZmys

A Simple Life When elderly Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the housekeeper who’s served his family for decades, has a stroke, producer Roger (Andy Lau) pays for her to enter a nursing home. No longer tasked with caring for Roger, Ah Tao faces life in the cramped, often depressing facility with resigned calm, making friends with other residents (some of whom are played by nonprofessional actors) and enjoying Roger’s frequent visits. Based on Roger Lee’s story (inspired by his own life), Ann Hui’s film is well-served by its performances; Ip picked up multiple Best Actress awards for her role, Lau is reliably solid, and Anthony Wong pops up as the nursing home’s eye patch-wearing owner. Wong’s over-the-top cameo doesn’t quite fit in with the movie’s otherwise low-key vibe, but he’s a welcome distraction in a film that can be too quiet at times — a situation not helped by its washed-out palette of gray, beige, and more gray. (1:58) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87E6N7ToCxs

Wreck-It Ralph Wreck-It Ralph cribs directly from the Toy Story series: when the lights go off in the arcade, video game characters gather to eat, drink, and endure existential crises. John C. Reilly is likable and idiosyncratic as Ralph, the hulking, ham-fisted villain of a game called Fix-It-Felix. Fed up with being the bad guy, Ralph sneaks into gritty combat sim Hero’s Duty under the nose of Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a blond space marine who mixes Mass Effect‘s Commander Shepard with a PG-rated R. Lee Ermey. Things go quickly awry, and soon Ralph is marooned in cart-racing candyland Sugar Rush, helping Vanellope Von Schweetz (a manic Sarah Silverman), with Calhoun and opposite number Felix (Jack McBrayer) hot on his heels. Though often aggressively childish, the humor will amuse kids, parents, and occasionally gamers, and the Disney-approved message about acceptance is moving without being maudlin. The animation, limber enough to portray 30 years of changing video game graphics, deserves special praise. (1:34) (Ben Richardson)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLxP8snjdGc

The Zen of Bennett Landing somewhere between a glorified album making-of and a more depthed exploration, this documentary about famed crooner Tony of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” fame shows him recording last year’s all-standards Duets II disc. His vocal collaborators are an eclectic — to say the least — mix of mostly much younger artists including Norah Jones, John Mayer, Carrie Underwood, Willie Nelson, and Andrea Bocelli. Some pairings are clearly a matter of commerce over chemistry, while others surprise — Lady Gaga is better than you might expect, while Aretha Franklin is certainly worse. Most touching as well as disturbing is his session with the late Amy Winehouse, whose nervous, possibly hopped-up appearance occasions his most gentlemanly behavior, as well as genuine admiration for her talent. (Others on the record, including Mariah Carey and k.d. lang, do not appear here.) Unjoo Moon’s rather mannered direction includes little displays of temperament from the octogenarian star, and glimpses of his family life (which extends well into his work life, since they all seem to be on the payroll), but just enough to tease — not enough to provide actual insight. Still, fans will find this less than-definitive portrait quite satisfying enough on its own limited terms. (1:24) (Dennis Harvey)

Film Listings

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Amber Alert An audition tape for The Amazing Race quickly turns into an epic chase in this low-budget "found footage" drama. Arizona BFFs Nate (Chris Hill) and Sam (Summer Bellessa, wife of director Kerry Bellessa) — and Sam’s teenage brother, shaky-cam operator Caleb (Caleb Thompson) — notice they’re driving behind the very Honda that’s being sought by an Amber Alert. "Following at a safe distance," as advised when they call the cops, leads to high-decibel arguments about how to handle the situation — and for the next hour-plus, the viewer is trapped in a car with two people communicating only in nails-on-chalkboard tones. Amber Alert‘s nonstop bickerfest is so tiresome that it’s actually a relief when the child molester character starts taking an active role in the story. Not a good sign. (1:20) Rohnert Park 16. (Eddy)

The Bay Top-quality (i.e., realistically repulsive) special effects highlight this otherwise unremarkable disaster movie that’s yet another "found footage" concoction, albeit maybe the first one from an Oscar-winning director. But it’s been a long time since 1988’s Rain Man, and the Baltimore-adjacent setting is the only Barry Levinson signature you’ll find here. Instead, parasites-gnaw-apart-a-coastal-town drama The Bay — positioned as a collection of suppressed material coming to light on "Govleaks.org" — is a relentlessly familiar affair, further hampered by a narrator (Kether Donohue) with a supremely grating voice. Rising star Christopher Denham (Argo) has a small part as an oceanographer whose warnings about the impending waterborne catastrophe are brushed aside by a mayor who is (spoiler alert!) more concerned with tourist dollars than safety. (1:25) (Eddy)

"Don’t Shoot the Player Piano: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow" The late Texarkana-born composer’s birth centenary is celebrated in this two-part (Fri/2 and Sun/4) program of films examining his unique contribution to 20th century music. Frustrated early on by the inability of standard musicians to play his incredibly complicated scores, he turned to composing for player pianos, with their greatly heightened capacity for producing density of notes and rhythms. A member of the American Communist Party, he returned from fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War to discover the U.S. government had revoked the passports of many citizens with similar political convictions. As a result, in 1940 he moved to Mexico, where he remained until his death 57 years later — his reputation remaining an underground musicologists’ secret until the early 1980s, in large part due to his disinterest in fame and dislike of crowds (he’d always avoided any gathering of over five people). But in his last years he became much more widely known, thanks in large part to fans like fellow composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who in one documentary here calls him "the most important composer of our time," comparing him to Beethoven and saying "his work is completely, totally different from [his contemporaries]." Among the movies screening are Uli Aumuller and Hanne Kaisik’s 1993 German Music for 1,000 Fingers, in which the reclusive, elderly subject allows us into his studio to explain his (still somewhat inexplicable) methodologies. The brand-new, hour-long Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano offers a posthumous appreciation of his life, music and influence. It’s a first film from James Greeson, a professor of music at the University of Arkansas who knew the man himself. Also featured are several international shorts that provide interpretive visual complements to Nancarrow pieces. His widow and daughter, as well as kinetic sculptor Trimpin and composer-former KPFA music director Charles Amirkhanian will appear at both PFA programs. Pacific Film Archive. (Harvey)

The Flat See "Past Lives." (1:37) Albany, Embarcadero.

Flight Robert Zemeckis directs Denzel Washington as an airline pilot whose act of heroism brings to light his secret drinking problem. (2:18) Presidio.

A Late Quartet Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken head up a star-spangled cast in this drama about a famous string quartet. (1:45) Embarcadero.

A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman Blessed with recordings made by Monty Python member Graham Chapman (King Arthur in 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Brian in 1979’s Life of Brian) before his death in 1989 from cancer, filmmakers Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, and Ben Timlett recruited 14 different animation studios to piece together Chapman’s darkly humorous (and often just plain dark) life story. He was gay, he was an alcoholic, he co-wrote (with John Cleese) the legendary "Dead Parrot Sketch." A Liar’s Autobiography starts slowly — even with fellow Monty Python members Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin lending their voices, much of the bone-dry humor falls disappointingly flat. "This is not a Monty Python film," the filmmakers insist, and viewers hoping for such will be disappointed. Stick with it, though, and the film eventually finds its footing as an offbeat biopic, with the pick-a-mix animation gimmick at its most effective when illustrating Chapman’s booze-fueled hallucinations. In addition to opening theatrically, the film also debuts Fri/2 on premium cable channel Epix. (1:22) Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Loneliest Planet Travel broadens, they say — and has a way of foregrounding anxiety and desire. So the little tells take on a larger, much more loaded significance in The Loneliest Planet when contextualized by the devastatingly beautiful Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. In this film by Russian American director and video artist Julia Loktev, adventuring, engaged Westerners Nica (an ethereal Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) hire a local guide and war veteran (Bidzina Gujabidze) to lead them on a camping trip through the wilderness. They’re globe-trotting blithe spirits, throwing themselves into new languages and new experiences, though the harsh, hazardous, and glorious Georgian peaks and crevasses have a way of making them seem even smaller while magnifying their weaknesses and naiveté. One small, critical stumble on their journey is all it takes for the pair to question their relationship, their roles, and the solid ground of their love. Working with minimal dialogue (and no handlebar subtitles) from a Tom Bissell short story, Loktev shows a deliberate hand and thoughtful eye in her use of the space, as well as her way of allowing the silences to speak louder than dialogue: she turns the outdoor expanses into a quietly awe-inspiring, albeit frightening mirror for the distances between, and emptiness within, her wanderers, uncertain about how to quite find their way home. (1:53) Clay, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Man With The Iron Fists Erstwhile Wu Tang-er RZA directs (and co-wrote, with Eli Roth) this over-the-top homage to classic martial arts films. (1:36)

Miami Connection See "Black-Belt Sabbath." (1:23) Roxie.

The Other Son The plot of ABC Family’s Switched at Birth gets a politically-minded makeover in Lorraine Lévy’s The Other Son, in which the mixed-up teens represent both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. When mop-topped wannabe rocker Joseph (Jules Sitruk) dutifully signs up for Israeli military duty, the required blood test reveals he’s not the biological son of his parents. Understandably freaked out, his French-Israeli mother (Emmanuelle Devos) finds out that a hospital error during a Gulf War-era evacuation meant she and husband Alon (Pascal Elbé) went home with the wrong infant — and their child, aspiring doctor Yacine (Medhi Dehbi), was raised instead by a Palestinian couple (Areen Omari, Khalifia Natour). It’s a highly-charged situation on many levels ("Am I still Jewish?", a tearful Joseph asks; "Have fun with the occupying forces?", Yacine’s bitter brother inquires after his family visits Joseph in Tel Aviv), and potential for melodrama is sky-high. Fortunately, director and co-writer Levy handles the subject with admirable sensitivity, and the film is further buoyed by strong performances. (1:53) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

A Simple Life When elderly Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the housekeeper who’s served his family for decades, has a stroke, producer Roger (Andy Lau) pays for her to enter a nursing home. No longer tasked with caring for Roger, Ah Tao faces life in the cramped, often depressing facility with resigned calm, making friends with other residents (some of whom are played by nonprofessional actors) and enjoying Roger’s frequent visits. Based on Roger Lee’s story (inspired by his own life), Ann Hui’s film is well-served by its performances; Ip picked up multiple Best Actress awards for her role, Lau is reliably solid, and Anthony Wong pops up as the nursing home’s eye patch-wearing owner. Wong’s over-the-top cameo doesn’t quite fit in with the movie’s otherwise low-key vibe, but he’s a welcome distraction in a film that can be too quiet at times — a situation not helped by its washed-out palette of gray, beige, and more gray. (1:58) Four Star. (Eddy)

Wreck-It Ralph Wreck-It Ralph cribs directly from the Toy Story series: when the lights go off in the arcade, video game characters gather to eat, drink, and endure existential crises. John C. Reilly is likable and idiosyncratic as Ralph, the hulking, ham-fisted villain of a game called Fix-It-Felix. Fed up with being the bad guy, Ralph sneaks into gritty combat sim Hero’s Duty under the nose of Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a blond space marine who mixes Mass Effect‘s Commander Shepard with a PG-rated R. Lee Ermey. Things go quickly awry, and soon Ralph is marooned in cart-racing candyland Sugar Rush, helping Vanellope Von Schweetz (a manic Sarah Silverman), with Calhoun and opposite number Felix (Jack McBrayer) hot on his heels. Though often aggressively childish, the humor will amuse kids, parents, and occasionally gamers, and the Disney-approved message about acceptance is moving without being maudlin. The animation, limber enough to portray 30 years of changing video game graphics, deserves special praise. (1:34) Balboa, Presidio, Shattuck. (Ben Richardson)

