The California Supreme Court has legalized same sex marriage in California, ruling this morning on the case that stemmed from San Francisco’s move in 2004 to unilaterally allow gay and lesbian couples to get hitched. This is a big day for Mayor Gavin Newsom (who decided the city should go ahead and issue marriage licenses to everyone, which was by far the boldest and best thing he’s done from Room 200), City Attorney Dennis Herrera (who won the legal fight, making California just the second state to extend marriage rights to all Californians), and all residents of San Francisco and California.
The press conferences at City Hall kick off at noon and it’s likely to be quite a celebration down there (mixed in with some apoplectic opponents of gay rights, I’m sure), so ride your bicycle on down and help mark a historic day for San Francisco.
California
Same sex marriage legalized in California
Big gay thanks, California Supreme Court
As a ginormous, idealistic faggotta, I of course can’t help tearing up at the news that the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage. As someone who’s been with the love of their life for more than three years now, though, I’m suddenly terrified. How the hell am I gonna pull off a fuschia wedding dress in this heat? Thank goddess for Secret antiperspirant, ladies.
Of course, there’s still a big fight ahead — in California, with a heinous, probable November ballot initiative that wants to amend the constitution against love, and the inevitable “why can’t I marry this tree?” panicky bullshit from the right. (Well, why can’t you, treehugger?). And this is, alas, just a mere blip in changing this weird country’s attitude as a whole. But, despite my queer anarchist misgivings about legalized emotional contracts and human property, I’m ecstatic for all the brave lovers who went full in to win this one. Hey, I’m a sucker for romance.
SFBG will have more coverage coming this afternoon.
PS — yes, Florida: Rainbows ARE sexually suggestive.
Big fat gay wedding announcement
The California Supreme Court has announced that it will issue its long-awaited same sex marriage ruling tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., deciding whether the current ban is unconstitutional. City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office has been fighting for the right of LGBT couples to get hitched and whose website has extensive links to documents on the case, will host a press conference at noon to react to the ruling.
So far, nobody knows what to expect except the fact that whatever the ruling, it will be big, big, big news for San Francisco and the rest of the state. Stay tuned.
San Francisco tops list of best cities for the outdoors
During this wonderful heat wave, on the day before the increasingly popular Bike to Work Day, it hardly seems surprising that Forbes Magazine has named San Francisco as the best city in the country for the outdoors.
The top three cities (us, San Diego, San Jose) are all in California, so apparently our state’s picture perfect weather was a big plus in their rating system. But San Francisco was also singled out for our good air quality, abundant recreational opportunities, and the facts that almost 20 percent of city land is devoted to parks, which we spend $252 per citizen to promote and maintain.
Yay us!
Flowers for Kathleen Edwards
Being of so-called American Indian and African descent, I have never believed in borders. These imperial lines have only wreaked havoc and sealed our fate. Still, I’m always amused by just how much Canadian roots rockers seem to out amber-wave many Americana acts in the Lower 48. From the Band’s part-Mohawk Robbie Robertson penning classic anthems about Southern history ("The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down"), to Neil Young’s prurient praise-songs, to my much-removed kinswoman "Pocahontas" and beyond, there’s an outsider quality shared with my outlaw peoples, a sense of being on the margins that triggers keen lyrical and sonic focus. Add to this lineage Young’s aspiring heiress, Kathleen Edwards: on tracks such as the barroom gothic "Goodnight, California," she certainly makes that skill plain.
Edwards has bubbled under since her 2003 debut Failer (Socan/Factor), widely celebrated by music cognoscenti with reliable ears. But her world-weary folkie moves reminded me of Lucinda Williams and other sepia-tone, anachronist comers of the period. With Asking for Flowers (Zoe/Rounder), her finest album to date, she has finally distinguished herself from much of alt-country’s fringe-fetish ghetto . A cinematic sweep and fine Los Angeles sessioneering frame its road songs ("Buffalo") and polemical tales from the heartland ("Oil Man’s War"). "O Canada" revisits themes of drugs and mayhem from Tonight’s the Night (Reprise, 1975), by Young and his famed, unvarnished backing band Crazy Horse. I reckon we’ll be dancing round the ole maple this spring, crowing "B is for bullshit" from Edwards’ "The Cheapest Key" as it abounds on the ever more absurd campaign trail. Other Edwards lyrics should be reserved for rocker girlfriends and women saddled with tired-ass boyfriends. "I’ve been on the road too long to sympathize / With what you think you’re owed."
Nowhere is Edwards’ inherited Great North gift of odd insight more evident than on the disc’s best song: "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory." One could almost see Ellen Burstyn’s Alice singing, "You’re cool and cred like Fogerty, I’m Elvis Presley in the ’70s" to Kris Kristofferson in some meta-American vérité — that is, if much current US indie cinema wasn’t vastly inferior to films like Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated Away from Her (2006). Just as Polley kicked creative ass and Feist has been anointed the "New Joni" by worshipful black Atlantic male musicians, Edwards looks poised to be this year’s sweetheart of the rodeo — although nowhere nearer to Music Row than before. Happy trails, gal.
KATHLEEN EDWARDS
With the Last Town Chorus
Tues/20, 8 p.m., $18
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
(415) 771-1422
The real energy-policy choice
EDITORIAL According to City Attorney Dennis Herrera, if San Francisco wants to see the Potrero Hill power plant, which spews pollution over the southeast part of the city, close down next year, the city’s going to have to operate its own fossil fuel plants in the neighborhood. Some environmentalists say that’s not true — that the city could develop enough renewable energy and use existing backup systems to obviate the need for the so-called peaker plants.
Opposition to the plants comes from the Sierra Club, Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi — and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
Even for people who spend an inordinate amount of time studying energy policy, it’s a confusing mess of a situation — and San Francisco, of all cities, shouldn’t have to be facing it.
