Conservative Archives — Page 6 of 40 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Walls of the Internet

Andrew Lam

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May 7, 2013

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN The mural was neatly rendered in aerosol, with an expert’s eye for color. It read “Facebook.” Surrounding text bubbles proclaimed “poke,” “write on your wall,” and “I’ll find something to put here” to the denizens of Sixth Street.

Tech-based graffiti? If you’re up on the Bay Area art scene, the juxtaposition won’t come as any surprise — the companies building the Internet have emerged as major supporters of professional street art.

“The influx of tech companies has affected our business at all levels,” says Daniel Pan, founder of SoMa’s 1AM Gallery. Pan and his team exhibit works by local graff legends and recently came under attack by conservative SF Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius for 1AM’s retail space, which sells one of SF’s best selections of street art sprays and tools.

Scenes from 1AM Gallery’s corporate graffiti workshops. Photos courtesy 1AM Gallery

The gallery also facilitates corporate graffiti workshops like the one that gave birth to the aforementioned 2010 Facebook mural, and arranges custom murals for techland’s stomping grounds. Last month, the gallery released a mobile app perfect for capturing, cataloguing, and searching for one’s favorite pieces of street art all over the world.

“On a very fundamental level, tech has allowed the street art scene in San Francisco, and worldwide, to spread faster and further than ever,” Pan says.

1AM is by no means the only site of this pairing. Though Facebook may have led the way for the tech-street art connection, having tapped artist David Choe to do its office walls back when the company was still in its Palo Alto offices, you can now see murals in the YouTube office park — and in many tech companies across the Bay.

Among the experts with whom I spoke for this story, many attributed the trend to the fact that the new tech elite is much younger than the leaders in other industries.

“They share a lot of the same values,” Vikki Tobak of the Palo Alto Arts Commission told me. “[Street art] is young, DIY, there’s no pretense. It’s very ‘of the generation’ in terms of who works at these companies.”

Tobak points to various ways the two worlds are interfacing. Eyebeam’s Graffiti Research Laboratory is the maker of “L.A.S.E.R. Tag,” a system that allows artists to project digital tags onto buildings from a distance of hundreds of meters. Re+Public’s reality augmenting mural app allows street art fans to travel through time at NYC’s famed Bowery wall and digitally hallucinate via animations and 3D effects in Miami’s Wynwood Walls mural complex. Locally, Tobak sees the in-progress University Avenue tunnel mural project that will transform a major pedestrian connector in one of Silicon Valley’s first cities as an example of how street art-style work has gained traction among techies. Zynga neighbor Project One Gallery hosts tech happy hours within walls covered in murals by acclaimed visual artists.

Contemporary SF gallerist Catharine Clark says it would be a mistake to say that street art is the only art form in which the tech community is interested. The annual Zero1 art-tech festival (www.zero1.org) explores a vast array of art forms, and few street artists are included on the program. The high-powered tech couple of Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer and investor-philanthropist Zachary Bogue will chair this week’s opening gala of SF’s artMRKT art fair. Clark says as wealthy techies age, their taste for art will mature as it does for any collector. But she does see a logical reason behind any propensity that does exist to line programmers’ offices with works once seen on the blocks of the Mission District.

“I would imagine if you’re a company in the Bay Area and you’re thinking about what’s been endorsed on a larger level of the art world outside the Bay Area, it would be the Mission School aesthetic,” she tells me in a phone interview. “That has been accepted by the art world, but still has something youthful and cool about it.”

Ian Ross goes in at the AdRoll office. Guardian photo by Sixteenth & Broadway Photography

Many of the mural artists who’ve been closely tied to the tech community have little to do with street art’s historical legacy.

Ian Ross has found major success in his fluid live paintings, landing a year-long residency at the current Facebook offices after one of his live works proved popular at the company’s campus café. He’s since done work for AdRoll, Lyft, Livefire, and other firms. Recently, he and wife Daniele Rocha opened a gallery in the tech-heavy neighborhood near AT&T Park where they highlight other artists’ works, many of whom have found similar levels of support working for tech companies and collectors.

“People really respond and appreciate street art in the tech world,” Ross says. “It’s a much more unpretentious format. People don’t need to know anything about art to get something out of the experience.”

“Ian’s work is vibrant, energetic, and his style is flexible and adaptable,” writes AdRoll president Adam Berke in an email shortly after our photographer captured shots of Ross creating a looping green and black piece during an AdRoll office party. “We think these attributes match our own values as a company and are common characteristics among the people that work here.”

But Ross is also quick to note that what he does is different than, say, the artists of Wild Style. “I personally don’t think one should call themselves a street artist if they are producing this work completely legally,” he says. “[Street artists] often work against a lot of dangerous variables to make their work viewable in public. I appreciate the risks they take to do this.”

Does it still count as street art when established subway writer Lee Quiñones paints the rooms in what became Sean Parker’s Greenwich Village “Bacchus House”? What about when Facebook employees are taught the fine art of stencil-making? What do you call art that looks similar to the illicit works of graffiti’s past, but is done in a context completely divorced from shadowy trainyards and unguarded rooftops?

As San Francisco culture continues to form around the rise of tech, street artists and their fans are far from the only ones pondering the importance of form versus function. At the very least though, we’re guaranteed some pretty walls.

Stage listings

Andrew Lam

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May 7, 2013

0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Previews Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (Tue/14, show at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (Sat/11, show at 8pm). Through May 18. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 25. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Last Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $17-30. Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through May 19. Will the apocalypse save us from ourselves? Mojo Theater again raises that question as it presents the second installment in director-playwright Peter Papadopoulos’ Love-Gone-Wrong-at-the-End-of-the-World trilogy, the follow-up to last season’s fertile and funny Lost Love. The story centers on a George and Martha-esque couple, Charles (Jonathan Bender) and Lucida (Kimberly Lester), who on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary declare all-out war, lobbing younger lovers at each other only to find their new partners (played by an increasingly endearing Michael Saenz and an unexpectedly powerful Gloria McDonald) have a past together and unresolved issues of their own. The grimly romantic comedy returns to, without greatly elaborating on, a familiar fantasy: blowing away the haze of our fractious, insecure, and muddled love lives in the clarifying immediacy of disaster. That this may be more than pure fantasy — that the seemingly discrete realms of personal and political trauma may be in some subtle and profound way connected — is an animating dimension of the trilogy, but here in a more superficial and perfunctory fashion than in Lost Love. The strength of the production lies less in its premise than in the penetrating humor and emotional veracity in Papadopoulos’ sure, heightened dialogue, which is played generally well by the cast and exceptionally so by a vibrantly intelligent Lester, Mojo’s co–artistic director. The staging also benefits, albeit inconsistently, from a stylized approach that revels in self-conscious artifice (including a trio of stage managers from “Command Center Communications,” a video-backdrop by Micah Stieglitz, and some light choreography by Lester). These strengths lend a restless, occasionally inspired production a slow-burning charm, but leave one wondering what might be left when all the dust settles. (Avila)

Little Me Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm. Through May 19. 42nd Street Moon performs Neil Simon’s outrageous musical.

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 18. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 26. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a twist on the Shakespeare classic, set in an urban neighborhood in the 1950s.

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. Through May 26. The 17th fest presented by “San Francisco’s incubator for a new generation of playwrights” includes the PlayGround Film Festival, staged readings of four new full-length plays, a fully-produced program of six short plays, panel discussions, and more.

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Wed/8-Thu/9, 7pm; Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 3pm). Completing a trilogy of plays about body awareness and self-image (along with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig), Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty begins with a misconstrued remark that quickly gathers enough weight and momentum to tear three sets of relationships apart in the span of a two-hour play. The SF Playhouse production begins with a bang, or rather an awesomely knock-down, blow-out breakup fight between a righteously pissed-off Steph (Lauren English) and her awkwardly passive boyfriend Greg (Craig Marker), who has inadvertently referred to her as “regular” in a conversation with his jerkish buddy Kent (Patrick Russell), which she takes to mean he finds her ugly. English’s Steph is at turns ferocious and fragile, and her comic timing as she eviscerates Greg’s looks in a mall food court zings, while the hyperkinetic Russell elevates the condition of noxiously irredeemable douchebag to an art form. But terrific acting and polished design can only make up so much for a script that feels not only flawed, barely scratching the surface of the whys and wherefores each character has internalized an unrealistic view of the importance of conventional beauty standards, but also already dated, with its circa-2008 pop culture references. Ultimately it gives the impression of being a rerun of a Lifetime television drama that wraps itself up into a too-neat package just in time for the final credits to roll to its admittedly kickass soundtrack (provided by Billie Cox). (Gluckstern)

Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose About Samuel Beckett Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $10-20. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. Performers Under Stress remounts and revamps its series of short plays and pieces by Samuel Beckett, this time staging it throughout the basement quarters of Bindlestiff Studio, where audiences are led around an economical maze of performance spaces. Opening weekend consisted of too much text and too little in way of staging ideas, especially with several spoken selections of Beckett prose (which have reportedly since been dropped from the program). The best of what remains (in a program of six short plays total) includes Valerie Fachman’s respectable performance as the disembodied “mouth” of the brilliant Not I; and James Udom and Geo Epsilany’s duet in Rough for Theatre I, in which a wheelchair-bound food-hoarder (a softly eccentric Epsilany) strikes up a doomed friendship with a blind beggar (a solid Udom) amid a colorless and barren landscape. The bucket of Beckett dreary gets less satisfying from there, though director Scott Baker’s wordless performance as the titular Joe in Eh Joe proves poised and the doubled voices in his head (by Melissa Clason and Allison Hunter Blackwell) both haunting and intriguing. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through May 18. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Arsonists Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $35-60. Wed/8-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 2 and 7pm. There’s a lot of humor to be found in Alistair Beaton’s crackling translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, playing now at the Aurora Theatre, but much of the laughter it elicits is of the nervous variety, as the play’s mostly protagonist, the effete, bourgeois Herr Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) inadvertently signs off on his own destruction when he invites an uncouth arsonist to come and stay in his attic (Michael Ray Wisely). “If we assume everyone is an arsonist, where does that get us?” becomes his standard deflection, as one arsonist becomes two (adding in the unctuous, nihilistic Tim Kniffin), and the empty attic a repository for giant drums of gasoline, a detonator, and fuse wire — arousing the suspicions of a chorus of firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Michael Uy Kelly), who act as the conscience and guardians of the township. Although on the surface the scenario is patently absurd, the message that passivity in the face of evil is like helping to measure out the fuse wire that will eventually claim your life, is relatively clear. “Not every fire is determined by fate,” point out the firefighters right in the first act. Hiatt, as Biedermann, strikes an admirable balance between loathsome and powerless, while Gwen Loeb shines as his socialite wife, Babette, as does Dina Percia as his agitated housemaid, Anna. (Gluckstern)

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Wed, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Through May 18. Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 23, 2pm; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bailout! Or can you picture this prophecy? The temperatures are too hot for me.” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/10-Sun/12, 8pm. Pay what you can. Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater perform a site-specific multidisciplinary performance inspired by environmental disasters.

“Bitch and Tell: A Real, Funny Show” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.ftloose.org. Sat/11, 8pm. $8-10. Comedy with Tracy Shapiro, Carolé Acuña, Allison Mick, and more.

“Bob’s Burgers Live!” Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium, 1111 California, SF; http://bit.ly/bobssanfrancisco. Sat/11, 8pm. $32.50. The cast of the animated series performs.

“Bound for Glory” Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Fri/10, 7:30pm; Sat/11, 2pm. $8-50. Marsh Youth Theater’s MainStage Performance Ensemble presents a musical (written by the ensemble with director Lisa Quoresimo) about a Dust Bowl-era family.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/12, 3 and 6:15pm. $29.95-49.95 (includes meal). Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.elriosf.com. Mon/13, 8pm. $7-20. Fourth anniversary show with Frankie Quiñones, Dan St. Paul, Aundre the Wonderwoman, and more.

“The Fantasticks” Mission Dolores Academy Auditorium, 3371 16th St, SF; www.16thstreetplayers.org. Fri/10 and Sat, 7:30pm (also Sat/11, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. Free. The 16th Street Players perform the classic musical.

“I Am a Lie that Always Tells the Truth” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.kingdomofnot.com. Fri/10, 8pm. $10-20. The Kingdom of Not (Dan Carbone and Andrew Goldfarb) perform “music, monologues, and emergency dispatches.”

“ImmigraNation” Punchline Comedy Club, 444 Battery, SF; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Tue/14, 8pm. $15. Comedy about the immigrant experience with Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, Samson Koletkar, and more.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Mortified” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.getmortified.com. Fri/10, 7:30pm. $21. Also Sat/11, 7:30pm, $20. Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. The storytelling series, which specializes in all things embarassing, ups the ante with a Mother’s Day theme this month.

“Mutant Creatures and Unlikely Teachers: Short Plays by Short People” Koret Auditorium, De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.stagewright.org. Tue/14, 11am. Free (advance reservations required). Also May 16, 6:30pm ($10) and May 17, 7pm ($50; fundraiser for StageWright program), Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.stagewright.org. StageWright presents plays by fifth graders at Starr King Elementary School, performed by professional actors and museums.

“Once in Love with Loesser” Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. Mon/13-Tue/14, 7pm. $45-70. 42nd Street Moon presents Tony nominee Emily Skinner performing songs by Frank Loesser.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.sfballet.org. Wed/8, 7:30pm; Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm); Sun/12, 2pm. $45-250. Performing the US premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella.

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

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.smuinballet.org. Fri-Sat and May 16, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through May 19. $24-65. Also May 22-25, 8pm (also May 25, 2pm); May 26, 2pm. $52-68. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View. Also May 31-June 1, 8pm (also June 1, 2pm). $54-70. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. The company presents the West Coast premiere of Helen Pickett’s Petal and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s JAZZIN’, among other works.

“A Spaghetti Western” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.clownsnotbombs.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm). $15-20. ClownSnotBombs performs a circus adventure about pasta and the Wild West.

“Stretchmarks” Creativity Theater, Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.themommadrama.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. $25. The Momma Drama presents this play as part of a mom-centric event on Mother’s Day.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Asian Improv aRts: 25th Anniversary: Traditions in Transformation,” Sat/11, 1-3pm; “Taiwan in the Gardens,” Sun/12, 1-2:30pm.

BAY AREA

Company C Contemporary Ballet Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.lesherartscenter.org. Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 1pm. $23-45. The company’s spring program features Natoma, a world premiere by Company C dancer David von Ligon.

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 3pm. $30-92. The company performs the Bay Area premiere of its latest ballet, Rodin.

“A History of the Body” Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St, #290, Oakl; historyofbody.eventbrite.com. Sat/11, 7:30pm. $15-25. Work-in-progress performance of Aimee Suzara’s new play.

Oakland Ballet Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice, Oakl; www.oaklandballet.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). $20-35. The company performs its spring season program, “Diaghilev Imagery.”

“The Shout: Life’s True Stories” Grand Lake Coffee House, 440 Grand, Oakl; www.theshoutstorytelling.com. Mon/13, 7:30pm. $5-20. Ten-minute tales from a variety of storytellers.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. June 3 and 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

Another attack on public-employee unions

Zelda Bronstein

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May 2, 2013

43

Another attack on public-employee unions

Big-business and conservative interests have been trying to years to find a way to undermine the political clout of organized labor, particularly unions like the teachers and nurses, who have played a huge role in progressive campaigns. And now there’s a new tactic.

The anti-union folks have gone to court to try to do what they haven’t been able to do in the legislative arena: take away the ability of public-employee unions to use membership dues for political campaigns:

In a scarcely-noticed lawsuit filed Monday in federal district court in Los Angeles, a conservative nonprofit, the Center for Individual Rights, claims that California’s system for collecting union dues from government employees abridges free speech safeguards by compelling employees to subsidize union political advocacy and activities with which they disagree.

Peter Scheer, who runs the California First Amendment Coalition, notes that current law is on the side of the unions — but five Supreme Court justices have been critical of the prevailing case law.

And if they prevail? Public employee unions, not just in California but across the country, would lose the bulk of their dues funding-and with it, the ability to wield decisive political influence in state and local governments everywhere. That is a big deal.

Yep. It’s a big deal. It could do what corporate America has been trying to do for years — eliminate the one remaining power base with the money to challenge right-wing efforts. If this gets all the way to the Supremes, it will be a few years away, but we need to keep an eye on it.

SFMTA chief hopes to calm the parking meter furor at supervisorial hearing

Sasha Cuttler

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May 1, 2013

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SFMTA chief hopes to calm the parking meter furor at supervisorial hearing

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency director Ed Reiskin faces a tough challenge tomorrow (Thu/2) at the Board of Supervisors Neighborhood Services and Safety hearing that Sup. Mark Farrell has called on expanding parking meters into new neighborhoods, where Reiskin is expected to face a hornet’s nest of SFMTA critics stirred up by the loss of free street parking and perceptions that the agency is mismanaging public spaces and transit. [UPDATE: Read what happened here.]