The Zen of Bennett Landing somewhere between a glorified album making-of and a more depthed exploration, this documentary about famed crooner Tony of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" fame shows him recording last year’s all-standards Duets II disc. His vocal collaborators are an eclectic — to say the least — mix of mostly much younger artists including Norah Jones, John Mayer, Carrie Underwood, Willie Nelson, and Andrea Bocelli. Some pairings are clearly a matter of commerce over chemistry, while others surprise — Lady Gaga is better than you might expect, while Aretha Franklin is certainly worse. Most touching as well as disturbing is his session with the late Amy Winehouse, whose nervous, possibly hopped-up appearance occasions his most gentlemanly behavior, as well as genuine admiration for her talent. (Others on the record, including Mariah Carey and k.d. lang, do not appear here.) Unjoo Moon’s rather mannered direction includes little displays of temperament from the octogenarian star, and glimpses of his family life (which extends well into his work life, since they all seem to be on the payroll), but just enough to tease — not enough to provide actual insight. Still, fans will find this less than-definitive portrait quite satisfying enough on its own limited terms. (1:24) Vogue. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Alex Cross (1:41) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Argo If you didn’t know the particulars of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, you won’t be an expert after Argo, but the film does a good job of capturing America’s fearful reaction to the events that followed it — particularly the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran. Argo zeroes in on the fate of six embassy staffers who managed to escape the building and flee to the home of the sympathetic Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). Back in Washington, short-tempered CIA agents (including a top-notch Bryan Cranston) cast about for ways to rescue them. Enter Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck, who also directs), exfil specialist and father to a youngster wrapped up in the era’s sci-fi craze. While watching 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Tony comes up with what Cranston’s character calls "the best bad idea we have:" the CIA will fund a phony Canadian movie production (corny, intergalactic, and titled Argo) and pretend the six are part of the crew, visiting Iran for a few days on a location shoot. Tony will sneak in, deliver the necessary fake-ID documents, and escort them out. Neither his superiors, nor the six in hiding, have much faith in the idea. ("Is this the part where we say, ‘It’s so crazy it just might work?’" someone asks, beating the cliché to the punch.) Argo never lets you forget that lives are at stake; every painstakingly forged form, every bluff past a checkpoint official increases the anxiety (to the point of being laid on a bit thick by the end). But though Affleck builds the needed suspense with gusto, Argo comes alive in its Hollywood scenes. As the show-biz veterans who mull over Tony’s plan with a mix of Tinseltown cynicism and patiotic duty, John Goodman and Alan Arkin practically burst with in-joke brio. I could have watched an entire movie just about those two. (2:00) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Beasts of the Southern Wild Six months after winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (and a Cannes Camera d’Or), Beasts of the Southern Wild proves capable of enduring a second or third viewing with its originality and strangeness fully intact. Magical realism is a primarily literary device that isn’t attempted very often in U.S. cinema, and succeeds very rarely. But this intersection between Faulkner and fairy tale, a fable about — improbably — Hurricane Katrina, is mysterious and unruly and enchanting. Benh Zeitlin’s film is wildly cinematic from the outset, as voiceover narration from six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) offers simple commentary on her rather fantastical life. She abides in the Bathtub, an imaginary chunk of bayou country south of New Orleans whose residents live closer to nature, amid the detritus of civilization. Seemingly everything is some alchemical combination of scrap heap, flesh, and soil. But not all is well: when "the storm" floods the land, the holdouts are forced at federal gunpoint to evacuate. With its elements of magic, mythological exodus, and evolutionary biology, Beasts goes way out on a conceptual limb; you could argue it achieves many (if not more) of the same goals Terrence Malick’s 2011 The Tree of Life did at a fraction of that film’s cost and length. (1:31) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Chasing Mavericks Sidestepping the potential surf-porn impact of influential docs like The Endless Summer (1966) and Step Into Liquid (2003), Chasing Mavericks directors Curtis Hanson and Michael Apted instead focus on the coming-of-age back story of Santa Cruz surf legend Jay Moriarity, who landed on the cover of Surfer magazine at the very unripe age of 16 while attempting the way-challenging waves at Half Moon Bay’s Mavericks. How did the teenager manage to tackle the mythically massive, highly dangerous 25- to 80-plus-foot waves that have killed far more seasoned surfers? It all started at an early age, a starting point that’s perhaps a nod to Apted’s lifetime-spanning Up documentaries, as Moriarity (Jonny Weston) learned to gauge the size of the waves on his own and grew up idolizing neighbor and surfing kahuna Frosty Hesson (Gerard Butler). After tailing Hesson on a Mavericks surfing jaunt, Moriarity becomes enthralled with the idea of tackling those killer waves — an obsession that could kill the kid, Hesson realizes with the help of his wife Brenda (Abigail Spencer). So the elder puts him through a makeshift big-wave rider academy, developing him physically by having the teen, say, paddle from SC to Monterey and mentally by putting him through a series of discipline-building challenges. The result is a riptide of inspiration that even Moriarity’s damaged mom (Elisabeth Shue) can appreciate, that is if the directors hadn’t succumbed to an all-too-predictable story arc, complete with random bullying and an on-again-off-again love interest (Leven Rambin), plus the depthless performance of a too-cute, cherubic Weston. Too bad Butler, who tasted the ocean’s wrath when he got injured during the production, aged out of the Moriarity role: he brings the fire — and the fury that fuels a drive to do the physically unthinkable — that would have given Moriarity’s story new life. (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Cloud Atlas Cramming the six busy storylines of David Mitchell’s wildly ambitious novel into just three hours — the average reader might have thought at least 12 would be required — this impressive adaptation directed (in separate parts) by Tom Twyker (1998’s Run Lola Run) and Matrix siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski has a whole lot of narrative to get through, stretching around the globe and over centuries. In the mid 19th century, Jim Sturgess’ sickly American notory endures a long sea voyage as reluctant protector of a runaway-slave stowaway from the Chatham Islands (David Gyasi). In 1931 Belgium, a talented but criminally minded British musician (Ben Whishaw) wheedles his way into the household of a famous but long-inactive composer (Jim Broadbent). A chance encounter sets 1970s San Francisco journalist Luisa (Halle Berry) on the path of a massive cover-up conspiracy, swiftly putting her life in danger. Circa now, a reprobate London publisher’s (Broadbent) huge windfall turns into bad luck that gets even worse when he seeks help from his brother (Hugh Grant). In the not-so-distant future, a disposable "fabricant" server to the "consumer" classes (Doona Bae) finds herself plucked from her cog-like life for a rebellious higher purpose. Finally, in an indeterminately distant future after "the Fall," an island tribesman (Tom Hanks) forms a highly ambivalent relationship toward a visitor (Berry) from a more advanced but dying civilization. Mitchell’s book was divided into huge novella-sized blocks, with each thread split in two; the film wastes very little time establishing its individual stories before beginning to rapidly intercut between them. That may result in a sense of information (and eventually action) overload, particularly for non-readers, even as it clarifies the connective tissues running throughout. Compression robs some episodes of the cumulative impact they had on the page; the starry multicasting (which in addition to the above mentioned finds many uses for Hugo Weaving, Keith David, James D’Arcy, and Susan Sarandon) can be a distraction; and there’s too much uplift forced on the six tales’ summation. Simply put, not everything here works; like the very different Watchmen, this is a rather brilliant "impossible adaptation" screenplay (by the directors) than nonetheless can’t help but be a bit too much. But so much does work — in alternating currents of satire, melodrama, pulp thriller, dystopian sci-fi, adventure, and so on — that Cloud Atlas must be forgiven for being imperfect. If it were perfect, it couldn’t possibly sprawl as imaginatively and challengingly as it does, and as mainstream movies very seldom do. (2:52) Balboa, California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Dark Knight Rises Early reviews that called out The Dark Knight Rises‘ flaws were greeted with the kind of vicious rage that only anonymous internet commentators can dish out. And maybe this is yet another critic-proof movie, albeit not one based on a best-selling YA book series. Of course, it is based on a comic book, though Christopher Nolan’s sophisticated filmmaking and Christian Bale’s tortured lead performance tend to make that easy to forget. In this third and "final" installment in Nolan’s trilogy, Bruce Wayne has gone into seclusion, skulking around his mansion and bemoaning his broken body and shattered reputation. He’s lured back into the Batcave after a series of unfortunate events, during which The Dark Knight Rises takes some jabs at contemporary class warfare (with problematic mixed results), introduces a villain with pecs of steel and an at-times distractingly muffled voice (Tom Hardy), and unveils a potentially dangerous device that produces sustainable energy (paging Tony Stark). Make no mistake: this is an exciting, appropriately moody conclusion to a superior superhero series, with some nice turns by supporting players Gary Oldman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But in trying to cram in so many characters and plot threads and themes (so many prisons in this thing, literal and figural), The Dark Knight Rises is ultimately done in by its sprawl. Without a focal point — like Heath Ledger’s menacing, iconic Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight — the stakes aren’t as high, and the end result feels more like a superior summer blockbuster than one for the ages. (2:44) Metreon. (Eddy)

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel The life of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland is colorfully recounted in Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, a doc directed by her granddaughter-in-law, Lisa Immordino Vreeland. The family connection meant seemingly unlimited access to material featuring the unconventionally glamorous (and highly quotable) Vreeland herself, plus the striking images that remain from her work at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Narrated" from interview transcripts by an actor approximating the late Vreeland’s husky, posh tones, the film allows for some criticism (her employees often trembled at the sight of her; her sons felt neglected; her grasp of historical accuracy while working at the museum was sometimes lacking) among the praise, which is lavish and delivered by A-listers like Anjelica Huston, who remembers "She had a taste for the extraordinary and the extreme," and Manolo Blahnik, who squeals, "She had the vision!" (1:26) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Frankenweenie Tim Burton’s feature-length Frankenweenie expands his 1984 short of the same name (canned by Disney back in the day for being too scary), and is the first black and white film to receive the 3D IMAX treatment. A stop-motion homage to every monster movie Burton ever loved, Frankenweenie is also a revival of the Frankenstein story cute-ified for kids; it takes the showy elements of Mary Shelley’s novel and morphs them to fit Burton’s hyperbolic aesthetic. Elementary-school science wiz Victor takes his disinterred dog from bull terrier to gentle abomination (when the thirsty Sparky drinks, he shoots water out of the seams holding his body parts together). Victor’s competitor in the school science fair, Edgar E. Gore, finds out about Sparky and ropes in classmates to scrape up their dead pets from the town’s eerily utilized pet cemetery and harness the town’s lightning surplus. The film’s answer to Boris Karloff (lisp intact) resurrects a mummified hamster, while a surrogate for Japanese Godzilla maker Ishiro Honda, revives his pet turtle Shelley (get it?) into Gamera. As these experiments aren’t borne of love, they don’t go as well at Victor’s. If you love Burton, Frankenweenie feels like the at-last presentation of a story he’s been dying to tell for years. If you don’t love him, you might wonder why it took him so long to get it out. When Victor’s science teacher leaves the school, he tells Victor an experiment conducted without love is different from one conducted with it: love, he implies, is a variable. If that’s the variable that separates 2003’s Big Fish (heartbreaking) from 2010’s Alice In Wonderland (atrocious), it’s a large one indeed. The love was there for 29 minutes in 1984, but I can’t say it endures when stretched to 87 minutes 22 years later. (1:27) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

Fun Size (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

Here Comes the Boom The makers of September’s Won’t Back Down might quibble with this statement, but the rest of us can probably agree that nothing (with the possible exception of Trapper Keepers) says "back to school" like competitive steel-cage mixed martial arts — particularly if the proceeds from the matches go toward saving extracurriculars at a down-at-the-heels public high school. Kevin James plays Scott Voss, a 42-year-old biology teacher at the aforementioned school, whose lack of vocational enthusiasm is manifested by poor attendance and classroom observations about how none of what the students are learning matters. He’s jolted from this criminally subpar performance of his academic duties, however, when budget cuts threaten the school’s arts programs, including the job of an earnest and enthusiastic music teacher (Henry Winkler) whose dedication Scott lazily admires. It seems less than inevitable that this state of affairs would lead to Scott’s donning his college wrestling singlet and trundling into the ring to get pummeled and mauled for cash, but it seems to work better than a bake sale. Less effective and equally unconvincing are Scott’s whiplash arc from bad apple to teacher-of-the-year; a percolating romance between him and the school nurse, played by Salma Hayek; and the script’s tortuous parade of rousing statements celebrating the power of the human spirit, seemingly cribbed from a page-a-day calendar of inspirational quotes. (1:45) SF Center. (Rapoport)

Hotel Transylvania (1:32) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

The House I Live In Much like he did in 2005’s Why We Fight, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki identifies a Big Issue (in that film, the Iraq War) and strips it down, tracing all of the history leading up to the current crisis point. Here, he takes on America’s "war on drugs," which I put quotes around not just because it was a phrase spoken by Nixon and Reagan, but also because — as The House I Live In ruthlessly exposes — it’s been a failure, a sham, since its origins in the late 1960s. Framing his investigation with the personal story of his family’s housekeeper — whose dedication to the Jarecki family meant that she was absent when her own son turned to drugs — and enfolding a diverse array of interviews (a sympathetic prison guard, addicts and their families, The Wire‘s David Simon) and locations (New York City, Sioux City), Jarecki has created an eye-opening film. Particularly well-explained are segments on how drug laws correlate directly to race and class, and how the prison-industrial complex has played a part in making sure those laws remain as strict as possible. (1:48) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Looper It’s 2044 and, thanks to a lengthy bout of exposition by our protagonist, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), here’s what we know: Time travel, an invention 30 years away, will be used by criminals to transport their soon-to-be homicide victims backward, where a class of gunmen called loopers, Joe among them, are employed to "do the necessaries." More deftly revealed in Brick writer-director Rian Johnson’s new film is the joylessness of the world in which Joe amorally makes his way, where gangsters from the future control the present (under the supervision of Jeff Daniels), their hit men live large but badly (Joe is addicted to some eyeball-administered narcotic), and the remainder of the urban populace suffers below-subsistence-level poverty. The latest downside for guys like Joe is that a new crime boss has begun sending back a steady stream of aging loopers for termination, or "closing the loop"; soon enough, Joe is staring down a gun barrel at himself plus 30 years. Being played by Bruce Willis, old Joe is not one to peaceably abide by a death warrant, and young Joe must set off in search of himself so that—with the help of a woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) and her creepy-cute son Cid (Pierce Gagnon)—he can blow his own (future) head off. Having seen the evocatively horrific fate of another escaped looper, we can’t totally blame him. Parsing the daft mechanics of time travel as envisioned here is rough going, but the film’s brisk pacing and talented cast distract, and as one Joe tersely explains to another, if they start talking about it, "we’re gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws" —in other words, some loops just weren’t meant to be closed. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Masquerade (2:11) Metreon.