The peaker dilemma exists for a reason: San Francisco has allowed private-sector companies like PG&E and Mirant, which owns the existing Potrero plant, to control the city’s energy systems. The good news is that the fight over the power plants is driving a new move for public power — a move that ought to bring together the public interest activists on both sides of the plant divide.
Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, a peaker foe, and Aaron Peskin, a peaker supporter, plan to introduce a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco. The amendment would provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.
Peskin and Mirkarimi may not agree on the three peaker plants the PUC wants to site at the foot of Potrero Hill, but they do agree that PG&E is up to no good here. The giant private utility desperately wants to keep the city from developing its own electric power plants: the city peakers would be competition for PG&E and would open the door for the city to get more directly into the electricity business. Although the fliers put out by the "Close It Coalition," funded by PG&E, talk about environmental issues, that’s just old-fashioned greenwashing. PG&E is building similar combustion turbine gas-fueled generators all over the state.
Why should this be the city’s only choice?
If there’s going to be a fight over energy policy in San Francisco, it ought to focus on the real long-term questions: Who should control the local grid, and the future supply of electricity, and the decision over how much of the local portfolio should be in renewable resources? Should PG&E continue to hold that power, or should the city take it over?
The movement for public power is exploding all over California. In Marin County, a group called Marin Clean Energy is mounting a sophisticated campaign for a community-controlled power agency that would use 100 percent renewable power. The South San Joaquin County Irrigation District is trying aggressively, against a full-scale PG&E political assault, to buy out PG&E’s distribution facilities and create a new public power system. Stockton is looking at becoming a public power city.
San Francisco is pursuing CCA, but needs to do much more. This is, after all, the only city in the nation that has a mandate under federal law to sell retail electricity.
If the city had created a public power agency years ago, the peakers wouldn’t be an issue. San Francisco would have been able to develop more extensive renewable power sources, create a long-term energy plan, and concentrate on shutting down fossil fuel plants instead of building them.
But whatever the outcome of that fight, it’s time to think about the future — and the future is community-owned energy programs. That’s the choice that ought to be on the ballot in November.
PS: Stop the presses — has Newsom buckled to PG&E? The mayor at the last minute May 13 has orchestrated a delay in the peaker vote — at the behest, we hear, of PG&E, which is begging the mayor to do anything to stop public power. Now he wants to retrofit the Mirant plant. That’s an unacceptable option and needs to be rejected.
Poesia
› paulr@sfbg.com
Since my Italian is limited to a few cuss words plus "prego," I was not able to follow the ins and outs of the Italian film being shown, Foreign Cinema–style, on the rear wall of Poesia, a lovely restaurant opened by Francesco D’Ippolito in March in one of the Castro’s most haunted locales. The movie looked like a close relation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, to judge by the costuming and black-and-white cinematography, and it lacked both sound and subtitles — not necessarily a huge loss for Anglophone diners who prefer to keep their attention trained on their dinners and on one another, instead of on the movie’s progress and whether or not the actors are swearing in Italian.
The movies at Foreign Cinema generally include subtitles and are not limited to Italian provenance. In these respects, Poesia is a not-quite-direct descendant of that highly successful, highly atmospheric Mission District restaurant. Nonetheless, the new place’s ancestry is plain. It’s also welcome, and I speak as someone who resists the multimedia antics that make too many restaurants too stimuutf8g to be pleasant these days. Poesia’s second-story digs, across the street from the venerable Midnight Sun, have recently been home to Ararat and La Mooné, a pair of worthy ventures that seemed to get lost in the Castro shuffle. This can happen when people can’t easily find you. A staircase is a slim sidewalk presence for any restaurant. So, sweeten the deal with a movie! Screen it, and they will come.
And if they come hungry, all the better. Poesia’s food is rich in friendly elegance and would be worth seeking out even without a cinematic enticement. It also reminds us that classic Italian cooking doesn’t (on the one hand) need tinkering with but (on the other) does accept flourishes, even California-style ones, without losing its essential honesty. I particularly liked the glasslike slivers of flash-fried green garlic that served as a bed for a trio of arancini ($6), risotto fritters aromatic with a stuffing of smoked mozzarella cheese. Once the arancini were gone, it was as if we’d been transported to the scene of an auto break-in, with shards of translucent green all over the place. The arancini themselves were sensually, addictively creamy, though short-lived. But we found ourselves nibbling at the green garlic as a satisfying coda.
Fennel root (finocchio) has been a player in Roman Jewish cooking for two millennia, and it clearly matters to Poesia’s kitchen too, at least at this time of year, the crest of the season of roots. The bulbs turned up quartered, breaded, and lightly fried ($7) as an appetizer — a kind of frito misto without the misto — and, shredded, in a salad ($7.50) tossed with arugula leaves and mandarin-orange sections and dressed with a blood-orange vinaigrette. Fennel root is often mentioned as an interesting substitution for celery, but these two dishes, whether considered separately or juxtaposed, suggest that it’s far more than a stand-in for a simple staple.
If not finocchio, then radicchio — the claret and white chicory leaves with the bitter edge — which turned up as a bed for a sophisticated seafood salad ($14). The seafood consisted of peeled shrimp, sea scallops, squid, clams, and mussels, simmered in a marinara sauce and laid atop the radicchio, whose leaves had been softened and made less sharp by braising. And since finocchio and radicchio need not be mutually exclusive, the plate (a long and narrow rectangle like a sushi platter) was finished with a salad of intertwined carrot and fennel-root ribbons at the far end.
