Crime

THURSDAY

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JUlY 27

EVENT

Annalee Newitz

The title of Guardian contributor Annalee Newitz’s weekly column, Techsploitation, is perfect on so many levels: she has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, but she’s also totally down with porn, true-crime books, and Z-grade sci-fi movies – viva “sploitation”! Fittingly, her new book, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, is based on her doctoral research – and it contains zombies. Tonight’s reading also features a B-movie trivia contest. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m.
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus, SF
Free
415) 362-8193
www.techsploitation.com

EVENT

Jeff Adachi campaign kickoff

Party with the public defender and Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin at a re-election campaign kickoff. (Deborah Giattina)

5:30-8:30 p.m.
Glas Kat Supper Club
520 Fourth St., SF
Free
(415) 553-9520

A reporter in Wolf’s clothing

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
If freelance journalist Josh Wolf goes to jail for refusing to turn over what federal prosecutors say is video evidence of a crime that allegedly took place during a demonstration in July 2005, he’ll no doubt become a bigger cause célèbre in the lefty blogosphere.
But that doesn’t exactly make the prospect of jail time tantalizing. Wolf was hit with civil-contempt charges after refusing to testify before a federal grand jury and turn over video footage he’d obtained at a demonstration last summer in the Mission District against a G8 meeting in Scotland.
Some of the video has appeared publicly and Jeffrey Finigan, a prosecuting attorney involved in the case, saw it and wanted more. Prosecutors believe other portions of the tape, edited out by Wolf, contain evidence of protesters torching a cop car. Wolf denies that but says he’s standing on principle in withholding the tape. At the state level, Wolf is protected by California’s Shield Law, which is designed to protect the news-gathering process, but there is no federal equivalent.
Wolf attended a contempt hearing last week in federal court, where Judge William Alsup extended the issue to a future date, giving Finigan and Wolf’s East Bay attorney, José Luis Fuentes, time to iron out remaining questions about what protection Wolf might be afforded as a journalist. Wolf is also receiving help from the San Francisco office of the National Lawyers Guild and announced at a prehearing press conference that the Society of Professional Journalists recently gave $1,000 to his defense fund.
Wolf’s legal team has regularly lobbied the court to allow documents related to the case to be made publicly available, and several of them have been posted at Wolf’s Web site, Joshwolf.net. “We fought really hard to make all of those documents public,” Wolf said at the press conference. “It’s a situation where we have a lot of public information about it, which we’re lucky to have.”
Even if the contempt charges are tossed, Wolf could still decide to testify and turn over the tape with or without immunity from criminal charges that could be filed against him for any role he may have played in the alleged vandalism. At the press conference, Fuentes insisted the police department still has not stepped forward with any description of damages or subsequent costs reutf8g to the car.
The day of the press conference, Wolf’s story appeared on the blog Huffingtonpost.com via contributor Stephen Kaus. “The fact is that the effectiveness of the press is substantially diminished if every reporter is turned into a ‘surveillance camera’ as Wolf has claimed,” Kaus wrote. “Perhaps with exceptions for genuinely ‘terrible’ situations, the press cannot function if each crime-related story could turn into days of court testimony.” SFBG

Royal Fleischer

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Ever since somebody figured out that movies were, indeed, an art form, directors have been viewed as lone authors, or at least queen bees imperially orchestrating the efforts of mostly faceless subordinate collaborators. This is a flattering view, and sometimes a fairly accurate one. But they don’t call it the film industry — as opposed to, say, the film canvas — for nothing. Most employable directors are worker drones who just get the job done. Any job. After all, it’s competency that’s needed, not vision, the goal being entertainment rather than art.
When Richard Fleischer died three months ago, a final door closed on one of the most versatile, undiscriminating, and thoroughly Hollywood careers ever. In fact, the 90-year-old director had long been retired — his last feature was 1987’s Million Dollar Mystery, a starless farcical flop that coproducer Glad Bags promoted via a product tie-in: a $1 million treasure hunt. (The movie, alas, earned less than its title.) But his never stopped being ubiquitous as the “directed by” name on many of the most frequently televised films ever made. Some had originally been major hits, some bombed, some just punched the clock. But all were created equal in the eyes of the tube — and most likely, it seems, in the purview of Fleischer himself.
Just try connecting the dots between the features Fleischer directed between 1966 and 1976, when he was at his peak as a critically derided but reliable veteran entrusted with millions in studio money. He bounced from the psychedelic sci-fi adventure of Fantastic Voyage — with body-suited Raquel Welch as its most special effect — to 1967’s elephantine family musical fantasy Doctor Dolittle, then wasted no time and probably less sleep before turning to 1968’s The Boston Strangler.
Next up was 1969’s notoriously stupid Che!, with Dr. Zhivago (a.k.a. Omar Sharif) as the romantic revolutionary and daft Jack Palance as Fidel. Then came straight-up WWII patriotism via 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, followed by a western, a Godfather knockoff, Charles Bronson avenging as usual, blind Mia Farrow walking barefoot on broken glass to escape a murderer, 1973’s immortal Soylent Green, 1975’s bad-taste campsterpiece Mandingo, and — perhaps most incredibly in this context — Glenda Jackson as The Incredible Sarah in 1976. (Pauline Kael griped, “To think we were spared Ken Russell’s Sarah Bernhardt only to get Richard Fleischer’s,” dubbing him a “glorified mechanic [who] pleases movie executives because he has no particular interests and no discernable style.”)
Somehow amid all this middlebrow showmanship, Fleischer snuck in a small, low-key, fact-based British movie during 1971. 10 Rillington Place — part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “Too Scary for DVD: Neglected Horror on 35mm” series — is closer in spirit to the sharp, documentary-influenced B-grade noirs (1952’s The Narrow Margin, 1949’s Trapped) with which he started out his career, before Disney’s 1954 live-action smash 20,000 Leagues under the Sea promoted him to the A-list. Fleischer made several true crime films over the years, but arguably none truer than this chillingly poker-faced tale.
The Christie murders were infamous in Britain, not least because the execution of a probably innocent man played a significant role in that country’s abolition of the death penalty. Milquetoast landlord John Christie drugged, assaulted, and strangled numerous women, hiding their bodies in the Notting Hill house and backyard he shared with tenants and his oblivious wife. 10 Rillington Place focuses on those events of 1948, when a rather awful young couple (Judy Geeson, John Hurt) and their baby took the dingy upstairs flat. The Evanses were easy prey — the husband an illiterate compulsive liar with an IQ of 70, the pretty wife no exemplar either but understandably concerned that a second pregnancy would make their already marginal existence impossible. Christie (Richard Attenborough, future director of Gandhi) claimed knowledge of then-illegal abortion procedures, to Beryl Evans’s fatal misfortune.
Trading in British working-class miserabilism as if born to it (even Ken Loach would be impressed), the distressing yet nonhyperbolic Rillington delivers one credible version of the much-disputed case. Everything about it is astutely controlled, but two performances — Attenborough’s and Hurt’s — push that description into the realm of brilliance, indelibly etching the respective banalities of evil and of innocence.
One might call this sober replay of sordid reality an anomaly for Fleischer, but what film of his isn’t? Like several other major-league commercial directors of the ’60s (Robert Wise, Stanley Donen), he hung on through the ’70s but developed a serious case of irrelevance in the ’80s. Indeed, the embarrassments lined up like ducks: Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer, Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja, Amityville 3-D. No doubt he enjoyed the retirement that by then was so richly deserved. It is reported that he liked playing tiddlywinks with his granddaughter, perhaps while seated near his Mickey Mouse head–shaped swimming pool. (This despite his own father being Betty Boop creator Max Fleischer, Walt Disney’s leading early rival.) The director of Boston Strangler and Mandingo must have been a very nice, normal man to accommodate so many contradictions with so little fuss. He may be in the grave now, but it’s we the living who are spinning. SFBG
10 RILLINGTON PLACE
Thurs/20, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room
701 Mission, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Sunny side of the scream

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
The Greek deities might throw lightning bolts and issue stormy protests, but when I first saw Erase Errata in November 2001, they seemed less a fledgling local all-girl band than scruffy goddesses sprung full grown from the temple of … Mark E. Smith. The year-and-a-half-old foursome opened for the newly reenergized, near-surfabilly Fall and they were staggering — seeming grrrlish prodigies who picked up the sharp, jagged tools discarded by Smith with a confidence that seemed Olympian (as in Washington State and Zeus’s heavenly homestead). On their way to All Tomorrow’s Parties in LA, vocalist–trumpet player Jenny Hoyston, guitarist Sara Jaffe, bassist Ellie Erickson, and drummer Bianca Sparta were poised to speak in primal feminist riddles while constructing their own dissonant wing to the Fall’s aural complex, one comprising driving, weirdo time signatures; raw, textural guitar; and atonal washes.
It was not the type of performance you might expect from Hoyston, 32, who grew up stranded in a singular God’s country in the “dry,” extremely Christian, and very un–rock ’n’ roll town of Freeport, Texas, where she was once more likely to be Bible thumping instead of guitar thrumming. “I was a born-again Christian, Republican. I was engaged,” says Hoyston today, gazing out on the concrete beer garden of el Rio where she regularly does sound and books shows. “I thought my life had to be this one way.”
So what turned her toward the path of big-daddy demon rock?
“Uh, LSD,” she says drily.
Actually it was the empty feeling that engulfed her despite all the church-related activities she threw herself into — that and the life-changing spectacle of SF dyke punk unit Tribe 8 playing her college town of Lansing, Mich. “I was just really impressed by how free those crazy people seemed. It just seemed really beautiful,” she explains. “And I didn’t necessarily come out here to meet them and hang out with them. Straight-up punk is not really my kind of music. But I think they are just so powerful. They came to town and made all the queers feel like they were going to go to this place, maybe even with their boyfriend and hold their hands and not get beat up. I wanted to get that empowered.”
There are still more than a few remnants of that sweet, shy Texas back-roads girl that Hoyston once was: She speaks gently and looks completely nondescript in her black T-shirt and specs, padding around el Rio as the petal-soft air of an SF summer afternoon burns into the deep velvet pelt of night. Some might mistake her watchful awkwardness for holier- or hipper-than-thou aloofness. But here at her dive, waiting for Tank Attack and Fox Pause to materialize for the first Wednesday show she books, she’s in her element, playing Bee Gees tracks and disco hits between the bands, running the PA, and busying herself by distributing flyers for an upcoming Pam Grier movie night.
“I’m excited about tonight’s show because it’s not a big heavy-drinking crowd,” Hoyston offers sincerely.
Erase Errata’s vocalist and now guitarist is far from an archetypal star, even as her band has become more than a little well-known in indie, underground, and experimental music circles. The seniors in a small smart class of all-female groups in the Bay Area — including conceptual metal-noise supergroup T.I.T.S. and experimental noise Midwestern transplants 16 Bitch Pileup — they share with those bands an embrace of threatening, cacophonous sonics and edge-rockin’, artful yet intuitive tendencies that inevitably meet the approval of those persnickety noise boys, an approach Hoyston is now fully conscious of.
“I think had our music been slightly less confrontational, we would have been dismissed a lot quicker,” she says. “I think people thought we had cred because we were being hard, y’know.”
Weasel Walter — who first lived in Hoyston’s former Club Hott warehouse in Oakland upon moving from Chicago — can validate that perspective. His band, Flying Luttenbachers, played nightly with Erase Errata, Lightning Bolt, Locust, and Arab on Radar as part of the Oops! Tour in 2002. “Every night I got to watch them play intense, energetic versions of songs from their entire catalog and also began to understand what a complex organism the band was, musically and personally,” he e-mails. “Bianca and Ellie are a fantastic rhythm section, and Jenny is an LSD poetess and standup comedienne without peer!”
GOING OUT
Erase Errata’s new, third album, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars), is the latest sign of untrammeled spirit and uncontainable life in the band — and in the all-woman band form. Hoyston may personally favor a more low-key version of nightlife — not so with her art and lyrics.
Now a threesome after the departure of Jaffe in 2004 for grad school and a temporary stint by A Tension’s Archie McKay on token-male vocals, the band has become both more directly melodic and more pointedly politicized. The echoing, droning, rotating police copter blades of the title track demonstrate that they are far from detached from their boundary-testing inclinations, but otherwise — while other bands of their turn-of-the-century generation have quieted down, folked up, or simply folded — Erase Errata wind up for an energizing, wake-up kick in the ball sac with Nightlife, aimed at those who claim that the underground has been far too escapist, evasive, or simply mute when it comes to polemics and art punk.
Borrowing American Indian powwow rhythms (“Take You”) and sandblasted rockabilly beats (“Rider”), along with their more archetypal ragged textures (“Dust”), the band skates between the urgency of midperiod Sleater-Kinney and the honking dissonance of DNA, as Hoyston coos, “While you’re too broke to not commit a crime/ Your federal government knows that this is true/ More prisons/ More people have to die” on “Another Genius Idea from Our Government.” The group lets its anger and outrage drive the songs — allowing a Gang of Four–style frenetic punk funk to propel “Tax Dollar” (“American bastard, murderous bitch/ Traitor to humans/ So rebel! Get on the run”) — but not consume them. They stop to study the world around them — be it the well-armed paranoid desert rats of “Rider” (which finds Hoyston turning the phrase “Where everybody has a gun/ Everybody has a knife” into a wildly western horror show of a hook) or the street-level violence that bleeds into the gender wars on “He Wants What’s Mine” (“Hey Beautiful!/ Take it into the night, I’ll walk beside you and steal/ Your life like a carving knife”).
Hoyston attributes the tone of the album to her move from Oakland to San Francisco. “In general, I started to notice things around my city that kind of woke me up to national situations, when I think I’d been a little bit dormant on that front as well. So I got really inspired,” she says. “I think At Crystal Palace [Troubleman, 2003] isn’t as political a record as Other Animals [2001] was. I think it was more us being artistic and more me lyrically just existing in a purely artistic realm and not really thinking about, well, yeah, I am political. I have feelings and I can express them in art and they can actually reach a wide audience. I think I just rerealized the power of the tool of having a voice.”
BIG JOKE
The band never had any intention of making their music a career: In fact, Erase Errata began as an outright joke played on Hoyston’s Club Hott housemate Luis Illades of Pansy Division. Hoyston moved to the Bay Area in the late ’90s, where she began working in the Guardian’s accounting department; formed California Lightning with her best friend, Bianca Sparta; and met Ellie Erickson (who was in Nebraska all-girl teen band XY and also later worked at the Guardian) and through her, Sara Jaffe.
“When Sara and I met each other, it was, like, ‘OK, are we going to go out or are we going to start a band together? Why don’t we do something more long-term and start a band together?’” recalls Hoyston. “You know when you meet somebody and you have so much in common with them and they’re actually queer? It’s a really powerful thing.”
Even now, the once painfully timid Hoyston marvels, “I seriously can’t believe I’m a front person for a band. It was seriously a joke that I was going to sing for this band because I considered myself an accomplished guitar player — not a front person, by any means. I think front people are really pretty or cute or sexy and all the kind of things that I don’t see myself as. We were just making up songs and people would hear and say, ‘Omigod, what was that? Will you guys play with us?’”
That dirty word for this noncareerist group — momentum — came into play, and Erase Errata discovered themselves on tour with Sonic Youth and Numbers, as, Hoyston says, she challenged herself “with, like, can I get in front of all these people and act like a fool and try to sing weird and sing good and get confident and maybe even feel aggressive, the way my bandmates were challenging each other with instruments? It’s something that eventually kind of came easier and easier over time. And now I can sit down and talk to you.”
The key to Nightlife’s success lies, perhaps, in the fact that the band is still pushing itself, musically and artistically. “I think it’s women’s music,” ponders Hoyston. “There’s still something odd about some of the music we’re making. It’s still atonal at times, some parts might be a little awkward, some parts might go on too long. Here and there, things are like that intentionally. We still try to keep things a little bit difficult for ourselves to pull off live. So I think it’s made for people who might appreciate an interesting take on pop punk, maybe.”
Pop punk! Nightlife is still not exactly Vans Warped Tour material, though one punk godfather might approve. Sort of, according to Hoyston, who conjures her most memorable encounter with Fall guy Mark E. Smith: “I was a smoker back then, and Mark E. Smith walked right up to me and took my cigarette right out of my hand as I was putting it up to my lips and smoked it all the way down to the filter and then flicked it at me and said, ‘See ya, kid.’ In a really mean, mean, mean way! Then he went out onstage and did the encore. And I was just, like, ‘He stole my cigarette! That’s great!’ Because he’s like an … icon to me.
“I don’t like him necessarily. I don’t think he’s a nice person…. He’s a real jerk in general. But I love the Fall.”
The gods can be merciless — and forgiving — though Hoyston would be the first to debunk any of that vaporous junk. Amid Erase Errata’s achievements and her own multiple solo incarnations such as Paradise Island, it’s clear she’s no goddess. She’s simply very human and just trying to stay active. “I’m just really into demystifying things for myself,” she says. “I mean, if I wanted to be mystified, I’d still be in church.” SFBG
ERASE ERRATA
Guardian Best of the Bay party
Aug. 2, 9 p.m.
Club Six
60 Sixth St., SF
$10
(415) 863-1221
CD release party with T.I.T.S.
Aug. 4, 7 p.m.
El Rio
3158 Mission, SF
Free
(415) 282-3325
www.elriosf.com