The Master Paul Thomas Anderson’s much-hyped likely Best Picture contender lives up: it’s easily the best film of 2012 so far. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Lancaster Dodd, the L. Ron Hubbard-ish head of a Scientology-esque movement. "The Cause" attracts Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, in a welcome return from the faux-deep end), less for its pseudo-religious psychobabble and bizarre personal-growth exercises, and more because it supplies the aimless, alcoholic veteran — a drifter in every sense of the word — with a sense of community he yearns for, yet resists submitting to. As with There Will Be Blood (2007), Anderson focuses on the tension between the two main characters: an older, established figure and his upstart challenger. But there’s less cut-and-dried antagonism here; while their relationship is complex, and it does lead to dark, troubled places, there are also moments of levity and weird hilarity — which might have something to do with Freddie’s paint-thinner moonshine. (2:17) Albany, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Middle of Nowhere All the reasons why movie publicist turned filmmaker Ava DuVernay scored the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival are up here on the screen. Taking on the emotionally charged yet rarely attempted challenge of picturing the life of the loved one left behind by the incarcerated, DuVernay furthers the cause of telling African American stories — she founded AaFFRM (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement) and made her directorial debut with 2008 LA hip-hop doc This Is The Life — with Middle of Nowhere. Medical student Ruby (the compelling Emayatzy Corinealdi) appears to have a bright future ahead of her, when her husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) makes some bad choices and is tossed into maximum security prison for eight long years. She swears she’ll wait for him, putting her dreams aside, making the long bus ride out to visit him regularly, and settling for any nursing shift she can. How will she scrape the money together to pay the lawyer for Derek’s parole hearing, cope with the grinding disapproval of her mother (Lorraine Toussaint), support the increasingly hardened and altered Derek, and most importantly, discover a new path for herself? All are handled with rare empathy and compassion by DuVernay, who is rewarded for her care by her cast’s powerful performances. Our reward might be found amid the everyday poetry of Ruby’s life, while she wraps her hair for bed, watches Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and fantasizes about love in a life interrupted. (1:41) Stonestown. (Chun)

Paranormal Activity 4 (1:21) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Move over, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series — there’s a new shrinking-violet social outcast in town. These days, life might not suck quite so hard for 90-pound weaklings in every age category, what with so many films and TV shows exposing, and sometimes even celebrating, the many miseries of childhood and adolescence for all to see. In this case, Perks author Stephen Chbosky takes on the directorial duties — both a good and bad thing, much like the teen years. Smart, shy Charlie is starting high school with a host of issues: he’s painfully awkward and very alone in the brutal throng, his only friend just committed suicide, and his only simpatico family member was killed in a car accident. Charlie’s English teacher Mr. Andersen (Paul Rudd) appears to be his only connection, until the freshman strikes up a conversation with feline, charismatic, shop-class jester Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his magnetic, music- and fun-loving stepsister Sam (Emma Watson). Who needs the popular kids? The witty duo head up their gang of coolly uncool outcasts their own, the Wallflowers (not to be confused with the deeply uncool Jakob Dylan combo), and with them, Charlie appears to have found his tribe. Only a few small secrets put a damper on matters: Patrick happens to be gay and involved with football player Brad (Johnny Simmons), who’s saddled with a violently conservative father, and Charlie is in love with the already-hooked-up Sam and is frightened that his fragile equilibrium will be destroyed when his new besties graduate and slip out of his life. Displaying empathy and a devotion to emotional truth, Chbosky takes good care of his characters, preserving the complexity and ungainly quirks of their not-so-cartoonish suburbia, though his limitations as a director come to the fore in the murkiness and choppily handled climax that reveals how damaged Charlie truly is. (1:43) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Pitch Perfect As an all-female college a cappella group known as the Barden Bellas launches into Ace of Base’s "The Sign" during the prologue of Pitch Perfect, you can hear the Glee-meets-Bring It On elevator pitch. Which is fine, since Bring It On-meets-anything is clearly worth a shot. In this attempt, Anna Kendrick stars as withdrawn and disaffected college freshman Beca, who dreams of producing music in L.A. but is begrudgingly getting a free ride at Barden University via her comp lit professor father. Clearly his goal is not making sure she receives a liberal arts education, as Barden’s academic jungle extends to the edges of the campus’s competitive a cappella scene, and the closest thing to an intellectual challenge occurs during a "riff-off" between a cappella gangs at the bottom of a mysteriously drained swimming pool. When Beca reluctantly joins the Bellas, she finds herself caring enough about the group’s fate to push for an Ace of Base moratorium and radical steps like performing mashups. Much as 2000’s Bring It On coined terms like "cheerocracy" and "having cheer-sex," Pitch Perfect gives us the infinitely applicable prefix "a ca-" and descriptives like "getting Treble-boned," a reference to forbidden sexual relations with the Bellas’ cocky rivals, the Treblemakers. The gags get funnier, dirtier, and weirder, arguably reaching their climax in projectile-vomit snow angels, with Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins as grin-panning competition commentators offering a string of loopily inappropriate observations. (1:52) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Samsara Samsara is the latest sumptuous, wordless offering from director Ron Fricke, who helped develop this style of dialogue- and context-free travelogue with Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Baraka (1992). Spanning five years and shooting on 70mm film to capture glimmers of life in 25 countries on five continents, Samsara, which spins off the Sanskrit word for the "ever-turning wheel of life," is nothing if not good-looking, aspiring to be a kind of visual symphony boosted by music by the Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard and composers Michael Stearns and Marcello De Francisci. Images of natural beauty, baptisms, and an African woman and her babe give way to the madness of modern civilization — from jam-packed subways to the horrors of mechanized factory farming to a bizarre montage of go-go dancers, sex dolls, trash, toxic discarded technology, guns, and at least one gun-shaped coffin. After such dread, the opening and closing scenes of Buddhist spirituality seem almost like afterthoughts. The unmistakable overriding message is: humanity, you dazzle in all your glorious and inglorious dimensions — even at your most inhumane. Sullying this hand wringing, selective meditation is Fricke’s reliance on easy stereotypes: the predictable connections the filmmaker makes between Africa and an innocent, earthy naturalism, and Asia and a vaguely threatening, mechanistic efficiency, come off as facile and naive, while his sonic overlay of robot sounds over, for instance, an Asian woman blinking her eyes comes off as simply offensive. At such points, Fricke’s global leap-frogging begins to eclipse the beauty of his images and foregrounds his own biases. (1:39) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Chun)

Searching for Sugar Man The tale of the lost, and increasingly found, artist known as Rodriguez seems to have it all: the mystery and drama of myth, beginning with the singer-songwriter’s stunning 1970 debut, Cold Fact, a neglected folk rock-psychedelic masterwork. (The record never sold in the states, but somehow became a beloved, canonical LP in South Africa.) The story goes on to parse the cold, hard facts of vanished hopes and unpaid royalties, all too familiar in pop tragedies. In Searching for Sugar Man, Swedish documentarian Malik Bendjelloul lays out the ballad of Rodriguez as a rock’n’roll detective story, with two South African music lovers in hot pursuit of the elusive musician — long-rumored to have died onstage by either self-immolation or gunshot, and whose music spoke to a generation of white activists struggling to overturn apartheid. By the time Rodriguez himself enters the narrative, the film has taken on a fairy-tale trajectory; the end result speaks volumes about the power and longevity of great songwriting. (1:25) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Sessions Polio has long since paralyzed the body of Berkeley poet Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) from the neck down. Of course his mind is free to roam — but it often roams south of the personal equator, where he hasn’t had the same opportunities as able-bodied people. Thus he enlists the services of Cheryl (Helen Hunt), a professional sex surrogate, to lose his virginity at last. Based on the real-life figures’ experiences, this drama by Australian polio survivor Ben Lewin was a big hit at Sundance this year (then titled The Surrogate), and it’s not hard to see why: this is one of those rare inspirational feel-good stories that doesn’t pander and earns its tears with honest emotional toil. Hawkes is always arresting, but Hunt hasn’t been this good in a long time, and William H. Macy is pure pleasure as a sympathetic priest put in numerous awkward positions with the Lord by Mark’s very down-to-earth questions and confessions. (1:35) California, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Seven Psychopaths Those nostalgic for 1990s-style chatty assassins will find much to love in the broadly sketched Seven Psychopaths. Director-writer Martin McDonough already dipped a pen into Tarantino’s blood-splattered ink well with his 2008 debut feature, In Bruges, and Seven Psychopaths reads as larkier and more off-the-cuff, as the award-winning Irish playwright continues to try to find his own discomfiting, teasing balance between goofy Grand Guignol yuks and meta-minded storytelling. Structured, sort of, with the certified lucidity of a thrill killer, Seven Psychopaths opens on Boardwalk Empire heavies Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg bantering about the terrors of getting shot in the eyeball, while waiting to "kill a chick." The talky twosome don’t seem capable of harming a fat hen, in the face of the Jack of Spades serial killer, who happens to be Psychopath No. One and a serial destroyer of hired guns. The key to the rest of the psychopathic gang is locked in the noggin of screenwriter Marty (Colin Farrell), who’s grappling with a major block and attempting the seeming impossible task of creating a peace-loving, Buddhist killer. Looking on are his girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish) and actor best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), who has a lucrative side gig as a dog kidnapper — and reward snatcher — with the dapper Hans (Christopher Walken). A teensy bit too enthusiastic about Marty’s screenplay, Billy displays a talent for stumbling over psychos, reeling in Zachariah (Tom Waits) and, on his doggie-grabbing adventures, Shih Tzu-loving gangster Charlie (Woody Harrelson). Unrest assured, leitmotifs from McDonough plays — like a preoccupation with fiction-making (The Pillowman) and the coupling of pet-loving sentimentality and primal violence (The Lieutenant of Inishmore) — crop up in Seven Psychopaths, though in rougher, less refined form, and sprinkled with a nervous, bromantic anxiety that barely skirts homophobia. Best to bask in the cute, dumb pleasures of a saucer-eyed lap dog and the considerably more mental joys of this cast, headed up by dear dog hunter Walken, who can still stir terror with just a withering gaze and a voice that can peel the finish off a watch. (1:45) Marina, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D The husband and adopted daughter of Rosa (Radha Mitchell, star of the 2006 first film and seen briefly here), Harry (Sean Bean) and Heather (Adelaide Clemens) have been on the run from both police and ghouls since mom vanished into the titular nether land some years ago. When dad is abducted, Heather must follow him to you-know-where, accompanied by cute-boy-with-a-secret Vincent (Kit Harington). There she runs screaming from the usual faceless knife-wielding nuns and other nightmare nemeses while attempting to rescue Pa and puzzle out her place in resolving the curse placed on the ghost town. The original 2006 film adaptation of the video game was a mixed bag but, like the game, had splendid visuals; this cut rate sequel lacks even that, despite the addition of 3D (if you’re willing to pay for a premium ticket). It’s pure cheese with no real scares, much-diminished atmosphere, and laughable stretches of mythological mumbo-jumbo recited by embarrassed good actors (Martin Donovan, Deborah Kara Unger, Carrie-Anne Moss, a punishingly hammy Malcolm McDowell). There is one cool monster — a many-faced "tarantula" assembled from mannequin parts — but its couple minutes aren’t worth ponying up for the rest of a movie that severely disappoints already low expectations. (1:34) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

Sinister True-crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) hasn’t had a successful book in a decade. So he uproots wife (Juliet Rylance) and kids (Michael Hall D’Addario, Clare Foley) for yet another research project, not telling them that they’re actually moving into the recent scene of a ghastly unsolved murder in which an entire family — save one still-missing child — was hanged from a backyard tree. He finds a box in the attic that somehow escaped police attention, its contents being several reels of Super 8 home movies stretching back decades — all of families similarly wiped out in one cruel act. Smelling best-sellerdom, Ellison keeps this evidence of a serial slayer to himself. It’s disturbing when his son re-commences sleepwalking night terrors. It’s really disturbing when dad begins to spy a demonic looking figure lurking in the background of the films. It’s really, really disturbing when the projector starts turning itself on, in the middle of the night, in his locked office. A considerable bounce-back from his bloated 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still remake, Scott Derrickson’s film takes the opposite tact — it’s very small in both physical scope and narrative focus, almost never leaving the Oswalt’s modest house in fact. He takes the time to let pure creepiness build rather than feeling the need to goose our nads with a false scare or goresplat every five minutes. As a result, Sinister is definitely one of the year’s better horrors, even if (perhaps inevitably) the denouement can’t fully meet the expectations raised by that very long, unsettling buildup. (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Harvey)

Tai Chi Zero A little boy dubbed "the Freak" for the curious, horn-like growth on his forehead grows up to be Lu Chan (Jaydan Yuan), who becomes a near-supernatural martial arts machine when the horn is punched, panic-button style. But activating the "Three Blossoms of the Crown," as it’s called, takes a toll on the boy’s health, so he’s sent to the isolated Chen Village to learn their signature moves, though he’s repeatedly told "Chen-style kung fu is not taught to outsiders!" Stephen Fung’s lighthearted direction (characters are introduced with bios about the actors who play them, even the split-second cameos: "Andrew Lau, director of the Infernal Affairs trilogy"), affinity for steampunk and whimsy, engagement of Sammo Hung as action director, and embracing of the absurd (the film’s most-repeated line: "What the hell?") all bring interest to this otherwise pretty predictable kung-fu tale, with its old-ways-versus-Western-ways conflict and misfit hero. Still, there’s something to be said for batshit insanity. (Be warned, though: Tai Chi Zero is the first in a series, which means one thing: it ends on a cliffhanger. Argh.) (1:34) Metreon. (Eddy)

Taken 2 Surprise hit Taken (2008) was a soap opera produced by French action master Luc Besson and designed for export. The divorced-dad-saves-daughter-from-sex-slavery plot may have nagged at some universal parenting anxieties, but it was a Movie of the Week melodrama made on a major movie budget. Taken 2 begins immediately after the last, with sweet teen Kim (Maggie Grace) talking about normalizing after she was drugged and bought for booty. Papa Neeson sees Kim’s mom (Famke Janssen) losing her grip on husband number two and invites them both to holiday in Istanbul following one of his high-stakes security gigs. When the assistant with the money slinks him a fat envelope, Neeson chuckles at his haul. This is the point when women in the audience choose which Neeson they’re watching: the understated super-provider or the warrior-dad whose sense of duty can meet no match. For family men, this is the breeziest bit of vicarious living available; Neeson’s character is a tireless daddy duelist, a man as diligent as he is organized. (This is guy who screams "Victory loves preparation!") As head-splitting, disorienting, and generally exhausting as the action direction is, Neeson saves his ex-wife and the show in a stream of unclear shootouts. Taken 2 is best suited for the small screen, but whatever the size, no one can stop an international slave trade (or wolves, or Batman) like 21st century Liam. Swoon. (1:31) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Vizcarrondo)

The Waiting Room Twenty-four hours in the uneasy limbo of an ER waiting room sounds like a grueling, maddening experience, and that’s certainly a theme in this day-in-the-life film. But local documentarian Peter Nicks has crafted an absorbing portrait of emergency public health care, as experienced by patients and their families at Oakland’s Highland Hospital and as practiced by the staff there. Other themes: no insurance, no primary care physician, and an emergency room being used as a medical facility of first, last, and only resort. Nicks has found a rich array of subjects to tell this complicated story: An anxious, unemployed father sits at his little girl’s bedside. Staffers stare at a computer screen, tracking a flood of admissions and the scarce commodity of available beds. A doctor contemplates the ethics of discharging a homeless addict for the sake of freeing up one of them. And a humorous, ultra-competent triage nurse fields an endless queue of arrivals with humanity and steady nerves. (1:21) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Clear and Present Danger to Prop. 30 (and all of us)

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This is suddenly getting serious, very serious. A secretive super PCA out of Arizona, where all bad things seem to originate, just put $11 million into a No on 30/Yes on 32 operation, and while it’s likely not enough to pass 32, which is trailing pretty far behind in the polls — and might actually benefit from news that a group allegedly pushing for campaign transparency is living off shadowy money, the money’s already hurting 30.

