California

Awaiting consensus

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
Awaiting consensus

news@sfbg.com

Mayor Ed Lee’s pension reform proposal was unveiled May 24 with support from some of those who helped develop it, including investment banker Warren Hellman, Rebecca Rhine from the Municipal Executives Association, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce head Steve Falk, and San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson.

The plan would dramatically alter the way the city manages employee retirement benefits, starting July 2012, while exempting employees who earn less than $50,000. Lee described it as “serious,” “comprehensive,” and a plan that “reflects consensus.”

Already the legislation to place it on the fall ballot has secured the cosponsorship of Board President David Chiu and Sup. John Avalos, rival candidates for mayor. Other mayoral candidates also offered their support, including former Sup. Bevan Dufty and City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

But there is one notable exception to the support for this plan, a party that has been at the negotiating table where it was crafted: Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents about half of the city’s 26,000 employees. The union claims the plan disproportionately affects 500 SEIU members, who are mostly women and people of color and already took large pay cuts last year to avoid layoffs.

Avalos, who described Lee’s proposal as “a sensible approach” and “the right way to go,” has said that if SEIU’s concerns aren’t adequately addressed, he’ll withdraw his sponsorship.

“I’d like to get to a consensus, but if we don’t and 10,000 union workers don’t sign on, I’m going to take my name off as a sponsor,” Avalos said. “We have to find ways to pay for pension benefits without decimating jobs and social services.”

Lee’s measure also didn’t win over Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who claims the proposal won’t make deep enough or fast enough cost savings in the next few years, so he will continue gathering signatures to place a rival measure on the ballot.

So rather than the consensus product Lee hoped the whole city family would be able to convince voters to support, it’s looking like pension reform could again be a divisive issue and one that spills over into this year’s mayor’s race.

Chiu thanked “our brothers and sisters from the labor community” when Lee announced his pension measure, noting that “each city worker that makes more than $50,000 would have to give thousands every year.” He supports the pension deal and hopes SEIU will eventually back it. Avalos and Sen. Leland Yee, another mayoral candidate, seem to be waiting for SEIU to sign on before offering their full support.

Mayoral spokesperson Christine Falvey told us that Lee views SEIU’s concerns as separate from the pension reform proposal. “He appreciates SEIU’s input in the pension reform talks and has committed to sitting down with them and trying to resolve this issue.”

Then there’s Adachi, who helped qualify Measure B, a 2010 pension reform proposal that united labor and city leaders in opposition. He continues to gather signatures to qualify a competing pension measure, needing about 50,000 signatures by early July unless Lee amends his plan to secure greater cost savings in less time.

“My focus is on this issue,” Adachi said, praising Lee’s efforts at achieving consensus. “But is this going to solve this problem so we don’t have to come back within two to three years? It comes down to a math problem.”

Adachi says Lee’s plan doesn’t adequately address the city’s need to save money now.

“The stress period is really in the next four years, so my hope is that the mayor’s proposal could be strengthened,” Adachi said, noting that his proposal yields $90 to $144 million in annual savings, compared to $60 to $90 million annually under Lee’s plan.

“SEIU is right that Mayor Lee’s proposal is inequitable,” Adachi added, noting that Measure B was criticized for being unfair to lower-income workers. “That’s why my new proposal increases pension contribution rates in $10,000 graduations. But under Lee’s plan, a person who earns $100,000 contributes the same rate as someone who makes $50,000.”

He criticized Lee’s plan for requesting only modest increases from safety workers. “Police and fire cost two to three times as much as everyone else’s retirement. They pay 17 percent of what’s in the fund and take out 36 percent. So that means SEIU folks are subsidizing the costs of safety workers’ retirement.”

Adachi acknowledged it would be better to have one measure everyone can support. “But I don’t agree that we should put ineffective reform on the ballot,” he said.

Adachi took a lead role on the issue in 2010 when he qualified Measure B mostly with backing from a few wealthy sponsors, including venture capitalist Michael Moritz, a financial supporter of Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio Republican Party. Adachi took lots of political heat for the move, but he shrugs off the criticisms.

“It comes down to making sure people understand the issue,” he said. “A year ago, no one was acknowledging that it was a problem, but now everyone does. I’m hoping the board strengthens the proposal. It’s going to take supervisors really looking at this to see if works, not just jumping on the bandwagon.”

According to the Department of Human Resources, Lee’s plan would yield an estimated savings of $800 million to $1 billion over 10 years, with the bulk coming from increased employee retirement fund contributions of up to 6 percent for future and current employees. The proposal raises the retirement age from 62 to 65 for most city workers and from 55 to 58 for public safety workers. It also imposes caps on pensions for new employees.

Lee’s proposal must now make its way through the Rules Committee and win the approval of the full board by July 12, the deadline for supervisors to submit charter amendments. According to the Department of Human Resources, 89 percent of San Francisco’s 26,000 city workers earn more than $50,000. That means only 3,000 city workers fall below the $50,000 cut-off that exempt them from paying extra, under Lee’s plan.

But Larry Bradshaw, a bargaining unit member of SEIU 1021, said that members who make slightly more than that threshold will face pay cuts under the plan, on top of the pay cuts they took last year to avoid being laid off by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

For certified nursing assistants, the shift would amount to a roughly $12,000 annual pay cut, Bradshaw said. Security guards would face an estimated $5,000 per year cut, and clerical workers could face anywhere from $1,000 to $11,000 per year.

These workers faced getting fired and rehired at lower-paid classifications to make up for a revenue shortfall, but the union reached an agreement to stave off the worst pay cuts for those “de-skilled” employees by imposing a one percent across-the-board cut for all members in order to restore the salary cuts.

As SEIU workers take the pay cut to fund pensions, he said union members won’t be able to continue subsidizing the salaries of these deskilled workers.

“So we’re not going to have that option of asking our members to keep funding these workers who have taken this 20 percent pay cut,” he said. “And these are primarily women and people of color.”

But Sup. Sean Elsbernd and other supporters of the pension deal say the plight of these workers is an unrelated issue. “They aren’t a pension issue, so wouldn’t it be more appropriate to discuss them in the collective bargaining context?”

Elsbernd believes Lee’s measure is “fair and equitable,” partly because employees’ pension contributions would be reduced in boom years when tax revenue and stock market gains swell the city’s coffers.

“But Jeff Adachi is throwing a big roll of the legal dice,” Elsbernd said. He noted that city employees have long paid 7.5 percent toward their pensions. “But now, along come two pension reform plans that both challenge that notion.

“And every case in California shows you have to provide a commensurate benefit to change that kind of right,” he continued, arguing that Lee’s proposal is more legally sound because it lowers employees’ contributions during boom years. “So the $60 million that our plan would save is a hell of a lot more secure than the $90 million Jeff claims his plan would save.”

Sup. David Campos has yet to take a position on Lee’s plan, but hopes there is a way to address legitimate concerns about lower-income workers. “There’s no question that we have to do something about pension reform,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s a perfect proposal. But I’m especially intrigued by Mayor Lee’s plan. It recognizes that low-wage workers should not be expected to contribute at a higher rate than higher-wage workers. But we have to put the mayor’s proposal in the context of what else is happening, which is why SEIU’s de-skilling concerns are legitimate.” Campos credited Adachi for highlighting pension reform. “My hope is that we can come up with something that we can all be supportive of, where the mayor and Jeff’s proposals are combined. And while we have to be careful that the balance that has been constructed is maintained, this allows for a dialogue at the board, and for Jeff to be involved, so we can come up with a unified proposal. Because if we are going to address pension reform, we need to do so with a united front.”

Art fair city

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Art fair city

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL The booths have been dismantled, countless plastic cups and empty liquor bottles are heading to recycling centers, and the exhibitors have returned to the quiet of their respective white cubes. San Francisco’s big, busy art fair weekend has come and gone. By many accounts it was a success for a city that two years ago hadn’t had an art fair in almost two decades, even if, in retrospect, it doesn’t feel like the lay of the land has been significantly altered.

The buzz generated by the raucous preview parties for SF’s two newest fairs, artMRKT and ArtPadSF, carried on throughout the weekend, no doubt helped by the good weather and ever-present availability of booze. When I arrived at the Phoenix early Saturday afternoon, the young, stylish crowd (which included a few families) milled around the hotel’s patio, awaiting a much-hyped synchronized swimming performance organized by Bean Gilsdorf, a California College of the Arts student. Other visitors popped in and out of the midcentury modern hotel’s rooms, each occupied by a gallery, like excited college students on their first day at the dorms. “It’s been positive so far,” said Patricia Sweetow, one of the first gallerists to sign on with ArtPadSF.”The fairs give the community a focus, a place, a reason to celebrate.”

Wendi Norris, co-owner of Frey Norris gallery, echoed Sweetow’s comments when we chatted at her booth beneath the fluorescent glare of the Concourse’s lights. “Participating in this makes me feel like part of a community, instead of an island,” Norris said, adding, “of course, there’s the business side of things, but that’s not the only reason we’re here.” It was past 5 p.m., and the steady stream of foot traffic throughout the art-covered cubicles slowed as people drifted toward the corner bars. I hoped that they would stop en route at the tables for local arts organizations and nonprofits, which, truer to Norris’ words than she perhaps intended, had been placed at the outer edges of artMRKT’s grid-like layout like outliers in an archipelago.

Still, none of the partnering orgs involved could be said to have suffered from underexposure. Attendance at the fairs was high. ArtMRKT boasted 13,000 visitors over its three days (impressive, considering that incumbent SF Fine Art Fair’s total was 16,600). Meanwhile, ArtPadSF brought in 9,000 visitors (with 2,000 tickets sold), a high number given the Phoenix’s smaller size and the fair’s edgier aesthetic. Certainly, artMRKT and ArtPad’s turnouts were helped by the shuttle service that ran between them on the weekend (something that further underscored Fort Mason’s relative geographic remoteness).

The fairs were also strong fundraisers. UCSF’s Art Program netted $10,000 at artMKRT’s preview benefit, and ArtPad’s party raised $15,000 for its beneficiary nonprofit, the Black Rock Arts Foundation. Additionally, the SF Fine Art Fair raised $2,000 in donations for the SF Art Commission’s ArtCares conservation program, and each of the local arts organizations that participated in artMRKT’s MRKTworks online and mobile auction now has $1,500 more to their name.

Given those numbers, the question isn’t whether San Francisco can support art fairs — clearly it can, although I don’t think a city our size needs three to its name — but rather, What kind of fairs can best support art in San Francisco? ArtMRKT and ArtPadSF’s differing approaches and ambiances complimented each other immensely, and it was heartening to see such a concerted outreach effort to noncommercial spaces as well, even if, as at artMRKT, their presence didn’t really register onsite or in terms of programming.

One criticism I heard from a portion of gallerists, collectors, and attendees was that none of the fairs offered a strong enough curatorial sensibility, and that there weren’t enough prominent names among the non-SF participating galleries (several prominent SF galleries were also notably absent). Art fairs are, to some degree, always going to have to deal with the problem of offering something for everyone and nothing for some. But implicit in this critique is that none of the fairs presented themselves — and by extension San Francisco — as a unique market to be taken seriously by collectors.

To repeat a sentiment expressed in local critic and former Guardian contributor Glen Helfand’s take on the fairs for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, the presence of art fairs isn’t going to turn San Francisco into a market boom town overnight. And that’s fine. In Helfand’s words, “[the Bay Area’s] market is determined by scale and temperament — we’ve got intimacy and experimentation on our side, but a curiously uncomfortable relationship to conspicuous consumption.” Smaller fairs such as ArtPadSF, at which the art was by and large more affordably priced and modest in scale, are one way perhaps to ease that discomfort, while still allowing local galleries, arts orgs and artists tobuild out their contact networks.

Certainly by late Sunday afternoon, as packing materials emerged, the optimistic skepticism expressed by many in the art community in the weeks leading up to the fairs seemed to have given way to pleasant surprise.

While talking to Kimberly Johannson of Oakland’s Johannson Projects, I witnessed a very happy 20-something purchase her first piece of art: a palm-sized, chirping kinetic sculpture of a bird-like creature by Misako Inaoka. Transactions like this could be taken as a hopeful sign that the future of art collecting in the Bay Area doesn’t rest solely with the established few or with moving units (although sales figures of SF Fine Art Fair, which boasted $6.3 million spent on modern and contemporary artwork, offer a different form of reassurance).

It will be interesting to see if and how these fairs, in particular ArtMRKT and ArtPadSF, grow and expand. “We need to keep in mind that these fairs are in their infancy,” cautions SF Art Commission Gallery director Meg Shiffler, who also attended and participated in the fairs, in an e-mail. “But people showed up. This goes a long way in validating the substantial support for the visual arts that exist in San Francisco.”

For a city that too often portrays itself as the woeful underdog routinely losing its visionaries to New York City and Los Angeles, that validation is critical.

Stalled out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Stalled out

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Call it one step back in the middle of a big leap forward. Intersection for the Arts and resident theater company Campo Santo marks the organization’s recent move to the Chronicle Building with a hobbled world premiere adaptation of Denis Johnson’s latest novel, Nobody Move. The title for Johnson’s fleet, cool, and witty crime noir comes from a reggae lyric: “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.” A cautionary line that sounds too prescient under the circumstances, but life moves whether we like it or not.

Personally, I don’t like it, at least this week. Watching Campo Santo flail with Denis Johnson material is a bummer that feels like the end of a winning streak. Johnson, a protean American author (and Campo Santo’s playwright in residence), turned midcareer to playwriting after contact with the exceptional San Francisco theater company back in 1999. His close collaboration with Campo Santo led to some of the more vibrant and thrilling productions of the last decade, including Soul of a Whore and Hell Hound on My Trail. Even less successful outings like 2006’s Purvis were more than worthwhile, full of bold ideas and strong take-no-prisoners performances.

No such inspired passion or theatrical muscularity arises from Nobody Move, which centers on the California adventures of one Jimmy Luntz.

Many a first-glance would peg Luntz (Daveed Diggs) as a loser, but this oddball amateur musician and inveterate gambler is sure he was “born lucky.” Luntz, however, has owed a gangster from Alhambra named Juarez (Tommy Shepherd) a little too much for a little too long. He narrowly escapes retribution from Gambol (Donald E. Lacy Jr.), Juarez’s strong arm, by popping him one in the leg and making for the mountains along the Feather River. There he meets a tough, boozy Indian beauty named Anita (Catherine Castellanos) who has been set up to take the fall for an embezzlement scheme by her powerful ex-husband and a corrupt judge. Luntz and Anita form a lopsided marriage of lust and convenience, with Luntz promising to help her steal the stolen money as they hide out together at a sad motorcycle clubhouse operated by former Luntz associate Capra (Michael Torres) and his high-strung lover Sol (Brian Rivera). Meanwhile, a veteran in Juarez’s employ named Mary (Margo Hall) nurses Gambol back to his ugly self and begins a curious romance with the bad man as he plots sadistic, testicle-chomping revenge against lucky Luntz.

Lunching on Luntz’s nuts is just one plot-driver, but a solid one. At the very least, it should have created — as it does in the novel — a wincing degree of suspense. Director-adapter Sean San José assembles a cast of Campo Santo regulars who should be more than up for the job. But an unmoving note is struck from the very first lines. Diggs broadcasts too loudly and manically to allow us much entry or sympathy for our hero. And though Castellanos gets him to cool down a bit, just about everyone else is over-amped too, turning the cool-jazz tone of Johnson’s enjoyable prose into a screechy cacophony.

There are, nevertheless, some choice moments here and there, as you’d expect from the likes of a Margo Hall or Michael Torres, who both provide some much needed ballast. But the actors are also up against a script that never quite stands firmly on its own legs, but rather — like the injured psychopathic gangster Gambol (infused with plenty of bluster and spleen by Lacy) — hops painfully from one place to the next. The dialogue — originally sharp, lean and consistently funny noir-repartee — comes across here as strained and unnecessarily overloaded by detail confined to descriptive passages in the novel. As is, the play moves, but skittishly, in a loud and self-conscious way that prevents any serious engagement with either the characters or the story.

The benefits of Intersection’s move from Valencia Street to previously vacated space on the ground floor of the Chronicle’s longtime headquarters (the newspaper’s offices have retreated to an upper floor) will no doubt show themselves in the coming months. But Campo Santo’s opening bid is a disappointment, even as it shows off a promising new performance space in a large basement-level conference room.

NOBODY MOVE

Through June 12

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun, 3 p.m., $20–$35

Intersection for the Arts

925 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2787

www.theintersection.org

FBI spying will be an issue for new Police Commissioner

Mary Magee
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When Police Chief Greg Suhr got sworn in at City Hall a month ago, reporters each got to ask one question during a hastily convened media roundtable inside Mayor Ed Lee’s office. And since the Guardian’s story about the FBI’s secret agreement with the San Francisco Police Department had just hit the streets, I asked the new Chief, if he would welcome clarification around the duties of SFPD officers assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Taskforce.

Chief Suhr said he believed an examination of the wording of the FBI’s most recent memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the department was already under way. “I believe that the MOU is being revisited,” Suhr said. “I have not been a part of that, but again I think we have a real good policy with regard to our intelligence gathering and that does supercede any ask of any other agency. The officers are bound by policies and procedures. And that policy was well thought out with tremendous community and group input years and years ago, from situations that have not since repeated themselves. I think a lot of people back then couldn’t believe they happened in the first place, but I think measures were well thought out and put in place to make sure we don’t have a problem again.”