Reiskin needs to quell some of the anger that is erupting in the northeast Mission District, Potrero Hill, and other areas slated for new meters enough to prevent increased supervisorial intervention into his independent agency and ensure a transit improvement bond measure planned for next year has a chance of passing – which the agency desperately needs to make improvements to Muni.

“We appreciate the opportunity to share information on how we’re trying to create more parking availability and ease congestion,” SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told us.

Jay Primus, who manages the SF Park variable price meter program for the SFMTA, told us he’s seen the presentation that Reiskin will be giving and finds it compelling, even though he knows better than anyone that, as Primus said, “Parking is always a difficult subject, particularly in an area as dense as San Francisco.”

It’s hard to imagine what might satisfy the SFMTA’s staunchest critics, who have created websites blasting and lampooning the agency’s every action and formed opposition groups that use militant rhetoric.

Mary Eliza is the spokesperson for Eastern Neighborhoods United Front, which has whipped up critics of the parking plans with calls to “FILL THE HALL. Raise your flag and wear your colors.” Speaking to the Guardian, she cited a litany of complaints and deep, conspiratorial suspicion of the SFMTA and its agenda, which is why she said critics have appealed to the supervisors.

“We’re not dealing much with the MTA anymore, we’re dealing with the supervisors because we think it’s our best chance to get anything accomplished,” Eliza told us.

They seem to have found a sympathetic audience with Farrell, a conservative from the westside, where pro-car ideologies are strongest. “Even as a transit first city, San Franciscans deserve to have reasonable parking situations in their neighborhoods. With plans under discussion to expand SFMTA’s number of parking meters citywide, every potentially affected neighborhood deserves to have extensive input into and thorough understanding of SFMTA’s upcoming plan,” Farrell wrote in calling for the hearing.

Primus said the SFMTA does try to be responsive to community concerns, noting that when its plans for new meters in the northeast Mission, Potrero Hill, and Mission Bay ran into strong community opposition in 2011, officials delayed the plans to gather more data and do more community outreach, separate the proposals, and remove them from the SF Park pilot program.

They are now finishing work on the Mission plan, which should come out this summer, after they do more work on solving issues raised by car repair and other light industrial businesses. But Primus said parking scarcity and good transit access in the area make it “an area where good parking management is all the more important.”

Then comes Potrero Hill, where the anti-meter furor appears to be strongest. But with increased development planned for the area, Primus noted that the community and Board of Supervisors have already called for more active parking management by the SFMTA: “All these parking policies were called for in the Eastern Neighborhoods plan, so it was already approved by the supervisors.”

Stage Listings

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April 30, 2013

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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Opens Fri/3, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 25. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Last Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $30. Opens Thu/2, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through May 19. Mojo Theatre performs Peter Papadopoulos’ play about two couples struggling through “the landmines of love.”

Little Me Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Previews Wed/1, 7pm; Thu/2-Fri/3, 8pm. Opens Sat/4, 6pm. Runs Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm. Through May 19. 42nd Street Moon performs Neil Simon’s outrageous musical.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Opens Sat/4, 8pm. Runs Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 26. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a twist on the Shakespeare classic, set in an urban neighborhood in the 1950s.

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. May 1-26. The 17th fest presented by “San Francisco’s incubator for a new generation of playwrights” includes the PlayGround Film Festival, staged readings of four new full-length plays, a fully-produced program of six short plays, panel discussions, and more.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (May 11, show at 8pm). Through May 18. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

The Expulsion of Malcolm X Southside Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.fortmason.org. $30-42.50. Fri/3-Sat/4, 8pm; Sun/5, 3pm. Colors of Vision Entertainment and GO Productions present Larry Americ Allen’s drama about the relationship between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

How To Make Your Bitterness Work For You Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.bitternesstobetterness.com. $15-25. Sun/5, 2pm. Fred Raker performs his comedy about the self-help industry.

I’m Not OK, Cupid 🙁 Shelton Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.leftcoasttheatreco.org. $15-35. Thu/2-Sat/4, 8pm. Left Coast Theatre Co., a new company formed in 2012 from the gay men’s writing group GuyWriters Playwrights, offers this rocky but sometimes clever evening of seven short gay comedies about love, relationships, getting it on, getting it off, and so forth. The evening begins with Andrew Black’s A Small Fishing Village Wedged Between Estonia and Latvia, set in the Castro, where a gay couple (Chris Maltby and Dene Larson) try to foil a mixed couple of would-be robbers (Laura Espino and Richard Sargent) by injecting some homoerotic tension between their otherwise heterosexual vibe. Directed by ShawnJ West, it’s drolly if inconsistently acted, but never very funny, and followed by three more non-starters: James A. Martin’s Lollipops, Rodney “Rhoda” Taylor’s Goodbye, Cupid, and Black’s verse-bound Arlecchino’s Last Prank. The second half of the bill proves more satisfying overall — Rich Orloff’s Chekhov-inspired That Bitch, directed by Joseph Frank and featuring the able trio of Hayley Saccomano, Laura Espino, and Danielle O’Dea; Joseph Frank’s wacky The Parenthetical Trap, directed by Frank and Saccomano, wherein sibling rivalry (i.e., the amusingly puerile duo of Kyle Glasow and Dawson Montoya) meets dysfunctional family (rounded out by Gabrielle Motarjemi and Frank) reunited in musical harmony; and Alex Dremann’s randy and well-acted Four Dry Tongues, directed by ShawnJ West, in which friends Ginny (Angela Chandra) and Tristan (Michael Erickson) compete for the affection of guest Matt (Robert Rushin) by flirting with his gorgeously haughty lesbian friend Laura (Danielle O’Dea). (Avila)

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 18. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Lullaby Tree Phoenix Theater, 414 Mason, SF; www.secondwind.8m.com. $15-35. Thu/2-Sat/4, 8pm. In the face of the ever more extensive and controversial spread of GMO foods worldwide — not to mention last year’s state battle over Prop 37 — Second Wind premieres founding member and playwright Ian Walker’s half-whimsical, half-hardheaded drama about a boy searching for his mother in the underworld and a small band of lawyers and environmentalists going toe-to-toe with a multinational over the ownership of a mysterious crop of genetically engineered corn. It will eventually become plain that the two stories are linked, but first a ten-year-old boy (Samuel Berston) befriends a somewhat shrunken giant (Davern Wright) in an attempt to find his mother (Evangeline Crittenden) in an enchanted and hostile land of dragons. Elsewhere, Tim (Walker) and law partner Nod (Wright) prepare to do legal battle with a modern-day dragon, in the person of a corporate attorney (Cheryl Smith) for the ominous Mendes Corporation (read: Monsanto). They will argue over the ownership of the corn that has sprung up on the banks of a drowned town, and which may spell environmental disaster for the nature preserve surrounding it. In this fight Tim and Nod are in uneasy, ultimately disastrous alliance with activist Callie (Crittenden), whom Nod distrusts and with whom Tim is hopelessly smitten. The result is a convoluted plot and a fitful production (co-directed by Walker and Misha Hawk-Wyatt) in which a three-pronged story precariously balances the fairy tale, the romance, and the legal battle. It’s the last prong that offers the more interesting if formulaic scenes, in which the politics of GMOs mesh with the swashbuckling machinations of the attorneys. But the less compelling strands converge and take precedence, forcing things down a sentimental and forgettable road. (Avila)

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through May 11. Completing a trilogy of plays about body awareness and self-image (along with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig), Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty begins with a misconstrued remark that quickly gathers enough weight and momentum to tear three sets of relationships apart in the span of a two-hour play. The SF Playhouse production begins with a bang, or rather an awesomely knock-down, blow-out breakup fight between a righteously pissed-off Steph (Lauren English) and her awkwardly passive boyfriend Greg (Craig Marker), who has inadvertently referred to her as “regular” in a conversation with his jerkish buddy Kent (Patrick Russell), which she takes to mean he finds her ugly. English’s Steph is at turns ferocious and fragile, and her comic timing as she eviscerates Greg’s looks in a mall food court zings, while the hyperkinetic Russell elevates the condition of noxiously irredeemable douchebag to an art form. But terrific acting and polished design can only make up so much for a script that feels not only flawed, barely scratching the surface of the whys and wherefores each character has internalized an unrealistic view of the importance of conventional beauty standards, but also already dated, with its circa-2008 pop culture references. Ultimately it gives the impression of being a rerun of a Lifetime television drama that wraps itself up into a too-neat package just in time for the final credits to roll to its admittedly kickass soundtrack (provided by Billie Cox). (Gluckstern)

Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose About Samuel Beckett Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $10-20. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 11. Performers Under Stress remounts and revamps its series of short plays and pieces by Samuel Beckett, this time staging it throughout the basement quarters of Bindlestiff Studio, where audiences are led around an economical maze of performance spaces. Opening weekend consisted of too much text and too little in way of staging ideas, especially with several spoken selections of Beckett prose (which have reportedly since been dropped from the program). The best of what remains (in a program of six short plays total) includes Valerie Fachman’s respectable performance as the disembodied “mouth” of the brilliant Not I; and James Udom and Geo Epsilany’s duet in Rough for Theatre I, in which a wheelchair-bound food-hoarder (a softly eccentric Epsilany) strikes up a doomed friendship with a blind beggar (a solid Udom) amid a colorless and barren landscape. The bucket of Beckett dreary gets less satisfying from there, though director Scott Baker’s wordless performance as the titular Joe in Eh Joe proves poised and the doubled voices in his head (by Melissa Clason and Allison Hunter Blackwell) both haunting and intriguing. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through May 18. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Arsonists Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $35-60. Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through May 12. There’s a lot of humor to be found in Alistair Beaton’s crackling translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, playing now at the Aurora Theatre, but much of the laughter it elicits is of the nervous variety, as the play’s mostly protagonist, the effete, bourgeois Herr Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) inadvertently signs off on his own destruction when he invites an uncouth arsonist to come and stay in his attic (Michael Ray Wisely). “If we assume everyone is an arsonist, where does that get us?” becomes his standard deflection, as one arsonist becomes two (adding in the unctuous, nihilistic Tim Kniffin), and the empty attic a repository for giant drums of gasoline, a detonator, and fuse wire — arousing the suspicions of a chorus of firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Michael Uy Kelly), who act as the conscience and guardians of the township. Although on the surface the scenario is patently absurd, the message that passivity in the face of evil is like helping to measure out the fuse wire that will eventually claim your life, is relatively clear. “Not every fire is determined by fate,” point out the firefighters right in the first act. Hiatt, as Biedermann, strikes an admirable balance between loathsome and powerless, while Gwen Loeb shines as his socialite wife, Babette, as does Dina Percia as his agitated housemaid, Anna. (Gluckstern)

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage & Shipwreck Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Shipwreck runs Wed/1-Thu/2, 7pm; Fri/3-Sat/4, 8pm; Sun/5, 5pm. Voyage runs Sat/4, 3pm. Last year in the Shotgun Players’ production of Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy (also playing in repertory through May 4), we were introduced to a tight circle of Russian thinkers and dreamers, chafing against the oppressive regime of Nicholas I. In the second part, Shipwrecked, we find them older, perhaps wiser, struggling to keep their revolutionary ideals alive while also juggling familial concerns and personal passions. Focused mainly on Alexander Herzen (Patrick Kelley Jones) and family, Shipwrecked travels from Russia to Germany, France, Italy, and the English Channel, buffeted from all directions by the forces of the uprisings and burgeoning political consciousness of the European proletariat. It’s an unwieldy, sprawling world that Stoppard, and history, have built (made somewhat more so by the Shotgun production’s strangely languid pace during even the most dramatic sequences) but it’s worth making the effort to spend time absorbing the singular world views of Russian émigré Herzen, his impulsively passionate wife Natalie (Caitlyn Louchard), the cantankerous, influential critic Vissarion Belinsky (Nick Medina), professional rabble-rouser Michael Bakunin (Joseph Salazar) and up-and-coming writer Ivan Turgenev (Richard Reinholdt) as they desperately seek to carve out both their personal identities and a greater, cohesive Russian one from the imperfect turmoil of Western philosophy. (Gluckstern)

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Wed, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Through May 18. Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 23, 2pm; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Simon Amstell Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. Sat/4, 8 and 10pm. $31. The British comedian performs.

“Baasics.3: The Deep End” ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.baasics.com. Mon/6, 7pm. Free (limited seating). Bay Area Art and Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions produces its third program, featuring artists and scientists discussing and presenting, via artistic methods, various neurodiversities.

“Baile en la Calle: The Mural Dances” Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. Sun/5, 11:30am, 12:15pm, 1pm, and 1:45pm. Free. Four free dance performances in a variety of styles, presented in front of five Mission District murals. Guided walking tours start at Brava.

“Bound for Glory” Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Sat/4, 5pm; Sun/5, 3pm; May 10, 7:30pm; May 11, 2pm. $8-50. Marsh Youth Theater’s MainStage Performance Ensemble presents a musical (written by the ensemble with director Lisa Quoresimo) about a Dust Bowl-era family.

“Cabaret Showcase Showdown: Best Female Crooner” Martuni’s, 4 Valencia, SF; (415) 241-0205. Sun/5, 7pm. $7. With guest judge Linda Kosut and guest entertainer Sabrina Chap.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat, 6:15pm. Through May 18. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Stars Showcase” Neck of the Woods, 406 Clement, SF; www.dannydechi.com. Tue/7, 8pm. $10. With host Danny Dechi and guests Bobby Salem, Charlie Ballard, and more.

Company C Contemporary Ballet Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.companyballet.org/performances. Thu/2-Sat/4, 8pm. $23-45. Also May 9-11, 8pm; May 12, 1pm, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.lesherartscenter.org. The company’s spring program features Natoma, a world premiere by Company C dancer David von Ligon.

Hope Mohr Dance ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Fri/3-Sat/4, 8pm; Sun/5, 2pm. $20-30. The company presents its sixth home season, including the world premiere of Hope Mohr’s Failure of the Sign is the Sign.

Kunst-Stoff Dance Company Old Mint, 88 Fifth St, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Wed/1-Thu/2, 7pm, 7:40pm, and 8:20pm. Free. Yannis Adoniou and company celebrate 15 years of Kunst-Stoff with the world premiere of Rapport, presented at the historic Old Mint Building.

“May Day 2013” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri/3-Sun/5, 8pm. $35-5000. Three nights of performances benefit CounterPULSE. The line-up includes Keith Hennessy, Sean Dorsey, Jess Curtis/Gravity, DavEnd, Marc Bamutho Joseph, Monique Jenkinson, and more.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Mutiny Radio Comedy Showcase” Mutiny Radio, 2781 21st St, SF; www.mutinyradio.org. Fri/3, 8:30pm. $5-20. Podcast Pamtastic’s Comedy Clubhouse presents this showcase of local comics.

“The News” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF; somarts.com/thenews. Tue/7, 7:30pm. $5. This month’s installment in the new and experimental performance series previews four shows from the upcoming National Queer Arts Festival.

Paul Taylor Dance Company Lam Research Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.sfperformances.org. Wed/1-Sat/4, 8pm; Sun/5, 2pm. $35-60. Local premieres include Kith and Kin, To Make Crops Grow, and The Uncommitted.

“Picklewater Clown Cabaret Benefit for the Medical Clown Project” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; ww.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/6, 8pm. $25. Picklewater Clown Cabaret performs to raise money for an ongoing project providing therapeutic clowning for adult and pediatric patients in Bay Area hospitals.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

“Rotunda Dance Series: Chitresh Das Dance Company” San Francisco City Hall, Grove at Van Ness, SF; www.dancersgroup.org. Fri/3, noon. Free. Free performance by the acclaimed Kathak dance troupe under the rotunda at City Hall.

San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.sfballet.org. Fri-Sat, Tue/7, and May 9, 8pm (also May 11, 2pm); Sun, 2pm; May 8, 7:30pm. Through May 12. $45-250. Performing the US premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella.

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

“A Spaghetti Western” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.clownsnotbombs.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). Through May 11. $15-20. ClownSnotBombs performs a circus adventure about pasta and the Wild West.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: Anna Halprin’s Planetary Dance (Sun/5, 2-3pm).

BAY AREA

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun/5, 7:30pm. $10-20. Music and dance of Bali, featuring the world premiere of Warna.

“Les 7 Doigts de la Main” Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Fri/3, 8pm; Sat/4, 2pm; Sun/5, 3pm. $22-52. Canada’s nouveau circus troupe performs.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/6, June 3, and June 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings. *

Stage listings

Andrew Lam

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April 23, 2013

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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Opens Fri/26, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

BAY AREA

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Previews Wed/24, 7:30pm, and Fri/26, 8pm. Opens Sat/27, 8pm. Runs Wed, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (May 11, show at 8pm). Through May 18. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

The Bereaved Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.crowdedfire.org. $10-35. Wed/24-Sat/27, 8pm. Crowded Fire Theater launches its Mainstage season with Thomas Bradshaw’s wicked comedy about “sex, drugs, and the American dream.”

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

The Bus New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $32-45. Wed/24-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 2pm. NCTC performs James Lantz’s tale of two young men whose meeting place for their secret relationship is a church bus.