Rabid rabbi

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› news@sfbg.com
“You are my rabbi,” said the caller who claimed to be a Methodist. “Good,” said the talk show host, “Everybody needs a rabbi.”
This is no shock jock being irreverent — he’s a real rabbi. But make no mistake, this is no jolly rebbe kvetching about marrying a nice Jewish boy, nor a lefty Jew talking about justice, diversity, and the Holocaust. He’s Daniel Lapin, dubbed “the show rabbi of the Christian right” by the New York Times. And now he’s a San Francisco talker, Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. on right-wing radio station KSFO.
But Lapin’s more than a front man. He’s a faith-based political operative who was deeply implicated in the Jack Abramoff scandals when Lapin’s nonprofit, Toward Tradition, was exposed as one of a cluster of tax-exempt organizations through which Abramoff secretly routed tribal Indian and other gambling clients’ funds to an aide to Rep. Tom DeLay in return for favorable legislation.
According to news reports published as recently as last month, Abramoff’s nonprofit money-laundering operations are still under investigation. “It’s not a tax-exempt activity to act as a bagman for Jack Abramoff,” Marcus S. Owens, a tax lawyer and former IRS official, told the Washington Post in June.
The Post piece claims Lapin introduced Abramoff to deposed GOP House leader Tom DeLay, a social feat of epic political proportions. Lapin wrote in a letter to supporters after the scandal broke, “Although I have no clear recollection of having formally introduced them, it is certainly possible.”
Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has called Lapin his “spiritual adviser,” and white supremacist David Duke wrote, “There are so few honest voices like that of Rabbi Lapin.”
A rabbi without a congregation, the 59-year-old Lapin gave up his Seattle talk show in February. He’d been filling in for other KSFO hosts and began his show in April, broadcasting from a Seattle studio. Although Lapin denies it, observers opine that he moved to the Bay Area for a fresh start after national publicity about the Abramoff scandals made him radioactive in Seattle.
Toward Tradition has reportedly fallen on hard times after postscandal donations tanked. Lapin has given up his offices, laid off staff, and works out of his home on Mercer Island, a wealthy suburban enclave outside Seattle. He founded Toward Tradition with film critic and neocon radio talker Michael Medved and Abramoff in the early 1990s. The disgraced lobbyist joined the board and served a few terms as chairman. Lapin calls his organization a coalition of Jews and conservative Christians dedicated to faith-based American principles of constitutional and limited government, the rule of law, representative democracy, free markets, a strong military, and a moral public culture.
Until his recent problems, Toward Tradition allowed Lapin to pay himself a $165,000 annual salary, according to a 2003 IRS filing. He also fetched high speaker’s fees and right-wing Christian street cred that’s taken him to the George W. Bush White House for Shabbat dinners and the speaker’s podium at the 1996 Republican National Convention.
Lapin has been a conduit between the GOP and the fundamentalist “values” crowd, but was also directly involved in Republican fundraising. Newsweek reported last year, “When fundraising began for Bush’s re-election effort, Rabbi Daniel Lapin . . . urged friends and colleagues to steer campaign checks to Bush via Abramoff.” For his loyalty, Bush appointed Lapin to the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which helps protect cemeteries, monuments, and historic buildings in eastern and central Europe. He recently resigned from this post.
Although Lapin can be tedious on the radio, he’s charismatic one-on-one and on the stump. A striking figure in expensive dark suits, bright ties, meticulous ear-to-ear rabbinical beard, and bald pate usually covered with a yarmulke, he is a tall, lanky, ascetic presence.
His mission, as stated on his Web site, is “standing astride America’s secular path to decline, decadence, and depravity.” But his version of Judeo-Christianity looks like a right-wing Republican wish list. Lapin believes that currency and capital markets are revelations granted by God to the Jews and passed on to Christians.
As a man of God, he not only supports stable marriages, family life, faithfulness, and integrity, but (along, he says, with God) favors tax cuts, property rights, sodomy laws, school prayers, school vouchers, arranged marriages, and elimination of government social programs. He opposes promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, welfare, crime, funding for the arts, gun control, environmental laws, and black people giving their kids “funny” names.
“Recycling,” Lapin told the Guardian, “is the sacred sacrament of secularism.” He told KSFO listeners recently that saying a prayer over your dead pets is sick and bizarre.
According to Lapin’s writings, Terri Schiavo’s death was a “premeditated murder-plot,” and he’s said on the radio that living wills are “suicide notes.” Tattoos, birth control, piercings, abortions, and assisted suicide are all sinful because, as he told the Guardian, it’s not your body, thank you very much, you’re only a tenant. And tenants, in Lapin’s view, have no rights, especially when it comes to moving or evictions.
Lapin also crusades against homosexuality and is a headliner and co-organizer, with virulent Seattle homophobe Rev. Ken Hutcherson, of the effective, antigay Mayday for Marriage rallies, one of which drew some 150,000 supporters to the Mall in Washington, DC, just before the 2004 elections. He makes appearances on the pulpit of Hutcherson’s megachurch near Seattle and they’re jointly involved in other political activities. (Hutcherson is the evangelical who bullied Microsoft in 2005 into withdrawing support for a gay rights bill before the Washington State Legislature, which effectively killed it.)
There was comic relief at hearings last year before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee provided by e-mails between Lapin and Abramoff, and read by North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan. Abramoff asked Lapin to help him sex up a résumé to help him get into Washington’s exclusive Cosmos Club, whose membership includes Nobel Prize winners and establishment elites.
“Most prospective members have received awards and I have received none,” Abramoff complained, going on to say, “It would be even better, if it were possible, that I received these in years past, if you know what I mean.”
Lapin apparently knew what he meant, writing, “Yes, I just need to know what needs to be produced . . . letters? Plaques? Neither?”
Lapin wrote in a letter to supporters that it was merely a “jocular interchange” that he regrets, but Abramoff later used Toward Tradition’s award of “Scholar of Talmudic Studies” in serious applications, according to investigators.
Lapin also leads an organization called the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, which seems to exist only as a page on his Web site. Its board of advisers shows the company he keeps, such far-right luminaries as James Dobson, the current Christian right’s front man; the scandal-tainted Gary Bauer, a failed 2000 presidential candidate; the came-to-Jesus Watergate convict Charles “Tex” Colson; Michael Medved; and preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, whose wacky prophecies and laughable gaffes of the last few years have rendered them useless as national spokesmen for the evangelical right. It also includes hard-right orthodox rabbis like Barry Freundel, David Novak, and Meir Soloveichik.
Many Jews are nervous about such lovey-dovey political alliances with the Christian fundamentalists, considering many evangelicals don’t believe God even answers Jewish prayers. To born-agains, Jews will burn in hell if they don’t accept Jesus as their personal savior. Their support of Israel is not born of Christian love, but of Book of Revelation end-world myths that say Jews must control Israel for Christ to come back.
Lapin reassures Jews that despite evangelicals’ having been some of the most persistent anti-Semites in the past, they are the Jews’ natural allies. “I do not fear a Christian America,” he was quoted as saying in an Eastside Weekly article. “I fear a post-Christian America.”
So why does David Duke — the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard turned Republican congressional candidate — like Lapin? Good question, since Duke’s Christian Identity beliefs hold that Jews are “the children of Satan.” This does not look good on a Judeo-Christian résumé.
In an essay that ran in the Orthodox paper Jewish Press in January, Lapin denounced the silly 2004 movie Meet the Fockers, which starred his old friend Barbra Streisand. He compared its Jewish producers (and such Jews as Howard Stern) with the Jews producing Berlin theater in Weimar Germany, with their “deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations.” Lapin quoted Adolf Hitler (the leading voice on “values” of his day) charging that these Jews were responsible for “nine-tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy.” Apparently, Jews were practically begging to be hauled off to the ovens.
Duke, on his Web site, heartily agreed with Lapin and Hitler, and added that anti-Semitism isn’t just blind hatred, it’s for a darn good reason: “It is revulsion to the actions of the Jewish overseers of our mass media.”
Although he spent time growing up in Britain, Lapin was born and raised in and around white supremacist South Africa in the 1950s. Alongside his Afrikaner accent, it’s easy to detect in Lapin a sense of superiority reflecting the mid-20th-century South African Dutch Reformed Church, whose retributive, racist, and self-righteous worldview justified the apartheid system and provided a sociopolitical framework for his formative years.
Lapin often says non-Judeo-Christian cultures and secular liberalism are more of animals than of God and holds historically contentious theories that Western scientific superiority was developed directly from Judeo-Christianity. “Why didn’t the periodic table surface among the Eskimos?” he asked in a 1996 Eastside Week article. “It doesn’t make sense that Africa hadn’t figured out the wheel by the time England was at the end of the Industrial Revolution.”
The reason, Lapin said in that article, is because they never had the opening lines of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth.”
And that’s not just for third world heathens — it goes for the rest of us who don’t share the rabbi’s opinions. “Modern American liberalism,” he was quoted as saying, “is unquestionably at odds with everything Judeo-Christianity stands for.”
Strange worldview for a Bay Area audience? Maybe, but not for the station that launched Michael Savage and other angry right-wingers. However, the didactic Lapin has never had real broadcasting success, with short stints at Seattle stations and a stab at national syndication that was short lived. He says he’s doing well in the liberal Bay Area, but time will tell. SFBG
For Lapin’s denunciation of Meet the Fockers, see www.towardtradition.org/our_worst_enemy.htm. For David Duke on Lapin and anti-Semitism, see www.davidduke.com/?p=226.

Prop. A reality check

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
The greatest irony of Proposition A’s failure last month seemed to be what took place just a few short weeks after the June 6 election.
Prop. A would have budgeted $30 million over the next three years to fund violence prevention services for at-risk populations, such as anxious teens looking for a break from order during the warm summer months. It was a clear response to the city’s headline-grabbing homicide rate, which has continued its stubborn ascent this year, making life politically difficult for Mayor Gavin Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris, and the Police Department.
But with the mayor and the cops in opposition, the measure lost by less than a single percentage point. And just two weeks later, 22-year-old Andrew Ele — known among his friends as DJ Domino — was shot and killed at a bus stop near 24th Street and Folsom. Ele was a regular teen-outreach volunteer at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, a San Francisco nonprofit that helped run the Prop. A campaign with Sup. Chris Daly.
On June 20, as Ele waited for a bus with his brother André, a gunman walked to the middle of 24th Street and fired several shots at each of them before escaping in a waiting white Mazda MPV, the Police Department told the Guardian. André survived with non-life-threatening injuries, but Andrew was pronounced dead at the hospital.
The police still don’t know who killed Andrew, but as we’ve reported previously, the department hasn’t had the best luck with recent homicide investigations. As of January 2006 police had made arrests in fewer than 20 percent of the homicide cases that were opened the previous year, and the district attorney’s office has managed to file charges in only a fraction of those cases.
BACK TO THE BUDGET
The day after the election, the San Francisco Chronicle framed Prop. A’s failure as a big political win for Newsom rather than what it really was: an enormous letdown for groups such as Coleman Advocates that are offering something other than increased law enforcement. The $30 million may not have immediately improved DJ Domino’s chances of remaining alive, but neither did $18 million the city paid police overtime last year prevent a Mission bus stop from being filled with bullet holes.
The issue of violence prevention is still alive, though, and it surfaced again during the recent budget negotiations.
The press release accompanying the mayor’s late-May budget proposal for the next fiscal year boasts that Newsom set aside $2.7 million for violence prevention and intervention, which he combines with $7 million the board supplemented for the current fiscal year. Featured more prominently in the press release is his bid for 250 new cops — and yet more money to pay them overtime.
However, the board’s budget committee, chaired by Daly, found $4 million more for violence prevention, including $1 million to save the Trauma Recovery Center, which assists victims of violent crime and was close to shutting down in November for lack of funds. Not to be outdone, the mayor unveiled “SF Safe Summer 2006” last week, just as the Guardian was putting together this story, which includes an expansion of the Community Response Network, a Police Department program.
The budgetary give-and-take reflects the city’s growing frustration over a homicide rate that has at times resulted in tense Police Commission meetings. Last month a meeting at the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center — held the day after Prop. A failed — was commandeered by Western Addition and Bayview–Hunters Point residents angry over a perceived failure by the city to respond to chronic gang and street violence. (Police Chief Heather Fong and Sup. Sophie Maxwell were literally shouted down at the meeting.)
The campaign for Prop. A forced the city to address its ongoing philosophical divide on how to face off against violence. More cops or more outreach? More patrols or more job training? More overtime or more murals?
“Their approach is suppression,” Coleman Advocates youth coordinator José Luis said of law enforcement. “They get rats; they send in informants. They don’t want to use prevention.”
Luis knew Ele for eight years and said the latter used to help provide security at drug- and alcohol-free hip-hop shows that cops in the Mission eventually stopped.
“[Ele] on countless occasions jumped into a brawl and stuck his neck out to stop it,” Luis said of the events.
Ele, who often performed at clubs in the city with the DJ troupe Urban Royalties, had big plans for his life. He was going to record an album at CELLspace in the Mission once construction of a recording studio was completed there. Then he’d planned to teach young people how to spin and record hip-hop themselves.
THE OTHER APPROACH
CELLspace is a 10,000 square foot warehouse on Bryant Street that has for the last several years served mostly as an outpost for industrial artists. Locals know it best for the acrylic bombs that cover its exterior honoring fallen graf heads and Mexican revolutionaries. The building hosted dance parties for teens in the ’90s, but they were eventually shut down by the city.
By 2003, however, CELLspace had recharged its outreach efforts, slowly building an administrative staff, acquiring grant money, and implementing new after-school programs. Staffers are working with ex–gang members and specifically targeting recent Latino immigrants, who are often recruited by gangs.
“Those of us who sort of grew up in street culture, we have more experience with what could work now,” said CELLspace’s 25-year-old executive director, Zoe Garvin, who was born and raised in the Mission.
The place is brimming with ideas. There’s talk of outfitting a low-rider car with a biofuel engine and solar-powered hydraulic suspension. Staffers are building low-rider bikes and collaborating with other Mission-based groups to teach kids screen printing and break dancing. They even have a class for skaters, but the ramps that quietly appeared a couple of months ago at the Mission Flea Market, across Florida Street on the west side of the warehouse, will soon have to make way for a moderate-income housing complex, Garvin said.
CELLspace, she said, would have applied for Prop. A funding, but is looking elsewhere now. The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in early July passed over their $600,000 grant application, which would have funded a street outreach and case management program for 18- to 24-year-olds.
“I think we’ve done a really good job creating a sanctuary in here,” she said. “You have to be careful how you do it. You can’t just hire anyone.”
While the city eventually found money for community-based organizations through the budget process, it’s doubtful the debate over how to take on street violence issues will cease.
“Something like Prop. A,” Luis of Coleman Advocates says, “was long overdue.” SFBG

Anatomy of a scandal foretold

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MEXICO CITY (July 7th) — Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after Election Day. Just look at what happened in the days leading up to the tightest presidential election in the nation’s history this past July 2nd.