Veal is among the most ethically problematic of meats — the calves it’s obtained from are largely a consequence of the none-too-pretty dairy industry (only pregnant cows lactate) — but it’s also mild-flavored and sublimely tender and buttery if handled with care. At Poesia the sautéed medallions ($19) were bathed in a pizziaola sauce, a puree of tomatoes charged with garlic, oregano, and hot pepper, and dotted with halves of pitted black olives. The rest of the dish was finished simply, with quarters of roasted new potato and heap of sautéed broccoli rabe, dark green and glistening.
Desserts, like the savory courses, are variations on classic themes. Tiramisù is beyond cliché now, but Poesia’s version ($7) uses Grand Marnier, for a hint of oranginess, and it doesn’t have the typical tiramisù’s sloppy-lasagne-square look but instead resembles a striped lampshade. Cannoli ($7) is more conventional in appearance — a flute of crisped pastry — and is filled with chocolate chip–studded whipped cream, while an honor guard of strawberry slices stand at attention to one side.
The restaurant’s layout remains unchanged from earlier incarnations. There is a bar in a cozy corner, but you can’t watch the movie if you’re sitting at it: bad angle. The dining-room windows still offer a commanding view of a festive block of 18th Street, although the windows’ bareness is disconcerting. People peeking out from on high at passersby prefer a bit of cover, some curtains or drapes or even miniblinds. I speak from some personal experience on this point. Window treatments also relieve starkness, as experienced from inside. But it’s early, and perhaps D’Ippolito will get to such matters at some point.
He’s a busy man, though, working the dining room, supervising the service staff, and offering customers the occasional tutorial in conversational Italian or Italian film history. I tried out a few of my swear words, and they met with nods of approval, even if we both knew we weren’t dealing in poetry.
POESIA
Dinner: nightly, 5:30–11 p.m.
4072 18th St., SF
(415) 252-9325
Full bar
AE/MC/V
Noise under control
Not wheelchair accessible
“Held Rectangles”
REVIEW In Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 piece, A 36" X 36" REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL-BOARD FROM A WALL, the title functions as a set of instructions for a physical action that must be performed to complete the work. Like a number of Weiner’s other pieces in the same vein, the result varies based on where the piece is installed and/or executed, making for a work of art that is difficult to re-create identically. For these reasons, Weiner’s art seems to defy substantive definition. Since the artist does not seem to favor a specific environment in which to create the work, the piece becomes transient and ephemeral unless permanently installed — and even in this case, it co-exists simultaneously with other iterations elsewhere.
While the piece by Weiner currently on view in the small exhibit "Held Rectangles" at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum does not include a physically executed element, aside from the typographical installation of the words A RECTANGULAR REMOVAL FROM A XEROXED GRAPH SHEET IN PROPORTION TO THE OVERALL DIMENSIONS OF THE SHEET (1977), the construction of a geometric form is implied. Not only does the Weiner text allude to an act, it is based on a subjective set of parameters that, like A 36" x 36" REMOVAL, resist redundancy. In spite of his succinct instructions and regularized typeface, the phrase describes an abstract shape that is never defined but rather assumed.
By contrast, John C. Fernie’s Held Rectangles Series (c. 1970) begins with a physical object, recognized as a frame, examined through its 360-degree rotation and documented in a series of eight photographic screen prints. Unlike Weiner’s open instructions for a shape, Held Rectangles Series is defined, though the content it frames is not. In this case, the frame, like the shape in Weiner’s piece, becomes a study of a cultural signifier, its historical implications disturbed by its placement within the context of conceptual art.
HELD RECTANGLES Through Aug. 3. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs.). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Here comes the public power initiative!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down to see the historic Mirkarimi/Peskin/City Attorney resolution)
Today, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin introduced
a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco and start the process of kicking PG&E out of City Hall and the rest of the city.
The amendment, as our editorial in Wednesday’s Guardian outlines, would “provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.”
The move is prompted by the battle over whether the city should replace the ruinous Mirant private power plant with city-owned power plants called peakers at the foot of Potrero Hill. PG&E has quietly orchestrated a major political and public relations onslaught to kill the peakers because they would be what PG&E fears most: city-owned public power.
In fact, as Tim Redmond’s blog discloses, PG&E even marched seven lobbyists (yes, seven) into the office of would-be-green Mayor Gavin Newsom, who once personally backed the plan and whose Public Utilities Commission backs the plan. PG&E jacked Newsom around and muscled him into asking for a delay in today’s scheduled power plant vote to give PG&E more time to kill the peakers.
The rationale: some sort of vague and ridiculous idea of retrofitting the Mirant plant and keeping the PG&E uber alles status quo.
IF PG&E ultimately loses the peaker vote (and it will be close), PG&E will most likely run a referendum on the November ballot against this dread move to peaker public power. So the Mirkarimi and Peskin move is aimed at putting a counter initiative on the November ballot and breathing new life into the historic battle to enforce the federal Raker Act (which mandated San Francisco have a public power system) and bringing our own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the people of San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969.) The initiative would be timed to take advantage of the expected heavy turnout of Obama forces for the presidential election and for the election of supervisors.
The legislative digest sums up the amendment in a paragraph of City Hall legalese:
The amendment is to “address the need to change electricity production, delivery, and use to ensure environmentally sustainable and affordable electric supplies for residents, businesses, and city departments and to require the Public Utiliies Commmission to comprehensively study and determine the most effective means of providing clean, sustainable, reliable, and reasonably-priced electric service to San Francisco residents, businesses, and city departments.”
The amendment was written and signed by Deputy City Attorney Theresa Mueller and approved as to form by City Attorney Dennis Herrera. It was introduced by the president of the board (Peskin) and a powerful supervisor who is obviously running for board president and mayor (Mirkarimi). These references are important: when the public power movement was reinvigorated in the late l990s, it faced a massive lineup of PG&E stalwarts inside City Hall: City Attorney Louise Rennie, Mayor Willie Brown, the PUC executive director and PUC commission, and all the supervisors with the notable exception of Sup. Tom Ammiano.