The Expulsion of Malcolm X Southside Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.fortmason.org. $30-42.50. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 5. Colors of Vision Entertainment and GO Productions present Larry Americ Allen’s drama about the relationship between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Ghostbusters: Live On Stage Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. $20. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm. Rhiannastan Productions brings the beloved 1984 comedy to the stage.

How To Make Your Bitterness Work For You Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.bitternesstobetterness.com. $15-25. Sun, 2pm. Through May 5. Fred Raker performs his comedy about the self-help industry.

I’m Not OK, Cupid 🙁 Shelton Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.leftcoasttheatreco.org. $15-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 4. Left Coast Theatre Co., a new company formed in 2012 from the gay men’s writing group GuyWriters Playwrights, offers this rocky but sometimes clever evening of seven short gay comedies about love, relationships, getting it on, getting it off, and so forth. The evening begins with Andrew Black’s A Small Fishing Village Wedged Between Estonia and Latvia, set in the Castro, where a gay couple (Chris Maltby and Dene Larson) try to foil a mixed couple of would-be robbers (Laura Espino and Richard Sargent) by injecting some homoerotic tension between their otherwise heterosexual vibe. Directed by ShawnJ West, it’s drolly if inconsistently acted, but never very funny, and followed by three more non-starters: James A. Martin’s Lollipops, Rodney “Rhoda” Taylor’s Goodbye, Cupid, and Black’s verse-bound Arlecchino’s Last Prank. The second half of the bill proves more satisfying overall — Rich Orloff’s Chekhov-inspired That Bitch, directed by Joseph Frank and featuring the able trio of Hayley Saccomano, Laura Espino, and Danielle O’Dea; Joseph Frank’s wacky The Parenthetical Trap, directed by Frank and Saccomano, wherein sibling rivalry (i.e., the amusingly puerile duo of Kyle Glasow and Dawson Montoya) meets dysfunctional family (rounded out by Gabrielle Motarjemi and Frank) reunited in musical harmony; and Alex Dremann’s randy and well-acted Four Dry Tongues, directed by ShawnJ West, in which friends Ginny (Angela Chandra) and Tristan (Michael Erickson) compete for the affection of guest Matt (Robert Rushin) by flirting with his gorgeously haughty lesbian friend Laura (Danielle O’Dea). (Avila)

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 18. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Lullaby Tree Phoenix Theater, 414 Mason, SF; www.secondwind.8m.com. $15-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 4. In the face of the ever more extensive and controversial spread of GMO foods worldwide — not to mention last year’s state battle over Prop 37 — Second Wind premieres founding member and playwright Ian Walker’s half-whimsical, half-hardheaded drama about a boy searching for his mother in the underworld and a small band of lawyers and environmentalists going toe-to-toe with a multinational over the ownership of a mysterious crop of genetically engineered corn. It will eventually become plain that the two stories are linked, but first a ten-year-old boy (Samuel Berston) befriends a somewhat shrunken giant (Davern Wright) in an attempt to find his mother (Evangeline Crittenden) in an enchanted and hostile land of dragons. Elsewhere, Tim (Walker) and law partner Nod (Wright) prepare to do legal battle with a modern-day dragon, in the person of a corporate attorney (Cheryl Smith) for the ominous Mendes Corporation (read: Monsanto). They will argue over the ownership of the corn that has sprung up on the banks of a drowned town, and which may spell environmental disaster for the nature preserve surrounding it. In this fight Tim and Nod are in uneasy, ultimately disastrous alliance with activist Callie (Crittenden), whom Nod distrusts and with whom Tim is hopelessly smitten. The result is a convoluted plot and a fitful production (co-directed by Walker and Misha Hawk-Wyatt) in which a three-pronged story precariously balances the fairy tale, the romance, and the legal battle. It’s the last prong that offers the more interesting if formulaic scenes, in which the politics of GMOs mesh with the swashbuckling machinations of the attorneys. But the less compelling strands converge and take precedence, forcing things down a sentimental and forgettable road. (Avila)

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through May 11. Completing a trilogy of plays about body awareness and self-image (along with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig), Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty begins with a misconstrued remark that quickly gathers enough weight and momentum to tear three sets of relationships apart in the span of a two-hour play. The SF Playhouse production begins with a bang, or rather an awesomely knock-down, blow-out breakup fight between a righteously pissed-off Steph (Lauren English) and her awkwardly passive boyfriend Greg (Craig Marker), who has inadvertently referred to her as “regular” in a conversation with his jerkish buddy Kent (Patrick Russell), which she takes to mean he finds her ugly. English’s Steph is at turns ferocious and fragile, and her comic timing as she eviscerates Greg’s looks in a mall food court zings, while the hyperkinetic Russell elevates the condition of noxiously irredeemable douchebag to an art form. But terrific acting and polished design can only make up so much for a script that feels not only flawed, barely scratching the surface of the whys and wherefores each character has internalized an unrealistic view of the importance of conventional beauty standards, but also already dated, with its circa-2008 pop culture references. Ultimately it gives the impression of being a rerun of a Lifetime television drama that wraps itself up into a too-neat package just in time for the final credits to roll to its admittedly kickass soundtrack (provided by Billie Cox). (Gluckstern)

Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose About Samuel Beckett Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $10-20. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 11. Performers Under Stress remounts and revamps its series of short plays and pieces by Samuel Beckett, this time staging it throughout the basement quarters of Bindlestiff Studio, where audiences are led around an economical maze of performance spaces. Opening weekend consisted of too much text and too little in way of staging ideas, especially with several spoken selections of Beckett prose (which have reportedly since been dropped from the program). The best of what remains (in a program of six short plays total) includes Valerie Fachman’s respectable performance as the disembodied “mouth” of the brilliant Not I; and James Udom and Geo Epsilany’s duet in Rough for Theatre I, in which a wheelchair-bound food-hoarder (a softly eccentric Epsilany) strikes up a doomed friendship with a blind beggar (a solid Udom) amid a colorless and barren landscape. The bucket of Beckett dreary gets less satisfying from there, though director Scott Baker’s wordless performance as the titular Joe in Eh Joe proves poised and the doubled voices in his head (by Melissa Clason and Allison Hunter Blackwell) both haunting and intriguing. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

Sheherezade 13 Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.wilywestproductions.com. $25. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm. Wily West Productions presents a short play showcase.

Show Me Yours: Songs of Innocence and Experience Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $27. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm. New Musical Theater of San Francisco performs a new musical revue written by Pen and Piano, the company’s resident group of writers and composers.

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Stuck Elevator American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-85. Wed/24-Sat/27, 8pm (also Wed/24 and Sat/27, 2pm); Sun/28, 7pm. As federal immigration reform captures the national spotlight, ACT premieres a dynamic and entertaining new musical by Byron Au Yong (score) and Aaron Jafferis (libretto) that privileges the real-life experience of an undocumented Chinese deliveryman Ming Kuang Chen, trapped for 81 hours in a Bronx elevator in 2005. Slickly directed by Chay Yew, the memories, fears, and fantasies of Guang (a sympathetic and mellifluous Julius Ahn) become the stuff of chamber opera, wherein the chamber is a malfunctioning elevator car in a dilapidated high-rise housing complex. Initially too afraid to call for help (lest his immigration status be discovered), Guang suffers at the thought of the precious dollars he is losing with each hour spent away from work, and distracts himself with thoughts of his wife (Marie-France Arcilla) and son (Raymond J. Lee) back home in China, his mean employer (Joseph Anthony Foronda in comical drag), and his Mexican friend and coworker (Joel Perez). With the undocumented immigrant’s precarious situation become a literal cell, Daniel Ostling’s impressively kinetic, expansive scenic design pivots between grimy naturalism and a multimedia canvas for the protagonist’s unbounded thoughts and imagination. Fantastical routines ensue, sometimes wistful and romantic, sometimes comical and outlandish, throughout a story and score that prove consistently engaging but also somewhat lacking in real suspense. The impressive cast is also a highlight here, and the 80 minutes go by pleasantly enough, even if the larger complexity of the subject — the social, racial, and class dynamics that produce the protagonist’s surreal situation — is itself somewhat confined by the genre of the romantic immigrant narrative. (Avila)

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Arsonists Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $35-60. Tue and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm); Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through May 12. There’s a lot of humor to be found in Alistair Beaton’s crackling translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, playing now at the Aurora Theatre, but much of the laughter it elicits is of the nervous variety, as the play’s mostly protagonist, the effete, bourgeois Herr Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) inadvertently signs off on his own destruction when he invites an uncouth arsonist to come and stay in his attic (Michael Ray Wisely). “If we assume everyone is an arsonist, where does that get us?” becomes his standard deflection, as one arsonist becomes two (adding in the unctuous, nihilistic Tim Kniffin), and the empty attic a repository for giant drums of gasoline, a detonator, and fuse wire — arousing the suspicions of a chorus of firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Michael Uy Kelly), who act as the conscience and guardians of the township. Although on the surface the scenario is patently absurd, the message that passivity in the face of evil is like helping to measure out the fuse wire that will eventually claim your life, is relatively clear. “Not every fire is determined by fate,” point out the firefighters right in the first act. Hiatt, as Biedermann, strikes an admirable balance between loathsome and powerless, while Gwen Loeb shines as his socialite wife, Babette, as does Dina Percia as his agitated housemaid, Anna. (Gluckstern)

Being Earnest Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.theatreworks.org. $23-73. Wed/24, 7:30pm; Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm (also Sat/27, 2pm); Sun/28, 2 and 7pm. TheatreWorks performs the world premiere of Paul Gordon’s musical take on Oscar Wilde’s comedy.

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage & Shipwreck Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Shipwreck runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through May 5. Voyage runs Sat/27 and May 4, 3pm. Last year in the Shotgun Players’ production of Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy (also playing in repertory through May 4), we were introduced to a tight circle of Russian thinkers and dreamers, chafing against the oppressive regime of Nicholas I. In the second part, Shipwrecked, we find them older, perhaps wiser, struggling to keep their revolutionary ideals alive while also juggling familial concerns and personal passions. Focused mainly on Alexander Herzen (Patrick Kelley Jones) and family, Shipwrecked travels from Russia to Germany, France, Italy, and the English Channel, buffeted from all directions by the forces of the uprisings and burgeoning political consciousness of the European proletariat. It’s an unwieldy, sprawling world that Stoppard, and history, have built (made somewhat more so by the Shotgun production’s strangely languid pace during even the most dramatic sequences) but it’s worth making the effort to spend time absorbing the singular world views of Russian émigré Herzen, his impulsively passionate wife Natalie (Caitlyn Louchard), the cantankerous, influential critic Vissarion Belinsky (Nick Medina), professional rabble-rouser Michael Bakunin (Joseph Salazar) and up-and-coming writer Ivan Turgenev (Richard Reinholdt) as they desperately seek to carve out both their personal identities and a greater, cohesive Russian one from the imperfect turmoil of Western philosophy. (Gluckstern)

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Through May 18. Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

The Language Archive Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.symmetrytheatre.com. $20-28. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 2pm. A linguist named George (a nerdy but sincere Gabriel Grilli), obsessed with collecting languages on the cusp of extinction, reels when his unhappy wife Mary (a captivatingly distraught but spirited Elena Wright) decides to leave him in Julia Cho’s heart-tugging comedy exploring the language of love and other ineffable things. As Mary, discouraged by George’s inability to voice a reason why she should stay, heads out to who knows where, George and his secretly smitten lab assistant Emma (Danielle Levin) try to interview an older married couple who are among the last speakers of a dying language. But the couple (played winningly, in vaguely Eastern garb, by Stacy Ross and Howard Swain) spends all their time fighting with one another — in English (the language of aggression and the noncommittal, as they at various points explain). In one of the best scenes, Mary meets a despairing older gentleman (Swain again, in one of several excellent supporting turns) on a railroad platform who will change the course of her life as, meanwhile, George copes with grief and the reexamination of his faith in language, including the unabashedly utopian Esperanto, his favorite. Cho’s narrative broaches an intriguing exploration of language’s underlying dialectic of joy and suffering, and the fact that perfect understanding lies finally beyond it. The play has strained aspects in its humor and dialogue, and Symmetry Theatre’s production doesn’t navigate every turn in the story equally well. But director Chloe Bronzan ensures an overall enjoyable and well-acted production (set in the small, intimate playing area at the Berkeley City Club), while making the most of several key scenes that mine the genuine pathos and wonder in the subject matter.

Love Letters Various Marin County venues; www.porchlight.net. $15-30. Through Sun/28. Porch Light Theater performs A.R. Gurney’s romantic play at four different Marin venues; check website for addresses and showtimes.

“Pear Slices” Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-30. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 2pm. Nine original short plays by members of the Pear Playwrights Guild.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and Thu/25 and May 23, 2pm; no matinee Sat/27; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Alonzo King LINES Ballet LAM Research Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.linesballet.org. Wed/24-Thu/25, 7:30pm; Fri/26-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 5pm. $30-65. The company celebrates its 30th anniversary spring season with a collaboration between choreographer Alonzo King and composer Edgar Meyer.

“Dances from the Heart 2” Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.helpisontheway.org. Sun/28, 7:30pm. $40-60. Dancers from top Bay Area companies, including ODC Dance and Company C Contemporary Ballet, join forces to raise funds for the Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation and other AIDS charities.

David Dorfman Dance Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm. $25-30. Performing Prophets of Funk, a work inspired by Sly and the Family Stone.

FACT/SF ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.factsf.org. Thu/25-Sat/27, 8pm. $23-28. World premiere of Falling, an evening-length contemporary dance piece.

“Ghetto Klown” Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market, SF; www.shnsf.com. Fri/26-Sat/27, 8pm. $40-95. John Leguizamo performs his latest autobiographical show.

“Journey of the Shadow” Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfchamberorchestra.org. Fri/26, 8pm. Also Sat/27, First Palo Alto United Methodist Church, 625 Hamilton, Palo Alto; Sun/28, 3pm, First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing, Berk. All performances free. The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra presents the world premiere of musical stories, spoken and sung, with special guests composer-in-residence Dr. Gabriela Lena Franke, and Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

Kunst-Stoff Dance Company Old Mint, 88 Fifth St, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Tue/30 and May 1-2, 7pm, 7:40pm, and 8:20pm. Free. Yannis Adoniou and company celebrate 15 years of Kunst-Stoff with the world premiere of Rapport, presented at the historic Old Mint Building.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“The Naked Stage” Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.improv.org. Sat/27, 8pm. $20. BATS Improv performs an improvised stage play.

Opera Parallele Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.operaparallele.org. Fri/26-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 2pm. $40-75. Performing a double bill of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

“The Romane Event Comedy Show” Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, SF; www.pacoromane.com. Wed/24, 8pm. $10. With Sean Keane, Paco Romane, Kate Willett, Matt Lieb, and more.

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

“Tickled Pink!” Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; www.caferoyale-sf.com. Thu/25, 8pm. Free. Comedy night with Butch Escobar, Ryan Papazian, Dan “Gonzo” Mechanik, and more.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

BAY AREA

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Wed/24-Sat/27, 8pm (also Sat/27, 2pm); Sun/28, 3pm. $30-92. Four programs highlight the company’s annual Cal Performances residency, including two Bay Area premieres.

CubaCaribe Festival Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon, Oakl; www.cubacaribe.org. Fri/26-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 2 and 7pm. $25. Master artists performing music and dance from the Caribbean Diaspora.

“The Divine Game” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/29, 8pm. $20. A spur to thought, to reading, to listening, to sparring over the meaning and magnitude of art — they’re all there in the brilliantly expansive, acute, and sometimes barbed observations of professor Vladimir Nabokov (a delighting, animated John Mercer), as he expounds on the subject of Russian literature in this simply staged but witty, well-honed dramatic reading from First Person Singular and adapter-director Joe Christiano. Presented as part of Shotgun’s Monday night Cabaret series, The Divine Game, drawing verbatim on Nabokov’s Cornell lectures of the 1950s, is an invitation to a heady walk down several byways in the land of great literary art, and there are few more discerning or inspiring guides whether or not you share in every conclusion about the relative merits and demerits of Chekhov (Joshua Han) or Dostoyevsky (Brian Quackenbush) — both of whom appear onstage alongside their idiosyncratic peers Gogol (Colin Johnson) and Tolstoy (Jess Thomas). There’s a frisson of mental joy in a distillation like, “Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people,” or the sweet-talking yet penetrating pronouncement that, “Of all the great characters that a great artist creates, his readers are the best,” and their cumulative impact over the course of 90 minutes offers enough inspiration for several reckless bookstore sprees. (Avila)

Nina Haft and Company Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz, Berk; ninahaftandcompany.wordpress.com. Fri/26-Sat/27, 8pm; Sun/28, 7pm. $20. World premiere of a performance installation of dance, sound, words, and food: To begin with the ending already in sight. *

Screening is believing

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April 23, 2013

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cheryl@sfbg.com

SFIFF Most contemporary Americans don’t know much about Uganda — that is, beyond Forest Whitaker’s Oscar-winning performance as Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland. Though that film took some liberties with the truth, it did effectively convey the grotesque terrors of the dictator’s 1970s reign. (Those with deeper curiosities should check out Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait.) But even decades post-Amin, the East African nation has somehow retained its horrific human-rights record. For example: what extremist force was behind the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which proposed the death penalty as punishment for gayness?