Fast forward three weeks, and Suhr found himself in the hot seat at a May 18 joint meeting of the Human Rights Commission and the Police Commission, where commissioners got an update about the Police Department’s response to community concerns about surveillance, racial and religious profiling of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian Communities and the potential reactivation of SFPD Intelligence Gathering.

After Suhr introduced his new Command Staff—and stressed their great diversity–Police Commission President Thomas Mazzucco, who was Suhr’s football coach in high school, tried to assure folks that the Police Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the FBI, the SFPD, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian Law Caucus had already addressed the community’s intelligence-gathering concerns, in part through a bureau order that Chief Suhr then introduced during the hearing, in which Suhr clarified that SFPD policies trump FBI guidelines every time.

And Mazzucco,  a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California and a former Assistant District Attorney for San Francisco, before Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed him to the Commission in 2008, noted that the community’s concerns were based on allegations. not factual findings.

But his comments got folks wondering whether Mazzucco’s prior involvement with the feds left him with a blind spot that is preventing the Police Commission from dealing with the issue in a timely and effective manner, particularly since Commissioner Jim Hammer’s term has expired, and the rest of the Commission is waiting for the Board’s Rules Committee to decide between nominating David Waggoner, L. Julius Turman, Phillip Hogan or Vanessa Jackson as the next new Police Commissioner.

For, as members of the public observed during the meeting, if the Police Commission President himself expresses no outrage at finding that the Commission’s policies have been undercut for the past four years by secret agreements between SFPD and the FBI, how can San Francisco claim to have a credible system of civilian oversight?

Instead, they felt that Mazzucco seemed more concerned about defending federal practices and officials, who were unwilling to show up at the May 18 hearing, than worrying about the role and authority of the civilian oversight body he now represents. And attorneys with the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus noted that though Suhr characterized his new order as being based on the Portland resolution and a prior proposal from community advocates, they believe Suhr’s approach can only work with the written consent of the FBI, (which SFPD doesn’t have) if the FBI’s 2007 contract is left in place.

“That’s why there is a need for a transition to a non-MOU, Portland-style resolution,” ACLU’s John Crew told the Guardian, noting that ACLU’s willingness to work collaboratively with the commissioners and the new Chief should not be confused with a willingness on ACLU’s part to roll over and accept an approach that is based on wishful thinking rather than the realities of the MOU that’s still in place.

During the May 18 joint hearing, Chief Suhr acknowledged “the validity of the perceptions raised by the community,” even as he insisted that SFPD has “very strict policies” in place to ensure appropriate oversight for investigation- involving activities.

Suhr summarized the history of those policies, including ACLU’s John Crew’s involvement in creating Department General Order (DGO) 8.10, which establishes that there must be reasonable suspicion before SFPD intelligence gathering can occur.

Suhr noted that SFPD joined FBI’s Joint Terrorism Taskforce (JTTF) after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and SFPD officers assigned to the JTTF subsequently came under control of the Department of Homeland Security unit, but starting now, they are back under SFPD’s special investigations.

“I gave the order today that JTTF will be moved back under SFPD’s special investigation unit,” Suhr said. “They will have the security clearance necessary to oversee the activities. The members are required to comply with all department policies, even if they can conflict with FBI policies. Simply said, San Francisco policies, procedures, laws, and statute trump any federal policy or procedure. Our officers are bound by those.”

Suhr said that to ensure everyone is clear about the chain of command, he’d drafted his May 18 bureau order. “It essentially turns back the clock and emphasizes that officers are responsible for our policies and procedures first, and our officers are bound to identify themselves as San Francisco police officers,” Suhr said, further noting that he’d be happy to further amend his new order as needed.

And Mazzucco noted that SFPD has absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever over the Transportation Security Administration’s activities at the airport.

But while Human Rights Commission Chair Michael Sweet said Suhr’s new bureau order,  “goes a long way toward helping to alleviate some of the concerns,” he and many commissioners noted that this was their first chance to read the order. And Sweet said he saw the May 18 joint hearing “as by no means the end of the discussion.”

HRC director Theresa Sparks, who was on the Police Commission when the FBI drafted its 2007 JTTF MOU, noted that the issue is not whether we should opt out, but what we can do to ensure that officers involved in activities have “strong civilian oversight of their activities and report activities through the established civilian oversight mechanisms and procedures defined in DGO 8.10.”

” Our approach to achieve this objective is to publish internal directives ensuring our officers only participate in activities that meet our local standards of reasonable suspicion,” Sparks stated, claiming that Suhr’s order will “ give the city control over misconduct charges and allegations of misconduct charges.”

Sparks noted that the May 18 hearing was a status report about “alleged violations by the FBI and SFPD, as well as airport police,” and that the HRC “did no independent investigation” to verify these allegations.

Sparks added that HRC and the Immigrant Rights Commission has a tentative agreement to move forward with townhall meetings to address community concerns, and will encourage the Board to appoint a special prosecutor to determine if the prosecution of terrorism cases is valid and fair, and discuss the need for an Ombudsman at the airport. And she talked about the need for SFPD to establish legal safeguards, mechanisms for greater transparency and oversight, and conduct more detailed yearly audits.

“Tonight was a real dialogue about the issues,” Sparks said, further noting that civilian oversight of local JTTFs is also a popular discussion in Oakland and in Portland, Oregon, which has decided to rejoin its local JTTF after opting out in March 2005. But she didn’t mention that Portland had entered into a resolution with the FBI, instead of signing a new MOU with the feds.

That explanation was left to Veena Dubal of the Asian Law Caucus and ACLU’s Crew– in between explaining why they believe Suhr’s Bureau Order isn’t enough. “The good news is that we all collectively agree that SFPD policies should apply to SFPD officers assigned to the JTTF,” Dubal said. “The bad news is that the recently released MOU, which was secret for four years, doesn’t reflect our collective desires.”

Dubal stated that the FBI won’t amend its 2007 MOU with the SFPD.
“And that is why the Chief issued the bureau order,” Dubal stated, claiming that the FBI Special Agent in Charge of JTTF involvement recently told ALC and the ACLU that the FBI will continue to block key parts of local policy central to accountability and oversight.

“But there’s a solution and it doesn’t necessitate a divorce from the joint terrorism task force,” Dubal continued, noting that there are now two ways for local law enforcement officers to participate in JTTFs: an MOU, in which SFPD resources are put into the hands of FBI with relatively no local control, as in the SFPD’s 2007 agreement with the FBI. Or via a resolution which the federal government just approved in Portland, which allows participation in the JTTF, but provides much better protection for civil rights and gives the police department and the police commission more control of the relationship.

Dubal noted that in the decade since 9/11, the FBI has expanded its intelligence powers, and its agents are now allowed to conduct intelligence without a factual connection to criminal activity.

“Given these massive shifts in FBI activity, the question is, what should the relationship between the SFPD and the FBI look like?” Dubal said.

“Unlike the FBI, the SFPD is not a national security organization, “ Dubal continued, noting that when SFPD signed up to work with the JTTF under an MOU that preserved local control and policies, “it wasn’t assuming that some of its officers, paid for by San Francisco taxpayers, could be transformed into national security agents.”

”The SFPD signed on without telling anyone, not even the police commission,” Dubal said, noting that SFPD cannot afford to participate in these practices. “We need community trust to keep all of our communities safe.”

ACLU’s Crew noted that the FBI came to the SFPD in 2007 with a new MOU. “And perhaps inadvertently, there was no review by the City Attorney, and no notice to the police commission,” Crew said. “And it’s a drastically different MOU, unfortunately.”

“Now, we didn’t know about that MOU because it was kept secret at the insistence of the FBI for four years,” Crew continued, further noting that when ACLU and ALC met with the SFPD in 2010, they were suddenly told that the police department couldn’t talk about these issues without FBI permission.

“That set off a warning sign,” Crew observed, noting that in early April, when the ACLU and ALC finally got the MOU released, their worst suspicions were confirmed.

“There was no public discussion of transforming the SFPD into a national intelligence gathering association,” Dubal said. “The problem is that the FBI changed the deal, and the SFPD signed it, without telling anyone.”

Dubal noted stark differences between the FBI’s 2002 MOU and the one the SFPD signed in 2007, along with stark changes to FBI guidelines that occurred in 2008, in the dying days of the Bush administration, and that now allow a new assessment category, that does not require reasonable suspicion and has been criticized by civil liberties groups.

And according to Crew, the FBI’s new MOU “puts at risk the very concept of civilian control.” As Crew noted, between the mid 1990s, when the SFPD developed DGO 8.10, which governs its officers’ intelligence-gathering policies and procedures, and 2007, when the FBI prepared a new JTTF MOU, there’d been little controversy over intelligence-gathering in San Francisco.

 “And then, perhaps inadvertently, the SFPD signed that MOU and it was drastically different and kept secret at the insistence of the FBI for four years,” Crew observed.

And in 2010, the SFPD suddenly said it couldn’t talk about the issue without the permission of the FBI, Crew added, noting that “Unnecessary secrecy breeds suspicion.”

“We don’t think the Bureau Order is sufficient,” Crew concluded. “This is an issue that has to be dealt with at the Police Commission level.”

Crew noted that the Portland City Council chose not to enter into an MOU, “specifically because it restricts the ability to provide local control and local oversight. “

“So, we are not saying opt out, but we are saying there needs to be a transition to a resolution that maintains local control over the assignment of officers and provides all these elements of civilian oversight,” Crew continued.

He claimed that the federal government says a resolution is possible, as long as you’re not doing it under an MOU.
“So the question is, if that level of protection is available now to the people in Oregon, why would San Francisco not take the same deal?” Crew said. “All you have to do is give 60 days’ notice to the FBI that are you going to start this transition to a resolution. That notice period allows the FBI to have any comments or express any concerns they want, I think it’s very regrettable that they chose not to participate tonight and unfortunately I think it says something in terms of how seriously they take these concerns.”

Crew concluded that such a transition would be a win-win situation.

”If we went to a resolution that merely asserted local policy, then they could keep doing exactly what they’re doing now,” Crew said. “On the other hand, if it turns out that there’s activities SFPD is involved in that they shouldn’t be involved in, don’t we want those stopped?

“The one comment I will make of the bureau of general order is that I’m thankful to hear it’s a work in progress,” Crew added, noting that ACLU and ALC “don’t think a bureau order is sufficient. That’s because it can be changed at any time without the notice of the police commission, without a public hearing.”

But Mazzucco disagrees with ACLU and ALC’s claims that FBI intelligence-gathering guidelines have been relaxed since 2008.
 “There are no random assessments, and there has to be a predicate of a criminal violation,” Mazzucco told commissioners, noting that ” with honorable people like Bob Mueller” (Mazzucco’s former boss) “running the FBI, there should be a level of confidence that there will not be any violations.

And in a follow-up call, Mazzucco told the Guardian that he thought Suhr’s bureau order clarifies that “local officers follow SFPD rules.”

Mazzucco also suggested that Police Commission oversight, “is more over policy and procedures and less about operations,” by way of explaining how the SFPD’s 2007 MOU  with the FBI never came before the Commission.
“But I suggested that we see the next MOU in this area,” Mazzucco added.

And he proposed “a simple solution” moving forward, namely transparency and educating the public,” about the JTTF.

“SFPD is probably the most diverse police department in the country,” Mazzucco said. “And there is civilian oversight. We won’t let anything untoward happen.”

And he praised the new US Attorney for Northern California Melinda Haag, and FBI Special Agent Stephanie Douglas for their participation in recent meetings with city officials about the community’s intelligence-gathering concerns.
“The good news is that nothing controversial is going on here,” he said, noting that out of the broad array of community advocates who showed up at the May 18 joint hearing, there were maybe five citizens who spoke about encounters with the FBI, and only one from the Bay Area. ”My goal is to make everyone feel comfortable,” he said.
 
But HRC Chair Sweet acknowledged at the May 18 joint hearing that it was “very difficult” to know from a first reading of Suhr’s Bureau Order if it fully addressed the community’s intelligence-gathering concerns. “I think a great deal of discussion really needs to take place on that particular issue,” he said.

And HRC Vice Chair Douglas Chan dug into the details, starting with the apparently now classified question of how many SFPD officers are currently assigned as deputized FBI officers.
”We don’t generally discuss the specific numbers, but I will tell that you we’ve never had less than two officers assigned to the JTTF,” Suhr replied.

And he told Chan more work can be done on the Bureau Order. 
“The intent of the order was to align it with DGO 8.10 and to close any gap that was in the 2007 MOU,” Suhr said.

Chan asked if SFPD has in mind “ a framework or an approach” if a case arises, wherein an officer, in order to defend himself against an allegation of misconduct, or a citizen seeking to discover facts and other evidence relating to an incident, bumps up against this need to know and the fact that apparently JTTF activities are, “under a federal classified information.”

“I think that would probably need to be flushed out in subsequent drafts of the bureau order,” Suhr replied. “I think we could turn the clock back to where the officers are ultimately accountable to the police department, the commission and the citizens of San Francisco.  I think that the most recent MOU, as has been discussed, there was somehow a mishap where it was not reviewed.”

 And while Police Commissioner Petra DeJesus said Suhr’s Bureau Order was, “a step in the right direction,” she added that she felt it needs to be amended to clarify how the Police Commission would truly have oversight of SFPD officers’ JTTF activities.
‘Even though a commissioner is going to look at what’s been done monthly, that commissioner doesn’t have the clearance, and we’d only see a sanitized version of the events,” she observed. “And we need to look at the auditing report part of it.”
 
 And Police Commissioner R. James Slaughter said he thought everyone was “frustrated that the FBI is not here to answer some of these questions.” I think that would help us.”

And now, with four candidates vying to replace Jim Marshall as the seventh Police Commissioner, it’s not clear what the Police Commission will do beyond Suhr’s Bureau Order. But clearly that question now becomes part of the commission selection process.

And so here is the basic direction of Suhr’s new Bureau Order:

 
Under Suhr’s new Bureau Order (not to be confused with an FBI order) SFPD officers assigned to the FBI’s terrorism task force must abide by local policies protecting civil rights rather than looser federal rules.

 “It is the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to prevent, investigate and respond to terrorism in the United States.” Suhr’s May 18 order states. “The FBI has established local Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) to share resources and coordinate among federal, state, tribal and local governments. It is the policy of the [San Francisco Police] Department to help prevent and investigate acts of terrorism, protect civil rights and civil libertes under United States and California law, and promote San Francisco as an open and inclusive community by participating in the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

“The Chief may assign SFPD offices to work on JTTF investigations that comply with the requirements stated above regardless of whether or not the investigation is based in the City & County of San Francisco,” Suhr’s order, which was issued by Deputy Chief Kevin Cashman, continued.

 “SFPD offices shall work with the JTTF only on investigations of suspected terrorism that have a criminal nexus,” Suhr’s Bureau Order concludes. “In situations where the statutory law of California is more restrictive of law enforcement than comparable federal law, the investigative methods employed by SFPD officers working on JTTF investigations shall conform to the requirements of such California statutes. While cross-designated and deputized as federal officers for the purposes of their JTTF assignments, when not operating in a covert or undercover capacity, SFPD officers shall always identify themselves to members of the public as SFPD officers.”

Or as Suhr told commissioners May 18, “Our officers will follow our department orders.”
.

 

Rep Clock

Maria Poblet
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0

Schedules are for Wed/1–Tues/7 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $8-10. “Mission Eye and Ear,” new film/video and music collaborations by Paul Clipson and Darren Johnston, Kerry Laitala and Aaron Novik, and Konrad Steiner and Matt Ingalls, Fri, 8.

BALBOA 3620 Balboa, SF; www.balboamovies.com. $20. “Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema:” Aida, performed by Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Wed, 7:30; Romeo and Juliet, performed at the Globe Theater, Sat-Sun, 10am.

BRIDGE 3010 Geary, SF: www.peacheschrist.com. $17. “Midnight Mass:” Sleepaway Camp (Hiltzik, 1982), Sat, midnight.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. Regular programming $7.50-10. “The Castro Remembers Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011):” •Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 1966), Wed, 2:15, 7, and Boom! (Losey, 1968), Wed, 4:40, 9:25. “Sidney Lumet (1924-2011):” •Network (1976), Thurs, 2:45, 7, and 12 Angry Men (1957), Thurs, 5, 9:15. “Midnites for Maniacs: Debutantes Triple Feature:” •Cruel Intentions (Kumble, 1999), Fri, 7:20; The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999), Fri, 9:30; Buffalo 66 (Gallo, 1998), Fri, 11:45. All three films, $12. “70mm Festival:” It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Kramer, 1963), Sat-Sun, call for times; Play Time (Tati, 1967), Mon-Tues, call for times.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $10.25. The Double Hour (Capotondi, 2010), call for dates and times. The First Grader (Chadwick, 2010), call for dates and times. Queen to Play (Bottaro, 2009), call for dates and times. La Traviata, performed by the Royal Opera House London, Thurs, 7; Sun, 1. This event, $18.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $10. “Asian Movie Madness: Jet Li Now and Then” •The Warlords (Chan and Wai, 2007), and The Shaolin Temple (Zhang, 1982), Thurs, call for times.

LUMIERE 1572 California, SF; www.contractorsroutine.com. $8-10.50. Contractor’s Routine (Tsapayev, 2010), June 3-9, 7.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Programming resumes June 10.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. Kill the Irishman (Hensleigh, 2011), Wed, 2, 7:15, 9:30. Paperback Dreams (Beckstead, 2008), Thurs, 7:30. Repo Man (Cox, 1984), Fri-Sat, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat, 2, 4). The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981), Sun-Mon, 7:15, 9:20 (also Sun, 2, 4). Wayne’s World (Spheeris, 1992), June 7-8, 7:15, 9:20 (also June 8, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “Another Hole in the Head Film Festival,” June 2-16. Horror, sci-fi, and fantasy films; visit www.sfindie.com for complete schedule. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. Mamma Roma (Pasolini, 1962), Thurs and Sat, 7:30; Sun, 2.