Mikarimi led the two famous initiative campaigns as campaign manager in 2000 and 2001, which PG&E defeated with muscle, mutli milliions, and staunch daily paper support. Now, Mirkarimi is inside City Hall in a starring role leading the charge for community choice aggregation (CCA) and now a public power initiative. And the whole thing scares the hell out of PG&E.as never before.
.
Hurray! The battle is on!
P.S. PG&E marches in: You can see how PG&E works by seeing who was at the critical May 5 meeting in the mayor’s office. No public power people, nobody from the Sierra Club, and no environmental justice activists who are also opposing the peakers (but for understandable environmental reasons.) But standing tall at the secret meeting were seven PG&E lobbyists, led by Travis Kiyota, and such PG&E friendly folks as PUC Commissioner Dick Sklar (remember him?), Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and a representative from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
PG&E and NRDC arranged to have a timely letter on NRDC letterhead, dated May 12 , come to the supervisors from Robert Kennedy Jr., with ccs to Newsom, President Michael Peevey of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The letter was of course released to the press and the public on the eve of the vote. PG&E, NRDC, and Kennedy had at least one line right: “Where San Francisco ultimately decides to invest its precious energy dollars is a choice that will send a message to cities around the country.”
The tipoff: nowhere do the PG&E supporters, including the Chronicle editorialists who suddenly took a down-with-the-peakers stand yesterday, nor the Examiner, with a wimpy story today on Newsom’s sudden change of plans, mention those dread three letters that divulge the secret agent at work (PG&E) nor that dread phrase that tells what the secret agent is really up to (killing public power.) C’mon, folks, this isn’t that hard to figure out. Is there some law somewhere that says the local media can’t cover what PG&E is doing to perpetuate the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and once again kill public power? (See “The Shame of Hearst” in previous Guardian and blog items.)
On guard. The pubic power forces are once again moving up to the front lines, muskets at the ready. B3 (who sees the fumes from the Mirant plant every minute of every day from my Potrero Hill office window)
Click here to read Mirkarimi and Peskin’s recent Charter Amendment.
Click here to read Redmond’s recent blog, PG&E offers Newsom a blank check
Click here for this week’s PG&E editorial.
Joe Nation, the landlord’s man
The Marin Organizing Committee held a rally May 8th in San Rafael that attracted all three state Senate candidates to discuss issues of social welfare in the county. More than 600 people showed up, and by Marin standards, that’s a huge crowd.
Among the top issues: Prop. 98, the horrible ballot measure that would end rent control in California.
All three candidates say they are against 98.
Mark Leno and Carole Migden got to the rally on time. Joe Nation was a bit late. The reason: He had to stop first in San Francisco – at a fundraiser sponsored by some of the same landlord groups that are funding Yes on 98.
That’s right: Nation went and took some big checks from the pro-Prop. 98 landlords, then drove across the bridge for a No on 98 rally.
Lisa Christensen, Nation’s campaign manager, told me that Nation “has been against Prop. 98 from the start, and wears his No on 98 button everywhere he goes.” As for his alliance with the landlords? “San Francisco politics is a melee,” she said. “Some of my dearest friends are passionately against me on some issues, and we work together on others.”
I wonder if he took the No on 98 button off for the landlord party.
Burning Man ’08 to be terrifyingly sober
Burning Man will lose all meaning this summer for thousands of revelers who will attempt to attend the event under a dark cloud of startling sobriety.
That’s because a man named Yacov “Jacob” Yida was sentenced today in federal court for conspiring to smuggle into the United States 500,000 ecstasy pills from Paris to California.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office is claiming that the pills had a street value of about $15 million. If you know anything about the drug war, $15 million is probably a vastly overstated figure, but that’s still a lot of fucking drugs now unavailable to people with bad dye jobs and goggles as accessories.
So now what are you people going to do? Rely on cocaine, booze and pot alone to convince you for two weeks that bolting back and forth across the desert next to a guy in a leather thong who works as a corporate branding consultant by day is a good idea? That surely won’t be enough.
Okay, okay. So we’re being a little cruel. Yida actually arranged the sale all the way back in 2000, according to court records, which means that short-lived void in the black market is long gone.
A confidential source tipped off the feds to Yida’s pending exchange, and when the shipment arrived in the United States, it was intercepted by narcs. Yida fled the country to Mexico before police could nab him, but he was extradited in 2005. He was convicted by a jury in December of 2007 and today sentenced to 121 months in prison.
Hot Jew-on-Jew action
We’re getting word of a big standoff going on right now at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center on California Street, where 30 Jewish activists protesting Israel’s policy toward Palestinians have blockaded the doors during an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. Police have reportedly shown up on the scene of the “No Time to Celebrate” protest, which also includes another 40 or so Jewish and Palestinian supporters, and arrests are expected.
Mayor Gavin Newsom just returned from a trip to Israel, where he told The Jerusalem Post that much of the criticism by Bay Area residents of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and its longstanding military occupation of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt was simply anti-Semitism, something these Semitic anti-war activists just might take issue with.
The end of the line
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
"The film is called RR, but I like to call it ‘Railroad,’ because RR sounds like a pirate movie."
— James Benning
TRAINS A short stretch of celluloid is a representation of a train, one image following the other in rapid succession, connected by essential blocks of black, moving forward in time and space, and, when projected, rotating on a wheel. Cinema began with a train entering a station, shot with a fixed camera, chugging toward the screen. Barring a change of mind or circumstance, the masterful RR will be the last of James Benning’s works shot on 16mm, and how fitting that this 37-year phase closes with the image of a locomotive, pointedly stopped in front of a wind farm outside of Palm Springs, scrapped tires lying in the foreground, the end in a line of 43 trains shot across the United States (and the final frame of 34 extant films).