The answer might surprise you, or not. As the gripping, fury-fomenting doc God Loves Uganda reveals, America’s own Christian Right has been exporting hate under the guise of missionary work for some time. Taking advantage of Uganda’s social fragility — by building schools and medical clinics, passing out food, etc. — evangelical mega churches, particularly the Kansas City, Mo.-based, breakfast-invoking International House of Prayer, have converted large swaths of the population to their ultra-conservative beliefs.

Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, an Oscar winner for 2010 short Music by Prudence, follows naive “prayer warriors” as they journey to Uganda for the first time; his apparent all-access relationship with the group shows that they aren’t outwardly evil people — but neither do they comprehend the very real consequences of their actions. His other sources, including two Ugandan clergymen who’ve seen their country change for the worse and an LGBT activist who lives every day in peril, offer a more harrowing perspective. Evocative and disturbing, God Loves Uganda seems likely to earn Williams more Oscar attention.

>>Check out our short reviews of several SFIFF films of interest.

More outrage awaits in Fatal Assistance, Port-au-Prince native Raoul Peck’s searing investigation into the bungling of post-earthquake humanitarian efforts in Haiti. So many good intentions, so many dollars donated, so many token celebrities (Bill Clinton, Sean Penn) involved — and yet millions of Haitians remain homeless, living in “temporary” shelters. Disorganization among the overabundance of well-meaning NGOs that rushed to help is one cause; there’s also the matter of nobody trusting the Haitian government to make its own financial decisions. Peck, a former Minister of Culture, offers a rare insider’s perspective. Though the film’s voice-overs (framed as letters that begin “dear friend”) can get a little treacly, the raw evidence Peck collects of “the disaster of the community not being able to respond to the disaster” is powerful stuff.

There’s more levity sprinkled amid the tragedy (and bureaucratic frustration) contained in Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance. If nothing else, this doc will make you extremely cautious if you ever find yourself visiting the capital of Bulgaria; its depiction of the city’s medical care is grim at best. An underpaid, harried trio — doctor, nurse, and driver — grapple with dispatchers who don’t pick up and drivers who don’t let ambulances pass, bad directions, outdated equipment, and other unbelievable situations that would be funny if lives weren’t hanging in the balance. Metev never films the patients, instead keeping his focus on the paramedics. Sarcastic nurse Mila Mikhailova is a standout, sweetly calming down an injured child, bluntly advising a drug addict, and joking about her love life with her co-workers. Only during rare moments of downtime does her exhaustion emerge.

>>Dennis Harvey on SFIFF’s Finnish angle.

More lives in chaos — albeit slightly more existentially — are depicted in A River Changes Course, which picked up a Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Cambodian American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam followed a trio of rural Cambodian families over several years, eventually crafting a vividly-shot, meditative look at lives being forced to modernize. Talk about frustrating: farmers grapple with a new worry — debt — so the eldest daughter heads to Phnom Penh to work in a factory. But the paltry wages she earns aren’t enough to offset the money they will have to spend on food, since they can’t farm enough to eat without her around to help. Elsewhere, a teenage boy who figured he’d grow up to be a fisherman takes a backbreaking planting job when the fish grow scarce; he confesses to Mam that he’s long since given up any dreams of getting an education. “Progress” has rarely felt so bleak.

Adding a much-needed dose of quirk to all of the above is Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s Rent a Family Inc., about Ryuichi, a Tokyo man whose business name translates to “I want to cheer you up.” He’s a professional stand-in, offering himself or any of his rotating cast of staffers to pretend to be friends or relatives in situations, including weddings, where the real thing is either not available or won’t suffice.

That premise alone would make for an intriguing doc — though there’s a disclaimer that certain scenes with clients are “reconstructed” — but Ryuichi’s career choice feels even more surreal once it’s revealed how dysfunctional his own family is; among a wife and two kids, he gets along best with the family Chihuahua. Though Schröder focuses on Ryuichi’s ennui at the expense of delving into, say, what it is about Japanese culture that enables the need for fake family members, the guy is undeniably fascinating. “I’m like a handyman, fixing people’s social engagements,” he explains — but he has no clue how to mend his own. *

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

festival.sffs.org

Short takes: SFIFF week one

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April 23, 2013

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SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

festival.sffs.org

The Artist and the Model (Fernando Trueba, Spain, 2012) The horror of the blank page, the raw sensuality of marble, and the fresh-meat attraction of a new model — just a few of the starting points for this thoughtful narrative about an elderly sculptor finding and shaping his possibly finest and final muse. Bedraggled and homeless beauty Mercè (Aida Folch) washes up in a small French town in the waning days of World War II and is taken in by a kindly woman (Claudia Cardinale), who seems intent on pleasantly pimping her out as a nude model to her artist husband (Jean Rochefort). As his former model, she knows Mercè has the type of body he likes — and that she’s capable of restoring his powers, in more ways than one, if you know what I mean. Yet this film by Fernando Trueba (1992’s Belle Époque) isn’t that kind of movie, with those kinds of models, especially when Mercè turns out to have more on her mind than mere pleasure. Done up in a lustrous, sunlit black and white that recalls 1957’s Wild Strawberries, The Artist and the Model instead offers a steady, respectful, and loving peek into a process, and unique relationship, with just a touch of poetry. Fri/26, 1pm, and Sun/28, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Daughter (Alexander Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova, Russia, 2012) Imagine a serial-killer tale as directed by Tarkovsky and you’ll get an idea of this fascinating, ambiguous Russian drama by co-directors Aleksandr Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova. Someone is murdering teenage girls in what otherwise seems a tranquil village backwater. That’s one reason the almost painfully naïve Inna (Maria Smolnikova) is kept on a fairly tight leash by her gruff, conservative widower father (Oleg Tkachev), who expects her to perform all housekeeper duties and mind a little brother. When brash, borderline-trashy new schoolmate Marta (Yana Osipova) surprisingly decides to make Inna her best friend, she’s both a liberating and dangerous influence. Less interested in narrative clarity than issues of morality, spirituality, and guilt (at one point the killer confesses to a priest whose daughter he murdered — tormenting the cleric who is bound to confidentiality), this often-gorgeous feature is a worthy addition to the long line of somber, meditative Russian art films. Fri/26, 6:15pm, and Sun/28, 1pm, Kabuki; May 6, 9pm, PFA. (Dennis Harvey)

The Kill Team (Dan Krauss, US, 2012) Dan Krauss’ documentary chronicles the shocking case of a US Army unit in Afghanistan whose squad leader, one Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, encouraged his men to kill unarmed, unaccused civilians for fun, then cover it up as alleged self-defense. (He also collected severed fingers for an eventual bone necklace.) When subordinate Adam Winfield was disturbed enough by this to tell his parents (his father a Marine vet), and ponder informing officials, he was threatened with his own lethal “accident.” Once the scandal finally broke, he found himself on military trial for murder along with Gibbs and others. While sometimes a little too slickly made in a narrative-feature kind of way, this is a potent look at the vagaries of military justice, not to mention a military culture that can foster dangerously frustrated adrenaline junkies. As one of Winfield’s fellow accused puts it, Afghanistan was “boring as fuck” because they expected to be “kickin’ ass” when “instead we’re forced to help ’em build a well, or a school, or whatever.” Another shrugs “It was nothing like everyone hyped it up to be … and that is probably partly why, uh, things happened.” Fri/26, 9pm, PFA; May 6, 3:15pm, and May 7, 6pm, Kabuki; May 9, 6pm, New People. (Harvey)

Rosie (Marcel Gisler, Switzerland, 2013) Moms: can’t live with ’em … and can’t live with ’em. Roughly, that’s the predicament of successful gay writer Lorenz (Fabian Kruger) when his hard-drinking independent mater Rosie (Sibylle Brunner) keels over with a heart attack. His heart is with his tough old bird of a mother — unlike his more conventional sister (Judith Hofmann) — though a young, adorable fanboy of a neighbor (Sebastian Ledesma) is intent on competing for his attentions. Director and co-writer Marcel Gisler spares no warmth or care when it comes to filling out the story fully, as when Lorenz discovers that he has more in common with his seemingly inaccessible late father than he ever imagined. While Rosie paints a rosier, slightly more sentimental picture, imagine a warmer and fuzzier yet still renegade Rainer Werner Fassbender nursing a wisecracking, headstrong Emmi post-1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fri/26, 9:30pm, Kabuki; Sun/28, 9pm, PFA; Tue/30, 6pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

You’re Next (Adam Wingard, US, 2011) The hit of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival’s midnight section — and one that’s taking its sweet time getting to theaters — indie horror specialist (2010’s A Horrible Way to Die, 2007’s Pop Skull, 2012’s V/H/S) Adam Wingard’s feature isn’t really much more than a gussied-up slasher. But it’s got vigor, and violence, to spare. An already uncomfortable anniversary reunion for the wealthy Davison clan plus their children’s spouses gets a lot more so when dinner is interrupted by an arrow that sails through a window, right into someone’s flesh. Immediately a full on siege commences, with family members reacting with various degrees of panic, selfishness, and ingenuity, while an unknown number of animal-masked assailants prowl outside (and sometimes inside). Clearly fun for its all-star cast and crew of mumblecore/indie horror staples, yet preferring gallows’ humor to wink-wink camp, it’s a (very) bloody good ride. Sat/27, 11:30am, Kabuki; May 1, 9:45pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Thérèse (Claude Miller, France, 2012) Both Emma Bovary and Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly relate to this increasingly bored and twisted French woman of privilege stuck in the sticks in the ’20s, as rendered by novelist Francois Mauriac and compellingly translated to the screen by the late director Claude Miller. Forbiddingly cerebral and bookish yet also strangely passive, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) looks like she has it all from a distance — she’s married to her best friend’s coarse, hunting-obsessed brother (Gilles Lellouche) though envious of her chum’s affair with a handsome and free-thinking Jewish student. Turns out she’s as trapped and close to death as the birds her spouse snares in their forest, and the suffocatingly provincial ways of family she’s married into lead her to undertake a dire course of action. Lellouche adds nuance to his rich lunk, but you can’t tear your eyes from Tautou. Turning her pinched frown right side up and hardening those unblinking button eyes, she plays well against type as a well-heeled, sleepwalking, possibly sociopathic sour grape, effectively conveying the mute unhappiness of a too-well-bred woman born too early and too blinkered to understand that she’s desperate for a new century’s freedoms. Sat/27, 3pm, Kabuki; Mon/29, 6:30pm, New People. (Chun)

Ernest & Celestine (Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner, France/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2012) Belgian animators Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier are best known for the stop-motion shorts series (and priceless 2009 subsequent feature) A Town Called Panic, an anarchic, absurdist, and hilarious creation suitable for all ages. Their latest (co-directed with Benjamin Renner) is … not like that at all. Instead, it’s a sweet, generally guileless children’s cartoon that takes its gentle, watercolor-type visual style from late writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s same-named books. Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) is an orphaned girl mouse that befriends gruff bear Ernest (the excellent Lambert Wilson), though their improbable kinship invites social disapproval and scrapes with the law. There are some clever satirical touches, but mostly this is a softhearted charmer that will primarily appeal to younger kids. Adults will find it pleasant enough — but don’t expect any Panic-style craziness. Sun/28, 12:30pm, and May 1, 7pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlácil, Czech Republic, 1966) An extraordinary evocation of medieval life, this 1966 black and white epic — considered by some the greatest Czech film ever made — is being reprised at SFIFF in honor of the festival’s late board chairman and generous benefactor George Gund, for whom it was a personal favorite. The violent struggle between pagan feudalist clans and rising Christian political forces in 13th century Eastern Europe is dramatized in brutal yet poetical form here. You will be very glad you didn’t live back then, or suffer the privations director Frantisek Vlácil and his crew did during an apparently very tough rural, mostly wintertime shoot. But you won’t forget this cinematically dazzling if sometimes opaquely told chronicle based on a classic Czech novel. Sun/28, 12:30pm, PFA; May 3, 8:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, US, 2012) Feature documentaries Benjamin Smoke (2000) and Instrument (2003) are probably Jem Cohen’s best-known works, but this prolific filmmaker — an inspired choice for SFIFF’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, honoring “a filmmaker whose main body of work is outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking” — has a remarkably diverse resume of shorts, music videos, and at least one previous narrative film (albeit one with experimental elements), 2004’s Chain. Cohen appears in person to discuss his work and present his latest film, Museum Hours, about a guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (“the big old one,” the man calls it) who befriends a Montreal woman visiting her comatose cousin. It’s a deceptively simple story that expands into a deeply felt, gorgeously shot rumination on friendship, loneliness, travel, art history and appreciation, and finding the beauty in the details of everyday life. Sun/28, 5:30pm, Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi, France/Germany/England/Afghanistan, 2012) “You’re the one that’s wounded, yet I’m the one that’s suffering,” complains the good Afghan wife of Patience Stone in this theatrical yet charged adaptation of Atiq Rahimi’s best-selling novel, directed by the Kabul native himself. As The Patience Stone opens, a beautiful, nameless young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) is fighting to not only keep alive her comatose husband, a onetime Jihadist with a bullet lodged in his neck, but also simply survive on her own with little money and two small daughters and a war going off all around her. In a surprising turn, her once-heedless husband becomes her solace — her silent confidante and her so-called patience stone — as she talks about her fears, secrets, memories, and desires, the latter sparked by a meeting with a young soldier. Despite the mostly stagy treatment of the action, mainly isolated to a single room or house (although the guerilla-shot scenes on Kabul streets are rife with a feeling of real jeopardy), The Patience Stone achieves lift-off, thanks to the power of a once-silenced woman’s story and a heart-rending performance by Farahani, once a star and now banned in her native Iran. Mon/29, 6:30pm, and Tues/30, 8:45pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Peaches Does Herself (Peaches, Germany, 2012) Canadian-born yet the quintessential modern Berlin act — transgressively sexed-up electroclash slash-performance artist — Peaches delivers an expectedly high-concept live show in this nimbly cinematic concert movie. The first 15 minutes or so are absolutely great: raunchy, hilarious, imaginatively staged (completely with an orgiastically inclined dance troupe). But after a while it really begins to bog down in prolonged appearances by elderly burlesque-type standup Dannii Daniels, stilted ones by Amazonian transsexual Sandy Kane, and an attempt at a quasi-romantic-triangle narrative that is meant to be funny and outrageous but just kinda lies there. Diehard fans will be thrilled, but most viewers will hit an exhaustion point long before the film reaches its (admittedly funny) fadeout. Mon/29, 9:45pm, and May 2, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey) *

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 25-May 9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and info, visit festival.sffs.org.

Miranda rights in Boston

Zelda Bronstein

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April 23, 2013

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It’s the age-old dilemma, the stuff of dozens of thrillers and action movies: You’ve captured a guy who knows exactly where a bomb has been planted, and it’s going to explode in 30 minutes and kill thousands of people. Do you bother to read him his Miranda rights and encourage him to speak to an attorney before he answers any questions?

In the movies, no: You shoot him in the knee, or break his fingers one by one, or waterboard him until he talks, and then with seconds to spare, you rappel down the side of a giant building, crash through the glass door, and disarm the bomb. No sweat.
In real life, it’s a bit more tricky — particularly when the suspect, an American citizen, hasn’t even been arrested yet, but can’t go anywhere because he has a bullet hole in his throat.

I can get the initial instinct: When FBI agents grabbed 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, they wanted to be sure he didn’t know of any other devices that were about to go off. If they’d refused to read him the Miranda warning and even used “enhanced interrogation techniques” and he’d said: “Hey, OK, I give up, there’s another bomb about to go off,” and they’d found it and saved lives, well…we’d have some Zero Dark Thirty debates, but at least there would have been a point.

In this case, it appears he has said no such thing, and no other bombs connected to him have gone off. There may be evidence that later emerges showing that the normally illegal interrogation saved lives, but so far, it looks as if all the feds have done is compiled information they can try to use against him in court.

Which is a problem.

It’s really, really hard to be even remotely sympathetic here — the guy (allegedly) killed three people, including an eight-year-old, and wounded many more, including a lot of amputations. He terrorized the Boston Marathon. I’m not even remorely suggesting that he get any special treatment. If he’s guilty — and the evidence at this point is pretty solid — then he’s going away for life. (Unless the federal prosecutors foolishly seek the death penalty, which would turn him into a martyr.)

But you can’t just decide that this guy is a bad guy and so the Miranda rule doesn’t matter. There are all sorts of really horrible criminals arrested in the United States, and they all have the right to remain silent, to avoid self-incrimination, and to have an attorney present before they say anything.