On the Cheap Listings

Maria Poblet
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0

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

WEDNESDAY 1

Wicked Plants indeed Conservatory of Flowers, 100 JFK Drive, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 831-2090, www.conservatoryofflowers.org. 6:30-8pm, $10. Meet botanical rockstar Amy Stewart, author of the bestselling book Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities – which happens to be the inspiration for the Conservatory’s current exhibition, also called Wicked Plants. Hear about a tree that sheds poison daggers, a red seed that stops the heart, a shrub that causes paralysis, a vine that strangles, and a leaf that triggered a war.

THURSDAY 2

“Bestia Mundi” art opening Bone Room, 1573 Solano, Berk.; (510) 526-6262, www.boneroompresents.com. 7-9pm, free. Check out the latest work of Ron Pippin, the artist who creates museums of “wunderkammers” – specimens of an empyrean other-world consisting of boxes and skeletons articulated with strange machinery – at his opening for “Bestia Mundi.” Of course, given the venue, you will be able to peruse the wonders of natural history as well as the oddities that the Bone Room has to offer.

FRIDAY 3

Small space, big taste Books, Inc., 2551 Chestnut, SF; (415) 931-3633 , www.booksinc.net, www.biggirlssmallkitchen.com. 7pm, free. Having a large kitchen, especially in San Francisco, is not always an option. Quarter-life Cooks Cara Eisnepress and Phoebe Lapine understand all too well and have got you covered with their new cookbook to accompany their cooking blog, Big Girls Small Kitchen. They teach you everything from buying your first spatula to must-have kitchen essentials and recipes that reflect a twenty-something and cramped-for-space point-of-view.

SATURDAY 4

Eco-urban festival Union Street between Gough and Steiner, SF; www.unionstreetfestival.com. Sat/4 and Sun/5, 10am-6pm, free. This year the Union Street Festival promises to be even more focused on on health, green education, and sustainable living. Dine at the many healthy food booths, cafes, and bistros, and peruse the local green vendors while listening to live entertainment featuring jazz, classical and swing music. But be sure to leave your brown bags at home – this year the festival is alcohol-free.

King of RPGs launch party Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; (415) CAR-TOON, www.cartoonart.org. 5:30-7:30pm, free. Celebrate the release of the second volume of this popular Graphic novel, King of RPGs, a tongue-in-cheek tale of nerd rage due to a crippling World of Warcraft addiction. Tonight, writer and manga expert Jason Thompson and artist Victor C. Hao meet and greet fans with beverages, light food and a talk about the process of making professionally published manga.

SUNDAY 5

Dance church el Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3323, www.elriosf.com. 11am-3pm, $3-$5 suggested donation. Its parties like this that helped save Lyon Martin Health Services from closure, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop showing the love. This Sunday’s Dance Church – a booty dancing, bloody mary drinking alternative to traditional church – will be donating the cover charges to the much needed health clinic. There will be breakfast, bloody marys (of course,) and a queer communion on the back patio.

MONDAY 6

The Lazy Gourmet book launch party Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California, SF; (415) 831-5620, www.twolazygourmets.com. 6-9pm, free with drink purchase. Help celebrate the launch of Robin Donovan and Juliana Gallin’s new cookbook, The Lazy Gourmet: Magnificent Meals Made Easy, and learn how even the most unmotivated person with an empty stomach can make simple, elegant, and delicious dishes. Come hungry, buy a book, and sample the recipes prepared by the authors themselves.

TUESDAY 7

Viral Time Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, SF; (415) 752-5537, www.longnow.org. 7-8:30pm, $10, free for members. This installment of the Long Now Foundation’s monthly series called “Seminars About Long-term Thinking” features science journalist Carl Zimmer as he discusses blazingly fast and ancient viral time in his new book, A Planet of Viruses. Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand hosts this discussion about these microscopic organisms – some good, some bad – that are a major engine for the evolution of all other life on the planet.

Whore! Magazine release party Casanova Lounge, 527 Valencia, SF; www.whoremagazine.net. 7-10pm, free. The second issue of Whore! Magazine – the quarterly publication that celebrates the women who define themselves outside of the status quo – features vagina fashion, women of the French Revolution, feminism (duh!), and more. Kick back with a cocktail among like-minded feministas and give cheers to another issue of this provocative magazine.

 

 

Editorial: Don’t undo ballot measures

Maria Poblet
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3

 

The California initiative process is broken. The state’s too big, and it costs too much to gather signatures and mount a media campaign for or against a ballot measure.

But in San Francisco, the initiative process has traditionally been, and for the most part continues to be, a check on corrupt or ineffective political leaders and a chance for progressive reforms that can’t make it through City Hall. That’s why Sup. Scott Wiener’s proposal to allow the supervisors to amend (or, in theory, abolish) laws passed by the voters is a bad idea.

Since 1968, the San Francisco voters have approved 96 ordinances; that’s an average of about two a year. Obviously the pace has picked up since the 1970s. In 2008, there were eight measures approved; in 2010 there were four. The length and complexity of the ballot makes it appear that the supervisors aren’t doing their work, Wiener says. He notes that when he was campaigning, one of the most common complaints was that the voters were being asked to decide too many things that should have been handled at City Hall.

Some of that is the result of an unwieldy City Charter. Benefits for police and firefighters, for example, are specified in the charter, and any change needs voter approval. Wiener’s measure, aimed only at initiatives and not charter amendments, wouldn’t change that situation.

But some of it relates to the political alignments in San Francisco. For much of the past decade, the supervisors and the mayor were at odds over major issues. The mayor couldn’t get his (bad) proposals, like a ban on sitting on the sidewalks, through the board, and the progressives couldn’t get their proposals past a mayoral veto. So both sides went directly to the voters.

That’s a lot better than the paralysis we’re seeing in Sacramento. At least the issues are getting decided.

And over the years, some of the most important legislation in San Francisco — growth controls, tenant protections, protections for children’s programs, the city’s landmark open-government law — has come through ballot initiatives. The only way public power advocates have been able to get the issue on the agenda has been through ballot initiatives.

Those were issues that generations of supervisors and mayors wouldn’t take on — the developers and landlords and secrecy lobbyists and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had too much power at City Hall. And those protections for the public, the environment, and the most vulnerable residents only survive today because they’re set in law and can’t easily be changed.

If Wiener’s measure has been in effect a decade ago, for example, Proposition M — the 1986 law that set neighborhood planning priorities and limits on office development, would have been summarily scrapped by Mayor Willie Brown and a pro-developer board. Key rent-control laws would have been repealed or amended to death. The ban on buildings that cast shadows on parks would be gone. Killing the Sunshine Ordinance would have been Brown’s first act.

Today’s district-elected board is far more accountable to the voters — but there’s hardly a reliable progressive majority. And the point of ballot initiatives is that you can’t predict who will control City Hall next year, or in 10 years.

We don’t think the initiative process in San Francisco is out of control. Sure, big money wins the day too often — but on balance, it’s a check that the Board of Supervisors should leave alone.

 

James Durbin, California Idol

Zelda Bronstein
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76
James Durbin, California Idol

Okay, here’s a really important political issue for the long weekend.


Now that American Idol is over, and the wrong people made it to the final, and our own James Durbin, the Santa Cruz kid who was by far the most talented performer on the show, was kicked off way to early in favor of a pair of southern god-fearing country types, maybe it’s time for California to make a statement.


After all, Durbin’s a hard rock guy from a crazy Left Coast town, has become an inspiration for people with disabilities, and is all aobut the California spirit. So we ought to show him some love. How about the state Legislature declares Durbin the “California Idol 2011?” Invite him up to perform outside the Capitol. Have a party. Rock out. Tell the southerners that, with all due respect, we stand by our man.


At least it would take everyone’s mind off the budget for a few hours.


Who wants to introduce the resolution?

Bliss Dance grooves on Treasure Island

Sasha Cuttler
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0
Bliss Dance grooves on Treasure Island

Dancing against the San Francisco skyline, perhaps looking even more vibrant and beautiful that she did at Burning Man last year, Bliss Dance – a 40-foot steel sculpture by Marco Cochrane and company of a nude woman feeling her musical bliss – was feted by city leaders and residents during a reception at its temporary new home on Treasure Island last night.

Mayor Ed Lee thanked the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a nonprofit offshoot of Burning Man that helps place art in San Francisco and other cities, for its work on this and other local projects. “You’re really helping us revitalize so many areas,” Lee said, adding, “I know there will be many more sculptures on this island.”

Lee pledged to extend the six-month temporary placement, telling the crowd of hundreds, “It will go beyond October out here,” And he even expressed an interest in visiting Black Rock City when he said, “Perhaps I will join you one day at Burning Man.”

Cochrane and his crew built Bliss Dance for Burning Man right there in a Treasure Island warehouse, where an increasing number of projects for the event have been built in recent years. His latest piece, Truth and Beauty, is now under construction on the island, as is artist Peter Hudson’s latest work, Charon, and many others.

After being introduced by Lee, Cochrane said he appreciated being raised in California by hippie parents who encouraged his “puppy-like optimism…And I was fortunate enough to be able to keep it.” They encouraged him to “follow your bliss to the fullest” and “to believe that you have an inherent nature and to believe that it’s good.”

Cochrane was drawn to express his artistic vision by conveying the mysterious beauty and fire of women because “their energy is difficult to quantify in this world.” It is also difficult to explain the impact this sculpture has on those who see it, particularly during an event like last night’s when it spectacular lighting effects were on full display, a vivid and inspiring image when set against our scenic city.

“Follow your bliss and it will open doors where you didn’t know doors existed,” Cochrane told the crowd before restarting the dance party with a musical performance by Deja Solis, the model for both Bliss Dance and Cochrane’s latest work, Truth and Beauty, in which the nude woman will be stretching her arms to the sky, 55-feet into the air.

Ammiano’s TRUST Act passes the Assembly

Mary Magee
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10
Ammiano’s TRUST Act passes the Assembly

Tom Ammiano’s TRUST Act (AB 1081) passed the California Assembly in a 47-26 vote. It now heads to the Senate for approval. Ammiano says his bill “seeks to repair the damaging impacts of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency’s “Secure” Communities program.”  The feds’ Secure-Communities program, in which fingerprints taken in local jails are automatically shared with immigration enforcement officials, has increasingly been accused of undermining public safety without transparency or local oversight. Today’s vote came a year after San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey blew the whistle on ICE’s plan to silently activate S-Comm in San Francisco. And it followed on the heels of a series of damaging revelations about how S-Comm has mostly resulted in the deportation of non-violent immigrants, and has led to complaints that local municipalities received confusing information about their participation options.


Following a request from Congressmember Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Robert Menendez, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of the Inspector General recently announced it will investigate questions about S-Comm’s success in meeting its stated criminal targets, and look into charges that misinformation was provided to states and localities about their ability to opt out. Earlier this month, llinois Gov. Pat Quinn tried to cancel his state’s participation in the program and the Congressional Hispanic Committee asked Obama to put a moratorium on the program.  



 “S-Comm is a farce,” Assemblymember Ammiano charged. “ICE misled local jurisdictions from the beginning and blurred the lines between law enforcement and immigration, striking unnecessary fear into innocent people’s lives. The TRUST Act is a practical solution that will re-build trust with our immigrant communities and by doing so will restore some balance to this dysfunctional and unjust program.”


 

Activists speak out at Chevron’s shareholder meeting

Sasha Cuttler
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2
Activists speak out at Chevron’s shareholder meeting

Police and security guards were out in full force in San Ramon yesterday, (Wed/25) where activists and shareholders of Chevron’s valuable stock converged at the company’s annual shareholders meeting at its headquarters.

Inside, the meeting, Chevron Board Chairman John Watson touted the oil corporation’s “community engagement” and market growth. Outside, around 140 activists from all over the world held signs to the speedy traffic on Bollinger Canyon Way, beseeching the general public to understand the costs of Chevron’s high profits. Some even made it inside.

“Our people have been dying,” said Tom Evans of the Sugpiat People of the Alutitiq Tribe in the native village of Nanwalek, Alaska, choking back tears during the 45-minute Q&A session with Watson.

“You are all a bunch of liars and thieves,” said Rev. Kenneth Davis, a Richmond resident who was arrested last year at Chevron’s shareholders meeting in Houston, Texas. He claimed he could see Chevron’s refinery from a window in his home. “People are dying, you steal from all over the world and process it in Richmond,” he said.

“When will Chevron embody in its operations environmental and social justice?” Elias Isaac of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa asked the chairman.

After giving one of his canned responses of “we are a force for good everywhere we operate,” Watson conceded, “Perhaps it’s not enough, and we could always do more.”

Chevron just came out of a record-breaking year with $20 billion in profits, making it the largest corporation in California and the 11th in the world, with expectations of more growth in the years to come. It has nine new exploration projects it hopes to start in the next decade that will make Poland, Romania, Western Australia, China and other countries a part of the at-risk catalog of nations where Chevron chooses to do business.

It has claimed over 14 million acres of land for “exploration activities.” It’s also planning the world’s largest carbon sequestration project in Australia on a nature reserve and turtle habitat. If all this information isn’t scary enough, Chevron also makes huge messes and ducks out of cleaning them up.

Recently, the corporation appealed a guilty verdict from an Ecuadorian court for $8.6 billion in damages because of massive environmental degradation. The 18-year lawsuit stems from the destruction and mismanagement of the diseased Amazonian land that Chevron acquired when it bought Texaco in 2001. Ecuadorian Servio Curipoma lost his mother due to Chevron’s toxic sludge and was present at the meeting with other indigenous community members pleading with Watson and Chevron’s shareholders to change its policies in Ecuador.

“Take it up with your government,” Watson said to the speakers. “Petroecuador has not been a good partner,” he added, passing the blame onto Ecuador’s state-owned oil company. Chevron execs decided that was a good time to roll a video about the lawsuit and smeared the plaintiff’s lawyer, Steven Donziger, showing outtakes of the documentary “Crude,” emails and other private meetings, displaying Donziger to be haughty about the case. As the film rolled, most of the stockholders applauded Chevron’s PR efforts.

Seven items on the meeting’s agenda pertained to stockholders’ proposals on various subjects, including hiring a third party director with environmental expertise, creating a human rights committee, and disclosing the guidelines for Chevron’s country selection. None of the stockholders proposals passed, including one on the controversial process of “fracking,” which extracts natural gas from rock, that obtained 41 percent of the preliminary votes.

Once the meeting ended, the activists in attendance were met with a hero’s welcome out on the streets. Gitz Crazyboy of the First Nation Dene/Pikini in Alberta, Canada told the crowd he didn’t buy Chevron’s excuses that they were just following government mandates.

“If that were true we wouldn’t be here right now,” he said.

Antonia Juhasz of Global Exchange and the co-editor of the recently released The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report, said that although Chevron wasn’t as responsive as they hoped it was a victory nonetheless for the protesters.

“What was spit back at us was spin,” she said to the crowd. “We didn’t hear a truly substantive response to the damning human rights abuses that Chevron has caused.”

The secret life of Michael Peevey

Maria Poblet
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11
The secret life of Michael Peevey

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Inside a legislative hearing room at the state capitol, things were beginning to get uncomfortable. Roughly five weeks had passed since a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. pipeline explosion killed eight and leveled an entire San Bruno neighborhood, and this California Senate committee hearing was an early attempt to get answers.

San Bruno residents who lost loved ones in the deadly explosion huddled in the front row, their eyes fixed on company representatives and agency bureaucrats as they spoke. At the back of the room, a band of immaculately dressed PG&E executives and utility lawyers sat clustered together.

Richard Clark, director of the consumer protection and safety division of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), fielded questions from visibly frustrated state legislators. Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) wanted know why the CPUC hadn’t done anything when PG&E ignored an impaired section of the ruptured pipeline even after it was granted $5 million to fix it.

“Did the PUC do any accounting when you gave them $5 million?” Florez demanded. “Do we just give them money and cross our fingers and hope they fix it? Is that what we do? Until some terrible tragedy occurs?”

Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said the CPUC needed to step it up and start practicing serious hands-on oversight. He recalled a tragedy that occurred in 2008 when a gas leak in Rancho Cordova triggered a pipeline explosion, killing one person and injuring several others. Although an investigation determined that PG&E was at fault, the CPUC hadn’t yet gotten around to fining the company.

“We’ve got a pattern here,” Leno said. “And we’re not doing anything differently.”

Less than three weeks after CPUC staff members were grilled in Sacramento, Michael Peevey — president of the CPUC and the top energy official in the state — boarded an airplane for Madrid. He was embarking on a 12-day travel-study excursion, with stops in Sevilla and Barcelona, sponsored by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy (CFEE).

Peevey’s wife, California Sen. Carol Liu (D-Glendale), was along for the trip. So were two other state senators, several members of the state Assembly, CPUC commissioner Nancy Ryan, and a host of representatives from the energy industry. The group included executives from Chevron, Mirant (now GenOn, the owner of the Potrero power plant), Covanta Energy Corporation, Shell Energy North America, and engineering giant AECOM. High-ranking executives of the state’s investor-owned utilities also participated, including Fong Wan, the senior vice president of energy procurement for PG&E.