After a prolific three-year period that has seen Benning produce five crucial works — likely exhausting his stock of 16mm film — while teaching, driving across America, and building a full-scale replica of Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin, technology has vanquished this last of the old-time filmmakers.
Those familiar with Benning’s landscape films will be comforted by RR‘s fixed camera and continental scope, but the film marks something of a crucial advance. As opposed to the awesome 13 Lakes (2006) — 13 individual lakes, each shot lasting the full 10 minutes of the 16mm cartridge — RR finds Benning adopting another structural principle: the signified (the train) takes over from the signifier (the camera).
Every shot is mesmerizing, yet the film builds, acquiring a cumulative power, as the simplicity of structure gives way to infinite experiences. To some, trains invoke nostalgia; to younger viewers, classical antiquity. To trainspotters, well, RR is Valhalla. And just as Benning’s California Trilogy (2000–01) concerns work and water, RR becomes a film "about" American overconsumption. Benning lets what’s on screen tell the story, with the tumultuous history of railroads and western development only alluded to by songs and words on the soundtrack. Filmed and recorded, as always, by a one-man band, all of its shots captured without permissions or permits, maybe RR is a pirate movie.
SFBG How far back does RR‘s genesis go? Were you into railroads as a kid?
JAMES BENNING Yeah, I like trains a lot. When I was a kid I had a little model train, an American Flyer. When I was a teenager we used to play in the train yards in Milwaukee, and that was fun, because we weren’t supposed to go there. We’d hop on slow freight trains and ride them for like a mile, and then jump off.
SFBG When you started making RR, was there a specific plan? Did you know the exact locations where you wanted to shoot?
JB I was pretty familiar with the major US lines. When I drive from Wisconsin to California, I pass by the lines that run through the Midwest. I know the lines that go up and down the [east] coast from New York to Washington. Other lines I knew through research, by getting a good railroad atlas. I wanted to film according to landscapes, too. I knew I wanted to do a shot across Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and a shot in Mississippi of a train going through the kudzu growth, and [a shot of] this famous park called the Rat Hole in Kentucky. I also used a Web site [www.railpictures.net] that says it has "the best railroad pictures on the Net." It has thousands of still photos by railroad fans.
SFBG Is it accurate to call RR a landscape film?
JB The initial idea was to use railroads to define landscape because they can only go up a 2 percent grade. But as it became apparent to me that the film was going to be about trains more than landscapes, I learned more about different kinds of engines. The second shot is of the only piggyback train — where you take semi trucks and load them onto cars — in the film. Later there’s a RoadRailer, the train that looks like a long white snake. I shot that in the Rat Hole, an area that used to be all tunnels. I was shooting from above, which was the best vantage point [from which] to film it.
For me, the film came to be about consumerism and overconsumption — I could feel the weight of the goods going by me. Especially the oil and automobiles, as I saw a lot of tanker cars and auto trains. They pass each other constantly.
SFBG The mathematical nature of RR is impressive. One comes to realize the number of variables at play — the size and expanse of the train, the number of cars, the colors, the speed, the landscape, the angle where the train comes into the frame and where it leaves. All of these factors pile up.
JB It’s the way I always work: I’ll set up a problem for myself. I basically collaborate with the train in that it’s going to suggest the length of the shot. I thought I could vary the distance the camera was from the train, vary the angle that the train approaches from, and change these angles from shot to shot to build rhythms. The variables make it possible to take this idea that is confining and make it grow. The same thing happens with earlier films like 13 Lakes, where I set up an idea — to shoot a lake with the same amount of sky and water — and the problem is how to show the uniqueness of the lake.
SFBG RR must have been a very different experience from shooting 13 Lakes.
JB That’s true, because in shooting 13 Lakes, I was waiting for the best moment to turn the camera on. In RR, I’m waiting for the train, and hopefully it will correspond with the best moment to turn on the camera.
SFBG One is more your choice, and the other is the train’s choice.
JB Yeah, I enter into this collaboration with the train. It’s going to choose the moment. Of course if I am on a line that has five trains an hour, then I can choose the time of the day. But if I’m at a line that has one train a week, then I’m at the mercy of the train. The one place I shot like that was at the causeway that crosses the spillway outside of Lake Pontchartrain — the Kansas Line. That train comes by once a week. I waited all day, and that train came by at 4 in the afternoon, on a day [when] it was 110 degrees with 100 percent humidity.
SFBG Is everything in RR there as you found it? That last shot with the tires strewn by the tracks seems too good to be true.
JB Yeah, it’s outside of Palm Springs. In the film that Reinhard Wulf made about me [James Benning: Circling the Image (2003)], we stop at the same wind farm. On the soundtrack I talk about going back to places I’ve filmed and seeing how the places change. That area is just littered with stuff, so it wasn’t hard to find a good frame with tires.
SFBG When I saw RR, the audience gasped at that final shot, like they do at the mirrored image of Crater Lake in Oregon in 13 Lakes. It isn’t comparable in beauty. But there is perfection to the composition: the colors of the train match up with the landscape, the blue of the sky and the white of the windmills.
JB The other thing is that as the train gets slower and eventually stops, the sound of the train gives way to the sound of the windmills. There is this slow dissolve between train noise and wind energy that somewhat suggests an alternative way of living, a cleaner energy. After [one] screening, an interviewer said that he found it to be hopeful, but I find it kind of ironic, as it seems too late. The tires lying there like the death of the automobile — the death of our culture, really — and the use of oil, all of that is in play.
SFBG The general perception of RR is that the film’s structure is precisely a function of the length of each train — the shot begins when the train enters the frame and ends when it leaves. But that’s not exactly the case.