Let us remember: If Prop. 30 goes down, the state goes off a fiscal cliff. Schools get his with cuts so brutal that the school year my have to be cut by a couple of weeks or more. The University of California and California State University systems will cease to function in anything remotely resembling their current state, which is already a disaster. Cities and counties will get hit, social services will suffer, more parks will close — it’s almost too awful to think about.

I didn’t write Prop. 30; I would have left out the sales tax and hiked the rate even more on the wealthiest. But it’s a compromise deal, and it’s not only good for the state it’s absolutely essential. And the Big Boys out of the state of Joe Arpaio are trying to undermine it.

Add that in to Molly Munger’s unconscionable efforts to take down Prop. 30 (at this point, it seems like nothing but sour grapes since her Prop. 38 is clearly going to lose) and you have a recipe for disaster.

Look, we all know Obama’s going to win California, and some of us don’t have a contested supervisorial election. But there’s lots of stuff on the local ballot that matters — and if Prop. 30 goes down, nothing else is going to matter because (unless by some miracle the Dems get a two-thirds majority in both houses and can pass other taxes) this state’s going down the tubes.

So go vote Yes on 30. Vote yes on 38, too, if you want, although a lot of people are mad enough at Munger to vote no. But 30 is the one that matters. Vote early and often.

 

Another look at Olague

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OPINION As Election Day nears, the chaotic contest for supervisor in District 5 represents a critical decision for progressive voters in the district — and for activists across the city.

The campaign for Julian Davis, the original first choice of many left/liberal activists, has imploded and is now in free-fall. The repercussions of the board’s vote on Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi continues to reverberate, nowhere more than in District 5. And respected progressive advocates who had worked together for decades are now estranged, even as our city faces urgent challenges of great complexity.

I don’t know Davis or the other candidates in District 5, but I sat down with Supervisor Christina Olague last month after she received the endorsement of the San Francisco Labor Council. It was our first meeting, and as I rode the Metro to Civic Center I was, frankly, not expecting much. Like many San Franciscans, I could not help but be skeptical of anyone appointed by Mayor Ed Lee. I had heard of decisions made and votes cast by Olague that troubled me. I was not expecting to like her, but friends of mine in the labor movement encouraged me to speak with her directly and I’m glad I did.

I started to like Olague as we walked from her office to find some lunch. Before we got to a restaurant I was already asking her questions about some of the tougher choices she’s made. We didn’t agree on everything, of course, but I was struck by her candor, her common sense, and pragmatic progressive values.

Christina Olague grew up in a migrant labor community in the Central Valley. She survived the often-brutal working conditions and poverty that define the lives of some of the most cruelly exploited workers in the United States. She became active in politics early in life, put herself through school, and moved to San Francisco, where she became a familiar figure in the city’s grassroots community.

As a Latina, and as a member of the LGBT community, Olague’s life experiences shaped her politics and basic values. Her candidacy is important in a city that seems every day more destined to become an enclave reserved exclusively for only the very wealthy and most privileged.

I endorsed Olague several weeks before she cast her vote on the struggle between Lee and Mirkarimi. I would have continued to support her regardless of her vote that day. But the bitterness of that controversy, and the nature of the scandal now surrounding Davis, underscore the need for progressives to heal, to repair our alliances and to demonstrate political leadership grounded in respect for all our communities.

The UNITE HERE International Union represents hotel, restaurant, casino, food service and laundry workers throughout the US and Canada. The majority of our members — the people I work for — are immigrant women. In our union we stand together: LGBT and straight, brown and black and white, immigrant and native-born. In all our actions we seek to build power for working people and to strengthen the broader movement for peace and social justice.

San Francisco has seen many changes in the 40 years since I first hitchhiked here as a youth from Arizona. While the political landscape has certainly altered, I reject the notion that the city’s voters have moved irrevocably to the right. I do believe that progressive activists must do better in communicating our values and our vision for this beautiful and unique city we all love. I think Olague could be an important part of that process.

On behalf of the members of UNITE HERE Local 2, and as a longtime organizer for LGBT and worker rights, I ask my many friends in District 5 to take another look at Christina Olague and to consider casting your vote for her on November 6.

Cleve Jones is a longtime activist and the founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt

Werewolf beats all: Interview with the CEO of fantasy sex toy site Bad Dragon (NSFW)

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At this point, the dragon dildos have become a personal archetype. Since Bad Dragon came onto my Internet psyche, the Arizona company’s vividly colored sci-fi/fantasy sex toys have lingered around the corners of my mind. The mental exertion that designers had spent on what a cockatrice’s penis might look like and on how an orca’s vagina would feel to stick yourself into. The craftsmanship (made in the USA.) The lovingly-written, exciting character bios and comic illustrations that let you know that your Moko the Liger toy is embodied by a feline dojo master who favors wearing revealing tunics.

At some point, we realized it was perfect for this week’s Sex Issue and we made a flow chart in celebration. (You can check the chart in our digital edition, page 29.) Once again, the Bay Area has cause to fulminate on which characters from LOTR, Brian Jacques’ Redwall, and outer space it’d most like to meet outside the pages of their fan fic. 

But Bad Dragon’s a slippery slope. Make a flow chart, and you want to know the whole story behind the company. Hence, this email interview with Varka, the mysterious CEO and founder of the company, who dips occasionally into third person in a way we found endearing. Read on for office catfights, and about the supremacy of the werewolf race. 

SFBG: Who started Bad Dragon and why?

V: The initial idea to produce fantasy-themed adult toys happened in 2007, when Varka was first learning to sculpt in clay over Skype with other fantasy enthusiasts. These accidentally created fantasy cocks were amusingly well recieved when photos were posted online. At this point Varka realized that if these toys were to become available for others, significant help would be required to turn the prototypes into a viable business.

As a result, Bad Dragon was founded in June 2008 by Narse, Raith, Varka, and Athus, out of a shared love of all things fantasy. At the time there was a very poor selection of fantasy-themed toys available, and so they focused their enthusiasm and talents towards filling that niche. Since the very beginning Bad Dragon has grown at an astonishing rate, starting with just four people and growing to nearly 30 people, all working towards the goal of making fantasies real.

Varka is a computing science graduate and systems designer from Scotland that loves to tinker with prototypes, produce proof of concepts, and pursue new ideas.

Narse is an esteemed fantasy artist whose love for his favorite characters knows no bounds. His art can be seen today in the character art that accompanies most of the products that BD sells.

Raith is a talented craftsman, whose contributions in mold making and model finishing were instrumental in BD’s success.

Athus was a talented and driven illustrator and 3D sculptor, who created some of BD’s finest designs. He sadly passed away in 2011, and is missed by all.

SFBG: What is the most popular model?

V: Our most popular model is David the Werewolf, closely followed by Natascha the Anthro Husky. Bruiser the Fusion also gets a lot of love from customers.

SFBG: Who came up with the idea for the liger edition?

V: It was a team effort; we got a lot of requests for something feline-ish through our forums, and that combined with a lack of decent anthro feline toys on the market persuaded us that it was about time we developed something to meet that demand. We ended up deciding on a tiger-lion hybrid — mainly because there was no clear winner in the tiger versus lion versus panther “catfight” that took place via staff emails!

SFBG: Does the Bad Dragon community exist offline? Are there gatherings for the fantasy-sexual?

V: The community exists in little pockets offline. We sell at conventions, but often our customers will meet up with one another and host their own small-scale gatherings, particularly at conventions. So far we’ve not seen many large gatherings mostly because of the wide geographic dispersion of our customers. We’re hopeful that with wider exposure and awareness of the fantasy-sexual community (as well as other events which draw in new people such as fantasy/sci-fi conventions) that there’ll be more in the future!

Live Shots: Desaparecidos at the Regency Ballroom

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A wave of nostalgia rolled fierce last night through the Regency Ballroom. It was everywhere – on stage with the Desaparecidos, a reformed group of five accomplished Omaha musicians, who seemed to lean on one another for comfort during noisy breakdowns, bending backward and lurching forward while playing all the tracks off their one album together, Read Music, Speak Spanish (Saddle Creek Records, 2002). It was in the rapturous, screaming crowd, mosh-pitting past its prime, and pumping skinny fists to the beat. And up on the balcony, it rose on my arms in the form of an endless series of goose pimples. Nostalgia sans irony.

In between tracks off Read Music, Speak Spanish, the band jumped out of the past and into the (possible?) future with brand new songs, including the recently released “MariKKKopa” and one that group leader Conor Oberst said they just named, “Anonymous.”

Oberst, ever the emotive front person, threw his long pony hair back and kicked his red bandana-swaddled leg up during the intense guitar swells and his mid-lyric yelps of “woo!” The singer-guitarist-Bright Eyes mastermind also talked about the disparity between the rich and the poor, the problems with a two-party system, Arizona’s sheriff, Obama’s short-comings (fewer cheers there), and a whole lot about the RNC. I also think he called someone a witch?

As one balcony-percher noted, “he’s preaching to the choir.” And another, “I feel like this political rhetoric was more interesting 10 years ago.” That would be when the band first came out, railing against the American dream. Still, it was nice to hear that someone out there in the music biz still cares; and that there are relatively mainstream bands still willing to stand up for what they believe. Sure, Desaparecidos is a cult favorite on an indie label, but Oberst supposedly dated Winona Ryder, so it’s not like he’s exactly under the radar. Anyways, I can’t recall if he discusses such issues during Bright Eyes sets as well, but he certainly seems more intense with all the fury of Desaparecidos. And his vocals were stronger than ever.

The most nostalgic track of all (at least in my general area) was “Manana.” Rousing lyrics being, “We will learn, we will love, we will work to change each other/We will spread, we will cover the earth like air and water/Tomorrow is blank, well, just fill it in with our little answers/If we are stopped, well, just start again.” And ending with an intro callback, Oberst howling “Yes, today we are giving birth to our own fu-tur-r-re.”

Down in the crowd below Oberst, the pit ebbed and flowed. There were crowd-surfers and rising plumes of smoke. After a tight hour and 15-minute set, Desaparecidos played a brief encore that included the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” during which time a rapid fan tried to get at Oberst and a guitar tech and security guards snapped into action. Oberst put his hands out, saying “it’s fine, it’s fine.” After finishing the cover, Oberst ran up to drummer Matt Baum and apologized for something, then kissed him on the mouth.

The band closed out with screamy “Hole in One.” Baum cracked hard into his drums then whipped the sticks onto the stage. The whole thing was over before 11pm, like some sort of back-in-time dream.

All photos by Chris Stevens. 

Read music, speak Desaparecidos

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When the first – and only – Desaparecidos full-length came out in 2002, it touched a raw nerve. Released a year after 9/11, with pro-Bush rhetoric still burning in our collective ears and mass confusion and fear still bubbling, Read Music / Speak Spanish took a specific Midwestern town, looked around, said, “what the fuck is going on?” and applied that rage to the rest of the country in a gleefully noisy Saddle Creek Records release. Omaha, Nebraska was home-base for both Saddle Creek and this group of riled up indie rock musicians.

And it still is; guitarist Denver Dalley, bassist Landon Hedges, drummer Matt Baum, keyboardist Ian McElroy, and perhaps most notably, vocalist-guitarist Conor Oberst, otherwise known as Bright Eyes – reunited in the past year in Omaha to start practicing again.

Though, as Dalley notes in our conversation, the band never officially broke up, it was just waiting for the chance to play together again. That ended up taking a decade, but what has emerged was worth the wait: two equally furious tracks, one (“MariKKKopa”) digging into villainous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, now on a federal civil rights trial for a “pattern of discriminatory policing,” and with another lawsuit on the way brought on by the Justice Department for similar charges. Arpaio is the man who created the controversial outdoor “tent city” jail in sweltering hot Arizona and forced inmates to wear pink underwear.

For a specific generation of Saddle Creek-obsessed fans, these two songs were a welcome relief, another breakdown of the so-called American dream. Even better, the original lineup is touring again, and rolls into San Francisco this week for two shows. Before they left, I talked to Dalley about all things Desaparecidos:

San Francisco Bay Guardian The big question is, what spawned this reunion?

Denver Dalley Even though we kind of went our separate ways back in the day, there wasn’t like an inner-band thing, like we weren’t getting along. It was just a timing thing. And I think there was starting to be expectations, and we were getting away from the whole reason we’d started.

But even back then we left it as “we’re on a hiatus.” Which I know a lot of bands say these days. But we really wanted to leave it open, we didn’t ever say that was the end, or that we’d never do it again. So for a long time it was a scheduling thing. We’d always say, ‘oh yeah, some day we’ll do it.’

Then when we did that Concert for Equality [in August 2010], we all had a lot of fun hanging out and doing that again. And then once they were done touring on the Bright Eyes record – because they did a pretty extensive world tour – the timing was right.

We started having band practice again. Not just rehearsing for a tour like a lot of us have started to do in more recent years, where you’re kind of a hired gun or there’s a purpose for something. We started having band practice again like we did when were 19, and it was a lot of fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2m2IzHPVU

San Francisco Bay Guardian Everyone has gone off and done so many other projects, to get everyone back together a decade later…

DD When we were talking about getting back together we were saying like, the romantic ‘maybe it was just that time and that place, it wouldn’t be the same’ but once we started in the band room again it really did feel like it did 10 years ago, we picked up where we left off.

We still have the same energy for it. We were all joking, “oh we’re all old men now, we don’t want to look like old men up there.” But no, it totally sounds the same, if anything the songs are even more angry and energetic now.

SFBG It’s certainly a more aggressive sound than we’ve heard from Brights Eyes or [Dalley’s band] Statistics, was that an intentional direction?