Although strict rules normally govern commissioners’ interactions with parties that have a financial stake in the outcomes of commission rulings, there wasn’t anything especially unusual about Peevey traveling internationally with a group that included representatives from the same companies his regulatory commission oversees. CFEE trips happen every year. The nonprofit has footed the bill to fly groups of regulators, legislators, and utility executives to prime vacation destinations like Italy, Brazil, and South Africa in recent years, excursions organizers say are critical for educating top-level stakeholders about worldwide best practices for sustainable systems. However, groups such as The Utility Reform Network (TURN) have decried CFEE trips as “lobbying junkets.”

As PG&E and the CPUC both work to win back the public’s confidence after their latest deadly failure, it’s worth analyzing whether their relationship — shaped by vacations together at exotic locales — has grown too cozy.

 

THE BUDDY SYSTEM

CFEE isn’t the only nonprofit that regularly flies Peevey overseas for green travel tours with high-ranking utility executives, and the 12 days he spent in Spain wasn’t the only time he spent away from official duties and in the company of the corporations his commission regulates.

These controversial getaways are just a small part of Peevey’s involvement with private-sector interests. He also chairs the board of a nonprofit investment fund created as part of a $30 million settlement agreement with PG&E. Called the California Clean Energy Fund, it funnels money into private venture-capital funds that invest in green start-ups, plus a few companies in the fossil-fuel sector.

While legislators have voiced frustration that lax CPUC oversight of PG&E on pipeline-safety issues opened the door to disaster in San Bruno, inside observers are critical of the outright favors Peevey has granted utilities, such as guaranteeing an unprecedented, higher-than-ever profit margin for PG&E as part of the company’s 2004 bankruptcy settlement.

The CPUC is set up to perform as a watchdog agency, yet social and professional ties running deep within California’s insular energy community mean regulators sometimes run in the same circles as the executives who answer to them, making for cozier relationships than the general public might anticipate. It’s an old-fashioned insider game that one longtime observer wryly characterizes as “the buddy system.” But the buddy system can bring consequences.

As the public face of the CPUC, Peevey repeatedly has been thrust into the spotlight. He has absorbed advocates’ concerns about pipeline safety, rising electricity rates, SmartMeters, missed targets for energy efficiency, and municipalities’ David-vs.-Goliath battles with PG&E to implement community choice aggregation (CCA), to name a few. He’s a magnet for public scrutiny while occupying the center seat at commission meetings, but Peevey’s behind-the-scenes engagements with private-sector organizations bent on shaping statewide energy policy demonstrate how power is wielded in California’s energy world, a system in which regulators seem to be partnering with utilities rather than policing them.

Based at Pier 35 in San Francisco, CFEE’s board of directors is composed of a small group of officers, plus a long list of members who hail from some of the most prominent businesses nationwide. Shell, Chevron, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, and PG&E all hold positions on CFEE’s membership board, and each entity chips in to fund the foundation’s activities and travel excursions.

The group also includes representatives from labor organizations like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and mainstream environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Among the emeritus members of CFEE’s governing board are some high-ranking figures, such as CIA director-turned-Pentagon boss Leon Panetta. CFEE received $45,000 in donations from PG&E in 2009 (the most recent year available) and was granted similar amounts in prior years.

CFEE spokesperson P.J. Johnston, the son of former state senator and CFEE officer Patrick Johnston and the press secretary under former Mayor Willie Brown, described the trips as valuable opportunities for top-level stakeholders to gain insight on best practices and engage in noncombative dialogue on key issues.

“The idea for us was that it made sense to have someplace where it was nonconfrontational to engage in policy, work-type discussions,” Johnston explained. He added that the trips are “all about policy, on the 30,000-foot level,” and emphasized that discussions aren’t about specific decisions pending before the CPUC.

Loretta Lynch, a former president of the CPUC who brought a reformist spirit to the agency and was never shy about rebuking utilities, is skeptical of CFEE’s stated program goals. When she was first appointed to the commission, Lynch said, CFEE contacted her to ask where she wanted to travel. If the trips are arranged to fly regulators to destinations they’ve been itching to visit, she reasoned, must-see green innovations probably aren’t dictating the itineraries. “To me,” Lynch said, “they don’t have anything to study in mind.”

 

“PARTYING WITH THE JUDGE”

The CFEE trip to Spain included a briefing on developing wind energy from AES, a company working on wind and solar development in California that also operates polluting, gas-fired power plants in Huntington Beach, Long Beach, and Redondo Beach. There was a round table on solar energy featuring a presentation from the Independent Energy Producers Association, a trade group that regularly files petitions and comments on CPUC proceedings. The trip included a tour of a desalination plant, a talk from the president of the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, and discussions about California’s energy market. Scheduled activities ended by midafternoon on some days, and the itinerary left a Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday in Sevilla wide open.

Asked to comment on concerns about inappropriate lobbying, Johnston said: “We’re not guarding against anyone’s potential behavior any more than we would be on the streets of Sacramento. We’re not setting ourselves up as the guardians. We’re not facilitating that, per se, either.” He added, “I realize there are critics of any kind of travel and any kind of commingling. But it is wise for us not to close our eyes to the rest of the world, and there’s not a great appetite for spending taxpayer money on these trips.”

Yet Lynch countered that there is an important distinction between the roles of Sacramento legislators and that of utility commissioners. “Regulators are not legislators,” Lynch said. “They’re more like judges. Their decisions have the power of a judge’s decision.” By inviting commissioners along on these lavish getaways, she said, “it’s as if you’re partying with the judge.”

Mindy Spatt, a spokesperson for TURN, echoed Lynch’s concerns. “These ostensibly educational trips are essentially lobbying junkets, where utilities … wine and dine legislators,” Spatt said. TURN raised the issue several years ago, she said, when Peevey joined a CFEE trip attended by a representative of Southern California Edison “just coincidentally at the exact same time that he was penning an alternate decision in Edison’s rate case.” She added: “In TURN’s perspective, the commissioners need to be more in touch with what actual utility customers are experiencing, rather than in touch with the top restaurants in Brazil.”

While Peevey is only one of a host of officials who attend CFEE trips, he has more than just a casual tie to the nonprofit. From 1973 to 1983, he served as president of the California Coalition for Environment and Economic Balance (CCEEB), an organization CFEE grew out of and whose membership shares some overlap with CFEE.

Based in San Francisco, CCEEB was founded by Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Gov. Jerry Brown’s father) in 1973. CCEEB backed a late-1970s proposal to construct a series of nuclear power plants along the California coastline. More recently, the group honored BP with a 2009 award for environmental education — shortly before the company and lax federal regulators were responsible for the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

 

A YEAR IN THE LIFE

Spain wasn’t the only country Peevey jetted off to with complimentary airfare in 2010. According to a Form 700 filing with the Fair Political Practices Commission, he also traveled to Germany from Aug. 1–5 for a sustainable energy study tour organized by the Energy Coalition. Joining that trip were representatives from investor-owned utilities PG&E, Southern California Edison, and Sempra, plus various city officials and energy experts from the Swedish Energy Agency.

The group stayed at the Radisson Blu Berlin Hotel, which is famous for its AquaDom. “Standing at 25 meters high, it is the world’s largest cylindrical aquarium containing 1 million liters of saltwater,” according to the hotel website. All Radisson Blu Berlin guests have free access to “the hotel’s well-being area,” called Splash, which features a pool, sauna, steam bath, and fitness room.

Based in Irvine, the Energy Coalition’s Board of Directors is chaired by Warren Mitchell, a retired chair of the Southern California Gas Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co.. Another director is a utility lawyer who also sits on the board of directors of the Northeast Gas Association, a consortium of natural gas companies in the northeastern U.S.

Founded in the late 1970s by John Phillips to get large businesses to reduce energy consumption in partnership with utilities, the Energy Coalition has arranged excursions for years to bring energy regulators, city officials, and utility executives to Sweden (where Phillips’ wife was born) to exchange ideas on energy issues. The nonprofit organizes an annual summit called the Aspen Accord, “an energy policy forum where cities, utilities, regulators, and end-users collaborate to identify problems and propose solutions to our most pressing energy issues,” according to a 2009 tax filing. While it used to be held in Aspen, Colo., the most recent Aspen Accord was held at San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis. Peevey gave introductory remarks, and the conference featured talks from PG&E, among others.

Craig Perkins, executive director, told the Guardian that the Aspen Accord and study trips are designed to create a venue for major stakeholders to arrive at outside-the-box solutions. “What we try to do is get everybody out of their comfort zone, if you will — that’s the best way to support more creative thinking,” he said. Official regulatory proceedings are “so rigidly legalistic and bureaucratic that it almost prevents any creative thought from happening,” he added. “We’re not in San Francisco, we’re not in Sacramento, we’re not in corporate offices — let’s just talk about these really big issues, and really big challenges.”

The Germany tour included meetings with the Berlin Energy Agency, talks about climate policy, and a tour of an eco-community in Freiburg. Perkins said utility companies must to pay their own way on the trips, but costs are covered for governmental officials.

An Energy Coalition tax filing reveals that board members receive a monthly retainer of $1,000, quarterly meeting fees of $1,000, plus $500 for each board committee meeting. Teleconferences also result in $500 meeting fees.

Several years ago, the Energy Coalition partnered with PG&E to create the Business Energy Coalition, which paid businesses including Bank of America and the Westin St. Francis $50 per KW of energy savings for banding together to reduce energy during peak load hours. According to a tax filing, total annual Energy Coalition revenue dropped from $10.7 million in 2008 to $3.75 million in 2009 “due to large revenue receipts for participant incentives” for the Business Energy Coalition program, as “revenues were used for direct pass-through payments to program participants and contractors.” In 2006, according to a CPUC filing, PG&E paid the Energy Coalition $227,373 for unspecified consulting services.

In addition to the $8,880 trip to Spain (comped), and the $6,583 trip to Germany last year (comped), Peevey’s 2010 disclosure form shows that he also went to Australia May 14-19 to participate in a conference hosted by the Sydney-based Total Environment Center called “Smart Metering to Empower the Smart Grid” ($12,577, comped). And while it doesn’t show up on his FPPC filing, an agenda for CFEE’s Energy Roundtable Summit from Dec. 9-10 at the Carneros Inn in Napa lists Peevey as a participant. A glance through past filings suggests that 2010 was no anomaly; it’s a typical year in the life of a jet-setting utilities regulator.

 

GREEN CAPITALISM

Peevey once served as president of the Southern California Edison, an investor-owned utility, and was president of NewEnergy, Inc., an electricity company that later was sold to Williams Energy. Yet his professional image is that of a forward-thinker on climate change. According to a bio on the CPUC website, he’s received awards for achievements on green and sustainable energy from various organizations throughout California.

In 2005, speaking in Berkeley at an annual conference for the California Climate Action Registry, Peevey touted a list of his accomplishments on sustainable energy. “My final example of PUC actions on climate change is related to PG&E‘s bankruptcy,“ he said. “When they emerged from bankruptcy last year, one of many conditions of our support for their reorganization plan was that they create a $30 million Clean Energy Fund, devoted to investing in California businesses developing and producing clean technologies.“

What Peevey didn‘t mention is that he chairs the board of directors of that fund. As a “nonprofit venture capital fund,“ the obscure, San Francisco-based CalCEF sounds like an oxymoron. Based on the terms of the PG&E bankruptcy settlement, it‘s governed by a nine-member board consisting of three CPUC appointees, three PG&E appointees, and the rest selected jointly by the CPUC and PG&E appointees. Other board members include past PG&E executives, a former member of the California Energy Commission, and a former chair of the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the body that ensures statewide grid reliability and blocked the closure of the Mirant Potrero Power Plant for years.

The nonprofit’s stated mission is to catalyze clean energy investment to aid in the state’s transition away from fossil fuels. CalCEF president Dan Adler described it as a sort of seasoned guide for fledgling green companies that might otherwise fail to navigate the murky, complicated clean-energy sector. CalCEF is in a position to usher start-ups toward success with a combination of funding, networking, and insider wisdom on state energy policy.

Among the challenges that the clean-energy sector faces, Adler said, are the utilities themselves. “They are effectively monopoly, or oligopoly, controllers of the energy industry,” he said. “And they don’t like outside innovation coming and disrupting their work process or their relationship with their customers.”

CalCEF aims to guide the finance community “to be partners with what public policy is doing around clean tech and clean energy,” Adler went on. “There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for money to be wasted. If you don’t have a private-sector investment community that understands these rules and can put their money alongside these rules in a collaborative framework, we’re very unlikely to achieve the really aggressive energy targets that California has set.”

Yet as one skeptical energy insider noted, “there are 15 to 20 other funds, with 10 times as much money, an hour south in the same field,” referring to the burgeoning clean-tech hub in Silicon Valley. It’s questionable whether the CPUC is actually fulfilling some dire need with CalCEF, this person said.

Lynch, not surprisingly, takes a dim view of CalCEF. The former CPUC president questions what business the CPUC has creating a private foundation to guide venture capital investment. “It is a fundamental distortion of the PUC’s authority,” she charged, “all in service of Peevey’s ambitions.”

Peevey’s economic disclosure showed that he holds more than $1 million in a private family trust, without disclosing whether private investments contributed to that fund.

Adler stressed that there is arms-length relationship between CalCEF board members and the companies that benefit from the fund’s investments. “Because we are a nonprofit, and because we have on our board members of the regulatory community, we recognized quickly that we can’t be making direct investments into companies,” said Adler, a former CPUC staff member who was highly regarded even by the critics of CalCEF. “So … we’ve picked the venture-capital funds that we wanted to partner with.”

CalCEF funnels its capital into three different for-profit investment firms, which in turn select the companies that will be included in CalCEF’s investment portfolio. Several directors of the partnering investment firms also sit on the boards of directors of the companies they invest in. The startups run the gamut, from carbon-offset outfits, to energy-efficient lighting manufacturers to solar and wind companies, to biofuels startups to various kinds of technology firms related to the smart grid.

But CalCEF has also poured money into companies that bolster the fossil-fuel industry. One of its first investments was CoalTek, a company developing technology for so-called “clean coal.” Asked to explain why, Adler told the Guardian, “We don’t have veto power on every deal that goes down.”

Adler said he personally believes that “there’s no such thing as clean coal,” but tempered this by adding, “there are some very smart people in our community who will tell you that there’s no future … without coal.”

Another CalCEF investment, DynaPump, is developing technology to make it more energy efficient to pump oil and gas. Asked about this decision, Adler responded: “I will say that when we were approached with this investment by the venture partner that ultimately undertook it, we had our misgivings. If you can save energy in the production of oil and gas, then you’re definitely making a contribution to overall energy efficiency.”

 

TAX-EXEMPT TESLA

There appear to be some closer-than-arms-length links between CalCEF board members and the investment fund’s beneficiaries. A bio for CalCEF director Nancy Pfund, for example, notes that in her capacity as manager of an outside investment fund, she had “worked closely” with Tesla Motors, a CalCEF investment. Tesla provided CalCEF’s first investment return earlier this year after Tesla went public. A principal of one of the investment firms that works with CalCEF, Stephen Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, holds Tesla shares in a personal trust, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tesla manufactures sleek, electric, zero-emission sports cars with prices in the six-figures, and it’s gearing up to roll out a model that will cost somewhere closer to $50,000. The company’s success was helped by a sales-and-use-tax exclusion granted by the state of California last year. Peevey had a hand in that, too. Few Californians may have heard of the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority (CAEATFA), a state body within the Office of the Treasurer, which has the power to authorize sales-tax exclusions for companies that are developing alternative energy technologies. Peevey has a seat on it.

In October 2009, according to a CAEATFA document, Tesla was granted a sales tax exclusion from that financing authority. The sports car manufacturer had received a tax break of $3.3 million as of December 2010, and stands to gain a tax break as large as $29.1 million, depending on its property purchases. As a CAEATFA member, Peevey approved the deal by proxy.

A central question is whether the CalCEF dollars that benefited Tesla and other CalCEF portfolio investments were originally derived from PG&E shareholder profits or ratepayer funds. Adler was careful to note that the initial $30 million came from company shareholders, not PG&E customers. But Lynch pointed out that every dime in PG&E coffers originates with the millions of customers who pay utility bills.

Lynch noted another provision of the bankruptcy settlement agreement, which guarantees PG&E a minimum annual profit of 11.2 percent, catapulting it forever into a higher rate of return than the 8 percent to 11 percent profit traditionally granted by the CPUC in prior decades. “They’re manipulating how big this bucket is to siphon off funds into programs like CalCEF,” Lynch said. “It’s all to give Peevey and his friends access — and to greenwash what was a very stinky deal for the ratepayer.”

 

ELUSIVE CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE

In California, a national leader in addressing climate change, the stakes are high in the energy sector. The CPUC is tasked not only with shoring up transmission-pipeline safety to prevent another San Bruno disaster, but helping to chart a course away from reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy sources.

CFEE, the Energy Coalition, and CalCEF share a common thread — their missions relate to advancing the cause of a clean energy future in California. And while utility funding and partnership is evident in all three operations, the overarching goal is understood to be green.

But as Adler observed, the utilities themselves present one of the greatest obstacles to progress on a clean-energy transition. While California has increased renewable energy sources, it’s done a poor job at supplanting fossil fuel generation with green alternatives, in part because the CPUC has allowed for increasing fossil fuel power generation even as renewable energy expands. According to a listing on the California Energy Commission website, nine natural gas power plants have won approval statewide and are moving toward construction, while six new ones are under review.

The CalCEF approach to addressing climate change, rather than aggressively targeting polluting industries, is to encourage the fledgling green industry in hopes of facilitating success in partnership with the financial sector. In many cases, the backers of the clean-tech companies are the same players behind the big energy giants.

Environmental advocates are critical. “If anyone thinks the CPUC is set up to serve public interests, forget that,” says Al Weinrub, executive director of the Local Clean Energy Alliance, a group that organized against PG&E’s ill-fated Proposition 16 last year. “They never have and they never will.”