JB Most of the time there’s an empty frame, the train enters, it leaves, and then there’s a cut. I would like to have drawn that out. For me the film is very much about time and about waiting, but I didn’t want waiting to become part of the film. I wanted you to realize through the absence of waiting that I had to wait.
SFBG Something else happens within RR. At least twice, maybe three times, there is an optical illusion. After the train leaves the frame what’s left behind seems to vibrate.
JB It happens a lot.
SFBG Were you aware that this would occur?
JB I wasn’t when I made the film, but when I started to project the work print, I was shocked. You don’t need a film to get that optical illusion — you can stand in front of a waterfall, follow the water down, then turn your head. [Likewise,] your eyes will follow the train so that when it’s gone, the effect remains and even kind of warps.
SFBG Most of the trains in the film are freight trains, there are maybe only one or two passenger trains.
JB There are two: one was a commuter train, one was a passenger train. The amount of commuter travel, at least on the West Coast, is minimal — you hardly ever see a train with people in it. Amtrak leases the right to use rails from the companies that operate the freight trains. I’ve taken most of the Amtrak train routes. They’re fun … and slow.
SFBG How long did you shoot?
JB I shot for two and a half years, probably. I had so much fun that I didn’t really want to stop. I still miss it. Sometimes I go back to those same sites and wait for trains, just to have that feeling again.
Growing up
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GREEN CITY Arguments about urban sprawl and the need to drastically improve transit services at the Transbay Terminal are driving plans for massive new skyscrapers in the SoMa District. Although the project is still in its initial phase, as many as seven towers — some higher than the Transamerica Pyramid — would surround the centerpiece Transbay Tower.
At an April 30 public hearing on the project at Golden Gate University, about 150 people, mostly developers and architects, voiced their opinions as they listened to the city’s updates on the proposal. For the most part, the business community audience wanted buildings as high as possible and felt that even the city’s most ambitious proposal, to build a Transbay Tower more than 1,200 feet high — almost twice the height of One Rincon Hill — was insufficient.
"I support raising the heights. By increasing density, we’re taking better care of our environment," Rincon Hill resident Jamie Whitaker told the room.
The original plan called for a 550-foot Transbay Tower, but the city wants to double its height to ensure sufficient funds for the Transit Center, the Caltrain extension, and other infrastructure improvements. The project’s environmental impact report will study three height options: 850, 1,000, and 1,200 feet. The addition of a couple of hundred feet would raise revenue from about $150 million to between $310 million and $410 million, according to the San Francisco Planning Department.
Although increasing the height of the planned office buildings will bring in more money for other improvements, the increased density comes with transit and quality of life costs. Some worry that the higher population will create an unlivable space.
"Mission Street is turning into a canyon," Jennifer Clary, president of the urban environmental group SF Tomorrow, told the Guardian. "Already there are virtually no parks in this side of the city. They’re creating a demand for more open space, but they’re not fulfilling it."
Although a new park will extend about 11 acres on the roof of the Transbay Terminal, some existing open spaces may be in jeopardy. If the Transbay Tower is higher than 1,000 feet, it will cast a shadow for part of the day over Justin Herman Plaza and possibly Portsmouth Square.
Even though Proposition K, which passed in 1984, states that new buildings cannot cast shadows on public parks, the city’s planning department has the ability to waive that rule. "The law says no new ‘significant’ shadows, so it’s really a judgment call and can be interpreted in a variety of ways," Joshua Switzky, project manager for the San Francisco Planning Department told the Guardian.
For example, the city allowed the Asian Art Museum, remodeled in 2003, to cast a small shadow over Civic Center Plaza. "Shadow impacts can be precisely calculated, and we’re working to mitigate the impact on parks," Switzky said.
In addition to thoughts on how to keep parks sunny, several ideas to ease congestion were introduced at the meeting, including changing one-way streets, restricting terminal access to public vehicles, installing more bike lanes, and increasing curb width.
According to a 2004 Planning Department study, 70 percent of downtown workers commute using public transit, 17 percent drive, and the rest walk or bike. Sufficient funding has yet to be secured to connect Caltrain tracks to the Transbay Terminal, instead of its present end at 4th and King streets. Either way, the planning department hopes to increase commuters using transit by 6 percent, according to the April 2008 Transit Center District Plan.
"Right now all we have is a huge skyscraper for a bus terminal, and it’s not clear if the city will invest the extra money from taller buildings to improve transit," Clary told us.
The planning department estimates it will need an additional $1.9 billion to connect Caltrain, and if it doesn’t reach that goal, SoMa may be inundated by even more cars since there will be no direct commute route from the Peninsula to the new Transbay Terminal offices. In November, California voters will decide on a $10 billion bond measure to create a high-speed rail line linking Los Angeles to San Francisco at the new Transbay Terminal, the centerpiece of the planned project.
The next public meeting will be held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday, May 8 at 5:30 p.m.
The yard sticks
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I hopped my first freight train in the spring of 1993, outside a small central Florida town. My first train sat behind a drive-in theater along old Highway 301, among the pines sometimes seen in old photos of turpentine camps and prison work crews. Under a Southern moon, I battled mosquitoes and listened to a chorus of swamp frogs that must have been heard by the very men who built the railroad. I waited impatiently on the porch of a grainer car, as if it were the threshold of adulthood, for the train to carry me somewhere else.
As the ’90s ushered in a new era of gentrified, cookie-cutter, chain-store cities, I crisscrossed the country several times on freight trains. Today, I still think about that place in Florida outside of time, and when I’m sick of computers and phones and NPR news, I find myself heading to the train yard. In recent works that seem eerily timed to headlines announcing an impending US financial collapse, the writer William T. Vollmann and the photographer Mike Brodie have headed there too. This resurgence of interest in train-hopping stories might be a barometer of public dissatisfaction.