There’s a whole cottage industry of cops and prosecutors finding ways to avoid the Miranda warnings, which is not only unConstitutional but somewhat nutty, because Miranda almost never hurts a criminal investigation or prosecution. The Boston Bomber’s case won’t rest on what he told investigators from his hospital bed. In fact, I tend to agree with what law professor David Harris says:

The Obama administration’s interpretation of the public safety exception is suspect; its announcement that no Miranda rights would be given was transparently political, aimed at avoiding criticism from conservative quarters. Worst of all, the administration seemed to be telling the public that Miranda warnings are just petty rules — another instance of hyper-technical laws that get in the way of real justice. This is dead wrong, and it shows grave disrespect for the rule of law and the Constitution — the very things that make our country great.

I would guess that now that Tsarnaev has a lawyer, he’s hearing the grim reality of his situation: Unless there’s something we really don’t know, and he’s got some astonishing claim of innocence, (“my brother made me do it” won’t work) he’s never going to get out of prison, and everything that the legal team does from this point on is about saving his life. He’ll wind up, most likely, pleading guilty to a crime that gives him life without parole, if prosecutors drop the death penalty.

We’ll never know exactly what happened when the FBI gave Tsarnaev a pencil and paper and asked for written answers to interrogation, because that evidence likely won’t be made public. But I suspect that the first thing the agents asked was whether there were any more bombs, and once they got that answer, they should have stopped and issued the Constitutional warnings. Which they almost certainly didn’t.

I know this is speculative, but it’s the reason the Miranda rules are in place. Because we shouldn’t have to speculate on this stuff; we should know that the federal government doesn’t think the “Miranda warnings are just petty rules.”

The Performant: Burning down the haus

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April 19, 2013

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The Arsonists at Aurora Theatre crackles and sears

If there was ever a time to revive a play best known for its condemnation of the silent complicity of the comfortable classes in times of civil unrest and encroaching disaster, this might well be one of the best. And Max Frisch’s 60 year-old classic Herr Biedemann und die Brandstifter, newly translated (in 2007) by Alistair Beaton as The Arsonists, might prove to be one of the timeliest of cautionary tales to revive. Currently playing at the Aurora Theatre, two years after its bang-up American premiere at the Odyssey Theatre in LA, this Mark Jackson-directed farce might play on the surface as a cheerfully absurdist comedy of manners, but the pointed cultural critique that underlies it is deadly serious.

“It’s hard just lighting a cigar,” observes Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) plaintively at the top of the show, as a trio of uninvited firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Micheal Uy Kelly) menaces him into putting said cigar and lighter away, before introducing themselves as the “guardians of the city,” and its unacknowledged conscience.

The brilliance of Biedermann, whose very name can be alternately defined as “upright,” “honest,” or “conservative,” is how well his character skewers expectations of his supposed role as the play’s protagonist, even when it becomes clear that he is also its biggest dupe. His classist hypocrisies and dogged belief in keeping up appearances paves the road to his undoing, as surely as if he had set a noose around his own neck. Flanked by his appropriately haughty Hausfrau, Babette (Gwen Leob) and his harried serving-girl, Anna (Dina Percia), and bolstered by his inflated sense of personal worth, even as he is gradually revealed to be an amoral bounder, Biedermann manages to encompass the most troubling elements of both the belligerent right and the ineffectual left, defending, above all else, his right to “not think anything at all,” under his own roof.

By far the most fun characters to watch on the stage are the titular Arsonists, played respectively by Michael Ray Wisely and Tim Kniffin. Wisely’s Schmitz, the very picture of a gone-to-seed wrestler with his softening bulk encased in an immodest tank top and a spiky Sonic-the-Hedgehog hairdo, appeals to Biedermann’s vanity by praising his humanity and acting the role of a borderline mentally-incapacitated buffoon, even as he deftly manipulates the hassled homeowner into letting him stay in the drafty attic—and fills it with drums of gasoline. Meanwhile Kniffin’s Eisenring at turns obsequious and shrewdly blunt, subtly flatters Biedermann by pretending more than a passing familiarity with Beidermann’s social ranking, even as he gleefully maneuvers him into physically assisting in his own destruction.

The insistent rumble of Matt Stines’ sound design at times overwhelms the fragile human element onstage, but the action is well-served by the incomparable Nina Ball’s graciously appointed set, and Mia Baxter’s perfectly-detailed props. And while the humor in the script does provoke its share of laughter, much of it is the kind of horrified laughter emitted by an oddience that reluctantly recognizes its own complicity in its perhaps inevitable downfall. But there is hope too, lodged within this “moral play without a moral,” as right from the beginning the firefighters remark that “not every fire is determined by fate,” meaning preventable, so long as inaction and passivity do not carry the day. Think on it. And see the play.

Through May 12

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berkeley

$32-$50

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

“Street Fight” examines the politics of mobility in San Francisco

Sasha Cuttler

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April 17, 2013

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“Street Fight” examines the politics of mobility in San Francisco

Ideology plays a bigger role in shaping San Francisco than most people realize, as we’ve discussed in this space before. Nowhere is that more true than in the politics of land use and transportation, as my friend Jason Henderson, a San Francisco State University geography professor, discusses in his insightful new book, Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.

He’ll be discussing his work this Friday, April 19, from 7-9pm during a book launch party hosted by Green Arcade Bookstore across the street at the upstairs loft space of McRoskey Mattress, 1687 Market. Or if you miss that but want to join the discussion, you can catch Henderson’s forum on May 15 at SFSU or what will surely be other local events on this pivotal topic.

Henderson chronicles the seminal events in San Francisco’s history with “automobility” and related transportation issues, from the freeway revolts of the late ’50s through 2000 to today’s continuing political struggles over parking, bicycles, livability, gentrification, and the form, function, and financing of Muni.

Yet the lens that Henderson brings to understanding all of these issues and struggles is ideology, which he breaks down into three major categories: progressive, neoliberal, and conservative. Whether we realize it or not, we can all be fairly easily placed in one of those three categories when it comes to how we think about automobility, or the primacy of cars in modern life.

“A progressive framework conceptualizes mobility as a systemic problem that requires deep social commitment and responsibility. How we get there matters. It posits that there can be too much mobility, as exemplified by high levels of [Vehicle Miles Traveled] in the United States, and that excessive mobility results in both environmental degradation and major social inequality at a local, state, and global scale. The main problem, obviously, is that automobility is part of a wider, systemic moral and social problem of over-consumption and disproportionate materialism,” Henderson writes, sounding themes that I echoed in this week’s cover story.

On the other end of the ideological spectrum are those with conservative views on mobility, who see driving as a basic right, which is the dominant mindset on the west side of supposedly liberal San Francisco. “Unlike progressives, conservatives do not think about responsibility as relating to broader systems such as the economic structure of society. Instead, they think in terms of direct causation and of each individual being responsible for the consequences of his or her actions. For example, poverty is a result of individual shortcomings caused by personal and moral characteristics, not of structural themes like socioeconomic forces beyond an individual’s control. Getting to work on time and providing one’s daily needs are not collective concerns but the responsibility of the individual,” he writes.

Of course, these conservatives still rely on government to build and maintain their transportation infrastructure, which they believe should be centered around cars. “Government should guarantee and accommodate automobility, not seek to discourage it or make it more expensive. Government-sponsored road building and other explicit policies that encourage motoring reflect an optimal use of government to stabilize conservative social relations centered on automobility,” Henderson write of the conservative mindset.

Between those two poles are the neoliberals, who have come to dominate City Hall, particularly in the last few years with the ascendancy of Mayor Ed Lee, Board President David Chiu, and Sup. Scott Wiener, who has taken the lead role on transportation issues. Neoliberals rely on market-based solutions to almost any problem, and they end up partnering with either conservatives or progressives in the politics of mobility depending on the issue.

“Neoliberals, consistent with the broader agenda of the privatization of space and market-based pricing of public access to space, envision a mobility system shaped by pricing and markets rather than by regulation and collective action. Unlike progressives, neoliberals feel the built environment must be allowed to develop with the efficacy of the market. Movement, paid for by the individual user, should be unrestrained. Yet such efficacy can include a commodification of nonmovement or slower movement or the package of quality-of-life goods surrounding the ‘walkability’ and ‘livability’ of the city, a package reserved for those who can afford to enter. To that end, neoliberal mobility includes the aggressive use of government to both enhance mobility and rein it in, but only inasmuch as government policy helps realize the goals of profit and facilitating economic growth and development,” Henderson writes.

It’s fascinating to explore how these three distinct mindsets have shaped San Francisco in recent decades, and how they interact today to create the city that we’ll be moving through in the future.

Ish says

Andrew Lam

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April 16, 2013

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culture@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN [Caitlin Donohue: Although I originally contacted former Stanford University football offensive guard and current Apple employee Ish “Mr. Marina 2013” Simpson for help in writing a style guide to the Marina, he wrote me back a rundown so evocative that I hated to paraphrase his words. And so this week, I’ve given my style column over to him. Check out sfbg.com for my recap of the glorious March night he was crowned king of SF’s preppiest neighborhood, and don’t forget, you can add flair with a belt.]

I buy a lot of clothes, but not many in person. I love to buy, hate to shop, so I buy mainly online. There are some stores and brands I’ve shopped at in the Marina, but since you asked me to explore I was able to find a lot of cool stores that I didn’t know existed. There are more men’s stores in the Marina than I realized.

My fellow Marina gentlemen don’t usually take too many risks when it comes to fashion. The guys I see downtown or in the Castro are usually very fashion-forward. But some of the best-looking guys in the Marina I’ve seen do rock bespoke suits and shirts. Classy. Men’s fashion here steers toward preppy or sailor styles. The women take way more risks, and Marina women are definitely some of the most fashionable in the city.

>>WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: CHECK OUT OUR COVERAGE OF ISH’S VICTORY AT THE MR. MARINA PAGEANT

G-STAR RAW

“If someone says, ‘Hey, I like your shirt,’ you have to say, ‘Yeah, it’s G-Star Raw!’ Whatever.” All store photos by Anna Latino

This place intrigued me because I saw one in Barcelona when I was there in December 2011. I talked to the guy working here and he said the brand is Dutch and it’s way bigger in Europe. Makes sense: the name is just terrible, and they only sell G-Star Raw clothes. That means if someone says, “Hey, I like your shirt,” you have to say, “Yeah, it’s G-Star Raw!” Whatever. They had a nice selection of belts, which I love. Belts are a great way for conservative dressers to express some flair. I loved the colorful chinos (a staple in my wardrobe). I also loved this one cardigan they had.

2060 Chestnut, SF. (415) 567-7224; 76 Geary, SF. (415) 398-5381, www.theswimminghorses.com

MARINE LAYER

“Cool threads that you’d wear out to bars on a Thursday night.”

This place on Chestnut has cool shirts and hoodies. Also, some nice scarves. The clothes are advertised as being extremely soft and they aren’t lying! The fabrics are nice and I like the bold, yet muted colors. I’ve had some friends buy their stuff and it has a worn-in, vintage look. This is a good place to grab some cool threads that you’d wear out to bars on a Thursday night.

2209 Chestnut, SF. (415) 346-2400; 498 Hayes, SF. (415) 829-7519, www.marinelayer.com

THE BLUES JEAN BAR

I’ve bought a few pairs of jeans from here and it’s always a great experience. I kind of don’t like how all of the jeans are behind the bar and you have to ask for them, but I also kind of like it too. Many hot girls work there, so you’re not shopping by yourself and you get a great female opinion when you try your jeans on. They give you great recommendations on fit and style, and they will tell you how to care for your jeans and whether or not you should have them tailored.

1827 Union, SF. (415) 346-4280, www.thebluesjeansbar.com

HIGH SOCIETY

This shop is one I just discovered that sells both women’s and men’s clothes. They had a great selection of slim-fitting jeans and blazers. They had a cool leather jacket I liked. This is the place to go if you’re looking for a nice outfit for date night with a pretty young lady.

1969 Union, SF. (415) 447-0447, www.highsocietybrand.com

BRANDY MELVILLE

This is for the ladies! I like the style of the women that like shopping here. Every time I walk by there are a lot of good-looking girls in there. The music they have jamming is awesome, the ladies working there are gorgeous, and the clothes are awesome (in this man’s opinion!) I like the material they use for their clothes, very light and breathable; at least it looks like it is. I loved the camo pants, the flowing dresses, and the printed shirts.

2085 Chestnut, SF. (415) 292-7754, www.brandymelvilleusa.com

EYE HEART SF “POP DOWN SHOP”

“They have awesome clothes for Sunday Fundays”

This is your go-to spot for gear that is meant to be worn when partying! This brand was born in San Francisco and the guys behind it take pride in representing this great city. They have awesome clothes for Sunday Fundays (tanks!), holidays (special gear for St. Patty’s, Cinco de Mayo, etc.), sporting events (Giants, Warriors, Niners), and for music festivals (break out your JammyPacks). This should be one of the first places to shop at when you’re going to be out in the sun having a great time.

1980 Union, SF. www.eyeheartsfshop.com

Indicator city

Andrew Lam

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April 16, 2013

74

steve@sfbg.com

When biologists talk about the health of a fragile ecosystem, they often speak of an “indicator species.” That’s a critter — a fish, say, or a frog — whose health, or lack thereof, is a signal of the overall health of the system. These days, when environmentalists who think about politics as well as science look at San Francisco, they see an indicator city.

This progressive-minded place of great wealth, knowledge, and technological innovation — surrounded on three sides by steadily rising tides — could signal whether cities in the post-industrial world will meet the challenge of climate change and related problems, from loss of biodiversity to the need for sustainable energy sources.

A decade ago, San Francisco pioneered innovative waste reduction programs and set aggressive goals for reducing its planet-cooking carbon emissions. At that point, the city seemed prepared to make sacrifices and provide leadership in pursuit of sustainability.

Things changed dramatically when the recession hit and Mayor Ed Lee took office with the promise to focus almost exclusively on economic development and job creation. Today, even with the technology and office development sectors booming and employment rates among the lowest in California, the city hasn’t returned its focus to the environment.

In fact, with ambitious new efforts to intensify development along the waterfront and only lackluster support for the city’s plan to build renewable energy projects through the CleanPowerSF program, the Lee administration seems to be exacerbating the environmental challenge rather than addressing it.

According to conservative projections by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the Bay is expected to rise at least 16 inches by 2050 and 55 inches by the end of the century. BCDC maps show San Francisco International Airport and Mission Bay inundated, Treasure Island mostly underwater, and serious flooding the Financial District, the Marina, and Hunters Point.

Lee’s administration has commissioned a report showing a path to carbon reduction that involves promoting city-owned renewable energy facilities and radically reducing car trips — while the mayor seems content do the opposite.

It’s not an encouraging sign for Earth Day 2013.

HOW WE’RE DOING

Last year, the Department of the Environment hired McKinsey and Company to prepare a report titled “San Francisco’s Path to a Low-Carbon Economy.” It’s mostly finished — but you haven’t heard much about it. The department has been sitting on it for months.

Why? Some say it’s because most of the recommendations clash with the Lee administration’s priorities, although city officials say they’re just waiting while they get other reports out first. But the report notes the city is falling far short of its carbon reduction goals and “will therefore need to complement existing carbon abatement measures with a range of new and innovative approaches.”

Data presented in the report, a copy of which we’ve obtained from a confidential source, shows that building renewable energy projects through CleanPowerSF, making buildings more energy-efficient, and discouraging private automobile use through congestion pricing, variable-price parking, and building more bike lanes are the most effective tools for reducing carbon output.

But those are things that the mayor either opposes and has a poor record of supporting or putting into action. The easy, corporate-friendly things that Lee endorses, such as supporting more electric, biofuel, and hybrid vehicles, are among the least effective ways to reach the city’s goals, the report says.

“Private passenger vehicles account for two-fifths of San Francisco’s emissions. In the short term, demand-based pricing initiatives appear to be the biggest opportunity,” the report notes, adding a few lines later, “Providing alternate methods of transport, such as protected cycle lanes, can encourage them to consider alternatives to cars.”

Melanie Nutter, who heads the city’s Department of the Environment, admits that the transportation sector and expanding the city’s renewable energy portfolio through CleanPowerSF or some other program — both of which are crucial to reducing the city’s carbon footprint — are two important areas where the city needs to do a better job if it’s going to meet its environmental goals, including the target of cutting carbon emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2025.

But Nutter said that solid waste reduction programs, green building standards, and the rise of the “shareable economy” — with Internet-based companies facilitating the sharing of cars, housing, and other products and services — help San Francisco show how environmentalism can co-exist with economic development.

“San Francisco is really focused on economic development and growth, but we’ve gone beyond the old edict that you can either be sustainable or have a thriving economy,” Nutter said.

Yet there’s sparse evidence to support that statement. There’s a two-year time lag in reporting the city’s carbon emissions, meaning we don’t have good indicators since Mayor Lee pumped up economic development with tax breaks and other city policies. For example, Nutter touted how there’s more green buildings, but she didn’t have data about whether that comes close to offsetting the sheer number of new energy-consuming buildings — not to mention the increase in automobile trips and other byproducts of a booming economy.

Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and president of the BART board, told us that San Francisco seems to have been derailed by the last economic crisis, with economic insecurity and fear trumping environmental concerns.