Weinrub said he viewed proponents of green energy as falling into two camps: Moneyed interests motivated by a growing new market sector, and activists motivated by environmental and social justice causes. Major green investment firms “want to de-carbonize capitalism,” he observed. “But everything else stays the same.”

Peevey is considered a major driver behind the state’s climate change legislation, and he’s highly regarded for his dedication to green energy. Yet as long as the interlocking dynamic between energy regulators and California’s largest utilities goes unchallenged, change will only come in a way that’s as comfortable, profitable, and manageable for the state’s top polluters as they wish. And in a state with an aging energy infrastructure that’s vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, that pace isn’t nearly quick enough. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power to the powerful

Maria Poblet
-
0
Power to the powerful

news@sfbg.com

On Thursday, May 26, the California Public Utilities Commission is set to vote on changes to the electricity rates of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers. Currently two proposals are on the table, and consumer advocates characterize the better one as merely the lesser of two evils.

At its last meeting on May 5, the commission approved a requested 8.1 percent increase in the total amount of money PG&E will collect from its customers in 2011. The $454 million revenue increase is supposed to account for costs accrued by the company’s spending on infrastructure.

The big question that remains is how the increased burden will be divided among customers, or more precisely, what class of customers will see a bump in their monthly bill. The price of electricity in California is regulated by a tiered structure, meaning the less you use, the less each kilowatt of power costs you. In this way, higher usage customers pay above-cost prices for power, subsidizing users who conserve and those enrolled in the energy discount program.

Under both proposals, the rates would be moving away from that structure. Their description summarizes the new structure this way: “Lower-usage customers will incur higher rates offset by reductions in higher usage customer rates.” Critics said the proposal hurts conservation and the poor.

“The policies are going to hurt low-income household in a time when low-income households can’t take any more hurting,” said Stephanie Chen, senior legal counsel for the Greenlining Institute.

One of the proposals is especially detrimental to the 20 percent of PG&E customers who use the program known as California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE) to afford their bills. If approved by the commission, PG&E would introduce a new fixed monthly fee. CARE customers would have to dish out an extra $2.40 every month and everyone else would pay $3.

The effect can be acute for households on fixed incomes, which is why Matt Freedman, staff attorney from The Utility Reform Network (TURN) said, “Our top issue is killing the customer charge.”

He is confident in his case against the customer charge and says he is supported by California laws that limit how much the rates of low-income consumers can go up. The law is meant to keep prices stable for the poor, which TURN said it will defend.

“We are prepared to sue the commission if they adopt the customer charge,” Freedman said. “We are prepared to fight.”

Although protecting vulnerable consumers is at the top of the agenda of many consumer advocates, there are other reasons to oppose PG&E’s new rate scheme. “If your bill gets lower all of sudden for using the same amount of power, you are not going to conserve,” Chen said, referring to the how high-usage customer may respond to their new bills.

PG&E failed to reply to Guardian phone calls, but public comments by the energy giant elucidate the push for a change to customer rates. The company cited the “historical context” of more than 10 years of frozen rates for low-income customers.

Melissa Kasnitz, a spokesperson for Disability Rights Advocates, said the data from PG&E indicates that many households already on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder are teetering on the brink of disconnection. She called the historical context of frozen rates a “meaningless abstraction” given the hardship those households will face.

Even more alarming is that PG&E sees the proposed change to the rate structure as a “continuing movement toward a cost-based framework for [rates].” California law, however, says that the guiding principle for determining rates should be accessibility and conservation, not simply cost. But that could change under Senate Bill 142, a bill introduced by state Sen. Michael Rubio’s (D-Bakersfield) that would more directly link utility rates to the costs of generating power. 

 

The death drug dealers

Maria Poblet
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0
The death drug dealers

tredmond@sfbg.com

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration is conducting a multistate criminal investigation into the actions that prison systems have taken to obtain a death drug no longer produced in the United States, documents obtained by the Guardian indicate.

The documents don’t reveal the specific targets of the investigation, but federal agents have seized drug shipments in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee and are apparently also looking into drug procurement policies in California, Arkansas, Alaska, and Arizona.

The states have been scrambling to obtain sodium thiopental, a drug used in executions, after the lone American manufacturer, Hospira Corp., stopped producing it last year.

Georgia and Arizona both received shipments of the drug from Dream Pharma, a British wholesaler that, according to the Associated Press, “shares a building with a driving school in a gritty London neighborhood.”

In October 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sent agents on a secret mission to get some of Arizona’s supply. The agents drove under cover of night to the Arizona state prison in Florence, where at midnight the warden handed them 12 grams of thiopental, enough for an execution.

The state later ordered 521 grams — far more than the state could possibly use in the next few years — from Archimedes Pharma, also a British supplier.

Several other states, including Georgia, obtained the drugs from a different British supplier, Link Pharmaceuticals. According to the Associated Press, Nebraska’s supply was imported from India.

Most of the states imported the drugs without the proper DEA paperwork, a federal crime, the documents show.

Sodium thiopental is part of the three-drug mix used for lethal injections in most states that allow capital punishment. It renders the subject unconscious before the other drugs stop the heart and lungs from operating.

If the drug isn’t effective — that is, if it’s an improper formulation or an off-market product that doesn’t meet U.S. standards — the condemned inmate could suffer horrible pain, something the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear is not legally tolerable.

The drug isn’t often used in hospitals; it has been replaced by other drugs. And California had to put all of its executions on hold last fall when the state’s last batch expired.

The documents are the latest released as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Northern California and the Guardian seeking access to all records related to the import of the death drug. Last week the DEA released 71 pages of documents, but withheld 160 pages, justifying the withholding by saying that some of the records are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

A May 16 letter from Katherine Myrick, the DEA’s chief Freedom of Information Officer, states that there are “two active investigations” and that release of the records could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” The documents reveal how desperately state prison authorities were trying to find a way to procure the drug — and how concerned the DEA was about importing a controlled substance by agencies that had no medical or research functions.

Among other things, they show that the Obama administration was taking an active role in the process: “The White House is involved and is trying to sort things out,” a Nov. 11, 2010 memo from the Office of Diversion Control states.

Another Nov. 11 memo notes that “states have been importing the lethal drug regimen from England … the U.K. has written the State Department (and the FDA?) asking the U.S. to end the importation of the drug, which is being used in lethal injections.”

A Nov. 9 memo notes that “FDA is concerned about importation of non-FDA approved sodium thiopental used for executions … Safety, efficacy and indication are FDA issues. So is the matter of off-label use (which was also brought up).”

The memo from the Liaison and Policy Office explains that the “DEA requires a valid DEA registration as an importer and a properly executed declaration in order to import controlled substances.”

A Nov. 12 memo confirms that “only two import declarations have been filed for sodium pentothal” — meaning that all the other states obtained their supplies illegally. The identity of the two states is blacked out.

Arizona has an execution date set for May 25, and Nebraska has an execution scheduled for June 14. But the documents are so heavily redacted, and so many pages are missing, that it’s impossible to tell exactly which states are doing what — and whether any of the upcoming executions would be using illegally obtained drugs.

“The DEA is making it impossible to know whether the states are complying with the law and whether DEA is fulfilling its obligation to enforce our nation’s drug laws,” said Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director for the ACLU of California. “Importing sodium thiopental without informing the DEA is a crime. We now know the DEA was poised to go into the Arizona Department of Corrections and seize their drugs, as they did in Georgia, but for some unknown reason they did not. Why did the DEA seize drugs in some states but not others?”

Calls and e-mails to the California Department of Corrections seeking information on whether the department is the target of a federal investigation were not returned. 

 

Fatal stance

Maria Poblet
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7
Fatal stance

sarah@sfbg.com

Ever since Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Police Chief George Gascón district attorney in January — when Gascón said he was “not categorically opposed to the death penalty and would consider it in appropriate cases” — capital punishment has become a big issue in a town where the last death penalty case was in 1989.

Gascón is running against former San Francisco Police Commissioner David Onek, who is the founding director of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and has consistently promised since entering the race last summer that he will not seek the death penalty.

Both men also face a serious challenge from Alameda County Deputy D.A. Sharmin Bock, who opposes capital punishment but won’t categorically state that she would never seek it, as former DAs Kamala Harris and Terence Hallinan both did while running for office.

Bock said that Harris eventually formed a committee to review each capital case but never filed for the death penalty, including in the 2004 murder of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza, the same approach Bock would take. But she doesn’t think it’s legally wise to make a categorical statement opposing the death penalty, saying it could be challenged in court, as some attorneys tried to do with Harris.

“But capital punishment is unjust, and can say that categorically,” she said.

In the week since Bock’s May 17 campaign launch, Gascón challenged her credibility on the issue by noting that Bock used the threat of the death penalty to secure a guilty plea from a sexual predator who tortured and killed women in Alameda County last year.

But Bock used that case to draw a distinction in their positions on the issue, telling us, “George Gascón says he’d use it for the most heinous cases, and I’ve seen the most heinous cases and I haven’t use it,” Bock said, emphasizing that she’s the only prosecutor in the race.

In a May 1 Chronicle op-ed, Gascón tried to neutralize Onek and those opposed to the death penalty by noting that he also has “serious misgivings” about capital punishment, including the potential for wrongful convictions, the disproportionate application on racial minorities, the roller-coaster the victims’ families endure as they wait decades for closure, and the financial impact on an already overburdened justice system.

But Gascón also tried to hide behind the “death penalty is state law” defense, even though prosecutors have extensive discretion in such matters. “Rather than refuse to enforce our laws, I believe the more appropriate approach is to accept the law and work to change it,” Gascón wrote. “I don’t believe district attorneys should be allowed to supplant the views of the state with those of their own.”

Bock criticized Gascón’s deferential stance, which was in sharp contrast to Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who recently announced that he will stop cooperating with federal immigration officials and start releasing undocumented immigrants jailed for minor offenses before they can be picked up for deportation, to comply with San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance.

Gascón appeared to be trying to cast his position as a courageous stand. “Some have given me the political advice to simply say I will not seek the death penalty in San Francisco,” he wrote. “While I am not prepared to say that at this time, I can say that I do intend to be a district attorney committed to San Francisco values.”

And he promised that if he believes a case merits the death penalty, he would seek the advice and counsel of a panel of local prosecutors. “Ultimately, the decision will always rest on my shoulders, and it is a decision that I will not take lightly,” Gascón wrote.

But Onek accused Gascón of giving a politician’s answer. “Gascón is trying to have it both ways,” Onek told the Guardian. “The voters have the right to hear a clear answer to a fundamental question. And my answer is clear — I will not seek the death penalty in San Francisco and I will continue to work to change the law statewide. To me, it’s a yes or no question, and I won’t seek it. Period.”

Onek says his stance is informed by his belief that the death penalty solves nothing. “It doesn’t make us safer; it’s not fair and equitable; and it wastes enormous resources,” he said. “We are much better off spending our precious resources on things that actually make us safer, like more cops on the streets, more programs in our communities, and better services for victims.”

Gov. Jerry Brown made a similar comparison last month when he canceled a $356 million project for a new death row at San Quentin. “At a time when children, the disabled, and seniors face painful cuts to essential programs, the state of California cannot justify a massive expenditure of public dollars for the worst criminals in our state,” Brown said.

A recent David Binder research poll found 63 percent support statewide for commuting all of the 700 sentences of California’s death row inmates to life in prison without parole and requiring them to pay restitution to the victims’ families, while 70 percent of Bay Area voters support the plan, which would save the state $1 billion over five years.

At a May 18 panel discussion on the death penalty, Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s criminal justice summit offered panel moderator Matt Gonzalez, a chief attorney in Adachi’s office, a timely opportunity to grill Gascón about his death penalty stance.

“Folks felt it might be a step backward,” Gonzalez said, noting that former D.A. Terence Hallinan pledged not to seek the death penalty when he ran for reelection in 2000, and Harris followed suit when she first ran for district attorney in 2003. “So — are you pro death?” Gonzalez asked.

“No, but I am a public official,” Gascón replied, even as he repeated his misgivings about the death penalty, including the fact that 62 percent of those on death row are minority populations, especially from African American and Latino communities.

The panel also provided a chance to see Gascón debate exonerated death row inmate JT Thompson, watch American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California attorney Natasha Minsker explain why the death penalty system is dysfunctional, and witness former San Quentin prison warden Jeanne Woodford describe how the impacts of the four executions that she reluctantly oversaw motivated her to sign on as director of Death Penalty Focus, a nonprofit dedicated to abolishing capital punishment.

“Who is responsible for the prosecutors that go bad?” asked Thompson, an African American man who spent 14 years on death row in Louisiana, and another four facing life without parole, because a prosecutor suppressed exculpatory evidence.

“When I was sentenced to death in 1985, for a crime I didn’t commit, I thought this would be rectified right away. But it took 18 years, and I watched 12 inmates being executed while I was there,” Thompson said, noting that he was holed up 23 hours a day.

Gascón said he would terminate prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence, but said he didn’t know if he could charge them with murder.

Thompson, founder of the New Orleans-based nonprofit Resurrection after Exoneration, argued that the debate needs to be recast from its current public safety frame.

“People need to be asked, ‘Under what conditions do you support giving the state the right to kill you?’ ” Thompson said.

Woodford recalled how she got sick after the last execution she presided over. “I focused on what my responsibility was. But in hindsight, I realize it had had much more of an impact,” she said. “These executions happen in California at least 20 years after the crime. And they don’t bring victims back.”

Minsker noted that 16 states do not have the death penalty, and that every day brings people closer to ending the practice in California. “People once thought opposing the death penalty would end political careers, but Kamala Harris showed that it is no longer a liability,” she said.

Reached by phone after the debate, Onek said ending capital punishment makes sense morally and financially. “We would have $1 billion to invest in things that actually make us safer,” Onek said. “The D.A. is given discretion around requesting the death penalty, and I will use my discretion to reflect San Francisco values. That’s why people in the trenches working on these issues, including Jeanne Woodford, support me in this race.” 

 

Chevron’s critics gather before annual shareholder meeting

Sasha Cuttler
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Chevron’s critics gather before annual shareholder meeting

Chevron destroys everything, except profits. And by everything, we mean everything. The Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities? Check. The Boreal Forest in northern Canada and its indigenous communities? Check. The Niger Delta? Check. Indonesia, Texas, and Iraq? Check, check and check. And even San Francisco’s own neighbor, Richmond, the home of one of Chevron’s largest oil refineries in the world? A big, whopping check.

Not that oil companies taking the lives, resources, and spaces of millions of people is something to take lightly. In fact, the opposition to Chevron is strong and growing, with many people across a network of international communities planning to stand up at Chevron’s shareholder meeting tomorrow (Wed/25) in San Ramon to give faces and names to the enormous destruction the company caused, which coincides with the release of the 3rd annual report on the company’s many misdeeds, The True Cost of Chevron.

At a press conference this morning (Tues/24) at a Chevron station in San Francisco, activists and representatives from places adversely affected by Chevron’s drilling, dumping, land grabbing, and environmental degradation told stories about losing mothers to cancer, women having miscarriages due to contaminated water, clear-cutting forests used by their ancestors for hunting and farming, and losing one’s sense of home.

“I have personally witnessed this devastation,” Servio Curipoma of the Amazon Defense Coalition in Ecuador said of Chevron’s operations within his country. “And I will fight to the bitter end and never give up,” he said after showing a photo of his mother who died of cancer. After an 18-year lawsuit by the people in Educator against the oil corporation, Chevron was found guilty of massive environmental crimes. But Chevron has yet to take note of its transgressions, and aggressively pursues communities at risk of complete disintegration.

Elias Isaac with the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa spoke about entire fishing communities in Angola going days without catches as they rely on the waters that Chevron polluted through its operations in the country. “The pollution is effecting livelihoods,” said Isaac. “And it’s getting worse.”

Communities for a Better Environment also understands the nefarious ways in which Chevron puts its stock above its virtue. For example, the company doesn’t pay taxes to extract oil from California. “They had the audacity to ask for an exemption from the law,” said Jessica Tovar of the Oakland based advocacy group. Recently Chevron’s Richmond refinery was denied the possibility to process dirtier, heavier crude oil only after opponents went to court to stop the proposal.

The bitter truth, said Antonia Juhasz of Global Exchange and the co-editor of alternative report, is that no matter where Chevron decides to set up shop, the stories are the same: corporate side-stepping of responsibilities to the community, polluted water, love ones lost, environmental disaster that cannot be undone.

Just like the exploitation Chevron is responsible for through its operations across the globe, its profits are also ever increasing. Last year the company made $20 billion in profits, bolstering its standing as the 11th largest corporation in the world, and the largest in California.

In order to make a dent in its exploitative practices, members of different organizations will be voicing their opposition in Chevron’s shareholders meeting tomorrow, some through legal proxies of current shareholders.

There is a resolution activists hope will be discussed that will appoint a third party with expertise who will oversee operations to further prevent environmental disasters, said Mitchell Anderson, the Corporate Campaigns Director of Amazon Watch, which is based in San Francisco.

“We came to tell them that we disagree with their ads. It’s not a rosy image. It’s a lie,” said Juhasz. “Chevron knows how to do better but chooses to do worse.”

 

 

 

 

Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

The state of Arizona is preparing to execute a prisoner with drugs that were obtained illegally, records obtained by the Bay Guardian and the ACLU of Northern California show.


Donald Edward Beaty is set to die by lethal injection early in the morning May 25. However, DEA records show that the sodium thiopental that will be used in the execution was not imported legally — and may not meet U.S. standards for drug quality.