DD Yeah, definitely. Some of that just happens when we’re all in the same room. We all have a lot of fun discussing issues and I think sometimes there’ll be…well you know, the lyrics are totally up to Conor, but we can all go into something and be like, “we should have a song about this particular issue,” and be all fired up about it.

It’s just a natural process, it’s not like “oh that song sounds too ballady” or “that songs not tough enough.”

SFBG You’re based in Omaha. How did you get interested in writing about what’s going on in Arizona, and Sheriff Joe?

DD Conor really does follow the whole issue, the whole debate, everything that’s going on. He must just spend a lot of time doing internet research. The Concert for Equality was to combat that law in Arizona. Sherif Joe is just kind of the prominent character, the figurehead for a lot of that stuff, and so blatant and ridiculous, and he’s kind of the poster-boy for a lot of unnecessary and weird stuff.

I still can’t get over that sample at the end of “MariKKKopa.” It’s just unreal to me, I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

SFBG He’s kind of a modern-day villain.

DD Yeah, man. Views aside, everyone’s obviously entitled to their own opinion and I can respect other people’s views, but a thing like that, how can that possibly be a matter?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5c3z0GubIQ

SFBG Something I often wonder  – what happens after a specific scene blows up? There was this huge watchful eye and media attention on the Omaha/Saddle Creek scene in the early 2000s, and it seems like a lot of that attention has gone away. So what’s the vibe like there now? Have bands returned to a more DIY sensibility, or is it forever changed?

DD In general, touring expenses have gone up so much we’ve all joked about how bands that went from crashing on couches to hotels, they’re going back to ‘hey, can we crash on your floor tonight?’ It is crazy how little it used to take to go out and tour and you could get by. But now to even fill up the van with gas, it’s just a different world.

But Omaha to me, I kind of equate it to when a group of friends – like that time when everything was on the up-and-up and there was all that buzz and attention that you were talking about – I felt like we were in high school; we were all there and in each others’ lives and at each others’ shows, then it was like we all went off to college. We all went our separate ways and did different things, moved to different places and had different projects.

Now it feels like a lot of people are coming back from school now, and meeting up again. It’s different, there’s a younger crowd here too, which is awesome. When you can come back and say, ‘I don’t know hardly anyone at this show,’ and before it was like, I could tell you everyone’s name at this show. It’s cool but it’s different.

SFBG So even though the band was on a hiatus and not technically broken up, it is kind of high school reunion?

DD Yeah! For sure. Definitely. [Laughs]

SFBG Have you seen a strong reaction from fans?

DD Obviously, a great deal of everything is because of Conor’s popularity. There’s no question. But I feel like that record came out a really important time. It was so close after 9/11 and everyone was being really careful and guarded and “God Bless America” everywhere, and I think it was almost a relief in some ways to have this record that was kind of, calling out what the American dream has become. It wasn’t anti-American but maybe anti-American Dream. And I think it was a relief for people to realize, “oh yeah, it’s not wildly inappropriate to have constructive criticism and say things at a time like this.”

It does have a cult following and people are definitely exciting. I feel like it’s half and half, where people are like, “I’m so excited, I have my tickets for the show!” or, “I had no idea you guys were playing again.”

SFBG Will there be a new full-length with the two new songs?

DD I don’t know? Honestly, when we were practicing, those songs came together and we were at the studio already and thought it’d be fun to have something new out there. While we would all love to do a new record and hope to, there’s no actual plans to. If I’ve learned anything from the past, it’s who knows when things will happen and when schedules are going to align. We’ll have to write them I guess.

Desaparecidos
With the Velvet Teen
Tue/28, 9pm, $25
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

With the Velvet Teen
Regency Ballroom
Wed/29, 8pm, $25
Regency Ballroom
1290 Sutter, SF
(415) 673-5716
www.theregencyballroom.com

7 spots for mental regeneration this week

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Pride is over, and we’re willing to wager your depleted brain cells could stand for some stimulus. Whether you’re into sitting in dimly-lit rooms in North Beach listening to fiction read in a thick Hungarian accent, or dressing to the nines and perusing some edgy new performance art, here are seven cultural hot spots in the city this week.

László Krasznahorka

A Hungarian author emerges from his reclusivity in the hills of Szentlászló in order to present the San Francisco literati with a reading from his novel of scheming, sex, failure, hope, communism, freaky farm collectives, tango, and the devil. Sounds like a can’t-miss situation. City Lights will host celebrated author László Krasznahorka to read Satantango (yes, that’s satan-tango), the book that inspired the seven-and-a-half hour film by remodernist filmmaker, Béla Tarr. 25 years after its original publication date, the novel has finally been translated by George Szirtes, so now we plebeian Californians can get our Hungarian apocalyptic fix. 

Thu/28 7:30pm, free

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus, SF

(415) 362-8193

www.citylights.com

Kala Art Institute artist talks 

The busy thoroughfare of Berkeley’s San Pablo Avenue makes an appropriately unsettling backdrop for the Kala Art Institute’s first night of artist talks. From large-scale industrial sculpture, to dystopian watercolor, to engineered photographs of imaginary landscapes, artists Randy Colosky, Vanessa Marsh, and Alison Frost’s work treads an uncanny path between real and surreal. It defamiliarizes the familiar in a fashion of which even Freud would be proud. This series of talks features discussions from Kala fellows during their residencies at the gallery, so look forward to more free inspiration (and free refreshments, which are, um, always a welcome addition for any easel-toting San Francisco artist) in July, August, and September.

Wed/27, 7pm, free 

Kala Gallery 

2990 San Pablo, Berk 

(510) 841-7000

www.kala.org

Raw SF Solstice 

Despite its strictly fashionable cocktail attire mandate and swanky SOMA venue, June’s Raw SF installation offers something for even the freakiest. With a mission to showcase and support emerging, underground artists during the first 10 years of their careers, RAW displays innovative visual art, film, fashion, music, hair and makeup artistry, photography, modeling, and performance art. San Francisco’s installation attendees can also expect henna, organic refreshments, food trucks, a DJ, and a ceremonial tea service.

Thu/28, 7pm-12am, $10 pre-sale tickets, $15 door, $5 after-party (after 9pm)

1015 Folsom, SF

(888) 729-7545

www.rawartists.org

Readers Café and Bookstore poetry series

In support of the San Francisco Public Library, the dusty shelves of Readers Café and Bookstore will be available after hours for the last installment of the shop’s Thursday night poetry readings. Palestinian American poet and historical children’s fiction writer Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis and San Francisco beatnik Martin Hickle will read from their respective collections, and special prices on food and drink will be on offer as you contemplate questions of life and poetry while you gaze out at the Bay from this Fort Mason storefront. 

Thu/28, 6:30pm, free

Readers Bookstore

Building C, Room 165, Fort Mason Center, SF

(415) 771-1076

www.friendssfpl.org

“Evolve: A Woman’s Journey”

Turn what was intended to be a sangria-fueled and nail-painting girls’ night into a celebration of femininity with some real punch. The Fort Mason center showcases Patrick Stull’s work in a diverse series of art from almost all mediums – digital, oil, graphite, sculpture, casting, mixed media, and even original music that chronicles the emotional and physical experience of pregnancy. Much of the art is built to a life-size scale to deal with a subject matter that is as life-large as it gets. 

Fri/29, 9pm, $25

Fort Mason Center

2145 3rd St., SF

www.patrickstull.com

“Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in This World”

A million thanks to whoever decided to make food trendy. Combining some of the things NorCal natives hold dear (that’d be food, art, and agriculture) the Museum of Craft and Folk Art hosts a show with curator Harrell Fletcher that displays past and contemporary representations of agriculture, farming, and labor. With a certain focus on alternative farming project imagery, the show links agriculture art with social activism and community building through engaging with various genres, including folk art, outsider art, and craft. 

Sat/30, 11am-6pm, GA $5

Museum of Craft and Folk Art

51 Yerba Buena, SF

(415) 227-4888 

www.mocfa.org

Librotraficante Bay Area Banned Book Reading

As school board officials threaten to ban ethnic studies books and authors — not to mention the subject entirely — in Arizona, Libotraficante is hosting this afternoon of readings from banned books. With more than a dozen performers set to read from controversial tomes, the event is sure to be anything but boring. 

Sun/1 noon-4:30pm, free

Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin, SF

www.sfpl.org

Pride leather marshalls hail a “kinky renaissance”

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It was almost Pride Week, I’ve had two leather luminaries hanging out at kink coffeeshop Wicked Grounds – it just seemed like an opportune time to start waxing philosophical about the possibility of a kink renaissance in San Francisco. 

“There just seems to be this general coming-out,” said Leland Carina, who as a member of the SF girls of Leather has done her part to increase the inclusiveness and malleability of her kink community. She likened this expansion to the capital-R Renaissance, which happened after the threat of bubonic plague had been mitigated. Likewise, she said, the kink community in San Francisco is finally hitting a point where the fear of AIDS no longer rules people’s sexual encounters. 

Race Bannon, Carina’s co-leather marshall in this Sunday’s Pride parade, hadn’t thought of it that way – but Carina’s theory resonated with him. “We’ve figured out how to deal with [AIDS], and we’ve moved past it. I call what’s happening a kinky renaissance.”

The two of them should know. Bannon and Carina are connectors in the leather community. In our chat at Wicked Grounds, the two surmise that they were chosen to be Pride’s leather marshalls based on their approachability and connection with their playmates and community members. They are both very good at creating community on the Internet through social media — but are both rather accomplished perverts off the web as well. 

Brief descriptions, for those of us that thrive on bullet points:

Leland Carina

  • Founding member of SF girls of Leather
  • Now retired from SF girls, but works to promote and brand the movement in other cities. To date, there are girls chapters in Arizona (the original group, SF was the second), Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Tulsa, New York, among other regional chapters
  • Until recently, Carina was a graphic designer at Kink
  • Correspondent for leather news blog Leatherati
  • Leader in the SF Bay Leather Alliance

Race Bannon

They are the Miss Universes of the leather community, if that’s not too distasteful to say. “It’s mainly a wave and smile sort of thing,” says Carina – who will be wearing a red latex dress for her pageant moment made by an ex “roller derby sister” who runs Lust Designs. But be that as it may, Bannon and Carina are determined to make what they can of it. The two have pledged to do what they can to raise attendance numbers in their contingent so that the Pride hoards can see for themselves the growing scope of the leather community. They’ll be towed in the parade by human ponies, expertly trained by human pony mistress Liliane Hunt. 

In the spirit of a true pageant host (I was channeling Sinbad in 2000, which I chose because Montell Jordan was the musical guest that year. My second pick would have been Jerry Springer in 2008 because Lady Gaga was his musical guest. You really need to read this list), I end our meeting with a truly corny question. What is the biggest challenge facing the leather community today?

“Right now we have a very kumbaya status,” Bannon smiles, as Carina grimaces a little from across the table (surely, a girl of Leather has a bit different view on schisms in the community than an established older gentleman). Bannon also said that finding space for playtime is always a challenge in a city as dense and expensive as San Francisco. 

For Carina, the challenges have more to do with the forces outside the community. In an era when Rihanna boldly displays her kink proclivities in her music videos on MTV and 50 Shades of Grey is thrilling the harnesses onto Middle America, she says, “I’m interested in how that’s going to affect the community. After queerness becomes accepted, BDSM and polyamory becomes the next big thing.”

Pride parade 

Sun/24 10:30am, free

Begins at Market and Beale, ends at Market and 8th St., SF

www.sfpride.org

Dick Meister: Two big tests for labor

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By Dick Meister

 Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Helping get President Obama re-elected tops organized labor’s political agenda. But for now, unions are rightly focusing on special elections this month in Wisconsin and Arizona, where other labor-friendly Democrats are being challenged by labor foes.

Coming up first, on June 5, is the Wisconsin election to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who’s been labor’s public enemy No. 1 for his blatant anti-union policies. He’s been acclaimed by anti-labor forces nationwide and as widely attacked by labor.

Both sides see the election as highly symbolic, a possible guide for those seeking to limit the union rights of public employees and other workers or, conversely, for those attempting to halt the spread of Walker-like attacks on collective bargaining in private and public employment alike.

There are many reasons for replacing Walker with his recall election opponent, Democratic Mayor Thomas Barrett of Milwaukee. The AFL-CIO has come up with about a dozen reasons, headed by Walker’s severe limiting of the bargaining  rights of Wisconsin’s 380,000 public employees – a key action that helped trigger what Obama has described as a national “assault on unions.”

The AFL-CIO also complains that Walker has:

*”Led Wisconsin to last place in the nation in job creation.”

*”Disenfranchised tens of thousands of young voters, senior citizens and minority voters with voter suppression and voter ID laws.”

*”Put the health care coverage of 17,000 people at risk with unfair budget cuts.”

*”Allowed the extremist, corporate-backed American Legislative Council to exercise extraordinary influence.”

*”Made wage discrimination easier by repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay enforcement law.”

*”Attacked public workers’ retirement security.”

*”Blocked the path of young workers to middle class jobs by repealing rules on state apprenticeship programs.”

*”Killed the creation of more than 15,000 jobs when he rejected $810 million in federal  funds to construct a passenger rail system between Milwaukee and Madison.”

*”Sponsored new tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations that will cost the state $2.4 billion over the next 10 years.”

*”Proposed cuts to the state’s earned income tax credit that will raise taxes on 145,000 low-income families with children.”

Despite all that – and more – polls show the recall vote could go either way, with lots of campaign funding for Walker flooding in from  corporations and other union opponents across the country.

Unions have lots of tough campaigning ahead, as they do in Arizona. There, on June 12, a special election will determine who will serve in the Congressional seat held for three terms by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. She resigned in mid-term this year while still recovering from the serious wounds she suffered during a 2011 shooting in Tucson in which six people were killed.

Ron Barber, a Giffords’ staffer who was wounded in the Tucson attack, will challenge Republican Jesse Kelly in the race to elect a representative to serve the rest of Giffords’ term. Kelly, who ran a close losing race against Giffords in 2010 , opposes  much of what the AFL-CIO supports.

The labor federation is especially unhappy with Kelly’s support for GOP proposals in Congress “which would turn Medicare into a voucher system,” and for getting $68 million in federal stimulus funds for his family’s construction firm while at the same time attacking Obama for creating the stimulus program.