The somewhere else I thought I wanted to go on that first train ride probably looked a lot like the romantic universe encapsulated in the Polaroid photos of train-hopping friends taken by Mike Brodie, a.k.a. the Polaroid Kidd. Brodie’s photos, posted on his Web site, Ridin’ Dirty Face (www.ridindirtyface.com), depict a hobotopia where packs of grubby kids (and dogs!) play music, share food, and forage in the ruins of postindustrial America, traveling from town to town on freight trains and homemade river rafts. Everyone’s good looking and no one appears to be over 25.
As my first train left the yard that long-ago day, I sang some words by Johnny Cash because at 19 I wished my life were an epic country song. Similarly, the subjects of Brodie’s pictures wear suspenders and fedoras and patched-up oversize suit coats, as if they’ve walked out of newsreels from the Great Depression. In Brodie’s version of somewhere else, though, the Depression is glamorous. One of the most charming — and possibly most emblematic — photos in his current show at SF Camerawork depicts a young woman standing in the doorway of a rickety shack, a yard full of chickens pecking at her feet. At first glance, the image seems lifted straight from Walker Evans’ classic photos of 1930s austerity in his 1941 collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But in Brodie’s photo, the light is sensual, the mood somehow humid — it’s summertime — and the woman is, incongruously, wearing a beaded ballroom gown.
Brodie’s photos might depict a wish for a world uncomplicated by money or its absence — an aesthetic nostalgia for a time when no one had any money, and everyone had, perhaps, more integrity without it. Yet these images of romanticized destitution have, quite ironically, become high-priced art objects. Frankly, I find it creepy that art collectors will pay top dollar for highly aesthetic portraits of cute — and apparently penniless — teenage punk waifs staring guilelessly from dirt-smudged faces into the camera. Brodie’s photos have become valuable just as the country stands on the edge of the kind of Great Depression they romanticize. The winner at age 22 of the 2008 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers, Brodie is highly talented. But the buzz about his subjects suggests that the weary art world is willing to go to as great lengths as the train-hopping kids in a search for authenticity. The Great Depression to come is on some level longed for.
Brodie seems motivated by a sincere desire to celebrate his community. "I just want to spend the next couple of years traveling around, following the warm weather, and documenting the train-hopping youth of America," he said in one recent interview. The joy of young friendship and the camaraderie of the road come through in his work. One soon-to-be-classic photo captures three train-hoppers from the waist down on a moving train: three sets of rolled-up trousers exposing dirty legs hang off the train, with the gravel rail bed and tracks below a blur. Near the center of the image, a can of beans with a spoon sticking out of it is being passed to someone whose hand reaches down from the upper right. It’s sort of a tramp reenactment of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, and the meeting of the hands on the can gives the photo an emotional punch. Though the young legs look straight out of The Little Rascals, the image is timeless, as poignant and enduring as summer itself.
When Brodie photos like this one escape from the self-consciousness of staged portraiture, they effortlessly capture the exhilaration of being young and on a freight train with your whole life seemingly ahead of you. The picture in this show of the kid hanging off the back of a moving train by one tattooed arm may be bought, but the middle-finger salute he triumphantly gives to the camera says the joke is on the collector who pays for it.
That the kid giving the finger will likely one day resemble William T. Vollmann in the new train-hopping memoir Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco Press, 288 pages, $26.95) is a joke — played by time — on all of us. As the book begins, Vollmann finds himself nearing 50, recovering from a broken pelvis, and too hobbled to catch moving freights. Without even a fedora, he humbly cowers around the perimeter of a train yard carrying his only fashion accessory, a trusty orange bucket ("One could sit on it, carry things in it, and piss into it"), while contemputf8g his life’s narrowing options: "I hope that as what I get diminishes thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss, or authority’s love taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully."
Like a veteran pitcher who has lost some zip on his fastball, Vollmann gets by on guts, his vitality flowing from an ornery and uncompromising hatred of authority that isn’t matched by young Brodie. "The activities described in this book are criminally American," he states in a disclaimer. In an increasingly controlled and uptight America, where "year by year the Good Germans march deeper into (your) life," Vollmann holds onto the hope that a freight train can still help him find a hole in the net.
Riding Toward Everywhere includes 20 or so pages of photos by Vollmann. In sharp contrast to Brodie’s, none feature anything you could really call pretty — except perhaps a snapshot of a friendly waitress in Wyoming, whose inclusion here only underscores the loneliness and desperation he finds on the rails. Vollmann’s camera finds cardboard camps in the weeds, toothless tramps, stern rail cops, and racist graffiti under rail bridges. For him, the train yard represents a collection of failed possibilities. In a boxcar heading from Salinas to Oakland, he finds an old hobo moniker from La Grande, Ore., written on the wall and spends the long boxcar night contemputf8g a woman from there whom he’d loved — and what might have been if they’d stayed together. In the morning light through the boxcar doors, looking out over "cornfields and the half-constructed houses of our ever-swarming California," he mourns "not merely my past but the vanished American West itself, where I would have homesteaded with my pioneer bride."
Well versed in the lore of rail-hopping, Vollmann goes to such places as Spokane, Wash., and Laramie, Wyo., in search of the hobo jungles of today’s American West. However, where proud Wobblies and tramps once cooked up a mulligan stew and waited to catch out, he finds a police lineup of blown-out drunks and SSI recipients. Though free to roam the rails under that big Western sky, they seem as herded and docile as those last few sad bison living out their days at the end of Golden Gate Park.