By law, the parties and their candidates close down their campaigns three days before Election Day. On Wednesday night June 28th, as the legal limit hove into sight, a team of crack investigators from the Attorney General’s organized crime unit descended on the maximum security lock-up at La Palma in Mexico state where former Mexico City Finance Secretary Guillermo Ponce awaits trial on charges of misuse of public funds “ much of which he appears to have left on Las Vegas crap tables.

During his nearly six years in office, outgoing president Vicente Fox has often used his attorney general’s office against leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to counter his growing popularity, including a failed effort to bar the former Mexico City mayor from the ballot and even imprison him.

Now, in a desperate last-minute electoral ploy by Fox’s right-wing National Action or PAN party to boost the fortunes of its lagging candidate Felipe Calderon, the agents tried to pressure Ponce into testifying that AMLO and his PRD party had used city revenues to finance his presidential campaign but Ponce proved a stand-up guy and ultimately rebuffed the government men.

The imprisoned finance secretary’s refusal to talk greatly disappointed both Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly that has waged an unrelenting dirty war against Lopez Obrador for months and even years. Indeed, TV crews were stationed out in the La Palma parking lot to record Ponce’s thwarted confession for primetime news and both networks had reserved time blocks on their evening broadcasting, forcing the anchors to scramble to fill in the gap.

That was Wednesday night. On Thursday June 29th, Lopez Obrador’s people awoke to discover that the candidate’s electronic page had been hacked and a phony message purportedly signed by AMLO posted there calling upon his supporters to hit the streets “if the results do not favor us.” Although officials of Lopez Obrador’s party, the PRD, immediately proved the letter to be a hoax, the pro-Calderon media broadcast the story for hours as if it were the gospel truth, eventually forcing the PRD and its allies to reaffirm that AMLO would abide by results released by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the nation’s maximum electoral authority, even if the IFE’s numbers did not favor the candidate.

The PRD pledge was a reiteration of a “pact of civility” that Televisa had browbeat PRD president Lionel Cota into signing in early June. “Hackergate,” as the scandal quickly became known, was designed to prevent Lopez Obrador’s supporters from protesting the fraud that the electoral authorities were already preparing.

That was Thursday. On Friday, June 30th, after more than five years of false starts, Fox’s special prosecutor for political crimes placed former president Luis Echeverria under house arrest for his role in student massacres in 1968 and 1971. Not only was the long overdue arrest portrayed by big media as a feather in Fox’s — and therefore, Calderon’s – cap, but it also put the much-hated Echeverria, a pseudo-leftist with whom Calderon has often compared Lopez Obrador, back on the front pages. Since Echeverria is an emeritus member of the PRI, the bust killed two birds with one very opportunist stone.

That was Friday. On Saturday June 1st, two PRD poll watchers in conflictive Guerrero state were gunned down by unknowns, invoking the memory of hundreds of party supporters who were slaughtered in political violence after the 1988 presidential election was stolen from party founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, up until now Mexico’s most conspicuous electoral fraud.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, July 2nd, Felipe Calderon and the PAN, aided and abetted by the connivance of the Federal Electoral Institute, Mexico’s maximum electoral authority, stole the presidential election before the nation’s eyes.

As mentioned above, Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after the votes are cast. During the run-up to July 2nd, the IFE, under the direction of Calderon partisan Luis Carlos Ugalde, systematically tried to cripple Lopez Obrador’s campaign. Venomous television spots that labeled AMLO “a danger” to Mexico were allowed to run, sometimes four to a single commercial break, for months on Televisa and TV Azteca despite an indignant outcry from Lopez Obrador’s supporters. The IFE only pulled the plug on the hit pieces under court order.
In a similar display of crystal clear bias, Ugalde and the IFE winked at Vicente Fox’s shameless, unprecedented, and unconstitutional campaigning for Calderon, and refused to intervene despite AMLO’s pleas for the president to remove himself from the election.

One of the IFE’s more notorious accomplishments in this year’s presidential elections was to engineer the non-vote of Mexicans in the United States, an effort that resulted in the disenfranchisement of millions of “paisanos” living north of the Rio Bravo. Undocumented workers were denied absentee ballot applications at consulates and embassies and more than a million eligible voters were barred from casting a ballot because their voter registration cards were not up to date and the IFE refused to update them outside of Mexico. Untold numbers of undocumented workers who could not risk returning to Mexico for a minimum 25 days to renew their credential were denied the franchise the IFE was sworn to defend. The PRD insists that the majority of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. would have cast a ballot for Lopez Obrador.

The left-center party has considerable strength in Los Angeles and Chicago, the two most important concentrations of Mexicans in the U.S. When thousands of legal Mexican residents from Los Angeles caravanned to Tijuana to cast a ballot for Lopez Obrador, they found the special polling places for citizens in transit had no ballots. The 750 ballots allocated to the special “casillas” had already been taken by members of the Mexican police and military.

In Mexico City, when voters in transit lined up at one special polling place, according to noted writer Elena Poniatowska, hundreds of nuns presumably voting for the rightwing Calderon displaced them and were given the last of the ballots.

Back in the bad old days when the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) stole elections with impunity, most of the larceny took place in the polling stations –stolen or stuffed ballot boxes, multiple voting, altered vote counts — but since national and international observers like the San Francisco-based Global Exchange became a regular feature of the electoral landscape here, such overt fraud has diminished and the cumulative number of anomalies recorded in 130,000 casillas July 2nd seemed insignificant when compared to the size of the victory Calderon was already claiming the morning after — i.e. the John Kerry Syndrome, named in memory of the Democratic Party candidate’s sudden capitulation in Ohio in 2004 for much the same reason.

Nonetheless, this “fraude de hormiga” (fraud of the ants) which steals five to 10 votes a ballot box, when combined with the disappearance of voters from precinct lists (“razarados” or the razored ones) can fabricate an electoral majority: The long-ruling PRI (which failed to win a single state July 2nd) was a master of this sort of “alquemia” (alchemy) during seven decades of defrauding Mexican voters.

During the build-up to July 2nd, independent reporters here uncovered what appeared to be IFE preparations for cybernetic fraud. One columnist at the left national daily La Jornada discovered parallel lists of “razarados” on the IFE electronic page; one of the lists contained multiples of the other. While the columnist, Julio Hernandez, made a phone call to the IFE to question this phenomenon, the list containing the multiples vanished from his computer screen.

Similarly, radio reporter Carmen Aristegui was able to access the list of all registered voters through one of Felipe Calderon’s web pages, and the list had been crossed with one containing the personal data of all recipients of government social development program benefits. Former social development secretary (SEDESO) Josefina Vazquez Mota, is Calderon’s right hand woman and the PAN candidate’s brother-in-law Diego Zavala, a data processing tycoon, designed programs for both the IFE and the SEDESO. Utilizing voter registration rolls and lists of beneficiaries of government programs is considered an electoral crime here.

AMLO’s people went into July 2nd fearing a repeat of 1988 when the “system” purportedly “collapsed” on election night and did not come back up for ten days. When results were finally announced, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has been despoiled of victory and the PRI’s Carlos Salinas was declared the winner.

Lopez Obrador’s fears were not unwarranted.

When on July 2nd AMLO’s voters turned out in record-breaking numbers, Interior Secretary officials urged major media not to release exit poll results that heralded a Lopez Obrador victory. Ugalde himself took to national television to declare the preliminary vote count too close to call, and Mexicans went to bed without knowing whom their next president might be.

Preliminary results culled from the casillas (PREP) that ran erratically all night and all day Monday showed Calderon with a 200,000 to 400,000-vote lead, activating suspicions that cybernetic flimflam was in the works. When the PREP was finally shut down Monday night, the right winger enjoyed a commanding lead and Televisa and TV Azteca proclaimed him a virtual winner. U.S newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune followed suit, and the White House was poised to celebrate a Calderon victory.

But there was one fly in the IFE’s ointment: 42 million Mexicans had voted July 2nd, but only the votes of 39 million appeared in the PREP and Lopez Obrador demanded to know what had happened to the missing 3,000,000 voters. Then on a Tuesday morning news interview with Televisa, Luis Carlos Ugalde admitted that the missing votes had been abstracted from the PREP because of “inconsistencies”. Indeed, 13,000 casillas — 10% of the total — had been removed from the preliminary count, apparently to create the illusion that Calderon had won the presidency.

Meanwhile all day Monday and into Tuesday, AMLO supporters throughout Mexico recorded thousands of instances of manipulation of the vote count. A ballot box in Mexico state registered 188 votes for Lopez Obrador but only 88 were recorded in the PREP. Another Mexico state ballot box was listed 20 times in the preliminary count. Whereas voters in states where the PAN rules the roost, cast more ballots for president than for senators and congressional representatives, voters in southern states where the PRD carried the day cast more ballots for congress than for the presidential candidates. Among the PRD states that purportedly followed this surreal pattern was Tabasco, the home state of two out of the three major party presidential candidates, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo.

On Wednesday morning, with the tension mounting to the breaking point and demonstrators already massing in the street, a final vote count began in Mexico’s 300 electoral districts. Although the tabulation of the votes was programmed to finish Sunday, IFE officials pushed the recount ahead at breakneck speed. As the day progressed, PAN and PRI electoral officials, charging Lopez Obrador’s people with trying to obstruct the process, repeatedly rejected PRD demands to open the ballot boxes and recount the votes inside one by one in instances where Lopez Obrador’s tally sheets did not coincide with numbers in the PREP or were different from the sheets attached to the ballot box. When a recount was allowed such as in one Veracruz district, Lopez Obrador sometimes recouped as many as a thousand votes.

Surprisingly, by early afternoon, AMLO had accumulated a 2.6% lead over Calderon — and his supporters were dancing in the streets of Mexico City. And then, inexplicably, for the next 24 hours, his numbers went into the tank, never to rise again — at the same time that the right-winger’s started to increase incrementally. By late evening, AMLO was reduced to single digit advantage and a little after 4 AM Thursday morning, Calderon inched ahead. It had taken 12 hours to count the last 10% of the votes and still there were districts that had not reported.

When Lopez Obrador addressed the press at 8:30, he condemned “the spectacle of the dance of numbers” and announced that the PRD and its political allies would impugn the election — he had proof of anomalies in 40,000 polling places (a third of the total) and would present them to the “TRIFE”, the supreme electoral tribunal with powers to annul whole districts and states, within the 72 hours dictated by the law.

Then, in his typically hesitating, Peter Falk-like way of saying things, AMLO called for the second election — the one that takes place in the street — beginning at 5 PM Saturday in the great Zocalo plaza at the political heart of this bruised nation.

Although Lopez Obrador’s words were perhaps the culminating moment of this long strange journey, Mexico’s two-headed TV monster chose to ignore them – Televisa was otherwise occupied with “entertainment” news, and soon after the screens filled up with game shows and telenovelas (soap operas.) Although it had not yet concluded, the telenovela of the vote count disappeared into the ether of morning television.

This chronicle of a fraud foretold is an excerpt from John Ross’s forthcoming “Making Another World Possible:Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006” to be published this October by Nation Books.

No more taxicab cheating

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EDITORIAL The embarrassing spectacle of the San Francisco Taxi Commission firing its executive director in a secret 2 a.m. session June 28 demonstrates how out of control the cab industry in this town is. And it shows that the cab companies need much tighter regulation and monitoring.
The commissioners — all but one of them appointees of former mayor Willie Brown, all of them serving despite expired terms — decided to fire Heidi Machen for the crime of actually doing her job: auditing (and often pissing off) the cab companies.
This all happened while the mayor, who had handpicked his former aide Machen for the job, was either not paying attention or not sufficiently engaged (a problem that’s becoming all too common these days). In the end, Newsom replaced two of the commissioners, and Machen is getting her job back — but the message that was sent here was atrocious.
The cab industry in this city operates under unique rules, established almost 20 years ago by then-supervisor Quentin Kopp. Nobody can drive a cab without a permit, called a medallion; that’s standard for most cities. But in San Francisco the scarce and prized medallions are only issued to active drivers, who have to wait as long as 15 years to qualify. They can use the permits only while they still drive a cab. The permits can’t be bought or sold, and revert to the city upon the death of the holder.
But even active drivers only work part of the time, and since cabs are on the streets 24-7, the holders can lease those permits to other drivers for the shifts they aren’t working. The lease fees alone are worth about $70,000 a year; it’s a nice juicy income for the holders.
The idea was to get the benefits of the medallions into the hands of working drivers. In practice, permit holders use all sorts of tricks to keep from actually having to drive a cab — why work when you can earn that much money without lifting a finger? And some companies, like Yellow Cab, manage to hold on, one way and another, to a huge number of medallions; Yellow alone controls one-third of all the permits in the city.
Past taxi commission directors have operated on a friendly basis with the companies and the permit holders, letting some amazing scams go on without any crackdown. Machen took the radical step of auditing the companies to make sure that the medallion holders were people who actually drove cabs. The industry was furious, and has been trying for some time to get her canned.
When the late Arthur Jackson was president of the commission, the companies got nowhere. A principled straight shooter, Jackson supported his staff and took no guff from the companies. After he died several months ago, Martin Smith, who manages Big Dog City Taxi Service, took over the top job, and Machen has been under pressure ever since.
But there were no grounds to fire her — she’s been doing her job, by the book. So the cab companies started getting personal.
Somebody — possibly a private investigator — pulled some old court records and found out that one of Machen’s aides was arrested 15 years ago and charged with burglary. It turns out his conviction was later expunged, and the guy’s had no further run-ins with the law, but no matter: Cab company representatives, including Jim Gillespie, who runs the San Francisco Taxi Association, hand-carried copies of the original charges (minus the later order dismissing them) to several supervisors to stir up trouble. (They showed the same stuff to Commissioner Jackson before he died; he checked the story out and sent them packing.)
Then company representatives showed up at the hearing to toss out vicious, wildly exaggerated allegations that went way beyond anything in the court records in an effort to smear Machen by association.
The mayor, to his credit, supported Machen in public (after the dismissal), and at press time was planning to reappoint her to the job. But he needs to go further: He should denounce the character assassination by the cab companies and publicly endorse a full and complete audit of every single company and medallion holder’s driving record. The penalty for willful and egregious violations of the law should be the permanent loss of taxi permits. And the district attorney ought to open an investigation into whether the cab companies and medallion holders have conspired to cheat ordinary drivers and the public out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. SFBG