“Arizona is about to execute someone with an illegal substance, and the federal government is ignoring its responsibility to enforce the law,” said Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California.


Documents obtained recently show that the Drug Enforcement Administration is investigating the illegal importation of the death drugs, and has seized thoipental stocks in several states. But Arizona’s prison system still has custody of the sodium thiopental that it imported.


And documents released May 24 show that Arizona — along with Nebraska, South Dakota and Arkansas — imported the drugs from either the U.K. or India without filing the proper DEA import declarations. That means the prison systems violated federal law.


“The DEA records demonstrate that Arizona and other states broke the law,” Minsker said. “We cannot understand why the DEA has failed to act but has allowed the states to keep these illegal and dangerous drugs. When state officials break the law in order to carry out an execution, it makes a mockery of our justice system and puts us all at risk. State and federal officials must follow and enforce the law—that’s their duty and what the public expects and deserves.”


 

Our Weekly Picks: May 25-31, 2011

Maria Poblet
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0

WEDNESDAY 25


MUSIC

Stiff Little Fingers

Led by founding member and singer Jake Burns for 34 years now, Belfast’s punk legends Stiff Little Fingers remain a stalwart musical force to be reckoned with. Fueled by the same energy and edgy political criticism that drove classic tracks like “Alternative Ulster” and “Suspect Device,” the band may have changed lineups over the years, but still delivers the goods live, and will likely showcase some songs from its forthcoming album, due out later this year. Be sure to catch SLF tonight in all its glory in a small club — later this weekend they co-headline the Punk Rock Bowling festival in Las Vegas. (Sean McCourt)

With Sharks

8 p.m., $20

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com


MUSIC

Yeasayer

After listening to its self-described “Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel” music on its second studio album Odd Blood, you’ll only be yelling “yay!” to the stylings of Brooklyn-based trio (Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton, and Anand Wilder), Yeasayer. Truth be told, the threesome admitted that Odd Blood was conceived because of a “massive” acid trip in New Zealand. Psychedelics or not, Yeasayer managed a more poppy feel to its much-acclaimed sophomore releases as opposed to its previous recordings. What’s more of a trip is that Peter Gabriel’s drummer, Jerry Marotta, assisted Yeasayer with its recording in an upstate New York studio. Trust me — you won’t be saying “nay” to Yeasayer.(Jen Verzosa)

 With Smith Westerns and Hush Hush

Wed/25-Thurs/26, $20

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com


THURSDAY 26


EVENT

“Muybridge in Three Movements”

It’s Eadweard Muybridge madness with performance, film, and conversation about the artist wrapped into one evening at SFMOMA. A pioneering spirit whose work led to early motion pictures, Muybridge began his artistic career in the 1860s in California. In conjunction with the retrospective exhibition “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change,” SFMOMA presents excerpts from Catherine Galasso’s Bring On The Lumière!, a performance meditation on early cinema and the basic components of light and movement, key to Muybridge’s work. Also on the program: related short films selected by San Francisco Cinematheque’s Steve Polta and a conversation on cinematic space and time led by Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas author Rebecca Solnit. (Julie Potter)

7 p.m., $10

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org


MUSIC

Atomic Bomb Audition

The first time I heard the Atomic Bomb Audition, I wondered what film the band was scoring: desolate yet pretty, surreal but cohesive, complete with natural scene changes and visible textures. The Oakland band thus succeeds in its explicit compositional goal — to make music for films that don’t exist. Self-described “cinematic sci-fi metal” (Oh Lucifer, please not another heavy metal sub-sub-subgenre … ), ABA channels psychedelic black doom tainted with Mr. Bungle’s carnie creed and heartened by the fearlessness reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s Animals. The resulting soundtrack rings equally holy and dissonant; get your cinematic self to the show because this is the band’s last live one of the year. (Kat Renz)

With Listo, and Moe! Staiano

9 p.m., $8

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com


DANCE

“Post:Ballet Sneak Peek”

Rooted in ballet with an eye toward the future, Robert Dekkers’ Post:Ballet thrives on fresh, edgy collaborations with artists in other disciplines. “Sneak Peek” offers an interactive preview of Interference Pattern, a work in progress with film excerpts by Amir Jaffer, performances by the company, audience experiments, and discussion. In discovering how observations influence the subconscious, the exchange during the evening aims to draw a variety of responses from the dance-artists and the audience. Before starting Post: Ballet in 2009, Dekkers performed in the Bay Area with ODC/Dance and Company C Ballet. These days his gorgeous troupe breathes new movement and ideas into ballet. Go ahead, sneak a peek! (Potter)

7–9 p.m., $10

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.postballet.org


FRIDAY 27


MUSIC

“Carnaval Fever”

Just can’t get enough SF Carnaval? Sparkly revelers: stray ye not far from the Mission this Memorial Day weekend. Go beyond the free parade and festival (more info on those events at www.sfcarnaval.com) and shake your feathers at the multi-venue after-party, “Carnaval Fever.” Brick and Mortar, newly opened in the old Coda space at Mission near Division, hosts a trio of live bands, starting with Latin American-Caribbean funksters B-Side Players (Fri/27) and followed by retro funksters Monophonics (Sat/28) and the not-purportedly-funky-but-no-doubt-will-make-you-dance-anyway Brazilian accordion slingers Forró Brazuca (Sun/29). For those who’d rather party in a club pounding with Latin beats, there’ll be DJ sets at Public Works (with headliner Marques Wyatt, Sat/28) and Som. (with Sabo, Sun/29). (Cheryl Eddy)

Fri/27–Sun/29, 9 p.m., $12–$15

Brick and Mortar

1710 Mission, SF

Sat/28, 9 p.m., $10

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

Sun/29, 9 p.m., $10

Som.

2925 16th St., SF

www.carnavalfever.com


SATURDAY 28


DANCE

“RAWdance Concept Series: 8”

I’m here to tell you: RAWdance’s Concept Series can become addictive. Few mixed programs of excerpted or in-progress works are as much fun as these occasional showings hidden in the Duboce Triangle (with parking as difficult as North Beach). Presided over — if such it can be called — by RAWdance’s Wendy Rein and Ryan Smith in a venue where, quite unceremoniously, you have to move your butt if the choreographer needs your space, the evenings offer glimpses of what these choreographers are up to. Rarely does it lack for something intriguing, even if it’s just a question the choreographer hasn’t found the answer to yet. This time AXIS’ Margaret Crowell, Amy Seiwert, and wild-woman Christine Bonansea join the hosts, along with the South Bay’s Nhan Ho. As always, coffee and popcorn are included. (Rita Felciano)

Sat/28–Sun/29, 8 p.m.;

Sun/29, 3 p.m., pay what you can

James Howell Studio

66 Sanchez, SF

(415) 686-0728

www.rawdance.org


SUNDAY 29


FILM

Saicomanía

If you haven’t heard of Los Saicos, you’re not alone — though Héctor M. Chávez’s new rockumentary, Saicomanía, aims to shed some long-deserved light on “the best-kept secret from the ’60s.” Formed in 1964 Peru, at the height of worldwide Beatlemania, the members of Los Saicos were anything but fresh-scrubbed mop tops (see: the band’s name, which recalls a certain 1960 Hitchcock movie). Amid (unfounded) rumors that its members were cannibals and played their instruments with hand tools, a raw, frenzied, jangly sound emerged, surging forth to influence countless other bands (including present-day darlings the Black Lips, who appear in the doc), but earning few props from music historians beyond connoisseurs of early garage rock. Saicomanía traces the band’s origins and catches up with its surviving members, still giving off mischievous punk-rock vibes after all these years. The film’s U.S. premiere is hosted by Colectivo Cinema Errante; the screening also features music videos by contemporary South American bands influenced by los abuelos of garage-punk. (Eddy)

7:30 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.atasite.org

 

TUESDAY 31


DANCE

Royal Danish Ballet

The 19th century Bournonville repertoire is what the Royal Danes — a.k.a. the Royal Danish Ballet, founded in 1748 — is best known for. With this company, forget about errant princes and lost princesses, sky-high extensions, and tornado like whirligigs. Instead, watch for ordinary folks in feathery footwork, rounded arms, suppleness, and ease. That’s what you’ll get with La Sylphide — the oldest extant Romantic ballet. But the Danes, no longer exclusively Danish, also are resolutely 21st-century dancers. That’s why the company is also bringing Nordic Modern, four hot-out-of-the-studio choreographies. Why won’t we see some of Bournonville’s fabled full-evening story ballets? Everyone else on this U.S. tour is getting them, but we don’t have an available theater that can accommodate the designs. What a pity. (Felciano)

Tues/31, June 1, and June 3–4,

8 p.m., $38–$100

Zellerbach Hall

Bancroft at Telegraph,

UC Berkeley, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu


MUSIC

Antlers

There are depressing albums, and then there is Antlers’ 2009 LP Hospice. Based on musician Peter Silberman’s intimate solo recordings, Hospice paints nightmares of hospitals, terminally ill children, death, and depression, all with such solemnity that it made this listener egregiously bummed. The band’s follow-up, Burst Apart, drops hospital drama for what might as well be a psychologist’s office — this time wrestling with universal themes of love, scary dreams, and putting the dog to sleep. It’s a far easier pill to swallow, and the newfound keyboard melodies provide a strong backbone for Silberman’s sing-along “ooh and ah” falsetto. It’s also the year’s first firmly melodramatic release to play equally well whether it’s late at night or a sunlit day. (Peter Galvin)

With Little Scream

8 p.m., $18

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(315) 885 0750

www.gamh.com 

 

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Film Listings

Maria Poblet
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0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

The Hangover Part II What could possibly go wrong this time? (1:42) Four Star, Marina, Presidio, Shattuck.

Hobo With a Shotgun See “Last Train to Fuck Town.” (1:26) Lumiere.

*Into Eternity Danish artist Michael Madsen (no, not that Michael Madsen) sneaks into Werner Herzog territory with this rather existential documentary about nuclear waste storage. Though he lacks Herzog’s distinctive, delightful style (his narration is way too corny, and his interview subjects lack any discernable quirks), Madsen is onto something here. Ostensibly, his film is an exploration of Finland’s Onkalo, an enormous underground facility built to store highly dangerous waste until it is no longer radioactive. Ho-hum, until you realize the facility must remain intact and functional for 100,000 years. How, Into Eternity asks, can we plan that far in the future? We can anticipate most natural-disaster scenarios, but what about human intrusion? How can we prevent future civilizations from drilling into the deadly cache, either accidentally or deliberately? How do we warn them? Should we warn them? Will humans even be around that far in the future? All we are is dust in the wind? Needless to say, this quiet, stylistically unassuming doc goes way, way deeper than 500 meters below Finland’s ancient bedrock. (1:15) Roxie. (Eddy)

Kung Fu Panda 2 Po (Jack Black) and company return for 3D martial-arts misadventures. (1:30) Cerrito, Four Star, Presidio.

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

ONGOING

American: The Bill Hicks Story (1:41) Sundance Kabuki.

*L’Amour Fou Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later. Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton. Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) but also forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed, but this is clearly Bergé’s show. (1:43) Albany, Embarcadero. (Sussman)

The Beaver It’s been more than 15 years since Jodie Foster sat in the director’s chair; she’s back with The Beaver, which tells the unique story of Walter Black (Mel Gibson), a clinically depressed man who struggles through his suicidal desires with the help of a beaver puppet. Walter uses the puppet — which he also voices — as a way of connecting with his family and the outside world. The film examines both the comedic aspects and the devastating reality of mental illness, and the script walks the line between dark and light — it’s the first feature from Kyle Killen, who created the critically adored but short-lived TV series Lone Star. The Beaver gets points for ambition, but it’s ultimately too all over the place to come together in the end. The moments of humanity are undercut by scenes of Walter and his wife Meredith (Foster) having sex with the puppet in the bed — intentionally funny, but jarring nonetheless. Still, Foster’s direction is solid and, for all its faults, The Beaver is a great reminder of Gibson’s legitimate talent. (1:31) Elmwood, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) Bridge, Elmwood. (Sussman)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) Balboa, Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Conspirator It may not be your standard legal drama, but The Conspirator is a lot more enjoyable when you think of it as an extended episode of Law & Order. The film chronicles the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the lone woman charged in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It’s a fascinating story, especially for those who don’t know much of the history past John Wilkes Booth. But while the subject matter is compelling, the execution is hit-or-miss. Wright is sympathetic as Surratt, but the usually great James McAvoy is somewhat forgettable in the pivotal role of Frederick Aiken, Surratt’s conflicted lawyer. It’s hard to say what it is that’s missing from The Conspirator: the cast — which also includes Evan Rachel Wood and Tom Wilkinson — is great, and this is a story that’s long overdue to be told. Still, something is lacking. Could it be the presence of everyone’s favorite detective, the late Lennie Briscoe? (2:02) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

*The Double Hour Slovenian hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) and security guard Guido (Filippo Timi) are two lonely people in the Italian city of Turin. They find one another (via a speed-dating service) and things are seriously looking up for the fledgling couple when calamity strikes. This first feature by music video director Giuseppe Capotondi takes a spare, somber approach to a screenplay (by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo) that strikingly keeps raising, then resisting genre categorization. Suffice it to say their story goes from lonely-hearts romance to violent thriller, ghost story, criminal intrigue, and yet more. It doesn’t all work seamlessly, but such narrative unpredictability is so rare at the movies these days that The Double Hour is worth seeing simply for the satisfying feeling of never being sure where it’s headed. (1:35) Albany, Clay, Piedmont, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Everything Must Go Just skirting the edge of sentimentality and banality, Everything Must Go aims to do justice by its source material: Raymond Carver’s rueful, characteristically spare short story, “Why Don’t You Dance?,” from the 1988 collection Where I’m Calling From. And it mostly succeeds with some restraint from its director-writer Dan Rush, who mainly helmed commercials in the past. Everything Must Go gropes toward a cinematic search for meaning for the Willy Lomans on both sides of the camera — it’s been a while since Will Ferrell attempted to stretch beyond selling a joke, albeit often extended ones about masculinity, and go further as an actor than 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. The focus here turns to the despairing, voyeuristic whiskey drinker of Carver’s highly-charged short story, fills in the blanks that the writer always carefully threaded into his work, and essentially pushes him down a crevasse into the worst day of his life: Ferrell’s Nick has been fired and his wife has left him, changing the locks, putting a hold on all his bank accounts, and depositing his worldly possessions on the lawn of their house. Nick’s car has been reclaimed, his neighbors are miffed that he’s sleeping on his lawn, the cops are doing drive-bys, and he’s fallen off the wagon. His only reprieve, says his sponsor Frank (Michael Pena), is to pretend to hold a yard sale; his only help, a neighborhood boy Kenny who’s searching for a father figure (Christopher Jordan Wallace, who played his dad Notorious B.I.G. as a child in 2009’s Notorious) and the new neighbor across the street (Rebecca Hall). Though Rush expands the characters way beyond the narrow, brilliant scope of Carver’s original narrative, the urge to stay with those fallible people — as well as the details of their life and the way suburban detritus defines them, even as those possessions are forcibly stripped away — remains. It makes for an interesting animal of a dramedy, though in Everything Must Go‘s search for bright spots and moments of hope, it’s nowhere near as raw, uncompromising, and tautly loaded as Carver’s work can be. (1:36) Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Fast Five There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in Fast Five, in addition to a much demolition derby-style crunch — instances that stretch credulity and simultaneously trigger a chuckle at the OTT fantasy of the entire enterprise. Two unarmed men chained to the ceiling kick their way out of a torture cell, jump favela rooftops to freedom with nary a bullet wound in sight, and, in the movie’s smash-’em-up tour de force, use a bank vault as a hulking pair of not-so-fuzzy dice to pulverize an unsuspecting Rio de Janeiro. Not for nothing is rapper Ludacris attached to this franchise — his name says it all (why not go further than his simple closing track, director Justin Lin, now designated the keeper of Fast flame, and have him providing the rap-eratic score/running commentary throughout?) In this installment, shady hero Dominic (Vin Diesel) needs busting out of jail — check, thanks to undercover-cop-turned-pal Brian (Paul Walker) and Dominic’s sis Mia (Jordana Brewster). Time to go on the lam in Brazil and to bring bossa nova culture down to level of thieving L.A. gearheads, as the gearhead threesome assemble their dream team of thieves to undertake a last big heist that will set ’em up for life. Still, despite the predictable pseudo-twists — can’t we all see the bromance-bonding between testosteroni boys Diesel and Dwayne Johnson coming from miles of blacktop away? — there’s enough genre fun, stunt driving marvels, and action choreography here (Lin, who made his name in ambitious indies like 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, has developed a knack for harnessing/shooting the seeming chaos) — to please fans looking for a bigger, louder kick. (1:41) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The First Grader After a government announcement offering free elementary school educations to all Kenyans, an elderly man, Maruge (Oliver Litondo), shuffles to the nearest rural classroom in search of reading lessons. Though school officials (and parents, miffed that the man would take a child’s place in the already overcrowded system) protest, open-minded head teacher Jane (Naomie Harris) allows him to stay and study. Maruge’s freedom-fighter past, which cost him his family at the brutal hands of the British, is an important part of this true story, which otherwise would’ve felt a bit too heavy on the heartwarming tip. (His classmates, actual students at the school used for filming, are pretty unavoidably adorable.) As directed by Justin Chadwick (2008’s The Other Boleyn Girl ), Harris and Litondo turn in passionate performances, but the film unfolds like a heavy-handed TV movie. The facts of this story are inspiring enough — the film shouldn’t have to try so hard. (1:43) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Forks Over Knives Lee Fulkerson steps up as the latest filmmaker-turned-guinea-pig to appear in his own documentary about nutrition. As he makes progress on his 12-week plan to adopt a “whole foods, plant-based diet” (and curb his Red Bull addiction), he meets with other former junk food junkies, as well as health professionals who’ve made it their mission to prevent or even reverse diseases strictly through dietary changes. Along the way, Forks Over Knives dishes out scientific factoids both enlightening and alarming about the way people (mostly us fatty Americans, though the film investigates a groundbreaking cancer study in China) have steadily gotten unhealthier as a direct result of what they are (or in some cases, are not) eating. Fulkerson isn’t as entertaining as Morgan Spurlock (and it’s unlikely his movie will have the mainstream appeal of 2004’s Super Size Me), but the staunchly pro-vegan Forks Over Knives certainly offers some interesting, ahem, food for thought. (1:36) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