Apparently, says the AFL-CIO, “Kelly lining his own pockets with stimulus dollars is proper. Everything else is socialism.” The AFL-CIO is likewise unhappy with Kelly’s endorsement by organizations considered “extremist and racist” by civil rights groups.

Like labor, Barber is a strong supporter of Social Security and Medicare. But Kelly says that Social Security is a “giant Ponzi scheme” and that Medicare recipients are “on the public dole.”

He’s said health care is a “privilege” and so presumably should not be a government-guaranteed right, and claimed that “the highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government.”

Kelly wants to reduce the Federal Drug Administration “as much as humanly possible.” He’s also advocated an end to government food safety inspections, leaving individuals to do their own inspections rather than rely on “the nanny state” to do it for them.

No wonder labor is mounting major campaigns against Kelly in Arizona and Walker in Wisconsin. Labor victories are needed there to help protect unions, their members and many others from attempts to weaken the rights, protections and other essential aid provided through government.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Open Walls Baltimore: What the murals said, how the streets responded

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Most of you will know the neighborhood I was walking that early evening in from The Wire. In fact, the school where season four was shot was a few blocks away. That TV show is an eternal point of reference for Baltimore’s Greenmount West neighborhood, which Open Walls, the town’s first street art festival which I was in the hood to cover, was hoping to combat. The festival, going since March, will conclude with a closing party on May 25.

“Hey! I have a question for you!” Sometimes when you’re walking through half-vacant blocks at dusk you don’t turn around when people yell at you from across the street (you know white people), but this time the Argentines and I turned. A woman was walking towards us and pointing up at Jetsonorama’s massive, half-finished wheatpaste of a man’s face hovering in the dark above our heads.

>>RELATED READ: CAITLIN DONOHUE’S INTERVIEW WITH GAIA, THE 23-YEAR OLD STREET ARTIST-ORGANIZER OF OPEN WALLS

“What are you guys doing with that wall? Is that Mr. Tony?”

It should be noted that I have little to nothing to do with Open Walls, though I managed to secure a spot sleeping on a half-inflated mattress in 23-year street artist and festival organizer Gaia‘s cavernous live-work space for a week to watch the haphazard business of trucking half-cans of paint and open containers of paste across town in various station wagons by underpaid, incredibily dedicated staff and volunteers.

But even though – alongside season four’s Primary School No. 42 – hundreds of young artists lived in a massive ex-cork factory just a few blocks from where we had our exchange, it struck me the woman that evening saw us (some white and Latino scruffy-types) as a big enough anomaly on her block that she knew we had to be associated with the steet art festival.  

“You know Mr. Tony?” I asked. “Yeah,” she replied, with something that sounded like worry in her voice. “Why is he up on the wall?” “You’ll have to ask the artist,” I said. “Do you like it?” “Oh yeah, it’s really nice,” she told us, walking away, back into the night.

Around the corner in an alleyway, I’d seen Jetsonorama’s mirror-image pasting on either side of the narrow corrdor; a black kid on his bike. It seemed like he was reflecting the neighborhood back at itself, in stark contrast with the neon triangles and backwards wording of Baltimore artist Josh Van Horn’ previously-completed building-sized piece or even Argentine Jaz‘s corner park, which he’d lined with regal, painterly drawings of big cats. 

So that night, back at Gaia’s paint-covered live-work circus, Jetsonorama and I found a quiet place to talk about street art. Of course, I set my Android up wrong and none of the video footage of our epic, enlightening interview recorded, so I’ll steal his quotes from an epic and enlightening blog post he later wrote on his trip to Bmore. 

Jetsonorama, a.k.a. 50-something family physician Chip Thomas, lives on a northeastern Arizona Navajo reservation. He initially came for a four-year engagement to pay back his medical school loans, but, he tells me, “I loved the land, loved the people. So I decided to stay on.” His street art career began in 2009 on a trip to Brazil where he was struck by the sense of community that had arisen among the street artists he met there. 

And so upon his return to the rez, he began printing and posting images from photos he’d taken of people and animals there in the community. Jetsonorama saw them as an expression of the hip-hop culture he’d grown up in, love letters to the beleagured reservation he adored. He called the series Big. His next project was the Painted Desert Project, started with a friend. The work started earning props from those omnipresent street art blogs, and Jetsonorama began an online correspondence with Gaia, another artist who does “site-specific” (often a code word for “something the neighborhood will like”) wheatpastes.

The decision of what to paint is a defining aspect of street artists. Many of the artists at Open Walls like Rome’s Sten and Lex, Argentina’s Jaz, and Capetown’s Freddy Sam, create works that follow a specific artistic canon — like gallery painters, their inspiration can be culled from all over. Others, like Gaia, Jetsonorama, Chris Stain — even the New York artist LNY who dropped through Baltimore for a night to put up his wheatpaste of a boy astride a halo-ed horse — will often choose themes that reflect the geographic location of their work. This approach can often lead to a sense that a piece was created for neighborhood residents, avoiding the fate of pieces like Swoon’s Open Walls wheatpaste of an ancient woman (an Aborigine elder she met in Australia, though that fact was apparent in the finished piece.) The neighborhood, it was said around among the street artists, didn’t really get that piece, found it “creepy.”

Freddy Sam comments on his wall’s reception in Baltimore

To date, Jetsonorama is the only African American artist that is part of the Open Walls, which made his exchanges with neighborhood residents particularly meaningful. 

Indeed, they shaped his time in Baltimore. When Jetsonorama’s first attempt at pasting up Mr. Tony — a neighborhood legend, by the way, known for raising pigeons and wearing quarters in the stretched holes in his earlobes, which Tony will tell you is his change for the payphone — failed on an unprepped wall, he tried again. As he and street artist-festival organizer Nanook worked into the wee hours of the morning on the first draft, the block turned out to support them, telling them how much they liked the piece. So when the wheatpaste refused to stick to the wall, Jetsonorama extended his eight-day trip, eventually staying for two weeks and turning out a second version of Tony and a few other pieces. 

Open Walls Baltimore was all about balancing art and neighborhood – an apt reflection of the city’s plan for those blocks, given that Greenmount West and adjoining Charles North are both parts of the planned Station North arts district. In addition to the half-vacant blocks, Greenmount West is marked by old factories that have been filled with hundreds of working artists. Artists plus low-income renters: an age-old recipe for gentrification.

Those involved with Open Walls are well aware that their project may be a harbinger of higher rents in the neighborhood. “There’s a latent fear of this being one aspect of a changing neighborhood,” festival organizer and 23-year old wheatpaste artist Gaia told me when I interviewed him in his live-work studio space, the chaotic center of Open Walls. 

“Not all developers are totally evil, despite what people may say,” says Ben Stone, executive director of Station North, the area’s arts advocacy organization that is playing a large role in the implementation of Open Walls. Our interview took place at a sidewalk cafe in front of Cafe Bohemian on Charles Street, the bustling center of the North Charles neighborhood that was once the commercial center of the city in addition to being its geographic hub (the bus and train station is a few blocks away.) Stone told me that neighborhood associations envision a future for the area that includes the same number of low income units – but no more. That means that all the infill of those abandoned buildings can be more expensive housing, even “30-story buildings,” Stone says.

Stone tells me that the aim behind Open Walls is to attract real estate developers to the area so more of the empty properties can be turned into housing and other businesses. It also looks to make visible the art scene that is going on in Greenmount West behind the doors like those of the famous Copy Cat, an ex-factory megalith of artist housing. Doing murals out on the street inspires conversation between the street artists and the other residents of Greenmount West. 

Jetsonorama certainly found that to be true. He tells me a handful of stories of neighbors taking pride in the fact that a black man was participating in an endeavor that was seen as being controlled by forces outside the neighborhood. He recounts an exchange that happened while putting up a piece for Open Walls in the Station Village area. A woman stopped at a light, rolled down her car window, and yelled at him the following: 

“That’s nice! I like that. Thank you for sharing your art with us. Be sure to put your name on it when you’re done because if you don’t, the white man will come along and say he did it.”  

Obama and state’s rights

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So how many angry pot smokers (and how many of my libertarian-leaning blog trolls) are going to love this? The governors of four western states want to take control of federal land inside their borders, and they’re organizing to do it. Mostly a political stunt — the governors want to allow more mining, ranching, and drilling on public lands, and the feds are taking it a bit more slowly. And nothing new — we’ve had these western range wars for decades, and for decades Utah governors have insisted that the state ought to be making the decisions around the 66 percent of the total Utah land mass that’s owned by Washington.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the administration is doing the right thing by resisting — you can’t just take national parks and national forests and Bureau of Land Management land and turn it over to development-oriented states. Much of that was federal land before there were states. And it’s not as if the Interior Department is all pristine about it — there’s already far too much resource development on public property, and the public doesn’t get anywhere near enough money for it. Sometimes it’s so bad it’s nutty.

But Obama’s got a problem, and it’s called medical marijuana — and he’s doing the same dumb thing that presidents before him have done, and all it does is create allies for the far right. Hell, after the U.S. attorney started attacking dispensaries I was ready to seceed. Let’s take California and walk; we’re already the ninth largest economy in the world, and we pay far more in federal tax money than we get in federal benefits. The Sierra makes a pretty defensible permiter; who needs Washington?

Of course, I’m quite happy that Obama doesn’t want to let the nuts in Arizona and Alabama get away with their racist and oppressive anti-immigrant laws and I’m happy to argue (in those cases) that immigration is a federal issues and that states shouldn’t try to mess around with it.

Except that San Francisco is a sanctuary city, and we have our own policy, which is excellent and the feds should leave us alone. And when this city did same-sex marriage, in defiance of state law, that was one of the coolest things ever.

You see where I’m going here.

Both sides can raise this Constitutional stuff and argue state’s rights and a long list of other things, and any good law school professor can spend years talking and writing about the historical and legal issues. There are some things that should be left to the states, and some things that the federal government should do, and that is always evolving.

But really, a lot of this is about policy. Legal pot is a good thing. So is same-sex marraige. Crackdowns on immigration are bad. Drilling and mining on public land are a problem, whether it’s state land or federal land. Politics isn’t perfect, and I’m willing to take our victories where we can get them.

But when the president is inconsistent (he’s cracking down on medical marijuana in CA but not Colorado; he’s against the Arizona/Alabama laws but still his ICE trying to mess with SF’s Sanctuary City) and does things that make his allies and supporters (that’s us potheads) mad at him, then it’s easier for the governor of Utah to say the feds are on his land and should leave him alone. Just like the pot farms.

 

 

 

The legacy of racism

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steve@sfbg.com

The legacy of brutal racism in this country, particularly against African Americans, shapes the events of today. That’s a notion that much of white America resists accepting, particularly conservatives. But actions create reactions, hatred begets hatred, and those cycles can roll forward endlessly and manifest in unpredictable ways.

That’s one of the most compelling lessons in local journalist Thomas Peele’s gripping and insightful new book, Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist (2012, Crown), which grew out of covering the aftermath of the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Bailey was killed to prevent him from writing a story in the Oakland Post about the violence and financial crimes perpetrated by followers of the late Yusuf Bey and his sons, including Yusuf Bey IV (aka Fourth). Peele and other local journalists and media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to build on the work Bailey began and investigate his murder, which Fourth was convicted last year of ordering.

“The free press on which the public depends to keep it informed had been attacked,” Peele wrote. While such murders are rare in the U.S. — the last was a Mafia hit on a reporter from Arizona in 1976 — Peele and his brethren considered it important to send the message that, “A story could not be killed by killing a journalist.”

But the story that emerges from Peele’s years-long investigation goes well beyond Bailey’s murder, its flawed investigation by the Oakland Police Department, the violence and hypocrisy of the Your Black Muslim Bakery “cult,” or its long and complex relationship with Oakland’s political and community leaders.

Peele delves deeply into the 80-plus-year history of the Nation of Islam and Black Muslim ideology, dissecting its turbulent evolution and belief system that white people are “devils,” created by a mad scientist named Big-Headed Yakub, who use “tricknology” to hide the truth that African Americans are superior beings who will be spared during a coming Armageddon inflicted by a spaceship that has long circled the earth — a belief system that Malcolm X rejected after taking a hajj to Mecca and shortly before his assassination.

Peele dismisses the entire religion — which has very little in common with true Islam — as a deceptive scam from its inception, devised by the “con man” W.D. Fard and promoted by Elijah Muhammad simply to enrich its leaders by manipulating poor African Americans. Similarly, Yusuf Bey spoke the language of black empowerment in founding his own breakaway Black Muslim sect in North Oakland then used it as cover for criminal enterprises and raping the women under his control over a period of decades.

But to understand the appeal of Black Muslims preaching hatred of white devils, you have to look at the African American experience and horrible racism and violence that black people have endured in this country, as Peele does. He starts in Depression-era Detroit, where Fard and Muhammad met amid the virulent racism against Southern blacks who migrated north to work in Henry Ford’s automobile factories.

“This is the question of the psychology of race,” legendary attorney Clarence Darrow said during the Detroit murder trial of blacks defending their home against an attacking white mob, which Peele uses to great effect. “Of how everything known to a race affects its actions. What we learn as children we remember — it gets fastened to the mind. I would not claim that the people outside the Sweet house were bad. But they would do to Negroes something they would not do to whites. It’s their race psychology.”

We see Joseph Stephens (who would later become Yusuf Bey) growing up with tales of brutal lynchings in his hometown of Greenville, Texas, and later as a Santa Barbara hairdresser who discovered the Nation of Islam in 1962 after the Los Angeles Police Department had shot up its mosque and Stephens found his calling in the resolute words of Malcolm X and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

African American history made Bailey want to become a journalist focused on covering and empowering his community. And this same legacy — mixed with hopelessness, poverty, and broken homes during an upbringing in San Francisco and Richmond — animated Devaughndre Broussard, who fired three shotgun blasts into Bailey on a sunny morning in downtown Oakland.