Weill-ing away the hours

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Happy End was thrown together in 1929 at the behest of a starry-eyed theater producer looking to capitalize on the surprise success the previous year of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. It was an ominous year for capitalizing ventures in general, you might say. As if to prove it, Happy End, whose story of Chicago gangsters and Salvation Army evangelists was cobbled together by Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, was anything but a success in its time. In fact, after its famously negative reception Brecht made a point of distancing himself from it. The score alone, including some of Weill’s most memorable work, survived more or less unscathed — at least until Michael Feingold’s 1972 English-language version helped give the full musical new life.
American Conservatory Theater’s production of Happy End makes it clear how, showing the revival off as something more than mere pretext for reanimating Brecht and Weill’s irresistible songs. True, Brecht and Hauptman’s plot seems like thin stew for three acts: In the midst of an evolving heist, Salvation Army Lieutenant Lillian Holiday (a slender but steely and musically superb Charlotte Cohn), a.k.a. Hallelujah Lil, leads her Christian soldiers to battle for souls in the gangster den of Bill’s Beer Hall, only to fall in love with top dog Bill Cracker (a gruffly charismatic Peter Macon) and precipitate falling outs with their respective outfits. Moreover, the political critique buried in its happy-go-lucky story is, let’s just say, unlikely to provoke anything like the notorious uproar of boos and whistles offered up by its bourgeois audience in 1929.
But ACT’s production and Feingold’s fluid adaptation (which cleaves to Brecht’s lyrics but freely reworks much of the book) make it easy to Weill away the hours (just over two of them) until lead gangster “The Fly” (Linda Mugleston) utters her famous closing line: “Robbing a bank’s no crime compared to owning one!” The show winds up with a terrific mocking paean to capitalist “saints” John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J.P. Morgan. Throughout, artistic director Carey Perloff’s staging is stylish, lively, and sure, while the comedic and musical performances from a first-rate cast (decked out in Candice Donnelly’s snazzy costumes) are enjoyable enough that you won’t worry about the plot, or lack thereof.
While slight in comparison with much of Brecht’s oeuvre, Happy End has contagious fun with the contradictions inherent in a jolly left-wing musical assailing the capitalist class in the midst of one of its own commercial theaters. Walt Spangler’s bold scenic design says as much with its oddly shaped, impossibly shiny steel surfaces covered in a rash of rivets — including a great flat moon that descends from the flies in time for the moonlight evoked by both “The Bilbao Song” and “The Mandalay Song.”
HAPPY ENDING
Stumbling out of a series of Mission bars and onto 16th Street the other night, I was drawn to the doorway of yet another bar after my friend got a whiff of something worth investigating. There we proceeded to make friends with what seemed to be two other lollygaggers. Then one of them proffered a flyer, and asked us if we ever go to the theater. (We’d actually just come from a play, which, featuring a pitcher of Bloody Marys, had inspired our copycat binge.) We nodded and took the flyer. This sounded like fate to us, so the next day we headed to the Marsh and the New Voices Festival to see Rude Boy, a one-man show written and performed by Ismail Azeem about a troubled African American man moving in and out of various institutions and realities. Its combination of raw energy, deft delivery, beautifully honed characters, and inspired narrative flow (moving seamlessly from monologue to hip-hop to stand-up to dialogue and communion with the dead) was so transporting I actually lost my hangover. I wish I could report the show were still running, but stay tuned — chances are you’ll be hearing more about Azeem. SFBG
HAPPY END
Through July 9. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.)
Geary Theater
415 Geary, SF
$12–$76
(415) 749-2228
www.act-sf.org

Angel of death

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> cheryl@sfbg.com

“It has to be pretty. Everything should be pretty,” explains Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), who throughout Lady Vengeance is variously referred to as “a real live angel,” “Geum-ja the kindhearted,” and “the witch.” The fact that what has to be pretty is a gun should surprise no one who’s seen Korean director Park Chanwook’s gruesome Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or his staggering Oldboy. His latest is the glorious female-revenge film Quentin Tarantino wished he could make, ending up with two so-so Kill Bills instead.
And Lady Vengeance has similarities with Kill Bill: a very bad man, a stolen child, and an agonizingly long period of inactivity preceding a fevered, focused pursuit of payback. But Geum-ja doesn’t fall into a coma; at the start of Lady Vengeance she’s exiting jail after serving 13 years for a crime it’s pretty obvious she didn’t commit. Behind bars, she’s been plotting, sweetly luring fellow inmates into her debt so that they have no choice but to help her on the outside. As the film’s intricate story line slowly reveals, she’s most intent on punishing the man responsible for her confinement (a children’s teacher with sinister tendencies, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik), but there are other considerations — including a reunion with her long-lost daughter, now an English-speaking adolescent being raised by a square Australian couple.
Park’s previous revenge films drew some ire for their vicious violence, but they also earned the director a passionate following among genre fans. Lady Vengeance is no less cleverly brutal — granted, nobody cuts off their own tongue with a pair of scissors in this one — but it’s also Park’s most elegant effort, starting with graceful opening titles that introduce a classical, harpsichord-laden score. Overall, the film has a more feminine quality than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or Oldboy — obviously a result of the casting, but it’s a twist that also permeates Park’s visual and tonal style. The film’s obligatory moments of over-the-top nastiness are tempered by an overall mood of delicate, lusciously colored restraint.
A big part of Lady Vengeance’s success is owed to Lee, perfectly cast as a woman caught between the conflicting forces of maternal instinct and the need for sweet, sweet revenge. Her years-ago arrest is chronicled for us by a breathless newscast; it seems Geum-ja became a media sensation not just for her confessed terrible crime (kidnapping and killing a child), but also for her refined beauty (the TV says, “tabloids compared her to Olivia Hussey”). And indeed, Lee is an exquisite actor, slipping between perfectly telegraphed emotions with often-wordless ease.
After prison, Geum-ja reenters society with relative ease, partially because of her skills as a baker (no accident, a stereotypically feminine talent), and her cool good looks. Her transformation into the lady of the title is achieved by applying crimson eye shadow (“People are always saying I look kindhearted”), a kind of superhero disguise that foreshadows the blood she’s hell-bent on spilling.
To fully explain Geum-ja’s motivation would deprive the viewer the pleasure of following Park through Lady Vengeance’s brambly maze of a plot. However, the statement “the kidnapper had kidnapped a kidnapper’s kid” (delivered in complete seriousness, though the film’s not without plenty of gallows humor) sums things up pretty well. Lady Vengeance falters only in its final quarter, when Lee steps back from the action for a few key scenes. Her quest for revenge is what drives the film, and without her red-rimmed gaze front and center, things meander a bit.
By the end, thankfully, she’s back in focus; her mission may be completed, but there’s no Kill Bill–style sense of triumph. “He made a sinner out of me,” Geum-ja says about the man she desperately wants to punish. And he will die, of course, but will Geum-ja ever find atonement? Lady Vengeance ends on that question — as pretty as ever. SFBG
LADY VENGEANCE
Opens Fri/23
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.lady-vengeance.com

The right to fuck and suck

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OPINION Three years ago, on June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court struck down all sodomy laws, and adults of all sexual orientations were, for the first time in the history of our country, totally free to engage in consensual sex “per os or per anum.” That monumental decision freed our collective genitals from one of the most repressive laws ever slapped on them.
The act of sodomy was named after the infamous city in the Bible that was destroyed by the Old Testament god-patriarch either for inhospitality (the liberal interpretation) or propositioning angels for anal sex (the fundie read). The term sodomy was first used by St. Peter Damian in the 11th century, when antihomo sentiment ran rampant in Europe. By 1350, most of the continent had sodomy statutes on the books, according to gay historian John Boswell.
The prohibitions against oral and anal sex in America were enacted state-by-state and followed English law. The first colony to ban the “crime not to be named among Christians” was Virginia in 1610. By the 1950s, when the first “homophile” groups formed, all the states had sodomy laws.
The post-Stonewall gay liberation movement pushed hard for the decriminalization of all sex acts between consenting adults. The movement got its first poster boy in 1982: A police officer caught Atlanta bartender Michael Hardwick in his own bedroom engaging in anal sex with another man. The officer, who had come to serve a summons at 3 a.m., entered the apartment on the invitation of Hardwick’s roommate. The district attorney declined to prosecute but, at the urging of the ACLU, Hardwick decided to fight.
In 1986, the Supreme Court delivered a blow to America’s libidos: It upheld the Georgia sodomy laws (Bowers v. Hardwick).
In 1988, two Texas men, John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner, were jailed overnight and fined $200 after police found them having sex in Lawrence’s apartment. The cops had come in response to a weapons disturbance falsely reported by a neighbor. The men followed Harwick’s lead and took the matter to court. In a surprising turnaround, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law (Lawrence v. Texas) and killed all the sodomy statutes in the 13 states that still had them. America had finally entered the modern world — except for the US military, which still punishes sodomy (Article 125) among straight and queer service members.
In light of Lawrence v. Texas, that law will be struck down eventually too.
Good riddance to it all.
In an age when many queers are fighting for the more mainstream goals of getting married and joining the military, let us not forget the fight for sexual liberation that our LGBT movement once championed. As feminist anarchist Emma Goldman might’ve said: “If I can’t fuck, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” SFBG
Tommi Avicolli Mecca
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime radical working-class southern Italian sodomite writer, performer, and activist.

Put away the cameras

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EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG

Big Brother, where art thou?

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›gwschulz@sfbg.com

One question seemed to stand out at the San Francisco Police Commission’s May 24 meeting, where it was considering the issue of security cameras being placed in high-crime neighborhoods across the city.

"Is there a plan to phase these out at any time?" commissioner Joe Veronese asked Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who was presenting his recently proposed legislation to regulate the cameras. "Or is the idea that we just have more and more of these going up?"

Mirkarimi admitted that the idea of at some point phasing out the cameras has so far not been considered by the Board of Supervisors. He told the commission that it’s still too early to even determine how much the cameras would help in mitigating crime. But he added that some of his constituents who support the cameras "are very insistent that this not be layered with red tape."

Worried about privacy rights, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California wants the board to do away with the cameras completely and consider alternatives such as community policing. Even Mirkarimi compared the cameras to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is getting closer to nonfiction. But he insisted to the commission that the cameras "are not a substitute to policing, whatsoever."

Mirkarimi would seem an unlikely proponent of the cameras. He’s one of the most progressive supervisors on the board; yet he represents a Western Addition neighborhood with growing crime problems. Mirkarimi’s aide Boris Delepine told the Guardian that the cameras were inevitable strongly pushed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and the supervisor was simply hoping to get some civil liberties protections in place before the program stretched across the city.

"We feel that the cameras are going up regardless," Delepine said, "and we’d like for there to be a public process when they do."

London has perhaps the largest number of citywide security cameras, with around 200,000; other industrialized cities are just beginning to debate and install them. The cameras raise real civil liberties questions, but supporters want their help with evidence gathering when witnesses are too afraid to step forward.

Since installation of the cameras began in San Francisco as a pilot program last July, the ACLU has pointed to a batch of studies it claims dispute any suggestion that the cameras elsewhere have either reduced crime or provided valuable evidence for criminal prosecutions, including in London.

"The ACLU is opposed to video surveillance cameras because they intrude on people’s privacy and they have no proven law-enforcement benefit," Elizabeth Zitrin, a board member of the ACLU’s San Francisco chapter, told the commission May 24.

Critics have acknowledged some of the protective measures that Newsom included in the original pilot program: Footage is erased after 72 hours unless it is believed to contain evidence of a crime, and where possible, cameras are not trained on individual homes. But ACLU Police Practices Policy director Mark Schlosberg told us he fears proliferation of the cameras will be impossible to stop.

"Privacy is sensitive," he said. "Once you lose it, it’s very difficult to get it back."

Indeed, commissioner Veronese’s question seemed to answer itself for the most part. Would there ever come a time in San Francisco when crime rates were so low that the city would remove the cameras in deference to civil liberties? Presumably not.

Two board committees have reviewed Mirkarimi’s legislation since it was introduced in January, but the full board recently delayed its vote until after the proposal could be considered by the Police Commission, which voiced its unanimous support May 24. The board was scheduled to vote on a first reading June 6 after Guardian press time.

Mirkarimi’s measure would require that the Police Commission hear public comment from affected residents before new groups of cameras are installed in individual neighborhoods. In addition, signs would be posted nearby to inform residents that the cameras were operating, and police inspectors would have to file a written request with the Emergency Communications Department before footage could be obtained and used as evidence of a crime.

The Office of Emergency Communications currently oversees two of the cameras, but did not know how often the Police Department has used any of the surveillance footage. The department’s Investigations Bureau could not respond to our inquiries by deadline.

Last July’s pilot program began with 2 cameras in the Western Addition. Since then, 33 more cameras have appeared at 14 locations in the Mission, Bayview, and Excelsior districts, and Newsom recently proposed the installation of around 20 more.

Mayoral spokesperson Peter Ragone said Newsom reviewed similar security camera programs in several other cities, including LA, Chicago, and New York, and insisted that case law confirms surveillance footage can be used as effective criminal evidence. He wasn’t aware of cases in San Francisco in which such evidence had been used, however.

"We asked the ACLU to sit down and help us develop guidelines for the placement and use of [the cameras],” he said. "They said no, so we went around the country and looked to other best practices for guidelines and procedures." SFBG

NOISE: Desmond Dekker, RIP

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Ska legend Desmond Dekker died on May 25 in his home in England. Guardian calendar editor Duncan Scott Davidson writes in praise of the Jamaica native:

ddekker.jpg

“Oh Lord, it is not easy,” Desmond Dekker sings in falsetto on his track “It Is Not Easy.” “I work and I toil/ Yet I suffer all the while/ Trying to live a life on my own/ I don’t want to end up like Al Capone.” The suffering has ended for Dekker; he succumbed to a heart attack on May 25. Even the baddest gangster and the King of Ska must, eventually, go the way of all flesh.

The ska Dekker helped originate in his native Jamaica is a much slower, more groove-centered affair than the frenetic, even spastic, punkified outbursts from what the English Beat’s Dave Wakeling called the “high school horn section” bands that have come to be associated with the genre in its latter days.

For me, a Dekker record is a ticket to a good mood. There’s really know way to be depressed or stressed out when listening to a Dekker tune. It’s good-times music, but there’s always something deeper going on: There’s the struggle to walk the path, to be upright in the face of suffering, to not give in to a life of crime that, for a parentless teenager in Kingston, must’ve been a huge temptation. Dekker’s music mirrors this struggle as his hits alternate between religious numbers like “Honour Your Mother and Father” — where he quotes directly from the ten commandments — and “The Israelites” and songs about punch-up, rude boy culture.

An example of the deeper currents that Dekker circulated underneath perfect pop songs is his “Licking Stick:” “Mama, mama, mama I am feeling sick. Papa, papa licked me with the licking stick. I’ve got the fli-ipping hiccups, Mama. I’ve got the fli-ipping hiccups, Papa.”