“All our other values got tossed aside and it was all jobs, jobs, jobs. And then the crisis passed and the mantra of this [mayoral] administration is still jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said. “They put sustainability on hold until the economic crisis passed, and they still haven’t returned to sustainability.”

Radulovich reviewed the McKinsey report, which he considers well-done and worth heeding. He’s been asking the Department of the Environment for weeks why it hasn’t been released. Nutter told us her office just decided to hold the report until after its annual climate action strategy report is released during Earth Day event on April 24. And mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey told us, “There’s no hold up from the Mayor’s Office.”

Radulovich said the study highlights how much more the city should be doing. “It’s a good study, it asks all the right questions,” Radulovich said. “We’re paying lip service to these ideas, but we’re not getting any closer to sustainability.”

In fact, he said the promise that the city showed 10 years ago is gone. “Gavin [Newsom] wanted to be thought of as an environmentalist and a leader in sustainability, but I don’t think that’s important to Ed Lee,” Radulovich said.

Joshua Arce, who chairs the city’s Environmental Commission, agreed that there is a notable difference between Newsom, who regularly rolled out new environmental initiatives and goals, and Lee, who is still developing ways to promote environmentalism within his economic development push.

“Ed Lee doesn’t have traditional environmental background,” Arce said. “What is Mayor Lee’s definition of environmentalism? It’s something that creates jobs and is more embracing of economic development.”

Falvey cites the mayor’s recent move of $2 million into the GoSolar program, new electric vehicle charging stations in city garages, and his support for industries working on environmental solutions: “Mayor Lee’s CleantechSF initiative supports the growth of the already vibrant cleantech industry and cleantech jobs in San Francisco, and he has been proactive in reaching out to the City’s 211 companies that make up one of the largest and most concentrated cleantech clusters in the world.”

Yet many environmentalists say that simply waiting for corporations to save the planet won’t work, particularly given their history, profit motives, and the short term thinking of global capitalism.

“To put it bluntly, the Lee administration is bought and paid for by PG&E,” said Eric Brooks with Our City, which has worked for years to launch CleanPowerSF and ensure that it builds local renewable power capacity.

The opening of the McKinsey report makes it clear why the environmental policies of San Francisco and other big cities matter: “Around the globe, urban areas are becoming more crowded and consuming more resources per capita,” it states. “Cities are already responsible for roughly seventy percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and as economic growth becomes more concentrated in urban centers, their total greenhouse gas emissions may double by 2050. As a result, tackling the problem of climate change will in large part depend on how we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of cities.”

And San Francisco, it argues, is the perfect place to start: “The city now has the opportunity to crystallize and execute a bold, thoughtful strategy to attain new targets, continue to lead by example, and further national and global debates on climate change.”

The unwritten message: If we can’t do it here, maybe we can’t do it anywhere.

ON THE EDGE

San Francisco’s waterfront is where economic pressures meet environmental challenges. As the city seeks to continue with aggressive growth and developments efforts on one side of the line — embodied recently by the proposed Warriors Arena at Piers 30-32, 8 Washington and other waterfront condo complexes, and other projects that intensify building along the water — that puts more pressure on the city to compensate with stronger sustainability initiatives.

“The natural thing to do with most of our waterfront would be to open it up to the public,” said Jon Golinger, who is leading this year’s referendum campaign to overturn the approval of 8 Washington. “But if the lens you’re looking through is just the balance sheet and quarterly profits, the most valuable land maybe in the world is San Francisco’s waterfront.”

He and others — including SF Waterfront Alliance, a new group formed to oppose the Warriors Arena — say the city is long overdue in updating its development plan for the waterfront, as Prop. H in 1990 called for every five years. They criticize the city and Port for letting developers push projects without a larger vision.

“We are extremely concerned with what’s happening on our shorelines,” said Michelle Myers, director of the Sierra Club’s Bay Chapter, arguing that the city should be embracing waterfront open space that can handle storm surge instead of hardening the waterfront with new developments. “Why aren’t we thinking about those kinds of projects on our shoreline?”

David Lewis, director of Save the Bay, told us cities need to think less about the value of waterfront real estate and do what it can to facilitate the rising bay. “There are waterfront projects that are not appropriate,” Lewis said. Projects he puts in that category range from a scuttled proposal to build around 10,000 homes on the Cargill Salt Flats in Redwood City to the Warriors Arena on Piers 30-32.

“We told the mayor before it was even announced that it is not a legal use of the pier,” Lewis said, arguing it violated state law preserving the waterfront for maritime and public uses. “There’s no reason that an arena has to be out on the water on a crumbling pier.”

But Brad Benson and Diana Oshima, who work on waterfront planning issue for the Port of San Francisco, say that most of San Francisco’s shoreline was hardened almost a century ago, and that most of the planning for how to use it has already been done.

“You have a few seawall lots and a few piers that could be development sites, but not many. Do we need a whole plan for that?” Benson said, while Oshima praises the proactive transportation planning work now underway: “There has never been this level of land use and transportation planning at such an early stage.”

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission was founded almost 50 years ago to regulate development in and around the Bay, when the concern was mostly about the bay shrinking as San Francisco and other cities dumped fill along the shoreline to build San Francisco International Airport, much of the Financial District, and other expansive real estate plans.

Now, the mission of the agency has flipped.

“Instead of the bay getting smaller, the bay is getting larger with this thing called sea level rise,” BCDC Executive Director Larry Goldspan said as we took in the commanding view of the water from his office at 50 California Street.

A few years ago, as the climate change predictions kept worsening, the mission of BCDC began to focus on that new reality. “How do we create a resilient shoreline and protect assets?” was how Goldspan put it, noting that few simply accept the inundation that BCDC’s sea level rise maps predict. “Nobody is talking about retreating from SFO, or Oakland Airport, or BART.”

That means Bay Area cities will have to accept softening parts of the shoreline — allowing for more tidal marshes and open space that can accept flooding in order to harden, or protect, other critical areas. The rising water has to go somewhere.

“Is there a way to use natural infrastructure to soften the effect of sea level rises?” Goldspan asked. “I don’t know that there are, but you have to use every tool in the smartest way to deal with this challenge.”

And San Francisco seems to be holding firm on increased development — in an area that isn’t adequately protected. “The seawall is part of the historic district that the Port established, but now we’re learning the seawall is too short,” Goldspan said.

BCDC requires San Francisco to remove a pier or other old landfill every time it reinforces or rebuilds a pier, on a one-to-one basis. So Oshima said the district is now studying what it can remove to make up for the work that was done to shore up Piers 23-27, which will become a new cruise ship terminal once the America’s Cup finishes using it a staging ground this summer.

Yet essentially giving up valuable waterfront real estate isn’t easy for any city, and cities have both autonomy and a motivation to thrive under existing economic realities. “California has a history of local control. Cities are strong,” Goldspan said, noting that sustainability may require sacrifice. “It will be a policy discussion at the city level. It’s a new discussion, and we’re just in the early stages.”

NEW WORLD

Global capitalism either grows or dies. Some modern economists argue otherwise — that a sustainable future with a mature, stable economy is possible. But that takes a huge leap of faith — and it may be the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough.” Bill McKibben writes in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. “Across partisan lines, for the two hundred years since Adam Smith, we’ve assumed that more is better, and that the answer to any problem is another burst of expansion.”

In a telephone interview with the Guardian, McKibben discussed the role that San Francisco could and should be playing as part of that awakening.

“No one knows exactly what economy the world is moving toward, but we can sense some of its dimensions: more localized, less material-based, more innovative; these are things that San Francisco is good at,” he told us, noting the shift in priorities that entails. “We need to do conservation, but it’s true that we also need to build more renewable power capacity.”

Right now, CleanPowerSF is the only mechanism the city has for doing renewable energy projects, and it’s under attack on several fronts before it even launches. Most of the arguments against it are economic — after all, renewable power costs more than coal — and McKibben concedes that cities are often constrained by economic realities.

Some city officials argue that it’s more sustainable for San Francisco to grow and develop than suburban areas — thus negating some criticism that too much economic development is bad for the environment — and Radulovich concedes there’s a certain truth to that argument.

“But is it as green as it ought to be? Is it green enough to be sustainable and avert the disaster? And the answer is no,” Radulovich said.

For example, he questioned, “Why are we building 600,000 square feet of automobile-oriented big box development on Hunters Point?” Similarly, if San Francisco were really taking rising seas seriously, should the city be pouring billions of dollars into housing on disappearing Treasure Island?

“I think it’s a really interesting macro-question,” Jennifer Matz, who runs the Mayors Office of Economic Development, said when we asked whether the aggressive promotion of economic development and growth can ever be sustainable, or whether slowing that rate needs to be part of the solution. “I don’t know that’s feasible. Dynamic cities will want to continue to grow.”

Yet that means accepting the altered climate of new world, including greatly reduced fresh water supplies for Northern California, which is part of the current discussions.

“A lot of the focus on climate change has moved to adaptation, but even that is something we aren’t really addressing,” Radulovich said.

Nutter agreed that adapting to the changing world is conversation that is important: “All of the development and planning we’re doing today needs to incorporate these adaptation strategies, which we’re just initiating.”

But environmentalists and a growing number of political officials say that San Francisco and other big cities are going to need to conceive of growth in new ways if they want to move toward sustainability. “The previous ethos was progress at any cost — develop, develop, develop,” Myers said, with the role of environmentalists being to mitigate damage to the surrounding ecosystem. But now, the economic system itself is causing irreversible damage on a global level. “At this point, it’s about more than conservation and protecting habitat. It’s about self-preservation.”

Blue Angels grounding is a victory for sanity, safety, and peace

Sasha Cuttler

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April 9, 2013

82

Blue Angels grounding is a victory for sanity, safety, and peace

Finally, peace in our time. The Blue Angels’ annual Fleet Week assault on San Francisco has finally, blessedly, mercifully been canceled for 2013, the result of $85 billion in federal budget sequestration cuts divided equally between military expenditures and social service spending.

The Guardian has long called for the cancellation of this wasteful show of military might, citing its inherent danger to a dense urban area, wanton waste of resources and fossil fuels, disturbance of the peace and pets, glamourizing of war and its weapons, and its Soviet-style fetishizing of militarism.

But in the end – appropriately and a little ironically – it was conservative fiscal prudence that finally shot down the Blue Angels. The military is already the biggest item in the federal budget, a massive, unjustifiable expenditure caused by imperial over-reach and the bloat of crony capitalism and pork barrel politics. Spending millions more just to show off their toys over scenic San Francisco was the ridiculous cherry on top of that sloppy sundae.

Real people and the real economy are suffering real harm from reckless sequestration cuts to social programs that have been inflicted by the anti-government ideologues sent to DC by the plutocrats and their minions. To keep the Blue Angels flying high against that backdrop would have been simply obscene, and surely a sign of decadent late empire in decay.

This decision by the Navy to nix the Blue Angels is a small but significant sign of sanity in a country gone mad, and the Guardian proudly salutes this decision.

The Performant: The sacred and the profane

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April 4, 2013

0

Putting the “good” back into Good Friday at “Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar” and Zombie Christ Haunted House

They might seem merely irreverent, or downright blasphemous, to conservative churchgoers, but I’m pretty sure the original JC Superstar would have dug the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — you know, the water-into-wine Jesus who supported sex workers and preached tolerance and respect for the marginalized.

The Sisters, who have been preaching the same since 1979, really get a chance to shine (and glitter) come Easter Weekend. One of SF’s most singular events, Easter Sunday in Dolores Park grabs the lion’s share of the attention, what with its iconic Easter Bonnet contest, the sainting of local community heroes, and the ever-popular Hunky Jesus competition, being rescheduled as we speak due to spring showers. But for those of us who find it difficult to get up early on a Sunday morning, hardbody of Christ or no hardbody of Christ, the Sisters have expanded their influence across the weekend, creating plenty of opportunity for the nocturnal among us to grab a little of the resurrection gusto for themselves.

Thus it was the holy day saddled with what must surely be the world’s greatest misnomer—“Good” Friday— that played host to two separate events dedicated to the mystery of the risen dead. The Zombie Christ, if you will.

Kicking off the evening at the endearingly ramshackle Victoria Theatre, the second (hopefully annual) “Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar” gathered the faithful together to wave palm fronds and cheer for the last days of cinema’s most notorious Rock Star Jesus (Ted Neeley).

Fortunately it’s not bring-your-own, since I don’t know where one goes to source official Easter weekend palm fronds, nor the communion wafers that get blessed pre-show by Sister Connie Pinko and passed around during the Last Supper scene. The Sisters work in mysterious ways. Props and palm fronds aside, the real fun is bellowing “What’s the buzz?” “So, you are the Christ,” and “just watch me die” along with the brooding, scantily-clad, long-haired Jesus freaks on the screen.

Produced by Bad Flower Productions, and co-hosted by StormMiguel Florez and Sister CP, that the Sing-Along is also a fundraiser for the Trans March makes it a Holy Week “must-do” that I hope finds a permanent spot on the Sisters’ Holy Week calendar.

Later that night I found myself hanging with a pack of monster messiahs, in the Gay-Glo labyrinth of the Zombie Christ Haunted House on Market Street. Another fun(d)-raiser the interactive setup included communion with the holy blood of Franzia (died for our sins), a disco inferno, “glory” holes, a giant pope puppet (scary!), strewn body parts, a smidgen of hardcore pornography, and a variety of cannibal Christs jumping out of dark corners and demanding brains.

“Not much there,” I tell one eager ghoul with fantastic bloody makeup.

“Christ not expecting much,” he reassures me.

More than anything it reminded me of the early days of Bunny Jam, when it was still all about pin-the-tail on the Trailer Trash bunny and less of a fashion show, ragged but vibrant; a fun, freaky kickstart to our famously irreverent Eastertide bacchanal.

No progress in condo conversion standoff, despite the Chron’s spin

Sasha Cuttler

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April 3, 2013

93

Perhaps it was just an unfunny April Fool’s Day joke or some wishful political spin, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s April 1 article about how tenancy-in-common owners and their political supporters are pushing legislation that would allow them to bypass the condo conversion lottery seriously misrepresented the city’s biggest current political standoff.

Nevermind the article’s over-the-top bias in favor of those poor, hard-luck TIC owners, like the featured Pacific Heights couple forced to raise their baby in a closet when all they really want to do is flip the apartment they bought for a profit. Or how the Chron all-but-ignored the fact that these TICs were rent-controlled apartments in a city where two-thirds of citizens rent. That kind of top-down view of the world is pretty typical for the Chron, even in its news stories, despite the paper’s strained claim to “objectivity.”

No, the article’s real sin was to get the basic facts wrong on where this political stalemate now stands, presenting the wishful spin of one side as if it were the latest news. Between the headline, “Owners seeking condo conversions may have shot” and the first deckhead, “Making progress” (which plays off this paragraph. “’I think we’re making progress in our discussions and negotiations,’ said [sponsoring Sup. Mark] Farrell, while noting the talks with tenant advocates, TIC owners, and real estate interests are ‘far from the finish line.’”) the article leaves the impression current negotiations may produce a compromise.

But the problem is that there aren’t any current negotiations between the two sides, and there haven’t been for weeks, according to tenant and other involved sources. In fact, they say there’s been no movement in this standoff since almost a month ago when I last reported that tenant groups and progressive supervisors were preparing a set of hostile amendments to the legislation.

They would allow a one-time condo lottery bypass for the nearly 2,500 TIC owners in the pipeline in exchange to shutting down the lottery for many years and preventing any conversions of rent-controlled apartments into condos until city builds a comparable amount of new affordable housing, and then probably restricting condo conversions to smaller buildings after that to protect large rent-controlled apartment buildings from real estate speculators.

That proposed compromise, which the article barely mentions before letting Farrell say “his legislation poses no threat to rent control,” would help the poor Pacific Heights couple at the center of the article. But the real estate industry and its conservative allies don’t really care about that couple as much as they do maintaining the flow of rental units into the real estate market, which is why the negotiations have broken down.

Instead, the Chron has Sup. London Breed – who is indeed a swing vote of the issue, but not one that tenant groups are counting on given how close she is to Plan C and the landlord lobby – citing a compromise proposal that would prevent the new condo owners from selling their properties for five years to discourage real estate speculation.

Perhaps that’s something the TIC owners and real estate interests that the article relies on think is a realistic compromise, but it’s not something that has been seriously discussed with tenant groups, mediating Sup. David Chiu, or the other interests that would be needed to pass this legislation.

Sara Shortt, the token tenant activist that the Chron talked to for the article, confirmed to us that there is no real compromise deal in the works and preventing the creation of new condos from existing apartments is a bottom-line issue that unites everyone who is now opposed to this legislation.

“The Plan C/Realtor etc. won’t concede on our key issue: restriction on future conversions in exchange for the bypass. We have given as much as we can give and they have given virtually nothing in return,” Shortt, executive director of the Housing Right Committee, told us by email.