As in his last book, Poor People (Harper Perennial, 464 pages, $16.95), Vollmann records somewhat incoherent interviews with these subjects, an approach that stands in for sociology. While the elliptical conversations do give a somewhat impressionistic take on what life on the rails is like, Riding Toward Everywhere‘s subjects are hardly representative. Like Brodie, Vollmann is in thrall to a particular aesthetic. He’s committed to sensationalizing the ugliest aspects of the rails, to obsessing over swastika tags and crude drawings of women’s genitalia scrawled by bums on boxcar walls.
While spending much of Riding Toward Everywhere looking for the Freight Train Riders of America, a half-mythical hobo gang whose members supposedly will "kill you for $5 in food stamps," Vollmann fails to mention possibly the largest population on the West Coast train lines — undocumented Latino farmworkers. In my own experience hopping trains, I’ve shared food, water, and a sweet sense of humanity beyond language with such laborers. (Just last October, when I got off a train that stopped at the bridge over the American River in Vollmann’s hometown, Sacramento, I looked back to see five Latino guys carrying their belongings in Safeway plastic bags, scurrying up the embankment to get on the train before it started moving again toward Stockton.) Their presence on the rails is so great that I’d venture to say that if train cops actually tried to stop them from riding, an apple would cost five bucks, because there’d be no one left to pick them.
Still, despite self-consciously labeling himself a "fauxbeau," the 2005 National Book Award winner gets most details of train hopping right. Insider safety tips — don’t forget to put a rail spike in the boxcar door so it can’t slam shut on you! — are well represented, and Vollmann is especially good on the sights, sounds, and feelings of actually being on a train. He captures perfectly that indescribably victorious moment when your train is finally leaving the yard and it starts to accelerate just as you pass the cursed patch of weeds and litter where you’ve been hiding from the yard bull for 24 hours. Riding Toward Everywhere is most enlivening when this old pro simply lies back and describes what he sees out of his boxcar door.
Unfortunately, it turns out Vollmann doesn’t have even a relatively short book’s worth of train-hopping stories. After the excitement of a handful of train rides described early in the book, he pads the page count by dusting off other writers from the past and their takes on the road. Jack Kerouac, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway are, predictably, quoted at length. Mark Twain’s raft on the Mississippi makes a guest appearance. Riding Toward Everywhere, it turns out, is a lot like a freight-train ride itself: in the beginning it’s really exciting and feels like it could lead anywhere, but after a while it starts moving so slowly that you can’t wait to get off!
Yet Vollmann’s book still has something to say about the search for real freedom — about its elusiveness and the price of trying to find it. "And we flee in search of last summer or next summer," he writes, "but there’s no harm in it if we know all the time it’s only a shadow show." Somewhere between the eternal search for next summer and the eternal search for last summer is the real ache Vollmann feels in his bones as he struggles to climb aboard a boxcar. In the years between the kid that Brodie photographs hanging off the back of a speeding freight train and the incoherent drunk living by the tracks that Vollmann interviews, there are cherished bits of freedom. They’re snatched from razor-wired train yards and robot train cops: a view through a boxcar door of elk at sunrise, or the taste of cold water from a trackside creek in the middle of nowhere Montana. These experiences are so rare and true that mere images of them are worth thousands in galleries.
The holes in the net are rare these days. I think often of my first train ride from that place out of time. It is a place seen in my favorite photo from Brodie’s exhibition at SF Camerawork. Through a rear window, it catches seven kids in the back of a pickup truck rolling down a flat Middle American prairie road at dusk. Hair is blowing all around in the wind, but one guy on the left is bent over in cool concentration, rolling a smoke, as warm yellow sunlight the very color of nostalgia floods the image. Whether you’re Mike Brodie, 22, or William Vollmann, 48, or myself, just now 35, you can’t help it; you want to live in this photo forever.
MIKE BRODIE: THE 2008 BAUM AWARD FOR EMERGING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS
Through May 24
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, second floor, SF
(415) 512-2020
www.ridindirtyface.com, www.sfcamerawork.org
More train hoppin’ in this issue:
>>The end of the line
Trainspotting America with James Benning’s RR
>>Time travel ticket
Excerpts from a book that is Mostly True
>>What is Who is Bozo Texino?
“I hear you callin’, baby, but you ain’t gettin’ me. Not today, anyhow.”
Dandelion Dancetheater
PREVIEW The San Francisco Ballet closes its season this week, but Bay Area dance keeps pulsing. Across town in the Mission’s modest CELLspace, Dandelion Dancetheater is starting its own rather remarkable program of new dance. The two-week run — which heads to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the third week — features the company’s own performers plus guest artists from Montreal and Madrid. Collectively these performers and choreographers call what they are doing "physically integrated dance," the moniker folks who have long been expanding the concept of who is a dancer seem finally to have settled on. It’s a movement pioneered by Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, so it should be no surprise that these programs draw heavily on former AXIS dancers Jacques Poulin-Denis, who has returned to Canada, and Nadia Adame, who has gone back to Spain. Eric Kupers, Dandelion’s codirector and a former AXIS collaborator, initially became interested in working with nontraditional dancing bodies for the challenges it poses to his own creativity. Kupers has investigated ideas of identity, body image, beauty, intimacy, loneliness, ability, and disability. In The Undressed Project series (2002 to present), he asked his very diverse group of dancers to perform in the nude, challenging their vulnerability and our willingness to look. In his Physically Integrated Dance Program at California State University-East Bay, he works with performers with emotional and physical challenges. They will perform in one program with his newest company dancer, a young man with a learning disability. Kupers’ work-in-progress, oust, and Adame’s 9 días y 20 horas a la deriva look at issues of displacement, particularly surrounding immigration. Poulin-Denis, with Mayday Dance, will bring Les Angles Morts (2007), while his DORS investigates sleeplessness.
Dandelion Dancetheater Fri/9-S0un/18, 7 (Program A) and 8:30 p.m. (Program B), CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF. $10–$20. (510) 885-3154, www.brownpapertickets.com