If you’re driving to the beach with the top down, the lyrics completely fly under the radar. You start hipshaking ever so slightly in your seat, and the percussive syllables are just another part of the rhythm, like the later “chka chka” oral punctuation thrown into so many ska tunes — especially with the nearly comic basso profundo “don’t go” in the background and the falsetto echoes of “Mama, Mama, Mama” over the top.

But when the fade comes and Desmond quietly sings, “Mama please tell Daddy/ Do not hit me with that/ Mama, I’m feeling pain/ I’m really, really feeling/ I can’t stand it…”

Well, it’s not really a song about hiccups, is it? Like the Muscle Shoals sound that was happening across a geographic and cultural gulf, Desmond Dekker’s ska is party music with soul, Emma Goldman’s long-awaited revolution you can dance to. To quote Toots: “Reggae Got Soul,” and no one had it more than Desmond.

Doing the Cannes-Cannes, Part Two

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Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the second of his reports.

What a day! They’ve moved things around. Problems with my accreditation badge mean I can’t get into the movies. Offices that used to be in the Palais are at the other end of the Croisette, a 20 minute walk. The lines are huge and don’t seem to move. Finally I get my problems cleared up but every screening is full. Even my friends connected with some movies can’t get me in. The day is almost over and I haven’t seen one film yet. BUZZZZ. “Good morning. This is your 7am wake up call. Have a nice day.” Anxiety dreams are the worst here. I am feeling guilty that I only saw four films yesterday, but that was all there was worth seeing.

The morning started promisingly. Ken Loach’s newest, The Wind that Shakes the Barley , is generally well-received. Cillian Murphy proves that his acting turns in Breakfast on Pluto and Red Eye were not flukes. He stars as a young doctor faced with an offer to practice medicine in London — or stay in his village and become increasingly involved in forming a guerilla army to fight the “Black and Tan” army from England, sent to squash Irish independence. Set in the 1920s, the film has contemporary relevance. The first half is exciting, playing like a grand adventure with a political conscience, just as we have come to expect from Loach. The second half slows a bit but still worked for me.

Continuing in the history vein, with sociology and myth thrown in, is Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes. This Dutch director has developed a small but faithful following with his diverse filmography of under-distributed movies including The Quiet Room, Dance Me to My Song, and Alexandra’s Project. Ten Canoes was developed with actor David Gulpilil (most known for starring in Walkabout) who was interested in the stories of his own tribe, the Ramingining people. Gulpilil narrates (in English) simultaneous stories related to forbidden love but separated in time by many generations. There is a certain irreverence in his storytelling that is surprising: What is a flatulence reference doing in a story set hundreds of years ago? But then one realizes people have passed wind as long as they have existed. The guilty warrior is moved to the back of the line as they go through the forest — and more bawdy humor reminds us that dirty jokes aren’t new.

Ten Canoes is an impressive accomplishment on many levels. Though its austerity may be off-putting for some audiences, the fascinating stories, stunning visual delights, and truly unique experiences make it worthy of distribution.

The next two films shouldn’t be watched on a full stomach … but a viewer might not want to eat afterwards either. Taxidermia is the second feature from Hungarian director György Pálfi, after his astonishing Hukkle. Like Ten Canoes — another film dealing with several generations in a family — Taxidermia opens with a story of an orderly masturbating while observing his master’s young daughters, and servicing the man’s rather large wife on a monthly basis. The accidental offspring grows up to become a champion eater, winning contests while becoming a national, very fat, hero. Just as the sexual escapades of his father were graphically portrayed, we are shown huge amounts of vomit following the son’s competitions. The absurdity of it generates nervous laughter from those who haven’t turned away from the screen. He grows older, and becomes so large he cannot move. When he explodes, his son, a taxidermist, does what you might expect — and then what you won’t expect.

In some ways Taxidermia is a brilliant piece, with incredible cinematography, black humor, and a couple of visual treats. A brief sequence in a pop-up storybook and one exploring the myriad of uses for a bathtub are moments I should like to see again. But this is a hard movie to recommend to most; the gross outs just keep coming, each topping the previous one. Obviously, it’s only for those who can stomach it.

If one hasn’t lost his or her appetite after Taxidermia, the fiction film adapted from Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book Fast Food Nation could move anyone in that direction. The author developed the screenplay with director Richard Linklater (whose animated science fiction film, A Scanner Darkly, screens here next week). The story centers around an executive at a thinly disguised hamburger chain — “Mickey’s” — who is sent to Colorado to investigate reports concerning fecal matter in beef. Along the way he encounters a number of characters working at the slaughterhouse and at the chain’s local burger joint.

In trying to cover as many controversial bases as he can, Schlosser may have taken on too many issues (the treatment of illegal aliens, sexual harassment, America’s poor dietary habits, the lack of sanitary conditions in both the meat-processing plant and the retail outlets, corporate neglect for bigger profits, etc). But the over-ambitious narrative rarely makes the impact these issues deserve. Following Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, Schlosser’s investigative book confirmed that things aren’t much better in the 21st century. Though trying to reach a wider audience with a narrative film is a noble idea, it doesn’t succeed as either entertainment or piece of muckraking. The French seemed to generally like Fast Food Nation, probably because it makes for an easy anti-American target. But they also eat fast-food burgers in huge numbers.

High concept

The Marche is a massive film market that happens simultaneously with the film festival. More junk that you ever imagined is produced all over the world, and thousands of films are being sold here. Some are finished and others are in development. Many will never be finished.

We can always expect ripoffs of Hollywood blockbusters. There is no description for Sacrament Code or Stealing the Mona Lisa in the ads because the makers are probably hoping for some down and dirty direct-to-international video and cable sales. I’ve seen ads for at least three pirate movies, each looking very much like the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean II, with supernatural elements floating through the art work and featuring casts of total unknowns who look a lot like Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley.

One of my favorite things at Cannes is seeking out the most ridiculous titles for movies selling in Marche. Are you ready for a horror film about “hair extensions that attack the women that wear them?” Japan’s Toei is selling it here. Exte will star Chiaki Kuriyama, the crazy chain-swinging schoolgirl in Kill Bill.

And how about Motor Home Massacre? No description offered and none is needed.

Whatshisnamesnewfilm

The masses gathered at Cannes rarely refer to upcoming Festival movies by their title. We are asked, “Are you going to see the new Almodovar?” or “Did you see the Turkish movie?”

We say: “I liked the first feature from the director of that short Wasp,” and “Don’t miss the Indonesian documentary about the tsunami aftermath.”

This puts the film in a context that is easier to explain than “Are you going to see Volver? Iklimler? Red Road? Serambi?”

What do those titles mean? Until enough people have seen or heard about them, they are merely strange words or odd phrases. Volver is the new film from Pedro Almodovar; it’s a bit more subdued than some of his over-the-top recent entertainments. Penelope Cruz, who returns to her roots in Spanish cinema, plays a mother dealing with a teenaged daughter, a lonely sister, and an aging aunt. When the aunt dies, her dead mother appears, first as what the women assume is a ghost — but, maybe she never died in the fire that took their father? Initially the filmmaker continues his homage to Hitchcock with a surprise murder (and Bernard Herrmann-like music) before moving more to melodrama. While not a great film, Volver is wonderfully entertaining, full of surprises, and features a performance by Cruz that made me an instant fan. The buzz is great.

Iklimler has an English title of Climates, an appropriate description of the hot and cold relationship between a man and a woman who break up during a beach vacation and meet again in the snow. Like director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film Uzak (Distant), the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2003, this film could be best described as contemplative. On the surface it is a simple story of a relationship, but the emotions and motivations dig much deeper. The characters are believable, the emotions real, and the performances powerful. With virtually no camera movement, the filmmaker beautifully composes each shot; so impressed with his work, the camera stays in that one position for long sequences. Some raved about this “work of art,” but gorgeously composed images don’t make a movie. For me, this slowed too much midway. I stayed with it and appreciated the ending, but as with so much at the festival, Iklimler is an acquired taste. No doubt I will be damned for my comments.

Red Road is another story. Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s first feature is a tense and original thriller. Working from a concept proposed by Lars Von Trier’s team, three different filmmakers set out to create original stories based on the same main characters. Each were given notes; the same two actors will star. Red Road is the first to be made. A woman works for a security company watching various video monitors for possible troublemakers in a rough neighborhood. She concentrates on a man recently released from prison for a crime obviously committed against someone close to her. This variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window grows increasing more tense as details are carefully revealed. Despite a few missteps, the film works well and Arnold is a talent to watch (her Oscar-winning short, Wasp, was a knockout).

In a given day there will rarely be a logical pattern to the order of film-watching — and the segue from one to the next can be very strange. Following Red Road with Serambi was such a radical shift. This documentary explores the aftermath of the tsunami, following children, young adults, and adults who search for their friends and relatives while coming to the realization they must rebuild their lives and city.

Another documentary, Boffo! Tinsletown’s Bombs and Blockbusters proved a good way to end a day that also included a program of shorts and a long Korean film about young soldiers that left me cold (The Unforgiven). Boffo! is by onetime Bay Area director Bill Couturie. Packed with film clips and great interviews, it tries to help us figure out why a movie is a hit or flop — even if people from filmmakers to studio heads come back to writer William Goldman’s quote: “Nobody knows nothing.”

Cruel and unusual punishment

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OPINION Homelessness was recently put on trial in California. It was found not guilty.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declared April 14 that the city of Los Angeles can’t arrest those who have no choice but to sleep on its streets. It’s a victory for those of us who believe that homelessness is not a crime, but a symptom of an unjust economic system.

At issue in the LA case was a 37-year-old law prohibiting sitting, lying, and sleeping on the sidewalks. Six homeless folks brought the complaint in 2003 with the aid of the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild.

In her ruling against the statute, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote: "Because there is substantial and undisputed evidence that the number of homeless persons in Los Angeles far exceeds the number of available shelter beds at all times," the city is guilty of criminalizing people who engage in "the unavoidable act of sitting, lying, or sleeping at night while being involuntarily homeless." She termed this criminalization "cruel and unusual" punishment, a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Her enlightened opinion should guide public policy everywhere, especially here in San Francisco. In our "progressive" city, we have gay weddings at City Hall and an annual S-M street fair, yet our views on the homeless are as 19th century as the rest of the country’s opinions on gay marriage and kinky sex. The majority of voting people here still favor the old-fashioned method of punishing the poor and the homeless. That’s how Care Not Cash and our current antipanhandling measure managed to become law.

According to Religious Witness with the Homeless, in the first 22 months of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration, San Francisco police issued 1,860 citations for panhandling and sleeping on the sidewalks, as well as 11,000 "quality of life" tickets. That’s more than were issued under former mayor Willie Brown in a similar time period. How many officers did it take to issue those citations? How much money did it cost the city? What better things could San Francisco have done with the money to actually help those who were cited? How many of the people cited are now in permanent affordable housing with access to services they need to put their lives back together?

Homelessness can’t be eradicated with punitive measures. Addressing homelessness in America doesn’t mean sweeping the poor out of sight of tourists or upscale neighbors. It doesn’t mean taking away the possessions of homeless folks or fining people for sleeping in their cars. It means addressing the basic social inequities that create homelessness, among them low-paying jobs, the immorally high cost of housing, and the prohibitive price of health care.

It means having drug and mental health treatment for those who need it when they need it.

That’s the real message behind Wardlaw’s ruling.<\!s><z5><h110>SFBG<h$><z$>

Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, working-class, queer, southern Italian activist, performer, and writer.

Dishin

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For a complete schedule of the 10th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival shows and events (May 14–22), go to www.mcmf.org. Check Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music, for more Mission Creek festival coverage.

Ane Brun

This Scandinavian neofolkie — it’s probably safe to say — is the only musician at Mission Creek who’s also had the pleasure of performing alongside Annie Lennox. Fittingly, sweet dreams are indeed made of the beautifully understated hymns on her putf8um-selling (overseas, at least) second album, A Temporary Dive (DetErMine/V2). The recording radiates so much warmth that even its bleakest lyrics — e.g., "I’m crawling on your floor, vomiting and defeated" — can’t help but sound strangely comforting. With Volunteer Pioneer, Tingsek, Ben and Barbara, and Fiji Mermaid. Sun/14, 8 p.m., Argus Lounge, 3187 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 824-1447 (Jimmy Draper)

Cloud Cult

Cult leader Craig Minowa suffered the loss of his two-year-old son in 2002 and has since used the tragedy to become an obsessively prolific writer and eco-activist. Hailing from Minneapolis, Cloud Cult offers a tie-dyed indie with the slightest hint of trip-hop and includes multimedia, such as live painters, as part of its stage show. With Hijack the Disco, Ebb and Flow, and Radius. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 647-2888 (Izquierdo)

Edmund Welles Bass Clarinet Quartet

The bass clarinet is the granddaddy of all woodwinds, with a deep, warm tone and a punch, if used the right way. No one does it better than "the world’s only composing group of four bass clarinets." This foursome tackles Radiohead’s "Creep," original compositions with a metal sensibility, and even the Knight Rider theme with skill, humor, and a taste for the experimental. Tues/16, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $6. (415) 970-9777 (Eliana Fiore)

Ettrick

With 6/6/06 so rapidly approaching, it’s comforting to know that we’ve got hell’s house band right here in our own city. Enter Ettrick, a sax and drums duo that offers up a bludgeoning amalgam of black metal and skronk sure to summon the apocalypse. Jacob Felix Huele and Jay Korber rotate instruments to create an excruciating free jazz that feels like being trapped in a metal shed during a thunderstorm. Noise fans have no business missing this show. With Moe! Staiano, Tussle, Jackie O-Motherfucker, and Weasel Walter Quartet. May 20, 8 p.m., The Lab, 2948 16th St., SF. Call for price. (415) 864-8855 (Kate Izquierdo)

Hello Fever

The LA gothic garage-rock trio shows us how good an unholy alliance between Blonde Redhead and Joy Division can sound. Comb your hair over your eyes, stare at your shoes, and think very angry thoughts — this is the soundtrack to your angst. With Hey Willpower, Anna Oxygen, and Flaming Fire. May 17, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $8–$10. (415) 970-9777 (Izquierdo)

Joules

Technical without being contrived, and lush without being wimps, this Seattle post-math trio takes unduutf8g guitars and peppers them with beats of varying persuasions. Check out Joules’s MySpace page for "Hole Ole," a flamenco send-up with hand claps that morphs into a crashing sonic expedition. With Crime in Choir, Modular Se, and Madelia. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 550-6994 (Izquierdo)

Sunburned Hand of the Man

The band jams folk-drone psychedelia without all the hippie baggage — awesome! For almost a decade this Boston collective of improvisers has cut its teeth in the experimental-noise circle on distortion-charged blowouts, backbiting electronics, and tribal-chanting powwows. With the Alps, the Cheapest and Best, and Effi Briest. Tues/16, 9:30 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $8. (415) 923-0923 (Sabbath)

Vincent Gallo

Actor, musician, and painter extraordinaire Vincent Gallo is no stranger to controversy. After the online sperm auctions and the fire-eater scene with a certain deep-throater, it should come as to no surprise that the Republican-happy, onetime break-dancing b-boy and ex–Calvin Klein model is the talk of the town. Though the Buffalo, NY, native’s narcissistic reputation might not earn him any brownie points, his musical contributions are something of another world — he has a sharp know-how for fabricating song structures seeded somewhere between the modestly stark, incredibly warm, and overtly depressive. He’s the sole producer and performer on his recordings in the same way that he’s the singular auteur behind Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny, and like those absorbing films, his short, penetrating songs leave you salivating for more. You can only hope Gallo’s debut musical performance in the Bay Area will leave you with the same afterglow his movies do. With Sean Lennon and Carla Azar. May 19, 9 p.m., Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. $20. (415) 474-0365 (Chris Sabbath)

When the lights go up

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I wanted to make something that was really grand and epic, that was really composed, and maybe kind of mythic, in the way that a lot of those protometal bands were trying to do," Ezra Feinberg of Citay says, his postpsychedelic, postmetal outfit. Feinberg is inspired by hard rockmetal bands of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, whose used power chords as the basis for their grand, jazz-inspired, narrative song structures. Favoring melodies interwoven with narratives over power chords, Feinberg has turned Citay into a kinder, gentler incarnation of the archetypal headbanging unit. "I wasn’t writing the songs with a drummer, you know, where it’s about power chords and physical energy," he explains. "Instead, it was more melody-driven composition and harmony."