Even Sup. Scott Wiener, who co-sponsors the legislation with Farrell, told us there has been “no change from before,” when negotiations broke down. But the legislation is on the April 15 agenda for the Land Use and Economic Development Committee – for the fifth time, with most hearings canceled because of the lack of negotiating progress.

If the Realtors and Plan C (which is dominated by real estate and banking interests) stick to their intransigent position – hurting this poor Pac Heights couple in the process, which the Chron fails to note – then tenants and progressive supervisors are likely to amend the legislation and call the bluff of those who claim this issue is simply about poor TIC owners stuck with shared mortgages.

GOP ‘dark wizard’ and Occupy ‘anti-leader’ to speak in SF on the same day

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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April 2, 2013

45

GOP ‘dark wizard’ and Occupy ‘anti-leader’ to speak in SF on the same day

This coming Thursday, a central intellectual figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement will give a talk on “Austerity and its Discontents.” And across the city, at the very same time, powerful anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist will mix it up with an elite group of San Francisco Republicans (yes, they really do exist).

Graeber, an American anthropologist and anarchist who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, was dubbed “the anti-leader of Occupy Wall Street” in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine article published shortly after a determined band of committed activists staked a claim on Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, kicking off the global Occupy movement. Graeber’s tome on wealth inequality, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, recounts the ages of human history through the lens of the indebted, vis-à-vis their creditors. The book helped give rise to Occupy activists’ famous chant: “We are the 99 Percent!”

Norquist hails from the polar opposite end of the political spectrum. An influential lobbyist who leads Americans for Tax Reform, he was once described as “the dark wizard of the Right’s anti-tax cult,” in the words of Arianna Huffington. The fiery conservative is most well known for his role as keeper of “the Pledge,” which essentially asks Republican lawmakers to swear that they will never, ever vote to raise taxes for any reason.

The Thursday meet-and-greet, billed as “Cocktails with Grover Norquist,” is being hosted by the San Francisco Republican Party – a political body that barely registers as a blip as far as local elections are concerned, but apparently has enough clout to make it worthwhile for a famed operative like Norquist, whose group is based in D.C., to dip into San Francisco for a visit. The cocktail hour will be held at The City Club, a financial district venue. It costs $100.

Just as San Francisco Republicans sip cocktails and discreetly await the chance to engage Norquist in a few moments of powerful face-time, an audience of lefties will gather to hear Graeber’s studious analysis of global austerity measures and anarchist organizing tactics. Billed as a forum that’s free and open to the public, Graeber’s talk is being hosted by the Anthropology and Social Change Department of the California Institute for Integral Studies, located at 1453 Mission Street.

In a recent interview about the round of national budget cuts known as the sequester, Norquist told The Daily Beast: “I’m for the spending cuts. Just let them take effect. … The only thing worse than the sequester would be not reducing spending.”

And here’s Graeber’s take on the underlying economic climate that gave rise to the Occupy movement: “It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. … The economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the ‘third world debt crisis.’ But the global south fought back. … The debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of ‘austerity.’”

Behind the decision to accept cuts to in-home support services

Sasha Cuttler

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April 2, 2013

29

Behind the decision to accept cuts to in-home support services

For the last four years, advocates for those with disabilities have successfully fought to stave off the 20 percent cut in In-Home Support Services that then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed to help balance California’s budget, each year winning legal injunctions preventing the cuts while the case wound it way through the federal court system.

Their main argument is that such deep cuts in these vital services would discriminate against disabled or elderly Californians by forcing them into nursing homes rather than allowing them to receive services at home, which they contended was a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (I discuss this and other systemic devaluing of caregiving in last week’s Guardian).

The Ninth Circuit of Appeals was set to hear the California case (Oster v. Lightbourne) on March 19, and the judges in this famously liberal San Francisco-based court had just ruled against Washington state’s effort to make similar cuts (MR v. Dreyfus) just over a year ago. But then, on the eve of that hearing, proponents in the case announced a settlement that will result in an 8 percent across-the-board to IHHS services (allowing a 3.6 percent cut made by Gov. Jerry Brown now and another 4.4 percent cut to go into effect July 1).

While disabilities rights groups and other opponents of the IHHS cuts issued public statements that put a happy face on the settlement, emphasizing that it had avoided much deeper cuts, many advocates privately grumbled about accepting still-deep cuts to this popular and important program. After all, these cuts will hurt the families of those with disabilities (it is often relatives who are paid as caregivers by the program) and likely result in greater long-term costs from nursing home care and more emergency room visits.

So why did they settle? Sources close to the case who don’t want to be identified say a big factor was that two of the three judges assigned to the case – Carlos Bea and Diarmuid O’Scannlain – are the most conservative on the Ninth Circuit bench and seemed likely to rule against the disability rights community. In other words, those with disabilities drew bad cards.

Bea was appointed to the Ninth Circuit in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush after serving more than 20 years as a San Francisco Superior Court Judge (appointed in 1990 by another fellow Republican, then-Gov. George Deukmejian), where he received poor marks from local attorneys, who said he was biased in favor of Big Business.

O’Scannlain was a founding member of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom back in 1960, later serving as a tax attorney for Standard Oil. He was in private law practice and serving as chairman of the Oregon Republican Party in 1986 when then-President Ronald Reagan – whose presidential campaigns he had worked on – suddenly appointed him to the Ninth Circuit bench.

And if their histories and ideological leanings weren’t enough to tip the balance in favor of settling, there’s the fact that it was Bea who wrote a strong dissenting opinion in the MR v. Dreyfus case, dismissing the disability rights arguments completely.

He wrote: “Mind you this case does not involve the provision of certain social services to one group of disabled – those in nursing homes – but not to another group – the disabled residing at their own homes. No, the panel majority’s decision proceeds on the premise that the very reduction of social services currently provided the at-home disabled will risk their going to nursing home, and that such reduction therefore ‘discriminates’ against the at-home disabled, although not in favor of the disabled in nursing homes, or anyone else. But virtually everything the government does involves discrimination; it is in the nature of laws that they treat some people differently from others. This is not generally impermissible discrimination. Most government spending affects some groups more than others, but that doesn’t mean that the result in impermissible discrimination.”

He then rues the fact that “since the decision interprets and applies the ADA, it constitutes binding precedent in our nine Western states, with 20 percent of the nation’s population,” calling it a flawed decision that violates other court precedents with its “strained interpretation of the ADA.” Then, Bea goes on at length about how the state voluntarily and generously provided these in-homes services and says it should be allowed to suddenly withdraw them as well.

“To the contrary, this program is a flexible one: coverage is dependent in part on how much money the state has,” he wrote, later concluding by calling the majority opinion, “anti-democratic budgeting by judicial fiat.” Judge O’Scannlain is also a strong critic of “judicial activism,” which is often right-wing code for any rulings that expand the rights of society’s least powerful members, as opposed to the interests of the wealthy and powerful that they normally protect.

Yeah, I can see why disability right advocates might have wanted to cut their losses and settle the case.

The Guardian drone

Zelda Bronstein

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April 1, 2013

1

The Bay Guardian today unveiled a plan to take Bay Area journalism “to the next level,” by offering readers an up-close look at local politics through the use of disruptive, innovative, crowd-sourced, cutting-edge technology that was inspired by the sharing economy.

Thanks to generous underwriting from the Knight Foundation and a partnership with Code for America, the Guardian has obtained an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), more commonly known as a drone. The paper has applied for certification from the Federal Aviation Administration and expects the drone to be airborne in less than 60 days.

The Guardian’s investigative journalism drone will enable our editorial team to shine a blazing spotlight on the activities of unregistered lobbyists, conservative billionaires, or political operatives. It will eliminate the need to submit public records requests and give us the capability to surveil city power brokers and collect real-time data.

The drone will instantly transmit surveillance video footage, streamed audio, and facial recognition identification data to SFBG office computers, and will be shared with local and federal authorities whenever there’s a threat level of orange or above, or when somebody really annoys us.

It will also be delivering newspapers to some of the more outlying areas, like Berkeley, West Portal, and France.

And we will begin using it immediately to track down and spy on the trolls who haunt the comment section of our website and dare to say that Tim Redmond isn’t funny. You’ll never see it coming.

Do we care?

Andrew Lam

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March 26, 2013

77

steve@sfbg.com

Teresa Molina faced abusive, belittling treatment on the job.

The 52-year-old immigrant from Sinaloa, Mexico, says she was paid $500 a month to provide 24-hour, live-in care to a girl in a wheelchair and her family. She wasn’t allowed regular breaks. She couldn’t eat what she wanted. Even her sleep was disrupted.

“I spoke up a couple times, but when I did, my employer told me I was dumb and good for nothing,” Molina, speaking Spanish through a translator, told us. “She would ask my immigration status, and I said that was not important, but she used that as a threat.”

Molina is a domestic worker — one of the only two professions (the other being farm work) exempt from federal labor standards.

Her experience, a common one among immigrant women in California, prompted Molina to get involved in last year’s California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights campaign, part of national effort that resulted in the first-ever protections being signed into law in New York in 2010.

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the California version of the bill late on the night of Sept. 30, 2012, the deadline for signing legislation, citing the paternalistic concern that better pay and working conditions might translate into fewer jobs or fewer hours for domestic workers.

“I was offended by how he did it, in the middle of the night on the last day, and he basically trivialized it,” Assembly member Tom Ammiano (D-SF), who sponsored the measure, told us. “Here in California, it’s a major workforce, but there’s no rules and there’s a documented history of abuses.”

But if anything, Brown’s veto has energized local activists, who say the battle for domestic worker rights is part of a much larger issue that women, children, immigrants, and their supporters are struggling against as they try to get society to value one of the most basic of social and economic functions: caring and caregiving.

Those in the caregiving professions are used to such defeats, but this one seems to be galvanizing and uniting several parallel movements — most of which have a strong presence here in the Bay Area — that want to apply human values and needs to an economic system that has never counted them.

It is, economists and policy experts say, a profoundly different way to measure economic output — and if the domestic workers and their allies succeed, it could have long-term implications for national, state, and local policy.

CARING DOESN’T COUNT

There are endless examples of how society undervalues caring and caregiving and other labor that has long been deemed “women’s work.” They range from nurses fighting for fair contracts to in-home support service workers fighting for their jobs. Many are jobs that have traditionally been done in the home — and in some cases, not counted at all as part of the Gross Domestic Product.

Social work, teaching, administrative support, caring for children or seniors, community organizing, and other jobs held predominantly by women and people of color are consistently among the lowest paid professions.

But the demand for those jobs is increasing — and the price of under-investing in education, caregiving, and child development is decreased productivity and increased crime and other costs for decades to come — so activists say they are critical to the nation’s future.

“It’s a different perspective. Caregiving isn’t transactional the way we think about other jobs,” said Alicia Garza, executive director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), which has joined with other organizations nationwide for a Caring Across Generations campaign. “We’re a nation that has a growing aging population with no plan for how we’re going to take care of these people.”

In California today, caregivers find themselves under attack. Despite playing an important role in electing Brown as governor and in keeping Kaiser Hospital in Oakland and CPMC’s St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco open to the low-income residents they serve, the California Nurses Association is still stuck in a years-long contract impasse with those huge hospital corporations.

“We don’t think of ourselves first, we think of others first,” says Zenei Cortez, a CNA co-president who has been a registered nurse for 33 years, noting that patient care and advocacy standards have been key sticking points in their negotiations.

During each year with a budget shortfall, in-home support services for the sick, elderly, and disabled have been placed on the budgetary chopping block in California and many of its counties — including San Francisco, which has about 21,000 such workers — saved only by political organizing efforts and a longstanding lawsuit against the state (which was just settled on March 20 and will result in an 8 percent across-the-board cut in services).

“This program has been under assault for a full decade,” says Paul Kumar, a public policy and political consultant for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, calling that attack short-sighted, in both fiscal and human terms. “People get better care in a home setting.”

UNDERVALUED, ACROSS THE BOARD

If people generally act in their financial self interest, as economic theory holds, Oakland resident Lil Milagro Martinez would oppose the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and its requirement that she pay her nanny at least minimum wage and allow for breaks and sick days.

After all, Milagro and her family are barely scraping by, with her husband working four jobs as she balances care for their infant son with coursework as a theology graduate student. Instead, Milagro said, she offers their nanny a living wage, benefits, and good working conditions.

“I wanted to feel that we were affirming her rights, so she would pass on that level of respect to my son,” Milagro told us. “If I can do this, and there are companies out there saying they can’t afford to do the right thing, that angers me.”

She was also angry when Brown vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. She’s been working with a domestic worker employer group called Hand in Hand, a part of the larger National Domestic Worker Coalition.

“Our goal is to bring people together to create the kinds of worker relationships they want with people in their homes,” Danielle Feris, the national director of Hand in Hand, told us. “There will just be more and more people that need care in the home, so this touches all families.”

Milagro and other domestic worker employers say their stand is about much more than enlightened self-interest. They say this is an important step toward recognizing the important contributions that women and minority groups make to society and creating an economy focused on addressing human needs.

“Care, we can say, is undervalued across the board,” Feris said.

In addition to reintroducing the bill in Sacramento this year, the coalition is pushing similar legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois.

“I think the domestic workers have done a fantastic job at organizing across the country,” Ammiano said. “Making a movement of something isn’t easy, but once it gets traction then it’s tough to ignore.”

Like Milagro and Ammiano, Molina said she was bitterly disappointed by Brown’s veto, although all say it only strengthened their resolve to win the fight this year. “I felt very sad, depressed, and betrayed,” Molina said. “But we will win this…And I think the movement for women, workers, and immigrants will only grow from us winning.”

Domestic Workers Coalition campaign coordinator Katie Joaquin noted that the campaign is about triggering a cultural shift as much as it’s about winning legal protections, as important as they may be. “Once this bill passes and we have basic protections doesn’t mean the abuses will stop,” she said, noting that this is really about valuing care work.

“It’s bringing people together around the care we need,” Joaquin said. “These are conversations that are breaking new ground. The bill is really something that gets the ball rolling.”

Once some household work gets recognized, it’s not a big step toward a conversation about valuing all kinds of caring work and including that in our measures of economic progress.

“We definitely support the idea of valuing all care work, both paid and unpaid,” Feris said. “We all have something to gain by valuing each other.”

THE REAL WEALTH OF NATIONS

Author and researcher Riane Eisler has been a leading thinker and advocate for creating a more caring economy for decades, work that resulted in her seminal 1988 book The Chalice and the Blade, which sold half a million copies and was lauded as a groundbreaking analysis of the gender roles in ancient and modern history. She followed that with The Real Wealth of Nations in 2007, and the creation of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) and the Caring Economy Campaign.

Eisler takes issue with what most people call “the economy,” a wasteful and incomplete system that doesn’t actually economize in connecting what we have to what we need. She persuasively argues that it makes sense in both human and fiscal terms to value caring and caregiving, for one another and the natural world, providing myriad examples of countries, cultures, and companies that have benefited from that approach.

“In a way, the concepts are very simple. What could be more simple than saying the real wealth of nations isn’t financial? It consists of the contributions of people and nature,” Eisler told us by phone from her home in Monterey.

On March 20, Eisler gave a Congressional Briefing (attended by members and staffers in the Rayburn House Office Building) entitled “The Economic Return From Investing in Care Work & Early Childhood Education,” presenting a report on the issue that CPS and the Urban Institute released in December: “National Indicators and Social Wealth.”

“I think this is extremely timely,” Eisler told us, noting that the Republican Party’s currently aggressive fiscal conservatism must be countered with evidence that meeting people’s real needs is better economic policy than simply catering to Wall Street’s interests.

Her address to Congress followed ones that Eisler has given to the United Nations General Assembly and other important civic organizations around the world, and it was followed the next day by an address she gave to the State Department entitled: “What’s Good for Women is Good for World: Foundations of a Caring Economy.”

While Eisler said “there are people who are very excited about it,” she admits that her ideas have made little progress with the public even as the global economy increasingly displays many of the shortcomings she’s long warned against. “This is still very much on the margins.”

But that could be changing, particularly given the political organizing work that has been done in recent years around the rights of domestic workers and immigrants and on behalf of the interests of children and the poor, some of it drawing on the work of liberal economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

“The Gross Domestic Product is a very poor measure of economic health,” she told us, noting that it perversely counts excessive healthcare spending, rapid resource depletion, and the cleanups of major oil spills as positive economic activity.

Erwin de Leon, a Washington DC policy researcher, opens “National Indicators and Social Wealth” with a quote from a speech that Robert F. Kennedy gave in 1968 criticizing GDP as a bad measure of progress: “It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

De Leon then writes: “An urgent need met by measuring a nation’s social wealth is identifying the attributes of a society that make it possible to create and support the development of the full capacities of every individual through the human life span. Social wealth indicators identify these drivers, with special focus on the economic value of caring for and educating children and the contributions of women and communities of color.”

The carefully documented report makes an economic argument that investment in caregiving and early childhood development more than pays for itself over the long run in terms of increased productivity and decreased costs from crime and other social ills, creating a happier and more egalitarian society in the process.