*Hanna The title character of Hanna falls perfectly into the lately very popular Hit-Girl mold. Add a dash of The Boys from Brazil-style genetic engineering — Hanna has the unfair advantage, you see, when it comes to squashing other kids on the soccer field or maiming thugs with her bare hands — and you have an ethereal killing/survival machine, played with impassive confidence by Atonement (2007) shit-starter Saoirse Ronan. She’s been fine-tuned by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), a spy who went out into the cold and off the grid, disappearing into the wilds of Scandinavia where he home-schooled his charge with an encyclopedia and brutal self-defense and hunting tests. Atonement director Joe Wright plays with a snowy palette associated with innocence, purity, and death — this could be any time or place, though far from the touch of modern childhood stresses: that other Hannah (Montana), consumerism, suburban blight, and academic competition. The 16-year-old Hanna, however, isn’t immune from that desire to succeed. Her game mission: go from a feral, lonely existence into the modern world, run for her life, and avenge the death of her mother by killing Erik’s CIA handler, Marissa (Cate Blanchett). The nagging doubt: was she born free, or Bourne to be a killer? Much like the illustrated Brothers Grimm storybook that she studies, Hanna is caught in an evil death trap of fairytale allegories. One wonders if the super-soldier apple didn’t fall far from the tree, since evil stepmonster Marissa oversaw the program that produced Hanna — the older woman and the young girl have the same cold-blooded talent for destruction and the same steely determination. Yet there’s hope for the young ‘un. After learning that even her beloved father hid some basic truths from her, this natural-born killer seems less likely to go along with the predetermined ending, happy or no, further along in her storybook life. (1:51) SF Center. (Chun)

*Hesher Young teen TJ (Devin Brochu) has lost his mom, and her shockingly sudden passing has sent his entire family into a tailspin. His father (Rainn Wilson) can barely rouse himself from his heavily medicated stupor, while his lonely grandmother (Piper Laurie) is left to care for the wrecked men folk as best she can. All TJ can do is to try to desperately hang onto the smashed car that has been sold to the used car salesman and then the junkyard. So it almost seems like a dream when he catches the attention of an aloof, threatening metalhead named Hesher (a typecast-squashing, perfectly on-point Joseph Gordon-Levitt), squatting in an empty suburban model home. Hesher threatens to kill him, then moves in, becoming his so-called “friend” and brand-new, unwanted shadow. What’s a grieving family lost in its own tragic inertia supposed to do with a home invasion staged by an angry, malevolent spirit? Coming to terms with Hesher’s presence becomes a lot like going through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: there’s the denial that he’s taken over the living-room TV and rejiggered the cable to get a free porn channel, the anger that he’s set fire to your enemy’s hot rod and left you at the scene of the crime, and lastly the acceptance that there’s no good, right, or unmessy way to say goodbye. Director Spencer Susser (with co-writer David Michod of 2010’s Animal Kingdom) modeled the character of Hesher after late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, and that fact, along with the film’s independent-minded spirit, is probably one of the reasons why Metallica allowed more than one of their songs to be used in the film. Hesher itself also likely had something to do with it: if the intrigue with heavy-metal-parking-lot culture doesn’t do donuts in your cul-de-sac, then the sobering story might. (1:45) California, Lumiere. (Chun)

*Incendies When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. (2:10) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Jumping the Broom (1:48) SF Center.

*Meek’s Cutoff After three broke down road movies (1994’s River of Grass, 2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy), Kelly Reichardt’s new frontier story tilts decisively towards socially-minded existentialism. It’s 1845 on the choked plains of Oregon, miles from the fertile valley where a wagon train of three families is headed. They’ve hired the rogue guide Meek to show them the way, but he’s got them lost and low on water. When the group captures a Cayeuse Indian, Solomon proposes they keep him on as a compass; Meek thinks it better to hang him and be done with it. The periodic shots of the men deliberating are filmed from a distance — the earshot range of the three women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson) who set up camp each night. It’s through subtle moves like these that Meek’s Cutoff gives a vivid taste of being subject to fate and, worse still, the likes of Meek. Reichardt winnows away the close-ups, small talk, and music that provided the simple gifts of her earlier work, and the overall effect is suitably austere. (1:44) Roxie, Shattuck. (Goldberg)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*Nostalgia for the Light Chile’s Atacama Desert, the setting for Patricio Guzmán’s lyrically haunting and meditative documentary, is supposedly the driest place on earth. As a result, it’s also the most ideal place to study the stars. Here, in this most Mars-like of earthly landscapes, astronomers look to the heavens in an attempt to decode the origins of the universe. Guzmán superimposes images from the world’s most powerful telescopes — effluent, gaseous nebulas, clusters of constellations rendered in 3-D brilliance — over the night sky of Atacama for an even more otherworldly effect, but it’s the film’s terrestrial preoccupations that resonate most. For decades, a small, ever dwindling group of women have scoured the cracked clay of Atacama searching for loved ones who disappeared early in Augusto Pinochet’s regime. They take their tiny, toy-like spades and sift through the dirt, finding a partial jawbone here, an entire mummified corpse there. Guzmán’s attempt through voice-over to make these “architects of memory,” both astronomers and excavators alike, a metaphor for Chile’s reluctance to deal with its past atrocities is only marginally successful. Here, it’s the images that do all the talking — if “memory has a gravitational force,” their emotional weight is as inescapable as a black hole. (1:30) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides The last time we saw rascally Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), he was fighting his most formidable enemy yet: the potentially franchise-ending Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). The first Pirates movie (2003) was a surprise critical success, earning Depp his first-ever Oscar nomination; subsequent entries, though no less moneymaking, suffered from a detectable case of sequel-itis. Overseeing this reboot of sorts is director Rob Marshall (2002’s Chicago), who keeps the World’s End notion of sending Jack to find the Fountain of Youth, but adds in a raft of new faces, including Deadwood‘s Ian McShane (as Blackbeard) and lady pirate Penélope Cruz. The story is predictably over-the-top, with the expected supernatural elements mingling with sparring both sword-driven and verbal — as well as an underlying theme about faith that’s nowhere near as fun as the film’s lesser motifs (revenge, for one). It’s basically a big swirl of silly swashbuckling, nothing more or less. And speaking of Depp, the fact that the oft-ridiculous Sparrow is still an amusing character can only be chalked up to the actor’s own brand of untouchable cool. If it was anyone else, Sparrow’d be in Austin Powers territory by now. (2:05) Balboa, Castro, Cerrito, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Priest (1:27) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Princess of Montpensier Marie (Mélanie Thierry), the titular figure in French director Bertrand Tavernier’s latest, is a young 16th century noblewoman married off to a Prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) of great wealth and property. But they’ve barely met when he’s called off to war — leaving her alone on his enormous estate, vulnerable to myriad suitors who seem to be forever throwing themselves at her nubile, neglected body. Lambert Wilson (2010’s Of Gods and Men) is touching as the older soldier appointed her protector; he comes to love her, yet is the one man upstanding enough to resist compromising her. If you’ve been jonesing for the kind of lush arthouse period epic that feels like a big fat classic novel, this engrossing saga from a 70-year-old Gallic cinema veteran in top form will scratch that itch for nearly two and a half satisfyingly tragic-romantic hours. (2:19) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Potiche When we first meet Catherine Deneuve’s Suzanne — the titular trophy wife (or potiche) of Francois Ozon’s new airspun comedy — she is on her morning jog, barely breaking a sweat as she huffs and puffs in her maroon Adidas tracksuit, her hair still in curlers. It’s 1977 and Suzanne’s life as a bourgeois homemaker in a small provincial French town has played out as smoothly as one of her many poly-blend skirt suits: a devoted mother to two grown children and loving wife who turns a blind eye to the philandering of husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini), Suzanne is on the fast track to comfortable irrelevance. All that changes when the workers at Robert’s umbrella factory strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, with the help of union leader and old flame Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as big as a house), negotiates a peace, and soon turns around the company’s fortunes with her new-found confidence and business savvy. But when Robert wrests back control with the help of a duped Babin, Suzanne does an Elle Woods and takes them both on in a surprise run for political office. True to the film’s light théâtre de boulevard source material, Ozon keeps things brisk and cheeky (Suzanne sings with as much ease as she spouts off Women’s Lib boilerplate) to the point where his cast’s hammy performances start blending into the cheery production design. Satire needs an edge that Potiche, for all its charm, never provides. (1:43) Elmwood, Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

Queen to Play From first-time feature director Caroline Bottaro comes this drama about … chess. Wait! Before your eyes glaze over, here are a few more fast facts: it’s set in idyllic Corsica and features, as an American expat, Kevin Kline in his first French-speaking role. (Side note: is there a Kline comeback afoot? First No Strings Attached, then The Conspirator, and now Queen to Play. All within a few short months.) Lovely French superstar Sandrine Bonnaire plays Héléne, a hotel maid who has more or less accepted her unremarkable life — until she happens to catch a couple (one half of which is played by Jennifer Beals, cast because Bottaro is a longtime fan of 1983’s Flashdance!) playing chess. An unlikely obsession soon follows, and she asks Kline’s character, a reclusive doctor who’s on her freelance house-cleaning route, to help her up her game. None too pleased with this new friendship are Héléne’s husband and nosy neighbors, who are both suspicious of the doctor and unsure of how to treat the formerly complacent Héléne’s newfound, chess-inspired confidence. Queen to Play can get a little corny (we’re reminded over and over that the queen is “the most powerful piece”), and chess is by nature not very cinematic (slightly more fascinating than watching someone type, say). But Bonnaire’s quietly powerful performance is worth sticking around for, even when the novelty of whiskery, cardigan-wearing, French-spouting Kline wears off. (1:36) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Rio (1:32) Elmwood, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

Something Borrowed (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

*Source Code A post-9/11 Groundhog Day (1993) with explosions, Inception (2010) with a heart, or Avatar (2009) taken down a notch or dozen in Chicago —whatever you choose to call it, Source Code manages to stand up on its own wobbly Philip K. Dick-inspired legs, damn the science, and take off on the wings of wish fulfillment. ‘Cause who hasn’t yearned for a do-over — and then a do-over of that do-over, etc. We could all be as lucky — or as cursed — as soldier Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who gets to tumble down that time-space rabbit hole again and again, his consciousness hitching a ride in another man’s body, while in search of the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. On the upside, he gets to meet the girl of his dreams (Michelle Monaghan) — and see her getting blown to smithereens again and again, all in the service of his country, his commander-cum-link to the outside world (Vera Farmiga), and the scientist masterminding this secret military project (Jeffrey Wright). On the downside, well, he gets to do it over and over again, like a good little test bunny in pinball purgatory. Fortunately, director Duncan Jones (2009’s Moon) makes compelling work out of the potentially ludicrous material, while his cast lends the tale a glossed yet likable humanity, the kind that was all too absent in 2010’s Inception. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*13 Assassins 13 Assassins is clearly destined to be prolific director Takashi Miike’s greatest success outside Japan yet. It’s another departure for the multi-genre-conquering Miike, doubtless one of the most conventional movies he’s made in theme and execution. That’s key to its appeal — rigorously traditional, taking its sweet time getting to samurai action that is pointedly not heightened by wire work or CGI, it arrives at the kind of slam-dunk prolonged battle climax that only a measured buildup can let you properly appreciate. In the 1840s, samurai are in decline but feudalism is still hale. It’s a time of peace, though not for the unfortunates who live under regional tyrant Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), a li’l Nippon Caligula who taxes and oppresses his people to the point of starvation. Alas, the current Shogun is his sibling, and plans to make little bro his chief adviser — so a concerned Shogun official secretly hires veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to assassinate the Lord. Fully an hour is spent on our hero doing “assembling the team” stuff, recruiting other unemployed, retired, or wannabe samurai. When the protagonists finally commence their mission, their target is already aware he’s being pursued, and he’s surrounded by some 200 soldiers by the time Miike arrives at the film’s sustained, spectacular climax: a small village which Shinzaemon and co. have turned into a giant boobytrap so that 13 men can divide and destroy an ogre-guarding army. A major reason why mainstream Hollywood fantasy and straight action movies have gotten so depressingly interchangeable is that digital FX and stunt work can (and does) visualize any stupid idea — heroes who get thrown 200 feet into walls by monsters then getting up to fight some more, etc. 13 Assassins is thrilling because its action, while sporting against-the-odds ingeniousness and sheer luck by our heroes as in any trad genre film, is still vividly, bloodily, credibly physical. (2:06) California, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Thor When it comes to superhero movies, I’m not easily impressed. Couple that with my complete disinterest in the character of Thor, and I didn’t go into his big-screen debut with any level of excitement. Turns out Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a genre standout — the best I’ve seen since 2008’s Iron Man. For those who don’t know the mythology, the film follows Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as he’s exiled from the realm of Asgard to Earth. Once there, he must reclaim his mighty hammer — along with his powers — in order to save the world and win the heart of astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Hemsworth is perfectly cast as the titular hero: he’s adept at bringing charm to a larger-than-life god. The script is a huge help, striking the ideal balance between action, drama, and humor. That’s right, Thor is seriously funny. On top of that, the effects are sensational. Sure, the 3D is once again unnecessary, but it’s admittedly kind of fun when you’re zooming through space. (2:03) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls It’s hard to name an American equivalent of New Zealand’s Topp Twins — a folk-singing, comedy-slinging, cross-dressing duo who’re the biggest Kiwi stars you’ve never heard of (but may be just as beloved as, say, Peter Jackson in their homeland). Recent inductees in the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame, the fiftysomething Jools and Lynda, both lesbians, sing country-tinged tunes that slide easily from broad and goofy (with an array of costumed personas) to extremely political, sounding off on LGBT and Maori rights, among other topics. Even if you’re not a fan of their musical style, it’s undeniable that their identical voices make for some stirring harmonies, and their optimism, even when a serious illness strikes, is inspiring. This doc — which combines interviews, home movies, and performance footage — will surely earn them scores of new stateside fans. (1:24) Shattuck. (Eddy)

Water for Elephants A young man named Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) turns his back on catastrophe and runs off to join the circus. It sounds like a fantasy, but this was never Jacob’s dream, and the circus world of Water for Elephants isn’t all death-defying feats and pretty women on horses. Or rather, the pretty woman also rides an elephant named Rosie and the casualties tend to occur outside the big top, after the rubes have gone home. Stumbling onto a train and into this world by chance, Jacob manages to charm the sadistic sociopath who runs the show, August (Christophe Waltz), and is charmed in turn by August’s wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), a star performer and the object of August’s abusive, obsessive affections. Director Francis Lawrence’s film, an adaptation of Sarah Gruen’s 2006 novel, depicts a harsh Depression-era landscape in which troupes founder in small towns across America, waiting to be scavenged for parts — performers and animals — by other circuses passing through. Waltz’s August is a frightening man who defines a layoff as throwing workers off a moving train, and the anxiety of anticipating his moods and moves supplies most of the movie’s dramatic tension; Jacob and Marlena’s pallid love story feeds off it rather than adding its own. The film also suffers from a frame tale that feels awkward and forced, though Hal Holbrook makes heroic efforts as the elderly Jacob, surfacing on the grounds of — what else? — a modern-day circus to recount his tale of tragedy and romance. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Win Win Is Tom McCarthy the most versatile guy in Hollywood? He’s a successful character actor (in big-budget movies like 2009’s 2012; smaller-scale pictures like 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck; and the final season of The Wire). He’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (2009’s Up). And he’s the writer-director of two highly acclaimed indie dramas, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). Clearly, McCarthy must not sleep much. His latest, Win Win, is a comedy set in his hometown of New Providence, N.J. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who’s feeling the economic pinch. Betraying his own basic good-guy-ness, he takes advantage of a senile client, Leo (Burt Young), when he spots the opportunity to pull in some badly-needed extra cash. Matters complicate with the appearance of Leo’s grandson, Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a runaway from Ohio. Though Mike’s wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is suspicious of the taciturn teen, she allows Kyle to crash with the Flaherty family. As luck would have it, Kyle is a superstar wrestler — and Mike happens to coach the local high school team. Things are going well until Kyle’s greedy mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up and starts sniffing around her father’s finances. Lessons are learned, sure, and there are no big plot twists beyond typical indie-comedy turf. But the script delivers more genuine laughs than you’d expect from a movie that’s essentially about the recession. (1:46) California, Piedmont. (Eddy)

 

Environmentalists rappel off Richmond Bridge to protest Chevron

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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This morning, May 23, activists from Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network rappelled off the Richmond Bridge and unfurled a 50 foot banner which read: “Chevron Guilty: Clean Up Amazon.”