“His life was no accident. Neither was his faith,” Peele wrote of Fourth in the last chapter. “The society that now worked through its flawed laws and imperfect courts to put him in prison for life had only itself to blame for the terror that Fourth and his fellow believers had inflicted upon it. The backlash against centuries of enslavement of Africans and the subhuman treatment of their descendants had seen to that. The stick figure hanging from a loose that Elijah Muhammad had ordered displayed in all the Nation of Islam mosques, the symbol of the boyhood lynching of his friend Albert Hamilton, showed that some could never forget, or forgive. Neither could Yusef Bey forget the stories of cotton fields his parents brought west from East Texas along with the story of a Negro burned to death as white people gathered in the square of a horrible place called Greenville and cheered. Some wounds are too deep to heal.”

But Americans have short memories for even our recent history, coupled with a growing sense that society’s have-nots somehow deserve to be that way and a lack of understanding of the many ways that racism and its legacy still affects this country.

“I don’t think white America understands it at all. White America has this attitude of: get over it,” Peele told me when I asked about that “racism’s backlash” theme. “How long can you oppress people and treat them like utter garbage before there is a rebellion?”

Gauged by poverty or incarceration rates, or by the poor quality of many of its schools, much of black America still faces tough struggles. It wrestles with a lack of opportunities and an understandable sense of hopelessness that can easily breed resentment or even violence. One example that Peele includes were the Death Angels (aka the “Zebra murders”), in which a small group of militant black ex-convicts randomly shot dozens of white people in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 1970s.

Peele closes the book with a chilling suggestion that Broussard, who is serving a fixed 25-year prison sentence because of his cooperation in the prosecution of Fourth and co-defendant Antoine Mackey, is studying to become a spiritual leader and may follow familiar patterns. “Look at where he came from? Have things changed that much?” Peele said of the lack of opportunities that Broussard faced growing up, and will face again when he gets out of prison in his mid-40s.

Peele has long been an award-winning investigative reporter rooted in deep research, which he combines with a colorful and dramatic narrative style. Yet he sometimes oversimplifies and harshly judges events and people, even Bailey, who Peele deems a lazy journalist and bad writer.

“The truth speaks for itself,” Peele told me. But the truth is often a matter of perspective, and Peele can’t escape the fact that he’s a white guy who has worked out of Contra Costa and Alameda counties since 2000. Perhaps that’s why he’s so quick to label poor urban areas with substantial African American populations as “ghettos.” Or, sometimes even more dramatically, as a “sagging, blood-splattered ghetto,” a phrase that a Los Angeles Times reviewer singled out as an example of how “Peele’s prose occasionally overreaches.”

I was repeatedly struck by the same thought, almost physically cringing when Peele labeled San Francisco’s Western Addition, my old neighborhood, as a violent ghetto. Or when he wrote, “Richmond is one of the most hopeless and violent cities in America, an oil-refinery town of 103,000 people, littered with shanties where shipyard workers lived during World War II ,” as if it were a cross between an Appalachian coal town and Third World hovel rather than a clean, modern Bay Area city well-served by public transit and a Green Party mayor.

Peele got defensive when I asked him about the labels, telling me, ” I stand by characterizations,” although he admitted that maybe Western Addition isn’t really a ghetto. “I think you’re nitpicking,” he told me.

Perhaps, and I do think that Peele’s flair for the dramatic is one of the things that makes Killing the Messenger such a page-turner, in the tradition of great true-crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But in a book that bravely takes on the complexities of racism and its backlash, I think this is more than a trivial “nit.”

It’s tempting for white America to dismiss such details, treat racism is a thing of the past, and malign racial sensitivity as political correctness. But as Peele and his book remind us, the wounds of not-so-distant indignities can run deep. And the collapsing opportunities for social and economic advancement in this country will create a backlash if we try to ignore it.

On the Cheap

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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Soojin Chang. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 22

“An Edward Gorey Birthday Party” Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; (415) 227-8666, www.cartoonart.org. 6 p.m.-8 p.m., free. Edward Gorey: a cool guy who not only made pop-up matchbox-sized books by hand, but also redefined the macabre nonsense that makes up children’s literature. Come celebrate the world-renowned author’s birthday with an evening of readings, interpretations, and cake.

BAY AREA

“Path to Prison Reform: Freeing Jails from Racism Berkeley-East Baby Gray Panthers” North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst, Berk; (510) 548-9696, berkeleygraypathers.mysite.com. 1:30 p.m., free. Plenty of things go down in jails that are neither documented nor resolved. Join ACLU members and former prisoners in a discussion of how racism may be the culprit behind prison brutality.

THURSDAY 23

“A Mnemosyne Slumber Party” Mechanic’s Institute, 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0101, www.mililibrary.org. 6 p.m., $12. Mnemosyne is a free online journal that features art, fiction, and nonfiction work dedicated to the science of memory and the mind. Come to the premiere of their newest “Sleep and Dreams” issue, stay for a night of live readings and artist appearances.

FRIDAY 24

“Diversity and Evolution of Hummingbirds” City College of San Francisco Ocean Campus, 50 Phelan, SF; (415) 239-3475, ccsf.edu/upcomingevents. Noon-1 p.m., free. Hitchcock ruined birds for some of us, but for those who still find these flying feathered creatures non-terrifying, this is a chance to join ornithology instructor Joe Morlan as he discusses the many birds he saw in his adventures in California, Arizona, Belize, Costa Rica, Trinidad, and Ecuador.

BAY AREA

Oakland Food Not Bombs benefit show Revolution Cafe, 1612 Seventh St., Oakl; (510) 625-0149, www.revcafeoak.com. 7 p.m., $4-$13. Food Not Bombs is all about non-violence, consensus decision-making, and tasty vegetarian meals, distributed for free to the community. What’s not to love? Support the group’s efforts this weekend in a benefit show featuring local bands Nate Porter and Wagon Boat.

SATURDAY 25

“Noise Pop Culture Club” Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; (415) 932-0955, www.publicsf.com. 11:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., $10. Noise Pop would not be possible without the visionary artists in the music, film, art, design, technology, and food communities. This event features a discussion by Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy, artwork by Grimes, an Ableton Live workshop with Thavius Beck, a talk on animation by Aaron Rose and Syd Garon – plus a bounce lesson taught by New Orleans bounce belle, Big Freedia.

Punk Swap Meet Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, 1195 Evans, SF; (415) 642-3371, www.goodbeer.com. 1

p.m.-6 p.m., free. If you thought flea markets were just for old knitting ladies, you have never been more wrong. Punk Swap Meet has tables selling records, zines, tapes, DIY crafts, clothing, and is open to all ages. There will be food by Eagle Dog, with vegetarian and vegan options available, and brew on tap for $3.

San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center Building A, 99 Marina, SF; (415) 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (also Sun/26, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.), $6 for two-day admission. Is your chakra out of sync? Not to worry. Pacific Crystal Guild is coming with over 40 exhibitors carrying crystals from Nepal, Bali, Afghanistan, and China.

SF Flea Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason Center, One Buchanan, SF; (415) 990-0600, www.sf-flea.com. Sat., 11 am.1-6 p.m. (also Sun/26, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.), $5. SF Flea is a modern public market that brings together local design, style, food, art, and entertainment.

BAY AREA

Miss and Mister Oakland Punk Rock Pageant East Bay Rats Club House, 3025 San Pablo, Oakl; (510) 830-6466, www.eastbayrats.com. 8:30 p.m., $5 (free for contestants). Who says you have to be a six-year-old from Georgia or proclaim world peace in a bikini to be in a pageant? Have your long-awaited tiara moment by showcasing how swiftly you can open a beer bottle with your teeth at Oakland’s very own punk rock pageant.

Stories of Old San Francisco Chinatown reading Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University, Berk; (510) 548-2350, www.asiabookcenter.com. 3 p.m., free. A long walk through Chinatown conjures ghosts – one can’t help cogitating on these streets’ secrets and history. Join Lyle Jan, a San Francisco native, for a journey through his youth spent growing up in Chinatown.

SUNDAY 26

San Francisco Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl Meet at Green Apple Books, 506 Clement, SF. (415) 387-2272, www.greenapplebooks.com. Noon-6 p.m., free. Go on a walking tour of some of San Francisco’s finest bookstores, buy some books, and eat a lot of chocolate.

The Fairy Dogfather signing Books Inc., 3515 California, SF; (415) 221-3666, booksinc.net/SFLaurel. 3 p.m., free. In Alexandra Day’s new book, a dyslexic boy asks for a fairy dogfather instead of a fairy godfather. And we’re so glad he did, because the combination of a fedora-wearing dog-friend and a confused child makes for one adorable picture book.

MONDAY 27

Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning reading Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 7:30 p.m., free. Is it really true that an old dog can never learn a new trick? In his book Guitar Zero, NYU professor Gary Marcus chronicles his own experience learning to play the guitar at age 38, and finds that there isn’t necessarily a cut-off age for mastering a new skill.

TUESDAY 28

“Pritzker Family Lecture” with Claude Lanzmann and Regina Longo Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1200, www.jccsf.org. 7 p.m., free with reservation. Lanzmann not only lived through the German occupation of France and fought with the French Resistance, but helped document the whole thing as the editor of Les Temps Modernes, Jean Paul Sartre’s political-literary journal. Come pick his brain as he discusses his new memoir, The Patagonian Hare, and his film, Shoah.

Alerts

0

news@sfbg.com

FRIDAY 6

Pathology of wealth

Progressive author and speaker Michael Parenti discusses this country’s dysfunctional political and economic systems during a lecture entitled “Democracy and the Pathology of Wealth,” describing how corporate capitalism has corrupted key institutions. In his books and talks, Parenti has covered a wide array of political topics, always with great passion and insights, and his perspective has never been more relevant than in the current political moment.

7:30, $12–$10

La Peña Cultural Center

3105 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 849-2568

www.michaelparenti.org

lapena.org/event/1952

 

End torture now

A screening of the film Ending U.S.-Sponsored Torture Forever will be followed by a discussion led by members of the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture. Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission member Rita Maran will also be honored for her efforts to get the Berkeley City Council to pass a resolution calling for President Barack Obama to honor commitments he made during his presidential campaign to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which became notorious for employing torture and other human rights violations.

7 p.m., $5–$10

Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall

1924 Cedar, Berk.

www.bfuu.org

(510) 841-4824

 

SATURDAY 7

Occupy and divest

Omar Barghouti, author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, gives a lecture entitled “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine!: BDS and the Global Struggle for Justice & Freedom.” Proceeds from the event, where Barghouti will be signing his book, benefit the Middle East Children’s Alliance and its Maia Project, which supplies clean drinking water to the children living in Gaza.

7:30, $10 (but no one turned away)

First Presbyterian Church of Oakland

2619 Broadway, Oakl.

events@mecaforpeace.org

(510) 548-0542

www.mecaforpeace.org

 

SUNDAY 8

Vigil for gun victims

Candlelight vigils remembers the victims of gun violence are being held around the country to mark the first anniversary for the shootings in Tuscon, Arizona that left six people dead and 13 injured, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. So come and light a candle to honor those affected by this senseless violence. Sponsored by Legal Community Against Violence.

6:30 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens

Mission and Third St., SF

(415) 433-2062

ecartwright@lcav.org

www.bradycampaign.org/toomanyvictims


Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Dick Meister: A decent living for all?

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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsoom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Finally there’s some good news for the millions of Americans who must to live on pay at or close to the legal minimum wage. Eight states are raising their minimum wage on January First, in line with state laws requiring the minimum to keep pace with inflation.

The raises to come are modest by any measurement. But any increase must be welcomed as desperately needed and hopefully as a major start toward increasing the minimum wage everywhere to a level that will provide a decent living to all working Americans, many of them living in poverty or near-poverty.

The minimum wage is just as important now as it was in 1938, when the wage law was enacted as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, with a promise of guaranteeing workers “a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general wellbeing.”

The federal rate was set at 25 cents an hour, with states and local governments free to set their own minimums, as long as they are above the federal rate.

Today’s rates are much higher, of course, although barely adequate. The federal rate is $7.25 an hour, only about $15,000 a year for full-time workers before taxes and other deductions. Eighteen states, more than 100 cities and counties and the District of Columbia have higher rates, but their rates also are clearly inadequate.

During his 2008 election campaign, President Obama proposed raising the minimum to  $9.50 an hour by 2011. But even though that would merely adjust the minimum wage for inflation, Congress and the White House have done little to make it happen.

Some of Obama’s Republican opponents in Congress actually have called for the minimum wage to be abolished, largely because their big money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests.

Congress’ failure to act has left it up to the states. The eight that are raising their rates on New Year’s Day include Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.  Their rates will increase by 28 to 37 cents an hour to between $7.64 and $9.04. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) calculates that will bring nearly 1.4 million full-time minimum wage workers an extra $582 to $770 per year.

Another 400,000 will get raises as pay rates are adjusted upward to reflect new minimum wage rates. It’s not just individual workers who will benefit from the raises. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and the hiring of new employees to help provide them.

NELP estimates that the increased consumer spending generated by the raises will add $366 million to the gross domestic product and create the equivalent of more than 3,000 full-time jobs. Other estimates indicate that every dollar increase in wages for workers at the minimum creates more than $3,000 in new spending after a single year.

And we shouldn’t forget that those earning the minimum include many of our most valuable yet needy and exploited workers.  Most work in the service or retail fields, as domestics providing home health care for the elderly and other household services or caring for the children of working mothers, for example. Others work in agriculture.

Many can’t find full-time jobs even at the bare minimum.  More than one-third are the main or sole support of their families. Almost two-thirds are women, many of them single mothers. One-third are African-American, Latino or Asian. Many are recently arrived immigrants. Only a few belong to unions or have other protections aside from the law.

But wouldn’t a minimum wage increase cause businesses to cut back their hiring, as opponents of minimum wage raises claim? No. Studies show that even during times of high unemployment, raising the minimum does not lead to a loss of jobs. Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the federal minimum has increased over the past 73 years.

Consider this, too: Taxpayers are providing billions of dollars in subsidies to employers of minimum wage workers, since much of the money paid out in public assistance goes to families whose working mothers do not earn enough to be self-supporting. Private charities provide additional millions in aid.