“Nobody talks about the work that immigrant women do and how it contributes to productivity. They free us up to do other things, but we don’t count it,” De Leon told us in a phone interview. “We put lots of value on numbers and the views of economists. The problem with the numbers is it’s an economic number that just values production.”

Eisler’s approach is neither liberal nor conservative, and she takes equal issue with capitalism and socialism as they’ve been practiced, labeling them both “domination-based” systems (as opposed to the “partnership-based” systems she advocates) that devalue caregiving and real human needs.

In fact, she seems to be even harder on progressives than those on the other end of the ideological spectrum, given the Left’s stated concern for women and communities of color. It was a point that Ammiano echoed: “There’s a lot of liberal guilt, but the follow-through has yet to happen.”

“What this entails is re-examining everything,” Eisler told us. “It starts with examining the underlying beliefs and values.”

INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM

Even in supposedly enlightened San Francisco, things are getting worse. On March 26, following a battle with SEIU Local 1021 that began last fall, the city’s Department of Human Resources submitted to a labor mediator its proposal to lower the salaries for new hires in 43 job categories, including vocational nurses, social workers, and secretaries.

The rationale: Those workers were paid more than market rates based on a survey of other counties. But it’s also true that those positions are disproportionately held by women and minorities. In the 1980s, San Francisco made a policy decision to raise the pay of what were traditionally female-dominated professions, part of a nationwide campaign to erase decades of pay inequity.

“The city is rolling back decades of historic work on pay equity in this city,” SEIU Political Director Chris Daly told us. “We were concerned about equal treatment of workers who were disproportionately women and people of color.”

DHS spokesperson Susan Gard told us, “The city is committed to that principal, equal pay for equal work, and we don’t think our proposal erodes that.” But she couldn’t explain why that was true. In reality, the move will lower the salaries for women that come to work for the city.

Those involved in the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign mince no words when it comes to seeing the long history of sexism in political and economic institutions as one of the main obstacles they face.

“In so many ways, domestic work is women’s work, and women’s work has always been undervalued and underpaid,” Milagro said.

She even saw it growing up as child when she accompanied her father when he did housekeeping work, when he was treated “as nonentity, not human,” abuse and mistreatment that was exacerbated by the twin facts that he was an immigrant doing women’s work.

“Sexism has undervalued care work,” Feris said.

Ammiano likened the current struggle to the gay rights movement, and he said that when he started as a teacher back in the 1970s and wanted to teach in the early primary grades, he was told that was for women.

“It’s the feminization of labor,” Ammiano said. “When you have institutional sexism, you have to peel it back layer by layer.”

Eisler is equally direct: “We’ve all been taught to marginalize anything connected to the feminine,” she said.

She noted the vastly disproportionate global poverty rates of women compared to men and said “it’s because most are full or part-time caregivers,” work that isn’t often compensated.

Eisler said the current economic system “marginalizes and dehumanizes half the population,” asking how that could ever be considered ethical or equitable. She dismisses arguments that we can’t afford to value caregiving or work done in the home, noting that “there’s always money for the masculine values” of war and economic expansion.

Ammiano said the cultural blinders that prevent people from seeing how society discriminates against women and the work they do makes the problem more insidious and tougher to solve.

“If they’re doing it deliberately, it’s almost better because you can sink you teeth into it, but if it’s not deliberate then it’s tougher to corral,” he said.

Yet there could be subtle but important changes underway in how people value the roles of men and women in society.

There are indications that substantial majorities of people increasingly see men and masculine values as a big part of the problems the people of the world are facing. Author John Gerzema, whose forthcoming book is entitled Athena Doctrine: How Women (And the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future, revealed some of the extensive polling research behind his book in a recent TED Talk.

Much of it points to what he called a “global referendum on men,” with strong majorities in countries around the world — with Canada the only exception — agreeing with the statements “I’m dissatisfied with the conduct of men in my country” and “The world could be better if men thought more like women.”

He and his research partners also had the tens of thousands of people they surveyed rate a list of traits as either masculine or feminine, and then later he had respondents state the traits they most wanted to see in their political leaders, finding that people around the world have begun to strongly prefer feminine traits to male ones in their leaders.

His conclusion: “Femininity is the operating system of 21st Century progress.”

THE SILVER TSUNAMI

The “silver tsunami” — Baby Boomers reaching old age and about to need more care — is about to break.

POWER, Senior Action Network, and many other San Francisco-based organizations in the Caring Across Generations campaign are part of a national push to increase access to and investment in caregiving, from early childhood development through care for those with disabilities to elder care.

“The caregiver industry is something we should invest in,” said POWER’s Garza. “We believe in a society that values care and we want to value that work.”

Yet with short-term, bottom-line thinking guiding the decisions, that requires a bold paradigm shift. Instead, the popular state In-Home Support Services program — which provides some compensation for caregivers of those with disabilities — is now facing an 8 percent cut as part of the recent settlement to lawsuits filed to prevent the 20 percent cut that then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed.

The SF-based lawyer who filed the lawsuit, Stacey Leyton, told us this was the best settlement possible given the current political climate and the risk of deeper cuts if the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the state’s favor. But she thinks any IHHS cuts are short-sighted: “Any cuts to home care may balance the budget ledger now, but they can cause more costs later in the form of nursing home care and emergency room visits.”

James Chionsini, a community organizer with the Senior and Disability Action (SDA, formerly Senior Action Network), tells us that in addition to the sheer size of the “silver tsunami” coming through — which will require a huge influx of caregivers — efforts by the federal and state governments to contain medical costs could hurt the “upper-poor,” who are required to somehow pay a share of their MediCal health care costs.

That’s one reason why SDA, POWER, and other groups are supporting several campaigns aimed at creating a more caring society, from the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights to Caring Across Generations to basic, bread-and-butter political organizing efforts.

“Organizing is so important,” Garza said, while Chionsini said, “It’s about raising the profile of people who are providing care.”

Milagro said that if the immigrant women who do domestic work score a major victory, that could empower other marginalized groups. “It’s about a change in consciousness,” she said. “This can show a path for other movements to build, strengthen, and work together.”

Garza agrees that important, foundational changes are already underway, even though they will require lots of hard organizing work to bring them to fruition.

“There is a groundswell. This is happening,” she said, noting that it revolves around asking important questions. “How do you look at an economy not rooted in patriarchy? What would it look like if we had to compensate mothers?”

Next week: Part II, Do we care about the natural world?

Artists respond to hate-speech ads with “fabulous” alterations

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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March 26, 2013

25

When it comes to countering hate speech, there’s nothing like creative expression mixed with direct action. Activists affiliated with art collectives Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power (BAAQUP) and Street Cred declared yesterday to be “Hate Free Monday,” and celebrated by modifying hate speech ads recently plastered on Muni buses.

Purchased by the pro-Israeli American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), the ads contain bigoted, inflammatory quotations directed at LGBT people, attributed to prominent Muslims. Although city officials have condemned the advertisements, they were nevertheless allowed to be displayed because Muni determined them to be within First Amendment guidelines.

Headed by conservative blogger Pamela Geller, AFDI has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Geller herself is the target of the activists’ handiwork.

“We believe that all public spaces, including public transit, should be welcoming and safe for all members of our community,” the artists, who did not give their names, wrote to the Guardian in a statement sent from baqupower@gmail.com. “The hate-filled messages purchased by Pamela Geller’s AFDI defame and vilify Muslims and are harmful and offensive to residents and visitors in San Francisco, both Muslim and non-Muslim.  Since the city will not take action against these ads on city buses, we have.”

To read BAAQUP’s full description of the motivations behind their action, go here.

Their statement concludes: “As long as these advertising outrages continue to appear on our streets, we will continue to reconstitute them to reflect something more truthful, just, and ideally fabulous.”

San Francisco female priest and gay Catholics react to selection of Pope Francis

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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March 21, 2013

7

Victoria Rue, a female Roman Catholic Priest, leads a small community of renegade Catholic worshipers in San Francisco. Ordained by a trio of female Bishops on a boat on the St. Lawrence Seaway in 2005, she’s part of a growing international movement to dismantle the longstanding ban on female clergy and push the Catholic Church in a more liberal direction. Although Rue was excommunicated shortly after her ordination, she continues to consider herself a Catholic.

Contacted by the Guardian shortly after Pope Benedict stepped down last month, Rue said, “It’s just as much my church as [former Pope Benedict] Cardinal Ratzinger’s church.” She regarded his resignation as a welcome, if limited, opportunity to push the church in the direction of inclusivity.

But that’s a tall order to say the least; the Pope selection process is fundamentally flawed, Rue says, since “women are left out completely from the process.”

And while Rue said the selection of Pope Francis showed some sensitivity to the church’s changing constituency — “The fact that he is Argentinian is definitely a positive sign” — the newly chosen pope also pushed for legislation to ban gay marriage and gay adoption in Argentina. The church’s conservative values are entrenched: When it comes to LGBT rights, female priests, and contraception, the incoming Pope isn’t likely to budge.

“There is extremely limited hope for a new direction in the Church,” said Tom Piazza, a member of Sophia in Trinity, a San Francisco Roman Catholic church.

Piazza, who is in his 70s, says he grew up Catholic but felt alienated by the Church’s conservative tone — and local Catholics like him are increasingly at odds with the Roman Catholic Church. While it continues to champion conservative social mores, the majority of local Catholics now support gay marriage, according to a recent Field Poll.

The San Francisco Archdiocese is currently headed by Salvatore Cordileone, a major proponent of Prop 8. Cordileone served as the chairman of The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ subcommittee for the defense of marriage, and his appointment to the San Francisco Archdiocese was widely understood as an effort to rein in the city’s diverse Catholic community.

The ideological rift between parishioners and the hierarchy is most apparent at Most Holy Redeemer Church, in the Castro — home to San Francisco’s active gay-Catholic community. The parishioners at Most Holy Redeemer routinely clash with conservative church leadership. Bishop Cordileone has even suggested that the Church’s gay couples refrain from taking communion.

Father Brian Costello, the priest at Most Holy Redeemer, recently removed a picture of former Pope Benedict XVI from the Church after parishioners raised concerns about the Pope’s homophobic leanings. In a letter to the community, Costello expressed hope that with the selection of a new Pope, gay Catholics could work to “embrace the Pope and the Church, even when they don’t accept us.”

Jesuit Priest Donal Godfrey, author of Gays and Grays, a history of the gay Catholic community at Most Holy Redeemer, sees the ascension of Francis as a welcome opportunity to change the relationship between San Francisco’s Catholics and the church leadership.

“I want to get away from the dynamic of always getting put in our place. Instead of being smacked on the head and being told we are not good Catholics, we should create a space where we aren’t frightened to share our truths,” he told the Guardian.

At Sophia in Trinity, Rue echoes Godfrey’s concerns and hopes that the new Pope Francis will allow local Catholics to collaborate more closely in her community. “In the future, if a parish wants to work with a woman priest, maybe they won’t get their hand slapped by the Church hierarchy.”

Angels in Budapest

Andrew Lam

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March 12, 2013

0

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER On two old VHS tapes in the collection of San Francisco’s Museum of Performance and Design you can watch the Eureka Theater’s 1991 world premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a response to the AIDS epidemic and the reactionary politics of the Reagan era. It’s a low-fi document, with poor sound quality, but it’s completely riveting. Something more than the play’s words and images, as striking as they are, cling to that worn magnetic tape: there’s the electric excitement of a work of art cracking open its historical moment.

A similar frisson passed through the main auditorium of the National Theatre of Budapest last week, where I joined a group of international guests and a local audience for Romanian-born American director Andrei Serban’s production of Angels in America, starring as Prior Walter the National’s celebrated yet politically embattled artistic director, Robert Alföldi, an award-winning international director in his own right and one of the country’s most famous actors.

The production was the capstone of an impressive weeklong festival featuring some of the best work in contemporary Hungarian independent and state-sponsored repertory theater. Presented by the Hungarian Critics Association, in international partnership with Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theatre Development and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Hungarian Showcase (March 2–9) encompassed a revelatory range of styles and talents. It also highlighted a theater actively responding to a rising tide of reactionary politics — reminiscent (especially in its overt anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anti-Roma racism) of the ultra-nationalism of the 1930s — even as the arts in general and theater in particular reel under the economic strain of the conservative government’s neoliberal agenda and attempted curbs on free expression.

The National’s production of Angels is just one instance of theater’s critical role in public dialogue in Hungary today, but in many ways it was the most poignant instance encountered. That’s in large part owed to Alföldi’s powerhouse performance in the lead — a muscular, charismatic performance, extremely witty and wrenching by turns — and simultaneously to his history as artistic director over the last five years. Since Alföldi’s government appointment in 2008, something extraordinary has been underway at the country’s premier stage. Previously, Budapest’s National Theatre had been better known for its kitschy postmodern edifice (opened in 2002 and made to resemble a rather gaudy ship aimed vaguely at the nearby Danube) than for the unexceptional productions on display inside. Under Alföldi’s brilliant and maverick leadership, the theater has come to be widely regarded as one of the best — if not the best — in the country, and attendance has grown dramatically, including among younger audiences.

Alföldi’s attempts to make the theater a place of inclusion and dialogue, meanwhile, as well as his lively and provocative interpretations of classic Hungarian nationalist texts like The Tragedy of Man and John the Valliant, have earned the disfavor of rightwing politicians — including members of the ultra nationalist Jobbik party, who were not above demonstrating noisily outside the theater to demand his ouster, and slandering Alföldi on the floor of the Parliament. Alföldi, popular and unprecedentedly successful in the post, has managed to stay on for his five-year term, but the government denied his application for a second term in favor of a well-known director with conservative political opinions.

In Serban’s considerably pared down version, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika together come in at just under four hours, separated by a short intermission. There are naturally some sacrifices entailed. The subplot involving Roy Cohn (played by the National’s brilliant János Kulka), for example, takes a big hit in terms of stage time. But whatever the faults of the production, the exuberant, ironical tone feels aptly knowing, as does the rotating stage set up like a cross between a dance floor and a merry-go-round.

In just one example of the production’s winking conversation with the audience, an announcement over the PA system at the outset of Part II reminds patrons in this former Soviet bloc country that the play is set in a far off land bearing little resemblance to anything close by — only to be followed by the familiar twang of an electric guitar as the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” creates a musical bridge to a speech by the Oldest Living Bolshevik. Like Prior’s heavenly counselors, the Bolshevik urges a halt to history. The significance of the theme is unlikely to be lost on an audience facing the atavistic return to authoritarian models of the past.

While this isn’t the first time a Hungarian theater has essayed Kushner’s play, enough has changed politically in Hungary in the last few years to make this production, in which Alföldi assumes the role of the play’s cross-dressing openly gay hero, an act of brazen defiance as well as solidarity with all “outsiders” in the right wing’s narrow compass of nationhood.

“The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come,” says Alföldi as Prior. “The great work begins.” In its own call for “more life,” the National’s production captures something of the original life of the play all over again — defining the nation and its theater as a place of empathy and inclusion, of harmony in difference.

Meanwhile, tickets for Angels in America, widely seen as Alföldi’s farewell bow, are completely sold out.

Oakland’s JVP counters AIPAC’s push to exempt aid to Israel from sequestration cuts

Sasha Cuttler

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March 6, 2013

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Oakland’s JVP counters AIPAC’s push to exempt aid to Israel from sequestration cuts

Ahead of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s three-day policy conference in Washington DC, Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace and Avaaz.org blanketed the DC Metro with provocative anti-AIPAC posters. The $100,000 marketing campaign features images of young Jews with the words: “AIPAC does not speak for me. Most Jewish Americans are pro-peace. AIPAC is not.” The posters, which are part of a larger campaign to counteract AIPAC’s strong and hawkish influence on American foreign policy, will run for two-weeks in the DC Metro.

The March 5-7 AIPAC conference attracts pro-Israel activists from around the country and this year features an address by Vice President Joe Biden. AIPAC spends nearly $3 million a year lobbying Congress and enjoys widespread support from both major political parties. But according to JVP Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish-American frustration with AIPAC is mounting.

JVP’s high-profile ad campaign is designed to appeal to more liberal American Jews who are uncomfortable with AIPAC’s continued support for conservative US foreign policy priorities. “AIPAC is the NRA of foreign policy lobbies, it pushes a right-wing agenda that in no way represents the majority of Jewish Americans,” JVP Spokesperson Sydney Levy told the Guardian.

JVP endorses the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement which seeks to isolate Israel internationally through a sustained divestment from Israeli institutions. This position has drawn criticism from other local Bay Area Jewish organizations and Levy said JVP has been barred from using space at the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council.

During the ongoing conference, AIPAC is expected to launch a campaign to convince Congress to exempt Israel aid from the sequestration budget cuts. But JVP is calling on its grassroots network of more than 35 local chapters to oppose the campaign. “In the era of sequestration, where every item is on the table – from Medicare to Head Start – why isn’t aid to Israel on the table?” asks Levy.

AIPAC did not responded to requests for comment, but we’ll update this post if it does.