Anyone who has listened to Citay’s carefully crafted, self-titled debut will tell you that composition is clearly Feinberg’s modus operandi. Each song is knit tightly around melodies that aren’t so much meandering as on a journey with a distinct destination. Though Feinberg is admittedly obsessed with Led Zeppelin, and Citay’s emphasis on instrumentation wears its classic rockmetal influences on its sleeve, it is the disciplined melodies and more nuanced harmonies, à la the Beach Boys and the Byrds, combined with a scampering mandolin and lackadaisical tambourine, that make Citay’s music accessible and original. Citay’s forthcoming Mission Creek performance and upcoming summer tour with Vetiver might make a comparison to the psych-folk movement an apt one, even though Feinberg is quick to distance Citay from any such categories.

The 29-year-old Boston native wrote and composed the album using a cache of instruments and a multitrack computer program in his Excelsior apartment, the results of which he brought to Louder Studios to collaborate with Tim Green (the Fucking Champs, Nation of Ulysses), with whom Feinberg had worked previously in Brooklyn when Green produced the album by Feinberg’s "sludge metal" band, Feast.

Feinberg credits Green with much of the Citay sound and with adding another dimension to his music. "If the record is any good, a lot of it is because of Tim," he says. "I had the songs, which were written the parts and the melodies were already there but he added so much." Tim Soete, of the Fucking Champs, also contributed backing vocals and guitar.

Not only is Green’s Louder Studios the home of Citay the band, but it was also the home of Feinberg for about a month after he moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in 2004. Having spent four years in Brooklyn working with Feast and a few other musical endeavors, Feinberg felt as though he was "done" with the Brooklyn music scene and considered moving to be an opportunity to focus on writing music for himself, outside of a collaborative band environment. "I felt that I needed to musically be alone for a little while, which sounds really juvey and dramatic, but I had just been doing the band thing for so long. I knew that I wanted to keep writing music, but I knew that I wanted to do it in another way."

Now that the Citay album has been released, on Important Records, to largely glowing reviews, the challenge for Feinberg has been transutf8g that sound in performance, a process that has always evolved the other way around for the songwriter. He’s still solidifying Citay’s live lineup, which currently includes eight friends drawn from Crime in Choir, the Dry Spells, Ascended Master, By Land and Sea, Skygreen Leopards, and Tussle. "It’s the first time that I’ve ever gone from the studio to the stage," he says. SFBG

Citay

With Silver Sunshine, Persephone’s Bees, the Winter Flowers, and Willow Willow

May 20

7 p.m.

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

$10 advance, $12 door

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Last call?

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› news@sfbg.com

Concerns about public drinking in North Beach and stifled public debate are conspiring to cripple a pair of popular outdoor festivals, possibly creating a troubling precedent for other events at the start of San Francisco’s festival and street fair season.

"We’ll have to cancel this year’s festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

The Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee is set to review the jazz festival’s permit May 3, and if sentiments among the three mayor-appointed commissioners haven’t changed, they might not allow Kowal and his partners, John Miles and Alistair Monroe, to set up bars and serve drinks to local jazz fans in Washington Square Park, as they’ve been doing without challenge for the past 12 years.

"We’ve never even had a hearing to get a permit before," Kowal said. "We’ve had no arrests and no [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] violations. We’re being punished when we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re caught up in this whole North Beach Festival situation."

Kowal was referring to a dispute involving the neighborhood’s other popular street fair, the North Beach Festival, a 52-year street fair that had its permission to sell alcohol in the park yanked this year. The festival is hosted by the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, whose director, Marsha Garland, is a political adversary of the area’s supervisor, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin.

The problem started when parks general manager Yomi Agunbiade determined that a long-standing ban on alcohol in city parks should also apply during festivals. Two out of three members of the Rec and Park Commission’s Operations Committee agreed with that ruling during an April 5 meeting, and it became official policy.

Then, as the North Beach Festival permit went to the full commission for approval April 20, the words "permission to serve beer and wine" disappeared from the agenda item. Those words had appeared on an earlier version of the agenda, allowing the commission to grant what Garland had received with every permit for the last 20 years. The agenda change meant the commission couldn’t even discuss the alcohol issue, let allow issue a permit that allowed it.

Commissioner Jim Lazarus questioned a representative of the City Attorney’s Office about it and was told that the full commission couldn’t hear the policy if the general manager and Operations Committee were in agreement.

"I was taken aback by the fact that the full request of the applicant to serve beer and wine was not on the calendar," Lazarus told us. "I’ve been on the commission for three and a half years, and I’ve never seen that happen before for this kind of issue."

This story is still unfolding, but observers are openly wondering whether this is an isolated case of political sabotage or whether this battle over beer could hurt the summer festival season.

Wine and beer sales have always played a critical role in the financial viability of many of the city’s summer festivals. In a city that’s never been afraid of a liberal pour, many are beginning to wonder if the good times are over, and if so, why?

"The Rec and Park meeting was so disheartening, and if it’s used as a precedent in any way, it will harm other events. If the oldest street fair in this city can be chipped away at like that, who’s next?" said Lindsey Jones, executive director of SF Pride, the largest LGBT festival in the country.

Some North Beach residents think this Rec and Park procedural shell game is punishment for Garland and her organization’s opposition to Peskin, whom they blame for the change.

"Aaron Peskin would like to take Marsha Garland’s livelihood away," said Richard Hanlin, a landlord and 30-year resident of North Beach who filed a complaint over the incident with the Ethics Commission.

"They want to railroad Marsha," said Lynn Jefferson, president of the civic group North Beach Neighbors. "They want to see her out of business. If she doesn’t have those alcohol sales, she’ll personally go bankrupt."

At the heart of the Garland-Peskin beef is a 2003 battle over a lot at 701 Lombard St. known as "the Triangle," which the owner wanted to develop but which the Telegraph Hill Dwellers wanted for a park after they found a deed restriction indicating it should be considered for open space. Peskin agreed with the group he once led and had the city seize the land by eminent domain, drawing the wrath of Garland and others who saw it as an abuse of government power.

Peskin told the Guardian that it’s true he doesn’t care for Garland, but that he did nothing improper to influence the commission’s decision or agenda. However, he added that he’s made no secret of his opposition to fencing off much of the park to create a beer garden and that he’s made that point to Rec and Park every year since the festival’s beer garden started taking over the park in 2003.

“Just let the people use Washington Square Park. It’s the commons of North Beach,” Peskin said. “The park should be open to people of all ages 365 days a year. That’s just how I feel.”

Yet Peskin said that neither the North Beach Jazz Festival, which doesn’t segregate people by age, nor festivals that use less neighborhood-centered parks, like the Civic Center and Golden Gate Park, should be held to the same standard. In fact, he plans to speak out in favor of the jazz festival’s right to sell alcohol during the May 3 meeting.

Access became the buzzword this year, in response to last year’s decision by the San Francisco Police Department to gate two-thirds of the park off as a beer garden, effectively prohibiting many underage festivalgoers from actually entering a large part of the park. The section near the playground remained ungated, but many families were disillusioned by the penning of the party.

Enter the North Beach Merchants Association, a two-year-old rival of the Chamber of Commerce with stated concerns about booze. President Anthony Gantner learned that the park code banned alcohol from being served in any of the parks listed in Section 4.10, which includes Washington Square as well as nearly every other greenway in the city, unless by permission of the Recreation and Park Commission, which should only be granted as long as it "does not interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of the park."

Gantner and Peskin both argue that the beer garden does interfere with the right of those under 21 to use the park. "The Chamber is basically doing a fair, and that’s it," Gantner said. "A lot of its members are bars, and they run a very large fair with beer gardens that result in incidents on the streets for merchants."

Though Garland contends that the festival is an economic stimulator, resulting in an 80 percent increase in sales for local businesses, Gantner claims that a number of businesses don’t benefit from the increased foot traffic. He associates alcohol with the congruent crime issues that crop up when the clubs let out on Broadway, and thinks that selling beer and wine in the park only accelerates problems in the streets after the festival ends at 6 p.m.

Gantner has the ear of local police, who are understaffed by 20 percent and looking for any way to lower costs by deploying fewer cops. "It used to be we could police these events with full staff and overtime, but now we’re trying to police them with less resources, and the events themselves are growing," Central Station Capt. James Dudley said.

He’s also concerned about the party after the party. The police average five alcohol-related arrests on a typical Friday night in North Beach, most after the bars close. But those numbers don’t change much during festival weekend, leading many to question the logic behind banning sales of alcohol in the park. Besides, if sales were banned, many festivalgoers would simply sneak it in. Even one police officer, who didn’t want to be named, told us, "If I went to sit in that park to listen to music and couldn’t buy beer, I’d probably try pretty hard to sneak some in."

At the April 20 Rec and Park meeting, Garland presented alternative solutions and site plans for selling beer and wine, which represents $66,000 worth of income the festival can’t afford to lose. Beyond her openness to negotiations, Rec and Park heard overwhelming support for the festival in the form of petitions and comments from 30 neighbors and business owners who spoke during the general public comment portion of the meeting.

Father John Malloy of the Saints Peter and Paul Church, which is adjacent to the park, spoke in support of Garland’s request. "I think I have the most weddings and the most funerals in the city," he said. "I’m praying that we don’t have a funeral for the North Beach Festival. If anyone should be against alcohol, it should be the priest of a church."

So who are the teetotalers? Testimony included 10 complaints from members of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, Friends of Washington Square, and the North Beach Merchants Association, as well as Gantner and neighborhood activist Mark Bruno, who came down from Peskin’s office, where he was watching the hearing, to testify.

Commissioner Megan Levitan said, "If anyone knows me, they know I like my wine," before going on to explain that she was born in North Beach and even used to serve beer at O’Reilly’s Beer and Oyster Festival. However, she said, she’s a mother now, and parks are important to her.

"It does change a park when alcohol is there," she said. "I do not believe we should serve alcohol in the park."

Will that still be her stance May 3 when the North Beach Jazz Festival requests its permit? The jazz fest has never had beer gardens, and the organizers don’t want them. Instead, they set up minibars throughout the park, which remains ungated, allowing complete access for all ages.

Although there is hired security and local police on hand, by and large people are responsible for themselves. The organizers say it’s just like going to a restaurant for a meal and a drink, except in this case it’s outside, with a stage and free live music.

Though Kowal remains optimistic, he’s rallying as much support as possible, even turning the May 3 meeting into an event itself on his Web site (www.sunsettickets.com). His partners, Monroe and Miles, were concerned enough to swing by City Hall to see Peskin, who agreed to testify and help the Jazz Festival retain the right to sell booze.

"The first person to write a check to start this festival was Mayor Willie Brown," Kowal said. "Peskin has always been a big supporter of the festival, which is why we think it will all work out."

The festival is a labor of love for the three organizers, who barely break even to put the event on; after expenses are covered, any additional profit from the sale of alcohol is donated to Conservation Value, a nonprofit organization that aids consumers in making smart purchases.

"We were the first fair to use Washington Square Park," Monroe, the founding father of the jazz festival, said. "We’re standing up for the right to access the park. It’s not about ‘he said, she said’ or who did what to whom. It’s about hearing free live music."

So now comes the moment when we find out whether this is about alcohol, parks, or simply politics, and whether future street fairs could feel the pinch of renewed temperance. If the jazz festival gets to sell booze, Garland’s supporters argue, that will represent a bias against the North Beach Festival.

The commission will hear Garland’s appeal at the end of May, just two weeks before the festival begins. With contracts already signed and schedules set, the stakes are high. Owing to lack of funds, Garland has already canceled the poetry, street chalk art, and family circus components of the fair. She did receive an e-mail from Levitan promising a personal donation to put toward the street chalk art competition. Even so, she’s preparing for a funeral.

And if alcohol is prohibited at the jazz festival, it could send out a ripple of concern among street fair promoters and lovers around the city. To be a part of the decision, stop by the meeting and have a say. SFBG

PS This weekend’s How Weird Street Faire, on May 7, centered at Howard and 12th Streets, will have beer gardens in addition to seven stages of music and performances. But organizers warn that it could be the last festival because the SFPD is now demanding $14,000, a 275 percent increase from the police fees organizers paid last year.

operations committee hearing

May 3, 2 p.m.

City Hall, Room 416

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 831-2750

www.sfgov.org

Students, drugs, and a law of intended consequences

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A few weeks before Marisa Garcia started her first semester of college in 2000, a cop found a pipe with marijuana residue in her car. The pipe was hers, so she fessed up, went to court, paid her fine, and thought the case was closed.

Soon after, Garcia, the daughter of a single mother with three other college-age children, lost the financial aid she’d been counting on to cover her tuition costs at Cal State Fullerton. She called her school and found out it was because of the drug charge: The Higher Education Act makes students with a drug conviction ineligible for financial aid. Garcia had never heard of the law before.

She’s not alone in her predicament. A study by the reform group Students for Sensible Drug Policy, released April 17, found that more than 180,000 students have lost or been denied financial aid under this law since it went into effect in 2000. California has had the highest number of students affected: a startling 31,000. The group hopes the overall numbers will spur Congress to repeal the law.

The law is intended to be a deterrent to drug use, but critics question its effectiveness. "Most people don’t find out about it until it’s too late," Tom Angell, campaign director for SSDP, said. "If kids are thinking about using drugs, they’re supposed to say, ‘No, I could lose my aid.’ But not a lot of people know about it until they come across it on their financial aid form."

Since Garcia lost her aid, the act has been amended to apply only to students who get busted while receiving financial assistance. But that doesn’t fully address the concerns of its critics, who see it as counterproductive.

"[The law] affects the very students whom the Higher Education Act was intended to assist in the first place when it was passed in 1965: the students from low- and middle-income families, the ones who cannot afford college tuition on their own," Angell said. "These are the people who, when they get a conviction and lose their financial aid, are forced to drop out."

Critics also contend that those punished for using drugs shouldn’t be penalized a second time for that same crime. "If you break the law, there is a system of justice that is designed to deal with you," said Tom Kaley, spokesperson for Rep. George Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education Committee, who supports the repeal of the law. "But then to have the Department of Education add another punch on top of that sounds a lot like double jeopardy."

That issue and others prompted the SSDP and the American Civil Liberties Union to file a federal class-action lawsuit March 22 seeking to overturn the law. That suit, in combination with the study, seeks to highlight how damaging the law has been.