There’s no doubt employers are shifting a significant part of their labor costs to the general public, and no doubt that welfare costs could be reduced substantially if the minimum wage they had to pay was raised to a decent level.

Think of the benefits to society generally if the minimum wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.

Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and replacement costs.

Think of the benefits to small retail businesses. Opponents of a minimum wage increase say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities.

Tiffany Williams of the Institute for Policy Studies says raising the minimum wage “would be a step toward restoring dignity for millions of workers, enabling many ordinary working Americans to become part of the economic recovery rather than its collateral damage.”

Hard to argue with that, or with Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director,  who says the minimum wage increases “represent bright spots on an otherwise bleak economic horizon. Workers’ buying power is the secret weapon in the fight to get our economy back on track. States are taking action to protect that critical buying power. Congress should follow their example to realize those benefits for the national economy.”

Let the minimum wage raises in eight states be just the beginning of raises in all states.  Let all Americans have the right to a decent living

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsoom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

More good omens

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The author of the racist Arizona law AB 1070 was just recalled. And Mississippi voters decided that life doesn’t begin at conception. Maybe some sanity is returning to America.

Helping the 99 percent — with less

2

OPINION La Raza Centro Legal, an organization central to the empowerment of San Francisco’s low-wage immigrant workers, finds common cause with the Occupy movement during a time when our programs combining legal services and worker organizing are in jeopardy. Our hour of need falls within a window of tough times, but heightened political awareness, and we are calling out to the community to join us in solidarity as members of the 99 percent.

La Raza’s resonance with Occupy shows on a bilingual sign printed for the movement. Under a day laborer’s face, the sign reads, “We are the 99 percent. I’m blamed for the economic crisis, but what about the Wall Street banks?” Immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in government services, generate revenue exceeding the services they receive, subsidize the Social Security system, and provide labor that supports entire industries.

Contrary to the red herring propaganda generated by the 1 percent, the scapegoated low-wage immigrant worker is not the cause of the financial crisis in the United States. Occupy has resuscitated public discourse with the plain facts of shocking economic inequity and the corruption of our democracy. Immigration debate can now rise to the surface after nearly drowning in the lies that spawned the recent legal abominations in Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia.

In the current political and economic climate, immigrant rights organizations face an intractable three-pronged challenge: dangerous policies born of anti-immigrant zeal, a crushing economic crisis that disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color, and dwindling funds from the government and foundations that used to support our work. The Obama administration’s Orwellian-named “Secure Communities” deportation program creates an unprecedented stream of profits for privately contracted immigration detention facilities rife with human rights abuses. At the same time, employers take advantage of job scarcity to exploit low-wage immigrant workers. On the same days that our advocacy and services are needed more than ever, we’ve receive news that a grant that we depend on will not be renewed in the coming year.

Just like so many other members of the 99 percent, La Raza Centro Legal is in financial crisis. If the organization cannot find immediate support, some of La Raza’s programs that help so many people in the immigrant community could die. If La Raza is diminished, who will reunite a family unjustly torn apart, or take an employer to task for ripping off a day laborer so that the worker can feed his children? Who will organize the community so that, through La Raza’s Day Labor Program and Women’s Collective, low-wage immigrant workers can find their voice and build their own innate capacity for leadership in their community?

We aren’t giving up. Because the Occupy movement has pushed into public consciousness the well-established but long-ignored truth of how the status quo is hurting us all, it offers incredible hope. An October 20 community meeting kicked off a new fundraising drive for La Raza. San Franciscans and the city must join us in solidarity to help us find ways to support community nonprofits in declining economies and increasing civil rights abuses — which is when they are needed most.

Kate Hegé and Kate Deeny work in the Workers’ Rights Program at La Raza Centro Legal. For more information about how to help, contact Genevie Gallegos, Executive Director of La Raza Centro Legal at Genevie@lrcl.org.

Far from heaven: Sam Brower takes aim at the FLDS church in “Prophet’s Prey”

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If you read Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven, and followed the trial of Warren Jeffs — notorious leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints, now in jail for life for sexual assault (after a stint on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List) — you’ll dig Sam Brower’s Prophet’s Prey (Bloomsbury, 336 pgs., $27).

Brower’s book, subtitled My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, is the thrilling and disturbing tale of the private investigator’s relentless crusade for justice — not just in the Jeffs case, but against high-ranking FLDS members across Texas, Utah, Arizona, and beyond. The sect, which is completely removed from mainstream Mormonism, is best-known for its polygamist beliefs, often pairing underage brides with elderly church leaders (Jeffs is estimated to have over 50 wives, including the two, ages 12 and 15, that he was convicted of assaulting). They’re extremely well-funded, with leaders who live in mansions even as the rank-and-file go hungry. They also don’t care much for outsiders.

In Brower’s estimation, the FLDS church is “an organized crime syndicate that specializes in child abuse” — after reading his book (with a preface by Krakauer), you’ll tend to agree. He’ll be reading in Berkeley Tues/15; I caught up with him by phone at his home in snowy Cedar City, Utah, just over an hour’s drive from FLDS stronghold Short Creek, an isolated community straddling the Utah-Arizona border.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: I was just watching the recent clip of you on Dr. Phil, opposite former FLDS spokesperson Willie Jessop [an antagonistic figure in Prophet’s Prey]. That must have been an interesting experience.

Sam Brower: It was. It was weird, first of all, being there with Willie, who’s been on the opposite side of things throughout this whole ordeal. And then, Willie showed his true colors — he can’t answer a question and lies at the drop of a hat.

SFBG: He was in the news a couple of weeks ago, when the story broke about one of Warren Jeffs’ wives escaping from the church compound. I think you were quoted in the article, actually.

SB: Yeah, could be. One of Warren Jeffs’ wives took off, which is a very rare occurrence. This is the second one — the first one, I wrote about in the book; her name was Janetta — so it’s kind of a weird thing that they would actually let one of his wives get out of their grip, you know. And then just recently I heard that she has gone back to him. She’s with her family now, and so she’s back in the FLDS from what I understand. I was just waiting for that to happen. I know that they can’t afford to have one of Warrens wives out and talking, and that they’ll stop at nothing to try and get her back.

SFBG: You talk about this in the book a bit, but why is it so hard for them to escape?

SB: Number one, it’s not like they’re brainwashed. A lot of people use the term brainwashed, but it’s much, much deeper than that. They’re indoctrinated. It’s a cultural thing, and they really have no understanding of any other parts of the world. Their entire existence revolves around their life with the prophet. Many of them don’t have birth certificates. They don’t have drivers’ licenses. They’re with “caretakers,” they’re called — so there’ll be a group of wives and children that are being watched over by their caretakers.

In fact, it would be hard to trace wives, because they have no credit. They’re like non-entities. So it’s easier to trace their caretakers, the guys that are watching them. So they’re being watched constantly. They’re being shuttled around from place of refuge to place of refuge, and so, you know, they just don’t have a life or a world outside the relationship with Warren Jeffs and the church. So for [the wife who recently escaped] to get away is highly unusual, and my understanding was that she was in her stocking feet. She literally ran away.

SFBG: Do you think she had her own children that she left behind?

SB: I don’t know if she does or not. Some of his wives have not had children, mostly because there’s just so many wives. By the same token, some very young wives do have children, too. And I know that part of their existence is a very deviant existence, it’s a very deviant life — some of the things that came out in Warren’s trial regarding, basically, ritualistic orgies with his wives, in which he would say, “We all have to participate.” It was something that, before they became involved with Warren, was completely foreign to them. And it has to rock them a little bit to go from absolutely no sex education, no idea what it’s even about, to such a bizarre world.

SFBG: Warren Jeffs is serving a life sentence. Is he still in charge of the church?

SB: He’s running the show from prison as much as he can. While he was in jail, he had more access, because he was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on calls from the jail. Now that he’s in prison he’s more restricted, but he still gets a 15-minute phone call every day, and he has two hours’ worth of visits on Saturday and on Sunday. And there are people who are called to visit him for those two hours on each day, and take down his revelations and notes and orders to the people.

So he’s still running the show, not as freely as had been in the past, but he still is, and he has his brother, Lyle Jeffs, who is now the prophet’s mouthpiece — the man who’s running the show on the ground, who is just as bad as Warren. Some people say he’s worse. And he also has his places of refuge all around the country in Colorado, South Dakota, and Texas, and different compounds. He has little kind of clones of himself there who also run those operations as well.

It’s a little bit of both: he’s still overseeing everything. He still has his input in everything. But he’s gotten rid of anybody within his crime syndicate that has any kind of moral compass, and instilled people who are blindly obedient and will do whatever he tells them to do.

SFBG: In the book, the first case that draws you into the FLDS world illustrates that obedience: a family nearly loses their home after the father is kicked out of the church, seemingly on a whim, and nobody outside of his immediate family questions the decision. How come nobody rebels?

SB: That’s the hardest thing for us, people on the outside, to wrap our minds around. And I think that’s what really grabbed me when I first started working on it, when I saw [the recently excommunicated man] Ross Chatwin holding up a copy of [history book] The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich [in a newspaper photo]. I read that book when I was a kid, and in my mind I was thinking, “Good grief, when I was a kid and read that book, I couldn’t understand what would make this whole country do whatever this madman told them to do!” And that’s what Ross Chatwin was saying.

And sure enough, I go down to [Short Creek], and good grief, there’s 10, 15 thousand people that’ll do anything that this guy tells ’em. He tells them to leave their home, their family, kids, and go repent from a distance, and they do it, and the wives go to another man. It’s nuts, crazy. It took me a long time to kind of get a feel for it. I still struggle with it. It goes back again to this deep-seated cultural thing, where blind obedience gets you stature within the culture. The more you can demonstrate this obedience, the more you demonstrate your faith, and the higher up on the pedestal you are.

It’s to the point where, this is an example, a mother who’s a nurse has a daughter who is hemorrhaging. The daughter was married off at 14 to some old lecher, and she’s hemorrhaging and about ready to die, and the mother won’t take her daughter to the hospital because Warren Jeffs told her not to, because they might be able to trace her to the “priesthood,” quote-unquote, and it may result in charges. It may lead them to the prophet. And she doesn’t do it. She’s willing to let her daughter die to prove her obedience and her faith. It illustrates how there are no boundaries there.

I’ve thought many times that, had not there been a handful of people that went after Warren Jeffs and tried to expose these things, how would it have ended? In fact I still worry about that. Would it have been another Waco, or another Jonestown? Right now there are edicts coming down that are out in Short Creek that there can be no more sex, period. Not even for procreation. They can’t watch TV, listen to the radio, read books, magazines, newspapers. Get on the internet. Nothing. They have no hope in their lives, no joy. It makes me wonder, how’s this all going to end? Is going to be, just a vision, some kind of huge manifestation of their faith that ends in some other tragedy? What’s going to happen?

SFBG: If their leader is in jail and they’re all behaving the same way, is there any hope for the future?

SB: I wish I knew. The way it appears now is that it’s just getting worse. Lyle Jeffs is a real mental case himself, and he’s the one who’s running the show now. I have a client, actually a half brother of Lyle and Warren, who wants to have his children. They’re his children. He has legal custody of them. But Lyle has taken them and is hiding the children from him. So we’re having to go to court, and jump through all these hoops to try and get this guy’s children back. And for some reason Lyle just doesn’t want him to have these children. Because he’s received some revelation saying that he shouldn’t have his own children.
I see it just continuing to get worse and worse. It’s anybody’s guess, really.

SFBG: You mentioned earlier that the church is like a “crime syndicate” — is that sort of the go-to argument to convince people who wonder about freedom of religion in this case?

SB: The freedom of religion thing is the FLDS’s wild card. You know, they try and go around and say that people are going after them because they’re an unpopular religion, and they practice polygamy, or whatever. But the fact is, they have turned into a crime syndicate that specialized in child abuse. And everything they do is in support of their illegal activities. They marry little girls off as young as 12 years old. They groom them from the ages of eight, nine, even younger, to become “heavenly comfort wives.”

You know, you can can believe whatever you want, as part of your religious doctrine or theology. If you want to believe that it’s OK to sacrifice virgins and throw them in a volcano, that’s fine. But when you start acting on those beliefs — when you start breaking the law — then it’s not OK anymore. And that’s what they’ve done. They’ve regressed to the point where, anything they do, anything that’s in violation of the law is, to them, within their rights to do that. That’s part of their free exercise of religion. And that’s not true. That’s not what the constitution says. It’s not OK to break the law just because you think it’s part of your religion. You can believe it if you want, but you can’t act on it.

SFBG: In the book, you discuss your own faith as a member of the mainstream Mormon church. I know the two aren’t connected, but is the FLDS church a topic of interest for mainstream Mormons? What’s been their reaction to the book?

SB: I think mainstream Mormons have been very interested in it. It’s one of the few times they’re able to read about it and find out what’s going on without being blamed for it. In fact, I just did a signing in Salt Lake City that was attended by a lot of mainstream church members.

SFBG: It sounds like you’re still very involved in FLDS cases, even now that Warren Jeffs is in prison. What are you up to now, and — as seen in the book — are you still a target for the church?

SB: Yeah, I’m still not on their Christmas list. I still have clients that are FLDS or former FLDS, and am still involved in it, and I guess I will be for as long as they’re still abusing children. It’s been a roller coaster ride and of course they do everything they can to try and get me out of the way, but it hasn’t worked in eight years. I feel sometimes like [the third] Godfather movie, where Michael Corleone says, “Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” I have those moments every once in awhile, but I think I’m probably going to be in it for awhile.

When Warren’s trial happened, it was a good feeling in Texas. Life plus 20. But it was kind of bittersweet at the same time. Because then I leave, and I’ve got another client who’s still struggling to get his kids back. Lyle Jeffs is still doing the same things out in Short Creek. And part of me is going, “Yeah, we’ve come a long way. Things are happening.” But also, it’s still going on, too.

Sam Brower

Tues/15, 7 p.m., free

Books Inc.

1760 Fourth St., Berk.

(510) 525-7777

www.booksinc.net/Berkeley