Anchored to the bridge deck, three brave souls dangled airborne above the bay alongside the banner, within view of an oil tanker. The banner drop was carried out to draw attention to Chevron’s environmental contamination in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCtDl1Jf2A

In an historic court victory in Ecuador on Feb. 14, Chevron was found guilty of causing $18 billion worth of environmental damage to a Rhode Island-sized swath of the Amazon. The widespread soil and water contamination, caused by decades of toxic dumping by Texaco and Chevron, has been linked to high rates of cancer and birth defects. Amazon Watch has been campaigning to get Chevron to clean up the oil pollution for 18 years.

“Chevron has said they are going to appeal the decision,” noted Paul Paz y Miño, managing director of Amazon Watch. “They’ve said they’ll fight it till hell freezes over.” So activists are keeping the pressure on.

Chevron will hold its annual shareholder meeting on May 25 in San Ramon, and a coalition of environmental organizations are using the occasion to draw attention to environmental problems the company has caused worldwide.

Three community leaders from the impacted Ecuadorian region traveled to California to share their stories and join in protests outside the shareholders meeting.

Their personal stories are moving. Humberto Piaguaje is a leader of the indigenous Secoya people of Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest, whose numbers in that region have dwindled from thousands to just several hundred since Texaco arrived in the area nearly 50 years ago.

Carmen Zambrano moved to the Amazonian region affected by Chevron in 1984, and according to her bio, tells stories “of how the company told people that the crude was good for their health, and that the contaminated water was safe to bathe and wash in, to drink from. … Her own children are terminally ill and developmentally disabled. Her sister-in-law suffers from cancer; her brother-in-law has serious heart problems. Her neighbors have died and almost everyone she knows has skin ailments.”

Serbio Curipoma, a cacao farmer from the Orellana province of Ecuador, lost his parents and sister to cancer. According to his bio, “He realized six years ago that the house his family has lived in for 20 years had been built directly atop an unremediated covered oil pit; digging just a few meters into the earth reveals thick crude.”

The trio from Ecuador will be joined by leaders from Chevron-affected communities in Nigeria, Indonesia, Canada, Angola, and Alaska at a teach-in at Berkeley’s David Brower Center May 23 from 7 to 9 p.m. on “The True Cost of Chevron.”

Paz y Miño noted that Amazon Watch is hoping to amass 30,000 signatures for the 30,000 plaintiffs in the Chevron case in a petition the group plans to deliver to company shareholders and executives during the meeting. They are also hoping to raise funds to cover the cost of the delegation.

DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
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DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration is conducting a multistate criminal investigation into the actions that prison systems have taken to obtain a death drug no longer produced in the United States, documents obtained by the Bay Guardian indicate.


The documents don’t reveal the specific targets of the investigation, but federal agents have siezed drug shipments in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee and are apparently also looking into drug procurement policies in California, Arkansas, Alaska and Arizona.


The states have been scrambling to obtain sodium thiopental, a drug used in executions, after the lone American manufacturer, Hospira Corp., stopped producing it last year.


Georgia and Arizona both received shipments of the drug from Dream Pharma, a British wholesaler that, according to the Associated Press, “shares a building with a driving school in a gritty London neighborhood.” And California sent agents on a secret mission to get some of Arizona’s supply.


Several other states, including Georgia, obtained the drugs from a different British supplier, Link Pharmaceuticals. According to the Associated Press, Nebraska’s supply was imported from India.


Most of the states imported the drugs without the proper DEA paperwork, a federal crime, the documents show.


The documents are the latest released as the result of a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Northern California and the Bay Guardian seeking access to all records related to the import of the death drug. The DEA this week released 71 pages of documents, but withheld 160 pages, justifying the withholding by saying that some of the records are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.


A May 16 letter from Katherine Myrick, the DEA’s chief Freedom of Information Officer, states that there are “two active investigations” and that release of the records could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement procedings.”
The documents reveal how desperately state prison authorities were trying to find a way to procure the drug — and how concerned the DEA was about the import of a controlled substance by agencies that had no medical or research functions.


Among other things, they show that the Obama administration was taking an active role in the process: “The White House is involved and is trying to sort things out,” a Nov. 11, 2010 memo from the Office of Diversion Control states.


Another Nov. 11 memo notes that “states have been importing the lethal drug regimen from England … the UK has written the State Department (and the FDA?) asking the U.S. to end the importation of the drug, which is being used in lethal injections.”


A Nov. 9 memo notes that “FDA [the Food and Drug Administration] is concerned about importation of non-FDA approved sodium thiopental used for executions …. Safety, efficacy and indication are FDA issues. So is the matter of off-label use (which was also brought up.”


The memo from the Liason and Policy Office explains that “DEA requires a valid DEA registration as an importer and a properly executed declaration in order to import controlled substances.”


A Nov. 12 memo confirms that “only two import declarations have been filed for sodium pentothal” — meaning that all the other states obtained their supplies illegally. The identity of the two states is blacked out.


Sodium thiopental is part of the three-drug mix used for lethal injections in most states that allow capital punishment. It renders the subject unconscious before the other drugs stop the heart and lungs from operating.


If the drug isn’t effective — that is, if it’s an improper formulation or an off-market product that doesn’t meet U.S. standards — the condemned inmate could suffer horrible pain, something the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear is not legally tolerable.


The drug isn’t used very often in hospitals; it’s been replaced by other drugs. And California had to put all of its executions on hold last fall when the state’s last batch expired.


Arizona has an execution date set for May 25 and Nebraska has an execution scheduled for June 14.
But the documents are so heavily redacted, and so many pages are missing, that it’s impossible to tell exactly which states are doing what — and whether any of the upcoming executions would be using illegally obtained drugs.


 “The DEA is making it impossible to know whether the states are complying with the law and whether DEA is fulfilling its obligation to enforce our nation’s drug laws,” said Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director for the ACLU of California. “Importing sodium thiopental without informing the DEA is a crime. We now know the DEA was poised to go into the Arizona Department of Corrections and seize their drugs, as they did in Georgia, but for some unknown reason they did not. Why did the DEA seize drugs in some states but not others?”


Calls and emails to the California Department of Corrections seeking information on whether the department is the target of a federal investigation were not returned.

Where’s Gascon on Ammiano’s pot bill?

Zelda Bronstein
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Where’s Gascon on Ammiano’s pot bill?

Some very good news from Sacramento (and since good news from that part of the world is rare these days, let’s celebrate it). Assembly Member Tom Ammiano has a bill that would eliminate the mandatory felony charges for marijuana cultivation and allow district attorneys to charge some pot farmers with misdemeanors. And it’s cleared committee and is headed to the Assembly floor. The Bay Citizen has a decent wrapup on the politics (including the fact that the prison guards union isn’t going to like it — less customers).


It’s likely the Senate will go along with the bill, too — particularly since most of the district attorneys in Pot Country are supporting it. Mendocino DA David Eyster is the main sponsor. His colleagues in Humboldt, Del Norte and Lake Counties are all on board.


Oddly enough, the California District Attorneys Association still opposes the bill. The board of this august group seems to be dominated by the more conservative counties, but still: The DAs who have to deal with this issue regularly all want the bill passed. What’s up with that? Well, the spokesman for the group, Cory Salzillo, told me that the bill “send the wrong message with controlled substances generally” and that it would also give not only a prosecutor but a judge the ability to turn a potential felony into a misdemeanor. “We’re concerned about that judicial discretion,” he said.


Which seems, frankly, a little nuts — again, the four DAs who are most involved in charging people for cultivation of marijuana — the folks on the front lines, so to speak — want the bill to pass. So who decided the association position?


Salzillo says there’s a legislative committee, but since this one was controversial, it went to the full board. And guess what? There’s a San Francisco rep. on the board — Assistant D.A. Jerry Coleman. I called him to ask how the vote went down. Here’s our conversation:


Me: Hi, Mr. Coleman, I understand you’re on the board of the California DAs association and I wanted to talk to you about why that group is opposing the Ammiano marijuana bill, which the DAs of the north counties that deal with the issue all support.


Coleman: “I’m not the spokesman for that association.”


Me: Yes, but you’re on the board and I’m wondering if you voted in favor of opposing AB 1017.


Coleman: “I can’t give you an answer to that. I won’t discuss any vote. I don’t remember this one, but if I did I wouldn’t talk to you about it anyway.”


That was helpful.


Meanwhile, where’s Coleman’s boss, the San Francisco DA, George Gascon? This is a city that supports medical marijuana, has perhaps a few growers living in its city limits — and if I had to guess, about, maybe, 93 percent of the voters would agree that marijuana cultivation shouldn’t be an automatic felony. Why isn’t Gascon’s name on the list of supporters?


I dunno. His office hasn’t called me back. I’ll let you know when they do.

Clean secrets revealed: the Lusty Ladies

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Clean secrets revealed: the Lusty Ladies

Sex workers do all kinds of naughty (and very nice) things during work hours, but how these super-sexed individuals spend their down time seems like an alluring mystery. It’s fun to assume the sassy stripper wears high heels while vacuuming and doesn’t own sweatpants, but these are real people — and though they deal in dirty, it’s time for the Lusty Ladies to reveal their ‘clean’ secrets. 

The Lusty Lady is a unionized peep show establishment featuring a play pen packed with foxy bodies and a show that all sorts of loins love to watch from behind glass. The Lusties make it hard to think about anything other than sex, but for today, let’s leave the dancing, self-stroking, and teasing for the stage.

But these are well-rounded, independent women, replete with a full dancecard of squeaky-clean hobbies and pastimes. You want sexy? Try fresh brewed tea, or a cathartic yoga session. Rawr!

 

Bottoms’ up in the kitchen

sandy

Sandy Bottoms

Sandy Bottoms has been working at the Lusty for a year and a half and loves being surrounded by the cast of intelligent babes who prove that the sex industry can indeed provide legitimate work. She started off as the “surfer-California beach girl” but eventually found herself playing a younger role, complete with braces. 

SFBG: What’s your clean secret?

Sandy Bottoms: When I’m not dancing naked on stage I can usually be found in my apron baking. I’m so obsessed with cupcakes I’ve even wrangled a sweetie into making me a cupcake dress. 

 

SFBG: When do you most like to do it? 

SB: I like to make treats for my fellow Lusties, family, and friends whenever I can, really. Decadent boob-shaped cakes have made their way to birthday events, baby blue meringue cookies to transition parties, and indulgent vegan gluten-free cupcakes to Lusty PRIDE bake sales. 

 

SFBG: Where do like it? 

SB: My kitchen. 

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good? 

SB: I suppose in part baking fulfills a 1950s housewife fantasy that doesn’t integrate with or show through other parts of my character. I like to be productive when I’m relaxing and I never let the green grass grow under my high heels. 

 

Cinnamon’s late night creations

cinnamon

Cinnamon

It’s been nearly five years since Cinnamon debuted at the Lusty and she just completed her year-long term as Lead Madam in February. She likes stripping because it’s fun, different, and unionized — and her “pretty awesome juicy booty” demands attention. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret? 

C: I love to paint. I love to paint, sculpt, costume design (as seen above), sew, and get down and dirty with a good art project. Not that exciting, but it’s what I love. I even went to an art high school in Oakland.

 

SFBG: When do you most like to do it? 

C: In the morning, afternoon, evening. Sometimes even late at night, I wake up at 2 a.m. and want to paint or draw. 

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good?

C: Painting helps me sort my thoughts and I don’t feel so overwhelmed. I feel relaxed when I paint. I love getting really into a project and getting messy and covered in paint and other materials. I also don’t just stop with paint when I’m really into a project. I usually use anything I can get my hands on, from sand to coffee filters. 

 

SFBG: When do you feel most proud about it?

C: When I finally finish a project! Which is hardly ever. I also feel pretty happy when I start a really good new project with something I’ve never tried before. But more than anything I love it when someone comes over to visit and says “That picture is awesome, where’d you get it?”

 

Bijou shows off her flexibility

bijou

Bijou. Photo by craspadseries.com

A love of dancing and an appreciation of the Lusty community has kept Bijou on the stage for three years. She doesn’t pre-plan a routine per se, but she’s known to have cat moves, or at least a very feline-like presence. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret? 

B: I absolutely love and do A LOT of yoga.

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good? 

B: I can literally enter another space while I’m practicing, and my body always feels immediately energized after a class or home practice.

 

SFBG: Where did you learn such a thing? 

B: Studios all over the country and I informally trained every single day during a year in Bangkok, Thailand.

 

SFBG: When did you feel most proud of it? 

B: When I just let go and cry during my practice. It sounds funny but that usually means I’ve really, truly connected with my body.

 

Harlow Valentine brews it hot and wet

Harlow

Harlow Valentine

As a co-owner of the Lusty, Harlow Valentine loves exploring hot scenarios with lots of strangers and sharing the attention with intelligent and sexy women. She especially likes to show her “booty” to curious peepers. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret?

HV: I love to drink tea.

 

SFBG: Where do like it? 

HV: In the kitchen, at a cafe, in bed.

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good?

HV: It’s soothing, it’s warm, it’s delicious and sometimes has a fantastic color!

 

SFBG: When did you feel most proud of it?

HV: When I hear pleasing sighs escape from the lips of someone who’s just sipped my freshly brewed tea…though perhaps that’s because, in general, I enjoy hearing people sigh from pleasure!

Your summer guide to art escapes

Andrew Lam
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Living in San Francisco means having the richness of art in a major city, and the natural beauty of California all in one fell swoop. Here’s your guide to enjoying urban escapes and art and live performance – at the same time! – this summer. Also, check out our guides to the season’s falls and festivals, movies, music, and best adventures you can go on without a car.

 

WITHIN THE CITY 

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

With three stages of free performances, this festival is perfect for a dose of culture and fresh air during your lunch hour with music, dance, theater, and readings. There’s weekend concerts too: the SF Mime Troupe performs Aug. 21, SF’s local songbird Meklit Hadero on Aug. 27, and SF’s pluckiest free ring wraiths, Circus Bella return to the lawn for the weekend of July 1-2.

May through September, free. www.ybgf.org

 

Stern Grove Festival

Stern Grove’s eucalyptus tree surroundings create a pretty magical summer stage for free performances. The experience gets even better when you pack a tasty picnic spread to enjoy — but leave your umbrellas and high-back chairs at home to keep the peace with those who didn’t snag the primo front row spots. In addition to the annual appearances of the San Francisco Ballet, Opera and Symphony, the concert lineup features Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, the Jazz Mafia Symphony, Neko Case, Afrocubism, The English Beat, Aaron Neville, and Javier Limon and Buika.

Sundays, June 19-August 21, free. www.sterngrove.org

 

San Francisco Mime Troupe at Dolores Park 

Enjoy palm trees and revolutionary spirit with your Tecate: with this historic troupe of not-mimes – forget the pantomime, this is socially relevant theater in the park.

July 2, 3, 4, free. www.sfmt.org

 

San Francisco Symphony in the Park

This year’s concert, which will be performed in Sharon Meadow, features conductor Michael Francis and pianist Valentina Lisitsa on a program of Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.  

July 10, 2 p.m., free. www.sfsymphony.org

 

Shakespeare in the Park, The Presidio

Bring the whole family for this year’s performance of  Cymbeline at the Presidio’s Main Post Parade Ground Lawn.

September 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17, 18, 24, 25, free. Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.sfshakes.org

 

Opera in the Park

This year’s annual concert, also in Sharon Meadow, features a special musical program commemorating the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

September 11, 1:30 p.m., free. Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.sfopera.com

 

AND BEYOND…

Oliver Ranch

Seventy miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, Oliver Ranch boasts scenic acres and 18 site-specific installations by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, as well as Ann Hamilton’s distinct tower where commissioned dance, poetry, theater, and music performances unfold. The tower structure – defined by two staircases built in a double helix form that accommodate the audience on one staircase and the performers on the other — suits a range of sensory projects and performances hosting artists like Meredith Monk and the Kronos Quartet. Limited capacity allows for only 100 visitors, making this ticket a splurge — but it’s all good, each concert in the tower benefits a non-profit organization. June appearances include Pauline Oliveros and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. Should you be lucky enough to get tickets, be sure to bring some water and sunscreen and make a day of it visiting all the nearby wineries.

Various dates in June, prices vary. 22205 River, Geyserville. (510) 412-9090, www.oliverranchfoundation.org

 

Headlands Center for the Arts open house 

Just across the bridge in the rugged Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the Headlands Center for the Arts synthesizes natural and urban environments in a cluster of historic, 1900s military buildings at Fort Barry among hills, cliffs, coves, and beaches. At the center’s summer open house, artists open their studios to the public to show their works-in-progress and talk with visitors about their creative process in a variety of disciplines. Catch one of the many performances and readings scheduled throughout the day and then head to the mess hall, which is transformed into a café serving delicious homemade snacks at down-home prices for the event. While you’re there, a hike through the windy Headland hills is a must-do.

July 24, 12-5 p.m., free. 944 Fort Barry, Sausalito. (415) 331-2787, www.headlands.org

 

Robert Mondavi Winery Summer Music Festival

One of the first wineries in the Napa Valley, the Robert Mondavi Winery offers much more than sipping, swilling, and spitting. A concert series scheduled for Saturday nights in July features music in an open-air setting and this summer’s lineup includes Gavin DeGraw, Colbie Caillat, David Foster, Chris Isaak, K.D. Lang, and the Siss Boom Bang. Mondavi’s grounds also include an art gallery open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with artifacts and paintings as well as a sculpture collection focused on the work of San Francisco artist, Beniamino Bufano, displayed in the main courtyard surrounded by rows of vines. Head here for a fancy summer night of outdoor music and wind down after an afternoon of tastings.

Saturdays in July, $75-$105. 7801 St. Helena Hwy., Oakville. (888) 766-6328, www.robertmondavi.com

 

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