"Now all members of Congress know exactly how many of their own constituents are devastated by the policy," Angell said. "They’re not going to be able to keep ignoring it year after year while tens of thousands of students lose financial aid. They’re going to have to do something about it." (Hunter Jackson)

Daniel in the lion’s den

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The first time I heard Daniel Johnston’s music, I’d ordered a tape from K Records, having little idea what to expect. What arrived in the mail was something very different from Let’s Kiss and Let’s Together and other happy home- and handmade cassettes distributed by the label. Yip/Jump Music presented a more tortured brand of raw expression.

daniel2 -- small.jpg

Over the years Johnston has played solo and with bands, and recorded for a major label as well as several indies. He’s inspired an excellent tribute album (Dead Dog’s Eyeball, on Bar None) by Kathy McCarty, and now, Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a winner of the 2005 Director’s Award at the Sundance Film Festival. As Feuerzeig’s movie begins a local run at the Lumiere Theatre, producer Henry S. Rosenthal – who some may also know as the drummer of Crime — agreed to talk about it.

Bay Guardian: The Devil and Daniel Johnston begins with some uncanny self-recorded footage of Johnston from 1985, in which he introduces himself as “the ghost” of Daniel Johnston and refers to “the other world.” How did you and [director] Jeff Feuerzeig get that footage?

Henry S. Rosenthal: Part of Daniel’s mania is his obsession with self-documentation, and as you can tell from his early Super-8 films he’s funny and creative. He loves comic books — that’s his world. As for the footage, it’s as if Daniel was creating this voluminous archive knowing that someday someone would put it all together. Clearly that task is beyond him, but creating the source material is something he’s devoted much of his life to. Was he doing it consciously? Certainly — but it’s part and parcel with his illness.
Daniel has a sense of posterity that is uncanny. He recorded all of his phone conversations with Radio Shack equipment. All of that was there for us to go through.
We didn’t understand the magnitude of the archive until we went to the house and found Hefty bags filled with hundreds of tapes. He’s kept a cassette recorder going for every second he was awake for 15 years.

BG: I was surprised at the wealth of early footage of Johnston – his home movies are a hoot. Did Feuerzeig do anything to treat or restore that footage? Also, is Johnston still as interested in self-documentation today as he was while growing up?

HR: All of the texture that you see in the early films — the snowflakes as we call them – stems from mold eating the films. When we found the films they were in a shoebox in a closet being eaten by mold. We sent them to the same restoration facility that Martin Scorsese sends things to. We transferred them twice over two years, and when we went back to watch the footage, the snowflakes or mold had advanced considerably. Those films will eventually be consumed. The fact we could preserve [some of] them means they’ll exist in the future.
Daniel no longer walks around with a cassette recorder. That was part of his manic phase, and he isn’t theoretically having manic phases anymore — he is under the influence of psychotropic medication. Now he puts that manic energy into his music and his art.

BG: His devotion to recording is very Warhol-like.

HR: It reminds me of Warhol’s filing system with the boxes. Warhol just kept those empty cardboard boxes that he’d put anything in. Then they’d be taped up, numbered, and sent to storage. Later, they found so many important documents mixed in with his junk mail. I can’t say it’s effective, but it’s good for posterity. At least you know things are chronological.

BG: Feuerzeig’s rock docs – both this and Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King – allow the parents of the “rock stars” to have their say. Is that something you like about his approach? Obviously in Johnston’s case it’s necessary to have his mom in the film since she plays such a major role in his early recordings.

HR: The Mabel of the movie is a mellowed Mabel. She’s not the Mabel of Daniel’s youth. She’s also not the Mabel of today because she’s unfortunately deteriorated considerably. She’s blind and has had hip replacements and has trouble walking. She’s in frail condition.
The parents are great. Both Jeff and I like old people. There aren’t enough old people on the screen in general. In Jeff’s films, the parents play a key role in the lives of the artists. Jad and David [Fair, of Half Japanese] lived at home during their early creative years. There’s that great scene in The Band That Would Be King where the parents talk about Half Japanese’s first record negotiations at the family home, and about Jad going downstairs and getting Coke – the drink, not the drug.
These people lived at home and the parents are a big part of the story. In Daniel’s case, they’re an even bigger part in terms of decisions they’ve made for him.
Different people view [Daniel’s parents in the movie] differently. We showed the film to an audience of psychologists, and many saw the parents as heroic for choosing not to institutionalize Daniel. Many others saw them as making a big mistake.

BG: The movie talks about aspects of Johnston’s art, such as the eyeball imagery that dominates his drawings. I’m wondering about his early identification with Joe Louis and also the recurrent references to Casper the Friendly Ghost in his lyrics. Has he said much about any of that?

HR: Casper’s always occupied a central role in Daniel’s life. You may recall the sequence [in the film] where Daniel is sent to Texas to live with his brother and he turns his brother’s weight bench into a recording studio. Sitting right next to that “recording studio” was a Casper glass. In one of Daniel’s audio letters he talked about how lonely he was in Texas and that his only friend in the world was his Casper glass.
We found an identical glass on eBay; [Daniel] helped us art direct many of the recreations in the film.
I liked Casper as a kid, but I never thought about it until Daniel asked — “How did Casper die?”

BG: Can you tell me a bit about the decision to not have Johnston interviewed in the movie? It seems as if others talk about him, but he rarely directly addresses the viewer.

HR: We filmed hours and hours of interviews with Daniel, and the sad fact is this: Daniel is not able to host his own film. He’s sick and he can’t tell these stories. He doesn’t remember them, and when he does, he doesn’t tell them right. You can’t draw Daniel out. He says what he wants to say when he wants to say it. He can’t host the movie like R. Crumb hosts Crumb.
When journalists travel all the way to Texas to interview Daniel, they are shocked and frustrated to discover that he’s a mental patient. People want to believe that it’s an act, or that he’s putting people on.
If we had relied on Daniel’s interviews to drive the film, there would be no film. It wasn’t until we unearthed the archive that we realized that Daniel narrated the film, but in real time, as it happened. We don’t have to have Daniel reminisce – [because of his self-documentation] we can be there during his manic phases and see him babbling to Gibby Haynes, or swimming in the creek while talking about baptizing people.

BG: How and when did you become a Daniel Johnston fan? Do you have a favorite song or album? I know you’ve referred to this movie as a 6-year labor of sorts, so could you also give me a bit of background in terms of its creation?

HR: I think I came to Daniel through Half Japanese, whom I met through my friendship with Bruce Conner. Bruce was on Jad [Fair]’s mailing list. Jad would send Bruce packages of records — when you get something from Jad, it’s mail art. Then Bruce had a party in the late ‘70s and brought them [Half Japanese] out and I met them.
My favorite album of Daniel’s is the Jad Fair-Daniel collaboration, which has been reissued under the name It’s Spooky [originally on 50 Skidillion Watts records; now available on Jagjaguwar]. It just doesn’t get better.
Jeff and I met in Berlin [at the Berlin Film Festival] in 1993, when he was there with his film about Half Japanese. I felt like he had made that film just for me. I knew I was the only person in the room who knew who the band was. Everyone was convinced this was Spinal Tap. We talked about our love of Daniel and how there should be a Daniel Johnston film. It seemed impossible. He [Daniel] was dormant at the time. It wasn’t until 2000 that he began emerging again. That’s when we seized the moment.

BG: You are producing Bruce Conner’s sole feature-length film, a years-in-the-making documentary about the Soul Stirrers. Can you tell me a bit about that movie, and about your other involvements with Bruce via the film and his Mabuhay Gardens photos of your band Crime?

HR: We met during the punk rock years and became friends then. Bruce asked me if I could produce a reunion concert of the original Soul Stirrers. I knew nothing about filmmaking at that time. We decided the event was so important it should be documented. We looked for people to film, and that’s kind of how I got tricked into being a movie producer. Twenty years later, that movie is still the albatross around my neck. We are making slow progress on it, believe it or not. It’s not dormant and it’ll emerge one day.
It’s priceless archive footage that we’ve shot, because all of our protagonists are dead.
Bruce definitely got me started in this profession – though I hesitate to call it that, I don’t know what it is – and as I sharpen my skills with other filmmakers on other projects we’ve continued to collaborate.

BG: Do you see any links between Devil and Daniel Johnston and documentaries such as Tarnation and Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt?

HR: The movies that most often get mentioned in relation to ours are Capturing the Friedmans and Crumb. Those are either stylistic or content pairings that people are making. There’s validity to all of them.
Tarnation I enjoyed, though I didn’t think it was a great film. It bogged down, but it was interesting. The high point of the movie for me was the early footage where he [Jonathan Caouette] was impersonating his mother — that’s what stands out in my mind. When Tarnation came out, we were done with this film, so Tarnation exerted no influence. We were curious to track it because it relied heavily on a person’s obsessive self-documentation. But I think that the materials are handled with a completely different sensibility.
Crumb deals with an artist who you could say has interesting personality disorders. I’m not going to say Crumb is mentally ill — he’s nowhere near where Daniel is. But like Devil and Daniel Johnston, Crumb is a monograph about an artist.
Capturing the Friedmans will forever remain the most astounding archive of found footage ever stumbled across.

BG: A review of Devil and Daniel Johnston in Film Comment claims the movie makes a virtue of Johnston’s “self-defeating” eccentricity, and asserts that the movie fuels “mad genius” myths while ignoring Johnston’s influences. What do you think of that kind of criticism?
HR: I completely disagree. Daniel’s influences are discussed throughout the film. They’re all over the walls of his garage – comic books, Marilyn, the Beatles, he’s a sponge of pop culture and everything else. He has art books devoted to da Vinci and Van Gogh. He sucks from everything and it gets spewed out through his filter. He doesn’t assign value to things – to him, everything’s the greatest. He has the biggest collection of Beatles bootlegs I’ve ever seen. To Daniel, Ringo’s solo albums are as great as Sgt. Pepper’s. Wings albums are as great as Beatles albums.
He listens to Journey, Rush – whatever garbage, he processes it. And yet when you engage Daniel on a topic when he’s conversant and catch him in a lucid moment you can have the most erudite discussion. He can critique every panel Jack Kirby ever drew.
There’s that shot [in the film] when you’re in a basement and seeing his work materials, and you’re seeing Warhol’s Marilyns. I wonder how many other teenagers in Westchester at the time were cutting out Warhols – probably none. Daniel’s always been plugged in and sought out the most interesting things going on.

BG: What does Daniel think of the movie?

HR: You can imagine what this movie would mean to a narcissist of Daniel’s proportion. Of course, he likes the film — but he’s very funny. He told Jeff when he saw it that he liked the colors.
We did take the time to shoot 16mm film and we took hours to light and compose shots.
The aesthetic of the film is a huge part of it. If we had this movie with a camcorder it wouldn’t have given the subject the weight it deserved. That’s why this movie cost a million dollars.

28 years later

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If you live in or truly love San Francisco, you’ve seen The Times of Harvey Milk. Rob Epstein’s 1984 movie is one of the best nonfiction features ever made. It’s also one of the greatest movies about this city. Only time will tell whether Stanley Nelson’s new documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a work of similar importance, but the fact that I’m even mentioning it in the same context as Epstein’s movie says something about the reserved precision of its journalistic reasoning and the overwhelming emotional force of its finale.

Of course, there is another reason to connect Jonestown and The Times of Harvey Milk. The murder of Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White took place 10 days after the deaths of Jim Jones, Congressman Leo Ryan, and more than 900 members of Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. One tragedy claimed the life of a man who was already a civil rights hero, while the other led mainstream media and true crime sources to portray a human being as a monster. Just as Epstein’s movie profoundly humanizes Milk, Nelson’s movie digs beneath stereotypes of pure evil to reveal a different Jones than the one used to sell quickie television and paperback biographies.

Twenty-eight years later, the tragedy in Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders still have an effect on San Francisco politics: In very different ways, they represent the death of progressive, district-based local activism and its afterlife. (Garrett Scott, codirector of the superb documentaries Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story and Occupation: Dreamland, was in the early stages of making a movie about the two events and their relationship to SF politics when he died earlier this year.) It seemed appropriate to have New York native Nelson discuss his movie with a contemporary political figure whose knowledge of local history runs deep. On the eve of Jonestown’s screenings at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, former San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez agreed to interview Nelson about the roads leading to the cataclysmic events of 1978 and the roads leading away from it.

MATT GONZALEZ I want to start by saying I had a typical impression of Jim Jones as a cult leader whose message was a hustle to get people into his church so he could take advantage of them when they were vulnerable. The thing that jumped out immediately to me in this film was that the fundamental part of his message throughout his ministry was this idea of racial integration and equality. The main component was there at the beginning, and in a place like Indiana, when Indianapolis was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. It made me rethink and see him as someone who exhibited a certain genuineness and courage at that time.

Did that surprise you about him?

STANLEY NELSON The depth of his commitment surprised me. During one of the anniversaries of the deaths in Guyana, I heard some Peoples Temple members talking about it on [the radio]. I started thinking, “This involved over 900 people all these people weren’t crazy. So what was it that drove them to the church?”

Research made me realize that there was something much deeper going on and that this was a real political movement for a lot of the time the church was in existence.

MG Jones had been a member of a human rights commission out in Indiana. That also underscores a very self-conscious relationship between his church and what was happening in society.

SN Yes. [In the film] there’s that incredible audiotape when he’s giving his own history, where he talks about how his father didn’t want to let a black kid in his house. Jim Jones says, “I won’t come in either,” and he doesn’t see his father for years after that.

I don’t think it was a hustle at all, I think it was something he truly did believe in. Jim Jones was a very complicated individual. Everybody’s complicated there are no simple people but Jim Jones was much more complicated than most of us.

MG How hard was it to find folks in Indiana who knew Jones?

SN It was hard. But Lynn [Jones’s hometown] was very small, and we were able to find one person who could lead us to others. One thing that’s amazing when you do research is that you can go to high schools and grade schools, and they still have yearbooks. You find people’s names, use the phone book, and just start calling.

MG Over time, Peoples Temple gets a financial foundation because its members give their property to Jones. He’s then able to set up communal living arrangements. But when he’s in Indiana, if I’m to understand correctly, he’s selling monkeys door to door or something like that.

Was his message about communal living a part of the hustle, or do you think that was also a belief that he genuinely held?

SN I think he genuinely believed it. That component really came out of Ukiah, in Redwood Valley, where they [Peoples Temple] had this farm. People actually did travel with him from Indiana [in 1965], so how were they going to live when they’d sold their houses? They could live communally.

One thing that I found fascinating is that the older people who lived in these communal houses got better treatment than they ever could have gotten from the state or welfare or Social Security, because not only were they housed and fed, they were also loved. All of a sudden they had this family the old people were revered in Peoples Temple.

MG Would you say those two components racial integration and property held in common were the cornerstone of his preaching?

SN I think they were a big part, but it was also more than just racial integration. There was a sense that “we have this power that none of us has as individuals.” This was a time when a lot of people were smoking dope and dropping out, but Peoples Temple members were active. They saw themselves as activists; they saw themselves changing the world with the church as a tool.

MG In 1971 Richard Hongisto was elected sheriff of San Francisco, and it was a very liberal campaign. [George] Moscone was elected mayor in ’75, and we know Peoples Temple played a part in that. Hongisto’s election was an early sign of growing liberal strength in San Francisco, enough so that you can look at the Moscone victory and not simply say, “Peoples Temple caused this to happen.” But there’s no question given how close the election was that they played a major role. How do you see their political impact then?

SN Peoples Temple was part of the mainstream politics of the Bay Area. I’m from New York. I had no idea that Jim Jones was head of the Housing Commission in San Francisco or that politicians came to Peoples Temple events and gave incredible speeches praising Jim Jones. That was something I discovered while making the film.

It’s part of the history of Peoples Temple, but it was also like a birthday caketimes-12 to the politicians. The politicians didn’t look too far behind this gift horse, because [Peoples Temple] was highly organized. People did what Jim Jones said. At one point they had 13 buses. They’d fill up the buses and

MG a politician could have an instant press conference.

SN Just one phone call and Jim Jones could come with buses. You’d have 500 people at your march.

MG Do you get a sense that what happened in Jonestown reverberates politically today? The players then aren’t necessarily in politics. Jackie Speier still is, but Moscone, Willie Brown, and others are not holding political office. Still, do you see any aftereffects?

SN I’m not sure on a local level, but one thing I think it did was help kill the idea of communes in this country [at a time] when there was a strong movement saying, “Let’s live together; let’s live on the land; let’s pool our resources.” All of a sudden that was associated with “look at what happened in Guyana.”

MG As I understand it, there are about five survivors who were there when the massacre took place.

SN There were about five people actually there [who survived], and of those, there are, to my knowledge, three left alive. Two of them are in the film.

MG People closely associated with Peoples Temple spoke to you and revealed some, I would think, very difficult, personal stories about sexual assault or the use of authority to express dominance. Was it difficult to get people to talk honestly?

SN It was surprisingly easy for us to get people to talk honestly. Time has passed. Partly because of a play [Berkeley Rep’s The People’s Temple] that was produced here in the Bay Area, I think people understood that maybe we were ready to hear a different version of the story that was much deeper.

MG In the film you see that Jones is abusing prescription drugs and probably has a mounting paranoia that’s associated with some mental condition. Is there a sense that he changed while he was in San Francisco, or was Peoples Temple headed toward this sort of cultlike finality from its inception?

SN We interviewed people who knew Jim Jones when he was a kid, and they talk about the fact that he was not normal even as a six- or seven-year-old boy. But I think that his behavior did get more extreme as time went on. He had this incredible power within the church, and he was this warped individual, and the combination affected his behavior. In the end, when they [Peoples Temple members] are isolated in the jungle, that’s [a reflection of] who he is.

MG Tell me about the wealth of material you have. There is film footage of a healing that is rather dramatic and recordings of his various sermons.

SN Going in, I had no idea that there was so much film footage. But we found a guy in LA who had shot in Peoples Temple over two days using three cameras and 16-millimeter film and had lit the whole church. His footage is just incredibly beautiful. The healing service, Jim Jones preaching, and the congregation singing and dancing are all part of that. He’d sold off bits and pieces to places like NBC, but we came along at a time when he felt that the film he wanted to make would never get made, so he agreed to sell us some footage.

We found members of Peoples Temple who had footage that had never been seen before. There are actually shots from the plane of them going down [to Guyana] you can hear Jim Jones describing what he’s going to do and shots of Jones cutting through the jungle with machetes.

Also, we were working very closely with the California Historical Society library, which has a Peoples Temple collection.

MG There was a recent book [Dear People: Remembering Jonestown] that compiled some of that material.

SN Also, Jim Jones recorded himself and his sermons at Peoples Temple. They actually audio-recorded the night of the suicides. As the people are dying, Jim Jones is encouraging them to drink the poison. There are audiotapes of the children and the women and men screaming and dying.

MG As a filmmaker going into a project like this, are you trying to present the truth? Are you trying to present an alternative reading of what happened? Are you trying to warn people?

SN I’m not trying to warn people or tell an alternative history, although obviously what we did turns out to be an alternative history. I was just trying to tell this incredible story and tell it with as much honesty as I can. Everybody in the film had a part to play in Peoples Temple. We really wanted it to be a film told in the voices of the people who lived through it.

MG In my notes I have a reference to the various CIA-related theories [about what happened in Guyana]. You don’t pick that up in the film, and I wonder if you might say something about that.

SN There are different theories that Jim Jones was a CIA agent and this was all a scary mind-control experiment. You know, we found nothing to back that up, and it just didn’t make sense for us to go down that road.

MG As I understand it, a lot of these theories stem from [the fact] that the government withheld documents related to Jonestown. I guess Congressman [Leo] Ryan had a bill pending, the Hughes-Ryan amendment, that would have required that CIA covert operations be disclosed to Congress before those operations could be engaged in. You didn’t find anything related to that?

SN No, we didn’t find any hard evidence. I’m trying to operate as a filmmaker and also as a journalist.

MG So you had access to material

SN and we just didn’t find it [evidence].

MG I’d be interested in seeing what the original accounts were like in the local press in San Francisco during the time of Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders. There was probably a sense of how Moscone’s opponents might use his ties to the Peoples Temple for political purposes.

SN One reason for the article in [the magazine] New West that first exposed Jim Jones and called for an investigation of Peoples Temple was to discredit Moscone. Part of the media follow-up was that “here is someone that Moscone supported.” So that was already happening around a year before the deaths in Guyana.

MG There are folks who find objectionable the idea of referring to the deaths as mass suicides. Did you reach a conclusion about that?

SN The film has no narration, so we didn’t refer to that other than in a title card at the end that I think calls it the largest mass murder-suicide in history. It’s impossible to say exactly what went on that day, but it is very clear that the kids something like 250 people who were under 18 were all murdered.

It was something we struggled with: “What do we call it: suicide or murder?” I think by the end of the film you feel that it’s kind of both at the same time.

MG If Jim Jones had died in Guyana prior to Ryan’s visit, is your sense in talking to the survivors or those associated with the church that this is a project that would have sustained itself?

SN I just don’t know.

MG You don’t want to engage in a bit of speculative history?

SN I think they had a real problem in sustaining themselves. They were growing food, but they were bringing in food too. Financially there was a burden.

One fascinating thing about that day is that there weren’t a lot of people who left with Congressman Ryan less than 20 people. It was more Jim Jones’s insanity, him thinking that 20 people leaving is devastating [that led to the massacre].

MG Other than the sermons, are there other records of his thoughts? Are there tracts and manifestos?

SN There are some things that he wrote. He didn’t write a definitive book of his philosophies, but there is a piece in which he picks apart fallacies in the Bible.

MG On the one hand, Jones could be critical of the contradictions in the Bible, and on the other, he could pick out the parts that were useful to him.

SN One thing that everybody said was that Jim Jones knew the Bible he wasn’t just talking off of the top of his head. He was incredibly smart, prepared, and cunning.

MG What did you learn from making the film?

SN It’s a film I’m glad to be finished with. All films are hard to make, but it really took a lot out of me. We’ve only had two screenings, and both times afterward there was a kind of shocked silence. One was for the members of Peoples Temple and their friends to let them be the first to see it.

MG How it was received?

SN The Peoples Temple members loved the film. We screened the film in a small theater, and we had a reception outside. The Peoples Temple members who were there with their families just stayed in the theater for about 15 minutes talking among themselves. It made me a little nervous [laughs]. But when they came out they all said they loved the film and felt it was a powerful way of telling their story — a story that hadn’t been told that way at all.

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE

April 29, 6:15 p.m.; April 30, 7 p.m.; May 1, 7 p.m.; May 2, 4:30 p.m.

Part of the San Francisco International Film Festival

Various venues

Call (925) 866-9559 for tickets and (415) 561-5000 for more information.

www.sffs.org

Un certain regard

0

Like Bresson and Renoir did before them, the Dardenne brothers tend to inspire reviews using vaguely Christian words like transcendence from critics trying to describe the way a transparent film style can result in such fully formed, singular movies. At least one such reviewer has already referred to their newest masterpiece, L’Enfant, as a miracle, but, alas, it is not so. Like the Dardennes’ previous pinnacles La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son L’Enfant handles weighty themes like guilt and redemption with awesome grace. But to liken the film to an act of God surely takes something from the technical precision and artistic concentration that so informs cinema Dardenne.

While their breakthrough may have come on the stage at Cannes, Luc and his brother Jean-Pierre cut their teeth on a decade of vérité-style documentary work before making their first fiction film, 1987’s Falsch. Much has been made of the way the fly-on-the-wall documentary technique has informed the Dardennes’ fiction work, and, indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone exploring the tension between realism and reality as fruitfully. L’Enfant‘s camera isn’t as doggedly shaky as in the earlier films, but the general long-take style is still present: Conversations and characterizations are mediated by constant reframing instead of by cuts. The Dardennes’ ability to narrate with single takes, conveying information and drama via performance, framing, and an impeccable, Bressonian use of sound, means the brothers belong in any discussion of cinema’s long-take masters (a table that many, including Gus Van Sant and Richard Linklater, wish to eat at). Had he been alive to see L’Enfant, celebrated French critic and letting-the-camera-run aficionado André Bazin would surely have turned in a sparkling review.

Described as a sketch, L’Enfant‘s story is the stuff of melodrama. A penniless teenage mother (Déborah Francois) wanders with her baby in search of the father. Played by a ravaged Jérémie Renier (La Promesse), père Bruno is a decidedly small-time crook. Always looking for a score, he sells the newborn to back-alley adoption agents when mother Sonia isn’t around. As with all Dardenne stories, though, there is redemption: The baby is recovered, and Bruno ends up assuming responsibility for an unrelated theft to spare an underage accomplice.

If this sounds like a nail-biting character study, though, the story plays more mutedly than one might expect. Like much art cinema, the Dardennes use an oblique film style to distance us from characters and de-emphasize narrative spectacle. For the brothers, this strategy isn’t used for the sake of vague artiness but rather to convey their filmed stories as moral parables. One of the key sequences of L’Enfant is the one in which Bruno sells his baby. There is a sort of tension that builds as he rides the bus toward a rendezvous point in a single long take, but it’s of an infinitely quieter and more reflective sort than the kind produced by a comparable scene in Oscar-winner Tsotsi. A couple of cuts and a few rings of Bruno’s cell phone later, our protagonist is waiting in a barren apartment while the baby’s “adopter” operates next door a climax narrated entirely by offscreen sound. The scene conveys an outrageous misdeed, but any judgment or repulsion has been sucked out by the Dardennes’ removed perspective; as such, Bruno’s betrayal seems less a crime against humanity than an action, an inevitable result of his role as the thief.

In the end, the Dardennes aren’t concerned with why their characters do what they do (the thing that occupies the vast majority of narrative filmmakers) but rather are taken with charting the moral implications and consequences of their characters’ actions. Someday a wise DVD distributor is going to package the Dardennes’ fiction films as a set, and the result will rival Kafka’s collected short stories in its parabolic riches. L’Enfant‘s protagonist thief may spend much of the film running to stand still, but the Dardenne brothers are nothing if not directed toward greatness, that is.

L’ENFANT

Opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters.

For showtimes go to www.sfbg.com.

www.sonyclassics.com/thechild

Hotel California

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The father of all masked superheroes, Zorro first appeared in California in 1919, in serial form, brought to life by pulp writer Johnston McCulley. Soon afterward, the suave, playful Zorro (the secret identity of the decidedly unglamorous Don Diego Vega) became an enduring international phenomenon, thanks to screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and continues to evolve in a slew of films, TV shows, and comic books up to and including a new Isabel Allende novel and a forthcoming musical scored by the Gipsy Kings.

A new wave of anti-immigrant demonizing and criminalization under way nationwide makes all the more obvious the urgency behind the breezy but pointed comedy Zorro in Hell, Culture Clash’s beautifully staged romp in black leather, mask, and cape, in a coproduction with La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Rep and deftly helmed by the Rep’s artistic director, Tony Taccone. If it took the LA-based, Mission Districtbred Latino political-comedy troupe (composed of Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza) 22 years of writing and performing to finally tackle the mythical Hispanic crime fighter, their timing couldn’t have been better.

But is Zorro to be considered an authentic pop-cultural or folk hero despite his conflicted origins in mass entertainment, ethnic stereotype, and pseudohistory? The trio’s own initial ambivalence serves as an engine for Zorro in Hell‘s critical but redemptive excavation of the myth at a time when resurrected rebel heroes, as spurs to mass action, seem to be the order of the day (very Z for Vendetta, in other words, and little wonder the Wachowski Brothers’ film is one of myriad cultural reference points bandied around to nice effect here).

The story centers on a frustrated LA writer and nominal Latino (Montoya) who’d prefer to be penning sitcoms but, meanwhile, has an “other voices” grant to write a play about the Zorro legend. He arrives at the El Camino Real Inn less than enthusiastic about a subject he considers culturally specious and politically irrelevant and meets a couple of larger-than-life characters who take it upon themselves to set him straight: the 200-year-old proprietress (a feisty, very funny Sharon Lockwood) and her ancient bellhop, Don Ringo (Sigüenza), proudly self-described as “the first Chicano.” Together, their careers seem to touch (literally in the case of Doña’s countless love affairs) upon most of California’s cultural history.

Cracking open the Zorro legend (given stage form by a versatile and amusing Joseph Kamal) sets in play a whole history and rebel tradition peopled by names like Ambrose Bierce, William Saroyan, Jack London, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Sacco and Vanzetti, Marx, Nietzsche, and, of course, the Scarlet Pimpernel (likely inspiration for McCulley’s masked avenger). Other references are more off the wall, or off the flag, as in the case of a talking grizzly named Kyle (Salinas), an erudite bear offering the slightly spooked, drug-addled writer some talking-cure in a charmingly professional bedside manner. Then there’s legendary outlaw Joaquin Murieta (Salinas again), the incarnation of crafty but principled revenge: “I taught myself to walk, talk, drink like them. But I never murdered like them.” The writer’s own transformation includes entering an old Zorro movie in the part of the archetypal “sleepy Mexican,” who, in this radical reappropriation of cultural capital, we’re told, is more like a sleeping giant beneath the wide brim of his tilted sombrero.

Doña has an ulterior motive behind all this consciousness-raising: She needs help fending off the imminent threat brought by land-snatching developers in league with the evil Gobernador, who naturally arrives by Humvee. (As the Latinos who voted against their own interests by helping to elect an action movie icon demonstrate, the superhero sword can cut both ways.)

Charming, sharp, and frequently wacky, the cutting jokes, quips, and allusions in Zorro come at a remarkable clip (a breathless 20 rpms, or references per minute, at least). All of it unfurls amid Christopher Acebo’s colorful, kinetic, and multifaceted scenic design; some zesty swordplay choreographed by fight director Dave Maier; and appropriately dramatic on- and offstage musical accompaniment by guitarist Vincent Christopher Montoya as the swashbuckling movies of yesterday spill onto the stage, and the stage antics of Culture Clash and company, in turn, transform into cleverly refashioned celluloid dreams projected onto a massive movie screen.

And so, with rapier wit, Culture Clash leaves its own mark on the Zorro legend, proving the pun to be mightier than the sword and the myth capable of new, subversive energies in a reactionary age. It might be that its sprawling, garrulous nature fails, in the end, to lay the best ground for the play’s final call to arms (at least the culminating “rise up!” segment feels a bit forced and tends to drag on), but no matter: Hundreds of thousands of Latinos and others are already in the streets of LA and other cities across the country. Zorro may or may not be a myth with real political traction, but either way, justice, as Zorro would be the first to tell you, is a do-it-yourself job.

CULTURE CLASH’S ZORRO IN HELL

Through April 16

Tues., Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.

Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater

2015 Addison, Berk.

$10–$59

(510) 647-2949 or (888) 427-8849

www.cultureclash.com

www.berkeleyrep.org